AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN

by MARY HOCKING

  They did not like direct questions. The big woman said, ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘But not here, in this house?’

  ‘We shan’t stay here long. We’ll be on our way soon,’ the crimson bandeau said defiantly. ‘What makes you live like this?’

  ‘We’re travelling people, see.’

  Murdoch wanted to shout that they resembled the Romanies about as much as a tatterdemalion youth with a line over a gravel pit resembles a deep-sea fisherman. Instead he controlled his temper and succeeded in sounding like one of the magistrates with whom they were no doubt familiar. ‘This country is too small and overcrowded to support a nomadic people.’

  ‘No one supports us,’ the man said. ‘We only take what’s our due, same as everyone else. We don’t beg.’

  This momentary flash of pride warmed his companions. The crimson bandeau said, ‘All we want is to be left alone,’ and the big woman said, ‘So piss off!’

  ‘Just as soon as I can,’ Murdoch snapped. He would very much have liked to administer his own version of a short, sharp shock; to have left them here, abject and humiliated. The force of his anger communicated itself without words. They turned their backs on him and went to the window, looking south, huddled like besieged prisoners wondering whether help will arrive in time, fearing to see the feathered head-dress parting the long grass.

  ‘Look there!’ The big woman pointed.

  Murdoch joined them and saw a feathered tail parting the long grass. Relief washed away his anger. ‘It’s all right,’ he assured them. ‘It’s not the police.’

  It was, in fact, Patsy, looking businesslike in slacks and carrying an efficiently contrived stretcher in the guise of a well-roped deck chair. She greeted the squatters with cheerful good-humour and by the time Janet had been made as comfortable as possible relationships were sufficiently cordial for the man to say, ‘We’d have given her a hot drink – if we’d got the fire going.’

  When they had gone some way from the house Murdoch looked back. The squatters were still standing at the door and he thought they were like characters in a ghost story, forlorn and insubstantial, unlikely to survive long in the full light of day. He felt ashamed of having been so angry with them.

  Janet lay on the improvised stretcher, her eyes closed, her face peaceful. Murdoch and Patsy walked slowly and carefully and she was not jolted about unnecessarily. She had not been unconscious during the exchanges with the squatters, but had given way to the longing to let someone else take charge. Now she enjoyed the experience of being carried. Not since she was a child had she let go like this. Always in adult life she had remained in charge, even during brief minor indispositions there had been footsteps on the stairs, the anxious voice at the bedroom door, ‘Mum, where do we find . . .?’ ‘It looks done but how do we tell for certain?’ and she had roused herself to give instructions, ‘You must warm it through thoroughly . . .’ ‘Make sure it is quite cold before . . .’

  Now responsibility slipped like a garment from her shoulders, arms, belly, thighs and she lay naked and heavy-limbed, a vacancy between the eyes which no questions or demands could penetrate. She had drifted beyond them on a raft which was carrying her down a dark river.

  By the time they reached the road the rain had stopped and as they left the heath the clouds were breaking apart. There was a glimpse of sun running with the wind across a green field. Murdoch said, ‘Oh God, oh God!’

  Patsy said, ‘Poor old chap! Not much further.’

  They passed a paddock enclosed by wooden palings, green as though the sap still rose in them. Murdoch groaned and Patsy said, ‘I’ll come up this evening and make you a good supper, if you like.’

  He looked at her mass of hair and the sweat-soaked shirt clinging to her shoulders. ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea.’

  Janet lay in the single bedroom where she now slept. Occasionally she heard noises about the house which she made no attempt to identify. A blackbird sang like a ghost in the tree outside the window.

