A young woman stood on the doorstep.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said. “Isabel Field, Social Services.”
As she said this, she put one foot over the threshold. Presumptuous, Evelyn thought. For a moment she moved forward to block the doorway; stepped back just as the girl’s eyes began to widen in surprise.
“Delighted,” Evelyn said. “I can’t think why we haven’t met.”
Standing in the hall, the girl unwound a long woollen scarf from round her neck.
“I’ve written,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve called before.”
“Really?”
“You’ve been out, perhaps.”
“Very likely.”
“So I’ve been unlucky.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Are you well, Mrs. Axon?”
“Quite well, thank you.”
“And is Muriel well?”
“Come through, Miss Field.”
Muriel sat and stared into the fireplace, pulling at a thread of her blue dress. She gave the visitor one glance devoid of all interest, then slumped down further into her chair.
“Hello, Muriel.” Isabel stood before her, but her client would not look up. She took a chair; leaning forward, a hand extended, she tried to engage Muriel’s attention. Her voice was gentle, almost timid. She doesn’t know how to go on, Evelyn thought.
“How are things, Muriel?”
“You’ll find,” Evelyn said, “that Muriel has no small talk. It’s a big disadvantage to her, socially.”
“It’s not really small talk, is it?” The girl glanced up at Evelyn. “I am here on business, after all.”
“Yes, but there’s no compulsion, is there? You don’t have to come. She’s not committed a crime.”
“No, no, of course not, but we are very concerned about Muriel. It’s months since she’s been to the Day Centre.”
“Well, she has a full life.”
“Really? That wasn’t the picture we’d formed.”
“We?”
“Social Services. It’s unfortunate that so many people have handled Muriel’s case, but we do have records, you know.”
“Well, look for yourself. She’s happy enough. She didn’t like the class.”
“Didn’t she?” Concern crossed the girl’s face. She’s all hot and strong when she talks to me, Evelyn thought, and gentle as a mouse with Muriel. But now she’s wondering what to do.
“I didn’t know that. She should have said something at the time. What didn’t she like?”
“She doesn’t care for being regimented. She likes a bit of independent action, Muriel.”
Again, Miss Field’s attention flickered over her client. “She seems so…so cut off. Is she often like this?”
“Now and again. She’s a grown woman. She’s got a tongue in her head.”
“I wish she’d use it.”
“How would you like it, Miss Field, if strangers came into your house enquiring into your circumstances? Suppose it were your own home?”
Now the girl blushed, a deep guilty red.
“Well, in a sense, Mrs. Axon, I wouldn’t like it at all. But I’m not trying to interfere, only to help Muriel. You see, looking at her there, hardly moving, her body all drooping, not speaking—well, it crosses my mind that she could be suffering from depression. Clinical depression. Of course, that would be a matter for your GP, in the first instance.”
“I’d take her to the doctor,” Evelyn said, “if I thought it would help.”
“Yes, do take her, because if he thinks she is depressed, there are some excellent drugs. Then, if she felt better in a month or two, she might try the class again.”
“You think that’s what’s the matter, do you? Depression?”
“It could be.”
“You don’t notice anything amiss with her physically?”
“Better let your doctor be the judge of that. I’ll try to call next week, and you can tell me how you got on.” She looked around at Muriel again, again put out her hand. “That’s an unusual dress, Muriel. Where did you get that, then?”
Muriel closed her eyes, screwed them up, and grinned.
“She’s got a sense of humour, hasn’t she?” Miss Field said. She patted Muriel’s wrist. And Evelyn’s patience snapped.
“Sense of humour? Lovely dress?” The girl’s head snapped back in shock at her ugly tone. “I made it for her. I do adorn her, I deck her in all the modes. Yes, she’s a wonderful personality, my daughter, not a beauty, but very striking. Isn’t she, Miss Field?”
The girl straightened up. She was staring at Evelyn, her mouth slightly ajar.
“Perhaps she has a beau.” Evelyn laughed. “Perhaps she slips out when I sleep in the afternoons, and meets him in the park. No wonder you get no answer when you knock, Muriel’s on the razzle.”
The young woman turned, with a strange and frozen expression, and looked at Muriel. Stared, Evelyn might have said, as if she were seeing her for the first time. Muriel lifted her face, like an animal sniffing for water; she looked, her mother thought, particularly unintelligent and unappealing, just at that moment. Without a word, Miss Field scooped up her briefcase, and got herself most precipitately from the room. Evelyn followed her to the front door. The girl jerked it open, and took a deep breath of the leaf-mould air. “I’ll see you again,” she said, and fled down the path towards her car.
Evelyn watched her go with fleeting amusement, thinking that she would likely not be back; but they might send another one, there were plenty in reserve. Something had struck a chord. Her neck felt stiff, her eyes strained, with the effort of keeping her gaze averted from the middle of her daughter’s body. She returned to the sitting-room.
“Thanks to me,” she said. “Thanks to my tact, young lady, you aren’t locked up by now. A month from now you won’t be able to hide it.”
