by Jane Gardam
He returns looking much rested and his wife during his absence looks much rested too. She is even sometimes seen about the town dressed in memorable clothes of a purplish sort and not by any means warm enough for the time of the year. Sometimes she walks along the sea-front and into Boots or a flower shop. Once she was seen carrying a small sheaf of corn and an ornamental bread loaf all the way along the prom, away past the pier to the parish church which was getting ready for its harvest festival. She is rather like a harvest festival herself—an immense storehouse of a woman with a large though indeterminate face. She’s like someone you’ve vaguely heard about in a rather bad book.
“Not at ’oame ’ere,” says Paula often, “thoase Gatherins. They’re Southeners.”
“Well what about you?”
“They’re different. Different again from me.”
“How?”
Paula thumped the iron about and turned it flat side up and gazed intently at it as if it knew the answer. The silver triangle was scorched all over with rusty stripes where she had burned things.
“You’ll burn your face.”
She moved the iron nearer to her cheek, country brown and red though it had seen little but cold Yorkshire weather for years.
“I don’t know roightly,” she said. “It’s what used to be called County. Before that it was Gentry.”
“Gentry’s a bit ancient,” I said, “and I don’t like County. It’s not right to say County.”
“You mean it’s not county to say County. Don’t you come this Marxism-we’re-all-one with me.”
“No—I don’t mean that,” I said. “But it’s only people who think they’re less than County who talk about County. I’m not less than Mrs. Gathering.”
“Nobody could be more than Mrs. Gathering.” We laughed and Paula put the iron down and was Mrs. Gathering round the kitchen. First she was Mrs. Gathering walking about and picking flowers, waving her hips extremely slowly. Then she was Mrs. Gathering arranging herself on her sofa and meditating on Lovely Ideas: and then—because I may as well tell you that Paula is like this—she became Mrs. Gathering in bed with Dr. Gathering who was the little fat cushion Paula puts under boys’ heads when they’re concussed after rugger. Slowly, slowly Mrs. Gathering folded Dr. Gathering into her arms and moaned, “Ooooooooh! Horold!” Dr. Gathering’s name is Harold but Paula says that in the south and among the County that is the way it is pronounced, the letter a.
Oh Paula makes you die, and when I met Mrs. Gathering soon after this in the lavender walk I had to try very hard not to remember the concussion cushion and dissolve. I blinked like mad. I wriggled about. I grinned very wide. She seemed surprised by the grin which was a very thorough-going affair for the smallness of the occasion, but she took my hand in hers and I heard her say, “Marigold. Marigold Green. Your dear mother—” and her eyes grew damp. “Such a sad shame. It might have been so different.”
She was looking now of course not at my grin but at my skirt hem which was coming down and at a hole in the knee of my tights. Paula is termagantal about clean fingernails but never sees clothes. The sole of one of my sandals was flopping about a bit, too. But I was furious because all this damp-eyed business was nothing more or less than criticism of Paula and father. “I am perfectly happy.” I announced, and gave her a good hard gleam from behind my specs. They are plastic non-break lenses and if you get the angle right you can magnify the eye-ball just about enough to fill the lens. It was an immature thing to do at fifteen I suppose but it was the fruit of years of practice and for some time had done rewarding things to Miss Bex, my form-mistress, and could sometimes make her yelp and knock jam-jars full of daffodils down the back of the bookcase, drip, drip, drip, all over the red Warwick Hamlets, making them bleed.
“Oh, of course my dear,” said Mrs. Gathering falling back, and I noticed for the first time (you see how big she is) that Jack Rose was standing just behind her, holding her Boots library books. She had been strolling round the park with him, father’s House Captain, Captain of Rugger, tall as a lily, all among the lavender and the red hot pokers.
