I took this as a veiled allusion to the dull result of my first chemistry examination, so I kept quiet. My father kept quiet too. My mother had the air to herself: but she was used to this.
“Jacky Williams won’t go to Oxford, not even if he has the brains, which I doubt. You’ll see. He’ll go straight into the business. That’s how they’ll go on. He could afford to send him, but he won’t. And poor Miss Dawlish, slaving away—”
But this was too much for my father.
“She’s no need to‚” he said gruffly. “Why, with what she gets from the money she put into his business she could live like a—she could live in Bournemouth if she wanted to.”
I was getting bored.
“Well, she was lucky this afternoon anyway. Let’s leave it at that. Though I do think the milk lorry might have stopped.”
“Lucky?” said my father. “Lucky?”
My mother echoed him.
“Lucky?”
They looked at each other then back at me.
“I mean she could have been stuck there. It took me an hour to get home. If Henry hadn’t been coming through the woods—What’s the matter?”
They had turned back to each other, my mother with a look of incredulous amusement.
“Oliver, dear,” said my mother fondly. “You really are—but then, of course you’ve been away. Everybody knows about her—even the man in the milk lorry. She was a hundred yards from the cross roads in the woods, wasn’t she?”
“Telephone box,” said my father briefly. “She rang him up.”
I shoved back my chair.
“My God! So there is!”
“Not luck at all.”
“But she might have told me! I mean—there was I prepared to—”
My mother laughed aloud; then subsided.
“Poor soul!” she said. “All she wants is for him to put a little attention about her.”
There was a sort of convulsion in my mind. Late, later than for anyone else in that neighbourhood, the pieces—ancient and new—flew together, and I understood. My mouth opened and stayed open; for I had nothing to say. Yet they must have seen something in my frozen face, for my father put out a hand, clumsily, and laid it on my sleeve.
“We were forgetting how much she means to you, Oliver. But you see, old son—these telephone boxes—she’s done it before.”
My father’s gesture was so unusual in our undemonstrative household that I grimaced and stood up. I muttered.
“Well, if she’s got enough money—”
“Ah,” said my mother darkly. “Money isn’t everything. You’ll find that out one day, Oliver.”
I took my astonishment away; and in all that confusion of thought and feeling, I had a hazy awareness that the end of my mother’s conversation had contradicted something in the earlier part of it; so that this was the first time I understood she was not only my mother. She was a woman. This mental revolution was emotional too and very confusing. I stood there in the hall, gloves on, scarf hanging down over chest and back, and was consumed with humiliation, resentment and a sort of stage fright, to think how we were all known, all food for each other, all clothed and ashamed in our clothing. I opened the front door to escape her understanding; but as I closed it I heard her burst out with a half-suppressed giggle—
“I wonder what she’ll do when she runs out of ’phone boxes?”
So now when my mother sent me the Stilbourne Advertiser I searched it diligently. Sure enough, I learned not only that at the organ was Miss C. C. Dawlish, but on another page, how Miss C. C. Dawlish had been fined five pounds; and later still ten pounds. When I was at home during the vacations, I sometimes saw her—but from as far away as possible—pacing from the garage to the house, with the ghost of that old, elastic stride. I saw the darkness in her face, too, the ring of muscle contracted round her mouth, eyes unwinking.
“Poor soul‚” my mother would murmur mechanically. I think she had lost interest. Bounce was like the long-dead Ophelia with her hatful of leaves—a Stilbourne eccentric, assimilated and accepted. At last, I read how Miss C. C. Dawlish was the defendant, up for dangerous driving. She had hurt, not herself, but someone else. I read how the chairman of the bench had said that he accepted this and that; but that we were none of us getting any younger and it would be in Miss Dawlish’s own interest, etcetera. He would suspend her licence for five years.
I read that, sitting in the window of my rooms with the spire of the university church stretching above me; and I remember how amused and cynical I was. Had she, indeed, reached the end of the available telephone boxes? Was this the next step? If so, she had been too clever by half. She had called attention to herself for the last time, I said to myself in my innocence. For I was a chemist, not a biologist. It was only when I was getting ready to return to Oxford for my last year, that I learned better.
That autumn was hot, and for once we had an Indian Summer. The hollyhocks were burning up where they stood. Either side of our front door they were dark brown sticks with a last flame of red or yellow at the tip. The grass plot in the Square was almost as brown as the stems and the individual blades snapped if you stepped on them. I could hear my mother moving about in the kitchen, getting things together for supper; but there was no other noise in the house. My father had not yet finished in the dispensary so that I had our little sitting room to myself. I could hear Bounce practising in the church—a voluntary of impeccable dullness. I stood, among our chintz and china, listening and watching. Then the organ stopped and shortly afterwards I saw Bounce walk quickly along the other side of the Square and go into her house. I was glad she was securely tucked away because it meant there was no chance of my meeting her. The Square was deserted. It was safe to go out.
The door of Bounce’s house opened. She came out, walking as ever very upright. Her flat, corduroy hat was skewered to her thinning hair. She pulled the door to behind her and put on her gloves without looking at them. Her face was calm and smiling. She turned left and paced along the pavement towards Henry’s garage. She looked neither to right nor left. The air was so still I could hear the tap tap of her shoes on the flat stones. I watched her till she passed beyond the Town Hall and disappeared.
I found myself writhing, twisting, sneaking on hurried feet—but nevertheless slamming into the sitting room door—sliding back, past the kitchen, past the scullery, out into the garden, down between the fruit trees—then back in my brick angle and alone; but staring, staring—trying to find something on which I might fasten my eye and blind my mind’s eye. There was a storm in me which felt as if it were around me, so that the dry webs of spiders between the bricks seemed part of it and of her and me, and everything. I could hear my own voice as if someone else was using it.
“No. No. Oh-No. No. No—”
And I knew even then that the sight was seared into me, branded where I lived, ineradicable—Bounce pacing along the pavement with her massive bosom, thick stomach and rolling, ungainly haunches; Bounce wearing her calm smile, her hat and gloves and flat shoes—and wearing nothing else whatsoever.
*
After that, Bounce vanished. The house was the same, and her two seater still stood on Henry’s premises—still washed and polished. Nobody mentioned Bounce. She had become one of those cases on which Stilbourne turned its corporate back. Indeed I should never have had any certain knowledge of what happened to her in all those years had I not deliberately—shamelessly—raised the question. It was during the last of my parents’ yearly visits to me at Oxford. It was after tea, during the lame hour we spent between that ceremony and the train’s departure. I had come, as I always did—glad though I was to see them—had come to the point of silence, when none of us could think what to say next. We looked at each other now across a kind of gulf of years and differing experience. Only the embarrassment of such a painful silence could have induced me to broach the topic.
“By the way, how’s Bounce, Mother? I didn’t see her at all last time.”
/> The silence was intense again. My father busied himself with filling his pipe, and kept his pebble glasses very close to it.
“She was ill,” said my mother with delicate enunciation “—you know. She had to go away.”
Their glances flickered to and from each other.
“It was a bad business,” said my father, fumbling with matches. “A very bad business.”
My mother patted her mouth with a lace handkerchief.
“Poor soul,” she said.
The silence lengthened and deepened. So that was that.
*
Nevertheless I was to meet Bounce again, though not for many years. The war came on us and the peace; and after years of peace I went back with my family to persuade my mother she must not live alone in the cottage but make her home with us. Yet neither I nor my wife could cope with her mixture of tears and hysteria. I felt it was very bad for the children and I tried to calm her.
“It’s cats,” said my mother, wiping her eyes, “You know I can’t stand cats.”
“Well, never mind—”
“But I do mind. She ought to be told. She’s got so many of them, she’s out half the night, ‘Puss, puss, come to Mummie den! Milkies—’ I simply can’t sleep—”
“Who’s got so many cats, Mother?”
“She has. Miss Dawlish,” said my mother angrily. “I haven’t any patience with the woman.”
“Bounce!”
“You must go and tell her about them, Oliver. I won’t have it!”
“Bounce! She’s back? I thought—I thought she was—”
“Of course she’s back. Been back a long time. You must tell her, Oliver!”
“But we shall all be gone in a few—”
My mother burst into a storm of tears.
“Well you must speak to her! And your father not cold in his—The place is swarming with them! Suppose they got in here!”
I patted her shoulder, with a clumsy gesture so like my father’s that I took it away hurriedly.
“All right, Mother. I’ll go across and see her, anyway.”
“Besides. You were always so—”
“I know, Mother, dear. I’m devoted to her.”
I went out and stood in the Square, bracing myself. Mark was machine-gunning Sophy who was ignoring him and throwing daisies about; but when they saw me they came running. I took one in each hand and went across to the door by the bow window. It was open, so we went in and stood for a while in the hall. I knocked on the music room door and got no answer; but the door down into the yard was open too. We went through, I, at least, glad to be out in the open air; for cats and canaries and budgerigars had added to the already stale house an entirely new dimension of fetor. As I stepped down, an evil-looking Tom slid by us into the house, and two seconds later I heard the spats and hisses and the furry thumps of a fight.
Bounce was coming slowly up the garden path, seeming broader than it, square. The corduroy hat was still skewered to her hair, and her tie divided an enormous expanse. She stopped, two yards away, and examined the three of us.
“Hullo, Miss Dawlish. Do you remember me?”
“It’s old Kummer. Are these yours?”
“This is Mark and this is Sophy. How are you, Miss Dawlish?”
“Let’s go inside.”
She led the way into the hall. We followed, the children pressing close to me. I began to have an uneasy feeling that perhaps this was not so good an idea after all. Bounce peered at a budgerigar which ignored her and went on contemplating its own entrancing reflection in a little mirror. She made noises at it.
“Weep, weep, weep!”
“Mark—for God’s sake, child! Not in public! Here—you’d better run along home.”
Bounce watched him out of the door.
“That boy of his did very well in the war. You can never tell, can you?”
“I suppose not.”
“What did you do, Kummer?”
I thought back.
“I enjoyed a very peaceful war, I’m afraid. We had to have gas ready, of course. But we never used it.”
She turned back to the budgerigar.
“Weep, weep!”
“You’ve got very fond of animals, haven’t you?”
“I always was, even when I was—as small as your daughter. Do you know, Kummer? I used to pretend I was a boy so that I could pretend I was a vet! But of course with my music I didn’t have time for pets. Then afterwards, with that horrible boy in the house, I couldn’t possibly have them.”
I realized with a shock, how time was foreshortening for her. But before I could say anything more she went on. Her eyes had a kind of insolence in them.
“I was ill for a long time,” she said. “Seriously ill. You knew, didn’t you?”
I became a small boy again with a quarter-size violin. Wordlessly, I shook my head. Suddenly her slablike cheeks broke up, gold teeth flashed, and she roared with laughter.
“But I’m better now—much, much better!”
I felt my daughter’s cheek press against the back of my hand; but Bounce stopped laughing, bent down, and spoke severely to a pair of ferocious eyes that blazed in the darkness under the stairs.
“Naughty! Naughty!”
The Tom slid past us and out at the front door. Bounce straightened up.
“Would you believe it?” she said. “He’s as much trouble as a child. He keeps me up, waiting to open the door, all hours of the night!”
“Do what Isaac Newton did for his cats. He cut holes with flaps in the door for them—a big hole for the big cat and a little hole for the little cat.”
After a few seconds the joke hit Bounce. She rocked and roared.
“And then you wouldn’t have to bother to let him in.”
Bounce stopped laughing.
“Henry would do it,” she said. “He’d make the hole properly. I’ll ask Henry. He would come up and do it or bring one of His Men with him.”
I nodded, moving towards the door.
“Well then—”
“Do you know he still polishes my car? In overalls. No one else touches it.” She nodded meaningly to me. “It’s a penance you see. And that woman—she’s another penance. Henry understands. He always understands, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. Yes, he does.”
“But as for other people—” She looked at the music room door, then down at Sophy. “Has your daughter started to play yet?”
“She’s not started yet. But she’s very fond of music, aren’t you, Sophy?”
My daughter nuzzled into my trouser leg, away from the square woman with the slablike cheeks. I put my hand through her hair, feeling the fragility of her head and neck; and a great surge of love came over me, protection, compassion, and the fierce determination that she should never know such lost solemnity but be a fulfilled woman, a wife and mother.
“I used to call your father ‘Kummer’ because he was always late.”
I shifted my feet.
“Well. I suppose we must—”
“Goodbye, then, Kummer.”
“After all these years, I ought to thank—”
“Don’t bother. It doesn’t mean anything, does it?”
She turned towards the yard; then stopped and looked at me.
“D’you know, Kummer? If I could save a child or a budgie from a burning house, I’d save the budgie.”
“I—”
“Goodbye. I don’t suppose we shall meet again.”
She went heavily down the two steps and I heard her flat shoes pacing through the yard.
Never again.
*
The ton of marble, the harp, the stone chips, the immortelles, white marble surround, the organ thundering out from the south transept—
CLARA CECILIA DAWLISH
1890—1960
—and amid the thunder of the organ, the three words in smaller letters, written almost between my feet:
Heaven is Music
I caught myself up, appalled at
my wanton laughter in that place; and as if a long finger had reached out and touched me, I felt in every nerve that my shudders came out of the ground itself. For it was here, close and real, two yards away as ever, that pathetic, horrible, unused body, with the stained frills and Chinese face. This was a kind of psychic ear-test before which nothing survived but revulsion and horror, childishness and atavism, as if unnameable things were rising round me and blackening the sun. I heard my own voice—as if it could make its own bid for honesty—crying aloud.
“I never liked you! Never!”
Then I was outside the churchyard, standing on the grass in the centre of the Square; and for that moment I could not think how I had got there. A middle-aged man, running away as though he had found himself once more in the long corridor between the empty rooms!
*
A girl laughed with a high tinkle from the window of the Wilsons’s house, which now bore the sign EMPLOYMENT EXCHANGE. An icecream van bumped past my father’s cottage, calling attention to itself with a vibraphone. Beyond the pillars of the Town Hall, I could see twelve white television figures serve twelve identical aces. The gooseflesh lay down on me by degrees; and from the security of my own warm life, I set myself to speak, inside myself, of how things were.
I was afraid of you, and so I hated you. It is as simple as that. When I heard you were dead I was glad.
I walked forward towards her house. The front door was not merely open, but off the hinges and leaning against the wall. There was a neat, square hole in the bottom panel, closed by a springloaded flap. The workmen had made a chalky tangle of bootmarks between the front door and the steps down to the yard. I went to the music room, lifted my hand to knock, then remembered. I flung the door open so that it crashed back then rebounded from the panelled wall. Instantly with the crash, there came a fierce, papery beating from the window beyond the muslin curtains—or from beyond where the curtains had been. I stood stock still, hands up. The thing beat mindlessly with frayed wings among the cobwebs on the pane. I ran forward to wrestle with the sash; but the maimed thing fluttered down to the floor and lay there motionless. The keyboard hung there, invisibly present in the empty room, the row of organ pedals lay just above a square of unworn floor boarding. My eye put back two brown photographs on their squares of lighter panelling. I had had all I wanted of the music room.