I
Sarah had been prepared for unpleasantness to follow Mr. Wilson’s arrival. She had, however, expected that it would be of the dramatic kind. In fact, it was the irritating, uncomfortable kind. Meal times were adjusted slightly. More disturbing, behaviour underwent that mysterious adjustment which the intrusion of a stranger seems to necessitate with the result that Aunt Myra and Uncle Ralph became suddenly less familiar. As for Mr. Wilson himself, he was careful and over-anxious, like a new boy at school. During that first week he liked everything, his room, his job, his food; he helped with the washing-up, made his bed, cleaned his own shoes and Uncle Ralph’s as well, even peeled potatoes when he came in early one evening. Sarah was disgusted by this craven eagerness to please. She had expected more of Mr. Wilson.
The snow was the only real excitement that week. There was a heavy fall on the Wednesday and it continued intermittently on the Thursday and Friday. On the Saturday, the clouds lifted. The sky was pale blue, the snow still fresh and white, and the apple tree in the vicarage garden glistened as though studded with black sequins. The air was very cold, but dry, and the snow crunched beneath the feet. Children played on the green beyond the church, making snowmen and fighting great snowball battles. Sarah was told that she could join them if she did not get herself too wet. She preferred, however, to watch Mr. Wilson who had offered to brush down the drive and the pavement outside the house. He had forgotten about the length of the brick wall and was not pleased to discover the full extent of the task which he had undertaken. Sarah made a pretence of helping him. He was not a very good companion; but he suffered her without giving a lot of tiresome instructions and he wasn’t jolly about the snow.
At least, he wasn’t jolly about the snow until Jill came up the road, scarlet in the face from the wind and breathless with laughter. Everything was explosively funny to her. In particular, she thought it funny that Mr. Wilson should have volunteered to clear the pavement because she had done the same thing herself the last year that the snow was bad. Mr. Wilson suddenly decided that he thought it very funny, too.
Jill went off in search of a shovel, taking Sarah with her. They finally tracked one down in Spencer’s shed. Spencer argued about lending it because he had intended to clear the pavement for the vicar. He seemed very injured as though he had been robbed, and did not brighten when Jill suggested that he should sit by his fire and take a well-earned rest.
‘I’ll be pensioned off next, I suppose,’ he muttered. ‘Except that I shan’t get no pension.’
They went back to the vicarage wall. Jill and Mr. Wilson did a little work and a lot of fooling about, getting her shovel and his broom entangled and tripping over one another like a couple of clowns. Spencer watched them gloomily from his front window. Jill was enjoying herself, but the clowning did not come naturally to Mr. Wilson. Sarah thought that he made an awful fool of himself.
‘I always imagine that Moscow looks like this in winter,’ Jill said. ‘I shall be terribly disappointed if it doesn’t.’
‘You sound as if you were going there,’ he teased, watching her pink, shining face as though it dazzled him.
‘But I AM going there, silly!’
He stopped work and stared down into the snow, looking so put out that Sarah thought he must have found something nasty in it. Jill seized the broom from his hands.
‘Well, if you don’t intend to work . . .’ She brushed a heap of snow into the gutter with an exuberant ‘whoosh!’ and then turned to face him. ‘I’m going round the world—travelling east because all the really exciting places seem to be east.’
‘Air hostess?’
‘No!’ She tossed her head, the snow winking in her hair. She was showing off dreadfully, Sarah thought in disgust. ‘That’s not the way to see the world. I mean to work my way, getting a job in one place for six months or so and then moving on. I thought of starting in Turkey; but it might have to be Hong Kong because I’ve got relatives there.’
Mr. Wilson took the broom and pushed at a mound of snow in a half-hearted way.
‘That costs money,’ he pointed out.
His face was dark and sullen, but the more dismal he became the more it pleased Jill. She scooped up some snow and moulded it into a ball in her hands.
‘I’ve been saving up ever since I was thirteen. I’ve got enough money for a return fare from anywhere in the world. Mummy made me promise I wouldn’t go until I had money for the return.’ She threw the snowball, quite gently, at Sarah. ‘Wake up, Sarah Jane!’
