WELCOME STRANGER

by MARY HOCKING

  Today a friend had taken her mother to see him in the afternoon and Irene was visiting on her own. She dreaded the moment of entering the ward and seeing yet another change in him. He played such tricks on them now, making up for all the years of courtesy and consideration.

  She passed the doors to a ward where a carol party was singing ‘Stilly night, holy night’. She could see holly and mistletoe, and one of the nurses looking pert as she talked to a young doctor. On the next floor, the door of a private room was open. The chaplain said, ‘Sitting up now, are we?’ to an autocratic old lady who would certainly not have been addressed in this fashion since she was in kindergarten. A spurt of rage shook Irene at the thought that he might talk to her father like that. Whom, she asked, pausing on the stairs to rid herself of a desire to rush in and do physical harm to the man, did he imagine he was protecting by this insensitivity? Did he think he could win some kind of dispensation for himself by being jocular with Death? Her hands clenched round the stem of the roses she was carrying, and a thorn reminded her of her indebtedness to the hospital staff. Whatever happened, she must not forget that she was now a dependent. Already, she noted a regrettable tendency to ingratiate herself with the ward sister. She told friends, ‘The nurses are quite marvellous.’ She was not in a sufficiently balanced state to make evaluations and would have said this even if they were not. Meekly, she took what crumbs of comfort were offered and was at pains to appear a model visitor for fear that otherwise they would withdraw co-operation, might refuse to answer the few questions she asked, even turn her away when her father was having a bad day. She had brought these roses for the ward sister at great expense.

  As she reached the third floor, strains of ‘We three Kings of Orient are’ soared up the great well of the building, putting her in mind of carol services at school. She wished fervently one could be allowed a limited number of fresh starts at life. She would certainly use one of them now and hope to make a better job of the business of growing up. Something had been neglected and she would have liked the chance to identify it and make sure it didn’t happen the second time around. But there were no fresh starts – life just went on powering away into the future. She entered the ward.

  At first she thought he was dozing, but when she sat by the bed she saw that his eyes were open – they smiled and she thought how free of trouble they seemed. The anxiety which had brought on his illness had spent itself, leaving him not so much reconciled as disengaged. She was troubled by this disengagement. She looked away quickly, because it would be unforgivable to let him see her tears. He put his hand over hers, just as he might have done when she was a little girl and sick – their physical contacts had been few, but this gentle touch had been one of them. His hand rested on hers light as a feather, yet she sensed he was trying to steady her spirit. It had been one of their gifts that they could be quiet in each other’s company, but now it was only with a great effort of will that she refrained from prattling. Her father, watching her, saw that she had grown into a woman without his having been aware of it. Her eyes were very bright. Tears on a young woman’s face were like dew on a rose. Wasn’t there something . . . there ought to be . . . His mind wandered, turning the pages of his scholarship. After a quarter of an hour Irene saw the ward sister hovering like a spectre beyond the foot of the bed. She kissed her father lightly on the forehead and whispered that she would be back tomorrow. His eyes traced the lines of her face.

  She gave Sister the roses and was thanked graciously. In fact, too graciously. It wasn’t the roses Sister was concerned about. She said, ‘I think we should have a word,’ and opened the door to the little cubicle at the end of the ward. There were two chairs and they both sat down. Sister said, ‘You do realise how ill your father is?’

  Irene said, pitching her voice higher than she had intended, ‘Of course. He has had a heart attack.’

  ‘You’ve seen him today.’

  But not professionally. As soon as she entered the ward she began to add touches of her own to his countenance, bits and pieces from the past, to give substance to the picture. She took a deep breath, and said in that calm manner which always led people to imagine her to be more in possession of herself than she was, and which had earned her so much pain, ‘Is there something I should know?’

  ‘I’m afraid he hasn’t much longer.’

  ‘But the doctor said . . .’ She looked at Sister. The doctor was young. Sister had seen much more of death.

  ‘This will be a great shock to my mother.’ She bowed her head, wondering how she was to break the news.

  Sister said, ‘Your mother knows.’

  ‘You mean you told her this afternoon?’

  ‘I didn’t need to.’

  Irene sat looking at the little glass panel in the door, a very slight frown drawing her brows together, her eyes narrowed. She might have been aware of an incipient headache, nothing more. Some people rock at the blows of life, others receive them less directly and it takes a long time for the bruise to show. She said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Should we stay the night? Is that possible?’

  ‘It’s not as immediate as that. If I were you I would get what rest you can tonight.’

  As Irene left, she said, ‘He is not in pain, you know.’ Irene did know.

  She walked part of the way home to give herself time for recollection. She wanted to be composed when she greeted her mother. It is a myth that grief shared is a burden lightened: they had hardly spoken of it.

  There was a carol party singing under a lamp on the Embankment. She put a shilling in a tin and they called out ‘Merry Christmas!’

  ‘I shouldn’t have accepted it so easily,’ she thought, guilty as if she had allowed him to slip away as a result of neglect on her part.

