MARCH HOUSE Read online

  ‘. . . have to learn to control your baser instincts!’

  I looked at him, startled, but he was talking to Punter.

  When he had gone I went back to bed. It was a warm, sunny day; I could hear the birds singing in the trees. The light breeze smelt of flowers and hay. It was the kind of day when it is sinful to be indoors, let alone in bed. I lay without moving.

  Downstairs the french windows were open. There had been a fire at the school overnight and we had all been sent home. I propped my bike against the shed and walked round the side of the house and in through the open french windows. My mother was in the hall, speaking on the telephone. She was saying, ‘Oh Sid, I have thought about it. But what’s the use? You wouldn’t leave the farm and I couldn’t leave Ruth.’ I turned and went out again quickly.

  Once or twice when I was returning from the games field which was several miles from the school building I had seen her talking to the man who farmed the land beyond Mill House. There had been something unfamiliar about them which had made an impression on me. Probably she was on her way home and he had been inspecting the crop; but they hadn’t the look of people who have momentarily paused to greet each other. You would be surprised if next time you looked they weren’t there; they belonged in the way that people in a painting belong to the scene along with the trees and the corn. I had never seen my mother look as if she belonged with a person before.

  I got on my bike and rode away. I was full of fear for my father. Later in the month I was going away to guide camp; but I knew that now I must not go. I must be here because my mother was always happier when I was here and if I went away she might leave my father.

  I looked at the curtains moving gently in the breeze and remembered how I had ridden back to the house the second time. There was nothing spontaneous about that arrival, and there had not been much that was spontaneous after that. I had perceived that my role was to stop my parents from harming each other.

  But none of this was new to me, I had not blocked it; it didn’t take psychoanalysis or hypnosis to bring it to the surface of my mind. What was new was that child holding the doll against the pain in her chest. I had always taken things in my stride, turned an amused gaze on life. The pain was new and I was afraid of it. The child had grown older and the pain had grown more intense. She had lain here in this bed and listened for the noises, the slamming of a door, the smashing of china on the stone-flagged kitchen floor; she had gone to sleep saying, ‘Please God, don’t let them quarrel, please, please don’t let them quarrel tonight.’ I told myself that I did not know this child, that she was a stranger who had invaded my mind. I was a quiet, sensible, practical, well-adjusted person; I had been told this many times by many people; the word ‘serene’ had even been mentioned. But whatever my mind tried to tell me, my body gave the lie to it. My body ached with the strain of holding fear at bay, ached with the strain of being torn two ways by people I loved.

  When I was twelve I had had a lot of stomach trouble. My mother had taken me to the doctor who had diagnosed indigestion. Subsequently it was accepted that I could not eat rich food.

  ‘Oh Mummy, Mummy, I feel so bad inside!’

  ‘That must be the pork yesterday. Never mind, darling, we’ll have fish today.’

  I hadn’t eaten pork since. The smell of it was sufficient to make my stomach muscles tighten with fear. It was when I was twelve that I found out about my mother and the farmer.

  My mother and the farmer . . . How important had it been to my mother? I wondered. A little bit of excitement, something to break the monotony of her life? I would never know. Until this moment I had not wanted to know. Their love, if love it was, had been a thing of terror which threatened the structure of our lives. It had never occurred to me that we could have survived a crisis. As far as my father was concerned, I think I was right; people talk easily nowadays about infidelity and the breakdown of marriages, but he would not have been able to take it, it would have destroyed him. Or would it have done? Are our parents as fragile as we imagine? I only knew my parents in so far as their lives impinged on mine. Only this morning I had noted how little my father knew me. But was I any better? I had seldom thought of my parents as people who had a separate existence before I came into the world; nor had I imagined that anything of great moment happened to them in the times when we were not together. At least, not until the day that I heard my mother talking to the farmer.

  I could hear other voices now, the room was full of them.

  ‘Ruth is very self-sufficient . . .’

