Every Day Is Mother's Day

CHAPTER 3

“Look,” Colin said, his hand half over the mouthpiece. “I can’t talk now. But why not Thursday?”

“Because Thursday is the writing class.”

“But you don’t really want to go there.”

“How do you know that I don’t?”

“You said you didn’t find any profit in it.”

“No, but much pleasure.”

“Isabel, please—look, I’m in the staffroom, I can’t talk.”

“Then what was the use of telephoning?”

“I wanted to fix something?”

“Well, then. But not Thursday.”

“It’s just that it’s such a good chance. Sylvia knows that I go out on Thursday.”

“Tell her you’re going out another night.”

He was awed by the simple terms in which she saw his predicament. “I—well, she might not just accept that.”

“That’s your problem.”

“Well—which night then?”

“Monday.”

“People don’t go out on a Monday. At the end of the week, that’s when they go out.”

“For pleasure, but not for business. You wouldn’t be going out for pleasure, would you, Colin?”

“No, that’s true. All right, I’ll think of something to tell her. Can we go to a film, would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“All right then, I’ll pick you up at half-past seven Monday, and we can have a drink first.”

“Fine,” she said. “Goodbye.”

“Isabel—”

But he had heard the click. He knew she had gone, and still went on calling her name. He stood still. He realised that her plan was better. He could see her on Monday, and on Thursday too. After the class they could go to the Duke of Norfolk. He would see her two evenings instead of one, and it was Friday already.

Where had she been last night? He hadn’t asked her. He could have raised the point, he could have said, ah, then why did you miss the class last night? But he hadn’t questioned her on that one. He’d been too relieved to hear her voice. She always seemed to be out, or engaged with a client. He rushed to the phone between lessons, piles of exercise books slipping about under his arm, wedging the receiver under his chin, trying to juggle his cigarettes and his lighter for a quick drag before the next forty-minute period. Sometimes Luther King House was engaged, solid, for hours. All the weary morning he rang her, through to spam fritters and steamed fruit pudding, and into the afternoon. Once he dropped a whole pile of books, and his colleagues looked up from their marking and card games, and he felt they had noticed he was agitated and red in the face. When he heard her voice at last he could hardly believe his luck was in; it seemed to him a miracle that she walked on the same pavements in the same town, that the line distorted her voice, like anyone else’s.

The tall and shady trees, the disconsolate sparrows huddling in the trees: these protected Evelyn and Muriel from observation. The oncoming winter stripped them of their shade, but because it was winter there was no need for Muriel to walk in the garden. By the end of October the plots were fenced by black arms held aloft, mourners from some more fervent culture; Brewer, Petty & Co. nailed up their signboard on 3 Buckingham Avenue, and Evelyn’s closest neighbours moved away. Sylvia remarked, when they next visited Florence, that the house would remain unsold until after Christmas; no one wants removals, she said, with Christmas upon us.

Evelyn gave Muriel some of her own old dresses. At five months, even six, Muriel didn’t show too much. She was tall, and ungainly at the best of times; her clothes had never been in the height of fashion. When in the end the dresses began to strain and pull in the middle, Evelyn went into the conservatory, and delved about among the boxes. She came out grey to the elbows with dust, lengths of fabric laid across her forearms.

She had found a pair of old blue curtains, very large. She hung them out on the line to get rid of the smell of must. When she brought them in they smelled of soil. Saxe-blue, she said, very nice. She took out a treadle sewing-machine and ran up a couple of garments for Muriel, two identical. She didn’t need a pattern. She could wear them turn and turn about. She wanted for nothing, Evelyn said.

Cards from the Welfare dropped through the letterbox; apart from the household bills, there was no other post. Muriel collected a stack of the cards. She held them in her hands and shuffled them until they were greasy and turned up at the corners. Evelyn took them from her in the end and burned them.

“Do you want to go to the doctor?” Evelyn asked. “Because if you do they’ll take it away when it’s born, and you’ll have nothing to show for it.”

Muriel seemed to have lost interest in life. She sat a good deal of the time with her eyes closed, her fingers in her ears. Then her fingers would pinch her nostrils closed; when Evelyn had first seen this trick she had been distraught. “What is the smell?” she had demanded, trying to drag Muriel’s hand away from her face. “What is the smell?”

Soon she understood that Muriel was enjoying one of her strange holidays from the world. There was nothing she could do until the girl repacked the tattered baggage of her personality and came home. Sinking into immobility, Muriel would allow Evelyn to manoeuvre her around like a piece of furniture, putting her wherever convenient. I don’t know how I am going to manage, Evelyn thought, if she is like this when the baby comes.

So Monday morning brought relief. Muriel was back. Her pale eyes travelled around the house, without interest, but more freely than of late. “You are being a good girl today,” Evelyn said kindly. Muriel got up and took herself upstairs to the lavatory.

Evelyn was in the kitchen when the knocking started up at the front door. Muriel heard it too. I know what is done, she thought, or what can be done, when that noise starts up. She remembered to rearrange her clothes, or to do as much rearrangement as was necessary under the enveloping blue dress. She watched her large feet going before her, placing themselves slightly sideways on each descending stair.

