“But are they going anywhere?” she said. “I mean is there a conductor or anything to start them and stop them?”
“Have a drink,” Marius said.
“What would you like?” I said.
“Water please. But do you suppose they have any tickets?”
She was a medium sized ghost with medium hair and everything else about her quite exceptional and then, standing close to me, she became flesh and blood — a tough straight flesh like a tulip and blood which gave her the nervousness of an animal. She had a wide mouth and soft brown eyes and when she spoke she spoke with the whole of her body as if there were some violence within her to make her dance. It was as if she would respond to a touch or even a presence. She took the glass of water from me, and when it was in her hand I half expected it to bubble over and spill.
All the people in the pub were watching her. I supposed people always watched her. The barman was wiping the bar and lifting up the glasses to get at the underneath of them, and as he leaned forwards with the cloth he was watching her and Marius out of the tops of his eyes. Everyone was silent. And then suddenly she laughed, and some of the water did spill, and this time I did expect the glass to fly out of her hand in some uncontrollable spasm of amusement.
“But how did you get up here?” she said.
“I’ve been hit on the head by a brick,” Marius said.
“Oh dear,” she said.
“A small one,” Marius said.
“Your poor head,” she said.
The old man solemnly raised his glass to her. She responded to him, quickly, as if he had touched her. They drank.
“I knew a man once who was hit by a brick,” she said. “But I think it was on his elbow. So I supposed that’s different.”
“Yes, that’s different,” Marius said.
“It’s dreadful,” she said. “I never can tell a story.”
“That story was all right,” the old man said. “I’m telling you. Never you mind it being a bad story.”
“I think it’s because my mouth gets so full of dribble,” she said.
I could not think of anything to say. I had never met such people. I began to be afraid that without such people I had never met anyone at all.
“I’ve been trying to buy a musical box,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s for a wedding present. Do you think a musical box is a good wedding present?”
“Yes,” I said. Again I could think of nothing else.
She turned to Marius. “There,” she said, “he thinks it’s a good wedding present.” Marius was drinking. Her voice and her body moved back to me. “Thank you,” she said. The corners of her eyes were wrinkled like flowers. “Were you hit on the head by a brick?”
“No,” I said.
Outside in the street there were some children playing. I could hear the noise of them each time the door opened to let someone in. They were playing soldiers, playing war behind the dustbins. They were banging old tins and shouting, and then one of them put his head round the door and pointed a stick at Marius and made a sound like a gun going off. He was a small boy with an old army cap on his head, and he stood there grinning. The barman shouted at him and he swung his stick backwards and forwards like a machine-gun and then he ran off back into the street. He had surprised us.
“Them kids,” the barman said. “You’d have thought we’d had enough of it without them kids going round playing soldiers.”
“Yes,” Marius said.
“And what’s going to happen to them?” the old man said. “What’s going to happen to the kids in the streets?”
“I suppose they’ll continue,” Marius said, “until it kills them.”
“It’s a dirty game,” the old man said. “It’s a dirty rotten game to be out in the streets chucking bricks around and chucking bombs around when you get too big for bricks.”
“How are you going to stop it?” Marius said.
“I don’t know. I’ll be out of it before the next one comes. I’ve had enough of it. It’s you who’ll have to do the stopping.”
“I can’t stop anything,” Marius said.
The girl was standing close to him as if she wanted to impart something to him without telling him, without looking at him even; trying to impart something serious just by the way she leant and the way she became impersonal so suddenly when she was serious.
“What can you do?” I said.
Marius laughed. “What can I do?” he said to the girl.
“Can’t you make them frightened?” she said.
“I can’t frighten them,” he said.
“No, but I mean, can’t you make them frightened for themselves?”
The old man put his glass down on the counter and stretched towards her. “Come here,” he said: “Come here a minute.” She was nervous. His fingers stretched out to her like the branches of trees. “But they are frightened,” he said: “of themselves;—they are frightened.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I don’t think they are. Not really frightened.”
“Come here,” he said.
“Not frightened for themselves. I said for, not of.” She spoke in a queer flat voice, different from before. Her serious voice, I supposed — her impersonal voice; the voice that she used perhaps when she was making people frightened for themselves. I did not know then what she meant, but I felt it. And I think the old man did too, for he let go of her suddenly and swayed back again and said, “frightened of hell, perhaps,” and she said,
“Yes!”—a grave and unearthly monosyllable like a clap.
There was a moment’s silence, a silence throughout the room, and then there was a scraping of a chair and a laugh and Marius was taking it up and turning and ordering more beer even as the girl looked at me with her queer soft alarming eyes and her mouth half smiling, and then her face became twisted and her eyes went down and she left the smile somewhere in the spaces between us, and it was lost, and I was frightened, as if I myself were a ghost.
We were there for another quarter of an hour, but I do not remember much about it. Marius was joking with the old man most of the time, and the girl joined in with one or two of the others, although I do not think she had her heart in it quite like Marius had. I was thinking about what she had said, and I was frightened, frightened for myself. I wanted to get away on my own to think about it, for I found that I could not speak to them any more. I had wanted to go on with them, to ask them to dinner perhaps, but now I could not approach them. I felt separated from them by enormous distances, the distances by which they had separated me from my past life, the distances in which her smile had got lost. For I felt separate from everybody. I had felt earlier that my old contacts were worthless, and now I knew that as yet I was not capable of having contact with them. As I looked round the pub I became aware of it for the first time as a place — a place of loneliness. The bottles and glasses on the shelves seemed to be symbols of infinity, the infinity of distance between others and myself. The bottles touched, but there was no contact. Only the cold chink of glass, the surface scratch, the brittle breakable aloneness of objects. Even the light was reflected: there was no contact. I could not speak to Marius and the girl because I was hard like glass and was afraid of breaking.
Before they left the old man handed something to Marius, a charm, I think — some seated figure carved in wood. Marius tried to refuse it, but the old man pressed it on him, pressed it into his hand, honouring him. So Marius received it. They had their contact. Then the girl held out her hand to the man and said goodbye. As he took it he looked as if he were crying. Then she shook hands with me, and she was nervous, not looking at me. Marius followed her to the door and he waved at me and then went out. I went to the door to watch them. As they turned the corner the small boy with the army hat jumped out from behind a wall and waved his gun at Marius. They paused, and I think the girl looked back at me, but I could not be sure. Perhaps she was only looking at the boy. It did not matter much anyway because the distance was so great.