Mr. Wilson propped the broom against the wall and picked up the shovel.
‘It’s not much of a life for a girl.’
He looked so downcast that Jill said more kindly:
‘I hope you didn’t mind my telling you about it? I usually do. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair, would it? Because I’m not going to settle down until I’ve done it.’
Mr. Wilson scraped savagely with the shovel.
‘I haven’t asked you to marry me, have I?’
‘I know you haven’t. But I say it to all my boyfriends. Just to be fair, you see.’
‘You must have quite an opinion of yourself.’
Jill made a show of being offended; she strutted off towards the gate, missed her balance and plopped down in the snow. Sarah suspected that she had done it on purpose, but Mr. Wilson made as much fuss as if she had fallen down a mountain. He helped her to her feet and then took out a clean handkerchief and carefully flicked away the heavy patches of snow along the hem of her coat. Jill stood stiffly, looking down at him as he half-knelt before her.
‘You’re very gallant, aren’t you?’ She sounded pleased, but not quite so sure of herself. ‘Most of my boy friends wouldn’t think of that.’
He smiled at her.
‘I expect they’re rather young.’
He stood up and flicked his wet handkerchief to and fro. Jill watched him. She seemed suddenly to have become shy.
‘I suppose they are.’
She picked up the broom and they began to fool about again; but this time it was Jill who was the awkward one. After a time Aunt Myra came out to see what was happening. There were some people coming in for coffee that evening and she said that she wanted help in the kitchen. It was Sarah who was detailed off to help her; an arrangement which did not suit Aunt Myra.
‘It’s only one person’s work to brush down that pavement,’ she said to Uncle Ralph who was standing in the hall just about to make a telephone call. He looked at her enquiringly and she jerked her head in the direction of Jill and Mr. Wilson who were now proceeding quietly with their work.
‘Is that a good idea?’
Uncle Ralph smiled and shut the front door.
‘Jill will come to no harm.’
‘There may be a few surprises in store for you where Jill is concerned. Just because she’s enthusiastic about nuclear disarmament you regard her as a latter-day Joan of Arc; whereas in fact she’s a quite ordinary young woman. And sensible enough to realize it soon.’
But Uncle Ralph was already dialling a number. Later he came into the kitchen to say that Mr. Rutledge would be coming for coffee but not Mrs. Rutledge who had her mother staging with her.
‘I suggested they should bring the old lady along, but that wasn’t well received!’
Aunt Myra said slyly:
‘You’ll be able to tell Rutledge about the new boiler, won’t you.’
‘Oh, he won’t mind.’
‘Heaven protect you, you’ll never protect yourself!’ Aunt Myra exclaimed, and she put down the butter knife as though she did not trust herself with it. ‘He will mind because you didn’t consult him. He thinks you do it deliberately to humiliate him.’
‘What rubbish!’ Uncle Ralph picked up a cheese biscuit and winked at Sarah. ‘He isn’t the type to be humiliated.’
Aunt Myra pushed the biscuit tray out of his reach.
II
The coffee party was Wilson’s first social occasion since his release. ‘We don’t bother with formalities,’ the vicar assured him. ‘Just make yourself at home’. Which was the one thing that Wilson was incapable of doing. He edged his chair further into the corner, bit his nails, and hated them all except Sarah who had been allowed to stay up as a special treat and was looking disagreeable because she would have preferred to have ‘acted’ in her bedroom. He could hear the conversation buzzing around him, meaningless as noises on a wavelength to which he was not tuned in.
‘Perhaps we can discuss it some other time?’ the vicar was saying.
‘The proper time,’ Rutledge pointed out, ‘would have been before you told Spencer that we’d order a new one.’
What were they talking about? It seemed very important to them. He tried to forget himself and become the disinterested observer again. The vicar was looking down into his coffee cup, his expression a nicely calculated mixture of puzzlement and contrition. Frank Godfrey was watching him with the rather irritable affection that friends of long-standing often have for one another.
‘It was most thoughtless of me,’ the vicar said. ‘I do apologize. The trouble with me . . .’
Rutledge slashed through this gentle magnanimity.
