Complete Short Stories (VMC) (57 page)

The air was bright with summer sounds, voices across the water and rooks up in the elm trees. Roger stood back listening in a dream to the good-byes and thank yous. Nor was
this
the end of the world, he told himself. Etta would come again and, better than that, they would also grow older and so be less at the mercy of circumstances. He would be in a position to command his life and turn occasions to his own advantage. Meanwhile, he had done what he could. None the less, he felt such dejection, such an overwhelming conviction that it was the end of the world after all, that he could not watch the car go down the drive, and he turned and walked quickly – rudely, off-handedly, his mother thought – back to the house.

Mrs Salkeld, driving homewards in the lowering sun, knew that Etta had tears in her eyes. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,’ she said. Without waiting for an answer, she added: ‘They are very charming people.’ She had
always suspected charm and rarely spoke of it, but in this case the adjective seemed called for.

Mr Lippmann would be coming back from London about now, Etta was thinking. ‘And David will bring Nora. They will all be on the terrace having drinks – dry martinis, not sherry.’

She was grateful to her mother about the sherry and understood that it had been an effort towards meeting Mrs Lippmann’s world half-way, and on the way back, she had not murmured one word of criticism – for their worldliness or extravagance or the vulgar opulence of their furnishings. She had even made a kind remark about them.

I might buy her a new dress, Mrs Salkeld thought – something like the one Sarah was wearing. Though it does seem a criminal waste when she has all her good school clothes to wear out.

They had come on to the main road, and evening traffic streamed by. In the distance the gas holder looked pearl grey and the smoke from factories was pink in the sunset. They were nearly home. Etta, who had blinked her tears back from her eyes, took a sharp breath, almost a sigh.

Their own street with its tall houses was in shadow. ‘I wish we had a cat,’ said Etta, as she got out of the car and saw the next door tabby looking through the garden railings. She imagined burying her face in its warm fur, it loving only her. To her surprise, her mother said: ‘Why not?’ Briskly, she went up the steps and turned the key with its familiar grating sound in the lock. The house, with its smell – familiar, too – of floor polish and stuffiness, looked secretive. Mrs Salkeld, hardly noticing this, hurried to the kitchen to put the casserole of chicken in the oven.

Etta carried her suitcase upstairs. On the dressing-table was a jar of marigolds. She was touched by this – just when she did not want to be touched. She turned her back on them and opened her case. On the top was the book she had left on the terrace. Roger had brought it to her at the last moment. Taking it now, she found a letter inside. Simply ‘Etta’ was written on the envelope.

Roger had felt that he had done all he was capable of and that was to write in the letter those things he could not have brought himself to say, even if he had had an opportunity. No love letter could have been less anticipated and Etta read it twice before she could realise that it was neither a joke nor a mistake. It was the most extraordinary happening of her life, the most incredible.

Her breathing grew slower and deeper as she sat staring before her, pondering her mounting sense of power. It was as if the whole Lippmann family – Nora as well – had proposed to her. To marry Roger – a long, long time ahead though she must wait to do so – would be the best possible way of belonging.

She got up stiffly – for her limbs now seemed too clumsy a part of her body with its fly-away heart and giddy head – she went over to the dressing-table and stared at herself in the glass. ‘I am I,’ she thought, but she could not believe it. She stared and stared, but could not take in the tantalising idea.

After a while, she began to unpack. The room was a place of transit, her temporary residence. When she had made it tidy, she went downstairs to thank her mother for the marigolds.

Where the lawn was in shadow from the house, the watering-spray flung dazzling aigrettes into the air. The scent of the wet earth, the sound of dripping rose-leaves was delicious.

The round marble table was abandoned in the sun, a butterfly hovered above it, both blindingly white. Too hot, Lillah had decided, and had taken her chair and her sewing into the shade; but the damage was done, and she began to feel giddy. Mrs Hatton made her go upstairs and drink salt water and lie on her bed.

‘It’s a swine, isn’t it?’ the gardener said, meaning the weather. He was speaking to the postman, who crunched by on the gravel drive with letters in his hand.

