by Angus Wilson
Sylvia hoped that she laughed in the right way. “It was only that it reminded me so much of the Rectory. . . .”
“Rectory? What rectory, Gran?”
“Good God, if your grandmother starts telling all her murky past . . .”
“That’s not fair, Grandad. You’re always telling . . . Anyway, what rectory, Gran?”
Sylvia folded her hands on the table before she spoke. She looked neither at Arthur nor Harold.
“The Rectory where I was in service as a girl, dear.”
“Your Grandmother was housekeeper .. .”
“No, Arthur, I was housemaid.” There was a silence, broken first by Mark.
“I’ll bet it was draughty ...”
“Well, it was in the kitchen quarters. But the gentry were protected by a green baize door.”
“Did you wear a pretty cap, lovey?”
“Yes, it was rather a pretty one, dear. With long ribbons behind, you know.”
“There’s no need to look ashamed, Judy, because your grandmother was in service.”
Judy got up from her chair and flung her arms round Sylvia’s neck.
“I wasn’t Gran, I wasn’t. Honestly I wasn’t.”
“Well, if you had been, dear, it wouldn’t have mattered. But things were different then, you know. It was at the beginning of the First War.”
“Perhaps Judy looked ashamed because you never told us, Dad,” Mark said, just loudly enough for his father to hear. But Harold decided it was easier to be deaf; he glowered all-around him.
These petty but sad family sequences to her outdoor expeditions within the town strengthened Sylvia’s growing sense of a futile evasion. Only through the dark nothingness and the dreadful silence, she judged now, could she hope to pass.
One morning later that week, she cut herself two egg sandwiches and set out resolutely to explore the countryside. Yet, once sought, the endless “Midlands”, that lay open before her in such terrible enticement from her bedroom window, proved hard to find. The New Town, though it merged into the country, was yet cut off from it by a system of lanes and roads that turned back on themselves and eventually returned to Town Centre, as inevitably, by contrast, the paths in a maze lead away from its core. Often and again she would follow the lanes that, leaving behind the last primary school’s bold colours and even the white pavilions of the last sports ground, passed on between fields of tender young wheat and stretched ahead, it seemed, to an endless rolling patchwork of fields—when suddenly there would appear a familiar green sign white-lettered: “Footpath to Melling” or “Footpath to Carshall” or “Footpath to Darner’s Green”. Her fears welcomed the diversion; she knew, indeed, that, if it had not come, she would have found some other excuse—probably the throbbing at her temples, or her shortness of breath—to turn back; yet she also knew that these obstacles only deferred the day when she must go on into the distance. She passed very few people in these walks—a householder with his dog, an occasional young woman pushing a pram; and twice she came upon the crazy old humpbacked woman, though no doubt she had seen her many times before in Town Centre but had not noticed her among the shopping crowds. Both times the old creature was jabbering away to herself, and on the second occasion she said something to Sylvia, who walked quickly on. After four or five days of such frustrated assaults upon the countryside, she came one afternoon upon a signpost that read merely “Footpath”, and, after a sceptical quarter of an hour, she realised that she was at last moving away from the town along a path that was no more than a narrow grassy strip between two sown fields. She had sought it so long that she half expected some miraculous change in her feelings to come about from the discovery, to walk straight into some enchanted land of good or evil, but all that came from that first two hours’ walk along the field balks was a laddered stocking and very tired feet, for the surface was stony and burnpily uneven from molehills and deserted rabbit warrens.
