‘And so,’ the voice came breathlessly to the difficult part. ‘I know you’ll understand if I say I can’t come this week.’
Hester said, ‘Bloody hell, Veronica!’ She could see the whisk resting on the side of the bowl where she had set it down to answer the telephone. She could smell the lemon juice.
‘I know you won’t have made too many preparations as it’s only me,’ the voice continued, gaining strength now that the worst was past. ‘I’m as disappointed as you are, but I really can’t go away and leave the old aunt.’
‘She’s got neighbours, hasn’t she? And Nurse.’
‘But it’s always me she wants at such times, poor old love.’
‘So, you’re not coming?’
‘Hester, how can I? There is no one I want to see more than you at this moment, things have been pretty bleak lately and I was longing for one of our lovely long walks and a good talk in the evening and . . . But this is duty.’ A pause, rather a long one. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Standing to attention.’
‘I’ll come next month, if that’s all right with you. She’ll be better by then.’
‘If she hasn’t broken the other one.’
‘Even if she has, Nurse will have to cope.’
So why can’t Nurse cope now? Hester wondered. She stood asking the phone this question after she had put down the receiver. ‘The answer,’ she said aloud, ‘is that I am Veronica’s oldest friend, but I am not a duty – in fact, I am in the nature of a temptation. Friendship has an element of pleasure in it, so it is never wrong to put it to one side when duty calls. And quite right, too. All very proper and praiseworthy.’ Yet how it stung, this assumption that one had no needs. But Veronica has others to consider, she told herself as she turned back to the kitchen, others more important than I. Tears pricked her eyes. Oh, the pain of never being at the centre of another’s life! It was largely her own choice, of course, but that didn’t mean she did not sometimes grieve over it, that path not taken.
‘This is tosh!’ she said, whisking more vigorously, the white of egg spattering the wall. When she was not writing, thoughts raced through her mind like undisciplined children who could not understand that while they might be welcomed and encouraged during one period of her day, they must behave themselves in more seemly fashion when she was not at her desk.
Later, as she came to terms with the clutter in the sink, she thought: how fast life moves! It doesn’t allow us time to savour the joys of the present moment, and when we are old, we turn back, hoping to recapture the treasures we left undiscovered. And we get maudlin, unable to take small disappointments, such as the last-minute defection of a loved friend. She thought of the things she had never done – slept under canvas or gone to live on a barge. She would never do these things now. Why did they sound so much more interesting, the dramas of a vagrant life, than the long process of making a home in a particular place? It’s the sending down of roots, she thought, as she put the last of the pans away, such a lengthy business it doesn’t make for interesting chat. She looked round the room, rubbing her hands on her apron. I haven’t slept around, either, and the man I loved I haven’t seen for years and can no longer recapture my feelings for him.
She could not bring Harry’s face to mind, but she saw her sister Sylvia as she had so often seen her in the past, standing across the table from her in this very room; the accomplice of childhood enterprises, the loving friend whose understanding had steered Hester through the less innocent adventures of maturity, the dear mother of Michael. It was Sylvia, not the defaulting Veronica, for whom she wept.
‘It’s me that should have died,’ she said across the table. ‘You were needed by so many people.’
No, no! She walked to the window and beat on the sill with her fists. ‘We will have no self-pity.’ Then she saw that there was not going to be much call for gladness, either. For here, approaching the back door with uncertain tread, was Andy Possett.
Andy Possett had a remarkably thin face with a fine, pale skin and soft pink lips and whenever she looked at him Hester was reminded of a flower pressed between the pages of a book. There was even a faint smell of squashed roses about his person. He lived in a small house for young men with psychiatric problems who had been released into the community because the regional psychiatric unit had found them too disruptive of its particular community. The home was run by a retired missionary, Mrs Hardacre, and loosely supervised by Social Services. Mrs Hardacre maintained that Andy was working through his problems. As Freud saw sexual implications in every object, so Mrs Hardacre, having wholeheartedly espoused the cause of Andy’s recovery, was able to interpret even his more bizarre actions as symptomatic of progress. Recently he had appeared at St Hilary’s wearing his underpants over his trousers and while most people regarded this as a deterioration in his behaviour, Mrs Hardacre would have none of such pessimism. ‘People react like that because they have been troubled. The fact that he has decided to challenge them, to make himself noticed, is a sign of health,’ she had insisted to Valentine who had duly reported the conversation to Hester. ‘And, of course, the symbolism of pants over trousers is an acknowledgement on his part that the hidden depths must be brought out into the open.’