‘Too sudden,’ the postman agreed, stopping for a moment, watching the other man work, the brown hand moving slow as a toad among the geraniums, tweaking up tiny weeds. ‘A criminal colour, that bright red,’ he said. ‘Hurts my eyes to look at it. I always preferred the white ones.’

He continued slowly up the drive, hoping to be seen from the house by Mrs Hatton the cook, and offered tea.

No one saw him, for the curtains, hardly stirring, were drawn across the open windows. He stepped into the hall and laid the letters on the brass tray on the table. He suffered a fit of noisy coughing, stood with bowed head after it, listening, but heard not a sound and made off down the drive again.

The letters – what Lillah would call a tradesman’s lot – stayed there until Richard came home. It was six o’clock then and hardly any cooler. The cats lay on the stone floor like cast-off furs. One of them got up and stretched and came towards him, its sides hanging, very thin, for it did not fancy its food in this weather. Listlessly, it rubbed its head against his leg, smelt the streets of London on his shoes and wandered, repelled, back to its place and flopped again.

Mrs Hatton, neat as a new pin, came down the back stairs to the kitchen, having napped and tidied up and now, ready for the fray, pinned a clean, folded napkin round her head, as if it were a Stilton cheese. She took the grey and white fish off the ice and, looking grim, began to fillet.
All her movements were slow, so that she should not get hot. She even sang under her breath; although yearningly – for a Wiltshire woman – about Galway Bay.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to hold the fort,’ Lillah told her husband. ‘I’ll try again later, but at the moment I can’t put my feet to the ground.’

She lay on the bed, wrapped in a white kimono. The bedroom was cool to Richard, after the hot pavements and the asphyxiating train. His clothes clung to him, he felt that this room was no place for him and longed to plunge into the river, a long dive between the silken, trailing weeds. But Lillah said there would not be time.

She had nothing to do all day but keep herself cool, he thought, and she had not even managed that. He held the curtain aside, so that at least he could look at the river. It flowed by at the foot of the garden, beyond the urns of geraniums where the lawn sloped down to the mooring-stage. On the evenings when there was dinghy-racing from the club, white sails clustered there, tipping and rocking, caught in the sheltered curve of river without wind. There was none tonight. There was no breath of air.

‘Too late to put the Foresters off,’ Lillah said. ‘I suppose.’

Although actressy in so many other ways, she lacked the old trouper’s temperament, and her audiences – even such a loyal one as the Foresters – were not considered first if she were out of humour.

‘Do you mean you won’t come down at all?’ he asked in consternation.

‘Of course, I’ll try. I did a little while ago. You must leave me as long as you can, please, darling. Every minute I think it must get cooler, that the dizziness will go.’

She sighed and stirred, then stretched her arm towards him. It looked imploring, but as he moved towards her was withdrawn. She crooked it under her head, and stared up at the ceiling.

‘A quick wash, then,’ he said, turning to the door.

‘Did Mrs Hatton put the wine on ice, I wonder,’ Lillah said, not exactly giving him instructions to go and find out, but getting that effect.

Richard went to the kitchen as soon as he could, and found that Mrs Hatton had remembered the wine. She was well forward, she said. And it was certainly hot, she agreed, but nothing to the climate in some parts of the world.

Once upon a time, she had made what she called ‘the round trip’, on a legacy from an employer, and travel had changed her life. She had returned to another kitchen, but so enriched that her mind was forever roaming, as she stirred and whisked and sieved. ‘Bermuda, you’d like, sir,’ she once told Richard, as he was setting off for a short holiday in Suffolk.

‘The heat’s knocked Madam,’ she remarked, and took up some steak and began to knock that. ‘I got her to drink some salt water. We always did that in India, I told her. “It will put back what you’ve perspired,” I said.’ She had indeed told Lillah this and Lillah had disdained to listen, drinking quickly to prevent more of such homely hints. ‘You learn to respect the sun when you’ve been in the tropics,’ Mrs Hatton informed Richard.

‘No doubt you do,’ he said. ‘I never was east of Biarritz in all my life.’

‘If Madam wants help dressing, I can spare a minute. I’m quite nicely forward.’

‘We can always rely on you,’ he said hurriedly, looking about him in a flustered manner, forgetting what on earth it was that had suddenly come into his mind while she was talking.

