Complete Short Stories (VMC) (27 page)

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Miller faintly, and smiled wanly into the telephone.

‘Then that will be lovely. Constance will be so delighted. It will quite cheer her up.’

When Mrs Miller put down the receiver, she went on standing there, her eyes closed, her wrist to her brow, her mouth dragged tragically down. ‘Sarah Bernhardt,’ thought her husband, eating one éclair after another.

Ronald Ives once more took the train from Victoria to the place of all his seaside holidays in Kent. To travel first class did not – would not for many years – occur to him.

On most of those journeys to Eastgate his widowed mother, whose brother lived in that town, had been with him. When she had died he had thought of nowhere else to go, even after her brother had died too. He had simply taken a bedroom in a boarding-house farther down the same road. Fernbank. This was his destination.

His mother had died without knowing about Madame Olga, who was the purpose of his visit. In a way, her death had left him less grieved than at a loose end. Their life together had gone on too long for his good. On that first holiday without her, he had wandered about aimlessly until he had been driven by rain into a shopping-and-pleasure arcade. It was on that day, there, that he met Madame Olga.

Speeding through Kent on this later occasion, the train rattled and jolted and he wondered if it would be derailed. He was a nervous man but hoped to hide his anxiety by softly humming and glancing about him. He wore spectacles, nicely polished like his shoes. His mouth drooped, pouchy from many small disappointments, and he did not look like a man who had only a week before come into a large fortune.

He knew that there were people to whom seventy-five thousand pounds would not seem to be a large fortune. He had never met any of them and did not expect to.

He wondered if his mixed emotions might be described as a depressed excitement and decided that it would be a contradiction of words. Yet his heart gave a lift, then a lurch, when they ran into the steep chalk cutting, through the tunnel, out of it and, slowing down, into the echoing, fish-smelling station, Eastgate Central.

Arrival at a known resort out of season has a strangeness that those who have been there only on holidays, with all the pavements crowded with sauntering people, noise, traffic, can imagine.

Ronald, in a taxi on his way to Fernbank, saw a changed territory – the
ice-cream parlours closed, the beach deserted and the town taken over by the elderly, who sat lonely in half-glazed shelters or walked, in tweeds, with dogs.

Along the windy esplanade, the sand had blown up over the lawns. The sea was a long way out. He passed the Grand Hotel, the Connaught, the Marston Towers. Then, farther on, and nearly into bed-and-breakfast land, the taxi took a turn-off by the bowling green and drove to Mrs Plaistow’s ‘Fernbank’.

Mr and Mrs Plaistow were decorating, and Ronald had been warned that being out of season he would have to muck in as best he could – ever so welcome all the same. Here was a different atmosphere, too. He remembered the summer jollity of the other guests, those dining-room jokes and the end-of-holidays photographs of them all taken on the front steps, with glimpses of wet, sandy swim-suits draped from window-sills above. This afternoon he was given a cup of tea in the kitchen while Mrs Plaistow tried to find out why he was there.

‘I felt I was due for a bit of a change. Four days at Mrs Plaistow’s will do the trick, set me up,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ve been overdoing it a bit.’ He told them of his new responsibilities: until last year he had been an assistant in a grocery shop, but now was promoted to manager of a smaller branch of the same firm. He wished, he said, that his mother might have known of his success, but it had come too late for that.

Mrs Plaistow believed scarcely a word of what he was saying. She was convinced that he was giving her false reasons or, at best, being suspiciously reticent.

What Ronald was being reticent about was his fortune – but only because he needed time to come to terms with it, to understand its implications before all the other smarter people did. He was relieved that he had signed a form debarring any disclosure of his name. Although never having expected to win, he had protected himself.

Mrs Plaistow, not being satisfied by his explanation (for he did not look at all off-colour to her), began to wonder if the opposite of what he had told her might not be true, if he had not in fact lost his job and was looking around for something else, perhaps in Eastgate. Lest he should be unable to pay his bill, she decided to be very careful about the catering. She made the decorating an excuse for cold ham and beetroot that evening.

Later, coming back probably earlier than expected from a stroll to the darkened Esplanade Gardens, he smelled onions being fried in the kitchen, imagining steaks lying ready for the pan. But he was not to be put out by such a thing. He called ‘Good-night’ cheerily from the foot of the stairs and went on up to his cold bedroom. Looking around it he had again the strange sensation of both depression and excitement.

In the morning he set out to walk to Madame Olga’s.

In summer the arcade was usually crowded, with voices echoing and mingling with the din from the jukebox at ‘The Burger ’n’ Beans’ and the shrieks of laughter coming from the Hall of Mirrors. Ronald had not imagined half the shops and all the amusements being closed for the winter.

Half-way down the arcade was a cheap jewellery shop that during the season had a souvenir stall outside it. Now the stall had been taken away, and the jeweller’s window was revealed, with its display of engagement rings and alarm clocks. Next to the shop was a door giving on to stairs that led to a flat above the shop. There had been a card taped to the glass panel on the door: ‘Madame Olga. Palmist and Clairvoyant. First Floor.’

The card had gone and the door was locked.

‘I’m afraid Madame Olga’s folded up,’ the jeweller said.

In a flash, Ronald saw as a vivid picture that rather frail figure bent double in some sort of predicament, for ‘predicament’ was implicit in the jeweller’s voice.

‘Financially. Also healthwise.’ The jeweller was engraving a silver-plated tray with an electrically driven machine. ‘Forgive me. This needs my concentration.’

But Ronald lingered.

At last the jeweller swung the instrument aside and looked across at Ronald. ‘What were we saying? Ah, Madame Olga. As she was known. She won’t be returning, I’m afraid. In fact I’ve already let the flat to a so-called Japanese masseuse for the next season. It may work. It may not. Eastgate has always been a place for family holidays. Now it’s changed in every way. They seem to go to Ostend and Boulogne and all that these days. Unfortunately, the Ostenders and so on don’t reciprocate.’

