Towards Another Summer (11 page)

Grace zipped her bag shut. She was ashamed that she had spent so long in trying to decide what to wear during the weekend. She had been away for the weekend only once or twice before in her life, and the last time had been an ordeal and a revelation, and Grace came home obsessed with her latest piece of knowledge about human beings - if you were a woman away for the weekend you carried a handbag with your handkerchief in it, and when you wanted to blow your nose you snipped open your bag and withdrew your handkerchief.

And Grace had never known! She always tucked her handkerchief in her sleeve and she had never carried a handbag
up and down inside a house; it would look as if she did not trust anyone.

It was taking so long to get used to the ways of the world; Grace did not think she would ever learn.

She inspected the jersey and skirt that she had hung over the back of a chair. It’s true, she said. I look like an unemployed housemaid. She had worked as a housemaid and found it a successful disguise, but now when she wanted to shed her disguise she found it had grown to be a part of her. She was so used to it that only a few days before her journey to Winchley she had been walking along Earls Court Road, and a middle-aged woman of whom she asked the way had said

—It’s along here, I’m going there myself, and in the hundred yards of their walk together the woman advised Grace, judging from her appearance, that she ought to visit a certain agency in Kensington High Street if she wanted a really good domestic job; they paid you four shillings an hour and fares, you had a modern place among rich people who, if you worked well for them, would bring you fresh eggs and cream from their weekend cottage in the country.

—You pay for the eggs and cream of course, the woman said. —But they’re fresh. You take my advice and go straight to that agency in Kensington High Street.

—Thank you. I will, Grace promised.

Grace was feeling increasing panic at the thought of going downstairs to join the family. The longer she stayed in her room, the more afraid she became. She decided that by going for a walk she would avoid the embarrassments of trying to be sociable. Putting on her coat and headscarf, taking her gloves and her small purse, she went boldly downstairs to the kitchen.

—Grace-Cleave’s going for a walk, she said, adopting Sarah’s way of speaking about her.

—Do you still walk around London? Philip asked.

At her interview in London when he asked,—How do you spend your time when you’re not writing, she had answered, —I walk in the streets. I walk and walk.

—Yes, I still walk.

—Very far?

—Oh, she said daringly, remembering that she had walked so far only during the bus strike,—I walk, say, from Kentish Town to Camberwell.

—Kentish Town to Camberwell!

—Oh yes.

As if it were an almost daily walk.

—Usually (she modified her boast), I walk only two or three miles.

—Dad likes walking, doesn’t he Philip?

—Yes. Dad walks miles every afternoon. He’s not been used to it though.

—Oh yes he has, on the farm, there’s quite a bit of walking to do.

—Didn’t he ride?

—Yes, but walking to inspect fences, look for sheep . . .

—But they do most of that on horseback don’t they love?

—Yes. I suppose they do.

Philip gave a great guffaw.

—Dad walks chiefly for his bowels.

—Yes he does. He’s so bashful about it isn’t he Phil.

—I think he likes to walk, but he’s thinking most of the time about his bowels.

—It gives him an interest though, Phil, doesn’t it?

—Yes love.

Grace moved towards the door. Her head was dizzy with undercurrents.

In a guest-ridden tone she said,

—I’ll be away a couple of hours.

Anne, now preparing to do the weekly washing, busy at the washing machine, leaned down and extracted a small wet shoe.

—Oh Phil, here’s Noel’s shoe. Do you think it will dry?

She turned to Grace.

—We’d thought of going into Winchley this afternoon to show you a few of the sights and change Sarah’s library book. You’d like to come?

—Oh yes!

—It’s a nice bright day.

—We’ll be having dinner about one, Philip said, host-ridden, as Grace went out the back door. He came with her.

—Would you like a map?

—Oh yes!

He found her a map.

—Thank you very much.

He marked their street.

—You’re here. The village is along there. There’s the golf course.

They walked in the garden. He pointed among the shocked frosted plants to a small aged grey rosemary bush.

—We’re hoping the rosemary has survived. We’re rather lucky to have been able to grow it up here.

—Yes, Grace said.

He showed her the back gate and the path she would take to reach the village.

