The system for some reason I can't identify is making unnecessarily long linegaps between paragraphs much of the time. Just imagine them out, please. P.S. No, I'll actually go through and edit them out, putting / or * or both instead.
Paragraphs cannot be idented either, I don't know why not.
Sometimes, for convenience in typing, capitals are used where italics would be better.
Dedication: In Memory O.R.M.C (G).
I've not written much since comp-positions at school, just letters and postcards, but I'll try to tell the truth of it as I remember it, I do see that parts aren't easy to believe. The first thing I've got to say is that in my memory this first bit happened before Dave and Pask got to be friends. It was this Saturday afternoon when rest the family was out, and I was laying down the sofa but not really relaxing because, it's like a plot, I'm knowing all the time that every single clean thing in the house is working away hard but quiet to get itself dirty and every thing that's done up is loosing itself somehow or anything that should be loose is getting itself tight somehow all on its little own-ee-o. Alf's out the betting shop and Dave's out the caravan reading and reading and Ma's out at her little cleaning job and Blowse, I don't know where she is but I'm all by meself for once. When a car draws up quite sudden which has been driven faster than cars usually are our little cul-de-sac road and there's a hasty, rude kind of knocking. 'Sugar!' I says to myself, and I goes to the front door and there's Tom Ferrace. He usually brings Ma back when she's done cleaning for them (doesn't think of course that she has to walk two miles to get there, and her rheumaticky and sixtyish, but there you are.) It's an hour or near before she'd be back usual. Then I noticed he was looking upset. 'It's yogh mothagh,' he says. 'She ce-em ovah ahl queerah. Ai've got he-ah ah-oot in the ce-agh.' Sorry about the funny spelling, but them sort people talk funny and can't pronounce their Rs properly even though they're West Country. Well, I rush down the path. Poor old Ma is sat in the passenger seat the front looking pale and trembly, and behind her is the Ferraces' only child 'Miss Pasqueline' - silly name! - who's always pale anyway, and slim too, with lovely hair, dark chestnut, shiny and silky and thick. 'Ce-en ye-oo wah-ahk, Bessie?' Tom was shouting at Ma as if she was deaf. 'Well, yes, spose I can, Tom,' Ma said in a wishy-washy kind of way, nothing like so definite-minded as she is usual. Between us Tom Ferrace and I sort of unfolded Mother from the car as if she was a blooming great clotheshorse or something, and she stood on the pavement like a wardrobe. I mean, she just stayed there where she was put. /Tom said -- but I'll stop spelling what he said all wrong to give the idea how funny his voice sounds to me, I'm just having a little bit revenge over those who'ud mispell what I said; if I was to keep on making fun of him like that everything he said would seem funny haha AND funny-peculiar too and you'd think he was an idiot. Which he's not, he went to Cambridge or somewhere. Anyways, it's natural for him. Tom said that he thought it best to bring Mother straight home and had 'taken the liberty' to ask the dr. to call in our house. And, with a polite gesture, as if she was an important stranger, I had to invite Ma to walk in her own front door to the house she's lived in nigh thirty years, she didn't seem to think of it for herself. When we'd got her sitting down in her own chair in the front room I thought to ask about Pask, did she want to go on sitting out there all by herself really? Tom went to the window and got her attention and after a while said 'Seems she does want to' in a slightly fed-up sort way. It was then I saw that his hands were pink with earth and he was wearing a peculiar collection of old clothes. 'I was gardening,' he said, seeing me notice. 'I'm sorry to burst in upon you dressed like this --- no, I'm not, it's an emergency, more or less. But may I wash my hands?' I showed him into the kitchen. *Soon upon that there's a ring at the door and Dr Ostletwaite marches in. He's a Scotsman, despite the North of England name, a little man (me, I'm tall for a woman) and like many little men bossy in his manner. Judging by his clothes, neat as usual but not how I've ever seen him before, he'd been called away from the golf course. Very kind he is when you get to know him. He was very helpful years and years back about my eyes. He says to Ma, 'And how's Mrs Bellows today?' wonderful soft and gentle, looking at her sweetly as if no-one else exists in the world at all. Then he picks up her hands and feels them, I don't know why, and takes her heartbeat. He leaned over her (to check she'd not been drinking, I daresay, by smelling her breath) and then somehow without saying anything got her to open her mouth and put her tongue out. And then he picked up the scatter cushions and plumped them up and put them behind her. /'What happened, Tom?' he asked. 'You've heard of seances, Doug?' says Tom Ferrace surprisingly. He did salt-mustard-vinegar-pepper over his chest then, which I've never seen anyone do before who wasn't an RC. 'Heard, yes.' 'What d'you think?' 'I suppose one must keep an open mind,' says the dr, though rather implying by his tone that he doesn't. 'What happened, though, was what I said.' Tom Ferrace, whom I'm sure is a truthful man, then told a fantastic story of how Ma had spoken in several voices which weren't her own:- his boring old great-aunt Maria, Nell who was out to service with her, Ma, I mean, his own cousin what was murdered, and at the very end she had said his - Tom's - lost wife had gone to Prague. Dr Ostlethwaite listened, nodded, put the expression on his chops (face, I mean) of someone who won't say anything but'll think the more, which I'm quite familiar with from my son Dave, thankyou very much. 'I can't find anything organically wrong,' he says to me at the end of examining Ma, 'but your mother had better go into hospital for a thorough check-up.' It was years and years before mobile phones came in which you see everywhere now, and we didn't even have an ordinary phone those days, so he, the dr, I mean, had to go next door to 11 and ask to use theirs to call someone out to take her. /I went out the kitchen while he was gone to make us all a good brown cup of tea. We certainly needed it. All the time his gran was suffering like this, Dave was in the caravan out the back reading and reading, and Pask was in their car out the front, trying hard half the time not to bite her nails. The other half the time she was biting them. /(Note by editor B.H. I haven't corrected this mss. as thoroughly as many will feel I ought. I'm not intending to destroy or as it were corset the essence, the 'haecicity', of Lize.) /*/After an hour or two they sends a car, not an ambulance, and I go with her -- I'd packed a little case -- and after another hour or two she's settled in in Bishoprick General about twenty miles away, and then I am having to come home by bus and find Tom and Dave trying to cook their own tea and making heavy weather because (a) it's women's work, they think, so Their Majesties have never done it ever, and (b) they don't get on together particular well. Easier to take over from them even though I'm a bit tired (no, more than a bit) rather than try to put up with their uselessness. And worried too, needless say./Next day is Sunday and in one way it's a relief not to have Our Mum fussing round the place and wanting everything Just So as she always does, in another it's queer that she's not there, empty-like. Nothing much happens that day. She's going to be away some weeks (not that I know it yet) and I'll get into the pattern of going up by bus to the hospital on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings; on Saturdays I'll give my 'day-out' ticket to our Dave if he's free, and send him up in the afternoons. It's boring, he'll say, Yes, life often is, I'll say./Cause it's no use pretending that hospital visiting's all that exciting...and they didn't make it easier there by having a television in the ward on all the whole blooming day with the picture slipping up, up, up all the time./Yes, it's hard to know what to say even to people you know well when they're taken out of their usual surroundings and you are too. Also, Ma is a great one, in some moods, for chatting on and ON about nothing very much and Dave is thoughtful and silent natural, which at times can seem just rude.../Well, it began. And it was nothing much at first. (I'll tell it how I recall it now, which is likely bit different from how I wrote it before, and Katharine typed it up for me on a disk in LSPRO, which just can't be read any more. It was all happening twenty or more years back and I wrote it first about ten years ago. Anyways --)/There are five of us living in our little house -- I say 'our' but it's really the council's -- or there was then. Ma, me Lize, my sister Blowsy or Baby or Belinda, my husband Tom and of course his mighty cleverness Our Dave (who, to be fair, doesn't give himself airs about what a great brainbox he is all that very much, considering.) Maybe the memory of Dad ought to make it six, Ma's always going on about him so much. We get along somehow, we're not poor exactly, I mean we're not ragged or starving or anything, but it's a bit of a scrape most of the time. Dad was a policeman who'd passed the exams to be sergeant but them days not long after the Second War there was a bottle-neck against promotion and constable he stayed./He died a hero. And now God knows how many years later it was seeming half the time that poor old Mum was going to follow him at last. But,then, no, it wasn't. Human bodies like any other sort of mechanism, the hospital wallahs said, when it gets old, specially if it's had hard usage, it begins to fail. Well, thank you very much, doctor, for telling me what I and everybody else knows already, without hundreds of thousands being spent on my training!/And it has been hard, no doubt, though we've heard about it more than often enough, bringing up us girls to be decent on the pension of a constable's widow and what else she could scrape up by cleaning, ect. And both of us in different ways a disappointment to her, me marring Alf who she likes well enough but has never quite trusted, and Belinda never marrying at all, and only one grandchild while other old ladies have lots./What about me, though? (I'm asking that question myself, because no-one else does, not ever.) Some of the time -- this was bit extra stress -- I was trying to forget what Tom Ferrace had said had happened up Gritnells, other times it worried me a lot. Once I lay there awake -- Alf was snoring loud, in fact he'd been tiddly when he came to bed. (Polite for half-cut.)/Our room's at the front. There was a shade on the streetlamp here once, dunno what's happened to it, but for years and years now the thin curtain's been showing a bright oblong and its flower pattern./What to do, how to react? Or not. Dunno. No use asking Alf's advice about it, nor anything else, even if he's awake and sober, and Blinda's so flip about every single thing (yes, I knows she can be funny sometimes, but I've had a lifetime of it) that you can't talk serious to her, and Dave's only a teenager anyway, got no experience, and he's just the opposite -- whatever it is he'll want to go on and on about it, tweezling out what he calls, 'the implications', every blooming little detail, so you can't get nowhere. (But, by the way, I heard that Tom and Pasqueline were taking all this stuff quite serious, what Mum's supposed to have said, and were actually thinking of going to Prague to look for her.)/Who to talk to? This is my trouble, and I don't think it's anything to do with being working class or not having much schooling, which is in any case much the same thing, no, I think it's something bad, almost wicked, rooted deep down in the whole nature of being English. That's this: when it comes to the really deep things - feelings, emotions - I haven't got anyone to turn to at all, and, what's worse, I haven't really got the vocabilary to name things with./And, I ask myself, would I be any good if someone else turned to me for that sort of help? Probably not! Or maybe I'm being a tad hard on b myself there -- I'd be better than our Blowse, for sure./It was the beginning of summer by now. You could tell that if you looked on the calendar. Not if you looked at the sky or the thermometer, see./Well, a day or two after they'd completed all their tests on Mother, them doctors, they'd even tested her poo and spit, and without coming to any decision that made much sense. 'Generally healthy enough, but run down. Old for her age. Needs rest.' Well, I could have told them that! She'd been in the hospital two or three weeks together, I'm not sure now quite how long because it's years back now, I can't definately remember. Cousin Maze's grandson took me up there to bring her back in comfort, and I insisted he had a fiver for his trouble and petrol. (His name is Humphrey Pumphrey, which is a bit odd; they said that they liked the name Humphrey, his parents, after the christening, but they might have thought before. He's a good lad, not clever.)/So Mum was reinstalled where she belongs. She's never been at all outgoing, she 'keeps meself to meself'' and that's the main part of what she calls 'being respectable', which is very important to her. She's usually quiet, specially in the evenings, I don't know if she's thinking or resting, or just half-asleep. But --/Yes, there was a but. I sensed there was a different quality to her quietness now. Kind of gathering things together in her mind. If you was going on a long journey you'd go through your cupboards and your warddrobes and work out what things you'd take and what things you'd chuck... / Now she's not a seasoned traveller, our ma. She's been to London only the once, the South coast for holidays a bit, and even Bishoprick which is only twenty miles away not at all often. So there's only one long journey she's likely to be going to take, and that's....no, I didn't like to put it clear even to myself. You understand what I mean, don't you? Or perhaps not. O meant that I thought she was preparing in her own mind to, you know, pass over./She was quite clear in her head, really. Nearly all the time she was silent, but when she wasn't she didn't half talk a lot. I'd heard it nearly all before, mind, several times. A lot about her childhood, and how she gave herself airs down village school because she belonged to the Big House, and how the other kids tried to make her life utter misery in that horrifyingly vile and cruel and boring way they have, but she wasn't having any, because as far as she was concerned it was such a blindingly obvious thing to be proud of that of course she went on being proud of it. / I didn't know whether to laugh or cry about that, as they say. Yes, Gritnalls is a big house, biggest in our village, it's getting on as long as our street, or would be if you straightened out its L shape, though it's only two rooms deep, mostly, and these days is pretty run down because its present owner Tom is only something in an office on a salary not filthy rich; years back it was different. Or seemed./Mum was born 1928, so when she can first remember it must have been mid-thirties. Even the First War can't have altered things all that much. There was never a squire in our village, and the biggest farm which belonged to the county council was leased to old James Ferrace, Tom's grandfather (James's other grandson since then has bought it, with his wife's money.) Anyway, because there was no squire old Ma Gritnell felt called upon to take on herself the bossiness and dogoodingness of a squire's wife, and the bossiness and interferingness came very natural, the kindness (and don't those people ever see that it's always resented, even when genuinely well-meant?), well, that didn't come so natural. O, reading between the lines - everything she ever did was right, according to our mum, but I see it differently -- old Mrs Gritnall was a right old bag who wanted to have her own way in every single thing, and virtually always got it, which must have appeared as natural as the sun's rising -- to her, that is./But not quite gentry after all. Her grandfather-in-law had quarrelled with the vicar and taken himself off to that big chapel in Sharth, the one with the port-ic-o, and that made her a Methodist out of family obligation, which she hated, though she couldn't see any way of wriggling out of it. Now --/Let me get this as clear as I can, which isn't very. Either Maria was a Ferrace before she married a Gritnall, or her mother-in-law was already a Ferrace before she got married, or I don't quite see why both those things couldn't be true simultaneous. (Ma if I'd been interested enough to ask could doubtless have explained it far better than she ever could her own geneology.) But what it comes to is this: the Ferraces and the Gritnalls and the Gritnall-Ferraces have been cocks of the walk here in Belker for what seems centuries and have been marrying each other almost as often as if there was a law that said they had to. These 'alliances' have had the effect of consolidating their power locally, which was probably why they did it./Anyway, my own ma as a little girl gloried in the fact, and what's more she's never stopped, that she belonged to the big house, and it don't seem to have struck her quite, either then or up to this very day, that though she did belong to it what she belonged to was its unpainted and almost unheated back parts and attic. The bleak parts, the servants' parts, see. Yes, she belonged -- much as if they had title-deeds to her!/Somehow or other old Mrs Gritnall kept up, right to her death in some time in the seventies (she was about eighty but liked to be thought much older), the illusion that nothing had changed since before the War. The First War, that is. The food on the big table would be pretty plain, but there'd be a maid to serve it, Mum's great friend Nell, practically as old as herself (Maria, I mean.) If the servants were cold, so was she, but wouldn't lower herself even to think it. The better oil paintings had all been sold, but she had no interest in art anyway. The horses were all gone the same way, but she was too old to ride. And so on./You can't help admiring her tough-mindedness, even though you don't really want to admire any part of her, because in most ways she wasn't a nice person at all. Guts she had in plenty, and patience to endure -- but defiantly -- the worst life could throw at her. If Hitler and Himmler and that evil lot had come and invaded our country same as all the others, she'd have stood up to them bravely, yes, even with her life; but no warm human feeling, not even in truth for her own kind, and none at all for anyone else./There'd been the sort of event that her fashion of people regard as a scandal and a disgrace and hardly to be lived down over three generations, though it was nothing really, this was when old Maria was only about forty; her younger sister had upped and married her music teacher.Perfectly decent and responsible man, talented even, and his father had twice been mayor of Sharth too, but he had no money except what he could make by piano-teaching and keeping a shop (musical instruments, sheet music, etc.) A shop! Hetty, the sister's name was./Well, I don't know what happened to this couple, it seemed they died young in some kind of accident. They left a daughter, also called Hetty,the only child, and Maria brought her up. Wasn't that kind and loving of her? No! Decent, maybe. Duty and all that. Like Mum, Maria was a widow very early and went on being a widow so long she might have put it as her job on her passport if she'd ever gone abroad. She -- I suppose -- had wanted to have her own children, but didn't./Tough and brave and wilful and strict and in a way cruel, she was. Cruel to herself, I mean. She had a lot of money, to start with anyway, why couldn't she use it to make herself comfortable, or even other people? But old Maria, as far as I can tell, wouldn't ever admit to any feeling, I mean emotion, and thought it was morally wrong or -- far worse! -- a token of ill-breeding if other people did so either./And a snob? Well, kind of. She knew that there were people who lived in houses very near to or even stuck onto other people's, with numbers on them, and went to ordinary people's schools and could be easily recognised by anyone with two ears, if they moved away, as not quite belonging in the new place, but she couldn't stand to think her own close relation would grow up as one of them, so she stepped in and saved her, and herself, from what she'd have seen as a disgrace. But who am I to judge? And anyway few generations back it's as foreign as Mars some ways./But I was fed-up, and jealous too, let's face it, hearing about her so much, and Ma thinking her the most unforgettable character she's ever met. /This Hetty, she had one fault she couldn't help, that is, she was a girl. Old Mrs Gritnall wanted a son too, or near as, and she almost stole a little boy from his parents, Tommy Ferrace. Maria too was an excellent trainer of servants, and my ma has always been proud at how well she was trained and how well she did her job. Christ! (Excuse me, I don't often swear.) Just thinking and believing all your life that that's all you could do with it, waiting on other people! Believing, yes, really believing, your employer's maybe unconscious low estimate of you, that that's what you were born for! Not seeing it as a misfortune, but actually making a living out of being seen to be inferior. And believing it yourself! /Old Maria was the mould that formed Mother. There's that in Mother too, the wanting everything to be 'just so'. She's had to compromise it often, mind, being short of cash frequent, but given half a chance it comes out. Opportunity arises, she can be just as bossy as old Maria. /And, for all I know, it was at least partly Maria's idea that Mother should marry Dad; apparently Maria was always going on about Dad being 'a good-looking, strong young man, a fine type' ect. /Course, Dad is a bit of a mystery really, just like everyone who's dead. I've hardly ever met any relatives the side the family. But I know he was clever and wanted to get on, he'd passed the exams to be a sergeant a year or two before he was took. I think I can remember seeing him poring over his books, though mayhap that's just me having heard so much about it all, after all I was just a tot then. Certainly he was tall and good-looking; I reckon I've got the height and Blinda's got the good looks, if you see what I mean, I don't mean she's got a great big blonde wavy moustache, that would put paid to her gentlemen-friends alright! No, I mean she'd be even more striking, and her figure even better, from a man's point of view, if she was a few inches taller. But I don't say so, I'm not in the habit of making personal remarks, like her. /My hair is black going a bit grey, hers is dark blonde, probably these days with Mr Goldstein's help, our local chemist. She's three and a bit years younger than what I am, 36 not 31 as she gives out. /And she dresses real super. She's got really good taste. I can't stand her half the time and the other times I'd go through fire and water for her sake. (I bet you got relations too.) /See, it's hard on a little girl, and I think I was pretty enough as a child, but in an ordinary and unremarkable way, when the grown-ups are always gassing on around you (and a lot of people have got more regard for the feelings of dogs and cats, or even slugs and worms, than they have for little children's!) saying 'Oh, what a beautiful little girl!' and 'Oh, what a sweet child!' and all that, and of course it wasn't ever me they meant. And Blowse even from a toddler would playup to it quite disgustingly, pretending to have a completely innocent and unselfish nature all the time instead of a strong regard for the interests of no. 1, as she had then, has now, and has always had. /When we were up the infants-and-juniors up the village - and by the way, if you live in Eastbridge, it was plonked down to the south-east of Belker, where there's the pubs, post office, school, church and what shops there are, with half a mile of open land in between as if living on a council estate was a germ that owner-occupiers might get if there wasn't a lot of fresh air blowing in between - anyway, those days I was fairly good at lessons and Belinda just got by, and, being tall, I was quite good at some sports too, which she just couldn't be bothered with, but who d'you think got the lion's share of Sir's and Miss's attention, specially Sir's? Yes, little Miss Prettymiss, of course! /But it's her nature, always wanting to be noticed, and doing whatevers necessary to get it; she'd be completely naked in the changing-room when we went swimming, walking up and down letting any girl see, while I'd always wrap myself in my towel and keep decent. She'd take me dancing with her when we was teenagers (I wasn't keen, being a little clumsy), I used to think it was just to point the contrast. /Now here's something everybody knows but won't all say - the world needs sensible people far more than it needs glamorous and self-regarding ones. It's our sort that gets on with things and runs them, on the factory assembly line, driving buses and lorries, standing behind shop counters, checking things on lists, these days sat bent over computer keyboards and tapping them, yes, we do responsible and boring and necessary things, where would we all be if no-one cleaned toilets or emptied dustbins? Reliable, sensible, respectable people, we're needed; alright, we can be called dull, but if we stopped today the whole world'd be stopped by next Tuesday./But our Blowse, she decided early, while still inside Ma, I reckon, that she'd be icing not plain cake. It would have suited her well to be a countess or princess or something, certainly she'd be one of the Franklyns if she could. Cheerful, popular, funny, but it's all on one note somehow. /Dave and Belinda, well, they're so different. I sometimes think I can see him looking at her out the corner of his eye, or him at her, and I reckon they're thinking, 'Is he (or she, course) crackers, or am I?' Apart from this Pasqueline he's shown very little interest in girls, and I don't think there's much of the you-know-what in their friendship either, I think it's just a friendship. I honestly think our Belinda's put him off girls quite a bit, with her noisy, vivid ways, him being the quiet type natural. (Dave looks very like my Dad, not like Alf at all, only his hair has a different sort of fairness.) Family, you don't always really have much in common. /Talking of common, like, our Blinda's got a sense of humour that's really broad. Yeah, broad as the aisle of Sharth Cathedral, or the 'Great Hall' at Dave and Pasqueline's school. She barged in the bathroom once while he was lying soaking and ...well, I scarcely know how to put it, you know what I mean, and instead of saying sorry and all that she stood there and said, 'Blimee, our Dave, you're not doing that very well!' What an attitude! /Dave wouldn't speak to her except to say 'pass the salt' kind of thing for some time after that. /Then there's that singing first began.
Now my life isn't war or refugees or coal-mining, but, I got to admit, I was pretty stressed really before all this started. Bit on edge. No, more than a bit. But completely in my right mind. I can rememember clear what happened, though I didn't undertand it at the time. /Still don't, course.
