“But you had to be away, for Jane’s sake, what else could you do? I was only trying to help.”
“I can’t divide myself in two,” Alison said, and from time to time repeated.
On the fifth day, he took Molly and Alison down to the pub, to see if a change of scene would cheer her up. It did not help much. Mrs. Bunney greeted Molly with enthusiasm, would have greeted Alison with like enthusiasm, but Alison took her drink with hardly a smile, and walked away, to sit in a corner, watching the game of darts. Anthony, leaning on the bar, chatting to make up for her taciturnity, glanced at her from time to time: there she sat, resolutely out of place, in her smart gray wool dress, with her smart shoes, and her smart ankles, and her expensive bag, alien, inassimilable, hopeless. It was all hopeless. The time was past, had never been, when he and Alison could have lived happily together ever after. It was not the death of love, for he still felt love for her. It was the hopelessness of time past that lay between them. The hopelessness of accident also had divided them. He glanced at Molly, ungainly, her nose running slightly in the indoor warmth, in her pleated check woolly skirt and her woolly jersey. Molly could not even sit tidily, let alone perform a tidy action. Her feet were always all over the place, she tripped others and tripped herself ten times a day. She dribbled when she drank. Even her head did not sit neatly on her neck. The contrast between the two of them was too poignant to contemplate. The one so perfectly, so delicately articulated, the other so inarticulate in every way. What was it for? A joke, a trial, a punishment? Too much had been asked of Alison. No wonder she sat like a tidy stone. And poor Jane, poor Jane, a great wash of sympathy for Jane, the first ever, overcame him, as he stood there and talked to Mrs. Bunney about the condition of the village call box; no wonder Jane had abstracted herself, confronted daily with so eloquent a vision of irredeemable injustice and irredeemable pain. That Alison, of all people, should have been called upon in this way; that Alison should have so denied herself; that she should so have undone and unknitted herself in all ways but one—it seemed too unkind to bear. And this unkindness she herself had borne for ten years now, and would forever.
It was true, of course, as he had read surreptitiously in a book on the handicapped child, during his first acquaintance with Alison, that it is not necessarily an advantage to the handicapped to be born into an advantaged family. There are some disabilities that money and privilege may lighten; others that it accentuates. Mrs. Lightfoot’s fat boy, the child of her middle age, would run around the village with an I.Q. below 60, and nobody would much notice. Whereas one could hardly expect fane and Alison not to notice Molly.
He wondered if it would be at all possible to persuade Alison to continue her career. Would anyone let her, now, after so long a gap? Perhaps he could put it to her that his own finances were so appalling and his prospects so poor that it was necessary that she should work again. She must do something, or she would get worse, he could see.
Christmas of that year was much the same as usual. Economically, the country was declared to be in acute decline, and yet, of course, record spending went on, accompanied by record moaning. There were no festive lights in Regent Street; some thought this a bad thing, some thought it a good thing, but most of the nation did not notice. (Most of the nation does not live in London, though this fact is not often mentioned by novelists and the national press.) Many households celebrated the event with their usual enthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm: children enjoyed themselves, mothers complained, and fathers sneaked off to pubs. Bitterly antagonistic families gathered together in order to quarrel bitterly, in the name of unity and love. Perhaps there was an attempt to economize on light, heat, and other forms of energy, but this seemed to have been counteracted by an ever-increasing expenditure on alcohol. Some families, of course, particularly those of the unemployed, suffered real hardship, or at least a real cutback in merrymaking, and the usual quota of poor feckless old folk died of cold. But, on average, most people in Britain were having a better time than they or their forebears would have had in the middle of the nineteen thirties. Indeed, immeasurably better. Naturally enough, few people thought about this at all. People have short memories. There was an unusually high sale of electric blankets in the pre-Christmas period, which sales analysts interpreted in different ways: as a fear of unheated bedrooms and nonelectric power cuts; as a fear of a very cold winter (the snails in the valley of the Po had been reported to be behaving oddly again); as a relatively cheap substitute for the more elaborate presents that otherwise might have been given, such as second cars, outboard motors, diamonds and fur coats, dishwashers, and so forth.
