Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  And she put the exercise books back in the drawer, carefully, where she had found them, and then she went back to her own bedroom, and got into bed between the rough blankets, too tired to look for sheets, and as she fell asleep she noticed in herself a sense of shocked relief, for she was glad to have found her place of birth, she was glad that she had however miserably pre-existed, she felt, for the first time, the satisfaction of her true descent.

  In the morning, she got up and went to the hopital, as she had been told, and found the specialist, as she had been instructed, and he told her the whole story, and told it with a kind of bluntness that paid little respect to whatever feelings she might have had. He seemed to be saying to her, beneath his lines: Plain dealing is what you expect, plain dealing is what you will get, we are no fools, you and I, and how useful that neither of us has time for sentiment. She found him offensive, though she could see that he meant to soothe, that he meant to invite her into a dry and stoic world; she wondered how many emotions he had disarmed and strangled at their timid, delicate, hysteric birth. His lack of circumspection pained her, for she had grown used to the circumspect, and she would have preferred a veneer of sympathy, no matter what indifference it might have covered, for she felt herself forever alienated from this world where brutality presented itself as sincerity. She disliked his dreadful suggestion of conspiracy, his suggestion that nobody cared, that death was a necessity, that an appearance of caring would be merely a mockery and a pretence. And when he said, finally,

  ‘She’ll be all right here with us, there’s no reason to think of moving her, whatever she says, because after all you’ve got your own life to live, you won’t want to be looking after her yourself, let’s face it, will you?’ She found herself almost forced into revolt, upon the verge of declaring that she could, finally, precisely, face just that, the final, often imagined (and yet how final, and therefore possibly endurable) martyrdom: but she looked at him, at his square face, and his heavy glasses, and his knowing look, and her eyes dropped because of course she could not face it, he was right, he knew the limits of human effort better than she herself had known them, for he had seen them more often than she had.

  ‘No,’ she said, meekly, ‘no, I couldn’t stay here, I have to be back in London, I couldn’t stay, I really couldn’t stay …’

  And he led her, thus defeated, to her mother. She was in a small ward, curtained off from two other patients, and when Clara was shown into the room she was dozing, her head propped up upon the high mound of hospital pillow, her jaw sagging, breathing through her mouth. She looked appalling; the change was worse than anything Clara had ever imagined, and she could not believe that in so little time so much flesh could have worn itself away. It was only two months since she had seen her, and she had come to this. The bones of the head, once sunk deep, now reached forth through the skin to their final revelation, and the breath disturbed the body, as though it caused it pain. Clara, staring, in the instant before her mother stirred and woke, wondered how she could not have known, how she could have missed the warnings of this imminent decay. And she felt that she was standing there empty-handed, bringing nothing, useless; in a jug by the bedside a few roses withered, and she thought, at least I could have brought her flowers. And she was the more ashamed because she had thought of bringing flowers, she had passed, on the way there, a dozen flowershops, and had not stopped, because she had been afraid, afraid of rejection, afraid of that sour smile with which so many years ago her mother had received her small offerings of needle cases and cross-stitch pin cushions and laboriously gummed and assembled calendars. She had been afraid of the gesture; she had learned nothing, she could not give, and yet she knew that without gestures there was no hope that love might fill the empty frames, the extended arms, the social kisses, the proffered flowers. She had brought nothing, and her meanness dismayed her. She had not wished to be mean.

  When her mother woke, she sat up, abruptly, and looked at Clara, evidently forewarned, and looked her in the eye, and said, bitterly, sourly, without interrogation,

  ‘Oh, so you’ve come then, have you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clara, standing there nervously, uneasily.

  For some time neither of them spoke, and then her mother said, fretfully,

  ‘Sit down, go on, sit down, there’s a chair there somewhere, isn’t there, you might as well sit down.’

  So Clara sat.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why you didn’t come any earlier,’ said her mother, after another long pause.

  And Clara, who had been toying with the idea of saying, I was in Paris with a man, as some desperate final appeal to that young woman leaning on a gate forty years ago, found naturally that such an appeal was impossible, against nature; and equally impossible was the only other possible reply, which would have been to answer this dull uninflected demand in kind, by saying, ‘No, I am not going to tell you.’ Freedom abandoned her, the pitiful ineptitude of freedom, and she found herself once more, as of old, basely prevaricating, terrified into deceit, mumbling shamefully on about examinations, and having been away on a course, and not having received messages.

  Then her mother, who had been looking down at her sheet, and picking at the hem of it with an unfamiliar feebleness, said suddenly with all her ancient venom,

  ‘If I were on my deathbed, it would be all the same to you lot. What do you care? I work my fingers to the bone, and what do you care? If I were on my deathbed, you wouldn’t care. If I dropped dead, you’d walk over my dead body.’

  And Clara, telling herself that she had heard these phrases, word for word, a hundred times before, and that hardly a mother in the world had not been driven to them, could nevertheless not restrain a kind of sick shivering, for she knew, then, that her mother knew, and was thus obliquely imparting her terror and her information. For she too was not after all lacking in circumspection: she too could multiply implications. And knowledge lay between them, dourly, without comfort, inarticulate.

