An End to Autumn (3 page)

He got out of the car, leaving it unlocked for nothing was likely to happen to it, and walked slowly into the station. There were one or two pupils at the bookstall glancing through magazines about football and he nodded to them absently and they smiled back with the sort of smile that they offered when they were not actually in school. He strolled on to the gate through which his mother would appear when she came, and stood there, a slightly hunched figure, gazing along the rails as if they were double-barrelled shotguns aimed from the haze towards him.

Eventually the train wormed itself into the station and he watched as door after door opened, and people stepped out onto the platform. Then he saw her and with a sudden rush he went towards her for she was looking around in a bewildered manner, almost as if she were in a foreign country whose language she did not know. She had a large black case which a tall man with a briefcase was helping her with, but when he saw Tom coming he nodded briefly and walked briskly towards the exit. She was wearing a black hat and black coat as if she was still in mourning, helpless and confused. He took the case from her and they walked towards the exit side by side, he slowing down to accommodate his pace to hers. He never kissed her when they met, though his mother-in-law kissed him with a dramatic flourish each time he met her, as if he had just arrived from the North Pole, and she might never see him again if she didn’t greet him quickly.

“Did you have a good journey?” he asked and found that his voice was slightly colder than he would have wished.

“Yes,” she said, “I was talking to a woman who was coming here on holiday. She’s from England and she comes every year. She says she likes it very much.”

“Yes, we get a lot of tourists,” said Tom who did not at that time think of himself as a tourist. “Have the people moved into the house?”

“They moved in yesterday. Very nice people. He’s a chartered accountant and she doesn’t work. They’ve got a lovely little girl. She’s only five and she’s just gone to school.”

“You’ll like it here,” said Tom. “Plenty of sea, plenty of fresh air. You can come and sit in the gardens in the warm weather, and it’ll pass the time for you.” And he pointed out to her the railed-in garden, with the benches on each side of it, on which even then some tourists were sitting, a number of them reading newspapers.

“It is lovely,” she said and certainly the town was looking its best on that fine autumn morning, the flowers still in bloom, the sea calm and sparkling, and the islands green in the distance. It was as if she were coming on a holiday and not to stay, for nowhere could she see the sort of cramped tenements to which she had been used in her youth. It was as if she were gazing at a picture, staged and perfect, distant and yet slightly faked.

“Lovely,” she repeated. “Where is your school?”

“It’s not near here. We won’t actually be passing it,” he said taking out his key to open the boot of the car in order to put the case in.

“That Englishwoman was saying that she comes every year. She said she wouldn’t go anywhere else for her holidays.”

He thought she was trying to put him at his ease, and she thought that he was looking thin and worried. Perhaps he was working too hard.

“Are you well?” he asked. “Are you quite well?”

“I’m not bad,” she replied. “I sometimes have a slight dizziness but not much. The doctor said there wasn’t anything really wrong. He said my lungs are still very good for a person of my age.”

And she laughed a little for she liked the doctor, a young man who joked with her when he came to visit.

He opened the car door for her and waited till she had settled herself in the seat. As they drove off he felt as if he were bringing home a conquest, a treasure of some kind, and it made him feel happy so that as he indicated to her the various features and buildings, they appeared as personal gifts which it was in his power to grant. He heard himself saying to her, “I used to worry about you down there, with all that vandalism. You haven’t had any more break-ins?”

“No, just the one,” she said. “You have a lot of trees here.”

“Yes,” he answered as if they belonged to him.

When they drew up at the door of the large house, Vera was standing there as if she had been waiting and watching for them. She came forward and as her mother-in-law stepped slightly awkwardly from the car she kissed her lightly on the forehead as if she were giving her the sort of kiss a nun might give.

“I hope you haven’t had a tiring journey.”

“No it was quite nice,” said her mother-in-law. Vera waited for Tom to get the case out of the boot and then, Tom preceding them, she and Mrs Mallow entered the house.

Vera took Mrs Mallow into the living room and said to Tom when he had come in after depositing the case, “Your mother can go to her room later. I think we should have a cup of coffee now. Would you like that?” she asked her mother-in-law, helping her to remove her coat and hat and leaving them for the time being on a hook behind the living-room door.

