Eleven days after her murder Mrs Templeton was buried. It was as she would have liked it, with her dread of cremations: a small country churchyard, a minister neither too casual nor too sympathetic, a small group of mourners. Even William, as he stood by the grave in this churchyard which seemed to be definitely tilted – tilted towards the sun and the delights of the valley below – recalled his mother’s horror of fires. It was the one fact about her he could recall in his distress. Otherwise her life and character were mysterious, the violence and strangeness of her end seeming to have thrown a long shadow backwards, obscuring the details by which she might otherwise have been remembered. (As if – William thought – it was a usurper’s corpse before them.) He swayed, liverish and fearful, noting the exceptional self-possession of his sister opposite him.
Marion had arrived two days before, but he hadn’t seen her until today, for she had been staying with friends. He hadn’t even been sure, arriving at the church, if she would be there. And, seeing her, the aloofness with which she held herself, he wondered why she was. Questions occurred to him, the sort for which drunks – with their tactless insistence, desperate muddled perseverance (the drunk’s prerogative, if there is one) – are noted. Is it perhaps the violence of our mother’s end that has called you from New England? The murder or her death – which has summoned you? Would you have come had she died in bed? (It is not everyone whose mother is murdered, Marion.) Would either of us have come had she died in bed? Would you from the higher and I from the lower regions have budged at all? And what difference now, here, by the graveside, between you from on high and I from below? Sensational children. A sensational mother. His dear mother, her unforced prettiness: briefly recalled, it made his sister behind her half-veil seem merely glamorous. He faced her across the grave, careless of his tears, his unsteadiness, the impression he knew he was giving of mounting abandon. He wasn’t drunk – only weak from the habit of being so – but he could see that it was assumed that he was.
Some of the mourners, old friends of his mother, had barely acknowledged him. He had dressed as well as he could, but it was not well – certainly not well enough to make them think they might have wronged him. A certain sense of style, though, had survived his ruin, but it didn’t show in his clothes – only in a capacity to make light of that ruin, to make a riddle of it. He had been quite theatrical, greeting the mourners, quite cavalier, coming up with appreciative phrases when he couldn’t remember the names. And mainly he couldn’t remember the names. Some, it appeared, barely recognised him, and some he could have sworn he had never met. Others clasped his hand with a kind of awed forbearance, as if the son’s disgrace and the mother’s murder were somehow connected.
And one, whose name he immediately remembered, looked at him with more than simple disgust. It weakened him considerably, this look. Indeed, it may have been the main reason why he forgot most of the other names. Alice Fox. Alice Mary Fox. He remembered her role in his mother’s life well: the pert and inflexible confidante. In this woman, for some reason, his mother had confided, by her she had been advised, mocked, admired. It had been one of the mysteries of their family life.
It was as his mother’s grave was being filled that William realised the meaning of the look. In Alice Mary Fox’s eyes, he, William, was the murderer. Cleared by the police (“too broken to want to kill anyone but himself”), he had not been cleared by Alice and would probably never be. Several times during the service she looked at him from her position behind Marion. Marion’s detachment, Alice’s accusation: their two heads came together, appearing to share the one pair of shoulders. He was used to these illusions of grotesque reassembly. In his time, he had seen men with the heads of giant crows, women with no heads at all, crowds with heads horribly swollen, as from a plague of hydrocephalus, dwarfs with wild grins and enormous bellies. There had been spells when these illusions had threatened to become more frequent than his times of normal vision. So it was with a grin almost of recognition that he saw Marion and Alice sprung from the one pair of shoulders. A legendary alliance. A kind of immemorial dovetailing in malicious agreement.
By the end of the service, however, his eyes were closed against the possibility of further distortion. On the surface of his vivid inner darkness lights flickered, born from nothing, returning to it. He feared he was swaying disgracefully, but he didn’t care. It was the sun on his face, wasn’t it, rather than Mrs Mclehose’s gas fire? He should have known the difference, he had spent so much of his time by that fire, on the floor. With Mrs Mclehose on the floor, with her sour breath and sour underwear, her words alternately romantic and vicious.