‘The trouble with you, Vicar, is that you’ve got your mind full of this nuclear disarmament business.’
He winked at Myra Kimberley, who pulled a wry face and said:
‘He’s got you there, darling!’
This brought Jill to the attack. She had been unusually quiet up to now, sitting on the hearth-rug, watching the flames roaring up the chimney and looking detached and inaccessible as though she had already embarked on her travels. Now she put her cup down with a sharp click on the fender.
‘He puts first things first.’
She’s going to spout politics, Wilson thought in disgust. Myra Kimberley had the same thought.
‘You’re a naughty girl,’ she reproved affectionately. ‘If you’re going to turn my coffee party into a disarmament debate you shan’t come again.’
Jill looked abashed, but Rutledge ploughed on.
‘It would be a bad thing if we all neglected our work to sit down in the road, wouldn’t it? Someone has to keep the world going round.’
‘But the world may soon be nothing but a burnt-out scrap heap whizzing round.’ Jill cast an apologetic glance at Myra who flicked the tip of her tongue out at her. ‘What can be more important than to prevent that happening?’
‘Your turn,’ Myra said resignedly to Rutledge.
‘I agree, my lass,’ he said heavily. ‘I agree. But do you think the sight of you all sitting on your bottoms is going to move Mr. K. so much that he’ll crawl away and bury his bombs?’ He took a gulp of coffee and shook his head. ‘You’ve got to live in this world, you know; not way up in the clouds like so many people in your outfit.’
Myra darted a glance that was amused, but a little apprehensive, at her husband. He was sitting with his pipe clenched between his teeth; perhaps to prevent himself from intervening. Frank Godfrey, on the other hand, sat with the composed detachment of someone who has no desire at all to intervene.
‘Negotiations,’ Rutledge was saying. ‘Hard negotiations. That’s what will win peace, not all your resounding moral gestures. Old Mr. K. don’t understand ‘em.’
‘I doubt if he understands negotiations in our sense of the word, either.’ The vicar put his pipe to one side. ‘And, in any case, negotiations take time . . .’
‘And patience,’ Rutledge countered. ‘More patience than your folk have. There’ll be men—dedicated men in their way—negotiating on this issue when half your members have lost patience and joined up with some other racket.’
It was fascinating to watch Frank Godfrey. Wilson sensed that he was quite outside this argument—or perhaps it might be more true to say that he was beyond it. He was as passive and remote as a Byzantine saint, and there was the same impression of stillness at the heart. By contrast, the vicar, now passionately engaged in the argument, seemed less convincing.
‘The negotiators are too timid, too half-hearted,’ he was saying. ‘We have to take matters into our own hands.’
And yet, in spite of the resolute voice, one was aware of a slight uncertainty. Beside Godfrey, the vicar was reduced to the rôle of another struggling mortal not quite sure of his place in the pattern of things.
‘You’re playing into Mr. K’s hands,’ Rutledge said.
‘I don’t give a damn about Mr. Kruschev!’ Jill tossed the remark at Rutledge with a provocative tilt of her head. ‘Better to play into his hands than commit mass suicide.’
There was no uncertainty here; only a marked lack of depth. She was eager enough, but one had the impression that to some extent this was all part of a game to her. She had had the same eager look when she talked about going abroad, Wilson remembered; as though life were a tremendous adventure, an expedition into an undiscovered territory where at every moment she would be confronted with the challenge of the unexpected.
‘Man has discovered something so terrible that it can put an end to all life,’ she went on excitedly. ‘What other course is there but to renounce the bomb if we are to survive? You talk about us as though at best we were a bunch of woolly idealists. In fact, we are so realistic that you can’t stomach what we are saying. If something isn’t done soon, the argument will be finished. We shall all have lost.’
The thought made her solemn, but not really desolate. The vicar was regarding her with the forbearing expression of a fond parent. Myra, however, was beginning to lose patience.
‘Does anyone want sherry, Ralph?’ she prompted.
The vicar frowned and shook his head. Myra turned away, her eyes bright with anger.
‘Frank? Sherry, dear?’
‘Thank you, Myra.’
