INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  They were all moving away from her. Would they, with a careless backward glance, say to one another, ‘I wonder where poor Alice got to?’ The more she thought about it, the more she imagined herself, by the very fact of her falling behind, to be a topic of conversation. How could she face them again, now that they had humiliated her in this way?

  She wondered what Mr Drummond made of it all. When she wrote to Irene, the only reference which she made to the party was ‘Mr Drummond must have been put out about Ben and Daphne.’ She was tempted to ask how he was taking it, but felt this betrayed too great an interest. No doubt Irene, who knew about the nastiness in the Drummond household, would tell her in any case. But Irene seemed more concerned with Angus and Mozart, and did not refer to the matter again.

  Alice decided that she, too, must put it behind her. Her knowledge of life might be limited, but her knowledge of films more than made up for this lack. Although she liked love stories to be poignant, she had never – even in the worst days of her addiction – liked them to be lingering. She resolved that the next time she met Ted Peterson, she would tell him she had decided to become engaged to him.

  But – alas for dinners at the Berkeley and country house week¬ends with men who were ‘just friends’ – when next she telephoned Ted’s home for news of him, his father told her that his battalion had moved. ‘We think he’s on the Continent, but we don’t really know.’ He spoke as of a place as far removed as Antarctica.

  The war was beginning at last, with friends and relatives to worry about. Yet, as she went about her duties, Alice had a feeling of unreality, as though she was waiting in the wings for something to happen on an empty stage. The nature of her course – she was training to be a coder – was a contributory factor; but primarily it was her surroundings which made her feel unconnected with the play of events.

  The baronial hall in which she was quartered was a mysterious, slightly creepy place. It had not been built to house over a hundred service women. For one thing, there was too much circulation space – winding corridors and long galleries which were difficult to heat, and in whose labyrinthine meanderings it was all too easy to mislay personnel. The scale was wrong, too. The ceilings were lofty and there was a tiresome echo which tended to ridicule commands. The fireplaces all appeared to have been designed for roasting oxen; the small stoves placed in them became derisory comments on the inadequacy of the heating. Above all, the house had the effect of making the present occupants seem unreal as amateur performers in a setting unsuited to their limited talents.

  This friction between the house and its inmates produced a feeling of unrest in Alice, reminding her that there were as many dark corners as sunlit gardens in the world of the imagination. At night, after the cheerful talk of men and sex, there was an awful darkness. Even after they had taken down the black-out and the steely moonlight penetrated the room, it was no better. The house was indifferent to them. It had stood for a long time; the wood and stone had endured, but the people had come and gone like shadows. Alice lay and thought of all the things people were doing even now, preparing to blow up cities and change the map of Europe. Yet they had so little time. The cavalier in the canvas at the turn of the stairs would probably outlast them all, as he had already outlasted painter and sitter.

  For a time, there seemed a danger that her illness would recur. Then, at last, she was kitted out. One morning she looked at herself in the speckled mirror. Her collar was commendably stiff, the tie neatly knotted at her throat. Navy blue suited her. She made a vow. She would not look into this darkness any more. This was her time of life and she would bend all her energies to making the most of every moment.

  Chapter Three

  April-August 1940

  In April the Germans invaded Norway. ‘It’s a rugged country,’ Stanley Fairley said to Judith. ‘The Germans won’t be able to fight in that sort of territory.’ In May he was telling her what splendid fighters the Dutch were. Guy had had embarkation leave in March. Louise thought he was probably on the Continent.

  Whatever the resolution of the Dutch, it was obviously time to take the war seriously. Mr Fairley decided that the loft must be cleared.

  ‘If we are bombed, it will be cleared anyway,’ Judith pointed out, visualizing all the dust which would be blown through the house, ‘Why not leave it till then?’

  He frowned at this levity. ‘All that stuff up there is a fire hazard. We are risking not only our own lives but those of our neighbours.’ As the house on one side had been standing empty ever since Mr Ainsworth, their elderly neighbour, died, there did not appear to be any immediate risk to anyone there.

