She sat on a leather seat in the waiting room as if she were waiting for a train. She could imagine herself going to London or any other part of Britain. Better still would be an airport lounge: there one could imagine oneself going to Europe or Africa or Asia. She had only been on a plane once and it had been just like being on a bus, not at all exciting, just looking out of a window and seeing banks of white clouds below one.
It was funny how she fell asleep so often nowadays if she sat down for a long time. Perhaps that was a good thing: on the other hand it might mean that there was something wrong with her. It might be psychological also. She ought really to try and keep awake.
She read some of her book and then went out and walked about the station. She noticed a number of telephone kiosks some of which had been smashed and had gang slogans written on them in chalk. The dangling useless phones somehow looked symbolic. The unharmed booths were occupied by people talking excitedly into black mouthpieces.
Everywhere she went it was the same, people talking to each other, laughing, gesturing, sometimes shouting at each other, as once she had seen a gipsy and his wife quarrelling. It had ended with the man hitting his wife across the face so that blood poured out of her lip. A bony dog barked at their heels and in the background smoke rose slowly out of their camp.
You never saw so many gipsies now. Her mother would never give them anything when they came whining to the door, nor would she listen to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to hand out what she called heathenish magazines. Her mother would get rid of such people briskly and effectively. She herself would listen to them in an embarrassed manner while they, that is the religious people, would talk about Darwin and God, referring closely like automata to verses in the Bible. Invariably she bought one of their magazines which her mother would immediately throw in the bin.
As she sat in the waiting-room, watching through the window trains coming and going, pictures of all kinds passed before her eyes. She remembered a holiday she had once had in a desolate glen in the Highlands. She could visualise clearly the mountains veined with stone, the deer that grazed by fences, the foaming rivers, the abandoned cottages, the blaze of yellow gorse, the horses nuzzling each other on the sands. She had liked that place. It seemed suited to her personality. But one day she had seen, sitting in front of a caravan, a large fat lady dressed in red trousers and painting the glen, and the illusion of contentment had been destroyed.
At five past seven she started to walk to the theatre. Now that she had an aim she was happy but at the same time she thought that she would have difficulty in filling the hours of the following day. She had already exhausted quite a lot of the sights she had intended to see, unless perhaps she went on a bus tour. She would have to check on that in the morning, or perhaps they had a brochure in the hotel.
Her feet were already getting sore as she had done a lot of walking but she didn’t want to spend money on a taxi. She didn’t like taxis. They reminded her of hearses and she was always sure she was being cheated. They would always take one the long way round and she was sure the drivers recognised strangers to the town instinctively.
At twenty past seven she reached the theatre which was a very small one, seating perhaps sixty people or so, on cushions round the central area which formed the stage. There were strong lights blazing down which made the place hot: she imagined interrogations taking place there in a concentrated hot dazzle. She had bought a programme which gave very little information about the actual play: all that she gathered was that it seemed very avant garde. She didn’t know what exactly to expect, perhaps a dramatisation of the rise of Hitler, with reference to the SS and the Jews and the concentration camps. She didn’t often go to the theatre, preferring the cinema, but there was nothing else on that evening. She also didn’t like avant-garde stuff.
She noticed that the audience was predominantly youthful, girls wearing slacks and Indian headbands, most of them probably students. The theatre was a small and intimate one and she could hear some of them talking in a brittle knowledgeable way before the play started. She sat in the front row on her cushion wishing that it was a chair and feeling rather tired because there was no support for her back.
It was certainly not a conventional play. It began with a sinister music on drums which went on and on, exerting a hypnotic dark rhythm. In a mirror high above she could see the drummers with their long hair reflected. Then a young man came into the central space and stood there motionless for a long time while the music played.
Suddenly he became a dying German soldier with glazed eyes, greatcoat, rifle and dull boots. Children came in and danced around him, among them a girl who appeared to be a spastic. The beating drums seemed to draw one into the dying festering mind of the German soldier by their rhythmic compulsion, as he was slowly resurrected, pulling himself to his feet against the wind of death and the beat of the drums. He made an appointment with the spastic girl who at night went into a wood to meet him, the dead German soldier. The lights
