In Another Country (5 page)

 

The light crept up as delicately as it had faded. Lou became aware of it as a faint alteration on the lids of her eyes; she opened them, dozed again, opened them next on a hazy visibility. The wren chirred loudly and flitted. Lou found that her right hand was gripping quite hard into the clothing over Owen's heart. And in a rush of happiness back came a memory of the strength of the grip of her fingers in the clefts of moss and rock when she hauled herself by the last body-length of the let-down hank of pure water in one light movement through and safely up.

She felt for Owen's cold face, the rasp of beard, and further, for his eyes
—
first one then the other they fluttered at the centre of the palm of her right hand. He eased himself free, wrapped her more tightly, put on his boots and a hat, and left. The blanket alone was by no means enough. So much warmth in a man. Still she lay, watching and listening. Outside was lighter, but misty. Under the coping, the ferns were beaded. The breathing through the slit of the cave issued over her cold. And she exulted
—
to have kept warm, like a bird, like a small animal, to have slept on a ledge with the din of the underworld droning all night in her ears, her and the man, with his arms around her, warm enough together, surviving.

When Owen came back he appeared strange to her. He was bare-headed and his hair, shining with droplets of mist, had a grizzled look. But he was grinning like a boy. See here, he said, see what I've found. She sat up and peered into his proffered hat. Berries, like big blackberries, the drupels with a grey-purple bloom over them, like plums. Dewberries, he said. I hoped there might be some. He laid them by her, she took one very gently between three fingers and a thumb, examined it, its collected succulence. Dewberry, she said, and popped it into the warm room of her mouth. Meanwhile Owen dug out a small gaz from his bag and brewed a mug of black coffee. Boy scout, she said. Hunter-gatherer in the fog. She loved him when he couldn't help showing he was pleased with himself. After the small ceremony of breakfast, she asked him did he have a towel in that bag of his. He did, he produced it. Now go for a little walk while I see to myself.

First Lou went to the back of the cave where the clear water slid out with the bubbles. She made herself small, to get as close as possible, and listened. Listened hard. It was a pulse, a great heart beating and pulsing, it would live forever. So the rock-earth respired, air riding on water came forth. Then she went out, taking her bag, to the brink where the water fell. She could see nothing ahead or below, only mist. But the mist, not so very high above her, was colouring faintly blue; and above that, very distinctly, were larks. Quickly she undressed, ran off to the far corner, squatted like a beast, ran back to the water, stood in it, stooped and with copious freezing handfuls sluiced and washed herself. Stood towelling then on the brink, facing out. Nobody sees me, she thought. Like the chute in the dark in the cave. And here I am, fit to be looked at, and shivering for no other reason than that I am cold. Then she put on the underwear she had bought for their meeting, then her jeans, socks and boots. Next the red dress, and over that her sweater and fleece.

Owen came back. They packed. Owen, she said, can we walk all day now? Do we have to go back into the town? I don't really want to climb down the waterfall. Not that I couldn't, you understand, but it was so lovely climbing up. I was going to say, said Owen, that we can walk across to the gritstone from here, if you like, all the way back to my house, if you would like. I looked at the map while you were seeing to yourself. That is exactly what I would like, she said. And will it be warm? I'd say so, he said. In an hour or so. Good, said Lou, I want some sun. I know I look funny at the moment, bundled up. But things will improve as we go along, you'll see.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Loss

 

 

N
obody noticed. Apparently they never do. Or if they do, they misunderstand. It might be one of those sudden pauses—a silence, a gap—and somebody will say: An angel is passing. But it is no such thing. It is the soul leaving, flitting ahead to its place in the ninth circle.

