Please read this first:
These three inter-related stories have the overall title 'A Time of Healing'. The first is 'Up Gritnells, OR, A Visit to Relations'. I am publishing them myself on the Internet and anyone with a computer may read them; you may print out one copy only for your own use. No other form of publication is allowed without my written consent.
The author David Gamon asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
COPYRIGHT David Gamon 1993, 1994, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012.
David writes: I 'took it in snuff' when no London publisher I approached wanted to publish these novels, and thought that the ungrateful world was appropriately punished by not having the benefit of reading them. After some years (and I am amazed how many!) I've become more generous; here is the first.
I am imposing conditions on my readers. Here they are:
1. If you think it's boring, DON'T TELL ME! Just stop reading -- no-one compels you to.
2. I welcome helpful criticism, and I define it like this:
i. Don't go in for the sort of comment which is really just a lazy sort of character assassination: you always were boring/sex-mad/snobbish/ (worst of all) religious, etc., etc. How could that possibly help?
ii. And don't go in for the sort which is really a lazy fashion of boasting: if I were doing this, I'd do it better. There's no doubt at all that you'd do it differently!
I define constructive criticism like this:
First of all, leave the story and characters alone.
The novel is written by one who has never been a teenage girl*, or a fortyish woman, or 'middle class'. If you are or have been, rewrite paragraphs or chapters or even the whole blooming novel so that you think it carries greater conviction and Email it to me either as a response here or to davidgamon@waitrose.com. And yet it must be understood, if you do, that you do not retain any copyright in your own work and that anything I regard as an improvement I may take over gratis; however, I will almost certainly feel that your rewriting is insensitive, clumsy, that you have missed the effects I was obviously trying to make, etc. etc. AND YET what you have offered me will be a stimulus to me to rewrite better, so thank you in advance.
If you think that this is an odd way to write a novel, remember that Richardson's 'Clarissa' was partly written just in this way; read that great novel, if you have a month to spare -- this one won't take as long.
Some notes:
In one respect this novel is badly punctuated. There must be a way to indent paragraphs in a blog, though I have not found it yet.
Unfortunately the blog mechanism is imperfect, and in one or two places trying to make corrections has made things worse; it is an ongoing process to try to spot such mistakes and to correct them.
Almost finally, if you are able to interest an agent or a publisher in my work, I'll be grateful.
*All novels are disguised autobiography, they say. Despite that and despite the co-incidence of the same name, I feel that there is more of me in Pask than in Dave.
Read on:
UP GRITNELLS, OR, A VISIT TO RELATIONS
O. It's changed. Me too.
I don't understand.
Part of me's gone. Don't know where. Clearer, I used to think clearer. Like an old lady I'm getting.
Brain half gone? Don't know. See as well as I did ever. Don't hear much, but it was quiet here usually. But where was I a moment before standing here? Outside the front door? Just can't remember.
No-one here? No servants?
Why can't I remember, why is my head like a fog?
What things was I thinking of just then? I can't feel my clothes, I can't feel my own arms or legs even. What's wrong with me?
The house is like it was, mainly. New stair carpet, same old pictures of the Lakes. No, that carpet's worn, there's a hole on one tread, someone might fall and die. What's that mean, then?
Can't think it through. New carpet, old carpet! Can't reason.
Go slow. Think slow. Just wait.
She pauses. For as much time as one might take several deep breaths, though she does not take them.
Ah! New carpet, old carpet. Must be years since I was here before. There, I'm thinking now. Sort of.
She does not try to work out how many years, that somehow would be too difficult.
The same as it was then, and not the same. Let me come further into the hall. Yes, I have come further into the hall. Yes, they got these pictures of the Lakes when they were young. Honeymoon. I know the word, but what does it mean? Coming....yes, they'd just got married. I don't think I knew them then. I never got married. Pity, pity!
Here at the back of the hall I must turn. Up the stairs or stay down? Why are these banisters so dull? Downstairs I'll stay. Left are the family rooms, I remember that now, and right is down to the ------- but what is that, filling the passageway? Red and black, it's flashing red and black, it gives pain to see like looking into the sun, it bites me like a dog or a dragon. I will not go that way.
So, without choosing, she drifts to the drawing room. Much as it was, yes, she thinks. Pictures moved round a bit. And a new one, old man in funny clothes. I kind of know him. Long back, he was younger then. Trying to read what it says on the back of it. When did I reach out to turn it over? I see the letters, they're pencilled on brown paper, what they mean I cannot understand. So I can't read any more? I see well enough. My brain must have gone wrong. I'm like a small child, I'm like an old lady, I just don't know.
I'm not clever. I wasn't ever. But now? Though I can see that the furniture is furniture I don't know quite what it's for. Most of it shabby and not all that clean, though, I can understand that.
Must be a long time since I was here last then. But once I was here often. Often? No, nearly always! I lived here, it was home, something happened to me (but not here, in this big, well-lit room) no, somewhere else in the house, and afterwards I didn't come here any more, or very rarely, and...this may be my first coming back but where else have I been can't think clearly.
Take hold of yourself! Who used to say that? But it is right, a good idea. There are other rooms where I may go. But not all. I belong here. Family. Not guest, not servant. Why is it all so empty? What is there behind the dragon? Even, it may just be, a friend? Shall I go upstairs? Yes, I will go upstairs. O, this window with the spikey flower, the coloured glass, blue, white, yellow, red, I used to like it so much, one pane is cracked now. What was on the walls, the upstairs corridor? Gone! Plain, empty.
Which was my room? Yes, here! How strange! The odd machine, the coloured things on the wall, the mess.
I am sad that I am now in my own particular place and now it is my own particular place no more and I don't know where I've been or how long away and where is my bed with all its shining brass fal-lals and the picture I had 'Ruth Amid the Corn' pretty she was or supposed to be in a generous-built sort of way, I was smaller, graceful, pretty I thought, some of them thought I was dull but I could sing very ---
Outside the trees are lashed back and forth by a fierce wind. Did she remember them smaller?
Who's this?
She is shocked, she had thought herself alone in the room, in the house. A low bed, a young woman lying upon it. Take hold of yourself.
The girl is slim, and asleep. Yes, much younger than me. Raven tresses. Inelegant. Flung upon her back, mouth open as if to snore, her dress immodest even for a bedroom, showing long legs almost up to her trunk, and even apart. Ill?
Her clothes, how thick in material and ugly in design they are. Ill? Or asleep? What can I see moving around her head? But even if she is ill she may have the use of reason, is she family too, does she also belong? Shall I speak to her? Yes, I shall speak and surely she will hear. Help I need, and she will give it. Yes, I need help greatly. I shall put out my hand and shake her gently by the shoulder and when I do she goes on sleeping, so I will cry Wake up! Wake up! and I do not know who she is I even do not know who I am but I will cry wake up! wake up! and when I touch when I cry out she will awake and help me.....
'Mummy! Mummy!'
Pasqueline wakes up. Stares.
No-one else there. Course not.
Even as she realises the existence of her fear, she starts to puzzle. What frightened her?
She is glad to have woken up in the light of the afternoon. How friendly the moving trees look, reassuring.
Really, how awful to have shouted out for Elaine. Like a little girl. Like a toddler, even! Mother probably is somewhere in the house, in her 'sanctum' doing yoga. Just suppose she'd heard? And come?
What on earth could she have said to her? Or what would she have said?
Pask decides that she would have had to tell her that she had been asleep. That's true. And had a bad dream. That's not. She is absolutely certain-sure she was not dreaming at all (and she has had plenty of bad dreams.) and she knows that for the first seconds, or even minutes, after you have woken up they still seem to be real. And yet this was not a dream.
She has started up into a half-lying, half-sitting posture, watchful, alert, and a sense which she does not know she has, which radiates from behind her ears, is trying, trying hard to find that intruder who, she is still convinced, is present here.
She pushes herself more or less upright, swings her legs round, is now sitting on the edge of the bed. This takes not one movement, rather five or six jerky ones. She supports herself with spread hands, knocks dark hair into her left eye painfully, and fiercely shakes her head, as if she is attempting to throw out this notion of another's presence physically. That someone is not at all nice, not seen or touched, alien, yet also familiar somehow....
She casts around for explanation. Unoriginally and unkindly she puts the blame on her mother's dreary idea of an adequate luncheon, tinned meat and Smash. Yet she has no indigestion.
Standing, she leans over to smooth the cover she was lying on, but, leaning on it with the other hand, only makes creases radiating from the dent in it she makes. The bright posters, some covering triangles of broken plaster, which show young men showing their armpits and their drums; the bow-fronted wardrobe with its grown-out-of teddies on top, one bright pink; the thin blue and white curtains with sailing ships on them, shaken by the high wind even though the sash window is closed; the black horizontals of the music centre tricked out in chrome; the china ornaments of a curvetting horse and an eighteenth century wide-skirted lady; the postcards of Whitby and France; another half-hidden of two women looking at a statue of a naked man; the desk she does her prep at with its two rectangular holes at the back, support for a mirror when, previously, it was a dressing table; the tights and shoes beside and half under the bed; the battered case half open with dull textbooks and scribbled paper spreading out....Yes, they are all there, yes, they are all (as far as she can tell) just as they were before, though the whole room is oddly lit, yellowish, as if a thunderstorm is coming. They are real, they are solid, they are boring even, but they are all true, they are as they should be, they are not imaginary, there is nothing here to be afraid of.
No thing? But no one, no person?
Her heart is beating fast, her mouth is dry. She pushes down her short dress, lime green with a red plastic belt. She wants reassurance. For once she wants to see or speak to someone else. Or perhaps open the wardrobe and look at herself? No!
Mirrors disturb her. At least they do when she is in this kind of mood. Her heart's going far too fast. It's like when, as very rarely, she makes an effort on the hockey pitch, though the quickened heartbeat is that effort's only effect, and the taunts of her said-to-be friends will not be abated by it.
How then to be comforted? Unfortunately Daddy is at work, and at such a time his very boringness, his predictability, his tedious-English refusal ever to get het up about anything at all, how reassuring they'd feel! Elaine would be - as usual - unsympathetic, thank Heaven she did not come. Old Bessie is probably around but she understands only about half what you say and loves to talk herself, mostly about her precious grandson, but she does at least try -- to understand that is, yet you can barely understand when she answers, she's an ignorant old fool.
Pask has well hidden some cigarettes and matches, but in fact gets no pleasure from smoking, only does it because it defies, there is no point in trying to soothe herself with it now.
So the mirror then, after all. She opens the dark-inside wardrobe. (Although my description of the mess inside is amusing enough, it is long and slows up the story, so I have cut it out. Just take it that Pask, like many other teenagers, is untidy.)
The rest of the universe back to front swings on the wardrobe door, trembles, then is still and silent.
The depth to the window, next to the trees and sky! Herself before it all.
Pasqueline looks at herself, first trying to put on a haughty pose and face. Usually she finds herself wishing that she was as good-looking for a young woman as Grandpa Aitch is for an old man or irritated that she resembles rather boring now dead Grandma Elvira in face and figure - probably her bosom will not grow more, fourteen is not a child. But now she puts her hands up to her eyes and stretches them bigger up and down, she grimaces to show her canine teeth, lurches forward as if attacking, snarls like a dog, showing her inner lips; all this is to try to act out frightening herself, to give herself pale excuse either to explain her still-persisting fear or to make fun of it; most unsuccessful.
And a wariness is still with her, and a not-focused half-belief that in the deep corners of the mirror where she cannot see something or other is lurking. Or behind her - suppose the mirror only makes you think you can see what is behind and is telling you wrong? What if it is lying to you for its own bad purpose?
A cup of tea or perhaps coffee would be a good idea. (She intends never to drink alcohol, it is the only aspect of her life in which she is aware that she agrees with her mother.) Her very occasional smoking is mainly to mock at, though privately, Elaine's frequent talking about the healthful effects of deep breathing; Mother's Yoga teacher says that it is true that in caves in the high Himalayas there are holy men so pure and spiritual that they live by perfect deep breathing only, never have to do anything so crass and materialistic and vulgar as to eat.
Pasqueline opens her bedroom door. Opposite her is the ghost or spirit or shadow of a big picture outlined in a rectangle of lighter fading upon the sepia-faded wall. She does not close her bedroom door, She does not turn left to the main staircase but right towards a narrow door which almost hides the servants' stair. This is lit only by a high roof window so hard to get at that it is almost never cleaned. The treads only of these dried-out wooden steps have a dark red rubbery material upon them, the steps are at least two centuries old; these facts make them ill-designed for creeping down upon them silently, which she is trying to do, even if the would-be creeper were not a standing joke for clumsiness.
She wants to avoid old Bessie. She is not a child, or a dog, she does not want to be fussed over and petted, she is perfectly capable of doing this simple thing for herself. Also, old people frighten her more than a little; it's not that they are often ugly, awkward and stupid, that she can bear just about, it's the way they're most of them so effing cheerful about it, as if it was in some way desirable, that's what's so amazing. And hooorible, as they say at Sharth. That courage appears to think it deserves from her an admiration which she is very unwilling to give to anybody or anything -- except of course to herself.
She gets unseen into the kitchen. It is at the right side of the front of the house, with a big window showing a lawn and tree. It is big and light, a little damp. Black beams of impossible smoothness cross the ceiling, a tasteless attempt at making this part of the building look as old as it really is. There are horsebrasses on the oak door. Under a blue shelf the washing machine is shaking and burring.
Pask fills the electric kettle, sets it to boil, is reaching for her favourite striped mug when -- how on earth did she hear her with the machine racket going on? -- old Bessie comes waddling out from her own place. As expected, she has to make a great performance of it, ye olde familie servaunte, affectionate and yet respectful, 'Miss Pask' my eye and it's the twentieth century! 'Just you sit yourself down, Miss Pask my dear, and I'll brew up', and of course instead of putting a tea-bag in the mug she has to make a ceremony of it all, the second-best pewter teapot on a tray with matching milk jug and sugar bowl, matching each other, that is, on a cloth of fine lace which must be washed in milk taken out from a drawer, on a tray of some fine wood, with coasters, etc. etc. and it takes five minutes for the tea to 'stew', as Bessie calls it, and she rabbits on inquisitively, having apparently no notion that there is such a thing as a private thought in the universe, and gives you the impression she'll cheerfully share every single experience of hers since 'the War', the first one....o well!
But Pask is schooled by her father's example and a certain pride of caste she would not admit to to be always polite, courteous, tolerant -- outwardly! Inside she is bored, irritated, almost hating, though she knows that old Bessie's motives are of the best. (She calls her 'Mrs Bellows' to her face.)
Bessie offers sweet biscuits, not from a packet, but neatly arranged on their own plate. Pask refrains from dipping the one she takes, knowing Bessie would think that unladylike, smiles a little, listens after a fashion, nodding when it seems right, as Bessie goes on and on and ON about her own family, the only subject she knows well, and without any notion of summarising.
Meanwhile Pask is wondering whether it is all true. Is there really a son-in-law Tom, and is that the same man as red-faced Tom who helps Daddy in the house or garden sometimes? As for Lize the elder daughter, Pask has never seen her (she thinks, quite wrongly; in fact Lize is a part-time assistant in a shop Pask goes to now and then.) Is Lize just lies, then? As for David, the grandson, so handsome and strong he could be Mr Universe, so clever he could be Einstein, so virtuous he could be Jesus, he's evidently a fantasy figure Bessie's made up to comfort her in her long widowhood, which is quite sad, really...
'Miss Pask, I mind you're not listening to a word I'm saying, I might as well talk to the wool!' (Wall, she means.) 'O well, I mind being bored by old people when I wuz young and I don't spose it's any different now the boot's on the other foot...' (Maybe there is more humour and a little criticism here which Pask misses.) Bessie returns to the subject of her family's doings, not mentioning her younger daughter, however, and Pask listens with real pleasure, though it is the pleasure of thinking that she is not so tiresome herself.
The washing machine eventually stops, and later, clicks. There is a second cup of tea. Its warmth spreads in Pask's body. She tells Bessie her own ordinary events, the more public irritations of school life, the length and boringness of the speech to them all by Vice-Chancellor Sir Doodah Whatsit, the length and boringness of having to watch Sports Day, especially when it wasn't even sun-bathing weather.
Elaine comes in with the teacup from which she has drunk herbal tea after her yoga. She is now wearing a long purple dressing gown over the black bathing costume. She annoys Bessie by insisting on washing this up separately herself, and insisting that it must drain. She notices that Pask looks 'peaky' and almost asks her how she is -- nearly, but the most obvious reason is not to be mentioned. She takes potatoes and peels them with a half-blunt knife, leaving odd peaks and valleys, in preparation for John's supper; he may be late, he will not, though considerate otherwise, think to telephone to tell her so. After they have eaten together, and without speaking much, they may watch television together, or separate if they want different programmes. This evening, that is, will be much as u ----
A bolt of lightning strikes at the back garden with the noise of a bomb! Elaine is blinded, only for a few seconds, then sees through a red-green fog. 'My God!' she's exclaimed, Bessie 'Goodness!' and Pask 'Jee Zuss!' 'Out of a clear sky too,' says Bessie. 'That's bad luck!' (In fact it has been overcast all day.) They jostle to the door and stare out, it's not clear who was first to open it, there's a scorched and smoking mark on the lawn a foot or two across.
All three are silent. There's a half-formed idea in all of them that something sinewy and vigorous, like the plainer kind of poetry, ought to be given voice in so rare and strange a moment, so near a contact with the power that made the world and will unmake it. They are all three unconsciously regretful that they do not have the appropriate speech.
Surprisingly soft rain begins to fall, though it hisses and even spits from the burnt grass. They stop marvelling, they become aware of their separately-themed existences, the sky is darker.
Suddenly the rain falls solid as if thrown from a waterfall in the sky.
It continues to rain, and nearly as heavily, for all the rest of the day.
I don't understand.
Part of me's gone. Don't know where. Clearer, I used to think clearer. Like an old lady I'm getting.
Brain half gone? Don't know. See as well as I did ever. Don't hear much, but it was quiet here usually. But where was I a moment before standing here? Outside the front door? Just can't remember.
No-one here? No servants?
Why can't I remember, why is my head like a fog?
What things was I thinking of just then? I can't feel my clothes, I can't feel my own arms or legs even. What's wrong with me?
The house is like it was, mainly. New stair carpet, same old pictures of the Lakes. No, that carpet's worn, there's a hole on one tread, someone might fall and die. What's that mean, then?
Can't think it through. New carpet, old carpet! Can't reason.
Go slow. Think slow. Just wait.
She pauses. For as much time as one might take several deep breaths, though she does not take them.
Ah! New carpet, old carpet. Must be years since I was here before. There, I'm thinking now. Sort of.
She does not try to work out how many years, that somehow would be too difficult.
The same as it was then, and not the same. Let me come further into the hall. Yes, I have come further into the hall. Yes, they got these pictures of the Lakes when they were young. Honeymoon. I know the word, but what does it mean? Coming....yes, they'd just got married. I don't think I knew them then. I never got married. Pity, pity!
Here at the back of the hall I must turn. Up the stairs or stay down? Why are these banisters so dull? Downstairs I'll stay. Left are the family rooms, I remember that now, and right is down to the ------- but what is that, filling the passageway? Red and black, it's flashing red and black, it gives pain to see like looking into the sun, it bites me like a dog or a dragon. I will not go that way.
So, without choosing, she drifts to the drawing room. Much as it was, yes, she thinks. Pictures moved round a bit. And a new one, old man in funny clothes. I kind of know him. Long back, he was younger then. Trying to read what it says on the back of it. When did I reach out to turn it over? I see the letters, they're pencilled on brown paper, what they mean I cannot understand. So I can't read any more? I see well enough. My brain must have gone wrong. I'm like a small child, I'm like an old lady, I just don't know.
I'm not clever. I wasn't ever. But now? Though I can see that the furniture is furniture I don't know quite what it's for. Most of it shabby and not all that clean, though, I can understand that.
Must be a long time since I was here last then. But once I was here often. Often? No, nearly always! I lived here, it was home, something happened to me (but not here, in this big, well-lit room) no, somewhere else in the house, and afterwards I didn't come here any more, or very rarely, and...this may be my first coming back but where else have I been can't think clearly.
Take hold of yourself! Who used to say that? But it is right, a good idea. There are other rooms where I may go. But not all. I belong here. Family. Not guest, not servant. Why is it all so empty? What is there behind the dragon? Even, it may just be, a friend? Shall I go upstairs? Yes, I will go upstairs. O, this window with the spikey flower, the coloured glass, blue, white, yellow, red, I used to like it so much, one pane is cracked now. What was on the walls, the upstairs corridor? Gone! Plain, empty.
Which was my room? Yes, here! How strange! The odd machine, the coloured things on the wall, the mess.
I am sad that I am now in my own particular place and now it is my own particular place no more and I don't know where I've been or how long away and where is my bed with all its shining brass fal-lals and the picture I had 'Ruth Amid the Corn' pretty she was or supposed to be in a generous-built sort of way, I was smaller, graceful, pretty I thought, some of them thought I was dull but I could sing very ---
Outside the trees are lashed back and forth by a fierce wind. Did she remember them smaller?
Who's this?
She is shocked, she had thought herself alone in the room, in the house. A low bed, a young woman lying upon it. Take hold of yourself.
The girl is slim, and asleep. Yes, much younger than me. Raven tresses. Inelegant. Flung upon her back, mouth open as if to snore, her dress immodest even for a bedroom, showing long legs almost up to her trunk, and even apart. Ill?
Her clothes, how thick in material and ugly in design they are. Ill? Or asleep? What can I see moving around her head? But even if she is ill she may have the use of reason, is she family too, does she also belong? Shall I speak to her? Yes, I shall speak and surely she will hear. Help I need, and she will give it. Yes, I need help greatly. I shall put out my hand and shake her gently by the shoulder and when I do she goes on sleeping, so I will cry Wake up! Wake up! and I do not know who she is I even do not know who I am but I will cry wake up! wake up! and when I touch when I cry out she will awake and help me.....
'Mummy! Mummy!'
Pasqueline wakes up. Stares.
No-one else there. Course not.
Even as she realises the existence of her fear, she starts to puzzle. What frightened her?
She is glad to have woken up in the light of the afternoon. How friendly the moving trees look, reassuring.
Really, how awful to have shouted out for Elaine. Like a little girl. Like a toddler, even! Mother probably is somewhere in the house, in her 'sanctum' doing yoga. Just suppose she'd heard? And come?
What on earth could she have said to her? Or what would she have said?
Pask decides that she would have had to tell her that she had been asleep. That's true. And had a bad dream. That's not. She is absolutely certain-sure she was not dreaming at all (and she has had plenty of bad dreams.) and she knows that for the first seconds, or even minutes, after you have woken up they still seem to be real. And yet this was not a dream.
She has started up into a half-lying, half-sitting posture, watchful, alert, and a sense which she does not know she has, which radiates from behind her ears, is trying, trying hard to find that intruder who, she is still convinced, is present here.
She pushes herself more or less upright, swings her legs round, is now sitting on the edge of the bed. This takes not one movement, rather five or six jerky ones. She supports herself with spread hands, knocks dark hair into her left eye painfully, and fiercely shakes her head, as if she is attempting to throw out this notion of another's presence physically. That someone is not at all nice, not seen or touched, alien, yet also familiar somehow....
She casts around for explanation. Unoriginally and unkindly she puts the blame on her mother's dreary idea of an adequate luncheon, tinned meat and Smash. Yet she has no indigestion.
Standing, she leans over to smooth the cover she was lying on, but, leaning on it with the other hand, only makes creases radiating from the dent in it she makes. The bright posters, some covering triangles of broken plaster, which show young men showing their armpits and their drums; the bow-fronted wardrobe with its grown-out-of teddies on top, one bright pink; the thin blue and white curtains with sailing ships on them, shaken by the high wind even though the sash window is closed; the black horizontals of the music centre tricked out in chrome; the china ornaments of a curvetting horse and an eighteenth century wide-skirted lady; the postcards of Whitby and France; another half-hidden of two women looking at a statue of a naked man; the desk she does her prep at with its two rectangular holes at the back, support for a mirror when, previously, it was a dressing table; the tights and shoes beside and half under the bed; the battered case half open with dull textbooks and scribbled paper spreading out....Yes, they are all there, yes, they are all (as far as she can tell) just as they were before, though the whole room is oddly lit, yellowish, as if a thunderstorm is coming. They are real, they are solid, they are boring even, but they are all true, they are as they should be, they are not imaginary, there is nothing here to be afraid of.
No thing? But no one, no person?
Her heart is beating fast, her mouth is dry. She pushes down her short dress, lime green with a red plastic belt. She wants reassurance. For once she wants to see or speak to someone else. Or perhaps open the wardrobe and look at herself? No!
Mirrors disturb her. At least they do when she is in this kind of mood. Her heart's going far too fast. It's like when, as very rarely, she makes an effort on the hockey pitch, though the quickened heartbeat is that effort's only effect, and the taunts of her said-to-be friends will not be abated by it.
How then to be comforted? Unfortunately Daddy is at work, and at such a time his very boringness, his predictability, his tedious-English refusal ever to get het up about anything at all, how reassuring they'd feel! Elaine would be - as usual - unsympathetic, thank Heaven she did not come. Old Bessie is probably around but she understands only about half what you say and loves to talk herself, mostly about her precious grandson, but she does at least try -- to understand that is, yet you can barely understand when she answers, she's an ignorant old fool.
Pask has well hidden some cigarettes and matches, but in fact gets no pleasure from smoking, only does it because it defies, there is no point in trying to soothe herself with it now.
So the mirror then, after all. She opens the dark-inside wardrobe. (Although my description of the mess inside is amusing enough, it is long and slows up the story, so I have cut it out. Just take it that Pask, like many other teenagers, is untidy.)
The rest of the universe back to front swings on the wardrobe door, trembles, then is still and silent.
The depth to the window, next to the trees and sky! Herself before it all.
Pasqueline looks at herself, first trying to put on a haughty pose and face. Usually she finds herself wishing that she was as good-looking for a young woman as Grandpa Aitch is for an old man or irritated that she resembles rather boring now dead Grandma Elvira in face and figure - probably her bosom will not grow more, fourteen is not a child. But now she puts her hands up to her eyes and stretches them bigger up and down, she grimaces to show her canine teeth, lurches forward as if attacking, snarls like a dog, showing her inner lips; all this is to try to act out frightening herself, to give herself pale excuse either to explain her still-persisting fear or to make fun of it; most unsuccessful.
And a wariness is still with her, and a not-focused half-belief that in the deep corners of the mirror where she cannot see something or other is lurking. Or behind her - suppose the mirror only makes you think you can see what is behind and is telling you wrong? What if it is lying to you for its own bad purpose?
A cup of tea or perhaps coffee would be a good idea. (She intends never to drink alcohol, it is the only aspect of her life in which she is aware that she agrees with her mother.) Her very occasional smoking is mainly to mock at, though privately, Elaine's frequent talking about the healthful effects of deep breathing; Mother's Yoga teacher says that it is true that in caves in the high Himalayas there are holy men so pure and spiritual that they live by perfect deep breathing only, never have to do anything so crass and materialistic and vulgar as to eat.
Pasqueline opens her bedroom door. Opposite her is the ghost or spirit or shadow of a big picture outlined in a rectangle of lighter fading upon the sepia-faded wall. She does not close her bedroom door, She does not turn left to the main staircase but right towards a narrow door which almost hides the servants' stair. This is lit only by a high roof window so hard to get at that it is almost never cleaned. The treads only of these dried-out wooden steps have a dark red rubbery material upon them, the steps are at least two centuries old; these facts make them ill-designed for creeping down upon them silently, which she is trying to do, even if the would-be creeper were not a standing joke for clumsiness.
