The Heart of the Country (13 page)

He would like her to be happy, so long as her happiness didn’t stand between him and his.

Doing it all Wrong

In the middle of March, Ben and Alice started at the comprehensive. That is to say, Ben stood in the playground on the morning of the first day and shouted at his mother, ‘I won’t go to this school. I won’t. I’m not like the others. They’re thicks and turnip tops. They’ll laugh at me. I hate you! What have you done with my father? You are a bitch!’

Then he gave up, and went inside, unprotected by a school uniform (for here they wore any old thing – one of his other complaints), looking much like anyone else aged 12. Presently Alice stopped crying and went inside the school too, to whatever unpleasant destiny she believed awaited her. Natalie found herself saying under her breath, ‘I hate you, Harry Harris’ and meaning it.

Hate is the third stage of the cure. After passivity comes anger, after anger comes hate. These allegedly negative emotions are to my mind fine, healing things. Natalie was fortunate enough to heal quickly. People differ in the speed with which they recover from what therapists refer to as major life disasters (divorce, that is to say) in the same way as they do from cuts and bruises, and she was lucky. She had been born with a very strong life-energy (Tor-language – sorry) which during her marriage to Harry had simply stayed tamped down, underground. It was this, I do believe, which made her so attractive to men (oh and women, women too!) at that particular time: the sense of the unreleased, which they (Eros willing) might be the lucky one to release. Her suitors interpreted it as simple sexual attraction, but it was more all-pervasive than that. Oh yes.

Dunbarton was withdrawn from auction, suddenly, at the end of March, and was sold, privately, for sixty thousand pounds.

‘He offered cash,’ explained the pleasant, bright-eyed young man at Waley and Rightly, the estate agents. He was Angus’ assistant. ‘We can’t afford to let a cash buyer slip through our fingers! Not with Inland Revenue tapping on the window pane! Not to mention the bank!’

Natalie could remain in the house for two more weeks, he said. The contents were to be auctioned separately at the end of that time, and should, he consoled her, fetch an excellent price. Angus was to be the auctioneer.

‘A fine man!’ said Bright Eyes. ‘Splendid auctioneer.’

Natalie went down to the Welfare Office, and this time saw not Mary Alice but a certain Rosemary Tuckard. Rosemary had a flat, round face and very tiny features, so her face seemed almost blank. Talking to her was rather like talking to one of Alice’s cut-out paper dolls, Natalie thought. But at least she smiled and nodded, and a cold dark hole did not seem to be her natural home.

‘Inland Revenue forced the sale,’ said Natalie. ‘I didn’t have a leg to stand on, according to my solicitor. Not that I trust him. One of his friends bought it, as it happens. You know him? Arthur Wandle the antique dealer? His wife was tired of living above the shop.’

‘It’s easy to be paranoic at a time like this, Mrs Harris,’ said Rosemary Tuckard. ‘That’s a very serious allegation you’re making and I don’t think you should repeat it.’

‘If I’m paranoic,’ said Natalie, ‘will I get more housing points?’

She was getting quite sassy with those in authority. It did her no good.

‘I wonder if you’re being quite open with us about your circumstances?’ asked Ms Tuckard. ‘A lot of people do withhold information, thinking perhaps it isn’t relevant, when it is. If, for example, you are in receipt of any financial help from a man or are even living with one…’

– ‘I’ve declared everything and I’m living with no one’ –

‘Then what
are
you living on?’ enquired Ms Authority, ‘if, as you say, you have no source of income since your husband left?’

‘On the children’s money boxes.’

‘Um. I believe you did have an association before your husband left?’

Now how could she know a thing like that? Easy. She was a good friend of Jean the pharmacist. Who wasn’t?

‘Are you implying it’s my fault my husband left?’ demanded Natalie. She was bright pink and angry. ‘Is that what you mean… ?’

‘Well,’ said Ms Tuckard, who had never been unfaithful because the opportunity had never arisen. ‘You can’t mess up your life wilfully and then expect the State to step in and pick up the pieces!’

‘What sort of world is this?’ demanded Natalie, flailing away. ‘Do I have no privacy at all?’

‘It’s a world in which you are asking for public funds,’ said Ms Tuckard, primly, ‘and your character and behaviour when in receipt of them must be taken into account.’

‘But what you’re talking about was
before
I was in receipt of them.’

