Novelties & Souvenirs Page 3

  Rain coursed down the windshield as they rose up and shot down a rise with heartsickening speed, blind. She fumbled for the wiper button, peering into the silver nothing. Hail fell clattering, roaring; the wipers stuck. She braked, panicking, and they seemed to rise up smoothly off the road, accelerating, gliding toward the cloudy head of Ascutney—she could see it fast approaching. The brake, pressed down, had no effect in air—that was the thought she had—and a piece of mountain, a tall black rectangle of it, detached itself and flew out of the nothing to meet them, changing size swiftly.

  You can come too, John Knowe said, and it was already not his voice. You can come now.

  NO, and she twisted the wheel violently away from the black rectangle that would have engulfed them

  and when she was helped from the car, rain washing the sticky blood from her hands and face, in the deep fearful calm of shock she saw not this car half crushed beneath, against the black stalled truck, but an old convertible, with autumn leaves caught beneath its wipers, turning carefully, lost yet found, into a weed-spined drive between stone gateposts; and heard, not the shriek of sirens and the shouts He’s dead, he’s dead, but the faint yet audible click of a falling leaf joining the others on the littered ground.

  THE REASON FOR THE VISIT

  SHE WASN’T AS TALL as I had supposed she would be; I’d always imagined that she would tower over me. Certainly she has always been described as “tall,” but just as certainly those people who are largest in our imagination can never be quite as large in the flesh (though I suppose that’s not strictly speaking what she was in). The big, sculptured features and long hands, the seeming distance of all her parts from one another—hands from wrists, brow from mouth, chin from breastbone—were all as they would have been in one as greatly tall as I had always imagined her to be, but the whole was on a smaller scale, as though I saw her at a great distance, coming toward me.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  I had the presence of mind to make a social gesture immediately, as I’m sure she would have done had I thus suddenly come to visit her, to forestall, for a moment, the inevitable discomfiture in store for us. I offered her a cup of tea, which she accepted; but when she followed me into the kitchen, already marveling at what she saw of my place (a perfectly ordinary New York apartment) I found I had only instant tea.

  “It’s better iced,” I said, trying to make little of the weird tall jar of brown powder. I remember my father vainly trying to introduce iced tea to England in the hot summer of 1944. That is, I don’t remember it; I was only two, and lived on Washington Square. I remember him telling the story. Be nice with a bit of rum in it, they said.

  “Iced?” she said, her macaw’s eyes wide. I explained about iced tea. I couldn’t tell if the expression of fascinated surprise she wore was assumed, to fend off genuine shock, or was genuine shock. I saw her surprise when the little light went on in the refrigerator, and when I squeezed lemon juice into the tea from a plastic lemon. The plastic lemon she found enormously witty. For a moment I felt a profound and inappropriate pity for her. I made mayonnaise sandwiches with Pepperidge Farm bread. “What an extraordinary number of things you take out of jars and bottles,” she said.

  We had our tea. I expected that she—being the visitor—would be shy and at a loss, and that it would be up to me to explain, to explicate mysteries, to compare and contrast. It had seemed to be up to me to do that for other visitors; to Dr. Johnson, for instance, I’d explained about elevators (he wouldn’t understand that the little room had moved upward; he continued to suppose that the scenery outside had been quickly shifted while we were enclosed within). And to Max Beerbohm I’d insisted that I would be considered well-dressed—even something of a dandy—wearing my old, yellowing tropical suit and a vulgarian’s Hawaiian shirt. But those visitors were figments, really. This visit was hers, and she asked the questions, and I was shy.

  She was always interested in the situations of others, in how they got on with their lives. I answered carefully, trying to gloss over what in my life would be utterly incomprehensible to her. She—so conscious that she lacked a university education—was astonished that I’d gone to a decent school and not got past reading Ovid, of which I remembered next to nothing, and that even so I was unusual for having at least attempted it. I didn’t try to tell her that with all its holes my education was considered, in my circle, so extensive as to be positively esoteric. I didn’t want to look like the fool I felt before her.

  Taking cues from my answers, she began to invent a life for me, as everyone says she often did for people she’d just met. Only for me she had to invent a time, too, and a place. The plastic lemon and the instant tea—“not nasty at all, really,” she said, but didn’t drink much of it—gave her the idea that society was geared now to providing a simple and Bohemian life for contemplatives, removing the necessity for servants and complex social relations so that other impulses could flower. She even suggested that the light in the refrigerator was there so that an absentminded poet would realize he was looking into the larder and not the wardrobe as he stood fuddled with thought before it. It was a brilliant flight. I didn’t try to describe to her how sadly wrong she was. I only enjoyed the vivid future she imagined from her standpoint in the past, a future that was of a piece with that past and that standpoint, and which would never happen; had never happened.

  “Like your essay about flying in a plane over London.”

  “I see. How is that?”

  “Where it’s revealed at the end that you never took the flight, only imagined it.”

  “Oh. Was I quite right about the sensation of it?”