She wants to avoid old Bessie. She is not a child, or a dog, she does not want to be fussed over and petted, she is perfectly capable of doing this simple thing for herself. Also, old people frighten her more than a little; it's not that they are often ugly, awkward and stupid, that she can bear just about, it's the way they're most of them so effing cheerful about it, as if it was in some way desirable, that's what's so amazing. And hooorible, as they say at Sharth. That courage appears to think it deserves from her an admiration which she is very unwilling to give to anybody or anything -- except of course to herself.
She gets unseen into the kitchen. It is at the right side of the front of the house, with a big window showing a lawn and tree. It is big and light, a little damp. Black beams of impossible smoothness cross the ceiling, a tasteless attempt at making this part of the building look as old as it really is. There are horsebrasses on the oak door. Under a blue shelf the washing machine is shaking and burring.
Pask fills the electric kettle, sets it to boil, is reaching for her favourite striped mug when -- how on earth did she hear her with the machine racket going on? -- old Bessie comes waddling out from her own place. As expected, she has to make a great performance of it, ye olde familie servaunte, affectionate and yet respectful, 'Miss Pask' my eye and it's the twentieth century! 'Just you sit yourself down, Miss Pask my dear, and I'll brew up', and of course instead of putting a tea-bag in the mug she has to make a ceremony of it all, the second-best pewter teapot on a tray with matching milk jug and sugar bowl, matching each other, that is, on a cloth of fine lace which must be washed in milk taken out from a drawer, on a tray of some fine wood, with coasters, etc. etc. and it takes five minutes for the tea to 'stew', as Bessie calls it, and she rabbits on inquisitively, having apparently no notion that there is such a thing as a private thought in the universe, and gives you the impression she'll cheerfully share every single experience of hers since 'the War', the first one....o well!
But Pask is schooled by her father's example and a certain pride of caste she would not admit to to be always polite, courteous, tolerant -- outwardly! Inside she is bored, irritated, almost hating, though she knows that old Bessie's motives are of the best. (She calls her 'Mrs Bellows' to her face.)
Bessie offers sweet biscuits, not from a packet, but neatly arranged on their own plate. Pask refrains from dipping the one she takes, knowing Bessie would think that unladylike, smiles a little, listens after a fashion, nodding when it seems right, as Bessie goes on and on and ON about her own family, the only subject she knows well, and without any notion of summarising.
Meanwhile Pask is wondering whether it is all true. Is there really a son-in-law Tom, and is that the same man as red-faced Tom who helps Daddy in the house or garden sometimes? As for Lize the elder daughter, Pask has never seen her (she thinks, quite wrongly; in fact Lize is a part-time assistant in a shop Pask goes to now and then.) Is Lize just lies, then? As for David, the grandson, so handsome and strong he could be Mr Universe, so clever he could be Einstein, so virtuous he could be Jesus, he's evidently a fantasy figure Bessie's made up to comfort her in her long widowhood, which is quite sad, really...
'Miss Pask, I mind you're not listening to a word I'm saying, I might as well talk to the wool!' (Wall, she means.) 'O well, I mind being bored by old people when I wuz young and I don't spose it's any different now the boot's on the other foot...' (Maybe there is more humour and a little criticism here which Pask misses.) Bessie returns to the subject of her family's doings, not mentioning her younger daughter, however, and Pask listens with real pleasure, though it is the pleasure of thinking that she is not so tiresome herself.
The washing machine eventually stops, and later, clicks. There is a second cup of tea. Its warmth spreads in Pask's body. She tells Bessie her own ordinary events, the more public irritations of school life, the length and boringness of the speech to them all by Vice-Chancellor Sir Doodah Whatsit, the length and boringness of having to watch Sports Day, especially when it wasn't even sun-bathing weather.
Elaine comes in with the teacup from which she has drunk herbal tea after her yoga. She is now wearing a long purple dressing gown over the black bathing costume. She annoys Bessie by insisting on washing this up separately herself, and insisting that it must drain. She notices that Pask looks 'peaky' and almost asks her how she is -- nearly, but the most obvious reason is not to be mentioned. She takes potatoes and peels them with a half-blunt knife, leaving odd peaks and valleys, in preparation for John's supper; he may be late, he will not, though considerate otherwise, think to telephone to tell her so. After they have eaten together, and without speaking much, they may watch television together, or separate if they want different programmes. This evening, that is, will be much as u ----
A bolt of lightning strikes at the back garden with the noise of a bomb! Elaine is blinded, only for a few seconds, then sees through a red-green fog. 'My God!' she's exclaimed, Bessie 'Goodness!' and Pask 'Jee Zuss!' 'Out of a clear sky too,' says Bessie. 'That's bad luck!' (In fact it has been overcast all day.) They jostle to the door and stare out, it's not clear who was first to open it, there's a scorched and smoking mark on the lawn a foot or two across.
All three are silent. There's a half-formed idea in all of them that something sinewy and vigorous, like the plainer kind of poetry, ought to be given voice in so rare and strange a moment, so near a contact with the power that made the world and will unmake it. They are all three unconsciously regretful that they do not have the appropriate speech.
Surprisingly soft rain begins to fall, though it hisses and even spits from the burnt grass. They stop marvelling, they become aware of their separately-themed existences, the sky is darker.
Suddenly the rain falls solid as if thrown from a waterfall in the sky.
It continues to rain, and nearly as heavily, for all the rest of the day.
*
Elaine is only occasionally voluble. She often sits near silent in company, then, growing aware of it, blurts out something tactless and too true. Younger - she is a little older than her husband - she was slim and tall, nearly elegant. She has minor skin problems which she thinks major. Physically awkward often, seeming to have more elbows than the normal allowance of arms can account for. Yoga helps, not enough. She dislikes that her own clumsiness is magnified in Pask to something almost oafish, but 'I do love her', she says to herself now and then.
Now back to Bessie. Elaine and Pask left her there soon after the lightning struck. She sits on, with yet another cup of tea, her eyes pointing out to the fierce rain, lost in thought, or rather lost in her own self. She used to be a hard worker, but now she is not far from seventy and has mild rheumatism. She has had a hard life, she says often to others, and it is true. And yet she relishes the role.
She is short, has no waist, is softly plump, her once black hair is grey and rather thin, her unlined face is an agreeable pink colour like some old brick. Nothing much is in her head. She has not many words and almost no ideas. Rarely has she been further from home than Bishoprick, the county town only twenty miles away. She loves her own family, especially Dave, and those up at the big house, with reservations about Elaine. Her neighbours, she thinks, respect her for the courage she has shown over against life's hardness. Of course, they think of her much less than she imagines; for all that, she is recognised as one of the 'old characters' of the 'estate' where she has lived most of her life.
She is a widow, and has been so long it is as if she born one. Her husband William was a policeman, killed by a bomb. Not in the War itself, but when an unexploded one had been found, and he went into the danger area to rescue an animal or a child or to check that no-one else was there. He was blown to bits, they had to bury what they could find of him in a little box no bigger than a child's, and him six foot three. She was rightly proud of his heroism, and of the newspaper articles which she cut out and put away safe somewhere.
She had a small or very small pension. She had two tiny daughters to bring up as well as she could alone. I never looked at another man, she used to say. They had to leave the police house, they got her a council house, then shining-new but overhastily built. She spent a lot of time in the next years in the shabby waiting rooms of almost-as-shabby offices trying to get various grants, loans, hand-outs or allowances. She would not lie or beg, she had her self-respect.
If she had thought forward all those years ago (to do so is alien to her) she would not have expected her daughters to be living with her still. Her little house with more spent on it could be comfortable for two, but there are five: herself, Lize who is respectable and penny-pinching, her husband Tom who is amiable and usually unemployed, the remarkable Dave their son, and Belinda who nearly everyone else calls Blowsy, which Bessie resists, who has the achievement of having become eight years younger than the elder sister who was three when she was born, who is beautiful (or -ish), sexy, laughing, frivolous, whom everybody immediately likes on first meeting and after years of acquaintance knows no deeper. Mark her well, she is the only extrovert in this story.
Only in the big house is Bessie ever alone. The family there, like her own, like the characters in a 'soap', provide interest and amusement or disapproval. It never occurs to her, and probably doesn't to them either, that they have no absolute obligation to employ her - but, after all, she grew up here too, in what were then rooms over the stable; her father was at first coachman, then chauffeur, her mother was the housekeeper. That was when old Mrs Gritnell was alive, John's great-aunt Maria.Nothing of any importance has happened here ever which Bessie does not know as witness, participant, or through servants' hall tradition. She keeps secrets like a priest.
Yet there is one matter of which she will never think, she has disciplined herself even to be unaware that she will not think of it - at some cost.
*
Now, we writers and readers of books have much more inner life than someone like Bessie. Or so I assume, aware that this may be the basest snobbery. I'll summarize the next few pages of the original mss. If I tell of Bessie's work at any great length, it may be as tedious for you to read as a different woman (London University degree, say) might find doing it. But remember that Bessie does everything with controlled, economic, as it were quiet movement, she is a well-trained servant; this is what Pask thinks is fussy and tiresome in her.
The back door here is several hundred years old. You could scrape through it with a knife and find out what colours were fashionable when, so many times it has been repainted. It's fallen on its hinges and has made quarter-circles on the paving of the floor. Bessie's own particular place is where fifty or more years back a fierce smoking woman used to come in to mangle the clothes, that is, half-dry them by squeezing them between rubber-clothed cast iron rollers. She swore and smoked and never worshipped, the servants with their steady jobs and much-(over)valued 'respectability' avoided her as much as they could. She had arms like a blacksmith's.
There was then, is still, a deep oak-fronted cupboard at the back. Here Bessie keeps her hoovers and so forth, but has to bend awkwardly to get them in and out, because the doors start only from three feet above the floor. They meant kindly, surely they did, giving her her own particular room in the house, and she has furnished it quite pleasantly with their throw-outs and things from jumble sales, but it was not sensitively chosen, because her rheumatism makes her stiff sometimes. And for another reason.
Up she goes on the rubber-coated stairs in what is almost darkness because of the continuing storm, and into the guest bathroom, which is along the corridor some way from Pask's bedroom. The Edwardian bath (ivory-coloured, with odd brown stainings) stands central, and has legs like those of a big dog gilded over. It radiates coldness. At the taps' end and extending above it is a complicated and expensive mass of plumbing seventy years old for giving yourself all kinds of different showers, or for another purpose. Like many things in the house it no longer functions properly. Maria's husband John was friendly with a minor artist who one bored Sunday painted a merman on the wall here. Bessie erects several clotheshorses, one fitting across the bath, checks that a small window is open, and arranges the new-washed clothes upon them to dry.
The storm goes on.
Bessie goes down and irons other clothes. She takes Pasqueline hers (she is doing her prep - homework - in the bedroom) and Pask thanks her casually and plonks them on the nearest half-empty surface. Then Bessie goes down again and sits in her room drinking instant coffee, which does not prevent her from nodding off to sleep...
Bessie goes down and irons other clothes. She takes Pasqueline hers (she is doing her prep - homework - in the bedroom) and Pask thanks her casually and plonks them on the nearest half-empty surface. Then Bessie goes down again and sits in her room drinking instant coffee, which does not prevent her from nodding off to sleep...
...Ten minutes later, she wakes suddenly, and feels all queer. She looks everywhere in the room. No-one there. Lord, it's a bit like I felt all those years ago when ---. When. I was a teenager not that they called it that then and I had to work, WORK I tell you, up early, bed late, six and a half days a week and none of the chance of being educated kids have nowadays. Heavy I'm feeling. Cast down. Like you're carrying something you don't want to be carrying. Lot like that bad time all them years back.
Some gin'd help but Mrs John would think it odd to ask her for it...
She goes to the front of the house now to look for him, and is pleased to see that John has drawn up in his elderly Land Rover, which shines for once, so heavy is the rain which is making the taller flowers nod and shake; he won't buy a newer vehicle just for the look of it.
He'll take her home soon. He comes in and asks her after all her family, whom she is always eager to talk about, and goes out first into the rain so that he can open the passenger door for her.
He drives back cautiously along Gritnell's Lane, though there is no other traffic, then onto a wider and twisting up-and-down road through the hilly village. It's crossed by a railway viaduct now disused, which, he says, you could buy for only a pound; trick is, you'd have to maintain it, and that would cost tens of thousands each year. (Bessie does not say that he has told her this before.) He'd like the Franklyns to buy it; they're a local rich family, his elder brother's wife is one of them, people like Bessie don't like them much because they have, deserved or not, a reputation of being hard employers and hard landlords; this also, of course, she does not say.
He drives back cautiously along Gritnell's Lane, though there is no other traffic, then onto a wider and twisting up-and-down road through the hilly village. It's crossed by a railway viaduct now disused, which, he says, you could buy for only a pound; trick is, you'd have to maintain it, and that would cost tens of thousands each year. (Bessie does not say that he has told her this before.) He'd like the Franklyns to buy it; they're a local rich family, his elder brother's wife is one of them, people like Bessie don't like them much because they have, deserved or not, a reputation of being hard employers and hard landlords; this also, of course, she does not say.
The storm and the plain vehicle's tough old engine make it hard to talk, and the inside of the front window threatens to steam up. In the odd light John's finely outlined face with its nose a little too long for elegance (Pask's is like that too) looks unfamiliar.
They go down this twisting and - for a main one - quite narrow road, leave the old village, and after a half-mile or so, come to the Eastbridge estate, turning off where there used to be a preaching cross used by friars and Wesley until, fairly recently, it was decided it was a traffic hazard and therefore it was torn down. For all that, this turn is still known as 'the Cross'.
Mrs Bellows' road is St Osgyth's Close. St Osgyth was a princess of the royal family of Demnetia quite a while back, sister of the even less well-known St Ethrwulf, King and Martyr, whom his vile stepmother Queen Isgyth murdered. In their time Belker Tap, this nowadays obscure village, was for a month or so every year the nation's capital -- the king and his nobles came with their furniture in carts and ate up that year's harvest, then went on. Locals have never forgotten this past status, and see that their children won't.
In this close there are seven blocks of four little terraced houses, with a passage through the middle leading to the 'back', in fact side, doors of the central two houses. Some remarkably expensive-looking cars are parked. John leaves Bessie there and she goes hastily up the brief path that leads to the front door (it is still raining) and he reverses with minor difficulty to drive back.
She opens, almost too easily, the quarter-inch thick front door and goes into the front hall, shaking herself. 'Belinda, it's me!' she calls out. Blowsy does not answer. She opens the hall cupboard to put her coat in it, then decides it's just about wet enough to need airing, puts it over the banister, and closes the cupboard door; after a few seconds, as if living and faintly malicious, it opens itself again.
There are many customs, rituals even, in Bessie's innocent, blameless, almost virtuous life, one of which is that when she comes in she must announce herself to the next-senior member of the family whom she believes to be present; neither must she go out ever without saying where to. She believes, wrongly as it happens, that Blowsy is there, and shouts out to her again.
'She's not here, Gran,' Dave calls from the dining room six feet away. ''Spec she's still up Seydell-Mertz's.' He is almost disguising his resentment at being interrupted, even from himself; he is a quiet, well-meaning youth. Yes, he really did keep it out of the tone of his voice: long practice.
The others who live in the house had all of them been out, all of them together; this isn't often the case. He had relished the opportunity to work. He had gone to his special box, a trunk kept, awkwardly for everybody, under the dining room table, which everybody else has promised solemnly never to open, and kept that promise, indeed they have superstitious feelings about it.
He had been kneeling lifting the lid when the lightning had struck fiercely. About two miles away, roughly north-east, he had estimated - automatically, he has a habit of estimating such things. He is one of those people, need I say, whose life is lived mainly inside his own head.
Soon he had spread out across the table most of the pages of last week's local newspaper. Next he put neatly and methodically upon it various wires, batteries, transistors, several kinds of screwdriver, and the invention itself. The elaborate plan he put to his right. He laid all these things out each in their long-accustomed place, much as a theatre sister would do for a surgeon.
He unfolded the plan and read it over again, almost unnecessarily, since he himself had designed it.
It had rained and soon after had begun to rain heavily, but he did not notice. He was bending over his work, a tall young man, strongly built though stooping. He has greyish-blonde curls, his skin is pinkish, he has no acne nor any apparent need to shave. He is precise in all his movements. After a brief while the rain made it dark enough for him to put on the overhead light, after two hours he needed to wee, otherwise he was completely absorbed. Behind him is a china cabinet too big for the room, extravagently designed, french-polished, not holding much; it was a present from Gritnells. His back is reflected in its thin panes. Round-headed, long-limbed, with pronounced knuckles and finger-joints, he was staring at work that almost appeared to be doing itself, so little was any part of his body moving except his hands. From time to time he sucked his upper lip, or clicked his tongue as if encouraging a horse.
The rain went on falling heavy-steadily upon the little house, upon the others nearly identical in their block of four, upon the similar blocks in the same street, and on other roads with houses of the same kind, all painted cream. It rained on open country, making red mud of paths, it rained on the grey 'old village' in its dip, upon the newer houses just north with their many cars, upon Gritnells where his grandmother was, apart from them all in its own lane, upon the row of bungalows away from all the other houses which look as if they have strayed from a town, and the old barn next to the end of them. Streams and the tumbled fast and pink under their bridges.
Despite its long duration this rain has brought no refreshment. It makes the air horribly damp like a steambath, it seems even to be swallowing the air and replacing it with some less wholesome gas.
They go down this twisting and - for a main one - quite narrow road, leave the old village, and after a half-mile or so, come to the Eastbridge estate, turning off where there used to be a preaching cross used by friars and Wesley until, fairly recently, it was decided it was a traffic hazard and therefore it was torn down. For all that, this turn is still known as 'the Cross'.
Mrs Bellows' road is St Osgyth's Close. St Osgyth was a princess of the royal family of Demnetia quite a while back, sister of the even less well-known St Ethrwulf, King and Martyr, whom his vile stepmother Queen Isgyth murdered. In their time Belker Tap, this nowadays obscure village, was for a month or so every year the nation's capital -- the king and his nobles came with their furniture in carts and ate up that year's harvest, then went on. Locals have never forgotten this past status, and see that their children won't.
In this close there are seven blocks of four little terraced houses, with a passage through the middle leading to the 'back', in fact side, doors of the central two houses. Some remarkably expensive-looking cars are parked. John leaves Bessie there and she goes hastily up the brief path that leads to the front door (it is still raining) and he reverses with minor difficulty to drive back.
She opens, almost too easily, the quarter-inch thick front door and goes into the front hall, shaking herself. 'Belinda, it's me!' she calls out. Blowsy does not answer. She opens the hall cupboard to put her coat in it, then decides it's just about wet enough to need airing, puts it over the banister, and closes the cupboard door; after a few seconds, as if living and faintly malicious, it opens itself again.
There are many customs, rituals even, in Bessie's innocent, blameless, almost virtuous life, one of which is that when she comes in she must announce herself to the next-senior member of the family whom she believes to be present; neither must she go out ever without saying where to. She believes, wrongly as it happens, that Blowsy is there, and shouts out to her again.
'She's not here, Gran,' Dave calls from the dining room six feet away. ''Spec she's still up Seydell-Mertz's.' He is almost disguising his resentment at being interrupted, even from himself; he is a quiet, well-meaning youth. Yes, he really did keep it out of the tone of his voice: long practice.
The others who live in the house had all of them been out, all of them together; this isn't often the case. He had relished the opportunity to work. He had gone to his special box, a trunk kept, awkwardly for everybody, under the dining room table, which everybody else has promised solemnly never to open, and kept that promise, indeed they have superstitious feelings about it.
He had been kneeling lifting the lid when the lightning had struck fiercely. About two miles away, roughly north-east, he had estimated - automatically, he has a habit of estimating such things. He is one of those people, need I say, whose life is lived mainly inside his own head.
Soon he had spread out across the table most of the pages of last week's local newspaper. Next he put neatly and methodically upon it various wires, batteries, transistors, several kinds of screwdriver, and the invention itself. The elaborate plan he put to his right. He laid all these things out each in their long-accustomed place, much as a theatre sister would do for a surgeon.
He unfolded the plan and read it over again, almost unnecessarily, since he himself had designed it.
It had rained and soon after had begun to rain heavily, but he did not notice. He was bending over his work, a tall young man, strongly built though stooping. He has greyish-blonde curls, his skin is pinkish, he has no acne nor any apparent need to shave. He is precise in all his movements. After a brief while the rain made it dark enough for him to put on the overhead light, after two hours he needed to wee, otherwise he was completely absorbed. Behind him is a china cabinet too big for the room, extravagently designed, french-polished, not holding much; it was a present from Gritnells. His back is reflected in its thin panes. Round-headed, long-limbed, with pronounced knuckles and finger-joints, he was staring at work that almost appeared to be doing itself, so little was any part of his body moving except his hands. From time to time he sucked his upper lip, or clicked his tongue as if encouraging a horse.
The rain went on falling heavy-steadily upon the little house, upon the others nearly identical in their block of four, upon the similar blocks in the same street, and on other roads with houses of the same kind, all painted cream. It rained on open country, making red mud of paths, it rained on the grey 'old village' in its dip, upon the newer houses just north with their many cars, upon Gritnells where his grandmother was, apart from them all in its own lane, upon the row of bungalows away from all the other houses which look as if they have strayed from a town, and the old barn next to the end of them. Streams and the tumbled fast and pink under their bridges.
Despite its long duration this rain has brought no refreshment. It makes the air horribly damp like a steambath, it seems even to be swallowing the air and replacing it with some less wholesome gas.
Now, as always when she hears his voice, his grandmother's manner brightens. Her head goes up a little, attentive, the sides of her lips twitch as if she is beginning to smile. She takes off her cellophane rainhat now, smoothes her thin iron-grey hair, and comes into the tiny dining-room. Dave is sitting at the table which nearly fills it, wearing his school blazer still. Bessie doesn't glance at the wires and tools etc., even passingly. Keenly curious about people, she has little interest in things - objects, I mean. She barely registers that he is making something, yet she knows that if it is being made by him it must be amazingly clever, and she glows with possessive pride.
Which immediately translates into a need to make herself useful to him. 'Would you like me to make you a cup of tea or coffee, our Dave?' she asks, her tone as deferential - at least! - as it would be 'up Gritnells' but here there is eagerness, excitement even, also.
'Thanks, Gran. Coffee. Please. That would be nice,' he answers with his usual patient good manners, and she does not understand that he has agreed partly, mainly, to stop her interrupting further his work, or rather to postpone such interruption; she never will.
She goes into their kitchen now. It has a floor of some dark shiny hard material, and a large mat or rug of interwoven plastic strips covers most of it. An open door reveals the house's only w.c. with its seat up in a O, above it the crude metal cistern on which cold clear drops are now condensing. At waist level there is a profusion of ingenious gadgets, two mixers, one big, one small, two electric kettles, the same, a radio, shining microwave, toaster, a slow cooker or two, electric carving knife, etc., Dave had insisted they buy all these - so it is better furnished in this respect that the four or five times bigger kitchen at Gritnells. And there is an oven, frig, washing machine of course too. A long thin table and matching chairs make it full.
Bessie starts making instant coffee, delighted by this trivial and completely unnecessary work. Seventeen and a half years of such worshipping attention mean that David, who really is clever and is probably the best student of physics his not undistinguished school has ever had, though he could do it for himself, would first need to take thought how.
When she comes and puts the coffee gently near his right hand, she says, 'Look at the rain! How it dew come down!' She speaks in wonder, awed by its power. Dave glances up, in the garden the cabbages are swaying under the storm's force more like animals than plants, and says 'yes' briefly out of patient politeness, though wonder is not in him.
But it is well worth looking at, the fierce rain. The wild vigour of it, the way it is jumping back into itself where it hits the road, the brilliant shine it gives even to the oldest vehicles, the way it is making rare pedestrians fight, blowing umbrellas inside out, forcing their clothes wetly onto the fronts or backs of their knees, lifting outer garments nosily. Worth listening to as well, its cheerful hiss seems to be aware of its own wild energy and to be praising itself for it.
Rain does not interest Dave, his self-given task does. He bends his long neck over it again, sucking now his lower lip, as his mother does sometimes when tired at her shop till.
Gran does not imagine that the big house family and their doings are of only marginal interest to Dave; (it would not be true to say of no interest, he has been hearing about them all his life.) She now tells him, settling herself in her favourite chair in the front room, all about what the Ferraces said and did or even wore, which, apart from the lightning strike, is very much as it was the previous week. She speaks almost formally, feeling herself charged to impart information of great weight. Well-practised in seeming to listen, David said 'yes' or 'really!' where her tone suggests it's appropriate.
Bessie is long accustomed to talk about other persons, their actions, their clothes, their health (o, especially their health), even their beliefs. People and where things can be bought cheap in shops are her two subjects. Emotions she does not speak of, or intuitions, it is our bad English way. No, not even her own, her oppressed unease in the big house today, lessened by the journey back and the familiarity of home, but still there.
To talk she had put herself in her favourite brown leather armchair. There is a double door between the front room and the back where Dave is. When she has finished and put the television on he gets up and shuts these doors discreetly. This closing makes almost no difference to the noise of the set, but he feels it cuts him off. He goes on working deftly, as if by instinct, assembling many of these parts. His mother no doubt is working late at the shop, his dad is at the pub. He is not aware of loneliness.
It gets darker. Bessie pulls the front room curtains neatly, comes into the back room, pulls those there, goes back to the television, having closed the dividing doors; all this as noiselessly as if a well-oiled machine did it.
*
A black squat taxi leaves the end bungalow of the row, next to the converted barn with big windows. It comes east into the village by Kinghouse, under the purple-bricked viaduct, turns down the mirrored main road. The one passenger sprawls in the back seat, a generously made woman though not tall, her legs and arms spread out. Her hair is long, thick and blonde, her features large, she is made-up thick and carefully, her opulent breasts would have spread were it not for involved and expensive cantilevering, her hips have done so. She is all in expensive well-brushed black, though nothing like a funeral, over that dress a red half-transparent shiny raincoat one size too small. She is laughing at all this rain, imagining too that it is laughing back at her. A while back she was the village princess in the carnival.
She calls the driver 'mate', he calls her 'love'. They understand each other. He is driving his square four-wheeled box flamboyantly, swerving half-way across the road at corners, in fact as if it is a red, low-slung sports car. This is in response to her luscious over-ripe sexuality, she is like a costly creamcake, she is like a windfall apple, most of all she is like herself.
The cab splashes the pavement pulling up. She pays the driver and tips him, rushes to the front door, slams it, or rather tries to, the wind meaning she must put her bottom to it, cries out 'Mum! I'm home!' (which is obvious enough, she might be part of the storm), flings her raincoat over the banister, leaves it on the floor where it wetly slides, flings herself through the two other downstairs rooms into the kitchen, cying 'Wotcher, our Dave!' as she goes by and thumping him friendlily on the shoulder just as he's trying to make a delicate connection, asks 'What yer fiddle-faddling about with now then?' but does not stay for an answer.
************************************These two are not on the surface friends at all. Dave's self-absorption irritates her as far as anything does, but that isn't much. She knows he thinks she's stupid, she thinks he's a bore, 'and if he's so boring now while he's so young what on earth will he be like when he's my a--?' (no, she does not want to think of that age) and envies just a little in Dave that capacity to observe seriously and think things through which she knows she lacks, and his ability to make his own pleasure: 'well, I can, of course, ducky, but I'd rather have a man', she says -- all her humour is of this sort. She has never yet spoken or done anything else quietly.
'I'll show you when I've finished,' Dave has answered, but she's already gone. His whole life, and naturally especially in the last few years, he has found the physicality of Blowsy's presence disturbing. He moves, as he does everything, carefully; she seems to throw herself around, though she never breaks anything unless she means to.
