An End to Autumn

by Iain Crichton Smith

  As if she had issued a challenge she waited with great interest for the answer.

  Mrs Murphy still smiling said, “I know what you are saying. You don’t have to explain it to me. I will tell you the truth and no lying. When you have to do something you have to do it and that is all there is to it. Many people I know have lived alone and some of them have gone off their heads. Some of them have taken to the bottle and some of them are hearing voices, would you believe it? There was a woman I used to know once. She lived on her own and after a while she used to think that everybody was talking about her. When they waved their arms when they were talking that was how she used to know. Well one day she saw a policeman directing the traffic and she went up to him and gave him a piece of her mind because she thought he was taking the mickey out of her. I remember her well. In every other way, you understand, she was right as rain. She was frightened, you see.”

  “And are you not frightened?” Angela asked eagerly.

  “I can’t afford to be. If I feel frightened I go and clean a room. That is what I do.”

  “So admirable,” said Angela to Mrs Mallow, “so admirable. You are a very fortunate woman.”

  She seemed lost in reverie for a while and then she said, “There are so many different kinds of people in the world. Mrs Mallow is fortunate to have you as her friend.” And then as if unwilling to give up,

  “Do you never find the time heavy on your hands?”

  “Sometimes. Not often.”

  “Ah, well You are all armour. You are all armour. I retire defeated. May I treat you both to a cup of coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to that,” said Mrs Murphy and together they entered a restaurant which was crowded with people, mostly women, who were in for their morning coffee.

  Suddenly Mrs Murphy said to Mrs Mallow, “There’s one thing I forgot to tell you. I saw that girl Ruth Donaldson recently.”

  “Oh?”

  “She came up to me in the street. She apologised to me. She told me she hadn’t been feeling well. As a matter of fact, I think she has had a hard life of it.” And a strange almost triumphant smile crossed her face briefly.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t judge her too hard. I took her to the house and gave her tea. She is a very miserable woman, that one. She made one mistake,” and she paused.

  “And what mistake was that?” said Angela.

  “She blamed the world for what happened to her. That’s no good. The world won’t take the blame for things like that. It’s like the land in Connemara. If you blame the Lord for the big stones you won’t do anything at all. I told her she should go to Mass but she wouldn’t. She’s a clever girl but she’s not a clever girl at all if you see what I mean. I knew what she was up to right enough,” she said to Mrs Mallow. “Oh, I could see right enough. But I’m not going to say any more.”

  Angela glanced from one woman to another, not understanding what they were talking about but sensing its significance. She stirred her coffee with her plastic spoon.

  “Oh I knew right enough,” said Mrs. Murphy again, “but she apologised. I said she could come back any time she liked. She’s a very unhappy woman. Maybe she would have been better cleaning stairs,” she added and burst out laughing so that the coffee cup shook in her hand.

  There are those, thought Angela looking at her, who are strong, and there are the others who are weak. For instance, she thought that she herself was weak and so perhaps was Mrs Mallow. Unlike Mrs Murphy they had not as yet recognised the necessity and inevitability of things. It was so simple if one could grasp it: all one had to do was to go with the current, be a part of the day like a stone or a tree. But something in her said, No, that is not enough: we would not then be men or women, we would be only stones. We must flash for a little while, we must spark, send out flames. We must create the theatre of the imagination.

  And it seemed to her that as Mrs Murphy shook with laughter, the tiny cup in her hand, she was like an old wrinkled Celtic goddess, who had about her the reality and clay of the earth, secretive, yet public, strong and peasant-like, yet in the end lacking in fineness, in a necessary fineness. She imagined her on her hands and knees climbing stair after stair but the stone was all that was in front of her eyes. What door had opened to her or would open to her at the top of the stair? What illuminating door?

  “I think,” she said, “that Mrs Mallow and I must be going now. We have to make our lunch.” Mrs Mallow glanced at her in surprise but stood up, almost obediently.

  “Perhaps some other time,” Angela said to Mrs Murphy, “I might see you when I’m in town.”

  “A pleasure,” said Mrs Murphy, “a pleasure.” Already she was looking across to some people at the other end of the restaurant who were waving to her and whom she obviously knew. Mrs Mallow suddenly felt faint: after all Mrs Murphy knew the town better than she did and had other friends: she was only one among many, and the thought laid a heavy grief on her mind. How could one step into the middle of a town and be part of it? It wasn’t so easy: in fact it was extremely difficult. For instance it was very odd that Mrs Murphy had been speaking to that abominable Donaldson woman: she should have had more delicacy than to do that.

  And as she left the restaurant her last sight was of Mrs Murphy rising from her table and with her duck-like walk, carrying her coffee cup over to where the group of women were sitting and laughing. It seemed as if a key had been turned in a lock: Mrs Murphy didn’t belong to her at all, it was only part of her that she knew, and deeper than her relationship with Mrs Mallow was Mrs Murphy’s knowledge of and commitment to this small town and her other friends. Bloody Catholic, she muttered to herself, with your talk of your sons, one of whom is probably not a manager at all. Bloody Catholic with your replica of the Manger and the Irish donkey and the green vulgar Irish shrine.

