by MARY HOCKING
Can we put this behind us for a time? I can see I may have rushed at it. In three weeks I have to take a party of girls to France, Teresa among them. It will afford a breathing space, a time to reflect.’
A time to heal the breach, she hoped. But when she left him she carried heavy in her stomach a pain for which she knew there would be no healing. She sat in her office after she returned to the school, hearing the voices of the girls as they came back from the playing field, cheerful as they anticipated weekend pleasures. Then cars started up as, one by one, the staff took their leave. Miss Heffernan had left early to take her mother to the doctor. Soon the cleaners moved in, their raucous voices echoing in the empty building. Clarice wished she had planned a weekend away But where would she have gone? Her parents were dead, her affair with Robert had left her with little time for women companions, most of whom had drifted out of her life. She was suddenly aware of how lonely she was, how unfriended. ‘Once known, something has to be done.’ Brave words when spoken as a rallying cry to all good men and true. But alone? She was not at all sure she was strong enough for what lay ahead of her.
She went to the window and pulling up the sash leant out. It was cold and already the fallen leaves were curled, dusted with silver. The sky was streaked with tufts of pink and saffron that, as she watched, spread and darkened into a deep crimson glow. The air was acrid with frost and woodsmoke.
Chapter Fourteen
Clarice said to the woman with the lamp who sat by her bed, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry . . . ‘What she was sorry about was not clear to her, but she seemed to have been saying it all night.
The farmer’s wife said, ‘I’ve brought your breakfast. I thought you’d prefer to have it in bed. We’ve had a Dutch party staying the night. It’s a bit noisy in the dining room, everyone talking about farming methods.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ There she went again. She watched the farmer’s wife clear a space on the little table by the bed, then fetch the tray she had put on the chest of drawers. She could have sworn there had been a woman with a lamp there a moment ago. But now that the curtains were drawn back and sunlight swathed the end of the bed in a warm haze she realised she must accept the loss of a companion who, she sensed, understood better than she herself what was happening. It must be late, after nine o’clock, with the sun riding high, well established up there.
‘What happened?’ she asked dully, not really wanting to know. ‘I’m sorry to have given you this trouble.’
This time the farmer’s wife heard her. All those other sorrys must have been directed to someone else. Heaven alone knew there was enough to be sorry about.
‘You fainted last night at dinner. Don’t you remember? You kept saying you were very hot, but you didn’t seem to have a fever.’
Clarice elbowed herself up in the bed. Her head was heavy and she felt unsure of her body, as though something had broken down somewhere along the assembly line.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Was I a nuisance?’ Being a nuisance was the eighth deadly sin.
‘No, of course not. You gave us a bit of a fright, though. Dr Hillman came over; he reckoned you’d be all right after a good night’s sleep. You don’t remember?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Other things had occupied her wandering mind and whatever had passed between her and the doctor had been lost.
‘I have a bit of trouble with my heart,’ she said, hoping this explanation might serve as cover for any misdemeanours she feared yet to come. ‘Nothing much, of course. We’ve all got something at my age, haven’t we? Bits and pieces that wear out.’
The farmer’s wife acknowledged high blood pressure. ‘Nothing much, though.’ They looked at each other in complicity, both women who would never admit to anything more serious than ‘nothing much’.
‘Dr Hillman said he’d come again this morning. They’re not expecting you at the theatre. I had a bit of trouble explaining to your director. Is he deaf?’
‘To everything but Pericles at the moment.’
‘I’ll send Carrie up in a little while to see if there’s anything else you need.’ As she went out of the door, she said, ‘As long as I’ve got my senses, that’s all I ask.’
But I haven’t got mine, Clarice thought. Not any more.
She ate as much of the breakfast as she could manage and made her usual apologies to Carrie, who went away giggling. Outside, the children were playing the murderous games children so enjoy. How distant their world seemed, much, much further away than that of the woman with the lamp, who had looked as if she cared more than anyone had cared since Clarice’s mother died. ‘I’m sick and I want my mother,’ she told herself. ‘I conjured her up.’
At eleven o’clock the doctor called. A brisk man, but thorough in his examination. He told her she should rest today. ‘Nature’s warning,’ he said as he left. ‘Nature’s warning, Miss Mitchell.’ Clarice believed him; her path lately seemed strewn with warnings.
After lunch, Alan came. ‘They’re all very worried about you,’ he assured her.
‘Not half as worried as I am.’ She didn’t want to talk about the company, she had other company on her mind. ‘I dreamt again last night. Have you got a few minutes?’
He said ‘yes’ cautiously. He wasn’t happy in the world of dreams, feeling he had enough problems without interference from his subconscious.
‘I want to tell you about it because you’ll understand,’ Clarice informed him firmly. ‘It wasn’t a dream. When you do a performance, it’s not like a television repeat, is it? Each performance, it happens again – Hamlet sees the ghost, kills Polonius, remembers poor Yorick . . .’
‘What did you dream?’ Alan asked. Hamlet had associations for him on which he preferred not to dwell.