Evelyn snatched the pan off the stove. As she blundered down the hallway, she felt tiny malignant hands pull at her skirt and catch at her ankles. She could not, could not, make headway.

Her face contorted with effort and alarm. “Muriel!” Muriel turned her head, gave her a blank look, her hand on the catch of the front door; then a slow, spreading smirk. The door swung open, framing mother and daughter, as if they had come to open it together in an expansive gesture of welcome.

A young woman stood on the doorstep.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said. “Isabel Field, Social Services.”

As she said this, she put one foot over the threshold. Presumptuous, Evelyn thought. For a moment she moved forward to block the doorway; stepped back just as the girl’s eyes began to widen in surprise.

“Delighted,” Evelyn said. “I can’t think why we haven’t met.”

Standing in the hall, the girl unwound a long woollen scarf from round her neck.

“I’ve written,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve called before.”

“Really?”

“You’ve been out, perhaps.”

“Very likely.”

“So I’ve been unlucky.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Are you well, Mrs. Axon?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

“And is Muriel well?”

“Come through, Miss Field.”

Muriel sat and stared into the fireplace, pulling at a thread of her blue dress. She gave the visitor one glance devoid of all interest, then slumped down further into her chair.

“Hello, Muriel.” Isabel stood before her, but her client would not look up. She took a chair; leaning forward, a hand extended, she tried to engage Muriel’s attention. Her voice was gentle, almost timid. She doesn’t know how to go on, Evelyn thought.

“How are things, Muriel?”

“You’ll find,” Evelyn said, “that Muriel has no small talk. It’s a big disadvantage to her, socially.”

“It’s not really small talk, is it?” The girl glanced up at Evelyn. “I am here on business, after all.”

“Yes, but there’s no compulsion, is there? You don’t have to come. She’s not committed a crime.”

“No, no, of course not, but we are very concerned about Muriel. It’s months since she’s been to the Day Centre.”

“Well, she has a full life.”

“Really? That wasn’t the picture we’d formed.”

“We?”

“Social Services. It’s unfortunate that so many people have handled Muriel’s case, but we do have records, you know.”

“Well, look for yourself. She’s happy enough. She didn’t like the class.”

“Didn’t she?” Concern crossed the girl’s face. She’s all hot and strong when she talks to me, Evelyn thought, and gentle as a mouse with Muriel. But now she’s wondering what to do.

“I didn’t know that. She should have said something at the time. What didn’t she like?”

“She doesn’t care for being regimented. She likes a bit of independent action, Muriel.”

Again, Miss Field’s attention flickered over her client. “She seems so…so cut off. Is she often like this?”

“Now and again. She’s a grown woman. She’s got a tongue in her head.”

“I wish she’d use it.”

“How would you like it, Miss Field, if strangers came into your house enquiring into your circumstances? Suppose it were your own home?”

Now the girl blushed, a deep guilty red.

“Well, in a sense, Mrs. Axon, I wouldn’t like it at all. But I’m not trying to interfere, only to help Muriel. You see, looking at her there, hardly moving, her body all drooping, not speaking—well, it crosses my mind that she could be suffering from depression. Clinical depression. Of course, that would be a matter for your GP, in the first instance.”

“I’d take her to the doctor,” Evelyn said, “if I thought it would help.”

“Yes, do take her, because if he thinks she is depressed, there are some excellent drugs. Then, if she felt better in a month or two, she might try the class again.”

“You think that’s what’s the matter, do you? Depression?”

“It could be.”

“You don’t notice anything amiss with her physically?”

“Better let your doctor be the judge of that. I’ll try to call next week, and you can tell me how you got on.” She looked around at Muriel again, again put out her hand. “That’s an unusual dress, Muriel. Where did you get that, then?”

Muriel closed her eyes, screwed them up, and grinned.

“She’s got a sense of humour, hasn’t she?” Miss Field said. She patted Muriel’s wrist. And Evelyn’s patience snapped.

“Sense of humour? Lovely dress?” The girl’s head snapped back in shock at her ugly tone. “I made it for her. I do adorn her, I deck her in all the modes. Yes, she’s a wonderful personality, my daughter, not a beauty, but very striking. Isn’t she, Miss Field?”

The girl straightened up. She was staring at Evelyn, her mouth slightly ajar.

“Perhaps she has a beau.” Evelyn laughed. “Perhaps she slips out when I sleep in the afternoons, and meets him in the park. No wonder you get no answer when you knock, Muriel’s on the razzle.”

The young woman turned, with a strange and frozen expression, and looked at Muriel. Stared, Evelyn might have said, as if she were seeing her for the first time. Muriel lifted her face, like an animal sniffing for water; she looked, her mother thought, particularly unintelligent and unappealing, just at that moment. Without a word, Miss Field scooped up her briefcase, and got herself most precipitately from the room. Evelyn followed her to the front door. The girl jerked it open, and took a deep breath of the leaf-mould air. “I’ll see you again,” she said, and fled down the path towards her car.

