Elizabeth and Richard are on holiday in Morocco, travelling from its fertile coast to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. During the expedition's adventures and mishaps, Elizabeth surveys her eighteen-year marriage and its accumulations of grievance, frustration and betrayal. Nina Bawden allows us to see the ambivalences and deceptions on both sides as this touching and often subversively comic novel moves towards a shocking catastrophe and a wryly surprising coda.
Release date:
May 5, 2011
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
159
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Somewhere between Meknes and Fez, the bus came to a sudden halt. The driver shouted something and got out, slamming the door.
No one else moved.
The Arabs, shrouded in their burnouses, sat with their eyes closed. Now there was no longer a breeze through the windows,
the bus became very hot. There was total silence except for a fly that circled, buzzing; it settled on my knee and rubbed
its back legs busily. I brushed it off; the small movement made Richard shift irritably beside me. Neither of us is fat, but
we were cramped on the hard, narrow seat and our clothes were too tight. My brassiere strap cut into my shoulders; Richard’s
belly bulged over his belt. The Arabs, in their voluminous garments, seemed much more comfortable. Perched together in pairs,
they looked like white, roosting birds.
The image remains. But it is all. For most of the time other people are under-developed negatives, snapshots taken at different
times and in different poses. You know other people only as witnesses to your own situation: when they reflect your own fears
and desires, obstruct or extend them.
When does this happen? At what point, for example, did the Hobbs become real, develop in my mind like photographs coming to
life in an acid tank? There may have been a moment on the boat to Tangier, perhaps, when they sat at our table in the tilting
saloon and Mrs Hobbs talked about her bungalow in Kent – my bungalow, she said, my roses, while her husband smiled, content, apparently, to be a man without possessions – but if there was, I cannot remember
it. On the road to Fez, several days after that brief sea voyage, I may have thought of them once or twice but I had no sense
of their continuing existence. They had been fellow travellers, that was all, no more to me than the roosting Arabs in that
bus.
Richard says I ‘encouraged’ them – he has his mother’s lace-curtain mind. Nonni disapproves of the people who drop into the
house at all hours and sit in our kitchen, drinking gin: both she and Richard believe guests should be carefully selected,
come at stated hours and always wipe their feet. No – Richard is nicer than that. He simply believes it is unfair to be over-amiable
to people you are not interested in. And excessive amiability is one of my faults, he tells me. It is a kind of laziness.
Perhaps it is a fault, though he is wrong about the laziness. If I was pleasant to the Hobbs on the boat, I was deferring
to that third person reportage that runs constantly in my mind. Elizabeth is such a nice person, she puts herself out for the most boring people.
This inner voice is sometimes a moral arbiter of action, sometimes a high-toned excuser, but more often a way of giving myself
some kind of shape. Of helping me to see myself.
I find this so difficult. When I look in the mirror – not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting,
but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why – I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my own situation: I am Elizabeth
Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle-aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don’t really believe
it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when
I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.
What of the time between? What have I done – become – during twenty long battling years? Is there no answer, no key?
Sitting in the hot, motionless bus, I am suddenly weighed down, heavy, inert and shapeless. An old woman, dull and futureless.
And yet last night, when we were sitting in the restaurant in Meknes, the small lights twinkling (Richard said something about
the electricity supply), the looking-glass on the near wall restoring some element of magic, of memory, we were young, tall,
handsome. We talked and laughed and got drunk, showing off to each other like strangers.
This mood, that mood. Last night I was a young woman, well under thirty. Now I am an old one, feet aching, cheeks hanging
in pouches, sodden with meaningless sadness.
‘I told you we should have hired a car and not relied on the bus,’ Richard said.
He told me, of course, nothing of the sort. We had planned all along to hire a car in Fez and drive over the Atlas, down to
the desert. I looked at him. There was a line of black skin on his lips; he was pulling at it cautiously with his thumb and
forefinger, wrinkling his nose. The skin of his nose is coarse, pitted with open pores. Sometimes he buys astringent lotion
to dab on, as he buys things to rub into his scalp. Half empty bottles crowd our medicine chest, each a small epitaph: when
I tidy them, they make me tender towards him.