Hester was glad to see that on this occasion he had suffered a regression in so far as underclothes were concealed. He wore odd shoes, but this was understandable since Mrs Hardacre bought the odd shoes left over at jumble sales and distributed them to her charges.
Hester’s friend Annie Cleaver, who was by way of being a saint and a constant source of discouragement to Hester, said that she did not mind Andy in the least and found him quite pleasant to have about the house because he did not want to talk all the time. Hester found him disturbing. She did not like situations over which she had no control. She did not object to the mentally unbalanced because they were different but because she did not know how to handle the problems which they presented. In a tight corner, Hester liked to know which way to jump.
She hoped that Desmond would not decide to put in an appearance in the garden. A constellation in which Andy was in conjunction with Desmond was one which she could only regard as ominous.
‘I thought it was next week that you were coming,’ she said.
He did not think this worthy of a reply. She wondered what would have happened if she had found it necessary to insist that this was not a convenient time for him to fix a shelf in the spare bedroom. When she was tired or upset her mind delighted in presenting her with a series of doom-laden scenarios.
‘As it happens,’ she said, leading him upstairs, ‘my friend can’t come this week, so it has really worked out quite well.’
He made no comment and she had not expected one. The remark was intended to discourage any further melodramatics on the part of her mind.
An hour later Charles Venables, who had just returned home from school and did not want to see another human being for a year, and certainly not within the hour, opened his front door to Hester.
‘May I use your loo and then can I have a word with you?’
‘Please.’ He waved a hand towards the stairs and stood biting his lip, hoping Mrs Quince had put out a spare toilet roll. Even if it was not immediately required, he had pointed out more than once that it should always be reassuringly in evidence.
‘I couldn’t use my own,’ Hester said when she joined him in the hall, ‘because I can’t get into it.’
‘The door has jammed?’
‘Andy Possett has taken possession.’
‘Andy Possett,’ he repeated, screwing up his eyes.
‘Don’t bother. If you knew him it wouldn’t take a split second to bring him to mind. He does odd jobs around the town and he suffers from some kind of mental disorder which has never been specifically explained – to the layman, at least.’
‘I see,’ Charles said, in order to gain time. ‘Mmmh. And what does he say?’
‘Nothing. As far as I can tell, he isn’t breathing. I have tried to get on to the home where he stays, but the telephone is off the hook – not an uncommon occurrence.’
‘The doctor?’ Keep calm, keep calm, Charles told himself.
‘I rang my own doctor and his receptionist gave a sort of eldritch screech and conveyed the impression that at the moment he was on a trip to Outer Mongolia. I was to call back in seven years if Andy hadn’t moved by then.’
Charles, fighting back rising panic, said, ‘The police, then, I suppose.’
‘I don’t think I could do that to him. And, anyway, they know about him and I suspect they would despatch a constable to my house by way of the moor.’
Charles looked at her glassily, but she was a determined person and once her mind was set to some purpose she knew no shame. ‘I’m sorry about this, Charles,’ she said briskly, ‘but I wondered whether you would go up my ladder and look in at the window. Just to make sure he hasn’t done himself a mischief. Or . . .’ since he looked as if he in his turn might suffer some kind of attack, ‘would you hold the ladder for me?’
‘No, no, of course you mustn’t,’ he said desperately. ‘Oh no, no! I will, er . . . provided,’ he snatched at a wisp of comfort, ‘provided the ladder is long enough.’
‘It’s a roof ladder – the one your workmen often borrow from me.’
‘It’s not the sort of job for the fire brigade, I suppose?’ he asked weakly when, after some trouble, they had the ladder up against the wall.
‘It may well be, but not until we know what has happened to him.’
