Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  Lying awake, after everyone else had gone to bed, Carol knew that she would go with Tom in the morning. She had thought about it, on and off, all day; she felt grubby, condemned by Clive's cold eye, by the children's indignation. ‘Poor rabbits,’ Marian said once. ‘I think it's beastly. Horrid Tom,’ and she had answered nothing, being without defence. Now, staring at the dim square of the window, she knew that she would go, had to go, whatever they thought, whatever happened. Guilt clutched her; she lay sleepless for most of the night.

  He was waiting for her at the bottom of the track. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I thought you weren't coming,’ and his innocence compounded her guilt. She carried now the burden not only of what she was doing, but of the fact that he did not know what they were doing, did not know that what they did was wrong, despised by decent people.

  They climbed the hill again. It was raining; the wind blew wet sheets into their faces and they walked with heads down, not talking much. At the gate Tom did not vault but climbed over; Carol noticed how thin his legs were, childishly thin, like his bony wrists. Walking behind him, she observed that his hair made a ducktail at the nape and that the cleft had the softness, the look of vulnerability that the back of a small boy's neck has. She saw, for a moment, the ghost of the child that he had recently been; Mark Laidlaw's stocky frame had suggested the man from whom he stood at one remove. She thought of her own body, which seemed always to scream out in conflict – the alien, uncontrollable breasts, the pudgy hands and face, the scar on her knee that remembered a fall when she was ten. Her body held her back; at the same time it dragged her inexorably onwards.

  At the place where they had waited before, he gestured her down into the grass. They lay again side by side, staring through rain-studded greenery at the point in the field where something might happen. The time passed slowly; it stopped raining and a weak sun shone opalescent behind the clouds. Occasionally, they murmured to each other. ‘Taking their time again,’ he said. ‘Hope I'll have better luck today.’ And she nodded and murmured yes, hope so, and ssh! look, isn't that one? no, it's just a thistle, sorry. Something had lifted, things had eased once more, guilt had been put to flight; Frances, Clive and the children no longer hovered behind her shoulder. The crystal globes of water on the grass blades shivered with a thousand colours; the dried head of a summer flower held between delicate stalks a miniature of the landscape beyond – skyline trees, clouds; the sun on the back of her hand was a breath, a promise, of warmth.

  And then, together, they saw it on the grass beside the burrow; a moment ago it had not been there and now suddenly there it was, quietly munching grass, bobbing away a yard or so, sitting up to sniff the wind.

  He raised the gun, hesitated for what seemed far too long, fired.

  The rabbit bucked into the air. Bucked, and at the same time screamed. The sound was hideous; it rang over the field, obscene in the quietness of the morning. She cried, ‘You got it! You hit it!’ and they jumped up together and ran across the grass.

  And saw, together, at the same moment, that the rabbit was not dead. It lay threshing and writhing and as they came near it screamed again, humanly, like a hurt child, and they pulled up short and stood there in horror, a few yards off, staring. Blood welled from its ear; it writhed and twitched.

  Tom was shaking. His voice was high-pitched, out of control, ‘I got to do something. You got to kill them, when that happens, you got to finish them off.’

  She said, ‘Oh, I don't want to see!’ and turned away, her hands over her eyes, but then turned back, moments later, and he was standing above the rabbit, white-faced, and the rabbit bleated again, and arched its back, and kicked. He said, ‘I don't know what to do. I've seen my dad do it – you have to break their necks. I don't know how to do it.’ He was distraught.

  She covered her eyes again.

  When she looked back he had the rabbit in his hands, and the rabbit was limp. Blood dripped from it. He put it on the ground and it lay still. He was shaking violently. He moved away a few paces and sat on the grass, turned from her, and she could see his whole body tremble. She felt sorry for him, and yet at the same time exasperated. She could not help him; they were quite separate now, it was as though they did not know each other; the whole fragile structure of confidence, the sense of being at ease with the world, had been destroyed with the rabbit. She saw Tom, wretched, and could think only: I am wretched, too, I hate myself, and what we have done, and what people must think of us for it.

