The picnic at St Anne Crane had been organized by Caroline as a regular family event, every summer, very soon after they came to Darton. She had to believe – being the woman she was – that ‘a family must do things together’, that ‘children need both a father and a mother’. Since they had never gone away anywhere on a long holiday together, largely because Henry’s best work was always done at home in the summer, she had insisted with unusual firmness that he must make a part of her picnic – this had thus become a ceremonial event, laden with ritual importances and anxiety that it should go well. St Anne Crane was some miles away, on the coast. It was the kind of little place, unspoiled and natural, that everyone dreams of finding and conceals the existence of jealously from friends and acquaintances. It was outside the usually acceptable radius for expeditions from Darton, and thus getting there required a long and arduous car journey, beginning, in order that the picnic should be as expansive as possible, very early in the morning, before any of them would normally have been up.
Caroline had arranged the picnic, this year, for the last day of the Cannings’ visit; two years ago, she had decided, with reluctant realism, that family solidarity would be better maintained if there was some alien element in the party. Otherwise it was only too likely, whatever the ideal, that Henry would forget himself and wander away entirely, or that Anna would turn nasty and refuse to play with Jeremy; there had been one or two very unpleasant incidents already. This year she was quite glad that it had turned out as it had; it would keep the Cannings occupied and show them that an effort was being made to entertain them which went beyond board and lodging; it would also give Henry, if he behaved, some chance to alleviate the bad impression he had made on Oliver without having to talk to him too much or too intensively; he could show him the Norman church which would be friendly and not taxing.
She had made a lot of the arrangements, with faith, whilst Henry was away. She had arranged the hiring of a second motor-car, and had hunted out the wicker picnic baskets, flasks and cutlery several days in advance; she had ordered food, and washed swimming things, packed canvas stools and checked the maps in the car. Now, on the day itself, she had only two worries – the usual one of the weather and when it would break, which was really, she told herself, slightly absurd by now, and Henry’s health. The sky shone as blue and clear as ever – Caroline returned its serene stare across the breakfast table as she poured coffee and ladled kedgeree for a party roused early for the occasion. At the other end of the table, Henry looked well enough; his cuts were healing, he had spent two good nights and was eating a large breakfast. Jeremy, working busily through his second plateful of kedgeree, saw her look towards the window and said solicitously, ‘I do hope the weather doesn’t break. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh, surely it won’t,’ said Margaret. ‘Not just when it’s important.’
‘You have a touching faith in the weather’s sympathy,’ said her husband. ‘However, in this case, I can’t see it as likely that it will rain. Even taking the law of averages into account.’
‘You are always laughing at me,’ said Margaret.
‘Not at all, I said it was touching and I’m touched. I mean it.’
‘I can’t eat kedgeree in this heat,’ said Anna, pushing her chair back. ‘May I get down?’
Caroline stiffened with automatic annoyance. Anna had come down late, in her old jeans, with her hair obviously uncombed and her face flushed. If she was in for another of those days it was really too much. Caroline said, as pleasantly as she could, ‘You look feverish, dear. Are you sure you’re quite well? Did you sleep?’
‘Like a log. I don’t think I’m feverish. I just don’t like kedgeree.’ She stood up and went out slamming the door.
Caroline said, ‘Really, her manners.’
Margaret said, ‘I don’t think she does look very well.’
‘She never does. It’s hardly surprising. She thinks it beneath her dignity to take any care of herself. So someone else has to and there has to be a row about it.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Oliver, and went out, after Anna. Henry got up, as surreptitiously as his bulk allowed, and padded off towards his study. Caroline caught his sleeve.
‘Henry! The second car. Who will collect it?’
‘Oliver. And Anna, in our car. Give them something to do. Anna can drive back. What did she learn to drive for?’ He went out, incontrovertibly. Caroline sighed. ‘Everyone enjoys picnics, but no one seems to think they might need arranging. Anna is impossible. Do you think Oliver would mind?’
‘I should think he’d be only too pleased.’ Margaret hesitated. ‘I really don’t think Anna looks well.’
Caroline drew her mouth together. ‘I expect I handle her badly. I’d like to see anyone else do any better, that’s all. You wouldn’t think anyone could show such a complete lack of interest in everything. And such a complete lack of comprehension about ordinary things – she’s quite frighteningly stupid with pressure cookers, and Hoovers. And she’ll have to cope with them some day, she’s a woman, nobody’ll cope for her. But she won’t be interested. She can’t manage anything. Not even school and everyone gets through that somehow, don’t they? She ran away from school twice, I don’t know if I told you, they expelled her in the end. I suppose it was a bit hard, but I can’t say I blamed them. I suppose it’s my fault – it’s supposed to be, isn’t it – but what I think sometimes is if you look at people they were born the way they are, really – I mean, all this putting it on to the parents leaves people with nothing that you could call them, does it? I can see my getting cross with her makes her no better, but what flummoxes me entirely is just that – that – that I feel she’s nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me. She repudiates me. That’s what it is.’
Margaret said, ‘Isn’t it simply that it’s time she left home? She’s just not at an age where it’s possible – for most people – to be at home. I know I felt like that – I don’t think there’s anything unusual –’
‘No,’ said Caroline, who did not want to have to think there was anything unusual and may indeed have been right about that. ‘In any case, I don’t see where else she can go.’
‘She could come to us for a bit. I’d have her willingly; she’d be company for me when Oliver’s out and Oliver could go on coaching her. He thinks highly of her; it must be good for her to have someone so interested … that is, I mean, someone who knows of something she can do … Would you like that? I’ll ask Oliver, I’ll ask Anna herself, she might talk to me better, I might be able to find out what she does want …’
‘I don’t know,’ Caroline said dubiously, trying to weigh the disadvantage of being further indebted to Oliver, against the advantage of having Anna out of the house and usefully employed. ‘It might be too much for you. I’d have to ask Henry. We’ll think …’
‘Do,’ said Margaret. ‘And I’ll ask Anna, tactfully, shall I?’
An hour later Caroline had them all together on the lawn and covered them with a counting look, whilst she ran over the inanimate objects which had been collected earlier.
‘I really never thought I’d get you off. Now – the baskets are in the boot of our car. The rugs, the swimming things, the first-aid box, and Jeremy’s cricket and Jeremy’s frogman’s things are in the hired car. There are maps in both; it will be best if Henry drives our car and Oliver follows in the hired car. Margaret and Anna had better go with Henry and Jeremy and I will go with Oliver, so that I can guide Oliver if Henry gets out of sight. I think that’s all; the house is locked, is it, Henry? Have you all got hats?’
They all had, except Oliver, who did not mention this but looked the other way, deliberately vaguely; Anna, watching him, thought, he has to pretend he hasn’t heard because even he can’t face mother telling him to take a hat without giving in or excusing himself. Anna herself had been made to change, and now she and Jeremy looked oddly alike, in timeless grey shorts and white shirts and linen sunhats. They stood together, brown and long-legged, any country children on any country outing. Anna’s hair was bunched up in her shirt collar, not yet long enough to fall free of it. She stood with her hands in her shorts’ pockets, which were not intended for that; her stomach protruded and her shoulders sloped awkwardly back. Caroline said gently, ‘I wish you would learn to stand more gracefully, Anna.’ Anna shifted from one foot to the other.
Margaret wore a cotton sundress, rose and white striped, with a full skirt and petticoats; over it she had a white piqué jacket, buttoned with tiny pearl buttons. She wore white strapped sandals with a little heel, and an enormous white cartwheel of a sun-hat tied with a rose ribbon under her chin. It was one of her feminine days – she had decided on these clothes as proper for the occasion and rejected jeans and espadrilles. In her hand she carried a little leather case of lotions and protective creams. Oliver had told her – mockingly but with obvious pleasure – that she looked very nice. He liked female clothes, swinging skirts and low necks, hats and necklaces, whether they were fashionable or not. Caroline on the other hand frowned slightly over the probable fragility of the sandals – no good for scrambling over stones – and the impracticability of a froth of petticoats on a cliff edge. The childless, she thought, had no sense of the realities of life. Herself, she wore a blue and white printed linen dress and Clark’s ladies’ sandals, with a summer version of the Henry Heath gardening hat. Short sleeves, and no petticoat. She noticed that Oliver had no hat.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, attacking, ‘you would like to borrow one of Henry’s hats?’
