I had sensed a little of his instability. But what had now befallen him? From what I heard, in those meetings (in some town on the south coast) and in this sharing of food, this communion, Bray had joined people whom the radical conservative in him despised: workers, people looking for employment, the kind of person he, Bray, the self-employed man, celebrating his freedom after his father’s and grandfather’s lifetime of servitude, looked down on. The man who scoffed at Pitton, exulted in his fall, now showed sympathy for people like Pitton, people for whom in England, even in this well-to-do part of England, there was no longer room: people coming down from the Midlands and finding themselves dispossessed, without lodgings or security, people (unlike the naked souls in the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas’s) who knew what it was to be in charge of their fates, but felt they had lost control.
The more I heard about Bray’s meetings the more I thought of that London meeting of twenty years before. And the scene reconstructed itself in one detail after another, down to the lamp painted HALL shining palely in the quiet street, quiet at night in that part of residential London in those days, with few people out and very few cars. So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs.
“It’s as with everything else,” Bray said. “You can take out only what you put in. The more you put in, the more you take out. The good book is always open for you.”
From Mrs. Bray I heard more. She was someone I hardly knew. I knew her mainly as a voice on the telephone. She answered the telephone when Bray was out and made the bookings for him; he telephoned her regularly when he was out. She was brisk (Bray’s instructions, to save his customers telephone charges); she was efficient. No extra talk there. A cheerful little voice on the telephone; its possessor hardly seen. She lived in her house — there was no garden: Bray’s paved yard left little space for anything like that. She was driven into Salisbury or Andover by Bray to do her shopping; she seldom took the bus. Sometimes Bray, in the car, greeted her in Salisbury. Then I saw her: a very small, thin woman, a wisp of a woman, hardly there — as though life with Bray, the driver, the mechanic, the man with strong views, the hard worker, the perverse neglecter of the valley’s beauty, had worn her down. It was from her, now, that I heard more of Bray’s religion and “meetings.”
“I can’t answer for him these days. He’s at one of his meetings, I expect. He’s emptied the deep-freeze. That’s how I know. That’s not the way you treat a deep-freeze. I don’t understand him. If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.”
I had heard about the deep-freeze from Bray. It was important to him. I didn’t have one myself and he delighted in telling me about the rituals connected with it. The bulk buying (and at reduced prices from certain shops, apparently), the cooking and the storing of great batches — the deep-freeze made food the center of a new kind of ritual, provided a new kind of shopping, a new kind of excursion, restored an idea of plenty and harvesttime and celebration.
Mrs. Bray had her own ideas. Towards the deep-freeze she was more squirrellike, hoarding, wishing to keep the granary full. And when one day I met her at the bus stop — unusually: she was usually driven by Bray to Salisbury or Amesbury or Andover or to some special discount supermarket on the outskirts of Southampton — she was still inflamed about the deep-freeze. So small, so thin, so inflamed.
She said, the rooks cawing and flapping above us: “If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.” She spoke as though, in an ideal world, she would keep her deep-freeze full forever and never touch it. She spoke as though — in spite of the manifest hardships, the absence of Bray and a car — the replenishing of the deep-freeze was the purpose of her trip to Salisbury. She repeated, “You build it up.”
At the end of the road — no longer hidden at its far end by the elms and the growth at the roadside between the elms — the red bus appeared.
She waited until the bus almost stopped. She said, “It’s that fancy woman of his.”
The words burst out of her. As though the arrival of the bus, the sudden darkening of the bus-stop area, the folding door opening back, the noise of the engine, had provided her with the correct dramatic moment for the disclosure, the abandoning of civility and talking about things she didn’t absolutely have on her mind. And having taken her inflamed mood up several degrees, she stamped into the bus, slapped her coins down on the driver’s little stand, and generally did as much as she could to draw attention to herself and her anger.
She sat in one of the front seats — such fuss, such commotion from such a small person — and paid no further attention to me. And I wondered whether in 1950, when I was eighteen and new to England, new to adult life, I wondered whether, seeing a woman of that age in a bus behaving in such a way, I would have thought it even likely that the anger of a woman so old and small and white-haired would have had to do with her husband’s “fancy woman.”
The words, coming from that little lady, were shocking to me. I had known her for so long as a friendly, brisk voice on the telephone, knowing my voice and taking pleasure in anticipating my name before I spoke it. “Can do,” “Will do,” “Thank you, sir”—those were the words (spoken swiftly on the telephone, to prevent me from having to put in new coins) I associated with her. “Fancy woman” was awful — demeaning to her, demeaning to the woman she was talking about (if such a woman existed), demeaning to her husband, demeaning (the way obscenities of speech are demeaning) to all of us.
And it was of this other woman that I now heard from Mrs. Bray, on the telephone, at the bus stop (where she began to appear more often), and in the shopping streets of Salisbury. How had Bray met this other woman? Who would be attracted to Bray? I had never thought of Bray as a partner for anyone; but that was a man’s way of looking. In this business of sensing or seeing partners, a woman would live in a different world.
In the beginning I had had my doubts about the existence of this woman. But then, quite quickly, from Mrs. Bray’s circumstantial stories, I believed there was a woman; and from Mrs. Bray’s stories I could see the point up to which Bray had directly and innocently spoken about the woman, speaking of the oddity of the meeting with her as he might have spoken of any other oddity connected with his taxi work.
She had arrived late one night at Salisbury railway station on a slow train from the south. (Only a few details, in Mrs. Bray’s stories, of the age and appearance of this woman; and I had no idea whether all these details had formed part of Bray’s story as he had told it to Mrs. Bray.) She had told the ticket collector that she had no ticket; no money; no place to spend the night. He or a colleague had telephoned the police; they (the curious, taken-for-granted humanity of the British state and its officials) arranged for the woman to be put up in a bed-and-breakfast place for the night; a decision about what was to be done with her was to be taken by higher officers the next day. The bed-and-breakfast place was run by a man supplementing his poor income from his original business, a picture framing-junkshop-antique shop.