The High Places Read online

  Sarah remained quiet. Then she said, ‘My husband’s gone to find help.’

  She had been waiting to use this phrase: ‘my husband’. Her first time.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to be a doctor. That would be convenient.’

  ‘Not a human doctor,’ said Sarah. ‘An animal doctor, though.’

  ‘My leg, you see,’ he said. ‘I think it should hurt, but at this moment it doesn’t.’

  ‘You’re probably in shock.’

  ‘You’re not British, are you. Antipodean.’

  ‘Australian.’

  ‘I thought so, but didn’t venture it. From the first few sentences you might just as well be a New Zealander.’

  He pronounced it ‘New Zellander’.

  ‘No, no!’ Sarah protested. ‘We sound completely different.’ She demonstrated the difference: ‘Fish and chips,’ she said. ‘That’s us. This is a Kiwi: fush and chups.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘No one speaks that way at all.’

  Sarah felt chastised. She didn’t resent it – there was something pleasantly authoritarian about Mr Ronald, who made her think of a school principal driving home from church, or the father of a boyfriend, to whom she must be polite at all costs.

  ‘A veterinarian,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Dogs and cats.’

  ‘Actually I specialise,’ said Sarah. ‘Exotic animal medicine. But dogs and cats too, sometimes. Mostly for friends.’

  ‘What counts as exotic these days?’ asked Mr Ronald. His right hand moved slowly over his chest and toward his legs, testing for pain and damage.

  ‘Chinchillas,’ said Sarah. ‘Ferrets. Hermit crabs. Monkeys.’

  ‘Monkeys?’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Good god. Does anyone in England actually own a monkey?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘And is it legal?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘And people will spend hundreds of pounds to cure a hermit crab?’

  ‘People become very attached to their pets,’ said Sarah. She had defended her clients on this subject before, at parties and college dinners, and whenever she did she saw them all in the surgery waiting room, bundled against cold and worry, holding cages and carriers and shoeboxes with holes punched in them.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Mr Ronald, and he thought about this for a moment. ‘Dogs I understand, and cats too, in their own way. I grew up with a bull-mastiff. He could knock me down until I was eleven, and then I could knock him. He ate the leg off a rabbit once.’

  The bull-mastiff walked through Sarah’s mind. Hip dysplasia, she thought. Hypothyroidism. A heavy dog. She’d need help lifting it.

  ‘And you’ve treated a monkey yourself? You seem very young.’

  ‘A capuchin once, with a broken leg.’

  This mention of a broken leg seemed to remind Mr Ronald of his situation. His face altered in pain.

  ‘Do you feel it now?’ asked Sarah. The skin whitened around his mouth and he let out a sound that reminded her of a tiger, a long and drawn-out ‘ooow’.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘My husband will be back soon.’

  She looked out of the window. The road was dark in both directions and overshadowed with trees. There were shapes in the trees. They looked like small crouching monkeys escaped with their rotten teeth and cataracts from backyard sheds all over England. When she looked back at Mr Ronald, he seemed to have recovered a little. He laid his head against the seat and breathed quietly. A band of sweat bound his forehead. She placed her fingers on his wrist: his heartbeat was steady now, and slow. She kept her hand where it was, despite feeling revolted by the dampness of his old skin. They sat together listening for cars. Someone will come in this minute, thought Sarah; but the minute passed.

  ‘A capuchin, you say,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘A kind of monk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, a monk, yes, I think so. But also a kind of monkey.’

  ‘I saw an orangutan in the Berlin Zoo once, painting on the wall with a dish brush. Looked just like my wife cleaning the shower. But here Douglas is, against primate testing. I can’t go in for that. Douglas calls me species-ist.’ Sarah decided not to ask who Douglas was. ‘If they cure Parkinson’s, then it’s worth those gorillas, I think. Not a popular stance, I’m told. I myself can’t stand vegetarians.’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Well, in the abstract. It makes sense for someone like you. A veterinarian. Why heal them and then eat them? But I always say vegetarians ought to eat meat when it’s served to them. Imagine being a guest in someone’s home and turning down food that’s offered.’

