Free An End to Autumn by Iain Crichton Smith Page A

manic laugh as if he wished to explode in front of the mirror, as if he wished both reality and reflection to merge with each other in the infinite depths of the glass. Then he began to dance in his shirt in front of the mirror, moving his body backwards and forwards in a parody of Top of the Pops and as he did so he was laughing helplessly and silently while his distorted waltzing image gazed back at him.
    After he had done this for some time he put on his trousers and when his wife returned from the bathroom he went and busied himself with the tedious business of shaving. While he was doing so, his wife in her turn was sitting on the bed, gazing into the mirror and examining her face as if to assure herself that she had lost none of that quality, whatever it was, that had first attracted Tom. She was wondering if she ought to do her hair in a different way, or perhaps wear make-up which she ordinarily never did. I didn’t know I was like this, she thought with surprise, I didn’t think that I was like an animal scenting trouble from a distance, sensing some other as yet unfocussed predator moving stealthily towards it. She was amazed that these thoughts had come to her since she was not at all imaginative but as she sat there she wondered what it would be like for an animal to feel itself being stalked, death steadily nearing in the long grass. But she was not so helpless as a small animal might be: she could do something about what was happening. She was not going to wait till the teeth bit into her. She was going to do something about it.
    And she briskly made the bed with obsessive tidiness. She put the brush away in the drawer removing as much of the hair as she could and placing it in a small coloured bucket that stood in one corner of the room. She turned at the door to make sure that everything was neat and in its proper place before leaving and then she went and made the breakfast.
    The two of them, she and Tom, were silent at breakfast as they usually were for Tom was not the sort of person who was conversational in the early morning, nor for that matter was she. A part of her mind was already thinking about her classes and how she would present a particular lesson. She was thinking that she might try to get another cupboard for her room, or a new blackboard of the sort that rolled round and round. Even in the car—whose windows were almost frosted over—they were silent, Tom driving with his usual negligent speed, both of them gazing out of small spaces between the frost at the uniformed pupils who were walking up the road. There they were, willing or unwilling to be educated, and there were the two of them responsible for their education. What a privilege, she thought, what a life’s work. What an immensely complicated thing, he was thinking, what an intricate and often useless business.
    The car drew up outside the school and he kissed her briefly before they set off for their respective rooms. As yet there was no one in her room and she stood at the table looking around her at the empty desks, briefly glancing at the blackboard, allowing the day to ascend steadily in her so that she would be able to meet it with whatever knowledge and readiness that she had. She looked at the posters on the walls and felt that she was in her proper place in life, the place that she would probably occupy till she retired. This was her life’s work and she was good at it, she was in control of it. Here the unreasonable was converted into the reasonable, and the inarticulate made articulate. She was a colonist of partially unknown minds, a missionary assimilating new areas to literacy. She waited happily for the class to enter and had almost forgotten her mother-in-law and Tom in the excitement of anticipation and conversion, as if she were a secular nun married to her work. Sometime she would have to try some drama with them, perhaps a little play about an old woman. She knew exactly which girl she would choose to play the