An End to Autumn by Iain Crichton Smith

seemed to her to be vulgar, cheap and meretricious. She had somehow inherited, though not from her mother certainly, a concept of a church which had the rational moderation of the Protestant along with the mediaeval resonance of a more beautiful church. A church of nuns might have suited her, but she thought of the Catholic Church as not at all nun-like but aesthetic in a false way, in an unrigorous style. And this idea was reinforced by her mother’s theatrical flirting with churches of a similar cheap nature: for example her mother had a brief but intense flush of enthusiasm for a Greek church whose proceedings were carried out entirely in a Greek language which she did not understand. Her mother loved grandiose ceremony, white clothes, singing, colour and pageantry, even the smell of incense. Even her clothes—a succession of streaming bizarre cloaks—were a manifestation of a religious plumage. And Vera had associated her mother with an emotional falsity which she had transferred to the church itself. Thus she felt a distaste which she would probably have admitted was irrational though nonetheless powerful.
    At the same time she was disturbed that this woman—this Mrs Murphy—had been in the habit of cleaning stairs and belonged to a much lower class than herself. It was as if she represented a threat of some sort, the nature of which she did not fully understand, for she had not really known people like her in her own protected life. The closest she could get to her were the school cleaners whom she did not speak to, though she didn’t deliberately choose not to. And the fact that the woman was Irish didn’t help either. She had no knowledge of Ireland and she hadn’t met any Irish people but she thought of them as opposed to order, difficult and too sociable. She did however like the poetry of Yeats which had more Protestant qualities.
    She also felt a slight anger against her mother-in-law. Why had she complicated things in this way? Why couldn’t she have struck up an acquaintance with a woman of her own class, some middle-class person from her own church, whom she would have more in common with. She should think of things like that: the fact that she hadn’t showed a failure of tact and responsibility and, yes, even intelligence.
    “I’m sure,” she said to Tom, “that this woman, Mrs Murphy or whatever her name is, will want to visit her, or at least your mother will feel that she ought to ask her since after all she visited her.”
    “I don’t see why,” Tom replied, “and even if that were the case why shouldn’t she come here? She wouldn’t be in the house all the time.”
    They were lying in bed together, the window open, and a little light from the moon half dissipating the darkness.
    “I just know that that will happen,” Vera insisted. “It is in the nature of things.”
    Tom himself felt slightly confused, for he sensed Vera’s disapproval, and he was bothered that the question had arisen, but now that it had he was determined to be fair.
    “We can’t after all say that she can’t bring her here. We can’t decide who her friends are to be.”
    He was worried about an incident that had happened in his class that day and which he had told Vera about. A girl had fainted, had keeled over in her seat, and he hadn’t known what to do. It all happened very suddenly. She was a big girl and she lay there on the floor and a pool of water, which he later realised was urine, had formed about her.
    He had stood there in a fixity of distaste mixed with panic, quite useless and remote. In fact another girl had taken charge. Later the school medical officer had come in and taken over and he had watched as the girl, her head between her knees, her hair falling downwards in a floating stream, had returned to consciousness. It was like seeing life transmit itself through a block of wood, for at first when the girl had been walked about the room she had looked as stiff as a log, but then it was as if