A Pocketful of Rye

by Anthony Masters

  He drove on—through a sprawl of garages, co-ops, and a multitude of signs and hoardings. Continually halted at traffic lights and intersections, he felt a grim satisfaction in his slow progress. Another cigarette dangled from his lips, but he hardly bothered to inhale. He just liked it there—it felt good. For a moment the perpetual drizzle stopped and the windows of the car began to steam up. He turned on the radio—and turned it off again. Outside, the monotonous streets had given way to an arterial road—a maze of concrete and rusty iron railing. Even now he made no attempt to pick up speed, but eased the car along on the inside lane.

  “My sister Emma is mad.”

  He said it aloud, baldly, with a dull tone to his voice.

  “My sister Emma is mad.”

  He repeated the phrase again with a different intonation, and the rhythm of the car took it up as it cruised smoothly along the battered concrete.

  “My sister Emma is mad—is mad—is mad—” sang the wheels and the road and the rain. It had begun to drizzle again and then it came down much harder—the sky spitting at the concrete and the concrete receiving the rain in its pores and hollows, sending it scudding across its gently curved surface and into the gutter to the blocked drains. Other cars passed him with a gentle sound, taking up the song and sliding it smoothly along the road. He watched the droplets speed along the telegraph wires—and caught a glimpse of shimmering fields and market gardens below the level of the concrete. There was a rain mist that was gradually creeping over the flat land, and then suddenly he was back in the built-up area of another urban sprawl. He looked at the name of the town and realised that he was only a few miles from his sister. He did not accelerate, but neither did he slow down. The speed of the car maintained the steady rate that he had remained at since he left London. A fresh cigarette—and the tobacco was hot and unsoothing. His sister would be waiting in her patient undemanding way. If he said nothing throughout the course of the visit there would be no repercussions. That was a known fact—although he had only been once before. Then it was a different place—in London. It would be quieter for her in the country—well, almost in the country. They had written to him and told him how she loved the big windows and the views of the woods and fields outside. There was even television—she liked that. It had only upset her once, and that had been at home. Mother had taken her away, and frail as she was she had forced Emma to her bedroom and locked the door. That was the time that television had been forbidden for two weeks, and Emma had sat forlornly looking out of the window—watching all the time with an urgency in her eyes that were like windows themselves. But there was a wall behind them and you could see it—people were reflected in her eyes—they moved and gestured—but she couldn’t understand—perhaps she didn’t want to understand—perhaps she was just bloody ungrateful—if—

  He was there—out of the town now, and on the wooded hill was the place. To the right was a drive and a signboard. Opposite was a small station and a line of wooden kiosks. They sold cigarettes, repaired shoes, and ordered coal. He turned the car away from the drive and into the station-yard. Just five minutes—before he saw Emma. It was utterly quiet in the yard with the engine switched off, except for the gentle patter of the rain. He slumped back in his seat. Only five minutes—his mind was blank and his mood was still untidy. Idiotic, trite thoughts trickled like dust over the continuous unease that he felt was gathering. His gaze ran absently around the shanty buildings and lighted on a ramshackle café. Perhaps a cup of tea—he recoiled at the thought, but he had to clear the film of drying saliva. He left the car and went inside.

  The café windows were completely steamed up and the immediate smell of warm tea and condensed milk almost made him choke. He expected to find the café empty except perhaps for a porter or a lorry driver. Surprisingly enough it was quite full, and he sat down clumsily on a hard wooden chair. His eyes were heavy and he ran his hands through his thick black hair. It felt greasy, and the dryness of his mouth made him almost long for the anticipated sweet weak syrup to come.

  “Pot or cup?” she said.

  “Pot,” he muttered.

  The woman disappeared into the steam behind the counter. Another cigarette—better not spend too long. He brought out a crumpled paper and spread it across the table. Idly studying it he thought again of Emma. They said she was quiet and easily pleased. They said she was happy and smiled a lot. They said there was no hope at the moment of—of any improvement. She liked pretty things—rows of beads—coloured things—but she didn’t hoard them. She didn’t want to own them—just to look at and sometimes hold the winking globes. They wouldn’t believe Mother, he thought vaguely. Mother had said Emma was violent and obscene. It was true; once she had wet herself when some guests were there. Mother had said she did it purposely. She said she was like a child—not a forty-year-old woman.

