An End to Autumn (16 page)

“They are doing as well as can be expected,” said Tom laughingly as if he were delivering a medical bulletin.

“Good, good. For a moment there I was afraid that you had lost your sense of humour. Ah, here’s Vera with the coffee. My daughter has learned to make good coffee. At one time I thought I would never get her head out of a book and dreaming of being an orphan in darkest Yorkshire—or was it Belgium?—and now she’s treating her aged mother. Did I ever tell you, Tom and Chrissie, that my own parents were dull people, even duller than Jeff and me. That is probably why I decided to become flamboyant, and don’t say that I’m not for I should never forgive you. My father and mother were the sort of people (or should I say sorts, Tom?) who never said boo to a goose, not even the most harmless of them, who hid from the world going past them especially when it threw splashes of water on them like one used to get from the buses before one grew affluent and never walked anywhere any more. My Father was a dull lawyer just like dear Jeff whom I love in spite of his addiction to torts (how like a disease the word sounds, some very decisive disease, some malady of the bones at any rate). This coffee is quite good, Vera, quite passable. In any case, that’s why I became flamboyant. I wasn’t going to let the world pass me by. I meant to make it sit up and listen. You’ve heard me talking of my father and mother, haven’t you, Vera? Your grandfather was the kind of man who, if he noticed children at all, would tell the housekeeper to take them away as if they were to be put on a shovel somewhere. In any case I became theatrical and Vera became bookish. It’s a great mistake however to let life pass one by, isn’t it, Tom?”

“I suppose so,” said Tom, “though it depends on what you mean by life.”

“There you go again speaking like dear Jeff and that man who used to be on the Brains Trust, though for the moment I can’t recall his name, some professor was it. Toad? No surely it couldn’t have been that though it doesn’t really matter.” She gazed piercingly at them, her eyes sparkling with a keen intelligence, and it seemed to them, even to Vera, that she had descended from a larger world which diminished their own, that she had blown fresh air on to a structure which had become slightly self-regarding and mirror-like, that she was in short making them feel uncomfortable.

“Anyway,” she said, “I think you two should go and wash the coffee cups and do whatever else you have to do, and leave me and Chrissie together for a while. We two old people have our own concerns,” and again her eyes flashed disconcertingly with that sudden sharp light.

When the two had left, she turned to Mrs Mallow and said, “And how are you, my dear?”

“Oh I’m fine, fine,” said Mrs Mallow. Overwhelmed by this strange bird of vivid plumage, articulate and knowledgeable and continually in motion, she found it very difficult to say anything much to her, and only felt envy that she couldn’t be like her.

“Your son is a good boy, Chrissie. And Vera? Vera is an odd girl. You see, Chrissie, I’ve always believed in letting people alone. Maybe I’ve left Vera too much alone. Do you think she likes me?”

“I’m sure,” Mrs Mallow began nervously.

“Oh, but I’m not, Chrissie, I’m not at all sure, Vera is very self-contained. Still waters run deep as the proverb says, and too many cooks spoil the broth is another old saw. No, Chrissie, I’m not at all sure about Vera, she’s always been a girl who liked being on her own. I, on the other hand, am not like that. I prefer people to isolation. The world is so full of riches. Do you know that the other day I was talking to a tramp who came to the door. He told me he spent his nights sleeping among the haystacks. There’s a bit of the gipsy in me: I should like to wear a kaftan and wander about the world. But the two of them love each other, I know that. They’re so alike you see, in so many ways, except that Vera is harder. Tom is too soft for his own good, and he keeps tripping over his ideals all the time. They remind me of two children in a fairy story, they don’t know anything of the world. And we have to accept reality at the end, don’t we, Chrissie?” And again she turned her piercing disconcerting gaze on Mrs Mallow. “Don’t you believe that?”

For perhaps the first time in her life in her dealings with Angela, Mrs Mallow found some words to speak. “I think,” she said slowly and carefully, as if she were measuring out her words, “that you can’t tell. I think that your life is so different from mine that you can’t understand. That’s what I think, though I know that you mean well.” And then she was abruptly silent as if there was nothing more that she wished to say.

