The Memoirs of a Survivor

I forgot this occurrence. I went on with the little routines of my life, conscious of the life behind the wall, but not remembering my visit there. It was not until a few days later that I again stood, cigarette in hand, in the mid-morning hour, looking through drifting smoke at the sunlight laid there on the wall, and I thought: Hello! I’ve been through there, of course I have. How did I manage to forget? And again the wall dissolved and I was through. There were more rooms than I had suspected the first time. I had a strong sense of that, though I did not see them all. Nor did I, on that occasion, see the man or the woman in overalls. The rooms were empty. To make them habitable, what work needed to be done! Yes, I could see that it would take weeks, months … I stood there marking fallen plaster, the corner of a ceiling stained with damp, dirty or damaged walls. Yet it was on that morning when I was beginning to understand how much work needed to be done that I saw, just for the ghost of a second – well, what? But I can hardly say. Perhaps it was more of a feeling than something seen. There was a sweetness, certainly – a welcome, a reassurance. Perhaps I did see a face, or the shadow of one. The face I saw clearly later was familiar to me, but it is possible that that face, seen as everything ended, appears in my memory in this place, this early second visit: it had reflected itself back, needing no more to use as a host or as a mirror than the emotion of sweet longing, which hunger was its proper air. This was the rightful inhabitant of the rooms behind the wall. I had no doubt of it then or later. The exiled inhabitant; for surely she could not live, never could have lived, in that chill empty shell full of dirty and stale air?

When I again knew myself to be standing in my living-room, the cigarette half-burned down, I was left with the conviction of a promise, which did not leave me no matter how difficult things became later, both in my own life, and in these hidden rooms.

The child was left with me in this way. I was in the kitchen, and, hearing a sound, went into the living room, and saw a man and a half-grown girl standing there. I did not know either of them, and advanced with the intention of clearing up a mistake. The thought in my mind was that I must have left my front door open. They turned to face me. I remember how I was even then, and at once, struck by the bright hard nervous smile on the girl’s face. The man – middleaged, ordinarily dressed, quite unremarkable in every way – said: ‘This is the child.’ He was already on the way out. He had laid his hand on her shoulder, had smiled and nodded to her, was turning away.

I said: ‘But surely.…’

‘No, there’s no mistake. She’s your responsibility.’

He was at the door.

‘But wait a minute.…’

‘She is Emily Cartright. Look after her.’ And he had gone.

We stood there, the child and I, looking at each other. I remember the room had a wash of sun: it was still morning. I was wondering how the two had got in, but this already seemed irrelevant, since the man had gone. I now ran to the window: a street with a few trees along the pavement, a bus-stop with its familiar queue of people waiting, waiting; and on the wide pavement opposite, underneath the trees there, some children from the Mehta’s flat upstairs playing with a ball – dark-skinned boys and girls, all dazzling white shirts, crisp pink and blue dresses, white teeth, gleaming hair. But the man I was looking for – not a sign.

I turned back to the child; but now I took my time over it, and was wondering what to say, how to present myself, how to handle her – all the pathetic little techniques and tricks of our self-definition. She was watching me, carefully, closely: the thought came into my mind that this was the expert assessment of possibilities by a prisoner observing a new jailer. Already my heart was heavy: anxiety! My intelligence was not yet making much of what was happening.

‘Emily?’ I said tentatively, hoping that she would choose to answer the questions in my mind.

‘Emily Mary Cartright,’ she said, in a manner that matched her bright impervious voice and smile. Pert? At any rate a hard, an enamelled presence. I was trying to get past, or around it; I was conscious that I was desperately making signals – my smile, gestures – that might perhaps reach something softer and warmer which must be there behind that cold defence of hers.

‘Well, will you sit down? Or can I make you something to eat? Some tea? I do have some real tea, but of course …’

‘I’d like to see my room please,’ she said. And now her eyes were, quite without her knowing it, an appeal, She needed, she needed very much, to know what walls, what shelter, she was going to be able to pull around her, like a blanket, for comfort.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I haven’t thought yet, I don’t quite … I must …’ Her face seemed to shrivel. But she preserved her bright desperation. ‘You see,’ I went on, ‘I wasn’t expecting … let’s see now.’ She waited. Stubbornly, she waited. She knew that she was to live with me. She knew that her shelter, her four walls, her den, the little space that was hers and which she could creep into was here somewhere. ‘There’s the spare room,’ I said. ‘I call it that. But it isn’t very …’ But I went, and I remember how helplessly and unhappily I did, into the little front lobby, and through it to the spare room.

