FAMILY CIRCLE

by MARY HOCKING

  I was shocked to see how tense he had become, as though braced for a scene. No doubt in the past these interruptions had been the subject of conflict and that conflict had eroded his confidence.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can go for a walk? It’s a nice afternoon.’

  We went out quickly in case the telephone rang again; he drove the car as though he still expected to hear it. Fortunately, we had not far to go; we left the car at Kingston and took a path which climbed steeply to the Downs. At first, it was not easy to shake off the affairs of the day. He was too tense to relax, and I was not sure enough of him to relax. The Rouths were our only common ground so we talked about them. Margaret’s behaviour in the morning was still on my mind. As the path climbed and Kingston seemed with each step to grow smaller and more compact, I said to him:

  ‘Margaret worries me. What will become of her?’

  ‘You tell me. I’ve no idea.’ He was striding forward with all the grim resolution of a man with Everest ahead of him.

  ‘If only she wasn’t so bitter about her family… .’

  ‘It would be better if she went away from her family, but one can’t do anything without their consent, and that they will never give.’

  I was having difficulty in keeping pace with him, nevertheless, I persisted, ‘You think it is her mother and father that are the trouble?’

  ‘Don’t you?’ He paused briefly to glance at me.

  ‘But they are good parents. Oh, I know it’s easy to criticize them now, when things seem to be turning out badly; but they have a lot to put up with. You only have to deal with Margaret when she comes to your surgery, and then you can regulate the conversation. They have to put up with her moods for breakfast, dinner, tea and supper, and they’ve been doing it for weeks! Even I find myself getting irritated with her, and I’ve only been here for a short time.’

  He kicked a stone from his path and asked, ‘Why should you be irritated with her?’

  ‘She goes on and on being so difficult.’

  ‘But if she had a broken leg, it wouldn’t irritate you if she continued to limp, would it?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Only because you can see for yourself that the leg is injured.’

  ‘I suppose that is true. But are things really so difficult for her?’

  ‘They are indeed. And her family should be grateful for her forbearance.’

  ‘Forbearance!’

  ‘Yes. She has carried a load for a long time. All the while that you accepted her as a sane, accomplished, attractive person, she was in fact finding life extremely hard. But she didn’t burden her family with it. She behaved in the most exemplary fashion for years.’

  ‘She’s making up for it now!’

  ‘She has a lot of credit in the bank.’

  ‘But what load did she have to carry?’ I was very short of breath. Kingston was now no more than a clutter of child’s bricks spread carelessly at the foot of the hill. Ahead, the path still climbed. I gathered my resources to defend the Rouths. The wind was strong and I had to shout. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Routh never imposed anything on their children. They tried not to inhibit them… .’

  ‘That kind of freedom can be a fairly heavy burden for a child to bear.’

  ‘You sound as though you know all the answers,’ I accused him. We were warming to each other as the argument took a hold of us.

  ‘That’s an occupational hazard with doctors. But I’ll tell you one thing.’ He stopped and turned out of the wind the better to express himself and I had the full force of his vehemence. ‘I have no intention of playing Blind Man’s Buff with my children, if they need my guidance they will have it! I shan’t leave them to blunder about in the dark hoping they’ll come across the right door but not daring to intervene in case I should influence them in any way. I shall exercise a degree of censorship, too. They won’t spend their young lives listening to a constant critique of life, nor will they be subjected to a ceaseless analysis of other people’s shortcomings, putting poor inadequate Miss G. under the microscope, stripping the pretensions—and God knows we all need a few pretensions— from Mrs. B., diagnosing the weaknesses that led to the breakdown of this marriage, identifying the flaw in that child/parent relationship, until they feel that sanity and sound judgement reside in their own home and nowhere else! And, what is more, I shall try not to devour my wife so that there is nothing left for her children to feed on.’

  I was completely taken aback by this outburst. I could appreciate that his ideas differed from those of the Rouths and that this would cause tension between them, but that the Rouths should arouse such impassioned anger in him startled me.

  We began to walk again, bent against the wind.

  ‘You can hardly say that Constance has suffered,’ I protested.

  ‘Constance holds the whole thing together. A remarkable sacrifice to accept from their twenty-six-year-old daughter, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sacrifice!’

  The wind buffeted me and I slipped on the stones in the path. He took my arm.

  ‘Well, what would you call it? She is the housekeeper in every sense of the word, she knows their finances better than they do themselves; she does all the really hard work about the house and in the garden; she watches over her parents, though she may not seem to, and in their declining years she will be mother to both of them.’

  ‘But Constance likes it that way.’

  ‘She makes it seem so.’

  ‘But she never strikes one as being discontented, or repressed.’

  He gave me an odd look and said, ‘She’s certainly not repressed.’ His anger had gone and I caught a flicker of amusement in his eyes which seemed to invite a response from me. I was bewildered.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No? Ah well… . Do you think we might have a rest from the Rouths for a little while?’

