by MARY HOCKING
‘. . . arrogant and selfish . . . squalid, degrading. . . .’
Tom said, ‘Yes, yes, I accept all that.’ He put the receiver down and looked at Miss Huber, who was obviously so much worse off than himself. He decided she probably had an ulcer and that her breath would smell. He said, ‘All right. I’ll find something.’
Holmes was a good stage manager, he had Miss Huber out of the room before she had time to do more than gulp. He himself returned to say to Tom, ‘I shan’t forget this.’
‘I’ll see you don’t,’ Tom told him grimly. ‘I shall expect favours from you after wishing that one on me.’
The telephone rang again. Beth said, ‘Will you never see things from my point of view? I feel soiled, shamed . . . not a person but a commodity . . . something to be taken for granted like a comfortable armchair. . . .’
Chapter Three
Tom stopped the car in the lane and wound down the window. The air was keen and the light bright; trees, hedges, roofs stood out sharply as though etched against the sky, just as he remembered colours coming up strongly when as a child he had peeled the protective skin off a transfer. At the far end of the lane the sombre majesty of the Downs was made glorious by a brush of burnished trees in the foreground. Tom stared at the scene. After a moment he said aloud, ‘I am here. I live here.’
That hedgerow, still lightly silvered with frost, was real. That poplar, standing like a green exclamation mark in the midst of the golden mass, was real. And that magpie flashing up there, one for sorrow. . . .
It was no use. The scene remained strangely dreamlike, as though the village which for a long time had been slipping into the past had severed its last link with the twentieth century. Perhaps it would have been more reassuring if there had been a few people around; but the men were at work, the children at school, and he supposed the housewives would be having tea at this time. And Isobel? Surely his wife should restore his sense of reality. He thought about her. Did she have tea? Did she have bread and butter and jam, and those cakes she was forever baking? He had no idea. In fact, he had no idea how his wife spent her time during the day and he could not visualise her at work in the house or in the garden, he could not imagine how she behaved if she lunched with a friend, or when she went to Women’s Guild meetings in other villages. Did she look carefree when she wasn’t inhibited by his presence? Did she laugh more often?
At the office there was more laughter in his section than in any other. He was kind to his office staff because this was less trouble than being unkind; and he was patient because he did not care enough about local government to lose his temper over it. It was in his home that the weight of sustained kindness and patience was really felt.
He drove slowly down the street. There were several cars parked in the field at the side of the church. Cars, other than the battered estate cars owned by the inhabitants, were a rarity in the village and he looked at them with interest, wondering what had drawn their owners here. He soon found the answer. His house was swarming with women. There was one at the front door, sitting behind a small table. She looked at Tom suspiciously as though he was Pluto come to fetch Persephone and said, ‘You’re very early.’ A woman in a huge cartwheel hat hurried forward, exclaiming, ‘Why, it’s Mr. Norris, isn’t it?’ The woman at the table muttered, just loud enough to be heard, ‘Well, no one told me!
The woman in the cartwheel hat said to Tom, ‘You won’t know me, but I knew your father. Dr. John, as we all called him, is very well-remembered in our village. Quite a mythology has grown up around him.’
Tom said, ‘He would like that,’ and was as aware of the untruth of this as if his father had risen from the dead to dispute the statement.
‘My goodness, they don’t make them like him now, do they?’ She spoke as though doctors were put together on an assembly line. ‘He terrified me as a child. I used to dread the moment when I had to tell him what was wrong with me; it was like an inquisition, I felt he was drilling holes in my poor little brain. Now they’re writing out a prescription before you’ve had time to open your mouth.’
‘You think you were better off with your brain full of holes?’ Tom meant to toss the question off lightly, but lightness was never possible when he spoke of his father. The aggression he had suppressed during his father’s lifetime was beginning to make itself felt now.
The woman laughed, but her eyes told him she was doing a rapid revision of her initial favourable assessment of him. She said, ‘I’ll tell Isobel you are here.’
