Complete Short Stories (VMC) (15 page)

Fred stepped back, close to Vi, who avoided his glance. Staring ahead, still whistling, he put his hand out and gripped her wrist. She turned her arm furiously, but no one noticed.

‘You’ve been asking for something all the evening, haven’t you?’ he asked her in a light conversational tone. ‘One of these days you’re going
to get it, see? That’s right, Harry!’ he shouted. ‘That was a near one! Proper old character. You can’t help admiring him.’

Vi’s hand was still. She looked coolly in front of her; but he could sense a change of pulse, an excitement in her; and almost nodded to himself when she began to twist her fingers in his, with a vicious lasciviousness he had foreseen.

A cheer went up as Harry went near to his target. ‘Next round on the house,’ the owner said. Harry’s smile changed to a desperate grin. His bowler-hat was crooked, and all of his movements were impeded by his heavy overcoat. Noise shifted and roared round him until he felt giddy and began to sweat.

Insanely, the roundabout horses rose and plunged, as if spurred on by the music and the lateness of the hour; sparks spluttered from the electric cars. Above the trees, the sky was bruised with a reddish stain, a polluted light, like a miasma given off by the fair.

The rough good-will of the crowd went to Harry’s head, and he began to clown and boast as if he were drunk. Fred and Vi seemed to have vanished. Their voices were lost. He could hear only the roundabout and the thud of the wooden balls as he threw them against the canvas screen, and he feared the moment when his act was over and he must turn, empty-handed, hoping to be claimed.

Suddenly tears poured from her eyes. She rested her forehead against her mother’s hand, and let the tears soak into the counterpane.

‘Dear Mr Wilson,’ she began, for her mind was always composing letters, ‘I shall not be at the shop for the next four days, as my mother has passed away and I shall not be available until after the funeral. My mother passed away very peacefully …’

The nurse came in. She took her patient’s wrist for a moment, replaced it, removed a jar of forced lilac from beside the bed as if this were no longer necessary and went out again.

The girl kneeling by the bed had looked up.

‘Dear Mr Wilson,’ she resumed, her face returning to the counterpane, ‘My mother has died. I shall come back to work the day after tomorrow. Yours sincerely, Lucy Mayhew.’

Her father was late. She imagined him hurrying from work, bicycling through the darkening streets, dogged, hunched-up, slush thrown up by his wheels. Her mother did not move. She stroked her hand with its loose gold ring, the calloused palms, the fine, long fingers. Then she stood up stiffly, her knees bruised from the waxed floor, and went to the window.

Snowflakes turned idly, drifting down over the hospital gardens. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and already the day seemed over. So few sounds came from this muffled and discoloured world. In the hospital itself there was a deep silence.

Her thoughts came to her in words, as if her mind spoke them first, understood them later. She tried to think of her childhood: little scenes, she selected, to prove how they had loved one another. Other scenes, especially last week’s quarrel, she chose to forget, not knowing that in this moment she sent them away for ever. Only loving-kindness remained.

But, all the same, intolerable pictures broke through – her mother at the sink; her mother ironing; her mother standing between the lace curtains staring out at the dreary street with a wounded look in her eyes; her mother tying the same lace curtains with yellow ribbons; attempts at lightness, gaiety, which came to nothing; her mother gathering her huge black cat to
her, burying her face in its fur and a great shivering sigh – of despair, of boredom – escaping her.

She no longer sighed. She lay very still and sometimes took a little sip of air. Her arms were neatly at her side. Her eyes, which all day long had been turned to the white lilac, were closed. Her cheekbone rose sharply from her bruised, exhausted face. She smelt faintly of wine.

A small lilac-flower floated on a glass of champagne, now discarded on the table at her side.

The champagne, with which they hoped to stretch out the thread of her life minute by minute; the lilac; the room of her own, coming to her at the end of a life of drabness and denial, just as, all along the mean street where they lived, the dying and the dead might claim a life-time’s savings from the bereaved.

‘She is no longer there,’ Lucy thought, standing beside the bed.

All day her mother had stared at the white lilac; now she had sunk away. Outside, beyond the hospital gardens, mist settled over the town, blurred the street-lamps.

The nurse returned with the matron. Ready to be on her best behaviour, Lucy tautened. In her heart she trusted her mother to die without frightening her, and when the matron, deftly drawing Lucy’s head to rest on her own shoulder, said in her calm voice: ‘She has gone,’ she felt she had met this happening half-way.

