Sugar and Other Stories Read online

  “I put the house on the market.”

  “Isn’t that a bit precipitate?”

  “I don’t want it. And I keep hearing my parents quarrelling in the next room.”

  She did not expect him to believe her, but there was relief in the statement.

  “You did them proud. They’re gone now. You can get a place of your own.”

  And if I had had, once, a place of my own … we should not now be sitting companionably here. She persisted.

  “I keep feeling they’re not gone. I hear them.”

  “You need a change.”

  “I know. I was going to ask. I wondered. I’ve lived all these years hoping — believing I could travel again, do another tour, get away — I suppose it’s hopeless.”

  “On the whole,” said Mike gently, “the foreign tours are saved for the tough young men, the single ones at that. You know how it is. But I did have an idea. If it appeals. It isn’t glamorous. It’s a change, though. Would you want to go to Durham? We’ve got a project on, on the feasibility of new small industries in mining villages. You know, the Survey always did a little local work, as well as the international. Nowadays, that’s on the increase. You’d be talking to skilled men, interviewing local planners, What do you think?”

  The African moon faded and the horizon contracted like a brace. All the same.

  “It’s a challenge.”

  “Right. Exercise the old fieldwork techniques even if not exactly breaking new ground? Get you away from the voices in the next room.”

  “They won’t like that.”

  “Now you’re being silly. I’ll fix you up with a lunch with Protheroe, who’s liaising with the finance companies, and we’ll get you off next week.”

  The night before she left for Durham, Joanna spent a considerable time in the conservatory. The plants were silent, living their own lives. Mrs Stillingfleet would come in and attend to them until the house was sold. Mr Maw had had one or two tempting nibbles, he said, but nothing definite yet. It was early days, he said. He could get in touch if Miss Hope was needed. Durham wasn’t the end of the earth. The conservatory had a harsh pool of light in its centre, and a peripheral population of ghostly plants, reflected amongst harsh slivers of glitter off dark glass squares. The sky was very close; a black layer on black walls and roof, apparently solid above the solid glass. Tendrils hung softly from invisible struts, feathery fronds of jasmine, corkscrew curls of passion flowers, a contained little jungle, neatly trained and tied. The potted plants were banked on trays of sandy gravel on benches, smelling paradoxically of cold, moonlit steam. Joanna moved amongst them, breaking off a dead leaf here, removing a spent bloom there. Several of these had blushed unseen; she had not visited them since Molly’s death. Now she looked at the cactuses and their pups, Molly’s favourites. “I must see to my pups,” she had said, the week after Donald’s scattering, though she had mocked him when he boasted of their health and multiplicity. Pups, indeed, Molly had then said. Anyone would think they were sentient creatures, the way you go on. Looking at the major cactus, now, swollen and furry, sprouting cobwebs of silvery hairs, and surrounded by little, fat, arachnoid replicas of itself, Joanna more or less felt its discomfort in her own blood. It was unbalanced, sprawling heavily over the rim of its container. Carefully she broke off and repotted some of the younger tumuli, digging with Molly’s little brass shovel in Molly’s little tub of gritty, arid potting compost. Not a creak, not a whisper. The Christmas cactus, Joanna Hope, was not a true cactus. It needed watering and feeding freely, it needed a good loam, like any other flowering plant. It did not of course flower in summer, but it did put on new growth. Joanna picked one up. It had strange, gawkily bent arms, made of segments at slight angles to each other. The lower segments were dark green and ridged. The higher ones were paler green. The newest, perhaps the size of Joanna’s little finger-nail, were glossy with health and were flushed with a roseate glow that hinted at the pure salmon-flesh pink the improbable bloom would be, in midwinter. This pink colour, and the hooked, serrated end of the segment, gave it a resemblance to the claw of some marine creature; this was enhanced by the little fringe of hairy feelers that sprouted where the new segment joined the old, and so, repeated and invariable, down all the joints of the awkward stem or arm. These feelers were of course roots. If you broke off one of these segments, delicately, roots and all, and planted it firmly in a new pot of new earth, it would expand into another plant, darken and lose its translucent pinkness, sprout more segments. Some of these plants must be parts of other plants her father himself had teased into shape, fed and watered. They represented a sort of eternity, predictable, cyclical, unchanging in form and colour. The roseate segments with their very new crenellated edges reminded her of her baby teeth: but after the baby teeth had come the rooted teeth, and after the rooted teeth this fleshed and shrinking hole. Joanna picked up a small, unassuming “Joanna Hope” stuck, by Molly no doubt, into a pale blue plastic plant pot, and took it up to bed with her. It was quiet, and alive. It might be possible to take it out of this house, up to Durham.

