The Atom Station (19 page)

“Did our Member … swear?” I asked.

“It was easy to understand what he was getting at, even though he did not put much in his mouth, the blessed old worthy,” they replied, and from their answer I suddenly saw the mask he wore for his tired, penniless voters in the valleys of the north: an old worthy, something like an old and impotent bishop. But such men indeed would never have understood that he was himself too wearied of the sunshine of good days to have any ideals, too cultured to be affected by any accusations; that he looked on life an an empty farce, or, much more likely, an accident; and was bored.

“By the way, he came over to me and asked me to greet the Good Stepmother,” said my father. “And mentioned, moreover, that he would pay a visit up the valley to have a look at our church before he returned south.”

I am not going to describe the mist that descended on me, or how the strength drained from my limbs; I was beside myself all day, and did I not dream all night that he was standing outside with the wooden ladle ladling water out of the well? What well? There is no well there. Next day I heard nothing but hammer blows and no plover; until I said to my mother, “If he comes, I shall run up into the mountains.”

“And what do you want up in the mountains, my dear?” asked my mother.

“He shall never see me with a belly,” I said.

Then my mother answered, “You do not have such a father that you cannot hold up your head before any man, whatever condition you are in; and, I hope, not such a mother neither.”

I am not going to describe how relieved I was when news came that he had flown south, without warning, on urgent business. But the next day brought a visitor to our door from down in the district, who had with him a letter for me, and on it the words: To Ugla.

His visiting card, with no signature, but with a new telephone number—that was all the letter; and these words hastily scribbled in pencil: “When you come, come to me; all that you ask for, you shall have.”

*
In that year, after a long period of power seeking and civil strife, Iceland entered into a confederate union with Norway, under the Norwegian crown.

*
In Scandinavian mythology, one of the monsters of darkness. He was fettered by the gods until, at the
Ragnarok
(destruction of the gods) he burst free and killed Odin.

21. All that you ask for

All that you ask for; you shall have: little Gudrun was born in the middle of August, or, by the way my father reckoned time, in the seventeenth week of summer. My mother said that the girl weighed ten pounds. I was scarcely aware of the birth until she had been delivered; perhaps I am one of those who can have ten-pound babies ten times over without feeling it much. When my mother showed her to me I felt I did not know her, but I felt a little fond of her at once because she was so little and large. And my father, who never laughs, laughed when he saw her.

The church was completed at about the same time. While I was still confined they brought the altar from the old church out of the storage attic where it had been kept since the nineteenth century. Throughout my childhood that altar had stood in there amongst old lumber, and although it had become so faded that one could only just make our traces of an occasional saint and half a word of Latin here and there, I had always as a child been afraid of this relic which had some mysterious link with the Pope. When I was on my feet again the altar had been placed under that untheological gable-window in the church, and they had painted it red so that neither saint nor Latin could be glimpsed any more.

The other possessions of the church were a three-pronged and thrice-broken brass candlestick, which I tied up with twine for them so that it would hang together so long as no one touched it; and a copper candle-snuffer. With this luggage we were going to start so-called spiritual life anew here in the valleys of the north.

The pastor wanted to baptize little Gudrun at the same time as the church was being consecrated; but when I told him that I had become scared of sorcery and exorcisms, and asked him if he did not feel it a grave responsibility to dedicate an innocent child to an institution that had been the arch enemy of human nature for two thousand years and self-confessed opponent of Creation, and asked if it would not be more prudent to keep the distance between gods and men as great as possible, he merely smiled and patted me on the cheek and then whispered to me in confidence: “Pay no attention to what I may recite from the manual with my lips; in our minds we shall dedicate her to the Slope of Life.”

The Women's Institute brought a Danish butter-god rising from a cream trough, but when the time came there was no place to hang it in the church and so they took the plaque away again. But they brought other things with them which were much more useful for the dedication of a church, no more nor less than a complete refreshment tent and all that went with it—coffee and chicory, and biscuits in the enormous quantities you can only see in the country, made from flout; margarine, granulated sugar, and essence, in addition to layer-cake by the chestful. And though such baking might have had a touch of anemia, it played its part in saving the day's morale, for outside there was rain and a great deal of Black Death. And no one could expect dalesmen to provide coffee and what goes with it for many districts, even though they happen to have knocked up a hut for God.

The pastor and the bishop made their two speeches apiece, and those who were sober crossed and uncrossed their legs and wriggled their toes and counted up to a thousand and from a thousand back down to one, over and over again all day long, until the speeches came to an end and the church was consecrated. Thereafter the pastor dedicated little Gudrun to the Slope of Life, according to our agreement. At the end of the service the cement-smeared plank benches in the church were moved out into the tent, and later used for firewood. And after that the church stood empty, filled only with a smell of cement, with damp walls and the saints and the Latin painted over. When the temporary door had been put back in place (it had been made out of packing cases to last the next hundred years), it came to light that on the door were the following words, upside down, in black printed letters: Sunna Margarine Company. Finally a bar was nailed across the church door on the outside, for the State grant had not sufficed to provide a lock. Somehow it was as if everyone had a feeling that God would not be worshipped in this place again in the near future.

THE NORTHERN TRADING COMPANY

It rained very hard that evening. Near midnight we were relieved of the last drenched dedication guests, some of them being taken away by their friends, slung across their saddle bows. It had now been dark for some time. I was at the farm door with a candle, hanging up some rags to dry; the rain drummed on the slabbed paving, and through the open door came the warm fermented smell of the hay, inseparable from the first shortened evenings. I had been hearing the dog barking busily for some time, but thought it was just the revellers being carried homewards down the valley; until all at once a man was standing in the doorway. First I heard his footsteps outside on the paving, then I felt him come nearer and gradually fill the doorway until all of him was there.

