by MARY HOCKING
Erica saw Dorothy finishing her days sad and celibate, and Dorothy saw Erica finishing her days mad and celibate. Each sought to warn the other. The result was not a happy one.
‘If you want a life of your own, and I can understand that,’ Erica said; after all, when she married Harry, Dorothy’s place in the household might well be an awkward one, ‘why don’t you buy a cottage in one of the villages near here? You’ll have your own home then and you’ll be near enough for us to keep an eye on you.’
‘I’m not in my dotage.’
‘Darling, people need help all their lives, not just when they are old.’
‘Nor am I a neurotic’
‘Of course you’re not! You’re sensible and efficient. But we all have our weaknesses, and you aren’t terribly imaginative. I can always foresee what might happen if I took a certain path and why it would be wrong for me. But you just go ahead without imagining it beforehand. You could find you’d taken a wrong path and were some way down it.’
‘I’d rather risk that than spend my life dithering at a crossroads. One has to plan sometimes, Erica.’ Dorothy moved to the attack. ‘The children will grow up and leave home, and what will happen to you, then? Mother won’t always be here. You must plan your life.’
‘Life just happens,’ Erica said.
‘Daniel didn’t just happen. You married him and had two children by him. He’s a part of your life and you must consider . . .’
‘I have no reason to consider him!’ Erica began to suffer from a feeling of claustrophobia. The room was very hot, the walls seemed to be caving in. Panic made her speak vehemently. ‘He has treated me abominably. He had a woman out there in Africa. I didn’t tell you because it didn’t seem fitting to talk about it. But that was why I would never allow the children to go out to him during the holidays.’
She assumed this confidence must put an end to the discussion, but Dorothy continued with regrettable insensitivity, ‘You mean, he had this woman while you were with him out there? That was why you had to come home?’
‘Oh no, it happened some time afterwards. Dodie Andrews told me about it.’
‘I see.’ Dorothy’s mouth set in an uncompromising line. She looked. Erica thought, quite remarkably plain. ‘You left him, and refused to go back to him, so he had another woman. That surprises you?’
‘Oh, I didn’t bear him a grudge. He was lonely and one must be compassionate.’
‘Compassionate!’ An unbecoming flush stained Dorothy’s cheeks, she was quite formidably plain now. ‘You left him in circumstances where eventually he was bound to find another woman, and then you used that as a reason for refusing to allow the children to go to him during the holidays. You call that compassionate, do you?’
‘I could hardly have let my children be corrupted!’ Erica was trembling; she could not remember a time when anyone had made such a direct attack on her. ‘You wouldn’t understand, you have no children.’
‘Daniel wouldn’t have corrupted the children. You could have trusted him to behave discreetly during the short time they would have been with him.’
‘Why was he in Africa? Why? Why? Tell me that!’ Erica began to speak very fast. ‘I was his wife. Did he consult me? And look at the muddle he’s landed himself in, unable to get a job over here when he does come home. And I’m supposed to sympathise and support him when it would never have happened if he had listened to me when I said I couldn’t live there. Now, I don’t want to go into this any more. But i am not going to live with him again! And I don’t ever want to discuss Daniel with you again, do you understand that? How dare you imagine you can speak of these things! What do you know about life? You have only lived on the edge of other people’s lives.’
Erica thought that Dorothy looked very small now; she seemed to be shrinking visibly, her hard little crust disintegrating so that Erica could see the helpless, jelly-like creature floundering about beneath. ‘You disgust me!’ she shouted. ‘I think it’s a good thing you are going away, a very, very good thing!’
A door opened somewhere upstairs and Emma shouted, ‘Mother! We can hear you all over the house.’
Erica snatched up a china shepherdess from the mantelpiece and smashed it in the hearth. Dorothy went into the kitchen for a dustpan and brush. Erica went up to her bedroom and drew the curtains, the coloured stripes were already dancing about; she was going to have a very bad migraine, it would probably last for days, even a week. She lay down and closed her eyes.
‘What was that all about?’ Emma asked.
‘It was my fault,’ Dorothy said quietly. ‘I upset her.’