‘I don’t think so, thank you. I’ve a thick skull, the sun doesn’t affect me. Hats irritate me.’
Caroline flushed. ‘The summer is exceptional and the sun by the sea is always brighter …’
‘Let him be.’ Henry by the car was buried as far as the bridge of his nose in an enormous panama which Caroline had once brought back in triumph from the Army and Navy stores, after Henry had protested that his head was too large for any hat he could purchase. ‘Let him be. He’s over twenty-one and no relation. I don’t suppose he’ll suffer. I was out without a hat and look at me. Perfectly fit.’
Caroline was effectively distracted. ‘Are you sure? Are you really fit? Do you think you can drive? Perhaps Anna –’
‘Don’t fuss, my darling,’ said Henry. ‘I’m all right. I prefer to drive myself to my own destruction. I’d tell you if I wasn’t all right.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Oliver, but this gratuitous piece of trouble-making passed unremarked.
The journey was long, and dusty and not very exciting. Anna sat behind Henry and Margaret and did not speak. She still believed firmly that to travel, even unhopefully, was almost certainly better than to arrive and was disturbed unpleasantly from her drowsiness when Henry swung the car over a last little rise – they had been climbing for some time – and they found themselves falling rapidly down a wide, cobbled main street, between high, railed pavements and higher houses, into the village of St Anne Crane. At the foot of the main hill was a square; Henry parked in it, and opened Margaret’s door. It was very hot in the car, but Anna was gripped by lethargy. The air was clear, the sun washed the white square, and gulls called, but Anna felt that the effort of moving her body, of having to notice or move herself at all, would be altogether too much; she sat curled in the back seat and surveyed the place through the dusty glass of the window, whilst Henry strode around the square which was the end and centre of the village and explained it to Margaret. They seemed to be some way ahead of the others. Margaret tripped after him with quick little steps and exclamations of delight. Her skirts swung and flashed in the sun.
‘This is all there is,’ Henry said. ‘This street and then the square, and the pubs, one on each side. The wall at the far end here is the sea wall – here.’ Margaret came and stood beside him and leaned over the wall to stare down; there was a long drop, a steeply shelving beach, a landing stage with two or three fishing boats and to the right a tongue of cliff, enclosing the strip of shingle altogether. ‘All the beach here is luckily inaccessible to traffic,’ Henry went on, ‘which is why it’s been left alone, I suppose. And this stretch isn’t particularly nice, anyway – the coves further along are where we picnic, and it takes a good walk and some scrambling to get down to them, though there are rudimentary staircases cut in the cliff in places.’
Margaret looked uneasily down at her shoes. ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ she cried. ‘You are really terribly clever to find places like this in these days. So utterly unspoiled.’
Anna caught the last part of this and winced at the word, without at first knowing why. It seemed suddenly a vulgarization and an intrusion, a word associated with the dishonesty of travel magazines who broadcast all secret places, sharing their ‘unspoiledness’ chattily with all their readers, and not only betray secrecy but in some way reduce all places to the same norm of unspoiled prettiness and ‘scenery’. She doesn’t see it, Anna thought savagely, she just cries out like a parrot, ‘Unspoiled, unspoiled,’ and then was angry with herself for snobbery – sharing, having to share, places, makes one angry in itself, unreasonably, and there was no reason to suppose that Margaret was not bad at words rather than at seeing, the two did not always go together, one had no need to see vulgarly because one used vulgar words, probably. Henry was now leaning back with Margaret, and pointing out and up to where, although in the shadow of the George she could not see it, the little earthbound Norman church squatted on the hill.
Anna looked out at the pale and glittering strip of sea beyond the wall and wondered what she would most remember – the very real bodily pleasure she had taken in the St Anne picnic in the early days, as a child, in sand and sea and climbing, in the sound of gulls and water in which she had been, she thought first, absolutely involved, or the enormous social discomfort it now caused her. Looking at it through the car window distanced her, although she was there now, in the middle of it – it was all overlaid with dust and scratches, like an old film, to be assessed, an object. The empty square, patterned with jutting shadows where she was, white with sun towards the sea, was layered with mystery and importances for her – the mystery which comes from collecting and choosing between, or attempting not to choose between memories.
St Anne, where she had been first taken by Caroline on a conventional picnic, had been for years Anna’s dreamed retreat and edge of freedom. It was the first place that she had recognized as beautiful – probably because she had been told it was beautiful – and now she carried with her as a touchstone the fined down image of all this emptiness and clarity, of the sudden, peculiarly poised rush of buildings to the edge of nothing and the horizon stretching beyond them, solid, shining metal blue, and the bodiless paler blue of the sky laid on it weightlessly. She remembered the heaviness and darkness of the little church and its damp smell. She remembered the smaller coves, and liked to sit lonely at the bottom of a funnel, enclosed, with high walls of chalk curving almost round her, but with the sky opening above and the sea bright through the gap.
Over the years she had polished these three images so that now they were bright and easily accessible; she had taken, in her way, possession of the place. But her feeling for it was essentially a thing of the past. Once, some time, she had found it violently beautiful, and now she found it so not because it hit her with the immediacy of that postulated moment in the past, but because it was weighted with the memory, and the nostalgia and the recreation of that moment. She suspected, dimly, that in fact the moment of knowledge had never occurred, that she had never, directly, completely, taken anything in, that what she now remembered was a whole series of half-realized impressions or even later imaginings, which had little to do with any vision at the time and were much less incompatible with her other memories – the continual frustration of Jeremy’s presence, Caroline’s insistence that she should enjoy herself, the heat and irritation of walking, scrambling, hurry to arrive and hurry to leave – than any such vision would have been. Perhaps the past as it really was, she thought, or this present, as it would be when it became the real past, were impossible to remember and not even very relevant. Perhaps one built oneself out of what one constructed of what one had seen, and perhaps what one had done, or really felt, were only important in so far as they affected this. Anna knew perfectly well what she meant by building herself – it was what she must do – what she could not find out was how. To build oneself, it was maybe more important to remember a whole vision, than actually to have one. Or maybe, on the other hand, to build on that was a lie. It was certain that to care for things seen was important, but how seen? If the way of seeing was artificial, a construct, what then? She thought, St Anne is beautiful for me now – or will be, even more, when I come to remembering, to reflecting on now – but when I am honest I cannot remember having seen it as I have believed I saw it.
And one’s memories, Anna thought, glowering out at her father and Margaret, as the breeze lifted Margaret’s skirt and Margaret held it down with flat palms and laughed, one’s memories won’t hold together, as fast as one manages to gather one up another falls away. I can’t manage to keep hold of how beautiful this is and how tiresome the family is both together, I am two people with regard to these two things, and yet they are both true and to build oneself one must take account of what is true, or what is built will crumble and crack apart. And one can’t do anything if one is two people – one upright, clear-eyed, possessing a place, and one an angry child. If I went away and lived my own life, she thought, I might manage to be everything I am, or have to be – and then I might see and not only remember having seen. The thought brought up with it Oliver, and the question of what his presence and his ideas would do to her picture of St Anne. And she was suddenly discouraged. Watching Henry coming back across the square with one hand under Margaret’s elbow, and carrying his hat, she thought, and anyway, my own life that I keep thinking about, it’s all a game of comforting myself, I shall find nothing important enough to see or to do. I might just as well go on like this.
