Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

O sound to rout the brood of cares ,

The sweep of scythe in morning dew ,

The gust that round the garden flew ,

And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

Those kids were lucky to get a goddamn orange in their stockings at Christmas. Few ever did. Tumbling pears.

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers ,

We heard behind the woodbine veil

The milk that bubbled in the pail ,

And buzzings of the honeyed hours .

And gradually, with each of the succeeding thirty-odd years of small towns and stifling classrooms, these visions of refreshment sustained him , although the poetry stopped working for the students. He came to the conclusion that they no longer needed it or wanted it. With prosperity, their dreams became more elaborate, more opulent, less dictated by peculiar circumstances. Their desires were the conventional lusts of a consumer society.

But Joe needed the old visions during those sweltering June days as he prepared class after class, row after row, face after face, for the Department of Education final examinations. Every year his head pounded and ached from the stunning sunlight, the smell of hot paper and dirty hair.

“ I heard the water lapping on the crag / And the long ripple washing in the reeds .” It had always helped to imagine the cool sinuosity of moving water, the liquid coiling between green, lavish banks, the silken run so silent and so deep.

Perhaps, Joe thought, that is why I have come. For the healing waters. Like a nineteenth-century gentleman in search of a cure for what ails him. I have come to take the waters. I have come to be made whole.

Mark was speaking to him. “I made a reservation at the Bloomsbury Centre,” he said. “We’ll go there now so you can catch up on missed sleep. That jet-lag is a killer. I was a zombie for a week.”

Joe nodded. It was a good idea. Already jet-lag was making it difficult for him to concentrate. He felt stretched on the rack of two continents. Physically here; in time, located some place back there.

“It’s a good location,” his son said. “It’s within walking distance of the University of London and the British Museum, so we’ll be able to meet easily. I can slip out of the Reading Room at noon and we can have lunch together in a pub or at your hotel.”

“That’s fine,” said Joe equably. “I don’t want to take you away from your work. Just go about your usual business.” He was proud to have a son who was a scholar.

“You know,” Mark said, shrugging apologetically, “we only have a bed-sitter. Not even our own bathroom. We’d put you up if we could, but there’s no room. Joan’s mortified. She’s afraid you’ll think she doesn’t want you.”

“Christ,” said Joe, hurrying to interrupt him, “as if I didn’t know? The shack your mother and I lived in when we were first married – a crackerbox…” He trailed off, uncertain if the boy had flinched at mention of his mother. The beard was a mask he couldn’t penetrate, the face couldn’t be read.

“Look at that!” said Mark, suddenly fierce, diverting the conversation. “Bastards! The National Front thugs are at it again.”

The train was slowing for a station. Brakes binding, it slid by a carious warehouse with skirts of broken-brick rubble, windows painted blind. A message several feet high was painted on the building in white letters. “No Wogs Here.”

“It seems,” said Joe, “that the sun has finally set on the British Empire.”

“No,” said Mark, his face intent, “the Empire’s come home to roost.”

Joe woke to hunger and the sound of voices speaking German in the hall outside his doorway. The glowing numerals of the clock on the dresser announced that it was two o’clock in the morning, but his belly informed him that if he were back in North America he would be sitting down to a meal. What meal – breakfast, dinner, supper – he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure how to compute the time change.

The woman outside his door was drunk. There was an alcoholic, forced gaiety to her voice that couldn’t be mistaken. And although Joe barely knew three words of German, he could guess that the man’s guttural purr was directed towards convincing her to go to bed with him.

Joe got out of bed and flicked on the TV. The screen was empty. He ran quickly through the channel selections. BBC 1 and 2, ITV, all blank. Bathed in the aquatic, wavering blue light and kept company by the hum of the box, he sat on the foot of the bed and lit a cigarette.

Odd the often simple source of our most complex imaginings, our most disturbing dreams. The sounds of an attempted seduction heard in indistinct German and he had dreamed that his wife and her mother (dead these twenty years past) had been sitting talking the Deutsch in his living-room, just as they had in the first years of his marriage when the old girl was still alive.

He had always resented that. He had felt left out not being able to follow the conversation. He was suspicious that his mother-in-law asked questions and pried into their private life. He hadn’t liked her much. Frieda was what his own father would have called a creeping christer. A woman of a narrow, fundamental piety and sour views who hadn’t liked her daughter marrying outside the charmed circle of the Kirche .

But a dream has its own rules and logic and Joe had understood this conversation perfectly well. He knew that Frieda was trying to take Marie away with her. She was trying to persuade her to leave Joe and go away some place with her. Silly old bitch. The only thing was that Marie seemed half inclined to follow her mother’s suggestions.

And while all this had been going on Joe had found himself unable to move out of his chair. He was paralysed, and no matter how he struggled to unlock his rigid limbs he could not do it. He was unable to stir a muscle, not even to speak.

He saw at last that they were in agreement. Marie got up and put on her coat. She went around the house turning out the lights as if he weren’t there. Then she followed her mother out the door. But she forgot to close the door. That was strange.

And there Joe sat in an empty house, rooted in a chair, blinded with tears. Not even a decent goodbye.

The sounds outside intruded. Joe was sure that the man’s voice seemed to be growing more insistent and demanding, and the woman’s more encouraging in a sad, passive sort of way. The bargains struck, the diplomacy and language of love.

Joe made the rounds. He began as a proper tourist. He wound through the Jubilee-jammed streets of London on a tour bus. The banners were out, the buildings were being cleansed of a century of dirt and grime. The workmen exposed clean stone in patches; it shone through like white bone in an incinerated corpse. The windows in Oxford Street were stuffed with regal souvenirs; the crowds surged on the sidewalks.

Everything was done with haste. They disembarked for a thirty-minute gawk at St. Paul’s, a stampede through the Tower, a whirl around Piccadilly Circus. Their female guide was disconcertingly brazen. She browbeat outlandishly large tips out of them. She claimed intimacy with famous people. Described a night out on the town with Lord Snowdon. She drove her charges relentlessly through the sacred places, hectoring, scolding, full of dire warnings not to be late, not to dawdle. Joe put up with the woman and his fellow tourists for two days; then he gave it up as a bad business, likely only to get worse.

It didn’t take him long to realize that something was wrong. He was filled with anxiety. The long English faces with their bad teeth made him shift his shoulders uneasily when he looked at them. The streets were too full. The lure of royalty and the weak pound was a powerful attraction.