7
‘Chris Rogers?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Pauline Carter. Your copy editor.’
‘Oh – right. Could you just hang on a moment?’
There is background noise of children, a running tap, a radio. Some of this is eliminated and Chris Rogers returns to the phone. Pauline knows nothing of him except that this is his first book and he lives in mid-Wales. She explains that she is half-way through her work on his manuscript and it might be a good thing to sort out a few queries at this stage. She asks if he has a fax.
‘I do not,’ says Chris Rogers. From his tone of contemptuous rejection you would think that she had asked if he had a Kalashnikov rifle.
‘Never mind. I’ll send it first-class post.’
‘That’ll probably get here.’
‘It’s lovely country where you are,’ says Pauline encouragingly. She has looked it up on the road atlas – a pin-prick in Powys.
‘It’s cheap country, is what it is,’ replies Chris Rogers. He explains that he and his wife rent a cottage that no one else wants half a mile up a rough track in an empty valley. ‘I reckon country doesn’t come much cheaper.’ This seems to be a matter of pride.
‘And scenic into the bargain,’ Pauline offers.
‘Scenic you can keep,’ says Chris. ‘Downtown Manchester, that’s where I’d like to be. It’ll be a long time before we achieve that. At the moment we aspire to Swansea. I don’t suppose this book’s going to make me rich, is it?’
Pauline knows that it isn’t. She hesitates. ‘Well, of course it’s very difficult to …’
‘Not to worry. Anyway, I’ve just spent fifty quid on a load of firewood for next winter. More to the point – how did you get on with it? Does it make sense? Are there a lot of spelling mistakes?’
Pauline mentions a few queries she needs to raise with him. ‘But it’s all in the notes I’ll send you. I have had a bit of a problem with the names of characters. Talusa, for instance.’
‘I made them all up.’
‘Well, yes – I guessed as much. But sometimes you give that one l and sometimes two.’
‘Which do you fancy?’ he inquires.
The background noise has built up once more to an insistent clamour. ‘Excuse me while I slaughter a child,’ says Chris.
‘Don’t bother,’ Pauline tells him. ‘I’ll get all this off to you today and then we can talk later in the week.’
She rings off. The cottage in Powys vanishes, extinguished as she lays down the receiver. She puts her notes into a large envelope. The postman has already been so she will have to take it along to the village to catch the second post. She writes POWYS on the envelope in felt pen in large letters and then looks out of the window at her own section of landscape, struck by the fickle nature of space. That pullulating cottage and the unknown young man are simultaneously within arm’s reach and a hundred miles away. While she talked to him the noise of his children playing was overlaid by the rumble of a tractor on the track in front of World’s End. And as she listened there had drifted into her head an image of Teresa as a small child squatting on a toy-littered floor staring up at Harry who stands at a window with his head cocked over the black receiver of a telephone. Time and space were for an instant fused.
The tractor has come to a halt further down the track, its driver now in discussion with Chaundy, who is on patrol in the battered Peugeot. This tractor is the flagship of Chaundy’s fleet, a shining scarlet monster in which the driver rides high in a cab of tinted glass, perfectly insulated from his surroundings. He can cruise the fields in a state of absolute detachment, like an astronaut in a capsule. Rumour has it that some of these vehicles are equipped with television sets, though Pauline has never been able to confirm this. She watches Chaundy conclude his instructions and get into the Peugeot. The tractor driver gets back into his capsule and roars away towards the main road. Chaundy drives slowly past World’s End on his way presumably to the battery chicken complex over the brow of the hill. Nobody working this landscape ever proceeds on foot. The only walkers who pass World’s End come from elsewhere, ramblers on whom Chaundy wages war, disputing rights of way and erecting thickets of barbed wire.
