by MARY HOCKING
Tom noted these things while Norma Rossiter talked. He had been doing this for so many years that people like Norma didn’t register properly, which was why he could tolerate her so much more easily than could the rest of his colleagues. Even the initial surprise occasioned by her ridiculous decision to apply for a deputyship had worn off and he was no longer interested. Yet, although his brain continued to make notes on the country scene, the process gave him no satisfaction because he knew that when he got back he would not be able to turn these mental jottings to advantage. But he would not be able to get rid of them, either; they would be added to all the other phrases and images which had gone to waste. Sometimes he was frightened by the thought of how bad it must be for him to carry within him all this undisposable dead material.
‘. . . roll over on her back with her paws in the air.’
‘What?’ He had been making reasonably appropriate responses all the while, but this defeated him.
‘The Huber woman,’ Norma said impatiently. ‘I was saying she probably wouldn’t give you any trouble, that type never does with a man.’
A car came over the brow of the hill and drew into a space hollowed out of the hedge so that Tom could pass. Tom acknowledged the driver, who banged vigorously on his horn.
‘Do we know him?’ Norma turned round, but the enormous collar blocked her view; the fur tickled Tom’s cheek.
‘She seems quite efficient,’ he said.
‘The Huber? Well, that may pass for efficiency in Schools Section, but my standards are higher.’ She was roguishly provocative; but there was evidence of a malice that was more authentic than the roguishness. Tom thought she harboured a malicious spirit, just as Mather harboured a sadistic one. ‘She’ll spend all morning checking one page of a report, and she’ll argue endlessly about a colon, just to show how literate she is. She has a quite pathetic desire to convince people that she is an intellectual manqué. “Absolutely petrified by Miss Rossiter”,’ Norma assumed a mincing tone. ‘But not so petrified she hadn’t the damn cheek to correct the English in my reports.’
Out of the corner of his eye Tom saw something float in the air, low over the hedge, like a strange-shaped bird. They were high now, hills on either side, and the wind was up. After a moment the same thing happened again, only this time the wind caught the shape and tossed and twirled it around. Images came to mind; a lost soul, or better still, the ghost of a thought whirled about, never taking root. . . . More shapes followed. A very disturbing image came to mind. He stopped the car. ‘Just a minute, I want to investigate. . . .’
‘Bit open, not to say draughty!’ Norma’s laugh was gusty as the wind.
Tom walked to the back of the car. He had not shut the boot properly and the mound of papers and files was now somewhat smaller. Norma, becoming suspicious, got out of the car. ‘I hope you haven’t got a flat tyre,’ she said belligerently as she came towards him. As Tom thought of the car nosing up the hill, its backside belching out Norma’s precious papers, he felt an irresistible desire to laugh, but a glance at Norma convinced him that laughter would be inadvisable. For a moment shock emptied her face of all expression leaving it masklike; then, as the natural colour drained away, the mask became less bland, affronted lines bracketed the mouth and a heavy exclamation mark was daubed between the eyebrows. The carmine lips moved and made a mewling noise.
‘I’m afraid the papers are probably scattered all the way down to the village,’ Tom said. ‘Do you remember those children shouting after us?’
‘You did this on purpose, Tom Norris! On purpose to discredit me with my committee.’ She rushed at the hedge and tried to claw a way through it.
Tom took her arm and drew her away. ‘We’ll try to get them back, don’t worry. But first have a look at what is left, then we’ll know what we are looking for.’
All the case history papers had blown away, only the minute books were left.
‘Do you know what was there?’ Norma cried. ‘The social workers’ case histories! And you know the detail they go into when they write up their home visits, every link in the lavatory chain. . . .’ She turned and ran towards the gate which was farther up the hill. Tom followed more slowly. It was no laughing matter that the County Council’s confidential papers should be scattered about the countryside, but as he walked up the hill he was convulsed by hilarity of a kind he had not experienced since adolescence when laughter was uncontrollable and painful. His mood from now on fluctuated between light-hearted irresponsibility and deep uneasiness. He seemed unable to centre himself within the actual situation.