The flat was on the front of the building, the south side. The living-room took up most of the space: its size was why I had taken the flat. At the end away from the entrance lobby, so that you had to walk through the living-room to get to it, was the kitchen, on the corner of the building. This was quite large, with cupboards and storage space, and was used for eating as well. From the entrance lobby went two doors, one to the living-room, one to the room I called a spare room. This room was connected with the bathroom. My bedroom was on the front of the building, reached from the living-room. The bathroom, lobby, spare room, took up the same space as my bedroom, which was not large. It will be seen that the spare room was very small. It had a small high window. It was stuffy. There was no way of making it attractive. I never used it except for keeping things in or, with apologies, for a friend staying the night.

‘I’m sorry that it is so small and dark … perhaps we should …’

‘No, no, I don’t mind,’ she said, in the cool jaunty way which was so much hers; but she was looking at the bed with longing, and I knew she had found her refuge, hers, here it was at last. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, you don’t believe me, you don’t know what …’ But she left the possibility of an explanation of what she had been experiencing, and waited, her whole body expressing how she wanted me to leave.

‘And we’ll have to share the bathroom,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’ll be ever so tidy,’ she assured me. ‘I’m really very good, you know, I won’t make a mess, I never do.’

I knew that if I were not in this flat, if she did not feel she must behave well, she would be between the blankets, she would already be far away from the world.

‘I won’t be a tick,’ she assured me. ‘I must get tidy. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

I left her and waited for her in the living-room, first standing by the window looking out, wondering perhaps if fresh surprises were on the way. Then I sat down, rather, I imagine, in the attitude of The Thinker, or some such concentrated pose.

Yes, it was extraordinary. Yes, it was all impossible. But after all, I had accepted the ‘impossible’. I lived with it. I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place. And as for the public, the outer world, it had been a long time since that offered the normal. Could one perhaps describe that period as ‘the ordinariness of the extraordinary?’ Well, the reader should have no difficulty here: these words are a description of the times we have lived through. (A description of all life? – probably, but it is not much help to think so.)

But these words convey perfectly the atmosphere of what was happening when Emily was brought to me. While everything, all forms of social organisation, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life. When nothing, or very little, was left of what we had been used to, had taken for granted even ten years before, we went on talking and behaving as if those old forms were still ours. And indeed, order of the old kind – food, amenities, even luxuries, did exist at higher levels, we all knew that; though of course those who enjoyed these things did not draw attention to themselves. Order could also exist in pockets, of space, of time – through periods of weeks and months or in a particular district. Inside them, people would live and talk and even think as if nothing had changed. When something really bad happened, as when an area got devastated, people might move out for days, or weeks, to stay with relatives or friends, and then move back, perhaps to a looted house, to take up their jobs, their housekeeping – their order. We can get used to anything at all; this is a commonplace, of course, but perhaps you have to live through such a time to see how horribly true it is. There is nothing that people won’t try to accommodate into ‘ordinary life’. It was precisely this which gave that time its peculiar flavour; the combination of the bizarre, the hectic, the frightening, the threatening, an atmosphere of siege or war – with what was customary, ordinary, even decent.

For instance, on the newscasts and in the papers they would pursue for days the story of a single kidnapped child, taken from its pram perhaps by some poor unhappy woman. The police would be combing suburbs and the countryside in hundreds, looking for the child, and for the woman, to punish her. But the next news flash would be about the mass deaths of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. We still believed, wanted to believe, that the first, the concern about the single child, the need to punish the individual criminal, even if it took days and weeks and hundreds of our hard-worked police force to do it, was what really represented us; the second, the catastrophe, was, as such items of news had always been for people not actually in the threatened area, an unfortunate and minor – or at least not crucial – accident, which interrupted the even flow, the development, of civilisation.

This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy … or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much, or at least, nothing irrecoverable, was happening, was because for us the enemy was Reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening. Perhaps our pretences, everyone’s pretences, which in the moments when we felt naked, defenceless, seemed like playacting and absurd, should be regarded as admirable? Or perhaps they were necessary, like the games of children who can make playacting a way of keeping reality a long way from their weaknesses? But increasingly, all the time, one had to defeat the need, simply, to laugh: oh, not a good laughter, far from it. Rather bellows and yells of derision.

