The Anderson Question

by Bel Mooney

  At last he said, simply, ‘There’s nothing else for it, you know.’

  His voice sounded jokey, not grave; and she frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘There’s nothing else to do but forgive.’

  Eleanor nodded, then put her head on one side and looked at him quizzically: ‘Ah yes, Conrad, I know that’s right. But who? Forgive who? Him – or myself?’

  His mouth was wry. ‘Oh – in general, I should say.’

  ‘It’s not so easy. Easier to say.’

  He put a hand on her arm, urgently as if he had to make himself understood, ‘It’s like confessing, I think. You have to confess to be able to forgive properly; you have to confess to your own history. Looking two ways at once, you see.’

  ‘Do you mean admitting where you went wrong?’

  He squeezed her forearm, as though impatient. ‘No! That’s simple. I don’t know … somebody once said it, I seem to remember – Confess to history. It’s not the things you left undone, or anything so simple, because that has to do with what we can help, and I’m talking about what we can’t help. Confess … it’s true in two ways, both on a personal level and more generally. You see, if we see ourselves as linked indissolubly with the past, we can go on living it with understanding. It’s accepting its responsibility for you, and also your responsibility for it, don’t you see? It gives me great comfort, Eleanor.’

  She did not understand, he could tell. She shook her head slowly: ‘I can’t bear to think of that; it going on, forever. I want to close the door.’

  ‘You musn’t! Think of it all – the people with their lives, their love for each other, having their children, growing old, playing with grandchildren, knowing they will be remembered and forgiven, all accepting each other in the great tolerance, forever … you can’t close the door on that! It is what you were born to.’

  ‘You’re lucky, Conrad.’ There was great envy in her voice, and as much humility in his reply:

  ‘Me? Just an old relic. But I must admit I don’t mind that anymore.’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’

  ‘Just remember what I said then, Eleanor, remember what the old fool says. There’s nothing else to do, but forgive.’ He said it lightly, as before.

  ‘Shall I walk across to your house with you, Conrad?’

  Surprised he said, ‘Of course!’

  ‘I might beg a cup of coffee from you, if you have such a thing in the house.’

  ‘You mustn’t mind the state of the old place,’ he replied, his voice rising to a gentle query.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  As they turned to cross the road, pausing at the kerb although the village street was quietening now, Conrad obeyed an impulse and reached out, leaning on the younger woman as he took her arm, so that she could smell, with no distaste, the odd, musty aroma of his bent head.

  Jack and Margaret Ainslie were undressing, folding their special clothes away in the suitcase they kept under the bed. He said it went well, and she agreed, combing her thin hair in the glass which also contained his reflection. ‘I’ve been thinking, Jack,’ she said, ‘that we could do something, you know, something to show.’

  ‘Just what I’d thought too, Mags. And I tell you what, I’ve got an idea. What about a little garden seat?’

  ‘There, in the churchyard?’

  ‘Just it! With a little plaque, brass, with the names on. Both their names.’

  She turned, her eyes wide with pleasure and worry. ‘It’ud be lovely, but, wouldn’t it be very dear? I wouldn’t want anything second hand.’

  ‘No, we can do it, Mags. People’ull like it. Something to sit on there, and think. Just near. It’ll be sort of permanent, won’t it?’

  As they nodded at each other, with the knowledge that something important had been decided, Daphne Ryan descended her stairs. Enid was already in her room, exhausted, with the rum and coffee by her bed, but Daphne wanted to linger. She sighed, with the swelling sense that she had achieved much. She still heard the applause, and in her imagination it was as if it were all for her alone, the musician, the reciter, the singer, the joker, the source of all pleasure; and even the stage itself – the blank space on which things happen. ‘It is worth it, after all,’ she said aloud, waddling to the sideboard to pour herself a sherry, ‘and I think you deserve this, my girl.’ The trumpet had not been so bad, and the flute had been lovely … ‘And everybody enjoyed themselves, you could tell. But next year, no, I don’t think she should play next year. Next year I must find some new people to do things …’

  She pulled back the curtains, to be ready for the morning. As they crossed the road, very slowly for Conrad’s sake, Eleanor glanced towards the Ryans’ house and saw her in the distance, a tiny shapeless figure silhouetted against the yellow light. Then she and Conrad reached The King’s Head, and caught each other’s eyes with identical grimaces at the rattle of pinball, television and conversation from the glowing windows, before turning together into the long, shadowy overgrown drive to Winter House.

  Epilogue

  The hot Bank Holiday had brought crowds to the area. Little village shops sold out of ice cream, and walkers abandoned their target of miles, regretting the layers of clothes they had worn in case the May weather should prove deceitful. Around the Ordnance Survey post on the plateau in the Quantock Hills, people wandered, and sat, and ate sandwiches. Some people still picnicked inside their cars, although the afternoon sun was so warm. Litter was everywhere: papers, cans, crisp bags.

