Comfort Zone

And not their consequence.’

1 (#u36681651-24e5-5adc-bb89-cdc3153e3797)

The Anchor (#u36681651-24e5-5adc-bb89-cdc3153e3797)

A crouching figure was illuminated by the stub of a candle burning on a saucer. The figure was that of a full-skirted woman, kneeling before the candle on the floor of a little dark room in a hired house. Scalli – she now called herself Scalli, for none of the English for whom she worked could pronounce her real name – Scalli in her little dark room abased herself before the figure of her god. She addressed that imaginary figure, which she saw clearly, asking him to preserve her daughter, who was so far away. Her dog lay beside her in what it considered a reverential position: begging. Scalli also begged.

‘Oh, mighty Baal,’ Scalli said, ‘I know I am nothing in your sight. I know I am mere filth on the ground over which you walk. Yet I beg you hear my despicable voice. I cry out to you for my daughter Skrita in Aleppo. In Aleppo she lies sick. As you rose again from the dead, so I beg you, raise up Skrita. I cannot be by my daughter’s side. I beg you to be there in my stead and raise her back to health, oh mighty Baal!’ She rose slowly from her crouching position and went to sit on the side of her unmade bed. There was nothing else she could do, trapped in this alien land of England.

At this hour of a summer evening, the road running through Old Headington was quiet. Two young people, both female, one black, one white, strolled along the pavement and turned down Logic Lane. Sorrow is a constant; fortunately, we take a while to learn that. Out of friendliness, Ken Milsome walked with Justin Haddock to the crossroads. They had been drinking tea with Ken’s wife, Marie. It was no more than three hundred yards from this point to Justin’s house. Justin’s legs, a permanent trouble, were not troubling him too badly this evening. The two men stood together, watching the desultory traffic. Both morning and evening rush hour choked the road with cars driving to or from Oxford’s ring road; but at this time of day the automobile might not have been invented. Justin was wearing a panama hat, to protect his head from the sun: that head from which a generous proportion of hair had retreated. On the corner, opposite where the men stood, was the Anchor, one of the two village pubs – this the bigger and sterner of the two. It had been bought by a married couple but had recently been put up for sale. Rumour had it that this couple, unlikely as it might seem to most of the villagers, had been born in the chilly reaches of Siberia.

‘I was sympathetic at first,’ said Ken.

‘She’s Russian, the wife,’ said Justin.

‘Latvian,’ said Ken. ‘They’re both Latvian. She should have played to her strengths and served borscht and blinis or whatever Latvians eat. All she served was cod and parsley sauce.’

‘With chips?’

‘No doubt. She complained that she has no customers. “And I have so clean floor,” she told Marie. But she wouldn’t allow swearing in her pub, if you can believe it.’

‘What? One goes to a pub in order to swear,’ said Justin. ‘Not just to drink. A sentence without a swear-word in it is a jigsaw with one piece missing … For some of us at least.’

‘Some students from Ruskin College were in there, and one of them swore. This Latvian lass turned them all out.’

‘Not exactly a gesture towards financial success … She should be running a church, not a pub.’

‘She told Marie about it. Marie said she was crying, that all she could say was, “And I have so clean floor.” Marie was sympathetic, being no enemy of clean floors herself, but in the end she got sick of it and told the woman straight that for anyone entering a pub, the cleanliness of the floor was hardly the thing uppermost on their minds. She told the woman to get her finger out.’

‘I don’t suppose that did much good.’

‘It didn’t. You know what Latvian fingers are like.’

Ken, an American, spent much of his time with the various computers in his study. He was a leading protagonist in WUFA, the World United Financial Association, as yet just a winged phantom designed to manage more equably the obscure workings of the World Bank. He had explained the workings of WUFA more than once to Justin, without great effect. Every so often, Ken disappeared to conferences in Stockholm, Orlando, or Istanbul. Justin, an older man, considered his days of wandering were done. The recession proved a godsend as an excuse. Justin lingered, hands in pockets, wondering about the present moment in English life. No one seemed to think it odd that the village had acquired its ration of Latvians, Muslims and Chinese. Yet it was hardly a rational process that brought them here. Some came by reason of wealth, some by reason of poverty. It was just – well, just Chance. Someone ought to do something about it.