She has by now made herself instant coffee and put a spoonful from her own private brandy in it, a large spoonful, need I say? Now she throws her body back in a chair in the front room, showing the bulging smooth white tops of her thighs above the black stockings bitten into by the straps of her suspender belt, old-fashioned as Hell, she thinks, but 'the boss' Heinrich likes them. She has reached for the control and turned up the television sound. Dave had stood up for about only the third time in as many hours and closed the doors between the rooms, though since they are mostly striated glass the colours of the large television could still distract one less able to switch them off from his attention. Without asking Bessie, Blowsy has changed channels, having said 'Woss this rubbish, our muff?' in doing it. After that she pays the programme scarcely more attention than Dave, scratches herself a little, listens a little to the downpour, and tells Bessie, always hungry for such details, everything - or rather seemingly everything - she has done that day. Blowsy has not got married, therefore her mother likes to believe that she is a virgin.
She often seems to be flush with money, though she doesn't appear to do anything much. Her official line of work, well, a more sensitive youth than Dave would be teased about it every day at school; he will never realise how much an even temper, a good physique and an inbuilt habit of emotional restraint have spared him. She has friends whom she visits 'to oblige' in various places in Demnetshire, and she does think of them as friends, she has generously been given beauty, she must behave generously, she thinks, and from her thirteenth year there has been no lack of men who will explain to her how to. She takes from these friends, though she never demands, clothes, jewels, restaurant meals, holidays abroad, etc.; not usually cash, but when she is offered it large quantities of notes discreetly wrapped in an envelope. She is kind when it is not much trouble, she has paid for the caravan in the back garden outside and all the expensive fitments inside. She is good company for anyone with any minor sorrow, though not bereavement. You can just about imagine that she will go to Heaven, but never that she will go to the Methodist chapel.
She begins now though no-one is listening to berate another tv programme just started. Bessie enjoys this one and tries to defend it weakly. Blowsy does not notice that Bessie looks upset.
Dave's hands tremble a little as he works on. Why? he asks. He is certainly not upset by Blowsy, she always behaves like that. He stretches his arms, cracks his knuckles, stares at the 'contraption' on the table. No, there is no shaking in his fingers, so where? And as soon as he touches his work again, again it moves - only very slightly, as a twig might in a summer wind, but it does move.
Why? He puts it down, and it lies there utterly still. He touches it, even with one finger, and it vibrates - not much, just enough to notice. He tries holding it near to his face, he tries holding it at arms' length, it moves still. In terms of physics this is work, and work requires energy, and energy must have a source -- yet it is not wired to its battery yet. Now what he won't do - many scientists would, but it is still unscientific - is to reject this observation because it is inexplicable. Though unsought for, this is equal to an experiment, it must be thought about -- though perhaps not now, the observation must be filed away. So in some unclear fashion energy is being taken from him? How?
One thing is clear, at least. He has been working now just over three hours without a break. A walk outside would clear his head -- windows aren't opened much there -- but it is raining violently still. Better to say goodnight to Gran and Blowsy and go to bed.
First, of course, he tidies everything carefully into his box, slides it back under the table.
*
And Pask. She's so clumsy sometimes, will break things other people value, and unkind people laugh at her for that, Maggs is unkind that way. I wish she looked happier or that I could do something new or not do something I'm in the habit of doing to cheer her up. She must have got it from me, John's so neat and careful with his model ships and things. I must have got in from Mum, my dad's so clever with his painting - o well!
In their ancestor Caleb's time to be mayor (and he had been, three times) was to be locally powerful; a good mayor was a blessing to his citizens, a bad one a curse. Nowadays in England it is not much more than a rather expensive way of buying local prestige; you can invite all sorts of persons to meals, royalty even, and they come and eat your food and are pleasant enough to you and you pay the caterer. And your portrait is put up in the town hall with all the others.
So Jabez employed a local artist (though his was certainly not a local name) to paint him, and John had to arrange it. John was fluent in German - not accurate, but fluent - and enjoyed learning the particular vocabulary of oil painting. Because of Jabez' business, he had often to cancel appointments or make them if convenient at short notice, so John was frequently at the artist's bungalow. His wife Elvira made him cakes, fussed over him, said he had 'no side', decided that he was virgin (you always think you can tell that if you have served behind a bar) and made sure that he was frequently in the company of her daughter. John played tennis and swam well, he had had dancing lessons as a boy and danced adequately; Elaine could do none of these things. And she was a few years older than him, which to one in his twenties then, even so sophisticated as to have been at Keble, seems half a generation.
Elvira suggested forcibly to Elaine that she should take an interest in him. 'D'you want to be a spinster all your life?' she said, rejecting 'virgin' as too frank a word. Well, (1) Elaine wasn't sure she didn't, and (2) actually, she wasn't; but maybe spinsterhood was duller even than marriage, she thought, not being energetic either in thought or action. She contrived to obtain tickets for a touring company's 'Macbeth' in Sharth, which, she said, a girlfriend she had arranged to go with had given her, that is, both, because she couldn't come, unexpectedly. 'That's very kind of you,' John said when asked, and was about to say 'Miss Seydell-Mertz' which in truth was how he had thought of her so far, but obviously 'Elaine' was more appropriate. He is a formal sort nowadays, always was even then, was irritated to be greeted by Blowsy as 'John' only, pretended not to have seen the flash of flesh as she put on her gown. She is younger than he by about as much as Elaine is older. (Another man would have invited Blowsy out to fish and chips, that then-famous movie 'Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes' and tried to get her bra off in the back seat during it.) However, John then as now was always concerned to do what seems right.
Correct behaviour, if you had invited a girl to the theatre (John had already translated the coming visit into that in his mind) is to take her to a meal beforehand. Now John had not often been in a restaurant, except when his great-aunt visited him at school, but the dinner beforehand passed surprisingly pleasantly, with Elaine on sure ground for once entertaining him with accounts of the hotel business's 'wrinkles', that is, how they made more or less dishonest profits often -- not that Ganpa of course would have done such things - and John, scrupulously honest himself, was amused to hear of them. Having his attention, she smiled unintentionally, and her eyes shone. The production disappointed, they agreed afterwards over a drink (she was not then teetotal) and he took her back home in the car he'd borrowed from a relative, kissed her tentatively, and was surprised, even shocked, that she kissed him in turn enthusiastically, pressing her body against his.
And in such a fashion for some time the relationship continued. They began to be recognised in the village as a couple and be invited out together, and it began to be assumed, eventually by themselves too, that they would marry in a few years. Some of John's relations disapproved; farming is landowning, therefore 'nobiliary', keeping a pub was 'trade' and that is a dirty word. Rather dull, or very, these two seemed to many of their contemporaries.
John continued to be more or less unemployed. Maria had bequeathed him everything she owned; she was thought to be a wealthy woman, and no-one else in the family had left or given him anything. Unfortunately everything she owned turned out to be the big house and fair-sized gardens, solely, almost no money. You or I might have sold up, bought a smaller house, and invested the difference, but he regarded his inheritance as sacred, and, only able to afford to heat two rooms, lived now on the edge of the mansion as if he was in a large caravan, sleeping on a single bed in the kitchen. Bessie 'did' for him once a week, and once a week at least said, 'You ought to get yourself a wife, Master John.'
Once the gardens had employed a man and a boy. He did what he could with part of them, put the rest down to lawn or rougher grass. Working there one very hot day, while Elaine sat listlessly reading and occasionally went into the house for orange juice on a tray which she tended to spill, he formally asked her permission to take off his shirt, found himself just as hot, so she suggested he took his vest off too. This was just after he'd found white pig's foot wort, which he told her was unique to Belker Tap. Such semi-nakedness seemed to him indecorous, though showing no more than on a beach, he thought aloud. Rubbish, Queen Victoria had been dead at least fifty years now, she said, he was being 'stuffy', which at Bishoprick Grammar School for Girls had been a word of very great reproach. 'Belinda poses completely naked for Dad and neither of them think anything of it,' she added. 'Germans are different', he almost said. 'No-one's here but us, I'm very hot too, why shouldn't I undress?' she said mischievously -- well, her brain was being overheated in her skull, her normal character was fleeing. 'Don't be silly, my dear', he replied, bending down to weed. A little insulted, she had thought she was offering him a treat, she stood up and kicked off her shoes, and took off quickly as if she were going to shower her yellow blouse, white brassiere, dark skirt and grey knickers.
'There!' she said, and he looked up and life was changed; nude she had a beauty, a glow, a majesty even, his heart beat rapidly in his throat...
And a few minutes later he for the first time definitely felt obliged to marry Elaine, tricked not by herself but by Nature which he had always feared.
*
Around sixteen years later, the visitor thinks:
Where gone, this girl? Why gone? Gone!
I tried to follow. A glass shutter it was like. I could see her, I could not go after her. What prevented?
Gone, gone, gone, this girl odd-dressed. Sad I am at her going. Gone, gone, gone, it's like a bell clanging.
Must try think it out. Can't think much, brain doesn't want toil. Can feel, though. O I am feeling a horrid sadness weigh my heart as if I'd seen her die and she a dear one to me.
She went. I couldn't follow. Why here fixed?
Wanted, I wanted, the visitor thinks, to make contact, to be understood, wanted to tell her -- something, I don't know what, I had it in intention to tell her some strange thing that I can't understand myself. What thing, I do not know. I was believing then that my own understanding of it would come as I was telling her it.
Why did she not respond to me? (What is her name?) Why did she go? Did she not see me? Appears not, yet some sense she had, she sensed me being here with it but that sense was weak.
She couldn't understand. Willed not to, maybe. Would not.
She knew me in one way, she did not know me. Some part there was in her that answered, something other than that part, more strong, rejected understanding.
What? Why?
Terror, was it terror that made her wake, or confusion only, it was confusion then.
Or was it terror? Why should I frighten, I? She felt me somehow, there was a touch. She knew, she did not know.
What use to her, what use to me, this fleeing? Why, what fearsomeness can there be in me?
Yet it really was horror she felt. Why? And why did I not follow, follow? Why am I here stuck as if rooted down?
The visitor's mind now begins to become less unclear. Thoughts focus badly, they run across each other, they rule her, yet for all their rush and confusion she is to some little extent able briefly to stand apart and observe their writhing.
Have I been asleep too? How long has passed? Hours? Days? Years, even? I mean, between whatever it was that went before that I can't or won't remember and just now -- was it just now? -- when I tried to wake her so that we could talk, but it didn't work. What went on before I came?
Must I stay here? What, here on this odd-changed landing? Shall I once more look around it -- though there is nothing more to learn. Little interest I have in it. I have already seen its differences from how it was then, I do not care to notice them all over again.
Now into her errant mind there floats from she does not know where a picture horrible, as if of one only a brief time since cruel-murdered, stinking of new-shed wet red blood. This vision stays only a moment.
It was not her rejecting it which made it go, it took off of itself. Taken away. In much the same way (she does not herself compare) it has been decided for her, and she obeys, that here by this child-woman's bedroom door she must be fixed.
Confused herself, and that confusion building upon a stupidity, that stupidity equal with or, rather, darkened by some dreadful thing past which she cannot remember or will not face, she knows only one thing clearly, that here she must stay. And remains.
There is no longer a heavy storm outside.
The visitor, barely able to notice that it is growing later (the sky outside has become even darker), little though she can think or reason, yet does slowly observe this, and even more slowly reason from it.
Very slow her thinking, yet accurate in its way.
Hours go, she says to herself. Yet I scarcely mark them. What is time to me? I am given great patience. Like a rock. Here by this door I am put. I do not sit, I do not lie, therefore I must be standing, yet I do not grow tired. Or rather I tire no further, because I cannot, I am more weary than I thought I could be weary. Yes, she thinks, I am as weary as death.
Then there comes to her lightning-sudden an imagination of utter terror, yet at the moment of perceiving of a truth compelling:
I am now a ghost.
A ghost! The word in itself is grisly, hideous. To know oneself as one (and she does not doubt it) is horrid past all expression. To be a spectre, an afreet, a thing to frighten stupid, sleepless children with, to be herself what she has ever of all things most feared, her hair would lift, an icy finger would run down her spine, her limbs would shake, her bowels would turn to water; that is, if she had hair, or spine, or limbs, or bowels. She is a half-lunatic mind only. Such physical reactions half-soothe terror in one who is living, that is, living in a body. Her coldness, her dread, they are of the naked spirit only.
It must be thought on. It cannot be thought on.If the child had seen me she would have been terrored even to madness. Yet her terror could not have been the hundredth part of mine, she could run from it, I who must be it.
There is no courage in the visitor, only despair. And yet, after many hours (such were the mental fashions in her lifetime, they are in her still) she attempts to find even in her situation some touch of good.
I have no limbs, no trunk, I do not need to sleep, I do not need to eat.
And I am alone. Alone for ever and always, unless this girl may listen. She only is, or can be, in some fashion my saviour; in some fashion she is like me.
My duty, then, this task, is waiting. For her. I suppose for her. It is my part I must play, it is what I must do, in truth it is the only thing I am able to do. I accept this burden, I take it up as if I have chosen to bear it. A punishment? I do not know. But if that is so, for what am I being punished?
How still and empty this house which was once full and lively!
The hours or days of her worst shock have passed away. A sort of -- well, it might be called courage, that has been found -- but a different and completely alien feeling comes. It is a deep unease she has never before known, which because of that inexperience she is long unable to understand, but she perceives that from an irriation it will grow into a pain, and from a pain into an agony.
Yes, it is hunger. It is hunger after all, though never again will I want meat.
I am hungry, after all. I am hungry for whatever it is feeds ghosts, and I do not know what that is!
So it is learned that it is possible to fall out of despair into a further, deeper despair. (She understand this fact, does not use the words.) If she were starving living, she could at least hope for the relief of death; that bitterness is added to the other suffering.
After a while, another fear too. This house is very old. It was always said that it is haunted. Suppose, and it is likely, that there are other ghosts here, suppose that one other, understanding my suffering, and wishing me anytthing but ill, takes pity and comes to me to instruct me in the art or skill of being a ghost?
She now understands that being yourself a ghost in no way reduces your fear at the thought of seeing one.
This and other fears, her bitterness, her horror at her own state, her terrified knowledge that there is something in her past which she does not dare think upon, and added to these the great hunger for she knows not what, these drown all her thinking, such as it is, blur such thought-processing that now remain, and too what faint sense she has even now of how time is passing, she drowns in such feeling, she can no longer reason, she becomes terror, shock, famine, self-pity only. The numbness she is feeling, because it is numbness, is a sort of help.
*
Pask suffers too. Not as much. But at times she is as unhappy as she knows how to be.
As yet?
A virgin, a maiden, she ought to be the bud which will flower into a gracious, generous and sympathising woman, a true lady. But she isn't. She is screwing her soul up like a fist. Let it not become a habit!
She hates their house (named after its moderniser in the 1790s). She loves it too -- it is historic, it is alone of all the village houses named in Pevsner's interminable 'Buildings of England' (critically, mind.) She does not so much hate her parents as dislike their self-absorption, Daddy with his weekly jag of high-falutin' religious sentiment for his 'soul', whatever that is, Mummy with her yoga for her body, the way both of them accept (and yet she accepts it herself) her appalling clumsiness as just unalterably part of her like the shining chestnut hair, pale skin and finely-chiselled nose a little too long for conventional ideas of beauty. She dislikes, even weeps inwardly, that this means the whole world is full of spikey or heavy objects which are enemies, and enemies too which will not fight fair. She does not want - how extraordinary! - to be a butt. She hated it most of all when girls she liked stood round her planning a cycling trip and no more thought of asking her to join them than they did - say - the prime minister.
How little real contact those three Ferraces have! And the house's size half-causes it. A family superstition is that the number of rooms in it may never be reckoned, and, indeed, it would be hard to decide - for instance - if the doored-off space at the back of Bessie's room was really a cupboard, or a different room; a grown man could hide in there easily. And the house has - somehow - a brooding personality, well, if that is overstating it, let me say rather an atmosphere -- the long chilly corridors well-lit by twelve-paned windows, the high ceilings, the ancient furniture - some of it - long out of date but too well-made to wear out and be replaced, the many spare bedrooms, one with nothing at all in it, not even a lightbulb, the least bad just sometimes offered to an overnight guest, six empty bedrppms at least, and that is not counting the servants' bedrooms in the floor above. A few of these rooms might have held siblings, but don't. There is not even a cat or a dog.
Her uncle's house, though larger than most people's, is smaller than theirs. James's farmland surrounds the village, north, east and south, like a reversed C. Her three cousins come home to it from their boarding schools by cab for a few hours every Sunday, noisy and cheerful. They have a vaunting-opulent lifestyle there, nearly everything is fashionable and new, and Aunt Vanessa-Veronica or 'Vee-Vee' can sometimes be most amusing, often about those who commit sin, e.g. put milk in their teacups first or wash their hair in the bath.
Pask dislikes that the Gritnells tennis court is now overgrown almost as much as she would if it were not and she were obliged to expose her awkwardness to ridicule by trying to play; there is no need to be consistent. By the way, though she does not yet realise it, she has already begun to grow out of this clumsiness.
She affects to resent her being descended from old Caleb -- at least three times over, the details are in her father's book privately printed, no date -- about their ancestry, and too there is a pedigree displayed in the hall. And in fact she is partly proud of it.
Caleb was famous for his integrity, he never broke his word, even if it cost him money, no wonder such a man prospered. His origins are unknown. He was apprenticed to a 'general dealer' in Bishoprick, whose port was then far busier than now. His master died, the widow took over the business with his help, they inevitably married and had twelve children (five reached adulthood), they worked hard and thought they deserved to be rich. And were.
He was undoubtedly a man of strong personality, very tall, well-muscled, spare, he was highly intelligent though without much education, and always able to spot, and seize, the main chance. He died an alderman, and in modern terms, a millionaire at least.
I agree with John, in his forward to his book. Someone uninterested in his/her own family and their ancestry -- well, it's the first thing you're given to love and be fascinated with, so if you're indifferent doesn't that mean you're wanting both in intelligence and sensitivity? He almost said so. But whether it is wise to erect your ancestry into a myth in which you live and move and have your being, that's another thing.
Belker Tap in 1795 had about nine hundred inhabitants; few or no houses were above two storeys, not counting attics. Rich Caleb found it a convenient distance from Bishoprick, where he worked very hard and very long, and from the elegant parish church in Sharth where he worshiped each Sunday. He bought a large farm and its land and outbuildings, that is, it was a farm then, sold off most of the land, had that part of the farmhouse which fronted the lane extended much, had twenty or so other rooms added, many of them in accordance with his own eccentric ideas of design, moved in the next year. (Even at the time of which I write there are only about two thousand occuptants of the village.)
Knowing himself intelligent, Caleb felt disadvantaged all his life by the gaps in his education, so he left half his fortune to found a school at Sharth 'for the education of poor men's sons, and others', mentioning also that 'they must be formed in habits of neatness and diligence'. The rest of the fortune kept some of his Gritnell descendants right into the twentieth century; those Ferraces who were their contemporaries - farmers or land-agents mostly, with the occasional doctor of lawyer - worked. The Gritnells lived in not-very-elegant idleness. John Matthew, uncle by marriage as well as second cousin of James and John Ferrace's father, was the last to bear his surname. (See John's book.)
What matters for us is that Maria Ferrace married her cousin John Gritnell (in the big Methodist chapel at Sharth; John Ferrace's father, Caleb's grandson, had walked out of the parish church in disgust when the vicar put candles on the holy table and called it 'The Altar' and even expected this piece of wood to be bowed to!) John Matthew died fairly young during, though not because of, the Second World War; his widow lived on and died very old. Maria made a favourite of her relative John Ferrace.
Yes, hard to believe, that this mildly liked nearly forty year old man, pale, balding and a little stooped, who in another thirty-seven or so years will be a stinking, hideous corpse, was then a chubby, always smiling child who seemed to have more ideas, and 'quaint' ones, than he had words to put them in. Partly because he had no intention of doing so, this sweetly charming toddler stole the heart of his otherwise stiff, cold and correct old great-aunt.
Her idolising love irritated John's mother greatly. It was Anne Ferrace's misfortune to seem mild rather than be it. She was - still is, of course - the only daughter of Sholto MacPriest, a solicitor in Bishoprick, himself son of a Church of Scotland minister. He was, though not for this reason, a hard man; the child of so strict a father learns early on to suppress her emotions and opinions. So, while grudgingly acknowledging the aunt's best of intentions, Anne both resented her decisiveness and could not say so to her. It was Maria, or so it seemed to Anne, who decided what John should eat and when, how he should be dressed, when he should go to bed, what books he should read, even where he should be educated.
This suited James Ferrace, the father, very well. He believed as so many do that education is not education unless it has cost your family more money than they can easily afford. Since Maria would pay for John, he could now afford - just about - to send his heir James to Desborough in the next county.
Anne, like so many of us, seemed doomed to pick a spouse whose character reflects what is dislikable in her parents. James's firmness, like Sholto's, was remarkable -- except in this matter of John. She complained of Maria's interference to James, often and at some length, but in the manner of a weak person. And her talking so much about it unavoidably suggested to him the imagination of her not talking about it, much more agreeable. And James thought of 'My Sons' as his family, his blood, his wife as a necessary cipher, his relative by marriage only; all this was not really her business.
Maria insisted out of family piety that John should go to Sharth. In the nineteenth century and afterwards Sharth School had gone the bad way of many other schools for poor men's sons. The property which endowed the scholarships produced less and less real income, therefore fewer pupils. A school cannot be run, certainly not in the impressive buildings the alderman had given, with only twenty pupils, therefore (remembering that 'and others') the space was filled with boys whose fathers could pay, and who, as the century went on, required more and more subjects to be taught, therefore had to pay higher fees; the scholarship boys every year grew fewer, and were often sneered at because of, even though they were envied for it, their cleverness. In short, Sharth had become what is so queerly called in England a 'public' school, though never a grand or fashionable one.
It was not in John to resent his brother's comparative good fortune, nor even being patronised by James's 'well-bred' school friends when they visited; he had inherited his mother's good nature, in fact in him it was more true or real than it was in her. He fitted very well at Sharth from the first; he was good or goodish at most sports, though not heavily built or aggressive enough for rugby. He did not have strong opinions, nor any of those oddities of face, manner, figure, background, origin etc. which attract schoolboys' malice. The only wrong thing he ever did was to put his head through a clear pane in a door; it had had a frosted one until it was broken by someone else, he thought it had not been replaced. Minor cuts, and his aunt's indignant refusal to pay for the damage; as 'founder's kin' she carried her point.
At first lessons were grey interruptions to sports, later he enjoyed most of them, and did fairly well. Quietly he had decided that he did not like the kind of people who enjoy giving or receiving orders, which his schoolmasters called 'showing qualities of leadership'. They had, many of them, been officers in the War and the school recorded their medals in its prospectus. They were 'disappointed' -- they were awfully fond of that word -- that he did not put himself forward more. He founded a modelling club, was a house prefect only, got to Oxford, but only to an unfashionable college and without a scholarship. He knew that homosexuality existed just as he knew Australia existed, but had not come across either. Except once.
An unremarkable young man, Oxford thought, or would have thought if it had thought of him at all. The first year he had a generous allowance from his aunt, and spent it cautiously, travelling in France and Germany and learning by speaking and listening. His second year was shadowed by Maria's illness, cancer, and his often imagining the great pain which she bore unceasingly and almost uncomplainingly. He really had loved her very much, and was puzzled and a bit ashamed that when at last she died he felt (a little, of course he has never been one) like a prisoner set at last to freedom. In his third year, then, he was already the owner of Gritnell's, but had no more money than would cover basic needs. In the third year too he began to be a communicant in the college chapel; he had been confirmed at school, all the boarders were automatically, but now, forced to contemplate death, he decided -- well, it was scarcely a decision, more a recognition, certainly not a conversion -- that he really did believe what he said he believed; and in that respect only himself against fashion, convention, what is generally thought, both then and for the rest of his life.
He had given little thought to a career. Like most/many?/even nearly all? undergraduates he thought being an undergraduate would last for ever, and was wrong. His degree -- he had hoped for better standing, was not much dejected when he missed it -- well, like most recent graduates he got the odd letter of congratulation with 'B.A., (Oxon.)' on the envelope after his name, and if he had been a middle-aged man who could put 'O.B.E.' after it that would have been, yes, an honour, but of no practical use either. So Jabez pulled a string or two and got him an interview with a local insurance company; he was pleasant-mannered, cautious and conservative by nature, he belonged to two families locally prestigious and knew others such.....so here he is at nearly forty on a decent but unsplendid salary expecting that after as much again of the same he will retire on a decent but unsplendid pension (in fact, this doesn't happen; read on.) A 'worthy of England' you might almost say, and even something of a bore; for such a man his politics are leftish.
One evening near the end of their time 'up' he and his circle of undergraduate friends -- one or two of them, greying, visit or write still -- had talked seriously about marriage. All of them assumed that they would marry in the next few years, and (this was before 'the Pill') the only one of them who openly spoke of having sexual experience did so diffidently, even tentatively, certainly not boastfully, 'I know some of you men will think it wrong, but I...' All families, all societies, argued another, have unwritten laws about who is allowed to marry whom, and ways of punishing the disobedient. This impressed John, not least because a third man had grown angry about this comment, even, in words only, almost violent; he had evidently in some unclear fashion been deeply wounded by what was said. John, as ever, liked the idea of their being rules.
And when he met Belinda again, beautiful, amusing, delightful, frivolous, 'accidentally' often letting the top of her gown nearly open, John did his best conscientiously to keep his eyes on her face -- that red, mobile, oily-lipsticked mouth! -- and not let them wander downwards, almost succeeded. And censored his own interest. He couldn't have a girlfriend, and he thought of a girlfriend as an apprentice wife, whose mother and grandmother had been his own family's servants.
This John was quite well educated. He is also well informed, which isn't quite the same thing. He was aware that some people (mostly fellow-students who had not been to boarding schools) had the notion that social differences should no longer matter. He disagreed.
And would Blowsy be interested in him? He was, he knew, not exactly an intellectual, but very much nearer it than she, and concerned as always with what is right or wrong, both socially and morally. She and all her easily-laughing acquaintance would rate him dull, obviously, and by their own (wrong) measures they would be right.
He saw that, and did not see how stubborn he was and is, probably the least changeable person in Belker Tap, though Pask nowadays is strong competition. If the Archangel Gabriel had appeared to him, standing upon the air with iridescent wings faintly beating, and commanded John Ferrace, change yourself! he would have answered, very respectfully but as firmly, No!
Nearly sixteen years ago John Ferrace and Elaine von Seydell-Mertz were married in the parish church, in the company of some of his friends from school and Oxford, about twenty-five of his relatives, the bride's father, Maggs, her only English cousin, Bessie of course, &co. They moved almost at once into Gritnell's and quite a few of the ineffective radiators of brown-painted iron were turned on. They did not entertain or visit much.
The baby's birth in the second year of their marriage was difficult, and they were told that it was unlikely that she would ever have another, which neither regretted. They did not find the ever-presence of the child and her ever-present need for attention to be delightful, they were not besotted by wiping vomit, changing nappies, etc., which John anyway regarded as part of the job of the nanny they could not afford.
Without speaking of it, as the years went on, and of course not speaking of it was a part of the trouble, they both came to understand that their characters, opinions and interests were different, probably always had been. John is quite fond of Elaine, she has been there as if nearly always, he feels for her much as he would for a dog or horse he has had a long time -- and if he were to think about it he would probably think that she regards him in much the same light. They 'rub along'. Surely, on balance, he is a good man rather than a bad; surely he would like to be judged in such terms.
