Every Day Is Mother's Day

And Autumn does not smell like Autumn, Colin thought; where is the woodsmoke and the russet apples packed in barrels, and what are russet apples anyway, a breed or only a colour? Where are the swallows twittering on the wires? What will the swallows do when we all communicate by telepathy? I have only seen one, this year, and it did not make a summer.

I will never be a writer, he thought, I will never learn it, just as last year I did not learn Russian, I will never do it, my mind runs to cliches like abandoned plots to seed.

“You have to give people what they recognise and understand,” Mrs. Wells was saying sweetly.

Autumn is only the wet lamplight on the black wet road, soup out of Sylvia’s packets, a splutter and a cough from the car engine at eight in the morning; kids whining and defaulting dragged by their scruffs from September through to Advent, transistor blah-blah, only two thousand shopping days to Christmas, blah-blah, God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

“Mushrooms,” said Mrs. Moffat with pride. “I have sent an article to The Edible World on the cultivation of mushrooms.”

My vegetable love will grow, thought Colin, vaster than Empires and more slow.

“Do read it to us,” Mrs. Wells shrilled. “Could you, would you, read it to us, and we might help you with helpful hints. But first we must have our little assignment, shall we? ‘An Interesting Experience.’ Mr. Sidney?”

Colin grinned. “I’m sorry, I haven’t done my homework.”

“Oh, now, that’s a pity, Mr. Sidney.”

Her tone was light; if there was genuine grief, she kept it out of her voice. It is commendable, he thought, her restraint. A bare branch tapped and tapped against the window, dice in the evening’s pot.

“I couldn’t think of anything to write about.”

Mrs. Wells was shocked into reproach. “But Mr. Sidney, there’s always something to write about. That’s the whole point.”

“I didn’t think any of my experiences were interesting.”

“But there’s a book in each of us, Mr. Sidney.”

“Is there?” said Colin, engaged by this. “I wonder if people would like to tell us what book there is in them? I should like mine to be Les Liaisons Dangereuses or The Brothers Karamazov, but more likely it is something like Famous Five Join the Circus.”

“I should like mine to be Mansfield Park,” said Isabel, without a smile.

“Now, Mr. Sidney,” Mrs. Wells said, “you know I meant a book of our own, of our very own. We may think that we lead very ordinary lives, but believe me, it’s this very ordinariness that is the stuff of great books of all time. Look at Jane Eyre.”

“I wouldn’t call that ordinary,” Colin said. “Having this madwoman up in the attic, biting people.”

“Stabbing,” Isabel said.

“Stabbing, biting…though come to think of it, it happens all the time in the classes I teach.”

“Well, there you are then,” Mrs. Wells said. “Miss Field, have you got an interesting experience?”

Colin turned in his chair, all attention. The Duke of Norfolk, he thought; not altogether inconsequentially, because it was the name of the pub to which he hoped to take Isabel Field.

The lounge of the public house was heaving with wet raincoats, smelling of damp fake-furs and warming plastic. Electric coals twinkled merrily; above the bar, coloured Christmas lights winked around the calendar, and a notice informed the public that spirits are served in measures of one-sixth of a gill. Colin read it avidly, and the notice which said he didn’t have to be mad to work here but it helped. It was half-past nine, filling up. Colin manoeuvred for a corner table, and read the beermat as he pulled out Isabel’s chair, thinking, nobody pulls out chairs in a pub, what do you think it is, the bloody Dorchester? He was very anxious about the impression he was making.

“It’s the nearest,” he said apologetically, “and it’s quite nice really, you never get any rowdy people.”

“No horse-brasses. Good.”

“Plastic beams are my bete noire. What will you have to drink?”

She hesitated. “Gin.”

“Righto.”

Colin began to push his way to the bar. Singularly failing, as always, to catch the barmaid’s eye, he took time to look back at Isabel. Her eyes were cast down; perhaps she also read beermats. Her fingers were interlaced on the table in front of her in a formal pose, as if she were about to deliver a public statement. Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, Colin thought. This terrible habit of inappropriate quotation. How do you know she has a grief, perhaps she is just waiting for her drink, perhaps she doesn’t like to stare around her. Absolutely the worst you can do, he thought, is to fail. Isolated in his gaze, she gave the effect of a study, monochrome, perhaps the unnoticed frame on the back wall of an exhibition, or one of those grainy smudged photographs of Russian streets, a woman looking indistinctly for a moment into the lens of a strange culture. Her clothes were always beige or charcoal or grey, or a peculiarly soft dead green which he had never seen on anyone else. But then he had never looked.

He set the glass down in front of her, gin and orange.

“Oh, no, no,” she said quickly, “this wasn’t what I meant.”

Colin’s face creased with concern. “I’m sorry, was it gin and tonic you wanted, you didn’t—”

He began to get heavily to his feet. She arrested him with a quick flicking motion of her hand.

“This will be fine.” She picked up the glass and looked down into it, as if it contained a rare fish. “I’ve never had one of these before,” she said.