An End to Autumn (12 page)

“In earlier poetry,” he continued, “we don’t have this sort of difficulty or at least not to this extent. For what Eliot is doing is this, he is referring to the past, he is continually evoking it as a part of the present, juxtaposing images of order such as those of the Elizabethan against the meaningless present.” But, he though to himself, he was also leaving out the sweating seething world of the real Elizabethans, the world of the streets, of the ballad makers, of those who sold their wares at markets, of the dagger and the murder and the theft.

“But before I go on about that I should like to talk for a moment about fertility symbolism.”

He drew a deep breath. How could he even begin on that, Frazer and the rest of them? The new leader pursuing the old leader in the dark wood, ready to kill him, as the new stag took on the old stag so that on an autumn slope one might find the two of them dead, their antlers locked together among the stones, their eyes glazed.

They were so docile, so quiet, taking all of it down while, outside, the young man was casually manipulating the machine.

The young immediate stag in the cool of the morning. No, he thought, I can’t go on with this. This is not of their world: they are obedient and they listen but this doesn’t belong to them, this belongs only to the world of those who have left the immediate, who have brooded over it till finally it has become a haze, a mist of the morning.

Why should they listen to this story of those who have seen nothingness, who have walked alone in the middle of London listening to the dead sound from the church clock, who have hollow eyes and hollow hearts. What is this to them? For they don’t have hollow eyes and hollow hearts, they are full of hope, ready to set out into the real world of all of us: they have not yet suffered this dispossession.

Why, he asked himself, was Leicester not carbuncular, or Elizabeth or Tristan or for that matter Iseult? No, they must not be allowed to be carbuncular, but the young man must be made so, for the plot demands it, the symmetries require it.

He shut the book abruptly and said, “I think we’ll leave Eliot for a while.” He left the room and went briskly in search of the plays of Sean O’Casey, walking very confidently and surely as if he were a train that had come at last out of a dark tunnel and was picking up speed again, and would later enter a station where there was movement, people passing and repassing, on different errands, the bustle of life itself which cannot be denied, cannot be avoided, which in all conscience cannot be other than it is, unpredictable, spontaneous, untidy, and in some sense inexplicable and finally perhaps holy.

14

O
N THE EVENING
of the dinner Tom went to pick up Mrs Murphy to take her to the house: Ruth Donaldson had her own car. He left his mother nervously sitting in the living room (while Vera was cooking in the kitchen) and now and again checking that her watch was right. She was wearing a brown dress for the occasion while round her neck was a necklace of imitation pearls. The weather had broken and there was a little rain when he set out; the leaves on the road were wet and soggy and it looked for the first time as if winter would soon be coming. The breathless pose in which the trees had rested for so long was slightly disturbed and occasionally a slight wind got up, dishevelling the few leaves that still remained on the branches. It was beginning to darken earlier, and street lamps were going on for the first time.

His car drew up in front of the tenement and he got out and walked into the close at the back of which were piled a lot of cardboard boxes which had probably been stored there by the shopkeeper next door. They looked soggy as if the rain had been getting at them, and indeed there was some water in the close itself. He climbed the wooden stairs slowly, hearing a step creak now and again: he looked out of a window which was set in the wall halfway up and thought for a moment of a “broadbacked figure playing the flute”: he smiled wryly. But all he saw was the rope and posts for hanging up washing, and round the sides a small narrow area which had been dug up and in which some flowers, now wilting, had been planted.

He pressed the bell at the door and waited. Finally footsteps came to the door, and there in front of him was Mrs Murphy. He hadn’t known quite what to expect but this brisk figure, dressed in a flowery frock, was perhaps not quite what he had pictured beforehand. Splay-legged and seeming to move like a sailor on a plunging deck she preceded him into the room.

