People Live In London
‘What is the City but a Thought?
Thomas Carlyle.
People Live In London.
‘Let’s face it, Hettie, we’ll never make young men sigh again, sad isn’t it.’
yes it’s sad it’s sad it’s sad
but sometimes they still look, sometimes they see
‘But we can still make them laugh. We’re still funnier than anybody else. We don’t stay down for long, women of spirit like us. Don’t go under, Hettie, you’re starting to go under – wear your age with pride.’
Thus admonished Hettie moves off among the shadows, the evenings, the rainy dashing of trees. Down through the curtains of rainbeaded light she comes, her tall, high-profiled figure, dark-eyed Hettie, whose face used to make people think of the Caucasus, of an eagle flying out,
who was once everybody’s angel, everybody’s dream.
Thorough the fog
She came
As if she had been a Christian soul
We hailed her in God’s name.
It rains and rains; seen against the blur of the lit shop windows figures are pared to knifelines; boots ring out on metal stairs; in the tunnels of the underground nobody speaks; in the voiceless brightness the slow clack shut of the lift bears its contingent of souls away and down, to the deep earth that lies underneath even this city, spreading all beneath.
Eagleheaded Demon (Assyrian) British Museum
*
In this season’s cool declining gold Sebastian stands near his open window, next to the walnut chest where he keeps his whips, his nipple-cripplers, his collection of hard rubber rings. He ponders the era he belongs to; standing at the open drawer he looks at his whips soft from the Argentine, the metal pincers and chains. Images stare out at him from every wall, ceramics pierced with arrows, paintings fainting with blood. He has been aptly named. Around him a myriad San Sebastians sink beaten from the post or remain erect, their eyes cast upward in a wanton swoon. Round and round goes his empty gaze, his eye like a bird trapped in a church.
‘Have you noticed,’ says Sam, the master of the minimal, ‘how in his room your eye can never come to rest, it just goes round and round, over all the dozens and dozens he’s got of everything.’
Sam, by the way, has some idea about the contents of the chest and other drawers, but the others here tonight do not.
‘You’re NOT,’ says Maia, in her noisy Swedish whisper, whispering even though Sam has already left, ‘even Thinking about going out with Sam, are you! He’s not good for women, you know that, just think about Denise!’
‘Do I have to,’ says Regan, ‘do I really have to think about you, Denise?’
Denise grins her crooked little smile; her black fringe comes down almost over her eyebrows; she looks like the girl in the Twilight movies, you know, the vampire one.
Denise is the closest to Regan in age and style; the others are varyingly between ten and twenty years older. And they are all famous: Sebastian (fashion), Maia (food), Hettie (broadcasting) and Denise (dance). And Sam, the sexually beautiful man, is also famous, but in a slightly different way, somewhere impenetrable behind the scenes.
‘You have to think about us all,’ Denise says, lighting her cigarette from Maia’s. ‘We’ve all been there you know – we’ve all crept stricken from his door in the mornings, mutilated by love. ‘
‘Mutilees de la guerre,’ Hettie says, ‘Maybe they should put special seats aside for us on the Underground.’
‘It would be standing room only if they did,’ Denise says.
‘Standing room only,’ says Sam as he and Regan stand in Bunhill Fields one ice-still afternoon. They are looking at the obelisk above Defoe’s grave. ‘It looks as if he’s been buried standing up.’
‘Mutilated,’ Mai says now, rolling it richly, ripely around her mouth as if she could eat it, rolling too her large Swedish eyes. In her saucepan the baby mussels are singing and chirruping; they think they are in a heavenly ocean, not yet knowing that it’s about to turn into soup.
‘I saw Helen’s baby this afternoon,’ Denise says. ‘He’s wonderful, he’s only 5 months old and he’s nearly crawling, and he’s waving as well.’
‘He’s waving?’ Maia says. ‘His whole hand or just a few little fingers.’
‘Actually waving,’ Denise says.
Waving, they agree, is important, especially when you can’t speak yet. Making signs.