Wilson accepted a glass because he felt better with something in his hands. His hands were unsteady, however, and he spilt a little sherry on the table as he put the glass down and furtively tried to rub it off with the sleeve of his jacket. Rutledge waved the sherry aside.
‘And suppose we do take your advice, young lady? It won’t have much effect, except t’other side of the Iron Curtain where they’ll think it means that the rot has set in in the West.’
Sarah, secure in her corner, was mimicking Rutledge. She did it rather well and Wilson, watching her, felt slightly hysterical. He decided that he must have a cigarette and went across to the mantelpiece for matches. Rutledge concluded:
‘And in ten years’ time we shall all be living under the hammer and sickle.’
There was a short silence. Wilson, standing by the mantelpiece fumbling awkwardly with the match-box, had placed himself at the focal point of the picture. Rutledge stared, noticing him for the first time; there was something calculating in that stare. He knows about me, Wilson thought; he is going to make a scene. The observer had gone: there was only Keith Wilson now, surrounded by a blur of faces, mask-like, unreal. His heart began that thudding beat which he had come to dread.
‘And what do you think about all this?’ Rutledge demanded.
Wilson, now in a panic, had no idea to what he was referring. Jill came to the rescue.
‘He’s much too tired to think.’
‘Tired? A young fellow like him?’
‘He offered to sweep the front down this afternoon and then discovered it meant doing half a mile of pavement as well!’
‘I’m glad someone around here has a sense of citizenship,’ Rutledge commented.
The vicar said sharply:
‘I resent that.’
Rutledge wagged a finger.
‘I mean it, Vicar. I speak my mind, always have and always shall. I don’t think much of this law-breaking and when adults start encouraging kids to cock a snook at the law of this country, I think it’s a damned disgrace.’
The atmosphere had suddenly become much less comfortable. Wilson felt, deep in the pit of his stomach, the first twinge of the familiar fear. The sooner they got off this topic the better.
‘It is a serious thing,’ the vicar agreed. ‘No responsible person would argue with you about that.’
‘Ralph has a great respect for authority and the law,’ Jill put in.
Wilson found Rutledge leaning towards him with a light; the man had become suspiciously friendly. He whispered: ‘ “Ralph”! If it was my niece she would get a smacked bottom for that.’
‘We all of us respect the law,’ Jill went on. ‘That is why . . .’
‘Rubbish!’ There was a roughness in Rutledge’s voice that had not been there earlier. ‘Look at those kids who were up at the juvenile court the other day for beating up the night watchman down at old Forster’s place. They were nuclear disarmers!’
‘You can’t win campaigns if you limit your members to the pure in heart.’ There was an edge to the vicar’s voice. ‘Every cause has its riff-raff.’
‘Mightn’t it be better, in that case, to start with the riff-raff? Get rid of the violent element in your own backyard before trying to clean up the whole world?’ The vicar and Jill spoke at once, but he raised his voice above theirs. ‘You’re never going to have peace on earth if you don’t have people who respect law and order. That’s where the church comes in, helping ordinary men and women and keeping out of things that don’t concern it.’
‘That seems to me a kind of blasphemy,’ the vicar thundered.
‘Blasphemy, is it!’ The back of Rutledge’s neck went red.
‘I can’t see why it’s blasphemous, darling,’ Myra cut in sharply. ‘After all, all sorts of honourable people have to be non-combatants, surgeons and . . .’
‘That is an absurd analogy. The surgeon is concerned with life and death . . .’
‘Doesn’t that apply equally to you?’ Myra’s voice was higher and her face had a pinched look. ‘I should have thought . . .’
Wilson was beginning to get that suffocating feeling he had had in his cell the first few nights when he heard the key turn in the lock. Rutledge had edged himself almost off his seat in his agitation. Sarah was watching him uneasily as though fearing that he was about to launch a physical attack on her uncle.
‘Did Christ stand aside?’ the vicar asked.
‘From politics, yes,’ Rutledge answered. ‘ “Render unto Caesar . . .”.’
‘This isn’t a question of politics! Man is in danger of destroying all that God has made, and you expect His church to stand aside?’
‘I expect His church to get on with its own job.’