This is the man we last saw 'humping' or 'bonking' or 'having it off' along the bare earth he had just dug, his pale buttocks never before or ever afterwards exposed to the sun jerking back and forth, his belly warm against hers.
Since it was already done, and because he liked it enormously, he felt free or free-ish to go on having intercourse with Elaine during their four months' engagement, and learned about contraception, yet never again did he lose awareness that he was his own man.
He had sex again many times, but never again did sex have him. Or only once.
*
As ever imitating better-known schools in the same line (now, reader, you would not think, would you, that I am having not wholly kindly fun with my memories of my own time there? Start again.) Imitating as always better-known schools in the same line, Sharth nowadays takes girls as well as boys as pupils, and Pask is one of them, a day girl. She does not particularly like it, and yet it is difficult to conceive that she would like another school better. All schools cater for the average, though each defines that average differently; all schools value conformity of attitude and behaviour to their (almost never actually stated) beliefs. Pask does not fit, she is one of Nature's nonfitters. She has a kind of integrity, will not be swept along with the crowd, that is the good side of it; most of her fellow-pupils do not like her much, and she returns that dislike, that is the bad.
She is obliged therefore to try to enjoy her own company. She has a talent for admiration, even devotion, as yet has found no-one to admire -- except herself, and that does not quite 'work'. She is contented to be discontented, that proves her superiority, she thinks.
The school is a good or even very good school by most of the usual measures. It plays games against other similar schools and quite often wins. It inculcates the values of the middle class. It gets its pupils A-levels and sends them on to universities, the services, the professions, etc., where they will have high salaries and status; no, I don't mean that of course, I mean that it 'prepares them well to be of service to the wider community', as the prospectus says. Its buildings are attractive, though the Victorian additions in reddish stone, notably the enormous Great Hall, march oddly with the grey Georgian original.
There Pask is being taught (generally speaking) what she has no desire to learn, and has to play games she has no desire to play, and she is the butt of her fellows' casual or deliberately intended unkindness. She has had only one half-close friend there, Sophie. The change from girl into woman has confused and nearly angered her. She does not have the measure of her own body or personality. It appears to her that her parents, never outgoing, have as she has got older retreated almost totally into their own personal concerns, that whatever interest and understanding they showed when she was a child has evanesced -- quietly gone. And yet she values her privacy from them.
Plenty of us were like that; the central trouble was that each of us, as Pask does now, thought we were the only one.
She is by now almost literate enough to make a salve of recording her feelings, certainly she is literate enough to want to try; it's like a crude attempt at magic. Nearly every school day she writes a diary, mostly a record of trivial events and her comments on them. She misspells deliberately in rebellion against Sharth's ever-insistence on accuracy, abbreviates, has almost in places a code. This is going to make it tiresome for her in ten years' time when she will be deciding whether to throw out these tattered notebooks. What the devil is 'rye spuding'? O, yes, I see. And 'cb#'? O, corned beef hash. What a lot about food there is!
Let me translate one ordinary enough day (well, more or less) out of schoolgirlspeak:
No! For some extraordinary reason the blog refuses to accept it, though I have tried many times. I'm having to resume the story when she leaves the school that day.
The Wednesday the week before she'd been walking dreamily to the usual stop when a car going by splashed her from a puddle, to the joy of her 'friends', so she walked to the railway station to get a different bus. A rough-looking man stopped her and asked her for change of a florin to make a 'phone call. She thought he was begging, but gave him four sixpences. He then did give her the florin and said, 'Ta, darlin'', which cheered her up out of all reasonable proportion, 'it showed some people are decent, though not most of my Sharthian "brothers and sisters"!'
Home and out of school uniform. Maybe to compare herself with Lez, maybe for other reasons, she takes off all her clothes and stares into the depths of the 'mirreor', which is how she spells it. Then there was an odd happening; 'first a kind of green blur comes over everything, then it's like I'm suddenly very awake zif I'd had some drug, zif I'd been very deeply asleep, tho I can't [have been], I'm still standing up.
'There's this thinnish pale girl with nice hair who's got nothing on, quite good-looking in her slim way, and she's regarding me interrrogaa-- as if she's got the cheek to be wondering who I am!!!
Sarcastic, she looks. Now this isn't mysterious, not like the horrid draught. It's me, that's all. But I found it hard to break her gaze and as I turned away had the really queer idea that she turned away 2 but NOT AS FAST! I don't like mirreors. I wasn't fri10ed, yet it was queer, odd.'
She got dressed quickly now, saying to herself the kind of thing that grown-ups have been annoying her by saying for years past now, you're fourteen, at your age you ought to have more sense, etc. This wasn't much, really - the frozen sensation, just for a few seconds only, as she goes into her room, that's much more odd. After a supper her mother had cooked, which wasn't bad, though vegetarian, she told John about the cold spot outside her room 'for about the sixteenthbillionth time no musnt exager8 the fifteenbillionth and he said as usual sort of yes dear I'll try to do something about it some time as much as if to say he isn't really listening'. Back in her bedroom she did some more prep she'd forgotten and tried to read, back downstairs again she watched television with her parents on Great-Great-Aunt Maria's long old-fashioned set and wrote some more diary complaining of the slowness and sameness of life and opined more out of exasperation than kindness towards her that Daddy ought to give Bessie a small pension nowadays and employ some other younger woman who'd work faster. And she finished by writing what so many of us felt at her age, that if your schooldays really are the happiest days of your life you'd better top yourself now!
*
What appalling manners we readers and writers of novels have! We've just nosed into a young girl's diary, now we're going to listen in to her father's prayers -- in his dressing room, where there is a single bed for when he has 'one of his colds', a four-foot high Chinese or Chinese-seeming vase, dragons picked out in gold flying over hills with pagodas, either valuable or pretending to be so, and a view of the orchard with its now nearly bare trees. This is next to the master bedroom he shares with his wife, in whose double bed other things than sleeping so often take place, that is one or the other lying awake staring at the long row of windows (this is in the back of the house, one of the older parts) where the ancient curtains are almost in rags, outlined, now dimly, now brightly, depending on the cloud cover and the phase and position of the Moon.
He is kneeling against a light chair with wickerwork back upon a carpet made years back by the now defunct Bishoprick Carpet Company, wearing plain grey cotton pyjamas Elaine bought him from a shiny catalogue, a light-brown wool dressing gown he got from a charity shop, and dark-brown imitation leather slippers which give no warmth, which is why he still has his socks on.
Well, here I am, God. Are You? I must think so or I wouldn't be kneeling here now, but....o long ago I thought you at times anyway spoke to me almost directly nearly as if there was a Voice or through strange concatenations of events which seemed to deny chance.....marshal thoughts; make a presentation. The judges in French civil courts say 'Speak! We are listening!' Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Confession: well, I couldn't refuse to have Alyss as PA just because she's beautiful, it's a career progression for her, sometimes my eyes wander from my work, and my thoughts....there, I'm doing it once more in trying to repent it, but only my eyes and thoughts...I'm not strongly sexed as far as I can tell but now Elaine and I almost never....o it's not really sins or vices I've got to confess but lack of virtues, too restrained, too moderate, too English. Thank You for my wife and daughter, I feel obliged to say, I don't think I quite mean it; You know that. I wish -- no, this is prayer: grant that I will be -- more loving, I wish I enjoyed Elaine's and Pask's company more, I wish I were generous enough to sell this house and give all no most of what I got away, they wouldn't like it really even though they say sometimes they don't like living here. Would Elaine and I be happier now if we'd come to marriage innocent? Well, who can tell? O, I don't really know how to pray, just go through the motions...would it be any better if I poped? (became RC) probably not, and our clergy are our own sort of people not peasants no that's snobbish I was short with that delivery man who came to the office from Manchester whose name was Gritnell because he made it obvious he thought I was a bore not a serious fault.....
Pay attention. I'm expecting Almighty God to listen and I'm scarcely listening myself. I don't enter into other people's experience, I've no imagination, or very little. What is it like to be Pasqueline? Or Elaine? I just don't know -- glimmer, maybe. I wish they shared my faith, weak though it is, but couldn't reconcile myself to leaning on Pask to be confirmed since she doesn't want to be, or not yet, certainly. She irritates me sometimes. Old Caleb's wealth. Made a bad way. Invested and re-invested down the years, I'm still benefiting. No, don't think of that.
and and
But that curious state of mind supervenes, in which, for a few seconds only, a man knows that he is too tired to go on thinking, though he can still, as John does now, cross himself, pour a glass of water, drink half, put it by his side of the bed in the big room, mutter 'Goodnight, dear' to Elaine who is already asleep or pretending to be, put his dressing gown on the coverlet over their feet -- his are often cold at night -- and soon he is asleep, unobserved.
A man with great vices could greatly repent; he has not that privilege.
*
Elaine -- what a dull, ordinary lot they are! Like most of us! Like you, probably, like me certainly! Here is Elaine who, if she wrote her autobiography, though she won't, could not in honesty present marrying John or giving birth to Pasqueline as the highs; but if she did it would be her grandfather and his hotel (read 'pub') which would be most vivid -- 'old' Daymer (who was always called that, though he wasn't particularly old) tough, resourceful, proud, noisy-cheerful, with red triangles on his cheeks showing when-soon and how he would die, fat-solid, that day (it is vivid still) when he'd put her up, up, ever so high-up on the bar counter in front of the beer pump handles large, shiny-smooth and coldish against her little back -- 'sittee there, my little queen!' -- how different his spoiling her was from the common-sense of home! (Her father combined 'Lutheran' practicality and common sense with his 'artistic temperament'.)
Smells there were there, entrancing ever - most interesting the caky-warm stink of beer as it's delivered by flubby men in pale clothes the quality of flour sacks, not nosenice this aroma, yet with more foodiness within it than roast beef gravy dripping from the joint; dangerous-exciting the sloping hole down to the barrelled cellar; the great horses lip-shaking, puffing and stamping in the roadway and dropping shiny-smooth dung thick like boot polish; the cellar woth its dark, whitewashed, cobwebbed threatening immensities (she's inside it now in her memory or imagination); the sky above it because outlined looking false like painting on a blue cloth; the sense of physical labour expertly though grudgingly done.
And G'andpa, the idea she'd had from him, that loving, short-fat, lovable, stupid man, of being just about the most important being in the world, 'my princess' and all that, the only for several years and always the oldest granddaughter) while visiting the pub, as in life unlike in memory she dis infrequently, so moving, so dramatic, so exciting, yet not quite predictable, new always and brilliant almost as the sun, and so important that even She, just now and then, must be put aside so that its progress may now -- well, do whatever a progress does -- progress, she supposes.
Childhood loves, hates, noises, friendships, emnities, knowledge, meetings, smells (smells especially), happinesses, traumas, all these so vivid and interesting then, they are fascinating still, she runs them through like a video again and again, she observes them always inside herself -- shining; children love anything which shines or reflects. Everything following on from childhood's what? A detail only. When she was a child she knew heartdeep that this would be so; maybe that was behind her decision, her wrong decision, to become an infants school
teacher.
Her father, less interesting than G'andpa, is a famous artist, or so she loyally believes. Reproductions of the staid old chap's pale seascapes and decorous nudes are sold in the bigger shops of the Boots chain. He's well enough liked in the village these days. She gets her good taste from him, she says. To decprate her 'lair' she has disbound her great-aunt-in-law's copy of Lady Forestier's 'Rose Varieties of the British Isles' published in 1909, the only copy in the county, and framed some of the hand-coloured illustrations them in odd frames she found in second-hand shops to decorate her 'lair'. She likes telling people of such bargains as these frames, or her dreams.
She goes to Yoga classes Wednesday afternoons in Bishoprick, fifteen miles north; by bus, not having learned to drive, or not yet. In Bishoprick, getting on towards thirty years back, she was -- in her own eyes, anyway -- one of the less dull and pen-pushing 0f the sixth form of one of the girls' grammar schools, the brown-uniformed one. She enjoyed hinting that one holiday she had parted with something which, in those days, some time back, no brown-uniformed girls' grammar school pupil should ever be without; the others did not believe her. But, looking back, she thinks that she was able to relate to people better then than now. She suffered a little then, and still does, from very mild skin trouble; it's treated with various exceedingly expensive lotions and so is quite invisible except to herself, it has sapped her self-confidence.
Nothing, or almost nothing, surprises Elaine these days. The future will. She is never shocked not because she is unshockable, rather because life brings no shocks. Her personality has not formed as it should.
She and Katharine Veale went from school to St. Ethrwulf's, the Demnet teacher-training college, and boarded there. Only five miles from home, but they felt very independent. For two terms they had 'mugged up' the theory of teaching infants; she had done better than Kathy in the college exams, though at school it had been the other way round. Then they were sent out on teaching practice to meet their first classes.
Elaine is in a big high room dull despite its huge windows cheered up by a frieze, pictures of a red apple, a green ball, a black cat etc. There is a cork notice board on which children's paintings are neatly pinned, a long blackboard, several cupboards of various colours and heights, a corner where another blackboard and an easel are propped, a fireplace without a fire.
And nearly fifty children.
Miss Blew the children's regular teacher (prim, ladylike, forty) had introduced her. Miss Blew had in mind to step back, let the student begin, then pass through the chipped blue door almost silently, to feet up in the staff room, a cigarette and a newspaper.
She had turned her children's attention upon the student.
But the student had said not a word.
Nothing.
Something -- seeing all at once so very much clear skin, was it? she was never to know -- had shut Elaine up as firmly-sure as her grandfather had slammed his cellar's trap after the beer's delivery.
She had stared all around the room as if rudely at first; later -- ten seconds only later? --aware that she must do something - anything - with those nearly ninety eyes upon her, she had opened her mouth, licked lips which seemed to belong to someone else, she was (and as aware of it as if she saw herself from outside, maybe she did) gaping stupidly, uselessly.
Twenty seconds? That long?
A small, near-silent rustle there was now, feet sliding on floor or shuffled paper...
No words. Thirty seconds --
A handsome, curly-haired, blue-eyed little boy --
thirty-five? --
had opened his desk, half-looked round, closed it, scarcely loudly, grinned at her as if friendly, turned round (he was at the front) to catch the eye of another boy further back
forty?
and the regular class teacher, grey-bunned, restrained, erect, who had only just stepped back, now stepped forward, pushing at Elaine's right arm. She spoke roughly to the children with a roughness that seemed to Elaine at much as her directed, and after she had got them busy almost at once at what everybody there knew to be a totally unnecessary piece of written work she had stage-whispered to Elaine, 'My dear, I think you had better get back to the staff room'.
My dear! She fiercely resented being so patronised, and was too as fiercely grateful for it. She must have got back to the staff room, though even a few hours later she could not remember it, and from there to the college somehow and her little room in it, where Kathy found her paler than usual and looking at nothing about nine o'clock that night; she had not eaten since breakfast.
In a fog in memory is the next month or so, as it was even then. It wasn't exactly a nervous breakdown, someone told her, she had just lost confidence in herself. It was unlikely, her plump supervisor (who had so many other things and people to worry about) that Elaine would want now to proceed with the training course, probably it would be best in the end if she decided to retire from it; there were after all many other things which a young woman of her age with good, well decent, A-levels could do. 'What, for instance?' Elaine said, truculent for once; the supervisor usually so certain about everything had answered vaguely.
At some time in those misty weeks she had seen a doctor, some sort of psychiatrist or pschotherapist, who had said, don't worry about it some people have some kinds of skills others have others some can do gymnastics some can't for instance my wife can't grill sausages for instace which is a pity because I like sausages but it's not everything you can eat other foods instead and in the same way you can do other things with your life than teach....Elaine had to pay thirty guineas for him to tell her this.
Not long after she had packed her two cases and got the bus home. She was nineteen. And (unlike most students of teaching) almost rich. Her English grandfather had left her cousin Maggs the pub, the goodwill, the stock, etc. and Elaine had inherited about twenty thousand pounds in shares, etc. which brought not vast sums and yet as much as many people work for, which (unfortunately for her, one neighbour at least said) made it only too easily possible to go on living at home and do nothing much without being an expense to her parents (market researchers call such a person a 'gentlewoman') and it appeared quite probable that she was going to go on doing that for many years to come.
Tall, blonde, bell-voiced Vanessa-Veronica, her husband's brother's wife, speaks tolerantly of and to Elaine, as people sometimes do to cripples. Elaine knows (and mimics accurately) the particular tone in which Vee-Vee regrets that her mother's people were 'on trade' and that she went to 'state schools'; and yet Elaine, the famous artist's daughter, also used to try unsuccessfully not to appear to think herself superior when she went down terraced brick-pink streets to visit her school-friend Kathy.
It was a little paper shop, selling also sweets, soft drinks and cigarettes, but not many. Past the counter you went through a door into nearly complete fuggy darkness, up noisy uncarpeted steps, and into the one living room. Thin carpet, dusty 'three-piece, view over wasteground to ugly nineteenth-century church. Kathy's vague and cheerful parents were vaguely and cheerfully welcoming, and smelled of burnt tobacco. Kathy, though not tall, was taller than they, plump even then, and much cleverer than her brother and sisters. She finished the course, and used her teaching qualification to travel, once educated the Embassy's children in Bangkok, sent postcards, married a clergyman, and by seeming chance returned to Bishoprick. Elaine nowadays visits her for tea most Wednesdays after her Yoga class, and irritates her a little by saying often 'Do you remember...?' For one thing she often seems to Kathy to remember wrongly, for another, we are forty-three not one hundred and forty three, Kathy is often on the edge of reminding her.
Her husband Benedick Hunsden and she find it difficult to manage a big house on his 'stipend', even though they rent out two of its many rooms as bedsitters and she teaches two afternoons a week and the school their youngest child goes to. What he is trying to sell does not 'move', in shopkeepers' language, and sometimes that makes him glum. John Ferrace knows Benedick, though not well; Elaine does not know this and that John does not know she visits Kathy.
Elaine often seems not quite awake, not 'on the ball'; a useful cliche, instantaneous response to stimuli is useful not just on the sports field.
So often Elaine appears to be immersed in thought, yet, a moment later, she could not tell you what she had been thinking of.
How can such a person be spoken to from outside? the visitor has asked herself. (She is learning the edges of her new state.) Only fear would wake her, no slighter contact would move her.
The visitor will not refrain from rousing terror for pity of those she is able to terrify. Not that, but a need to learn how to control her power, is what restrains her.
As yet.
*
What did I come up here for?
Elaine is standing in an upstairs corridor up at Gritnells. Its rows of thin-glassed windows strike cold, there are other draughts around her feet, and other rustlings which are probably mice. Parts of the floor are bare, much of the wood has only been roughly planed, there are fixed runners over much of it, not very clean, and the brown curtains here, though quite clean, are thin. A flex has been run from an adaptor in the nearer light and hooked up to the ceiling half way along with another bulb at its end.
Elaine is feeling foolish, and looking it too, mouth half-open, tongue feeling a canine tooth.
What a dull ordinary woman, whose dreary clothes match her worn surroundings! you might say.
Wrongly.
Consider Beltegueuse, a very near star, whose light set out towards our eyes not millions or even billions of years ago, rather in the reign of one of the Plantagenets. It's so immense that if it replaced our own sun our own earth would be buried within it. That appears to be wonderful, but isn't. Did we think it would be small? No! Or cold? Of course not! It's not remarkable, it's a far-away bonfire only. It's no mystery.
But Elaine is one. Both to herself; and to others, properly considered. To say that she is ordinary, that's just shorthand, we're condemning ourselves for lack of grace and charity and imagination, blaming it on her.
Elaine is much more mysterious than Beltegueuse, which can (somehow!) be weighed and measured, as mysterious as God. Except of course that it is absolutely certain that Elaine exists and was born forty-three years back in the maternity ward of Sharth Cottage Hospital, while about God's existence it is possible to have two opinions (even both at once.)
Elaine's father made war for Hitler; whether he was officer, NCO or private he will not say. He was an art student, he was called up, he had to go. It is not known, in Belker Tap at least, whether or not he showed admirable and outstanding courage, as so many did, though he must have shown some, as so many did, in his country's evil cause. Maybe he was only nominally a soldier, rather an art-historical expert in uniform. Possibly, having said so little for so many years, he himself has partly forgotten his soldiering. At the war's end he was a prisoner of war in Bishoprick, wearing clothes even shabbier than British civilians did, let out on parole with a yellow patch over his heart front and back to help them shoot him in case he decided to make a run for it. The British victors didn't look or feel like conquerors, they were drab of clothes and skin, their buildings when not destroyed unpainted and sometimes windowless. Everything was in short supply, except emotion; he was spat on sometimes, he was sometimes treated to generous fair shares of what food and drink there was. In a pub he exchanged sketches of the landlord and his family for watery English beer. He was tall, well-built, blonde-haired, pleasant-mannered, spoke English formally, they did not exactly dislike him, and since labour like everything else was in short supply old Daymer got him waiting on tables, painting walls, shifting heavy beer barrels, etc., and paid him meanly, while he himself fussed around with officials of the ministry of this and that (peace meant freedom for regulations to breathe and breed), asking favours, making promises, even keeping them. Now Elvira, the daughter, was 'one of those who's a widow without having been a wife, so to speak'; her husband-to-be had been killed bombing Berlin; inevitably this young woman so much in the company of this young man, well, they were attracted to each other, or thought they were, they were married in a big grey chapel near the pub (it was he not she who insisted on a religious ceremony) and soon after he bought a bungalow; he had decided to settle in England, he had apparently savings or property at home, that too was mysterious.
Yes, it was quite a big chapel. Elvira had not realised it was quite so big. None of his family came, not surprisingly, and most of her father's friends or customers had when invited discovered prior commitments.
Elvira showed moral courage in marrying one who had been so recently her country's enemy; she used up her lifetime's supply. After a while he was able to buy the barn in the field next to the little house, and worked at his painting. Elvira refused to pose for him -- the idea! and said often that they were so poor because of all this arty stuff that if her parents had not been in the trade they might have died for want of food and drink. An exaggeration, though of what was really the case; part of her trouble was that she had not the skill to put reasonable complaints in a reasonable way, and her ill-modulated voice was unpleasant. If they had not had the daughter, their only child, they might well have parted. He had in full measure the creative artist's inability to concentrate, except upon his creation.
He made no close male friends, and his relationships with his models appeared only those of employer and employee. Sometimes he destroyed or overpainted work which dissatisfied him, sometimes he offended possible clients, sometimes he refused to be separated from work which Elvira thought would be saleable. Brought up to buying and selling and always seeming polite she could not understand him, nor did she feel any duty to try. Five or six years after the War they were still struggling financially, which she believed was his fault. To be fair to Elaine, who I never liked much, she was neither clever or kind, I make the unremarkable observation that money troubles do little for anyone's look or temper.
Elvira brings up the little girl predictably enough. She has friends, some, at the primary school, who come on her birthday wearing frilly dresses to eat jelly and sweet cakes and play pass-the-parcel and musical chairs. She does not often speak to boys there, especially not to those who climb trees or throw stones. She tolerates lessons and games alike without receiving any obvious benefit. If she has any thoughts, she does not share them. From babyhood, apart from childhood illnesses, right up to her breakdown at the college, she gives little cause to worry. Her mother dies when she is a teenager; father and daughter, though it is a small house, have little real contact.
In those days there was an examination called the 'eleven plus' which pupils took at ten. A minority afterwards went to grammar schools, (the more academic kind of secondary schools) and felt superior, the majority, many of them, felt hurt to be rejected. It was not expected that Elaine would be in the minority, but she was; her younger cousin Maggs at a different school already expected not to 'pass' and was jealous, indeed she was so remarkably, ingeniously and persistently unkind that it is hard to understand why Elaine even now regards her as her best friend.
Adolescence came upon her with little more trouble, or so it seemed, than her needing new clothes and shoes remarkably often; by now Dad was prospering modestly. It seemed that she did not care much about anything much. (Her father had expected her to grow up tall and bosomy like his sisters; she did not.)
She got through all the 'O' levels she took, without doing well at any of them, and was accepted into the sixth form by her teachers without any enthusiasm, nor did she show any to be there. She made the more-or-less suitable friendship with Kathy, years later married John...
And here she is dithering on the landing, asking herself why she is there, and feeling the draught which blows usually from the top of the main stairway towards the servants' steps near to her daughter's bedroom, or when the wind direction is from the north the other way round.
Why? Dash it? WHY? There must be some reason. John laughs kindly at me because I'm so forgetful, he's always kind, wish sometimes he'd be rougher in temper, it'd be more like a man. But it's not funny if you're in it, if it's part of you, it's annoying...
O he's neat, efficient, orderly, at work, at home, I don't think he's any cleverer than me brainswise for all his education but he's organised, I wish he'd taken the Newcastle job, chance like that won't come again, doesn't want to leave the West where (o how often he says it!) his family have been rooted so long, wouldn't hurt him...
....nothing for it but to go back down again and then being in the same place will remind me why I came up, at least I hope it will, this house is too old and too cold and too big, we could knock half of it down and make it into a....
....what was it? Not important, though. O JESUS CHRIST!
She finds that she is on the floor, with the memory of a heavy bang! in her mind as if she has not fallen but rather been thumped down to the ground. Partly recovered, she pulls herself up, shivering and weeping, her nose running. She wipes it, and begins deep breathing, which to some extent comforts her, decides to go and make herself cocoa and put lots of sugar in it just this once, it's good for shock.
So she stands, trembling, and goes down, drinks the cocoa, thinks about what G'andpa Daymer would say if he could see her now, tries to 'take herself in hand'.
After a while she calms and remembers that she was sorting through the post, here at this very table, and among other complete dross was a stiff white invitation to a 'do' just after Christmas at James' and Vee-Vee's house, which John's sense of family duty means they must attend, and how she'd just 'phoned Vee-Vee to say they'd come and got one of those tiresome answerphone things and she'd written it in on the calendar there and was going up to look for drawing pins in the Christmas decorations box in a small unused bedroom so that she could pin the card on a corkboard that is there.
So up she goes again, thinking, What a nuisance this forgetfulness would be if I had anything important to do with my time, or urgent, but I haven't, it's irriating anyway, what can my brain look like to anyone who observes it from the outside, a sort of mist or fog lit up now and then by wandering lights which go out suddenly, funny thing to think, I'm not normally imaginative.
And as she again passes her daughter's room there is a harsh and sudden chill. Invasive as rape; though soon passing.
*
The second day of the new term Dave got on the bus as usual at the Cross, and went to the upper deck out of habit, because he dislikes the smell of smoking, familiar enough at home, and because schoolboys in uniform resent the implied pressure to have to stand up for ladies if all the seats are full downstairs, which they weren't. When the bus would finish its six-mile journey it would arrive almost too late for the decently clad men there, accountants and clerks, he assumes, to get to their work at nine. Almost, but they were evidently seniors of their own rank, men of the forty to sixty bracket, they were trusted and unlikely to be rebuked. He found them boring and reassuring both at once; he compared their grey predictability and industry with his father's attitudes. Each of these middle-agers, since the top desk was not full, was sitting away from the others; in six years he had rarely heard one of them speak to any other, familiar though they must be. One had a jerking newspaper, the others looked through the dirty windows at fields and houses moving by.
The dark-haired girl who runs in the corridors but must know she shouldn't is there too, half-way along on the left.
He sits by himself on the longest seat at the back and puzzles about the meter which responded though hooked up to nothing. Why? He is absorbed in trying to find to start with the precise question about this that must be asked; 'get the question exactly right, and the answer will come soon after -- at least it may, it is much more likely', one of his schoolmasters is fond -- too fond! --of saying. So absorbed in his own thought Dave is and therefore so still that he would be invisible to a casual glance.
Insufficient data, he decides. He can't -- as yet -- sort it out. His attention returns to the bus. Someone is sniffing.
