Complete Short Stories (VMC) (31 page)

‘It was a poor grass snake,’ Mrs Ingram said. ‘It would have done no harm to anyone and great good to the garden.’

‘I am just a Cockney. How should I know?’ said Freddie. ‘I did as I was told.’

Catherine could only keep saying how sorry she was.

‘I am surprised at you,’ Mrs Ingram said teasingly. ‘So meticulous in your painting, and to make such a mistake.’

It seemed to be Catherine who had failed. Freddie was triumphantly
eating dinner instead of lunch, although Catherine would have staked a great deal against such a possibility. She had listened to his long apology with outraged astonishment … ‘tramping along in the blazing heat with my little petrol can in my hand … I went all round some village looking for the Post Office. Wonderful honeysuckle all over it and jars of bull’s-eyes in the window. I should have thought there would be some regulation against calling them that, when they are nothing of the kind …’

‘He is putting off the weak part of his story, about the telephone,’ Catherine thought with interest.

‘… the phone-box was just outside the door and the exchange itself just inside by the bacon-slicing machine. The same pop-eyed old codger who was selling the bull’s-eyes went to the switchboard. Twice he got the wrong number. “Skates the Fishmongers here” was one. The third time I truly thought would be lucky, but there was no reply. “There is always someone there. There are hundreds of servants. They are moneyed folk,” I said. “Comfortably
placed
, as you might say.” “I dare say,” he said, sarcastically, as if I were a child, or drunk. “All the same, they’re not answering.”’

Esmé bent down and stroked his dog, trying to hide a smile.

‘You
might
have answered,’ Freddie whined complainingly. ‘After I had trudged so far and had such a horrible time and my hands were so
sore
with carrying the petrol can.’ He glanced at them, wincing.

‘It
is
only pretending, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Ingram, her voice as sweet as honey. As if she thought that Freddie was over-exciting himself, she changed the conversation.

So Freddie triumphed. He triumphed over his headache and he stayed to dinner and Catherine thought that he would manage to stay the night as well. Esmé was quiet and full of a peace that Catherine could understand. She remembered the contentment of saying those words to herself, ‘We are under the same roof.’ She had known how beautiful it can be to come to the close of the day and lie down in bed, thinking those words. Then the house itself became haunted, enchanted, spellbound with love.

Her heart began to ache again and her throat almost shut. The flesh is endlessly martyred by grief, humiliated by nausea and vomitings, bothered and alarmed; breath checked and the heart belaboured; the eyes stabbed viciously until they unload their tears and the tongue as bitter as if it had tasted poison. ‘This Freddie does not know,’ Catherine thought, and she felt pity for Esmé and kinship with him.

Dinner was soon over, for there was hardly any conversation to prolong it. Once Mrs Ingram said to Freddie: ‘Catherine paints, too,’ and Freddie answered, ‘So I saw.’

Beset by midges they drank coffee out on the terrace above the steps.
‘An irritating noise,’ Freddie said, referring to the weir, and Catherine thought, ‘So it is. The sound is what you are yourself at the moment: if you are in despair, it sounds despairing; tumultuous if you are angry; romantic when you are in love.’

Esmé and Freddie never exchanged remarks or glances and when Mrs Ingram went indoors Catherine felt herself so much in the way that she followed her and was conscious of their nervous silence as she walked away.

Mrs Ingram came from the back hall carrying a bunch of roses. ‘I was going to ask you if you would like to come, but don’t if you aren’t up to it. To Noël’s grave, I mean. No, you would rather not, I am sure,’ she said quickly. ‘It is difficult to guess how other people feel about such a thing. I know it is old-fashioned and unimaginative of me, but I feel comforted when I go there.’

Catherine did not know herself how she felt or would feel, but she went with Mrs Ingram and carried the roses for her. They walked slowly along the scented lane to the church by the river; then through the lych-gate under the limes. She began to be afraid. She remembered the churchyard carpeted with wreaths and the raw earth mounded up ready for its dreadful purpose; the groups of black figures standing, as if stunned, among the graves and the lime trees only just in leaf which now were ready to flower. She wondered if she would have to face some overpowering monument, for death is alien enough in itself without some of the things which are done afterwards as being appropriate. She hung back on the gravel path as she had done once before and Mrs Ingram, humming peacefully, her pink cardigan hung over her shoulders, stepped quickly across the grass. Following her, raising her eyes only to look at a safely eighteenth-century headstone with a cherub’s head and wings and saffron rosettes of lichen all over the crumbling stone, Catherine saw the name ‘Ingram’ with a sense of shock. But there were groves of Ingrams, among them Noël’s father, who was to share the roses. Unlike most of the other riverside families, this had kept its bones in one place for at least two hundred years. The last Ingram had, Catherine was relieved to find, only a simple white wooden cross with his name painted in black. She faced this steadily, feeling that she had been spared an awkwardness. ‘Only until the ground has sunk,’ Mrs Ingram said, throwing away stale water and going to fetch fresh.

