An End to Autumn Read online

  “I don’t know. I always think of her as walking along on a windy day and her skirts are being blown about her legs which are also fat and red.” Quite irrelevantly he added, “My mother doesn’t read much. You remember three years ago when I took out a subscription to the People’s Friend for her. I thought it would pass the time for her. But I don’t think she ever read any of the magazines, so she told me to stop them.”

  “Yes, a lot of them read the People’s Friend,” said Vera as if she thought of his mother as belonging to a certain class of people, definite and fixed. “I should have thought she might have liked the stories.”

  “No, not at all,” Tom pursued. “She said she had too much to do, and she didn’t really have all that much. Certainly she worked in the garden but that was only in the mornings. She could have read in the afternoons or the evenings if she had wished, but she didn’t. My father read a lot. Mostly serious books, non-fiction. I don’t think he read a fiction book in his whole life. But he was always reading about the pyramids or about foreign countries. He wasn’t at all political: he only read for information.”

  “Well, at least she will have a TV set in her room,” said Vera. “She can watch that if she feels bored.”

  She herself didn’t watch the TV much, and in fact only did so when there was a play on which she had asked her pupils to see, one whose text they were studying in school and which would help them in the examinations. Now and again however she would also watch documentaries about famous composers such as Schoenberg, for she was very fond of music and liked to know biographical facts, feeling that knowledge of the lives of creative people was important to an understanding of their work. Tom was more interested in painting than he was in music, though his knowledge was sporadic and amateurish.

  Vera looked out through the window ahead of her. It was an autumn evening and the landscape looked brown. Already in late August she felt a strange bitter nostalgia as she always did at that time of year as if something was saying goodbye to her, as if some slant light were crossing the bare land. At twenty-seven she did not really feel old: for that matter she couldn’t remember a time when she had felt young either. What she sometimes felt was the strain of being herself, of holding herself tightly in the necessary check, of not giving anything away. People regarding her might find there an enviable coolness which was more worked for than many of them realised. Days passed and certainly they passed in tranquillity, for Tom and she hardly ever quarrelled. Tranquillity she judged was better than its opposite however it contained its own terrors, however it spoke of absence.

  “Well,” said Tom finally shutting his book, “that’s it. I’m sure that I still don’t know a quarter of what it’s about but it will have to do. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ll go and make one.”

  “Yes. That would be fine.”

  He went off to the kitchen as he always did at about that time of night, and she was left alone. Sometimes, she thought, she liked being alone, even free of Tom, just for a while. She wondered if he ever felt like that: he certainly never said so. But then of course there were certain subjects which one simply did not discuss. She considered that she might survive alone for a certain time, but wasn’t sure whether she might survive for long. Perhaps Tom might survive better than her. One mused about things like that sometimes, or rather they swam into one’s head without warning.

  Neither of them of course was a dreamer. Tom had done quite a lot of work on the house in the way of painting and shelf-building and she had helped him: for instance she had chosen, and put up the wallpaper, for Tom was very impatient of exact measurement, in which however she believed. Her teaching was far less spontaneous than Tom’s and more meticulously prepared. She was also better than he was with the more difficult classes. She didn’t allow them much scope: but on the whole she preferred the others.

  Tom came in and laid the tray down on the table. He had brought some biscuits which they ate.

  As they sat there in the room, the only sound being that of the yellow flaring bird-shaped wall clock which her mother had given them, they felt in complete harmony with their surroundings and with each other. It was an achieved ease in which they lived, or so they thought. To Tom her cool classical figure, her pale narrow face with the fair hair combed flowingly away from the head, seemed exactly what he wanted: or at least that was what he thought more often than not.

  And to her Tom was exactly what she wanted though she did not think of his physical presence much. She rested in his care and from that safety set out on her cold and otherwise self-sufficient voyage.

  2

  QUITE EARLY ON the Saturday Tom took his car down to the railway station and waited inside it for a while. It was a cool, calm morning and from where he was parked he could see a train waiting though as he didn’t use trains he didn’t know whether it was about to go or not. The station of course was much smaller than the one to which his father had used sometimes to take him, introducing him once, with a mixture of servility and pride, to the stationmaster, an apparently busy little man with a toothbrush moustache who had given him a hard white sweet. In that station there had been a continual pulsation of steam, a rushing of people, a pushing of cases by porters, a sense of a whole world in continual motion. Sometimes he felt that he could take a train somewhere, anywhere, to find a series of different landscapes and end up perhaps in Arabia or Turkey or even in fabulous Athens. But of course he had never done that. Because his father had worked on the railways they had been given free travel, but they had never been adventurous and had stayed inside Scotland. The radiation of rails had attracted him but he had stayed where he was and his life had been one of careful uneventfulness: his wife told him that since he was a Capricorn unadventurousness was to be expected of him.

