Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  ‘So how are you, then?’ said Molly in the shop. ‘Good. I’ve kept you a Herald. You forgot to pick it up last week. Not a thing I like to be without, myself. The national papers you can keep, but you don’t know what’s going on without the Herald. The cottage by the church is for sale, I see. People don’t stay put nowadays, do they? It’s here today and gone tomorrow. Didn’t used to be like that, round here. Still isn’t, for some, if you see what I mean – ’ a momentary pause within which Stella is subtly defined and perhaps delicately distanced – ‘but that being said, there’s those that muck in and pull their weight and those that don’t. You used to know how a person stood, without having to take soundings, know what I mean? You knew if they were farming or trade, church or chapel, you knew who their father was and which way they’d jump if it came to the push. Nowadays, people can walk into the shop and it’s anyone’s guess, frankly … Not that that doesn’t have its own interest, mind. Still, it’s complicated. Even the Herald doesn’t help there.’ She laughed.

  Naturally, thought Stella, getting into the car. All societies are complex, most are opaque – a fact which has kept the likes of me in business for quite a while now. But I am no longer in business, I am a part of the landscape like everyone else. And some of us are more tenuously placed within that landscape than others. Some are entrenched; others merely perch.

  All her life, wherever she was, she had thought of herself as a bird of passage. She had rented rooms or flats, expecting to move on. Where she worked, most of her colleagues were sunk deep in the culture of mortgages and house prices; she had felt relief to be excused all that. And in the field she had been in the ultimate state of transience – the invisible observer, the visitor from outer space. The people in whom she was interested were there, in that place – she herself was both there and crucially apart. If she lived permanently anywhere, it was in a landscape of the mind.

  In the Delta village no one knew where England was, except that it was distant. For most Maltese the general impression of Australia, to which many of their friends and relations had emigrated, was that it could not be that far away, since they knew that it took only twenty-four hours or so to get there. Orcadians refer to Scotland as the south. The siting of elsewhere depends on the viewpoint, but in the last resort it is simply elsewhere, with all that that implies. We are here but they are there, where things are done differently.

  She drove home. The red car tore past her on the lane, belching exhaust fumes. Karen Hiscox raised a hand in perfunctory greeting.

  The boys considered one another. Furtively, but each knowing that the other was doing it. That complementary face – the same thick dark brows, blunt nose, jut of the chin.

  I hate her, they told each other.

  ‘Maybe they gave me the wrong ones at the hospital.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘It happens. You don’t look like me, do you? Neither of you.’

  It did not occur to them that this was disproved by their resemblance to one another. They were slow thinkers. Later, at some point, they stumbled to this realization, but by then the incident was just part of a general cargo of resentment.

  ‘It’s going well,’ said Judith. ‘Far too well, so far as the Southwest Building Society is concerned. Two more trenches and I think we shall have most of the perimeter wall. The Southwest Building Society comes along in its pin-stripe suits and gazes in dismay. It sees its squash court receding by the day. The local paper did three columns and a nice picture of my students digging away in shorts and T-shirts. That’s bought me another week or two at least. No way the pin-stripes can move us on while that’s fresh in the local mind. I’m considering school visits and an Open Day. Come and visit again. Bring your boyfriend. Interested crowds are what I need. Sorry, did you say something? Joke, joke … You said yourself he keeps offering services. Seriously, though, noise it abroad. ELECTRIFYING DISCOVERY OF TWELFTH-CENTURY CHAPEL UNDER SQUASH COURT FOUNDATIONS. It’s the only way we’ll buy more time. What? No, medieval chapels are not two-a-penny, even in these parts. Even the pin-stripes know better than to suggest that. Oh … joke, I see. All right – touché. But what would really serve the purpose is a burial. No, you idiot – an ancient burial. Medieval graveyard, that’s what I want. Bring in the demographic boys and I’d be in business for months. No, I shouldn’t think there’s much chance. Best we can do is scrape on and hope for… You’ve just heard what? Shots? Well, people do shoot things in the country, don’t they? It’s the main point of the place, as I understand it. So anyway, get over if you can, otherwise I’ll give you a ring again. Have to go now. Mary wants me to give her a hand with something …’

