As the train drew into Bath, Robert’s face slid past the window like an enormously enlarged photo-graph in black and white, his eyes staring fixedly but without expression straight into Leda’s. The shock made her cry, Forgive me, Robert; it was the meanness round your mouth I remembered – I had forgotten the fine shape of your head.

She sprang out. The wind rushed at her with a smell of sun and hot iron. ‘I’m here,’ she called, edging her way through the crowd and dropping her suitcase at his feet.

He turned unhurriedly. ‘Ah, there you are… yes. Welcome home.’ She would have hugged him, but he was already stooping for her case. ‘Ticket handy? Let’s go, then. Tottie will be out of school… I don’t want her alone in the house.’

‘I saw you, Robert. You flashed by. You were looking at me.’

‘Was I? I didn’t spot you.’

‘How windy it is. There was no wind in London. No sun, either.’

He took her arm to guide her down the long wooden stairs. In London she had moved freely, as if drawing after her a wake of daring: now his thumb pressed into her elbow, and as they reached the bottom she heard him muttering, in a tone of reproof: ‘Nasty steps, those. Not at all well designed.’

The van stood outside, still caked with mud.

‘So you didn’t wash it?’ she exclaimed.

‘Afraid not. It will get you home, though.’ He stowed her suitcase carefully on the back seat. ‘I’ll just wipe the wind-screen. I imagine you’ll want to see out.’

She sat, her knees pressed together, aflame with hostility. Slowly the duster went back and forth. Once he licked it with his broad, coated tongue. ‘All right now?’ he asked, peering along the glass but not troubling to wipe his own side.

He speaks in gestures, she thought, not in words; he wants to prove how little he asks for himself. As he climbed in, his shoulder grazed against her arm, but though she felt the touch with extraordinary sharp-ness, she kept her arm still. The floor of the van was littered with matches and cigarette ends; in the glove compartment lay the same confusion of old envelopes, maps, pieces of string and empty cartons.

‘Not too sorry to be home? Only two weeks – still, it seemed a long time this end. Battery’s low… I think she’ll start. Yes, there she goes.’ He pulled out in front of a large car. ‘My right of way, I think! Your letters were a joy. I’d forgotten what good letters you write. Must be some years since 1 had one from you.’ He glanced round, smiling swcetly. ‘You’re looking better ... less dark under the eyes. Enjoy yourself?’

‘I missed Tottie.’

‘She missed you too. 1 had to cross off the days. She’s her mother’s girl all right.’

‘And her father’s.’

‘I like to think so. Tell me about yourself.’

‘Oh, Robert, that’s not easy. I liked being in my old room, but I felt rather like a revenant, especially walking round at night. I don’t know anyone in town. You look in the telephone book and people simply aren’t listed any more.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘I found my old address book. Some of the names 1 couldn’t even remember. I’ve lived down here so long – perhaps other people see my name in their book and wonder who’s Leda Paul.’

‘Not likely they’d forget you, not with your looks.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘I was rather good-looking when 1 was young. The house is so shabby, Robert, with grime everywhere and flowers wilting in dirty vases. Mother’s char is hopeless and she won’t do a thing herself except the cooking. Oh yes, Phoebe’s due tomorrow. Appar-ently she’s pregnant again.’

Robert cleared his throat. ‘Lucky woman.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, Robert.’

Bath had dropped away as they climbed the hill; the valley opened before them, deep and very green. Only last night she had been sobbing in Charlotte’s arms, saying again and again, ‘I dread going home.’ Now the argument recommenced: ‘You see, Charlotte, we hardly ever make love, nothing flows between us. I’m like a desert, 1 burn so, and Robert’s set in such loneliness he doesn’t notice that we confront each other silently, like strangers. He has such patient love for his carving –
why can’t he approach me with the same patience, for the sake of love? And why tell me I have the sex, it’s up to me to put it to work, when such a thing is not part of his language?’ Moist with sweat, her palms clasped each other nervously as Robert laid a hand on her thigh.

‘Time we got to know each other again… made a new start.’

She searched his face for some clue, some promise, but his lips were already a line pinched at each end between his full, colourless cheeks. ‘I’d like to. I’ve thought of it so much, till I could hardly think of anything else. It must have been hard for you living with me lately, I’m afraid.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, but I’ve been anxious. That’s why I sent you off. And you do look better for it… more like the girl I once married.’

