"The Face" in A Bit Touched
Reproduced in full, here, is one of the shorter of the nine tales from Just a Bit Touched:
The Face
by Roy Holland
I happen to be rubbing my eyes and yawning by the telephone in my flat when it rings. I try to sound alert.
“Morning!”
“This is Rhoda.”
“Good God! At this hour! This is an occasion!”
“It is,” says my sister.
“I’m just on my way to the bathroom for my morning shave.”
“Late for work as usual? Shan’t keep you! Something has come up.”
“Important?”
“Very.”
“What?”
“Come and have a meal with Harry and me. Tell you tonight.”
“You’re inviting me to eat — with Harry? It must be important!”
“See you tonight, then. About seven.”
And she rings off. We aren’t a close family. Since Dad died about ten years ago, we haven’t seen much of each other. Really, not since Ma walked out on us twenty years before that, about the end of the war. She went off with a hook-nosed Welshman from Cardiff who worked in the same munitions factory while Dad was still in the Royal Airforce. We haven’t seen her since.
It pretty well finished him. He got himself invalided out of the Service and disappeared into a bottle. Unnatural, some people called her, walking out on her kids like that. Maybe she is? What does that make me and Rhoda? Nowadays, we only see each other once in a blue moon.
I am never quite compos mentis at seven o’clock in the morning. I wake up at six, but even when I’m vertical it usually takes me a whole pot of tea and a good hour before I’m properly awake, and in that state I’m prone to gather wool. Images float in and out of my mind. You know the kind, I’m sure. People are beset by them just before they fall into a doze or go properly asleep. But hypnagogic images come to me anywhere, any place. I’m nearly asleep most of the time. Daylight hauntings, you might say. I often feel as if I’ve never really woken up since I was born. Often wondered what it would be like to be properly awake. Especially in the mornings. Some people bound straight out of bed at early light, instantly awake, eager for a shower. Brr! Not me. I can scarcely look at a glass of cold water.
Shaving is an activity I no longer enjoy. When I was young it was different. In my youth, the whole experience was a pleasure. Not just afterwards, but while. Now, the clean smooth skin when the job is done is all I enjoy. Today, seeing my face in the mirror — bags like muscles under my eyes, tramlines in my forehead, dewlaps like a Labrador’s, half-covered in shaving soap — depresses me. It used to exhilarate me. And my eyes used to be so bright and clear. Now, they’re like dull pools, slightly muddy. I wish I was still young and full of life, even the sleepy kind of life I knew. With an ageing portrait in my attic. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Fat chance! Don’t even possess an attic.
Today, I look ill.
There is a haggard expression about the eyes that I seem to recognise of old, though it’s not mine. Usually, I look ravaged, yes! But healthily ravaged. My reflection brings back the face of a middle-aged woman I once saw on a bus a long time ago. I don’t know why her phantom has returned to me again and again over the years; but it has. It isn’t sexual attraction. Nothing like it! No. It’s disturbing! Even painful. Why, I don’t know! Especially as the time I first saw her was a beautiful Spring morning and I was young and full of a surplus joy.
I was on the way to the Drawing Office, the same bus I shall catch today. The route goes between Cannon Hill Park on one side of the road and Edgbaston County Cricket Ground on the other. I have spent many happy and joyful childhood hours in both places: on the boating lake, round the lovely gardens watching the shrubs flower through the seasons, playing under the big trees; or keeping up on all the county cricket teams when they came to get beaten by Warwickshire in the Summer. Oh yes, a route full of memories, it is!
On that particular morning, I remember, the bus was full. I was strap-hanging in the downstairs aisle, bending my knees to look at the early glories of the almond blossom going by in the park, and the yellow jasmine as yet without its leaves, and the purply-drooply racemes of the wisteria bunched and hanging on their sinuous shoots. I espied a sudden flash of scarlet from a shrub I didn’t know and as I dipped to glance back I found the haunted eyes of the woman watching me intently.
The colour of the wisteria echoed itself more darkly in the circles under her eyes. Her lined cheeks drooped, too. She was swarthy, without the colour of health on her skin. In fact, she looked ill. A bit like the way I look today. I s’pose that’s why her phantom has returned: my face triggered hers. I stared her briefly in the eyes, but when she showed neither acknowledgment nor rebuff, I turned away and began watching through the windows on the other side of the bus.
From time to time, as the bus stopped and started, and I moved to avoid another passenger in the aisle, or bent to look at something going by, I found her eyes still rivetted on me. She watched me very sadly, full of hurt, as if I represented the way life had used her. She was shabbily dressed in a smooth navy-blue coat, her greying hair hatless, and she clutched a kind of patchwork shopping-bag flat on her lap. On her marriage finger she wore a large signet with the design of a coiled snake on its upper surface. No wedding ring. She saw me scrutinizing it and she closed one hand over the other.
The bus pulled up at a request stop by the park and the odour of blossom — almond, cherry or what? — drifted through an open window. The man sitting by the woman suddenly got to his feet to make way for her. She manoeuvred herself past him and got off without a glance at me. I watched her patting herself into place on the pavement for a moment before the bus moved away.
That was all. I never saw her again. But her face has come back to me time and time again over the years, and every time, inexplicably, it disturbs me.
I wash off the shaving-soap and concentrate on getting ready for work and trying to dismiss her face from my mind. I am already five minutes behind schedule and old Tremlett comes down heavily on any of his Design Team who clock-in late. As I enter the office, little Billy Berrows — a brilliant designer — glances up and winks at me, then nods ever so slightly towards Tremlett standing grimly in his glass-cubicle. Billy is only just taking the plastic cover off his own drawing-board. In addition to being Senior Designer, he is a hunchback, a beekeeper, a humourist and a philosopher — an irresistible combination. We’ve had many very interesting and illuminating conversations since I joined the firm as an apprentice draughtsman, especially about bees, his special passion. I notice him watching me curiously throughout the morning. Eventually, he can’t resist calling me over.
