The Heart of the Country (7 page)

Sonia’s shrink says he reads everything she writes, but Sonia doesn’t believe it. Sonia is going to write on, and then smuggle the manuscript out of here and get it to a publisher. They give you paper to write on if its therapy, but not if you’re writing fiction. Sometimes Sonia can’t remember who’s pulling whose leg.

Facing the Day

Sonia made a joke or so that morning, catching up with Natalie on the walk to school. Natalie wasn’t particularly talkative. She still had this idea that if you kept yourself to yourself everything would be okay. Slam the front door and keep the world out, was her motto. Only now if she slammed the front door the whole house would shake and fall.

‘Car broken down then?’ Sonia asked.

‘Yes,’ said Natalie, conscious of Ben blenching. Obviously it was as he feared, and this embarrassing acquaintance could never now be shaken free. In the file that made its way to school were six females (four of them sponging off the State) and one male, and he was the male. It was a terrible situation. He would be seen, moreover, by friends from school, who were driving past in proper style and comfort, and laughed at. He hated his childhood. It was appalling to be so at the mercy of the adult world: to be obliged to suffer one humiliation after another because of its disinterest or actual sadism. It would have been perfectly possible for his mother to have ordered a taxi and saved him from this ordeal, but she just wouldn’t.

‘Can’t your husband mend the car?’ asked Sonia (the bitch!), and her voice floated in the wind over hedges and fields. I will give you a discourse on hedges presently: about layering. Hedges ought to be layered in the winter, not just have their tops sheared by that machinery which is so dangerous to passing traffic. Branches must be bent, part-severed, and intertwined in all but horizontal position, so a calculated and stock-proof tangle of foliage is achieved. The cuts heal, leaves and flowers spring, birds delight, fieldmice rejoice. (You said presently, Sonia, not now. You mean well, then you forget. Part of your difficulty is your capacity to be sidetracked: into, for example, arson:
shrink
)

‘No,’ said Natalie.

‘What do you keep him for then?’ asked Sonia. That was the joke. (Shall we consider anti-male humour and what we are really trying to say when we indulge in it?:
shrink
)

Natalie laughed politely. Sonia knew then she wanted something.

‘Walking’s all right in this weather,’ said Sonia. ‘It’s when it rains and the cars splash you I hate it. Mostly it’s the women drivers are the worst. And people who have dogs in the back. I don’t know why.’

But Natalie didn’t seem to be listening.

‘Can you tell me about social security?’ was all she asked.

Now she’d come to the right person for that. Sonia was practically a founder member of the Claimants’ Union. (Now defunct by reason of encroaching lethargy. My own theory is that they put something in the glue on the back of the brown envelopes circulated by the DHSS.)

‘Not between now and nine o’clock, no,’ said Sonia. ‘Some time perhaps when I’ve got a week to spare. When I’m dying of malnutrition in the cottage hospital, and have a spare moment from taking the kids to school and back, you come to my bedside and I’ll tell you. Not that they usually admit those dying of malnutrition into hospital these days – they’d have no room for proper contributing citizens if they did, would they? But I might swing it through the Claimants’ Union. Though, now I come to think of it, they’ve closed the Cottage Hospital, so you’d have to take the bus into Bristol to visit me: they might give you a special compassionate allowance to pay that, but by then I’d be dead.’

‘Seriously though,’ said Natalie. She was just a kid herself. She thought I was joking.

‘What do you want to know, precisely? Low Income Family Supplement? That’s great if you swing it, but you have to find yourself a full-time job first. You can get them round here cleaning the milk tankers. Inside, not out. You crawl around inside them all night for sixty pounds a week. The fumes make you sick all the next day, and may do long term damage to the CNS. Central nervous system, to you. And you’re not the type employers are looking for: you might ask for more, little Olivia Twist, or go to the Factory Inspectorate. But you just might be lucky, and actually get the job. Then you could claim a blanket allowance, a whole 50p! Lucky old you. Dog food? No – no pets on the State, I’m afraid. If you’re thinking of going on social security, why don’t you cook and eat the dog?’

