by MARY HOCKING
Daniel did not answer immediately, and she said, ‘Aren’t you interested in music? You must pretend to be. Emma is so sensitive about the school because it hasn’t the same status as Giles’s school. And don’t whatever you do say you enjoyed “Silent Night”. For some reason, it makes her cross.’ She felt the tears coming into her eyes. Everyone was so cross, and she didn’t understand why. She said with a shaky laugh, ‘I say to them sometimes, how would you like it if I went dumb?’
Daniel said, ‘Erica, don’t you think it is time we talked about us?’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘I have things to talk about.’
They were walking down a dingy street lined by Victorian semi¬detached houses. She said, ‘We can’t talk here. At least wait until we get home.’
‘I can never pin you down at home. You’re doing the ironing, or preparing a meal, or remembering that you must telephone someone.’
‘That’s how life is.’
‘It isn’t how marriage is.’
‘And I do have to telephone someone! My goodness, what a good thing you said that. Harry wanted to talk about the conservation society meeting on . . .’
They came out into Westgate and began to walk towards the market cross. She talked about the conservation society meeting. ‘I hope you are preparing something interesting. We don’t often get a speaker who knows as much as you.’ They threaded their way between stationary traffic at the market cross. Erica said, ‘Late night shopping.’ When they reached the entrance to the cathedral precincts, Daniel put his hand on her arm. ‘Let’s sit down in there for a moment. It’s not too cold.’
‘But it’s dark!’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Only tramps sit on benches in the dark.’
‘The dispossessed.’ Daniel flopped down and drew her down beside him. ‘I’m one of the dispossessed.’ He took her hand and said gently, ‘Aren’t I, Erica?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Come. You’ve got to say it sometime. It may be easier here.’
There was grass growing between the flagstones at her feet. She pushed at a tuft uneasily with the toe of one shoe. The light from the lamp at the far end of the path was pallid and seemed a long way off. She said, ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’ Her hand lay in his, damp and cold, inert.
He sighed. ‘Let me put it another way, then. I can’t stay in the house as a lodger for ever, can I?’
‘But we’re waiting for the Department to decide where to send you.’ She moved her free hand agitatedly to her throat and plucked at the collar of her coat.
‘And when they do decide? What then?’
‘I don’t see how we can talk about that until we know what has been decided.’
‘Suppose we forget about the Department and think about us, you and me. We must face the facts of our situation.’
‘Facts!’ she said. ‘Always facts!’ It wasn’t fair, he knew so many more facts than she did.
He was silent for a time. Erica sniffed and looked about her uneasily, hoping that no one whom she knew would come along the path. In the distance, the lights of Eastgate shone brightly; isolated sounds rose above the general drone of traffic, a lorry changing gear, a motor-bike starting up, and, much farther away, a police siren. A light came on in the cathedral, just one light, high up and very pale like an anaemic star. Daniel said, ‘What do the children think about this, do you know?’
‘About what?’
‘About the relationship between their mother and father!’ He gave way momentarily to exasperation.
‘I don’t suppose they think about it.’ She jerked her hand away and began rubbing both hands together. The marriage tie was one thing, a relationship quite another. She was not prepared to acknowledge a relationship.
‘They are intelligent young people.’
‘I’m not going to discuss the children. Not in that way.’
‘In what way? They are our children.’
‘Not when you talk about them like that – intelligent young people—as though they were just any two people . . .’
‘But they are intelligent!’
‘I’ve brought them up all these years, without any help. And now, first that odious man Hepple, and now you, say something is wrong.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘It’s what you are getting at. And Hepple once tried to hint that I loved Giles too much. As though there was something wrong with love, just like the Nazis . . .’
‘All right.’ Daniel got up. ‘All right.’
‘What do you mean?’ His voice was cold and angry; she could have borne indifference, indeed she would have welcomed it from him, but antipathy alarmed her. ‘Why do you say “all right” in that way?’
