A World of Other People (13 page)

And as he lowers his head, mesmerised by it all, something is happening to him. He is clammy. In the bitter cold of the church he is clammy. His palms are sweaty and his legs have turned to jelly. Something comes. The body knows. Something comes. Beware, it says. I must ready myself, the body says. This is why you are sweating and your chest is tight. He is now resting his head in his sweaty palms and his legs have begun to tremble. And his hands too would be shaking if they didn’t have something to hold on to.

Then silence. And the church breaks into applause. Long and loud applause that he couldn’t join if he wanted to, for he is almost hunched, rocking back and forth in his place. As the applause fades a respectful quiet falls upon the place. People around him begin to stand, and just as it seems that the whole business is concluded a voice rises somewhere behind him. It is a question. And Jim lifts his head, looks around, but can’t see where the question is coming from. He turns to the front again and glimpses a pained expression on Eliot’s face — clearly he did not expect questions. But the gentleman continues, and he wants to know just what it was that Mr Eliot drew upon for his images of the war — the flames, the dove, the dust. For, the gentleman continues, they are such strong images. And so even though it is unexpected it is a question that carries with it appreciation. And Jim, aware of the effort of keeping his head up and the trembling of his legs and body and the thumping of his heart in check, watches as Eliot nods. And, like everybody else, he waits for the response. There is a short pause, and when Eliot speaks it is with the clipped, precise manner of the lecturer.

‘These images,’ he says deliberately, as if he is not speaking but composing aloud, ‘the dust settling in the early hours of the morning after a raid on the living and the dead, or a single bomber in flames, come from fire-watching on the rooftop of Faber and Faber. And, of course, it is impossible not to be moved by these sights. We are all human. But it is the task of the poet to remain perfectly still in such circumstances.’

He stops, and there is another question. But Jim doesn’t hear it. He barely heard the end of the previous answer. He is here and he is not here. The church, the paintings on the walls, the woman beside him, the man with the heavy European accent behind, all cease to exist. He is gone from them. He is flying. He has fled his shaking body. He is out there. In the sky. In the cabin of ‘F’ for Freddie. Back there again where these words have flung him.

Stay calm, a voice is telling him, above the drone of the engine. The engine that is keeping them up there. The other is aflame. Stay calm, this voice, this uncanny fourth who joined them sometime during the flight, is saying. The marshmallow cloud is endless. The dead second pilot is slumped beside
him; the wireless operator and the navigator dead behind him. No instruments. Everything dead. A thousand-to-one nightmare. He is flying on instinct and faith and peering into the cloud that never ends, the windscreen smeared with the second pilot’s blood. And all the time the voice is telling him in quiet, reassuring tones to stay calm. Stay calm and soon this thousand-to-one nightmare will be over. All will be well. This is not the moment. You will know the moment of your death when it presents itself, and this is not it. Stay calm. But do not relax. Not yet. The clouds will part. Trust me, says the voice. And then, miraculously, they do and he bursts into the clear, moonlit night that was there beyond the clouds all along, and he knows exactly where he is. For there, directly below, illuminated by the brilliant full face of a chandelier moon, is the city. Clear and crisp. He crosses the river. Here I come, here I come. The university, the Senate building all lit up, the familiar landmarks of
his
London loom. Here I come. And it is thrilling too, this lost reel of memory. Everything so extraordinarily clear. A rooftop, the square, the moon. And as he nears the rooftop he is momentarily distracted by figures rushing towards its railings,
railings that glint in the moonlight, for he is low in the sky, so low he could reach out and scoop them all up. But he is only distracted for a moment. Why is that? He rocks back and forth on the pew. The wheels are lowered for landing. The flames around the engine are leaping into the night. Any minute now, any second, everything will go up. He sweeps over the rooftop and on over the city. The wheels are lowered for landing, but where? He rocks back and forth. The church, the world around him, has collapsed. There is no world here. Only this one he has entered. The wheels are lowered for landing, but where? And then he sees it. A park.
Not
a country field, but a city park. The playing fields of this park are spread below him. Dark with a deep green, sodden look. Then they rush up to meet him. And he is lifted from his seat. The noise is distant as they career along the open fields, then halt with a crash.