  This reminded Sarah of her grandfather: perplexed and indignant, having survived a war, to find that people cared about other kinds of suffering. Food might run out – eat what you’re given. Life might be lost – don’t mind the monkeys. Sarah liked to argue on this topic, calmly maintaining her position, but in this case she would not.

  ‘Oh, but I’m sure you’re a charming guest,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘And here you are, helping an old man in distress.’

  He chuckled and the pain came again – stronger, it seemed, this time. It lifted him from the seat a little, and the lifting caused more pain. He shut his eyes against it. Sarah waited for this to pass, as it had the last time, and when he was quiet she asked, ‘What can I do? Anything? Is it your legs?’

  He laughed again, sucking in his cigarette breath, and moved his wrist away from her hand. The rain grew heavier and the trees on the road began to move their monkey arms. The damp fields gave up their deeper smells of mice and manure. No cars passed by. Sarah worried about David in the rain. He couldn’t have been gone for longer than ten minutes, she reasoned; perhaps fifteen. She wondered briefly if the woman was still ironing in her house.

  She asked again, ‘How are your legs?’

  ‘Funny,’ said Mr Ronald, and his breath was shorter now. It left his throat unwillingly. ‘Funny, but one of them’s not even a leg. Left leg, below the knee. Plastic.’

  Sarah imagined him at other times rapping his fingers against the plastic of his leg, knocking it through his neat trousers while chatting on a bus. The war, she thought, he must have lost it in the war; she saw him and other men moving quickly over a French field. Poppies blew in the grass, and he was a young man, strong of limb, and the sea lay behind them all as they ran.

  ‘Diabetes,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Didn’t know, did you, that it could take your leg off?’

  Sarah shook her head, but she did know. She’d seen diabetic dogs, cats too. She’d cut off their legs. The French field fell into the sea, and the rain still fell against the roof of the car.

  ‘Started as a blister, then an ulcer,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Just a mishap. A blister from new shoes. No one tells the young: be careful of your feet. Feet should last a lifetime. What can be prevented? Everything, they say. No they don’t. They say not everything.’

  He laughed harder now, in a thin straight line, and his cheeks drew in over the laugh so that Sarah could see the shape of his skull and the crowded teeth, nicotine-stained, that swarmed in his mouth. Perhaps this wasn’t laughing, but breathing. The steady rain and wind moved the car slightly, back and forth. The branches of the tree against which the car was pressed were darting shapes at the corner of Sarah’s eye, like Sheba at night, stalking rats with his stomach full of jellymeat.

  (Sheba lay panting in the corner of his cage, overwhelmed by the pain on which he concentrated with a careful doling out of attention. He kept himself steady but his small side rose and fell, rose and fell, higher and then deeper than it should. His eyes moved toward the door and his mouth sat open, showing pink.)

  Mr Ronald’s laugh was a clatter behind his teeth. Sarah huddled close to him as he moved against his seat. She placed her arm around his shoulders, touched his damp forehead, and felt her hair lift away from her skin, all along her arms and the back of her neck. The summer passed through the car, windy and wet
.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Sarah. ‘Just hold on.’ Her mouth was close to his ear. David would come soon. You could swear at a cat that rocked this way, crowded close in pain and confusion; you could talk softly, not to the cat but to the idea of the cat, to the faces of the family to whom you must explain the cat’s condition. You could sing to the cat and if you had forgotten its name you could call it ‘kitty’ – you could say ‘Hold on, kitty’ while your hands moved and your neck craned forward and the parts of you that understood the machinery of a cat, its secret places, worked despite the cat’s terror. You could set the leg of a monkey and watch it, later, as it limped back and forward across the surgery floor, scowling and shaking its funny fist at you.