‘I’ve been coming to Eastgate for many years,’ Ronald said. ‘Twenty odd, or maybe more.’

‘Loyalty is a rare quality in this day and age.’ The jeweller screwed a glass in one eye and began to examine the inside of a watch.

‘And in time, one holiday, came to consult Madame Olga,’ Ronald said. ‘I found her predictions uncannily exact.’

The jeweller took the glass from his eye so that his face could better express amazement.

‘“Promotion in my employment,” she said.’

The jeweller shrugged. After all, most people, unless utter numbskulls, got some sort of promotion as their lives went on. Nothing so very surprising about that. ‘You
did
say “predictions”, though,’ he reminded Ronald, stressing the plural.

‘That I should travel abroad …’

‘And …?’

‘Only months later I went with our local football team’s Supporters’ Club to France. Day trip. I’m keen on football, always turn out for the Club, even week-nights, but that was a trying day. People were sick on the pavements of Dieppe. I wished I’d stayed at home. But, you see, the prediction came true. And there was also a question of my kidney.’

‘Ah, yes,’ the jeweller said resignedly, screwing in the glass again, thinking the man strange, to say the least.

‘I passed a small stone. Madame Olga had warned me of an internal upset. She was reassuring about it and said that there was nothing to worry about – and so it turned out.’

‘Nothing marvellous
so
far,’ the jeweller thought.

‘With
her
insight, or foresight, I should have thought the world would have been flocking up those stairs,’ Ronald said.

‘There certainly was no flocking.’

‘Have you any idea of her whereabouts?’

‘When she fell ill – it was some form of schizophrenia or kleptomania, one of those nervous disorders that make you keep twitching your mouth and blinking your eyes, also a persistent cough – well, she was certainly not herself and couldn’t have inspired much confidence in clients. Some cousin or other came and took off the bits of furniture and
she
went into the convalescent home at the end of the esplanade. All this was some months ago.’

‘They might be able to put me on the track,’ Ronald said brightly. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

‘Her name, by the way,’ the jeweller called after him, ‘is Lacey. Winnie Lacey. That’s the name to ask for.’

When Ronald had left, the jeweller smiled to himself. ‘There goes a man who very badly needs to know the answer to something further,’ he thought …

At the convalescent home, where frizzy-haired women in short, quilted dressing gowns stared at him, Ronald was at last told by a reception secretary that, as far as was now known, Miss W. Lacey now resided at Number 178 Dover Road in the care of a relation.

‘A cousin,’ Ronald said.

‘Might well be,’ said the secretary.

Ronald thanked her and left. Afterwards, walking to Dover Road, which ran through a squalid part of town beyond the station, away from the sea front, he tried to imagine the visit before him, as he had tried for days – to rehearse, to improve.

‘And as soon as I heard the news, though I was stunned, it was
you
who came into my mind,’ he would say. They would talk. He would tell her how all the things she had foretold had come about, and come about so soon. Then he would put the envelope with the cheque in discreetly in her hand, thank her, and slip away. Having found out her real name, he had already written out the cheque, except for the actual amount, which even now he had not decided. His fortune had made money seem unreal to him: suddenly there were zeros at the ends of sums that pitched them into fantasy. All of his life’s careful calculations were nonsense now. He thought that one hundred pounds would be quite a handsome present, fifty adequate, even ten a mark of grace. But he had not made this journey simply to give someone ten pounds. Gratitude had no price, he decided. Madame Olga had protected him from great areas of depression, as when he had thought someone else – young Tarrystone, for instance – would get the branch managership, be promoted over his head. But Madame Olga had said no, that was not to be. And the trouble with the kidney stone: remembering her gentle warning, he had gone at once to his doctor, and all had been well. Yet she, Madame Olga, had been unable to help herself, it seemed, if what the jeweller and the convalescent home had said were true. She was in need; how much need he could not know until perhaps too late. He would scarcely (according to the sort of plight he found her in) sit down in front of her and fill in the cheque. He was still undecided about the matter when he came at last to Dover Road. Terraces of shabby Victorian houses on either side, small shops. He suddenly stopped by the piece of blank wall, took the cheque from his wallet and, resting it against the wall, filled in,
One thousand pounds only
.

Of course Madame Olga has no memory of him. A shaking hand flew to her lips in terror when he asked if he might come in and talk for a while.

‘It’s past – it’s all in the past,’ she insisted. ‘I gave it up. I take in alterations now instead.’

But very soon she realised that he was nervous, too: that he had the mild face of a man who had never done anyone any harm, never would. She backed into the passage, seemed to fade into its darkness, opened a door on a room untidy only with sewing things: otherwise neat, but dismal.

‘Do you remember my promotion – the question of my promotion?’ Ronald asked, as she gathered up some tacked material from a chair so that he might sit down.

No, she remembered nothing, was obviously determined not to. Her offer of tea Ronald accepted, and he watched her quietly preparing it. If not exactly folded up, she was bowed slightly – not from age, for he guessed her to be in her forties, as he was himself, but from frailty or too much stooping over a sewing-machine. In spite of fragility, pallor, she was a not
unattractive woman. There was a difference about her that he had noted at once – her hair, which in the arcade days had been an unvarying black, had now at least two inches of greyish-brown at the parting and around her brow. He thought the lighter colour would be more becoming when the hard black had finally grown out. Perhaps he had stared at her for too long, and she had been conscious of it in her uncanny way for, waiting for the kettle to boil on the gas ring, and with her back to him, she touched her hair and said, ‘I am surprised you recognised me.’