An End to Autumn (7 page)

Even in the school itself he saw reflections of his own predicament. For instance there was a lady teacher who always brought her frail tottering ninety-year-old mother to all the school functions, looked after her with great affection, and in fact devoted her life to her, so that though she remained unmarried, she, in apparent joy, kept alive that old bundle of bones, but perhaps only so that she herself wouldn’t be left alone. It was all very complicated.

Why should Vera object so strongly to that Irish woman? After all, she was an ordinary human being like his own mother.

6

O
NE
S
UNDAY MORNING
Tom made a momentous decision. Casting his Sunday papers aside he announced that not only would he take his mother to church but he would also attend the service with her. Vera who had been standing at the cooker turned and looked at him in amazement as if she had been struck to the heart. Because his mother was already waiting to go, gloved and coated, and carrying her bible in her hand, Vera didn’t say anything but he felt that he had somehow wounded her deeply, and for the moment the pathos that surrounded his mother transferred itself to his wife. Then Vera had turned away and continued with her cooking in silence, and he had simply said that they would be back at half past twelve.

“I shall expect you then,” said Vera in an almost muffled voice. At that moment she looked so defenceless and hurt that he nearly went up to her and kissed her but her back, so eloquent of disapproval, discouraged him. He left the
Observer
and the
Sunday Times
as a peace offering for her, unopened, unread. At least, he thought, she should realise what an effort he was making, in going against his own principles in the service of another human being. She should surely thank him for taking his mother off her hands for a whole morning. Surely that should weigh in her judgment. His mother was waiting, trying not to look pleased, as if she had sensed Vera’s disapproval: but he could tell nevertheless that his decision had made her happy. What am I to do, he thought. I’m trying to be fair to both. It’s all very difficult. Human relationships are really impossible. One tug here and there’s an open wound there.

“Wouldn’t you like to come yourself?” he asked Vera.

“No, you go,” she said, in the same remote muffled voice. “I’ll have to do the cooking. You go. I don’t really want to go.”

And so they left. When they had gone Vera looked down dully at the spoon in her hand. What was she expected to do? Was she not doing her best? And now Tom was betraying his own true self by going to church. As she stood there she remembered her mother, flamboyant and theatrical, setting off to her church in Edinburgh, pulling on her red gloves in a flurry of excitement, as if there was a coach outside waiting. And she also remembered the compulsory church services she had had to attend when she was in school and which she had hated, as she had hated many of the pupils; their childish scurries in the dorm after lights out, the shared food parcels at midnight, the running into wardrobes and under beds when authority came to investigate. They had all been so infantile, their world was so uninteresting in comparison with that of for instance Jane Eyre. She remembered the stupid conspiracies with hot-water bottles and baths. And she suddenly felt overwhelmingly insecure as if someone were trying to disassemble her carefully structured world. Evil perhaps rose simply from that; fear, grief, absence, insecurity.

And now there was this new development which she couldn’t help construing as a threat, Tom’s going to church. What had happened to his, for want of a better word, integrity? How could one despise the empty robes and theatre of religion, how could one feel the utmost contempt for that bravado without substance, and then in such a short time and so inexplicably become a willing spectator of it, perhaps even an actor in it. It was true: she felt a new coldness about her, as if her formal world were in danger of destruction, a sentence which would soon lack a verb. In the chill of the autumn morning she left the kitchen and went to the bathroom and stood staring at the doll which was lying on the cistern facing her as she looked in. The eyes, blue and cloudless, gazed at her from below the long eyelashes. The face, round and chubby and red as an apple, showed an almost vulgar healthiness and absence of thought. The dress, short and frilled and golden, hardly reached the chubby knees.

