by Jo Mazelis
Leaving the water to cool, and taking the back door key with her, she went out to the privy, which was thankfully only six steps away from the kitchen. Some people had them at the bottom of the garden and you’d see people hurrying down their garden paths in their nightclothes with old newspaper in one hand and perhaps a full chamber pot in the other.
She locked her back door from the outside, even though where she was going was only a few feet away, and it was a peaceful Sunday evening and at seven-thirty, still light.
Her imagination, the same imagination that shaped God to her own design, was relentless; it sent swarthy feet tiptoeing past the wooden door of the privy, it made heavy hands with dirty fingers stealthily open her back door, it put shadowy men behind the couch in the best room, in the cupboard under the stairs, in the wardrobe.
So she locked the back door, locked herself in the privy, sat there gripping the key in her hand, alert to any sound or movement in the small yard beyond.
Gerald had promised to come to see her that night. Her feelings towards him were curiously mixed; lately he had grown so tall and manly that she often thought of him as a sort of father figure, but there again she vividly remembered him as a young boy of fifteen with only a slight dark fuzz on his upper lip and a wiry long body that had yet to develop the muscles and chest hair and broad shoulders of the man he would become. Back then she had felt worldly and maternal, like a teacher who would guide him towards the exquisite experience of love between a man and a woman. He had been dutiful in his lessons, had practised his techniques on her body like a virtuoso musician doing scales on a grand piano. But now she sensed that she was losing him.
Oh, and she had always known that one day she would. That he would go off into the world and find some pretty young virgin to love and marry. What she hadn’t anticipated was the sense of loss she felt, the anger and resentment at the insult to her.
And when he was sixteen he had (silly boy) told her he loved her, swore he would always love her and asked her to marry him. He’d even bought a ring from Woolworth’s; she’d worn it on the third finger of her right hand, until it turned her skin green and the claws that held the glass diamond bent and broke, disgorging the fake gemstone and rendering the ring an ugly spiteful weapon that snagged stockings, satin and skin.
He’d been spending a lot of his time with the ironmonger’s daughter. What was her name? It was hard to distinguish these young women; they all seemed to dress the same, to tie their hair in girlish braids or ponytails, and to hare around in packs giggling wildly. Edna. That was it. Edna Thomas.
There was a rumour that Gerald and Edna were courting, but until she heard it from his own lips she wouldn’t believe it.
Naked, she eased herself into the tub. She washed hurriedly, soaping under her arms, between her toes and behind her ears, before using a flannel to wash between her legs. She was careful to rinse all the soap from the soft black hair that grew there in such remarkable abundance.
After her bath Mrs Dundridge dressed in a new frock, it was made from a glazed cotton fabric with white flowers on a dark blue ground. It suited her figure, emphasized her small waist and slim legs.
Gerald arrived before she had a chance to put on her shoes or stockings. His knock at the door; two sharp taps, then three longer ones, sent a quiver of butterflies through her stomach where they trembled and thrilled in a delicious ripple of anticipation.
She hurried to unlock the door, and then airily, coldly – like the mistress of the house instructing a servant of the lowest order – she waved him in.
He shut the door and had only stepped forward two paces when she threw her arms around his neck and showered him with hot lavender-scented kisses.
It had not always been like this; she used to be shy and reluctant, would move around him or sit close to him, accidentally grazing her body against his. The moth and the candle; his young heat, her willful proximity. He had been young and naive at the beginning, and she had been subtle. She had not seemed to notice how he watched her, nor that she’d accidentally left two buttons on a blouse undone. She seemed oblivious when she leaned across the table to pour his tea and he could see the inviting valley between her swelling breasts.
His mother had taught him to feel both pity and gratitude for this childless widow. Mrs Dundridge had helped their family by giving Mrs Davies well-paid work, and she had extended her generosity by employing the eldest son too.
‘She might take a shine to you,’ Gerald’s mother had said, ‘and remember she has no children of her own.’
