Complete Short Stories (VMC) (82 page)

‘No, Mrs Milner comes to help me with the housework – every Tuesday and Friday.’

‘She must be a very kind old lady,’ Benny said.

‘Do you like that?’ Laura asked Sep, who was pushing jelly into his spoon with his fingers.

‘Yeah, I like this fine.’

He had suddenly cheered up. He did not mention the lolly, which Mrs Milner had put back in her pocket. All the rest of the morning, they had played excitedly with the telephone – one upstairs, in Laura’s bedroom; the other downstairs, in the hall – chattering and shouting to one another, and running to Laura to come to listen.

That evening, Harold was home earlier than usual and could not wait to complain that he had tried all day to telephone.

‘I know, dear,’ Laura said. ‘I should have stopped them, but it gave me a rest.’

‘You’ll be making a rod for everybody’s back, if you let them do just what they like all the time.’

‘It’s for such a short while – well, relatively speaking – and they haven’t got telephones at home, so the question doesn’t arise.’

‘But other people might want to ring you up.’

‘So few ever do, it’s not worth considering.’

‘Well, someone did today. Helena Western.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘There’s no need to look frightened. She wants you to take the boys to tea.’ Saying this, his voice was full of satisfaction, for he admired Helena’s husband. Helena herself wrote what he referred to as ‘clever-clever little novels’. He went on sarcastically, ‘She saw you with them from the top of a bus, and asked me when I met her later in Blackwell’s. She says she has absolutely
no
feelings about coloured people, as some of her friends apparently have.’ He was speaking in Helena’s way of stresses and breathings. ‘In fact,’ he ended, ‘she rather goes out of her way to be extra pleasant to them.’

‘So she does have feelings,’ Laura said.

She was terrified at the idea of taking the children to tea with Helena. She always felt dull and overawed in her company, and was afraid that the boys would misbehave and get out of her control, and then Helena would put it all into a novel. Already she had put Harold in one; but, luckily, he had not recognised his own transformation from professor of archaeology to barrister. Her simple trick worked, as far as he was concerned. To Harold, that character, with his vaguely left-wing opinions and opinionated turns of phrase, his quelling manner to his wife, his very appearance, could have nothing to do with him, since he had never taken silk. Everyone else had recognised and known, and Laura, among them, knew they had.

‘I’ll ring her up,’ she said; but she didn’t stir from her chair, sat staring wearily in front of her, her hands on her knees – a very resigned old woman’s attitude; Whistler’s mother. ‘I’m
too
old,’ she thought. ‘I’d be too old for my own grandchildren.’ But she had never imagined
them
like the ones upstairs in bed. She had pictured biddable little children, like Lalage and Imogen.

‘They’re good at
night
,’ she said to Harold, continuing her thoughts aloud. ‘They lie there and talk quietly, once they’re in bed. I wonder what they talk about. Us, perhaps.’ It was an alarming idea.

In the night she woke and remembered that she had not telephoned Helena. ‘I’ll do it after breakfast,’ she thought.

But she was still making toast when the telephone rang, and the boys left the table and raced to the hall ahead of her. Benny was first and, as he grabbed the receiver, Sep stood close by him, ready to shout some messages into the magical instrument. Laura hovered anxiously by, but Benny warned her off with staring eyes. ‘Be polite,’ she whispered imploringly.

‘Yep, my name’s Benny,’ he was saying.

Then he listened, with a look of rapture. It was his first real telephone conversation, and Sep was standing by, shivering with impatience and envy.

‘Yep, that’ll be OK,’ said Benny, grinning. ‘What day?’

Laura put out her hand, but he shrank back, clutching the receiver. ‘I got the message,’ he hissed at her. ‘Yep, he’s here,’ he said, into the telephone. Sep smiled self-consciously and drew himself up as he took the receiver. ‘Yeah, I am Septimus Alexander Smith.’ He gave his high, bubbly chuckle. ‘Sure I’ll come there.’ To prolong the conversation, he went on, ‘Can my friend Benny Reece come, too? Can Laura come?’ Then he frowned, looking up at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. ‘Can my father Alexander Leroy Smith come?’

Laura made another darting movement.

‘Well, no, he can’t then,’ Sep said, ‘because he’s dead.’

