MARCH HOUSE Read online

  ‘What made you take up nursing, Di?’

  ‘All those doctors on telly. Look where it got me.’

  ‘Isn’t Alec with you?’

  ‘He left me again last night.’ Tears came into her eyes; she was easily hurt and prone to put herself in a position where she was likely to be hurt. ‘Why do things go sour so soon?’ She shifted her position on the window seat slightly. Her short, corn-coloured hair was rumpled as though she had just tumbled out of bed and the flat, generous planes of her face were untouched by make-up, although I could smell body oil. ‘You find a fellow who’s grateful to you just for breathing and suddenly it’s all over and he treats you like shit.’

  ‘You’ll find another bloke, Di.’

  ‘It’s not easy, with two kids.’

  The door opened and Douglas Gulliver came in. It was his practice to have coffee in my room, sitting on the window seat, and he looked disconcerted to find Di there. She gazed at him from beneath drooping eyelids. I examined him more directly. He had a cap of sleek black hair and a round, pale face like a rather sad pudding; horn-rimmed spectacles protected puzzled brown eyes. I had always felt sorry for Douglas because I had imagined that he was too gentle to look after his own interests. This was how he affected most women, Di included. Now that he had left his wife I was revising my opinion of him; I wasn’t sure how Di felt.

  ‘Sometimes I get very tired of rural life,’ he said disconsolately stirring his coffee. ‘I went into the village shop for cigarettes and half the cast of the Archers was there, chewing the cud in their bovine way. You know what was exercising their minds? They were listening to old Appleton reciting a long list of items he didn’t stock and how much each would cost if he had stocked it. Every so often he had to look up a catalogue to refresh his memory, and they all stood ruminating on this great issue while I was waiting for my cigarettes.’

  Di said, ‘I’ve got a packet you can have.’ Involvement was important to her, she saw no other point in conversation. ‘When did you take up smoking?’

  ‘I haven’t. I said I’d get some for Eddie.’ He frowned as though the light hurt his eyes. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this place isn’t just a mistake; one of those places which exists without anyone knowing anything about it because someone made a mistake on a map. County A thinks the boundary stops to the south while County B thinks it stops to the north; we are in a narrow strip which has been forgotten for centuries. It probably goes back to the time of the ancient kingdoms. After all, this is March House; and doesn’t March mean “a boundary or debatable strip between countries”?’ He was only half-joking; he never seemed very sure of the ability of the world to reassemble itself each day.

  Di said, ‘Christ! It’s not the clients who need the new psychiatrist!’

  ‘New psychiatrist?’ He looked at her directly for the first time. She smiled, glad to give pleasure, and told him that Iris had said we had a new psychiatrist as though this was her own personal gift to him.

  ‘When is he starting?’ Douglas seemed, if anything, rather taken aback. Perhaps he had hoped for more time to sort out his affairs.

  ‘We’re not quite sure,’ I said. ‘There’s no date on the letter.’ I handed the letter to Douglas and Di came across to read it, leaning against his shoulder. ‘You happy now?’ she asked.

  He moved away irritably and put the letter back on my desk. ‘I suppose it will look neater if we have the full complement. Apart from that we don’t seem to have any more success when we have a psychiatrist.’

  He went out of the room and Di stared after him. ‘If it wasn’t for the kids I wouldn’t stay in the place,’ she said. ‘But Iris runs it better than any health administrator I ever came across, and Douglas isn’t a bad social worker. So who gets harmed? That’s what I say to myself.’

  ‘What does Mrs. Libnitz make of it?’ I wondered.

  ‘She wouldn’t realise things were different anywhere else, would she?’

  So that left me. I went along with it because they had been good with time off when Mother was ill.

  Iris came in after lunch and said that we must start making preparations for the new psychiatrist. We were short of current clients and she did not want him to be discouraged. ‘Perhaps you could go through the register and make a list of the clients we have lost touch with. Then Douglas and I can do a bit of visiting.’

