by MARY HOCKING
The sitting-room was reasonably comfortable but contained none of the treasures so often accumulated by single women; Miss Towton, on the evidence of this room, did not set much store by possessions. There was, however, a good collection of books and he was reminded that Phoebe must often have sat here in late November dusk. What had taken place between the child and the woman?
Miss Towton provided tea and fruit cake. He was glad that the tea was strong and said, ‘I needed that!’
‘Yes, I can see you did.’ She looked at Tom very directly when she spoke; he felt he had made a considerable impact on her, but the quality of her attention was alarming rather than flattering.
‘I didn’t come to talk about myself.’ Miss Towton smiled as though she recognised this as a typical preliminary to self-revelation. ‘I came because a member of my staff lives just outside the village, and she isn’t well.’
‘You mean Phoebe Huber.’
This was an obvious assumption since Phoebe was probably the only person living in Pendlecombe who worked in the Education Department; nevertheless. Miss Towton gave him the impression that had Phoebe been one of a hundred she would have singled her out as the cause of his concern.
‘She isn’t well,’ he repeated.
She made no comment and busied herself cutting fruit cake; like most women she could make silence as effective as words.
‘We are all under a bit of pressure with the reorganisation, but Miss Huber seems to have other problems as well.’ He was beginning to sweat and his hands were shaking; he needed to talk about Phoebe as an alcoholic needs a drink. ‘Obviously, I want to help her as much as I can.’
Miss Towton considered this sadly as though there were times when she recognised that it would be comfortable to deal in platitudes and regretted her inability to do so. Eventually, she shook herself out of this mood and said decisively, ‘But you couldn’t possibly help her. I never managed to, and I had the opportunity when she was much younger.’
‘I am sure you under-estimate yourself.’
‘That is something I have never done.’
This time it was Tom who attended to the fruit cake, crumbling bits between his fingers.
‘Now, look! What could you possibly do about this?’ Miss Towton addressed him urgently, a sick woman rousing herself to answer a late call, not expected. ‘Her parents were killed in a car crash on their way to a dance. She said to me once, “They got their reward for leaving me alone.” The feeling that her parents had deserted her was the understandable reaction of a desolate child; but it has persisted, she has never grown beyond it. She thinks all adult people are basically untrustworthy. When I first started to teach her I was aware of her observing me very closely during the first few weeks.’
‘To find out whether she could trust you?’
‘No, no! If you think she wants to trust people you are a long way out in your assessment of her.’ Miss Towton flashed him a worried look, allowing him to see that his situation was worse than she had at first imagined. ‘It was to make sure of my faults that she studied me closely. She was like a blind person, needing to know the loose boards, the uneven paving stones, the worn step. That was over twenty-five years ago. What do you think you could do for her now?’
‘There must be something.’ He gathered up a few more crumbs. ‘On the contrary, I think it might be dangerous to do anything to interfere with her way of life. Phoebe is incarcerated in a fairy castle from which no knight errant could set her free. I hoped I might be able to, but Aunt Mady’s enchantment Was too strong; she provided a world full of fascinating quirks and distorted images. And now. . . . What could you do if you did break through? Phoebe has never learnt to live in the everyday.’
‘She looked after her aunt when she was ill. That was a fairly down-to-earth sort of achievement, surely.’
Miss Towton did not comment. Silence effective again.
‘You suspect her motives?’
‘I don’t know her motives,’ she corrected. ‘But it was a situation in which she would feel safe.’
‘Her aunt was dying,’ he protested.
‘It’s life that Phoebe fears.’
‘I don’t know about all this,’ he muttered.
‘There is no reason why you should, is there?’ She asked the question as though it demanded an answer; she was determined to talk about him rather than Phoebe. ‘Don’t think about her; you’ll never understand her. Think about yourself. You’re the writer, aren’t you? I’ve read your poetry. I quite liked it, if only it wasn’t so negative. I wish you liked yourself a little better. It’s so important to like yourself. You’ll never be able to give much to anyone else if you don’t give a little more to yourself.’
‘I thought we were supposed to care for those less fortunate than ourselves.’
‘Good works will get you nowhere! It’s your life you have to live, you can’t live in another person’s skin. Don’t get involved with Phoebe Huber. She is a neurotic and she’ll turn you into one if you aren’t careful. You’d be surprised how strong these people are.’
‘You make it sound as though she was a witch.’
‘No; but you can make her into a witch by attributing powers to her that she doesn’t possess.’
She flicked up the lid of the hot-water jug; apparently the jug needed refilling because she went out of the room. Tom eased back in the chair. He had not gained what he expected from this visit but he had no sense of anti-climax. His emotions were unpredictable lately. Now, seated in this plain but not uncomfortable room, he felt a glow of pleasure, tea and the drawing-in of the day reminding him of the magic hour when he was released from school and called in on his aunt on his way home.
