She took out a magazine which she began to read. It was a romantic magazine which had stories of love found and lost in hospitals, factories and offices. This was her secret vice. She thought of herself as an intellectual who would attend concerts, the better films and plays, but who would never descend to reading trashy love stories. And yet this was what she was doing. And also she was looking up her sign in the horoscope to find out what was to happen to her. She was in fact Capricorn, remote, cold, miserly, determined. She read quickly but with only half her mind. The park was so beautiful, so crowded with people, and she was so alone. An old unshaven man who carried a paper bag sat down at the end of her bench. He slumped forward, his hands on his knees, staring down at the ground. Beside him on the bench he had placed an old greasy cap. His lips mumbled some words which he was apparently addressing to himself. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Eventually he got up and this time she heard him say, ‘Bugger everything, bugger everything,’ as if it were some meaningful litany. She drew in her legs as he passed her. Then she put down her book and watched the children playing.
She liked children. Since her parents died she often thought that it was the children who had saved her. They were so nice, so innocent, so willing to learn, so willing to engage themselves in plays, concerts, projects, so alive and so loving. She believed that her own mother had never liked children. She herself had been born – she worked out – when her father had been unemployed and when her mother must have been very worried about the future. The coldness of her own personality must have been because her mother had never lavished enough love upon her. Surely that must be the reason. What other reason could there be?
But perhaps the reason why she liked children was that she wanted to mould them to be like herself. Was that it? No, it couldn’t be that. Children were so spontaneous, perhaps it was their very spontaneity that she loved. They would come up to her and tell her stories of what had happened to them, and she would listen attentively. They wrote nice little poems which had fine feeling and a directness which moved her. She was lucky in a way to have them. And yet there was something which she was missing. She couldn’t think what it was but it was something which kept reality at a remove from her as if she were looking at it through a plate glass window. Children weren’t like that. Children moved unselfconsciously through reality.
Her father had that kind of unselfconsciousness. He would sit down in a chair and seem able to endure time without terror. He would move about in a very slow heavy manner as if he were at home in the world. He would eat carefully as if he were drawing from what he ate sustenance for some work which it was necessary for him to do. He talked little and slowly. He would look out of the window and say, ‘It’s going to be a good day,’ and in some way the statement seemed final and exact. He never discussed anything profound or philosophical. Her mother from that point of view was the same. But she was also much more ambitious, much more jagged and edgy. She had even gone to see her daughter capped at the university though she had never been such a long distance from home before. She herself had tried to stop her from going in case she would utter idiocies to her friends but she hadn’t in fact done so and had behaved very circumspectly. She had also, strangely enough, chosen the right clothes to wear.
But her mother had said something to her once which she remembered. ‘I don’t know what will happen to you if you are ever left alone.’ She remembered this as if it were some prophecy of disaster.
She put down her book and got up. It was time to return to the hotel. In the hotel there were some sandwiches and tea laid on a table in the lounge. She took some tea but no sandwiches and sat for a bit watching the TV. The only other people in the room were an old man with a white moustache and his wife who sat on the sofa together, not speaking, gazing at the screen with the same kind of look as they might have had if they were looking at fish in an aquarium. The screen seemed to be showing a gangster story for shortly after she sat down a small thin quivering man was shot and the seeping blood reddened the screen. After a while she got up and looked at some magazines which were lying around. One was the Scottish Field, another the Countryside. There was an unfinished crossword which she looked at without much interest. At one time she had used to do a lot of crosswords but she had given that up.
As she sat there, there came to her the extraordinary feeling that she had ceased to live properly, that at some time she had left a road and was slowly going down a side track where she would find herself on abandoned sidings among old railway carriages in a blaze of yellow flowers. For a moment she suffered intense panic but then the panic subsided and the two old people were still there watching the TV as silently as ever.
Her father hardly ever watched TV. When someone switched it on he went outside and did some job. Her mother would watch it avidly. Sometimes she used