Henry called to her, ‘Anna. Won’t you come out and look? It’s a good day.’ ‘Anna!’ said Margaret, as she crawled out into the air and drooped against the car. ‘How can you bear not to come out? Oh, I do think you’re lucky. This is so beautiful. Oliver will love it. It’s incredible. I didn’t know there still were quiet beautiful places like this. All this air –’ Her gesture managed to suggest that the air had been laid on specially by a benign landscape designer.
The other car came over the rise more smoothly than Henry had, with less rattle, more of a rubber bounce on the cobbles. Anna saw her mother’s head inclined towards Oliver and wondered what those two would ever find to talk to each other about. When they drew up beside her they were both laughing.
‘How pleasant,’ said Oliver, jumping down neatly, slamming the door. ‘How very pleasant.’ He went round and with exaggerated gallantry helped Caroline into the square. ‘St Cecily in your Poor Monster, I take it, Henry? Rather Faulknerish, surprisingly, that one, I’ve always thought. Odd. I must look at this place carefully. It’s obviously worthy of being looked at. But first we need a drink, don’t you agree? It’s a hot drive, I’m exhausted. We must sit on that wall and have a long drink, here are two pubs, don’t you think that’s a good idea?’ He was ebullient, he was still, surreptitiously, laughing about something. Margaret, who had meant to run up to him and tell him how beautifully the place, now completed by his presence, struck her, was a little daunted; she moved closer to Henry. When Oliver was not there she always imagined what he would do if he were, and in this case she had seen him, infected by the sea air, kissing her casually, taking her hand, sharing his first impressions of it with her. But instead, he was shepherding Caroline, organizing. Anna drew circles with the tip of her sandal, and thought that today he was being very grown up. She meant something very precise by this, something to do with laughing with her mother.
Caroline said doubtfully, ‘I don’t know, Oliver. It takes us some time to find a place to lunch, we’ve always found … It’s quite a distance.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry,’ said Oliver, cheerfully ignorant of the long cliff walk still before him, and the rush and effort attendant upon the Severell pursuit of the ideal picnic. ‘I should think we’ll manage. Don’t fuss, it’s bad for picnics. Anyway, I’m not moving another yard until I’ve had a drink. I’ve driven like a maniac and deserve something. Come along.’ He settled Caroline on the sea wall. ‘Sit there quietly. What will you drink?’
‘Cider,’ said Caroline meekly.
‘Darling? And Anna?’
‘The children like lemonade,’ said Caroline. ‘Schweppes, if they have it.’ Oliver winked at Anna, an avuncular wink. Today she was back on Jeremy’s side of the fence, it seemed they all had a tacit agreement about it. Yesterday she had wanted to stay there.
Oliver counted, ‘Three lager, one cider, two lemonades. Will you help to carry, Henry?’ They went off towards the George.
‘You could always start unpacking the cars,’ Caroline suggested to Anna. Anna, although out of the car now, was still suffering from the feeling, common to girls of her age and quite unappreciated by other people, that in her state of inexplicable exhaustion to move at all would make her faint, or be sick, or at least give her a violent headache. She trailed across to the boot of the car and unloaded picnic baskets.
Caroline pursed her lips. Anna came back to the now completed row on the wall and sat on the end of it, next to Jeremy, holding her unwanted lemonade and feeling very cut off and far away. Jeremy swayed to and fro on the wall, thinking his own thoughts. Anna was the only person towards whom he never felt any social duty. She would not be entertained and she was not entertaining. Next to him Margaret, with half an eye on Oliver, complimented Caroline vivaciously on St Anne and its unspoiledness and Caroline accepted her enthusiasm graciously, as though she were St Anne’s builder. Beyond Caroline, Oliver was telling Henry exactly how Henry had used the sea symbolism in Poor Monster, and why the death on the beach in the sun was so effective. Henry, Anna could see, leaning dizzily back over the beach to watch them, was not listening. He had removed himself, he was staring out to sea and quite deliberately not listening. Anna realized that she had had Oliver’s constant company for some time, now, and that tomorrow he was going. She would miss him, she knew suddenly, in spite of his tiresomeness.
‘He treats me like someone,’ she repeated to herself again. ‘And not just part of a-a-thing – a set-piece – a-a-concept, like family photographs, or this silly row of us like birds on a wall.’ She kicked viciously and half accidentally at Jeremy’s bare, swinging, childish legs. Jeremy, who had been humming to himself, stopped, looked injured, and rubbed his shin ostentatiously. Anna leaned back further, bringing her feet up against Jeremy again – ‘exercise his Honour Code,’ she thought, as Jeremy, grimly silent, rubbed even harder – to see whether Oliver saw how much she was suffering. He had still not noticed that Henry was not listening, although Henry looked far too polite. Anna was angry with Henry. She thought, anyone can see Oliver minds so much what father thinks, it’s dreadfully selfish and disagreeable not to listen to him. Yesterday she would have thought that Henry was right, that he had no need to submit to interrogation, but today she was bathed in melancholy indignation on Oliver’s behalf. He ignores us all, she thought; who does he think he is?
Caroline, cutting in neatly on the end of one of Margaret’s sentences, raised her voice a tone and said, ‘If the men carry the picnic baskets, and the children carry the rugs and the swimming things –’ She walked them all away briskly along the cliff path: Henry, then Oliver, then Margaret, Anna and Jeremy, with herself last, like a goose-herd. The path was rough and narrow, and wound along more or less the extreme edge of the cliff, touching it here and there where there had been a fall and the earth was bare and broken. On their left the sea shone, on their right the cliff grass stretched away, over lumps and hillocks, and whispered and whistled although there was little breeze. Margaret, who had no head for heights and whose shoes hurt her, began to feel sick. They turned a corner, to the left, and the path began to twist around the orifices of the coves; now and then Henry would stop and look over, and point out a flight of steps or a winding path, and Caroline would call, ‘No, I don’t think so, not quite yet, do you think?’ and they would all move away again one after the other.
Anna, resting her chin on the high pile of rugs in her arms, and struggling with Jeremy’s slipping stumps and bat, had nevertheless walked herself back into the long Severell stride, and was again travelling hopefully. She was submerged in her St Anne daydream, of herself retreated to a cottage on these cliffs, writing good novels and contemplating the water. She would have rooms with little windows and deep window seats, an untidy garden, and a white kitchen with a stone floor and an enormous refrigerator humming in it – the refrigerator somehow put the seal of reality on the whole thing. Henry would be dead, or removed to the Mediterranean or Mexico, and anyway she would write under a pseudonym, no one would know she was a Severell. She would have a table with a typewriter, in a window looking out in the direction of the sea, and she would work all morning and go for long walks in the afternoon, she would come and go when she wanted, no one would visit her unless invited, no one would interfere. She would have time on her side, then.
She walked through her garden, up and down her stairs, in and out of all her rooms – it was an exercise of the imagination familiar and efficacious by now; she stared happily and arrogantly out over the water, amalgamating her pleasure in it with her pleasure in her hypothetical writings so that the one became a specious guarantee of the other. The dark trumpets of the currents curved and widened around the rocks beneath her, streaks of a duller, more dangerous blue on the pale flat surface. Further out, a stray patch of wind whipped the water into a network of little weals. I shall remember this, she told herself, as though a promise was contained in simply seeing it. I shall remember, I knew I could …
She realized that Margaret had already addressed her, twice, by name, with some urgency.
‘Anna –’
‘Oh yes. I’m so sorry. I was dreaming.’
‘How much – further – do we – have to go? My feet hurt – I put on the wrong shoes, so stupid – and I haven’t much head for heights. Where do we stop?’
Anna caught up with Margaret on a widening of the path and made another grab at Jeremy’s slithering cricket things. She wondered for a moment whether she should not just let the whole bundle slide away and be lost, and then decided that since her brother was immediately behind her this was not practicable. She answered Margaret’s question companionably, with weary experience.
