The Memoirs of a Survivor Read online

  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 good looking. 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 word 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 weekend 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 corners of long passages to find another room or suite of rooms. Empty. That is, I did not see anyone, 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 minuscule 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 tome 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 centered 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 coo
k 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 I’ 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, recognizing 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?’

  There she sat, most of the day, lolling in a large chair that she pulled up for the purpose: a child, presenting herself as one. One could almost see the white socks on her plump, well-turned legs, the bow in her hair. But what one really did see was different. She wore jeans and a shirt she had ironed that morning whose top two buttons were undone. Her hair was now parted in the middle, and at a stroke she was turned into a young beauty: yes, already, there she was.

  And, as if in acknowledgement of this step forward into vulnerability, now her worst, or best, comments were for the boys who went past: this one’s way of walking which she knew represented an uncertainty about himself; that one’s flashy way of dressing; the other one’s bad skin, or unkempt hair. These unattractive grubs represented a force, an imperative which there was no way of evading, and like a girl on a too-high swing she was shrieking in thrilled terror.

  She was dreadful in.her accuracy. She depressed me - oh, for many reasons; my own past being one of them. Yet she did not suspect this, she really did believe - so the bright manner, her confident glances at me said - that she was, as usual, ‘paying her way’; and this time by her perspicacity. She simply could not let anyone pass without swallowing them, and regurgitating them covered in her slime: the clever child, the one who could not be deceived, who could not have anything put over on her: who had been applauded for being like this, had been taught it.

  And yet I came into the room once and saw her talking through the window with Janet White: she was earnest, warm, apparently sincere. If she did not like Janet White, she intended Janet White to like her. Infinite promises were made by both girls on the lines of joint forays into the markets, visits, a walk. And when Janet went off, smiling because of the warmth she had absorbed from Emily, Emily said: ‘She’s heard her parents talking about me, and now she’ll report back.’ True enough, of course.

  The point was that there wasn’t anybody who came near her, into her line of sight, who was not experienced by her as a threat. This was how her experience, whatever that had been, had ‘set’ her. I found I was trying to put myself in her place, tried to be her, to understand how it was that people
must pass and re-pass sharply outlined by her need to criticize - to defend; and found I was thinking that this was only what everyone did, what I did, but there was something in her which enlarged the tendency, had set it forth, exaggerated. For of course, when someone approaches us, we are all caution; we take that person’s measure; a thousand incredibly rapid measurements and assessments go on, putting him, her, in an exact place, to end in the silent judgement: yes, this one’s for me; no, we have nothing in common; no, he, she, is a threat … watch out! Danger! And so on. But it was not until Emily heightened it all for me that I realized what a prison we were all in, how impossible it was for any one of us to let a man or a woman or a child come near without the defensive inspection, the rapid, sharp, cold analysis. But the reaction was so fast, such a habit - probably the first ever taught us by our parents - that we did not realize how much we were in its grip.

  ‘Look how she walks,’ Emily would say, ‘look at that fat old woman.’ (The woman, of course, was about forty-five or fifty; she might even be thirty!) ‘When she was young, people said she had a sexy walk - “Oh what a sexy little wriggle you have there, ooh you sexy thing you!” ‘ And her parody was horrible because of its accuracy: the woman, the wife of a former stockbroker who had become a junk-dealer, and who lived on the floor above, was given to a hundred little winsome tricks of mouth and eyes and hips. This is what Emily saw of her: it was what everybody must see first of her; and on these tricks she was likely to be judged, by most people. It was impossible not to hear Emily without feeling one’s whole being, one’s sense of oneself, lowered, drained. It was an assault on one’s vitality: listening to her was to acknowledge the limits we all five inside.