And Jack had a very confident and pleased look on his face as he watched me and smiled down at me encouragingly. He had grown even more gloriously good-looking since the time he had yanked back horrible Terrapin from the window in the Peeping Tom business three years ago. He looked very strong and clean and clear-skinned—a creamy sort of complexion like a pale Spaniard. A bit like hers. His eyes were brown like hers, too, but where hers were round and moist and wandering his were small and watchful. I have a thing about brown eyes. I don’t mean that I dislike everyone with brown eyes but whenever I feel that I want someone to matter to me I am slightly relieved if their eyes are blue. Paula says I’d be lonely in India or Wales.
Noticing Jack Rose’s eyes now was a very curious experience. I thought
1. They’re brown
2. They’re little
3. But it’s Jack Rose. Jack Rose. My life and my love.
And then in a mighty rush came
4. He is in the park with Mrs. Gathering and they have just come out of a lavender bush!
I have said that those two Terrapin things taught me some things about myself. I have said that all my long quiet life with only grown ups has taught me about maturity. What I discovered now was a surge of excitement and distaste and interest and misery and curiosity and a sort of envy about something in common with both. I was seeing something I didn’t understand and did not want to.
No I wasn’t. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.
What did I want to know? I Iooked at Jack Rose’s hands, long white, medical hands, stroking Mrs. Rose’s library books and then, looking quickly away found myself gazing at the deep V of Mrs. Gathering’s lilac crêpe morning dress. Her neck down to the V was rather red and the skin thickish with minute raised pimples all over it. It was an old neck. I looked back at Jack Rose’s unlined beautiful blank pale face high up above the pair of us. I could have wept. I don’t know why.
Oh yes I do.
CHAPTER 4
A move had been afoot at the Comprehensive to make me do my A levels in one year instead of two. I had got my O levels to everybody’s surprise and had even managed to get a pass in English, as the set book had been a very easy one, Under the Greenwood Tree. I didn’t particularly like Under the Greenwood Tree except that it sounded like Dorset and had traces of Paula in it now and then which made me grin, though Paula had a bit more fire and brimstone about her. I got Paula to read me the whole book right through one night and didn’t bother with the English mistress’s notes at all. In the Greenwood Tree lessons I just sat thinking of this and that, and not feeling superior as I knew Miss Bex the English mistress thought I was. I don’t know why Miss Bex was so sure I hated her. I wouldn’t have come across a lot of things without her.
One day for instance she read out something that was most astonishingly interesting. It was something Hardy said about novels. A novel, said Hardy, should say what everybody is thinking but nobody is saying.
A novel must be true.
I dare say it doesn’t sound very extraordinary to most people but it did to me. Think of it—TRUE. True like a theorem. True like an equation. Naked and unashamed. I said it aloud, “Naked and unashamed,” I said and Miss Bex said, “Hullo? Yes? What? Was that Marigold?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say but I was still so enchanted by what Hardy had said that I gave her a big grin and nodded my head, and then I sort of waved my hand at her.
She looked very uneasy and the rest of the class began to splutter and cough and make a great to-do with handkerchieves. Miss Bex said that will do now, and turned with a flurry to the board which she tapped with the chalk and I think because she was playing for time she wrote on the board: The novel should express what everybody is thinking but nobody is saying. Then she turned and glared
at me menacingly and for a long time, even after the words had been rubbed off and covered up by Algebra next lesson—it was one of those green black boards that show through for weeks even after you’ve tried to get it out with water—I felt a warmth and satisfaction as I saw the words hollowly gleaming behind the symbols—facts behind facts. Truth behind truth. And on my way home the night of me Hardy lesson, as if to crown the beauty of it all by myself, I met Jack Rose. He was coming along Madeira, which is the road beside the railway line which has a rose-red wall the other side of it, the back wall of Victorian houses with long kitchen gardens, that catches any sun we get and faces south. Like the night I was a Peeping Tom, it was a balmy evening and I was sauntering along imagining myself to be Fancy Day looking at my pretty, unbespectacled face in a mirror on a cart. I was trailing my shopping basket full of books in one hand and watching the tufts of grass between the paving stones which looked like fuzzy seaweed—it’s interesting sometimes to be long-sighted. And there was Jack Rose beside me.