‘It must be his whole hand, fingers are harder,’ they agree. ‘Which is why the Royal Family….’ they say.
‘How many words I like that start MU…’ Mai says, as the water hits boiling point. Dead mussel babies line the pot. “MU-mmy. MU-esli. MU-tton stew. “
And for tonight’s large gathering of fifteen or so, all women, ‘MUssel soup.
‘Feeding,’ says Denise, ‘the MU-ltitudes.’
‘But MUmmy is my absolute favourite,’ Maia says.
The women eat their supper together then go home. Some like Denise walk along next to the iron railings that run almost unbroken from Maia’s place to hers. Hettie takes a cab, feeling unlike the casual glances of the streets. Regan, flattered by their friendship and half in love with them all, makes her way to the Tube. Entering the packed station she comes to a halt against the solid, slowly moving queue; filing slowly like the rest of them she is getting close to the blackboard with its chalked message: Due to a body… delays on the Northern Line.’
Ahead of her somebody groans. ‘London,’ he says, halting before the board, He and his friend, who also stops, cause a blockage in the line but no one loses their temper. ‘I’m sick of London,’ he says, standing there in his neat dark raincoat and under it his neat striped suit. And under it, thinks Regan, his neat male body.
‘What was it Dr. Johnson said …?’ he asks his friend. ‘… A man who is tired of life is tired of London.’
He and his friend stay stopped there as Regan and the others shuffle past.
‘I don’t think it is quite that,’ the friend is saying, doubtfully. She is almost out of range. Maybe, she thinks, looking back at them, we could all be friends. We could all have been friends, that is, but the universe gives you only one shot, one chance, and already this one has been tossed over the world’s shoulder. And even though she can still see them she is already out of earshot as the large crowd shuffles by.
She reaches the top of the one escalator that is working and, looking back for the last time, sees they are stillstaring at the board, leaning forward as if immobilized. She reminds herself that if she is going to tell this as a story she mustn’t call the board black.
At the next level, on the way to the lowest tunnel of all, they pass a giant plywood partition, hiding perhaps another side of the escalator, or a second set of stairs?
DANGER, says the notice.
BEWARE.
BEHIND THIS OBSTRUCTION THERE IS VOID.
Someone laughs. ‘The VOID’ he says, to no one in particular. ‘I knew it was around somewhere, I just didn’t know it was so close.’
He turns his head and catches Regan’s eye. She smiles, but it’s not really a joke. Everything to a woman in a certain mood, wearing a lime-green dress that doesn’t suit her, already too keen on a guy who is probably going to break her heart, and who already has a long-term girlfriend, notably Hettie, is a combination of obstruction and void.
That’s an ambiguity, someone says. I mean who’s the one with the long-term girlfriend?
Oh it’s all ambiguous these days, mate, Simon Someone says, don’t even ask.
Simon Says… Put your hand on your heart and swear you love me.
And Simon Says… Always tell the truth.
Who loves their lovers more, Sam or Sebastian? Hettie or Regan or Sam?
Sam
Sam, listening to one of Hettie’s endless stories allows his eye to run across the surfaces and outlines of his room. Barely an object interrupts the mind’s cool but never aimless flow. Everything is massive and phenomenal. Sam lives at his deepest in a world of appearances and things. He watches the light gild his walls. It is thoughtful, the late afternoon gold, lingering with heavy reflection on the three great paintings mustered along the entrance hallway, leaching colour from one image, bestowing it on the next, turning the third into a sudden resplendence, leaving a great patch of effulgence here, a contrasting dimness there.
Sam lives at his deepest in this world of phenomena. His grand piano, the flowering sprays of diamonds that he produces from it hang in the clear air along the glassy walls. The whole place says Maia to Hettie is as much an overstatement as Sebastian’s : ‘ an overstatement of understatement’ she says.
***
‘You’ve been going to church, ‘Denise says accusingly.
‘Only to pray, ‘Regan says, defending herself.
‘You pray to the Madonna?’ Maia asks. ‘This is what you call the Our Lady, the Virgin?’ she says.