For instance again: in the same week as a horde of two hundred or so hooligans had surged through our neighbourhood, leaving a corpse on the pavement across from the street from my windows, leaving smashed windows, looted shops, the remains of bonfires, a group of middleaged women, self-appointed vigilantes were making formal protests to the police about an amateur theatricals group some youngsters had set up. This group had written and put on a play describing the tensions inside an ordinary family living in a block of flats like ours, a family which had taken in half a dozen refugees from the eastern counties. (As long as travellers were with the migrating gangs they were ‘hooligans’, but when they hived off to find shelter with some family or household they were ‘refugees’). A household that had held five people suddenly held twelve, and the resulting frictions led to adultery and an incident where ‘a young girl seduced a man old enough to be her grandfather’ as the good women indignantly described it. They managed to organise a not-very-well-attended meeting about the ‘decay of family life’, about ‘immorality’, about ‘sexual indulgence’. This was comic, of course. Unless it was sad. Unless – as I’ve suggested – it was admirable; a sign of the vitality of the said ‘ordinary life’ which would in the end defeat chaos, disorder, the malevolence of events.

Or what can one say about the innumerable citizens’ groups that came into existence right up to the end, for any ethical or social purpose you could think of: to improve old age pensions, at a time when money was giving way to barter; to supply vitamin tablets to school children; to provide a visiting service for housebound invalids; to arrange formal legal adoption for abandoned children; to forbid the news of any violent or ‘unpleasant’ event, so as not to ‘put ideas into young people’s heads’; to reason with the gangs of hooligans as they came through the streets, or alternatively, to birch them; to go around and about the streets, exhorting people ‘to restore a sense of decency to their sexual practices’; to agree not to eat the meat of cats and dogs; and so on, and on, and on – there was really no end to it. Farce. Splitting into a hurricane; standing in front of a mirror to touch up one’s face or straighten a tie as the house crashes around one; extending the relaxed accommodating hand of the Royal handshake to a barbarian who will certainly bend and take a good bite out of it … these similes come to mind. Analogies were being made then, of course, in the conversations that were our meat and drink, and by the professional comedians.

In such an atmosphere, in a time of such happenings, that an unknown man should arrive in my home with a child, saying she was my responsibility, and then leave without further remark, was not as strange as all that.

When Emily at last came out of her bedroom, having changed her dress and washed from her face what looked like an assault of miserable tears, she said: ‘The room will be a bit small for Hugo and me, but it doesn’t matter a bit.’

I saw that she had beside her a dog, no a cat. What was it? An animal, at any rate. It was the size of a bulldog, and shaped more like a dog than a cat, but its face was that of a cat.

It was yellow. Its hide was harsh and rough. It had cat’s eyes and whiskers. It had a long whip-like tail. An ugly beast. Hugo. She sat herself down carefully in my deep old sofa opposite the fireplace, and the beast got up beside her, and sat there, as close as he could get, and she put her arm about him. She looked at me, from beside the animal’s cat face. They both looked at me, Hugo with his green eyes, and Emily with her defensive shrewd hazel eyes.

She was a large child, of about twelve. Not a child, really; but in that half-way place where soon she would be a girl. She would be pretty, at least goodlooking. Well-made: she had small hands and feet, and good limbs that were brown with health and sun. Her hair was dark and straight, parted on one side, held with a clip.

We talked. Or rather, we offered each other little remarks, both waiting for that switch to be turned somewhere which would make our being together easier. While she sat there silent her brooding dark gaze, her mouth with its definite possibilities of humour, her air of patient thoughtful attention made her seem someone I could like very much. But then, just as I was sure she was about to respond in kind to my attempts, my feeling of pleasure in her potentialities, there would come to life in her the vivacious self-presenting little madam – the old-fashioned world was right for her: there was something old-fashioned in her image of herself. Or perhaps it was someone else’s idea of her?

She chattered: ‘I’m awfully hungry, and so is Hugo. Poor Hugo. He hasn’t eaten today. And neither have I, if the truth must be told.’

I made my apologies and hastened out to the shops to buy whatever cat or dog foods I could find for Hugo. It took some time to find a shop which still stocked such things. I was an object of interest to the shop assistant, an animal-lover, who applauded my intention to stand up for my right to keep ‘pets’ in these days. I also interested one or two of the other customers, and I was careful not to say where I lived, when one asked me, and went home by a misleading route, and made sure I was not being followed. On the way I visited several shops looking for things I usually did not bother with, they were so hard to track down, so expensive. But at last I did find some biscuits and sweets of a quite decent quality – whatever I thought might appeal to a child. I had plenty of dried apples and pears, and stocks of basic foodstuffs. When at last I got back home she was asleep on the sofa, and Hugo was asleep beside her. His yellow face was on her shoulder, her arm was around his neck. On the floor beside her was her little suitcase, as flimsy as a small child’s week-end case. It had in it some neatly-folded dresses and a jersey and a pair of jeans. These seemed to be all she owned in the way of clothes. I would not have been surprised to see a teddy or a doll. Instead there was a Bible, a book of photographs of animals, some science fiction paperbacks.

