by Alan Warner
In any case the whole romance had finished when she discovered that the man to whom she had been engaged had been seeing another girl all the time, a very common girl who really liked pop songs and worked in a supermarket. She had found it shattering that he should have preferred this girl to her. In fact this was the most painful part of the whole episode, that the girl should have such a cheap mind, and that her mother had been right all along. ‘It was lucky for you that you found out in time,’ her mother would say to her. For a long time she didn’t feel like going out but she had to since she was teaching and otherwise people would talk. So she had put on a brave face and pretended that the whole thing had been trivial but for weeks she would burst out crying for no particular reason. After all he had been very entertaining and they had gone to so many different places. What struck her most was that afterwards she would analyse the whole relationship and realise that without her knowing it he had been incredibly selfish. For instance he would only go to places which he himself suggested, football matches for instance because he was interested in football or pubs because he liked to drink. She would have much preferred to visit museums and art galleries but he didn’t like that so she had remained silent about her preferences. If once in a while they did go to an art gallery he would fidget and make rude remarks about the paintings. One thing she did discover during their relationship. At the beginning of it she liked representational paintings, at the end she preferred surrealist ones.
Before she started going out with him she had idealistic illusions about love and marriage. She wanted to have children, but legitimately. She imagined herself staying at home looking after the garden and watching her children playing among the flowers while he earned their living. But in fact he let the shop go to ruin and lived extravagantly because his mother would do anything for him and never saw any of his faults. His mother was a woman with blue rinsed hair who played cards a lot.
So that episode had ended ingloriously and the worst of it was that her ideas about love and marriage had been irretrievably soured. If ever a man showed any intention of taking her out she would analyse his motives quite coolly and in the end decide that she would prefer to be on her own. All the passion had been drained out of her. Most of the time after school she stayed in the house and prepared her lessons for the following day. She transferred all her love to her pupils who were all young children. And of course her parents were growing old. Her father had a stroke one day after he had been out working in the garden on a very hot summer’s day. Her mother had great difficulty tending him since she didn’t want to send him to hospital and eventually she herself had fallen ill. Her father had died first and then her mother and then she was left alone.
After the initial grief which had lasted for a long time she had felt free. She thought that with the money which she had carefully saved she would go to places that she had only read about but which she felt that she ought to visit. There would be no one peering over her shoulder, no one wondering when she would come home at night, she could come and go as she pleased. She had always wanted to go to Greece because she couldn’t believe that places such as Parnassus had ever existed or that Homer had ever lived. She could believe in the existence of all other places but not the places in Greece. But in fact she had cancelled her reservations because when it came to the point she couldn’t go alone. She had however gone to places nearer home and hadn’t enjoyed her holidays at all in spite of her freedom.
Gradually she came to the conclusion that total freedom is an unmitigated evil. There ought to be someone waiting up for one, there ought to be someone with whom one could communicate, even quarrel. But there was no one. She found herself moving in the world like a shadow. And she didn’t visit much. There was no one really she wanted to visit and she felt that people might be sorry for her. So she tended to stay in the house a great deal. At first she passed the time by reading but this soured on her. Later she would knit and sew a lot but after a while she thought there was no particular reason for that either. Then she took to going to night classes and she would attend courses such as ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ and ‘Inflation and How to Deal with it’. But she found the same small earnest women at these courses, not understanding what the lecturer was saying, but only going there because they couldn’t bear to stay in the house. And so she had stopped going to these courses as well.
But the long summer holidays were the biggest problem of all. She couldn’t stay at home then all the time. She had to go away for a while and therefore she usually took a holiday of about a week. Before she left she carefully turned off the water and the electricity and worried sometimes even after she had reached her destination whether the fire or the immersion had been left on. She was very careful with the doorkey, which she hung round her neck. One of her greatest nightmares was to find herself at the door and not be able to find her key. Once she had left the house lights on all night after going to bed, and a neighbour in the block of flats opposite had come over in the morning wondering if there was anything wrong. They did think about her and they did worry about her. But of course they couldn’t be expected to understand what it was to be lonely.
She came out of the cinema, not waiting for the cartoon (she didn’t like cartoons) and went outside again. The sun was still hot and there were still as many people on the street as there had been before. It was only eight o’clock and she didn’t want to go back to the hotel as early as that. People in hotels noticed you and summed you up, even receptionists. For instance that young girl had asked her if she had a car and she had to confess that she hadn’t. Things like that marked you out, made you different. And the more there were of these absences, of these differences, the more wary people became of you. If there were enough differences they would avoid you altogether.