‘She’ll go round the twist one of these days.’
‘Emma, you shouldn’t say things like that.’
Dorothy brushed the china into the pan. Emma watched her.
‘You’re going away, then?’ she said.
‘Soon. Not just yet.’
Emma did not ask the questions one might have expected. Dorothy glanced up. Emma was plaiting strands of hair with quick, adroit movements, her face absorbed as though the deft fingers produced some kind of music to which she was listening. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, her breathing shallow: if she got to the end of the plait without a discordant note she would, one felt, have demonstrated something to herself It was evident this was not a matter in which another person could intervene. Dorothy crouched with the dustpan on her knees. Emma ran out of hair. She pushed the plait back, cupping her hand momentarily over one ear, and said, ‘Yes. I see.’ She smiled at Dorothy, an experimental smile; if it did not fit, she might remove it and replace it by something more appropriate.
Dorothy said, ‘Emma . . .’
‘It’s all right.’ Emma was not sure about this, but she was trying to make it all right, not for her father and Dorothy, but for herself – this was a solo exploration; she was feeling her way around in the adult world, trying to make sense of it and it had to be her own kind of sense. It was painful, but one had to fight the pain if one wasn’t going to be crushed by it. It was all part of experience, one had to use the bits and pieces of experience that presented themselves and be grateful. Although it was painful, it was not without interest. ‘I can see it had to happen this way,’ she said dubiously.
Dorothy got up and dusted down her skirt. She felt it was probably better for Emma to go on working at this herself. She said, ‘Would you take a cup of tea up to your mother if I made it? She would appreciate that so much.’
‘She’ll start on me.’ Emma regressed into childhood.
‘No, she’s too exhausted.’
‘All right. If you’re sure. She frightens me when she’s like this.’
Erica stayed in her room for several days. An uneasy peace descended on the household. Giles went out in the evenings. He seemed now to be caught up in some scheme of his father’s which involved making a model of the town. He had never betrayed so much interest in Yeominster before. He spent a lot of time at the school in the evenings, and sometimes left home carrying pieces of wood and scraps of iron which he took from waste land and rubbish tips.
Hepple was pleased by Daniel’s success. Daniel, Hepple considered, possessed that combination of intellectual energy and robustness of spirit which can fire the imagination of the young. Hepple’s staff did not entirely share this view. They were surprised at Daniel’s success, and some of the senior masters, who best knew the pupils concerned, were suspicious. Daniel approached his task with gaiety of spirit and zest; he enjoyed his dealings with the boys and the enjoyment communicated itself infectiously. This was all very fine. He was master of his subject, which was a considerable help. He could afford, when presented with a fresh viewpoint, to say, ‘I hadn’t looked at it that way,’ or ‘this is something that hadn’t occurred to me.’ He had no need to take guard because the boys soon realised that his mind far outstripped theirs; this realisation made the occasions when they scored a point against him a real triumph. All very understandable. It was a champagne summer: some of the boys
would remember it all their lives. A complete success, then? But why, the senior masters asked themselves, this interest in model-making? They knew these boys, they were not given to arduous manual labour. One could appreciate that Daniel Kerr might, on an intellectual level, and for a brief spell, extend them as no one else had done; but that he should convert them to wood and metal work, so that they devoted long summer evenings to mundane work in the heavy craft block – that was not comprehensible! It was not even as though they were using the more sophisticated tools (the handicraft master had seen to that). Making a model of the town? Perhaps. The senior masters viewed this development with some scepticism.
Harry Clare was as much responsible as anyone for the project. This, as far as Harry was concerned, was the inadvertent summer. Inadvertently, he had roused Erica from despair; inadvertently, he had gained Daniel Kerr a post at Mansfield; inadvertently, he picked up Gerald Grey’s committee papers as well as his own when he left the latter’s office one afternoon. He went on to Mansfield and inadvertently left his briefcase behind. The return of the briefcase was entrusted to one Colin Everett, a clever sixth former of ingenious mind and somewhat ambivalent moral standards. Colin had his car parked in the playground- a luxury permitted to senior sixth formers. He sat in the car and went through the contents of the chairman’s briefcase. His parents had applied, on his behalf, for one of the governors’ university awards. Colin failed to find the application in the briefcase. But he did find a confidential document prepared by the borough engineer at the request of the highways committee. Colin studied the document with interest. It was the council’s answer to the by-pass: a detailed scheme for the establishment of a one-way system throughout Yeominster. Only recently, Alderman Pike, the chairman of the highways committee, had publicly denied that the council intended to oppose the scheme for the by-pass. Colin thought the document so interesting that he purloined it and presented it as a subject for discussion in the small group of ten boys which Daniel took for current affairs.