In the nineteen thirties there were no electric blankets, and only the rich or the ill thought of sleeping in heated bedrooms.
But, despite the national average, there were some for whom Christmas this year was an exceptional event. It was Len Wincobank’s first Christmas in jail, and Kitty Friedmann’s first without her husband. It was also Jane Murray’s first Christmas in jail: her trial had been postponed until January, partly because the vanishing boyfriend had turned up and was willing to give evidence. It was Maureen Kirby’s first Christmas without Len since she had first started to work for him, six years earlier. And it was Anthony Keating’s first Christmas in the country.
It was not what he had imagined. On purchasing High Rook House, he had had visions of open fires, Christmas trees, snow, the Yule log, if not exactly of Mummers and carol singers. He got the snow, all right: it began to fall on Christmas Eve, a thin, fine powder, a white cold dust that settled everywhere, picking out the lines of the walls, the contours, the paths, and drifting icily across the top of the fell. But little else went to plan.
It was Anthony’s first Christmas without Babs and the children. Like many a divorced, separated, or reluctant father, he had always before put in his time on this unholy festival: in the old days, he and Babs with one or two small children had gone up to his parents’ in the Cathedral Close, but that ritual had lapsed with the birth of the third, and since then they had always had Christmas in London, with a visit from his parents for the New Year. Since his affair with Alison, he had always managed to spend either Christmas Eve or Boxing Day with her; this was the first year they had been together for the whole holiday. Though it was not so different from other times, except in the memories it evoked, for his normal life in Yorkshire was hardly marked by a strict work routine. Indeed, he was beginning to wonder whether, when the Riverside disaster sorted itself out, he would ever be able to work again. And, if so, what at.
He had to organize what there was of Christmas himself, for Alison remained worryingly listless and passive, it was uphill work, organizing presents, ordering a turkey (one had to do these things for Molly, he told himself), and remembering to provide Christmas boxes for people like the grossly underage paper boy. He thought of inviting Maureen over—to fill their rather empty house, and because she was the most cheering person he could think of—but when he rang her, she said thanks ever so, but she had to go to her mum’s. He then thought of inviting some of his own children up: perhaps, he reasoned with himself, Babs would be glad to have one or two off her hands. So he rang them, in London, and made his offer. It was rejected. “No, thank you,” said his eldest daughter, Mary, indignantly, “what on earth would I want to come up there for? You must be mad. I don’t want to come up there miles from anywhere and freeze, thanks a lot.”
“I just wanted to be helpful,” said Anthony.
“Oh, we’ll get on all right without you,” said Mary, cuttingly. Or perhaps she meant to sound optimistic and cheerful. He spoke to Babs, to ask how everything was: she sounded as dotty as ever, and he could hear the noises of excitable living going on in the background—yelling, music, banging, doors slamming. Babs said she was fine, just a bit hectic, she had her new husband’s parents coming to stay for Christmas and didn’t know how on earth she was going to cope, she’d had a nice card from Anthony’s mum, Peter had broken his leg on a school ski-pa
rty practice on a grass slope—“Not even in the real thing, damn it, and we don’t get the deposit back, would you believe it?” said Babs, who was stirring (he could hear) something in a pan at her elbow at the same time. She just remembered to say, as she was about to ring off to put the stuff from the pan into the oven, that she’d had a phone call from the real estate agent to say he’d had an offer for the London house, and what should she do.
“What was the offer for?” asked Anthony, but Babs couldn’t remember. The agent had tried to ring Anthony, but hadn’t been able to get through. Why didn’t Anthony ring him?
“Because it’s after hours, there’ll be no one there,” said Anthony. “Do try to remember, Babs.”
“Honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Babs, clattering around ostentatiously.
Irritation with Babs and all his family returned in its old strength. No wonder he hadn’t been able to put up with that kind of thing.
