No More Meadows (36 page)

When she got off the bus at the corner of her road the heat of the day had drawn itself up into a vast black cloud that brooded for a moment overhead and then suddenly let itself go in one of the drenching, battering rainstorms with which heat-heavy Washington likes to play at being the tropics. Christine ran. Her clothes and hair were soaked, but by the time she had reached
home and put on a dressing-gown and pinned up her hair the rain had stopped and she was already as hot again as she had been before it started.

She felt quite exhausted. She lay down on the bed and wished that Aunt Josephine were there to look after her. She found that she was thinking about Aunt Josephine more often these days than she had done immediately after her aunt's death. The shock of Aunt Josephine so suddenly not being there had to a certain extent numbed Christine's realization that she would never be there any more. But since she was married and had begun to settle down to her life in America with Vinson, and particularly since the baby, the thought came into her head time and again: I wish Aunt Jo were here.

Not living with them, of course. It was not disloyal to Aunt Jo's memory to realize that one could never conduct a tranquil married life with her in the house, but living near by, on hand to discuss things and share things, and give, when it was needed, her own brand of wisely irrational advice.

How she would have revelled in this baby! Sylvia had never let her in on her pregnancies. She had not even told Aunt Josephine about Clement until his presence became too obvious, because when she was expecting Jeanette Aunt Josephine had told her she was standing all wrong, and Roger had snapped back at her not to interfere in things she knew nothing about, and there had been a quarrel, which had upset what Sylvia called her nerves, and she had cried on and off for two days, which had been no fun for anyone.

But Christine would have shared her baby, and let Aunt Josephine give advice, and gone to her when she felt tired or ill for the sympathy that she dared not ask of Vinson, because he went into a frenzy of concern if she said she did not feel well.

Christine lay on the bed and wanted Aunt Josephine. When the clock struck six she sighed and got up heavily, pushing aside her sad fancies to reach back to actuality.

She had to go downstairs before Vinson came home. If he found her in bed he would worry and catechize her about why she was so tired, and she could not tell him about the visa. It was one of his evenings when he came home gay and full of energy. He wanted to take her out to supper, so Christine put
the food she had prepared into the refrigerator for tomorrow, plodded upstairs to change her dress and went out with him to a hot little restaurant with a television screen nagging at you from the wall, and tried to eat the steak he ordered for her.

She was still tired when she woke the next morning. Her legs ached like weights when she put them to the floor.

‘Why are you getting dressed?' Vinson asked when he came back from the bathroom.

‘I'm coming with you to the Annexe. I want to have the car today.'

‘I'm sorry, honey, but I'm afraid I'll have to keep it there. I have to go over to Main Navy for a conference this morning.' Buses ran from the Arlington Annexe to the Main Navy building on Constitution Avenue, but Vinson never went in buses. ‘Did you want the car for anything in particular?'

‘Oh no,' Christine said, going wearily downstairs to make the coffee. ‘Nothing particular.'

The day was already sweltering with a sticky heat. While she was clearing up the kitchen after Vinson had gone, she heard the radio telling her that it was probably going to be the hottest day of the year so far, and might also break temperature records for that date. The man who gave out the weather forecasts was always very proud and excited when the thermometer broke a record. As he was spending the day in an air-conditioned studio, it did not incommode him.

It was a damp clinging heat that Christine had never met anywhere else in her life. If you moved at all, sweat stood on your skin and could not evaporate, because the air was as damp as you were. It was a limp heat, a clammy heat that seemed to close you round with stifling hands and wring the moisture out of you. If you took a shower you were wet again with sweat before you could dry the water off yourself. Making up your face was a lost cause. Your skin was never dry for long enough to put a foundation on evenly, and beads of perspiration were starting up between the grains of powder before you had put down the puff.

When Christine went out at half past ten the road lay sizzling in the sun like a griddle ready for pancakes. The air-conditioning fan in the Meenehans' top window was making a noise that
no one but the Meenehans could have lived with. The Kesslers' dog lay panting on the lawn with no sense or energy to get himself back to the house. As Christine walked down to the bus stop her bare arms burned and she could almost fancy that her brains were bubbling in her head like gravy. She felt sick.

