Mrs Caliban and other stories Read online

  James twitched the map into place. He liked planning things out and was good at it. She, on the other hand, couldn’t even fold a map back up the right way. She was better at the shopping. Now that they were used to their routines, they had a better time sightseeing. In the early days James had spent even more time phoning his broker than Flora had in worrying about the babies.

  She remembered the young couple at dinner the night before, and how much they had seemed to dislike each other. Of course, it was hard to tell anything about people who were quarrelling; still, they didn’t seem to have acquired any of the manners and formulae and pleasing deceptions that helped to keep lovers friendly over long periods. She herself had come to believe that – if it weren’t for this other glimpse of a love that would be for ever unfulfilled – she’d have been content with just those diplomatic gestures, plus a shared affection for what had become familiar. If she had been free to choose at this age, her life would have been different. Everybody was free now; and they all lived together before they got married.

  James put a pencil mark on the map and started to draw a line across two streets.

  Maybe, she thought, she’d been free even then. The freedom, or lack of it, was simply ceremonial. Rules and customs kept you from disorder and insecurity, but they also regulated your life to an extent that was sometimes intolerable. They protected and trapped at the same time. If it weren’t for habit and codes of behaviour, she and Michael could have married and had a happy life together.

  It had taken her years to find out that most of her troubles had been caused by trying to switch from one set of conventions to another. The people around her – even the ones who had at first seemed to be against her – had actually been all right.

  She said, ‘You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to see that girl.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The one the Dixons were talking about at tea. The goddess.’

  ‘Oh.’ James looked up. ‘Well, maybe. But don’t you think the idea is going to be a lot better than the reality? Following it up is just going to mean what they said: standing in line for hours. Do you want to spend your vacation doing that?’

  ‘And if you don’t, regetting that you never did. I would like to. Really. You don’t have to come, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Of course I’d come, if you went.’

  ‘Could you find out about it? It’s the thing I want to do most.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Are there goddesses at home?’

  He laughed, and said, ‘Only in the museums. And in the bedroom, if you believe the nightgown ads.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘OK,’ he promised. ‘I’ll find out about it. But it seems to me, the one worth looking at is going to be the one that went AWOL and got married.’

  ‘She didn’t go AWOL. She was retired.’

  ‘A retired goddess? No such thing. Once a god, always a god.’

  ‘If you become impure as soon as you bleed, then you can lose the divinity. Women –’

  ‘All right, I’ll find out about it today. Right now. This very minute.’

  ‘I’m only trying to explain it.’

  ‘Wasted on me,’ he told her.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s interesting?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’ll see about it this afternoon.’

  Over the next few days they went to the botanical gardens; to the theatre, where they saw a long, beautiful and rather dull puppet play; and to a nightclub, at which Flora developed a headache from the smoke and James said he was pretty sure the star chanteuse was a man. They got dressed up in their evening clothes to visit the best restaurant in town, attended a dinner given by a friend of the family who used to be with the City Bank in the old days, and made an excursion to the boat market. Half the shops there were hardly more than floating bamboo frameworks with carpets stretched across them. Bright pink orchid-like flowers decorated all the archways and thresholds, on land and on the water. The flowers looked voluptuous but unreal, and were scentless; they added to the theatrical effect – the whole market was like a view backstage. James and Flora loved it. Michael said it was too crowded and the entire place was a fire-trap.

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of water near at hand,’ James said.

  ‘You’d never make it. One push and the whole mob’s going to be everybody on top of theirselves. They’d all drown together.’

  ‘I do love it when you get on to the subject of safety, Kelvin. It always makes me feel so privileged to be alive.’

  A privilege granted to many, Flora thought, as she gazed into the throng of shoving, babbling strangers. She suddenly felt that she had to sit down.

  She turned to James. ‘I feel –’ she began.

