Jump and Other Stories (12 page)

—And you only get told tonight?—

—Nils, how was Jimmy to know? It was only when the neighbours found someone who knew where he works that he got a message. He's been running around all day trying to find where they're being held. And every time he goes near a police station he's afraid they'll take him in, as well. That brother of mine isn't exactly the bravest man you could meet…—

—Poor devil. D'you blame him. If they can take your mother—then anybody in the family—

Her nose and those earlobes go red as if with anger, but it is her way of fiercely weeping. She strokes harder and harder the narrow-brained head of the Afghan hound, her
Dudu. She had never been allowed a dog in her mother's house; her mother said they were unclean.—It's so cold in that town in winter. What will my mother have to sleep on tonight in a cell.—

He gets up to take her to his arms; the kettle screams and screams, as if for her.

In bed in the dark, Teresa talked, cried, secure in the Afghan's warmth along one side of her, and her lover-husband's on the other. She did not have to tell him she cried because she was warm and her mother cold. She could not sleep—they could not sleep—because her mother, who had stifled her with thick clothing, suffocating servility, smothering religion, was cold. One of the reasons why she loved him—not the reason why she married him—was to rid herself of her mother. To love him, someone from the other side of the world, a world unknown to her mother, was to embrace snow and ice, unknown to her mother. He freed her of the family, fetid sun.

For him, she was the being who melted the hard cold edges of existence, the long black nights that blotted out half the days of childhood, the sheer of ice whose austerity was repeated, by some mimesis of environment, in the cut of his jaw. She came to him out of the houseful, streetful, of people as crowded together as the blood of different races mixed in their arteries. He came to her out of the silent rooms of an only child, with an engraving of Linnaeus, his countryman, in lamplight; and out of the scientist's solitary journeys in a glass bell among fish on the sea-bed—he himself had grown up to be an ichthyologist not a botanist. They had the desire for each other of a couple who would
always be strangers. They had the special closeness of a couple who belonged to nobody else.

And that night she relived, relating to him, the meekness of her mother, the subservience to an unfeeling, angry man (the father, now dead), the acceptance of the ghetto place the law allotted to the mother and her children, the attempts even to genteel it with lace curtains and sprayed room-fresheners—all that had disgusted Teresa and now filled her with anguish because—How will a woman like my mother stand up to prison? What will they be able to do to her?—

He knew she was struggling with the awful discovery that she loved her mother, who was despicable; being imprisoned surely didn't alter the fact that her mother was so, proven over many omissions and years? He knew his Teresa well enough not to tell her the discovery was not shameful—that would bring it out into the open and she would accuse herself of sentimentality. Her
mother
was sentimental: those bronzed baby shoes of the men and women who had not grown up to be careful not to get into trouble, who had married a blond foreigner with a strange accent or taken to drink and bankruptcy, or got mixed up in politics, secret police files, arrests in the small hours of the morning. He listened and stroked her hair, sheltered her folded hand between his neck and shoulder as she cried and raged, pitying, blaming; and cursing—she who kept of her mother's genteelism at least her pure mouth—those fucking bastards of government and police for what they had done, done not only at four in the morning in that house with its smell of cooking oil and mothballs, but for generations, tearing up lives with their decrees on bits of paper, breaking down doors in power of arrest, shutting people off from life, in cells.

Later in the night when he thought she might at last have fallen asleep, she sat up straight:—What will she say? What does she know?—

She meant, about Robbie. Teresa and the brother, Robbie, were the ones who had got mixed up in politics. Teresa and her Swedish husband, living in this backwater coastal town in the company of marine biologists who were content to believe all species are interesting, and enquire no further into questions of equality, belonged to progressive organizations which walked the limit of but did not transgress legality, going no further than protest meetings. This was a respectable cover for the occasional clandestine support they gave Robbie, who really was mixed up, not just in avowals, but in the deeds of revolution. Sometimes it was money; sometimes it was an unannounced arrival in the middle of the night, with the need to go Underground for a day or two.