  ‘Ruth doesn’t want to go away to university; she loves her home too much . . .’

  ‘. . . so sweet-natured, most of the young are so aggressive . . .’

  ‘It’s a tough world, she’d never find her way in it . . .’

  ‘Ruth doesn’t want to have a place of her own; she loves her home too much . . .’

  ‘A rather unexpected sense of humour; there isn’t much she misses . . .’

  ‘Ruth is very self-sufficient; I sometimes wonder if she will ever get married . . .’

  ‘She loves her home too much.’

  I was cycling home through the country lanes. It was late and I was afraid they would be worried about me. My chest was tight and I couldn’t pedal fast enough. At the next bend I would see the house. I was saying to myself, ‘Oh God, let it be all right; let the lights be on; don’t let anything have happened to them.’

  Perhaps I was always a little anxious coming back to the house. I was prepared to admit that: a little anxious. But saying to myself, ‘Oh God, let it be all right; let the lights be on . . .’ No, I really did not remember that!

  I was always so self-contained. My mother said that I was self¬contained. When I returned from parties she would come and sit on the edge of my bed and ask questions, enjoying youthful pleasures vicariously and offering contradictory advice. ‘You must give, for God’s sake, give!’ ‘Keep them guessing, Ruthie! Always keep the buggers guessing!’ When I tried to evade her questions by pretending I was tired she would say, ‘You’ve no business to be tired at your age. What’s the matter with you? I never know whether you’ve enjoyed yourself or not: I hope they know.’

  I always had enjoyed the parties, hadn’t I? I didn’t come home like other girls, tearful because I had been overlooked; or rapturously excited and subsequently terribly let down. I was the one who always got the mixture right. And if I was a little anxious when I returned to the house, was there anything so unusual about that?

  The telephone rang and I was glad of its intervention. It was Iris to know whether I was all right. I said I seemed to be having ‘a reaction’ and that I wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week. She said that it was natural that I should have a reaction and to stay away and take things easily; I must not think about the office. Then she asked about several of the case files and whether I had got the appointment letters out for the following week. She was on the telephone for a long time. When I went back to bed Punter came up to tell me how desperate he was for the Hamiltons’ bitch and to plead with me to let him out. In the afternoon, Mrs. James, our daily woman, came to clean the house. She made me a cup of tea and hovered in the doorway, recounting the latest village gossip. I could tell that I would have to postpone being really ill for another day. I got up, washed, dressed, and took Punter for a walk in the opposite direction to the Hamiltons’ house.

  It was a warm day with rather a lot of cloud and I felt tired and heavy. I had to keep Punter on the lead until we got down to the river. When I got back to the house I was exhausted. I sat in the sitting-room and went to sleep.

  The next two days passed in much the same manner. Eleanor came to stay at the week-end. My father had told her that I was not well. She said that she would ‘take over for a few days’. She said this deliberately and observed my reaction carefully. Our ability to get on together was a factor which had to be taken into account when considering how far to commit herself in her relationship with my father.
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br />   The building of relationships is hard, however, and I was not prepared to help with this one. Eleanor wanted to see to what extent we could co-operate; but I left everything to her: she had, after all, said that she would ‘take over’. I sat in a deck-chair in the garden. My father brought my meals to me on a tray, watched thoughtfully by Eleanor from the kitchen window. At tea-time, he said to me, ‘Eleanor is quite surprising, isn’t she?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She’s much more domesticated than I imagined.’

  ‘I don’t find that surprising,’ I said indifferently. ‘She’s always had a place of her own to run.’

  He looked uneasy. I closed my eyes and let my head roll to one side. He was planning to marry Eleanor. I would be needed to cement the marriage, to prove to him by my acceptance that it was all right. Well, I wasn’t going to do it.

  In the evening, I took Punter down to the river and walked along the tow-path. There were quite a lot of people there, boys fishing, families packing up picnic baskets, couples on their way to The Anglers’ Rest. Someone called my name. I turned round and saw Iris walking towards me accompanied by her son. ‘You remember Julian?’ she said. He was tall and thin and gave an impression of lowering energy. He looked as though his mother was a continual source of exasperation to him.

