Quartet in Autumn (2 page)

The door opened and a young black girl, provocative, cheeky and bursting with health, entered the room.

'Anything for the post?' she asked.

The four were conscious of the way she looked at them, perhaps seeing Edwin, large and bald with a pinkish face, Norman, small and wiry with his bristly grey hair, Marcia with her general look of oddness,
Letty,
fluffy and faded, a Home Counties type, still making an effort with her clothes.

'Post?' Edwin was the first to speak, echoing her question. 'Hardly yet, Eulalia. The post does not have to be collected until half past three, and it is now' — he consulted his watch — 'two forty-two precisely. Just trying it on,' he said, when the girl retired, defeated.

'Hoping to get off early, lazy little so-and-so,' said Norman.

Marcia closed her eyes wearily as Norman began to go on about 'the blacks'. Letty tried to change the subject, for it made her uneasy to criticize Eulalia or to be guilty of any unkindness towards coloured people. Yet the girl was irritating and needed to be disciplined, even though there was no doubt that her exuberant vitality was disturbing, especially to an elderly woman who felt herself in contrast to be greyer than ever, crushed and dried up by the weak British sun.

Tea came at last and just before five o'clock the two men packed up what they were doing and went out of the room together, though they would separate on leaving the building, Edwin to the Northern Line for Clapham Common and Norman to the Bakerloo for Kilburn Park.

Letty and Marcia began a more leisurely tidying up. They did not speak of or break into gossip about the two men, who were accepted as part of the office furniture and not considered worthy of comment unless they did something surprisingly out of character. Outside, the pigeons on the roof were picking at each other, presumably removing insects. Perhaps this is all that we as human beings can do for each other, Letty thought. It was common knowledge that Marcia had recently had a serious operation. She was not a whole woman; some vital part of her had been taken away, though whether womb or breast was not generally known, Marcia herself revealing only that she had undergone 'major surgery'. But Letty did know that Marcia had had a breast removed, though even she did not know which one. Edwin and Norman had speculated on the matter and discussed it in the way men did; they felt that Marcia ought to have told them about it, seeing that they all worked together so closely. They could only conclude that the operation had made her even more peculiar than she had been already.

In the past both Letty and Marcia might have loved and been loved, but now the feeling that should have been directed towards husband, lover, child or even grandchild, had no natural outlet; no cat, dog, no bird, even, shared their lives and neither Edwin nor Norman had inspired love. Marcia had once had a cat but old Snowy had long since died, 'passed on' or 'been taken', however one liked to put it. In such circumstances women may feel a certain unsentimental tenderness towards each other, expressed in small gestures of solicitude, not unlike the pigeons picking insects off each other. Marcia, if she felt the need for such an outlet, was incapable of putting it into words. It was Letty who said, 'You look tired — shall I make you a cup of tea?' And when Marcia refused the offer, she went on, 'I hope your train won't be too crowded, that you'll get a seat — it should be better now, getting on for six o'clock.' She tried to smile at her, but when she looked at Marcia she saw that her dark eyes were alarmingly magnified behind her glasses, like the eyes of some nocturnal tree-climbing animal. A lemur or a potto, was it? Marcia, glancing sharply at Letty, thought, she's like an old sheep, but she means well even if she seems a bit interfering at times.

Norman, speeding northwards on the Stanmore branch of the Bakerloo line, was going to visit his brother-in-law in hospital. Now that his sister was dead there was no direct link between him and Ken, and Norman felt pleasantly virtuous at going to see him. He has no one, he thought, for the only child of the marriage had emigrated to New Zealand. In fact Ken did have somebody, a woman friend whom he expected to marry, but she did not visit on the same day as Norman. 'Let him come on his own,' they had said to each other, 'for after all he has no one and the visit will be a bit of company for him
.
'

Norman had never been in hospital himself but Marcia had dropped many hints about her experiences and especially about Mr Strong, the surgeon who had cut her up. Not that Ken's experience could be compared with hers but it gave one an idea. Norman was ready to surge through the swing doors with the crowd into the ward when the signal was given. He had not brought flowers or fruit, it being understood between them that the visit was all that was expected or required. Ken was not much of a one for reading either, though he was quite glad to glance at Norman's
Evening
Standard
By profession he was a driving examiner and his present stay in hospital was the result, not of an accident with a middle
-
aged woman driver on test, as was jokingly assumed in the ward, but of a duodenal ulcer brought about by the worrying nature of life in general, to which the anxieties of his job must surely have contributed.