  Mrs. Libnitz came in while I was working on the list and said the new psychiatrist would have enough to do here without any clients.

  I had a busy day and it was twenty past six when I left the office. I should have been prepared for what happened then, but I wasn’t. For over a year the office had been a place where I was released from myself. So serious to Iris, to me the events there had the quality of a charade which I observed and which helped me to forget reality. But now, reality had changed; it was still at home, waiting for me, but it was different. I felt frightened as I pedalled down the lane. I had felt anxious while my mother was ill, wondering what had happened during the day, but not frightened. Why should I be frightened now? It was over, wasn’t it?

  My father was already at home when I arrived, he had caught an early train. Usually he was not home until quite late; he had always said the only time he could get any useful work done was after four in the afternoon. He seemed to have expected me to leave early as well this afternoon. ‘You’re not usually so late, surely?’ he asked. We had never talked much about my work and now he said, ‘You don’t do evening surgery?’

  ‘I don’t work for the doctors any more,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve been working at the clinic for three years now.’

  He stared at me anxiously as though my behaviour perplexed him. ‘I was worried,’ he said.

  ‘Worried?’ I felt he expected some kind of apology from me and this irritated me. ‘But I’m often home later than this if I go into town on my way.’

  I hung up my coat and went into the kitchen to make preparations for our meal. He followed and stood in the doorway, watching me.

  ‘I was thinking about a holiday,’ he said. ‘Things have been so hard for you. Would you like to go to Scotland? You have always said you wanted to explore Ross and Cromarty. We might take a cottage up there.’

  ‘I only have three weeks’ leave,’ I pointed out.

  ‘We could go for a fortnight. That would leave you a week for anything else you wanted to do.’

  My holidays were usually spent keeping up with my friends who had scattered fairly widely; three weeks had never seemed long enough.

  My father said, ‘Of course, I know you like to see Dorothy.’

  He did not say any more. These withdrawals into silence had always had a disastrous effect on my mother who either capitulated or let out a torrent of angry abuse: my father knew that I was not given to angry outbursts. I broke eggs into a bowl and whisked vigorously. In the past I had been an intermediary between my mother and my father and I was unused to this more direct relationship. If anyone had asked me a year ago whether I would have managed better living alone with my father or with my mother, I would have said with my father. Now I felt rather at a loss with him. But this, after all, was bound to be a difficult time. He had come home from work for the first time since Mother died and I could understand the enormous emptiness with only me there in the kitchen. I felt it myself, as though a great crowd of people had melted away and left my father and me alone, unprepared for and even a little shocked by our isolation. During my mother’s illness we had grieved in different ways and had not been able to comfort each other. Now we were neither of us quite sure how the other felt. It was harder for my father; he had to construct another life and no doubt needed rather urgently to find out how I was going to fit into it. I wasn’t sure myself, so I hoped that tonight I could concentrate on practical things like preparing food, eating and washing up.

  To my relief, my father said, ‘Oh well, I’ll leave you to think about it.’ He was looking at the clock which told him that any further conversation would delay dinner
until half-past eight by which time he hoped to be watching a programme on an archaeological site in Turkey.

  Our springer spaniel, Punter, barked at the back door and I let him in. He seemed anxious, too, and followed me about the kitchen as though he was afraid to let me out of his sight.

  Over supper, my father raised the question of a holiday again. ‘I can understand that you must want to see Dorothy and your other friends.’

  ‘Well, yes . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you take some time off now and go to Dorothy?

  Things have been difficult these last few months and you need a break. I can manage for a week or so.’

  ‘I can’t take weeks off just like that.’ I was surprised; as a civil servant he must have known the position regarding compassionate leave as well as I did. ‘Besides, Dorothy teaches.’

  ‘What has that to do with it?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be any point in going to her during term-time.’

  ‘Really?’ The perplexed look came into his face again. He had such a quick mind that it was disconcerting to see him so unable to grasp simple facts. We ate in silence. I felt tired and flat and could not think of anything to say. Later, I would have to clear some of the things from my mother’s room and the thought oppressed me.

