‘Perhaps if we all introduced ourselves,’ Mrs Wells said. ‘Perhaps if we all say a few words about the sort of writing we want to do. How we see ourselves.’
How we see ourselves, Colin thought in querulous alarm, how we see ourselves? I am a history teacher, a teacher of the benighted past to the benighted present, ill-recompensed for what I suffer and despairing of promotion. My feet are size eight and a half, and I belong to the generation of Angry Young Men, though I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated. I am not a vegetarian and contribute to no charities, on principle; I loathe beetroot, and the sexual revolution has passed me by. My taste in clothes is conservative but I get holes in my pockets and my small change falls through; I do not speak to my wife about this because she is an excellent mother and I am intimidated by her, also appalled by the paltry nature of this complaint or what might be construed by her as a complaint. The sort of writing I want to do is the sort that will force me to become a tax-exile.
He looked across the room and saw a woman, directly opposite him in the semi-circle into which they had lumbered the desks. He wondered why he had not looked up before. Habit, he told himself. Habit ends here.
‘My name is Isabel Field,’ she said. ‘No, I have never tried to sell any work. I am not interested in writing commercially, I am interested in increasing my clarity of expression. I am a social worker.’
You are twenty-four or twenty-five, Colin thought, self-contained, reserved, sardonic. What struck him was that she had not hesitated; when she closed her mouth you knew she was not going to open it again until a fresh topic was raised. Her voice was accentless, or almost so. She had the fractured face of a Modigliani, clever yet obtuse; the long darting almond eyes and long supple neck. Her neat competent legs crossed when she sat down, crossed at the ankle and tucked under her chair. Her hands were long and lean, strong and beautiful, like the hands of the Lady with an Ermine.
The lady next to her said she was Mrs Higginbottom, would they please call her Sheila, and that she wanted to write for womens’ magazines. Now that is a difficult market, said Mrs Wells with extreme vigour, a very difficult market indeed. The Readers Digest, a man said, those anecdotes, you know, page-fillers, Humour in Uniform, I could do a lot of those, because a lot of funny things happened to me while I was in the army. Mrs Wells seemed enthused. He was a man whose ears stuck out. Colin looked back at Isabel Field. He felt suddenly like a refugee, the past a memory of blazing ruins; the future, the long grey road and transit camp of the displaced heart.
Unanchored, Evelyn’s mind moves backwards and forwards over the years. In the 1950s Muriel inhabited her body as though it were a machine. She had a powerful urge to bite, to tear with her teeth. For this reason, she kept her mouth covered with her hand, and swallowed her food without chewing. Reasoning that her teeth were seldom used, Evelyn did not try to take her to the dentist.
The first years were spent in cleaning Muriel, in reconciling herself to her existence. Evelyn wanted to be alone in the house; the house filled up, more than she had dreaded. After some time, Muriel began to appear sufficiently normal to be sent to school, but Evelyn was well aware that she was concealing her true nature. She spoke now more like other people, though she was still both clipped and sententious. At first she had said, ‘Mother, Mother,’ and Evelyn thought it was ‘Murder’ she had called out in the dark.
1950: a neighbour buys Muriel a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas, and she works it without fumbling on the parlour floor, blank side up. 1960: Muriel flings back at her statements once heard, a song from the radio, taunting her with the empty echo of her own speech. At the same time, the spare room becomes tenanted; the same mockery greets her on the stairs. Muriel has a passion for giving objects the wrong name, even when she knows the right one; it is a technique of bafflement she is practising. She glances only surreptitiously around her, moving her eyes, never her head; she can see, for self-preservation she must see, but she is not sure that she is supposed to look. Once she watched in wonder Evelyn’s ritual with the milk-money. Now she has learned that coins pay for desires. She wonders about the changing face of the clock. Is it related to the lines on her mother’s face, her increasing deafness and feebleness, the accumulation of dust upon their lives? Is it possible that every year is not the same, not just the same? Hurry, hurry, Evelyn always says: or you will not be on time…Yesterday, she says, today, tomorrow. Without causality there is no time, and there is no causality in Muriel’s head. Evelyn’s speech is just a noise, like the clatter of dustbin lids or the crack of bone, the incessant drip of the guttering. Events have no order, no structure, no purpose. Things happen because they must, because they can. Each moment belongs in infinity, each infinity cherishes its neighbour like turtle-doves on a bough. Muriel’s heart is a mathematical place, a singularity from which, in time, everything will issue.
Mrs Wells had a flute-like voice; it would have been suitable for opening Parliament, and it seemed a pity that she would never get the opportunity.
‘Rejection after rejection,’ she was saying, ‘until finally – ’; and she would go on to read her class the story of the wealth and acclaim that had come to some struggling author overnight. But they were not much encouraged, for it was always some American of whom they had never heard, with a wildly improbable name. Colin had long ago ceased listening. Classrooms do not smell like classrooms any more, he thought, where is the scent of dried ink and bullying, where is my childhood?
‘I also write fairy stories,’ said the man whose ears stuck out. Mrs Wells stared at him glassily, at a loss.
And Autumn does not smell like Autumn, Colin thought; where is the woodsmoke and the russet apples packed in barrels, and what are russet apples anyway, a breed or only a colour? Where are the swallows twittering on the wires? What will the swallows do when we all communicate by telepathy? I have only seen one, this year, and it did not make a summer.
I will never be a writer, he thought, I will never learn it, just as last year I did not learn Russian, I will never do it, my mind runs to clichés like abandoned plots to seed.
‘You have to give people what they recognise and understand,’ Mrs Wells was saying sweetly.
Autumn is only the wet lamplight on the black wet road, soup out of Sylvia’s packets, a splutter and a cough from the car engine at eight in the morning; kids whining and defaulting dragged by their scruffs from September through to Advent, transistor blah-blah, only two thousand shopping days to Christmas, blah-blah, God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.
‘Mushrooms,’ said Mrs Moffat with pride. ‘I have sent an article to The Edible World on the cultivation of mushrooms.’
My vegetable love will grow, thought Colin, vaster than Empires and more slow.
‘Do read it to us,’ Mrs Wells shrilled. ‘Could you, would you, read it to us, and we might help you with helpful hints. But first we must have our little assignment, shall we? ‘An Interesting Experience.’ Mr Sidney?’
Colin grinned. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t done my homework.’
‘Oh, now, that’s a pity, Mr Sidney.’
Her tone was light; if there was, genuine grief, she kept it out of her voice. It is commendable, he thought, her restraint. A bare branch tapped and tapped against the window, dice in the evening’s pot.
‘I couldn’t think of anything to write about.’
Mrs Wells was shocked into reproach. ‘But Mr Sidney, there’s always something to write about. That’s the whole point.’
‘I didn’t think any of my experiences were interesting.’
‘But there’s a book in each of us, Mr Sidney.’
‘Is there?’ said Colin, engaged by this. ‘I wonder if people would like to tell us what book there is in them? I should like mine to be Les Liaisons Dangereuses or The Brothers Kara-mazov, but more likely it is something like Famous Five Join the Circus.’