I for Isobel (20 page)

She hoped nobody would ever find out what a fool she was.

As she walked back past the the church another memory popped up and made her halt, seeing a young priest standing in the pulpit, looking with a friendly face at the congregation, talking about insects that scuttled in the cobwebbed cell of the soul, looking right into Isobel and accepting what he saw.

And that was it. It all came now, the calm elation, the sense of everything solved, of peace.

She had received the Holy Ghost, or something.

Well, she had known from the beginning that it was a mistake, meant for the woman next to her, probably. Just the same, having found herself in a state of grace, she had done her best to keep it, and managed it for a few weeks. She understood the saints and their eccentricities, like sitting on poles and not washing, because the joy came first and you had to guess how to keep it—there weren't any rules. How she had worried because there weren't any rules, reading everything she could find about the saints, trying to discover the secret. She never could have lasted long, that was certain. Still, she looked back at a spell of tranquil weather, the calm that came when she touched the book. She didn't remember reading that one, but she might have, or the word
Saints
on the cover had been enough to bring back the calm of the season.

So now she knew. It was religion, after all. How sad. She felt in her bag for the book, feeling nothing as she touched it but melancholy. She had told herself, you have to know, and had exchanged a useful spell for something she knew already, that religion made you happy. Of course it made you happy; that wasn't the point.

Where was she going? She was halfway down the main street, past the park. Her feet were taking her home from school.

After all, why not? Might as well do the thing thoroughly, go and look at the house and maybe lay a ghost or two. She was going undefended, since virtue had gone out of the book, but the whole place looked so empty, so peaceful, she felt she could risk it. She took the familiar turning, though it was no longer familiar. Estrangement. She climbed a hill, crossed a road, descended, turned, climbed again. There was the house, dead as a dead tooth. She stood and waited for something, anything, felt only blankness. She walked on.

A voice called, ‘Isobel! Isobel!'

Run, Isobel, run! You put a lady's name in the paper, Isobel. She's going to have you put in jail. We can't save you; you should have asked Mummy, you should have asked Daddy. Run, Isobel, run! Run and hide!

Too late. Too late to run past, head down and heart banging. Caught. She forced her face towards the woman who was coming down her front path to the gate—such a tiny little woman that Isobel in her big quaking body felt like Alice after she had been at the magic drink. Drink me. She could do with a few of the cakes, right now.

Mrs Adams. Mrs Adams lives three doors from me. Mrs Adams was coming towards her, smiling. Could she have forgotten? Mrs Adams the bogeyman, bogeywoman, was coming towards her smiling brightly.

‘Well, Isobel. Fancy seeing you. What are you doing with yourself now?'

‘Working.' She stopped to steady her breathing. ‘I'm working in an importer's office in town.'

‘That's nice. And how is Margaret? Does she like it in the country?'

‘Yes. She likes it very much. She's very well.'

‘I am glad. Such a dear little girl. You're not in a hurry, are you? Come in and have a cup of tea.'

Oh no, Mrs Adams, it's a trap. You'll call the police to put me in jail.

What rubbish it was. Of course you didn't go to jail for putting a lady's name in the paper—certainly not at the age of nine. Still, she had to force herself to follow Mrs Adams down the narrow dim hall into the bright kitchen. The ignorance of her parents, and the years of misery it had caused her! Years of terror: doing the messages, she had bolted past the house in a frenzy of fear, getting past unseen, usually, but when Mrs Adams had seen her and called her, how she had run, till her legs went to jelly and her breath hurt her lungs.

In the confessional, she had whispered, ‘I put a lady's name in the paper.' ‘That's not a sin.' Not a sin; no hope, then, no absolution.

‘Sit down while I put the kettle on,' Mrs Adams said.

The smell of gas and breadcrumbs, polish over mould, just like their own place, was getting to her, taking her back as the sight of the house hadn't done. She thought, I always expected to be happy, getting home. Never learnt from experience.

Mrs Adams got down cups, put tea in the teapot and biscuits on a plate, then said, ‘Now, wait a minute. There's something I want to show you.'