  She felt peaceful on that raft which was still carrying her down the dark river. But at night she dreamed she was in the city. It was a cold, bitter night and she and Patsy were standing by a trolley serving soup. She could see that there was very little soup left, but still people came out of the shadows, holding out mugs which she must fill. She dipped deeper and deeper into the cauldron. She was frightened because she knew she would reach the bottom soon and Patsy and the other helpers had gone. She would have to face the people in the shadows on her own when the time came that nothing was left.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Deutzia feels that I should be doing more for Janet Saunders now that she is so ill,’ Hector Beaney said to his wife over breakfast. Breakfast in the Beaney household usually had something of the confessional about it, the hour when Mr Beaney unloaded upon his wife those cares which the night had failed to dispel.

  ‘It has all been too much for poor Deutzia. She has always put her own interests before those of other people and she can’t be expected to change at her age.’ Mrs Beaney made this pronouncement without malice in much the same way that a forecaster might speak of the weather in an uncongenial climate. ‘But because she is unable to assume this burden, it does not mean that we must take it up.’

  Mr Beaney looked hopefully at his wife, waiting for her to develop a cogent argument which would relieve him of a responsibility which they both knew he was unfitted to bear.

  Priscilla Beaney said, ‘They live too much to themselves as a family. She has hardly had an existence beyond the walls of that house. But that was their choice. It is necessary, and surely good, that we should have to face up to the results of our choices.’

  Her husband crumbled toast and wondered how many more times he was to be reminded that he had made a choice. Mrs Beaney, who herself had made a choice when she married this melancholic man, briskly disposed of the last portion of poached egg and said, ‘ “No man is an island.” Perhaps you might refer the Saunders family to John Donne?’

  ‘Murdoch has been about quite a bit. I seem to remember that when he was young he went off with a travelling circus . . .’

  ‘That I can believe, circus people and gypsies! But he never seems at home with his own kind. He doesn’t know how professional people converse. Do you remember when we went to dinner with the Hardings and he and Tim Harding had the most frightful argument about whaling, of all things! What does either of them know about whaling?’

  ‘Most men argue over things about which they know very little.’

  ‘And he used language!’

  ‘Ah, yes . . .’

  ‘I really think you have enough to do without becoming involved with people who only call on your services when they are in trouble.’

  ‘That is rather an unfortunate way of putting it, my dear. When people are in trouble is the very time when I should be there.’

  He was such a good man and yet unable to do much good, Mrs Beaney reflected as she poured another cup of tea for herself. The ways of God were mysterious indeed! She applied her mind to buoying up his spirit. ‘What nonsense, Hector! If you only sat down to think about it you would realise that almost everyone in the village is in trouble of one kind or another. You cannot be involved in everyone’s pain. Even our Lord had doubts about whether his mission extended to the woman of Samaria. It is necessary to discriminate.’

  ‘Janet Saunders is very disturbed about this anti-nuclear meeting which Patsy Saunders is so insistent we should all attend. And if my parishioners are to be disturbed I feel that the least I can do is to be confused with them.’

  ‘Janet Saunders is hardly typical of your parishioners.’

  ‘She says she doesn’t understand what is going on in the world today – I would have thought that was fairly typical. Then she goes on to say that she is beginning to realise she never has known, that life is not as she had imagined it.’

  ‘Well, I think it all a waste of your time, but you would probably have to was
te even more time justifying a decision not to go to this wretched meeting; so you will have to read all their literature, just to satisfy yourself that you could not possibly espouse their cause.’

  ‘That won’t take long. It is very repetitive – a series of questions with answers. I don’t see why they need a meeting if they already know all the answers.’

  ‘How naive you are! Most meetings are held to reinforce opinion. I suppose, when you come to think of it, that is why we go to church.’

  ‘My dear, I do hope not.’

  ‘I certainly don’t go in order to have my opinions changed. And Patsy will not be going to this meeting to have her opinions changed, either. She actually said to me that the Chernobyl disaster proved everything that the anti-nuclear lobby has been saying! The West had over-reacted; the press had behaved disgracefully, saying that thousands were dead, when it was the Russians who had been telling the truth all the time; and, in addition to that, the Russians had proved far more efficient in dealing with the aftermath of the disaster than most people in the West had believed possible. Whereas I would have said exactly the opposite – it had proved that the Russians are completely untrustworthy and hopelessly inefficient. At a time when even the Poles were warning against eating fresh fruit and vegetables and drinking milk, the Russians were still saying there was no danger. Moscow didn’t know what was happening and their leader had gone to earth somewhere. Imagine what Patsy would have said if that had been Mrs Thatcher!’

