The Heart of the Country (22 page)

Madness, I say. Today, certainly, it seems like madness. It’s raining. I can see water seeping beneath the door, and have not the strength to fetch one of my cheap, bright, non-absorbent towels to sop it up. Damp stains the stone floor: I feel a dark stain of wretchedness creeping up to the very edges of that part of my mind, my being, which I usually manage to keep inviolate. The part which is daily reborn with gladness, excitement and gratitude to God (or whatever you call it) because the world exists and is so full of interest and possibility: a part of me which I associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Praxis of the very early years, who would run happily into the waves with shoes and socks on to see what would happen, meet with a slap or two, and do it again the next day, unafraid.

Praxis, protected by parental love. While it lasted. Paradise was there, then snatched away.

Children who have been hurt, grow up to hurt. This I know. I knew it, but was helpless in the knowledge. I shouted and screamed, attempted murder or faked suicide, in my children’s presence: conducted the dark side of my erotic nature beneath their startled gaze, careless of the precipice I opened up beneath their feet. I, who guarded them from the fleas of strange dogs, and nasty sights at the pictures, and brushed their hair with loving care. Yes, I did, and so did you, and you: paid back to them what mother did to you.

I remember clearly that early sense of fear and desolation of which all later fears and desolations are mere shadows. And I handed it on to them: this extreme of terror and horror; the ultimate standard by which they must judge the traumas of their own lives, and will hardly feel alive if they do not attain, and so strive to attain for ever. The shrieks of generations growing louder, not softer, as the decades pass.

I am ashamed of it: as ashamed of that as of anything I have done: and bewildered as to why I feel compelled to do it. The domestic row existed, I could almost believe, in order to distress the children.

Perhaps I am dead, and this is my punishment? To believe I am still alive, and live as a useless old woman in a Western industrialised society? There cannot be much worse a punishment. Unless it be to live as a young woman in the East, and see your children die from starvation: or worse, watch them grow up sour, undersized and crippled by curable diseases.

I touch my elbow to see if I am alive. I am.

‘I want to go to school,’ Praxis said to Hypatia, when she was seven; she spoke experimentally, wondering whether it was possible, by mere words, to influence the course of events.

‘Always fussing,’ said Hypatia. ‘Anyway we can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just be quiet,’ said Hypatia, who was sensitive to Lucy’s anxieties, and knew that the matter of their going to or not going to school kept their mother awake at night. ‘And wipe your nose, it’s dripping again.’

Hypatia walked cautiously through life, fearful of disturbing stones in case she saw the insects scuttling underneath. Praxis, she felt, blundered blithely on, aiming careless kicks as she went.

Hypatia sat inside the house and sewed and embroidered with her mother. Praxis swung on the garden gate and watched the other children going to and from the council school at the end of Holden Road. Noisy, messy, muddled children, even by comparison to herself: shirts and ties awry, satchels broken, shoes dirty, trailing sweet papers as they went. They ran, shrieked, scuffled, stumbled, fell and helped each other up.

‘Common children,’ said Lucy Duveen, ‘come away.’

Lucy taught her daughters to read, write, add up, launder, embroider and sew. She taught them how to boil mutton, unlump a white sauce, stew cabbage and mix a plum duff.

Henry emerged from his developing room, adapted from the cupboard under the stairs. His business was thriving. He had saved almost enough to put down a deposit on a small photographic studio on the sea-front. He breathed more easily these days. He went to the pub: he had a crony or two there, although he did not tell Lucy. Her fear of gossip, of people Finding Out, was too great for her to be able to view friends with equanimity.

Lucy was worried by the matter of the children’s schooling: worry made her unreasonable. She would divert her mind from its proper preoccupation, and busy it with trifles: and then accord the trifles the emotional weight that better befitted the preoccupation. Anxiety, anger, and a sense of injustice, welled up in her at the notion of Henry’s lack of breeding, and blotted out her panic at the thought of the girls’ birth certificates, which would have to be produced when and if they ever enrolled at school.

Close inspection of their birth certificates would reveal the girls to be illegitimate, and their true names Hypatia Parker, and Praxis Parker; the mother’s name being entered as Lucy Parker, spinster. And though in the column for father was written not the humiliating ‘unknown’, but ‘Benjamin Duveen, occupation, gentleman’, the disgrace of mother and daughters would become known.