Evelyn watched her go with fleeting amusement, thinking that she would likely not be back; but they might send another one, there were plenty in reserve. Something had struck a chord. Her neck felt stiff, her eyes strained, with the effort of keeping her gaze averted from the middle of her daughter’s body. She returned to the sitting-room.

“Thanks to me,” she said. “Thanks to my tact, young lady, you aren’t locked up by now. A month from now you won’t be able to hide it.”

Muriel sat examining her hands. She always looked at them as if they belonged to someone else, and she was surprised to find them attached to her wrists.

“How many times have I told you about going to the door?”

Oh, once twice, thrice, Muriel replied uncaringly.

“You dare to cheek your mother!” Tears sprang into Evelyn’s eyes. I am getting old, she thought, I am getting old and I do not deserve this. It is such a strain for me. Even the blue tits have learned to open the milkbottles; but Muriel has learned nothing at all.

Colin was surprised at how easy it was to tell lies to Sylvia. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

That night he drove up to Isabel’s house at half past seven. He knew he was early, so he took the car slowly along the road, reversed into a driveway, and drove back. It was an unremarkable street on the outskirts of town, the kind of place where he would have been glad to live. The estate was too noisy, swarming with the kind of children he taught all day. His windows looked into other windows, and he resented the share of themselves with which his neighbours presented him. The gardens were heavy clay strips, waterlogged and cleared only recently of builder’s rubble; the tiles were coming loose in the bathroom, and rain got in under the kitchen door. He wanted a house like the one in which he had grown up; grey shrubberies and yellow-cream curtains of heavy net guarded each property. Ah, property, he thought, that is what they are, not merely houses but a statement of values. But surely, he thought in mild surprise, those are not the values I hold?

Colin stopped the car. He looked at his watch. His hand went for the door handle, and then withdrew. He sat hunched for a moment and slowly leaned forward, to let his head rest on the steering wheel. I am lonely, he thought, I am behaving very badly. As if I were free to do this.

Muriel had begun to imitate the visitor, crossing her legs at the ankle and tucking them under her chair, and absently smoothing her hair around the imaginary curve of a cheek. She wore the remote and abstracted air of the woman from the Welfare.

As punishment, she was being deprived of food. It annoyed Evelyn that she wasn’t more affected by this. If you put food in front of her, she ate it; if not, she didn’t miss it. By herself she would starve, Evelyn thought, or make herself very sick. She would bring a raw egg to the table, and set it down with every appearance of satisfaction; choose what was raw or half-cooked or stale, in preference to the good food her mother provided for her. The idea of mealtimes didn’t seem to have got into her head. Is she human, Evelyn wondered that night; is she human or something else, and what is she likely to give birth to?

Colin brought their drinks, and put them down on the table.

“Not a very good film, was it?”

“We didn’t really need to see a film. But if we just parked the car in a field and made love, you wouldn’t think we had a proper relationship.”

Turning his chin very slightly, Colin looked covertly over his shoulder; and then the other way, out of the tail of his eye.

“Just…having a check round,” he said. “I don’t want to run into anybody.”

“You look shifty, doing that.” She seemed amused. “You won’t risk much, will you?”

“You don’t love me,” Colin said heavily. He sat down and pulled up his chair to the table. “You must be playing some sort of game with me.”

“I don’t know what game that could possibly be.”

“Perhaps you’re using me as a study. To extend your professional range.”

She laughed. “You have a curious idea of my job then.”

“Isabel, before I knew you, what did you do at the end of the day?”

She stared. “Substantially, what I still do now.”

“Did you have a boyfriend?”

“I didn’t give anyone up for you, if that’s what you mean. People with an active love-life aren’t found at evening classes.”

“But there have been people?”

“You didn’t think I was a virgin, did you?”

“I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know how it happened, the other night.”

“I have never understood this point of view, that only after so many meetings, so much money spent, so much conversation…I wanted it to happen, or I would have stopped you.”

“I know that. I wasn’t apologising. I just want to know about you. It’s natural, to want to know about the person you love. So you can picture them, when you’re not together. I’d like to know what you do on the nights you’re not with me.”

“I clean the house. And I put my feet up. My job’s quite tiring.”

“Do you like your job? If you’d just tell me about your job, it would be something. When we’re not together you have a way of seeming…nebulous.”

“You’re possessive, Colin.”

“Because you’re evasive.”

“Evasive?” She laughed without humour. “Do you really want to know about my job? Today I met some people who are very evasive.”

“Yes, go on.”

I shouldn’t talk about it, she thought. It’s confidential; no names, but it’s even possible he could know them. I shouldn’t talk about it—oh, but I must, I must. Spit it out. Get the foul taste out of my mouth.

“These people—I’ve been chasing them for weeks. A mother and daughter. They’ll never let me in. I cornered them today.”

“What’s the matter with them?”

“Oh, the daughter’s mildly retarded. She used to come to a Day Centre we run, but she doesn’t want to come any more.” You handled it badly, said a voice inside her. You were brusque and unprofessional; and then you let the situation completely defeat you. Now tell him about it, set out the facts; so that in setting them out you will become sure of what they are. And only the facts; not some silly product of your imagination. “When I saw the daughter I thought for a moment she must be pregnant. She was wearing the strangest clothes, a sort of blue tent. God knows where she found it.”