Norman sat down by the side of the bed, averting his eyes from the other patients. Ken seemed a bit low, he thought, but men did not look their best in bed. There was something very unattractive about the average man's pyjamas. The ladies made more of an effort with their pastel-coloured nighties and frilly bed jackets which Norman had caught glimpses of when he passed the women's medical ward on his way up. Ken's bedside table held only a box of paper handkerchiefs and a bottle of Lucozade beside the regulation plastic water jug and glass, but in the recess underneath Norman could see a metal bowl for vomiting and a curiously shaped 'vase' of a grey, cardboard-like material which he suspected was something to do with passing urine — waterworks, as he put it The sight of these half-concealed objects made him feel uneasy and resentful, so that he didn't quite know what to say to his brother-in-law.

'Seems quiet tonight,' he remarked.

'The telly's broken down.'

'Oh, so that's it. I thought there was something different.' Norman glanced towards the centre table where the great box stood, its face now grey and silent as its viewers in their beds. It should have been covered with a cloth, if only for the sake of decency. 'When did this happen?'

'Yesterday, and they haven't done anything about it. You'd think it was the least they could do, wouldn't you?'

'Well, it'll give you more time for your thoughts,' said Norman, meaning to be sarcastic, even a little cruel, for what thoughts could Ken have better than telly? He could not have known that Ken did indeed have thoughts, dreams really, of the driving school he and his woman friend planned to set up together; how he lay thinking of names — something like 'Reliant' or 'Excelsior' was obviously suitable, then his fancy was suddenly arrested by the name 'Dolphin' and he had a vision of a fleet of cars, turquoise blue or buttercup yellow, swooping and gliding over the North Circular, never stalling at the traffic lights as learners so often did in real life. He thought too about the make of car they would have - nothing foreign or with the engine at the back — that seemed to be against nature, like a watch with a square face. He could not reveal any of this to Norman, who disliked the motor car and couldn't even drive one. Ken had always felt a sort of pitying contempt for him, being so unmanly and working as a clerk in an office with middle-aged women.

They sat almost in silence and it was a relief to both of them when the bell went and the visit was at an end.

'Everything all right?' Norman asked, now eagerly on his feet.

'The tea's too strong.'

'Oh,' Norman was nonplussed. As if he could do anything about a thing like that! What did Ken expect? 'Couldn't you ask Sister or one of the nurses to make it weaker or put more milk in it?'

'You'd still taste the strength, even so. It's strong to begin with, you see. Anyway I couldn't ask Sister or one of the nurses — it's not their job.'

'Well, the lady that makes the tea, then.'

'Catch me doing that,' said Ken obscurely. 'But strong tea's the last thing I should have with my complaint.' Norman shook himself like a tetchy little dog. He hadn't come here to be involved in this sort of thing, and he allowed himself to be hustled away by a bossy Irish nurse, with never a backward glance at the patient in the bed.

Outside, his irritable mood was intensified by the cars that rushed past, preventing him from crossing the road to the bus stop. Then he had to wait a long time for a bus and when he reached the square where he lived there were more cars, parked side by side, overlapping on to the pavement. Some of them were so large that their hindquarters — rumps, buttocks and bums — jutted over the kerb and he had to step aside to avoid them. Bugger,' he muttered, kicking one of them with a small ineffectual foot. 'Bugger, bugger, bugger.'

Nobody heard him. The almond trees were in flower but he did not see them and was unconscious of their blossom shining in the lamplight. He entered his front door and went into his bed
-
sitting room. The evening had exhausted him and he did not even feel that he had done Ken much good.

