Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [112]
She is trying to be matter-of-fact, but he can hear the tearfulness in her voice. Guiltily he proposes a meeting. They have coffee together; she comes back to his room and spends the night (‘our last night,’ she calls it), clinging to him, crying softly. Early the next morning (it is a Sunday) he hears her creep out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom on the landing to get dressed. When she comes back he pretends to be asleep. He has only to give the slightest signal, he knows, and she will stay. If there are things he would prefer to do first, before paying attention to her, like reading the newspaper, she will sit quietly in a corner and wait. That seems to be how girls are taught to behave in Klagenfurt: to demand nothing, to wait until the man is ready, and then to serve him.
He would like to be nicer to Astrid, so young, so alone in the big city. He would like to dry her tears, make her smile; he would like to prove to her that his heart is not as hard as it seems, that he is capable of responding to her willingness with a willingness of his own, a willingness to cuddle her as she wants to be cuddled and give ear to her stories about her mother and brothers back home. But he must be careful. Too much warmth and she might cancel her ticket, stay in London, move in with him. Two of the defeated sheltering in each other’s arms, consoling each other: the prospect is too humiliating. They might as well get married, he and Astrid, then spend the rest of their lives looking after each other like invalids. So he gives no signal, but lies with his eyelids clenched till he hears the creak of the stairs and the click of the front door.
It is December, and the weather has turned bitter. Snow falls, the snow turns to slush, the slush freezes: on the sidewalks one has to pick one’s way from foothold to foothold like a mountaineer. A blanket of fog enfolds the city, fog thick with coal dust and sulphur. The electricity fails; trains stop running; old people freeze to death in their homes. The worst winter of the century, say the newspapers.
He tramps up Archway Road, slipping and sliding on the ice, holding a scarf over his face, trying not to breathe. His clothes smell of sulphur, there is a foul taste in his mouth, when he coughs he coughs up black phlegm. In South Africa it is summer. If he were there he could be on Strandfontein beach, running over mile after mile of white sand under a great blue sky.
During the night a pipe bursts in his room. The floor is flooded. He wakes up surrounded by a sheet of ice.
It is like the blitz all over again, say the newspapers. They print stories of soup kitchens for the homeless run by women’s auxiliaries, of repair crews toiling through the night. The crisis is bringing out the best in Londoners, they say, who confront adversity with quiet strength and a ready quip.
As for him, he may dress like a Londoner, tramp to work like a Londoner, suffer the cold like a Londoner, but he has no ready quips. Not in a month of Sundays would Londoners take him for the real thing. On the contrary, Londoners recognize him at once as another of those foreigners who for daft reasons of their own choose to live where they don’t belong.
How long will he have to live in England before it is allowed that he has become the real thing, become English? Will getting a British passport be enough, or does an odd-sounding foreign name mean he will be shut out for ever? And ‘becoming English’ – what does that mean anyhow? England is the home of two nations: he will have to choose between them, choose whether to be middle-class English or working-class English. Already he seems to have chosen. He wears the uniform of the middle class, reads a middle-class newspaper, imitates middle-class speech. But mere externals such as those are not going to be enough to get him admission, not by a long chalk. Admission to the middle class – full admission, not a temporary ticket valid for certain times of