And now Pauline gets into her car to go to the village, which is just over a mile away. She has occasionally walked there, but this is inconvenient in terms of time taken and also the fact that the only route lies along the main road, not an agreeable pedestrian route. So she drives, parking the car outside the branch of the Mace Store which is now the village shop and post office. The village is impoverished, in terms of facilities. The school closed down several years ago. Mace is said to be struggling, unable to compete with the allure of the Hadbury superstores. Only the pub survives, because it has upgraded itself from its former local and homely role to reference book status. It is in the Good Pub Guide and Egon Ronay. It serves gravadlax, couscous and gazpacho. Its façade is a cascade of petunias, lobelia and fuchsias fattened to monstrous proportions on Phostrogen.
Pauline spends some time in Mace, having her package weighed, buying stamps and stocking up with a few other things in order to save a trip to Hadbury. As she comes out she pauses on the step and sees Maurice emerging from the phone box opposite.
She is momentarily taken aback. She had not noticed his car – indeed he must have arrived while she was in the shop. And why does he need to use the village phone? If theirs was out of order he could have used hers.
‘Hi!’ says Maurice. ‘We could have given each other a lift.’
‘Is something wrong with your phone?’
‘No, no. I came for some stamps and suddenly remembered a call I should have made. Let’s have a coffee.’ He waves towards the pub.
They sit outside. It is a fine morning, suggesting real heat later on.
‘You know something …’ says Maurice. ‘This threatens to be a good summer, weather-wise.’
‘So it seems.’
‘Worth several million to the British Tourist Board. And with the useful knock-on effect that a quite wrong impression of the climate will bring a further spate of foreigners next year.’
‘I suppose so.’
Maurice drops this topic, noting Pauline’s abstraction, or lack of interest. He is sensitive to other people’s moods, though it is not a sensitivity that necessarily makes him switch course. But he changes tack now in a diversionary move that enforces Pauline’s attention.
‘Where were you living when Teresa was Luke’s age?’
He does indeed have her attention, because the question has focused uncannily on her own preoccupations. She names the town in which she lived with Harry, when Harry was forging ahead in the academic stakes. The town in which she attempted to burn a book – but she will not tell Maurice about that, because he would be rather too interested. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I was wondering if it was town or country. Teresa was claiming this morning that she’s never lived in the country before.’
‘She hasn’t – bar the occasional holiday. Neither have I. And none of us really lives here, either. We perch.’
‘Quite so.’ But this is not to be a discussion of rus versus urbe, apparently. Maurice is now in pursuit of something else. ‘Do you think motherhood changed you?’
Pauline looks sharply at him. It seems that he really wants to know. ‘Who am I to say?’
‘Teresa is different.’
‘Different in what way?’
‘More … applied,’ says Maurice. ‘More concentrated. Less … diffuse.’
‘You make her sound like a chemical experiment.’
Maurice grins. ‘But you see what I mean, I’m sure. An interesting process – watching someone you know well go through a process of change. Can you remember it happening to you? Within sound of the cathedral bells. Did you live within sound of the cathedral bells?’
‘No,’ says Pauline. It is not clear which question she is answering. Or indeed if she is answering a question at all or mer
ely blocking Maurice’s line of conversation.
Maurice perceives that he has fallen upon stony ground. He gives her a look – a good-humoured, foxy look which tells her he knows there is no point in going on with this, that he concedes she has every right to clam up if she wants to but that he has noted her resistance and finds it of interest. Pauline feels both irritated and in some obscure way outmanoeuvred. Maurice is now talking about a visit he made last week to a new tourist attraction – the re-creation of an industrial site in the Black Country. He is shrewd and entertaining. She is entertained, despite herself. Maurice is laying himself out to please, and she is pleased, also despite herself. They sit in the sun, finishing their coffee outside the pub, beside an old wooden wheelbarrow filled with potted plants and a cartwheel from which gushes lobelia and African marigolds.
‘Well,’ says Maurice, ‘I’d better get my stamps before I forget what I came for.’
They part company. Pauline gets into her car. She sees Maurice enter the Mace Store. She looks again at the village phone box. And then she drives back to World’s End.