“Who's there?” I said.

“Good evening,” he said.

I thought I was going to turn to stone where I stood, but then replied questioningly and angrily in the way one would address a burglar: “Good evening?”

“It's me,” he said.

“And so what?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“What a fright you gave me, man.”

“Sorry.”

“It's past midnight.”

“Yes,” he said, “I didn't want to come during the daytime. I knew there were crowds of people here. But I wanted to see my daughter.”

“Come right in out of the doorway, man,” I said, and offered him my hand.

He made no attempt to kiss me or anything like that; caressing or coaxing was not in his nature. It was impossible to have anything but confidence in a man of his demeanor.

“Take off your things,” I said, “you're soaking wet. How did you come?”

“The Cadillac's at the other side of the gully,” he said.

“The Cadillac!” I said. “Are you a thief now too?”

“The vocation,” he said.

I told him he ought to explain this vocation, but he said it was impossible to explain a vocation.

“Have you left the police?” I asked; and he replied, “A long time ago.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Plenty of money,” he said.

“Plenty,” I echoed. “If there is plenty, then it has quite certainly not been well come by. But come into the parlor anyway, or come into the kitchen instead, perhaps, we'll see if there's any life left in the range. If not I'll try to get a fire going; you'll have to have some coffee even though I'm not sure if you'll be allowed to stay the night.”

The kitchen was directly opposite the main door, with the parlor to the left and the living room to the right, where my parents slept.

“Where's my daugher?” he asked.

The outcome was that I took him into the parlor and shone the candle on the girl sleeping beside the wall, in the spare bed, with my place just in front of her. He looked at her, and I at this unknown man, and found myself still in sympathy with those races that recognize no connection between father and child. For the moment I could in no way see nor understand that he could own this child any more than other men did, nor indeed that any man owns children generally. He stared at her for a long time without saying a word. I lifted up the bedclothes so that he could see all of her.

“Can you feel what a nice smell she has?” I asked.

“Smell?” he said.

“I thought they smelled of urine,” he said.

“That's because you're a pig,” I said.

He looked at me and asked solemnly, “Am I not her father?”

“Unless you want to deny it on oath,” I said, and added: “Thought I don't really see how it matters.”

“It doesn't matter?”

“We won't go into that now,” I said. “Come into the kitchen. I'll try to cheer the fire up a bit.”

When he had sat down I noticed that his clothes were made of expensive material and his hat was new; and that his footwear was ill-suited for walking: his thin brown shoes had got covered in mud on the way over from the car, and he had waded through the stream. But when I offered him dry things he flatly refused them. “Not even well-knitted homespun socks?” I said.

“No,” he said.

As usual, he had to be fed with conversational topics, he was reluctant to speak without prompting; but long after he had fallen silent the timbre of his voice would still tingle in one's ears.

“What news is there from the south?” I asked.

“None,” he said.

“How is … our … organist?” I asked, and at the same moment was aware of the surrender implied in admitting our joint ownership of anything. And he was not slow to notice it either.

“Our
organist,” he repeated. “His mother is dead. But he is raising seven new kinds of roses.”

I remarked how good it was to forget first and then die later, like that woman; and then I said that the world could not be utterly wicked, fundamentally, when there were so many varieties of roses in existence.

“And here's some layer cake,” I added. “We inherited it from the Women's Institute. Or would you rather have bread and butter with your coffee?”

Naturally he preferred bread and butter.

I could feel how he was watching me, even though I had my back turned to him as I busied myself with the food and coffee.

“And the gods?” I said, still searching in the corner cupboard.

“They have declared war on Pliers,” said my visitor. “They claim that he had given them a half share in the Cadillac while he still believed in them, and allege that they have it in writing. So Pliers got rid of the car cheap.”

“And you think it charitable to take the car off the poor creatures?” I said. “It was their pride and joy, after all, and I say for myself that I find it hard to imagine an atom poet without a Cadillac.”

“I don't pity the gods,” he said. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“And how is the Figures-Faking-Federation getting on at selling the country?” I asked.

“Very well,” he replied. “Pliers has flown to Denmark to buy the bones. The F.F.F. is going to hold a monstrous tile-hat funeral—for the people.”

We carried on talking about this and that for a while, until suddenly, while I was laying the table, he said, staring at my hands, “May I be with you tonight?”

“Leave me alone, I'm a reinstated virgin,” I said.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It's a girl who becomes a virgin again after seven years if she is left alone,” I said, and hurried to the corner cupboard again so as not to let him see how I was blushing; it is really an act of sex to talk like that.

“We'll get married this autumn,” he said.

“Are you mad, man? How can you get such nonsense into your head?”

He said: “It is expedient for us both; all of us; everyone.”

“Wouldn't it be better for me to try to become a person first?” I said.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“Can't you understand that I'm nothing, man?” I said. “I know nothing, can do nothing, am nothing.”

“You are the ultimate thing in a northern valley,” he said.

“I think it enough to have a baby with the first one who offered, without making things worse by marrying him.”

“Why did you slam the door on me last year?” he asked.

“Why do you think?”

“Another man, maybe,” he said. “And myself fallen out of favor.”

“Of course,” I said. “Always another and another, a new one and another new one. I could scarcely cope with the numbers I slept with.”