“Hullo,” he said.
He had a kind face. I mean, kind. Not soppy or twee but kind.
Good-natured and loving. His hair was soft and brown and clean. He swooped and took my basket full of books from me and swung it. “Plenty of homework,” he said. He had books of his own in his other hand and dropped them in my basket. His books mingled with mine. Oh God! I loved him—looking at our books together, jumbled in a heap. Then the top book fell off and I caught it and gave it back to him. It was called Ulysses, a huge heavy thing. “Thanks,” said he, “not that I’d mind losing it too much.”
“What is it? Is it Greek?”
“No. It’s English. Supposed to be a noveI. It’s just some poor perisher’s thoughts going on and on. Want to read it?”
He picked it out and solemnly presented it to me and although it was only from St. Wilfrid’s Library and I’d have all the trouble of getting father to take it back, I was thrilled because no one had ever given me a heavy book to read before, knowing that I found reading difficult. It was common knowledge that I could hardly read. “A present,” he said bowing and I held Ulysses close to my heart and Rose swung along beside me talking of things like cricket and the summer holidays and all the things he was doing as if I had been anybody or attractive.
At the House Boys’ Entrance we stood chatting and boys came and went between us, bursting out like rabbits free until Prep. Boakes came out and smiled at me. Then out blundered Terrapin and fell over Rose’s feet. Rose kicked him. “Get up slob. You nearly knocked Bilgewater over.”
“I didn’t. I knocked you.”
“Well, apologise.”
“Not on your—ow!”
“Now get.”
Terrapin rubbing a twisted arm looked at me and saw the book and read its title on my chest. “You’re not reading that!” he said and started laughing.
“Get!”
Terrapin ignored him. “You won’t like it, Bilge. You leave that alone.”
“Why?” I was so angry I was sweaty.
“It’s not fit,” said Terrapin. “And you’ll never get through it it’s so long. And it’s all boring private thoughts. It’s the way you use words when you’re thinking.”
“I’m interested in that.”
“So there you are,” said Rose and (oh glory) for the second time in my life tweaked a bit of my hair. “That’s what Bilge likes.”
“A novel should contain what everyone is thinking and nobody dares to say,” I announced and there was a bit of a pause. Jack Rose said, “So you see, Terrapin. She has got the right book. It’s later than you think.” He sort of eyed me and disappeared into the school.
Meeting Terrapin’s crazy round eyes which were not kind at all, I couldn’t help saying that I hadn’t actually started Ulysses yet. “I don’t actually understand what its—”
“You won’t at the end of it either,” he said, “But I expect you’ll love the bit about stuff coming out of his sister’s navel.” He went in through the door and then bobbed out again and his face was worse than usual—CONTUSED and ferocious.
“And there’s a lovely long bit about someone pushing on the lavatory. All he’s thinking about while he’s—Oh dear old Thomas Hardy,” he yelled, and I could hear his horrible laughing all through the garden and up our stairs and into Paula’s sitting room which was empty, and the Mrs. Thing of the moment had forgotten to get me any tea.
Now whether it was Ulysses or not—and I don’t think it was because I never did get through it—Uncle Pen had got it into his head that I was dreaming about it, and should have a shot at the A Levels a year early.
I had done a lot of extra work with my father in the holidays and when I took the A levels and got top grades there was a great confabulation between Pen and Puffy and father and Paula, and letters were written to Miss Bex and my Headmistress. Miss Bex who as I have said has never liked me at all asked me to stay back after school one day for a little talk and I discovered that someone—Uncle Pen again I should think—had murmured the idea that I might get in to Cambridge. Miss Bex told me of the idea as if it had been her own, offering it to me as if it had been a great big sticky chocolate. She sat back brightly to watch me lick my chops.
