Guarding a husband and son had its rules. Cosset them, and they assumed you were spoiling yourself due to the pleasure you ought to be getting. Sometimes they were right, but mostly not, for you drudged along and took no chances, because nothing must jar or be out of place either for them or yourself. You were afraid to miss putting sugar in your husband’s tea in case he had a nervous breakdown at the thought that your next move might be a knife in his back. If you forgot to put your son’s school bus fare in his pocket, and he found no money when the conductor asked, he’d think you had deliberately committed treachery against him, and would probably hate you as well as all women for the rest of his life. Every act was a form of premeditated lunacy, because you were never allowed to take risks even with yourself as long as you were glued like a cut-out on to the cardboard scenery of a family.
Now it was different. Her eyes in the mirror were not flat and vacuous in their expression any more. They were coming back to life. She had changed continents, and was more at risk because she had thrown in her lot with the rest of the world. She was waking out of a long sleep, which explained why proper sleep was impossible. The excitement of getting to know herself drove away sleep, and she had long been used to the idea that she could not have everything, or even much of anything, and certainly not two states of blessedness at the same time – wherein all choices were impossible to make.
On such evenings that seemed endless she sat by the fire. No one would knock at the door. Those who had known her would never find her. If George were to shuffle on the landing she wouldn’t let him in. If he paced obstinately day after day, she had enough tinned food not to go out and be talked into following him home. Should he get angry and smash the door, and knock her about in order to drag her away, she had a carving knife on the table.
Impossible to go to bed. All important moves were made, and her desires could make no impression on the course of action. She felt in the grip of some force too strong to resist, but she would fight it because she didn’t like being led into situations where she was not under her own control.
She wondered what had brought her to this room, for she wasn’t clear in her own mind as to how she came to be there – or here, she thought. She was living on the outside of herself, and trying to discover what was happening within. The person she saw in the mirror knew far more about her and how she had come to be here than she knew herself. She hoped that, no matter how great the effort, she might soon acquire the knowledge possessed by that sardonic reflection in the mirror. She also hoped that when the two of them were united they would be able to learn about others, not wanting to end the rest of her life with the revelation that she had not actually lived.
She listened to noises that came either from water pipes close by, or from the street. Wind rattled a door. The only way to learn as well as survive was to let things happen as if nothing could affect her. To endure meant walking the streets without flinching at every passer-by. Her life had been lived in a hundred pieces, but at any one moment she had been only a single fragment giving an intense light which she alone could sense.
She had been born inside a fragment of bottle-green glass, and couldn’t remember how it had happened. Didn’t much matter, as long as she one day got all her senses back. However far she was inside, she both liked it here and liked it there as well. Existence had become too good to wonder whether she liked it or not. Yet to speculate was a condition of not going back into the dark; and being here wasn’t painful because, however she had gone into this room, and no matter what her reflection in the mirror said, her own will always told her to stay where she was, especially when she felt urged to go back to the bitter warmth of normality.
Sitting at the fire she was alone yet not lonely, wary but unafraid, hunted though not threatened, and willing to dwell for as long as the mood lasted on why she had been born as a small piece of bottle-green glass over which people could walk barefoot without cutting themselves. Such humiliating pressure had driven her to a place where neither George nor anyone she had known would be able to set the mark of judgement on her more convincingly than she could put it on herself.
Now that she was free it was easier to forgive George, and at the same time admit that she too needed forgiveness. Being the one who had left the happy home she was guilty in the eyes of the condemning world; but knowing that somehow or other she would have to pay made her wonder whether the whole cakewalk was worth the bare reward of being able to go on breathing.
The face in the mirror looked wryly into her sparsely furnished room. She was free. She had left everything behind. Even a few bits of furniture would have made some difference to the desolation. Her father had been apprenticed as a cabinet maker, but left the trade at twenty-five to become a shop assistant. No one knew why. He made things out of wood in his spare time, saying it was a consolation for not being able to do much else. He put together an ornamental mantelshelf for her wedding, with borders of elaborate beading, and six diamond-shaped mirrors along the front, a well-varnished box-like structure to fit over the plain shelf in the living-room. It was out of place among the furniture George and she had chosen, but would stay with him for ever.
She sat through the long evening, the mirror-image telling her that idleness was a sin unless you took advantage of it by wasting time, as her father used to say with a seriousness that deceived her for years. There’s nothing wrong with idleness, as long as you don’t get into mischief, he would say. Idleness is its own reward, and the greatest pleasure in life, because you can do so much with it.
His only idleness was in those few minutes during which he came out with such homilies, usually between ending one job and starting another. She had never seen him idle. With his peculiar humour he taught by first saying the opposite of what ought to be done, and then setting such an example at doing the right thing that the emphasis was even more sure than if he had plainly told her what to do in the first place.
The occasional idleness did not make her feel guilty, yet she was aware of being so. When idleness turned into freedom she contemplated the wallpaper in order not to feel imprisoned. Each wall was a different colour, its pattern a scruffy map she had damp-ragged to get clean. At first she couldn’t tell one direction from another when glancing out of the window at so many buildings. Their bedroom in George’s house looked west, the builder told them when they first went to see it, from which she gathered that the front door pointed east, and that the other sides of the box faced north and south, confirmed when winter came on the estate of private houses where crescents curved in all directions.
In London, figuring it by the A to Z, her window appeared to face south-east.
Perhaps four young men had once shared this room, each choosing the paper for his wall. Women would have used pleasanter designs – though the room was certainly too small for four to live in. But suppose she herself had four different people careering around inside her? She would settle a wall on each, and to do so would start on the one with the door.
The rectangle of entrance and exit made the least interesting wall of her abode, since she hadn’t come in by it for hours and had no intention of going out till morning, if then. The dullest and the least conspicuous. She turned her back because the brown shade was tonally dead. It had been a plush russet judging by the section curling down under the top of the skirting board, that she had picked out with her longest fingernail when sitting on the floor one afternoon while entranced with a shabby old copy of Wuthering Heights got from a stall at the market. The embossed pattern of Grecian urns would have been almost funereal but for the fern and sprig of alfalfa springing from each as if they had just been born and were full of life.