  ‘I am not entirely happy myself . . .’

  ‘Oh, the woman has no social sense at all, I grant you that. But at least she would have spoken to the nation.’

  ‘But would she have told the truth? One has to ask oneself these questions . . .’

  ‘Not unless one can provide a sensible answer.’

  ‘Janet Saunders sees the answer as some kind of participation . . .’

  ‘Janet Saunders, don’t forget, has always fancied herself on the stage – particularly as St Joan. Because she wishes to take an acting role, there is no need for you to contemplate it, Hector. We have to learn to live with nuclear power, just as we learned to live with the bow and arrow. Or, if you would prefer it in theological terms, man has eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and he cannot unlearn what he has learned. It is just another example of living with the consequences of your choice.’

  ‘There are people with first-class brains in the anti-nuclear lobby. They put forward very telling arguments . . .’

  ‘The great majority don’t have arguments – they have emotions.’

  ‘People’s emotions are sometimes their surest guide.’

  ‘And have frequently led them into war. You must not get yourself involved in this, Hector. It is all much too close, with these antinuclear groups all around us. You have always become confused when issues get on top of you. Remember how disturbed you became about Suez. And who thinks of that now?’

  ‘There are usually two sides of an issue, Priscilla.’

  ‘That kind of thinking leaves people unable to make decisions and it destroys their peace of mind.’

  ‘Well, my dear, I have never had peace of mind, so you must be right. But I have made two decisions this morning. I shall go to this meeting with as open a mind as possible, and I must continue to talk to Janet Saunders about this. Not that I expect anything to come of either.’

  As he sat in his study he wondered what he was to say to Janet Saunders. He had no idea how one set about counselling others on their problems, least of all a woman in her fifties who, he could not help but feel, had no business to have problems. Not for the first time he asked himself whether he should have become a monk. The contemplative life, seen from the outside, seemed so comfortable. But at his retreat house he had often been assured that the most trying thing in the monastic life was the other monks. Certainly Priscilla was not the most trying thing in his life. ‘I have been very blessed,’ he said humbly.

  ‘Why did you marry Patsy?’ Deutzia asked, proffering cucumber sandwiches. Tea was a meal at which she excelled, the only meal which she took any pleasure in preparing. ‘She seemed different from the other young women I knew, who were all rather ambitious. Career women frighten me. I thought Patsy was . . .’

  ‘Like your mother.’ Deutzia nodded her head, a satisfied smile brightening her eyes. ‘When you are my age you notice things.’

  ‘Be that as it may, I didn’t notice the disorder.’ He himself was immaculate in pale silver-grey slacks with a darker grey shirt, an outfit which, with his pale colouring, made him seem quite spectral in a cool, unemphatic way. Even as a ghost he would not create undue excitement.

  ‘Your mother isn’t very orderly,’ Deutzia said. ‘She does produce meals on time – or used to – but I wouldn’t call her orderly about the house.’ She gazed round her sitting room in which every ornament and chair had its proper place. ‘Mrs Pringle, our daily help, once said to me – not that I encourage her to gossip, of course – that your mother’s house was always in a mess. Not dirty, but with books and papers and sewing everywhere. She said that if she made a space your mother always filled it.’

  Hugh said, wanting to change the conversation, ‘All I ask of a woman is that she produces meals on time.’ In fact, he asked for love and comfort, strength, security and stability. Patsy had not done so badly with the comforting, but had failed notably to provide stability. Being married to Patsy had been like living on a ship whose ballast has shifted.

  ‘Shall you marry again?’

  ‘I couldn’t afford to.’