  He saw straight away what was wrong. He put his arm around her and started to push through the crowd. Michael took the other side. She knew that if she really collapsed, Michael could pick her up and sling her over his shoulder like a sack of flour, he was so strong. He’d had to do it once when she’d fainted at a ladies’ fund-raising luncheon. That had been a hot day too, lunch with wine under a blue canvas awning outdoors; but she’d been pregnant then. There was no reason now for her to faint, except the crowd and the lack of oxygen.

  There wasn’t any place to sit down. She tried to slump against Michael. They moved her forward.

  ‘Here,’ James said.

  She sat on something that turned out to be a tea chest. They were in another part of the main arcade, in a section that sold all kinds of boxes and trunks. A man came up to James, wanting to know if he was going to buy the chest.

  Back at the hotel, they laughed about it. James had had to shell out for a sandalwood casket in order to give her time to recover. When they were alone, he asked if she was really all right, or could it be that they’d been overdoing it in the afternoons? She told him not to be silly: she was fine.

  ‘I think maybe we should cancel the trip to the goddess, though, don’t you?’

  ‘No, James. I’m completely OK.’

  ‘Waiting out in the sun –’

  ‘Well see about that when we get there,’ she said flatly. It was a tone she very seldom used.

  ‘OK, it’s your vacation. I guess we could always carry you in on a stretcher and say you were a pilgrim.’

  He arranged everything for the trip to the temple. The day he chose was near the end of their stay, but not so close to the flight that they couldn’t make another date if something went wrong. One of them might come down with a twenty-four-hour bug or there might be a freak rainstorm that would flood the roads. ‘Or,’ James said, ‘if she scratches herself with a pin, we’ve had it till she heals up. They might even have to choose a new girl.’

  In the meantime they went to look at something called ‘the jade pavilion’ – a room in an abandoned palace, where the silk walls had been screened by a lattice-work fence of carved jade flowers. The stone had been sheared and sliced and ground to such a fineness that in some places it appeared as thin as paper. The colours were vibrant and glowing – not with the freshness of real flowers nor the sparkle of faceted jewels, but with the lustre of fruits; the shine that came off the surfaces was almost wet-looking.

  As they walked under the central trellis a woman behind them said, ‘Think of having to dust this place.’ A man’s voice answered her, saying, ‘Plenty of slave labour here. Nobody worries about dust.’

  ‘Glorious,’ James said afterwards. And Michael declared that, ‘You had to hand it to them.’ He’d been impressed by the amount of planning that must have gone into the work: the measuring and matching, the exactitude.

  Flora had liked the silk walls behind, which were covered with pictures of flying birds. She said, ‘I guess you’re supposed to think to yourself that you’re in a garden, looking out. But it’s a little too ornate for me. It’s like those rooms we saw in Palermo, where the whole place was gold and enamel – like being insi
de a jewel box. This one would have been even nicer made out of wood and then painted. Don’t you think?’

  ‘That would fade,’ James said. ‘You’d have to re-do it all the time. And in this climate you’d probably need to replace sections of it every few years.’

  They kept calling home every day. The weather there was horrible, everyone said. Anna-Louise had a long story about friends of hers whose house had been burgled. And one of the children had a sore throat; he coughed dramatically into the receiver to show how bad it was.

  ‘They need us‚’ Flora said. ‘That was a cry of despair.’

  ‘That was the standard performance‚’ James told her. ‘There’s one who hasn’t inherited any bashfulness. He’d cough his heart out in front of fifty reporters every day and do retakes if he thought it hadn’t been a really thorough job. No hired substitute for him. It’s going to be a question of how hard we’ll have to sit on him to keep him down. Worse than Teddy was at that age.’

  ‘He sounded pretty bad.’

  ‘You’re the one we’re going to worry about at the moment. One at a time. Feeling faint? Claustrophobic?’

  Flora shook her head. She felt fine. They strolled around town together and sat in a public park for a while. They’d chosen a bench within the shade of a widely branched, symmetrical tree. Michael rested against the stonework of a gate some distance away. While he kept them in sight, he watched the people who passed by. James pointed out a pair of tourists coming through the entrance.