“Well, you’re a bloody fool not to remember,” he yelled. “It’s important to me, to get rid of that house. Why the hell couldn’t you take a note of it?”
“Because I was busy, that’s why,” said Babs. “And thanks for the Christmas spirit.” And she slammed the phone down.
He tried to ring the real estate agent, but he wasn’t there. He could hardly believe that anyone actually wanted his old house, so little did he want it himself. But maybe it was a good omen. Maybe, if he sold the house, they would manage to sell the Riverside site too. And how could he have even momentarily doubted that a melancholic Alison was better than a euphoric Babs? At least Alison would never forget a message. He would go down to London, as soon as the holiday was over, and make some effort to sell the house, and bully Giles, and make his presence felt. He had had enough of keeping quiet, waiting for things to happen. He would go mad, if it went on much longer, or Alison would go mad, which at the moment seemed more likely.
Tim spent Christmas Eve in a pub in Drury Lane, with a crowd of actors (mostly out-of-work) and ballet dancers. He regaled those who would listen with stories about the extraordinary affairs of property magnate Anthony Keating, who had gone melancholy-mad and locked himself up in a great house in Yorkshire, where he ranted and tore his hair, like a latter-day Heathcliff.
Giles’s ex-girlfriend Pamela spent Christmas Eve with her friends the Sinclair-Davieses, in Wiltshire. There were many other house guests, none of whom was quite sure who any of the others were, or to whom it was necessary to give presents, so many unallocated gifts drifted around the place, making their way from stranger to stranger, in an orgy of alcoholic exchange. Pamela ended up with a King Charles’s spaniel, which was dead before Easter: she left it in her car one weekend in London by mistake, and by Monday morning it had expired.
Giles Peters spent it with his secretary, in bed. The intensity of speculation about the Riverside site had by now given him a very unpleasant skin disease, but his secretary was polite enough not to mention it, perhaps because she had noticed that Giles was temporarily unmarried, and had never been known to remain so for more than a year. The year was almost up. Also, she found Giles rather fascinating, spots and all, and for reasons other than his money. She was frightened of him, and sorry for him, at the same time, and the sensation of feeling sorry for so powerful a man gave her a quite peculiar sexual thrill.
Len Wincobank spent it watching a worthy group of left-wing actors performing a modern morality play about advertising, racism, and the unemployment problem. It made a change from the telly, but he found it inexpressibly naive, and agreed with the general view that it was a scandal that they were offered that kind of crap, when they might have had a decent singer or a variety act.
Len was feeling rather bleak these days. He still had another six hundred days to go, at least, and there seemed little hope that Maureen would wait for him: he ought to have married her, he now realized, but there had somehow never been time. He was also oppressed by Tom Callander. Ever since his fateful overture of friendship on the night of the storm, Callander had persecuted him, boring his pants off with arguments about coincidence and ESP, treating him to the dullest and most embarrassing of confidences. He was as mad as a hatter, and Len often felt he ought to report him to the doc, but didn’t. Nor did he like the train of thought that Callander’s spineless evasions inspired in him. If Callander went to the lengths of going mad rather than think he had been justly convicted, what, thought Len, if I am doing the same? Len did not much like the company he was forced to keep.
Finally, he was haunted by the vision of Northam’s derelict L.N.E.R. station. He had worked out in his head, for his memory was astonishing, who owned every foot of the land, who owned each inch of bordering land, and it did not seem to him possible that it would wait for him to get out. He felt that every speculator in the country must have his eye on the same site. How was it possible that nobody had thought of it till now? Was it possible that he, who knew Northam like the back of his hand (or so he had always claimed), had only just thought of it? And if he thought of it too much, and if that old drag Callander were right about ESP, might not his very thinking about it tip somebody the wink? He must put Northam station out of his mind, in case somebody read his mind. He felt like a research chemist, on the brink of some discovery at once so sensational and so simple that he feels scientists all over the world must get there first; or like a writer who invents a plot so spectacular that he cannot believe it has not been done before. A race against time, but what race could the disqualified Len now enter? For the first time he began to think that it might have been better to have gone down, gone bankrupt over the Porcaster deal. One can get out of bankruptcy quicker than out of jail.
