AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN

by MARY HOCKING

  This time the interruptions were so forceful, and accompanied by such a degree of physical protest, that he was able to recognise hostility. ‘You care?’ he asked, pointing a finger at the most gesticulatory of the objectors. ‘You say you care about the environment, but I guarantee that you own a car and would not consider exchanging it for a bicycle. Yes, yes! The very idea is laughable. How would you get to your demonstrations without the aid of the motor vehicle? But what is needed is not Friends of the Earth but Friends of the Air.’

  Patsy, who had been very distressed by what was being said, and who believed that challenges should be taken up without delay – or even a pause for thought – stood up and cried out, ‘We do care! And if what you say is true, I should be willing to give up my car tomorrow!’

  Janet shouted ‘Bravo!’

  There was little support from Patsy’s friends, one of whom said, amid general laughter, ‘More likely your car will give you up, Patsy.’

  Patsy rounded on the speaker. ‘I should be quite prepared to walk.’

  ‘Or go by pony and trap,’ Janet suggested.

  A man in the front row said acidly, ‘Have you any idea of the cost of a trap?’ and another said, ‘To say nothing of the cost of the pony and the matter of training and stabling it.’

  Voices were raised on all sides.

  ‘Do you realise what the running costs would be?’

  ‘The pony would have a longer life expectancy than a car.’ Patsy gallantly adopted Janet’s alternative means of transport. ‘And the maintenance costs wouldn’t be so high.’

  ‘What about parking? Can you imagine the parking areas that would be required if we all had ponies and traps?’

  Janet said, ‘There would be side benefits, like manure, instead of side effects . . .’

  ‘We are a travelling people now, like it or not.’ This turn of the debate delighted Dr Harrison. ‘Yes, yes. You are right, of course. We can’t go back. People adapt. They have to travel because jobs are centralised, mainly in towns, and so are food and other commodity stores. Even if this were not so, they would not give up mobility. And people love their ruined Welsh valley towns and fight to save them and the coal industry which crippled their menfolk, and refuse to leave the houses encircled by the great tips. People don’t care about the environment. It is not pollution which worries them, it is other people’s pollution, the pollution which doesn’t threaten their interests. And in time nuclear power will take its place along with the coal and oil industries and man will accept the risk and live with it sooner than sacrifice what he has come to see as his need. Man is quite incapable of sustained altruism, which, I suspect, is why the anti-nuclear lobby needs to be boosted with regular injections of fear.’

  In the silence which followed this statement an elderly man rose from the body of the hall, a dry, attenuated, fastidious man, he said quietly but in a voice that carried, ‘I have no high hopes for the future. In fact, as I grow older I have come to subscribe to the pessimistic view that “the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train”.’ Sadly he allowed a pause for laughter, which was forthcoming and in which Dr Harrison joined. ‘But I will take my stand – in what I suppose might be called, even in someone as totally free of religious belief as myself, an act of faith – I will take my stand against the idea that man is unredeemably base.’

  ‘I hope you are right, sir,’ Dr Harrison said pleasantly.

  ‘And this is what happens when we try to be positive!’ Patsy cried. ‘You should be ashamed. You should all be ashamed!’

  The man at the rear of the audience, more saturnine than ever now, said, ‘While I have little else in common with the two ladies at the front, that sentiment has my complete support.’ There was much muttering and scraping of chairs as he and his ten companions made their way out of the hall to catch their bus.

  ‘I declare the meeting open for discussion,’ the Chairman said, dispiritedly.

  Voices rose on all sides. Deutzia fidgeted and fanned herself. Patsy argued with passionate inconsistency, Janet sat in silence, her hands slack in her lap. It all matters so much to them, she thought, and yet really they are quite helpless. They can’t even order their own meeting so how do they think they can get the world back on course? As she listened to the confused noises her mind persisted in universalising its own sickness and interpreting the disorder accordingly. This is the sort of thing the bomb will do, she thought; it will take everything apart, just as time does. Time is a bomb with a very slow fuse. But she wished she could be one of those who were standing up and shouting defiance.