It is the girl who runs, etc.
People sniff either because they have colds or because they are trying not to be noticed crying.
The latter here.
With the self-righteousness of a teenager he gets indignant at these older men; surely they have daughters her age, some of them, surely they could offer help! They don't.
Up to him, then. Kindly by nature, he hasn't the faintest idea how. He is also shy, both because he is innately very introverted, and because he is from time to time aware, being a scholarship boy, of the much higher standard of living and self-esteeming of the parents and therefore of their children who can afford to pay the high fees.
The older men either out of embarrassment or out of a habit of not observing, not surely out of wickedness, continue to look at the newspaper or the windows. Dave remembers of course, as in truth he will all his life, his first day at Sharth, and the welcoming speech given by Dr Glaster the Head Man in his vivid-coloured ceremonial gown, in the Great Hall of the school, the largest building Dave had even been in except Sharth Cathedral once, how very impressive it was with its stained glass, its row of cups and shields, its portraits, its enormous height, that Great Hall larger than any other in the country except that of Winchester, he and the others were told; yes, he had heard of that city further south. Dr Glaster had said that he wanted every Sharthian to think of any other Sharthian as his brother; or sister, he had added after a very very brief pause. Now Dave has neither brother nor sister, but if he had, he is sure, he wouldn't just sit idly by if they were weeping.
O Lord, he thinks as he moves forward, this girl may think I'm trying to get off with her - though his life has little room for such frivolity, it is thought - effective thought and knowledge that matter to him supremely. He sits down, not next to her, rather on the outer edge of the double seat on the other side of the access passageway. 'Hullo there', he says.
No answer. A few seconds more and the girl looks up and sees him half, blurred by her tears, between stripes of pale sunlight, stretched out jerkily diagonal. Yet somehow like an angel. She comes to partly out of her misery quick as a blow, and is at once self-conscious and embarrassed and deeply aware that her kind of people do not show that kind of thing. 'O', she says, not very loudly. 'Hello, Dando'.
That she knows his name and he doesn't know hers adds to the awkwardness. 'Would you like my hankie?' he offers.
'Sorry', she says.'Hay fever.' He doesn't think to comment that this is unlikely in November; just as well, because if he did think it he'd say it. Instead he shifts his buttock clumsily as if his body is a machine he hasn't quite mastered driving yet, and produces the clean hankie, spilling some pennies onto the dusty seat beside him.
'What's up?' he says, shifting again and putting the money back.
'None of your beeswax!' she snaps.
'Sorry to ask then' he says in a 'cheesed' kind of way, and turns to look at some cottages passing; he has the momentary illusion that it is they not the bus which are moving.
Brief silence.
She reflects that she has been childishly rude, and that (a) he is good-looking, (b) does really seem concerned. His thought might be best represented by a cartoon 'balloon-thing' with '??' on it.
He tries again. 'I'm not trying to be nosy, farr from it,' he says. 'Just that sorrt of knowing you and bein' on the same bus sometimes and bein' both of us at Sharrth...' and he tails off; he has the 'burr' which those who have the misfortune not to be brought up in the West Country find amusing. That he has it recalls her to duty. All of twenty seconds past Pasqueline was a silly girl half-enjoying her misery, real though it is, now she is a young lady who must make a good impression by putting an inferior at this ease.
So she does take his handkerchief, despite having her own, and wipes her eyes with it and thanks him for lending it to her when she hands it back, and sits straighter. 'I'm sorry. I ought to know better than to make an exhibition of myself', she says, using a pet phrase of her previous school's headmistress. 'One or two things are difficult at home, that's all'.
A kind of 'nous' he did not have two minutes before stops Dave asking what things. 'Homes can be difficult places', he says portentiously. 'We'd have a job to manage without 'em, mind.'
'Parents too, ' she says.
'Yes,' he says. 'Mine don't understand at all what I'm studying at Sharth, they haven't the faintest idea what it's all about. But at least they do their best to keep out of the way.' (O, is that unkind? he thinks.)
'Mine never seem to be there', she says. 'At least, not together, and anyway the house we rattle around like peas in a drum, the house is so big'. ('O, is that swank (showing off)?' she thinks.
She decides to change gear. 'What are you studying, actually?' she says.
'I spend most of my time now in the Senior Physics Lab,' he says. 'I'm going on to University, preferably Cambridge, to....' and off he goes, fluently even, taking the studies he hopes to pursue onward in imagination at least as far as Ph.D level; later on he'll be amazed how much he has talked to this younger near-stranger. She too is surprised, reflecting upon it, by her having done what she has rarely done before, listening with full attention. What she has not done is confided (yet?)
The bus journey, not long in itself, passes quickly.
When they get to the bus stop for the school ('Sharth', not 'Sharth School', to its pupils, as if the city itself does not exist) he stands and lets her go down the bus steps first. They walk along the pavement together besides its big grey building, talking almost volubly. Yet she is a little self-conscious now, and swings her case of books etc.; nothing is private in a school. 'Bye, David, ' she says when they get into the school's darkness, and he must go to the prefects' room and she to Mr Perkins' formroom past huge never-used yet never-moved mahogany and wire coatracks. 'Bye', he says, 'but what's your name?'
'Pasqueline Ferrace.'
O!
'That's "Ferrace" with an A-C-E, not like wheel or dust. "Pasqueline" is because I was born on Easter Sunday, which is "Pasques" in French, as you know, ' she explains automatically. 'There aren't many of us.' 'One threehundredandsixtyfifth of the poulation, I suppose,' he says usefully. 'Yes, but not many of us called Pasqueline, I mean,' she says.
The bell for registration goes and parts them, each half looking forward to the next meeting, which would occur by chance soon enough in any case. She does not run in the corridor that afternoon (he is again on prefect's duty), instead smiles shyly as if by chance as she passes him. She is unused to anyone's taking this much notice of her; that he did nearly all the talking, and about himself too, she has not noticed.
Again she walks forward on her journey home later as far as the railway station, more out of habit than particularly to avoid others, again smiling a little, absorbed. A taxi, whose only passenger, oddly, is a big red setter dog, almost knocks her over as it turns left into the station incline. The driver has to pull up sharply and shouts out that she ought to look more carefully where's she's going, but ends his rebuke with 'm'darling' so she feels quite grown-up, even pretty. Quite unconsciously she is stooping less than usual; whether this is the reason she is not splaying her feet and jerking out her elbows as she often does, or its cause, is hard to say -- but she looks for once quite ordinary and unremarkable. She is intending once again to get the late bus tomorrow.
She does, but David is not on it today. Pity. Next day she is on the early bus and he is too. They do not even look at each other, so many fellow-Sharthians are there too. The following day is Sunday, therefore there is no school.
That Monday they are both on the same late bus. She got on first of course, living two miles further away.
He comes and sits beside her again. Not exactly next to her; she is on the left of one two-seater bench on the left, he is in the middle of another on the right beside it. What on earth can he say, though? She seems for a moment quite a little girl, a child.
Now even to shy teenagers the shyness of shy teenagers (and why are they all thought to be brash?) can appear, if not exactly funny, at least as one of those serious matters which yet have their funny side, e.g. funerals. They evidently can't go on like this and be silent travelling together for the whole ten minute journey; each pretending to be unaware of the other will lack conviction pretty soon, say fifty seconds. 'Well, here I am,' he says to himself, speaking aloud without realising it.
'Morning, David, ' she says.
'Morning, Pasqueline,' he answers.
Thus it is established that they are serious and equal makers of interlocutory conversation, not any of those vulgar and flippant daves and pasks who will chat or natter. 'You look today--' he begins, and in that quarter-second represented by the dash he finds, surveys and rejects such expressions as happier, more cheerful, pretty happy, not so miserable, etc., realising that she may not appreciate being reminded of the cause of their first speaking, and settles clumsily on 'pretty more good', which she does not really understand. She assumes its some dialect phrase and it is obviously said with good will, and smiles.
Now what to say? 'Look,' she launches in, 'why are some things cold and some things hot?'
He in turn launches into a complex explanation of rate of molecular vibration, the absorbency of energy of various materials, the difference made by ambient temperatures, the overriding need to take accurate measurements with instruments rather than rely on one's own subjective feelings, etc., although it is possible that in ways one does not understand, and probably never will be able to understand, the very act of measuring may alter what is measured, that is, on a subatomic level, which brings us to the very difficult ideas of quantum mechanics.
And so forth. Many young women would think him tedious beyond words; Pask, however, looks admiring, as if she is at least trying to understand.
'Look,' she says when he at last stops, 'There's this place I know, it's in our house,' and for some reason she will not say that it's outside her bedroom, as if associating him with it....she does not complete the thought, which almost gives her a physical sensation which surprises. 'It's nothing much, in one way. Just a place that is cold, and you can't understand why it's cold, well, I mean I can't, it didn't used to be that cold. Daddy says it's a draught of course, but what's really queer is that it seems really cold one way when I'm passing it, but not the other, I mean when I'm coming out of the room again. Which is ever so odd!' she finishes, with more emotion than would seem to most of us at all reasonable in a more-or-less healthy young woman telling that she got cold briefly, even more than once.
'I think that's easily enough explained,' he says. 'It's nothing to worry about. We only notice things, anything at all, because they are not something else. Edges, differences, borders, see? Going one way you get cold, then coming back you are cold already so you don't notice it. It's a matter of perceiving the difference, all such things are. The second time, without the contast, the coldness which really is still there can't be felt.'
She goes through the motion of thinking about what he has said rather than voicing her agreement immediately, yet says, 'No. I mean, I am going along the corridor, and just before I get into this room, my bedroom actually, that's where I do my prep, I feel really very cold indeed just for a second or two. Icy. It's really horrid. Though not for all that long. A moment or two, that's all it is. Now the corridor's unheated, but in the room there's a radiator, which does work, even though it was probably put in in King Ethrwulf's time, so I'm warm enough, but when I come out again into the corridor it does seem more or less the same temperature as the room.' Aware that for him she must be as accurate as she can, she imagines/relives it all along her smooth body and corrects herself, 'That is, it's a little cooler than this room itself, the corridor, but no more than you'd expect really, no sudden chill. It's like going through a freezing shower, coming in.'
In telling him again she again relieves its horror. Her skin yearns towards his like a smoothed cat.
'Are you sure you're not imagining all this?'
'Absolutely! Daddy just says I'm exaggerating and of course an old house has draughts, and my mother who's usually full of opinions takes no notice at all.'
'Sorry, I don't quite see that there's anything I can do to help.'
For all that, he does perceive that he has been asked to.
*
The visitor has been almost unaware even of her own self for long, knows little but that there is a would-be all-destroying coldness like Antarctica, whether in her or all around her, or both. Is she in Hell? Or is Hell in her? Is she herself a kind of Hell? But Hell is hot, and (so I have been told) this much mercy is shown even to its inhabitants, that they are unaware of time.
Before her eyes, which are not eyes, and may not blink, is the tall and solidly made doorway and the tall and solidly made unpainted door. She knows that she may not pass through it. Night and day she stands regarding it, or rather what is night and day to you and me. Everything is grey.
Without memory, without needs, and too without boredom, she stands. Invisible, even to herself.
When Pasqueline walks through her to her room, just for a moment the dead woman and the living one coincide, Pasqueline's mouth's warm wetness is over upon her mouth's cold dryness, her breasts, her hips, her womb, her never-by-another-touched most intimate and tender places overlap the visitor's; to this poor ghost this second is like a blast from a furnace, stifling and yet envigorating. She is reminded dimly of what in the past it was like to be living, every part of her vibrating to the beat of her ever-patient heart which is now still.
Each time Pasqueline thaws her just a little; she comes slowly to focus upon her place, her own being, although as yet she cannot remember even as much as her own name. 'I do not know who I am,' she says,' But I know now that I do not know it. I have a name, I am a person.'
And she knows the inhabitants of the house. The Girl, mainly. The Woman, and that she is the girl's mother. And that both are in their own ways discontented; this pleases her.
She knows without shame now that others' unhappinesses, when they are near her, is her food; loneliness, boredom, sleeplessness, masturbation, these do her good. She knows less clearly of the Man. And there is a fourth too, who is a friend to her in some way, yet contact is not possible.
She sips delicately at their dissatisfaction. It is good to her that these women are never touched by a loving hand.
*
Pask is again writing her idiary. She has an energy of mind which Sharth, for all its excellent reputation, does not engage. She records events, principally, small victories and defeats mostly, but inevitably binds in with them her feelings and judgments.
She does not fully understand her own self. (Heaven protect us from those who are certain they do!) Her scribblings about the petty-predictable happenings of the day do not gell; better writing would bring better understanding &/or the other way round. Maybe.
David has - apart from anything else - surprised her. He is virtually grown-up, he has finished the toil Nature has demanded of her also. He speaks to her as if graciously, not as to a child. He is clever, too. And a prefect, which seems to Pask a very impressive thing; herself disorganised and not a games-player, she knows she will never be one, admires him for this in the same way successful businessmen admire a knight. (The prefects have their own lawn to play croquet upon, sit at High Table with the Head Man to converse with distinguished visitors while eating their horrible school lunches.) He is good-looking yet appears unaware of it, so it seems an achievement of hers to have noticed. But - this may be a problem - there is the way he speaks; then she is annoyed with herself for thinking like that absurdly tiresome proud woman Vanessa-Veronica. Yet she has ears, how can she not hear it?
And a man. Has he ever....? I expect so. And did she, whoever-it-was, enjoy it? Or they? What can it be like? Wonderful, they say, the most important thing that has ever happened. Yet they don't look at all wondering or important, being much more concerned with A-levels.
Could he do that to me?
Evidently. I am a woman too now. But do they really like it? The whole thing seems the most silly and comic thing you've ever heard of, a man with a great stick of skin poking up by his tum!
And yet I'd like to see it, or feel it...
She stops. Her own thoughts have embarrassed her. She actually blushes, a little. If she had written down such things she'd tear them up and throw them down the loo.
Vain narrow complacent little prig that she has been, she is now finding another person more interesting than herself.
She understands that he lives mainly in his thoughts and that therefore he must be webbed by her own. So the mysterious and unhappy-making cold patch outside her room, which not long before made her cry and sniff on the bus, that now actually has its uses.
*
Next she does not see him for some days. Since they are not always on the same bus, Pask, though she regrets this, does not ponder on it. But she doesn't see him around the school either.
Two more days, no sign of him. She is a little anxious now, and surprised at her own anxiety.
She asks whether they have seen him of several of her schoolfriends; 'fellow students' might be a better phrase, for they after the fashion of schoolfriends then speculate loudly and at some length, even crudely, upon the motive of her question, and give no answer.
She decides that she must go to his formroom, which means the prefects' room, since the prefects who are day pupils have the honour of registering themselves. This requires of her almost more social self-confidence than a fourteen-year-old normally possesses; she has never been there before except to hand in 'lines' and to suffer other petty punishments which, it seems to her, the prefects give out open-handedly, with no regard to justice, only to show that they can.
For they are almost like gods to the younger pupils, these youths and lasses who, never in most cases, or only when greying and life-weary, will achieve so marvellous a dominance over any other society of which they are members. Their advancement over their equals has come about as just reward for -- well, servility is the wrong word, but for being eagerly willing to sing along with whatever tune their own seniors, the masters are mistresses, are singing, and in some cases this is no way unthinking, but cynically designed. The 'real world''s distinctions, life peerages and such, are distributed in much the same way.
There is a platform in the Great Hall a foot or so high from which the Head Man holds forth to the whole school every single morning after a process of hymn, Bible reading and prayer which is miscalled worship; upon this eminence the High Table is erected at lunchtimes. Pask of course knows the history of the school, she knows that this immense edifice was the munificence of a nineteenth century tobacco baron. She does not know much about architecture, cannot see that its imitation-medieval design was built awkwardly by workmen ill-at-ease with what for them was unmodern, uncontemporary.
No, she is impressed, as ever, by the place's vastness. Early mornings and lunchtimes most of the school crowds in, now at midmorning break when it is near empty its full hugeness can be seen, and the noisiness of the science sixthformers who have their desks there is swallowed up. (Each dark desk is fully thirty feet long, divided into fifteen separate compartments. ) Some of the enormous windows here have stained glass, others are clearish with leaded panes. A blue-grey bird has got in through a small hole in or near the very high roof and has made a nest among the rafters and has been left there year after year either because of sentimentality or because of the practical and insurance difficulties of sending the head porter/sergeant up so very far to clear it out.
Behind a surprisingly frail partition, decorated in golden letters with the names and ranks of those old boys who 'gave' their lives 1914--18, the prefects lounge in draughty splendour; nowhere is comfortable whose roof is seventy feet high. Pasqueline of course stoops anyway as if naturally, so her manner appears as it should be humble as she knocks.
She is not immediately answered, or quickly; this long pause must be engineered to underline what honour it is to be answered at all.
Comes at last a fair-haired, fair-skinned being, perfectly proportioned, tall, very neatly dressed who says '?' by raising its eyebrows. 'Please, is David Dando here?' Pask asks humbly.
The presence raps her with its gorgeous eyes, turns smoothly its beautiful head without venting speech, calls 'Dando?' into the mystery-heavy emptiness beyond (where surely there ought to be darkness, music and heavy smell of incense, but somehow isn't.)
Indistinguishable words echo from there.
'Who asks?' the radiant one lowers itself to question.
'Pasqueline Ferrace 5b.'
'And why, I must enquire, does Pasqueline Ferrace 5b ask such a question?' the heavenly apparition voices further.
'Because I want to know,' Pask answers.
A pause follows, probably only five seconds though seeming longer, during which both Pask and the radiant apparition both wonder from their different perspectives whether such a remark is what is spoken of as cheek though spelled i n s o l e n c e and therefore merits summary punishment; however, the tone was meek so judgement pauses.
'O, does anyone know anything about Dando?' the prefect says, half-turning, and all at once lapsing into the irritated manner of a self-judged as overworked petty official, and then repeats phrase by phrase what those inside say, 'absent...ill...accident...in hospital.'
Pask's heart beats faster. 'Which hospital, please?' This prefect gives way to another not quite so gorgeous and less god-like in manner, who says, 'I don't know. But, look, if you ask Miss Love in the school office she'll surely be able to tell you.'
The warning bell for the next class rings and Pask must go there. She is more than usually inattentive in the next two lessons and the badly-dressed Latin mistress discovers in herself the necessary force to rebuke her. Then she is compelled to eat first session lunch, so it is 1.20 before she goes to the office, where she explains to cover her enquiry that she is Dando's cousin.
Now she is not permitted to leave school without permission at lunchtimes, and there is no telephone in the school which pupils may use without very, very good cause (nowadays each has one in a pocket) but she goes out anyway to a red public telephone box, being aware all the time of her skin's presence as if naked outdoors, and gets through to the hospital. A cycling accident, she is told, broken left arm and left leg.
Pask gets back unseen, unreported anyway, and is inattentive in the three afternoon lessons also. She usually prefers her own thoughts to her teachers' blether, and today she feels morally right to do so; she does not care about Trigonometry, she does care about David. Afterwards she walks again to the railway station bus-stop for solitariness's sake, and makes it her first task when she gets home again to contact the hospital, and this time gets put through to the ward, 'Quite a bad accident...fairly well, considering...no danger' and she enquires about visiting. Elaine goes by as she is listening; their only instrument is in the cold hall, black, heavy, clumsy, old-fashioned even then.
Next day is Saturday, therefore lessons finish early. 'Games' on Saturday afternoon requires only the keen and talented, so Pask, not one of them, is able to come home without school lunch and hastily eats a salad Elaine has prepared. She wants to visit a friend from school who is in hospital, she says truthfully, assuming correctly that Elaine will assume this is another girl. She goes up to her room -- again the sudden chill -- to get clothes, showers in one of the big, half-heated bathrooms, and dresses more carefully than normally.
She does not analyse her motive for going -- mainly sincere concern, yet shot through with childish pomposity; this hospital visiting seems a 'grown-up' thing to do.
Bishoprick General Hospital (BGH to locals) was founded in 1781. Alderman Gritnell was one of the subscribers. It was then on the extreme western edge of the city, now is almost at its centre; the land it is on is worth many millions.
Dave is on the balcony of a south-facing ward, where until recently it was the custom to put the tubercular in the open air; now it is glassed in, though still cold. He looks a boy, seen now in his pyjamas. A tall, elegant, clear-spoken brunette student nurse shows her to his bedsite and brings her a churchhally kind of chair. Pasqueline envies the nurse her self-possession. She is bemused by the unfamiliar sounds and smells and sights of the hospital, above all by its odour of aggressive cleanliness -- this is some time ago -- though not intimidated by it; young women of her background are not easily frightened.
She looks at Dave with pity, even perhaps love. He does not look back, because he is asleep. His mouth is open, his lips like tender worms, his tongue lolls naked. He snores just a little. His forehead -- he is turned slightly towards her -- shines, his curly hair is slightly damp. His left arm is outside the bedclothes, and of course his foot, stretched up by a pulley.
Pask sits down, looks at the nuse enquiringly. 'He's not too bad, considering the bad shock to his system, broken bones, loss of blood and all that. Don't worry; at your sort of age,' the nineteen-year-old student nurse adds, distancing herself from these schoolchildren, 'recovery comes quickly. Now you'll find him tired, very tired. Five minutes only, by that clock on the wall over there. No longer, mind, his family's coming too.'
With officious tenderness the nurse calls 'David!' and shakes his right shoulder just a little.
He wakes. That is, his eyes open, but do not focus, he seems mild and benevolent.
'Hello, David,' she says. 'It's me.'
Silence; she reflects that she has given him truthful information which is self-evident.
He tries to smile, which pleases her, tries to raise himself a little in the bed, gives up. 'Pasqueline,' he says. 'Good. Of you. To come. To see me.'
'Pleasure,' she says formally. Then, in a sincere rush, 'I was worried about you after what they told me at Sharth.'
'Kind you. Coming.'
'Didn't bring grapes, sorry.'
Hard to know what to say to someone even better known to her than David is yet when out of usual context.
'What happened? How d'you get here?'
'Ambulance. Course.'
'Yes, yes, but what caused the accident?'
'Dunno. Yes. Carelessness. Going too fast. Down the hill. Rowtham's Hill. Big pub at bottom, then road curves a bit. You know?' She nods. 'Enjoying ride too much. Wind face. All that. Tires hiss. Wheel clicks. Not thinking, see. Loving not thinking. Think too much, normal.'
You ought to have been thinking about riding your bicycle carefully, she doesn't say.
'Lorry outside pub. Delivering. Bus coming other way. Can't go out. Must brake. Brake, brake!'
She thinks he is saying 'break, break!', appropriately enough.
'Brakes cycles. Never much good. Front jams.'
Longer pause. She understands that he hates yet needs to retell it. 'Saddle and back wheel, me on them, leap up, see. Can't remember more. Someone must've rung 999, see, woke up here.'
'Much pain?'
'Dunno.' He is unwilling, even though half conscious, to voice inaccuracy. 'Maybe. Pumped with anaesth....'
'Anaesthetic.' She helps him with the difficult word.
'See, I'm right-handed. You're not, I've noticed, most people are....' He pauses, losing his train of thought. 'Doctor says, self-protecting reflex, you put out the less-used hand . Instinct. Must only have been a second. Less. Until I hit. Thrown up, you'd have put out right hand, I put out left. Smashed up left side.'
In a flash of unusual imagination Pask sees the accident almost as clearly as if there, though her lorry is yellow like the one council workmen drive, which isn't likely. She winces, imagining hearing his limbs crack like branches in a bonfire.
'Well, if it had to happen,' she goes on with a false-cheerfulness, a moment afterward realising that it's the way her tiresome mother sometimes speaks, 'best where people around and telephones. If it had been in a country lane...'
It's Dave's turn to wince. He is more fully awake now. 'My own fault, really. It's good to see you partly because there's someone else to say that to, I keep saying it to myself when I'm awake. I'd always know the pub was there.'
'Don't think like that. You couldn't help it.'
'Could!' He transfers his irritation with himself to her. A little. 'Who else's fault was it?'
'Come off it, don't be cheesed' she says -- 'cheesed' is school slang for fed up -- and then she feels the need to speak in a more adult 'register'. 'You've no cause to blame yourself.'
He's got sleepy again. 'Yes, have. Wasn't anyone else going too fast. I wasn't thinking about cycling, I was thinking about my Cambridge entrance.'
'Don't worry!' she exclaims. 'You'll get in easily!'
Now the curious thing here is that she speaks in a 'vatic' tone, as if a prophet; no statement may be challenged, so voiced.
They talk a little more, about Sharth and its trivial defeats and victories. He grumbles about the boringness and repetitiveness of hosptal life, and Pask sympathises conventionally; she finds much of her own life like that.
He gets tired again. The attractive nurse comes to warn her that time is up. Problem: how to say goodbye. You just don't shake hands with your fellow-pupils, or at least you don't at Sharth; besides, he's more-or-less lying on his right hand. Pask therefore bends down hastily and kisses his cheek as his sister might. Looking back to wave as she goes out into the corridor a moment later she is surprised (yes, and gratified) to see that this nearly-grown man is grinning and blushing.
Corridor with flowers and notices, neon lights, lift, another corridor (floor glass-polished, amateur watercolours on the walls.) Here the outer world's bright winter day shines in. Through the swing doors now to her surprise comes her family charwoman, who toddles in her direction accompanied by a taller woman, awkward-looking, of much Elaine's age.
Pask would rather be alone to think, even though to think about what isn't very clear. However, there is quite evidently a social duty to be done; she has been well-trained in recognising the importance of such things.
So she stops and speaks in a friendly manner and is introduced to the younger woman, shaking her hand. They are visiting Ardave, Bessie says, who came off his bicycle down Rowtham Hill.
O!
'I hope you find him better,' Pask says, fatuously in the circumstances. 'Goodbye.'
She goes on out and down the steps beside the jammed road. She turns left towards the shopping centre instead of right to her bus stop. She looks in the handbag she is carrying for her cigarettes, finds she has no matches.
Why didn't she connect up? (Why didn't he for that matter?) It seems now that all her life she has been hearing Bessie going on and on and ON about her grandson and how very clever he is, and has taken very little notice. Yet -- of course! -- he gets on the bus at the Cross, nearest stop to those rows of all-the-same-looking ivory-coloured little houses in one of which Bessie lives. It is right at the bottom of the village, their own house is separate from the 'old village' at the top.
So he's in actuality just as clever as Bessie has always said and he's gained one of the local dayboy scholarships from up out of the red-triangle-roofed village school! Why has the old woman rabbited on and on about him and never mentioned that he's suffering at the same place? However, she has, (rabbited, she means); maybe she thought I knew, Pask thinks. Did she tell me while I was at Ladywell myself and I took no notice?
This needs considering, she thinks, and turns into a little coffee shop and orders coffee and a cake, asking too for a light for her cigarette.
And considers: what on earth will Aunt Vee-Vee Vanessa-Veronica think? What will she say unprivately to her sloany friends about it, i.e. the friendship?
The waitress serves her. Pasqueline thinks about VV, and decides that she does not like her. She takes proud glee in contemning others, and at the same time praising herself; in this way she deserves blame far more than they. Is she a person therefore entirely without worth? Is her disapproval even a sort of honour?
Yes, David and she can go on being friends. What really prevents? There may be times, in fact there almost certainly will, when awkwardness may arise -- but nothing that can't be overcome with good humour and a some give-and-take.
Pasqueline therefore, no thanks to her school and little to her family, has begun to grow up. She has made a commitment, inwardly; the friendship will go on.
And what about the other? (She does not think this.) What will he want?
*
A month later John is writing to an old school friend who has worked for twenty years in South America, as he does every year about this time because his friend's birthday is coming near. He has a fantasy of visiting. Occasionally in dreams he does so but, waking, knows that it would involve a great deal of time, difficulty and expense.
