Letters From Constance

by MARY HOCKING

  Let me know when you have talked things over with brother Angus. I am so glad that he is going to act for you.

  Our love and blessings,

  Constance

  Sussex

  January, 1963

  My dear Sheila,

  How cruel that it should be on Boxing Day, when we looked forward to having the three of you and your parents here, that Sussex should be obliterated along with the rest of the country. ‘It never happens here,’ our neighbours assure us as we fight to keep our nostrils above the snow line. ‘It never comes this far south in Sussex.’

  My mother and Aunt Ada managed to get away on the 29th. Indeed, by now you have probably received graphic accounts of their stay, though delicacy may prevent their telling how Aunt Ada gallantly insisted on carrying the laden lavatory bucket out to the garden only to have the handle break when she was halfway down the stairs. Fergus and I were alerted to the state of affairs by Dominic howling, ‘We shall all have typhoid!’

  We have had another heavy fall this morning. I do not like this whiteness. Fergus took Dominic, Kathleen and Cuillane to school after he had dug the car out of the garage. I watched them dissolve in whiteness and wondered if I would ever see them again. Stephen and the twins went off on a tractor. Their school is quite near so I feel they are retrievable. The sky is sickly grey above the dazzling white. Already a few flakes are falling.

  Peg and the dogs frolic. The cats hate it; they stand in the doorway, fastidious paws raised, and complain as if I were responsible. What the rabbits make of it I don’t know because I haven’t yet burrowed my way to them. Before I do any work, before I even decide which of all the many challenges to meet first - shall it be digging a path to the coal shed, putting the oil stove in the lavatory in the hope of unfreezing the cistern, emptying the linen cupboard because any thaw in whatever part of the house always results in a burst pipe and piles of wet sheets - before I do any of these things, I am determined to get a letter off to you. This is such a wearying time, even the simplest task taking twice as long, to say nothing of the frozen brain working so slowly, and it must be trebly hard for you, exhausted by worry and sorrow. There, I have done it again! Why is it that I cannot stop telling you how you are feeling? The fact is I am having a struggle to adjust to this new life of yours. I still see you in the days when you and Miles were together. As a child, it always took me a long time to acclimatise to a change of air. Bear with me.

  As soon as the weather relents and you feel you can leave the house without fear of its turning into a block of ice, you must all come down for a weekend. Do you promise?

  Our love to you all and come soon,

  Constance

  P.S. The people in the Manderley house went out on Christmas Day and were unable to get back. The ground slopes so steeply the snow was up to the window-sills. Fergus and some of the other men went to offer assistance when they returned, but they refused all help. She was quite distraught. I now have a theory that she is mentally retarded and he can’t bear that anyone should know.

  Sussex

  April, 1963

  My dear Sheila,

  It was a surprise to hear your news when you stayed with us last month. There was I picturing you engaged in a dour battle with the house when in fact you were slogging purposefully through the snow to these interviews at the Education Office. How brave you are! When Dominic and Kathleen start talking about their school work I dare not open my mouth, such is the extent of my ignorance; but you listened to our young with that enjoyment which can only come of the confident knowledge that one has a trick or two up one’s sleeve. I’m sure you will make a very good teacher.

  We enjoyed having you all here. Linnie looked pale and listless, I thought. Be patient with her, my love. I know her indecisiveness can be irritating, but she hasn’t your resilience. Toby worries me. It was kind of him to play games with Stephen and to amuse the twins, but I would have been happier had he kept company with the older ones. We didn’t have much time to talk about the suggestion that he should see the educational psychologist, but I got the impression you were not very happy about it. I’m glad he is seeing more of your father; I would put my money on him rather than any psychologist.

  We have our struggles here. Fergus is much dismayed by this talk at the Vatican Council of the use of vernacular liturgies. It comes hard to the Irish, struggling to revive one dead language and now finding themselves deprived of another. Why is it that one can’t preserve the glories of the past while setting one’s face to the future? It seems to be one of the laws of life that thou shalt not have it both ways. I hope and trust that one of the wonders of the world to come will be having it all ways.

  I tell Fergus that if language is all he has to bother about he can count himself lucky; it is as nothing to the storm we Anglicans must brace ourselves for as a result of this Honest to God book. Have you read it? I gather he actually refers to Christians who think of God as an old man with a long white beard. It does make one wonder what kind of world our bishops inhabit that this is their picture of the people in the pews.

  I have found consolation in Baron von Hügel’s letters to a niece. Have you come across them? I was spring-cleaning Fergus’s study, as we are pleased to call that little cell between the dining-room and the scullery, when I swept one too many a book from the shelf. It fell at my feet. I shall always regard it as a small miracle that it did not fall open at a page where he is pontificating about the Odes of Pindar, or protesting that he doesn’t want to convert his niece to the Roman Church when to the reader it stands out all too clearly that this is what he is bursting to do. Rather, I found myself reading ‘Never try to get things too clear. In this mixed up life there is always an element of unclearness.’ What words to stare out at me at a time when I find myself pestered by people who want to tidy up my mind. He says of people who seek to know God exhaustively, ‘they are like sponges trying to mop up the ocean’. I began to read and was still curled up on the floor with the book on my lap when Peg came back from playgroup.

