AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN

by MARY HOCKING

  A lovable creature, Murdoch thought as Patsy walked slowly back to the kitchen having restored peace of a kind, slapdash but lovable. Hugh should have made something of that marriage.

  ‘So what is the book about?’ she asked as she joined him.

  It was a question most people had learned not to ask, but Patsy was uninhibited, or insensitive, or both.

  ‘The Falklands War.’ He was surprised by his own indulgence.

  ‘It takes you a long time to hear what people are saying. But it hasn’t taken so long for you to catch up on the Falklands as it did on Vietnam. You’re making progress, Murdoch!’

  ‘What people are saying seldom makes sense to me. Patsy. During the Vietnam War – while you, no doubt, were doing your homework – Janet and I used to watch television.’ Matilda’s great grandmother would have been performing her ablutions on the hearthrug, and the children playing their last game of the day in the garden. He remembered that more vividly than the newsreels. ‘The Vietnam War was about as real to me as the Crimean War – they had both taken place. I wasn’t any more involved in the one than the other.’

  ‘But you saw those ghastly scenes on television.’

  ‘Burning villages, refugees dressed in the sort of clothes which turn a person into a bundle, napalm flame throwers, together with bits and pieces of human bodies which the networks had decided were compulsory viewing – is that what you have in mind?’

  ‘It didn’t move you?’

  ‘It’s a sort of black miracle that the small screen performs for me – containing within its frame grief, horror, terror, violence, defusing it and making it safe. The passion to inform debased into a mission to accommodate.’

  ‘Yes,’ Patsy conceded. ‘It it is very difficult to educate the masses in these matters.’ She looked solemn and he had a picture of her stirring the witch’s brew she had prepared for his supper and reflecting on the difficulty of distilling wisdom for the masses.

  ‘So why did you write it?’ she asked. ‘I thought it was a bit limited, mind you. But passionate. Really surprisingly passionate. Where did you get the passion from, Murdoch, you sly old fox?’

  ‘I was sitting in my study, reading a Sunday paper.’ Why am I telling her this? he wondered. They had always talked easily but not about things like this. He did not usually analyse the way ideas came to him – that would be questioning a gift, inviting who knew what retribution. Yet a kind of recklessness drove him on. ‘I came across an article written by a foreign correspondent. In this article he referred to a Vietnamese family with whom he had stayed in peacetime. To supplement the war pictures, there was a photograph of the family. And there, Patsy, among the obligatory pictures of Vietnam represented as one great devastation area, was a group of people picnicking on the banks of a river. They were as formally dressed and disposed as subjects in a painting by Watteau. The woman who was the centrepiece wore a white, high-necked dress. The picnic hamper rested on a large, white cloth. Can you imagine that? Not your kind of picnic, with the tin-opener and teapot left behind at home.’

  ‘That only happened once.’

  ‘This was a scene so peaceful that, in England, one must have gone back to Edwardian times for its like.’

  ‘And this really got to you?’

  He had sat staring from one picture to the other, trying not so much to reconcile, which was not his business, as to relate them in time and place. And the background? Was it possible that the river should still flow so quietly, the trees bend so gently towards it, the grass yet grow in that meadow? And they, anonymous, archetypal refugees, had once known that?

  So it happens, he had thought, looking out of the window at his children playing on the swing with Janet standing watchfully by. It happens not only to other people, it happens to us. It happens to the woman of whatever culture who has prided herself on her clean home, the hospitality of her board, the woman who in her own small sphere has established and maintained a necessary order; a person not like Mother Courage, born and bred to the battlefield, but having the pride and dignity due to one who has achieved what is expected of her in the society in which she lives.

  Gradually as he studied the pictures day by day, they began to merge, he saw what journey it was these people had had to make, he felt the wounds of people and place.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That really got to me.’

  ‘I liked the way you did the woman. But I was surprised that you concentrated so much on her. What about the massacre?’

