Jill could tell this woman didn’t think she was at all the right type for selling wool, with her short skirt and eye make-up and patrician condescending accent – whereas the idea thrilled Jill perversely, to end up here, with her first class in Greats from Oxford. Eagerly she insisted that she could knit, was skilled in knitting: which was perfectly true. She had knitted such lovely things before Hettie was born, including a shawl in 2-ply off-white lambswool, as subtle as a cobweb, in a complicated leaf pattern. She had had a job, while she was pregnant, on reception at a publisher’s, and when she wasn’t enlisted for tying up parcels of books, had striven away on her needles through long empty hours. The matinee jackets and bootees in the wool shop window – in brash strawberry nylon, and yellow and vermilion – weren’t anything like the tasteful old-fashioned things that she had made. She had imagined that motherhood was going to be dreamy and delicately absorbed like her knitting: then all the pretty clothes she’d prepared had turned out to be so wildly beside the point, in the days of shock and violence – as she thought of them – which began with the arrival of the actual baby. The dainty wool vests and cardigans had quickly become matted and tight with washing, and anyway they had given Hettie a rash – and she had outgrown them in a few weeks. Jill had only ever imagined her baby, in advance, as a tiny, wistful, curled-up creature-thing.
The vicar was away for the day at a diocesan meeting and Sophy found Roland in his study, staring into a leather-bound book open across his scabby knees: Herodotus in the original, as it turned out. She stored this up as a funny story to report to Jill; then, in a second impulse of protective tact, decided to keep it to herself. Jill these days seemed to make a joke out of everything, including her children – she believed it was better to jolly them along and not indulge them. Sophy quailed occasionally at her daughter’s brittle, brave performance; Jill had mentioned already, as if it was funny, that Roland was slow at learning his letters. — He’s a sweetheart, but he isn’t Einstein, she had cheerfully said. He was holding Herodotus the right way up, anyhow, and turned the pages with great care, seeming really to be peering closely at the words. His small, intent face was brown and neat as a nut, wrenching his grandmother, and the silky hair curled tight on his skull like a black lamb’s. He told her he was reading Grandfather’s book.
— How interesting, darling. What is it about?
— All sorts of things, Granny. They can’t be said, because I can only read it with my mind.
— Of course, that’s very natural, I’m the same way.
— But what is thinking?
Sophy pushed away the idea of those absences of hers, when she sank into deep water: did they count as thought? — I suppose it is a kind of work, she said. — You can feel it in going on in your brain, when you’re understanding things. For instance when you’re reading words in a book, trying to find out what they mean. This book is in Greek, of course, so Granny can’t read it: but your mummy can, and your grandfather.
— And I can.
Roland twitched his nose when he looked up, to keep his glasses in place, with a backwards jerk of his head like a little old man. Sophy blamed this new habit, which distressed her, on the glasses mended lumpily with sticking plaster, which must be a blot in the corner of his vision. At the first opportunity she would take him into Corrigan’s, for a real repair. She mentioned it as soon as Jill arrived home off the bus, her basket piled high with shopping – and of course Jill took it as a criticism, although she was in buoyant spirits and forgave her mother easily. — Don’t you think I’ve had them repaired ten times already? He’ll only break them again right away. And old Corrigan’s creepy, he used to put his hand on my knee. But if you want to, I don’t care.
Jill’s beauty was startling that afternoon, with her hair pinned up and something scalded and raw in her young face: Sophy had to turn her eyes away from it. She didn’t have the refinement of either of her parents, with her straight long nose, lean animal jaw, big lazy mouth, her golden colouring suffused across the cheeks with a rough pink. — I can’t believe how everything in town is just the same. I knew everyone. I bumped into Mikey Waller – he’s working as an estate agent, did you know? And Ailsa was in The Bungalow. Thank you for the ten shillings. I felt like a schoolgirl on a treat, and ate two teacakes and bought iced buns for everyone.
— Hurrah, hurrah! Hettie shouted, picking up on her mother’s mood. She had been tranquil all morning while Jill was away, filling in her colouring book at the kitchen table.
— Ailsa’s always in The Bungalow, Sophy said. — No wonder she’s jumpy, it’s all that coffee she drinks.
— Innocent dear Mummy, Ailsa’s drink problem isn’t coffee.
Sophy frowned across the children’s heads and shook her head just perceptibly; alertly Hettie caught it, looking from her grandmother to her mother and back again. — Who is Ailsa? she demanded. — And what is her drink problem?
Jill laughed and wouldn’t tell her, then when Hettie loudly persisted she lost her temper, smacking Hettie smartly across the back of the legs. — No iced bun for you!
Hettie’s screams awoke the baby early from her nap, and Sophy thought of that flat in Marylebone, where they were all on top of one another. None of this fraught chaos of childcare had seemed to arise when Jill was a child herself. No doubt it was easier with only one – and anyway Jill had been serene from the moment she was born: commanding and forceful, but never naughty. Sophy hadn’t realised perhaps how peculiar their family was, with a child who was her parents’ easy companion, entering all the concerns of their adult lives: parish war work, the Tennis Club, Latin and Greek and poetry. This childhood seemed even odder in the light of Jill’s adult life – she had disavowed her parents’ style so wholeheartedly.
