FAMILY CIRCLE

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘But you’re doing a fair bit of judging yourself where your parents are concerned.’

  ‘I don’t judge my mother. We’ve never been very close and we don’t understand each other. But I don’t judge her. But my father … My father meant so much to me when I was a child. I used to think he stood for all the great values; not the social and psychological trivia my mother was so concerned with. His voice rang out like a great gong, resounding through my childhood. When I was afraid of anything, I used to tell myself that he would have conquered that particular fear, when I saw that something was wrong, I was sure that he would stand firm against that wrong. He was the one in the hymn, who would true valour see. He was always very kind and gentle with us children, but in chapel he was a great force. The rest looked like pygmies beside him. Then, chapel congregations began to fall away, and so he fell out, too. He said he was seeking a wider audience, but really he was turning away from his calling. He’s been on the run ever since.’

  ‘But he does so much good, Margaret.’

  ‘Oh, Pug, Pug! Does he? Lately it seems to me as though he has gone over to the other side. He is so anxious to be liberal and progressive that he no longer keeps his spiritual values which are out of fashion; he is attached to causes, but he won’t give himself to any one cause and work for it, risking everything, even failure. Failure is the unthinkable thing. Do you know about Khatmandu?’

  The words came chillingly out of context. I had the terrible fear that her mind had gone. But when I looked at her, I saw that she was in fact completely sane and perfectly in command of herself. She said:

  ‘Obviously you don’t know. I thought that perhaps my mother might have told you.’

  ‘Your mother …?’

  ‘Oh, she knows. She and my father both know. But they have forgotten. Sometimes it is convenient to forget.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It all happened several years ago, when the three of us were returning from a trip to Sark. We had to wait around for the aircraft, the weather was bad. They made a room available for us in a nearby hotel. There were only a few other people waiting. There was a leather sofa and a woman sitting on it, surrounded by parcels, suitcases and holdalls. I asked her if she would move some of the parcels so that I could sit down—I didn’t really want to sit down, but it went against my upbringing to see someone being selfish and getting away with it. She complied, not very graciously. She wasn’t a gracious person. She was middle-aged with a thick body and a rather formidable face that hadn’t had any care and attention for years; her eyebrows straggled across the bridge of her nose and her skin was yellow. Her hair was grey, cropped short as though to get it out of the way rather than to achieve any stylish effect. She was wearing the kind of clothes that might have been made any time during the last fifty years, a tweed suit with a longish skirt, heavy wool stockings and those stout lace-up shoes that go on for ever. I thought she was probably a teacher at one of those eccentric private schools where the staff grow old with the building and never notice that the world outside is changing.

  And, in fact, that was what she was. Only the school was in Khatmandu and she was a missionary. I can’t remember how we got talking, I think she was grumbling about the delay. All she did was grumble. She hated England and had only come back to see to certain legal matters involving her family. She said how spoilt we all were, thinking we were hard up if we didn’t have a car and a television set and a washing machine; how little we knew or cared about the way other people lived. Then she had a go at the people who thought they did care. Some big-wig had been to Khatmandu and told her how to run her school on more modern lines and reproved her for trying to convert the natives from their natural ways. People, he had told her, must run their own lives in their own way, even if to us they sometimes seem cruel and don’t come up to our more sophisticated standards of civilization. I could see that my parents heartily agreed with him; my mother caught my eye and twinkled at me. We were all going to have a good laugh after we had given her five out of ten for good intentions. But suddenly, while she was grumbling about him, I saw just what it must mean to her. She had spent twenty-five years of her life out there, trying to do good, perhaps not succeeding, but trying just the same; and some high-powered do-gooder had flown in on a three months’ tour of the East and told her where she was going wrong! And maybe he was right. But did he ever pause to wonder what it meant to give up, not three months, but twenty-five years of your life to an idea? I don’t suppose he gave it a thought, he probably used her for light relief in his lectures when he returned. I put this point to my mother afterwards; but she wasn’t receptive. She gave a vivid thumb-nail sketch of the woman with some penetrating psychological observations on her motivation. If my mother had lived in the time of Christ, she would have had searching comments to make on some of the disciples! But I was staggered. I couldn’t get that woman out of my mind. She was a young woman, at her beginning, when she went out there; she had given up all the exciting, hopeful, creative years to this place and now she was an alien in her own country. And, probably, she was alien to the people among whom she lived in Khatmandu. She had no roots anywhere, nowhere that she could call her home, no people that were her people. She simply had an idea of service to which she had been astonishingly faithful. It made a very deep impression on me. Perhaps because she was so unappealing, so untouched by any sense of beauty and romance. If she had had one of those calm faces which look as though they have seen the vision beautiful, it would have been different. One would have felt she had had her reward. But she was one of those who have lost everything on the way, even their original inspiration. Do you remember that terrible cry in one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems, “Send my roots rain”? But the rain does not come, so you must soldier on without promise or hope. I think it requires a saint to do that. I told my parents so. It wasn’t well-received. Neither of them has stuck to anything that long. They invest their resources in a number of causes: it spreads the risk of failure.

