A Tale of Two Families (13 page)

‘I can’t let her loose on these materials – some of them are lovely.’ May might dislike her aunt but pretty materials deserved to be protected. ‘Oh, I don’t really mind ironing them. It’s just the calm way she takes it for granted that infuriates me. Do have a drink, Mother, and get your strength up to face her at lunch.’

Fran said, ‘Let’s all make up our minds that there’ll be nothing to face. May, dear, you
will
control yourself?’

But when Mildred eventually sailed downstairs it was Fran who had to control herself for, accompanying Mildred, was Penny.

Mildred said, ‘The poor baby was whining piteously so of course I had to rescue her.’

‘But I told you –’ Fran broke off. Penny was already out of the French window and into the lilac grove.

Robert, as well as Fran, went after her, only managing to catch her because she misguidedly ran into the little sundial garden.

‘Idiot creature,’ said Fran lovingly, picking up the now grovelling Penny. ‘Robert, will you go back and explain to Mildred
fully
? If have to do it again I shall lose my temper. Tell her about Penny’s delicacy and – oh, everything. I’ll go and shut the creature up.’

Fran took her time, soothing Penny with more chocolate biscuits and then going to wash melted chocolate off her hands. Returning to the Long Room she found Penny still under discussion.

Mildred was saying, ‘In spite of all you’ve said, Robert, I still think Nature knows best about these things.’

Robert, with noticeable patience, said, ‘Well, setting aside Penny’s special case and the difficulty of finding homes for mongrel puppies, let me remind you that she’s Hugh’s dog and it’s up to him to decide when she mates.’

‘“Hugh’s dog”,’ said Mildred. ‘What ominous words! I well remember his misery over the last one.’

‘But that was when he was a little boy,’ said June.

‘People don’t change, dear.’ Mildred turned to greet Fran. ‘Well, has the poor prisoner been shut up by her jailer?’

Fran was exasperated. ‘Damn it, Mildred…!’

‘Lunch!’ said May loudly, opening the door to the kitchen. ‘We’re ready, Mrs Matson.’ It would have been a pleasure to hear Fran lose her temper with Mildred, but May knew how upset her mother would be about it afterwards.

Lunch began. May, June and Robert addressed polite questions to Mildred who answered with chilly brevity. Fran said nothing; she was too annoyed with Mildred, and annoyed with herself for being annoyed. Baggy, deciding that he had not yet lived up to his intention of ‘doing the civil’ to Mildred, said, ‘I believe you live in a boarding house – or should I say a private hotel? (He was pleased with that touch of civility.) My wife and I spent nearly a year in one, once, when we were between houses. I hope you find the food more satisfactory than we did.’

‘Oh, I expect so,’ said Mildred. ‘But I never notice what I’m eating.’ She continued to spoon up one of May’s most exquisite cold soups.

Baggy shot a quick glance at May and caught her eye. She gave him a fractional wink, to which he responded with a feeling of great pleasure. In spite of the fact that May was unfailingly kind to him he found her, as he had never found June, a little formidable. The exchanged wink gave him a sense of assurance,
somehow incorporated him more fully into the Dower House family, made him an accredited member of the gang, as opposed to non-gang Mildred. So warmly happy did he feel that he again treated her to ‘the civil’ and at last succeeded in getting a conversation going. Mildred, in fact, became slightly coy, and there was a general easing of tension.

Still, Fran was glad when lunch was over and Mildred went to get ready for her walk. She returned swinging a very small silk handbag by its drawstring. Fran, whose irritation had been dwindling, now softened completely. With genuine – if momentary – affection, she said, ‘Oh, Mildred, we used to have little bags like that when we were children. Didn’t Mother call them “Dorothy bags”?’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Mildred coldly.

Fran sighed. Probably her remark about the Dorothy bag had been taken as an implication that the bag was old-fashioned. Well, it was more than that; it was archaic.

‘We’ll start you on your way, Auntie,’ said June. ‘And you can see our cottage.’

‘Just at the moment I only need
woods
, dear,’ said Mildred.

‘I’ll show you how to get to them quickly,’ said Robert. ‘And then go back home and do some work, June.’

They all escorted Mildred out.

‘Isn’t our lilac lovely?’ said June.

‘Just past its best, isn’t it?’ said Mildred, then sneezed delicately.

‘Perhaps it gives you hay fever,’ said Robert. ‘I’ll take you through the park.’

May called after Mildred, ‘Tea’s at four-thirty.’

Mildred called back to May, ‘Oh, I never know the time. Watches won’t go on me. I’ve too much electricity.’