‘I know the one you mean,’ Regan says.
‘I wouldn’t pray to her, ‘Denise says, ‘she couldn’t even keep her own child alive.’
Even Maia is shocked. ‘Is this a blasphemy?’ she wonders, looking from face to face.
‘Don’t ask for credit,’ Denise goes on, ‘as a refusal may offend.’
Meaning, she explains, don’t try to save something up for the next world, because there mightn’t be one.
They are all at Hettie’s for the winter afternoon. Hettie, whose flat is an untidy shabby bareness, lives at the top of a half-unbuilt house in Paddington, with a ruined Australian poet on every floor. Hettie lives somewhere in the eighties. Maia and her big, cold-kneed boys, seems hip enough but really is stranded somewhere in the thirteenth century, in a forest, in a hut like a pile of logs. Sam is relentlessly of the here and now and his flat is like God’s idea of New York.
‘We who were living,’ said Eliot, ‘are now dying.’
‘History,’ said Eliot, who was depressed, ‘is now and always.’
‘Breakfast,’ says Sam, brightly bearing in the breakfast tray, ‘is now and always. Look, I’ve made you an egg.’
‘Come with me,’ Hettie’s husband, who was a singer, said to her, ‘and you will never grow old.’ So she married the singer, who broke her heart (for this is the house that Jack built, and here is the maiden all forlorn, eating her egg.)
Was hor’ich, Pamine’s stimme?” sings Sam coming to the door to Hettie’s knock, and answering himself he sings the next line: “Ja ja das ist Pamine’s stimme
And frequently, through the comfortless nights of winter, Hettie, the wayfarer who makes her way ‘thorough the mist and snow’, goes down all the long streets to Sam’s, even though he doesn’t love her. And we hail her, when we see her, in God’s name.
‘You look nice,’ Sam says to Regan, when he meets her for a drink. ‘Like a dryad, or the spirit of a tree.’ He looks at the fine pallor of her face and her pale reddish hair. Outside the Irish boy, so young, so neatly wrapped up in a checkered rug as he sits on the footpath, is begging in the cold. ‘I like your lime-green dress.’
Early the next morning as she pulls up the dim brown blind and surveys the even dimmer light of the London atmosphere Regan sees her green dress sprawled across the chair in a posture frankly abandoned and thanks God, or the patron saint of clever young girls, Holy Dorothy, that she herself didn’t lose her own common sense the night before with Sam.
Heilige Dorothea, the Patron Saint of Girls. Though not exactly a maiden herself, Regan knows how it feels to be resolute and resist. And when she looks at herself in the dusky mirror of the unlit bathroom cavity(for that’s all it is) she thinks she sees around her neck the same thin red line, where the Romans chopped off Heilege Dorothea’s head, before the Angel came and stuck it back on again. She’s been part of that story since her childhood, since her Confirmation when that’s when she chose the name. Resolute, that is; refusing to give in. Only the Angel element hasn’t quite kicked in yet.
Regan Dorothy, two names, one a figure of downright evil, one (an early Christian girl, virgin and martyr) a virtuous early Christian maid.
‘That should just about cover it,’ her father said.
*
Sam and Hettie go shopping on a Saturday morning. London is bright and clear; and the Thames is clean again, teeming with little fishes. But the two great rivers, the Fleet and the Tyburn are now deep underground, that used to flow through bright meadows. Now imprisoned in darkness below this mortal city they still pump their gallons of clear clean water into the tidal surge of old Father Thames. When Hettie thinks of rivers they are always masculine, in this whole island veined with waters, the Clyde and the Severn, the Avon and the Wye, the land flowing with streams in the country Churchill evoked, imagining it in Caesar’s time when he came, the mighty Julius himself, to subjugate these Northern Barbarians to the rule of Rome.
‘Listen,’ Maia says, reading aloud to her boys: The land not covered by forest or marsh was verdant and fertile. The climate, though far from genial, was equable and healthy.