—Robbie won't have told her anything. You know how, even if he ever wanted to, she'd stop her ears.—

—It's not what she
knows.
She's never known anything about us. But they won't believe that! They'll go on interrogating her—

—Don't you think they'll soon discover it—that she's never known anything that would matter to them?—

His slow voice was the anchor from which she bobbed frantically. Suddenly her anger spilled in another direction.—What the hell got into him? What did Robbie go there for? How could he
dare
go to that house? How could he possibly not know that there, of all places, would be where they'd pick him up! The idiocy! The self-indulgence! What did he want,
a home-cooked meal?
I don't know what's gone wrong with the Movement, how they can let people behave so undisciplinedly, so childishly… How can we ever hope
to see the end, if that's how they behave… The idiot! Handed over—
yes do come in and meet my mother and sister
—quite a social occasion in the family, all ready to be carted off to prison together. I hope he realizes what he's done. Some revolution, left to people like him… how
could
he go
near
that house—

They did not call each other by the endearments used commercially by every patronizing saleswoman and every affected actress—‘love' and ‘darling'—but had their own, in his language.—
Min lille loppa,
we don't know what his reasons might have been—

His ‘little flea' beat the pillows with her fist, frightening her dog off the bed.—
There can't be any reason.
Except she ruined them all, for everything, for the revolution too—he's no different from the other brothers, in the end. He goes crawling back under mummy's skirt—You don't know those people, that family—

He went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of hot milk at four in the morning. While the milk was heating on the stove he stood at the kitchen window and put his palm on the pane, feeling the dark out there, the hour of the end of night into which, forty-eight hours before, mother, brother and sister had come, led to police cars.

In the morning, she didn't go to work. She was soiled and blurred by helplessness. He had been in that family house only a few awkward times over their seven years together, but he saw for the first time that she would resemble her mother if she were ever to grow old and afraid. With her lips drawn back in pain, her teeth looked long—the face of a victim. Distraught, her beauty dragged out of
shape, there was the reversion to physical type that comes with age; some day he would become the listing old Scandinavian hulk who was his father or his uncle. He begged her to take one of his tranquillizers but she wouldn't—she had a horror of drugs, of drink, anything she had seen give others power over the individual personality; he had always privately thought this came subconsciously from her background, where people of one colour were submitted to the will of those of another.

He went to the Institute for an hour to set his team the tasks of the day and explain why both would be absent—she was employed there, too, in a humbler capacity, having had the opportunity, through their marriage and his encouragement, to satisfy her longing for some form of scientific education. When his colleagues asked what he was going to do he realized he didn't know. If it turned out that Teresa's family were detained under Section 29 they would have no access to lawyers or relatives. Between his colleagues' expressions of sympathy and support were (he saw) the regarding silences shared by them: they could have predicted this sort of disaster, inconceivable in their own lives, as a consequence of his kind of marriage.

He found her talking on the telephone. She was clutching the receiver in both hands, her feet were bare and wet, and the dog—the dog had undergone a change, too, shrunk to a bony frame plastered with fringes of wet fur.

She had bathed the dog? On this day?

She saw his face but was hysterically concentrated on what she was hearing; signalled, don't interrupt, be quiet! He put his arm round her and her one hand left the earpiece and groped up for his and held it tightly. She was cutting into the gabble on the other end:—But I must be able to
reach you! Isn't there anywhere I can phone? If I don't hear from you, who will tell me what's happening? … Listen Jimmy, Jimmy, listen, I'm not blaming you… But if I can't phone you at work, then… No! No! That isn't good enough, d'you hear me, Jimmy—

There was a moment when he tried to hold steady the shifting gaze of her eyes. She put down the phone.—Call box. And I've forgotten the number he just gave me. I've been waiting the whole morning for him to call back, and now… I didn't know how to get myself away from sitting here looking at that phone… do anything, anything… He phoned just after you left and said he had a lawyer friend-of-a-friend, someone I've never heard of, he was going to find out details, something about approaching a magistrate—

