The Centre of the Green Read online

  There was another pause, lengthening into a definite silence. They were all watching Curly now, attentively, like cats at a mouse-hole. Ethel said, “Is that all? It’s not much,” and the others no longer resented her; they felt she spoke for them all. Curly blushed an even deeper red, and stared ahead of him, focussing his eyes on blankness. When he began to speak again, his voice was unnaturally high and controlled. “No, I had this trouble, you see,” he said. “Wanting to … expose myself like. In public. I couldn’t help it, you see. Of course there was complaints. I’m on probation, as a matter of fact.” A pause. “That’s why I’m here.” Another pause. “It’s quite mad really, because I’m not like that.”

  In the silent room, the simultaneous release of breath from the six of them was like a surrender. Then Charles said, “And I’m here because I tried to commit suicide, if you want to know.” He could almost hear the click, as the others turned their heads like vultures in his direction. Now Curly had rejoined the community, and Charles was the one in the middle. The session was under way.

  *

  In Devon the days went slowly by. Being at home did not bring peace to Julian after all. He was bored. He had made his gesture, committed his decisive act, and now it was done, time the enemy was still there, stretched before him like an endless worm. “The worm that dieth not”— that was time. Hell, Eternity, Heaven were three names for the same thing. He felt the trivial routine of life at home closing over him. What was there to do but get up late, read the papers, go for walks, gather vegetables from the garden, lay the table, help to wash up, watch the television, go to bed early? He was tied to the cottage and the unfrequented fields, since he avoided even errands to the village, knowing that already the villagers must be asking what young Mr. Baker was doing at home all this while and where was his wife.

  So Julian avoided all but his own mother and father, and of those two, his father avoided him. Between Colonel Baker and his son there was a barrier of shame. The Colonel was ashamed of his son, and ashamed of himself, for both had failed, he as a father and Julian as a man. The Colonel knew what his son should do, but he had abdicated his responsibility to see that it was done. He was embarrassed. He had nothing to say, and was in any case afraid of saying anything. So he kept out of his son’s way and out of his wife’s way. As for Mrs. Baker, she had long ago lost the habit of conversation. It was enough for her that she could see Julian, touch him, minister to him, protect him. In the old days, when the boys had returned to her after some absence, she had enjoyed the drawn-out ritual of a chat, pulling out and devouring all the information she could, until she had made those days of absence as much a part of her as if the boys had not been away at all. Even now when Julian went out for a walk she would want to know where he had been, but such inquiries took up little time now that he was always conveniently within reach.

  Julian grew restive. He was not a lustful person, and his mind was not filled with what the Catholics call “lustful thoughts”. That was not the basis of his compulsion. Julian’s philandering was not out of lust, but for its own sake. Each casual adventure was an exercise in building—in building the shell of a personality behind which he could hide, always the same shell, but always needing to be rebuilt for each new encounter. This shelter was twofold; not only against the world, but against time, for time was consumed in the act of building. As long as the process lasted, he was engaged in it, all consciousness of time and self absorbed in it. He was like a snail run mad, gone off the rails, making again and again the same complicated shell out of the secretion of its own intestines. And when he could do so no longer, he itched and pined.

  On his mother’s advice, he had written to the County Education Committee, offering himself as a supply teacher. He had filled out a form, had it acknowledged, thereafter nothing. Soon the school holidays would begin, and all chance of work of that sort would be gone. Was there anything else he could do to break the routine? What could he do? Should he go back to London, try for another job? He would have to do that eventually in any case. (Perhaps the Agency would take him back. Other people had breakdowns, and were reinstated afterwards. It was almost expected of the “creative people” from time to time.) But not yet, not until he had heard again from Penny—though that would only be to say that she needed money for the girl’s operation.

  Money! What was he going to do about money? He spent none here, but there was nothing coming in. As for his bank balance, he did not even know whether that was in credit or not; there was always a time in the middle of the month when the figure of the balance changed from black to red, and remained red until a salary cheque arrived to right it. All very well for Penny to go on about his paying for this abortion, but with what?

  It seemed to Julian that whenever he tried to think seriously about what he should do, he was brought up short by an impossibility. It wasn’t fair. He got no credit for trying. It wasn’t easy to “take a grip on himself”, and think about unpleasant things, and when he did, all that happened was that he saw the unpleasantness more clearly. “Facing facts”, when you couldn’t do anything about them, was like wilfully hitting your head against a wall. Soon Julian developed the knack of turning his mind away from an unpleasant fact before he came to it, but since there were so many unpleasant facts about his position at this time, his mind became rather fuzzy and confused, incapable of consecutive thought. Even Julian realized this, but he told himself that it would be all right when he had something to do.

  When eventually the County Education Committee did write from Exeter, asking Julian to finish the term as a supply teacher at Garrett St. Angus Primary School, about ten miles away, everyone was relieved. It solved nothing, of course, but at least it would make life easier for the next four weeks. Julian could borrow a bicycle for the journey, Mrs. Baker said; she would make sandwiches for his lunch and have a hot meal ready for his return.

