Stories (46 page)

He caught her eyes and signalled an invitation, but it was an aggressive invitation, to make it as hard for her as he could. After a bit, she smiled at him. Then he roughened his speech to the point of unintelligibility and said: “‘Appen you’d like t’window up? What wi’ t’rain and t’wind and all.”

“What?” she said sharply, her face lengthening into such a comical frankness of shock that he laughed out, and afterwards enquired impeccably: “Actually it is rather cold, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to have the window up?” She picked up a magazine and shut him out, while he watched, grinning, the blood creep up from her neat suit collar to her hair-line.

The door slid back; two people came in. They were a man and his wife, both small, crumpled in face and flesh, and dressed in their best for London. There was a fuss and a heaving of suitcases and murmured apologies because of the two superior young people. Then the woman, having settled herself in a corner, looked steadily at Charlie, while he thought: Deep calls to deep, she knows who I am all right; she’s not foxed by the trimmings. He was right, because soon she said familiarly: “Would you put the window up for me, lad? It’s a rare cold night and no mistake.”

Charlie put up the window, not looking at the girl, who was
hiding behind the magazine. Now the woman smiled, and the man smiled too, because of her ease with the youth.

“You comfortable like that, Father?” she asked.

“Fair enough,” said the husband on the stoical note of the confirmed grumbler.

“Put your feet up beside me, any road.”

“But I’m all right, lass,” he said bravely. Then, making a favour of it, he loosened his laces, eased his feet inside too new shoes, and set them on the seat beside his wife.

She, for her part, was removing her hat. It was of shapeless grey felt, with a pink rose at the front. Charlie’s mother owned just such a badge of respectability, renewed every year or so at the sales. Hers was always blueish felt, with a bit of ribbon or coarse net, and she would rather be seen dead than without it in public.

The woman sat fingering her hair, which was thin and greying. For some reason, the sight of her clean pinkish scalp shining through the grey wisps made Charlie wild with anger. He was taken by surprise, and again summoned himself to himself, making the didactic voice lecture: “The working woman of these islands enjoys a position in the family superior to that of the middleclass woman, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” This was an article he had read recently, and he continued to recite from it, until he realised the voice had become an open sneer, and was saying: “Not only is she the emotional bulwark of the family, but she is frequently the breadwinner as well, such as wrapping sweets at night, sweated labour for pleasure, anything to get out of the happy home for a few hours.”

The fusion of the two voices, the nagging inside voice, and the jeer from the dangerous force outside terrified Charlie, and he told himself hastily: You’re drunk, that’s all; now keep your mouth shut, for God’s sake.

The woman was asking him: “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes, I’m all right,” he said carefully.

“Going all the way to London?”

“Yes, I’m going all the way to London.”

“It’s a long drag.”

“Yes, it’s a long drag.”

At this echoing dialogue, the girl lowered her magazine to give him a sharp contemptuous look, up and down. Her face
was now smoothly pink, and her small pink mouth was judging.

“You have a mouth like a rosebud,” said Charlie, listening horrified to these words emerging from him.

The girl jerked up the magazine. The man looked sharply at Charlie, to see if he had heard aright, and then at his wife, for guidance. The wife looked doubtfully at Charlie, who offered her a slow desperate wink. She accepted it, and nodded at her husband: boys will be boys. They both glanced warily at the shining face of the magazine.

“We’re on our way to London too,” said the woman.

“So you’re on your way to London.”

Stop it, he told himself. He felt a foolish slack grin on his face, and his tongue was thickening in his mouth. He shut his eyes, trying to summon Charlie to his aid, but his stomach was rolling, warm and sick. He lit a cigarette for support, watching his hands at work. “Lily-handed son of learning wants a manicure badly,” commented a soft voice in his ear; and he saw the cigarette poised in a parody of a cad’s gesture between displayed nicotined fingers. Charlie, smoking with poise, sat preserving a polite, sarcastic smile.

