An End to Autumn (8 page)

After he had done this for some time he put on his trousers and when his wife returned from the bathroom he went and busied himself with the tedious business of shaving. While he was doing so, his wife in her turn was sitting on the bed, gazing into the mirror and examining her face as if to assure herself that she had lost none of that quality, whatever it was, that had first attracted Tom. She was wondering if she ought to do her hair in a different way, or perhaps wear make-up which she ordinarily never did. I didn’t know I was like this, she thought with surprise, I didn’t think that I was like an animal scenting trouble from a distance, sensing some other as yet unfocussed predator moving stealthily towards it. She was amazed that these thoughts had come to her since she was not at all imaginative but as she sat there she wondered what it would be like for an animal to feel itself being stalked, death steadily nearing in the long grass. But she was not so helpless as a small animal might be: she could do something about what was happening. She was not going to wait till the teeth bit into her. She was going to do something about it.

And she briskly made the bed with obsessive tidiness. She put the brush away in the drawer removing as much of the hair as she could and placing it in a small coloured bucket that stood in one corner of the room. She turned at the door to make sure that everything was neat and in its proper place before leaving and then she went and made the breakfast.

The two of them, she and Tom, were silent at breakfast as they usually were for Tom was not the sort of person who was conversational in the early morning, nor for that matter was she. A part of her mind was already thinking about her classes and how she would present a particular lesson. She was thinking that she might try to get another cupboard for her room, or a new blackboard of the sort that rolled round and round. Even in the car—whose windows were almost frosted over—they were silent, Tom driving with his usual negligent speed, both of them gazing out of small spaces between the frost at the uniformed pupils who were walking up the road. There they were, willing or unwilling to be educated, and there were the two of them responsible for their education. What a privilege, she thought, what a life’s work. What an immensely complicated thing, he was thinking, what an intricate and often useless business.

The car drew up outside the school and he kissed her briefly before they set off for their respective rooms. As yet there was no one in her room and she stood at the table looking around her at the empty desks, briefly glancing at the blackboard, allowing the day to ascend steadily in her so that she would be able to meet it with whatever knowledge and readiness that she had. She looked at the posters on the walls and felt that she was in her proper place in life, the place that she would probably occupy till she retired. This was her life’s work and she was good at it, she was in control of it. Here the unreasonable was converted into the reasonable, and the inarticulate made articulate. She was a colonist of partially unknown minds, a missionary assimilating new areas to literacy. She waited happily for the class to enter and had almost forgotten her mother-in-law and Tom in the excitement of anticipation and conversion, as if she were a secular nun married to her work. Sometime she would have to try some drama with them, perhaps a little play about an old woman. She knew exactly which girl she would choose to play the part. She had tried drama before but hadn’t done it very well. But she thought that the next time she tried it she might do it competently and with imagination.

Meanwhile in another room Tom was sitting alone, at his desk, waiting. Round him too the school gathered and he assumed the day like a cloak (though in fact he never wore one: his wife, however, always did). Through the window he could see the rowan tree still partially in blossom, its red berries bright as drops of blood, its branches airy and light. The sun made a straight line across the floor to his desk, direct as a ruler. Through the open door he could see the pupils standing at a radiator with newspapers in their hands as they studied the football results. The hall was being prepared for the morning service with seats already laid out. “Oh Christ,” he thought, “here we go again.” The school itself was like a church, ancient, finished, and again with the bubble of laughter that sometimes arose in him spontaneously he thought, “Down that street man must go, bearing only his honour, believing in nothing, a corrupt knight in a corrupt society. Through the Waste Land a man must go, through Margate, feet outstretched on a canoe. “Nothing, nothing, do you hear nothing?” “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” “What is that voice under the door?”

