Mylor Drew said, ‘anything else?’ and tried to keep the impatience out of his voice because this would only make Miss Freeth delay the longer. Miss Freeth was not deceived. She gazed at him severely, the loops of hair coiled at her ears giving her the appearance of a depressed spaniel who is disappointed in its master. Her wounded brown eyes told him as clearly as words could have done that she was only a part-time worker who could have left the school at mid-day had she chosen, whereas he was the Head Master and should be in no hurry to quit the building at four-thirty.
‘Not if you haven’t time,’ she said.
‘I have time if there’s anything else, but not if there isn’t.’ Mylor’s stock of patience was soon exhausted.
Miss Freeth pursed her lips and began to collect her bits and pieces. Mylor let her get to the door before he said. ‘It was nice of you to stay.’
She gave him a brave smile. ‘The work had to be done. The education office asked for that return a week ago.’
When she had gone he picked up an exercise book and hurled it at the door. It was exactly how the Chairman of the Education Committee had suspected that he might behave.
‘Not too happy about that one,’ he had said when Mylor had left the room after his interview for the headship.
‘He is an outstanding candidate.’ This was one of the rare occasions when the Chief Education Officer exerted his influence. ‘A first-rate teacher, he understands children, and he has some kind of a flair that will take him a long way.’
The Chairman was not impressed by flair. He was merely aware that the man wore his hair too long and had an impossible name.
‘Foreigner, I suppose? Dark, and with a name like that.’
‘No. Cornish, in fact.’
His parents had come from the village of Mylor. Exiled in London, they had meant to call their house by this name, but the son came first. It was not the kind of caprice which would have appealed to the Chairman even had he been aware of it. It would simply have added to his impression that there was something not quite right about the candidate. His manner had not been nearly as earnest, or as flatteringly deprecatory, as that of the candidate whom the Chief Education Officer dismissed as mediocre. In fact, when Drew came into the room he had surveyed the appointments panel with alert amusement, rather as though it was he who was judging their suitability for the job in hand. Arrogant presumptuousness! was the Chairman’s reaction. The fellow was not even particularly prepossessing, a little below medium height and with a strong-boned face of no noticeable refinement; a wiry, tough little character, not at all the type for a professional man. But there was undoubtedly something about him, some kind of mental vigour which communicated itself immediately. The other candidates had seemed rather dull in comparison, even a trifle effete. The Chairman, not wishing to appear to support mediocrity, had acquiesced to the appointment against his better judgement. His doubts remained. The man was not quite a gentleman; by which the Chairman meant that his behaviour would not always conform to standards which the Chairman understood. He would, for example, be capable of indulging childish anger if he was delayed when he had planned to spend a precious hour with a young woman before going home to his wife and children.
Mylor looked at his watch. A quarter to five. The education office closed at five, and she would be out at Sarre at five-forty. Should he telephone? Better not to risk that. He could still hear Miss Freeth in the outer office; it would take her another ten minutes to clear her desk, check the petty cash, lock up the safe, and have a final brood over her wrongs. If he drove fast he would be there in time.
In fact, he was there first; and he was so delighted when he saw her walking down the lane from the village that he got out of the car and ran to meet her.
‘Oh Maggie, Maggie May!’ he sang loudly and flung his arms around her.
‘Mylor, someone might see!’
‘Only by telescope! The nearest house is a mile away at least.’ He kept his arm round her waist as they walked back to the car and she did not protest because she could not believe that they were doing anything wrong or that any harm could befall people who were so happy.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘We’ve already been seen. The great white chief saw us last week at Hawkhurst.’
‘It’s a good thing it was him, if it had to be anyone. He won’t say anything. He’s a dear.’
‘An old lecher, you mean. Always round to inspect the first appointments if they’re personable.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. How innocent you are at the education office! Everyone else knows it.’
She laughed. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. He’s got a dear little plum pudding of a wife to whom he’s quite devoted.’
He did not comment, but she felt his mood change and sensed the darkness in him. He never said anything about his wife and she respected him for this; she liked to think of their affair, which was innocent, as something apart which would not interfere in any way with his married life. But she was beginning to know him well enough to be aware of the tension in him and to want to ease it.
When they were in the car she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and whispered, ‘Don’t be sad, Mylor.’