It was getting dark. He could see the setting sun reflected on the window of the house opposite, the glass slightly distorting the picture, making something melancholy but beautiful of a television aerial, a lone twisted tree in a desert; while the outline of roof and chimney became the black hump of a distant hill, a pale lemon sky above it with bands of smoky red cloud. It was strange and very moving and he wanted to cry out ‘Alleluia!’
He wished he had gone to see his aunt when she was dying. There hadn’t been much time and he had been so busy; but he wished he had gone for his sake rather than hers. Probably the dying don’t want to be troubled with last-minute tributes, but these are a great comfort to the living.
Miss Towton returned and poured more tea. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘You’re quite the wrong person for Phoebe to be working with. You are both too introverted. You won’t do each other any good. Can’t she work for someone else?’
She spoke decisively, assuming the authority of one who will shortly die and has no time to temporise. He argued with her about Phoebe and about attitudes to life in general; but it wasn’t any use. Her condition distanced her from life, she saw it rolled out beneath her like the view from a low-flying aircraft, the landmarks, still distinguishable, now part of a larger pattern. But a lot of the detail is missing, he thought defensively: ‘The toad beneath the harrow knows/Exactly where each tooth-point goes!
They talked for another twenty minutes. He told her something about his life; he could not remember how much afterwards, although at one point he recalled her saying excitedly, ‘Look here! You’ve got a lot of things to sort out. Not least, your wife. She is your responsibility.’ She was a strange woman. She had power of a kind, sometimes she spoke as though she knew him as he could never hope to know himself; but it seemed to him that while she could pick up signals she did not always read them correctly, and she threw out remarks at random, some of which were meaningful and some of which, like her remark about Isobel, were of little relevance to his present condition. Hers was an interesting but rather disorganised mind. He had the impression that she had reached a similar conclusion about his mind.
When he left she said, ‘You think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I still say you need to give more attention to your wife.’ She was tir
ed now and he supposed this was the best she could offer. It would have been better to have said nothing, but he had arrived on her doorstep when she was on the point of departure and she wanted to leave things tidy.
He said, ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ He was sorry she had talked about Phoebe incarcerated in a fairy castle, unable to cope with the everyday. It disturbed him in a personal way as though it was a criticism of his own life rather than of Phoebe’s.
It was very cold now and as he drove it began to snow. A lighted sign outside a hotel cast a splash of red on the snow. He thought of Mather who had had blood on his face when he last saw him and it occurred to him that he might have killed Mather. He stopped the car and sat staring out of the window until snow gradually piled up against the windscreen. He did not know what to do about Mather, but eventually he started the car and drove until he came to a telephone box where he dialled Mather’s home number. Mather answered the telephone; his voice sounded slurred, but that was drink. Tom put the receiver down. Through the call-box window he saw the top of his car covered in snow and a strange blue light creeping over the hills. Undoubtedly a catastrophe had befallen the world outside and it would be dangerous for him to go out. He spent the night in the call-box.
Chapter Ten
The snow was so bad that many people were unable to get home, cars were stuck in drifts, trains stranded. In the village where Tom lived a woman who had driven to Squires Bay station to meet her husband failed to get home, as did the husband, and neighbours had to look after their children. As far as Isobel was concerned, Tom was swallowed up in the general chaos; she spent the night in the church hall helping to look after a visiting choir who had been singing at the church when the blizzard started. There was a lot of work for the snow ploughs to do and villages were cut off for several days. In these circumstances, Tom’s behaviour had been exemplary. Even Phillimore congratulated him. ‘Very wise, old man. Never leave shelter in a snow storm!’ Had not Mather, venturing out to fetch paraffin from the garage, fallen over and given himself concussion, so that neither he nor Tom was quite sure what had happened on the afternoon that the snow started?
It was unheard of to have such weather so far south in November. People marvelled at this while Tom smiled slyly, as if he alone had the explanation of this freakish behaviour of Nature.
In the telephone box he had looked out on a world in the grip of catastrophe. Had he stayed in the box he might have been immune, a lone survivor; but fastidiousness about hygiene had driven him out in the morning and once outside he could not go back. Quite apart from unpleasantness, he knew that things done cannot be undone, whether you are Lot’s wife, the Lady of Shalott, or a man concerned with hygiene. But although he could not go back to the box he remembered the revelations which had been vouchsafed to him as he gazed from its security. The snow anaesthetised the land and the strange blue light came up on the hills heralding that Coming for which the wolf had waited so long; he saw the shadows move on the snow, heard screech and howl as the forces gathered, knew that by the time of the thaw the takeover would be complete.
‘Life will never be the same again,’ he told Isobel on his return.
‘This is the last packet of sugar,’ she said.
The show put everything out of joint. Many people stayed at home preferring to watch life on television rather than venture out in the cold and live it. Roads were strewn with the wrecks of cars. Bus services were cancelled. A crowd of hippies shacked down in an Elizabethan manor owned by the National Trust; and an approved school was taken over by some of its more maladjusted pupils. Stranded goods trains were rifled. Deliveries of food failed to arrive, and a gang held up a bread delivery to a village shop. The police could not cope with incidents in the country districts. Soon, there would be no law enforcement outside the towns.
