Complete Short Stories (VMC) (80 page)

‘Shall we try
pâté de foie gras
tomorrow?’ Vron suggested.

‘No, it’s frightfully cruel,’ he said, looking shocked.

They sampled a very small bottle of cherry brandy, taking it from a tablespoon like medicine; pulling faces. They were rather prim and disapproving where alcohol was concerned. It seemed to them that it was the clever ones who did not drink, and it was quite clear to them that those who did so were exploited. In the old days, they had only to pour more and more brandy into Aunt’s glass, topping it up constantly, to get practically anything they wanted. She usually gave in. If she did not, they pretended that she had, and she would easily be convinced. ‘But, Aunt, don’t you remember promising last night?’ In shame, she would quickly agree that it had been so; had for a moment slipped her memory.

Muzzy, and just where they wanted her, she deteriorated. They flourished. And the lessons they most needed and respected were those they had taught themselves.

‘I shall speak to Charlie Garter,’ Miss Bassage said, in her angry, wobbly voice, standing with her fists on her hips, blocking their way to the stairs.

‘Who he?’ asked Willie insolently, bending to tie his shoe-lace just to his liking, as if the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to go upstairs.

‘Police Constable Garter to you,’ Miss Bassage said.

Vron noted tears of anger in her eyes. Of
anger
! she thought. Such an unusual manifestation.
She
knew who PC Garter was. She took more interest in people than did Willie. She had seen the constable going up Enniskillen Grove, padding along with his slow pace. She had recognised him at once when she met him coming out of Miss Bassage’s kitchen to the hall where she, Vron, stood with a little tray of
petits fours
she had just pinched scattered on the floor.

‘Allow me,’ said PC Garter stopping. He looked quite different, she thought, holding his helmet in one hand, snatching up thieved
petits fours
with the other; really looked so unfamiliar, bare-headed. She felt quite shy of him in this informal situation, as if she had caught him off his guard.

He had just been having a cup of tea with Miss Bassage, she guessed.
They went to the same Wesleyan Chapel. Miss Bassage had stood watching him, with the look which should be accompanied by purring.

She was not purring now.

‘I shall write to your aunt,’ she went on.

Willie was still arranging his shoe-laces. (‘Oh, they
rile
me,’ she would tell PC Garter later on. ‘They just
rile
me.’)

‘Do my ears deceive me?’ Vron asked, unwinding a marabou stole from her neck. ‘Oh, dear! That dewdrop!’ she thought.

‘A little common consideration. You’re not the only people in the world, nor in this house, either.’

Someone in a room below had complained of the noise; for Vron and Willie would come back from their forays in the early evening, dump the loot, turn up the wireless very loud, and dance. They danced non-stop, as gay as birds in April.

Really, Vron thought, her feet were itching already, while she stood there whirling the marabou stole in circles.

‘Or
go
–
you
–
will
,’ Miss Bassage ended, stepping across the hall at last, slamming the kitchen door. She had threatened PC Garter, their aunt, and expulsion. She could think of nothing else, and what she
had
thought of would surely be enough.

With hands over their mouths, Vron and Willie bolted upstairs, flung themselves into the room, laughing convulsively.

‘It’s “akimbo”, isn’t it, like this?’ Willie asked, imitating Miss Bassage.

They collapsed into chairs, writhing with laughter, and Vron stuffed her stole into her mouth, then wiped her eyes with it.

But they were too hungry to go on laughing for long. Vron fetched the bread-knife, and cut a couple of lobsters in half. While they ate them, they felt at peace; they enjoyed the contentment of those who have discovered their real way of life; the deepest satisfaction.

‘What
else
do we want?’ Vron asked, looking round the crowded room.

‘Those portable record-players are rather neat,’ said Willie, putting a lobster claw on the floor, and stamping on it. ‘Not too big, either.’

‘And to think of all the records we could get,’ said Vron. ‘And dead easy, too.’

After supper, they switched on the transistor-set and danced, obliged to make up a kind of very slow twist to the last movement of Brahms’ Symphony Number One.

‘You see what I mean about the record-player?’ said Vron. ‘This is hopeless.’

They danced on, however, and with vigour, not hearing someone banging furiously on the ceiling below.

‘So light, you could eat it with your teeth out,’ said PC Garter, praising Miss Bassage’s Victoria sponge.

‘Oh, I fancied it wasn’t quite up to the usual,’ she said, flushing with pleasure.

At this moment, Vron and Willie were going upstairs, with the record-player in a large rush basket, hidden under packets of popcorn. Soon all hell was let loose. The tenant in the room below banged at his ceiling until he was breathless with exertion and anger. Then he descended the stairs and knocked on Miss Bassage’s kitchen door.

‘Well,
this
is final,’ she said grimly. ‘This has done it. They’ll have to go. I wrote to their aunt, but not a word from her. I’ve
warned
them enough.’

Her eyes strayed to PC Garter, sitting there so happily, drinking tea, his helmet on the horsehair sofa behind him. She hesitated. ‘A word from you,’ she suggested. ‘With the authority of the law behind it.’ For, indeed, how
could
she turn them out into the street, at their age, having had Willie, at least, practically put into her care?

‘Quite unofficial, of course,’ she added.

PC Garter rose and took up his helmet. As he and Miss Bassage climbed the two flights of stairs, the clamour from above grew louder, beat down on them. Miss Bassage put her hands over her ears.

The dancing stopped as he flung open the door. Vron and Willie froze like statues. Their faces were pink, making their green eyes look greener; their hair was tangled.

