The Hide

by Barry Unsworth

  After lunch Marion came out and covered the tables with white cloths. They gleamed with an almost granulated effect in the sunshine, and the breeze kept their lower edges trembling incessantly. The tables remained thus, blank, gleaming, continuously agitated, for about an hour and then my sister and Marion appeared again bearing plates of sandwiches and cakes and setting them out on the tables. From my room I watched them go backwards and forwards, Marion pale, a little round-shouldered, mouth open slightly in the effort of getting everything right, my sister quite clearly nervous, gesturing and making energetic detours. Obviously in the crisis of the organising phase.

  There were bottles of beer and a big brass tea-urn which they carried between them, and strawberries—scores of little plates of strawberries each with a dollop of cream. I could see in Audrey’s face even at this distance the drawn, suffering and yet excited look these preliminaries to hospitality always effected in her. The occasion, of course, was an important one: she was attempting to consolidate her position with the Drama Group by establishing herself as number one fund-raiser. Certainly none of the other members would have been able to stage a thing like this at home.

  After they had finished Audrey retired into the house no doubt to change and so forth, while Marion seated herself in the middle of the lawn and remained there, perhaps to guard against the possible depredations of birds.

  I did not wait to watch the arrivals: indeed I deliberately turned my back on the window in order to avoid doing so. I spent the next hour pleasantly leafing through my scrapbooks. After a while, however, the sound of voices from outside made it difficult to concentrate. Still without going to the window I began to listen more intently, and almost immediately I became possessed by a deep feeling of uneasiness. It was that tribal twittering again. I knew in this moment that I should have to go down and join the party. Perhaps something of profound importance to me personally was at the moment being decided. Thinking of this I became even more agitated. I closed my scrap-book, put it away and went immediately downstairs and out on to the terrace.

  It was still fairly early, there was only a sprinkling of people there, standing in the area bounded by the trestle tables, talking, conveying food from time to time to their mouths. I saw no one I knew. After hesitating for a moment I stationed myself in an angle formed by two tables, on the nearer of which was a plate of chocolate éclairs. I took one of the éclairs. Not far from me there was a balding man of medium build with very large ear-lobes, as though, in the formative period, with a view to elongating them, he had worn heavy earrings, as certain primitive peoples are said to do. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a navy-blue blazer with a badge stitched in gold thread. I caught his eye at this moment, nodded and smiled at him and waved my half eaten éclair. He returned my smile but looked away immediately, seeming rather ill at ease. I took another éclair. Several more people now arrived. The lawn was filling up, the texture of the conversation growing denser. I wondered, with a sudden anxiety which the sweetness in my mouth did little to allay, what the gardener might be up to. I had the impression that numbers of people were glancing at me and glancing away again quickly. My feeling of uneasiness increased. I nodded again at the man with the ear-lobes.

  ‘Good, are they?’ he said, glancing at me and then averting his gaze.

  ‘The king of cakes,’ I said. Or should I say queen?’ For some reason, perhaps because of my anxiety, pronouncing this last word caused me to titter a little. He kept his head austerely averted. ‘It must be wonderful,’ he said, after a moment, ‘to have your own few acres of land. It is beautiful weather today, isn’t it? Real summer weather.’

  As unobtrusively as possible I possessed myself of another éclair. My sister approached us, smiling sociably at the man beside me. ‘Delighted you could come,’ she said. She was wearing a lilac-coloured dress with sleeves very wide at the wrist in a mandarin style and a little conical hat of the same colour. Her smile disappeared when her gaze encountered mine. She looked significantly at a point about half way down my chest. I thought that she had perhaps seen me wolfing the éclairs, but following her gaze I understood almost immediately the reason for her disapproval and perhaps for the rapid glances of which I had been aware since coming to stand here: in my haste to join the guests I had forgotten to change my attire, and I was still wearing my old tweed tunnelling suit with its reddish impregnations of clay. There was a longish pause which I attempted to fill in by looking shrewdly up at the sky; then Audrey’s instincts as a hostess prevailed: ‘Have you two met?’ she said. ‘This is Mr Spink, who does the lighting for our plays. My brother Simon. He is interested in birds.’ This last in a tone of veiled disgust. ‘Why Mr Spink,’ she added, ‘I don’t believe you’re eating anything.’ She raised her arm in a vague gesture, gave him a rather unfocused smile, and moved away.

