by MARY HOCKING
‘It wasn’t at first.’ She helped herself to more sprouts; she did not usually have second helpings but now she attacked the food as if she was quelling a rebellion.
‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked.
‘I mean that I had to make a life for myself, that’s all.’
Isobel spoke as though this was something Tom did not realise, something she had kept from him for a long time but which she was now telling him because he had made her so angry. Tom was completely at a loss.
‘It’s so quiet today, that’s all,’ he muttered.
‘It’s always quiet.’ Isobel went on speaking in a quiet angry voice. ‘Nothing happens that you don’t make happen yourself.’ She had built a life here, perhaps not the life she would have chosen, but some kind of structure for her days in which she could exist with self-respect, feeling she was a caring person, making her contribution to whatever it was one made a contribution. Tom, who spent most of his time away from his wife, did not understand.
‘But you like it, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t do it.’
‘You mean I’m not paid? So the things I do can’t really be necessary.’
‘I suppose they are necessary. But I can’t believe anyone would do so much, all these bazaars and committees, visiting those old dears, unless. . . .’
‘I’m not that sort of woman!’
‘What sort of woman?’
‘The sort of woman you are describing. I hate that sort of woman!’ She was flushed and vehement. He had noticed lately that she was less reasonable, not only to him, but in her attitude to life. He decided it would be pointless to argue. She began to clear away the plates, motioning him to sit down when he tried to help her.
He said, ‘It isn’t as if you have to do it. That’s all I meant.’
The day dragged on. What they had managed to make of their life together seemed to be peeling away in the stillness. Isobel felt she was back at the beginning; it was all stark as an undecorated room. Tom felt, as he looked at his wife’s incommunicative face, that he would have been as well-off married to a woman in Outer Mongolia.
In the evening the wind got up again. Isobel said she had neuralgia and went to bed early. Tom took her up a glass of hot lemon and aspirin. She was asleep by the time he came to bed. He looked out of the bedroom window; the moon was up and the wind had blown the snow about, making strange patterns on it as if something not human had danced across it. The icy savagery of it appalled him. He lay still in bed, not daring to move in case he woke Isobel. When eventually he went to sleep he dreamt of a room with Edwardian furniture in it and two enormous aspidistras; there was a woman sitting behind the aspidistras and someone who was with him but whom he could not see, told him that the woman had killed a lot of people. ‘But they would never have caught her if her friends hadn’t given her away,’ his unseen informant sounded disapproving. ‘But she’s a murderess,’ he protested. His informant replied, ‘It was in her own house and no one else’s business.’ After that the dream became blurred and it seemed that the murderer was, in fact, a man. When he woke up he was at first mainly interested in the question the dream posed about murder as a household affair; it was only later that he began to wonder whether Phoebe had murdered her aunt.
It was well into January before the communications services came to terms with the fact that they were dealing with a prolonged state of emergency. People came to offices when and as they could, some travelling all day and never arriving, others never starting, some never reaching home. Edgar Holmes brought a lilo to County Hall and slept in his office, but no one followed his example.
Work was at a standstill. The eleven plus selection panel did not hold one meeting and there was now little chance that its work could be completed before the reorganisation took effect. Schools were closed because of bad transport and lack of heating; parents who went out to work were desperate to know what arrangements to make for the children. Plans for the reorganisation of local government were seriously delayed. The Appointments Board was now hopelessly behind with its schedule and this was a source of amusement to the lower grade staff. Phillimore was more frantically kinetic than ever. Norma Rossiter became very militant about God, whose existence she denied vehemently while blaming Him for the state of the weather; she would sometimes chant bitter psalms as she walked down the corridor. ‘Hail to Thee, God of chaos, God of the snow drift, the icy road and the frozen loo.’ There were problems at the power stations and staff were forbidden to use electric fires, but Marsden, who felt the cold intensely, was said to have smuggled one into the strong room and to be hunched over it most of the day. His secretary said grimly, ‘He soon won’t be able to see by daylight.’ Most of the staff had no choice but to obey the injunction and this period marked the end of the mini¬skirt era at County Hall.