  He got up, without a word, and began to walk away down the field, and wordlessly she followed him. He carried the gun all anyhow, not with pride, cradled over his arm; it looked, now, disproportionately large, as though it had grown and he had shrunk.

  At the road he turned to her. ‘Don't say anything about what happened – not to my mum.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Cheerio, then.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  It was raining once more. She trudged towards the house; she was shrivelled with guilt. They did not know what had happened, could not know, but she felt that the very look of her announced the incident; she carried still, in her head, the rabbit's scream.

  They were having breakfast. As she came into the kitchen silence fell and the children looked expectantly towards Frances.

  Frances said, ‘You'd better have something to eat, Carol’; her voice was not friendly. When Carol was sitting at the table she went on, ‘It would have been a good idea, you know, to mention that you were going out with Tom Binns again. Clive and I are responsible for you, while you are here.’

  Carol stared at the table. ‘I'm sorry,’ she said.

  Clive had not looked once at her. He kept his back half-turned. Now, he busied himself giving milk to the cat. He poured the creamy top from a bottle into a saucer and put it by the stove. ‘There, Mr Patch,’ he murmured. ‘There. Come on then, puss.’ The kitchen was filled with well-loved, well-tended animals.

  ‘Did Tom kill a rabbit?’ said Marian in her small, clear voice.

  Scarlet-faced, Carol noted the bordered tablecloth: red flower, cluster of leaves, spray of berries, red flower again. ‘Yes,’ she muttered.

  ‘Children,’ said Frances, ‘you can get down now and go up and do your teeth. Oh, and tidy your bedroom, please, Marian darling.’

  They went. Clive said he thought he would just go now and do the hens and the pony before he went into Ipswich. He went.

  Frances began to clear the table. The room was charged with feeling; once, she dropped a cup, and swore. Carol sat, the rabbit's scream still in her ears, behind and above the sounds of the children upstairs, of Frances running water at the sink, of the cat lapping milk.

  Frances slapped plates on to the draining-board and spoke again, her voice assured and tinged with indignation, ‘What I cannot understand – what Clive and I cannot understand – is why you should want to. I daresay it has been a bit dull here for you given that the children are a good deal younger and I am frightfully busy what with little or no help these days, not like it was for people before the war, but we've tried to find things for you to do and had Mark Laidlaw over who I thought would be just right for you, so I simply cannot understand why …’

  The room spun; Frances's voice roared. Carol wrung the tablecloth between her shaking fingers and burst out, ‘He didn't mean to. Tom didn't mean to – he meant to do it like his father said, a clean death, not hurting it, and something went wrong, it wasn't. He felt awful about it. I don't think he'll go shooting again. I don't want to, not ever. I hated it. It was beastly, the rabbit being hurt like that.’ She fought back tears.

  Frances turned from the sink; she was staring now, in surprise, across the kitchen table. She said, ‘What rabbit? What do you mean? I'm not talking about shooting rabbits, Carol, which is really neither here nor there, lots of people round here shoot rabbits and of course one wishes they wouldn't but there it is. I'm talking about why you should want to go off doing things with someone like Tom Binns, as
though he were a friend or something, when surely you must realise that it really won't do. I don't know what Mrs Binns was thinking of, suggesting it, she is normally such a sensible woman.’ She paused, and then went on, ‘I know it has made things difficult for you, growing up out there in India, sometimes it is a bit confusing for you here, I daresay, but surely you must see that a boy like Tom Binns … well, it really doesn't do, you should know that, Carol.’

  The rabbit's scream died away; in its place there came, all innocent and unaware, Tom's voice of yesterday, explaining the workings of the gun. She stared at her aunt in bewilderment and thought: I don't know what you are talking about, I knew I had done one thing and now you are saying I have done another. It came to her suddenly that there was no way, ever, that she could oblige everyone, could do both what was expected of her, and what her own discoveries of what she was would drive her to do; she would have to learn to endure the conflict, as her body endured the conflict of what she had been and what she was bound to be, like it or not.