  ‘Every war has its massacre. The journalists can deal with massacres better than I can.’

  She let this pass, although plainly dissatisfied. ‘And the Falklands?’

  ‘The same sort of thing.’ But it wasn’t the same – he was still revising the book, yet he was talking to her about it and seemed unable to stop. He, who had always said scornfully, ‘When you have to explain your books you are finished,’ was now worrying away at it like a terrier digging for a buried bone.

  Patsy said, ‘But you didn’t seem very stirred at the time.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But then, when it was over, one paper sent a reporter to cover the return of the ship which had brought back the coffins of the dead. A grey, wet day, and only a handful of relatives come to see their soldier home. Pictures again – a glimpse of bemused faces beneath umbrellas.’

  ‘And that stirred something?’

  ‘I thought, looking at them, these are the people for whom no one speaks, certainly not the politicians, blaring away about patriotism or warmongering, according to their persuasion.’

  ‘You saw those ships blazing, all those men in the oily water, still on fire, and that did nothing to you!’ Her face had gone quite flinty, the whole texture of her body seemed to have changed; if that sacklike garment were to burst apart a load of gravel would spill out!

  He said, ‘I can’t respond to the media coverage. The media is concerned with the numbers game, casualty figures are more important than casualties.’

  ‘And that means?’ He had lost her sympathy.

  ‘It is the one death which matters; death is no more grievous if it is multiplied by a hundred or a thousand, only more newsworthy.’

  ‘Thanks for the sermon.’

  ‘I’ve listened to plenty of yours.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But call it my failure, if you like.’

  ‘Humility is not your thing, Murdoch.’

  ‘It is in the small and the intimate that the likes of us can best hope to come to some kind of understanding of the forces which move in the world today.’

  ‘I’m glad to have your word for it. I just hope for your sake that all your Right Wing friends . . .’

  ‘I have few friends and none of them Right Wing.’

  ‘. . . won’t find it offensive. Giving the Argentinians their comeuppance is the only thing they have had to shout about in years, poor things.’

  His agent had expressed similar fears.

  ‘It isn’t about us and the Argentinians,’ Murdoch had protested. ‘It is about one family whose son was killed in the Falklands; a family who must remake their inner world while going about the routine of their lives in an outside world which has lost its points of reference, where there are no longer any signposts. A world in process of returning to chaos.’ The agent had not been impressed. He tried something more direct on Patsy. ‘It is about people who have been so badly shocked that some kind of dislocation has taken place. You might say, I have tried to see a small area of London through the eyes of someone who has never been exposed to civilisation before.’ A countryman himself, he had this feeling whenever he stood in Piccadilly Circus.

  Patsy said, ‘London isn’t civilisation.’

  She is so thick! he thought. Why should it seem important to try to get ideas to penetrate that dark tangle? He tried again. ‘We have lost our identity.’

  ‘I could have told you that,’ she said scornfully. ‘Ever since we lost our Empire.’

  ‘But think what it means! Without a corp
orate identity we find ourselves trying to do what society once did for us. We try to find our own way. It’s not possible, of course. But there is some sort of inner effort which we have to make which once wasn’t required of us, which perhaps shouldn’t be required of us. Don’t you feel that, Patsy? When you wrestle with these enormous issues – which I see reduced to single statements on your car windscreen – doesn’t it all seem too much for you on your own?’

  ‘I don’t mind being on my own,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Of course you mind!’ He was becoming passionate about it and he could not understand why. ‘Man does nothing on his own. The solitary individual does not reach the Antarctic; he may be the person who actually stands there and plants the flag, but there are people behind him who have brought him thus far. One scientist may take the leap that results in a great discovery, but he will not have pioneered the whole territory on his own. When we go right out on our own, we lose our way and our minds.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve deserved that, Murdoch. It was Hugh who left me, remember.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  But she had gone. He watched her marshalling children and dog for a walk; and then, when the garden was empty, he remained staring across the lawn to the hedge which so badly needed clipping. He heard Janet saying, ‘What goes on out there? Now that I have more time to give to the outside world, I find I am unable to make sense of it. Can’t you help? Can’t anyone help?’ That had been several months ago and he had not taken her seriously. But now it struck him like a blow in the stomach that the woman in his book, and in the book before that, the woman without identity, for whom there were no signposts, for whom a kind of dislocation had taken place, was Janet.