The gate led to rolling pastureland bounded by a barbed wire fence along the southern edge of which a herd of cattle was packed close; beyond the herd he could see two ploughed fields, then, sloping away steeply to the valley, more pasture-land. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to five. They should by now be calling on County Councillor Hillman in the next village; but this was hardly an enterprise in which Hillman, who had asthma and no sense of humour, could be asked to join. Tom hauled himself slowly over the gate. The air was dank and smelt of dung and churned earth; the evening wind went to the bone. Hilarity was displaced by extreme despondency. Norma was running uphill, stumbling through tussocks of long grass, hands outstretched towards a piece of paper which danced always a little ahead of her. The coppery hair streamed on either side of the dunce’s cap hat, and the purple cloak flapped as though at any moment she might take flight; she did not, in this setting, look as incongruous as one might have expected. How stupid it is to think that in our petty day-to-day encounters we get even the glimmering of an idea about one another, Tom thought as he approached Norma.
‘I could slaughter those animals!’ She was standing over the piece of paper which had come to rest in a cow pat. ‘The whole bloody herd, I could slaughter.’
Away in the distance they could see pieces of paper blowing about between the cattle who were now packed even more solidly along the wire fence. Norma began to run again, leaving Tom to collect the one bespattered page. He picked it up and read the last sentence. ‘Met Mrs. S. in the high street; she had a black eye and said that her husband had beaten her up the night before, after. . . .’ Cow dung obscured the next few words; the remainder of Mrs. S’s story was presumably somewhere in this field or the next.
Norma had plunged into a thicket. Most of the hillside was open grassland, there was no need for her to have headed for one of the few patches of scrubland; but her manoeuvrability seemed to have been affected by her loss and once pointed in a certain direction she could only go straight ahead. The dunce’s cap hat, surprisingly, was still in place despite the wind and for a time this gave an indication of her whereabouts, bobbing up and down like a marker-buoy. Then, suddenly, it disappeared. Tom waited for some time for it to emerge but nothing happened. The possibility of losing Norma as well as her papers was disturbing; the one could be explained away, but not the other. He skirted the edge of the thicket which was more extensive than he had realised; he called out, ‘Are you all right?’ but received no answer. He began to feel rather foolish, like one of those embryonic characters locked in his mind for whose dilemmas he had failed to create a plausible story structure. He decided he would have to penetrate the thicket himself, but was diverted by the discovery of two more sheets of paper. He glanced at them quickly to see whether they related to Mrs. S’s history. The wind blew them about so much it was hard to read consecutive words let alone a complete sentence, but he managed to pick up a thread here and there, ‘. . . says there are rats ‘. . . could have been self-inflicted . . .’ ‘. . . inventive as ever. . . .’ The last phrase reminding him of his own predicament, he began to edge his way through thorns and brambles. He wondered how Norma had managed to move with such speed; undoubtedly, she was better protected than was he who had neither gloves nor boots. His hands and face were soon badly scratched. The thorn bushes began to grow into small, knotted trees, the undergrowth was becoming so dense that even a dog would have
had difficulty getting through it. He decided to go back. But when he turned the thorns were just as thick on all sides. He had lost the way out. In fact, the more he looked, the more obvious it became that there was no way: he was the pioneer of this particular thicket. He meditated on this; he was not one of those intrepid men who long to cut a path through virgin territory, but now he had been put in a situation where he had no choice. He studied the undergrowth for signs of his own passage, but there were none; nature had reclaimed with lightning speed. His heart was beginning to pound; he was out of training, he must do more walking this winter, only he’d make damn sure he stayed in open country! The air had now become much colder; the temperature must have dropped several degrees since they left the car. He began to force a way to his right; furze bushes, thorns, brambles were packed tight and resisted him at every step. A