  The boys went a little way up the grass track to the hills. They had a go at some pigeons and then a crow, but didn’t get anything. And they didn’t dare stay long – their parents were both out, but their mother could be back any time. Michael cleaned the gun and hung it up again in her study. They were both shaking, in case she came. But it was worth it. It gave them a buzz, all evening, knowing what she didn’t know. She thought she knew everything about them, did she? Well, there were things she didn’t know.

  ‘I’ve picked up the throttle cable,’ said Richard. ‘I could stop by and fit it one day next week, if that suits you. So … how are things with you? Excellent. Oh, not too bad … My self-imposed schedule. The days are filled, one way and another. A determined assault on old papers, at the moment. A task I’ve been postponing. Including things of Nadine’s I felt unable to deal with when … at the time. Apropos of which, there is the occasional communication from yourself. I’ll bring them along, shall I? Ah … right, then, I won’t. You, too, are de-accessioning – I believe that’s the archivists’ term. I will consign to black sacks. Mostly postcards from exotic locations, anyway. One from Orkney with picture of seal and pups and cryptic message on the reverse – “Time for a five-year check? Long days to be seized up here.” No doubt you could deconstruct. I read it – hope you share my view that postcards are in the public domain.’

  ‘The thing about life is to have a strategy,’ says Nadine. ‘Ultimate aim, fall-back position. The aim right now is Magdalen Commem with John Hobhouse, but if he doesn’t ask me, then I’ll have to settle for David Phelps, who will if I throw out a hint. And here are you in the fifth week of term with no strategy at all. Do you want David if I don’t need him? I could probably fix it.’

  ‘No thanks,’ says Stella. ‘At the worst I’ll pass up Magdalen Commem. And in any case I entirely disagree. The thing about life is to act expediently and creatively. Seize the day. See what comes up and act accordingly.’

  ‘Fatal. Drift theory. That way you get stuck doing things you never meant to do and you end up married by accident to the wrong person or not married at all when you’re thirty.’

  ‘Or,’ says Stella, ‘you proceed from one glittering opportunity to the next and are mercifully still available for grand passion when the moment strikes.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ says Nadine. ‘We’ll see. Wanna bet?’

  ‘Bet on what? How are we to decide who is coming off best?’

  ‘Five-year checks,’ proposes Nadine. ‘Absolute honesty on both sides. I chalk up strategic success and you prove opportunistic gains.’

  Peter said to their father, ‘Where was I born? And Michael?’

  ‘What d’you mean? In a hospital, of course.’

  ‘But where? What town?’

  ‘Dunno. Can’t remember. Wherever we was then.’

  ‘Did you have that garage when we were born?’

  ‘Maybe. Shut up asking stupid questions and do something useful. You can start changing that wheel.’

  Like you’d slammed up against a brick wall. He’d always been like that, their father, but even more now. Not a word, most of the time. Eat, go out to the sheds, go off on a job, come back, eat.

  Her, you knew about, because she told you, when she felt like it. She’d been on that ranch in America and she’d been at a college and she’d done racing driving
and run businesses with a turnover of thousands. At least, that’s what she said. Their father, you didn’t know anything.

  ‘And us,’ said Peter. ‘We dunno where we were fucking born. Not even that.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They couldn’t have said why it mattered. Simply, they lacked something. There was nothing they could cite. Other people came from round here, or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they knew where they’d been. The boys saw that they were without a history, though they were unable to identify the perception.

  Nadine searches for Stella in the Radcliffe Camera. She sweeps past the desks wearing her red crossover jersey and her flared grey flannel skirt, causing heads to lift, distracting keen young minds from the significance of the Exchequer under Edward I, from the role of Ship Money, from the rise of Chartism. She beams at friends and acquaintances. She locates Stella. ‘There you are. Come and have coffee. I’ve got things to tell.’

