AN IRRELEVANT WOMAN Read online

  Stephanie scraped back her chair. ‘I said it was too hot in that kitchen!’

  In the garden, Katrina said shrilly, ‘She’s not like my mother. Don’t touch her.’

  ‘Who do you think she is?’ Malcolm joked. ‘Queen Mab and our father Old Hob o’ the Muirs? I always knew there was something strange going on in this house.’ He laughed but stood back.

  Stephanie said, also standing back, ‘We must be very careful about this.’

  Murdoch squatted beside the retriever who opened bloodshot eyes and gazed at him in bleary sadness.

  ‘Of course we must touch her,’ Hugh said and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  At once, she woke and looked from one face to the other, smiling and benevolent as she had always been.

  ‘I can’t think what came over me,’ she said, restored to the dining room, the apple tart distributed and pronounced a success.

  Stephanie said, ‘It’s much too hot in that kitchen.’

  Katrina and Malcolm looked at each other and looked away.

  Hugh brought his mind to bear on this and said, ‘But the kitchen is no different from what it has always been.’

  Stephanie said, ‘But Mother is older,’ and Katrina mouthed at Hugh, ‘The time of life.’

  Murdoch asked Stephanie, ‘What can be done about the kitchen?’

  ‘You should get an extractor fan.’

  ‘I will get one on Tuesday.’

  ‘You will need to get someone to install it for you.’

  ‘I have no doubt I could do that myself. I expect they come with instructions.’

  Hugh said, ‘I don’t think the kitchen needs an extractor fan, Stephanie. It has windows on two walls, one of which is usually open for Matilda, and a garden door, which is usually open for Humphrey. There is a more than adequate through draught.’

  Janet said loudly, ‘I think I shall go to Greenham Common with Patsy. Does anyone see any reason why I shouldn’t?’

  She sat crouched forward as if about to spring. Instinctively her children averted their gaze, each hoping not to be the object of her attention. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Has anyone got a better offer? Deutzia has suggested art lectures or a continental holiday. And I believe Open University has been advocated.’ Stephanie flushed scarlet. ‘I think I might learn more at Greenham Common.’

  Malcolm sat with his body hunched, hands gripping his knees. Katrina pressed knuckles against her teeth. Hugh said objectively, studying the stem of his wineglass, ‘Who will look after Sam and Francesca?’

  Janet leaned forward, staring fiercely down the length of the table. ‘You could look after them for one day,’ she said to Murdoch who alone was prepared to meet her gaze. ‘You would like to look after your grandchildren, wouldn’t you? They could watch you putting in the extractor fan. That would be fun for them.’

  Murdoch said, ‘I thought it was Friday that Patsy wanted us to have the children. You put a ring round the day on the calendar.’

  ‘And. . .?’

  ‘I was proposing to put the extractor fan in on Tuesday. But it can wait until Friday if you would prefer that.’

  Janet sat back. ‘So that is settled.’

  Stephanie said, with an attempt at good-humour which was a little too highly-pitched, ‘You are not going to cut wires, or worse, I hope. I wouldn’t put it past Patsy.’

  Janet collected the dishes within easy reach. ‘What a silly phrase that is, isn’t it? “Put it past Patsy”.’ She went out of the room.

  Stephanie said, ‘Phew!’

  Katrina said, ‘Oh well, it is hot in the kitchen.’

  ‘Don’t be so snide, Katrina.’

  ‘If that’s the best psychology you can come up with!’

  ‘I don’t want to analyse my own mother.’

  Murdoch said, ‘I should hope not.’ He and Malcolm gathered the remaining dishes and went out.

  ‘Perhaps Mother needs a holiday,’ Hugh said. ‘We are all a bit difficult to deal with, when you come to think about it.’

  ‘But she loves dealing with us,’ Stephanie protested. ‘She is a born enabler. That has been her fulfilment. She enables father to write and, I suppose, she enables each of us, in a way, though to do what, I’m not sure . . .’ They pondered this, none of them having a satisfactory answer.

