An End to Autumn (18 page)

After they had walked into the wood in silence among the dapple of sunlight and shade, Angela and Vera finally came to a glade in which were stumps of old trees and many boulders and stones. There Angela halted, breathing heavily as if she had been making a greater effort than she could easily endure.

She sat down on one of the stumps and then said abruptly to Vera:

“Well, now, what’s going on? Your phone calls, brief and dutiful as they have been, suggest that something is going on.”

Vera looked down at her with a disdainful smile and answered: “All that is going on is that Tom’s mother is with us.”

“I see. And you don’t like that. Do you mind if we stop here for a while?”

“You don’t need to act with me, mother. I know the play from the inside.”

“Of course,” absently. “Of course. You don’t like me much, do you?”

“Not very much.”

“I see.” She gazed at a buzzard that had settled on a branch, its wings folded.

“What you choose to forget, Vera, is that I’ve believed in allowing people to grow up in their own way.”

“Which is simply another way of saying that you don’t care for them. Which is simply another way of saying that you can’t be bothered with their runny noses, whether their shoes are polished or not, or whether their tiny minds have thoughts of their own.”

Angela sighed again, pulling her red cloak about her as if for greater warmth.

“You’re very bitter really. You’re not very likeable.”

“I’m as likeable as I’m allowed to be. I am what I am.”

“I seem to have heard that phrase before but it may have been in another country.”

Angela paused as if she were thinking deeply. “You don’t really know much, do you? You talk and act as if the world were everything. You’re very naïve. Why should it be me you choose to blame your inadequacies on? Has it never occurred to you that you are responsible for yourself? Did you for instance tell Mrs Mallow straight out that you didn’t want her in the house. Did you have the guts?”

“I did it for Tom. I thought it would be all right, but it hasn’t been. I did what I could. It isn’t my fault.”

“But when you found out that the arrangement didn’t work did you tell her directly. Did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Angela gazed at her daughter as if some inner confidence in her voice puzzled her, as if there was some part of the circumstances that didn’t fit.

“I know what you would have done,” she said at last. “You would have smiled and kept silent. Have you ever considered that some day you may be in the same position as Mrs Mallow yourself?”

“I’m not stupid, mother.”

“Have you considered then what this may do to Tom and to your marriage, forcing him to get rid of his own mother?”

“I have considered all that, strangely enough.”

“I see. You’re taking great risks aren’t you?”

“I’m not taking risks. I’m accepting life, as perhaps you’ve never done. You married my father to get out of your so boring house as you call it but you don’t love him, do you? Well, I love Tom. We were happier before she came than you are with my father.”

“Yes, perhaps you were. But perhaps at the cost of shutting life out. Is your life style necessary, may I ask, necessary to you so that you won’t run the risk of losing Tom? I notice that you have few friends.”

“We have all the friends we need,” said Vera waspishly. “If we needed more we would have them.”

“Perhaps Tom is your child,” said Angela as if thinking aloud, letting her thoughts run on. “The one you never had. His mother was a threat, was she?”

“She was not a threat. She insisted on associating with unsuitable people.”

“I see. Unsuitable people.”

From her stump of old wood Angela gazed up at her daughter, “Would you consider me for instance unsuitable?”

“I didn’t consider you at all, for the reason that you never considered me. And anyway what you’ve just said is …” Vera came to a sudden halt as if she had decided not to say what she had intended to.

There was a sudden whirr of birds about them in the bare wood and at that moment Angela as if for the first time realised that she was not a mother confronting a daughter but one woman confronting another and the pain pierced her heart so that she had to clutch the stump on which she was sitting for support. She felt a dizzying darkness about her.

“I have considered everything that needs to be considered, mother,” Vera continued evenly. “Tom loves me. I know that, and that is all I need. I have worked it all out. It is very simple.”

“It sounds monstrous to me. But perhaps I am old fashioned.”

“Perhaps you are. I know what I want and that is the difference. I am not going to be an ageing actress who speaks her lines to a man whom she finds intolerably boring and whom she doesn’t love. I don’t find Tom boring. I love him. I am capable of that. And no one shall come between us.” Her fierceness was as strong and direct as the descent of the buzzard on its prey.

“I see,” said her mother. “It’s clear enough. I am confronted by the representative of a new generation, simple, uncomplicated, genuine. And unashamed. The new adult. May I ask you again why you keep that doll in your bathroom now that you are so mature? It occupies pride of place on top of your cistern. I wonder why.”

“There is no particular reason.”

“Can you not remember where you got it?”

“No I can’t and it doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I can. It’s a doll that you once stole from another girl when you were a child. You were at a party and quite blatantly you stole the doll. The mother came to me in great distress because her own child was crying for the doll. We managed to get another one for the child because you refused to give the original one up. No wonder you can’t remember. It has blue eyes just like your own.”

“You may do what you like, say what you like, but I shan’t change my mind about Tom’s mother.”

“I see.”

They stared at each other and Angela knew that her daughter hated her, that somewhere along the road she had been responsible for what was now happening. The world was endlessly complex and justice was unerring and true. She wished that she could say the word that needed to be said but couldn’t think what it was, and with a start realised that Vera wouldn’t have taken her in either if she had been in Mrs Mallow’s position. And at that moment she wished to be back home, with her husband, watching him as he sat in his armchair smoking his pipe and reading the paper. In truth he was all she had: the rest was theatre and nonsense. The new road glinting and hard was too sharp-edged for her: truly she didn’t understand it. Truly she couldn’t comprehend the risks her daughter was taking so open-eyed and clear-sightedly. My poor Jeff, she thought, we are together in the world, we have no one else.