‘This is its job, the one supreme . . .’
‘But there are other dangers to the church besides the bomb. Indifference, surely . . .’ Myra was now trying desperately to introduce a more reasoned note, but Rutledge shouted:
‘Are you telling me that everything, all other duties and responsibilities, must take second place?’
During the few seconds’ silence that followed, Wilson felt they must all hear the thudding of his heart. Frank Godfrey looked confidently at his friend; Myra’s gaze had no confidence, only a deep fear. The vicar raised his eyes and fixed them on a point above the heads of the people in the room.
‘Everything.’
His face seemed suddenly to glow with an inspiration which admitted no doubt. The inflexibility was a little frightening; it aroused a defensive desire to find a chink in the armour. Rutledge said:
‘That’s something between you and your God, Vicar. Always supposing you consult Him.’
The random thrust went home; the vicar’s expression did not change, but the eyes darkened. Wilson wanted to get out of the room before something irrevocable was said, but social barriers as relentless as the locked prison door prevented him from making his escape. Rutledge said hoarsely:
‘I didn’t want to say this to you, but . . .’
A chair overturned. Sarah was standing up, her face very white. She turned towards Rutledge, made one of her most hideous faces and rushed out of the room.
III
Frank Godfrey came into the kitchen where Myra was making more coffee.
‘What was wrong with Sarah?’ he asked.
‘She says her tummy felt bad. But she seems to be all right now.’ She poured milk into a saucepan and went on unhappily:
‘I don’t know what to make of Sarah. She used to be so self¬contained, nothing seemed to touch her.’
‘And now?’
‘She reacts to things more, but in a defensive way. We’ve had a good deal of door-slamming and foot-stamping in the last week, and a couple of tearful outbursts. I don’t know why. I never do know why with Sarah. I try to find out. Perhaps I try too hard.’
‘I shouldn’t pay much attention to it, if I were you,’ Frank murmured, with memories of his own children. ‘Sarah is too walled-off from other people. This may be the sign of some kind of a break-through.’
‘It seems to me more like the sign of a break-down. I don’t think I could bear that . . . added to everything else.’
He watched her as she walked across to the gas stove; she was so very thin now, he could see her shoulder blades outlined sharply through the light jersey-cloth dress.
‘I’m sorry Rutledge hit so hard at Ralph, Myra. It must be distressing for you.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Little things like that don’t trouble Ralph. It would have mattered once; but now I believe he rather enjoys unpopularity.’
He came across to her, uneasy at the bitterness of her tone. He knew that she still loved Ralph; one saw it in her eyes as she watched him. But he knew, too, that strange things can happen when love is stifled.
‘He has a lot on his mind, Myra; you have to be even more patient and forbearing than usual.’
‘I’m not a very forbearing person, Frank.’ Her mouth quivered. ‘Lately, I find myself saying unkind things deliberately to hurt him. But even that doesn’t have any effect. We seem to get further and further apart. Ralph takes his politics so intensely seriously, while I find that as the years go by I seem to care less and less what happens to the world.’ She flicked the gas pistol at one of the gas rings which popped noisily. ‘You see? Nothing in this house works properly because we are so busy trying to ward off Armageddon.’
The wind was getting up and a cold draught of air from the ill-fitting window agitated a paper doily on the table. He picked it up and then stood holding it, rather at a loss.
‘All marriages have their difficult periods, Myra.’
‘Even with you and Edith?’
‘Oh yes.’
She was standing quietly now with her head bowed over the gas stove. She seemed to make an effort to put bitterness aside.
‘It is as though he had left me and gone to some other place where I can’t follow him. Perhaps it is that in the quest for goodness a stage is reached where . . . where human love seems wrong? Is that possible, Frank? I think I read somewhere that as people come nearer to God they loosen their bonds with their dear ones.’
‘Possibly.’ There was a trace of asperity in his tone. ‘Though I must say it is a theory I find hard to follow.’
She laughed shakily.