ridiculous situation! He had attended a lecture recently at which a naturalist had said that there were very few areas of real wilderness left in this country; at the time he had deplored this fact and he had given fifty pence in aid of the preservation of wilderness. He liked the word ‘wilderness’ which he associated with solitary places and he did not want it to go out of currency. Now, he was not sure he had understood its meaning. On either side, brambles and thorns came alive, they clawed at him, leant against him, switched across his face, twined round him until it was as painful to move as if he was being choked in barbed wire. He wondered what was the smallest area in which a man can disappear never to be seen again. Perhaps he had found it. He began to compose the first lines of a story in which a man trapped in a thicket on the Downs dies of exhaustion. He decided to start with the funeral at which people cannot stop laughing because the thicket was so small. They couldn’t understand that if you are lost it doesn’t matter whether you are in the Australian bush, on Rannoch Moor, or down the White Rabbit’s burrow. While he was thinking about the imbecile cruelty of these laughing people he caught his foot in a branch and stumbled forward, falling heavily; the undergrowth parted beneath his weight and he felt himself bumping down a bank. When he sat up, he saw that he had rolled onto a broad path cut through the thicket. It was along this path, no doubt, that Norma had been running when he saw her, like one of those evil creatures who lure men from safe ground.
This thought, instead of filling him with relief at what he had escaped, increased his interest in Norma and he looked round eagerly to see whether he was in sight of her. The first thing to catch his eye was a piece of paper flapping in a thorn bush as though she had left a trail for him to follow. He limped across to retrieve it. He didn’t like to think of the details of Mrs. S’s undoubtedly haphazard life being tossed about in this hostile place; the least he could do was to restore them to their original page order. He folded the sheet and put it with the others which were now badly crumpled; then he hurried down the path to a broad clearing where he had a view of the land beyond the thicket.
He could see Norma in the distance. She had reached the barbed wire fence and was sitting in the midst of cows as though holding an outdoor seance. In her bizarre attire she seemed to have found her natural habitat. Phoebe Huber had said she liked the bizarre, but she was an onlooker, a voyeur; whereas Norma lived the bizarre. Was that possible? Had he discovered in Norma Rossiter, if not a hobgoblin, then at least one of the great eccentrics? One is always being told by older people who are possessive about their memories that this is a species which has died out; it was exciting to think that one might still be extant, that he could write ‘. . . On a wild October evening on the Downs, I discovered, sitting on a toadstool. . . .’
She was not sitting on a toadstool, but a big, rounded stone which at this distance looked not unlike a toadstool. She was sorting through papers as though they were a pack of cards and the cows were gazing at her in gentle concern. Perhaps she would tell their fortunes? ‘Beware of the little black bull with the twisted horn. . . .’ He went towards her with a feeling of expectancy. There was madness in the air and he wanted his share of it. He wanted to do something wild and shameless but was so new to this state that he could think of nothing appropriate; he must rely on her for this. He approached her speculatively.
The wind had blown away that image of the person who was always trying for an effect she never quite achieved. Her nose was red, there were brilliant blotches of purple where the wind had whipped across her cheekbones, her eyes had watered and mascara ran down her face in grooves; around this grotesque face the wind- whipped hair thrashed about like the writhing snakes of the Medusa. She was startlingly ugly and splendidly alive. He waited for her to speak, unable to imagine what terrible words might issue forth from such a creature.
She said, ‘That brown job over there has got a hoof on one page. Do you think you could shift it?’
He laughed, for want of any more inspired rejoinder.
‘For God’s sake, Tom, this is serious!’ She snatched agitatedly at the papers he was carrying. ‘I’ve got pages four, seven and nine. What have you got here?’ She began to sort through the papers, muttering the last sentence on each page as she searched for the continuation sheet. ‘. . . beaten her up the night before. . . .’
