THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  They stopped at a pub on the outskirts of the town and took their drinks into the garden where there was a bench in the shade of a sycamore tree. Maggie thought, now I shall ask him what has happened; but she did not say anything because she hoped that if she remained quiet this thing might pass from her. She sat looking up at the thick foliage of the tree, marginally glad of its cool shelter. The heat had been trying in the office; her face looked tired, the corners of the eyes crusted with dust and the skin staled with sweat. The long hair hung in lank rags about her shoulders. Mylor, looking at her in this moment when she had lost her youthful freshness, was almost unbearably moved. The fact that he did not dare so much as to raise a hand to smooth the dull, tangled hair was a bitter foretaste of the greater deprivations to come. He turned away, afraid of himself, and drank his beer slowly while he tried to find some way of lessening the impact of what he had to tell her. But there was no way of breaking this gently, it was not, after all, a gentle thing; so in the end he told her, quietly and with remarkable lucidity, what had happened in Hibbert’s room. It took a great intellectual effort to co-ordinate the small amount of information which he had to convey and when he had finished he felt tired as death.

  ‘Whoever suffers, it mustn’t be Daniel,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see that.’

  But her care was all for Mylor. The irrepressible boy that he had sometimes seemed, with his jagged urchin hair and unrepentant smile, was gone and in his place was a man, grey-faced and drawn about the mouth.

  ‘I don’t think I can say any more,’ he said.

  ‘There isn’t any more to say,’ she answered.

  The one line of dialogue seemed to follow the other; it had no real meaning for her, simply the completion of a pattern. Afterwards, she was amazed that she had let him go so easily, as though he was a person of no account to her; she would go over in her mind arguments that she should have put forward, ‘Don’t make any sudden decisions, let it lie for a while . . . We can meet occasionally and see how things go . . . Whatever happens, we mustn’t lose touch. I can be terribly patient and I don’t ask for much, just let me stay in the background of your life . . . Who knows what a year will bring? We’re both young, there is so much time . . . Will it solve anything simply to stop seeing me? Won’t you find it even harder to bear?’ But by the time that she was able to argue like this, she had discounted the darkness in him which overwhelmed them both that afternoon. Sitting beside him on the bench, she was as much a part of him as she had ever been in their moments of passion; his despair drained her vitality, emptied her heart of hope. However much she might torment herself with doubts and questions in the future, on that afternoon she knew in her innermost being that this was the end; and knowing this she wanted it to end quickly because she could not bear his pain. It was only afterwards that she thought of herself, when a little time had passed and she began to understand that there was nothing more that she could do for him.

  When they were walking to the bus stop, he noticed how the sun had burnt the upper part of her arm; where the bare flesh met the line of her dress there was a red weal. Feeling stirred. He said, ‘When you look back on this, will you hate me?’ Life was beginning to return, and with it came the impulse to struggle. He could not resist giving her this opportunity to cry and show her pain so that he would have to comfort her, perhaps to promise something. But she only said incredulously, ‘Hate you!’ He saw her on to the bus; on the step she turned and looked at him, her face tearless, but frightened as a refugee being driven into exile. The conductor hustled her inside.

  Jemima had kept his supper hot for him. He could not eat it, and she did not comment; she watched over him tenderly, like a nurse who sees that her patient’s illness has reached its climax. When he told her to go to bed, she went without a word.

  The house was oppressively hot, the rooms too small. But Jemima wanted to live somewhere with smaller rooms. His mouth was dry and his heart beat fast with panic. He was not sure that he could live with this. He had always liked a challenge because, equipped as he was with intellectual energy and a robust constitution, he had seemed assured of ultimate success. But to build his life again within the strait-jacket of a crippled marriage was a task to which he felt himself unequal. Some people are able to accept that life will not strike its major chords for them, and are prepared with infinite humility to extract a minim of joy from a melody in a minor key. He doubted whether he possessed that kind of fortitude.

  At midnight, when he could bear it no more, he took the car and drove to Maggie’s house. He sat beneath her window as the long night passed; the window was open and the curtain moved in the night wind, the wind brushed his face as it must brush hers lying on the pillow. It seemed to bring them together again and he imagined that he held her close, a part of him once more. Before dawn, he drove away. And that is the end of it, he thought. But in the lonely years that followed, he sometimes found her again when, in some unguarded moment, he heard the sound of the wind in the trees.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rudderham made a statement dissociating himself from the views expressed by Miss Kane. He said that he had investigated the climbing frame matter very thoroughly and while he thought that the statements made by the parent had been exaggerated, there were some aspects of the case about which he was not happy and he had made the Head Master aware of this. He now considered the matter closed. Half an hour after the statement was issued the representatives of the N.U.T. and the N.A.S. asked for an appointment with him.