  In the next room, the voices had acquired a certain ruggedness and clarity. Why not irises, said one, an iris bed, a raised iris bed, is a splendid feature. Not for most of the year, said the other, querulous granite, just a mass of ugly old leaves, taking up space, you want something serviceable and adaptable. You never give any credit to the larger things of the imagination, said the first voice, never. It’s worth the old leaves for its time of glory. You never could see that, you never could see glory. You could have one or two at the back, said the ungiving voice, by the cistern there, one or two. What use are one or two, said the sad voice, and was answered, you never understand the proper scale of things, a bed of that size is just silly, just presumptuous, in the space you’ve got. One or two by the cistern. The roots need sun, said the other, you fool, the roots need sun, they must be baked in sun, soaked in light, you never understood that, never, you never admitted how much light they needed, you moved that bronze bearded one I had under the laurels where it rotted …

  There must, Joanna thought, be endless quarrelling singing voices attached to this piece of earth: why do I hear only these? Are the happy silent? Bonnie Roote’s relatives were in suburban bliss. The Academy of the Return might explain this anger, but I will not go there. I will go north and leave the field to them, the garden and the next room both, and they can call on Mr Maw to arbitrate, who will not hear them, who experiences them, if he senses them at all, as, what was it, full of love and consideration. Be quiet, she said to them, aloud or not, she hardly knew, and she heard them hear her protest and ignore it. Impossible to come to any civilized arrangement with you, one said to the other, impossible, impossible.