  The tea arrived—cloudy with the over-sweet condensed milk. There was no pot—just a cup. He didn’t complain—perhaps it was just a formality to give a choice. He returned to the newspaper, trying to blot Emma temporarily from his mind. She was violent too; once she had ripped all her clothes—and stood over the scraps of gaudy print dresses gurgling delightedly and scooping them up in her hands. She had sat and looked at the colours—then Mother had come in and irritably he tried to concentrate on the paper, taking a sip of the tea. It slid down his throat, leaving a deep, full taste in his mouth. Trying to read was hopeless and he looked idly around the room.

  She sat at the next table, almost directly opposite to him. His glance swept her and immediately returned. Temporarily appalled he tried to take his eyes away, but they remained fixed rigidly on the grotesque features. He saw a clown. He had been terrified of them at the circus when he was a child, and could never understand why they were a source of joy and laughter to the surrounding children. Their dead white faces stunned him with a horror that he had forgotten, and their red lips and grotesque expressions had given him terrible nightmares for weeks afterwards. Again he saw a clown. He began to sweat—he felt the fear returning and then, to his utter horror, he met the eyes. They stared out of the powder-baked mask—met his own eyes and for a moment held them. He could see his reflection in them, but beyond that there was the brick wall. This woman had Emma’s eyes. She was looking through him—but he continued to stare. There was nothing he could do to take his eyes away. They were prisoners, a clown’s prisoners, and the terror bubbled and sweated inside him. The face was so heavily made up that the cracks in the powder scaled down the face like a fine tracery or the studied chaos of crazy paving. The eyes, doubly made up with mascara and heavy shadow, were surrounded with distinct, tapering blue lines. She had attempted to extend the eyes with an eyebrow pencil, and there was a thick dark pencil line running out from the corner of each. Two vivid spots of rouge flared from the over-powdered, dead white cheeks, and the lips were a flash of scarlet, so misapplied that the lipstick covered half the area between the nose and the upper lip. The hair straggled greasily from what remained of a little girl’s frizzy perm. There were pins still in the hair. The terrible misapplication had him trembling with the very horror that had first seized him as a child. The woman was middle-aged—about forty. Emma was forty—and she had the same eyes. Then the woman pulled a huge cheap black handbag from under the table and opened it. He winced as he remembered the clown who opened the shopping bag in the ring and out of it fell—confetti—and the clown showered everyone near the edge of the ring with— Inside the handbag were tiny, torn-up scraps of paper. It was completely full—and some of it was coloured. As the woman looked inside her face was suffused with a delight that he had only seen—when Emma had torn up her clothes and sat, cross-legged, on the floor exclaiming over the pretty, coloured pieces of cloth. Scrabbling inside the handbag the woman eventually produced a powder compact. He watched, powerless to take his gaze away, as she smilingly opened it and began to apply more powder to the dead white tip of her nose. She used so much that it flew up in great clouds, and he w
as reminded again—of the flour and the ringmaster’s fine red coat so suddenly become white, saturated and suffocated with flour. And then they pretended to throw it at the audience. The sack was empty, but oh how he had cringed in his seat, terrified that he would be suffocated, waiting for his mouth to fill with the flour—and now he thought of the powder in his mouth—how Mother and Emma had laughed at the circus and at him and—at the clowns who threw the flour.

  Then the woman cleaned the powder from the mirror in the compact, and he watched her expression change from its childlike contentment to—could it have been sanity for a flash or simply a change of mood. Emma had changed mood so quickly—it was difficult to say. But somehow he knew that for a brief second the woman’s expression had been as horrified as his own when he had first noticed her. Ridiculous to assume that she had even looked—scandalised. Like Emma had looked when for a moment he had thought that she was—she was all right again. Then in a moment the woman’s expression became blank again, and the wall in her eyes slipped over the horror that perhaps had been in them—or perhaps had never existed at all.

  He was shaken—stupid, he thought, obviously she’s—she’s a patient. So near the—the place—it’s meant to be—what was it?—open plan or something. He remembered that they had said that the model guests could sometimes go out. Perhaps the woman was—very quiet and reasonable.

