The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  *

  On the fourth morning of their stay, the Colonel and Myra Plumstead sat on the beach in the shade of a rock. Miss Plumstead wore a woollen bathing costume and a wide white hat, and was writing a letter; she often wrote letters or postcards in the morning. The Colonel, in khaki shorts and an open-necked shirt, was reading a very long five-generation family chronicle set in a Yorkshire woollen town; Vivian Waters, the young architect from Reading, had bought it in a paper-covered edition to read on the plane, but had given up at chapter six. The Colonel did not intend to be defeated by a work of fiction, and, having begun, persevered with it. “Going to take me a long time to get through, though,” he said. “All this detail! What imaginations these chaps have, eh?”

  “How far have you got?”

  “Nineteen hundred and ten.”

  “Cheer up. You’re bound to lose a lot of characters in the war.”

  “More chaps’ll get born though,” the Colonel said. “You see if they don’t.”

  Miss Plumstead said, “Justin”.

  “Mmmmm?”

  “We’re very lazy, you know. We just sit on the beach all day, soaking up the sun. We never see any of the sights.”

  “What sights?”

  “I thought we might go to Valledemosa, and look at the monastery.”

  “Good idea. We can take the bus.”

  “I thought we might try walking. It’s very picturesque, you know. I mean, we wouldn’t be in any hurry. We could stop whenever we wanted to, and look at the view.”

  “You’re not going to drag an old man like me all those miles in the heat? What’ll you do if I pass out on you, eh? Leave me by the road, and press on, I suppose.”

  Miss Plumstead smiled. “You’re not old, Justin,” she said. “I’ve known a lot of people in my life—too many, I sometimes think, because of course you never get to know anybody well——But I don’t think I’ve ever known——”

  “A younger man? Surely one or two?” The Golonel put down his book for a moment, and savoured his pleasure like sunlight.

  “Don’t be silly. You know what I mean. There’s a sort of quality in you.”

  The Colonel said, “Dash it; I’m blushing. Only you can’t tell it, because I look like a lobster already.”

  Miss Plumstead went doggedly on, keeping her gaze on her writing pad. “Sometimes people pretend to be older than they are as a sort of defence,” she said. “Like ugly people pretending to be uglier than they are. One of my students has ears which stick right out. He’s always calling attention to them. He has an Australian accent too.”

  The Colonel said, “I’d like to walk to Valledemosa very much. Maybe they’ll put on a show for us. Some of that folk-dancing, eh?”

  “And Julian?”

  “We’ll ask him. Where is he?”

  “Swimming, I think. I saw him a moment ago. He was on that rock with a girl.”

  “With a girl?” Anxiety begins in the stomach, and unless you master it, it can spread all over you, stimulating all those bloody chemicals, and making your pretence of age an earnest. Besides, there was no need to worry; there had been no trouble of that sort. The whole purpose of this holiday was that Julian should make a fresh start, take up a normal life again. He couldn’t be insulated from women, and shouldn’t be.

  “Well, I say ‘with’. All I really mean is that they were both on the rock. You know the one. There’s always someone there.”

  The Colonel knew the rock. It was a kind of resting place for swimmers, making an under-water shelf to stand on when one felt tired. None of the rock itself showed above the water, but whenever you looked in that direction you would see heads, bobbing gently like water-lilies in the swell.

  “He’s not there now,” Miss Plumstead said. “I can’t see him anywhere.”

  “I expect he’s swum out a bit. It doesn’t matter. We’ll ask him when he gets back. Except that——”

  “Yes?”

  “It might be a bit dull for him, dragging him along with us.”

  “Of course. I hadn’t thought of that. How easy it is to be selfish in that way! One forgets that younger people have their own interests. There’s no reason why they should bother with us, or we with them, except in rather a superficial way. I think one ought to move forward through life with one’s own generation, not trying to ape the old or live off the young—I’ve seen so much of that; the first is suicide, and the second is cannibalism.”