Feeling very far from that girl, she turned away, and, lowering the window, leant out to look across the valley. The curving fields rolled away like the limbs of an animal asleep, corn and pasture sharing the same electric green. From the bank came the smell of hawthorn blossom, reminding her of the time her father had crowned her with a wreath of may while Phoebe and Anne stood apart, their arms linked. ‘Now you’re my queen,’ he had said, but with such tender pity that she received no joy from his gift, rather an intimation, as precious as it was awe-inspiring, of having been dedicated to the same doomed path as himself. Though at home, like him, in the terrible outer limits of love, it was the dull, stale centre that she could not tolerate.

As her eye followed the hill-crest that cut across a sky of gentian she began telling Robert a story the very opposite of this open, physical grandeur.

‘One of Charlotte’s patients had to make herself crawl up the stairs to her flat. She had three small children waiting for her, one of them a baby. Think of it, Robert, crawling like a dog!’ She imagined the woman’s hair falling over her eyes, the pointed elbows, the unwilling knees. Drag me, hands; push me, feet. Then she heard him ask, what was the connection? ‘Oh, none. Charlotte was telling me about her cases. Why, did you think I might come crawling out of the train on all fours?’

‘You made the connection, not I.’

‘Yes, so I did. But things look different when you’ve been away, as if a veil… She stopped. ‘One feels queer…’ She looked at him guiltily.

‘Don’t tell me if you’d rather not.’

‘But you said we must get to know each other.’

‘I meant it... you’re only just back ... time enough later.’

‘But, Robert, later you may not...’

I’ll be there.’ Now he was smiling in the fatherly way which most reproached her.

The torrent froze in her mind; she recognised his need for the ordinary, his suspicion of anything violent or eccentric.

‘Forgive me,’ she said in a dull voice. ‘It’s the excitement of coming home, I’m much happier, really, and not tired any more.’

‘That’s my good girl.’

At the summit they turned east to cross the high plateau of farmland. The village came in sight, an eyebrow cocked on the edge of the world, now darkened by cloud-shadow. That’s home, she told herself, it’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m more than well; I’m charged like an electric power cable. But how I wish he’d drive faster! The edge of cloud stroked over the landscape like a paintbrush, turning the grass parrot green and the cock on the church tower gold. A dot of pink came in sight, bobbing up and down. ‘Robert, there’s Tottie!’

‘I thought she’d be along to meet us.’

Tottie was leaping along the verge, arms extended. Suddenly she fell and disappeared; her pink skirt reared up, again she was running and now the mouth showed wide open in the small brown face. ‘Hi, Tots!’ Leda called from the window. As the van came to a halt, she jumped out and caught Tottie in a boisterous hug. ‘I saw you falling over, silly thing, flop into the grass. Oh, it’s good to hug you again, darling pudding. Come and sit on my lap.’

‘Mind Mummy’s skirt,’ Robert warned.

Tottie clambered in on top of Leda, burying herself in Leda’s arms. ‘I’ve missed you so terribly, Mummy. I couldn’t wait for you to come home.’ She sat up, her eyes sparkling. ‘You’ve got scent on, and lipstick, and your hair’s different! What a grand lady you are, for once!’

‘Don’t worry, it will all come out in the wash.’

They rocked with laughter and again clasped each other in a hug of joy. Now the van was turning north up a narrow lane by a row of cottages, past Robert’s workshop and the long garden wall; it swung through a white gate on to the gravelled drive and halted outside the house.

‘You shouldn’t leave the front door open, Tottie,’ Robert said, ’not when there’s a wind. Strains the hinges.’

Tottie dragged Leda into the hall. Robert pointed and she nodded back vigorously.
‘ I’m to put the kettle on, Mummy; Daddy’s orders. You’re not to touch a thing, and no peeking in the dining-room either.’ She darted into the kitchen, slamming the door.

Robert left the suitcase at the foot of the stairs. ‘There’s a fire in the drawing-room. I won’t be a minute ... just get the van in the garage.’