  County Durham was full of ancient things that had once been powerful new beginnings. The cathedral, slipping slightly into the river down its craggy steep, houses the bones of St Cuthbert and the black slab under which rests the Venerable Bede, who changed the shape of the English sense of the English and their history. The mining villages are scattered in pockets amongst purple and grey moorland, not strung in a black chain as they are further south in Yorkshire. Ancient mills have become industrial archaeological sites, as Roman camps became before them, where the wind whistles in over heather and soughing bracken. New steel mills stand, silent, empty and cold; colliery wheels above their conical slag heaps are rusty and forever still. Joanna for some reason noticed the dead, though her work was with the living and despondent. Legionaries from Scythia and Mesopotamia and the sunlit Provincia Romana lay under that heather. Undernourished girls and boys haunted the mills and the old workings, perhaps still lacerated by the straps with which they had hauled loads of ore. Joanna listened for them and could not hear them. She herself was housed in the splendid Mitre Hotel in Durham, where the assize judges had slept when not housed in the Castle, where they still slept, feeding well, laughing sonorously, going out to admonish sinners, release the innocent, and command
the confinement of the guilty in the fortress-like gaol where other dead lay in quicklime and where the sheriff’s hair had gone white with horror at a hanging. The hotel was, it claimed in its parchment-like, tasteful brochure, quite possibly haunted by a wrongfully hanged highwayman and a distraught Jacobite widow who had ridden vainly to save her beloved from his terrible march to the Tower. Their presence, the brochure said, announced itself respectively by a feeling of great coldness and panic, or by a kind of sighing noise and unbearable apprehension. Joanna liked the hotel, which had ancient uneven floors and romantically low and heavy doorways, newly embellished with heavy firedoors. She dined in the dining-room amongst warm smells of good cooking, brandy flambé, crisp hot pastry, garlic-simmered sauces, a long and splendid way away from poached eggs on toast and Benger’s food. Her terror of the presences in the next room in her own house, she thought, over apple pie and crumbly Wensleydale and fresh cream, was not a gut terror such as that evoked by highwayman and mourning lady. Her ghosts only grumbled, they did not threaten, nor did they bear with them any searing experience of unbearable pain. No, the truth was, they were simply theoretically frightening. She did not wish to believe the revenant of the Academy of the Return. She did not wish to spend eternity, or even an indefinable future life or lives, in the company of Donald and Molly, the iron and the kettle. She had formed the hypothesis, for want of a better one, that her parents did indeed persist in death, much as they had been in life. She might conceivably be schizophrenic and hallucinating, of course, but she believed she was not, and was by no means going to waste her valuable and abbreviated future on discussion of raised iris beds with an expensive psychiatrist. She had formed the further hypothesis, or hope, that these spirits, or presences, were attached to the earth where they had lived and died, as the Red Indian so providentially revealed to her had suggested. They were there, and she was here. Mr Maw would sell them, and their husks of housing, with the bricks and mortar they had been previously confined by. This view was encouraged by the local nature of their disputes, in so far as she had heard them. There was another hypothesis, a worse one, which she refused to entertain. She slept soundly the first night in her brown and gold hotel room, enjoying everything, a dark blood-red bathroom en suite, a marvellous tray full of instant teas, coffees, little sugar biscuits, a television, a radio, everything anonymous, user-friendly, you might say, or simply indifferent to its users, who were not inhabitants, who were rootless passengers on the earth, as Joanna had always wished to be. She slept one night in silence. Two. Three. She went into Durham and met the team of economists and market researchers and computer experts who were testing out various job-creation plans. She met also the local unemployed, the skilled men, whose predicament funded her own precarious livelihood. She sat in Job Centres across scarred formica tables on hard leatherette chairs and discussed retraining. She had some hopes. Joanna had always been a believer in human ingenuity. Also in progress. It is hard to become a development economist if you do not believe in those things. She had supposed human ingenuity would find ways round food shortages and over-population, round scarcity of fossil fuels and the joblessness initially caused by the second industrial revolution, round third world hunger and starvation wages battling with first world standards of living and normal requirements for a decent day’s work. Beyond that she had more vaguely believed in men becoming wiser, cleverer, healthier, more adaptable and accommodating, outgrowing war and anger as childish things. It was hard to maintain these beliefs in the face of the kind of cultural and personal vertigo experienced by whole communities of men with complex crafts which would never be needed again, never again be a guarantee of wit, or pride or marvel. The ones who distressed her were those a little younger than herself, who had invested a life in this form of activity, whose bodies and brain-cells were excited functions of cutting this tool, gauging this kind of coal-face, wiring this kind of digger. One she talked to, a large man who had been foreman of a specialized tube-making team in the steel mills, turned on her with a kind of personal accusation. “Me father worked in t’mill, and his father before him, and I wanted nowt for me son, nowt but that he should do an honest day’s wek in t’mill, the same as I did. We have us pride, you know, we have us sense of community, we know who and what we are, and now they come along and say no, you’re not economic, you’re not competitive, we don’t want to know. But we have the skills …”

  “You could acquire other skills.”

  “Oh yes. To do what. What skills? Young men might learn to operate them computers, but us as are set in our ways, we’re dead men, and you know it, you’ve written us off, a whole generation, you can’t wait for us to be tidied away. Come on, admit it.”

  “I’m not here for that reason.”

  “No. O’course you aren’t. But you’re not here to help men like me, are you? Th’young, maybe. Th’bright ones. I’d give up investigating us and let us die wi decency as fast as we can, Miss. Honest I would.”