Charles had a bad head for heights and this, added to his dread of what he would find when he reached the window, made the ascent quite terrifying. Half-way up he was convinced that he was suffering a heart attack. In the hope that one fear might cancel out the other, he told himself that if this were the case he would undoubtedly fall from the ladder and be killed, or so seriously incapacitated that he would have to go into a home. He paused, resting his brow against the rung of the ladder and the first breeze of evening wafted a quite heart-rending smell of honeysuckle to his nostrils. He could see Hester below, looking impatient. At the door of a house further down the terrace a woman was shouting at the milkman, ‘We haven’t had that much wind to blow my note away. I’m not going to pay for what I didn’t order.’
‘Keep going. Don’t look down,’ Hester commanded. ‘I can’t have you stuck half-way up a ladder to add to everything.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said faintly. ‘I can’t move. Not at the moment.’
He closed his eyes. Far below a brewery van was being loaded; the jarring of heavy crates sounded like distant gunfire. Charles clenched his hands on the sides of the ladder. A gate creaked and steps sounded on the path below.
‘Having trouble?’
Beneath him Charles could hear Hester making explanations.
‘Poor chap.’ Such a nice voice, warm as hot syrup and just as soothing. ‘I came to see how Desmond was getting on working for you. A good thing, wasn’t it?’
‘If you can do something, it may well be.’ Hester sounded very cross.
‘I’ll bring him down and then I’ll pop up and have a squint at Andy.’
Charles felt the ladder move beneath another weight, then a hand grasped his right ankle. ‘I’ve got hold of you.’ The voice was so reassuring that he was convinced against all common sense that her hand on his ankle would make him as near immortal as Achilles. ‘Now, put this foot down on to this rung, slide your hands down a little, that’s right. Now the other foot. Good! Keep going, easily, slowly, I’ve got hold of you, just keep going. Right foot now. There we ARE!’
He turned to see a robin-red face atop rounded curves of emerald and crimson. She seemed to be all the colours of the rainbow and he thought her the most radiant creature he had ever seen. It was quite some time before he realized it was only Shirley Treglowan wearing an exotic track suit that was too tight for her. He sat down on the grass and put his head in his hands. Hester leant on the ladder while Shirley went up. She did not even ask him how he felt. The milkman, recognizing a situation in which something strenuous might be demanded of him, walked briskly past.
‘Well?’ Hester called.
Shirley peered, tapped on the window pane, made ‘Yoo-hooing’ noises, then came briskly down. ‘He’s just standing there, right up against the door as though he had been turned to stone. It happened once in the Major’s garden.’
‘How long did it last that time, do you remember?’
‘About three hours. The Major said he was quite resigned to having Andy as a piece of sculpture, peering at visitors through the rose bushes. I tell you what. I’ve got my bike. I’ll go round to the home and get Mrs Hardacre to come along. I don’t suppose she can bring him round, but at least she’ll be here to take him home when he comes out of it.’
‘Better still, I’ll go in my car, if you and Charles wouldn’t mind standing guard here.’
‘I could go in my car,’ Charles said wearily.
‘You don’t know Mrs Hardacre. And, anyway, you don’t look fit to drive.’ Hester felt she had treated him badly. ‘Come into the house and I’ll put out the whisky bottle and prepare a snack for you both before I go.’
Charles and Hester were so tired and confused by now that it did not occur to either of them that Shirley Treglowan could probably have unearthed Mrs Hardacre by the time Hester had produced the snack. Shirley did not repeat her offer because she was quite excited by the prospect of having a talk with Charles Venables.
‘I am so looking forward to your lecture,’ she told him as they consumed chicken sandwiches in Hester’s sitting-room.
Her eyes shone with such eager anticipation that a man less sure of his ability might have feared to disappoint her. What misgivings Charles had, however, were concerned with the shortcomings of his audience. ‘Really? I am beginning to wonder why I agreed to do it. How many people in this town will have read Anna Karenina?’
‘Well, I have and I think it’s a wonderful book. It’s all gone, lost to us, isn’t it? That world, I mean. People giving up everything for love.’ The Russian revolution had produced the Soviet state, but it was the giving all for love which seemed to her to be the important change. He was not disposed to criticize her for this. ‘You can have love whenever and wherever you want it now – and suddenly it’s not around any more. There were boundaries then. Do you think you can only have love when there are boundaries? I mean, do we need forbidden territory stretching away beyond the frontier?’ She asked these questions as though it really mattered that they should be answered.
