Presently the river widens. Keith, with an effort that has him copiously sweating, puts on a spurt and overtakes Bob. “My,” says Paula, as the punt passes, “that’s very manly stuff, Keith”. Bob, now, is scowling. Tessa, now alongside, tries vainly to catch his eye; he is avoiding her, she knows he is, something has happened, it is all over, she knows it is …
Keith, methodically raising and dropping the pole, feels terrific. Calm and controlled and terrific.
They are approaching another punt party composed of French schoolchildren. Blasts of transistor radio and strident voices rake the willows and the sunlit grassy banks. Jean Simpson, staring, remarks that if there are any teachers with that lot they aren’t, frankly, doing much about controlling them. Paula winces at the transistors, putting her hands over her ears. “Barbarians,” she says, without bothering to lower her voice. The young French pass comments on the Framleigh party which are perfectly understood by several of them. “One does, as it happen,” says Paula loudly, “speak French.” At this point a girl pushes a boy into the river and any further comment is swamped by shrieks and laughter. The thrashing punts are left behind.
“It’s people like that,” says Jean Simpson, with a sigh, “who ruin places like this.”
The punters, now, are beginning to flag. It is Greg who gives in first and proposes a stop. A length of bank ahead offers a place for all three punts. Toby, in a weary voice, gives instructions about tying up securely. “And stick the pole in alongside,” he tells Greg, “that’s what one does.”
“Does one?” replies Greg. “Just fancy …” Toby gets from the punt with exaggerated care, one hand to his back. Others alight also. Paula stands pointedly until Keith comes forward to offer assistance. She remarks that there is something to be said for old-fashioned good manners. Keith smirks. Greg, though, has not heard. He has flung himself down on the grass in the sun.
They are in a meadow – a buttercup meadow, gold-splashed from one end to the other. There are great swathes of meadowsweet, too, and a blue veiling of vetch on the river bank and here and there a soldiery of clover heads. Warblers singing from the reeds. A pale blue sky marbled with thin high clouds. Sun. Water.
No one, though, pays much if any attention to all this. All are concerned with feelings and with the effect they are having on others or the effect those others are having on them. Mary Chambers tingles with irritation and hostility towards almost everyone. She has not felt like this for a long time; for so long, indeed, that she cannot at first place the distant echo of the emotion. Then it comes to her: the jungle reactions of the Upper Fourth, time out of mind ago at Worcester High School for Girls. It is as though some disease of the personality, long tamed, were to spring once again to energetic life. She steps from the punt to the bank, and finds a patch of grass on which to sit. Others dump themselves around her: Jean Simpson and Nick and Sue and Bob and Tessa. Paula and Keith. Toby props himself against a tree. When asked by Nick how his back feels, he says he is all right, thanks, his tone implying the opposite.
“You want to watch it,” says Jean, “with back things. My husband was laid up three weeks the year before last.”
Paula sits amid buttercups. She is wearing a long dress patterned in reds and mauves, a string of amber beads; her hair is loose and wild, with a silk scarf somehow threaded amongst it but not holding it together. She looks pre-Raphaelite; she also makes all the other women feel drab. She says, “I used to have the most ghastly trouble with my back once. I couldn’t paint for weeks.”
“Yes, Paula,” says Toby wearily, “I remember.” Paula does not hear. She continues, “I still have to be careful not to lift heavy things.”
“George was off work a month,” says Jean Simpson.
Both Toby and Paula have placed themselves a little apart from everyone else. Some people have gone for a stroll along the bank. Bob and Tessa have disappeared, unregarded by the rest (which is odd, as Tessa’s uprush of emotion should surely be as potent as the smells and sounds of the place).
Mary Chambers observes Toby, and Paula. The way in which they are sitting slightly apart does not escape her; she realizes, though, that she no longer feels, as she did five days ago, that they, or Greg, or Bob – or indeed Nick, but Nick was always a subordinate, as it were – are persons of a different order. And furthermore they are both, today, annoying her. As indeed is almost everyone. She dismembers flower-heads, and listens despite herself to what others are saying.