“Would you take a seat?” she said to him and it was as if she were some socialite whom perhaps she had seen on a film in the past, and whom she was now imitating: the words came out like a false echo of a language that was not natural to her. He felt suddenly depressed as if something dreadful was about to happen, a dinner party composed of people who would be, as it were, reciting words that they did not mean and watching each other like malicious momently-animated dolls. “I won’t be long,” said Mrs Murphy and then turning at the door she said, “Thank you very much for the invitation” and it to him that she was simpering. It occurred to him that she was seeing him as a person from a class higher than her own, a teacher, and that she was therefore trying to make an impression. God, he thought, don’t let her offer me a glass of sherry.

He waited while she readied herself, and looked around the room, studying the photographs on the mantelpiece and the wall. One showed a wedding in which a young girl, with knife poised, was about to cut a three-tiered wedding cake while beside her there stood smiling a thick-set slightly older man who looked like a boxer. In another picture there was a young soldier who was smiling sunnily, his diced cap aslant and negligent on his head.

The room was overcrowded like the one in their own early flat but the ceiling was higher and stained as if it had broken out into a variety of brown measles. He wondered whether this had been caused by condensation over a long period. How old were these houses anyway? He speculated idly that they must be at least a hundred years old and that before Mrs Murphy there had been a succession of tenants, each of them entering the flat with the eternal hope that springs in the human breast of assiduously transforming old rooms to their own desires.

As she entered, having put a long fur coat over her frock, he immediately stood up. Where had she got the fur coat from anyway? She must be richer than he had thought, or perhaps her sons sent her money regularly. There was even a touch of lipstick on her lips.

“Are you ready then, Mrs Murphy?” he asked. “I’m so glad you could come,” and again he heard but this time from himself words that seemed superficial and without feeling, because he could think of little else to say to her, the distance between their two worlds was now so great.

“Yes, I’m ready,” she answered adding, “It was so good of you to have me.” She checked that her key was in her handbag and after she had shut the door they made their way down the stairs, Tom telling her that it was wetter than it had been in previous weeks and she as if for a moment reverting to her early Irish world—but perhaps only repeating the ordinary trivialities of conversation—saying that the farmers would be glad of the rain. It seemed to him that, as he opened the door of the car for her and she stepped into it, clutching her handbag, she looked up at the windows of the tenement briefly as if hoping that some of the neighbours would see her as they peered out from behind their curtains, wondering where she was going and who the toff was that had called on her. But in fact when he followed her brief avid glance he saw no one.

On the way to the house she chattered away about the weather and he asked her how long she had been in the town and what she thought of it.

“I don’t mind it,” she said. “I wouldn’t go back to Ireland now. Did your mother tell you that I come from Ireland? Well, I do. But I wouldn’t go back there. The brothers want me to go back but I wouldn’t.” And Tom imagined a whole host of brothers, wearing dungarees and standing on their crofts, pleading with her to return to the land of Erin which she should never have left in the first place while behind it all there was the music of Ireland, and a singer in a green dress repeated some such word as Mavourneen over and over again, at the same time plucking the strings of a harp.

By the time they had reached the house however she had withdrawn into herself again, clutching her handbag tightly in the seat beside him, as if at any moment she expected that someone would take it away from her. It was darkening appreciably when they stepped out of the car, he opening the door for her: and she remarked, though perhaps she couldn’t make out the object of her compliment very well: “It’s a lovely house you have here.”

“It’s not bad,” said Tom.

She paused for a moment below the light which fell over the threshold, her fur coat heavy and dark and her handbag in her hand. Then she turned to him and for the first time a mischievous smile illuminated her face below the white light:

“Well, into the britch,” she said, surprisingly, and Tom saw her in a sudden flash as she might once have been, a young Irish girl arriving for the first time at the “big house” somewhere in a big city.

“Up the intellectuals, Mrs Murphy,” he said under his breath as he followed her into the house.