The record came to an end; and in the sudden silence, PC Garter said, ‘
Well
, now,’ and took a slow stride or two forward, crunching on popcorn which was scattered over the floor. Neither Vron nor Willie moved. Miss Bassage’s eyes, astonished, flew about the room. PC Garter’s, more calculating and interested, travelled slowly, at loot piled on loot; chairs, bed, cupboard and chest tops heaped with plunder.

‘Well, well,
well
,’ he said, taking a turn about the room, picking up a large pot of caviare and reading the label aloud. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said again. All the time, he was watched by the statues, followed by the thoughtful-looking bright green eyes, in the now pale faces.

When Aunt was asked questions about the children – often by malicious, winking people who already knew the answer – she would think for a little, trying to gather what was left of her ravelled wits, and say at last, ‘They are continuing their education.’ And this was true.

Laura was always too early; and this was as bad as being late, her husband, who was always late himself, told her. She sat in her car in the empty railway station approach, feeling very sick, from dread.

It was half-past eleven on a summer morning. The country station was almost spellbound in silence, and there was, to Laura, a dreadful sense of self-absorption – in herself – in the stillness of the only porter standing on the platform, staring down the line: even – perhaps especially – in inanimate things; all were menacingly intent on being themselves, and separately themselves – the slanting shadow of railings across the platform, the glossiness of leaves, and the closed door of the office looking more closed, she thought, than any door she had ever seen.

She got out of the car and went into the station walking up and down the platform in a panic. It was a beautiful morning. If only the children weren’t coming then she could have enjoyed it.

The children were coming from London. It was Harold’s idea to have them, some time back, in March, when he read of a scheme to give London children a summer holiday in the country. This he might have read without interest, but the words ‘Some of the children will be coloured’ caught his eye. He seemed to find a slight tinge of warning in the phrase; the more he thought it over, the more he was convinced. He had made a long speech to Laura about children being the great equalisers, and that we should learn from them, that to insinuate the stale prejudices of their elders into their fresh, fair minds was such a sin that he could not think of a worse one.

He knew very little about children. His students had passed beyond the blessed age, and shades of the prison-house had closed about them. His own children were even older, grown-up and gone away; but, while they were young, they had done nothing to destroy his faith in them, or blur the idea of them he had in his mind, and his feeling of humility in their presence. They had been good children carefully dealt with and easy to handle. There had scarcely been a cloud over their growing-up. Any little bothers Laura had hidden from him.

In March, the end of July was a long way away. Laura, who was lonely
in middle-age, seemed to herself to be frittering away her days, just waiting for her grandchildren to be born: she had agreed with Harold’s suggestion. She would have agreed anyway, whatever it was, as it was her nature – and his – for her to do so. It would be rather exciting to have two children to stay – to have the beds in Imogen’s and Lalage’s room slept in again. ‘We could have two boys, or two girls,’ Harold said. ‘No stipulation, but that they must be coloured.’

Now
he
was making differences, but Laura did not remark upon it. All she said was, ‘What will they do all the time?’

‘What our own children used to do – play in the garden, go for picnics …’

‘On wet days?’

‘Dress up,’ he said at once.

She remembered Imogen and Lalage in her old hats and dresses, slopping about in her big shoes, see-sawing on high heels, and she had to turn her head away, and there were tears in her eyes.

Her children had been her life, and her grandchildren one day would be; but here was an empty space. Life had fallen away from her. She had never been clever like the other professors’ wives, or managed to have what they called ‘outside interests’. Committees frightened her, and good works made her feel embarrassed and clumsy.

She
was
a clumsy person – gentle, but clumsy. Pacing up and down the platform, she had an ungainly walk – legs stiffly apart, head a little poked forward because she had poor sight. She was short and squarely-built and her clothes were never right; often she looked dishevelled, sometimes even battered.

This morning, she wore a label pinned to her breast, so that the children’s escort would recognise her when the train drew in; but she felt self-conscious about it and covered it with her hand, though there was no one but the porter to see.

The signal dropped, as if a guillotine had come crashing down, and her heart seemed to crash down with it. ‘Two boys!’ she thought. Somehow, she had imagined girls. She was used to girls, and shy of boys.

The printed form had come a day or two ago and had increased the panic which had gradually been gathering. Six-year-old boys, and she had pictured perhaps eight-or ten-year-old girls, whom she could teach to sew and make cakes for tea, and press wild flowers as she had taught Imogen and Lalage to do.

Flurried and anxious entertaining at home; interviewing headmistresses; once – shied away from failure – opening a sale-of-work in the village – these agonies to her diffident nature seemed nothing to the nervousness she felt now, as the train appeared round the bend. She simply wasn’t good
with children – only with her own.
Their
friends had frightened her, had been mouse-quiet and glum, or had got out of hand, and she herself had been too shy either to intrude or clamp down. When she met children – perhaps the small grandchildren of her acquaintances, she would only smile, perhaps awkwardly touch a cheek with her finger. If she were asked to hold a baby, she was fearful lest it should cry, and often it would, sensing lack of assurance in her clasp.

The train came in and slowed up. ‘Suppose that I can’t find them,’ she thought, and she went anxiously from window to window, her label uncovered now. ‘And suppose they cry for their mothers and want to go home.’

A tall, authoritative woman, also wearing a label, leant out of a window, saw her and signalled curtly. She had a compartment full of little children in her charge to be delivered about Oxfordshire. Only two got out on to this platform, Laura’s two, Septimus Smith and Benny Reece. They wore tickets, too, with their names printed on them.

Benny was much lighter in complexion than Septimus. He was obviously a half-caste and Laura hoped that this would count in Harold’s eyes. It might even be one point up. They stood on the platform, looking about them, holding their little cardboard cases.