  He liked the small town in which he lived but sometimes, as in his youth, he felt a phantasmal motion of departure, especially on hazy summer mornings, as if he were a child again in a busy railway station. What was it he wanted that he didn’t have? He often wondered and couldn’t think of anything. After all he was happy in his work, he had a good home and a very agreeable wife, and his surroundings were themselves beautiful, a fine blending of sea and land. What therefore was he looking for on those days, for he only felt those motions of departure at certain times and not constantly. He was sure that his wife didn’t feel restless, or if she did she never revealed it in any way, and never talked about it. She seemed to have a deeper calm than he had. Perhaps it was because she had not been brought up in an atmosphere of trains and railway stations, bound to timetables as his father, and therefore he and his mother, had been. When he was young he remembered his father waving flags from a train that was setting off into an unimaginable country and which would never return no matter how hard he ran after it and pleaded with his father to wait. In the end of course, his father had done just that, he had set off on a final journey and hadn’t returned. The rails had been narrow and he had finally turned a corner from which one could see only steam like breath arising and being dissipated on the chilly air.

  Tom sat for a while in the car thinking, and now and again letting his gaze rest on the present, on the fishing boats that he could see in the harbour, on the hills that he could see on the other side of the bay. What a beautiful little town it was, with its changing lights so different from the hard definite rigid light of Edinburgh which delineated so firmly massive stone buildings such as insurance offices. Here the light broke randomly on water and stone, in a less assured and more wavering manner but at nights flared into the most theatrical sunsets such as his mother-in-law, he thought wryly, might have disported herself in.

  As he waited for the train bearing his mother to come into the station, he had a strange feeling that something decisive was going to happen, though he didn’t know what it was. It was true, as Vera had surmised, that he felt guilty about his mother though there was no particular reason why he should. In a certain sense his guilt was literary, as if he saw himself as a character
in a book who had left his own class and was bound therefore to feel guilty. By attending university he had placed a distance between himself and his father whose untrained though industrious mind was as inferior to his own as an old-fashioned adding machine to a modern computer. The image of his father in his not very attractive and slightly blurred blue uniform arose in his mind as one he felt he ought to be guilty about.

  Thinking these thoughts he watched with fascination a seagull that was standing splay-clawed on the pier, turning its head from side to side, and opening its beak as if it were yawning. Perhaps if he had pulled down the window he would have found that it was screaming, Tom thought wryly. Now and again the seagull would peck at some wrecked bones, probably those of herring, that lay on the stone. Tom could see its stony eyes even from the inside of the car, a good distance away. The seagull seemed to him to be an image of self-containment, concerned only with its food, its eye cold and remote, and it was as if he was possessed by a sudden blind hatred of the bird, such that if people hadn’t been about he might have thrown a stone at it. But in fact he only looked at his watch to find that there were another ten minutes to go before the train came in.

  He got out of the car, leaving it unlocked for nothing was likely to happen to it, and walked slowly into the station. There were one or two pupils at the bookstall glancing through magazines about football and he nodded to them absently and they smiled back with the sort of smile that they offered when they were not actually in school. He strolled on to the gate through which his mother would appear when she came, and stood there, a slightly hunched figure, gazing along the rails as if they were double-barrelled shotguns aimed from the haze towards him.

  Eventually the train wormed itself into the station and he watched as door after door opened, and people stepped out onto the platform. Then he saw her and with a sudden rush he went towards her for she was looking around in a bewildered manner, almost as if she were in a foreign country whose language she did not know. She had a large black case which a tall man with a briefcase was helping her with, but when he saw Tom coming he nodded briefly and walked briskly towards the exit. She was wearing a black hat and black coat as if she was still in mourning, helpless and confused. He took the case from her and they walked towards the exit side by side, he slowing down to accommodate his pace to hers. He never kissed her when they met, though his mother-in-law kissed him with a dramatic flourish each time he met her, as if he had just arrived from the North Pole, and she might never see him again if she didn’t greet him quickly.

  “Did you have a good journey?” he asked and found that his voice was slightly colder than he would have wished.

  “Yes,” she said, “I was talking to a woman who was coming here on holiday. She’s from England and she comes every year. She says she likes it very much.”

  “Yes, we get a lot of tourists,” said Tom who did not at that time think of himself as a tourist. “Have the people moved into the house?”

  “They moved in yesterday. Very nice people. He’s a chartered accountant and she doesn’t work. They’ve got a lovely little girl. She’s only five and she’s just gone to school.”

  “You’ll like it here,” said Tom. “Plenty of sea, plenty of fresh air. You can come and sit in the gardens in the warm weather, and it’ll pass the time for you.” And he pointed out to her the railed-in garden, with the benches on each side of it, on which even then some tourists were sitting, a number of them reading newspapers.

  “It is lovely,” she said and certainly the town was looking its best on that fine autumn morning, the flowers still in bloom, the sea calm and sparkling, and the islands green in the distance. It was as if she were coming on a holiday and not to stay, for nowhere could she see the sort of cramped tenements to which she had been used in her youth. It was as if she were gazing at a picture, staged and perfect, distant and yet slightly faked.

  “Lovely,” she repeated. “Where is your school?”

  “It’s not near here. We won’t actually be passing it,” he said taking out his key to open the boot of the car in order to put the case in.

