Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop (2 page)

Despite its comparable tale of claustrophobic personal distress,
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
is less like
The Metamorphosis
and more like Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
. In that novel, Jane finds refuge in a mansion where she is haunted by the madness of the past, before finding peace. Witting’s novel, in which Isobel recovers from her terrible past in a grand sanatorium, is similarly uplifting in its conclusion. Witting does not want to destroy; like Brontë, she wants to recreate. The impetus for both women’s resurrection is love. It is a love stripped of romance and religion; it is love restored to the simple fact of its necessity and therefore its true potency.

Ultimately
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
speaks even more urgently than its predecessor. The novel is compelling—a true page-turner—while maintaining the complexity we expect of great literature. It is a tragedy that Witting, whose writing has been acclaimed internationally yet remains undervalued in Australia, died before she completed the third and final Isobel book.

An unconventional obituary in the
Guardian
described Witting as a ‘freak’, remarking on her ‘strange juxtaposition of a raw history with a playful, merciless, fastidious mind’. The same can be said of her unforgettable doppelgänger, Isobel Callaghan. ‘Freak’ is a term that Amy Witting might have embraced, given her empathy for the walking wounded, those individuals who are often given such labels and to whom Isobel so unforgettably speaks.

Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

‘How can I write about love,’ Isobel asked herself, ‘when I don’t know the first thing about it?’

She sat at the typewriter staring at the blank page where George should hours ago have made his delicate, sensitive approach to Anna.

Since she had rolled that sheet into the machine, she had played a dozen games of patience, stared out from her attic window at the view of the houses across the street, eaten a baked bean sandwich, chewed a fingernail painfully down to the quick, keeping at bay the thought that the whole enterprise had been a mistake, that perhaps she couldn’t write at all.

Two successful stories and a rave note from an editor and she was off. Living in an attic, how childish. Had she really supposed that three and a half flights of stairs would take her halfway up Parnassus?

She would not get up from the typewriter. She could not give up, she must not fail. She had burnt her boats, thrown up her job…

Now, don’t dodge.

You told Mr Richard to fuck off.

She had screamed at Mr Richard to fuck off. She had screamed in a rage, a flash of red lightning frightening to remember.

I’m not mad, no, not mad. Frank always said that one day I would explode, and so I did. Told him to go and find something useful to do, instead of peering over my shoulder clucking like a bloody half-witted hen. Get the fuck off and let me get on with my work in peace, will you?

He had fucked off, all right, and after a moment of shock and horror, so had she, cleared her desk in a frantic hurry and run, run all the way back to Glebe, bawling. Too ashamed to go back, ever. Run through the front door of the rooming house and up the stairs to her room without for the first time pausing to look for mail in her letter box, where Fenwick’s letter had been waiting to change her life.

Fenwick’s praise had been warming, but it was no help to her now.

‘Oh, come on, George. There you are, in front of Anna, and you have to indicate a certain special interest. The thing exists, doesn’t it? At the least it’s a kind of pairing device. Not very reliable, in my opinion. But that’s beside the point.’

It was not at all beside the point.

This was the final resort. She would not budge from her chair until George had declared himself to Anna.

‘Oh, do come on, George. Spit it out. You can blush and stammer all you like, but get it said. You have plenty to say on other subjects. On politics, I can’t shut you up.’

Nervous, articulate, vain, dyspeptic George was in trouble at the school where he taught History, suspect because of his regrettably left-wing opinions. A parent had complained to the headmaster about his indoctrination of his pupils.

George had had plenty to say to the headmaster. Why couldn’t he speak his heart to Anna?

What was love anyhow?

Her own researches into the matter had been disastrous. One didn’t learn about love in one night stands.

It puzzled her still that an activity which had such a long, extensively documented connection with human love, was regarded indeed as its expression, could be performed with such indifference to the partner and even with dislike and contempt.

‘
You can just piss off now
.’

That had been an extreme example but not, she understood, an exception. At least the young man’s frankness had given her an opening also.

‘I thought I was doing you a favour. Is this how you react when someone does you a favour?’

‘You were ready enough.’

‘Well, yes. That’s the favour I was speaking of.’

‘Oh, thank you very much. Now piss off.’

She had dressed in silence. Sitting on the edge of the bed to pull on her stockings, she had expressed the idea she had been considering as she had stepped into pants and skirt.

‘Look at it this way. There’s a general tradition that sex is connected with…well, with friendly feelings. You seem to see it differently. I was just wondering why.’

He had groaned, seized a clump of his hair in each fist and tugged.

‘A clever bitch. Just what I was needing!’

‘But that’s the point. What do you need? Apart, that is, from the physical thing?’

‘Nothing you’ve got.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about meeting your needs. I just wanted to know what they were. Matter of interest.’

This polite inquiry had seemed to be a very satisfactory reprisal for his insults, though she had not meant it so. She had stooped to put on her shoes; she looked up to find him staring at her white-faced, in baffled fury.

‘Oh, get out!’

She had gone taking with her the honours of war, but why had it been war in the first place?

She could cope with the difficulties of promiscuous women—after all, she was one, had been one. The difficulties of promiscuous men were beyond her.