He was in the grip of terror. He was afraid he might slide off the seat. He could no longer help himself.

“London’s a big place, for strangers,” said the woman.

“But it makes a nice change,” said Charlie, trying hard.

The woman, delighted that a real conversation was at last under way, settled her shabby old head against a leather bulge, and said: “Yes, it does make a nice change.” The shine on the leather confused Charlie’s eyes; he glanced over at the magazine, but its glitter, too, seemed to invade his pupils. He looked at the dirty floor for comfort, and said: “It’s good for people to get a change now and then.”

“Yes, that’s what I tell my husband, don’t I, Father? It’s good for us to get away now and then. We have a married daughter in Streatham.”

“It’s a great thing, family ties.”

“Yes, but it’s a drag,” said the man. “Say what you like, but it is. After all, I mean, when all is said and done.” He paused, his head on one side, with a debating look, waiting for Charlie to take it up.

Charlie said: “There’s no denying it, say what you like, I mean, there’s no doubt about that” And he looked interestedly at the man for his reply.

The woman said: “Yes, but the way I look at it, you’ve got to get out of yourself sometimes, look at it that way.”

“It’s all very well,” said the husband, on a satisfied but grumbling note, “but if you’re going to do that, well, for a start-off, it’s an expense.”

“If you don’t throw a good penny after a bad one,” said Charlie judiciously. “I mean, what’s the point?”

“Yes, that’s it,” said the woman excitedly, her old face animated. “That’s what I say to Father, what’s the point if you don’t sometimes let yourself go?”

“I mean, life’s bad enough as it is,” said Charlie, watching the magazine slowly lower itself. It was laid precisely on the seat. The girl now sat, two small brown-gloved hands in a ginger-tweeded lap, staring him out. Her blue eyes glinted into his, and he looked quickly away.

“Well, I can see that right enough,” said the man, “but there again, you’ve got to know where to stop.”

“That’s right,” said Charlie, “you’re dead right.”

“I know it’s all right for some,” said the man, “I know that, but if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to consider. That’s what I think.”

“But Father, you know you enjoy it, once you’re there and Joyce has settled you in your corner with your own chair and your cup to yourself.”

“Ah,” said the man, nodding heavily, “but it’s not as easy as that, now, is it? Well, I mean, that stands to reason.”

“Ah,” said Charlie, shaking his head, feeling it roll heavily in the socket of his neck, “but if you’re going to consider at all, then what’s the point? I mean, what I think is, for a start-off, there’s no doubt about it.”

The woman hesitated, started to say something, but let her small bright eyes falter away. She was beginning to colour.

Charlie went on compulsively, his head turning like a clockwork man’s: “It’s what you’re used to, that’s what I say, well I mean. Well, and there’s another thing, when all is said and done, and after all, if you’re going to take one thing with another …”

“Stop it,” said the girl, in a sharp high voice.

“It’s a question of principle,” said Charlie, but his head had stopped rolling and his eyes had focussed.

“If you don’t stop I’m going to call the guard and have you put in another compartment,” said the girl. To the old people she said in a righteous scandalised voice: “Can’t you see he’s laughing at you? Can’t you see?” She lifted the magazine again.

The old people looked suspiciously at Charlie, dubiously at each other. The woman’s face was very pink and her eyes bright and hot.

“I think I am going to get forty winks,” said the man, with general hostility. He settled his feet, put his head back, and closed his eyes.

Charlie said: “Excuse me,” and scrambled his way to the corridor over the legs of the man, then the legs of the woman, muttering: “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry.”

He stood in the corridor, his back jolting slightly against the shifting wood of the compartment’s sides. His eyes were shut, his tears running. Words, no longer articulate, muttered and jumbled somewhere inside him, a stream of frightened protesting phrases.

Wood slid against wood close to his ear, and he heard the softness of clothed flesh on wood.

“If it’s that bloody little bint I’ll kill her,” said a voice, small and quiet, from his diaphragm.

He opened his murderous eyes on the woman. She looked concerned.