  When we were having coffee, my father said, ‘I know that when your mother was alive it was important for you to get out of the house and occupy yourself with other people; but now that things are different, is it necessary for you to go out to work?’

  ‘But I must work.’

  ‘Why? You refused to go to university.’ It was extraordinary how quickly he picked me up on this, as though the refusal had been made only yesterday and the resentment was still warm. ‘I remember that on the advice of the school we sent you to an educational psychologist and he said you weren’t motivated, or some such nonsense.’

  ‘But that was different.’

  ‘You are motivated now?’

  It had not been possible to explain my attitude at the time and I could hardly expect to succeed now, but I said, ‘I didn’t want a profession. But I must have a job. I’m over thirty.’

  ‘I fail to see what your age has to do with it.’

  ‘I’m a grown woman; I have to have a job.’

  ‘I should have thought,’ he said, after a pause during which he made a wry grimace as though this was rather beyond him, ‘that a woman doesn’t have to have a job, unlike a man.’

  I realised he was making arrangements for me to take over my mother’s role and I was annoyed that he should do it so clumsily. But then I thought that it showed how unsettled he must be by my mother’s death, even a little frightened. I had never thought of my father, who was always quiet and unemotional, as a frightened person. I suppose we didn’t know each other very well. His face was composed now, but the eyes had a startled, affronted look I had not seen before. I felt dismayed and was about to offer to go to Scotland with him when the telephone rang.

  He went to answer it and stayed in the hall for several minutes. When he came back, he said, ‘That was Eleanor.’ He gave me a reproachful look as though I had let him down over some matter in which Eleanor was involved.

  Chapter Two

  There was a beautiful view from the back of our house across fields and orchards with no buildings in sight. My bedroom and the spare bedroom, in which my father had slept for the last year, were at the back of the house. Mother had insisted on a bedroom at the front of the house because she liked to look down the lane towards the farm cottages and outbuildings. These buildings were not old or picturesque, but Mother had liked buildings whatever their architectural merit; when there was a scheme for a housing development in the vicinity she had refused to sign a petition which opposed it on the grounds that it would spoil the rural nature of the area. ‘Shit the rural nature of the area!’ she had said to my father, though to the woman presenting the petition she had said she had mislaid her glasses; she did not wear glasses.

  ‘You should have the courage of your convictions,’ my father had said in his gently mocking way.

  ‘I don’t have convictions. I have feelings. But no one in this place cares about feelings.’

  I pushed open the door of her room.

  The big sash window had been open at the bottom all day, but the room still smelt sour. I stripped the bed and put the sheets and blankets in the linen basket on the landing. Then I took the mattress off the bed and propped it against a chair under the windows. In the morning I would ask Mrs. James, our daily woman, to help me carry it down to the garden; the weather was fine and I could leave it out on the lawn all day. The rug and the carpet were stained. I wanted to roll them up and get them out into the fresh air, too, but I managed to restrain myself. There would be time to do these things, there wasn’t any need to tear the room apart.

  The pictures, picked up from stalls in Camden Passage before it became fashionable, were dusty, the glass spotted. The mirror with a picture of Carole Lombard painted on it was spotted, too, and the silver on the dressing-table was tarnished; the lacquered top was smeared. A bottle of scent was lying on its side, leaking Ma Griffe through the stopper. The last few months of her illness had been very difficult and my father, Eleanor and I had exhausted ourselves trying to make her comfortable day and night. But now that all the activity was over, the uncared-for objects in the room seemed like a reproach and I began to accuse myself. I had imagined the aftermath of death as an exhausted, but ultimately healing, sorrow, but in fact it was more unpleasant than that: mingled with guilt was anger, though what I was angry about I would have found it hard to say.

  There was a pile of letters and cards on the bedside-table with messages which varied from ‘Get better soon, Lil’ to ‘I am with you always, even to the end of time’. I tidied them and put them on the landing-table so that I would not forget to take them down to the drawing-room; there were people to whom I must write expressing thanks for their kind thoughts. I examined the various tablets which had done so little to relieve her distress and decided to cope with them later.