  ‘We’re going to The Angler,’ Iris said. ‘Do come with us.’

  I hesitated, thinking that my father might worry if I did not come back soon. But I told myself that that was a problem with which Eleanor could cope, and I agreed to have a drink with them.

  The tow-path was narrow, so Julian and Iris walked in front. Iris kept a pace ahead of Julian and whenever he lengthened his stride she quickened her pace. Suddenly, he stopped short and I nearly bumped into him. Iris turned, surprised.

  ‘You’re doing it again,’ he said plaintively. ‘Why can’t you walk level with anyone?’

  ‘I’ll walk with Ruth if you are going to be so silly.’

  She walked beside me, but keeping a pace ahead. It seemed that, for her, the element of competition could never be absent. It was impossible not to react and I found myself walking more slowly.

  ‘Andrew and Julian have been arguing so much that I came out with Julian to separate them,’ she said. ‘Julian is a revolutionary; his family’s bourgeois, middle-class life style sickens him, doesn’t it, Julian? But Andrew is just finishing at university so he’s busy coming to terms with the capitalist society. He says he won’t look at a job that starts below eight thousand. It was eight thousand, wasn’t it, Julian?’

  Julian muttered something that sounded obscene.

  ‘I keep pointing out to Andrew that if he wants that kind of money he should have gone into computers. With an arts degree he’ll be lucky to get a job.’

  I stopped and threw a stone in the river for Punter. ‘What about teaching?’ I asked.

  ‘It will probably come to that, but I don’t like to be too discouraging at this stage.’

  ‘You really are disgusting,’ Julian said loudly.

  The tow-path was widening now and we could walk three abreast; Iris and Julian competed for the lead with me and Punter trailing. Iris said, ‘Disgusting perhaps, but a fact. People go into teaching if they can’t get anything more rewarding. I know all about that.’

  ‘We’re not going to have all that about your father putting you into the teacher training factory, are we?’

  ‘I had four brothers and they all went to university . . .’

  ‘And all your sons are going to university and you were just a teacher and had to study psychology by candlelight! Oh Mum, don’t get on to that now!’

  By this time we had reached the garden at The Anglers’ Rest. All the tables were occupied, so Iris and I sat on the river bank while Julian stalked off to fetch drinks. Iris watched him with an odd, baffled expression. Was she thinking of the cost to her of child-bearing? I thought of my mother and the farmer.

  ‘It’s a good job we met you,’ Iris said. ‘We are getting across each other. I shall be glad when he’s at university. But he’s not sixteen yet.’

  ‘Should he be getting our drinks?’

  ‘He looks older. They all do nowadays, don’t they?’ She looked enviously at the young people lying on the grass. I could not decide whether she was more vulnerable out of the office or whether I was projecting my own feelings on to her.

  The river bank was steep here which was a pity because I would like to have taken off my shoes and dangled my feet in the water. Instead, I looked down into the water while Iris talked.

  ‘It’s true that I wanted to be a missionary. I think the idea probably came to me when I was up the apple tree.’ Julian returned with drinks and she said, ‘I have been trying to explain it to Julian, but he gets cross.’ Although she made these remarks about Julian, she was by her manner excluding him from the conversation rather than drawing him into it.

  ‘I don’t know why you keep on about that apple tree.’ He spoke loudly and angrily, not, it seemed to me, because he was ill-natured but because he had devised no other way of attracting her attention.

  ‘That was when I decided I wanted to be a missionary,’ Iris said to me. ‘Only there wasn’t God.’

  ‘Of course there wasn’t God.’

