Checkmate

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘You haven’t eaten since lunch, have you? I’ll get you something.’

  He said, ‘You’re very kind.’ She could have dashed the glass in his face. Instead, she went into the kitchen and prepared a cold salad with her usual brisk efficiency. She had done this often when her husband was lying upstairs, gradually withdrawing from her into the narrow world of illness. She had stood by this sink, washing lettuce, slicing tomatoes with quick incisive movements, trying to fight the feeling of death in the house. At its first approach they had drawn apart, each making his own preparation for the final parting. Her husband had scarcely been aware of her during the last years of his life, save as a nurse who was never there when wanted. And now, quite suddenly, the house which had seemed dedicated to death, vibrated with life. It was not her husband’s voice calling from the sick-room for which she listened, it was the footsteps in the hall, the question in the dark. She was not a virtuous woman and she would gladly have taken Richard Oliver for a night if that was all that he had to offer.

  But he was still sitting in the lounge when she went in with the tray, absorbed in a dream in which she played no part. When she saw him to the door at the end of the evening, she waited for a while, listening to his footsteps dying away in the distance. Oh, Anna, Anna! she thought. How much I envy you all the wonder and pain that are in store for you.

  ‘Sin,’ Catherine said, ‘May be out of fashion, but it is none the less real.’

  ‘Against whom have I sinned?’ Anna enquired.

  ‘Against yourself.’

  Anna looked at her, but said nothing. Catherine went on in her quiet, even voice:

  ‘The man is a coarse, corrupt creature, interested only in satisfying his lust. I am sorry to speak to you in this way; but if you are going to look for adult pleasure you must learn an adult attitude. You must learn about lust. Don’t flatter yourself that Anna Jory appeals to this man, that he is even aware of Anna Jory as an individual woman. He is aware of a body, still dusted with the bloom of youth, but on the verge of ripeness.’

  Anna closed her eyes. In the hot, dark room, she was very still; but her stillness was not Catherine’s marble composure, it was an effortless stillness, a deep, slumbering repose.

  ‘You have degraded yourself by allowing him to touch you. What is more, you will have aroused his appetite.’

  Anna moved her head to one side, her lips parted slightly. She was floating out into a deep, dark sea, a beautiful, luxurious experience alien to anything she had known before and yet strangely familiar as though she had always been waiting for it.

  ‘Do you realize what that means?’ Catherine said. ‘I’m afraid you don’t. We have allowed you to remain innocent for too long. But you are not a child. Your own body must give you some intimation, some warning . . .’ She stopped and her voice became sharper. ‘Anna! You do know what I am talking about?’

  ‘Yes, Catherine.’ Anna’s voice was husky as she dragged herself to the surface of consciousness. ‘Oh, yes, I do know what you mean.’

  There was a long pause, and then Catherine said:

  ‘Come here. It’s getting dark. I can’t see your face.’

  There was silence again. It was almost as though Catherine was on her own. She cried out:

  ‘Anna! Get up! Do you hear me?’

  Anna rose to her feet. The last light from the window fell on her as she stepped forward. Catherine said:

  ‘Stay there! Don’t move until I give you permission.’

  She got up and came to stand in front of Anna. She looked her up and down and the girl submitted quietly. She had been made to stand like this for an hour at a time as a child as a punishment for displaying unwarranted emotion and she had learnt to do it without moving a muscle. But now, her body strained against the coarse material of her dress. Catherine clenched her hands at her sides.

  ‘You disgust me!’

  Anna cried out suddenly:

  ‘And Grandmother? Didn’t that disgust you?’

  ‘Your Grandmother is old and clumsy.’ Catherine slapped Anna across the face. ‘You will apologize.’

  ‘She did it on purpose.’

  Catherine slapped her again.

  Anna chanted exultantly, ‘On purpose! On purpose! On purpose!’

  Catherine hit her again and again. When she stopped it was she and not Anna who was crying. Anna turned and opened the french windows; she went out into the garden and shut the door behind her. Through the glass she could dimly make out Catherine’s crumpled figure on the floor.

  Her face was smarting and the night breeze made her eyes water, but she felt exhilarated. It was much more satisfactory to be struck by Catherine than to be made to stand for an hour, or to be locked in her room all day. She was sure that it must be better for Catherine, too; she had never, in all her twenty years, seen Catherine so alive.

  She walked across the cooling grass and lay down under the branches of the cedar. The tree was very old and the lower branches trailed on the ground so that she was completely hidden. But there was no sense of being imprisoned. Above her, the feathery branches stirred gently and there was a pleasing aromatic smell from the nearby shrubbery. It was very peaceful. It occurred to Anna that life was good.

  Chapter Seven

  The sun scorched the grass, there were brown patches on the lawn at the Jory farm and the earth in the borders was hard and cracked. The streams on the moor had run dry leaving the beds white as bleached bones. The sky was unbroken by cloud and the sun at midday was a burning glass.

  They prayed for rain in the chapel and old people crawled exhausted on the shady side of the high street, or, if they had someone to do their shopping for them, stayed indoors in darkened rooms, pressing handkerchiefs soaked in lavender to their faces. Tempers flared and grievances festered.