  For her this had been a crucial occasion, her chance to break out of the nightmare isolation, to participate however humbly in great issues, to join hands around the camp fire lit by a new generation of pioneers. However muddled they might have seemed on this occasion, their fervour, stamped on furrowed brows and flashing from angry eyes, was undoubted and fervour meant considerably more to her and to most people than organisational ability. Fervour could sweep a country, a continent, while the organisers were still studying their computer programmes. Somewhere, in this vast movement which crossed barriers of birth, race and creed, there should have been a place for her, a role, however modest, which she could play, if it was only to spend chilly nights monitoring the passage of army trucks down country lanes.

  She had wanted desperately to become part of this community and it hadn’t worked. She was like the outsider drawn into chapel seeking a revelation and coming away repelled by the ugliness of the architecture and the banality of the hymns.

  The Chairman was on his feet waving his arms about like a conductor summoning an orchestra to make music after a prolonged tuning-up process.

  Janet experienced a feeling of total rejection, as if this farce had been laid on simply to discourage, or worse, to debar her from going forward.

  As they made their way out of the hall, after the meeting had been brought to an abrupt end by the caretaker, they were joined by the Beaneys and the Bellamys. They walked together to the car park.

  ‘I don’t know how Dr Harrison expects me to do my rounds without a car,’ Dr Bellamy said.

  ‘You did threaten to take to horseback last year when it was so snowy,’ Ann Bellamy pointed out. ‘Perhaps we should learn to think of the disadvantages of the car, rather than its advantages.’ More and more roads to enable people to travel about solo . . .’

  Deutzia thought that Ann Bellamy was rather a silly young woman. She turned to Mrs Beaney for a more considered judgement. ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘Most interesting. And profitable.’

  ‘Profitable!’ Deutzia wondered whether there could have been a conversion. She had heard of a BBC man who had been converted by one of those sandwich boards which, no doubt owing to lack of space, usually asked questions too direct to be taken seriously.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Mrs Beaney was briskly unrepentant. ‘Now we know that their ideas are not worthy of consideration. There was hardly a person capable of sustaining a sentence, let alone an argument, with clarity. Apart, of course, from the admirable Dr Harrison.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Mr Beaney said, tapping the curb with his stick. He had poor night-vision. ‘Articulacy is the art of expressing thought with ease. Our deepest beliefs are not capable of easy expression.’

  Mrs Beaney took his arm. ‘Come along, my dear. You are doddering. The church has produced people quite capable of vision and lucidity.’

  ‘Not all that number in two-thousand years.’

  ‘Poor Mr Beaney,’ Deutzia said when they had parted company. ‘She does bully him so.’

  Patsy unlocked the car without speaking.

  A few minutes later, seeing the bonnet dimly reflected in a shop window as Patsy drove out of the car park, Deutzia said, ‘You have got your lights on?’ Patsy switched on the lights without so much as a thank you.

  ‘Now, what are we to make of this meeting?’ Deutzia asked as they headed into the darkne
ss beyond the town. As neither Patsy nor Janet replied, she went on, ‘I can’t say I got much out of the discussion. If only people would realise that if they will insist on all talking at once none of them will be heard.’ She grasped the front seat as the car swerved round a corner. When they were once more on the straight, she said, ‘And I didn’t really like Dr Harrison. He struck me as being rather supercilious.’

  ‘Like him!’ Patsy spoke for the first time. ‘How they got hold of him I can’t imagine. He must be the establishment’s secret weapon.’

  When they arrived at Deutzia’s house Patsy refused to come in for a cup of tea.

  ‘But I thought it would be nice to talk about the evening,’ Deutzia protested.

  ‘It wasn’t a theatrical production.’ Patsy sounded unusually sharp.

  ‘Then surely it is even more important to talk about it.’ Deutzia who did not sleep well, was always anxious to persuade people to stay with her as long as possible. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’ she appealed to Janet.