He is alone in the 'open plan' office. It is 6.13 and everyone else has gone home. He is in the division of it he shares with Alyss writing in his elegant longhand with his great-uncle's fountain pen on thick home notepaper. He does not realise that it is his habit to write the annual letter there.
'Pask sends her regards too,' he writes (though it is not his custom to lie.) 'She'll be fifteen next April, and she's not doing as well at S. as I could wish. Nothing they teach her seems to strike her mind or imagination, except music, and I am not musical, as you full well know. Recently she has made quite a close friend of a boy she has met at school. As far as Elaine and I know it's all so far pretty innocent physically, though I assume we'd be the last to know. more a matter of shared enthusiasms. He's undoubtedly clever, and she appears more willing to learn from him than from any of the masters and (nowadays!) mistresses at Sharth, and yet---' He pauses, crosses out 'and yet', writes 'but I could wish'. His ever-active conscience is accusing him of inbred snobbery. He crosses out 'I could wish' and puts weakly, 'Our two families have intertwined for many years so in a sense it's appropriate.'
His friend, 'Don Antonio', the locals call him, lives in a big airy house waited on by native girls day and night. He has sometimes come to Gritnell's. John tells him that Pask has of course the bedroom which he (John) always thinks of as poor Hetty's, and that the tiresomeness of her complaints about the draught outside it have fallen off since she got friendly with this boy. Of course there are draughts, he writes to Anthony as he has said so many times to Pask; what on earth else do you expect in a house whose modern parts are two hundred years old, and some of the rest very, very much older? He complains a little of his wife's interest in yoga, tai chi, etc. and the 'new age' people it brings her into contact with; 'they'll believe anything and everything as long as it's not Christian and focuses always on Self.'
'This David,' he adds out of order, wants to go to 'the other place'; an Oxford man, he means Cambridge, not Hell. 'Like so many these days, he's been brought up, I'm sorry to say, without even the name of any religion.'
He reflects sentimentally upon when he first saw Anthony, not quite having scored his century against Clifton, stiff-upper-lippedly hiding his disappointment. He adds Elaine's best wishes, untruthfully, and a lament that she is always faintly off-colour, which 'makes difficulties for us both. All good wishes, J.'
It was 'Love' when they were younger, though John has never despite boarding sinned in that way.
*
Elaine almost always goes to bed earlier than her husband. He kisses her cheek, puts out the bedside lamp, settles down to sleep too. He is not strongly sexed, does not miss intimacy very much, and yet misses it for all that. Each, never saying, scarcely thinking it, blames the other a little.
James met VeeVee at a Hunt Ball at Lord Demnet's 'place' at Sheat -- but pass by that, we are not much concerned with the orchidaceous. Elaine has almost forgotten how she met John. Pask, already, is ashamed of sniffing on the bus. Bessie met Bellows because she was accused of a violent murder.
None of Bessie's neighbours, friends, relations or acquaintances was ever accused, however wrongly, of committing murder. She does not relish this distinction; her whole life's instinct as well as her training has been to fade against the background of these dull, worthy, almost virtuous unmurderous people.
She never thinks of it, she is very careful not to think of it.
This refusal to engage complicates her relationship with her dead husband and too with her grandson who is so much like him.
Fifty and more years back ('them days', she calls them) Bessie was a pretty teenager with very pale skin and very dark hair. Her black and white maid's dress which she took great care of therefore made her strikingly good-looking; it was pushed out agreeably by slight but firm roundnesses. The inspector thought that it would not be disagreeable for William (he called him 'Bill', which he disliked, or 'laddie', which was worse) to go and tackle Bessie while he again and fruitlessly challenged old Mrs Gritnell. William knew his value; he'd passed the exam for sergeant, though actual promotion had been held up because of the War, he'd be an inspector himself in ten year's time, he would be the modern breed of policeman, not a bumbling yokel. And the young girl's eyes had lit up when she came to the door, not because of the shorter and pudgier inspector; no, he was tall and strong and fit, she had immediately seen. In the drawing room with laboured politeness his boss would once again take the householder through her version of what she knew of 'the unfortunate events of last week, madam' and William in the servants' hall (nowadays the kitchen) would do the same with Bessie.
They sat opposite. (He did not think to ask Nell, the other maid, to stay; she bustled off self-importantly to do whatever servants do.) He was handsome, fair-haired, ginger-moustached, normally happy-looking though at the moment stern; he thought that she probably liked what she saw, and he was right. (Well, he was vain, yes, though no vainer than most tall, strong, fit young men.)
This was the first time they had met. He had the notes made by the other policeman who'd interviewed her before, and who presently had 'flu. Nothing she said to William now differed materially from what she had told him, and nothing, not even seemingly insignificant, was added. She wept and he gave his handkerchief; he took no pleasure in making her cry, his was a good nature despite the vanity, but he was unreluctant to do it if it would help reveal the truth. It didn't; in fact, all these years on, the truth isn't clear.
Her woman's body, her uninstructed child's brain, weeping was almost her sole defence. He was Authority, she was one of the hereditarily powerless, he knew, and knew also that he must not let 'guilt' about that stand in his way. 'Cry if you like,' he said, 'but tell me the truth.' Damn it, it didn't sound as rough as he meant it to be. It was a pity to make that sweet and pretty face unsweet and unpretty.
No! It is his own duty, his boss's, the whole Force's to bring to justice the perpetrator of this especially bloody murder. This girl who said she'd come across the body so unexpected, she was either a most important witness, or...
Or she would hang. Tears didn't matter.
In the chilly drawing room it was, if anything, harder. The inspector was not used to drawing rooms but thought that probably visitors to them were asked to sit down. He wasn't. Maria stood even more erect than usual and answered him as if this interview was some very simple examination she was sure of passing. She was older than himself, she was understood to be rich, she was a gentlewoman, etc.etc. He was more used to dealing with poachers, petty thieves and boys who rode bicycles without lights. He resented having to dust off his party manners for her, but did not know how else to behave.
Several times her small mouth formed, 'I have already told you that, inspector'. Tricked into deference, the inspector could not say what he was thinking, that while such an old lady would not lie, maybe was even incapable of it, she was not telling him the full truth, and wasn't ever going to either.
*
Elaine comes upon Dave and Pask as she goes to make her morning barley-cup. (He is better now and out of hosptal, though still aching and twingy.) The door to the backstairs is open. 'Where are you two going?'
'I'm taking David up to see where I feel the cold spot.'
'No, Pasqueline.' This is the first emergence for many years of the Mummy-says-no-and-that's-it tone Pask knew well as a toddler. And did not like then. She would grizzle or yell in her pushchair and attract to Elaine disapproving looks from women of her own mother's age. Well, she can't do that now. Instead she presses her weight down on her back foot as if actually preparing for physical combat. 'Why not?' she says louder than is necessary to be heard two feet away. (David frames mentally but does not speak an explanation of his interest as a physicist in anomalous phenomena; he likes long words such as those.)
'Because you are not children any more,' Elaine says, then losing what little advantage she has by adding, 'Haven't you noticed?' She explains, 'You can sit down here together and talk, or use one of the sitting rooms. You do not go upstairs together.'
A teenage youth cannot protest that he did not have in mind what Elaine thinks he has in mind.
However, he looks at her searchingly. He has now and then, through Blowsy, met Elaine's father, a strikingly good-looking man even now that he is old. As if he too were an artist and about to draw her he notices in a second her strained look, her inexpensive clothes, her skirt too long to be fashionable, her 'sensible' shoes with their flat heels and silly pompoms.
'I was fifteen once too, Pask,' she says, 'believe it or not'. Neither of them do. She looks into David's eyes, which are bluish-grey, hers are brown and long-eyelashed, and - amazingly! - blushes. She looks all at once ten years younger. David is surprised to be thinking that she's an attractive woman after all, and not unlike Pask.
She sits down at the kitchen table, suddenly lost in thought (they just stand by) and smiles faintly. That visit to the German cousins on their farmland, so unsuccessful in so many ways, she and her mother unable to speak their language while they were almost fluent in English, the unfamiliar food, too heavy, too pickled, too sweet, the generosity with which it was pressed upon them, the odd manners, strangely formal, strangely childish, obviously excellent in their way, but strange, the heat of that summer...
And Cousin Heinrich-Joachim seeking out her company. That especially hot day when they were by the barn, his invitation to her to swim in their river, her 'but..but--' , his mocking 'But I haven't got my swimming costume with me! You English, you are so stiff, so dreary, always so Protestant! Don't be silly, child!' (He was all of eighteen months older than she.) You need only your arms and legs, you've got them with you, of course! We Germans have more sense than to be ashamed of what makes us men and women!'
How attractive he'd looked wading in, and how strange too. How she'd wished she could swim as well as he, and he did seem to want to swim too, he'd gone quite a distance away. She'd kept part-hidden under the water, careful not to get out of her depth.
And afterwards? Yes, they had gone all the way in the barn, yes, she can smell it, she can feel its scratching her back and her bottom, hear the little squeaky noises it was making.
O, are David and Pask still here? ('The children', she calls them mentally. David she tolerates easily; she rates him good-natured though dull, much as she rates John.)
She stretches and turns her neck like a pet cat wanting to be smoothed. Her body floods with remembered....well, I suppose it is delight. But a mother must do her duty, and that is to forbid; she cannot even admit the thought that she might think otherwise.
*
' A ghost?' David says. 'A ghost!' he says in the room with the television where the family mostly sit in the evening. 'Just suppose for the moment that there are such things -- which doesn't seem likely, though one must try to be open-minded -- then it is not material, or so one must suppose, and therefore will not make any instrument react. One might however posit a case, that what is spiritual may nevertheless have physical concomitants; therefore the coldness which spectres are popularly alleged to cause may after all be objectively measurable, though probably it is not.'
Is this the way a young man usually talks to a young woman when they are alone together? I think not, but David is not a usual sort of person.
She is sitting beside him, even very near, yet separately. 'Corr, you doan' aff talk clever, wossit all mean?' Pask says to make gentle fun of his seriousness.
'Just suppose there is a "ghost"' he says. 'Does it make you feel cold directly, because it's cold itself? Or does it frighten you and you shiver and that makes you feel cold?'
Now Pask has been often hurt, but rarely frightened, and not by this.
He is in what to her is already a familiar posture, both hands folded together between his knees, head bowed, looking at the carpet. 'And if there is a ghost - though I think the idea of life-after-death just's wishfulfilment, don't you?' he says, (and maybe his 'don't you?' carries an undertone of 'you'd better'.) 'If there is, just let us just imagine it for the moment, we will hypothesize that there really is so kind of spirit world, and that a citizen of it is actually, by some means we don't know how, signalling to us.....then, might it not be possible by some means to...improve the quality of the reception?'
'What? Get an outside broadcast from Heaven? That'd beat "Coronation Street"!'
'Who knows what there would be to discover? Heisenberg and Bohrs wouldn't be in it, there'd be a Nobel prize at least!'
For me, he means of course in his out-loud fantasizing, and brushes aside Pask's objection that he's surely too young: 'Most physicists' best work is done before they're thirty.'
Pask is second only to Dave in her admiration for him, which he does not notice; as he said, things are observable by contrast.
He goes on thinking, and even puts his arm around her absent-mindedly. She would not resist if he did more; he doesn't, at least not today. What Dave knows, he knows deeply and thoughtfully. What he does not know he dismisses as being of no importance.
It is comic, or sad, or both, to imagine Elaine at this moment half-hoping, half-fearing and perhaps enjoying the imagination of these two in all kinds of scarcely possible embraces.
'Wait till he is ready' an inner voice advises Pasqueline; it makes her feel quite grown up. This voice is not Hetty's. (Who's Hetty? The ghost; you ought to have guessed.)
She must wait for -- whatever there is that is going to come and for whenever it comes. It will be wonderful, marvellous, it will change you through and through, she has been told by other young women, it will alter the way you see everything utterly; they are still concerned with A-levels, university entrance, and careers, she notices.
Some call it 'being opened' -- as if they were tin cans!
*
A few days later, when the school term has begun, Elaine is alone at Gritnells, ill-at-ease. She has made this morning's barley-cup, left it so that it has got cold. 'How long have we lived in this house?' she asks herself. 'Twenty years? Too long! I was no older than Pask is now when we married! '
Her emotions are thinking, not her brain. It is sixteen years, and she was almost twice Pask's present age.
'How happy we were or thought we were! Now we seem then children enjoying playing at being grown-ups. Where did the happiness go? And time, where has that gone too?
'Was the happiness real at all? Or was it like thinking you're Boadicea, sort of delusion you get locked up for?
'A bit later, we were still thinking we were happy, but we weren't, not really. You try to believe it out of loyalty. Loyalty to the most important decision you've ever made, you've gambled your life on it.
'I suppose feels thinks the same. Pity we don't talk about it. Where to begin, how? Too English to deal with emotion?' (John's half-Scots and she herself is half-German, she for the nonce forgets.)
It is not (need I say) that she has anything seriously to complain of in her marriage. John is good-natured, he earns a goodish salary, he spends it judiciously, nearly all on things which benefit both of them and their child, directly or indirectly, or are thought to. He surely has no secret and expensive vices.
'My mum had real cause to grumble. She got to know that Pop was having Blowsy in the studio. She put up with it in a way, but she made life awkward for him. I bet he's doing it still, for all he's seventy.'
The thought of modest John having another woman somewhere makes her laugh aloud. Briefly. No, he never was passionate, except the first months. (Her own fault, perhaps? She represses that notion.)
Teenagers think the middle-aged have lost all excitement, all joy in life, not just in its sexual aspects. Are they right? The teenager still alive in Elaine tells her impatiently that this dullness is common in your forties, inevitable even, they're just like everybody else.
Elaine does not rebuke that teenager for thinking in cliches.
She tries to think about the interrelationships of couples she knows who are approximately John's and her own age. Well, that's difficult. She is not perceptive, and does not know very many. Her cousin Maggs either is or chooses to appear to be a widow, VeeVee she does not as yet much like, her friend Katharine's husband she scarcely knows.
But if it is true that most or even nearly all middle-aged couples are unhappy, it strikes her, why should John and I be of them? And -- a true insight -- she asks now, what can I do about it?
*
Work harder at her Yoga, maybe? (Wouldn't it in fact benefit her more if she regarded it as play?) She practises it, usually mid-afternoon though sometimes before or instead of breakfast, in the little room which she calls her 'den' and Pask her 'lair'. She usually wears for it a black one-piece swimming costume her parents' neighbours gave her years and years back; when that needs washing she does it in a dressing-gown, which flops irritatingly, or naked, but does not feel at ease. She has a small window open, but also, these cold winter days, a paraffin heater whose flickering red circle and fuggy smell do not seem appropriate. She has here a small table and a 'coaster' upon it for her various strange teas; she thinks the picture on it is the Taj Mahal, in fact it is Brighton Pavilion.
Every Wednesday afternoon she goes by bus to Bishoprick and attends a Yoga class in what was a leafy suburb one hundred and forty years before and is now the 'inner city'. Most of the others there are students, though it might be hard (even for them) to say students of what. They and their 'partners' mostly scrape by on what the DSS calls 'benefits' and their clothes are as colourful as those VeeVee wears skiing yet so thin that even in the summer they cannot be warm. As is the convention of such classes they are all on first-name terms, nevertheless they are suspicious of this older and more prosperous woman and she is of them. Their tutor Velda, an astonishingly beautiful though grey-haired woman, sits downstairs afterwards willing to murmur benevolent advice, an opportunity Elaine neglects, and instead gets another bus, though it is to only half a mile further on, all downhill, to visit Katharine is the high-ceilinged chilly vicarage.
Katharine is an olive-skinned woman, short, dark-haired and with just a hint of a moustache. She is patient (except now and then with her own children, one of whom has stencilled footsteps up one wall of the sitting-room.) She is in some ways self-indulgent, which is why she is plump, and has baked a fruit cake for this visit which she offers with Indian tea; what Elaine would prefer would be a more suitable tea for a rabbit, she thinks.
She can be sharp like this, and if she were not also genuinely kind she might be called cynical.
Elaine's eyes as she talks wander to the footsteps sometimes. She manages to be both fluent and boring. It's not that John doesn't earn a decent salary, she says, so different from the stop-go income her artist father had in the bungalow. Wholly English by upbringing and 'culture' she can scarcely speak or even think about anything involving emotion. 'When we were children, you came to the bungalow sometimes, didn't you?' she says.
'Yes,' Katharine says, thinking: Children! We both had breasts! And your clever, handsome, charming father o he kept his hands to himself but made certain-sure we both noticed how clever, handsome and charming he was!
'No, we're not hard-up, not really,' Elaine says, 'though the bills keep coming, and it's a big house'. Indeed it is, even by comparison with a nineteenth century vicarage.
That archdeacon at the weekend for clergy wives said, 'Never pry, don't force confidences, listen much more than you speak, ' Katharine remembers; fellow must have thought we had no brains and no breeding -- true of some of them, mind.
'Life's difficult in some ways, ' Elaine says vaguely, and then (maybe she would have said what ways) suddenly, 'What's that?' as her thought's interrupted by a squeal or scream like an ill-treated animal's. Katharine explains not for the first or last time that the impressive gates of their house were taken in the forties to be melted down to make Spitfires, never replaced, and that every so often a motorist fails to notice the right angle in the road until nearly too late.
'I just feel there ought to be more to life than this!' Elaine would like to explain, but she is wary of seeming to oblige her friend to say something in favour of being 'religious' (she wouldn't) and so embarrass both of them. Without tact herself, she underestimates other people's.
Katherine teaches two days a week, as I think I said. She does not like teachers, or children, in the mass, or the dreariness of nearly all school buildings. She is in a minority of one among schoolteachers, even internationally; she does not think they are badly paid.
Now Elaine is speaking about her husband. She says that she is sorry (says!) that her own unathleticism has prevented his continuing with swimming and tennis she used to enjoy. She wishes, she says, that she was more interested in history and model-making and what she calls geneology so that they could work at them together. All this is an elaborate way of saying that their characters do not 'gell' while evading disloyal criticism. After five or ten minutes wandering around it, she will probably get to the point, and in getting there understand for the very first time what the point is.
But --
'Hello!' from the kitchen. 'I'm home!'
Katharine's reverend husband appears, greets Elaine, feels the teapot, goes back to the kitchen for a cup and a plate, pours tea, cuts cake, etc., sits down to enjoy them at the other end from Elaine of the striped sofa his parents gave them, half-laments that the old lady he set out to visit for once wasn't in (he is sorry about her rheumatism but not sorry not to hear about it again) and so forth. He is not wearing a parson's usual fig, but rather old-fashioned 'smart casual' clothes, open neck and sandals despite the season, soft jacket of the kind favoured by music masters, etc. He is cheerfully unaware that his wife is annoyed with him, and is casting her eyes hintfully (is that a word?) towards his study; no, he is looking alternately at Elaine or his tea. A cheerful or cheerful-seeming man, he is underneath very stressed. He makes home-made wine, loves cricket, is fond of saying that he's not one of these Low fellows who think the best thing you can do in bed is drink cocoa -- he meets an unusually high number of widows, spinsters and male homosexuals. He is one of those physically healthy men who at any age between thirty and sixty looks unidentifiably between thirty and sixty.
Katharine's reverend husband appears, greets Elaine, feels the teapot, goes back to the kitchen for a cup and a plate, pours tea, cuts cake, etc., sits down to enjoy them at the other end from Elaine of the striped sofa his parents gave them, half-laments that the old lady he set out to visit for once wasn't in (he is sorry about her rheumatism but not sorry not to hear about it again) and so forth. He is not wearing a parson's usual fig, but rather old-fashioned 'smart casual' clothes, open neck and sandals despite the season, soft jacket of the kind favoured by music masters, etc. He is cheerfully unaware that his wife is annoyed with him, and is casting her eyes hintfully (is that a word?) towards his study; no, he is looking alternately at Elaine or his tea. A cheerful or cheerful-seeming man, he is underneath very stressed. He makes home-made wine, loves cricket, is fond of saying that he's not one of these Low fellows who think the best thing you can do in bed is drink cocoa -- he meets an unusually high number of widows, spinsters and male homosexuals. He is one of those physically healthy men who at any age between thirty and sixty looks unidentifiably between thirty and sixty.
Elaine is irritated at being prevented from confiding, yet - for once! - makes a social effort. She has heard (just) of the Holy Spirit, thinks a clergyman will be interested that Pask thinks there may be a spirit or ghost on the landing -- 'silly girl!' says Benedick, over-tolerantly. He is shorter than Kath and almost as wide. He will not be drawn into any seriously-meant comment; he knows that often his mere opinion can seem, even to unbelievers, heavy with the age-old jewelled weight of his priesthood.
Considered merely as a social occasion, this tea-time has not been unpleasant for Elaine -- but she leaves at 5.30 for the 5.40 bus into the centre of town, to catch the country bus out again at 6.10, feeling more not less discontented.
*
Is there a ghost in your house? (Or mine for that matter?) Have you, or I, our equivalent of Hetty-on-the-landing? I hope not; can we be sure? Are we just not able to perceive it? Dogs hear, eagles see, better than we can, bees know more colours -- are we just (mercifully) insensitive?
And what causes events? Everything has a known cause. Lucid, transparent, limpid, crystal -- everything can be explained, can't it?
Just two thoughts.
*
Yes, Hetty is there. She feeds, she comes closer to a sort of understanding. She now remembers some flashes of her earthly life, knows her own name and those of others - Pasqueline, Elaine, John (the same John she knew?) and that one who is, or would be, a friend comes to the house sometimes. She knows also of David, just a little.
Ghosts in books are nearly always malevolent, evil; they have no pleasures except a sadistic joy in terrifying. Now Hetty is not like that, not quite. She is through and through selfish, but she will even do good if she can -- as long as it benefits herself!
She will make what use of the girl she may. If it matched her purposes she would kill her, but it's better to have her alive and strong -- so a part of Pask's improvement in looks and manner may even be down to Hetty. Odd, that.
Dave is Pask's first real close friend. Not a boyfriend, just a friend of approximately her own age who happens to be of the other sex. That is what they both sometimes think or say to others who do not quite believe it.
Pask is happy. She has even discovered a talent for it. The cruel teasing almost ceases now that it is apparently no longer perceived as cruel; that is the fine thing human nature is, at Sharth certainly. She gets up earlier than she used to, she sings (badly) as she dresses, she travels Sharthwards with John in the old car, attempting to make conversation. When himself fifteen her father never spoke to a fifteen-year-old girl; he now discovers that it is possible to enjoy doing so -- in spoonfuls, now and then. Being an Oxford man, and religious, he inclines to think her shallow.
Yes, the girl has nowadays some physical energy, as well as curiosity. She too makes a discovery, that she is capable of charm/persuasion. An effect of this is that John and David one Saturday put in three new electrical outlets on the long landing, one opposite Pask's bedroom door. They speak as they work only when necessary. Each admires the other's physical dexterity; both enjoy making as little mess as may be and tidying it up afterwards. At Dave's suggestion an oil-filled electric radiator only nine inches high is plugged in and left on night and day. John thinks it stupidly wasteful to try to warm an alleged ghost but is willing to take up the idea out of gratitude to him for the improvement in Pask. If that is his reward, he deserves it.
It is not of course to warm the ghost but to strengthen him (Dave is assuming it is a him) that Dave wishes to give him energy ~ which he hopes will be used in such a manner that it may be recorded.
*
Family gives you help and support; family jolly well has to. Or so Elaine has always believed. In any crisis of her life, as now, as in its ordinary grey passing, she likes to take the advice of cousin Maggs. Maggs is a little younger than herself, indifferently educated, though that indifference matches the quality of her mind. She has a collection of maxims and prejudices, but knows almost nothing except how to run a pub, and that she knows thoroughly and very well. She dislikes John, who has only visited her there twice, thinking him 'stuck-up' because his accent is different.
Elaine never had a sister and appointed Maggs to fill that place. She has visited, but never lived, away from Demnet. She has never revised her childhood habit of treating Maggs as wiser and kinder than she is. So once again she is visiting her today.
The pub (or 'inn') is sixty or seventy years old, built to look older, a largish well-constructed building at a crossroads at the bottom of a hill where lorry-drivers change gear, so that the air is always fumy and noisy. It is about a mile inside Bishoprick, and the hill is almost the last of the Demnets.
Elaine gets off the bus by hard-edged little council houses and goes through a little lane beside them into an asphalt and presently empty car-park, and in by the back door.
The pub kitchen is twenty feet square with long windows. At this time of morning -- about ten -- it is not busy. There are several tables for chopping, etc., and the chef Mike Brown glowers over one of them, where an onion is being sliced as it were without his intention; the knife flashes as if of its own will. The waitress, a pale girl younger than he, is also present. He is her lover as well as Maggs'. Well over six feet tall he is not so much fat as body-armoured by stoutness. But enough of him -- they are both so used to Elaine's frequent visits that they give her only perfunctory greeting.
Elaine goes to a corner and makes two cups of instant coffee, her own weak and almost sugarless, then takes them through to Maggs in the long bar. The decor has been faked up half-skilfully to suggest to visitors that this was a country inn two hundred years ago and the town has overtaken it -- stuffed owl, stuffed badger, stuffed fox, mildewy bridles and saddles, rusty tools of various incomprehensible kinds, one seven feet long, two machines with bright flashing lights for taking money (often) and giving it back (sometimes.) In one corner is an aged butter churn of brown wood, and hanging above it Maggs' particular treasure, highly polished, a warming pan of bright brass; asked about it, Maggs will say that it was used in the bed in which her greatest great-grandmother mewled into the light, upstairs in a little room now used as an office -- mendacity disguised as lying.
(I'll cut a page or two further from my original mss, in which, very wittily and observantly I again describe the furnishings of the place, its essential falseness. It's very amusing in itself, but you've already got the point.)
Maggs is short and tries to be slim, fails. Her hair is dyed, skilfully and expensively. She is amused by almost the whole universe; the joke against it or about it must have been a very good one, though Maggs couldn't tell you what it is. Cheerful, smiling, friendly, brimming over with envigorating cliches and all that. Wise? No, no, NO! Worth confiding in? No.
She will give Elaine up to twenty minutes of her time then use her professional skills to ease her out.
Elaine can't get round to what is on her mind, she can't 'spit it out', so, having last seen Maggs ten days ago, she gives her ten days' worth of accumulated trivia, including that Dave and John have installed a radiator because of a ghost.
'Me-en!!' exclaims Maggs. 'That sort thing keeps'm amused!'
Is there really, Elaine wonders, a ghost in the house? (It's alway's 'the house' or 'John's house' or 'Gritnell's' in her thoughts, not 'home'.)
She gropes towards focusing her problem. She does not perceive how little real human feeling there is in the heart of her complacent, competent relation.
'They think there's really a ghost there, Maggs, for goshakes!' she exclaims. 'It's stupid, it's......like something out of....the Dark Ages! She then breaks an unwritten law of speaking with Maggs, actually asking her about belief. 'D'you think there are ghosts, Maggs?'
Maggs who has never hesitated in her life and scarcely conceives that there might be two opinions about ghosts or anything else, jumps in. 'Course!' she says -- completely unamazedly; she says that the dead revisit as if she has said there are bus-shelters.
Suppose yourself to be a murderer (as of course you may one day be), wouldn't you have partly failed if the death you caused was recognised as murder, not natural death? Now suppose yourself to be a ghost (and of course that too you may one day be) wouldn't being recognised as being one also be a partial failure?
Yes, what is named because it is named is to that extent less frightening.
Elaine would do well to be frightened of Hetty. Yet that is not what is worrying her at all.
