by MARY HOCKING
‘Something caused yesterday’s agitation,’ he agreed dryly.
‘Timothy is not very stable, of course, we know that …’
Timothy whispered, ‘Oh, God!’ There was a sob in his voice. He had always reacted very strongly to his mother’s disapproval although it had always been very calmly expressed.
Mrs. Routh said, ‘Well, I’ll have to think about it. Now, you’ve got a busy morning ahead of you, I expect, and we’ve taken up a lot of your time. Won’t you have a coffee before you go?’
Before we realized what was happening, she was at the kitchen door. Timothy’s guilty expression must have told her that he had overheard the latter part of her conversation. She looked at him, her expression a mixture of compassion and annoyance. Compassion won. She said to me, ‘I wonder if you would mind making Dr. Lander a cup of coffee?’ She put her hand on Timothy’s shoulder and led him away. I was left with Dr. Lander. He said:
‘Strong and black.’
He needed that coffee. We sat one on either side of the kitchen table and talked about Saul. We decided that he was predominantly Manchester terrier with a strain of fox terrier about the face and a trace of Airedale in the legs. Saul rewarded our attentions by balancing on the base of his spine and carrying out a grisly and prolonged attack on his private parts. He was never a gracious dog.
When he had finished his coffee, Dr. Lander said, ‘I feel better.
How about you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You look tired. You haven’t had a break from this place since you came, have you?’
‘I don’t need a break… .’
He said, ‘May I prescribe something for you? A day in Brighton. It will do you a lot of good.’
I had almost forgotten that the outside world existed. The prospect of Brighton was attractive.
‘I might at that,’ I said.
While we were clearing the table, Mrs. Routh called out:
‘Pug, dear, could you put the oven on for the joint? I promised Constance I would see to it.’
I went to the oven. Dr. Lander regarded me with raised eyebrows as though it surprised him that I was capable of any domestic activity. Or so I thought, until he asked:
‘What did she call you?’
‘Pug.’
He stared at me.
It was, I suppose, just the release that he needed; he had been holding the tatters of his temper together for a long time and now his control gave.
‘Oh, this damnable family!’ he burst out. ‘How can you tolerate their insolence?’
‘They don’t mean to be insolent,’ I laughed. ‘It’s just an affectionate nickname.’
‘They don’t use affectionate diminutives for their own children, do they?’ He bit on the words with venom. ‘Margaret is never Maggie, Constance never Con, nor Timothy, Tim. But you are Pug!’
‘It really isn’t important,’ I said.
The colour flared in his pale face and his eyes looked formidably angry. ‘You tell them that in future they are to call you Flora and nothing else. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, all right,’ I said.
I judged it wiser not to argue with him; he had obviously lost all sense of proportion.
Chapter Six
The sea was grey, the waves seethed and surged beneath the pier and slapped the promenade drenching the venturesome with towering jets of spray.
‘Dreadful place for cars,’ said a young man who had just emerged from a house in the Royal Crescent. ‘All that salt blown over everything. I always go by train.’ He spoke as though this was the very height of fashion.
‘At least you can still have kippers, thanks to Larry,’ his girl friend said.
They went on their way laughing. She was dressed in a brilliant purple midi coat with high cossack boots and a great black slouch hat; she looked, like so much in Brighton, a trifle bizarre, not in quite the best taste, but colourful and magnificently alive.
There were few tourists about at this time of the year and the people in the busy streets had an air of belonging, if not to Brighton itself then to the immediate area. They had a liveliness combined with an air of relaxation that one never finds in London. This was a bustling, thriving town, but it was not frantic; it did not drain its inhabitants of vitality, its pressures were not too extreme. Perhaps because its follies were so extreme? The daily sight of the Pavilion alone must surely be an antidote for taking life too seriously.