Mother carried on being -- well, not doolally or anything, but somehow not her normal self. In a house this small, our biggest room's only twelve foot square and there are only the five rooms and the kitchen and bathroom (where common people like us keep the coal, that's not true,
bitter joke), though, mind, the garden's huge and we grow a lot of our own vegetables, Alf's very good like that./Where was I? /See, Ma when we girls was small, had the biggest bedroom for herself and put us girls in together. But when we girls grew into our teens and stopped thinking sharing was o such fun we nagged her and nagged her and she moved me out so there wasn't the spare room no more that she'd kept always clean and tidy over against a friend's visit, even though no-one never came. When I married Alf, which is getting on for twenty years past now, I brought him here pro tem, the idea being we'd get our own place soonish, though it didn't work out, and we put a double bed in instead of the single in my room, and what with the wardrobe and dressing-table you could scarcely move round it. /And its still like that today. When Dave come along we shoved his cot in the corner of the room and then it got really difficult. We didn't like to say to Mum straight out, you've got the biggest bedroom all to yourself, can't we swap over. No, not straight out, being English, and to all our hints she was impervious. /We was hoping to get our own council house soon, like, as you could them days with a bit of luck. After all, 12 by then was not far off from what council officials call 'overcrowded in the meaning of the Act', which means the place is a good bit fuller than what you and me would mean using the word 'overcrowded' ordinary. I mean, Dave got bigger, out of nappies, and he wasn't a baby no more, he was a toddler big for his age, and you couldn't tell yet that he was going to be so blooming intelligent, but he was a noticing kind of child, always asking questions, and then asking questions about the answers he got. Ma to some extent and all of Alf's relations took offence at this and tried to shut him up; I thought that was the wrong attitude, still do, but he wouldn't be put off, he went on and on and it did get up my nose now and then. /Also, no need say, there were things we wanted to do often them days, we were both in our twenties, remember, that everybody quarter-decent wants privacy for (except actors and actresses on teevee nowadays, which is supposed to be alright because it's truthful and artistic and part of the story, and if you believe that you must have seen lots of pigs flying past the window.) We did it mainly for itself, course, but we also hoped for another child, little girl, I very much wanted, but it was not to be. For herself, I mean, not mainly to get us further up the council's waiting list. Yes, those days we really enjoyed our conjugal relations. /Anyway, it was no use rigging up a curtain as we did, cause the boy'd often stand up in his cot and pull it open and be staring at us curious-like, and he managed to know as if by instinct what's the most awkward and embarrassing moment./Fortunately we've got a wide landing, so we got one of those child-size beds and put it on the landing by the side of the stair-rail, and Alf made quite a good framework round it, and George, Maze's husband, whose an electrician, rigged up a light the boy could turn on and off when he was in bed. (Soon as he learned how Dave was always very keen on reading.) /So that's how we lived quite a time. Not too uncomfortable, we had Alf's wages coming in regular -- until he got the push up factory. Idle and dishonest was what they said. Now I daresay he was idle, he works very hard though not for too long at anything that interests him, and does it well too, and that was partly their fault for not giving him anything interesting to do, just standing at the assembly line all day. But dishonest? No! No policeman's daughter's going to marry a man who's dishonest. But then, people in our position have just got to take whatever insults the powerful fling at them, we can't in practice go to law or anything. But as I say no policeman's daughter's not going to marry a man who's a thief or a cheat, my Alf's as honest as the day is long. No, maybe only as honest as the day is long in December, as honest as the next man certainly, if he's offered something he wants cheap up pub maybe he don't ask questions... /Alf's never had a proper job since with income coming in regular. Bit of this, bit of that, helping out friends and relatives and acquaintances who want things done, returning good turns to those he's had good turns from kind of thing. He can turn his hand to almost anything skilful for a short while, and he's always good-natured, specially to his mates, long as he's not pushed much.
And I am too, they say. I'm far too tolerant and have been all these years, lots of women say that to my face, or hint it, and doubtless they say it a lot behind my back too. But it's my nature, he's my Alf. See, if you like dogs (I don't myself) you don't mind that they bark and bark and get hair all over your carpet and sniff each other's bums so disgustingly, do you? It's part of what a dog is. So I accept Alf for being what he is, he can't be different even if he tries (though he won't), I certainly did use to love him, didn't I? and as the song says, I'm accustomed to his face. But you can't really change people, whatever they say up chapel, they are what they are what they are. Try to change them and you'll probably change yourself instead, breaking your own heart. /
Alf gets his unemployment money and gives me some of it, Ma has her little job up Gritnalls, I've got my regular work Patel's shop three days a week as well as other things I pick up casual, there's overtime now and then, Belinda's often generous, even amazingly so, but it's not regular, and I've got a thousand and one ways of scrimping and saving which do chop money off things though at the cost of time and fuss; bet you didn't know if you paint a stale loaf with milk with a pastry brush and pop it in a warm over for ten minutes it comes up good as new, well, almost, and Maneesh quite often gives me loaves he can't sell.
Alf's got his petty faults, yes, 'a working man's harmless pleasures', smoking a bit, drinking quite a bit, always wanting the full English breakfast it's a bother to cook. But he's never violent or abusive, I couldn't stand that, as some husbands are, and, though you can scarcely believe it, some wives. Just now and again his horse'll win, very rarely, he's the reason why bookies drive posh cars.
Anyway, what with one thing and another we've never moved out, so upstairs there's Mum, us two, Belinda in her little 'boodoyer' as Alf calls it sarcastic-like, with all kinds nice scent spilling out when she opens the door. When he was eight (of course that's nearly ten years back) we got Dave a little caravan to sleep in in the garden. Course, we sold it to him as a great treat to be grown-up enough by now -- kids always fall for that -- to be trusted to sleep separate from the main house. We've got it linked up by now to the electricity and water supply and drain, in that respect it's quite nice for him, and he keeps it beautifully neat (unlike your average teenager), I must say that for him. Oh, we got the neighbours to let us take down their fence and took down ours too, and got it in through the side their garden across their back into our back, and quite a few of Alf's pub friends helped heave and push and he stood them drinks for it weeks afterwards, and Alf, whose very good at that sort of thing, as I say, long as its days and not weeks of work, put nextdoor's garden back very nice, in fact better than it was before, and ours too. It's not really our own house, course, so we had to ask permission up council offices. 'Don't ask me, missis,' said this nice old suit when I did. 'Well, who do I ask then?' I said, sharpish, forgetting I was a suppliant. 'No, no, missis,' he says. 'What I said was, don't ask me. Put it all back as it was before, quick as you can, see, and we knows how to turn a blind eye.' That sort people can be quite human sometimes, long as you're polite.
All that wasn't what I set out to tell you. The point I'm trying to make is that it would be a proper size for two or three, our house, but five, well, that's pushing it. There's two problems here which you think would cancel each other out, but don't, quite. One is, your so often in other people's way and they are in yours. And the other, well, it's almost like loneliness. You can't ever be be yourself if you want to be, yet the others aren't always company and sometimes they don't even feel like friends....I want someone to talk to, I mean, talk intimate, not just about the weather and all that, and I haven't got nobody. Alf -- let's face it! -- for all his talents some ways, he's a kind of grown-up kid, no sense responsibility, and Blinda's stuck in the psychological development of the silliest, bigheadedest sort of teenager; she was mature -- for her! -- at age seven, for she'd got there already, now I suppose she's lumbered with it for life. Dav's seems more adult than her since he was about ten.
And the work Blowse does! (Though it brings in the money.) I mean, you go in the big chemist's down Sharth and in their picture gallery upstairs, £30 including frame, there's a reproduction of a portrait of a woman coming out of the briny wearing the only bathing costume God himself gave her, not blushing about being seen like that but grinning all over her chops, and it's your own sister and you're quite likely there to meet someone you know who knows it is. It's interesting, mind, to see that the artist has made her a good bit firmer in the superstructure than most big-that-way girls are when forty's in sight, and also as tall, I'm pleased to see, as I am myself.
And that's the more admittable part of the way she gets good wages for too, because you know that the painter and her are,well, more than just friends, though, give her her due, they are friends too, and he's not the only one either. Mind, she's discreet about it in her way.
But this is a pretty small village too. It must be easier to keep private in a town or a big one. Everyone knows everyone -- well, sort of. Belinda's the favourite model of the German artist Seydell-Mertz who lives in the last of a row of bungalows in the west of the village, who is also the father of Pasqueline's disappeared mother Elaine.
By now Pask had been friendly with Dave for more than a year, I think, and had got in the habit of coming down 12 often (though she had the sense not to come in her school uniform.) I bet her own home's just as shabby as here, but different way; most of our furniture's much newer than theirs, but it's worn out much faster, being cheap, gimcrack stuff to start with, theirs is good quality, built to last, and it has lasted and lasted, it has had to.*
Our home was built on the cheap thirty years ago, and it shows. We've got the original metal frame windows, a bit warped now, a bit draughty, a bit rusty, and the laminated board doors, and built-in cupboards which don't open very well or close very well either, the glaring white bath, sinks and toilets, the thin plasterboard ceilings with silly patterns combed into them, and umpteen other marks wherever you look of the place having been thrown up hastily, as well as there being not enough space to swing a cat upstairs sometimes. Not just bad design and bad materials, but the creeping shame of knowing that our own sort of people couldn't or wouldn't do for us, their own kind, the care and workmanship they'd do for gentlefolk.
Pasqueline, through 'good breeding' or just not ever having noticed it, has never said anything which shows she's making comparisons, though it's likely she has. She's better now than a year ago, but she's still an awkward little thing, ought to have been cuddled more when she was a kid, hugged a lot, and even smacked sometimes, she ought to have had a much more physical sort of childhood, she would be happier in her own body now, more at-ease generally.
I'm reasonably sure that Dave hasn't told her he sleeps in caravan out garden, and she hasn't thought to ask; I mean, her sort, they always have their own bedrooms to themself, except in one of them ha-ha 'public' schools that do our country so much harm by dividing it ways it doesn't have to be divided and never did their pupils much good that I did see. This could all be a lot more difficult than it is in fact, their friendship, straddling different backgrounds, if we weren't despite everything all English (well, mainly in Pask's case) and hadn't somehow or other come almost by instinct to a silent agreement that there's definately things we do NOT say.
/The singing --
I started, quite a few pages back, to write about it. So it's about time I did.
That first night, Alf came in half-cut after I'd already gone to bed. Trying to be quiet. Trying. There's a borrowed light, sort of window, above the door, so he'd left the landing light on, and was attempting to put his pyjamas on by that, not to wake me up. Well, he was trying -- but not seeing very well and having poor balance he made pretty heavy weather of it. I was pretending to sleep on because I knew he meant well.
He got both parts of his pee-jays on, and got under the left side of the continental quilt and flopped down and soon was dead to the world, snoring a bit.
I slept too, I think, though not for very long. I don't know. Something woke me up. I don't know
what time it was, doesn't matter anyway. Wasn't dark, course, Alf had left the landing light on and there was the street lamp too.
All of a sudden I was awake. I was if you take my meaning not just awake but VERY awake. I seemed to be seeing twice as much as I would usual even if there was a spotlight on -- the tiniest marks or irregularities on the matt pink of the opposite wall, the way the side walls, the same colour really, looking greyish-orange instead because the light hits them different, all the deep colours in the 'Laughing Cavalier' picture that we'd framed out of a calendar, and how the frame which I'd usually call black was really a deep reddy brown, beautiful, the light-greeny shine on the backs of the brush and hand-mirror put down flat on the dressing-table top, the way the reflection in the central mirror of it had gone a bit wavey and browney with age, a wisp of light-grey dust blown into the corner, the line of whitish wood where the bluey carpet don't quite fit behind the splayed-out legs of the dressing-table, which could do with a good polish, I took note, the way a half-inch of the cream frilly bit has come loose round the edge of the pale lampshade and is hanging down in a curve about as big as the bottom half of an old penny, all the half-circles of whorls combed into the ceiling to try make it seem better than what it is really, superior cardboard, every single one of the several hundred little ridges standing down individually as sharp-looking as a kitchen knife, the snakey black extension wire twisting under the bed for the kettle and the electric blanket, the roughness of our own old grey wool blanket on top of the quilt. All of that --
and --
and something I COULDN'T see, see, though I couldn't tell what, yet I was aware of it too, it was something I was trying to hear. Hear somehow. No, that's not putting it very well either. Like, something I was trying to see, yes, but see it with my ears, like a bat. (Yes, I do know that doesn't make much sense.)
I know I'm not making this very clear, or clear at all.
Something's there. I'm certain-sure that something IS there. Or some ONE. And I'm trying to be aware of it or him or her in some fashion, but not a fashion I'm used to trying to understand things in.
It gets away from my trying to know it. I'm reaching out with my senses alright, and it's understanding I am too, but it skips away from being noticed. Kind of nothing, it is, yet I'm left with the feeling that it, whatever-it-is, knows very well that I'm there and that I'm attempting to find out what it is, or who, and is purposely sliding away from being known...
So by now I'm sitting up in bed, and it's not very warm, in fact its quite cold, and I'm reaching out automatic for my purple and grey mohair bed-jacket.
Adter a while - don't know how long, minute or two, five at the outside - I'm quite sure, in my own way, but I can't even start to explain to you how I'm sure, or even explain it to myself, I know that it's gone, totally, whatever it was. And yet it's feeling it wants me to know that it's not there...
I don't get back to sleep immediate, but -- just a minute! How was I, of all people, seeing so very clearly, and in such poor light too, me whose glasses are scarcely ever off my nose except when I'm in bed, like I am now? I can't answer that question, course, so I begin to drift off...
And, as I'm going - it's faint, I only remember it the next day - there's this woman's voice singing, lovely clear voice, not loud, just a bar or two. Of course it might have been a radio next door. /*Nothing much, it was, not a bit frightning, just odd. But I'm thinking about it in the kitchen the next morning, standing over the frying pan, and Alf and Dave are sitting there next to each other at the kitchen table gollopping down their egg and sausage and bacon and fatbred, the 'real working man's breakfast' that Alf's always insisted upon. I'm cooking my own breakfast, last of us all, of course, and at the same time I'm thinking about them odd minutes night-time and I'm wondering whether I ought to confide in either of them. (Mum eats her breakfast in the dining room, she likes to be waitedon. Blinda isn't up yet. She won't touch fatty foods anyway.)
But our Dave is so useless, many ways. Utterly. It strikes me with almost a pang of pity that it's nearly as big a misfortune to be so very much cleverer than normal as it is to be one of those poor souls who've only got sixty pence to the pound up top -- you're almost as disqualified for ordinary life being brainy as they are being mental. / Picture the scene in your mind's eye. There's Alf, who's quite short, in his open shirt and bracers with his beer gut spilling out over the trousers I told him to change three days ago and hasn't, and Dave so smart in his school uniform with the crest on the pocket that you'd think it was made-to-measure though it am't, his shirt beautiful white, his tie in a neat small not, well-creased trousers (guess who ironed them so well), black lace-up shoes all highly polished and reflecting, (he does them himself) good-looking, fair-haired, handsome almost, kind of son you're always supposed to want, it would have to be Dave if it's anybody./ You wouldn't take them for father and son, would you? But they're alike in this. I can't really talk to them, not deep, I mean. They'll tell me what's on television or whether they think it's going to rain, course, but if something's seriously worrying me it'll just have to go on worrying me as far as they're concerned, because they're not concerned, see? I just can't bring up the subject of what happened last night, they'd say it was nothing really because they wouldn't want to be bothered (and of course they might be right too) but if they see me looking real worried, well, their eyes will register it, but their minds just won't take it in.O, men! MEN! They think the wife or their mother has to be like a Rock, the Mainstay or Anchor of the whole family. And, yes, we do have to be too, and are, not so much because it's in our nature as women as because of what's so lacking in men. / I tell you, it's no fun not having anyone you can speak to when you're really worried./Next night something worse happened. Far worse, in a way. Though what it was, again it's not easy to say what it was. And nothing like it happened again, though they were lots of bad ones or at least queer ones. I'm not sure how you fit this in. /I woke up again, there in my own bed, lying on my side in an S shape, turned away from Alf, and comfortable enough with the soft mattress and warm enough with the warm covers. But it didn't feel what it looked like, if you get me (well, if you can't imagine it at all, try hard, please, but if you can't I don't blame you, it was so odd.) My eyes was telling me one thing, my nerves another. I was just seeing the wall two foot away./ But I felt -- oh my Christ, torture must be like this! -- as if my body was being pulled and squeezed and stretched, even having knives drove in it, and as if I was being both heated and frozen beyond the point of endurance. It can't have gone on long or I'd have died, I'm sure I would.Only a minute, probably, but what a minute! Much more, and I wouldn't be here to be writing it now, that's forsure. Then I was laying there all trembly, didn't think I could move at all first, my heart going pitapatpitapat ever so fast. But after a while I got up just as I was in my nightie and went down through the not-very-warm house all trembly and sat on the lav all bent over and was sick twice and had the runs and I wasn't weeping exactly but my eyes couldn't stop watering. I had to keep on wiping them with bits of toilet paper as well as using lots of it for what it's made for, I must have got through more than half a roll. /And I didn't wake no-one else up, course, just made a mental note to be up first as ever, but a bit earlier than usual, open the window, pull the flush, clean the bowl, and all that. A Wife and Mother has always got to be Well and Strong.I'll tell it now. I did something I'd never even think to do 'normal' times. I helped myself to a glassful of Blowse's private brandy, then washed the glass up and wiped it up and put it away./ And when I went back to bed again -- by then it was half past three, might have been a whole hour since I went down first -- I thought I heard her again, That voice -- singing so sweet and so brightly, but not for long./*/I had half a mind to go and see old Ostlethwaite about this. I needed to talk to someone personal. It didn't seem right to bother the vicar, never having gone to church to speak of. I was afraid that the dr who's so good and kind under his brusque manner might go suffocatingly commonsense on me, bad night cramps, something you ate, don't worry about it, next please kind of thing. And as for the voice singing that I'd heard twice up till now he'd just dismiss them totally -- after all, I did myself much of the time. It was only a few seconds each time. If I was to be asked, couldn't it have been something else you'd mistaken for singing? I just couldn't have put my hand on my heard and said, no, it couldn't have been, I just wasn't certain myself.
Other people being calmly sensible when you yourself is worried is very hard to bear and that's the truth.
Oh, how the others get on my nerves somehow, in fact I even hate them, though briefly. I'd happily die for any of them, too, or so I like to think (long as it wasn't long-drawn-out) but sometimes......well, you live in a family home yourself, I daresay, so you can imagine!
When I'm tired and run-down, all sorts of things I'd put up with normal get my goat, in fact I want to SCREAM and SCREAM! (But I don't, of course, being A Wife and A Mother and An English Woman.) It's not 'Mother, do this' and 'Lize, do that' all the time (not all), but it's their assumption that whatever I'm doing, but especially if it's just for me, private-like, I'll drop it to wait on them, and as often as not to do something for 'em that they could do just as easy themself. Sometimes when I'm working my fingers to the bone I almost very nearly wish -- no, I do, but not for long --that I'd never married Alf, that I'd never had Dave, that I'd never had a mother or a sister! But that's all nonsense and don't last long. Afterwards I feel guilty because.
And the funny thing is that while my nerves are all frayed my hands are working away speedily, efficiently, quite normal, and I think I'd go on like that even if my heart was breaking, even if I was ill if I could stand up, even if I was dying even. Why?
Yes, why would I? Mix of good and bad reasons. Love, habit's strong chain, conscience, and stupid lack of the imagination to think anything could be different. Besides, how could I fill up my time?
Alf don't seem to have no problems that way. He's never excited, never bored, and, give him his due, I've never heard him say an unkind word about anyone. Though I've never heard him make a really generous and charitable judgement either. He don't say much. He don't think much, far as I can tell. He's quite giving in small ways - pints of beer and all that - to those he calls his friends, and they're quite giving to him back. I've never known him to be nasty, except just the once to Pask; envy, probably.
He's got no malice. He doesn't do much, so for one thing he don't do no harm. (I bet that Hitler was a very hard worker.) He's happy. Well, content. He doesn't ever vote and thinks it's stupid to. Now, running up to elections, though I can't spare the energy, I do what I can for my party (Labour, course), putting leaflets through doors, stuffing envelopes, making lists, answering the phone in the office, and all that, which Alf sort-of laughs at. For the only time in his life he seems to see that my life's quite difficult, 'Haven't you got enough to do?' he says. Seems, seems, only seems!
Total different from Dave, who's always worked very hard, very hard indeed, at what suits him to work hard at, that is. Like most women's sons, he'll never do anything in the house, I mean in the nature of housework, except electric stuff, unless he's nagged and nagged into it, and then what's needed to be done has got to be very clearly and definately explained, two or three times over, as if you're talking to a toddler what's not very bright, and then whatever-it-is gets done slowly and grudgingly and awkwardly and badly, But he's marvellously intelligent in his own way and talks a lot about going to Cambridge and getting a good degree (whatever that is - opposite of a bad one, I suppose) and winning lots of prizes and being a famous scientist and even getting knighted. What's more, his teacher when I saw him, seemed think all that was quite possible. 'The most able pupil in our sort of line I've met in thirty years,' he said! Well, I don't understand any of it, but I swelled with pride and wrote those words on my heart, as you can imagine.
Just a thought, though. You hear a lot about the rat race to get into universities; doesn't that mean that it's the rattiest rats who always win?
No, I'm so proud and grateful, comparing him with other women's sons the same age, training themselves to be Alf, drinking too much (what a waste of money) and then boasting about it afterwards as if it's a great achievement, or, if they've got a bit more oomph, drinking too much and getting girls into trouble - as we used to say - and then boasting about that afterwards too. No, Dave is highly intelligent, talented, sensible, and all that, but I'm only a qualified admirer of his character, there's a coldness at the centre, I bet. He's after the good of no. 1 just as much as Blowse, very different way. But he's not a bit vain of being so good-looking, and as for the chance her dopey adoration is serving up to him like it's duck on a plate with all the trimmings, I mean that in some ways silly but underneath, I feels, deep-down good girl, I mean Miss Pasqueline Osmonde Ursula What-A-Moniker Gritnall-Ferrace, that is, the chance of marrying her eventual and leaping bottom to top our local social system in just one bound, well, he's as ignorant of that as a Martian or a Chinaman might be.
Mother does next-to-nothing to help me in the house nowadays either. Except criticism. course. Everything must be 'just so' for her like it was for 'Aunt Maria' or I don't half hear it. O, I was well-trained to be a servant just as she was, and Gran, and all those overworked, underpaid, self-important women stretching back donkeys. Sarcasm and repetition and sharp looks were the motivations.
As for Blowsy, that flower, well, isn't she what the Good Book calls a harlot? But I takes her money, comes irregular but when it does it's more than a whole month in the shop. (I get stale bread and cakes too. Manesh Patel is decent, even smiling-friendly, but an awful fusser - maybe a lot of Indians are like that - and the work's easy enough if a bit tedious, except sometimes late at night, or when there's a rush on just before Christmas, and I get headachey and can't quite see the till and its keys juggling around, and it's hard to keep polite and helpful and cheerful and it's hard not to brood on the fact that keeping polite and cheerful and helpful's demanded just so your customers (even though they're people of your own kind) never have to relate to you as a real human being who is tired and worried, only just as part of the 'fixtures and fittings' of the shop. When Ashweena his wife has one of her turns sometimes Manesh phones next-door about ten and I'm called there to speak to him and he speaks ever-so-polite to beg me to come in extra, I feels bit ashamed to take advantage of her bad health and at the very same time pleased too by the thought of earning extra, and off I hurry down to the bus-stop. We don't have a car, nearly all our neighbours do, but I do know how to drive, and now and again I go out delivering orders in his van, a nice change.
But I've got off the subject I meant to be writing about, what happened next. Now Blowsy's the only familymember I don't have to get breakfast for. She emerges from her room like a butterfly from its crysalis round about ten thirty usual, and gets herself a cup of weak green tea (ugh!) and nibbles at a thin biscuit or two. After, she'll nearly always have a bath, takes about an hour - fortunately the toilet's separate - and leaves the room smelling delicious. (She pays our electricity bill herself, mind.)
If I'm not at Patel's down Sharth by the time she's finished I'll be tidying, dusting, hoovering and all that, which she (whose so blooming fussy herself in entirely different ways) always calls 'Lize's fuss'. Yet if I didn't do it she'd be the second to complain, Ma first of course.