  I have read and reread, skipping the bits about literature and the Roman Church. The spiritual advice is pure gold. Why did no one ever tell me these things before? Drop, ignore antipathies, do not strive to like people or to be like someone else. I have spent years striving to like and be like. Some people are born good- natured and positively enjoy being kind and charitable, but my natural bent is towards ill nature. For years I have struggled with this problem. Somewhere, so deep inside me I know not whence it comes, there is a voice forever telling me, ‘You must struggle against this, Constance.’ Now comes the suggestion that perhaps more might be achieved by making less of it. He is the first person who has ever introduced me to a way of thinking about my religion that was not totally effortful - the kind of enterprise one goes about with elbows out, as if spring-cleaning. Be silent about great things, let them grow inside you. Never discuss them. . . . One of the verses in the Bible which I have always loved, though I never thought to associate it with my own living, is ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ I feel as I read that he understands how I tend to get my teeth into a subject and worry at it like a terrier, and that if I am very attentive he may be able to help me as well as his niece.

  I must work in the garden now. How blessed it is to have the green world restored to us. I am determined our garden shall send up loud hosannas - which it will do without my aid; the daffodils were proclaiming the glory of the Lord while Fergus and I were squabbling over whether it was necessary for him to paint the garden tools yet again.

  Let me know if you decide to let Toby see the educational psychologist.

  My love to you all,

  Constance

  Sussex

  July, 1963

  My dear Sheila,

  Yes, I can understand how this new work eats up your energy. I will be patient and content myself with a postcard here and there and such other crumbs as may fall from the staffroom table.

&nb
sp; There is one thing, however, on which I would be grateful for your comments when you have time to write. Have you come across any evidence of drug-taking since you have been teaching? I ask because a friend of Dominic’s was at a party where there was trouble with the neighbours which led to the police being called. As a result several people were arrested for smoking what Dominic referred to as ‘pot’ and I have always thought of as ‘reefers’. Admittedly, this happened in Notting Hill, where the friend’s elder brother has digs. But Dominic does see rather a lot of this family and was obviously impressed by the pot-smoking elder brother.

  ‘It’s nothing to get so excited about,’ he said to us. ‘People have been using marijuana down the ages.’

  ‘People may have done,’ Fergus said, ‘but the Byrnes haven’t.’

  ‘It’s probably less harmful than alcohol,’ Dominic persisted.

  ‘Have you smoked a reefer?’ I asked.

  ‘Reefer! Oh, Mother!’ He went out of the room, banging the door behind him.

  ‘Do you think he has?’ I asked Kathleen.

  ‘Day and night,’ she said.

  This was as far as we could get. The children thought it a great joke and for several days we had to bear with Stephen’s impersonation of a Somerset Maugham character.

  I spoke to the mother of the pot-smoking young man. She is one of those advanced women who believe that children should be free to experiment. ‘People in this country are so ignorant about drugs that they are incapable of making sensible judgements. Pot isn’t habit-forming and it has no bad aftereffects.’

  I am not persuaded. Any advice will be welcome.

  Our love to you all,

  Constance

  Sussex

  November, 1963

  My dear Sheila,

  I was in the kitchen, rolling pastry, and Kathleen and Cuillane were peeling vegetables. One of them switched on the radio and we heard a voice say, ‘It is not thought that the President was hurt.’ We all froze as if we were playing statues and the music had stopped. Kathleen had a curl of potato peel on the knife. A voice said that an appeal had gone out for blood. Then the news came to an end and a different voice announced that President Kennedy was dead. Kathleen burst into tears; she is the one of all my children who has perfect emotional pitch. Dominic, who appeared a few minutes later, was consumed with personal outrage because to him Kennedy represented the hope that the affairs of the world may one day be ordered by young men. Cuillane’s reaction came later. ‘He had only just begun.’ She looked at me, explaining, ‘Lincoln had finished, but he had only just begun.’ I did not know what to say, my mind full of images of blood and poor Mrs Kennedy. She went on, speaking in the studious tone in which she discusses her homework with Fergus, ‘I hadn’t realised, I hadn’t understood it could happen like that,’ as if she had found a flaw in a mathematical formula which invalidated any conception of the constant order of phenomena. I so seldom see Cuillane clearly; pale and unemphatic, I suspect she prefers to be overlooked. There is never any suggestion that she feels neglected or would have things other than they are. I noticed on this occasion, however, that although she is so colourless, she is not insubstantial. No lack of purpose went to the making of that long face, the bones are those of the Celtic saints. It crossed my mind that she might become a nun.

  I should have spoken to Fergus about her later. He has a closer relationship with her than I have. But we listened to the radio and time slipped by. After the last news bulletin we got the late-night reading, a man’s voice, lilting:

  ‘And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

  About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

  In the sun that is young once only,

  Time let me play and be

  Golden in the mercy of his means,

  And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

  And the sabbath rang slowly

  In the pebbles of the holy streams.’

  It was unbearable, to hear that morning song at such a time.