Marion and he, hardly having spoken, took up their positions by the churchyard gate. The path between the gravestones was narrow and uneven and the mourners mainly over seventy, so the line moved very slowly – a sort of stricken shuffle. Now couples passed them, marriages of forty years or so (dressed, it almost seemed, not just to show respect, but to try and appease death itself), now individuals, the unmarried, the once married. William became aware that Marion was as uneasy as he was himself. Her words were few and made slightly ridiculous by what struck him as a false American accent. His own voice, he knew, was thick, made so by lips still cracked and swollen from the winter. But he was able to vary his expressions of appreciation; he was nimbler than his sister, and after seven or eight people had passed he realised she was using some of his phrases. “It may have been a long time but it’s nonetheless a pleasure.” “How good to see you, under such terrible circumstances.” “Thank you, I’m sure we’re equally appalled.” “An unusual awe unites us today.” “It is shocking – doubly shocking.” “Of course I know you – why should I have forgotten?”
Then they were alone with the minister on the quiet hillside. The sound of the cars going down into the valley in low gear grew distant, was gone. William stood smiling, glad of the silence, the sound of larks, the sun. Marion was smiling too, but uneasily, and she was holding on to her hat; though there was a wind, there wasn’t even a breeze. William saw that it was her way of managing herself. She didn’t seem aloof now at all. Merely ordinary. Ordinary grief; ordinary mortality. It was the same with himself. An ordinary embarrassment. He didn’t know this minister and it was so long since he had seen Marion that it was as if he had never met her. Alone with two strangers, his drunk’s impudence asserted itself.
“Who were all these people? Are you sure they had the right funeral?”
“They can be difficult occasions, William,” the minister said. “One is confused.”
“One is indeed,” William went on. “You’d think some of them had climbed from their graves to help mother into hers!”
“William!” Marion said, but it was clear that she was relieved.
“Alice Fox, for instance. I could have sworn she’d died before mother.”
“I’d forgotten you were a joker, William,” Marion said gravely. “Alice Fox. Yes. I couldn’t remember that name at all.”
Sometimes a house seems like Noah’s Ark, everything of worth stored inside, to be enjoyed under a new dispensation. Old objects become charged with significance and there is a feeling that those who live there have been entrusted with the elements of exceptional change. It is particularly so if the sky is torn and livid, the trees and bushes bent against a gale, and if the residents themselves have recently been afflicted. Then the windows suggest that such storms are the last rages of the old creation. The intimacy of those indoors is as perfect as their confidence and they part with no suspicion that either will be undone. Little in the poses they strike is justified by experience, but the poses are deeply suggestive nonetheless and, like signs or oracles, are never forgotten.
William and Marion had arranged to meet in order to sort out their parents’ possessions. William joked immediately that he was beyond possessions: he had come to nothing and so he needed nothing; he had no place for anything. All he wanted were knick-knacks, a few souvenirs; and maybe he would find that he didn’t even want these. But he wasn’t unhappy; it meant that they wouldn’t have the problem of how to divide their inheritance. It also made him feel generous, and since he hadn’t had the means to be generous for some time this was a great pleasure. What failed to happen when he had entered the house with the inspector happened now. He moved about the rooms with simple curiosity, often touching things, occasionally being enthralled – rediscoveries so intense they recalled the discoveries of children. (There were moments indeed when, dizzy, staggering slightly, he might have been leaving the darkness of infancy for the first time.) Some rooms he barely recognised at first: he had to take up several positions before he remembered. Had their mother rearranged the house after their father’s death? Sold some of the furniture? His gaze and questions were innocent, interrupting Marion’s attempts to work out what she wanted. She didn’t mind. Her brother appealed to her strongly today, and if there was a selfish reason for this – he had not been favoured in the will and he wanted nothing anyway – there was also an unselfish one. His very absence of status or position was arresting. It was a touchingly bare disinterestedness. It was not an achievement, she knew, but a few times, hearing him say – “D’you remember this?” or “There it is!” or “I’d take that, if I were you” – she was close to feeling that it was. Her smile was of wonder, and wonder at her wonder: her brother was ruined and the house was hers, but as he accompanied her from room to room, opening doors for her, sometimes taking her arm, he didn’t seem ruined and the house didn’t seem important.
“What about Margo and the children?” Marion asked.