The two friends lingered on the corner in silence, contemplating the Latvian woman’s sorrows. The sun was low, dusting the quiet street with nine-carat gold. The atmosphere was heavy and becoming thunderous, to celebrate the summer solstice. The Anchor was a large building, built of brick, tall and unwelcoming, whereas most of Old Headington was built from venerable stone; with their low roofs they showed no particular wish to dominate. This modesty included the Anchor’s better situated rival, the White Hart, just down the road, opposite the church and almost as ancient as the church itself, both in its stonework and its aspirations. After a while, the friends parted by mutual consent. Ken turned back to rejoin his wife at home, a short way down Logic Lane. The crown of the great green oak growing in their garden could be glimpsed from the main road. Justin trudged slowly towards his house, careful of the uneven pavement. The birds sang under the street lamps. His way lay past the White Hart, across the road from the church whose origins dated from Saxon times. Justin was no great frequenter of the Hart. He had heard that the owners had engaged a new foreign waiter. He hoped that waiter might prove more effective than the foreigners who had closed the Anchor. At the church gate, the vicar, the Reverend Ted Hayse, was standing listening to an earnest young man, hanging on to his bike, as if in unconscious fear that the parson, forgetting his trade, might nick it. Gripping a handlebar, this youth was leaning towards Ted Hayse, and intensely pouring out his tale.

‘Good evening,’ said Justin as he passed the pair.

‘Good evening, Justin,’ said Ted in response.

‘And even then, even then,’ the young man was saying, emphatically, ‘it was simply an accident—’

‘Talking about Chance again,’ said Justin to himself. ‘But no good speaking of Chance to the Reverend Ted. He’d naturally ascribe whatever it was to the Will of God …’ He shuffled onward, came to his gate and went into his little house. He hung his hat on a convenient peg. The house smelt comfortably of burnt toast, coupled with the elusive fragrance of the clothes Justin had washed that morning, setting them to dry on various radiators.

‘I’m home, Maude,’ he called. ‘Are you okay?’ After a pause, reply came. ‘Is Kate there? She could find it.’

‘You know Kate’s in Egypt.’ He entered what had become known as Maude’s room. Maude, his mother-in-law, was a small, stringy, bespectacled lady with a whiskery pale face and a hearing aid. She was surrounded by piles of books she had pulled off the bookshelves.

‘What are you looking for, dear?’ he asked.

She turned her dim gaze towards him, eyes grey and watery through her rectangular lenses, looking vexed. ‘Dash it, I’ve forgotten. I know it was a book I wanted.’

He was used to Maude’s fits of vagueness. ‘I’m going to pour myself a glass of something. Would you like one?’

‘Certainly not. I had one earlier when my friend from the pub popped in.’

‘Oh, the Russian woman?’

‘She’s Latvian, so she says. They are selling up, you know. Such a pity.’

‘I did know.’

‘It was called Best Behaviour in Baghdad. Grey cloth, I think. About a conversion to Islam.’

‘Not much good behaviour in Baghdad now.’ He grinned at her and left her to it, amid the increasing piles of books.

In their shared kitchen, he found a bottle of Chardonnay standing open. It had lost its chill but he poured himself a glass, to retreat to his living room. A last beam of sun filtered into a corner behind the sofa. Here he kept his art books and a small hoard of DVDs. Justin, nursing the wine glass, sank into his favourite armchair. It was the armchair Janet, his late wife, had liked. After sipping the wine, he set his glass down on an occasional table and rested, closing his eyes. ‘She have so clean floor,’ he murmured. Within a minute, he was asleep. He did not dream. These daytime sleeps, of increasing frequency he thought, more closely resembled unconsciousness. They were places, being empty, of some indefinable alarm. He heard Maude talking, or perhaps chanting, to herself. She had arrived to help look after her dying daughter and had stayed ever since. She was eighty-nine and, he considered, increasingly eccentric. He feared he must nurse her to the end, as he himself felt his faculties crumble. A genuine horror of human life gripped him.