Cautiously Leda stared round the hall. Lupins on the telephone table, the stone floor washed, no dust in the bar of sunshine, the banister polished – dear Pat, how good of her. She wandered into the drawing-room to her right; there lay her knitting in the corner of the sofa, and her book, marker in place, on the window-seat at the far end, and again there were flowers, iris, peony, white lilac, and the smell of polish. She knelt on the window-seat to look out across the garden. On either side of the path leading to the workshop the grass was inches thick and white with daisies. Damn Robert, why hadn’t he done the mowing? Was it deliberate, a reminder: You’ve had your holiday ... now, back to work?

Tottie came through the panelled side-door. ‘The kettle’s on and I’ve poured out the milk. We made a surprise for you last night, Mummy. Wait till you see my tarts.’ She shouted through the window, ‘Hurry up, Daddy,’ then grasped Leda’s arm and said plaintively: ‘Don’t ever go away again, Mummy, promise you won’t. I don’t like it here without you.’

‘I’ll take you with me next time, darling. Let me get my suitcase. There’s a present in it for you.’

From the hall she caught a glimpse of Robert bending over the dining-room table, delicately lifting a sheet of polythene from an iced cake. She averted her eyes, hoping he had not noticed her.

‘All my clothes are dirty,’ she complained, opening her case. ‘One forgets how filthy London is. Here’s your present, Tots, and this is Daddy’s.’ As he came in she held out a narrow parcel, saying impulsively: ‘Don’t think I’ve been extravagant, Robert. Mother gave me a tip for washing down her stairs.’

‘How nice of her ... and how nice of you.’ He examined the parcel, pleased and evidently surprised. Tottie had already torn open hers.

‘A paint-box, an enormous one! Look, Daddy.’

‘Why, that is a beauty. You be careful with it, little one.’

‘Oh, I will. I’ll wash it every day.’

Neatly he opened his parcel, extracting a silk tie patterned in green and umber. He held it to the light, stroked it with his broad thumb, examined the label, the lining; his thumb, coarsened by work, grated slightly on the fine silk. ‘Have to buy me a new suit to do honour to that. Thank you; thank you very much. You must wash your mother’s stairs more often.’

She laughed, glad of her success. The corner of a block of cartridge paper showed in the open suitcase. Quickly she shut the lid. This was a present to herself, the symbol of a path forsaken long ago, bought secretly in the art shop because the sight of it had roused an excited craving in her hand, like hunger. She trembled to think Robert might have seen. The kettle whistled. ‘Shall I make the tea?’

‘No ... my job.’ Robert was already on his way.

She took her dirty clothes to the linen basket in the kitchen, only to find it full and stinking of sweat. At once she was besieged by anger: the van caked, the lawn unmown, and now this! With revulsion she stuffed her things in and, Tottie at her heels, ran up to her bedroom with her case. More flowers, white and yellow in a glass bowl – she must remember to thank him – and on the dressing-table one of Tottie’s posies thrust into a jam jar. From the window came the note of a starling perched on the garden wall, who flew away in alarm as she raised the sash. She looked towards the far downs as blue as speedwell and over the immense stretch of arable land reaching to a sky a thousand times wider than the sky of London. Below ran the long border, ragged with wallflowers; to the left, in the rough ground by the north wing, the grass rippled like corn, the lilac stems rocked flower-heads already browned at their tips, and some dusters, which Pat must have washed, flapped from the washing-line. The old attachment to her garden claimed her. She saw the apple trees in the kitchen garden were in bud, she wondered if the young carrots had grown and if Robert had watered the tomato plants in the greenhouse, and when Tottie said, ‘What’s this grey thing, Mummy?’ she started as from a trance.

‘Oh, just cartridge paper. It’s a secret. Put it in my bottom drawer.’

‘Are you going to do some painting?’

‘Perhaps, one day. Don’t tell Daddy.’

Tottie struggled with the heavy drawer. ‘You could borrow my paint-box, if you like. You ought to be an artist again, you’re so marvellous at drawing. It’s silly just doing gardening and housework the whole time.’

‘Someone has to do it. Look at the wallflowers. Look at that lawn.’

‘Daddy meant to cut it, but he spent all Sunday staking the chrysanthemums.’

‘He couldn’t have!’

