FAMILY CIRCLE

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘There’s something in that, of course,’ Mrs. Routh said to me. ‘Family life has become very claustrophobic in the twentieth century.’ She sounded as though she was viewing the twentieth century from a great distance in time.

  Constance had settled on the grass for what seemed to be an amiable chat with two of the young men. Dr. Ahmed had taken on two of the girls. The scene began to resemble a group of tutorials in the open air. Several of the village folk had drifted in, hoping that Mr. Routh might be persuading the hippies to leave. They did not appear to be very impressed by what they saw. Dr. Ahmed was discussing O and A levels with one of the girls.

  ‘I’ve got eight O’s and three A’s,’ she told him.

  ‘And you don’t want to make use of them?’

  ‘For why? I go to university and I get a degree. So what then? It will be harder than ever to convince people that I don’t want any part of all this.’ She waved her hand generally in the direction of the village. One of the villagers waved back at her and another made a coarse gesture.

  ‘But if you want to change things, don’t you need all the weapons you can command?’ Dr. Ahmed asked. ‘The intellect is a much more formidable weapon than anything else.’

  ‘I don’t want to change anything. I don’t like the world enough to want to change it. Wanting to change something is becoming involved with it. I don’t want to be involved. I want out.’

  ‘This, of course, is why the Asian philosophies are so attractive to them,’ Mrs. Routh said to me.

  She stood looking at them, as though they were a different species for which special allowances must be made. But they weren’t different, however much they or anyone else might like to fool themselves, they were people of the same age as myself and probably with much the same background. I looked at Mrs. Routh’s face, the features carefully smoothed of irritation, and I began to feel intensely irritated myself. I looked at Mr. Routh, engaged in earnest dissertation, bending his mind to the hippie problem in a way that he would never have troubled to consider the problems of the boy down the street who worked in a solicitor’s office or the girl who was a clerk in the bank. As far as he and Mrs. Routh were concerned, the youngsters who went out to humdrum jobs and gave a portion of their salary to keep the home going were non-people. I was a non-person, too.

  One of the villagers came up to Mrs. Routh. I recognized her as the woman in the surgery. Her manner was even more truculent now.

  ‘We ought to have the police on them,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mrs. Cunforth,’ Mrs. Routh said with a slightly surprised inflection in her voice as though a strange but rather amusing suggestion had been made. ‘One can hardly object to people sitting on the grass chatting, can one?’

  ‘Not just sitting, some of them aren’t. They used my garden as a lavatory.’

  ‘Oh? Well, we haven’t anything to complain of here.’

  Mrs. Cunforth retired to repeat this conversation to a small group by the kitchen window. Mr. Routh was saying, ‘It’s only recently we have had so much leisure. Might this not be a part of the answer?’ He was stretched out again now, a stalk of grass between his teeth.

  ‘Are you extolling the virtues of work, the dignity of honest toil?’ one of the young men asked. ‘Because if so, don’t! My old man was a miner, all it got him was tuberculosis. There is no particular dignity about tuberculosis.’

  ‘And my old man was a bank manager and all it got him was thrombosis,’ someone else chimed in.

  ‘Oh, spare us the details of your tragic childhood!’ the earnest girl dismissed them and turned back to Mr. Routh. ‘This idea about the value of work is another misconception fostered by the moneyed classes who require others to work for them in order that they can enjoy this leisure that you are so dead against. But they don’t like it when our type of person finds leisure. And yet we don’t compel anyone to work for us.’

  ‘No one works for you, did you say?’ one of the villagers called out. ‘Who grows the vegetables you steal, tell me that?’

  ‘And who drives the cars you get lifts in?’

  ‘And who works the land you sleep rough on?’

  ‘We don’t believe in property,’ the girl replied.

  ‘Well, we do, so eff off!’

  One of the young men said, ‘Jesus! We soon get down to basic issues when the sacred word property is profaned!’ He stretched back on the grass and laughed hysterically. A girl leant over him and they began to fondle each other. The earnest girl stretched her arms upwards and flung her head back; the contours of her body showed clearly beneath the thin material of her dress. One of the young men hooked his arm round her waist and pulled her down on top of him. She thrashed about a bit so he rolled her over and lay on top of her. He was very heavy and she was only a twig of a thing; she offered no more resistance, her hands fluttered once or twice and then settled at the nape of his neck. Mr. Routh rose to his feet and dusted the knees of his trousers.

