She walked to the Air Terminal at the Invalides. It did not take her as long as she had thought it would, and she was there well before seven. She was on the point of buying herself a bus ticket to Orly when she thought of looking at her plane ticket, and discovered that for some reason it was booked from Le Bourget, so she bought one for Le Bourget instead. It all seemed very simple. It seemed too simple. She wondered why journeys had always seemed so significant before, so fraught with possible disaster. She felt strangely clear and light: weightless, almost. Acts that would once have driven her into a panic of hesitation seemed to have become transformed into simplicity itself, and a whole moral inheritance of doubt had dropped away from her; the thought that she might have gone to Orly by mistake did not stay with her, a nagging reminder of human error, an indictment of human effort, but instead it fell calmly away, and drifted off into unnecessary space. She got on to the bus, and sat there with a kind of placid blankness; the night was over, and nothing seemed to be of much importance, it had all grown out into some clear dawn of acceptability.
As the bus moved off, and drove north through Paris to the dreadful outskirts, she realized that she was going to feel ill, and that the night would be in one sense at least paid for, but as she contemplated her growing nausea she found she did not care about it at all, she did not at all care if she was going to be sick all over the bus. It was all the same to her. She stared out of the window, at dirty streets and shabby houses and cemeteries and reaching, unfinished fly-overs, and she thought that she did not care what greeted her when she returned to England, nor what should happen to her, ever, in the future. And yet such carelessness did not pain her; she felt free, the light weight of her limbs, the clear grey spaces in her head, the ebbing of her need, these were merely symptoms of her freedom, and she was in some open early region where despair and hope seemed, as words, quite interchangeable, where she seemed to sit, quite calmly, beside her own fate.
When the bus arrived at Le Bourget, she got off it and went straight to the nearest Ladies’ Room and was sick in the wash bowl. She did not give it so much as a thought. Then she washed her face, and her hands, and the bowl, and looked at herself in the mirror, and thought that she did not look too bad; her shirt, which she had been wearing for twenty-four hours, was looking a little dirty, but not on the other hand particularly dirty, not dirtier than it had looked on various more innocent occasions, not dirty enough for anyone to know. She did not look as though she had been up all night; she looked no worse than anyone else, at that early morning hour. She put some lipstick on, and she thought that her face took on a positively radiant aspect from so small an addition; she looked as well as she ever looked, after no matter how many hours of preparation. The complete equality of all actions assailed her, solaced her; there was really no difference, it was all the same, Orly, Le Bourget, lipstick, no lipstick, sleep, no sleep, none of it seemed to matter. It would not even matter, she thought, if Gabriel should come. She wandered out of the Ladies’ Room, and went to the desk to acquire her flight ticket, and there she was told that she had to pay seven francs’ tax for the use of the airport facilities. She looked in her bag, and found that she had six francs fifty change from her ten-franc note; the bus had cost her three francs fifty. So she looked at the girl behind the desk, the girl in uniform, and said that she hadn’t any money, that she couldn’t pay. And as she said it, she could not tell whether she cared so little because the question was so totally uninteresting to her, or whether it was the most interesting thing that had happened to her in her life. The girl behind the desk said that she had to pay, and Clara said once more that she couldn’t, and gave her the six fifty, and then started to look in her coat pocket, and found a ten-cent bit, and another one, and then she opened her handbag and looked in the bottom of her handbag, and found another five cents. She handed them over, and stared at the girl in uniform, and said, ‘If I owe you twenty-five cents, does that mean I can’t go on the aeroplane?’ And all the time the extraordinary flavour of nonchalance, a taste stranger than the taste of celebration from the day before, filled her mouth. It satisfied her, to find herself reduced to the small change of life, to find years of inherited thrift and anxiety and foresight so squarely confronted, with so little disaster in the air. The girl was just suggesting that Clara should look through her bag once more, when a woman standing at the next desk leaned over and gave Clara twenty-five cents, saying, ‘Je vous en prie, je vous en prie,’ and Clara took them and smiled politely, gracelessly liberated from gratitude, and obtained her boarding ticket, and went and sat down on a plastic-covered seat to await, in destitution, the announcement of her flight. And she felt, as she waited, that she had perhaps done to herself what she had been trying for years to do to herself: she had cut herself off for ever, and she could drift now, a flower cut off from its root, or a seed perhaps, an airy seed dislodged, she could drift now without fear of settling ever again upon the earth.
She took the flight to London as though she flew to London every day, released from all action by her entire poverty, got off the plane, and collected her luggage, and walked to the bus, as though she had been born to such events. She thought of Gabriel, and she found that her feeling for him seemed to have passed already into the tenuous twilight world of nostalgia; she did not look into the future for his face. She got on to the bus as though in a dream, and took the tube from Gloucester Road to Finsbury Park, and a bus up to the Archway from Finsbury Park, and when she got home, she found waiting for her a postcard of the Eiffel Tower from her one-time teacher Miss Haines, a letter from her aunt Doris, and a telegram from Northam saying that she was to go to Northam immediately, for her mother was in hospital there and seriously ill.
