An End to Autumn

by Iain Crichton Smith

  5

  WHEN VERA HEARD about Mrs Murphy she felt more disturbed than she could rationally account for. Her disturbance was compounded of a number of factors. One was that Mrs Murphy was a Catholic. She hadn’t thought that this would disturb her but it did. As had already been said her idea of the best kind of church was one of a chaste artistic almost mediaeval institution which no longer existed and probably never had. It was an aesthetic ideal rather than a religious one. But Mrs Murphy’s Catholic church—or rather what she assumed it was—didn’t fit her idea: it seemed to her to be vulgar, cheap and meretricious. She had somehow inherited, though not from her mother certainly, a concept of a church which had the rational moderation of the Protestant along with the mediaeval resonance of a more beautiful church. A church of nuns might have suited her, but she thought of the Catholic Church as not at all nun-like but aesthetic in a false way, in an unrigorous style. And this idea was reinforced by her mother’s theatrical flirting with churches of a similar cheap nature: for example her mother had a brief but intense flush of enthusiasm for a Greek church whose proceedings were carried out entirely in a Greek language which she did not understand. Her mother loved grandiose ceremony, white clothes, singing, colour and pageantry, even the smell of incense. Even her clothes—a succession of streaming bizarre cloaks—were a manifestation of a religious plumage. And Vera had associated her mother with an emotional falsity which she had transferred to the church itself. Thus she felt a distaste which she would probably have admitted was irrational though nonetheless powerful.

  At the same time she was disturbed that this woman—this Mrs Murphy—had been in the habit of cleaning stairs and belonged to a much lower class than herself. It was as if she represented a threat of some sort, the nature of which she did not fully understand, for she had not really known people like her in her own protected life. The closest she could get to her were the school cleaners whom she did not speak to, though she didn’t deliberately choose not to. And the fact that the woman was Irish didn’t help either. She had no knowledge of Ireland and she hadn’t met any Irish people but she thought of them as opposed to order, difficult and too sociable. She did however like the poetry of Yeats which had more Protestant qualities.

  She also felt a slight anger against her mother-in-law. Why had she complicated things in this way? Why couldn’t she have struck up an acquaintance with a woman of her own class, some middle-class person from her own church, whom she would have more in common with. She should think of things like that: the fact that she hadn’t showed a failure of tact and responsibility and, yes, even intelligence.

  “I’m sure,” she said to Tom, “that this woman, Mrs Murphy or whatever her name is, will want to visit her, or at least your mother will feel that she ought to ask her since after all she visited her.”

  “I don’t see why,” Tom replied, “and even if that were the case why shouldn’t she come here? She wouldn’t be in the house all the time.”

  They were lying in bed together, the window open, and a little light from the moon half dissipating the darkness.

  “I just know that that will happen,” Vera insisted. “It is in the nature of things.”

  Tom himself felt slightly confused, for he sensed Vera’s disapproval, and he was bothered that the question had arisen, but now that it had he was determined to be fair.

  “We can’t after all say that she can’t bring her here. We can’t decide who her friends are to be.”

  He was worried about an incident that had happened in his class that day and which he had told Vera about. A girl had fainted, had keeled over in her seat, and he hadn’t known what to do. It all happened very suddenly. She was a big girl and she lay there on the floor and a pool of water, which he later realised was urine, had formed about her.

  He had stood there in a fixity of distaste mixed with panic, quite useless and remote. In fact another girl had taken charge. Later the school medical officer had come in and taken over and he had watched as the girl, her head between her knees, her hair falling downwards in a floating stream, had returned to consciousness. It was like seeing life transmit itself through a block of wood, for at first when the girl had been walked about the room she had looked as stiff as a log, but then it was as if a new dawn had arisen in a primitive world and the log had begun to feel the warmth of an early sun and come gradually alive. Expression had radiated from the log, and it was finally transformed to a human being again. It had worried him more that he could say to find that he had been totally helpless in front of that situation. Remembering the urine he had carefully avoided the girl’s eye for the rest of the period.

  “I know that,” said Vera. “It’s just that … it’s difficult to explain. I’m not trying to be difficult about it. But it seems to me that in the first place these are not the kinds of people your mother should be with. I feel it in my bones.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Tom, “she’s reverting to her early days, to the days when she was happiest. These are the kinds of people that she knew then. I can understand it. It’s very simple.”

  “Simple? I should have thought that would have been the last word one would apply to it. You’re being curiously opaque for once.”

  “I’m not being curiously opaque,” Tom said with a slight flare of anger, “not at all. I’m trying to understand. In any case she can always take her to her room. We don’t need to see her if we don’t want to.”

  “Mm. That’s easy to say. But what are the practical mechanics of it? I shall have to take tea in to them.”

  She did not feel that she wanted to be a maid to Mrs Murphy who after all had nothing to do with her: and in any case there was nothing of the servant in her nature.

  “Well, I’ll take it in then and I’ll make it too if you like. In any case the situation hasn’t arisen yet.”