  After a while they started to talk, laboriously, of other things; of the immersion heater and the laundry and the milk bill. Clara, listening, sustaining her part, dispelled the hope, which had sprung in her the night before, that some reconciliation, some gleams of sympathy or need might show themselves, and she saw, as she had always known, that understanding is never anything but fitful; indeed, she found herself watching anxiously, fearfully, for any sign of feeling, for any chink in the stony front, because it was in truth the last thing that she wanted, the last thing that she could have borne. And there was nothing, nothing at all: with relief she saw that there would be nothing, that she would not be called upon to give, that she could merely answer meanness with meanness. When they started to talk, after some time, of Clara’s plans, Mrs Maugham herself like the doctor prefaced her remarks by the assumption that Clara’s only desire would be to get back to London as quickly as she could: Clara demurred, denied, postponed, and admitted.

  ‘I’ll stay for a day or two,’ she found herself saying, ‘and I’ll come back next weekend, I’ll come back on the Friday evening train …’

  She could not bring herself, at first, to ask how the hospital suited her, or whether she would prefer to move, whether she would prefer a private nursing home, but in the end she forced herself to do so, and her mother said,

  ‘Oh no, I’m better off here.’

  ‘Are you sure,’ said Clara, feeling herself suddenly called upon to insist, ‘are you sure that you wouldn’t prefer to go somewhere more private? I mean, I’m not saying it’s not nice here, but we could find somewhere else, couldn’t we, surely, if you wanted …’

  ‘Why should I move?’ said her mother. ‘It’s all right here. They’ll look after me all right here. And after all,’ she said, looking at her daughter squarely in the eyes, ‘it’s only for three weeks or so, isn’t it? Three weeks’ treatment, they said, and I’ll be fit to go home.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Clara, unable to meet her l
ooks, frightened before such grim mockery, ‘oh yes, it wouldn’t be for long. But even so, if you wanted to move … ’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Maugham, tired, suddenly tired of the whole business, turning her head to the tall white wall, ‘Oh, I’m not bothered, it’s all the same to me.’

  Clara did not know what to do with herself for the rest of the day. It was Saturday; she knew that she had no reason not to stay till Monday, that she must stay until the end of the weekend. She spent the afternoon wandering around town once more, looking in at the bookshop, gazing at the library and the windows of the department stores, walking, walking, tiring herself. The thought of the empty house unnerved her; she did not want to go back to it until she was fit to drop. She bought a sandwich for lunch and ate it as she walked, and in the middle of the afternoon, pleased to find herself hungry, glad to be able to fill in some time by eating, she went to have some tea. She went to the department store which her mother had always favoured, not through perversity, but because it was the only place she knew, and she walked through the counters of haberdashery and gadgets and stockings and cosmetics, and into the lift, and emerged in the tea room, and sat down and ordered herself a pot of tea and some teacakes. All around her, women met and talked and nodded to each other, in their unseasonable tweed suits and their hats and their linen dresses and their unfashionable expensive shoes. It was a nice shop; her mother liked it because it was a nice shop. At the next table there were two women, two middle-aged women, both grey-haired, and they were talking to each other with competitive pride about their grandchildren; each looked as though she might have been her mother, and yet from them seemed to pour such fountains of innocent, lovely, generous solicitude that Clara, overhearing them, suddenly wondered if her whole vision of Northam might not after all have been a nightmare, and that the whole city might have been filled with warm preoccupations, a whole kind city shut to her alone, distorted in her eyes alone. And she felt once more charitably towards herself, that she had had no wish to hate; she had merely wanted to live.

  She visited her mother again in the evening, for the visiting hour, between seven and eight; Kathie was there too, released from the other evil of the children’s bedtime, and she and Clara exchanged embarrassed greetings by the bedside, and parted, at the hospital door, without having exchanged a word of truthful communication, without even acknowledging their mutual awareness of their visit’s purpose. Then Clara got back on the bus and went back to the house and let herself in. It surprised her, to have to unlock the door for herself. She had never had a front-door key before.

  It was nine when she got back, and she did not think she could go to bed at nine, so she opened herself a tin of soup, then discovered that she was still hungry, and ate a tin of baked beans. There was no milk: she wanted a drink of Ovaltine, but there was no milk. She walked around the kitchen once or twice, and then she went and sat down in the sitting room, and looked at the books on the shelves, at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the school prizes, the Edwardian novels, so well perused, but she did not feel that she would ever care to open a book again. Then she switched on the television, but it meant nothing to her, she had lost the habit of watching, she could not watch it alone. So she went and had a bath and went to bed. She was in bed before ten, and she fell asleep at once, and she dreamed that it was she herself that was dying, that she had been given a week to live, and she was crying in her dreams in despair, but I can’t die, there are so many things I wanted, there is so much I wanted to do, things that I can’t do now, I can’t do them this week, I wanted to do them later, you don’t understand, my plans, you don’t understand, my plans were long-term plans: and yet through her protests ran the fatal certainty that it would happen to her just the same, that it was useless to cry out, for they would never allow her the time that she needed. And then, through her dreams, she heard the telephone bell ringing, ringing downstairs, and she woke herself up and fumbled for the light and went down the stairs, and as she went, as she picked up the receiver, she found that her cheeks were wet, that she was sobbing, that she had been crying in her sleep, and that her throat was still trembling with emotion.

