The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 17

  He said austerely, ‘Not now. It was too perfect.’

  When she got back to the farm she told Meriel, ‘We just sat and had wine together. All very civilized.’ She went to bed early with a hot water bottle, but in spite of this she had a bad cold.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Jan returned to the restaurant he found that everyone knew about his week-end with Robin. Kerren and two friends had called at the restaurant with a consignment of black market food. Jacob had accepted the food and in return he had shared his grievances. ‘Always he wants to get away with this woman, so I must slave here alone . . .’ Jan was furious with Jacob for accepting the food without consulting him.

  ‘How can I consult you when you are not here?’

  Jacob had expressed himself very coarsely and Jan had been reminded that Jacob came from a plebeian background. He had been on the point of reminding Jacob himself of this when the cook had intervened, intent on some crisis of his own. The partnership survived, albeit somewhat weakened.

  Kerren was concerned about Jan and Robin.

  ‘You mustn’t make too much of this,’ she told Jan. ‘Robin is not the intense kind. If things go wrong, it will be your fault for asking too much.’

  But, in fact, all that Jan asked was that Robin should be there. He was lost away from his own country where he had moved in a society whose structure was very precisely defined. He doubted whether he would ever find his way in the dark confusion of English life. He did not understand the people; they seemed to have no sense of purpose and a quite incomprehensible sense of humour, being amused by things which he regarded as extremely serious and taking offence over trifles such as the use of the word ‘virgin’ in mixed society. He found it almost impossible to judge whether the individuals he encountered were honest and he could not place them in their particular strata of society. Robin was the great exception. Her place in society seemed as assured as the first star in the firmament; she was a light in the forest, she made him believe in the possibility of survival. He did not see her as the prisoner of upper middle class accomplishment, although it was this factor more than anything else which gave her the appearance of stability which he so much admired. To him, she personified that unselfconscious assurance which was a particularly English attribute, maddening in its other manifestations, but enchanting in her. She belonged to a country which had been allowed the inestimable blessing of a long, slow childhood, a country which had come to maturity without being violated or abused. There had been time to chisel that appraising patrician beauty, time to temper and refine the cool elegance of the body. She never made an ugly movement, she never looked socially insecure or ill at ease. After all that had been stripped bare in the last few years, after so much had crumpled and decayed, she emerged unflawed as an Easter lily.

  He could never tire of looking at her. When he had taken her to his room it had been with the intention of becoming her lover, but he had realized how fantastic that was when he saw her, still as an alabaster statue caught in the rose-red glow of evening. She was an immortal. Also, she made him feel awkward and gauche. He had decided then and there that he preferred her to remain unattainable. It had been a difficult decision to convey to her, and he had been vastly relieved when she had announced that she must go.

  ‘You won’t tell her about the bacon and eggs, will you?’ Kerren asked.

  He shuddered. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Because I haven’t told her. I think we should keep quiet about

  it.’

  She had not told Cath. But she had reason to suspect that Cath had found out; her manner had become very disapproving since the trip to Wales. Kerren had arranged to go home for two weeks at the end of July, and Cath came to the station to see her off. When Kerren was seated in the train, Cath produced a letter which she handed to Kerren with an air of heavy responsibility. She made a speech about it.

  ‘You’re going away to your own country and your own people.’ Kerren felt as though she were a Zulu. ‘You’ll get a fresh slant on things. So this seemed the best time for me to say something to you, something that has to be said. You’ll be able to think it over calmly. It’s all written in this letter.’

  Kerren looked angrily at the letter with its firm, rounded script. A lecture on the black market, no doubt! Her conscience had been troubling her enough as it was, without Cath adding her modicum of disapproval. As the train moved out of the station she took the letter from the envelope. Her attention was caught by one sentence. ‘So now you know why I have so often said that he wasn’t the right person for you.’ She read on for a moment, ‘I know that my attitude has made you angry, and I expect you are angry now, but in time you will have reason . . .’ What was Cath talking about? She turned the page and began at the beginning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It WAS hot in Donegall Place, she had been lucky so far with the weather. The clock outside the City Hall said half-past twelve. Dorothy would not be here yet, one always had to allow an extra ten minutes when meeting Dorothy. Kerren turned into a side street. She would let Dorothy arrive first on this occasion. There was a pillar box on the opposite pavement and she crossed the street to post a letter to Cath.

  ‘It is wonderful to be home again,’ she had written. ‘Belfast is a much more relaxed city than London.’ She had made no mention of Adam in the letter. It had taken her a long time to decide that this was the best way of letting Cath know that she considered her accusation too contemptible for comment. It had taken her even longer to decide not to mention it to Adam.

  She strolled along the street in search of a shoe shop. In one particular, Cath had been right. A period in her own country had been good for her; it had enabled her to see things more clearly. Ireland was wonderfully refreshing. So irrational, so unconcerned with great issues, so gloriously irrelevant. She had obtained a length of Donegal tweed from a shop in Armagh. The man who owned the shop went to prison periodically and his son ran the shop in his absence; everyone took the situation for granted. The Irish did not respect the law nor did they consider order a virtue. The countryside was as unkempt as ever, free of the restriction of neat hedges, the fields not disciplined by the plough. She must try to be a little more pagan. For a start, she must get rid of the protestant conscience that made her feel guilty about buying on the black market, that still fussed over that wretched consignment of bacon; she must get rid of the few remaining doubts about Adam’s conduct and its importance to her. God, she said to herself as she turned in at a shoe shop door, cure me of morality!

