by MARY HOCKING
This was Isobel at her best. Over supper, she told Tom, with a hint of pride, ‘I think Councillor Hillman considers ours a strange alliance! I got the impression that Mrs. Hillman keeps him on a very tight rein. Which is Norma Rossiter? It’s not the popsy, is it?’
She was enjoying herself and it occurred to Tom that this explanation of his late arrival had come as a relief to her. Did she know about Beth? Beth swore she had never telephoned him at home. ‘Such a thing simply wouldn’t occur to me. We don’t intrude on each other in that way.’ But Beth wasn’t a truthful person.
‘It was a great embarrassment to Councillor Hillman to have to tell me that there was “another person” in your car, and that that person was Miss Rossiter. I felt that at any moment I should have to say “I TRUST my husband. Councillor Hillman”.’ She made a modest attempt at pomposity, Isobel was no actress. ‘ “And, in particular, I trust him with Miss Rossiter.” ’
Tom laughed uneasily, thinking to himself that she did know about Beth.
‘Whatever happened to your face?’
He told her about the brambles and she accepted this explanation. She was not in the least jealous of Norma Rossiter and he was discomfited to note how her spirits had risen as a result of this episode. She talked with unusual vivacity; her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. She had enjoyed being on his side, knowing that on this occasion she had no reason for anxiety.
Usually, she was quick to clear plates and dishes away but tonight she allowed him to relax over coffee. He told her about the paper chase which amused her until it came to the history of Mrs. S.
‘Do they really keep such very intimate records of people?’ she asked in a subdued voice.
‘Even the quality of your smile is noted—and the quantity. Never smile too much to a social worker, that’s a bad sign.’
‘How horrible!’ Her own smile faded and her face grew careful. ‘No wonder these people don’t want “the welfare” to get hold of them.’ She was as dismayed as though her own privacy was at risk. Tom had a momentary glimpse of a very frightened person and he felt a desire to give comfort. But it was not enough. Too much had happened, or not happened, over the years for the situation between them to be resolved by one gesture, however tender. He let the opportunity pass and said, ‘I’ve got some notes I shall have to work on tonight.’
When she had washed up and gone to bed he sat in the library unable to concentrate on the notes of the meeting, feeling he had let a moment pass when they might have drawn closer together. Perhaps even now it was not too late, she might be lying upstairs worrying about Mrs. S. and hoping for comfort. But how could he comfort her? He could confess about Beth; he had become tired of her lately and it would cost him little to give her up. But Beth wasn’t important and she had nothing to do with his relationship with Isobel.
As it grew colder, and the night pressed against the walls of the house with a heavy weight of darkness, the incidents of the evening which he had related so amusingly for Isobel’s benefit assumed a more menacing aspect. The swirling paper became a symbol of something which had been happening all his life; it represented ideas at which he had snatched never really grasping any of them, never holding on to a difficult thought, following it through, stretching himself in an attempt to realise his inspiration fully. He took what came his way gratefully, but never attempted to trace it back to its source. No journey into the dark for him; when he came up against anything difficult he altered the story and made a diversion round the difficulty.
‘I must think this thing through,’ he told himself. And then another voice said, ‘Yah, boo! Fuck you!’
‘I must think it through,’ he repeated firmly, and opened the right-hand drawer of the desk from which he took a buff folder. As he did this he was aware of pain behind the eyes and that slight feeling of nausea which heralds the beginning of migraine. He opened the file, which was full of notes on odd scraps of paper, and tried to compose himself to re-read the notes. His eyelids were so heavy he could barely keep his eyes open; the rims seemed to be coated with grit so that whenever he blinked it was as if someone was jabbing needles into his eyeballs. Words did not register in his mind; his head felt tight as if it could not absorb any more words, and his stomach reacted as it might to the smell of food which had once made him ill. His whole body seemed to be trying to reject something unassimilable. He drank a glass of water but did not feel any better. Nevertheless, he persisted, laying notes out on the desk and making a pattern of them.
Isobel at breakfast: ‘I was telling Judy Finch that we used to have three buses a day, and she didn’t believe me. Isn’t it sad? People growing up without knowing what it is to have a good bus service.’
One of the youngsters at his office: ‘I’d love to go to the Lewes Bonfire Night, but there isn’t a bus from our village after six. We can’t go anywhere.’
Madge Conroy: ‘. . . only one post a day. When I was a child we had five deliveries. The last one was quite late in the evening. My friend and I used to write for film stars’ photographs, and we would hang about in the street waiting for the postman; I can remember peering at him in the dusk to see whether he was carrying any large envelopes.’
An old woman in the village: ‘. . . given up the telephone and now postage is going up they won’t write. I say to my husband “We’ll not hear from them again this side the grave”.’
Other notes on the breakdown of the hospital service, the housing crisis.
