I come here fairly often, and I know his daughter reasonably well. He has only the one daughter and no sons, his wife is dead. They say that he treated her badly. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that he loved his jars of sweets more than her. Imagine living among sweets all day: one would have to be sour when one had left them surely. Is that not right? He wants Diane to go to university since somewhere buried beneath that servility is ambition. I know her, and she is a bitch. Anyone with half an eye could see that, but she’s sweet in public, dewy-eyed and cool above the mini-skirt. One of these peroxide blondes and the kind of nutty mind that may get her yet into a students’ riot in our modern educational system.
He has brought her up himself, of course. I have played chess with him in the local chess club; I always win, naturally. After all, would he want to lose a customer? But sometimes, I have seen him looking at me . . . He thinks the world of his daughter. You know the kind of thing; if she’s first in Domestic Science, he’ll give her a bicycle. As a matter of fact, I know that she goes with this fellow Marsh, who’s at least ten years older than her, and he takes her out to the beach at night on his motor-cycle. His father owns a hotel in the town, and he’s got quite a reputation with the ladies. You’re not going to tell me that they are innocently watching the sea and the stars.
She doesn’t like me. I know that for a fact. I can tell when people don’t like me. I have antennae. She thinks I’m some kind of queer because I’m fifty and not married, and because I’m always going to the library for books. And because I wear gloves. But why shouldn’t one wear gloves? Just because young girls wear mini-skirts up to their waists doesn’t mean that all the decencies should be abandoned, that the old elegancies should go. I like wearing gloves and I like carrying an umbrella. Why shouldn’t I?
That day – as so often before – I got into conversation with the Lady while he hovered round me, and we came round to education.
‘They’re doing nothing in those schools these days,’ I said, and I know it’s the truth. ‘Expressionism, that’s what they call it. I call it idleness.’
He looked at me with his crucified expression and said,
‘Do you really believe that?’ He had a great capacity for listening, he would never volunteer anything. Some people are like that, they hoard everything, not only books, not only money, but conversation itself. Still, I don’t mind as I like talking.
‘In our days we had to work hard,’ I continued. ‘We had to get our noses to the grindstone. Arithmetic, grammar and Latin. Now they write wee poems and plays. And what use are they? Nothing. How many of them will ever write anything of any value? It’s all a con game. Trying to make people believe that Jack is as good as his master. I’m afraid education is going down the drain like everything else. They can’t even spell, let alone write.’
Suddenly he burst out – rather unusual for him –
‘She doesn’t want to go to university.’ Then he stopped as if he hadn’t meant to say so much, and actually wrung his hands in front of me.
‘You mean Diane?’ I said eagerly.
‘Yes. I’m so . . . confused. I wouldn’t have said it only I have to talk to someone. You know that I don’t have many friends. I can count on you as my friend, can’t I?’
As far as you can count on anyone, I thought. As far as anyone can count on anyone.
‘She says to me, “I can’t stand the books”. That’s what she says. What do you think of that? “I can’t stand the books,” she says. She says a haze comes over her mind when she is asked to study. She says that she has read all the books she wants to read. “What is the good of education anyway?” she asks. “All that’s over. We don’t need education any more and anyway,” she says, “we’re not poor”. What do you make of that?’
‘Oh, that’s what it’s come to,’ I answered. ‘There was Mr Logan died the other day. Now he spent all his years teaching in that school. He read and read. You won’t find many like him any more. Nobody needs him. Nobody wants him.’
He wasn’t listening. All he said was, ‘After what I did for her too. I used to go with her to get dresses fitted and her shoes and everything, and I’m not a woman you know.’
There might be two opinions about that, I thought to myself. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘What’s wrong with them? She wanted a guitar. I gave her a guitar. She used to go to the folk club Thursday nights and play it. Then she grew tired of that. She wanted to go to France for her holidays and I let her do that. Do you think it’s a phase?’ he asked eagerly, his face shining with innocence and agony, the crucified man.
I thought of the little white-headed bitch and said, ‘No, it’s not a phase.’
‘I was afraid it might not be. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ He was almost crying, such a helpless little man that you
