Complete Short Stories (VMC) (18 page)

Kathy came screaming up the path.

‘I don’t call this the real country,’ she said. ‘People only
sleep
here.’

From the window, she watched the cars going by from the station. There was almost a stream of traffic, for the London train was in.

‘And not always with whom they should,’ George Eliot agreed. His name was something he had to carry off. He tried to be the first with the jokes and never showed his weariness. His parents were the most unliterary people and had chosen his name because it had somehow sprung to their minds, sounding right, and familiar. Taking that in his stride had originated his flamboyance, his separateness. He made his mark in many dubious ways; but the ways
were
only dubious and sometimes he was given the benefit of the doubt. As a bachelor, he was a standby to dissatisfied wives and only the wives knew – and would not say – how inadequate he turned out to be.

‘There go the Fletchers,’ Ida said. ‘What a mass of silverware they have on that car! They were sitting bolt upright and not speaking to one another.’

‘How could you see? She would scarcely have her head on his shoulder just driving back from the station.’

‘Nor on any other occasion. Nor his on hers.’

‘Come away from the window and talk to me. What time will Leonard come?’

‘Who could know but Leonard? He might have caught that train and stepped aside on the way.’

‘For a drink?’

‘It might be that even,’ she said, brightly insinuating.

She turned her back to the window, but stayed where she was. The branches of trees with their young leaves came close to the house and threw a greenish shadow over the walls inside. The colours of the spring evening were intense rather than brilliant: the lilac was heaped up against sky of the same purple. A house nearby had a sharp outline, as if before rain; but there had been neither rain nor sun for several days. Swallows flew low so that she could see their pale, neat bellies as they flickered about the eaves. In the wood, cuckoos answered one another, at long
intervals, haltingly; one had its summer stammer already; its explosive, broken cry.

‘The peonies almost open! How it all hastens by and vanishes!’ Ida said, working herself up for a storm of her own.

‘Why not have a drink?’ George asked. He had come in for that, and because it looked like being a dark and thundery evening. No golf.

‘I hate our lives,’ she cried. ‘We fritter our time away.’

She looked round the room, at the rather grubby roughcast walls, little pictures hanging crooked, the red-brick fireplace with its littered grate, its dusty logs. ‘Everything goes wrong with what I do,’ she thought. ‘This room has simply no character. It looks raw, bleak, dull.’ Studying pictures in magazines it all seemed easy enough, but her colour schemes became confused, something always obtruded. If she followed elaborate recipes, what resulted was nothing like the photograph in the cookery-book. Her enthusiasms scarcely deserved the name. Her piano-playing, to which she resorted in boredom, remained sketchy and improvised in the bass. Resolutions, too, soon abated. Slimming-exercises, diets, taking the children to church, were all abandoned. Only dull habit remained, she thought. When her daughter wished to learn to play the violin, she refused. ‘You will want to give it up after a couple of lessons. You will never practise,’ she said, thinking only of her experience of herself; for Virginia was a tenacious child.

‘A drink …?’ George began once more. Though they were old friends he did not feel like going to what she called the cocktail cabinet and helping himself.

‘I have nothing,’ she said moodily and dramatically. He looked surprised and alarmed. ‘The empty days,’ she continued, to his great relief, ‘the long, empty days.’

‘Oh hell, I thought for one moment you meant the drink situation.’

‘Have what you want,’ she said ungraciously, impatiently.

‘Those damn cuckoos!’ He laughed, pausing with the bottle in his hand pointing at her like a gun, his head on one side.

She persisted in her mood, pacing the room, trying to claim his whole attention. Vexed, frustrated, she was baulked by his indifference.

‘You have the children,’ he said. ‘This nice home.’ He glanced at the crooked pictures, at some fallen petals lying round a jar of flowers.

As if he were a conjuror, the door opened and Virginia came in. She looked like a Japanese doll, with her white face, her straight black hair with the curved fringe, and her brightly patterned frock. At the back of the house, life was gayer. In the maid’s sitting-room she and the nineteen-year-old girl from the village gossiped and giggled. She held the edges of the sheets to the sewing-machine while Nancy turned the handle, putting sides to middle. (‘All the sheets are going at once,’ Ida had said bitterly, as if
even household linen conspired against her.) The whir of the sewing-machine interrupted their discussions and they sucked sweets instead. The stuffy room smelt of pear-drops. But at seven, Nancy said: ‘Hey, you! Go on. Bed. Hop it.’