‘We won’t talk.’ He began to walk away and she followed him. ‘We’ll carry on for the time being. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
She walked beside him. He was quiet and the quietness seemed ominous. She said, ‘When we hear from the Department, Daniel, things will sort themselves out.’ She put out a hand and pushed it awkwardly against his sleeve. ‘It will be all right, then.’
Chapter Six
Rain slashed down and the grey sky offered no promise of relief, no faint outline of an individual cloud which might decide to break away from the sullen mass. Life folded in on itself. Mist had curled in from the marshes and for days the Downs had been blotted out. Even the cathedral spire was no longer clearly visible and the town was reduced to a grey huddle of buildings with no focal point. It was cold, but not unreasonably so for early December; it was the damp which chilled the bones. Rain filled gulleys, sluiced down from the awning of a fishmonger’s. Already shop windows were given over to the display of Christmas goods, but there was no air of festivity and shoppers trudged through the rain, heads bent, swerving from time to time to avoid the spray thrown up by passing traffic. Drivers pushed cloths at steaming car windows and tired women trailed children and small, low-slung dogs caked with mud. Erica stood in Smith’s in front of the racks of Christmas cards. Rain streaked her face and slid off the scarlet wet mac that Emma had persuaded her to buy last year because she liked her mother to look modern, within limits. As she stared bleakly at the cards, it came to her that she dreaded the awful jollity of Christmas. This blasphemous thought was quite uncharacteristic of Erica who, in the past, had always insisted on everyone around her being vigorously happy at Christmas. But now she felt suddenly tired of it, as though it had repeated itself once too often. She remembered how, in other years, there had come that moment when one is aware of silence, the traffic has ceased to flow and no one walks in the streets, the outside world is obliterated and there is only this one place where you and yours have come together; an interior world, with a great vacancy beyond it wherein exist only the outcasts, the people for whom society has no use, just as it was on that first Christmas night. It had never occurred to her as she drew the curtains against the night and the desolate people who inhabited it, that she was rejecting Him: she believed things had changed a lot since that first Christmas night and that the present-day outcasts had largely themselves to blame for their condition. So she had enjoyed this moment of quiet, this feeling of being a little island of warmth and security on which the outside world could make no claim until the day after Boxing Day. But this year, the idea of the Prentices and the Kerrs closing in on one another did not have the same attraction. This year, the cards must presumably be signed ‘Erica and Daniel’. She did not like this idea at all. The fact that Daniel’s name was to go on the card rather complicated the choice of card. There were one or two cards which appealed to her and which she would normally have had no hesitation in buying: a group of people in early Victorian costume arriving at an inn, a delightfully urchin shepherd boy peering wonderingly into the stable, a painting of Bethlehem in very delicate colours, the contours of buildings and surrounding hills blurred in a soft dawn light. These cards ha
d a stylish elegance which appealed to her; they were the kind she usually sent and when she visited friends and saw her card on display she felt pleased because it looked so tasteful. But this year, she seemed to have lost confidence. Finally, she selected a card depicting a detail from the Nativity by van Honthorst. She noted that the original was in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence: no one could quarrel with that! She bought ten packs and left the shop. She walked slowly along the street, thinking about Christmas. Dorothy did the cooking because Erica thought it was nice for her to feel included, an essential part of the Christmas festivities. She generously handed the kitchen over to Dorothy. ‘I’m just the scullery maid, doing as I’m told,’ she would laugh to her friends. Nevertheless, she did a great deal of the organising. She had been talking to Dorothy at breakfast only this morning about the purchase of provisions. ‘We must remember this year that the shops won’t be open until Thursday.’
‘We can live on the leftovers.’ Dorothy tended to adopt what Erica described as a “hey nonny” attitude to provisions.
‘We shall be tired of turkey and ham by then.’ Erica prided herself on being the practical one. ‘Beef would be the answer, I suppose.’
It was at this point that Daniel asked wonderingly, ‘How many people do you entertain at Christmas?’
‘Just ourselves.’ Christmas was a family time. Erica had always been very firm about this.
‘Six of us!’ Daniel’s face seemed in danger of falling apart.
‘Yes.’