  The atmosphere at the Jory farm was particularly unstable. Only Anna was free from it. She liked the fierceness of the heat and did not fight it. In the house, Hester had closed all the windows and drawn the curtains; there was a smell of age and old clothes. Anna took bread and cheese, an apple, sometimes a hard-boiled egg, and went out each day, not returning until late evening. At night, she slept in the garden, but she did not tell anyone of this and concealed herself under the sweeping branches of the Himalayan cedar. As she lay in the scented darkness, she wondered if her mother had lived in this way. It was unlikely, because her mother had come from Damascus; but Anna liked to imagine that she had lain in the desert and looked up at a night sky brilliant as a sequin scarf. She felt very near her mother, as though a door had opened and her mother had been admitted to the garden. She found that she knew things about her that she could not recollect being told. Lying there, enveloped in the cool green world of the cedar, she knew that her mother was gentle and loving and that this was true goodness.

  She began to look more like her mother and this, for Silas, was disturbing.

  ‘I worry about Anna,’ he said to Catherine one morning when Anna had gone out early.

  Catherine looked at the clock. It was half past eight and Silas should have left for his office.

  ‘You will have to run to catch the bus.’

  Usually she and Hester did not acknowledge the fact that Silas worked, but behaved as though he had gone out for exercise when he left the house. But it was very hot and Catherine, who had noticed that he was a bad colour lately, did not want him to run for the bus. ‘You had better wait now for the nine o’clock,’ she said. It was one of the most mundane conversations she had ever indulged in over breakfast; they might have been a suburban husband and wife. She flicked distastefully at a fly that was making its laboured way towards the butter dish. The butter was very soft. She picked up the dish and went into the kitchen. There was no refrigerator, so she covered the dish and put it in a bowl of cold water. When she returned to the dining-room she noticed that the milk was turning sour; she could tell this by the way little clots coated the lip of the jug. It was a long time since she had found it so difficult t
o rise above the small change of life. Silas was still sitting at the table and he went on speaking as though nothing had happened to interrupt him.

  ‘I know so little about her . . . my own daughter . . .’ His face puckered in the helpless, childish way which usually endeared him to her because it made her feel necessary to him. On this occasion, she felt irritated and she spoke more sharply than usual.

  ‘This is frequently the case with fathers.’

  ‘She seems to be changing . . .’

  Catherine was also aware of a change in Anna. When the girl was in the house she seemed to set up an unpleasant vibration and Catherine was glad that she spent so much time on the moors.

  ‘She is simply making herself more noticeable,’ she said. ‘That is why you think she is changing.’

  ‘She seldom speaks to me now.’

  ‘You don’t have to speak to draw attention to yourself.’

  ‘But why does she draw our attention? Why do we notice her? Is it something that has happened to her, or to us?’

  ‘She has grown up.’ Catherine looked at the clock again, then her eyelids drooped and she said wearily, ‘It is time she left here and got a job.’ A vulgar statement, she despised herself for it; but the heat seemed to drain away one’s spiritual reserves leaving the bare bones of a situation exposed. Silas must have felt this, too, because he said abruptly:

  ‘I must sell the house.’

  ‘Sell the house!’ Catherine’s eyes flicked wide open, like those of a doll suddenly jerked upright.

  ‘I must provide for her . . .’

  ‘You must be mad! Can’t you remember the anguish that woman caused your mother . . .?’

  ‘My wife.’ Silas brought his hand down hard on the table. Some of the milk slopped over. It was definitely bad. Catherine rolled her handkerchief into a ball and held it to her lips. Silas’s face was yellow and he was breathing with difficulty. ‘My dear wife . . . wanted me to sell the house . . . to give me a chance to start a new life . . . I wanted to buy a bookshop . . .’

  ‘It would have killed your mother, if you had turned her out of the house.’

  ‘The farm would have fetched enough to have provided for her.’

  ‘This was her home!’ Catherine’s eyes frosted with anger. ‘Don’t you understand what it meant to her!’

  They were arguing as though it had all happened yesterday and the outcome was still in doubt.

  ‘But I had a wife and a child . . . I should have thought of them .|.|.’

  ‘What had they to do with the farm?’ Catherine clenched her hands. She was herself again; in spite of the heat her words were sharp splinters of ice in Silas’s brain.

  ‘Your father never did a day’s honest work, you know that as well as I do. It was your mother who kept the farm going so that you shouldn’t be done out of your inheritance. It was for her the men worked, not for him. It was she who bought and sold the cattle, rooted up crops that failed and sowed crops that made money; she hired the labour, paid the wages, kept the accounts, did the marketing. She was never in bed until one o’clock in the morning and up again at half past five all your young life. And after your father died, the war came, and you went away to play soldiers. Most of the labourers went, too. But she didn’t give in; she had tremendous reserves of strength. I shall never forget her, working in the fields from first light till dark like a peasant woman. And all for your sake, so that the farm should still be here when you came back. Don’t you think she has earned the right to live here?’

  Silas looked around hopelessly, his shoulders sagging beneath the eternal burden of contempt. He put his head in his hands, his usual refuge on such occasions, and whispered, ‘I know . . . I know .|.|.’