  Janet said, ‘I think we should go back for the children.’

  Deutzia went indoors looking hurt.

  Patsy drove the car a little way down the street and then stopped. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be joining us?’ she said, staring ahead.

  ‘I’ll pay a subscription. But I don’t see myself being active.’

  ‘I can hardly blame you after tonight. The hard core, the people who really know what they are about, were picketing the Michael Heseltine meeting.’

  ‘I’m not criticising your friends, Patsy. They are good people. I could see when I looked at them depths of concern I had never suspected. The couple who run the wine shop – easy-going hedonists, as I had thought them – and there they were transformed into the stuff of which the saints of old were made!’

  Patsy seemed, if anything, more oppressed than ever by this tribute. Janet tried to breathe renewed life into her. ‘I marvel at these people – at their ability to steer a way through muddle and confusion, mismanagement and . . . oh, the human multiplicity of motives! That above all. And they can do this because they have this one clear goal. Even though they may never see the Promised Land they will go on struggling to the end.’

  Patsy said bleakly, ‘So why won’t you join us?’

  ‘It’s a matter of size. I am not big enough.’ Beside her, she saw Patsy’s face, silver and black as a vampire demanding more and more. She struggled to give more.

  ‘Even while I’ve been so ill, I’ve managed to drag myself to church once a week for the Eucharist. Usually on a week day because there are only a handful of people then. I find many of the religious intolerably pious and I abhor platitudinous priests. But I go. I know that the Anglican church is weak, vacillating, out of touch, unsure of what – if anything – it believes, has lost sight of its priorities, that it will fail Christ and all His saints again and again and again; but I go. Because of what lies beyond, I go. So why can’t I shrug aside the aggressiveness of your peace people? Why can’t I tolerate their kind of piousness? And, most important of all, why can’t I see beyond their unhealthy fascination with disaster? I don’t know. But I can’t see beyond it. “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train” doesn’t strike me as funny – it is absolutely unacceptable. I need hope. I need hope more than anything else, without it I should dwindle away.’ She laid a hand on Patsy’s shoulder. ‘I think you are very brave.’

  There, she thought, that is an end to it. She was hollow, dizzy, held in place only by the body of the cramped, intransigent little car.

  Patsy said, ‘But not effective. I wouldn’t say that to anyone but you. But I would like you to know that I know that I am not effective. Not at anything, not even at being a woman.’

  ‘ “Even”!’ Janet sighed. ‘Oh, Patsy, that, from you!’

  ‘I am so terribly unhappy. Nothing I do ever seems to work out. And I do try. I let people think I live the way I do because its the way I want to live, but the truth is I work just as hard not getting things done as other people do getting them done.’ She began to cry. ‘I spend all my time trying to bring things about that won’t be brought . . .’ She put her head down on her clenched fist and wept. Janet reflected, as though viewing a strange phenomena taking place in a capsule, that whatever Patsy did she devoted herself to it with remarkable singleness of purpose. Certainly, she was putting her entire being into the business of crying. The sobs seemed to have their origin somewhere in the region of the bowels and from there they travelled extensively, racking chest, heaving shoulders, tearing throat and agitating limbs. Janet watched, her own bowels of compassion unmoved, until the disturbance ceased and Patsy addressed herself to the more tractable problem of starting her car again.

  On their return to the house Patsy went upstairs to the children who were asleep in the room which had once been a nursery.

  Murdoch was in the kitchen doing the ironing. He studied Janet’s face and said, ‘Not a success?’

  ‘I should be useless to them.’

  ‘You’re not useless to me.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I am useless.’

  ‘Would you like coffee?’

  She turned and walked away from him. She had done this so often over the last months that he paid little attention and continued with the ironing. She went into the sitting room and closed the door. Humphrey was in his basket. He sat up and shook himself, looked at her, contemplated a greeting, decided against it and settled himself again.