‘Gillian Davies came to tell me about her father. It wasn’t memory or a reminder: it happened. Another performance, you might say.’
‘Was anything different?’
‘How would I know? I wasn’t observing, I was there, in the action. But yes, I suppose there was one difference. In life, mercifully, we are usually allowed to take our trials bit by bit, in stages; we don’t have to absorb the whole shock at any one moment. It’s a cumulative effect. You’re given time to grow into your particular harrowing. But in my dream, my body felt the whole of it, the full impact – not my mind, my body.’
‘You probably aren’t doing your body any good by dwelling on this,’ Alan said.
‘It’s not my body I’m worried about, it’s my mind.’
Clarice felt she was achieving something in the recounting of the dream experience, but she was not sure what. It was like one of those maddening episodes in detective stories where the character senses that a conversation contains a vital clue but can’t bring it to the forefront of the mind. The solution was usually to let it lie awhile and then it would pop to the surface. She was content to rest on her achievement even if she didn’t know what it was.
‘I’m sorry.’ Yet again! ‘Do you ever think you’re going mad?’ she asked Alan, in a hurry to bring her mind to order. ‘You must have done, I suppose, when the police came and dug up your garden.’
Now, there was something to be sorry about. Poor Alan, why was it his problems were never treated seriously? Perhaps it was that in spite of his undoubted ability to portray tragic characters on stage, in real life he seemed destined to play a melancholy clown.
‘It was so unreasonable,’ he said. ‘I told them that I buried all our dogs and if Mrs Percival had only cared to ask me, instead of phoning the Chief Constable, I should have been perfectly willing to show her Marcus’s corpse.’ The mild resentment sounded fresh, as if it had been stored up waiting for someone to release it. Clarice recalled that at the time the director’s one concern was the staging of Hamlet. She remembered his trying to ascertain, not very capably, whether Alan’s ‘trouble’ was likely to prevent his appearance. Neither he nor Alan had wished to use the word arrest and the conversation had ended with Alan saying he
hoped to be available.
‘When I told the police I didn’t know where Muriel had gone, they behaved as if there was something unusual about it, whereas in my experience it’s quite common in these circumstances not to leave a forwarding address. I’m quite an expert on the subject, after all. Muriel took off on a number of occasions and she never told me where she went.’
‘Didn’t you ask?’
‘What good would that have done? It wouldn’t have altered anything if she’d said she’d gone to Torquay. But that wasn’t the worst of it. “Would you say, sir, that your marriage was a happy one?” And then they expressed a sort of pained surprise because I didn’t seem to know, as if the idea of a marriage that was less than happy was something quite new to the police. One might have thought this was Puritan England of centuries ago.’
‘Was that when they dug up the garden?’
‘Soon afterwards.’
Why hadn’t they talked like this before, she wondered. ‘Alan, it must have been dreadful for you.’
‘They didn’t even offer to pay for the returning.’
She hadn’t known him well then, had only worked with him on a couple of productions. When they came together, they were too bruised by their experiences to want to rehearse them to each other. At least, she had imagined him to be bruised. ‘Were you afraid they would arrest you?’
He looked away into a corner of the room as if his mind needed a dark place at this moment. ‘Do you know what I was really afraid of? That they would find her; that perhaps I had killed her and somehow overlooked it. It’s surprising how much guilt we seem to have stored up in us, isn’t it, waiting a chance to get out? I can remember standing at the window watching them, dreading what they might turn up.’
‘Did you hate her?’
He considered this, as he might have done a weather front that had failed to live up to his forecast.’ I don’t think so. She was very tiring to be with all the time. One of those people who must have a reason for everything they do. When we went for a walk she always wanted to know where we were “heading for”, while I didn’t want to head anywhere in particular. She must always have an object in view, while I’m a fairly objectless man. But I don’t think I hated her, not really . . .’ He looked at his watch.
Clarice said quickly, ‘I killed someone.’
‘No, Clarice, no, it wasn’t your fault.’
‘I brought about a death. It’s the same thing.’
He looked at his watch again.
‘Never mind about rehearsal.’
‘But we’re doing a run-through and they can’t start without Gower, he’s the prologue.’
‘Damn the prologue, we’re long past that. We’re well into Act V and we need to talk.’
‘Clarice, you should rest. The doctor said so.’ He kissed her gently and she let him go. When he had gone out of the room, she said:
‘I killed a man.’
This brooding was hardly what the doctor had intended when he advised her to rest. She looked around for something to occupy her mind. The prompt copy of Pericles lay on the table beside her and she decided to read it straight through, thinking about the play instead of the actors’ lines. The producer had said the play was about loss and reconciliation, a theme which spoke to her condition. When she came to the scene in which Pericles discovers the long-lost Marina she began to cry, gently at first. Then as she read,
‘Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness’
she was torn by rending sobs until it seemed her ribs must crack, her body fall apart. By the time she got to Thaisa’s appearance she was in calmer waters and fell asleep, the book open on her chest.