Sophy’s own experience, she thought, hardly counted as motherhood at all – she had missed out on something more boisterous and transforming. Probably as an adult she had been too childish. Jill was right, she was an innocent – and that was awful. Though she did know about Ailsa. No doubt there were things in Jill’s and Tom’s life together which made it harder to include children. When Tom played with his children they had great fun, he rolled round on the floor with them, roaring like a bear – but he was quickly bored, and away too often. Poor Jill had to make up the rules for their family life all by herself. And Sophy saw that the children were bruised sometimes by their mother’s power, which could be inconsistent and capricious. She thought that Jill adored her son too openly, and was too hard on little Hettie.
Jill took the children into the woods to eat their buns: even Hettie, when she’d apologised, was allowed to have one. They spread a rug among the bluebells – which were over, darkened and shrivelled on their stems – and Jill poured out plastic beakers of orange squash. Dwarfed by the woods’ tall spaciousness, the children were very calm: the smooth trunks of the birch trees soared up all around them and over their heads the branches broke out in young leaves, tender as scraps of soft cloth caught in the twigs. Out of sight of other adults, Jill let her prickly irony lapse as if it was exhausting. Her children knew this and they loved to be alone with her. Ali stuffed her mouth determinedly with leaf mould and they gave up trying to prevent her: it was only earth after all, as Roland reassured his mother. Colours were clean in the watery light, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, a wood pigeon took off from time to time, its disruption startling as gunshot. Behind the stillness they felt the surge of spring, pressing everything forwards.
After their picnic Hettie and Roland ran on along the path through the trees, while Jill let the baby stagger at her own pace, in her leading reins, pausing to bend over unsteadily like a stout old gentleman, picking up litter so daintily between two fingertips: a lolly stick, sweet wrapper, cigarette end, all dropped long ago and weathered to the same brown as the woods. Jill had changed out of her heels into a pair of flip-flops she found in the scullery; every so often, to catch up with the others, she slipped out of these and ran barefoot, carrying
the flip-flops hooked over a finger, the baby bouncing and hiccoughing with laughter on her hip. She thought she’d take the children to call on the old couple who lived in a lonely cottage perched on a bend in the path, with a well in the garden and a view down through the trees into a secluded valley. They’d called here before, and Mrs Good had given sweets to Hettie – she had given them to Jill too, when she was a child, and Jill had always thanked her politely, then carried them home to bury them guiltily in the vicarage dustbin. She couldn’t remember now what she’d been afraid of. Poison perhaps, as if they were sweets in a fairy tale, because of the old lady’s name and the equivocal position of the cottage, set apart from the village community.
When they arrived at the cottage and knocked on the door, there seemed to be no one at home. All the windows were on the inaccessible back wall, overhanging the valley below, so they couldn’t peer inside; Roland tried the door handle and was taken aback when the door swung open. Stepping halfway across the threshold into the tiny single room on the ground floor, Jill called out in case anyone was lying sick or in trouble upstairs. The silence and stillness inside the cottage was a shock after the perpetual movement outdoors; this air hadn’t been stirred for long hours – or days perhaps. Even the light was stale. She felt she’d intruded on something forbidden. The dishes on the painted dresser and rug in front of the hearth communicated the home’s emptiness, presided over by the religious pictures on the walls: Jesus was sorrowfully reproachful, or had a lantern and a lost lamb tucked under his arm. The Goods were a remnant of the Bible Christians, who once had a great following among the farm workers.
Jill called out again for Mrs Good, and then when no one responded was relieved to get out of the cottage, pulling the door shut quickly behind her, choosing not to explore upstairs. Roland asked her what she’d seen inside.
— Nothing at all. Just the ordinary inside of a house, when the people are out somewhere.
There was a message waiting for Jill when they arrived home, sent round from the Smiths who owned Roddings, the biggest and oldest farm in the village, and had a telephone. Tom had called her and left a number he could be contacted on, if she rang him at nine that evening. Mrs Smith had written it out in a fat schoolbook hand, in purple indelible pencil, on notepaper headed with an advertisement for a dairy – a cow kicking up her heels, jumping over a moon.
Jill frowned at it, suspicious. — So is this a Paris number?
The outrage of him: sending his instructions, dictating that she should arrange her life around his convenience. She wouldn’t call, anyway. He could sit and wait, expecting the phone to ring, and it wouldn’t. Let him have a taste of that.
Peering at the number, Sophy worried. — What do you think?
— It’s rather important because of the time difference. I don’t think it’s Paris, it’s not long enough. I think it’s London. He wouldn’t have thought to take the Smiths’ number away with him, he must be back at the flat. I’m surprised he remembered where I wrote it down. By the way, what’s happened to the Goods? We went to the cottage and their door was unlocked, but no one was home.
Sophy was vague, her mind was still on Tom. — It shouldn’t be unlocked. We ought to see to that. There’s a niece who might want things. Didn’t I write to you? He died just before Christmas, she went into a Home, poor old thing. Daddy calls on her but she won’t see him, she has some rather eccentric religious convictions. I don’t know what will happen to the house. No one will live there, without running water.