He drove through quiet country lanes until he found a track leading to a ploughed field where he stopped the car. The place was sheltered by a big ash tree. In the back seat, he took her in his arms and they stayed like this wordlessly while the sun grew big and dipped behind the distant trees. They were easily satisfied at this stage. She was in love for the first time and he was achingly grateful for this blessed interval which made the evenings easier to bear. Half an hour of kisses and a few light caresses, they would never ask for more; and as they were not greedy they would never come to any harm. It was all very simple.
‘You aren’t sad, are you?’ she said when their limited time was up and they had returned to the front seats. It was always a time of sadness for her; a sadness sharpened by the hour when they met, colour fading in the level evening light.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m not sad.’
‘I wouldn’t ever want to make you sad.’
‘You never will. I’m not a sad person.’
He was a passionate man, given to extremes; it was true that she was unlikely to make him sad.
‘You’re the one that risks being hurt,’ he said, not very seriously.
‘I don’t mind that.’
‘Maggie!’ He laughed, suddenly diverted as he was about to start the engine; he turned to look, seeing something in her for the first time, some little touch of absurdity. ‘Everyone minds being hurt, you goose!’
‘I don’t mind if you hurt me.’
He gazed at her, his expression losing some of its authority; then he turned away, frowning so that she thought he was angry. He did not say anything for quite a while after that.
When they were sitting in the car waiting for the bus, she rested her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes. ‘It’s been quite a day!’ He saw that she was tired, there were faint blue shadows beneath her eyes; he bent down and kissed first one and then the other. She moved her head, gently protesting, and he mimicked, ‘Someone might see!’ and kissed the tip of her nose.
‘I’ve just remembered! No, Mylor darling, please . . . This is important. Miss Cathcart came into the office this afternoon.’
‘No! Not to complain because Peter bruised his knuckles?’ He folded her hair back from her face and said, ‘You have a little pucker developing just there.’ He touched her between the eyes. ‘You take life too hard.’
‘She said his hands were torn to shreds—or at least, her tone implied it.’
‘Nonsense! He had bruised knuckles and a grazed knee.’ He rubbed his fingers gently between her eyes, smoothing away the frown.
‘She said you wouldn’t see her.’
Mylor sighed and slumped back in his seat.
‘I was on my way to see the second sitting started for lunch and she darted in front of me and started to gabble something. I could tell it was going to be a prolonged visitation, so I said I couldn’t attend to her at the moment, but if she liked to wait five minutes I’d see her then.’
‘Well! You’ve no idea the story she told. I was quite worried for you.’
‘Save your concern for poor Miss Smith. Miss Padwick should have taken the class on Friday but she is away ill and little Miss Smith has had to take over. Young Peter, who’s about the most maladjusted child you can imagine—I bet Mother didn’t tell you that—was more than she could handle. After he had hit one child, spat at another, and stamped on a third’s foot, she told him he couldn’t play and dismissed him to the sidelines.’
‘No! Do go on, it’s so wildly different from the tale I got.’
‘I gather she instructed him very firmly not to go anywhere near the climbing frame, because he’s an ungainly child and can scarcely throw a beanbag without doing himself a mischief. Anyway, he went straight off as soon as her back was turned and up he clambered. When she found out and told him to get down, he just loosed his grip and down he came, bruising knuckles on the way. Does that satisfy you?’
‘Will you see Mother and explain all this?’
‘I’ve already offered to see her.’
‘Do you mind if I write and confirm it? I don’t want her coming into the office again. I felt quite strange when she began to talk about you. As though I should hit her if she said much more.’
‘My gentle Maggie! You don’t need to defend me against Miss Cathcart.’ He wasn’t too pleased at her invasion of his world and she was quick to sense this.
‘I’m sorry.’
He put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a little hug. ‘You take life too hard.’ The bus had turned the corner. He bent to kiss her. ‘Give me a ring tomorrow.’
‘Not while your Miss Freeth is there.’
‘She’s got a dental appointment, praise be!’
He waited while she boarded the bus and then turned the car and made his way back to Eastgate. They always met at a place some distance from Eastgate and he was careful to keep to the less frequented country roads; he had a fifteen mile journey ahead of him tonight and he drove with a lack of consideration for others on the road which would have confirmed the Chairman’s view of his character. When he reached home Jemima had given the children their supper and was telling Daniel the latest adventures of Pippa the Parrot while Clare amused herself trying to pull the leg off a doll. Jemima was good at telling stories, but she kept them too young for Daniel whose mind was ready to stretch a little further.
‘Children don’t worry about unusual words,’ Mylor had protested. ‘For one thing, they don’t know that they are unusual. They accept them.’
