The Pumpkin Eater (21 page)

The rich, actor's voice sank into silence. The old man in his funeral clothes, his silver hair like a prophet, walked slowly down the chancel steps and stepped sideways into the front pew. After a moment's pause the Air on the G String, relayed on tape from the organ loft, sang through an uneasy silence. It gathered the noble and despairing words and suspended them in a perfect cone, a capsule of eternity, over the lonely coffin. Sitting next to Jake I was afflicted, physically afflicted in shoulder, hip and thigh, by his sense of betrayal. He was a child mocked by a father who had played games like a child and now, in death, turned gravely to adult matters, leaving him alone. His father had been the progenitor of Jake's whole world, its prime example: sceptical, tepid, suspicious of emotion, contemptuous of the laws he scrupulously kept, a member of success and an enemy of failure; if he had acknowledged conscience, he had shrugged it away; the only thing that had ever tortured him was boredom. Why had he ended his life with this agonized cry for help? The only time that Jake had spoken to me since I came, he had burst out, “Why did he want this read? He didn't believe all that!”

I said awkwardly, “Well … it's beautiful.”

“Beautiful? He was a bloody liar.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“He didn't trust me.”

“He loved you,” I said uselessly.

“I thought he was like me. I honestly thought he was … myself. Now it turns out he was quite different.”

“No.”

“I never tried to understand him. I never thought there was anything to … understand. Just a likeable old bastard, mean with his money … liked whisky, liked his cigars, he liked food. And his writing — it wasn't good … professional, though. Successful. I thought he just wanted to live. What more did he want? What
more
?”

“I don't know, Jake. I don't know.”

“There isn't any more.”

But every inconsistent wish had been observed, nevertheless. The vicar, crouching back in the choir stalls, looked deeply unhappy. He was troubled by a sensation of blasphemy. The friends, five old men, only one of them with a wife, sat peacefully enjoying the music, the spring sun, the smell of lilies. When the music ended four of the old men — the actor did not go — rose and stood apprehensively at the corners of the coffin. Four burly undertakers, jostling the old men, lifted the coffin and lowered it on to the old men's fragile shoulders. A wreath slipped off the tipped end of the coffin and the vicar put his hand over his eyes in quick prayer. There was a hurried consultation among the undertakers, and swift as children picking daisies they stripped the coffin of flowers while the old men stood trembling, throwing hopeless looks up the aisle to the open door. Jake was gripping the front of the pew, leaning forward on his arms as though he were going to be sick. I could hear his father saying, “Absolutely no good asking Jake to carry the box. He'd be sure to drop it,” — and then smiling at him, taking his hand, giving him love but never responsibility. There was nothing I could do. I was a stranger.

Finally, after some scuffling, two of the undertakers crouched under the sides of the coffin, bending low to level up with the old men, who edged uncertainly forward to the brink of the steps and then, at last, proceeded. The vicar pursued them, his face tense, his eyes half shut, waiting for the inevitable crash. But the old men stepped out bravely, although their feet hardly seemed to touch the floor and they were more suspended from the coffin than supporting it. The two undertakers breathed heavily, trying to maintain their expressions of pious gloom while bearing the yoke of an ebony coffin and five schoolfriends, one dead. Jake and I followed. The actor, the solitary wife and the housekeeper fell in behind us. We went out into the warm air. Two children playing catch among the tombstones stopped, stared at us and backed away, running when they were beyond the gate.

Jake would not go to the grave. The vicar signalled to him, but he turned his back on the deep hole, with its emerald lining that could have more usefully been used for a display of lawn mowers and garden rakes than for disguising the solid walls of a grave: the walls of earth, clay, stone, worm and root, hospitable and alive, were made indecent by that horror of fancy raffia. The old men stood perilously near the edge, peering down with the fascination of people looking into the crater of a volcano. How long before they too would jump? Their rusty black clothes were shadows, their faces peaked with fear and curiosity. I stayed with Jake, although he did not know I was there. He was alone. He no longer needed me.