9
When Clara opened the telegram and saw the news about her mother, she trembled as though she had been struck from the heavens. She stood there, staring at the fatal yellow paper, and her first thought was, I have killed my mother. By willing her death, I have killed her. By taking her name in vain, I have killed her. She thought, let them tell me no more that we are free, we cannot draw a breath without guilt, for my freedom she dies. And she felt closing in upon her, relentlessly, the hard and narrow clutch of retribution, those iron fingers which she had tried, so wilfully, so desperately to elude; a whole system was after her, and she the final victim, the last sacrifice, the shuddering product merely of her past.
Then, shaking herself, shaking off these thoughts, she rang up her mother’s number, and received as she had expected no reply, and then she rang up Alan, and he told her their mother was in hospital, that she had cancer, that he had been trying to get hold of her for days, and that her mother kept asking for her, and he had not dared to tell her that she could not be found.
‘What does she think, then?’ said Clara. ‘Does she think that I refuse to come? And what does she think is wrong with her, does she know what’s wrong with her?’
‘No, she doesn’t know,’ said Alan, ‘they wouldn’t tell her a thing like that. And I don’t know what she thinks about your not coming, I didn’t bother to ask her, and she didn’t say, she just said she wanted to see you.’
‘I’ll come up this afternoon, then,’ said Clara.
‘I think you’d better,’ said Alan.
So she went to King’s Cross, and got on the train to Northam. She thought that she would sleep on the train, but she did not; she stared out at the increasing familiarity of the landscape, restless, sleepless, wondering what awaited her, what recriminations, what disavowals, what regrets. When she got off the train she took a taxi, Gabriel-style, to the hospital, and tried to find out what had happened, but nobody seemed anxious to help her; it was too late to visit Mrs Maugham, they said, visiting hours were over, and that she should come back in the morning to speak to the specialist. So she went away again, relieved by the delay. She got on to a bus, and went into the grimy town centre, and walked around for a while, staring up at the blackened bricks and the dirty windows and the noncon
formist architecture, and thought of Paris, with its angelic cornices and its pale and flowery stones, its classical statues, its draperies and its trees and its gilt. She could not make sense of it. Then she went into a phone box, and rang up Alan, and he said that she should go round to the house in Hartley Road, and that he would come round with the keys and meet her there and let her in.
‘You could sleep here, I suppose,’ he said, ‘but you know what it’s like here, it would be much more convenient if you didn’t.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Clara, ‘I don’t care where I sleep, I’ll sleep at home.’
And she got on another bus, the very same bus that had taken her daily to and from the school, the number seventeen, a number once endowed with proprietory delight, and still familiar beyond all other familiarities, and they went past the school itself, and there was a group of girls coming out of the side door, and she looked at her watch, and noted that it was half past eight on a Friday, and that they had been doing their School Choir rehearsals for the Whitsuntide concert. It was on this bus that she had sat with a boy called Higginbotham, and dreamed of Gabriel.
When she got to the house, Alan was waiting for her; he had driven over in his car. She looked at him, standing there in the back door looking for her, and at the sight of him fatigue suddenly overwhelmed her. She wondered if he would touch her, if he would say anything to her, but he held the door open for her and all that he said was, ‘I told you you wouldn’t get anything out of them at the hospital.’
‘No,’ she said, putting down her bag on the kitchen table. ‘No, you were right.’ And for some time they said nothing to each other, while she went and hung up her coat, and looked in the refrigerator to see if there was anything to eat. He stood around, watching her, and he said nothing, but she felt uneasy under his gaze, as though he could see on her marks and indications. Then, while she made herself a sandwich with some old sliced bread and a piece of sliced processed cheese, he went and sat down in the sitting room and switched on the television. She received its noise with joy, and as soon as it tuned up she asked him, ‘Well, do tell me about it, you might as well.’
‘They say it’s cancer,’ said Alan, staring at the flickering set, where two young actors in historical costume were pretending to talk about Charles the Second.
‘How did she find out?’ asked Clara, seeing that no information would be volunteered and that she would be compelled to demand, rather than be allowed graciously to receive. She had forgotten this stubborn, obdurate refusal to reduce strain.
‘About a fortnight ago,’ he said. ‘She’d been feeling ill for months, she said, but she never saw anyone, and then it got bad, and she went to the doctor. And he sent her to the hospital.’
‘How long has she been there?’ said Clara.
‘Since Tuesday,’ he said. ‘I rang you on Tuesday, but you weren’t there.’
‘And is it bad?’ said Clara, gazing intently at the television.
‘She’ll be lucky,’ said Alan, with a kind of dreadful satisfaction, ‘she’ll be lucky if she lasts three months.’
And Clara, hearing it, knew that she had from the first expected to hear it, for what did telegrams mean but death? Not, in her family, births or greetings or weddings or events or excitements, but death itself, quite simply so. Nothing else was worth so extravagant a gesture, so expensive an announcement.
‘Oh,’ she said.
And warming a little to his theme, Alan continued, ‘They say there’s no hope, no hope at all, there’s nothing they can do for her. It’s far too far gone, they said.’
