Faith Fox

by Jane Gardam

  The art class was busy this morning with a huge collage planned for a Nativity tableau on Christmas Eve. The Tibetans were not excited by it. One of them, a girl with good A levels at Liverpool, was wild to get into the Slade. The Priors was only her temporary billet while she waited for interviews. She was building a portfolio in a rather absent-minded way when she wasn’t spending time on the telephone sharing long silences with a busking boyfriend in London.

  The girl was dismissive of mysterious Jocasta, who had been out of touch with what was going on in Art colleges for over twenty years. The girl sulked and lolled, looking Jocasta up and down, disagreeing with all her theory and practice and scratching her hands through her raspberry-red hair. Only her eyes were Tibetan; her clothes and accent aggressively scouse. Silly bitch, this girl thought as Jocasta’s fingers cut and pasted, with her posh voice. Jocasta was talking today about negative space. ‘Negative space, for Chrissake,’ said the Tibetan girl to herself.

  Negative space, thought Jocasta, snipping at shredded silk, daubing it orange for sunrise, is where I live.

  Oh what to me the little room

  That was brimmed up with prayer and rest . . .

  She had stopped sleeping with Jack long ago, long before Andrew had returned with the baby. Jack had understood. He had understood perfectly, he said, the urge for celibacy in a woman no longer young and particularly in Jocasta, who had been on an unearthly spiritual plane in India. They had met so late, he said, looking at her with love. Everyone, The Missus, The Smikes, the hangers-on around The Priors, thought Jack was a fool to love Jocasta, who was a cold fish. Jack never complained, seemed to have no conception of infidelity or treachery in anyone. His trust was ridiculous, childlike. He looked, he loved.

  But he does want me in his bed, she thought, and otherwise brimmed up with prayer and rest. And Andrew did let me go. He ditched me. He made a political marriage. And look where it got him.

  But yet there’s something good in Andrew. Something fearless, unchanging. Look what happened. Within an hour. He could have held me for ever. He still could hold me for ever. He shall hold me for ever.

  He bade me out into the gloom, she thought,

  And my breast lies upon his breast.

  ‘D’you never think of going home?’ she asked the sulky girl, the Tibetan bohemian. ‘Isn’t it a bit easier now? Couldn’t you get back somehow, at least to Nepal? It’s your continent, your culture.’

  ‘I’m not goin’ back to that sort o’ painting, thanks very much. It’s only boys do it anyway and it’s all copying old Buddhist stuff. Might as well work for Disney. Coom on, Jocasta, let’s get to it. Let’s hear about this negative space.’

  ‘It’s what we’re doing here,’ she said, and smiled over at unsmiling Pema. ‘Move over a bit, could you, Pema, while I open the screen up. Shouldn’t you put her down in her cot for a while?’

  Pema didn’t speak. Knitting without dropping the hump across her chest that was Faith, she waddled to another part of the workshop and sat with her back to everybody. Laying down her needles, she adjusted the baby and began to heat up milk.

  ‘So,’ said Jocasta, ‘we do this. We block in roughly and then in detail, first sketching, then drawing, then the layers of colours and textures. Cloth—oh, all the substances we want. Grit, glitter, granite chips, bits of heather, coal-dust, beads, baubles, ribbons, glass, net, everything. These are to surround the subject only. The suburbs of the city. The city, we leave bare. We almost reject it. We ignore it. We have no feeling for it, no plans. We do not allow ourselves the concept of a subject. We let it materialise. It emerges by our creation of the material around. Its clothing, if you like. The material is in part its creator: the material is the cause. If we do this faithfully we find in the end that the subject of the work shines out the clearer, apparently of Its own accord. Life of its own. It’s a way of arriving there by standing back, letting the Creator create so we sometimes get a big surprise. Well, here of course we know what the centre of the thing is going to be because it’s for the Christmas do in the chapel. It has to be the Nativity in the centre, obviously. But the idea is that perhaps the central object will be revealed more dramatically, more clearly, if we don’t overwork it. Don’t work at it exclusively or even at all. Sometimes the subject can only be found if it’s crept up on like this. The central point of this picture can turn out to be more than we can bear to reveal directly. Sort of wearing dark glasses. Perpetual light is, after all, unbearable. Well, for mortals.’

