Complete Short Stories (VMC) (34 page)

She was a woman of fifty-five, whose children had grown up and gone thankfully away. They left their mother almost permanently, it seemed to them, behind the tea-urn at the village hall – and a good watching-place it was. She had, as Emily once put it, the over-alert look of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Her head, cocked slightly, turned to and fro between Emily and Edmund. ‘Dyed hair,’ she thought, glancing away from him. She was often wrong about people.

‘Now, don’t let me interrupt you. You get on with your coffee. I’ll just sit quiet in my corner and bury myself in the Encyclopaedia.’

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Emily asked. ‘I’m afraid it may be rather cold.’

‘If there
is
some going begging, nothing would be nicer. “Shuva to Tom-Tom”, that’s the one I want.’ She pulled out the Encyclopaedia and rather ostentatiously pretended to wipe dust from her fingers.

She has presence of mind, Edmund decided, watching her turn the pages with speed, and authority. She has really thought of something to look up. He was sure that he could not have done so as quickly himself. He wondered what it was that she had hit upon. She had come to a page of photographs of Tapestry and began to study them intently. There appeared to be pages of close print on the subject. So clever, Edmund thought.

She knew that he was staring at her and looked up and smiled; her finger marking the place. ‘To settle an argument,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid we are a very argumentative family.’

Edmund bowed.

A silence fell. He and Emily looked at one another, but she looked away first. She sat on the arm of a chair, as if she were waiting to spring up to see Mrs Waterlow out – as indeed she was.

The hot afternoon was a spell they had fallen under. A bluebottle zigzagged about the room, hit the window-pane, then went suddenly out of the door. A petal dropped off a geranium on the window-sill; occasionally – but not often enough for Edmund – a page was turned, the thin paper rustling silkily over. Edmund drew his wrist out of his sleeve and glanced secretly at his watch, and Emily saw him do it. It was a long journey he had made to see her, and soon he must be returning.

Mrs Waterlow looked up again. She had an amused smile, as if they were a couple of shy children whom she had just introduced to one another. ‘Oh, dear, why the silence? I’m not listening, you know. You will make me feel that I am in the way.’

You preposterous old trollop, Edmund thought viciously. He leant back, put his finger-tips together and said, looking across at Emily, ‘Did I tell you that cousin Joseph had a nasty accident? Out bicycling.
Both
of them, you know. Such a deprivation. No heir, either. But Constance very soon consoled herself. With one of the Army padres out there. They were discovered by Joseph’s batman in the most unusual circumstances. The Orient’s insidious influence, I suppose. So strangely exotic for Constance, though.’ He guessed – though he did not look – that Mrs Waterlow had flushed and, pretending not to be listening, was struggling hard
not
to flush.

‘Cousin Constance’s Thousand and One Nights,’ he said. ‘The padre had courage. Like engaging with a boa-constrictor, I’d have thought.’

If only Emily had not looked so alarmed. He began to warm to his inventions, which grew more macabre and outrageous – and, as he did so, he could hear the pages turning quickly and at last the book was closed with a loud thump. ‘That’s clinched
that
argument,’ said Mrs Waterlow. ‘Hubert is so often inaccurate, but won’t have it that he can ever be wrong.’ She tried to sound unconcerned, but her face was set in lines of disapproval.

‘You are triumphant, then?’ Edmund asked and he stood up and held out his hand.

When she had gone, Emily closed the door and leant against it. She looked exhausted.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘She would never have gone otherwise. And now it is nearly time for
you
to go.’

‘I am sorry about Cousin Joseph. I could think of no other way.’

In Emily’s letters, Mrs Waterlow had been funny; but she was not in real life and he wondered how Emily could suffer so much, before transforming it.

‘My dear, if you are sorry I came, then I am sorry, too.’

‘Don’t say anything. Don’t talk of it,’ she begged him, standing with her hands pressed hard against the door behind her. She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he had gone. If he spoke the truth, she could not bear it; if he tried to muffle it with tenderness, she would look upon it as pity. He had made such efforts, she knew; but he could never have protected her from herself.

