An End to Autumn (10 page)

She thought that it would have been splendid to have lived in that castle when it had been in good condition; it had such a commanding view across the straits, though now it was inhabited only by birds, and littered with empty beer bottles. The breeze from the sea blew in her hair and freshened her face so that she felt suddenly young and strong again.

“That’s where I stay,” said Mrs Murphy pointing.

“Where do I stay?” Mrs Mallow asked.

“Over there. On that hill. Can you see it?”

“Yes, I can see it,” said Mrs Mallow, realising that from this height and distance the house looked small and unimportant. It was just another house among many, not specially large or impressive.

Mrs Murphy was staring down at what appeared to be the remains of a bra. “Disgusting,” she said, and then,

“They say that that Duke was connected with the Queen and used to attend her at the Coronation.”

In the distance Mrs Mallow could see the smoke rising from chimneys, and a train winding like a green snake through the hills, sunlight sparkling from its windows. It was as if her troubles, her niggling worries, had all gone, and she could see them like tiny houses diminished on that clear dry autumn day, which framed the scene below her like a picture hung in a railway carriage.

“There’s a lot of shit here,” said Mrs Murphy irritably, looking down at her shoes and rubbing them vigorously against the green wet grass. “That’s the one thing you get among these old castles.”

And Mrs Mallow burst out laughing and she couldn’t stop. Mrs Murphy gazed at her in amazement, and she started to laugh too, and suddenly the two of them, like two maniacs in a roofless house, swayed together, laughing, Mrs Mallow’s laughter being increased by her friend’s comic splay-legged appearance, against that magnificent landscape, and Mrs Murphy’s equally increased by the sight of this normally quiet woman in her brown coat convulsed and rocking backwards and forwards, sometimes having to steady herself by placing one hand on the broken wall in front of her. Eventually they stopped and wiped their eyes; Mrs Murphy made another fierce effort to clean her shoes: and then they walked down the brae to the promenade.

11

“W
HAT EXACTLY ARE
you trying to do?” said Tom to Vera, “inviting that bloody woman to the house. You know she’s practically crazy. None of the pupils like her. What put it into your head anyway?”

“I was going to do a project on Joseph and his brothers,” said Vera, “and I thought she might be able to give me some ideas, some books.”

“But surely you didn’t have to invite her to the house. For dinner. I don’t understand you. You never invited people before. And she’s such an old bag.”

Very put down her sewing and said quietly but firmly, “I don’t, as you say, invite many people to the house but I thought, among other things, that she might meet your mother.” Her eyes gazed blandly at him, blue as a doll’s.

“My mother!”

“Well, why not? She doesn’t meet anybody apart from that Mrs Murphy. She might have something in common with Ruth Donaldson. After all she’s quite religious. In fact …”

“In fact what?”

“I thought we might invite Mrs Murphy as well.”

Tom stared at her in astonishment. What on earth was she up to? Mrs Murphy, his mother and Ruth Donaldson.

“After all,” Vera continued calmly, “it’s you yourself who were saying that I was an elitist and that I was only interested in intellectuals. I’m sure your mother and Mrs Murphy would be quite happy to have dinner with Ruth Donaldson. She’s not a monster, you know. She’s just a lonely person.”

Tom, who felt that he had been outmanœuvred but wasn’t exactly sure how or why he should have been, said, “It worries me when I don’t understand what you’re up to. Why couldn’t you just have invited Mrs Murphy to meet my mother? Why that woman?”

“I told you. She’s lonely. She might have something in common with the two of them. I believe that she herself looked after her mother for a while.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Tom. “And how exactly did you find that out? I thought she hardly spoke to anyone.”

“Well, she spoke to me. She was quite talkative in fact. All she was wanting was someone to talk to. She is very pleased to have been asked. I don’t think she’s been out for ages.”

“I can believe that,” said Tom viciously. “And am I supposed to attend the dinner as well?”

“Naturally you’re invited,” And Vera smiled coolly.

“I see.”

