Towards Another Summer (10 page)

 

 

 

 

A child crying.—Mummy, Mummy. Sound of sleepy voices from the parents’ room, the slow dream-movement of Anne along the passage, Philip stating formally as if thus he could win the inevitable argument with waking,—It’s five o’clock in the morning.

 

Silence once more. Sarah had gone into the big bed between Mummy and Daddy where all three, neither film stars nor corpses, asked for and received the second helping of instant
sleep that is a treasured mixture to tired fathers and mothers and children. From a gift of empathy accumulated as the prize and compensation for loneliness, for being denied human essence, forced to live as a migratory bird, Grace was able to help herself to the family mixture of peace after weariness, and she slept, waking into daylight to the hearty recitative of the Village Blacksmith, that is, of Noel, who was using his own language and combination of tunes to sing - one supposed - the praises of waking, thinking of food, light, play, battle, love.

But . . .
sugar-puffs
. Are not these the common denominator of waking?

Saturday breakfast. Mistaking the time, too early as usual, Grace came downstairs and found Anne feeding the children their sugar-puffs. Strangely unable to apologise for her intrusion, feeling powerless and spellbound and childlike, she too sat at the table, waiting, her mouth open, like a small bird, for her share of sugar-puffs; and naturally, as if Grace were indeed a child, Anne set about preparing the place in front of her, allotting Grace her spoon, knife, plate, cup and saucer, while Grace looked around her at the morning view that is always so different, so inescapable, shadowless compared with the sleepy stored memory of the night of arrival.

Grace gave a shudder. The day ahead seemed so long, so everlastingly, intolerably provided with light; there was nowhere to hide; even the grey northern light penetrating the kitchen was unmerciful in the way it marked the outline of every object bringing to the furniture and clothes a winter share of poverty and to the face of Anne and the children an incongruous mark of age and defeat. The walls and windows and roofs of houses in the north, Grace observed, were no defence against intruders; the severe winter was overpowering furniture and people as well as trees and hedges and grass. She understood suddenly what might have been the reason for her parents’ alarm when as children they used to play in the paddocks and when they came home their mother or father would greet them almost with fear,

—I hope you’re not bringing in anything from outside! She understood, suddenly, the terror of ‘outside’, the battles waged against it, the comfort and deep bliss felt by those who slept the first night in the first cave; yet even then they had to contend with creatures and ‘things’ from outside; no wonder a
man might become insane with the fear that his last harbour, his private thoughts and dreams, could offer him no shelter.

 

—Sarah, run upstairs and tell Daddy it’s a quarter to ten; tell him that Grace is waiting to have breakfast with him.

—Please don’t wake anybody just for me.

Grace said ‘anybody’ instead of Philip, for she was finding difficulty in addressing Philip and Anne by their Christian names, and until now she had solved the problem by referring to them as ‘you’, ‘he’ and ‘she’.

—No you won’t be disturbing him. Philip’s so fond of sleeping, but he’ll be angry if no one wakes him. Go on Sarah, wake Daddy.

Obediently Sarah ran upstairs and fifteen minutes later a sleepy Philip emerged, a lapsed Saturday look on his face.

—Hello. Did you sleep well?

—Yes thank you, Grace said primly.

He looked at her as if he expected her to provide details of her night’s sleep. Hastily she responded,

—The bed’s very comfortable.

—A polite guest, he said, smiling, waiting.

Under the persuasion of his glance she almost began,—Oh yes I slept very well thank you, I had some strange dreams, I dreamed-

—The bed was comfortable then?

—Yes thank you.

—When you come again, and Dad’s here, you’ll find the other room is more Spartan.

—Oh! Anne exclaimed suddenly, looking dismayed.—Oh! I hope you don’t mind having seed potatoes in your room.

(Does parenthood bring an increased fear of things ‘coming in from outside’, Grace wondered.)

—I showed her the potatoes, Philip said.

—I don’t mind them at all, Grace assured them - she was not so consistently inane that she added,—I
like
having seed potatoes in my room when I visit for the weekend, although she was surprised that she did not make an equally foolish remark.