Well, one Monday morning about this time while I'm 'fussing' I see that for once she's done herself a boiled egg, and, just to make conversation like, I pass the remark, ill-chosen I do admit, 'Getting a bit greedy in your old age, ay, Blowse?'
That doesn't go down too well; she likes to imagine she gets older only at about a week a month, unlike everybody else, and she glares at me a bit -- she's got lovely brown eyes, very expressive, 'beautiful as a cow's' old Seydell-Mertz said to me once, which I thought a bit odd, but next time I met a cow I stopped and looked at it and saw what he meant -- anyway, she glares, then thinks better of it and mumbles surely she's welcome to have a boiled egg if she wants one, you don't grudge your own sister an egg, forsure, and so on...
Mumbles! Our Blowse, the noisiest woman in Tap, who's always crying out 'Look at me, look at me!' in words or actions or both. Now sometimes we two have a serious row and she throws at me how much she puts into the home compared with me or Alf, and once she mentions cash then I know it's as if she has said, THIS IS WAR, no Geneva convention, but, well, even then maybe it's not as serious as it sounds, we've been rowing about one thing or another well over thirty years; anyway, all that clear the air until the next time, or looks as if it does.
Put short, if Blowse had fired up and flung harsh words at me, or even her egg, that would have annoyed me, yes, but it wouldn't have worried me, all that's pretty usual, it's natural in her -- but the way she looked down quiet then at her plate, and put a bit more it's-healthier-than-butter olive margarine on one of her 'soldiers' to have a seeming reason to break my gaze, well, that really was odd.
She looked a bit like Mother for a while. I don't mean in looks, Mother was quite pretty when young but Belinda's gorgeous - large features, clear skin, long shiny light-brown hair, good posture, sort of figure men like, o she works hard at it, far harder than anything else, but she's got A1 at Lloyds natural aspects to work on. I mean, the inwardness of her look, the way she was speaking to her plate, not me, that was pretty funny-peculiar. So I was very gentle to her and said of course she's welcome to an egg, hope she was enjoying it and all that, or told her she didn't have enough breakfast normal, this'd do her good kind of thing.
It just crossed my mind that she might have 'fallen pregnant' as young girls call it nowadays as if they don't know what causes it, and my heart missed a bit, not because your neighbours mind that sort of thing nowadays, it's almost compulsory some streets, but because I was envisioning who'd have to do the lion's share of looking after a baby and having a toddler always tripping up your feet and asking questions that half the time you don't know the answer to and I was for certain-sure it would be Auntie.
I've thought about it since and concluded I was selfish a bit that morning. Maybe...I mean, it's hard to imagine, but maybe Blowse wasn't feeling well that day, though she's always been healthy enough up to now in my experience, despite not having much energy. If something's hard to imagine, mind, it doesn't mean it's impossible, does it? I suppose I'd been on the wrong end of comparisons between the sisters too much, but that doesn't quite explain or justify me.
People, I mean people in the family, they'd always be faintpraising me, see? They were always saying, 'she's such a decent girl, our Lize'. If I was dead, no doubt they'd put it on my tombstone! Sensible, hard-working, you always know where you are with her, she's never been drunk, she's never come home late without a good, and true, excuse, she did quite well at school, the teachers liked her and she liked them...all that was right too...but Blowse, 'Our Belinda, well, if she's a bit flighty you can't blame her, Nature's been so very generous to her in the matter of looks, men put temptation in such a pretty girl's way' and so on. I've always suffered by this long-standing contrast, even when it seemed it my favour; I'm truthful (I am too) but that means I haven't got her wonderful imagination, she's fascinating and I'm just dull.
As a result of all that, I've come to realise, I've been jealous of her all my life. (Learning about yourself some fact which has always been instantly obvious to everyone else the moment they've met you, that's called 'wisdom' or 'maturity'.) I'm one of the workers, see? I rush round tidying up or washing or other cleaning even if I'm tired to start with. I mean, if it needs doing, I'll do it. But Belinda just sails along like a great yacht, very calmly, the air itself divides to make an easy passage for her. By comparison my way of moving, or even of standing still, is a bit twitchy. She's restful to be with, I'm not, it's just how we're both made.
Alright, another of my faults is, I don't always notice that things have changed. Or persons. So it took a few weeks to get through to me that our Belinda wan't looking quite as alert and active as she does normal, that she was stooping just a little over her not big yet bigger than before breakfasts. I thought I ought to say something out of sisterly sympathy (with a bit of curiosity mixed in, like) but I knew I'd have to be careful not to offend her; when she gets on her high horse her tongue can cut like a saw. She's easily upset if you suggest that her behaviour doesn't match her ideas of what's a lady. And tactful I'm not, often.
So I sat down opposite her one morning, and looked at her in what I hoped would be taken as a kind way, and --
Very hesitantly, heart in my mouth, 'Blowse...' I said.
She looked up. A bit surprised, she was, she hadn't known I was there, seemed.
'Is everything...well, alright?'
Her chin and eyebrows went up, arrogant almost. '?' she said by her look.
Go at it indirectly, I thought to myself now. 'It's our Mum, is it? The way she seems so withdrawn?'
Straight look from Blowse, then she relaxed a bit. 'What, the way she don't talk much half the time ' (I eased up a bit, inward; she'd have said 'doesn't' if she'd been getting angry, to seem 'superior') 'an' the other half goes on and on and ON?'
'It's not right, Blowse, it's not her somehow.'
'No. Nothing to worry about. Just her age. Lot of old people get like that, talking far too much. Christ, I hope I get run down by a bus first.'
Or a Rolls-Royce, I thought, you'd prefer that; but I had the sense not to say. 'No, she don't seem quite herself' was all I said.
'No, nor do you.'
That was a very surprising answer. Now here's me trying to be all concerned about her, and there's Blowse, giving me the full benefit of her 'lustrous orbs' and with just a quarter-smile on her full lips as if she can see the funny side of me but's too polite to mention it.
'Well, I'm not sleeping too well,' I said as an excuse. But as soon I said it I realised it was completely true; I'd been up part of every night, though not for long always, for quite a time back now.
'That's us both, then,' she said.
Brief pause.
Then one of us said, 'Weather, d'you think?' (You can blame anything on the weather in rainy Demnet.) And the other said, 'Spec so'.
So where that little conversation got us was nowhere. /*/Yes, you can blame anything you like on the weather down Demnet. See England in your mind's eye and on the left near the bottom there's a sort of triangle shape, bit like a leg stretched out, but not very, the big toe so to speak is Land's End. We're up near the top of that triangle bit, twenty miles or so south of Bishoprick, that great trading port what got so very rich by ruining lives with slavery and lungs with tobacco, we -- I mean our village, Belker or Belker Tap or just Tap, it's called all three at times, is a bit northish of Sharth; the road goes on further down all the way to Seatown and the other decent holiday places on the South Coast, that's about fifty miles. Between us and Bishoprick is the Demnets, which we locals just call the Hills. It's twenty miles or ish to Birnham, where the Estuary's widened into the Channel; you can see Wales from there when it's clear, which isn't always. Mostly the clouds come off the sea going eastish, and when they get to the Hills they try to lift themselves up over them, and can't, much of the time, so it rains. Seemingly every day, but really that was almost true the year I'm writing about. Mind, the Romans thought it was lovely -- never been to Italy, though I suppose it's hot and dry - and they called the flat country to the south of us 'the Isle of Apples' (in their own language, course.)
At school the teachers were very keen on telling us that sort thing. Our exercise books had a round map on the back of which showed fifty miles all around Bishoprick, and as far as we were concerned that might as well have been the whole Universe. Miss and Sir told us stories of local history too, of very important people in our locality like St. Osgyth and King Ethrwulf. And of the great merchant traders of about a thousand years later - Tyning who built Holy Virgin church in Bishoprick (they were a religious lot), Merrick who put money into exploration of the New World -- possibly, Miss Joliffe said, that was why America's called that (A-merrick-a, got it?) and right down to old Gritnall, the last of them, who settled in Tap just over two hundred years back. All this had the result, probably intentional, of making us feel that because others now dead who lived round here donkeys' years past were very important, why, we too were very important people too.
Which as the song says 'ain't necessarily so'. We're unimportant people in a little village probably no-one who lives more than twenty miles away's ever heard of. Even the Ferraces who we're accustomed to look up to, I wonder if the rich and grand people who put their daughters up for sale in 'Country Life' magazine, (yes, they do, they really do) would take much notice of the Ferraces.
Anyway --
We're not much used to confiding in each other, that's our family trouble.
Anyway --
My hair, which was striikingly black when I was a child has now gone a bit grey, the skin of my face has roughened, just a bit, and I've developed (or always had) a bad habit of stooping a bit and keeping my shoulders a bit stiff, which is explained by 1. being tall, 2. being short-sighted, 3. always being a little worried about something, usually money, i.e. the lack of it. I don't go round kidding myself that I'm young still. I'm nearly forty and I do acknowledge it. I look older because I am, that's the way life is, you don't need no degree from Oxford or Cambridge to tell you why.
But Belinda, of course, is total different. Her looks are her living, her life, her greatest 'area of expertise', her religion, nearly. What was happening around this time I'm telling you about was that she was sleeping badly, she felt it told on her appearance, and was sleeping badly because of worrying about that in addition too, a 'vicious circle'.
She was getting up in those days sometimes as late as noon, but still often insisted on being in the way getting her breakfast still past noon while I was making dinner, before going out wherever she was going (she has taxis a lot) and -- well, it's hard to feel sympathy for her, being such a bloom or blossom, but -- she'd sit round after her breakfast and well, she's too elegant to make little gestures which irritate others, unlike me who's always a bit uptight, or Pask who was about this time beginning to succeed sometimes in not biting her nails -- but I noticed that, although she'd ceased to smoke now it was no longer fashionable, she'd stretch out her right hand before her across the table just as if she had a cigarette in it. I didn't know what was up with her, but in the end she told me unasked:
'It's nothing much, my darling, but just as I'm going off to sleep, most nights, I hear this voice.'
'Oho!' I thought, but went on with the feather-dusting or whatever I was doing, and said, 'What voice is that, then?'
'It's a woman's voice. Singing. Old-fashioned songs, I reckon. But as soon as I starts to listen she clams up.'
'Oh!' I says to meself; proves I'm not mad, or if I am there's two of us. I thought I'd better tell her I'd heard it too, and
And then I didn't.
Here's the queer thing, in fact this really IS mad. I'd heard something of the same nature myself, only too likely the very same voice, and with all her faults she is my own only sister who grew up with me and much of the time slept in the same bed. Now, just this once, yes, I really think this was the very first time, she was turning tentatively towards me for help or comfort or something. But could I bring myself to say I'd heard the singing too? No! Whatever the reason.
On the contrary I felt absolutely obliged to pour the cold water of scorn upon her experiences and say it was all imagination. ('Imagination'! Just about the most useless word in the dictionary. When used in that sense, I mean. Tells you nothing.) I heard myself saying things like, 'Is that all, my lover? It's nothing really. Something you ate disturbing your insides, p'raps. You of all people, to let a tiny little thing like that get you down!' (Yes, I heard myself talking such twaddle, I knew it was twaddle, and I went twaddling on.)
'No. I'm not dreaming, my darling. I knows whether I'm awake or asleep,' she answers. Stubbornly, it's true, but politely, like to an outsider not a sister.
'You just think you're awake, but really you're asleep and dreaming it,' I said. In view of what happened since, some of it awful, I'm real ashamed. I'd been no use to her. Or to my own self either. She can't have been dreaming, We can't have both had the same dream. So this singing, it really was real and true.
Besides anything else, I've had to learn, through going through all this, that what's 'real' and what's 'imagined', they're not so different as I always did think, there's not that sharp edge between them, as if separating out what's true and what isn't. D'you get my meaning? Or if you don't, I hope it'll become clear as you reads on.
That knowledge hasn't been helpful, it hasn't made things easier.It's like the opposite of getting glasses. When you first get glasses - I'll never forget it! And neither will anyone else who's grown up severely short-sighted and no-one realised it for years and neither did you yourself because for one thing you were only a child and for the other you didn't have any means of comparison...well, the first pair of glasses you have, it's such a wonder and a joy to see things clear at last, it doesn't matter what your looking at, could be the sunset, could be a sausage, the hardness of the outline is just so beautiful in itself it makes you want to cry with joy and gratitude.
But supposing, then, someone had come along that minute and taken away your lovely new glasses and said, with authority, 'Oh no! These are no use. They're just lying to you. The world out there really is vague and fuzzy!'
Dave could explain this kind of thing better than me. It's worrying, even frightening, these days, now I'm not sure what's imaginary or what's real, kind of sliding around in my understanding. Mind, it's the opposite of what he believes.
So that day - it was a Sunday - I did an odd thing for me. (Alf says we don't need a clock our house, just see what I'm doing that time, which is an exaggeration, but it's true to say that generally I'm predictable, a creature of habit.) Let the menfolk get their own food for once, won't kill'm, I thought, and half an hour later I gets in her taxi with Blowse and goes as far as Kingshouse.
That's where Saint Ethrwulf, king and martyr, was murdered all those years ago by being hanged in a tree, nearly under the disused railway viaduct which is the main feuture of our village that strangers notice. I got out there, Blowse took the cab onwards to Seydell-Mertz's. I walked up through the middle of the village, out on the main road a bit, and along Gritnall's Lane.
I'd taken into my head to go and ask Tom Ferrace about this business of the voice. He's a sensible man and educated (the two don't always march together) and I do like him and respect him, even though I feel that his affection for Ma is a bit like what he might give an old dog. And we've sortof known each other all our life, I suppose I'm two or three years older. And if he's got the usual prejudices of his kind, having been bred and taught and trained to feel superior, for all that I sense he's aware of it and tries to look through those prejudices. I mean, he's not like one of those men, and it's not only in old-fashioned novels that they exist, do believe me, who's quite capable even of going to bed with a woman not in his own 'rank in society' and giving her a
child, yet never even thinking for a moment that she might be a human being like himself.
And, anyway, I had to talk to someone, or else I'd break down and scream.
Their house is about ten yards set back from the road, with a great stone triangular thing above the front door, main door I might say, since it's on the side, and several half-curved steps up to it. Although I'd put on my best clothes, I thought, I'm as good as him sortof thing, I just WILL NOT go to the back door, and I didn't either.
Their 'front' door was after all just a door, stained a dark-reddy colour a bit cracked round the edges of the panels, nothing to be frightened of, of course (yet I had to tell myself that) and next to it was one of those 'sugarstick' handles you pull out, and then a bell, a real metal bell with a clapper and all, swings and clangs inside. Beside the step was one of those haitch-shaped things for scraping horsemuck of your shoes which were very necessary way back.
Tom answered the door himself. A bit surprised it was me, I daresay, but too courteous to let on. He smiled and stood aside so I could come into the hall, didn't say anything I can remember. There were big pictures of lakes and mountains on the walls, faded colours. I explained briefly I'd got a problem I thought he could help me with, he smiled thinly again and said he'd certainly do his best, and took me into a living-room, sat me down in a big chair with arms.
He offered coffee. I didn't really want any, though I said yes. For two reasons. One, which I knew was a bit petty at the time and has seemed far pettier since even, was that I was 'tickled' (as we say round here, amused, that is) by the thought of one-like-them making one-like-me coffee in the very same house where so long the boot had been on the other foot, and the other - which I'm afraid was also petty - was I needed to think a bit more about why I'd come.
I certainly trusted Tom this much, even then, that he'd attempt to help. He did too, though not quite how I expected, tried, I mean. But in actual fact I didn't spend that minute or two getting my thoughts together, I was too curious (nosy, even) to see how such people lived.
The room wasn't really anything special. Smelt a bit stuffy, as if they had dogs, which they don't. Main colours were various greys or browns, partly because the heavy velvetty curtains, dark red but faded in places to pink downward stripes, were only just drawn apart. But there were pictures, landscapes, which were painted in gold, that is, their frames were, but this gold was chipped in places because the frames were plaster, not wood. Some but not all these pictures had little flat lights sticking out above them, some skew-whiff, not on, and there was a brass fender about five feet long, and brass fire tools.
The mantelpiece was just a long plank or beam of thick dark varnished wood, and either side and in front the fireplace there were dark green tiles unevenly put on, and in the grate a superior sort of electric fire standing up - pity it wasn't on - actually made of pewter, black in some places, silvery-grey in others, lovely thing. The purply cotton covered flex for this disappeared under the carpet and came out other side to an adaptor in a big round-pin plughole on the opposite wall (Dave wouldn't like to see that, I thought) where several other things were plugged in too. There was a coffee table just in front of me, all whirly in outline, blackish wood, foreign, I reckon, with the 'Radio Times', the 'Guardian' newspaper, and a few 'Reader's Digests' on. The television there was smaller than ours, on a sortof trolley thing to one side. There was a picture of some mayor, probably a relative, in his robes and funny hat and with a lot of frilly stuff at his neck which you'd have to use a goffering iron for (though most modern women don't even know the name.)
The wallpaper was a big pattern which suited the size of the room, mainly green, partly brassy, vaguely like leaves climbing up, and embossed; the brassy part must have started off gold-coloured umpteen years back. The carpet was Axminster or something grand like that, with stained floortiles round the edge; it must have been the kind of thing you sink in up to your ankles when it was new, but it wasn't any more, worn down to the rope-coloured backing some places, by the door and in front the chairs mainly, and was supposed to be reddish curly pattern on light grey or ivory background. The ceiling was high, of course, and had a 'rose' nearly in the middle from which a modernish four-branched light hung down, there was quite a few other single chairs, and a nice long leather sofa, cracked a bit, but surely very comfortable. And a tall dark bookcase where too many books and magazines had been stuffed in. It wasn't a very big room, maybe twenty foor by twelve, though almost as big as the whole downstairs of my own house.
But what really amazed me, and shocked me, was the odd cobweb floating in the corners (mind, the whole room could have done with a thorough turning-out, more dusting, polishing and all that.) Cobwebs!! 'Mother, you're slipping!' I thought. Mind you, she never does a hand's turn that sort of thing at home, takes the attitude, what did I raise a daughter for? (but doesn't apply that to Blowse somehow) and has always made sure I do that kind thing thoroughly and well , standing over me and staring hands on hips and calling me 'my girl!' in a special kindof threatening toneofvoice if she thinks I'm not doing anything exactly right. That's the very reason I always notice them sorts things other people's houses.
Yet now I was seeing with my very own eyes clear evidence that her own housework wasn't much good. O, I felt triumphant, glowing bright with it -- 'Caught you out, you fussy old bag!' was the way I was feeling.
And then almost at once I felt real ashamed. And ever so sad too. Poor old thing, even though she's not well and she's returned to her work here and she's carrying on when she's past it, and must know it herself and all, and be ashamed not to be doing a proper craftswoman's job no more. And for why? Because she knows I need her bit money for housekeeping. And too out of the kind of loyalty to the Ferraces that people call 'feudal'. (But the triumph went on, muted, for all that.)
Anyway, Tom brought me the coffee. I'd started calling him 'Tom' by then and he didn't seem to mind, and anyway he'd called me 'Liz' just now when I turned up. And he sat down opposite me know, twitching his trousers up, formally dressed but nothing remarkable, off-the-peg grey pinstripe suit from Burtons or somewhere, cream shirt, tie with stripes on, (he goes to church), and very good, highly polished shoes, brogues, which might even have been hand-made. And he smiled a little, and was silent.
So I jollywell had to talk. And out it all came in a rush, and not only what I'd intended to tell him about that voice Blowse and me had both heard, us sisters, but also all kinds of difficulties relating to Ma and her and Dave and Alf (well, I've told you most of that) and back again to the singing.
And as I was talking about this the second time through I heard the music!
It seemed to be an old-fashioned song, and it terrified me. My heart just turned over, it went cold, it was like it had stopped and then started running again, yet backwards. And much, much faster nor it should. Then I did what I'd never done in my life before, or since either, I fainted dead away./*/When I come to --- no, I'm going to start that again, try to make it clearer, well, that is, I mean, less unclear. Because of course I didn't come to all at once sort thing. No, it was more that bits of my senses returned, like jigsaw pieces, one by one back from, well, back from wherever it was they'd gone to, I don't know./First, I came to be aware that I was alive, that is, existing. No more than that, at first. Just me, there, wherever there was (or was seeming to be) and I was there all alone, or I'd certainly have thought that I was alone if I'd been able to think of it. But all I could see was blackness, blacker than night. Quicker than it takes to tell, though, this black turned a bright blood red, and came clear from the middle out toward the edges. Whatever it was I was seeing now was all bright and vivid and unreal and almost shiny like a colour photo overerexposed, quite beautiful fresh colours they all were, but not meaning anything at all./So I was seeing something-or-other, but it had no meaning. If Tom who's clever that way spoke to me in French or German I'd understand that it meant something to him, but it wouldn't mean nothing to me; these colours at first were like that. My eyes were working, but my brain wasn't, at first anyway./Then I began feel that there was a brick wall or stone cliff, and it was pressing hard and heavy against my right shoulder, as if I was having a hard time holding up this wall or cliff with all my strength, but yet it was my bounden duty to do it, and the most important thing to do in the whole world./Someone's calling out, urgent in his tone he is, 'Pask! Pask!'/Then there's shoes, not far from my eyes, good ones, brogues, highly polished, an orangeish shade of brown, huge they look, but they're all on one side, or so it's appearing, them legs are going left to right not down to up, no, no, hang about, it must be me that's not straight, not them nice shoes./And memory (of a simple sort) and reasoning (ditto) wakes, and I know now that I'm me and that I'm laying on the floor, and there's a dry tickly smell of not very clean carpet up my face, no wonder either since my nose is almost on top of it, and Tom Ferrace's voice is telling me just what I'm working out for myself, that I must have had some kind of turn -- well, you don't lie on the floor usual, do you? --Pask, Pask! --What? --Come Here! Now, please! It's important! And Tom in a gentle voice is telling me the dead opposite of what I'm thinking myself, he's saying I ought to carry on being down there a bit longer./Now I really don't want to do that. It's not so much any sense of my own dignity, it's basic self-respect, or good manners maybe, but I'm feeling I ought not to lay there a moment longer, and I moves my hand to help push myself up. But, blow me, as soon as I do he puts his hand on my shoulder, the one that's up in the air, and pushes down, polite but firm like, and actually obliges me to go on laying there by physical strength. Now Tom's not got big muscles but the ones he's got are very strong for their size, and anyways I'm feeling about as tough as a goldfish, also his is the kind of voice I'm accustomed to being obeying to, also there's something funny-peculiar and funny-haha as well about the idea of making it a struggle between us where I try to get up and he tries to stop me and succeeds and I then try to get up again and he -- you get the idea. 'It's for your own good, he says. 'Just stay where you are for the moment. You won't come to any harm,' and all that./Anyway, I'm looking at things from this queer point of view, though at least I know it's a queer point of view now, and the bottom of this blacky-coloured door opens, and the top must've too, but I can't see that, oh and the middle too, come to think of it, and in come some feet in sandals, with, would you believe, shiny pink stuff on the toenails. Course, there're ankles, calves, knees, thighs and all that stuck on, but I can't see them from where I am, these feet seem to be seperate somehow./I'm back to normal now, sortof. That's to say that though the world's looking pretty odd, at least I know that it's pretty odd now. I understand that the girl I'm regarding from this 'unfamiliar perspective' is young Pask. By the way, there weren't no more music now./Now Pask has some odd mannerisms, or did then, and from what she says sometimes you'd imply that she's got an odd way of thinking too. Some people think she's stupid because of that, but that only proves how stupid and unimaginative THEY are being. /At this moment-in Pasqueline's wearing casual clothes that don't suit her, tight jeans with odd bits of cotton sticking out here and there and a loose tee-shirt with pink and white horizontal stripes bit like a burglar in a cartoon, kind of thing fashionable from time to time and I suppose this was one of the times; she's one of those who look better formally dressed, in her school uniform for instance. And she's got her nice shiney reddy-dark hair pinned up not very tidy in a bunch on her head, which shows how pale and clear her face is, and too, though I'm not going to notice this until later, how very fine and delicate the moulding of her ears is, also how her figure is very plump and full up to about her waist, but light and slim thereon up, opposite to our B'linda./I must say this for the girl, she was thoroughly sensible at this time. There wasn't much to do except wait and let me recover, so that's what she set out to do. Easy enough, but some people older than her would have flapped round crying 'give her air' or 'open the window!' and so been no use at all. She squatted down a bit awkward, for at that time in her life she was not a graceful mover, and, if she was surprised to see me in her house, especially on the floor, gave no sign whatever of it, she's a lady, after all, that one./'Hello,' she says, 'Lize. Not feeling too well, seems. Just take it slowly, very slowly. Sit up if you can. When you can. Don't force it.' 'Do it in your own time. No hurry,' Tom puts in from behind. Now that another woman was here I reckon he was thinking it more decent to let her do the major part of dealing with me. /From where I was, everything apart from being low-down was sideways-on. I could understand with my mind that it was all sideways, and that the left-right direction was really up-to-down, and yet my balance - or something! - had gone and it just didn't feel like that. Get me? Maybe I'm not putting it very well./Eeeeventually, I did what they suggested, and pretty slow too. Very slow indeed, I would have thought, yet, by the time I'd got my head up (to just above the level of the seats of the chairs there) everything had gone all woozy again and it was like the huge house and everything in it was on one of those big roundy things they have at fairs called Ferris wheels (which is a bit of a joke, if you get me.) /'Look, I'll get you a glass of water,' Tom said, and went out. This made me wonder what had happened to my coffee, and I turned my head to see. Very, very gentle the movement was, that is, in my own understanding of it, but it was almost like being in a car-crash (I was once, though not hurt serious), I mean, in terms of how my eyesight reacted, the reddy-black edging trying to invade again. But when it did, there was my coffee cup unmoved from before my faint, on the wooden arm of the chair I'd been sitting in, but far away as if one the very edge of the Universe, and, somehow, brilliantly shining and sublimely beautiful, vast, huge, immense, as if - I thought later - it was God's own Coffee-Cup on the Arm of His Eternal Throne (though, mind, I'm not sure I believe in God, and I'm dead certain he doesn't drink coffee.)
