Complete Short Stories (VMC) (38 page)

A long drawn-out scream came from Miss Sully’s wireless-set as Lalla crossed the hall and went softly upstairs.

When she awoke it was dark and she was still alone. She got out of bed and went to the window. Lamplight shone over leaves in the street beyond the wall and fell over the courtyard. The statues and urns looked blanched. In the centre was an ornamental stand for plants. Its wrought-iron lilies threw slanting shadows across the paving-stones; she could even see the shadows of the fuchsia blossoms – real flowers, these – swinging upon the ground.

It was a romantic place in this light, and she knelt by the window looking down at it, quite awake now and refreshed by her sleep. Then she saw that Sophy and Graham found the place romantic too. She had not noticed them at first, under the dark wall, clasped close together, as still as the tree beyond them. But before Lalla could turn away, she saw them move – they swayed lightly, like the fuchsia blossoms, as if rocked by the same faint air, of which they were so heedless.

She went back to bed and lay down and drew the covers over her, her eyes wide open to the darkness. ‘Defend me from envy, God,’ she prayed. But the poison of it gathered in her against her will and when it had filled her and she was overflowing with despair, tears broke in her like waves. Even Miss Sully, coming upstairs when the play was over, could hear her.

Lily had not considered culture – as a word or anything else – until she fell in love. As soon as that happened it, culture, descended on her. It was as if all the books Mr Ransome had ever read were thrown at her one after the other – Voltaire, Tolstoi, Balzac – the sharp names came at her, brutal spondees, brutally pronounced. She thought, though, that she hated Dostoievski most of all. ‘Yes, Dad,’ Mr Ransome’s two sons continually said, agreeing to rate Zola higher than Dickens if he wished them to, promising to remember what he had told them about Michelangelo. Painters’ names were also part of the attack, but Lily thought they sounded gentler. She had felt curiosity about someone called Leonardo when first she heard him mentioned and had wondered if he were Harry’s cousin. When she asked Harry he laughed and referred her to his father, which meant three-quarters of an hour wasted, sitting in the kitchen listening, and then it was too late for them to go for their walk. Trembling with frustrated desire, she had learnt her lesson; she asked no more questions and sat sullenly quiet whenever the enemy names began again.

Only winter courting seemed to be allowed: then, with the Thames valley giving off impenetrable vapours or taking in, day after day, torrents of rain until the river rose and spread over the fields, Harry was free to take her out; except, of course, for his two evenings at the Art School. They held hands coming back in the bus from the cinema, kissed beneath dripping trees in the muddy lane, choked and whispered in the fog.

‘Silly notion, venturing out tonight,’ Mr Ransome would tell them. ‘You’ve no right, letting her catch her death, Harry.’

‘I think it’s easing up now,’ Lily would say. ‘Just the clearing-up shower. And a spot or two of rain doesn’t do anyone any harm.’

Mr Ransome, with a daunting-looking book open in front of him, would be hurriedly unfolding his spectacles.

‘We ought to be going,’ Lily whispered.

‘Man is a political animal,’ boomed Mr Ransome, wanting to throw as many words at them as he could before they escaped, but Lily had gone, was through the scullery and already standing in the wet garden and Harry sent an apologetic smile back at his father and followed her.

‘Good Lord,’ said Lily. ‘Once he gets going.’

‘He’s a wonderful old man,’ Harry said.

‘You’re both afraid of him, I think – you and Godfrey.’

‘We
respect
him,’ Harry said sententiously. ‘He’s been a good father and since Mother died he has no one to read to in the evenings. He misses that.’

‘She did the best thing, dying,’ Lily thought.

Mr Ransome was a lock-keeper. He and his sons lived in a red-brick cottage at the side of the lock. On hot summer afternoons, the garden was what people going through in their boats called a riot of colour. The primary colours assaulted the eye – salvias, geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias were made all the more dazzling by everything being whitewashed that Mr Ransome could lay his brush on – flower-tubs, step-edges, the boulders round flower-beds, the swinging chains round the little lawns. In wintertime, it seemed that it could not really have been so bright.

