AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN

by MARY HOCKING

  Katrina walked ahead, fists bunched in the pockets of her anorak. It was acceptable for Deutzia, who was over eighty, to make such a fuss, but she was ashamed of her mother.

  In the little restaurant, Deutzia said, as though picking up the threads of an interrupted conversation, ‘Of course, I never cook out of tins, either. I make a point of that. But some people make such a performance of cooking nowadays. I had the Percivals and Patsy to dinner last week. Not quite my sort of people, but one must try. After all, a village only offers limited scope for hospitality. Well, of course, they all talked about this nuclear business. And I know we are all going to die in the nuclear winter, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. So I just let it go over my head. But what really upset me was that I had spent days preparing the meal and that tiresome woman Mrs Percival walked round the kitchen exclaiming about my still using aluminium saucepans until I felt I was poisoning them.’

  Katrina turned her head away and stared accusingly round the room which had a bay window which bellied out like a small prow overlooking the square. The walls were panelled in a light, pinkish pine which Katrina thought repulsive and the tables were covered with pale lime cloths which were undoubtedly tasteful and, therefore, in Katrina’s view, worse than repulsive. A little bowl of violets had been placed on each table, a felicity which had led Deutzia to exclaim, ‘They never have plastic flowers here!’ There was a large ‘no smoking’ notice. The proprietors owned both the restaurant and the boutique beneath and crocheted skirts and dresses, pastel sweaters and a variety of expensive scarves were displayed on the wall of the stairway. Deutzia pointed to a ribbed tomato oblong which Katrina thought resembled an overgrown tabard.

  ‘Now, I can just see Katrina in that, can’t you?’ She addressed Janet as if Katrina were still so young she could best be communicated with through her mother.

  Katrina said, ‘You never will see me in it.’

  ‘It would need dressing up, of course. A little scarf and a belt, perhaps.’ She fanned herself. ‘Summer is coming, after all, and you won’t be very comfortable in trousers and boots when it gets warmer, will you? I find it quite warm enough now. I wonder whether we could have the window open . . .’ She looked round for someone to pester and gave a little cry of delight.

  ‘Excuse me, I must just . . .’

  An elderly man at the window table was struggling to his feet. His female companion’s amused expression suggested that in her opinion such gallantries should be dispensed with once they can no longer be performed with ease. Deutzia rewarded his efforts with a kiss. The other woman extended a thin, elegant claw and they talked while the old man laboriously resumed his seat.

  After a few minutes Deutzia rejoined Janet and Katrina. ‘Oh dear, how embarrassing! They insist that I have lunch with them. I couldn’t refuse. We haven’t seen each other for months and we are all getting older so these opportunities are precious . . .’

  ‘When shall we pick you up?’ Katrina was eager to settle matters. ‘And where?’

  ‘Oh, I rather think Roddie will run me home.’

  ‘It’s not just round the corner.’

  ‘Even so, you don’t ask someone to lunch and then leave them to make their own arrangements. Roddie would certainly expect to run me home.’

  ‘I expect she is now telling them how badly she feels because she couldn’t possibly have asked us to wait around for her, particularly as you haven’t been well and I am so impatient,’ Katrina said when she and her mother eventually sat down to eat in a dimly-lit, smoke-filled cavern.

  Janet had not objected to Katrina’s choice. She had welcomed the haziness of the atmosphere as if it were her own natural habitat. When Katrina lit her second cigarette she made no protest.

  Katrina said, ‘Sorry about this. But I have to talk.’

  Janet wondered whether it was because they had been drained of colour that the jacket potato and its accompanying froth of cheese and butter had lost their goodness, or whether her sense of taste was now affected. It was very difficult to digest food which looked so unappetising and tasted like cotton wool. Cotton wool in my head, cotton wool in my stomach! Pills would be better – at least I would only have to swallow once.

