So Pauline is briefly startled. And then she sees the car, and Maurice who unfolds from the driving seat, stumbling as he does so (that slight infirmity in one leg) and reaches into the back for the Gladstone bag. Pauline returns at once from her seething elsewhere, registers Maurice and continues in a different key to chop and slice ingredients for the casserole she is making. Pauline is not a vehement cook. She eats in the spasmodic and opportunistic way of those who live alone and she seldom spends time on the careful preparation of food, but today she has shopped in the village and decided on impulse to make this casserole, which will do for her sup per and can then be put in the freezer as a hostage to fortune. Even if those two are coming for the weekend it is by rights her turn to act as Saturday-night hostess. The casserole will come in handy. She assembles the different piles – pinkish-white umbrella-shaped slices of mushroom, translucent curves of onion, scarlet sections of pepper – she hears the front door slam next door, Maurice’s voice, the sound of Luke – she sweeps the vegetables into a frying pan and starts to cut a slab of meat into cubes. From time to time she looks out of the window, across the track at the wheat which is changing colour by the day. She remembers the green rash of early spring, which was succeeded by a thick pelt, but cannot now see them in her head and thinks again how odd it is that some things hang there, indestructible – Harry’s face and voice on a street corner, the feel of his hand on her arm – but the ordinary processes of change are so hard to recover. What did that hedge look like in May? Why does language hang there in the mind – a voice, a sequence of words – but she cannot now summon up the cuckoo?
She completes the preparations for the casserole and puts it in the oven. The phone rings.
‘I merely wish to tell you,’ says Hugh, ‘that the Alma-Tadema exhibition is not to be missed. I strongly advise that you emerge however briefly from this self-imposed exile before it comes off. I forgot to mention it the other day.’
‘Mmn … Well, I’ll see. Maybe.’
Hugh expounds further upon this exhibition. Eventually he senses a certain inadequacy in her response. ‘Is all well? You sound a bit … unsettled.’
Pauline hesitates. ‘I suppose all’s well. Maybe I am unsettled. I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about Harry.’
‘I hope he hasn’t been bothering you,’ says Hugh sternly. He knows about Harry’s occasional overtures.
‘Oh no – I don’t mean Harry these days. I mean Harry then.’
‘Ah. I see.’ Now Hugh is in retreat. He is not a man for emotional confidences. He has a working knowledge of Pauline’s past and of Harry’s role but does not care to mull over the matter, as Pauline well knows.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Pauline. ‘A tot of whisky and a dose of the telly will calm me down nicely.’
‘Good-night then, my dear. And I urge you to bear the Alma-Tadema in mind. I shall pursue the matter.’
The light soaks away at last and World’s End stands isolated in the summer night. Pauline draws her curtains, eats a helping of the casserole and zaps through the airwaves in search of distraction. She dips into Californian simulated crime, into the wildlife of the Siberian tundra, into the problems of emigrant Albanians. Eventually, quite late, she switches off, tidies up the kitchen, opens the back door to empty rubbish into the bin. She stands then for a moment because it seems that everything is not quite as it should be, and indeed it is not, for a wedge of darkness beyond her suddenly moves.
‘Christ, Maurice!’ she says irritably. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’
‘Sorry.’ He steps forward into the light, and deals her the Maurice smile – confiding, conspiratorial. ‘I was enjoying the night. Teresa’s gone to bed. Have a drink?’
‘No, thanks.’ Maurice has had several, Pauline sees. ‘I’m going to bed too.’
‘All right, then – abandon me.’ He empties his glass. He stretches – sensual, cat-like. He gestures at the sky – the sizzling stars, the sickle moon. ‘Look at that! Life’s pretty good, isn’t it, Pauline?’
She stares at him for an instant, and goes inside.
12
The Museum of Rural Life is well attended on this Saturday afternoon but not crowded because the day is as usual remorselessly fine and most people have chosen to amuse themselves in the open air. It is Maurice of course who has proposed the visit to the museum, which is an item on his research itinerary, and the others have acquiesced for their own reasons. James and Carol are compliant because they are visitors and visitors should comply. Moreover, so far as James is concerned this expedition is a professional concern, in the service of Maurice’s book. Teresa is there because she is driven to be where Maurice is, and Pauline, who knows this, is there herself because it is conceivable that her presence might be of some help to Teresa.