She made her way to the Gardens and sat down on a bench. Even as late as this – eight o’clock in the evening – the sun was still hot though not intolerably so. She sat in the shadow of a tree on a bench on which no one else was sitting. She crossed her legs and automatically pulled her skirt down. Her skirt was of medium length, there was no point in her wearing one of those very short skirts. And she simply watched the people passing. There were young couples with their arms round each other, an Indian girl of quite astonishing beauty who wore clothes the colour of a peacock, accompanied by two grave children – a girl and a boy – who also wore very bright clothes and looked like two perfect statues walking. They wore yellow socks, red shoes and lilac jerseys. A lone Negro went past and a boy on the back of whose blouse was written the number and name 15784 Pentonville. Two small girls rolled on the grass till the park-keeper blew a whistle and when he began to stride towards them they ran away. On the bench next to hers an oldish woman was sitting by herself throwing bread to the fat blue pigeons who waddled towards her, interrupted now and then by diminutive birds which would fly away with large morsels almost as big as themselves.
It occurred to her that most of her life she had been watching other people pass by as if she herself had no life but were the spectator of the lives of others. Other people often astonished her. So many of them walked instinctively into the future without thinking as if they expected that the water would buoy them up and that nothing would ever happen to them that they could not foresee. They accepted the motions of the present in a way that she could never do. They laughed and played in a forgetfulness which they seemed to be able to summon at will. For instance, she herself found it difficult to sit still on the bench. She wanted to walk about and at that moment she did so. She took a path which deviated from the main road and again sat under a tree. Here it was darker and there was more vegetation, truncated tree trunks and so on. It was some time before she noticed that only a few yards away from her a boy naked to the waist was lying on top of a girl who was also naked to the waist. It was some time too before she pulled her eyes away from them: not that she found the sight disgusting but that she wondered what it was like. She felt stirring within her a motion of regret
, an irretrievable absence. But she got up again in case they would see her looking at them and went back to where she had been before.
She took out a magazine which she began to read. It was a romantic magazine which had stories of love found and lost in hospitals, factories and offices. This was her secret vice. She thought of herself as an intellectual who would attend concerts, the better films and plays, but who would never descend to reading trashy love stories. And yet this was what she was doing. And also she was looking up her sign in the horoscope to find out what was to happen to her. She was in fact Capricorn, remote, cold, miserly, determined. She read quickly but with only half her mind. The park was so beautiful, so crowded with people, and she was so alone. An old unshaven man who carried a paper bag sat down at the end of her bench. He slumped forward, his hands on his knees, staring down at the ground. Beside him on the bench he had placed an old greasy cap. His lips mumbled some words which he was apparently addressing to himself. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Eventually he got up and this time she heard him say, ‘Bugger everything, bugger everything,’ as if it were some meaningful litany. She drew in her legs as he passed her. Then she put down her book and watched the children playing.
She liked children. Since her parents died she often thought that it was the children who had saved her. They were so nice, so innocent, so willing to learn, so willing to engage themselves in plays, concerts, projects, so alive and so loving. She believed that her own mother had never liked children. She herself had been born – she worked out – when her father had been unemployed and when her mother must have been very worried about the future. The coldness of her own personality must have been because her mother had never lavished enough love upon her. Surely that must be the reason. What other reason could there be?
But perhaps the reason why she liked children was that she wanted to mould them to be like herself. Was that it? No, it couldn’t be that. Children were so spontaneous, perhaps it was their very spontaneity that she loved. They would come up to her and tell her stories of what had happened to them, and she would listen attentively. They wrote nice little poems which had fine feeling and a directness which moved her. She was lucky in a way to have them. And yet there was something which she was missing. She couldn’t think what it was but it was something which kept reality at a remove from her as if she were looking at it through a plate glass window. Children weren’t like that. Children moved unselfconsciously through reality.
Her father had that kind of unselfconsciousness. He would sit down in a chair and seem able to endure time without terror. He would move about in a very slow heavy manner as if he were at home in the world. He would eat carefully as if he were drawing from what he ate sustenance for some work which it was necessary for him to do. He talked little and slowly. He would look out of the window and say, ‘It’s going to be a good day,’ and in some way the statement seemed final and exact. He never discussed anything profound or philosophical. Her mother from that point of view was the same. But she was also much more ambitious, much more jagged and edgy. She had even gone to see her daughter capped at the university though she had never been such a long distance from home before. She herself had tried to stop her from going in case she would utter idiocies to her friends but she hadn’t in fact done so and had behaved very circumspectly. She had also, strangely enough, chosen the right clothes to wear.
But her mother had said something to her once which she remembered. ‘I don’t know what will happen to you if you are ever left alone.’ She remembered this as if it were some prophecy of disaster.
She put down her book and got up. It was time to return to the hotel. In the hotel there were some sandwiches and tea laid on a table in the lounge. She took some tea but no sandwiches and sat for a bit watching the TV. The only other people in the room were an old man with a white moustache and his wife who sat on the sofa together, not speaking, gazing at the screen with the same kind of look as they might have had if they were looking at fish in an aquarium. The screen seemed to be showing a gangster story for shortly after she sat down a small thin quivering man was shot and the seeping blood reddened the screen. After a while she got up and looked at some magazines which were lying around. One was the Scottish Field, another the Countryside. There was an unfinished crossword which she looked at without much interest. At one time she had used to do a lot of crosswords but she had given that up.