He, facing her, turned his eyes for a moment towards the window; then he looked back at her. He said nothing; but she knew that he had seen the station-car drawing to a standstill beyond the hollyhocks.

‘You have to go?’ she asked.

He nodded.

Perhaps the worst has happened, she thought. I have fallen in love with him – the one thing from which I felt I was completely safe.

Before she moved aside from the door, she said quickly, as if the words were red-hot coals over which she must pick her way – ‘If you write to me again, will you leave out today, and let it be as if you had not moved out of Rome?’

‘Perhaps I didn’t,’ he said.

At the door, he took her hand and held it against his cheek for a second – a gesture both consoling and conciliatory.

When he had gone, she carried her grief decently upstairs to her little bedroom and there allowed herself some tears.

When they were dried and over, she sat down by the open window.

She had not noticed how clouds had been crowding into the sky. A wind had sprung up and bushes and branches were jigging and swaying.

The hollyhocks nodded together. A spot of rain as big as a halfpenny dropped on to the stone sill, others fell over leaves down below, and a sharp cool smell began to rise at once from the earth.

She put her head out of the window, her elbows on the outside sill. The soft rain, falling steadily now, calmed her. Down below in the garden the cat wove its way through a flower-bed. At the door, he began to cry piteously to be let in and she shut the window a little and went downstairs. It was dark in the living-room; the two windows were fringed with dripping leaves; there were shadows and silence.

While she was washing up, the cat, turning a figure-of-eight round her feet, brushed her legs with his wet fur. She began to talk to him, as she often did, for they were alone so much together. ‘If you were a dog,’ she said, ‘we could go for a nice walk in the rain.’

As it was, she gave him his supper and took an apple for herself. Walking about, eating it, she tidied the room. The sound of the rain in the
garden was very peaceful. She carried her writing things to the table by the window and there, in the last of the light, dipped her goose-quill pen in the ink, and wrote, in her fine and flowing hand, her address, and then, ‘Dear Edmund’.

In the old part of the town, between the castle and the cathedral, were some steep and cobbled streets whose pavements were broken open by the roots of plane trees. The tall and narrow houses stood back, beyond the walls of gardens and courtyards, but there were glimpses of them through wrought-iron gates. The quiet here was something that country people found unbelievable. Except for the times when the cathedral bells were ringing, the silence was broken only by the rooks in the castle trees or, as on this afternoon, by the sound of rain.

Lalage left the car in the garage at the foot of the hill and the two girls – Lalage herself and her step-daughter, Sophy – walked as quickly as they could towards home, carrying the smaller pieces of Sophy’s luggage, Lalage, already hostess-like (Sophy thought), bowed over to one side with the weight of the bigger suitcase, and the other arm thrust out shoulder-high to right her balance.

The road narrowed gradually to less than a car’s width and rain ran fast down the cobbles, swirling into drains. Reaching the gate in the wall, Sophy swung her skis off her back and turned the iron handle. The scraping, rusty sound of it was suddenly remembered and was as strange to her as anything else in a world where every familiar thing had moved into a pattern too fantastic ever – she was sure – to be dealt with or understood. She and Lalla, for instance, going in through this gate as they had done so often before; but Sophy now at a loss to guess what might be waiting for her inside, in her own home.

Her father, Colonel Vellacott, had always loved Italy and everything Italian and had tried to make a Venetian courtyard in wet England. Its sadness was appalling, Sophy thought. The paving-stones were dark with rain and drops fell heavily from the vine and the magnolia, off statues and urns and, in a sudden gust of wind, rattled like bullets on the broad fig-leaves by the wall. In the seats of some iron chairs puddles reflected the cloudy sky.

‘John will be back for dinner,’ Lalage said, as they picked their way across the wet stones – ‘He had to go because he was in the chair.’

Ah yes, ‘John’, of course, Sophy thought.

The front door opened and Miss Sully came out to take the case from
Lalage, primly eager to wring all she could from the peculiar situation. ‘It is just like old times,’ she said to Sophy, ‘when Madam used to come to stay with you in the holidays and I used to listen to hear the gate so that I could run out with a welcome.’