Where had the doll come from? She couldn’t remember. Had she got it as a marriage present? Surely not. Had she bought it in the town one day when she had nothing better to do? She couldn’t remember at all. But there it stood on top of the cistern, mindless and clear-eyed confronting her head-achy untidy self, as if it were a symbol of a primitive time before religion had been even thought of, with its red lips, red ribbons and startlingly blue eyes which seemed to suggest a pagan heaven without mercy or fear. She picked it up in her hand, weighing it delicately, and then began to stroke the golden hair very gently and tenderly as if she were stroking the head of a child, over and over, a stiff staring child golden in the autumnal light.

7

M
EANWHILE
T
OM SAT
beside his mother in the church after a moment of hesitation at the door, as if even then he could turn back and not commit himself. He saw a number of people whom he knew and who nodded at him in slight surprise, glancing at his mother who smiled in an almost queenly manner. As he waited for the service to begin, looking around him at the bright hats of the women, the tall blue cross on the pulpit cloth, the varnished pulpit with the microphone, the narrow windows with their stained-glass panes, he thought of what he was doing. His mother sat beside him, staring straight ahead of her, her hands in her lap, passive in the silence, and he sensed that in some way she was repossessing him, that by doing what he had done he had taken an irrevocable step. For what he was doing, and his motive for doing it, was unusual. Not believing in religion, he had placed humanity above ideology as if by doing so he was setting himself beside her in the world, as if he was showing that he was not ashamed of her.

This extraordinary achievement—the clearsightedness with which he had seen the issues at stake—warmed him with a righteous glow. How many people would have understood what he had understood, that beyond ideology, that even beyond disbelief, there lies the human being, solitary and vulnerable: that more important than intellectual consistency is the helpless demand of the human soul and body: that from these stale forms peers out shyly and timidly the human face, lost in a world that it does not understand. How easy really it had all been, and how few understood how much it had cost him to sit where he was now sitting. And yet if one did not believe in religion was it any worse than going to a performance in a theatre, a willing surrender of disbelief? Or, if one considered the whole thing as a routine act, like having a weekly injection, why could one not bear it with a smile?

It seemed to him that when the minister entered, dignified in his black robes and carrying a bible in his hand, he was paying special attention to him, as if he were a hero who had done something magnificent and unique: and when he preached his sermon which was about the Parable of the Talents he felt that it was he himself, talented and sensitive, who was being referred to.

When the psalms were sung, he found himself back again in the world of his childhood, a word of settled order, which on the whole it had been. Nor was it the psalms alone that recalled that world. It was also the smell of varnish from the seats, the slight coughs of members of the congregation, the colour of the psalm books themselves. He thought of the world of the Bible as a secure aesthetic world, with shepherds watching their sheep on patches of sunny green, boats floating in water, stars shining in the sky, staffs and beards, skies of eternal blue above brown deserts. Yet at the same time he did not believe that this world represented any form of immortality, nor was the church itself anything other than a building of stone built by mortal hands. Nor did he believe that anyone had ever risen from the dead, nor in miraculous interventions. None of these was a truth to him, they were simply beautiful images, poetic and colourful, a vanished primitive world.

But he believed that his mother rested secure in that world. Her faith was simple, though it seemed to have little to do with her daily living. For instance at that moment she might be thinking, for all he knew, that she had won some sort of triumph over Vera, and this triumph perhaps was making her singing sweeter. Life was terrible, it was a truly terrible thing, and its issues beyond our understanding, for deeper even than religion was the terror and glory of the human mind. How could one live at all with people? How did people ever manage to live together, tugging and pulling, shouting silently, “I am, I am, listen to me, I am here. Pay attention to me. Love me without return, gratuitously, with utter constancy.”

When the service was over he walked among the congregation, was shaken hands with by the minister who recognised him (for he had a daughter in the school) and whose smile was as benignant as the sun. He introduced his mother to a friend of his who taught at the school and was an elder of the church, and in the after-service bustle felt about him a warmth which might have been false and meretricious, but was welcome just the same. It was clear to him that his mother was happy to be at his side: after all he was her son and he had a recognised place in the community. The desert was blossoming like the rose, he was showing charity and kindness, he was being what he ought to be, a man who loved his mother and who showed it before the world. He was successful in his own small way.