“Yes I would, thank you,” said Mrs Mallow, sinking deeply into the sofa. “I was telling Tom that I met an Englishwoman who told me that she always came here on holiday. Her husband is a professor but he’s too busy to come with her.”

“A professor of what?” said Vera handing the cups round.

“I don’t know. Was it science? I can’t remember. They had been married for thirty years, she told me.”

She sipped the coffee and looked around her, not as yet feeling at home, and watching Tom who was glancing at the headlines of the morning paper but who, realising that she was staring at him, put it down again and said to Vera:

“She tells me that she gets a little dizziness now and again.”

“Oh nothing much, nothing to worry about,” his mother protested. “Not often. Only once or twice when I was shopping. It wasn’t anything. I was telling Tom that the doctor said that I had good lungs. He told me I had the lungs of a sixteen-year-old.”

“That’s good,” said Vera. “I’m sure neither Tom nor I have that,” and her mother-in-law laughed.

“I think I have the lungs of a ninety-year-old,” said Tom. “We don’t get enough exercise. We should take more exercise.”

“It’s a lovely house,” said his mother. “A lovely house.”

“Is the coffee sweet enough,” Vera asked.

“Yes, yes, it’s good coffee. Exactly as I like it,” though in fact it was not quite as sweet as she usually wanted it.

“I hope you haven’t had any more break-ins.”

“No no, just the one. And they didn’t take anything. Of course I don’t have much anyway. I mean I don’t have any jewellery or anything like that.”

“They wouldn’t get much jewellery here either,” said Tom, “though you don’t get many break-ins in this place. Or at least hardly ever. Shops maybe but houses hardly ever. You won’t need to worry about that.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Are you sure you haven’t something to do? I’m not keeping you back or anything?”

“Not at all,” they both said simultaneously.

“Not at all. We don’t do much work on a Saturday. Hardly any really. But if you would like to see your room,” Vera suggested.

“I don’t mind,” her mother-in-law replied and Vera and Tom went along with her.

As he stood outside the door of the room with his mother, Vera behind him. Tom had the strangest feeling as if he were a warder showing a prisoner into his cell, and yet there was no reason why he should, since the room was in fact a very fine one with large windows looking out on to the hills and trees at the back, and was furnished neatly with a TV set, an electric fire, a bed with a yellow continental quilt, a wardrobe and basketwork chair. There was also a dressing table of the same light contemporary wood as the wardrobe with a large mirror above it. The curtains were a pale yellow.

“This is your room, mother,” he said, using the word for the first time.

“It’s lovely,” she said enthusiastically. “Lovely. It’s so airy and light.”

And indeed it was airy and light and sunny. There was about it no sense of sweat or time, its wood was innocent and clear, no deep thoughts had ever brooded in it, the windows and furniture were all without memory.

She stood there as if not quite believing that the room belonged to her, as if she were a lodger moving in, as if she would at any moment ask them what the terms might be, or when breakfast would be served in the morning. Tom laid her case down in the middle of the room and said rapidly, “Put on the TV any time you like. And don’t worry about the electric fire. Use it as much as you like. Remember it is your room. If there’s anything else you want, you ask.”

“If the quilt isn’t warm enough,” Vera added, “just tell me. But we usually find that these quilts are warm enough on their own without blankets.”

“Well then,” said Tom awkwardly, “we’ll leave you just now. The bathroom is on the left as you leave the room. We’ll leave you then,” he said again. He and Vera left the room, the door still open. He didn’t say anything: it was as if in that moment, in that encounter, his mind had been flooded with images from the past, they all swam on the sea of his fresh feeling, images from tenement rooms in a big city, massive brown wardrobes, sideboards huge and becalmed, ponderous chairs, flowered wallpaper, speckled ceilings inadequately whitewashed.

A train long and brown, a sinuous snake, bulleted through the walls, and turned into a coffin and then he was standing in a gush of feeling at his father’s grave. The day was clear and warm. The minister was standing at the graveside speaking of the Resurrection and the Life, and the many mansions to which all the mourners were invited. He himself waited, hearing above the words the hum of a wasp about his head, for the moment when he would be summoned to take a cord of the coffin and help lower it into the grave. All around him he saw the intent faces of the mourners, many of them blinking their eyes rapidly, and they seemed to him like the faces he had seen in a painting by Rubens or some other painter (was it Rembrandt?), permanent, puzzled, austere.