‘Mother won’t rest until we are well past the church.’ They were now skirting the rise on which it stood. ‘So that anyone who wants to come and look at it will have to walk all the way back. And there are people in that cove down there, look. We can’t stop where there are people.’
‘Why not?’ asked Margaret, who liked people, and still hoped for some revelation, some momentous friendship, from every new meeting. The people below looked harmless enough; a couple on little canvas chairs, a gaggle of diminutive children, burned to a smooth chocolate colour around scarlet and peacock briefs, poking delicate feet at the frill of water. Margaret liked small children. Anna put her head up and looked at her in surprise.
‘I don’t know why not. It’s a family party – I mean – we never do go where there are people.’ She considered, ‘I suppose it’s a pity in a way – one sees enough of the family.’
‘I was wondering,’ Margaret said, ‘what you’ll do now? When Oliver’s gone? I mean – who will teach you?’
‘I expect they’ll get a tutor. I don’t really care very much, you know.’
Margaret persisted. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere else than at home? I know I would have, when I was your age. You need to live your own life – you know – manage your own money – go to your own parties – have your own friends – and come in when you please.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna non-committally.
‘I wondered if you’d like to come and stay with us. Then Oliver could go on teaching you – I know he thinks that’s very important – and I’d love to have you. We could do all sorts of things – I’d introduce you to people – it would be London after all – there’d be parties – and clothes to buy – and theatres – I’d enjoy it no end, and I wouldn’t interfere, no more than Oliver thought good for your work.’ She laughed uneasily; she had completely lost the feel of any contact with her audience, who said now, flatly, ‘They wouldn’t let me.’
Anna did not know why she was so sure. Her parents paid little attention to her, but she was certain that they would be automatically opposed to her leaving home unnecessarily. That was accepted on both sides, her place was there.
‘I think they would. I asked your mother.’ Anna peered at her over the cricket stumps with a start of interest.
‘Did you? Do you think they …? I’ll tell you what though, he – Uncle Oliver – he wouldn’t like it. What does he think, then? He’s had enough of me by now, I should think.’
‘You mustn’t say that. He minds very much about you and he believes in you. I know that.’ Anna had a fleeting vision of the Cannings, sitting up in bed together, intimately discussing her problems. She could see Margaret clearly enough, nesting in pillows, her thick hair let down all over, warm and concerned. Oliver in pyjamas, Oliver in any kind of undress was much more difficult. Oddly enough, this idea was very comforting after Oliver’s exhortations – she didn’t feel Margaret’s interest as an intrusion at all, but as something human and a safeguard. Margaret’s offer of clothes, and parties, and friends, of an interesting life with interesting people, made Oliver’s world so much more habitable, and now, by contrast with her own, so attractive. Although, she thought, it was doubtful whether she could live with Oliver any longer and keep her reason. She said, ‘It’s nice of you, but I think I’d drive him mad in a week, I really do.’
‘You must let him decide that,’ Margaret said, generous on Oliver’s behalf and solicitous for his comfort at once. She felt that so far she had done nothing to further any real contact with Anna; all that had been said was so ordinary, and Anna would not look at her. She wanted to show Anna that someone really understood, someone was on her side, and would do something practical about it, but she could not find words to get it over. And she became a little annoyed with Anna and suppressed the annoyance; she would have been even more annoyed to know that this was most people’s usual reaction to Anna. She said, ‘I envy you, you’ve got everything to come; you won’t believe me, but you don’t know how much I envy you.’ Anna did look at her then, drawing her breath in sharply as though she was afraid, which she was, with the look of a suspicious colt. Margaret thought, you needn’t look so scornful, people your age never realize how much they are to be envied until it’s too late, but it’s true, all the same. And Anna thought, everyone thinks I have something to come, I think it sometimes, but if I haven’t – and I’ve never seen whatever is – how much worse it will be when I find out. She was nevertheless grateful to Margaret for her friendliness, which she sensed much better than Margaret gave her credit for. She was much more certainly grateful than she was to Oliver, but Margaret was quite unconscious of that.
Caroline called to Henry, who had suddenly begun to walk much faster, staring out to sea and giving the beach below only the most cursory examination.
‘Henry! Why don’t we stop here? this looks ideal –’
‘He’s not listening,’ Anna said wisely to Margaret, as the whole crocodile pulled up in some confusion and turned back on itself. Henry strode on, and Oliver ran after him and pulled him by the sleeve.
‘I told you so,’ said Anna. ‘I can always tell.’ She broke away from them suddenly and plunged down into the cove, running and sliding, bundle and all, down the steps cut in the cliff, and had dropped her burden, all anyhow, and was out at the sea mouth, surveying the water, before any of the rest of them had begun the descent. It was a good place – a wide shelf of sand, with rocks and pools at the foot of the cliff nearer the water. There was no one there, and the sun was on it. Margaret, who came down last, and insisted on being helped by Oliver, found time before the descent to say to him, ‘I asked Anna to stay with us in London. I thought you could go on teaching her. I thought she needed to get away for a bit.’
‘Did you?’
‘I thought,’ Margaret ran on happily, sharing Anna with Oliver, ‘that what she really needs – you know – is to have a bit of a fling. A real boy-friend, a bit of dancing, late nights.’ She laughed. ‘Oh, I know her work comes first, but don’t you think I’m right, too?’
‘And you were going to provide it?’
‘I thought I’d introduce her to a few people. I’ve not got about much lately, it’d be good for me –’
‘I see. What did Anna say?’
Margaret laughed again. ‘She was worried about you. She said she’d drive you mad in a week. I said you’d like to have her.’
‘Did you?’
Margaret looked up at him, then, dubiously. ‘I thought – as well – at the moment – it would do us good – maybe – to have someone else in the house – as well. Sometimes – when one has been getting on each other’s nerves –’
‘Oh,’ said Oliver. He looked down to where Anna stood at the water’s edge, the slight breeze lifting her hair away from her face, her legs long, planted apart, under her childish grey shorts. Margaret followed his look.
‘She’ll be quite pretty, in another few years. Don’t you think so? I thought, if someone told her so now, it would make such a difference –’
‘She’ll find it out, quickly enough. I shouldn’t worry.’
‘She’s so unsure … At her age, I knew so much more about life. I really think it’s terrible, how little of anything these English middle class children get at – hockey, instead of dancing, and horses instead of human beings –’
‘I agree with you, there –’
‘And it is a good idea if we have her to stay?’
Oliver looked at Anna, and then said curtly, ‘You’re always too generous, you know. You want to take the world on single-handed. I don’t think you’d make much difference to her and I’ve too much on my hands to go on coaching university entrance candidates. I think she’s quite right, as a matter of fact. She’d drive me mad in a week. If you’ve committed us, of course …’
Margaret’s mouth trembled, ‘Oh no, of course I haven’t –’
‘I don’t need to coach anyone, not even Henry Severell’s daughter –’
‘I know,’ said Margaret. ‘It wasn’t that. I only thought –’
Caroline called up that they were ready to lunch if they came down. They made their way down the path; Caroline was saying, ‘Come along, come along, we shall never eat if everyone doesn’t give a hand. I think if we sit round this rock – in this patch of shade – like a table. We shan’t have time to digest our food before bathing if we don’t hurry a little.’
Caroline’s picnics were always splendid and successful; never too much and never too little. They were packed and served, chilled and protected, in plastic boxes and plates of all shapes and sizes and clear colours, without depth; Caroline spread a cloth on her rock, and arranged everything, glowing palely on it. She was pleased with it, she even twitched the leaves of the lettuce and arranged a curl of endive round a sculpted tomato as though she was creating a flower arrangement.
