And then one day, they had simply disappeared. Gone. The groundsmen had swept away the broken bottles and discarded rags. The compost was doused with chemicals and spread on the campus’s floral display. The Vice-Chancellor had never joined the bent backs round the zol and the bottle down there and was in his panelled office. The lines caging Heimrath’s mouth in silence did not release him to ask why students gazed at him. Minerva sat before us in her special way with matched pale narrow hands placed as if one were the reflection of the other, its fingertips raised against a mirror. Jepson’s old bristly sow’s ear sagged patiently towards the discourse of the seminar’s show-off.
From under the bushes and behind the grandstands they had gone, or someone had found a way to get rid of them overnight. But they are always with us. Just somewhere else.
THE DIAMOND MINE
I’ll call her Tilla, you may call her by another name. You might think you knew her. You might have been the one: him. It’s not by some simple colloquial habit we ‘call’ someone instead of naming: call them up.
It was during the war, your war, the Forties, that has sunk as far away into the century as the grandfathers’ Nineteen-Fourteen. He was blond, stocky in khaki, attractively short-sighted so that the eyes that were actually having difficulty with focus seemed to be concentrating attentively on her. The impression is emphasized by the lashes blond and curly as his hair. He is completely different from the men she knows in the life of films — the only men she knows apart from her father — and whom she expected to come along one day not too far off, Robert Taylor or even the foreigner, Charles Boyer. He is different because — at last — he is real; she is sixteen. He is no foreigner nor materialisation of projection from Hollywood. He’s the son of friends of a maternal grandmother, detailed to a military training camp in the province where the girl and her parents live. Some people even take in strangers from the camp for the respite of weekend leave; with a young daughter in the house this family would not go so far as to risk that but when the man of the family is beyond call-up age an easy way to fulfil patriotic duty is to offer hospitality to a man vouched for by connections. He’s almost to be thought of as an elective grandson of the old lady. In war these strangers, remember, are Our Boys.
When he comes on Friday nights and stays until Sunday his presence makes a nice change for the three, mother, father and young daughter who live a quiet life, not given to socialising. That presence is a pleasant element in the closeness between parents and daughter: he is old enough to be an adult along with them, and only eight years ahead of her, young enough to be her contemporary. The mother cooks a substantial lunch on the Sundays he’s there; you can imagine what the food must be like in a military camp. The father at least suggests a game of golf — welcome to borrow clubs, but it turns out the soldier doesn’t play. What’s his game, then? He likes to fish. But this hospitality is four hundred miles from the sea; the soldier laughs along in a guest’s concession of manly recognition that there must be a game. The daughter — for her, she could never tell anyone, his weekend presence is a pervasion that fills the house, displaces all its familiar odours of home, is fresh and pungent: he’s here. It’s the emanation of khaki washed with strong soap and fixed, as in perfume the essence of flowers is fixed by alcohol, by the pressure of a hot iron.
The parents are reluctant cinema-goers, so it is thoughtful of this visiting friend of the family that he invites the daughter of the house to choose a film she’d like to see on a Saturday night. She has no driving licence yet (seventeen the qualifying age in those days) and the father does not offer his car to the soldier. So the pair walk down the road from streetlight to streetlight, under the trees, all that autumn, to the small town’s centre where only the cinema and the pub in the hotel are awake. She is aware of window dummies in the closed shops her mother’s friends patronise, observing her as she walks past with a man. If she is invited to a party given by a schoolfriend, she must be home strictly by eleven, usually fetched by her father. But now she is with a responsible friend, a family connection, not among unknown youths on the loose; if the film is a nine o’clock showing the pair are not home before midnight, and the lights are already extinguished in the parents’ bedroom. It is then that, schoolgirlish, knowing nothing else to offer, she makes cocoa in the kitchen and it is then that he tells her about fishing. The kitchen is locked up for the night, the windows are closed and it is amazing how strong that presence of a man can be, that stiff-clean clothing warmed — not a scent, not a breath, but, as he moves his arms graphically in description of playing a catch, coming from the inner crease of his bare elbows where the sun on manoeuvres hasn’t got at the secret fold, coming from that centre of being, the pliant hollow that vibrates between collar-bones as he speaks, the breast-plate rosy down to where a few brownish-blond hairs disappear into the open neck of the khaki shirt — he will never turn dark, his skin retains the sun, glows. Him.
Tilla has never gone fishing. Her father doesn’t fish. Four hundred miles from the sea the boys at school kick and throw balls around — they know about, talk about, football and cricket. The father knows about, talks about, golf. Fishing. It opens the sea before her, the salt wind gets in the narrowed eyes conveying to her whole nights passed alone on the rocks. He walks from headland to headland on dawn-wet sand, the tide is out — sometimes in mid-sentence there’s a check, half-smile, half-breath, because he’s thinking of something this child couldn’t know, this is his incantation that shuts out the smart parade-ground march towards killing and blinds the sights the gun trains on sawdust-stuffed figures where he is being drilled to see the face of the enemy to whom he, himself, is the enemy, with guts (he pulls the intricately perfect innards out of the fish he’s caught, the fisherman’s simple skill) in place of sawdust. Sleeping parents are right; he will not touch her innocence of what this century claims, commands from him.
Walking home where she used to race her bicycle up and down under the same trees, the clothing on their arms, the khaki sleeve, the sweater her mother has handed her as a condition of permission to be out in the chill night air, brushes by proximity, not intention. The strap of her sandal slips and as she pauses to right it, hopping on one leg, he steadies her by the forearm and then they walk on hand in hand. He’s taking care of her. The next weekend they kiss in one of the tree-dark intervals between streetlights. Boys have kissed her; it happened only to her mouth; the next Saturday her arms went around him, his around her, her face approached, was pressed, breathed in and breathed against the hollow of neck where the pendulum of heartbeat can be felt, the living place above the breast-plate from which the incense of his presence had come. She was there.