An End to Autumn by Iain Crichton Smith Page A

a new dawn had arisen in a primitive world and the log had begun to feel the warmth of an early sun and come gradually alive. Expression had radiated from the log, and it was finally transformed to a human being again. It had worried him more that he could say to find that he had been totally helpless in front of that situation. Remembering the urine he had carefully avoided the girl’s eye for the rest of the period.
    “I know that,” said Vera. “It’s just that … it’s difficult to explain. I’m not trying to be difficult about it. But it seems to me that in the first place these are not the kinds of people your mother should be with. I feel it in my bones.”
    “You don’t understand,” said Tom, “she’s reverting to her early days, to the days when she was happiest. These are the kinds of people that she knew then. I can understand it. It’s very simple.”
    “Simple? I should have thought that would have been the last word one would apply to it. You’re being curiously opaque for once.”
    “I’m not being curiously opaque,” Tom said with a slight flare of anger, “not at all. I’m trying to understand. In any case she can always take her to her room. We don’t need to see her if we don’t want to.”
    “Mm. That’s easy to say. But what are the practical mechanics of it? I shall have to take tea in to them.”
    She did not feel that she wanted to be a maid to Mrs Murphy who after all had nothing to do with her: and in any case there was nothing of the servant in her nature.
    “Well, I’ll take it in then and I’ll make it too if you like. In any case the situation hasn’t arisen yet.”
    “That wouldn’t look very nice,” said Vera angrily. “It would be putting me in a false position.”
    “All right, then, you’ll be put in a false position. But all this is surely very trivial. Aren’t you making mountains out of molehills?”
    “No I’m not and you know it,” said Vera, sitting up in bed, her ghastly nightgown making her look momently like a nun.
    “All these little things are very important. They are the ends of the wedge.”
    “What wedge?”
    “Oh, nothing. If you can’t see it you can’t see it, and that’s it.”
    There was a silence and in the silence Tom imagined his mother lying in bed in her own room, ignorant of what was being said about her.
    “After all,” he argued, “she’s on her own and she needs someone. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
    “All right, I won’t mention it again till the situation arises and we’ll just leave it there for the moment.”
    However, she thought that Tom was being unreasonable: he had this habit of calling important issues trivialities because he did not wish to face up to them. It came from that part of his nature which sometimes emerged in inane and unfunny jokes.
    “In any case,” said Tom, “your own mother had strange friends in the past. What about that Indian guru she brought to your house one night?”
    “That was different. My mother was concerned with him intellectually. She …”
    “Oh,” Tom interrupted, “so long as it’s intellectual it’s OK, then. So long as she can say, ‘I can bring any old tramp to my house, it’s all part of the search for my identity’. He may be unshaven, stubbly, toothless and stink to high heaven but so long as he hides a piece of nirvana inside his dirty cloak and has a half-baked vision of the universe which involves astrology, spiritualism etc. he’s all right. I call that snobbery.”
    “Call it what you like. It’s a different situation, and even you must admit that.”
    “I don’t admit it at all. I only see snobbery at the root of it.”
    There was another silence which this time prolonged itself. Vera had turned away from him, and Tom felt that she had done this as a tactical manœuvre.
    “I’m damned if I’m going to talk,” he told himself. “I’m damned if I’m going to say anything.”
    And he stared at the ceiling which glimmered