  Katrina had not started to eat. She was finishing her cigarette while she talked. ‘. . . and his wife came to see me and made a scene! It was like something out of George Eliot! I didn’t know people still thought they had these proprietary rights!’ In the dim light she looked like a very sad Harlequin. The fingers which stubbed out the cigarette shook. She said hoarsely, ‘It was all so hideous. She was crying. I didn’t know anyone could feel like that . . . still . . .’

  A married man, Janet thought. But who? Why wasn’t I listening?

  Katrina said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Don’t see him for a while.’ After all, time heals – and if it doesn’t, God help us all!

  ‘He’s my tutor. Mum!’

  This kind of situation would always have been beyond me, Janet thought. I am not an advice giver. I have given what I have to give and now that my children have left home they should manage, or mismanage, their own affairs.

  ‘It hurts,’ Katrina said bleakly. ‘It hurts so much.’ Just as if it was her first aching tooth and Mother must kiss the pain away. As Janet said nothing, she asked, ‘Did it ever happen to you?’

  ‘No. There was only your father. There weren’t a lot of young men on Mull. I grew up on one island and married another. I am fifty and I have spent all my life on one island or another.’

  ‘Don’t bother to go on. I don’t think John Donne is the answer to my problem.’

  For a moment the haze seemed to clear and Janet pounced through the gap. ‘Do you have a problem? If there are no proprietary rights then it’s the open season for predators.’

  She watched as Katrina seemed to fold herself in half. ‘Did you expect me to sympathise? I’m a clanswoman. Married women with children are my clan.’

  Katrina’s voice came muffled from the region of her stomach. ‘I shall never tell you anything again as long as I live.’

  They only spoke once on the way home. Katrina had been forced to stop while a herd of cows made its leisurely way across the road. She sat tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, maddened by the ponderous beasts with their milky breath and laden udders. Janet said, with the new sharpness which characterised much of her speech, ‘The vicar called last week. Did one of you put him up to it?’

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘Someone did. He would never think of it himself. He’s too busy girding himself for the battle against women priests.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘He asked if anything was troubling me, so I told him I worried about the Eucharist prayer “. . . send us out in the power of Thy spirit to live and work to Thy praise and glory . . .” I told him I hadn’t been “out” for years.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He muttered something about going to Matins instead. His only practical suggestion was that it might do me good to become a chauffeur for the halt and maimed among his flock.’

  ‘The way you drive the number would soon be doubled.’

  This observation appeared to please Janet who gave an appreciative bark of laughter. It must also have satisfied her that Katrina was not the culprit and no more was said of the vicar’s call.

  Over supper, however, she suddenly announced, ‘I feel like a car which has some mechanical failure. There is a queue of people eager to peer about in my bonnet.’

  Katrina said, ‘You can count me out.’

  Murdoch said, ‘Anyone found contemplating obscenity on my wife will be thrashed within an inch of his life.’

  ‘Including the vicar?’

  ‘I don’t think he would know how to set about it. I doubt if he has ever lifted a bonnet to any purpose.’

  After supper Murdoch went to his study while Katrina did the washing-up. Janet collected flowers from the garden and arranged
them in a bowl in the sitting room. She howled as she did this and then, holding the discarded stems to her breast, she went out of the front door, making little mewling noises which she switched off as she passed the kitchen window.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Katrina demanded.

  ‘To the dustbin.’

  ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘Mayn’t I do anything without being questioned?’

  Katrina slammed the window shut.

  Janet mewled over the dustbin and then turned and walked towards the house, moving slowly and carefully, her grief like a bowl full to the brim which must be contained without spilling a drop.

  Katrina met her in the hall. ‘We’ll watch television. There’s bound to be something on the news to cheer us up.’

  ‘There won’t be any news yet.’

  There was a discussion programme on the role of television. A BBC pundit talked earnestly about urban deprivation and race riots, rape and child molestation and the importance of bringing reality into the sitting room.

