Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (12 page)

She sank back into the chair. The Professor disappeared. Veronica took stock of this startling new situation. She found that she was smiling, at herself, at him, at the absurdity of it all. She pulled her skirt down over her knees and tried to compose herself. She wondered what on earth they were going to talk about.

When he returned, easing himself from his own garden into hers by way of a narrow gap at the bottom of the fence, she saw that he was remarkably organised. She had expected a mug of tea, no more, but he carried a laden tray, and had slung a thick rug, like a Scottish plaid, over one shoulder. He laid the tray down on the grass beside Veronica, spread the rug and sat himself down on it, his long, angular body folding up like a jackknife. He wore old corduroys that someone had tried to mend at the knee and there was a button missing at the collar of his checked shirt, but he looked in no way pathetic … more like a cheerful gypsy. She found herself wondering how he managed to stay so tanned and lean when he appeared to spend so much of his time indoors.

“There,” he said, safely settled. “Now you must pour.”

The china didn't match, but he had forgotten nothing, and there was even some of one of Mrs. Thomas's fruit cakes for them to eat.

She said, “It looks splendid. I don't usually bother with tea—when I'm on my own, that is.”

“The children have gone.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes…” She occupied herself with the tea pot. “I've just put James on the train.”

“Does he have far to go?”

“No. Only Carmouth. Do you take sugar?”

“Yes, lots. At least four spoonfuls.”

“You'd better put it in yourself.” She handed him his cup and he ladled sugar copiously. She said, “I never thanked you for making him the bow and arrows.”

“I thought you'd be angry … giving him such a dangerous toy.”

“He's very sensible.”

“I know. I wouldn't have done it otherwise.”

“And…” She turned her teacup in her hand. It had roses on it and looked as though it had once belonged to an elderly female relation. “You rescued Sally the day she fell off her bike, too. I should have made a point of thanking you for that … but somehow I never seemed to see you.”

“Sally thanked me herself. And she took to me.”

“I'm glad.”

“It's quiet without them.”

“Oh, dear, do they make so much noise?”

“Only a little, and I like it. It's sort of company when I'm working.”

“They don't disturb or distract you?”

“I said I like it.” Thoughtfully, he cut himself a chunk of cake. He took a mouthful and ate it, and then said, abruptly, “He seems so small. James, I mean. Such a small chap. Do you have to send him away to school?”

“No, I don't suppose I have to.”

“Wouldn't it be more fun for you both if he stayed?”

She said, “Yes it would.”

“But he has to go?”

Veronica looked at him then, and wondered why she was not offended by his persistence; why she knew that his questions stemmed from deep interest and not a mere curiosity. His eyes behind the spectacles were very dark and kindly. He was not in the least intimidating.

She said, “It sounds ridiculous, but it's very simple really. He is my only son. He is also my baby. We've always been together, and very close, all his life. I adore Sally, but in some way she is a person apart from me, that's one of the reasons we get on so well. But James and I are, I don't know, like two branches on the same stem. After my—” She leaned over to put down her teacup, hiding her face from the Professor with a curtain of hair, for still, even now, she could not trust herself to say it and not to weep. “After my husband died, there wasn't anyone for James but me.” She straightened up and pushed her hair out of her eyes and faced him again. She smiled. “I've always had a horror of smothering mothers and sons that were never able to break away.” He watched her thoughtfully, not answering her smile. She went on, briskly, “It's a nice school, small and friendly. He's very happy there.”

He was, too. She knew this, but was still bedevilled with doubts. After the agony of this morning, of the last lunch and the journey to the station, and the final parting, she felt that she could not go through it again. She was haunted by James's face, the pale wedge showing over Nigel's shoulder, growing smaller and more blurred as the express sucked him away from her.

“Perhaps,” said the Professor, “if you lived in a different sort of place, where there was a similar sort of school, and other boys, and things for him to do?”

“It's a father,” said Veronica without thinking. “Something to do with not having a father.”

“But you're lonely without them? You must be.”

“It's sometimes selfish to be lonely … and now, please, can we not talk about it anymore.”

“All right,” said the Professor amiably, as though he had never brought the matter up. “What shall be talk about?”

“Your book?”

“My book is finished.”

“Finished?”

“Yes, Finished. Typed, corrected, and typed again; not by me, I may add. Not only is it typed and bound up in buff covers and red tape, but it has reached the desk of a publisher and been accepted.”

“But that's wonderful. When did you hear?”

“Today. This very day. I got a telegram over the phone and I went to the post office to pick up the confirmation.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took it out and flapped it around in the breeze. “I always feel safer when things are in writing. It proves I didn't imagine anything.”

“Oh, I am pleased. And what happens now?”

“I still have three months of my year's leave to run and then I go back to lecturing at Brookbridge.”

“What are you going to do with the three months?”

“I don't know.” He grinned at her. “Perhaps go off to Tahiti and become a beachcomber. Perhaps stay here. Would you mind?”

“Why should I mind?”

“I thought perhaps I'd been so rude and unfriendly you wouldn't be able to wait to see the back of me. The thing is that I find being sociable, and organising things and arranging things, takes the most enormous amount of concentration. I mustn't have anything else on my mind. Especially when writing a textbook on archaeology. Can you understand that?”

“Easily. And I never thought you were rude or unfriendly. Anyway, I'm just as bad. James wanted me to ask you in for supper one night and I said you wouldn't want to come. I said you'd be too busy.”

“Perhaps I was.” He appeared to be embarrassed; he frowned, tried to flatten the coxcomb of hair with the palm of his hand. He said, “James came in to say goodbye to me last night. While you were getting his supper. Did you know?”

It was Veronica's turn to frown. “James did? No, he never said a word.”

“He told me then that you wouldn't ask me to supper because you thought I wouldn't want to come.”

