Pilgrims Way Page 8

  ‘You look all right,’ she said, smiling. She came back up on the pavement and took his arm.

  They stopped under St George’s Tower while he showed her the inscription that said that Alderman Spencer had laid the foundation stone for that edifice. Behind this, under the arches of the tower, was another inscription, very much smaller, which said that Kit Marlowe’s family home had stood thereabouts.

  ‘At least for the tourists’ sake they should have made that Marlowe one bigger,’ Catherine said, tightening her hold on him. ‘And given a little more information about him.’

  ‘They should’ve emblazoned it across the clock face, with a slot machine at the bottom. For only 50p you can hear the first 100 lines of Tamburlaine,’ he declaimed, conscious of the slightest alteration of the pressure of her arm. ‘Read by David Gower, local boy made good. But the burghers are more honest than that. Kit Marlowe was a scandal who shamed his parents with his whoring and his boozing, and founded nothing but a couple of plays. You can get that kind of information from the tourist centre. Here they are concerned to celebrate their own more solid achievements.’

  ‘What a philistine,’ she said, dragging him away from the tower.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk! An habitué of the Yacht Club.’

  She coloured a little behind her smile and he could not restrain a pang of envy. Who is it? Who is the bourgeois shrimp who’s been chatting up ma chick? It was still very early in the evening, and very quiet even though it was Friday. He suggested they went for a drink first, but she said she was too hungry. They stopped in front of the theatre while they debated where they should go. He entertained her in the meantime by inventing histories for the actors whose photographs they were standing in front of. She moved away from him in the end, saying she could not think with all that chatter and clatter going on in her ear. She came back, demanding a Chinese meal. As they walked away from the theatre, she took his arm again, holding tightly to it and leaning on him.

  ‘What exactly are you doing in that place?’ she asked, softening her voice to show her sympathy. ‘A clever man like you?’

  Her arm seemed a great burden to him. By small, irritable movements he conveyed this to her and she withdrew it, looking at him with surprise. He folded the arm across his chest as if to keep it out of reach, as if to control himself from using it otherwise. ‘Perhaps you’d like to suggest that I become a nurse,’ he said, glaring at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, laughing out of embarrassment. ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean a nurse? What have I said wrong?’

  He ignored her, caught now in the dynamic of his hurt. That was what people who decided to treat him kindly said: Why don’t you try for a nursing course? I’m sure they’ll accept you. He resented that he was vulnerable to them, that he did not have a mother and father at the end of a telephone to tell him to hang on, to learn to labour and to wait. He detested the meaningless pity of people who knew nothing about him but could still hector him. Make something of yourself. You are not doing yourself justice. We all know that you are capable of a great deal more than this. He was doing his best to keep his head above water, keep despair at bay by mocking the afflicted, spurn the culture clash with surprise forays into forbidden territories. Why could he not be left alone to the quiet contemplation of his failures? Why could he not be left to wallow in self-pity?

  ‘What is it? What have I said?’ she asked, challenging him to explain himself. She stared angrily at him, stopping on the pavement and turning to face him. ‘I actually meant to be flattering, not critical. What annoyed you?’ She saw the look of anger in his face turn to pain. He shook his head and sighed, and gave her a shame-faced smile. She resisted a temptation to reach out and touch him and comfort him. There there.

  ‘I’m sorry, I get hysterical about some things,’ he said, surprised by the challenge and wanting now to win her back to his side.

  ‘But I still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why did you get so angry?’

  ‘I suppose your words imply a criticism . . . even if you don’t mean to be critical. That I’m resigned to that dirty place. Not doing anything for myself. That I’m here simply because I haven’t had the good sense to do something better with myself.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she protested. ‘I didn’t mean anything like that. I was just prying, trying to find out how you felt about it. If you had ambitions . . . Or how you found yourself where you are.’

  He made himself keep silent, feeling that he had come near enough to embarrassing disclosures, had come close to chasing her away with his sensitivities. ‘Please forgive my peculiar behaviour,’ he said, bowing slightly with a pretence of cavalier charm.

  She made a solemn face, then laid her hand on his arm the way she imagined a strong, sophisticated woman of the world might a few minutes before dinner.

  8

  The waiter hovered over the spare ribs and asked if it was all right. Catherine looked up from her eager munching and smiled brightly at the boyish-looking man. ‘It’s delicious,’ she told the waiter. She invited Daud to contribute and he added several nods and an appreciative mmmhm. The waiter straightened with an eager smile. Smile is good for business, but it was, anyway, no less than he had expected to hear.

  ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ she said after he had gone. ‘The way he comes and says All right?’

  ‘Don’t patronise him,’ he said. ‘If he didn’t want your money so much he’d probably chuck a handful of rat poison in your food.’

  ‘Charming. Am I patronising him?’

  ‘All that sweet business . . . because he is a small man or gives you that bizarre smile.’

  ‘Are you like this all the time?’ she asked. ‘Anyway, stop being so unpleasant and tell me about your true ambitions.’

  ‘To leave that place,’ he said, leaning back from his gnawed bones.

  ‘Is that all? And go where?’