  Noises came from Mr Ronald’s throat now, and these sounds seemed accidental, the by-product of something else. They continued past the point Sarah felt certain he had died; they rattled on in the can of his throat. After they had subsided – although this took time, and they came in unexpected spurts – she became aware of the sound of a radio playing. In her own car, or this one? Who could Douglas be? A son? A grandson?

  Sarah was unsure how long she had been sitting beside Mr Ronald and how long it had been since he stopped making any sound at all. His wife cleaned the walls of their shower and he had been to see orangutans in Berlin. He was too young to have been in that war.

  Without warning, David filled up the space in the passenger door of Mr Ronald’s car. She had been so certain she would hear his footsteps on the road, but here he was in the doorway as if she’d summoned him out of the field.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t find anyone.’ He was wet and his breath came quickly. ‘I ran and finally found a house but there was no one home. I thought about breaking in. Kept going for a bit but no sign of life. No cars on the road, even. So I came back to try the car again.’

  He looked at the stillness of the man in the driver’s seat. He saw the blood on Mr Ronald’s trousers and the way that it crept toward his belt and shirt, and he searched for blood on Sarah.

  Sarah concentrated on David’s face, which swam in the sound of the rain and the radio. My husband. She smiled because she was happy to see him. Then she placed the wallet in Mr Ronald’s lap. She moved to step out of the car and David made space for her.

  ‘How is he? How does he seem?’

  When a cat died during an operation, when a macaw was too sick, when a snake was past saving, then Sarah must tell its owners. It was difficult to tell them this true thing, and so along with it she added other, less true things: that the tumour caused no pain, that the animal hadn’t been frightened to go under anaesthetic. Still, it was difficult. It made no difference to Sarah that words were inadequate to her enormous task. Of course they were. There might be a time when she would have to tell her friends, Sheba’s owners, that he wouldn’t survive his infection. Each loss of which she had been the herald seemed to have led to this new immensity: Mr Ronald, dead in a car. But they didn’t know Mr Ronald. David had never even spoken to him. She had been married that midday, with no rain. There were only two witnesses.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Sarah.

  She stood and shut the door behind her. David fought the desire to lower his head and look through the window. It seemed necessary to make sure, but more necessary to trust Sarah. He held his hands out to her and she took them.

  ‘My god,’ he said. She shook her head. He knew that when she shook her head in this way, it meant: I’m not angry with you, but I won’t talk.

  ‘What now?’ he asked. ‘Should we take him somewhere?’

  David felt that Sarah owned the wreck, owned the tree and piece of road on which Mr Ronald had died, and that he need only wait for her instructions, having failed to find help. He thought of her sitting alone with the unconscious body of an old man, and he thought of the moment at which she must have realised that Mr Ronald was no longer unconscious, but dead. David saw with certainty that Sarah was another person, completely separate from him, although he had married her today. His wife.

  ‘We’ll try the car again,’ said Sarah. ‘We just have to get to the surgery.’

  ‘We can use the phone there,’ said David.

  Sarah crossed the road and he followed her. She didn’t look back at the wreck. Waiting on its grassy rise slightly above the road, their car had a look of faithful service, of eagerness to assist. It started on the third try with a compliant hum. Sarah had always been better at coaxing it; even before trying the ignition she’d known it would work. She was unsure if this resurrection was good or bad luck, or beyond luck – simply inevitable. Now that she could see the rain in the headlights, she realised how soft it was, how English. She missed home, suddenly: the hard, bright days and the storms at the end of them, with rain that filled your shoes.

  It grew bright and then dark in Mr Ronald’s car as their headlights passed over him, and it remained dark as they left that piece of road and that tree. David watched Sarah drive. They didn’t speak. As the distance between their car and Mr Ronald’s grew, it seemed that the roads were all empty – that all of England was empty. It lay in its empty fields while the mice moved and the airplanes flew overhead to other places, nearby and far away.

  They reached lit buildings and the surgery so quickly that David was embarrassed at having failed to find help. Sarah walked calmly, and she spoke calmly with the nurse about Sheba. She didn’t look at the telephone. There was no blood on her clothes. David watched his wife as she made her way toward the cat, who rubbed his head against the bars of his cage. He was waiting for the pain to stop. And then he would be let out, healed, to hunt mice in the wet grass.

