by MARY HOCKING
‘Yes, I know him. I could hardly help it, could I? With his mending cars in our yard and you getting mad at him.’
‘Never mind that. He’s unselfish. He’d do things for others while his own house fell down around him.’
‘So what happened that’s so awful?’
‘Tracy was telling me how Kelly Parsons told her he poked about right up her stack. At least, that’s what I thought she said. I couldn’t move, I just stood there paralysed, wondering what I ought to do about it.’
‘Her stack!’ It was the first time she had had Desmond’s full attention in quite a while.
‘It’s a way, I suppose . . .’
‘Kelly wouldn’t use an expression like that.’
‘Well, you never know. But as it turned out, he had been poking up a stack, trying to sweep the Parsons’ chimney and he dislodged a lot of bricks that came down on his head and now he’s in hospital. So I don’t want to hear any more about all this business of child abuse.’
‘Well done, Mum. You finally got there.’
‘It just shows the way we are being conditioned to think.’ But she had lost him again.
No, she couldn’t tell the Vicar. But the incident was relevant to her thoughts. She said, ‘Life is so awful for children nowadays. I never used to believe the things people said. I thought they had nasty minds. When the neighbours began to drop hints about Clifford – my husband – I was sorry for them, being so warped. Even when I got the phone call, I didn’t take it seriously. I told him about it as soon as he came home. “I’ve had a phone call saying you’ve found yourself a fellow” and waited for him to laugh. Then he told me. He went off to Canada soon afterwards, saying we could start again there once he had found a job. I heard afterwards that his boy friend went with him.’
Michael looked at her, puzzled that a woman of such warmth and vitality, who seemed so robustly healthy, should have failed to sense some ambivalence in her husband. Had she thought of him as being like one of the more sensitive children in her class, one who needed rescuing? Was that it? Had she plunged in and picked Clifford up by the scruff to comfort and console him?
‘What did it do to the children?’
‘Tracy hasn’t settled but that’s her age – all over the place.’ She sounded as if she was talking about a jelly. ‘It’s not to do with her father. She behaves as if he never existed. She doesn’t seem unhappy. Perhaps she has that sort of mind – with compartments where things can be locked away neatly. Or perhaps she’s one of those people who can just leave things behind. She’s a bit like that with her friends. If anyone lets her down, she never has any more to do with them. No one has a second chance with Tracy.’
‘And Desmond?’
‘Clifford was a very good father to Desmond, ever since he was tiny, bathing him, changing his nappies; when he got older he would read to him, play games, go for long walks. They were great companions. Clifford was a bit like Tracy in some ways. He could be good and kind and loving and great fun to be with – and then if it suited him, he would just walk away.
‘I don’t think Desmond really believed it had happened. He behaved as if it was a bad dream and we would all wake up and find Clifford still there. He talked about him as if he was on holiday – “When Dad comes back he’ll fix that . . .” “I’m keeping this to show Dad when he comes back . . .” Well, Clifford had to come back to see to some legal matters and Desmond found out where he was staying and went to see him. He was so sure that once his father saw him everything would be the same as before. It would be like when he was a little boy and Clifford saw that he was hurt and hugged him.’
‘What happened?’
‘His father was angry. He told Desmond to get out and when Desmond tried to tell him how he felt, how we all needed him, he hit him. The Head of the school had arranged for him to see a psychologist about that time and she tried to explain to Desmond that this showed that his father really cared about what he had done, that hitting out was a form of defence. I expect that’s true, don’t you? But I don’t think Desmond really took it in. In fact, I don’t know what he has taken in since; there hasn’t been much in the way of what you would call meaningful communication between us.’
‘Was it about that time that he became so interested in anthropology?’
‘That was when it really took off; he’d always collected flints and fossils and such like.’ She looked at Michael expectantly.
He said, knowing he was out of his depth, ‘If the psychologist can’t help him, I’m not sure what I can do.’
