A Lesson in Dying (2 page)

Paul Wilcox was washing up and listening at the same time for the sound of his wife’s car. From the living room came the voice of the television and occasionally the children’s voices raised in argument. He supposed he should go into them and put an end to the quarrel. He should switch off the television and persuade them to play something constructive, but he was grateful to be on his own for a while.

They lived in a big house, converted from an old water mill, with a garden and a paddock by the stream. He had never expected to live in a house like that and it would have been impossible if he and not Hannah had been working. He loved the house, but it shamed him. It was a reflection of his incompetence. The kitchen, where he was hiding from the children, had a gloomy unfinished quality. It had a red quarry tile floor and a large dresser they had bought at an auction before the children were born, but some of the units were still without doors and it needed more light. Hannah thought that as he was home all day he should be able to turn the house into the dream property they had imagined it could be, but it was not that easy. He had worked as a nurse. He had never been a practical man. Besides he did not have Hannah’s energy, her vitality, her ability to do three things at once and still do them all well.

He scraped remnants from Elizabeth’s plastic plate into an already overflowing wastebin and wondered when he would have the courage to admit to Hannah that the experiment of role reversal had been a mistake. It had been his idea.

‘You have a far greater earning potential than me,’ he had said. She was a graduate, a mathematician. ‘I’ll enjoy being home with the children. It’ll be exciting.’

Hannah had been unsure. She took motherhood seriously. She read books about it. Then an old colleague from the computer firm where she worked came to see her. He was considering setting up on his own, he said. A computer consultancy. There was a gap in the market in the north-east. Was she interested in joining him? For the first six months Paul worked nights while she struggled to make a go of it. She worked from home in the small terraced house where they lived. Elizabeth was a tiny baby and Joe a serious three-year-old. Then she started making money and to celebrate they moved to the old mill in Heppleburn and there was no longer any need for him to continue working.

At first it had been fine. It had been a joy to escape the routine of work. Joe was at nursery school and Elizabeth slept a lot. He planned the things he would do with his new free time. He would read, perhaps join a band again, decorate the mill, plant the garden. Then Elizabeth changed, almost overnight, into a kicking, screaming, demanding monster who drew in wax crayon on his books, broke the strings of his guitar and washed her hair in wallpaper paste. Their friends, said she was a normal toddler. Joe, they said, had been exceptionally good. They couldn’t expect to have the same luck twice. For Paul the shock was enormous.

It would have been easier perhaps if they had family who lived locally, but they were both southerners and had no one to support them. Paul loved Heppleburn. It fitted in with all his romantic notions of the north. He liked the seamen’s mission on the coast, the miners’ welfare hall, the leek shows and the racing pigeons. He liked to talk to shop assistants and to old ladies in bus queues to show that he was friendly too. He and Hannah often told their friends from Kent about the day Hannah took Joe out in his pram as a new baby and the pram came back jingling with coins – the lucky money given by people in the street to celebrate his birth. But despite all that they had no real friends in the area. There was no one he could talk to.

As Hannah’s business succeeded she came home later and stayed away more often. She was running courses, attending conferences, selling her skills. Some weeks Paul hardly saw her and at the weekends she was exhausted, kept awake only by nervous energy and her desire to have time with the children.

He joined the Parents’ Association because it seemed the right thing to do. Some of his ideals about being the perfect parent still remained. He wanted to prove his commitment to Hannah but thought that she hardly noticed. He seemed to be losing her. She was slipping away from the family and he felt inadequate to take her place. Thousands of wives must feel like this, he thought as he looked at his watch again. He was so tight, so full of resentment, that he felt he should cry out to relieve the pressure. Perhaps then, magically, the self-pity would leave him like air from a balloon. It’s my only night out this week and she’s late.

