Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (8 page)

But having a guest in the house would make a change. The thought of cooking for an American
appealed to him. Beef olives for supper. He reckoned he was a dab hand with beef olives. Funny she didn’t bring any luggage, he thought – only that shoulder-bag. There had been nothing for him to carry up.

He decided to have a little rest from his teeth, and he put them carefully into a cup of water, then began to beat the steak with a rolling-pin, and he thought about his non-existent wife, and tried to knock her into shape, too.

It was growing dark. Amy showed Martha her bedroom, and drew curtains across the view of the back courtyard.

“Very
art nouveau,”
Martha said, throwing her raincoat on the bed. The fret-worked furniture was white-painted and the wall-paper was a bilious green and cream William Morris design of chrysanthemums. Amy had spent the morning clearing out drawers and relining them. Now, with pride, she opened an empty clothes-cupboard, but thinking of the lack of luggage, closed it again. She had asked her to stay to make amends for all the previous neglect, and had decided to take trouble over the visit. “There is this little table for writing if you want to,” she said. “Just switch on the fire any time you want to work up here.”

Amy had been brought up with a reverence for creative expression, although the form Martha’s took embarrassed her. She had not known what to make of that book, the humourless study of sexuality, the desperate foray into a man’s – a married man’s – world, or, rather, a narrow aspect of it. The stresses and despair, and bloody-mindedness. No one had any money, but they managed to drink bourbon, wore
racoon coats, travelled, or had travelled. Perhaps in this spare room of hers, another sad little story would be added to.

“Well, come down when you’re ready,” she said, hesitating by the door.

“Why, I’m ready now,” said Martha. “I’ve something to show you in this,” she said, taking up the smelly leather bag from Istanbul. “Something special.”

They went downstairs, and Martha strolled about the sitting-room, looking at pictures, without comment. There were two of Nick’s, hanging above bookshelves, and she paused over these, but still without saying anything, then turned to watch instead Ernie who had brought in tea. She studied him carefully, as he fussed over the tray, lisping to himself worriedly about having slopped a little milk. Before he had really set out the tray to his liking, Martha took a biscuit from a dish and began to nibble it, staring at his fragile hands, which looked blue with cold, from some draughty English kitchen, she supposed.

When he had gone, she asked, “Where did he come from, and why?”

“He’s been with us for some years,” Amy said. She still expressed herself as if Nick were alive, saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ so often, and then falling silent, as she did now.

“He seems very strange, and his hands were blue with cold,” Martha said accusingly.

“He has a poor circulation. He will tell you all about it if he has a chance.”

“But where did you get him from?”

“The pub along the tow-path. Nick used to go there
after work each evening, and Ernie was working in the bar there, and then one evening he told Nick he’d got the sack.”

“What for?”

“I dare say customers reacted to him as you seem to be doing. He got on their nerves.”

“Does he get on yours?”

“Yes, sometimes… his ailments.”

“So, when he got the sack?”

Lolling back in her chair, steadily eating biscuits as if to satisfy a long-felt need, Martha dropped crumbs onto her lap, and occasionally brushed them off onto the carpet. She is going to be untidy about the place, Amy was thinking. Two long days. She glanced up at the clock. What could she do with her for all that time? The long evening ahead, for instance. They could not – surely? – just talk all the time. What to talk about? For the present there was Ernie and she decided to spin him out. “I had shingles at the time,” she said. “In those days we had a woman who came in just two mornings a week, so poor Nick had to do the cooking, and carry up trays, and trying to get together an exhibition too. I couldn’t move. . It’s a wretched thing. Have you ever had it?”

“No,” said Martha, trying to get back to Ernie.

“Well, so Ernie came to help Nick. He had nowhere else to go. It was to be just for while I was ill, or until he found another job; but he simply stayed. Getting a new job wasn’t mentioned after a while. He took over the house, and I suppose I didn’t really mind. He’s very good at it. He says he was a sailor once, and they’re usually domesticated.”

“You say he says he was a sailor. Don’t you believe him?”

“I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.” She lowered her voice, and said, “No, I don’t always believe what he tells me, but it’s not important. Would you like some more biscuits?” The plate was now empty.

Martha shook her head. She hadn’t bothered to drink her tea, which was cold. She got up and switched on a table-lamp, just as if she were in her own house, Amy thought.

“What’s his name?”

“Ernie’s? Pounce. Ernie Pounce. Terribly good, don’t you think?”

Martha didn’t answer. She was considering Amy’s voice – the light, clear English tone, all syllables articulate, the disposition quite detached.
‘Terribly
good, don’t you think?’ No one in America talked like that. She was out to learn; meant not to return to her own land until she had really got England. (She had never managed to get Italy, because of its enchanting-sounding, but to her incomprehensible language.) Even in Istanbul, Amy had appeared as the English woman complete. She had thought them a dead race. Now she stood up by the lamp she had switched on, brushed her skirt of crumbs, yawned.

“What happened to the domestic help? Who used to come in, what was it, two mornings?”

“Mrs. Carpenter?”

“Whoever.” Martha shrugged.

Amy, suddenly fed up with it all, leaned back and smiled, pretended to look as if Martha’s yawning were catching, and she might drowse off any minute.
“Ernie saw to Mrs Carpenter,” she said.

Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or for you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed that sort of tenacity as coming from having had no choice.

“What was the war like?” she now – surprisingly to Amy – asked.

“The war?”

“Where were you? During it.”

“I stayed with my mother. James was a little baby, and Nick was in the R.A.F. Why?”

“I’ve wondered what it was like – what London, being in London – was really like. Were you here, in this house?”

“No, in Kent?”

“Did you have bombs?”

“Yes, of course. Nearly everyone had bombs.”

“What was that like, then? Being bombed?”