  ‘The thing that troubled me,’ Katrina said, ‘was the way she looked at Daddy, so angrily. But he didn’t seem surprised. It makes me wonder how long this has been going on.’

  Stephanie shrugged. ‘He probably didn’t notice.’

  Hugh said slowly, ‘That’s one thing you can’t say about him. They have always had a way of looking at each other as though . . .’ He got up and went to the window, seeming to have difficulty in speaking of this. ‘As though they had a loss of memory overnight and discovered each other again every morning.’

  Katrina looked at him in surprise.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Stephanie said. ‘But there was certainly something rather naive about them.’

  ‘So what made her turn on him like that?’ Katrina asked. ‘You don’t think that Daddy – he couldn’t, surely?’

  ‘I rather think he could, if he had a mind to it.’ Stephanie considered her father thoughtfully. ‘But who with? That’s the question. Opportunity would be a fine thing in the village!’

  ‘He does take long walks every afternoon. And he never asks her to go with him. What do you think?’

  They both turned to Hugh.

  ‘I don’t think he has ever looked at another woman. It wouldn’t surprise me if it hadn’t even occurred to him how many other people – men and women – there are around.’

  His bitterness surprised his sisters and Stephanie tried to rephrase his statement in more acceptable terms, ‘Of course, he is rather exceptional. His writing undoubtedly stimulates him and gives him a kind of fulfilment. An alternative pleasure, almost a licensed infidelity, one might say . . .’

  Malcolm returned, his face grey as lard. ‘I think you had better come.’

  Janet was lying on the kitchen floor weeping, attended by Murdoch and Humphrey, each ineffectual after his own fashion.

  Hugh said, ‘She had better lie down in the sitting room’ and Stephanie said, ‘Get her out into the garden. She needs fresh air.’

  This being what most of them needed, they moved Janet into the fresh air. They propped her once more on the bench beneath the apple tree where she slumped, looking uncomfortably like a straw figure.

  ‘She looks so pale, Katrina said. ‘Not a bit like my little nut-brown Mum.’

  Chapter Three

  The doctor was a young man, very concerned to live up to every word of the Hippocratic oath. Were the village to be smitten by plague, he would stay to the last. In a believing age he might have been a priest. It was unfortunate for him that his first big test should be a woman in late middle life, a period about which he had had no personal experience and had received no adequate instruction. In fact, the only comment which came to his mind at the moment was that of a testy old man – ‘In my day the answer was delicately tinctured water – violet was particularly effective, I recall. God knows what they do with them nowadays!’ He sat gazing levelly at Janet, striving to present himself as a man who was sympathetic, soothing, shrewd, wise and, above all, in control, these being the attributes which he imagined she most needed in her doctor at this moment.

  Janet saw a man in his late twenties with an eager, sensitive face beneath a neat pudding-basin haircut. ‘Don’t let me down,’ the eyes pleaded as he talked to her. ‘I can’t afford a failure at this stage. I have such dreams and so little self-confidence.’ She recognised him as a kindred spirit. He would never make his mark in the world. She felt that she was the physician faced with the decision whether to tell the patient he is doomed, or to allow him the few unclouded years which may lie ahead before the disease tightens its grip on him.

  How could she say to him, ‘My children have all gone. But they return from time to time
to talk about what I should do and to disparage what I have done. My husband behaves as though nothing has changed; now that I have more time – a fact he does not seem to realise – he does not ask me to share his long afternoon walks. Deutzia tells me what I should do which means that half the village is thinking about what is to be done with me. But there isn’t any solution.’ Oh, how could she say that to him when he was so desperately anxious to find one for her? It would be cruel to tell him the truth, to say to him, ‘I am not a modern woman. I am a series of “nots” – not typical, topical, current, competitive, controversial, contentious, protesting. I am not given to confrontation, nor am I concerned with success as most people understand it today. I am passive, accepting, quiescent, unmotivated, uncommitted, and therefore uncaring and irrelevant. My trouble, doctor, is that I am an irrelevant woman.’

