“And you don’t want to leave your father?”
“I don’t feel that I can.”
“It’s bad luck on you to have no brothers and sisters, and a father who’s so elderly. I suppose he can’t get about as he used to.”
Isabel opened her bag and took out her handkerchief. Inside the bag were her father’s spectacles. He could not manage without them. After some thought, she had hit on this method of confining him to the house. “This place,” she said, “it’s a new approach, small numbers, a good staffing ratio. It’s for children who are mentally ill.”
Colin noticed the blue circles under her eyes, the tightness around her mouth. “I should think that would be intensely depressing. What have children got to make them mentally ill? Are they born that way?”
“Are you asking me for information?” she said. “Or is it a debating point?”
“For information. You’d be surprised what I don’t know. Explain to me.”
“Some babies don’t eat, they don’t cry. Nobody knows why.”
“It can hardly be society. It must be their genes. Genes are not much in fashion, I think. It must be their mothers.”
“Some of the mothers don’t seem to make relationships with the children. They don’t treat them as people, just as objects. They let them lie for hours and don’t react when they cry. The children feel that nothing they do can influence the world. They can’t control it. And they give up trying.”
“Like me,” Colin said. “I can’t control the world. I’m like that. I have it.”
“It’s not a disease, it’s a state of being. The constant frustration of one’s efforts to adapt the world, and the resignation of the attempt.”
“It’s common.” He sighed. “Look at the Labour Party.”
“Oh, Colin, it isn’t a bit the same. The frustrations we meet every day are of a different order. Sometimes the mothers are quite normal, and then we can’t account for it. When they get a bit older the children just sit, or they lie, and they gaze into the distance, you know, or just play with their fingers. They seem not to want to live. They seem afraid of it. Afraid of everything.”
“Nobody can do anything about anything,” Colin said. “They are right, the rest of us are wrong. Deluded. Why should we victimise them? Poor little sods.”
“But it’s a practical problem. They have to be fed. Kept alive. The whole world seems to them completely destructive.” She paused. “Maybe it is. I see your point. They have the nuclear weapons inside their heads. The megadeath.”
“Why don’t they give up then? Just give up and die?”
“Some do.”
“And the others?”
“We presume that they once felt some security or goodness. At the breast. They are fighting to get back to it.”
“But you can’t get everything from the breast.”
“No. You can’t get very much at all.” She looked up at him. “Could we possibly, do you think, be more cheerful?”
“It is Christmas,” he said automatically. “Look, Isabel, I don’t think you should rush into a decision. On the one hand, would you be any more satisfied with that sort of work? On the other hand, perhaps your father should stand on his own feet. Plenty of people that age manage for themselves. He might live another twenty years, and then what? You’d be a prisoner.”
Isabel put her bag down at her feet, and edged it under the table.
“Don’t put it down there, love, you might forget it.”
“Women never forget their handbags. They’re womb symbols. You wouldn’t forget your womb, would you? I bet Sylvia never does.”
“You’ve not been well, you know. You look very run down. Put everything off for a month or two.”
“Well, I can’t seem to cope, that’s true enough. I do some stupid things. I lost a file. At least, I put it in the back of my car, and then it went into the garage, and when it came back the file wasn’t there.”
“Nobody would want it, would they?”
“It would be of no use or interest to anyone. That’s why it’s so annoying.”
“Have you told them, at the office?”
“Not yet. I shouldn’t have taken it out. I only did it by accident. We did lose a few things when we moved from Wilberforce House, but I think they turned up. I don’t know what the procedure is.”
“Well, there must be some way round it. Have you phoned the garage?”
“Oh yes,” she said tiredly. “But they’re all really stupid people. I never did come to grips with that case, somehow. I could almost think I lost the file on purpose.”
“I think you make too much of people’s subconscious motivations, Isabel. You’re always looking to complicate things.”
“I dare say you’re right. I dare say this particular case hasn’t half the complications I’ve seen in it. Somebody else would handle it more rationally.”
“Has it upset you? Do you want to talk about it?”
“I shouldn’t talk about my clients. No, it’s not an upsetting case, compared to some. It’s just been very trying and distasteful. The file can never be put together again. It goes back too many years, too many people have been involved.”
“They’ll have to make a fresh start.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever made a fresh start. Except Lazarus.”
Colin went to the bar. She sat with her eyes downcast as he carried their glasses back again. She was pale, and she had a cough; she seemed to have lost more weight. She was nervous, less competent.
“Is all this…quite what you wanted to ask me about?” Colin said as he sat down. “You sounded so urgent on the phone.”
“No, of course it wasn’t. I wanted to talk about us. I think it’s time we made some decisions, Colin.”
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
“I want to live with you.”
And now it is she who pleads. The passing weeks have worked a little miracle. She didn’t touch the glass he had put in front of her.
“So you are asking me,” he spoke very deliberately, “to break with Sylvia in the near future?”
“What’s the far future? Do you want to wait until Karen is twenty-one?”
“You know there’s nothing left between me and Sylvia. It’s the children. That’s all.”
“You still sleep with her, I’m sure.”
“Yes. Well, I do.”
“So there is something there.”
“Something.” But no one who has been married, he thought, would presume it to be affection. “The point is, I have to think very carefully. Their whole future hangs on this. I have to make the proper arrangements.”
“But deep down, Colin, you don’t think any arrangements are proper.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I won’t leave her.” He struggled for a judicious tone, something measured. “But can’t you see, Isabel? I feel torn.”
She reached for her coat from the chair beside her, reached for her bag under the table. “Ah, this tired old scene,” she said. “I should have known. How is it possible to be of moderate intelligence and reasonable education, and not know? I’ve read the Problem Pages. I ought to know. Come on, Colin, let’s be going. I can’t sit here and run through the lines that society has written for me. They’ve outlawed wire nooses and gin traps, but they can’t legislate against this.”
They sat in silence; then, leaving their drinks half-finished, got up and walked stiffly out to the car.
Earlier that day, Florence Sidney had taken a conspicuous initiative. Her morning had begun badly. She had telephoned Sylvia to discuss arrangements, only to be told curtly that everything was under control and that she had nothing to do about Christmas dinner except turn up and eat it. Sylvia contrived to make her feel a fumbling amateur at family festivity, a selfish, disorganised, childless woman. Whereas the truth was, Florence thought bitterly…she looked down at her small, cool, pastry-making hands, and went into the kitchen to make two dozen mince pies.