And Pask - she's left-handed like me - was taking the glass water from her father, bubbles in the clear glass moving, some of them, and all shiney, like little worlds - which I took, and drank a bit, gulping clumsily, and went to put it down on the floor, but she took it from me and Tom took it from her and put it on the dark wood mantelshelf thing. I was trying to wipe my mouth, and then I felt I had to offer some explanation, about how hearing the music had made me go all queer./Pask looked quite hurt now. 'It was me! I was practising my flute in Em's sitting-room!'/ *'Well,' said Tom. 'Music has rather er stressful connotations for Lize at the moment.' (Which wasn't, come to think of it, much of an explanation.)/Pask, teenager-like, seemed now to think that it was her call to say sorry, and jibbed at actually doing so. It wasn't really her fault at all, she was thinking - and I understood that just as much as if she'd said it - and of course that was perfectly correct really. Her music-making had never had that effect on anybody before, she said, feeling her way towards saying sorry unconditional by saying first that she was sorry it had taken me like that. So after that it appeared that it was my turn and I ought to say sorry for reacting as I did, it wasn't her fault at all (true) but rather mine (not true, but manners is manners). Howbesoever, I thought to myself in my mind, blow that for a load of cherries, we could stay here all day apologizing to each other and meaning it less and less, so I shut up./'When you're ready - no hurry in the world! - we'll help you into a chair,' Tom said, reminding me of what I'd kindof forgotten the last minute or two, that I was still on the floor./Cause he'd spoken, I looked towards him, natural-like, and just the seeing him shook me hard, like a shock. How can I put it? I was looking at Tom Ferrace (who I'd known, after all, though not well, my whole life through) as if I hadn't seen him before./No! That's not it! I was looking at Tom Ferrace as if I'd not seen ANYONE AT ALL in my whole life before. No, not never! I must still have had my glasses on, either they didn't come off in my fall or else I'd reached out for them automatic and settled them on my nose while still not with it. I don't remember - but everything more than a foot or two away is just coloured clouds without them, usual./Anyway - Tom Ferrace is quite tall, quite good-looking, though pale and long-nosed, he's past forty, he's dressed quite well in ordinary but goodish clothes, he's neat rather than smart if you see the distinction I'm making, he's quite slim and fit-looking, he's precise and careful in all his movements, he talks quite posh, in other words he's an ordinary and unremarkable man, though a different type from the ordinary and unremarkable men down streets like ours. But I was looking at him in a sort of daze, wasn't I? No I wasn't, I don't mean that at all, it was the complete opposite of a daze, it was like - oh what was it like, it's so difficult sometimes to get your meaning into words - it was like - it was like - it was like I was God, or an angel!/Does that help you to understand? Well, I expect not. But I'm trying, see./Another attempt. Words are for telling people things, if you think about them at all. In fact it's the only thing the blessed things are for. And yet when it comes to the crunch they're not really much good at it at all. I found that you often have to fight them, to bend or twist them round to attempt to make them mean what they very stubbornly don't want to mean./Well, this moment was like being slapped in the face, it was so sudden and attention-grabbing. POW! as it says in the kids' comics. KA-ZAP! There's me, lying on the floor, sitting anyway, in the lounge or one of the lounges of this big house I can't remember being in before, though I probably have when I was small, and just the experience of what I'm seeing is rushing at me so strong it's like being blown backwards in a gale (a hot gale, mind.) You're perhaps thinking that I'd fallen like lightning in love with Tom. No, that wasn't it. Neither then or at any other time (and by now a lot of water has gone under both our bridges together) I wasn't 'in love' with him, whatever that means, not ever. But I'll admit that it was very like as if I was./I wasn't just looking at him, I was tasting him, feeling the experience of being him all through -- his conventionalities, his faith and his doubts about it, his awkward relationship with his wife (and bitter regret at what he saw most of the time as his wife's betrayal), his honest, useful, hard-working, passably well-paid, and pretty dull and grey kind of working life, his dittoful awareness of his ancestors and the parts they had played in village life, his shame at one of them, his sexual fantasies, his fiddle-faddling hobbies, his pleasure in gardening, his bits of out-of-the-way knowledge, his surprising ignorances. I was seeing all those, sensing them I ought rather to say. All that was like the surface of a moving river, but I was looking through it, deep down in all the way to the bottom --the very Tom-ness of Tom!/Somehow I was getting the impression - no, dead-certainty, I mean! - that I was seeing into him far deeper and far truer than he did himself, or his wife, or his child, in some kind of a way looking right down into the central jewel of the man.../Look, what more can I say? You know me by now if you've read what I've written up to now, which I suppose you must have I'm a sensible, practical, reliable type, I know off the top of my head the price of every single thing in Patel's shop, and he's got a hundred and seventeen different lines. In those days, before there was computers in tills, when it was really busy and we had both of them going, often enough Manesh at the other one would be holding something up for me to see, he didn't even have to ask, 'How much is this then, Lize?' and I'd tell him. Oh, there are lots and lots of plain, simple, practical, useful things I know, and this is a good example of them, and I'll tell you for why that is, even if you think I'm labouring the point, it's because I'm a simple and practical and useful person myself./But --/But for now it was completely different, this moment-in-time./I was seeing, like a vision, right into Tom Ferrace, as God would, as Love would. Right down. But not missing the surface either, real kindness, real concern for me, but a little annoyance that I was stopping him serve up their dinner, and a social concern, as ever, to say and do the right thing; he wants very much to be known as the kind of man who always says and does the right thing. And underneath this traditional English petty-virtue, which some would call stuffiness, this...this...well, soul if you like. Grandpa Fred used say, 'I'm an atheist, thank God!' I mean, I wouldn't go that far myself, but I'm not at all sure that God is there, or cares if he is, I'm not religious, but I don't know, at this point, thinking about it afterwards, what other word I can use than 'soul'./And then there's the contrast -- I'm feeling all this grand stuff, but I'm still all on a heap on the floor, there's no halo shining round my head, I'm an ordinary enough woman, taller than most and with thick glasses, nothing remarkable, and I'm just over the edge into middle age, and.../Well, they're helping me sit up, and after a bit longer, they're helping me to sit in a chair, not the one I was in before, and bending over me all concerned. And I'm feeling more-or-less my old self and behaving to all outward view just about how I always do (I mean, making allowance for the odd circumstances I'm normal) and I'm beginning to feel ashamed and embarrassed, all the more because I can see that there's a funny side to all this and the joke is on yours truly. I hate being a nuisance to people, I don't relish being the centre of attention (unlike Blowse, no need say.) /Tom's now offering politely to run me back, same he does Ma. Seeing he's so polite and says 'let me' or 'may I' instead of 'that's what I'm going to do and you can like it or lump it' sort thing, I feel absolutely compelled to be polite back, and say, 'no, but thank you very much for the kind offer', ect./So I've automatically refused in that ever-so-good-mannered way, which leaves the question unresolved, how the hell (pardon) am I going to get back? I'm wondering whether to ask Tom to let me ring the man down our street who runs a taxi firm to come and get me, but I think it would probably cost more than the two pounds which is all I've got until Manesh next pays me Tuesday (though, mind, I haven't got much idea, me, of the likely price of cabs, unlike you-know-who) and I'm also saying, out of politeness, but it's lies, really, that I've often had these queer turns ever since I was a kid, so that one isn't anything to specially bother about, and - at least the second time - that Tom's not to bother himself and put himself out./What is very foolish, because obviously that would be the best way. I'd intended to walk the two or three miles back, it's mostly along the path by the river, the weather's bucked up a bit and it's sunny but not stiflingly hot, and I don't usually get much chance of a nice walk, but of course Pask was quite right when she put in that I'm not fit at this time to walk that sort of distance./(She had gone away by now, but, though I wouldn't say that being tactful's her strongest suit, for all that she's had the gump not to restart playing her flute.)/Then it comes into my mind that cousin Humphrey Pumphrey wouldn't mind coming up to fetch me if he's in. So, in a few minutes, Tom takes me out into the hall where there's an old black telephone, with a dial, heavy in the hand, the sort that even then you'd have thought no-one had no more, and, not to make a long tale of it, I phones our Humph and he says he'll come immediate./This hall is quite big, and draughty, and has two or three old black leather chairs, one with a strawy kind stuffing leaking out, as well as a fireplace looking as if it's never been used. So we sits down there while we're waiting for Humph./Imming and amming round it quite a bit , Tom harks back to what I was telling him before the faint - about the queer singing I was telling him about then, and of course I do really need to be reminded, because of what's happened since. All that might be nothing, or it might be a series of mistakes, or it might be, well, something queer, says Tom. He's experienced something of the same nature, broadly speaking, himself, that is, he's almost sure he has. He's got a friend who knows about that sort thing, or, if he doesn't himself, he'll know a man what does (as the advt says!), so as long as I say it's alright, and I did, he'll mention it to him.../*/So what happens now?/Somehow all this has changed me, and yet I've stayed the same. (Not a bad summary of life, that.)/Well, Humph takes me home, and I make a few appreciative remarks about what a kind action this is, which he shrugs off, and a few more about what a big, comfortable, well-maintained car this is, which he laps up. When I get in, Alf and Dave are all tooled up to quarrel with me -- no 'where have you been? are you alright?' -- which is just as expected. 'More in sorrow than in anger', as the saying is, because of course at Sunday Dinnertime I haven't got them their Sunday Dinner, the most important Meal of the week, I've neglected the clearest, the most sacred, the most obvious, Duty of a wife and mother, which is to stuff her men's faceholes. It's been unspeakably dreadful, and what's more this is the second time recently. They've actually had to look in the fridge themselves, and open the cupboards, and cook and peel things their own selves! Ma has stuck there like a pudding and has given bit of advice, as I understand it later, but not actually done a hand's turn to help, and has eaten her share of what can't have been a very good meal because of their almost complete lack of practice. And I was supposed to stand up straight and take the criticism, or at most grumble back in words I'd used a hundred times before, meaningless repetition (but I didn't.)/Now does all this fit in with what I later came to call the pattern? I mean Pattern, capital P. I just don't know. See, their's change in me, in all kinds of unexpected ways. Oh it was set going by the singing and other queer things that happened, but they only set it off, so looking back it's the change in itself that happened, that's what mattered, not the incidents that set it off. Although I wasn't realising it at the time, I had more pride. In the good sense, self-respect. I heard what they said about neglecting them, but I just felt it all went to prove what I'd known all along really, that in some respects I'm better than they are and they don't know it. I came to think much the same too next time I was helping out for pay at Lady Greene-Baitrie's. (At least that kind of people are meant to be useless, not like our own lot.)/However -- poor old Mother in the next few days got to be more than ever a worry. Belinda at that time was for some reason very busy in her work and out an awful lot, so of course it all fell on yours truly even more than it would do if she'd been there. Well, you've got to think, she breast-fed me, changed my nappies, sat up all night with me when I was ill kind of thing, forty or nearly forty years back, and now things are exchanged, boot's on the other foot, and I must be caring for her. Paying your debts, like. That's what you think you should think. But, in complete contradistinction to what I've just wrote about Alf and Dave being over-reliant on me, what I'm really feeling is that your mother's your mother and she's always got to be there and be strong and brave to defend you against whatever comes. And when she's not, when someone who's always had to be strong and brave over against circumstance isn't so any more, and half the time's not even ashamed to be showing that she isn't, well, it's unsettling if not worst./Talking of mothers and motherhood and being one I'll tell you something you might think is odd. I'm still tuned up, deep down, to the little boy on the landing having one of his bad dreams, as those days he often did - yes, even though these days he's talking a lot about university and needs to shave some mornings. Wake me up in the night, I mean, if anything at all does, and I'm all ready to go to him and cuddle him and say 'there, there, Mummy's here' and all that. Even now. Wanting to do and say it, even it is that my heart is overflowing with passionate need and desire for it. But, no-need-say, the occasion doesn't arise...but way back in Dave's childhood, way back in mine, way back in yours too, reader (unless you had a nanny), that's deep-rooted like a vine. We're all creatures of instinct, all creatures of convention or habit. Though let me say, I was by then less a creature of habit than up to just a while before. And more intelligent, somehow. Surely I'd have got to the grammar school, unlike Belinda, if only they'd spotted my eye trouble earlier, or even if Dad had lived, and he'd surely have got promoted, then they'd have thought I was their kind when they came to decide (because me, I noticed long ago that schools -- not just snobby private ones, but all of them, really exist mainly to perpetrate their own sort of people, and a sergeant, probably, and an inspector, certainly, would be very much in their line.) And, let's face it, I love Alf, or I'm pretty certain I did once, but I'm not going to kid myself that any of our Dave's cleverness came to him down that side./Back to the actual tale. See, one night about two there's a great scream. I'm up and out of bed and on the landing all before I'm properly woke up, and that despite all the awkwardness of coming pigeon-footed along the only foot-wide space my side our double bed. Once my eyes open, there's no little Dave, course. That was years back. No, it's Mother, and I have to barge in her bedroom, there where I very rarely go, and in the big high old-fashioned bed where I daresay Blowse and I were both got started, she's lying with only a sheet over her - everything else has fallen off the bed - absolutely straight out, and absolutely still, looking at the ceiling, so it appears she's - you know what I mean - and this is her shroud or winding sheet./Well, I haven't put the light on, don't like to unasked, there's only the light from the passage, and a sweetish stuffy smell a bit like lemons and a bit like soap and a bit like facepowder, because her generation don't like opening windows much, think it's weakening./Anyway, she wakes up instant, looks round quick, like a mouse or something, reaches out for the bedside light, gives me a quick stare as if to say she hates me and has never hated anyone else as much in all her puff, calms down just about as quickly, though she's even so not looking at me particularly friendly-like. 'What you doing here, Lize?' she says, low, sharp and suspicious./'You were calling out in the night,' I says./'I did NOT,' she says, very firm indeed./'Yes you did, ' I says. 'You screamed.' Now this is completely true, what I'm telling you now, just as if I was on my Bible oath, but for all that Mum's manner of speaking is so firm, certain and definate that I run the last minutes through in my head again just like a video, just to make sure that I hadn't dreamt it, and, no, I'm absolutely certain that, yes, she either screamed or shouted. (I really was dreaming, mind, myself, I'm sure of that, but it was about something entirely different, which I can't now remember.)/'Look, Ma,' I say gently, not wanting to get in an argument with her, 'you've ki--' , then I switch my tack instant, 'all your bedclothes have come off on the floor,' I say, just as if they've got naughty little minds of their own and have taken it into their heads to go walkabout just to be a tease, nothing to do with our ma at all. 'Here, I'll pick them up for you,' and I begin to do just that. She lies there and lets me make the bed round her, don't give no help, though, mind you, it's hard on reflection to see how she could help unless she got out of bed too, which'd defeat the purpose./So I remake the bed, envisaging she's going to be watching me critical, same as she almost always does, to make sure I'm doing it just as excellently as she'd have done it all those years back for 'Aunt Maria', though she isn't for once. She's totally calm (but surely I wasn't dreaming her crying out), and she kind of enjoys me doing it, wriggling her toes and the like, same as a small child would. And afterwards she says in a soft voice, not ordering-like as she usually does, 'Lize my sweet, ' (my sweet!), 'your mother would really like a glass of milk. And' - softer still - 'why don't you have one too?' (Who does she think pays the blooming milk bill? But, after all, why not?) 'Then we could have a little talk, just the two of us.'/Anyone who's ever been got up in the night to wait on somebody they really do love knows the mixture of feelings, tenderness and exasperation both together, and too the sense that maybe you two are the only people waking, or even alive, the whole world over.../So I got us both milk, and Mum sat up in bed, and we had our little talk, i.e. she talked, I listened, as I expected. And I was expecting too yet more memories of days long gone past, and of her 'dear kind friends', as she calls them, who in fact worked her hard and paid her a pittance and made her sleep in the cold attic high up, but didn't let her sleep for long. And, what's more, in a way it was, only - oddly enough, after a whole lifetime of listening to Ma's 'out-to-service' remininsences - it was new stuff, concentrating on this Hetty I was telling you about. Mother and Hetty, she was saying, were much of an age, only a few months in between them, that was one way they were equal, the two youngest in the house, for all the difference in the roles they had to play in the life of the big house (look how tactful I'm putting it, just the once.) Hetty was very clever, musically, well all her father's family were skilful in that line, Ma said, and went on to give a dozen or so examples of Hetty's cleverness at music; mind you, I don't know Ma was really qualified to judge. She talked on, sentimental-like, for about a quarter of an hour, then went off to sleep eventual with a peaceful little smile on her face - like a good baby, she was, or as if she had been blessed. As for me I went back to our room, but if anybody'd been looking I don't think they'd have thought me as happy as her./'And what's worrying about that?' you might say. Reasonably enough. But that was only the start. I was woken up the next night too, but that was different. Queer and indecent. A lot less pleasant./ Now I'd been having a dream about the Middle East or somewhere. The sky was purple, like slate. I was staring at a castle. A very big castle. But I won't go on about it. I was just in it, and the later one too, recording it just as if I was a teevee camera or something. But then it changed./ There was a sound like wood under pressure, being bent under weight or twisted is what I mean to say, and that brought me forward into a different more up-to0date world, in truth it was like a vision of how the future might be. But it wasn't just a vision, which is seeing only, but feelings. And I don't just mean emotions by that, abstract things, but actual physical feelings in my body./No, that's wrong too, what I've just said. Like I said before, I've got to fight words to get them to tell my meaning, and they're tough and stubborn, they don't half put up a good fight. They win, half the time too./See, it wasn't my own body I was in. Not sure it wasn't a better body in its way, mind. Younger for a start. Little and neat, plump, healthy limbs. Innocent too, kind-of, she'd never done 'it', not fully, nor thought about it much. (Don't ask me how I knew, but know I did.) She was use to wearing nice clothes, and I reckon she must have been wearing them then, though that didn't concern me. And she'd got laryngitis or something of that sort really terrible, you'd have thought someone was burning a bonfire in her throat./Now this girl who was me, or I was her, whichever it was, this girl - let's put it like that - who I'd sort of entered into, and whose bodily experience I was sharing or even stealing from her - reading this through, Benedick suggests that 'usurping' is possibly the word I'm after - look, it's difficult this, I'm trying to describe to you the sort of thing no-one else has experienced or tried to describe, as far as I know, that is) well, she was standing in front a huge building, square and grey, and with big square windows too, darker grey. It wasn't a welcoming-looking place, but not particularly horrible, and what happened to her there, that wasn't horrible either, though it left a very nasty taste, specially in view of how it was interrupted./This unattractively-designed but not particularly nasty building was big, very big. I daresay you've seen pictures like I have of the Crysler Building in New York. Almost as tall as that is was, but squarer, heavier. If you'd put Sharth Cathedral down beside it it would have looked like a Leggo brick. I don't know if she was thinking that then or I was, but after I thought how odd it was that in all that vast place we didn't see no other person./It was ugly, as I said, and though it was nothing like it to look at somehow it seemed to be Gritnalls too./And I or we or she we'd got this job to do in it, to look for something - no, someONE. Who it was we didn't know, and yet at the same time if we found him we'd know for certain that was right (but probably wouldn't have liked finding him, I or she or we felt.)/This task was somehow very important, and yet it was to grow more boring even than it was important. Somehow we'd got up to the first floor, stairs or lift, I don't know, and we looked in the first room. Now normal when you look in any room, you know what it's for, roughly, it's like reading it, from the 'furniture, fixtures and fittings' as the estate agents call it; it's an office, a kitchen, a sitting room, a cabin or a boat or what have you. But though this first room we looked in had quite clearly been designed and furnished for some purpose or other, and all the others too, it was just impossible for me (or us) to understand what that purpose was. And, Dear knows, we looked in an awful lot of rooms, all so mystifying, and tedious it got so you wouldn't believe it, dozens of rooms, it was like it took days and days, in fact the wonder was we didn't feel starved it took so long, but that awful pain in our throat would have put us off eating even if we'd thought of it. How oppressive it all was, how fruitless!/Bit a noise, almost as if someone was sawing wood, or creaking, that came in to my head all at the same time, not loud at all, but going on, insistent, demanding, as if to say, 'Lize, Lize, never mind all that stuff, pay attention to me!'/And I did wake a bit, and yet I was still in the dream. I'd no idea which was imagination or which was real, in a way they both were both, but I sortof came out of it and was feeling, yes, pain is there, and frustration, but somehow they're not my own pain and frustration./And I was there in my bed staring at the ceiling, and the room though I'd been familiar with it my whole lifetime all the same was looking queer and false and, apart from anything else, so little it was like a miniature doll's house and my neck was feeling just like my own neck again, which was enormously freeing./On and on goes the sound. Up I get. Usual pang on the landing; where's my dear little two-three-year-old now, so trusting and smiling and happy the day long, though not the night, he's just as dead as if he'd been shot fifteen years ago, but of course he isn't, and of course that's completely as it should be.../The odd noise was coming from Belinda's room, another place in our house I don't go much. I'd put the landing light on by now. On it went, with another noise added, sort of grunt or gasp, Creak! Aagh! Creak! Aagh! and so on, it kept going.. At first I thought these were cries of pain./In I went. Blowse was quite asleep, but arching and shuddering in the bed, and evidently delighted by what was happening to her or what she thought was happening to her, sort of pushing down with her -- well, you know the part I mean -- and thrusting up, again and again and again as if she was some kindof engine./ Alf had woken up too. He came as far as the doorway, looked in, all at once got a frightened expression on his face, went all silent, even though he'd not said anything yet, I mean he sort of switched off inside, and went back to bed -- fat help!/And I was there all clear now what was causing her delight, pink-faced for all I know, but standing my ground, yes, I mean that phrase, it was frightening, almost, until after a final screech, she calmed down, then I tried to wake her up, and she told me half-asleep still, 'It was him! It was him! The one, the one!' as if (though she was not really right) she understood that I would completely understand./And I did understand, but only partly; this had been the best of that sort of thing Blowse had ever experienced, and God knows she's got enough knowledge to be really discriminating, it was whoever she'd always wanted, and not just first-rate sex either, it was making love, he loved her deep in his heart, or she certainly thought he did./That's as far as my mind took me, I wasn't wholly sympathetic. I'm stood there helpless, undecided whether to wake her up completely or no, and a bit cold in my cheap nighty, looking at her in her expensive one and thinking, 'Yes, she really is beautiful' in complete admiration, without the slightest tinge of envy for once./And I daresay you're expecting me say that the next night it's me awakes the rest. No. But I was woke up. Third night in line's not good for you./I was dreaming again, and it all started over, the castle dream what I'd had before. I was looking down from a mountain through somebody else's eyes, just as if I was in his-her brain. And this person wasn't concerned. What was going on - and a procession was coming towards the castle - just was for him or her something seen many times before and expected to be seen many times after. And this limited me no end. See, I was fascinated, me. It all looked strange, and interesting, and even maybe exciting, but I couldn't get a closer look, it wasn't my own eyes that were seeing./ Like 'the box'. TV appears real and true, but in fact we're seeing what the tv people think is right for us to see. That's total obvious when you think about it, but I'm absolutely and completely certain-sure most people just don't. What's not quite so obvious is: we're not seeing what the tv people want us not to see or think about, they're controlling us. Think about that!