  ‘To the university . . . this autumn perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Really? That’s good.’ She paused in her chewing and dropped the bone on her plate. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Can I tell you about the cricket score first? At Old Trafford this morning England were all out for 71 . . .’

  ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I hate cricket. Tell me about going to the university.’

  She sighed after a moment and then smiled an apology. It’s the Yacht Club again, he thought. He told her about the evening classes and the examinations he had recently taken. If the results turned out to be reasonable, he would start at the beginning of the new term. He had kept quiet about it in case things went wrong. Oh, she was pleased! Evening classes! She had tried to attend evening classes while she was living in London, and she just could not do it. Mind you, it was a secretarial course, deadly dull. What was he going to study? History! And literature! He laughed with the pleasure of explaining how he had arrived at the choices, while she became absorbed in the pleasure of living somebody else’s life. He paused while the waiter brought them the rest of their meal.

  ‘Beanshoots in everything,’ she said.

  ‘The authentic traditional Chinese flavour. And this padded cell that we sit in, with the muted lights and the hideous canopy of silver-spangled stars, is probably a mythological representation of the contempt they hold us in. We’re probably sitting in the middle of a painting called “Cultural Chaos” by Lin Ah.’

  ‘You’re too sensitive,’ she said. ‘Smile at the sweet little man. Can’t you see he’s beaming at you? Anyway, so you’re going to get away from that horrible job. But what about money? Will you get a grant? You have! It sounds as if it’s all worked out. I envy you, I think. Oh . . . what about sending money home . . . to your parents? How will you manage that on a grant?’

  He remembered that on that night they were on duty together she had asked him why he had left the college where he was a student and he had lied. He lied to everybody about that. Usually he said that he had to go out to work, earn some money, because his
father had been taken ill with meningitis or something like that, and his family needed him to send money back to support them. Very few people ever asked any further questions, and if they did, he volunteered hints that there were other unnameable diseases in the family. This was usually enough to force the hardiest into retreat, in case they got embroiled in an endless family saga.

  ‘What will you do about that?’ she asked, carelessly pressing him into a corner.

  He shovelled a forkful of beanshoots into his mouth, undecided about how much to concede. He tried to resist the temptation to unburden himself. He told himself, as he always did, that he would feel no relief but only shame and remorse. She was waiting for more, holding her fork in the air as if she knew she would soon tire of the waiting and would have to prod him into speech.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ he mumbled.

  ‘But you used to send money to them, didn’t you? That was why you stopped being a student before, wasn’t it?’

  It was a lonely winter. The days were grey and dark . . . never seen such days. The damp, the chill in the evenings, and nowhere near home. The long evenings muffled to the noise of human laughter. The nights were frightening as men and women grew in size, adding inches in girth and adopting lowering looks at chance encounters. The cold froze the sweat in the anus, running out of fear and anxiety. The wind blasted the cracks open. Gloomy, long winter evenings of painful regret. Gloomy, long winter evenings when the thoughts of friends and home were like torture.

  ‘No,’ he said lightly, all at once indifferent to what she might think. ‘I never sent money anywhere. I lied to you.’

  She looked sad, and he wondered if she had guessed all along.

  ‘Does that break some code of honour?’ he asked, watching her with a look of fierce, angry attention.

  ‘I guess so,’ she said, watching him back with wary surprise but with the beginnings of anxiety in her eyes. His look of fury confused her, and she was afraid that she had missed something, had misunderstood. ‘I think I tell too many lies too,’ she said, feeling foolish but trying to think of something encouraging to say.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He was too absorbed in himself to notice the help she was trying to offer. What was he saying sorry to her for? Why was he apologising to her? ‘I wounded them so much . . . beyond remedy. I disappointed them so completely. And I could not bring myself to be abjectly contrite and penitent enough in my letters to console them.’

  ‘Your parents?’ she asked.

  Something abject would have appeased them, he thought. Or at least would have allowed them to feel that there was something he still needed from them. Instead he could feel only the injustice of their rejection of him, and could respond only with hurt silence. They took his silence to mean that he did not care, that he was not worried about their approval any more. Now so much had happened that he had no idea where he would begin to explain to them the sheer misery of all the things that had happened.

  When she spoke again, repeating her question, he raised his eyes to her and she saw that they were liquid with a pain he was trying to subdue. He looked away quickly, not from embarrassment, but as if he would leave. ‘Tell me,’ she said, feeling she should touch him, stop him from going. ‘I’d like to know.’

  She was nothing to him. He thought that with a mental swagger. She would understand nothing of this. Why did she ask about things she could not possibly understand? Forcing him to talk about events he would rather forget. He did not even talk to others like himself about this . . . others who had also come to conquer the world and ended up as car park attendants and accounts clerks. But still she waited, expectant and serious, waiting for him to bare his soul. She wanted to help him, he could see that. Save him from himself. She wanted him to prove to her that he was not just wallowing, that he had cause and reason to wander around the countryside looking tragic and interesting.

  ‘My father didn’t need my money,’ he said. ‘I stopped being a student because I failed all my exams.’