Paula and Jean are still talking, independently, of Paula’s and of Jean’s husband’s back ailments. Sue is asking Toby what those reeds are called, over there, and Toby is replying in a detached and impersonal way that has Sue looking suddenly glum. Nick is just sitting.
Thinking, in fact, that he would like to be alone. Alone and uncaring like … like the reeds and the monotonously singing bird somewhere within them and the cow wading through the meadowsweet.
“Of course,” says Paula, “it’s not really the same thing at all …” The sentence trails. She is dissociating herself, as everyone at once realizes, from Jean’s husband.
Mary Chambers looks up. “Why?”
Paula turns and stares at her; course members do not normally query her thus; Mary is not the sort of person who thus queries.
There is a silence, into which Sue rushes to say that well after all it’s different, isn’t it? I mean, doing a job isn’t the same as being an artist. She glances quickly at Toby; the remark, in so far as it is contrived at all, is intended to please him while also giving offence to Jean Simpson.
“It’s a question of commitment, isn’t it?” says Toby with a smile. It is not clear if he is subtly closing ranks with Paula or putting down Mary.
Jean, offended, remarks that as it happens George is very dedicated to his work and that in point of fact he’ll be senior manager next year.
Mary looks at them all. She doesn’t much like any of them, she realizes. She wishes she could clap her hands and make them disappear. Or cry, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Nick she might allow to remain, along with the sunlight on the river and the bird in the reeds and the distant, decorative cows. She feels distinctly aggressive, a most unfamiliar response.
“If I’m not working,” states Paula, “I’m simply not myself, that’s all there is to it.”
“People,” Mary snaps, “aren’t what they are because of what they do.”
Paula gazes at her in astonishment, and distaste. “Well, really …” she begins.
Greg interrupts. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?” says Mary, dangerously. She knows, all of a sudden, that she is not going to be told what does or doesn’t make sense by Greg, of all people.
“It’s a question of what you mean,” says Greg, lying on his back, hands clasped behind his head. “Of what you mean by ‘are’ and ‘do’. Words are tools. Meaning is what you dig for. I assume that what Paula means, and what you mean, is that …”
“Oh, be quiet!” exclaims Mary.
Everyone, now, stares at her. It is as though she were manifesting visible and startling symptoms of disease: smallpox, leprosy. Paula is quite genuinely surprised to be confronted with a display of temperament in one who is just an ordinary person. She wonders if perhaps the woman is ill. Toby’s expression is one of absolute weariness, as though tried beyond endurance by the vagaries of others.
“The way you go on …” says Mary. “Some of you … sometimes … It’s enough to put people off what you’re doing and actually what you’re doing is important. I don’t mean what you personally are doing but the thing … creating, if only there was some other word for it because that one doesn’t much mean anything any more … it’s probably more important than anything but when it gets mixed up with thinking that what you do makes you what you are then …” She stops, swallows, her face is a dull red and her eyes slightly bulge. She says, “I’m sorry but that’s how it seems to me”.
They gaze, variously reacting
. Paula, who particularly disliked the bit about what you personally are doing, sorts out several replies with rather more deliberation than is usual for her. Toby closes his eyes. Jean Simpson says, “Well, I must say I think that’s a bit strong. Personally …”
Keith is standing up. It seems at first as though this too is some kind of response to what has been said but he is in fact looking not at. Mary but towards the river. “Oh Christ, one of the damn punts has gone.”
They all, now, look.
“And I left my bag in it!” cries Jean. “With twenty-eight pounds and my cheque book and the Barclaycard …”
Greg is saying that he put the darned pole in and anyway I thought you were tying it up, Toby … and Paula is saying that yes, you should have checked, after all this whole thing was your idea … and Toby breaks in to say that it wasn’t his idea frankly to crack his spine and Greg as it happens was doing the punting so it was up to him to see the thing was tied up properly.