‘Without understanding?’
‘Comprehension isn’t everything. The mind must have its adventures.’
‘Adventures of the mind—for a child of seven!’
She began to choose her words even more carefully after that. This deliberate stunting of the child’s growth hurt Mylor physically, it was as though some damage was being done to his own body and he could not bear to be in the room while it was going on. When he heard her voice raised in the familiar Pippa squawk, he shouted, ‘Shan’t be a minute,’ and went upstairs.
He went into the children’s bedroom and made a pretence of clearing up, but his mind was not on what he was doing. He was seeing a face, a face that he had not registered clearly before; a pleasant face, and kind, but not beautiful though youth gave it the illusion of loveliness. It would grow into a thoughtful face, mainly notable for the eyes which were grey-green and had an unusual clarity; the eyes would grow troubled with the years but would never lose that rather disconcerting directness, as though an appeal was being made from subconscious to subconscious. Under his breath he hummed, a little less exuberantly now, ‘Oh Maggie, Maggie May!’ In the moment when he knew that he could not go back, he questioned whether he should have come so far.
The children, released, came up the stairs, Clare thrusting herself forward as always while Daniel waited, dark with suppressed emotion, to give the details of some minor tragedy which had befallen him at his infant school.
‘Mummy says I can’t have a puppy,’ Clare was launching a big campaign about this. ‘I can, can’t I, Daddy?’
‘Of course not. Mummy has already told you that.’
Whatever their difficulties, they supported each other in front of the children.
‘I said, not until you are six,’ Jemima called from the bathroom.
This was the same as never to Clare, who was three and a half. Daniel began to speak, ‘Daddy, my teacher . . .’ Immediately Clare interrupted, ‘Clare wants to go to school, Clare wants to go to school . . .’ Jemima appeared briefly in the doorway and scooped her up; she was aware that Daniel needed time with his father. There was the sound of water splashing and high-pitched protests from Clare, then the bathroom door closed. Mylor settled down to try to unravel his son’s problem. Daniel could not express himself well; he suffered from emotional constipation and once the blockage was eased words tumbled out in no very recognizable pattern. One had to search for a key word here and there. It was not easy, Daniel tended to fly into a fit of temper if one came up with the wrong answer. Recently he seemed to be getting worse. Mylor was very patient with the boy and usually managed to calm his fears without minimizing them unduly.
‘What was it all about?’ Jemima asked later, when they were alone together.
‘His teacher taught him to do his sums by a different method.’
‘You’ll have to stop helping him.’
‘Yes. I should have known better.’
‘He’s been a trial all week.’ Jemima was not complaining. She was a good mother; she was worried about her son and so, though he was reluctant to admit it, was Mylor.
‘Do you think there is something wrong at school?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t seem to get on well with his class teacher.’
‘I can’t ask very easily. It would look as though I was trying to run old Hibbert’s school for him.’
‘Would you mind if I asked?’
‘Leave it for a while. He’ll be in the junior department in September and it may sort itself out then.’
Jemima looked at the clock. ‘Seven already! That can’t be right, surely? Do you mind if we have supper in front of the television? I want to watch the programme on children at risk. Where does the time get to? I had no idea it was so late.’
This was her way of referring to his late arrival. She never commented directly because she had found out that it irked him to have his movements questioned; it had been one of the minor disillusionments of married life for her. ‘I thought we were going to share things,’ she had said early on. ‘Sharing isn’t accounting for every minute of the day!’ He had often been angry in those days, but he had learnt his lesson now. She used his anger as an excuse for creating dramas that would last for days during which time she would refuse to eat, or would stay awake at night, insisting on sitting downstairs so as not to disturb him. At the end of such a period it was hard to tell which of them was the more exhausted.
Although they had supper in front of the television, she did not in fact watch the programme. She started instead to talk about the inadequacies of the house. She was not a grasping person, everything that she demanded was for the children. ‘There’s no garden; and I worry about them up at the top there. Suppose there was a fire?’ Mylor loved the old weather-boarded house, the children peering from dormer windows like half-hatched chicks. It was convenient too, standing as it did in a cul-de-sac that petered into straggling fields. There was no front garden and the garden at the back was the size of a pocket handkerchief; Jemima could weed the borders while the potatoes were boiling.
‘Country children don’t need a garden,’ he protested.
‘Eastgate is hardly the country,’ Jemima said.
‘But we’re right on the edge of the town.’
