6

Saturday 5 — Tuesday 15 July 1986

Chaite had spent her last week with her sister’s family; a holiday

week during which she had immersed herself in being Auntie Chaite to two nephews and two nieces who loved her (in a John-Frumm-like way) — and her metallic mauve Metro, treating it as an extension to their home; leaving it filled with discarded wrappers and crisps bags and empty Coke cans.

On the last day, they had celebrated Auntie Chaite’s twenty-eighth birthday by going to Shalthorpe zoo, and done zooly things: monkeystudy, sealwatching and penguin fancying.

While the children swang on the swings, Chaite had watched the alligators, unchanged in their habits since the days of the dinosaurs, time capsules of reptilian remanence.

Chaite had focused her thoughts on the alligators in their artificial environment, until the panorama changed to a desolate swamp, nothing man made, no humans, no hominids. The chatter of the people became that of pterodactyls; she heard the distant trumpeting of an elephant and the throaty purring roar of a tiger as of feral beasts roaming freely; the hair on her neck bristled. As the only human being in that world, millions of years before her time, Chaite shivered. As long as she kept still and silent, all would be well. It would only be when she moved the slightest muscle that she would have to fend for herself in this hostile world — whether it was the world of the solitary human out of her time faced with survival (and ‘survival for what?’ asked the Only Girl in the World), or the solitary human in her real here-and-now body, at this moment in sole charge of her family’s four representatives of the next generation.

Reality returned with the impact of a niece clasping her legs: ‘Auntie Chaite, have you ever seen a dinosaur?’

‘Are there any real live ones?’

‘Not stegosauruses and diplodocuses and pterodactyls and things like that. But those alligators there have been like that for millions of years’

‘Are those alligators millions of years old?’

‘Well, they aren’t, but there have been alligators that look like that for millions of years’

‘Do you think they tell stories about what it was like millions of years ago?’

‘I expect so. But I expect they haven’t seen a lot of change — because they’ve stayed the same, and crawled about in the water ...’

‘Perhaps they tell stories about how man came’

‘And what it used to be like when it was all open fields around here’

’Auntie Chaite ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Did an alligator bite off your hand?’

‘Yes ... when I was on a pirate ship on the South China Seas’

Most of the time the children took Auntie Chaite’s missing left hand for granted and didn’t talk about it. Chaite didn’t mind talking about it as long as people didn’t ask too many questions about how she had lost it. What she did mind was people who elaborately pretended not to notice; it could make them clumsy. Not that everyone did notice; her artificial hand could be gratifyingly lifelike (in a passive sort of way) and most people were singularly unobservant.

‘Auntie Chaite ...’

‘What now?’

‘When will it be time for our sandwiches?’

Chaite looked at her watch: ‘It’s time now — call the others, and we’ll go to the picnic area’

many cherished presents, and green jelly and ice cream and the nicest soft banana cake she had ever tasted.

‘When are you going away, Auntie Chaite?’

‘Tonight. I’ve got to be at home tomorrow to write some letters, and next week I’m going to look for a job’

‘Don’t you have a job?’

‘Not at the moment. I used to have one, and then I stopped. So I’ve got to find another’

‘What sort of a job are you going to find?’

‘I’m not sure’ Chaite wasn’t giving anything away.

‘Will it be a typing job?’

‘How do you type with one hand?’

‘I’ll show you sometime’

‘Our Mummy can type’

‘Our Mummy does very fast typing’

‘Our Mummy doesn’t have a job’

‘I thought everybody had a job’

‘Our Daddy’s got a job’

‘Yes, Daddy’s got a very hard job’

‘Why can’t you stay some more?’

‘When can we go to see a film?’

‘I’ll take you to see a film next time I come’

‘When you’ve got a job’

Thinking about the job, Chaite fell into conversation with Cepha and Rupert that evening. She could never understand how a sister of hers could have married Rupert. Remembering herself and Cepha — and Mercia — as girls, talking about the men they would marry, never would she have imagined someone as humourless as Rupert. But he was good and kind and solid; it seemed somehow obscene to criticise him for not being what she thought he ought to be. After all, she was a fine one to talk; she thought angrily of Roy, and — as she put it to herself somewhat unfairly — what he had done to her. And she thought of Colley; if she hadn’t met him as she did, she wouldn’t be looking for a job now.

Chaite could have made more of her hopes of returning to Sellis & Co, Auctioneers & Estate Agents, but she felt it was tempting Providence to treat the outcome of her forthcoming interview as cut and dried.

qualified both as ’perceived’). They tried this; if any of them perceived Chaite’s enforced right-handedness as a weakness, they didn’t let on.

Then Rupert asked her to record her experience (he qualified it as ‘practical’). It was here that she started to kick over the traces; she knew he meant his analysis with kindness, but she felt she was being treated as an object — similar to the RAF concept of people as self-loading freight. Rupert’s clinical approach started to annoy her; seeing what was happening, Cepha tried to bring the analysis under control; she started to play it like a game; before long, she and Cepha developed a fit of sisterly giggles and then, predictably, Rupert had become annoyed.

So the attempt had fallen by the wayside for, in spite of the giggles, Chaite could feel her temper rising. She had thought she had conquered it now; knew how to control it — she had cause enough to regret its consequences; its eruption had more than once had a profound effect upon the course of her life. And here it was, irrepressible.

Cepha had never fully understood Chaite’s terrible temper; Chaite had left home and married Roy. It had had something to do with Chaite’s accident, and later her losing her job; she knew that Chaite hadn’t told her the truth, and she could see no way of opening the subject. Mercia knew even less about it than Cepha; Roy had disappeared.

Chaite stood up, voice quivering: ‘I think I must go home now’

‘You don’t have to ... [and you really ought to calm down before you do] ... why not have a good night’s rest; take it easy ... anyway, the children will want to see you before you go’

Chaite knew that Cepha was right, but: ‘I’ve said good-bye to them — they’re not expecting to see me tomorrow’