‘It’s just that when I heard you talking at that meeting about God and love, I thought you’d be the person to help Desmond.’
‘I see. Yes, I see.’ As he looked at her, she seemed to become disproportionately large, a creature whose expectations were beyond all reason. He thought, she is capable of the same quality of belief as the woman who knew she had only to touch the hem of His gown to be healed. He felt himself getting smaller and smaller, dissolving in his own inadequacy.
‘I see. Yes, I see,’ he repeated; and then, drily, ‘I have talked to my wife about Desmond and she is prepared for him to come and work in the garden. I have to warn you, however, that she is herself a gardener – and you know what they say about there being no room for two gardeners. He will have to work under her instructions.’
‘He won’t mind that provided he likes the garden. Mr Venables and Miss Pascoe have gardens that slope upwards steeply and he loves that. Major Heneker has one of those dead level gardens where every plant knows its place and Desmond won’t go near it. And he’s such a kind man and might help Desmond to find a job while he’s waiting to go to university. But Desmond doesn’t notice people, only their gardens.’
‘We’ll have to see if he approves of our garden. And then, perhaps, when we get to know him better, if we get to know him better . . .’
He walked slowly when he left the house. He felt as if this woman had been raised up to confront him, not with the little flaws which are built into personality and can no more be helped than a cleft palate or a hare lip, but with a failure in the very heart of being.
His next call was on the church treasurer, Mr Pettifer. He wondered in how many other professions people were expected to swing so wildly between the profound and the trivial. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of profession as his own inability to stabilize his emotions.
Old Mrs Pettifer opened the front door to him. ‘I come up to see if I can help,’ she said aggrievedly. ‘But she never wants me. Thinks I ought to stay in the granny flat and never put me nose out of it.’ She left him standing in the doorway to the sitting-room. Here chairs were huddled into a stockade in the middle round which Mrs Pettifer, lean and hawk-faced, rode her vacuum cleaner, all the while whooping at Mr Pettifer, beleaguered in a large wing armchair.
‘I’ll take you into the parlour.’ Mr Pettifer, a rotund, rosy-faced man with a perpetual rictal smile, was obviously delighted at the prospect of rescue.
‘Indeed you won’t!’ Mrs Pettifer cried. ‘I’ll be doing that any minute.’ She switched off the cleaner.
‘I’m sorry. This is obviously a bad time to call.’ Michael had heard rumours of Mrs Pettifer’s cleaning activities, but had imagined that she relaxed her regime on Saturday mornings when her husband was at home.
‘We’ll be straight in no time,’ she assured him and began to put the chairs back, fitting the legs carefully on to the appropriate dents in the carpet. Michael and Mr Pettifer shuffled awkwardly while she manoeuvred round them. She talked without stopping. ‘Elsie Mannering said she never dusted until after she had vacuumed because it created dust. Can you imagine that?’ She ran a duster along the top of a cabinet and walked to the window to examine it. ‘That’s it, then!’ She turned to face them, holding the duster out for their inspection, a look of such incredulity on her face that her eyes seemed to start from their sockets. ‘That’s it, then! We’ll have to see about that. I can’t dust everything twice.’<
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As her husband said nothing and she obviously expected a reply, Michael said, ‘I suppose perhaps when one moves furniture about it is bound . . .’ He flapped his hands vaguely, feeling he was behaving like a vicar in a Ben Travers farce.
‘But it is moved every day, every day of my life I move that furniture. There can’t possibly be any dust in it.’ She banged the back of the wing armchair and dust particles rose glittering in a shaft of sunlight which had penetrated the side of a net curtain. She turned to her husband. ‘It’s this old chair of yours . . .’
‘If the chair goes, I go.’ It was by no means clear that he was joking.
‘One day . . .’ Mr Pettifer said when he and Michael were at last alone. ‘One day . . .’ He gazed at the window as though at any moment the curtain might rise on an unfamiliar scene.