The bus had been standing in the sun at the terminal and its interior was like an oven. The streetcar was slightly cooler, but it was one of those with a radio, and Christine's ride along Wisconsin Avenue was made hideous by hillbilly music and commercials about scouring powder and laxatives.

In Bethesda, she had to walk two blocks in the sun to get to the building which housed the Immigration Office. Going up in the lift she felt dizzy, and trod on a man's toe as she stepped back to lean against the wall. The man took off his hat and apologized, which was unnecessarily civil of him, but his clothes smelled as if he had worn them day and night all summer, and Christine could not summon a smile for him.

The operator directed her to a door at the end of a long passage, where people were going busily in and out of doors with armfuls of papers. Constantly coming and going – out of one door, across the passage, in at another door – they seemed to be the same people, in motion all the time to give the effect of a busy crowd, like stage soldiers marching across the backcloth, then dashing round behind the scenes to march across the stage again and give the illusion of an army out of half a dozen extras in helmets and dusty doublets.

The Immigration Office had nothing in common with the passage that led to it. No one bustled about in there. Nothing seemed to be happening at all. When Christine opened the door on the tableau of quiet figures sitting at desks or on chairs against the wall, she had the impression of stepping into a photograph.

The desk near the door was called INFORMATION. Its chair was empty, although a half-smoked cigarette sent up a straight thread of smoke from a brimming ashtray. Christine stood by the desk and looked around. One of the figures in the tableau came to life and nodded civilly at her from another desk.

‘Hullo,' he said. Americans in shops or offices never said:

‘Good morning', or: ‘Good afternoon.' It was always: ‘Hullo', or even, in the hardware store: ‘Hi there!'

‘Mrs Dent has just stepped out for a moment,' said the figure.' Won't you have a seat, and we'll attend to your business directly.'

Christine sat down at the end of the line of people along the wall, who were waiting to have their business attended to directly. They seemed to have been waiting a long time. Some were reading. Others were slumped in attitudes of hopeless resignation. A small boy was fidgeting and squirming and falling off his chair, and his mother had tired long ago of telling him to sit still. A man in a black felt hat was tapping his foot and jabbing at his chin with the handle of the umbrella which he had unaccountably brought with him on the hottest day of the year.

Although it was a relief to be out of the glaring sun, it was as hot in here as it was in the street; a stale, suffocating heat that sapped the senses and made you drowsy. There was plenty of air space under the high ceiling, but the air had been used up long ago – probably days ago, because the closed windows did not look as if they could ever be forced open without giving yourself a hernia, and none of the Immigration staff looked feckless enough to risk that.

It was a large high room decorated and furnished with a somewhat temporary air, like wartime civil defence offices in England. The windows were dirty, one wall was distempered a different colour from the others, no two desks were the same, and the odd collection of chairs looked as though they had been filched from other offices when no one was looking. The whole place looked as though the Immigration business might come to an end at any moment and the room and its occupants find themselves evacuated.

One corner of the room was divided into a cubicle by plasterboard walls which did not quite reach the ceiling. There was a doorway without a door in both the walls, so that the people sitting waiting to have their business attended to directly could see the man who sat at the desk in the cubicle, and he in turn, by leaning backwards and looking over his shoulder, could see and talk to the occupants of the desks in the main office.

That was what he was doing now. He was talking to a stout
man with a perspiring bald head, who sat in shirt-sleeves and a tie like a Gauguin nightmare at a desk nearest the cubicle. They talked a full ten minutes with the sober intensity of two women discussing a confinement.

Christine could not hear what they said, beyond the fact that the fat man was called Aubrey, and the small sandy man in the cubicle was called Elwood. They finally finished with the confinement, and Elwood turned back again to his desk, on the other side of which a woman in mourning sat in a detached way, as if she had given up hope of ever making contact with him. Elwood looked at her pensively for a while as if he might be going to say something, and then the telephone rang.