  ‘And goodness alone knows what the Vaseyelins have in their loft!’ Judith said.

  ‘Very little, judging by the furnishing of the rest of the house,’ he retorted. ‘Refugees don’t hoard possessions.’

  He uttered the word ‘possessions’ as though it was itself a rebuke.

  ‘I still don’t see why you want to do it. You refused to evacuate. You said Hitler wasn’t going to turn you out of your home. Now, you are preparing to turn out your home for him!’

  ‘This is only a small thing.’

  ‘But why, having refused the big thing, surrender over the small?’

  ‘We are not surrendering, Judith! Simply taking necessary precautions. I can’t think why you are being so inconsistent. You have complained a hundred times that there is too much stored away in the loft.’

  It was true. Stanley was the one who cared about the bits and pieces of the family framework, she was the casual one. Her disquiet did not seem reasonable, even to herself. She said, ‘Do it if you must, but don’t leave a lot of rubbish in the back garden. War or no war, we don’t want the place looking like a junk-yard.’

  He was excited by the prospect. Once, it was he who would be annoyed because Judith must go about household duties when he wanted them to sit quietly together. But he had become very restless and seemed to welcome any diversion; while she was the quieter of the two, giving an impression of strength at the centre.

  They set about the task one Saturday afternoon when Alice was home on forty-eight-hour leave, and Louise had come for the day. It was, after all, a family affair, the loft being full of tokens of the lives of Fairleys for generations past. Louise had left the children with Guy’s parents. ‘I’d have brought them with me if I’d known,’ she said, rather surprisingly, since usually she had little time for sentimentality.

  Alice had a boy friend with her, a young Pilot Officer in the RAF. He was enthusiastic about the project when he saw the contents of the loft. ‘This will be a real treasure hunt!’

  ‘We’re not looking for treasure,’ Judith said drily. ‘Only throwing it away.’

  ‘It is the least we can do.’ Stanley Fairley wondered how she could speak like this in the presence of a young man who might be called upon to throw his life away.

  The young man appeared to have no sense of his imminent sacrifice. He wasted a lot of time trying on the clothes in the dressing-up trunk and striking attitudes. Family parties in his home had been restrained affairs, and his present uniform was the nearest he had ever come to wearing costume.

  Louise looked through the old photograph albums, lingering over the pictures of herself and her sisters when they were young. Her own children asked for their father continuously. She had to be brave for the three of them and accepted this without complaint; she had grasped eagerly what life gave, and now set herself to meet its demands as readily. But the news was bad, and Guy somewhere in the thick of the fighting; she seemed to tremble inwardly much of the time. She could hardly keep the tears back when she came unexpectedly upon snapshots of herself and Guy, taken on that hilarious occasion when the Women’s Bright Hour had been tipped into the sea. There was Guy, leaning against a breakwater, looking self-conscious in a blazer, the young face smooth as almond paste!

  Judith, looking at her, guessed something of what she was going through. She remembered waiting for news
from the Front. How lucky she and Stanley had been! She prayed it might be so, too, for Louise and Guy.

  Claire was protesting that this was ‘all stupid’. Judith said, ‘Then go downstairs, and let us do it.’ But Claire remained, kicking at old dolls and broken chairs, complaining, ‘Who wants to keep all this rubbish anyway!’ More than her sisters, Claire found this exercise upsetting. She feared change. Her aggressive behaviour betrayed the longing to revert to childhood and be comforted.

  The dog. Rumpus, who had been allowed to join them, rushed from one person to another, tearing at discarded curtains, barking furiously at the old rocking horse. Like most of the Fairley dogs, he was more loved than trained, and became increasingly hysterical.

  Alice worked methodically with her father, enjoying herself. Much of what was found she had already committed to her diary, and she did not need the actual objects to spark memory. In fact, the objects tended to be disappointing. She had remembered the masks, given by an unimaginative aunt, as more frightening than they seemed now that her sophisticated sensibilities rejected the merely crude. Yet, that Christmas, she and Claire had been so terrified, they had huddled together in Alice’s bed – until they fell out, bringing down the centre light in their parents’ bedroom beneath.