It was quite apparent to Charles that here was a young woman who was thirsting for improvement. If her enthusiasm was a little raw and her questions betrayed too close an acquaintance with the cinema, she must nevertheless be dealt with kindly. Undoubtedly there was here an understanding to be awakened, a mind which might respond to proper guidance. This was more than could be said for most of the boys whom he taught. Charles was no pedant. Literature to him was a living thing and while Shirley might thirst for improvement, he yearned for evidence of sensitive appreciation.
‘I think you can only have great art when there are boundaries,’ he said cautiously. ‘And perhaps passion needs a framework of a kind. I don’t know about love.’
She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I don’t know about it, either,’ she said sadly. It occurred to him that at this stage of her aesthetic development she was prone to the temptation to identify in too personal a way with works of art – something which he had noted tended to happen to people whose interest was not entirely cerebral. He decided that it would be wise to say something brisk and sensible about his lecture.
She was looking at him in a way that made him feel she had wrongly interpreted his silence. People rarely looked at Charles with sympathy. He did not project himself as a person in need of sympathy – self-sufficient was the way in which he saw himself. Yet now he experienced that sense of the organs of his body loosening their control that he had had as a child when his mother said to him, ‘I want a word with you.’ He had always felt an immediate guilt, even if he had not offended against any of her household rules. He was very suggestible. Quite suddenly, he felt himself in some obscure way to be unfortunate and in need of consolation. As he looked at Shirley Treglowan he could not think of anything brisk to say about his lecture. She had a good colour naturally and either her earlier exertions or the whisky had heightened it so that her face seemed blazingly bright and he was reminded of the sleigh ride in War and Peace and thought that this was how Natasha must have looked, exhilarated, rushing headlong downhill. He said, ‘I haven’t thanked you for so gallantly coming to my rescue.’
‘Oh that, well . . .’ He was pleased to note that she was not in the least brash. ‘I think you were very brave even to try. I can’t go in a lift. I always tell my kids – “I’ll give the last drop of my blood for you, but if anything happens to you in a lift, you’re on your own.” ’
‘The last drop of my blood’. Oh dear, oh dear! She really had a long way to go.
Charles had frequently regretted the fact that nowadays it is almost impossible for two people to remain in the same room and be silent; that, in fact, to come upon a couple so engaged would be more convincing proof of intimacy than catching them in an embrace. Perhaps some such thought was in the mind of Andy Possett when he opened the sitting-room door. Certainly, he looked very stern as he gazed upon Charles and Shirley. There was now a rather alarming silence involving three people. Charles noted that he carried a tool bag from which a hammer protruded.
It was Shirley who spoke first. ‘Finished for today, have you, then, Andy?’ She nodded her head busily to illustrate comprehension of the situation and smiled to show that this was all as it should be.
Andy said, ‘I’ll see Miss Pascoe tomorrow.’ He turned on his heel and walked out of the room. They watched him go slowly down the garden path, his tool kit slung over one shoulder.
Shirley said, ‘Phew!’
Charles said, ‘I think Hester may feel that we should have kept him here until she arrived with Mrs Hardacre.’
Hester did.
Valentine was talking to Desmond as they gardened. She talked a lot to him and always about things which interested him; the properties of the soil – what it would nourish and what it would fail to support, the remarkable adaptability shown by squirrels in their approach to the nut stocking, the intractability of snails and the industry of ants. When he made a contribution she accepted or rejected it according to its merits. The matter at issue was the garden, its flowers, its mollusc, insect and birdlife. Polite conversation had no place in their exchanges.
‘Ugh!’ She shook her head vigorously and the halo of gnats danced to its movement. She would stop working now, Desmond thought glumly, and sure enough she said, ‘This is the time of evening when one should be indoors.’
Reluctantly he began to collect the gardening implements. She said, ‘When you have cleared away would you like to look up that wild flower you were describing? I’ll bring you a fruit drink in the study.’ She did not ask him to be sure to wash his hands, she had already observed that he handled books with respect.
