Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (16 page)

Amy had not thought of giving goodbye presents and felt awkward. She would have to dash out tomorrow to find something very English as a souvenir. What? And get it to Hampstead somehow.

“Do open it,” Martha said.

Slowly, Amy unknotted the string, trying to compose herself and gain time. She unwrapped a small, framed canvas.

An old woman, lying a little sideways in a half-curtained bed, squinting through steel-rimmed spectacles at a book. Her thin hair loose on her shoulders. Under the bed, narrow slippers; and on a table beside her bottles of medicine, a paper fan, more books, a lamp with a glass globe. The hands of the clock at ten past five. The colours a foggy yellow and grey, with black.

Martha watched Amy, who had taken the painting in shaking hands, as if holding it might either damage or restore her. At last, she said, “I remember. It was so long ago. An aunt he loved, who loved him. He was much influenced by Vuillard when we first met. One can see. Where on earth did you find it?”

“I tracked it down.”

“But, Martha, you mustn’t be allowed to do this. I would pay anything.”

“A present, I said.”

And Amy thought of the begrudged taxi-drive
through the Park, and other parsimonious reactions, and was overcome, not only with shame.

“Don’t cry,” Martha said. “Unless you haven’t finished yet. I don’t mind if people cry or not. So often they seem to do it from relief.”

“But you can’t possibly afford to give me such a present.”

“It so happens that I can. My grandmother has sent me some money because she is dying.” She wondered if she might be able to see her again before this should happen – on their very brief visit to Long Island before the journey north and west; the family’s meeting with Simon. And what would they think of him — they who had probably imagined her not the marrying kind?

Amy had gone to the window with the picture, and was standing there, staring at it, absorbing it.

“I want no one in the world to know I gave it to you,” Martha said, meaning that Simon must not know. “You will have to make up some story for James’s sake. And I also want you to bank this for me,” she said, “and no one is to know about this, either.” She handed Amy a cheque for two hundred pounds. “My escape money. If, or when, I need it, I shall let you know.”

Ernie came in with a pot of tea, and what he thought of as a few desultory biscuits, which he had bought for himself; no one had been expected, so there were no muffins or crumpets. “Is there anything further I can do?” he asked, looking at the fire.

“I think we’ll just wait, and hope,” Amy said.

“Wait and hope,” Martha repeated, as Ernie shut the door. “It’s what
I’m
doing – though I can’t evade the
foreboding. If you knew you had just a week, or a month perhaps, to live, what would you do?”

“I should turn out my desk…oh, dear, drawer after drawer… throw away the shoddiest of my underclothes, and then … go on as before.” Too late, remembering having glimpsed Martha’s shoddy underwear, she wished that she had not said quite all of this.

“In fact, you would have a bonfire as I have just had.”

Martha, with her own answer ready, was – typically – not asked the question the conversation was meant to be about, so she said, “I should kill myself at once. I couldn’t bear to hang about waiting for it.”

“Why are you talking like this? It’s marriage you’re going to, not death. You haven’t even tried marriage yet. No one could call it that. As you say, it’s made no difference. But it will. You’ll learn what day-to-day living with someone’s like. It’s the most important thing that happens in people’s lives. Yes, I do believe that”

And then, for some reason, marriage suddenly became typified by a memory of boredom on wintry Sunday afternoons; all those newspapers littered about their feet – hers and Nick’s – and ash-trays full of apple-cores and orange peel: those dark, frowsty hours, with rain most probably washing down the windows, hissing into the river, and no one at all walking by outside. They would doze in the sort of untidiness married couples often allow themselves. And I used to feel bored, she thought, and long for something bracing, even dangerous, to happen. And if he could return, I should be bored again, just the same.

“I’ll go down and tell Ernie goodbye,” Martha said, picking up the tray as she had done on her first visit to Laurel Walk. “There won’t be time to come again.”

“Well, goodbye, Ernie,” she said, putting the tray down on the kitchen table.

“Don’t say we shan’t be seeing you any more.”

“Not this trip, I guess.”

