FAMILY CIRCLE Read online

  Mary Hocking

  FAMILY

  CIRCLE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  To Dorrie

  Chapter One

  ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatman . . .’

  Margaret Routh claimed to have seen the idol. She assured the police of this when they found her lying in the railway carriage. The police were not interested, being solid men whose horizons were bounded by the tenements of Bethnal Green. She told the same story to the doctors at Charing Cross Hospital who were more interested. She had spent many years in Khatmandu, working in a school, and then she had become rather ill and could not remember much of what happened to her subsequently; she could not remember, for example, who she was and there was nothing on her person to give a clue to identity. It was an interesting story and attracted attention in the newspapers; and from the newspapers her frantic family had traced her whereabouts and she was taken to her home in Sussex.

  Margaret’s father and mother were upset. It was not the story about the one-eyed yellow idol that disturbed them so much as the fact that she had never been to Khatmandu. She had never, in fact, been anywhere east of Suez. ‘On the occasion of her illness,’ her mother wrote, ‘she was returning from a short visit to Holland where she had been staying with Timothy, of all people! And he was never one to trigger off flights of fantasy, as you know.’ Admittedly, Margaret had only recently come down from Oxford where she had gained a second in History. ‘We had all expected a first, of course, but Margaret herself didn’t seem unduly disappointed; she just said that it would save her from becoming a don. I really don’t think that a second can have unhinged her mind.’ Mrs. Routh went on to say that Margaret’s condition still caused the family anxiety, and she concluded her letter by asking me to stay with them.

  I had to go, of course. It meant cancelling a trip to Florence, a present from my father because I had achieved that most unexpected of miracles, a second in History. But I had to go. When, at the age of eleven, I had lost my beloved mother, the Rouths had been wonderfully kind to me, having me to stay at half-term and in the school holidays. My dear father looked after me devotedly, refusing to send me to boarding school (a fate which I dreaded) and, as I now realize, making great sacrifices in his own personal life in order to accommodate me. But he had no gift for amusing a child and he needed time on his own for study, which was his antidote for grief. I was desolate with no one to whom I could offer my small gifts of love. Those stays with the Rouths were undoubtedly my salvation; I acknowledged my debt to them without reservation and I imagined that this was all that I would ever be called upon to do. It never occurred to me that I would be asked to repay the debt.

  I was still surprised about it as I sat in Lewes High Street, not sorry to be held up in a traffic jam. I looked at the lights on the corner near the County Hall; the green light showed, but cars were moving so slowly that I estimated the red would be on when I reached the corner. I wound down the window and looked across to where, at the end of a street which was scarcely more than a crevice between the buildings flanking the high street, I had a view of the Downs, hazy in the late autumn sunlight. This was one of the beauties of Lewes, that whichever way you looked you could see the Downs. ‘They give a lift to the heart,’ I had once said in a moment of poetic inspiration. They did not, on this occasion, do anything for the queasy feeling in my stomach. We inched forward, but as I had predicted, the light turned red before I reached the corner. I wasn’t too pleased about it, this stopping and starting was beginning to get on my nerves. The sooner the journey was over, the better; I wasn’t going to be any more prepared for what lay ahead because I had taken fifteen minutes to get through Lewes.

  The green light came on again. I had one last view of the Downs, straight ahead this time, rising steep above the Cliffe end of the town, the tawny folds like the flanks of a gigantic animal, the spine darkened by a mane of trees. Then the one-way system led me away to the left through the meaner parts of the town. It was somewhere down here, I recalled, that Mr. Routh’s chapel had been situated. The family had moved to Lewes fifteen years ago when he was appointed as minister; they had lived in our road in Hendon and when they left I had cried a little as I waved good-bye to them because I felt that this was expected of me. Margaret had kept in touch with me faithfully, but I had had to be prodded to reply to her letters: at that time, I had had no great need of Margaret and her family. I looked in vain for the Horn Street Methodist Chapel; the new bridge across the Ouse had altered the lay-out of this part of the town beyond recognition. In any case, Mr. Routh had come a long way since he decided to resign his ministry and try to reach a wider audience through the medium of books and radio. Now that his name was a household word, one tended to forget what a brave decision that had been for a man with no capital behind him and three children to maintain and educate.

  At the station I had to stop to ask someone the way. Then I was going down Southover High Street, passing the lovely old Georgian houses in one of which it had been my childhood ambition to live, possibly with Timothy. Today, I gave the houses hardly a glance. Out in the wide green valley beyond, I asked of the placid landscape, ‘But why me?’ It wasn’t as if I had ever achieved any notable success among them. They were so magnificently self-sufficient. It was this that I remembered most about them as a family, their gay, high-spirited dominion over life; those meal-time conversations, not perhaps of any great intellectual content, had been remarkable for the firmness of pronouncement, the absolute, unshakeable assurance, the kind of calm authority that seemed to come direct from God with whom they were all well acquainted. Is that unkind? I don’t mean to be unkind, I admire and respect them more than any other people, except my father. I am just in rather a panic and at such times one tends to strike out. It would be nice to think that Mrs. Routh felt that Margaret needed a companion, but there was more to it than that; her letter had not stated it explicitly, but I knew that something was expected of me. Or, if not expected, then hoped for. That was it: incredibly, the Rouths were importing hope. I could not believe that I had been their first choice.

