THE MEETING PLACE

by MARY HOCKING

  Chapter Two

  Clarice woke in the night. She wanted the bathroom but could not think where it was. The position of her bed seemed wrong in relation to the window, which should have been facing her but had now moved alongside. It took longer than it ought to have done to work out where she was. She had been given a room in the middle, and oldest, part of the house with the bathroom adjacent but not en suite. The old boards creaked as in a dream of reliving their uprooting when she came into the corridor, and she was thankful that the family slept at the far end of the house. Her bladder certainly needed relieving, but some other pressure remained after she was back in bed and the plumbing had registered a final protest before the house quietened again. This is the aftermath of travel, she told herself, remembering the first night of so many holidays abroad, the feeling of anticlimax and disappointment, the breathtaking scenery not yet on display and the alien beds all too rackingly in evidence.

  She lay back and tried to empty her mind, but it wasn’t sleep that came. Clarice had prided herself on being a forward-looking person, with the result that the past had not been given enough room in her life. Of late, it had demanded reparation. Certainly, it had begun to occupy her to an irritating extent. Periods of switching off had always been necessary to her, time when she let the mind off its leash and allowed it to go walkabout. Lately, on these occasions the past rushed in like those drivers who must occupy every space on a road. An occasion like this was too good an opportunity for it to miss and in it zoomed to remind her of why she was here.

  A woman who had become Rhoda Tresham had been born here in the early part of the last century. Clarice didn’t even know her maiden name. In fact, she knew nothing about her except that her granddaughter had been the headmistress of the school Clarice had attended from the age often.

  All right, all right, she thought wearily, it was a mistake to come here, an impulse I should have resisted. But to no avail. She was already remembering her father, could see him in his hardware store, a cheerful, hard-working man, his non-conformist principles etched into his face. These principles hadn’t allowed him to send his cherished only child to a posh school, but he had wanted her to have a better education than he himself had had. The idea of education as the gateway to opportunity and the fulfilled life was tremendously important in her childhood. A determined man, he had obtained from Truman and Knightley a list of girls’ independent schools, and over the course of one summer he had visited some fifteen possible candidates for his favour. His method of introduction was unorthodox. He arrived on his bicycle, usually on a Sunday afternoon, travel-stained after a long time in the saddle. His reception ranged from cool to hostile. It was not surprising, therefore, that it was the school at which his advent was greeted without surprise – as if this were an eminently sensible way to set about planning a daughter’s education – at which Clarice was enrolled.

  A pleasant warmth engulfed Clarice. In retrospect, her schooldays seemed one long summer of ease and happiness. The school was small, no more than seventy boarders who were not unduly inhibited by rules and regulations. Even the timetable was flexible and could be adjusted to accept the gift of a particularly beautiful day or the challenge of a frosty landscape. Whereas most schools aimed at moulding. Miss Wilcox’s school broke the mould and worked with and encouraged whatever creature it was who shyly emerged – or, as in Clarice’s case, bounced out. Learning was not neglected, only its environment was changed, and within its limits the education was good. The limits set were those of the headmistress herself. She was interested in art, music and the humanities, without which she considered it was not possible to become a fully mature human being; science was not ill-taught, it was simply not taught at all. ‘If we can stimulate the mind and feed the imagination, we shan’t have failed utterly,’ Miss Wilcox was wont to say. She had certainly not failed Clarice, whom she had saved from a life of well-ordered employment and practical good sense and opened the door on the road to grief and pain and joy and longing for the unattainable that is the lot of those who never pitch camp.

  So, here I am, Clarice thought, come like a pilgrim to say thank you for releasing my small painterly gift. It wasn’t your fault I took so long to free myself from expectation. She saw the old easel in the art room. There was a painting on it; it needed one stroke of colour on the left and as her brush hovered above the palette she fell asleep.

  She woke before her alarm went off, which was good, since she drifted gently from sleep and on the way, her mind alighted in the right place, accepted the strange room and even recalled that a rehearsal had been called for nine-thirty. ‘We are very fortunate to have been allocated the theatre in which to rehearse and we must make the most of every minute,’ their director had said, severely putting down any suggestion that the first day should be spent exploring the area.

  She had breakfast in a room that was also a passage to another room. She could imagine these small interconnecting areas in the days when the building was an inn. The highbacked bench chair would have fitted in well, as would the long bench that ran the length of one wall, now softened by cushions. Her table was by the window and she could see two toddlers playing on the grass, one hitting the other energetically with a rubber spade. Behind her was a huge fireplace at present filled with dried wild flowers. In an alcove beneath the stairs there was an old chest with an oil lamp on it. The image troubled her imagination.

  ‘Do you know anything about the people who used to farm here?’ she asked the young woman who waited on her.

  ‘My husband’s family has been here for seventy years.’ As long as time was, Clarice thought, looking at the bright face with the lively brown eyes. No point in asking her questions about a long dead family whose name she didn’t even know.

  She said, ‘Perhaps someone would remember one of the granddaughters. She used to visit in the summer holidays – Roberta Wilcox. That would have been as late as the nineteen thirties.’