The museum is in the centre of a small county town that has escaped the commercial and industrial fate of Hadbury and now earns its keep as a display of well-groomed buildings with attendant antique shops, pubs and restaurants. Outside the museum stand the town stocks, also scrupulously maintained and with an explanatory text in gothic script. Maurice pauses to take a photograph, though his subject is not the stocks per se but the giggling adolescents who are trying to fit their legs through the holes. No doubt this will furnish some ironic sub-text in the book.
Pauline stalks the rooms with curled lip. She inspects the elegant arrangements of flails and scythes and sickles and shears (shapely artefacts spotlit against a white wall) and the facsimile dairy with its churns and creamers. She stares at the sepia photographs of quaintly clad folk going about their tasks – reaping, mowing, shoeing horses, milking cows. The children assembled for a Sunday School group portrait, looking out at her from the 1870s, inscrutable, pinned up there now as a museum exhibit. There is a frozen gentility about this entire assemblage. The objects displayed are detached from any function and have become décor, the explanatory text and pictures invite an attitude of scientific observation. This is how this was done; this is the process for doing that. But these are the people who lived at World’s End, thinks Pauline, and it was not thus at all. These are the men and women to whose spirits she occasionally offers guilty apology. As though they should care.
The museum is tactfully instructive, mindful that visitors are here of their own volition and that if they feel unduly hectored they will head for the pub or the craft boutiques immediately instead of later. So it tempers information with appealing displays. Pauline is now in the room devoted to an explanation of agricultural change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is a model of a village field system, before and after enclosure – an intriguing miniature layout of ploughed fields, fallow land, meadows, woodland, common land. There are framed copies of Enclosure Acts. There are panels that give accounts of rural discontent in large print and with short sentences accompanied by grainy representations of disaffected peasantry.
Pauline looks round for the others. The museum is a sequence of smallish rooms so that the party tends to become separated, perhaps because people move at different paces, perhaps for other reasons. Sometimes she can see them all, sometimes not. Right now Maurice is at the far side of this room with Carol and James, the three of them inspecting some display of metalware. Teresa has just come in, with Luke asleep in the buggy.
Pauline is aware of Teresa. She is painfully aware of what Teresa is doing. Teresa is watching Maurice. She is working desperately at apparent detachment – moving idly from one item to another – but all the time she is seeing only Maurice.
The metalwork at which they are looking is an exhibit of man-traps.
‘Ouch!’ says Carol.
James peers at some rusty marks on the iron teeth. ‘Blood, do you think?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ says Maurice.
‘Oh, come on …’ says Carol. ‘They’d have cleaned them up before they put them in here.’
James moves away, wanders off into the next room. Carol and Maurice remain where they
are, looking now at each other rather than at the display.
‘It’s rust, not blood,’ says Carol. She is smiling, as though they share a joke.
‘Not necessarily,’ says Maurice. ‘There could be an argument for retaining what may or may not be blood. It increases authenticity.’
They continue to look at one another. If they are conscious that they are observed they do not care. Is this innocence or insouciance? Teresa has shot a glance across the room and Pauline knows that this is what she is thinking. Are they? Do they? Is all this in my head alone?
‘Rust,’ says Carol.
‘Well, you may be right,’ says Maurice. ‘We’ll never know, will we?’ And they move on together into the next room, without turning, without looking round for anyone else.
Pauline walks across to examine the man-traps. She sees the jagged teeth, the simple but efficient mechanism. Teresa joins her, stands beside her staring unseeing at the traps. And it seems to Pauline that the room is filled with a silent scream. The scream of some hapless nineteenth-century labourer? Or Teresa’s rigidly controlled distress?
‘This is an appalling place,’ says Pauline. ‘Let’s get out and find some coffee.’