  ‘They began to be a bit worried about my obsession with this woman. For several years I had wanted to be a missionary, and I think they were afraid she was going to push me over the edge. Missions are out of date now. And the idea of missionary work is embarrassing to my father who has advanced ideas about coloured people and the importance of alien cultures. My mother began to talk to me about what a marvellous brain I had, and how important it was that one should use one’s gifts to the full. The drudgery of mission life would destroy me. At this time it was touch and go whether I went to Oxford, did you know that? I put up quite a strong resistance to it. At Oxford I would have to think and think and think, and I didn’t want to think, I wanted to give and give and give, I wanted to give not less than everything. I was avid for this “drudgery” they wanted to spare me. Anyway, in the end, we reached a compromise: I would go to Oxford and get my degree, and then I would be quite free to decide my future.’

  She turned to me. ‘So. Here I am. Quite free.’

  I did not know what to say. It was so unexpected that all the comments which came immediately to mind were trite. She said:

  ‘I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. But why should that incident come into your mind when you were taken ill on your return from Holland?’

  She said sharply, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about that.’ There was panic in her voice. She put her hands to her face. At first, I was irritated by this return to her more dramatic manner; then I realized that she was genuinely unwell.

  ‘Here, sit down.’ I took off my jacket and spread it on the grass verge. She almost fell down. I made her bend forward and pressed my hand against the back of her neck to keep her head down. She whispered, ‘Oh, dear God, I feel so bad.’ Her face was grey. After a time, she began to sweat heavily and then the faintness seemed to pass. She wiped a handkerchief across her forehead and around the back of her neck.

  ‘I must pull myself together, something awful wi
ll happen to me otherwise.’ There was quiet desperation in her voice. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘You might try getting a temporary job. It would occupy your mind.’

  She said, ‘Yes’ rather bleakly. She put up a hand and twisted a strand of hair behind her ears; her hand was shaking. ‘I must get a grip on myself. It’s so difficult, Pug. There’s nothing to hang on to, it’s like trying to crawl out of a well with greased sides.’

  ‘There’s yourself, Margaret. Hang on to that!’

  She stared at me suspiciously as though I was making fun of her.

  ‘You’ve got so much,’ I said. ‘You’re intelligent, reliable and hard-working. And you want to serve people. So many people want a job for what they can get out of it, but you want to put something into it.’

  She looked away.

  ‘Perhaps you did overwork at university. But you got your degree, a good degree. That’s all behind you now.’

  ‘A degree is a ticket to nowhere. At university you are taken for a ride into an intellectual desert. And when it is at its most arid, you are left stranded with no useful piece of equipment to enable you to continue your journey.’

  ‘You could certainly get a job making statements like that!’ I retorted.

  She laughed. ‘Maybe. But you said yourself you weren’t sure what you wanted to do.’

  It was true. I was very undecided about the future, and in no position to lecture anyone else on the subject. She got to her feet, with my help, and brushed down her skirt.

  ‘We’d better get you home,’ I said.

  The chapel was empty when we reached it, save for the sidesmen who were counting the collection in the vestry.As therewerefive of us, I had had to bring my car so our return presented no problem.

  Margaret said to me, ‘Can you leave me here for a while?’

  I hesitated. ‘Lunch will spoil if you don’t come soon.’ And I had an engagement after lunch.

  ‘I won’t be long. Please leave me, please, please!’ she entreated.

  ‘I can’t go back in this state.’

  ‘All right. I’ll wait in the car.’

  She walked up the side aisle towards the piano. As I went out of the door, she was singing softly, ‘Oh love, that wilt not let me go; I rest my weary soul in Thee… .’ Gradually, her voice grew stronger, sustained not so much by emotion as dedication. ‘I give Thee back the life I owe …’

  Lunch was served by the time we returned and Constance was carving the joint.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ I said. ‘We went for a walk.’

  ‘It’s a nice day for a walk,’ Mrs. Routh said. ‘It has brightened considerably in the last half-hour.’

  I took the opportunity to say that I would be going to Brighton for the afternoon.

  ‘Everyone is going to Brighton!’ Mr. Routh said. ‘It has a great appeal for the young.’ He spoke with fervour about the appeal of Brighton, which was ‘raw with life’, not a last resting place for the elderly as were so many seaside resorts. He sounded as though he felt an emotional need to associate himself with Brighton. Mrs. Routh explained:

  ‘Timothy has gone to stay with friends in Brighton.’ I thought she sounded a little sad. Perhaps Constance thought so, too, because she diverted their attention by saying:

  ‘Seaford is supposed to be swarming with hippies. I met the dreadful Mrs. Cunforth; she said that some of them had turned inland, the vanguard had already reached Pidding-hoe. I told her that you were speaking at Seaford this afternoon, Daddy, and she said, “I hope your father won’t bring them here”, as though you might be a carrier of rabies.’

