She looked so rustic in the mirror as if she had lived all her life on a farm and had only gained from it a disease which gave her eyes a staring thyroid look, and her body the appearance of someone suffering from advanced dropsy. The man smiled at her again—as if caught up in her simple laughter—and Hugh glowered at the two of them.
Then he himself turned and looked in an adjacent mirror. This particular one elongated his body so that he seemed very tall and thin and his head with its frail brow was like a tall egg on top of his stalklike body. He smiled without thinking and she laughed from behind him and so did Sheila, clapping her hands, and shouting, ‘Daddy’s so thin. Look at Daddy.’ She moved from mirror to mirror. In one she was squat and heavy and lumpish, in another her legs were as thin as the stalks of plants, climbing vertically to her incredibly shrunken waist. And all the time Sheila was running from one to the other excitedly. Hugh wasn’t laughing as much as she was, he seemed rather to be studying the reflections as if they had philosophical or poetical implications.
Most of the people in the tent were laughing so loudly and with such abandon that they were like occupants of an asylum, rocking and roaring and leaning on each other, hardly able to breathe. But though she laughed she didn’t abandon herself as helplessly as they did. And Hugh gazed at the reflections gravely as if they were pictures in an art gallery which he was trying to memorise.
She looked down at her slim body in the yellow dress as if to make sure that she wasn’t after all the distorted woman in the mirror, the gross heavy-rooted peasant with the swollen arms and the swollen legs. And all around her was the perpetual storm of laughter and the rocking red-faced people. And suddenly she too abandoned herself, doubled over, banging her fist on her knee, shrieking hysterically at the squat figure, making faces at her. Tears came into her eyes, she wept with a laughter that was close to pain, and in the middle of it all she saw the reflection of her husband, tall and incredibly thin, with the immensely frail tall egg perched on his shoulders, gazing disapprovingly at her.
She couldn’t stop laughing, it was as if a torrent had been released in her, as if she were a river in spate. And beside her the man and his wife were doubled over with laughter, their faces red and streaming, the man making faces in the mirror to make his reflection even more macabre.
Finally she stood up and made her way to the door, Hugh following her with Sheila. He was silent as if he felt that she had betrayed him in some way.
‘Didn’t you like that?’ she asked him. ‘It was really funny.’ And she began to laugh again, this time more decorously, as if at the memory of what she had seen, rather than at its present existence. Why on earth did he never let himself go? Ever? She was angry with him and gritted her teeth. She supposed that even when he had been working in the library he had been like that, sad and serious, gravely spectacled, a source of tall disapproval when women borrowed their romances or thrillers. But how on earth had he learned to be so dull?
The two youths who were wearing striped green and white scarves came back up the road again, shouting. Hugh pulled Sheila aside out of their way, turning his eyes from them.
Damn you, damn you, she almost shouted, why didn’t you go straight on? But she knew that he shouldn’t have done so and that she was being unreasonable, for after all the creatures she had just seen were quarrelsome, irrational, and violent. But was that what writing did for you, sitting day after day in your room and then drawing aside from the rawness of reality when you emerged into it? Oh my God, she thought, what is it I want? Joy, life … She listened to the steady beat of the music which animated the fair. In the old days she used to dance such a lot, now she didn’t dance at all. She even knew some of the tunes they were playing, nostalgic reminders of her youth. Paper roses,paper roses, she hummed to herself, as she walked along. But why couldn’t he take off his damned jacket? There were men passing all the time with bare torsos tanned to a deep brown and looking like gipsies, while by contrast Hugh seemed so pale even in this gorgeous summer because he never left his room. Damn, damn, damn. If only one was a gipsy, wandering about the world in a coloured caravan, without destination, without worry.
She wanted to dance, to sing, to shout out loud. But she didn’t do any of these things and she merely walked on beside Sheila and Hugh looking as demure as any of the other women she met, a member of an apparently contented family, while all the time the beat of the music throbbed around her and inside her.
They came to a place where there were small cars for the children to drive and she asked Sheila if she would like to go on one of them. Sheila gravely nodded and then paid the man with the money her mother gave her, stepping with the same unhurried gravity into one of the cars which ran on tracks so that there was no danger. Ruth watched her daughter as the latter gazed around her with the same unsmiling serious self-possessed expression and when one of the other little girls began to cry Sheila gazed at her with a faint distaste. It worried Ruth that her daughter should be so unsmilingly serene and while she was thinking that thought Hugh said, ‘She’s cool, isn’t she?’
‘Isn’t she?’ Ruth hissed back and Hugh turned to her in surprise.
‘I’m worried she’s so cool,’ Ruth continued in the same hissing tone. ‘She never smiles. She’s like a robot.’
‘What’s wrong with being cool?’ Hugh asked her.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s like you. Maybe she’ll be a writer.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said Hugh, his face pale.
‘What I said. Maybe she should be a writer. Isn’t that a good thing? Maybe a writer doesn’t have to have emotions.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’
‘Oh skip it,’ said Ruth impatiently and watched her daughter driving past with the same unearthly competence and composure as she had noticed before, self-reliant, never bumping into anyone, never making a mistake.
‘Anyway,’ she said aloud, ‘what does your writing mean? This is the real world. What have you got to say about this? About the fair? You haven’t said anything. I don’t think you’ve noticed a thing.’ She was hissing like a snake and all the time he was staring at her with his pale hurt face among all the tanned people. Perhaps he thought the fair vulgar, beneath him; perhaps he thought that the music which recalled her youth to her was indecorous, inelegant, raucous.
They watched Sheila driving round and round in her small yellow car.
‘It’s because I don’t drive,’ said Hugh.
‘No,’ she almost screamed. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Nothing at all to do with that. It’s your lack of feeling, your damned lack of feeling. She’s getting like you. Look at her. She’s like a robot, don’t you see?’
‘No I don’t see. She’s self-contained, that’s all. But I don’t think she’s like a robot.’
‘I don’t care what you say, I know.’
‘Do you want me to stop writing then?’ he asked plaintively.
‘You do what you want. Anyway I don’t think writing is the most important thing in the world, as you seem to.’
And all the time there throbbed around her the beat of the music, heavy, sonorous, plangent. Her body moved to its rhythm. And her daughter revolved remorselessly in her small car.
‘You’re shouting,’ said Hugh. ‘People are hearing you.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care whether they hear me or not.’
The cars stopped and she leaned over and pulled Sheila towards her. She walked off ahead, Sheila beside her. It was as if she wanted to get into the very centre of the fair, its throbbing centre, in among the lights, the red savage lights, so that she could dance, so that she could feel alive, even in that place of cheating and deception, crooked sights, bad darts.
He was so dull, always asking her if poetry was important. And what should she tell him? Why was he doing it if he doubted its value so much? The fair was important: one could sense it: its brash reality