  “To move through life?”

  “With dignity, and at one’s own pace. Not hurrying and not resisting. And then, when it all gets too much, to leave with dignity.”

  “What a—what a strong woman you are, Myra,” the Colonel said thoughtfully.

  “It’s just bossiness really, I’m afraid. I get into the habit of it with the students. But I’ll try to control it. Here’s Julian now.”

  “Hullo,” the Colonel said. “Where have you been?”

  “Swimming.”

  “We looked for you, but we couldn’t see you anywhere.”

  “I swam round the point. Any objections?” Julian picked up his towel, and draped it round his neck. He rummaged in the pocket of his shorts for some money, and walked up the beach to the omelette café. When he returned, he was carrying six postcards which he gave to his father. “Here you are,” he said. “Miss Plumstead’s been doing so much letter writing, I thought it might stir your conscience. You haven’t sent a card to mother since we got here.”

  *

  The cottage was so silent. Silence filled the rooms, and lapped at the top of the stairs. As you walked about, you made your way through silence, which closed again behind you, and if you turned on the radio it was no more penetrating than a flashlight in fog; the silence closed in all around it, insulating it to a glow of sound.

  There was no longer any reason for doing anything. The pattern of meals, shopping. and housework, which had made a frame for living, fell in, and everything was shapeless. There was no reason to get out of bed, no reason to eat, no reason to clean the house. There was no reason to go out into the garden, no reason to stay indoors.

  But this is ridiculous, Mrs. Baker thought; I was alone before. Whether Justin is here or not makes no difference. Perhaps. But Justin had been an occupation, sometimes an antagonist, always a shield against the outside world of friends and neighbours and social obligations with which (since she wanted only her sons) she would not be involved. Against Justin also, she had raised barriers—her household duties by day and the television set at night. But now that Justin was gone her occupation had gone with him; there was no longer any reason for running the house, and the television set was not a sufficiently powerful drug.

  Worse than the idleness was the jealousy. It tormented her, and that it should torment her tormented her, for she was a sensible woman, and knew that she ought not to give way to it. The idea of the Colonel’s “enticing Julian’s affections” of his “turning Julian away from her” was ridiculous, the kind of thing one expected from some uneducated working-class woman who took her emotions from cheap novelettes and the Daily Sketch; nevertheless it was there. What relationship were they building together, her son and her husband? Would they return in alliance against her? Would their memories be of experiences shared in which she had no part?—laughing together, drinking together, opening their hearts together? Was it the Colonel now who was one of the gang?

  Mrs. Baker had a pain between the eyes—not exactly a headache, just a pain between the eyes; she had it most of the time now, and was afraid to overdo the aspirin. Lying in bed at night, or in the early morning as she watched the sunlight moving over the carpet, she would say to herself, I am too old to change. She couldn’t change now. She couldn’t “love” Justin. She didn’t want to depend on him, or confide in him, or feel pride in him, or responsibility for him. She was too old. Matters had gone for too long on quite another tack. All she wanted was that things should remain as they had been. Let the Colonel be back home again, a husband by
convention only, an occupation, an old man to look after, simply a physical presence in the house. Let the boys come down unwillingly to visit from time to time, and she would make do with that. Only let this silence, this gnawing jealousy, this aloneness be swiftly over.

  It was to Mrs. Baker in this state of mind that the Colonel wrote his postcard from the beach at Deya. It read, “My dear, We are having a most enjoyable time together. You won’t know us when you see us again. Much love from us both. Justin.”