Mr. Silverman looked up, looked round. All the men were still there, the men and the one or two successful women, all still there. He resumed his speech. Perhaps he had never faltered in it. He continued, he reached the end. He invited questions, some needed answers almost as long as a speech. Then it was over, he saw that he had been successful. They were smiling, they wanted what he wanted. One after the other they came and shook him by the hand, called him by his first name, congratulated him, wished him a safe journey. Seeing them dwindle—soon fewer than half remained—Mr. Silverman became fearful and, in some degree, also curious. Truly, had nobody noticed? He feared they had, and all the world henceforth would be gilded with pretence. Or he feared they had not, and he must go on now in the fact, enclosed in the fact, and nobody noticing. He took a big man by the sleeve and turned with him to the window in an old gesture of confidence. The big man—whose name was Raingold, who liked to be addressed as Ed—inclined to him, listening, frequently nodding, bespeaking friendliness with every fibre of his suit and with every pore of his naked skin where it showed in his hands and in his large and dappled face. But Mr. Silverman, speaking quietly, aware that at his back there were others waiting to wish him on his way—Mr. Silverman felt that it was too warm in the room and too cold outside in sunny Manhattan and that the plate glass between the warm and the terrible cold was surely quite impermeable. Mysterious then, the loss, the quitting. Would an adept be able to see his loss, like the dusty shape of a bird against the glass? It must be that the molecules of glass give way for the passage of a soul intent on reaching hell.

They were very high up, somewhere in the early hundreds. The surrounding towers of steel and glass seemed to be swaying slightly or rippling like a backcloth, but it was only an effect of light and shadows and clouds and reflections in the freezing wind. The towers were quite as stable as before. Yes, said Mr. Silverman, tugging at the good cloth of Ed Raingold's sleeve, went very well, I should say. What would
you
say? Went
very
well, Ed Raingold said. And he added, beaming down, You can do it, Bob. In Mr. Silverman's wonderment, in his honest puzzlement, there was a fine admixture of contempt. Had nobody noticed? Did it really not matter whether he had a soul or not?

At death, as is well known, the body lightens by a certain amount: twenty-one grams, in all cases. Aha, we say, that must be the weight of the human soul. The cadaver varies greatly. I saw a teenager the other day who must have weighed twenty stone. It was in the new mall at the old Pier 17. The food in there is on an upper floor and she stood at the foot of the escalator, wondering did she dare ascend or not. She wore a decoration in her hair, like antennae, such as elves and fairies are seen wearing in Victorian prints. On the other hand, one of those infants in, say, Ethiopia, can't weigh more than a pound or two. But the loss at death, apparently, will be the same.

But waking next morning Mr. Silverman did not feel lighter. On the contrary, he felt heavier. Imagine a blob of lead implanted in you overnight; or that some organ, roughly kidney-sized, has been converted to lead during your sleep. So it was. Hard to say where exactly: at the back of the head, in the region of the heart, in the pit of the belly? It seemed to shift. Wherever he pressed his hand, there it was not. Perhaps it could dissolve and occupy him thoroughly, like a heavy flu. He dozed and dreamed.

Shaken awake again by his early-morning call—he had an aeroplane to catch to Singapore—Mr. Silverman sat on the bed and tried to weep. He shook, he strained, he sobbed, but the tears that came were not much more than the wetness of a few snowflakes on his cheeks. No relief. He took a shower, he wandered naked around the overheated room. Again and again, touching, he received little shocks, from doorhandles, switches, a metal frame—quite sharp little shocks. They startled him, in little jolts they frightened him through his fingers to his heart. He collected them, each time giving forth a small yelp, until the room was dead. Then he looked out of the window. He was high, in the nineties, the sun was visiting the upper reaches of the towers. Down below—Mr. Silverman looked down—all the silent hurry was deep in shade. Which was worse? The measurement of remoteness in no company but his own? Or proof of it when he clutched at Ed Raingold? Mr. Silverman foresaw an icy interest in the ways and means and relative degrees of horror.