There were more people in overalls in the corridors, fewer working in the rooms. Desks now appeared in the corridors, piled one on top of the other, and entire filing cabinets were humped about by men who had joined the women in the corridors. Telephones rang endlessly in empty rooms. Edgar Holmes moved among the people in the corridors, like a priest, hearing complaints and promising compensation.
Phoebe coped as well as the next person with the snow and rather better with the reorganisation. She, too, had taken to humping parcels and files into the corridors; refusing all offers of assistance, she laboured as though involved in a struggle to the death with each parcel. Yet day after day, when strong men failed, she took her place in the labour force. Edgar Holmes spent a lot of his time sitting on a packing case, listening to Phoebe. What she talked about, Tom could not discover because Edgar closed his lips tightly whenever this subject was broached; a priest does not betray the secrets of the confessional.
Once Tom heard her saying, ‘I can’t bear suffering. But it’s a terrible decision to have to make.’ There was a note of such anguish in her voice that Tom was convinced she was telling Edgar Holmes that she had killed her aunt.
‘If there is anything she is worried about, she can come to me,’ he said angrily to Edgar Holmes.
‘She feels certain things very deeply,’ Holmes replied enigmatically.
Phoebe produced a scarf which she tied round her head, peasant- style, to protect her hair from the thin powder of dust which hung constantly in the air. This made her look like pictures of women in forced labour camps and she seemed to adapt to the role, playing it as if she had at last found her vocation. Norma Rossiter said, ‘I can imagine that face on the cover of a book entitled, “One day in the life of Phoebe Huber”.’
The parcel humping threatened to keep Tom and Phoebe apart. He had to work hard to hold her interest. At night he was like a tired schoolmaster who must plan activities for the next day to keep the children occupied; but in this case there was only one child, Phoebe needed a one-to-one relationship. During the day he was constantly on the alert for the first sign of discontent. Sometimes she was easily pleased and would crouch for hours absorbed in minutes or statistics. She spent one whole morning trying to discover how the National Foundation for Educational Research had arrived at a mathematical formula which no one in the office had ever questioned before. Tom joined in the exercise, sitting at his desk doing square roots when he should have been attending a meeting.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told Madge Conroy when she came in to tackle him about the meeting for the third time. ‘They never decide anything.’
‘You don’t think it might be an idea for you to go along and make them reach a decision?’ Her face had become fretted by anxiety. ‘It’s our future they’re talking about.’
Phoebe began to count on her fingers, stabbing agitatedly at the table and hissing under her breath.
‘I expect it’s too late now.’ Tom picked up the internal telephone receiver and dialled Edgar Holmes’ number.
Holmes had recently taken to speaking so quietly that his words were listened to more than those of anyone else, simply because it
required such a great effort to hear what he was saying. He said, ‘You missed a very important meeting. We spent the whole morning talking about the position of people on protected salaries.’
‘What did you decide?’
Phoebe got up and went out of the room.
‘We didn’t decide anything,’ Holmes rebuked quietly. Now that South Sussex was reaching the end of its days there weren’t many decisions that could be taken and people spoke scornfully about ‘all this decision-making’ as though they were concerned with something of much greater importance. ‘Some very interesting points emerged,’ Holmes went on. ‘We decided to have another meeting about it next week with a representative of the County Treasurer.’
‘You see,’ Tom said to Madge Conroy. ‘Nothing was decided.’
But he had lost Phoebe and nothing he could do would lure her back to the room that day.
On his way home Tom passed a place called Hangman’s Corner. A new housing estate had been erected where once there was heathland; but as he drove past that night he saw the gibbet and something that could have been the body of a man, half-dead, turned from side to side registering the direction of the wind and little else. He wondered what it was like to linger so long suspended between earth and eternity, how long before consciousness ceased altogether. Wolves had come down from the hills and eaten a postman—or was that in Italy and in another year?