It was dark when she woke. She felt better than might have been expected and decided to go down to dinner. The nooks and crannies and alcoves that comprised the dining room were filled by the Dutch party, two of whom sat at her table. They exchanged pleasantries. Clarice asked what farming methods could possibly be common to Holland and this untamed area, and they told her that they were doing a tour of the West Country on their way to the Isles of Scilly. The farmer’s wife, who was serving, said that next week a party of Frenchmen were coming. ‘With them, we have more in common.’
As Clarice was drinking coffee, Alan called to say that there was to be a technical rehearsal the next day so they wouldn’t be needed until the dress rehearsal in the evening.
‘I thought you might like to go for a walk and stop for a pub lunch.’ A pub lunch was not something he favoured on walks, so this was an acknowledgement of her weakness.
‘Unless there’s anything else you’d rather do? A trip to the coast?’ He looked absently into the middle distance while she digested this offer, prepared to sacrifice himself, though hoping it might not be required of him.
‘I’d like the pub lunch.’
They started off before nine in the morning. As they walked across the farmyard they could hear sounds of hysteria from the nearest barn; the Crucible company had started rehearsing early and was about the business of witch-hunting. Backstage staff were assembling near one of the other barns, looking long-suffering as only backstage staff can.
‘It’s like having a day off from school when everyone else is working,’ Alan said.
They walked for two hours across moorland and then came down into a valley where a clapper bridge forded a river. It was too early for lunch, so they sat watching the water frothing and frisking about the great gritstone slabs and the sloping stone piers. The river was swollen and no free space showed beneath the arches.
‘I’m sorry I had to go to rehearsal yesterday.’
Alan spoke diffidently, as he did when he was not happy with the lines a playwright had given him. Any minute Clarice expected him to complain, ‘I’m not sure how I should be playing this scene.’ Surprisingly, he decided on resolution. ‘You’ve never talked much about what happened to Teresa, and afterwards. We’ve always agreed that going over it wouldn’t mend anything. So I only know the bare facts. Yesterday, I felt you wanted to talk and I should have stayed with you.’
She sat in silence for some minutes and he didn’t prompt her, perhaps giving her time to sort out her thoughts – or hoping she would decide that she no longer wanted to talk. Torn branches of trees lifted above the water like the arms of skeleton swimmers, and looking at them Clarice realised she had reached a stage where her personal inclinations no longer counted; if she didn’t talk, her subconscious would break through and plague her with dreams of the drowned Marina. So she said, addressing the gritstone slabs which looked strong enough to endure all things:
‘I took a group to France during half-term. Not a strictly educational visit. In fact, I wanted to give them something of what I had in my schooldays, an escape from the straitjacket of orthodox learning. So we went to the Lot, eight of us in two cars; six girls, all French students, and two members of staff. We meant to walk, explore the villages, perhaps see the cave paintings. But outings were optional. Just being in another country, and one as different as France, would do them more good than any culture trip. One or two of the girls wanted to sketch and paint. Others walked. I went with the walkers, of whom Teresa was one. I knew she had been to France several times with her family, but she was vague about where they had stayed – Vienne mostly, was all she contributed. Her lack of contribution generally disturbed me. Usually, she could be relied on to lift any group she was in and was an ideal person to have on this sort of holiday.’
She paused, looking at the bridge and thinking how strange it was that many people would have lived a lifetime unable to reach the other side of the valley save by this bridge, icy in winter, flooded in spring. Some would have crossed it in fear, others bowed with toil, but a few would have danced across.
‘It wasn’t just that she was highly intelligent; there was something else that distinguished
her from the others. There are some people who seem to be motivated by the sheer will to enjoy life – or something other than will, which suggests an effort, more a natural orientation to joy. Do you know what I mean?’
Alan scratched the side of his nose. ‘Not really.’
She thought about this, looking at the shadows of trees moving on the nearer stepping stones. ‘It’s a gift, one can’t emulate it. I think it was there in her father. That may seem a strange thing to say of someone who did such terrible things; but he had a brilliant mind and, I suspect, more than his share of sexual energy. Who knows what may happen when the driving forces in a person are dammed? If things had turned out badly for Teresa, I think she, too, might have been corrupted, her natural gaiety channelled into mischief. She wasn’t a plodder on the road to virtue; nor, I think, did she have the moral fortitude to survive the quenching of the light that sparked her spirit. I believe she sensed some danger in herself – not to herself, but from herself.
‘She wasn’t helpful on the journey out, nor was she considerate to the girl who was car-sick. Usually, she responded spontaneously to other people’s needs; now she seemed unaware of them and behaved as though she were the only person in the car. This self¬imposed isolation, I felt, surprised her as much as the rest of us. After we arrived at the pension where we were staying I had a few minutes alone with her as we were unloading the car. I said something fairly trivial, like, “You don’t seem yourself, Teresa.”
‘I can see her now, nodding as at a point reasonably made. She said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it.” It was a flat statement, neither defiant nor apologetic, an acknowledgement that she had no means available to her of tempering her behaviour. One of the other girls came out to help and I decided to wait until I had more time alone with her.