Mrs Caliban and other stories Read online

  ‘The halo’, Anselm said, ‘is a symbolic representation of an inner warmth or glow. Fire around the head is supposed to indicate enlightenment of the mind. It isn’t peculiar to the Christian tradition.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it is strongly felt that the presence of a halo would be a desirable adjunct to anyone entertaining aspirations to a holy state. It would add authenticity to your claims. Such as they are.’

  He had never believed it. Frederick wouldn’t countenance anything that wasn’t in the books.

  ‘If you doubt me all along the line,’ Anselm said, ‘what do you think the explanation is?’

  ‘I wouldn’t presume to advance a theory as to that. All I know is that the Church is against it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  For a moment Anselm thought that Frederick would actually break loose and say: Because the Church is against women. It seemed to be what he thought; but instead he answered, ‘Because it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘It doesn’t fit in with scriptural, social, or indeed biological precedence.’

  ‘You think it should have happened to you?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. You don’t even seem to understand that in other people’s eyes this is a hideous and freakish thing to have occurred.’

  ‘I know that. Oh, yes. Or funny. But not for all of them. A few have been good about it. I expect it’s those few that scare you.’

  ‘Scared? The Church has weathered a great many storms over the past centuries.’

  ‘And caused some.’

  ‘It isn’t scared.’

  ‘I give up,’ Anselm said. ‘You won’t even think about it, will you? You just push it away. All right – you don’t want me here; where do I go? I’ll have to live on something, and I won’t be able to work when the baby comes.’

  ‘Brother Duncan has given me the name of a reputable nursing home.’

  ‘The arrangement was that I was to go into a place where they’d have all the latest equipment. Either that, or stay here and have an old-fashioned home delivery. Duncan didn’t want to risk that.’

  ‘Well, the arrangements have been changed. Brother Duncan now agrees with us that the discretion of the private clinic outweighs the conviviality of a public ward. The medical attention will be in all respects identical.’

  Anselm clasped his hands lightly over his bulging front. He knew now what they were going to do to him. First it was William, and then the business with Adrian must have given them a better idea: to put Anselm in a home for the insane. He was sure that that was what they had in mind.

  ‘All right,’ he said. He fished around awkwardly for support and lumbered to his feet. Frederick made no move to help. I hope your nose rots away, Anselm thought, and your fingers drop off one by one. I hope you die in pain. I hope it feels like your death lasts longer than your life ever did.

  ‘Goodbye, Frederick,’ he said. ‘I hope you think about me sometimes.’

  ‘Of course, Anselm. I don’t reproach you.’

  ‘I hope you think about what you’ve done.’

  ‘I have the welfare of the order at heart, you know that.’

  ‘Horseshit.’

  ‘If that’s the way you’re going to behave, perhaps you’d better leave now.’

  ‘I’m trying to.’ Anselm reached for the doorknob and opened the door. He said, ‘And now you can go wash your hands.’

  *

  He pounded on Duncan’s door with his fist and opened it himself. The doctor was sitting at his desk, papers in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other. Anselm closed the door behind him.

  ‘Are those my committal documents?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Don’t smile at me, Judas. The whole damn gang of you.’

  ‘Anselm, we’re doing our best for you.’

  ‘Going to put me in the loony bin, and my baby too.’

  ‘The child will have the best care imaginable.’

  ‘The best care imaginable is me.’

  ‘An unmarried mother cannot be said to be a person of high moral standards.’

  ‘Then I think you’d better marry me.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like me. Or, so you said.’

  ‘There isn’t any choice. You’re the last one on the list. William was the one I wanted. And after that, Francis is at least a good man. But he doesn’t have any strength left. You’re the only one around who can protect me.’

  ‘I see. And why should I?’

  ‘What did he give you, Duncan?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Then it won’t make any difference if you tell me. What was the bribe?’

  ‘They promised me I could go to Africa. Have my own hospital. A crew of novices working under me – everything. All my dreams.’

  ‘That’s a lot more than it’s worth, unless my story’s true. And if it is, then there isn’t any price high enough, is there? Do you think they’ll keep their word?’

  ‘Now that I think about it, no.’

  ‘Of course not. They’ve strung you along for so many years now, they know they can do it for ever. All the part of you that could have been your life has become your fantasy world. And your real life has become theirs. It’s been going on for years, till you don’t have a life of your own any more. You do what they tell you.’

  Duncan dropped the pen and papers. ‘Go away,’ he said.

  ‘And they’re telling you: Get rid of Anselm. You know what that means. If you have to kill me, they won’t care. How much does being a doctor mean to you?’

  ‘It’s the way I came to God.’

  ‘And when did you stop believing?’

  ‘Right at the beginning,’ Duncan said. ‘During the long cold spell when all the old men stayed in their beds.’ He looked away and sighed. ‘That was before your time. I realized they’d be better in a nursing home, but I also saw how they were degenerating from day to day; how the decay of the body was becoming the decay of the mind. It was a natural progression. And the next stage was for both to come to a stop.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  ‘Because it broke me. I used to think I was too good to stay outside. I found out I wasn’t good enough to go back. I didn’t think it was worthwhile trying to save anybody from anything.’