The air was still as though the world had petrified and the snow was rock-hard. His house looked like death when he reached it. There was not a light on anywhere. As he came up the drive, the front door opened and Isobel confronted him with a lighted candle in one hand.
‘All the lights have gone,’ she said. ‘All over the village. It’s not just us.’
She explained anxiously that the central heating and the cooker had ‘gone’ along with the lights, as though they were witnesses to a general failure for which she could not be held responsible. The woman in the house next door would put a pie in the oven for the Norrises, but they would have to wait until eight o’clock because most of the families in this part of the village had been allocated oven space and time. ‘Their stoves have gone, too. We’re not the only ones,’ she assured him.
Tom lit the oil stove but as he had neglected to clean the wick it smelt bad and Isobel said she would rather freeze to death since she was half-way there already. They sat in the sitting-room, muffled in blankets and an eiderdown, and Isobel held a hot-water bottle to her stomach. Usually Isobel came into her own in domestic crises such as this, but the spirit seemed to have gone out of her tonight. She was worried about the cat. The cat would not go out because it was so cold and there was nowhere it could dig; she could not remember how long it was since the cat had been out.
‘I expect he knows,’ Tom said.
‘He may do himself an injury.’
‘He might do another cat an injury, but he’s always very careful of himself.’
But Isobel had known someone whose dog had died during a flood because it would not relieve itself indoors; it had died gradually before the horrified eyes of the family. ‘It makes you realise how we inhibit the poor things.’ Her voice sounded thick as if she had been crying. Isobel was fond of the cat but was not usually obsessive about it. Now, she could talk of nothing else and in the end Tom went out with the cat and dug a hole in the snow which the cat refused even to contemplate.
‘He can always use his tray,’ he pointed out to Isobel when he and the cat returned.
‘He hasn’t used his tray for months. He’s so fastidious.’ She picked up the cat and held it against her chest, rubbing her cheek in its fur.
‘What would you do if you had nine cats?’ Tom asked.
‘I haven’t got nine cats,’ she answered listlessly. ‘What a silly question.’
The cat, who was not used to being mauled about, struggled free and hid under the bookcase.
Isobel said, ‘He’s gone away to die. I wish I could, too.’ She held the hot-water bottle to her chest and folded her arms about it.
‘How did you get hot water for that bottle?’ Tom asked.
‘Mrs. Isted filled it for me when I took the pie into her.’
‘It can’t be very hot now.’
‘No.’ But she continued to cuddle it.
‘Have the lights gone out all over Sussex?’ Tom asked. ‘Are places like . . . well, Pendlecombe, for example . . . blacked out, too?’
‘Pendlecombe! I shouldn’t think they’ve ever had electricity there! I doubt if they’ve got the wheel.’ She began to rock to and fro, hugging the bottle.
The next day nothing would hold Phoebe’s attention for long. She pushed papers to one side and sat with her hands folded in her lap and a look of martyred resignation on her face. When Tom asked her what was wrong, she turned great wounded eyes on him: ‘If you don’t know, what is the good of me telling you?’ the eyes said. In the end he had to let her go out in the corridor to hump parcels. He left his door open so that he could keep an eye on her, but to his irritation Madge Conroy intervened. She came into the room with a letter for him to sign.
‘Applications are being invited. . . .’ How solemn she was, he thought; how drearily intent on obtaining a job which would give her even less satisfaction than her present one.
‘What post are you applying for?’ He cut her short because the parcel humping appeared to have ceased and he must find out where Phoebe had gone.
‘You haven’t been listening! I said Area Education Officer. This is your letter of application for the Brampton post. I’ve written it for you because it’s got to be in by the end of the week.’ She thrust it at him and he signed it without reading it. ‘I can’t go to the interview for you, though. You’ll have to rouse yourself to do that.’
‘Yes, yes, I will.’ He got to his feet muttering that he must get Phoebe to find a circular from the Department which he had mislaid.
