The Pumpkin Eater

by Penelope Mortimer

  “We could go somewhere in the car, if you like.” I thought I might drive where I could see the lights of the house.

  “No, we’ll walk.”

  We walked to the river, along the river, over bridges, past bright furniture shops and drapers, shut houses, pubs, churches, miles of railing, corridors of brick, streets, cross-roads. Giles talked, and I kept my legs moving one after the other, left, right, left, right, keeping in step. We went to bed and slept. Again, when I woke, it was nearly night-time. No, Giles said, no one had telephoned, no one had come. We went out to the same restaurant, but I paid for the meal. Afterwards, Giles suggested going to the pictures but I pretended that films, anything to do with films, distressed me. Instead, I bought a bottle of brandy and we went back to the flat.

  “I’ve got no clothes, no make-up, no anything. What shall I do?”

  “I’ll go and get you some in the morning.”

  “You can’t, in the morning. You have to go to work.”

  “I shan’t go tomorrow.”

  He didn’t actually follow me about, but he watched me, he was always there. He watched me thinking. He heard my feelings. I said I could sleep in the armchair that night, but he made me go to bed and took a spare blanket from the cupboard for himself in the armchair. I felt so guilty about him, and so lonely, that after a while I got up and fetched him. He came with the same uncomplaining grace that he did everything, but in bed he suddenly burst into tears and clutched at me as though he were dreaming. I twisted my head, clenched my hands, calling for Jake again and again, amazed that my body was putting up no resistance. My skin grew no spurs, barbs, thorns, briers to protect it, I had no shell to shrink into — why, when the rest of me was speared like a battlefield? At last he cried my name out loud, and I knew that at that moment he thought he was alone. Then, slowly, the realization that I was there came back to him. There was nothing to say. We were both ashamed, both silent. He moved away from me. I said, “I must go in the morning.”

  “Yes. I know. Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps to the tower. Perhaps … I don’t know.”

  He was silent for a long time. Then he got out of bed, he was standing up somewhere in the dark room. I asked whether I should put the light on.

  “No. No. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Well? What is it?”

  He hesitated. “I’ve only had two feelings in my life,” he said at last. “Love for you …”

  “Yes?”

  “And hatred. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Hatred.”

  “Of course there’s such a thing. Why don’t you turn the light on? I can’t see you.”

  “I hated Jake.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve only had two feelings in my life.”

  “Yes, I do understand.”

  “I’m empty. You, the children … were taken by Jake. After that I was empty.”

  “We weren’t taken by — ”

  “Yes, you were!” he shouted. The sound was abrupt and violent.

  “Let me turn the light on. Please.”

  “No. Leave it off. Wait till I’ve finished … That pitiful performance you just witnessed — God knows you couldn’t take part in it — was me. Me. Myself. As I now am. Do you understand?”

  “Look, you’re good, Giles. You’re kind. There isn’t anybody like you. Just because — ”

  “Good? Kind?”

  “It’s not fair to you if I stay here. That’s all.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “All right. I don’t want to stay.”

  “We’ve had this conversation before.”

  “Yes. What were you going to tell me?”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t care what he had to tell me. In the darkness I covered my face with my hands, pressing my hands against my jaw and forehead, longing to break the bone. Nothing I could do to myself would hurt enough. Everything was an indulgence, courage and cowardice, punishment and crime, honesty and deceit; everything was corrupt; nothing, no regret, remorse, no penitence was untainted by pleasure. I might as well stay with Giles, revelling in disgust; I might as well give in. Avoid evil? There’s nothing else. Nothing else in my own head. Nothing else in me.

  “I lied to you about Jake,” Giles said.

  “What?” I looked up, over my hands, into the darkness. “What did you say?”

  “I lied to you. About Jake. He rang up … oh, half a dozen times.”

  I groped for the light, turned it on. He was naked and turned with his back to me, desperately looking about for some covering.

  “What do you mean? When did he ring up? When?”

  He was stumbling into his clothes. “When you were asleep. Yesterday. Today … Each time I told him you didn’t want to talk to him … I left the phone, as though to ask you, and went back and said you wouldn’t talk to him … I was comforting him, can you believe that? Laughing my bloody head off, comforting him … Even he thinks I’m good, kind, self-sacrificing, poor bloody Giles only wants to help … Well, you came back to me, didn’t you? You came back to me, didn’t you? You came back to me?”

  “No!”

  He sat down, collapsing. I dragged on my clothes, tearing them, laddering them. In the large, mahogany-framed, mildewed mirror I saw his face sagging open, as though it had been plundered. I got my coat on, tied the belt, combed my fingers through my hair.

  “Goodbye, Giles.”

  “You’re going home? You won’t find Jake there.”

  I crossed the room. As I got to the door he repeated, “Jake’s not there.”

  “You think I believe you?”

  He leapt up and grabbed my arm. For a moment he held it tightly, then his hand dropped.

  “He’s gone … to his father. He went yesterday. He’s been ringing you from there.”

  “He wanted me to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told him I wouldn’t go?”

  “Yes.” He raised his head. The faintest shadow of pleasure, almost a smile, moved across his face. “Anyway … it’s too late now. His father died, this morning.”