  ‘I shan’t mind in the least if they come to my meeting.’ Mr. Routh accepted the diversion happily. ‘After all, Christianity has its roots among the tribes of a nomadic people.’ He turned to me and said, ‘How irritating my generation must seem to you. This absurd fuss about hippies.’

  ‘I don’t identify with them,’ I said.

  ‘No?’ He was surprised, just as he would have been surprised to learn that Dr. Ahmed, who was Lebanese, did not identify with the Asian immigrants.

  ‘I think the nomadic idea is an attractive one,’ Constance said. ‘But I wish they would wash. After all, we’re not short of water in this country, are we? Now, if we are all ready, I will serve the sweet.’ While she did this, her father discoursed on the reasons why young people had turned away from twentieth-century civilization.

  ‘I am turning away from twentieth-century civilization this afternoon,’ Constance announced. ‘I am going riding on the Downs.’ She sang a line of ‘Oh, who will o’er the Downs with me?’ And, quite suddenly, without any one person seeming to give a lead, they all took up the song. It was one of those spontaneous outbursts of gaiety that had welled up among them when I was a child, as though there was some corporate spring of joy which they could sometimes, but not always, tap. Mrs. Routh sang, waving a spoon in strict time, ‘Her mother she has locked the door’ and Mr. Routh came in, his voice pulsating with drama, ‘Her father keeps the key’, and even Margaret threw back her head and joined in the triumphant, ‘But neither door nor bolt shall bar my own true love from me’. In the kitchen, Saul began to howl.

  ‘He wants his song, Daddy,’ Constance said.

  Saul’s song, the one which made him howl the loudest, was ‘Drake is going west’. Mr. Routh had to leave the table and stand to get the best effect. He stood very erect, shoulders squared, and gave heart and soul to the rendering. Although he knew that the performance was amusing, and indeed meant it to be so, there was a vein of emotion in the song which touched him but which, in present-day conditions, must only be allowed release beneath the mask of satire. At such times as this, I could glimpse him as a young man, gauche, vulnerable, intensely eager, and, like his daughter, in love with all the heroes.

  ‘ “Some are going west, lad …” ’ He tucked his chin in for the last verse, his face became grim. ‘ “Who’ll ne’er see home again.” ’ His voice lingered mournfully on the notes. ‘ “Some will sleep their long, long sleep,” ’ a blood-curdling howl here from Saul, ‘ “ ’Neath the Spanish Main.” ’ His chest expanded, his head was flung back:

  ‘ “So here’s to the Spanish Main

  And here’s to the foe.

  And here’s to Drake and his merry, merry men

  Who’ll never see Devon again

  ’Till they’ve laid, ’till they’ve laid

  The enemy low.” ’

  We all applauded and Saul was allowed in to take his share of acclaim. Constance, while enjoying the performance to the full, had collected and stacked the plates: she appeared to be in a hurry to get out. ‘There will be no washing up,’ she announced. ‘It can wait until even e’er the sun is set, when there will be a further recital. And we’ll have “We’m come up from Somerset”, Daddy.’

  She and I were ready at about the same time, so we left the house together, watched rather wistfully by Margaret who, I think, had hoped until the last minute that I would ask her to join me.

  Constance wore a cotton blouse and faded blue denims which indicated only too clearly that her thighs had spread. The blouse was an old one and her figure had developed beyond its capacity; the buttons strained at the point of maximum tension. The effect was distinctly disturbing and I wondered if she was riding alone. She appeared to be quite untroubled by the shortcomings of her clothing and strolled beside me, her face upturned to the late autumn sun. Her skin, soft as a child’s, was clear and white save for a faint dash of freckles across the bridge of the nose and beneath the eyes. She did not look as though she rode on the Downs in all weathers. I did not ask where the stables were: Constance and riding was a subject about which I was not altogether easy. We came down the village street together and as we neared Owen’s house I wondered what I was going to say. In the event, I murmured awkwardly, ‘Well, I’m going in here.’

  ‘Are you, now?’ She affected a brogue and gave me a delighted smile. ‘An’ the top o’ the
morning to you! Don’t go into Brighton, my dear. Take the man up on the Downs so free!’ She went on her way laughing.

  Owen was in the hall, speaking on the telephone; he opened the door with one hand and beckoned me inside. He said to the mouthpiece, ‘As I told you yesterday, there’s nothing you need to do, Mrs. Cunforth. He must have no food for the next forty-eight hours, no food at all, and it will cure itself… . But milk is food, Mrs. Cunforth; of course he won’t keep it down… .’ He listened for a moment or two, the fingers of one hand tapping restlessly on the telephone pad; then he said tonelessly, ‘The germs also live on food, Mrs. Cunforth.’ Eventually, he said resignedly, ‘Well, I have to go out to Stonegate Farm early this evening, so I’ll call in on the way.’ He put the receiver down and regarded me uneasily. ‘I’m sorry about this; but I’ve got to go out to the farm, old Mr. Denton is very ill.’