I made as welcoming a meal as I could for both her and Hugo. I woke them with difficulty: they were in the exhausted state that follows relief after long tension. When they had eaten they wanted to go off to bed, though it was still mid-afternoon.

And that was how Emily was left with me.

In those first few days she slept and she slept. Because of this, and because of her invincible obedience, I was unconsciously thinking of her as younger than she was. I sat waiting quietly in my living-room, knowing that she was asleep, exactly as one does with a small child. I did a little mending for her, washed and ironed her clothes. But mostly, I sat and looked at that wall and waited. I could not help thinking that to have a child with me, just as the wall was beginning to open itself up, would be a nuisance, and in fact she and her animal were very much in the way. This made me feel guilty. All kinds of emotions I had not felt for a long time came to life in me again, and I longed simply to walk through the wall and never come back. But this would be irresponsible; it would mean turning my back on my responsibilities.

It was a day or two after Emily came: I was beyond the wall, and I kept opening doors, or turning the comers of long passages to find another room or suite of rooms. Empty. That is, I did not see any one, although the feeling of someone’s presence was so strong I even kept turning my head quickly, as if this person could be expected to step out from behind a wall in the few seconds my back had been turned. Empty but inhabited. Empty but furnished … wandering there, between tall white walls, from room to room, I saw that the place was filled with furniture. I knew these sofas, these chairs. But why? From what time in my life did they date? They were not my taste. Yet it seemed that they had been mine, or an intimate friend’s.

The drawing-room had pale pink silk curtains, a grey carpet with delicate pink and green flowers laid on it, many small tables and cabinets. The sofas and chairs were covered in tapestry, had pastel cushions placed exactly here and there. It was a room too formal and too self-sufficient ever to have been mine. Yet I knew everything in it. I walked there, slowly filling with irritated despair. Everything I looked at would have to be replaced or mended or cleaned, for nothing was whole, or fresh. Each chair would have to be re-covered, for the material was frayed. The sofas were grimy. The curtains had little rents and the roughened patches moths leave, each with its miniscule holes. The carpet showed its threads. And so with all the many rooms of this place, which was giving a feeling of things slipping away from me through clumsy and stiff fingers. The whole place should be cleared out, I kept saying to myself. It should be emptied, and what was in it now should be burned or thrown away. Bare rooms would be better than this infinitely genteel shabbiness, the gimcrackery. Room after room after room – there was no end to them, or to the work I had to do. Now I kept looking for the empty room that had in it a painter’s ladder and a half-glimpsed figure in overalls: if I could see this, it would mean a start had been made. But there were no empty rooms, every one was crammed with objects, all needing attention.

It must not be thought that all my energy was going into this hidden place. For days at a time I did not think of it. The knowledge of it, being there, in whatever shape it was using for the moment, came to me in flashes during my ordinary life, more and more often. But I would forget it, too, for days. When I was actually through that wall, nothing else seemed real; and even the new and serious preoccupations of my life – Emily and her attendant animal – slid away, were far off, were part of another distant life which did not much concern me. And this is my difficulty in describing that time: looking back now it is as if two ways of life, two lives, two worlds, lay side by side and closely connected. But then, one life excluded the other, and I did not expect the two worlds ever to link up. I had not thought at all of their being able to do so, and I would have said this was not possible. Particularly now, when Emily was there; particularly when I had so many problems that centred on her being with me.

The main problem was, and remained for some time, that she was so infinitely obliging and obedient. When I got up in the morning she was already up, dressed in one of her neat little dresses, the clothes of a good child whose mother needs her children to be well dressed, even remarkably so. Her hair was brushed. Her teeth were cleaned. She was waiting for me in the living-room, with her Hugo, and instantly she began chattering, offering this or that to me, how she had slept marvellously, or how she had dreamed, or how she had had this amusing or foolish or valuable thought – and all in a rushing almost frantic way of forestalling some demand or criticism from me. And then she began about breakfast, how she would ‘adore’ to cook it – ‘oh, she would simply love to, please’, for really she was ever so handy and capable. And so she and I would go into the kitchen, the beast padding behind us, and I and Hugo sat watching her preparations. And she was, indeed, competent and nifty. And then we ate whatever it was, Hugo’s head at her waist-level, his eyes calmly watching her, me, our hands, our faces, and when he was offered a bit of food he took it delicately, like a cat. Then she would offer to wash up. ‘No, no, I love washing-up, incredible as it might seem, but I really do!’ And she washed up and made the kitchen neat. Her bedroom had been tidied already, but not her bed, which was always a nest or womb of coiled blankets and pillows. I never reproved her for this; on the contrary, I was delighted that there was one place she felt was her own, that she could make her refuge, where she could hide away from this really awful need always to be so bright and good. Sometimes, unpredictably, during the day, she went to her room – abruptly, as if something had been too much. She shut the door and, I knew, crawled into the heap of disorder and there she lay and recovered … but from what? In the living-room she sat on my old sofa, her legs curled up, in a pose which was as much an offering to what might be expected of her as was her manner, her obedience. She watched me, as if anticipating commands or needs, or she might read. Her taste in reading was adult: seeing her there, with what she had chosen, made her bright child’s manner even more impossible, almost as if she were deliberately insulting me. Or she would sit with her arm round the yellow beast, and he licked her hand, and put his cat’s face on her arm and purred, a sound which rumbled through the rooms of my flat.