“Well, all that I find I can say on the occasion, is that I hope… I hope sincerely. . that you will be very happy in your new abode, and have a tip-top time.”

“Imagine me wandering around a new town, and saying ‘Wow’ at every block.”

Not, from this, being sure of her attitude, he began to clear the tray.

“Well, I sure hope you’ll be happy, too, Ernie. Perhaps marry again. Find the right one next time.”

“I fear that would be like trying to get a needle into a haystack,” he said off-handedly; for her audacity had always astounded him, although had not always been unwelcome.

“One last question,” Martha said, as if she were interviewing him on the television. “What did
you
think of Nick’s paintings?”

Although he flinched at the familiarity of the Christian name, he answered seriously. “You could recognise the people. He even did
me
once, among my pots and pans. Came back from the pub, and was chatting me up before supper, and started to draw. He ran more true to form, in my view. Not like Picassio.

I think he should be horse-drawn and quartered, the way he’s taken people for a ride. More fools them. But the master ran true to form. No fraud about him. ‘Let me whip my old apron off.’ I said, flustered a bit, with him sitting there at that table, drawing fast, and keeping on looking at me with his eyes screwed up as if he was half blind. ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘But the parsley sauce!’ I remember saying that to this day. ‘Sod the parsley sauce,’ he said, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“I find that interesting. Thank you, Ernie. It’s been nice knowing you.”

And so they shook hands and said goodbye for ever.

Amy, upstairs, was shutting out the last of the day.

“You always draw curtains so beautifully,” Martha said. “I shall remember that, too.”

“And soon you will have to think of me doing it much later in the evening.”

For the first winter of her widowhood was coming to an end. Already, there were tiny leaf buds, like embroidery stitches, on the lilac trees which hung over walls along Laurel Walk.

“What a winter,” she said from her own thoughts. She felt that she had been cut into pieces and not yet reassembled correctly.

“The time will be five or six hours different, anyhow,” Martha said, from hers.

In spite of the below-stairs farewell, Martha said suddenly, “I don’t like saying goodbye, so I shan’t.” She snatched up her shoulder-bag, swung her untidy
hair, and made for the front door, and out-of-doors. With strange feelings, Amy watched her go. Lifting her hand (but to Martha’s back), not having said goodbye, either. Then, from an even stranger emotion, her eyes began to fill with tears. Remorse again – as with the thought of Nick after his death. It would be there for anyone, she realised, who went away unhappily, or died. I did nothing for her, she thought.

As if in some other way she might compensate for this, she went down to the kitchen, and sat nibbling a biscuit, and listened to Ernie. He humoured her, thinking her grief-stricken by her friend’s departure.

Even on his day off, Gareth would often call to visit patients he was concerned about, or attend operations. His wife, Anna, had complained that nothing could ever be arranged and certainly happen – that there had been promised treats, trips into the country to go over stately homes or on picnics, and many of them so long-deferred that they never took place.

Amy, having been asked to go on a jaunt, as Gareth put it, one Thursday (his day off from the practice), knew from the experience of her old friend that the outing might not in the end come about, and she waited placidly for the telephone to ring that she could be told so.

Ernie, having been warned, waited not so placidly. Amy had said that she would provide the picnic, so Ernie had gone all out to show the doctor what a good-for-nothing his Miss Thompson was. The cream cheese and shallot flan, faintly flecked with herbs, was warm and ready for the thermos bag; white wine and salad were cooling for the cold one. Into one flask would go hot consommé laced with sherry, and into the other strong coffee. The wedge of Brie, in spite of a nip in the air, had begun to run nicely, and its sides were supported with foil.

“Don’t go to a lot of trouble,” Amy had said. “Just a roll with ham or something. Or hard-boiled eggs. We shall probably have to sit in the car and eat it, although I believe ‘picnic’ means out-of-doors.”

When she saw him getting the hamper ready, she was dismayed. It was to be a knife-and-fork job; plates, pepper, salt (“salt is essential with lettuce” Ernie said), real and carefully packed glasses instead of old yoghourt pots, linen napkins. “What a feast!” she said, still waiting for the telephone to ring. “And what are you going to eat?” she asked – thinking, probably some of this as things may turn out.