And yet … And yet … The children were not wholly corrupt. They came like seagulls, their beaks outstretched for food. I love them, he thought, I do not love the institution, I love the children. It is they who in their freshness must save the world, though the old must be saved too. It is the human being who must be saved, not this building of stone. If the freshness could only be retained, if the fresh voices would speak and sing, if the unpredictable could survive. Love is all we have. But how hellishly difficulty it was to share out our love to everyone, when so many beaks were thrust at one.

Those children, ready to set out into the world with hope in their eyes, how much he loved them. He himself must once have been like them, unclouded and clear. How beautiful they were, how fresh, how lovable. What a privilege it was to have them in his room, to be in a sense responsible for them. What a grave responsibility it was to feed their minds. What a glory among all the terror. His mother too must have been like them once, though perhaps not so intelligent, hopefully setting out into the future, careless of what it might bring. And look what it had actually brought her.

The bell rang and here they were sitting in front of him. Waiting. For their minister. For the food of the day. And as he started reading
The Waste Land
he could hear from the hall the uninspired singing of ‘To Be a Pilgrim’.

9

A
T ELEVEN O
’
CLOCK
the bell rang and the teachers went to the school dining room for their coffee. There they sat at tables, joked, complained. They discussed children, the unfairness of time-tables, the difficulty of certain classes, the administration which ensured that they did not hear of anything till it was too late. Bearded men mixed with clean-shaven ones, oldish women with very definite views on education mixed with the eager young who were still enthusiastically experimenting. The hubbub was as loud as in any class that had been left unattended. And to the dining room Vera came with the others, though she did not like being among so many people. However she did not want to miss anything of importance, any gossip, any major or minor step that was being taken.

It was a world of people brought together by their daily work, making concessions here and there in the service of others. It was a world of tedium and a world of interest. To it willingly or unwillingly each came with his or her own burden of the day. There was Mr Dawson who complained about everything, whose response to all initiatives was a mechanical “No”, and who, himself lazy and uncooperative, would complain endlessly about lazy and uncooperative pupils. There was Miss Glenn, fresh-faced, efficient and future-loving, who had never in her short life had any doubts about her vocation, and who had dedicated herself utterly to her work till the day when she would receive her token of esteem and step out into the universe without bells or altering children; and Mr Leitch, abrupt and almost brutal, who taught with insensitive conviction and who might equally well have been a farmer or a salesman.

There was the shy Miss Bryce who found great difficulty in controlling her classes, and whose dedication was therefore greater than that of most of the others, for her conscience would not let her alone, and lay beside her even in her bed at night, issuing in terrible dreams of upset chairs and great wild laughing faces. There was Mr Grieve who, once an artist, had found his final happiness in teaching others how to draw and paint, whose room was a celebration of his contentment, and who believed sincerely that one day, yes, one day, he would discover an artist of immense natural talent who might in his interview on TV mention his name as the man who had influenced him most.

It was in fact a whole world that gathered in the dining room. And each moved away from or towards the others in a dance of mutual attraction or repulsion. Sometimes one would find one-self with one group and then another as interests or activities changed. A certain bluffness discouraged melancholy, curiosity encouraged gossip. The school had in some vast random manner gathered all these people together and set up relationships within it. Some loved it, some hated it, some tolerated it, some complained about it. But outside the school there lay another world, considered physically and metaphysically, which became more and more distant, and was often feared. The school itself was an affair of bells and rooms. Into it year after year came the children and then the children, almost unnoticeably, changed and left. Their faces duplicated those of their parents. It was a vast family, boisterous and protected. It was a womb and a museum and a place of learning. Scarred desks told of those who had been there and left.

Inside that world as in any other world people complained and were inconsistent. They wished to be elsewhere at times but there was nowhere else to go. They were frightened at times, happy at other times. A single achievement would make them feel like gods, a single failure would dishearten them. The seasons flowered and withered, and these were dominated by the tasks of the year. It was seldom that any major disaster happened, but minor accidents were magnified. One need not be lonely in the school for if one surrendered to it one could find fulfilment. One could shine with its poor glory, one could live inside one’s dream. One could demand that uniforms should be made compulsory, or one could not. Each could be himself within limits, and those limits were created by the continual rubbing against others, whose personalities were different and therefore sacred.