“Perhaps she is pregnant.”

“No, that’s not possible. She never goes out, she has no opportunity. She’s revolting, anyway. No one would want her.”

“You’d be surprised. The unlikeliest people find partners, I always think.”

Isabel shivered.

“What is it, are you cold?”

“No. I’d like another drink, maybe.”

He picked up their glasses and took them to the bar. Her eyes followed him. He may not be much, she thought, but he’s sane, he’s clear, he’s outside all this; he has no truck with the filthy speculations I deal in.

“She gave me a shock,” she said, when he sat beside her again.

“Who? Oh, this girl. Sorry, go on.”

“She’s not a girl really. A woman.”

“Are you worried about them?”

“We’re not supposed to worry. Only to display professional concern. It’s different. You mustn’t identify with your client, or let her life touch yours. It’s professional death, to get involved.”

“It must be hard to stay uninvolved, though. If you see people who are unhappy.”

She shrugged. “It’s not my fault that people are unhappy.”

“No, but isn’t it rather your professional responsibility? Or am I pitching it too high?”

“Much too high. That’s the trouble with social work, no one has fixed on what to expect of it. You can’t be with people twenty-four hours of the day. If they’re really going to beat their children to death, they’ll find time to do it. And if you try to take the child away from them it gets into the newspapers, and you are shown to be a do-gooder and a tyrant. And you can’t improve people’s thoughts. You can’t stop them creating private hells for themselves, if that’s what they want to do.”

“Do you see eye-to-eye with your colleagues?”

“Not really. This miserable old woman today asked me how I would like it myself, some strange person coming into the house enquiring into things. I think, my reaction would be that things are bad enough without social workers.”

“I think perhaps you’re in the wrong job, Isabel.”

“Probably.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “I sometimes think I don’t care much for people. When I was a student I spent some time working with schizophrenic children. They frightened me. I used to think—I kept it to myself, of course—that there wasn’t a lot that was human looking out from behind their eyes. Then I studied the people I met on the street. They had much the same expression.”

“We’ll have to go,” he said. “Where do you want to go to?”

It was a blunt demand, but he could not think of any way to soften it. It was not quite time yet; they might hang on for another ten or fifteen minutes. But that would solve nothing.

“Let me just get my coat.”

He helped her into it. “Shall I take you home?”

“Do you want to get rid of me?”

“That’s the last thing I want.”

“Let’s drive then.”

“All right. Soon get the heater going, when we get out on the road.”

He opened the door and she slipped through it under his arm. The night buffeted past them like an animal avid for the hearth. They left the bright doorway for darkness and raw blue air. He felt her shiver against him, and took her arm. On the safe and public tarmac, splashed by yellow lights from the main road, he felt a fugitive wind on his cheek; the hollow-faced tossed bundles onto carts, eyes piercing for the camera. To be exiled, he had read, you need not leave home. Banishment is to the desert round of the familiar world, where small conversation is made and the weekly groceries are bought in good time. He had accepted this, as an intellectual conceit; now he felt the needles of loss. He tightened his grip above her elbow. “Come on, it’s chilly.” Their breath hung on the air. She slid into the passenger seat. “If that van would move,” he said. They had to stop and wait. He edged gingerly out of the car park and onto the main road. “Which way? Oh, Christ.” He slammed the wheel with his hands. He wanted to weep with frustration. “This is ridiculous. Nowhere to go. Like kids. Kids do this.”

She reached out and put her hand over his. “Colin, it’s all right, calm down. Drive to where we went before, and if you prefer it we can just talk. Or, if you prefer it, take me straight home. Whatever you think best.”

She spoke very softly, very gently. He would always remember the tone of her voice and the tips of her fingers brushing his knuckles, inside the woollen gloves she had just pulled on. Later, when it was all over, he would think: at that point, if at no other, she must have loved me. Then, if at no other time.

“We’ll go to where we went before.”

She pulled off her gloves again and unzipped her bag and fumbled for cigarettes. “Shall I light one for you?”

“Yes please.”

He hardly ever smoked now but he wanted her to touch him again. He could not wait until they got to the field.

As winter set in, Colin waited every week in the street outside Isabel’s house. It was not necessary for him to ring the doorbell. She never kept him waiting for more than a minute, and it gratified him to think that she must listen for the sound of the car.

“Take me to meet your father,” he said. “He need not know that I’m married.”

“I’d rather not tell lies.”

“There’s no need to lie. There’s no need to say anything about it. You shut me out of your life,” he complained. “When you aren’t with me, do you ever give me a single thought?”

Her dark almond eyes flickered over him. Her face remained impassive, unimpressed. “You have all the woman’s lines, Colin. Have you noticed that?”

Once or twice he had glimpsed the elderly man in the doorway, wearing spectacles and a bulky handknitted cardigan. He would wave a hand limply and forgetfully to see his daughter off, and then withdraw into the house.