  It was only then that he realised that some of the people in the cafe came from—the place too. They had the same eyes— There was a table at the far end of the room where some people were with a patient—probably a relation. They spoke slowly to her as if she was deaf, and took great care to include her in the conversation. The patient smiled and bobbed amicably, but the eyes had walls that were impenetrable. There were two other women, sitting by themselves, drinking the cloudy tea and looking ahead.

  Now, he wanted to go. He felt an intruder and an invader—A sense of shame came over him and he rose to pay for the tea.

  “Pot or cup?” she asked over the till.

  “Cup,” he replied.

  The waitress rang up the till and he noticed that she had charged for a pot. He went out into the yard and climbed into the car. It was still drizzling and he drove carefully out of the station, across the road and into the long drive that led up to the house behind the trees.

  “Perhaps that’s as far as Emma will walk—maybe that’s as far as she’s allowed to go—they’re all allowed to go. To the station café for afternoon tea—but by themselves—independently.”

  He had parked in a car park (Visitors Car Park Only—Staff Car Park To The Right) halfway up the drive. Hunched in a mackintosh he walked slowly up the wet gravel, tired now and still so apathetic. Trees and shrubberies covered the grounds and they were all weighed down with the constant spatter of rain. Everything was sodden—the grass at the edges of the drive seemed almost completely waterlogged. A smaller cinder path lead off to the right, and instinctively continuing to prolong the afternoon he followed it. His shoes were soon soaked, for the grass had invaded the cinders, pushing its way up amongst them and scattering them in uneven heaps. A screen of fir hid his view of the house completely, and he cursed quietly as the water seeped through his shoes. The smell of fir was rough and persistent and it had overgrown the path in places so that he had to duck underneath it. The track seemed to be leading away from the main building but he walked doggedly on. The gentle haze of rain began to ease, and looking up he saw a break in the sky. The path would be lovely on a summer’s evening—he wondered if they would allow Emma to walk down it. She would like that—it was somewhere, sometime—possibly when she was a child—that Emma had said:

  “I like to walk slowly—because when I do I pretend I’m floating—like a piece of grandfather’s beard that has been blown along—and gradually, very gradually, I’ll come to rest—but not until the wind has caught me—and blown me very gently, very slowly along—that’s why I’m walking so slowly now—I’m drifting along with the wind—and when the sun comes out I’ll float on to a bush, or catch myself in the branches of a tree—and lie and watch the sun—and wait for the wind to move me on.”

  He remembered it so vividly now—and his reply:

  “You’re just a silly, rotten, boring girl—Who else has a stupid sister that just wants to be blown along like a piece of cotton? You wait till I tell Anne what you said—she’ll laugh and laugh and tell all the girls at school and in break they’ll all get you.”

  He remembered that she had scratched and bitten him and run away crying. He had chased her and tripped her up, and they had fought savagely until Mother had come running down the garden.

  It was amazing how these memories suddenly returned—he had hardly thought about Emma—the real Emma.

  The path began to broaden out and the gentle rain ceased completely. There was a rise in the ground in front of him, covered with smooth, short grass and on top of it, a wooden seat. Careless of the wet boards he sat down and found that he could see above the fir screen to the house and beyond. Apart from the main road and station there were fields all around as far as the eye could see. The gently rising hillside was dotted with copses of fir. In the dip below him, at the foot of the screen of fir, were a few wild flowers amongst a number of thistles. Suddenly a very watery sun burst through the leaden sky, obliquely lighting the glade. A pale light crept over the grass and he felt the soft touch of the subdued warmth. Before he had really noticed them, he saw two women in Wellington boots and mackintosh capes approaching the few wild flowers in the dip. Over their arms they had baskets containing a damp selection of grasses, thistles, and pieces of wood. They hardly seemed to notice him, but as they were wading through the tall grass to the flowers they turned and looked up at him. He saw the blank wall in their eyes and shifted his gaze slightly. Then one of the women pointed towards the flowers, and for a second the wall disappeared and the same delighted expression came into their eyes as he had seen in the eyes of Emma when she surveyed the remnants of her clothes, and in the eyes of the woman in the café before she looked in the mirror.