‘Where’s Laurie?’

‘Out in the shed, I dare say, with the cat. You can just run quick and see whether there’s any kittens yet, but mind, when I say quick I don’t mean your usual hanging about.’

Virginia pressed her elbows to her sides. The oppressive evening menaced her with thunder and lightning, now with the horror of birth. Her mother had special feelings of the same kind; could forecast storms by her headaches; was sick at the smell of lilies; could not eat shell-fish, and fainted at the sight of blood. She over-reacted to the common things of life, even in physical ways, with giddiness and rashes on her skin. She taught her family to reverence her allergies and foibles and they were constantly discussed.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Virginia had said.

‘Then say good-night to your mother,’ Nancy said, as if she had no better alternative to offer.

Virginia did not want that either, but stood obediently at the door, with her suspicious, upward look at them, at George and Ida.

Out in the shed, Laurie hung over the cat’s basket, absorbed, though a little frightened. His cat, Moira, swaying with her weight of kittens, trampled the basket, crying. When Laurie stroked her head, she stopped, turning her golden eyes on him, appeased. She seemed as nervous as he, and as un-instructed. Maternity wrought an immediate, almost a comical change in her. The first kitten was born, silent, still. Laurie feared that it was dead. It looked so un-kittenish – livid, slimed-over, more blue than black. But at once, Moira became definite and authoritative: she licked and cuffed, treating brutally the poor clambering thing with its trailing navel-cord, its mouth pursed up like a flower-bud. Fantastic, at last alive, it tried to lift on its stringy neck the nodding weight of its head. Its paws were more hands than paws, with frail claws out-stretched, and piteously it raked the air with them.

Laurie imagined the edged cold after the warm; the discomforts of breathing. Surely, he thought, the poor creature felt, if not through its sealed eyes, then through its shivering body, the harsh, belabouring light, after such utter darkness.

Moira was arrogant in maternity, no uncertainty beset her now. When the kitten was cleaned, she lay down on her side awaiting the others, purring a little. She seemed contemptuous of Laurie and gave him only an occasional, unseeing glance. At the approach of each birth, she seemed to
gather herself up, took on a suspicious look, with eyes narrowed. When she had cleaned them, the kittens were indistinguishable from her own black body, her thrust-out satiny legs. They clambered feebly over the mound of her belly, even before the last was born: their pink hands frailly felt the air: splayed out on dampish legs, they looked old and burdened creatures: they mewed wretchedly, resenting the bitter, cuffing, hard-edged world in which they were – the unrocking, unyielding stubbornness of it. Black, like their mother, they had bare-looking patches which would one day, Laurie thought, be white feet, white bibs. He looked forward for them. They peopled his home. He thought of them opening their eyes at last and playing; putting on mock terror at the sound of a footfall; arching their spines, cavorting, curveting about the legs of the furniture.

The stream of cars had dwindled and run out. The beech-leaves against the sloe-coloured sky looked more lucent; the birdsong which had suddenly increased in urgency and hysteria as suddenly ceased. Only a single thrush went on and its notes echoed in the silence, the intent air vibrated with the sound.

Thirty miles from London, the village had a preponderance of middle-sized houses. They lay at the end of short but curving drives, embowered in flowering trees. At this time of the year, the landscape was clotted with greenish creamy blossom – pear, white lilac, guelder-rose. Later, as it all faded, a faint grubbiness, a litter of petals seemed a total collapse. But there always were a great many birds: green woodpeckers appeared on the suburban-looking lawns; owls cried in the night. When the rain came it fell through layers of leaves, loosening gravel, staining the white roughcast houses and vibrating on sun-porches and greenhouses.

Ida was unusually placed in being able to see the road. Only rather low beech-hedges separated her. The cars reminded her of fish going by in shoals. At the week-ends when there were parties she would stand waiting by the window to be sure that plenty of her friends had gone by, not caring to be early. Like shoals of fish, they all headed one way, arrived at one destination (where there would be plenty to drink); turned homewards at last in unison.

