7
MEANWHILE TOM SAT beside his mother in the church after a moment of hesitation at the door, as if even then he could turn back and not commit himself. He saw a number of people whom he knew and who nodded at him in slight surprise, glancing at his mother who smiled in an almost queenly manner. As he waited for the service to begin, looking around him at the bright hats of the women, the tall blue cross on the pulpit cloth, the varnished pulpit with the microphone, the narrow windows with their stained-glass panes, he thought of what he was doing. His mother sat beside him, staring straight ahead of her, her hands in her lap, passive in the silence, and he sensed that in some way she was repossessing him, that by doing what he had done he had taken an irrevocable step. For what he was doing, and his motive for doing it, was unusual. Not believing in religion, he had placed humanity above ideology as if by doing so he was setting himself beside her in the world, as if he was showing that he was not ashamed of her.
This extraordinary achievement—the clearsightedness with which he had seen the issues at stake—warmed him with a righteous glow. How many people would have understood what he had understood, that beyond ideology, that even beyond disbelief, there lies the human being, solitary and vulnerable: that more important than intellectual consistency is the helpless demand of the human soul and body: that from these stale forms peers out shyly and timidly the human face, lost in a world that it does not understand. How easy really it had all been, and how few understood how much it had cost him to sit where he was now sitting. And yet if one did not believe in religion was it any worse than going to a performance in a theatre, a willing surrender of disbelief? Or, if one considered the whole thing as a routine act, like having a weekly injection, why could one not bear it with a smile?
It seemed to him that when the minister entered, dignified in his black robes and carrying a bible in his hand, he was paying special attention to him, as if he were a hero who had done something magnificent and unique: and when he preached his sermon which was about the Parable of the Talents he felt that it was he himself, talented and sensitive, who was being referred to.
When the psalms were sung, he found himself back again in the world of his childhood, a word of settled order, which on the whole it had been. Nor was it the psalms alone that recalled that world. It was also the smell of varnish from the seats, the slight coughs of members of the congregation, the colour of the psalm books themselves. He thought of the world of the Bible as a secure aesthetic world, with shepherds watching their sheep on patches of sunny green, boats floating in water, stars shining in the sky, staffs and beards, skies of eternal blue above brown deserts. Yet at the same time he did not believe that this world represented any form of immortality, nor was the church itself anything other than a building of stone built by mortal hands. Nor did he believe that anyone had ever risen from the dead, nor in miraculous interventions. None of these was a truth to him, they were simply beautiful images, poetic and colourful, a vanished primitive world.
But he believed that his mother rested secure in that world. Her faith was simple, though it seemed to have little to do with her daily living. For instance at that moment she might be thinking, for all he knew, that she had won some sort of triumph over Vera, and this triumph perhaps was making her singing sweeter. Life was terrible, it was a truly terrible thing, and its issues beyond our understanding, for deeper even than religion was the terror and glory of the human mind. How could one live at all with people? How did people ever manage to live together, tugging and pulling, shouting silently, “I am, I am, listen to me, I am here. Pay attention to me. Love me without return, gratuitously, with utter constancy.”
When the service was over he walked among the congregation, was shaken hands with by the minister who recognised him (for he had a daughter in the school) and whose smile was as benignant as the sun. He introduced his mother to a friend of his who taught at the school and was an elder of the church, and in the after-service bustle felt about him a warmth which might have been false and meretricious, but was welcome just the same. It was clear to him that his mother was happy to be at his side: after all he was her son and he had a recognised place in the community. The desert was blossoming like the rose, he was showing charity and kindness, he was being what he ought to be, a man who loved his mother and who showed it before the world. He was successful in his own small way.
Side by side they walked to the car, their shoes rustling the gravel, while near them lay the graveyard with its tombs ordered and clean in the morning light. He could see flowers here and there, vases, open stone bibles, the glitter of granite from the gravestones, he could even hear a late autumnal bird twittering from the churchyard. How silent and pure that world was, the world of the dead, with its iron railings and mostly ancient stone. How clearly it told in its very dumbness of the continuity of life even in death, of ancestries that perpetuated themselves through centuries, for to this place the living came with their flowers and in turn others would bring bouquets to them. How well the world was organised, and how simple life really was. How little the intellect had to do with it. There were only a few clear necessary truths which one could carry with one as if in an overnight bag with its toothbrush and shaving gear. The rest could be left to itself. He opened the door of the car for his mother and she got in, arranging her coat. Then she sat back in the car, her bible in her lap, looking relaxed and at peace, heading for home.
8
ONE MORNING VERA woke up feeling very cheerful, Tom still lying in bed gazing at the ceiling. An idea had blossomed in her mind during the night and stood there clearly before her, as if it had emerged without her intervention or presence at all. It was a fine beautiful creative idea of the kind that visits one perhaps on a summer morning when the sun is shining and the curtains shake a little in the breeze: but this one had blossomed on an autumn day.
“You’re very happy this morning,” said Tom lazily.