Now, when all the locks down the river were closed, the cottage was lost in a cauldron of steam and the sad sound of the weir came drearily through the fog. Mr Ransome wondered how Harry and Lily could prefer the sodden lanes to a nice fire and a book to read beside it. He read so much about great passions, of men and women crossing continents because of love, and enduring hardship and peril, not just the discomforts of a dark, wet night – but he could not see Harry and Lily go out without feeling utter exasperation at their fecklessness.

‘It will be lovely when the summer comes,’ Lily sometimes said; but Harry knew that it would not be, if by ‘lovely’ she meant they would have long evenings together in the golden meadows or walking along the towing-path. ‘He does like us to get out with our sketching, Godfrey and me,’ he said.

‘I don’t mind. We can go miles away. You can sketch with one hand and I’ll sit beside you and hold the other.’

‘We couldn’t very well do that, you see, because Dad likes to come out with us.’

‘I can’t think why you bother with it when you’ve got such a nice job.’

Harry knew why he bothered. His father, self-taught painter, had once had a picture hung in a local exhibition – an oil-painting, moreover. ‘I jib at nothing,’ he had explained. The bright, varnished scene hung in the parlour now. ‘It was not for sale,’ he said, when no one bought it. Jibbing at nothing, he had used a great deal of paint and had, in some way, caught the hard, venomous colours of his own garden. ‘The Towing Path of A Sunday’ was inscribed carefully on the frame. The white chains stood out thickly, like icing piped on the canvas; the chestnut trees had pink cones of blossom stuck about them and dropped down sharp ovals of shadow on the
emerald grass. ‘If I had of had tuition,’ Mr Ransome so often said. He would see to it, he added, that his sons should not look back and have to say the same. In their earliest days they had been given paint-boxes and sketching-blocks; he had taken them to London to the National Gallery and shown them the Virgin of the Rocks and, standing in front of it, lectured them on Leonardo. They had not known which was most painful – their embarrassment or their shame at their own disloyalty in suffering it. Young as they were at the time, they realised that he was much stared at – the thin, fierce man with his square beard and so old-fashioned clothes – but they could not help feeling that he deserved it, booming away as he did in the echoing gallery. They even began to think that he expected to be noticed and took pleasure from it.

Harry and Godfrey, articled in respectable offices in the nearby town, were not quite yet a disappointment to him; for many great men mature late, their father reminded them, reach their height after middle-age: Voltaire, for one. They went on with their art classes at evening school and were painstaking enough in their desire to please; but, sometimes, looking at them and then at their feeble paintings, Mr Ransome could not help thinking that passion was missing from them.

‘They are not on fire,’ he mourned. ‘As I have been.’

Then Harry met Lily and seemed, to his father, to be less on fire than ever. ‘But it will come,’ he encouraged his sons. It must come. What had been in him so powerful a desire, so bitterly a failed attempt, could not be wasted, must be passed on, and in greater strength, too, if things were to turn out as he considered just.

Lily, impinging on his plan with her sly, mincing manner, her pout and her impatient sighs, was the eternal female enemy. He had built a bastion, a treasure-house for his sons, with all the great names they had heard from the cradle, the learning he had struggled for to make their inheritance. It had come too easily, he realised now, and Harry would rather spend an evening talking inanities, lowering his mind to Lily’s level. His attitude towards her was vexing, suggesting that he was willing, eager to learn something from her and even that she might be able to teach it: suppliant, receptive he was with her; yet it was surely for him to instruct, who knew so much, and dominate, being a man, and to concede, whatsoever he felt inclined to concede; not beg for favours.

Mr Ransome thought of his own happy married life – the woman, so gentle and conciliatory, listening to him as he read. Into those readings he had put the expression of his pleasure at being able to share with her the best he had discovered. She had sat and sewed and, when she raised her eyes to look for her scissors, she would also glance across at him and he, conscious of her doing so, would pause to meet this glance, knowing that
it would be full of humble gratitude. She had never been able to comprehend half of what he had offered her, she had muddled the great names and once dozed off after a few pages of Stendhal; but something, he thought, must have seeped into her, something of the lofty music of prose, as she listened, evening after evening of her married life. Now he missed her and so much of the sound of his own voice that had gone with her.