  Nadine has been to the Oxford University Appointments Board. ‘The woman went berserk,’ says Nadine. ‘I was honest and straightforward. I said, I just want a nice interesting job for a couple of years because I intend to get married shortly. And she blew up. I’m planning on having children in good time, I said. And she said, you haven’t been expensively educated here for three years in order to have children.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ says Stella, who knows Nadine.

  ‘Well, that’s what she was thinking. “What sort of job did you have in mind?” she asked. Clipped voice. Freezing stare.

  And I suggested something where you meet lots of people and there’s opportunity for travel.’

  ‘Air hostess,’ says Stella. ‘Package-tour guide.’

  ‘Certainly not. Marry a diplomat, possibly. So then she wanted what are apparently called my credentials and I don’t seem to have any. Apart from the degree that we sincerely hope I will indeed get. You’re supposed to have run for President of the JCR or written for Isis or been a stage manager for OUDS. She wanted to know what I was interested in.’

  ‘So you said – men.’

  Nadine giggles. ‘She gave me more of the cold stare and said, I advise you to do a course in shorthand and typing. So I gave her a look and said, surely I haven’t spent three years being expensively educated here in order to become a secretary?’

  ‘Spot on!’ says Stella, admiring. Just occasionally, Nadine can score a bull’s-eye.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Stella had not at first realized that there was a fifth person living at the Hiscox bungalow. But then she once or twice caught sight of a white head in the back seat of the red car. Someone’s old mother, presumably. Occasionally the two boys would also be in the car, but generally speaking it was rare to see members of the family except in isolation – an expressionless profile hurtling past in car or tractor or pick-up van, the boys hunched over the handlebars of their bicycles. Stella was faintly bothered by the thought of this concealed old woman, stashed away there like an obsolete piece of furniture except for these infrequent airings. She thought of old people in the Delta village or in Malta, intently monitoring local life from a chair outside the front door. Far more rewarding than the television set in a nursing home. Or whatever fetid family life was experienced by this poor old soul.

  A life that must be at its most intense now in late July with the school holidays in full swing. The Hiscox boys were more in evidence than usual, mooching up and down the lane on foot or on the bikes, tinkering with a tractor on the track to the bungalow. Indeed, the whole landscape seemed to run with young, like fields in the lambing season – every recreation ground swarming, gangs of children erupting round corners, silting up the village newsagent in pursuit of snacks.

  There was a group of adolescents eddying around the phone box on the green as she headed for the car after visiting the shop. Half a dozen boys and a clutch of girls, grouping and regrouping, several of the boys equipped with sleek cycles on which they made occasional flamboyant circuits, like cock birds displaying. The girls tossed their hair, preened self-conscious bodies, draped themselves against a fence. The air crackled with sexuality. Stella observed, amused. So it goes, she thought, the world over.

  And now their collective attention was diverted. They were watching two boys who had emerged from the newsagent’s, mounted bikes and started to ride away. Ah, the Hiscox lads. Who were not, it would seem, part of the gang, for they pointedly ignored the group on the green, a ploy which at once provoked a response. The girls clustered together, giggling and staring. Jeering derisive shouts from the boys. A cat-call, a whoop. The general tenor of rejection was clear enough. The Hiscox boys were approaching her now, pedalling fast, their expressions tense and sullen. She smiled, in a sudden access of sympathy. ‘Hi, there!’ she called out. No reply. Black scowls and they were gone, rattling away down the road. On the green there were gusts of laughter; the sexual parade had resumed.

  The village green was a triangle. Stella had read somewhere that its shape echoed the structure of the original medieval settlement, with an enclosed central area in which animals could be safely penned. Today, one end was laid out as a children’s playground with swings and slides, while the telephone kiosk commandeered by the adolescents occupied the apex of the triangle. Facing on to it were the pub, the garage, the Minimart, the chemist, a diminutive branch of Barclay’s Bank, a sprig of the West Country’s main estate agents and a solicitor’s office. The green was always the scene of various concurrent actions, most of them mutually exclusive. The adolescents ignored the group of mothers with small children, who were in turn impervious to Stella, passing them on her way back to the car. She herself, she realized, should find an affinity with the several other visible grey heads. The retired, the settlers, the colonizers.

