Possession

by Celia Fremlin

  Impossible? The three requirements were incompatible? Then you know nothing of the skills we have acquired, we wives and mothers, during our long years of specialised training. To concoct a convincing story that satisfies three incompatible purposes is child’s play to us. I could feel my brain whirring into action, applying itself to the familiar task, and I hardly bothered to attend to its intermediate convolutions, so sure was I that it would end by coming up with something.

  So much for the neighbours, then. But what about Cissie? Cissie was coming to us for Christmas, as she always does; she comes to be enfolded into the warmth and affection of our family life; to revel in it for those few days, and—as I have noted before—to idealise it. And pleasant enough it is—highly flattering in fact—to have one’s happiness blown up larger than life. But the happiness has to be really there to start with. Always, before, it has been there. But tonight, as I sat up waiting in dull dread for Sarah’s return, it seemed incredible that we had once been happy; that until a few short months ago we had been one of those families that have sing-songs round the piano on winter nights; whose laughter rings through open windows in the summer dusk. This was our image. This was how Cissie thought of us; this was how she would still expect to find us when she arrived, beaming, with her expensive luggage and lots of presents, in a few days’ time. She would look for her welcome; for the bright fire burning, for the eager, chattering girls; for Ralph, benign and happy, pouring her a drink, and me bustling in from the kitchen with a great dish of mince pies, agog for gossip. She would step out of her taxi with this vision of us glowing behind her eyes, and would step into—what?

  Into silence. Bad-temper. Heartbreak. Sarah stilled with grief, her gay serenity destroyed. Janice sunk into who-knows-what sort of huddle of sulks or tears. Ralph, bombarded by his daughters’ misery as by machine-gun fire, would be slinking about his home in search of cover; and I—I suppose—would be keeping up some gruesome pretence of seasonable jollity. I pictured the scene, and saw no escape anywhere. I could feel Christmas pounding nearer, like some monstrous beast of prey.

  Trivialities. Christmas: the neighbours: I scolded myself for so much caring. These were mere pinpricks on the surface of our troubles; the frills, one might say, round the edges of the real problem. Sarah’s whole future was at stake. Her happiness, perhaps even her life, would depend on how persuasively I could talk to her when she came in tonight. I ought to be planning what to say, arranging my arguments, memorising the points that would have to be made: yet I could think about nothing but the unhappiness that was about to descend on my home; and the eyes, the hundreds of neighbours’ eyes, that would be staring in on it through the dark, uncurtained windows…. Already it was beginning. … A face flattened against the glass, pale in the surrounding frame of blackness … and then, with a surge of relief, of sanity, of sudden hope, I saw that it was Sarah’s face; she was saying something, gesticulating to me to let her in….

  *

  “But Sarah….”

  I seemed to have been saying these words for hours, over and over again, prelude to a hundred useless arguments, a hundred futile pleadings. We seemed to have been sitting here talking since the beginning of time, in the tidy, midnight kitchen, with the stove purring, and nothing outside but the December rain steadily falling.

  “But Sarah—” I tried once more. “It’s not fair of you to take such a risk…. It’s not fair on yourself … on us … on your future children….”

  “It’s not a risk, Mummy,” Sarah repeated patiently. “I keep telling you—Mervyn and I understand each other completely. I know that what he did was terrible, and so does he. Do you think he hasn’t thought about it—suffered for it—all these years? But it was fourteen years ago. Fourteen! Why, even if he had been convicted at the time, and given the full sentence, he would be free again by now! Even the Law would have stopped holding it against him by this time. How can you possibly expect the person who loves him to be harder on him than the law itself? How unforgiving would you like me to be, if you could choose?”

  I winced. Wounds inflicted by Sarah are peculiarly painful, because she truly loves me and is concerned for my feelings; but by now, I could see, she was worn out by the long fruitless argument that neither of us had any intention of losing.

  “It’s not a question of forgiving,” I said dully. “It’s a question of actual danger. To Mervyn as well as to yourself—because what do you think the rest of his life would be like if he ever did such a thing again …?”