One thing was established: one didn’t go looking for love in strange beds. She hadn’t found much physical pleasure there either. The whole procedure had been much overrated.

So what was love?

A truce? A temporary suspension of the normal state of hostility between the sexes? That was a bit savage. Shared personal fiction. She knew about that. She had been essential to Mr Richard’s personal fiction, which was that he was gainfully employed at Lingard Brothers, where it was Isobel’s duty to translate the German mail. Mr Richard’s share in the task was to select a letter, probably at random, since he knew no German, to commend it to Isobel’s attention as urgent, to disappear for five minutes or so into his cubbyhole, to dash out and ask her if she hadn’t finished it yet, then to stand behind her clucking, twitching and sighing, until the letter was finished and he could perform the important task of carrying it to Mr Walter, his elder brother and boss.

Mr Richard’s personal fiction was essential to his self-respect. She had worked that out the day Olive had said, ‘Mr Richard, Isobel would get on much faster if you didn’t interrupt her.’

And Mr Richard’s reaction had been not indignation but fear.

Seeing the dread in his eyes before he turned and walked away, she had resolved on tolerance. ‘Let him have his little dream of importance. I can afford it, now that I know the fear behind it.’

According to her theory of shared personal fiction, she had been having a love affair with Mr Richard. Scrub that definition.

Tolerance had failed, after all.

Well, she had had a headache. The German words had been drifting and eluding her, trying her temper already. Truly, she had seen red, the flash of lightning which had seemed to split her skull had been bright scarlet. So she had stripped poor big, flabby Mr Richard to his small, cowering soul. Not pretty.

No use expecting a reference, either. She had slammed that door behind her, all right.

It had been a matter of timing. Fenwick’s letter had seemed like a directive. If the letter hadn’t come that very day, found her jobless, without prospects, frightened, too, by that flash of red lightning…

A place to hide. A signpost to the future and a place to hide. It was timing not only to the day but to the hour. She had stopped crying, had washed her face, combed her hair and discovered that she was hungry. She had decided then to defy fate and brace herself for the ordeal of breaking the news to Aunt Noelene with cinnamon toast and real coffee at Repin’s. She had found Fenwick’s letter in her box on the way out, had noted with a lift of the spirits that it was a thin one, promising acceptance, and had put it in her bag unread. It would be an extra treat with the cinnamon toast. So it was in the cheerful and reassuring atmosphere of the crowded café that she had read it at last.

Why not? she had thought, reading and rereading the letter. She had savings, all of fifty-six pounds in the bank, a typewriter and—it had seemed at that moment—an infinite capacity for fiction and, perhaps, talent. Fenwick thought so.

The attic too had seemed part of a grand plan. The tall, shabby rooming house would, she had told herself, be full of stories. But in that house there seemed to be one story only, and the people she passed on the stairs lived it in the privacy of misery, the last stand of human dignity. The odd old lady alone, mumbling, shuffling along the street in slippers with her few provisions in her string bag, the single mother with the two whining children, tired, harassed and sullen—they had closed upon their fate, their looks said, ‘Keep away.’

And Mr Lynch.

She averted her thoughts from Mr Lynch and fixed them on the uncooperative George.

So you know nothing about love. You write about plenty of things you know nothing about. What do you know about people in a suicide pact? Fenwick had said it was writer’s intuition.

It didn’t work with love.

Right. If intuition won’t work, and you don’t have experience to guide you, and this is one you can’t get from observation, use your intelligence, use what you do know.

She typed.

‘“Anna,” said George. “I love you.”’

No. Apart from being absolute corn, and out of context, it doesn’t leave George a retreat. Being George, he’ll be tentative, testing the water.

‘“Anna, do you know you have beautiful eyes?”’

So Anna, being Anna, will answer, ‘All the better to see you with.’

It has to be more than a compliment, a suggestion of good faith and serious intentions.

A way of retreat for George, a promise of commitment for Anna.

Oh, the hell with the pair of you. George can be a crusty old bachelor, Anna can wither on the stem.

She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, crumpled it and tossed it into the basket at her feet.

It was worse than lack of experience, or lack of imagination. This was the dead country, the airless space where she could not breathe nor move nor speak.

It was not a matter to brood on.

That settled it. She would go out this evening after all. She would go to the McIvors’.

She hadn’t meant to go to the McIvors’, having a suspicion that she had worn out her welcome. Liza had said, last Friday evening, without warmth, ‘You’re getting to be quite a regular.’

What had she meant by that? Had she meant ‘quite a pest’ or ‘quite a freeloader’?

Duncan’s letter had been warm enough. Her first fan letter ever, it was another she knew by heart:

Any Friday evening didn’t mean every Friday evening.

There was another reason for avoiding the McIvors. The trouble with success was that it roused expectations. Questions like, ‘What are you working on now?’ That was not a question one welcomed when one was spending hours staring at a blank sheet of paper in a typewriter.

She couldn’t stay alone with it all evening. It would have to be the McIvors’.

If she went to the McIvors’, she must take a contribution. That might be what Liza had been hinting, that she was freeloading. Other people brought flagons of wine, and sometimes bottles. A bottle might be insufficient. One problem about being poor was that one couldn’t afford to look poor.