by MARY HOCKING
Emma was angry that she had not had an opportunity to speak to her father and even more angry that Erica had not asked about his work at the laboratory. The next morning, when she and Erica were indulging in what was supposed to be the luxury of a leisurely breakfast, she took up the subject again. ‘Do ask him about the work when he rings again. He’ll think we aren’t interested, otherwise.’
‘After one day, he wouldn’t have formed any impression,’ Erica was far more concerned that he should find suitable living accommodation.
Emma thrust her clenched hands into the hollows of her cheeks and looked across the table at her mother. Each day she made a resolution to be nice to her mother. They were both affectionate and volatile, but Erica was possessive and Emma did not like to be possessed; they could not find a way of loving that was not hurtful to one or other of them. Emma, bruised by many unsuccessful encounters, found solace in her more distant relationship with her father, but her sense of justice told her that she was unfair to her mother. She constantly studied her mother’s virtues, applauding the positive goodness which showed itself in the unwavering moral principles, the robust confidence of her assertions, the energy, expended on looking after home and family, the verve and attack with which she carried out even the smallest household duty. Her mother tried so hard. She tried hard in her relationship with Emma, who could only respond with spasms of hysterical emotion. It was all such an effort and Emma was now at an age when energy came in fierce, intermittent bursts and then left her drained and lethargic. She prayed night after night that she might be given the strength to sustain the effort of loving her mother.
‘It’s no use glaring at me like that, darling,’ Erica said. ‘And do take your elbows off the table.’
Emma said, ‘Our minds don’t meet. They don’t ever meet, do they?’
‘Emma, you’ll have to explain these cryptic remarks a little more. Remember that you’ve got a very silly old mother.’
‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that you don’t understand what is meant when someone says “our minds don’t meet”?’
Erica closed her eyes wearily. ‘Oh dear, I shall be glad when term begins!’
‘So I’m not to get an answer, as usual.’
Erica laid her hands lightly on the table, the fingers spread out; there was something feline about the poise of her body, like a tiger ready to spring. Emma found herself breathing a little faster.
‘You are for ever complaining that people don’t see things your way,’ Erica said in the quietly humouring voice which she used when her patience was ebbing. ‘But do you ever try to put yourself in another person’s position? Have you ever tried to see anything from my point of view?’
‘I see things from your point of view quite clearly as it happens.’ Emma’s voice was high and squeaky because she was not quite sure that she could go through with this.
Erica froze: on the table, her splayed fingers rose a few inches in the air and then flapped down. ‘What nonsense!’
‘You don’t want Daddy at home, do you?’ Emma had planned a mature psychological analysis of her mother’s state of mind, but she had only breath for a few words and these tumbled out without consideration. ‘You don’t want to share Giles and me with anyone.’
Erica went pale; she took a deep breath and held it, her mouth slightly open. For a moment, Emma was afraid that her mother was going to rush round the table and strike her; then, the familiar face crumpled like a splitting paper bag and Erica hunched forward. It was Emma who rushed round the table; clumsily, she massaged her mother’s heaving shoulders and beseeched, ‘Oh, Mummy, Mummy, don’t cry, please, please don’t cry! I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it!’ She butted her head against her mother’s cheek and began to cry, too.
Giles, who had been on his way to the morning-room, backed away, turned, and rushed upstairs to Dorothy who was getting ready to go to work.
‘My mother and Emma are crying,’ he told her. ‘Do come quickly.’ He looked as stricken as though his mother and sister were bleeding to death.
‘They’d be much better on their own,’ she answered.
‘But I’ve left my bicycle clips on the bureau and I’ve got to meet Jem Protheroe in five minutes.’ He danced about from one foot to the other, wringing his hands in agitation. ‘Do do something, please! I can’t go in there while they’re like that.’
‘Oh, all right.’
‘No.’ He grabbed at her arm. ‘Perhaps you’d better not, had you?’ He bit his fingernail, his face screwed up as though he, too, might cry at any minute.