  Janet said, ‘Is he suggesting that reality is race riots, murder, rape and sex-on-demand?’

  ‘Sshh . . .’

  ‘And that the sooner this becomes reality for everyone the better? That there is something unfulfilled about people who have been deprived of these attentions?’

  ‘Sshhhhhhh . . .’

  Janet, however, was now addressing the BBC pundit. She stood, arms akimbo, one hip thrust forward, as though confronting a live person. Katrina was reminded that her mother was no mean actress. ‘And what about my kind of reality – the lives where nothing much changes from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year? When are you going to bring that into the bar parlour?’ Her face was flushed, her voice getting louder. ‘God knows how you would make it compete with all the bashing and the slashing and the blasphemy. But you must have some little genius tucked away in a corner just waiting for a challenge like that. It’s the only challenge left – you’ve exploited all the others!’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘I’m not ashamed. I am not ashamed and you are not going to make me ashamed!’ Janet turned and ran out of the room, holding her hands cupped over her mouth. Katrina remained sitting staring woodenly at the television screen.

  Half an hour later Katrina opened the study door, ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said to Murdoch. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, but I think Mum has gone off her head.’ She slammed the door and thudded up the stairs.

  Janet was in the sitting room when Murdoch came in. There was only a light from a small table-lamp and she was by the window, staring out into the darkness. She looked quite peaceful. He held out a tray on which there was a cup of hot milk and two biscuits. She regarded the offering in surprise and then said, ‘That was very kind of you, Murdoch. I’ll have the biscuits; you drink the hot milk, it makes me sick.’

  He sat down beside her.

  ‘Katrina is unhappy,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘A married man.’ She laughed wryly. ‘I thought they had it all sorted out, but it still happens.’

  ‘It still hurts, too.’

  ‘Should I have done something?’

  ‘There is nothing one can do, is there?’

  ‘That’s a comfort. The only real comfort is being helpless.’

  But she did not sleep that night. The house was dying, bleeding to death. She saw the flaked skin on the walls, the deep scores in the fabric. All the things they had neglected over the years reproached her at every turn – the terrible wheezing of the hot-water system, the groaning of the lavatory cistern as it roused itself for another effort for which it no longer had the necessary force, the complaint of stair treads, the agony of floorboards, the wind howling through broken tiles, all cried out that it was enough. This had gone on far too long, the house could endure no more. And she had not the resources to pour into it to restore it to order, nor even to alleviate its lesser ailments.

  Chapter Five

  The following weekend Stephanie went to see the doctor. He had been thinking about Janet and hesitatingly volunteered the idea that ‘perhaps your mother needs her breakdown.’

  Stephanie put this idea down with a withering reference to Erich Fromm. The doctor, daunted, was willing for Erich Fromm to take the blame.

  ‘And anyway,’ Stephanie said, ‘it is not a breakdown.’

  In which case, the doctor could see that he was quite incapable of diagnosing whatever mysterious ailment it was from which Janet Saunders was suffering. He therefore consented to Stephanie’s suggestion that Janet should see a psychiatrist, inconsistent though this might be with the insistence that a breakdown be ruled out of court.

  When a few days later he telephoned to tell her that he had arranged for Janet to see Dr Georgina Potter, Stephanie almost shrieked down the telephone, ‘That woman!’

  Dr Potter had a reputation for indiscretion, bad temper, and making impulsive and capricious judgements which her many detractors felt were in no way justified by her occasional flashes of insight and an enormous capacity for work. On the day on which she saw Janet she had been up all night dealing with a crisis at a women’s prison. Included among the papers on her desk was a letter from Stephanie telling her all the things which were not wrong with her mother and going on to say that while she appreciated that Dr Potter was a disciple of Melanie Klein, she herself had considerable reservations about this lady’s work – which she elaborated in some detail – and considered that many of her theories were based on false premises – of which she did not give a single example. She concluded by saying that in her view Janet would have been more receptive to a male psychiatrist. ‘One would like to know more about this young woman’s infancy,’ Dr Potter had commented, putting the letter to one side but not out of her mind.