  Party

  SHE GETS out of the taxi, Ellen Greaves, the grandmother, and pays with the change that she has assembled, carefully, on the way from Padding-ton. Then she picks up her suitcase once more and climbs the short flight of steps to the front door of the house, her daughter's house. It is a tall, thin terrace house, nineteenth century, in the middle of a street of similar houses. Aircraft lumber overhead. She rings the bell.

  The door is opened, by an adolescent she does not recognise, who explains that they are all in the kitchen. From down below, in the basement, her daughter's voice calls up, ‘Hallooo … Mum? Down here … It's a shambles – be warned.’ And Ellen dumps her case in the hall and goes with caution down the steep stairs to the basement kitchen which is full of people and certainly most untidy. There are bottles everywhere, and food, both cooked and uncooked, and many loaves of bread. She kisses, and is kissed. Her grandchildren are there: Toby who is seventeen and Sophie who is eighteen and Paul, the little one, who is only eleven. And there are others, a dark girl and two boys and yet another she does not at first see, who is apparently mending the back of the fridge. They smile and greet; they have nice manners. Ellen smiles and greets too, and notes their appearance: all are shabbily, not to say scruffily, dressed, but their voices suggest a reasonable prosperity. Ellen finds this interesting.

  Her daughter, Louise (who has got very thin again – indeed everyone is thin, they all have a lean and hungry look, despite the plenitude of things to eat) is furiously applied to something at the stove. She chops and stirs and flies to cupboards and despatches someone to the freezer and explains that she is doing the food for their party, for the grown-up dinner, and they are coping absolutely on their own with their stuff (and indeed, as Ellen now sees, Sophie is also chopping and stirring, though with what seems to be a less refined approach). The two parties, Louise explains, will coexist but there will be no mixing, in all probability – we shall be upstairs and they will do their own thing down here, and nobody will get in anyone else's hair that way. But, she adds, doing it like this means that we are here to keep an eye, Michael and I, there will be no hanky-panky, no nonsense. And she casts a look at the young, who grin.

  Ellen sits down at the kitchen table and wonders if, amid all this, there will be a cup of tea going. She decides (rightly, as it turns out) that there probably will not. Someone goes out and comes back in with a crate of bottles which is put on the dresser; Louise shrieks no, no! not there, for heaven's sake! The crate is removed to the floor beside the fridge. There is a brief, whispered consultation among the young, two of whom leave; they move with slouching purposefulness. Louise, on the other hand, darts from point to point. Her mother observes her thoughtfully.

  We, Louise explains, are having a salmon trout and a rather lavish pud that I haven't tried before. They – and there are to be absolutely no more than thirty, do you hear, as agreed, no last-minute additions (Sophie and Toby nod emphatically) – are having plonk and some goo that Sophie is fixing.

  Chilli con carne, murmurs Sophie, stirring. She peers through her hair into the saucepan; the kitchen is very hot and close. Ellen looks at the window and at the same moment Louise dashes to it, throws up the sash, and returns to her chopping-board.

  Ellen, who is really here for her annual visit to the dentist, says that she hopes she won't be in the way. If she had known, she says, she could quite easily have made it another day … But before she can finish Louise is saying that there is absolutely no question of her being in the way, her usual room is empty because no one is staying the night, that's for sure (another sharp look at the young), and this is an absolutely inter-generational night so in fact it is very appropriate that she should be here. Louise, in mid-chop and mid-stir, pauses to smile fondly at her mother. Not everyone's mum, she says, would fit in, as it happens, but you will be all right, I can count on you, I know, and actually you may rather like some of the people who are coming. There is Tony Hatch who … But Tony Hatch remains undeveloped, because at this moment the two departed young return bearing cardboard boxes full of glasses and there is an altercation over the disposal of these, which must not be put there, nor there, nor above all on the dresser… Indeed, the kitchen is silting up rapidly, there is not an uncluttered surface nor much uncluttered floor. Louise and the rest dart and shuffle amid the confusion with remarkable adroitness; Ellen decides that she is safest where she is. She sits there at the table, and looks at Paul, who is perched on a stool, intent on some map or plan he is studying; he seems quite impervious to what is going on around. Once, he says, ‘Mum, have you got any glue, my tube's almost used up?’ and Louise says, ‘What?’ and goes to the stairs to deal with Toby, who, with a friend, is trying to bring a table-tennis table down; there are accusations and denials concerning scraped paint. Louise comes back into the kitchen scowling (she is also sweating profusely, her mother observes, which is odd for someone so thin); Paul sighs, slithers from the stool, and goes out.