“Not particularly,” Vera replied carelessly for as yet she did not wish to tell him of her idea which she hugged to herself as if it were a child loved secretly for itself alone. She combed her hair in the mirror while Tom watched her. If only she were a nun, fulfilled in the world of her cool vocation: but that was not possible. Nowadays one must live in the world and the world made demands which had to be met: it required that one get up in the morning, set out into its infinitely devious maze, meet with other people and have relations with them, useful or futile.
Even from our loved ones, she thought, we hide most of our secret wishes and dreams. For instance at this moment Tom does not know what I’m thinking and I don’t know what he’s thinking. Nevertheless we are able to live together as if we knew each other wholly, which is an impossibility: for how could she have known that Tom would have surrendered the convictions of a lifetime in order to go to church? Nor had he even talked about what had happened when he came home, and when she had questioned him he had given unsatisfactory and vague answers as if this was a part of his life that he did not wish to talk about to her, or as if it was simply impossible for him to talk about it. He would have considered her interest trivial not realising how important his action had been to her. It was as if their marriage were beginning to cloud slightly like a window on an autumn or winter morning when it is enwrought with cold patterns of ice so that one cannot see through it as one could when the weather was warm and unclouded and sunny. Exactly like the bedroom window on that very morning so that she could not see the trees in their autumn bravery until she rubbed it with her hand.
“Should you not be getting up?” she asked.
“In a minute,” said Tom, lying there in the warmth of the bed.
She shook her hair back, put on her clothes and went to the bathroom while he still lay there. What am I? he wondered. Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I going to school this morning? Why is that wardrobe with the mirror standing in front of me at this particular moment? Why is her hairbrush with strands of her hair in it lyi
ng on the dressing table? And he gazed at it as if it were an object that he had never seen before, dear and distant, the pink hairbrush which contained part of his wife’s body. And the conjunction of the hairbrush and her hair and the dressing table puzzled him so that he found it difficult to imagine why they had come together in that room, like spaceships emerging from the depths of an unknown universe.
He suddenly threw back the bedclothes from him and looked at himself in the mirror. His long narrow face gazed back at him, his eyes examined his reflected eyes, his nose thrust itself forward, his mouth with the prim pursed lips was reflected back at him. He pushed his face against the glass as if against an icy window and burst out into a manic laugh as if he wished to explode in front of the mirror, as if he wished both reality and reflection to merge with each other in the infinite depths of the glass. Then he began to dance in his shirt in front of the mirror, moving his body backwards and forwards in a parody of Top of the Pops and as he did so he was laughing helplessly and silently while his distorted waltzing image gazed back at him.
After he had done this for some time he put on his trousers and when his wife returned from the bathroom he went and busied himself with the tedious business of shaving. While he was doing so, his wife in her turn was sitting on the bed, gazing into the mirror and examining her face as if to assure herself that she had lost none of that quality, whatever it was, that had first attracted Tom. She was wondering if she ought to do her hair in a different way, or perhaps wear make-up which she ordinarily never did. I didn’t know I was like this, she thought with surprise, I didn’t think that I was like an animal scenting trouble from a distance, sensing some other as yet unfocussed predator moving stealthily towards it. She was amazed that these thoughts had come to her since she was not at all imaginative but as she sat there she wondered what it would be like for an animal to feel itself being stalked, death steadily nearing in the long grass. But she was not so helpless as a small animal might be: she could do something about what was happening. She was not going to wait till the teeth bit into her. She was going to do something about it.
And she briskly made the bed with obsessive tidiness. She put the brush away in the drawer removing as much of the hair as she could and placing it in a small coloured bucket that stood in one corner of the room. She turned at the door to make sure that everything was neat and in its proper place before leaving and then she went and made the breakfast.
The two of them, she and Tom, were silent at breakfast as they usually were for Tom was not the sort of person who was conversational in the early morning, nor for that matter was she. A part of her mind was already thinking about her classes and how she would present a particular lesson. She was thinking that she might try to get another cupboard for her room, or a new blackboard of the sort that rolled round and round. Even in the car—whose windows were almost frosted over—they were silent, Tom driving with his usual negligent speed, both of them gazing out of small spaces between the frost at the uniformed pupils who were walking up the road. There they were, willing or unwilling to be educated, and there were the two of them responsible for their education. What a privilege, she thought, what a life’s work. What an immensely complicated thing, he was thinking, what an intricate and often useless business.
The car drew up outside the school and he kissed her briefly before they set off for their respective rooms. As yet there was no one in her room and she stood at the table looking around her at the empty desks, briefly glancing at the blackboard, allowing the day to ascend steadily in her so that she would be able to meet it with whatever knowledge and readiness that she had. She looked at the posters on the walls and felt that she was in her proper place in life, the place that she would probably occupy till she retired. This was her life’s work and she was good at it, she was in control of it. Here the unreasonable was converted into the reasonable, and the inarticulate made articulate. She was a colonist of partially unknown minds, a missionary assimilating new areas to literacy. She waited happily for the class to enter and had almost forgotten her mother-in-law and Tom in the excitement of anticipation and conversion, as if she were a secular nun married to her work. Sometime she would have to try some drama with them, perhaps a little play about an old woman. She knew exactly which girl she would choose to play the part. She had tried drama before but hadn’t done it very well. But she thought that the next time she tried it she might do it competently and with imagination.
