by MARY HOCKING
Dorothy met him half an hour later. He was standing in North Street staring at a banner which read. ‘Do you want this – or a by-pass?’ He said, ‘This is all my work.’ No one else, she thought, could have invested these simple words with such desolation. She laughed and took his arm.
‘You must be extraordinarily athletic, Daniel!’
He looked at her in bewilderment. ‘I don’t see how you can laugh about it.’
‘But it’s the most magnificent joke! I should have thought you would be proud of them.’
‘You assume it’s them?’ he asked dully.
‘The word seems to have got around. The cow was a giveaway.’
‘Cow?’
‘I’m afraid you’re too late for the cow. But there must still be a lot going on. Come on!’ She urged him gently forward. ‘You must admit that it has been carried out with great elegance, to say nothing of a proper respect for the law.’
‘Respect for the law! I doubt if anyone else will think that.’
‘But what can they be charged with? I haven’t seen a single road sign defaced, have you? Only a few additional ones.’
‘But what about obstruction?’
‘The signs aren’t obstructing anyone. The motorists are doing that.’
‘Some of them are going to be very annoyed.’
‘That’s not a matter for the police! It’s the governors of Mansfield who will be pressed to mete out punishment. Poor Harry! It’s not a situation he will enjoy.’
‘I shall never forgive myself if the boys suffer in any way.’ Daniel looked around him, his face screwed up in anticipation of suffering.
‘Suffer!’ She was a natural iconoclast and the chaos caused her little concern. ‘Oh, Daniel, they’ll be telling their grandchildren about the day they had a famous victory! Do you imagine Yeominster will have a one-way system after this?’
Gerald Grey, who had just returned home after being hosed down by the firemen, echoed this sentiment if none other. ‘We’re going to have a by-pass now,’ he said grimly to his wife. ‘And one thing you can be sure of – it will go through Cobbett’s Bridge!’
Although the boys had agreed to keep out of the town, this proved more than could be borne, and when they had a free period in the early afternoon, Colin Everett, Jem Protheroe and Giles came out to view their creation. They immediately saw that Daniel had been right when he emphasised the difficulty of establishing order out of chaos. Each absorbed this lesson in his own way: Colin Everett saw it as his initiation as an urban guerrilla; Giles thought it was magnificent madness, a once-for-all gesture he would not care to repeat; Jem Protheroe was glad he was not a policeman.
On the periphery of the town, the police were gradually gaining control; patiently, car by car, they attacked the problem as the sun grew hotter and the petrol and manure fumes made a dense haze over the town. To the people in the stranded trains along the line, in the cars in the centre of the town, or sitting hopelessly on kerbs, in shop doorways, or anywhere they could rest their weary limbs, there seemed no possibility that life would ever return to normal. But by half-past two the first street was cleared and traffic began to move down it from the near-by T junction. The evacuation of Yeominster had started.
In the centre of the town, street traders were prospering, ice cream vendors went from car to car, enterprising greengrocers came out with trays of oranges and lemons as though it was half-time in the Yeominster versus The Rest match. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses were busy making the most of a captive audience. A young man had stripped and was lying on the roof of his car, his white body resembling something on a slab in the Macfisheries. On the corner of North Street, the European link was being forged. A Spanish driver explained earnestly to a group of girls, ‘Spain is good for holiday, perhaps, one week, two week . . . but no is good to live in, see? When I make money, I no live in Spain. I come here, perhaps . . .’
‘You come here!’ the girls giggled.
‘I keep petrol station,’ he said.
Alderman Pike had been conducting less good-natured interviews. He had started by trying to question some of the drivers in the hope of obtaining evidence. This had worked well with those who did not know him; but those who lived in the town soon became abusive and he had to retire to the town hall, which he reached with some difficulty. A number of motorists who had abandoned their cars had gathered outside the town hall to express their feelings. Alderman Pike was ill-advised enough to address them. He promised that the culprits would be brought to justice and severely punished, but the blood they wanted was his own and he had to be rescued by the hall porter and two cleaners with buckets and brooms. Windows in the town hall had been smashed and one burly lorry driver was shouting that he was going to send bills for his damaged goods to Alderman Mr. Ruddy Pike! Someone began to sing, ‘We’ll hang Andy Pike from a sour apple tree’.
Erica had moved about the town strenuously but without direction. She did not really mind the confusion and liked the intensity of emotion; it was rather as she had imagined wartime London, people talking to strangers and seeming to care more than usual. She only had a very vague idea of what was happening and was quite unable to separate cause from effect. Nevertheless, she entered with gusto into any demonstration that was happening. As she stood outside the town hall, roaring that she would hang Andy Pike from a sour apple tree, she felt that something was being created and she was part of it. ‘This is how Giles feels when he demonstrates,’ she thought, and was warmly glad that she could at last understand him. Harry, trying to get through to the town hall, was heaved against her; he thought she looked totally different to the person whom he knew, like some idiot peasant woman caught up in a revolt which she had neither the will nor the brains to understand. ‘She simply wants to make a noise, like all the rest of this stupid, howling mob!’ he thought angrily. She put a warm, moist hand on his wrist and shouted, ‘Come on! You’ve got to sing!’