“Haven’t seen them for years. They may have joined you in the New World for all I know.”
“I mean, wouldn’t they like some of the furniture?”
“No need. Margo is well provided for. With my demise her father stepped in. Huge cash injections. He threw a castle round her.”
“Would it help if I saw her?”
“It wouldn’t help me,” William said quietly, realising that Marion hadn’t quite grasped how far he had fallen. When had he last seen her? Had he seen her off to America or had he just heard that she had gone, imagining so many farewell scenes that he had come to believe that one of them must have happened?
“When did we last meet, Marion?” He asked it very directly, almost as if he believed that unless he were told he wouldn’t know how to go on.
“Oh, William, you don’t recall?”
“No. Most of the lines between my past and I are down.”
“Margo rang me because you’d passed out at breakfast.”
“So you saw me but I didn’t see you? No wonder I don’t remember! There would have been too much toast. Always was. Yes. But which year?”
“Let me see,” Marion said, looking carefully at her brother. “It would have been nine years ago. You still had a few years to go with Margo.”
“So nine years ago I was asleep on a bed of toast,” William said, standing up from the window seat on which they had been talking. “I see.”
He was rueful, not from some affectionate feeling for the details of that time, but from the realisation that he had no such feeling. Except for the children, there were no images, and even his images of them, he suspected, were sentimental. They were always grave and always together: in the bath, for example, or waiting to be read to at night, or coming into their parents’ bed in the morning. Saving images, images which allowed him to pretend that his children hadn’t grown. But they wouldn’t always be summoned, and then the children, tall and thin now, would seem to be in a wood of some kind, crows’ heads on the ground, the air thick with hawks. Thick too with sanctimonious babble. On their way to a lake of pitch, spellbound by their mother’s plans. Margo in a lake of pitch, pointing, commanding. It was unfair, he knew, and it was uninteresting, but they were the images which assailed him when the other ones – the cameos of innocence and vulnerability – failed.
“William?”
“Sorry. Unnecessary reflections. Easily banished. There!” he said, clicking his fingers as for the amusement of a child. “There!”
“I’ve brought some dinner. I thought we’d be hungry.”
“A carry-out?”
“Oh no. I’ll cook it.”
“That’s kind of you,” William said, going with her to the kitchen. “But I should say – please don’t be offended – that my appetite is poor. It happens, you know.”
She paid no attention to him, as if she was confident that when he saw the meal he would eat it! She might have been back in New England, it seemed to him, preparing dinner for a dozen guests. His admiration turned her into a performer. She moved stylishly, like one giving a cookery demonstration – cooker to table, table to cooker – now and then smiling at him as he sat. She was wearing their mother’s apron, but her kitchen manner was very different from Mrs Templeton’s. Even for the simplest snack, William recalled, their mother’s preparations had been halting. Marion’s were soft, silent.
But his admiration wasn’t confined to her kitchen manner. He noted that she had become heavier but also more graceful, with a way of throwing her head back and smoothing her hips. If she hadn’t been his sister: but that was the trouble – it didn’t feel that she was (ostracism so barbarous apparently it destroyed even the sense of blood ties). Changed by America, by marriage there – her face, at least, was fuller, kinder – she struck him as the sort of woman (suggestive of many types without herself being one) one might talk to on a train and find it difficult to forget. Wasn’t that exactly it? This was a heightened interval, and Marion, more appreciative than he, was marking it with a meal. He stood up abruptly, but there was nothing for him to do, and so he sat down again, smiling at the preparations, approving them, not wanting them to end.
They ate in the old dining room. The evening sky was livid and stormy. Rain drove against the window in gusts, the background in wavering sunlight, or scoured the hills, the young forests there, the foreground or middle ground in uncertain light. Then there were intervals when there was neither rain nor sun, only gloom and a wind unsure of its strength and direction.