It was certainly an antidote for me, who was always inclined to take life seriously. The whole town was an antidote. The air had a sharpness and the views were sharp, too, none of the summer blurring of outline yet without the starkness of winter. The trees in the gardens around the Pavilion were rust and gold against a deep blue sky. It was a day of crystal clarity, the best that autumn can offer. I spent much of my time walking, taking a turning here and there at will. I felt that I had been released from an overlong period of quarantine. My body glowed with health.s
The mental readjustment was not, however, quite what I had anticipated. In the afternoon, I walked along one of the crescents which had been started in the Regency period and had been finished in the mid-Victorian period; one’s eye could trace the gradual transformation from elegance to ostentation. While my eye did this, my mind was worrying away at the Routh family. I looked at the house immediately opposite me. It had a lot of mid-Victorian embellishments and had not been very well-maintained: rusting iron balustrade, ominous cracks in the façade, a film of dust on the inside of the windows and a coating of salt spray on the outside. I moved on. The Rouths moved with me. I had thought that the change of scene would help me to gain a more balanced outlook and correct my distorted impressions of the Routh household. But the thrashing seas of Brighton had not cleared my mind. I was, if anything, more confused than ever. The problem, I told myself, arose from the fact that I was now viewing the Routh family in a period of stress and although dramatists like to maintain that at such times one sees deeply into the human personality, this is probably a fallacy. The man on the rack is not the whole man. And just as a ship during a storm will pitch and toss, engines straining, timbers creaking, and may to the ignorant give every appearance of breaking up, when the wind subsides it will glide smoothly forward emerging from this testing time with no more damage to the structure than a scratch here and there on the paintwork. The Rouths, too, would survive their storm.
Nevertheless, I had had one or two surprises. Mrs. Routh, in particular, had reacted in a way that puzzled me. She, who was so eminently sane, so formidably intelligent, who had such a deep psychological understanding of her fellows, had this morning accused Dr. Lander of refusing to give information which he was, quite plainly, trying to impart. Moreover, she had been unnecessarily rude to him. I chided myself for criticizing her behaviour; she was under considerable strain and could not be held to account for a momentary lapse from her usual standards. But all the time that I was saying this to myself, I was recalling the tone of her voice as she spoke to him, and resentment was stirring inside me. But this was Dr. Lander’s affair, not mine, and he appeared to be perfectly able to withstand her attacks.
I took a road which led to the shopping centre and turned my attention to Mr. Routh. He seemed, as ever, a towering figure, but rather in the way of a formidable fortification that has outlived its usefulness; he was dominant, craggy, yet somehow not as effective, as I had remembered him. Perhaps I was unnecessarily influenced by Margaret’s criticisms. They had been so unexpected and had therefore made too deep an impression on me. She was ill, and at such times people often turn against their nearest and dearest. But the statement that she had made about his being unable to meet other people on an adult level worried at my mind. She had been speaking in particular of his relationship with Dr. Lander. It was unfortunate that before she ever made this comment, I had noted that there was something a little forced in his attitude to Dr. Ahmed. He tried too hard with Dr. Ahmed, and Dr. Ahmed was aware of it and did not lik
e it.
‘What a little bitch you are!’ I said to myself. ‘Putting these people under the microscope and then complaining because you find that they have faults and weaknesses like other human beings! The trouble with you is that you are not mature enough to accept gradations of tone and colour, you still want everything in black and white as when you were a child.’ The fault was in me, and not in the Routh family: it had ever been so.
I took myself off to The Lanes and went into one of the cafes for tea. I sat by the window looking across a small, enclosed square bordered by new shops bright and cluttered as an English flower border but more exotic. I realized, munching toast and gazing at a shop which sold Oriental jewellery, that my relationship with the Routh family was undergoing a necessary transformation. Something, or someone, had intervened between me and them so that I was seeing them from a distance and in a new perspective. That was fine. Gradually, a more adult relationship would develop and when I had passed through this rather critical stage, I would rediscover them, their virtues stronger and more impressive than ever. I poured tea and concentrated on the display of Oriental jewellery; there was a medallion on a long silver chain, it was just what I needed with my blue jersey trouser suit, it would give a nice distinction to an otherwise unremarkable outfit.