  The man in the shop said that for the sake of her smile and those darling bright eyes he would have the shoes ready for her after lunch. A note in the window read ‘Shoes mended while you wait’. But the blarney sweetened life. Oh, life needed that! The world had supped full with horror, let it rest. Further down the street she had passed an old cinema which was now used as a lecture hall; a board outside announced that a lecture on the concentration camps was being given that evening in aid of a fund for helping displaced persons. Why should this country feel any guilty need to involve itself in all that? It was the future that mattered now.

  She walked slowly back towards the City Hall. Dorothy was there now, pacing up and down like a caged leopard: it always came as a great shock to her when anyone kept her waiting. Over lunch, Dorothy tried to persuade Kerren that she should return to Belfast and resume her study at the university and Kerren tried to persuade Dorothy to take a few days’ holiday and come to Donegal with her. Neither convinced the other. Dorothy was probably right, Kerren thought, when they had parted company; the obvious thing to do was to return to the university. But too much water had flowed under the bridge for that; she did not want to study any more, she wanted to live. It was hotter than ever; if the weather held, she would go to Donegal on her own and stay for a few days with her aunt who was wildly eccentric and told fantastic stories about her exploits during the Troubles. The last war had been of no more interest to her than a distant th
understorm. She collected her shoes and walked back towards Donegall Place.

  Perhaps she could take her bicycle with her, stay a night with her aunt, then make her way to Killybegs and on to Malinmore. She stopped outside the cinema looking at a poster, the faded paper stripping from the board; she could just make out the name of Jean Harlow. Hold your man had been one of the first films she had seen, her mother had said that it was unsuitable and she had stayed away from school one afternoon to see it. She could remember edging backwards into the cinema; she could remember the darkness before the usherette flashed her torch, the strong sweet smell of disinfectant, the interval music fading out, the extraordinary sense of excitement at the wickedness about to be revealed as the A certificate flashed on the screen. How sad that this cinema which had once offered such delights should have been allowed to lose its glitter until it became dingy and forbidding as a revivalist meeting place. A gloomy man in a cloth cap was hunched in the box office, looking as though he never expected to sell a ticket. As she turned away, her eye caught the last line on the notice board standing on the pavement: the speaker, it announced, was Connolly Hilliard. A breeze flicked her skirt, worried the torn strip advertising the Jean Harlow film, and passed on to ruffle the awning outside a cafe. The heat settled again on her shoulders. Con! Somewhere in the main road a tram came to a grinding halt, its bell ringing; the sounds were unreal as though they came breaking in upon a dream. She went through the dust-grimed swing door and bought a ticket for the lecture.

  ‘You have a right to escape,’ Con had said. ‘If you don’t like your century, you can live outside it.’ She had not believed this; but, oh, she had wanted it to be true for him! She remembered him telling them about his pre-war life when he had been with a research unit at college. He had been down the Amazon and he had been on an Arctic expedition; he was a climber and he hoped to go to Nepal one day. The men in his outfit had thought that he was mad. One of them had said that he would just go on until he pushed himself right over the edge of the world. That was the way she liked to think of him, a man who, quietly and with nonchalant good humour, had extricated himself from the bonds of twentieth-century civilization. And now he was lecturing on the concentration camps!

  It couldn’t be true, surely it must be another person with the same name? And yet, the last that they had heard of him had been that he had deserted his unit. It had seemed so unlike Con, who was not irresponsible although he was uncommitted; they had puzzled over it from time to time, wondering whether he had been sent on a special mission. Then Kerren had stopped wondering because the picture of Con walking into the distance was the way she liked to think of him, a man with a road to travel that was his alone. She had not wanted to hear of him again. Above all, she did not want the memory to be cheapened, she did not want to hear him recounting the conventional escape story. He had not been that kind of a hero.

  When she went to the cinema in the evening, she felt that she was about to lose her most precious illusion. Con, who was Irish- American, represented some conception of freedom which was peculiarly Irish and which was dear to her. She had told Robin that he was brother to the wild goose and she had been glad when he eluded Robin. Now she sat with clenched hands praying fervently that it would not be too embarrassing, that this most solitary of men would not have been made over in the fashionable image of the charmingly inarticulate American hero, that the strong-boned face would not have been moulded into the predictable lines of the movie idol, the cold, far-seeing eyes softened by the droll humour that was so much a part of that great American invention, the good mixer. She felt physically sick as she stared at the empty platform and she wondered if she would be able to stay for the lecture. The woman beside her had the same qualms.

  ‘I’ll tell you now, my dear,’ she said to her friend. ‘If it’s too horrible I shall go out. I’ll meet you at Sherry’s milk bar.’