Desmond, delighted to have the freedom of the study, accelerated the cleaning-up process, rubbing away the earth from the hoe before hitching it on a hook on the wall of the shed.
‘How do you find him?’ Michael asked when Valentine came into the kitchen where he was pressing a lime over a jug containing a slightly bitter concoction of his own devising. It was a splendid thirst quencher and very refreshing but no one had ever asked the Hoaths for the recipe. Valentine maintained that this was due to the fact that English tastes are regrettably bland.
‘He’s an odd boy.’ She cut another lime and handed it to him. ‘But not antagonistic. I don’t feel any antagonism, do you?’
‘I don’t feel anything at all. He is very strange.’ Michael looked into the garden where Desmond was washing his hands beneath the garden tap, although he could perfectly well have come into the kitchen. His body conveyed an impression of pain, as if it had been stretched on a rack until all the suppleness had gone from the limbs. Yet, in spite of the appearance of dislocation, Michael had earlier seen him move with a kind of swooping grace, feet barely seeming to touch earth. ‘I was watching you both out in the garden and I thought to myself, I have no idea what that boy sees. Of course, I don’t know exactly what it is you see, but I am fairly sure it is something akin to my own vision. Whereas when I look at that blackbird perched on the wire up there, I have no idea what his view of our garden is. Or Desmond’s.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ Valentine licked the flesh of a squeezed orange. ‘Like Neanderthal man, observing homo sapiens from a safe distance. Is it just a game he plays or is it more serious?’
Desmond, drying his hands on a piece of sacking, was well aware of his separateness but concerned only in so much as it troubled his mother. He loved his mother because he knew that his mother loved him. For her sake he had attended sessions with the educational psychologist who had gently tried to uncover the deep resentments which she felt he must be concealing. They had confronted each other across a chasm which for Desmond was quite literally there. Every time he sat down to talk to her he could see the precipice and one leg of her chair perilously close to its jagged edge. She was a plump, warm woman, not unlike his mother, and reminded him of a roly-poly pudding, oozing all the good things in which his tongue delighted, and it worried him to see her perched on the edge of oblivion – because oblivion was undoubtedly the place to which he would consign her were she to go too far; he would certainly not put out a hand to bring her to his side of the chasm. In the end she had pronounced his troubles too deep-seated for her to reach. His mother had firmly rejected the suggestion that Desmond should see a psychiatrist. ‘He will work his way out of it,’ she had affirmed. And Desmond, who felt much safer on his side of the chasm, was none the less sorry because he would have liked to prove his mother wiser than the experts. But not at the price of bridge building.
He closed the shed door, took off his boots and hurried towards the house, going quietly through the open French windows and making his way to the study. It was not the dictionary of wild flowers which he took down from the shelf, but a book which he had come across a week ago. He was reading it when Michael Hoath came in with that rather awful fruit drink and a bowl of sugar – ‘In case you find it a trifle bitter.’ He had already contrived to upset some of the liquid and the glass was sticky. Desmond put the book carefully to one side before accepting the glass, and Michael saw the title – The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley.
‘An odd book, that – hardly one of the seminal works on anthropology.’
The moment the amused, dismissive words were spoken he regretted them. Desmond had not seemed to respond, yet for the first time something happened between these two. Understanding was too cerebral a word for a purely physical experience, the smarting of a wound exposed to the air. As he fingered the book Michael recalled how he had felt years ago when a master had smiled to himself when he found him reading Look Homeward, Angel: seeing his distress, the man had said, kindly enough, ‘There’s a lot to be said for exploring new continents. Have you come across Carson McCullers? Very much in command of her material, I always feel.’ But it was the excess which Michael had loved in Wolfe, the passion which burst the seams of fiction.
As for the matter of being in command of material, neither the man nor the boy in this room gave the impression of having achieved harmony between mind and body. Movements were not well co-ordinated and one felt that the objects which they approached, furniture or even books, were under threat. Desmond handled glass and sugar bowl as though deliberately taking risks with them – a small exercise in the possibilities of destruction. In Michael Hoath’s case, the impression was one of over-eagerness. Neither was a naturally studious person and each brought a store of unused energy into the book-lined room. Some people seem to attain early in life the air of a finished product; while others must labour unceasingly at the process of moulding and refining. One felt that, however long they might live, Michael Hoath and Desmond Treglowan would always present an appearance of incompletion, the suggestion of work still in progress.
