Complete Short Stories (VMC) (24 page)

Fernando’s anger, when it occurred, was a ceremonious anger. His gaiety, which was the gayest gaiety I ever encountered, had some of the same formality. In England, gaiety is informal, spasmodic. We do not reserve it for special occasions, and at Christmas it is sometimes a dogged duty. We did not have Fernando with us for Christmas. But we did have him for the
fiesta
.

One afternoon, we took Fernando and the baby for a drive. Not far from home we came to a village where a little fair was set out on the green – a few caravans, a roundabout, sideshows, swing boats. Fernando, in the back seat, began to wave his arms, and cried, ‘
Fiesta! Fiesta!
’ As we had to get back for the baby’s six-o’clock feeding (and even that seemed un-Spanish, dogged), we could only promise to return to the fair next day. ‘
Mañana
.’ He nodded with satisfaction.

Late that night, as my husband and I were thinking of going to bed, we heard Fernando’s boots on the landing, then the sound of water running from the bathroom tap. We ran upstairs to see what he was doing. He was dressed in the Fair Isle jersey, his wet hair flattened to his brow. ‘For the
fiesta
,’ he said. Dismayed by memories of Ernest Hemingway, of bulls charging through the streets at dawn, and wine running in the gutters, I wondered how to explain. In England, I said, the fiesta does not begin until daytime. Dazed, a little scornful, he was led back to his bed.

Very early in the morning, I awoke to the sound of the boots and the rushing water. Again I explained. Puzzled, Fernando watched my husband go to work. (‘In England, we do not stop work for the
fiesta
.’) Because he spent such a disconsolate morning, and from a kind of national guilt, I let him strike match after match. Thoughts of the modest village fair lowered me.

As it was Saturday, my husband came home at noon, and we all got into the car and drove off after lunch. I was as flattened and subdued as Fernando’s hair. Over my shoulder, the baby bobbed its head at him. Long strings of dribble festooned me. Fernando spoke Catalan baby talk, winked, whistled, sang. He was lifted to a pitch of excitement that filled us with gloom and despair. We drove into the village, and the fair was gone.

There were no words to cover our horror. We thanked God for His arrangements about the Tower of Babel, which seemed now a piece of long-term wisdom. We smiled reassuringly and said, ‘Is quite all right.’ As if he knew where we were going, my husband drove confidently down the lanes, made enquiries at village shops. No one could help. After a long time, we found a few caravans on a dirty fairground, outside a market town. Drearily set amid mud and cinders, they looked shabby and unclean compared with those we had seen the day before.

Fernando put a hand apprehensively to his fringe, as if about to enter Windsor Castle. I wished I had not read that book by Hemingway. It was so full of local colour, of which Britain seemed to have none (save the Fair Isle jersey).

The baby’s eyes stretched in terror at the panic of music forced by steam
out of the roundabout. Fernando, with his hand still on his fringe, burst from the car. Utterly dejected, my husband and I made our way down the cinder path.

I think that one of the most touching things I have read about a war was by Gertrude Stein, who remarked how the look of her French village altered in 1939. The elder brothers and the fathers went off to the front, and suddenly the lanes were full of little boys riding bicycles too big for them, standing on the pedals, their elbows in the air. I do not know if Fernando’s brother had a bicycle and there was the same brief period of riding it, but it was now revealed to us that the great force and passion of Fernando’s life was to own one – or at least to ride one for a while, pretending ownership. Ignoring the rest of the fair, he made for the children’s roundabout, where, among peacocks, racing cars, airplanes, and gilded horses, he could see a stationary bicycle with movable pedals.

Excitement exploded in him. His hair, beginning to curl again, bounded on his forehead. The few people who were about glanced from the blond baby to the impassioned Spaniard with amusement. Self-consciously, we led him to the bicycle. The other children, used to their fairy-cycles and tricycles, preferred the more exotic birds or the airplanes.

The rides – in those days – were a penny, and lasted perhaps for three minutes. Two shillings’ worth covered about an hour and a half, for there were gaps while the man waited for more customers. My husband and I stood watching, taking turns holding the baby. At first Fernando waved as he passed us, but later forgot. He gazed into the distance, pedalling rapidly, grave, absorbed. His eyes narrowed, and he leant to an imagined camber of the road.