There was a continuous high-pitched squawk coming from the drawing-room. Through the half-open door Tom could see Isobel standing by a trestle table listening to several women with flushed faces who were gesticulating agitatedly. She was dressed in the russet-coloured suit which matched her hair in shade and wiry texture; a contrasting colour would have been more striking— turquoise suited her admirably—but Isobel preferred to be inconspicuous. She was not the kind of person who normally stands out in a crowd; but now, surrounded by more dramatic and volatile companions, her sobriety and air of judicious consideration immediately drew attention to her and gave an impression of a person of some profundity; whereas, in fact, as she listened, head bent, to the women’s angry clamour, Isobel was merely waiting for the tempest to blow itself out.
‘Don’t worry her now,’ Tom said. But the woman in the cartwheel hat was already making her way through the crowd with the weaving shoulder movements of the expert lacrosse player.
Isobel came into the hall; although she walked in her usual deliberate way, her mind was obviously on other things and she studied Tom reflectively, as though she could not for a moment recall how he fitted into the pattern of her life. She said, ‘Why are you home at this time?’ She did not speak accusingly, but her manner was grave.
‘We broke up early.’
‘What?’ She inclined her head towards him, thinking she could not have heard properly.
‘You make me feel as though I am still at school.’ She had the unfortunate gift of making him behave petulantly. ‘An intruder. . . .’
She looked at him without understanding and said, ‘Can you find somewhere to go? This will be over soon.’
‘I’ll go to bed if you like,’ he said sulkily. ‘I’m not feeling well, anyway.’
‘Perhaps that would be best.’ She sounded relieved that a solution had been found. ‘But not in our room; people have left coats there.’
Tom went upstairs to one of the spare rooms and lay on the bed. He wondered whether he should go to Beth, after all; she was obviously in one of her analytical moods but almost anything would be better than this. The women were coming up the stairs now. He could imagine them invading first one room, then another, and he wondered whether he and Isobel would ever be able to get them out of the house. There seemed to be a queue for the lavatory. He could hear two of the women talking on the landing, just outside the door of the room. One of them said, ‘Was that her husband?’
‘It was indeed.’
‘Quite attractive, eh?’
‘Some people find him so.’
‘He’s not much in evidence, is he?’
‘There are . . . other women . . . you know.’ She made it sound as though this was an alternative species to homo sapiens.
‘No, I didn’t know. You do surprise me.’ There was a pause while the speaker came to terms with her surprise. ‘Of course, she does so much. I’ve often wondered how she managed to do so much and run a home as well.’
‘She manages just that bit too well, if you ask me. If it was me, I’d have to let fly every now and again to prove I was human. Kick the cat, throw something at the children.’
Tom wondered whether he should interrupt to point out that Isobel was childless and that he would leave her were she to kick the cat. Instead, he got up and opened the window. The birds were singing in the trees, close against the house; he was glad of their demented noise. Nevertheless, the trees were close. Perhaps he should have done more work in the garden. The year h
e and Isobel moved here, they had tried to work together. He had sent in the order for bulbs late and when the bulbs came he had taken a long time planting them. Isobel had said the frost would get them, but in fact there had been a good display in the spring. By then, however, she was worrying about the summer planting. Isobel must always plan well ahead.
Phillimore planned ahead, too. Mather said that this ability to plan ahead branded a man as chief officer material, only ‘branded’ wasn’t the word he had used. ‘Marked a man out . . .’ that was it; branding was for the herd. Tom had always thought he belonged with the herd, but he wasn’t even sure of this now. Certainly, he couldn’t think ahead; there was always too much to get through in the present for him to be able to afford that luxury. Now he wasn’t even keeping up with the present. The pace was too fast for him, he was slipping out of the time scheme altogether. Sometimes he felt as if he was centuries behind everyone else.
His head was beginning to ache, the birds were pecking away at the nerves. He closed the window and went back to the bed. It was quiet now, only a gentle bumbling from the hall. He felt at peace and it came to him, as answers will when one ceases to strive for them, that he knew what it was that had troubled him about the village street. It had been like one of those puzzle pictures where you have to pick out the thing which doesn’t belong in the picture. And in this case, the thing which didn’t belong was Tom Norris. He was the thing that wasn’t authentic. The knowledge must have been hovering on the edge of consciousness for a long time because he felt that by acknowledging his unrelatedness he had made a tremendous breakthrough and that life was never going to be the same again. After all the fumbling and agonising, this was so lucid, so complete; if only he could hold on to it long enough to explain to Isobel, perhaps he would be able to work himself into the picture again.
