An End to Autumn (11 page)

“I’m fine,” said the old woman. “No I’m not fine. I fell.”

“Fell?”

“I fell when I was going down the stairs.”

There was a pause.

“Mother, we were thinking that you should go away. This place is too …” the boy sought for a word, “too hard for you.” He was not satisfied with the word and looked at Vera who said nothing but simply gazed back at him expressionlessly, neutrally.

“This place is not hard for me,” said the old lady, her childish eyes blazing. She began to hammer the floor with her ruler. “This place is not too hard for me. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not.”

“But it is, mother. If you’re falling downstairs. I think you should go to a home.” The words came out with childish bluntness, without prevarication or disguise, with such a sudden brutal directness that Vera herself was suddenly shaken.

The child had forgotten that she was an old lady and was hammering on the floor in a tantrum.

The son said obsequiously and cunningly, “It would be for your own good,” and his childish wife, standing beside him in her navy-blue uniform, repeated, “It would be for your own good.”

“I won’t go,” said the old lady angrily. “I will phone my other son in Blackpool.” Where had that come from, Vera wondered, why Blackpool?

The old lady hobbled over to a corner of the room where there was a large map of France and picked up an imaginary phone:

“Is that James? I should like to speak to my son James.” She smiled triumphantly at the other two who were watching her, the boy rubbing one leg against the other.

“Is that you, James? Can I come and stay with you in Blackpool? I don’t want to go to a home.”

She appeared to listen and then turned back to the others and said, “He doesn’t want me in Blackpool. He says his wife is pregnant.” Again the word so nakedly spoken shocked Vera and she almost intervened but against her better instincts did nothing. “This is getting out of control,” she thought. “What are they going to say next? What?”

The old woman hobbled back to the high desk and the son thrust at her cruelly. “You see? You’ll have to go to a home. You can’t stay here. You’re always falling down.”

“I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. I fell down once but I’m not always falling down.” And she screamed a high-pitched scream.

“That’s too loud,” said Vera breaking the spell. “You’ll disturb the teacher in the next room.” They stared at her as if they had come out of a dream. “More quietly,” she said. Why couldn’t they do what they were told? Why must they always take advantage? Why couldn’t they be like herself, obedient, keeping to the script?

The silence prolonged itself. “Well, go on,” she said, “what are you waiting for?”

But they couldn’t at first quite get back into the rhythm which they had earlier established. It was as if they had returned to being themselves again, and they couldn’t resume their ageing flesh.

“I think you should go to a home,” said the boy without conviction.

“No,” said the old lady.

They were becalmed, not knowing how to proceed.

“You say to her,” said Vera in a cold calm voice, “that she just has to go. You tell her that. There is no other way.”

“You have to go to a home,” said the son, “there is no other way.”

Suddenly the old lady began to cry. “But you’re my son,” she wailed, “why do I have to go to a home?”

“It’s because we have six children and we can’t take you,” said the wife mercilessly, neat and clean in her uniform.

“I could stay with you,” said the old lady.

“No,” said the wife, “we have six children. And two of them sleep in the attic, already. And the house is full of toys and books. And anyway my father won’t allow you.” She stopped suddenly realising what she had said, and then added, “My husband … he won’t allow you.”

The old lady began to talk to herself, “After all I did for you. I wouldn’t put you in a home. If you were old I wouldn’t put you in a home. I would give you a room. I would give you even a small room.” And she gazed down from her high chair into a small room imaginary and distant. “It would have dolls in it. And books. And a rocking chair,” she added with sudden inspiration.

“You have to go,” said the son, now totally obsessed. “You’re always falling down and you’ll have to go. You’re always crying all the time. People are fed up of your crying. You’re making everybody sad. And I have to catch the bus every Thursday to come and see you. I’m fed up visiting you. You’re too old.”

His wife nodded in agreement but the old woman fiercely replied: “I’m staying here. You can’t put me out. This is my house. Go away. Go away from here.”

