Ought oughts are ought

Another damp day. I signed on at nine and made an abortive trip to the barber’s before setting off into Easterby with Mum at half-twelve.

I missed the four minutes to one train and so had an hour to wait in the drizzle for the next one. The train crawled through the unprepossessing landscapes of Haley Hill, Nortonroyd and Mill Bridge; wet-roofed factory buildings and dark houses crouched shivering on the hillsides, and black clusters of buildings loomed out of the murk as we rattled past.

Ms. Hirst picked me up at the station and we drove to her house high above Midgeroyd, a small ivy-clad cottage perched overlooking the valley. Lee, Jeremy, and Gillian were already there, sitting uneasily across from one another in the front room. Gillian's just like her sister, perhaps a bit more easy going and trendy. Hirst’s house is small with typically arty touches--a tastefully arranged pile of pebbles on one corner of the coffee table, a heap of shells placed with studied carelessness on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, several pseudo-pointillist paintings of palm trees on the walls.

She asked me about Watermouth and asked me how it was going. I blurted out the usual spiel about the academic drudgery of ploughing through books only to write essays and told her my semi-serious idea of packing it all in. She mentioned Art History: I began to think about it seriously, but I felt very uncomfortable with her probing questions: What would I do on the dole? etc etc.

Lee made the idle, incidental comment that I should have done an Art course, but I should change me, not my course, and anyway I can’t imagine my tutors taking too kindly to my flitting from one course to another in such whimsical fashion. I came across as very undecided and lacking any real self-knowledge. Truthfully I haven’t a clue as to what else I’d rather be doing.

“Ought oughts are ought” said Hirst, meaning I’m not deserving of any reward if I don’t put anything in. Jeremy later told me I’d sounded “neurotic.”

Apart from this all was quite OK. Hirst thought Lee and I looked fresh-faced and boyish, and I thought she was her usual satirical self, quite unchanged. She made us lasagne and salad with plum crumble for dessert and told us she’s reaching a bit of a crisis point in her life, isn’t really happy with her career at Egley, and feels that, at thirty four, she isn’t getting anywhere in particular. Promotions don’t interest her and she says she needs a change.

I’m doomed to feel this too.

By now the sun had pierced the gloom and shone into the living room. We went for a walk. Midgeroyd was still wrapped in a murk the sun couldn’t penetrate, the valley bottom a jumble of shrouded outlines and silhouettes. The grass was sodden and the roads were still damp from the heavy afternoon rain. We climbed up a flight of stone steps and emerged onto the top of the hillside and finally into evening sunshine.

The valley is very narrow at this point, its sides towering over the village. Lots of steep hills and narrow streets. We saw one building with a tower, about two-storeys high, topped off with a small spire. We also glimpsed a magnificent chapel set back in its own grounds, a huge blackened building with a frontage adorned with pillars at either side of an imposing doorway.

We had a couple of drinks at a pub and Hirst let us into some of the secrets at school. It sounds as awful in the staff room as it was being a pupil there. She says the staff is boring and gave us a glimpse of the crawling careerist Mrs. St. John who “is a fascist.”

Gillian had to be back or her parents would have been on her about staying out late, but before we caught the nine-thirty train back Hirst gave me Ornette Coleman's Body Meta (which she hates); Jeremy came away with a Zenit camera. Gillian seems OK; I quite liked her.

Lee was in fine form and we got on very well; he had me in fits several times and as we hurried for the train he whistled loudly and regaled us with impressions from Coronation Street. Back in Easterby we said goodbye to Gillian in the station and went for a drink at the Four Pigeons, but I missed my bus and ended the day trudging home through the mist on foot.

Andrew was in bed when I got back. He’s come home to pick some stuff up.