  “Not quite, no.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  A silence fell, and she rolled a cigarette. The difference between imaginary visitors and real ones is that with imaginary visitors you can immediately start in on whatever it was that occasioned the visit, without preamble or confusion; the elevator occasioned Johnson, and when it had been explained to him, and he had rejected the explanation in favor of his own, then the visit was over. But she and I must face each other now in an uncomfortable silence, with a whole world around us to be explained, or ignored; we must choose. When she lay back, the wicker of the chaise longue groaned faintly. She thrust one lovely hand deep into the pocket of her old gray cardigan. Her bun was beginning to come down. I was interested that the sheen of silk stockings, so hypnotic a detail in photographs, is the same as the sheen of silk stockings in actuality; and then too utterly different. She began, speculatively, dreamily, almost to herself, to wonder about the reason for the visit.

  Her theory—a very natural one—was that she had fled from her historical moment into her own Immortality, her own urn-burial. From some approaching madness, the febrile disintegration that always attended finishing one of her big books, she had escaped into the calm changelessness which that very book would in part earn for her. The country—this one; the time—this present; none of that mattered. “Not until the lamp is utterly shattered,” she said, “and all pages everywhere sealed up in mildew—but then one would only cease to be, wouldn’t one? Till then, simply changelessness. How deliciously restful. It’s what one wanted, isn’t it, what one had prepared for and sought after—what one had invented out of all the terrible longings and dissatisfactions, never knowing that this exactly was what one was inventing—and yet having no other reason, all along, but this. How pleasant and odd that it should be so….”

  And yet she wasn’t restful. Her repose was the enormously active repose she shows in so many photographs, that quiet as of a momentarily still candle flame. I thought she was wrong. I knew she was wrong. Her luminous brave eyes looked over the spines of my books, but the ones she had every right to expect to find would not be there. This was the difficulty: I knew her, I knew her in some deeply intimate way; her books I knew much less well. I can’t remember if I ever got to the lighthouse; if I had, I suppose I’d remember. What I’d rea
d was the essays, and the little biographies, and Leonard’s memoirs; the letters and diaries and ephemera. I was a friend of hers, not a fan of hers. Her immortality—this visit to me, anyway—lay not in the perfect urns she had placed in the one great columbarium but in her old mortality.

  “Well, I really love your ‘Lives of the Obscure,’” I said. “I read them over and over.”

  “Yes? Such fun to do.”

  “I think in some ways they’re the best things you did.”

  “Not the novels?”

  “Well, I’m not really—familiar with everything you wrote, I’m afraid.”

  “I see.”

  I suppose I blushed. She continued to look politely interested, enormously gracious, but it was an instant mask now, slipped on without a skipped beat, for terrible disappointment.

  Oh, antique lost fine manners! No reason for me to feel like a graceless boor before her, to feel at a loss, measured by the height and breadth and depth of her calibrated sociability and found wanting. I know well enough that nothing is lost that isn’t replaced by something new of equal value, however different; I know that my life is brimful of satisfactions unimaginable to her. But nostalgia—this pain I felt—has no interest in all that; it only and always suffers from irremediable loss, especially loss of what one has never quite had. Yes! I began to see the reason for this visit.

  “The little seaside provincial library,” I said, “where you found those memoirs and biographies. Empty; a few people nodding over the Wesleyan Chronicle as through the window comes the cry of the man selling pilchards on the cobbled street. Dully ordinary. But don’t you see, that little library is gone now, and every other one like it. There is no such thing left alive in my world. Yet I see it; I feel it; I smell it. I touch the beeswaxed wood and hear pages turn. I am transported back to it as wholly in your brief, dismissive paragraphs as you were to the old parsonages and country lanes in those memoirs.

  “You see, things have been changing so fast. I know, I know: you felt them to be changing with dizzying speed. Believe me, the pace has picked up. Unimaginably. The whole physical world, the man-made part anyway, seems to alter utterly every few years. So that your life, your place in time and its sensations, the constellation of feelings caused in you by the world, are the farthest-off now that I can completely grasp. They are a hair’s breadth out of reach beyond my own; yet I seem to be able still to feel them wholly. But because the world changed so much more slowly in your growing-up, your sense of the past—your experience of sensations felt in the past—was longer than mine, your grasp reached farther. You could touch hands a hundred years away, not merely thirty or forty. And because, a hundred years before you, the wheel was turning so slowly, the physical facts of the world changing so imperceptibly—I mean a wood fire in 1820 made a vicarage parlor smell as the same room smelled in 1720, or 1620—those hands you touched touched hands that could touch hands that were held in the old, old changeless circle around the old, original fire.”

  She hadn’t interrupted this headlong rush; had seemed to grow remote. Her hands lay now in her lap, the long white hands. Rosamond Lehmann said that when Virginia held up her hands before the fire to warm them, they seemed almost transparent, as though you could see the fine bones through the skin. But there was no fire here.

  We said no more. In a little while Leonard, apprehensive that she might be overtiring herself, came to collect her.

