Читать книгу The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books - Elspeth Davie - Страница 7

THE SHOCKING TITLE, stinging us instantly to attention, was read out one afternoon amongst the usual fortnightly choice of essay subjects: A Visit to the Zoo. We were in the highest class of boys and due to leave school in a few months. After a stunned silence these words were greeted with incredulous whistlings, loud and prolonged hoots, sickened groans and a great shuffling and stamping from the back seats where young men with brilliantined hair and narrow shoes were sitting, casually hacking great slivers from the underside of their desks with outsized penknives. Our English master, who was new to the job and unsure of himself, quickly withdrew the subject, explaining that it had got mixed in with a set from some lower form. But the damage was done and it was a long time before the class settled down. A sense of outrage hung menacingly around, ready to ignite explosively with the chalk and dust in the dried-out air at the first hint of further offence. Gradually, however, still muttering savage threats, we sank heavily to the business of writing, after making our reluctant choice between The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Political Career and The Dangers and Benefits of the Space Age – giving only a scornful glance at Whirlpool which had been thrown in as the sop to those who had more imagination than knowledge. Yet throughout the whole hour from its blank beginning to the frenzied bout of last-minute writing, I felt the impact of that subject which had been withdrawn. It was indeed the one topic which for a long time I had been at pains to avoid, but here it was now forcing itself up unexpectedly like something painfully green and fresh amongst all those stony opinions which I was doggedly setting down on paper.

Almost three years before a young woman had come to live with my family for several weeks. I knew nothing about her except that she was a cousin of my mother’s, that she was convalescing from a serious illness and that she expected to be left quite free all day to go out and in as she pleased. Two or three bottles of brilliant-coloured tonics, placed there by my mother, appeared on the bathroom shelf amongst our normal collection of dingy brown ones, throwing stained-glass wedges of light into the bath on sunny days but remaining corked throughout her visit. Nor did she appear to follow up any of the suggestions being offered on all sides as to the best method of ‘taking her out of herself’. For it turned out that the one and only cure she had chosen for herself was to go often and alone to the zoo which was on the other side of the city.

I was on holiday – the only young person in the house and it seemed obvious that, sooner or later, she would ask me to accompany her. At first I was both surprised and thankful that she did not; then I grew angry. Later, however, as I watched her going off day after day by herself, I believed that by not taking it for granted that I would have to be asked she had given me a certain value apart from the family and had somehow included me in the adult world where people could be free and separate from one another if they wished to be, with no reasons given. In this way I gradually, silently came closer to her, and indeed believed that I could share the emotions which kept her all day and in all weathers restlessly on the move.

Then one day while casually drawing on her gloves she flatly enquired with an indifferent glance directed beyond me into the hall mirror: ‘And are you coming out today?’ We walked together to the centre of the city, moving silently and apart, going our separate ways with our own thoughts until we came to the junction of roads where a policeman directed three great streams of traffic. This place where there was hardly a person to be seen but only a steady whirl of glittering cars had for me an unreal and precarious brilliance that afternoon. Even the policeman seemed to take on the authority and abandon of some white-gloved clown who can draw a crazy collection of vehicles after him with a wave of the hand or keep them circling dizzily until he has decided at what corner he will point his finger. I followed with my eyes the direction of that hand down one broad street as far as the eye could see to where it narrowed and a faint green of trees could be seen. They were still the dusty city trees, sparsely planted, and the zoo was still a long way beyond them, but that day, for the first time, I saw this greenness with a painful shock of pleasure.

Now, day after day, we went to the zoo. Sometimes it was wet and we would be almost alone there, and on the stormiest days gusts of rain fell against the metal roofs of the monkey-houses like handfuls of sharp nails and even the enclosed pools were raked into miniature waves on which old crusts, orange peel and dusty feathers rocked desolately together. Sometimes it was so hot that after we had made a tour of the lower houses we climbed no higher but sat for a long time on a bench beside three empty cages which stood on their own in the shade of the only group of trees in that part of the garden. These cages had no labels; there was no way of knowing whether the animals there had died or been moved to some other part or whether the place was being prepared for new arrivals. In the heat we sat and stared at the dusty straw and the empty troughs wondering what the inmates had looked like, and my eyes would climb up and down the wire netting behind the bars as my imagination moved from ostriches and giraffes down to some almost invisible rodent hiding in the straw.

‘I wonder how old you are,’ she said one afternoon as we were sitting in the half-empty tea-house. It was unlike any other restaurant. Half of the roof was glass and on hot days there was an almost tropical atmosphere about the place. All round the walls grew tubs of tall, waxy green plants whose leaves were always damp from the quantities of steam which rose from the tea-urns at one end of the room. The concrete floor was sandy and children would pad silently back and forth carrying flashing glasses of lemonade which they drank holding them above the table, the straws tilted at an angle – thus keeping their chins high enough to see what was going on out of the windows. The smell of elephants penetrated to this place and above the high bushes one could catch an occasional glimpse of the two rows of children rocking by, perched back to back on an ornamental tray which swung like a hammock at every step. Long ago, in another age, I also had swung there. Now I was sitting silently at table opposite a young woman who had been watching me intently for some time while I finished my tea.

