A Particular Place

by MARY HOCKING

  It was raining steadily by the time they reached Shirley’s house. The friend went into the bathroom to rub her hair dry while Shirley got busy in the kitchen. ‘Pancakes?’ she called out. ‘Tuna fish pancakes, all right?’

  ‘And you know what happened?’ The friend related this to some imaginary companions as she watched Shirley gather the odds and ends which needed using up. ‘Of all things, what does she do? She uses margarine instead of butter, topping up the milk in an old carton (how old is not revealed) with water and a drop of evaporated milk which has been hanging around waiting just such an emergency. To her intense surprise the mixture sticks to the pan. After several unsuccessful attempts, she abandons margarine and uses cooking oil (and three different frying pans). By the time the mixture has run out she has wasted half a packet of margarine, the remains of her cooking oil and two large eggs to say nothing of milk and flour. And then, going to the larder to see what else she can make with the tuna fish, she naively admits that in fact she doesn’t have any tuna fish – only sardines.’

  At this point the friend asked, ‘Are you going to offer me sardines on toast?’

  ‘I can see you are angry,’ Shirley answered. ‘Would sweet and sour from the take-away placate you?’

  She allowed the friend more than her share of the plonk by way of making amends. It only made the friend morose. She told Shirley she wasted too much time taking short cuts which didn’t work out. ‘I like experimenting,’ Shirley said. ‘If you aren’t prepared for a failure here and there you get set like concrete by the time you are forty.’

  When the friend had gone in a state of middle dudgeon, Shirley set herself to clean the house from top to bottom, wondering as she did so where she and Charles would eventually settle down and whether it really was a good idea for them to be married.

  Later that evening, waiting for Tracy to come home from the disco, she sat by the window watching the rain drowning the last of the day. Across the roof tops a light came on in a dormer window. The light had a shade which reminded Shirley of a Christmas lantern and it hung there, over the roof tops, like the light that lifts the hearts of lost travellers in the nicer fairy stories.

  Valentine had never been one of those good troupers who are prepared to take their turn at playing small, unrewarding parts. Dramatic societies tended to tolerate prima donnas, so she had got away with it. Now, when she seemed constantly to be looking back over her life, she recognized that it might have been to her advantage to have had a little preliminary practice in self-effacement so that she did not come totally unprepared to its real-life enactment. For enactment it must be. No miracle transformation had been wrought in her, and she realized that what changes were needed she herself must effect at much cost and with many failures.

  ‘I have been special so much of my life,’ she told Hester. Someone must act as her confessor and it was hardly a role she could expect Michael to play. He had burdens enough. ‘My mother was one of those gentlewomen who regard with tolerant amusement other people’s way of living – their houses, pictures, furniture.’ She herself looked very patrician as she related this, sitting straight-backed as a ballerina, ignoring the advances of Tabby. ‘It was quietly understood that our circumstances, our possessions, our attitudes, were in all ways superior. We were people apart. Belonging – in a town, a village, a community of any kind – was for those who needed it. The Adlams did not need it.’

  Hester, squatting on the fireside stool, felt like a frog at the feet of a princess. ‘I’m not very good at belonging myself,’ she said.

  ‘That is different.’ Valentine tilted her chin austerely. She did not want Hester muscling in with confessions of her own. ‘You have worked out your place in society. I was brought up on a myth. It is not strength which holds me back from involvement. My persona is very fragile.’

  Hester thought there was something rather comic about the tragic way Valentine delivered herself of this statement; but a darkening of the big violet-grey eyes betrayed the fact that the acknowledgement of weakness, however portentously phrased, was genuine.

  ‘You are not the only one to believe in that myth,’ she said. ‘Being self-sufficient and successful is a very acceptable image nowadays; but don’t you find that the people who really touch you deeply are often those the most wounded by life?’

  ‘I don’t think you are understanding me.’ Valentine began to see the case for the confessional; priests didn’t answer you back or try to rephrase your confession for you, they just listened and asked ‘How many times?’

  At home in the vicarage it was Valentine who listened. She did not know how Michael seemed to others at this time, but to her his movements had the erratic desperation of a lost animal, snuffling false trails, bounding towards chance strangers only to halt at the last minute, dumbly bewildered. His conduct of the church services was unsure and his sermons echoed the confusions in his own mind. To add to his troubles, dissension had broken out among members of the P. C. C. and one of the parishioners had offended the organist. Valentine was as intelligent as Michael and more perceptive. In the past she had been impatient when he seemed obtuse. Now, as he talked of his problems with the P. C. C. she realized with dry satisfaction that it was possible for her to sharpen his vision without being destructive. She was less sentimental and this, allied to a certain ruthlessness, had sometimes upset him; but when she addressed her mind constructively to issues instead of using them to score off him, he listened to her with respect. She was alarmed by the thought of the responsibilities which respect might lay upon her and, like a climber daunted by an arduous ascent, she was tempted to loosen her hold.

  He, however, had gained confidence and one evening he spoke to her of the guilt which tormented him. ‘This thing which has struck Norah down – it’s like a judgement. I can’t see it any other way.’