Meanwhile in another room Tom was sitting alone, at his desk, waiting. Round him too the school gathered and he assumed the day like a cloak (though in fact he never wore one: his wife, however, always did). Through the window he could see the rowan tree still partially in blossom, its red berries bright as drops of blood, its branches airy and light. The sun made a straight line across the floor to his desk, direct as a ruler. Through the open door he could see the pupils standing at a radiator with newspapers in their hands as they studied the football results. The hall was being prepared for the morning service with seats already laid out. “Oh Christ,” he thought, “here we go again.” The school itself was like a church, ancient, finished, and again with the bubble of laughter that sometimes arose in him spontaneously he thought, “Down that street man must go, bearing only his honour, believing in nothing, a corrupt knight in a corrupt society. Through the Waste Land a man must go, through Margate, feet outstretched on a canoe. “Nothing, nothing, do you hear nothing?” “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” “What is that voice under the door?”
And yet … And yet … The children were not wholly corrupt. They came like seagulls, their beaks outstretched for food. I love them, he thought, I do not love the institution, I love the children. It is they who in their freshness must save the world, though the old must be saved too. It is the human being who must be saved, not this building of stone. If the freshness could only be retained, if the fresh voices would speak and sing, if the unpredictable could survive. Love is all we have. But how hellishly difficulty it was to share out our love to everyone, when so many beaks were thrust at one.
Those children, ready to set out into the world with hope in their eyes, how much he loved them. He himself must once have been like them, unclouded and clear. How beautiful they were, how fresh, how lovable. What a privilege it was to have them in his room, to be in a sense responsible for them. What a grave responsibility it was to feed their minds. What a glory among all the terror. His mother too must have been like them once, though perhaps not so intelligent, hopefully setting out into the future, careless of what it might bring. And look what it had actually brought her.
The bell rang and here they were sitting in front of him. Waiting. For their minister. For the food of the day. And as he started reading The Waste Land he could hear from the hall the uninspired singing of ‘To Be a Pilgrim’.
9
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK the bell rang and the teachers went to the school dining room for their coffee. There they sat at tables, joked, complained. They discussed children, the unfairness of time-tables, the difficulty of certain classes, the administration which ensured that they did not hear of anything till it was too late. Bearded men mixed with clean-shaven ones, oldish women with very definite views on education mixed with the eager young who were still enthusiastically experimenting. The hubbub was as loud as in any class that had been left unattended. And to the dining room Vera came with the others, though she did not like being among so many people. However she did not want to miss anything of importance, any gossip, any major or minor step that was being taken.
It was a world of people brought together by their daily work, making concessions here and there in the service of others. It was a world of tedium and a world of interest. To it willingly or unwillingly each came with his or her own burden of the day. There was Mr Dawson who complained about everything, whose response to all initiatives was a mechanical “No”, and who, himself lazy and uncooperative, would complain endlessly about lazy and uncooperative pu
pils. There was Miss Glenn, fresh-faced, efficient and future-loving, who had never in her short life had any doubts about her vocation, and who had dedicated herself utterly to her work till the day when she would receive her token of esteem and step out into the universe without bells or altering children; and Mr Leitch, abrupt and almost brutal, who taught with insensitive conviction and who might equally well have been a farmer or a salesman.
There was the shy Miss Bryce who found great difficulty in controlling her classes, and whose dedication was therefore greater than that of most of the others, for her conscience would not let her alone, and lay beside her even in her bed at night, issuing in terrible dreams of upset chairs and great wild laughing faces. There was Mr Grieve who, once an artist, had found his final happiness in teaching others how to draw and paint, whose room was a celebration of his contentment, and who believed sincerely that one day, yes, one day, he would discover an artist of immense natural talent who might in his interview on TV mention his name as the man who had influenced him most.
It was in fact a whole world that gathered in the dining room. And each moved away from or towards the others in a dance of mutual attraction or repulsion. Sometimes one would find one-self with one group and then another as interests or activities changed. A certain bluffness discouraged melancholy, curiosity encouraged gossip. The school had in some vast random manner gathered all these people together and set up relationships within it. Some loved it, some hated it, some tolerated it, some complained about it. But outside the school there lay another world, considered physically and metaphysically, which became more and more distant, and was often feared. The school itself was an affair of bells and rooms. Into it year after year came the children and then the children, almost unnoticeably, changed and left. Their faces duplicated those of their parents. It was a vast family, boisterous and protected. It was a womb and a museum and a place of learning. Scarred desks told of those who had been there and left.
An End to Autumn Page 6