‘Of course,’ the flat-faced woman now apparently in charge of Natalie’s life and conduct observed, ‘and therefore doesn’t affect your legal rights: not at all. Nevertheless, we do have areas of discretion. I take it the sale of the contents is expected to bring in quite a sum?’ No doubt she too was a friend of Bright Eyes.

But, as Natalie explained, much of that was already bespoken. The school fees had to be paid, and all the local creditors. It was a matter of
pride, as much as legal necessity.

‘Pride,’ observed Ms Tuckard. ‘You may have to learn to forgo that.’

‘And after that I’m homeless,’ said Natalie. ‘That’s why I’m here. Not to talk about my love life.’

‘You want the children put in care? Is that it?’

‘Of course not!’

‘It might be best for them until you’re sorted out.’

‘I don’t want to be sorted out, I want a house to live in.’

She was doing it all wrong, of course. I told her so later.

‘You mustn’t talk about wanting this or that,’ I said to her, ‘about your feelings or pride or whatever: you must talk about your rights as a citizen half the time and cry the other half. That gratifies them both ways – as officers of the State and virtuous private citizens to boot.’ But too late then, of course.

‘A
house
is out of the question,’ said Ms Tuckard. ‘We just don’t have houses available. I wish we did. Our public housing stock is being run down. We are obliged by law to sell them to tenants if they wish to buy, and round here they often do. The re-sale price can be really quite good, you see, what with the views and the scenery and people wanting second homes, weekend cottages. There is, of course, emergency accommodation. We don’t like women and children of otherwise good character sleeping in ditches! So we do have a hostel. You have to be out by nine in the
mornings, of course, and not back until seven. It can be tricky, especially if it’s raining, but better than nothing.’

‘I suppose I could join the peace convoy,’ said Natalie. ‘At least they wouldn’t turn me out in the rain.’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’
said Ms Tuckard, suddenly brutal. ‘They have some very nasty diseases up there. In fact, if you try anything like
that
we’ll take the children into care at once.’ And that put Natalie in her place.

At periodic intervals the peace convoy – for so it calls itself – trundles into Glastonbury: a procession of ancient vans and lorries which journey at an average speed of three miles an hour, wherein the peace hippies live, in what the good citizenry see as squalor, depression and aggressive criminality, and the travellers themselves see as pleasant, dozy virtue, and the only possible way to live – semi-nomadic, looking always for a home, a place where welcome awaits, and taps and hot water, and never finding it. Moving on, moved on, the new gypsies. Well, to journey is better than to arrive – or so say those who have already arrived! The peace travellers shake their dreadlocks on the local streets as they gather before the local DHSS offices, and wait to collect their rights, their payment from the State. To the ratepayers, to those with painted front doors, it seems that AIDS, herpes and hepatitis fly in a mist about them as they wait. Shop doors slam and pubs close as they pass. Some have noses eaten away by cocaine and syphilis, some are whole, clean and beautiful and most consult the stars for advice. They have their spokesmen (sorry, spokespersons) and their martyrs. Policemen offer them petrol to take them off to the next county. Vigilantes slash their tyres to show them what is what. Otherwise, nobody knows what to do about them. For what
is
what? How can they be sent back home when they have no homes to go to? How can they take jobs when they don’t have the mentality to
do
jobs? How can those who ought to be in the loonybin go
there
even, since they’re closing down all over the country, and not just in the heart of it? How can those who should be in prison go to those, since the prisons are already packed to bursting with those who consent to society’s reproach, and these do not? You can hold one person against (allegedly) his will, but a hundred thousand? The peace convoy is the first tattered, fluttering swallow of a long hard summer ahead, in which the travelling dispossessed roam the countryside, living off what they can.

Natalie would never join them. She would be too frightened. I toyed with the idea once. But to be outside the law did not suit me. And I’m sorry to say I was swayed by the Argument from Hygiene. I wanted to be
clean,
I wanted not to
smell,
and I wanted that for my children too. That was the real madness. For of course you can’t get away from dirt, ever. There’s a kind of grime about mental hospitals: a lingering septic smell, like the children’s breath when they have tonsillitis. Patients are still put to washing floors, but nobody teaches them how to do it. Washing floors is a skilled job. Most people (like Flora) do it by swilling water around the middle, without sweeping properly first, so that mud lines the skirting of the floor, up and into the spaces between cupboards and furniture. And if you walk down any corridor in a mental hospital you will observe the inch of black grime which proves me right.