‘These are good words for you to use in essays,’ she says …verdant, fertile, genial, equable, healthy…’
‘MUM,’ they say. ‘You don’t need to tell us this – we’re English! You’re the only foreigner round here.’
‘The natives, though uncouth,’ she goes on reading, ‘had a certain value as slaves…’
‘MU..UM,’ they say, ‘you can’t say natives.’
‘Why on earth not?’ she says. ‘We’re all natives of somewhere…native means born, born to a place. What on earth is wrong with saying that?’
‘It’s condescending,’ the older boy says. ‘It’s like…imperialist.’
Sam, who is propped against the kitchen bench listening and enjoying Maia’s fairly feral family life, or FFF for short, thinks they might have a point.
Hettie, meanwhile, is up in arms against a recent art review where the word primitive is in question, as a kind of ragbag term for all sorts of paintings and painters to whom it doesn’t apply. It does, however, apply to certain races! Apparently!! She says.
‘Can you believe it?’ she says. ‘There’s a comment you won’t believe! Maori bushmen are primitive. That’s what it says. Who are these Maori bushmen? This category of people simply doesn’t exist! Is she thinking about the Kalahari? Is she thinking at all?’
‘I want you to get on to the editor,’ she says to Sam. ‘I know you know him. I want you to get him to get the reviewer – the perpetrator of this review - to withdraw it and apologise. There is no such thing as this racial group shecalls Maori bushmen.’
‘Maybe it’s a mistake for bushcraft,’ Sam appeasingly says. ‘You know how we pride ourselves on our bushcraft.’ He recalls the days when he was a student, going off with other blokes, piling into somebody’s SUV, taking everything they needed with them, their packs, their rifles, their boots, their big bare knees.
‘That’s just a whitewash,’ she says. ‘The word used was primitive. How dare someone who clearly knows nothing make a statement like this. How dare anyone use the word primitive of any racial group. Sitting in London, casting a word around like this.’
‘O.K, O.K,’ he says, ‘I ‘ll have a word.’
‘But do you agree with me?’ she asks him, thinking she very rarely sees Sam take up a moral position of any sort. And here he is now, just passing her point on to someone else, without necessarily having a moral position of his own.
She is often more than usually discontent with him these days.
But for the moment they are happy enough walking along the bank of the great tidal river in the sun. They come to Cleopatra’s Needle, lifting its head into northern skies. That lay for centuries in Egypt’s shifting sands.
‘I’ve seen Concorde from here,’ Sam says. ‘Back in the day.’ When Concorde was still floating in the air above the world. ‘Like a miracle,’ he says. ‘Such a beautiful thing.’
‘You know,’ says Hettie, ‘Cleopatra’s Needle is only one of the antiquities brought here that sank on the way. Lots of them sank.’
‘Recovered of course,’ Sam says. ‘Mostly.’
They look at the obelisk and imagine it, like a battering ram pounding inside the ship’s hull.
‘It’s very sexual of course,’ Sam says. ‘But then, isn’t everything.’
‘Not bells,’ she says. ‘Lots of bells sank going across the world, and they all came from Whitechapel.’
‘Let’s go to the bell foundry, then,’ says Sam, ‘today’s the perfect day. But the fish shop first.’
‘I don’t think it’s open any more,’ she says. ‘In fact I’m not sure if it’s even there any more. We could go to Keats’ house instead – or Dickens’s – or the John Soane Museum.’
‘Or,’ says Sam, ‘we could go to see scary primitive things.’
They walk on through the layered streets. At the fishmongers near the Monument to the Great Fire they look at a slab covered with fresh fish.
‘Ocean Going Trout,’ Sam says. ‘I hope that’s strictly voluntary.’
The fishmonger gives him a flat-eyed look and doesn’t reply.
Outside again Sam quotes from The Waste Land. ‘I wish I didn’t find him so irritating,’ Hettie says, under her breath, practising for saying it to her friends.
O City, city I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street (which is in fact where we are, he says, interrupting his own intonings). He starts again:
O City, city I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon.’
‘Do you think our fishman lounges at noon?’ he asks Hettie.
