‘What do you look forward to most in the day?’ she once asked her grandmother.
‘Going to bed,’ was the reply, ‘and filling my two hot water bottles.’ Why work through being young, thought Deborah, to this?
Back in the dining-room the children discussed what they should do during the heat-wave. It would be too hot, Deborah said, for cricket. But they might make a house, suggested Roger, in the trees by the paddock. If he got a few old boards from Willis, and nailed them together like a platform, and borrowed the orchard ladder, then they could take fruit and bottles of orange squash and keep them up there, and it would be a camp from which they could spy on Willis afterwards.
Deborah’s first instinct was to say she did not want to play, but she checked herself in time. Finding the boards and fixing them would take Roger a whole morning. It would keep him employed. ‘Yes, it’s a good idea,’ she said, and to foster his spirit of adventure she looked at his notebook, as they were drinking their soup, and approved of items necessary for the camp while he jotted them down. It was all part of the day-long deceit she practised to express understanding of his way of life.
When they had finished supper they took their trays to the kitchen and watched Agnes, for a moment, as she prepared the second meal for the grandparents. The soup was the same, but garnished. Little croûtons of toasted bread were added to it. And the butter was made into pats, not cut in a slab. The savoury tonight was to be cheese straws. The children finished the ones that Agnes had burnt. Then they went through to the drawing-room to say good night. The older people had both changed. Grandpapa was in a smoking-jacket, and wore soft slippers. Grandmama had a dress that she had worn several years ago in London. She had a cardigan round her shoulders like a cape.
‘Go carefully with the bath-water,’ she said. ‘We’ll be short if there’s no rain.’
They kissed her smooth, soft skin. It smelt of rose leaves. Grandpapa’s chin was sharp and bony. He did not kiss Roger.
‘Be quiet overhead,’ whispered their grandmother. The children nodded.The dining-room was underneath their rooms, and any jumping about or laughter would make a disturbance.
Deborah felt a wave of affection for the two old people.Their lives must be empty and sad. ‘We are glad to be here,’ she said. Grandmama smiled. This was how she lived, thought Deborah, on little crumbs of comfort.
Once out of the room their spirits soared, and to show relief Roger chased Deborah upstairs, both laughing for no reason. Undressing, they forgot the instructions about the bath, and when they went into the bathroom - Deborah was to have first go - the water was gurgling into the overflow. They tore out the plug in a panic, and listened to the waste roaring down the pipe to the drain below. If Agnes did not have the wireless on she would hear it.
The children were too old now for boats or play, but the bathroom was a place for confidences, for a sharing of those few tastes they agreed upon, or, after quarrelling, for moody silence. The one who broke silence first would then lose face.
‘Willis has a new bicycle,’ said Roger. ‘I saw it propped against the shed. I couldn’t try it because he was there. But I shall tomorrow. It’s a Raleigh.’
He liked all practical things, and the trying of the gardener’s bicycle would give an added interest to the morning of next day. Willis had a bag of tools in a leather pouch behind the saddle. These could all be felt and the spanners, smelling of oil, tested for shape and usefulness.
‘If Willis died,’ said Deborah, ‘I wonder what age he would be.’
It was the kind of remark that Roger resented always. What had death to do with bicycles? ‘He’s sixty-five,’ he said, ‘so he’d be sixty-five.’
‘No,’ said Deborah, ‘what age when he got there.’
Roger did not want to discuss it. ‘I bet I can ride it round the stables if I lower the seat,’ he said. ‘I bet I don’t fall off.’
But if Roger would not rise to death, Deborah would not rise to the wager. ‘Who cares?’ she said.
The sudden streak of cruelty stung the brother. Who cared indeed . . . The horror of an empty world encompassed him, and to give himself confidence he seized the wet sponge and flung it out of the window. They heard it splosh on the terrace below.
‘Grandpapa will step on it, and slip,’ said Deborah, aghast.
The image seized them, and choking back laughter they covered their faces. Hysteria doubled them up. Roger rolled over and over on the bathroom floor. Deborah, the first to recover, wondered why laughter was so near to pain, why Roger’s face, twisted now in merriment, was yet the same crumpled thing when his heart was breaking.
‘Hurry up,’ she said briefly, ‘let’s dry the floor,’ and as they wiped the linoleum with their towels the action sobered them both.
Back in their bedrooms, the door open between them, they watched the light slowly fading. But the air was warm like day. Their grandfather and the people who said what the weather was going to be were right. The heat-wave was on its way. Deborah, leaning out of the open window, fancied she could see it in the sky, a dull haze where the sun had been before; and the trees beyond the lawn, day-coloured when they were having their supper in the dining-room, had turned into night-birds with outstretched wings. The garden knew about the promised heat-wave, and rejoiced: the lack of rain was of no consequence yet, for the warm air was a trap, lulling it into a drowsy contentment.