  A family sat on chairs around a battered old green Cortina: father, mother, and two teenage children, who listened to music on their transistor radio, despite protests from one middle-aged couple in country-green clothes, who stalked past in sensible shoes. A little way off a child sat pulling aimlessly at the grass, a little girl of three, the ‘afterthought’, as they called her. She was bored. Nobody would play with her, and twice her mother had shouted that she must not dirty her dress. She glanced at her family. Her father seemed to be asleep, and her mother had disappeared inside the car, putting things away.

  Escape. She put a blade of grass in her mouth, got up, and wandered off. The sky was immense to her, and the gorse bushes like forest trees, and the streak of Bristol Channel in the distance as vast and uncharted as an undiscovered ocean, which she thought it was. She wandered, stopped to tread on a beetle, prodded curiously at the resulting small mess on the ground, then skipped a little, wiping her fingers on her dress.

  She wanted to hide from her parents, forgetting, in the excitement of the independent decision, that she had done it before, and been punished. So she skirted the clump of trees, ran down into the little hollow, and waited. No one came. Bored, she wandered further, and decided to pick things. Bushes were near her, bearing yellow flowers, and she looked closely at one, noticing something whiter than the flowers, something hidden in the heart of the bush, low, at her own level.

  The little girl thrust in a hand, crying out a little as she was scratched, but not minding as she grasped her prize. She looked at it, then her face fell. It was nothing but a piece of paper; she knew from trying to scribble and cut out in their own back garden that paper blew away, and so although there was no wind, she held it tight. ‘Dirty,’ she said to no one, examining the slightly torn, stained edges, not knowing that the density of the gorse bush had protected the letter from far worse ravages. ‘Numbers,’ she said, staring at the paper as she saw her parents do, and tracing some of the shapes with one small finger.

  And most of it was left.

  Dearest Eleanor,

  … not much time left to explain to you. I know you will … puzzled and hurt. You may even be angry with me. But I … could never have explained this to you, and that says what was good, not bad, about our marriage. You always saved me from despair, and you rooted me. Without you I should … I’ve felt for years like a man living two lives – the real life of his private self, which is negative, full of hatred: … fals
e life which is the public self, the good man, the pillar of the community. Kind. If I told the truth and … that I care about nobody, especially not myself, the … could people look at me, how could you look at me? It seems to me now that the decent thing is to end the lying. And I like the power of it, Eleanor. Perhaps that is the truest reason. At last I can choose something. I am not waiting, afraid, as I’ve seen so many people … I feel I am being honest, taking control at last …

  Dear Eleanor, nobody could have been better for me than you have been. When I say that I care about nobody, I don’t mean I love nobody. Love is a helpless thing, and I can’t … but love you and Paul. But beyond that, my energy has gone, and caring implies energy, faith, a belief that you have something to offer. But I have nothing left, except this choice. It is because I love you, and I no longer … lie, that I am setting you free. I want to ask you which is better: for me to go on betraying us both by living, or to be honest at last in dying? Honourable, that is what I am trying … and because I love you so much I ask you to understand, and forgive me, with love,

  David.

  She squinted at the puzzling hieroglyphics, bringing them close to her face as she had seen her grandfather do, when he complained he had lost his glasses. Then she heard the voices. They called her name. ‘Michelle? Michelle? Michelle!’ She looked up, and saw her mother standing on the edge of the hollow. She was frowning and shouting, ‘You don’t wander off like that! We thought you was lost, you naughty girl! What’s that you’ve got in your hand? Nasty, dirty thing – throw it away!’

  She looked at her mother, then down at the paper in her hand. Afraid, she looked up again. Then the voice changed; the day was too beautiful for anger: ‘Come on, lovey, I’ve got some sweets for you in the car.’ A smile broke across the child’s face. She took the piece of paper in both hands, and quickly tore it in half across, then again, scrabbling at the paper with her fingers. It shredded easily, and when her hands were full of fragments she flung them out wide. Caught in a current of air, the scraps of paper fluttered white in the sunlight, like tiny gulls’ wings, before eddying down to rest on the earth.

  A Note on the Author

  Bel Mooney (born 1946) is an English journalist and broadcaster. She was born in Liverpool, and spent her earliest years on a council estate;in 1969 Mooney became a journalist,and later went on to write for the New Statesman, the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Cosmopolitan and many others. She was also a columnist on the Daily Mirror, The Times and The Sunday Times.

  Having made her name as a journalist, columnist, and broadcaster, Mooney turned her hand to writing fiction for adults and children. She haspublished 26 books for children and young people, and her fiction (adults and children) has been translated into eleven languages. Her children’s novel The Voices of Silence won a New York Public Library citation and was shortlisted for a Gold Medal in the State of California.

  Mooney holds honorary degrees from the University of Bath and Liverpool John Moores University, and is a Fellow of University College London. She has reviewed fiction and non-fiction for many newspapers including the Spectator, the Observer, The Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She has also been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year and The Orange Prize.

  Discover books by Bel Mooney published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/Bel Mooney

  Bel Mooney’s Somerset

  Lost Footsteps

  The Anderson Question

  The Fourth of July

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain

  references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1985 by Hamish Hamilton

  Copyright © 1985 Bel Mooney

  All rights reserved

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  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

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  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448210534

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