‘Well, all Sunday morning.He said you’d be cross if he didn’t do it properly. In the afternoon we went to the White Horse. I ran up and down its tummy. His eye’s as big as this room; you could put a tent on it and live there. But it’s dull without you, Mummy. Daddy never sees things the way you do; he can’t make up stories and he doesn’t dance or jump about.’ She laughed mischievously. Her wide-apart, tilted eyes were like escape valves for some inner blaze of merriment, but as Robert called they grew serious and she ran out, saying, ‘Come on, Mummy, we’re supposed to be downstairs.’

Robert ushered Leda into the dining-room with a slight bow from the waist and a formal sweep of the hand. The table was laid with the best linen mats, his mother’s tea-service, the silver knives and spoons, the lustre tea-pot; he had filled the Worcester plates with small sandwiches, and set, in the centre, his magnificent white cake iced to represent a station, with a tiny train, and tracks that led to the word ‘London’ and back to the word ‘Bath’. Round the sides of the cake he had piped swags of roses.

‘Robert, it’s a masterpiece.’

‘Yes ... I’m rather pleased with it myself.’

Tracing the design with her finger, Tottie chanted, ’You climb in the train here, the man blows his whistle, you go clackety-clack to London’

‘Don’t poke it, child.’

Tottie had stabbed the word ‘London’. She tried to push the icing together, glanced guiltily at her father and shrugged as if to say, I don’t care.

Robert paled, the corners of his mouth sucked in.

Leda said: ‘She didn’t mean to. It was an accident.’

‘Well, we’ll let you off this time, young woman, but you must learn to watch those clumsy fingers.’ Opening his penknife, he worked at the damaged icing until the letters were more or less recognisable. ‘Took me one and a half hours to do this. I don’t like seeing good work wantonly spoiled.’

Tottie flopped down in her chair, her back to Robert. A tremor of pure hate ran through Leda; she gripped the rail of her chair to keep herself from dashing out of the room. Robert, settling himself, poured the tea. ‘Do sit down, at least,’ he said, and with the silver tongs dropped two lumps into a cup and passed it to her. She sat down; she stared at the cake, the sandwiches, the lustre tea-pot over which Robert was slipping the cosy, and then with relief at Tottie’s burnt tarts. ‘I like your tarts, Tots. I think I’ll start with one.’

Tottie said indifferently, ‘I can’t make super things like Daddy.’

‘When I was six my tarts weren’t nearly as good as yours. Mother wouldn’t have them on the table.’

‘Coo, I don’t think that was very nice of Granny.’

Robert cut the damaged piece of cake and put it ostentatiously on his own plate. Catching Tottie’s eye, Leda winked from the sheer desire to ridicule him. She thought, He moves from one position to another like a spider shoring up its web; now he’s passing the cake, not to me, but to his wife who has just come home. His hands are stained with work – ‘It took me one and a half hours to stain that doodle-do’ – but he’s scrubbed them, his hair is brushed, he’s wearing his new tie. How presentable he is, modest, handsome, attentive, and now his expression has softened: he wants something from me.

‘Tottie hasn’t heard about your trip yet.’

‘Yes, Mummy, go on, tell me. Did you see the animals in the Zoo?’

‘Without you, Tots? Impossible.’

‘Did you do anything exciting?’

‘Not really, darling. I took a sleeping pill every night and didn’t get up once before ten.’

‘You lazy thing.’

‘Mummy wasn’t lazy. She was enjoying a well-earned rest.’

‘But Tottie’s right. I meant to visit the art galleries, but I just snoozed or went for long, fast walks. I did go to the Tate once, but I started crying in the Blake room and had to leave.’

Intensely interested, Tottie asked, ‘What made you cry!’

‘There’s a terrible picture, Tots, a green devil of pestilence with a whip, and rows of poor chaps laid out dying, and God above with his arms stretched out but his eyes shut, not looking, not even caring.’

‘God does care because he loves us.’

‘So I’ve heard, but I think God’s more loved than loving.’

She saw pillars of devotion rising from a thousand hearts while God’s immense eyelids remained shut; the pillars swept back like a rain of sorrow, the hands rose to catch what was only rejected tears. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, dragging herself back. ‘About the north wing. You remembet those friends of Gladys Williams who wanted a flat in the country? Mother spoke to them over the telephone yesterday. She says it’s a historian and his sister – he was on the same faculty as Gladys at one time, so of course that makes him okay by Mother’s standards. We ought to be hearing any day now. Mother insists on our having her old electric cooker. She even suggested dividing the garden with a fence.’