The dull murmur of their grandparents’ voices came from the dining-room below. What did they discuss, wondered Deborah. Did they make those sounds to reassure the children, or were their voices part of their unreal world? Presently the voices ceased, and then there was a scraping of chairs, and voices from a different quarter, the drawing-room now, and a faint smell of their grandfather’s cigarette.
Deborah called softly to her brother but he did not answer. She went through to his room, and he was asleep. He must have fallen asleep suddenly, in the midst of talking. She was relieved. Now she could be alone again, and not have to keep up the pretence of sharing conversation. Dusk was everywhere, the sky a deepening black. ‘When they’ve gone up to bed,’ thought Deborah, ‘then I’ll be truly alone.’ She knew what she was going to do. She waited there, by the open window, and the deepening sky lost the veil that covered it, the haze disintegrated, and the stars broke through.Where there had been nothing was life, dusty and bright, and the waiting earth gave off a scent of knowledge. Dew rose from the pores. The lawn was white.
Patch, the old dog, who slept at the end of Grandpapa’s bed on a plaid rug, came out on to the terrace and barked hoarsely. Deborah leant out and threw a piece of creeper on to him. He shook his back.Then he waddled slowly to the flower-tub above the steps and cocked his leg. It was his nightly routine. He barked once more, staring blindly at the hostile trees, and went back into the drawing-room. Soon afterwards, someone came to close the windows - Grandmama, thought Deborah, for the touch was light. ‘They are shutting out the best,’ said the child to herself, ‘all the meaning, and all the point.’ Patch, being an animal, should know better. He ought to be in a kennel where he could watch, but instead, grown fat and soft, he preferred the bumpiness of her grandfather’s bed. He had forgotten the secrets. So had they, the old people.
Deborah heard her grandparents come upstairs. First her grandmother, the quicker of the two, and then her grandfather, more laboured, saying a word or two to Patch as the little dog wheezed his way up. There was a general clicking of lights and shutting of doors. Then silence. How remote, the world of the grandparents, undressing with curtains closed. A pattern of life unchanged for so many years. What went on without would never be known. ‘He that has ears to hear, let him hear,’ said Deborah, and she thought of the callousness of Jesus which no priest could explain. Let the dead bury their dead. All the people in the world, undressing now, or sleeping, not just in the village but in cities and capitals, they were shutting out the truth, they were burying their dead. They wasted silence.
The stable clock
struck eleven. Deborah pulled on her clothes. Not the cotton frock of the day, but her old jeans that Grandmama disliked, rolled up above her knees. And a jersey. Sandshoes with a hole that did not matter. She was cunning enough to go down by the back stairs. Patch would bark if she tried the front stairs, close to the grandparents’ rooms. The backstairs led past Agnes’ room, which smelt of apples though she never ate fruit. Deborah could hear her snoring. She would not even wake on Judgement Day. And this led her to wonder on the truth of that fable too, for there might be so many millions by then who liked their graves - Grandpapa, for instance, fond of his routine, and irritated at the sudden riot of trumpets.
Deborah crept past the pantry and the servants’ hall - it was only a tiny sitting-room for Agnes, but long usage had given it the dignity of the name - and unlatched and unbolted the heavy back door. Then she stepped outside, on to the gravel, and took the long way round by the front of the house so as not to tread on the terrace, fronting the lawns and the garden.
The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand.
Deborah went to the summer-house, and it was not sleeping like the house fronting the terrace but open to understanding, sharing complicity. Even the dusty windows caught the light, and the cobwebs shone. She rummaged for the old lilo and the moth-eaten car rug that Grandmama had thrown out two summers ago, and bearing them over her shoulder she made her way to the pool. The alley-way was ghostly, and Deborah knew, for all her mounting tension, that the test was hard. Part of her was still body-bound, and afraid of shadows. If anything stirred she would jump and know true terror. She must show defiance, though.The woods expected it. Like old wise lamas they expected courage.
She sensed approval as she ran the gauntlet, the tall trees watching. Any sign of turning back, of panic, and they would crowd upon her in a choking mass, smothering protest. Branches would become arms, gnarled and knotty, ready to strangle, and the leaves of the higher trees fold in and close like the sudden furling of giant umbrellas. The smaller undergrowth, obedient to the will, would become a briary of a million thorns where animals of no known world crouched snarling, their eyes on fire.To show fear was to show misunderstanding. The woods were merciless.
Deborah walked the alley-way to the pool, her left hand holding the lilo and the rug on her shoulder, her right hand raised in salutation.This was a gesture of respect.Then she paused before the pool and laid down her burden beside it. The lilo was to be her bed, the rug her cover. She took off her shoes, also in respect, and lay down upon the lilo. Then, drawing the rug to her chin, she lay flat, her eyes upon the sky. The gauntlet of the alley-way over, she had no more fear. The woods had accepted her, and the pool was the final resting-place, the doorway, the key.
‘I shan’t sleep,’ thought Deborah. ‘I shall just lie awake here all the night and wait for morning, but it will be a kind of introduction to life, like being confirmed.’