  Your story haunts me, the empty tube station and the voice calling to you from the cubby-hole, ‘President Kennedy has been shot.’ How isolated that ticket collector must have felt, holed up alone with such dark thoughts. Your gesture of bringing the thermos flask of tea must have done much to warm his heart.

  Thank you for your comments on the drug question. I expect you’re right. Drug-taking isn’t a mainline activity in our culture and, even in his vices, Dominic is conventional.

  I look forward to having you all at Christmas.

  Our love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  February, 1964

  My dear Sheila,

  I know we decided, as you are so busy with school work, to write less often. But I must forestall the report which Harpo will undoubtedly send to you, she being with us at the time.

  Miles came with that creature of his. I opened the door and there he stood, this wisp of a thing at his side. He didn’t introduce her and she said, ‘I’m Joey’; a reminder that an addition had to be made to the cast list rather than a friendly gesture. She was ageless, with close-cropped curly hair and a greyish face with teeth to match; she could as easily have been his son as his mistress. They had come in an ancient Armstrong Siddeley which was blocking the driveway next door and when I pointed this out, it was she who moved it. She did not look full-grown enough to get her feet to the pedals; but she had the kind of determination that can master any obstacle that gets in the way of achievement. She treated the gears and clutch with that mixture of respect and contempt I associate with lion-tamers.

  Fergus had appeared by now and was all for sending them packing; but as I had insisted on their reparking the car we could hardly refuse to admit them.

  They sat close together on the sofa like children. Sheila, this is how he seemed to me, a wilful child who had, all unknowingly, started a process which is irreversible. He did not look happy. I recall that when he was amused he glittered, but did he ever look happy? Now there is no question of it. He has definitely settled into a state of unhappiness; but this, rather than turning him against Joey, seems to have made him pathetically dependent on her. She did not speak, just sat quietly with her knees drawn close, like a Victorian miss, watching him slantwise. She has stubby hands, the nails chipped, the cuticles ingrained with dirt; the sort of hands which are used to being in control of matter. While he was talking she kneaded the palms. Her eyes never left his face. I think she willed him into this affair.

  He said, as if it caused him pain and surprise, that he had heard nothing from you. Harpo suggests he was surprised not to have been rescued by now. ‘And my children,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what is happening to my dear children.’

  Harpo said, ‘You don’t think the children might have expected to hear from you?’ as if she herself were unsure whether this were a reasonable expectation. Since taking up psychology direct questions are definitely out as far as Harpo is concerned. Miles did not respond to the indirect approach, I wanted to shout, ‘Why haven’t you tried to see your children?’ As this may not be a development you would welcome, I held my peace. For what seemed a very long time we all held our peace. Then Miles burst into tears. Fergus said, ‘Dear God, spare us this!’ I went into the kitchen to make tea, which is my answer to situations that are too embarrassing to be borne. Harpo tells me that Joey held him to her as if about to breast-feed him.

  As they were leaving, I said to him, and I hope you will forgive me, ‘When are you going to stop this silliness and go back home?’ I ignored her, but there was no need, she stood passively by without betraying the slightest uneasiness. He looked at me as if he were drowning and I his last hope. ‘How can I?’ Then, briskly, and with a different emphasis, ‘How can I?’ He took her hand and they stood there, holding hands, defying us. You are right, there is more than a streak of self-destructiveness in Miles; he does feel
he has to kick down his building blocks.

  Fergus went into the garden after they had gone and wreaked havoc among the vegetables. The children came out of the various parts of the house in which they had taken refuge and I left Harpo to deal with their enquiries while I washed the tea things. Later, when we were preparing supper, I said to Harpo, ‘Yet he can’t be completely under her control. He must have insisted on coming here. I don’t see her suggesting it.’

  Harpo said he wouldn’t have had to insist; she would never thwart him. ‘If he wanted them to dance naked in Piccadilly Circus, that little bitch would do it.’

  ‘What did he expect of this visit?’ I asked. ‘Did he hope that if he managed to get here, he would find himself reinstated like the Prodigal Son, the past miraculously cancelled out?’ Harpo said that he was genuinely troubled about you and the children and wanted to speak your names among friends. She talked a lot about guilt and the need for reassurance.

  Whatever the reason, it may result in his writing to you or trying to get in touch with the children. This happened so unexpectedly. Sheila; we were none of us prepared and may have botched it badly. We were careful not to give him much in the way of information; but Fergus did tell him that you were teaching and he made it clear that this meant more to you than a matter of earning a few pence. It came as a surprise to Miles; I could see he had not envisaged your making a new life for yourself. Perhaps he had thought of you walled up in perpetual grief, perhaps that is what he wanted to think. It was soon after this that they left us.

  My love, I hope this is not too upsetting for you and that it won’t lead to unpleasant developments. We did our best on the spur of the moment.

  With love and some anxiety,

  Constance

  Sussex

  February, 1964

  My dear Sheila,

  Thank you for your letter. I was sure you would want a full account, but I was afraid I might have said too much. I can see now that in my anxiety I may have painted a clearer picture of Joey than of Miles. You ask how he looked.