  ‘Are you going to marry me?’

  Duncan’s gaze ranged over the shelves where his medical reference books stood, and the filing boxes that held all the case histories of the monastery for the past twelve years. He looked at his framed certificates hanging on the wall, at the small crucifix propped against the one-volume Webster’s dictionary; and at Anselm.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get ready to leave tonight. I’ll come to your door at eleven.’

  *

  They drove all night, Duncan behind the wheel. Anselm fell asleep and woke to hear the doctor talking to himself.

  ‘Silly’, Duncan muttered, ‘to worry about them being able to stop me getting to Africa. I see the light now. The case of my career. Lucky I’ve taken a lot of notes.’

  They were driving along a straight desert road at a speed of nearly ninety miles an hour.

  ‘Slow down,’ Anselm ordered. When Duncan didn’t seem to hear, he shouted, ‘Slow down, I said. ‘We’re going too fast.’

  The doctor eased his foot from the pedal. ‘I was thinking about something else,’ he said.

  ‘Think about the road.’

  Anselm went back to sleep and woke once more to find that they were driving very fast again. It kept happening all through the night. Towards morning he was exhausted and beginning to feel cramping pains. They came to a place in the road where he could see slopes of green meadows ahead and a stream beyond.

  ‘Stop the car,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got to get as far away as possible.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Now.’
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br />   Duncan pulled over to the side.

  They were in the middle of an empty landscape. It was just before daybreak; everything lay quiet in the grey light.

  Anselm got out. He nearly fell. The pains were growing worse. He staggered across the field towards the stream. He was frightened. He thought he might be dying or that the baby could have been hurt, or that he had started to bleed. And he remembered how Duncan had said that as a student he used to have a foetus in a bottle and had studied it.

  It would be better, he thought, to drown himself in the river straight away.

  ‘Come back,’ Duncan called after him, but Anselm struggled forward against the surging pain that threw him from side to side.

  He was coming to the bank of the stream just as Duncan caught up with him and grabbed him by the elbow. Anselm beat back with his free hand, screaming.

  ‘It’s all right, Anselm – I’m a doctor,’ Duncan shouted at him.

  ‘Let me go –’

  ‘Cut it out. Stop that, or I’ll give you an injection.’

  ‘Bastard!’ Anselm shrieked. He lacked and twisted. The doctor let go, dropped to the ground and took a tight grip on Anselm’s knees. Anselm fought. He dragged himself forward with the doctor hanging on. The dawn began to break around them. He tried with all his strength to gain the bank. He screamed for help until at last, impelled on the tide of his urgency, he reached the water’s edge.

  The sky opened. Brightness rained down on him. And he was carried along quickly, borne up and up and forward in the sweeping rush of the power he’d been searching for all his life: the wave that goes on for ever.

  Friends in the Country

  It took them an hour to leave the house. Jim kept asking Lisa where things were and why she hadn’t bought such and such; if she’d intended to buy that thing there, then she should have warned him beforehand. ‘Otherwise,’ he told her, ‘we duplicate everything and it’s a waste of money. Look, now we’ve got two flashlights.’

  She let the shopping bag drop down on the floor with a crash. ‘Right. That’s one for you and one for me,’ she said. ‘And then we won’t have to argue about it when we split up.’

  His face went set in an expression she recognized. He’d skipped two intermediate phases and jumped to the stage where, instead of being hurt, he started to enjoy the battle and would go for more provocation, hoping that they’d begin to get personal. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I hosie the blue one.’

  She laughed. She leaned against the wall, laughing, until he had to join in. He said, ‘We can keep the black one in the car, I guess. It might come in useful.’

  ‘You think we should phone them?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t know anything about this Elaine – she was Nancy’s friend – but he was pretty sure her cousin wouldn’t want to begin eating before eight on a Friday night, especially not if she lived out of town. ‘And they shouldn’t, anyway,’ he added. ‘Eight thirty would be the right time.’

  ‘But some people do. If you’re working nine to five, and if you–’

  ‘Then they ought to know better.’

  There were further delays as he wondered whether to take a bottle of wine, and then how good it had to be if he did. Lisa heard him rooting around in the kitchen as she stared closely into the bathroom mirror. She smeared a thin film of Vaseline on the tips of her eyelashes, put her glasses on, took them off and leaned forward. Her nose touched the glass. Jim began to yell for her to hurry up. Her grandfather used to do the same thing: she could remember him shouting up the stairs for her grandmother; and then if there was still no result, he’d go out and sit in the car and honk the horn. Jim hadn’t learned that extra step yet, but he might think of it at any minute. They’d been living together for only a few months. She was still a little worried that one day he might get into the car and drive off without her.