  24

  “Let me wither and weare out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth, with the beggary of mine age. Let me wither in a spittle under sharp and foul and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his spiritual blessings, his Grace, his Patience, if I can call my suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is temporal is but a caterpiller got into one corner of my garden, but a mill-dew fallen upon one acre of my corn. The body of all, the substance of all is safe, as long as the soul is safe. But when I shall trust to that, which we call a good spirit, and God shall deject and impoverish and evacuate that spirit; when I shall rely upon a moral constancy, and God shall shake and enfeeble and enervate, destroy and demolish that constancy; when I shall think to refresh myself in the serenity and sweet air of a good conscience, and God shall call up the damps and vapours of hell itself, and spread out a cloud of diffidence, and an impenetrable crust of desperation upon my conscience; when health shall fly from me, and I shall lay hold upon riches to succour me and comfort me in my sickness, and riches shall fly from me, and I shall snatch after favour and good opinion to comfort me in my poverty; when even this good opinion shall leave me, and calumnies and misinformations shall prevail against me; when I shall need peace, because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me, and then shall find that all the wounds I have come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine; and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou has given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that the fever is not in the humors, but in the spirits, that mine enemy is n
ot an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real and an irresistible and an inexorable and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of Hosts himself, the Almighty God himself, the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrevocably, irremediably…”

  The rich, actor’s voice sank into silence. The old man in his funeral clothes, his silver hair like a prophet, walked slowly down the chancel steps and stepped sideways into the front pew. After a moment’s pause the Air on the G String, relayed on tape from the organ loft, sang through an uneasy silence. It gathered the noble and despairing words and suspended them in a perfect cone, a capsule of eternity, over the lonely coffin. Sitting next to Jake I was afflicted, physically afflicted in shoulder, hip and thigh, by his sense of betrayal. He was a child mocked by a father who had played games like a child and now, in death, turned gravely to adult matters, leaving him alone. His father had been the progenitor of Jake’s whole world, its prime example: sceptical, tepid, suspicious of emotion, contemptuous of the laws he scrupulously kept, a member of success and an enemy of failure; if he had acknowledged conscience, he had shrugged it away; the only thing that had ever tortured him was boredom. Why had he ended his life with this agonized cry for help? The only time that Jake had spoken to me since I came, he had burst out, “Why did he want this read? He didn’t believe all that!”

  I said awkwardly, “Well … it’s beautiful.”

  “Beautiful? He was a bloody liar.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “He didn’t trust me.”

  “He loved you,” I said uselessly.

  “I thought he was like me. I honestly thought he was … myself. Now it turns out he was quite different.”

  “No.”

  “I never tried to understand him. I never thought there was anything to … understand. Just a likeable old bastard, mean with his money … liked whisky, liked his cigars, he liked food. And his writing — it wasn’t good … professional, though. Successful. I thought he just wanted to live. What more did he want? What more?”

  “I don’t know, Jake. I don’t know.”

  “There isn’t any more.”

  But every inconsistent wish had been observed, nevertheless. The vicar, crouching back in the choir stalls, looked deeply unhappy. He was troubled by a sensation of blasphemy. The friends, five old men, only one of them with a wife, sat peacefully enjoying the music, the spring sun, the smell of lilies. When the music ended four of the old men — the actor did not go — rose and stood apprehensively at the corners of the coffin. Four burly undertakers, jostling the old men, lifted the coffin and lowered it on to the old men’s fragile shoulders. A wreath slipped off the tipped end of the coffin and the vicar put his hand over his eyes in quick prayer. There was a hurried consultation among the undertakers, and swift as children picking daisies they stripped the coffin of flowers while the old men stood trembling, throwing hopeless looks up the aisle to the open door. Jake was gripping the front of the pew, leaning forward on his arms as though he were going to be sick. I could hear his father saying, “Absolutely no good asking Jake to carry the box. He’d be sure to drop it,” — and then smiling at him, taking his hand, giving him love but never responsibility. There was nothing I could do. I was a stranger.

  Finally, after some scuffling, two of the undertakers crouched under the sides of the coffin, bending low to level up with the old men, who edged uncertainly forward to the brink of the steps and then, at last, proceeded. The vicar pursued them, his face tense, his eyes half shut, waiting for the inevitable crash. But the old men stepped out bravely, although their feet hardly seemed to touch the floor and they were more suspended from the coffin than supporting it. The two undertakers breathed heavily, trying to maintain their expressions of pious gloom while bearing the yoke of an ebony coffin and five schoolfriends, one dead. Jake and I followed. The actor, the solitary wife and the housekeeper fell in behind us. We went out into the warm air. Two children playing catch among the tombstones stopped, stared at us and backed away, running when they were beyond the gate.

  Jake would not go to the grave. The vicar signalled to him, but he turned his back on the deep hole, with its emerald lining that could have more usefully been used for a display of lawn mowers and garden rakes than for disguising the solid walls of a grave: the walls of earth, clay, stone, worm and root, hospitable and alive, were made indecent by that horror of fancy raffia. The old men stood perilously near the edge, peering down with the fascination of people looking into the crater of a volcano. How long before they too would jump? Their rusty black clothes were shadows, their faces peaked with fear and curiosity. I stayed with Jake, although he did not know I was there. He was alone. He no longer needed me.

  The vicar, able at last to speak, bared a voice that sent the rooks cawing from the elms and made a cow, browsing the churchyard hedge, raise its head in gentle enquiry. “Earth to earth!” he bellowed, as though he were giving judgement. “Ashes to ashes! Dust to dust!…” But except he put in that exceeding weight of an eternal glory with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up … I felt diminished, lost, as unrelated to reality or purpose as a piece of cotton caught on a branch, a fragment of china in the grass. Who was I, to come to terms with evil? What arrogance. But it’s arrogance that keeps one alive: the belief that one can choose, that one’s choice is important, that one is responsible only to oneself. Without arrogance what would we be? I longed now to know what Jake’s father had really thought, had really felt and suffered behind that bland barricade. But it was too late. He had made quite certain that the one great statement of his life would be made after his death, involving him in nothing.

  I touched Jake’s hand, but he didn’t turn, or look up. I wanted to ask him to forgive me, as I, at that moment only, forgave him. But it was impossible. I walked slowly away across the churchyard. When I turned at the gate, and looked back, I saw the five old men with their heads bowed, standing together, and the younger man standing alone, isolated, as he had chosen.

  25

  I went to the tower. There, in a cell of brick and glass, I sat and watched the wall of sky that rose ten feet away from my lookout window. Nothing else existed. Nobody else lived. A thick mist packed the surrounding valleys and rain, very fine rain, fell incessantly, to obscure the world further. The birds clattered, invisible; or sometimes drifted like burnt paper across the window, were carried up and away again, lying on their wings as though half asleep.

  I seemed to be alone in the world. My past, at last, was over. I had given it up; set it free; sent it back where it belonged, to fit into other people’s lives. For one’s past grows to a point where it is longer than one’s future, and then it can become too great a burden. I had found, or had created, a neutrality between the past that I had lost and the future that I feared: an interminable hour which passed under my feet like the shadow of moving stairs, each stair recurring again and again, flattening to meet the next, a perfect circle of isolation captive between yesterday and tomorrow, between two illusions. Yesterday had never been. Tomorrow would never come. Darkness and light succeeded each other. The thick log in the grate became a heap of ash. Did this mean time continuing? I didn’t believe it. The high tower, rising like a lighthouse in a sea of mist, was inaccessible to reality. Even the birds flung themselves about as though there were no trees, no earth to settle on.

  I had been married for twenty-four years, more than half my life. The children who were born during my first wedding night now walked heavily about, frowning, groping in worn handbags for small change; their clothes were beginning to grow old and many of them must have stopped falling in love. I found it hard to understand this, as I found it hard to grasp the idea of distance, or as I always found it hard to believe in the actual
ity of other people’s lives. For further proof, there were my own children, who until recently I had loved and cared for. Some were still growing up. Some merely grew thinner or fatter, but the size of their feet, the length of their arms, the circumference of their wrists and ankles would never change, except from disease. In them, in their memories and dreams. I existed firmly enough, however unrecognizable to myself. I stood over stoves, stirring food in a saucepan; I bent and picked things up from the floor; I stepped from side to side in the ritual of bed-making; I ran to the garden calling “Rain!” and stretched up for the clothes-pegs, cramming them into one fist and hurrying in, bedouined with washing. I shook thermometers, spooned out medicine; my face hung pinkly over the bath, suspended in steam, while I scrubbed at the free, tough flesh over a knee-cap, removing stains. I glowered, frightening, and then again sagged, sank, collapsed with the unendurable labours of a Monday. All this, and more, I saw myself perform in my children’s memories, but although I knew that at one time it was so, I could not recognize myself. My children could remember stories of my own childhood, although they found them boring; but I was severed even from those old, clear images which determine, as I had previously thought, everything. The images of my childhood had disappeared.

  But on the hill, in the tower, there were no children to identify me or to regulate the chaos of time. It was very light, the glare of the mist more accurate than sunshine. I had taken the telephone receiver off its rest: it lay like an unformed foetus on the table, its cord twisted in thick knots. No postman, milkman, baker or grocer walked on the gravel. The sound of their footsteps, of their low gears grinding up the track, would in any case have been muffled, and I would not have known they were there until they rang the bell. But I was safe. I had ordered no milk or bread, no cornflakes, flour, butter, cocoa, cat food, assorted jellies, biscuits, bacon, honey, cake, salad cream, sugar, tea, currants, chutney, tomato ketchup, gelatine, cream of tartar, soap, detergents, salt, shoe polish, cheese, sausages, rice, baking powder, margarine, orange squash, blackcurrant syrup, tins of soup or beans or salmon, disinfectant or instant coffee. The women who came to clean, in their fitted coats and Wellington boots, with wedding rings embedded in fingers glazed and pudgy as crystallized fruit, sat home by their fires and cared for their families. Only the wild cats knew I was there. They lay upstairs, spread out on separate beds with their stomachs heaving and their feet crossed, sleeping as though they were tired.