Suddenly she stood up and said, “Well, that’s that then. There’s nothing more to be said. Perhaps we should get back.” They left the glade in silence and in silence waited at the car for the other two to appear out of the wood. Now and again Angela would make as if to speak but then stop as if anything she said would be useless. It was almost as if she was frightened of her daughter, of her pure natural feelings, for they could be considered in a sense to be natural. They could be considered to be courageous, all those eggs, blank and staring, in the one basket, all those fundamentally sterile eggs.

And she saw her daughter again, withdrawn and pensive, hunched over a book in her room, the doll at her feet, and she said to herself over and over, “Please forgive me O God please forgive me for what I have done.” And she would pull her red theatrical cloak around her for warmth.

5

T
HE OTHER TWO
had also in an uncomfortable silence walked into another part of the wood which was not unlike the one that has already been described.

After a while Tom said, “She does go on a bit, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t like her very much,” said his mother.

“Oh? Why not?”

“I think she’s deep. She’s never had to suffer as I had to. She’s never had to live in a tenement. She’s always had good things about her.”

“That’s true.” And then consideringly. “But I don’t think she’s very happy.”

“She’s got her husband.”

“Yes,”

The wood was very quiet with hardly any sound except for the rustle of their shoes over the fallen leaves. The death of the year, thought Tom, that is what we are in at. Not a coronation but an abdication. A sorrow that pierces the heart.

“It’s not easy to bring a boy up in a tenement. Many a time I had to keep you from the others. They used such bad language. Do you remember that?”

“Not really.”

“I went to the headmaster about you once and he said that you would do well. He said you were a very responsible boy with a good head on your shoulders.”

“Did he?”

Their words fell hollowly into the silence as a stone falls down an empty shaft.

At that moment they emerged from the wood and in front of them they saw a lake unruffled and calm. A flock of geese flew high above them in wedge-shaped formation and Tom knew that they were migrating, heading for warmer lands, their necks out-stretched as if already they were in sight of it.

He loved the autumn to excess. There was no other season to compare with it. In the autumn there was a sense of slow inevitability as of a world maturing to its proper and exact end. The animals, the birds, accepted it, the leaves put off their array. A brown month majestic in its going, in its surrender to circumstance, putting away its crowns as a child its toys when it is finished with them. Around them some of the colours of the trees were red, some golden and some brown. The season hung at its turning point, like a clock about to strike, waiting, measuring its moment.

The two of them stood beside each other in the wood looking at the loch, he in his yellow jersey and black trousers, his pale face thin and haunted and slightly sad, and she in her black coat and black hat. And it seemed to Tom as he gazed around him that he and his mother were part of a landscape that had existed before they came and would exist after they had gone but that at the same time their lives like those of the leaves were a growing and a fading. He felt it as an almost holy moment and would have turned and told his mother what he felt but he couldn’t, for he knew that she would not be able to understand. There was so little really that he could talk to her about: all that bound them together was blood and obligation. He had in his mind transcended her long ago. He was the mountain tall and towering and she was the distant reflection sleeping in the loch. “We have nothing,” he thought, “but the natural bond of our blood and bones.” His thoughts were not her thoughts nor her thoughts his. All the time he had to make allowances for her: it was an unnatural situation.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes.” And then, “How long did that woman say she was going to stay?”

“Another day, I think.”

The moment had passed and he no longer felt anything.

“I didn’t take to her at your wedding,” his mother continued. “She hardly spoke to me. And sometimes I think she looks down on you too. She thinks you’re not good enough for her daughter.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s fair, mother. She’s been very nice to me. I know she goes on a bit but deep down she’s not bad. She’s got a good heart.”

“Deep down she looks down on you,” his mother insisted. “I know that. You’re blind. Just like your father. You don’t see things. But I’m too old in the tooth for that.” And in her black coat and hat she seemed suddenly fierce and formidable and real.

“Well, all right, then, mother. Perhaps she does. But it doesn’t bother me.”

“It should bother you then.”

She was speaking to him now as she had done when he was a boy, as if he still belonged to her, as if she were telling him to brush his shoes, wear a clean shirt and clean trousers. But of course he didn’t belong to her now and he knew that he didn’t. If only she would consent to be what he wished to her to be, totally amenable, able to get on with Vera, with no rebelliousness or pride of her own. But of course life consists of rebelliousness, of bristly pride, of flags of vanity. Perhaps she had enough left to live on her own. Enough of pride, which was what it came to in the end.

He turned and looked at her and her face was set like that of a stone image, like a profile on a coin. Absurd in her conspicuous black, a being of nature and yet not of it, she attracted all the more his pathos towards her.

“Anyway,” she said finally, “I have my own house. I’m not dependent on her.”

They walked slowly from the loch through the trees past the fallen stumps, the stones, the brown leaves, and stood for a moment looking at the car beside which Vera and her mother were standing, slightly apart, not speaking. This is my wife, thought Tom, to whom I must cleave, on whose behalf I swore an oath in church. On that day she had worn white as now, her veil had blown slightly in the breeze, when the photographs were being taken, she had turned and looked at him with love. The minister had spoken, music had played, they were together, two people, separate from all others even from their parents. Outside the church the middle-aged women had been waiting as if they were searching in the two of them for something that they had forever lost: and little boys had scrambled for pennies in the April day of shuttling light and shade. And there after all had been the two of them emerging, nervous and parched, the deed accomplished. There hadn’t really been a miracle for the middle-aged women who had turned away as the black taxi left in a shower of confetti like falling snow. There would never be a miracle, only the conjunction of two lonely people in a world that continued on its way as it had always done. And now a little distance away there was Vera standing with her mother, her back turned towards her, the car behind them, and behind that all that the hills. Only another scene that rolled remorselessly from the eternal camera as time passed.

And suddenly as they approached, Angela broke the silence saying excitedly, “Do you think we could have our picnic soon, if dear Tom would drive on a little further to a more suitable spot.”