‘I’m fifteen,’ I replied, abruptly pushing my plate away from me.

‘Yes, I know that,’ she said, ‘but I’m wondering how old you are in other ways. I mean,’ she went on, leaning her elbows on the table, ‘what do you know about people – about men and women? Do you know, for instance, that they can illumine the most dense, the most boring objects or places or people for one another, and then, by one word or even one look, turn the whole world to iron?’

I looked up quickly. But she was smiling slightly as though to take back a little of the impenetrable hardness, the numbing coldness she had put into that last word, at the same time looking aside again through the hedges, to imply that it was not after all a real question which required an answer but simply a statement of fact which needed only mutual recognition. I had not taken my eyes off her, but now she appeared, in the space of a few seconds, to be quite changed. She was a person who had at last spoken directly to me, who had broken through the restless, drifting indifference of the last few days with something unequivocal as a shout or a fierce gesture of the hands, and I tried to hold her there at the point where this momentary and precarious contact had been made by taking a more careful note of her appearance.

Her hair was straight and dark, with a faint bronzing of lighter colour at the back of her head where it was intricately plaited and twisted up into a heavy coil like a great unripened blackberry. In front it was brushed well back from a smooth, narrow brow which, while absorbed in some thought, she would often touch, tapping her fingers gently between the eyebrows, then drawing them firmly up over her brow and carefully round the temple down to the cheekbone, as though she found deep lines there corresponding with certain ineradicable grievances in her own heart. She had fine dark eyes but most of the time she seemed to look at things with a peculiarly blank and fixed stare as though she would not bother to see objects unless they presented themselves within a very limited field of vision which for her was usually straight ahead. One had the impression that only at this particular spot were human beings clear or even human before disappearing into the amorphous background from which they had emerged. She seldom followed them with her eyes. Occasionally she would drop her head and tuck her chin down into the folds of a broad scarf of blue silk which she wore even on warm days and drew up over her head if it was wet or windy. In this position, and without moving her head, she would stare up and down her person from toes to bosom with the same blank indifference with which she might look down at a flat and uninteresting landscape. I remembered all these things clearly now. I also knew in a flash that the extra bottles in the bathroom – the tonics, the laxatives, the vitamin pills – were all nonsense; my mother’s insistence on gritty brown bread, her references to deeper sleep, extra milk and fresh air – meaningless. All these were no more a likely cure for love than a bandage over the finger for some internal injury.

From that afternoon all the childishness of the zoo disappeared for me, and as the days went by its whole character changed; its cruelty and beauty, its strident colours and harsh cries gradually took the place of all those mild and comic impressions I had experienced there as a child. Now something savage and sad brooded far back in the darkness of the cages we passed. When I stopped to listen I would hear sounds I had not been aware of before – strange rustlings and whistlings from hidden birds, those unidentified croakings and hoots belonging rather to midnight than to noon; and sometimes there came a howl, heart-freezing, yet so distant that it seemed to come, not from the trim confines of the garden, but through the black arctic air and across miles and miles of snow-covered plain.

Everything that had been associated with earlier visits faded out. The animals themselves had changed. Now it was horrible to remember that I had ever expected them to clown for my entertainment – painful even to stare too long at the yawnings and scratchings, the sudden blows and caresses, or to meet the brooding, yellow eyes which stared back, unblinking, at grimacing human faces. Even the seals, flopping off the hot boulders, or rocking from side to side on their flippers ready for a fish to come hurtling through the air, looked mournfully out of place. No longer hypnotised by the velvety backwards and forwards padding of the lioness, I waited only for the slow, swinging turn she would make at each end of the narrow cell, and heard, with a sinking of the stomach, the soft swish of her great shoulder as over and over again with sickening regularity it brushed the same spot on the wall.

As the days went by and our outings never varied I began to wonder if the likeness of the man she loved might not, after all, be found in one of these animals at which we stared so long and gloomily; depending on my ever-changing feelings towards him I would find him on certain days amongst the monkeys, on others amongst the brilliant and talkative birds, and occasionally, when the thought of him began to bore me, I found him in a tank of brown, wrinkle-headed fish, gaping coldly at us like some jaded business man sealed inside the plate-glass of his office. One day I caught a spark of interest in her eyes for the first time as she looked after a well-dressed man who was strolling by himself round a pond of black and green ducks – a spark instantly extinguished when he turned his head; but from that moment I quickly removed this man of hers, whoever he was, from any likeness to certain of the monkey race – those tousled ones, shamelessly unbuttoned, who wore frayed fur round wrists and neck or, worse, patches of bare, scarlet skin on their backs. There were other elegant species to which he might still belong: monkeys with silky chestnut hair parted in the middle and falling smoothly over cleanshaven cheeks, whose fingers were long and delicate, rosy-pink on the inside. But the most likely place for him was still amongst the stylish birds; even if he was fat and formal it was possible to find him amongst the penguins who could stand for great lengths of time, tilted backwards, presenting plump, snowy shirtfronts to the admiring crowds.

