‘What is the matter?’
With heedless childish honesty, he says, ‘I have other books already. I have the recipe book, and George’ – that name again – ‘has been reading to me from this.’
She looks at it. Around the World in Eighty Days. It was her favourite, as a child. She would imagine herself as a female version of the hero, circumnavigating the globe. How simple and attainable that dream had seemed in childhood, before the restrictions and complications that came with adulthood, with war.
‘It’s wonderful – oh, it’s about …’
‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know what it’s about.’ He looks faintly hurt. But then, she thinks, he has hurt her, and in this moment it doesn’t seem to matter that he is a child and she a grown woman. And it is her own copy of the book. She recognises the jacket: powder blue with the title picked out in gold embossed letters. Inside the jacket her name is written, in the childish hand of a decade ago. Not a gift from the doctor at all, then, but an appropriation. An occupation. A city, a house and now, it seems, a childhood.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Of course you must finish that, first. It will help with your English.’
The words are cold and hard as pebbles in her mouth. She is not unaware of the contradiction: she has told him to steer clear of the Englishman, but continue the endeavour to learn his language. The alternative would be to admit that those years of lessons, all her work, has been in vain.
‘Thank you,’ he says. He takes the book of fairy tales from her and, with an unlearned, childish grace, says, ‘I’m sure I will enjoy these, too.’
She feels her anger ebb.
‘Perhaps you could teach me to play dominoes.’
George
She comes to tell him that she is leaving. He realises that he is disappointed – he has hardly had a chance to speak to her this time, other than the odd conversation about the bread. For a second then there had been that expression again, the one she had worn on the jetty, or when he had stooped to retrieve her book. As though – he is fairly certain of this – she rather wanted to spit at his feet like the little boy before the Aya Sofia.
The visit to her son has been good for her. Sensing something like a new lightness in her, he wants to keep her talking, to make her linger. Grasping for a subject, he says, ‘I wanted to ask you to explain what these rooms were used for, when you lived here. I suspected, for instance, that the ward was a women’s room.’
The stare that he is met with makes him feel all the impertinence of the question. For a moment he thinks that she is not going to deign to answer him.
‘Yes,’ she says, finally. ‘It was.’
‘I can see that it must seem very strange—’
‘And that room,’ she indicates the place where the boy lies, her tone unmistakably dangerous now, ‘was my father’s study. And through there is the room in which my grandmother smoked her cigarettes … that, with the fountain, is where I once deposited some goldfish that I had bought in secret at the bazaar; my father was angry with me. And behind us is the room in which my father died, and on the opposite side of the house is the room in which my brother and I were born. And this, here: this is where we first heard the drums of war, over supper, the last time were were all together as a family. Is that enough for you? Or must you have more still?’
He knows that he should not allow her to get away with this last challenge. Locals have been arrested for less. She seems to be waiting for him to act, almost curious to see what the repercussion will be.
‘You should not speak to me like that,’ he says. ‘I cannot allow it.’
‘I apologise.’ And yet there is no hint of remorse in her tone.
But he cannot make himself feel the outrage that he knows he should. Mainly because her own outrage, at seeing her house colonised like this, can only seem reasonable to him. And though it was all said in accusation, he now has a picture before him that he feels privileged to glimpse. Of this building as a living place: domestic joy and tragedy, all the mess and splendour of life.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I accept your apology.’ At this the mutinous look returns to her expression again. She is usually so careful, but at this moment he could imagine her as the saboteur Bill suspects her of being. He does not want her to say something regrettable, now, that will force him to act. So he says, ‘And I apologise too. I should not have asked you to speak of that time. I understand that it must have caused you pain.’
She closes her eyes. When she opens them again she looks directly at him and nods. ‘Thank you.’
A strange pause occurs, now. There is an unexpected frankness in it; he realises that this may be the first time they have looked at each other properly. Usually she keeps her eyes averted from his face, as though there is something objectionable in it: which he supposes, as the face of the enemy, there must be. This look seems to redress the balance. In it, they become equals.
He watches her go, from behind the shutters, where she will not be able to turn and see him; he feels a voyeur. She moves quickly, as though the lawn is a no-man’s land in which it is unsafe to linger.
She has come nearly every day. And he is glad of it. He enjoys her company in spite of the hostility. For so long he has had the company of men: men who talk and think in the same way as one another; who all come from