The phone sprang alive again and she stared at it; he picked it up: there was the voice of her brother, hesitant, stumbling—Ma and them, they in under Section 29.—

She sat at the phone while he tried to activate the house as if it were a stopped clock. To keep them going there would have to be lunch (he cooked it), later the lights switched on, the time for news on television. But she couldn't eat not knowing if her mother was able to eat what there would be in a plate pushed through a cell door, she couldn't read by lamplight because there was darkness in a cell, and the news—there was no news when people were detained under Section 29. She telephoned friends and could not remember what they had said. She telephoned a doctor because she suddenly had the idea her mother had low blood pressure or high blood pressure—not sure which—and she wanted to know whether her mother could have a stroke and die, from the one, or collapse,
from the other, in a prison? She did not want to go to bed. She brought out a small cracked photograph of her mother holding a baby (Robbie, she identified) with a cross-looking tiny girl standing by (herself). A piece of a man's coatsleeve showed where the rest of the photograph had been roughly cut off. The missing figure was her father. Exhausted, the two of them were up again until after midnight while she talked to him about her mother, was filled with curiosity and flashes of understanding about her mother, the monotony and smallness of her mother's life.—And it has to be this: the only big thing that's ever happened to her has to be this.—Her whole face trembled. He suffered with her. He was aware that it is a common occurrence that people talk with love about one they have despised and resented, once that person is dead. And to be in prison under Section 29, no one knows where, was to be dead to the world where one did not deserve to be loved.

In bed, she would not (of course) take a sleeping pill but they had each other. He made love to her while her tears smeared them both, and that put her blessedly to sleep. Now and then she gave the hiccuping sigh of a comforted child, and he woke at once and lifted his head, watching over her. There was a smell of clean dog-fur in the bed that third night.

Teresa.

He woke to find she was already bathed and dressed. She turned her head to him from the bedroom doorway when he spoke her name; her hair was drawn away tightly from her cheekbones and ears, held by combs. Again something had happened to her in his absence; this time while she
was beside him, but they were parted in sleep. She was ready to leave the house long before it was time to go to work: going first to see an Indian woman lawyer whom they'd heard speak at protest meetings against detention without trial. He agreed it was a good idea. That was what must have come to her overnight, among these other things: if she was right about her mother's high tension (or whatever it was) Jimmy must contact the doctor who treated her and get a statement from him confirming a poor state of health—that might get her released or at least ensure special diet and treatment, inside. And something must be done about that house—it would be rifled in a week, in that neighbourhood. Somebody responsible must be found to go there and see that it was properly locked up—and tidy up, yes, the police would have turned everything upside down; if they arrest, they also search the scene of arrest.

—Shall I come with you?—

No, she had already phoned Fatima, she was waiting at her office. Teresa paused a moment, ready to go, rehearsing, he could see, what she had to say to the lawyer; blew him a kiss.

There were no more tears, no more tremblings. She came to the Institute straight from the lawyer's office, reported to him on the advice she had been given, put on her white coat and did her work. She found it hard to concentrate those first few days and had a dazed look about her, from the effort, when they met for lunch. They would seek a place to sit apart from others, in the canteen, like clandestine lovers. But it was not sweet intimacies their lowered voices exchanged. They were discussing what to do, what should be done, what could be done—and every now and then one or the other would look up to return the wave or
greeting of a colleague, look up into the humid, cheerful room with the day's specials chalked on a board, people gathered round the coffee and tea and Coke dispensers, look out, through the expanse of glass the sea breathed on, to the red collage of flamboyants and jazzy poinsettias in the Institute's park—and her mother, brother and sister were in cells, somewhere. All the time. While they ate, while they worked, while they took the dog for his walk. For that progression of repetitions known as daily life went on; with only a realization of how strange it is, in its dogged persistence: what will stop it covering up what is really happening? In the cells; and here?