‘You’re feeling much worse than either of them!’ Dorothy assured him. ‘A good cry has a purgative effect, like being sick.’
‘I wouldn’t mind if they were being sick,’ he muttered.
There was the rattle of crockery from below, and a squeal of unsteady laughter; after a moment, they heard the kitchen door opened and then Erica saying, ‘I’ll wash, you can put away.’
‘Well!’ Giles looked angrily at Dorothy. ‘What was that all about?’ He thudded heavily down the stairs, grabbed his clips, and slammed out of the house. Dorothy followed shortly afterwards. As she let herself out of the house, she looked like a person on whom events have crowded in too quickly, there was a ruffled quality about her as though she might make a physical effort to break free.
The next morning they woke to find a strange white light on the bedroom walls. In the garden, the snow lay smooth as velvet with a sparkle here and there as though a child had scattered a handful of sequins across the white surface. In the main roads of the town ice had formed in deep ruts made by passing cars; children on their way to school added to the perils of the pedestrian by making slides. A few cars had been abandoned; the snow was heavy on roofs and bonnets, and windows had been blocked out. Council carts were already out and grit had been laid in the area around the market cross, but not in time to prevent a car skidding into a pillar-box. Above, the sky was pale but serene; the turreted cumulus clouds had retired to the eastern horizon and looked momentarily fulfilled.
It was very peaceful. Erica opened the drawing-room window wide, in spite of the cold, just to let the peace get a real grip on her. Nothing moved. Transport was dislocated and for a whole day the telephone lines were blocked. When communication was restored, Daniel telephoned to say that the roads were so bad he would not be able to get home for the week-end. It snowed again that night. There was a crisis about meals on wheels; Erica went to a meeting at a friend’s house to see what, if anything, could be done about it. On the way home, through the quiet sideroads, she had the feeling that the past had been blotted out completely. In the garden to her right, a ginger cat picked its way across the lawn, leaving prints that were much larger than she would have expected. She said, ‘Puss, puss’ and it looked at her and complained, its whiskers tufted with snow, its eyes angry as though she were the author of its misfortunes. She laughed delightedly. In the afternoon, she walked to the house of one of the old, crippled women whom she visited with meals on wheels and offered to do shopping for her. The old woman lived on the fringe of the town, well beyond the city walls, and the roads here were impassable by car. As she left the town behind, she could see the land stretching away in front of her, very flat for several miles. She loved to see the fields under snow. She thought of the country as pure and real, concerned with unchanging values; as she gazed across the laden hedges and saw a cluster of cottages in the distance, the sloping roofs white against a leaden sky, she had a feeling of renewal. It was cruelly cold; but she could usually generate enough body heat to withstand the cold and she got particular pleasure from this inner warmth which resisted the harsh air stinging her face. By the time she had done the shopping and taken it to the old woman, she was very tired; but she felt more secure, restored to her own small kingdom, a useful, resilient person.
By the end of the week, Giles and Emma had returned to school. Erica watched them wobble off on their bikes. Her own balance was considerab
ly better; she had things in perspective now. For a while, she had been afraid that Daniel was going to effect some fundamental change in them all; but he had only ruffled the surface of their lives. Soon, she could say gaily to Dorothy, ‘It does us all good to be shaken out of ourselves from time to time. Our beliefs can’t be very strong if they can’t withstand a bit of pressure.’
Dorothy did not reply.
‘You haven’t had any nasty cases, have you?’ Erica asked with sympathetic concern. ‘Not another battered baby?’
‘It’s too cold, even for that.’
Usually Dorothy could resist the cold, but this year it oppressed her. As she went about her work, she was unutterably depressed by the white pall which covered the earth, and the few green shoots thrusting bravely towards the light hurt by their hopefulness. There was a pain in her breast when she looked at them. For years she had lived what she regarded as a useful life and, if she seemed to have missed some of the greatest joys, she had had no difficulty in counting her blessings. There was no reason why she should experience, between anger and despair, these gusts of panic which drove her out of the house as though its once sheltering walls now closed in on her with all the physical menace of a prison. At such times, she would make for the open country, heedless of the weather. As she walked across the fields, feeling, beneath the snow, the intractable fines of the plough, she would say, ‘What am I to do? What is to become of me?’ She had never been so little able to control her emotions. ‘I am thirty-five, it is too late for this . . .’ She would pause for breath, looking up at the starlings, dark against the grey winter sky, and an icy trickle of despair would run down her spine.