He is suddenly face down in that sodden earth. Rows of houses are out there. Footpaths and streets. The dove has landed, and it too is face down in the field. A playing field, not a country field. The wing has gone. The flames are rising. And the voice is now warning that it’s going to go. Any minute, it’s going
to go. And as he stumbles to his feet he looks for the gunners. The tail gunner, the front gunner. Nowhere. And in spite of the voice telling him that it’s all going to go, he rushes back (oblivious of his broken ankle) to the tail of the plane. But the tail gunner is a goner. One look, his head like that, and Jim can tell he is gone. And it is then, in the noise and the heat, and he feels that he could explode any minute, that he staggers to the front of the plane and stops, staring at the front gunner’s cabin window. The lost reel of memory — the park, the playing fields in which he crashed are all new … but that familiar feeling that this is where the world turns black returns. For this is where it always ends. This is where his memory always stops. The world turns black and everything stops with it, and whatever is on the other side of that blackness remains a mystery. The missing page he could never find.

But tonight it doesn’t. Tonight the world does not turn black. Suddenly, his memory is lit up and he bursts upon that world that lies on the other side of darkness, which has been there all along. And there he is. Smith. Hammering at the perspex. Screaming to get out. And Jim knows there is an axe inside the
plane. And that with the axe he could smash the door of the cabin open and set Smith free and the screams would stop. And at the same time the voice is yelling in his ears, saying it’s going to go. Any minute. All of it. It’s going up. But even as he imagines going back into the plane, the voice, no longer calm and reassuring, becomes frantic. It’s going to go. It’s going up. All of it. Get out. Get out. For God’s sake get away! And his feet, his treacherous feet, are taking him backwards. Away from the flaming plane. Away from the screams and the waving arms of Smith. Away from the noise and the heat. Then everything explodes and the world turns black.

When he opens his eyes his coat is unbuttoned, his hat is gone. His hands and face and neck, in the cold, wintry church, are running with sweat. And people near him are staring. It is then that he realises he must have cried out and that those nearest heard, for only those nearest are turned judgementally towards him. His eyes are blank. The reel of recovered memory has run out. But no sooner has it run its course than it starts up again. And again. At the front of the church Eliot closes the slim volume of poetry and puts it back in his briefcase. So slim a volume, Jim notes, so few
words. But these words, spoken in the driest of dry voices, were waiting for him all along.

It is then that Eliot, gaunt, lean, pale, begins to make his way from the church, amid further applause. Slightly stooped, the air of an elder statesman, he nods to the crowd, a hint of a smile. And then he stops; for a moment he stops because he is staring directly at Jim. And those eyes are coming from deep inside the mask, peeping out from behind the face that he wears to greet the faces that he meets, and Jim stares directly back at him. And in that moment they are equals. They are one and the same, for they each, Jim immediately recognises, inhabit a world of other people. For you and me the world is other. Isn’t it? And being one and the same Jim can speak his mind. Or, rather, convey his thoughts and all their attendant, messy emotions without need of speech. That was my plane. That was my kite. We died that night, but you saw only an idea. A useful idea. A way of saying things that you hadn’t known how to say until we burst from the clouds and showed you. We weren’t real, were we? None of it is real, is it? Ash, old men, houses with the life bombed out of them. None of it. And will the applause, the applause you
now nod in recognition of, will the applause sting one day? Will it sting because you know, and I know, that when you should have been moved to care, you were taking notes instead? Remaining perfectly still, as a poet must? We were useful for a time, were we not? That was
my
plane. That was
my
kite. We died that night, but at least we were alive enough to die in that flaming moment. Were you? Were you ever? Will I ever be again? They are dead now. They are gone. They have crossed over. And here
we
are, you and I, one and the same. In a world of other people. Neither alive nor dead, but walking a dead patrol through that no-man’s-land in between.