/Is it the same, the way dreams control us? In the day, look, we're in charge of our thoughts. Or think we are, anyways. In the night we're powerless. Or if that's putting it too high, well, not as powerful as we'd like to feel; something or someone can put ideas and visions into our heads, use them for its own purposes even, not our own, and that's frightening./*/And there's the sense that there IS a pattern, really, though I can't see it. Contradiction there? Yes, but I've got to live with it. And I've come to see -- yes, I've come to learn lot of things and this is only one -- that it's quite possible (for me, certainly, and most likely for other people too) to believe two things that go completely against each other; as a frinstance, dreams are rubbish, kind of foam or scum that rises to top of our brains when they're switched off in sleep, AND dreams are enormously importance and significant, messages from the Other World which we're not always clever enough to understand./That next night I 'tuned in', so to speak, with this girl. I'm tall, so I've got long arms and legs, but for the moment, before we merged, it was blooming odd to feel I had short ones as well as my own, then I was almost totally a part of her and shortness felt right. She still had the neckache -- that overrode any other 'bodily sensation' she might have. And she was still going on through the myriad rooms of this incomprehensible edifice. It was a man she was looking for, that was clear to me now./Miss Joliffe, a teacher I was fond of at school and still keep in touch with, used to say, 'If you think something's too difficult for you, well, you're absolutely right. It's self-defeating. If you think you may be able to do it if you try to, at least there's a chance you're right.' She'd also say, 'Don't concentrate, I mean, don't get all worked up; relax into it.'/So, friend, relax into what I'm telling you, queer though it is./At last she got there! (And her throat got even worse.) It was a man sitting at a table, a powerful-looking man, and/(I've crossed out what I wrote yesterday and am rewriting the next paragraph, copying out more-or-less what I wrote first of all because on second thoughts it's better. I don't usually make this sort of alteration.)/We found it or him, what or who we were looking for. He was a man who looked very big, sitting down at a table he was, and he looked big because he was very strong and well-muscled for his size. I got the impression but I don't know how that he was something to do with Italy. There was a smell in the air, very powerful and very hot, a smell with power over our emotions, not at all pleasant and yet it was evidently one you could get addicted to (think of your first taste of brandy.) And although, or because, he was terrifying, there was attractiveness, fascination, he could hold your eyes like a gorilla or chimpanzee in the zoo and you're locked into something inhuman, heartless.../Colouring and all that I can't give, just the 'feel'. He hadn't moved yet, but I knew when he did it would be very soft, graceful and gentle and that this in itself would be a threat -- will, determination, physical strength, above all vanity, was in him, and over and above that a willingness to use and cast away others like a dictator's. Bad things he'd do, evil, wicked, sinful -- such as another man might do in hot anger, all the time knowing them to be wrong, he'd just do them, casually as picking your nose, and never regret. Oh how weak Tom's weak virtues seemed then, and Alf's weak vices, this was a man, admirable, lustable-for, in his manliness. I couldn't help admiring him even as I hated him (it was like my response to them lovely uniforms the Nazis had.)/Cruelty, I tell you, you can almost sympathise with, understand it, anyway; people are cruel because they enjoy it, the pleasure they take it in outweighs the pain, in their minds anyway, of those cruelled to. But he'd just do it, I felt, emotionless./She, mind you, wasn't making that judgement. Or any other. Me realizing that was the first step away from her. She was drinking him up./Now he moved - very soft, as I knew he would be - coming towards her (or us). Did he want to punish her? But how?/Nearer and nearer he came, until his face filled the Universe. And yet I can't describe the feautures of his face any better - oh, just one thing, a scar on his upper lip, left, that is, right as I looked at it./Nothing./I just came awake, feeling a bit sick. Bumpetty bumpetty bump the old heart was going. All at once I fet very irritable. There's Alf ten inches away, it's darkish and as always everything much further away is blurred because of my eye trouble. I'm thinking just for the moment of trying to wake up Alf to comfort me, and deciding against it in a worst than fed-up kind of way. Then I've half a mind to wake him up to tell him how useless I think he is in any emergency, he's not all the ball, if he'd been in the Army, supposing they'd've had him, of course he'd have had the wrong sort of voice to be an officer, but he wouldn't even have made lance corporal, no initiative./Huff! he's going. Not snoring, but breathing in noisily. Huff!........................................................huff!/I'm more disturbed than frightened now that I'm awake. The experience itself has somehow given me grace to bear it. I've sort of passed the test, some kind of test. As for the voice singing which had given me all kinds of odd ideas of ghosts and whatnot, I was really quite - what d'you call it? - blazzy about that now. 'If you want sing, my darling-o,' I was saying to it in my mind, 'you go ahead and sing if you want, sing your heart out, it's no skin off my nose'./It don't sing. /Looking back, I wonder if I didn't get it really annoyed by taking that attitude, even though I didn't mean to. I mean, if it was trying to frighten me by singing like that, and I told it it wouldn't, it must have been right put-out./*/Usual sort of breakfast that next morning. Alf and Dave out fairly early, Blowse up late, all frilly and langorous, and sporting one of those hairstyles which cost an awful lot and yet look untidy. I'm trying to see if she remembers crying out the night before, by which I really mean the night before that, words do trip you up sometimes. I asks indirect questions, and don't get no answers. Maybe that was because she didn't cotton on to what I was asking, because I didn't make myself clear, or whether she understood right enough and pretended not to, Dear knows, not me. So the vague idea I had that perhaps I might be helpful fell pretty flat./After that she went up and made herself up and got dressed, especially well, got a taxi to somewhere about 11.30. Mother was in the frontroom having a snooze pretending to read a magazine, which she calls a 'book', and there's a knock on the back door, (so-called, it's really in an alley the side the house.) There's a 'smart-casual'-dressed little man there, smiling, who's got a sports coat on - among other things, course! - what is an odd thing to see round our way. I'm a bit suspicious, think he's one of those blokes who sell lonely housewives things they don't want really and don't have no use for, but I'm reassured to see that he's not carrying a case. The man says he's a friend of Tom Ferrace, who asked him to call -- blow me if my visit to Gritnalls though it was only the Sunday before last (today's Thursday) hasn't quite gone out of my head, so much seems to have happened since then./So I sitsim down the kitchen table and makes two mugs instant coffee, but don't touch mine that momentin, I'm putting away the washing-up from the drainer. He says his name's Benedic Hunsden, he works for a well-known charity, Tom thinks, and he thinks too, that he might be able to help, he's quite experienced in such matters, and all that. 'What, d'you think I'm going crackers? Or does Tom?' I say lightly, sitting down opposite. That is, I'm intending to say it in a light manner, but somehow it doesn't come out like that. 'No, not at all,' he reassures me, or attempts to. 'Tom has told me something of your problem. Not much. If you want to tell me more, well, that's up to you. I've been told I'm a good listener, if not --''--then you'll have had a wasted journey,' I interrupted, which was a bit rude, only a bit, mind, but I wanted to leave my options open, not to be cornered by politeness into telling him more than I really wanted him to know./'Not at all,' he says cheerfully, 'It's a nice sunny morning and I've had a pleasant walk and seen a part of this lovely county I've not seen before.'/Well, I was less suspicious now, despite his posh voice and manner, by his having come on foot. We talked for a little while then about seeming unimportant matters, and he said in passing that he'd worked much of his life abroad, but had married a woman who came from Demnet, who he'd met in Shanghai, indeed came from the next county himself by background. Well, by then I'd relaxed with him and decided I liked him, but I'd also decided that liking him was different from pouring my whole heart out, wasn't it?/See, something was growing in me, in my mind, that is. Fortyish is a bit late to grow, you might think, (except your waistline if your not careful) but that was what was going on or being done to me -- it's special hard for a person like me to force this kind of thing into words, being used to thinking of day-to-day things, like what shops sell what things cheap./But I sortof hinted at what was happening, trying to say I didn't want help, that is not yet, though I don't think I put it particularly clever./He got my drift, though. Growth and change couldn't be hurried, he said, that's part of their very nature. Standing, he added, get in touch with me if you feel you need to, or not if you don't, and gave me a sort of business card with address and phone.no, etc., Reverend Benedick Hunsden, it said. I don't like wearing my funny collar, he said, it's uncomfortable and puts people off, also I'm not 'into' offering people religion when they don't want it (sighing a little, as if generally they didn't.) But I can give a sympathetic ear if anyone wants or needs it, so can my wife, we're trained experts that way. Well, thank you for coming, I said neutrally, resisting babbling giving him a lot of untrue excuses for not going to church, reckoning that would be tedious for him. He shook hands and went./I stuck his card on top the fridge-freezer in the toastrack I have there to store bills and receipts and money-off coupons and forgot him for a while. Afterwards I thought, maybe I was stupid to neglect the chance he'd given me. In effect I'd brushed him off with 'not today, thankyou' as if he really was one of those brush salesmen! Maybe what would have happened to me later, which was pretty awful, one way considered, wouldn't have happened, or wouldn't have been as bad, if I'd confided in him? But there's no way of telling that./I think I've got built-in the notion that you must live with your own problems and solve them on your own, which is of course Ma's attitude -- but that's only true as far as it goes. On the contrary, it may be that what's needed is to sit down and stare them in the face, pay attention to them, focus them clear (I know all about focussing because of my eye trouble). Dave would say look at them carefully, I'm sure./All I can say is, it seemed right at the time to do what I didn't do./I had an afternoon in the shop later that day and enjoyed it more than usual. I decided I'd look at the customers as if they was characters in a play put on forentertaining just me, and that certainly helped to pass the time!/About another fortnight went by now uneventful enough. Every night I had normal dreams or none. I don't know for certain about the others, needless to say, but no-one called out or went on about it (dreams) in the morning. This Pasqueline called in two-three times, and I think Dave took her to the theatre at Bishoprick once. He let slip that the school establishment wasn't keen on their friendship because they thought it might distract him from studying for their precious exams, which is what they've got the face to call 'pastoral care' though it seems like plain bloody nosiness to me, scuse my French./This Pasqueline - they don't use the double-barrel in their name much, so she was P.O.U.Ferrace on the school list, had taken it now into her funny little head that she would like to be called 'Pouf' as a nickname because of her initials and naturally I went along with it since that was what she wanted, though I inly thought it was a bit daft, far too much like 'poof' for my liking, and anyway didn't go along with the fact that her dad was always aware that they were the first family local and she ought not to forget it ever./ (Mind, with his wife letting him down total as she had by vanishing, months back now, it may well've crossed Tom's mind that he might have married 'better' or certainly different, I don't know about that, though I do know that if he had Pask wouldn't have existed. I do know, by the way, that like nearly every other man around here roughly her age, or even younger, Tom had looked sideways on at our Blowse in his time -- though he was one who only did the looking, mind you.) /I was regarding 'Miss Pasqueline' with lot more sympathy these days. After all, after Dave I'd wanted a daughter and if I had she'd be about the age Pask is now. I even tried to call her 'Pouf' sometimes, though I thought it was silly, just to please her./Well, one morning she was sitting at the kitchen tale. She'd come unexpected, and Dave was out. So I'd given her some instant, and she was trying to smoke a cigarette, which, I'm sorry to say, she did those days sometimes (yes, I sell them down Patel's, doesn't mean I approve, does it?) and making all her movements doing it pretty clumsily -- she was often awkward physical those days -- and looking washed-out, even allowing for the fact that she's pale usual. She was telling me a rambling story about how there use be a cold place on the landing outside her bedroom but wasn't any more and how she'd been wondering if it wasn't something to do with her cousin Hetty./This Hetty was dead, she went on, she'd been murdered years before she herself had been born. How she was killed was completely clear, she said, and where too, a downstairs room of their house where there was a very big built-in oak cupboard, but who had done it (apart from the fact that it certainly wasn't suicide) or why, they were utter mysteries at the time ands supposedly were to go on for ever being, though, they say, the police never actually close down a murder file..../I told her then that my dad had been a policeman and had had a lot to do with the investigation, that was how he met Ma. She didn't seem to have known this before. She was obviously very interested, but put it aside for the moment, she wanted rather to talk about her own feelings. Her first reaction on hearing that her cousin had been murdered, she said, had been excitement, but already that seemed to her childish, and callous too. 'I mean, poor woman and all that. She was only about twenty-five, she could still be alive. She was a generation older than Pa on the family tree, but not all that much older in actual years, she could still be alive' (which she didn't seem to realise she'd said twice.)/Perhaps instead she ought to be deeply ashamed, she went on. Pa had always hidden it from her, she supposed he'd thought she wouldn't like to be growing up in a house where she knew there'd been a murder. 'Men think we're such sensitive plants, don't they?' she said, giving me a queer upwards look like a little old woman./What was the motive for it, she wondered. Wasn't theft, nothing had been taken as far as anybody could tell. It must have meant that someone had really hated Hetty, enough to slit her throat and then, as it were, go on and on killing her after she was dead, kicking and stabbing the body time and time again. If you had a relative who was really so - well, utterly horrible, to draw on herself that sort of hatred, it would be a very good reason to feel deeply tainted, really ashamed through and through, wouldn't it? 'But Be-- your mother knew her well, surely. Hetty wasn't a bad person at all, was she?'/ 'Certainly not!' I exclaimed. I said it really fiercely, as if this Hetty person was someone I'd known really well myself, my own cousin as it might be, and had loved and felt great loyalty to so I felt honour-bound to defend her. Anyway, I sent Pask into the frontroom to talk to Ma about it./And then as soon as she'd gone I wished I hadn't. What could would it do? Raking over old sorrows and all that, and probably upsetting Ma into the bargain! I blamed myself almost immediately she'd gone, cause of that. I'd been thinking I liked the child, but now, just because she'd been delaying me getting ready our dinner I'd wanted her out of my hair. Why should I think that was more important than another human being and their emotions?/Just then, a good bit later even than usual, the postman came, slipped a card through the door. I reckon Dave gets more things than the rest of us combined, but there wasn't no official-looking brown envelopes this time, just this picture postcard. It was a view taken in some city on a gloomy day, at least the sky was all dark; funny sort of place, it was all churches or castles or other towers all jumbled up together, with only one little house jumbled in bottom left, a statue in front of it. A statue's normally ten foot high at least, with the block it stands on, and, though I'm calling the house little, it had three storeys and was strong built, so, using these things as scale, it meant you could reckon that they other buildings must have been really big./Next to this house was a very tall grim sort of building with a very narrow roof, and behind that a domed place like the Albert Hall, behind that lots of towers and spires and things, some tricked out with goldy bits against the dark sky. Far off the horizon was ragged with towers too. Striking picture, pity there was a white tear part of the front where the coloured surface of the card had been torn away./On the other side there was a stamp with a greyish picture, and printing I didn't understand, Prahastaremesto and Vasdodvatelkorent written across it, and 'Elizabeth Bellows' and our address, ending 'Anglie (England)' underlined, in what was clearly intended to be very elegant handwriting, foreign-looking, sharp-angled. On the left-hand side of the p.c. where you'd naturally look for some kind of message, nothing at all, except some light-blue dots that were accidental, probably./While I was staring at it all puzzled-like, just as if she'd been called, our ma came out the hall. 'There. You doan much get postcards from abroad, do you, Mum?' I said, handing it over. I'm afraid I'd got in the habit of speaking to her in that irritating false-cheerful way some people use to children or invalids, sometimes anyway, and since I know from being on the receiving end now and then how annoying it is I should have known better./Now Ma's not one for stamps or photographs so she just glanced at that side before turning it over, but when she went to look for a message and there weren't none she was a bit put out./Pask had come out with her. 'What d'you make of this, girl?' Ma says, handing it over. Pask took it careful, as if it might be hot, and read out what I hadn't noticed, Czecha Republica on the stamp. She went pale, pale even for her, I mean, and looked for a second or two asif she might faint. 'I reckon that's Czechoslovakia,' she says, 'and look, on the front' - another thing I hadn't noticed - 'it says Praha and I think that must be -- Prague!' And she started to cry quietly./Now I always feel awkward and useless when someone else is weeping, and all the moreso - I was just finding it out - when it's someone like Pask who's had it dinned in to them all down the generations that it's always bad to show your emotions. (Incidentally, I think that's wrong. In theory that's what I think. In practice I try not to show mine much either.)./I don't know now what I ought to have said, but I think now I ought to have put my arm round her and held her, and I didn't and I'm sorry about it but the moment is past. I gave her my hanky anyway, and she wiped her eyes out sideways, making the sides of her head wet./Obviously she was thinking that it was somehow her mother who had got someone else to write this postcard and sent it to my own mother. Angelikka hadn't written to herself or her father, in fact she hadn't written to anybody, it wasn't her handwriting on it. But for some reason that wasn't clear at all, and most like never would be, she had had this sent to our Mum./I'm surprised she knew our address. especially that she could remember it when she had been through all the stormy emotions which she must have gone through. But it was absolutely certain, even though it wasn't her handwriting, that it must be her. I mean, we don't know anybody who lives in Czechoslovakia; come to think of it, we scarcely knows anyone that doesn't live in Demnet.)/Angelikka, then, really was in Prague. That wasn't proved absolute, it wouldn't stand up in a court of law as they say, but surely it was true. When she'd taken control of herself, or nearly, Pask said, 'We must go to her', and too in that resolute tone of voice which brooks no opposition./Now it wasn't really much if anything to do with me (not that that's ever stopped anyone at all being interested in something and firing off opinions that I've been able to notice in forty years) but I was thinking to myself in my mind - though I had more sense than to say it - that if her blooming mother had taken herself off so mysterious, and, yes, callously, without even so much as a note in pencil on the back of an old envelope, and had caused so much worry and distress - for Pask and Tom are both, in their quiet way, sensitive souls - then it was her blooming mother's call now to come home, full of apologies and explanations. Possibly bringing souvenirs from foreign parts too, though I wasn't sure about that, after all it wasn't a holiday./By the way, Angelikka is Pask's mother's real name, and I've heard said that her father had her called that after one of his sisters he was particular fond of who was killed in the bombing in the War. However, from early childhood she's insisted on being called by her second name Elaine, which was her English grandmother's first name; this nan of hers and her husband kept a pub, they say, so the family's not all posh./Now Pask was reacting as if she was the mother hen here, and one of her chicks was in danger. Protective like. Well, our Dave comes in that moment, full of cheerfulness not much suited to the occasion. I daresay he'd been let in the lab down the school to do some extra work, holiday though it was, and it had gone well, though he never talks about that kind of thing. He's a bit too unmoveable if you ask me./'Hello, Pask,' he says brightly. She kind of hovers the side of her face in his direction as if expecting the measliest kind of kiss, and doesn't get it (and this at a ttime of life when all these 'hormones' you keep reading about are supposed to be buzzing on extra strong, I don't know about him sometimes.)/Pask then rushes, no other word but 'rushes', to show him this ppc and go on about it. Now I'm afraid I've noticed that, however serious thing are, when looked at from one direction, looked at from another people thoroughly enjoy the dramatic side and being the focus of people's attention (well, listen to Mother's generation go on and on drearily to each other about their precious War, if you can stand hearing about it all over again. In one way they thoroughly enjoyed all the risk and kerfuffle, they even speak of 'ole Ditler' more or less affectionately because he was kind enough to give them all that excitement.)/What I mean is, Pask was quite sincerely upset, but sort of enjoying to be upset too and be playing the part of someone who was upset. I daresay you understand that yourself, but I'm certain-sure that Dave didn't. It didn't fit in with what he was feeling, cheerful for some reason, so he was doing his best to put it what she was feeling aside. He's like that often. Not much to his credit, no real sympathy./The girl had really taken to the idea of going to Prague. He however poured cold water on it, for no other reason that I could see except that he didn't want to put himself out by having to think about it. Saying that doesn't put him in a good light, do it? But that's how he was talking, it's God's own truth, so there it is. It would be very expensive, he said, and could her father afford it, it would be a wild goose chase....and so on and so on and so on, and what a fuss and a worry and a bother it would be, and surely her father would never agree. 'Oh, I can twist him round my little finger,' Pask said, 'if there's anything at all I really want,' which didn't seem to me much to her credit. And suppose her mother really had been in Prague, he said, 'even so', well, he didn't know much about Prague but surely it was the capital and therefore almost certainly a big place, and (more or less repeating himself) it would be difficult to find just one particular woman there. And there'd be a language problem too./'Come with us!' she said, not answering this at all. It just wasn't a sensible idea, he went on again./Jesus wept! (excuse me), I was thinking, you couldn't always be sensible all your life, which was exactly what Pask said now, or rather, she said effing sensible -- you know the word I mean; I fear she does use broad language sometimes -- especially not while you were young, and I certainly agree strongly with her there, not that I've had much fun in my own life, it's obvious that Blowse has had my share as well as her own and a lot of other people's too, the greedy thing, but the desire and need to have fun has always been with me alright./Besides that, thinking about this was evidently cheering her up. So I got out our red clothbound atlas that had probably belonged to Grampi up Gloster, which showed half the countries of the world as red, andPrague as an outlying part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which even I know isn't there any more. Distances can't have changed any more, I said, and maybe railways are still much the same. No, they'd have to go by road, Pask said, I don't know why./It was now as if by being miserable for ten minutes she'd stored up ten minutes-worth of normal cheerfulness and was now spending it out at twice the normal rate, looking delighted, and, what's the word? animated. Her face which often looks a bit sad because she's so pale normal was now glowing, she was half-smiling. Dave kind of stooped over her and glowered. He has no imagination, he's a plodder, he likes everything to be predictable, run to a timetable, and the very idea of it, this journey, had got right under his skin. And of course -- my Christ, don't these ruddy 'students' who no-one ever dares criticize see how selfish they're being always? No, of course they jollywell don't! But anything that might disturb his settled little plans and stop him doing quite as very well in his precious exams and he would otherwise, and of course there's nothing in Heaven or on Earth as important as that, and no doubt it would be the same if it was his own mother lost, not hers. There really are times and moods when I don't like him at all, to speak truth./But I don't think Pask noticed much. She was being fun and a mite childish, as if it was to be 'Three Go On A Journey of Adventure' by Enid Blyton sortof thing./I don't mean of course that our Dave's oh so serious and oh so dismal objections were totally wrong, it was his general killjoy attitude I'm objecting to. But students, poor things, can't ever really be happy long or savour it. Their blooming teachers (and how happy!! how successful!!! they're always looking, victors of their own competition!) their always holding before them getting qualifications like a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey, making them think forward to being fifty or getting their pensions even even before they're twenty. And, while I'm on my high horse, I'll add that the rest of us what aren't students or haven't even had the chance for to be have got to pay for them one way pr another./Well, if only we'd had the phone then I'm sure that Pask would have been on it by now making enquiries or even booking things in her father's name for him to pick up the tab later. As it was she was just obliged to calm down, at bit anyway, because there wasn't anything at this momentin that she could actually DO with her excitement. 