by MARY HOCKING
‘Sarah likes bright colours,’ she answered simply.
He gave her a smile which was unexpectedly sweet, although she could not see what she had done to deserve it. She broke the cotton between her sharp teeth.
‘I don’t know what has come over Sarah lately,’ she said. ‘She was really aggressive with poor Spencer when he came into the garden the other evening to chase out that stray dog; and yesterday she pushed Sid Price off his bike for no reason at all.’
‘His being Sid Price would seem reason enough to me.’
She laughed delightedly.
‘And where does she get all this talk about being “saved” from?’ Ralph wondered. ‘She was telling me some tale about Sukie Price this evening. Apparently Sukie was saved nine months ago—at four o’clock on the fifteenth of June on her way home from school, to be precise. Where do they get it from? I never talk in that deplorable way.’
‘They get it from Miss Haines who takes the Bible Group. She is a convert from the Free Church and still very emotional.’
‘I shall have to speak to Miss Haines.’
Myra stuck the needle in the arm of the couch and put the costume to one side.
‘Ralph.’
He quivered. Was he never to be safe from the steel in her voice? It had been so pleasant, more pleasant than he could remember time spent with her for so long; and now she was saying:
‘The pageant seems to mean a great deal to Sarah.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s to be on the Tuesday after Easter—you remember?’
‘Well?’
‘You will be there, won’t you?’
Dear God! How many ways could this scene be played? Now she was using Sarah. He would die for Sarah. He was sure that was not an empty statement; he was sure . . .
‘Because if you’re not there,’ she was saying, her hands clenching and unclenching on her lap, ‘I shall never forgive you. You understand? You must understand that, Ralph. I shall never forgive you.’
Her voice seemed to stab always at the same spot; the raw agony was intolerable.
‘Yes,’ he said desperately, ‘all right, my dear, all right. We won’t go into all that now.’
‘There you go again! You shut yourself away from me and it makes me desperate, don’t you understand, Ralph? It makes me desperate. We ought to be able to talk about things together; we’re man and wife. If we can’t talk . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Myra. I’m sorry.’
He got up and went out of the room. A few moments later she heard the front door slam behind him. She remembered that he had a vestry meeting; he would not be back for several hours.
She sat quite still, her face very pale. The dark eyes, almost violet in this shadowed light, darted round the room. It was very bare. The furniture was heavy, the coverings on the chairs faded, the carpet badly worn by the door; there was a patch of damp on the long side wall and several cracks in the ceiling. But then, she remembered, the rooms in which she had lived had always been like this. Only once, there had been a glow to lighten the ugly rooms. Perhaps it would have been better without that glow. The memory of it, in moments like this, was beyond bearing.
She picked up a newspaper, but sat with it neatly folded, her thin hands clenched above it. She wondered if anyone would call this evening. Callers at the vicarage, she had once said, were her cross. Now she prayed for a caller, but no one came.
When she could stand it no longer she went to the door and hesitated for a moment in the hall, her hand on the banister rail. She looked up into the darkness of the landing above.
‘Keith.’
No reply. But she knew that he was in, so she went up to the landing.
‘Keith.’
The door of the room opened; his face, rather surly, looked down at her from the shadows at the top of the attic stairs.
‘Come and fill the coal scuttle for me, will you? Ralph has had to go out.’
And when he had done that for her:
‘See if you can make something of the fire.’
He carried the coal scuttle into the sitting-room; he did not look at her, but crouched in front of the fire, raking out the ashes at the bottom. He had grown thinner in the last few days and more restless; his movements were clumsy as though he had reached the nerve’s edge. She watched him as he arranged a few sticks in the grate and proceeded to build what seemed to her an elaborately intricate pyramid of coal on top.
‘Were you a stoker in the navy?’ she enquired.
He was not amused; he liked being laughed at less than most men. He said ‘no’ very gruffly and continued to concentrate his attention on the fire. She sat down on the sofa, leaning forward a little so that her foot brushed the bottom of his jacket. A frown nicked between his eyes. He put a large piece of coal on the fire and the pyramid collapsed. Myra laughed.
‘Anyone can see you were never a boy scout.’
She watched his face. Beneath the pallor of the skin there was a faint, uneasy glow. She felt the fever throb in her own veins. The need to provoke was imperative.
‘You haven’t a very strong sense of humour, have you?’
He swung round on her. His voice was thick.
‘Has anything happened that is particularly funny?’
She leant towards him, her eyes bright with mischief.
‘You are funny! So terribly solemn and self-conscious all the time!’
She watched the nerves quiver in his cheeks and she felt a thrill of excitement ripple through her body. Now that he was tensed for conflict, her own mood relaxed. She leant forward and laid her fingers on his wrist.
‘I’m sorry. You mustn’t take things so seriously.’ She rubbed her fingers over his hand; her voice became gentle. ‘Why! How cold you are! You’ve been sitting up in that room without a fire. You silly boy!’
She was thinking: ‘You hate to be spoken to like this.’ And, of course, she was right. He snatched his hand away from her, and turned back to the fire, heaping the remainder of the coal on to it with savage disregard. It was exhilarating to realize the ease with which she could aggravate the conflict within him: she was really a very accomplished bitch. She went to him and put her hands on his shoulders.