A little bustle began, quick footsteps along the empty passages, and for a moment she was left alone with her dead mother. She laid her hand timidly on her soft dark hair, so often touched, played with when she was a little girl, standing on a stool behind her mother’s chair while she sewed.

There was still the smell of wine and the hospital smell. It was growing dark in the room. She went to the dressing-table and took her mother’s handbag, very worn and shiny, and a book, a library book which she had chosen carefully for her, believing she would read it.

Then she had a quick sip from the glass on the table, a mouthful of champagne, which she had never tasted before, and, looking wounded and aloof, walked down the middle of the corridor, feeling the nurses falling away to left and right.

Opening the glass doors on to the snowy gardens, she thought that it was like the end of a film. But no music rose up and engulfed her. Instead there was her father turning in at the gates. He propped his bicycle against the wall and began to run clumsily across the wet gravel.

The car devoured the road, but the lines of poplars were without end. The shadow of sagging telegraph wires scalloped the middle of the road, the vaguer shadows of the pretty telegraph posts pleased Louise. They were essentially French, she thought – like, perhaps, lilies of the valley: spare, neatly budded.

The poplars dwindled at intervals and gave place to ruined buildings and pock-marked walls; a landscape of broken stone, faded Dubonnet advertisements. Afterwards, the trees began again.

When they came to a town, the cobblestones, laid fan-wise, slowed up the driving. Outside cafés, the chairs were all empty. Plane trees in the squares half-hid the flaking walls of houses with crooked jalousies and frail balconies, like twisted bird-cages. All had slipped, subsided.

‘But it is so
dead
!’ Louise complained, wanting to get to Paris, to take out from her cases her crumpled frocks, shake them out, hang them up. She dreamt of that; she had clung to the idea across the Channel. Because she was sick before the boat moved, Richard thought she was sick deliberately, as a form of revenge. But seasickness ran in her family. Her mother had always been prostrated immediately – as soon (as she so often had said) as her foot touched the deck. It would have seemed an insult to her mother’s memory for Louise not to have worked herself up into a queasy panic at the very beginning. Richard, seeing walls sliding past port-holes and then sky, finished his drink quickly and went up on deck. Hardier women than Louise leant over the rails, their scarves flapping, watching the coast of France come up. The strong air had made him hungry, but when they had driven away from the harbour and had stopped for luncheon, Louise would only sip brandy, looking away from his plate.

‘But we can never get to Paris by dinner-time,’ he said, when they were in the car again. ‘Especially driving on the wrong side of the road all the way.’

‘There is nowhere between here and there,’ she said with authority. ‘And I want to
settle
.’

He knew her ‘settling’. Photographs of the children spread about, champagne sent up, maids running down corridors with her frocks on their arms,
powder spilt everywhere, the bathroom full of bottles and jars. He would have to sit down to telephone a list of names. Her friends would come in for drinks. They would have done better, so far as he could see, to have stayed in London.

‘But if we are pushed for time … Why kill ourselves? … After all, this is a holiday … I do remember … There is a place I stayed at that time … When I first knew you …’ Only parts of what he said reached her. The rest was blown away.

‘You are deliberately going slow,’ she said.

‘I think more of my car than to drive it fast along these roads.’

‘You think more of your car than of your wife.’

He had no answer. He could not say that at least his car never betrayed him, let him down, embarrassed him, because it constantly did and might again at any moment.

‘You planned this delay without consulting me. You planned to spend this night in some god-forsaken place and sink into your private nostalgia while my frocks crease and crease …’ Her voice mounted up like a wave, trembled, broke.

The holiday was really to set things to rights between them. Lately, trivial bickering had hardened into direct animosity. Relatives put this down to, on his part, overwork, and, on hers, fatigue from the war, during which she had lived, after their London house was bombed, in a remote village with the children. She had nothing to say of those years but that they were not funny. She clung to the children and they to her. He was not, as he said – at first indulgently but more lately with irritation – in the picture. She knit them closer and closer to her, and he was quite excluded. He tried to understand that there must be, after the war, much that was new in her, after so long a gap, one that she would not fill up for him, or discuss. A new quirk was her preoccupation with fashion. To her, it was a race in which she must be first, so she looked
outré
always, never normal. If any of her friends struck a new note before her, she by-passed and cancelled out that particular foible. Men never liked her clothes, and women only admired them. She did not dress for men. Years of almost exclusively feminine society had set up cold antagonisms. Yes, hardship had made her superficial, icily frivolous. For one thing, she now must never be alone. She drank too much. In the night, he knew, she turned and turned, sighing in her sleep, dreaming bad dreams, wherein she could no longer choose her company. When he made love to her, she recoiled in astonishment, as if she could not believe such things could happen.