*
It was the Moon, he had thought afterwards. She made him do it. How had the curtains come open? In some fashion it - She - had contrived to look both like a skull and like a very young woman, slant-eyed, unintelligent, but o very beautiful! And not at all like an enormously large lump of nearly spherical stone pitted by hundreds of aeons-old meteor strikes.
Yes. Be rational. Don't emote. Think clearly. A rock, a very big one, true, far away. Not a spirit. Not a goddess. Television pictures were less clear then, and these especially so, but you yourself 'with these my eyes, o queen' saw those men with outlandish names walk in in the lunar desert's vast immensity, shovelling tardy feet through heavy sand which hung in the air as if the air embraced it, yet there was no air. Saw it with what affronted pride too. Sharth and Oxford had raised him as if there was still an Empire; if the Moon was to be discovered and explored it was self-evident that Englishmen should do it; if the Moon was to be conquered and possessed (though this was not apparently the intention) then it was the Union Flag that should be planted. But these Americans are English by their ancestry, he and others had comforted themselves in their even-then unvoicable hurt, they are 'but sprigs of us, planted in a foreign stock.'
A big stone. A quarter of a million miles away. A just about imaginable distance. John had walked twenty-five miles in a day once. Imagine an ordinary man whose labours oblige him to walk a great deal, a postman or milkman say, and over a working lifetime of forty or fifty years he might walk that far. Just.
The Moon's visitors had brought back with them a tiny part of its surface. He had queued to see it at Bishoprick University, where it had armed guards. Tiny odd-shaped black (not pale yellow) splinters, faintly shiny, like the sweepings of a coal cellar. He was not sure whether he was awed or disappointed.
And he assumed that these visitants had tried to find evidence of life, and had failed. To call this vast boulder 'dead' was poor logic, therefore; it had never been alive.
It. Or she? She? His intelligence was trying to make sense of an action of his human, sinless, commendable even, but so alien to what had long been habitual behaviour that it was amazing, appalling nearly; no, that was the wrong word.
He was blaming this action upon the Moon. Irrationally.
Brain knows it to be dull stone, to heart it is other.
That time he had walked all through the night...twenty years back now, was it? And why? Young people did that kind of thing then, he tells himself; but did they? I suppose I -he - I did it just for the experience's sake, he reflects, and, what's more, the experience really was valuable. Though in what way I couldn't say then. Can't now.
How he had stumbled at first, how unreliable the first surface he had walked on, the hardcore between the sleepers of the didused railway line, the sleepers themselves too close together to work up even pace.
And a train had come! (He had misunderstood the map.) Well, there was no real danger. It's obvious where a train is going to travel, you can easily stand aside from it -- otherwise it would crush you like a man stepping on a beetle, there's the thrill of danger. The train's driver had cursed him - he couldn't hear what he said, but understood it from the shaken fist; he didn't blame him either.
It was May, he remembers now, which did not mean the night was warm. Leaving the railway line at a bridge over a road he scrambled down an embankment and drank cider in a bright-lit public house nearly about to close. The others had left in cars and vans; as they drove away he had felt a nostalgic pang for the expected ritual of ordinary life. Yes, for the moment he felt really, or almost, like the homeless wanderer he was pretending to be.
Then he struck out into the hills, first along a path half-familiar, where he had walked a few years before with a beautiful young woman his own age who had talked, though only talked, most intimately; he had seen her a few times before and was to see her a few times again, but to say 'hello' only. She spoke so openly, so freely, confiding so much -- then; it had helped him that he helped her by listening, he was less immature.
It was not frightening in the wood. No. He had his torch, backed up by a lengthy small print guarantee. It gave up.
A fashion of alertness which he had not known he had now made him aware of the hundred little lives rustling in the trees and hedges. They were not afraid of him, they were not enemies, they knew that he was not enemy to them, and yet in some manner he could not understand, just as clearly as if they had spoken words, they told him that he was unwelcome now, an intruder. This was their time, their place; he trespassed.
Of course he had unmade the torch, screwed tighter the bulb, taken out the batteries and put them back in a different order, and of course after a few seconds more of light it had again died. He was five miles at most from any village.
Cloud was obscuring the moon and stars. It was like blindness. But not for long. He had got out of the other end of the wood and the cloud was blown away much at the same moment. The completeness of the darkness must have lasted only six or seven minutes.
He prayed briefly, thanking God he could now see his way.
After a fashion.
He had gone on stubbornly across country. He could have crossed a cowed field and -- it was probably about midnight -- have hitched a lift. Even briefly glanced at, he was obviously not a thug. He would have appeared to be walking because he had missed the last bus; this was perfectly true, except that he had missed it deliberately. Or since it was so late maybe drivers would not be willing to stop after all. But he went on walking. Brambles cut his hand twice and he sucked his hand; the feel of his own skin was comforting. Out in the fields he knew that he was presently in much need of skills or senses or instincts which a primitive man or even a dog could find in himself; nothing public school or Oxford had taught him was any use here.
The glow on the horizon he had not understood at first. A fire? No, too even. The streetlamps of a village?
It was the full moon, briefly silhouetting branches. It was almost immediately in front of him. Next, as if there had been no pause, it had jumped a quarter of the way up the sky. Impossibly huge.
It - She - stared at him. He stared back. There was a queer sense of being observed, though without much interest, in roughly the way that a woman who preferred cats would see an unusual breed of dog. Of being judged. Not harshly, certainly not harshly. Not kindly either - or rather with a thin-diluted kindness, which expressed itself in his feeling helped and guided -- just a little. He had a sense of unequal companionship, as if he was indeed a little dog following his mistress.
Common sense, even during those minutes, translated: the darkness was scaring, when the moon rose you were not so frightened, though the shadows are very long, very black, and in the silver glow treetrunks look like sentinels: not enemies exactly, but fully prepared to be so. But common sense abeyed; I suppose there is such a word, I mean that it was in abeyance, not now working.
John, awake when normally sleeping, a little cold, a little hungry, aware that no-one else on earth knows where he now is, and he himself not very sure, in such a state (fugue?) he is certainly not insane, but his sanity is of a different vibration from normally, when he is where he is used do be, doing what he is used to do, in daylight or under electric bulbs.
And this night how much the same the full Moon had looked! She would not change in twenty years, or twenty thousand.
Yes, he had prayed to Jesus, early in that long night. He is not a pagan. Christianity spread from town to town, he knows, he knows that 'pagan' means countryman, this Modern Languages graduate. Whose ancestors have owned and farmed land as far back as he knows; his mind or soul is Christian, his subconscious pagan still - maybe.
He had known early on that he was not to inherit the fields. James did, who did not go to Oxford or any other university after his flashier school.
('That was nice', Elaine thinks, wriggling further into the bed like a cat. That was good. That was very good. And what a surprise! How strange that I had almost forgotten!' and, as sleep takes her, 'What a thing to forget! Was it right, was it right after all, what I did at Kindlesham?')
John has cheerful contempt for those who feel no mystery in the Moon, or anywhere else. Their souls appear to his fancy like brand-new aluminium buckets in the ironmonger's, clean, shiny, cold and empty. He has read widely without fully understanding; the Moon is goddess, huntress, virgin, matron, hag, Diana, Selene, Persephone, Astarte, Power.
How rarely now he is awake in the night, he thinks at 2.21. He is in good health, his conscience is clear (he thinks at that time), his income is adequate to his needs or else his wants have long past shaved themselves down to it.
He looks at the digital clock Elaine's side. 2.22, its red figures say. The coincidence of the numbers strikes him as meaningful, that is, meaningful of something other than what the time is. But why is he awake now? Why is he not asleep? Why does the Moon gaze at him so? And where is the curtain that ought to be pulled across this window space?
So he looks back at the Moon, much as on that walk years before. Like equals who may become enemies they regard each other; the Moon has the advantage of height. He debates whether to get up and shut it out. It is winter, the room's heating is indifferent, anyway he will soon get back to sleep, in his opinion.
The room itself - what he can see of it - looks odd, as if made of very thin metal, of foil, as if the boards could not take his weight, nor any pressure save the mouse-lightness of moonbeams. He is surprised by his own fancy. And his own mood. 'How little we know, really! Others can always surprise us, others we think we know. We can even surprise ourselves.'
Is Elaine awake too, he wonders. It is 2.25. Except for the raised smooth curve of one shoulder she is in near-darkness, a blank greyish oval is her face, the black blur around it is her hair, the white blur around that is her pillow. The indistinctness leads his thoughts into something which is like wonder, and almost like fear; 'Who is she? Who am I?'
O dear, being conscientious is like being a snob, you're never off-duty for long. Now he is worrying about what (if anything) they have really in common, despite just now; there is the shared past, the house, the girl of course, yet surely he felt more strongly for her once. Has love become dimmer than the starlight? When they married they were at the age when it is (or was then) conventional for a young man and young woman to become engaged and to marry. Was that all there really was? But when Pasqueline was born, what a fire, what a passion, what a settled delight was in him -- for a week or two, certainly. It had seemed to embrace the world, the Universe.
He had really wanted to have a son. A girl was of course the promise of one later. (His brother has two sons and two daughters.) If there had to be only the one, couldn't it have been a son? Not Elaine's fault, not Pask's of course, if there's any question of blame (though there isn't) it's his not theirs; he remembers his 'O' level biology.
Elaine now stirs. She sits up in the bed. She looks at the clock. Her face is in the light -- innocent, unprotected. She does not appear to be fully awake.
'Are you all right, my dear? Can't you sleep either?' Nothing in these words' expression of weak concern is surprising (except maybe 'my dear') yet Elaine does look surprised. Even astonished. As if she thought she was alone in the bed! Then she looks worried. Suppose that John looked into the dressing table drawer, then he'd know? Then self-reassured; he's too decent to invade her private space.
She lies back, and she too looks at the Moon. Unusally bright, she too thinks. As for Maggs, how insensitive! She did not even understand that there was any problem! Kath did, or was about to. If only Benedick hadn't come in when he did!
How hot it is! Her nightie has rucked up under her arms, she is in effect naked in the sheets. Her legs come up and down, much as if she were running or jumping, no, swimming, though in some liquid more thick than water. Or rather, some other person is swimming, much more capable in action, much less capable in thought. And he too is there next to her, the man, as her leg passes him his member is stiff and warm against her.
If she were properly awake, she would not reach out with both hands, cup, press, smoothe, rub, very gently twist, pull away and let smack back, hold again. A part of her soul is amazed by these actions and their instinctive art. He moans or sobs, the sound would do for one stabbed, he makes himself more naked still, his hands go to her breasts, her hips, he lifts himself, kisses her cheek hastily, then her lips and neck, she arches towards him, he lifts himself and enters her dark wetness and in that darkness they listen to their united moving, first gentle, soon strong, even fierce as if each set out to break the other. And Elaine as never before screams in delight.
John now comes off her as quickly as if struck, mumbles something, is immediately asleep. It is 2.40. No-one saw?
*
At fifteen minutes past seven, much her regular time, Elaine is awake. She does not as she usually does regret that she must leave the bed's cosiness for the compelled grey dreariness of a day whose ordinary petty happenings can already be foreseen. No, it is a profounder, much more sensual unwillingness to depart from where she feels content, fulfilled, belonging.
O how lovely that was, she is thinking. It had never before been as good as that! And how long since the last time before. Why has he left me now? (For the moment she forgets that it is John's habit to get up before her, and how much more even than most people he is controlled by habit.)
So that was why she got out of bed slowly, and put loosely on her dark-green dressing-gown, and sat down again to think, pulling the gown closer; it is a cold morning. Do a few minutes, however entranced, really weigh more than years? If you had a huge space, like the 'Great Hall' at Pask's school, and you put into that immensity a very precious and very beautiful diamond, just that, wouldn't it still be true to say, 'This space is empty'? What, if anything, had been altered by those moments, even though while they passed the appeared to salve the pain of the Universe? No, nothing had altered; an unhappy truth. The general situation and the uncomfortable feelings within it, they were exactly the same; even though, physically, it could not be denied (and why should she want to deny it?) she is more well than ever.
She had thought everything through. Too much, even. She had reached conclusion.
She still had to go. That was still her duty to herself. And when after such long hesitation you have decided, then such decision and your self-respect are fused. That was what gave her nerve two days back, first in the Kindlesham bank, then with the red-uniformed blonde. Who was about half her own age, Elaine had seen, and had been expertly made-up to appear as if a middle-aged woman imitating twenty. How seeming-obliging, how knowledgable and persuasive she was! And yet Elaine did not fully trust her, unfairly judging her character by the cheap nastiness of her plastic and metal chairs. Thank Heaven the shop was empty except for herself and the agent; otherwise she would have run.
Escape was what she had so long desired. Escape she was finding now. Yes, despite the young woman's facile glossiness, she would have to trust her. And indeed many other strangers.
She would not go by 'plane. She had given to the other as if it was her finally intended destination a capital city only half way there. She would buy another ticket there, or somewhere else, you can get tickets anywhere, maybe from an inspector while actually travelling. She had committed herself now to go to find happiness, or freedom, or what.
*
And what does a man feel when his wife has left? Or think?
Why, nothing. Nothing at all. That's the odd thing, looking back from only a day or two later.
Nothing at all, at first. He doesn't know she's gone. O, he understood that he was appearing a bit of a fool to the policeman only a few hours later, very early the next morning, because he had been slow to grasp the idea.
When he got home from work, about six that evening, as he so often did except when he had one of his church or charity meetings, her not being there seemed to him only very slightly unusual. He liked her to offer to make him tea or coffee, he even liked that he would normally refuse, he enjoyed (as who does not?) speaking about the minor difficulties or successes of his day, he did not mind much that she was not attentive. He began to realise later that her mere presence was valued, even though slightly, in those evening's returns, it was in itself missed just because it was customary.
Her not being at home was mildly surprising, strange even, but in no way a matter of concern; she must have a life of her own.
Around seven o'clock it was being used to eat some time in the 7.30 to 8.00 bracket rather than hunger, which he has never felt, which had for the first time made him conscious that, yes, he was worrying. Pask was not there either, but nowadays it was so much a thing of custom for her to be two miles away with Dave in the early evening that he had barely noticed.
He had been sitting in front of the television for quite some time, he realised, yet could not have told what programmes he had seen. He switched off. He is used to being efficient, to giving clear instructions to himself or others, now he was feeling somewhat at a loss.
Feeling some need for company or support, John stood by the staircase and 'phoned Bessie's house, wanting to make sure that Pask was, or had been, there. By a mild mischance it wasn't Bessie herself, or Tom, or Lize, or Dave, who answered, but Blowsy. Now John hadn't spoken to her for almost twenty years, except once when they met by chance in the High Street, so he felt obliged to ask her how she was (even though for the moment his usual good nature was in abeyance) and then she must ask him how he was after so long, and he tapped his fingers silently on the little telephone table irritated, annoyed by the slowing effect of all this politeness. Eventually Blowsy said that Pask had been with them, yes, and had left about forty minutes past. He remembered Blowsy (Belinda, he called her) as frank, open, pleasant; now he was peeved that she appeared to be speaking in an affected accent, not as herself. That did not matter, of course; he recognised that he was on edge, tried to put that aside.
Supper had called Pasqueline too and she came in just as he put the telephone down. He was pleased to see her.
But, so soon after the event (well, it was scarcely that as yet, but already from that midnight he was going to divide his life into before and after that event) it was still no more than a mild nuisance, only just not a joke. 'Well, your mother's not here for some reason, we'll have to cook for ourselves, or starve,' he said. And getting the meal together had an aspect of innocent fun, like a camping trip. He knew little of cooking (then!) but had made quite a decent omelette, and Pask had opened tins. Yet his mood grew duller, even as the sky did.
Pask washed up. John put away. She went up to her room to do prep. Left by himself, John approached, intellectually, the possibility that his wife had -- left him?? surely not! what then? gone somewhere without explanation? Impossible! Unlikely, anyway! And so soon after it had appeared that whatever barrier had grown between them had at least begun to be breaking down. No, she must be with a relative. Or a friend. But she had not many of either.
John did not often visit his father-in-law, but he was on general friendly terms with him. He 'phoned, and began, 'Not to worry you, Heiny, but ...' and his worried tone did worry him; she was not there. There was too her cousin Maggs, who John hadn't much liked when he'd met her, only twice, and whose No, she never comes here evenings, excuse me, I've got a business to run' seemed to courteous John impolitely blunt, yet fair-mindedly he recognised his continuing irritation.
He was by now feeling keyed up, as if for a royal visit or a sporting competition. That's not entirely a bad feeling.
John now remembered that Elaine had spoken briefly once or twice of a schoolfriend Katharine whom he'd never seen. Well, she might be with her. Now (need I tell you this? isn't it obvious?) John is the sort of man who greatly values his own privacy and respects others', so even in such a circumstance he scarcely liked to open the drawer of her dressing table, which smelled of weary facepowder, to look for and find the address book she took out every December; she had covered it neatly in flowery wallpaper, which she had learned to teach small children to do. After looking through half its mostly empty pages, he found a letter K and a Bishoprick number.
He had not realised until he got through -- 'Holy Trinity Vicarage!' a known man's voice said, vibrant with real or assumed kindness -- that this Katharine was the wife of an Anglican clergyman he knew a little, having sat with him on several church committees; this slight acquaintanceship with Father Benedick involved him in what while he was making it involved him with infuriatingly complex explanation. Yet afterwards it was established quickly enough that Elaine was not there either.
Benedick felt obligated by his own politeness and a real concern to ask John to tell them when Elaine eventually turned up, and John felt a duty to promise to.
He works in an alcove in a big office, which he half-heartedly tries to make individual with pot plants. He and the beautiful Alyss share this barely adequate eleven foot-square space, which contains also two desks, a table, two word processors, a filing cabinet or two, and of course telephones. It appears to him that much of his working day, even half of it, consists of making or answering telephone calls. Therefore he makes very little use of his home telephone -- when things are normal.
He is trying hard now, not very effectually, not to be seriously concerned. Yet his profession, insurance, is a sort of constructive worrying; therefore he is both disinclined to worry outside business hours and also very well practised in doing it. All the rails (let me indulge myself in metaphor) all the rails on which the train Worry glides are already laid, bedded down, silver-shiny with frequent use. If Elaine were a gregarious extrovert, he thinks, as Belinda used to be and presumably still is, it would be stupid to concern yourself about an unexpected absence of two -- no, nearly three hours now. But she is not.
For the first time in sixteen years he wonders what Elaine does with the day, who has no work and so few interests. Also he thinks that after all there is something in Pask's oft-voiced complaint, that the telephone should be moved from the hall, or even that they should have several 'like everybody else'. Teenagers are always wanting to be original and eccentric and indistinguishable, he thinks. And he welcomes the inappropriate distraction of thinking this at such a time.
He finds himself trying strongly to wish that it is not growing dark, efforting himself to believe it, succeeding even, yet it is growing dark for all that. He also (naturally) imagines Elaine coming through the big front door at any moment, and his being 'cheesed' as Pask calls it because of his own fuss, and her giving some brief and credible explanation, so that it will all be forgotten (today is Friday) by this time next week. By now Winter is past, though it is scarcely yet Spring.
Pasqueline comes down round about ten and makes herself a chocolate drink. She says almost nothing. She too is sombre. As she goes to bed, unusually, she offers him her smooth cheek to kiss.
He really does not know whether Elaine is usually out in the afternoon and back just in time for his coming, or whether she is most commonly out. He obliges himself now to consider whether she may have been in some accident. He 'phones the General now, the only hospital near, is put through to Casualty (surprised, even shocked, to find it difficult to give a description, 'forty...not tall...thinnish, dark-haired' isn't much.) With curdled hope and fear he learns that a woman like that has been brought in; she was conscious long enough to give her name, but when she was 'out' they went through her bag and confirmed it.
The police, then, next. 'Hello. Police. Sergeant Palmer speaking'. He is by now so tense that right up to the end of his life the sergeant's name will be fixed in his mind. He explains briefly, and is asked to give his name and address. This sensible and necessary request 'throws' him; he is so aware by now of his concern (mixed with anger) that he is assuming that everybody knows it, and him, his worry has grown or his mind has narrowed so that the two are as if the Universe. 'Gritnell's, Belker Tap, sir? Well, I know your house by sight, everybody does around here. Quite a big place, isn't it? Now, look, sir, don't take offence, but have you looked carefully in every room?....No, people don't always think of that. Look everywhere, sir. Your wife might have had a faint or a fall. Be slow and thorough, sir, and then phone me back afterwards whether you find her or not. Thank you.'
It is so reasonable a request that John is embarrassed not to have thought to do it without prompting. He goes through the whole place, except Pask's bedroom. It is as if he has never before this time truly noticed the edifice which he has known all his life -- how vast, there are twelve rooms at least totally unused, how very, very shabby some of it is, damp too. And the used rooms not very clean either, Bessie is really past it. He even looks in the huge cupboard in her room; he had not realised that it is six foot deep, more like a tiny windowless room itself.
He discovers furniture he did not know he had. In one downstairs corner there is a tiny oil of a wide ship sailing, in a gold-painted frame enormous by comparison, one of Caleb's trading vessels probably. In another behind a settle there is an old rusty cruel instrument probably designed to improve a Victorian gentlewoman's posture. On the attic floor all the old servants' low rooms are empty. Some do not even have ancient linoleum on the floor. In one brass bed-ends lean frameless, in another there is a dull blue-painted candlestick on the black metal mantel, nothing else; in one or two rooms there are no bulbs hanging and he must make do with light from the corridor.
No Elaine.
He makes fully without meaning to a do-it-yourself survey of his ancient property, finds himself wondering how many tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, more likely) which he does not have would be needed to get it all into half-decent condition again. He is ashamed to find himself trying to make such a reckoning. Then, hard upon it, he is pleased to be; it will not alter his response if he does find her unconscious or even (horror!) dead, and yet it helps damp down his immediate and useless fretfulness. (His long habit has been to do any improvements or repairs he is himself capable of when he has a free Saturday, and pretend not to see any others, unless they are structural.)
No Elaine. He puts on his greeny-black waxed Barbour, and takes a large torch from his car, in the garage that was once a stable. Its far corners have in them low boxes, planks, dried leaves , nothing could be hidden behind them. There is one 150 watt bulb swinging, the only light in a structure as big as some families' homes. He leaves it on and climbs the creaking wooden steps to the rooms above; for twenty feet or so he is preceded by a hunchbacked, jug-eared version of himself. His dry and noisy footsteps make it seem as if two other men were following him to attack him, or rather they would, if his fear and imagination were not otherwise full.
It is as if the air is colder than outside's. There is a weary yet not unpleasant smell, as if apples were stored here years back and forgotten. There are old garden tools black with rust, and a doorway where there is a mirror where his own white face surprises him and the torch's shine is like a bright hole in the darkness only copied faint upon the glass's surface. There is the frame of a chest of drawers, but no drawers. That and other wooden things are furry with dust. There are cobwebs, in one place so thick that he must break them down with his left hand in order to pass, so thick indeed that they make a slight noise resisting. His torch makes huge, very black, fast-fleeing shadows on the walls and in the empty triangle above the beams. Rats and mice rustle. He begins to be, not frightened, yet aware that he might become so, and pauses to breathe deeply. He does not think that no-one else on earth at present knows where he is.
He does not think of ghosts. He does not find Elaine.
Past midnight, he goes again into the house and again 'phones Palmer. Asked to describe his wife, he does better now - practice. In such circumstances, he thinks, it would be foolishly genteel not to mention her only slightly bad facial skin, and the birthmark on her left foot. 'What clothes are missing, sir?'
Oh. Evidently what the policeman has in mind is not that Elaine is for some good or neutral reason unexpectedly delayed and unable to 'phone, rather that she has with full intention decamped/bolted/run off. John almost reacts as if insulted, then -- Good God, he was almost shouting! -- says humbly that he will go and look.
Ought he to wake Pask? But perhaps she sleeps naked, he has read that some young people do, and...no, don't even think that. But if he were to bang on her thick door, after all, why would he? Only for company and 'moral support'? That would be cowardly. He has to explain to the policeman that he can't come into the station (though he wasn't asked to) because a child, well, a teenager, is asleep. He will look and telephone again.
Now John is a bore, and a gentleman. That last word may by this year require inverted commas. There are certain things which one does not do, nor even think of doing, and those not so much out of consideration for others as because of self-respect. Other people's letters and diaries, for instance, are sacred. So to go to another person's wardrobe and pick through her clothes is distasteful; however, it must be done now.
He goes up to try to find out about clothes, limited by not having taken much notice of his wife's clothes, or any other woman's, for at least the last eight years. He pushes the dresses along the rail and apart and tries to think what is missing. There is a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. He becomes aware of a figure standing unspeaking looking at him standing in the corridor in the light from the bedroom. Just for a second he feels it is someone he knew thirty years back and ---
No, of course she is slightly taller and a good bit slimmer, of course it is Pasqueline, who else could it be? How incredibly stupid not to recognise his own daughter twenty feet away! She is wearing white pyjamas of imitation silk (the insurance man in him hopes they are flameproof) and a loosely tied slate-blue dressing-gown with 'frogging' like an officer's uniform. Her slight frown asks what he is doing.
He esplains; he says that maybe Elaine is absent 'for some good reason of her own'.
Pask - to his relief - takes on looking through the wardrobe, and drawers, muttering to herself a list (not a long list) of those clothes which are missing. And under the wardrobe is usually kept a leather case which was Maria's, light brown with coloured splashes of old hotel labels half torn off. It isn't there.
They look at each other. Yes, it is so, there is no doubt now:
Elaine (John's wife, Pask's mother, Heiny's daughter, Maggs' cousin, Katharine's friend) has gone away. She had planned to, she has carried out her plan. But none of these people who thought they knew her intimately have any idea why, or how, or where. Almost certainly none of this five will be able to think of a sixth person whom she might have told anything. Yet this intention of hers must have been rooted down in her weeks, months, or even years before today -- no, yesterday -- when it was carried out.
*
John Ferrace is phlegmatic by nature and, nowadays, sedentary by habit. He prays every night, and often in his prayers tries to be ridded of prejudices, for instance that at such a moment an Italian husband, though equally distressed, would relish the drama of it; but, certainly, the prejudices continue.
He feels -- well, not much, just numb. He wearily makes another 'phone call to the police. Sergeant Palmer says he will send another officer as soon as possible to take fuller details. 'In the meantime please let us know if there are any further developments, sir.' 'Yes, sergeant, of course.'
John and his daughter drink cocoa together, speaking almost not at all, then she goes back to her bedroom.
He now for almost the first time that long evening pays some attention to himself. His work clothes feel stuffy on him. He goes up and has an unsatisfactory bath under the merman. The old pipes, some of them as old as such pipes can be, burble, sing and whistle as always. He does not care; Pask surely is not asleep. Afterwards he feels clammy rather than warm. He puts on pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers and comes down again to the drawing room.
Here he switches on only the standard lamp in one corner. He slops down into an 'over-stuffed' black leather chair with greenish (once shiny brass) studs or buttons. He rests his small feet on a long mis-shaped red pouffe. It would be sensible to try to doze, but it feels wrong; instead he looks at the 'Readers' Digest', which Elaine takes (or took?) He does not usually read it, and he doesn't now exactly, though his eyes skim the smooth small pages, and his attention fades out, fades in, fades out...and he wakes guiltily, though his sleeping can do no harm, ponders whether to pour a brandy, decides very firmly not to, dozes again, wakes next time suddenly and stares round almost as if panicking, as if the room is unknown...
About three a car draws up quietly. A taxi perhaps? Bringing Elaine home? Prepared to laugh and be angry both together, he stands suddenly, listens for the front door opening.
No. He goes to the curtains, pulls one aside. A police car. Of course. He waits for a ring at the door....which does not come.