She had never analysed what revelation of horror or hope her superstitious awe of the surrounding country expected; or even perhaps thought quite consciously whether she expected any revelation at all. She sensed only that the long familiar sketchy outlines of her grey life had now suddenly so blurred and dissolved that she had altogether lost herself. If she could have hidden herself in the smallest hollow in the tightest nutshell so that from its very pressure, from its very narrowness, she could find some shape in life however small, she would have sought such a cramped cell immediately. But “The Sycamores”, she now knew, was not that prison of peace. As for escape, it too had failed—neither Mrs. Harker nor Queen Anne nor Lady Violet nor Wardress Webb could swallow up what remained of Sylvia Calvert; on the contrary, the great comforting engulfing whale of fiction seemed now to have died on her, so that she looked out through its ribs to nothingness; and even that skeleton v/as decaying into dust from which nothing more came to her than the sweetly sick smell of romantic falsity. Why the flat prosaic countryside should offer such dread, or promise some vague hope through this dread, she had no idea. Since so many of her thoughts now were mere morbid fancies, she thought it likely that this too was simply some such sickly whimsy. Out of the fog in which she moved only one thought about herself came suddenly, clearly and quite absurdly: she remembered the first jumper that Iris had knitted—at the age of about eleven or twelve—a garment so badly strung together, so loose and shapeless, its two-colour pattern so muddled that even the little girl herself had started at once unpicking the wool in order to knit it all over again. It seemed clear to Sylvia that she was that jumper. Perhaps to weave all the threads together again, she needed to return to the country world of her childhood—but even this idea seemed more something she had once been told than any personal conviction.
Yet if in that vague idea of return Sylvia had sensed some slight promise or comfort or happiness, she was soon undeceived. For long distances of her walks she could not have accounted for any scene or object that she passed, neither could she have recalled the trains of thought that distracted her from her surroundings. All that remained was a pervasive depression or a nagging ache of anxiety as from fugitive, forgotten bad dreams. At other times she noticed every object that she passed with a dreary monotonous clarity: vetches or poppies not yet in bud springing up every now and again between the rows of wheat; coarse thistles growing in the banks and on their spiny leaves a trail of snail slime; fragments of broken shell pressed into the soil—every petty repeated detail that lay before her tread. Sometimes more suddenly she would be roused by a bird shriek to the sharp vision of two magpies swaying in the wind in a larch sapling, or by a sudden hiss to a tiny snouted shrew disturbed from its lifelong, unappeasable search for food. But petty or rare these sights carried no overtones, merely passed in blank visual succession, leaving no trace in her memory. On other days again the thoughts that shut out her surroundings remained clearly with her, but again with no meaning, no effect but stunning misery; she would remember only hours of obsessive concentration on the image of some old or ageing woman humiliatingly pulped into nullity: Mrs. Tyler no longer hotelworthy, that terrible drawing of the Queen of France in the tumbril, Mary Stuart at the block, faces reserved and proud and terrified, faces appealing, chattering, smiling and terrified all came out from among past memories of residents, and old Mrs. Fox and Mrs. Durand-Deacon, and that poor old countess running like a squawking hen round the execution block. These obsessive images now brought less and less panic horror, they only remained with her for successive days as dead weights upon her spirits.
Only once in that bright warm April of aimless wandering in the countryside did something happen positive enough to break through her numbed anxiety. She was walking along a little path between a field and a copse of firs planted as windbreakers when at a sudden turn she came on a large ginger farm cat with a young rabbit dangling from its mouth. Startled from her thoughts she let out a cry. The alarmed cat crept stealthily away, and then when she followed it dropped its prey and sped off into the wood. The rab
bit’s back had been broken; it lay on the path with eyes of glazed terror and blood clotting on its fur; it jerked convulsively. Sylvia bent down with some difficulty, picked it up from the ground by its cold damp feeling long ears and quickly snapped its neck. She was surprised at how easily the knack came back to her from so many years ago. But she left the copse with intense disgust for pity, asked or given. And the disgust remained with her.
No answer had come from Miss Priest. For Sylvia this, too, seemed part of the expected course of things. When daily events passed in random disorder, who would expect the broken half-intimacy of two old women to be re-ordered from the past? It was difficult enough to make the right noises for one’s own flesh and blood.
Yet their demands on her remained.
“Mark,” Judy asked at breakfast, “have the scorers been chosen for the match against the Budgies?”