  ‘Birds of the feathered sort, did our lady hostess mean?’ Spink said. The topic had emboldened him. He not only met my eye now but actually winked.

  ‘What is that badge?’ I said, rather maliciously I am afraid—I hate my hobbies to be mocked. ‘What university is it?’

  ‘Royal Corps of Signals,’ Spink said. He began looking with feigned interest at another part of the lawn and was obviously about to move off when Gravelin was suddenly before us, wearing a dress of large dimensions and generous stripes cut low to expose an expanse of pink neck and upper chest. Her hair was drawn back in a chignon. She enveloped us both in the mild but relentless beam of her prominent grey eyes. ‘How do you do, Mr Thebus?’ she said, obviously resolved to let bygones be bygones. ‘You here too, Mr Spink? Are those strawberries? How delicious!’ She advanced a large reddish hand free of rings and secured a plate. ‘Mm,’ she said, ‘delicious.’ She spooned up a couple, freighted with cream. Like many greedy people she found it best to be open about things. A small gob of cream adhered to the corner of her mouth, exactly the corner, and went disregarded. I watched with some fascination the way the small globule retained its essential form and density though it was constantly being interfered with by the stretching of Gravelin’s mouth. How long could it preserve itself under such circumstances? Unfortunately she now saw the direction and fixity of my gaze and licked it up with nimble, though fleshy tongue.

  I began to feel oppressed now by the proximity of Spink and Gravelin. Also it occurred to me at this point that I had left the gardener too long unattended. He might have taken it into his head or been instructed to start tidying up the shrubbery, he might at this very moment be poking about in the vicinity of my tunnel. . . . I began to make some tentative motions of withdrawal, but Gravelin began immediately to speak, keeping her eyes fixed on me.

  ‘I have such a problem with this man,’ she said. I thought at first she must mean Spink, but the way in which she kept us both in her sights soon disabused me of this idea. No, it must be someone else. I stood there helplessly while Gravelin observed the statutory waiting period, the reverential silence. ‘He pesters me,’ she said. ‘He is always at my bus stop in the morning. He catches the same bus as I do. Every morning he is there. At first it was only good morning, nice day and so on, but now he is becoming familiar. He sits beside me on the bus, attempting to strike up a conversation. He is middle-aged.’ Gravelin paused to lick her sticky fingers girlishly.

  ‘Middle-aged,’ Spink said. ‘Ah.’

  ‘He is becoming familiar,’ Gravelin continued. ‘More and more familiar. Yesterday morning he asked me if I were comfortable in my seat. That is not the sort of question you put to people on a public conveyance. I don’t want to hurt his feelings but what is a girl to do?’ She looked from one to the other of us, conveying the possession of doomed beauty. Another pregnant silence was developing. ‘Get an earlier bus,’ I said, swiftly, breaking it.

  She gave me an unfriendly look. ‘I don’t see why I should put myself out,’ she said. ‘It’s inconvenient.’

  ‘Get on at another bus stop,’ Spink offered. His face bore the abstracted, slightly stricken
look I had seen in other victims of Gravelin’s predicaments, as of a man confronted by a trivial but unexpectedly obstinate impediment to progress. ‘That’s what I would do in your place, get on at another bus stop.’

  ‘Why should I change my habits?’ Gravelin said. ‘It’s not as though it were my fault, is it?’

  Suddenly I knew that I could endure no more of this. ‘Evidently an impasse,’ I said lightly, edging out of my corner and round Gravelin and so away.

  I had intended to pass straight into the grounds and locate the gardener, but found myself now quite close to a group of people surrounding my sister, who was speaking in a hurried, rather breathless but absolutely unfaltering voice:

  ‘It was the mindlessness that amazed me, don’t you know, sheer primitive mindlessness. Not the pain of the cut. The cut was rather a deep one but it wasn’t that that bothered him, he simply didn’t know what to do. . . .’