“… and all those wretched French kids are just along there!” wails Jean at which Greg exclaims fairly but not quite sufficiently inaudibly that of all chauvinist remarks that just about … and Paula is telling Toby, who is on his feet staring down the river, that there doesn’t seem much wrong with his back now … and Greg has gone on to point out that in fact Keith’s punt is drifting downstream and very likely dislodged the other one and …
Into which exchange of opinion Nick breaks to shout that all this is pointless and what they have to do is get the punt back, using one of the other punts.
“Why was Greg all wet?”
“Because he fell in the river.”
“Why did he?”
“Because,” says Paula, “the punt was stuck in the mud and people were silly about getting it unstuck.”
“Was Toby silly?” asks Jason with interest.
“Yes,” says Paula, “I mean no.”
“Was Greg silly?”
“Yes,” says Paula crisply.
“Why was the lady cross?”
“Because her dress got dirty.”
“Did someone push her?”
“Of course not,” snaps Paula, “it was an accident.”
“It’s not fair,” says Jason, aggrieved, “why couldn’t I come out in a boat too?”
“Because,” says Paula, “it wasn’t for children. It was a grown-up time.”
Chapter 12
Framleigh, on this last morning of the course, is washed with sunshine. Sun has the early mist smoking up from the prospect and a haze of midges spinning above the lily-pond. It flashes from the wire angles of “Introspective Woman” and falls across the bed in which Paula lies with Greg. Greg is outlining some thoughts he has had about a poem sequence and Paula is thinking about clothes: she knows suddenly that she cannot go for much longer without a dark blue cheesecloth dress, full length, with some kind of braiding effect around the sleeves and hem. The events of yesterday, for both, have shrivelled to insignificance; both have experienced that kind of occasion often enough before and in any case both are people conveniently able to shed tiresome or inconvenient pieces of the past. Paula forgets about boring things, and Greg translates personal humiliations into more advantageous events. That damn fool punting business, for instance, he now realizes, could be used symbolically: the river of life or something like that, and the poet’s creative strivings against the hostile currents of … of …
Mary Chambers stands naked in front of the mirror. She ignores the person pointedly shuffling outside the door because she also has done plenty of waiting for the bathroom and it is her turn now. She appraises herself: she is not as handsome as Paula or as young as Sue and Tessa but she is not bad, all the same. It is a long time since she looked at herself thus. She decides that when she gets home she will throw away most of her clothes and get new ones. In order to pay for these she will put in for a salary rise which as it happens is long overdue anyway: she is worth, she reckons, about a third as much again as she is getting. She will point this out, quietly but firmly. She will also tell her husband that she would like to spend the money set aside for a greenhouse on painting equipment; they can do without a greenhouse. And she will have her hair cut differently and tell her mother-in-law that no, she cannot come to stay for three weeks in September.
Nick says, “Toby, there’s something I’ve been rather wanting to ask you about …”
Toby dresses: not a lengthy process. “I’ve got some phoning to do. Later – O.K.?”
“It’s about whether if I go on, well, being here, I could run a design studio for the courses … I thought maybe …”
Toby sighs. “If only one could do everything one would like to do.”
“… if we turned the billiard room into another studio …”
Toby makes a despairing gesture. “Cash?”
Nick swallows. “But I thought … well, this bank … if you’re going to …”
“Going to what?” says Toby coldly. “I’ve got a thousand things to do this morning, Nick. You really must not nag.”
Keith stamps up and down outside the bathroom door. When eventually Mary Chambers emerges they barely greet one another. She has splashed water all over the floor, he notes: women always do that. He shaves, and thinks of yesterday, with faint disbelief. He remembers how he felt suddenly exasperated with the whole damn lot of them (with one or two exceptions, maybe); he remembers, in astonishment, telling Toby and Greg to shut up; he remembers, and the morning is enhanced by the memory, Greg trying to shove the punt out of the muddy bank and shoving too hard and losing his balance. He remembers Paula in that long flowery dress, dappled with sunlight, talking. When, though, he tries to remember what she was talking about he finds that it has dissolved into an unmemorable flow; she sounds once again worryingly and of course quite inaccurately like his mother. Or Karen’s mother. Or Karen, occasionally.
