An End to Autumn (2 page)

It would probably have surprised Tom to discover how much she relied on him for she never showed her emotions and always maintained the same equable poise. It never occurred to him that she needed him deeply, for her emotions, though controlled, ran more deeply than his. She never showed excessive feeling and though she loved books was not liable to be conquered by imagery or bravado but rather by a hopeless pathos which belonged to another world and not to this one.

The reason why she agreed to Tom’s having his mother in the house was that she sensed it was important to him and not because she had any deep feelings about his mother, one way or the other. She believed that reasonableness would be enough and that they could all get on together reasonably. At the back of her mind, though she was not conscious of it, was a picture of her mother-in-law quietly reading books in her room, as she herself had done in her childhood, ignoring both her father’s coldness and her mother’s spasmodic and undependable and yes, theatrical, affection.

In ordinary affairs Vera was surprisingly competent and she had a very shrewd mind which was not easily deceived. She was not liked but she was respected. Her pupils thought her fair and knowledgeable but she didn’t generate the kind of coarse warmth which children respond to; so they gave her little of themselves, though they were never disobedient. She did not in fact require more of them, for excess of love would have made her uncomfortable. Her colleagues respected her but again did not particularly like her for there was about her an inexplicable and rather irritating air of superiority as if she were implying that she had to be with them but she didn’t particularly wish to be. She didn’t talk to anyone much and if she ever did she never volunteered any information about herself at all. Other more spontaneous people didn’t like her for this, and thought her mean, both with her emotions and her mind.

She was clever enough to see that Tom for some reason felt guilty about his mother and would probably have done so about his father too, if he had lived. She herself had nothing against her mother-in-law, though the latter was inclined to ramble on about the old days; that, Vera supposed, was natural and to be expected. She looked around her at the comfortable room in which she and Tom were sitting, the deep black leather easy chairs which formed part of the suite which the sofa on which she was sitting completed; the sideboard, with the glasses and the crystal, which they had got at their marriage; the shelves of books which ran along one wall; the wooden-framed electric fire large enough to be considered a piece of furniture; the small table with the vase which contained artificial flowers (she would have liked real ones but they hadn’t got down to the garden yet); the large windows with the bronze curtains. And she looked at Tom who was sitting in one of the black leather chairs with another small table in front of him which he used for marking exercises when he had any to mark. He was staring at his book in a puzzled manner and when he appeared perplexed small lines appeared in his forehead. These for some reason displeased her for she liked smoothness, as if they reminded her of a mortality which she would have preferred to forget. She would in fact have wished to begin from the beginning with Tom, as if they were setting off on an original exclusive journey unshadowed by the past, but this was not possible for her own parents, especially her mother, would come to visit her now and again when for some reason they grew tired of Edinburgh, or her mother wished to return “to nature” and sample again “the simple life”. It was fortunate that there was no theatre in the small town in which they lived.

The two of them on the whole were lucky for they succeeded in keeping themselves to themselves, they had congenial work which they liked doing, in the same place, and they did not exhaust each other with emotional demands or jealousies.

“It’s a funny thing,” said Tom, laying his book down, “I think I’m going off Eliot.”

“Are you?” she said with genuine surprise. “And why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. When I was reading there was an image kept coming back to me. It was an image of an old fat woman I used to see walking about the street when I was young. She was a large woman with a red face and large lips and her stomach jutted out in front of her and she was always carrying a bag. But the thing was that she was talking to herself. Whenever you saw her she was holding long conversations with herself. I never found out where she lived. I think the redness of her face must have been caused by high blood pressure.”

“That’s odd,” said Vera absently. “I wonder why that particular image comes back to you.”

“I don’t know. I always think of her as walking along on a windy day and her skirts are being blown about her legs which are also fat and red.” Quite irrelevantly he added, “My mother doesn’t read much. You remember three years ago when I took out a subscription to the
People’s Friend
for her. I thought it would pass the time for her. But I don’t think she ever read any of the magazines, so she told me to stop them.”

“Yes, a lot of them read the
People’s Friend
,” said Vera as if she thought of his mother as belonging to a certain class of people, definite and fixed. “I should have thought she might have liked the stories.”

“No, not at all,” Tom pursued. “She said she had too much to do, and she didn’t really have all that much. Certainly she worked in the garden but that was only in the mornings. She could have read in the afternoons or the evenings if she had wished, but she didn’t. My father read a lot. Mostly serious books, non-fiction. I don’t think he read a fiction book in his whole life. But he was always reading about the pyramids or about foreign countries. He wasn’t at all political: he only read for information.”

“Well, at least she will have a TV set in her room,” said Vera. “She can watch that if she feels bored.”

She herself didn’t watch the TV much, and in fact only did so when there was a play on which she had asked her pupils to see, one whose text they were studying in school and which would help them in the examinations. Now and again however she would also watch documentaries about famous composers such as Schoenberg, for she was very fond of music and liked to know biographical facts, feeling that knowledge of the lives of creative people was important to an understanding of their work. Tom was more interested in painting than he was in music, though his knowledge was sporadic and amateurish.

Vera looked out through the window ahead of her. It was an autumn evening and the landscape looked brown. Already in late August she felt a strange bitter nostalgia as she always did at that time of year as if something was saying goodbye to her, as if some slant light were crossing the bare land. At twenty-seven she did not really feel old: for that matter she couldn’t remember a time when she had felt young either. What she sometimes felt was the strain of being herself, of holding herself tightly in the necessary check, of not giving anything away. People regarding her might find there an enviable coolness which was more worked for than many of them realised. Days passed and certainly they passed in tranquillity, for Tom and she hardly ever quarrelled. Tranquillity she judged was better than its opposite however it contained its own terrors, however it spoke of absence.