  ‘This has been very interesting,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Now I wonder if any of you would like to have tea with us?’

  But the hippies sensed weakness and, in spite of their protestations of good-will, they were only too ready to exploit it. They began to close with one another. The villagers made suggestions of varying degrees of coarseness and one or two of the farmhands showed a disposition to demonstrate that there are none so virile as those who work close to the earth.

  Mr. Routh stood, lone and upright, like a figure in an allegorical painting contemplating a scene from Dante’s inferno. Mrs. Routh said to me, ‘Well, I don’t think anything of interest is going to be said from now on. I suppose tea had better be prepared for any who may require it.’ She turned and walked back to the house.

  Constance came and joined me.

  ‘Poor Daddy! What are we to do?’

  It was indeed a difficult situation. A love-in in his orchard was not to Mr. Routh’s taste; but if he telephoned the police, the hippies would have driven him to abandon one of his most cherished principles, while if he did nothing the hippies would regard this as weakness rather than tolerance. He stood looking about him helplessly: in spite of his advanced views on obscenity, it was a kind of martyrdom for him to stand his ground while this scene was being played out. But he did so, and when I look back and see him standing there, fighting the pangs of sickness, it seems to me that, ineffectual and ridiculous though it was, it was one of the bravest stands he ever made. Dr. Ahmed deserted him and edged back among the crowd of villagers where he made one or two unavailing attempts to stem the tide of violence. Constance and I made an appeal to a fair-haired girl who was leaning against a tree trunk, not yet actively engaged.

  ‘Can’t you do something to stop this?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were all so dedicated to peace.’

  ‘Isn’t loving peaceful?’ she turned wide blue eyes on me.

  It was, in present circumstances, gross provocation and she was well aware of it. So was Constance. Constance had herself indulged in a good deal of non-violent provocation and she was at a loss as to how to deal with the situation now that she was in the position normally occupied by authority of one kind or another.

  ‘If you want to make love, why don’t you go somewhere else to do it?’ I asked. In most of our dealings one with another some common ground exists, there is a degree of acceptance; once this breaks down, all one’s arguments become trite.

  ‘Where could we go?’ the girl pretended to take my question seriously. ‘They turn us off the beaches, they turn us out of the parks.’

  ‘There’s always the Downs.’

  ‘Do you climb some bloody great hill in order to make love?’

  It was at this point that Margaret appeared. She came out of the kitchen and walked purposefully across the yard, seemingly quite unaware of what was happening around her. She went into the outhouse and shut the door. I envied her her ability to dissociate herself from her surroundings.

  Mrs. Routh was in th
e kitchen, looking through the window. Saul could be heard hurling himself against the closed door, no doubt under the impression that he could solve the whole problem if only someone would let him out. By now things were getting rough. The villagers were throwing anything that came to hand, old flower pots, stones, a rusty trowel; one of the farmhands was disputing the body of a girl with her hippie boy friend.

  ‘We’ll have to get the police,’ I said to Constance. ‘Someone is going to get hurt soon.’

  I turned towards the house and at that moment Margaret came out of the outhouse. She had something in her hand. She disappeared from view for a moment on the far side of the building and then emerged again. A fierce gush of water sprayed the lawn and its writhing occupants. The effect was instantaneous, it was a cold day: the recumbent figures were on their feet in no time at all. Margaret stood her ground, resolute and steady, and allowed the water to fall on the just and the unjust alike. When her father came towards her crying, ‘No, no!’ she sprayed him from head to foot with the same detachment with which she would have watered a hollyhock. The villagers stopped throwing things, some came to her aid with buckets while others faded quietly away. In a short time, hoses had been turned on all over the village. Someone telephoned the police, but by the time they arrived, the village was awash and all that the police had to do was mop up the hippies.

  Mr. Routh, dripping from head to foot, confronted his daughter. ‘That was very wrong,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Christ drove the money lenders from the temple,’ she replied. ‘I have dispersed a plague of locusts.’ She went round the side of the outhouse and turned off the tap.