“Scorers? I don’t know. Better ask Jim Forrester. Why?”
“Oh, only that you said I was a good scorer.”
“I did?”
“Well, Jimmie Forrester did.”
“He’d say anything to the right girl. And as a matter of fact, you are.”
“I could score for the Mellingerers.”
“Well, go on,” Ray said, “accept, boyo. You won’t get anything easier on the eye. . . .”
“That’s the trouble, she’ll distract Jimmie. . . .”
But when Judy looked disappointed, Mark said, “No. We’d be glad. At least I think so. I’ll ask Jimmie.”
Harold who had been opening his letters, now bore down on the conversation. “You didn’t know our ban the bomber was the local ten pin champion, Mother. Scoring for the Mellingerers! Will you sink that low, Judy?”
“Here, mind your language,” Mark said.
“Oh, don’t mistake me, I’m delighted to see Judy take an interest in anything local. I suppose the County Ball’s been cancelled. . . .”
The sudden disappearance of Judy’s normal sulky look when her father praised her attracted even Sylvia’s attention. She turned to Harold to see if he had noticed his daughter’s pleasure, then she became aware that an unopened letter by his plate was addressed to her. The stamp was a foreign one. She found it at once almost impossible to attend to the conversation.
“Harold, is that a letter for me?”
“... unfortunately I don’t think you should, Judy . . . .”
“Harold, I wonder if that isn’t my letter. . . .”
“But the rehearsals were quite a different thing, Daddy. They lasted for weeks. . . .”
“Nevertheless . . .”
“Harold, I believe that letter is for me. . . .”
“I should have thought the whole thing was simply a matter between Judy and Mark. ...”
“No, Ray, I’m not perhaps what Judy would call a ‘super’ father, but I am . . .”
Sylvia could control her curiosity no longer. The letter was surely from Miss Priest. The reply, now so firmly discounted, seemed to offer some magical answer. She leaned across and picked it up. Harold glanced at her in surprise.
“From foreign parts apparently, Mother. In any case, Judy, the exam is that much nearer and any unwelcome distraction ...”
“Anything that we do together that doesn’t revolve round you is an unwelcome distraction. . . .”
“You have an almost infinite capacity, Mark, for psychological fantasies. Anybody else could see that my whole aim has been to keep the family ...”
Sylvia gave all her attention to the large round handwriting before her.
“DEAR MRS. CALVERT,
Of course I remember you. And very well too. For those of us who choose to live our lives in hotels, people like you who give us both comfort and friendliness are rare, memorable, and to be cherished. I am only so glad that you recall our expeditions and my chatter with pleasure. I remember I felt at the time that I had perhaps tried too hard to break down your reserve—I’m that foolish thing, ‘a friendly person by nature’, which means sometimes that I am a thoughtless and irresponsible intruder. I can say for myself, however, that some part of my motive was good: I knew more than you realised what a hard, backbreaking time you were having keeping your hotel going and I saw no other way of helping. I am very happy to know that I succeeded a little. And, as you have probably guessed, happiness has not been to the fore in my life in these past few months. When one gets as old as I am one spends so much time putting the little pieces together. It’s been a wonderful life but it isn’t easy to make sense of it all. My religious friends propose different jigsaws, but the pieces never seem quite to fit. I certainly shouldn’t have chosen hundreds of noisy, vulgar, inquisitive journalists’ voices questioning and intruding on top of the natural sadness of old age. At times it’s been almost unbearable. Of course it has been bearable because it had to be borne. But now like an old wounded animal I only long to creep away somewhere to lick my wounds and doze in the sun.