‘You look like Aaron gazing at the promised land.’
It was Nurse McIver. She was wearing a light tweed suit and a tan scarf jauntily knotted at the throat; but she might as well have been in uniform, years of service to others had indelibly stamped her features with an air of friendly but professional reassurance. She was carrying a tray laden with tea, toast and pastries. I said, ‘Do join me. I’m just thinking about that medallion in the window over there.’
‘It looks fair enough,’ she said, when she had identified the piece. ‘But you’ll get something similar much more cheaply elsewhere; and probably better workmanship.’ She unstacked the tray. ‘Not that I can talk. The food here is impossibly expensive, but I always come because I like the place so much. I’m a push-over for this sort of thing, whether it’s The Shambles, The Pantiles, The Lanes or the Kasbah, these human honeycombs just draw me in.’
‘Do you come often?’ I asked.
‘Once a week, sometimes twice if I can manage it. I’m addicted to Brighton. I used to work here. I was at the Royal Sussex. Then my brother became ill and I had to leave to look after him. I’m always looking after people. Even when they don’t need it. The need, of course, is in me. I’m a typical case of repressed maternal instincts. Dr. Lander says I try to organize him.’
‘That would be difficult,’ I hazarded.
‘Oh, he’s not so very intractable; he just got left out when tact was being handed round. But fortunately I’ve not a great deal of time for the soft talkers, so we get on well enough. He’s a good doctor and I’m a good nurse.’
‘Have you worked with him long?’
‘I went to help him when his wife was so ill. Poor man, he needed help and there were few who offered any practical service.
People are very ready with advice and consolation, but there always seems to be a shortage of those who will roll up their sleeves. That’s where I come into my own. And I was glad to get back to a bit of nursing. It’s ideal for me. I can’t leave my brother for too long, he has Parkinson’s disease. He seems to feel that he was afflicted with it so that I could have someone to look after. It does us good to get away from each other for a while.’
She went on talking, crisply and cheerfully; but I felt that she was not a woman who normally talked quite so much. Every now and again, I caught her studying my face with an amusement which was not in the least unkind.
‘It must be a great help to Dr. Lander to have you,’ I said.
‘He certainly needs someone. After his wife died, he should have had a rest, he was in a low state of health himself by that time. But he went on working just as hard. Work is a drug, you’re afraid of what will happen if you reduce the dose.’
‘Is there a lot of work in his practice?’
‘Enough. He has no partner, and he’s not in the sort of practice where you can switch off at night and leave emergency calls to a duty doctor. If there’s an emergency in one of the villages or farms, he has to turn out. And he takes a clinic at the East Sussex Hospital as well. There’s enough work to tire a healthy man and more than enough to give this one a breakdown if he doesn’t do something about it soon.’
‘Perhaps he can’t now.’
She gave me that amused look and said dryly, ‘Men have a strong instinct for self-preservation. I was afraid he had lost his, but I think maybe I was wrong.’
‘That’s good, then,’ I said.
There seemed to be nothing more to say about Dr. Lander.
We talked for some time about Brighton. She did not like the Victoriana, which appealed to me; her Scots dislike of excess would not allow her to enjoy it. ‘I’m a child of the manse. You can’t get away from it, however hard you try. You’ll never believe me, but I feel a real sense of wickedness when I come here and indulge myself.’
Quite naturally, the Rouths came into our discussion at this point. We agreed that they seemed to have escaped the rigours of non-conformism.
‘Except for Constance and ballet,’ I laughed.
‘Constance and ballet?’ She looked surprised.
‘She gave it up,’ I explained. ‘For some reason, her mother wasn’t very happy about it.’
‘Maybe she wasn’t,’ Nurse McIver retorted. ‘But Constance gave up ballet when her thighs spread.’
