LOOK, STRANGER

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Having Daniel at home . . . it isn’t as if I know when he will be in and when not . . . I can’t . . .’ She was never safe from his disturbing presence, but she could not bring herself to say that. ‘I can’t organise myself.’

  ‘Would it help if he had a temporary job?’

  ‘Yes, I think that would help.’

  ‘It would give you both a breathing space, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I need—a breathing space.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘You’re very good to me.’

  Harry stroked her upper arm. After a moment, he asked, ‘Have you thought about the future?’

  ‘The future?’

  ‘I was wondering whether you planned to stay in Yeominster?’

  ‘Of course I plan to stay in Yeominster.’ She looked rather affronted. It was plain she had not yet reached a stage where she could make any decisions about her marriage.

  Harry looked at her thoughtfully, wondering whether he should kiss her. Her face was blotched with tears and emotion had brought up an unbecoming cluster of pimples on her right cheek. He said, ‘I’ll see about the job, at any rate.’ He was not sure that he was prepared to undertake anything more. Certainly, he needed to think quietly before it was too late. He liked the irrevocable even less than the inevitable.

  Erica, however, now felt assured of her future. She would marry Harry. Quite how this was to be achieved, she was not sure, but she assumed he would work out the details. She realised, however, that there was a long, dark night ahead which she must somehow get through before she could emerge into the radiant new life that awaited her. She was not sure she could manage without help. She thought about the vicar, but he would tell her to pray. Of course, she did pray; she talked to God more or less all day, whether she was making the beds, rolling out the pastry, collecting meals or taking notes at meetings, she was in constant communication with Him. But in this instance, prayer was not really effective because there was the problem of divorce from which her mind skidded away. She dismissed the idea of going to the doctor. There was nothing physically wrong with her and she resented the thought that he might put her on drugs, as though she was a neurotic. Then the answer came to her one evening, quite suddenly, while she was ironing one of Giles’s shirts. She was taken aback by the audacity of it; at first, she dismissed it, but she returned to it later that night, and by the following morning it seemed to have taken root. She would go to a psychiatrist! ‘I am ready for this,’ she told herself. ‘This is my moment.’ She made arrangements to see a man who had once lectured at the young wives’ group and whose personality had seemed to her to be particularly sympathetic. She was very excited. Psychiatry had become a part of twentieth-century life, it was a service of which the intelligent modern woman should avail herself. The thought that her own particular exploration was about to start had a liberating effect on her. All the things she wanted to tell the psychiatrist began to bubble to the surface of her mind, she could hardly contain them. She waited with mounting impatience for the first appointment.

  Now that vigour was restored to her, she began once more to take an active part in the affairs of those around her. Emma was studying too hard; Giles had a ridiculous notion that he wanted to leave Mansfield and go to the technical college; old Mrs. Prentice was launched on one of her periodic obsessions with lost treasure - this time an old snapshot album for which she searched incessantly, rummaging in drawers, turning out cupboards and suitcases. Erica darted in and out of all this like a terrier snapping at a ball. She was particularly concerned about Dorothy’s attitude to Daniel.

  ‘I know you don’t like him,’ she said. ‘But you ought to control it a little more. Whenever he comes into a room, you become a different person. You probably aren’t aware of it yourself, that’s why I’m telling you about it. You become nervy and restless, and I notice you have a bad effect on him. I thought you were terribly rude to each other at lunch, over nothing at all; just out of the blue there was an explosion between you.’

  Dorothy said, ‘I’m sorry. Erica.’

  ‘There’s something almost – well, I can’t quite say what, but something not quite right.’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t seem yourself at all.’

  ‘Perhaps this is the real me?’

  ‘Don’t be so silly. You’re a very nice person really.’ Erica wanted that person back, capable, reliable, above all, predictable.