Quite without thinking Tom looked up at the pictures on the walls and said, “I’m beginning to get fed up with Hockney. Why don’t we get some other people for a change? Some of the Dutch painters, for instance.”

“If you like,” Vera conceded, still sewing.

“Right then. We’ll do that.”

After a pause during which Vera’s head was still bent over her embroidery, he said, “It was nice of Mr and Mrs Stewart to write to my mother and say how much they liked the house.”

“Yes, wasn’t it?”

“It’s a child of six they have, isn’t it?”

“I think so. I think that’s what they said.”

“I wonder why they’re not buying their own home. Why they’re renting one.”

“Perhaps they can’t afford one at the moment.”

“Perhaps. But he seems to have a good job.”

“I had gathered he was an accountant, yes.”

“Maybe they’re saving up. And after all they are getting the house very reasonably.”

“Yes.”

There was another longer pause before Tom spoke again:

“My mother seems to have taken a liking to TV all of a sudden.”

“I think she doesn’t want to come into the room while we’re working. It’s nothing more than that.”

“Perhaps you’re right. That bloody R.E. woman.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I only said that I don’t like that R.E. woman. Still, now that you’ve invited her we can’t very well say that she can’t come.”

“It would certainly be awkward.”

“I understand,” Tom continued relentlessly, “that she didn’t talk much to the women in the staffroom. How did you get so friendly with her all of a sudden?”

“I felt sorry for her, and I talked to her at coffee. And, as I said, I want to do this project. There is no deep plot, you know.” She raised her eyes and looked directly into his. “There isn’t,” she repeated. “Any more than there was when you took your mother to church.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing particular. I don’t think there was any deep plot in your taking your mother to church.”

“Why should the thought have entered your mind in the first place?”

“I’ve just been telling you that I don’t think there was.”

“Semantics,” said Tom vigorously. “What have the two things to do with each other?”

“Nothing. Did I say that they had anything to do with each other? I said that in neither case was there any evidence of any deep plot. They were spontaneous gestures.”

“Mine wasn’t spontaneous,” said Tom firmly. “Mine wasn’t spontaneous at all. I thought it all out carefully. In the old days I wouldn’t have gone with her but now I would and have. It isn’t that I believe in church or in the usefulness of what the minister is saying. What I am affirming by that gesture as you call it is that the human being is more important than a religion one doesn’t believe in. It’s not even a question of selling one’s soul since I don’t believe that one has a soul to sell. It is simply saying that human happiness is more important than an hour or so spent in a museum. It is as simple as that.”

“Or as complicated. And what about your own happiness?”

“My happiness? It doesn’t affect my happiness one way or another.”

“In that case.”

“In that case what?”

“In that case there is nothing more to be said.”

Tom was silent for a while and then he began again, “I don’t understand exactly what it is you’re saying.”

“If you don’t, then everything is all right, isn’t it?”

I loved her, I still love her, he was thinking, and with sudden pain he remembered the two of them once driving out into the country in his car on a cold windy day. She had got out of the car to stand on a bridge looking down at a river which was snarling among broken rocks, and he had sat in his seat gazing at her in her brown coat with the fur collar, as she stood hunched at the wall staring down. She had looked so vulnerable, so small, as if she were a schoolgirl absorbed in a deep juvenile dream, while the water flowed past. Another time they had fallen asleep in a lay-by after driving back from Edinburgh and when, after he had wakened, he had gazed at her defenceless face he had felt the same intensity of protective feeling as if she were a fragile being that depended utterly on him. And now again the river was rushing among the hidden rocks and bearing him uncomprehendingly away with it.

“Perhaps it’ll be all right,” he said at last. “Perhaps she really is lonely.” And he felt that he had been uncharitable, unjust. Who knew what went on on the depths of people’s minds? Who knew what miseries this woman had endured? Maybe life had been hard on her, it wasn’t, after all, natural to be unsociable. In general it could be said that people wanted to be liked if it was at all possible. And, as Vera had said, she wasn’t a monster. No human being was a monster, or if they became monsters they weren’t to blame. If one didn’t believe that how could one continue as a teacher?