‘I remember once, when we had been particularly at odds with one another, Ralph gave me a book to read—Le Milieu Divin by Teilhard de Chardin. It was all well above my head, and instead of helping me to understand it made me more bewildered than ever.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
As he looked at Myra’s face he remembered how enchantingly mischievous she had been as a young woman. Now, in the glint of the eyes there was a suggestion of mischief of a less innocent kind; and the lines of laughter at the sides of the mouth had a sour twist. The thought flashed across his mind that there was nothing quite so terrifying as to witness the slow destruction of one human being. She saw him looking at her.
‘I’m not really a suitable partner for a saint, am I, Frank? I need a solid, earthly affection centred round me.’
‘We all need that.’
‘Sometimes, with Ralph becoming more and more remote, and Sarah not wanting me, I feel so useless and neglected. Even Jill is growing away from me. We used to have such fun together. But now she has suddenly started to idolize Ralph, and because I am sometimes critical of him, she begins to see me as a carping wife. We are becoming wary of one another. I seem to be losing so much. It makes me desperate, and when you’re desperate you start to claw at things.’
They stood watching the milk beginning to creep up the sides of the saucepan. He said uneasily:
‘What do you mean “claw at things”?’
‘I get a dreadful desire to injure . . . because at least people notice you if you injure them.’
‘They do indeed!’
She took the saucepan up and poured the milk into a jug. He wheeled the trolley forward for her.
‘How well Edith has trained you!’ she murmured.
‘I can even wheel it without spilling anything.’
He demonstrated as far as the kitchen door, and then hesitated.
‘You know, Myra, I think this desire to injure is perfectly natural. I feel it very strongly in myself sometimes. Only . . . don’t do it, will you? Do something silly and spectacular instead.’
‘Like buying a new hat, or changing my hair style?’
They both laughed and, having over-simplified matters to their mutual comfort, left it at that.
The restoration of comfort had obviously been the aim in the sitting-room as well. Jill was sitting quietly in a chair staring into the fire, while Rutledge and Ralph discussed church affairs with the heartiness of men bent on appeasement. Only Wilson, sitting so far back in his corner that he might have been trying to dissolve into the shadows, seemed uneasy still. As the trolley was wheeled in, Rutledge was saying to Ralph:
‘What about this young man here? Didn’t you tell me he had been in the navy?’
They both turned and looked at Wilson.
‘If you won’t come and do the work yourself, you might at least give us this young man!’
Ralph responded with his ready, forgiving smile, and eager to seal the bargain turned to Myra.
‘Rogers is moving and we shall need help with the youth club. Rutledge is suggesting that Keith might be our man.’
Myra did not reply. Rutledge moved his chair closer to Wilson; Ralph went across and stood by the young man’s side. Wilson was not enthusiastic, he made a lot of weak excuses. Jocularly, but relentlessly, the two men continued to press him. As Frank Godfrey approached the group with coffee cups, Wilson glanced up.
‘Surrounded on all sides, eh?’
His mouth twisted in a sarcastic smile; after that he seemed to go slack and his face set into a mask of indifference. Frank, himself no stranger to weakness, recognized the last resource of the cornered.
‘Youth work isn’t for all of us,’ he said tentatively.
‘Exactly!’ Rutledge snapped up the remark and turned it adroitly. ‘There aren’t many suitable people. And with this lad’s experience in the navy, he’d be ideal.’
Wilson did not answer, but he looked at Ralph who answered his mute appeal by saying gently:
‘I have every confidence in you.’
Wilson muttered, ‘All right’ between clenched teeth.
‘And we’ll let him handle the Easter pageant, too!’ Ralph offered in a happy excess of generosity.
Later, when Rutledge had gone and Wilson and Jill were washing-up in the kitchen, Myra said to Ralph:
‘It was a mistake to decide the youth club business without letting Rutledge know about Keith.’
‘The boy’s only a first offender, isn’t he?’ Frank said. ‘If he was an old lag it would be different, but . . .’
‘And Rutledge knows about Spencer and it doesn’t worry him,’ Ralph pointed out.
‘Exactly! He knows about Spencer.’ Her voice had suddenly taken on its sharpest edge and both men winced. ‘Why can’t you descend from the clouds, Ralph, before you do any serious harm? Try to see people as they are. Rutledge isn’t ungenerous. But he can’t bear being left in the dark about things. He’s not nearly so proud of being a self-made man as he makes out, and he thinks you despise him.’