Side by side they walked to the car, their shoes rustling the gravel, while near them lay the graveyard with its tombs ordered and clean in the morning light. He could see flowers here and there, vases, open stone bibles, the glitter of granite from the gravestones, he could even hear a late autumnal bird twittering from the churchyard. How silent and pure that world was, the world of the dead, with its iron railings and mostly ancient stone. How clearly it told in its very dumbness of the continuity of life even in death, of ancestries that perpetuated themselves through centuries, for to this place the living came with their flowers and in turn others would bring bouquets to them. How well the world was organised, and how simple life really was. How little the intellect had to do with it. There were only a few clear necessary truths which one could carry with one as if in an overnight bag with its toothbrush and shaving gear. The rest could be left to itself. He opened the door of the car for his mother and she got in, arranging her coat. Then she sat back in the car, her bible in her lap, looking relaxed and at peace, heading for home.

8

O
NE MORNING
V
ERA
woke up feeling very cheerful, Tom still lying in bed gazing at the ceiling. An idea had blossomed in her mind during the night and stood there clearly before her, as if it had emerged without her intervention or presence at all. It was a fine beautiful creative idea of the kind that visits one perhaps on a summer morning when the sun is shining and the curtains shake a little in the breeze: but this one had blossomed on an autumn day.

“You’re very happy this morning,” said Tom lazily.

“Not particularly,” Vera replied carelessly for as yet she did not wish to tell him of her idea which she hugged to herself as if it were a child loved secretly for itself alone. She combed her hair in the mirror while Tom watched her. If only she were a nun, fulfilled in the world of her cool vocation: but that was not possible. Nowadays one must live in the world and the world made demands which had to be met: it required that one get up in the morning, set out into its infinitely devious maze, meet with other people and have relations with them, useful or futile.

Even from our loved ones, she thought, we hide most of our secret wishes and dreams. For instance at this moment Tom does not know what I’m thinking and I don’t know what he’s thinking. Nevertheless we are able to live together as if we knew each other wholly, which is an impossibility: for how could she have known that Tom would have surrendered the convictions of a lifetime in order to go to church? Nor had he even talked about what had happened when he came home, and when she had questioned him he had given unsatisfactory and vague answers as if this was a part of his life that he did not wish to talk about to her, or as if it was simply impossible for him to talk about it. He would have considered her interest trivial not realising how important his action had been to her. It was as if their marriage were beginning to cloud slightly like a window on an autumn or winter morning when it is enwrought with cold patterns of ice so that one cannot see through it as one could when the weather was warm and unclouded and sunny. Exactly like the bedroom window on that very morning so that she could not see the trees in their autumn bravery until she rubbed it with her hand.

“Should you not be getting up?” she asked.

“In a minute,” said Tom, lying there in the warmth of the bed.

She shook her hair back, put on her clothes and went to the bathroom while he still lay there. What am I? he wondered. Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I going to school this morning? Why is that wardrobe with the mirror standing in front of me at this particular moment? Why is her hairbrush with strands of her hair in it lying on the dressing table? And he gazed at it as if it were an object that he had never seen before, dear and distant, the pink hairbrush which contained part of his wife’s body. And the conjunction of the hairbrush and her hair and the dressing table puzzled him so that he found it difficult to imagine why they had come together in that room, like spaceships emerging from the depths of an unknown universe.

He suddenly threw back the bedclothes from him and looked at himself in the mirror. His long narrow face gazed back at him, his eyes examined his reflected eyes, his nose thrust itself forward, his mouth with the prim pursed lips was reflected back at him. He pushed his face against the glass as if against an icy window and burst out into a manic laugh as if he wished to explode in front of the mirror, as if he wished both reality and reflection to merge with each other in the infinite depths of the glass. Then he began to dance in his shirt in front of the mirror, moving his body backwards and forwards in a parody of Top of the Pops and as he did so he was laughing helplessly and silently while his distorted waltzing image gazed back at him.