“I’m sorry,” he said, stiff and sullen, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”

“It’s all right,” she said, and laid her two red hands on his crossed quivering forearms. She took his two wrists, and laid his arms gently down by his sides. “Don’t take on,” she said, “it’s all right, it’s all right, son.”

The tense rejection of his flesh caused her to take a step back from him. But there she stood her ground and said: “Now look, son, there’s no point taking on like that, well, is there? I mean to say, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s no other way of looking at it.”

She waited, facing him, troubled but sure of herself.

After a while Charlie said: “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

She nodded and smiled, and went back into the compartment. After a moment, Charlie followed her.

I
have only known one potter in this country, Mary Tawnish, and she lives out of London in a village where her husband is a school-teacher. She seldom comes to town, and I seldom leave it, so we write.

The making of pots is not a thing I often think of, so when I dreamed about the old potter it was natural to think of Mary. But it was difficult to tell her; there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don’t, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. Mary Tawnish says, when others relate their dreams: “I’ve never had a dream in my life.” And adds, to soften or placate: “At least, I don’t remember. They say it’s a question of remembering?”

I would have guessed her to be a person who would dream a good deal, I don’t know why.

A tall woman, and rather large, she has bright brown clustering hair, and brown eyes that give the impression of light, though not from their surface: it is not a “bright” or “brilliant” glance. She looks at you, smiling or not, but always calm, and there is an impression of light, which seems caught in the structure of colour in the iris, so sometimes her eyes look yellow, set off by smooth brown eyebrows.

A large, slow-moving woman, with large white slow hands. And a silent one—she is a listener.

Her life has been a series of dramas: a childhood on the move with erratic parents, a bad first marriage, a child that died, lovers, but none lasting; then a second marriage to William Tawnish who teaches physics and biology. He is a
quick, biting, bitter little man with whom she has three half-grown children.

More than once I have told her story, without comment, in order to observe the silent judgement: Another misfit, another unhappy soul, only to see the judger confounded on meeting her, for there was never a woman less fitted by nature for discord or miseries. Or so it would seem. So it seems she feels herself, for she disapproves of other people’s collisions with themselves, just as if her own life had nothing to do with her.

The first dream about the potter was simple and short. Once upon a time … there was a village or a settlement, not in England, that was certain, for the scene was of a baked red-dust bareness. Low rectangular structures, of simple baked mud, also reddish-brown, were set evenly on the baked soil, yet because some were roofless and others in the process of crumbling, and others half-built, there was nothing finished or formed about this place. And for leagues and leagues, in all directions, the great plain, of reddish earth, and in the middle of the plain the settlement that looked as if it were hastily moulded by a great hand out of wet clay, allowed to dry, and left there. It seemed uninhabited, but in an empty space among the huts, all by himself, working away on a primitive potter’s wheel turned by foot, was an old man. He wore a garment of coarse sacking over yellowish and dusty limbs. One bare foot was set in the dust near me, the cracked toes spread and curled. He had a bit of yellow straw stuck in close grizzling hair.

When I woke from this dream I was rested and excited, in spite of the great dried-up plain and the empty settlement one precarious stage from the dust. In the end I sat down and wrote to Mary Tawnish, although I could hear her flat comment very clearly: Well, that’s interesting. Our letters are usually of the kind known as “keeping in touch.” First I enquired about her children, and about William, and then I told the dream: “For some reason I thought of you. I did know a man who made pots in Africa. The farmer he worked for discovered he had a talent for potmaking (it seemed his tribe were potters by tradition), because when they made bricks for the farm, this man, Elija, slipped little dishes and bowls into the kiln to bake with the bricks. The farmer used to pay him a couple of shillings a week extra, and sold the dishes to a dealer in the city. He made simple things, not like yours. He had no wheel, of course. He
didn’t use colour. His things were a darkish yellow, because of the kind of soil on that farm. A bit monotonous after a bit. And they broke easily. If you come up to London give me a ring….”