One afternoon I was peering into a cage which had seemed empty, but hearing a rustling in the inner passage I had put my head against the cold bars with both hands grasping them on either side. For a long time I stared but nothing appeared except a mouse which darted across and disappeared into a pile of straw. A chill disappointment had been growing in me for the whole of that day and now it was a raging discontent. Long ago I had lost the early liberties and privileges of this zoo and now, coming back again, had found nothing to put in their place. It was becoming clear to me that I was not to be allotted any of the responsibilities of being a real companion to this woman who stood behind me at this moment. She might speak flippantly about herself, but she did not bother with any comments I might make. She asked questions without expecting an answer; and sometimes after sitting silently for a long time she would give a deep sigh which she cancelled out immediately by a loud burst of laughter, at the same time turning her head away as though any reaction which might come from me was the last thing she could endure. The holidays were nearly over. That particular afternoon the zoo was almost deserted and inside me and around me was emptiness, a feeling that everything was already falling from my grasp. I hung on grimly to the bars as I spoke:

‘Why don’t you do something about it? Go after him, if that’s how you feel – or find somebody else! Anything’s better than wandering about day after day! Why did you choose us anyway? We’re no use to you and you know it. You even show it – yes, that’s true – you don’t even bother to hide it – you’ve shown it all along!’

I shouted these last words in such a desperate voice that somewhere nearby but out of sight, the steady raking of a gravel path which had been going on for some time in the background ceased for a few seconds. Indeed at that moment everything seemed dead silent over the whole zoo.

She stepped forward quickly and put her hand round mine which was still holding the bar – grasping it so hard that the fingers were crushed about the iron in an instant’s bone-cracking pain. The ache of iron was in my wrist, in my arm; cold iron was moving towards my chest when she dropped her hand. Mine remained on the bar until slowly, with the greatest caution, I withdrew it and held it up before me, still painfully curled and shaking slightly from its rigid grip. Slowly I stretched it out, finger by finger, and finally brought it close and peered into the palm which still held a blurred white bar-mark. No sooner had I seen this mark than I clenched my hand again as though concealing a painfully won prize and thrust it deep down into the pocket of my raincoat. We walked on without a word.

A few yards away was a signpost bristling with half-a-dozen white-painted arms pointing in all directions and on which were inscribed: Giraffe, Monkeys, Wolves, Gents, Reptiles, Elephant. Cautiously taking the middle path between the Reptiles and the Wolves I arrived at a small pavilion hidden behind bushes and here I sat down wearily on the short flight of wooden steps which led up to it. There was nobody about. I sat perhaps for ten minutes wondering if I would always be tired now, if perhaps this heaviness in the limbs and the slight giddiness which I felt as I bent to tie up a shoe-lace were the characteristic signs of maturity, and though I welcomed these, I wanted nothing better than to return for a few moments to my normal state. It was a relief to turn my eyes, hot with staring at fantastic birds, to the few dusty sparrows hopping about near my feet amongst leaves and stones which concealed only the common spiders and beetles which I could have found any day in my own back-garden. There was no mystery here and no glory. Not far away a gardener, clipping back a high hedge, kept the distant howlings at bay.

I had imagined that when I went back to the main path I should find her sitting on some nearby bench, or perhaps walking slowly on ahead, waiting for me to catch up. But when I at last emerged I saw her far off in the distance, already at the entrance gates. She turned once and waved – a friendly but casual gesture which slowed me down immediately, so clearly did it indicate that our afternoon together was at an end. I decided there and then that from that day I would leave nothing to chance. She would see that it was no dumb schoolboy she had on her hands. I would break ruthlessly through silences. If need be, in the days ahead, I could shift the whole scene of action to some entirely new and less disturbing territory.

But there were to be no more days. The next afternoon was hot and thundery; I was outside the front door of the house, casually turning over the pages of a newspaper which lay on the steps and occasionally flicking away the flies which zigzagged erratically across the avenues of black print. Although seemingly absorbed, I was only awaiting the one cool look from her which was the usual signal that she was ready to go if I wished to join her. I waited a long time, and at last she came out. But the look was not casual. Instead, I saw with terror that her expression was kind. She paused, looked down at my paper in silence for a moment as though something of interest had caught her eye. Then she said, pointing, still with her head bent:

‘They’re absolutely wrong about that because I happen to know the town myself. A fishing river indeed! With paper mills along the banks! I suppose they’ll be making out it’s a holiday resort with freshwater bathing next. I’ll see it later. Save it for me till I get back.’

She turned away and went quickly down the path to the gate. Usually she let it bang carelessly, not looking to see whether it was shut or not, but this time I heard her lift up the latch, then let it down carefully into its slot behind her, as though to emphasise that though such barriers between human beings might be absurd there was nothing to be done about them, so one might just as well learn to manipulate the various keys and latches and the cunning little iron bolts which had so thoughtfully been provided.

A week or so later she was gone; the summer holidays were over and I was back at school. The duster flouncing out angrily across a density of figures on the blackboard released great clouds of spinning white chalk, silently exploding nebulae through which we stared in the direction of the window and out over the dark chimneys of the town. But all was grey dust now, dust in the air we breathed, dust in the air outside. All illumination had come to an end.