“I shall find something. Have no doubts on that point.”

She thought, ‘he is a vicarious eater. In fact, he is a vicarious everything.’

The telephone rang. “Twenty minutes,” Gareth said, and hung up.

“Twenty minutes,” Amy said listlessly to Ernie, thinking, ‘or not at all.’

“That’s the sort of split-second timing I like,” he said. “Miss Thompson doesn’t know her luck.”

Amy thought that they didn’t know theirs yet. But in exactly twenty minutes, Gareth was there.

“How nice to be driven out to somewhere I really want to go,” Amy said, settling herself in the old Bristol car which Gareth had had for years and years, and even so had bought it second-hand long ago. They made for Buckinghamshire and beech leaves newly unfurled, patchy sunshine lighting up their dazzling green. Hawks hovered over the motorway, and bluebells grew on the banks of it.

They turned off into lanes. Cottage gardens were full of forget-me-nots and crown imperials and wallflowers: lilac soon to be out. At the end of a cart-track, they stopped for their picnic, Amy sitting in
the car and handing food out through the open door to Gareth, who sat on the grass on an old coat.

“
Miss
Thompson herself couldn’t have done better,” he said, just as if Ernie were within earshot, and he trying to annoy him. It was a very good picnic, and, so far, one of the nicest of his days off for years. Usually, he rather wasted his leisure, meant to go for walks, write letters home to Swansea, had vague ideas about taking up golf; but, soon after lunch, tiredness overcame him, he would doze off in his armchair, wearing a newspaper like an apron under his clasped hands, and snore the afternoon away. When he awoke, his tongue would move about his mouth as if it had discovered a new, unpleasant taste.

At the back of his dull house in Park Road was a narrow, board-fenced garden. The soil was sour, and knotted with old iris roots and nothing much else. Sometimes, in fine weather, he might fetch one of the shabby deck-chairs and sit there, listening to the shouts and whistles from the recreation ground – the Rec – beyond the wooden paling. From upstairs, the bathroom window, he could see men in brightly-coloured shirts playing football and hockey, older men taking dogs for walks, children swinging on swings. In summer, ladies would sit on the pavilion verandah watching cricket, having cut the paste sandwiches and laid out the plates and cups and saucers. Sometimes, he would go out; in winter stroll round a touch-line, shiver beside a goal-post; in summer, sit on a periphery bench among elderly know-alls. He was bored, really waiting for drinking-time and going to Amy’s.

While Amy was packing up after the picnic – and Ernie would be gratified that all was eaten, but then perhaps mortified that Miss Thompson would have provided a great deal more – Gareth strolled off to pick a few cowslips and have a pee. Amy went another way and squatted in a ditch, was stung on the bottom by nettles, and felt resentment at being a woman, at having to be so clumsy (she had made her shoes wet), to look so inelegarit, so absurd, even though no one saw her, and to have to keep rubbing her buttocks all the afternoon because of infuriating irritation. Gareth might think her little trouble’ had spread. Once, she had been forced to go to him with vaginal thrush. In fact, she had planned
not
to go to him, had chosen his day off, so that she might see his partner instead, and had then found that for some reason his day off had been changed and there he was sitting behind the desk as usual. “He may be used to looking at horrid things like that,” she had once confessed to Martha, “but
I
am not used to having them looked at. Especially by someone I am meeting at a party that very evening.”

It was a not very stately home they went over in the afternoon – a Jacobean Manor House in a park full of dead elms: no French furniture, no lions, no collection of Ming porcelain, and just one Gainsborough. But there was an atmosphere of homeliness which appealed – photographs, a dolls’ house like the one in
Two Bad Mice.
There were evidences in obscure places of Edwardian girlhoods (Amy saw what Gareth didn’t); hand-painted menu cards, hand-decorated lists of times when letters were collected, water-colours
of the house – barely recognisable – and much uninspired needlework.