Listen To The Voice. Iain Crichton Smith

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      ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t anything like that at all. It’s just that … Oh, never mind …’

      Sheila was still talking to the staring teddy bear, quiet and self-possessed as she sat on the grass in front of their bench.

      In the old days the two of them had gone out together and they would lie down beside the river that flowed through the glen and she would think that Hugh’s silence was very restful. But they would talk too.

      What did they talk about in those early days that passed so quickly? Days passed like hours then, now hours seemed as long as days. She didn’t even know what he did with himself when she was out working, and even when she came home at night with her fragments of news he didn’t seem to be listening or, if he was, it was to some inner voice of his own, and not to her. She knew that she was jealous of that inner voice that tormented and obsessed him, that it was a part of him that she would never know, deep and dark and distant. What inner voice was there anyway beyond the fair, beyond the passing people and the music? She stared down at the grass which was green in places and parched in others. If Sheila hadn’t been there she might have walked away but she was there and she couldn’t leave her.

      Sitting beside each other on the green bench they stared dully down at the ground. Eventually she got up. ‘We might as well go back and see the rest of the fair,’ she said. ‘After all that’s what we came for.’ Hugh got to his feet resignedly and followed her as did Sheila, cradling the teddy bear in her arms.

      When they returned to the fair, she asked Sheila if she would like to go on the swings. She paid for her and watched her settle herself on one of them, she herself standing on the ground and watching her from below, while Hugh was silent at her side. Sheila sat on the swing turning round and round with the same unnaturally quiet self-possessed air. Sheila terrified her. She wondered if, while she was away at work, Sheila was learning to be like her father, distant, without feeling. Maybe Hugh was taking her away into his own secret unhuman world. She wanted to rush up to the swing and stop it and take Sheila into her arms and say to her, ‘This is the real world. This is all the world there is. Don’t you smell it? Don’t you hear the music? Enjoy it while you can. This is your childhood and it won’t come again.’

      She turned and glanced at Hugh, but he was staring ahead of him, hurt and wounded, as if into a private dream of his own.

      God, she thought, what is happening to us? Maybe I should leave him. Maybe I should take Sheila with me and leave him. Maybe I should take her into the centre of the fair and teach her to dance.

      The swing had come to a halt and gravely as ever Sheila stepped off and walked over to her parents still clutching her teddy bear. She stopped beside them, staring down at her brown shoes, shy and serious.

      Ruth took her by the hand and in silence they moved forward.

      ‘Would you like to go into the Haunted House?’ she asked Hugh but he didn’t answer. She didn’t want to go by herself, as she was superstitious and believed firmly in ghosts.

      What had that Hall of Mirrors meant? What had been the significance of it? She had looked so squat and earthbound there. Was that what she was really like who once had danced with such abandon and joy?

      She thought, I’d like to go to a dance just once. Just once to a dance so that I would let myself go. But Hugh didn’t like dancing. I should like to listen to music, she thought, the music of my early days when I had my freedom, before that silence descended. He has done more harm to me than I have done to him with his tall thin spiritual body and his brooding mind. If I had only known before my marriage … If only … But it was too late.

      She was still alive but dying. The flesh—surely that was superior to the spirit, the soul.

      There must be dancing in the world, joyousness and music.

      But Hugh walking beside her was not speaking. She knew that he was hurt and angry, she could tell by the pallor of his face, by his compressed lips. What had he learned at the fair? Had he had any ideas for a poem? She didn’t like his poems anyway, she didn’t pretend to understand them, she was not a poseur as some people were. There were lots of people who would say that they liked a poem even if they didn’t understand it, in order to be ‘with it’. She, on the other hand, was the sort of person who would speak out, who had definite opinions.

      She wasn’t enjoying the day one little bit, she knew that: everything was so hot and sticky. She wanted to be at the centre of things just once, she wanted to do something dramatic, something that she would remember in later years. She wanted to throw perfect darts, hit a perfect target…. No, on second thoughts, she didn’t even want to do that, she merely wished to laugh and enjoy herself and have a happy untidy day so that she could go home and plump herself on the sofa and say, ‘Gosh, how tired I am.’ But that wasn’t likely to happen.

      The three of them walked together but she seemed as far away from the other two as she could possibly be. And all the time Hugh remained wrapped in his silence as in a dark mysterious cloak.

      They came to a tent outside which there was a notice saying SEE THE FATTEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. She stopped and looked at the other two and said, ‘I want to see this. Even if you don’t,’ she added under her breath. She paid forty-five pence for the three of them and they entered the tent. Sitting on a chair—she thought it must be made of iron to sustain the weight—there was the fattest grossest woman she had ever seen in her whole life.

      The head was large and the cheeks were round and fat and there were big pouches under the treble chins. The breasts and the belly bulged out largely under a black shiny satiny dress. With her huge head resting on her vast shoulders the woman was like a mountain of flesh, and in close-up Ruth could see the beads of sweat on her moustached upper lip. The hands too were huge and red and fat and the fingers, with their cheap rings, as nakedly gross as sausages. Crowned with her grey hair and almost filling half the tent, the woman seemed to represent a challenge of flesh, almost as if one might wish to climb her. Ruth gazed at the immense tremendous freak with horror, as if she were seeing a magnification of some disease that was causing the flesh to run riot. Sunk deep in the head were small red-rimmed eyes, and in the vast lap rested the massive swollen hands. And yet out of this monstrous mountain, vulgar and sordid, there issued a tiny voice saying to Sheila:

      ‘Do you want to talk to me, little girl?’

      And Sheila looked up at her and burst out laughing.

      ‘You’re just like Mummy in the tent,’ she shouted. And she ran over and clutched her mother’s hand, laughing with a real childish laughter. Pale and tall, Hugh was watching the woman and Ruth thought of the vast body seated on a lavatory pan in some immense lavatory of a size greater than she had ever seen, and as she imagined her sitting there she also saw her spitting, belching, blowing her enormous nose. She was sickened by her, by her acres of flesh, by the smell that exuded from her.

      She imagined the fat woman dying in a monstrous bed, people bending over her as she breathed stertorously, beads of sweat on her moustache.

      And Sheila was still laughing and shouting, ‘She’s just like you, Mummy,’ and tall, with egg-shaped head, Hugh gazed down at her, ultimate flesh seated on its throne.

      Ruth felt as if she was going to be sick; the image in the mirror had come true in the stench of reality; the legs like tree trunks, the large red hands, the sausage-like fingers were there before her. She ran out of the tent, the bile in her mouth, and Hugh followed her with Sheila. In the clean air she turned to Sheila and said, ‘There’s the Big Wheel. Do you want to go on it? Your father can go with you СКАЧАТЬ