Edwin had spent a much more satisfactory evening. The attendance at the sung Mass had been pretty much as usual for a weekday — only seven in the congregation but the full complement in the sanctuary. Afterwards he and Father G. had gone to the pub for a drink. They had talked church shop — whether to order a stronger brand of incense now that the Rosa Mystica was nearly finished — should they let the young people organize the occasional Sunday evening service with guitars and that — what would be the reaction of the congregation if Father G. tried to introduce Series Three?

'All that standing up to pray,' Edwin said. People wouldn't like that.'

'But the Kiss of Peace — turning to the person next to you with a friendly gesture, rather a...' Father G. had been going to say 'beautiful idea', but perhaps, given his particular congregation, it wasn't quite the word.

Remembering the emptiness of the church at the service they had just attended, Edwin was also doubtful — not more than half a dozen dotted among the echoing pews and nobody standing next to anybody to make any kind of gesture — but he was too kind to spoil Father G.'s vision of a multitude of worshippers. He often thought regretfully of those days of the Anglo-Catholic revival in the last century and even the more sympathetic climate of twenty years ago, where Father G., tall and cadaverous in cloak and biretta, would have been rather more in place than in the church of the nineteen seventies where so many of the younger priests went in for jeans and long hair. One such had been in the pub that evening. Edwin's heart sank as he visualized the kind of services at
his
church. I think perhaps we'd better keep the evening service as it is,' he said, thinking dramatically, over my dead body, seeing himself trampled down by a horde of boys and girls brandishing guitars
...

They parted outside Edwin's neat semi-detached house in a street not far from the common. Standing by the hatstand in the hall, Edwin was reminded of his dead wife, Phyllis. It was the moment of waiting outside the sitting room door before going in that brought her into his mind. He could almost hear her voice, a little querulous, asking, 'Is that you, Edwin?' As if it could be anybody else! Now he had all the freedom that loneliness brings — he could go to church as often as he liked, attend meetings that went on all evening, store stuff for jumble sales in the back room and leave it there for months. He could go to the pub or the vicarage and stay there till all hours.

Edwin went upstairs to bed humming a favourite Office Hymn, 'O Blest Creator of the Light'. It was tricky, the plainsong tune, and his efforts to get it right diverted his attention from the words. In any case it would be going a bit far to regard tonight's congregation as 'sunk in sin and whelmed with strife', as one line of the hymn put it. People nowadays wouldn't stand for that kind of talk. Perhaps that was one reason why so few went to church.

Two

So
OFTEN
NOW
Letty came upon reminders of her own
mortality or, regarded less poetically, the different stages towards death. Less obvious than the obituaries in
The Times
and the
Telegraph
were what she thought of as upsetting' sights. This morning, for instance, a woman, slumped on a seat on the Underground platform while the rush hour crowds hurried past her, reminded her so much of a school contemporary that she forced herself to look back, to make quite sure that it was
not
Janet Belling. It appeared not to be, yet it could have been, and even if it wasn't it was still somebody, some woman driven to the point where she could find herself in this situation. Ought one to
do
anything? While Letty hesitated, a young woman, wearing a long dusty black skirt and shabby boots, bent over the slumped figure with a softly spoken enquiry. At once the figure reared itself up and shouted in a loud, dangerously uncontrolled voice, 'Fuck off!' Then it couldn't be Janet Belling, Letty thought, her first feeling one of relief; Janet would never have used such an expression. But fifty years ago nobody did — things were different now, so that was nothing to go by. In the meantime, the girl moved away with dignity. She had been braver than Letty.

That morning was a flag day. Marcia peered at the young woman standing with her tray and rattling tin outside the station. Something to do with cancer. Marcia advanced, quietly triumphant, a 10p coin in her hand.

The smiling girl was ready, the flag in the form of a little shield poised to stab into the lapel of Marcia's coat.

'Thank you,' she said, as the coin clattered down into the tin.

'A
very
good cause,' Marcia murmured, 'and one very dear to
me.
You see, I too have had
...'