  Ellen surreptitiously rewashes some crockery stacked on the draining-board, having noted its condition with disquiet.

  Louise says, ‘Oh, Christ, the man never came about the stereo,’ and rushes out. She can be heard upstairs, vehemently telephoning.

  Ellen, who has been able to do some prospecting from her seat at the table, and has established the whereabouts of cups, tea, sugar etc., makes herself a cup of tea. She sits drinking it and listens to the conversation of two people at her feet. They are not so much exchanging observations or opinions as making statements, separate and unrelated. The girl says that she simply cannot stand anything fried nowadays, she doesn't know why, she thinks perhaps it is psychological, and the boy says there is this master at school, this bloke who has really got it in for him, it's a hassle. They are joined by another girl, who is concerned about the state of her fingernails. She sits peering at them and saying there are these little white spots, look, I'm worried, what should I do; then for a few moments these assorted themes come together in a united objection to honey (however did they get on to that?) before each is off again on a saga of personal revelation. Ellen, one of whose feet is being sat on, shifts, as unobtrusively as possible, and pours herself a cup of tea.

  Louise returns, followed by Paul, who says again, ‘Is there any glue anywhere, mum?’ Louise says, ‘Why?’ and darts with exclamations of dismay to her saucepan. Paul begins, ‘Because I haven't …’, but now Louise remembers that no one has counted and allocated cutlery, so the group under the kitchen table are jolted into action, or rather into a state of gentle drift.

  It is five o'clock.

  At six o'clock Louise has the most ghastly headache. Further, she is seized with some compulsion that sends her on frequent brief and furtive excursions into the large room next to the kitchen, Toby's room, in which the youthful party is to take place. She seems to be hunting for something. During these hunts the young, in the kitchen, exchange glances and roll their eyes. Once or twice, Ellen cannot help hearing whi
spered snatches on the stairs, unspecified threats about what Louise will do if there is the slightest suspicion of, if anyone is so damn stupid as to bring, if anything other than absolutely straightforward … During one of these fraught exchanges, Paul reappears, sliding past his mother and siblings without paying them any attention. He delves in the bread-bin, helps himself to bread, butter and jam, and sits once more upon the stool, lost in perusal of yet another printed sheet. Ellen says, ‘What is that, dear?’

  It is, Paul explains, the instructions for the assembly of the model aircraft on which he is currently working. He is stuck, he says, because he has run out of glue, almost, but also because there is a bit that he simply cannot get the hang of. It doesn't, he says, seem to make sense. The aeroplane is a De Havilland Mosquito, he explains, and the problem is that …

  Ellen asks if she can have a look. She reads, frowns, puts her glasses on and reads again. After a few moments everything falls into place; the problem, as it turns out, is a semantic one. The model aircraft kit has been made in Japan, and the translation of the instructions, while for the most part admirable, has fallen down just at the end here, where in fact ‘right’ should read ‘left’, and ‘front’, ‘back’. Paul is gravely grateful, and goes off again.

  Michael arrives home. He kisses his mother-in-law, and immediately busies himself stowing bottles in the fridge, placing others by the stove; he says it is amazingly brave of Ellen to let herself in for all this, and Ellen, who is now repairing the zip on Toby's jeans (they have not been washed for some time, which makes the job a mite disagreeable), says not at all, a bit of gaiety will be a nice change, she leads a quiet enough life in the normal way of things. Louise, whose voice has become peculiarly shrill, interrupts to point out that the table needs laying; Sophie comes in and has an argument with Toby about some gramophone records; the telephone rings. Michael and Louise exchange clipped words about some gin, of which, it seems, there is not enough. Subdued accusations are made about responsibility.