‘Somehow I doubt it,’ she says, grinning at him. For suddenly now she finds him endearing. She’s so changeable these days: sometimes she feels ice-cool towards him,and other times she feels she is burning up. Is she menopausal? Surely not at forty-three.She’s in the throes of something though, something that makes her normally equable life start skittering about. But today turns out to be a good day. Following Sam’s quoting they go and find Magnus Martyr, the Wren church, another one of the city’s richnesses, another Wren church not far from the Thames, not far from Lower Thames Street where fishmen lounge at noon; where the walls (Sam is quoting again)/ Of Magnus Martyr hold/ Inexplicable splendours of Ionian white and gold.
‘I must say,’ says Sam, casting a happy look around, ‘they look fairly explicable to me.’
And the next day they do go to the British Museum, but not for long. They go to the corridor where the Assyrian bas-reliefs are – the great figures carved in high relief, with their Kingly Heads, their Lion Bodies, and their Great Carved Wings. Further along is one of Hettie’s favourites, the figure called the Winged Genius, except it’s not called that any more, the description has been tamed.
‘I’m not going to look at the description,’ she says, ‘because last time it really pissed me off; they’ve taken the word ‘Genius’ completely away.’
Image of Winged Genius here
‘It’s probably because most people reading it would feel annoyed, that there’s
a category called Genius, and they’re not in it,’ says Sam, reading the new label.
‘Don’t tell me it,’ she warns him. ‘I’ve managed to put it out of my mind.
And actually I think there used to be two, but maybe that’s wrong.’
‘Two Winged Genii,’ he says.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ she says as they walk away. ‘It’s probably because they think it might offend people, now when no one’s allowed to be better than anyone else.’
‘Or maybe,’ she says darkly, as they go out the main doors and down the steps, ‘somebody from ISIS has done it, got themselves into the system somehow and changed it from there – as part of their war on cultural heritage, you know.’
‘It’s very hard to see how that would be possible,’ he says, watching her as she grumpily stomps along. ‘I think we need to go somewhere nice for a drink now,’ he says, catching up. ‘All this history after the last two days. It’s making you quite cross. Too much history can be bad for you. QED,’ he says, pulling her by the arm and making her look at herself in a shop window.
But Hettie thinks differently later as she’s walking home; for her, history is what stabilizes everything, gives it a foundation and a structure, walls to secure them, doors and windows for going and looking in an out. This is why she can’t bear vandalism and change.
‘Go with the flow,’ Sam says. ‘Everything flows. You resist everything.’
*
Maia is telling them about one of her dreams. ‘I was there right next to him,’ she says. ‘And he was really close.’ ‘Clo-ooze,’ she says, with her enlarged vowels. It was a snowy landscape. There were a few other people, all men, standing about. They were so cold their breath was freezing. He was the Father of his people, unless you were a kulak or in the camps. Without looking at her he reached over and pinched her so that it hurt. She tried to warn them, the others all standing around; she tried to tell them how dangerous he was because he was really cruel, he was a mean cruel petty man. But she couldn’t get it out, and the freezing air and the snowy landscape stayed the same. ‘He enjoys being cruel,’ she tried to say. He was standing next to me, in a snowy place. And then he reached over and gave me a really mean hard pinch.’
‘He was worse than Hitler,’ someone says. ‘Stalin systematically destroyed his own country.’
‘So did Hitler,’ someone else says.
‘Yes but Hitler thought he was saving his own country.’
‘So did Stalin,’ someone says.
‘Stalin was the worst,’ Maia says, ‘that’s what I saw in my dream, it was a really personal dream – I dreamed about his person.’
‘You can’t win an argument that way, Maia,’ everyone says.
‘I think maybe you can,’ says Sam. ‘But maybe, meantime, can we move back to the present day?’
‘What do you want from me?’ he asks Hettie later when they are alone, after the others have gone. Together they are clearing up, cups, glasses, lots of dirty plates.
‘Equable,’ she has said to the others, though not with him in hearing, of course. ‘He’s always so bloody equable.’