I put out my hand. He took it and, after a second, handed it back to me like a borrowed handkerchief. He made a sound, a dry
croak in his throat, and, because I was looking at him, straightened up, tightening his stomach muscles, lifting his chin.
Once, he had a casual, Byronic look, dressed in velvet jackets and wore his dark hair long. Now his features have solidified
and he looks like a Roman emperor.
Perhaps he will die, I thought. I closed my eyes and planned. I can move the boys into the spare room, they will be crowded
but they will have to manage. Letting their rooms would bring in perhaps eight pounds a week. Moving out of my bedroom into
the study, a little more. I will be able to get rid of Richard’s desk which has always been an eyesore, a nasty, gimcrack
affair he had as a boy, and put my bed against that wall. Nonni’s room, which is on the ground floor and has its own bathroom
would be a good one to let, but she cannot be moved upstairs because her stroke has left her paralysed on one side. She will
be a major problem as I will have to get a full-time job and she needs looking after. But it would be unthinkable – that is,
I must refuse to think of it – to send my crippled mother-in-law into a home, push her out of my life like some old, unwanted
animal.…
Elizabeth is a heroine; she has done marvels; who would have thought she had such courage, such tenacity…?
I laughed out loud, and Richard stared.
‘I was thinking about the Hobbs.’
He looked unconvinced: Mr and Mrs Hobbs had not amused him. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s absurd, we’ve been here nearly half an hour,’ he said, incredulous at this mean trick fate
had played upon him and a little angry because he couldn’t, rationally, blame me for it.
As if at some pre-arranged signal, the passengers rose and began to file out of the bus. They moved slowly, very patient and
polite. A tall man in a sky-blue robe waited while Richard grovelled, his bottom sticking out into the aisle, for the precious
canvas bag that held our travel documents and a half empty bottle of fizzy water. He looked at me gravely over my husband’s
bent back; his steady stare seemed somehow disapproving and I smiled at him because I prefer to be approved of. His thin,
burned hand emerged from the folds of blue cloth and held out a small, lidless tin filled with yellow cough lozenges. I took
one, thanked him, and put it quickly in my mouth before Richard could stand up. He is nervous of the food and drink abroad: in Meknes, he was angry because I brushed my teeth with water from the bathroom tap.
Outside the bus, everyone had settled on a patch of sparse grass at the side of the road. A stream ran beside it and a man
was dabbling his child’s feet in the water. She was a tiny girl with henna plastered on her hair and gold ear-rings; she laughed
and drew up her feet. The rest of the passengers crouched patiently on their haunches; the women, who had removed their yashmaks
in the bus, had now replaced them so that nothing could be seen of them but their eyes. Feeling the heat prickle on my bare
arms and on the reddening skin of my neck, I realized that their clothes were more sensible than mine. The stream tinkled
and made me thirsty; I went to stand beside it, watching the little girl, and wondering if I should bathe my feet.
‘Bilharzia,’ Richard said, though I had made no move to take my sandals off. He gave this warning with relish, liking to feel
there were dangers lurking in this foreign land.
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘No?’ He grinned. The sun made him look paler than usual, and younger.
‘Well…’
We laughed together. Our feelings for each other rattle round like cards in a spinning tombola. Love, rage, dislike, tenderness
– we draw out a card, not always appropriate, for each occasion.
The bus driver came to the side of the road and filled a battered tin with water. Richard spoke to him in French as he crouched
by the stream wearing an old Army tunic over baggy, white trousers. He was so thin that he looked, in those oddly assorted
garments, like a jointed scarecrow. I wondered if I should try to lose a little weight on this trip, just a cup of coffee
for breakfast, a light lunch. Richard was talking rapidly, waving his hands in a Continental way. The driver laughed hilariously
at something he said and walked back to the bus, a trail of water dripping from a hole in the bottom of the tin.
‘There’s a leak in the radiator,’ Richard said. ‘He says they’ll get it going soon, though God knows – that bus must have
been on the road since the year dot! I don’t suppose there have been any spare parts brought into this country since the French
left. I only hope our car doesn’t break down in the desert.’