“He shouldn't have…”

“But he did add, in a man-to-man sort of way, that perhaps I might ask
you
to supper.”

“He
what
…?”

“He's concerned about you living on your own. He knows how much you miss him and Sally. And you mustn't be annoyed about it, because I think it's the nicest thing I've ever known a small boy to do.”

“But he had no right!”

“He has every right. He is your son.”

“But…”

He overrode her objections. “So of course I said I would. And that's what I'm doing now. And I've even gone so far as to book a table at that new place over at Porthkerris. For eight o'clock. So if you refuse to come, it's going to be very difficult for me, because I'll have to go and cancel it and the head waiter will be furious. You won't say no, will you?”

For a moment she couldn't say anything. But watching him, she remembered what Frank had said about him and all her resentment and annoyance melted away.
People are exasperated by Marcus Rydale, amused by him … but he is impossible to dislike.
And she thought, and was taken unaware by the thought, that he was the nicest man she had met in years. She had shared her house with him all these months and never even guessed. But the children had guessed. They knew. James had known from the very first.

She began to laugh, defeated by a multitude of pressures. “No, I won't say no. I couldn't say no, even if I wanted to.”

“But you don't want to, do you,” said the Professor, and once more it was a statement, not a question.

Amita

The notice of Miss Tolliver's death was in this morning's paper. My husband handed it to me across the breakfast table and the name sprang at me from the column of close print like a cry from the past:

TOLLIVER.
On the 8th July, in her 90th year, Daisy Tolliver, daughter of the late Sir Henry Tolliver, some time Governor of the Province of Barana, and Lady Tolliver. Private cremation.

I had not thought of the Tollivers in years. I am fifty-two now, well into middle age, with a husband on the point of retirement, and children and grandchildren of my own. We live in Surrey, and Cornwall and childhood seem a long way away, another time and another world. But every now and then something happens to bring it all back, like a note struck on a seldom-played piano, and then it is as though the crowded years between had never happened. The old, aimless days are back, bright with perpetual sunshine (did it
never
rain?) and crowded with remembered voices, running footsteps, and marvellously nostalgic smells. Bowls of sweet peas in my mother's drawing room, and the fragrance of pastries baking in the oven of the black-leaded Cornish range.

The Tollivers. When my husband had said goodbye and taken himself off to catch the London train, I went out into the garden with the newspaper and sat in the swing chair by the rose bed and read the lonely little paragraph again—
the late Sir Henry Tolliver, some time Governor of the province of Barana.
I remembered him with his red face and great white moustache and his panama hat. And I remembered Angus. And Amita.

*   *   *

To be a child of British India in the early 1930s was a hybrid existence. My father was in the Indian Civil Service, posted to Barana to run the Port and River Department. His terms of duty ran for four years, when he would disappear out of our lives completely, to return for six months' leave that passed like a perpetual holiday.

We were typical of thousands of families in which the burden of rearing the family and running the home in England inevitably fell upon the wife, whose life was constantly bedevilled by the agonising decision of whether she should stay with her children or accompany their father out east. If she did the former, then any sort of married life went by the board. If the latter, then arrangements for the children's welfare had to be made: boarding schools found, and kindly relatives or friends approached and invited to care for the children during the holidays. Whichever she did there were always, inevitably, heart-breaking goodbyes. There was no air service to India then. The days of Imperial Airways were to come later, and the P. & O. boats, sailing from London, took three weeks to complete their journey. It was indeed a very complete separation.

My own mother went twice to India. Once before either of us was born, and once again when we were still so small we scarcely noticed her going.

It was on her first trip, as a young and lively bride, that she met Lady Tolliver. The friendship which sprang up between them was an unusual one, for Lady Tolliver was a good generation older than my mother, and the Governor's lady to boot, while my mother was simply the new wife of a young official.

But Lady Tolliver was both unpretentious and friendly. She found my mother refreshing and natural. To their mutual satisfaction and everybody else's surprise, their deck chairs were placed side by side on the boat deck, and there they sat in the pleasant sunshine, with their needlework and their lively conversation to keep them amused as the great liner slid through the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and into the blue Indian Ocean beyond.

In England, the Tollivers lived in Cornwall, and it was because of this that my mother, on her return home from India, heavily pregnant and in need of some sort of a base, rented a little house nearby. It was a very modest house, with a tiny garden, for she could afford nothing more; and there my sister and I were born, and there, in certain austerity but total contentment, we were brought up, and there we stayed until the war came and tore us all apart forever.

It was, looking back, a very uneventful life we led, punctuated by school and holidays; by the letters that we wrote to and received from my father; by Christmas, when packages came, smelling spicy and wrapped in newspaper printed, amazingly, in Indian characters. Every three or four years came the long bright excitement of my father's home leave. And every so often the Tollivers abandoned their Indian palace and their many servants, their garden parties and soirées, and came home too, to see their friends and open their house and live like ordinary mortals.

Daisy was their eldest daughter, unmarried and very musical. She used to play the violin at musical evenings and accompany, on the piano, any person who felt impelled to sing. Then there was Mary, married to a soldier and stationed in Quetta, and then Angus.

Angus was the family's darling, and everybody else's darling as well. Handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed, he was in his last year at Oxford. He drove about at a great pace in an open Triumph with great polished headlamps, and he played dashing tennis looking like a matinée idol in his white flannels and surf-white shirt.

My sister Jassy, who was two years older than I, was madly in love with him, but she was only ten at the time, and Angus was never without some pretty girl at his side. But I could see why she was in love with him, because when we did manage to catch him in an uninvolved moment, he was always willing to play French cricket with us, or help to build huge sand-castles on the beach, with deep moats which the flood tide would fill while we splashed and screamed and dug like mad, trying, Canute-like, to shore up the embankments and keep the water out.