The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  “Like me?”

  “I suppose.”

  Julian said, “I’ll tell you something. I killed father. I didn’t mean to; I just wanted to shock him. Everybody was treating me—well, as if I were just an object—reforming me, sending me off on holidays; I got sick of it. You see, I knew it wouldn’t be any good. I wanted to get my own back. I went wild during that holiday. I did all sorts of things I’d never done before—meaner than before, and more awful. He never knew that. I pretended, you see. But I wrote it all down in a diary, everything I’d done, and I illustrated it with pictures I’d bought from one of those postcard sellers, and I left the diary on top of the stairs for him to find. I knew he wouldn’t want to read it, but I thought he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. I thought, ‘Let him be tempted for a change’. And he found it, and read it. That’s what brought on his attack, and when he fell, he hit his head.”

  Charles said, “Does mother know?”

  “Not unless he told her.”

  “He wouldn’t tell her.”

  “I must have gone right over the top,” Julian said.

  “Yes. Are you still over the top?”

  “No. Not like that. I don’t think anything like that could happen again.”

  “It’s not important then.”

  “No.”

  “What about the other thing? Do you think you can change?”

  “Not really.”

  “Important to try, though.”

  “Oh, yes,” Julian said. “Important to try. For you too.”

  “We’ll both go on trying then. And see what happens. Even if it doesn’t do any any good, we have to try.”

  The boys had gone by the afternoon train. Mrs. Baker was alone in the cottage.

  The cottage was filled with silence again, flowing like mercury from one room to another, but not with silence only, for it seemed to Mrs. Baker that there was a clock in every room, and wherever she went she could hear the tick! tick! tick! tick! measuring the silence into lengths for easy use. In this silence, her hearing became acute. It was not only the ticking she could hear, but the sound of the gas meter and the electricity meter, measuring the cubic feet and ohms. She could hear the insects in the garden, and the creaking of boards in the house, and the leaves of the trees in the drive rustling together, and the sound of her own footsteps.

  The boys had gone by the afternoon train. She would sell the cottage, of course, and move into a flat in town. She would not be dependent on her children. She would find a place of her own. Perhaps there would be some kind of work she could do. She would help at a nursery school. She made some tea, and drank it, and looked at the Women’s Page of the Daily Telegraph, which was lying on the table. When will men realize, she read, that there are times when a woman simply wants to be by herself? She put down the paper, and went out into the garden. Mr. Sayers had sent Sam to level off the earth on the Colonel’s grave, and lay new turves on top of it, so there it was beneath the almond tree, green and artificial like a miniature lawn in some Municipal Gardens. Beneath those turves her husband lay in a casket of polished walnut.

  She stood there in the garden, gazing at the grave without seeing it, while the dusk deepened around her. The boys had gone back to London by the afternoon train, and her husband lay buried beneath the almond tree. She would have to get a man in to look after the flat in town. She could hear the vicar’s Vespa far away in the lanes, and somewhere the sound of a bicycle bell, and then the church clock striking the half hour. Perhaps she would advertise for a companion, or open a Guest House, or do cream teas in summer; she did not wish to be dependent on anybody. She turned, and walked back to the house. She could hear the hinge of the kitchen door as she opened it, and the clocks ticking, and the meters turning, and the sound of her footsteps. She went into the drawing-room, and turned on the television set. She sat watching it in the dusk, until first the vision appeared, and then came the sound. Harpic! Harpic! sang the television set; The sign of a clean, clean home! Mrs. Baker began to weep. There was a man interviewing housewives about a washing powder. Mrs. Baker wept violently, uncontrollably, a storm of weeping which quite drowned out what the man was saying about brightness. The picture changed. Someone’s mum just doesn’t know, went the television set, while Mrs. Baker wept, and wept, and there was no one, no one at all to hear.

  About the Author

  John Bowen was born in India, sent ‘home’ to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943–47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for children’s television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar, Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain, Little Boxes, The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin; there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

  Copyright

  Faber Finds edition first published in 2008

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © John Bowen, 1959

  The right of John Bowen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30514–8