He had once thought she would be so happy to leave the village, that by comparison her life in London after the war would seem wonderful. But boredom had made her carping, fidgety. Instead of being thankful for what
she had, she complained at the slightest discomfort. She raised her standards above what they had ever been; drove maids, who needed little driving, to give notice; was harried, piteous, unrelaxed. Although she was known as a wonderful hostess, guests wonderfully enjoying themselves felt – they could not say why – wary, and listened, as if for a creaking of ice beneath their gaiety.

Her doctor, advising the holiday, was only conventional in his optimism. If anyone were benefited by it, it would be the children, stopping at home with their grandmother – for a while, out of the arena. What Richard needed was a holiday away from Louise, and what Louise needed was a holiday from herself, from the very thing she must always take along, the dull carapace of her own dissatisfaction, her chronic unsunniness.

The drive seemed endless, because it was so monotonous. War had exhaled a vapour of despair over all the scene. Grass grew over grief, trying to hide collapse, to cover some of the wounds. One generation hoped to contend with the failure of another.

Late in the afternoon, they came to a town he remembered. The small cathedral stood like torn lacework against the sky. Birds settled in rows on the empty windows. Nettles grew in the aisle, and stone figures, impaled on rusty spikes of wire, were crumbling away.

But it looks too old a piece of wreckage, he thought. That must be the war before last. Two generations, ruined, lay side by side. Among them, people went on bicycles, to and fro, between the improvised shops and scarred dwellings.

‘After wars, when there is so little time for patching up before the next explosion, what hope is there?’ he began.

She didn’t answer, stared out of the window, the car jolting so that her teeth chattered.

When Richard was alone in the hotel bedroom, he tried, by spreading about some of Louise’s belongings, to make the place seem less temporary. He felt guilty at having had his own way, at keeping her from Paris until the next day and delaying her in this dismal place. It was destined to be, so far as they were concerned, one of those provincial backgrounds, fleeting, meaningless, that travellers erase from experience – the different hotel rooms run together to form one room, this room, any room.

When he had put the pink jars and bottles out in a row above the hand basin, he became dubious. She would perhaps sweep them all back into her case, saying, ‘Why unpack before we reach Paris?’ and he would find that he had worsened the situation, after all, as he so often did, meaning to better it.

His one piece of selfishness – this halt on the way – she had stubbornly
resisted, and now she had gone off to buy picture-postcards for the children, as if no one would think of them if she did not.

Because he often wondered how she looked when he was not there, if her face ever smoothed, he went to the window, hoping to see her coming down the little street. He wanted to catch in advance, to be prepared for, her mood. But she was not moody nowadays. A dreadful consistency discoloured her behaviour.

He pulled the shutters apart and was faced with a waste of fallen masonry, worse now that it was seen from above, and unrecognisable. The humped-up, dark cathedral stood in an untidy space, as if the little shops and cafés he remembered had receded in awe. Dust flowed along the streets, spilling from ruined walls across pavements. Rusty grasses covered debris and everywhere the air was unclean with grit. Dust, he thought, leaning on the iron rail above window-boxes full of shepherd’s-purse – dust has the connotation of despair. In the end, shall we go up in a great swirl of it? He imagined something like the moon’s surface, pock-marked, cratered, dry, deserted. When he was young, he had not despaired. Then, autumn leaves, not dust, had blown about these streets; chimes dropped like water, uneven, inconsequential, over rooftops; and the lime trees yellowed along neat boulevards. Yet, in the entrancement of nostalgia, he remembered, at best, an imperfect happiness and, for the most part, an agony of conjecture and expectancy. Crossing the vestibule of this very hotel, he had turned; his eyes had always sought the letter-rack. The Channel lay between him and his love, who with her timid smile, her mild grimace, had moaned that she could not put pen to paper, was illiterate, never had news; though loving him inordinately, could not spell, never had postage stamps; her ink dried as it approached the page; her parents interrupted. Yes, she had loved him to excess but had seldom written, and now went off in the dust and squalor for picture-postcards for their children.