The beginning of a ‘Fairy story for older children.’
‘Once upon a time there was a County Council and this Council was composed of warring parties, as are all councils in good, democratic societies. But this was a wise Council and it had learnt one very important lesson. It knew that civilised people no longer fight with expensive hardware, but with words which cost nothing at all.
‘Words have magic properties. For one thing, they save work and effort. Once words are absorbed into the folklore of the people, the reality is in the word, the two become one and indivisible. The “caring society” is established in spite of the degradation of the homeless, the abuse of the sick, and the abandonment of the aged.
‘And nowhere have words worked greater miracles than in education. . . .’
It was no good, it read like a tract; but it wouldn’t go away. None of these ideas would go away. There had come a day when he had said to himself, ‘These things have been inside me for a long time, I can’t afford to ignore them any longer. I must write.’ But how to go about it? They did not belong in a children’s book. He was in a no-man’s land between the world of the child and the world of the adult.
‘Yah, boo!. . . .’ He thumped his fist on the desk. ‘I will think this thing through once and for all.’ And once again he set about worrying, probing, trying to find not so much a way out of chaos as a way in through himself. But immediately he was faced with the difficulty—who was ‘himself’? The man at the office, that imperturbable Norris who never blew his top, always kept his cool; the unsatisfactory husband; the selfish lover; the amusing, lovably unbusinesslike writer so dear to his publishers: which was the real person? It was becoming a matter of some urgency to find him. He had coped with an unsatisfactory marriage, a series of casual love affairs, the possibility of a set-back in his local government career; it was only when he had discovered that he could no longer write that he had realised that something must be done. His writing was his only means of communication, if he lost that he would be so lost it wouldn’t matter whether it was in the Australian bush, on Rannoch Moor, or down the White Rabbit’s burrow, he wouldn’t ever find a way out.
He forced himself to look again at the notes he had written: ‘transport no longer functioning, centres of administration breaking up, postal services non-existent, towns becoming like medieval city states—Brighton no longer knows what goes on in Eastbourne, is there civil war in Birmingham, plague in London? People holed up in villages, the forests spreading, the wolf returns.’
No wonder he couldn’t write if he was side-tracked in this way. He thrust the papers back in the drawer and went up to their bedroom. Isobel was reading in bed. He said, ‘You’re not asleep?’
‘You know I can’t sleep until you come to bed.’
‘You make it sound as though I am some kind of sedative.’
She gave the vague smile which was her way of refusing to respond to a challenge, and switched off the bedside lamp.
Chapter Six
It was odd that after all the disturbing things which had happened yesterday his first thought on waking should be that he must see about Miss Huber. He had to go to the doctor, tell Mather about the paper chase, see Madge Conroy about the matters raised at the meeting of head teachers: Miss Huber was surely the one person who could wait. Nevertheless, he was still thinking about her when he left home with the result that he was well on the way to County Hall before he remembered that he had intended to go to the doctor. It was too late to turn back, so he continued on his way, thinking about Phoebe Huber. There was something positive and satisfying in thinking about Phoebe Huber; he had become too self-absorbed lately and it would be of benefit to himself as well as to Phoebe if he concentrated his energies on making life more bearable for her.
She was not in his room when he arrived at the office but there were indications of her presence. A beige raincoat, with a green woollen hat with a pom-pom protruding from one pocket, hung on the hook behind the door; and a pair of Wellington boots was standing in the corner by the filing cabinet. The boots were muddy. He had forgotten that Phoebe Huber lived in the country and had imagined her in one of those nondescript semis built between the wars. He adjusted the picture to a red-brick cottage next to the General Stores, faded chintz curtains and an off-white cat at the sitting-room window.
There were other things to do, however, than to dwell on the likely habitat of Phoebe Huber. He went to see Mather. Mather had already had County Councillor Hillman on the telephone. ‘Tortured by suspicions he could very well bring himself to name.’
‘He couldn’t possibly think that I. . . .’
‘My dear Tom, it would be his first thought. He’s a Methodist or Baptist or one of those sin-ridden sects. What did happen? Norma, I must tell you, is away. She thinks she caught a chill!’ Mather was relishing this. There was a recklessness about him now that was disturbing; his classical features seemed to have coarsened over the last few months, his skin was mottled, and, while not yet unkempt, he had a slightly ruffled appearance which, since he never allowed himself to be hustled, could probably be ascribed to drink. ‘You have no ill effects, I trust?’ Tom noticed how slowly the lips curled back so that one was not quite sure whether to expect a snarl or a smile. One must never rely on this man. When he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll smooth things over,’ Tom felt no confidence that he had either the ability or the inclination to do this.
During the last five minutes of their conversation, Tom had been aware of raised voices in the corridor; by the time he left Mather’s room the sounds of dissension were unmistakable, although Mather affected not to hear. The moment Tom appeared a tearful young woman stabbed a finger in his direction. ‘There’s Mr. Norris. You talk to him about it.’