  She is standing with her back to me but I know what expression she will be wearing, an affected humorousness only partially concealing her underlying excitement, and now for the first time I realise how obsessed Audrey is on this subject, she is no longer concerned with suitable social contexts, with relevance. She seems to think that the gardener, like God, can be referred to at any time, without preliminary description of the being in question. What are the people round her making of it? Their faces look immensely stolid and inexpressive. I see Miriam Daintry in a floppy red hat, Major Donaldson looking hot and rather sleepy, Dovecot’s Adam’s apple as still as a stone, two unknown youngish men both in grey suits.

  ‘He simply allowed the decision to be indefinitely postponed. In that moment, he emptied his mind, you may not believe that is possible, but he is very . . . elemental. He just stood there and the blood dropped on the floor. . . .’

  That was blood then, on the horse, not paint or dye. He must have given it to her at the same time. And the bandage, so conspicuous in the sunshine on the gardener’s thumb. That was blood then, on the horse. She doesn’t say a word about the horse, though.

  ‘Fortunately I went down to the kitchen at the moment. He did everything I told him. I had to lead him over to it, hold his hand under it, he seemed to have no power of . . . independent motion . . . .’

  There is a sort of gaiety in her tone, not at all congruous with the subject, which is after all blood and confusion, an irrepressible gaiety which renders her words intensely disturbing to me. Surely I am not alone in detecting this incongruity? Gravelin and Spink have now joined the group. There are, in fact, only two main groups now: that surrounding my sister and the other, entirely female, centred on the Reverend Ede, who is to draw the winning number, whose resonant voice I hear now saying, ‘We live in an age of immense potential for good or ill. . . .’

  ‘He was white,’ Audrey says, ‘under his tan. I told him he could have a day off but he didn’t want to.’

  ‘Well, that’s a wonder,’ Major Donaldson says, doubtless speaking from a deep knowledge of malingerers acquired in the army. He speaks in normal tones; none of the others look in any way disturbed.

  ‘What impressed me most, as I say, what I chiefly remember, is this extraordinary docility. You’ll think I am exaggerating. . . .’ A humorous glance round the faces, submitting herself to their judgment, secure, however, in really being the one involved. Of course several will privately think that she is heightening the occasion, gilding the whole thing so she can gleam in it too, part of the picture, part of the artist’s conception—Audrey has always seen herself as a figure in the foreground and not only there but outside it too, strenuously publicising the work. . . . Nothing about the horse, though, not a word about the horse. Even if I did not know it was there, up there in her room, I should know there was something more, something splendid in her mind which gives a special vividness to the way she tells us what she is willing to impart. No, the horse clearly is for herself alone. What she attaches to it is incommunicable. And yet what a marvellous finishing touch it would provide, for just such a gathering, the bloodstained horse. My wonder at her reticence increases as I imagine how she would tell it, the dramatic pauses, the obvious attempts to manipulate her audience’s responses, all the marks of a rotten actress. And at the end of all this my dears, what do you think happened? Just when I thought he had lost his wits completely, no flicker of expression on his face at all, he handed me the little wooden horse that he had carved for me himself and it had taken him weeks to do. . . .

  Yes, quite a temptation Audrey, but I am delighted that you don’t succumb. Nothing could have expressed more clearly than this forbearance how much you value that gift.