Mrs Davies had an idea that the widow would become so fond of Gerald that she might name him in her will. She pictured Gerald inheriting Mrs Dundridge’s house. She pictured Mrs Dundridge in an oak casket dead of consumption at a tragically young age. Mrs Davies would of course make her the most beautiful shroud. She imagined an open casket, a white satin dress, delicately hand-stitched and embroidered with seed pearls.
Gerald stood awkwardly by the coat stand in the hall, Mrs Dundridge had caught him off balance and he rested one hand on the wall to steady himself as she ran her tongue over his neck and hissed in his ear, ‘Oh Gerald, my god, Gerald.’
She tugged at his shirttails, pulling them and his vest out of his trousers so that she could run her hands over the bare skin of his back.
‘Darling,’ he said, meaning to arrest this intense assault, but she found his mouth and pushed her tongue into it. Thus silenced he found his body responding even as his mind resisted.
Mrs Dundridge felt dizzy and, as sometimes happened lately, she could sense an odd squeaky pulse as blood pumped through a vein at the base of her skull. She wanted Gerald to lift her in his arms and carry her upstairs and force her onto the bed. She would have liked to say, ‘No, no, please. Don’t, it’s wrong,’ but the one time she had said that he had actually stopped what he was doing and apologised. She wanted him to want her with all the swirling energy with which she wanted him.
As it had been at the beginning.
Suddenly, in the middle of that achingly beautiful kiss, he turned his head and moved his body up and away like a diver exploding out of the water and into the air. ‘Listen,’ he said. His mouth was cloying and tacky, ‘Could I have a glass of water?’
‘Oh, are you alright?’ Mrs Dundridge asked. The skin around her mouth was pink and raw-looking he noticed. His doing as he hadn’t shaved since the morning before.
Together they went through the house to the back parlour, where he dispensed with the civilities of the proffered glass, and bent his head under the tap to drink noisily from the cold torrent.
He sat at the table and asked if there was anything to eat. She offered to fry him some bacon and eggs, or to open a tin of salmon, but he said that bread was all he wanted.
She stood by the table a few feet away from him, her body set squarely towards him and with the bread loaf under one arm she sawed away with the serrated knife to produce a thin slither of bread. This was typical of her refinement; the daintiness of everything – there would be no doorstops of bread and dripping under her roof.
He wanted to snatch the bread and the knife from her and stuff his whole hand into the loaf, pull out the soft centre just as if he was cleaning the entrails from a rabbit, to jam it into his mouth and eat without any concession to good manners.
But he didn’t, he just watched as she first buttered, then sawed off each slice. Sometimes they were so wafer thin that it seemed it was only the salty, bright yellow butter that held each slice together.
The redness had faded from around her mouth, but now her cheeks wore high spots of colour. He still resented the way she had rejected his wedding proposal when he was sixteen. Resented it, even as he had grown to realise how preposterous it was, how much of an escape he had had. He’d noticed lately how her hair had developed strands of silvery white, how her cheeks often seemed sunken and drawn, how her eyelids were weighted and creased and the eyes themselves did not shine with the same clarity as before
.
‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ he said at last.
She had laid each buttered slice of bread on a white dinner plate, stacking them up edge to edge.
‘I’ve got some cheese on the cold shelf. Or ham?’
‘I’ll be gone for a few days.’
She continued to slice the bread, sawing it inwards towards her pale chest and the softly swelling breasts, and the heart that lay hidden beneath.
He found himself picturing her heart, big as an ox’s and liver-coloured, throbbing with the same rhythm as a vein in his temple.
‘I don’t want anymore,’ he said, meaning the bread and butter.
She understood. There was no difficulty whatsoever. She put the kitchen knife down on the table and stood the flat heel of the loaf beside it. On the white plate the stack of sliced bread lay untouched.
He noticed how the bread in its neat stack on the plate mimicked the uncut half loaf; they were the same shape and approximately the same height. It reminded him of a trick he knew; you took an unpeeled banana, and with a needle and thread it was possible to slice the soft fruit inside, so that when you gave the banana to an unwitting person they would be amazed to see it fall apart in neat pieces.