Michael went to a shelf where the books were tightly packed. His fingers groped impatiently, scraping the knuckles before he managed to pull one volume free. ‘This is Eiseley’s The Unexpected Universe.’ He pushed the book towards Desmond. ‘You might like to borrow them both.’
Desmond received this olive branch with every appearance of apathy. Michael did not blame him. He said, ‘I’d like them back. I do dip into them from time to time.’
‘Perhaps you should write your name in them?’ Desmond suggested curtly. ‘In case I forget where I got them from.’
Michael refrained from saying ‘I trust you’ which Desmond would have found not only offensive but burdensome, spoiling his pleasure in reading because he felt himself bound by some obligation of honour. He wrote his name in both books and handed them to Desmond who departed soon afterwards.
A fine mess I made of that, Michael thought. But what could this little-known American anthropologist have to say which was relevant to Desmond? And yet he and Valentine had been fairly ruthless in turning out books before this latest move, but Eiseley’s books remained. Why, he wondered? The answer came to him some time later, as is the way of answers, when he should have had his mind on other things. He found it rather disconcerting. It was for a certain rawness which he valued these books; there was too much pain in them to throw them away. One could only hope their appeal to Desmond was rather different.
Charles’s lecture was to be held in the United Reformed Church Hall. The town had increasingly to cater for the needs of an ageing population which included a high proportion of retired professional people, many of whom had travelled west in search of kinder air and cheaper housing. It was these people who were behind the attempt to establish a university of the third age – a concept which greatly enhanced the attraction of courses and lectures designed for those of mature years. Shirley Treglowan and Valentine Hoath found themselves considerably younger than most of those present. Shirley approached Valentine with diffidence.
By the standards of the town, which were not demanding, Valentine Hoath looked expensive and, which was rather more offensive, elegant. Shirley thought she must spend a lot of money on clothes and appearance generally. In fact, the dark, upswept curls owed their stylishness more to the shapely head and long neck than to the attention of a hairdresser. As for the grey suit which Shirley so admired, it had been bought several years ago at one of Marks and Spencer’s sales; Valentine had trimmed the skirt and pockets with turquoise braid and had lined the tie with turquoise silk. She had little dress money but a flair for transforming the mundane. It was doubtful whether the townswomen would have warmed to her had they known this, money being more acceptable than flair.
‘The Vicar not coming?’ Shirley asked.
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time for reading, let alone discussing what he has read.’ Valentine was aware of sounding like the worst kind of clergy wife, speaking from a higher horse than ever the husband mounted.
‘Perhaps I could sit beside you, then. Would you mind? I don’t know anyone here.’
Valentine, surprised but not displeased that Michael’s absence should seem a bonus, moved her handbag from the adjacent seat.
‘Or perhaps you were keeping a place for someone else?’ Shirley hovered, unsure of herself.
‘Only for Hester, who probably won’t come.’
The Rector’s wife moved down the row in front of them and smiled distantly at Valentine. Later she told her husband, ‘I can’t imagine what your flock would think if I turned up at meetings looking like a fashion model.’
‘I get nervous going out where I’ll meet strangers. Isn’t it silly?’ Shirley sat down and folded her arms round a straw bag into which she had stuffed a jersey in case the mist had come up from the river by the time the meeting was over. She rested her chin on her hands and surveyed the room like someone peeping over a protective hedge. ‘I nearly turned back, but I told myself this was a good way of meeting people – not just social, learning together.’
Valentine, recognizing that nerves dictated the flow of talk, probed cautiously. ‘You don’t go out much? I suppose teaching is very demanding.’
‘Oh, it’s not that. It was Clifford going.’ Shirley bounced the bag up and down on her knees. ‘I was stunned. For years I couldn’t seem to get myself going. I dropped out of everything.’
‘He has married again?’
‘It wasn’t like that. It was a fellow.’
