“I wish she’d use it.”
“How would you like it, Miss Field, if strangers came into your house enquiring into your circumstances? Suppose it were your own home?”
Now the girl blushed, a deep guilty red.
“Well, in a sense, Mrs. Axon, I wouldn’t like it at all. But I’m not trying to interfere, only to help Muriel. You see, looking at her there, hardly moving, her body all drooping, not speaking—well, it crosses my mind that she could be suffering from depression. Clinical depression. Of course, that would be a matter for your GP, in the first instance.”
“I’d take her to the doctor,” Evelyn said, “if I thought it would help.”
“Yes, do take her, because if he thinks she is depressed, there are some excellent drugs. Then, if she felt better in a month or two, she might try the class again.”
“You think that’s what’s the matter, do you? Depression?”
“It could be.”
“You don’t notice anything amiss with her physically?”
“Better let your doctor be the judge of that. I’ll try to call next week, and you can tell me how you got on.” She looked around at Muriel again, again put out her hand. “That’s an unusual dress, Muriel. Where did you get that, then?”
Muriel closed her eyes, screwed them up, and grinned.
“She’s got a sense of humour, hasn’t she?” Miss Field said. She patted Muriel’s wrist. And Evelyn’s patience snapped.
“Sense of humour? Lovely dress?” The girl’s head snapped back in shock at her ugly tone. “I made it for her. I do adorn her, I deck her in all the modes. Yes, she’s a wonderful personality, my daughter, not a beauty, but very striking. Isn’t she, Miss Field?”
The girl straightened up. She was staring at Evelyn, her mouth slightly ajar.
“Perhaps she has a beau.” Evelyn laughed. “Perhaps she slips out when I sleep in the afternoons, and meets him in the park. No wonder you get no answer when you knock, Muriel’s on the razzle.”
The young woman turned, with a strange and frozen expression, and looked at Muriel. Stared, Evelyn might have said, as if she were seeing her for the first time. Muriel lifted her face, like an animal sniffing for water; she looked, her mother thought, particularly unintelligent and unappealing, just at that moment. Without a word, Miss Field scooped up her briefcase, and got herself most precipitately from the room. Evelyn followed her to the front door. The girl jerked it open, and took a deep breath of the leaf-mould air. “I’ll see you again,” she said, and fled down the path towards her car.
Evelyn watched her go with fleeting amusement, thinking that she would likely not be back; but they might send another one, there were plenty in reserve. Something had struck a chord. Her neck felt stiff, her eyes strained, with the effort of keeping her gaze averted from the middle of her daughter’s body. She returned to the sitting- room.
“Thanks to me,” she said. “Thanks to my tact, young lady, you aren’t locked up by now. A month from now you won’t be able to hide it.”
Muriel sat examining her hands. She always looked at them as if they belonged to someone else, and she was surprised to find them attached to her wrists.
“How many times have I told you about going to the door?”
Oh, once twice, thrice, Muriel replied uncaringly.
“You dare to cheek your mother!” Tears sprang into Evelyn’s eyes. I am getting old, she thought, I am getting old and I do not deserve this. It is such a strain for me. Even the blue tits have learned to open the milkbottles; but Muriel has learned nothing at all.
Colin was surprised at how easy it was to tell lies to Sylvia. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere.
That night he drove up to Isabel’s house at half past seven. He knew he was early, so he took the car slowly along the road, reversed into a driveway, and drove back. It was an unremarkable street on the outskirts of town, the kind of place where he would have been glad to live. The estate was too noisy, swarming with the kind of children he taught all day. His windows looked into other windows, and he resented the share of themselves with which his neighbours presented him. The gardens were heavy clay strips, waterlogged and cleared only recently of builder’s rubble; the tiles were coming loose in the bathroom, and rain got in under the kitchen door. He wanted a house like the one in which he had grown up; grey shrubberies and yellow-cream curtains of heavy net guarded each property. Ah, property, he thought, that is what they are, not merely houses but a statement of values. But surely, he thought in mild surprise, those are not the values I hold?
Colin stopped the car. He looked at his watch. His hand went for the door handle, and then withdrew. He sat hunched for a moment and slowly leaned forward, to let his head rest on the steering wheel. I am lonely, he thought, I am behaving very badly. As if I were free to do this.
Muriel had begun to imitate the visitor, crossing her legs at the ankle and tucking them under her chair, and absently smoothing her hair around the imaginary curve of a cheek. She wore the remote and abstracted air of the woman from the Welfare.
As punishment, she was being deprived of food. It annoyed Evelyn that she wasn’t more affected by this. If you put food in front of her, she ate it; if not, she didn’t miss it. By herself she would starve, Evelyn thought, or make herself very sick. She would bring a raw egg to the table, and set it down with every appearance of satisfaction; choose what was raw or half-cooked or stale, in preference to the good food her mother provided for her. The idea of mealtimes didn’t seem to have got into her head. Is she human, Evelyn wondered that night; is she human or something else, and what is she likely to give birth to?
Colin brought their drinks, and put them down on the table.
“Not a very good film, was it?”
“We didn’t really need to see a film. But if we just parked the car in a field and made love, you wouldn’t think
