mine.”
She doubled her fist and struck out at Muriel, pounding at her shoulders and arms and ribs. Muriel stood, stoic. The blows bounced back from her plump solid body. Evelyn whined and gasped. Weariness stopped her. She stood glaring at her daughter, her arms limp by her sides. Suddenly, Muriel smiled. The grin split her face and lit up her eyes. She was delighted, she said softly. Delighted to be here. Welcoming you all. A short programme of song and laughter. For your entertainment. Tonight.
Three days before Christmas, Colin said to Sylvia, “Frank O’Dwyer phoned up.”
“Oh yes?”
“I thought I might just run over there. There are a few things he wants to get straightened out, about next term.”
Sylvia gave him an odd look, he thought. “Can’t it wait till after Christmas?”
“Well, yes, but you know how it is. The holidays are over before you know where you are.” He paused, watching the effect of this; none discernible. Sylvia was peeling potatoes. “I think he might want a bit of company as well. Poor old Frank,” he added sentimentally.
Sylvia filleted out an eye with the sharp end of the peeler. “All right,” she said.
“Only you wouldn’t want to come. It would mean getting somebody in to babysit, and we’d only be talking shop.”
“I’ve a lot to do,” Sylvia said, and added warningly, “Christmas is no holiday for me, you know.”
The following night Colin sat with Isabel in a chilly country pub twelve miles out of town. It was one of the unregenerated kind, with stone floors and a picturesque but quite inadequate open fire. A limp paperchain or two hung over the bar as a nod to festivity, but the customers were quiet and the landlord surly. Isabel looked up and watched Colin as he walked across the room with her tepid gin and his own pint of flat warm beer. Frankly he wondered how he was going to be able to manage these expeditions; the money for drinks, and the extra petrol. He always had an overdraft by the end of January. Every year.
“No ice,” he said jerking his head back towards the bar.
“It’s all right here,” Isabel said. “It’s quiet.”
“I could hardly believe Sylvia didn’t know I was up to something.”
“Up to something? You make me sound like a practical joke.” She lit a cigarette. “Colin, I wanted to see you because I’ve got some decisions to make. I’m thinking of leaving my job.”
“Well…I didn’t think you were happy.”
“Happiness seems a bit ambitious. I’m not sure I can see my way to that.”
“You’re not thinking of going away, are you?”
She watched his face, for the dawn of any hope. How have I come to trust him so little, she wonders, how has all my life become so soured?
“I’ve been offered a post in a new set-up—a therapeutic community, we call it. Must I blush for my jargon? It’s only a few miles away. But they’d like me to live in.”
“And you don’t want to leave your father?”
“I don’t feel that I can.”
“It’s bad luck on you to have no brothers and sisters, and a father who’s so elderly. I suppose he can’t get about as he used to.”
Isabel opened her bag and took out her handkerchief. Inside the bag were her father’s spectacles. He could not manage without them. After some thought, she had hit on this method of confining him to the house. “This place,” she said, “it’s a new approach, small numbers, a good staffing ratio. It’s for children who are mentally ill.”
Colin noticed the blue circles under her eyes, the tightness around her mouth. “I should think that would be intensely depressing. What have children got to make them mentally ill? Are they born that way?”
“Are you asking me for information?” she said. “Or is it a debating point?”
“For information. You’d be surprised what I don’t know. Explain to me.”
“Some babies don’t eat, they don’t cry. Nobody knows why.”
“It can hardly be society. It must be their genes. Genes are not much in fashion, I think. It must be their mothers.”
“Some of the mothers don’t seem to make relationships with the children. They don’t treat them as people, just as objects. They let them lie for hours and don’t react when they cry. The children feel that nothing they do can influence the world. They can’t control it. And they give up trying.”
“Like me,” Colin said. “I can’t control the world. I’m like that. I have it.”
“It’s not a disease, it’s a state of being. The constant frustration of one’s efforts to adapt the world, and the resignation of the attempt.”
“It’s common.” He sighed. “Look at the Labour Party.”
“Oh, Colin, it isn’t a bit the same. The frustrations we meet every day are of a different order. Sometimes the mothers are quite normal, and then we can’t account for it. When they get a bit older the children just sit, or they lie, and they gaze into the distance, you know, or just play with their fingers. They seem not to want to live. They seem afraid of it. Afraid of everything.”
“Nobody can do anything about anything,” Colin said. “They are right, the rest of us are wrong. Deluded. Why should we victimise them? Poor little sods.”