Catherine took a step back, as if she might otherwise sink with the earth. She felt obscenity, not peace, around her.

‘I suppose that little liar will be staying the night,’ said Mrs Ingram, returning from the water tap. ‘I can’t pretend that I fancy having him under my roof.’

She knelt down and began to strip leaves off the roses and break off the big blood-red thorns.

‘When her plans have failed, there are always the flowers to do,’ Catherine thought. ‘The night I arrived, I suppose that she left them until late as an excuse for sending Esmé to the station – to make us be together from the start. But Esmé wouldn’t fall in with the plan – a new habit in him, I should think.’

Then the words ‘my darling Noël’ broke across her reflections. For a second, she wondered if she had said them aloud, caught on the in-breath of a sob. But Mrs Ingram finished the flowers calmly and then they walked home along the towing-path. The river was bronze in the sunset and the fluffy meadow-grasses filled with a pinkish light.

Esmé and Freddie were still sitting on the terrace. Freddie was now in Mrs Ingram’s wicker chaise-longue, his hands clasped behind his head and his legs stretched out comfortably. Esmé sat, rather awkwardly, with his greyhound across his lap. They both struggled to rise when they saw Mrs Ingram and Catherine crossing the lawn, but Mrs Ingram ignored them and went round the house by a side-way and Catherine followed her.

Catherine went up to bed and stood by the open window, looking out into the dark garden. A misty moonlight furred the grass, like rime, and white ghosts rose off the weir. ‘I have been to the churchyard,’ she thought, ‘and now I have had enough.’

She drew one of the heavy velvet curtains round her like a cloak. ‘I cannot
not
feel when I am here,’ she thought. ‘Especially when I am so
meant
to feel.’ Was not Mrs Ingram, she wondered, trying to make her realise the extent of her loss, as if nothing could be accomplished until this was done or any other part of her plan proceeded with.

Mrs Ingram came in to say good-night and found Catherine wound up in the curtain.

‘So Freddie went – as if he overheard me and meant to prove me wrong.’

She came to the window and they both looked out at the garden, listening to the weir.

On the blanched terrace below Esmé’s greyhound appeared, then Esmé. He went down the steps and was lost in the dark garden. Sometimes he reminded Catherine of his brother. Family likenesses in gestures are stranger than those of feature or build and often more poignant and she had sometimes been moved by such a slight thing as the inclination of his head as he walked, so mysteriously the same as Noël.

‘He is going away next week,’ Mrs Ingram said.

‘And I,’ said Catherine quickly. ‘I must go too.’ She was struggling with tears and her voice was rough and abrupt. She breathed very steadily and presently the tears receded and she said: ‘I must get back to work, you know. I must …’

‘What makes it difficult for living here may make it good for painting,’ Mrs Ingram said.

‘Too beautiful,’ Catherine began. She put her hands over her face and tears ran down her wrists and the insides of her arms. Mrs Ingram waited, as if she were measuring the fall of tears and knew when the limit of grief was reached and only then put out her hand and touched Catherine’s shoulder.

‘You see, I can’t stay. You do see?’ Her heart had been twice ambushed in this house and now she was desperate to escape. Yet did Mrs Ingram understand? She said nothing. She simply took Catherine in her arms and kissed her – but with a welcoming, a gathering-in gesture as if to one who has come home at last rather than to someone preparing to go away.

They were the same age – Mrs Allen and the woman who came every day to do the housework. ‘I shall never have children now,’ Mrs Allen had begun to tell herself. Something had not come true; the essential part of her life. She had always imagined her children in fleeting scenes and intimations; that was how they had come to her, like snatches of a film. She had seen them plainly, their chins tilted up as she tied on their bibs at meal-times; their naked bodies had darted in and out of the water-sprinkler on the lawn; and she had listened to their voices in the garden and in the mornings from their beds. She had even cried a little dreaming of the day when the eldest boy would go off to boarding-school; she pictured the train going out of the station; she raised her hand and her throat contracted and her lips trembled as she smiled. The years passing by had slowly filched from her the reality of these scenes – the gay sounds; the grave peace she had longed for; even the pride of grief.