  *

  The Colonel and Miss Plumstead had walked a great many kilometres (as it seemed to them) along the main road in the sun. The Colonel had taken a photograph of Miss Plumstead as she sat, in her linen dress and wide hat, on a low stone wall silhouetted against the open sky, and Miss Plumstead had taken a photograph of the Colonel in front of a palm tree, looking stern. They had diverged twice from the road, once to examine one of the watch-towers, which turned out to be disappointingly small and smelly, and once to explore what they had been told was an Archduke’s Palace, with a Moorish Garden, and stone arches; the palace itself had been locked, and a lizard on one of the arches had frightened Miss Plumstead, but they were agreed that the place was beautiful, if a little run-down. From time to time as they had walked along, there had been a distant hooting, and then a car had appeared swiftly round one of the bends in the road as the Colonel and Miss Plumstead scrambled up the bank or jumped on the wall for safety. But they had met no other people.

  Now the time was twelve-thirty by the Colonel’s watch, and they had been three hours on their journey, with a break of ten minutes every hour. From the very beginning, the Colonel had explained that it was better on a long march to rest at definite times for definite periods; if you stopped when you felt like it, you would never get finished. Twelve-thirty was lunch time. They sat on a shelf some way up the grassy bank overlooking the road. Far away and below them, they could see the Mediterranean, while behind them the bank rose to what seemed to be the lawn of a large white house. The Colonel unpacked their lunch from the haversack he had been carrying. There was a bottle of white wine, a bottle of water, flat cold Spanish omelettes between bread, tomatoes, olives, oranges, hard-boiled eggs. “Goodness!” Miss Plumstead said, “We can’t possibly eat all that.” The Colonel said that they had better go easy on the wine, because the day was hot and would get hotter, and they still had some way to go. Miss Plumstead bit into her omelette, took a gulp of wine from the bottle, and replied that they would take the bus back.

  A car went by below them, and they watched it out of sight and into sight again, round the receding curves of the road, getting smaller with each new appearance. All around them, unnoticed unless one made a point of listening, there was the tiny constant chirr-chirr of insects. Miss Plumstead, bending to unfasten the white tapes of her rope-soled sandals, dislodged a small stone, which rolled down the bank and hit the road below. A bird called. Then, from somewhere above them, they heard the notes of a harp.

  First there was a single note, then another, then another, as if each string were being separately plucked to test it. Then two glissandi followed in quick succession; then a number of little runs and linked chords, as a racer leaves his mark and runs two or three paces to be ready for the start. Miss Plumstead and the Colonel gazed in astonishment at one another. “What on earth——?” Miss Plumstead said, and the Colonel replied, pointing to the house above them, “It’s from up there somewhere. A harp. Somebody practising.”

  “They can’t know we’re here, can they?”

  “No. They can’t know.”

  Now the music began. It was a dance. Precise, formal, elegant, the music made a pattern in time, a long curving line like the wake of a ship in water; as each note carried the line forward, its predecessors began to dissipate and disappear. The Colonel and Miss Plumstead sat silently listening. Too soon the music stopped. The dance was over. The last note lingered for a while, making its own ripple in the memory, and then was gone.

  “I wish it hadn’t stopped,” Miss Plumstead said.

  “It’ll begin again.”

  “It’s like—like an open-air concert, just for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish we could clap or something. I wish we could go up and see who’s playing, and say thank-you.”

  “Do you, Myra?” the Colonel said. “I’d rather stay here and listen. Whoever it is, she’s not playing for us. We might embarrass her, you know. It’s better like this.”

  “She?”

  “I thought it might be a woman.”

  “I thought it must be a man.”

  “Did you?” They smiled at each other shyly, and the harpist began playing again, a slow sad piece of music, a formal elegy for the past. It was September music, October music, November music. The Colonel looked back at a Justin Baker he had almost forgotten, an ambitious over-earnest person, given, he remembered with surprise, to sudden bursts of physical energy, to eager talk with friends, to pride—given to pride in his talents and appearance. Well, he would not be sentimental about that; it had not come to much. He looked at Miss Plumstead, and saw that in the corner of each of her eyes a tear was forming. The tears grew, came to fullness, and trickled down the sides of her nose. How selfish of me, he thought, not to realize that she——He reached over, and clasped her hand. “Don’t cry, Myra,” he said.