Fran called, ‘Well, come back sometime.’

‘If only she wouldn’t!’ May whispered. ‘Mother, she’s worse than ever. She’s impossible.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Fran. ‘But I give you my word that nothing she says is
intended
to annoy. She simply speaks what comes into her head, like a child.’

‘She’s not in the least like a child,’ said May. ‘Children can be brutally frank but they can also be enthusiastic. They like lots of things. She never praised anything at all. My God, she even sneezed at the lilac.’

Fran laughed. ‘I don’t
think
that was intended as a comment.’

‘I hadn’t realised the lilac was past its best,’ said June. ‘How I shall miss it when it’s over.’

‘It’ll come again next year,’ said Baggy kindly.

May put her arms through his. ‘How marvellous you were at lunch, Baggy. You’re as good as George at stringing old Mildred along. Well, we’re free of her for an hour or so, though it’ll take me all of that to press her dresses. Come and talk to me while I do it, June.’

Fran went to see Penny. Baggy went to his room intending to take a nap. Settling in his armchair – he seldom lay on the bed during the day – he felt pleased with himself. What was that phrase May had used? Ah, yes, he remembered it. He returned the wide grin of his felt frog and mentally told it, ‘George and I will string her along together.’ He would not have admitted that he talked to his frog, even mentally. He merely thought thoughts at it.

Upstairs Fran, having brought ‘the creature’ into her bedroom, stood at the window looking out. She could see Mildred, minus Robert now, tripping gaily through the park. At least, Fran hoped she was tripping gaily, undistressed by the contretemps before lunch. She was certainly tripping, and swinging that
absurd Dorothy bag. What would she be thinking about them all? But here Fran pulled her thoughts up. Mildred would only be thinking about Mildred.

Fran was wrong. Mildred, after Robert left her to make her own way, spent some little time thinking about them all and feeling disappointed. But apart from her irritation with Fran about Penny, nothing said or done had actually distressed her. She was disappointed simply because nobody had provided any food for her imagination.

From her childhood, the chief pleasure of her life had been to tell herself stories about people. She had always been secretive about this, partly because she had as a child vaguely equated ‘making things up’ with telling lies, and even more because she was guiltily conscious that the most pleasurable stories were erotic in content. She was possessed of, and by, a powerful imagination of a very freakish kind in as much as it was entirely focused on her own conception of people; she had no interest in what they might be feeling, and therefore no insight into it – hence her complete lack of realisation when she was being annoying. She did not try to please or displease and had no idea that she was an instinctive displeaser or why she was.

In her youth she, herself, had been the heroine of all her stories. (The heroes had been actors, other celebrities and, quite often, unknown men whose faces, seen on a bus, in the street, in a newspaper, had attracted her. Once she had seen a man driving a four-in-hand and made use of him for weeks.) But for many years now she had found it difficult to imagine about herself, because she liked her heroines to be young, and to think of herself as young not only put a strain on her imagination but also made her conscious that she wasn’t young. So she bowed out of her imaginings and was always on the lookout for attractive and inspiring younger people. Television had provided good material
but no longer did. Girls’ skirts were too short, men’s hair too long. Actors and celebrities weren’t what they’d once been. She was also in need of new settings for her stories and had counted on the Dower House to provide them.

Well, so it might, she told herself, tripping towards the woods. And it was absurd to be disappointed just because the company at lunch hadn’t been inspiring. How could she have expected it to be? She had sometimes thought that June might be used as a romantic heroine (if on the old side) but her perfectly happy marriage to Robert was dull. May wasn’t in the least romantic and had no right to be married to such an attractive man as George – though Mildred admitted that May handled him sensibly and had long ago congratulated her on this, saying how wise it was to accept that some men had to have many women in their lives. George, ah, George! He was a rake – a word Mildred loved. She’d have no hesitation in imagining his rakish adventures if she could lay eyes on some exciting girl.

Fran and Baggy… would it be interesting to imagine them falling in love with each other? It would not. In the days when Mildred had been her own heroine Fran had often played a part in the same story, a subsidiary part and coming out of things pretty badly. But Fran, now… no, highly unromantic. Baggy had been nicer than Mildred had expected. Would it be possible to imagine a romance between Baggy and herself? The idea startled her so much that she stopped dead, to consider it. But no, it wouldn’t do: that shapeless old man. It was, however, interesting that she had momentarily considered imagining about
herself
again… rather exciting.