Vera is stronger than me, he thought, and not for the first time. There she sat sewing as if it all had been decided, as if an agreement had been arrived at, as if the embroidery were now all that mattered. She was right, he had surrendered an intellectual principle, in favour of the human, and why shouldn’t he extend the same charity, if it was charity, to Ruth Donaldson Anything else would be inconsistent. He wondered if Vera had actually thought all that out, if she had put him in a box from the very beginning, and his mind had been too blunt to see it. Perhaps as well as being stronger than he was, she was also more intelligent, and it was the latter possibility that troubled him more. Perhaps her mind really was clearer than his, and she had seen more deeply than he had.

He went and sat beside her on the sofa and kissed the tip of her ear gently. “It will be all right,” he said, “it might be a good idea after all.”

She put down her sewing and replied, “I think it will. Why shouldn’t it be?”

Their lips touched faintly. Directly ahead of him he could see the picture by Hockney of the blue staring swimming pool and he shivered. How could he ever have surrendered to fashion so completely as to have such a picture, so blatantly fierce, in his living room. Obviously the Dutch painters were the best. Their world was healthier, more human, less neurotic. And there was more light in them, clear and intellectual, falling about the domestic trivia of rooms with a mercy close to atonement.

12

T
HE LITTLE GIRL
using a very long blackboard ruler for a stick hobbled about the floor, and talked to herself in senile tones.

“No one comes to visit me. No one ever comes to visit me. I sit here day after day and no one comes.” She limped over to the black imaginary mirror of the blackboard and examined her face in it.

“I’m getting old. I can’t get to the shops any more.” She sat down on the high desk and forgetfully swung her legs, then steadied them.

“I’m tired.” She thought for a minute and then said, “I’ll go and make myself a cup of tea.”

She got down from the desk, placing her legs, with the white socks on them on the floor and hobbled over to the plug in the wall to which she plugged an imaginary kettle, and waited.

“Sugar. I forgot about the sugar.” She hobbled over to the cupboard and taking from it an invisible sugar bowl placed it on a desk.

“Milk,” she said, and went over to the cupboard again.

“A cup.”

“A spoon.”

She walked back and forwards from the cupboard to the desk, and finally was satisfied.

She gazed down at the desk as if into a mirror and said, “I’m so old.” She went over to the wall and returned with her imaginary kettle while tapping on the floor with her stick.

She poured imaginary water into an imaginary cup, put sugar and milk into it and then an imaginary tea bag, and then sat down on the high chair, placing the imaginary cup, which she stirred with an imaginary spoon, on the desk. She stared straight ahead of her while she was drinking.

“She’s good,” Vera was thinking. “I wish I could do that in so uninhibited a manner. But there was a stiffness in her nature which would not allow her to enter the mind and body of another person as this girl was doing. What direct innocent knowledge this little girl was showing: perhaps she had seen her granny and was imitating her.

The little girl had come to a halt in her little drama, not knowing what to do next.

She sat on the high seat awaiting instructions.

Vera stepped forward and stood in front of the class. “Someone is visiting you,” she suggested. “Your son and his wife are visiting you. You are old. They want to put you in a home. Who wants to take the parts of the son and daughter?” Hands shot up: they all wanted to take part, they all wanted to be other than they were. She, on the contrary, was always herself, she wasn’t a theatrical person, she didn’t want to lose her sense of what she was. If the children had the sense or wisdom to ask me to take part, she thought, I wouldn’t be able to do it, I would be too self conscious. And she loved them for their eagerness, their freshness, their willingness to obey her, their clean spotless faces. What lay behind these faces, what endless thoughts and resources? Her own mother would have been good at this, her careless theatrical mother, who had shone haphazardly on her in a colourful flurry like the sun passing in and out of her life. But her father would have been no good at it.

She picked a boy and a girl. They went to the door, knocked and the old lady told them to come in, her childish voice quavering.

“What do you want?” she said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No thanks,” they said almost in unison.

They stood about awkwardly and then the son said, “How are you, mother?” The two children stared at each other across the classroom floor.