The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 18

  ‘I read some terrible things, in the newspapers, you know. That when they gassed all these people, these Jews and people, they handed them soap and a towel, as though they were going for a wash, you know. Is it true that sort of thing happened?’

  Con moistened his lips. ‘Yes. At Mauthausen prisoners were backed towards a metrical measure with . . .’ He was speaking too quickly and had to check himself. He repeated, slowly, like a stammerer perfecting a lesson, ‘A metrical measure. It had an automatic contraption which released a bullet in their necks as soon as the moving plank determining the height touched the tops of their heads. Do you see what I mean?’

  The woman subsided slowly into her seat.

  A big, square man wearing a tweed suit and a clerical collar, got up. ‘Would you say that these people can ever be rehabilitated?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Some of them. And some provision must be made for the really hopeless cases.’

  ‘Such as?’ He sounded like the chairman of a board meeting pinning down an incoherent member.

  ‘They need somewhere to stay.’ Con looked confused. ‘Some of them will always be hospital cases.’

  ‘Then you need hospitals,’ the clergyman pointed out.

  ‘We need anything you like to give.’

  The clergyman sat down.

  The rosy-cheeked woman had recovered now and was ready to take over. ‘You said you would tell us about your experiences,’ she reminded him. Her bright little eyes sought his with avid interest. ‘Were you treated better because you were an American?’

  ‘I did clerical work for the commandant.’ Con had resumed his dry, unemphatic style now; he had answered these questions before. ‘My food and quarters were not bad.’

  ‘They didn’t ill-treat you at all, then?’ she prompted persuasively.

  The bearded man drew his brows together into a continuous bristling line. The woman beside Kerren moaned, ‘Oh, Mother of God, I shouldn’t have come!’ and looked longingly at the exit door. Con said:

  ‘At first, I was given a month’s solitary confinement, but it was realized that I did not mind this and so the guards were instructed to reverse the treatment. After that they never left me alone, day or night. This I found difficult.’

  These simple words, impassively uttered, were imprinted on Kerren’s mind so that for many years they would come back to her, associated with the dusty smell of seats in unused halls, the feel of worn arm rests, the bright, malevolent eyes of a certain type of woman. Sometimes she would start up from a nightmare and lie awake beside her husband, wondering what it was that they had done to Con, in the day and in the night. Had the invasion of privacy been subtle, a prolonged wearing down of the spirit, or had it been brutal, a subjection to the extremes of physical abuse? Whatever it was, it was over now; looking at him she realized that he was not deliberately withholding emotion from these people, he had none to offer. Whatever had been done, had been done thoroughly; at some time in the day or in the night the spark that had once seemed to set Con aside for great things had been extinguished. He was an empty voyager now.

  The man in the clerical collar was on his feet again. ‘What made them do these things?’ He spoke vehemently as though he meant to get to the bottom of the matter and had the energy to put it right. ‘What kind of a person was the commandant?’

  ‘He is not important.’ Con sounded very weary now, his speech was becoming a little slurred. ‘Nothing can be done about him. It is the people who have survived . . .’

  An old man just behind Kerren got up. Hitherto he had been a smell rather than a presence; the sour, neglected smell of an old person who has no one to care for him. Now he spoke in a high, reedy voice:

  ‘I’ll have one of them to live with me.’

  There was a startled silence. Con turned anxiously to his companions, who exchanged nonplussed glances. The old man said:

  ‘That’s what I came here to say. That’s what I came for.’

  Con said slowly, ‘There is a rather complex . . .’ He stopped. His hands were trembling violently; he put them behind his back. ‘There is a rather complex machinery for dealing with these people . . .’

  The old man interrupted testily, ‘Sure, it will have to be worked out, I know that. I’ll see you afterwards.’