'It IS a good idea, isn't it, Lize?' she appealed. 'Course it is, my lover,' I answered, I was really feeling very affectionate to her all of a sudden. Though mind you round here we often do call people 'dear' or 'my lovely' or whatnot even if we don't know them at all, we're very friendly like that./Now Pat is sitting one end our kirchen table as she speaks this. Dave and I are standing up, I've been at the sink, cleaning something-or-other I daresay, and Mum's sat the other end. This table is a funny shape, about nine foot by two, Alf calls it 'the coffin'. Mother all this while hasn't really been there even though she's there in body, she's been all tied up in her thoughts, memories or imagining, as she has so often recent. But now she lifts her head up, looks us each intently in the face, and makes as if to speak with the air of about to say something really important./So we all look at her expecting./And she doesn't say anything much, just what time is dinner or something pretty ordinary like that. Anyhow, I'm reminded I ought to be getting the meal ready, and I'm assuming too that Pask as she usually does if she drops in as if casual late morning will be joining us for it (she calls it 'luncheon', though) so I shoos the younger ones out into the front room, and 'Mother,' I say as firmly as I can, though she's not the easiest person in the world to be strict to, course, 'You can either go and watch telly with the kids in the lounge or you can make yourself useful here by peeling them carrots.'/ She chooses carrot-peeling sitting at the table, and I do the potatoes standing at the sink. After a bit I look round and there she is her fingers busy and fast and competent, you might even say intelligent, at peeling away while all the time her head was noddling to and fro and her lower lip hung down and she looked, I'm afraid, thoroughly stupid judging by her face./After a while her head stopped, she closed her mouth, frowned a bit, as if she was trying to get something clear. That is as far as I could work out myself. You can't really get into someone else's head, can you? (Though while I was at school there were those with exquisite sensitivity at getting into mine, and raking up exactly what would hurt me the most, and then repeating it and repeating it, but let that pass, let that pass.)/She now coughed and again seemed to want to say something important to her. I got a bit irritated and said, 'What is it, Mother? Spit it out for goshake,' which seemed a bit rude even as I said it, so without altering the words I softened the tone even in the middle of it./Pause. 'Seems to me,' Mother said at last, 'that anyone who be trying to be hid wants to go on being hid, sobvious.' That was sense enough, but didn't strike me myself as being worth making such a parlarver of getting it out. 'Elaine don't want be found. She's always been private-like. Not a sharer. She won't come forward, she'll go on hiding.'/'And what d'you know about that sort thing, Ma? You've never run off.' 'Oh, I know, my girl, I know.' Well, there was such an authority in her here that I wondered if she'd become telepathic all of a sudden. Or, I thought again, was what she'd said just common sense? Can't answer that question now I'm writing any more than I could at the time, mind./I'll change the subject now to my work at Patel's. If you don't think it's very exciting, I don't either, so I'll rattle through it./Sharth's a few miles away from of us, a little town what you must always call a city, because it's got a big church that's the first thing you see entering and the last leaving, and there's a king clergyman there who rules it. It's in a valley, half; you come down to it from the north where we are out of the hills, it's flat other side. It's said that the whole place was much the same size all from the middle ages until 1900ish when they started building on to it on the south. And again in the twenties or thirties they started building onto it again, rows and rows of thin-built pokey houses, the walls only one brick thick, nearly all terrace, and in among them here and there a line of shops./Manesh's shop is the end one of five, there's first a glazier's, then a baker's, next a shoe shop, both of these smell lovely different ways, then a shop to sell the sort of fiddly little treats that sort of DIY-er buys to please his car just as if it's a woman-friend who 'comes across' (you know what I mean) -- flashy chrome trims, furry steering-wheels covers, fuzzy dice or noddling dogs for the back, and all that, next a chemist's and last of all (sorry, that's six, not five, silly mistake) this general grocery or mini-supermarket which Manesh and his family took over now about five years back. I worked part-time for old Hobbs, the previous man too, you could say I was sold with the business. The Patels are one of the few Indian families in Sharth, they've got cousins who run a restaurant there too./The shopkeepers and their families live in back and up top, except for the chemist, so there's a seperate flat there rented out to a youngish couple who probably aren't married, which ten or thirty years' back might have meant they were sexy and exciting, but don't nowadays, at least certainly not him, he's one of those odd fellows who manages to be both thin and flabby, a bit greasy, and dresses badly too, trying to be fashionable yet not. The girl - no, woman, I must say, she must be thirty - is really quite smart, usually dressed in grey, in some kind of management for a small firm, entirely a different style of individual. But you can never quite work out what couples see in each other, I mean, look at me and Alf./ This Jakker, the man, is one of those who collects for the pools, and he's got up a little syndicate among those of us who live or work in the row, two quid a week for the right to dream about what we'd do if we won £75,000 or whatever, how I'd give Manesh a week's or even a fortnight's notice and work it conscientiously, and then.... Mind, I've never told Alf I'm in, it wouldn't go well with my disapproving of his betting on the gees. /Waste of money, you might say, and I'd know what you meant; for all that, one week we got the third divident, seventeen thou./Divided by twelve that was just over fourteen hundred each, not much to many people, but thirteen hundred and fifty more than I'd ever had before, and I put it in my post office savings books pretty quick, then took it out and put it in the bank instead and had my own cheque book for the first time ever./Real guilty it tried to make me feel. No, it wasn't the latest famine in Africa, yet another, and why should I have so much while others starve? You get usedto bearing down such emotions, though it's no credit to you. What it was was that it was nearly as much money as our family sees in many months together (not counting Belinda) and I was keeping it all to myself. But I knew how quick it could be swallowed up in incidental expenses of Dave's university life, or beer, or shoes, or new three-piece or almost anything, and course our Blowse has let me off debts time and time again and I wasn't going to remind her. No, this is personal, I said, I worked for this myself, overlooking the fact that I hadn't, it was luck, and that. So I was a capitalist now, just like the Franklyns!/I was right pleased with myself, as if it was the reward for some skill or talent I had, if people in the family had been used to noticing and observing they'd have seen it. I almost forgot what kind of house I was living in./A haunted house, see. It's not just castles and old manors that have ghosts, a council house can have them too./It might even have been that the very fact that I now had something to keep stumm about helped it, whatever it was, some kind of fashion. See, I'm open with people normal, and this putting a lock on my tongue, this resolve, which I kept, not even to think about it all that much, all this was a drain on my energy really./It may be, as I say, that that energy lost went to feed it somehow./*/It didn't like to be neglected, I understand now. There's lots of things I understand now I didn't then. And the queer thing is that as a result I've got less not more clear in my understanding. Dreams and awake, true and false, the real and what you imagine, they're not as clear divided as they used to be. In the past when I was respected or even liked because they thought I had lot of hard practical sense. Yes, life was simpler then./What's a nightmare and what's a helpful dream, that is sometimes a question. (Reading this through there's almost more about dreams than there is ordinary life. There wasn't much on the surface frightening about my next dream, yet it disturbed me a lot when I thought of it afterwards./In it, I came awake. And I was a different person that is body from my own self. Again. But not quite as when I'd been somebody else before. No pain was the main difference./General resemblance the tidiness of build, yes, though I didn't notice it first, both pain and its sudden absence when you expect it skew-whiffs how you understand anything. Dreams must use things you know in your waking life. See, that dream of the Middle East must have used my memories of the pictures in our family Bible which I'd forgotten since then. And we'd had a calendar in the kitchen 'Through the Year with the Dutch Masters' which had 'Lady at the Virginals' by Van Something as one of the pictures./If you write or talk to me you've got to use words we both know. This vision - yes, vision, odd word to use but I'll stick by it - was using imagery I'd half-seen for a whole month./ I wake up. Neat, plump little arms and legs. She or I wiggle them, enjoying them, maybe she's quite young. I or she had been asleep in a big bed in a small room. I knew somehow it was part of a big house. The ceiling was sloping so it was near the roof, but it wasn't a servant's room, she was family there. Fully awake, and she's been here in this room at least several weeks now, she remembers the job she's got to do this early and that she resents this bed and this bedroom which is all bound up with it. She glares through a gap in the rich curtains at the sky lined with little pinky-tinged clouds, then gets up slowly, washes herself at a basin there, very modestly, under her linen nightdress, then dresses herself in rich good quality clothes which don't look in any way old-fashioned to her. /Then down staircases which get wider and grander as she goes on, through a long hall where there's candelabras and mirrors and pictures (ancestors most like), several big carpets on the floor of well-polished oak, lots of space between, and she comes to the instrument, harpsicord or whatever, keyboard like a piano but different sound, sits, and takes out a little purse in which there's a little key, opens it up, it too is a beautiful work of craftsmanship only very rich people can afford, and begins to play./She knows very well how to do it very well, but she's not putting her heart into it, her not very hard work, 'well within her capabilities' as they say at Sharth, is to provide background music, no radios then, whilst the lord and lady of the place and the many others, get themselves up, so after a while as she goes on playing they begin to come in ones of twos or half-dozens, crossing and recrossing that vast ballroom-great space, and she plays on and on, after a while her real love of music and enjoyment of her art make her play better than before. At 90 degrees to her there a biggish window, church-style arched, but clear glass in most of its many panes, they show it's autumn or winter outside, trees bare. Inside, back a bit from where she is, there are log fires which soon will be roaring hot, red as many of the clouds are outside, but for all that won't give all that much heat unless you're close. A gardener outside at a short distance, that is, he must be something of that sort because he's got grey shapeless clothes, hat too, catches the woman's eye at one point. Odd sort of glance, as if he's got something he'd like to tell her, or she him, but they can't./This early-morning playing seems as if it's a punishment - not much of one, few sharp words of rebuke, that's all. Her dress is mainly silk, warm as well as beautiful./ It's a very formal place, this great house. Those others who pass her by - mostly with a slight dip of the head, they've no inclination to stop and chat - have done the same other mornings at about this time. She lets them annoy her by them doing this, though why she's annoyed's a mystery, and eventually determines to give pleasure no more and slams down the fine lid./No notice taken. Logs hiss and spit a bit. Half regretting her tantrum she takes her key out and makes sure the instrument is secure. After this a tall, formal person comes to her, very plainly dressed, though well, a dignified sort, and he's carrying to her a message from someone further up, written maybe, for she feels compelled to get up and follow him./He takes her through a door I haven't seen was there - no wonder, no handle on it, just the keyhole, it opens in the wall and brings a portrait with it - down some stairs and into a little room./Another person in authority is there, austure, in black with a white ruff, who says....I don't know what she says because the language is foreign, but it's obviously a telling off. The younger woman answers her hotly, the older woman answers her with much greater coldness. By this part I'm getting some of my own self back. And I'm resenting that 'my' lips are defending her, that's me and not-me, because I myself feel that she is in the wrong, and rash and proud, and why should I be blamed. 'No, I'm Lize, I'm Lize!' I start complaining, trying to break away, but it's hard as when you're last breath's gone and you're at the bottom end of the swimming bath right far down and have forgot how to swim or mayhaps never know. 'I'm Lize! I'm Lize!'/'Course you are, my old darling, course you are!' And there's Blowse leaning over me in her nightie, and Alf still huffing away asleep beside me, just as well too, there's an awful lot of Blinda on view./'Bad dream?' she says, brisk now. 'Yes. No. I dunno,' is my uninformative reply.'Was I calling out?' 'Not half, my lover. Look, get yourself up, can't you?' 'What time is it then?' 'Sevenish.' 'Blimee, Blowse, that's early for you.' 'Up you come, my lady. Quiet, mind, don't wake Mother.'/So I gets up and puts on my mohair and on the landing there's a brief wait while Blowse goes to get her own much more expensive and frilly dressing gown, lovely to look at, but I bet not as warm as mine is./ Next scene, we're in the kitchen. It's asif it's twenty years ago back again, when we'd exchange whispered secrets early in the day before Ma was up (course, it was Blowse who had most secrets) having toast in this same kitchen. It was bare enough then, by now Dave has nagged us to buy a lot of shiney new equipment for it. In those days our toast was only one-side done under the old noisy gas grill, burnt almost one side and soft the other, now there's a big chrome electric thing. Anyway, Blowse who never does a hand's turn normal gets out bread and things, hesitating just a bit over where they're usually put, and don't say much until she's put two thick slices front of me and the marmalade jar, one thin one for herself. 'Get outside that,' she says a bit rough, but kind with it, and both the roughness and the kindness isn't her usual manner./We eats, then, in what people call 'companionable silence', part from the chewing, and she says, 'You bin having dreams?' 'O yes, I bin having dreams all right!' I says, and go on to tell her about that what I've told you all about, though not in so much detail./'That's queer,' she says afterwards, and shuts up then; she don't seem keen to put her own oar in like she usually does. 'You bin dreaming too?' I says, and she sortof puffs some air and hesitates, which isn't like her at all at all, which I needn't tell you./ Now Blowse is a funny mixture of characteristics (which means she's much like the rest of us, I suppose.) She don't pay any attention that I've ever noticed to what do the neighbours say kind of thing, which I've always thought is very important, and often she talks pretty broad and makes coarse jokes and remarks. And yet, when she is modest, modest she certainly is! If I'm to make clear to you what she told me then, I've actually got to put it in language that's a bit more frank than she was using to me then, embarrassing though that is in a way./That night she'd disturbed me, she'd been dreaming she was in bed, but awake, total, and a man was having her (I'd gathered that!), a man who was strong and hard down there, and it was the most wonderful of all the most wonderful experiences of that kind she'd ever had (and she's a good judge.) It wasn't just sex, but true love too, or seemed it. It was the man she'd been longing for and hoping for all these years, he made all the others seem weak nobodies. There was something foreign about him, she couldn't say what it was, because he hadn't spoken ever. Oh, I thought./After a time she said, 'Ma's had dreams too. It's weird. There's something odd about this house now there didn't use to, all three of us having strange dreams. What about Alf, d'you know?'/'O blowse, I says. 'D'you think my Alf'ud ever dream? Or that he'd tell me about it if he did?'/ Now Blowse has got very nice-shaped eyebrows, and she lifts them at me when I've said this and gives me a direct look. And all of a sudden we're both off giggling and then a moment later screeching with laughter, and the thought of anything whatever getting stolid pudding Alf out of his comfortable rut, I'd like to see the plane crash or hurricane or the nuclear war even that'ud even dare try, and we're actually clutching each other's shoulders for support even though we're sitting down! It's just like we're teenage girls again, it's like we're both drunk!/Dave has come in the kitchen now with his mack over his pyjams, it's summer but it's raining a bit, and he's standing there looking more as if he's the older generation not us, kind of looking tolerant, written on his face obviously that he's thinking that we're being pretty silly but there's no real harm in it so let the kids have their fun.But not wanting to join in. 'Life is real, life is earnest' is one of his favourite quotes or would be if he'd ever learned it. Like a bachelor uncle he is bemused by kids' silliness and fun./Anyway, he grins, a bit uncertain, and walks round to the electric kettle in that awkward way he's had ever since he came off his bike quite a few years back (which I'm sure was his own fault really, thinking about something oh ever so deep instead of paying attention to the road as he should've been) and suddenly there's something ever so funny to us about our Dave too and we goes off into gales of laughter all over again./(He's never minded being teased, our Dave, not so much because of goodness of nature as just because he's so blooming serious and can't understand fun when it's there.)/ Now Blowse - she's for ever sociable - takes it on herself to explain. 'I can see through you, young Dave,' she says, 'You're thinking, Why is Belinda up so very early in the morning?' And, I'm a bit ashamed to say, auntie or not, just because she is talking to a man, she automatically puts her shoulders back so her generous b's are even more obvious than usual. Dave takes no notice of this, which mayhap I ought to be even more ashamed to write down.)/'Up to you what time you get up, Blowse,' he says, 'None of my beeswax,' as he's getting out the instant coffee etc. again./'Well, they do say as curiosity killed the cat, Dave, but I bet the cat had an interesting time of it until then.' 'Really, Blowse? If you want to tell me I'm all ears, but I'm not going force you.'/'It's yermother,' Blowse says, making it all one word like that. 'She's bin having queer dreams.' (She could of course have asked me first if I wanted to tell him, she didn't, of course.)/'Oh,' he says, and then he said what I always thought he was going to, that probably something I'd ate disagreed with me. The kettle's boiled by now, he makes his coffee and adds more sugar than's good for him like I've always told him not./I pipe up, 'I don't think dreams matter really, do you, Dave?' This isn't because I'm not worried about my dreams, I truly am, but because I'm not sure I want to talk about them with him. But I'm not sure I don't neither - I'd just have liked to have a think about it first, which hasn't, needless-to-say, struck Blowse whose always been one for jumping in with all gums firing./'There's dreams in the Bible,' she says importantly, though I should think the last time she was in a church they carried her there in a nice white shawl. Curiously enough, she's got a 'dark' way of talking sometimes, our Blowse, as if she's a priestess or a princess or something and knows things ordinary people don't, and this was one of those times./'So what?' says Dave. 'This is the twentieth century.' (Well, it was then.)/'Crumbs! Ta for the info!' Browse perts. Just this once she's a bit upset not to be taken serious. 'Look, when that Pask of yours said there was cold on her landing she couldn't explain, you gave it some thought with your ginormous brain, didn't you? Is she more important to you than us?' And, pressing on quick in case he should answer'yes', 'Yergran, yermum and yeranty, we've all had queer dreams recent, there's something in that, it can't just be coincidence, can it?'/'Now, come on, Blowse,' says Dave in a 'rallying' kind of tone, 'It's physics they're teaching me down school, not psychiatry.'/'Look, Dave, I'm asking you to think about it, ' says Blowse, herself sounding much more intelligent than usual. 'A parrot can learn things. So can a video recorder. What I'm saying is, listen to what's happened, and put things together. It's understanding that matters, see?'/I wasn't at all sure, me, if we was going to take things so serious, that I wouldn't rather talk to Reverend Hunsden instead - but Blowse by now had drawn Dave in, further in than I wanted him to be and all. She was turning his own attitudes and assumptions against him quite cleverly./'If we're going to talk about this proper, Dave,' I say brightly, 'shouldn't it wait till you've had breakfast? (I'm thinking, surerly Dave's belly and the fuss of being waited on are going to be enough to distract him.)/By now he's sat down along the 'coffin' too. 'Whole house, is it?' he muses aloud. 'Or is it just the women? What about our Dad - has he been having bad dreams too, then?' 'I didn't say "bad" dreams, Dave. Odd ones was what I said,' I kind-of correct him. And this time the idea of Alf dreaming don't seem so funny to me, nor Blowse either. There was just a moment of -- I realise it now -- faint guilt. I didn't think or feel it through at the time, but I think if I had it'd have gone something like this: our Ma's a strong personality, least she is in her own home, and I myself am a good bit cleverer than Alf is, and Blinda's so vivid and beautiful in all her ways, and of course Dave himself is cleverer than I am, or almost anybody, so taken all four all together, we're overpowering, and Alf's much less to blame really for finding company with his mates up pub and not having much to do with the rest of us except the little details of waring and sleeping down here than I'd usually thought, we're 'The Family' here and -- without meaning to, of course -- we've made him into a sort of outsider; it's not that we've forced him out, it's that we've never really taken him in, not complete, anyway./'Well --' I said. 'You've noticed of course that he's the quiet type that doesn't give information unasked?' says Dave a bit sarcastic. (Yes, you are always engaging him in conversation and asking him things, I thought but didn't voice.) 'Look, there are two things to be done,' begins Dave now, talking in a casual, breezy, ever-so-reasonable way he must have caught from one of his precious 'masters' at school. 'And the second's to ask Dad whether he's had odd dreams too. Now, what d'you think the first is?'/Blowse and I get caught up in his mood and we sit there a bit puzzled-like for a few seconds, but trying to look puzzled as if we're paying attention really. I starts to frown to make it clear that I'm TRYING to think, then I do think, and what it is is that I shouldn't be frowning because of the risk of developing lines on my forehead if I do, at my age, meanwhile Blinda -- give the girl a coconut! -- get's the right answer (though I don't see that it is right, myself, immediate) -- by saying, 'Have you had odd dreams, then, Dave?'/'No, I haven't,' he says briefly and -- I suppose he thinks that I think that he's been wasting time by getting her to ask this question when 'no' is the answer all along -- gasses on a bit about the 'necessity of elimination.' 'Yes, eat up your All Bran every day,' I quip, which he don't think much of a joke. 'Seriously, our Mum, you ought to ask Dad, ' he says. 'Why me?' I says. 'You're the obvious person,' he says. 'Yes,' Blinda agrees, 'You are his wife' quite serious. Well, ta for the info, as she says herself!/It strikes me for one thing that them two instead of spatting at each other as per usual are ganging up on me a bit, what is a development I don't much relish. And another thought is that though Alf and me shares the same bed and, how can I put it, acts like husband and wife there sometimes when the mood comes over us, for all that the last time we had any talk about anything intimate and persoal must have been...and when I try to think how many years back it was I'm shocked to be wandering into wondering if there was EVER such a time./But behind all this is the idea that our home's not quite like it was even just a few months back, it's not predictable any more, in a way it's a more interesting place to live in for that very reason, it's not so safe now, it's like it was under attack./Or is going to be, rather. It's as if it's being scouted, like it's being spied upon to find out where all the weak places are, and after that the real assault'll come. From outside. And by that I don't mean no 25 or no 29 either, or the garden -- I mean, I don't know quite what, but it's all really upsetting and disturbing./See, you may not believe in God or shosts, but that don't stop you being frightened of them, do it? Specially if it's dark outside./*/So, because it appeared important to talk to Alf about this, or just to speak to Alf full stop, I 'set him up.' Took a mort of arranging too. Firstly, see, he's never been one for doing anything in a hurry, so I had to plan it for all of ten days ahead; my Alf wants notice for it if he's going to change his mind, even. Wednesday week, I'd decided on. I had to get Belinda to be out that evening for a kick-off -- she's always got someone to go to see, so that was easy enough. And also to engineer an invite up Pasqueline's for Dave to arrange. That wasn't quite so easy done, because they both have homework every night (which they call 'prep') and Dave himself and Pask's dad, maybe not her exactly, think that is most Frightfully Important -- but after a while we got it agreed that he could go up there after it both were done. As for Ma, she was the real problem, because she's never gone out much except to work, taking great pride in 'keeping meself to meself', except for family visits sometimes. This was much easier than I thought because of a fortunate coincidence; Cousin Else, Humphrey's mother, asked her over that night to see their videos of the Costa last year, so she could show off both their expensive package holidays and their expensive tv equipment. I made some excuse why I wouldn't go, though privately feeling that when you've seen one lot of videos about a holiday you couldn't possibly afford for yourself you've seen them all, but getting Ma to agree to go by herself, even though I'd arranged that Humph would take here there and bring her back in his very big and comfortable old car, that was an effort; even a two-year-old's not very easily convinced if you say, 'go on, you'll enjoy it' when he don't think he will, at least our Dave wasn't ever, and Ma's always been quietly stubborn and hard-to-persuade. I won the fight in the end, though I wondered if I'd have enough energy left afterwards to cook the meal!