Dinner in Pauline’s kitchen. The five of them, and the disembodied presence of Luke who occasionally sighs or snuffles from the plastic dish of the baby-alarm. Drinks were taken earlier in the garden, they have worked through the smoked mackerel Pauline produced for a starter and are now on the casserole. Maurice is in fine fettle. He has orchestrated the evening, steering the conversation, killing off stale subjects and producing new ones with a flourish. He is entirely evenhanded in his attention – he is casually familiar with both James and Carol, joshing James in the way that appears to be the distinguishing feature of their relationship. Now and then he treats Teresa to an aside, when a note of intimacy creeps into his voice. He makes much of Pauline, perhaps because she is technically the hostess, perhaps for some more complex reason. Now he is opening a further bottle of the wine he has contributed.
‘Another?’ says Teresa.
‘Another.’ He pats her shoulder, propitiating. ‘We’ve earned it, haven’t we, James? A working weekend.’
James holds out his glass. ‘If you say so. It hardly feels like work – a couple of hours on Chapter Eight and a trundle round a museum.’
‘I loved that museum,’ says Carol. ‘It was like the set for one of those TV adaptations of Hardy. It made you want to go and live there in a long skirt and a shawl, like Tess.’
‘I can’t see you settling for the lifestyle of a milkmaid,’ says James. ‘But you’d look the part, properly got up.’
Carol pulls a face at him. Yes, thinks Pauline – subtract the designer T-shirt in that fetching cornflower blue to set off the eyes, and the white jeans and the trainers, mess up the fifty-quid haircut, add some grime and a few calloused fingers and she fits the stereotype. That pink-and-gold buttery look. Youth, health, sex.
Maurice is grinning. ‘How did it grab you, Pauline? The museum.’
‘It didn’t,’ says Pauline. ‘Voyeurism. Nostalgic tripe. There’s another helping of casserole if anyone wants it.’
‘Goodness!’ says Carol with a little laugh. ‘That’s pretty dismissive.’ She glances at Maurice.
Maurice is watching Pauline. He is delighted, it would seem. ‘Voyeurism? Tell us more, Pauline. I didn’t realize you felt so strongly.’
Pauline looks at him coolly. Carol she ignores. ‘Where are the blood and sweat, I ask? Where are the children with rickets and the dead babies and the chronic illness and the untreated disease and the festering injuries and the aching bones and the cold and the wet and the grinding labour each day and every day?’
Carol grimaces. ‘Surely it wasn’t as dire as all that?’
James holds out his plate. ‘Would it be insensitive to claim the last helping of casserole?’
‘Good point,’ says Maurice to Pauline. ‘The museum as cosmetic exercise.’
Pauline dumps casserole on to James’s plate. ‘No doubt you already have a chapter on that.’
‘I do, as it happens.’
The baby-alarm gives a plaintive cry.
‘Uh-oh …’ says Carol, solicitous, looking at Teresa.
There is a more positive wail. Teresa gets up and leaves the room.
‘The exhibits at the Tower of London are hardly cosmetic,’ says James. ‘Instruments of torture. Dungeons. The scaffold.’
‘Oh, that’s different. People don’t identify in the same way. It’s historical violence so it’s over and done with. Besides, disease and discomfort don’t fit in with what a Museum of Rural Life is seeking to promote. The country is better. The country is healthy. The country is arcadia.’ Maurice looks at Pauline for endorsement but Pauline is now stacking plates, rather violently, and pays him no attention.
‘Interesting,’ says James, ‘I’d never thought of it like that. The museum industry is going to hate this book. But all the better. It will generate controversial reviews and promote lots of interest.’
‘Can I do anything, Pauline?’ inquires Carol.
‘No, thanks. There’s cheese but we’ll wait till Teresa comes back.’
‘In that case where’s your loo?’ says James.
‘Up.’ Pauline turns to the sink and puts the plates into the basin. Behind her Maurice and Carol are talking about an industrial museum in the Potteries which Maurice has visited. Carol is saying she’d like to go. ‘We’ll fix something up,’ says Maurice. ‘I need to check it out again anyway.’ Pauline goes into the larder to fetch the cheese. She unwraps it and puts it on the board and hunts for a packet of biscuits. When she returns Maurice is standing behind Carol’s chair, reaching for the wine on the dresser and Pauline sees for an instant his other hand resting on the nape of Carol’s neck before it slides away and Maurice is busy filling glasses.