The school could be considered as a theatre or a church, a continually changing scene or one dominated by rules. It could be dignified or flamboyant but never silent. It was a world which reflected the outer world and as such it had to be borne, for the alternative was worse, the alternative was another world of still greater silence or greater noise, of diminished humanity or loss. And yet if one had come in and looked and listened to it, it would have seemed noisy and cheerful, with people talking intently to others, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, holding brief conferences while standing up, cups in hands.

Miss Donaldson sat among the others, though curiously separate from them at one of the tables, smoking heavily as she always did. It was one of the school jokes that someone who taught R.E. (Religious Education) should find it necessary to smoke more than the acknowledged agnostics and atheists. Perhaps, they surmised, she also drank, in secret. Not that anyone knew very much about her, except that she had not been very long at the school, that she had taken over the R.E. classes because no one else was willing to do so, and that she didn’t seem particularly happy. Certainly she wasn’t a great talker. But the others were content to have her since otherwise it would have meant that they would have to take some of the R.E. classes themselves. R.E. was not taken seriously: indeed all it really meant was that classes were sent to a particular room where it was assumed, sometimes wrongly, that they would be given some instruction on the bible. But in fact no one knew whether they were being taught about religion or not.

Miss Donaldson was a very odd sort of person with a white slab of a face, a stout body, and very large feet: she walked in a limping manner often imitated by her pupils. She had taken a philosophy degree, had taught in other more difficult schools in the city, and had finally found herself at this particular one. She hated what she was doing, for most of the pupils came to her, determined not to work, and would prevent her from doing anything by asking her questions which would set her off, against her better inclinations, down strange tracks of Hinduism, drug addiction, alcoholism and sometimes even sexual mania.

“What about Hell then, miss?” they would ask her. “Do you believe in Hell then, in the tortures and that?” Or, “Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead, miss?” Or, “What did Jesus look like miss? Was he yellow or what?” And then disorganised arguments would start, someone implying that he was a Paki, others imitating Pakistani accents, saying, “Thank you very much, miss. I am thanking you a great deal, miss.” Sometimes they would say, “Why do we have to do R.E., miss? Why do we have to do it if we don’t believe in it? Do you believe in it, miss?” “Tell us about the Catholics, miss. Is it true that the Pope is infallible?” And one or two of the older and more daring pupils would wave green and white scarves shouting, “Cel-tic, Cel-tic.” “Is it true that the Catholics worship idols, miss? It says in the Bible not to worship the Golden Calf, isn’t that right, miss?” “What’s the Golden Calf then,” someone would ask as if attracted by some divine rustic vision, glimpsed perhaps momently on the farm from which he came and where he would look after the cattle during weekends.

Philosophy never taught me this, she would think cynically, philosophy taught me that there was a calmer world than this where bearded tranquil men would speculate about matter, forms, language, morality, with an ease and luxury divorced from the concerns of everyday.

“Do you believe God has a beard, miss?” “Twit, do you think he’s got a stash then?” “What about the Pope, miss? Why doesn’t the Pope ever get married.” Then there would be a communal whisper from which she would hear as if floating on another air the single word “Balls” and she would feel a primitive desire sometimes so intolerably strong that it would nearly overwhelm her.

No, truly this was not what philosophy had taught her. In those university days when she was studying Philosophy she had lived in an exalted fever of study, in an atmosphere of libraries, imagining that the “real world” was that of Kant, whose mind worked like a watch, or that of Wittgenstein whose personality attracted her so much that she thought she was in love with him. It seemed to her that his idea of a one-to-one relationship of objects with the parts of the speech of the language was a beautiful concept which made reality meaningful and radiant. But now here she was teaching R.E. to pupils who did not want to listen.