  Wicks said to Bunce as they left the County offices after a late afternoon meeting, ‘Such a pity he said that he had “made the Head Master aware of this”. If only he had left it that he had taken appropriate action. You have to be so careful.’ He shook his head, saddened by the clumsiness of his colleague. ‘Appropriate action would have been quite enough to close the incident.’

  ‘In a case like this you need a lot of help from your chief officer.’ Bunce was sad, too; his russet cheeks puckered by the perplexities of life. ‘I don’t think people would say that I am an unreasonable man.’ He pondered this for a moment and acquitted himself. ‘I am not an unreasonable man. I don’t think I expect too much of our officers. But I do feel that there is no proper leadership at the education office. I’m prepared to agree—after all, one must accept what one’s officers tell one—that there may be a case for increasing the establishment. But I should take a lot of convincing that any of them are really overworked. It’s leadership that’s lacking. Leadership.’

  ‘Things are moving, things are moving,’ Wicks said. ‘This climbing frame affair has brought matters to a head. It’s really getting poor old Rudderham down. We’re having a word with the Clerk tomorrow.’

  ‘If there is anything affecting the position of the Chief Education Officer, I hope you will keep the minority party informed,’ Bunce chided gently.

  ‘I was thinking that perhaps you had better be there.’

  ‘I don’t like this sort of thing,’ Bunce said heavily. ‘But I think I should be.’

  ‘None of us likes it,’ Wicks said. ‘Ten o’clock then, in the Clerk’s office.’

  Miss Kane, asked by the press to comment on Rudderham’s statement, said that local government had got into the hands of men who were straws in the wind, blown this way and that by every shift of public opinion, men whose one concern was not with the good of education but to stay in office at all costs. Rudderham announced his intention of suing her.

  ‘A great mistake,’ Wicks commented to his wife who, as usual, was preoccupied with the children. ‘You must have broad shoulders in this game. Politics is a rough business. When I think of some of the things that have been said of me . . .’

  ‘A little weasel’ one man had called him, while a more literary-minded colleague had said that he was a personification of Uriah Heap. Wicks’s frail body showed no signs of crumbling beneath these blows; he slicked his auburn hair down on either side of the parting
and prepared for an evening engagement. His wife crooned to her youngest, ‘Hasn’t he got a cross-patch Daddy, then?’

  At her home, Maggie Hester continued the work she had been engaged on intermittently throughout the day. She was writing to Mylor. There was so much that she had not said, it was inconceivable that nothing further should pass between them. For one thing, it was very important that he should know that there was no bitterness on her side. She must tell him how much he had meant to her, that she would never regret their love, that she hoped that he would be happy. She had written him a very long letter, but had not posted it because she was not quite sure that she had expressed all her deepest feelings; now, she added a sentence here in order to make her meaning quite clear, and deleted a phrase there because it might be misinterpreted. She took the letter to the office the next morning and worked on it during the lunch hour. It kept her going, knowing that it was there in her handbag, a link with him still. In the evening, she went into Crossgate Park to read the letter through to make quite sure that all her love and concern had been adequately expressed. While she was reading it, she found herself wondering what he would say in return and she realized that all this writing and re-writing was to ensure that the letter would touch him so deeply that he would feel that he had to reply. She sat with the sheets of paper in her hands staring across the dry grass. I am doing this for myself, she thought; it will not help him, the greatest thing that I can do for him is to be silent. She got up and walked round the park, across the bridge over the artificial lake where children were feeding the ducks, on through the gardens where hoses were spraying the wilting flowers. But I am telling him things that will make him happy, things that will reassure him, she argued; and when he gets this letter he will know that should circumstances change, I will still be there. I am not possessive, I could sustain this kind of relationship. I must make him realize this, it would probably alter his view of the whole situation. She sat on a bench near one of the sprays; icy drops of water sprinkled her bare arms and feet. He does not want a letter from me, she thought; he needs the finality of a complete break. If I send this letter it will lead to tears and endless arguments, to broken promises and reproaches, and our love will dwindle into one of those wretched affairs which has outlived any real attachment. I must let things be. But immediately, she thought angrily: I have some rights, I was not ready for this, I was quite unprepared whereas he had rehearsed what he had to say. After all that we have meant to each other, he could never begrudge me time to talk to him; this is too sudden, too brutal, I need a little while to accept it. What possible harm could there be in our meeting just once more? When I have spoken to him and told him how I feel I shall be satisfied and it will be easier to let him go. She got up and began to walk across the wet grass. He does not want to see me again, she thought; he is the kind of man who prefers a clean break. He will see my handwriting on this envelope and his heart will be heavy, he will read the letter with understanding and compassion, but with regret; his attitude to me will change gradually, delight will wither as he becomes more and more frustrated and he will end by hating me. Or am I being too exquisitely sensitive? Am I caught in the writer’s trap, the damnable capacity to see things from the other person’s point of view? Would it not resolve itself more satisfactorily if I let him attend to his feelings and simply concerned myself with my own?