  I directed myself diagonally across the lawn intending to take the nearest way into the grounds on the side to the right of the drive, the side where my tunnel begins. This involved passing quite close to the group dominated by the Reverend Ede. By a most unfortunate chance, as I was passing, our eyes—mine and the Reverend Ede’s—met, and I seemed to detect in his amiably quizzical expression an intention of addressing me or perhaps the consciousness of just having addressed me. Helplessly responding to this look, indeed quite as if impaled on it, I came to a stop, smiling and nodding my head in acknowledgement but already his face was changing, reforming as it were, and I realised too late that I was mistaken, only at this moment had he become aware of me, and he thought, of course, that I wished to attract his attention, he was regarding me expectantly. I continued to smile, trying to think of some appropriate remark that, once uttered, would enable me to move on into the freedom of the grounds, but nothing came to mind. The Reverend Ede seemed equally at a loss. He did not, however, take his eyes off me. The ladies round him had fallen silent, one or two of them glanced round. I raised my hand in a gesture of greeting and suddenly into my whirling brain came the memory of the new public lavatories opposite the churchyard gates. Some fortnight previously, in passing, I had looked in and been impressed by the immaculate white tiles, the soothing hush—an atmosphere not unlike that of the church itself. Unable to move on and equally unable to endure the silence any longer, I began to speak about these lavatories to the Reverend Ede, although I had no reason to suppose him in any way connected with them. ‘I would like to congratulate you on those new lavatories,’ I heard myself saying. In my nervousness I spoke with offensive familiarity. ‘I don’t know how far . . . but I have long felt the need. . . .’ The Reverend’s face had become quite expressionless now, though he continued to regard me intently. ‘The ones opposite the church, I mean, there are no others as far as I know for miles, convenience in this case is no misnomer, especially for the aged who, let us be frank . . . , yes, your parishioners, in all walks of life, will feel the benefit. . . .’

  The Reverend Ede at this point spoke, his lips moved, but I was confused and heard nothing. I beg your pardon? Especially in the wintry weather, emerging from your church, those lavatories. . . . I beg your pardon?

  I was about to step nearer to him, but my sister approached vivaciously, spoke to him about drawing the tickets for the raffle soon, she was saving the situation again of course, his eyes slid away from me, at last; ‘Entirely as you see fit dear lady,’ I heard him say, as I hurriedly resumed my way out of the enclosure formed by the tables, into the grounds. I was aware that my departure had been closely observed by almost everybody.

  The voices are still audible behind me, indeed very close, but the people are invisible. I move forward, away from the voices, through the trees, through patterns of sunlight and shadow, breaking without violence these patterns, sensing their immediate reforming behind me, the resumption of precise inviolate rays. With every step the sounds recede, my confusion lessens. I am aware of course that by appearing in my tunnelling suit and addressing to the Reverend Ede those unsuitable remarks I have lowered my stock still further with Audrey, but in spite of this, I am not so afraid for myself as I was before. I feel in control of events, through my secret knowledge of the existence of the horse, my sense of having engineered that wh
ole occasion. This gift has fixed them in a relation to each other and to me. They are no longer free to range destructively. My endeavour now must be to choose a time when the feeling between them is taut, a time of tension, and then snap the thread as it were, hoping for a recoil violent enough to propel the gardener out of our lives for good, deflect at the same time my sister’s displeasure from me. . . .

  Gaining the shrubbery, I feel the sun hot again on my back. I entertain briefly the idea of going across to my corner to see if the bungalow woman is anywhere about but my overwhelming desire just now is to get down into my tunnel, to sit down there for a while completely motionless, and rest. My efforts to penetrate my sister’s thoughts, or rather to impose on Audrey the thoughts she should be thinking, to forge thoughts for her, have quite tired me out. Moreover, I feel that I need very urgently the detachment that being below the earth gives me. I am tramelled up with all these persons, my sister and Marion and the gardener and the members of the Drama Group, it is as though we are all snared in repulsively adhesive strands or coils, hideously squirming together. Only down below can I be free of them for a while.

  I made my way therefore, circumspectly but without excessive caution, to the point among the rhododendrons where my tunnel begins. Making sure that there was no one in the drive and no one in view in the roughly semicircular area between where I was standing and the thicker bushes on the nearer side of the pond, I ducked down quickly and crawled under the bush.

  I inserted myself into the entrance shaft, replaced the trapdoor and sank to my knees preparatory to entering the tunnel. I had the torch on me—I am never without it—but preferred for these first few moments to remain thus, on my knees. When I felt sufficiently restored by the darkness, the narrow confines of the shaft, I entered the tunnel, switching on the torch at the same time.