Christmas was celebrated in a state of siege. Isobel’s Aunt Enid, who usually spent Christmas with Tom and Isobel, was unable to step outside the door of her bungalow let alone travel to Sussex. ‘What shall we do?’ Isobel said. There would be nothing for her to do except cook the Christmas dinner; the thought of being cut off from usefulness for so long disturbed her deeply.
Tom said, ‘The water situation alone should keep us fully occupied.’ It was touch and go whether they managed to keep the water flowing; they had oil stoves in the attic and he had to get up each hour during the night to flush the lavatory. He thought about Phoebe while he did this, just as he thought about her most other times now. He wondered how she would manage on her own with the cats, but when he asked her about this she disconcerted him by saying she went to ‘people’ in the village on Christmas Day.
‘What will you do?’ he asked.
‘The usual thing, eat, drink, and watch the goodwill drain away.’ The chaotic weather seemed to have made little impression on her.
‘Is this Miss Towton that you go to?’ he asked.
‘Good gracious no! I don’t want to be improved over Christmas!’ She sounded defensive, as though Miss Towton made demands that were beyond her compass.
There was a blizzard on Christmas Eve. When Tom and Isobel went to Midnight Mass the drifts were so bad Tom wondered whether they might not have to spend Christmas snowed up in the church. The vicar’s warden was there, no one else. He said, not without satisfaction, ‘There won’t be anyone else, not on a night like this.’ He had tried to persuade the vicar to cancel the service, but the vicar was a dedicated and obstinate old man who, like Kipling’s Eddi, would have felt bound to hold the service for such as might attend even if only an old marsh donkey came.
There were no lights, only two candles on the altar in the lady chapel. Candles had been lit on window sills but they had blown out. There is a difference between candles lit for effect and candles lit for need. Tom was aware of darkness all around. It was unimaginably dark, as if morning was in the mind of the creator, something held in reserve, not yet used. It was dark and very cold and it was winter; winter was here and now, spring was myth.
There were three of them and a priest performing a meaningless rite. Three. No one else anywhere at all. Just three people, no world-wide brotherhood, no fellowship of the faithful, no community of saints. Three people and a priest alone on a dark, cold winter’s night. What could come of it? It wasn’t even hopeless. Hope had not been born.
The wind howled and piled snow thick against the windows. Tom felt the chill rising from the ground. The wind howled down the feeble voice of the old man. What could stand against such a wind? There was only terror here, no love, no warmth, no comfort; man clung on by his fingernails, that was all. The cold touched Tom’s heart. He felt such desolation he could have died of it.
The snow had stopped by the time they left the church and that strange light had crept up again; the landscape was an undulating blue desert, inhuman and unfamiliar. This might be any place at any time. But the air was still, which made it more likely that it was no place at no time. The old man, Isobel and the vicar’s warden all exclaimed as if something wonderful had happened and pointed to the stars. Isobel said, ‘It must have been like this on that first Christmas night.’ She spoke with yearning, not sadly or elegiacally, but like a person hoping against all odds to find a pearl in a vast waste of snow.
It took them half an hour to see the old man into the vicarage which was next door to the church, and twenty minutes to struggle the hundred yards to their own house, blue, with dark enigmatic windows which weren’t telling what had happened while they were away.
Isobel said, ‘Happy Christmas, darling!’ when they had managed to open the front door. Their cat, who had been asleep on his rug by the radiator, stretched a languid paw and yawned half-heartedly but did not get up to greet them. Isobel sat down on the stairs and bowed her head on her knees. She was behaving rather oddly, Tom thought. After a moment she said, ‘I feel faint. Shall we have some rum before we try the water?’ They had half a tumbler of rum each. The water was still running in the bath but the lavatory was fr
ozen.
Tom spent Christmas morning keeping the water circulating so that they did not have to let the boiler out. As keeping the boiler in meant keeping it stoked, he had also to make a path to the coke bunker and this was exhausting and took a long time. While he was doing these things Isobel prepared Christmas dinner under conditions of extreme difficulty. They went about their labours as grimly as if it was existence and not roast turkey which was at stake.
Outside the house it was quiet as if everyone had died. It was the day in the year when most people are doing the same thing at the same time and doing it indoors. Tom wondered if it was too late to run away. Was there, somewhere, some small island, perhaps, where one might still live safely? At lunchtime, because they must talk about something, he said to Isobel, ‘Shall we go abroad another year? To the Canary Islands, one of the smaller ones?’
‘The ones without water?’ she asked drily.
‘I’m serious.’ He was sitting facing the window; over her right shoulder he could see the terrible silent blue landscape. ‘We can’t be trapped here again.’
She cut flesh from bone, her face intent, before she said, ‘I have to live here.’
‘So do I.’
She put down her fork. ‘This is where I have to live all the time, Tom.’ For some reason Tom could not understand his wife was deeply angry. ‘You are only here at week-ends and in the evenings, but I am here all the time.’
‘I know it’s home to you, of course. . . .’