She reached a small wood which, Robert had told her, contained nightingales. But it was too tangled for easy walking. She went on until she came to a wood where the walking would
be easy. And here she would take a rest. But she soon found that this wood didn’t invite sitters. There was no grass beneath these old, heavily leafed trees. It didn’t occur to her to wonder what kind of trees these were; she simply knew they weren’t the kind she wanted. What she did want were lithe, young trees with the sunlight filtering through their rustling leaves. She also wanted something she thought of as a mossy bank.

For some minutes she continued walking without pleasure. Then she saw sunlight ahead and shortly came, if not to a mossy bank, to a place where the trees were thin and there was grass which invited her to sit on it. She sat, and spread her flowered skirt around her. She must, she felt, surveying her small green shoes, look very like an illustration to a fairy tale. But her imagination no longer functioned in fairyland. She let her thoughts drift where they willed.

Would they be missing her at her hotel? (
Of course
it was a hotel, not a boarding house.) Most of them were staying on, in discomfort, during the redecorations. Such dear, devoted people, they all counted on her – but alas, such dear
dull
people; it was years since any of them had offered food to her imagination. At this time of the afternoon most of them would be taking a nap, as she normally would herself. It would be pleasant to fall asleep in this place – could one describe it as a ‘glade’? A glade was even more romantic than a mossy bank. She lay down, closed her eyes and smiled, imagined her serene face under the afternoon sunlight, imagined how she would look to anyone coming out of the dark wood.

And then a really valuable memory stirred, a memory of a daydream she had made use of again and again when she was a girl. It had begun when she went for a picnic all by herself in some woods – where? That didn’t matter. She had thought of
herself as a nymph, and there had been a creature…a faun, a satyr? Ah, now she remembered, it had been the great god, Pan. She hadn’t used that daydream for years and years – and now it was potent again. And it was about
herself
, an ageless self just as Pan was ageless. She must on no account open her eyes; that would break the spell. She must lie there
waiting
.

Pan would be ruthless. He would tear her clothes off. No, clothes were unsuitable. She mentally removed them, allowing herself only the kind of clothing suitable for a nymph… wisps of chiffon, a few leaves. Then she removed even those. She would lie here naked, under the sun. A hot wind blew from the cool forest, Pan was coming, there was no escape. He was here, above her.

It was no use. She couldn’t sustain the daydream. She was suddenly conscious of the hard ground and something crawling over her instep. She sat up and felt dizzy, not from bliss but because lying flat on her back always did make her dizzy… something to do with blood pressure but her doctor assured her it was normal for ‘a woman of your age’. The remembered phrase hit her unpleasantly.

Dizziness passed. She removed the caterpillar from her ankle. It had been a mistake to think about
herself
as a nymph, to have wasted such a wonderful resurgence of imagination. But perhaps it wouldn’t be wasted. She might revive it if she could think of a suitable nymph. Perhaps when she saw Corinna at the weekend… Up to now, Mildred’s imagination had refused to be interested in Corinna and Hugh; a romance between two innocents was just plain dull. But it would be all right to have an innocent nymph, seeing that Pan would be anything but innocent. Yes, Corinna as a nymph (terrified) was a distinct possibility.

But it would probably be better to concentrate on George – and she’d want to, once she’d seen him again. He would be
wonderful to imagine about, if only she could find him some beautiful woman. Perhaps she’d see someone on television or – yes, this was an idea – he might have a glamorous secretary. Mildred tried to visualise her and tried to visualise George in his city office; it would be an imposing place such as tycoons on television favoured. Soon he would say a few last charming words to the secretary (the romance between them should, as yet, only be budding) and then stride out to a powerful car – Mildred had been told that he almost always made the journey by train but she preferred him in a powerful car, tearing through open country. Dear George! Dear rakish George! She would wear her newest dress for him tonight.

It would have pleased her to know that he was, at the moment, thinking of her.

He had left the City early and come to Piccadilly to do some shopping, his first purchase being an expensive box of liqueur chocolates for ‘poor old Mildew’. She was undoubtedly a nuisance but probably not as black as she was painted in family discussions – and he could be as down on her as any of the others. In the mellow mood induced by spending money on her he decided she was merely a slightly dotty old lady, more to be pitied than disliked.