  It was all very well, Charles thought, to call this “Group Therapy”, but there wasn’t much feeling of belonging to a group, and what there was had to be built up afresh at the beginning of each new meeting. Perhaps one became part of the group without knowing it, perhaps only someone outside the group could realize its coherence, but to Charles himself, looking from the inside, it was no more than a shifting pattern of alliances and hostilities, with the nearest approach to a group feeling when they all turned together on one member to attack him.

  Today it was Anne, who always came late to their twice-weekly meetings.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “It isn’t an easy journey. I’ve got to change twice. I told you that.”

  “You could start earlier.”

  A silence from Anne. Then David said, “It’s not worth arguing about. It’s so obvious. She’s late because she wants to make an impression on Peter. She wants him to feel she’s something special, so she makes him wait for her. We all come on time, more or less, but Peter’s got to realize Anne’s different from us. That’s what she wants, anyway.”

  This divided them. Some felt that David had been unkind, and was showing off. “He’s been reading a book,” Ethel said. Others wished to know how Anne would defend herself. But Anne only said, “Maybe”.

  A silence. Ethel said, “I suppose this is going to be one of our stop-and-go sessions.”

  Charles did not feel that he wished to talk about himself, and searched for a harmless subject. “Last time Ethel was telling us about her travels,” he said.

  “Oh Christ! You don’t want to hear about that. It’s so boring.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, there’s no point in it anyway. You can’t go anywhere without money nowadays, and I’m just bloody poor. Washed up. Played out. Finished.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not a lousy scientist. Christ, I’ve written five books now, and you needn’t pretend you’ve read any of them, because I know you haven’t. You needn’t pretend you’ve even heard of me before, if it
comes to that. Five books. I’ve been all round the world…. Morocco…. Sumatra. I’ve lived with one tribe of Maoris for weeks—really lived with them, just like one of the family, not because I’m a bloody anthropologist, but just because I happen to enjoy doing that kind of thing. I’ve eaten food that would turn your stomachs rotten; you don’t worry about germs out there, you know. I’ve slept on the ground … in trees. I’ve had malaria, dysentery—been rotten with it, raving, saying all sorts of stuff, not that they could understand. Yes, I’ve lived. And now, just because I’m not a specialist, people say I’m washed up. If you want to write travel books nowadays, you’ve got to bring something back in a bottle. Writing—it has to be a hobby now, like fretwork; you can’t even afford to do it unless you’ve got a steady job. It’s the end of travel writing as an art, I’ll tell you that. Journalists, biologists, even commercial travellers—any bloody fool who gets sent somewhere can write a book about it, and if you just go because you’re born to travel and to write, you’re classed as a tourist, and expected to pay for it. Well, I can’t afford it any more. I’m finished. You know how much my publishers wanted to give me as an advance on my last book? A hundred and twenty-five quid. You couldn’t go to the Channel Islands on that.”

  Waters, who had not yet been known to ask a question, and who had replied only briefly to those put to him, now asked his first. “You reckon you’re a failure then?” he said.

  “I told you—I’m finished.”

  “You reckon you’ve failed?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘failed’. You can’t say it’s my fault if things have changed.”

  “Ah, but you didn’t make the grade, did you?”

  Ethel said angrily, “Some of my books have done very well. Nobody lost any money on me, you know. I mean, Christ—it’s a crowded field; we all know that.”

  Waters said in a satisfied way, “You’re not what they call a best-seller, are you? You’d get more than a hundred and twenty-five quid if you were. I reckon it’s what they thought you were worth.”

  “I had my own public. I used to get a lot of letters from all sorts of people.”

  “You’ve failed. You might as well admit it.”

  Charles said, “Have I failed, Waters? Is that my trouble?”

  “I’d say you have. Not got very far in your job as far as I can see. And then trying to kill yourself. That’s a confession of failure, if you like.”

  Myra said, “What about me?”

  “Ay.” He nodded at David, and then at Anne. “And him. And her with her two changes and all. I’ve seen her on the District line get into the same train as me, and she’s still half an hour late. It’s my belief she goes on past the stop. As for him——” at Curly, “—I’m surprised he’s let mix with us at all. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “Just to watch. I thought I’d just watch for a bit, and see what it was like.”

  “Have you failed, Waters?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask me that.”

  “But we do ask.”

  “Well, don’t think I’m afraid to tell you, because I’m not.” He drew himself up, and looked sternly round the circle of faces. “Yes, I consider I have.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about this while you’ve all been talking your heads off, trying to hide things as often as not. I consider that I have not fulfilled my purpose in life. I’ve let myself drift.”

  “What purpose in life?”

  “To have my own market garden, and not work for other people.”

  “You’re a market gardener? Here in London?”

  “I’m a commercial artist.”

  Peter made one of his rare interventions. He said gently, “Didn’t you take evening classes at the Poly for a bit?”