What distances in Catalonia, we wondered, did he cover? What goal achieve? Sometimes, impatiently, because of fool drivers, he rang the bell, sometimes seemed to stiffen his whole body, bear down on the pedals, braking for unseen obstacles, though the roundabout took him merrily on.

He became a character to the man in charge and to some of the onlookers, but he was oblivious of them. Each time the roundabout ran down, the bronchial music wheezed off into a trailing sigh, he would hand in another penny in a peremptory, irritable way, checked in his dream, and sit steady, tense, waiting. Once, catching my eye, he looked quickly aside, as if the sight of me violated his privacy.

At the end, when his money was spent, he climbed down. He stumbled towards us, seeming drunk. He did not speak.

We drove off through the drab town, with its queue already outside the cinema, and then into the quiet, lovely countryside. The fields were tented with cornstooks. A picture of peace. The baby slept now. Fernando, gorged with pleasure, replete, dulled, sat with his head jogging against the side of
the car. Awkwardly, I was silent, too, thinking of the bullfights, the
corrida
, a mounting, vinous excitement.

When we reached home, I turned to look at Fernando. He seemed drowsy and blissful. He smiled his fine smile. ‘Plenty good
bicicleta
,’ he said, nodding. ‘Plenty good
fiesta
.’

From four until six-thirty Ethel was alone. Four o’clock was good, with the fire built up to last and a cup of tea in her hand. Mrs Dring left the key under the mat, lest the priest should call, or the doctor – the doctor with sleeping-tablets, the priest with the political pamphlets she could not understand. ‘Dull stuff,’ she thought, reaching for her library book as the door closed on Mrs Dring at four o’clock, and ‘cosy’ she would murmur, glancing round the room, which moved in the shifting firelight, and seemed alive. After an hour, though, it had stilled and grown lifeless, and she had begun that agonising time of watching the hand of the clock, so nerve-destroying to the bedridden.

‘When Fred comes, we’ll have a good laugh about Mrs Dring’s boy – must remember to tell him that.’

She arranged the simple anecdote with the touch of an artist, laying a little emphasis here and there, not exactly exaggerating … She knew Fred’s life was dull, that she imprisoned him, made impossible demands. She wanted to tell him one evening to go out for a game of darts, but the evening was what she had looked forward to in anguish all day long, and she had never been able to make the sacrifice, but postponed it day after day.

‘He’s out all the time, meeting people,’ she thought resentfully. ‘Has a drink with his dinner. That’s more than I have.’

She knew the funny stories were an attempt to compensate him. She garnished, embellished, wrested from Mrs Dring what gossip she could, and her prize was never more than his wan smile, his laugh which cheated neither of them.

‘Good old Fred,’ she would think, around five o’clock. ‘Coming straight from work of an evening. Not many men like that.’

She finicked with her library books, Mrs Dring always said. Liked a nice love story, but nothing sexy. Could never remember what she had read. Would not have books about children; threw them aside at any mention of childbirth or pregnancy. Could not abide stories of foreign countries, or anything historical, or detective tales, or violence, or adventure.

‘Oh, I’ve had this one before, Mrs Dring, and this one’s about China. You know I like a nice novel. Surely …’

If she whined, Mrs Dring wouldn’t tell her what the young lady at the library said or what she was wearing, and so she bit off the words and sighed, foreseeing that blank time after tea, without a book even.

By five-thirty, she was thinking that she must come down to reading pamphlets; but they were across the room out of reach. Her eyes kept swivelling back to them in an exasperated way. The little books with their dull covers became dreadfully desirable.

The fire creaked and whispered. Some coals fell together with a shudder. The shadows on the wall grew still. The room seemed to be dying slowly, and the clock was running down.

‘It will be like this all my life,’ she thought, in one of those obliterating, dark waves of panic which came to her, as if she were in the condemned cell.

Confronted with the inevitable reality, frustration beat her down, hatred filled her; but it was a painful hatred, undefined. In her world there was only Fred. She could not hate him. And she loved and pitied herself.

‘I love him, for he is all I have, and I could never repay him for all his goodness.’