  But he would have no cure for that, so she accepted what he had to offer because it would do her little harm and might be of some help to him.

  When Stephanie telephoned the following day, Murdoch sounded quite cheerful. The doctor did not seem to suspect anything sinister, but he had given Janet a thorough examination and taken a number of tests, the results of which would be available next week. It was obvious that both Murdoch and the doctor gained confidence from the fact that Janet’s problems were now contained in specimen bottles.

  The following week Murdoch telephoned Stephanie to tell her that the tests were negative. ‘So,’ he explained, ‘there isn’t anything really wrong.’

  ‘So what is this all about?’ Stephanie demanded.

  ‘The doctor thinks that your mother has been pushing herself a bit hard for a number of years and needs a rest.’ Murdoch spoke quietly as though anxious not to wake a sleeping child.

  ‘He may be satisfied,’ Stephanie said to Piers. ‘But I should like to see for myself. I think we’ll go down for the day next weekend. The children can stay with your sister. We have hers often enough, goodness knows!’

  Piers noted three assumptions in one short speech: that he would accompany her, that his sister would have the children, that his sister would resent having to have the children. He set his mind to the business of finding valid objections.

  ‘I have a lot of marking to do. And we can’t just assume that Angela and Bill have no plans for the weekend. You were furious when they accepted that invitation to Ascot on the assumption that we would have their kids.’

  ‘Then I’ll go down on my own.’ Her eyes filled with tears. Piers was so astonished that he surrendered unconditionally.

  ‘There is nothing you haven’t told me?’ he asked, and hastily narrowed the issue before she could reply. ‘About your mother, I mean.’

  ‘I just want to make sure that doctor knows what he is about.’

  ‘He’s quite young, isn’t he? He’s bound to be up-to-the-minute in treatment.’

  ‘I don’t want my mother to have up-to-the-minute treatment. I want her to have the right treatment.’

  Piers studied her gloomily. As she stood by the window in the early morning sunlight she had the ripe perfection of a corn goddess; one could imagine pygmy mortals trying to climb the thumping great pigtail which hung down her back. A benign goddess, she wore an air of being tolerant, though still surprised by the fact that other people had ideas different from her own; and, while she meant to be kind, her big, candid eyes could not conceal the fact that she could do most things better than the person actually struggling with the task. He was sorry for the doctor.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

  ‘I was wondering which of your parents you take after.’

  ‘I take after my maternal grandmother, as you well know.’

  Piers’ eyes rested on a photograph of a truculent old woman sitting, arms folded, on a bench outside a cottage door. She did not look as though tears had come into her eyes at any time during her adult life and it was hard to imagine her as having had a childhood.

  ‘Are you planning to stay the night?’ he asked.

  Stephanie wavered. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We could ask Angela to take them for the night, just in case.’

  They contemplated the picture of their return to a house emptied of children.

  ‘Yes,’ Stephanie said. ‘Let’s do that – just in case.’

  They set out early on the Saturday. Neither of them questioned whether their arrival would be welcomed by Murdoch and Janet.

  ‘It will do you good to get right away from school. There is nothing like an exchange of problems for refreshing the spirit,’ Stephanie said as they travelled out of Surrey. She spoke consolingly, making amends for what he might consider a certain highhandedness in her behaviour.

  ‘I like school.’

  ‘You need to get away from it sometimes, nevertheless.’ After they had negotiated Farnham, she said, ‘And, anyway, you can’t possibly like it. You just feel you have to like it because you left the church.’

  A few miles ahead Piers turned the car into a lay-by. His thin face was white, the eyes like glass. Stephanie looked at him in alarm. He expressed her fears. ‘One day you will go too far.’

  ‘It’s only because I want to help you. Piers.’ The practised reasonableness of her tone was undermined by an unprofessional note of appeal. ‘You’re not cut out for this.’