She went out and came back carrying a photograph album, set it open on the table in front of Isobel and pointed to a photograph of a cat, with a newspaper cutting pasted below it.

‘I don't suppose you remember that, do you? Dear old Smoke. Do you take milk, Isobel?'

‘No, thank you.'

She was reading, her face burning and her head buzzing like a bee in the sunlight.

Mrs Adams lives three doors from me.

She has a cat. Smoke is his name.

He curls around the corner silently.

When he jumps, his name should be Flame.

Blue Certificate to Isobel Callaghan (9 years).

While she was reading a lot of things came back.

There's a writer in there, Isobel; a naked infant greased and trussed in the baking-dish with an apple jammed in its mouth.

Mrs Prendergast knew all about it. Mrs Prendergast's weird world was the true one. ‘I won't be a minute, dear. I'm just popping the baby in the oven.'

Mrs Adams said, ‘I was so thrilled with that little poem of yours. Everybody telling me Smoke was a silly name for a cat. That was just the way he walked and I called him Smoke because of that, not the colour, though that came into it a bit. I didn't see the poem myself; my niece's little girl—well, she's not a little girl any longer, she's the same age as you—well, she cut it out to show me, and my niece said to me, “Well, what do you know, Smoke's famous!”

‘Dear old Smoke, he lived to be ten and I miss him still. I often think, it's the little poem that brings him back, more than the photograph. I was so pleased, I bought you a book to paste your poems in, and a snap of Smoke, but you used to run away whenever I called you. You were a shy little thing, weren't you? I asked your mother to give it to you, but she said it would encourage you to waste time away from your school work. I suppose that was only right.' Right or not, Mrs Adams frowned over it slightly.

No, they wouldn't want a writer about the house. A witness, a recorder. Now you'll show all your poems to Mummy, won't you? No hope left when she started calling herself Mummy.

Isobel mumbled, ‘I thought you were angry…becauseIputyournameinthe—paper…'

‘Whatever made you think that?' Seeing the answer, she retreated quickly, murmuring, ‘A strange woman in some ways.'

‘Do you still have the book. The book you were going to give me?'

‘No. Oh, dear, I am sorry. If I'd thought you wanted it! I gave it to my niece to paste her recipes in.'

Observing that, somehow or other, she had drunk her cup of tea, Isobel got up. ‘It was very nice of you to think of it, just the same. I'm sorry Smoke died. He was a beautiful cat.'

‘Well, nothing lasts for ever, as they say.'

I hope they are right, Mrs Adams.

‘You won't have another cup?'

She shook her head. She had to get out, fast, because she was coming to pieces, in great slabs, in chunks, like an iceberg breaking up. She said thinly, ‘No, thank you. I'll have to be going.'

Mrs Adams ushered her into the street, which was almost as unsuitable as the house for the tears that were coming. Artesian tears, rising from the centre of the earth. Where could she go to shed them?

Bastards, bastards, bastards. Cruel, deceitful bastards.

She hurried along the street; behind the last few houses there was a rocky slope too steep for building. She went downhill to the street below and turned back, ran scrambling upwards, found the rock that she remembered and crouched behind it. Then she roared aloud, ‘Spiteful tormenting bastards.' Her father, too. She used to delude herself that her father had loved her, seeing that he had died too soon to disprove it, but it wasn't so, he had been just as bad, with his pompous talk about libel and slander—libel and slander, for God's sake, the woman owned a
cat.
Run and hide, Isobel, here she comes. Here comes Mrs Adams!

The tears were coming slowly. How could tears come from so deep, as if she was a tree with tears welling up from its roots? Then they came in a roaring flood that drowned thought; she put her cheek against the rock, which was as rough as a cat's tongue and unyielding, but she was too far gone to feel any perverse pleasure in that. Her sobs were so loud that even in this wasteland she had to put her hands over her mouth to muffle them; when her mind sobered up her body went on snuffling and heaving along ten years of roadway.