“Well,” said Tom finally shutting his book, “that’s it. I’m sure that I still don’t know a quarter of what it’s about but it will have to do. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ll go and make one.”

“Yes. That would be fine.”

He went off to the kitchen as he always did at about that time of night, and she was left alone. Sometimes, she thought, she liked being alone, even free of Tom, just for a while. She wondered if he ever felt like that: he certainly never said so. But then of course there were certain subjects which one simply did not discuss. She considered that she might survive alone for a certain time, but wasn’t sure whether she might survive for long. Perhaps Tom might survive better than her. One mused about things like that sometimes, or rather they swam into one’s head without warning.

Neither of them of course was a dreamer. Tom had done quite a lot of work on the house in the way of painting and shelf-building and she had helped him: for instance she had chosen, and put up the wallpaper, for Tom was very impatient of exact measurement, in which however she believed. Her teaching was far less spontaneous than Tom’s and more meticulously prepared. She was also better than he was with the more difficult classes. She didn’t allow them much scope: but on the whole she preferred the others.

Tom came in and laid the tray down on the table. He had brought some biscuits which they ate.

As they sat there in the room, the only sound being that of the yellow flaring bird-shaped wall clock which her mother had given them, they felt in complete harmony with their surroundings and with each other. It was an achieved ease in which they lived, or so they thought. To Tom her cool classical figure, her pale narrow face with the fair hair combed flowingly away from the head, seemed exactly what he wanted: or at least that was what he thought more often than not.

And to her Tom was exactly what she wanted though she did not think of his physical presence much. She rested in his care and from that safety set out on her cold and otherwise self-sufficient voyage.

2

QUITE EARLY ON
the Saturday Tom took his car down to the railway station and waited inside it for a while. It was a cool, calm morning and from where he was parked he could see a train waiting though as he didn’t use trains he didn’t know whether it was about to go or not. The station of course was much smaller than the one to which his father had used sometimes to take him, introducing him once, with a mixture of servility and pride, to the stationmaster, an apparently busy little man with a toothbrush moustache who had given him a hard white sweet. In that station there had been a continual pulsation of steam, a rushing of people, a pushing of cases by porters, a sense of a whole world in continual motion. Sometimes he felt that he could take a train somewhere, anywhere, to find a series of different landscapes and end up perhaps in Arabia or Turkey or even in fabulous Athens. But of course he had never done that. Because his father had worked on the railways they had been given free travel, but they had never been adventurous and had stayed inside Scotland. The radiation of rails had attracted him but he had stayed where he was and his life had been one of careful uneventfulness: his wife told him that since he was a Capricorn unadventurousness was to be expected of him.

He liked the small town in which he lived but sometimes, as in his youth, he felt a phantasmal motion of departure, especially on hazy summer mornings, as if he were a child again in a busy railway station. What was it he wanted that he didn’t have? He often wondered and couldn’t think of anything. After all he was happy in his work, he had a good home and a very agreeable wife, and his surroundings were themselves beautiful, a fine blending of sea and land. What therefore was he looking for on those days, for he only felt those motions of departure at certain times and not constantly. He was sure that his wife didn’t feel restless, or if she did she never revealed it in any way, and never talked about it. She seemed to have a deeper calm than he had. Perhaps it was because she had not been brought up in an atmosphere of trains and railway stations, bound to timetables as his father, and therefore he and his mother, had been. When he was young he remembered his father waving flags from a train that was setting off into an unimaginable country and which would never return no matter how hard he ran after it and pleaded with his father to wait. In the end of course, his father had done just that, he had set off on a final journey and hadn’t returned. The rails had been narrow and he had finally turned a corner from which one could see only steam like breath arising and being dissipated on the chilly air.

Tom sat for a while in the car thinking, and now and again letting his gaze rest on the present, on the fishing boats that he could see in the harbour, on the hills that he could see on the other side of the bay. What a beautiful little town it was, with its changing lights so different from the hard definite rigid light of Edinburgh which delineated so firmly massive stone buildings such as insurance offices. Here the light broke randomly on water and stone, in a less assured and more wavering manner but at nights flared into the most theatrical sunsets such as his mother-in-law, he thought wryly, might have disported herself in.

As he waited for the train bearing his mother to come into the station, he had a strange feeling that something decisive was going to happen, though he didn’t know what it was. It was true, as Vera had surmised, that he felt guilty about his mother though there was no particular reason why he should. In a certain sense his guilt was literary, as if he saw himself as a character in a book who had left his own class and was bound therefore to feel guilty. By attending university he had placed a distance between himself and his father whose untrained though industrious mind was as inferior to his own as an old-fashioned adding machine to a modern computer. The image of his father in his not very attractive and slightly blurred blue uniform arose in his mind as one he felt he ought to be guilty about.

Thinking these thoughts he watched with fascination a seagull that was standing splay-clawed on the pier, turning its head from side to side, and opening its beak as if it were yawning. Perhaps if he had pulled down the window he would have found that it was screaming, Tom thought wryly. Now and again the seagull would peck at some wrecked bones, probably those of herring, that lay on the stone. Tom could see its stony eyes even from the inside of the car, a good distance away. The seagull seemed to him to be an image of self-containment, concerned only with its food, its eye cold and remote, and it was as if he was possessed by a sudden blind hatred of the bird, such that if people hadn’t been about he might have thrown a stone at it. But in fact he only looked at his watch to find that there were another ten minutes to go before the train came in.