  ‘On the contrary, I feel this is my real vocation.’ His voice was cold, his mouth unforgiving.

  She reacted sharply. ‘Then why do you insist on being “Edward” to your colleagues at school?’

  ‘How could I teach in a comprehensive with a name like Piers?’

  ‘It’s very confusing for George and Marcus.’

  ‘They don’t notice. How often do we have anyone from the school into our home? I should think most of them have no idea where I live!’

  ‘I am not going to entertain people with whom I must constantly remind myself not to mention my husband’s name.’

  ‘You could call me Edward.’

  ‘Certainly not! It was as Piers that I took you for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I went through all that trauma of your withdrawal from the church. I even sat there while you preached that incredible last sermon.’

  ‘The Christian faith is incredible.’

  ‘Well, we won’t go into that now. But I am not going to call you Edward – ever!’

  He remembered how she had stood between him and his parishioners, refusing entry to his study, arguing with them in the sitting room. She had even argued with the bishop. ‘You were very good about all that, Steffie. And you’re right. I do find it hard at school. But then so do all the others. I’m no different from them.’ His hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘This is not going to fold up on me'

  ‘So long as you don’t drive yourself over the edge. Now that Mother has been taken ill I feel anything could happen.’

  ‘Your mother needs a rest. Why can’t you accept that, Steffie, instead of rushing in and interfering? Antagonising the doctor won’t help.’ He started the car again.

  ‘But why should she need a rest? She hasn’t done anything, Piers! Only looked after all of us. And helped with that. I was the eldest. I was always the one who was put in charge. Just think what you and I do in a week in comparison. Me at the clinic, you at school, taking incest and grievous bodily harm as part of our daily diet!’

  ‘I don’t know about incest.’

  ‘Then you are falling down on your pastoral care.’

  He winced and she said, ‘I can’t help it if the terminology is the same.’

  By lunchtime they were at Shaftesbury where they stopped for a meal because Stephanie said that Piers needed a break.

  ‘Why don’t you take over?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t drive with you sitting beside me, behaving like the examiner who failed me for the third time – the one who said I was too impetuous.’

  In the hotel she telephoned Murdoch to inform him ‘We shall be with you soon after three.’
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br />   After lunch Piers drove slowly and Stephanie looked out of the window at scenes which, however often she viewed them, she could never reconcile with her present way of life. She had lived in Dorset all her childhood and to her the village had been the normality of life, what lay beyond it a kind of failed chaos which was not to be taken seriously. Now she saw this part of Dorset as the one isolated area of deep country in the South of England. It wasn’t simply that the villages were far apart, leaving a lot of uninhabited space in between, but the villages themselves were still rural with leftover rainwater lying in the ruts of unmade-up roads and big stone houses owned by people who were too busy farming to prettify their dwellings. And then there were the valleys which lay like deep pockets of the past. She found herself thinking it was rather sinister. No wonder Hardy’s books were so full of foreboding.

  ‘Man is still at the mercy of Nature here,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Piers answered. ‘Nature is on the retreat here as elsewhere.’ He sounded displeased about this.

  ‘You wouldn’t have been any happier had you lived a hundred years ago,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘Think of Jude the Obscure.’

  ‘There was a certain form to life then, a shape.’

  ‘Hardy gave it form and shape. If it is form and shape you are after, you should have stayed in the church and worked through your problems.’

  ‘I shall never lack problems to work through.’

  ‘But you no longer have anyone to blame for the world being the way it is – apart from President Reagan, and he isn’t much of a substitute for God.’

  ‘Steffie, I know that you feel secure once you have got some sort of order into a situation by analysing it, but I wish you could understand that even the soundest case loses something by constant repetition.’

  ‘I would have thought that was a statement which most educationists would want to challenge. It seems to me that nowadays teachers proceed on the same assumption as TV pundits – that no one takes anything in until it has been repeated at least six times.’ Piers drove on for some minutes in silence while Stephanie talked, then he intervened, ‘You are scared silly, aren’t you?’