Mrs Dundridge felt broken inside. She saw that she had been foolish; being older, wiser she should have known better. She had not known that love would slowly ambush her.
But there was no difficulty whatsoever. She showed no outward sign of anger or pain, but busied herself around the room.
This is why women have kitchens, they can mortify their hands with scalding water and carbolic soap, cut themselves with sharp knives, sweat themselves in the sauna of a summer Sunday dinner, make thunderous music with their pots and pans.
Saying nothing, Mrs Dundridge got a sheet of greaseproof paper from the drawer, laid the stack of bread and butter on top, then folded it into a neat package. Gerald watched her hands, but avoided her eyes. She pushed the wrapped bread towards him; he might have been her husband then, taking sandwiches to eat down the mine, or her child going off to school.
‘Go,’ she said.
And willingly he did as he was ordered.
RITUAL, 1969
The lesson began. The teacher, a woman of around forty, with stiffly styled hair that was a gaudy yellow-blonde, cut in a sort of long bob, wore one heavy copper pendant necklace and another longer one that seemed to have been made out of varnished slices of banana.
‘Now children, today we are going to read a poem called The Moon and the Yew Tree.’
Mimeographed copies of the poem were distributed among the thirty or so thirteen year olds.
‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ the teacher declaimed, about to begin her recitation of the poem, but then struck by an idea, she hesitated, and almost as an aside, added, ‘Now who can tell me something about yew trees?’
She was expectant, confidently anticipating a number of eager hands to shoot up. When the children’s response was only a little mild shuffling, interspersed by the odd turn of a head to see if any other member of the class had raised a hand, the teacher looked a little ruffled. Composing herself, she decided that perhaps her question had been too broad. She tried again.
‘Well then, who can tell me where yew trees are grown?’
As in geography class, one child might have taken a wild stab at China or Scotland or Egypt, but none did.
‘Come on, children, where are yew trees grown? Where do you always see yew trees?’
Silence. The children growing somewhat wide-eyed in their shared astonishment to discover this black hole in the sum of their knowledge.
‘Yew trees. Think!’ The last word drawn out, an order, a prayer. ‘Where do you find yew trees?’
More silence. No child even prepared to make a guess.
‘One of you must know. Don’t be shy. If you know put your hand up.’
This ploy also fails. Shyness and its sister, modesty, are not staying the children’s hands. The truth is no one knows. No one has a clue. No one remembers the biology lesson about yew trees, nor the geography lesson (though they do know where cocoa and rubber trees come from), nor religious studies with its talking trees and burning bushes. They know oak trees by their wavy leaves, holly by its prickly ones, Christmas trees which are pointy and pine-scented. Willows that weep to make secret cave-like hiding places. Chestnut trees by the shape of their large leaves, their sticky buds and glorious conkers. But yew trees? A blank. A blank in a forest of vaguely known and unknown trees. Elms. Monkey puzzle trees. Some lose their leaves in the autumn, some don’t. Evergreen trees. Trees with beautiful deep red leaves. Tall firs with fallen cones at the base which can be used to tell the weather – open in fair weather, closed for the rain.
The teacher paces at the front of the class. She is incredulous. The children’s eyes follow her. She wears a long sleeveless cardigan made from crocheted squares of brightly coloured wool; orange, green, turquoise and purple. A tan-coloured suede skirt with poppers up the front. A yellow polo-neck jumper. Purple wool tights. Brown boots. The children, except for their white shirts, are uniformly grey like baby birds.
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ she says, ‘that not one of you. Not one, knows where yew trees grow!’
Somehow the poem itself has been forgotten. The yew tree, the damnable yew tree stands in the way blocking even the moon. Nothing can get past it. Most notably the teacher.
‘In all my years I have never been so shocked. Does no one really have any idea? I cannot believe it. I really can’t! Yew trees!’
To be certain the issue isn’t deafness, she picks up a chalk and with strident, noisy, dust-making jabs she writes on the blackboard, YEW TREES.