Jax was bringing up the rear of our little procession; did I forget to tell you that? Bess was frightened of him, and I’m not surprised. She kept bumping into my legs while I walked, in her attempts to keep out of the beast’s way. I had to keep turning round, and warning her not to go too far out into the centre of the road, where death awaited, not just the fear and exhaustion of walking along its edge.

‘So, no pets,’ Sonia went on. ‘They’ll pay for a colour telly though, so the kids can watch monsters, rape and murder and not feel left out. A spot of sexist singing and dancing and a blown-up body or so and a close-up of a child starved to death by its parents on the news. They’re stopping subsidized school dinners round here. Presently they’ll start handing out a sandwich lunch allowance on a sliding scale, depending on fillings, which will cost more to administer than a free dinner a day for the entire population. That’s the way it goes. Does that answer your question about social security, or the DHSS as it is known to connoisseurs?’

‘Where are their offices?’ she asked. She didn’t even know that. My favourite haunt had somehow passed her by.

It’s no use. I am guilty. I should never have caught up with Natalie that morning. I should have taken a lesson out of her book and kept myself to myself. I wanted to embarrass her and hurt her by asking about her husband, and I was punished.

By Accident on Purpose

You remember the Sally I mentioned, one of the women who ended up in a frilly dress waving a feather duster at the gawping crowds from a blazing float? She was another one who failed, by-accident-on-purpose to do her best for Natalie. That is to say, she really believed she was doing her best for her unfortunate sister, but her own state of mind got in the way. Since you can never tell what your motives are if you’re unhappy, you’d better interfere as little as you can as you go about the world. Or at least do your victims the honour of not trying to justify your actions, once you’ve done what you’ve done.

Sally Bains works up at the office of Coombe Barrow School, where the fees are £1,250 a term, in advance, which for Ben and Alice means £2,500 a term, and all of that owing, and more. Sally’s married to Valentine. Sally and Val were research scientists until the unit where they both worked closed down for lack of government funding. Val was a world expert in ergot-related diseases of wheat, and Sally knew everything there was to know about fungal diseases in bats. But who cares about either, these days? The money came out of fungi and went into the development of defence mechanisms in outer space – Star Wars to you and me. Too late for Val and Sally to change their disciplines: they were in their forties, with bright young twenty-year-olds who never even stopped to read the newspaper treading hot on their heels. So Sally and Val took their redundancy money, sold their house, and bought a cottage in the West Country, putting what was left into High Risk Commodity shares, which a broker told Val were wrongly named. Low risk to the shrewd, he said, high risk only to the incompetent. First the cottage had to have a new roof – that was two thousand, one hundred pounds – and then eight thousand pounds of Val’s money disappeared overnight into some great vat of coffee beans, if you put your hand in which you might pull out a fortune, or more likely lose your hand altogether. Which Val did, so to speak. The day he heard the money had gone, Val stooped to pick up a handkerchief – why didn’t he use a tissue like anyone else? Then it would never have happened – and slipped a disc. He was tense, you see. Rest and manipulation failed; an operation exacerbated rather than soothed the trouble, and now Val lay in bed, depressed, and whether he was in pain or merely thought he was in pain, who could tell, and what difference did it make anyway? Meanwhile Sally worked as a secretary at Coombe Barrow, and thought herself lucky.

The trouble with men who suffer from mild clinical depression – that is to say, not quite as bad as the drugged zombies you meet in here – is that they do tend to drink too much and hit their wives in their frustration, and the more their wives try to help the more they are insulted and berated for their pains. Everything’s wrong and miserable and awful, and whose fault can it be but the wife’s? And since wives tend to take their husband’s view of them, they get confused and wretched themselves, not to mention hit, and feel it’s their fault their husband’s job/back/talent/life has failed, because he keeps saying it is. ‘Look how I’m drinking!’ he raves. ‘Your fault!’ ‘Who, me?’ the startled spouse responds. ‘When I’ve done everything for you all these years! Really me? I suppose it must be, darling, if you say so. How I wish I were nearer what you want, that my breasts were bigger (smaller), my brain was better (worse), that I wasn’t so argumentative (acquiescent), then this would never have happened. I can see how it’s terrible for you, how my failure has driven you to infidelity. Oh, I am so sorry! Weren’t we once happy? What? No? Never? Oh, oh, oh!’ She weeps and wails and laments and he lowers through the once happy home, aggrieved and self-righteous. Well, that’s how I, Sonia, see it: I put it to the shrink and he agreed, but asked why I couldn’t keep my mind on my own problems, which run to the manic rather than the depressive.