He leant forward and picked up the paper on which they were making their list.
‘All this – for six people?’ He was red in the face.
‘You’d be surprised how much one gets through at Christmas,’ Erica told him tolerantly.
Her tolerance was ill-rewarded. He became very unpleasant: there was a puritan streak in him which she had never noticed before. He ranted at them, holding the list in front of him. ‘Not only is it necessary to have a turkey, Christmas pudding and mince pies; but one must have ham, beef, tongue, sausages, pickles, a whole Stilton, several different kinds of chutney, endless supplies of nuts, tangerines, chocolates, dates, figs, shortbread, Turkish Delight, ginger, to say nothing of cigarettes, cigars, wine, spirits, liqueurs: provisions which would stand one in good stead for a siege are somehow to be consumed in the space of three days!’ It was an astonishingly uncouth performance, and Erica decided that the best thing to do was to make a joke of it. She said, ‘One can see you have been living in the backwoods, Daniel!’ and departed humming cheerfully to the kitchen, leaving her mother and Dorothy to bring him to a more balanced view of things. Before she shut the kitchen door, she heard her mother telling him that it was no use buying ginger for her, it gave her the most terrible heartburn, and the figs stuck in her teeth. Her mother, who was usually so contrary, made a point of agreeing with everything which Daniel said. It was pathetic, and at times a little irritating.
As Erica walked away from Smith’s she could hear Daniel’s voice still, proclaiming that it was monstrous that people should over¬indulge themselves in this way. The signs of tension had been mounting ominously recently. Things had gone so well during the first weeks of Daniel’s stay; they had all seemed to live on a higher plane, both intellectually and spiritually, and Erica had imagined that one of those miraculous moments had been vouchsafed to them after which the days would pass more sweetly and with less effort. One would be good without having to try so hard all the time. But everything had gone sour since that dreadful evening when Daniel had behaved so unreasonably in the cathedral precincts.
In the meantime, there was Christmas. In spite of the uneasiness it aroused in her, Christmas was in some ways a blessing. It occupied so much of one’s time and thought. Erica dealt with all her problems by not coming to terms with them, pushing them forward a little each day, making a small clearing around her in which she could move about, but never uprooting anything. Each day she exclaimed at how busy she was, made appointments, rushed out late for other appointments. She talked more about Christmas preparations this year than she ever had before, and daily announced the tasks she still had to perform and her belief that she would never get through them. She could not sit for five minutes without remembering a telephone call, a circular in the bureau which must be studied for the date and time of a meeting, an overdue bill. The longest she stayed in one room was a quarter of an hour if the meat course was unduly prolonged by an argument between Emma and Giles, and even then she would probably decide that the mustard was not strong enough, or more butter was needed with the baked potatoes.
There was one main event before Christmas: the meeting of the conservation society at which Daniel had agreed to speak. Erica looked forward to this occasion with mingled pride and misgiving. She was proud to think that Daniel would know so much more about the subject than any of the society’s members, all of whom must be overwhelmed by the brilliance of his mind. On the other hand, she did not want to receive a lot of invitations to parties. She did not enjoy purely social occasions. The absence of a male companion was a drawback at a party; one always had the feeling that one had to try especially hard to make up for the fact that there was only one of you. She had become very self-conscious over the years and avoided social engagements whenever possible; she now disliked them for themselves and had no wish to attend with or without Daniel.
‘I don’t think that Daniel wants to be pushed into the social whirl as soon as he arrives,’ she told Dorothy. ‘I think I can explain this to people if we get a lot of invitations, don’t you?’
‘Why not ask Daniel how he feels about it?’ Dorothy suggested.
‘I don’t think that would be fair,’ Erica answered. ‘He doesn’t know anyone here so it would be difficult for him to decide.’
In fact, as her friends were uncertain what was the position between herself and Daniel, and failed to get any satisfaction from tactful inquiries, she received few social invitations and was rather hurt.
‘I think a lot of people must be going away for Christmas this year,’ she said to Dorothy. ‘I do hope the meeting of the conservation society will be well-attended.’