Sarah and Noel had finished their breakfast. The adult gold-rush was in progress with Philip, Anne, Grace busily sifting and spooning sugar-puffs while between mouthfuls Philip was explaining that the seed potatoes were a new variety which he hoped to grow successfully.

—What is their particular characteristic? Grace asked, glowing with her manifestation of deep intelligence, remembering vaguely that when she bought potatoes she asked for ‘King Edwards please’, but there were other varieties, Arran Chief . . . they bred potatoes almost as they bred dogs for their particular qualities . . . didn’t they? She had never bothered to find why some were called King Edward; an interesting trick of fame to have given one’s name to a potato.

—I believe they taste like kumaras.

—Oh, Grace said.

Back to New Zealand. She remembered kumaras, creamy-golden and sweet, and the flax basket that old Jimmy had given their father, a special kumara basket; and their mother’s talk of kumaras, her irritating allusions to them as if they belonged to a world which only their mother knew and which her children could not share: the world of the Maoris, and the Maori pa, and the old whalers and sealers in the Straits. Grace knew that although her mother had been a generous woman who would never refuse to share her possessions, she placed such a special value upon her experiences that the more she talked of them and shared them, the more she seemed to hoard them within herself, like miser’s treasure, to turn them over and over, studying them, delighting in them, with her dreams curled selfishly around them.

—You’ve tasted kumaras?

—Oh yes, yes.

So he was going to plant a part of New Zealand in his Winchley garden. More homeland images rose in Grace’s mind; deftly she seized and submerged them. Taking a page of a morning newspaper from a chair beside her she pretended to read it but was unable to absorb the words or the meaning. Sarah with a small naked doll wrapped in a piece of towelling
came up to her to explain that her doll was baby Jesus. Anne lifted Noel from his pot and began to dress him like a spaceman for his morning sleep in the pram on the lawn.

Except for the murmuring of children there was silence. Grace thought, Perhaps I ought to comment on some news. Unfortunately Grace was one of those people who can become a bore and an irritation to others and an anguish to themselves because their lives are dominated by ‘ought’. ‘What ought I to do? Do you think I ought to-’ . . . They refuse to let a situation rest; they must tamper with it, adjust it, change it, impose upon it their immediate concern of ‘ought’.

—I’m afraid I’m not taking in a word of this newspaper, she said, meaning her remark as an apology.

—Sarah! Anne spoke sharply.—Come away. Don’t bother Grace, she wants to read the newspaper.

When Grace had said, ‘I’m taking nothing in’, Philip had looked at her with a small stirred expression of anxiety; she could see it in his eyes, as if some thought or feeling that lay asleep there had moved and flecks of an anxiety had risen around it, like dust.

Grace wished she had kept silent.

—I find it hard to concentrate too, Anne said enthusiastically.

—Newspapers are about all I can manage in the weekend, and then it’s a struggle, Philip said in a bolstering manner.

It was almost as if, in making her remark, she had collapsed, and Philip and Anne had rushed to help her, concerned for her, anxious to explain that they too were in the habit of collapsing.

I must be careful, Grace thought, not to make another such remark.

—Terrible things are happening in South Africa, she said cheerfully, pointing to a headline.

—What things? Philip asked.

Philip and Anne lay, eyes alert, head between paws, waiting to pounce upon her words. Panicstricken, her ideas and the words which would have supported them scuttled to
the sheltering foliage of incoherence.

—Oh, the usual, she said foolishly, pointing to a newspaper paragraph.

Suddenly baby Jesus was lying on her lap. She took the doll, propping its head against the leg of the table; it had no eyes; they had been scooped out and their sockets chipped like tiny chalk quarries; its belly was plump, its belly-button (the proud and only immodesty admitted by doll-manufacturers who therefore make it a field-day of anatomy) was rimmed and deep like a tiny inflatable swimming-pool; it was unsexed, but Sarah assured Grace that it was baby Jesus, a girl.