  She stood looking at the inky water shot with light from Lambeth Bridge. She found it extraordinarily difficult to believe in the things which had happened to her over the past months. In spite of the war her expectations had not included tragedy. She had a good home, had been to a good school and had gained a good degree. That, she had imagined, and she was not alone in this, should be sufficient to launch her into a satisfying life. Not happiness, necessarily; she had never felt sure of that. But satisfying. And now this. Angus gone. Her father dying. And her mother? She was afraid her mother would not long survive her father. I shall be all alone, she thought, walking on past the bridge. She looked around her in amazement. How did it happen to me? How did it come about? It seemed important to trace the sequence of events, as though that in itself would make matters better, even rewrite the past. Some rewriting or reshaping was urgently necessary. People said she was self-sufficient, but she wasn’t; she needed love as much as anyone else. When her parents died, there would be no one for whom she was the most important person in the world. Perhaps Angus would think of her sometimes, but that would be little comfort. And, in any case, now that she came to think of it, his view of her had been odd in the extreme. He had once told her she was like a Mozart sonata, crisp and sparkling, and complete in itself! She should have shattered that image. A Mozart sonata had a beginning, middle and an end. She was only just past her beginning.

  When she came through the front door of her home she was greeted by the smell of roast chicken. ‘I thought we would have Christmas dinner tonight,’ her mother called from the kitchen.

  Irene went into the kitchen. Her mother, who was not a good cook, was busying herself with various pots and pans over which she seemed to have established little control. Irene adjusted the heat of the oven. Her mother said, without rancour, ‘Oh well, if you are going to take over . . .’ She returned to the table where she had left a copy of The Times. ‘Morgan Phillips says that communists are infiltrating the Trade Unions . . .’

  Irene said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to eat.’

  Her mother said, speaking more sharply than usual, ‘You must try.’ She turned to the paper again and said, ‘These people express themselves so badly.’ She looked ve
ry fastidious, with her long thin nose and pursed mouth, the kind of person who might be more hurt by a split infinitive than an emotional disjunction. Yet Irene knew that her mother was not really reading the paper, only taking refuge in it. She does not want me to intrude on her grief, she thought. That is why she has prepared this meal, to give herself something to do which will also keep her at a distance from me. Irene clenched her hands. This oblique, glancing approach to life would not do! Some things must be met head on. Above all, something must be shared. She said, ‘And so must you try!’ Her mother looked at her, face pulled awry with wounded anger. She folded the paper and got to her feet.

  Irene stamped her foot. ‘I can’t manage this alone. Mummy. Do you understand?’

  Her mother went into the hall. My father and I would have managed much better on our own, Irene thought; but it is my mother, my amused, ambiguous, maddening mother, with whom I am to be left. She began to peel the potatoes, cutting deep and wastefully beneath the skin. I must hold on, she thought, and she called out, ‘Don’t imagine you can just fade away. Because I won’t let you.’ It was important to hold on to what you had got. It might not be what you had hoped for, but you must make something of it.

  Her mother returned carrying the sherry decanter. ‘Yes,’ she said, as though continuing an interrupted conversation, ‘That is why we are having dinner tonight.’

  Jacov stood on the platform at Victoria District Line station, waiting for the train to Kew. He carried Claire’s carnations which smelt rather sickly. He was feeling sick in any case. He had not slept all night and had had nothing to eat. He was convinced he had been followed here. The indicator announced the coming of an Ealing Broadway train and a Circle Line train in that order. No mention of a Richmond train.

  He saw the people around him at the end of a long funnel, small and irrelevant, and in constant motion. While he was himself unmoving. It had been like this for a long time but he had managed not to notice it. During the war he had been drawn into activities of a communal nature, travelling abroad with shows to entertain the troops, meeting new people, seeing new places. This had kept him going and he had imagined himself more or less afloat on the stream of life. Only when hostilities had ceased did he realise that the war had passed him by without effecting any real change in his condition. It had been a travelling show which he had witnessed, a solitary bystander. Himself unmoving. But there had been the business of acting to keep him going. Now, as established as one could hope to be in a precarious profession, there were no incentives. Long-running plays might represent security for some, but they left him with too much time and too little activity to fill it. He had been appalled last night when he thought of the years stretching ahead, years during which he imagined himself imprisoned. He had been to church, but had been conscious only of the darkness surrounding the flickering candles. As the night wore on, he realised he was already in prison. And it was not the years ahead which concerned him, but the question of how he was to get through the next hour of his captivity. At daybreak he got up and moved about, making preparations slowly, methodically. Even so, the minutes were leaden. He had a moment of complete panic, standing by the sitting-room window staring at a spider’s web, spun-gold in a shaft of sunlight. Although eventually he managed to turn to face the door, he was daunted by the prospect of the three-minute walk to the station. He clung to the front door while the world heaved like a ship in a storm. His neighbour, who had come to offer the season’s greetings, said, ‘Oh dear, and on Christmas morning!’ and closed her door firmly. He launched himself at the stair rail, grasped it, and began to descend.

  Each step demanded intense physical effort. Even could he have been assured that the end of his troubles lay a mile ahead, it would have been no comfort. His energy was running out fast and would soon be spent. But only a mile? One might as well ask why, when a rock pool is so close to the sea, it should remain dry. The question is irrelevant, since the pool is dry.