  ‘Now you are not speaking just about money, are you? You are afraid of being hurt again, poor boy. But it’s bad for you to live alone. When you are my age, of course, there is no choice. But you have your life ahead of you.’

  ‘It is what is behind me that worries me.’

  ‘You mustn’t think like that. It is the present which is important. One must enjoy the present. That is one thing I am always thankful for – I got so much enjoyment out of life when I was young. Mind you, our pleasures were much more simple in those days. We only went abroad once a year and I never went sailing. But there was the theatre in the winter and tennis in the summer. Oh, those long summer evenings! After we had finished playing, we would go off, a whole crowd of us, to a country pub. I remember the Royal Standard of England was a particular favourite. Or was that later? I seem to remember men in uniform there . . . I forget the details, I just remember this sense of everything being very special. If your boyfriend was rich – and I confess without shame that many of mine were – you would be taken down to the river for dinner. Bray. There was a good place at Bray – I can’t recall the name, but the food was delicious and there’ would be a table overlooking the river . . . You should be doing that sort of thing, Hugh. Girls don’t change all that much, in spite of all this talk about being liberated, whatever that means. Find a pretty girl and take her to a hotel by the river.’ For her, that had been an end in itself. She barely remembered the men. But the little breeze stealing up from the river, the table with its single rose in a vase, the crisp cloth, the misted glass from which she drank her wine, the memory of these things gave her a little thrill of pleasure even now.

  Hugh said abruptly, ‘We hardly see you now. Not even for Sunday lunch.’

  For years Deutzia had come for Sunday lunch. It was nice, she had maintained, for Janet to have the company of another woman; and then Janet loved cooking while she hated it, so it was a very congenial arrangement for both of them. Now she said fretfully, in a tone of one tried beyond reason, ‘My dear, I have come for years on a Sunday, but I have other friends of whom I must think and they are becoming very insistent that I shouldn’t neglect them any longer. Such a dear couple who live just outside town. Rodney drives over to fetch me.’

  ‘But Deutzia, we are in trouble, and you are the only person outside our family on whom we have any claim.’

  ‘Really, Hugh!’ Deutzia plucked at the wide, flowered skirt, ar
ranging and rearranging its ample folds with trembling hands, as though quelling some subterranean insurrection. ‘One does not speak about claims to friends. Claims, indeed! Have you been keeping an account? All those years when I gave your mother my friendship, toiling up that awful hill to your house, so bad for my poor old heart, were you counting the number of visits in the expectation of some sort of repayment?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Deutzia; I am terribly sorry. It’s just that I don’t know which way to turn, I’m so worried.’

  ‘I think you must ask yourself why you don’t know which way to turn. Why am I the only person outside the family to whom you can turn? And why, indeed, do you make this distinction – one of which, I must tell you, I have always been conscious – between the family and myself?’

  ‘It’s only a manner of speaking, Deutzia. The relationship is a bit distant, that’s all.’

  ‘It is not a blood relationship, you mean. Oh, I have always been very aware of that, Hugh. Why, the last time I came to visit you all on a Sunday – though I missed seeing you to my great disappointment – I was not invited to lunch because Janet said that now you were so seldom together as a family.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘I am sorry for you all. But you have always kept yourselves apart and now you will have to manage as a family.’ She made a final adjustment of the folds in the skirt. ‘We sow as we reap.’

  ‘If you were ill, my mother would come to you.’

  ‘Your mother is fifty, Hugh, and I am eighty-three next January.’ She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and patted her face. ‘Oh, there’s nothing for it – I shall have to move away. I simply cannot withstand the pressures which are put upon one in this place.’

  ‘What pressures, Deutzia? I have only asked . . .’

  ‘It is not just this illness of your mother’s – though that is bad enough! There are other things. You should know, none better. Your wife, Hugh, is now agitating for people to attend some meeting which is to be held next month about nuclear power. You will find a leaflet about it over there under the Radio Times. It is headed “After Chernobyl . . .” ’