The house grew still. It was a long time before Isobel came. When she entered the room she went to the window, opened it slightly and adjusted the curtains. Then she stood looking at the sash cord. ‘Are you going to sleep in here?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you want to know what is wrong with me, first of all?’
She remained for a moment by the window and then turned to face the room; she did this very slowly as though by forcing herself to face into the room she was submitting to a distasteful but unavoidable moral duty. Isobel was repelled by illness. She was reluctant to admit to being ill herself, and she was resentful when others thrust their illness upon her. She was industrious and conscientious and she gave generously of her time and energy; her friends said of her, ‘If Isobel undertakes anything, you can be sure it will be well done.’ Yet she did the minimum that might have been expected of her when anyone was ill. Now, although she was not consciously aware of it, her one concern was to avoid being drawn into a serious discussion of her husband’s trouble. On such occasions she adopted a way of speaking which suggested that her attention was really on another and more important matter and only a few random comments could be spared for the trivialities of the moment.
‘You should have worn an overcoat last night, don’t you think?’ she hazarded.
‘It’s not my stomach that is sick. It’s me.’
‘I think the eiderdown is in here.’ She turned away and opened the wardrobe door, feeling along the top shelf. ‘You’d better put it over you.’
‘Isobel, I’ve got to talk about this. Something has been happening to me recently, you must have noticed. . . .’
She laid the eiderdown across him and he pushed it aside like a peevish child.
‘All right.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and absently smoothed her skirt tight across her knees. ‘If you feel like this, I suppose we must talk about it.’
‘You don’t want to, do you?’
‘I don’t think anything is solved by this kind of talk. But still. . . .’ She raised her head and looked at him not unkindly. ‘Well, come on. Then we can have our supper.’
His moment of lucidity was long past, however, and he was confused by the feelings of guilt and irresponsibility which Isobel always aroused in him. He knew he was ill, but when he spoke he was aware that he sounded hopelessly vague and unconvincing. ‘There’s something wrong with me. Something is terribly wrong and I can’t seem to get at myself to find out what it is. Haven’t you ever felt like this?’
‘I can’t say I have.’ She mistrusted introspection, but she forced herself to ask, ‘How do you feel?’
‘I don’t know.’ He put a hand between his eyes where the confusion seemed to have its centre. ‘I have this terrible panic. It comes over me suddenly; one minute I can be sitting enjoying a book, or listening to music, or I can be chatting with people when we’re out to dinner, and the next moment everything is black and the world is full of demons. I feel I am suffocating and I want to rush out into the air. There’s never any warning. It happened at the last sub-committee meeting; I don’t know how I fought it back. One of these days. . . .’
‘It’s this reorganisation,’ she said quickly. ‘And all these evening meetings. You weren’t home from the last governing body meeting until after eleven. That’s a long day.’
‘This has been going on a long time. The reorganisation has aggravated it so that I can’t ignore it any more, but it isn’t the cause.’
She darted an uneasy glance at him and looked away again. She did not want a revelation of whatever kind; revelations were too intimate. She said, ‘You don’t think you’re making rather much of all this? I was talking to Mrs. Marshall, the County Treasurer’s wife, at the bring-and-buy sale the other day, and she said all the senior officers were going round the bend.’
‘They’re not as far round as I am.’
She flicked fluff from the blanket off her skirt and said, ‘If it’s as bad as that, hadn’t you better go to the doctor?’
‘I am not going to the doctor.’
‘Doctor Carey is quite young, Tom, and he’s very easy to talk to. Not a bit like your father.’
‘This is nothing to do with my father.’
‘In that case, why not go to Doctor Carey? He can probably give you something to calm you down.’
‘I can’t take anything that slows me down, Isobel. You should see my in-tray at the office!’
‘You should look at your desk in the library! All those notes you are forever making! No wonder you can’t get through your office work.’ She pulled herself up abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to nag at you. I just don’t seem able to help myself. . . .’ She was close to tears.