  ‘Where?’ Flora asked.

  ‘Right by the gate. It’s those two from the restaurant we went to our first night out.’

  ‘Irma and Joe‚’ she said. ‘So it is. And they’re still arguing. Look.’

  The couple had come to a stop inside the gates. Joe leaned forward and made sweeping gestures with his arms. Irma held herself in a crouching posture of defence: knees bent, shoulders hunched, chin forward. Her fists were balled up against her collar-bone. The two faced each other still encumbered by their back-packs and bearing a comical resemblance to armoured warriors or wrestlers costumed in heavy padding.

  James said, ‘She’s just spent all her money and he’s bawling her out.’

  ‘You give it to him, Irma‚’ Flora said. James squeezed her hand.

  They stayed on their bench and watched a large group of uniformed schoolchildren who – under the supervision of their teachers – went through what seemed to be the usual class exercises and then began to play some game neither Flora nor James could understand. Two of the children passed a book through the group while the others counted, telling off certain players to skip in a circle around the rest. They they all sang a rhyming verse and formed up in a new order.

  At last he said, ‘OK?’ and stood up. She got to her feet. In the distance Michael too stepped forward.

  They were three streets from where the hired car was parked, when Flora caught sight of a yellow bowl in a store window. She slowed down and, briefly, paused to look. James and Michael moved on a few paces. She turned back, to ask James what he thought about the bowl, and a hand closed gently over her arm just above the wrist. She looked up into a face she’d never seen before. For a moment she didn’t realize anything. Then the hand tightened. At the same time, someone else grabbed her from behind. She dropped her handbag. Gasping and mewing sounds came from her throat, but she couldn’t make any louder noise. She tried to kick, but that was all she could do.

  Michael and James were with her almost immediately, hitting and kicking. Michael actually threw one of the gang into the air. Flora felt herself released. She fell to her knees, with her head against the glass of the window.

  ‘Here,’ James said, ‘hold on to that.’ He thrust her handbag into her arms and pulled her back up. She still couldn’t speak.

  They hurried her to the car and drove back to the hotel. Michael came up to the room with them and sat on the edge of the bed. James said he was calling in a doctor.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she jabbered, ‘all right, perfectly – I’m fine. I’m just so mad. I’m so mad I could chew bricks. The nerve of those people!’ She was shaking.

  Michael stood up and got her a glass of water. She drank all of it and put her head down on the bed.

  ‘That’s a good idea‚’ James said. He and Michael left her and went into the sitting room. She could hear them talking. Michael said, ‘The cops?’ and James said, ‘Tied up with police on vacation. Besides, what good?’

  ‘No hope‚’ Michael answered. ‘Anyway, weren’t after money.’

  ‘Bag.’

  ‘No, arm. And left it. Her, not the. Alley right next. A few more seconds.’

  ‘Jesus Christ‚’ James said. ‘That means.’

  Michael’s voice said, ‘Maybe not‚’ and Flora began to relax. She slept for a few minutes. She was on a beach in New Caledonia and Michael was sitting beside her on the sand. There was a barrel-vaulted roof of palm leaves overhead, like the canopy of a four-poster bed. She could hear the sound of the sea. And then suddenly someone stepped up in back of her and her arms were grabbed from behind.

  She woke up. She almost felt the touch still, although it had been in her dream. She stared ahead at the chairs by the bed, the green-and-yellow pattern of the material they were upholstered in, the white net curtains over the windows where the light was beginning to dim away. She thought about the real event, earlier in the afternoon, and remembered again – as if it had left a mark on her body – the moment when the hand had closed over her arm. Once more she was filled with outrage and fury. The nerve, she thought; the nerve. And the terrible feeling of having been made powerless, of being held, pinioned, captured by people who had no right to touch her. That laying of the hand on her had been like the striking of a predator, and just as impersonal. When she thought about it, it seemed to her that she was picturing all the men as much bigger and stronger than they probably were, and perhaps older, too. They might have been only teenagers.