The stars were thicker now than they had been before. No space in the sky without a prick of light, each star a sun. Some, she thought, were newly born, white-hot, and others wise and colder, nearing completion. The law encompassed them, fixing the riotous path, but how they fell and tumbled depended upon themselves. Such peace, such stillness, such sudden quietude, excitement gone. The trees were no longer menacing but guardians, and the pool was primeval water, the first, the last.
Then Deborah stood at the wicket-gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. ‘Pass through,’ she said when Deborah reached her. ‘We saw you coming.’ The wicket-gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?’
‘It could be,’ smiled the woman. ‘There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one.’
Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms.
‘Why only now, tonight?’ asked Deborah. ‘Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?’
‘It’s a trick,’ said the woman. ‘You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We’re always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick’s easier by night, that’s all.’
‘Am I dreaming, then?’ asked Deborah.
‘No,’ said the woman, ‘this isn’t a dream. And it isn’t death, either. It’s the secret world.’
The secret world . . . It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart.
‘Of course . . .’ she said, ‘of course . . .’ and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge.
‘I’m not myself, then, after all,’ she thought. ‘I knew I wasn’t. It was only the task given,’ and, looking down, she saw a little child who was blind trying to find her way. Pity seized her. She bent down and put her hands on the child’s eyes, and they opened, and the child was herself at two years old. The incident came back. It was when her mother died and Roger was born.
‘It doesn’t matter after all,’ she told the child. ‘You are not lost. You don’t have to go on crying.’ Then the child that had been herself melted, and became absorbed in the water and the sky, and the joy of the invading flood intensified so that there was no body at all but only being. No words, only movements. And the beating of wings. This above all, the beating of wings.
‘Don’t let me go!’ It was a pulse in her ear, and a cry, and she saw the woman at the turnstile put up her hands to hold her. Then there was such darkness, such dragging, terrible darkness, and the beginning of pain all over again, the leaden heart, the tears, the misunderstanding. The voice saying ‘No!’ was her own harsh, worldly voice, and she was staring at the restless trees, black and ominous against the sky. One hand trailed in the water of the pool.
Deborah sat up, sobbing. The hand that had been in the pool was wet and cold. She dried it on the rug. And suddenly she was seized with such fear that her body took possession, and throwing aside the rug she began to run along the alley-way, the dark trees mocking and the welcome of the woman at the turnstile turned to treachery. Safety lay in the house behind the closed curtains, security was with the grandparents sleeping in their beds, and like a leaf driven before a whirlwind Deborah was out of the woods and across the silver soaking lawn, up the steps beyond the terrace and through the garden-gate to the back door.
The slumbering solid house received her. It was like an old staid person who, surviving many trials, had learnt experience. ‘Don’t take any notice of them,’ it seemed to say, jerking its head - did a house have a head? - towards the woods beyond.‘They’ve made no contribution to civilization. I’m man-made and different. This is where you belong, dear child. Now settle down.’
Deborah went back again upstairs and into her bedroom. Nothing had changed. It was still the same. Going to the open window she saw that the woods and the lawn seemed unaltered from the moment, how long back she did not know, when she had stood there, deciding upon the visit to the pool. The only difference now was in her
self. The excitement had gone, the tension too. Even the terror of those last moments, when her flying feet had brought her to the house, seemed unreal.
She drew the curtains, just as her grandmother might have done, and climbed into bed. Her mind was now preoccupied with practical difficulties, like explaining the presence of the lilo and the rug beside the pool. Willis might find them, and tell her grandfather. The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets, reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket. The thing was, though - and the last remaining conscious thread of thought decided to postpone conclusion until the morning - which was real? This safety of the house, or the secret world?
2
When Deborah woke next morning she knew at once that her mood was bad. It would last her for the day. Her eyes ached, and her neck was stiff, and there was a taste in her mouth like magnesia. Immediately Roger came running into her room, his face refreshed and smiling from some dreamless sleep, and jumped on her bed.
‘It’s come,’ he said, ‘the heat-wave’s come. It’s going to be ninety in the shade.’
Deborah considered how best she could damp his day. ‘It can go to a hundred for all I care,’ she said. ‘I’m going to read all morning.’
His face fell. A look of bewilderment came into his eyes. ‘But the house?’ he said. ‘We’d decided to have a house in the trees, don’t you remember? I was going to get some planks from Willis.’
Deborah turned over in bed and humped her knees. ‘You can, if you like,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a silly game.’
She shut her eyes, feigning sleep, and presently she heard his feet patter slowly back to his own room, and then the thud of a ball against the wall. If he goes on doing that, she thought maliciously, Grandpapa will ring his bell, and Agnes will come panting up the stairs. She hoped for destruction, for grumbling and snapping, and everyone falling out, not speaking. That was the way of the world.
The Breaking Point: Short Stories Page 16