Instead there is a light tapping on the window. A uniformed constable, generously moustached, is there. John tries a welcoming smile, achieves a grimace, and points to the front door.
A minute later, he lets the man into the hall, who shows identity, very briefly, and as soon as he is in wipes his feet and takes his cap off, glancing round at the wide stairs, the Lake District pictures, the telephone and its table, etc. etc. as if about to list them. 'Constable John Sherrold, sir, ' he says, drawing himself up a little as if he is about to salute. 'My sister works with you.'
Why it is surprising that Alyss should have a brother and he a policeman John does not know. (And yet there are a large number of only children in this village; 'something in the Tap water', people joke.)
John the insurance broker shows John the constable into the drawing room, puts an overhead light on, and indicates a chair roughly opposite his own, finding for once such ordinary politenesses wearying. Sherrold's hair is reddish-brown, Alyss's is auburn, but he lacks her contrasting paleness of skin, is burly rather than slender, and has so many large brown freckles on his hands that they run together, and the white skin between seems pale blemish. John Ferrace feels obliged to offer coffee, which 'I won't have at the moment, thank you, sir.'
John Sherrold produces notepad and biro, John Ferrace relaxes just a little. Your wife's full name, please, sir. And maiden name (which has to be spelled.) Whether there was anything unusual about her dress or behaviour when you last saw her? That was this morning, that is, yesterday morning, yes? And you went to work as usual? What time was that? 'About eight thirty it must have been, it always is,' John says. How vague people can be, even about things which really matter, other John thinks. Now think back to then, please, sir, try to visualise it in your mind, run it through like a video. Did you notice anything, anything at all
about her, however small, that was out of the ordinary, doesn't matter if it seems to you unimportant, don't be afraid you're wasting my time?'
'No-o,' says John after a while, regretting that he scarcely noticed her at all. A little later he suggests that Pask could tell better than he what Elaine apparently took with her and they agree to call her down a little later.
And do you have a photograph, sir, a recent one if possible? No, not a recent one; that does not surprise the constable now.
John leaves the constable there and goes to the little-used dining room, where there is a big Edwardian sideboard. Its doors are crudely carved with leaves and flowers, mis-making by one who thought they have solid outlines like axes. He moves aside balls of wool, knitting needles, patterns, etc. and gets out a dreary-looking cardboard box, large but not deep, in which, probably, some dry-cleaning was brought years ago. Inside there are yellow wallets of photographs, framed posed photographs, snapshots in black and white and unconvincingly bright colours, elastic bands elastic no longer, old letters, paid bills, newspaper cuttings, an old fountain pen with the rubber inside rotted, bits of nylony fluff, etc.
He brings it to the drawing room, puts it carefully on a teak coffee table (Burmese, a relative's present) and begins to sort it through. Yes, here are the wedding pictures; they are both younger and healthier, unbitter. Also Pask as a toddler -- she looks pretty, she looks vulnerable, and strangely formally dressed, so differently from the casualness enforced nowadays; her facial expression suggests mystic illumination. There is Maria ramrod-backed, iron-certain of all she knew, iron-certain that all she did not know was not worth knowing, and a cousin pale, small, pretty, slightly-talented, olive-skinned, who if she were now living would be far past fifty. And not many photographs from the last ten years; most of those here are now dead.
But this is no time for sentimentality. Here is Elaine all in white outside the church's west door. He takes it out of its elaborate frame; real silver would be far more tarnished than this silver plate. 'Just the ticket,' the policeman said. 'Wonderful things, computers, they'll add sixteen years to the lady's face in a moment.'
Pask comes uncalled, tells about the clothes taken. Policeman John writes it all down. When asked how she must be paying for the journey John remembers her inherited money; she must have a savings account in some local bank, he says. How vague! It's as if they already led separate lives, Sherrold thinks.
He is more competent than sympathetic, but not unsympathetic for all that. Tea often helps people in this kind of situation, he knows from experience. He suggests it, they reject the suggestion courteously, as if he were their host. The size of the house and their accents mean they are 'posh'; he supposes that is why they seem determined not to let their feelings show, though in fact he himself would react or not react just the same.
He leaves at 3.40. John and Pask go up, each assuming they will not sleep. In fact both sleep thickly as if drunk or drugged.
Next morning there is reaction. John wakes early, can't bear to get out of bed. He looks up, and there are wisps of cobwebs dancing slow. After what seems an hour, he puts on his dressing gown and comes downstairs unwashed and unshaven, never his habit except when ill. He makes himself instant coffee and sits bowed at the kitchen table; by the time he remembers to drink it it is half-cold. Pask comes down in her dressing gown too. Sharth still has Saturday morning school. John says she needn't go 'in the circumstances' if she doesn't want to, but at her age she can 'phone herself and explain. She does not notice that she is being treated now as an adult, and forgets to.
As tedious-slowly as if swimming in glue they make breakfast and eat it without pleasure.
Afterwards, John goes into the drawing room and goes on sitting, this time by the table where he put the box of photographs. He leans his chin on his hands. He feels -- what? Not so much frustrated love for Elaine as himself wounded in his self-esteem, as insulted, under-valued. How much he had tried to be a good husband! Not succeeded, maybe, but tried, tried hard! Couldn't Elaine have seen that? Wasn't it obvious? And a good father too; at least he had tried. After some time he gets up, washes, shaves, dresses.
Pask meanwhile has been only a little less inactive. She had wanted Dave to confide in, though suspecting he would not be much use, but of course he will be at Sharth in his precious lab. She is as yet bemused or puzzled rather than hurt. Has Em (her mother) a Secret Lover? Her 'running away from home' seems glamorous, almost; it is the kind of thing which teenagers, who have no intention of doing it themselves, tend to admire -- in other teenagers. But this does not in reality help her to bear it. In her bedroom she had taken her flute, recently half neglected, and was faintly pleased to know that she remembered several melancholy tunes, which she played. Hearing her father come up, she too dresses and goes down to be with him.
They both take some comfort, not much, from the other's presence. She sits opposite to him, pulls the box towards her, and begins listlessly to sort the photographs. By chance there is the photograph of a youngish adult woman in old-fangled dress lying on the top. 'Who's this?' she says.
'A cousin -- died some time before you were born. Talented in her way,' says John. 'She'd be about sixty if still with us, I suppose.' 'Do you think I look like her?' 'No.' 'Nor me.'
There's a photograph of Maria, whom she recognises, then she finds another picture of the young woman. 'What happened to her?' she asks. Idly enough, she is not much interested.
'I'd rather not say,' John answers in what people of her age might call a stuffy or huffy tone.
'Go on.'
'It's not a matter I want to dwell on. Especially now. I'm sure you see what I mean. Yet why shouldn't you know? She was murdered.'
'Coo!' Her admiration slightly irritates and yet, despite everything, half-amuses him, as if having a relative 'done in', as she would probably call it, were a better claim on status than the pedigree in the hall. 'Who did it?'
'No-one knows. Except of course the murderer, if he's still alive.'
'Or she.'
'Yes, of course.'
'Put her photo away, dear. We'll talk about it, if you really want to know, at a more suitable time.'
She does as she is asked. But she had felt obliged to read her father's book about their ancestry (after all, it's not everyone's father who's written a book, even self-published) and she can recall nothing about murder there.
*
That evening Elaine is in a small hotel in an ancient city. From her room she can see a famous river. She does not even know the name of the language people are speaking outside in the street.
*
Bereavement hurts. Sometimes overmasteringly, dreadfully. But to be bereaved of someone who, you have every reason to believe, is still living and breathing, yet is as out of contact as the dead, that is maybe worse.
Yet (and we are almost ashamed) the pain of bereavement passes: how can it pass for Pasqueline and John?
A little is discovered by the police. Elaine booked a ticket for Paris through a Kindlesham travel agent. Her manner seemed quite normal, as far as you can tell when you've never seen anyone before, the woman said. An unusual thing was, she paid in cash, and it looked as if she had much more in her bag. She changed a little of it for French money. Might that, John had wondered, have been an expensive bluff? Had she wanted that much to be found out, and gone to hide somewhere else in Demnet? (Her passport is missing.)
No-one can recall seeing her on the train or the boat, or in Paris either. Elaine, not conspicuously tall nor short, young nor old, beautiful nor ugly, well-dressed nor shabby, 'posh' nor 'common', and having learned from her yoga teacher that stillness and long deep breaths can serve to make one (almost) invisible, and travelling by public transport which tends in any case towards the anonymous.....(I'm not sure how to finish this sentence; you get my idea.)
Pask and John are sad and confused. The mood settles in the big house like dust (though to Hetty it is like roast beef.)
Yes, Hetty becomes stronger. Once John wakes and hears singing. Nonsense, he says to himself, I must still be dreaming. Once - another time - Pask too hears singing in the night. Neither speaks of it.
John's religious belief does not help him now, or, if it does, he must believe (like a hero or a fool, take your pick) that he would feel even worse without it. After the first Monday he goes regularly to his office, works conscientiously, chats not at all.
Pask turns inward. She does not share his faith. She has only the support of an unspoken instinct that she is a 'gentlewoman', not one of 'the herd', to help her. It doesn't much. Her clumsiness reasserts. Her fellow-pupils (many of them, by no means all, but the others do not protest) resume their cruelties; they would all say they believe in 'fair play', yet that they act as a group, in their own eyes, completely absolves them, even makes their actions virtuous, admirable. Besides, it's so much easier to kick one who is already down. The few teachers who do notice (isn't this shameful?) do nothing; some even think (isn't this worse?) that it will do her good. They take their colour from the pupils much more than they would ever admit.
Now 'don't get me wrong'. Dave who is so successful there and Pask who is one of its failures are pupils at what is recognised as one of the first schools in England (though not up with the very first, Winchester, Eton, Shrewsbury and all that), recognised that is by those who jolly well ought to know, I mean, the admissions tutors at Oxford and Cambridge and such. They have had no sexual education which is any use (has anybody?) and no guidance whatever -- I exaggerate only a little -- in handling their own emotions, or others'. And are things changed at all today?
Look, Dave is brilliant, and Pask though not doing shiningly well must be intelligent and talented to be there at all; she is being measured as failing academically, yet by high standards.
Take this as an example of their human failure. Pask needs comfort, she departs from their usual comfortable cliche about being friends who just happen to be of different genders, part-undresses, shows Dave her right breast. He is more amazed than anything. 'Kiss it!' she says impatiently, and he does, avoiding the nipple which almost frightens him, softly, yes, and at least gently, which is so appropriate, but without gratitude at her beauty or her generosity, and she -- she expected sensation more than this pleasant enough tickling, so after a while she folds it softly back into its white pocket, and says 'thank you' much as she would to a taxi-driver or dressmaker. This is at Gritnell's. 'Let us go into the kitchen, 'she says now and makes him herbal tea before 'See you tomorrow'.
He cycles home feeling -- what? that he has failed an important test? that he has not done what he ought to have done? No -- just not feeling very much.
How Blowsy would have laughed! How well Dave knows ideas, how ignorant he is of 'mere' feelings/sensations/emotions! Even Blowsy is sad sometimes; how well Heiny knows how to comfort her!
Dave and Pask, each sole child of their parents (though that is only partly the reason) have damaged instincts.
*
John's distress lasts, yet the height or vividness of it does not; Pask the same. Elaine's not being there goes on hurting, but not as much as it did.
It is - what? - like the weather, like the greening of vegetation as Spring comes, it is - almost - given into the dull catalogue of common things.
John cuts out much of his indulgence (did I write 'indulgence' when I meant to write 'involvement'? yes; let it stand) with 'good causes'; he sends apologies to various committees, though he does not resign, he does not distribute and collect envelopes; he is no longer known as a willing volunteer.
Therefore he and Pask spend more time together. Therefore they are co-operators, even friends. He reads cookbooks and prepares meals now with the same conscientious fussy precision he gives to his work or model-making. He spends as a result more on housekeeping than he used to give his wife. He loses weight -- not through eating less but through eating better. He enjoys learning a new skill.
He stands aside from Dave's and Pasqueline's friendship, which (as far as he can tell) is on a plateau; it is there, it does not change. He reads casually, he watches television casually, he thinks about buying a videorecorder but doesn't. O Heaven, isn't life easier without his wife? He even imagines that since she is dead he might be friendlier, the wrong word, with the so attractive Alyss, and cuts off his thought there. He has not, as usually by this time of year, planned out a summer holiday. On Sundays he goes to church alone, as is his custom.
One Wednesday evening when the summer is just beginning he shows Pask briefly where his cousin Hetty is on the family tree in the hall -- rather where she ought to be, she was left out. With some distaste he tells her when and how and where she was murdered, by whom and why remaining ever a mystery. 'You see why I did not tell you before you were this age' he finishes. No, she doesn't. Yet grace has been sown in her, she perceives his hurt, she thanks him almost formally for the information given.
Where is Elaine?
*
(This is the last 'chapter' of the first of these novels. Foolish though it may seem, I anticipate once more saying goodbye to my old friends with sadness. They are real to me.)
It seems to be five past two by the clock in the hall of Bessie's house. She is getting ready for her afternoon's work, robing herself in her outdoor things garment by garment as solemnly as a priest before Mass. If it tell you the seemingly thought-laden manner in which which she does it, I can surely omit details of what she is wearing; she finishes up looking a not very well-off keep-yourself-to-yourself respectable elderly woman, clean and tidy, with the facial expression of one who is trying hard to keep cheerful.
Of course she closed the hall cupboard carefully; of course it opened itself ten seconds later as if mischievously, it always does.
The rheumatiz in her shoulder is worse than usual, she notices.
One of her settled habits is always to tell the next senior person in the house where she is going and why. Lize is in the shop, Tom is -- wherever Tom is. 'Belinda, I'm going up Gritnell's', she shouts up, having waddled on her slightly swollen feet in their cracked even though well-cared-for shoes to the stairs' bottom.
'She's not here, Gran. 'Spec she's up Seydell-Mertz's,' Dave calls from the dining room. She goes into the little living room, opens the badly-fitting glass door, and looks in on him just for the pleasure of seeing him yet again. He is -- not surprisingly! -- reading and taking notes. 'Books, books, books!' she says, almost wonderingly and yet with a touch of disapproval; if the photo going with it looks interesting, she will sometimes piece out an article in the 'Mirror', she will stare at each word by itself and mouthe it, which never ceases to embarrass Dave, whose reading so much and so easily and even seeming to understand what he reads never ceases to fill Bessie with a puzzled, wistful pride.
'Yergran's just gotty time to make you tea or coffee, if you'd like it, Ardave,' she says. Long ago she got used to offering him such petty services; long ago he got into the habit of refusing (usually) or accepting cheerfully and politely; his in many ways is a good nature.
'I'm just going up Gritnells,' she says.
'Yes, Gran, thought you were,' he says without irony. She has been there, several afternoons a week, from before his birth.
She goes out of the house, willing to greet her neighbours. She is pleased to be valued as an 'old character' on the estate; she has lived at 27 St Osgyth's Crescent in her cheaply made house, or rather the council's, almost since it was new. Two young men -- consulting over a vehicle as if surgeons, almost enjoying its breakdown because of the pleasure they will take in their own skill putting it right -- straighten a little as she passes and say, 'Alright, Gran.' (They're not her grandchildren, need I say? 'Gran' is a sort of title or 'mode of address' in the tone of voice they give it.) She smiles graciously.
I won't describe her walk in much detail. (I did, originally, and her clothing too, but I've decided that although that kind of stuff adds 'verisimilitude' it also slows the story and even when very well done [which it was] is on the edge of being boring.) She scarcely notices buildings which have been here all her life, not even the huge viaduct. She has a benevolent feeling that she is about to do good; people who live in houses like Gritnell's are pretty useless, they can't do things for themselves, she is about to help them. She does not compare the new houses at the top of the village with her own; they are four times as big, and sharp-edged. Their mortgagees drive every day to Sharth or Bishoprick; their custom of calling this part of the village Northbridge receives mild scorn from some Eastbridgers; Eastbridge has always been there, Northbridge is a johnny-come-lately name, people there've got big fat cars and big fat overdrafts and brand-new cheap furniture which won't last, they say, and do jobs in offices which are only writing letters and making telephone calls to people who are ditto ditto to them; you get the idea. Some of the mocking Eastbridgers however would be pleased to have that or any other kind of work.
The journey takes her over both two village's separate bridges across the Shour. Its weeds wave in the water, and she understands that, oddly, as what gives the river its movement. She doesn't quite really approve of Dave's and Pask's friendship, it is a bit awkward; however -- without saying anything at all, that is the strange English habit -- they have come to call each other 'Miss Pasqueline' and 'Bessie' up Gritnell's and 'Mrs Bellows' and 'Pask' down 27.
It is hard for you and me, readers and writer of books, to think about or try to imagine her inner life, not so much because she is not as intelligent as ourselves as because she is almost uneducated. If this comment seems patronising, whether it is or not, it is true. We ought to be grateful for our superiorities, our good fortune rather than our desert, and are not -- probably, they seem part of our very being. Bessie's own experiences, her own family, are vivid to her; places which are long known, and the experiences of others more-or-less like herself, they're clearish; otherwise there are rags of beliefs and superstitions, a good knowledge of cooking and house-cleaning, and vague conventional prejudices against Jews, Roman Catholics, the Franklyns, blacks -- not the word she would use -- and foreigners, mixed with vague conventional tolerances too, you must take people as they come, it takes all sorts, it'd be a dull world if we was all the same, etc., etc.
On she walks. Without much thought, without any emotion, unless feeling satisfied that yet again she is proved right that walking will ease the rheumatiz counts as one.
Gritnell's is in a lane west off the main road to Sharth, just north of the village. It is the only house there. With its pillared gateway, worn lions upon them holding shields, and its shell pattern over the main door, its solidity -- most of it is heavy stone -- , its two rows of slightly uneven sash windows and the attic rooms in the roof, it would be imposing, impressive, grand (not however to Bessie who has known it all her life) that is, if it were much better maintained. The coach house and stables are in front of it on the right, because (when it was extensively modernised, two centuries less a few years ago) what had been the front before became its back. The paint of the big doors of the coach house, where nowadays John garages his car, has worn away, the wood is almost the colour of iron. These doors are rotted near the ground, they have fallen slightly on their red-brown-rusted hinges.
Bessie goes around the back (what is nowadays the back.) Her posture improves; she is thinking again, as so often, of Great-Aunt Maria, and of how she was guided all her bleak life (whose only brightness was her love for young John) by the idols of Duty, Principle, Honour, Truthfulness, Restraint and so forth, and how she had got her servants in that cold house to believe that one of their predecessors had once been dismissed without warning for leaving a fire burning away unnecessarily, which may even have been true.
Bessie lets herself in with a smooth key which fits badly; she has had it nearly half a century. She goes down a dark stone-floored passage and into her own room, so thoughtlessly bestowed upon her by Elaine early in the marriage.
Mind, she had got it quite nice really over the years, with John's gifts of an electric kettle and such and bright curtains from the Tory jumble sale and all that, and there's a walled-off alcove which she calls her gloriole for bits and bobs, jars or tea and instant coffee and all that. There's a not too worn carpet on the floor, in many ways it's quite a pleasant little room, but she's never entirely at ease there; the big oak doors to the large storage space (which she keeps beautifully polished) glower over all, and try to bring to mind...something she usually successfully resists thinking about.
But not today. She has just made herself a cup of tea when she is suddenly screaming and, hearing herself scream, screams all the louder.
The walls and the big doors bounce back her screaming. It is as if they are shrieking too, it is as if the bricks and wood of the house took voice in her and were screaming too, a high, as-it-were inhuman wail.
*
'I was in my room doing prep', 'I was in the garden planting out,' they will say to each other later, when it will seem to be all over.
Pask had put her dressing-gown across her long legs for extra warmth, John was wearing a torn old fairisle pullover and old thick evening dress trousers which had been his father's.
Neither reacted immediately, horrid though the noise was. Pask assumed at first that it was the radio or television downstairs, John thought it might be a traffic accident in the Lane. He straightened to listen.
A few seconds later he had blundered through the back door, not wiping his feet and leaving small red footprints, and Pask was rushing, nearly falling, down the back stairs.
John got there first. Bessie could not see him, that (only that little) was clear, and yet she was looking wide-eyed at something and that something was terrifying her, screaming much louder than you would think a little elderly woman could scream, and still holding her tea cup unspilled.
He did not know what to do. To do something seemed important, and he was trying to get the cup from her fingers, which were as if they were forged steel, as Pask burst in.
She went on screaming for five or ten minutes. A thick foam like cuckoo spit dropped from her mouth. Pask handed John the cloth Bessie used for her washing-up there, he put it aside angrily. Each during these minutes tried touching her arm or shoulder and making reassuring noises. The shrieking went on.
So wild Bessie was looking, her long yellowish teeth exposed top and bottom glistening wet, that she seemed more like a cruel animal about to bite than a human. Her lips were drawn taut, folded back on themselves, her face coloured so deep that she looked negroid -- at first, though after the first minute (or so, neither of them were looking at a watch) a more normal colour returned. Yet she continued to scream.
Afterwards John was to think that he ought to have ordered Pask to go and 'phone Ostlethwaite their doctor, but his mind was barely working, he was goggling at this ordinary old woman as if she were a dragon, as too did Pask.
When at last -- she had seemed to have no need for it before -- Bessie stopped for breath, or maybe she stopped because her throat was rasped bloody as if by a file, she went on staring, staring at something. And so hard that each of them tried briefly to follow her eyes and see what she was seeing, though of course there was nothing.
'Bessie, Bessie! It's John!' he shouted.
Pask, sure for no reason that she knew better than John what to do, tried to shake her; the weak body of the old woman made no more response than would an oak. The girl said quietly, imitating calmness -- her heart was pittering fast -- 'Bessie, it's me, it's Pask, can't you talk to us?'
No answer. The old woman now breathed out rhythmically, each expiration with an odd consonantal sound 'g..pr...g..pr'. 'Bessie! It's me! It's John!' he told her, shouting this time, almost as if he was not sure of this fact himself.
Now Bessie's wide-opened and dilated eyes, unblinking, were seeing the room clearly enough, though some of it was dark, and with the bright detail in the illuminated parts that you get by looking through the wrong end of a telescope. But seeing it just as it used to be, years and years back, smelling its cold and damp, with the great chilly metal contraption that wrung the clothes in the middle, which the rough woman from the poorest part of the village had been used to work, her blacksmith-like arms bare, her face insanely grinning, her cigarette drooping, standing beside the machine turning, turning, turning it. It wasn't (then) a place where a respectable woman would come willingly, even a servant. 'Them other side', her employer and her niece, probably didn't know it existed, though it was in their own house, they had their own different life.
But something had made Bessie go there that morning. She couldn't say what, not never. That inspector had asked her and asked her, and he got angry with her for not being able to give any reason, and she'd nearly got angry with him, although of course she shouldn't have because he went on asking and asking her why and she couldn't tell him because she didn't know herself and he seemed not to understand it. Later the younger handsome policeman had asked her, and got angry too, and she had cried, and...
Maybe it was instinct, some kind of premonition which had compelled her there, not long after dawn, when she would normally be busy lighting up the black stove for the mistress's breakfast.
And so it was Bessie who had found the young gentlewoman, all dressed up for a journey. But Miss Hetty who was usually quite friendly hadn't said a single word to her. This was specially odd because Miss Hetty now had two mouths. One was in the usual place, between nose and chin; it was open in a palely purple o. The other was in her neck. It was curved and grinning wide and red, nameless broken fleshy stuff spilled out of it. And Miss Hetty's blood was all over her fine clothes, and on her parasol, and on her little case, Miss Hetty's blood was on the walls, it was on (and in) the big oak-fronted cupboard, one door of which had swung open. There was even a little of it on the ceiling and the unlit gas-mantle hanging down. Miss Hetty's red blood, in short, was everywhere except where it ought to have been, inside Miss Hetty.
Bessie had reached out and touched the body -- she had never met a corpse before -- half-thinking or hoping that this was some kind of grotesque life-size doll. So the blood got on her too. Then she had screamed and screamed, all those years back, much as, just now remembering it, or rather reliving it, she had been screaming this Saturday afternoon with the two Ferraces looking uselessly on.
Yes, the pretty little maid had screamed and screamed and had woken the house with her screaming. She had gone on and on screaming, with little pause, for a whole week afterwards. She was confined to her bedroom for all this time, the one she normally shared with her older friend Nell, who had to bunk down with Cook. Every so often she would get up -- sometimes, meaning well, they'd try to restrain her, at other times they'd let her have her way -- and try franticly to scrub. To her, it was certain, the bare and shabby but perfectly clean little room was also glistening dark red with blood.
'Pull youself together, my girl!' Bessie says now, firm, self-confident, as if one trying to speak kindly who has had little practice in it. 'Now, Bessie, you've had a shock, a very bad shock. So have we all. Try to bear it, as I do, I hope, with dignity. Show self-respect.'
John, horrified and amazed, recognises the clear speech, the favourite phrases, even the facial expression, of his long-dead great-aunt. 'Do you think we ought to send for the doctor, mum?' Bessie goes on, speaking West Country and humble in manner, yet not as herself.
A conversation spoken first long back now speaks from Bessie's throat, as if there are two voices there, one dry, imperious, decisive, the other deferential, uncertain and yet much kinder: 'I already have telephoned him, Nell. I'm surprised he's not here yet.' ' I 'spec he's out on his rounds, mum.' 'I dessay, girl, I dessay.' 'O, poor, poor Bessie!'
Then 'g -- pr --g --' again.
John and Pasqueline stare and listen. A third voice comes. 'Yes, this is it. This is the place. The very place,' it goes on sadly with a different emphasis. 'This is where it happened.' Whoever or whatever is speaking now is gaining in certainty as she speaks. 'Yes, I am certain now, even though it is changed. This is where -- how could I ever have forgotten? This was where I was killed, where my throat was cut.'
John knows this voice too, wants to resist speaking. Can it be her? Or is it instead --? But, fascinated, even though his spine is ice, he cannot prevent saying, very tentatively, 'Hetty?'
'Yes, I am Hetty. I am here. Who are you?'
John crosses himself. 'I am John,' he says very quietly, almost as if he is uncertain of it. 'John. Your cousin, Hetty.'
Bessie's head jerks. She is now seeing John. Or rather, out of her blank eyes something is looking at him. 'John?' she says wonderingly in the same voice, then, mockingly, 'John! John! No, no, no. John is only a boy, a child, you're almost old!'
'Many years have gone by, Hetty,' John says very gently. ' Many years. Now, do you remember' -- he is trying for evidence -- 'what jewels Aunt Maria wore on Sundays?' 'No!' impatiently. 'And, Hetty, please tell us -- all these years and nobody has known -- who killed you here?'
'Yes,' Pasks puts in, 'Who killed you, Cousin Hetty? And why?'
Bessie, or whatever is in Bessie, now turns to Pask. It seems to her that the old woman's long-known face is different, that her nose and eyes, the whole shape and proportions of her face, all are changed, that she is younger. Her breath feels cold. 'Child, I cannot tell you,' are all the words that come.
Now Bessie's head lolls. Her whole body relaxes. She now spills her cup.
'Pr - pr - pr', she mumbles, 'pragoo', then more confidently, 'Pragoo, pragoo, pragoo!'
She sits down, and now looks sensibly enough at John and Pask. She appears to be all at once not as she is normally, yet in her right mind. 'That's what I'm seeing, Master John,' she says. 'It's like it's written up on a board, them six letters. It's your wife, it's Elaine, she's pointing at it. Pragoo, that's what it looks like right enough, but that's not how they say it, where she is. She's telling me I'm saying it all wrong. Praag's what they call it, Praag.'
>>END.