  She wanted to forget about it. It was over. And James was right: it would ruin what was left of their trip to spend it making out reports in a police station. What could the police do? These gangs of muggers hit you, disappeared around a corner and that was the end of the trail. Once in Tokyo she and James had seen a man on the opposite sidewalk robbed by two boys. His hands had suddenly gone up in the air; and there was the pistol right in broad daylight, pointing into his chest. It could happen so fast. It was the kind of street crime she had come on the holiday in order to forget.

  But you had to be prepared. These things were international. And timeless. All the cruelties came back: torture, piracy, massacres. The good things didn’t return so often because it took too long to develop them. And it took a whole system of convention and ritual to keep them working; wheels within wheels. She was part of it. To keep the ordered world safe, you had to budget for natural deterioration and the cost of replacement. Nothing had a very high survival rate – not even jade, hard as it was.

  She thought about the pavilion of jade flowers and wondered whether it was really so beautiful. Maybe in any case it was only as good as the people who liked it believed it to be. James had loved it. Michael hadn’t seemed to like it except for the evidence of the work that had been put into it. He might have disapproved of the extravagance rather than been judging the place on aesthetic grounds. She felt herself falling asleep again.

  When she woke it was growing dark. She got up, took a shower and changed. The three of them ate together in the hotel dining-room, drank a great deal, had coffee and then even more to drink afterwards. They talked about law and order and decent values and Flora was tight enough to say, ‘We can afford to.’ They agreed not to mention the incident to anyone at home until the trip was over.

  James had a hangover the next day but read through all his newspapers as usual.

  Any mention of our little drama?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not. We didn’t report it. A few other muggings here, it says.’

&n
bsp; ‘Maybe they’re the same ones.’

  ‘Nope. They’d have gone for the bag and left you. These are all cases of grab-and-run.’

  ‘You mean, they wanted to kidnap me; get you to pay ransom. So, they must know all about us, who we are, what you can raise at short notice.’

  ‘Maybe they check up on everybody staying at big hotels. Maybe they saw your rings. Or it might just be that they know a good-looking woman when they see one: probably thought they could sell you to somebody.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sure. Hey, look what else. It says here, the ex-goddess was stoned outside her house yesterday morning.’

  ‘Yesterday morning we were pretty stoned, too. Or was that this morning?’

  ‘A mob threw stones at her. They were some kind of religious group.’

  ‘That’s disgusting. That’s even worse than trying to kidnap people.’

  ‘She’s all right, but she’s in the hospital. That ought to mean she’s OK. It only takes one stone to kill somebody.’

  ‘Disgusting‚’ Flora muttered.

  ‘And interesting,’ James said. ‘In a lot of countries it’s still the traditional punishment for adultery.’

  *

  Their hired car drove them down the coastline. They took a picnic lunch, went for a swim and visited two shrines that, according to their guidebooks, were famous. On the next day they spent the morning trying to find material for curtains to go in a house belonging to Elizabeth’s mother-in-law. Michael kept close to Flora all the time; their clothes often brushed as they walked or stood side by side.

  On the day of their visit to the goddess it looked for the first time during the trip as if it might rain. James went back up to their rooms and got the umbrellas. On the ride out into the country they heard a few rumblings of thunder, but after that the skies began to clear and the day turned hot and muggy. The umbrellas sat in the car while they entered the temple precincts.

  They were checked at the main gate, which looked more like the entrance to a fortress than to a religious building. Flora saw James stiffen as he caught sight of the long row of invalids sitting or lying on their sides, their relatives squatting near them on the ground. She remembered his joke about pilgrims. It wasn’t so funny to see the real thing. He never liked being in places where there might be diseases. Most of their travelling had been carefully packaged and sanitized to avoid coming into contact with contagion or even the grosser aspects of simple poverty. You could have all the shots you liked, and it wouldn’t help against the wrong virus. She knew that he’d be telling himself again about the number and quality of the hospitals in town.