  Dorothy went up to her bedroom. It was Saturday afternoon, dusk was beginning to gather; the air coming in through the open window was moist and the leaden sky promised rain. Daniel was working in the garden. He had worked out there a lot lately, giving himself employment of a kind. Dorothy sat by the window and watched him. He was collecting dead leaves and twigs to make a bonfire. As with most activities, he put all his energy into it. He was not content to scoop up a handful of leaves, but gathered them all with the care of the shepherd, going back for those which escaped the rake, and then kneeling down and burrowing diligently, seeking them in their hiding places beneath shrubs and under hedges. He gathered the twigs with equal concern, and a few branches which had fallen. The bigger branches he broke across his knees, and then sat back on his heels, holding something in the palm of his hand, puzzling over it. Perhaps the dried fruit from a tree which he did not recognise? Eventually he put it in his pocket; and then began the business of arranging leaves and twigs in a mound. A considerable business it was! Above him, unheeded, deep violet clouds bunched together and even in the short space of time that Dorothy had been watching, the cloud height had lowered perceptibly. Daniel crouched, hand arrested, while he pondered the exact position of a twig. As she watched him, Dorothy cried out, ‘Light the ruddy fire!’ and beat her fist on the window¬sill. Then she got up and paced the room. ‘Why can’t you light a fire like anyone else? Why do you have to make it seem that this is the first fire that has ever been lit?’ It was so typical of him. He behaved always as though there was a strangeness and mystery just beneath the surface of life, as though to him there was no common day, but a miracle which happened with each dawn and died with the going down of the sun and the terror of night. ‘I must go away,’ she moaned. ‘Oh, I must go away!’

  She went instead to church the next day. Her religion meant a lot to her, it was in the marrow of her bones; yet it had deteriorated into a series of clichés, God is within you . . . Gift of the Holy Spirit . . . What did it mean? How was God in her? What was the Holy Spirit? She had sat in church week after week, year after year, and it had all flowed over her with nothing to arrest her attention because, by and large, it was not aimed at her or any other adult. The vicar was old, gentle and fatherly; he regarded his congregation as his children and spoke to them on that level. During the sermon, Dorothy usually sat with her mind running over the past week’s events, making mental notes of things – administrative rather than spiritual – which she had omitted to do. Her religion had not matured because it had deceived no nourishment here and she had not gone out to seek it elsewhere. Now, when she needed Him, she could not find God. When she prayed. He was not there. God is light, she thought; and we think we can contain Him in this dark place, visiting Him once a week, bringing flowers, as if He were a sick relative. She watched light flicker along the sides of the window alcoves like flames licking the glass and she thought that if the windows were smashed, God would surge in and consume the building.

  Daniel wanted her to go away for a week-end with him. She refused.

  ‘Erica is my sister,’ she said.

  ‘But if she was dead, you wouldn’t hesitate then.’

  ‘But she isn’t dead!’

  ‘I can’t see what difference that makes. It’s not as though she has any feeling for me.’

  ‘I can’t see why there should be a difference either, but there is.’ They argued incessantly. Argument with Daniel was wonderfully exhilarating, there was not time enough left in life
to argue with him! In between arguing with Daniel, Dorothy was urging Erica to think more about him. ‘He is your husband. Erica! You must think about him.’ But really, what she was saying was, ‘Come on. Erica! Don’t make it too easy for me. Threaten me, fight me; above all, make me suffer for this!’ What a miserable puritan she was!

  Easter came, cold and grey. Good Friday was particularly bleak. As she walked to church for the three-hour service, Dorothy watched a plume of smoke rising into the sky from a near-by chimney; the smoke looked white against the ashen sky. In the distance, the Downs had lost their substance and were reduced to a grey-green shadow thinly stencilled on the sky. People passed in the street, coats buttoned to the throat, closed faces. It was all hateful, hateful! Everyone was saying, ‘We shall have no spring this year.’ The world was drained of hope. But the light had more penetration than winter light, it probed dusty corners, revealed the cracks in the fabric, showed the thin patches where belief had rotted away. The church was bare. Gone was baby Jesus in his crib, the candles, the dancing shadows, the lighted tree, the eager faces upraised. Here was darkness and gloom, agony beyond understanding, disillusion beyond bearing; right would not triumph nor good be rewarded, and death would have dominion over all. All else was a dream, a tale told to simple men who had been too credulous.

  As she knelt, trying to fix her mind on suffering, Dorothy said to herself, ‘I cannot do this thing to Erica.’ But the words carried no more conviction than anything else she said on the subject. Whatever show of repentance she might make, whatever confessions she might utter on her knees, her feeling for Daniel grew stronger and stronger: the sheer energy of it amazed her.