  But I do not, she thought. Cannot. Nothing in common except physical condition. Flung into proximity by circumstance, like children. But then I have never had much talent for belonging.

  Most people require a support base – family, community. Everyone does, perhaps. The extension of oneself that allows ‘me’ to dissolve into ‘us’, that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else. Most people are either born into this situation or achieve it, by hook or by crook.

  Except for me, thought Stella. Unwed, peripatetic. By choice and by chance. Spending my time taking stock of how others deal with proximity, while avoiding it myself. So am I a freak? Dangerously deprived? I passed up the offer of both, once.

  ‘Marry me,’ says Alan Scarth, ‘and you’ll see this every year of your life.’

  The sea cliff to which the island rises has sprung alive. It has bloomed with birds. They are nesting – the kittiwakes and the guillemots and the razorbills and the fulmars. They pack each ledge, each slope, each pinnacle. The entire sheer surface of the rock is studded with ranks of white, with clusters of black. More birds float alongside, sliding on the wind, swerving and twisting, rising and falling. The sea and the air are spawning birds, they lift from the waves, they surge from the spray.

  ‘You promised you wouldn’t say that again,’ says Stella. ‘You’re a man of your word, I thought. Known for it, I’m told.’

  ‘I had my fingers crossed,’ says Alan Scarth.

  He is also a man of absolute propriety. He has never touched her. Even here, side by side on the turf amid the thrift and the sea-campion, he keeps a clear space between them. Once he laid a hand on her back to steady her over a stile. She seemed to feel its burning imprint for hours.

  ‘Teach me which are what,’ says Stella. ‘Is that big dark one a skua?‘

  ‘Marry me and I’ll teach you.’

  ‘No,’ says Stella. ‘I’ve told you why. It would be the ruin of us both. Where are the puffins?‘

  ‘You’re an obstinate woman and opinionated with it,’ says Alan. ‘There are some puffins left of the big stack in the centre. Track past those kittiwakes, th
en go down to the next level.’

  ‘I’ve got them,’ says Stella.

  She is intensely conscious of his solid presence, a foot away. As stable as the rock, as assured as his tenure of this place. He occupies it like the birds – by right, by nature. Am I making a terrible mistake? she wonders. Could I be like that, too?

  The summer days flow one into another through the brief hours of dusk that pass for night. Just as the great skies melt into the sea and the land on cloudy days, a symphony of grey, no distinction between the elements. Time is on hold, it seems, its passage marked only by hay-making, by harvest. The people or the island work and Stella works alongside, with her notebook and her queries, her lists and her charts. The summer unfurls for her not in weeks or months but by the way in which she is subsumed into the lives of these people, by their kindly acceptance of what she does, by their interest. They are mildly amused to be the objects of study. They, too, ask questions, which give pause for thought.

  ‘And how will this make the world a better place?’ asks Alan Scarth. Tongue in cheek, perhaps. Back in the early days, back when he was just another face to be learned and filed away in the head, another name for the card index.

  She has explained to him that her project is an element of a wider study that aims to gather data on the absorption of immigrant arrivals into isolated and enclosed communities. Communities such as townships in remote parts of Canada and the United States. Societies such as those of the Hebrides or of this Orkney island to which, over time, outsiders have come. To this end she must plot the network of relationships, she must seek to understand the structure of the society – its attitudes, its assumptions, its codes.

  It won’t do anything to save the world, Stella replies. Or only in that it might be a tiny contribution to the process of understanding why human beings carry on as they do.

  ‘Well, never mind all that for now,’ says Alan Scarth. ‘It’s a beautiful evening. Come for a walk and I’ll show you the seals.’