‘But he isn’t likely to find out about Keith,’ Ralph said wearily. ‘It will be much better to let the boy prove what a useful sort of chap he is. Rutledge will accept it better then.’
Myra shrugged her shoulders. There had been enough argument for one evening and so she let the matter rest there. They sat quietly for a while, listening to the wind tearing at the house. Once Frank went to the window and drew back the curtain; the pane was glazed with ice.
‘I hope the pipes won’t freeze,’ Myra murmured.
IV
In the kitchen, Wilson was getting behind with the wiping-up. ‘You’re better with a shovel,’ Jill teased.
‘Consider my background,’ he retorted.
She scraped at the milk saucepan with more energy than was required and said lightly:
‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to forget it?’
‘Yes, yes. How silly of me!’ He was heavily sarcastic. ‘That’s Lesson One, isn’t it?’
She turned, surprised, letting the saucepan slip back into the bowl.
‘Lesson Two, I suppose, is “Give him something to occupy his mind in those dangerous leisure hours”.’
She pushed back a tuft of hair with a moist forearm and regarded him warily, as though a pet dog had suddenly turned nasty.
‘I think that’s a rather silly attitude.’
‘I’m sorry! I’m terribly sorry! Don’t let me seem ungrateful. I’ll run the mothers’ union, too, shall I? As well as the youth club and the bloody Easter pageant.’
‘You could have said if you didn’t want to do it.’
‘Christ!’
She presented him with her back and attacked the saucepan again. He continued to rub at one of the saucers with a very damp tea-cloth. After a while, she said in a careful, reasoned tone:
‘You do have to integrate yourself again, you know. And surely this is a good way? After all, Ralph said you had excellent reports from your head master and from your officers in the navy. You were . . .’
‘Form captain, prefect, chairman of the debating society, leading seaman in charge of a watch, promising candidate for a commission.’
‘Well then, you had a gift for authority . . .’
‘And would-be journalist. Don’t forget that! All set to put the world to rights from an office desk.’
‘I don’t see the drift of all this.’
She emptied the bowl and began to wring out the dish cloth. He watched her moodily; his fire had extinguished itself now and he looked merely wretched.
‘Don’t you think that perhaps there is something wrong with people who want too much authority over others?’
She draped the dish cloth across one of the taps and said firmly:
‘I think you’re dramatizing yourself.’ She looked at the clock. ‘I also think it’s time Ralph ran me back to the flat.’
But later, as he lay in his room listening to the onslaught of the wind, he knew that he had not been dramatizing himself. The youth club. He tried not to think about it, but as he lay in the darkness he felt the fear rising from the pit of his stomach. How could he refuse without betraying to them the chaos that he tried to keep hidden even from himself? He hated them. The thin veneer of gratitude cracked and the pent-up resentment gushed out. The bloody do-gooders! Interfering, inexperienced meddlers full of undisciplined good-will primed with a smattering of psychology picked up from books and lectures. He damned them for their good intentions, their clumsy attempts at rehabilitation.
‘You do have to integrate yourself again,’ she had said.
But not this way. He could never cope with this kind of responsibility again. ‘But you were all right once,’ they would say. ‘What you have done once, you can do again. It is like learning to use a limb which has been out of action for a long time. . . .’ But suppose the limb was not healthy, the poison still at work? He turned over and buried his face in the pillow and the fear came crawling up his body again. ‘What you have done once, you can do again!’ Did no one understand? She certainly didn’t. ‘You had excellent reports from your head master and from your officers in the navy.’ Only the Teddy boy might have told a different story.
He was suddenly aware that he was lying half-naked on the bed. He pulled the clothes over him, but he could not get warm. ‘Bloody do-gooders!’ he muttered again. He wished he could savage once and for all their snivelling pity, break free of their demands. He wanted to go down into the shabby sitting-room and smash up the furniture, take their tinny old car, get drunk, do a couple of jobs. That would teach them to control their transports of good¬will! He nursed himself to sleep, planning the outrages he would commit in order to spite them.