  ‘Yes, I know this annoys you, Julian; but that is because you don’t try to follow what I am saying. You should be prepared to talk about religion without losing your temper.’ In spite of the anger and resentment between them, I knew that they loved each other because I felt their pain. ‘It is a limiting factor, there being no God. I had a God’s eye view of things up in that apple tree. There they were, my father and brothers, foreshortened and ineffective; I felt I could hold them in my hand; move them this way or that, change their lives. I felt very tender and responsible.’

  ‘You’re making it all up,’ Julian said. ‘You pelted them with apples.’

  ‘It was after that, when I was in bed, that this yearning to change people came over me. I thought how tremendously exciting it would be to bring salvation to a subject race. But there is no satisfactory substitute for God when it comes to salvation. If you are bringing health and education you have to work in well-supervised units and if it’s political salvation you’ve got to belong to a party; it is only the religious who can peddle salvation with a minimum of interference and no fear of being held accountable.’

  Julian, who was sitting cross-legged with his beer on the ground in front of him, sniggered in embarrassment and said, ‘Why couldn’t you have been an explorer if you wanted to go it alone so much?’

  ‘There were no undiscovered territories.’

  ‘But there might have been some subject races that you could have dominated. That’s what you want, Mum, domination! You’re power mad.’

  ‘When you come to think about it,’ Iris turned to me with an air of confidentiality, ‘all the great escape routes have been blocked for us. There are no colonies and . . .’

  ‘All talk!’ Julian interjected fiercely. ‘Talk, talk, talk, you don’t mean any of it . . .’

  ‘. . . and the developing nations don’t want us. We are thrown back on drugs and . . .’

  ‘Thrown back on yourself!’ he hooted triumphantly. ‘Yourself, yourself, always yourself.’

  ‘My round.’ It seemed to me that this dangerous shadow play in which they were indulging could not be resolved without injury. ‘Drink up!’ I made a movement to rise and Punter came across to me.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Iris turned on Julian, ‘All my life I have had to put other people and their needs first.’

  ‘You enjoy getting a hold on other people’s needs; but you won’t share yours with them. That’s why you wouldn’t come to stay in that commune with me.’

  ‘We’re not going to start that again, Julian. The people in that commune hadn’t worked out their aims or . . .’

  ‘They were doing the same sort of thing that you do in your clinic, only it was much more spontaneous
and . . .’

  ‘There’s rather more to the healing process than eating health foods and weaving your own clothes with a spell of transcendental meditation thrown in for good measure.’

  ‘You don’t give a fuck about healing! It’s just a game of forfeits, what goes on in your clinic.’

  ‘I don’t know about forfeits, but . . .’

  ‘When you played forfeits as a child the person who was caught out had to tell a secret, didn’t you tell me that, didn’t you? And that’s what happens at your clinic; you hand over advice in return for secrets.’

  ‘However long have you been storing that up, I wonder? You really are becoming very manipulative.’

  ‘Manipulative? Me!’ Julian began to get to his feet and in doing so made a movement towards me. Punter, who had become increasingly agitated as the argument intensified, misjudged his intentions and leapt at him. He was not a fierce dog, but he was heavy. Julian overbalanced and fell headlong in the river. Punter went in after him, whether to effect a rescue or to complete the assault was not clear.

  ‘Call him off!’ Iris said to me.

  ‘He won’t bite,’ I said. ‘Retrieving dogs never do.’

  ‘Julian doesn’t need retrieving. He can swim.’

  Nevertheless, she hitched up her skirt and edged down the bank. I felt I should do the same, although I could see that Punter and Julian were heading towards the bank on separate courses. Iris lost her balance; she slewed to one side and lurched against a fisherman whose line had already been fouled by Julian. ‘I’m so sorry!’ She righted herself, knocking his food hamper into the water in the process.

  One or two other fishermen who had been having a dull evening up to now abandoned their lines and waded out to give Julian assistance which he did not need. He was humiliated, furious with his mother, and incapable of behaving graciously. As soon as he reached firm ground, he shook off his rescuers and strode down the tow-path. Iris was engaged in conversation with the fisherman who was trying to salvage his hamper.