me to read?” asked Marion, always equable with them. “Or play card games? Or sing to you?”—She did sing sometimes in a low, tuneful, untrained voice.
“Talk.”
“That’s the hardest work of all.” But she sat down with a smile. The children asked her ‘just to talk’ more often than anything else. She told them the most wonderful things and although they did not always believe them they drank in every word. She told them of things that had happened to her and stories she had heard. They were real life stories, and although the children were sceptical in fact she invented nothing; she would have preferred to read or play dominoes but very well, if they wanted her to talk, then she would talk.
As the weeks went on Marion’s talks got more and more vivid but she did not notice. The children noticed, however, and their excitement was reflected in their quickened pulses, raised temperatures and restless nights.
It took some time for the nursing staff to relate all this to Marion’s visits, but they did so in the end. Even then they could not at first guess why such a quiet person could have such a stimulating effect. A nurse lingered one afternoon to listen and observe.
“It’s all quite harmless,” she reported afterwards. “That is, she only tells them stories from her travels in South America and so on, and it is absolutely fascinating, and educational as well. I don’t wonder they love it. But still,” and she shook her head, “it’s the way she tells it: as if she was there, she’s reliving that past of hers. And I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it.”
So a gentle hint was passed on to her and Marion woke up to what she was doing. All story-telling from her own experiences was stopped and she stuck wryly to Cinderella. But inside her the stories went on. The past which she had comfortably laid away all those years ago was still alive and kicking.
It shook her up and reminded her that life was not a Pandora’s box which you could put the lid on and forget. Her headaches started again and drove her to seek the doctor’s advice. She thought his remark about dreams acute, but she was inclined to resent it. He could confine himself to her pains and leave her to cope with her dreams. So she shook her head.
Quite often she dreamt of the past but sometimes she dreamt of the future. She dreamt that the book she was working on was completed but that it had been burnt before she could get it to the publisher’s hands. She had dreamt this dream in varying forms more than once. Surely fire in dreams meant something rather nasty in Freudian terminology? It seemed a pity that it had to be associated with her poor little book. Characteristically Marion took her studies lightly. She knew her own value as a scholar and did not overrate it. She was a subordinate, a contributor, not an originator, not a hacker-away in new and virgin territory. She had had much praise, but it was beyond her deserts.
Marion had a keen idea that some of her colleagues were cautious, if not suspicious, of her. Sitting in the Common Room, or working in the Library, she felt their quick glances and their little silences. She was an outsider, never quite one of ‘them’; a changeling who had had too much publicity; more than was good for her perhaps.
A good deal of this feeling was caused by her change-over from one school of studies to another. She was only a tolerable English scholar but potentially she had been much more as an anthropologist. She knew this and everyone else knew it. So her transference puzzled them.
On this subject she had kept her own counsel. She never spoke of it. No one thought this odd of her. It was merciful that she lived among women who distrusted confidences and too much talk about self. They thought she was odd but not her silence.
What would they have said, she wondered, if they knew the real cause for her silence? She was silent because there was practically nothing she could say. She could never speak professionally again about her old subject: she had forgotten everything she knew. When she came round to life again after her husband’s death she had found that all her knowledge, all her carefully acquired techniques had been erased from her mind. Six years of work had gone in a few hours. She was not only ignorant, she was worse than ignorant, her mind blocked all further studies on this subject. Marion knew when to take a hint from the Gods; she rebuilt her life on different foundations.
But it was not a story she wanted her sober, realistic, feet-on-the-ground companions to know.
Down in the kitchen below Marion’s sitting-room Joyo was also watching the man from the window. She was as aware of his presence as Marion, but in a different kind of way. But Joyo was a different sort of person. She was small and sturdy and given to wearing bright peasant clothes. Joyo was not her real name, of course, but one she had adopted in defence against her real one, about which she preferred not to think; she had got it as a matter of fact from a gay Australian in the canteen where she had worked during the war. The war had been Joyo’s apogee, frankly she had never had it so good again. The laughter, and the crowding together, and the tension, even the danger, had suited her. She had been out, free. And then, the war over, back she was obliged to pop like Cinderella. She had a gay volatile temperament, although in her bad moods or when her head ached it was as well to keep out of her way.
But it was a bright cheerful face which stared from the window now. She was passionately interested in the Watcher, and unlike Marion would have liked to have asked him into the house. But being more worldly than Marion she could also see the danger.
She moved across the kitchen idly picking up a bit of pastry off the cinnamon apple tart as she passed, and then suddenly doing a little dance in the middle of the kitchen, just because the floor was bare and sunny. She looked at her face in the mirror. The bright orange lipstick which had so captivated her in the advertisements shone on her lips. Joyo kept a supply of make-up in the kitchen cupboard in a box labelled Oxo. It made her feel gay when the world was dull. It was a little secret she kept from Marion, although privately she thought Marion must be pretty slow not to have discovered it. She poked at her treasures, lipsticks, nail varnish, powder and scent. There was also a photograph in there which she studied with interest. It was not of anyone she was fond of, or indeed of anyone she had ever known, but it had won a money prize for her and Joyo, who was a frugal soul, appreciated that. She tucked the money into her purse. She dabbed a little scent behind her ears before going to look in the oven. She would have liked to have her hair dyed that deep mauve she so much admired, but she feared that it might embarrass Marion, not that Marion and Joyo always saw eye to eye by any means, but they had lived together for so long now that Joyo had learnt how far she could go.
Joyo looked wistfully at the coalman delivering coal next door but one. She fancied she knew his face. He turned, and she was quite sure: she had seen him at the little café down by the station where they played music and where she enjoyed herself so much when she got the chance. She had been there last Wednesday and unless she was much mistaken so had the coalman. He looked cleaner, of course (not so much cleaner as the honesty which lay close to the surface in Joyo obliged her to say), and he looked happier. Indeed he had been very happy dancing the cha-cha to a tune which had set Joyo’s feet tapping. She regretted that she had not been dancing herself but her companion at the time, a morose man from Manchester that she had met on the railway station, had not, as he himself put it, been much of a dancer. Joyo would never see him again and she did not care. She liked men and their company but she tried, as far as possible, to avoid permanent relationships. She would not, in any case, have wanted to know the Mancunian any longer. He had been tactless.
“You don’t want to dance that sort of thing, my dear,” he had said, patting her hand, “not at our age.”
One offence: for Joyo did not care to be touched unless she said. Double offence: he was at least ten years older than Joyo. So she moved her hand hastily away and upset a cup of coffee over him. It was one of those things that Joyo could never be quite sure she
