The Centre of the Green (24 page)

“I know. I’m having treatment for it.”

“What?”

“Yes. Things got so pointless, I tried to kill myself, but they pumped me out again.”

“Christ!”

“I’ve been going to a sort of Group Therapy thing.”

“Any use?”

“Not much. Gives me something to do two evenings a week.” Charles picked a leaf from the almond tree, and crumpled it in his hand. Insensitivity was only a matter of degree. Who knew whether the tree or the leaf felt pain, and could one care even if one knew? It touched nobody. He said, “I didn’t know anybody had noticed.”

“You can’t help noticing. Talking to you—it’s like playing chess or something. There’s no emotional reaction at all.”

Charles said, “Do you remember the story of Kay and the Snow Queen? It ends happily. Kay has a splinter of ice in his heart so that he doesn’t feel anything, but at the end, the splinter melts, and they take him away from the Snow Queen. I forget why it melts. Somebody kisses him or something; you know the way they do. The splinter melts, and he begins to feel again. It’s wrong, you know.”

“The splinter doesn’t melt in real life?”

“Yes, it does. Not often, but it still does. It melted when father was telling me—just before he died, when we were talking together, and he said that about doing things with style. It melted then. I felt—not sorry for him or anything like that—just with him … on his side. But it froze up again afterwards. Things change, but they change back again.”

“Like me?”

“I suppose.”

Julian said, “I’ll tell you something. I killed father. I didn’t mean to; I just wanted to shock him. Everybody was treating me—well, as if I were just an object—
reforming
me, sending me off on holidays; I got sick of it. You see, I knew it wouldn’t be any good. I wanted to get my own back. I went wild during that holiday. I did all sorts of things I’d never done before—meaner than
before
, and more awful. He never knew that. I pretended, you see. But I wrote it all down in a diary, everything I’d done, and I illustrated it with pictures I’d bought from one of those postcard sellers, and I left the diary on top of the stairs for him to find. I knew he wouldn’t want to read it, but I thought he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. I thought, ‘Let him be tempted for a change’. And he found it, and read it. That’s what brought on his attack, and when he fell, he hit his head.”

Charles said, “Does mother know?”

“Not unless he told her.”

“He wouldn’t tell her.”

“I must have gone right over the top,” Julian said.

“Yes. Are you still over the top?”

“No. Not like that. I don’t think anything like that could happen again.”

“It’s not important then.”

“No.”

“What about the other thing? Do you think you
can
change?”

“Not really.”

“Important to try, though.”

“Oh, yes,” Julian said. “Important to try. For you too.”

“We’ll both go on trying then. And see what happens. Even if it doesn’t do any any good, we have to try.”

The boys had gone by the afternoon train. Mrs. Baker was alone in the cottage.

The cottage was filled with silence again, flowing like mercury from one room to another, but not with silence only, for it seemed to Mrs. Baker that there was a clock in every room, and wherever she went she could hear the
tick! tick! tick! tick!
measuring the silence into lengths for easy use. In this silence, her hearing became acute. It was not only the ticking she could hear, but the sound of the gas meter and the electricity meter, measuring the cubic feet and ohms. She could hear the insects in the garden, and the creaking of boards in the house, and the leaves of the trees in the drive rustling together, and the sound of her own footsteps.

The boys had gone by the afternoon train. She would sell the cottage, of course, and move into a flat in town. She would not be dependent on her children. She would find a place of her own. Perhaps there would be some kind of work she could do. She would help at a nursery school. She made some tea, and drank it, and looked at the Women’s Page of the
Daily Telegraph
, which was lying on the table.
When
will
men realize
, she read,
that there are times when a woman simply wants to be by herself?
She put down the paper, and went out into the garden. Mr. Sayers had sent Sam to level off the earth on the Colonel’s grave, and lay new turves on top of it, so there it was beneath the almond tree, green and artificial like a miniature lawn in some Municipal Gardens. Beneath those turves her husband lay in a casket of polished walnut.

She stood there in the garden, gazing at the grave without seeing it, while the dusk deepened around her. The boys had gone back to London by the afternoon train, and her husband lay buried beneath the almond tree. She would have to get a man in to look after the
flat in town. She could hear the vicar’s Vespa far away in the lanes, and somewhere the sound of a bicycle bell, and then the church clock striking the half hour. Perhaps she would advertise for a companion, or open a Guest House, or do cream teas in summer; she did not wish to be dependent on anybody. She turned, and walked back to the house. She could hear the hinge of the kitchen door as she opened it, and the clocks ticking, and the meters turning, and the sound of her footsteps. She went into the drawing-room, and turned on the television set. She sat watching it in the dusk, until first the vision appeared, and then came the sound.
Harpic! Harpic!
sang the television set;
The sign of a clean, clean home!
Mrs. Baker began to weep. There was a man interviewing housewives about a washing powder. Mrs. Baker wept violently, uncontrollably, a storm of weeping which quite drowned out what the man was saying about brightness. The picture changed.
Someone’s mum just doesn’t know
, went the television set, while Mrs. Baker wept, and wept, and there was no one, no one at all to hear.

John Bowen was born in India, sent ‘home’ to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943–47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for children’s television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (
Heil Caesar, Robin Redbreast
) and plays for the stage (
After the Rain, Little Boxes, The Disorderly Women
). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with
The McGuffin
; there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.