Clara, listening to his tone, felt herself filling slowly with repugnance, for his tone was so grim, so emphatic, so much an inheritance from that dying woman; and she thought to herself, she bred it in him, how can she complain if her death is so received?
‘Cancer of what?’ she said, knowing that she had got him on to a subject on which he might well be expansive, and thinking that she might as well know; and he told her, he told her everything, with such emotionless self-congratulation that she finally could take it no longer, and interrupted him, and said,
‘No, no, that’s quite enough, I daresay I’ll have to hear it all over again in the morning.’
And so he told her whom to ask for at the hospital, and the number of their mother’s ward, and then he left her.
And then she found herself alone in the house. She had not been alone in it, thus, in the evening, for many years, for her mother never went out, and she felt, in her solitude, that her mother was already dead. She walked, restlessly, downstairs, from room to room, opening the cupboards, looking at the sad, much-hated objects of her infancy, the tulip-patterned slop bowl, the plastic mats, the easy chairs, the narrow bulging settee, the tiled fireplace, the plastic pulley in the kitchen, where a few abandoned tea towels still hung. It frightened her to think how much violence she had wasted upon such harmless things. What chance had there ever been, ever, that she would have been condemned to them for life? What immense folly had ever made her fear such a fate? It was nearly over; the house was about to expire, it would be taken to pieces and there would be nothing left of it.
After a while she went upstairs and thought she would have a bath, but the water was cold; her mother, provident even in illness, had switched off the immersion heater before her departure. So she went into her bedroom and started to undress, but anxiousness possessed her so much that she could not make herself get into the blanketed bed, and the sight of the empty room, with its ugly furniture and its bare primrose walls and its small narrow divan disturbed her so much, with so many recollections of the sufferings of her childhood, that she left it, and started to walk up and down the short corridor, up and down, and finally she wandered into her mother’s bedroom, and stood there in its emptiness, staring, bemused, at the satin-covered bed. And she felt, as she stood there, that she was facing the room for the first time, no longer averting her own eyes from her own shame before it, no longer blind with vicarious grief, no longer clouded by the menace of her own lack of love. None of it had any longer any importance, and she looked at the bed, and at the wardrobe, and at the flowered, worn carpet with its ill-assorted rugs and mats, and then she went and sat down at the dressing table, and looked at herself in her mother’s mirror. Then she started, methodically, assiduously, to open all the little pots and boxes, gazing earnestly at rings and hairpins, at bits of cotton wool and old bus tickets, and then she moved on, to the drawers themselves, to piles of stockings and handkerchiefs, still searching, looking anxiously for she knew not what, for some small white powdery bones, for some ghost of departed life. And in the bottom drawer, beneath a bundle of underwear, she found it. She found some old exercise books, and some photographs done up with a rubber band.
She took them out, and spread them on the dusty glass-topped table, and looked at them. She looked at the photographs first; they were old and brown and faded, and some of them she had seen before, for some were of weddings and birthday gatherings, but there were two that she had never seen. They were both of her mother, her mother alone, her mother aged twenty, and in both her mother sat on a fence in the country somewhere, with a bicycle propped against her skirts, and in one she stared gravely at the camera from beneath her cloche, and in the other she smiled bravely, gaily, a smile radiant with hope and intimacy, at the unseen hands holding the unseen, long-derelict camera. She looked thin and frail and tender, quite lacking the rigid misery that seized her face on the wedding photographs; Clara had never in her life seen such a look upon her face. She stared at them with a kind of wonder, and then she put them back in their rubber band, and started to look at the exercise books.
They were stiff-backed, and black, and inside they were lined, and covered with thin blue ink, in her mother’s hand. She started to read, and at first she could not think what she was reading. One page started: ‘It was a bitterly cold day, and Annabella, staring from her narrow attic window, shivered and held her hands towards the solitary
candle.’ The text was heavily emendated, heavily crossed out, and from time to time there were pages written out as verse; one of them said:
O let us seek a brighter world
Where darkness plays no part:
and another started with the verse:
I wait here for my life, and here I must wait
While all the world rolls on and passes by;
Surely my expectations have a date,
And I will find the answer ere I die?
And Clara, reading this, started to shiver, for she knew that she was reading her mother’s life, and that if ever she had needed proof that she had once lived, then this was it. And she turned to the end of the book, and there was the date, 1925; before her mother’s marriage, before the end of her hopes. And Clara began to cry, for she could not bear the thought of so much deception, of so much disappointment, of a life so eked and spent and drawn and withered away. She would have preferred to believe that hope had never existed, that there had been no error, no waste, no loss, and yet there it lay, in those faded stilted phrases, in those tenuous and stiffened smiles. It was possible, then, to go disastrously astray; tragedy was possible, survival was no certainty, there was no reason why anyone should escape. And Clara looked back at the writing, and at its shockingly literate echoes of stories and hymns long since forgotten, and she could bear to read no more, and she wondered whether she should fall on her knees and thank Battersby Grammar School and the Welfare State and Gabriel Denham and the course of time, or whether she should reserve her gratitude until more safe and later days.
Jerusalem the Golden Page 22