  All the way in to town Deutzia exclaimed, ‘Primroses! See! See the primroses! How very fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful place. And celandine! Just the colour I used to love, though I couldn’t wear it now, not with this old white head of mine! And what is that little pink flower?’

  ‘I didn’t think you liked the country,’ Katrina said.

  ‘I haven’t liked it so much since they cut down the bus service.’ Deutzia was in high spirits now that she was on her way to town. ‘I should never have moved here had I known how isolated I was going to be. But on a morning like this I don’t regret it one bit.’

  ‘So the dismembering of the bus service was withheld from you in mercy?’ Janet said. ‘Otherwise we shouldn’t have you among us.’

  Katrina turned her head to stare at her mother.

  Deutzia said, ‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’ But she understood the caustic tone. She fanned herself with one glove.

  ‘I talk too much, I know that. Wait until you live alone.’

  ‘I practically do,’ Janet said indifferently.

  ‘Mum!’ Katrina protested. ‘What’s got into you? Look! Look at the pretty lambs!’ She thought: for goodness sake, Mum, look at them before D tells you to!

  Katrina could see that it had been a bad idea to bring Deutzia. ‘I suppose it would be mean to leave her behind,’ she had said, imagining she was echoing her mother’s thoughts – her mother, after all, was the one who usually suffered Deutzia with good grace. But there was nothing gracious about Janet today.

  Katrina had never thought of her mother in moral terms. In her mind she had given her the attributes of a friendly wood sprite – a soft, brown, gentle creature, but rather unpredictable. She had relished the unpredictability, as had Malcolm. Its form was innocent enough – a tendency to provocative teasing and a certain contrariness which meant it would not be wise to take reactions for granted. What one could rely on was acceptance. She accepted other people and because of this never seemed to find any occasion for being really hurtful. There was a shyness appropriate to a woodland creature, a reserve which distanced her from those outside her immediate circle, but although she always viewed the world from a field’s length away, she had given the impression of enjoying what she saw.

  Yet here she was this morning, looking almost sullen and being so stingingly nasty to poor old Deutzia.

  ‘All so green after the snow!’ Deutzia said.

  Charcoal, Janet thought. What would they say if I told them it was only a charcoal sketch?

  They came to the outskirts of the small town and Deutzia applied her mind to the essentials of the day. ‘Now, I know you want to go to the supermarket, Janet. But if we did have time, I would like to look in Lucinda’s and perhaps just glance round the Gallery. Lovely animal paintings! Do you know his work? He has done the Queen’s corgies. Ah! Now I am going to pay for the parking, Katrina!’

  It was still early in the morning and the car park was almost empty save for three cars which had disgorged families crawling with recalcitrant children and dogs. At the moment a baby was evincing a marked lack of interest in its potty while a greyhound was disdaining to drink from its bowl. The parents were young, cheerful and patient.

  ‘Ah, how that takes one back,’ Deutzia said vaguely. ‘Now, when we have been to the supermarket, you must both have coffee with me. I insist!’

  It was inevitable that she would ask them to have coffee with her, but somehow Katrina had not foreseen it. She had forgotten Deutzia’s craving for company and had imagined her selfishly insisting on going her own way once she got into town. It would be the same at lunch, unless by that time Deutzia had met one of her cronies. Katrina had banked on having either coffee or lunch alone with her mother. This was the one time when you had another person at your mercy; once seated and served you could rely on at least twenty minutes – half an hour if it was lunch – when they could not decently get away from you. Katrina had a lot to say to her mother.