‘I want to go to school,’ said Praxis to Lucy.

‘And mix with common children? Is that the kind of girl you turn out to be?’ Lucy responded, with such a contorted face, and such unmaternal ferocity that her younger daughter was thereafter reluctant to present her mother with a need, let alone a want, for fear they should all tumble over the precipice into madness and despair.

‘Mrs Duveen,’ said Henry, ‘the law of the land requires that children go to school. Now the law of the land has never done anything for me except compel me to go to war and ruin my health, but nevertheless it exists, and the children must go.’

‘His health is a small thing for a gentleman to sacrifice for his country,’ replied Lucy, adding, with meaning, ‘I should have thought.’

‘I’m no gentleman,’ said Henry. ‘I thought you understood that.’

‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘perhaps you had better take your meals in the kitchen, with Judith.’

‘Very well,’ replied Henry, to Lucy’s dismay. ‘I think I will.’

He retired back under the stairs, where, half-crouching, he developed his prints. He had hoped to convert the small back bedroom to a darkroom but Lucy thought that room much too good for photographs. The stair cupboard would do. She had begun to enjoy despising Henry.

When Henry appeared at supper, as usual, for mulligatawny soup, stewed mince (it was Wednesday) and apple tart, Lucy said ‘I thought you were going to eat in the kitchen,’ and Henry took his plate and went. He absented himself from Lucy’s bed thereafter, letting it be understood that he would not return there until she invited him back into the dining-room, but she did not relent. She put out her shoes for him to clean, however, and clean them he did.

All this for Praxis was safety: waking up in the morning in the bed next to Hypatia: the dull routine of the house, of the day: Henry’s comings and goings: Hypatia’s moods: Judith’s sulks: learning to read: going to the children’s library: (talking to no one as instructed: hurrying straight home) there, running parallel, was a pit, just an edge away, of violence and hatred, screams and blows, fears, illness, death. Lucy sometimes showed Praxis a face which came straight from the other side: a witch face, demoniacal, tormented. Hypatia would show that face too, on occasion. ‘Let’s see who can make the ugliest face,’ she’d say, and promptly produce a devil mask straight from the other side, which terrified Praxis so that she’d cry. ‘Baby,’ Hypatia would deride, satisfied, and Praxis would sleep with her head under the blankets, in case she woke up in the morning and caught Hypatia with her devil face, before she’d had time to remove it.

Hypatia wished her harm, Praxis accepted that. Sometimes she’d relent, and they’d play sevens against the garage wall. Throw, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, turn, catch; throw, bounce, bounce, clap, catch; on and on for a whole afternoon, or until Judith emerged shrieking that she’d hand in her notice unless the thudding stopped.

Judith was a local girl, nearly thirty, unmarried. Her breath was bad: no one else cared to employ her. Black haired, black browed, black chinned, broad of face, and body: slurred of speech, coarse of hand, and sullen. That, at least, was how Lucy saw her. Pale, delicate Lucy. Judith received fifteen shillings a week, paid through Butt and Sons, solicitors. She affected a marked dislike of men, but seemed to attract sexual violence. She was propositioned by workmen, molested by strangers, became quite used to the pad-pad of unknown feet behind her, and carried a heavy handbag, which she would swing skilfully as a hand or arm appeared.

At first Henry felt quite ill at ease, obliged to eat with Judith in the kitchen. There was little conversation. But the food in the kitchen turned out to be better than that served in the dining-room. Judith would fill his own deep plate and her own from the soup tureen, place the plates carefully on the Aga stove to keep warm, then, after filling two jamjars for taking home later, would hold the tureen under the cold tap to top up the level, and take it into the dining-room. He said nothing to Lucy about this practice. Why should he? His loyalties were to Judith now; below stairs, not upstairs.

The vicar came to enquire why the girls were not attending school. Lucy, watching him come up the drive, saw him as nemesis, and greeted him with flat despair in her heart. She gave him sherry. He was a youngish man, clearly from the lower middle classes. Vicars used to be the younger sons of the landed gentry. Not what she expected.