Harry had some doubts about this. ‘You may have a small audience,’ he warned Daniel on the evening of the meeting. ‘We were rather doubtful about holding a meeting so near Christmas, but some people felt that January would be an even worse time.’ Harry, however, had underestimated the interest aroused by Daniel Kerr’s return to the bosom of his family. Daniel’s previous visits to Yeominster had been brief and there were many people who knew Erica well but had never seen her husband. They were resolved to make good the omission. Few were interested in Daniel in his professional capacity. They were aware that he was a scientist of one kind or another, but they did not think that this qualified him to talk about conservation. As far as they were concerned, conservation was a matter for builders, architects and town planners, and for the ordinary person who had to live with the mess created by builders, architects and town planners. At the previous meeting they had been addressed by a senior officer of the County Planning Department and had had a good deal of knockabout fun at his expense. They saw little possibility of drawing a scientist’s blood, scientists being rather bloodless individuals. When the platform party arrived, they studied Daniel with lively interest but did not share their chairman’s view that they were fortunate in having so distinguished a speaker.
‘Looks more like a farmer,’ one woman whispered to her husband as Daniel rose to speak.
Daniel said he was most impressed to see such a large gathering of people; he had been away from England for a long time and had not realised that there was so much interest in conservation. It gave one hope. He then went on to explain why things were so bad that there was need for hope.
The Yeominster Conservation Society was so-called because the word ‘conservation’ was in current vogue, but in fact it would have been better named as a ‘preservation’ society. Its members prided themselves o
n their sense of civic responsibility, and as they walked along any of the roads leading to the market cross, they were on the alert for any untoward sign of activity – the erection of scaffolding around an old Georgian house, the presence of council workmen in the vicinity of a row of decrepit Regency cottages in one of the cul-de-sacs which ran off Westgate, a painter mounting his ladder outside the Midland Bank. They had prevented one or two demolitions, and had recently successfully fought an adaptation which would have altered the character of Eastgate. Thanks to their persistent lobbying, a scheme was under way to clean the canal and provide a tow-path, and it was entirely due to their vigilance that the latest proposal for a by-pass had not been turned down out of hand by the Council (most of whose members wanted to entice traffic into Yeominster). They considered that they had the problem of conservation well in hand. It seemed to them rather irrelevant that Daniel Kerr should begin by talking about plankton. He was, however, an enthusiast on his subject, and he had the gift of clarity of speech; he soon made the connection between plankton and carbon dioxide, from whence it was but a short step to the need for oxygen which is our shield against ultra-violet light, and thence – with the killing of plankton by oil pollution – to the extermination of all living organisms. Life had come full circle in a very short space of time. Although they had heard rumblings of this kind before, and had read (skipping the dull bits) gloomy prophecies in extracts from scientific reports quoted in Sunday newspapers, it had never been brought home to them quite so succinctly. It was a relief when Daniel said that some might consider this an extreme view. But before they had settled themselves more comfortably in their chairs, he was telling them sternly that it was necessary, when talking of conservation, to realise that the fundamental issue was the survival of living organisms on the earth, not the reclaiming of a pretty stretch of river or the preservation of a rare species of bird. ‘We are not faced with loss of amenity,’ he told them austerely, ‘or with an impoverishment of the quality of life, whatever that may mean; nor are we concerned with aesthetics, or values. We are concerned with survival.’ They listened to him with an owlish solemnity befitting the members of a doomed species. They reminded themselves once more that it had all been said before, as though this in some way lessened the actual danger. But it had never been said so directly, so forcefully, and at such close quarters. They felt all the resentment of the captive audience, unable to switch off and prevented by good manners from walking out. It was difficult not to listen to him. He made his points briefly, before one’s mind had had time to wander. Also, his arrogant dismissal of what he called ‘coffee-morning conservation’ hurt and annoyed them, according to their temperament, and once you have allowed someone to hurt or annoy you, it is very difficult to ignore that person. They listened with a masochistic desire to become either more hurt or more annoyed.