  There was impatient hooting from a car behind me. I had been doing a reluctant twenty; even so, it was a twisting road and the hooting was overbearing. I am not an aggressive driver, but I do not like being bullied: I did not accelerate. Ahead there was the signpost that pointed to Stanford and warned the unwary traveller that there was no through road. I put out my indicator, just to show the owner of the angry red Triumph that his ordeal was nearly over. But he turned with me, slewing round wide so that he managed to pass me on the bend before the road narrowed again. Too bad if a car had been coming up from the village! As he passed he looked at me and I had a brief glimpse of a furious, unfamiliar face.

  It was five years since I had been to Stanford, yet I had imagined that it would have remained unchanged, as though all life had been suspended pending my coming again. The presence of this stranger disturbed me. I hoped that there had been no other undesirable changes. Stanford was a small village on the way to nowhere; once there had been a through road which crossed a bridge over the Ouse and linked with the Eastbourne road on the other side of the valley, but that had been a long time ago, longer than I can remember. Now there was nothing to draw the visitor down this narrow lane save Stanford itself. And Stanford was not a particularly beguiling place, being little more than a straggle of buildings on either side of the main street. It lacked a di
stinguishing feature; there were no perfectly preserved cottages clustered round a village green, no manor house with stately cedar tree, not even a pond with ducks to amuse the children. As for the architecture, it was pleasant in patches, but not homogeneous; there were the usual old Sussex stone cottages bordered by bright flowers, but these were interspersed with more recent red brick buildings, raw and utilitarian. There were several large houses, some of which were very old and had the weathered, comfortable look of places in which one would soon find oneself at ease. But these, too, lacked some essential quality which appeals to the tourist—style, or perhaps just paint and plaster? The houseowners belonged, if not to the same income bracket, then to that cross-section of the community which has to be careful about money.

  Stanford was a real village. Many of its inhabitants worked on the land and the countryside was not there as a backcloth, it came up to your door and a good deal of it was carried across the threshold. In the summer it smelt of hay and dust and a particularly offensive fertilizer, and in winter it smelt of mud and stagnant water. So, as I drove down the lane, I was not praying that the village would have been spared insensitive development, but that it would not have been prettied up and turned into a place fit for stockbrokers to live in.

  All was well I saw as soon as the first cottage came into view and the main street opened out before me, pleasant, peaceful and wholly undistinguished. I was immensely relieved, because I had been telling myself that if Stanford had not changed, then I would find that the people, and in particular the Rouths, had not changed in any essential way. The flaw in this reasoning was soon exposed. The red Triumph was parked outside a rather uncared-for house which boasted a doctor’s plate. It was a square house, rather brusque, like its new owner. I recalled that Dr. Stonor had lived there; he had had two boys and four girls and the doors and windows had always seemed to spill children. The house, like most houses in the village, had no front garden and opened straight on to the road. There was a light in one of the front rooms; as I idled by, I could see the driver standing by a table, reading. He was alone. Something about the look of the room, dark and cluttered with files and books, suggested to me that he was always alone. There had been a change here.

  The Rouths lived in a long, low Tudor house at the far end of the village. It had once been called Bailey’s Farm, but for over a hundred years had been known simply as Baileys. Beyond the house the road petered into a muddy lane which led to the church and a large house which had once been the schoolhouse. There were fields on either side of the lane. I opened the car door and smelt woodsmoke, dank leaves, water lying in the rutted lane, and for a moment I forgot why I was here and experienced again the tremendous joy of being in the country. The front door opened before I had had time to recover myself. It was Constance, eldest of the three children, now twenty-six, rather plump and untidy, dark hair straggling from a carelessly hoisted bun, face shining with easy mischief. Constance was attractive in the more ample style of another period, an early Renoir, perhaps? She said: ‘A Riley Elf! Oh, good for you. I was sure it would be an Austin 1100. You’ll have to park up the lane eventually, outside the church. Do you mind? Otherwise I shan’t be able to get to the garage.’

  I did not ask why Constance had been so sure that I would be driving an Austin 1100, that anonymously respectable car. She had my case in her hand and was shouting into the hall, ‘Our dear Pug is here! And she’s got a Riley Elf.’ The newly acquired maturity that I had so hoped would impress was peeled away with the careless flick with which a practised nurse tears off an adhesive bandage.

  At the end of the corridor to the left of the hall, a door was open and firelight leapt on a wall; I could smell the smouldering log. Tears came to my eyes, for me, for my mother, not for Margaret. A door shut somewhere above and Mrs. Routh came down the stairs.

  ‘Flora! It is good to see you again.’ She kissed me and then examined me briefly. ‘You haven’t changed. Ah well …’ She looked away, with that quick, impatient turn of the head which I remembered so well on occasions when she had sought to reconcile herself to one of the children’s more tedious misdemeanours. My unchangingness cast a momentary shadow.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ The old desire to apologize for myself overcame me. ‘But I got snarled up in Lewes High Street …’

  ‘But you don’t need to go through Lewes, you idiotic Pug!’