‘Housework does seem to become a bit of an obsession with some women,’ Michael said tentatively.
‘A bit of an obsession? She starts at four o’clock in the morning.’
‘Have you talked to her about it?’
‘Talked? We haven’t talked about anything for years.’
When Michael left, Pettifer said to him, ‘If you want to discuss something with me another time, why not drop into the bank? Any time. I’m there until nine o’clock most evenings. I get home at nine-thirty and she is preparing for bed then.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about.’ Pettifer had become blandly cheerful. ‘We manage, we manage very well on the whole. You just came at a bad time, Saturday morning.’
*
There must have been a time when Pettifer could have said something to her,’ Michael said to Valentine over lunch.
‘And how do you imagine he tackled it?’ She was annoyed that he had called on Shirley Treglowan. ‘He wouldn’t have told her directly, he would have talked about someone else’s wife while all the time he was getting at her.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘It’s the way men behave. They like to think they are straightforward and women are devious. But really they are hopelessly cowardly, never daring to come to the point.’
He rubbed his hand across his forehead, feeling the beginning of a headache. ‘So many problems without answers! And I’m the person who is supposed to have answers. Even the ones who have no faith think of me as a magician whose vocation it is to lay a healing finger on their pain. If I can’t do that, I’m a failed priest.’
‘Don’t forget you have Norah Kendall coming in a few minutes.’
‘I had forgotten.’
‘Make it as quick as you decently can. I want to get into the garden.’ She began to pile plates and dishes. ‘I hope there was someone in the house when you saw Mrs Treharris or Herbert, or whatever her name is.’
‘Yes, her daughter.’
‘There she is now.’ Valentine put down the tray and went into the hall. A minute later Michael heard her talking to Norah Kendall in the study. He carried the tray out into the kitchen.
‘I could do without this,’ he said when Valentine joined him. She turned away and ran water into the sink. As he looked at her averted face, the delicate curve of the brow, the secret, dusky hollow beneath the ivory cheekbone, he longed to cry out, ‘Just once! Surely, just this once!’ His arms ached to take this whole house in one agonized embrace, bringing wood and stone crumbling down around them.
Valentine said, ‘She is waiting.’
He went into the hall and stood for a moment, hands clenched, face seamed and furrowed, while he relearnt the lesson which would never be completely accepted, that spontaneous affection cannot be provided on demand. Later in the day, when she had been through whatever mysterious – and who was not to say tormented – process which was necessary to open the bowels of her compassion, Valentine would probably give what she could of tender consolation. But never would she hold out her arms to him at the moment of his greatest need. Granted, he experienced rather too many such moments. Yes, yes, he would plead guilty to incontinence. But was he never, never to receive an immediate, unrehearsed gesture of love? He looked around him and caught sight of his face in the hall mirror, the wounded eyes quite ludicrously enlarged in the pain-puckered face. Were pain not to be ironed out before it is publicly enacted, he thought, we should be laughing our way through all the great tragedies.
He walked slowly down the corridor. The study door was open so that as he came towards the room he could see his visitor. She had automatically taken the brisk little chair with the straight back and perfunctory wooden arms which Valentine had named the stool of penitence, although few who sat there seemed to him particularly penitent. Penitence was out of fashion. Now he saw in the sloping shoulders and bowed head not contrition but the feeling of liberation experienced by the person about to lay down a burden. They come to me, he thought, sick at heart or troubled in spirit, but they don’t need me and most of them don’t really believe that they need God. Nowadays, they think they can heal themselves, talking their troubles through to the blissful conclusion that they are not the ones to blame, it is the fault of their parents, teachers, husband, wife. Blaming has taken the place of penitence in our enlightened society. Norah Kendall seemed to him to epitomize the irrelevance of his profession. Of course, it was a sin to think like this. He sat opposite her, aware that of the two he was the greater sinner and in no way drawn to her by this knowledge.