  “That wouldn’t look very nice,” said Vera angrily. “It would be putting me in a false position.”

  “All right, then, you’ll be put in a false position. But all this is surely very trivial. Aren’t you making mountains out of molehills?”

  “No I’m not and you know it,” said Vera, sitting up in bed, her ghastly nightgown making her look momently like a nun.

  “All these little things are very important. They are the ends of the wedge.”

  “What wedge?”

  “Oh, nothing. If you can’t see it you can’t see it, and that’s it.”

  There was a silence and in the silence Tom imagined his mother lying in bed in her own room, ignorant of what was being said about her.

  “After all,” he argued, “she’s on her own and she needs someone. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

  “All right, I won’t mention it again till the situation arises and we’ll just leave it there for the moment.”

  However, she thought that Tom was being unreasonable: he had this habit of calling important issues trivialities because he did not wish to face up to them. It came from that part of his nature which sometimes emerged in inane and unfunny jokes.

  “In any case,” said Tom, “your own mother had strange friends in the past. What about that Indian guru she brought to your house one night?”

  “That was different. My mother was concerned with him intellectually. She …”

  “Oh,” Tom interrupted, “so long as it’s intellectual it’s OK, then. So long as she can say, ‘I can bring any old tramp to my house, it’s all part of the search for my identity’. He may be unshaven, stubbly, toothless and stink to high heaven but so long as he hides a piece of nirvana inside his dirty cloak and has a half-baked vision of the universe which involves astrology, spiritualism etc. he’s all right. I call that snobbery.”

  “Call it what you like. It’s a different situation, and even you must admit that.”

  “I don’t admit it at all. I only see snobbery at the root of it.”

  There was another silence which this time prolonged itself. Vera had turned away from him, and Tom fe
lt that she had done this as a tactical manœuvre.

  “I’m damned if I’m going to talk,” he told himself. “I’m damned if I’m going to say anything.”

  And he stared at the ceiling which glimmered with moonlight and thought about the girl who had fainted in his class, her wooden body, her doll-like perambulation about the room, her thaw and resurrection.

  He thought to himself, “I am changing. Something is happening to me. Something strange is happening to me. I’m not sure that it is a good thing. I don’t even know what it is.”

  Vera’s face was turned away. In a sudden access of what might have been either affection or contrition he kissed her lightly on the cheek but he might have been kissing marble. She did not waken from what he knew was a pretended sleep.

  Tom turned on his left side away from her, and so they slept back to back, he facing the open window, the draught from which slightly stirred the curtains.

  Nevertheless something was happening to him, and it wasn’t anything he could precisely focus on or name. It was as if in a late revelation he was coming into the Vale of Soul Making, as if across a flat autumn field he was seeing a strange slightly ominous structure rising, an airy web. His bringing his mother to his house was the result not the cause of this feeling. He had taken to thinking of her as totally alone, and he had found the thought unbearable. But he was perceptive enough to realise that his mother’s loneliness—that perpetual image—was in a sense a displacement of his own loneliness, and when he saw her in his mind’s eye as perhaps knitting by a window or pacing about an empty house it was himself he was seeing. Even after he had brought her to the house he thought of her as alone, and before he went to school in the morning he would shout “Cheerio” through the shut door, not knowing sometimes whether she was awake or asleep. He knew that she was trying to be as little bother as possible, but her attempts to diminish herself only paradoxically magnified her presence.

  Sometimes the terrible thought came into his mind, “Vera is not really the sort of person who knows about my mother. She needs someone less rarefied, more, in a sense, vulgar and cheerful.” But he did not blame Vera for being what she was. It was not easy for them to have their mother in the living room for after all they had preparation to do, and it would have been difficult for her to sit there in silence. Perhaps what they should have done was buy her a small house near themselves. But houses were expensive and scarce, and they almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to get a suitable one in their immediate area quite apart from the fact that paying a large mortgage they wouldn’t have been able to afford one. And there was no reason to believe that she would have liked to live in a house by herself in a strange town, not at least till she had grown used to it and liked it.

  He wondered if Vera had really wanted his mother there in the first place and whether now that she had heard about Mrs Murphy she might not turn against her. But what Vera didn’t seem to realise was that though she herself had been used to loneliness and could exist on very little human contact his mother wasn’t like that. She wasn’t at all interested in books as Vera was, nor for that matter was she a devotee of television. She was in fact a very ordinary person without special gifts, without a high intelligence, though Tom was beginning to wonder about the value of intelligence even in his pupils. Surely it was more important to be “nice” than to be intelligent. In effect what world did The Waste Land reflect? For from day to day people lived in the world as it was, boring, dull, shot through with flashes of excitement and expectation, and at the end of it all a sort of white misty light as one might see sometimes between autumn trees.

