serious self-possessed expression and when one of the other little girls began to cry Sheila gazed at her with a faint distaste. It worried Ruth that her daughter should be so unsmilingly serene and while she was thinking that thought Hugh said, ‘She’s cool, isn’t she?’
‘Isn’t she?’ Ruth hissed back and Hugh turned to her in surprise.
‘I’m worried she’s so cool,’ Ruth continued in the same hissing tone. ‘She never smiles. She’s like a robot.’
‘What’s wrong with being cool?’ Hugh asked her.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s like you. Maybe she’ll be a writer.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said Hugh, his face pale.
‘What I said. Maybe she should be a writer. Isn’t that a good thing? Maybe a writer doesn’t have to have emotions.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’
‘Oh skip it,’ said Ruth impatiently and watched her daughter driving past with the same unearthly competence and composure as she had noticed before, self-reliant, never bumping into anyone, never making a mistake.
‘Anyway,’ she said aloud, ‘what does your writing mean? This is the real world. What have you got to say about this? About the fair? You haven’t said anything. I don’t think you’ve noticed a thing.’ She was hissing like a snake and all the time he was staring at her with his pale hurt face among all the tanned people. Perhaps he thought the fair vulgar, beneath him; perhaps he thought that the music which recalled her youth to her was indecorous, inelegant, raucous.
They watched Sheila driving round and round in her small yellow car.
‘It’s because I don’t drive,’ said Hugh.
‘No,’ she almost screamed. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Nothing at all to do with that. It’s your lack of feeling, your damned lack of feeling. She’s getting like you. Look at her. She’s like a robot, don’t you see?’
‘No I don’t see. She’s self-contained, that’s all. But I don’t think she’s like a robot.’
‘I don’t care what you say, I know.’
‘Do you want me to stop writing then?’ he asked plaintively.
‘You do what you want. Anyway I don’t think writing is the most important thing in the world, as you seem to.’
And all the time there throbbed around her the beat of the music, heavy, sonorous, plangent. Her body moved to its rhythm. And her daughter revolved remorselessly in her small car.
‘You’re shouting,’ said Hugh. ‘People are hearing you.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care whether they hear me or not.’
The cars stopped and she leaned over and pulled Sheila towards her. She walked off ahead, Sheila beside her. It was as if she wanted to get into the very centre of the fair, its throbbing centre, in among the lights, the red savage lights, so that she could dance, so that she could feel alive, even in that place of cheating and deception, crooked sights, bad darts.
He was so dull, always asking her if poetry was important. And what should she tell him? Why was he doing it if he doubted its value so much? The fair was important: one could sense it: its brash reality had all the confidence in the world, its music was dominating and without inhibition. It was doing a service to people, even though the prizes were cheap and without substance. The joy of existence animated it, colour, music.
What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. What the hell is wrong with me? She watched a girl and a boy walk past, arm in arm, and she felt intense anguish like the pain of childbirth.
She hated her husband at that moment, he looked so pale and anguished and out of place. If only he would hit her, say something spontaneous to her, but he looked so perpetually wounded as if he was always trudging home from a war he had lost. The only time she had seen a look of concentration on his face was when he had been firing at the ducks.
She saw a great wheel circling against the sky with people on it, some of them shrieking.
‘I think I’d like some lemonade,’ she said aloud, and they walked in silence to the lemonade tent.
While they were in the tent a drunk man pushed his way past them swaying on his feet and muttering some unintelligible words.
‘Hey,’ she shouted at him but he pretended not to hear.
‘Did you see that?’ she said to Hugh. ‘He pushed past. He had no right to do that.’ She was speaking in a very loud voice because she was so angry and Hugh looked at her in an embarrassed way. She wanted to stamp her heels into the man’s ankles: but she knew that Hugh wasn’t going to do anything about it and so she said, ‘I don’t think I want any lemonade at all.’
‘That bugger,’ she said, referring to the drunk man, hoping that he would hear her, but he seemed to be rocking happily in a muttering world of his own.
Before she knew where she was—she was walking so fast because of her rage—she found herself away from the fairground altogether and in an adjacent park where she sat on a bench, seething furiously. When her husband finally caught up with her and sat beside her she felt as if she could pick up a stone and throw it at him, so great was her frustration and her loathing. Sheila sat down on the grass, cradling the teddy bear in her arms and saying into its ear, ‘Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.’ Its unblinking eyes with their cheap glitter stared back at her. She seemed to have forgotten about her parents altogether and was in a country of her own where the teddy bear was as real as or perhaps more real than her parents themselves.
‘Why didn’t you want lemonade?’ said Hugh.
‘If you must know,’ she replied angrily, ‘I didn’t take it because that man got ahead of us in the queue and you didn’t do anything about it.’
‘What was I supposed to do about it? Start a fight?’
‘I don’t know what you could have done. You could at least have said something instead of just standing there. You let people walk all over you.’
‘What people?’
‘Everybody.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I should get a job then. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t want me to be writing.’
‘What on earth …’ She gazed at him in amazement. ‘What on earth has that to do with what I’m talking about? I don’t care whether you write or not. You can carry on writing as long as you like. I don’t care about that. It doesn’t worry me.’
‘You think I’m a failure. Is that it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know whether you’re a failure or not. You’re never happy. You’re always thinking about your writing. And yet you never seem to see anything that goes on around you. I don’t understand you.’
‘And what about you? Do you see everything?’
‘I see more than you. You don’t care about