‘Cop it sweet,’ they say.
‘Are you unhappy with me?’ he asks her. ‘Or is it something you are unhappy with in yourself?’
She doesn’t know. It’s just that she’s beginning to think they are bad for each other, that they’ll go on like this day after day, year after year, without any change. Shouldn’t people always be helping each other change? But doesn’t that mean that instead of running away she should stay and try and help Sam to change?
A few days later she asks her women friends. Now that it’s nearly Christmas they have decided to meet nearly every day, to make up for not having their own families here. They are all outsiders, without any relatives around. ‘Outsiders as Definers,’ Sebastian says, leaving for Brazil where he is the eldest son of a large and wealthy family. ‘I’d ask you all to join me,’ he has said, ‘but you’d all have to pretend to be religious and somehow I don’t see any of you pulling that off.’
Apart from Maia and Denise the rest of them, as it happens, are all from the Commonwealth. Forty years ago they would have been called Colonials, but that parlance has gone. Forty years ago Hettie, who is from South Africa would have come over here and married a famous English poet and broken his heart, she’s that kind of girl, says Sam, who is from the Waikato, in New Zealand. He knows he will never go back. Denise’s parents are now in Canada but she grew up in London. She was at primary school when they decided you weren’t allowed to call blackboards ‘blackboards’ any more. ‘You had to call them chalkboards,’ she says. ‘Because they had no meaning until they were written on in white chalk, when they were black; black was blank. There was a terrible fuss.’
‘Like coffee in America,’ someone says. ‘You have to ask for it with cream.’
They put their minds to Hettie’s question. Sam, who apparently doesn’t mind being talked about, waits for their answers. He looks casual, but his face is slightly flushed.
‘He’s a playdough man,’ Denise says, ‘you can mould him any way you want him, that’s how he escapes.’ She pats his arm.
‘He won’t change,’ Maia says, ‘because in a way he’s never really available; he’s like an amoeba, he’s got no core self, have you Sam?’
He smiles benignly upon her. ‘You’ve got me right,’ he says, ‘I have no central self. Except – perhaps - in the moment of sexual penetration.’
They can think about this if they want to.
‘Apart from that I just want ataraxy,’ he says. (They all have to look that up.)
Regan and Sam and The Ten Pound Boy
It’s Christmas Eve. The buses roar by, belching diesel.
‘No they don’t,’ says Sam, ‘they’re retro-fitted, they’re all de-carbonised now.’
‘This one was,’ she says firmly. ‘I watched it coming down the road in a pall of smoke.’
Anyway it wasn’t the right bus, so she had to wait around. She sets the story up: behind her in the forecourt, the massive figure of Newton cast in bronze is melting into the pall; ahead the road is charging with traffic, their fumes mixing with the night that seems as much to be rising as falling. Newton is trapped in self. He is tortured by his own reasonings; he stares into a tiny infinity, the universe reduced to mechanics.
‘They’d’ve done better to have made it Stephen Hawkins,’ she says.
Anyway, waiting for the right bus in the Euston Road she is in the midst of ‘the rush and roar of practical life.’ London, noisy and overwhelming; London cruel. De Quincy as a young runaway finding the old slums of Covent garden awash with a sea of abandoned children, some of them too young to know their names; Dickens’ little orphan girl Charlie Neckett vanishing into the great city ‘like a dewdrop into an ocean,’ Blake’s weeping blacksmiths barely more than three or four years old. As she stands there waiting she too is awash in this ocean of suffering and time.
They all stand waiting. A miasma of cold and frost is thickening all around; Christmas Eve is roaring past; Christmas is coming in. The open-fronted bus shelter gives them no comfort, least of all the boy who arrives, pale and breathless after dodging through the traffic. He’s standing a little ahead and to the side of her. She studies him covertly. He is barely dressed, she sees. No jacket, not even a jumper, just a rather worn-looking wine-coloured shirt. As far as she can tell he has nothing on underneath. But he has made an effortfor his thin summer sneakers are the same colour as his shirt, and he has dashed his hair up into something like a trend. But he is cold, really cold, shivering, and he is very pale. He catches her looking at him and an angry flash rises in his eyes, then he turns his head away. She steps in front of him, trying to speak quietly so no one else can hear.