Then he heard her car on the drive and the clang of the garage door and she was in the kitchen, her hands full of papers and files and a bulging briefcase. She was wearing a long, gaberdine mac which was crumpled because she had been sitting too long in the car. Her face was drawn and her eyes were grey and tired.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, dropping everything in a heap on the kitchen table. ‘It’s those bloody road works on the A1. I’m so glad to be home.’

‘Sit down,’ he said, because it was impossible to be angry with her when she looked so small and ill. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

But as he filled the kettle he still wanted to cry or to scream as she started telling him about an awkward customer who had purposely misread the contract. He wanted to say that he had had a bad day too. He wanted to tell her about Lizzie wetting herself in the supermarket trolley and pulling the washing from the line into the mud, but he said nothing and pretended to be listening. Thousands of wives must feel like this, he thought again, but it was no real comfort.

‘I’ll have to go out now,’ he said at last. She turned to him with a hurt bruised expression, so he realized he must have interrupted her.

‘It’s the Parents’ Association,’ he said defensively. ‘ I’m chairman. I’ll have to go.’ He would have liked to say something more to her, something intimate, fun even, telling her to be ready for him when he came home, but he knew she would not want to make love to him. She was too tired and would fall asleep as soon as they were in bed.

Outside the house he composed himself. He was determined to maintain the illusion that their life together was a success, that he enjoyed his role as a parent. Harold Medburn’s remarks about his inability to support his family would not be allowed to hurt him this evening. He hurried up the lane towards the school and was the first one to arrive. When the others came into the hall he was already sitting in his place at the head of the table, studious, bespectacled and calm.

Irene Hunt unpinned the frieze of vegetables, flowers and fruit which the children had prepared for the Harvest Festival and threw it into the bin. It seemed ridiculous now that she had once had the ambition to be a student at the Royal School of Art. There was little sense of creativity in the visual arts form. After half term the bare space on the wall would be filled with the silhouettes of witches, cats and pumpkin lanterns. She did not entirely approve of Hallowe’en. It was, she thought, an American invention, but the children liked painting witches and it provided a focus for the craft work between Harvest and Bonfire Night. For forty years her life had been ruled by this calendar of childhood excitements and soon it would be over. At Christmas she would retire. For the last time she would teach her reception class to sing ‘Away in a Manger’, to perform the nativity play, to stick cotton wool onto black card in the shape of a snowman. It would be a relief to go. She had been forced into teaching by circumstance and though her disappointment had burned out long ago, she had never been fulfilled by it. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she would have the opportunity to grow up, to become truly adult. She stood in front of the blackboard, a tall gaunt woman, and thought with pleasure that this would be the last parents’ meeting she would have to attend.

The classroom door opened and Matthew Carpenter stood uncertainly on the threshold. When he had arrived as a new teacher at the school he had been full of enthusiasm and fun. There was little indication of that now.

‘Come in,’ she said. She was sorry for him and angry because of what Harold Medburn had done to him, but she was irritated too by his lack of fight and confidence in himself. Perhaps it was because she recognized something of herself in Matthew. She felt responsible for him. She should have had the confidence to stand up to Medburn years before. Well, she thought, soon she would be retired and there would be no need then for secrecy.

The arrival of Matthew Carpenter had marked the one major defeat Harold Medburn had suffered in his relations with the school governors. When a vacancy arose in the school he had wanted to appoint a middle-aged women, one of the congregation of St Cuthbert’s Church where he was church warden. The governors decided that Mr Medburn’s influence on the school was already too strong. It needed someone younger, with fresh ideas, someone more cooperative, more willing to involve the parents. Matthew Carpenter had been appointed straight from college knowing nothing of the problems he would face. From the moment of his arrival Harold Medburn set out to make his position there untenable. He criticized and contradicted the young teacher, so Matthew became confused and unhappy. His class recognized his increasing nervousness and grew unruly and noisy. Mr Medburn was exultant and some of the parents who had expected most from Matthew were beginning to complain about the lack of discipline.

‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ Matthew said, but he went in and sat on one of the desks while she finished putting library books into piles for the next day. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave.’

She looked at him. He seemed hardly more than a boy to her. He was long and thin with limbs that seemed to be jointed like a puppet’s, a thin face and long bony fingers. His hair was curly and impossible to tidy, but he tried his best to please Medburn by being respectably, even soberly dressed.

I don’t know what you’ll do either, she thought. Some days she wondered if he would have some sort of breakdown. On those days Medburn would never leave him alone. The headmaster would pick at him like a bully with a weak and miserable child, using calculated jibes and warped sarcasm. At other times she thought Matthew would simply resign.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Just see out your probationary year. Then you can apply for something else. Besides, Mr Medburn won’t be here for ever.’

‘I’d leave,’ he said suddenly, ‘but my mother was proud when I became a teacher. It would upset her.’

It would upset me too, Irene Hunt thought. It would be a wicked, wicked waste.

Angela Brayshaw had the house to herself. She had taken her daughter to the home for elderly residents where her mother was proprietor and matron. She had not waited to speak to her mother – the place depressed her and she was feeling low enough already. Angela’s house was tiny, one of the new terraces on the estate where Patty Atkins lived. She stood in the middle of the living room and felt trapped. Like a bird, she thought with an uncharacteristic flash of imagination, in a brick cage.

‘I hate this place,’ she said aloud. It was spotless, gleaming, but so poky, so unimpressive, so ordinary. She too was spotless and gleaming. Her blond hair shone silver. It was straight and beautifully cut. Her make-up was immaculate. She was small, wrapped in a big, black coat.

‘I want more than this,’ she cried to herself. ‘ I’d do anything to get away from here.’

Her husband had got away from it. Exhausted in the end by her ambition, her desire for the most expensive furniture, the newest car, the smartest clothes, he had left her. To Angela’s incomprehension he had moved in with a plain, dowdy woman older than herself, who had two children and lived in a rundown cottage miles from anywhere. The role of deserted, injured wife had pleased Angela for a couple of months. The men in the neighbourhood helped do her garden and mended her car. Then she realized how poor she would be with only the maintenance and the supplementary benefit to live on, and she was angry and bitter. Before she had always had dreams to sustain her. David, her husband, would be promoted, he would earn more money, then they could move and she would have the sort of house she saw in soap powder advertisements on the television. There would be a kitchen big enough to dance in and a bathroom so grand that she would long for all her visitors to ask to use the lavatory. Now even Angela realized that in her present circumstances her dreams were unrealistic.

Well, she thought, and her face became stubborn and hard. Well, we’ll just have to change the circumstances. She pulled her coat around her, shut the door and set out towards the school.

In the dining room in the school house Harold and Kitty Medburn had tea together. Kitty noticed how pleased he seemed with himself.

‘I don’t think young Carpenter will last much longer,’ he said. ‘He’ll leave before Christmas. I knew he would never make a teacher. Perhaps now the governors will trust my judgement.’

‘He’d probably do well enough,’ she said, ‘ if you’d leave him alone.’

They seemed to argue all the time. In the beginning it had been a marriage of convenience. No one understood why she had married him. He had never been popular in the village, but he had suited her. She had fancied being a teacher’s wife and knew he would never ask too much of her – to be available in bed of course, she had expected that – but not the closeness, the pretence of love, the cloying intimacy she saw in other couples and which would have been impossible for her. She wondered sometimes if there was something wrong with her. Perhaps it was unnatural to be so detached. If there had been children it might have been different, she would surely have felt something for her own offspring. But children had never come and she and Harold would live in the school house, having contact only when they argued and ate together, until he retired. It was the life she had chosen and she did not regret it.

‘Are you working tonight?’ he asked.

‘Not till later,’ she said. She was a district nurse and there were some old ladies to visit and settle for the night.

‘I’ll take a key then,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. You know how these meetings go on.’