James returns. ‘Lethal stairs you’ve got, Pauline.’
‘I know. You learn caution.’
‘A glass of red, Pauline?’ asks Maurice. ‘Or are you staying with the white?’
‘Neither.’
He is brought up short by the edge to her voice. She sees a sudden shock in his eyes, a wariness. And then it is extinguished – he is putting the wine bottle on the dresser, returning to his seat, telling James that they must all go to this museum in the Potteries at some point. And Teresa has come back into the room.
‘OK?’ says Pauline.
Teresa nods. ‘I hope so.’ She sits down. Cheese is passed around, and fruit. The room is littered with the debris of eating and drinking. An inviting scene, you might think. Convivial, relaxed. But Pauline is aware only of a spiderweb of tension, of the force-lines between this person and that, of the shuttered look in Teresa’s eyes, of the way in which people glance at one another, or do not. Only James perhaps is excluded, eating a peach, that wing of black hair flopping on his forehead, talking on, agreeably blurred with wine.
It is Monday, and they have gone, Carol and James. World’s End is embarked upon another working week – Maurice in his study, Pauline in hers, Teresa in attendance upon Luke. Chaundy’s tractor has roared back and forth along the track upon some errand, the wheat is ripening by the hour. Pauline has chatted to the postman, received the weather forecast and learnt that there was a nasty pileup on the main road last night. She has taken their mail in to Maurice and Teresa and seen that Teresa’s mood has changed, that the shuttered look has gone. Again, something has happened – something has been said or done and now Teresa’s state of mind is different. She is doubting her own conjectures. She is in remission. Pauline sees this and shivers for her. She returns to her own cottage, goes up to the study and immerses herself in the North Sea oil industry.
The phone rings. ‘It’s me. Chris.’
‘Hi!’ says Pauline. ‘How’s it going with the revision of that chapter?’
‘Well, it isn’t, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps you should climb your mountain
again. Or a different one. Get yourself unblocked.’
‘I don’t think that would help,’ says Chris Rogers dourly.
A pause. ‘Is anything wrong?’ Pauline inquires.
‘Yes. My wife’s gone. She’s left me.’
‘Oh.’ A further pause. ‘Oh, dear,’ says Pauline. Then, cautiously, ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’
‘Yes. She’s gone to her mother.’
‘Ah. In that case I think one can safely say she’ll be back. It won’t last.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I do,’ says Pauline firmly. ‘But it’s a shot across the bows, put it that way. You’ll have to do some thinking. About what the problem may be.’
‘I am,’ says Chris. ‘I’m thinking like crazy. When I’m not cooking and feeding the kids and doing the washing.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t like living half-way up a Welsh mountain.’
‘You could have a point there.’
‘Promise her Swansea,’ says Pauline. ‘Maybe that’ll do the trick. I mean … things have been reasonably OK between you hitherto, have they?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Where does her mother live?’
‘In a small village in Shropshire.’
‘In that case I give her a week,’ says Pauline. ‘She’ll be back. Have the children make piteous phone calls.’
In the late afternoon Pauline, Teresa and Luke take a walk up the track as far as Chaundy’s chicken houses just over the brow of the hill. At first Maurice is going to accompany them. He needs some fresh air, he says. He is all set to come and then the phone rings. Someone from English Heritage is returning a call he made earlier. ‘Go,’ he says, his hand on the mouthpiece. ‘This’ll take a while. Maybe I’ll catch you up.’ ‘OK,’ says Teresa. She is still in remission, Pauline sees. She has persuaded herself that all is well, that she was mistaken, that she misinterpreted whatever it was she saw or heard to send a spear of ice into her guts. Of course he isn’t, she has told herself. Of course they aren’t. And so she blithely sets off up the track with Pauline, the buggy rattling over the potholes, Luke chanting out some wordless paean of praise to the wheat, to the grass, to the cool blue sky.