The vicar, able at last to speak, bared a voice that sent the rooks cawing from the elms and made a cow, browsing the churchyard hedge, raise its head in gentle enquiry. “Earth to earth!” he bellowed, as though he were giving judgement. “Ashes to ashes! Dust to dust!…”
But except he put in that exceeding weight of an eternal glory with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up
… I felt diminished, lost, as unrelated to reality or purpose as a piece of cotton caught on a branch, a fragment of china in the grass. Who was I, to come to terms with evil? What arrogance. But it's arrogance that keeps one alive: the belief that one can choose, that one's choice is important, that one is responsible only to oneself. Without arrogance what would we be? I longed now to know what Jake's father had really thought, had really felt and suffered behind that bland barricade. But it was too late. He had made quite certain that the one great statement of his life would be made after his death, involving him in nothing.

I touched Jake's hand, but he didn't turn, or look up. I wanted to ask him to forgive me, as I, at that moment only, forgave him. But it was impossible. I walked slowly away across the churchyard. When I turned at the gate, and looked back, I saw the five old men with their heads bowed, standing together, and the younger man standing alone, isolated, as he had chosen.

I went to the tower. There, in a cell of brick and glass, I sat and watched the wall of sky that rose ten feet away from my lookout window. Nothing else existed. Nobody else lived. A thick mist packed the surrounding valleys and rain, very fine rain, fell incessantly, to obscure the world further. The birds clattered, invisible; or sometimes drifted like burnt paper across the window, were carried up and away again, lying on their wings as though half asleep.

I seemed to be alone in the world. My past, at last, was over. I had given it up; set it free; sent it back where it belonged, to fit into other people's lives. For one's past grows to a point where it is longer than one's future, and then it can become too great a burden. I had found, or had created, a neutrality between the past that I had lost and the future that I feared: an interminable hour which passed under my feet like the shadow of moving stairs, each stair recurring again and again, flattening to meet the next, a perfect circle of isolation captive between yesterday and tomorrow, between two illusions. Yesterday had never been. Tomorrow would never come. Darkness and light succeeded each other. The thick log in the grate became a heap of ash. Did this mean time continuing? I didn't believe it. The high tower, rising like a lighthouse in a sea of mist, was inaccessible to reality. Even the birds flung themselves about as though there were no trees, no earth to settle on.

I had been married for twenty-four years, more than half my life. The children who were born during my first wedding night now walked heavily about, frowning, groping in worn handbags for small change; their clothes were beginning to grow old and many of them must have stopped falling in love. I found it hard to understand this, as I found it hard to grasp the idea of distance, or as I always found it hard to believe in the actuality of other people's lives. For further proof, there were my own children, who until recently I had loved and cared for. Some were still growing up. Some merely grew thinner or fatter, but the size of their feet, the length of their arms, the circumference of their wrists and ankles would never change, except from disease. In them, in their memories and dreams. I existed firmly enough, however unrecognizable to myself. I stood over stoves, stirring food in a saucepan; I bent and picked things up from the floor; I stepped from side to side in the ritual of bed-making; I ran to the garden calling “Rain!” and stretched up for the clothes-pegs, cramming them into one fist and hurrying in, bedouined with washing. I shook thermometers, spooned out medicine; my face hung pinkly over the bath, suspended in steam, while I scrubbed at the free, tough flesh over a knee-cap, removing stains. I glowered, frightening, and then again sagged, sank, collapsed with the unendurable labours of a Monday. All this, and more, I saw myself perform in my children's memories, but although I knew that at one time it was so, I could not recognize myself. My children could remember stories of my own childhood, although they found them boring; but I was severed even from those old, clear images which determine, as I had previously thought, everything. The images of my childhood had disappeared.

But on the hill, in the tower, there were no children to identify me or to regulate the chaos of time. It was very light, the glare of the mist more accurate than sunshine. I had taken the telephone receiver off its rest: it lay like an unformed foetus on the table, its cord twisted in thick knots. No postman, milkman, baker or grocer walked on the gravel. The sound of their footsteps, of their low gears grinding up the track, would in any case have been muffled, and I would not have known they were there until they rang the bell. But I was safe. I had ordered no milk or bread, no cornflakes, flour, butter, cocoa, cat food, assorted jellies, biscuits, bacon, honey, cake, salad cream, sugar, tea, currants, chutney, tomato ketchup, gelatine, cream of tartar, soap, detergents, salt, shoe polish, cheese, sausages, rice, baking powder, margarine, orange squash, blackcurrant syrup, tins of soup or beans or salmon, disinfectant or instant coffee. The women who came to clean, in their fitted coats and Wellington boots, with wedding rings embedded in fingers glazed and pudgy as crystallized fruit, sat home by their fires and cared for their families. Only the wild cats knew I was there. They lay upstairs, spread out on separate beds with their stomachs heaving and their feet crossed, sleeping as though they were tired.