“That’s true, I suppose, in a way,” said Angela not at all offended but as if she were giving the matter her undivided attention. “I don’t really know. And yet … I suppose that you think my life with Jeff has been some sort of idyll. Well I can assure you that that is not the case. There are times when I could scream when I see him sitting there in his chair just as self-contained as his daughter. There are times when I feel I could walk out of there and take a long journey somewhere, anywhere. You see, people like Jeff and Vera,” she considered them objectively as if they were strangers, “are so self-centred it isn’t true. My husband deals with the law but he doesn’t know anything of the pains of living, nothing at all. Neither does Vera. They are incapable of sympathy, they cannot put themselves in the position of anyone else. It’s a fact of life that the rest of us have to endure as best we can. I remember one night when I was sitting in the room with Jeff and I was going over old photographs while he was reading the
Scotsman
I came on our wedding photograph. For some reason I burst out crying, and Jeff put the
Scotsman
down and looked at me over his glasses and said, ‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ He was incapable of understanding the tears of things, you see. And for that moment I hated him, because of his perfect inability to feel anything, a trait of his,” she added absently, “I rely a great deal on in the affairs of daily life.” She stopped, and said, “Anyway I’ve been speaking too much. Perhaps we should go and see what the two young ones are doing.”

For the rest of that day, while Angela moved theatrically about the house, Mrs Mallow felt not only the inferiority of a mind much slower than that of Angela’s but also, which was more surprising, a certain ease and relief, for Angela was drawing attention away from her, leaving her in a considering silence of her own. It seemed to her that Angela was essentially an unhappy woman and this in spite of the fact that her husband was still alive, and that in much the same way as she herself didn’t communicate with Vera, so Angela was finding difficulty in that direction as well. It wasn’t so much that anything was actually said to reveal the antagonism between the two women, but rather as if the unease and awkwardness hung in the air between them. It was as if Mrs Mallow realised, after a long period of silence during which she had idealised her former circumstances, that antagonism and discomfort were the normal relationships in a house where more than one person lived: and she remembered, as it were unwillingly, days and nights when she had quarrelled with her own husband or with Tom.

So this, after all, is life, she thought, this antagonism, and without it there is no life. And yet she also thought, I want peace, I want to be away from it all. She sometimes gazed at the unhappy face of her son when he wasn’t looking at her, and thought, He is no longer mine, he has to make his own way in the world, and this is the world in which he will have to live. When he was growing up he was sometimes difficult and rebellious, now he is embroiled in the battle for daily living. How little I really know about him, she thought.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, “I wonder what happened to that Miss Donaldson. Have you seen her since?” she asked Vera.

“I haven’t been speaking to her,” said Vera. “I have seen her from a distance.”

“Of course,” said Mrs Mallow.

And Tom looked at the two of them as if he was wondering whether they shared a secret.

It seemed at that moment that Vera was about to say something when her mother interrupted her to ask who Miss Donaldson was and Tom explained to her, though he didn’t mention the party which had been so disastrous.

But after all, Ruth Donaldson, Mrs Mallow thought, had created her own unhappiness, had allowed it to overwhelm her, had, in her unexamined simplicity, turned against the world, and if you turned against the world then the world turned against you. The world wasn’t interested in those who, hating it, turned their back on it, for the world could afford to dispense with these people. Ruth Donaldson was like a log which the tide had washed on to the shore but which was too far away now for the full tide to reach it and then float it out again.

It was funny, thought Mrs Mallow, how secretively Vera had smiled when they had mentioned Miss Donaldson, as if there were something she knew that none of them knew, as yet. It had been a small triumphant smile turned first on Tom and then on her mother and finally on her, Mrs Mallow.

While Angela in full spate was discussing a play by Chekhov which according to her was about some sisters who had wanted to go to Moscow but had never done so (“Didn’t they have trains in those days?” she asked) Mrs Mallow was thinking about Ruth Donaldson and her unhappiness. It was as if the large ugly limping woman represented some sort of a sign to her, as if she were trying to give her a message, though she couldn’t think what the message was.

Halfway through the meal, Angela excused herself to go to the bathroom and when she came back said to Vera, “I see that you’ve still got that doll there, the one with the blue eyes.”

“Yes,” said Vera non-committally.

Angela didn’t pursue the subject but continued with her food.