Jason is making himself a den in the undergrowth beside the prospect. He may let Kevin share it with him; they may make a fire and catch rabbits and cook them and live here all the time; he may cut down big trees and saw the branches off and make a better den like a real little house. He wanders, picking up sticks. He finds a splinter in his finger and chews at it. He looks towards Framleigh and sees people on the terrace and remembers that he has not had any breakfast.
Toby comes through the french windows. He glances around. “All here? Great. I’ll sort out studios in a moment but first there’s just one or two things I’d like to say.”
He pauses. Jean Simpson, who is sitting on the terrace wall telling people about this weekend cookery course in Devon she has heard about, stops talking. So do others. They look towards Toby, just as they did five nights ago. The looks, though, are tempered now by experience: some people are more interested, and others less so. Toby is a known quantity, for better and for worse; and he, for his part, sees faces that are not strange but invested with his own responses. Not, on the whole, that course members evoke much of a response from him: they are not really his kind, when all’s said and done.
“Well – last day! I know we’ve had one or two irritating hang-ups on this course, but you’ve all been marvellous about mucking in and I hope you feel as I do that in the end what matters is the Framleigh atmosphere and the work you’ve been doing. For my part …” – he looks round with a quick, deprecating smile – “… for my own part I always feel at the end of each course that I’ve learned a lot myself. Creativity is a matter of give and take, isn’t it? I want you to have felt that you’ve had a chance to see what it’s all about. And that you’ve been able to step aside from the rat-race and learn a bit about yourselves too. That’s what living with other people does, right? There – enough of that! More work now – do what you like this afternoon – and tonight we have our farewell party. Eight onwards. Now – who wants to be where this morning?”
Everyone is allocated. Tessa, returning to her room to fetch a Kleenex, comes through the empty house and hears the phone ringing in the gun-room. “
Hello?” she says. A man’s voice indistinctly replies, far down windy tunnels: he seems to ask if she is Mr Standish’s secretary. “No,” says Tessa, her mind on Bob: he said, last night, he casually said, that he might be up her way next month. She has been in a turmoil ever since; she hardly slept a wink. The voice crackles on about someone called Butters and negotiations and the possibility of a discussion tonight. Yes, she says, I’ll tell him. She puts the phone down and hurries back to the stables. What would Mum say, confronted with Bob? She tries to picture him at home, at her home, and fails. Did he mean it? Could he have meant it?
In the studios, this morning, there is considerable application. People want to finish what they have been doing and have some demonstrable achievement to take away with them. Those who have successfully potted are the most satisfied: there are ashtrays and mugs and bowls. Jean Simpson has a bead and mirror sculpture about which, privately, she has doubts: she just cannot see it in the living-room at home and may in fact quietly dispose of it on the way back. But it would not do to say so. Mary Chambers has several pleasing pictures. Sue has two drawings with which she is secretly rather thrilled. Keith has nothing; somehow no single endeavour was completed. In view of this he decides to spend the morning in Bob’s barn; it is too late to equip himself even with an ashtray but he may as well have another look at what goes on there. Come to think of it, pottery might be an idea. He is still a mite uneasy about the craft furniture scene. Once in the barn, though, he is chagrined to see that even the most banal and apparently untalented people have turned out perfectly agreeable, even aesthetic, objects. This is food for thought. He hangs around the studio after the others have gone, looking at things. Bob’s stuff, ranged around on shelves, is of course in another class altogether, that one can see … Keith picks up Sam’s bowls and Tessa’s mug, frowning slightly. He wanders to the end of the room and peeks behind a hessian curtain. What he sees there stops him dead. Jesus Christ! He gazes, in blank astonishment and then with dawning comprehension at the ranks of toby jugs and thatched cottage honeypots. Well, well, well …