  Yes, he thought, all my exams. The shame was not in the failure of intelligence, because he knew it was not that, but that those two years had shaken the sense of himself as hardy and resourceful. He had ended up a shambles of bitterness and despair, weeping with loneliness in his grubby, boarding-house room, his books and notes open before him, demanding to be studied. But his mind could not study anything, overwhelmed as it was by a relentless internal sobbing. ‘Why?’ she asked, frowning and direct. ‘Why did you fail?’

  ‘What?’ he said. His voice sounded distant and thick, disturbed by an idle question in the midst of tricky ruminations. It was intended to discourage conversation, to imply that he had not really heard the question, and did not really want it repeated.

  ‘Why did you fail?’ she asked, direct and insistent, but now soft-spoken and kind. He sat more upright in the chair, the palms of both hands pressed downwards on the table. She said nothing while she waited for him to speak, wishing she could, and thinking only that this was not what she had expected.

  Holton, the head of department, had gleefully sent a copy of his report home. Daud had deliberately given the wrong postal address in his enrolment papers, not because he feared that reports might be sent to his father – he had not expected to fail then – but out of a duplicity that had become part of their lives. It was a habit of fear that the years after the revolution had taught them all. But he could not, it had never occurred to him to, give the wrong name for his father. He had picked a post box number at random, anything. It had never occurred to him that whoever the letter reached would simply put his jacket on and take it round to his father’s house. Why should he not give the wrong address? There was nothing to hide, but it would give the postal censors a conundrum and a small headache.

  At the end of his second year, when it was clear the way things would turn out, the head of department asked Daud where he should send the report. Should he send it to Daud’s home address, all those thousands of miles away, where it would arrive like a lethal curse that would sweep the memory of Daud from proud parents and show that the assurances of well-being that he had plied them with were nothing but lies? Or should he send it to Daud’s boarding-house address, where he could shred it and throw it in the bin and write instead some more lies to his parents? Daud told him to send it to his parents, daring him to indulge his petty, official revenge. The head of department took him at his word and sent the report to his father. He wrote to Daud too, enclosing a copy of a report that detailed his various failures with complacent satisfaction.

  Daud had hoped that the report would not arrive, would get chewed up by the revolutionary censors or would sit and rot in a mail-bag at the airport. It took his father more than three months to write, and then only a dozen terse lines, congratulating him and wishing him all the luck for the future. Your mother has not mentioned your name. She has sworn not to until God has shown mercy and shown you the way out of your waywardness. Could they not bring themselves to say one word of kindness? Could they not have enquired if he was in some kind of trouble, if he had enough to live on? Could they not have said to him: This is bad luck, but don’t be too disappointed. Keep trying. Did they have to make him feel as if he had strangled their first-born? What wayward ways? He had missed them so much. Them and Bossy, and his people and his land. He had driven himself to the very edges of despair . . . cold and hungry and filled with hate.

  ‘By the end I had no money left anyway,’ he said, grinning at her, ‘so it wouldn’t have made any difference. I hadn’t paid any rent for months. I was lucky . . . the landlord had had lots of overseas students at one time or another. It was a boarding-house, you see, for students. I used to tell him that I was expecting a draft from my father and he would say: Of course! Pay me when you have the money. He was into racial harmony and all that. He’s still my landlord and I still owe him money.’

  ‘Is that what happened?’ she asked, her face flat and unresponsive, as if she suspected him of trying to escape a neces
sary but unpleasant fate. He smiled as he watched her put her fork down and cross her forearms on the table. Now this is for your own good, my lad. Just spill it out and you’ll feel much better afterwards. ‘But that’s not why you failed,’ she said.

  ‘My stomach was always rumbling with hunger. I used to feel puny next to these hale and beefy young Englishmen who were always shouting or getting excited about the smallest things. They were always eating: sweets, crisps, chocolate bars. Sometimes I used to stay away from class because my stomach made too much noise.’

  ‘What!’ she cried, incredulity in her dilated eyes.

  ‘I felt so silly.’

  ‘But that’s stupid!’

  ‘They laughed at me when my stomach rumbled, so I stayed away. They were always laughing at me. It sounds . . . pathetic, doesn’t it? You hear stories of these great people who battled against hunger and cold to complete a brilliant piece of learning. Now I always wonder: Didn’t their stomachs rumble?’

  ‘You’re joking!’ she said, but she could see from the patient way that he waited to continue that he was not.

  ‘I used to stand outside the college canteen during the lunch period, hoping that somebody I knew would walk by and ask me what I was doing there. Hoping that one of them would say Come in, I’ll pay for you, or You can have a share of mine. And they did, they used to. It couldn’t go on of course. I used to see this hunted look my class-mates would give me at lunchtime. They were stupid shits on the whole, always making jokes about coons and wogs and smelly niggers. Really to be despised by them was more than I deserved. I went for long walks in the town. Sometimes I stole something from a shop, chocolate or a bag of sweets. I wrote to my father asking him for money. I knew he’d given me all that he had when I first came, but what was I supposed to do? He wrote back saying there was no more . . . unless I wanted to go back and drink his blood.’