Then once more, chin now jutting, she scans every upturned face to find what look like expressions of beguiling innocence. Or as is more likely the case, a generation of dull, blank stupidity, each child culpable, wantonly incurious, glazed over by cheap sweets and that babbling monster of nonsense, the TV.
She paces, seemingly muttering to herself, though still loud enough for every child’s edification. ‘This is common knowledge. This is something everyone knows. This is hardly obscure or arcane. This is everywhere. You open your eyes. There it is. I’m sure I knew this when I was five years old! Perhaps when I was younger. I can’t believe that none of you know this. Some of you must! What is it then? You’re not shy, none of you. You’re not stupid. Oh, no, I don’t believe that! So then is it me? Is it poetry? Have none of you ever been touched by words? Have your senses not thrilled at the recognition of something better than She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah or Hey Diddle Diddle? Or those awful advert jingles for Turkish Delight and Pepsodent and hands that do dishes and don’t forget the fruit gums.’
She stops pacing, closes her mouth, breathes in and out deeply through her nose. Her chest rises and falls. Her necklaces shift and chime against one another.
Time itself is held in check by the yew tree. The lesson does not progress, but turns around and around on this one subject – a solitary tree pitched into blackness by its obscurity.
‘Think of where the dead are buried,’ she says. ‘What do we call those places?’
At last several hands shoot into the air. The teacher picks one, nodding enthusiastically at the boy in the third row whose fair hair looks faintly greenish in the fluorescent light.
‘A graveyard, Miss.’
‘Very good,’ she says. Then directly addressing him, she adds, ‘And what sort of trees do we always see in graveyards?’
He frowns, puzzling over this. In his mind he is roaming the churchyard where his nan is buried. He sees gravestones, some flat and rectangular like platforms, others that are simple grey tablets with arched tops, some are tall obelisks, and lastly there are three stone angels, one of which seems to cry grey tears. There are flowers in metal containers, some brown and wilting, others new and bright. What else? Grass, a few weeds. And trees, indistinct at the edges of his vision. Then there! There in the cor
ner, near the red brick wall that flanks the pavement, he seems to see a lush, berry-covered holly bush, as broad as it is tall.
‘Holly trees?’ he says.
‘No!’ the teacher roars. ‘For goodness’ sake. Not holly trees. We are not talking about holly trees!’
Another child puts up her hand.
‘At last,’ the teacher thinks. ‘Finally.’
‘Yes, Janet?’ she says, eyes narrowing, a grin smearing itself over her apricot-lipsticked mouth and long nicotine teeth.
‘In the church we go to there is a holly tree, because at Christmas, the Sunday school get to cut some to take home.’
Little noises of assent run like the rumour of revolution around the class.
‘Some graveyards might have holly trees,’ the teacher says heavily emphasising the first word. ‘But…’ She stops speaking, walks around her desk, sits down and with elbows resting on its top, cradles her head in both hands, looking to the children as if she were about to cry.
They exchange quick glances with one another, frown, shrug their shoulders, shake their heads.
The room they are in is on the top floor of a huge school that was built only two years before in the brutalist style. The classrooms are on three floors, divided by dimly lit corridors that pass down the centre like the black veins in shrimps’ bodies, door after door after door leading off. In other buildings there are a swimming pool, a gymnasium, changing rooms, an assembly hall.
The children are always told how lucky they are to have this wonderful school with its many playgrounds and sports fields, its light and airy classrooms, its specially designed facilities for teaching cookery and metal and woodwork, the physics, chemistry, biology and language labs. Its dedicated, learned and enthusiastic staff. The teachers are a diverse bunch; some are young and energetic, others are of a middling age, a few are old and lame, warty and peculiar. Some of the male teachers fought in the war. Some inspire fear, a very few inspire love, some are openly challenged, but none are ever pitied. All are sanctioned to use physical violence; most of them are capable of lashing out suddenly with hands, or rulers or wooden board dusters.