  ‘Is it religious, then?’ the second Tibetan woman asked. ‘Christian. Obey the doctrine and the faith looks after itself?’

  ‘Or Buddhist?’ said a third.

  ‘God, let’s hope it’s not Buddhist,’ said the A-level Liverpudlian.

  ‘It’s Methodist,’ said someone. ‘“The trivial round, the common task, would furnish all we ought to ask.” Be good like that, keep your eyes down, and you’ll get God as a prize at the end. Right at the heart of it all.’

  ‘If you like,’ said Jocasta, who kept off God, ‘or it is peace, truth, karma, a goal.’

  ‘Keeping your eyes down,’ said the other older woman of the group. She held up the thing she was stitching. It was like a little rectangular kit of framework sticks crossed at the corners, the fabric bound round and filled with a pattern of wools in three colours: a black circular pupil, bronze iris against the oval white, a dense, small tapestry about four inches by four. The third eye, held aloft, its last strands not yet all woven in, overlooked the little group. Jocasta shuddered.

  ‘It’s not a very adventurous idea,’ said the Slade-girl-to-be.

  ‘I think it is, quite,’ said Jocasta, ‘it is quite brave. And it’s a patient way of working with sometimes a great result. I’ve been surprised almost every time by what comes out at the end. If you push all your ordinary tricks and gimmicks and—persiflages—out of the way. Stop thinking of faith.’

  Oh what to me my mother’s care, she thought,

  The house where I was safe and warm,

  The shadowy blossom of my hair

  Will hide us from the bitter storm.

  Oh Andrew, Andrew, Andrew . . . but how can I leave him? Jack is my mother and my father and he keeps me safe and warm. Or he would if I would let him. But Andrew, oh come in under the blossom of my hair, oh damnation, oh sex. Oh my love.

  Pema came across to them again, walking calmly, and sat. She began to feed Faith Fox her bottle of milk and the child’s round pink hand like a starfish stretched up and traced a pattern in the air, then patted and stroked the old woman’s cheek.

  Outside the wind blew. The time was most certainly winter now and becoming cold. Most of Ellerby Priors had been closed down until the spring came. No more groups would be coming, no public events or days of meditation or farm visits. The curling lists on the notice boards could all be taken down now if somebody remembered. When the Tibetans left in the spring the guest sheds would be closed. The refectory had already been cleared and shuttered, the main priory dormitory stripped, and such heating as there was drained down. The skeleton staff of The Missus, The Smikes, Jack, Jocasta and Philip drew in each night round the stove of the old kitchen. Snow could sometimes begin in December and the steep road off the ridge was regularly blocked during January. The deep-freezes had been filled by The Missus with bread and chunks of long-dead Whitby cod and the barn was full of Jack’s potatoes and swedes. There was discussion about the economics of buying half a frozen cow; about how maybe this year it would make sense for Philip to be a full boarder at the school rather than Jocasta having to walk to the cross and coax the car alive and brave the moor road four times a day.

  Oh when, oh when, shall I see Andrew? thought Jocasta. And when he does come back, whatever shall I do? How shall I behave? Surely he’ll come at Christmas. He’ll want to look at the child. I want him to take me back with him. Yes, I do. And I should. It is r
ight and normal that I should. It’s healthy. And I want to do something for Philip. There’s nothing here for him. He’s not like a child. He’s not like any of them up here anyway. They’re North, that’s all there is about it. They’re as intelligent as us. Doctors’ and solicitors’ children. A private school I said I’d never countenance. They learn French in a fashion. But they’re different. It’s not the voices, it’s the glowering looks they have, and they’re so rude and they’re North. My God, I hate it here.

  And he spends all his free time with The Smikes and the old funnies at the seaside, so-called grandparents. Oh, but I have no money. I’ve left all my own life behind me. I’m going nowhere. Teaching Negative Space to Tibetans. I’m lost. Oh, how I want him. Andrew.

  26

  Hugo Jefford had been prophetic when he said that the Seton-Fairley wedding would be the last chance for him to see his old friend Puffy, husband of drifting Madeleine. It was Puffy, however, who survived the winter and Hugo who that warm autumn left the world. He left it suddenly, without any goodbyes.

