AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN

by MARY HOCKING

  A long, narrow room ran the width of the building, broken into small enclosures by the wooden beams. It contained, by way of furniture, two packing cases, an upright chair with a cane seat through which some large object, probably a foot, had been forced, and an old bench which had once stood outside the porch. There were piles of sacking, old newspapers and torn strips of tarpaulin on the floor, cigarette butts and empty beer cans brushed into a corner, the yard broom standing guard over them. There was a dank, sour smell, mingled with something more exotic which could be joss-sticks – or pot, about which she was completely ignorant. The plaster was yellowed with pale patches where pictures had once hung and soot-blackened above empty fireplaces. There were many hooks but no gleam of horse brass or copper pan. The shelves beyond the bar counter were empty save for three faded postcards and a corn dolly – ‘to bring plenty to the house’ the proprietor would joke, sounding wry because, even were it so, he was not a man to admit he was doing well. His customers had outstayed him, their names scored on the oak beams.

  In the corner to the right of the fireplace a flight of stairs receded into what had been the private part of the house. The stairs were dark. Janet stood, balanced between light and dark. The light was fitful and something drew her to the dark stairs. In the emptiness the treads groaned like the straining of a ship’s timbers in a gale. At the top of the stairs there was a low-ceilinged corridor with windows looking to the north on one side and several doors on the other. Beneath one window there was an old ottoman and sitting on it a large black cat which watched Janet with unwinking yellow eyes. ‘I am just going to look in these rooms,’ she told him, feeling some need to propitiate.

  Everywhere ceilings sloped, their different angles giving individuality to each room and an air of unpredictability. In the first room she found a broken carriage clock and scrawled on the dusty window a strange symbol composed of a triangle lofted above a circle; in the next, on a piece of rush matting, there was a candle stump and a paperback copy of The Prophet. A putrid smell hung about the third room and her feet disturbed a pile of ashes on the floor. A besom rested against the chimney. The next two rooms were empty, the windows broken and the floorboards splashed with bird-droppings. In the rafters and behind the skirting boards she heard tapping, scratching, scurrying evidence that the house was generous host to many small creatures. The last room had a speckled mirror nailed to the wall and looking into it she saw a face that was not her face, a face planed down to the bone from which eyes looked darkly out, accepting without complaint an undisclosed fate. For a few moments she remained motionless, afraid to break the spell. In the mirror she saw herself gathered into the shadowy room, the sloping ceilings falling about her shoulders like a cloak.

  When at last she moved away to the window, she saw that, although the sun was shining, purple clouds were boiling over the distant ridge and casting shadows across the heath. It would not last, this interval of lucidity. The cat spat at her as she hurried past him, down the stairs.

  At the back of the building french windows opened on to a narrow terrace. To the left was an old shed from which came the stench of human ordure. To the right, brick steps led down to a tangle of long grass and weeds. A rusty hoe rested against a wall and a broken wheelbarrow was loaded with empty bottles. She took off her oilskins and laid them on top of the bottles, then she went slowly down the crumbling steps. Her balance was bad again and she stumbled and fell in the grass. And there, close to her own cheek, something pale and delicate glimmered like a submerged face. There was no one to whom she could call; the only person who could act was herself. She knew that she would not be effective, yet she was here and so must try her hand. But it was not the task which she dreaded, it was the thing itself, the pale, delicate, petalled thing which might have fellows hidden in the undergrowth, it was this which frightened her. She knelt beside it and parted the grass and weeds; there was little to see but she felt pain and saw blood bubbling across the back of her hand. She closed her eyes, grasped fistsful of grass and tore and tugged until, eventually daring to look, she saw that she had uncovered a shrub rose and knew that hidden under the wilderness there was a garden.

  Here the enemy declared itself. Not squatters, birds, rats, but Time. Time was responsible for the breakdown of the house and garden. And yet the house had not stood empty for longer than seven or eight months. How soon Time made chaos of order! She pulled out thin, white stalks which had once supported unknown flowers; now brittle and long-dead, they came away easily, but the grass resisted. All she could hope to do was to create a little space, let in some air.

  And then, when she had made a clearing? Then?

  All the while that I work to create order, she thought, winding the grass round her wrists to gain greater purchase. Time will be working against me, undoing, breaking apart. She had always believed that order was the rule of life – one ordered one’s own home, one’s garden, one’s kitchen, to say nothing of one’s mind and body. Order was the norm, disorder a kind of deviance to be resisted at all costs. Yet here, all around her, was evidence that Time – so often represented as the great sorter out of problems, healer of ills, righter of wrongs, reconciler and arbitrator – was the agent of disorder. Time unravelled, broke down, sent the weeds shooting up between the cracks in the carefully-laid brick steps, wreaked havoc in the lovingly tended garden.

  Some of the weeds were tacky and laid hold on her clothes as she worked, others were thorny and drew blood. She broke her nails on sharp little stones. Before there was a Garden there was Chaos on the face of the earth, she thought. That is the way the world goes. It is chaos and not order which is the norm. Time has time on its side, order is impermanent. The weeds yielded, the grass resisted; the grass had been there before the garden and had rights. She cried out, ‘Help me!’ The battleground is here, does no one understand? Here is where the boundary of civilisation runs. To hold this frontier man must work and work, constantly be on the lookout, never relax vigilance, and when he grows too old and tired, or ceases to care, chaos will choke his every small endeavour.

