In the Middle of the Wood (11 page)

Linda was sitting restlessly beside him and then before Ralph could say anything to her she too had sprung to her feet and was dancing a duet with the Frenchwoman, thrusting out her false teeth like a vampire, hitching up her skirt, and staring down at her feet while dancing the reel on the deck of the Yugoslav ship, the Germans and Swedes watching intently but making no attempt to join in themselves.

Ralph was furious and turned away from the obsequious Yugoslav accordionist who was bending towards him, a large happy smile on his face, while he tried desperately to follow the tunes which the Scots were now singing in concert. God damn you, thought Ralph, why must you thrust yourself into the centre of things, why must you be so dramatic, so theatrical? And he began to grow jealous of the Scot from Glasgow who, large and tall, was conducting the Scots in renderings of ‘Amazing Grace' and ‘O Flower of Scotland'. Linda had by this time completely forgotten about himself and her mother who sat side by side on the bench, the mother gazing tolerantly at her daughter, Ralph inwardly seething.

The Frenchwoman and Linda were vying with each other as to which of the two would invent the most outrageous games. The Frenchwoman took a comb from her hair and began to play on it. Immediately Linda played a biro like a flute. The Frenchwoman draped a scarf around her face through which her large false teeth protruded. Linda removed her shoes and played them like castanets banging them against each other and dancing in her stocking soles. Ralph was angered by their spontaneous creativity, the marvellous inventiveness of the props which they had discovered in the most ordinary of objects.

And all the time he watched the Frenchwoman's husband, who also wore a beret, and who sat patiently with the bag in his lap, as if he were the wife and she the husband. Did he spent his days like this on cruises watching his wife entertaining the passengers, becoming an instant star in the transient world of tourism. Ralph sympathized with the Frenchman and wished that he were able to talk to him. There was a glitter from the two women like the glitter of water along the reaches between islands.

The Frenchwoman exchanged her beret for a tartan tammy, and marched up and down the deck playing imaginary bagpipes. To be like that, for grace to descend on one, for the deck suddenly to become the theatre of the moment, the bare wooden boards, for it to flower with meaning! Suddenly the Frenchwoman sighed and entirely exhausted sat down to be followed later by Linda. She looked sideways at Ralph as she sat down but he was determined not to speak, prim, pompous, silent.

“I wasn't going to let that Frenchwoman get away with anything,” she said at last as if in self-justification.

“Why did it have to be you?” said Ralph angrily.

“You're always so,” she searched for a word, “— academic.”

“I know how to conduct myself.”

“You can't bear to see people enjoying themselves.”

“Why does it always have to be you?”

Linda who was now furious maintained a prickly silence. So they sat side by side in their chairs while the boat cut its way through the water, both equally bad-tempered. If only I had something to read, thought Ralph, but there was nothing to do but stare at the green land stretching down to the shore, and at the empty sea. The tourists with their blank demanding eyes bothered him. There was such a lack of pattern to everything around him. He could not assimilate this unknown unstoried land.

Linda and her mother talked about the clothes the women wore, and ignored him. He felt panicky as if he was incapable of creating a plot which would incorporate these people, this land. It intruded itself on him in a raw undifferentiated unstylish lumpish mass. The only image he had found was that of the angling tourist in his bright yellow wellingtons. He had been like a strange foreign bird with a yellow beak, pecking in alien waters.

After a while the boat landed at a pier and the whole party left it and entered the grounds of a restaurant. There, fish was being fried in the open air, while the tourists sat round on wooden benches. Ralph and Linda ate their platefuls of fried fish, which was delicious, in a hostile silence.

“Listen,” said Linda fiercely. “You're an élitist, that's what's wrong with you. You never act spontaneously. You're always afraid of making a fool of yourself.” That was how she felt about him. His face and head were like those of the
Romans who had glared out of the stone among the roses, cruel, remorseless, eyes in stony sockets immune to pain. He glanced at his mother-in-law's labyrinth of varicose veins, rivers which gathered in blue knots, failed aqueducts. And even as he did so she said that she wished to go to the toilet and Linda took her by the arm. The body, how weak, how contingent it was; we carried it about with us with its smell of mortality. Only the soul was unchanging, triumphant. He put the bones beside him on the plate. He looked out towards the sea in search of seagulls but there were none to be seen. He had hardly seen any since coming to Yugoslavia.