  “That Englishwoman was saying that she comes every year. She said she wouldn’t go anywhere else for her holidays.”

  He thought she was trying to put him at his ease, and she thought that he was looking thin and worried. Perhaps he was working too hard.

  “Are you well?” he asked. “Are you quite well?”

  “I’m not bad,” she replied. “I sometimes have a slight dizziness but not much. The doctor said there wasn’t anything really wrong. He said my lungs are still very good for a person of my age.”

  And she laughed a little for she liked the doctor, a young man who joked with her when he came to visit.

  He opened the car door for her and waited till she had settled herself in the seat. As they drove off he felt as if he were bringing home a conquest, a treasure of some kind, and it made him feel happy so that as he indicated to her the various features and buildings, they appeared as personal gifts which it was in his power to grant. He heard himself saying to her, “I used to worry about you down there, with all that vandalism. You haven’t had any more break-ins?”

  “No, just the one,” she said. “You have a lot of trees here.”

  “Yes,” he answered as if they belonged to him.

  When they drew up at the door of the large house, Vera was standing there as if she had been waiting and watching for them. She came forward and as her mother-in-law stepped slightly awkwardly from the car she kissed her lightly on the forehead as if she were giving her the sort of kiss a nun might give.

  “I hope you haven’t had a tiring journey.”

  “No it was quite nice,” said her mother-in-law. Vera waited for Tom to get the case out of the boot and then, Tom preceding them, she and Mrs Mallow entered the house.

  Vera took Mrs Mallow into the living room and said to Tom when he had come in after depositing the case, “Your mother can go to her room later. I think we should have a cup of coffee now. Would you like that?” she asked her mother-in-law, helping her to remove her coat and hat and leaving them for the time being on a hook behind the living-room door.

  “Yes I would, thank you,” said Mrs Mallow, sinking deeply into the sofa. “I was telling Tom that I met an Englishwoman who told me that she always came here on holiday. Her husband is a professor but he’s too busy to come with her.”

  “A professor of what?” said Vera handing the cups round.

  “I don’t know. Was it science? I can’t remember. They had been married for thirty years, she told me.”

  She sipped the coffee and looked around her, not as yet feeling at home, and watching Tom who was glancing at the headlines of the morning paper but who, realising that she was staring at him, put it down again and said to Vera:

  “She tells me that she gets a little dizziness now and again.”

  “Oh nothing much, nothing to worry about,” his mother protested. “Not often. Only once or twice when I was shopping. It wasn’t anything. I was telling Tom that the doctor said that I had good lungs. He told me I had the lungs of a sixteen-year-old.”

  “That’s good,” said Vera. “I’m sure neither Tom nor I have that,” and her mother-in-law laughed.

  “I think I have the lungs of a ninety-year-old,” said Tom. “We don’t get enough exercise. We should take more exercise.”

  “It’s a lovely house,” said his mother. “A lovely house.”

  “Is the coffee sweet enough,” Vera asked.

  “Yes, yes, it’s good coffee. Exactly as I like it,” though in fact it was not quite as sweet as she usually wanted it.

  “I hope you haven’t had any more break-ins.”

  “No no, just the one. And they didn’t take anything. Of course I don’t have much anyway. I mean I don’t have any jewellery or anything like that.”

  “They wouldn’t get much jewellery here either,” said Tom, “though you don’t get many break-ins in this place. Or at lea
st hardly ever. Shops maybe but houses hardly ever. You won’t need to worry about that.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Are you sure you haven’t something to do? I’m not keeping you back or anything?”

  “Not at all,” they both said simultaneously.

  “Not at all. We don’t do much work on a Saturday. Hardly any really. But if you would like to see your room,” Vera suggested.

  “I don’t mind,” her mother-in-law replied and Vera and Tom went along with her.

  As he stood outside the door of the room with his mother, Vera behind him. Tom had the strangest feeling as if he were a warder showing a prisoner into his cell, and yet there was no reason why he should, since the room was in fact a very fine one with large windows looking out on to the hills and trees at the back, and was furnished neatly with a TV set, an electric fire, a bed with a yellow continental quilt, a wardrobe and basketwork chair. There was also a dressing table of the same light contemporary wood as the wardrobe with a large mirror above it. The curtains were a pale yellow.

  “This is your room, mother,” he said, using the word for the first time.

  “It’s lovely,” she said enthusiastically. “Lovely. It’s so airy and light.”

  And indeed it was airy and light and sunny. There was about it no sense of sweat or time, its wood was innocent and clear, no deep thoughts had ever brooded in it, the windows and furniture were all without memory.

  She stood there as if not quite believing that the room belonged to her, as if she were a lodger moving in, as if she would at any moment ask them what the terms might be, or when breakfast would be served in the morning. Tom laid her case down in the middle of the room and said rapidly, “Put on the TV any time you like. And don’t worry about the electric fire. Use it as much as you like. Remember it is your room. If there’s anything else you want, you ask.”

  “If the quilt isn’t warm enough,” Vera added, “just tell me. But we usually find that these quilts are warm enough on their own without blankets.”