The exchange takes a moment, and Eliot moves on, the applause slowly fading as he approaches the door of the church and disappears into the street, wrapped in his coat and hat. And he is no sooner gone than Jim summons all the strength he can from his jelly legs, rises slowly and unsteadily and stumbles out into the night. Drunk, they’ll think he’s drunk, stumbling about and yelling in a church like a drunk and beyond caring. Hatless, his coat flapping in the wind, he shambles onto the street and now longs for the oblivion of the world turning black. For this is how
it always went. Everything exploded. And then the world turned black. That was how it always worked. For the world did turn black that night. And it stayed black until he woke one morning in a hospital to learn that he had crash-landed in a country field and that all his crew were gone. That he’d been out of ‘radio contact’ for weeks. That nobody had expected him to pull through. But here he was, ‘back on the air’. Lucky Jim. And all the while, somewhere in a sealed-off section of his memory, Smith was screaming to get out. But his screams went unheard. Too far away to reach his ears until tonight, until those few words parted the clouds. For the poem contained that terrible truth and had been waiting for him all along, bursting with its secret. And so he wanders hatless into the snow, the screams that his mind had chosen to forget echoing in his ears, coming up from the well of memory, from the depths where they had been consigned to non-existence all this time.

And it’s just as well she wasn’t there. Just as well she was spared the whole business. And so much for that voice, that voice saying I come from the world of other people and I … He pauses at an intersection and wonders which way to turn, then realises it
doesn’t matter. Nobody can take him back into that world now. He has lost it. Like childhood, he cannot return. Not now. Never again. The sky, from which invisible snow falls on the street and on the city, is black. Dark, so dark he can touch the darkness. He is almost walking blind, parting it as he goes. She’ll be sleeping, or still in the pub, playing musical chairs. And laughing out loud, letting the world know with that laugh that it takes a lot more than a bomb to stop her. And he envies the laughing eyes of the girl in the ARP coat as he crosses into a wide road, the name of which he can’t see — no cars, no people, no sound except for the distant bell of an ambulance or fire truck.

In the church, a woman, a regular who helps out when she can, is walking between the pews, cleaning up and looking for forgotten items. She stops at a pew in the middle of the church, bends down, and picks up an air-force hat. And she knows it belongs to a pilot from the wings on the front. It’s a fine hat, and this is not the sort of weather to be wandering around hatless. Whoever dropped this will soon be back for it. You can rely on that. And she walks over to a
cloakroom that houses lost property and places it on a shelf with an extraordinary collection of spectacles, gloves, keys and umbrellas, confident that it won’t be there long.

What has she done? She’s walking home through St James’s Park, the sky light enough for it to be morning, but only just. She suspects it won’t get much lighter for the rest of the day. The snow will continue to fall. It’s got that sort of look about it. In the end, after she and her companion gave up on the rooftop, they took refuge in somebody’s office on the top floor, sitting and drinking whisky in relative warmth. And she’s sure it’s the whisky keeping her going now, for she will return to her flat just long enough to rest and have breakfast then go back for a full day’s work if she can keep her eyes open that long.

Fatigued as she is, she becomes aware of something out there in the sky. Faint at first, then louder. And from the moment she hears it she catches her breath. She can’t see it, but it’s there, she can hear it. That familiar droning of engines in the sky. Here I come. Here I come. And she wonders what on earth it’s doing there in this weather. Then a bomber drops from
the clouds, stark against the grey sky, and continues across the city and beyond. And she follows it until it becomes a dot in the distance, willing it home — willing it on with every ounce of energy left in her tired body. What has she done? What did she succumb to?
There
, that’s life, suspended up there between earth and sky. Homing. Homing, like a … what? Yes, that’s it … like a dove. What fabulous nonsense did she give in to? She doesn’t hold anybody’s fate in her hands and never has. There are no invisible hands guiding events and never have been. And the only duty she feels compelled to observe at this very moment is her duty to live. And there, that disappearing speck in the sky, that’s life.

BOOM, she mentally cries as she strides across the park to her flat. BOOM, then again and again. The dot fades then disappears altogether, but it doesn’t matter. And she doesn’t know if her heart’s pounding from striding across the park in the snow or from going BOOM. And she doesn’t know if there’s anything to be retrieved from the mess she’s made but she must find out. She won’t stop until she does. Fool! You little idiot! She leaves the park, her face set, telling herself that she has been a fool once, but
never again. They’ll never catch her again, those thin-lipped armies of the self-righteous! And just then the thin lips of Mr Eliot and his thin-lipped poem of cold, draughty churches and medieval gloom come back to her. Never again. That was life out there — ordinary, impure, silly human life that chases the runaway horse of love because it just can’t help it. There is time. There is time, she tells herself. Surely there must be.