  And yet when she was gone, her scent lingered a long time in the room, a scent chosen nearly at random in a shop in Jermyn Street; a scent chosen for its lovely name, not its odor, which she didn’t like to trouble the clerk to demonstrate for her on the inside of her wrist where the blue vein beat. Besides, she must reach before it closed a shop nearby, if she could remember the street and how exactly it intersected with this one, where pens were sold, and where she would be able to make her demands more specific—where, that is, she would have demands. Standing in Oxford Street, oddly exhilarated by the first breath of incipient autumn which cut through the London air like a new nib across coarse-grained paper, she thought suddenly to telegraph Leonard to say that after all she had decided to stay up in town and attend Lady Colefax’s party; she could imagine it, a lamplit conversation piece in a dark wood frame, that vast drawing room and the self-possessed identical young men in evening dress, hair and eyes black and smooth as their satin lapels. But—she is aware now of the throng around her, breaking around her as a stream breaks around a stone, with the same murmurous apologies—that would mean facing the telegraph office, and the blank accusatory form, she never could make herself clear in telegrams. No; she would return this same long evening to Rodmell as she had promised. It would still be light as she came up from the station; the roses that had hung in such heart-tugging profusion so late into the year over the wall of Monk’s House dropping the last of their innumerable petals along the way she would walk to the doorway where lamplight shone. And tomorrow Vanessa and the boys would come and they would read the Sunday papers in the garden while Leonard weeded thoughtfully, and there would be letters to write, and a new book materializing “in that hour between tea and dinner, when so many things seem not only possible, but already accomplished.” Victoria Station, then, the vast smoky space, and the bit of pasteboard, and the stale-smelling compartment perhaps empty.

  She turned, orienting herself. As she did so, she sensed Time as an enormous conical spiral. She sensed it tightening as it rose, tightening toward some furious stasis of immediacy. Time is compressible; it was quite simple really, she could compress it to a point. She could compress it all into the tiniest of compasses—into a day, into an evening—no, into an hour, even into the turning of a head: the single half-turn of a single great-eyed head.

  THE GREEN CHILD

  THIS STORY IS RECORDED by Ralph of Coggeshall and by William of Newburgh, both of whom say that it took place in their own time, about the middle of the twelfth century, in West Suffolk.

  At a place called the Wolf-pits, a woman of the village came upon two children at the entrance to one of the pits, a girl and a younger boy. The Wolf-pits, though everyone knew about them, had never been explored, as they were considered dangerous and unlucky, and no one knew how deep they were or where they led. The two children stood blinking in the sunlight, their pale eyes blank as though they had just opened them on this world. They were quite small for what seemed their age, and their skin was green, the pale, luminous green of the verges of a twilight sky in summer.

  The woman dropped the ball of wool she had been gathering, crossed herself, made other signs against the Evil Eye and the Good People; the children watched her, but made no response, as though they didn’t understand these gestures to be directed at them. The woman, feeling that despite their green color, the color of fairies, they might be just lost children after all, approached them, asking their names and where they came from. They drew back from her, the boy attempting to run into the pit’s mouth; the girl caught him, and held him back, and spoke words to him the woman couldn’t understand. The boy shook his head and shouted, as though not believing what the girl told him; she pulled him again roughly away from the pit’s entrance, and spoke sharply to him. The boy began to weep then, a storm of tears, and his sister—it seemed to the woman they must be brother and sister—held him tightly as though to smother his tears, all the while looking with her large pale eyes at the woman, for help, or from fear, or both.

  Pity overcame the woman’s wonder, and she came to them, telling them not to be afraid, asking if they were lost.

  “Yes,” the girl said, and her speech, though in form different from common human speech, was intelligible. “Yes. Lost.”

  The woman took them to her own house. The boy, still weeping, refused to enter it, but with her rough yet protective manner his sister drew him in. The darkness within seemed to calm them both, though the boy still whimpered. The woman offered them food, good bread, a bowl of milk, but they refused them with revulsion. The woman de
cided to get help and advice. Making gestures and speaking softly, she told them to stay, rest, she would be back soon; she put the food nearby in case they should want it, and hurried out to call her neighbors and the priest, wondering if when she returned the green children would not have disappeared, or her belongings, or the house itself.

  She brought back with her a weaver known to be a fairy doctor, who could cure the stroke, and his wife, and several others whom she met, though not the priest, who was asleep; and they all went to see the green children, the village dogs barking behind them.

  They were as she had left them, sitting on the bed, their arms around each other and their bare green feet hanging down. The fairy doctor lit a bit of blessed candle he had brought, but they didn’t start at it; they only looked with silent trepidation, like shy wild things, at the faces peering in the door and window at them. In the darkness of the house they seemed to glow faintly, like honey.

  “They won’t eat,” the woman said. “Give them beans,” the fairy doctor said. “Beans are the fairy food.”

  They were fairies to this extent, at least; when the woman gave them beans, they devoured them hungrily, though they still refused all other food.

  They would answer no questions about the place they had come from, or how they had come to the Wolf-pits; when asked if they could return to where they came from, they only wept, the boy loudly, the girl almost grudgingly, her face set and her fists clenched and the tears trembling on the lashes of her luminous eyes. But later, at twilight, when the people had all gone away, and the boy had fallen asleep exhausted by grief, the woman by kindly questions did learn their story, holding the girl’s cool green hand in hers.