Had she been some kind of a prisoner?

I did not ask. I never, not once, asked her a question. And she did not volunteer information. Meanwhile my heart ached for her, recognising her manner for what it was; and, at the same time, while I was really quite soft and ridiculous with pity for her, I was in a frenzy of irritation, because of my inability ever, even for a moment, to get behind the guard she had set up. There she was, the solemn, serious little girl, in her good little girl’s dress, showing every mark of the solitary child, all self-consciousness and observation, and then off she’d go, chattering and rattling, being ‘amusing’, offering me little skills and capacities as a return for – but what? I did not feel myself to be so formidable. I almost felt myself not to exist, in my own right. I was a continuation, for her, of parents, or a parent, a guardian, foster-parents. And when we left here, presumably I would hand her over to someone else? The man who had given her into my care would come to take her back? Her parents would arrive? Otherwise, what was I going to do with her? When I started my travels north or west, joining the general movement of the population away from the southern and eastern parts of the country, what would I be moving into? What sort of life? I did not know. But I had not envisaged a child, never a responsibility of such a total sort … and besides, even in the few days she had been here she had changed. Her breasts were shaping, pushing out the child’s bodice. Her round face with its attractive dark eyes needed very little to shape it into a young girl’s face. A ‘little’ girl was one thing, and bad enough – ‘child with her pet’… but the ‘young girl’ would be quite another, and particularly in these times.

It will sound contradictory when I say that another thing that bothered me was her indolence. Of course there wasn’t very much to do in my flat. She sat for hours at my window and watched, absorbed, everything that went on. She entertained me with comment: this was a deliberate and measured offering; she had been known, it was clear, for her ‘amusing’ comments. Here again I did not know quite what it was I had to reckon with, for these were certainly not a little girl’s perceptions. Or perhaps I was out of date, and this was what one had to expect in this time, for what strains and stresses did children now not have to accept and make part of themselves?

Professor White would come out of the lobby and down the steps, and then stop, looking up and down the street, almost in a military way: Who goes there! Then, reassured, he stood for a moment: almost he could be imagined pulling on a pair of gloves, adjusting a hat. He was a slight man, young for a professor, still in his thirties; a precise, an ashy, man with everything in his life in its proper place. On to Emily’s face would come a smile as she watched him, a sour little smile, as if she was thinking: I’ve got you, you can’t escape me! And over her attendant animal’s pricked yellow ears she would say: ‘He looks as if he was pulling on a pair of gloves!’ (Yes, this was her observation.) And then: ‘He must have a terrible temper!’ ‘But why? Why do you think so?’ ‘Why? Well, of course, all that control, everything so neat and clean, he must burst out somewhere.’ And, once, ‘If he has a mistress …’ – the use of the old-fashioned word was deliberate, part of the act – ‘then she would have to be someone with a bad reputation, someone rather awful, or he would have to think she was, or other people would have to think so even if he didn’t. Because he would have to feel wicked, don’t you see?’ Well, of course she was right.

I found myself making excuses to sit there, to hear what she would come out with. But I was reluctant too, watching the knife being slipped in so neatly, so precisely, and again and again.

Of Janet White, a girl of about her age: ‘She’ll spend her life looking for someone like Daddy, but where will she find him. I mean now, he won’t exist.’ She meant, of course, the general break-up of things, times which were not conducive to the production of professors with very clean white shirts and a secret passion for the unrespectable – since respectability itself was sentenced to death, and with it the distinctions his secret needs must feed on. The professor she called The White Rabbit. His daughter she called Daddy’s Girl, making the point that in doing so she was of course describing herself: ‘What else, after all?’ When I suggested that she might enjoy making a friend of Janet, she said: ‘What, me and her?’