Pauline does not often think about that town. When she does, she sees it as two distinct places. There are the placid streets, in which women like herself push prams. There is the majestic presence of the cathedral, suggesting an impervious continuity. There is Harry’s university, a campus on the outskirts of the town – stylish brick and concrete by the architect of the day, all done out with blond Swedish furniture, open-weave curtains and swinging black-clad students who make Pauline feel middle-aged at twenty-seven. There is the house, a Victorian cottage with a little garden at the back and quiet rooms in which she looks after Teresa and waits for Harry to return.
An unexceptional place. Innocent, even. Once, a few years ago, she found herself nearby and made a detour to drive through the town. There it all was – the shop-lined streets, the great complacent pile of the cathedral. And there also was that other place which she carries always in the head, the place she has long left behind but which is always there. The place in which she holds a match to a crumpled sheet of typescript and in which Harry stands at the window holding the telephone to his ear, and turns towards her as she comes into the room.
Turns towards her and simultaneously puts down the receiver.
‘Who was it?’ she says.
‘Wrong number.’
‘But you were talking.’
‘Of course,’ says Harry. ‘I was telling them they’d got a wrong number, wasn’t I?’
They stare at each other. Or rather, Pauline stares. Harry simply looks – bland, a touch perplexed. ‘What’s wrong, love?’ he inquires.
‘Nothing,’ she replies at last. She stoops to pick up Teresa. She goes through to the kitchen to give Teresa her lunch. She has this sick feeling, but does not think that she is pregnant.
Harry is not often there in the terraced cottage. He is here, there and everywhere but not a great deal at home. He is at the university, caught up in a whirlwind schedule of seminars and lectures and meetings. He is off to London for a bout at the BBC or a snatched day at the British Museum or the Public Record Office (for he must maintain the production of books and articles that will keep him at the sharp end of his profession). He is away at conferences. When he does come home he often brings people back with him – colleagues who make bright and brittle conversation or a posse of students who sit cross-legged on the floor and for whom Pauline has to make vats of spaghetti. Sometimes they smoke dope, to which Harry makes no objection. Indeed, he may well join in. The students dote on him. They find him clever and outrageous and challenging. Most of them would like to grow up to be Harry. This is a sign of the times indeed. Ten years ago students did not want to grow up to be academics. They wanted to be journalists or BBC producers or advertising agents (which is what most of these will end up as).
Pauline lives on the edge of all this. Sometimes, if she can find a baby-sitter, she goes with Harry to parties where the faculty and the students are democratically mingled and she feels out on a limb because she is neither – not young enough nor old enough. Most of the wives of Harry’s colleagues are in the same position, and she often finds herself in a group with them, talking about children. They have all read Bowlby on child care, and believe that their children will be irremediably damaged if they abandon them for more than five minutes. They have also read Spock, who tells them that their children are always right, so they are both anxious and unconfident. They are young, and youth is riding high just now, but none of them feels particularly young. Unlike their husbands and the students, all of whom seem caught up in a continuous celebration, carefree and liberated, lords of creation. When Pauline is out and about in the town with Teresa in her pram, she sees that she and those like her are pushed to the margins of life, just like the pensioners who also potter between the butcher and the greengrocer.
She is not dissatisfied, though the day is to come when she will be. The climate of the times has not yet told her that she ought to be dissatisfied, and in any case she is happy. She has a husband with whom she is in love and a child that she very much wanted. She is sometimes bored. She would like to do things that it is impossible at present to do – read a book uninterrupted, go to the cinema, travel, do anything on a whim – but this does not amount to serious dissatisfaction. There is Teresa, all day and every day. There is Harry – sometimes.
One of the girl students once said to Pauline – impertinently, in Pauline’s view – ‘God – you are lucky to be married to Harry.’ Pauline did not care for the implication of this: that out of an array of available women Harry had for some inexplicable reason picked her, Pauline. As it happens, Pauline was not short of suitors. Before she met Harry she had been deeply involved with an American research student: the consequences of this would be always with her. And there were others. When first she met Harry she had been much taken with the mutual friend who introduced them. She had thought Harry brash. And then Harry had made a dead set at her. The brashness became original and invigorating; the mutual friend began to seem rather colourless. Harry announced that he intended to spend the summer driving across the United States. ‘Come!’ he said. Or commanded. She went.