Washing Away the Stains

Arthur came to see Natalie on the day the contents of the house were sold around her. She sat in the children’s empty playroom. Porters had taken the contents away, and
set them up in lots downstairs, under ‘Toys – assorted’. Natalie did not mind seeing them go. She hated Ben’s Zoids and Action Men and robots and computer games: they were soulless and nasty. They were training her son in murder. She hated Alice’s Care Bears and Cindy Dolls and
Little Ponies. They were training her daughter in silliness and sentimentality. They could all go. Natalie could have stopped them, and said to the porters, ‘No, are you mad? Toys are personal! Not part of the sale.’ But what would she have done with them then? She had two big suitcases already filled to the point of not closing. She could take with her, wherever she was going, what she could carry and no more, one suitcase in each hand, like a refugee. Who knew when she would ever again have a shelf for a toaster or a board for an iron, let alone a cupboard for toys! Let it all go, and she would take the money, and start again!
She wanted nothing of the past, anyway. The past was all full up with Harry Harris, whom she hated.

Arthur said:

‘Natalie, I feel bad about this. But Jane and I were so crowded above the shop, and there was no way you and the kids could stay here, what with the rates and so forth. They are high, aren’t they! And whose idea was the underfloor heating? Very uneconomical, and splits the wood if you have good furniture. God knows what I’m going to do about that!
But it’s taken the problem off your hands, hasn’t it, Nat? And at least you know the house has gone to a good and friendly owner for a quick, cash sale.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Natalie.

‘You’ll be moving out tonight, I’m told?’

‘That’s right,’ said Natalie. ‘Don’t worry about me, Arthur. The children are down at the playing fields. I’ll pick them up after the sale, and be out of your life, not to mention your house!’

‘But not out of my heart, Natalie. You know that. Ever. Where are you going? Friends? Family?’

‘Never you mind, Arthur, I’ll be all right.’ Natalie had her pride, as we know. Not by a flicker would she show that she minded: that Arthur had upset her; Arthur, whose body she had known, had been so familiar with. He with the substantial, friendly girth, with its warm, pleasant smell, and all the pleasure that came with it, and whose mind she had not known at all.

‘Anyway, good to know Angus will look after you,’ said Arthur, placatingly. ‘Since you’ll have nothing more to do with me. You’ll get quite a bit from the sale, I imagine. Enough to get
you settled.’

Arthur had not been attending the auction, Natalie could only suppose, though Jane was down there buying an ironing board for 25p, a box of cutlery for 50p, and a set of chairs for five pounds, or Arthur would have understood very well that Angus was not looking after Natalie. On the contrary. The sale had gone largely unadvertised, and the buyers who turned up were mostly friends and colleagues of Arthur and Angus, or customers of Avon Farmers, on the trail of a bargain, and finding many. The new freezer went for fifteen pounds, Angus seeming unable to hear a call of twenty pounds, coming from a man who just happened to be passing, had seen the crowd, and stopped, and now couldn’t believe his luck. It must be something about the acoustics, he supposed, which made the auctioneer keep missing his bid.

‘Do you like gardening?’ Natalie asked Arthur, as she picked up her suitcases and prepared to leave.

‘No. But Jane does.’

‘Good,’ said Natalie, leaving Dunbarton for the last time. ‘This place could be made really nice. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone!’

She was right. I sit here writing in my cubicle, with the peephole in the door left over from the old manual days, so the nurse could look in to make sure the patient wasn’t swinging from a hook in the wall. She can do that now by looking at a screen, for we are all electronically surveyed, but the peephole remains, in affectionate memory of the past. There’s a central locking system so the duty nurse can lock my door from a distance any time there’s trouble anywhere, or she thinks there might be. Clunk-click! I too think of what I failed to appreciate. I
have always wondered how it is that one guard can handle so many prisoners; why there are not more army mutinies, more prison breakouts, why the massacred stand idly by and let themselves be massacred? It’s not just guns and gas and superior muscle power that does it. A critical mixture of coercion and persuasion is no doubt required: and superior knowledge and technology on the part of the warders comes in handy, but it is the fixed notion of guilt on the part of the prisoners that really does it. They have done wrong: therefore they deserve to be badly treated. They are badly treated: therefore they have done wrong. And the unfortunate construe their misfortune as their own fault, and so consent to their incarceration. I sit here on the bed, writing, submitting to electronic surveillance, because somehow I think it’s what I deserve, and because look, it’s better than loneliness. Anything is. Those who are watched are not alone!