Car. Airport. Aeroplane. Singapore. Passing—so muffled, steady, multitudinous the tread—towards Baggage Reclaim, Mr. Silverman saw an extraordinary thing. There was carpet, glass, more and more glass, and falling from everywhere like vaporized warm piss, there was the usual music: but the extraordinary thing was a bird, a common sparrow by the look of it, high up against a ceiling, perhaps only an inner ceiling, of sunny glass, beating and fluttering. Natural that the creature should seek the light and whatever sustaining air was still available outside, but incredible that it should ever have got where it was now. Nothing living ever came in there, blind-dogs or bomb-dogs perhaps in the service of humans, but nothing else that lived, except the humans in transit. Perhaps not even microbes got in there, only the humans, marching in their gross forms, but never a bird, certainly never a common sparrow, but there it was, fluttering, beating its life out against the sunny glass. That was the last pure astonishment in Mr. Silverman's remaining years. A sparrow against the glass ceiling on the way to Baggage Reclaim! It was also, he acknowledged later, the last occasion on which he might have wept. Yes, he said, had I stepped aside and gone down on my knees on that thick carpet and bowed my head into my hands, knowing the bird against the ceiling high above me, then, God be my witness, I could have wept, the tears would have burst through my fingers, I might have cupped my hands and raised them up like a bowl, brimful with an offering of my final tears. Mysterious, the afterlife, lingering a while between New York and Singapore, between landing and Baggage Reclaim, an afterlife in which he might have wept.

But Mr. Silverman was met at Arrivals by a smiling driver holding up a card which read: Mr. Bob Silverman, Fidelity Investments; and soon, among smiling people, he was proceeding through his routine. Two days of meetings and presentations, all successful. He steered the company into wanting what he wanted. He had a clear mind, he set out the facts and figures clearly, he made shapely arguments, his conclusions were ungainsayable. No wonder he was so successful! He was a born persuader, persuading came as naturally to him as playing golf or the violin did to other mortals. And all the while it was like ventriloquy. He stood aside, listening to his own voice; he could even see it, his own embodied voice, and himself standing aside, observant.

In Singapore the rooms were, if anything, rather cool and the air outside (the little of it he had felt in passing to and from the car), if anything, rather warm. But the rooms were very high, in the hundreds, and the towers all around, very densely rising, looked—to Mr. Silverman—liable to crumple at any moment. The men coming up to congratulate him and to wish him a safe onward journey were less tall than he was, they were slighter, but they were dressed like him and from behind their glasses they beamed on him with an almost ferocious admiration. When their numbers dwindled, again he clutched at a sleeve, stood at a window, speaking the words and the body language of an old condescension. But he felt the leaden implant somewhere in his body, and suffered little starts of indignation that it mattered nothing to these successful gentlemen whether he stood and moved and had his being among them with a soul or without. Alone then, he had the distressing thought that perhaps it had never mattered; and a shadow fell like lead over all his past, all the life before his loss withered and died when he entertained the certainty that it had never mattered, he would have done just as well, he would have got just as high, even without a living soul in him. It had never been required of him that he have one.

He was met at Heathrow by his wife, Mrs. Silverman. He looked her in the eyes, to see would she notice. She seemed not to. He kissed her with some force on the lips. Was it palpable there on the lips, as a shock of cold perhaps? Apparently not. She had brought the two children with her. It was easier than finding someone to look after them. She asked him had he had a successful trip. Yes, he said, very; watching, would she notice? Then he asked after her life in the interim. Busy, she said, and detailed the difficulties. Then husband and wife were silent, driving in dense traffic, and the children on the back seat were silent too. He sensed his wife returning to her own preoccupations and he saw beyond any doubt that what had happened to him would never happen to her. She was fretted to the limits of her strength, she had days, weeks, being almost overwhelmed; but below or beyond all that there was something continuing in her for which it was indeed required that she have a soul. Bleak, the few insights in Mr. Silverman's remaining years. Before a man struggles to retain his living soul he must first be persuaded that he needs one.