  Louise said, ‘Oh, the shells! The pretty things!’ She held one to her ear and listened to the roar of the sea, thinking of Guy, and how he had romanced about the windjammer, Herzogin Cecilie. How vulnerable he was, even still! Had she been unkind to him sometimes, she who was not a dreamer? ‘I shall take these for the children,’ she said. ‘They will love them.’

  ‘We’re supposed to be getting rid of things,’ her father said.

  ‘If I take them, you will have got rid of them.’

  He paused over a studio photograph of a fierce old woman in a mountainous hat. ‘Great-aunt Agatha! Now, Claire, you were saying only the other day you couldn’t remember seeing a picture of her, and I knew we had one somewhere. Here she is!’ He held it up proudly. ‘A terrifying old lady. I went in dread of her when I was a boy. She once locked me in the cowshed all one day for some minor misdemeanour. I don’t think we can throw her away.’

  ‘But you’re throwing photos of us away,’ Alice laughed.

  ‘I don’t need photographs to remind me of you, darling.’ He reluctantly consigned Great-aunt Agatha to the pile. Judith rescued her and studied the austere face from which Stanley’s eyes looked out.

  Stanley was hesitating over an even older photograph of Great- aunt Eleanor, who had dwindled to death in an asylum. It seemed that some honour was due to the photograph which had not been paid to the unfortunate woman in her lifetime.

  ‘We have madness in the family, you see,’ Alice said to the Pilot Officer.

  ‘Yes, indeed!’ He was much impressed.

  ‘You know, we could make things with some of this.’ Louise had become practical, bending over the dressing-up trunk.

  ‘That stuff is so old it will fall to pieces if you wash it,’ Judith said.

  ‘Not that black taffeta! That will go on until the end of time. And look at all this lace!’

  The young Pilot Officer watched her as she held the black lace against glowing face and chestnut hair. His eyes travelled slowly down her body with a look almost wounded, as though she had hurt him without warning.

  Claire gathered Rumpus into her arms, trying to soothe him, and he licked her face frantically.

  Alice held up a woollen doll’s bonnet. ‘Do you remember Daddy dressing him up in this, and a nightdress, to stop him getting pneumonia when he was run over?’ She put the bonnet on Rumpus and even Claire laughed.

  Judith, to whom it usually fell to supervise enterprises of this nature, sat in a broken wicker chair and let them get on with it. Stanley was enjoying himself. This is as good as stirrup pump drill for him! she thought wryly. The dismantling of the loft disturbed her. It had about it something of the confusion of abandoning ship. These were more than random accumulations which were being tossed aside; they were important just because they had accumulated. People who are settled accumulate. ‘Refugees,’ Stanley had pointed out, ‘don’t hoard possessions.’ She looked at her family, piling up photographs, old painting books, shawls and fans, toys and dolls’ furniture, a sampler worked by Aunt Meg, and sketches of the ships in which their Cornish grandfather had sailed, and she wondered at their wantonness. We grew out of this, she thought; it’s a part of us, our history. It is important to know where we came from, to have glimpses of the people from whom we sprang. It helps to explain us to ourselves. But how could she expect them to understand, when she herself had only recently become aware of it? She noticed that Louise was making a collection of items – not all of practical value – to take with her. Alice, judging by her absorbed expression, was committing them to memory. But Claire, who most needed the security of the past to balance the intractable present and unknown future, was simply letting go. She called Claire to her. ‘There’s nothing to stop you keeping anything you particularly want in your own room.’ But it was never possible for Claire to make choices easily, so she stamped her foot and said, ‘Throw it all out!’

  Later, downstairs, dusty and hungry, they sat talking over late supper until the time came to put up the black-out. Soon after this they were disturbed by Mrs Vaseyelin. On the day when they had been throwing out, Mrs Vaseyelin had decided to add to their possessions. She had brought them a carton of candles.