The easy tears flowed down the sides of her face. She would not have understood that often we do hate those in whose debt we stand deeply, who are all we have. It was life she hated, she sometimes decided, life itself; but that was like blaming God, the priest said.

She lay there, aching all down her back, the bed needing smoothing, the mirror over the fireplace (painted with bulrushes in one corner) hanging crookedly. She looked from that to the pamphlets in despair.

‘Fred
must
come,’ she thought. ‘He must come soon.’

She tried to imagine him running down the steps outside the office, flinging himself on a bus, knowing as he did that one minute less of her agony and frustration, her discomforts, the crooked bulrushes, her empty mind, was like one minute less on the rack, meant one wrenched-out gasp of irritation the less.

‘I can’t expect him for ten minutes,’ she began. ‘Oh, please God, don’t let him stop to buy a paper!’

She closed her eyes and counted sixty slowly, and to her triumph more than a minute had passed when she looked at the clock. By six-thirty, the fire needed tending. She lay breathing deeply but unevenly, awaiting the sound of the key scratching at the lock.

When he came – ten minutes later than usual – she was exhausted.

‘Sorry I’m late, old girl.’

She turned her face away from him, the tears running out of the corners of her eyes.

‘But I brought a little surprise. A lady to see you.’

Ethel’s face was wet, pink and crushed-up like an overblown rose in the rain.

He opened the door so that she could see. In walked a cat.

‘A Siamese,’ he said proudly.

The cat walked into the room and trod delicately across the carpet towards the fire. Ethel watched it. It was not a cat to her yet. It was ten minutes of anxiety and desperation. Fred took off his coat and shut the door. He shifted the coals in the fire, made a little draught between them, and threw on some kindling wood. The fire snapped and crackled into life again. When he had fondled the cat, he went to his wife and kissed her.

‘Pleased with your present? I thought it would be company for you.’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘One of my customers gave it to me. It’s quite valuable. I just stopped to pick her up on the way home.’

‘Which customer?’

‘Old Hussey. He breeds them. It’s quite trained. A nice clean cat.’

He lifted it and dropped it on the bed. Ethel put out her hand and stroked it. For a second, and only just that once, she felt love for the creature. It was oyster-coloured, with chocolate legs and ears, its head smoky, its eyes a deep gentian. She took one of its little suede paws – it was cold and the claws curved out wickedly.

Fred left the cat lying there on her chest, and they watched one another.

‘What do you feel like for supper?’ he asked her.

‘You didn’t plump up my cushions.’

‘Sorry. Shall I open a tin of sardines?’

‘If you like. I’m not hungry.’

‘I thought of calling her Simone.’

‘Why?’

He seemed not to notice the suspicion, the antagonism in her voice. ‘I don’t know. I’ve always liked that name. French. Sounds gay.’

As he opened the sardine-tin, the cat began to make small nervous movements, sniffing the air, lifting its paws and treading the bedspread.

‘You’ll pull the threads,’ Ethel said.

It leapt from the bed and wove its way ecstatically between Fred’s legs. He gave it a sardine and the oil in a saucer, and later, while he smoked his pipe, it lay on his lap with its half-closed eyes fixed contemplatively on Ethel. When Fred went out to make tea, it stood by the closed door and wailed.

‘Worse than a baby,’ he said happily.

Ethel said nothing.

It was the same in the morning. For a while, it cried by the door after he had left.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Dring. ‘It’s more like a baby than a cat.’

‘What did you get from the library?’

‘A nice Warwick Deeping and this
Pride and Prejudice
. A funny title, I know, but the young lady said she enjoyed the film.’

‘But it’s old-fashioned!’ Ethel cried. ‘Oh, never mind. The other one looks all right – if I haven’t read it before, that is.’

All day, the cat remained by the fire. When Mrs Dring went at four o’clock, it sprang on to the bed and sat hunched up, staring at Ethel. When she put out her hand to touch its mushroom-coloured fur, it gave a quick scratch at her wrist, and its eyes changed to slits. It watched her and oppressed her.

‘Well, Simone!’ said Fred, coming eagerly into the room promptly at six-thirty. ‘How’s she been?’

‘All right,’ said Ethel dully.

After supper, she told Fred a funny story about Mrs Dring and the greengrocer. He laughed and stroked Simone, who lay stretched against his waistcoat.