Wondering if he should also buy chocolates for Fran it occurred to him that he never thought of
her
as any kind of old lady, merely as an intelligent and most likeable woman – and Fran was three years older than Mildred and, though she looked young for her age, she didn’t look as young as Mildred did for hers. But there was something freakish about Mildred’s preserved youth, and the word ‘preserved’ described it well. It was a sort of frozen youth. Perhaps she suffered from a new disease, deferred
age, and would suddenly crumple and decay. He must tell May that – but on second thoughts, he wouldn’t, as it might not awake May’s tolerance but simply increase her dislike for Mildred, which wouldn’t add to anyone’s comfort. He finally dismissed his wife’s aunt from his mind with a valedictory thought that early and frequent rape might have made a different woman of her – and why she couldn’t have come by it, or a respectable equivalent, he simply couldn’t imagine, seeing that she must have been a beauty. Something odd there. He’d once asked Fran about it but got no change out of her.

Regretfully, he decided against chocolates for Fran; it would detract from Mildred’s. The same applied to May and June; anyway, the three of them were always thinking about their weight. Personally, he thought May ought to put on a little; her type of prettiness needed to guard against skinniness. June was just right at present. He had only recently realised that she could sometimes look quite voluptuously beautiful. He wished she could have more money to spend on clothes. Now that they lived so close to each other May never bought any clothes for herself without buying the equivalent for June, but they were only wearing simple summer dresses. He would have liked to see June in something rich – and she would conveniently be having a birthday sometime this month. He’d discuss it with May.

Coming out of Fortnum and Mason’s at the back, he made his way to Piccadilly past the side windows. There was an amber negligée which would look well on June. He’d have liked to buy it but it might not be much use to her in the country. Still, he’d describe it to May. What else should he buy today and for whom? He was in the mood for spending but rather lacking in ideas. He didn’t need anything himself and, anyway, he only got a kick out of spending money on other people. It was his form of
gratitude for happiness and he was at present extremely happy. For that matter, he’d been happy ever since they’d moved to the country but the happiness had increased, most noticeably, just lately. Why, exactly? Summer weather?

Today was delightful, even in London, and would be more so when he got back to the country. Not that he had any particular longing to get out of town. He felt kindly disposed to the jostling crowds in Piccadilly, particularly to all the girls in their preposterously short skirts which made one long to pat their bottoms – merely as a friendly gesture; he was conscious of no sexual drive behind the thought. Indeed, he had been conscious of no extra-marital sexual drive behind any thought for months. Most peculiar, especially considering that he had, at the moment, an enchantingly pretty secretary who, though equipped with a steady boyfriend whom she intended eventually to marry, had managed to indicate that she was capable of driving a tandem. George, while liking her very much, had never felt a flicker of temptation. That kind of thing was
out
. And not simply on May’s account. When moving to the country he had only sworn to himself that no more goings-on should take place under her nose. He hadn’t sworn that the close season would operate in London.

Odder still was the fact that his mood today strongly resembled feelings he was apt to have when about to start a new affair. At such times the happiness that was normal for him was increased in a way which never failed to astonish him. Exhilaration and, surprisingly, peacefulness combined to achieve a sense of
complete rightness
– never did he feel in the least guilty. Not, that is, just before or during the affair. He had felt retrospective guilt – also prospective guilt, for he had always been certain there were other affairs ahead. Now he felt no such certainty and he had no desire to.

Perhaps he was settling down, getting middle-aged; but if so, he had no sense of loss. He had never felt more contented. Summer, the country to go home to, the two households… what a success it had been, linking up with Robert and June. Yes, everything was
right
.

Rightness, for George, was the equivalent of God’s will to the religious. If he felt it about a state of mind, he accepted it unquestioningly. If it applied to a course of action, he was grateful for such guidance. He considered himself a shrewd businessman but he frequently made decisions which had nothing to do with shrewdness. He just saw them as ‘right’, knew he had been given the go-ahead. Later, he had been known to say to himself, ‘My God, I must have been psychic.’ But he didn’t really believe that. It was simply that he had the knack of recognising ‘rightness’.

The only thing that wasn’t ‘right’ this afternoon was that he had an itch to spend money and didn’t know what to spend it on. Then he sighted Hatchards. Of course! He could take home a present of books for the two households. That wouldn’t detract from the ‘special favour’ of old Mildred’s chocolates. She could share in the books – though, according to Fran, Mildred seldom read a book. ‘You see,’ Fran had explained, ‘books aren’t about
her.
’

He spent a happy half-hour in Hatchards, using his flair for knowing which books were likely to interest which members of the family. Then, heavily laden, he took a taxi to Liverpool Street Station. For once he didn’t feel like joining convivial acquaintances in the buffet car (‘rightness’ was better savoured in solitude) so he found a quiet compartment and spent a pleasant hour glancing at the books he’d bought… a pity he didn’t get more time for reading.