Mr. Silverman began to notice other men and women to whom the loss had happened. Angels wandering the world in human disguise are said always to recognize one another. Likewise the clan to which Mr. Silverman now belonged. In one gathering or another, to his mild surprise, he knew and was known by his desolate kind. They were from all walks of life. At least, he met them in the few walks of life that he and Mrs. Silverman had any knowledge of. Successful people. For example, at a Christmas party somewhere just outside the M25 he was introduced to a successful academic. They saw, each in the other, the fact of it. What to say? Nothing really. There was no warmth between them. They stood side by side, their backs to the company, looking down a garden at the fairy lights in a dead tree. The academic, a Dr. Blench, said: Most of what we know about the ninth circle comes from Dante, of course. And he had an axe to grind. But the ice must be true, wouldn't you say? Mr. Silverman hadn't read Dante, didn't know about the ice, but at once acknowledged, after a few more words from Dr. Blench, that what Dante reported on the ice must indeed be true. The thing I haven't quite worked out, Dr. Blench continued, is why he says it is traitors that it happens to. I mean, are you a traitor? I don't think I am. So perhaps he got that wrong, even if the ice is right.

Driving home round the M25 Mr. Silverman thought about treachery. Was he a traitor? Was he even a liar? Whom had he betrayed? Whom had he ever lied to? He glanced at his wife. She was concentrating on her driving among all the lights in a good deal of rain and spray. But he thought again: it will never happen to her. When she can relax a little she will revert to her own concerns, and for those a soul is necessary. Still he did not think that his worst enemy or the Recording Angel could assert with any truth that he had betrayed his wife. Two or three times on his business trips he had been with a prostitute. In Tokyo they sent one up to his room on the 141
st
floor, without his asking, as a courtesy. But always he told Mrs. Silverman when he came home, said how sorry he was, how joyless it had been. He could not honestly say that she had forgiven him. He would have to say she had made him feel there was nothing to forgive. She appraised him, shrugged. She lingered over it briefly, as though it were a strange but characteristic thing. She seemed to be gauging whether it touched her or not, and to be deciding, with a shrug, that it did not. For a while he had even sustained a sort of affair, with a woman in Frankfurt, a secretary at several of his presentations. She told him he was a very persuasive man. They had sex together for a while whenever he flew in. But he confessed that also to Mrs. Silverman, said it was nothing very much, and she contemplated him and the fact of it briefly and seemed to concur: it was nothing much. So he was not a traitor, he was not a liar, not to her at least, his wife, his closest companion on the upper earth. To whom else then?

Nothing much more to say about the remaining years—many years, interminable, as it sometimes seemed—of Mr. Silverman's living death. Heeding the sort of information that must inevitably come, by accident or by grace and favour, to a man in his position, Mr. Silverman shifted some money very advantageously, for the benefit of Mrs. Silverman and her growing children. He told her so, with some wan satisfaction, quite without personal pride, and she appraised him as she had done when he told her about the prostitutes and about the secretary he had for a while had sex with in Frankfurt: thanked him, nodded, as though it were both very strange and very characteristic. And he watched her vanishing behind her eyes, to where she really belonged.

Mr. Silverman thought a good deal about the ice. He connected it with his inability to weep—and rightly so. One evening in the lift, ascending very rapidly to the 151
st
floor in Manhattan or Tokyo or Frankfurt or Singapore, he found himself the sole companion of another of his kind, a bigger man than himself, in a suit of excellent cloth, wearing a confident loud tie and a very big signet ring on his left little finger. The man—Sam's my name, he said—told him at once about a particularly bad ending (if it was an ending) that had just come to his knowledge. The doors opened, Sam and Mr. Silverman stood together on the hushed corridor. Sam continued. The man in question—he must surely be one of us—had taken an ice axe to his own face, raised it in desperation against himself, in the firm belief, so the story went, that his face, indeed his entire head, was enclosed in a bulky helmet of ice, in the desperate illusion raising the ice pick against himself, to make a way through to his eyes, to give exit to the tears that were, so he believed, welling up in there, hot melting tears welling up and not allowed to flow.