  In the library at Knocke Hall, Daniel was writing yet another letter of applications. He now applied not only for jobs which seemed to be suitable, but for any vacancy which was not demonstrably outside his scope. At the moment, he was answering an advertisement for the manager of a chemist’s shop. It was a demoralising process, but he was no longer aware of the effect which it was having on him. He had ceased to react. There was a mechanism in his system which now seemed to operate automatically in an emergency, like fire doors sealing off a danger area from the outside world. He read the letter through, signed it and reached for an envelope. At that moment, the door of the library opened and he turned eagerly, hoping to see Dorothy. It was Emma who came into the room. She looked at him very directly as though taking aim between his eyes and said, ‘Are you coming to the prayer meeting with me? We have one at three o’clock this afternoon.’ She stood facing him, breathing heavily through parted lips as though she had climbed a particularly steep hill instead of running down a flight of stairs from her bedroom; he could tell that this was something she had forced herself to do and he could imagine her, seated in her room, suddenly putting down her pen and saying, ‘This is the moment when I have to do it.’

  He felt guilty and confused because his mind had been on Dorothy, and he said hastily, ‘Yes, all right, Emma.’

  She said, ‘I’ll tell you when to get ready’ and left the room hurriedly.

  Daniel stuck down the envelope and addressed it. Then he sat gazing out of the window at a fat thrush pecking for worms on the lawn. He thought about the prayer meeting. He was a scientist. He had contemplated the universe with its millions of galaxies, its great cauldrons of inter-stellar gas from which new galaxies would eventually emerge, its exploding stars from which new planets would be formed, and he had been aware that his own world was no more than a grain of sand in all this vastness. As for man, he saw him as part of the evolutionary process, and not as its peak, and he could look without dismay to a time when by a process of random selection a creature infinitely more sophisticated than homo sapiens would emerge. He was able to do all this without fear or experiencing the need to cry out for supernatural help. It was annoying, therefore, that he should find his own resources so inadequate to cope with the ordeal of accompanying his daughter to a prayer meeting.

  What did it mean? What was Emma expecting of him? Was she trying to involve him in an emotional experience from which she expected one or other of them to emerge altered in some mysterious way? Was that it? When Emma came to collect him, he had provided no answers to these questions and was in a state of funk.

  ‘The sun has come out,’ she said. ‘We can walk there.’ Emma liked to have a long run before she jumped her hurdles.

  All that was happening was that he was going to a prayer meeting with his daughter: it was not much to ask of him as a father. Yet it seemed, as he walked beside her, that this was the worst of all the things which had happened to him recently. He remembered how as a child he had stayed with an aunt who had taken him to prayer meetings; he had walked through the streets in a state of utter incredulity, refusing to believe that nothing would intervene to save him, no fire, flood, earthquake, each of which seemed to him more natural and bearable than the hour he would spend in the quiet, bare chapel. He had been repelled by the personal confessions, the probing of the soul, the lust for salvation. The very thought of this now brought him out in a sweat. He glanced at Emma who trudged beside him, head bent.

  ‘What is the procedure this afternoon?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘What do you mean, procedure?’ The word twanged on raw nerves. ‘What a silly word! We’re not going to a board meeting.’

  ‘What goes on, then?’

  ‘We pray.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’

  ‘Anyone who is moved.’

  It was warmer now. There had been no rain for some time and dust came up from the pavement and made his throat dry. He wished he had had a glass of water before he left the house.

  Emma said, ‘They won’t expect you to pray.’ Her tone made it quite clear that she neither expected nor desired it. He realised that she, too, was dreading what lay ahead. She was embarrassed for him in the way in which we are often embarrassed for our dear ones when we see them in the company of people whom we regard more objectively. Had Daniel risen to his feet and delivered the most moving and intellectually satisfying prayer ever heard in North Street chapel, Emma would have been embarrassed for him. Daniel put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a quick hug.

  ‘Cheer up! Or aren’t we allowed to be cheerful?’

  She laughed nervously and then resumed her grim contemplation of the pavement as though there might be some courage lying about which she could scoop up. She was at the age when to make herself conspicuous was a physical torture and she was about to make herself very conspicuous.

  They were coming towards the centre of Yeominster now; Daniel could see the cathedral spire straight ahead and he knew that when it was to the side of him, rising above the roof of the old Corn Exchange, they would be nearing North Street.

  ‘What happened about that Hampshire Trust job?’ Emma asked abruptly.