  They were out of the house, in the car, and halfway down the street when she remembered that she’d left the bathroom light on. She didn’t say anything about it. They moved on towards the intersection. Jim was feeling good, now that they’d started: the passable bottle of wine being shaken around in the back seat, the new flashlight in the glove compartment. He looked to the left and into the mirror.

  She tried not to breathe. She always hated the moment of decision – when you had to hurl your car and yourself out into the unending torrent of the beltway. Jim loved it. They dashed into the stream.

  The rush hour was already beginning, although the sky was still light. Pink clouds had begun to streak the fading blue of the air. When they got off the freeway and on to the turnpike, the street lamps had been switched on. They drove down a country road flanked by frame houses.

  ‘What did that map say?’ he asked.

  ‘Left by the church, right at the school playing field.’

  They were supposed to go through three small towns before they came to the driveway of the house but – backtracking from the map – they got lost somewhere around the second one and approached the place from behind. At any rate, that was what they thought.

  They sat in the car with the light on and pored over the map. Outside it didn’t seem to be much darker, because a fog had begun to mist over the landscape. He blamed her for misdirecting him, while she repeated that it wasn’t her fault: not if he’d worked it out so carefully beforehand; she couldn’t see all those itsy-bitsy names in the dark, and anyway she’d said for him to go exactly the way he’d instructed her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this should do it. Can you remember left – right – left?’

  ‘Sure,’ she answered. And so could he; that was just the kind of thing he’d told her back at the house.

  He started the car again and turned out the light. They both said, ‘Oh,’ and, ‘Look,’ at the same time. While they’d been going over the map, the fog had thickened to a soupy, grey-blue atmosphere that filled the sky and almost obscured the trees at the side of the road. Jim drove slowly. When the road branched, he said, ‘Which way?’

  ‘Left – right – left.’

  They passed three other cars, all coming from the opposite direction. As the third one went by them, he said, ‘At least it doesn’t lead to nowhere.’

  ‘Unless it’s to somewhere else.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just came to me.’

  ‘Wonderful. You should be working for the government. Which way now?’

  ‘To the right.’

  ‘And there’s a street sign up ahead. At last.’

  When they got near enough to the sign to make out what it said, they saw that it didn’t have any writing on it at all. It was white, with a red triangle painted on it, and inside the triangle was a large, black shape.

  ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘What’s it supposed to mean – black hole ahead?’

  ‘Look, there’s another one. The whole damn road’s full of them. What’s the black thing? Come on, you can see that.’

  Lisa opened her window. The signs were as closely spaced as trees or ornamental bushes planted along a street to enhance its beauty and give shade during the summer.

  She leaned her head out and looked at the black object inside the red triangle.

  ‘It’s like a kind of frog,’ she said, pulled her head back in and shut the window. She’d just realized that she hadn’t brought her glasses with her; not that it really mattered for a single dinner party, but she always liked to have them with her in case she had to change her eye make up under a bad light, or something like that.

  ‘I remember now,’ he told her. ‘It’s OK. I’ve just never seen it before. It’s one of those special signs for the country.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They signpost all the roads they’ve got to cross to get to their breeding grounds or spawning places, or something. People run over so many of them when it’s the season. They’re dying out.’

  ‘Frogs?’

  ‘No, not frogs. Toads.’

>   ‘I hope it isn’t their breeding season now. That’s all we need.’

  ‘Which way at the crossroads?’

  ‘Left.’

  In fifteen minutes they came to a white-painted wooden arrow set low in the ground. It said ‘Harper’ and led them on to a narrow track. The headlights threw up shadowy patterns of tree branches. Leaves brushed and slapped against the sides of the car.

  ‘This better be it,’ he said.

  ‘Otherwise we break open the wine and get plastered.’

  They lurched along the last curve of the drive and out into a wide, gravelled space, beyond which stood a building that looked like a medievalized Victorian castle. Lisa giggled. She said, ‘So this is where your friends live.’

  Jim reached into the back seat for the wine and said he hoped so, because otherwise it was going to be a long ride to anywhere else.

  *

  The door was opened by someone they couldn’t see. Jim stepped forward into darkness and tripped. Lisa rushed after him. There was a long creak and the heavy door groaned, then slammed behind them.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. She fell on top of him.

  ‘Look out,’ he said. ‘The wine.’ It took a while for them to untangle themselves. They rose to their feet like survivors of a shipwreck who suddenly find themselves in the shallows.

  They could see. They could see that the hallway they stood in was weakly lit by a few candles, burning high up on two separate stands that resembled iron hat racks; each one expanded into a trident formation at the top. The candles were spitted on the points.

  Lisa turned to Jim, and saw that a man was standing in back of him. She gave a squeak of surprise, nearly blundering against a second man, who was stationed behind her. Both men were tall, dressed in some kind of formal evening wear that included tails; the rest of the outfit looked as if it might have been found in an ancient theatrical wardrobe trunk. ‘Your coat, sir,’ the one next to Jim said. He held out his arms.