  And on such a lovely morning. The dew was on the Coombe Hill lawn and the marks of his bedroom slippers on their last journey suggested some passing giant or summer snowman marching from the house towards the three great garages. He had brought Pammie early tea that morning, a habit that had somehow established itself since her uncharacteristic oversleeping the day after her return from the North with the bag of potatoes. Hugo appeared to enjoy this new duty. He had stood drinking his own tea at the window, looking over his garden, as Pammie sat up straight against her pillows, sipping and glaring ahead of her.

  They said little and pretty well the same things each morning. ‘Busy today?’ and ‘Remarkable weather. Extraordinary autumn, this,’ and ‘They say it’s cold in the North.’ ‘Yes. Odd. It’s like spring here.’

  Hugo had stood hunched with his broad old back to her, his ears sticking out. The rising sun shone through them and turned them rosy. ‘You ought to get your hair cut,’ Pammie had said. Looking hard at his back she felt impatient. She felt young. She felt undervalued.

  ‘Hardly there to cut,’ he said, ‘not like this wretched lawn. He’ll have to go over it again.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘So he keeps having to. Makes a fearful hash of it. I’d like to have a go myself.’

  ‘Well, do, if you want a stroke.’

  ‘Stroke, my foot.’

  ‘I don’t want to stroke your foot. And I don’t want to be landed with someone like poor old Puffy. It’s probably Puffy who sent poor Madeleine off her marbles. I mean right off her marbles.’

  ‘Or vice versa,’ said Hugo. ‘We’re very lucky, Pammie, you and I. We’re so fit.’

  ‘Well, I’m hardly Madeleine’s age, if you don’t mind my saying so. You used to be always telling people I could almost be your daughter. Almost.’

  ‘Almost,’ he said. ‘I told the nurse you could, you know. Just to stop her getting ideas. Then she said, “Well, I could be your granddaughter.”’(‘And I don’t care,’ she had also said, but Hugo didn’t say so now.)

  ‘You liked her, didn’t you?’ Pammie all of a sudden found that she too liked Hugo and as much as ever. ‘Bring me some more tea. You’re an old reprobate.’ She pulled his head towards her by one of the rosy ears and kissed him.

  ‘That feller’s in the garden now,’ he said, ‘I can hear him. I’ll just nip down and catch him. Tell him to get the big mower out, not the Flymo. When it’s dried up a bit he could get a cut today.’

  ‘You’ll catch cold.’

  ‘No. Lovely morning. Fresh. Like spring.’ Pammie never saw the dark footsteps in the unruly grass because, by the time she discovered Hugo dead beside the Bentley, round which he had been manoeuvring the mower, they had disappeared. Hugo had been mistaken about the gardener. It had been the postman he had heard. He had taken the letters from him and then walked to the garage. He bade the postman a courteous goodbye, took the garage key from its compartment behind a loose brick, wheeled out the mower and leaned to the self-starter.

  His death flattened Pammie as nothing in her life had done. It put into proportion deaths of the children of friends and all attendant emotional shocks and sorrows. The weeping for Holly Fox over tumblers of whisky, Holly’s angry funeral, everyone seething at the behaviour of others, the distaste of the whole bazaar for the superficiality of Thomasina, the righteous disgust for her love affair, even the comfortable pride Pammie had begun to develop for the baby: all were revealed as things of a slight order. Most of them she now identified as boredom or self-indulgence, self-importance with almost a whiff of prurience. And most of all Pammie was revolted by her hearty behaviour at The Priors, that madhouse full of cranks. Whatever had she been doing there? Not one’s own sort at all. Religious fanatics. She had behaved like a schoolgirl rushing up there with the baby. She had been wanting to show up Thomasina. Now she was ashamed of herself. Seedy eccentricity was not the world of Coombe and it was only a seedy eccentric with a very nice face who had been gushing all over her up there, not someone you could know. You couldn’t possibly ask him to dinner. Nor, if it came to that, the laconic brother either. Secretive Andrew, running off in the heather. Not her generation and certainly not her friend. He was no more than the son-in-law of an ex-friend, and she should not have pushed into other people’s lives. Riffraff lives. Not worthy behaviour for the wife of Hugo. Hugo the good.

  Childless and alone in the huge house except for Hugo’s sorrowful old dog, Pammie surprised all her friends by her heaviness and inanition. Hugo had after all for years been no more than a benign shadow seated with glass and newspaper under a standard lamp, Pammie a stocky seraph flying past him at intervals, eyes fixed on her own ploys.