  Con sat down suddenly. The woman next to Kerren said, ‘Ah! That touched him.’ But to Kerren Con looked as though he had had a mental blackout; he was no longer equipped to deal with unexpected situations. The bearded man rose hurriedly and knocked a sheaf of notes on to the floor. In the absence of the notes, which he obviously regretted, his speech was brief. He was the treasurer of a local fund-raising committee and he would be glad of any contributions which members of the audience were pleased to make. The meeting broke up. The old man pushed his way down the aisle, moving with jerky agility towards the platform party who awaited him apprehensively. Kerren, standing to the side of the platform, heard him say:

  ‘I mean it, you know. I’ll have one of them. I had three sons in the war and they all came back. Not to Ireland, mind you; but you’ve got to be thankful.’

  Kerren looked at Con. What could she say to him? You got my wedding dress for me, do you remember? You had it sent from America. And you had an affair with a girl called Robin who had a son by you. But Con did not know about Terence, and there was no point in telling him now. As she turned away, the old man was saying impatiently to the bearded man, ‘Yes, yes, I know all that. But I nursed my wife for a long time when she was ill. Thin as a matchstick she was at the end.’

  Kerren followed the last members of the audience into the foyer. A woman in front was saying, ‘Poor auld fellow! Soft in the head.’

  There was a box on a table and people were fumbling in pockets and purses as they passed it. She waited until everyone had gone, then she took out her cheque book and wrote a cheque for one hundred and nine pounds which was all the money she had in the bank. She had not been aware that she was going to do this until she came to the box on the table, but she never afterwards regretted it or questioned the decision. Nor did she feel any elation or a sense of having made a noble gesture; she was only ashamed that she had nothing to give but money. The old man had the right answer, but it was so simple that it would probably be considered unacceptable; the world had become too sophisticated for his kind of goodness.

  She walked home to Holywood. A long way, but she wanted to compose herself before seeing her mother and father. She had long lost the habit of confiding in her parents, although she was fond of them and got along well enough with them when they were not together for too long. For some reason which seemed quite irrational the lecture had had the immediate effect of making her decide not to go to Donegal. She was suddenly aware that she and her parents were living on borrowed time. The sense of impending loss was overpowering. Her mother was nearly sixty and her father was sixty-three, he would be retiring from the bank in eighteen months’ time. Soon they would be old. She could not forgive herself for the way that she had squandered their years together; the opportunity to love and cherish them would be gone before she had done anything about it. She stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of asters, then she went to the theatre and booked seats for the Saturday evening performance of Dear Brutus which she had only recently condemned as intolerable whimsy. As she walked along the tree-lined road to Holywood, she planned to have her mother and father to stay with her in London. She could not wait to make the final arrangements.

  Her mother was pleased with the flowers, but doubtful about the theatre.

  ‘I don’t know that your father will want to come. He hates going out in the evening. But I’ll come, dear, and I expect we can find someone to take the other ticket if . . .’

  ‘Daddy must come!’ She was desperate to give them pleasure. ‘We haven’t been out together for years.’

  ‘He’ll rustle the programme and you’ll get so irritated with him. You always say he spends more time reading the programme than lookin
g at the stage!’

  ‘I don’t mind. I’m older now.’ She wanted so much to see him crouched to one side, trying to read the print in the darkness when he had had every chance of doing this before the auditorium lights went down; it seemed one of her most precious memories.

  ‘And he’ll like all the funny characters and fidget during the serious bits,’ her mother pointed out.

  ‘I don’t mind. The serious bits in this are pretty puerile anyway.’

  In the end her father came and enjoyed the evening immensely. He kept saying, ‘Why don’t they write plays like this any more?’ The actor who played Dearth belonged to the old school which believed in wringing every ounce of emotion out of each line. He made Kerren hot with embarrassment, but her father said it was the most tremendous performance he had seen and at the curtain he clapped much longer than anyone else.

  ‘It was a little overdone, don’t you think?’ her mother whispered to Kerren, anxious to show that one of her parents had some understanding of these things.

  ‘Daddy enjoyed it,’ Kerren said.

