“I don't think he saw, do you?” Alec whispered. He glanced at her briefly, then away. “I mean, it was all so quick.”
He didn't really want her to reply. He was stroking the boy's soft hair where he lay curled against her. The child was sleeping. He cupped the blond head with his hand, and asked her to confirm that darkness stopped there at the back of it, where flesh puckered between bony knuckles, and that the child was unharmed. It was himself he was protecting. She saw that. And when she did not deny his view, he leaned forward across the child's body and pressed his lips, very gently, to her cheek.
Their heads made the apex of an unsteady triangle where they leaned together, all three, and slept. Huddled in among neighbours, strangers with their troubled dreams, they slept, while the ship rolled on into the dark.
In Trust
There is to begin with the paraphernalia of daily living: all those objects, knives, combs, coins, cups, razors, that are too familiar, too worn and stained with use, a doorknob, a baby's rattle, or too swiftly in passage from hand to mouth or hand to hand to arouse more than casual interest. They are disposable, and are mostly disposed of without thought. Tram tickets, matchboxes, wooden serviette rings with a poker design of poinsettias, buttonhooks, beermats, longlife torch batteries, the lids of Doulton soup tureens, are carted off at last to a tip and become rubble, the sub-stratum of cities, or are pulped and go to earth; unless, by some quirk of circumstance, one or two examples are stranded so far up the beach in a distant decade that they become collectors’ items, and then so rare and evocative as to be the only survivors of their age.
So it is in the life of objects. They pass out of the hands of their first owners into a tortoiseshell cabinet, and then, whole or in fragments it scarcely matters, onto the shelves of museums. Isolated there, in the oddness of their being no longer common or repeatable, detached from their history and from the grime of use, they enter a new dimension. A quality of uniqueness develops in them and they glow with it as with the breath of a purer world — meaning only that we see them clearly now in the light of this one. An oil-lamp, a fragment of cloth so fragile that we feel the very grains and precious dust of its texture (the threads barely holding in their warp and woof), a perfume flask, a set of taws, a strigil, come wobbling towards us, the only angels perhaps we shall ever meet, though they bear no message but their own presence: we are here. It is in a changed aspect of time that we recognise them, as if the substance of it — a denseness that prevented us from looking forward or too far back — had cleared at last. We see these objects and ourselves as co-existent, in the very moment of their first stepping out into their own being and in every instant now of their long pilgrimage towards us, in which they have gathered the fingerprints of their most casual users and the ghostly but still powerful presence of the lives they served.
None of our kind come to us down that long corridor. Only the things they made and made use of, which still somehow keep contact with them. We look through the cracked bowl to the lips of children. Our hand on an axe-handle fits into an ancient groove and we feel the jarring of tree trunk on bone. Narrowly avoiding through all their days the accidents that might have toppled them from a shelf, the flames, the temper tantrums, the odd carelessness of a user's hand, they are still with us. We stare and are amazed. Were they once, we ask ourselves, as undistinguished as the buttons on our jacket or a stick of roll-on deodorant? Our own utensils and artefacts take on significance for a moment in the light of the future. Small coins glow in our pockets. Our world too seems vividly, unbearably present, yet mysteriously far off.
Each decade a new class of objects comes into being as living itself creates new categories of use. After the centuries of the Bowl (plain or decorated with rice-grains, or with figures, some of them gods, in hieratic poses, or dancing or making love) come the centuries of the Wheel, the age of Moving-across-the-Surface-of-the-Earth, from the ox-cart to the Silver Spur.
Later again, it is not only objects that survive and can be collected. Images too, the shadowy projection of objects, live on to haunt us with the immediacy of what was: figures alone or in groups, seated with a pug dog on their knees or stiffly upright in boating costume beside an oar; a pyramid of young men in flannel slacks and singlets holding the difficult pose for ever, blood swelling their necks as they strain upwards, set on physical perfection; three axemen beside a fence, leaning their rough heads together; the crowd round an air-balloon. Bearded, mono-cled, or in hoop skirts under parasols, and with all their flesh about them, they stare boldly out of a century of Smiles …
Not long ago,in the Museum of the Holocaust at Jerusalem, a middle-aged American, an insurance assessor, gave a sudden cry before one of the exhibits, threw out his arms, and while two maiden ladies from Hannibal, Missouri, looked on in helpless dismay, fell slowly to his knees — then, clutching his chest, even more slowly to the pavement at their feet. They tried to help him, but he did not get up again.
His tour companions had found him difficult, a loud, dull fellow. He had informed them that he made eighty-five thousand dollars a year, had a house at Fresno and a ranch near Santa Fe, was divorced from a woman called Emmeline who had cost him his balls in alimony, had a son who was on heroin, voted for Reagan, hated the Ruskies and that goddamned Ayatollah — the usual stuff. He wore a gold ring on one finger with a Hebrew letter (he was Jewish) and now, right in the middle of a nine-day tour of all the holy places, Christian, Jewish, and you-name-it, he was dead. He had, it seems, been confronted here with the only surviving record of his family, a group picture taken forty years before on the welcoming-ramp at Treblinka: his mother, father, two sisters, his six-year-old self, all with the white breath pouring out of their mouths in the January cold, heads turned in half-profile and slightly lifted towards the darkness just ahead, with beyond it (though this they could not have foreseen) a metre of roughened museum wall and the door into another country.
It was that vision of himself in the same dimension as the long dead that struck the man and struck him down: that rather than any recollection of the moment when the shot was taken. To see thus, from the safe distance of an American travel-group he had joined in Athens, Greece, that lost gathering to which he most truly belonged, and to see at last just where it was (despite the forty years’ detour) that he was headed, had pushed him to the only step he could have taken — straight through the wall; and an error made nearly half a century ago, when an officer had breathed too lightly on a rubber stamp, was righted at last and a number restored to sequence. His cry was a homecoming.
His fellow-travellers on this later occasion, though shaken, went on to the rest of the experience: images, objects, carefully worked facts and descriptions. Only that one man went right to the centre, stepping through a wall that was in the end as insubstantial as breath, and on into flame.
Gillian Vaughan came back from her great-aunt Connie's with a present, a large and rather dog-eared envelope that she was clutching with fervour to her schoolgirl breast and which she refused at first to show.
Her mother was disconcerted, and not for the first time, by the child's intractable oddity. At just eleven Gillian was old-fashioned— that was the kind way of putting it, and stubbornly so; it was something she would not outgrow. It worried the mother, since her own nature was uncomplicated, easy (or so she thought), and she would have wished for the same qualities in her child. “Gillian darling,” she protested now, but mildly, she was easily hurt, "what on earth? — I mean, what are we to do with them?”