knew that what he was saying was true but she thought that he shouldn’t be repeating it so often: after all there were more things that they could talk about than the deceitfulness of fairs. When she had married him his conversation had been less monotonous and more enterprising than this, but she supposed that sitting in the house all day, every day, there wasn’t much new experience flooding into his life.
A woman on toppling heels and wearing blue-rinsed hair walked past them.
‘Did you see that woman?’ she asked. ‘Do you see her hair?’
‘What woman? I didn’t notice.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she sighed.
Yet he had aimed carefully and with great concentration at the ducks as if more than anything else in the world he had wanted to shoot them down. He was pretty well as quiet as Sheila most of the time; she herself wasn’t like that at all, she liked to talk to people, that was why she worked in an office. She liked the trivia of existence. She would take stories home to him at night but he hardly ever listened to her or suddenly in the middle of what she was saying he would talk about something else. He might for instance say, ‘Do you think poetry is important?’ And she would answer, ‘I suppose so,’ and immediately afterwards, ‘Of course it is.’ And she herself would have been thinking about her boss whose wife had visited him in the office that day and how he had shown her round as if she had been a complete stranger. Or about Marjorie who had told her how she had thrown a frying pan at her husband with the eggs still in it.
And he would say, ‘It’s just that sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I …’ They had come to the Hall of Mirrors and she said, ‘What do you think? It costs fifteen pence.’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
Why was he always asking her what she thought? She wished he would accept some responsibility for at least part of the time. But, no, he would always ask, ‘What do you think?’ If only once he would say what he himself thought.
She didn’t know what a Hall of Mirrors would be like but she said aloud, ‘Why not?’ It was she who always walked adventurously into the future, throwing herself on its mercy without much previous thought.
‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’
Hugh and Sheila followed her into the large tent.
It was hilarious. When they entered they saw two people whom they assumed to be husband and wife doubled over with laughter in front of a mirror, the wife pointing at her reflection and unable to utter a word. The husband glanced at the three of them and at her in particular, raising his hands to the roof as if saying, ‘Look at her.’ Hugh stared at his wife angrily and she thought, ‘To hell with him. Can’t I even look at another man?’
Then she turned and looked in the mirror. Her body had been broadened enormously, her legs were like tree trunks, and her large head rested like a big staring boulder on massive shoulders. It was like seeing an ogre in a fairy story, in a world of glass, a short wide ogre so close to the earth that he might have been planted in it. She began to laugh and she couldn’t stop. Even Sheila was laughing and crying: ‘Look at Mummy she’s so fat.’ She looked so rustic in the mirror as if she had lived all her life on a farm and had only gained from it a disease which gave her eyes a staring thyroid look, and her body the appearance of someone suffering from advanced dropsy. The man smiled at her again—as if caught up in her simple laughter—and Hugh glowered at the two of them.
Then he himself turned and looked in an adjacent mirror. This particular one elongated his body so that he seemed very tall and thin and his head with its frail brow was like a tall egg on top of his stalklike body. He smiled without thinking and she laughed from behind him and so did Sheila, clapping her hands, and shouting, ‘Daddy’s so thin. Look at Daddy.’ She moved from mirror to mirror. In one she was squat and heavy and lumpish, in another her legs were as thin as the stalks of plants, climbing vertically to her incredibly shrunken waist. And all the time Sheila was running from one to the other excitedly. Hugh wasn’t laughing as much as she was, he seemed rather to be studying the reflections as if they had philosophical or poetical implications.
Most of the people in the tent were laughing so loudly and with such abandon that they were like occupants of an asylum, rocking and roaring and leaning on each other, hardly able to breathe. But though she laughed she didn’t abandon herself as helplessly as they did. And Hugh gazed at the reflections gravely as if they were pictures in an art gallery which he was trying to memorise.
She looked down at her slim body in the yellow dress as if to make sure that she wasn’t after all the distorted woman in the mirror, the gross heavy-rooted peasant with the swollen arms and the swollen legs. And all around her was the perpetual storm of laughter and the rocking red-faced people. And suddenly she too abandoned herself, doubled over, banging her fist on her knee, shrieking hysterically at the squat figure, making faces at her. Tears came into her eyes, she wept with a laughter that was close to pain, and in the middle of it all she saw the reflection of her husband, tall and incredibly thin, with the immensely frail tall egg perched on his shoulders, gazing disapprovingly at her.
She couldn’t stop laughing, it was as if a torrent had been released in her, as if she were a river in spate. And beside her the man and his wife were doubled over with laughter, their faces red and streaming, the man making faces in the mirror to make his reflection even more macabre.
Finally she stood up and made her way to the door, Hugh following her with Sheila. He was silent as if he felt that she had betrayed him in some way.
‘Didn’t you like that?’ she asked him. ‘It was really funny.’ And she began to laugh again, this time more decorously, as if at the memory of what she had seen, rather than at its present existence. Why on earth did he never let himself go? Ever? She was angry with him and gritted her teeth. She supposed that even when he had been working in the library he had been like that, sad and serious, gravely spectacled, a source of tall disapproval when women borrowed their romances or thrillers. But how on earth had he learned to be so dull?
The two youths who were wearing striped green and white scarves came back up the road again, shouting. Hugh pulled Sheila aside out of their way, turning his eyes from them.
Damn you, damn you, she almost shouted, why didn’t you go straight on? But she knew that he shouldn’t have done so and that she was being unreasonable, for after all the creatures she had just seen were quarrelsome, irrational, and violent. But was that what writing did for you, sitting day after day in your room and then drawing aside from the rawness of reality when you emerged into it? Oh my God, she thought, what is it I want? Joy, life … She listened to the steady beat of the music which animated the fair. In the old days she used to dance such a lot, now she didn’t dance at all. She even knew some of the tunes they were playing, nostalgic reminders of her youth. Paper roses,paper roses, she hummed to herself, as she walked along. But why couldn’t he take off his damned jacket? There were men passing all the time with bare torsos tanned to a deep brown and looking like gipsies, while by contrast Hugh seemed so pale even in this gorgeous summer because he never left his room. Damn, damn, damn. If only one was a gipsy, wandering about the world in a coloured caravan, without destination, without worry.
She wanted to dance, to sing, to shout out loud. But she didn’t do any of these things and she merely walked on beside Sheila and Hugh looking as demure as any of the other women she met, a member of an apparently contented family, while all the time the beat of the music throbbed around her and inside her.
They came to a place where there were small cars for the children to drive and she asked Sheila if she would like to