  Later, in her hotel room again, Joanna felt despondent after this conversation with a self-styled dead man. The mass of men, she thought, are disappointed and angry. Why should the dead be any different, why should we suppose that it isn’t our absolute nature to want more than we can have and yet to cling like limpets to what we know and have made of ourselves? Why not bungalows with peonies, why not a department of the afterlife full of fine steel tubing? Why should not the worst and most tenacious aspects of our characters persist longest? Why should I suppose that I have any right to hope either to change the world or to be quietly annihilated: those hopes are just part of what I am, which goes on and on within certain clearly defined and very narrow limits. As if in answer to her thoughts on disappointment and anger the voices started up, muttering behind the bathroom door, indistinguishable but furious, furious, purely enraged. Joanna’s second hypothesis had been that it is indeed our ancestors who form our eternity, the time before and the time after our short time on earth, like the Japanese grandfather who presided at breakfast, like Bonnie Roote’s happy family gathering. For an individual man or woman was an object not unlike the Christmas cactus, “Joanna Hope”, bearing its eternal genes which dictate its form and future forever and forever. The voices were attached, not to the vacated garden, but to her own blood and presence. She could go to the Academy of the Return and enquire what quality in her it was that enabled her to hear them, or she could close her mind to them, confront and ignore them. She went to the bathroom door. She imagined the alternatives behind it: shower curtain, non-slip rubber bathmat, glistening red porcelain, or the dusty garret the voices inhabited. There was a susurration: shifting plastic, dripping tap, monotonous plaint.

  “Please be quiet,” she said. “I can hear you. I can’t help you, and I don’t want to hear you. You must make things better yourselves … Please, I beg of you, leave me alone. Now.”

  Silence. More silence. Courage, Joanna thought, turning back towards the delightful anonymous bed, with its strip of discreet lighting, with its warm gold sheets.

  As she raised her knee to get into it, the voice said, “Of course, if you’d treated her a bit better, she wouldn’t be so spiteful, she’d show more understanding, more consideration, she was often lacking in feeling but I put some of it down to your mismanagement …”

  “She’ll learn, in the fullness of time.”

  In the fullness of time, the fine barrier would indeed be opened, Joanna concluded, and she would in her turn pass, none too quietly, into that next room.

  THE DRIED WITCH

  She was dry. It was the dry season, but this was her own dryness. Her inside-mouth felt like cloth dried into creased folds in the sun; her tongue scrubbed the silky-dry palate with its sand-ripples of flesh. The wet film was gone from her eyes; the rims and the lash-roots pricked. Between the legs was dry too. She washed out her mouth with a scoop of water but this wetness vanished like water spilled on a stone in the sun. She moved round her house, sweeping dust from the clay floor that sweated m
ore dust. She scrubbed spots of grease from the little cooking-stove and wiped traces of white scum from the necks of large jars of salted vegetables. She picked at loose ends on woven sacks of millet and baskets of lentils. She refolded the quilts on her upper floor, and brushed the stone steps in the shuttered shadow. She took up her bright brass pot and set out for the tank.

  The village had two streets, crossing. The houses were yellow stone, cemented, with wooden windows, painted pigeon-blue, and golden-brown doors. Half the houses backed onto the high crawling mountains; some had cave-cellars. Others faced the narrow plain in the valley and the mountain-ridge beyond, laced ice-blue on simmering air, river-blue shot with copper. The tank was fed by a small spring that came out of the mountain and went back into it, a little lower, making an angry, sucking sound. Women cleaned their pots, or beat their long skirts, on the stone edge of the trough.

  A-Oa needed to see her eyes. She looked into the unruffled tank, deep and dark, greenish at its lower edges and on its floor. Her face looked back at her, an oval shadow on the glitter, and then, as she came nearer, provided with features, an empty fall of black hair, a black mouth, the dark holes of the eyes. The water turned everything into dark purple and greenish-brown shadows: unsmiling and uniformly olive her dark mask peered back at her, wrinkling its eyes, which, it was true, were very dark.

  She took up a scouring stone and a handful of white sand and rubbed the vessel, which did not need it. She looked at herself in its convex surfaces, and finally in its curved bottom, spun with fine scratches, glinting white lights, brief coloured lights. Her potface, unlike her water-face, was round and beaming, a sunny shape in hot metal. Her hair scattered light, her features melted and shifted shape with the contour of the bowl. Here there were colours if they could be read, in the brassy refractions, brass-brown cheek-hollows, brass-russet closed lips, burning. Her eyes, under their arched brows, appeared to be ruddy.