—Goodbye.

—Goodbye. Be seeing you.

Alone, outside the gate, Grace breathed relief and freedom.

At once she was conscious of the deceit of the weather. From inside the house, with Philip and Anne and Noel and Sarah in the kitchen, human and alive, whenever Grace had looked from the window it had seemed to her that the day would be sunny. Anne too had been deceived, for swept close in family warmth she had said,—It’s such a bright promising day.

The first garish light of morning had the appearance of being softened by the wintry sun - that is, from inside the Thirkettle kitchen.

Now, alone, trying to walk on the layers of ice on the track through the park Grace looked about her at a landscape from which all life had been wrung; sodden grass; small heaps of black snow; slush; the trees standing stripped and grey as if the snowstorm, passing by like a plague of locusts, had devoured their life. Grace stamped her feet to get rid of their numbness. She walked carefully, her arms spread slightly, like wings. Up here in the north there seemed to be a draught from somewhere in the sky, as if the northern door leading to the homes of the Gods had been left open; they were the relentless Gods - Thunder, War, Revenge, Night; the wind blowing from their sky caverns was so penetrating and paralysing with its chill that Grace wanted to sink on her knees into the ice and beg for mercy. She walked on and on, shivering, her flesh demanding in vain a little charity from the weather, her mind yet revelling in the drama of this foreign hemisphere where North was a word full of menace and South promised sun and warmth. The traditional phrases of her own country - up north, down south, had no meaning in this part of the world. The combination of the two phrases - up north here, up north there, cancelled both meanings in such a way that Grace felt herself to be lost in a desert or snow-plain of
reference; her mind grew chilled; yes-yes murdered no-no; day and night together were effaced . . .

 

 

 

 

At last she came to the small group of shops which made up the village. She could see only the usual dusty exhibits of a village store - giant packets of cigarettes, cardboard butter, rust-edged tins of peaches and pears, reduced; the button-cotton-wool clutter of a draper’s; the shrivelled fruit, ‘morning-fresh’. She might have been in a poorer London suburb. At least, she thought, the sky is clear of London smoke. Its light was distant and grey, and now that she had walked for over a mile the freezing air was giving its reward, pinching, slapping her skin as if its intention, so often misunderstood, were to resurrect the human race rather than entomb it in ice.

Birds too, Grace thought, remembering that she had been changed; Philomela; Procne; it was an old tradition; we must tend the myths, she thought; only in that way shall we survive. Survive, survive; the word wearied her; here, in the northern hemisphere, survival was as much a part of consciousness as food and sex and shelter, and yet it was no longer the prerogative of the north; even in the warm south it occupied their minds; would the seasons change, then; would people change - to beasts, or to birds, as she had done?

She unfolded her map of Winchley, located the village, consulted her watch, and chose a street where the last building was marked heavily in black:
Industrial School
.

Why did her past life keep erupting and spilling dangerous memories over her weekend?

Industrial School. She shivered with fear and her heart quickened its beat. I’ll walk past it, she said to herself, I’ll see the kind of place where my father so often threatened to send Isy.

—You’ll go to the Industrial School in Caversham. It’s the Industrial School for you. We’ll have to send her to the Industrial School.

It surprised Grace to remember that she had not thought of an Industrial School as a school, and that it had been the word
Industrial
which used to frighten her; it gave the image of a vast hall (some connection, Grace used to think, with the song Isy sang and which her mother said was a terrible song a place filled with whirling black skeletons (like a sculptor’s ‘mobiles’) of which
dust
was the flesh, and that being sent to the In
dust
rial School you were caged inside a skeleton and forced to revolve with it in a fury of black dust until eventually your body became indistinguishable from the skeleton, and if people visited the Hall (mother, father, aunts, uncles from up north or down south) they wouldn’t even realise you were imprisoned there; they wouldn’t be able to see you, and if you had any voice and tried to speak to them they would never hear you.