She listened – as they worked together in the kitchen – to Mrs Lacey’s troubles with her family, her grumblings about her grown-up son who would not get up till dinner-time on Sundays and then expected his mother to have cleaned his shoes for him; about the girl of eighteen who was a hairdresser and too full of dainty ways which she picked up from the women’s magazines, and the adolescent girl who moped and glowered and answered back.

‘My children wouldn’t have turned out like that,’ Mrs Allen thought, as she made her murmured replies. ‘The more you do for some, the more you may,’ said Mrs Lacey. But from gossip in the village which Mrs Allen heard, she had done all too little. The children, one night after another, for years and years, had had to run out for parcels of fish and chips while their mother sat in the Horse and Jockey drinking brown ale. On summer evenings, when they were younger, they had hung about outside the pub: when they were bored they pressed their foreheads to the window and looked in at the dark little bar, hearing the jolly laughter, their mother’s the loudest of all. Seeing their faces, she would swing at once from the violence of hilarity to that of extreme annoyance and, although ginger-beer and packets of potato crisps would be handed out through the window, her
anger went out with them and threatened the children as they ate and drank.

‘And she doesn’t always care who she goes there
with
,’ Mrs Allen’s gardener told her.

‘She works hard and deserves a little pleasure – she has her anxieties,’ said Mrs Allen, who, alas, had none.

She had never been inside the Horse and Jockey, although it was nearer to her house than the Chequers at the other end of the village where she and her husband went sometimes for a glass of sherry on Sunday mornings. The Horse and Jockey attracted a different set of customers – for instance, people who sat down and drank, at tables all round the wall. At the Chequers no one ever sat down, but stood and sipped and chatted as at a cocktail party, and luncheons and dinners were served, which made it so much more respectable: no children hung about outside, because they were all at home with their nannies.

Sometimes in the evenings – so many of them – when her husband was kept late in London, Mrs Allen wished that she could go down to the Chequers and drink a glass of sherry and exchange a little conversation with someone; but she was too shy to open the door and go in alone: she imagined heads turning, a surprised welcome from her friends, who would all be safely in married pairs; and then, when she left, eyes meeting with unspoken messages and conjecture in the air.

Mrs Lacey left her at midday and then there was gardening to do and the dog to be taken for a walk. After six o’clock, she began to pace restlessly about the house, glancing at the clocks in one room after another, listening for her husband’s car – the sound she knew so well because she had awaited it for such a large part of her married life. She would hear, at last, the tyres turning on the soft gravel, the door being slammed, then his footsteps hurrying towards the porch. She knew that it was a wasteful way of spending her years – and, looking back, she was unable to tell one of them from another – but she could not think what else she might do. Humphrey went on earning more and more money and there was no stopping him now. Her acquaintances, in wretched quandaries about where the next term’s school-fees were to come from, would turn to her and say cruelly: ‘Oh,
you’re
all right, Ruth. You’ve no idea what you are spared.’

And Mrs Lacey would be glad when Maureen could leave school and ‘get out earning’. ‘“I’ve got my geometry to do,” she says, when it’s time to wash up the tea-things. “I’ll geometry you, my girl,” I said. “When I was your age, I was out earning.”’

Mrs Allen was fascinated by the life going on in that house and the children seemed real to her, although she had never seen them. Only Mr Lacey remained blurred and unimaginable. No one knew him. He worked in the
town in the valley, six miles away, and he kept himself to himself; had never been known to show his face in the Horse and Jockey. ‘I’ve got my own set,’ Mrs Lacey said airily. ‘After all, he’s nearly twenty years older than me. I’ll make sure neither of my girls follow my mistake. “I’d rather see you dead at my feet,” I said to Vera.’ Ron’s young lady was lucky; having Ron, she added. Mrs Allen found this strange, for Ron had always been painted so black; was, she had been led to believe, oafish, ungrateful, greedy and slow to put his hands in his pockets if there was any paying out to do. There was also the matter of his shoe-cleaning, for no young woman would do what his mother did for him – or said she did. Always, Mrs Lacey would sigh and say: ‘Goodness me, if only I was their age and knew what I know now.’