Thus, that cathedral town, which will be for ever locked into a particular time – so that Pauline was startled to find that the familiar High Street now had branches of Waterstone’s and Ryman’s. There was something vaguely treacherous about its mutation, as though it should have stayed as it was so that she could consign it to the past as she consigns those Harry years. For Pauline sees the Harry years now as a time of traumatic illness, a period of affliction, the long wasted era when she suffered from that now mysterious disease – love for Harry. Love? No, she thinks – balancing what she feels for Teresa, for Luke. Not love. An awful consuming need. Irrational obsession. Enslavement.
When Pauline arrives back at World’s End she finds Teresa and Luke on the track outside the cottages. There is a large muddy puddle here, much loved by Luke. Luke is picking up sticks and dropping them into the puddle. Teresa is both watching him and gazing down the track. She comes to the car window. ‘Maurice has been gone ages. He only went to the village for some stamps.’
‘We met up there and had a cup of coffee. He’s probably on his way back by now.’
Teresa’s face relaxes. She has been imagining a car smash. Pauline knows this because she has gone through the same herself, many times – oh, many, many times. Now Teresa blossoms again, immediately. All is right with the world, and she turns her tranquil face to Pauline and talks at once of other things. She tells Pauline that Chaundy’s tractor driver lifted Luke into the cab of his tractor, evidently a thrilling experience. They discuss a wild flower growing at the edge of the track, for which neither of them can find a name. Vetch, says Pauline – most things are vetch. Toadflax, proposes Teresa.
And Pauline, looking at Teresa, remembers Maurice’s remark and sees that there is a difference in her. Pauline has grown used to this differen
ce and therefore has hardly registered it. There is a new depth in Teresa, something still and settled. She seems not so much older as riper. She has acquired a bloom, like fruit. Pauline is startled now by this further metamorphosis of which she has scarcely been aware.
They stand talking in the sunshine outside World’s End, as women have probably stood before, taking a breather from the day’s demands. And beside them, in his own detached time capsule, Luke is locked into communion with his puddle of mud, learning about wetness, about softness and hardness, about buoyancy and the force of gravity and reflection and porosity. And eventually about pain, as he stumbles and bangs his knee on a sharp protruding stone. He howls. Startled birds erupt from the hedgerow. Teresa comforts him. She picks him up. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Look who’s coming.’ And there is Maurice’s car, gleaming again amid the green surf of wheat. Luke stops crying, and manages a watery smile. Teresa glows.
8
It is June the 15th. Mid-year, mid-week, mid-morning. World’s End sits amid a landscape of exuberance. The verge alongside the track is lush, brimming with red campion, knapweed, foaming drifts of cow parsley. The hedges are studded with creamy plates of elder. There is a feeling of completion – that the surging growth of May has peaked, is suspended now in its abundance. Only the wheat is still growing. The green pelts have become deep seas that billow in the wind. Pauline looks out on all this from her desk with appreciation. The place is different each day, transformed by weather and its own inexorable programme. She appreciates in particular the sky – sometimes stacked with columns of incandescent cloud, sometimes rippling with milky white cirrus, sometimes a primrose arc backlit by the setting sun. The weather is a spectacle, to be observed with interest as she turns the page of a typescript, opens a book or reaches for the telephone.
It occurs to her that she is probably the first person to live here for whom the weather is an aesthetic diversion. For those before her it conditioned the plans for the day, determined whether you were going to be wet, cold, baked or frozen. There may well have been those who managed nevertheless to note the luminosity of a cloud or the bright ripple of the wind across the wheat, but for the most part weather would have been a grim and capricious dictator. For Pauline, rain or sun merely decide whether or not she will be tempted from her desk to walk up the track and down the bridle-path that runs along the crest of the hill, whether she will sit for a while in the garden after lunch or spend all day at work.