  So she and Janet faced each other, neither with high hopes of this encounter.

  Janet saw hair in which the birds of the air might nest in summer, bushed about a face in which every feature had suffered a misfortune – an eyelid drooped permanently over one of the beady eyes, a monstrously flanged nose overhung the crooked mouth. Perhaps with a face so grotesque, eccentricity was the only answer; if so, Dr Potter might have been said to have embraced this solution rather than being driven to it. She wore a long black robe with batwing sleeves enlivened by a heavy rope of glittering emerald green beads which served as an erratic pendulum. The awareness that the beads were emerald green gave Janet an irrational feeling of having made some kind of connection.

  Dr Potter saw one of those quiet, anonymous women she occasionally noticed in supermarkets. Calm, unsurprised, never guilty of embarrassing their friends and family with wild outbursts of enthusiasm or anger – women who seemed to be in a perpetual state of balance. And yet, because of that very quietness – and the shyness which is almost always associated with it – giving an impression of having kept something to themselves, something which most people have had to hand over as the price of adulthood. She had felt she wanted to turn them upside down and shake them until their secret dropped out. But, of course, you would not be allowed to continue in practice if you resorted to such tactics. You could get up to most things in psychiatry so long as you did not physically abuse the client – that was the surgeon’s prerogative.

  Dr Potter said, giving a particularly vicious swing to the emerald rope, ‘Tell me something about your childhood.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’

  ‘Probably not. But we have to do it for the form book.’ Janet, rather amused at the idea of her placid father as stallion and her doughty mother as mare, drew a picture of a home where there was constant bickering but a great deal of love.

  ‘An island and all that love must have been rather stifling.’

  ‘We weren’t stifled by it.’

  They had had no need to foregather in the same room (this, in fact, had seldom proved a success) and had been content to be busy in different parts of the house, garden or island, aware of one another’s
presence without the aggravation of the actuality. She had been so secure in her parents’ love that separating had not initially presented problems.

  Dr Potter noted, ‘This family has long tentacles.’ Later, she wrote, ‘Love at home – yes. I don’t hear a child crying in this woman. So why this lack of self-confidence? Vicar has told her to forget herself. Silly old fool! People who are uneasy with themselves find it very difficult to think about anything else.’

  ‘But your schooling? That must have taken you away from the island – at the secondary stage, in any case.’

  ‘I went to a school on the mainland for one term,’ Janet said indifferently. ‘But I didn’t like it. They tried to teach things that were none of their business – how to dress and speak and “comport oneself”. So I ran away. I just ran away all the time. In the end I had my lessons at home from a peripatetic teacher.’ She smiled reminiscently, ‘Janet’s peri, we used to call her.’

  Not such an anonymous woman, after all, Dr Potter revised her opinion. ‘This woman will find means of getting her own way when it is important to her.’

  ‘And your own family?’ she said.

  She wrote down details of the children, taking particular interest in Stephanie. Oldest child, pushed off its mother’s knee to make way for the newcomer, always put in charge, domineering and very insecure. So what does she do? She studies psychology! Dr Potter gave a gleeful hoot of laughter.

  ‘And your husband?’

  Ah, of course, Murdoch Saunders, author of those extraordinary books!

  ‘He didn’t come with you this morning?’

  ‘My son brought me here.’

  ‘Why not your husband?’ If you ask this woman for the salt she will explain why the porridge is cold!

  ‘My son wanted to come.’

  ‘So by inference your husband didn’t. A pity. I should like to have met him. His is a most unusual gift.’

  ‘He is not very good at talking about it.’

  ‘I am quite capable of doing the talking.’

  The same could not be said for her client. Janet provided facts about her children but gave little indication of her feelings for them. ‘They are not troublesome – they don’t even protest!’