  The pleasant young woman worried as to how to deal tactfully with this idea and Clarice thought, how would I have felt when I was her age if someone had suggested my parents might have remembered Abraham Lincoln?

  It seemed however that light had dawned. ‘Grandfather kept a diary. I’ll ask my mother-in-law to have a look. Roberta Wilcox?’

  ‘I don’t want to trouble her. You must be so busy.’

  ‘Oh, she’d love it. She’s mad on family history.’

  Later, as she was leaving to attend the rehearsal, the farmer’s wife came across the yard to say that she would get the diaries out after dinner that night. ‘He was very old when I knew him. But every evening, after we’d cleared the table, he used to sit down in the kitchen and write his entry for the day. If there was a disagreement about when something happened locally, people in the village would come to ask him to look it up in the diary.’

  They talked with enthusiasm about diaries generally, both, it transpired, being readers not practitioners. Clarice asked, looking at the huddle of outbuildings, ‘Which is the theatre?’

  The farmer’s wife pointed to a long stone barn with a tiled roof standing aloof from the other buildings.

  ‘Do you find it a nuisance, having all these theatre people around?’

  ‘We reckon we’re lucky. If you’ve got to diversify this is the best way as far as we’re concerned. And they’re a nice crowd, brighten the place up for the young ones. Plays are a bit odd sometimes, but that’s the way of things now, isn’t it?’ She turned away to attend to a child who for some minutes had been proclaiming injury and outrage with increasing volume.

  On her way to the theatre Clarice paused at the gate leading into the near field. The sun was bright and she was reluctant to go inside. The director was blocking the first two acts and it seemed a waste of time for her to be there. Across the field she could see a huge shed from which straw, or fodder, was being loaded on to a cart. The sun dazzled her eyes and for a moment the scene shuddered and seemed to shift. She held on to the gate until
the dizziness passed. The doctor had warned her against being hard on herself. ‘You may get dizzy spells and you must treat them with respect. There is no need for alarm, provided you take sensible precautions.’ He had held her eye for a moment and she had realised there was something she had to know. But she preferred to make her own approach, come to it in her own time, not have the moment of acknowledgement dictated by the doctor. So she had thanked him for his advice and had not asked for more information. ‘I will try to pace myself,’ she had said. Now, remembering this promise, she allowed that she might have pushed herself recently and needed to take things more easily. She turned and walked unhurriedly towards the barn. Above its tiled roof bare hills folded into the horizon. She heard the cry of a bird, thin and high, finishing on a rising note: there was a lure in that cry, an invitation to the hills. A walk in the late afternoon should surely be possible.

  The door by which she entered the barn was at the rear of the auditorium. There must be another door on the far side of the building that led immediately backstage, she thought, as she stood accustoming her eyes to the dimness. The air struck chill and she wished she had worn her anorak. She could see figures slouched in the seats, not together as the stage staff might have been, but isolated – actors not at present required, going over words in their heads while they took in the details of the set. Not that there was much detail – an upturned barrel here, a mound there. An actor was seated on one of the barrels. She stopped to listen to him.

  ‘For now the wind begins to blow;

  Thunder above, and deeps below,

  Make such unquiet, that the ship

  Should house him safe is wrackt and split;

  And he, good prince, having all lost,

  By waves from coast to coast is tost;

  All perishen of man, of pelf,

  Ne aught escapen but himself;

  Till fortune, tired with doing bad,

  Threw him ashore, to give him glad:

  And here he comes. What shall be next,

  Pardon old Gower, – this longs the text.’

  The voice was melodious and the actor knew how to ring the changes of mood and emphasis. Although he sat to one side of the stage during the action, his still presence radiated such a benign authority that one never quite forgot he was the story-teller, the players owing their existence to his magic. Alan Meredith had understood the role perfectly from the start and had resisted any temptation to declaim.

  Clarice, looking in fond amusement at the sensitive, lantern-jawed face that gained such strength from its assumed role, marvelled once again at the transforming power of theatre. Who would have thought that here was a man who, in daily life, viewed his surroundings with the perplexity of the short-sighted who have never managed to get a proper perspective on the visual world? A man irresolute, indecisive and prone to melancholy, of whom reviewers and adjudicators would comment time and again that he held the stage without effort. Not quite the impression he had created when by some bizarre misjudgement he had been allowed to stand in for one of his Met Office colleagues on the TV weather slot; an occasion on which he had revealed an inability to coordinate hand movements and words coupled with a surprising lack of knowledge of the geography of the British Isles. ‘You were groping for Southampton in the Moray Firth,’ the outraged producer had exclaimed.

  Clarice edged towards a door to the right of the stage that she guessed would lead backstage. She found herself on the prompt side and saw a stool placed ready for her.

  In the wings on the far side of the stage she could see the wardrobe mistress fitting masks on the followers of Antiochus. The background characters were all to wear masks because the director wanted to capture something of the atmosphere of a Greek play. Some of them were laughing right up to the moment when the mask slipped over their face. Suddenly, they were menacing.

  The assistant stage manager had noted her arrival and was coming towards her with a mug of coffee.