As I say, the morning Natalie came up to Sally Bains in the school office Sally herself was distressed and confused. She’d left Val a hump in the bed, with a thermos of coffee beside him for when he woke, and she kissed the top of his head fondly – it was all she could see – and he’d said something and she’d said:

‘What did you say, darling?’ and he’d said:

‘Don’t kiss the top of my head. You know you don’t mean it,’ and she’d said:

‘Oh,’ feeling as if she’d been slapped, and he’d opened an eye and said:

‘Christ. Don’t you know better than to put coffee in a thermos? Couldn’t you at least give it to me in a cup, like other people?’

And since she was late for work – the making of the coffee had made her late, and the ringing of the doctor for a repeat prescription of painkillers for his back, and the phone had been engaged and engaged and engaged, as it always was in the early morning, she just left. And what’s more, he’d had the drawer by the bed open, in which he kept the photograph of the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally twenty years back. She knew she ought to have stayed and taken away the thermos and made fresh coffee and left that (in a cup and saucer: he didn’t like mugs either) by the bed, but somehow that morning she just had to get out. And now she was at the office she was beginning to feel better, only the feeling better was not somehow the true state, was it?
It was a kind of frivolity. Other people lived in a cheerful, trivial world which Val did not allow her to inhabit. And Val was right. She knew well enough that coffee never tastes its best after being in a thermos an hour or so; she should have remembered that, instead of how the thermos would let him sleep on, escape from the pain in his back, and still have something hot and reviving to drink when he woke up. She’d got it
wrong, as usual.

‘Can I ask you something, Mrs Bains?’

‘Ask away.’ Sally smiled brightly. Sally knew that Harry Harris had run off with Marion Hopfoot the beauty queen. Everyone did. Some cared more than others. Most just thought it a good story.

‘How do I go about taking the children out of school? We are just a little financially pushed, and what with the back fees and so forth…’

As she spoke Natalie stopped smiling brightly herself, turned quite pale and sat down. She could not quite grasp what she was saying, let alone the sense or otherwise of saying it. One part of her brain was trying to talk to the other, but couldn’t get through. It kept ringing engaged. It
was a horrible feeling. But look now, rationally, using the brain that
was
attempting to ring through, even if Harry did eventually get in touch, did repent or whatever, did come home, did send a cheque, and it all turned out to be some kind of mistake, she could not rely upon it happening. It was just not sensible to have the children in private schools when there were free ones available. Somehow they had started with the schools and worked back.

‘There has to be a full term’s notice,’ said Sally. ‘You’re liable for fees for the next five months. That’s going to take what’s owing up to about seven thousand. Look, don’t worry. It’s happening all the time. People go bankrupt, husbands run off, someone falls ill, dies. Children are forever being taken out of these schools. There’s nothing permanent about privilege. That’s its point, isn’t it? It’s the battle to stay on top. All tooth and claw and you’re forever fighting to keep on your perch.’

‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ said Natalie. It seemed to her that whenever she asked a simple question she got a reproach in return.

‘Now’s your chance,’ said Sally Bains. ‘The comprehensives round here aren’t bad. Of course they’re on strike a lot of the time. The Government means to privatize all schools, in due course, but you might just get a couple of years free schooling before the state system collapses altogether from lack of funding.’

‘I see,’ said Natalie, unsure whether Sally Bains approved or disapproved of free schools. Sally, of course, had little emotional energy left over from her marriage to approve or disapprove of anything. She spoke out of the memory of herself as a political being, young and vigorous, not as wife of Val Bains, unemployed back-sufferer and depressive.

‘Ring up the headmaster of Quartermante. Don’t let them go to St John’s. No one’s got an O level out of there for five years, and now it’s GCSEs I don’t think they’re even bothering to enter anyone: it’s too expensive. Still, it’s a sort of free child minding service, I suppose, even if it’s not an education.’