Phillimore did not even turn his head. ‘I am not talking to anyone. I demand that key.’
‘I haven’t got it! And don’t talk to me as though I was one of your Waafs.’ She darted past Tom and ran snivelling down the corridor.
Tom assumed that the dispute was over the key to the strong room which Marsden always kept in his possession, the one symbol of power which Mather had left him, probably because it irritated everyone else so much.
‘I’ve had about enough of this.’ Phillimore grasped Tom by the elbow. It was not clear whether it was the general lack of discipline or his failure to get the key which exercised him most. ‘We’ll have this out with Bertie when he comes back.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the strong room key,’
‘It’s the principle of the thing.’
Phillimore had a neat, bland face to which the little moustache seemed to have been added as an afterthought, just a couple of quick flicks to give a final touch of the debonair. It was not a face designed to register strong emotion; but, as if to compensate for this, he had been endowed with an extremely excitable body and was forever bobbing up and down on his heels, drumming fingers, and flexing and unflexing wrists. At present, however, rigidity seemed to have seized him and his movements were unusually wooden. His shoulders were hitched up almost to his ears as he pushed Tom into Marsden’s room.
‘Look at it,’ he hissed at Tom. ‘Just look at it!’
The walls of the room were lined with shelves stacked with papers, parcels and bulging files held together by pink tape, while copies of The Times Educational Supplement, Education, and The School Master mushroomed up from the floor leaving only a small track from the door to Marsden’s desk. The desk was laden to nose level although a clearance had been effected in the region usually occupied by Marsden’s elbows. It was a formidable sight, but one as dear to Marsden as is a woodland glade to a country child. Every morning when he opened the door of his room, this sight refreshed his spirits, healed his wounds, and drove away his fears; among old committee papers, teachers’ records and completed test papers, Marsden passed his time as tranquilly as did Lucy Gray amid the springs of Dove.
‘You know why he’s got a strong room, don’t you?’ Phillimore demanded. ‘Because when the County Council was first formed in the year nineteen hundred and four, the Treasurer’s Department was in this wing of the building! There is absolutely no need for an education department to have a strong room.’
‘Is there something in there that you want?’ Tom asked.
‘I want to have a glance at a report on “The Technical College and the Degree Course” which was prepared by old James when he was at Squires Bay Tech.; he made one or two useful points here and there.’ Phillimore agitated his shoulders nonchalantly and made throw-away gestures with his hands, from which Tom deduced that he wanted to extract large parts of the report and claim them as his own.
Tom removed a rush basket from a chair and sat down, cradling the basket in his arms. ‘I don’t suppose Bertie will be long,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t venture out of here all that often.’
Phillimore took up a position by the window; with shoulders squared, hands clasped behind his back, he gazed sternly ahead as though waiting for the flare path to be lit.
There were hurried footsteps in the corridor and the door opened. ‘What’s all this?’ Marsden demanded querulously. ‘Sybil is in tears.’
‘I want to get into the strong room.’ Phillimore was suddenly undecided as to what attitude to adopt. ‘I suppose you’ve got the key?’
‘Of course I’ve got the key. It is always on my person.’ The guardian of the Grail could scarcely have taken his duties more seriously.
‘I can’t see why the room should be locked.’ Phillimore decide
d to be tolerantly amused and took a fresh stance, his behind wedged against the wall shelving, arms folded to give an impression of casual ease; files protruded behind each ear and one rested on the top of his head, giving his face the appearance of a whimsically contrived dart-board. ‘There’s nothing of importance in there, nothing anyone would want to steal.’
‘There are files that go back to the beginning,’ Marsden said hoarsely.
‘I can’t conceive an enquiry going back as far as nineteen-forty, let alone Genesis.’
‘You can’t?’ Wit was lost on Marsden. ‘Well, the other day I had an enquiry from the United States about a man who emigrated there just after the war; he had applied for a job in a government department and they wanted to know what standard he had reached when he left school in nineteen thirty-seven. It took me three days to get the answer to that one because the school was bombed and the records were lost.’
‘I would have thought there might be occasions when the amount of work involved hardly justified the results.’ Phillimore mused.
‘I don’t like to be beaten,’ Marsden said unctuously.
One of the files tickled Phillimore’s ear and he sneezed; there was a lot of dust about and having sneezed once, several encores proved necessary.
‘You don’t need me.’ Tom got up and put the basket back on the chair.
Phillimore said, ‘Don’t go!’ He was standing very straight as though straining to add a cubit to his stature. ‘I think we should have this thing out once and for all. It’s quite ridiculous that we can’t get at the strong room unless you are here, Bertie. What happens if you are ill, or on holiday?’