These were Len Wincobank’s thoughts as he watched a group of actors trying to embody the Race Discrimination Act in a few meaningful tableaux. Poor sods, thought Len, sparing them too a thought, they can’t have made much of a go of it, to find themselves in this sodding dump at Christmastime.
Maureen Kirby, who was by much the nicest of this perhaps unrepresentative group of British citizens, spent Christmas Eve, as she had told Anthony she would, with her mum, who still lived in Attercliffe, Sheffield. Maureen’s mum was an old bag of the old style, with henna hair and a fag constantly stuck in the corner of her mouth: she had been a barmaid, but was now more or less retired, though she sometimes stood in for Enid at the Prince of Wales. She had a croaky voice, smoked forty a day at least, and spent most of her spare time laughing raucously about lung cancer and what a laugh it would be if she went and got it. She was not bad company, but limited. On Christmas Eve she assembled the entire family and crowded them into her tiny front room, where she gave everyone pork pies and tinned salmon sandwiches and trifle and kept the telly on all the time even though it was quite impossible, with twenty people in a room twelve feet by ten, for anyone to see it. But she liked a high noise level, and achieved it. Maureen was quite fond of her, and of our Dave and our Sid and our Mavis, and of their Darrens and Sharons and Marlenes, and the whole event was very undemanding: one could just sink into it and disappear, contributing, if one felt like it, a shout of mirth or even a song from time to time. But it really was overcrowded. Maureen had become accustomed, with Len, to better things and wider spaces. She felt at home, at home, but it certainly did provide a contrast with the carpeted expanses of the powder room in the Queen’s Hotel, Leeds, or the Hallam Tower, Sheffield. No wonder, she thought, as she squeezed her way past ten bodies and along a crowded corridor to the much overused lav (Darren had piddled all over the floor again) that she had such a yen for large powder rooms. One couldn’t even settle down in here for a minute without someone thumping on the door.
Kitty Friedmann also had a large family gathering, though of course she had more space to put them in. Her branch of the family had for years celebrated both Christian and Jewish festivals, indiscriminately, for she did not believe in letting an opportunity go to waste. But she was not feeling quite as cheerful as she managed to appear. T
he solicitors had been frightening her, with talk about death duties, and loans, and discrepancies in accounts. She could not understand a word of it, but knew it was not good news. Nor did she much like the look of Miriam. There was definitely something wrong with Miriam. She hardly ate a thing, and her collar bones stuck out shockingly. And the more Kitty pressed tempting little pieces of cake and biscuits on her, the more unpleasant Miriam got. Kitty could not understand it.
For Alison Murray, Christmas Eve was an ordeal. But then, it always had been, which was one of the reasons why it was so bad now, for it contained in it the grim recollections of an ever-receding chain of such celebrations. There must have been, in the dawn of time, she supposed, a few Christmases that she had enjoyed, but she could hardly recall them. Instead, she recalled the intense ill nature of her sister, Rosemary, who had grabbed her presents and quarreled over them and turned them into a misery; the year her grandfather had had a stroke and died in the bath; the year her aunt had been so miserable and cried all the time and said that nobody in the family ever paid her any attention all the year round, and did they think they could make up for it by asking her to stay for four days a year; the year Rosemary had invited her fiancé to stay, for the first time, and had been so extraordinarily unpleasant and self-satisfied and rude with him about Alison; the first year with Donnell, when Donnell had caused an outrage by going off to the pub with her father instead of sipping sherry at home, and they had both come back pissed; subsequent years with Donnell, trying to make things “proper” for Jane, crying herself into the tinsel, refusing to have Donnell’s girl to stay for Christmas, finding Donnell in bed with the au pair; a long, long string of exacerbated failures. And now, when everything should be coming right, it was as bad as ever. How could one not think of Jane, in prison? And why was she herself behaving so appallingly badly to poor Anthony?
The Ice Age Page 21