15

R
UTH
D
ONALDSON WHO
did not believe in dressing for dinner—and was wearing black slacks and a yellow jersey—sat in front of the fire, a whisky beside her on the long rectangular coffee table. It was ten minutes to seven and she would leave at twenty past. She felt nervous and unsure, unused to going out, though she had talked to Vera and knew who was going to be there. As she drank her whisky, she wished that she hadn’t agreed to go to dinner at all, and felt more than any anticipation her own clumsiness and resentment. If the others wanted to dress up, let them, she would show them what she was, unadorned and without pretence, an awkward person whom no one much wanted or had wanted up till now. The raw whisky comforted her, and she poured herself another one. Like many other lonely people, she was finding that drink was the only antidote to her ever-present sense of isolation, not the philosophy of Plato, nor even the TV or radio. Without it, she would have felt even more deserted and miserable than she actually was and her imperative desires would have been even more unbearable. Sometimes at night before going to bed, she would remove all her clothes and look in the mirror at her heavy breasts, unused, infertile, as if she were gazing at some other being on whom she had all the pity in the world. Yet she did not know whom, on these barren nocturnal occasions, she was offering herself to: her desire was unfocussed like the eyes of a drunk. All she knew was that her desire was towards some other being who would accept her as she was, her heaviness, her ugliness, her tortured hating mind. For she knew deep within herself that isolation is the worst of fortunes, and that without at least one other person, there was no life at all, only existence.

She wondered about Vera Mallow? Why had she invited her? Did she have some reason that she hadn’t told her. Her mother-in-law was to be there, as was a Mrs Murphy and Vera’s husband whom she had never spoken to but whom she considered a rather wet liberal type who preened himself on his fastidiousness. Vera, however, was different: she had a colder more realistic mind and did nothing without real motive. She sensed that with Vera she was in the presence of someone not unlike herself, though prettier in a cold nun-like way. But why had she invited her? Her story about material for a Joseph project was clearly suspect for there was little that she could tell her that she did not already know, and in any case what possible time would there be for discussion of such a subject, during a dinner when there were others as well. No, there was more to it than that. And with the second whisky in her hand she speculated.

It wasn’t simply that Vera had invited her to a dinner where there only would be herself and her husband, for there would also be her mother-in-law and Mrs Murphy. Was there some meaning hidden there? It was as if Vera were trying to tell her something which she did not wish to speak straight out. Did Vera therefore know something of her own history? Had she specially chosen her for some work that she could do, implying that if this work were done then a closer relationship would follow?

She looked around her at the flat—the sofa and chairs covered in red, the reproductions of Van Gogh and Gauguin on the walls, the opposite ones being papered in red and black respectively; and she imagined Vera sitting in front of her, icy and remote, her hands folded on her lap, and the desire was so strong in her that she felt her chest reddening and her face flushing.

I need someone else, she almost screamed, I need someone, almost anyone, I cannot go on like this. Without any attachment at all, what are we? Nothing. We are floating about anchorless in the world, ships adrift in the sea, like the ones she could see, if she had drawn the curtains, out in the bay in front of her. We are ghosts walking about the world, bodiless and without weight. If we are not to hate the world, we need someone, if we are not to succumb to violence and evil, and spiritual death.

She felt herself as a symbol of a definite truth, naked and vulnerable, looking in at the fires of others but condemned to stay outside, snarling in the darkness. I have been given nothing in my whole life, she thought, nothing. I was never loved, not even my mother loved me, she used me but she did not love me. I must break into the circle somewhere somehow. If I don’t break into the circle I shall die.

But how to break into the circle? That was the question. And as she thought about it, the second whisky finished, and the glass beside her on the table she thought she knew what she had to do, she thought she understood why Vera had invited her. It came to her as in a vision which the whisky had created and clarified, a vision so pure that it illuminated her totally in its light; she saw herself as a weapon being used, a pistol or revolver there on the table, a servant whose obedience is accepted without thought. It was so obvious that she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t thought of it before. It lay manifestly evident before her, as if under the bareness of electric light.