by MARY HOCKING
She had meant to suggest that Norah should take the opportunity to tidy herself before lunch. Her face was flushed from the heat of the stove and her hair was more wispy than ever. The apron had not entirely protected the tailored navy dress during pastry-making. Hester had wanted this occasion to be a success for Norah, but this no longer seemed important.
At lunch Hesketh sat at the head of the table looking like one of the more dissolute Roman emperors. Lois said to Hester afterwards that she was never quite sure whether he would pour more wine or hurl a glass against the wall. At first, he talked easily and wittily, mostly to Jack and Lois, but making occasional attempts to draw Hester into discussion. ‘Now, as a writer this will interest you.’ As this was high on Hester’s list of boring remarks to address to a writer, she took little part in the conversation. Once, when pressed, she made her standard response. ‘It has obviously roused your imagination. You write it.’
She was soon to regret having given him this opening.
‘Oh, I mean to,’ he assured her. ‘When I have more time I mean to get down to some writing.’ In a minute, she thought, he will ask me whether my characters take control. But she underestimated his self-concern. ‘That is why I want to make plans for the study.’ He deferred to her with hypnotic charm. ‘You, of course, will understand the importance of having the right room in which to work.’
‘Any room will do for me so long as there is plenty of paper and somewhere to put a typewriter.’
‘Ah well, for your sort of writing perhaps.’ She could almost feel the withdrawal of warmth. ‘I don’t suppose you do much research. I shall need a lot of reference books. But what about a word- processor? You would have to find room for that.’
‘God defend me from word-processors.’
‘Really? You do surprise me.’
Hester made no attempt to defend her attitude. She was resigned to the fact that nowadays people were not interested in the substance of books, only in the technicalities. Hesketh pursued the matter. ‘Of course, I know some people find it hard to come to terms with technology, but I would have expected that you would be able to master a word-processor.’
Norah made her first contribution to the discussion. ‘Hester is a creative writer.’
Samantha looked delighted to discover that her stepmother possessed that innate ability of wives to say in all innocence the one thing most likely to infuriate their husbands.
Hesketh said, ‘Creative? Mmh, I see. Creative.’ He rolled it around on his tongue like a wine-taster suspicious of a particular vintage. ‘We are saying, are we, that Jane Austen is creative, Boswell not? We would admit Mrs Gaskell on to the lower slopes of Olympus but Pepys must not set foot on the sacred mountain. Is that what we are saying?’
‘Some people, I suppose, would argue that there are no steps on Olympus.’ Jack deftly diverted the main thrust of discussion. Hester wished him well in his chosen profession. If she had anything to do with it, he would be made an Appeal Court judge without more delay. ‘They would say that you are either on the heights with Shakespeare and Homer or down on the plain with the Gaskells and Trollopes, Pepys and Boswell.’
Hesketh debated this with a lot of skill and a cavalier disrespect of literature until the cheese was brought in.
‘That was a most satisfying meal,’ Hester said to Norah.
‘I’m a good plain cook,’ Norah acknowledged.
Jack, who had been relieved to find that the meal when eventually served was indeed satisfying, said, ‘Learnt at your mother’s knee. What could be better?’
‘A clip on the ear was all I learnt there,’ Norah said in an aside to Hester. She looked amused and continued to seem amused when Samantha brought the discussion down from Olympus by saying, ‘If you’re going to write your memoirs you’ll have John Mortimer to contend with.’
‘John Mortimer? I don’t fancy I would be greatly concerned about the result of any contention between myself and the repetitious Rumpole.’
‘You have to admit he’s very witty.’
‘And you, my dear, need to beware of this tendency to begin sentences with the phrase “you have to . . .” As far as I am aware no law has yet been passed, no doctrine has been promulgated which compels . . .’
‘Oh, fuck you! It’s like arguing with Bernard Levin.’