  The friend said, ‘We ought to know about these things.’

  ‘Sure and don’t I know that! But I get so emotional I can’t control meself. There was a dead cow in May Street the other day, and I said to the policeman on point duty, if someone doesn’t do something about that cow . . .’

  Her remarks were interrupted by the arrival of the platform party. There was a spry little man with a wry face dominated by a severely broken nose, a thin man with a beard who looked like the young Bernard Shaw, and a tall man with close-cropped grey hair and a gaunt, grey face. At first, Kerren did not recognize the tall man.

  The man with the broken nose introduced the speaker. He was ill at ease as to how this should be done; one could sense the holes in his speech where he made a detour to avoid his usual jokes. The bearded man gazed sternly at the audience; under his bushy brows his eyes went from row to row counting heads. The result could not have given him much cause for comfort; there were not more than twenty people present. The tall man stood erect, the tips of his fingers touching but not resting on the table; looking at his stiff figure one had the feeling that there were only two postures for him, like a tin soldier he was either up or down. He did not look at the audience, but at some distant point beyond the end of the hall and the busy whirl of Donegall Place, beyond the coast of Lame and the Irish Sea. He had always been searching for something, Kerren thought. El Dorado, Nirvana, Shangri-La, call it what you will. Perhaps for all such travellers there is the danger that the road will run the other way. Certainly as he gazed steadily over the heads of the audience he had the look of a man who has found his own hell.

  The little man sat down, sweat glistening on his forehead, and the bearded man gave him a sardonic glance which conveyed the message that he would have made a better job of the introduction, not being given to jokes in the normal way. A woman behind Kerren clapped, then thought better of it and scrabbled in her handbag to cover her embarrassment. Con began to speak in a dry, staccato voice without variation of tone or inflection.

  ‘Immediately he came to power in 1933 Hitler issued his Protective Custody Decree which aimed at undermining resistance to his regime. By 1939 six major concentration camps had been established with a population of some 20,000. Then came the war. Under the Night and Fog Decree, as it is now known, prominent citizens of occupied countries were spirited away. Nine new camps were established between 1940 and 1942. It is estimated that some 238,000 prisoners passed through Buchenwald alone and of these 56,500 were murdered. At Auschwitz, which was an extermination camp, the official Soviet Commission has estimated that the number of victims was 4,000,000 of which approximately 1,000,000 were children. This, in terms of statistics, is the story of the concentration camps. We all like statistics; they give us a feeling that the problem with which they deal has somehow been contained. It isn’t so, of course.’ The woman beside Kerren gave a little sigh, as though reassured by this last statement. ‘Numbers mean nothing, they merely overwhelm us. It is more difficult to be shocked by four million dead than by the death of one man killed at a street crossing.’ Or one dead cow in May Street, Kerren thought. Con lowered his gaze. For a moment it seemed to Kerren that he looked straight at her; nothing registered in his face, but he paused as though he had lost the thread of his speech. A woman cleared her throat, a nervous, apologetic sound, and a man at the end of a row swivelled round in his seat to stretch cramped legs in the aisle. Con looked up again and said, speaking with more deliberate emphasis than hitherto,:

  ‘I have personal knowledge of this.’

  This was so unlike Con, for whom personal revelations were abhorrent, that the statement came to Kerren with all the force of a declaration; it was as though he was letting her see that he was not the man she had known. He went on speaking, the sentences as short and incisive as before, but this time there was a certain freshness about his speech as though for a few moments his audience, or one member of it at least, had aroused some response in him. His fingers, Kerren noticed, now gripped the edge of the table tightly.

  ‘I was dropped over Germany in 1944. I was caught almost i
mmediately. As I was not in uniform I was treated as a spy and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. My experiences are unimportant, but if they will help you to understand I will tell you anything that you want to know.’

  Again he seemed to look in her direction and for one brief moment there was a faint echo of the old, mocking Con. Then he went on, ‘The people of whom I want to talk, however, are those who survived in that they were not dead in the medical sense when the camps were liberated.’ He proceeded in a flat, unemotional voice to give horrifying details of some of the experiments carried out by the Nazi doctors. The woman next to Kerren clutched the strap of her handbag and looked towards the exit door, measuring the distance that separated her from the neon comfort of Sherry’s milk bar. It was obvious that only the fear of appearing callous kept her in her seat. This was too clinical for her and for most of the audience; Con could not bring his experience down to the level where they could understand it, in spite of himself some vestige of the old arrogant pride remained. Or so Kerren thought at that moment.

  When at last he stopped for questions, he had been speaking for only thirty minutes, but he was beginning to lose some of his lucidity. His breath rasped and his face was ashen. He had reached his limit. There would be no more mountain summits for him, keeping a foothold on the lower slopes would exercise all his courage from now on. The bearded man whispered to him to sit down, but he refused. A woman got to her feet. She was attractive in a sluttish way with rosy cheeks and very white teeth which splayed out of her mouth so that she seemed perpetually on the verge of laughter. As she spoke she leant forward and favoured Con with an insidious smile as though she were about to whisper a particularly reprehensible anecdote in his ear.