“That’s right,” said Vera to herself. “You tell them to go away. You tell them to go away, you stay where you are. Don’t let them put you out. You stay and read your books, don’t go out of the house for them.”

The honesty of children, Vera thought. “I have to take the bus to see you every Thursday.” When we grow up we hide everything. Why can’t we be as honest as the children? You’re trying to take my husband away from me, old woman, you’re making him pity you. Perhaps you never had a break-in at all, perhaps it was all an invention. You’re trying to get your son back, that’s what you’re doing, old woman. You may not even realise it yourself but it’s what you are doing all the same. And he for his part goes on with his claptrap about the church. You on the other hand have the defenceless cunning and the selfishness of the old. You’re playing on his better instincts, you’re making him into a slushy humanitarian without principles. All these trains, fathers waving out of the smoke, you’re putting that into his mind. The days of the tenements are over, this world we’re living in is not that world any longer. It’s not a world of people huddling together for warmth like cattle in the cold, drinking, fornicating, gossiping at corners. We are all orphans just like Jane Eyre. We are all sitting at our own little table in a large draughty world. You are betraying, Tom, the strictness of the intellect.

As she looked at the imaginary stage, where the children were still fixed in their poses, she knew that it wasn’t a stage at all, it was a schoolroom floor, bare and unpolished and ancient, not the wooden O but the wooden world, the world which is the world of all of us, where our poor footsteps echo.

“You make me come here on the bus every Thursday.” Their eyes, pagan and fierce and innocent and sincere, gazed at her like the eyes of the doll that she had kept in order to … in order to do what? To populate the nursery forever abandoned, or forever kept? The doll which was a link with her childhood, with her mother and father, or which was a substitute for both? Jane out in the rain and the storm, orphaned, alone, in the reality of the nineteenth century and not in any theatre.

“All right then,” said the son, “all right then, you stay where you are. But I won’t be back on the bus on Thursday. You have to learn to live alone.” Her mind was beating remorselessly and steadily like a white stick against the floor, like a white stalk.

The play was over. The actors had all gone. The stick had become a ruler again. The children had turned back into children again, her loved obedient ones, sitting upright in their desks, so clean, so submissive. And her bowels were moved with love for them. My bowels are moved as in the Bible, in the Old Testament. They are the promise and the bond, the rainbow in the sky. If only … if only …

“Now,” she said, “you may read silently for the rest of the period.” If only …

13

T
OM STOOD IN
front of the class, the copy of
The Waste Land
in his hand while directly in front of him through the window he could see the rowan tree, slim and light, still bearing its berries. It seemed to him that he was in the wrong place, that there was some other place where he could more profitably be at that moment, though he couldn’t think where it was. Not certainly with his legs curled up in a narrow canoe, not climbing dark stairs to a lustful rendezvous, with a bald spot in the middle of his forehead.

“Eliot,” he said, “is undoubtedly one of our greatest poets,” and the words echoed hollowly in the room. One of our greatest poets, what did that mean? It was like saying, Tide is certainly one of our best washing powders, its suds billow more fluently and more abundantly than those of other washing powders.

“He achieves his effects by oblique means,” he continued, “and in this is different from for instance …” Well, who for instance? Cowper? Burns? Thomas Campbell? Dorothy Hemans? And again the image came into his mind, sharp and clear, of that old woman, fat and red faced, walking down the road by herself, her big red hands clutching a shopping bag, while all the time she was talking to herself, a big waddling doll, now and again stopping in front of shop windows and looking into them as if they were mirrors.

They were all—all the girls, fresh-faced and earnest—writing it down in their notebooks.
Eliot is certainly one of our greatest poets
. If he is not one of our greatest poets then what is he? What to be precise is he? “Nothing. What is that noise under the door? Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing.” There is a sense in which the rowan tree communicates joy, it returns every year, laden with its berries, indomitable, repetitive, its roots sunk in the earth, fighting for their place as once in the tenements people fought for their place, sang, laughed, cried, were alive, drunken, spontaneous, remarkable.

“Thus,” he continued, for their eyes were fixed on him as if he were their guru, their oracle. But what were they really thinking of, behind that bland apparently interested facade?

“Thus we have to consider what poetry is, and in what way or ways Eliot is a new kind of poet, a revolutionary poet. We have to wonder for instance why he is so esoteric” (no, better change that word) “difficult, why he returns again and again to books, preferring to quote rather than to …”

And while his mouth exuded words, his eyes, fixed on what was going on outside the window, saw a big yellow and blue machine with a long neck like that of a dinosaur scooping up earth and rubble from the road, and sitting in the machine was a young man who was leaning forward, naked and brown above the waist, to see what the machine was doing. And it suddenly occurred to Tom to ask himself what the young man was thinking of, what his thoughts truly were at that particular moment. With great intensity he tried to put his own mind into that of the young man, and was repulsed again and again by a blinding darkness, like a star so faint that it cannot pierce the night. He made attempt after attempt to think of himself as bare and tanned in that machine as it dug up the road on an autumn day, but he could feel nothing, not the controls, not the breeze on his bare back, not the sun flickering warmly off the steel. And it came to him with utter certainty, as he watched the young man and the other one who was holding on to a bouncing pneumatic drill, that he didn’t have any idea at all what the lad was thinking of, that he was as distant from the world of the young man as he was from the world of the pupils he was teaching, that never again would he be able to understand that world and not simply understand it but feel it and rest within it, happy and negligent, as if he really belonged to it naturally and without effort.

“Eliot,” he heard himself saying, “can be compared with Picasso for he uses the same techniques. In the same way as in a Picasso painting we can see apparently unrelated images, such as heads of horses, candles, faces with three eyes, so we can find in Eliot as well images which apparently seem set down at random and without order.” But what did they know about Picasso and in order to tell them about Picasso he would have to … There was no end to the complexity and interrelatedness of the world — everything in the world must be talked of in terms of everything else. Except perhaps for the rowan which we do not dare to see as it really is, the rowan tree which is definitely not a system of quotations, unless it was quoting itself endlessly, but certainly not quoting all the other rowan trees that had lived through summer and autumn until they had died and been renewed again.

What was that young man thinking of as he so proudly and arrogantly manœuvred his machine along the road, looking back now and again, and whistling as he did so to make sure that the machine was under his control, that it was gathering together all the rubbish and depositing it where it should be deposited, that its long neck was digging into the ground as a swan into water, that it was fulfilling its proper function in the repair of the road over which so many cars would soon pass to their proper destinations. And the young man was thinking, must be thinking. Well, what were his thoughts? Was he thinking that last night he had managed after all to get that girl without mercy, that he had finally wiped the smile off her face, that he lay afterwards in his bed sleeping the sleep of the tired, and that today he was whistling because he had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish? Or was he thinking only of the machine itself, of the autumn day, of the breeze on his back? And how did the world appear to him? Certainly not distant, certainly not a series of quotations, but immediate rather, the machine immediate, the air immediate and cool, the work he was doing immediate and necessary, his hands there in the actual world clutching, manœuvring, so that if he had been a poet his poetry would have been immediate and without theory, he would grasp the real world as directly and roughly as the machine was doing.

But stop a moment, Tom told himself. For he recognised that he was doing what Eliot had done, that is associating the young man wholly with sex, the young man carbuncular, climbing the dark stairs for a quick piece of intercourse; that to him as to Eliot the young man was not a real being but a caricature, not to be distinguished clearly from the machine, someone who was not really worth taking notice of, someone who had not been seen, for it was assumed that he had nothing important to say or feel. And there in front of him, what were these girls thinking of as they took their notes. What was their world—the desks immediate, the pen or pencil immediate, their clothes immediate and in fact they far more able to approach that young man and talk to him as he whistled from his lordly position on that machine than he himself was, who once had come from a world not all that different from that of the young man.