  Art Appreciation

  Henry Taylor had always known he would have money one day, and this confidence was vindicated when his mother won the lottery on a Thursday in the August of 1961. He could afford to get married. But he wasn’t yet sure if he could afford to quit his job, so he went to the office the day after he heard the news. The sun came through the window blinds in long tedious slats and time passed outside, far below, with the noise of the road and the joy of boys on bicycles. Above, where Henry was, women walked among the men, delivering coffee and papers. They were all decorous, even the young ones – even those reproachable few who lingered with one hip against the corners of desks. One particular girl had caught Henry’s attention. She was new to her job, but had already made a name for herself with her prettiness and good nature. She dressed modestly, with a sense of pleasures offered all the same: a heightening of her body’s secrets through her polite attempts to conceal them. Her name was Eleanor, and she called herself Ellie.

  Henry thought, now he had money, that he would marry her.

  He didn’t tell anyone that his mother had won the lottery, and a considerable amount of his delight had to do with his windfall being secret. That was the great thing: to sit at his desk, observing as he always did the movements of the office – and Ellie’s movements among them – but as a profoundly different man, with a new and superior perspective. There was no longer anything to keep him from approaching Ellie, but he held off even so, not out of hesitation but in order to savour his own intentions. Henry noticed that she stole frequent looks at him. She had the quality of a bird among grasses, peering out in nervous excitement, eager for a mate but afraid to abandon safety. He was certain she was in the office not to make flimsy dates with different men but to find a husband.

  As he left work that Friday afternoon, Henry made sure to say goodnight to Ellie. She was flattered and demure.

  ‘Enjoy your weekend,’ he said, and she said – she almost sang – ‘You too!’ She wore her hair pulled back with a navy ribbon.

  Henry, as usual, took the stairs to the ground floor of the building – this was part of his fitness regime, to exercise his legs in the morning and the evening – and when he reached the lobby, the elevator doors sprang open and Ellie stepped out from between them.

  ‘Fancy that,’ Henry said. He looked at her with
pleasure. Her waist was small, she had pale, plump arms, and her hair had a good-natured sheen.

  Ellie stood swinging her handbag this way and that.

  ‘Walk me to the station?’ she asked, and he offered his arm, which she took.

  It had begun to rain, and they walked beneath his large black umbrella. She tucked herself in beside him and her small, uneven steps limited his stride. He wanted to lift Ellie up in his arms the way you might a child at a parade.

  ‘I’d like to take you out sometime,’ Henry said.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ she said, with a small frown.

  ‘I’d like to take you out right now,’ Henry said.

  ‘Tonight’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I have a class on Fridays. But some day next week?’

  ‘What kind of class?’

  Ellie gave a little smile, the bashful twin of her frown, and said, ‘Art appreciation.’

  They arrived at Wynyard station and there, between the sound of the trains passing underneath the street and the sound of traffic passing over the street, she leaned her head into his shoulder for one unexpected moment. Then she ran down the steps into the station. Henry watched her bright brown head move among the commuters and disappear in the direction of the North Shore line. He considered her his girl from that moment.

  * * *

  Henry was fond of Sydney on a Friday afternoon. It was late winter, so the sky lowered early, and there was that weekend feeling of relief and consequence. There was a place near the station where he liked to eat after work. The whole establishment smelled boiled – boiled meat, wet raincoats, and the undersides of shoes. He ordered a hamburger – no onions, never onions – and ate it while imagining Ellie on the way to her Friday-night class. He had a vague sense that art appreciation involved bowls of fruit and flowers. But his mind didn’t stay on her for long; he began, without quite knowing it, to think about his money. He wondered how much of the ten thousand pounds his mother would give him and concluded that it would be at least half. He thought of her clutching his arm the night before, saying, ‘I’ll set you up, you’ll get married.’