  He stood up very quickly and walked purposefully past them. They turned to gaze at him, the delight still in their eyes. He muttered, “Good afternoon,” but they simply stared at him. Walking back the way he had come, past the dripping fir screen, towards the house and Emma, he half turned in the fading sunlight.

  The two women had picked the flowers but had torn their hands on the thistles. They were gazing down at the scratches uncomprehendingly, the realisation of the physical hurt gathering on their faces. He turned quickly and walked away without looking back, his shoes sinking into the wet, springy grass. Behind him he heard one of the women begin to cry like a child.

  The Animals Went In Two by Two

  It was a limp and fretful Monday. Periodically the sun bathed Surbiton in watercolour listlessness, and Sheila hung out the washing vigorously. The tired autumn streets were dark with stagnant puddles and the trim wet lawns seemed dull and sad. The bedraggled cats of the neighbourhood sought the houses as refuges against the vaporous rays of the dying sun.

  The day slunk in, trying to avoid attention, and the sun apologetically excused its lack of intensity and began to build rain clouds around the pallid orange of its face. The stucco-terraced houses, shabby now and inconsequential, blinded themselves behind shrubberies that smelt of damp mould and rotting stems. The drives, weed-covered, seemed, like the sun, to want to apologise for existing and continued to conceal the houses with pale laburnum trees and coarse screen hedges of fir.

  Sheila sang as she bustled and listened for the shouts of the nearby children. Her husband had gone to work; she had been shopping; Mrs. Brown had spoken to her but she couldn’t remember what she said; the butcher had slipped an extra cutlet into her basket but she had hardly noticed. With the same song on her lips she had marched through the shopping, then slowed and walked idly down The Grove—her road—the road she had lived in since she was married—the road where she ha
d brought up her children—the road where Bobby had fallen off his bicycle and broken his leg—the road she had danced up blissfully after the Parkers’ party—the road where now the sun shone lightly and sporadically, tracing a shadow pattern of weak rays through the water in the gutters and the trodden grass at the sides.

  Now, in the garden of No. 17, she had finished hanging out the washing. She went inside, put the kettle on, sat down and picked up her weekly magazine. Outside, a man selling horsemeat despoiled The Grove with his raucous cries; a bus stopped, disgorging passengers, and almost ran over a cat who leapt screeching to the opposite pavement. A little wind stirred the damp shrubberies and the leaves whispered. The sun rode from behind a cloud and burst sunlight, for a brief moment, around The Grove. Sheila, undisturbed, continued to read. The kettle began to shrill, and from outside came the high clear voice of a child singing.

  High on Tabernacle Hill they had opened the doors and the first few were arriving. There was a hustle of activity as the sun again withdrew behind its sodden clouds. Some of them were busy reapplying pitch to the sides, whilst others were restoring rotten planks. The inside accommodation was being scrubbed out, and a line of washing fluttered in Monday salutation from the prow. Slowly tradesmen’s vans ground up the hill and provisions were unloaded and taken quietly inside. Chits were signed and there was little conversation. Then the vans reversed down the hill, churning the mud of the unkempt track. The tall grasses at the side of the ruts had been trampled down, and there were broken crates and empty boxes scattered untidily around.

  All was bustle and preparation, and at various points tall men in raincoats checked off lists—and these against others. Long trestle tables stacked high with unopened packages were being assessed by a crowd of uniformed women, whilst a policeman standing alone on a crest surveyed the scene with authority. All vans passed through an exit where licences and various other documents were checked and double-checked. There was a good deal of humour and much sharing out of cigarettes between officials and drivers. Above, clouds gathered again over the fading sun and a breeze stirred the tall grasses, which rustled as their brittle rapier stems bunched together. A sheep, amazed at the activity, bleated its indignation and was joined by another who stared, standing immovable on the hillside. On the other side of the hill two cows stood mooning at the preparation. Gently they were approached by two officials who stood in front of them, noted something down, then moved behind them and drove them forward up the muddy track to the top of the hill. Side by side the two cows ambled up Tabernacle Hill, whilst from another part of the hillside the sheep, after due registration, were also being driven protestingly towards the top. A lorry driver, easing his bucketing vehicle through a check point, shouted out: