Evelyn’s tone was easy, conversational. She was anxious to make it clear that she did not hold the business against her daughter. In matters of this kind, Muriel was as innocent as the day is long.
Evelyn put a cup of tea down before Muriel. Muriel began to devote all her attention to it, gazing into its depths avidly.
How long now? Evelyn thought. She had made no preparations, as yet. Clearly, she would have to take responsibility. She would have to do it all. She tried to remember Muriel’s birth, whether there had been difficulties, whether it had been painful. It was all so long ago now.
In the days after their marriage, the house had been very tidy. She had polished and swept all day. Clifford came and went. He went out to business. He was a handsome, taciturn man, a fastidious eater, a vegetarian. He shaved twice a day. She did not really know him well, not well at all.
She had made an appointment with the doctor, an elderly and sallow man.
“Well, I suppose you know your condition,” he had said. “It is sufficiently evident.”
She had gathered her courage, clearing her throat softly. “How does this come about?” she asked.
The doctor had looked up at her. “My dear lady.” He chuckled without a semblance of humour. “My dear lady.”
She had told Clifford the same night. He was not pleased. But he said that no doubt the child could be trained to be not much inconvenience. After all, he had never imagined that he would be a dog-owner, but the Airedale was very well-behaved.
Unfortunately, soon after Muriel was born, the Airedale chewed up a rug and Clifford took it away to the vet’s. Muriel lay quietly in her cot. Clifford’s temper was short, but she gave no cause for complaint.
A brief sharp pain interrupted Evelyn’s thoughts; now she remembered. She had been left alone to scream, on a high white bed. The landscape of her pain had been her high, knotted, purple stomach. The parasite was straining to be away. A woman with a clamped mouth had stuck her head around the door, and asked her to please have some consideration.
And dangling from the doctor’s hands, upside down and blood-smeared, like someone horribly executed: Muriel Alexandra, a lovely daughter.
She looked at Muriel in pity, turning at once to exasperation.
“Now what is that you have there?”
She pulled the bit of card out of Muriel’s hand. It was tatty, crumpled, thumbed; a reminder from the Welfare. Dates and times. The Day Centre. Miss Field has called.
“How long have you had this?”
No answer.
Evelyn ripped it through once. I’ll burn it, she said. If you have any more, give them to me at once and I’ll burn them all.
Muriel raised her head and gave her a direct look, engaging her eyes. It was something she did so seldom that Evelyn was shot through with alarm. She understood that she was being threatened.
“Why should they bother about you?” she said. “Why should they come looking for you? What are you worth, to anybody?”
Muriel subsided. She tapped her fingernail rhythmically against the side of her cup. Strange, Evelyn thought, but it was some time now since she had wondered how her daughter had come by the baby.
“You can drive nature out with a pitchfork,” she said, “but she gets back in.”
Muriel got up and opened the cutlery drawer, jerking it as she always did, as she always did to irritate her mother. She took out a fork and fingered it speculatively.
“Put it down,” Evelyn said. “You’ll prick yourself. Don’t go touching my things.”
Muriel threw down the fork with a clatter, and slammed shut the drawer. She seized the dishcloth and wrung it between her hands, dripping greasy water onto her feet. She flung it at the table and moved across the room, tapping the chairbacks with her knuckles and slapping the palm of her hand against the cupboard doors.
“Stop it, stop it.” Evelyn got up, pushing her chair back, convulsed with anger. “Everything in this house is mine.”
She doubled her fist and struck out at Muriel, pounding at her shoulders and arms and ribs. Muriel stood, stoic. The blows bounced back from her plump solid body. Evelyn whined and gasped. Weariness stopped her. She stood glaring at her daughter, her arms limp by her sides. Suddenly, Muriel smiled. The grin split her face and lit up her eyes. She was delighted, she said softly. Delighted to be here. Welcoming you all. A short programme of song and laughter. For your entertainment. Tonight.
Three days before Christmas, Colin said to Sylvia, “Frank O’Dwyer phoned up.”
“Oh yes?”
“I thought I might just run over there. There are a few things he wants to get straightened out, about next term.”
Sylvia gave him an odd look, he thought. “Can’t it wait till after Christmas?”
“Well, yes, but you know how it is. The holidays are over before you know where you are.” He paused, watching the effect of this; none discernible. Sylvia was peeling potatoes. “I think he might want a bit of company as well. Poor old Frank,” he added sentimentally.
Sylvia filleted out an eye with the sharp end of the peeler. “All right,” she said.
“Only you wouldn’t want to come. It would mean getting somebody in to babysit, and we’d only be talking shop.”
“I’ve a lot to do,” Sylvia said, and added warningly, “Christmas is no holiday for me, you know.”
The following night Colin sat with Isabel in a chilly country pub twelve miles out of town. It was one of the unregenerated kind, with stone floors and a picturesque but quite inadequate open fire. A limp paperchain or two hung over the bar as a nod to festivity, but the customers were quiet and the landlord surly. Isabel looked up and watched Colin as he walked across the room with her tepid gin and his own pint of flat warm beer. Frankly he wondered how he was going to be able to manage these expeditions; the money for drinks, and the extra petrol. He always had an overdraft by the end of January. Every year.
“No ice,” he said jerking his head back towards the bar.
“It’s all right here,” Isabel said. “It’s quiet.”
“I could hardly believe Sylvia didn’t know I was up to something.”
“Up to something? You make me sound like a practical joke.” She lit a cigarette. “Colin, I wanted to see you because I’ve got some decisions to make. I’m thinking of leaving my job.”
“Well…I didn’t think you were happy.”
“Happiness seems a bit ambitious. I’m not sure I can see my way to that.”
“You’re not thinking of going away, are you?”
She watched his face, for the dawn of any hope. How have I come to trust him so little, she wonders, how has all my life become so soured?
“I’ve been offered a post in a new set-up—a therapeutic community, we call it. Must I blush for my jargon? It’s only a few miles away. But they’d like me to live in.”
“And you don’t want to leave your father?”
“I don’t feel that I can.”
“It’s bad luck on you to have no brothers and sisters, and a father who’s so elderly. I suppose he can’t get about as he used to.”
Isabel opened her bag and took out her handkerchief. Inside the bag were her father’s spectacles. He could not manage without them. After some thought, she had hit on this method of confining him to the house. “This place,” she said, “it’s a new approach, small numbers, a good staffing ratio. It’s for children who are mentally ill.”
Colin noticed the blue circles under her eyes, the tightness around her mouth. “I should think that would be intensely depressing. What have children got to make them mentally ill? Are they born that way?”
“Are you asking me for information?” she said. “Or is it a debating point?”
“For information. You’d be surprised what I don’t know. Explain to me.”
“Some babies don’t eat, they don’t cry. Nobody knows why.”
“It can hardly be society. It must be their genes. Genes are not much in fashion, I th
ink. It must be their mothers.”
“Some of the mothers don’t seem to make relationships with the children. They don’t treat them as people, just as objects. They let them lie for hours and don’t react when they cry. The children feel that nothing they do can influence the world. They can’t control it. And they give up trying.”
“Like me,” Colin said. “I can’t control the world. I’m like that. I have it.”
“It’s not a disease, it’s a state of being. The constant frustration of one’s efforts to adapt the world, and the resignation of the attempt.”
“It’s common.” He sighed. “Look at the Labour Party.”
“Oh, Colin, it isn’t a bit the same. The frustrations we meet every day are of a different order. Sometimes the mothers are quite normal, and then we can’t account for it. When they get a bit older the children just sit, or they lie, and they gaze into the distance, you know, or just play with their fingers. They seem not to want to live. They seem afraid of it. Afraid of everything.”
“Nobody can do anything about anything,” Colin said. “They are right, the rest of us are wrong. Deluded. Why should we victimise them? Poor little sods.”
“But it’s a practical problem. They have to be fed. Kept alive. The whole world seems to them completely destructive.” She paused. “Maybe it is. I see your point. They have the nuclear weapons inside their heads. The megadeath.”
“Why don’t they give up then? Just give up and die?”
“Some do.”
“And the others?”
“We presume that they once felt some security or goodness. At the breast. They are fighting to get back to it.”
“But you can’t get everything from the breast.”
“No. You can’t get very much at all.” She looked up at him. “Could we possibly, do you think, be more cheerful?”
“It is Christmas,” he said automatically. “Look, Isabel, I don’t think you should rush into a decision. On the one hand, would you be any more satisfied with that sort of work? On the other hand, perhaps your father should stand on his own feet. Plenty of people that age manage for themselves. He might live another twenty years, and then what? You’d be a prisoner.”
Isabel put her bag down at her feet, and edged it under the table.
“Don’t put it down there, love, you might forget it.”
“Women never forget their handbags. They’re womb symbols. You wouldn’t forget your womb, would you? I bet Sylvia never does.”
“You’ve not been well, you know. You look very run down. Put everything off for a month or two.”
“Well, I can’t seem to cope, that’s true enough. I do some stupid things. I lost a file. At least, I put it in the back of my car, and then it went into the garage, and when it came back the file wasn’t there.”
“Nobody would want it, would they?”
“It would be of no use or interest to anyone. That’s why it’s so annoying.”
“Have you told them, at the office?”
“Not yet. I shouldn’t have taken it out. I only did it by accident. We did lose a few things when we moved from Wilberforce House, but I think they turned up. I don’t know what the procedure is.”
“Well, there must be some way round it. Have you phoned the garage?”
“Oh yes,” she said tiredly. “But they’re all really stupid people. I never did come to grips with that case, somehow. I could almost think I lost the file on purpose.”
“I think you make too much of people’s subconscious motivations, Isabel. You’re always looking to complicate things.”
“I dare say you’re right. I dare say this particular case hasn’t half the complications I’ve seen in it. Somebody else would handle it more rationally.”
“Has it upset you? Do you want to talk about it?”
“I shouldn’t talk about my clients. No, it’s not an upsetting case, compared to some. It’s just been very trying and distasteful. The file can never be put together again. It goes back too many years, too many people have been involved.”
“They’ll have to make a fresh start.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever made a fresh start. Except Lazarus.”
Colin went to the bar. She sat with her eyes downcast as he carried their glasses back again. She was pale, and she had a cough; she seemed to have lost more weight. She was nervous, less competent.
“Is all this…quite what you wanted to ask me about?” Colin said as he sat down. “You sounded so urgent on the phone.”
“No, of course it wasn’t. I wanted to talk about us. I think it’s time we made some decisions, Colin.”
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
“I want to live with you.”
And now it is she who pleads. The passing weeks have worked a little miracle. She didn’t touch the glass he had put in front of her.
“So you are asking me,” he spoke very deliberately, “to break with Sylvia in the near future?”
“What’s the far future? Do you want to wait until Karen is twenty-one?”
“You know there’s nothing left between me and Sylvia. It’s the children. That’s all.”
“You still sleep with her, I’m sure.”
“Yes. Well, I do.”
“So there is something there.”
“Something.” But no one who has been married, he thought, would presume it to be affection. “The point is, I have to think very carefully. Their whole future hangs on this. I have to make the proper arrangements.”
“But deep down, Colin, you don’t think any arrangements are proper.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I won’t leave her.” He struggled for a judicious tone, something measured. “But can’t you see, Isabel? I feel torn.”
She reached for her coat from the chair beside her, reached for her bag under the table. “Ah, this tired old scene,” she said. “I should have known. How is it possible to be of moderate intelligence and reasonable education, and not know? I’ve read the Problem Pages. I ought to know. Come on, Colin, let’s be going. I can’t sit here and run through the lines that society has written for me. They’ve outlawed wire nooses and gin traps, but they can’t legislate against this.”
They sat in silence; then, leaving their drinks half-finished, got up and walked stiffly out to the car.
Earlier that day, Florence Sidney had taken a conspicuous initiative. Her morning had begun badly. She had telephoned Sylvia to discuss arrangements, only to be told curtly that everything was under control and that she had nothing to do about Christmas dinner except turn up and eat it. Sylvia contrived to make her feel a fumbling amateur at family festivity, a selfish, disorganised, childless woman. Whereas the truth was, Florence thought bitterly…she looked down at her small, cool, pastry-making hands, and went into the kitchen to make two dozen mince pies.
At eleven thirty she stood at the Axons’ front door with a plateful of the pies in her hand, warm and fragrant. From the hall she heard Evelyn Axon’s voice raised in apparent anger; but she had already knocked. There was a sort of scuffling, a few seconds silence, and then the door opened on Evelyn’s strained face.
“Yes? What is it you want?”
Florence stepped backwards. Evelyn’s tone was coldly hostile. Without a word, Florence smiled miserably, and lifted the napkin to show the pies.
“I see,” Evelyn said, sneering.
“I thought—Merry Christmas.” Florence held out the plate; then suddenly, determination seized her. She stepped forward briskly, up the step and over the threshold, and Evelyn dropped back before her, caught off guard.
“May I come in?”
“You’re in already, aren’t you?”
“I hoped I could wish Muriel a Merry Christmas.”
“I dare say.”
“Is Muriel ill? It seems quite a time since I saw her out and about.”
Evelyn looked at Florence and saw nothing yielding about her; heard nothing apologetic, just the hard
note of the professional enquirer. She heard a rustling from above, from the top of the stairs. Was Muriel preparing to come down? If this woman cast half an eye—
“You had better come in and sit down. This way.”
The front room was the safest, she thought, the least informative about their life and possessions. She rested her hand on the doorknob, and turned back to see Florence looking about her. “How is your mother, Miss Sidney?” she said. Florence jumped and followed her.
The door was stuck. Evelyn gasped. Someone was at the other side of it. She heard a clunk, a scraping—the wood of the door knocked against something hard and resistant. Quickly, she turned with her back to the door.
“Is it stuck? Here, let me.”
“No. Get away.” She pushed Florence hard in the ribs. Florence dropped back, and two of the pies shot off her plate and plopped moistly onto the hall floor.
“Well, really. I was only trying to help.”
“You will hardly help yourself by going in there,” Evelyn said.
“I wasn’t trying to help myself,” Florence said. “It is of no interest to me. I was trying to help you.”
Evelyn’s eyes narrowed. “Have you any notion of what you may be doing, trying to force your way into locked rooms?”
“But it isn’t locked. What are you talking about?”
“You have no idea what may be behind that door,” Evelyn said. “Neither, for that matter, have I. Something is holding it shut, and it is certainly not damp.”
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Florence said with passion.
“Ridiculous? I am glad you can take so light a view of it. Go into the back room.”
“Now look, Mrs. Axon, I simply came to bring you some mince pies. I have no particular desire to go into your front room. Or your back room. I think possibly the best thing I can do is just give you the pies and go.”
“No,” Evelyn said. She pointed to the door of the back room. “We are going to celebrate Christmas.”