Jill said that all religious convictions were eccentric, including Daddy’s. Her mother was unperturbed. — Well, mine are the most eccentric of all. If you knew the half of the funny things that I have faith in. Just don’t start any theological arguments with your father before he’s finished supper. He forgets to eat, if he’s enjoying himself.
— Oh, you’re an old pagan, Jill said. — I know all about that. You’re a disgrace to the Church.
She was burning up all the time, with consciousness of Tom’s call: it roused her again to that exhilarated anger she’d felt in those last weeks in London, and to those heights of cheerful dissimulation. Whose number was it he had given her? It wasn’t his office. Perhaps some other woman’s place? He demeaned her and she repudiated out of her exceptional soul the cliché of the old wrong, would not allow sex-jealousy to be the explanation for her leaving. And how dare he presume that she wanted to speak to him?
Yet a few minutes before nine o’clock – the children were all asleep – Jill slipped out of the house in the dark as if under some compulsion, to go to the phone box in the village. Her father was working on his sermon, Sophy was sitting at her bureau, writing to old schoolfriends: Jill didn’t want their awareness accompanying her. It was a relief to duck down the stone steps at the front, into the chilly damp under the privet hedge, hearing the voice from the wireless carry on indoors, blithely assured, without her. Moonlight seeped around the edges of a mass of cloud. Sophy had left shillings and sixpences piled up discreetly beside Jill’s purse, and she didn’t notice how tightly she was gripping them until her fingers ached. Her hate-tryst consumed her, she was bent upon it, aimed in her entirety at the lit-up phone box and its dank sealed-in air, the furtive importance of fumbling in her pocket for the number, the burr in the heavy receiver, the suspenseful moment of waiting, reading over the framed instructions and advertisements in the kiosk without seeing them. Two worlds – here, and elsewhere – were steered into collision.
Tom made a mistake when he answered the phone. She knew him! He would have planned to snatch it up as soon as she rang, and greet her gravely, intimately. But for a moment he’d lost concentration, and forgotten: probably he was reading something he’d picked up while he waited, or scribbling an idea. So he answered the phone in a breezy light voice, without thinking, as he did at the office. — Tom Crane?
She almost laughed.
He changed his voice then hastily, to growly and low, troubled. — Jill, is it you?
— Where are you? she said. — Whose number is this? I don’t care: only I need to know.
— Bernie’s. I’m staying here. Can’t stand being in that flat without you.
— You’ll get used to it.
Did she believe him, that he was at Bernie’s? His silence tried to be reproachful, but he wasn’t very good at silence. — Everything’s changed, Jilly. You’d feel differently if you’d seen what I’ve seen. There’s no way things are going to go back to how they were, not after this. Listen, I’ll stay with the children at home for a few days and you can go over there, be part of it. I don’t mind at all.
— Go over where? she asked coldly. — Oh, you mean Paris. I’d forgotten about Paris. No, I’ve no desire to go there.
— It’s crazy, I’m telling you. The courage of those kids! The police have clubs and gas bombs: they’ve brought in reservists from Brittany – country boys, reactionary nationalists. Someone said that they’re getting rid of bodies in the Seine. And people in the apartments throw down chocolate and saucisson for the students, bring them out coffee. The bourgeois drive into the quartier from the suburbs on quiet nights, sightseeing, taking photos of themselves on the barricades. Three million joined the march protesting at the police repression. I stood up on a traffic island and I saw a river of them, running all the way down the Boul’ Saint-Mich and out of sight. Do you know what they chanted? Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands – because of Cohn-Bendit, the authorities threatening to deport him. Isn’t that beautiful?
— Three million sounds unlikely. The whole population of Paris is only eight and a half.
Jill knew how he hated her when she was flattening. She was like her father then, with his superior knowledge like a trap snapping shut. — I heard they’re cutting down the trees, she said. — The lovely old plane trees of Paris. They won’t grow again in a hurry.
Sententiously Tom said that this wasn’t a time to be worrying about trees.
— It’ll be too late to
worry about them afterwards. Anyway, what did you want? You left a message asking me to call.
He changed to the low-toned, coaxing voice he used when he wanted to make love to her. — Just to talk to you, Jilly. I wanted to hear you speak. Listen, I need you. I can’t live without you and the children. When are you coming back? You’re making a big fuss about a little thing. It was nothing, what happened with Vanda. She drives me nuts, she’s stupid, I don’t even like her. You’re the one, Jilly. You’re the only one who understands all this. I miss you so much. I need you.
Jill didn’t say anything. She coiled and uncoiled the flex of the phone restlessly around her left hand and held the receiver with her chin against her shoulder, stretching her neck as if her shoulders ached, pressing her back against the heavy door of the phone box until it opened under her weight, letting in the night air. She hardly knew that she watched the barn owl pass, weightless-seeming as a drift of chiffon against the gloom. Luxuriantly she listened to her husband. She didn’t want him back. But still, she wanted to hear this, she couldn’t help herself. When he fell quiet eventually, listening to her, trying to gauge what meaning there was for him in her silence, she put the receiver back in its metal cradle, cutting him off.
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