  ‘They didn’t think I would be suitable.’

  ‘Then why did Sir Charles Raines ask you out to lunch?’

  ‘He knows me. I think he felt that was the way to deal with it.’

  ‘But you were suitable! Much better than they deserved!’

  ‘That was what he said.’

  ‘Stupid old man!’

  Over the last week, she had been easily roused to anger and he guessed that his action, which at one time she had thought so beautiful, was beginning to weigh heavily on her. Was that why she was doing this? To prove she had not deserted him? Oh, Emma! Emma! he thought; even if you have your doubts, I can forgive them. Couldn’t you settle for forgiveness and let me go home?

  It was too late. They had turned into North Street. The chapel was just ahead of them, a drab yellowstone building which opened straight on to the pavement, its harsh appearance a little softened by forsythia which hung over the wall of the neighbouring garden. There were a few people outside making the most of the unexpected sunshine; a young girl at the age at which it is impossible to be still for one moment, balancing on one leg on the kerb, occasionally teetering over into the
gutter, two teenage girls with long hair cloaking solemn faces, a group of plump, comfortable-looking middle-aged women talking animatedly and sometimes bursting into laughter, two men standing back, giving the impression they were letting the women get on with it. It was a glance into someone else’s life, very orderly and reassuring, a cameo glimpsed while passing on one’s way to another place. Nothing to do with him. Even as they moved towards the group of people and someone waved to Emma, he could not believe he had arrived. Emma put her hand in his; he squeezed it.

  As they drew nearer the little group of women broke up. One of them said cheerfully to Daniel, ‘Hullo, Mr. Kerr. Nice to see the sun again, isn’t it?’ She spoke as though she knew him well and his presence in their midst occasioned no surprise. Emma was talking to one of the men. She was trying to appear self-possessed, but spoke with breathless rapidity as though the words emanated from a source which might dry up at any moment. Another woman said to Daniel, ‘Emma takes her exams next term, doesn’t she? We all hope she will do well. She works so hard.’ Daniel said, ‘Yes, indeed.’ The woman said, ‘You must be very proud of her.’ Emma looked at him, her eyes transmitting a distress signal. Daniel said, ‘Well, I suppose . . .’ and followed Emma into the chapel.

  A man standing at the side door handed Daniel a hymn book and said, ‘Glad to see you here.’ Inside the chapel, a man in a pew near the back stood to one side to make way for Daniel and Emma, he nodded his head at Daniel and smiled. Undoubtedly, they were all glad to see him and wanted to make him feel that he was one of them. They were concerned about him and showed it openly, there was no doubting their goodwill. One must never sneer at this kind of thing, Daniel thought as he sat beside Emma and bowed his head. It was cool in the chapel, his shirt clung clammily to his back. People were filing into the pews now, chatting to one another; it was not assumed that a reverent attitude should be adopted, God would not take offence if the commerce of daily life spilt over into His house. The atmosphere was quite different to that at All Saints’. There was a sense here that God was suffocatingly near, perhaps he would take His place at the back with a hymn book in His hand. The meeting began with a hymn, ‘Be Thou my vision, oh Lord of my heart’. Then they sat down and there was a silence which seemed to Daniel to go on for an unconscionably long time before an elderly man got up and said, ‘We thank Thee, Lord Jesus, that Thou art present in our midst this afternoon . . .’ Daniel glanced sideways at Emma, who was sitting with her hands clenched on her knees, her eyes closed. The flaming hair failed to warm her face which was very pale, the freckles on nose and cheeks were like cinnamon on milk. What was it she wanted God to do this afternoon? he wondered. He loved her so much and yet he had no idea what it was that she wanted. Was it something simple and explicit – ‘Please find my father a job’? Or something more despairing, ‘Don’t let him go away again now that he has come home’? Or did she want a sign, for herself as much as for her father – a blinding light on the Yeominster road? What would it mean to her for prayer to fail? It seemed, as he looked at her, that there was desperation in the set of her mouth, as though she knew she had already lost. But what had she lost? The fight for absolute belief? She came to this chapel because her parents had failed to provide her with stability at home and this had driven her to a quest for certainty. He hoped she would be able to disengage herself from it without too much pain; she needed a god to whom she must always reach out, not one who had been pinned down like a butterfly on a board.