Muriel sat examining her hands. She always looked at them as if they belonged to someone else, and she was surprised to find them attached to her wrists.
“How many times have I told you about going to the door?”
Oh, once twice, thrice, Muriel replied uncaringly.
“You dare to cheek your mother!” Tears sprang into Evelyn’s eyes. I am getting old, she thought, I am getting old and I do not deserve this. It is such a strain for me. Even the blue tits have learned to open the milkbottles; but Muriel has learned nothing at all.
Colin was surprised at how easy it was to tell lies to Sylvia. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere.
That night he drove up to Isabel’s house at half past seven. He knew he was early, so he took the car slowly along the road, reversed into a driveway, and drove back. It was an unremarkable street on the outskirts of town, the kind of place where he would have been glad to live. The estate was too noisy, swarming with the kind of children he taught all day. His windows looked into other windows, and he resented the share of themselves with which his neighbours presented him. The gardens were heavy clay strips, waterlogged and cleared only recently of builder’s rubble; the tiles were coming loose in the bathroom, and rain got in under the kitchen door. He wanted a house like the one in which he had grown up; grey shrubberies and yellow-cream curtains of heavy net guarded each property. Ah, property, he thought, that is what they are, not merely houses but a statement of values. But surely, he thought in mild surprise, those are not the values I hold?
Colin stopped the car. He looked at his watch. His hand went for the door handle, and then withdrew. He sat hunched for a moment and slowly leaned forward, to let his head rest on the steering wheel. I am lonely, he thought, I am behaving very badly. As if I were free to do this.
Muriel had begun to imitate the visitor, crossing her legs at the ankle and tucking them under her chair, and absently smoothing her hair around the imaginary curve of a cheek. She wore the remote and abstracted air of the woman from the Welfare.
As punishment, she was being deprived of food. It annoyed
Evelyn that she wasn’t more affected by this. If you put food in front of her, she ate it; if not, she didn’t miss it. By herself she would starve, Evelyn thought, or make herself very sick. She would bring a raw egg to the table, and set it down with every appearance of satisfaction; choose what was raw or half-cooked or stale, in preference to the good food her mother provided for her. The idea of mealtimes didn’t seem to have got into her head. Is she human, Evelyn wondered that night; is she human or something else, and what is she likely to give birth to?
Colin brought their drinks, and put them down on the table.
“Not a very good film, was it?”
“We didn’t really need to see a film. But if we just parked the car in a field and made love, you wouldn’t think we had a proper relationship.”
Turning his chin very slightly, Colin looked covertly over his shoulder; and then the other way, out of the tail of his eye.
“Just…having a check round,” he said. “I don’t want to run into anybody.”
“You look shifty, doing that.” She seemed amused. “You won’t risk much, will you?”
“You don’t love me,” Colin said heavily. He sat down and pulled up his chair to the table. “You must be playing some sort of game with me.”
“I don’t know what game that could possibly be.”
“Perhaps you’re using me as a study. To extend your professional range.”
She laughed. “You have a curious idea of my job then.”
“Isabel, before I knew you, what did you do at the end of the day?”
She stared. “Substantially, what I still do now.”
“Did you have a boyfriend?”
“I didn’t give anyone up for you, if that’s what you mean. People with an active love-life aren’t found at evening classes.”
“But there have been people?”
“You didn’t think I was a virgin, did you?”
“I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know how it happened, the other night.”
“I have never understood this point of view, that only after so many meetings, so much money spent, so much conversation…I wanted it to happen, or I would have stopped you.”
“I know that. I wasn’t apologising. I just want to know about you. It’s natural, to want to know about the person you love. So you can picture them, when you’re not together. I’d like to know what you do on the nights you’re not with me.”
“I clean the house. And I put my feet up. My job’s quite tiring.”
“Do you like your job? If you’d just tell me about your job, it would be something. When we’re not together you have a way of seeming…nebulous.”
“You’re possessive, Colin.”
“Because you’re evasive.”
“Evasive?” She laughed without humour. “Do you really want to know about my job? Today I met some people who are very evasive.”
“Yes, go on.”
I shouldn’t talk about it, she thought. It’s confidential; no names, but it’s even possible he could know them. I shouldn’t talk about it—oh, but I must, I must. Spit it out. Get the foul taste out of my mouth.
“These people—I’ve been chasing them for weeks. A mother and daughter. They’ll never let me in. I cornered them today.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Oh, the daughter’s mildly retarded. She used to come to a Day Centre we run, but she doesn’t want to come any more.” You handled it badly, said a voice inside her. You were brusque and unprofessional; and then you let the situation completely defeat you. Now tell him about it, set out the facts; so that in setting them out you will become sure of what they are. And only the facts; not some silly product of your imagination. “When I saw the daughter I thought for a moment she must be pregnant. She was wearing the strangest clothes, a sort of blue tent. God knows where she found it.”
“Perhaps she is pregnant.”
“No, that’s not possible. She never goes out, she has no opportunity. She’s revolting, anyway. No one would want her.”
“You’d be surprised. The unlikeliest people find partners, I always think.”