He recalled that Gustave Flaubert, on whom he had once made a TV documentary, took a dislike to a female friend when it became evident that she put happiness above art. Perhaps Maude was sinking into a similar madness, putting religion above sanity. He stared down at his clasped hands; the freckles of old age were apparent. He was already in decay like an old tree, and had scarcely noticed the encroachment. He still relished life even if, like the Chardonnay, it had gone a trifle flat.

Maude and Justin supped together on pasta, followed by rice pudding with raspberry jam. Later, he tucked her into bed before returning downstairs and reading an old hardbound copy of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Kate Standish, his lady friend, was away in Egypt, working on her good cause again. Justin was unhappy that Kate was away so frequently. He felt that the Aten Trust for poor Egyptian children was taking precedence over their love for each other. In the night, a short sharp thunderstorm broke out with a resounding crash. Maude cried out, but he did not go to her; he thought instead of his son Dave, who might have been frightened, with no one interested in comforting him. He found in the morning that his BT answerphone no longer worked. Fortunately, he also possessed a digital phone which was functioning. Kate had given it to him as a Christmas present. But it was a bugger about the answerphone. He would have to do something about it. Some time. Everything was an effort. Maude had found the book she wanted. He would be the one who would put the piles of books back on the shelves.

At twelve noon as usual, he boiled water in his kettle and made two cups of instant coffee. He called Scalli to join him. When he had first employed Scalli, he had tried to avoid the woman, and had left her to drink her coffee alone. But gradually he realized it might be pleasant to get to know her, particularly when he was missing Kate. They sat facing one another at the kitchen table as usual. He liked talking to Scalli. Although her main topic of conversation was her dog, on which she doted, she was an intelligent woman, and he imagined there was little intelligent conversation in her life.

‘I read in The Times that Syria has held a general election. What do you think about that?’ he asked her. Scalli said that one of her cousins had written from Damascus to say all was peaceful.

‘He tells that they suffer many fears and shut up their shop with boards, but nobody did not riot. He has an Iraqi young man to work for him which came across the border in fear of the war which you wicked Britishers make. My daughter is sick in Aleppo – made worse by the election.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Her hair was pale and cut short. She wore a faded blue dress with a high neckline. Her chin receded while her nose compensated by being rather long. Her skin was slightly withered. For all that, Justin was pleased by her blue eyes and dark eyebrows, and a general alertness. She gave him a doleful smile, accompanied by an inclination of the head.

‘To make the phone call to Syria, it’s so much expense.’

Maude looked round the kitchen door. She was wearing her old brown hat. ‘I’m just going out. I shall be back in time for lunch.’

Justin said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘So, another lesson on being Islamic?’

‘Whatever you may think, my decision is between me and my soul.’ She nodded towards Scalli, as if for confirmation.

‘Are you going to be a little Sunni or a little Shi’ite?’ Justin asked. He was disturbed by his mother-in-law’s espousal of Muslim faith, and occasionally – as now – his annoyance leaked out.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

He was anxious. Excusing himself to Scalli, he hurried to one of the front windows, in time to see Maude closing the gate behind her. She set off down the street, moving slowly with the aid of a stick, and turned, as he had anticipated, left down Ivy Lane.

Maude walked at a steady falter, entering the drive of the Fitzgerald house. She waved to Deirdre Fitzgerald, who was gazing from an upper window. Deirdre returned the merest of nods.

‘Grapefruit face!’ said Maude to herself. The Fitzgerald home, named Righteous House, as wrought-iron lettering in the tall gate announced, had been built in 1919, in a style dating some two centuries earlier. It was faced with white marble; its windows with their pouting sills were shaded by blinds pulled half down, giving the façade a look of world-weariness, as Deirdre herself looked weary and as if designed some centuries earlier.