She raised her head and looked at him, immediately noting the lines of pain around the narrowed eyes. ‘How you must curse people who come on a Saturday afternoon.’ She spoke with wry concern, but the statement was too near the truth of his present condition for him to accept it with good humour.
‘I am always available, I hope.’ He was not given to pompous utterances and disliked himself the more.
‘Of course.’ Something trembled in her face which could have been laughter. She looked out of the window while she composed herself and the afternoon sun caught a glint of red in the pale hair. She was at her best now. He had noticed before that in her moments of stillness this woman had that especial gravity which one sees in the faces of people who are listening intently to music, its harmonies reflected in their ordered features. Seen in this light, she looked a woman in whom one would place trust, eminently more suited to the job of counselling than was he. It occurred to him that this was probably in her mind. She had come to talk about the ordination of women.
So sure was he of this that it was a few minutes before he realized that she was, in fact, speaking of something quite different. He was alerted to this not so much by her words as the painful embarrassment which they caused her. Valentine sometimes accused him of hearing only what he wanted to hear, but this was not true. When he was very tired his brain seemed to function intermittently so that he missed key words in a sentence and English became like a foreign language, the gaps in the vocabulary making comprehension impossible. Now, suddenly aware of his mistake, he noted not only the embarrassment but the fluctuation in tone. Her voice was light and pleasant. But when she was agitated it took on a sharper edge and her face was distorted by the acidity of her tongue.
He said, ‘Can we go back a little. Who is Samantha?’
‘My stepdaughter. I explained . . .’
‘Yes, yes. And your relationship with her is a difficult one?’
‘Very.’
‘That is predictable, isn’t it? Was she close to her mother?’
‘Hand in glove.’ She flushed and bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry about that. But I wouldn’t need to talk about this if I was handling it well. And I don’t blame her for being difficult. I was more than difficult when I was young. But I would have expected her to see that we can’t live in the same house.’ Again, the rising inflection was unpleasing.
He said with studied reasonableness, ‘She is not asking to live with you, is she? Isn’t it that she wants to make sure she still has a home?’
‘But she doesn’t still have a home! I couldn’t
make a home for her.’
Her jangling nerves made his head throb and his reply came rather too crisply, ‘But as I understand it, you haven’t yet tried.’
‘I haven’t made a home for my husband yet. And I am trying very hard to do that. I’m not ready to cope with Samantha.’
‘One must not always wait to be ready – no task can be finished until it is begun.’
That was a definite rebuke, but a justified one, surely? He thought of Pettifer, staying at the office until nine in the evening because he could not face the misery of his home; of Shirley Treglowan, whose husband had left her for another man, and who had talked about her children with such concern without once mentioning her own pain. And here was a woman who had snatched at late happiness with little thought for the responsibilities of marriage and who was now reluctant to accept the intrusion of an unwanted daughter into her household.
‘We think too much of happiness,’ he said. ‘And this is not what life has to offer. Those who grasp this fact come out well. Once let life become a search for small satisfactions and you will be in all sorts of trouble. The people who seem to have been singled out for tragedy – a retarded child, an invalid husband, personal incapacity – are so often the ones who find the mystery at the heart of life.’
The words came readily to him, since he so often reminded himself of their truth when he felt tempted to despair. They seemed, however, to offer little comfort to her. ‘What am I to do, then?’ Her voice was low and desolate. The face had lost its earlier clarity; it was as though a sculptor had changed it with a brush of the hand, drawing down the eyelids, pulling at the corners of the mouth and weakening the chin.
‘I can’t tell you what you should do. But it seems to me that you have taken up a position which leaves you no room for manoeuvre and that is always a mistake, isn’t it?’ The eyes looked out from the smudged features without a spark of intelligence, let alone understanding. He went on, giving examples as if to a child, ‘You have said, “I will not have Samantha here” and you have forced your husband to insist that she comes. Wouldn’t it be wiser to arrive at a more flexible arrangement – perhaps invite her for a weekend to talk about her problems?’