*So far so good, though. And yet at this point it was as if I had only arranged to have a quiet evening by myself on my own-io -- not a bad idea either, I could put my feet up, have just the standing lamp on, and read the 'People's Friend' or something. Last and most serious, I'd got to wean Alf away from the pub just for once.*Anyway, I started by saying that 'ever so unfortunately' I'd be all lonely for hours and hours that night, though I had got myself by luck a very nice bit of steak, rather a lot for one though, which I supposed I could eat then....o, just a minute, I've just had an idea, I said, (after a pause in which I thought he might half-thought of it himself because of the word 'steak') why don't he stay in for once and keep me company? If he did I'd make a prawn cocktail first and do the steak just as he likes it medium rare with crinkly chips and all the trimmings, and for afters we'd have one of those ice-creams Walls does, with a four-pack of beer for him and for me a bottle of Lambrusco rosay (not that I'd have more than a glass or two, mind.) And afterwards, I tried to suggest, though without saying anything...I tell you, I was feeling quite nervous, flutter-flutter my chest was going, much like a chap Dave's age or younger asking a girl out first time...I'll do it really proper, I said, laying it on thick, candles on the table, and I'll wear that dress you used like (bit low at the front; nothing like most of Blowse's, mind) (that is, if I can still get into it) and Alf must have a bath and a shave and wear his suit (hope he can still get into it too) and put on that nice tie we bought him when the rest of us went on holiday down Burton Bradstock, and afterwards having the house to ourselves for once we might....at least, I hoped he'd got the idea by now. And, I took care NOT to say, I hoped he'd put more ooomph into the game of mothers-and-fathers than he does usual these days -- the rare usual, that is.*So my Alf thought it over for about a minute, and in the end said, don't mind if I do, or it'll make a change or something like that, not thanks or lovely or good idea. Men! (This man, anyway.)*Eventually, then, all the difficulties involved were overcome, and I was keeping my eyes peeled down Patel's for any particular good veggies. In the meanwhile there was a sort of mildly curious happening.*Not that it was remarkable, exactly. One afternoon when Ma was asleep the front room -- and she does sleep an awful lot these days -- I had a visitor unexpected. Tall, sun-burned fellow, bright red shirt, jeans, braces, tall boots, looked like a cowboy in a film almost. Not young, about fifty, but lithe and very fit-looking. 'I'm from Australia,' he began, which anyway I'd gathered from his way of speaking. He said his people came from round here way back, his name was Beal, which of course was Mother's name before she married, though she spelled it with an 'e', and he'd got our address from....well, I forget where exactly, as part of him making a family tree from the parish registers. He was wondering if we might be relations.*Handsome he was, well-muscled by his build, tall, flat tum, a better specimen than Alf was ever, even before he started his little-but-often (he says it's little) style of drinking. I wasn't -- mind, I've got to stress it was all quite innocent, the only time we touched was when we shook hands when he left -- but I wasn't a bit sorry to have a reason for talking to him, and I got the idea (you know somehow) that he thought I was quite attractive too. So I ask him in, give him a cup or two of our best tea, and a slice of cake (not homemade, unfortunately, Dave and Alf had eaten it all, but I found some boughten in a tin) and I was apologetic that I had to entertain him in the kitchen, but Ma was asleep in the front and he said he quite understood, but after a bit of friendly chat we had both to come to the conclusion that no, we weren't long-lost family after all, so off he went.*You know the lovely unstiff thoroughly relaxing way most Americans and Australians and such have with them, the kind of natural and unaffected good manners you scarcely come across in our own country, where folk, even when they honestly are trying hard to be nice, are always concerned to be respectful to superiors or gracious to inferiors either, and make it abso-blooming-lutely clear that they know exactly which is which -- well, this chap had that easy sort of air.*But for all that I didsn't think no more of him until a few weeks later when I got a nice letter from him, surprisingly formal, thanking me for my hospitality and including with it a snap taken of his house (he was at home by then) which was quite a big place, wood-built, and seemed to have a vast desert for garden.* Now, here's a queer thing; this, this, well I suppose you might call it an interlude, didn't seem to have much importance at the time, and looking back on it with hindsight it didn't seem to have much importance either. And yet, somehow, it all seemed part the pattern.* So -- that Wednesday evening rolled round at last, and a worry or almost the prospoct was. Because I'm not a foreigner. I'm English. Therefore I'm stiff much the time. On parade, see. And I don't usually find it easy to chat with strangers. I reckon I'm reasonably clever and I reads the paper when I gets a chance. But here I was, with trying to deal with a stranger in practice, who also didn't have much practice casual chat, and who isn't (let's be honest about it, and anyway you've gathered) not particularly intelligent or well-informed, and who hardly has the gump even to want to dishonestly try to appear to be.*Yes, it's my Alf what sleeps in the same bed with me every single night that I mean when I writes 'a stranger'. If you think that's an awful thing to say about your own wedded husband, and that I'm saying really that our marriage in its quiet way is near as much a failure as those that end in violence or the divorce courts, and if you think I'm a good part to blame because over the years I've lulled into thinking of him no more than an armchair-- well, you can think it. * But I was making an effort tonight. Sort of.*Not that it's easy dealing with Alf, just because he is so self-content, just not concerned to be different, ever. And, though he's never rude, quite, he don't have no Sunday behaviour to pull out for special occasions neither. (Rereading this now, I wonder if all I'm saying, long-windedly, is that he's thick and dull.)* But, mind, he's enormously obliging in little ways. If I want him to dress up just to eat prawn cocktail and that, he'll do it, and almost cheerful. *What looked likely early on to make it a very sticky kind of evening was Alf's got no small talk, he won't say anything unless he's got something he really wants me to know. So there we were sat with our shadows trembling large on the wallpaper, and no noise at all except for his eating.*And when we'd finished it and had sat silent for a minute, he began tapping his spoon against the glass waiting for the main dinner to be served up. Well, if I was to raise the subject of dreams or anything else and it would obviously have to be me that started it, I mean, if I was to get his imagination going it'd have to be along the jumpleads from mine, obvious, so I, after a bit of thought, went at it sideways, reminiscing about how, when we were both at school still, really young, with some other friends we'd taken our bikes and a picnic up into the Demnet Hills with the idea of seeing the famous caves at Yeddur other side. Less traffic there was then, it was almost safe for kids to be on bikes. It was lovely and sunny, in fact it was too hot for comfort. And we never actually got there, it would have taken more effort than we'd really allowed for, it was only ten miles but much of it steeply uphill. So we'd eaten our picnic in a field, and later we'd bought Pepsi or something from a fridge in a shop./*That day'ud been, for me anyway, a kind of magic one, shining. Why? (I see it now, I don't think I did then.) All six of us were getting to the cusp where we'd stop being boys and girls and 'ud become men and women. It was all innocent, still. Just! Yes, it was nostalgia I'd been feeling then, or do now when I look back. Us girls' chests were as flat as the boys' ones were, their hands weren't hairy, and no bigger than ours. Another year, I somehow knew, they'd be trying to thrust them down our necks. But I couldn't have put it into words.*Anyway, I gassed on a bit about that day, which still does even now mean something special to me, but Alf said no, he wasn't there, I must be thinking of someone else.*But that story of mine after all wasn't a dead loss, it'ud got him opening his mouth and talking.*And then he asked me a question for once. I'd said that a chap called Colin who used to live round the corner from us had been part of the gang, and Alf at least remembered him, he'd been a special mate of his. Not long after this time I'd been talking about his family and him had gone away. You couldn't imagine that Alf or any friends of his would keep in touch by letter. He asked me now if I knew what'd happened to them. 'Curiously enough, I do know,' I said, mendacious-like. (That's a posh word for lying, by the way.)* And went out to get the steak to point up the drama. Now in fact I'd no idea at all where old Colin and them (his lot) had gone, any more than I knows where the near thirty years since I last saw them are. And I couldn't have cared less either. But, anyway, as I put Alf's meal and my own on the table, I said, 'You must remember how fond Colin was of telling everyone his dreams?' and Alf, with a different flavour of dishonesty, not wanting to seem someone totally without interest in the past, even his own (though that really is nearly the case) said, quite eagerly for him, 'Yeah, course!'/Well! As it happened, I went on, lying in my teeth, I had a letter out of the blue a few years back from Anne, his sister, the one who was very pretty but had to wear an iron on her leg, and it had an American stamp on it. Colin had had a great stroke of luck over there. Somehow he'd fallen in with a professor who was studying dreams, and every night -- he was actually being paid for this too -- he was wired up to a machine in this professor's laboratory -- in fact I'd read about this sort of thing in the 'Daily Mail' -- and they'd measure his eye-movements and whatnot as he slept; because, it seems, though it's all in your mind, your eyes follow what you're dreaming about as if it's all really there) and when his eyes had moved a lot they'd wake him up to get him to tell them what he'd been dreaming about.* 'Hard day's night, eh?' says Alf, attempting to joke. He chewed a bit. Then he said he thought it was overeating caused most dreams, especially cheese. Then he asked all out of the blue what did you call them stringed instruments, bit like guitars, only made of wood? Might be a lute or a mandolin, I said, or possibly a hurdy-gurdy...He'd had a funny dream once, he said, then he went silent as if he was unsure whether to tell me anything more or not.* Gotcha, my bird! I was thinking triumphant. But I only asked him to hand me the French mustard or something like that. *Yeah, it was really funny, Alf said. There was this young girl standing on a low platform. There was a big piano there but it had the lid closed. She was playing something wooden with strings, and as she played she was singing too. She was about thirty, quite pretty, not big physical, her brown hair was tightly curled and her face was pale, though healthy-looking. She had dark-red lipstick, and she'd been singing away in this big grand room with the potted palms. You could tell it was a big place because you could see high sash windows divided into twelve like they have in old houses, with thick heavy curtains pulled back and tied up with things like dressing-gown cords, only thicker.* And all of a sudden out of her neck had come a red fountain, and she'd gone on singing away quite unput-out, even though she was hosing the front rows of her audience with her blood. Out it'd come with a fierce whoosh, then less fierce, then stronger again, according to the beating of her heart. And so on again and again.*She had an old-fashion way of singing, looking deliberately from one side of the room back to another, with a little smile on her face, making expressive little bobs of her head, and she'd gone on quite unperturbed in her high sweet voice, very clear it was. Those people sitting up straight or slouching in the front rows didn't change their postures at all, as if nothing out of the way was happening.* From side to side it worked, then back again, and none of these people, a well-dressed lot, had took no notice at all, even though they were being soaked all through. And after a while, besides the horrid shiny look of it all, there was this vile smell, warm it was too. And he'd woke up with the beat of his own heart going bump BUMP bump BUMP in his own head, and really feeling quite off-colour, he said and I believed him, though, mind, he went on chomping his steak and so did I.* When was this? I said. Did it happen recent?*She was wearing old-fashion clothes, he said, he thought he'd said that. No, I answered, don't be dopey (though trying to keep the irriation out of my voice), when was it you dreamed all this? Dunno, he said, only it was before Dave started his big school. He was absolutely certain-sure of that, he went on when I pressed him a bit further, and the reason he was so sure about this was it was the only dream he ever remembered more than a few hours in his whole life.* Well! With one part of my mind I felt quite sick and revolted, imagining all this. But I'm not ashamed either to say that we both finished up our steak, roast potatoes and all that, and ate up our ice-cream too perfectly cheerful, it was better food than we have usual, we both had far more sense than to let ourselves be put off our grub. *Poor old Hetty was musical. She had her throat cut. No need to remind you.* You ought to have asked him where he was when he dreamt it, Dave said the next night when I was kind-of reporting back. He called me not doing this 'inadequate methodology' or some such gobbledygook. Yes, I ought to have thought, I said, humbly-seeming, though you know Dad's such a stickinthemud he never goes anywhere, even when the rest-of-us're on holiday.*Dave goes, to himself, thinking I wasn't hearing, 'I wish I could dream', which worried or puzzled me a bit; what does it mean if you don't? What makes him tick?*Would Benedick have anything to say about that? I wondered. Or Tom? I hadn't seen him, Tom, I mean, for two-three months now, since that Sunday. I'll explain a bit more about him here, even if it's a bit out of place. His full name is Tomas Gritnell-Ferrace, Tomas with an accent because his mother's lot were Highlanders, and the hyphen because his precious great-aunt insisted he took on her surname as well as her house. But he's never wanted to be known as other than Tom Ferrace. So Pask with her German grandfather (who might have been 'bonking' [excuse the word] our Blowse the very moment Alf was on about his dreams) as well as the Scottish lot is really quite a mixture, geneologically speaking -- but for all that, who's more English than her?*I daresay Tom was thinking in his heart that Pask could do worse in the end than marry our Dave, whose intelligent and responsible and likely to go to university and do well there, though he don't have their sort background. And I certainly thought my son could do a lot worse than that Pask. When I was a teenager lot of girls, and I'm ashamed to say that Blowse was one of them, used to go out made up very thick and wearing the very very short skirts fashionable those days, and just mooch around, leaning on walls and the like, until some man came along to start chatting with them, and as long as he was their age or a bit older and had a bit of money jangling in his pocket to spend on a girl....I was very relieved my son wasn't mixed up with no such hussy. *Course, things have changed a very great lot since then, which really surprised me, at least (and what's even more amazing is that no-one seems to have noticed) and most girls that age now are on 'the Pill', which I suppose is why so many of them get pregnant, but I didn't myself believe, at that time, that Dave and Pask had gone the whole way, or not yet. And even if they had, their friendship had a reassuring feel to it, it had an air of permanency (well, for the time being.) Of course their both loners, not part as so many kids are of a kind of gang who've got a musical chairs kind of movement among themselves in which young girls glory and delight in breaking young men's hearts or at very most don't care that they do, and the young men if possible are yet more faithless still. (Our mum, needless to say, was no help at all when I was hurt bad by something a bit like that. Probably that's why it still hurts -- a bit. It wasn't Alf, maybe I'll tell you later.)*Though, come to think of it, why should I be so sure I know what Tom was thinking about Dave and Pask? We're all so blooming sure we know other people's thoughts when we don't know our own hearts half the time! And Tom with his responsible work and the worry of his wife's disappearance maybe just didn't think about it much.*I used, by the way, to hate his relatives-in-law the Franklyns, maybe 'detest''s a better word. Their family property is all things -- rocks, trees, earth -- what I'm certain-sure ought to belong to all of us together. Them saying they 'own' these things is like a burglar saying he owns the television he's just taken from your house, I thought. *But I'd changed my attitude a bit, not for any good reason, just because by chance I had got nowadays all of £1400 of my own, and every single day it brought me the unearned income of 40 pence. (I'll explain later.)*/You've got to think of such things even if you don't want to. When Ma goes, I'll inherit her tenancy, I won't of course throw Blowse out. Dave will have moved out by then -- s l o w l y as students do. Our gran up Gloster was married and expecting by his age now. No, they'll be no practical problems.* Emotional ones, different kettle of fish. How I'll miss her when I'm alone with Alf, irritating old bag though she is half the time. Loneliness. And so to speak a great cold wind blowing and now no-one older to stand shelter between me and it blowing me off to wherever it is it takes you -- if anywhere, course!
/*But even at nearly forty a girl relies on her mother and when she's not here...Blowse I admire and am ashamed of equal measure, Dave half the time knowing how very brainy he is for that very reason isn't much company, and Alf, well, I despise him sometimes, he's one of those things you see in the corner of the pub like a calendar with some thick blonde with no knickers on is.
/But nowadays I was observing Mum close and just feeling even though I couldn't quite put my finger on it that she wasn't quite normal, for her, I mean. And even more of the rambling stories starting, 'When I was a young girl', which she pronounced 'gel' like 'Aunt' Maria must've, nearly all of them I'd heard before, and all of them without exception boring. I feel, yes, I suppose she didn't have much choice, that it was cowardly of her to go into what her generation called 'service' ('slavery' might be a better word, so long and hard they were worked for a pittance), but she's never had much imagination and not that sort of courage, and she wasn't very clever ever; I see that clear, don't mean I don't love her, but it was our dad that had the brains.)/And, to be fair to her, despite the bit more opportunity, I'm not sure I've been no braver; perhaps I could have stayed on another year, they did ask after all, and started in an office instead of a shop (and - who knows? - I might have married the boss and....but there's no profit thinking along those lines.) Course, one of the reasons, part from habit, why when Mum's dead I'll never even think of throwing Blowse out on her nicely-curved rear, is, I'd be all alone with Alf. Not the main reason, mind./ One afrernoon when just for once I let slip to Ma about how feddup I was getting hearing her yet again go on about the 'good' old days she says with a catch in her voice that one day soon I'll never hear her voice again and then how I'll miss it, and that was unanswerable because so true and yet not fighting fair either and I had to hasten to reassure her how much I loved her and that she was really quite healthy and good for years yet. 'Not likely, my girl,' she said, relishingly, yes, relishingly. As if her death was a great plate of fish and chips in a shop with bread and margarine on the side and she was just spreading salt and vinegar all over it to enjoy it all the more!/Well, there was a photo of Mum's own mum up in the dining room that had been somewhere in the house all my life. Nan's got a huge bunch of keys hanging at her waist to show she's the housekeeper, St. Peter couldn't look prouder of his. Taken by 'Miss Hetty', Ma had said once, 'she had a darkroom under the stairs'./At this very moment this photo (which I'd dusted the frame of that morning not two hours ago, so I knew it was firm) slips from its placement as if the string had passed right through the nail and smashes down on the top of the chinacabinet from Gritnell's just below, denting the french-polishing./ Unlike me, Ma doesn't look the tiniest bit surprised. Or annoyed, which I am. The glass of the photo has come into umpteen twisted V-shapes, the frame is bust, though the nail and the string, as I'm about to find out, are both perfectly sound. Ma looks as if she expected or wanted or even willed it to happen. Complacent, that's the word I want. /Of course I'm going to have to brush and hoover up the mess and in the end have to pick up the tiniest bits of glass myself and probably cut my fingers a bit./ I'm part-way through doing that when this Pask arrives, and in her uniform too, which she's never done before. Their school lessons go dot and carry one through six days of the week, and every other afternoon is a sports one; though Pask whose abilities in that direction are just about nil isn't much wanted for games, so she often has afternoons off./By now she's learned to go to the back door like a friend. When she knocks I shouts out to her and she comes into the dining room where I am. It's a cold, faintly damp, sort of day, and she's been walking hard and has a good pinky colour to her face for once, which with her shining hair (dark chestnut, remember) and the dark-brown uniform she's got on, makes her look quite nice. And her face -- some would think her nose's too big, but I call it Roman, looks distinguished. She's carrying a leather briefcase, in fact it's imitation leather, but new and of such good quality you wouldn't know unless you look close - and she slides it on the table and plonks herself into a chair. /Though I've just said she's clumsy, she's at this time looking carefree-loose rather than awkward (I think our Dave, quite without meaning to, has made her more confident somehow.) She's not pretty, though some might say handsome. And she's been neglected, just a bit. Her father's been so tied up with church and good causes that maybe, until recent, he didn't give her the attention he should, and her mother's always been a dull and dreary thing, until she showed a spark of life some months back by shoving off, yes, that was life, however selfish. Anyways, Pask is looking more the young woman and less the girl than she usedto. 'Guess what happened at Sharth today!' she says (meaning of course the school, not the town). 'We had a really good early lunch!' What? I thought. You've got off the bus two miles early, and you'll have to walk home from here now, just to tell me that? But that didn't seem worth actually saying. Yet it almost seemed that this was why she'd come, to tell me about that, and a music lesson she'd had, and to let me infer that somehow the rest of the day so far hadn't been particular enjoyable. (I didn't particular enjoy my own schooldays, and I don't know why so many people did, but if they did and they say so, fine, that's the truth, even if it's not really interesting, but why people who hated them, specially at schools like hers, feel absolutely obliged for all that to say they did, that's beyond me.) (Dave's never made any male friends there who he invites home, by the way.)/However -- here we are, and maybe Pask's seeing me as a bit of a mother-substitute, I'm not sure. As I'm straightening up from my brushing and picking, she starts to smoke, though I wish she wouldn't, really, ands then offers to bandage my hand where I've cut it, though I hasten to say no thanks because I don't think she'd do it very well, and anyway, better to let the air get to it. Of course her attention's been drawn to the picture. She turns it over and on the back there's the date it was taken and 'Beth Beale our housekeeper' written in big round careful letters which somehow give the impression that whoever wrote it's not very clever. 'This must be Hetty's handwriting, ' says Pask, sensibly enough. 'She must have written this before she was murdered!' *Few seconds pause next. It wasn't the world's most intelligent remark, was it? Then the idea of poor old Hetty writing something after she was murdered strikes us both as a bit of a joke and we giggle. Ma goes all strict, and purses her lips, says it's not funny at all and it's bad luck to laugh at the dead etc. in a frightfully serious deep voice./'But surely that is Hetty's handwriting, Be ---?' asks Pask, cutting herself off short, remembering she calls Ma 'Mrs Bellows' when she's down our house. /Well, our mum, as she often says herself, isn't much of a scholard. I'm pretty sure she can only recognised a few close people's handwriting. She takes the card, almost roughly, then does a queer thing. She rubs her fingers over the address as if they can see better than her eyes do. 'Yes, it is,' she says, 'yes'. *'A message from the past!' exclaims Pask dramatically (as if everything ever written down wasn't that!) She looks again at the photo, and in case she's relecting, as I am, what a gulf there was between our families them days, and it's not filled up yet, I hasten to offer a cup of tea, which she doesn't want, and hasten too to offer an explanation of how it came to fall down, which isn't one.* Pask at this point makes one of her odd remarks, quaint yet undoubtedly true, much like the sort of things toddlers come out with. 'This is a very feminine house, isn't it? There's the three of you, mother and two daughters, and grandmother on the wall, but no photos out of Dave or Alf or your own father, Lize. It's the women who count here, isn't it? Dave and Alf are a bit out on the edge.'/Yes, that's right, I thought later. And the women having to change their surnames just disguises that there's this kind of succession -- not of property, of course, we never had none, but of personalities, influence, mood, see?* Yes, Pask had said a mouthful. Tom told me later that the word for how property or land or money is inherited, father/son/his son, and so on down the generations, is 'primogentiture', and that applies to his lot, more or less, even though it was his aunt he inherited the big house from./*I don't quite know the words, but I think it's really important, this. Our different kind of inheritance. This man-man-mad succession, this having things with hard edges, the houses, the money, the fields which men say they own, these things which give them status and purpose and yet limit them and dictate to them what they must be, from the Crown itself down to a little service station or caff, these men thave the illusion that they own them but in reality they own the men.*But we women, we're different, or at least we can be./Yes -- I know I keep coming back to glasses -- that remark of Pask's tossed off almost as chat showed me like a lens a completely different way to look at life and the world.*I was ill-advised enough to try to explain it to Blowse. 'We women, we're diffrent from men, ' I started to say. 