“Old Mrs. Barrow’s so fond of you—” my mother reproached later. “She’s always loved to have you, ever since you were a little girl. You can’t hurt her feelings—”
I said nothing, but resentment, motiveless and directionless, seemed to crowd out even my sight.
Less disturbing than all this was the habit I got into of disappearing into a re-creation of my time with Ludi whenever I was out with my parents among other people. At the cinema with them, I quickly learned not to see the film, but to use the darkness and the anonymous presence of people about me in the darkness, to create Ludi for myself more vividly than life. This was an intense and emotional experience, highly pleasurable in its longing, its secrecy. When I found myself at a tea party among the women in whose fondness I had basked, I could kill the troubled feelings of rejection and distaste by plunging into myself the fierce thrill of longing for Ludi, which would vibrate an intensity of emotion through me to the exclusion of everything else.
My mother was irritated by me. “In a trance. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Alice certainly fattened her up, but she’s made her slow.”
“Dreaming.” My father smiled at me across the table. He had never forgotten his own youth, and mistook the memory of what he had been for an understanding of what I was.
I ignored him kindly; I preferred my mother’s irritation; it seemed a temerity for him to pretend to understand a bewilderment of which he was so important a part.
Then I knew what he was going to quote: What is this life, if full of care … — But he must have sensed my waiting for it, and he stopped himself this once and only said, with the inclined head of still more certain understanding, “It’s the time to dream. Later on she’ll be too busy.”
The University. Should I go up the shallow gray steps between gray columns like great petrified trees; carry books; wear the blue and yellow blazer? I did not want to talk about it. I wanted to put off talking of it.
“What’s happening, Helen?” Nothing stopped my mother. “You’ve got to make up your mind, you know. There’s barely a week left.”
“When is the enrollment day?” my father asked.
“Thursday, Mrs. Tatchett tells me. She’s going in with Basil.”
“Oh—?—That boy’ll never do any good. He hasn’t a brain. What’s he going to do?”
“Something to do with engineering. You know I don’t follow the different names of these things. Electro-something.”
“I still think a teacher’s degree would be the best.” My father turned to me. “You needn’t necessarily use it as such afterward.”
My mother, who saw deflection of purpose in the housewife’s sense of waste, immediately took this up. “Why not? What’s the sense of wasting four years becoming a teacher if you don’t teach?”
“I don’t know.” My father nodded his head to himself; he believed he had educated himself on the Home University Library, the British Encyclopaedia and “Know Thyself,” but that he would have achieved this and his Mine secretaryship ten years earlier had he started off his career as a university graduate instead of a junior clerk. “It’s a good general education.”
“You’ve got big ideas,” said my mother, “too big for your pocket. Helen must take up something that’ll fit her for the world.”
I sat through their talk with a growing inner obstinacy. Now that phrase of my mother’s that I had heard so often, that had always sounded strong and practical as my mother herself, came to me as a disturbing question. Fit me for what world? So long as there was only my mother’s world, so long as I knew no other, the phrase had the ring of order and action. The world of my mother and father, or Ludi’s world? And if there were two, there might be more. But my parents wanted to fit me for theirs. My interest, that like a timid, nosing animal edged back and lay down in dim lack of enthusiasm before the advance of their discussion, was again forgotten in a sense of distress and bewilderment.
My mother was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail, as she sometimes did in concern. But when she spoke, it was with her usual vigor. “Perhaps she’d be happier at home? If she didn’t go at all — Perhaps you could speak to Stanley Dicks about getting her into the Atherton library. She’s so keen about books, and there’s a nice type of girl there—”
My father caught her with an accusing look, a kind of concentration of irritation, suspicion and wariness that comes from long observation, if not understanding, of someone’s methods and motives. It was as if he did not know what her next move would be, but he knew it should be prevented. He gave a curiously awkward fending gesture of the hand, and said, “Oh, the library—What sort of a career, pushing a barrow of heavy books about and stamping people’s names on cards! That’s no life for her. That’s not what I want for her.”
And then, with the inconsequence of daily life in the fluid of which are suspended all stresses, the jagged crystals of beauty, the small, sharp, rusted probes of love, the hate that glints and is gone like a coin in water, my mother said without change of tone, “You won’t forget about the lawn mower, will you? It’s Charlie’s day again tomorrow.” And with a little glance at his watch to recall him to himself, my father nodded and returned to his office for the afternoon’s work.
I went down to the Mine swimming bath. At first there was almost no one there; only the small boys, splashing and squealing hoarsely in their flapping wet rags of costumes. I lay looking at my shining brown legs; a stranger bearing the distinguishing marks of another land. Later some boys and girls of my own age came and dropped to the grass around me, gasping, fanning themselves after their bicycle ride. They exclaimed over me. You were away a long time! How long was it, Helen? My, she’s burned — look how she’s burned! They giggled and threw sweet-wrappers at one another, and every now and then, without a word, as if at some mysterious sign, a girl would tug at a boy’s ankle to trip him as he stood up, or a boy would pull the bow end of the strap that held a girl’s bathing suit, and suddenly they would be wrestling, chasing each other, shrieking round the pool, rolling and falling back into the middle of us, the girl screaming between laughter: No! No! Soon the grass around us was strewn with lemonade bottles and broken straws. A bright-haired girl, with the dimples she had had when she was four still showing when she smiled, carefully broke up a packet of chocolate so that it would go round. When I got up to swim, they all came flying, bouncing, chasing into the square tepid tank of water. Lorna Dufalette’s head broke through the surface beside me, water beading off her powdered forehead. “It’s not fair, those filthy Cunningham kids have got ringworm, and they come into the water. We might all get it.” I floated along amid used matches and dead grass. At last I pulled myself out by the shoulders and sat, feet dangling, on the side. One of the boys, at a loss for a moment, swam over to me, a bright challenging grin on his red face. His big teeth in the half-open mouth combed the water like a fish. “Come away to the lagoon with me, Tondelayo!” I had been watching the water streaming over his teeth and was startled when he suddenly appeared beside me. Saliva and water streaked his chin as he grinned, waiting my response. Apparently there was some film I had not seen that would have given it to me. Water poured from him and he laughed toward me. “Come on—” He slipped down into the water again and, at a howl from one of the others, turned his thick scarred neck and bellowed something back, then caught at my ankle. But with a quick slither I snatched my legs back and he was gone, threshing noisily after the jeer that had challenged him. I shifted away from the uneven puddle that marked where he had sat beside me.