‘She’s got a cheek!’

‘Of course we wouldn’t, darling. You know how Granny exaggerates. Still, she’s right; this house is far too big. I’m not young enough to do the work. I can’t – there’s so much.’ She caught her lip. The unmown lawn, the sour linen basket, the dying wallflowers – resolutely she refused to pity herself. ’Their name is Paget, by the way. Gladys said he’s taking a year off to write a book.’

Tottie grumbled, ‘I suppose that means I can’t play hide and seek in the north wing any more.’ When Robert suggested he and Leda might discuss it later, she grinned and said, ‘I know, Daddy, par devong.’

Leda laughed. Her mood changed abruptly. The moment Robert had finished she jumped up to start clearing away, but Robert took the plates from her. ‘Not today,’ he insisted.

‘You’re to sit in the drawing-room with your feet up,’ Tottie said, dragging her to the door.

‘But I feel so restless. Perhaps I’ll pick some flowers in the garden.’

From behind came Robert’s voice, tinged with reproach. ‘I doubt if you’ll find many vases left to fill.’

She spun round. ‘Oh, I saw your flowers everywhere, even by my bed. I meant to thank you, but like a fool I forgot.’

Mollified, he said, ‘We did try to make everything nice for you.’

‘And I’m so grateful. It all looks lovely, and the tea was absolutely marvellous.’ Methinks I bloody well do protest too much, she thought, going through the kitchen into the garden. Once free of Robert the separate parts of her mind flew together; she could have hooted with mirth or burst into a flood of tears with no sense of disparity. The shadow cast by the house gave way to an embrace of sunshine. She crossed the lawn to the arched dark-green door of her kitchen garden. There stood her rows of vegetables and soft fruits, the old apple trees along the south wall, the shed and greenhouse on her left, the rhubarb, the metal wheelbarrow half full of rain, while over the earth lay a bright veil of weed seedlings. Everything had shot up; the carrots were small feather dusters, the broad beans were at last in flower. She mooned along the stone path, dreaming, planning, at rest in this private heaven. Presently she found a patch where Tottie had been at play. A trowel lay half buried beside a potted wild pansy; within a square of smoothed earth the word ’MUMMY’ had been traced and surrounded with limestone chips. The square told so much: Tottic’s rescue of the wild flower, her game shot through with thoughts of Mummy, at last a pang and the magic word inscribed to bring Mummy back; then the wandering off, the pansy forgotten, the trowel left out.

She crouched down on the path and with the trowel began making designs within Tottie’s edging of chips. As the warmth of stone burnt through her skirt, she became the tall, thin child sitting on a hot wall in Italy while her parents wrangled on the beach below, and felt again that gratitude to stone for its comfort and solidity. People tear at one so, but stone and earth, these are one’s happiness. How I love them, she thought, lifting a handful of soil, her palm pierced with sensuality. And the Earth itself with its eternity and Tottie – once she had tried to explain to her mother how these two loves grew from the source of love itself. ‘Don’t pester me, child.’ Such words reverberate throughout a lifetime. And the phrase, ‘I cannot imagine’ – what a barrier between mother and child when the child’s imagination asks only to stretch itself to the very rim of the world. But in Tottie lived a mind both free and daring.

Intently she compared her childhood with Tottie’s, the two so alike in precocity of feeling, so overshadowed by adult unhappiness. Could she strengthen Tottie by allowing her the scope she herself had been denied after her father’s death? She thought of those others: Robert, her mother, Phoebe and Anne; what could one offer them but silence? And why could she not rage openly as her father had done? Was it kindness? Or cowardice? Lack of self-esteem? The latch clicked. She sprang to her feet. As Robert peered in she cried, Not here, in my sanctum! and quickly masked her features as one throws a sheet over a naked body. Raising the trowel, she said, ‘I’ve been weeding,’ as if to excuse her very existence.

This is the opening chapter of a novel we hope to publish in the future. When it first appeared in 1964 the original publisher, Hutchinson, wrote: ‘The Red Baize Door will place Ellen Ryder among our best contemporary women novelists.’ She wrote two more novels, Kate (1967) and The Forest Pool (1968). © Ellen Ryder 1964