‘You must sit down and get warm,’ she insisted, ignoring the smoking havoc to which he had now reduced the fire. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’
She went out of the room quickly before he had had time to adapt himself to her change of mood. Indeed, her mood changed so rapidly that she hardly seemed to be in control herself. When she came back to the room with a glass of whisky in her hand, he was sitting on the edge of the sofa. He watched her warily, like a fighter brought to his knees, dizzy, expecting a blow but no longer sure whence it will come. Perhaps he feared the gentle thrust the most for he said with brusque boorishness:
‘If that’s whisky, I hate the stuff.’
She cracked back at him: ‘I’m not concerned with your likes and dislikes. If you think I’m going to nurse you through another bout of ’flu, you’re mistaken.’
He took the glass and sipped the whisky, registering extreme distaste as though it were some particularly obnoxious medicine. She sat beside him. The cuff of his shirt was frayed; only a few days ago she had stopped herself from spoiling his pleasure in a new shirt. Then, she had been shocked at her zest for cruelty; now, the stimulant at work within her was more powerful.
‘Good gracious!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that the only shirt you have? Why don’t you wear the one that Ralph gave you?’
He glanced down in dismay.
‘This is all right . . .’
‘It’s in tatters! You must learn to take some pride in your appearance.’
‘That’s not fair,’ he protested.
Fair! Most certainly it was not fair! Her eyes met his mockingly. ‘I am deliberately tormenting you,’ the eyes acknowledged. The angry set of his mouth told her that he was ready to take up the challenge. But she had no intention of satisfying his impulses, wh
ether angry or tender. Another change in the emotional temperature seemed necessary, so she got up and went in search of her mending cotton.
It was while she was crossing the hall that she heard the front gate swing back. At least, she thought it was the movement of the gate that she heard; but as she waited, tense with irritation, there came no sound of footsteps. A caller would hardly walk across the grass. Perhaps it was some of the local boys playing around; she scarcely cared what they did provided she was not interrupted now.
The incident must have disturbed her, however, because when she returned to the sitting-room she imagined that there was a change in her victim. At first, since he was so quiet, she thought that he had become reconciled to her; the possibility of a passive surrender did not please her.
‘Take off your jacket,’ she ordered.
He hesitated and she feigned impatience.
‘Whatever is bothering you now?’
He took off the jacket, folded it carefully and placed it across the back of the sofa. He made no further protest, but as she sat beside him threading her needle she became conscious of the strain which this strange, new passivity was imposing on his body. She folded back the cuff of his shirt and paused, holding his hand palm upwards. It was not the lifeline that fascinated her, but the slender bones of the wrist so rigid beneath the tight-stretched skin that it seemed they must snap when she turned his hand over. The same rigidity hampered his breathing; out of the corner of her eye she could see the irregular chafing of his shirt across his ribs. His agitation aroused in her a hot, dry excitement. She worked more slowly, drawing the needle through with long, unhurried movements; she hummed beneath her breath. An orange flame sputtered in the grate and there was a smell of wood burning; a little smoke puffed out into the room.
‘What a bad light this is,’ she murmured.
She leant forward so that her hip pressed lightly against his thigh. He remained quite still. She looked up at him. There were ugly red blotches on his cheeks and a film of moisture above his upper lip. But for the eyes and the mouth, she might have thought he was at breaking point. As she noted the obstinacy of the mouth, the sullen defiance of the eyes, she understood why they had beaten him up in prison. For some reason of his own, he had decided to submit to her torment; it was a kind of self-inflicted punishment not to be confused with complete surrender. She felt a stab of vicious anger.
His cry of pain brought her to herself. She watched the crimson bubble rise from the place where she had jabbed the needle deep into the palm of his hand. A long thread of cotton hung from his cuff, but she had finished her work now. She got to her feet and turned away from him.
‘Go up to Ralph’s study if you want to work. There’s a heater there.’
When he had gone, she remained standing on the hearth her fist pressed against her mouth. There was a rustle of leaves in the shrubbery; she was conscious of it, but it was some time before she went across to the window. The garden was bright in the moonlight and it seemed to be quite empty, although the swing beneath the tree in the centre of the lawn moved as though something had brushed against it. The possibility that someone had been prowling around did not, at this moment, greatly disturb her. She leant her face against the cool glass and closed her eyes.
‘This must not be allowed to happen again,’ she whispered.
But even as she formed the words, the uneasy excitement agitated her body.
With the coming of Lent Ralph’s duties increased and there were other calls on his time which became more demanding. He was out a lot. In the evenings, after Sarah had gone to bed, Myra sought Keith’s company. She continued to tantalize him and he continued to resist her, although with increasing distress. The distress was all that she needed. Each ragged answer, each clumsy, nervous gesture was a stimulant to her: she had not felt so intensely alive for years.
‘You are becoming quite poisonously attractive, my dear,’ Joan Thomas complained. ‘It’s not quite decent in a vicar’s wife.’