In the quiet of the evening, as the ship made its way back, he was still angry. He and his mother and Linda drank Yugoslav brandy and slowly became tiddly. The Scots sang ‘Auld Lang Syne', people formed a ring on the deck, the humble accordionist played as best he could, his soft sweaty face smiling continually. Paper hats were given out and Linda wore hers at a swaggering angle. In a strange way Ralph felt as if he was going home, as the sun slanted across the water which was pure and simple and beyond the boundaries and margins and legends of particular nations.

Ralph suddenly conceded that he had been jealous.

“Who of?” said Linda amazedly. “Surely not of that man from Glasgow.”

So they made up, in the tranquillity of the moving seascape. It was one of those moments which in the nature of things can't last, harmonious, satiated. Clouds burned in the west. For that moment Scandinavians, Germans, Scots, were together in the mournful inaccurately played music, and as they climbed on to the pier when they had reached their destination it was as if each was leaving a friend behind. In their rakish pirate caps they emerged on to the grey quay.

They walked into the hotel and to a late dinner. The Grahams were still at their table. Ralph found that he could speak to them quite easily through his haze of brandy. He was not aware that he and Linda were laughing very loudly as they told the story of their day.

“So it's mishmash again,” they said, looking down at their plates, and they laughed loudly. Graham told them of a man who, while they had been away, had been found trying to smash his morning roll with a hammer; he had been sitting like a workman on the stair.

This image produced more immoderate laughter. Everything suddenly became dramatic, enjoyable, larger than life. Even the waiter smiled at them and spoke in broken English. “Scotland,” he said and smiled radiantly. If only, thought Ralph suddenly, we could speak to each other, each of us, beyond language, seeing through souls and bodies as if they were bones of fish.

The Grahams told of another man who had broken his false teeth on one of the morning rolls, and who had gone off in search of a dentist, past workmen driving the yellow dinosaur beaks of excavators. Everywhere apparently there was building and rebuilding. Yugoslavia was creating a world for tourists to live in and hiding behind it. Where were its songs, its own myths? The man who had broken his false teeth waited for hours outside an office and had finally left in disgust.

Suddenly a German woman, stern and thin, leaned over towards their table and said, “Too loud, too loud. Louden laughter.” Linda said, “Guten morgen, Sourpussen,” and smiled at her brilliantly, as if she were paying her a compliment. The Grahams smiled. Graham took out his wallet and recited his itinerary for the following day.

Suddenly Ralph felt deflated again. The bloody German woman. It occurred to him for the first time that he had taken too much to drink, that in the glow of the brandy he was behaving like a hoodlum, that he was the image of the Scotsman who had sung and danced on the boat.

He heard an English voice saying, “They haven't made the landing yet. They're sitting ducks. What are they waiting for?”

The Hermes was out in the water, distant, aloof, an apparently impregnable castle towards which enemy missiles were heading, vulnerable just the same. In that harsh sweating weather the ships heaved far from home. Even the water underneath was unsafe. The missiles like fish searched and homed, sped through the sea. No, not even the Hermes was safe.

“We're going to Venice tomorrow,” said Graham.

“Oh. I'm sure you'll like that.”

“We leave at eight in the morning.” His wife and mother smiled. They had it all prepared.

Ralph heard one Scotswoman saying to another one, “That's white they should dae. Have hydrofoils on the Clyde. Fancy that, eh?” And she bared her teeth and laughed. “Only the weather's no sae guid.”

The tall waiter in his white jacket stopped at their table. “Glasgow,” he said, and put his fingers to his lips, “Mm.” He blew a kiss as if in a melodramatic opera.

“That was the best day yet,” said Linda, sighing and removing her pirate hat as they took the lift to their floor.

Later, Linda washed some of their clothes and hung them out on the balcony to dry. They padded in bare feet about their room. Down below they could see people sitting at tables drinking slowly and calmly in the gathering darkness.

“Forgive me?” said Linda.

“Of course.”

Ralph did not feel at all disoriented in the glow of the brandy. Objects seemed to be in their correct places. Nevertheless he took a sleeping pill as usual, washing it down with water lest it burn his throat.

One of the things that bothered Ralph was that his bone tiredness, which he had now felt for a long time, months, perhaps years, was not melting away in the hot sun. On the contrary it seemed to grow heavier and heavier and though he slept on the bed in the afternoons and had another long sleep at night it remained. There were flashes too of something worse than tiredness, a feeling of the essential meagreness of reality, of its superficial nature, as if it were composed of sun beating on rock, and the human soul itself were a tourist. Books no longer protected him from the barrenness of a world without myth, without story, which belonged to a language that he didn't understand.

One day the three of them were sitting in a park around noon watching another hotel being built. It rose quickly into the sky — even a day seemed to make a noticeable difference — the workmen ran about the skeleton framework, never stopping for refreshment as British workmen did. It seemed absurd to him that they should be building for foreigners, creating luxuries which they themselves would not be able to enjoy. In the middle of their own national world was this other secret world. (Ralph's mother-in-law had the fixed idea in her head that the reason their passports had been examined and taken from them that first morning was that they were being spied on: and that the woman shaped like Krushchev was also a spy.)

As they sat in the park they saw one of the waitresses from their hotel taking her child to a woman who presumably was its grandmother and after kissing and hugging it leaving it with her. So busy these waitresses were, so hard they worked! The granny sat down on a bench and took out a piece of knitting while the child, a girl, sat down beside her. In front of them was a swing on which another girl was composing huge arcs, pushing herself up towards the sky which was a perfect blue. Ralph watched her with a vague interest.

She seemed a determined little girl, perhaps eleven years old or so. At first she didn't want to let the other girl on to the swing at all till the granny went over and spoke to her. But then she did, and returned to her swinging. Her face was resolute and pale as she tried desperately to beat her own previous arc, to rise ever higher and higher, as if she wanted to fly into the very heavens which were so unfadingly blue. From a street across the way an old woman watched from a window in which a vase with roses was set, and in front of her the workmen scurried like birds among the iron branches of the half finished hotel. All around was activity, purposeful, thrusting, and yet, Ralph thought, essentially absurd. These birds were building nests for others on whose foreign alms they existed.

And he could not communicate with any of them. Not the workmen, not the granny or the child on the swing or the other one shyer and more amenable to bullying. So little he really knew about this land, its inner logic, its inner purposes. In splendid arc after arc the girl swung towards the empty sky.

He watched as a little boy came along and asked to use the swing but the girl didn't seem to like him and soon they were throwing stones and twigs at each other while the other girl returned to her granny who was still patiently knitting. In a fury of words which Ralph couldn't understand the boy and the determined girl chased each other round and round the swing which was now moving gently with its initial impetus. The girl pursued the boy and then went back to the swing where she rode the sky in solitary glory. Soon more and more children appeared and she joined them, the resolute leader. The children gathered in a ring around the pale boy and shouted what Ralph took to be a version of ‘Cowardy Cowardy Custard' and the boy ran away past the bench on which the three of them were sitting wiping tears from his eyes. This day he would remember forever, the day of his defeat, unless he re-ordered it and made it into a fantasy in which he himself had been the victor. Ralph fantasized that some day he might become a cutting critic of, for instance, drama, of the community that he had been driven from. His wit would protect him instead of his fists, he would become the terror of the stage.

Linda was more concerned with the child's immediate welfare than Ralph was. She beckoned him over to give him a dinar or two but he shook his head and walked on steadfastly. The granny, who seemed to act as a one-woman nursery school, still sat knitting: she had seen worse disasters than this. The Yugoslavs, Ralph noticed, were very fond of their children, always kissing them and petting them: and the children on the whole were well dressed and neat.