  It was Gabriel who was speaking to her. At first, shivering and trembling, she could hardly answer him: his voice sounded as though it was coming to her from another world, after even so short an absence, and it sounded so desired and lovely that she felt relief settle into her, and she said to him, as soon as she could speak clearly, ‘Oh Gabriel, you woke me, I was asleep, I was dreaming that I was dying.’

  And he talked to her, patiently, with his unfailing ready solicitude, until she had emerged from her night-time confusion, and then he started to ask her why she had left him. At first she could not even think what he was talking about, and then it all came back to her, the party, and Magnus, and the taxi, and the hotel, and Gabriel asleep face downwards on the bed, and as she remembered it, as it took colour in her memory, she felt safe and warm once more, back at home in the realm of human treachery and love and infidelity.

  ‘You left me,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t me that left you, it was you that left me. How can you not remember?’

  And then, tenderly, bitterly, they embarked upon explanation and recrimination. They went back over it, over the whole night in Paris, over their conflicting jealousies, over his desertion of the party and her silent departure, over his solitary waking in the hotel bedroom, and her return, and her news of her mother’s fatal illness. She asked him how he had known how to find her, and he said he had not known, but that he had tried everywhere, and that he had tried, finally, her home.

  ‘Oh God,’ he kept saying, ‘I’m glad the explanation’s so simple. I’m sorry, but I’m glad.’

  After a while she said to him, when she had firmly regained her hold upon the situation,

  ‘Tell me, Gabriel, what time did you wake after I’d gone, that morning?’ And he laughed and said, ‘Oh Christ, don’t ask me, I didn’t wake till quarter to nine, and serve me bloody well right, I suppose,’ and they both laughed, and she could hear herself laughing, and some marvellous indestructible frivolity stirred in her again.

  ‘Look,’ he said, hearing her soften, ‘let me come up, let me come up and see you. We can’t leave it, we can’t leave it like this.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you can’t, you can’t do that. What will they think, if you go away again so soon?’

  ‘Let me come,’ he said. ‘Let me come and fetch you back. You can’t stay up there, all by yourself. I’ll come up and drive you back.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should want to,’ she said. ‘I’ve finished with you, you know.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, seeming to know it, ‘then we could have one last glorious ride together, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘It’s only two hundred miles,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the map here open in front of me. Let me come up for you. I’ll come up in the morning, and we could go back tomorrow night. Think how nice it would be, driving all that way together.’

  ‘It would be nice,’ she said, hesitating, completely hooked, as he knew, by the lure of such a treat.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I’ve never really driven you anywhere. It would be nice, in the car. To ride together, forever ride, as Browning said, I believe. It would be our last fling.’

  ‘I don’t like your driving,’ she said, ‘you don’t go evenly, you accelerate too suddenly, I don’t like it. And then there’s another thing, I don’t want you to see this house, I don’t want you to see where I come from.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter where I come from, but where you come from, that matters to me, you know. All you are to me, you know, is a means of self-advancement.’

  ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘I knew that. For all you were to me was a means of escape.’

  ‘I knew that too,’ she said, ‘but how rude of you to say
it.’

  ‘And did you advance yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes, without doubt,’ she said. ‘Though others, I suppose, might see it as a decadence. And you, did you escape?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ he said.

  ‘I did better, then, than you,’ she said. And then said, with sudden certainty, ‘And look, I always do best. Look at me, what a fantastic piece of luck my life has been.’

  ‘You’ve worked hard for it too,’ he said.

  ‘Gabriel,’ she said, able to use his name at last, luxuriously, expensively, across the long-distance miles of wires, ‘Gabriel, if you come up and fetch me, which way back shall we go? Shall we go along the motorway and stop at all the all-night places?’

  ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t,’ he said.

  ‘It would be rather nice,’ she said. ‘I can’t deny that it would be rather nice.’

  ‘I’ll come, then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do that, you come. But you must remember to shut your eyes when you get to this house, I don’t want you to remember it, I don’t want it in your memory.’

  ‘You’re a coward,’ he said. ‘Why can’t I know the worst?’

  ‘Because I don’t feel free of it,’ she said. ‘It’s a part of me for ever, I don’t want it to be a part of anyone else. I can’t be free, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be thought to be free, is there? In fact, listen, why don’t we make a rendezvous, why don’t I meet you outside the Town Hall?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that won’t do.’

  ‘You mean you won’t?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I mean I won’t. If you want to drive in my car, you must let me see your house.’

  ‘That’s fair enough, I suppose,’ she said. Then she laughed, and said, ‘I can show you a lovely tea set with tulips on, and all sorts of lovely things. After all, why shouldn’t you come? Why don’t you come right now?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I have to go home.’