Then, between the great yellow orbs which flanked the gate, she would turn to him the paler luminous oval of her face; not smiling, not speaking, she would slip into the seat beside him and their evening would begin. These days she wore a belted beige trenchcoat pulled in at the waist, and a long brown woollen scarf. Her hands when she lit a cigarette were often blue and mottled with cold. I will buy her some sheepskin mittens, he thought, at Christmas.

They did not go much to the field now. They were afraid of the car sinking in the mud. They had taken to getting further away from town. Colin would drive to the motorway intersection, slot them between the lights of other cars, and put his foot down. For miles and miles ahead the wet black road gleamed under the orange lights. Wrapped in their numb silence, their eyes on the tail-lights ahead, headlights reflected in the rear-view mirror, they were locked into the process of the road; parts on its conveyor, diminished to its function.

He would pull in at the service halt. They sat on padded seats of turquoise plastic, facing each other over the litter of stained paper cups and scraps of cellophane ripped from sandwiches.

“It’s so sordid,” she laughed. “It’s so properly sordid. Like a film.”

“I shall get a night from somewhere,” he said. “I’ll get some petrol in the car and we’ll go—drive up to Manchester, get a decent meal and find a hotel. I’ll come up with something. Just give me time.”

“Give me time,” she said mockingly. “That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?”

“Before the winter’s out,” he said, “things will be different. I told you that first night that I’d leave her. Give me—no, no, you’re playing games. If I left her you’d laugh in my face.”

“You’ll never leave her,” she said. A ginger-haired woman moved between the tables, whisking cigarette butts into a waste bag, her white face set in lines of ineradicable fatigue. She watched them with pale bitter eyes.

“She wants us to go,” Isabel said.

“Drink your tea. Then we’ll go.”

“It’s like treacle. It’s the end of the pot. It always is at this time of night.”

She leaned forward and tears dripped into the cup and splashed onto the table. She got up suddenly, thrusting her chair back, and strode towards the door ahead of him, fastening her coat and looping her scarf around her neck. He was afraid of the clenched set of her mouth. The rain had stopped; he saw them hurrying, reflected in puddles, ghost-white flitting among the petrol pumps and headlights. She put her foot on a sodden mess of paper and slime and skidded to her knees. He ran behind her and picked her up. Holding her tightly by the waist he steered her towards the car. In her seat she unbuttoned her coat again and pulled up her skirt, rubbing at her grazed knees and picking at the shreds of her tights. She sobbed and sniffed, fumbling for a handkerchief. He reached across her and fastened the seatbelt in her lap, making the soft nonsensical sounds of comfort he used to his children.

“You must take me to your house. We can’t go on like this—”

“I’ve told you, no. Her voice shook. “No, no, no.”

“What is it, love? What’s upsetting you?”

She turned and looked at him, for a second, as if she had never seen him before. “Whatever is wrong in my life,” she said, “might have nothing to do with you.”

“But has it?” She turned her head away. “Perhaps I’ve done you an injustice. Perhaps you do feel—”

“Oh yes, I feel,” she said harshly. “I took a training course to educate me out of feeling. I’m not paid to feel. But still I do it.”

“Then it’s your job that’s getting on top of you.”

“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath.

“And your dad. Your home. Caring for him. Perhaps it’s that.”

“I see you have your theories. Just leave off, Colin.”

“Leave off? Leave me alone, you mean.” He was angry. “You want to have me around when it suits you, you want to talk about your work, you want to put the burden onto me. You burst into tears, then you say leave off.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you.” She lifted her face. “See, I’m not crying now.”

“I worry about you.” He touched her hair tentatively. “You’re getting thin.” Suddenly he saw it. “You need me, don’t you?”

He did not ask, what for? She seemed vulnerable in her distress, naked; he rushed to cover her with willing assumptions.

“How shrewd,” she said.

“You need to pack in this job. You need a husband. You need a proper secure home.”

“And you’re offering?”

“Isabel, give me something back. I’m human.”

“Sure.”

“You go on as if you hate me. As if there were some enemy in your life, and it’s me.”

“It’s not you, Colin.” She spoke slowly. “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Well…what is there to be afraid of?”

She began to laugh, a low-pitched and merciless chuckle. Or perhaps to cry? She is unpredictable, he thought; mad. Perhaps her period is coming on; I must keep a check. She pretends to be hard, to be casual, but everyone knows that women can’t have casual affairs. She and I are equal now. But still—though the question was settled in his mind—her laughter made his skin crawl; as if there were some deep derangement in the situation that she meant to cherish alone.

“I hardly like to explore my own mind,” she said softly. “I think I imagine things. I hope I imagine them. There are connections I make between events in my life, between people, and I hope they’re not real connections. I tell myself it would be too much coincidence. But coincidence is what holds our lives together. That’s why you always get it in books.”

“Do you have to be so cryptic?”

“It would be pleasant to be a victim: a victim of circumstance. If there were no patterns in our lives, we would have no responsibility. I would like to think that events were entirely random. It would be comfortable.”