“What’s wrong?” he whispers.
When we want to talk together, we pretend to pore over a design on his drawing board or mine, or pretend to check a calculation, just to keep Old Tremlett guessing.
“Nothing, really!”
“Something’s on your mind.”
“I’m haunted, that’s all! An old phantom.”
“I have the same problem. My wife’s been haunting me for years. Especially when I’m late for meals!”
“No, I mean it.”
“Me, too!”
“A woman’s face! It keeps coming back to me.”
“Bachelor’s doom! Sexual frustration!”
“Nothing of the sort! Listen! When I was eighteen or nineteen . . .”
And I tell him the way it first happens. As I finish, he asks:
“And you had never seen this woman before?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“What kind of answer is that?” asks Billy.
“It’s the only one I’ve got. Faces can deceive me. I’m not good at faces. Now, voices! That’s different. Never make a mistake. But faces —eek!”
“She didn’t speak to you?”
“Not a word!”
“As you say — it’s odd that she haunts you.” He pauses. “Better book yourself a session with a trick-cyclist!”
“I’m as sane as you are!”
“Not a good defence! Better go, after all . . .People are so much more neurotic than bees. Bees don’t get haunted. Recognize other bees by gesture. And odour. Infallible. How long’s it been?”
“Since it happened? Oh, about thirty years, I suppose.”
“Christ! That is a long time!” says Billy.
“I see Old Tremlett’s on the prowl. We’d better watch it!”
“Is he ever not?”
The rest of the day passes slowly and, although I have an interesting project on the board, the unease of the morning does not lessen. Usually, the disturbance is over in half an hour.
When I get to Rhoda and Harry’s place in the evening, I am still feeling jumpy. But after we have had a good meal and a chatter about this and that, I begin to feel better, even strong enough to ask them what they want to see me about.
“We’ve got some news for you,” says Harry.
“So why didn’t you give it me over the blower?” I ask my sister. “What’s the problem?”
“You’ll see later!” she says, mysteriously.
There’s a little pause and then Harry asks right out of the blue:
“When did you last see your mother?”
“What’s brought her up?” I ask in astonishment.
For a moment it seems to me as if he’s telepathic. But not Harry! Nobody less so!
“Ask Rhoda. Don’t ask me! She knows.”
“I’m asking you,” says Harry, rather truculently.
“Now, you listen to me — .”
But, before I start, I take in a big breath and Rhoda is there before I can continue:
“ — Hold on! Before you two start quarrelling again, just answer Harry’s question. He’s got a reason for asking.”
“Well, he’d better watch his tone, that’s all! . . .” I add sullenly: “She walked out on us when we were kids.”
“How old was I?” asks Rhoda.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Not properly.”
“Well, I was fourteen.”
“So I must have been eleven. Thought so!”
“What’s all this about, Rhoda? Surely you didn’t bring me here just to — ?”
“ — Your Aunt Nel was here to day,” puts in Harry, belligerently.
I restrain myself. Harry always has this effect on me. Although I am in no sense pugilistic, he always makes me want to punch him on the nose. Usually, within the first few minutes; and he’s bigger than me, too. Tonight, luckily, the meal and the lapse of time since we last met has made things a bit blander.
“Yes,” says Rhoda. “She brought something round for us.”
“Us?”
“You and me.”
“After all these years? Utter silence! What’s she up to?”
“Yes! Weird, isn’t it?” hoots Rhoda, much too loudly.
“What did she bring?”
“For one thing, she brought a message,” says Harry.
I look at him with dislike.
“Your Aunt Nel says your mother died at seven-fifteen this morning.”
Harry seems to get a perverse pleasure out of delivering Aunt Nel’s message, so I ignore him and turn to Rhoda. She looks ready to weep. To me, it’s a jolt, sort of, but I don’t feel much, really. Certainly, not sorrow. Nor compassion. Nor any of the feelings I’m supposed to feel.
“Some message! We could have lived without it,” I remark.
“Oh, Jeff!” says my sister, reproachfully, very close to tears.
“And, after all, she is your mother!” adds Harry, self-righteously.
The urge to punch him on the nose is stronger than ever.
“We’ve lived without a word of her for thirty years!” I say savagely.
“I know!” says Rhoda, tearfully. “But I thought we’d better tell you. And particularly after Aunt Nel brought something Ma said she specially wanted you to have.”
“Me? Me! I can’t believe — !”
“ — I’ll fetch it!” says Rhoda, sniffing woefully, and she goes to the sideboard and brings back a foolscap manilla envelope and gives it to me.
“Here!”
There is one word written on it: Jeffrey! Must be in her handwriting. I open it with my finger and tip out what it contains onto my other palm. There is no letter in it, not even a scribbled message, neither greeting, nor explanation.
Just the signet ring! With the coiled-snake design!
That is a shock.
All at once, I feel really awakened! My nerves, my brain, my senses. Pure wakefulness, as I’ve never felt it before.
And the bus ride and the scents of the morning and the way the light fell on the face of my mother come vividly upon me, overcoming me, and things are happenning inside that I cannot . . .
When the loss, the hurt, the anger, the sorrow,
the compassion at last overwhelm me, Rhoda and Harry are staring at me in
unadorned astonishment and their expressions are breaking and blurring
through my tears.
|
|