‘The new materials make this kind of thing so much easier,’ she said. ‘It’s a modern miracle, I think. I can’t imagine how I managed before there was all this. So light and clean and such pretty colours.’
Henry picked up a sky blue translucent beaker and bent it across. ‘It’s slightly repulsive,’ he said, examining it with his enormous fingers, ‘I find. Like dead skin, or a false skin. No body. I imagine us living in a world of prettily coloured skin, and when we lose our tempers we shall have to learn to rip instead of smashing and that will require more deliberation and more skill as well as more strength and we shall be more hardened and nastier criminals. Anyone can smash a plate.’
‘I don’t see why you should want to destroy them,’ Caroline said calmly. ‘I think they are very nice.’
‘So they are,’ said Oliver. ‘They’re an advance, an improvement, they raise the standard of living and they are very pretty too – don’t be so conventional.’
Henry grinned amongst his beard. ‘I suppose I must confess now to the expected hankering for old things – pewter and horn spoons, and earthenware – solid things, that wear down gradually. Do you know what this stuff does when it’s old? It doesn’t grow thin and delicate, like horn. It gets fat and fluffy and peels off, like leprosy.’
‘Oh, Henry,’ Caroline said, laughing. Henry built up the idea with an extravagant gesture of the hands.
‘Like some growth, some disease,’ he insisted. ‘Unnatural from beginning to end.’
‘Natural, unnatural,’ said Oliver, sitting cross-legged on the rug and leaning forward, his teeth bared, attacking like a terrier with a rat. ‘I find your terminology very unhealthy, Henry. It’s symptomatic of something in you that I find very distressing. A minor version of this William Morris crankiness, the golden age, beautiful mediaevalism, the appeal to nature, whatever nature is. Isn’t it natural for man to make plastics? How can we accept what you say if you want to persuade us to live in a world that doesn’t, and can’t exist.’
‘I was talking about plastics,’ Henry said, deprecating.
‘You’ll find, in the end, you can’t afford to dismiss what is. Plastics are with us, they’re a fact of life, you’ve got to take them into account, or you’re weakened. You must make terms.’
‘I was talking about plastics,’ Henry repeated. ‘I wasn’t not talking about plastics. I wasn’t ignoring them. I was saying what I feel, I don’t like them.’
‘You can’t get out of it that way. You can’t just dismiss them by not liking them. You can’t get away from them.’
‘I can,’ said Henry, suddenly and disproportionately, magnificently angry. ‘I can if we’re talking about plastics. Have you no sense of scale? Some things are important and some are not, and some I care about and some I don’t. I will not – do you understand? – I will not have you fasten on to everything I say and make an issue of it. It’s intellectually dishonest. It isn’t right to accuse me of all this – golden agery – it isn’t relevant and what’s more you know it isn’t. You don’t write anything as stupid as some of the things you say, and I won’t have you sitting there and trying to provoke me into pronouncements. You won’t get anything out of it. No help with my work, if that’s what you’re at. If you’d stop labelling before you looked you’d get further. Though I imagine you’d better give up labelling altogether if you’re ever going to understand anything much. That’s what I think.’
He sat and stared, with complete intellectual arrogance, hard at Oliver. Then he shook himself, like a large dog, and said, looking down, ‘I’ve been used to thinking of myself as a friendly creature, but I won’t be harassed.’ He took up a leg of chicken – like a parody of a mediaeval knight, Anna thought – bit off a large mouthful and chewed angrily. Oliver flushed, slowly, painfully, a dark reddish brown, and closed his eyes momentarily.
Caroline said, ‘Henry, really,’ in the voice of a mother whose child has been rude to a visitor, and must, whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, apologize under the law of hospitality. Oliver, recovering, muttered with an attempt at lightness, ‘I should have said that was a pronouncement if ever there was one.’
Henry turned away from the picnic and the table and began to stare into sea. He was concentrating on the sound of it, the roar in it, barely submerged even on the mildest of days. Caroline saw that she had lost him, he would get up after lunch and go away, there was no help. She was very annoyed with Oliver, and to cover it turned to him and offered him more chicken.
Caroline wiped the dishes on paper tissues and packed them into the baskets. Jeremy leaned over her and embraced her. ‘What shall we do now? What shall we do now? May we swim?’
‘You must let your food settle.’
‘Shall I play cricket?’
Caroline looked at Henry’s face and then Oliver’s, and Margaret’s, and saw, not without some indignation, that it was no use trying to orient the party towards games on the sand with the children. They did not share her concept. She said, ‘Anna will bowl to you.’ Anna, who was unfortunately good enough with a cricket ball for Jeremy to consider it beneath his dignity to use her, had no choice. She said, ungraciously, ‘I’m far too tired,’ and wandered out towards the sea to help Jeremy fix his stumps in the damper, harder sand. She took off her shoes and threw the ball viciously at Jeremy, who missed it. The bails fell.
‘That wasn’t fair,’ said Jeremy. ‘I wasn’t ready. You must give me another chance.’
Anna retrieved the ball and went, in a desultory manner, back to her own end of the pitch.
‘And don’t hit it out to sea,’ she told him. ‘Or I’ll bash you with your own bat, and I won’t play any more.’
‘You’ll have to, or mummy’ll be upset.’ This was irrefutable. Anna delivered the ball again, more gently. Jeremy twisted the bat and slapped the ball neatly into the sea.
‘Not a bad shot,’ he said. Anna walked after it, watching the water come up darkly in her footprints. The sea was cold, and smelled clean and good. Anna stood, calf-deep, waiting for the waves to carry the ball back to her, thinking of Margaret’s offer and the endlessness of the water, and how remote and unreal it all was, especially herself, as she saw herself, a child playing on a beach. Change was always possible, and never imminent, one was neither what one was doing nor the person who watched the doing. The sea was calming, because there was so much of it, one looked out of oneself, away over it. It was odd how rarely one lifted one’s head at the seaside and looked right out. One was always digging holes, or picnicking, or throwing balls. ‘I don’t believe in myself,’ she said aloud. ‘One day I must, but not now. I am certainly not a child on a beach.’
‘Can’t you get it, Anna?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, bending down to retrieve the ball as it knocked against her leg.
‘You’re very slow.’ He said importantly, ‘I’ve got to practise pretty hard, old Bodger said I’d be really good – really good – if I kept at it. I might play for the school.’
‘It matters to him,’ Anna thought. ‘He believes in himself, altogether.’ She threw the wet ball at him, all anyhow.
‘That was wide,’ said Jeremy. ‘You’re losing your touch.’
Caroline smoothed out the rug, on the sand, in the sun, and sat down on it, leaning against a boulder. She had a little basket open in front of her from which she took a piece of clean white linen and a needle.
‘I shall sit here,’ she said, peacefully, ‘and enjoy the sea air and do a little sewing. I shall embroider the tablecloth I promised Helen Ashley for a wedding present. I find I have very little time for embroidery these days. That’s a pity. It’s a very soothing occupation.’
She selected a skein of cornflower blue silk and smoothed it, lovingly.
Henry stood up, stretched, yawned, gathered himself together, and said, ‘Oliver and Margaret ought to look at the church.’ He peered down at them abstractedly, and began to edge away in the other direction.
‘Would you like that, darling?’ Margaret said.
‘I’m too tired,’ Oliver said. ‘I’m terribly tired. I must sleep. I shall sleep at your feet, Caroline, and be soothed vicariously by your sewing.’ He lay back, spreading his arms above his head, and closed his eyes. Henry moved further away.
‘Henry,’ said Caroline, not very hopefully, without looking up.
‘I shall go for a walk myself,’ Henry announced. ‘A long walk.’ He broke into a run and was up the cliff steps.