“I can never see a pattern. Perhaps I can’t see the wood for the trees. Stupid saying, that. I only…I didn’t want to bandy platitudes. I only wondered if you loved me.”

“I’m afraid to ask myself what I feel.” She pressed her lips together; holding her damp handkerchief between her fingertips, she folded it into a tiny square. “I distrust all my thoughts and all my emotions; how do I know I didn’t get them out of books? I might even love you, but you can live in such a way that you get alienated from love, that you see its ghastly consequences all around you, and so I’ve tried to come to grips with it, I’ve tried to grapple with it in the back of your car. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They perform the actions and then they get the feelings?”

“Christ, I hope not.” Panic welled inside him. “You say you might love me, but love could be too big a risk, so you’re investigating, are you, at my expense? The town’s just one big laboratory, and you keep me under a glass jar until it’s time to take me out and experiment on my emotions again.”

“Human experiments are performed every day.” She sat back in her seat, her eyes closed. “Forget it, Colin. Just forget it.”

He needed no prompting. He told himself he was her anchor in the normal world; he felt her tugging at him, out to uncharted waters. No one wants to go there. Resistance was his duty; his obtuseness was all he had to offer her, the leaden anchor of habit, the steadying weight of sad routine.

“Touch of the existential panic,” he said. “I felt it too. There are some tissues in the glove compartment if you want to blow your nose.” Groping for the short end of his seat belt, his hand touched hers, hanging loosely, as cold and stiff as the hand of a corpse. Like The Duchess of Malfi, he thought at once. He shuddered. “We’d better get on the road. It’s ten o’clock.”

The alarm shrilled. Sylvia’s fingers groped for it. The noise continued to reverberate in Colin’s head. He screwed his eyes shut.

He was distressed by his lack of control over his own dreams. It seemed monstrous that your own brain was capable, in the hours before dawn, of such divisive folly. He had dreamed so vividly of Isabel that he was afraid her spectre and after-image would parade about the bedroom for Sylvia to see. He had never seen her naked, but he imagined her long white limbs.

“Colin,” Sylvia said. Her voice was cautious, exploratory; the first limb of Monday morning reaching out to touch him in the dark. “Colin, seven o’clock.”

“Mm.”

Sylvia sighed. She put her head back on the pillow and her rollers dug into her skull. She was going to the doctor’s that morning to get the result of her pregnancy test. She was sure it would be positive. She was as regular as clockwork, she thought, you could set your watch by her menstrual flow. Furtively she slid a hand down over her blue nylon belly. I’ll have to get myself a couple of patterns, she thought, and get the machine out, before the school holidays start. Sewing’s all right but it makes a mess in the house. “Colin?”

“Yes, all right.” He massaged his closed eyelids with his fingers, sat up, and swung his feet out of bed. “Christ, it’s dark,” he said. “Why do we always get up in the dark? Year in, year out.”

Sylvia did not bother to say that life was arranged that way. Their morning routine did not include expostulation. A grunt, a twitch, sufficed for anything out of the ordinary. I’ll get the kettle on grunt a boiled egg grunt the milk in grunt the fire on grunt and the children out of bed, and

“Why is it so bloody dark?” Colin bellowed. “Why is life so lousy and uncomfortable?”

Sylvia felt unable to rise to the occasion. She did no more than glance at him out of the corner of her eye. It was the first time in their married life that he had asked such a question, and she could not think of a reason. She went into the bathroom, threw up neatly into the toilet bowl, pushed down the handle, and wiped her eyes, which were misty from the effort. She poured disinfectant into the lavatory, flushed it again, and rinsed out her mouth, scooping up the water in her hands. She was shivering when she got back into the bedroom, but Colin didn’t notice. She reached for her dressing-gown. That makes sure of it, she thought. I’ll put off telling him. I think I’d better.

Colin ate his egg in customary silence. His sense of grievance seemed to have subsided. He grunted once when he could not find his tie, then found it screwed up in the pocket of his jacket.

“I should take your overcoat,” Sylvia said.

“I’m late.”

“Suzanne, run and fetch your dad’s overcoat.”

“I’m late too,” Suzanne said. Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “That’s all you use me for, running up and down stairs. I bet I go upstairs ten times a day, getting things for you.”

“Twenty,” Alistair said. “A hundred times. A billion.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Suzanne said to her mother. “You’re lazy, that’s why. You’re old.”

“Christ,” Colin said. “I’ll bloody do without.”

He looked back at his children from the kitchen doorway, without hope. “I’ll be late, love,” he said to Sylvia. “Not very late. I just thought I’d pop over to Florence.”

“All right.”

“Sylvia.”

She turned from the toast she was buttering for Alistair; slowly, as if she resented the extra effort.

“You look a bit peaky.”

“I’m all right.”

“About six o’clock then. Don’t worry if it’s a bit later.”

“I’ll have your tea ready,” she said, and turned absently back.

The front door clicked behind him. He stood on the doorstep for a moment. The relief…the relief of being out of the house; the urge to confess was becoming almost unbearable. He took a deep breath of the foul air of the coming week, and began his matutinal wrestle with the damp-swollen garage door.