  The wind was tearing our breath away and so at last we walked in silence. By the time we came to the brow of the hill, it was possible to dispense entirely with the Rouths as a means of communication. Over the brow of the hill, we left the valley behind, the little dolls’ houses that were Kingston, the larger sprawl of Lewes, vanished. The green hills folded about us and sheltered us. We walked now in that companionable silence which gives the illusion that two people are as one, reacting in an identical way to their surroundings, sharing the same thoughts, emotions and hopes. For my part, I thought that this was peace after effort, a green reward for the eye, a refreshment of the spirit. Furthermore, I thought how beautiful it was to have natural sound restored after the incessant throb of traffic, and I listened with joy to the bleat of sheep, the wind scything the long grass, the endless song of the lark. I experienced a sensual pleasure at the spring of turf beneath my feet, cropped short by the sheep; and even the slow, cumbrous movement of the cattle, of whom I am usually very wary, seemed to have a kind of poetic grace. I thought of history, too, here where the time of man goes back a long way to those ancient folk crouching about their barrows. I felt a tenderness for these long dead forbears; I felt a great tenderness for all creatures from iron age man to Owen Lander walking at my side and surely following all my wandering thoughts.

  After we had walked some distance, we rested, sitting on the grass and watching while the twentieth century intruded again in the form of a jeep, with an insistent hooter, which took the place of a sheep dog and rounded up a herd of cows on the hill opposite. The jeep weaved up and down the hill slopes and the cows responded at first with a dignified leisureliness appropriate to their shape, and then more hastily, surging downhill in a ludicrous pitch-and-toss movement like ungainly galleons driven before a storm.

  ‘How they must enjoy that!’ I said.

  ‘The cows?’

  ‘The people, of course!’ One could sense that they were young and greatly enjoyed this part of their day’s activity. How wonderful it must be to work up here, so free of the clutter of urban life.

&nbs
p; ‘I wouldn’t mind working on a farm,’ I said.

  But alas, our thoughts were not one, after all.

  ‘Drudgery,’ he said. ‘For a woman, at any rate.’

  Drudgery! It was Margaret’s day. One could not escape her. When we returned from our walk, she was standing outside Owen’s house, leaning against the wall, gazing at her feet as though they had been there a long time and might be taking root.

  ‘I must talk to you …’ she began. Then, when I got out of the car, her words trailed away and her face went stiff. ‘I’m so sorry…’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he said briskly. ‘Come in.’

  He went ahead before she could protest. Margaret and I stood aside for each other on the threshold, like people who scarcely know each other. I made tea and she made a pretence of helping me. She was trying hard to control herself. When we were gathered in Owen’s study, which was the most homely place in that unhappy house, she gave up the attempt to be helpful. I poured tea and handed her a cup. She took it and then sat looking at it, as though uncertain what purpose it served; she put a tentative finger to the handle, lifted the cup half-way to her lips, then set it down again, her mouth twisted as though even the smell of the tea was bitter.

  Owen said conversationally:

  ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Those wretched people who visited us yesterday… .’ Her lips began to tremble; she put a hand to them and sat for a moment, head turned away, trying to compose her features. ‘Desmond telephoned my mother, he thinks he has found me some sort of job. Research into ability levels or something like that… .’ She clapped her hand to her mouth again, tight so that the teeth pressed against the soft flesh of the palm.

  Owen said quietly, ‘There’s no question of your starting a job at the moment, so don’t worry about that.’

  ‘It brought it all back. I felt so sick.’ She looked as though she might well be sick. The sweat came in little beads along the hairline and gradually broke out all over her face. It seemed to give her some release. She closed her eyes and said, ‘That terrible job!’ She gave a sigh and repeated, ‘Oh, that terrible job!’ Then another great sigh and she rested her head against the back of the chair. She was breathing heavily, but not with difficulty.

  Owen said, ‘You didn’t want the job?’ He was watching Margaret as he had first watched me, his head slightly bent, the eyes slanted up at her face.

  ‘No, no, no… .’ She moved her head from side to side, a movement not of distress, but as though she was easing the muscles and discovering the luxury that a cat experiences when it stretches itself. ‘No, I didn’t want it. Oh, it was a wonderful opportunity, everyone said so. My parents were so pleased and proud. And the people on the board were so nice, much nicer than they need have been. They made me see myself as they saw me; intellectually well above average, capable, discreet, and above all, dedicated, ready to work like a black for very little pay.’ She looked up at the ceiling and smiled at it. ‘They were right about that, of course, and at first I consoled myself with the thought of how hard I would work.’

  ‘But Margaret, why did you need to console yourself?’ I burst in before I could stop myself, and then glanced anxiously at Owen. He did not seem to object to the interruption, in fact he raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested that having started I might as well continue. I said, ‘You would have been the ideal person for that job. What went wrong?’