‘The girls seem so young,’ she fluted, ladylike, wild-eyed. ‘And there’s such a lot of paper-work,’ she added, her tone altogether more sane, so, being a shrewd fellow, he took his cue from that. ‘Paper-work can be very tiresome,’ said the vicar, ‘especially for a widow like yourself.’ He was a member of the golf-course, at special rates, since he could not play on Sundays, and one of the few acquainted with Lucy – through her earlier outings with the children to the Sunday School – and her circumstances. He had assumed Benjamin had abandoned a wife: now, it seemed, he had merely left a mistress: and who was to say whose the children were, since a woman who’ll live with one man, unmarried, will sleep with another.

The Reverend Allbright nevertheless, good Christian that he was, accorded Lucy a way out. Widow, he’d said, thereby welcoming her back into the fold, the community, the Mothers’ Union. Her children would now be reckoned unfortunate, but not tainted, which was a considerable improvement.

‘If you like,’ said the vicar, ‘to hand the childrens’ birth certificates over to me, I’ll get them registered at the school. You wish them to be called Duveen?’

‘Of course.’ She paled. What did he know?

‘Sometimes widows like to revert to their maiden names,’ he said, lying through his teeth. ‘They feel they once again have the shelter of their father’s name. But you prefer to keep your husband’s name alive, I see, in them. You are a brave little woman, Mrs Duveen. I admire you and my heart goes out to you.’

And so he did, and so it did, though quite why he could not have said. His own wife, Margot, was a brisk, noble and simple woman, and their sex-life polite, simple and straightforward, a weekly event, with the lights out, occurring mostly on a Friday night. Saturday night, they both silently concurred, might leave the Reverend Allbright too tired for Sunday sermons, and certainly too much connected with the flesh, too little to the spirit. The Reverend and Mrs Allbright made a sharp division between the two, assuming that the flesh existed as a trial to the spirit: and since only he enjoyed it – and thought perhaps he shouldn’t – and she put up with it, for kindness and custom’s sake, they may well have assumed right. His strength and will were sapped, his vital juices drained away, when he succumbed to his sexual urges. And his wife could not recover from her sense of incongruity: the man in white dog-collar and black suit, whom she had married, thus translated to pink, pounding flesh and blood. Nor, come to that, could he. Still, God had devised this means of perpetuating the race and cementing the sacrament of marriage. God said do it, so they did.

Margot Allbright was obliged to cheat, too: pushing a piece of sponge soaked in vinegar up her vagina, for fear of conceiving a fifth child. Cheating herself, God, her husband, she did it, but scarcely bore to think about it. Was sex really necessary?

Now, the Reverend Allbright, surveying the sudden softening of Lucy’s sharp little face and the gratitude dawning in her eyes, caught a glimpse of other possibilities: of the exercise of sexual power, of mastery and masochism, of an entirely different scale of sexual existence than the one he was accustomed to, lapping and overlapping emotional entanglement and physical intertwinings; and even thought wildly for a moment or so of stepping to embrace his unfortunate parishioner, and seeing what would happen next –

But he did not. The moment passed.

‘I hope to see you at the church soon,’ said the Reverend Allbright. ‘I know your husband was of the Jewish faith, but I imagine you will want your daughters brought up as Christians?’

‘Of course,’ said Lucy, perfectly prepared to abandon King David in the interests of respectability.

The vicar enrolled the girls at the nearest Church of England school, which was a good two miles away, and not the secular school at the end of the road.

Lucy took the girls to church and saw that they went to Sunday School, became a member of the Mothers’ Union, voted for the expulsion of a young farmer’s wife, mother of three, who was discovered on the desertion of her husband to have been bigamously married, although not to her knowledge at the time. Exonerating circumstances, no doubt, but not powerful enough to wipe out sin. A state of sin, especially in sexual matters, could be brought about without the sinner’s knowledge. One had to be careful. Curtains must be closed lest the sun in its brilliance fade the velvet cushions. Food must be bland in case it agitated the senses: must not be too appetising, in case gluttony, that deadly sin, eroded the spirit. Servants must not be paid too much, in case they got above themselves, forgot their place. Visitors must be discouraged, in case they found out.

Found out what? Lucy could scarcely remember. She, a decent widow, with family solicitors, administering her interests, could scarcely have a guilty secret. Could she? No, she was surely too finely attuned to the lack of respectability in others: she was no hypocrite. Benjamin had said so.