  ‘I’m glad it’s only the followers who are masked,’ Clarice whispered. ‘Prompting veiled ladies is bad enough, but a whole company in masks would be impossible.’

  ‘Be a pity to mask your fellow, wouldn’t it?’ She put the mug in Clarice’s hands and padded away.

  Clarice thought the pity was that relationships had to be defined, since she had never, in the fifteen years she and Alan Meredith had, loosely speaking, been together, decided exactly what was their relationship. They weren’t married and, for reasons of his personality and her need of privacy, they had never set up house together. They had been lovers, but Clarice was old-fashioned enough to find it pathetic that women of her age should speak of their lovers. In any case, they didn’t make love very often now. One could understand why some mature couples opted for marriage simply in order to avoid having to explain themselves.

  Someone must have slipped into the barn. The door at the rear of the auditorium had been left open and she could see across the cobbled yard a building with half-doors, probably a stable at one time, where another company was rehearsing. In the yard, farm cats stalked unseen prey. It was very still; the light sparking on the cobbles made her feel giddy and for a moment she wasn’t quite sure where she was. Then someone shut the door and it was dark. The director said, ‘I want to do Scene Two again,’ and Pericles began to speak.

  Clarice’s eyes were by now used to the changes in light. She saw the group of players on the stage and beyond, in the wings, a black-clad figure climbing a ladder, probably one of the lighting men. Below him, masked faces tilted upwards, not looking as if they were giving him glad. The sense of not knowing where she was persisted. She had always enjoyed that feeling of entering another world once one was back of the stage, but this was different. Hitherto, the mind had managed to hold both worlds, the world of illusion and the real world outside, in balance. She experienced a moment of pure panic.

  Clive Geare, who was playing Helicanus, said, ‘Don’t prompt me, Clarice, love. I want to struggle through this if I can.’

  While he struggled she tried to find her place in the script. Surely her attention had wandered for only a matter of seconds, so why did she catch up with him towards the end of the scene?

  ‘Clive Geare has six parts,’ Alan Meredith said gloomily as he and Clarice walked on the moor in the late afternoon. ‘Six parts! And you know what he can do to a line when he’s lost.’

  ‘But he always does it in iambic pentameters,’ Clarice pointed out.

  Clarice had had in mind a short stroll on the slopes immediately above the farm, but Alan had wanted to see the site of an old mine. Not for the first time their attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable had come to grief. They now found themselves on one of the wilder stretches of the moor. Clarice, looking at the dull, mottled brown expanse dissolving into distance, felt as unforgiving as the scenery and in answer to Alan’s tentative, ‘It is rather splendid, isn’t it?’ she answered, ‘Well, it certainly echoes those lines, “A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone. ” ’

  She had no difficulty in thinking of those who had shared her evening, lying not too deep below the tussock grass; but it was the earlier people, those who had shared God’s afternoon, who crowded in on one here, lying proud in their barrows.

  ‘There would have been more of them than there are people living here now, wouldn’t there?’ she said, offering an olive branch.

  Not surprisingly, he failed to read her mind and replied, ‘Good gracious, no! It was only mined for a matter of sixty years.’ He was looking into a dark valley where slate-grey water reflected a few stunted trees. ‘It has a grim history.’ The fact seemed to afford him a melancholy satisfaction that he hoped she might share.

  ‘Well, you can scramble down there if you want to, but I’m staying up here with the Beaker folk.’

  She sat on the turf at the path’s edge, facing away from that dark declivity towards a hump-backed ridge of dingy green, inset here and there with faint purple.

  ‘Are you feeling
all right?’ he asked, a little anxious now.

  ‘Let’s say I’m not feeling in any need of a grim history. This place is grim enough without that. Do you think there are people who actually like this sort of desolation – misanthropes apart?’

  ‘I quite like it myself,’ he said unhappily. ‘It doesn’t ask anything of one.’

  ‘It doesn’t acknowledge one, let alone ask anything. It was here long before question time.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It gives me vertigo. I feel like a fly on one of those globes we had in the geography classroom.’

  He crouched down beside her. ‘That’s because it’s evening and you’re tired.’

  ‘It also reminds me I’m long past my morning.’

  He looked at her in helpless dismay and her mood changed. ‘Oh, don’t fret about it. Go on down and look at your mine. You’ll sleep a whole lot better if you’ve seen your face reflected in its grim history.’

  ‘There’s probably an easier way into that valley.’

  ‘I’m sure there is, but not for us. If you don’t do it now, we’ll only have to come back another time.’

  They argued for a while, but in the end he went down. If Alan wanted to do something, he usually did it, however apologetically.

  It was a long way down and the way up probably seemed a whole lot longer to him. ‘There wasn’t anything to be seen,’ he said, cross and short of breath. ‘It must have been sealed up years ag°.’

  They were both tired by now and agreed not to meet that evening, which was what Clarice had wanted anyway.

  After a substantial meal of roast duck followed by apple pie, Clarice felt sufficiently restored to allow herself a brandy with her coffee. The farmer’s wife joined her in the little sitting room set aside for guests.