  A policeman came into the orchard to see whether any damage had been done.

  ‘None at all,’ Mr. Routh told him coldly.

  The man tripped over the hose pipe. ‘Someone been watering the garden?’ He looked at Mr. Routh and winked. ‘Ah well, I daresay it could do with it.’ It was a great embarrassment to Mr. Routh to be in cahoots with the police in an affair of this kind. On the other hand, he could hardly insist that action be taken against his own daughter. He bent to pick up the nozzle of the hose and the policeman walked away laughing. Mrs. Routh came out of the kitchen and began to pick up litter in the orchard, hampered by Saul. I collected some of the broken flower pots and stacked them by the dustbin. Then I went into the house. As I came into the hall, I heard voices. Constance and Dr. Ahmed were talking in the sitting-room and the door was ajar.

  Constance had an unusual way of talking. Words meant little to her and she was not interested in ordinary conversation. Whereas Margaret involved herself deeply in any discussion that was taking place, Constance seemed to say one thing while her eyes said another. She would regard a person’s face with more interest than she accorded any statement they might make. I had often felt, watching her, that while I would remember every word spoken, Constance would be able to paint the speaker’s face, accurately recording not only the bone structure, but the more intimate details, the way the lips parted from the teeth, the way a man’s hair grows at the nape of the neck. This attitude was reflected now in her conversation with Rasim Ahmed, so that when she said, ‘Can’t you see that I have enough worries!’ she did not sound at all like a harassed woman whose domain has been invaded by hippies, but as though she was conveying something altogether different. There was a pause; he did not respond with his usual courteous sympathy. She said, ‘What a selfish little man you are! You really don’t care if I am upset or not, do you?’ There was no ill-will in her statement, in fact it had rather the reverse effect.

  He said, ‘I want an answer.’ He, at least, appeared to be deeply concerned with words, his voice was charged with so much feeling that I halted and thought twice of my intention of interrupting them.

  She laughed. ‘You … want …!’ She drew the words out slowly.

  ‘I have been very patient.’ His voice was full of the self-pity of the wounded male.

  ‘Ah, my poor Rasim!’

  ‘All last night, I waited …’

  ‘How terrible! For one night you do not have what you want.’

  There was a slight scuffling movement and Constance said, ‘No, no, no! Not here. Not in my parents’ house, ever, ever, ever!’ And she laughed joyously, making a nonsense of the melodramatic words. But this time she must have meant what she said, because I only just managed to regain the kitchen before the sitting-room door was flung back and she came into the hall. I heard her footsteps come towards the kitchen.

  ‘Hullo, are you getting tea?’ she said to me. I had turned away so that she could not see my face and was standing over the stove.

  I said, ‘Yes’ and turned the gas on under the kettle; I hoped there was water in it. She came and stood beside me; she lifted the kettle and said, ‘That won’t be enough. We are bound to have visitors.’

  I moved away to the table and said, ‘Can I cut the bread?’

  ‘But of course.’

  At this moment, Margaret came in dragging Saul with her.

  ‘You’re a bad dog,’ she told him.

  ‘I should have thought he was the one person who had come out of this with his paws clean,’ Constance snapped.

  ‘Would you?’ Margaret made a play of examining Saul’s paws.

  ‘Doesn’t say much for the rest of us, then.’ She was in great good humour, the recent water display appeared to have purged her soul of bitterness. It seemed to have restored her health, too. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were glowing.

  ‘Make the tea good and strong,’ she instructed Constance. ‘And lots of bread and butter, please. I seem to have worked up quite an appetite.’ She went out of the room, humming some quite inappropriate tune, I think it was ‘Some enchanted evening’.

  Constance put her hands on her hips and stared after her sister. ‘She really enjoyed that!’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing with that bread?’

  I put the knife down. ‘I’m sorry. I … my fingers are all thumbs.’

  ‘I’ll cut and you butter.’

  Constance was right. Visitors arrived. Mrs. Rydall, who lived at the old schoolhouse, and Owen Lander dropped in to find out how we had fared. Owen had escaped remarkably easily. When he found hippies congregating at the side of his house, he merely went out and said that this was a doctor’s surgery and they obligingly moved on.