This was an old quarrel. He wanted to go to New Zealand which he thought would offer a way of life in which men and women were not confined together in tight little suburban boxes. He had married too young and felt himself in danger of being hemmed in. Jemima, not unaware of this, would not consider emigrating. What was more, she did not want to live on the edge of Eastgate, she wanted to be in the middle of it. She wanted the security of a little estate. Children came and played football in the cul-de-sac during the school holidays; at night it was very quiet and dimly lit, one never knew who might come wandering in from the fields. She went across to the window and looked out, seeing in her mind’s eye beyond the straggle of old cottages and the sleepy high street of the old town to where the new estates flourished, neat little houses and small blocks of flats intersected by well-lit service roads. Quite why she wanted this, Mylor could not understand; she was not a convivial person and tended to repulse neighbours who tried to be friendly. He looked at her and wondered what she was thinking, but failed to guess. Her face had an invariable calm which was achieved by a conscious smoothing of the muscles, a wary watch for any tendency to tauten, to frown, for the mouth to sag, the chin relax; Jemima guarded her facial muscles with the vigilance of a sentry on duty at a besieged castle. Mylor watched her, not unaware that he was the invader against whom she must forever steel herself.
‘Sit down and talk to me about it,’ he said.
‘It’s no use talking to you.’
He had a much better brain than she; she could never argue with him and so she had found other ways of defeating him. She ran the forefinger of her right hand across her brow, tenderly, as though tracing a line of pain.
‘And, in any case, I want to go to bed early if you don’t mind.’
‘Not feeling so good?’
‘It’s nothing much. A touch of migraine.’
‘Poor you. Perhaps it’s the weather, we need a storm to clear the air.’
In time, he would find it necessary to move for the sake of her health; but he was not going to be manoeuvred into that yet.
Jemima went slowly up the stairs. There was a tight band round her head and a pulse in her temple was already beginning to throb. ‘He will never see things my way, never, never! He is utterly selfish. And he despises me.’ She washed her hands, creamed her face, brushed her hair, staring at the taut mask which confronted her in the mirror. She was naturally very attractive, with a small puckish face made for provocation; but marriage had drained her self¬confidence and she no longer believed in anything she did. Mylor was the wrong man for her, there was something in him that went beyond the confines of what she considered acceptable, something a little wild that frightened her, a rough edge to his nature that bruised her, and worst of all, he had a mind that was at once more sensitive and more robust than her own. Yet she loved him; and she still wanted him for the things which had made her yield to him eight years ago on a bright May night when the moon was big and the wind soughed gentle in the cornfield. There was something within him that burnt bright and she had thought that it would irradiate her, too, and that she would never be the same again. That particular dream had faded; but some of the fascination remained. He was so alive, he generated a physical energy which set her pulse racing. When they went to parties or to school functions, she would think ‘he is the only real man here!’ She was tremendously proud of him, yet she wanted to break him because she could not live with him as he was.
Perhaps she had always realized that her appeal would fade, but she had imagined that before he tried to break free she would have bound him to her; and so in a way she had, though now it brought her little comfort. Their courtship had been passionate and precipitate, he could not have enough of her. She had not nearly as much to give as he, but in those days she could keep him at white heat simply by a carefully-timed refusal; she had inflicted physical cruelty for the only time in her life and had enjoyed doing it. He had taken his revenge in the cornfield and she had enjoyed that, too. And then they had to marry, and gradually his need of her diminished, he no longer wanted to spend every moment with her, no longer rushed feverishly through the day in order to claim her in the evening, there was more restraint in his love-making, the urgency had gone. She could not see this as the inevitable transition from passion to the slower rhythms of married life. She saw it as a complete rejection, something engendered by her own failure. She decided that she no longer satisfied him, and from that time onwards ceased to do so. She became anxious, unrelaxed, fearful, petulant, until now it had reached a stage where she dreaded their encounters while in the lengthening intervals between she desired him more than ever before.
‘I must get away from this house,’ she said as she lay still, afraid to move because now every movement produced violent pain in her head and neck and shoulders. ‘I must get away from this house.’
He liked the house. It was old, the stairs creaked and there were loose floorboards, probably it was structurally unsound. There were no labour-saving devices and it was hard to run. It was not designed according to modem standards, it faced north-south and the bathroom and lavatory were combined. But he liked it. Mylor and the house joined forces to humiliate her.
‘I must get away from the house.’ And from the dimly-lit cul-de-sac which terminated in cornfields across which she could hear the wind soughing at night.