  “He won’t do such a thing again,” Sarah explained wearily, with the air of one proving for the thousandth time that two and two make four. “Don’t you understand, Mummy, boys in their teens are—well, they’re a race apart, they really are; it’s like a sort of fever, you can’t count them as ordinary human beings. Honestly, Mummy, I know. I’ve been out with boys who had such weird, mad ideas that you’d call them lunatics if they were grown-up men. You’d have them certified. Perfectly ordinary-looking dim boys—you’d never guess—you’d never believe…. Honestly, Mummy, you don’t know what goes on!”

  Perhaps I don’t; I don’t know. Our children always think that the older generation have led abnormally sheltered lives. I remember thinking that about my parents.

  “Maybe I don’t,” I retorted. “But whatever used to go on in the crowd you went around with—and, if you remember, Daddy and I said at the time that they looked a pretty neurotic bunch to us—but anyway, whatever they did, it didn’t usually end up in murder. And don’t tell me that I wouldn’t have known if it had, because I would. It would have been in the papers.”

  Sarah didn’t contradict me.

  “Sometimes it was just luck that it didn’t,” she said darkly. “As I say, they had weird ideas, some of them. But my point is, Mummy, that they’ve all grown up into perfectly ordinary, nice young men now. Looking back over the years” (Sarah is nineteen) “it’s amazing how normal they’ve all turned out. You can’t—you just simply can’t—condemn a grown-up man for what a seventeen-year-old boy once did.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said. “And you can’t trick me with words, Sarah. A seventeen-year-old boy, indeed! It was him! Him, him, him! People can’t dodge out of their responsibility for their own actions just by saying they’ve changed!”

  “But if they have changed? Honestly, Mummy, I don’t understand you, I really don’t. All our lives you’ve taught us that intolerance is a dreadful thing; you’ve always agreed with the people who say that crime is the fault of society, and not of the criminal; that we should try to understand rather than to condemn; and now, when I do understand Mervyn, and when I don’t condemn him, you say….”

  I held my head in my hands. Everything she was saying was the truth, the exact truth. How could I explain to her that to see my principles put into action filled me with a terror that went beyond words?

  “Did he—did he ever explain how it happened?” I asked her at last, hoping, I suppose, that extra facts might somehow affect the issue, though of course they never do.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Not really. He says he can’t understand himself, now, what it was that got hold of him. It was a sort of fever, like I said. It started off almost like a game, he says—the girl was giggling, quite willing to have the rope put round her neck. You know, sort of fooling about. And then—he can’t really remember—there was a sort of excitement—a feeling of power. The feeling that it was for him to decide whether she lived or died. Something like that. He can’t really remember, he finds it incredible now, just as you do. Especially since apart from anything else, he loved her. He really did.”

  “But that’s just what is so terrifying!” I cried. “That it should have been love that was at the root of it. If it had been hatred, it wouldn’t seem quite so …”

  “Oh, Mummy, what’s the good of trying to analyse it? Even Mervyn himself can’t understand it any more. It’s over. He’s a different person. That’s what I’ve at last succeeded in m
aking him understand. Listen: you remember that awful day when he suddenly broke off the engagement? Well, it was because of this. Because he thought that, once I knew the truth, I’d be frightened to marry him. But I made him tell me—I made him—and then, when he found that I wasn’t frightened … that, knowing everything, I still wanted to marry him…. Oh, I can’t describe it! It was like a great sun rising….!”

  She looked radiant, exalted; and fear for her, like ice, rippled up and down my spine.

  “So you see, Mummy,” she said. “I can’t put off marrying him till I’m twenty-one. It would look like hesitating—like not being sure. It would spoil the wonderful thing that has happened between us—this total, absolute trust. Can’t you understand how much it must mean to him, after all the years of guilt, to know that I trust him absolutely, that I love him without reservation, no matter what he’s done? That I want to marry him now, just as he is, without any hesitation, without any if’s and but’s? He says he’d never believed there was a woman in the whole world who would take it as I have taken it; he says I have given him back his faith in life—in himself—in everything! Oh, Mummy, you can’t spoil it for us! You can’t!”

