Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (12 page)

‘Is there any kind of cheese you prefer?’ she asked.

‘I like all kinds. I leave it to you. But I insist on paying for it.’

‘I have a Harrods’ card,’ Mrs Palfrey said, as if, because of this, money was not involved.

‘There is a tin of beans at home,’ Ludo said, trying to contribute something to the feast.

‘Splendid!’ Mrs Palfrey said, setting off, walking so much better now that spring had come.

Ludo leaned back, watching her, wondering about the evening before him. The warmth from the pie he held was comforting. He hoped it wasn’t going to slop about. He could faintly smell it through its wrappings, and felt hungry.

Mrs Palfrey returned with a carrier-bag with ‘Harrods’ printed on it. She set it down carefully beside him and said, ‘You could bring your sandwiches and your writing things in that. It would make you look more authentic. As a shopper, I mean.’

‘You think of everything.’

Mrs Palfrey thought, I do where you’re concerned, my dear Desmond. I try to go one step ahead of you, to discover what you want. She felt suddenly tired, from love. A cup of tea and a little lie-down on returning to the Claremont would set her right, she decided, and then she would change into her maroon wool and parade herself a little before the other ladies. ‘I shan’t be in to dinner,’ she would say.

‘I hope you can manage to carry it all,’ she said to Ludo. Tor I am sure that I couldn’t. The pie could balance on the top of the rest.’

‘No problem. I have the strength. Why, I could lift
you
up in my arms just as if you were a little baby,’ he said in – for some reason – an Irish accent. A woman sitting in the chair next to him turned sharply. Mrs Palfrey and Ludo, at this, looked steadily at one another, suppressing laughter.

‘What time?’ she then whispered, like a girl.

‘Seven-thirty for eight,’ he whispered back.

She stumped off to the front entrance to put herself in the care of the commissionaire for a taxi. She was spending money recklessly today; but it’s only once in a while, she told herself, making her way through Jewelry and Gloves.

‘Seven-thirty for eight.’ She smiled. Oh, he’s a funny boy. She wished that she had had a son. But he’d be old now. Her grandson? There was always Desmond, the real Desmond. She shrugged. Someone held open the great glass door for her. There never
was
Desmond, and thank heaven for that.

‘Good-bye, madam. Thank you. So nice to see you again. Keep well,’ said the commissionaire, palming her sixpence, smiling and nodding. She always gave sixpence. Always had.

The spring evening was beautiful. It was keeping light so late, people said They were drawing out, the days. Behind the budding lilacs in the Square, huge cumulus clouds reflected the setting sun, looking like a range of the Alps. Mrs Palfrey, half-closing her eyes, could imagine them as snow. Doing so, she veered a little across the pavement, then pulled herself together. She was so full of happiness, even though nobody had been about in the vestibule to see her leave. No matter: she would be missed at dinner.

Starlings, gathering to roost on the ledges of buildings, were making a commotion above her. At a street corner, a man was wheeling away a barrow of daffodils and irises, and the barrow was draped with artificial grass so much more brilliant than the sad stuff in the gardens of the Square. Little dogs were being taken for their evening walks, and people strolled along, looking through the railings at budding shrubs, noticing things
about them as if for the first time this year.

As she carefully descended the area steps, Mrs Palfrey could see Ludo in the lighted room, putting something on the table.

He opened the door to her and took her coat and complimented her upon her string of pearls, as if he could not think of anything else to say. To her disappointment, there was suddenly an air of constraint between them. She touched the pearls from nervousness, went over to the gas-fire and chafed her hands, though she was not cold. He watched her. Veins the colour of pewter branched over the back of those transparent hands. He took in every detail of her while she bent there before the fire – her heavy rings, the neatly-pleated handkerchief tucked in her cuff, folds of skin about her jowl, hanging loose. She had taken age as it came, and it had come apace.

She felt him looking at her, and straightened her back, with a creaking, uneasy sound, like an old tree in a high wind. His gaze at once slithered away, and he began to touch things on the table, rearranging what he had already set out – plates (there was nowhere to warm them, she realised, save on the floor before the gas-fire), odd knives and forks, two Kleenex tissues for napkins. He had gone to some thought and trouble; had perhaps become a little fussed. There was also a half bottle of Mateus Rosé; one glass, and a yoghourt carton in place of the second.

‘There was no time to get the silver from the bank,’ he said, standing back and surveying the table.

‘This is fun for me,’ she said. But is it? she wondered. Having said the words, she dared not dwell on them.

The pie was warming – but never would right through – on an asbestos mat above the gas-fire. Mrs Palfrey, having imagined an oven, now saw that the pie was an embarrassment. And she had put him to the expense of the wine, so really it was
she
who was the embarrassment.

He moved away from the table and she went to the window and looked up at the darkening street. No one passed.

‘I am afraid it is Cyprus – Cypriot,’ he said, handing her a little glass with
‘OW
painted on it. ‘Not like your usual Bristol Cream.’

Oh, sherry, too! Mrs Palfrey thought, feeling drowned in shame.

‘Mine has
“Sköl”
on it,’ Ludo said, raising his glass. ‘They were thrown in with the rest of the furniture, and I find them quite charming.
“Salute”,
got broken. To your good health, Mrs Palfrey, Grandmamma!’

‘Oh, to yours!’ she said.

‘Is it too horrible?’ he asked anxiously.

‘It is quite delicious,’ she replied, then, cancelling the validity of that, added, ‘I don’t know one kind of sherry from another.’

‘I sometimes wonder what sort of person lived here before, and bought them – the glasses – and left them. They would hardly be provided by the landlord, would they?
Things
don’t matter much to me; or, rather, awful or beautiful, they seem to interest me the same.’

‘Because you are a writer,’ Mrs Palfrey said solemnly, and her colour rose slightly, as if she had touched on something sacred.