Self-consciously Grace kept it propped against the table; resisting the frightening temptation to hold it in her arms, against her breast. As children do, with their sensitive antennae probing an adult’s emotions, Sarah realised Grace’s desire to possess her baby Jesus. She reached forward suddenly and claimed it, putting her arms protectively around it, folding the piece of towelling against its head.

She looked directly but kindly at Grace.

—It’s my baby Jesus, she said, gently challenging.

Grace looked around her with a furtive air.—I hope no one’s seen this, she thought. I hope no one’s reading my mind. I wish I were not so exposed; I wish it were time to sleep; it is not the night but the day that ‘has a thousand eyes’. I wish-

—Do you like rice?

Already Anne was considering the preparation of lunch.

—Oh yes, Grace said firmly. Anne might just as well have asked her if she liked poetry or the theatre or the country. Yes was Grace’s favourite word; it saved so much explaining; it was more often when you said No that people demanded explanations, waited for you to speak, argued with you to prove that your
No
should have been
Yes
.

—Dad’s funny, Anne said. She paused and looked at Philip, carefully giving him the responsibility of discussing her father’s whims.

—Yes. Philip laughed.—Rice is a pudding, Dad says. He won’t eat it with anything as a first course; simply refuses it. But
he’ll eat the same rice the next day if it’s called pudding.

—Well he’s never been used to it as a first course, Anne said, defending her father now that he was being criticised.—He’s always thought of rice as a pudding.

She laughed gently, not complaining, merely stating in a surprised way—I have to cook special meals for Dad. He’s so finicky. What is it, Grace?

—Nothing, oh nothing.

Are they talking of Anne’s father? Grace said to herself. Or is it of Jimmy, my brother, and the day two years ago when he said to me,

—I can’t eat egg, I’ve never been able to eat egg, and I realised that for the thirty years or more that I had known him I had been unaware that he didn’t ‘eat egg’; it was not as simple a revelation as it seemed; for thirty years he must have had a secret pact with my mother, an arrangement for the cooking of special meals; why hadn’t he talked about it? People enjoy talking of their dislikes in food. Once, I achieved prestige and fame within the family by ‘hating pineapple’; everyone flocked for my share; until the day I decided to taste it and found I liked it and had to wage continual war against the tradition, so firmly established, that I disliked pineapple!

I wondered if there were many more important things about my brother which I did not know. I remember the dismay I felt when he said it.—I don’t eat egg . . . The rebellion, jealousy; the emptiness, as if something had escaped me through my own carelessness.

—I’m sorry I missed seeing your father.

—You’ll have to come again to discuss liver fluke and pulpy kidney, Philip said, smiling at Grace. She felt embarrassed, remembering the vivid note about sheep diseases which she had written to Philip in response to his invitation. Ah, if only she lived for ever in a world of correspondence, writing (she thought) daring, imaginative, witty letters that revealed nothing of her social stupidity!

—Yes, she said inadequately.—Yes, I must come again. I like it here.

Oh God.

She looked vaguely around the kitchen.

—A cigarette?

—No thank you, I don’t usually smoke. Well, I will have one, thank you. I don’t smoke except in company.

When she sensed that the moments, once forming a perimeter of no escape, were gradually breaking into characteristic Saturday mid-morning hyphens, she slipped out between a gap in two moments, murmured excuses, and escaped to her room. She had made her bed. She had unpacked what she needed from her bag. She had brought far too much, having deceived herself by dreams of—Have a sherry, This is my wife, Anne. Anne, this is Grace Cleave.

I saw too many films when I was a child, Grace thought. She knew that she could never escape from the influence of Saturday ‘pictures’ when she and her three sisters and brother straggled along to their ‘shouted’ treat at the Majestic or Opera House. All the wives in the ‘pictures’ drank sherry. Mae West drank it too. In Grace’s family the invitation—Have a sherry, was an invitation to take part in moral depravity.

Grace smiled to herself; her imaginative naiveté was incredible. All journalists are sophisticated, blasé, their wives cuckold them and drink sherry; their houses are American dreams; they climb - no, sink - into fast red or white cars and whizz round the country roads splashing the natives with mud, tooting their horns in the narrow lanes . . .