Isabel shivered.
“What is it, are you cold?”
“No. I’d like another drink, maybe.”
He picked up their glasses and took them to the bar. Her eyes followed him. He may not be much, she thought, but he’s sane, he’s clear, he’s outside all this; he has no truck with the filthy speculations I deal in.
“She gave me a shock,” she said, when he sat beside her again.
“Who? Oh, this girl. Sorry, go on.”
“She’s not a girl really. A woman.”
“Are you worried about them?”
“We’re not supposed to worry. Only to display professional concern. It’s different. You mustn’t identify with your client, or let her life touch yours. It’s professional death, to get involved.”
“It must be hard to stay uninvolved, though. If you see people who are unhappy.”
She shrugged. “It’s not my fault that people are unhappy.”
“No, but isn’t it rather your professional responsibility? Or am I pitching it too high?”
“Much too high. That’s the trouble with social work, no one has fixed on what to expect of it. You can’t be with people twenty-four hours of the day. If they’re really going to beat their children to death, they’ll find time to do it. And if you try to take the child away from them it gets into the newspapers, and you are shown to be a do-gooder and a tyrant. And you can’t improve people’s thoughts. You can’t stop them creating private hells for themselves, if that’s what they want to do.”
“Do you see eye-to-eye with your colleagues?”
“Not really. This miserable old woman today asked me how I would like it myself, some strange person coming into the house enquiring into things. I think, my reaction would be that things are bad enough without social workers.”
“I think perhaps you’re in the wrong job, Isabel.”
“Probably.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “I sometimes think I don’t care much for people. When I was a student I spent some time working with schizophrenic children. They frightened me. I used to think—I kept it to myself, of course—that there wasn’t a lot that was human looking out from behind their eyes. Then I studied the people I met on the street. They had much the same expression.”
“We’ll have to go,” he said. “Where do you want to go to?”
It was a blunt demand, but he could not think of any way to soften it. It was not quite time yet; they might hang on for another ten or fifteen minutes. But that would solve nothing.
“Let me just get my coat.”
He helped her into it. “Shall I take you home?”
“Do you want to get rid of me?”
“That’s the last thing I want.”
“Let’s drive then.”
“All right. Soon get the heater going, when we get out on the road.”
He opened the door and she slipped through it under his arm. The night buffeted past them like an animal avid for the hearth. They left the bright doorway for darkness and raw blue air. He felt her shiver against him, and took her arm. On the safe and public tarmac, splashed by yellow lights from the main road, he felt a fugitive wind on his cheek; the hollow-faced tossed bundles onto carts, eyes piercing for the camera. To be exiled, he had read, you need not leave home. Banishment is to the desert round of the familiar world, where small conversation is made and the weekly groceries are bought in good time. He had accepted this, as an intellectual conceit; now he felt the needles of loss. He tightened his grip above her elbow. “Come on, it’s chilly.” Their breath hung on the air. She slid into the passenger seat. “If that van would move,” he said. They had to stop and wait. He edged gingerly out of the car park and onto the main road. “Which way? Oh, Christ.” He slammed the wheel with his hands. He wanted to weep with frustration. “This is ridiculous. Nowhere to go. Like kids. Kids do this.�
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She reached out and put her hand over his. “Colin, it’s all right, calm down. Drive to where we went before, and if you prefer it we can just talk. Or, if you prefer it, take me straight home. Whatever you think best.”
She spoke very softly, very gently. He would always remember the tone of her voice and the tips of her fingers brushing his knuckles, inside the woollen gloves she had just pulled on. Later, when it was all over, he would think: at that point, if at no other, she must have loved me. Then, if at no other time.
“We’ll go to where we went before.”
She pulled off her gloves again and unzipped her bag and fumbled for cigarettes. “Shall I light one for you?”
“Yes please.”
He hardly ever smoked now but he wanted her to touch him again. He could not wait until they got to the field.
As winter set in, Colin waited every week in the street outside Isabel’s house. It was not necessary for him to ring the doorbell. She never kept him waiting for more than a minute, and it gratified him to think that she must listen for the sound of the car.
“Take me to meet your father,” he said. “He need not know that I’m married.”
“I’d rather not tell lies.”
“There’s no need to lie. There’s no need to say anything about it. You shut me out of your life,” he complained. “When you aren’t with me, do you ever give me a single thought?”
Her dark almond eyes flickered over him. Her face remained impassive, unimpressed. “You have all the woman’s lines, Colin. Have you noticed that?”
Once or twice he had glimpsed the elderly man in the doorway, wearing spectacles and a bulky handknitted cardigan. He would wave a hand limply and forgetfully to see his daughter off, and then withdraw into the house.
Then, between the great yellow orbs which flanked the gate, she would turn to him the paler luminous oval of her face; not smiling, not speaking, she would slip into the seat beside him and their evening would begin. These days she wore a belted beige trenchcoat pulled in at the waist, and a long brown woollen scarf. Her hands when she lit a cigarette were often blue and mottled with cold. I will buy her some sheepskin mittens, he thought, at Christmas.
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