by MARY HOCKING
The man said huffily, ‘It’s easy for you. You chaps have got the hang of it.’ In fact, on these occasions Michael felt like a swimmer, thrashing about, unable to let the sea carry him, but sometimes aware beneath the nervous agitation, the trivial distractions, of something strong and steady, unwaveringly holding to its course.
He went again to see Norah the next afternoon, pausing on the hospital steps as though it had become a necessary ritual. There were flowers on the tulip tree in the public gardens and Michaelmas daisies, powder blue and mauve, cast long shadows across the lawn. People in the street moved at a leisured pace, grateful for this late summer blessing.
He climbed the stairs to Norah’s ward slowly. The sister looked grave. ‘We have tried to get her husband, but it seems he has had to go to London. Old Father Dewes has given her the last rites.’ Michael felt himself an intruder.
The room was hot and the flowers smelt sickly sweet. The minutes ticked away and Norah lay unmoving. Her breathing was slow but not laboured and her face was composed, the fretful lines eased out. Michael held her hand and, since he had no prayer of his own to offer, repeated at intervals, ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.’ In the corridor the tea trolley rumbled by and a cheery voice said, ‘Oh, doing very well, aren’t we, Mrs Piper! But don’t overdo it, dear. We don’t want another little accident, do we?’
The flowers reminded Michael of the ante-room of a funeral parlour. He studied one or two of the cards in which people had written messages varying from ‘Your roses are looking splendid and we hope you’ll soon be back among them’ to ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms’.
He was aware of the faintest stirring from the bed and saw that Norah had moved her head on the pillow. Her eyes were open and she looked round in bewilderment, first at the curtains, then the walls, the bedpost, and finally at him. She smiled and he thought she looked like a sick child waking from a troubled sleep and realizing this was home and that all was well. She gave a small, contented sigh and was still. When the sister came into the room, he said wonderingly, ‘She seems so young!’
The sister looked at him strangely and, even as she felt for a pulse, Michael realized that Norah was dead.
On the way home, he felt himself enfolded in a great calm. It would not last. He knew that in time he would seem to forget Norah – perhaps for days, weeks – and then suddenly when he was not on guard, in the garden or standing chatting at a bring and buy stall, sadness and longing would claim him. But now, at this moment, he was calm and grateful.
At the funeral service the church was full of roses on which Hesketh had spent a vast amount because he insisted they were Norah’s favourite flowers. He fixed his eyes on one of the altar vases from the moment he entered the church and continued to stare at it, unblinking, throughout the service.
Valentine was in a frenzy of agitation for Michael. She heard him begin his address, his voice firm and steady, ‘Many of you have known Norah Kendall for much longer than I have. Some of you remember her as a child, for she has spent her life among you. Others will remember her as a nurse who cared for their children. Whatever your memories, you will know . . .’ It is going to be all right, Valentine thought; he will not dishonour Norah by allowing space to his personal grief on this occasion. He had a gift for communicating some profound urgency to his audience, for reaching out to each individual present as if, although silent, they were vital components in a circuit. The service became a celebration, the drawing together of the threads of a life courageously lived, a completion. Hester sat beside Valentine, clenching and unclenching her hands, a few thin tears trickling down her nose.
There was no burial space now in St Hilary’s own graveyard and so it was to the municipal graveyard that the cortege made its way after the church service. It was a crisp autumn day – a return to sanity, Valentine thought; all over now, the summer’s madness, only one last furious streak of red in the pale, lucid sky. She put her hand in Hester’s. Hester was feeling this death deeply. Her face had a mauvish hue Valentine had not noticed before and her body seemed to have shrunk – or perhaps it was just that when she was at her least resilient one realized how small she was. Even so, as they stood side by side while the coffin was lowered into the earth, Valentine felt that the current established between them flowed more strongly through Hester’s veins.
As they walked slowly towards the waiting cars, Hester said, ‘Nothing came easily to Norah. How I do love people who have to struggle. They have so much more to teach us.’
‘If you have dying in mind, let me assure you, you won’t die, you will be consumed by your own energy!’
When eventually they returned to the vicarage, Valentine said to Michael, ‘That was a very moving service.’ She went into the kitchen to prepare tea, leaving him alone. When she returned to the sitting-room he was humped over the empty grate, his hands dangling between his knees. He looked as if he were made of sawdust.
Michael was thinking of the past, of evenings spent by the fireside and long walks through the Ashdown Forest. Life had seemed to dance in the flames of the fire and dart ahead of him through the trees. He had thought that sometime he would catch and embrace it. Norah had represented a last chance and now that she was dead he knew that this was not the way of things.
During the weeks immediately following the funeral Michael and Valentine became more at ease with each other, as if Norah had broken some deadlock between them. Indeed, it seemed to Valentine that, rather than taking her husband from her, Norah had lifted a load from her shoulders. For years Michael had made a symbol of his wife instead of accepting the living reality of her. What she had to give, he had not seemed to want. Now that he hoped for less, Valentine could delve into her neglected store, searching among the small treasures for appropriate offerings.
So it came about that one late October evening, as Valentine put down the tea tray, Michael looked up from his book and said to her, ‘You have come well out of this. Better than I have.’
The cost to him in saying this was nothing to the cost to her of receiving it. The indifferent disavowal was there, ready waiting in Valentine’s capricious mind. She gave a little spluttering cough as she choked it back. It was getting dark and she put out a hand to the lamp on the table but did not switch it on for fear that the light would demand words from her. In the dimness, there was still a chance she might feel her way. She had failed to answer the claims of her husband’s love; how had it come about that she now found herself asked to accept the burden of his respect? She, whose successes must always seem to be inadvertent, spontaneous, arising from natural attributes, not earned, was now seen to have ‘come well out of this’ – as if she had worked at it and must be rewarded. Mere respect is not something I will ever settle for, she thought, beginning to tremble. It would be wiser to disabuse him now. For a moment her finger touched the switch, then her hand dropped to her side. Instinct told her that if ever they were to make something of their life together, this was where they must start from. So she held her peace and, while the room and everything in it suffered the dissociation of darkness, she waited for what it was that he had to say.
Mary Hocking
Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers
a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1989
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