I am a writer. I am a writer.

Too late. It must be too late. The poor little bugger in the baking dish; nobody came in time.

Suppose I tried? Suppose I went through the motions? The writer might come back.

You've tried that with love. It doesn't work.

But that was other people, too. This is me.

The crying had slackened. There was such a feeling of limbs stretching, of hands unbound, she knew she could choose to be a writer. A pen and an exercise book, that was all it took, to be a rotten writer, anyhow. Good or rotten, that came later.

It meant giving in to the word factory. That frightened her, because the word factory was such a menace. Now she understood why the idea of being press-ganged was so alarming.

Oh, well. If you can't lick 'em join 'em.

Maybe that was what the word factory was all about, the poor little bugger trying to get out of the baking dish.

She giggled and that was the end of the crying. It was getting dark and she was cold in her thin blouse and skirt. She got up, scrambled down the rocky slope with drying tears stinging on her face, her drenched handkerchief stuffed into her pocket and soaking through to the skin. She stood in the darkening street brushing her skirt and trying to tidy her hair with her fingers, cold, peckish, uncomfortable and utterly happy.

Where could she buy an exercise book at this time on Sunday? She would have to walk to the main street, unless there was a corner shop still open. It was wonderful to have a problem just that size, something to walk up a street for, instead of drifting like an escaped balloon.

She was so absorbed in her thoughts she nearly walked past the dim light that combed through the bead curtain at the open door of the little shop. The man behind the counter gave her a funny look—no wonder, she thought, looking into the spotted mirror that advertised Fulton's Orangeade. Behind the lettering she saw herself, wild-haired, blubbered, red-eyed, and thought, This is the happiest moment of my life.

The shopkeeper brought her the exercise book; she groped for her purse and touched the book. That was a moment, when she exchanged one talisman for another.

She said, ‘Don't bother to wrap it,' dropped the exercise book into her bag beside the book and went out.

In the garden opposite, an untidy palm tree stood clumped against the fading pastels of the sky, and that was all right, too.

Back in her room at last, she opened the exercise book (this moment will never come again) and wrote at the top of the first page:

The Book is Gone

‘Now see this. I open my eyes and there's a girl—naked, not a stitch on her—'

‘Half your luck.'

‘Oh well. I'd had my luck, if you call it that. She was a left-over from last night, but what was she doing? Sitting with her bum on her heels in front of my bookcase reading Plato.'

‘So you said…'

‘What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? No, I didn't. Though I suppose it was what she was waiting for.'

‘Mean bastard, aren't you?'

‘I could have been meaner, could have asked her for a few words on philosophy. Instead, I made light of it, tried to jolly her into putting her clothes on—damn it, she'd had plenty of time to get dressed—what the hell are you grinning at?'

‘Your sense of sin. Reading Plato with no clothes on.'

‘Well, now you come to mention it, I did think it was cheek.'

‘The Greeks weren't so fussy.'

‘Well, this is what's funny. I went and had a shower, and when I came back, she was gone and—this is it—so was the book.'

‘And her clothes? Do tell!'

‘Of course her clothes.'

‘Oh blast. You just ruined a beautiful image.'

No, not Plato. Plato was too obvious. Something to get the second young man guessing, building up a whole skeleton from a toebone, nagging the first one about it. You can see he's haunted by the image of a naked girl reading…Turgenev?

She put down her pen and bit at her thumbnail, not for the last time.

The book must go, of course, back to Michael. She would wrap it and leave it in his letter box. She was sad to think of parting with it, but she could live without it. There were words to carry as talismans.

‘Did you have a good weekend, Isobel?'

Christ, was that just a weekend?

I met the ghosts of two murderers when I was out for a walk, found the semi-strangled body of an infant learning to talk…

For a moment she felt threatened, seeing the walls of the word factory coming in on her, but she rallied. Take it down, consider it later. The boy who had chased her and then couldn't hit her, make a note.

‘Very nice, thanks.'

She smiled so happily that Rita said, ‘I do believe our Isobel has met someone.'