She became impatient in her work and sharp-tempered with her colleagues. Harry Clare noticed the change in her when he met her walking down St. Peter’s Passage on her way to her office one lunch time. She was disgruntled about one of the doctors in the practice to which she was attached. The man concerned was an autocrat and Harry could well believe that he would consider it beneath his dignity to co-operate with his health visitor. Had Dorothy betrayed feminine weakness, Harry would have said, ‘You need a shoulder to weep on,’ and led her away to have lunch with him. But she was far from weeping, and her comments were terse and uncomfortably shrewd. Harry did not like to hear another man, and a professional man at that, subjected to such an unsparing analysis. He phrased his sympathy in such a way that the fault would seem to lie with her.
‘It’s January, my dear. Such a bleak month. One can feel one’s soul shrivelling in January.’
She answered grimly, ‘As far as my soul is concerned, it’s been January for a long time.’
Her eyes were bright and sharp and the wind flicked her hair in a peak across her forehead so that she looked like an angry little bird with its feathers ruffed up. Harry winced.
‘Is there any news of Daniel?’ he asked.
‘Daniel!’ she repeated irritably. ‘What news could there be in such a short space of time, even allowing for Daniel being Daniel?’ Daniel was on Harry’s mind. He found himself introducing the man into conversation, much as he might have probed a tooth to see if it still ached. Later, when he lunched with Gerald Grey, he said, ‘So your plans for Knocke Hall didn’t materialise. Kerr didn’t stay long.’
‘Gone to Brocklehurst, I hear? Damn funny that, eh? After the way he lectured us at the conservation society meeting!’ Gerald Grey had been resolutely opposed to the demonstrations against Brocklehurst; but now that the treaty on bacteriological warfare had been signed, it would have been as hard to convince him that the research carried out at Brocklehurst was benign as it had previously been to convince him of its malignancy. ‘The people you’ve got to watch,’ he said to Harry, ‘are the ones who talk about ideals. When I hear a man talking about creating a better world for people to live in, I know someone is going to get hurt!’ He paused to spear a carrot and then went on to explain why the scheme for the by-pass must be turned down.
When he returned to his office Harry found difficulty in getting down to work. He looked unhappily at the leather surface of his desk. He had much for which to be grateful. He had a devoted secretary whose pleasure it was to protect and cosset him; it was accepted not only that he was incapable of remembering appointments and social engagements, but that he could not be expected to book a table for lunch, change a library book, call a taxi or buy an airline ticket, and these things were done for him. His chief clerk was a man of humble origins, who, had he had the financial resources to qualify as an accountant, might have gone far; Harry was able to reward his hunger for intellectual fulfilment by leaving most of the paper work to him. As for the other members of the staff, Harry came across them on social occasions, such as the Christmas party, and at times when they were permitted by his secretary to approach him. It had never been necessary for him to rebuke a member of staff since this was delegated to his chief clerk. He never had to raise his voice if he wanted anything because he was never kept waiting, he had no need to stand on his dignity because it was never offended. Few men, Harry thought, staring gloomily at his desk, could be more fortunate. Yet here he was, uncomfortable as though a myriad pieces of grit had lodged in his body, upsetting the smooth working of the whole mechanism; his pulse throbbed, his scalp tingled and he was subject to hot flushes of anger. He took a paper knife and levered up a frayed corner of the leather surface of the desk. Daniel Kerr! All this unease dated from Daniel Kerr’s advent.