‘She’s in Norma Rossiter’s room.’
‘Norma Rossiter’s room?’
‘That’s what I said. What’s got into you, Tom? You’re like a zombie these days.’
She was worried about him but he sensed that her concern shaded into reproach.
‘It’s all of you who are zombies.’ He was angry because she made him feel guilty. ‘What are the things that really concern you? Two pence on a bar of soap, butter up, no granulated sugar! What does any of that matter?’
‘It’s easy to see who does the shopping in your household!’
‘But it’s TIME you are squandering on all this snivelling, can’t you understand?’
‘If you don’t post that application your time will have run out.’ She turned and went out of the room. Tom went after her, anxious to justify himself.
‘If it was money slipping through your fingers with nothing to show for it you’d be horrified, wouldn’t you? WOULDN’T YOU?’ She stalked into her room and put on her coat. ‘But you don’t think about the time you’re wasting, you don’t sit down at the end of the day and account for what you’ve done with your time!’ The other occupants of the room assumed industrious expressions and bent over their desks. ‘You just put up your feet and watch telly.’
‘I don’t have television.’ She walked down the corridor to the lift.
‘I’m not talking about you personally. It’s all of us.’ The lift came, already nearly full. Madge Conroy wedged herself between two men from the Engineer’s Department and Tom shouted over the shoulder of the nearest man, ‘We’re dominated by the trivial. It’s a growth industry. We say “when I’ve got all this rubbish out of the way, I’ll settle down to something really worthwhile”; but we never get it out of the way, we create more and more of it until there isn’t time for anything else.’ The lift had stopped at the ground floor. People turned towards the corridor leading to the canteen. Madge Conroy made for the front door accompanied by Tom. ‘We’re caught up in a vast machine which produces nothing of value and dissipates our energy so that. . . . Where are you going?
’
‘To sit in my car and rev the engine. I do it every hour.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘I don’t want you to come with me.’ She opened the door and an icy wind came screeching into the foyer. ‘But I must make you understand. . . .’
‘I’ve got better things to do with my time than listen to you talking at me as though I was a public meeting.’
‘Close that door. I haven’t got my overcoat. . . .’
‘Go inside then. Go upstairs and do your accounts. Work out how much time you’ve wasted lately doing square roots with Phoebe Bloody Huber.’
‘You say she’s in Norma Rossiter’s room?’
But already in this howling wind Madge Conroy was out of ear-shot. Tom watched her stumping into the frozen waste of the car park, a sturdy, determined figure. The cars, covered with snow, looked like so many igloos and he wondered how she would identify hers. She was the only human being in sight. He was full of fear for her.
‘I hope she’ll be able to get back,’ he said to the hall porter.
‘If she don’t we’ll send a search party out, sir.’ The porter laughed and sucked his teeth.
These are the last days, Tom thought; who, looking at this scene, could doubt it for one minute? The last days and she is representative of all the ordinary, decent people marching resolutely they know not where. Why are ordinary people always decent? But they are, most certainly they are; ordinary, decent, confused and lost.
‘Do you think I should go after her?’ he said uneasily.
‘Suit yourself, sir.’
They stood side by side staring at the snow and the little white mounds. A car engine gave the ghost of a cough.
‘Doesn’t do any good,’ the porter said. ‘Just wastes petrol. But you can’t tell women anything. There’s Miss Rossiter, now! Will leave a blanket over the engine; and what happens yesterday. . . .?’ Tom turned away abruptly and made for the stairs, taking them two at a time.
The door of Norma Rossiter’s room was open. As Tom came towards it he heard Phoebe’s voice. She spoke like a servant degraded by years of drudgery and exploitation, aware of the pointlessness of protest yet refusing to surrender all means of self-expression. Tom stopped to listen. ‘So you see, I know we haven’t any more copies.’ All the poor, the oppressed, the patient sufferers of the earth spoke in her meek voice when she added, ‘Though I don’t expect you to believe me.’