Tom looked at her in surprise. It was getting dark in the room. She was rather short-sighted and this gave her a permanently abstracted look as though she was forever trying to solve a problem that was beyond her ability; the effort had made her face rather drawn, but it was gently formed and the features were not assertive. There was nothing formidable about Isobel. Yet now, twilight had sucked colour from her skin and the green eyes looked unusually big and dark while the quiet, sober mouth had become purple. Tom thought she was like the victim of a disaster, helpless, yet at the same time powerfully disturbing. It occurred to him that she was too tired to be able to cope with his problem at this moment. This bad timing on her part annoyed him.
She said, defending herself against his silence, ‘You try to do too many things at once, Tom. In fact, you try to be two people, and it isn’t good for you. You don’t do any one thing properly. Why not concentrate on your work, at least until the reorganisation is over and done with, and put all that writing to one side?’ She spoke as though the writing was not work but an unhealthy self¬indulgence.
‘I couldn’t survive if I put it aside.’
‘Oh, Tom! All this make-believe. . . .’
‘You think that local government is the reality, do you?’
‘What do you want?’ She was becoming restive. ‘You don’t agree with anything I suggest, you won’t take my advice. . . .’
‘It’s not suggestions or advice that I need.’
&nbs
p; ‘What else is there?’
‘I want to talk, Isobel. I want to talk to you. I want to sit and hold your hand and talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘How do I know until I start?’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘But I’m not trying to make sense. It’s not sense that I’m concerned with. There are some things which will never make sense! Can’t you understand that?’
It was almost completely dark now. She realised this with a start and said, ‘What are we doing, sitting here like this? We must be mad.’ She sounded annoyed as though she had been betrayed into doing something wrong.
‘I like sitting in the dark. You can say things in the dark you wouldn’t say in the light. When I was a child I used to talk aloud in my bedroom at night, where my father couldn’t rap out questions, or correct the inaccuracies of my statements, tell me to get my facts right. Sometimes I made up strange, rambling stories. . . .’
‘This is all very morbid, Tom.’
‘Don’t go.’ He took her hand. ‘Please let me talk to you.’
‘Your hand’s cold. There’s going to be a frost tonight. We must get those plants in from the porch.’
‘Did you wake up last night?’
‘Wake up? What are you talking about?’
‘I thought you woke and said you could hear an animal howling. Perhaps I dreamt it?’
‘Oh, Tom! You’re not going to start that again!’
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No. I only heard you muttering in your sleep as usual. It’s all these silly books. They prey on your mind.’ She jerked away from him and almost tripped over the wire of the bedside lamp in her haste. She felt her way to the door and switched on the light. ‘That’s better! I’ll get supper. Perhaps you would bring the plants in. Now, please, Tom; before it gets any colder.’
She went downstairs and soon he followed her. There were a lot of plants in the porch and it took him some time to bring them in and place them on the wide window seats in the hall and landing. When he had finished he paused at the open door and stood for a moment irresolute, a state by no means foreign to him. From the kitchen, Isobel called to him to hurry. ‘I can feel the draught from that door.’ She would walk for miles over the Downs in the snow, but she didn’t like the cold air to get into the house. Tom’s face stiffened at the sound of her voice and he made no move to close the door. He and Isobel retained a measure of respect the one for the other. It was this respect which held the marriage together, but it was sometimes a strain to know that there was something left which could still be hurt. Neither Tom nor Isobel was well-equipped for marriage; they were emotionally immature and they passed responsibility between them like a parcel for which a forfeit will be demanded of the one who is holding it when the music stops. Tom was more aware of their failure than was Isobel. He was more perceptive than his wife who did not always realise when she had hurt him, whereas he saw every barb go home. After scenes such as the one tonight it was he who bore the burden of guilt and he did not do it gracefully. But he tried as hard as any other man with an unsatisfactory marriage. Lately, however, the effort was beginning to tell, and there was tonight a sharpness in the eyes which gave a new kind of life to his face, a suggestion that something which was not gentle might be beginning to make demands.