This doubled him up with mirth, and it was a long time before he could bring himself to say good-bye. When he had done so, he quickly put the receiver down.

‘Someone asked me to tea,’ he told Laura. ‘I said, “Yeah, sure I come.”’

‘And me,’ said Benny.

‘Who was it?’ Laura asked, although she knew.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sep. ‘I don’t know
who
that was.’

When later and secretly, Laura telephoned Helena, Helena said, ‘Aren’t they simply
devastating
boys?’

‘How did the tea party go?’ Harold asked.

They had all arrived back home together – he, from a meeting; Laura and the boys from Helena’s.

‘They were good,’ Laura said, which was all that mattered. She drew them to her, one on either side. It was her movement of gratitude towards them. They had not let her down. They had played quietly at a fishing game with real water and magnetised tin fish, had eaten unfamiliar things, such as anchovy toast and brandy-snaps, without any expression of alarm or revulsion: they had helped carry the tea-things indoors from the lawn. Helena had been surprisingly clever with them. She made them laugh, as seldom Laura could. She struck the right note from the beginning. When Benny picked up sixpence from the gravelled path, she thanked him casually and put it in her pocket. Laura was grateful to her for that and proud that Benny ran away at once so unconcernedly. When Helena had praised them for their good behaviour, Laura had blushed with pleasure, just as if they were her own children.

‘She is really very nice,’ Laura said later, thinking still of her successful afternoon with Helena.

‘Yes, she talks too much, that’s all.’

Harold was pleased with Laura for having got on well with his colleague’s wife. It was so long since he had tried to urge Laura into academic circles, and for years he had given up trying. Now, sensing his pleasure, her own was enhanced.

‘When we were coming away,’ Laura said, ‘Helena whispered to me, “Aren’t they simply
dev
astating?”’

‘You’ve exactly caught her tone.’

At that moment, they heard from the garden, Benny also exactly catching her tone.

‘Let’s have the bat, there’s a little pet,’ he mimicked, trying to snatch the old tennis-racquet from Sep.

‘You sod off,’ drawled Sep.

‘Oh, my dear, you shake me rigid.’

Sep began his doubling-up-with-laughter routine; first, in silence, bowed over, lifting one leg then another up to his chest, stamping the ground. It was like the start of a tribal dance, Laura thought, watching him from the window; then the pace quickened, he skipped about, and laughed, with his head thrown back, and tears rolled down his face. Benny looked on, smirking a little, obviously proud that his wit should have had such an effect. Round and round went Sep, his loose limbs moving like pistons. ‘Yeah, you shake me rigid,’ he shouted. ‘You shake me entirely rigid.’ Benny, after hesitating, joined in. They circled the lawn, and disappeared into the shrubbery.

‘She
did
say that. Helena,’ Laura said, turning to Harold. ‘When Benny was going on about something he’d done she said, “My dear, you shake me entirely rigid.”’ Then Laura added thoughtfully, ‘I wonder if they are as good at imitating
us
, when they’re lying up there in bed, talking.’

‘A sobering thought,’ said Harold, who could not believe he had any particular idiosyncrasies to be copied. ‘Oh, God, someone’s broken one of my sherds,’ he suddenly cried, stooping to pick up two pieces of pottery from the floor. His agonised shout brought Sep to the French windows, and he stood there, bewildered.

As the pottery had been broken before, he hadn’t bothered to pick it up, or confess. The day before, he had broken a whole cup and nothing had happened. Now this grown man was bowed over as if in pain, staring at the fragments in his hand. Sep crept back into the shrubbery.

The fortnight, miraculously, was passing. Laura could now say, ‘This time next week.’ She would do gardening, get her hair done, clean all the paint. Often, she wondered about the kind of homes the other children had gone to – those children she had glimpsed on the train; and she imagined them
staying on farms, helping with the animals, looked after by buxom farmers’ wives – pale London children, growing gratifyingly brown, filling out, going home at last with roses in their cheeks. She could see no difference in Sep and Benny.

What they had really got from the holiday was one another. It touched her to see them going off into the shrubbery with arms about one another’s shoulders, and to listen to their peaceful murmuring as they lay in bed, to hear their shared jokes. They quarrelled a great deal, over the tennis-racquet or Harold’s old cricket-bat, and Sep was constantly casting himself down on the grass and weeping, if he were out at cricket, or could not get Benny out.