  While I did these things I was not thinking much about Mother; I just wanted to make the room less dreadful because I could not sleep another night while it was in this state. I began to take her clothes out of the wardrobe and while I did this I caught myself thinking that there would be more room for my own things when I had got them out of the way. The thought horrified me; it was not even as though I had anything much to store, clothes did not interest me. My father was downstairs watching television. He had not asked me how I was going to spend the evening, although I think he guessed. He had said earlier that he could not bear to touch her things, an attitude which seemed more appropriate than mine. I seemed to have lost not only my mother but the feeling part of myself.

  Punter came and stood in the doorway. I think he would have been happier if my father and I had stayed in the same room so that he could have kept an eye on both of us. I reassured him and he went downstairs and barked outside the sitting-room door. Father said, ‘If you come in, you’re not going out again.’

  I finished taking the clothes out of the wardrobe. They presented a problem. Most of them were unsuitable for country wear. I realised, as I looked at them hung about the room, how little Mother had adapted to the changes in her life.

  My mother was born Lillian Jacobs and she lived all her life until she married in the flat above her father’s clothes’ shop in Islington. Eleanor had told me that when Mother was young she was so lovely she stopped the traffic. Even in later years, when she had put on weight and had to dye her hair to keep it blonde, she was an arresting person. In contrast, my father seemed always to be trying to merge into the background; he was tall and thin and good-looking in a fastidious, apologetic way, and he looked faintly tired about the eyes. Mother seemed to have been over-endowed with physical energy and vitality but had not been given a corresponding sense of purpose. Father had an air of quiet certainty, but life seemed a puzzle to Moth
er. She got very angry and could never make people understand why, and she tended to leave sentences unfinished as though afraid to see her thoughts through to a conclusion. She was very demonstrative and loving but never received enough in return to satisfy her and so she was often hurt. She had no friends in the village. My father thought this was perverse of her.

  ‘You are always complaining of being lonely, but you won’t attend any of the village functions.’

  ‘If I went I’d still be lonely. I’d be on my own.’

  ‘Take Ruth with you.’

  ‘Ruth isn’t a man. I couldn’t go without a man, I’d feel humiliated.’

  ‘Well, my dear, if you won’t go to these village functions on your own there’s nothing we can do about it. When I get home from the office I want to get away from people, not go out and rub shoulders with them. I’m not gregarious. You are the one who likes company. Why don’t you have a tea party?’

  ‘Tea party! I wouldn’t know what to say to them!

  The country folk depressed her and, in some way that I could not understand, she found them threatening. She was not a cultured woman, so she could not mix with the wealthy families in the neighbourhood, most of whom were not cultured either but would have died rather than admit it.

  Poor Mother! I looked at the black cocktail dress with the satin tie. Her clothes had always seemed to make statements for her. This dress, worn in the garden, had said, ‘Look how bored I am in your wretched garden!’ The garden was his particular joy; he worked hard in it and longed for her appreciation. ‘It was such a lovely afternoon,’ he would say. ‘Did you sit out in the garden?’ She would stare dully at him as though he was talking in a foreign language. On the rare occasions when she joined him in the garden for any length of time she would always wear something that made her look out of place.

  ‘All you care about is London,’ I often heard him say.

  ‘The people in London are alive.’

  Certainly, she was alive in London. To my father’s embarrassment, she had conversations with people on buses, in the street, in shops. She would see someone who looked lost and hurry forward to give advice and directions, she would ask newspaper vendors what sort of a day they had had, she could not move away from a kiosk without an exchange of views on the changing nature of the town, she spent precious minutes talking to the coloured women attendants in public lavatories while my father waited miserably outside. In the end, he refused to meet her in London. ‘I have enough of it all day.’ So once a week she went up to London on her own. I remember asking her once what she had done that day.