  Couldn’t I? Could I? Was it Permissiveness run mad to let her have her way? Or was it Possessiveness in disguise if I tried to thwart her? Is this, then, what Possessiveness really amounts to—this total terror for one’s child’s sheer physical safety? If so, may God forgive me for the times I have jeered at possessive parents, and felt myself a superior type of being, immune from the trap into which they had fallen. Now, it was my turn to feel the steel jaws closing over me: I, too, had found myself caught in the ancient, sordid battle of the generations, fighting in desperation, with teeth and claws, to rob my daughter of her freedom.

  “Sarah,” I said at last. “I’m tired. I can’t think. I just can’t think. Let’s talk about it again in the morning.”

  And I was thankful to find, when I went up to bed, that Ralph was sound asleep. His opinion, on top of Sarah’s and of mine, would at that moment have been more than I could stand.

  CHAPTER XX

  I WON’T SAY that things seemed better the next morning: they just seemed to be happening to someone other than me. You see, Ralph and Janice had so far been told nothing of this new catastrophe, and so the Monday morning bustle of alarm clocks, breakfast, and rushing for buses was exactly as usual. A catastrophe that no one knows about is, as yet, only half a catastrophe; it lacks form and substance, and above all it lacks a place to be. It’s natural habitat is among silences, and averted eyes, and lost appetites; it can find no proper foothold in a room where people are eating bacon, and reading the morning papers, and complaining that someone has borrowed their stockings.

  But presently, everyone was gone: Ralph to work, Janice to school, and Sarah into town to do some shopping. She had left quietly, and with a minimum of explanation; and so whether her purchases were to consist of Christmas presents or a running-away outfit, I could not guess, and I certainly did not inquire. We had reached stalemate in our argument, Sarah and I, and we both knew it.

  Slowly, I cleared away the breakfast things, trying to take in the immensity of the thing that hung over us. I had no impulse to run for advice—not to Peggy, nor Ralph, nor anyone. Especially not to Ralph. I knew without any doubt that he would agree with me, would back me up in forbidding the marriage; but I didn’t want to be agreed with and backed up. Can you understand this? Have you ever gone through the experience of having your fears confirmed? You notice that the plane is tilting at a strange angle … the sound of the engines has changed … and you look round—silly, panicky you—to make sure that the seasoned travellers are still reading their papers, smoking, not turning a hair: that the air hostesses are bustling placidly about with trays. But instead of that, you see faces white and tense: air hostesses huddled in a corner, whispering … and then the pilot’s voice comes down the microphone….

  Yes? You know about it? Then you will know why I didn’t—couldn’t—discuss it with Ralph just yet. I was thankful that he was to be away from home tonight. Let it all not have happened, for just a few more hours.

  But the day went on, and still I was deciding, deciding. What was I deciding? Everything that could be said, I had said last night, and Sarah had rejected it all—quietly, politely but as if from some exalted standpoint where fears like mine had no relevance. Could she conceivably be right? Could she be seeing the situation with a clearer vision, a higher standard of moral values, than any I had known? Or was she just a reckless, idealistic teenager, blinded by infatuation?

  The pattern! The awful, nerve-racking pattern that Ralph and I had long observed, and deplored, in Sarah’s choice of boy friends. Her fatal attraction, I mean, for the weak, the inadequate, the unlucky—we had long looked with dismay at this disconcerting side-effect of our daughter’s warm and sympathetic temperament. And now—just when we had been congratulating ourselves that the pattern was at last broken, that she had found herself a mature and self-sufficient partner—now it turned out that this last choice of hers was the crowning disaster of them all; a man who far beyond all the rest was drawing on her strength, her sympathy, her courage; a man who was taking all she had of warmth and loyalty and using it—perhaps—to lure her to her death.

  Or not. Or maybe. How could one know? And not knowing, how could one let her take the risk? Back went my thoughts to where they had started. What could I do? How could I decide? And if I could decide, then what would I do?