Muriel had taken to getting up early. Hearing the creak of the floorboards underfoot, Evelyn woke and lay stiff with alarm. Along the passage…“Muriel? Muriel?” Evelyn called hoarsely, her voice weak with apprehension. Muriel’s grinning head appeared around the door, dimly outlined in the half-light. Evelyn rolled her head around on the pillow, clutching up to her throat the old cardigan she wore at night for warmth. Her face had the look of thin old paper.

“Muriel?”

Why, she would brew her some tea, Muriel said. Brew her some coffee, brew her some milk.

“What are you doing up at this time? Are you sick?”

Muriel was not sick. She had never been sick at all during the course of her pregnancy. It had not incommoded her at all, except for the increased clumsiness of her swollen body. It was as if, Evelyn thought, the child was withdrawn and inert as its mother. A thing. A lump. Perhaps it was dead. Oh God. She struggled to sit up in momentary panic. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder. Let it not be dead. It was more than the house could contain. A ghost carrying a ghost.

“Muriel? Muriel?”

Muriel had gone downstairs. Why doesn’t she put on the lights? How does it come about that she can see in the dark?

Muriel opened each door in turn. The shiny leather parlour shrouded in shadow. The cramped back room where they sat during the day. The furniture had not moved itself. There was no material change. Muriel could never feel sure about things like this. Paper might walk and wood might laugh; and how was it possible to know whether anything existed, when you were out of the room? Very well, she thought reasonably, now I am here, now the house is playing dead. Now I turn, I turn my head, I watch out of the corner of my eye. Now I go out…she slammed the door behind her then thrust it open again as quickly as she could, propelling herself back into the room. The tables and chairs, unmoved, smirked at her knowingly. She looked at them in a passion of enmity. Once she had been at their mercy, but now she was learning how to go about things. Now she was making progress every day.

In the kitchen drawer was a ball of string. A ball of string and a knife to cut. Back to the front parlour. With savage tightness she knotted the string to the back of one of the dining chairs, and looped it round the door handle. She passed it around the back again, and pulled, the rough fibres burning her fingers; round the handle, and back a third time, lifting the chair off its back legs. She went out into the hall and dragged the door shut behind her. An example to the rest.

And back to the kitchen. She opened a cupboard and took out her breakfast egg. She balanced it on her palm for a moment and then allowed it to roll off and shatter on the floor. The result was gratifying. Evelyn made such strange noises when she bent down to clean the floor. “You’re a useless lump,” she would squall. “You never do a hand’s turn.” Useless lump, used to a bump. Muriel patted her body confidently. She thought she would go out to play.

It was very cold in the lean-to, but the cold was something that had never bothered Muriel. Over the last few weeks, when Evelyn had sternly forbidden her to go out of the house, she had taken to spending more and more time there, delving more deeply into the rotten cardboard boxes, shaking out the rusted tins and heaving aside planks of wood to see what was underneath. The recent wet weather had made it a musty, fungal place, with a private and unpleasant smell. Water was getting under the doors and soaking into Clifford’s collection of newspapers.

There seemed no likely end to the pleasures of the boxes. Here were images, for instance of people in strange clothes; furry little brown-and-white images, creased and smudged. And keys, for doors, a great bunch of them tied together. Locking doors, now there was a thing to do. And this fine garment.

An overcoat, Muriel thought. She could walk out in it. Promenade. She made a verse. An overcoat, across the moat, a man to dote, costs but a groat. It touched some chord in her heart, brushed some faint memory. She held up the coat and shook it out. It was thick and heavy, its dark wool mildewed but intact. Muriel wrinkled her nose at its ancient and complex smells. At first she wondered whether it had been left there by one of the corpses under the stones outside the door of the lean-to. Then her eye caught some writing. Writing in a coat? Who would want to write in a coat? She sniggered. She carried the coat over to the light to make sure. Yes, there was a kind of tape sewn into it, yellow and frayed, and faint grey letters on the tape. This coat had a name. Or its owner had a name. It would be pleasant to find out who was under the stones. Evidently corpses wrote in their clothes; evidently they had a strong sense of private property.

She spelled it out for herself. CLIFFORD F. AXON. Here was another matter. She smiled gently, and began to scrape with her fingernails at the mould which speckled the collar.

Colin had the third period free. It helped, this small oasis so soon after the dire start of the working week.

Frank O’Dwyer, his Head of Department, was coming out of the staffroom.

“Any change for the phone, Frank?” Change had become his obsession, lately.

“You may be the lucky one.”

They stood opposite each other digging into their pockets, like gunslingers in difficulty.

“What’s the magic of this telephone?” Frank enquired. “You spend half your working day on it.”

“I want to ring my sister.”

O’Dwyer produced a handful of loose change and decanted it into Colin’s palm.

“Did you run me off those copies?”

“5B’s exam? Yes…only twenty-five. Will that do? Bloody machine’s knackered again.”

“It always picks its time,” Frank said. “Twenty-five will suffice, they look over each other’s shoulders anyway, miserable little sods. Once we get the exams over it puts itself right during the night, do you notice? If it went to Lourdes, it would be called a miracle.”