Tom said, ‘That is Mrs. S.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Mrs. S’s husband beats her up, and there are rats in her house but people think she invents them. Personally, I believe her.’
‘What does it matter about Mrs. S. so long as we get all the pages together? If you could shift Daisy Bell before she performs over that page. . . .’
A large, black cow, who had been ruminating for some time on the advisability of asserting pasture rights, moved up and nudged Norma between the shoulders. She turned and rapped its forehead sharply with her knuckles. The cow backed away; but Tom, encouraged by this spirited display to hope that something meaningful might yet pass between them, sat down beside her and said, ‘Tell me about yourself, Norma.’
‘Don’t be so bloody patronising.’ His proximity had the effect of making her anxious about her appearance and, clasping the papers between her knees, she began to scrub energetically at cheeks and lips with a pink tissue. ‘Just because you are so imperturbable, there’s no need to adopt that avuncular attitude.’
‘Imperturbable?’
‘ “Norris never blows his top”, “Norris always keeps his cool”. I get so sick of it, I could spit! Nothing matters to you, that’s your great secret; all the manoeuvring over the reorganisation is just grist to the writer’s mill.’ She was making frantic attempts to discipline her hair now. ‘Well, you’re not going to write about this little episode, or talk about it; do you understand? Old Hillman loathes me; he’d like to get hold of something that would put paid to my chances of a top appointment.’
‘A top appointment! You sound like an advertisement for The Times.’
‘You can sneer if you want to. But it means a lot to me, more than anything else in my life, in fact; and you’re not going to bugger it up.’ She abandoned her attempts to tidy herself and turned her scoured face to his. ‘This isn’t the time or the place for subtlety, don’t you agree? So let’s say that if you dine out on this story, I shall tell a tale you won’t find easy to live down. What have you done to your face? It’s covered with scratches as if you’d been in a fight.’
‘I got clawed by brambles.’
She bared lipstick-smudged teeth. ‘A likely tale!’
‘And your tale?’
‘You take me up here, to a lonely spot on the Downs, and. . . .’
‘Leave out the bit about the Downs, Norma. I could take you anywhere.’
She turned her head away and pretended to inspect the next field for more pieces of her paper chase; although it was the only movement she made, Tom could sense the tension of limb and muscle as she drew her body in close and tight about its impregnable centre. There were no riches concealed beneath the gaudy exterior; she was as unsure of herself as a teenager and probably less experienced.
The wind
was stronger now, it shrilled in the barbed wire. The black cow, who had all this while been pondering the indignity which it had suffered, now raised its head and uttered a long, mournful protest, and finding some comfort in this, repeated it. The brown cow became excited and mounted the cow in front of it.
Norma spoke. She said, ‘ “Yah, boo! Fuck you!” That’s about your emotional level, Tom Norris. No wonder you only write children’s books.’
Chapter Five
They concocted a plausible story to cover their non-appearance at the meeting—flat tyre, nearest telephone box out of order. They found the telephone box and Tom ripped out the telephone cord to give verisimilitude to the story.
Isobel was speaking on the telephone in the library when he arrived home. He could hear her saying, ‘But I never know when my husband will come home.’ She managed, in her quiet, composed way, to convey the impression that the very suggestion that she might know her husband’s whereabouts was slightly improper. ‘I see . . . well, perhaps he went to another meeting? . . . Two . . . You have lost two of your officers?’ A slight suggestion of carelessness, but Isobel was not in the same league as Lady Bracknell and continued in a more reassuring manner, ‘In that case, surely nothing very dreadful can have happened?’ One of the children, her tone implied, might be relied on to keep an eye on the other. There was a longish pause, then Isobel said, ‘I don’t think the police would thank us, they are busy enough as it is.’ Tom entered the library and she raised her eyebrows in conspiratorial greeting. ‘He has just this minute walked in. Perhaps you’d like to have a word with him?’ As she handed the receiver to Tom she whispered, ‘Have you had anything to eat?’