‘I’ve never heard anything so stupid!’
She glanced at him in surprise. There were welts and weals on his angry, sun-battered face, and his shirt was crumpled and darkened with sweat. ‘How ill-natured he looks,’ she thought. Quite brutish, in fact, but not in a lusty way. The crowd gave another heave and they were torn apart. Erica went on singing.
The cathedral was the only place that seemed likely to be restful. Dorothy led Daniel towards it after their tour of the town. Daniel was in a state of deep confusion. Whatever he had expected his sessions at Mansfield to produce – what agonising intellectual revision of aims, what painstaking reappraisal of motives, what humble dedication to local reform – it had not been this. He had commended his pupils to the god of small beginnings. The god of small beginnings, it seemed, favoured farce.
As Dorothy looked at him, standing beside her on the pavement’s edge, it seemed to her that he had the makings of a clown. The seriousness of purpose was there, the unwavering sincerity, the fortitude in the face of one disaster after another, and the supreme gift of producing instant chaos. There was, too, that nobility of nature which does not seek to blame others for its misfortunes. And finally, he had the resilience to survive it all; vulnerable and hopeful, determined and unprepared, emotional responses unimpaired by shock, nerves undeadened by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he would stride into the future, angular, ill-advised and passionately caring. She took his arm and led him forward, holding firmly to his sleeve. Life without Daniel was no longer a possibility.
They sat in the cathedral. Out in the cloisters, The Rose of Sharon munched the grass and the dog slept at his master’s feet. In the cathedral, it was cool and quiet and Dorothy felt a vast, soaring happiness. Daniel was not happy.
‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘They were preparing all this, and I had no idea . . .’ He had been betrayed, not by the boys, but by some inadequacy in himself. ‘I told them to involve themselves in the life of the town, to start where they had an opportunity of making their protests heard . . .’
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bsp; ‘And they have done just that!’
‘Why didn’t they tell me?’
‘They thought you would try to stop them I expect. Would you have done?’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought this far ahead.’ He dragged a hand across his eyes and said wearily, ‘What is wrong with me, that I’m such a failure with people?’
‘You didn’t fail with Emma,’ she pointed out.
‘Emma is almost a part of myself. I seem to work out my moves with her according to some kind of inner music. But people . . . other people . . . I have such respect for them. But it seems I don’t understand them very well. We set such store by human relationships. Why, when it is all so hit-and-miss?’
He looked ahead at the brilliant tapestry and beyond to the stained-glass windows. He didn’t like it any more than he had liked All Saints, but now he was not concerned with the childishness, but with the idea it so inappropriately and inadequately sought to enshrine. Love. ‘Love is of God and God is love’ – a tautology. Love is immeasurable, ineffable, unfathomable and immaculate. It was all such arrant nonsense! Love, having neither shape nor substance, being outside the spectrum, not comprised of elements, having no atomic weight, no place in the periodic table: a philosophic concept born of man’s need to fill a vacuum. Irrational, imprecise, incapable of exact definition – a source, damn it, of eternal unrest!
‘Why aren’t I more successful in my relationships?’ he asked angrily.
‘It depends on what you call success. You made a great impression on those boys.’
‘But I didn’t know what kind of an impression I was making!’
‘Does it matter! Must you always know?’
‘Matter?’ He stared at her in consternation. ‘Of course it matters! One must know what one is doing, surely? Otherwise how is one ever to dare to offer advice or give guidance?’
‘You are asking the impossible.’
‘Impossible?’
‘I think it is very unlikely that we ever know the good we have done to others – or the harm, for that matter.’
‘That is terrible!’
‘Maybe. But that is life.’ She put her hand in his. ‘Life is a random happening, Daniel.’
Chapter Seventeen
A bird was singing outside Dorothy’s window; he sounded happy. Are birds happy? What right has one to say they are not, that they know nothing of such states as happiness? Soon, she would be starting an argument about the rights of birds. It showed the state they had got themselves into in the past week.
Her mother was up. Dorothy must have heard some slight movement; yet it was as though the knowledge did not depend on hearing, the feeling between them was so strong just now. A week ago, her mother had said to her, ‘You’re going away, then? I hope you know what you are doing.’
Dorothy had for some time known what she intended to do, but whether this was the same as knowing what she was doing, she could not be sure. Nevertheless, she had replied, ‘Yes, I know what I am doing.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
Mrs. Prentice had not sighed and said, ‘I shan’t be here when you come back,’ as she sometimes did when Dorothy or Erica went on holiday, or even, if she was particularly petulant, when they went out for the day. Now, when it was probable she would not see her daughter again, she made no parade of her feelings. But she was not sleeping well and Dorothy was aware of this. She longed to comfort her; but she would not be here long and soon her mother must manage without her. They must all manage without her. It would be hard for them. The thought caused her some distress.