Samantha and Hesketh rose from the table simultaneously. His command of invective relied less on the four-letter word and his voice was the more powerful organ. Samantha saw no choice but to have recourse to hysterics. Lois, whom Hester thought the more admirable the more she saw of her, took her by the shoulders and propelled her from the room. Hesketh said to Norah, ‘She is your responsibility now. It would have been nice to have had a word from you.’
Jack said, ‘Oh come, that’s hardly fair.’
Norah looked steadily at the beam of light falling across the silver on the sideboard. Hester, visited by one of those flashes of intuition which are both inspiration and agony, thought: she is thinking of Michael. How else could it be that at this moment this troubled woman could look as if Olympus was for the climbing. After a few moments’ contemplation, Norah said quietly, ‘Yes, of course, you are right. What would you like me to do?’
Hesketh was completely taken aback. If she had deliberately set out to shame him she could not have succeeded more completely. But there was nothing pious in her humility and as she collected the plates she might have been meditating some matter in which Hesketh had no part. The current between them had been switched off at her end of the table.
Samantha was sitting on the stairs crying dismally when Hester and Norah went into the hall. Lois was crouched beside her, a comforting arm around her shoulders. Samantha looked like any other unhappy child.
Norah said, ‘Come into the kitchen and help us wash up.’
Lois and Hester did the washing up while Norah talked to Samantha and Samantha alternately cried and dredged up fresh epithets to describe her father. When inspiration finally failed she said without much spirit, ‘Things were all right before you married him.’
‘What does that mean? Do you want me to go away so that you can look after him?’ Norah made the suggestion as though it were a reasonable proposition.
‘You think you’re bloody clever, don’t you?’
‘Do you really think it was cleverness got me into this?’ The good humour was holding out longer than Hester would have believed possible.
‘You just wanted a man, marriage, home – all the things most of your generation are beginning to find they can do without. It’s pathetic. Can’t you see how pathetic you are?’
Lois paused by the table, a saucepan in her hand. She turned it over, seeming to wonder whether she should use it or not.
Norah said sharply, ‘You don’t look any too good from where I’m sitting.’ She turned her head away and screwed up her eyes. The impression was not of a person suppressing anger, rather, she seemed to be trying to bring some relevant image to mind. One could almost see light penetrating the eyelids. Her face was composed when she spoke again. ‘I don’t think we can come to terms, do you? I’m prepared to try, but I don’t think we can do it. In a little while, perhaps, if we don’t get too much on top of each other in the meantime, but not now.’
Samantha got up. ‘If you think I’m going to come to terms with seeing my father getting more senile every day, you’re even more stupid than I thought.’
‘He wasn’t in the least senile when you failed to come to terms with him just now,’ Norah retorted. ‘He was on top form.’
Samantha said shrilly, ‘I’m getting out of here even if I have to sleep in a ditch.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Lois said cheerfully. ‘Jack will be going back to London on Tuesday, so if you can hold out until then, you can come to stay with me for a few days.’
Samantha was patently torn between the desire to make as much trouble as possible and a healthy sense of her own well-being. Eventually she said grudgingly, ‘How do
I get to you? I haven’t got a car.’
‘Neither have I. I can’t drive. But there are buses, three, in fact . . .’
‘Three buses!’
Hester, foreseeing the imminent breakdown of this sensible scheme, said, ‘If all else fails, I will take you.’
‘What about your work?’ Norah said when Samantha had departed, swearing defiantly to cover her retreat.
‘You may well ask.’
‘You’re a good woman.’
‘Just weak-minded.’
The kitchen door opened and Hesketh appeared, looking apologetic. ‘Coffee?’ he said. ‘Should I . . . perhaps?’
They left him to make coffee and strolled out on to the lawn where Lois joined Jack who was pretending to admire the river.
‘You have managed very well today,’ Hester said to Norah. She was suspicious rather than congratulatory, like the member of the audience who is not entirely convinced by a conjuring trick.
Norah said vaguely, ‘Yes, I suppose I have.’ She sounded as if her recall of what had actually taken place was fragmented.