  “It’s silly. I can’t help it.”

  “I know.”

  They sat together on the bank beside the road, their half-eaten lunch on the grass between them, and held hands while the harpist played on and on. The Colonel looked up at the sky. High above—so high they could not hear it—a jet plane was flying. It made a vapour trail, a straight line that cut the sky in two. Some day one of those planes would fly over the Arctic Circle right round the world, bisecting the sky completely so that the two halves would fall apart, letting in the dark upon the world below. Let that come when it would. Meanwhile the Colonel looked down again at the green grass and the brown earth, at the dusty road and the twisted olive trees and the sea. He looked again at the middle-aged lady with the flushed face and peeling nose, dressed in a wide hat and a crumpled linen dress and sandals laced as the young people lace them, and he tightened his grip on Miss Plumstead’s hand, and listened completely to the music. There were ten days more to spend in Deya before the holiday was over.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Home and Out

  The Colonel said, “You know, Julian, I had a sort of idea you mightn’t want to come back.”

  “Stay out there? What could I have done?”

  “I don’t know. Silly of me. Just an idea.”

  “I’ve got to—well, sort of tidy things up a bit, you know, Father. I mean that was one of the reasons for going in a way, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course.” Gazing across the carriage at his son as they talked together, watching him covertly between conversations, the Colonel felt proud of what he had done. The holiday had made such a difference in Julian. He was cleaner-looking, with his hair bleached by the sun and the salt water, and his skin a healthy brown, and his eyes confident and clear. He sat up straight in his corner seat, and as he watched the countryside go by or met his father’s gaze in easy friendship, you could tell that he took an interest in life again. Of course there was still, as he said, a mess—the devil of a mess—to be cleared up. There would be no short cuts, no easy answers; it was a nasty business, no doubt of that. But at least the boy felt a responsibility for it, and was ready to make a start.

  The train travelled from Southampton to Exeter (Central) by way of Salisbury. Thereafter they had only an hour’s journey from Exeter (St. David’s) to Newton Abbot. The platform at St. David’s smelt of old fish. Perhaps Mrs. Baker would be at Newton Abbot to meet them. The Colonel felt a discomfort in his stomach, and found it difficult to drink the tea Julian brought him from the Refreshment Room. Life had to go on, of course; it wasn’t all holidays and—and harp concerts. “You must come and see me whenever you come
to London,” Myra had said, but holiday friendships could not be presumed upon; they were evanescent by nature. Whenever you come to London—what reason had he for doing such a thing?

  “You know,” he said, “I got a bit worried sometimes. Thought I was neglecting you. Bit selfish really.”

  “Best thing you could have done. You let me work things out for myself. I’d only have resented you otherwise.”

  “Suppose you’re right.”

  “Of course I am.” Julian smiled. Suddenly the Colonel realized that he had a reason for apprehension as well as for regret. How would Teresa take the change in Julian? How much would she resent it, because it was not her doing? She should be happy, of course, but chaps weren’t really made like that; it would take a bit of swallowing. “Julian,” he said, “when we get back … your mother….”

  “Yes?”

  “If you could show you’re glad to see her——”

  Julian smiled. “But I shall be glad to see her.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.” A moment of confusion. The Colonel had taken it for granted that Julian would be as reluctant to be back again as he was himself. It was presumptuous of him to have thought so. Now he was ashamed.

  As the train ran along the sea wall at Dawlish, and in and out of the tunnels to Teignmouth, and turned inland by the river to Newton Abbot, the Colonel remained silent. He was confused, and a little ashamed, and there was also doubt, nagging at the back of his mind to be admitted. He found that he did not believe that Julian would be glad to see his mother again; he acknowledged to himself that perhaps this was because he did not want to believe it, but the doubt was there nevertheless, and of this doubt also he was ashamed.