I examined the chocolate thoughtfully and then said I would have to take it home to father. She began to slap papers about on her desk, disappointed. She had wanted me to be excited and grateful. I couldn’t see why I should be. For years and years Miss Bex, who taught English, had made me feel a fool. For years and years it had been Miss Bex who had missed me out going round the class reading because she thought I was educationally sub-normal. The A levels must have surprised her, but she had never said so—never said, “Well done.”
“I think I ought to say,” she called to me as I gathered my books up to set off home, “that I am not very confident. It seems to me to be a very—ambitious idea.”
So it did to me. It seemed the most astounding idea. I hadn’t really got used to the face that I wasn’t dim and I had never even considered any university let alone Oxbridge in my life. I suppose it is another example of my queerness that I had never thought about after school at all. If vague thoughts of it ever obtruded I had damped them down fast, with the help of the memory of Miss Bex’s familiarly exasperated face.
“The General Paper would be the trouble,” said father when I told him.
“Can I get help with that?” I asked. “Isn’t it some sort of essay thing?”
“English,” said Paula, putting down a tea tray. “Could you sign this for Boakes’s boil pills, William?”
“No, no Paula. No, no.”
“Why not?”
“Well the reading. The body of reading.”
“She reads all right now.”
“I am not deaf,” I said, “I am here. I am in your presence.”
“There are all the years she didn’t. No, no. Too much to make up.” But I could see as he pushed the signed medical form back to Paula and at her earnest look back at him that he felt excited and I suddenly saw all the anxiety they must have had about me all the long years when I couldn’t tell a b from a d: the worry that there was something wrong with me. All Paula’s evenings reading to me came back, and the memory of her unshakeable faith—whatever the secret notes from staff I had had to carry back from school, saying ought I not to be assessed by psychologists or the organisers of loony bins and so on—that I would be all right in the end.
I had never thought I’d have to do any English again after O level and my writing is still very bad. Also the A level English teacher is Miss Bex—need I say!—and the books she was doing with the English lot were lovely ones and I didn’t want them to be spoiled. I have always preferred thinking about a book to writing about it and I have always assumed that English was the subject along with Scripture meant for the duds or those who do things just for enjoyment. But for a General Paper�
�?
“Oh well,” I said, “All right. I’ll do some English.”
“It’s your decision,” said father. Paula went prancing off like the triumph of Jerusalem.
Miss Bex however did not. “Really?” she said. “English? For the General Paper for Oxbridge?”
“For Cambridge.”
I felt absolutely dreadful saying it. I knew I hadn’t really got a hope of Cambridge although my Maths and Physics were all right.
I began to blush dreadfully and Miss Bex gave a little sardonic laugh. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we might let you have a try. I think I had better have a word with your parents. Will you ask them to contact me?”
“It’s only my father,” I said. “My mother died.”
“Oh. Oh. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I hope it wasn’t—?”
“Some time ago,” I said bravely.
“Oh dear. Did the Headmistress—?”
“I didn’t talk about it,” I said. (I couldn’t have talked about it. Having just been born it was before I coold talk. I am not proud of this conversation and I ought not to be pleased that she looked so terribly embarrassed.)
“I’ll write to your father,” she said. “Perhaps he would let me come and have a little talk with him?”
“That would be better,” I said, “than his corning here. He doesn’t go out of the House much. He lives a very quiet life.”
She said, “Ah.”
A week later I looked out of my bedroom window and sure enough there she was walking around the garden yacketing away at father, her head wagging, very earnest, and father leaning courteously towards her with his lovely absent-minded smile. As I watched he picked her a late rose—or perhaps just picked it and held it out for admiration, but she took it with great exclamations and stuck it into her big check tweed suit.
“Whoever’s that?” asked Paula over my shoolder.
“That’s Miss Bex. I’m doing Hamlet and Hardy with her.”
“God save them,” said Paula.