‘The ice is in the drawing-room on the tray,’ she said.

She could even recapture and read thoughts that had flown from him. She was always more attuned to the master of the house than to the mistress. ‘I laid it all out ready.’

‘Yes, you think of everything.’

‘It’s simple enough when you’re on your own. It’s when there are two of you that things get overlooked.’

‘I could have swum, after all,’ Richard thought.

But that moment he heard a car coming up the drive, and went out to the hall door to greet the Foresters, relieved to know that at last Lillah had decided to get up again and dress.

A small, open car swung round the circle of gravel in front of the house and, alone in it, bare-shouldered, with hair knotted up on top, Lillah’s niece, Arabella, looked as if she were naked, she might have been sitting up in her bath.

‘I won’t stop a second if you would rather not,’ she said, as the car pulled up.

‘I thought you were stark naked,’ Richard said, opening the door and looking with interest at her small, white frock – which was sparsely patterned with strawberries – and at her shining, tanned legs.

‘I’ll only come in for a minute,’ she said, when she had jumped out of the car. She put her thin arms round his neck and kissed him. They were very long arms, he thought, and seemed to have been flung over his head like a lasso. Then she stepped back and hauled out of the car a large wicker hamper.

‘Are you picnicking?’ he asked.

She looked surprised. ‘This is only my make-up,’ she explained. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I shan’t stay the night. But I must have it with me. My cigarettes are in it.’

‘And your shoes?’ he asked, for she was crossing the gravel barefoot.

‘Maybe,’ she said, nodding. ‘Oh, it’s cool!’ She stood in the hall and let out a deep breath. ‘I’ve been in some bogus-looking pub all day long wearing a chinchilla coat – one of those snobbish photographs; playing darts with the locals, draped in fur and choked with pearls and all the mates grinning and enjoying the joke. So hot.’

‘Lillah’s not been well all day.’

‘Oh, poor old thing. I’ll tell you what, Richard – though I promise not to stay one moment – can I just slake my thirst before I go? Oh, you’ve got people coming,’ she said, passing the open dining-room door, seeing the table. ‘That settles it. I’ll run out the back way with my empty glass the minute they arrive.’

Richard wished that Lillah had been down to answer for him and he poured out the drink quickly and handed it to Arabella.

She picked up ice with her fingers and dropped it into her glass and took another piece and ran it round the nape of her neck and up and down the insides of her arms. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ she asked.

‘The heat, you know.’

‘Oh, I
know
. A chinchilla coat, if you please. Oh, I told you. I’ll just dash up and say good-bye to her. Who’s coming?’

‘The Foresters. John and Helen.’

‘Well, do give them my love.’

She ran upstairs, still holding the lump of ice in her fist, and Richard stood staring in a disturbed way at her wicker basket lying on a chair.

Lillah, whose bedroom, at the back of the house, overlooked the river, had not heard the car and answered rather suspiciously when Arabella knocked on the door.

She was at the dressing-table powdering her white shoulders, and turned, looking far from welcoming, to be kissed and then leant towards the glass again and wiped the lipstick off her cheek.

‘What are you up to, Arabella?’

‘I’ve been at Henley all day long, playing darts in a pub and wearing fur coats. I was just going home, when I thought that being in striking distance, I would look in for a drink.’

She sat down on a brocade-covered chair and sucked her ice cube. ‘I’m not staying a minute, though.’

‘How is your mother?’

‘Oh, you’re not well, Richard was saying. I’m so sorry. I was quite forgetting. I expect it’s the heat. I know
I’ve
sweltered all day long. Guess what I had for lunch. A cheese sandwich. But not to worry, I’ll be home in an hour and a half with any luck. You look so wonderfully cool, Lillah. It’s the most elegant dress. The Poor Man’s Lady Diana Duff Cooper,
Mother and I always call you. Don’t let me hinder you, but I must shake out my hair.’

She wandered round the room, looking for somewhere to put the piece of melting ice and at last threw it out of the window. Then she took the pins from her bright hair and shook it against her bare shoulders.

‘I like the colour of your hair today,’ Lillah said.

‘Oh, thank you. And I simply dote on yours.’

‘Well, mine is always the same.’