  When she turned to Angela there were tears in her eyes.

  “A remarkable woman that,” said Angela, “she can teach us all.”

  “Teach us nothing,” said Mrs Mallow, and she felt a healthy terrible anger so that she could have gone at that very moment to the railway station and left the town forever. “If she can do it I can do it,” she said to herself. “Bloody Catholic.” And then, “Anyway her house isn’t as good as mine, and she doesn’t even have a garden.”

  4

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON (she had decided to leave on the next day after that) Angela suggested that everybody go for a run in Tom’s car and have a picnic. “Anyway,” she said, “Chrissie will enjoy it and so indeed will we all.” And this was what they did, driving through the autumn landscape, the trees on both sides of the road having lost their leaves, the houses silent in the ripe yet slightly chilly light, the streams pouring down the mountainside: and once not far from the road they saw a pheasant, perfectly contained in its own Elizabethan colours, a stained-glass bird, a courtier at a bare court superb in its exquisite array.

  “How beautiful,” breathed Angela, “stop the car. I wish to look at him.” Tom brought the car to a quiet halt and they all sat there gazing at the pheasant which now and again lifted its tall neck and stared around it with aristocratic hauteur as if it were aware of its own stunning brilliance emerging out of the landscape with its fallen leaves and sharp stubbly fields.

  Vera in particular stared at it with her own secret smile though she didn’t speak to her mother much, now and again regarding her with an almost disdainful look as if she were tired of her incessant chatter.

  After they had driven for some time Angela said, “perhaps we could stop at this little bridge. We could go for a walk into the woods just for a short while. Vera could come with me and you, Tom, and your mother could take another direction and then we would pool our discoveries. Wouldn’t you like that, Chrissie?” Vera glanced at her mother with undisguised fury but Angela chose to ignore her and they got out of the car and went their ways in pairs as she had suggested.

  “We will meet here in an hour,” said Angela, clearly enjoying her role of directo
r. “Come on, let’s synchronise watches. Isn’t that what they do in all those films which have John Mills in them?”

  “Sometimes Trevor Howard,” said Tom laughingly, but he did as Angela suggested as if it were all a game that nevertheless had to be taken seriously.

  He sensed in an inchoate and unfocussed way that Vera’s mother was with instinctive intelligence creating a drama of her own and that all of them in this drama had their exits and their entrances, that she was plainly engrossed in her role of producer, partly for its own sake but also partly for the creation of some chosen result: and he wasn’t at all deceived by the apparent spontaneity and flamboyance of her gestures for he knew that below them was a deeply serious and perhaps unhappy woman who hung on to the joys of the world as to a raft in the middle of the sea. Thus as he entered the wood with his mother, accepting the production as for the moment at any rate plausible and, truth to tell, willing to be relieved temporarily of the undirected motions of his life, he felt the glimmerings of an unavoidable destiny as one sees at the end of a pathway in a wood the whitish mists of autumn only half penetrated by the sun.

  After they had walked into the wood in silence among the dapple of sunlight and shade, Angela and Vera finally came to a glade in which were stumps of old trees and many boulders and stones. There Angela halted, breathing heavily as if she had been making a greater effort than she could easily endure.

  She sat down on one of the stumps and then said abruptly to Vera:

  “Well, now, what’s going on? Your phone calls, brief and dutiful as they have been, suggest that something is going on.”

  Vera looked down at her with a disdainful smile and answered: “All that is going on is that Tom’s mother is with us.”

  “I see. And you don’t like that. Do you mind if we stop here for a while?”

  “You don’t need to act with me, mother. I know the play from the inside.”

  “Of course,” absently. “Of course. You don’t like me much, do you?”

  “Not very much.”

  “I see.” She gazed at a buzzard that had settled on a branch, its wings folded.

  “What you choose to forget, Vera, is that I’ve believed in allowing people to grow up in their own way.”

  “Which is simply another way of saying that you don’t care for them. Which is simply another way of saying that you can’t be bothered with their runny noses, whether their shoes are polished or not, or whether their tiny minds have thoughts of their own.”

  Angela sighed again, pulling her red cloak about her as if for greater warmth.

  “You’re very bitter really. You’re not very likeable.”

  “I’m as likeable as I’m allowed to be. I am what I am.”

  “I seem to have heard that phrase before but it may have been in another country.”

  Angela paused as if she were thinking deeply. “You don’t really know much, do you? You talk and act as if the world were everything. You’re very naïve. Why should it be me you choose to blame your inadequacies on? Has it never occurred to you that you are responsible for yourself? Did you for instance tell Mrs Mallow straight out that you didn’t want her in the house. Did you have the guts?”

  “I did it for Tom. I thought it would be all right, but it hasn’t been. I did what I could. It isn’t my fault.”