Marion hadn’t allowed William to do anything. Now he sat above his prawn cocktail, a perfectly folded napkin on his left, a glass of white wine on his right, his hands clasped in his lap and his eyes fixed on the salt-cellar. Marion spread her napkin and then, as if it was her custom, her brother’s deftly for him. They clinked glasses, the sound pure and high, but fading quickly, and Marion led the way with the prawn cocktail, eating with a slow relish she clearly hoped would be encouraging. William followed as best he could, but he could taste neither the prawns nor the wine. Still like one hoping to encourage by example (the optimism of her chewing and swallowing was exemplary), Marion went through the three courses – prawn cocktail, steak, fruit salad – finishing the third as William, apologising for his extraordinary slowness, was beginning the second. Was she, William wondered, simple enough to believe that she could persuade him of the importance of diet and the necessity of health by eating in this way? With this slow theatrical relish? He saw that she wasn’t. It was all she could do, under the circumstances. Another mightn’t have been as generous – mightn’t have cooked at all, or might have swept the bravely prepared meal onto the floor in a paroxysm of confusion and grief.
“You’d never think,” William said, as if to test the rituals of cooking and eating to the utmost, “that mother was murdered out there. And buried.”
Marion looked as if she thought he might have got his information wrong.
“You’d never think it,” he said again.
Marion was blinking, her tongue half out.
“To picture someone doing that: is it possible?”
“For me,” William said, starting to push his plate away with his fingertips, “it’s not who but why. Why.”
“Oh really?” Marion said. “For me the need is… a face. To supply a face.”
“She had no enemies,” William offered.
“Only friends,” Marion murmured.
But then, as if dismayed that the conversation was necessary at all, she banged her fist on the table.
William attempted to rise, to comfort her, but he couldn’t. Then he tried to say something appreciative about the meal; but he couldn’t do this either.
The meal remained with him however. In the squalor of Mrs Mclehose’s lounge – the air hot and stale and smelling of whisky – he thought of it. In her bedroom, which had somehow also become his, he thought of it. His sister’s nice and encouraging sense of ceremony. She had returned to America, promising to write, promising (he was to go over for a visit when he was ready) to send him his airfare. But when he was ready, he knew, it wouldn’t be for that sort of journey. Not that he could picture his path (if there was one), only the first steps (into the wind and the dark if necessary). He started to look at the “situations vacant” page in the evening paper, the last part of the column for those without professions: the meretricious, the migrant, the half-hearted, the discredited, the damned, the dull. And one day he saw an advertisement for a caretaker on a disused farm. Trembling (unclear whether it was fear of rejection, fear of commitment or fear of abandoned farms), he applied, keeping his intentions from Mrs Mclehose, for thoughts of desertion drove her wild. Suffering himself to be embraced nightly, on the couch or in the narrow bed, he dreamt of the farm, its limitless acres, its silences, the room he would have there were he hired.
September 10th, 1966
I am doing well at this job. I seem to be well liked, and, what is more, I like everyone here. I’m not aware of the grudges, the misunderstandings I sometimes hear about in the pub, at the end of the day. Indeed, young though I am (twenty-six next month), I’ve been asked to intervene on a number of occasions. I’ve not thought of myself as a peacemaker, not at all, but it’s a change from the uneasy opinions my seniors usually have of me. Between Mr Fraser and his secretary I arranged a reconciliation, and between Mr Fraser and Mr Arthur a handshake and a drink. The latter two came to see me in the pub, where I was sitting in my usual corner. It was clear that something was wrong, but it was also clear that they were hoping to be rescued from their disagreement. I seem to have that knack – particularly after a drink or two. Laughter: create the conditions for that and you create the conditions for ease and forbearance. If I believe anything, I believe that; I make no apologies. (For how many faiths have we seen crumble, burdened by their own complexity, thousands perishing as a consequence?)
It’s taken me some time however to find a job that suits me. What a relief to find it! This is partly the explanation perhaps for my popularity. My relief is mistaken for the happiness of a mature man, for informed good nature. It’s thought that I have wisdom, higher advice to dispense. I wish I had. I feel peculiarly ignorant, and if I have any virtues they are these: I make no claims to knowledge of an improving kind, and I live from day to day. This second, I sometimes suspect, borders on a vice, for the moment can seem to me all that there is. I try to arrest it by means of impromptu ceremonies, but I always end up (sometimes inside a circle of broken glass) by chasing my tail.
