An End to Autumn (15 page)

“I have failed to understand nothing. Mr Mallow. It is you who have failed to understand.”

“Not at all, dear Ruth, not at all. On the contrary, if I may be so bold as to say so, on the contrary. Here we have Mrs Murphy, Irish Catholic, and a good singer and member of the human race. She gives, Miss Donaldson, she gives. And you. What do you give? Nothing. That’s the difference. She is alive, dear Ruth, and you, dear Ruth, are dead. Listen to the wind and the rain. Do you hear it? The storm. Into the storm we all go, some more happily than others. More humanly. I speak the truth in wine, I am the Dostoyevskyan fool. And you are the cold idiot. You know nothing and you understand nothing and you drag your unhappiness with you like an old skirt, and you impose it on others. That’s all you do, dear Ruth. Come on speak the truth. Or would you prefer to dance?”

He got to his feet and linking arms with his mother and Mrs Murphy waltzed them about the room, and then sank down on the sofa again.

“That’s right,” said Mrs Murphy her eyes glancing mischievously. “In Ireland we would give you the bread from our lips. We would bring you the water from the well. We would bring you the peat for the fire. And we would bring you the song for your throat.”

“Did you hear that,” said Tom excitedly, “did you hear that, mavourneen?”

“And now,” he said, getting unsteadily to his feet, “I am about to take Mrs Murphy home. I’m going to run Mrs Murphy home and I’m going to leave you here, Miss Donaldson, for a while.”

Staggering about the room he managed to get Mrs Murphy her fur coat and led her to the car past the bathroom whose door was open and in which there sat the staring doll with the intense blue eyes.

In her bowlegged duck-like way, Mrs Murphy scuttled through the wind and rain towards the car whose door he opened quickly and then drove off erratically among the many lights till he had deposited her at her door. In a sudden quietness he said, “I hope you enjoyed your evening, Mrs Murphy.”

“Fine, Mr Mallow, just fine,” she said, and then she was out of the car and in the close, and he waved to her as she turned round once only, and he knew that she probably would never be in his house again. So he waved once more, slightly drunkenly, and turned the car in a whirl of spray towards the house. Arriving, he opened the door of the car, and after springing through the rain and wind and entering the living room he saw only the two women there, his mother having gone, Ruth Donaldson’s head bent towards his wife’s white dress, as the two of them half sat half lay on the sofa beside the table which was littered with bottles and glasses.

He rushed over to Ruth Donaldson, dragged her away, and pushed her from his wife who gazed up at him with a triumphant face. He rushed Ruth Donaldson along the hall and out the door into the wind and rain, banging it solidly behind her, and then walked slowly back to the living room. In a sudden access of what might have been rage or despair or desire he thrust himself on top of his wife, pulling viciously at her dress till he had got it up and over her knees. In a brutal silence they fought for mastery, he bending his mouth over hers like a beak, the two of them fighting all over the sofa in a pulsating gasping combat, till he had finally pinned her to the floor to which they had rolled, forgetful even that his mother might come in, and entered her as she suddenly quietened, as she put her arms around his neck, as she pulled him down on top of her, and they came together in a fiercer communion than they had ever known.

2

W
HEN
T
OM ROSE
the following morning (which was a Saturday) he left Vera still in bed, curled up almost in a foetal position under the bedclothes. His head heavy and sore he wandered into the living room where the curtains were still drawn, the table in the ghostly twilight crowded with glasses, and the cupboard whose door was open revealing the bottles of whisky and wine. He pulled the curtains aside, and looked out on a ravaged landscape, branches and leaves strewn on the ground in front of the house, pools of water glinting in a pale sun. He tidied the room and went into the kitchen where the plates and cutlery remained unwashed. He washed and dried them and then went into the bathroom to shave. The razor shook in his hand, his face, white and strained, seeming to repeat the appearance of the distraught landscape outside. Moon man, he thought, where is your Fisher King, shall you at least set your lands in order, this tumbler here, that soap there, that doll with the staring blue eyes in the other place, a constellation of trivia. Here in the mirror is my face, perturbed, lunar, shaken by its troubles. I have tidied my world till it is untidied again, till the next storm comes. With grim satisfaction he recalled the limping Miss Donaldson setting off into the night, while the branches plucked at her hair, and her warlock face (for he thought of her as half masculine) shook among the changing pools of water.

As he walked back to the living room he heard sounds from his mother’s room and knocked on the door. When he entered she was bent over a case.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m packing,” she replied standing up and looking at him. In the mirror he could see her face, wrinkled and old.

“Listen,” he said, his voice trembling, “you can’t do that. In any case there is no place to go. Let’s talk this over.”

“There is nothing to talk over,” she said stubbornly. “I shall have to go.”

“NO,” he heard himself shouting. “NO.”

“I have to go,” she repeated in a tired voice. “No one wants me here,” and her voice was whining and dull. “You know that.”

“You can’t go,” he said. “So you had better put all that back,” and in spite of himself he stared into the case noticing how old the clothes were, how much older than his wife’s silky ones. My heart is breaking, he thought, I can’t take any more of this, I have too much pity. I can’t be continually seeing people coming and going as if they were leaving on trains, I should have let things remain as they were from the beginning. I have made a mistake, I should never have brought her here at all. I should have thought less about principles, more about life.

“I don’t blame you,” said his mother quietly. “It’s not your fault. Don’t think I blame you.” But you blame me just the same, yes you blame me. How could you not? Is this another part of the drama, this setting out into the watery landscape towards the station, the rails, which my father once haunted. He is waiting for her there, silent, reproachful, in his cheap uniform as if directing her into the last station. There is a cloud of steam and he is standing in the middle of it, tiny, pitiful.

His mother’s whining voice grated through the room, “You’ve got your own life. It’s not my life. You’ve got your career. I don’t fit in here.”

My career. Straight as rails, climbing, climbing, leaving my father and mother there below, panting, distant, small. My career diminished and faded.

“You’re like your father. You want to keep the peace at all costs. That’s what you’re doing. He was the same. I often used to say to him, ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself?’ But he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to cause trouble. And what did he get from them at the end. Nothing. You’re just like him.”

I have to deal with you also, I have to understand you too, and I’m so tired, so desperately tired. So much pain in the world, so much understanding required, and I don’t have enough. Everyone has his own world, his antennae, crying, listen to me, pay attention to me, you are ignoring me.

“I know you wanted to help,” she said in the same whining voice. “I know that. I’m not blaming you.” They looked at each other across the ravaged landscape.

“You can’t go away today anyway,” he said. “The train will have gone by now.”

Not today. Give me time. I’ll work something out. Didn’t you know I was Mr Micawber, didn’t you know that?

“I never liked her anyway,” said his mother and he gazed at her as if he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

“Who?”

“Your wife. I never liked her. From the day I met her. She’s not your kind. She’s not our kind.”

What is she talking about? This mirror, what is it telling me, these two actors opening their mouths and speaking, what are they saying?

“I don’t understand her. She comes from a different background. She doesn’t understand.”

“Mother, she is my wife.”

“I know. Your father and I got on so well. Always.” And yet at the back of his mind were those other nights, days, when they hadn’t got on so well, when she had said to him. I’m tired of this flat, this slum, when are we going to get a new house, there’s no place to hang out clothes, the close is so dirty. Out of the tenement the voices came back to him with the pathos of early days, irrevocable, finished. What had he been thinking of? What had she been thinking of? What lies had they told each other?

“Leave it,” he pleaded, “for a while.” You can’t go out into the storm, not with that case, not with your hat on askew, not talking to trains in dead tenements.

She remained for a moment bent over her case and then said, “I’d thought you would have got some other wife, someone more like ourselves. Someone more ordinary.” And the pang went through him, a very fine intent needle. “I never told you before. You never came back much, did you? Not after you left. And yet I remember the days when we were so close, when I used to knit your socks for you.”

I remember, I remember. The laburnum among the tenements. Close against the sky. She is sly, she is pleading with me, by indirections, obliquely. Using old quotations. We are all alone, we are all using every weapon we have, every single armament. How did I not know this before, how could I have been so ignorant and naïve?

“Even the day of your wedding. I wasn’t in the photograph, it was that father and mother of hers. You didn’t even have a proper wedding. Not that I don’t like the father, but I can’t stand the mother, I never could.”

She sat on the bed in a pose reminiscent of someone he had once seen. What now was she demanding of him as she had demanded of him in the past? Remember I am not well, so don’t stay up late, your father has to go to his work in the morning.

“Remember,” she was saying, “that Mrs Murphy will spread this round. She looks harmless enough but do you think she won’t? All these people in the tenements are the same, you should know that. She’ll be telling them all about it, and you’ve got a position to keep up. You were always the same, taking people at their face value. She’s a gossip like everybody else and don’t you think different. And what about that Miss Donaldson? What is she going to say in the school? You don’t think of things like that.”

She stopped putting her things in the case and was speaking fluently and easily. “Everyone thinks I don’t know anything. Oh I can see it right enough, I can see what’s happening right enough. You disgraced yourself with that Mrs Murphy singing songs with her. What is she going to think of you? What respect will she give you, tell me that. There was an Irishwoman just like her in the tenement where we lived, a big fat woman who was always gossiping. She would say to people that I wasn’t doing the stairs right, that I should put pipeclay on them. Oh, don’t tell me about them, I know their kind. All they want is something to talk about, and they’re so nice to your face too.”

Don’t leave me, mother, not yet. I know you will have to leave but not yet. It’s not that I don’t see you for what you are, it’s not that I didn’t see you as you are, it’s something else. I’m bleeding for myself, that I can’t secure you, mean-minded as you are, as we all are, against the ravages of time, perfect, silent. It is for myself that I am weeping bitterly, it is for a whole world, that we aren’t better than we are, that we are so inconsistent, petty, lacking all nobility. It was not your loneliness that I was concerned with, it was my own.

“Leave it for a day or two at least,” he said. “Just for a day or two. Surely that won’t do any harm. Put your case away. Just for a day or two. Something might happen.”

Something might turn up. In all reasonableness. He put the case under the bed.

Child, even though you are old don’t run away from home as a child might do. Let us part in peace, at least in peace.

“I’ll go and make the breakfast,” he said, “Vera isn’t up yet. I’ll make the breakfast. Don’t do anything foolish. Promise me. Promise me that. Will you promise me that?” Child, pupil, will you promise?

“All right, Tom,” she said, “all right.”

He left the room and went to make the breakfast though he didn’t feel like eating. Still one had to eat for that was what kept one alive. Salvation was in routine, not in the storms: in rings, in rails, in the tables that have to be cleared, the beds that have to be made, the food that has to be cooked. If it were not so someone would have told us. Some priest, some minister, someone.

PART THREE

1

I
T WAS TWO
or three weeks later, on a particularly fine day in autumn, intensely still and clear, as if the year were pausing for a moment before proceeding to its decline: considering, taking the measure of its success or failure: that Vera’s mother, Angela, erupted from her small red car in front of their house, having driven impulsively from Edinburgh.

“My dear,” she said to Vera as she removed her fur and coat, “Would you and Tom please get my cases out of my car, there’s a good girl. I’m staying for two or three days. I haven’t decided yet. Your father couldn’t drag himself away from his codicils and torts so I had this wonderful idea of driving up to see you. You should see Loch Lomond, absolutely still, exactly like a mirror, I mean exactly. You’re looking pale. Is there anything wrong. And Tom. You’re looking pale too. Is the daily grind getting too much for you? Thank God I got out of the rat race when I married your father thirty years ago though it seems considerably longer. And Chrissie too. How are you?” And she kissed Mrs Mallow with a flourish.

It seemed for a moment as if the house had been turned into a theatre, as if lights had been turned up, as if a spotlight focussed itself on her as she continued to talk, the others listening.

“Your father, Vera,” she burbled, “couldn’t or wouldn’t come. He said to me or rather grunted, ‘If you wish to go just go but at least you should phone to say you’re coming.’ Well, my dear, I didn’t take his advice in that or anything else. And here I am. I thought I would descend on you in my little car and my red coat (don’t you think they match rather well?) almost like a female Father Christmas (if that isn’t a mixed metaphor or something, Tom) which we might soon have, Women’s Lib being what it is. In any case I left him there buried in papers, contorted in his torts, graved in his affidavits, and set off into the glorious morning. Edinburgh, my dear, is beautiful just now but so is your little town. And the Festival is finished. Do you know I saw six plays, half of them about Russian uncles and aunts (Chekhov has much to answer for), listened to four concerts and had a small tug at the Fringe, most of it very amateurish, I’m sorry to say. Aren’t you going to give me a coffee, Vera, after coming all this way? I hope someone will talk to me, you’re all looking so glum. Is anything the matter? And how are you settling down, Chrissie, among the grammarians? Have you enough to do? I’m sure Tom and Vera are so busy marking the exercises of our next illiterate generation that they have little time for the social niceties. How are they doing, our new drug-taking elite, Tom? But of course you don’t think of them like that, do you? You’re probably saying to yourself, ‘Who’s she to talk?’ and you’re quite right too. Who indeed am I? Who indeed is anyone?”