  ‘We have so many,’ she explained, standing in the dining room with her booty at her fed. ‘For the icons. Anita must have hoarded. Please to have these.’

  Mr Fairley frowned down at this tainted source of light. Judith briskly thanked Mrs Vaseyelin and offered tea. Mrs Vaseyelin declined, but sat on the edge of a chair.

  She was wearing a black coat, shiny with age, and a little black hat with a veil. The Fairleys had never seen her outside her house without a hat. Her sparse hair, insecurely knotted at the nape of her neck, was a rusty black. The hat, the shabby coat and the dyed hair seemed as mustily theatrical as the items in the dressing-up trunk. But to Mrs Vaseyelin they represented the last remnants of her dignity.

  Louise said impulsively, ‘May I take some of the candles, Mrs Vaseyelin? They’ll be so useful.’

  ‘Please.’

  She looked at Louise with eyes hungry for something that could not be put into words. Louise sat beside her. A gulf of time and culture separated them. It was too late to reach out now; if anything could have been done for this woman, it should have been done years ago. But Louise, once she recognized a need, was determined. ‘You have never been to see me, Mrs Vaseyelin – in my home, I mean. And I don’t think you have seen the children. Won’t you come? Come to tea one day next week.’

  The invitation perceptibly alarmed Mrs Vaseyelin. The most she could have accepted would have been a glass of sherry and a dry biscuit. She could have fed on that for days. She said, ‘Yes, yes – next week . . .’ She got up, and was preparing to take her leave before a firm date could be mentioned, when there was a commotion in the street.

  Mr Fairley went to the front door. A warden was standing in the Vaseyelins’ garden shouting, ‘Put out that light!’ Behind him, a number of surprisingly angry people had collected. A full moon lit the scene of the offence.

  ‘I think you must have left a light burning,’ Mr Fairley said to Mrs Vaseyelin.

  She stood at the gate, bemused by all the angry shouting. Someone said that the Vaseyelins were spies, that for years she had gone out every night to meet the man for whom she spied. Mrs Vaseyelin accepted this philosophically, as though it was only to be expected.

  ‘You should be ashamed!’ Mr Fairley shouted, but was stopped from saying any more by a clod of earth which hit him in the mouth. Fortunately, Jacov Vaseyelin came along the road in time to take over the defence of his mother.

  Jacov was not as well-equipped as Mr Fairley for the rough and tumble of open debate, but he had a better sense of theatre. It was
a chilly night, and he was wearing a long overcoat with a fur collar which he had borrowed from the studio property department. It gave him bulk which normally he lacked. He put his arm round his mother, and addressed the warden. His mother, he said, suffered from an obscure complaint. She was unable to tell dark from light, and would not, therefore, have realized that there was a naked light showing in the house. He delivered himself of this with such panache that the unlikely statement carried the same authority as if he had spoken of the disease of the Romanovs.

  The warden consulted Mr Fairley. ‘I don’t know about dark from light,’ Mr Fairley said, spitting blood and mud. ‘But she is certainly odd.’

  After a brief lecture from the warden, and a promise by Jacov that he would himself be responsible for the black-out in future, the crowd, now diminished to the status of extras, withdrew muttering rhubarb imprecations.

  ‘A disgraceful affair!’ Mr Fairley said later when Jacov had joined them in the sitting room. ‘I hope your mother was not too shocked.’

  ‘I think she thought it was your light they were angry about.’

  ‘My light!’

  ‘You left the front door open. Daddy,’ Louise told him.

  Mr Fairley, prepared to be magnanimous, was not pleased to find himself culpable. But although his family might be amused, Jacov treated him – as he invariably had – with the utmost respect.

  Mr Fairley transferred his displeasure to the crowd. ‘The war is supposed to be bringing people closer together. If those are the sort of people we have as neighbours, I’d as soon not know them.’