Jobs. It is as if they are embedded in the very substance of our world. One can break oneself against them. Just as there are more rock formations than people realise, there are more jobs. There are the professions, of course – we all know about these – but it is the world below them and around them that I am speaking of. I am at ease where I am, but there are many who are not – who are bent double or actually twisted in ill-lit caves. I was frequently so myself. The little firm of Robertson’s which sold diaries and calendars, for instance: I didn’t prosper there. From the start (after a characteristically impressive interview – at once attentive and cavalier) I was considered to lack a concern for detail. Fatal, this, in the world of diaries and calendars. My Housewives’ Calendar for 1984 featured a March with only thirty days. Now I know that March has thirty-one days, so what went wrong? Mr Robertson himself took charge of the matter. He was deeply aggrieved, and sat, as he interrogated me, with his hands on his two most popular calendars: the Dog Lover’s Calendar and the Calendar of Favourite Cats. It is no wonder my facetiousness surpassed itself. Arguing from the stars, quoting Newton and Einstein, I said that every one hundred and sixty-two years there was what some of us in the trade knew as a double leap year – twenty-nine days in February, thirty in March. I told Mr Robertson that if he were to check the records he would find that 1802 had been just such a year. (A year of memorable frosts, I added, three assassinations and twenty-six wars.) He was shaken and obviously wondering how to reward me if I was right. He did check and I was sacked instead.
From here, my disregard for the clock intensified by my experience of diaries and calendars, I went into the flour industry. There have been no appreciable gaps between my jobs, firstly because I am good at interviews and secondly because I have always been able to convert my despair over a job into the conviction that the next one will be almost ideal. In the flour industry, however, I couldn’t even bring myself to despair. A mild exasperation was mainly what I felt. The only thing I enjoyed was the sensation of the flour itself, running through my fingers. On my last day, I recall, it was what anchored me while I was being berated for my poor sales figures. I ran it through my fingers and onto my desk – ran it almost continuously. It was like exploring the substance of the time-glass. In the exquisitely fine grains which for centuries measured time I imagined I was taking up my position. Paradoxically, though, the effect was to destroy my sense of time’s great categories. Century, Decade, Year, Month, Week, Day – all dissolved as the flour ran. On and on, just the flour and my idle graceful fingers. Beyond, the terms of my resignation (or, failing that, of my sacking) were monotonously spelled out to me by what seemed like the entire board of directors. First one voice, then another, then another, each with its own part of the official script, but each losing conviction, I thought, as I sat silent, the flour running, the typewriters going next door, in the secretarial pool. The only words I remember are Charlie Hutton’s, himself a casualty of the next reshuffle. “You should be a fortune-teller, William, you have the hands of one.”
After Robertson’s diaries and calendars and Clapperton’s flour I had a spell with a distillery. It wasn’t the whisky which got me, but the drunkenness of so many of my colleagues. It disgusted me; at times it enraged me. The firm seemed to run itself, unless there were, hidden even from my exasperated gaze, sober, intelligent people who ran it while the official employees, my colleagues, played at being businessmen. No job has so deeply distressed me. There was no equivalent to running flour through my fingers (unless you want to count drinking from ten in the morning until six at night as an equivalent), and so I bought some of the very 1lb and 2lb packets I had been unsuccessful at selling. I got a reputation, running the flour through my fingers, for modelling in clay. (I was even asked to model a four-foot bottle of whisky – someone’ retirement present.) All that I got out of my stay was the chance to speak in public. I did it well, though it wouldn’t have taken much to impress these people (anyone who didn’t get lost in his sentences impressed them). I pitched my speeches higher and higher, at an imaginary audience (who might they have been?), one quite other than that actually before me, in all its florid messiness. They were lonely speeches to make. And, after six months, loneliness and disgust made me resign.
From my corner in the pub I review my day. We are an Educational Publishers. It is a small firm, but expanding. I am one of two salesmen. I travel alternate weeks, which makes my weeks in and about the office special. My popularity is intensified, I think, by these arrivals and departures. People store up anecdotes for me, as well as problems. I am missed. Who would have thought that I would be considered a peacemaker, and that, day by day, life should appear easy to me, running by as surely as the lovely flour?
At ease, therefore, I wait for Janet Macpherson. She is pregnant, I fear, but by whom I don’t know. What can I say?