Free An End to Autumn by Iain Crichton Smith

bouquets to them. How well the world was organised, and how simple life really was. How little the intellect had to do with it. There were only a few clear necessary truths which one could carry with one as if in an overnight bag with its toothbrush and shaving gear. The rest could be left to itself. He opened the door of the car for his mother and she got in, arranging her coat. Then she sat back in the car, her bible in her lap, looking relaxed and at peace, heading for home.

 
    8
    O NE MORNING V ERA woke up feeling very cheerful, Tom still lying in bed gazing at the ceiling. An idea had blossomed in her mind during the night and stood there clearly before her, as if it had emerged without her intervention or presence at all. It was a fine beautiful creative idea of the kind that visits one perhaps on a summer morning when the sun is shining and the curtains shake a little in the breeze: but this one had blossomed on an autumn day.
    “You’re very happy this morning,” said Tom lazily.
    “Not particularly,” Vera replied carelessly for as yet she did not wish to tell him of her idea which she hugged to herself as if it were a child loved secretly for itself alone. She combed her hair in the mirror while Tom watched her. If only she were a nun, fulfilled in the world of her cool vocation: but that was not possible. Nowadays one must live in the world and the world made demands which had to be met: it required that one get up in the morning, set out into its infinitely devious maze, meet with other people and have relations with them, useful or futile.
    Even from our loved ones, she thought, we hide most of our secret wishes and dreams. For instance at this moment Tom does not know what I’m thinking and I don’t know what he’s thinking. Nevertheless we are able to live together as if we knew each other wholly, which is an impossibility: for how could she have known that Tom would have surrendered the convictions of a lifetime in order to go to church? Nor had he even talked about what had happened when he came home, and when she had questioned him he had given unsatisfactory and vague answers as if this was a part of his life that he did not wish to talk about to her, or as if it was simply impossible for him to talk about it. He would have considered her interest trivial not realising how important his action had been to her. It was as if their marriage were beginning to cloud slightly like a window on an autumn or winter morning when it is enwrought with cold patterns of ice so that one cannot see through it as one could when the weather was warm and unclouded and sunny. Exactly like the bedroom window on that very morning so that she could not see the trees in their autumn bravery until she rubbed it with her hand.
    “Should you not be getting up?” she asked.
    “In a minute,” said Tom, lying there in the warmth of the bed.
    She shook her hair back, put on her clothes and went to the bathroom while he still lay there. What am I? he wondered. Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I going to school this morning? Why is that wardrobe with the mirror standing in front of me at this particular moment? Why is her hairbrush with strands of her hair in it lying on the dressing table? And he gazed at it as if it were an object that he had never seen before, dear and distant, the pink hairbrush which contained part of his wife’s body. And the conjunction of the hairbrush and her hair and the dressing table puzzled him so that he found it difficult to imagine why they had come together in that room, like spaceships emerging from the depths of an unknown universe.
    He suddenly threw back the bedclothes from him and looked at himself in the mirror. His long narrow face gazed back at him, his eyes examined his reflected eyes, his nose thrust itself forward, his mouth with the prim pursed lips was reflected back at him. He pushed his face against the glass as if against an icy window and burst out into a