  “That’s right. They were very pleased with me there —said I had a flair for it, you know. One of the instructors there said he thought I’d do very well for myself if I ever got started on my own. I’ve got green fingers. But there wasn’t much point in going on with it, when I knew I’d never have the money. You need a lot of capital. My wife says that just having the garden at home makes more than enough work. I grow much more than we can eat as it is; we give a lot away. I wanted to sell it, but of course she won’t have that. After all, we do own our own house. We’ve got a position to keep up.”

  “Why does that make you a failure?” David said. “I don’t own my own house. I don’t own anything.”

  “I’m forty-seven. It’s too old to start again. I haven’t what you might call achieved anything, you know. It’s like I say, I just drifted into things. I never really had any strong ideas of what I wanted to be, you see, so I just did what was suggested. It wasn’t until very late in my life, when we moved to Southfields and found we had this piece of garden, that I discovered, and then it was too late. Forty-seven! I’ll be sixty soon, and not done anything, not made anything.”

  “But most people could say the same thing.”

  “That’s right. It’s all failure, isn’t it? Just living, and then after a bit, sort of dying. I get very sad, just thinking about it—really melancholy, if you know what I mean. I had the headaches for a long time, and that was bad enough, though of course you have to put up with it when you’re my age. But then I got these crying fits, and that wasn’t natural.”

  “Do you still get them?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Only the once at work. It’s in the evenings mostly. Even when I’m working in the garden, which is strange when you think of it. Mowing the lawn, and the tears pouring down. My wife doesn’t understand it at all.”

  Anne said, “I do travel past my stop, but it isn’t because I want Peter to notice me. I’m just rather frightened; that’s all.”

  Peter said, “Is this going to open something up? Because I think we’ve had our ninety minutes for now.”

  As they left the Institution, Waters fell into step with Charles. “You can call me Bill, if you like,” he said. “I didn’t want to get too familiar at first, not knowing anybody, but it does seem more friendly.” And when the group reassembled three days later, they found that Waters had brought each of them a pound of tomatoes from his garden.

  *

  Garrett St. Angus Primary had once been a church school, the educational focus of several scattered villages. The Education Act of 1944 changed its name, but left its character unaltered. It was a small, squat building of grey stone, with a very small asphalt playground, a large garden and four primitive and draughty privies in a row. Although the children were divided into five classes, the school had only four classrooms, and Julian found he had to share a room with the headmaster. There was no staffroom at all. Indeed, since the members of the staff had no free periods, there was no need for one, and they met in the Infants’ Room to drink Nescafé during the morning break.

  Julian was the only teacher with a degree; the others were what is called “certificated”. The headmaster had been teaching at Garrett St. Angus for most of his teaching life, and expected to go on doing so until he retired, in ten years’ time, at the age of sixty-five. He believed that if you could teach “these children” the three Rs, that was enough; for the rest, their time would be better spent in the school garden. His own class consisted of those boys and girls who had failed the 11-Plus Examination; since the nearest Secondary Modern School was too far away to be easily reached, they stayed where they were until they reached the leaving age. Julian’s pupils were the next in age. Some had taken the 11-Plus that year, others would take it next year, and there were two mental deficients, rather older than the rest, who would never take it. The two classes were combined for History, Geography, Religious Instruction and Gardening. Julian was expected to teach the first two of these subjects, since the headmaster considered them unnecessary. Both Religious Instruction and Gardening, however, were a kind of extension of the school disciplinary sys
tem, and the headmaster taught those subjects himself.

  When this teaching arrangement was first explained to Julian, he asked what if both he and the headmaster should be talking at once. But the headmaster said that there would be no difficulty about that; it would not happen. “Don’t bother with trying to explain things in front of the class,” he said. “You just set them problems, and when they can’t do them, they come up to your desk. You’ll find they’re all on different pages of the book, so it’s much the best way. Reading’s the only thing that makes much of a row. When yours do reading, mine do sums.”

  So that is how it went. Julian discovered that Reggie and Donald, the two mentally deficient boys, could neither read nor do sums, but they were quiet well-behaved boys, perfectly happy if they were left alone to share a desk at the back of the room, and draw pictures of ships. During History lessons Julian read aloud from an old-fashioned textbook with large print and half-tone pictures of Nelson at Trafalgar, Sir Richard Grenville on the deck of the Revenge, Alfred driving back the Danes and other stirring subjects. For Geography, he made the class copy maps from the atlas. Since the headmaster remained in the room with him, he had no difficulty in keeping order.

  Julian took little interest in his pupils; after all, they would be his for so short a time. He did not know their mothers and fathers as the headmaster did; he had not watched them grow. They were just country children, some clean and some sour-smelling, some with spots and a few with sores. Some of his own class had the charm that most young animals do have, but the older boys were just louts, as far as he could see, and the older girls kept close together, giggling and sharing secrets. The members of the staff were dull too, with their endless talk of plasticine and paper cut-outs and what this child had done, that child said, as if they had no interests beyond their own charges. Just dull, all three of them, the spinster with spectacles and the married woman with a sniff, and Wotcherd, who was just out of Training College. Wotcherd had straw-coloured hair and eyes like pale blue beads set in egg-white; he called Julian “old chap” and helped the headmaster with the gardening lessons.