His secretary rang through to say that Mrs. Cutts was on the line for him. He said, ‘Tell her that I’m not in. And see that I’m not disturbed for the next half-hour, will you?’ He put the receiver down and sighed heavily. He thought about the past years. In retrospect, they seemed very sweet. Daniel Kerr, in Africa, had no reality for Harry; just as Olwen, in her sickroom, had no reality for Erica. They had comforted each other, exchanged confidences, dined out occasionally, and joined theatre parties. She was a big, cheerful, vibrant woman, but blessedly lacking the confidence to make her too forceful a personality. It flattered him that she should be dependent on him for advice and comfort. And she did depend on him. He seemed to her to have the quiet, assured manner of the man who expects life to treat him well and is not disappointed. They sustained each other through a period in their lives which would otherwise have been cheerless. They were discreet: Olwen and Daniel prevented any development in their relationship. It was all very tranquil and undemanding. But now Olwen had died, and Daniel had arrived. There are some facts which can be evaded and some which must be faced. Harry did not want to live alone.
The paper knife slipped and a strip of leather broke away. Harry sat staring at it, sobered by this wilful assault on his own property. He put the paper knife down and pressed the strip of leather against the desk as though the damage might remedy itself by magic. Did he want to marry Erica Kerr? In the days when this was not possible, he had thought that nothing could be sweeter than to spend the rest of his life with her. Later, after Olwen died, he had not been so sure. He had found himself looking at her rather more critically. As soon as he did this, she no longer seemed such a complete personality; she was inconsistent, illogical and erratic. It was also regrettable that she had an elderly mother and two children both of whom were at the strident stage. Daniel’s arrival had rekindled his interest. He now felt that he did want Erica and was prepared to put up with her mother and children. But would she divorce Daniel? And if so, on what grounds? Harry did not want to become involved in any unpleasantness; but he did not feel inclined to withdraw at this stage, and neither did he feel he could wait too long. It was all extremely unsettling. He brooded over it, wondering how he could explain the torn strip of leather to his secretary. How restricted one’s life was! One lived in a straitjacket as one grew older, ashamed of the slightest extravagance of behaviour. Why shouldn’t he be extravagant? Why shouldn’t he tear the leather off the whole of the top of this desk if he chose? Why, come to that, should he marry anyone in Yeominster? He had once had a
n idyllic love affair with a woman whom he met on a Greek island; no experience in the rest of his life had equalled it. Why should he not try again? Why didn’t he go away, take a cruise, find another island . . .?
His secretary came in with tea. She looked at the damaged desk but did not comment. He thought that she looked at him rather warily, as though there was something wrong with him.
Erica was aware that something was wrong with Dorothy, and she knew just what it was. ‘It’s the time of year. We all get low at this time of year. But you must try to throw off this depression. You are usually so sensible, Dorothy.’
‘Sensible!’ Dorothy spoke with such passion that Erica was taken aback. ‘I am tired of everyone telling me how sensible, capable, self-sufficient I am! Does anyone ever think what it would have been like if I hadn’t been sensible and self-sufficient after I left Hugh? I should have been a nuisance to everyone. One can’t be a nuisance, people don’t like it. So I had to be sensible.’
‘There isn’t anything wrong with being sensible, surely?’ Erica protested.
‘I don’t admire it as much as other people seem to. It isn’t what I wanted to be.’
It seemed to Erica that she was making up for it now. Sense and Dorothy had parted company. Dorothy’s depression seemed to emphasise Erica’s own buoyancy; she felt strength flowing back into her and longed to embrace her sister and tell her that she had strength enough for two. As Dorothy was unlikely to react kindly to such an approach, she contented herself with less demonstrative gestures. She made sure that Dorothy was never alone when she was in the house. She also organised quiet periods for Dorothy. Each day, she prepared high tea for her mother, Emma and Giles, insisting, ‘Dorothy is a little under the weather, it will do her good to relax over a quiet meal alone with me.’ Dorothy was not grateful for this arrangement. She would have preferred to get her own meal and then have the rest of the evening to herself. As it was, when the meal was cleared away, she was expected to have coffee in the drawing-room with Erica. On the third evening that this arrangement operated, she said, ‘I really don’t think I can spare the time . . .’