Margaret stood uneasily over Caroline and Oliver and wondered what to do. Caroline had all her skeins of silk pinned neatly to the lid of the sewing basket – only blue, but every possible shade of blue, from the palest periwinkle to the deepest midnight. She had stretched the linen over a hoop, and was blocking in great petals of silk, enormous, full blown blue roses carefully shaded, stitch by stitch. Oliver’s eyes were firmly closed and his face was still. Margaret, looking at the neat curl of his body and the way his shirt was pulled taut from his shoulders to his waist, was overcome by desire. She would have liked to crouch on the rug beside him and stroke him and caress him until he turned to her, but Caroline sat over him like a Victorian angel, blue and white, and in her shadow his sleep seemed innocent and remote. Margaret, as though caught out in an obscenity, found herself blushing, deeper and deeper, in the shadow of her hat, and then trembling. Afraid that Caroline might notice, she turned and walked quickly away, after Henry. At the bottom of the cliff path she looked back in time to see him roll and stretch and hump his body sleepily close to Caroline’s ankles. It was suddenly imperative to get to Henry; she began to scrabble up the cliff side, clawing with fingers and toes, her ribboned hat pushed sideways on her head.
Henry walked fast and angrily for some time. He was ashamed to have been caught out in a burst of temper, aware that Caroline was cross with him and had hoped for something better, and profoundly thankful that the Cannings were leaving tomorrow. He was conscious that Oliver’s public and persistent worrying of his books had affected his own attitude to them. Oliver’s academically preaching tone, applied to things with which Henry was concerned, clarified them for him because it was alien to him. On the other hand Oliver’s manner, Oliver’s excesses, Oliver’s weaknesses and the weaknesses of the school to which he belonged – chiefly, Henry thought, a kind of priggishness, a preaching from within an enclosure at one remove, irritated Henry to an absurd extent. He wished that he had never met Oliver. ‘The man wastes my time and messes up my work,’ he thought. ‘I shall take days to get over this visit.’
He was a controlled man, usually, and had his own way of directing himself back from distractions to his main channel. Now, since there was a part of a chapter that he had meant to walk clear this afternoon before starting on it tomorrow, and because Oliver had scratched at his novel so that he found it difficult to concentrate, he began to sing. He had a strong voice, not unpleasant, resonant even, but little sense of pitch, so that his repertoire was confined almost entirely to hymns with obvious tunes, in which it was the incantatory repetition of words that he found pleasing. He lifted his head, contemplated the horizon, and began,
‘Holy, holy, holy
Lord God Almighty
All the earth shall praise thy name
In earth and sky and sea.’
I have something wrong there, he told himself, there should not be that repetition of ‘earth’, it’s clumsy. ‘Land’, on the other hand, would be worse, in that line – or do I only think so because I’ve sung ‘earth’ for so long? He went on, his voice clear, dropping over the sea,
‘Holy, holy, holy
All the saints adore thee
Casting down their golden crowns,
Around the glassy sea.’
Lovely, long slow words, he thought; as a child he had trembled with pleasure over that verse, had had a vision, every time the boys around him piped it and the piano thumped it, of the rows of saints, stiff white pillars, crowned with gold, standing, raised, as in an amphitheatre, around a glittering, perfectly round bowl of ice, and slowly, measuredly, overarm, hurling down crown after crown to roll and clatter and slide and lie piled in the centre of it. This ice rink of a sea had been enclosed under a dome of glass; the weather, if it could be called weather, had been grey and cold – the scene had been beautiful, fascinating, but rather deathly, really. Henry repeated the verse, looked at the flat sea beneath him, and the light running liquid along its barely indicated ridges, and wondered why his sea had been so certainly indoors and so certainly ice; if he were seeing it now, he thought, they would throw down their crowns and dance in ecstasy, on emerald grass, at the edge of a bright humming, open, sea under a bright sun. He sang it again and noted that the old, rigid saints were still more powerful.
He changed key and began.
‘My God, how wonderful thou art,
Thy Majesty how bright
How beautiful thy mercy seat
In depths of burning light.’
The tune swooped up and down. Henry exaggerated its curves, roaring with pleasure, smiling wildly over the sun and water as though he were part of them. In the midst of his pleasure, something slid into place, the pattern of the part of the chapter he had been looking for. He knew no more about precisely what he would write than he had known, but a shape, a pattern of relations had come to him – his imagination carried a diagram, a squat triangle, a long one on the same base reaching out, and when he sat down to write, the pattern would be available now, he could draw on it, spin from it.
‘In the depths of burning light,’ he repeated, negotiating a crack in the path, and became aware of steps behind him.
Margaret ran along the cliff path after him, zig-zag, stumbling here and there, clutching her hat. Henry increased his pace automatically for a moment and then turned reluctantly, filling the path, at bay. In her rose and white dress, with its floating bell of a skirt, and dancing ribbons, she swayed and blundered in her progress like a huge drunken butterfly, just born. When he turned, she waved, and called thinly, ‘Henry, Henry,’ through the sounds of the gulls and the sea, and then came up, stretching fluttering hands to him and gasping for breath.
‘Henry, oh please take me with you, can you bear it?’ She patted her skin with a moist ball of handkerchief. Inside the low neck of her dress her breast moved rapidly, dusky pink and shining with the sun and the hurrying. Henry felt her presence cut across his mood like a knife. He said mildly, ‘By all means,’ and began to walk again, moving unconsciously faster and faster.
‘Were – you – going – far?’ Margaret asked.
‘I don’t know.’ He was aware that he was being ungracious. ‘I like to get a look at the next village.’
‘It’s so much fresher up here,’ Margaret offered. ‘Much better than just sitting all afternoon.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Henry, striding. Margaret was silent for some time, walking rapidly just behind him, taking little running steps from time to time as he moved away from her. At last she said, ‘I’ve a fearful stitch, I’m sorry. Would you mind dreadfully if we sat down for a moment or two?’
Henry turned and looked at her blankly. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh dear. Yes, of course, please sit down.’ He indicated the grass at the edge of the path. Margaret sat down thankfully, with her back against a hillock. Henry lowered himself beside her, folded his arms, and studied the horizon. Margaret ran her fingers through the tufts of wiry grass and waited to see if he would say anything. He did not, so that after a moment she burst out, ‘Henry –’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I talk to you, do you mind?’
‘Please –’ said Henry non-committally.
‘I just can’t go on, any more. I’ve been trying not to face it, I can see that, for some time. But we’ve got to go tomorrow and I’ve got to admit it, Henry. I’m absolutely terrified of going back to London and being alone – with Oliver – again.’
‘I know.’
Margaret looked up at him childishly, with a candour which invited intimacy, and said, ‘Yes, you do know, don’t you? I was sure you did. Tell me what to do.’
‘I don’t know that I can precisely tell you anything,’ Henry said vaguely, not accepting the invitation.
Margaret was silent, for a moment, studying his averted face. There was little of him to see, the eye lost itself in the abundant hair, attention was dissipated by the curls and waves and fronds of the beard. The eyes, into which she tried to look, were lost like drowned pebbles behind the lashes and brows which sheltered them like vegetation in a pool. He was rather like the sea, Margaret thought, all the hair rippled like the water, and looked warm and soft, and alive, and endless, like the sea. She transmuted the softness of the hair to a gentleness in Henry and was encouraged; it was somehow easier to talk openly to something as dispersed, as mysterious, as apparently imperturbable as he appeared. She gathered herself and looked away from him again and twisted the tuft of grass under her hand, round and round, torturing it.