I Stared at her. ‘But she took up horse-riding instead.’
‘She told her family that she had taken up horse-riding, I don’t doubt; but she still went to ballet lessons.’ She looked at my face. ‘Dear me! I shouldn’t have told you this. But several people know about it. It’s surprising that she managed to keep it from her family; but then the mother and father have always been so occupied with public duties, perhaps they didn’t see as much of their children’s comings and goings as most parents would have done.’
‘They wouldn’t have wanted to keep a check on their children’s comings and goings,’ I said. ‘They believe in freedom.’
‘And Constance took full advantage of her freedom.’
I stared, unbelieving, into my tea cup.
‘I always thought it was rather splendid of her to give up ballet like that,’ I confessed.
‘I don’t think Constance has a trace of non-conformist conscience,’ Nurse McIver said gently.
‘What you are saying is that she hasn’t a conscience.’ I was beginning to get angry.
‘I don’t know about a conscience. I sometimes think we’d all be the better without one. But I’m not saying that Constance is uncaring. I think she is very fond of her parents and believes that they should be spared any unnecessary suffering. As you said, her mother was not happy about those ballet lessons. The thought of Constance taking up a stage career did not appeal to her and one can understand why.’
‘I don’t think Mrs. Routh is at all prejudiced about that sort of thing.’
‘In theory she may not be prejudiced. But fact and theory seldom go hand in hand, do they? And she must sometimes have looked at her growing daughter and been a little frightened of what she saw.’ Nurse McIver studied the pastries and made a careful selection. ‘Constance always reminds me of a woman in a Rubens and Rubens wouldn’t be to Mrs. Routh’s taste, would he?’
‘I don’t know …’ I had myself thought of Botticelli and Renoir, but Rubens… . I pondered Rubens unhappily.
‘In any case, Constance relieved her mother of anxiety.’ Nurse McIver inserted a fork resolutely in a mille feuilles. ‘I couldn’t have done that. But I must confess to a certain admiration.’
I was still trying to come to terms with this revelation and I was some way short of the point of admiration. The story had the ring of truth; I recognized Constance’s own kind of logic. What had she said about Margaret? �
�Unpleasant things are so much better not known. Margaret has had the sense to forget them. So let it rest at that.’ I had not realized how completely she had carried this philosophy into her own life.
‘I often think Constance must be something of a throwback,’ Nurse McIver said. ‘One would like to have known the grandparents. Constance seems to be quite untouched by her immediate background. And she has that tremendous capacity to do good because she has a generous heart, and not from a sense of duty, that puts all of us do-gooders to shame.’
As one of the people who had been taken in by Constance’s renunciation of ballet, I was not at that moment prepared to accept this roseate view of her. I thought of poor Margaret’s struggles with conscience, of all the turmoil and anguish of decision, and I rather resented Constance’s apparent ability to slough off moral combat.
‘I was brought up to believe in duty,’ Nurse McIver said. ‘Duty to God, duty to my parents, duty to my neighbour. It’s the one idea I’ve managed to free myself of—this idea of duty. Nursing did that for me. If a sense of duty is all you have to offer your patients—then God help them!’
Margaret had been brought up in an atmosphere where a sense of duty was all-important and she had not freed herself of it. I felt a surge of sympathy for her and the beginning of an understanding as yet very faint.
‘I must get back soon,’ I said to Nurse McIver.
Already the light was fading, a lamp had come on in the square. I felt unaccountably sad and it must have shown in my face.
‘I’m sorry I told you this,’ she said. ‘I’ve upset you.’
‘One should know the truth about people,’ I said.
‘My dear child! I haven’t told you the truth about Constance; I’ve told you one small episode in her life.’
‘It makes the whole of her life a lie!’ I protested. ‘In that household, of all places, it makes her life a lie.’
‘The only person who can make a lie of her life is Constance herself.’
This, I felt, was merely a rephrasing of what I had said.