  Patsy cried, Janet thought, and I had nothing to offer. Every cell in her body had become a weight dragging her down. She took a few paces towards the corner of the room, then the pressure was too much. She gave way and curled up on the floor. The dog raised his head and eyed her mournfully.

  Patsy left with the children. Murdoch said, ‘Janet has gone to bed, I think. Better not disturb her.’ He bolted the door and went slowly up the stairs.

  For hours Janet lay still, huddled on the floor. From time to time the dog cried to himself. At first, as she lay there she saw quite clearly a picture of houses wrecked in the Blitz on London, all the futile pretence of permanence ripped away leaving here the remnant of an upper floor projecting a few feet from a jagged wall, still supporting an ironing board with a shirt neatly folded on it, and there a mangled bedhead topping a fallen chimney like the antlers of a mythical beast. Then dust rose from the ground and blotted out this surrealist obscenity. There was a wind howling and nothing else. Except a clock. She could hear a clock and knew that it was slowly draining her; drip, drop, hope leaking from the arteries as the dust dribbled from the wrecked building; drip, drop, gradually breaking down the organs of resistance where the will sought refuge. She abandoned herself to this inexorable process, mind, body and spirit. When it was done the clock stopped. She was empty, yet heavy.

  She was going down, down, down into the familiar nightmare from which in the past she had always woken just as the sides of the tall buildings closed like a well around her. But now there was no waking; she was really falling into the blackness which had blotted out the bombed landscape. She had come at last to that moment to which the dream had seemed to be leading her. There were no lights in windows now and no people moved in the streets. The curfew had tolled and every other soul had found shelter. She was in a dangerous place, abroad and bolted out. She had nothing with which to bargain for clemency, no case to plead, no papers to prove an identity; she was stripped, bankrupt, the title deeds of her poor estate nullified. Something so incredible was happening that the knowledge of it could not be contained within the body’s framework which had never been intended for such enormity; ribs and breastbone must crack, this structure of the skull splinter as she came at last to this forbidden depth from which self-preservation had so long protected her. She had never known such fear. The nightwatchman was upon her; she felt his arm on her shoulder bearing her down amid the misjudgements and evasions, the unanswered needs and flawed affections, all the failed promise and fumbled c
hances of her life. Then complete cessation of feeling, no heartbeat nor intake of breath as dread struck upon the thing most dreaded. The second between the lightning flash and the thunder’s roar was her whole lifetime. She lay in the unnameable void and the arm held her, light as a feather. And there was peace.

  The morning light came faintly through the curtains. The dog was sleeping, one paw hanging out of the basket. She got up and went to the window, moving stiffly. Her body was cramped, yet she felt nimble as if she had laid down a burden. She drew the curtains. Outside there was a curtain of gauze stretched across the sky through which colour strained faintly. It must be early. She stood and watched as the sun climbed higher and gradually the veil was lifted, outlines grew sharp, colour strong. The garden glistened and she could smell the dew on the grass.

  Humphrey decided that he wanted to go out. She went into the kitchen and opened the back door for him. She stood on the threshold for a little while, remembering the tramp and other things. Then she filled a kettle and made tea. She was drinking it, looking through the window at the blue tit on the nut stocking, when Murdoch came in. He was startled to see her there.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all over.’

  He came towards her, still looking alarmed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. But it’s over.’ She began to massage her eyes.

  He walked towards the table, slowly, carefully, like a man skirting a minefield. He sat down beside her and put his head in his hands.

  She felt that she understood now about the man who had seven devils cast out. But undoubtedly there were dangers in taking recovery for granted. The end of that parable was that the devils mounted a successful counter offensive. She said, stirring her tea, ‘Patsy cried last night and I did nothing.’

  Later she walked about the house and saw the sheets and pillow cases in the linen cupboard, newly laundered and ironed. The windows had been cleaned, the flagstones in the hall scrubbed, and even the stairboards were polished, which was not very wise. Was it the house which had meant so much to him?