There had never been anyone like her in Ludo’s life -no spoiling aunt, or comfortable Nannie, no doting elder sisters – just he and his mother living in too close quarters, and quarrelling. No one that he knew stood in awe of writers. The Major had told him one day that in five years’ time no one would read any more. Later, archaeologists would ponder on, argue about, what books had been
for.
‘It’ll all be telly; visual aids.’ ‘Then why are more books published every year?’ Ludo had asked, annoyed with him as usual. ‘Show me the figures, laddie. Show me the figures.’

‘Why do you look so annoyed?’ Mrs Palfrey asked him. ‘I shall think it is
you
who doesn’t like the sherry.’

‘I adore the sherry. But someone I
don’t
adore passed through my mind. My mother’s lover – the Major.’

As if in a panic, he brought the half-bottle of Aphrodite Medium-Dry, and refilled her glass.

‘Goodness, if I drink all this I’ll have to have a cab to take me home.’

‘Well, we arranged it once before.’

‘What a strange friendship we have,’ she murmured, and looked away with a clumsy movement.

Ludo thought of the man, her husband, who had had to woo her in those far-off days, and wondered at his courage. The spirit of the Empire-builders. He’d gone battling on, undaunted, and got someone brave and staunch. Not a bad thing to have.

The sherry had broken the ice, as he had hoped it would.

The supper was a success of a kind.

When he had made some coffee, Ludo read a quiz from an evening paper he had picked up from a chair in Harrods. He asked her questions, looking across at her, with pencil ready for a tick or a cross, his eyebrows raised inquiringly.

‘Do you prefer to be a host or a guest?’

She could think of the question only in terms of him. ‘Well, I loved that evening when you came to dinner at the Claremont; but I must confess I have preferred being here,’ she said.

‘If you were kept waiting by a friend you had arranged to meet, would you (a) wait patiently and be forgiving when he or she arrived, so that you could both in the end enjoy the evening, (b) go on waiting, and have a row when whoever it is turns up, or (c) go home?’

Seriously, she pondered the question, trying to give a true reply.

‘Have a chocolate mint,’ he said, pushing the box across the table.

She took one, but, before putting it in her mouth, said, ‘I know you wouldn’t keep me waiting, except for a very good reason. I should wait patiently, so that we might both enjoy the rest of the evening.’

‘No, not just
me,‘
he said. ‘Anyone.’

‘There
is
no one,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anyone else.’

He blinked his eyes, and then went on in a matter-of-fact way.

‘Do you ever break your word?’

‘No,’ she said at once.

‘Do you consider yourself an optimistic person?’

‘Oh, I think so.’ She did not explain to him how deeply pessimistic one must be in the first place, to need the sort of optimism she now had at her command.

‘Would you rush to get a hair appointment before an unexpected invitation?’ he asked, in a rather low, reluctant voice.

Cheerfully, she said, ‘I go to the hairdresser every other Friday.’

He began to add up her score, and she sat thinking.

‘You have an average capacity for friendship,’ he announced.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ she said, smiling. ‘Not after what I just had to confess. Of course, I found it easier to make friends when Arthur was alive – other couples, you know. We dined at one another’s houses. Widows aren’t quite the same thing: they get asked only to large parties where odd numbers don’t matter, and are really only seldom asked to
them.
And then, as one gets older, people die, or drop out of one’s life for other reasons. One is left with very little. Shall I ask
you
the questions now?’

‘No, I know the way the answers have to go. I think my result would have been much the same as yours.’

In a rather dreamy voice, Mrs Palfrey went on, ‘Sometimes, when I was a young, married woman, I
longed to be freed – free of nursery chores and social obligations, one’s duty, d’you know? And free of worries, too, about one’s loved ones – childish ailments and ageing parents, money troubles, everyone at times feels the longing – to run away from it all. But it’s really not to be desired – and I realise that that’s the only
way
of being free – to be not needed.’ He seemed as if he were going to interrupt her, but she went smoothly on, turning the rings on her fingers, looking across at the fire. ‘My daughter no longer needs me – indeed, her dread is that it might one day be the other way about. You’ve seen how much Desmond needs me. And there’s no one I know who could ever be a burden to me now.’

‘In a way,’ Ludo began, hoping to remember some of the conversation for future use, ‘in a way, ƒ need you.’

She blushed a little, looked flustered, and laughed. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, in ignorance, naturally, of what he meant.

‘I haven’t many friends myself,’ he said, looking surprised at this realisation. ‘One needs money to have friends. They’ve all got cars and jobs – the ones I used to know.’

‘One shouldn’t let one’s friends slip away.’

‘Not much I can do about it.’

‘What
do
you live on?’ she asked gently, feeling that from her great age she could.

‘Very little. I have some money from my grandmother. My
other
grandmother,’ he said. ‘My
dead
grandmother. You are my third and only living grandmother.’

I shall leave him a little, too, for a surprise, Mrs Palfrey decided. She thought about dying more and more as the months went by, yet dreaded it less. She could make her arrangements without sadness and panic.

‘You’re young,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter so much. But it’s nice to be comfortably placed when one is older. To be able to afford the Claremont, instead of living alone in one room.’

For the first time, he saw that one might live long enough to be grateful for the Claremont.

‘Rosie,’ Mrs Palfrey said, rather hesitantly. ‘Now, there’s a friend you have – for you told me so yourself.’

‘I really hardly know her,’ Ludo said (except in the Biblical sense, he added, to himself.)

‘Shall we wash up now?’ she suggested.

‘No, I shall do it later.’

‘Then I think I should be getting back.’

‘I’ll go and look for a taxi.’

‘No, my dear. The walk will be good for me.’

‘Then I shall come with you, and it can be good for me, too.’