  ‘Murdoch!’ she called. He came round the side of the building. She looked at him without surprise. ‘You are in your study,’ she said.

  ‘No, I am here.’

  ‘In your study! You must understand me.’ In his study, he started with chaos in his mind, slowly imposing order on it as the sculptor imposes order on the rough mass of material, both working against the grain of life. ‘But I am not artistic . . . Let go! Let go!’ He was trying to stop her tearing at the grass. ‘I need to create order, too.’ She must take the scattered bits and pieces which life presented to her and try to extract meaning from them, make sense of experience as she grew older and her body wore out. ‘We are mad,’ she said to him. ‘You know that, don’t you? We are mad. All this obsession with order when we ourselves are already decaying.’

  ‘Rest a little,’ he pleaded.

  ‘And God?’ She sat back on her heels, looking up at the sky above their heads, blue, lucid still, void of cloud . . . lucid and void . . . God, profligate one moment, the next destructive; a random giver, bestowing grace where it had not been earned, withdrawing the gift of life before the entrusted tasks are halfcompleted. ‘God,’ she said to Murdoch, ‘is fundamentally amoral.’

  ‘Come home now, Janet.’

  ‘But this I can do, this at least! You have words, I have my hands.’

  She renewed her attack upon the grass and weeds. She must not stop. The need to cut down, to pare away had become desperate, the making of the clearing a matter of more importance than the survival of the few plants she was uncovering.

  Murdoch said, ‘Take the weeds up first. The ground is wet now and they will come away easily.’ He demonstrated.

  ‘It is the grass,’ she said. The choking, stubborn grass overlaid the hidden, obscure things to which she must somehow reach down, which the woman in the mirror already knew.

  At last, together, they made a small clearing. Janet s
tared down at it and then folded over, her head on her knees, weeping. ‘There is nothing, nothing . . . I can’t go any deeper . . . I am not strong enough.’

  He took off his jacket and laid it around her shoulders. She said, ‘Don’t leave me!’ as the darkness closed over her.

  Indeed, he could not leave her, so what was he to do? Humphrey, who had not liked what was going on very much, had withdrawn to the terrace, but now, seeing an end to the mystifying activity which had failed to rouse anything to be worried or retrieved, he came slowly down the steps, approaching Janet like a ponderous detective intent on a cautious investigation which he hopes will not uncover anything very unpleasant.

  ‘We shall have to rely on you, old friend,’ Murdoch said to him. He tore a page from his pocket book and wrote a note on it which he attached to Humphrey’s collar. Then he led the dog round the side of the building and pointed him in the direction of the village. ‘Go fetch Patsy,’ he commanded. Humphrey put his ears back and his body quivered as it did when he was watching a partridge. Murdoch was both glad and apprehensive that he had always insisted on training his dogs himself. A part of the training was a belief that a dog should be allowed to develop his particular talent. Humphrey’s talent was fetching. He said, in case the instruction needed fleshing out, ‘Patsy, Sam, Francesca . . . Fetch!’ Humphrey departed at speed and in the right direction. He had never been expected to fetch anything at such a distance, but he was a dog with a strong homing instinct. Murdoch hoped he would not simply turn in at his own gate.

  Why didn’t I go and leave Humphrey here? Murdoch wondered. I could have fetched the car and he would have been as effective a guardian as I and less complaining. But then, if it rained, he couldn’t carry Janet indoors – as I must now, because it is beginning to rain.

  He sat on a window seat, holding Janet close, knowing that she was not there in his arms but had gone into some dark place where he could not follow her. He could not follow her, but the damnable thing was that he had got as far as the threshold! His experience as a writer was that thresholds, however dark, are for crossing. As a man, he believed his neighbours’ thresholds were inviolable and gave them a wide berth. But his wife? As he felt Janet’s body, heavy, unyielding as a conscientious protestor in the arms of a policeman, he was aware of a numb misery which was nothing to do with the raw feel of another’s pain which he sometimes experienced, but was rather the kind of inarticulate, uncomprehending misery which he imagined Humphrey to feel when something went badly wrong in the routine of attention, exercise, feeding on which his wellbeing depended.

  The rain, half-hearted at first, coming in intermittent bursts, had now settled dourly to its task, bubbling the windows, streaming from blocked gutters. Through the open door he could see it at work filling the deep cracks in the terrace, washing away the dust and grit. The wind buffeted the side of the house and drove the long grasses eastward like so many pointing arrows. Usually he did not begrudge the earth this gentle benediction, but today he felt as though all this effort on the part of the elements was directed solely at him. The whole purpose was to liquidate Murdoch Saunders, but slowly, first cutting off the source of power and potential, then withdrawing from him little by little all the favours so freely given, until only a small hard nub of misery remained. Hunched against the wall, the heavy, woollen cardigan sagging like the folds in his face, he listened to the glub, glub, gluck, burp and plerp of the earth drinking its fill and he hated every sodden thing out there, animal, vegetable and mineral. And its Creator, in whom he believed never more than at this moment. Him he hated most of all, because this was no benediction, this was valediction.