From time to time I put another log on the fire. I was very aware of comfort. The heat in the tower made irregular, small noises: a sudden thud through the pipes, a creaking, the slow hiss as a log blistered. I sat down again by the window. A man serving a life sentence will never again have children. Capable, strong, alert to love, he stares from his tower and cannot prevent his body growing older. His body is an uninhabited house and the outside walls are the last to crumble. I was alone with myself, and we watched each other with steady, cold, inward eyes: the past and its consequence, the reality and its insubordinate dream.

I stayed in the tower for three days, until they came for me. Of course if I hadn't known they would come for me, I might have gone somewhere else, I suppose that's pretty obvious. I didn't think of that. My only feeling was … I wanted to get away. Most people, I know, have this fantasy. One day they'll walk out of the door, through the garden gate, and … then? Then what? The fact is, you don't only need money, luggage, a ticket and a plan: you need a state of mind to think of all these things, and that state of mind is the one that keeps you at home, it's not the state of mind you're in when you're running away. Of course there are people who take out their savings, arrange for ropes and ladders, leave notes on the mantelpiece, provide themselves with some elaborate disguise; but I imagine that they are convinced that there is some preferable future. I wasn't convinced of this at all. I wanted to postpone the future; to stop things happening to me. I couldn't have gone to a bank — anyway, they'd have been closed — or collected some clothes or looked at a map; if I could, there would have been no need to go. So I went to the tower, which I knew was empty. And having got there, I stayed there. I'd run out of petrol and so I couldn't have left; that is, without a plan.

You think men don't behave like this? Perhaps it's true. A man has to be drunk, or insane, or unbalanced by talent, before he'll behave like a woman. But I have known men cry, try to pray; I've known men whose passion for triviality far exceeded mine; I've known men more weakly and willingly victimized by circumstances than I. Even love, which is believed to obsess us, can preoccupy some men to the point where they stop fighting successfully, working well, making sufficient money. You think well-adjusted, usefully occupied women don't behave like this? Of course. They haven't the time. Everyone, men, women, even children, has a great potential for fear, unhappiness, cowardice, lack of faith — but these things are unacceptable, and must be crowded out by occupation. If I had taken a job as … what? A receptionist, a cook, a shop assistant, a woman who does surveys for soap powders? If I had done that, instead of coming to the tower, would I have been happier? All right. Possibly I would. So, possibly, would Mrs. Evans, who, unlike me, was overworked. Do you remember her? I never wrote to her after all. I suppose she thought I didn't care. I'm sorry.

I wish I could say that during that time in the tower I reached some conclusion about something; that I left the tower of my own free will, having sensibly telephoned for them to bring some petrol; and went home to the children, having discovered that they were more important to me than … But I didn't. I stayed still and I stayed alone, for the first time in my life; and I waited for Jake.

Oh, I wasn't waiting for him as you wait for a lover, for someone coming back, or someone who is going to save you from danger. I didn't expect Jake to do anything for me. I waited for him as you wait on a hill, in a tower, in the mist, for an enemy. He had already incapacitated me, harried me, cut away most of my illusions and some of my ignorance; he had already so weakened me that I was falling back on myths, words, mysteries to replace what I had lost. I knew he wouldn't leave it at that. So I waited for him. And at first I felt calm and empty, as though nothing mattered, as though the past and the future were both meaningless. Then I thought of Jake standing alone in the churchyard, with his back turned on his father's grave, and I began to feel frightened. I bolted the doors and went up to the highest room in the tower. It is all glass, this room, but it was surrounded by cloud, and I couldn't even see the ground. I opened one of the windows and looked down, but I could only see a bed of mist. To be dead would be a perfect solution for me, I thought. But I couldn't bear the idea of pain, the possibility that I would be a broken mess on the gravel, bleating for help. I used to be physically very brave, but now if I pricked my finger I couldn't look at it. I shut the window and went downstairs again. It began to get dark. I wondered whether he would come up the hill in the night, when I couldn't see him, or in the day, when the mist would muffle the sound of his footsteps.