Colin grinned weakly. He wanted to get away, but it was not possible to have a short conversation with O’Dwyer. He was a large lanky, charming man, with heavy glasses which slipped down his nose and needed continual readjustment. His breath smelled faintly of the nip of whisky which he took to get himself started each day. Ten years ago, even five, people had said he was much too good to be a schoolmaster; ought to be lecturing, ought Frank, ought to have his doctorate. They had stopped talking in those terms, but Frank had kept his pretensions; only his clothes mirrored his state, the neckties starved narrow with dearth of variety, disappointed jackets in sagging tweed. Colin saw himself; the regalia of stagnation, the shroud of opportunity, rags of receding hope.

“We ought to get together, Colin. You must come to dinner.”

“Surely,” Colin said. “We will. After the exams?”

Now Colin sat with a pile of exercise books before him. Form 1C. The Vikings. He tried to gather strength to open them.

“Smith of English? Who said that thing, ‘Work fascinates me: I can sit and look at it for hours’?”

“It came off a matchbox, I imagine. I don’t know. Ask Smith of Woodwork.”

If Florence did not understand…if Florence was not sympathetic…then when the Christmas holidays came, and all the schools closed, and all evening classes were over (and Sylvia knew they were)…then, when he could no longer mumble about Parents’ Evenings as he sidled out in the mornings (and hope that she would not somehow find out)…then when his small ingenuity was defeated, how and when and where was he going to see Isabel?

Smith of English made a sound expressive of pain.

“Animal Farm,” he said.

Colin looked up. “Pardon?”

“All right, listen. This is 3A. This is the O-Level stream, this. ‘George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1867.’”

“They have those cribs, you know, those little books. They just copy down any date that takes their fancy. 1867 will be Das Kapital, I should think.”

“Mm,” Smith said. “How about this next one then? ‘George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1857.’” He raised an eyebrow. “Indian Mutiny?”

But Florence, thought Colin; tell Florence? “Excuse me,” he said. He fished in his pocket and went over to the phone.

“Colin’s ringing his turf accountant again,” Smith said.

“Luther King House. Social Services.”

“I’d like to speak to Miss Field, please.”

“Just one moment. Putting you through.”

Click.

“Yes?”

A small sensation in Colin’s chest rose and lodged itself in his throat. Grief.

“Yes?”

That deadly secretarial voice, that hope-crusher, that frustrated old maid; some slab-toothed old hag with thin knees pressed together and her glasses on a little gold chain, some Medusa in an Orlon cardigan.

“I wanted Miss Field,” he whispered.

“Miss Field is not in the office at present.”

“When will she be back?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”

“Can’t you ask? Someone in your office should know where she’s gone and when she’ll be back.”

A slight intake of breath told him that offence had been given and taken.

“Miss Field is a busy social worker with a full caseload and I think it most unlikely that her colleagues would be aware of all her intended movements in the course of the day. In any case it is not our practice to divulge what visits a caseworker is making, as we do not breach the confidence of our clients.” She paused, to let this sink in. “If this is an emergency, I can pass you on.”

“No, could you just find out—”

“I can pass you on to another caseworker.”

“Thank you, I only want to speak to Miss Field.”

“Shall I pass you on?”

“No.”

“Would you care to leave your name?”

“That’s all right.”

“Would you care to leave your name?”

“Thank you, no, that’s all right.”

“Would you care to leave a message?”

“No message.”

“Shall I tell Miss Field that this is a personal call?”

“No.”

“Are you by any chance the caller who was trying to contact Miss Field last Friday?”

“Not me.”

She had finished. She had exhausted her repertoire of frustration and snub, and she was finished now. He put the phone down. Where is she? Just out, that’s all. She will not tell him enough about her work for him to be able to envisage it; as if her clients’ paltry secrets were of any interest to him, as if his life could possibly touch theirs at any point. She is seeing people, or at that childrens’ home she goes to. She was out on Friday. Three times he had called on Friday, and had gone into the weekend hollow and lost. Now he had put the phone down on the secretary cow and antagonised her. Now she would say Isabel was out when she was in. Now she would say Miss Field cannot accept personal calls during office hours. What is your name, rank, or number, whether married divorced single, number of children in box provided, state professional qualifications, whether subject to epilepsy or visual defects, whether certified sane or insane, state whether dead or alive and name a referee. (Isabel ring me.) I don’t want to make a great performance of it, it’s not a lot to ask, no messages, no names, no packdrill, whatever that expression means. (Ring me. I need to hear your voice.) The bell. Lesson Four.

Give me this God and I’ll take myself off and give you some peace. I’ll not be back asking favours year after year. There’s only one thing I want. I won’t ask you to bring my blood pressure down. When I get cancer I’ll not even squeak. You’ll never hear me say I’m hard done by. Come God, I’ll praise you; isn’t that what you like? Form 3A, the American Revolution. Is it so much to ask, is it so bloody much?

How she laughed and said, you have all the women’s lines. Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence. Thank you, Lord Byron, mind how you go. Have a nice day.