  ‘Then it must be a judgement for something unconnected with you. She had been falling about the place for some time. Don’t you remember? She fell in the graveyard at the first Mass of Easter. Drawing attention to herself, I thought in my uncharitable heart.’

  And what if it wasn’t a judgement? What if their love was a gift, the last and most precious life would offer Norah? Suddenly Valentine was crying; crying for her own lack, for all the hurt and pain, the struggle which had passed her by. Michael was speaking to her, astonished and gentle, telling her how good she had been, how much he admired her. He thinks I am crying for Norah, she thought. Am I to accept approbation so unearned? Once, the proud disclaimer would have flashed out, but now the touch of his hand on her shoulder so awakened her physical need of him that she could only accept in the hope that in time other expressions of love, however constrained, might follow. Has it come to this? she thought; that I am to scrabble about like a pauper at a jumble sale, making use of anything available, every scrap of material, any remnant, however flawed and snagged.

  Norah had made a practice of going to confession three times a year. Until recently her confessor had been an elderly priest whom she had first known in her days as a student nurse. He had been a stabilizing influence on her and it was to him she turned now and not to Michael.

  ‘I’m very lucky,’ she said to him. ‘Either Lois or Hester come the nights when Hesketh is away. I get a lot of letters. There are plenty of people I can telephone.’ There was a strand of hair which worried her and she was constantly stroking it aside as she talked. She blinked her eyes a lot as though cobweb threads hung in front of them.

  Although the priest was old, his was still a bulky figure – a considerable force sitting opposite to her; waiting until the flow of words was exhausted.

  ‘I used to think when I was on the maternity ward that there was nothing more terrifying than birth.’ She was bringing herself closer to the brink now. ‘The separation from the warm darkness, emerging naked and alone into an unknown environment, totally helpless. But death . . .’ She screwed up her eyes to contemplate death as though it was a phenomenon for people set apart, not
for ordinary run-of-the-mill people. ‘It is so tremendous.’

  ‘But the dying you must not think of as tremendous.’ The old man was not of the school which believes that it is harmful to give advice. ‘You must try to look upon it as being like spring-cleaning. If you think of the whole house, the task seems mountainous; but if you take it room by room it gets itself done. What have you been doing with your time?’

  She gave up the strand of hair and ran both hands down her face in admission of defeat. ‘Nothing very special, I can’t seem to . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about anything special.’ If he was unfashionably didactic, he was also profoundly absorbed with this matter of her dying. She listened to him, head slightly on one side in the manner of a deaf person anxious to catch every word. A shaft of sunlight fell across her face and she raised a hand to shield her eyes. ‘Take what comes day by day. And whatever you do, don’t make changes in your pattern of worship and start doing silly exotic things or attending services you wouldn’t normally attend. I have known you for a long time; all you need is already there – prayer, observance, discipline.’

  He was too wise to speak of detachment; he knew that this would come anyway, an inevitable part of the process of which, perhaps, she herself would scarcely be aware.

  ‘And go slowly, dear Norah,’ he said, taking her hand when she left him. ‘Walk, speak, think slowly.’

  As she walked Norah frowned as the light sparked from slate and stone; she glanced into gardens bright with late summer’s abundance, her expression fretful and angry. From a long habit of obedience, she went home slowly and slowly she went about her household tasks and in the late afternoon, unpegging clothes from the washing line, she said aloud, ‘Just letting it happen. I suppose that is what we mean by playing it by ear.’ The idea of playing her death by ear seemed momentarily to amuse her. She held one of the garments close to her face, savouring that special freshness of clothes which have dried in the sun.

  As the days passed she did her daily tasks as thoroughly as her fluctuating health would allow and she tried, no less successfully than usual, to keep to some kind of routine in the preparation of meals. She tended to the seasonal needs of the garden and she resisted the temptation to set aside prolonged periods either for meditation or self-pity but contented herself with those observances which were a normal part of her prayer life.

  Michael came to see her regularly; sometimes he found her alone, at others with neighbours who thought it their duty to be with her as often as possible. As he listened to her talking, talking, talking, she seemed to him like a musician tuning an instrument, trying to find the right note. Then the day came when her ear was satisfied. All that remained was to be kind about the discordancies of others and this she achieved, bearing with courtesy the mistimed offers of assistance, the nervous attempts at reassurance which drained her strength.

  ‘I have no feeling of God,’ she told Michael one afternoon when they were alone together. ‘None at all. But then I always had to live by the book.’ She had become quite composed and others saw in her a quiet gaiety of spirit of which she herself was unaware.

  Michael wanted to rejoice for her, he wanted so very much to rejoice; but with the calmness had come a distancing. She was like a person leaving for another continent, her bags already packed, listening politely to the talk of neighbours about matters in which she will have no further interest. The pain this caused him was so intense he could not hide it from her. She looked at him sadly, perhaps remembering how once she had delighted in that face which showed every claw mark, thinking hers the balm which would ease away the hurt. She said, ‘Poor Michael.’ And this, he knew, whatever might follow, was their parting. He was shaken by a gust of desolation like a blow in the breast which took his breath away and when he left her he headed towards the moors as if some great calamity had struck the whole neighbourhood and only space could nullify its impact.