‘It is all a matter of caring,’ Lois said when Hester came down to the river bank. ‘Sometimes the less you care, the better you cope.’ They watched Norah poking about idly among the roses. ‘And for some reason she wasn’t really caring at lunch, was she? Once or twice, I felt she wasn’t with us at all.’
Hester said unhappily, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
‘I hope she’s not ill.’
Hesketh came out to announce that coffee was served. He had put a napkin over one arm and was making quite a performance of it. They all indulged him, Jack even going so far as to mention Jeeves.
Chapter Eight
Alone in the kitchen when all her guests had departed, Norah said aloud, ‘There is no happiness for you in this.’ Her expression suggested that her spirit denied this sober statement.
In his study, Michael reflected on the unwisdom of seeing Norah Kendall again. It was nearly dusk, yet the world seemed flooded with light.
Norah said, wringing out the washing-up cloth, ‘I can make do with a little, a very little, if only I don’t have to give this up.’
Michael told himself, I have had so little opportunity to love, I can’t turn away from this.
Three days later he went again to the country park where the log cabin was being constructed. ‘I’ll take sandwiches and have a walk on the moors in the afternoon,’ he said to Valentine. It was his one free afternoon and walking was his great pleasure.
As a rule, the Hoaths ate their main meal in the evening when there was less chance of interruption, so a sandwich lunch would normally have presented no problem. But Valentine was now attending so many rehearsals prior to the opening of Hedda Gabler that lunch, with attendant irritations, had become the main meal. ‘Alcoholism is supposed to be a problem with clergy wives,’ she had said only yesterday. ‘I would have expected chronic indigestion to be more prevalent.’ Now she said, ‘I shall probably be out late tonight. It’s our first dress rehearsal.’
‘I could finish off that pie we had last night.’
He was usually punctilious about consulting her as to how they should spend his free afternoon and they would often go to an art exhibition, see a foreign film, work together in the garden. It was a bright day and she could not complain that this once he should make his own choice. She noted, however, that he did not suggest she should join him. It was a constant irritation to her that he could not accept that she did not like walking and hated moorland and must always persist whenever the occasion arose in putting her in the position of having to refuse him. How many times had she said, ‘Why don’t you just go?’ She was dismayed when she handed him the sandwiches that this was what he proposed to do today.
‘Will you be back for tea?’
‘Don’t wait for me. I know you hate breaking off from gardening.’
This was true, but had never before prevented his returning for tea. He had a sentimental love of tea in the garden and would sit there long after she had become restive. He could not understand that the one occasion she lost all thought of time, was unaware of herself, was when she was gardening.
She watched him walk away and then sat at the kitchen table, unmoving, her expression remote as that of a chess player contemplating a difficult move. In fact, she was not thinking at all, her mind was empty as a wind tunnel on a still day.
Once out in the garden, however, she was tormented by thoughts of what he might be doing. This spoilt her pleasure and in the afternoon she occupied her mind by going over Hedda’s lines, aware as she did so of a widening gulf between herself and this woman.
Laura Addison had been weeding the paths in the graveyard, a task which she insisted on doing on her own, ‘because I get so muddled if people try to help, I’m better when I can do things at my own pace.’ This did not prevent her from telling people that ‘the graveyard seems to get bigger and bigger as I get older.’ As she rested from her labours to reflect on the burden laid upon her, she heard Valentine’s voice. After a minute or two she got up and walked round to the back gate of the vicarage.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, rather as though Valentine might not have realized this. ‘I thought you would be out as it is your free afternoon and such a lovely day.’
‘No.’ Valentine walked slowly towards her. ‘Michael had a meeting this morning. But this afternoon he is going for a walk and I shall be joining him later.’ She made this explanation as though it had been explicitly requested and Laura Addison flushed.
‘I hope you didn’t think I was interfering. It’s just that I like to keep an eye on the vicarage when you are both out.’
‘You are most kind.’