  She would post the letter and that was an end to it. She walked to the park gates and at the entrance she tore the letter into very small pieces and dropped them into the litter bin. After that, there was nothing that she could do. And there was no comfort anywhere. If she had known that he would find happiness again, she could have let him go; she would have told herself that she must forget him, and although this would have had little immediate effect, gradually she would have freed herself from him. But she knew that the future would be hard for him; early in his life he had made a wrong choice and although being a man he would find outlets for his energy, a part of him would always be unsatisfied. Perhaps it was his fault, certainly he would be the first to say so. But she had known that part of him that a man only reveals when all his defences are down. If she forgot him, it would be as though this other Mylor, this fervent, tender spirit, had never been, as though nothing stirred beneath the hard crust. She would have killed him by neglect. ‘If only he could be happy,’ she thought, ‘I wouldn’t care what became of me.’

  Two days later she accompanied Ellis to the meeting of the Governors of the Convent of the Sacred Heart School. Ellis was attending as the education office representative in place of Chatterton.

  ‘A lot of these meetings seem to come your way lately,’ Wicks commiserated with Ellis. He looked round the table; apart from Maggie there were no other officers present. ‘I can’t understand for the life of me how the office works these things out. At yesterday’s meeting of the Further Education Sub-Committee, we had far too many officers present; but when it comes to the governing body meetings, we are lucky if we have a senior officer present at all.’

  ‘I regard these meetings as very important,’ Ellis assured him. ‘These links with the schools are vital to us. It is so easy for a County Council to get out of touch with its schools.’

  ‘I’m glad someone feels that way.’ Wicks was aware that Ellis was playing up to him, but he regarded this as a point in Ellis’s favour; a desire to please members was an intelligent attitude on the part of an ambitious deputy.

  Canon Prosser, the Chairman of the Governors, arrived at this point and Ellis and Wicks devoted themselves to the business of the meeting.

  Maggie handed Ellis his copy of the extended agenda and prepared to make notes. Few people, looking at her, would have been aware that this was the strangest meeting she had ever attended. A shadow seemed to have fallen over her in the last few days, it was as though through some defect of the eyes the vision was limited; the people in the room were like figures seen at the wrong end of a telescope, moving in a small area of light rimmed by darkness. The experience was frightening; it was not the self-indulgent misery of someone who has made a voluntary withdrawal but rather the complete separation of someone who has taken a wrong turning on life’s stage and found themselves on the other side of the backcloth. At the meeting, a number of people spoke and she noted what they said, recording the words faithfully; but the personalities did not impinge on her, she was unaware of them as people that she knew expressing views that she had heard before. The subject matter was strange, too; although when Ellis whispered a question on staffing she answered him at once, she felt as though this was due to a prodigious feat of memory, like recalling an incident from very early childhood, instead of something about which she had made inquiries only that afternoon. The meeting went on for a long time. There was some question about children who attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart School from another parish where there was a Roman Catholic grammar school; the Head of this school had complained because she was losing pupils. This was not a matter for the education office and was argued out with some degree of malevolence by the priests of the two parishes concerned. Usually Maggie found these discussions very tedious, particularly as the meeting started late. Tonight, however, she was unaware of the passage of time.

  Her mother had said to her two days ago, ‘You will get over this. You don’t think so now, but you will.’

  She had replied, ‘I don’t want to get over it.’

  She did not want the pain to stop because when that happened she would be dead. Or perhaps a sucker would shoot up and give a semblance of life. It hardly seemed worth fighting to achieve that.

  But now, after two days’ oblivion, she was aware of something happening to her from which she might not recover and some instinct of self-preservation made her desperately anxious to haul herself back into the bright illusory world of everyday life. She was convinced that the dark world she now inhabited was in fact the reality behind the facade; but she had to desire to explore it further. She looked across the table and
from her remote darkness met the eyes of Reverend Mother, equally remote in her world of light. In between the two of them was this little stage on which the two priests argued while Wicks picked his nose and Ellis drew diagrams on his agenda.

  When the meeting was over, Ellis had one or two matters to discuss with the Chairman. Reverend Mother said to Maggie, ‘Come into my room, child. It will be more comfortable for you there.’

  The old woman walked slowly because she had recently been ill. Her body was too thin for the weight of the heavy clothes and she seemed to draw breath only as an act of discipline. The sculptor, unsatisfied with the ravages he had already wrought, had been at work on her face again, as though searching for a final purity which could only be expressed in the immutable bone.

  Her room was sparsely furnished with a heavy, worn desk, two upright chairs, a green filing cabinet and an armchair for the comfort of visitors. There was well-polished brown linoleum on the floor and heavy sombre curtains at the window. Nothing for self here. Maggie, installed in the armchair, felt drawn to the dark- clad figure seated opposite to her at the desk. She sensed a current of understanding and, like a child abandoned in a city street, on the edge of terror, she said, ‘I’ve lost myself, Reverend Mother.’