She began, ‘Shall I tell you something? You know those advertisements for central heating – they’re mostly for central heating, but some of them are for carpets – where you’re looking into a room and the weather outside’s usually nasty, and it’s so warm to be inside? And there’s a man in a chair with a paper and a woman knitting, and children piling bricks and it’s all closed away and cared for – with a thick carpet, and lots of warm light – I don’t mean the jolly ones, you know, where everything’s bright yellow and red, and mum comes on in a frilly apron carrying Walls ice cream on a plate and everyone cheers. I mean the restrained ones, with good, comfortable, modern furniture – what Oliver calls bourgeois – it’s funny, I know quite a bit about good china and antique furniture, but it’s these super-ordinary chairs that turn my inside over –’ She thought a moment and went on, reflectively, ‘Some of them are gas board, or maybe it’s electricity. With a warm glow –’
Henry jerked himself out of a doze and wondered when would she ever come to the point, if there was one. He caught for a moment the full absurdity of these visionary gas fires and armchairs and carpets, here under the summer sun, above the empty sea, with a grasshopper whirring behind them and sea-pinks quivering, just on the other side of the hillock he leant against. He gave a little indeterminate snort and Margaret jumped, laid a hand on his arm and turned desperately to him. ‘You do understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry.
‘I wanted to be married, I wanted to have children, I wanted to be with someone and sit round a fire and talk?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘and Oliver?’
‘Oliver –’ Margaret began and stopped. ‘People either understand about Oliver straight away or think I couldn’t have married anyone worse. You do see? He takes life so seriously. He tries to make something of it. And then – you know – he’s working class, he’s out of a world where my sort of super-ordinary room is just what you want, and half of him wanted it too. You know, he’s got a real working class mum, in one of those awful towns without any character in South Yorkshire. She doesn’t like me, and when we go there he sides with her – he takes pleasure in washing up for her at me, and carrying coal and saying there’s nothing like mum’s neck of mutton and tinned peas and dumpling and wet cabbage cooking, oh my God. He goes all homely and shirt sleeved in that nasty little tenement house. And I can see he wants what she’d want for him. That’s why – I mean – and I love him, so much, I do love him. I live for him really.’
‘And Oliver?’ Henry repeated. Margaret looked away, and twisted more rapidly at the grass, so that the juice, even out of those dried spines, came moist from the bruises onto her fingers. She faltered. ‘We’ve lost touch,’ and Henry wondered whether this curious couple had had any touch to lose. He could find nothing to say to Margaret. He saw her, with a dispassionate finality, already doomed, her marriage, her reality, structures like the rooms she had worshipped on the bright pages, parodies, lies, houses on sand.
Margaret cried, ‘Oliver does need me, he does, I know it, he’s so insecure, quite as much as I need him. I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong.’ She flung herself against Henry, pushing her face into his neck, and wept hysterically. After a moment, Henry clasped his huge hands loosely across her back; he did not like tears and he did not like physical contact; but this, and not to talk, was what Margaret had come for, and the end was therefore in sight. He shifted himself, leaned back more comfortably, stared out over Margaret’s heaving shoulders at the sea, and endured.
After a time Margaret gulped and sniffed, reared herself in his arms, and said, almost brightly, ‘Life is so much more complicated than you think always, isn’t it?’
Henry nodded.
‘Oliver is missing so much. He can’t live only for his work, can he?’
‘No,’ said Henry.
‘It’s easier to make allowances,’ Margaret said, ‘when you know you’re right. But I have to talk it out, now and then –’ She seemed suddenly cheerful as though she had talked herself into quiescence. She hooked her hand suddenly round Henry’s neck and aimed a kiss at his mouth.
‘Dear, dear Henry,’ she said. ‘You are so good to me.’
Henry avoided the kiss instinctively, disengaged himself and stood up.
‘I’m not good,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ve been little help, if any.’ In some inexplicable way he felt endangered by Margaret, as though some of the ground on which he stood so proudly was being eroded just by her sharing it.
‘You are good,’ she protested now, coming nearer again. Henry offered his handkerchief. ‘Your eyelashes have run,’ he said. Margaret, distracted, wiped, and licked, and scrubbed, and pink rims appeared round her eyes. Henry stood back a step, onto the very edge of the cliff, and peered down, dizzily, onto a bed of bladderwrack, olive green, khaki, with patches of a glistening brown. The point where they were jutted seawards, and here the water sucked in and out of a channel, bubbled and coughed and came back again welling up each time a little higher in a pool amongst the weeds. Across the mouth of the channel a huge streamer of that smooth flat weed that is nearly translucent, like rubber, and like rubber a golden brown, floated and waved. Henry looked at it and tried to calm himself; he was angry over his lost chapter. He was overcome by an old sense of the precariousness of his own position, his own, ultimate loneliness, however shored up by Caroline’s attentions.
One day, he thought, I might find I couldn’t see, or couldn’t write, and then I should be broken. He shivered momentarily, and his head turned. But nevertheless, to fall was really unthinkable, here in the sun, with the pattern he had just worked out available, however interrupted, for the future. He straightened himself, watched a gull turn, and passed a hand over his face. He felt obscurely guilty towards Margaret; he bowed, put an impersonal hand under her arm, and escorted her back towards the others.
Caroline was sewing steadily, but Oliver was nowhere in sight. Towards the sea, Jeremy was standing amongst a network of canals with a monarchical tilt to his head.
‘He’ll make an engineer,’ Henry said, nodding towards him. When he thought about his son, which was not often, he was afraid that he might become a sportsman – a professional tennis player, an Olympic runner, something like that. There was something wrong with making a life out of a pastime, Henry would think, and then grin over the idea that many people might suppose that he himself did just that.
Margaret said, ‘Where’s Oliver?’
‘He went swimming, with the children, since you seemed to have disappeared. Then he went up to look over the church.’
‘He didn’t wait for me.’
‘He didn’t know where you were,’ Caroline said reasonably.
‘Where’s Anna?’ Henry asked.
Caroline looked round her. ‘She was here a moment ago. She was drying her hair.’
‘Everyone wanders off,’ Henry said, inanely. He caught Caroline’s eye, and sat down on the rug. Caroline’s look asked, very clearly, what was wrong and he did not mean to discuss it. He lay back and closed his eyes.
‘The sun,’ he said mendaciously, ‘makes me so sleepy.’
Margaret was again left standing. ‘I shall go and look for Oliver.’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Caroline. ‘He’s probably on his way back by now and it’s such a hot climb. I should sit down and wait, with us.’
‘But I haven’t seen the church.’
Caroline looked as though she knew that Margaret was not interested in the church. She reiterated, ‘I should wait.’
‘I want to go and look for Oliver,’ said Margaret, and set off, swaying on her inadequate sandals, in that direction.
She found the walk to the church even longer than she had expected and very tiring. The slight breeze there had been in the morning had faded; the air was dead and heavy, whilst the sea lay flat like a canvas, under which some strange current moved aimlessly, lifting it here and there. She wished suddenly and passionately for a holiday beach, with crowds, ice-creams, striped umbrellas, the odd gramophone. The Severells made her lonely. Their passion for privacy extended Oliver’s withdrawal, gave him a right to close his eyes and ignore her. Down there, Caroline had even seemed to be protecting him. And Henry, however good, was so remote; he would not suffer with her, whatever he knew.
At the little gate at the foot of the flight of steps which led up to the church, someone was sitting, head curled into knees. Margaret came up and saw that it was Anna, in a black regulation woollen bathing suit, her fine hair blue-black and sparkling with salt, spread over her fingers, her body as smooth as a brown egg.
‘Hullo,’ said Anna. ‘I’m drying out. You look hot.’
‘I am. I can’t stand much more.’
‘Neither can I. I can’t really face the climb up there. I shall just sit here till it’s time to go home. Are you going to look for Uncle Oliver?’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret. ‘Do you know if he’s up there?’
‘Oh, I think so. He said he would be.’
‘Did you have a good afternoon?’
Anna spread her hands. ‘Well, you know. It could have been worse. The swimming was all right.’
‘I must go and look for Oliver. You’re sure he’s there?’
‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘he hasn’t come down.’ She sat, immobile, and watched Margaret toil up round the hill to the church. It was a pity, she thought, that people who were designed to look calm and decorative should ever need to become hot and flustered. Margaret’s going up there settled at least the question of whether she should do so herself, which was a relief. She had been divided, that afternoon, between a need to talk to Oliver about herself to prove that she did not belong with Jeremy and the old feeling that it was dangerous to talk to him, she was best left alone. They had all three gone into the water together – Oliver white and wiry, with a timid band of black hairs across his chest, somewhat improbable in trunks – and she had left Oliver to conduct a water battle with Jeremy and had swum away from them, out to sea, to turn on her back sideways in the trough of the waves, with nothing above her but the sky, glittering through the salt in her eyelashes, and the occasional swaying line of a rising wave. If he wants to come, he can, she had thought, and he had, as though summoned, swum up behind her, unnoticed since her ears were underwater, seized her by the hair and plunged her back and down. For some moments they had fought, quite seriously, thrashing and struggling in the spinning water, until, when Oliver had her by both wrists, she bent, frantically angry, bit at his hand and drew blood.
‘Don’t be vicious,’ he said, releasing her, licking his hand.
‘You started it.’
‘It was a game.’
‘I don’t care, you hurt me.’ They regarded each other, two trunks, sliced off at the waist. Oliver shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’m going out now. I shall go and look at that church. Do you want to come?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you do, come up after me. I’ll expect you.’ He turned and strutted away, out of the sea. He was wet, and his damped down hair exposed suddenly a bald patch on his crown, and his body was pale and insubstantial; but he was still, even screwing up his feet where he stepped on a pebble, jaunty. Anna sat back into the water, and made whirlpools with her hands. She thought, oh dear, he wants to be serious. He’s always furtive when he’s serious. I don’t know if I want that. She had nevertheless followed him as far as the church gate; it had been the easiest thing to do. But she was glad that Margaret had settled it. They were to leave tomorrow and there would now be no more serious talking, nor anything else. Anna kicked at a stone, and felt irrationally triumphant, as though she had retreated of her own accord and with dignity from something unpredictable and possibly unmanageable.
Margaret stood in the church porch, to recover her breath. There were notices on a green board – the usual ones – a list of those responsible for the altar flowers, entry forms for the Women’s Institute Jam Competition, a photograph of a negro child with yaws next to that picture of Christ in a wood with small animals and children, which Margaret had had in her bedroom until she married Oliver, who had picked it up, the night he moved in as her husband, and carried it down four flights of stairs to the dustbin. He had referred to her other favourite picture – Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross – as ‘that obscenity’; Margaret never knew whether he had noticed that she had herself disposed of that, after the other, without, at that time, much regret. That had been when she was going to be a wife for Oliver, a willing tabula rasa, and had assumed that he would take pleasure in talking to her and forming her taste.
The heavy door swung inwards with unexpected ease. She almost fell down the three steps into the body of the church. She closed the door behind her carefully and listened to the silence between the arches. The air inside was cold and her movement seemed to have disturbed it – it came swinging at her, enveloping her. It was too dark to see very much; inside the church was as low and solid as the outside had been, the pillars were squat and the windows tiny. Margaret succumbed easily to atmosphere and was always hushed and reverent in a church, in an embarrassed, war memorial kind of way. But this church was so low and dark and thickly enclosing that reverence was very near fear.
Over on the other side, someone moved, softly. Oliver, perhaps, probably. Margaret took two steps into the darkness and the heel of her loose sandal clattered on the stone floor. The noise startled her and the movement on the other side ceased abruptly. She stopped again, to get her bearings. In the window over the altar, in crude reds and yellows, the mild, self-confident prim Christ of the children’s picture sat on a crimson hassock with a lamb, whilst figures representing nurses and soldiers and Young Crusaders clutched at his skirts. It was partly the hot colour of what light there was that made the church seem so claustrophobic. She walked several more paces down the aisle, with her own echo tapping behind her, filling the building. There was another movement, to her right. She had the silly feeling that something was going to jump out at her, not Oliver, but something indeterminate and nasty that was playing hide and seek with her amongst the thick pillars. She went on, towards the altar, touching the corners of the pews for reassurance and for balance.
Under the altar rail was a carpet, which took away the sound of her presence and some of her fear; she walked, quite rapidly, round past the lectern towards the little chapel whose window glimmered vaguely to the right. She wondered how whoever was in there could keep so still for so long. She came to the screen which divided it from the rest of the church, put her hand against it, and peered in.
Oliver was standing quite still in front of the altar, his hands crossed before him, staring up at the window. Margaret was surprised by how much she had expected not to find him there.
‘Oliver,’ she said, in a church whisper.
‘Hullo,’ he said, without turning round. His voice was always quiet; there was no reason why he should have lowered it. ‘I thought you might not come.’
‘I wanted to. I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Look at this window,’ Oliver said. ‘I like rose windows, this is a good one. How they had the effrontery to put in the twentieth-century anthropomorph over the altar when they already had this, I don’t know. This is so durable, it’s satisfying. So ordered, that’s what I like – all those meanings, number symbolism, twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve months, look, all so formal, and so neatly tied up. Rosa mundi. Do you know about rose windows?’
‘No,’ said Margaret. She came and stood beside him and clasped his arm. ‘Oliver, I want to talk to you. I never seem to be with you, now –’
‘Margaret,’ he said, turning round and blinking. ‘Margaret. Did you have a good afternoon?’
Margaret said savagely, ‘Don’t. Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t ever use that tone of voice to me again.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You keep me at a distance, as though I was less of a person than anyone else. I can’t stand any more. Please listen to me, I can’t stand any more.’
‘Do I?’ said Oliver, as though paralysed.
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. Don’t just slide away. Try and be with me, a moment –’
‘It’s something I’m not very good at –’
‘You must, you must. We’re married, Oliver, you’ve got to come in with me, and be married. I may not be as stupid as you think. Try it. Just look at me, and talk to me –’
Oliver’s small mouth twitched. ‘I wish you would not mind about me so much. I don’t know how to deal with it.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have married me.’
‘You knew what I was like and what I couldn’t do, when you married me. Didn’t you?’
‘Marriage changes people.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Oliver.
‘Have you stopped loving me?’
Oliver backed away a few steps, little and cornered. He said, ‘No, I don’t stop loving as easily as that. I think you muddle things up. I should have said, I have had the capacity for making scenes left out of me. Whereas you need them. I prefer things unsaid, you like to go over them. It’s not insurmountable.’
Margaret cried, ‘But I’m so lonely,’ and began, suddenly, involuntarily, to scream and weep, kneeling on the carpet and clutching Oliver’s knees.
‘Now, now,’ said Oliver, stroking her head with a small quick hand. ‘You’ve caught the sun. That’s what it is. If I say, I didn’t realize what I was taking on, you mustn’t take it amiss. You seemed so self-possessed.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes, you did. I suppose it was partly the social difference. Don’t look so upset, and stop crying. We shall contrive. We must. If only you could stop battering us. I mean to do my best.’
Margaret, comfortable at his feet, wept on.
‘Look, it’s that time of the month, too. You must think, Margaret, before upsetting yourself like this. Aren’t I right? In another week you’ll be quite different. You imagine things at these times.’
Margaret, unhappily, recognized the justice in this. She said, ‘Talk to me, Oliver. Please, talk to me.’
‘Of course. What about?’
‘Anything. Your work. You. Anything, as long as you’re talking to me.’
Oliver gathered her up and settled her in a chair, at the front of the chapel. He leaned over her, intent, his face curiously grim and gentle at once. He said, ‘I didn’t marry you only to talk to you,’ a remark which Margaret found sinister only later, in retrospect. She was saying, weakly, ‘Oh no, Oliver, not in a church,’ when the air moved again and the heavy door behind them swung open. Anna said clearly, ‘Oliver – are you there? Mother says will you come now, they’re packing.’