“I’ve practically forgotten.” (I’ve practically forgotten, Martha noted.) “Heavens. All that time ago, and I believe one only remembers those sort of happenings when one goes on talking about them, and bombs we didn’t talk about.”

“Why ever not?”

“Perhaps because someone else would always have had a bigger one; or because there were too many to make any sort of intelligent conversation about; we could have bored one another silly. Frightening and commonplace – an awful combination. The worst of everything. Well, at least I remember it being so. You surely don’t want me to describe sirens and shelters,
and coming up in the morning to see what had been destroyed. It’s all been written about and about.”

“I just wanted to know about
you
in the war.”

“What was it you had special to show me?” Amy asked, fed up with the war:

“First, I’II take the tray out. Turn left, and down? Yes?”

“But Ernie…” Amy began to protest. Martha, with the tray, had gone.

Servants’ basements have been written about and about, too, she was thinking as she descended the stairs.

“Ah, goodness deary me,” Ernie said, coming to the opened door. “Allow me, please.” His teeth clicked, his tongue seemed to cling to them. He took the tray from her. She firmly followed him into the kitchen. It was a warm and cheerful room. She had not read of such basements in novels. As it was Ernie’s private room, he thought she should have asked permission to enter it.

“Something smells good,” she said. She lifted the lid off a little pan of sauce, letting out a savoury smell. Anger hit him. “Delicious.” she murmured, beginning to be affected by Amy’s way of talking. “Shall I teach you some time how to make Chilaly?”

“Perhaps you would ask Madam about that,” he said, turning his face away from her. “If she wishes me to…” He went to the sink and began to wash up the tea things, meaning to imply that the conversation was over; but, to his horror, she picked up a towel and begin to wipe a cup.

“That is the glass cloth,” he said primly.

“Don’t you get fed up being down here by yourself all the time?”

Spying, he thought. “I have my days off.”

He lifted his delicate hands from the suddy water, flicked them, and began to dry them carefully.

“So what do you do then?”

He felt like saying, “I mind my own business.” To such a customer, when he had been in the bar, he would have done; but Martha was Madam’s guest and not a customer in the pub. He said aloofly, “I go up to my Jazz club in Town and have myself a ball.”

“That’s interesting,” she said. “I should have thought you too quiet a type for that.”

“You don’t hardly know me.”

“Why, no. That’s true. I don’t know you at all. Where do
these
go?” She swung two cups from her fingers.

“If I may.” He carefully unhooked them from her hands and took them to a cupboard, feeling excited now, for no one in the world talked to him about himself. Amy’s indifference he was accustomed to. She asked no questions, scarcely listened to him, and when she looked at him seemed to find him transparent.

“You have a sort of ambience.” Martha’s hand described a vague sort of halo in the air. He did not know what she meant, but he approved of unusual words. “I miss the master,” he said, “and I have this trouble with my dentures,” he said, as if he were explaining all.

“He was a nice man,” Martha agreed, ignoring the dentures, as Amy did. “Though just as I was beginning
to know him, he died. You’ve never thought of marrying?”

“I was married, but my wife left me.” His eyes glinted. “She took the lot, everything she could lay hands on, the children, the television set, everything. I was left with the clothes I was standing up in when I got back from sea and found her gone.”

“Why did she go, for God’s sake?”

“That’s what I ask myself. She never wanted for anything from me.” His false teeth seemed to slip even more now, in his anguish at talking of these things. “It’s left me very lonely. What was it all for? I sometimes wonder.”

“She fell in love with someone else, perhaps?” It seemed the kindest suggestion she could put forward.

“Possibly,” he lisped.

“And where is she now?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he said impatiently, preferring to talk about himself. Now
he
lifted the saucepan and sniffed at the steam. “It does smell inviting, doesn’t it?”

“Real good. You like cooking?”

“I take a pride in it. There’s my little garden.” he said, moving to a row of pots on the window-sill. “My little treasures – basil, coriander, parsley. I like to watch over them. Snipping off the new leaves. ‘Grow when I say grow,’ I tell them.”

“We must have another chat some time,” Martha said, having looked briefly at the herbs.

Having been furious at her coming, now he was reluctant to let her go. When she did, he took out his false teeth.

Amy was standing by the sitting-room fire, tapping a toe against the fender. When Martha came back, she lowered the pink newspaper she was reading. “I’ll get you a drink,” she said. “What would you like?”

Martha studied the drinks tray, but as if she could not find anything there she recognised. Although she wrote a great deal about people drinking, it did not much enter into her own life. “What you’re having,” she said, lacking ideas. There were curious, indifferent areas in her mind, Amy decided. “I’ve been talking to Ernie about his ex-wife,” Martha went on. “I think in her place I’d have done the same as she.”

“One doesn’t know what to believe. A good job it doesn’t matter. Anyway, please don’t lead him on. It will only set the flow going, and I have to live in the same house. But you said you had something to show me.”

“To give you.” Martha opened her bag and brought out a photograph. Amy took it and sank slowly on the sofa. It was a very good photograph, with a grainy texture; shadows gave it depth, birds in the air an illusion of movement. Nick was standing by some roses in the gardens of the Topkapi Palace. His face had an eager look towards the camera, perhaps at thoughts of treasures he was yet to see. Amy sat on a boulder nearby, looking bored. Martha had taken infinite pains to exclude anyone else from the picture, though that afternoon the gardens had been full of tourists. Those two – Nick and Amy – seemed to be alone there. Amy remembered that she had become impatient of the long delays, waiting for people to move on; now she was infinitely grateful. For a while,
she looked at the photograph in silence. When she raised her head, she said, “Yes, it’s something extra. And I’ve longed for that. Just something, another word or two, or finding a letter or a message. I couldn’t believe that a line was ruled under what had been, and that there wouldn’t be any more to come.”