Valentine went back to work. She did not allow her mind to reflect on what had just happened, nor did she consider what she would do later in the afternoon. She was getting into a habit of not thinking. As she worked in the garden she felt much as she did when she was waiting off-stage. The cue would be given, she would make her entrance, with any luck she would come out with the right words.
Norah and Michael had chosen for their chance meeting-place the banks of a rock-strewn, peaty stream seldom visited by trippers warned away from this part of the moor because of a dangerous bog.
‘No one will come upon us here,’ Norah assured Michael as they ate their sandwiches. ‘The locals won’t go near the bog and the tors draw the tourists like a magnet. They have to go back with a trophy of some kind, poor things. “We got right to the top.” Occasionally one of them breaks an ankle or a neck.’ For some reason which he could not fully understand she seemed impelled to show him the less appealing side of herself. Now she was regarding him with a look which said, ‘You didn’t know I could be like this, did you?’
He said quietly, ‘I don’t like competitive people, either.’
‘But you don’t wish them dead. You’ve never had a spiteful thought.’ She turned on him a face in which humour and asperity seemed constantly in contention.
It occurred to him that she was nervous. ‘You’re sure about this bog?’ He affected mock anxiety as he looked towards the bobbing heads of cotton grass and the more beguiling bog asphodel. ‘I remember a ghastly film The Night has a Thousand Eyes where the villains were swallowed up in quagmire.’
‘You’re quite safe. Not for nothing did I dwell beside the untrodden ways.’
‘A maid whom there were none to praise and very few to love?’
‘Yes, indeed. But not, I’m afraid, the sweetest thing that ever grew beside a human door. At least he didn’t say “cottage door”, you have to give him that.’
‘You don’t like Wordsworth?’
‘I once had a boy friend who tried to convert me. It’s a good job it was Wordsworth he was preaching and not God, otherwise I’d be an atheist now.’
‘You have missed a lot.’
‘I’m sure I have. And not only Wordsworth. I’m tone-deaf to most poetry. But then God doesn’t
whisper in my ear. I have always had to do things by the book. Dear old Laura Addison says she has an immediate awareness of “something received” at the Eucharist which is so precious that she can hardly bear to encounter people socially afterwards when we have coffee.’ There was a hint of superiority in the way she spoke of Laura which was not quite masked by the amused good humour. ‘But I don’t have any feeling at all.’
‘As a nurse, though, you wouldn’t expect a patient to have an immediate feeling of being healed after an injection, would you?’
‘It’s exactly what I’d expect of some patients,’ she retorted tartly. She flipped her feet up and down in the water, sending up little spurts of spray. ‘As you must realize, I am rather a poor sort of Christian. After all these years, I can’t control tongue or temper, and I have very little idea of how to come before God. I am always edgy and without peace of mind when I pray – without composure.’ She looked at him, eyebrows raised. He was not sure what was expected of him. Reassurance? Or was it that the need to challenge had become a necessity to her, a way of survival?
He said gravely, ‘Yet I have seen you with people who are ill when I have visited them and you have seemed composed then.’
She was as uneasy with praise as she was sensitive to criticism. ‘Even that I have to work at.’ She rested her bare feet on a boulder and sat, hunched forward, watching the brown froth of water swirling beneath her.
He noted that she did not feel any need to work at her appearance. Her clothes, plain blue skirt and blouse, looked as if they might date back to the days of her student nursing. She wore no make-up and her pale skin was painfully inflamed by the sun. She was as unselfconscious about her looks as she was spikily aware of her personality. He thought how arresting she must have been in her youth when her red hair was thick and glossy. She would not have needed to try to command attention. Valentine said she was one of those women to whom youth gives a fleeting attraction and the lasting expectation that they can achieve the same effect throughout life with the minimum of effort. Valentine thought Norah dowdy, but he was fascinated and moved to see the habits of youth still lingering in the woman. Although the hair was switched back in a meagre pony tail, she carried her head confidently as if it was crowned with fire.