Then he was called and he stepped forward. He stood there looking down into the open grave, feeling slightly dizzy as if he might fall into it, following the small light body of his diminished father. It was as if he and his father had entered a tunnel through which the train would eventually emerge into bright daylight. But he knew that this would not happen. And as the coffin swayed down on its ropes, he woke up and there beside him, standing slightly perplexed, was Vera and across his face passed a shade. Suddenly he put his hand in hers and without saying anything squeezed it slightly and went back into the living room. They stood there in the common light, he more disturbed than she for some reason that he could not put a name to till he realised that the funeral he was remembering could not have been his father’s at all, since he had been too young to attend it.

He tried to think whose funeral it could have been, but couldn’t remember. She gathered the coffee cups together to wash them and in front of him still on the table was his copy of
The Waste Land
.

3

O
N THE FOLLOWING
morning Mrs Mallow woke early, the sun pouring through the window, and all around her an unaccustomed silence, except for the cry of seagulls. She felt light and free and happy as if she had thrown the weight of life’s responsibility on others, and had only to follow her own desires. She dressed rapidly after she had been to the bathroom—where she had noticed on top of the cistern a doll with flaxen hair and very clear blue eyes—and then finding that the other two were not yet up, she sat in her room for a while, thinking that she did not want to go out in case she disturbed them. She also left the electric fire unlit lest she should waste too much electricity, which had become so expensive in recent months.

Her journey to her son’s house had been a response to his repeated suggestions after her own house had been broken into one evening when she had been in church. She had thought of keeping it from him but had not in fact done so for the rather odd reason that it had given her something to tell him when he had visited her, since he believed that she led an uneventful life. The burglars had forced a back window and had taken the small radio which he had given her, as well as a few ornaments, and a clock: there was little else of value in the house. Perhaps because of this they had scattered some documents, including insurance policies, on the floor, and had left the lock of the window smashed. For the first time since she had lived in the house she had felt vulnerable. At first she hadn’t known what to do but had finally decided to phone for the police who came along, had a look at the room, advised her to have the window lock repaired, took a list of the stuff that had been taken (she didn’t know what make the radio had been) and then left her without much hope that she would ever get any of it back. Tom had been incensed when she had told him about it, as if he had been personally threatened. He had stormed down to the police station, and had been very rude to them: and then he had come back and told her that she must come and stay with him and Vera.

She hadn’t actually thought of that before, though she had wondered what would become of her if she was unable to look after herself. She only thought of this in a vague sort of way and not constantly. She was a rather heavy, big-boned woman and sometimes when she was out shopping, especially among traffic, she felt moments of dizziness as if her body were becoming too large to handle, and also more vague than it had been before. She found too that the world was becoming rather remote, and sometimes had the odd feeling that people were laughing at her and talking behind her back. Her only recreation, if it could be called that, was church. In church she relaxed in a restful silence, different from the silence that surrounded her at home; she could only think of it as a holy silence. Her troubles and torments seemed to fade away, leaving her mind and body light and fresh. Even the smell of the varnished seats conforted her, and sometimes in spring and summer she would look at the small high windows and see beyond them the motion of new green leaves.

As she was thinking these thoughts she heard movement in the house and knew that either Tom or Vera or both were up. She glanced at her tiny watch and noticed that the time was nine o’clock. She wondered if it would be possible for her to go to church. It was strange to be in somebody else’s house, even though it was her son’s: she had never been in a house before that wasn’t her own or her husband’s. The first one had been a flat in a tenement and now there was the small semi-detached house which she had rented out for a few months. It was odd to be waiting on the pleasure of others, and to adapt to their routine which would probably be very different from her own. It was strange that there should have been a doll in the bathroom when there were no children in the house, and it looked very much as if there wouldn’t be any. A house with children was different, there was a sense of life, laughter, noise, quarrelling. But there was a clean silence about this house as if it had not yet wakened up, as if everything rested securely in its place and would remain so. She quite liked her daughter-in-law or, rather, didn’t dislike her, but she had great difficulty in speaking to her and felt rather frightened of her in a way.