Daniel found himself in a quandary. It was obvious that the document was confidential and that Colin had come across it by means that were, if not actually dishonest, definitely irregular. On the other hand, Colin’s behaviour was straightforward in comparison with that of Alderman Pike and his associates. The group had spent much time discussing such matters as public and private morality. For him to adopt too cautious an attitude when faced with this example of political immorality would be indefensible. More important, he had tried to persuade them to think positively, had advised them to involve themselves in issues where they might hope to exert some influence. It would be inconsistent in the extreme were he now to suggest that proposals which might well affect the quality of life in the town for many years to come were no concern of theirs! He asked, ‘What do you think should be done with this document?’ and waited with interest for their answers.
‘Send it to the local paper!’ Jem Protheroe, a lusty lad of farming stock, said instantly. There was a murmur of approval.
Colin said, ‘They wouldn’t use it. They refused to publish that indictment of the council’s housing policy by Shelter.’
‘Send it to The Sussex Observer, then. They’ll publish anything.’
‘Not in full!’ Giles said. ‘They cover too wide an area. They’ll print a small paragraph without details, and that will blunt the impact.’
‘Suppose we duplicate it and send it to every householder?’
‘We could give it to the Yeominster Conservation Society.’
‘Councillor Grey’s a member of that, and he’s vice-chairman of the highways committee!’
‘People won’t read it. There’s too much of it,’ Colin said. ‘They won’t be able to visualise it. We need to make them understand what it will be like.’
It was then that Daniel suggested, ‘You might make a model.’
They talked about this and thought it was a possibility, but an awful lot of work; the very idea of so much manual work made them lethargic.
‘If you made a model of the centre of the town, with the streets running off it into the residential part, that would give a good idea of what will be involved. People will see, for example, the roundabout route they would have to take to get from Bates Yard to Westgate.’
They agreed to think it over. Daniel told them that, in his view, they should keep the information to themselves, but have the model ready for immediate display when the council released its plan – which would be towards the middle of July. This would cause the maximum impact. It would also, he hoped, keep them out of serious trouble. The situation was new to him, he was not sure that he was handling it well. For himself, he would have risked a clash with authority; but his recent experiences of authority made him wary of involving the boys in a direct confrontation.
They went away and thought about it. To his surprise, they informed him the next day that they wanted to make the model. They seemed enthusiastic. And so, the collection of wood and metal, and other rather more unlikely material, began. They worked late. When he finished in the library in the evening, he could still, see lights in the workshop. Model-making was not really in their line and it seemed to be going very slowly. A week went by before they had constructed Cathedral Square, and even then it wasn’t to scale. He supposed they were learning something from it.
The project absorbed Giles and for a time his behaviour at home was unexceptionable. Erica, revived and always ready to hope, still saw possibilities of that long, peaceful summer. Her visits to the psychiatrist were helping her considerably. She listened to what she wanted to hear and contrived not to hear what was not acceptable to her. It worked very well from her point of view. He gave her advice which her friends could equally well have given but which she would not have accepted from them. She carried out those of his suggestions which found favour in her eyes; but as she ignored advice which was contrary to the way in which she was used to conducting her relationships, she went on much as usual, but fortified by having psychiatry on her side. On the subject of Daniel, she was unable to come to terms with anything which the psychiatrist said, and as far as Daniel was concerned, she relied on anti-depressants prescribed by her doctor whom she did not inform of her visits to the psychiatrist.