He looked cheerful at this adventurous prospect. We walked slowly out of the shade of the bus, up the long, straight road
towards a clump of stunted trees. On either side the flat land stretched away, blue with heat and distance.
Richard said, ‘It’s surprisingly fertile here. Of course, it’ll be different the other side of the Atlas.’ He turned over
a sod of dry earth with his toe, frowning like a farmer.
‘Hotter, too.’
I longed for the desert. My life was crowded, cluttered up. I longed for broad, flat skies, wide horizons, emptiness.…
‘Mr Hobbs has always wanted to see the desert,’ his wife informed us. ‘When he was a little boy, he wanted to join the Foreign
Legion.’
She told us so much in so short a time – about her three grown-up sons, the colour of the curtains in her lounge and how they
had had such trouble matching the blue in the Indian carpet, what kind of television set she had and which were her favourite
programmes, what she thought of foreign food and how she made apple charlotte, baking wholemeal breadcrumbs overnight in the
Aga cooker with which she had recently replaced her electric stove – pouring it all out in a haemorrhage of information, so
it is hard to remember exactly when she told us this.
I think it must have been that afternoon when they picked us up in their chauffeur-driven car, sweeping by in a cloud of dusty
air and stopping a few yards further on with a squeal of brakes. ‘This must be Samaria, after all,’ Richard said, as we removed
our suitcases from the stranded bus.
Certainly, I have a clear visual memory of her, bouncing on the seat as the car lurched over a rut in the road and smiling
indulgently – all men are little boys at heart. Her face was unlined and apple-shiny as a child’s and her eyes naive and clear, a washed, bright blue.
Her husband’s eyes were cool, sea-grey, and perpetually wrinkled at the corners, either from nervousness, or at some private
joke. Perhaps inner amusement was an habitual defence against his wife’s garrulousness. He was narrowly built, an elegantly
elongated man with a long, caved-in face and long, narrow hands that had pale cuticle moons on the finger-nails. He reminded
me, for no reason I could pin down, of a stone crusader on a tomb.
He had reddened slightly at his wife’s disclosure: perhaps his boyhood’s dream was still precious to him. He said, with an
apologetic, preliminary cough, ‘I thought Morocco would make a change from Bournemouth.’
Mrs Hobbs sighed. ‘We always go to the same hotel. They know us there and we always have the same room, facing the sea, you
know, but nice and high up, so it’s quiet at night.’
I said, ‘It’ll be very hot in the desert. Won’t that bother you?’
She was so helplessly fat. Her breasts were pushed up by her corset into a single, jutting prominence; her thighs fell apart
as she sat because her muscles could no longer hold them in any other position. And like many fat women, she had little, fluttery
hands which she lifted and let fall in small, meaningless gestures, like birds blown on a current of air. My question was
not impertinent: she had told us, on the boat, that she had a heart condition and had to be careful.
‘Oh, I shall manage,’ she said, and raised her left hand as if to fan herself, but the effort was too much and it dropped
into her lap, resting there, small and white like a seagull on the billows. ‘I want Mr Hobbs to have a good holiday,’ she
said. ‘Once he retires, we shall have to draw our horns in.’
Retires from what? I may have wondered, but if I did it was only idly, too idly to ask. I was grateful to the Hobbs for this rescue operation but I could not summon up any real interest in them, nor see any reason why I should try. They were
a dull pair, kind and genuine enough, but totally predictable. Or so, it seemed. I know that if anyone had told me, that afternoon,
how we were to become so terribly involved with them, it would have seemed incredible to me. (There are days when it still
seems incredible, even now.)
Whatever Mr Hobbs’s career, it had obviously always been subordinated to his wife’s nesting instincts. She addressed him as
‘Daddy’. ‘Didn’t we, Daddy?’ Or, ‘Isn’t that right, Daddy?’ Thus appealed to, he murmured something appropriate and smiled,
though it seemed with some discomfort. Then, suddenly, she said, ‘Oh, I am sorry, dear,’ and clapped her little hand across her mouth. She looked at me with her innocent, child’s eyes—her age and
weight seemed ludicrous when you looked at her eyes: it . . .
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