Not that any licking can soothe the wound left by my niece’s terrible death. I find I can write to you about it, because you never knew her and there is no sense of betrayal. She was all that remained to me of a once large and lively family. My much loved brother’s daughter—but also the pitiful result of my brother’s unwise upbringing and a precarious mental balance. I only hope that there are few people in the world as unhappy by nature as Theodora was. All I could do for her were a few practical things—to give her a comfortable roof over her head and the constant change of scene and people that her restless spirit seemed to demand. Those things and not to interfere. And what has it led to? For all my good intentions, we have two unthinkable deaths—hers and now the wretched man’s. I expect the world has said again and again, ‘How much better if the old girl had gone instead.’ If only they knew how gladly the old girl would have done so to escape this sordid last act. . . .”
The noise of a chair scraping the floor sharply withdrew Sylvia’s attention. In any case, Miss Priest’s words seemed without healing magic.
It was not Judy, tense and on the edge of tears, nor even Mark, beetroot red and furious, who was walking out this time, but Ray.
“Look,” he said to Harold and he threw the whole weight of his stocky little figure behind the accusing arm he shook at him. “You’ve very nearly had it, you know. We stood it when we were kids. We stood it when Mum was ill. We stood it after she died. But if there’s much more coming from you, I can tell you now just where you can stuff it!”
Sylvia could see from Harold’s face that such an outbreak coming from Ray upset him greatly, and she could understand it; at the back of her own mind she always excused her powerlessness to help in solving the family problems with the thought that in any case Ray could be relied on in his own easy, jollying way to get them through. V
Washing-up with Judy afterwards, she made a concentrated effort to involve herself, but the girl maintained a bitter silence. At last she turned on Sylvia.
“Perhaps if you’d been a little less intent on reading your letter, Gran, you’d know a bit more about what went wrong. However, that’s too much to ask, I’m sure. After all, any news that comes from outside must be terribly important to you. We all know how much you hate living with us here.”
Sylvia could find no reply.
Ray was of the party, however, that set out from “The Sycamores” to the Bowling Hall at Town Centre to watch Mark bowl for the Mellingerers in the League match against Craighill’s team —the Bowling Budgies, although Harold, against all family remonstrances, had maintained his refusal to allow Judy to score for the team.
The evening began badly. As they were gathering in the hall before packing into the Zephyr, Judy came downstairs, looking her coolest and prettiest in a tangerine silk dress against which, Sylvia thought, her hair lay like thick gold thread.
“Oh, Judy dear, how pretty!”
“Blondes for ever.”
Her grandparents were enthusiastic. Harold asked, “And where may you be going, young lady?”
“Go upstairs and get on with your work.”
Judy taking no notice, passed Harold. He seized her arm. “Did you hear what I said?”
Sylvia suddenly saw Harold in school blazer in a rage with his sister Iris. Over his head she caught Arthur’s eye.
“Now don’t be silly, Harold dear,” she said.
“Yes, come on, Harold, old boy, we must cut along.” Each of his parents instinctively took one of Harold’s arms and led him out to the car. He accepted the regression, but his face flushed red with suppressed anger as he started the engine.
They entered the bar of the Falcon as though they were a much larger party, with plenty of talk and laughter to cover Harold’s silence until he could regain his temper. To Sylvia’s relief, there at the bar were seated Jack and Renee Cranston and old Mr. Tucker. She smiled at them and nudged Arthur, “Look, there’s the Cranstons.” He answered with no more than a wave of his hand; while Harold, in his mood, could find nothing to offer but a rather dismal nod. Yet after a little whispering between husband and wife Jack Cranston came over to them.
“Are you coming to see the Budgies beat the Mellingerers tonight?”
Harold bucked up immediately. “Alternative version, Jack. We’re going to see Mark and our lads wipe the floor with the Craighill twitterers. But you don’t mean to say that a Melling man like you is backing the opposing team?”
Jack looked judicious. “Oh yes, I believe in backing the best team. None of that sentimental rot. However, I’ll grant you Mark’s the greatest danger. The Budgies’ll have to watch those strikes of his. But he’ll have to watch his follow-through. I know our Mark if he starts to tire.”
Harold smiled, but Arthur said: “The boy’s got a beautiful action. His doubles are going to make rings around the Craighill boys tonight. . . .”