  Not Janet, of course; he did not hate Janet. But he did feel cheated when he thought of all the years during which she had allowed him to imagine her to be happy and content. How could she have been so deceitful? When her illness first forced itself on his attention, he had felt very strongly that she had a right to her breakdown. Seen from a distance, which was the way he saw most things, it was a sort of clearing and cleansing operation which might well be necessary for the renewal of her spirit. It was not for him to stand in the way.

  Inexorably, he had been drawn into it, not to the centre, but certainly well beyond the periphery. This he had accepted. They were man and wife, one flesh. He was confident that she would nurse him faithfully through any illness he might have, and he must do the same for her. He had not been prepared for how disturbing would be the watching, listening, anticipating, how the continual uncertainty would affect him, so that gradually the illness became uppermost in his mind. But this, too, he had accepted, telling himself that it must be allowed to run its course.

  He had not foreseen that the course could run downhill, that there might be no cure; or that he would one day come to this place, to sit here in the rain, knowing that something was being taken from him. This, he told himself grimly, looking out at the sheeting rain, this is Hell – not all bright flame and parched tongues, but this all-pervasive wetness. This is how the world will end, not in nuclear explosion, but the slow attrition of earth by the one element which preceded all others.

  He eased away from Janet and went to the window to see whether help was on the way. He caught his foot on the brush of the yard broom and the handle came up smartly and hit him on the side of the head. ‘And the sooner the end the better!’ he shouted.

  Whatever happened to the world, he could see that this particular episode would end like a fairy story. When they came to fetch Janet they would find nothing beside her but the pool of self-pity in which he had drowned.

  But no, they had come sooner than he had anticipated, if he had really anticipated that anyone would come. The footsteps, however, were approaching the rear of the building; which was not the direction from which he would have expected rescuers to arrive. He heard a woman’s voice say, ‘There’s been someone here, planting roses . . .’

  There was a silence while the ominous fact of the roses was assimilated. And in the pause he felt their fear, not sharp and glancing and soon to be gone, but the constant, debilitating harrowing of those without the resources to survive in an immutably hostile environment. A last gift! he thought; and as the self-conscious words formed in his mind he knew that his awareness was now of a different order.

  Another woman spoke, her voice deeper but no less intimidated, ‘I think the roses were there. They’ve uncovered them . . . sort of . . .’

  Shadows fell across the french windows and there they stood, two women and a man. One of the women was small, floatingly robed like a fairground fortune-teller with huge rings hung from her ears and a crimson bandeau covering her forehead. But alas for the brave accessories, the eyes were too scared to look squarely at the present let alone the future. Her companion was a large woman bursting from sweatshirt and old denim trousers cut short at the knees; her face had the look of a fat child used to being tormented. As for the man, hair had taken over his face as the grass had covered the garden and it was difficult to discern any individual features. The three stood close, huddled together as people will for whom all strangers are bad news.

  ‘My wife has been taken ill,’ Murdoch said to allay their evident fear of eviction, a design they seemed pathetically willing to believe might be accomplished even by so ill-equipped a pair as himself and Janet.

  The man said, ‘That’s all right, then.’

  Murdoch said, ‘It isn’t really. I need someone to go for help.’ The crimson bandeau said, ‘To the police, like?’

  ‘I don’t want the police here any more than you do.’

  This did little to lessen their apprehension. They edged closer, looking down at Janet suspiciously. ‘An overdose?’ the man asked.

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’ Murdoch was beginning to lose his temper. ‘She is exhausted, that is all. I need to get a message to my doctor.’

  The crimson bandeau consulted her companions. ‘Do you think we ought?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ The big
woman looked at the man who tugged at his beard.

  ‘We’ve got the others coming soon,’ the crimson bandeau said. ‘Perhaps one of them . . .?’ She looked at her companions. ‘I think we ought to wait for them. Don’t you think we ought to wait for them?’

  The big woman said to the man, ‘What do you think? Did we ought to wait for them?’

  The man said, ‘Perhaps one of us . . .?’

  The gravity of this suggestion weighed heavily on them. The crimson bandeau said, ‘Or we could go, us two, and you could wait here and tell the others.’

  Murdoch said, ‘Or you could all three go and I could tell the others.’

  This brisk intervention tore a hole through the tentative process of their decision making. The man said hastily, ‘No, I don’t think we could do that. Not all three of us.’

  The big woman said, ‘Perhaps when they come, one of them . . .?’

  The crimson bandeau said, ‘I think we ought to talk it over with them, anyway. It’s got to be something we all agree on. That’s what we’re all about, isn’t it?’ Thus relieved of responsibility she laid down one of the carrier bags she had been holding; a tin of Heinz beans rolled across the floor. They turned away from Murdoch and Janet, unwilling for further involvement.

  The man said, ‘Perhaps we should get the fire going?’

  ‘Except we don’t know how long they are going to be.’

  ‘How many are there of you?’ Murdoch was determined to have their attention.