As she sat there, there came to her the extraordinary feeling that she had ceased to live properly, that at some time she had left a road and was slowly going down a side track where she would find herself on abandoned sidings among old railway carriages in a blaze of yellow flowers. For a moment she suffered intense panic but then the panic subsided and the two old people were still there watching the TV as silently as ever.
Her father hardly ever watched TV. When someone switched it on he went outside and did some job. Her mother would watch it avidly. Sometimes she used to think that the announcers were smiling at her when they signed off for the night. She even seemed to have fallen in love with the man who did the weather forecast. Her face suddenly became school-girlish and illuminated by an autumnal pathos.
When her father had died her mother had acted very practically, doing all the necessary things but then, after all the business was over, relapsing into herself. She seemed to lose all her energy and would fall asleep in the chair even at midday. She also gave up cooking as if all those years she had really been cooking for her husband and for no one else, her husband who had done everything she had wanted him to do, who had never drunk even though he worked in a distillery, who had always been there, quiet, silent and strong. She had ceased visiting people’s houses. She had even ceased to watch TV and would say, ‘What rubbish they are showing there.’
Two large blue policemen burst into a red room and there were gun shots. She rose and went to her room. She took off her clothes, laying them down on the chair, and then got into bed. She took out a paperback and began to read it. One of the things she had always dreaded was that she would become an insomniac but in fact she slept quite well. One of the teachers in her school was an insomniac. His name was Ross and he had told her that he only slept an average of an hour a night. He would stay up most of the night making tea and reading. He had got through the whole of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in one spell of six months. Now he was getting to work on Dickens. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be an insomniac. She was sure she would go off her head but thanked God that at least she could sleep at nights. She looked at her watch which told her that it was ten o’clock. She closed the book and then her eyes, even though outside she could hear quite clearly the roar of the traffic and somewhere in the hotel the sound of conversation and crockery and trays. She fell asleep almost immediately.
She dreamed that she was in a park full of Greek statues of boys with short cropped hair like American athletes. In the middle of the night the statues began to move and to dance as if during the day they had been waiting patiently so that they could do precisely that. Their hollow eyes assumed expression and intelligence, they moved as if to a music which she herself could not hear. All round them bits of paper and other litter as well as fallen leaves swirled in a wind which had blown up. In the storm of leaves the statues remained solid and the expressions on the faces were both smiling and cruel as if they belonged to a royal supercilious race which despised the human. Then she saw in her dream the park-keeper unlocking the gate and the statues became immobile and blank again.
The following morning she woke new and refreshed and in the blaze of white sunlight that illuminated the room felt inexplicably the same kind of large hope that she used to feel when she was a girl, when suddenly she would throw off the bed-clothes and walk about the silent house as if waiting for something dramatic to happen.
She washed quickly and went down to her breakfast. The waitress was an old woman with a limp who had a pleasant smile, and asked her whether she would like one egg or two
as if she really wanted to give her the two. When she had finished her breakfast she went outside, her handbag over her shoulder. The morning was still cool and she felt confident and happy as she walked along. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She would tour the High Street and look at the museums and other sights and she might even have a look at the Castle later.
All around her she could see the crenellated outlines of old houses, solid and heavy, houses that had been in existence for centuries and between which were lanes and steps that had known many secrecies which at the time appeared trembling and immediate. She could see the spires of large churches that had seen many congregations which had flowed into them and flowed out again in their changing dresses. She found herself on ancient winding stairs at which people had once stood and talked in their short red flaring cloaks. The whole area was a place of romance and mystery. She walked up the steps till she arrived at a library which was advertising an exhibition of old manuscripts. She entered and went into a room which was off to the right and in which a man in blue uniform was sitting at a desk looking rather bored. He said good morning and turned back to whatever he was doing. She walked around looking at the old manuscripts, most of them beautiful illuminated Bibles such as she had never seen before. The pages were embellished with colourful Virgin Marys, green fields, and omnipresent angels. She couldn’t read the writing, most of which appeared to be in Latin. In one section she saw Mary, Queen of Scots’ last letter written in ancient French in which she seemed not to show so much fear as an imperious hauteur. But it was the lovely illuminated Bibles with their populace of angels that captivated her. What patience and faith and sense of vocation these monks must have had to create these works! She imagined them in gardens, surrounded by trees inhabited by birds, pains-takingly drawing and painting. She compared their colours to those of the TV screen and smiled to herself. The world which they revealed seemed so natural and so real though in fact the angels were descending on to the earth that we know. One showed Sarah, Abraham’s wife, being greeted by the two young men who were really angels and the whole picture was so ordinary and almost banal and everyday that it comforted her. Imagine a time when angels came to talk to human beings in such an unremarkable manner, descending and ascending ladders that led from heaven to earth like painters on the street. She thought what her mother would have said. ‘Nothing but candles and masses,’ she would have said. ‘Heathenism.’