  But Pammie the great organiser of Surrey rituals now could not even give orders for the funeral or the wake. Pammie the paradigm of common sense and courage in the face of disaster, so decisive and practical, now allowed letters of condolence to pile up unanswered, gave up her magistrate’s duties and her golf and her singing. Bridge she just about managed, ‘for her mind’s sake,’ she said, ‘and as long as nobody says anything,’ but she was withdrawn and looked disagreeable and her partner grew fidgety and then sniffy. There was a vulgar, old-persons’ sort of row and that was that. Pammie stayed home.

  But the worst of the loss of Hugo was how it attacked like a killing virus the very gut of Pammie, her sure, religious life. Froze it. Set it in aspic. God melted under its strobe light. And this hard cold light seemed to Pammie to be some sort of poisoned present Hugo had sent her posthumously from wherever it was he had gone when he fell, face forward, across the mower as the late autumn roses sparkled at him through the open garage doors. Hugo’s going pierced that layer of Pammie that she had confidently labelled Christian and out of it spilled only a ragbag of old rubbish.

  She examined this ragbag as soon as the stately funeral was over. It had been a rustling, whispering, concerned but not very upsetting funeral. There had been much good fellowship, several rows of stout old gentlemen in long dark overcoats (‘Was old Hugo Jewish?’), massive wreaths, and several unknown pale new partners from his old city firm. The nurse they’d had for Faith had been there with a white handkerchief to her face, and two or three rather nice-looking women Pammie could not place. There had been white moustachios in cricketing ties. Old Puffy had been there, leaning back in his wheelchair examining the vaulting of the church roof as if in search of angels. He had been attended by a young man in pinstripes with a bowler hat beside him on the pew. Someone said it was a butler. He had wheeled Puffy past Pammie at the church door and bowed. Puffy had said only, ‘Bad news, old girl, bad news.’

  Madeleine had been absent but Thomasina had been there (without the general) and so had Andrew Braithwaite, with a little dark woman Pammie felt she knew. She wondered if it was a girlfriend and thought, Oh how splendid, before all the petty Holly Fox bu
siness slid out of her head again. She could not even remember, as they all roared out the last hymn, Fight the Good Fight, she could not remember the name of Holly Fox’s little baby, who had lived with her and with Hugo under their rose-tiled roof. She could not conceive what she had ever had to do with the child.

  But then she saw before her Hugo’s face again, the face she had so terrifyingly been unable to recall since the day he died, and his voice saying, ‘Gets your finger in a vice. Smiles at you,’ and there at last, before the final verse, she began to cry.

  It was Thomasina who looked after her. After the funeral she saw to the guests back at the house, ran round after the caterers had gone, tidied up, gathered the service sheets, the tickets from the wreaths, put them on Pammie’s desk, said she would deal with them. She had brought whisky and little sandwiches for the evening, for both of them, as if there had been no rift, no death of Holly, no general, no Egypt, no Faith. A little warmth began to ease its way into Pammie again.

  Thomasina was now the image of her old self in her gold jewellery and smart shoes and she guided along a conversation almost macabrely ordinary. She suggested that Pammie should come back and stay with her at Spindleberries at least for the next week or so. Later they could talk about holiday plans. Hadn’t Pammie been thinking of Cyprus? They discussed Apex fares, then the appeal of going soft and travelling at least Club Class. They discussed dates, fitting them in around various summer appointments: the Chelsea Flower Show, the Cheltenham Festival, and so on. They might go at Easter . . . Or what about Christmas? The cadences of the sentences suggested the old way of things again, that after a stone sinks the water does eventually stop rippling. Their two voices worked for the future, towards a long-term forecast and, damn it all, a pleasant one.

  However, the old way of things for Pammie had included her habitual and lengthy conversations with God, which had filled up much of the time when she was not attending to her almost perpetual interior monologues addressed to friends and acquaintances. These monologues now had ceased. Pammie had discovered that they were no longer important, that the unconscious recipients of the monologues were no longer important. She had, she found out, only addressed them anyway to the unimportant. To the Jinnies and Vinnies and Daffies and Janes. Hugo had never been addressed as he had never intruded on any of her dreams, sleeping or waking.