  ‘They made one big mistake.’ She was still leaning back in that relaxed attitude, talking to the ceiling. ‘They introduced me to some of my fellow workers. In particular, I met my assistant. She was good. You didn’t need to be with her for more than one minute before knowing she was really good. She had close-cropped hair and an incisive voice and everything and everyone at her finger tips.’ Margaret’s voice was far from incisive, she spoke as though her thoughts came to her across a great distance and somewhere in the vastness of space the starkness of reality had been smoothed out. ‘She would have demolished me. In a very short time she would be telling me what supplies to order and presenting me with draft schemes of work for my signature. There was no doubt as to who would be working for whom. I couldn’t do the job. We left each other saying how much we were going to enjoy working together, but I knew I wouldn’t be coming and I think she knew it, too. She had more knowledge of people than all the members of the appointments committee put together.’

  I leant forward to speak, but Owen snapped his fingers and I sat back again. Margaret remained still, staring up at the ceiling. She began to frown. Gradually, her reflections lost their tranquillity as something darker was revealed to which she was not reconciled. I saw her hands tighten on the arms of the chair.

  ‘All the time, I was thinking about the job, and trying to convince myself that I could do it.’ The throat muscles were taut now; she snatched at the words as though short of breath. ‘I don’t remember Norway at all, except for those dark fjords with mountains that hemmed me in on either side. You could walk upstream or downstream, there was no other way. I tried to climb once, but it was too steep. So I just walked, upstream one day and downstream the next, always in shadow, the hotel was on the wrong side of the fjord. Not that it would have made any difference if the sun had shone, my gloom was pretty impenetrable. I was trying to work things out in my mind, presenting myself with problems that had to be solved: an earthquake, a flood, I was in charge of supplies, what would I need for a medium-sized earthquake? I began to make lists on any scrap of paper that came to hand. I had an awful shock one day when I found I had left bandages out altogether. Then there were the work schemes. Imagination required there, rather than the ability to rise to a crisis. I would wake in the night with a brilliant idea and write it down at once: in the morning it never looked so good. I was completely absorbed in all this, I couldn’t think of anything else. I got to the stage where it annoyed me if I had to share a table at meals because making light conversation interfered with my train of thought. But I got fairly good at doing the two things simultaneously. I only slipped up once when I asked the man with bus tickets for morphia. I think he thought I was a junkie—I certainly looked like one. I frightened myself when I saw my reflection in a mirror.

  ‘By the time I got to Holland, I was making lists all the time. I did it at breakfast, lunch, dinner. Timothy got mad about it.’ She shuddered to a halt, as though confronted by a physical barrier. There was some change in the nature of her distress which I did not understand. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her expression became furtive.

  Owen said, ‘You certainly weren’t suited to that job. It’s a good thing you found out.’

  ‘I’m not suited to any job.’ She began to cry.

  ‘That’s absolute nonsense.’ He sounded sympathetic, but amused, and he did not rush forward to comfort her. ‘Your trouble is that you set your sights too high. You talk a lot about humility, but you’ve never even contemplated a run-of-the-mill job.’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I?’ She was jerked from despair to defend herself. ‘I’ll tell you what I want to be. A secretary. A secretary to a very clever man who knows exactly what he wants done, and requires someone to do it without fuss, or drawing attention to herself, and at all hours of the day and night if need be.’

  ‘Then why not?’

  ‘Because I … I … God didn’t mean me for that.’

  Owen bit his lip. I understood the language better,so I said:

  ‘You mean God thinks that secretaries are of no account?’

  She shook her head, beginning to cry again. ‘Oh, no, no, no! But I was meant for something else… .’ There was no pride, no sense of exaltation, only the utter weariness of a woman tried beyond her strength. There was, too, a deep certainty: whatever the reason for her conviction, it had put down too deep a root ever to be taken from her without risking her life. Owen seemed to realize this. He said very gently, ‘My dear girl, surely there are ways of serving God which are within your capacity? Isn’t thi
s supposed to be a part of His wisdom? That He knows the load which each individual can bear?’

  She said dully, ‘I can’t bear any load at all. I tried teaching. I didn’t tell my parents about that. There wasn’t any point—the idea was still-born. I had the chance to do a little teaching practice to see whether it appealed or not, after I had taken my finals. They let me loose in a nearby school—secondary modern mixed. The children were supposed to be of low intelligence.’ She smiled wryly. ‘The idea, so I am told, is to have a talk to the class first and get to know them. So I started asking them questions, trying to get them to talk about themselves. But all that happened was that they got to know about me. In ten minutes, they knew exactly how to handle me. I couldn’t teach … I couldn’t cope… .’ She pressed her hands to her temples as though trying to still the tumult there.

  ‘I can’t cope with life, that’s what it amounts to. Please help me, please, please… .’ The terror in her voice was something I shall never forget, it made me understand that there are limits beyond which none of us may venture with safety.

  Owen went to her and laid his hand gently on her wrist.

  ‘We all have a problem with life,’ he said. ‘And we each have to find the level at which we can cope.’

  ‘My father has done that,’ she said wearily. ‘But I can’t. I have all his fervour without his versatility.’