  Constance laughed.‘You take the Newhaven road at the lights.’

  Mrs. Routh said, ‘Well, she’s here now, so I don’t think it matters which road she took at the lights, Constance. And perhaps she doesn’t like being called Pug any more.’

  Constance said, ‘I don’t think I could call you Flora.’

  ‘Then it had better be Pug.’

  ‘It doesn’t lacerate your soul or anything like that?’

  ‘That never used to make any difference.’

  Constance clapped her hands. ‘You haven’t changed! You’ve still got that tart way of answering back.’ She picked up the case. We went up the narrow stairs, the third and sixth treads still creaked; this had been one of the delightful perils of our midnight feasts. There was a wide landing with three doors off it; we turned to the right and involuntarily I stooped before she said, ‘Mind your head’, as we went through an archway into a long corridor. ‘You’ve got your old room.’ The corridor was dark and there was a smell of great age accentuated by bad ventilation. At the end of the corridor, Constance opened a door and said, ‘Mind the step’. There were two steps, in fact. She went across to the window, the floor complaining beneath her weight, and put my case down on an ottoman covered in faded pink-and-white striped cotton. ‘Come down and have tea first of all and then you can unpack.’

  It was dusk and Constance twitched the curtains across the window, depriving me of the chance to become sentimental about the view. I contented myself with being sentimental about the room. It was small and low-ceilinged, sparsely furnished with a narrow bed covered with a candle-wick bedspread which had once been white but was now yellowing, a wicker chair with its bottom falling out, a small white-painted chest of drawers, a bedside table also painted white on which there was a lamp with a handmade rush shade. There was pale pink linoleum on the floor and a worn rug by the side of the bed. A reproduction of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ partially covered a patch of damp on the wall above the bed. While I had been examining the room, Constance had been examining me. She said: ‘You’ve had your hair cut. I don’t know why women fancy themselves shorn.’

  ‘My hair’s so springy …’

  ‘But you need good features to wear it like that.’

  I put a dab of powder on my most noticeable feature and said the thing which was uppermost in my mind:

  ‘Margaret … is she allowed to get up?’

  ‘But of course. She’s down in the sitting-room, waiting for you.’

  But not too eagerly. She had not put her nose round the door while we were in the hall; I had assumed that the room was empty.

  ‘But how is she?’

  ‘Come and see.’

  ‘But I must know …’ I protested in rising panic.

  ‘Oh, she isn’t deranged or anything!’ Constance trilled with merriment. ‘Just a trifle reticent.’ Constance was brimful of affection, but she was not one to pave the way so that others might have a smooth passage. She waited for me outside the lavatory, stamping about and calling out, ‘Hurry up! You constipated Pug! The toast will be cold.’ She sounded as though nothing more important than cold toast was at stake.

  In spite of the fact that she was my own age, I had always had a kind of reverence for Margaret; she had seemed so clearly defined, so complete, like a character in a book whose place in the scheme of things is unassailable. She was not so vivacious as Constance, nor so endearing as Timothy; she was quiet, and this, in youth, seems to denote strength of character. She reflected deeply before she spoke and this gave to her words the semblance of wisdom. And while Constance was
light-hearted and provoking, and Timothy played the fool engagingly, Margaret presented a straight face to life and laughed only when she was really amused which was not often. Yet her seriousness became her, she wore it with patience and kindness, and was not gauche with it as was I who was always desperately striving for an understanding which eluded me. The thought of Margaret broken and ill frightened me; I was much too concerned with my own predicament to feel pity for her. As I followed Constance down the stairs, I wished very much that I had gone to Florence.

  ‘You know what I remembered while I was upstairs?’ Constance said to her mother as we entered the sitting-room. ‘We haven’t ordered those bulbs!’

  ‘My dear! Neither have we!’ As a family, they reacted immediately to one another’s small dramas. ‘Is it too late?’

  I looked beyond Mrs. Routh, standing at the tea trolley, to where Margaret was sitting by the fire. She had a rug round her knees although it seemed very warm in the room, and her hair looked dull and greasy. Apart from these rather trivial signs of illness, she seemed much the same. I edged round the tea trolley and said, ‘Hullo, Margaret.’

  She smiled, her slow, shy smile; her eyes met mine uneasily. It was clear that she did not want me to make any further advances. I had thought that perhaps I ought to kiss her and was relieved that this was neither expected nor desired.

  Mrs. Routh said, ‘You’ll want tea after that journey. No sugar, is that right? Pug has a Riley Elf, Margaret.’

  Constance said, ‘One hundred daffodils, was that what we decided?’

  ‘Oh, more than one hundred, surely, darling? They won’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Have you been driving long?’ Margaret asked me.

  ‘About two years.’

  ‘You used to say you’d never drive a car.’ She spoke hesitantly and flushed, as though pleased at this feat of memory.

  ‘But I enjoy it now!’ I responded warmly. ‘It gives you such freedom! You can go anywhere, it’s like carrying your house on your back.’