III
It was Sarah who found the first letter. When she came back from school she played in the garden with Sukie Price for a time. It was a fine, warm day with bands of cumulus clouds stretched across a pale, washed-blue sky. There was a hint of spring in the air, a dash of green here and there in the wild part of the garden, a few buds on the bushes. The two children danced about playing their boarding school game, and for once in a way Sukie forgot to talk about, her family troubles and her constant need to bear witness. The postman came rather later than usual. They watched him as he went up the drive.
‘Nothing much,’ Sarah said to Sukie. ‘When it’s anything big he has ever such a struggle getting it through the letter box; he told Aunt Myra so the other day.’
The mention of Aunt Myra reminded Sukie that she had to get home soon.
‘You’re afraid of my Aunt Myra,’ Sarah accused.
Sukie shook her head.
‘It’s just that my mummy doesn’t want me to play up here so much, and if your Aunt Myra comes back early from her meeting and sees me here she may tell my mummy that she saw me.’
‘Why doesn’t she want you to play here?’ Sarah demanded.
‘She says it isn’t a nice place for me,’ Sukie answered nonchalantly. ‘At least, not since your Uncle Keith came.’
‘Go home then!’ Sarah retorted. ‘We only have you here out of kindness because you’ve got such a dreadful background.’
‘I shall tell my mummy that.’
‘Tell your mummy!’ Sarah thundered, half-way up the drive. ‘And you can pray for me if you want to!’
Sukie slammed the front gate: her final salvo was delivered from Sloe Lane, her small, scarlet face poking through the rungs of the gate.
‘You shan’t watch Laramie on our television any more.’
Sarah hammered on the front door in case Mr. Wilson was in. There was no sound in the house. Either he was out or he was up in his room and had no intention of coming down to let her in. She trailed round to the back door. As she came out of the kitchen into the hall she saw the letter lying on the mat. She picked it up. It was addressed to Mr. Wilson in the kind of writing she herself produced when she wrote in capitals; it seemed a funny sort of letter to come to a grown-up. She stuffed it in the pocket of her coat and went up to the first landing. Now she could hear the clicketty-clack of a typewriter. She went up the attic stairs and pushed open the door of Mr. Wilson’s room without knocking, which was something Aunt Myra had forbidden her to do because it might embarrass Mr. Wilson. He wasn’t embarrassed, but he wasn’t pleased either as he looked up from his improvised desk; but when he saw Sarah standing there his face relaxed.
‘Come in and shut the door. There’s a draught.’
‘You’ve got the window open,’ she pointed out.
At night, when Aunt Myra had gone out, Sarah always got out of bed and shut her window.
‘I like windows open,’ Mr. Wilson answered.
‘Even when it’s cold.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He sighed and ripped a piece of paper out of the typewriter which Uncle Ralph had lent him.
‘Because I’ve spent so much of my time with people who liked them closed.’
This seemed reasonable to Sarah, so she dropped the subject and went across to his chest of drawers to examine the books lined along it. He watched her. They had too much in common, these two, to like one another, but there was some kind of understanding between them and a grudging mutual respect had developed. When she had finished with the books she came over to his table and picked up the report he was working on. She was showing more interest in what went on around her lately; he supposed it was something to be encouraged although he found it infuriating. Her way of showing interest left a lot to be desired. Now she was curling her thin lips over the first page of the article he was writing on the effects of the report on the reorganization of the Greater London area.
‘Do you write well?’ she enquire
d.
‘I think so.’
She put down the article and said doubtfully:
‘I suppose you must if you get in the paper.’
She drifted across to the mirror and began to make faces at herself. Suddenly he said:
‘Your mummy and daddy wouldn’t like to see you making those horrid faces.’
She became very still. He wondered how long it was since their names had been mentioned in her presence. He was just thinking that he had made a bad mistake when she said:
‘Mummy wouldn’t like it, but Daddy would think it was funny.’
He made no comment, one step was enough for today.
‘Did you come up here for any other reason than to waste my time?’ he asked.
She pulled the letter out of her pocket and handed it to him. He sat staring down at it, his jaw dropping in a way that made him look rather stupid, Sarah thought. After what seemed a long time, he looked up at her and said uncertainly:
‘This is from you is it, Sarah? Some kind of a joke?’
She shook her head. He wasn’t in a hurry to open the letter although he seemed interested in it, turning it over in his hands and looking at the envelope as though it might tell him something without his having to bother to read the letter.
‘Well, open it!’ she said impatiently.
He made rather a business of it, tearing the envelope badly. There was only one sheet of writing paper. He read what it had to say without any expression, but Sarah knew, as she always knew with him, that he had been hurt in some way.
‘Is it from your daddy?’ she hazarded. His father was at sea and all sorts of nasty things could happen at sea. ‘Has he had a shipwreck?’
‘No. He’s in Singapore.’
While he was speaking he was crushing the letter in his hand. She would have liked to have known who it was from but it was obvious that he did not intend to tell her. He was just going to keep on being hurt, and as this made her feel uncomfortable deep inside herself she decided to leave him alone. She would go down to the kitchen and see whether Aunt Myra had left any iced buns in the larder. At the door, she turned and said: