The Pumpkin Eater

by Penelope Mortimer

  From time to time I put another log on the fire. I was very aware of comfort. The heat in the tower made irregular, small noises: a sudden thud through the pipes, a creaking, the slow hiss as a log blistered. I sat down again by the window. A man serving a life sentence will never again have children. Capable, strong, alert to love, he stares from his tower and cannot prevent his body growing older. His body is an uninhabited house and the outside walls are the last to crumble. I was alone with myself, and we watched each other with steady, cold, inward eyes: the past and its consequence, the reality and its insubordinate dream.

  I stayed in the tower for three days, until they came for me. Of course if I hadn’t known they would come for me, I might have gone somewhere else, I suppose that’s pretty obvious. I didn’t think of that. My only feeling was … I wanted to get away. Most people, I know, have this fantasy. One day they’ll walk out of the door, through the garden gate, and … then? Then what? The fact is, you don’t only need money, luggage, a ticket and a plan: you need a state of mind to think of all these things, and that state of mind is the one that keeps you at home, it’s not the state of mind you’re in when you’re running away. Of course there are people who take out their savings, arrange for ropes and ladders, leave notes on the mantelpiece, provide themselves with some elaborate disguise; but I imagine that they are convinced that there is some preferable future. I wasn’t convinced of this at all. I wanted to postpone the future; to stop things happening to me. I couldn’t have gone to a bank — anyway, they’d have been closed — or collected some clothes or looked at a map; if I could, there would have been no need to go. So I went to the tower, which I knew was empty. And having got there, I stayed there. I’d run out of petrol and so I couldn’t have left; that is, without a plan.

  You think men don’t behave like this? Perhaps it’s true. A man has to be drunk, or insane, or unbalanced by talent, before he’ll behave like a woman. But I have known men cry, try to pray; I’ve known men whose passion for triviality far exceeded mine; I’ve known men more weakly and willingly victimized by circumstances than I. Even love, which is believed to obsess us, can preoccupy some men to the point where they stop fighting successfully, working well, making sufficient money. You think well-adjusted, usefully occupied women don’t behave like this? Of course. They haven’t the time. Everyone, men, women, even children, has a great potential for fear, unhappiness, cowardice, lack of faith — but these things are unacceptable, and must be crowded out by occupation. If I had taken a job as … what? A receptionist, a cook, a shop assistant, a woman who does surveys for soap powders? If I had done that, instead of coming to the tower, would I have been happier? All right. Possibly I would. So, possibly, would Mrs. Evans, who, unlike me, was overworked. Do you remember her? I never wrote to her after all. I suppose she thought I didn’t care. I’m sorry.

  I wish I could say that during that time in the tower I reached some conclusion about something; that I left the tower of my own free will, having sensibly telephoned for them to bring some petrol; and went home to the children, having discovered that they were more important to me than … But I didn’t. I stayed still and I stayed alone, for the first time in my life; and I waited for Jake.

  Oh, I wasn’t waiting for him as you wait for a lover, for someone coming back, or someone who is going to save you from danger. I didn’t expect Jake to do anything for me. I waited for him as you wait on a hill, in a tower, in the mist, for an enemy. He had already incapacitated me, harried me, cut away most of my illusions and some of my ignorance; he had already so weakened me that I was falling back on myths, words, mysteries to replace what I had lost. I knew he wouldn’t leave it at that. So I waited for him. And at first I felt calm and empty, as though nothing mattered, as though the past and the future were both meaningless. Then I thought of Jake standing alone in the churchyard, with his back turned on his father’s grave, and I began to feel frightened. I bolted the doors and went up to the highest room in the tower. It is all glass, this room, but it was surrounded by cloud, and I couldn’t even see the ground. I opened one of the windows and looked down, but I could only see a bed of mist. To be dead would be a perfect solution for me, I thought. But I couldn’t bear the idea of pain, the possibility that I would be a broken mess on the gravel, bleating for help. I used to be physically very brave, but now if I pricked my finger I couldn’t look at it. I shut the window and went downstairs again. It began to get dark. I wondered whether he would come up the hill in the night, when I couldn’t see him, or in the day, when the mist would muffle the sound of his footsteps.

  These were the last hours in which I loved Jake as I had loved him since the night when I took all Philpot’s possessions and dumped them in the garden. How long ago was that … nine years? These were the last hours of being joined to him by fear, and anger, and sexual necessity. This was the last time that I demanded — of him? of what? — that he should change, even secretly, as his father had changed; the last time that I believed it to be possible. You don’t know Jake. You only know me. Therefore it probably seems absurd to you that I ever expected so much of a man who must seem to you very normal, limited, understandable, a man who as far as you can see did his best, after all. To Jake, living is necessarily defective, vicious, careless, an inevitable time of activity between two deaths; to him the world is a little spinning piece of grit on which sad and lonely human beings huddle together for warmth, sentimental but unfeeling, always optimistic, but embarrassed by any real hope. That is the basis on which he works, and loves, and will eventually die. It’s enough for him. Those were the last hours — that night, when I was waiting — during which I tried to believe that it was Jake who was deluded and I … It’s amazing how vanity clings on to the very end, you open your dead eyes to look in the mirror which they are holding to your mouth. I still believed I was right. I was still on about avoiding evil; avoiding the messes in the street, the dust, the cruelty in one’s own nature, the contamination of others. I still believed that with the slightest effort we could escape to some safe place where everything would be ordered and good and indestructible, where Simpkin and Conway could never threaten us: a place where we could trust the trees not to fall down and crush us, the birds not to peck us to death, the earth not to split open under our feet. This belief wasn’t strong any more, but it still clung to me, tried to comfort me through the night. I was convinced by now that it wasn’t true. Jake’s battle was as good as won, if only he’d known it.

  But he didn’t. I sat by the window in the morning, looking out. The mist had cleared a little, like an outgoing tide, and the peak of the hill, on which the tower stood, was free of it. The garden — what would one day be the garden — sloped down to the brow of the hill and against that the mist lay just as thickly as on the previous days. There was no hedge or fence dividing us from the field below. I looked straight into the mist, which dazzled me.

  They came up over the brow of the hill spread out, like beaters. In the first second I saw only one child; then they rose up from every part of the small horizon, advancing through the mist, breaking it down, coming slowly on up the stony hill with their heads lowered and their short, strong legs moving like pistons. I must hide, I thought — hide. Where? Through the back door, then? Hide in the scrub and then …? But they were fanning out; some were taking the back path; they were surrounding me. Where’s Jake? I thought it would be Jake who would come. I could hear them now, coming across the gravel. I ran to the bottom of the stairs, where there were no windows; I ran up the spiral stairs, two at a time, and into the high, top room. They were swarming round the tower, trying the doors.

  “There’s no point in waiting for the key, you fool. It’s bolted.”

  “Let’s try the window, then. There’s bound to be a window.”

  I had been waiting for Jake. I could have bargained with him. I could have made some effort to defend myself, however useless. But what could I do against my children? Tell them to go away, leave me alone? Oh clev
er Jake, wily Jake … “For God’s sake,” I said out loud, “they’re breaking in …”

  There was a splintering crash and a high, cold voice said, “Now you’ve done it.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I say — he’s broken the window.”

  A voice from inside the house said, “Hang on a tick, I’ll unbolt the door.” I began to laugh; I laughed with the back of my wrist against my mouth, trying to stifle and control the laughter that was attacking me from inside myself.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “She’s probably still in bed.”

  “I’m going to find the cats.”

  Some of them were already half way up the stairs. They stopped, and looked up at me; I was still laughing, but they didn’t ask me why. I looked at each one, and finally at Dinah. She smiled.

  “Well…” I said. “How did you get here?”

  “He stopped in the village. He told us to come first.”

  “But … all of you? Where’s Josephine?”

  They glanced at each other. Some clapped their hands over their mouths and made great eyes. The older ones turned to Dinah. “She left,” Dinah said.

  “Left? When?”

  “On Wednesday.”

  “But … why?”

  “She said she couldn’t go on.”

  “Then who’s been … looking after you?”

  “Dinah didn’t go to school.”

  “We managed all right.”

  I went down the stairs. They stood back to let me pass, then raced on up the stairs, from room to room, calling the cats.

  “He said we should come here,” Dinah said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  I went outside. The air was much warmer than I had expected.

  “He’s buying some bread and stuff,” Dinah said. “In case you haven’t got any.”

  I saw Jake climbing up through the mist. Clear of it, he stopped, looked up at the tower, then came on. I was no longer frightened of him. I no longer needed him. I accepted him at last, because he was inevitable.

  “I brought the children down,” he said. “I thought I might join you for a while.”

  I have tried to be honest with you, although I suppose that you would really have been more interested in my not being honest. Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They are all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1962 by the Estate of Penelope Mortimer

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Daphne Merkin

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Susan Bower Downhill in a Pram, 2007; Private collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  Data Mortimer, Penelope, 1918–1999.

  The pumpkin eater / by Penelope Mortimer; introduction by Daphne Merkin.

  p. cm. — (New York review books classics)

  I. Merkin, Daphne. II. Title.

  PR6063.O815P86 2010

  823'.914 — dc22

  2010034049

  eISBN 978-1-59017-400-5

  v1.0

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