The two men and the woman at the desks in the main office looked up eagerly, as if the telephone bell were quite an excitement in their day. Elwood leaned back in his chair and said: ‘Shall I get it, Aubrey, or will you?'

‘I don't mind, Elwood. Just as you like. Unless Miss Hattie would like to take it?' He glanced chivalrously to the other side of him, where a middle-aged lady in a mauve sleeveless dress, with hair lying in thin coils on her forehead, was studying something which, from the poised pencil and the furrowed brow, might have been a crossword puzzle. She looked up and answered Aubrey's smile. Everyone in that office was as polite to each other as if they were in a quadrille.

‘No, no,' she murmured. ‘You get it.'

‘Well, then, will you, Elwood?' It seemed almost too much to ask.

‘Of course, my dear chap.' Elwood let down the legs of his chair and picked up the telephone, which had been ringing merrily all through this little courteous exchange. ‘Oh, hullo there! How are you? How have you been coming along?' Christine heard him say. The woman in mourning folded her hands; and her shoulders lifted in the suspicion of a sigh.

The grey-faced man at the desk beyond Miss Hattie's, whose occupation was hidden by a barrier of ledgers, got up with a little cough, tiptoed across to Aubrey and whispered something in his ear. Aubrey closed his eyes and shook his head, and the grey-faced man tiptoed back to his side of the room. As he passed Miss Hattie he murmured: ‘Hot enough for you?' and
Miss Hattie said: ‘My goodness, yes, Mr Pierrepont', and fanned herself with a piece of blotting-paper.

Mr Pierrepont looked pleased that somebody agreed with him about something and hid himself behind his ledgers again.

Suddenly there was a whirl of activity. Aubrey looked up from his desk and called out: ‘Next please!' in a startled tone, as if surprised to find himself still alive. Miss Hattie, catching the infection, looked up from her crossword puzzle and also called out:' Next, please!' in the loudest voice her muted throat could muster.

Consternation! Everyone sitting on the chairs along the wall stood up, or if they were women, made the motions of collecting handbags and uncrossing their legs preparatory to standing up.

‘No, no,' said Aubrey soothingly. ‘One at a time please. We must take you all in order or we'll never get anywhere. The people at the head of the lines first, you know.'

The man with the umbrella and the woman with the small boy advanced towards the desks. ‘But I was before her,' complained an Italian voice farther down the line. ‘Just because I sit in the wrong place –'

He did not complain very loud or very long, however. There was something about the doldrum atmosphere of the Immigration Office which was catching, and stifled rebellion. Everyone sat meekly down again. The woman next to Christine, whose tight head scarf emphasized the dominance of her nose, told her: ‘Yesterday I come, I wait two hour. Today I wait already one hour, but what can you do?'

What indeed? Christine sat on her hard chair and felt like a displaced person. Her first irritation was subsiding. It was too hot to go on fuming. She began to drift into a sort of coma of waiting, melting gently in the heat like a forgotten jelly, watching the slow happenings in the room with half-focused eyes.

The man with the umbrella was sitting at Aubrey's desk with the black hat tipped over his eyes and the umbrella held straight up between his knees, like an old gentleman in the pavilion at Lord's. He did not sit there nearly as long as the old gentlemen do, however. He sat there for two minutes. After squaring his shoulders and applying himself with heavy breathing to the form which the man with the umbrella had brought, Aubrey discovered
that it was the wrong form, and told him that he must go back to his firm and get another.

The man leaned the umbrella carefully against his knee so as to be able to spread his hands in a Gallic gesture. ‘I am waiting here two hours,' he said. ‘Two hours I am waiting, and now you are saying I must go away and come back again. It's not O.K.'

‘But look here, my friend,' said Aubrey, with a charming smile. ‘It's not my fault if you make a mistake. You have the wrong form, that's all. You can easily get the right one and come back.' He spoke as if a second visit to the Immigration Office would be a pleasure.