It was he who would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on Laura’s face while she read to him. Benny would wander restlessly about, waiting for the story to be finished. If he interrupted, Sep would put his hand imploringly on Laura’s arm, silently willing her to continue.

Benny liked her to play the piano. It was the only time she was admired. They would dance gravely about the room, with their bottles of Coca-Cola, sucking through straws, choking, heads bobbing up and down. Once, at the end of a concert of nursery-rhymes, Laura played ‘God Save the Queen’, and Sep rushed at her, trying to shut the lid down on her hands. ‘I don’t like that,’ he keened. ‘My mam don’t like “God Save the Queen” neither. She say “God save
me
”.’

‘Get out,’ said Benny, kicking him on the shin. ‘You’re shaking me entirely rigid.’

On the second Sunday, they decided that they must go to church. They had a sudden curiosity about it, and a yearning to sing hymns.

‘Well, take them,’ said liberal-minded and agnostic Harold to Laura.

But it was almost time to put the sirloin into the oven. ‘We did sign that form,’ she said in a low voice. ‘To say we’d take them if they wanted to go.’

‘Do you
really
want to go?’ Harold asked, turning to the boys, who were wanting to go more and more as the discussion went on. ‘Oh, God!’ he groaned – inappropriately, Laura thought.

‘What religion are you, anyway?’ he asked them.

‘I am a Christian,’ Sep said with great dignity.

‘Me, too,’ said Benny.

‘What time does it begin?’ Harold asked, turning back to Laura.

‘At eleven o’clock.’

‘Isn’t there some kids’ service they can go to on their own?’

‘Not in August, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, God!’ he said again.

Laura watched them setting out; rather overawed, the two boys; it was the first time they had been out alone with him.

She had a quiet morning in the kitchen. Not long after twelve o’clock they returned. The boys at once raced for the cricket-bat, and fought over it, while Harold poured himself out a glass of beer.

‘How did it go?’ asked Laura.

‘Awful! Lord, I felt such a fool.’

‘Did they misbehave, then?’

‘Oh, no, they were perfectly good – except that for some reason Benny kept holding his nose. But I knew so many people there. And the Vicar shook hands with me afterwards and said, “We are especially glad to see
you
.” The embarrassment!’

‘It must have shaken you entirely rigid,’ Laura said, smiling as she basted the beef. Harold looked at her as if for the first time in years. She so seldom tried to be amusing.

At lunch, she asked the boys if they had enjoyed their morning.

‘Church smelt nasty,’ Benny said, making a face.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Sep. ‘I prefer my own country. I prefer Christians.’

‘Me, too,’ Benny said. ‘Give me Christians any day.’

‘Has it been a success?’ Laura asked Harold. ‘For them, I mean.’

It was their last night – Sep’s and Benny’s – and she wondered if her feeling of being on the verge of tears was entirely from tiredness. For the past fortnight, she had reeled into bed, and slept without moving.

A success for
them
? She could not be quite sure; but it had been a success for her, and for Harold. In the evenings, they had so much to talk about, and Harold, basking in his popularity, had been genial and considerate.

Laura, the boys had treated as a piece of furniture, or a slave, and humbly she accepted her place in their minds. She was a woman who had never had any high opinions of herself.

‘No more cricket,’ she said. She had been made to play for hours – always wicket-keeper, running into the shrubs for lost balls while Sep and Benny rested full-length on the grass.

‘He has a lovely action,’ she had said to Harold one evening, watching Sep taking his long run up to bowl. ‘He might be a great athlete one day.’

‘It couldn’t happen,’ Harold said. ‘Don’t you see, he has rickets?’

One of her children with rickets, she had thought, stricken.

Now, on this last evening, the children were in bed. She and Harold were sitting by the drawing-room window, talking about them. There was a sudden scampering along the landing and Laura said, ‘It’s only one of them going to the toilet.’

‘The
what
?’

‘They ticked me off for saying “lavatory”,’ she said placidly. ‘Benny said it was a bad word.’

She loved to make Harold laugh, and several times lately she had managed to amuse him, with stories she had to recount.

‘I shan’t like saying good-bye,’ she said awkwardly.

‘No,’ said Harold. He got up and walked about the room, examined his shelves of pottery fragments. ‘It’s been a lot of work for you, Laura.’