  “But when you found out that the arrangement didn’t work did you tell her directly. Did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Angela gazed at her daughter as if some inner confidence in her voice puzzled her, as if there was some part of the circumstances that didn’t fit.

  “I know what you would have done,” she said at last. “You would have smiled and kept silent. Have you ever considered that some day you may be in the same position as Mrs Mallow yourself?”

  “I’m not stupid, mother.”

  “Have you considered then what this may do to Tom and to your marriage, forcing him to get rid of his own mother?”

  “I have considered all that, strangely enough.”

  “I see. You’re taking great risks aren’t you?”

  “I’m not taking risks. I’m accepting life, as perhaps you’ve never done. You married my father to get out of your so boring house as you call it but you don’t love him, do you? Well, I love Tom. We were happier before she came than you are with my father.”

  “Yes, perhaps you were. But perhaps at the cost of shutting life out. Is your life style necessary, may I ask, necessary to you so that you won’t run the risk of losing Tom? I notice that you have few friends.”

  “We have all the friends we need,” said Vera waspishly. “If we needed more we would have them.”

  “Perhaps Tom is your child,” said Angela as if thinking aloud, letting her thoughts run on. “The one you never had. His mother was a threat, was she?”

  “She was not a threat. She insisted on associating with unsuitable people.”

  “I see. Unsuitable people.”

  From her stump of old wood Angela gazed up at her daughter, “Would you consider me for instance unsuitable?”

  “I didn’t consider you at all, for the reason that you never considered me. And anyway what you’ve just said is …” Vera came to a sudden halt as if she had decided not to say what she had intended to.

  There was a sudden whirr of birds about them in the bare wood and at that moment Angela as if for the first time realised that she was not a mother confronting a daughter but one woman confronting another and the pain pierced her heart so that she had to clutch the stump on which she was sitting for support. She felt a dizzying darkness about her.

  “I have considered everything that needs to be considered, mother,” Vera continued evenly. “Tom loves me. I know that, and that is all I need. I have worked it all out. It is very simple.”

  “It sounds monstrous to me. But perhaps I am old fashioned.”

  “Perhaps you are. I know what I want and that is the difference. I am not going to be an ageing actress who speaks her lines to a man whom she finds intolerably boring and whom she doesn’t love. I don’t find Tom boring. I love him. I am capable of that. And no one shall come between us.” Her fierceness was as strong and direct as the descent of the buzzard on its prey.

  “I see,” said her mother. “It’s clear enough. I am confronted by the representative of a new generation, simple, uncomplicated, genuine. And unashamed. The new adult. May I ask you again why you keep that doll in your bathroom now that you are so mature? It occupies pride of place on top of your cistern. I wonder why.”

  “There is no particular reason.”

  “Can you not remember where you got it?”

  “No I can’t and it doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I can. It’s a doll that you once stole from another girl when you were a child. You were at a party and quite blatantly you stole the doll. The mother came to me in great distress because her own child was crying for the doll. We managed to get another one for the child because you refused to give the original one up. No wonder you can’t remember. It has blue eyes just like your own.”

  “You may do what you like, say what you like, but I shan’t change my mind about Tom’s mother.”

  “I see.”

  They stared at each other and Angela knew that her daughter hated her, that somewhere along the road she had been responsible for what was now happening. The world was endlessly complex and justice was unerring and true. She wished that she could say the word that needed to be said but couldn’t think what it was, and with a start realised that Vera wouldn’t have taken her in either if she had been in Mrs Mallow’s position. And at that moment she wished to be back home, with her husband, watching him as he sat in his armchair smoking his pipe and reading the paper. In truth he was all she had: the rest was theatre and nonsense. The new road glinting and hard was too sharp-edged for her: truly she didn’t understand it. Truly she couldn’t comprehend the risks her daughter was taking so open-eyed and clear-sightedly. My poor Jeff, she th
ought, we are together in the world, we have no one else.

  Suddenly she stood up and said, “Well, that’s that then. There’s nothing more to be said. Perhaps we should get back.” They left the glade in silence and in silence waited at the car for the other two to appear out of the wood. Now and again Angela would make as if to speak but then stop as if anything she said would be useless. It was almost as if she was frightened of her daughter, of her pure natural feelings, for they could be considered in a sense to be natural. They could be considered to be courageous, all those eggs, blank and staring, in the one basket, all those fundamentally sterile eggs.

  And she saw her daughter again, withdrawn and pensive, hunched over a book in her room, the doll at her feet, and she said to herself over and over, “Please forgive me O God please forgive me for what I have done.” And she would pull her red theatrical cloak around her for warmth.

  5

  THE OTHER TWO had also in an uncomfortable silence walked into another part of the wood which was not unlike the one that has already been described.

  After a while Tom said, “She does go on a bit, doesn’t she?”

  “I don’t like her very much,” said his mother.

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “I think she’s deep. She’s never had to suffer as I had to. She’s never had to live in a tenement. She’s always had good things about her.”

  “That’s true.” And then consideringly. “But I don’t think she’s very happy.”

  “She’s got her husband.”