  ‘Now, what is it that you want?’ Deutzia asked when they had tugged baskets free of their entanglement in surrounding trolleys. ‘I expect you have made a list. I have to list everything now. And I leave messages to myself all over the house. It must look like a treasure hunt sometimes,’ She was overcome with sadness at her plight. ‘Except that there isn’t any treasure.’

  Not only had Janet not made a list, she had not even considered the matter of purchases. The supermarket was small but its shelves had recently been restocked and the variety of choice was overwhelming. Janet recalled how Katrina had protested when she was studying the courses available at universities, ‘There is too much! I wish I had been born years ago and Daddy had had to save every penny for me to have this wonderful opportunity never hitherto enjoyed by a member of our family. And it was all desperately important and only the one chance. It would have meant something then. And I would have written a book about it in later years – my brilliant career!’

  Janet stopped so abruptly that a woman pushing a trolley bumped into her thus causing a series of small collisions more appropriate to a shunting yard than a food store. ‘Katrina, my little one! Are you happy doing Management Studies?’

  Katrina said, ‘However did you . . .?’

  ‘Tell me, tell me!’

  ‘Yes, I will! I want to. But later . . .’

  Janet looked at the shelves laden with dun-coloured tins bearing indecipherable legends. ‘I must make a joke of this,’ she thought as her heart began to pound. Aloud, she said, ‘I wish I lived in a mud hut and your father went out and hunted for food and all I had to do was cook it. Once man stopped hunting he should at least have undertaken the shopping.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better move along?’ Katrina was now more impatient than ever to get the shopping over and done with. ‘You don’t want anything here, do you?’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘Well, you have never yet fed us out of tins!’

  They moved away. But where should I go? Janet wondered, fighting to master panic.

  ‘What do you want?’ Katrina demanded.

  Janet tried to think in terms of a menu, but her head was stuffed with cotton wool. She reached out a hand and Katrina said, ‘Mum, you’ll get fresh fish at The Ark, surely?’

&n
bsp; Janet closed her eyes. ‘Katrina, will you please go away and wait outside. I can’t think with you pouncing on me all the time.’ Katrina turned on her heel and strode away. Janet waited until Deutzia caught up with her, then she said, ‘I have a headache, Deutzia. Could you possibly take me in hand?’

  ‘Yes, of course, my dear. What do you want?’

  ‘Whatever you think I want.’

  ‘But what are you short of?’ Deutzia looked around her vaguely. ‘After all, your deep freeze is so much bigger than mine.’

  Janet felt a slithering and sliding somewhere deep beneath the hatches. She made a great effort to keep herself in ballast. ‘A bit of everything, I should think.’ Even that involved endless choice: white bread, wholemeal bread, whole grain bread, granary bread (very indigestible according to Deutzia). She bought wholemeal bread because this was what Deutzia seemed to expect of her. The same performance followed with flour. She chose stoneground flour. She chose cereal with honey and raisins. The choice of fruit juice was overwhelming and she ended up with a concoction containing cocoanut and passion fruit. ‘I don’t believe a word of it!’ Deutzia said. She turned the carton over and read details of additives.

  ‘I thought you had bought the shop!’ Katrina said crossly when they eventually joined her.

  The sun was bright now and light sparked from the pavement as they walked. Janet put on sun glasses. Ahead was the town square. Deutzia pointed to the restaurant on the far side. Janet was finding it difficult to keep her balance and she had stopped several times on one pretext or another – pointing irrelevantly in shop windows, stopping to admire undistinguished flowers in a window-box – to disguise a tendency to lurch. She looked at the cobbled square in dismay, wondering how she could possibly venture out into the large open space. But she knew that whatever happened she must not take Katrina’s arm because once she did that it would all be over with her and she would not dare to walk unaided again. Slowly, step by step, she advanced. ‘How difficult cobblestones are!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m glad I didn’t live when all the streets were like this.’