The weather improved. It was one of the hottest summers in living memory. Dust settled on paving stones, walls, window-ledges, the slightest movement of air sent it swirling in one’s face. People were out each evening hosing parched flowerbeds, sprays played on the lawn in the cathedral precincts. A heat haze shimmered over the flat fields which surrounded the town. The town seemed full of lovers, sweatily embracing on benches or lying in torpid embrace on the grass in the recreation grounds; and there were girls who had not yet found lovers scattered like flowers in the shade beneath the trees. Harry bought himself a beer at the Militia Man and carried it to one of the benches in the garden which was unoccupied save for a white cat gazing with rapt amber eyes at some object not visible to the human eye. The beer was lukewarm. Heat pulsed down on him. He felt as though life was roaring past, leaving him behind like one of those rather gauche country folk one sees sometimes at a level crossing staring vacantly after a train. ‘I must marry again,’ he said. When he had finished his drink, he walked through the sultry streets, the old tiled houses glowed red and here and there the setting sun caught a window so that fire seemed to blaze from it. The town had the air of a place waiting its apocalypse.
Chapter Sixteen
A mist came in from the marshes on the night of July 2nd and engulfed Yeominster, transforming it into something slightly insubstantial, a place of mystery where streets have no endings and pavements no kerb, where gables lean towards each other and laugh and stone walls whisper to the few benighted travellers. Yeominster had its ghosts and on this night it seemed they were all abroad. At street corners, shadows moved, converged, disintegrated, strange shapes were lofted high. Even people as normally unimaginative as Constable Thripp would vouch for this. As he walked down
St. Peter’s Passage at one in the morning, he had a feeling of presences around him so strong that the hairs stood out on the back of his neck. Once he turned and saw something resembling an animal’s head on a totem post: he was an avid reader of thrillers and a recent outbreak of black magic in a near-by village had added to his knowledge. So concerned was he with the obscenity behind him, that he fell over something which had been placed at the street corner. By the time he had got to his feet, and retrieved his helmet, both the obstruction and the totem post had disappeared and he was left with nothing more baleful than a long piece of chalk. At ten to three, Miss Pearl Macey, who lived over her draper’s shop in Westgate, got up to go to the lavatory, and saw, on her return, white forms wreathing in the air outside her window. She decided that the Second Coming was at hand and spent the remainder of the night on her knees, encouraged in her devotions by the fact that whenever she ventured to peep between spread fingers, the ghostly visitors were still there and seemed, in fact, to be growing clearer each time she looked at them. Old Horace Campe, who had fallen into a drunken sleep in the doorway of the saddler’s shop, had an even more unpleasant experience: he was woken by something soft and wet nuzzling his face, he felt warm breath and smelt a smell most appropriate to a saddler’s shop; he opened glazed eyes and found pressed close to his own face, that of a terrible, misshapen horned creature. He gave up drink for a week after that. Then there was the howling dog. Everyone who lived anywhere near the centre of the town heard the dog. Gerald Grey’s wife woke him because it upset her so much.
‘It means there’s going to be a death,’ she wailed.
‘Well, what can I do about it?’ he asked crossly. Mrs. Grey lay awake ticking off in her mind all the people she knew who owned a dog.
The first hooter sounded, so some people claimed, at seven in the morning, a long, mournful sound, rather like that solitary note the piper plays at the beginning of a lament. Almost immediately, it was followed by a great skirl of hooters from all parts of the town. Simultaneously, the telephone lines to the police station became jammed with callers none of whom were able to speak the English language with any degree of fluency, so that the police were for a time isolated from the main stream of life in Yeominster that Thursday morning. People thought that a great calamity had occurred of which no one had thought to tell Yeominster, and this impression was innocently confirmed by the Rector of Christchurch who tolled his bell for a special communion service at about this time. Some of the more ghoulish inhabitants packed into their cars and went off in search of the disaster: it was many hours before they were to return. A few nervous souls prepared for evacuation, convinced that their worries about North Sea gas had at last been justified. People said that the river had overflowed its banks again, there had been a train crash at Three Mile Junction, a VC.10 had crashed on the A.27; small boys insisted that the Martians had landed. But it was all much more immediate than that.