  ‘Oh, I enjoyed it,’ her mother assured her. ‘I just thought that perhaps it was a little overdone.’

  Her father studied the programme in the bus on the way home, stabbing his finger at it from time to time and exclaiming, ‘Now! Lob! He was good, wasn’t he?’ He turned round in his seat to speak knowingly to his wife who was behind him. ‘Margaret was no child, though, was she? How old do you think she was?’

  ‘In her late twenties, perhaps?’

  ‘Late thirties would be more like it!’

  He hunched his shoulders and chuckled to himself over this. Kerren looked out of the window and prayed fervently that they would both live to be a great age and that she would be a loving daughter to them.

  They did not respond too eagerly to her suggestion that they should come to London. Neither of them liked travel.

  ‘When your father has retired,’ her mother said.

  ‘But I want you to come now! In a few months, at least.’

  ‘In the spring,’ her mother said. ‘Perhaps we’ll come in the spring.’ Kerren had to be content with this.

  She had planned to break her homeward journey to spend the week-end with Robin. Now she would like to have cancelled this arrangement and stayed longer in Ireland. A letter from Robin which arrived the next day, however, was so enthusiastic that she had not the heart to disappoint her friend. The last few days of her stay in Ireland went by very quickly. She did a lot of odd jobs about the house, touching up the paintwork and washing curtains; her mother said that having a flat of her own had certainly made her more domesticated. One way and another, she kept herself occupied all day. At night she went to bed reluctantly; it was dark and still, and although she had appreciated this when she first arrived she had not liked it so much after she had seen Con. Oh Con, Con! ‘The bright day is done and we are for the dark . . .’ Night after night she dreamt. She dreamt of Beatie whose warmth and beauty had been so aimlessly obliterated. She dreamt that Peter was lying in a catacomb beneath an unknown Gothic city, he was imprisoned and she went to free him; but when the ropes that lashed him to the bed were cut, he only gazed at her sadly and made no attempt to move, she could not persuade him to come with her. One night, she dreamt that Alison had come to life. She did not dream of Con, but his horror was in the marrow of her bones.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Marjorie Neilson had a copy of The Times spread out on her desk. The pages fluttered in the breeze from the open window. It was a very warm afternoon; in a garden near by someone was mowing a lawn, not a common event in Bays-water. She listened to the sound of the mower, separating it from the nervous flow of Jay Hughes’s conversation. It evoked her childhood more than any other sound. She longed to get up and go into her own garden because as a child she had not been encouraged to obey such impulses. Besides, the borders needed weeding. It was sad to realize that she still had to find a reason to mask her impulses. She turned her attention to Jay.

  ‘1 went to the office today,’ Jay was saying. ‘It was pandemonium. Amelia Vize was trapped in that antiquated lift – bottom half on view on the third floor, top half on the fourth, like a magic lantern slide that’s got stuck. I thought it was one of the more rewarding moments in this wretched enterprise. Evan was cowering in his office pretending he wasn’t in and Adam was being soothing. No one appeared to be doing anything constructive. I think Amelia felt that, too.’

  ‘She’ll probably sue.’

  ‘I doubt it. It wouldn’t suit her public image to appear vindictive, let alone ridiculous.’

  ‘Then she’ll take her next book somewhere else.’

  ‘I doubt that, too. She wouldn’t have come to us if she wasn’t desperate.’

  ‘Jay! It’s not as bad as that. And she still has quite a following.’

  ‘But they’re dying off.’

  ‘You’re a pessimist.’

  Jay acknowledged the truth of this with an irritable shrug of the shoulders and changed tack. ‘You know who else we’ve got? Ernest Calderwelll. He’s had a row with Arthur Maitland. Evan is delighted. But if you saw the manuscript you’d know why Arthur turned it down. There isn’t that much paper for the whole of the autumn list! But Evan thinks they can persuade him to make cuts. One optimist of that order in the family is enough.’