‘You’re not warmly enough dressed for this weather,’ she says.
Even his eyes are pale in the cold. ‘You know, you really need to be wearing something warmer.’ His mouth tightens; he looks past her.
‘If you don’t mind – you know, because it is Christmas, would you mind if I gave you something, just - would you just take this.’
She holds out the money.
He looks as if he’s about to cry. What is he up to, dressed like this, she wonders. And then she thinks she knows, she thinks he might be going off to sell himself, trying to not look poor, trying not to look desperate, in the purlieus of Kings Cross.
He stares away above her head, refusing to look at her.
‘Let me give you this,’ she says. She pushes the money towards him. God knows it is hardly enough but she hasn’t got any other cash.
He looks at her directly, bitterly, without any spark. He is so pale he is almost translucent. He shudders with cold. ‘What’s the catch?’ he says. His voice is stiff and thin. What’s the catch? No smile, no response. And in this moment the depth of his deprivation nearly swallows her too, his chronic lack of hope.
‘There’s no catch,’ she says. ‘I’m getting on the bus now and I promise you will never see me again.’ She thrusts the money at him and he takes it, then he turns and is gone. As the bus starts moving past the concourse in front of King’s Cross she sees him running clumsily through the crowd; all she’s done is fund a temporary reprieve.
Sam looks at her; he’s upset. ‘Something to take the edge off the pain for a bit,’ he says.
All these children London has seen fail and die. Their presence presses all around them then, on the Eve. He remembers the pale clustered faces of orphans at the window in the Whitechapel building that used to house them. That building has long gone, but the faces in the photograph still live on, in an image from the 1880s, over a hundred and forty years ago
‘…like a dewdrop into an ocean, so frail and young, he thinks.
He stands up and opens his arms to her; as he holds her she feels the intake of his breath.
The Pivot. See notes in Document30/4/25: none of this here.
This is how it works, if the engineering is right. If the engineering is right you can get great masses to turn, pivoting on their own weight, turning on the gravity and heft of themselves. But only if the engineering is right.
Something of this order seems to have happened to Regan. Since Christmas she has hardly been able to bear living in London, its history is too much for her – not the splendid history of dates and kings but the other one, the hidden multitudes spawned in misery. ‘The great Wen,’ William Cobbett called it. Everywhere she goes now she feels them everywhere, the millions of mortal dead. She needs to go to a country where human history is only inches deep, like the one she comes from. Until the Maori arrived, completing their great sea voyages, those journeys southward over the immensities of the sea to no known landfall, under the guidance of stars. For the Maori are not indigenous.
‘Though everybody these days calls them that,’ she says. ‘It’s a way of putting them in their place, in history.’ In fact it’s even worse, she tells them, or it got to be even worse – she’s pretty sure she read about this in the memoirs of an English settler called Thomas Pratt - ‘that in 1859, as more and more English settlers were arriving, a Commission called for Aborigines was set up, I’m pretty sure it called itself that.’
‘Think about that,’ she says to her friends – Ab origine: from the beginning. There from the beginning, as it happens. Simple people who just happened to be there, the way plants were, or trees. So that obliterates in just one word the magnificent enterprise, one of the world’s greatest sea-journeys over the waste of waters, under the stars.
‘Next someone will be calling them bushmen,’ Hettie says, turning to Sam. Sam has never managed to extract an answer from the editor let alone an apology.
Kingship, oratory, their arrivals from the sea seven hundred years ago all blotted out in the one word, Aborigine.
‘I’ve got the notes somewhere,’ Regan says. ‘That mightn’t have been the exact title but I know they used that word.’
Sam leaves, hauling his enormous bicycle down the front steps.
*
‘Really?’ says Hettie; ‘you’re really going back?’