Valentine was startled. Michael had not mentioned this. There were things he kept to himself, and rightly, but as this must be common knowledge there was no point in his not telling her. Probably it had shocked him. He had deep reserves of shockability. Valentine was shocked herself. Perhaps it was Shirley’s presence, ample flesh and blood overflowing the short puce tunic one could scarcely call a dress, which brought the reality home like the thrust of a knife in her own breast. The humiliation of it! And, worse than the blow to one’s pride, the fragmenting of the always fragile perception of one’s own personality. Most bitter of all, to be subjected to pity and the questionably motivated attempts to help one – odious phrase – talk things through. I should kill myself, she thought, that is what I should do. She felt icy calm, as though this death was actually unfolding and had a clear picture of herself on the bridge over the river; then realized it was Rosmersholm she had in mind. Blast Ibsen!
‘I didn’t guess,’ Shirley was saying. ‘Several of my friends told me they had always wondered. They must have thought I was an awful fool.’
‘There is never a shortage of people who are wise after the event.’ Valentine decided she must try to be more tolerant of this woman who did not seem so predatory now that one knew of her misfortune. ‘What about the theatre club? Wouldn’t that be an outlet?’
‘You’re playing Hedda.’
‘Yes. How news does get about.’
‘Rehearsals going well?’
Valentine shrugged her shoulders. ‘Early days.’ She was going through her bad period at the theatre. The prompt was too eager, but must be tolerated – one must never antagonize the back stage staff, the poor dears were so aware of their inferiority. The producer was a different matter and Valentine had already had to make it clear that she was unable to work with someone who mapped out every move like a drill sergeant.
Shirley said, ‘I do props for some of the shows. It’s the one thing I’ve carried on with. There’s nothing like a theatre for accommodating misfits, is there?’
Valentine, to whom this idea had not presented itself, made no reply.
Shirley went on, ‘I’m always making things for the kids in my class, helping with their projects. It comes in useful in the theatre, that soft of gift. I did a lot of the props for the opera company when they did Peter Grimes – fish and all that. Desmond and Tracy and Clifford all had parts as fisherfolk. It was such a happy time.’
It was just the kind of family activity which Michael would have relished had they had children. Momentarily, Valentine was surprised by an extraordinary blend of pain and sweetness, a brief taste of borrowed happiness.
She looked about her, irritated, not at all sure that she wanted to sit here listening to Charles Venables whittering on about Anna and passion.
Women outnumbered men, but not to a marked degree. Predictably among those present were ex-civil servants and retired teachers, but there were also several engineers, senior electricians, draughtsmen, abandoned by the firms to which they had given their lives and now, late in their day, anxious to discover the mysterious world of the imagination which had been largely hidden from them during the years when the blood flowed most strongly in their veins.
Charles did well by his audience. Something came alive in him which was allowed no outlet outside the constraints of literature. He spoke as one who has treasures to unfold and left little doubt that he loved Anna more faithfully than Vronsky. It was the only way in which Charles ever risked himself. His reward was not great. His audience was attentive and, one might have thought, sympathetic to his interpretation of the book and its major characters. Later discussion revealed a rather different state of affairs. There was not, it seemed, a great deal of sympathy for Anna and a general feeling that the book should have been about something else. The men who had come to serious literature for the first time had brought with them a requirement that it should define itself in their terms. In spite of a vague need to extend their horizons, they were not prepared to investigate a side of their personality which had never been used, but rather sought to imprison the book within their own limits. Charles was given to understand that they had expected something pretty tough-minded from a writer in the twilight period before the dawn of the great revolution. To them, Anna was an irritating irrelevance. One man asked, ‘Do you think perhaps she represents the old way of life that can’t survive in the climate of revolution?’
‘If so, it is a very idealized way of representing life under the Czars, wouldn’t you think?’ Charles did not bother to conceal his impatience.
The women were more ambivalent. To Charles, Anna was true woman, but they seemed to have a different concept of womankind. Woman was emerging, what she truly was had not yet been revealed, but one thing was for sure, she wouldn’t be like Anna Karenina. It wasn’t just that they had little patience with a woman who placed such high value on passion as distinct from sex, some of them actually showed a tendency to defend Karenin.
‘She is one of those women who want things all ways,’ a retired college lecturer said tartly. ‘Even when Karenin offers a divorce she won’t accept it because the offer doesn’t quite meet the picture of herself which she must at all times preserve.’