Grace had not associated the word ‘school’ with a place of learning because experience had taught her to be suspicious of the meaning of words. Hadn’t she sung God Save our Gracious Tin, then discovered that the ‘tin’ was not a kerosene tin but an old man with medals and a beard? Hadn’t she been forbidden to go near the magazine at the drill-hall, and then had found her mother reading a book which she described carelessly as ‘The Railway
Magazine
’? After such experiences Grace knew that you had to take great care with words. Her mother had convinced her of this too. She talked of whales.

—A family of whales, kiddies, is called a
school
.

—A
school
? That’s silly.

—Yes, a
school
of whales.

—A
school
of
wales
?

—Pronounce your words properly, their father had put in, for he was particular about pronunciation.

—It is
whales
.

So, preferring the unexpected meaning, for she could not bear to be taken by surprise, Grace had never revised her belief that an
Industrial School
was a group or family of black dusty skeletons revolving in a vast hall. Without question it would have been a terrible place to send Isy.

Grace remembered her fear when she used to lie in bed at night tucked up with her sleeping sisters and suddenly imagine that Isy would be seized and carried away. They would grab her arm and she would yell, as she so often did in play,—You’re pulling my arm out of its socket! (Saying ‘out of its socket’ was usually enough to make anyone stop pulling because it brought the awe-inspiring image of your standing there holding an arm and not knowing how to return it to its socket, and with parents around and punishment in view that was an embarrassing position to be in.) Grace knew, however, that when ‘they’ came to take Isy to the Industrial School they would not be deterred by anything or anyone, they would keep pulling, and Isy, with her arm in or out of its socket, would be imprisoned and slowly ground into black dust.

 

 

 

 

The village was out of sight now. Grace was on the road leading to the Industrial School. She passed an isolated shop where she bought cigarettes and a bar of raisin chocolate. She passed a church, then an old people’s housing estate, groups of small flats with a communal room facing the street. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows Grace could see a group of men and women sitting in armchairs looking from the window at the street, the people, and the occasional traffic. Although the motive in providing the large windows had been to bring the old people in contact with the life of the street, when Grace stared through at them, realising that no part of their sitting room was hidden from the public gaze, she knew a feeling of desolation, and the sordid persistence of truth which, by a thoughtful misdirection of architecture, had given the flat-dwellers the unusual
characteristic of seeming to be what, in fact, they were: they had not the appearance of sitting happily in a bright common room, knitting, or reading or staring out of the windows at the interesting view: they seemed more like clients in a travel agency, passengers at a bus station, waiting to be despatched; one could imagine scattered on the low tables which helped to give the ‘contemporary’ look to the room, the bright brochures, the illustrated enticements featuring the unknown tomorrow. At least, Grace thought, there will be an endlessness of time, not the calculated so many days so many guineas, and no Morning Free, Afternoon Sightseeing.

How dare I? she said to herself. They are happy. They like to see the world outside. They have no wish to be shut within dark brick walls in rooms with small high windows. It is just that when age waits so obviously to book a ticket to the world of the dead it offends my sensibility; perhaps they (they, they, they) are wise enough to enjoy it; travel agencies, bus stations are interesting places; it sharpens the mind, enriches the heart to haunt areas of arrival and departure.

Grace found that she could always dismiss a disturbing thought by wrapping it in a platitude.

 

The Industrial School was near. She felt her heart thudding. She felt afraid. To see an Industrial school after all those years of vulnerable childhood when grownups could threaten and punish and one’s world loomed with frightening images of ‘truant officer’ ‘welfare officer’ ‘health inspector’ ‘Industrial school’ ‘Borstal’! For a moment Grace’s courage failed her. She had a wild idea that as she passed the school she would be seized, dragged inside, kept a prisoner for ever. Had that been where Isy had really gone, in the end, after she died? She had thought about it at times.—She’s with God, their mother had said, and had made a great fuss about what it would be like meeting her again on Resurrection Day, although she had irritatingly refused to acknowledge or explain the difficulties of a Resurrection Day reunion. There had to be room to resurrect, there had to be means of recognition - it was no use carrying their father’s
joking symbol of recognition - ‘a white-handled pocketknife in a lefthand waistcoat pocket’. There were discrepancies of age, too . . . Grace had been sure it would not work, it would never work, there would have to be some other arrangement made.