How different was Lily. The moment he began to read aloud, or even to quote something, down came her eyelids to half-mast. An invisible curtain dropped over her and behind it she was without any response, as if heavily drugged. He would have liked to have stuck pins in her to see if she would cry out: instead, he assaulted her – indecently, she thought, and that was why she would not listen – with Cicero and Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche and a French poet, one of his specials, called Bawdyleer. Having removed herself, as it were, she would then glance at the clock, wind a curl round her finger and suddenly loosen it to spring back against her cheek. Distracted by this, Harry would murmur, ‘Yes, Dad, I remember you telling us.’ So Mr Ransome had lost them both. ‘Come here,’ Lily seemed to be enticing his son. ‘Come behind my invisible curtain and we can think of other things and play with my hair and be alone together.’

Sometimes, but very rarely, Mr Ransome would manage to catch her unawares and force one of the names on her before she had time to bring down the curtain. Then her manner was rude and retaliatory instead of vague. ‘And who, pray, is Dosty what’s-his-name when he’s at home?’ She knew that Mr Ransome was her enemy and felt not only malice in his attitude towards her, but something she might have defined as obscenity if she had known the meaning of the word.

He – for he was at heart puritanical – had once or twice delighted to indulge in a bout of broad-mindedness. She should learn that he and some of the great thinkers of the world could face the truth unflinchingly and even some of the words the truth must be described in. To the pure, he said, all things are pure: he watched Lily’s look of prim annoyance, implying that to her they obviously were not. He was defeated, however, by the silence that fell – Lily’s and his son’s. His remark, made to seem blatant by being isolated and ignored, repeated itself in his own head and he felt his cheeks and brow darkening. He did not want to appear to have any impurity in his own mind and quickly bent down and rearranged the coals on the fire.

The spring was beginning; the puddles along the rutted lanes were blue, reflecting the bright sky, and lilac trees in cottage-gardens bore buds as small as grape-pips. Although the darkness fell later, the interval of daylight after tea was of no use to Lily, for Mr Ransome had his two sons out, whitewashing and weeding and trimming. ‘We shall have no time to do it once the season has begun,’ he said.

‘But what about us?’ Lily asked Harry.

‘I can’t help but give him a hand of an evening. It wouldn’t be right to leave it all to Godfrey.’

‘It sounds as if the summer’s going to be just as bad as the winter.’

All along, Harry had known it would be worse.

In the summer, the lock was always full, boats jostled together, smart women in motor launches stared through their dark glasses at men in rowing-boats wearing braces and knotted handkerchiefs on their heads: in the narrowness of the lock they were all resentful of their proximity to one another, and were glad, when the water had finished rising or falling, to see the gates opening slowly. The locks were an ordeal to be negotiated, not made easier by the passers-by on the tow-path who stopped to watch them lying exposed below and hoped that they would ram their craft into the gates, or take the paint off one of the white launches.

Steamers came through at intervals and then the lock was a well of noise with someone thumping at the piano in the saloon and cheery messages thrown from deck to towing-path; glasses of beer were held up to tantalise and the funny man of the party, wearing a yachting cap, sang ‘A life on the ocean wave is better than going to sea’.

The pretty stretch of river with its willows hanging down to the water and the brilliance of the lock garden brought artists, with folding stools and easels, who took up much of Mr Ransome’s time. Such an odd character they thought him, forgetting – as, of all people, the English should not – that characters are encouraged at the cost of their families’ destruction. He showed them his own painting of the same scene and they were enraptured, they called him a true primitive and talked of the Douanier Rousseau.

On summer evenings, after days of advising these amateur artists, talking about himself, bringing in a great deal about Leonardo, Mr Ransome behaved as if he had been drinking too much. He boasted, belaboured his sons with words and then, from too much excitement, surrendered to self-pity. It suddenly seemed to him that he had wasted his life: he had seen this on the face of one stranger after another. ‘You,’ they had been thinking, ‘a man who has all the great Masters at his finger-tips and can summon from memory one thundering phrase after another, who would expect to find you in such a backwater, living so humbly?’