Another woman said, ‘She must constantly see herself as noble, not beholden to others, a person who rises above the sordid.’
It seemed that Anna belonged to a kind of woman who would have no allies – her own sex turned against her now as they had then. But then she had sinned against society. What had she done, Charles wondered, to arouse such dislike in these liberated women? So close on the thought it seemed almost miraculous, he heard Valentine Hoath speak.
‘Do you think it is possible that when we look at her we see something we have lost? We have become so clever, so tutored, so self-aware’ – a hint of mockery in the tone suggested she might not be including herself in this examination – ‘that we can’t find our way back to our more unconsidered – intuitive, I suppose you might say – beginnings?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ the college lecturer dismissed Valentine with contempt. ‘I think the old Countess had the measure of her – “She must show herself something out of the way.” ’
Valentine had no mind to be thus dismissed. ‘Or perhaps,’ she said, appearing to reflect, ‘it is that women secretly detest the rare ones among them who can win the adoration of men without effort – quite spontaneously.’
Charles was reminded of his occasional attendance at the golf club functions at which he had noted that women were quite indulgent of flamboyance, sexual expertise, even a little piracy, but were sour about the president’s wife, a Botticelli Venus to whom all eyes were drawn. ‘The silly cow doesn’t know how it happens, let alone what to do about it!’ As though it was like having a fortune and not investing it.
‘And as for being “a person who rises above the sordid” – I think that was what you said?’ Valentine turned courteously to the woman behind her. ‘Do many women enter into intrigues which they can see from the beginning to be sordid, even today?’
The woman, who felt herself impaled on Valentine’s lofty brows, muttered, ‘I don’t know that the word intrigue applies any more in that context.’
‘But sordid does. Personally, I find myself totally in sympathy with Anna – in this respect, at least.’
‘I can’t understand her leaving her son, though,’ Shirley Treglowan said, holding the straw bag tightly to her breast. ‘I can’t understand any woman leaving her children.’
‘It happens all the time.’ The college lecturer smiled condescendingly at Shirley.
‘Yes, I know all about that.’ Shirley bridled. ‘You see plenty of that teaching, believe me, and you see what it does to the kids. They didn’t ask to be brought into the world, poor little buggers.’
Across the room Valentine smiled at Charles. A meeting of true minds, he thought. The evening had not been a total failure.
Hesketh Kendall was sitting at the back of the hall next to Hester who had come in late. Charles wondered what he had expected from the lecture. Whatever it was, his glum expression suggested he had not found it.
When the discussion was finally brought to a close and Charles had been duly thanked, coffee was served. Charles, finding himself standing beside Hesketh, said, ‘I hoped you might have defended my client.’
‘If I took any brief, it would be Vronsky’s. I can’t understand why the poor fellow should get such a bad press. After all, he gave up his career for the woman and it must have been hard for him when she started whingeing.’
Hester thought that had there been a suitable weapon to hand Charles might well have assaulted Hesketh Kendall.
Near by a man was saying, ‘No one hates change more than your countryman. Khrushchev couldn’t get the peasants to change any more than Levin could.’
A woman said, ‘No, no, he detested women! At least he kills off Anna cleanly, but look what he did to Natasha.’
As they left the hall, Hesketh Kendall said to Charles, ‘Why not a lecture on Mrs Gaskell? Now, there is a woman one can be comfortable with.’
‘I can read Mrs Gaskell on my own,’ Shirley Treglowan said to Charles. They seemed to have found themselves alone in the car park. The mist had not come up from the river and it was a warm, scented night. Charles, fidgeting with his car keys, supposed he would have to offer her a lift. He thought it unmannerly of Hester to have departed with such alacrity, taking Valentine with her. He had himself intended to offer Valentine a lift. ‘But I need help with Tolstoy otherwise I miss so much. You wouldn’t think of taking a small class? I’m sure there would be others who would be interested. We could do Dostoevsky, too.’
‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘I’ve got my bike, thanks just the same.’
He was so relieved that he said, ‘Yes, I don’t see why not, provided there are sufficient people who are interested. We might even take in Turgenev.’