She sat by the window and listened to the bird, while the sun came up through a haze which promised yet another fine day. Yes, she was distressed for those whom she would leave behind, but the distress only served to give an edge to a feeling of quite a different order. Could it be wrong to feel like this? The question no longer seemed important. She was so full of joy that wrong and right were no longer relevant.
Along the landing, a door opened and Erica called urgently to Giles. It was today that Giles and the other boys were to come before the governors. Parents were invited to attend and it had been decided that Erica alone should accompany Giles, since Daniel’s presence could hardly be of any help to his son. Dorothy wondered how Harry would deal with this.
And Harry, breakfasting, also wondered how he would deal with it. Harry was tolerant, which meant he tolerated the things he could tolerate. Yeominster had seldom presented him with the intolerable. For this, he was grateful to it, and in return he was determined that it should be maintained as a place that was tolerable to live in. People (those whose property had not been damaged) laughed about the events of July 2nd. It was not the kind of laughter which belonged to good sense; it was malicious, satirical, with more than a hint of anarchy about it. Laughter should be a gentle thing, when it ceases to be so, one must cease to laugh. Harry was serious about the threat to Yeominster. He no longer had any notion of escaping from Yeominster; it was his home, a reasonable place, a place with an even disposition, not given to extremes, a place where controversy never became strident and discontent did not flare into violence. He was prepared to defend these gentle qualities. His determination was hardened by the television interview. Even now, several days later, he felt a hot flush of anger as he thought about that interview.
Most of the boys were inarticulate and a little silly. Colin Everett was altogether too articulate and most viewers must have wanted to kick him in the pants. Giles Kerr came across best. The interviewer asked him, ‘Don’t you think there are other means which should be open to intelligent people like yourself to make your views known?’
Giles agreed that there should be, but felt that in practice this was not the case.
The interviewer said, ‘You have, after all, a democratically elected council.’
‘And if they don’t behave democratically once they are elected?’
‘Mightn’t the answer be to seek election yourself once you are eligible?’
Giles said, ‘Do you know the average age of members of the Yeominster Borough Council?’
The interviewer did not.
‘Sixty-five. This includes two in the eighties, a fair sprinkling in the seventies, a solid mass in the sixties, and two youngsters in the late forties.’
The interviewer said, ‘I see.’
Giles said, ‘I can’t wait that long.’
At this point, the camera switched away from Giles, thus depriving him of the opportunity to develop his theme on the time it takes to bring about even the smallest change in a democracy. It was not unfortunate for him. He had made his point and had not been allowed to alienate his audience.
It was ridiculous that a youth of his age should be provided with an audience – more than ridiculous, it was intolerable. Authority must assert itself. Harry warned Erica that he took a serious view of the matter.
She said, ‘Oh dear, yes.’ Her manner struck him as furtive. In fact, she was secretly proud of her son: already she saw him as a famous politician. ‘You must admit there was something rather splendid about the way he stood up to that abominable little interviewer,’ she said.
‘Splendid!’ Her stupidity angered Harry. ‘Fascism, that was what it was, the whole affair – fascism! I didn’t fight Hitler to allow fascism to take root in my own backyard.’
‘People are saying Alderman Pike is a dictator.’ She did not seem to realise that there was any real point of difference between them. He did not argue with her. But the more he thought about her, the more she seemed to be fragments which did not assemble into a whole person; some of the fragments he had liked, but that was not enough. As he prepared for the governors’ meeting, he had already decided that he must not allow respect for Erica Kerr’s feelings to influence him.
It was going to be a difficult meeting, particularly since he could expect no support from Hepple. Hepple was the stuff of which Harry had always suspected martyrs are made. Not only had he refused to condemn h
is pupils, but he had adopted an unnecessarily abrasive attitude, asking one reporter, ‘Would it not be more to the point if you concentrated on how the document came to be prepared, rather than how one copy came to be appropriated?’ His attitude with regard to Daniel Kerr was scarcely more conciliatory. ‘Mr. Kerr has my full support,’ was all that he would say. When pressed by a reporter, ‘Head master, you surely can’t be happy about what has happened?’ he replied that to be happy was no more the lot of the head master than the policeman.
Daniel himself had done nothing to ease matters. As Harry had read Daniel Kerr’s character, he would in this situation take all to himself in one glorious outburst of remorse designed to shield those involved. In fact, his public utterances had been remarkable for their reticence. When asked if he took the blame for what had happened, he replied, ‘Neither the blame nor the credit.’ Did he disapprove of the boys’ action? ‘No.’ Had he known what was planned, would he have advised a more cautious approach? ‘Regrettably, I might have done. This is a young man’s venture, and I am no longer young.’ He had, it seemed, no intention of shouldering the burden of guilt. This left Harry the task of establishing where the guilt lay. Undoubtedly, if he took a firm line he would suffer temporary unpopularity. He was, however, a shrewd judge of public feeling, and he was sure that once the laughter had died down someone would be expected to settle the account. A show of firmness would not hurt his reputation in the long run.