  ‘But you were like your father, no good at hard work. The land has gone, thanks to you, and now you begrudge her all that is left, the house! You think you can root her up and toss her away. What would you do with her? Send her to an old people’s home!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ There were tears in his eyes, but whether they were for his mother or for himself Catherine could not tell, and at this moment she really did not mind. The tears represented weakness; the battle was won. Nevertheless, she drove in the last nails.

  ‘She has put everything into the land. Her husband failed her and so did you. All that is left is the house and it is a part of her; you can’t separate them, they are one.’

  ‘I would have worked.’ Silas was not looking at Catherine, but beyond her, as though pleading his case before a kinder judge. ‘But I don’t understand about growing things. I never made the right decisions at the right time. My mother had no patience, she showed her contempt and the labourers learnt from her. I didn’t want to get into debt, it just happened. The land slipped away, a field here, a pasture there. A farm takes a long time to build up, but it runs down quickly. Melita understood. She wanted me to buy that bookshop. I might have made a success of that, I was better on the academic side at school, but mother had no time for book-learning.’

  ‘You’d have needed a business head, even in a bookshop.’

  ‘I understood about books.’

  ‘Oh, you understood about the binding and the printing; you’d have enjoyed holding them, feeling the covers, the texture of the paper; but could you have sold them?’

  ‘Yes.’ Silas was not prepared to admit complete failure. ‘I could have sold them. And Melita would have helped.’

  Catherine bit her lip. She wanted to say things which would have been quite beneath her. Instead she pushed back her chair and said:

  ‘I’ll make you another cup of tea before you go out.’

  She made the tea, feeling a kind of subjection as she did so, as though this trivial act represented a chastening of her spirit.

  ‘It’s strong,’ she said as she put the cup down in front of him. ‘Drink it all. You can catch the ten o’clock bus. I’ll go down to Rhoda’s and use her telephone to let your office know that you are on the way.’

  It would be the first time she had ever brought herself to speak to anyone at his office, but she was prepared to make a sacrifice for him. He sipped the tea and she began to clear the table.

  ‘We’ll forget about this,’ she said. ‘It’s been so hot, one loses one’s sense of proportion.’

  He did not answer and this made her a little uneasy.

  ‘You mustn’t repeat any of this in front of your mother,’ she said more sharply. ‘I know you don’t mean it, but she’s old and it would be a great shock to her.’

  ‘She’s beyond being shocked,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Silas!’ Catherine put the tray down and stared at him.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t say anything to her. I haven’t the courage.’

  She was not quite satisfied, looking at his face.

  ‘You won’t do anything, either, I hope.’

  ‘You mean that I won’t sell the house? No. I don’t suppose I shall.’

  ‘You mustn’t ever think these things.’

  ‘You can’t control thought, Catherine.’

  He spoke with such intensity of feeling that she found herself at a distance from him. After he had gone she wished she had made him explain that last despairing utterance.

  She went into the kitchen to do the washing up. Anna had taken to reading. Catherine had seen her carrying books with her when she went out on her daily rambles. On this occasion she had left one of the books on the kitchen table while she prepared her packed lunch and had then forgotten to take it with her. To her surprise, Catherine saw that it was a copy of the Bible. She picked it up, wondering whether they had done Anna an injustice. Could her strange behaviour be due to a feeling of shame? The book fell open at certain pages. Catherine stood in the hot kitchen and read:

  “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

  As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

  As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons, I sat down under h
is shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. .

  It was all too much, the heat and now this. Catherine was shaking, her body no longer seemed her own. She ripped out the pages. The enormity of the action sobered her, but she was not ashamed. She stood staring down at the mutilated book. At this moment she was angry with God rather than awed by him; she felt that he had set some kind of trap for her. The idea that God might be an enemy sidled in at the edge of her mind.

  Up on the moors, Anna quoted from memory as she lay watching the birds wheeling in the sky above her:

  “My beloved spake and said unto me. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

  The fig tree putteth forth her green figs and the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away . . .”

  Silas got to his office at eleven o’clock. He was feeling faint and his appearance worried the staff so much that they gave him brandy.

  ‘You should see a doctor,’ they told him.

  ‘A doctor can’t help me,’ he said and put his head in his hands and cried.

  They called a doctor who said that Silas must go home and rest. When Silas had departed, the doctor confided in the senior partner:

  ‘He should go to his own doctor. He has a bad heart condition, aggravated by this heat, of course.’

  They told Silas to take a taxi all the way back and charge it to the firm; they were a good old firm and liked to look after their staff, even unproductive members such as Silas.

  Silas, however, did not go to the taxi rank. He went instead to an estate agent and asked how much the farmhouse would fetch. The young man who interviewed him told him that it was not possible to give a realistic figure without doing a survey; if the farmhouse was in good condition it might fetch as much as twelve thousand pounds, it had a very good position. Silas said that he would like it to be put on the market. The young man, who had heard rumours that the usual modern conveniences did not exist at the Jory farm, insisted that a survey would be necessary. Silas said that he would get in touch with him and arrange a date and time when the house could be surveyed.