  My own cowardice writhed up in front of me, jeering, forming and re-forming in front of my eyes like steam from the bowl of washing up. You’ll never forbid her to marry him, it laughed. You’ll never dare! Not you! You’ve poured love and understanding into your relationship with Sarah till you’ve reduced it to a pulp, it has no hard core from which you can oppose her. You know already what you will do. You will convince yourself that it will be “no use” to forbid the marriage; that she will run away and marry anyway. You will say to yourself that you must not “interfere”; that she is old enough to make her own decisions. These are the things you tell yourselves, you modern parents. You have lost the power to do anything about your children, but you have acquired wonderful compensatory skills in convincing yourselves that nothing need be done. You will give in, Clare, you will give in! Ha ha, you will give her a lovely wedding! Ho ho, you will let her go to her death before you will say “No!” and stick to it! You will, you will, I know you!

  Thus my cowardice danced and mocked before my eyes. “I’ll show you!” I said to it, and I tipped the scalding water down the sink, so that it gurgled away and there was no more steam grinning and gyrating before my eyes. I cleaned the sink, I wiped the draining board; and there I was, back at the beginning again, deciding, deciding, deciding. … The grey morning brightened into winter noon … the short brightness faded; and as the afternoon moved forward into winter dusk, I felt myself sliding irresistibly down that primrose path which universal compulsory education has opened up to all of us: the special route to Hell via more and more facts. I found myself, that is to say, imagining that more facts would clarify the situation. As I said earlier, they never do, but the delusion was a familiar and comforting one, and gave an excuse for action. I would go round to the Hard wicks’: I would find Sonja, and ask her what she had meant by that “chance of getting her own back” on Mervyn and his mother? Why suddenly now, after all these years? There must, I told myself, be a, fact buried somewhere in these cryptic threats. Facts, facts! I would get myself a feast of them, the dear, comprehensible things.

  It was nearly dark when I reached the Hardwicks’ home. Lights blazed from every window, and I could already hear the usual commotion as I walked up the path; young, hectoring voices, raised in grievance; a bleated protest; somewhere a child crying.

  I pushed open the front door, and almost walked slap into a grand piano. It stood blocking the hallway, while Giles and Pete leaned protectively one on each side of it, as if
it had been a drunken friend. Almost hidden behind its bulk stood Liz, palely and desperately protesting:

  “But he can’t, Giles! Pete, you should have stopped him! We can’t store it for him! We can’t!”

  “Bit late in the day to say that, Mum,” said Giles cheerfully. “Do you realise it took eight of us to get it this far?”

  “And Trevor’s had to go back for his suitcases,” added Pete. “Honestly, Mum, don’t be so mean! Poor old Trevor’s had to give up his digs, his landlady’s been going on and on about the rent until he just couldn’t stand it any more. He’s got to come here for a bit, he’s got nowhere else to stay.”

  “He hasn’t got here to stay, either,” squealed Liz, with rare determination. “He’s not bringing his suitcases here! He’s not coming to stay—and he’s taking that thing out of this hall right away! Do you understand?”

  The young men stared at her in wonderment; it was as if the cat had suddenly learned to speak.

  Then they both began to laugh.

  “Oh, Mum, come off it!” said Giles soothingly. “How do you think Trevor’s going to collect eight people together again for a job like this? They’re disbanded. Vamoosed. Home art gone and ta’en their wages! You should have heard them letting-off about it, too. It’ll be weeks before Trevor’ll dare ask them to shift it again!”

  “Yeah, be a sport, Mum,” urged Pete; and both young men leaned across the instrument admiringly. Pete began picking out “Baa Baa Black Sheep” with one finger.

  “I will not be a sport!” screamed Liz. “This is too much …!”

  “It sure is,” agreed Pete amiably. “Too much weight to shift any further, that’s for sure! This is the concert room now, Roll up, Roll up! Smashing one-finger percussion music by the smashing one finger of the smashing one-and-only Potty Peter Hardwick! See?—No thumbs!”