‘Madam’ had been a shock and a calculated one, Sophy thought. She smiled and shook hands. ‘In the old days, you always said we had grown. Not any more, I hope.’

‘Grown
up
, I should say.’

‘Isn’t she brown?’ said Lalla.

‘As brown as a berry.’

They went into the dark hall where the Italian influence continued in glass and marble, trailing leaves and a wrought-iron screen which served no purpose. Nothing visible had been altered since Sophy was here last, a year ago, but everything invisible had been. At Sophy’s bedroom door, Miss Sully turned away, with promises of tea in five minutes and a fire in the drawing-room. Sophy, standing in the middle of the room, looking about her, but not at Lalla, asked: ‘How do you get on with
her
?’

‘As I always did, trying to be as nice as pie, wearing myself out, really, but not getting anywhere. She is, as we always found her, a mystery woman.’

‘Kind …’ Sophy began.

‘Kindness itself. Thoughtful, considerate, efficient. But what lies underneath, who knows? Something does. She’s learning Italian now.’

‘Perhaps that’s what’s underneath. Not enough goes on here for her. She’s too intelligent to be a housekeeper, and too ambitious.’

‘Then why go on?’

Sophy could not now say ‘I think because she hoped to marry my father’. She had sometimes thought it in the past and suddenly wondered if she had ever told Lalla. She felt that she must have done, for she had told her everything, though she no longer could.

‘What was Switzerland
like
?’ Lalla asked. ‘I mean really.’

‘It went on too long.’

Sophy put her fingers to the locks of her suitcase, about to spring them open, and then could not be bothered, and straightened her back, thinking, ‘She will wonder why, if I found it too long, I did not come back earlier, as I could have done, and should have done and would have done, if it had not been for
that
.’ It was always ‘that’ in her mind – the marriage of her father and her dearest friend. The other questions – Sophy’s questions – that hovered between them were too unseemly to be spoken – for instance ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘where did it begin?’ The only question in the least possible Sophy was turning over in her mind and beginning to make a shape of it in words, when Lalla, before it could be spoken, answered it.
Since early girlhood, they had often found their thoughts arriving at the same point without the promptings of speech.

‘I am so happy, you know,’ Lalla said. ‘It is all so lovely in this house and now to have you in it with me at last! Though,’ she added quickly, ‘it is you who have always been here and I who has at last arrived.’

‘But, Lalla dear, you always seemed
part
of the house to me. We never called the spare room anything but “Lalla’s room”. When other people came to stay, it seemed wrong to me that they should hang their clothes in your cupboard.’

Then she suddenly bent down and unclicked her suitcase after all, to have something to do with her trembling fingers, and wondered, ‘What is the spare room called now? I have made another booby-trap for us, where there already were too many.’

‘Did you notice,’ Lalage asked, as if she had not heard, ‘how eagerly Miss Sully ran out to greet you? She has been quite excited all the week.’

‘I can understand that.’ Sophy lifted the lid of the suitcase and looked gloomily at her creased and folded clothes. ‘She loves situations and she wanted to see how I was facing this one.’

‘Yes, to see if you were jealous of me, hoping perhaps that life here from now on would be full of interesting little scenes between us, something to sustain and nourish her while she chops the parsley – which she does – doesn’t she? – with not just
kitchen
venom?’

‘She will analyse everything we say and fit it into her conception of our relationship.’

‘She has already tried to haunt me with your mother – so beautiful she was and you are growing up to be her image.’

Sophy lifted her head from the unpacking and could not help giving a quick look into the mirror before her. ‘How absurd!’ she said. ‘If she could throw up a woman so long dead, how impatiently she must have waited for
me
to throw
myself
up.’

‘She longs for incidents. I am sure she will hover to see who pours out the tea and whether, from habit, you will go to your old place at the table.’

This was brave of Lalage and seemed to clear the air.

‘It is a good thing,’ Sophy said, ‘that you and I have read so many novels. The hackneyed dangers we should be safe from.’

‘We shall be safe
together
,’ Lalla said. ‘Loving one another,’ she added, so quietly that she seemed to be talking to herself.