  One day he had a discussion about King Lear with his class, and it seemed to him that the play had taken on a new meaning for him, as if it were trying to teach him something. He found that for some odd reason his Sixth Year consisted almost exclusively of girls, which he didn’t really mind, for though their minds lacked the penetration of those of boys—a certain ruthlessness—they compensated by a sensitivity that boys didn’t have. They found King Lear not very interesting, which surprised him, but at least they had things to say about the king whom they considered little more than idiotic: nor did they condemn Goneril and Regan as much as he thought they might have done. No, there was no law inscribed on eternal tablets, which stated that one must look after the old, no matter what the latter were like. It all depended really on the individual old person. Certainly the bleak majesty of King Lear was very unlike the passive appeal of his own mother, and certainly the transformations and murders and wars belonged to a much earlier more barbaric world, but wasn’t the principle timeless? No, they repeated, there existed no timeless decree by which we could all set our compass, no eternal moral north. And as he looked at them—young, pretty, earnest—he sometimes wondered what would happen to them, which ones would be stranded by the storms of life, and eventually live on the scraps of charity distributed by a family busy with their own concerns.

  Even in the school itself he saw reflections of his own predicament. For instance there was a lady teacher who always brought her frail tottering ninety-year-old mother to all the school functions, looked after her with great affection, and in fact devoted her life to her, so that though she remained unmarried, she, in apparent joy, kept alive that old bundle of bones, but perhaps only so that she herself wouldn’t be left alone. It was all very complicated.

  Why should Vera object so strongly to that Irish woman? After all, she was an ordinary human being like his own mother.

  6

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING Tom made a momentous decision. Casting his Sunday papers aside he announced that not only would he take his mother to church but he would also attend the service with her. Vera who had been standing at the cooker turned and looked at him in amazement as if she had been struck to the heart. Because his mother was already waiting to go, gloved and coated, and carrying her bible in her hand, Vera didn’t say anything but he felt that he had somehow wounded her deeply, and for the moment the pathos that surrounded his mother transferred itself to his wife. Then Vera had turned away and continued with her cooking in silence, and he had simply said that they would be back at half past twelve.

  “I shall expect you then,” said Vera in an almost muffled voice. At that moment she looked so defenceless and hurt that he nearly went up to her and kissed her but her back, so eloquent of disapproval, discouraged him. He left the Observer and the Sunday Times as a peace offering for her, unopened, unread. At least, he thought, she should realise what an effort he was making, in going against his own principles in the service of another human being. She should surely thank him for taking his mother off her hands for a whole morning. Surely that should weigh in her judgment. His mother was waiting, trying not to look pleased, as if she had sensed Vera’s disapproval: but he could tell nevertheless that his decision had made her happy. What am I to do, he thought. I’m trying to be fair to both. It’s all very difficult. Human relationships are really impossible. One tug here and there’s an open wound there.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come yourself?” he asked Vera.

  “No, you go,” she said, in the same remote muffled voice. “I’ll have to do the cooking. You go. I don’t really want to go.”

  And so they left. When they had gone Vera looked down dully at the spoon in her hand. What was she expected to do? Was she not doing her best? And now Tom was betraying his own true self by going to church. As she stood there she remembered her mother, flamboyant and theatrical, setting off to her church in Edinburgh, pulling on her red gloves in a flurry of excitement, as if there was a coach outside waiting. And she also remembered the compulsory church services she had had to attend when she was in school and which she had hated, as she had hated many of the pupils; their childish scurries in the dorm after lights out, the shared food parcels at midnight, the running into wardrobes and under beds when authority came to investigate. They had all been so infantile, their world was so uninteresting in comparison with that of for instance Jane
Eyre. She remembered the stupid conspiracies with hot-water bottles and baths. And she suddenly felt overwhelmingly insecure as if someone were trying to disassemble her carefully structured world. Evil perhaps rose simply from that; fear, grief, absence, insecurity.

  And now there was this new development which she couldn’t help construing as a threat, Tom’s going to church. What had happened to his, for want of a better word, integrity? How could one despise the empty robes and theatre of religion, how could one feel the utmost contempt for that bravado without substance, and then in such a short time and so inexplicably become a willing spectator of it, perhaps even an actor in it. It was true: she felt a new coldness about her, as if her formal world were in danger of destruction, a sentence which would soon lack a verb. In the chill of the autumn morning she left the kitchen and went to the bathroom and stood staring at the doll which was lying on the cistern facing her as she looked in. The eyes, blue and cloudless, gazed at her from below the long eyelashes. The face, round and chubby and red as an apple, showed an almost vulgar healthiness and absence of thought. The dress, short and frilled and golden, hardly reached the chubby knees.

  Where had the doll come from? She couldn’t remember. Had she got it as a marriage present? Surely not. Had she bought it in the town one day when she had nothing better to do? She couldn’t remember at all. But there it stood on top of the cistern, mindless and clear-eyed confronting her head-achy untidy self, as if it were a symbol of a primitive time before religion had been even thought of, with its red lips, red ribbons and startlingly blue eyes which seemed to suggest a pagan heaven without mercy or fear. She picked it up in her hand, weighing it delicately, and then began to stroke the golden hair very gently and tenderly as if she were stroking the head of a child, over and over, a stiff staring child golden in the autumnal light.