'Yes, we've got tits!' Blowse said, frivolous as nearly always (or, rather, to be honest, she said we've got the c word which I just WON'T write down.) But I did try to talk this idea through with her, didn't get far, noneedsay. I wish I could be alone sometimes! But there's not enough space - if I went up to the bedroom everyone'd think I was ill or odd./ But I thought more about women and the importance of women than I had before. Men's attitudes - well, most men's -- is that men own everything really important. Things, see? Women don't matter, except that they're what men use to produce other men who will own the things in their turn. But Who Owns What is the really important thing; grab as much of what's going for yourself, your area, your country, your own sort really, and that means the men of your own sort. Women can be quite entertaining in their way, like pussycats, but they're meaningless, like words written down in a language no-one reads any more. The Things -dead objects - matter, women - living persons - don't.*Now I'd always been in the Labour Party, though sometimes it had seemed awfully stuffy, full of people born with their best clothes already on so they were dressed proper to go to chapel twice every Sunday. But I wondered if it had every altered anything much, at least, not since the 1940s, before my time. Or religion neither.*Well, is politics about Things or about People? I didn't feel that most people who voted Labour (or Socialist as it used to be called) had given that much thought or care. What value do individuals have? What do they mean?/ See, all these years, and counting our nan it's just over a century, we women in our family have been living outwardly more or less as if what men think about women (expendable) is right, and underneath our lives have been.....what? Spiritual, fulfilling, rich (in their way)? No, not really, let's be frank, but different, anyway, different from how they appeared. Trying to find what Womanhood stood for? Sort of!*And I was going to try to understand it. Bit of an effort it'd probably be, but thank you, Pask, for setting me on that road.*/Now the dreams stopped, or seemed to, because I had other things to think about. But all I've just said in these last paragraphs doesn't mean I wanted to dominate our home; no, I wished Alf would take a fuller, more equal part. I didn't want him to go on living so separate, bit like a lodger -- no, not even like a lodger, because a lodger, a long-standing one anyway, is likely to be consulted more than Alf often is, it's his home too. But it's so hard to get any opinion, or any response even, out of our Alf. If something comes for 'The Householder' of course I'm the one who opens it, he's not interested. And - let's face it! (well, he'll never read this) he's not interesting either. Why did I marry him? I enjoyed it at the time, I remember, but now.....I don't know, I've changed and he hasn't, I suppose. (Or read anything else much, and that's part the trouble.)*I tell you, from experience, that this country's run too much like an Army still, everyone wanting to be crystal clear who's in charge and who's obeying. But a house is, or ought to be if it's to be called a home, -- well, anything but like that. Love, that's the word. Mind, I'm not getting all sloppy-sentimental here. A house without love won't be happy if it's got carpets you sink up to your knees in and colour tellys in every room including the lavs -- but if there is love too physical comfort's no bad thing. At Gritnalls, strikes me now, they must have an opposite problem to us -- too blooming easy with all that space to get away from others, that might explain Angelikka's behaviour partly. House like that, hundred years ago or so it'd be normal for a daughter not to marry and stay at home all her years looking after Dad, but Pask, I suppose, though the two of them rub along well enough now she's a teenager, will want to go to some college and then have some kind of career away from home, I suppose something to do with her music, though I suppose she hasn't thought it through as yet. Not really my affair, though old Granpa Fred used to say minding other people's business was one of the great free pleasures of life.* Did I tell you it was Spring now? Well, I'm telling you now. St. Osgyth's Day had rolled round again with the usual mad celebration in Sharth Cathedral, and since we live in her Close (it's pronounced Ossyth) I as usual felt I ought to go and join in, and as usual didn't. In fact I've only seen it once, when Miss Joliffe took me as part a school party. At some time way way back some old Bishop gave us local people the right to take water from his well -- how kind, how Christian! -- and as part of the celebration everyone wears rainmacs, the chairs are cleared to the side, and at the signal 'The Water! The Water!' everyone yells 'The Water! The Water!' and suddenly all those people with capital letters, so to speak, Bishops, Deans, Archdeacons, Canons, Choirmasters and all, do a kind of dance and then produce buckets and bottles ands water pistols and bicicyle pumps sucking up water and try to soak each other, laughing like stink. Yes, I was thinking, when you posh lot have had your silly fun some poor woman like our ma has got to clear up after you, as always, so I didn't 'enter into the spirit of the occasion.' This tradition, by the way, like so many, was neglected between Elizabeth's time and mid-nineteenth century.* But we're always aware of the past down here. Kinghouse in our village just under the railway viaduct is where Queen Ratburga, and she really was a rat too, murdered her young stepson King Ethrwulf by hanging him in a tree, so she could make her lover Guthruc the king. And King Guthruc ruled cruelly, with very high taxes and punishments cruel even by the standards of them days, and too -- they didn't tell us this bit at school - broke into the nunnery where she was the abbess and raped King Ethrwulf's sister, and the daughter born of this, who grew up among the nuns and later was the abbess herself, was this Saint Osgyth.*Anyway, it was Spring, the time for sowing, though the only thing Dave was sowing was the booklearning that would bring a harvest of A-level certificates, and at the same time Pask, who's younger, was doing O Level, which they call GCSE nowadays. They'd study together down here sometimes, and I'd imagine they'd have breaks for snogging sometimes, though I never caught them at it (not that I tried, mind) but if I went in the kitchen to offer to make them cups of tea there they'd be at opposite ends the coffin with their books spread out before them, several feet apart. Struck me it was more fun being a teenager in my time than it is now.*Anyway, all this mugging things up from books kept them quiet and harmless. Dave was very self-assured and confident about it all, just wanting to make certain he gave a very good account of himself, presented himself to the examiners at his true high value, as a diamond of the very shiniest kind, and, noneedsay, even MORE important! presented himself to himself as that also, so that he confirmed or rather reconfirmed his own high estimate. He's modest like that as you know. But Pask was full of doubts./What's more, in the event they was both proved right. He did very well, she just passed. (I don't think I'm breaking suspense by telling you now at this point what happened in the story later on, I just don't think it's anything like as essential as they did.) Our Dave gave himself airs like a peacock about doing so well; by comparison, Pask never showed the slightest pride in her family tree stretching back to the year dot./Yes, there was a lot of kindness unspoken between her and me them days. No doubt she was missing her own mother very much. In a way it was like she was dead, but the ppc, though surely not intended as such, had the effect of ripping out again the open wound of her kindof bereavement.* And as I've said at this time I was expecting my own mum to make the Big Farewell. O, she's been brave and tough, she's had to be, kind sometimes, and also the world's stubbornnest stick-in-the-mud; Queen Victoria's been dead three or four generations but it hasn't got through to her yet, our ma, I mean. Mind you, she - sorry, it's Pask I'm on about here - wasn't exactly the modern miss in lots of her attitudes. A little village like ours, we must seem fifty years at least behind the times to those clever poeople up London. And the worst of it all (from the Londoners' point-of-view) is that we knows they think that and couldn't care a monkey's elbow!/ Dave's already left us behind, if he wasn't born like that. Me and Alf and Blowse, he knows more than we do about almost everything, even gives the impression that he always had. (Blowse might not fully agree with that statement of mine.) Our house here, which we do love in our way, sticking doors ands condensation and all, for Dave it's only a launch-pad to something 'better', it don't affect him personal at all. He'll have gone away, apart from duty visits now and then which maybe he'll find very boring, twenty or thirty or even forty years before we three line up to jump the last fence, and we'll have been carrying on all those years with nothing changing except stiffness and whitening hair. At least, I can't foresee any reason why it shouldn't be like that. We'll die where we've lived all our lives. Stuck here, even if we don't want to be.*In thgat respect, funny innit, we're much more like them up Gritnells than he'll ever be. There's no doubt he'll move on and on, going from job to job, house to house, with ever higher salary and standing, his whole grown-up life, and have nowhere he's really deep-rooted in, where he totally belongs. Pitiable in one respect, then?/Yes, up Dave goes like a rocket. He's going to learn even a very great deal more than he does already (fuelled by me, cups of tea whenever he wants them, full English fry-up breakfasts full of carbohydrates, and all that -- but not money if I can help it.) The only thing he's not going to learn is humility. /Mind you, I don't think I myself know it much. Jesus was always recommending it -- I remember from RE lessons at school -- for other people! When I look around at other people who are better-off, and that's lots of them, I think, all I needed was a bit more luck, Dad alive longer, glasses earlier, or whatnot, and I'd be where you are now. Far worse things in the world than living in a conveniently small house and getting your spectacles free on the National Health, that's for sure. So I try to be grateful, even if I don't know who to. As for being referred to so much as 'the plain sister' well, there's no denying that Blowse really was beautiful younger.
(I decided against contact lenses, though I could afford them now, they seemed too much fuss.)/
Those spring months, as I recall them now, were awful quiet. Yes, 'awful''s the right word -- lull between two storms and that. Some disturbing things had happened, and now they'd ceased to happen, but maybe I've overstressed them in telling you about it. We were in what Alf's dull old ma called a rut most of the time -- Alf going to the pub, me in the shop, Dave at his precious school, Blowse 'modelling', ninety or ninety-five per cent of life went on just as usual. (I said to her once, 'Ma-in-law, you don't mean a rut, a rut has hard dry edges and is uncomfortable; habit's much more consoling, like an armchair or one of those bubble baths that smells of plastic flowers' -- might as well have saved my breath, course.) Far too consoling -- even pain or bereavement because it upsets your settled complacency can jerk you into being a better person in the end. Well, complacent's how middle-aged people only too easily get, according to 'rebellious' teenagers (unlike Dave or Pask) who badmouth their parents all round but never cease to gollop the fry-ups their parents pay for and cook.
/Anyway, I'd decided to join the Open University now I had a bit money to spare. Why should our Dave be the only one with letters after his name? Or the wider view of the world they stand for? You don't need any previous qualifications for the OU, only willingness to work long and hard, and I felt very well qualified in that!
End March, April and May, nothing out of the way happened. Here was Spring, and I opened windows when I could if Ma wasn't looking. Alf began digging the garden over, making trenches, planting things, mainly vegetables. He works hard at that sort thing when the mood takes him. Once when we was younger he devoted six weekends on the trot to sieving the whole lot of it, big though it is, getting every stone bigger than a small pea out of it. (My Jesus, Alf, I thought but had the tact not to say, if you were half as keen down factory they'd make you foreman and then train you for manager.) He's really good at gardening, mind, he really cares about it -- but not about walking great red half-circles of earth into the kitchen when he comes in for his cuppa, that he can't be trained out of.
Dave helped him now and then, when he chose. Alf never asked for his help, never refused it once given. He'll take example from his dad, and instruction, over that sort of thing, which he's never done in any other aspect since he was about three. It's a great pity that he's never had no real respect for his father; contrariwise it's a great pity that Alf's never had the qualities that would earn it. But you can't change nature, can you?
As for what my Alf thinks about our Dave, I just don't know, he's not one to speak of his feelings. I reckon he regards him just as you might a storm of a tree, something you can't do anything about, but I don't know.
Pask was often visiting me now. Her grandfather the painter's very famous -- within the village, if you get me. Such a strong-built, handsome man, even now that he's old, that people say, pity his daughter and granddaughter aren't as good-looking as what he is, which really annoys me, silly though that may sound. About this time I found myself answering back sharpish anyone who criticised Pask or Angelikka or even 'ppor, dead Hetty' in my presence just as much as if they were my own family (very thing I've always laughed to myself in private for Ma doing, but there you are.) Hetty's often called 'poor, dead Hetty' because of the manner of her going; lots of people are dead but she's, like, extra-dead because of the manner of here going.
I was changing. Losing one kind of bitterness. So I'm more-or-less poor and haven't ever been anywhere grand except to lay the table and wash up? So what? Up to now, I had come to realise, I'd taken other people's low opinion, better-off, into my heart. I didn't need to fight against it by blustering 'I'm as good as you' no more. I knew it was true.*
Near forty isn't too old to grow up, then. But that coming summer I was going to need all the grownupness I could dredge.*
We chog along a bit too easily down here in the West, I sometimes feel. We bear with most things, suck up good and bad like a sponge. And what do we accomplish by that? Just qualifying ourselves, more or less, to do the same thing all over again. We're tough, see, even the weakest of us (Ma, for instance, though not as tough as she likes to think.) And we know it and we're proud of it; anyone who calls us 'humble' - wishful thinking! - needs his head read.
But when frightful things happen and you don't know how to deal with them....
I'd stopped dreaming now. I think I had anyway. But dreams, they sneak in, and no-one knows where they come from, when your guard is down. They can also force themselves on you when your awake, which is called 'hallucination.' Not nice, not pleasant at all. Here's my first:
Well, it wasn't anything much. I'd had an hour off from work unexpected. This is how it came about. The weather that afternoon, about four, suddenly got as dark as if it was nearly night, and rain bucketed down, hitting the pavement quite a bang, then jumping up again. It was only too obvious, no-one in their right mind was going to come out shopping, not even for necessities. We'd only had two customers the last hour. Everything looked odd; the neon striplights were making the shelves and the counters and the tills and the fruit and veg and newspapers etc. etc. shine queer - as if they were plastic copies hollow inside, or in some other way made of some substance they weren't made of really.*It was just Manesh and me there. That's not what a shop is for. Now I was due in at nine the next morning too, and it had been sunny earlier so I hadn't got anything with me to keep the rain off on the way to the bus-stop. Manesh very decently told me to take the van home (and bring it back tomorrow morning too, he said).*It was specially decent because all their money, such as it is, is in their stock -- their flat upstairs is awful scruffy, with a tin can hammered flat in one place covering a hole in the floorboards. And this van, though it kept me dry, is nothing to write home about - small and smelly, white outside though with brown bits. Anyway, I drove home, parked on the street, dashed in quick through the hammering wet, and the house felt really hot, which I suppose by comparison with outside it really was. Damp too - it wasn't of course, even a twelve-foot dash had got me pretty wet. And as I went through our little hall, I nearly blacked out. Or greyed out, it began to creep in from the edges in swirling drops. I needed to feel the bannisters just for a second or two to support myself before I went on (straight into the kitchen, not round by the front room and the dining room, I wanted to make myself a hot drink.) And in the kitchen I found --
Well, nothing very frightening in itself.
Just a short, rather dignified woman in a grey dress. Very good posture. She obviously thought well of herself and expected others to too, so straight she was. Now unlike Blowse I'm not very good at noticing that style of thing, but her dress, well, uit was old-fashioned and very good quality. Short, curly, darkish hair gone partly grey. Unremarkable kindof person, completely normal, except ---
Except that somehow although I was seeing her there I knew in my heart somehow that she wasn't there at all. (No, not in my heart, in my EARS somehow.) I mean, you go in your own kitchen and see a total stranger, it's obvious someone else in the house had let her in. But no-one had, I knew that, Ma wouldn't have, surely. Now she hadn't called out as she usually does when I came in, even though I've almost never brought the van home before, she must have been asleep -- or I would have thought that if I wasn't not so much frightened as mystified by this lady.
So there she is, standing by the gas stove as if she's going to light it. And she don't take no notice of me, she doesn't look round -- or up, I'm taller.
I'm a bit put out. Whoever she is, she's a trespasser. I haven't invited her in and neither's anyone else's. But I won't turn my back on her. Just in case. She stands there by the oven, and I stands there just inside the doorway as if rooted.
I gets the idea quite soon that though I know that she's there, she don't know that I am, or even where she is. As far as I can tell, anyway, she can't see me atall.
But for all that, for some private reason of her own, she turns slow toward me. And I hear myself taking a strong quick breath in through my teeth, like a sigh going backwards I realise now that that's my own way of strengthening myself for whatever's coming.
(And where is what I rewrote yesterday? This is the THIRD time that has happened?)
(Only advice obtainable by Google was, go to Wordpress instead. When I did I got into more difficulties. So here I am on Sunday about to rewrite what I wrote and lost on Friday.)
*And there she isn't any more. I'm lookingn through where she was and seeing the dark sky through the back window, and the garden soaking, sloppy with puddles, and hearing the rain nattering and spattering and clattering down. I'm a bit shaken, not very, and I puts the electric kettle on to make myself some instant, and sits on the kitchen stool, thinking: Did she have a face? Was it the bare skull? Or even writhing worms? No, it wasn't, I decide, I mustn't frighten myself by thinking up something hideous, I just didn't see her face and that was all.
I'm afraid this was another of those times (the few times, but they're getting more frequent) when I helped myself to Blowse's 'secret' brandy and slopped it in my coffee.
As I'm drinking Ma shouts out a word or two which I can't catch, possibly my name, maybe something other. And I go in to her, and she's still asleep -- maybe her being unconscious had something to do with....well, whoever or whatever it was.
How does all this FIT? Where's the PATTERN? Answer; it don't. I couldn't explain it then, I can't explain it now. Scientists, I've learned from Dave, who are very proud of being trained and meticulous observers, when they've got an experimental result that seems completely out of step, label it 'an anomoly' and neglect it. Yes, out it goes on its little sweet fanny! So their not as different from the rest of us as they'd like to think! (NB I must save every single page separately, as I did just now. Whether anyone else can access this blog I just don't know.) So I wanted to put all this out of my mind, and of course I couldn't. The more I thought of doing it, the more it rooted itself in. Was I mad, or what? I really didn't think so! Stressed, of course, but that's different from mad! And who could I talk to about what had just happened? Old Doctor Ostlethwaite? No, he'd been far too dry and sane and rational! You can't imagine that he's ever seen a ghost, can you?
Later that evening, I did something a bit naughty. After I'd cooked my menfolk their teas, of course, I'm far too well-trained not to know that any personal concerns of a Wife-and-Mother must come late in the queue after that primary duty, of course! Maybe it was against the law, too. A policeman's daughter is always very concerned with obeying the law, at least I am, dunno about Blowse. Now Manesh had given me spoken permission to take his precious van home and back, not to do what I in fact did, drive the 40 miles into Bishoprick to and from, and if there'd been an accident it would have looked pretty bad, though there wasn't of course, his insurance company could have made it look pretty bad, (which nowadays they're very, very good at doing, the dishonest lot.) On the way back I intended to put in enough petrol to cover what I'd used - and no-one looks at a mileometer. Anyway, I'd decided to go and see this Benedick Hunsden vicar fellow. Part way there I thought, bit of a cheek to turn up unannounced even if he is a vicar, so I stopped at a 'phone box -- there were still plenty then -- and asked if it was okay.
/It was, and I needed to get things off my chest, but whether it was helpful other ways, that time, I'm not so sure.
/They've got a very shabby dull-looking house, which must be the biggest for miles - little grey places all jammed-up together in jammed-up streets is the style in their part of the town, indeed it is for a lot of Bishoprick. It's hilly there, but not much, it's, I suppose, the furthest side of the Demnets. Anyway, he sat me down - if he thought about it at all he must have thought it was my own van, there's no sign on it - and he (and his wife too, which surprised me, she's a very dark-haired cuddly woman, short too, which I don't think I've said before that he is) listened intently.
/It was still raining outside, and darkening as if it was two hours later. Afterwards, 'Look, I don't exactly believe in ghosts...' he began. 'Me neither,' I said a bit too quick. He said that you must always look first for a 'rational explanation.' I'd said I didn't have a mac with me, he said, and I'd been driving, which takes very little energy, just moving your arms and legs a very little. And eyes, I thought. Then I'd stood up sudden and run as fast I could, but not far, and stood more or less still. So my heart had suddenly had to find bang bang extra energy and next it had had to calm down again. That was why I'd almost greyed out, the blood supply to my head had part failed. So I'd not been fully conscious for a few moments, like. That was why I'd thought I'd seen someone who wasn't really there.
Yes, that was reassuring, and I drove back after quite contentedly. The clouds had partly cleared and the setting sun made the still wet road brilliant, which looked beautiful but required especial care. Only later on that night I thought, hang about, his explanation was, as far as it went, a good one, but it didn't cover the most important single aspect, what I had actually seen, the woman. Why a woman and not a tiger or a Martian or something? Why that particular woman? And wasn't she like -- you've guessed it! -- 'poor, dead Hetty' that I was hearing a lot about/far too much about, in them days?
/And I was a bit affronted too by the trespass of it -- this is my house, and the kitchen is my own particular place within it, it may not be much of a kingdom but I'm the queen of it, how DARE this strange woman barge in uninvited? Also, I got to think later,Benedick (and Katharine too, that's his wife) had made too little of it, 'there, there, it's alright, don't fuss' kind of thing like I'd soothe little Dave after his nightmares years back. 'Tell Mummy what you saw,' I'd say, and he would, haltingly, and I'd listen and say 'That was nothing' and then -- in my own case, course I don't know what them two did later that evening -- when I got into our own bed I'd be staring at the ridged patterns on the ceiling and lying there awqake afraid to go off to sleep, repeating and repeating to myself what the kid had told me.
*Maybe I really had seen a ghost. It could even be that in some way she'd picked me out and was trying not very successful to contact me to...well, to do what? help her in some way maybe. Maybe it was all just imagination (but that word, 'imagination', it's great at seeming to explain what it don't explain at all.)
*What it wasn't, anyway, this experience, was nothing. Benedick and Katharine were wrong there. On my solemn oath I'm saying it really was important -- how it was I don't know.*
Well, this is anothing thing I haven't really got words to tell you. Nor even to think about properly. And a queer thought came to me: here I am, I'm Lize, I'm in my house at 12 St. Osgyth's Close, Belker Tap, Demnetshire, World, and inside my body I'm locked up safe inside my head. Or am I? How on earth would I know if I wasn't?
*Another queer occurence. And this one I don't know if it really happened or if it came to me from outside during my sleep. When I woke up the morning after I had my nighty all ruched up under my shoulders. When I woke up in the night everything looked grey. That was our stairway as I was walking down it, I can't remember getting out of bed.*In the hall I turned round and went into the kitchen, which is our biggest downstairs room as I expect you know. I wasn't really thirsty but I sortof knew that I wouldn't get back to sleep unless I did somethingorother, and the most obvious thing was to help myself to a drink. Milk. Now the
streetlight I've mentioned before shines up the alley between us and 13 and it reflects, but not much, from the wall there through the frosted glass in the door, so it was just about possible to see there, even though there was no moon. And the light in the fridge came on when I opened it, of course.*Well, I do come down in the night now and then, it's not really so rare in itself. So I'm holding the milkbottle cold in one hand and I suddenly realises I'm as naked as the day I was born, which I've never been anywhere except for the bedroom and the bathroom, I'm a decent girl, me, as they all keep on saying, unlike you-know-who, but even Blowse wouldn't wander about the house abso-blooming-lutely starkers, there are lower bounds, even for her, which she just won't pass. But I found myself thinking, a bit surprised at myself, what the Hell, if Blowse comes down it's another woman, if Alf does, he IS my husband after all, and if Dave was to come in, which was even more unlikely, I'd hear him on the path or his keys jangle and would have time to hide./ And I nearly think, though it seems rude to, how pleasant it feels, and not having to worry about clothes brushing up against you./I can't remember that the flags of the kitchen floor were smooth and cold against my feet, which is a point against it's really happening really. But I wasn't paying attention to that. Anyway, I'm about to get myself a glass down from the hanging cupboard.
(Continued on second 'Down Twelve' blog.)
No comments:
Post a Comment