‘It mightn’t be permanent,’ she says. ‘I just feel I need to go back, so that I can come here again. I just need to take some form of action – instead of just staying on and on like -’ She stops herself.
‘Like the rest of us, you mean,’ Hettie says. ‘I can sort of see that. You want it to be a decision, not just a failure to decide – there’s something in that.’
Regan looks at her almost shyly. They are very close – not in the way some have speculated. It’s as if Hettie is the mother she never quite had (but that’s another story).
‘I knew you’d see it,’ she says. ‘But there are other things too. I miss my side of the world too, you know, the seas and the islands.’ The great watery world of the Pacific nations. ‘Oceania,’ she says.
They see it then, both of them, the dark Pacific slowly swelling from horizon to horizon under a canopy of stars.
‘And there’s another thing, something I read, it keeps coming into my head. And what I’ve been thinking lately is how it’s written at pretty much the same time – almost to the year - I mean around 1370, 1380,’ she says.
‘The same time as…?’ Hettie says.
‘Oh the first Maori arrival,’ Regan says. ‘It’s kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?’
Hettie shakes her head. ‘You’ve lost me,’ she says.
‘Oh, well, you know – you know how I’ve always told you about their poetry – their oratory – I think they call it powhiri, but I don’t speak Maori – but that’s one of the things I’m going to take up when I get back home. Well, if at the same time they are arriving in New Zealand and Chaucer is writing this, then it’s even more than a coincidence, it’s a Sign.’
Hettie still doesn’t feel quite clear. Caught up in her own idea Regan goes on.
‘It’s from The Knight’s Tale,’ she says. ‘When Arcite is dying – he and Palamon have been bitter rivals for Emelye and now Palamon has won and Arcite has lost, and he says
Alas my hertes queene! Alas my wyff!
Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf!
What is this world? what asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Allone, withouten any compaignye.’
‘I know it off by heart,’ she says, ‘it’s so beautiful it just went straight into my mind, I didn’t even have to try.’
‘But I still don’t quite see…’ Hettie says.
‘I know, neither do I, I just know that I need to be back home, even if it means starting out all over again. I think it’s the allone bit, it makes me think of home.’
…the dark nights, the wind singing lonely in the lonely places…
‘You can’t make big decisions because of a few lines of poetry,’ Hettie is saying, ‘just from a few quotations.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Regan says. ‘Sam does; he’s making decisions and quoting all the time.
Hettie shakes her head. She is vehement; having decided to forgive him she is staying on. ‘Sam’s making terrible decisions all the time,’ she says, ‘things we don’t know about, terrible things in the world. He’s just using poetry as an anodyne- to cheer himself up. He uses it to distract himself from the real world and some of the awful things he has to do.’
And that’s where they have to leave it, so they do; they leave it at that.
*
Two weeks later Regan is on the plane. She has packed up or given away most of her things. At the last minute she has thrown out the lime-green dress. And now she is nearly home. She is flying in from Singapore through an electrical storm, looking at the small dark landscape of Wellington tilting below her, the hills lost in between flashes of orange light, even though it’s summer. As the plane steadies and stops veering from wing to wing, as it drops low enough to start its long landing drive she takes the hand of the scared little boy in the seat next to her, whose mother has been taken off the over-booked plane by a certain Miss Pansy Wong. * But his grandparents are waiting for him at the terminal and his mother is on the next plane.
‘So you’ll be fine,’ she says.
During the flight they’ve watched a video about Polar Bears. There is a mother and her two cubs; she is hurrying them inland, to find a cavern in the snow, to make them a snow cave where she can hide them from their father, and there he is down on the ice-flats, bellowing and padding on his flat strange feet, and lifting his head up to sniff for them, but he’ll never find them now, she’s been too clever for him, and now they are tucked away scentless inside their den of snow.
‘Would Dad do that to me?’ he asks her.
‘Oh no,’ she tells him, ‘No, no, no. Human fathers never do things like that.’ She looks at him now as he sits there, trying to be good. He’s a very nice-looking little boy. She hopes he’ll get on all right.