Ida drank little, although sometimes at parties, because of her very indifference, she would accept glasses haphazardly with no knowledge of her mounting foolishness. She scorned and resented the way her acquaintance revolved round, took their pattern from, so much alcohol. For one thing, the cost dismayed her. She loved clothes, or rather new clothes, and her own clothes. It seemed that dozens of bottles of gin stood between her and all the things she wanted. George, who knew her so well, had no idea of her ill-will each time he filled his glass, which he did while she was saying good-night to Virginia.

Sounds of knives and forks being put out came from the dining-room. Virginia, opening the door, had let in a steaminess from the kitchen, a smell of mint.

‘Ask Nancy not to
race
the potatoes like that,’ Ida said. ‘Good-night, darling one.’ She drew the child to her as if she were a springing young tree; Virginia leant, but did not move her feet. Her mother used endearments a great deal: sometimes to put an edge to displeasure. ‘
Darling
, how
could
you be so stupid!’

‘I don’t know if I should wait dinner for Leonard,’ she said to George, who was just raising his replenished glass. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you?’

‘Well, I will then. Do you mean Leonard just may not come home?’

She had a desire to lay waste something, if only George’s complacency,

‘He may not come home to
me
.’

‘Then, dear, you are wondrous cool. Where else should he go?’

‘To Isabel’s, I expect.’

‘Isabel?’

‘Oh, you must know,’ she said impatiently, surprised at her own tone.

‘At the Fletchers’ party, you mean? But parties are nothing. Everyone forgets the next day.’

‘Do they?’

She went to the window again, rapping her finger-nails on the glass. She felt isolated, because she did not forget the next day. Her own romantic hopes remained, and the young man at the party who had said ‘You don’t belong’, and pressed his knuckles steadily against her thigh as they stood in the porch waiting for cars, who promised – so falsely – to seek her out again, was real to her, her brooding mood enlarged, improved him. She had taken no heed of Leonard all that evening; given no thoughts to him. But some impression had been formed, as if her mind had photographed, without her knowledge, the picture of Leonard and Isabel intently talking. Now her dissatisfaction printed the negative. What had been to her advantage that evening, suddenly infuriated her.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ George assured her. ‘Your imagination. Just one of those village things.’

She had imagined the young man sitting in this room with her. The fire was lit; flames had consumed the cigarette-ends and litter. The house was silent, the walls receded into shadow. They watched the fire …

‘I thought I heard thunder,’ George said, hoping to turn the conversation, and also quietly, one-handedly, filling his glass.

‘I feel it in my head,’ Ida said, putting her hand across her eyes. When she heard footsteps on the road, she could not resist looking out again. She felt like the Lady of Shalott. ‘Shadows of the world appear,’ she thought. She imagined the young man, riding down between the hedges. But it was
Isabel, going along the road in her old tweed coat with her dejected spaniel on a lead.

Virginia took off her vest and hung it over the mirror. Her nail-scissors and a silver comb she put in a drawer away from the lightning. Naked, she was thin and long-legged, her side marked with a neat appendix-scar. Her spine was silky, downy. She dropped her nightgown over her head and stood, legs apart, elbows up like wings, trying to do up buttons at the back.

Outside, the sky seemed to congeal cruelly, charged with lead. At the first sound of thunder splitting across the roof, she jumped into bed and lay under the thin coverings, quite rigid, as if she were dead.

The birth of the fourth, the last kitten, was a triumph. Creamy and blond tortoiseshell, it was distinguished and mysterious from the beginning, suggesting an elegant grandparent on one side or the other. Larger than the others, longer-haired, somehow complete at once, blind but not helpless, it put the finishing touches to the basket, decorated Moira’s maternity.

Laurie shifted from his squatting position, feeling stiff, the pattern of wicker-work dented into one knee. He was relieved and exhilarated. Leaving benign, smug Moira, he went to put his bicycle away, for a few spots of rain had fallen on the path.

‘Well, we won’t wait,’ Ida said. The sight of Isabel had strangely frustrated her. ‘I’ll tell Nancy, and Laurie must go to bed.’ She thought: ‘Better to dine alone with George than have him drinking all this gin.’