  In the street, he had looked about for help. But if one looks intently at the human face, how often does one find one which seems to be completely trustworthy? To Jacov, usually the least censorious of men, the faces of people hurrying by bore the marks of the seven deadly sins; stiff with pride, jaundiced by gluttony, swollen with lust, pared to the bone by anger, they thrust their way past him.

  He had reached the station faint with fatigue and lack of food. And now, looking towards the dark tunnel from which there was no rumble of an approaching train, he saw the track as a stretch of time along which he had been struggling for hours until he was so spent that he could not last another second. The station seemed to roll, and he rolled with it, pitched, and rolled into the darkness of that dry, rock-hidden pool.

  He rolled, in fact, neatly and landed between the live wires, lying on his back looking quite composed with the flowers resting like a wreath on his breast, just as if he was in his coffin.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Are you happy about this move?’ Judith asked Louise when they were working in the kitchen on Christmas Eve.

  ‘There’s more than a move,’ Louise said. ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ She sliced a cross in the base of a sprout and threw it on top of a rising mound. ‘I know I’m pregnant. But I haven’t said anything yet. I want the children to have a good Christmas.’

  ‘Will they mind?’

  ‘Whether they do or not, they have enough to think about at the moment.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Angry.’

  ‘With Guy?’

  ‘We’d been careful and then something happened . . . Well, no matter. He got his way and I daresay I shall be pleased when the baby comes.’

  ‘I was angry when Claire came.’

  ‘Is that why you spoilt her, to make up for not wanting her?’

  ‘Since you can see my mistakes so clearly, you won’t make the same ones, will you?’

  Louise continued with the sprouts. When she had finished them she laid the bowl in front of her mother. ‘There! A labour of love if ever there was one!’

  Through the window they could see Austin and Guy and a man to whom they referred as the Visiting Author coming along the lane, the children following some distance behind, indulging in mild horseplay. ‘Where do you think they have been?’ Louise asked.

  ‘To see the old cottage Austin came across on that disastrous outing when Terence broke his ankle!’

  ‘Oh no! I will not be buried in the country.’

  ‘Austin had it in mind for the Visiting Author, who is looking for a rural retreat in which to write his masterpiece.’

  Louise frowned, irritated because her mother sometimes adopted a different mode of speech now that she was married to Austin.

  ‘Christmas pudding is by courtesy of America,’ Judith said. ‘A literary agent Austin knows over there sent us a food parcel! What do you imagine it will taste like?’

  ‘Heavily spiced pumpkin pie.’

  Austin’s daughter and family arrived for lunch and, this being the start of the season of goodwill, most members of the party emerged with resolutions intact. ‘You’re so good for Daddy,’ Judith’s daughter-in-law told her in the brief time that they were alone together. ‘And the house has really come to life again.’ It was apparent she regarded Judith as a superior housekeeper who must be encouraged lest she give notice. ‘I am sorry we couldn’t stay for Christmas Day, but Derek’s family would be devastated if we didn’t go to them this year. Although I do dread the journey. Derek gets in such a paddy when the children are car sick.’

  Judith, waving them on their way, thought of all the people setting out on journeys they would find exhausting to visit people who were bracing themselves for the disruption of their arrival; and wondered if a moratorium might not be declared every five years during which people would not be allowed to move out of their own homes at Christmas.

  The author hoped that now things were momentarily quieter Austin would take the opportunity to discuss the draft of h
is new novel, which he had had for over a month.

  Austin said, ‘A drink is called for, I think.’

  It was not until Christmas lunch that the subject of the country cottage was raised. The author thought it too large for one person, and the amount of work required daunting. He doubted if it was on main drainage.

  ‘We aren’t on main drainage,’ Austin said. ‘If it’s main drainage you are after, you would be better to stay where you are.’ He did not look forward to receiving a rural epic from a man who had been particularly successful in depicting the literary byways of Hampstead. Like all publishers, he viewed with alarm and despondency any tendency on the part of his authors to stray from their familiar pastures.

  ‘It would make a splendid family house,’ Guy said. ‘And it has a paddock for a pony.’

  ‘Supposing anyone wants a pony,’ Catherine said.

  James said to the author, ‘We are going to live in Lewes. We’re moving early next year.’

  Guy looked at Louise. She raised her eyebrows and said to Catherine, ‘Your father wants the bread sauce.’

  Judith changed the subject. ‘What about the Holland Park house?’

  ‘We thought of giving Ben and Alice first refusal,’ Louise said.

  ‘You’ll have to make some financial arrangement with Claire and Terence,’ Judith told her. ‘Your grandmother meant you all to have a share in it.’

  ‘They could wait.’ Louise was indifferent to financial claims.

  ‘Oh no, they couldn’t!’ Austin exclaimed. ‘Now is the time when they need money.’

  They began to argue about this while the author made mental notes for a future novel about a minor inheritance which divides a family. He was disappointed when Guy said, ‘We’ll talk it over all together, so that Terence and Claire can have their say.’

  Later, when he and Louise were doing the washing-up, Guy tried to revert to the subject of the country cottage. ‘I wasn’t all that struck with Lewes. Rather a grey little place, I thought.’