I can’t understand women, Tom thought, here they are all around me, creating webs of words and hidden emotions, and I feel as if I don’t belong here, not to them. If only … He imagined himself under a tree in a wood on an autumn day with a bottle of wine in his hand, drinking slowly and chastely, while a squirrel flashed in and out among the dappled lights and shadows of the tree trunk. They are different from me, he thought, and then: My mother must go, but I wish that she should go only after learning first why she should. In life, he asked himself, is there no catharsis after all? Or is it only an untidiness that has no frontier, no end?

“I think,” he said, “that I shall go and make a start on the garden. Get rid of some of the boulders.”

Vera looked at him with a triumphant secretive smile as if she knew something that he didn’t know; but in fact all he wanted to do was to hold a solid implement in his hand, a direct unchanging spade.

“Yes,” said Angela, “that will do you good. What should we do without our gardens?”

Mrs Mallow felt all sorts of uncomprehended words floating all round her, a secret unplumbable language, all the more so when Vera remarked, “Yes, we’ve been very neglectful.”

Mrs Mallow herself loved her garden and there was nothing she liked better than to sit there in the summer evenings when the roses hung white and fragile from their stems and somewhere in the distance faint and almost scented the pale moon climbed into the sky, as if it were a reminder of the past.

“I have had a letter from the people I rented my house to,” she told Angela.

“Oh?”

“They have a baby and he’s a chartered accountant. The letter was very nice. I think they will look after my house all right.”

“I’m sure,” said Angela. “They are probably very responsible people.”

“Yes, I think so.”

But at that moment Mrs Mallow had an intense desire for her house, as sharp as hunger or thirst, a desire to sit by herself in it so that she would not have to speak to anyone, but simply relax there, in an undemanding silence, which might of course later turn to a demanding one.

She looked out of the window at Tom who was leaning over his spade among the uncultivated ground. He seemed to be miles away. And so did Angela and Vera.

“I think,” she said, “I shall go to my room for a little while, and lie down. Oh I’m all right, there’s nothing wrong with me, I am just tired.”

Her last glimpse was of the two women, Vera and her mother, sitting opposite each other at the table, not speaking, while in the garden outside Tom was digging furiously with his spade.

2

I
N HER DREAM
Mrs Mallow was shouting at her husband, “Why can’t you get a better job than working on the railway? We never have any money. We have nothing.” And she stared fiercely at her old black kitchen range, at the linoleum instead of a carpet on the floor, at the sink discoloured and veined. “We have nothing at all,” she screamed. “And that son of yours,” she shouted, “what’s he going to do? He sits here all day after school and he doesn’t speak to anyone. What sort of person is he?”

She stared out at the backs of the houses, at the washing hung from the windows, at the blank grey yard. If only we had a garden, she thought, if only …

I wish I could stop this shouting she was saying to herself over and over, but she couldn’t.

What? What did the doctor say to you?

And he stood there in front of her like a schoolboy, and he wasn’t at all frightened, only resigned, as if he had arrived at a terminus which he had been driving towards all his life. No, she said, that can’t be right. You must see another doctor. He must be lying. I will go with you.

And they set off through the streets of Edinburgh together on that brisk fine breezy spring day. No, she was repeating to herself let it not happen. Not … not … not … It can’t be true. I loved you, I love you.

The insurance, he was saying something about the insurance. Something about the insurance and a garden. What was he talking about, an insurance and a garden. What was the connection? But he was going on about it in such an unhurried even voice almost as if he were talking about someone else. His body would be converted to a garden, he would flourish there. He would grow out of the garden, his buried body would blossom. And she clutched his hand. My love, my useless love, only your death, you are saying, will bring me my garden. No, no, no, there had been the two of them, there were the two of them, and of course Tom. And her mother and father hadn’t come to see her much, neither had his parents. They had been dependent on each other, and now he was talking about insurance. Death was something that happened to other people, not to her, especially on such a fine sparkling day as this. It couldn’t happen, there was no sense to it. Yes she could have lived forever in that tenement, put up with anything, if only he had been there with her. Perhaps with her nagging she had … Her mind winced away from the unbearable thought. They crossed the park, and the squirrels were playing games among the tree trunks, in the deft interplay of light and shadow, and there was a child playing with a red ball. The doctor would tell her that it had been a mistake, surely he would. But then if he didn’t … And her husband never went to church, though she did. He stopped for a moment and stood under a tree looking up at the pale white blossoms and then continued on his way, she beside him. Just for a while there he had stopped as if he had seen something. Soon she would know.