  Three days after this visit, Hesketh telephoned the vicarage. ‘They have taken her into hospital,’ he told Valentine. ‘The headaches had become intolerable and they say they have some new treatment they want to try.’ He was very agitated.

  ‘That is good, surely?’ Valentine asked cautiously.

  ‘She was so distressed. She didn’t want to go. She says they are just going to mess about with her.’

  ‘They can’t force anything on her, can they?’

  ‘She was much worse. I don’t think she’s in a state to make any decisions for herself.’

  ‘You mean, they asked you?’

  ‘What could I do? I said they must do what they thought best. What else could I have done?’

  Michael was out and Valentine decided to see Hesketh. She was interested in this man who, albeit unknowingly, shared her situation. He was grateful for company and insisted on pouring her a glass of sherry.

  ‘I thought you were remarkably good as Hedda,’ he said. They talked a little of the theatre; inevitably, he counted several well- known actors among his personal friends. As he talked Valentine glimpsed the man he must have been in the days when life went well, a sophisticated, amusing man, admired and well-respected. Now he had become an elderly child, feeling his way in an unfamiliar setting, seeking a hand to hold. She saw that he would never recover. They sent down no roots, he and his kind; dilettante, cultivated, uncommitted, they hovered like a little shadow over the surface of life. Whereas Michael, who risked so much of himself, would not lose his capacity for joy and pain, hope and disappointment. The more unsure she became of Michael, the more she appreciated him.

  Hesketh was talking about the urgent engagements which necessitated his return to London, a tremor of anger in his voice which he could not control.

  ‘She has never been a well woman,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize that when I married her.’ He wanted Valentine to know that he had been cheated, but even as he said it his face flushed as much with guilt as anger. She looked past him to the French windows.

  ‘What a lovely garden.’

  ‘You haven’t been in it? Then let me show you.’

  Big, bold dahlias had taken over the borders and neither Valentine nor Hesketh was disposed to take heart from this riotous display. If one was to learn anything from Nature, Valentine thought, it was that one was of little account. She and Hesketh walked down the lawn to the river, running fast after the rain of the last few weeks.

  ‘Had it occurred to you,’ Valentine asked, watching the exuberant race of water and wishing she had the control of it, ‘that the doctors may feel, because you are a barrister, that you would be capable of making trouble if treatment of a kind were not to be meted out to Norah?’

  ‘But what does that mean? I couldn’t tell them not to treat her, could I? What would people think of me if I were to do that?’

  ‘You said she was distressed. Perhaps she has cause. She is a nurse, so she knows something of what is involved. I don’t see why you couldn’t . . .’

  ‘I am unpopular enough in this place as it is.’ He shook his head as if he were trying to rid his mind of the whole wretched muddle. Valentine saw that his feelings were too ambivalent for him to contemplate any intervention. She felt sorry for Norah who had seemed to have made her peace and must now have the doing of it all over again.

  At the top of the steps leading to the main entrance to the hospital Michael Hoath paused, scratching the inside of one leg, taking long, shuddering breaths. One might have supposed he had arrived here on foot after a taxing uphill walk. He stood for a few moments recovering himself. It was a soft September afternoon. A man was cutting the grass in the public gardens opposite the hospital while another man heaped fallen leaves and twigs ready for a bonfire.

  Two young women in summer frocks came out of the hospital. They looked subdued but cheered up in the sun’s gentle warmth. ‘So long as she takes things easy for a bit she’ll probably manage,’ one said to the other as they ran lightly down the steps.

  Michael Hoath straightened his shoulders a
nd went through the doors to the reception desk. The receptionist, taking one look at the dog collar, directed him to the floor where Norah was in a small amenity room off the main ward.

  ‘She is very ill,’ the ward sister told him. ‘We had intended taking her to the operating theatre yesterday, but she was so bad . . .’ Her tone suggested that the patient had misbehaved.

  ‘Was it necessary to operate?’

  ‘Mr Hinch thought there was a good chance of relieving pressure.’

  ‘And that would have given her. . .?’

  ‘Perhaps another year of reasonable life.’

  ‘She may have felt it didn’t seem worth going through so much for another year.’

  She pleated her lips and he saw that she felt the system had been criticized, not only by him but by the patient.

  Norah was lying quite still; her mouth was half-open and she was frowning as if a lifetime’s problems had come together within her aching head. He sat beside her and took her hand and she gave a little whimpering sound. He stayed with her for an hour. Once she woke briefly and said, ‘I must have slept through the afternoon,’ as a person might comment on a winter evening, the dusk coming sooner than was expected, cutting off the day.

  As Michael was leaving a relative arrived, one of her brothers. He had had a long, tiresome journey and was much put out. ‘How is she?’ he asked Michael. ‘I mean, do you think she knows what’s going on? Of course, if it means anything, I’ll stay as long as necessary.’

  ‘I always assume people are aware at some level,’ Michael said, ‘even if it is not apparent.’