  ‘He will probably agree to make cuts if only to spite Arthur.’

  ‘You could be right. Authors are a nasty breed. Since this started I’ve entertained some of the most malignant specimens I’ve ever encountered. And they’re such bores into the bargain.’

  ‘You must be a great help to Evan, Jay.’

  ‘I’m not a help to anyone.’ Jay was not in the least offended by this gentle irony. Marjorie could never remember a time when Jay had been offended by anything that was said to her, possibly because she was not a good listener. ‘No one takes any notice of anything I say. And now John has fallen in love with that little oddity of Adam’s.’

  ‘I can’t imagine John in love, but I suppose it was bound to happen. It could be much worse. Jay. She won’t be unkind.’

  ‘But she’s so odd!’ Jay protested. ‘I always hoped that John was going to be sensible. Though why I should expect that from our offspring, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘She isn’t really odd. In some ways, she’s very like you. Full of energy and attack.’

  ‘Dissipating her strength, in other words.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I admire people who demand a lot from life.’

  ‘They merely store up disappointments.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Marjorie Neilson looked out at the small paved courtyard with its narrow band of flowers which she was pleased to call a garden. Even the sunlight seemed harsh, sparking up from the flagstones. ‘I sometimes think that happiness lies in hope, even if it is never realized. Some people remain hopeful to the end of their lives, and on the whole I think they manage better than the realists.’ She had been brought up in a particularly bleak non-conformist manse where the idea of happiness had never been allowed to take root; she had been saved a lot of suffering but she was not sure that she was grateful for this.

  ‘Will Adam marry her, do you think?’ Jay demanded.

  ‘Of course. When they have come to terms with each other. She, I suspect, is probably the more inflexible at the moment though I doubt that she is aware of it.’

  ‘Really, Marjorie! You are the most amazing person! You sit there sounding as wise as the serpent of old Nile. How can you be so sure? She’s not even attractive.’

  ‘She doesn’t lack any essential ingredient. Jay. Don’t make any mistake about that.’

  ‘She’s immature.’

  ‘Time will cure that soon enough.’

  ‘But Adam needs a sophisticated woman . . .’

  ‘Adam needs a woman to whom he can be faithful over the years.’

  ‘Faithful!’ Jay was embarrassed. ‘ My dear Marjorie, men are by nature polygamous. You
r erstwhile husband should have taught you that.’

  ‘Nevertheless, this particular man needs something constant and unchanging at the centre of his life.’

  ‘And you think that insignificant wisp of a girl . . .’

  ‘Who is no more insignificant than you are, though I grant you she is every bit as wispy . . .’

  ‘Poor John!’ Jay sagged in her chair.

  ‘Why poor John? According to you he’s had a lucky escape.’

  ‘I’d like him to have her. He’d get over it more quickly.’

  ‘Is he taking it hard?’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t talk to me about it. John has always kept his troubles to himself. Probably because his main trouble up to now has been his parents.’

  ‘Then how do you know that he’s in love with her?’

  ‘Because he has grown up. Quite suddenly.’ Tears came into her eyes and she made no attempt to conceal them: emotion had been allowed to run rampant in her childhood. ‘I’ve lost him. He’ll never be my little boy again. I wish to God I’d been more motherly while I had the chance.’

  ‘Would you like tea?’ Marjorie reluctantly renounced the prospect of weeding the borders.

  ‘I suppose so. It’s the answer to all misfortune, isn’t it?’

  When she eventually departed it was after five o’clock. Kerren would be arriving soon after six. Marjorie Neilson went to the mantelpiece where two postcards were propped against the wall; one was a picture of a ruined castle, the other a ruined abbey. Marjorie took the cards down and studied them, smiling at the carefully worded descriptions of Kerren’s more cultural pursuits. No doubt livelier communications had been sent to people of whom Kerren was less in awe. A pity they could not establish a more easy relationship. But this was a difficulty with which Marjorie had become familiar.