  ‘You were lucky,’ Constance said. She was handing round plates. Mrs. Rydall took hers and fussed about where to rest it. Rasim Ahmed gave her a brooding look and said, ‘Thank you’ in a sulky voice. Owen was talking to Mrs. Routh. As Constance moved behind his chair he did not turn his head, but he raised one arm and she leant forward and put the plate in his hand. Something about the easy familiarity of that exchange went through me like a knife.

  Chapter Ten

  I was woken early the next morning. Beyond the window it was dark, no moon or star. But something had woken me, and because I was uneasy, I got out of bed and went to the window. It must have been later than I thought. Constance was out with Joshua. Perhaps it was his bray that had awakened me. I could hear her voice, quite low, but carrying on the still air. She was quieting him. There was no light from the kitchen on this occasion, so I could not make out her form in the darkness. I opened the window wider and heard her feet pass lightly along the path beneath my window; then there was the sound of a key turning in the kitchen door. I went back to bed but I was now thoroughly awake, so I put on the light. My travelling clock said half-past five.

  I could not sleep again. I lay watching the darkness thin; the dawn came with some cold grey light probing the corners of the room, the birds did their best, but it was a bloodless affair. I let Mr. Routh have first turn in the bathroom.

  Constance’s nocturnal pursuits must have suited her well. She was as sparkling as the maidens who advertise the benefit of liver salts. Mr. and Mrs. Routh were not so happy. Margaret’s behaviour had upset them; in fact, they were more than upset, the
performance had had a spontaneity about it which had deeply disturbed them. I think they could readily have accepted it as another manifestation of instability; I sometimes suspected that Mrs. Routh found sick people more interesting than healthy ones, and undoubtedly sickness roused all Mr. Routh’s tenderness and compassion. But Margaret had taken her stand with considerable firmness of purpose and there had been no hysterical outbursts. Moreover, in spite of an almost unbearable atmosphere of unspoken disapproval, her resolution had not wavered and she had not as yet made any apology. I watched her eating large quantities of toast and marmalade and drinking strong coffee with every appearance of enjoyment. No doubt she was aware of the moral pressure being brought to bear on her, she had lived in this atmosphere for too long not to be aware of it; but she was putting up a remarkable resistance. A matter of fourteen hours may not seem long, but in a close family circle it is an unconscionably long time to be at odds with your parents, especially if you are not well and have never before successfully flouted them.

  Constance talked. What she said, I have no idea, but she kept up a staccato volley of conversation, most of which demanded answers from her parents. In this way she broke their concentration. It was the only time I ever remembered the children co-operating against their parents.

  The atmosphere was somewhat lightened after breakfast because Mr. Routh had to go to a meeting about race relations in Brighton and Mrs. Routh was attending the marriage guidance clinic. Constance drove her father into Brighton,

  Margaret and I went into the sitting-room. She sat by the window with a book open on her lap, looking composed as a Jane Austin heroine. I wrote to my father. It was high time that he had a letter from me. When it would be delivered was uncertain, since he was touring the Hebrides in connection with a book that he hoped to write about Bonnie Prince Charlie. I had no address and would send the letter care of his publishers who were the only people with whom he communicated on these trips.

  The light from the side window cast shadows on the desk. I had sat here, at this old, worn desk, on other occasions, writing to tell him that I had arrived safely. Constance and Margaret would be waiting for me to finish so that we could catch the post. The ghosts of their former selves hovered in the doorway, eager to get the chore out of the way so that the fun could begin. So much that was unpleasant had been brought to the surface of my mind by recent events that the good times had been buried. But now they came flooding back. What tremendous fun it had been for a solitary child like me to be with a party of children! I smelt again the warm cow-pat in which Constance had dropped our sandwiches; the drone of flies which had tormented us now seemed to be the melody of happiness, the scratching of grass on bare legs, the chill as evening came and the wind flicked scorched flesh was next to ecstasy. From the window, I swore that I could pick out the very tree I had climbed with Timothy, and from which I had subsequently fallen. In the field beyond, I had taken my first tentative ride on Jehoshaphat, Joshua’s predecessor; the warm, coarse, slightly sticky feel of his coat against the inside of my legs, and the leathery smell of him, had seemed wondrous strange to a town-bred child.