Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (15 page)

M
RS PALFREY and
le vrai
Desmond walked round the Square. She had almost hustled him from the Claremont.

‘It isn’t done, do you see?’ she said. ‘To have visitors, I mean. For one thing, there is nowhere to entertain them, except in the lounge where one would disturb some very old people who like to be quiet, or in the television room where one would be disturbing the television. And at
this
time, Desmond! Why, it was getting on for nine o’clock.’

‘One has one’s work to do. I am writing a book.’ Oh, not another one, she thought. She seemed surrounded by authors.

‘On Cycladic art,’ he added.

‘Well, I am sure your mother will be very proud of you,’ Mrs Palfrey said, and then – it was so on her mind – ‘So it would be better if you don’t come again, you understand.’

‘But once you wrote and asked me to dinner,’ he protested.

‘That was before I understood the – the position,’ Mrs Palfrey said firmly.

‘It isn’t a
prison
you’ve found for yourself, is it?’ he asked, really annoyed. ‘Or a lunatic asylum?’ He was furious with his mother for insisting on this absurd
meeting. Top in just once. That’s all I ask,’ she had written.

‘You’re more than welcome to dine with me at any time,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘Anywhere of your choosing,’ she added recklessly. ‘Apart from everything else, I should be ashamed to offer you the Claremont food.’

‘It has gone downhill since you first suggested it?’ Desmond asked nastily.

‘Dreadfully,’ she said. When first we practise to deceive, she thought, oh, what a something web we weave.

She was tired and confused, as only an inept liar can be; she was exhausted by questions.

‘And are you settled down there – in your prison? Mother asked me most particularly to report that. I shall be obliged to write something.’

In this case, blood was thinner than water, Mrs Palfrey thought, knowing that Ludo would not have spoken to her in such an offensive, offhand way.

‘I can just as well tell your mother direct,’ she said. ‘We
are
in communication.’

She could find no patience for this pompous grandson; her love lay elsewhere. She had quite liked him as a little boy, she remembered. Or had she made the most of what she had? She gave him a sideways glance. He was getting thin on top already, she noticed – for grass does not grow on a busy thoroughfare.

A large drop of rain fell on the pavement before them, then some more. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on a large silk handkerchief, and hurried, as if she
could alter her pace to match his. Ludo would not have behaved like that. She remembered
him
holding her elbow, and keeping the umbrella carefully over her, matching his step to hers. The night of the supper-party. That wonderful evening. There had been no others.

I shan’t sleep tonight, she thought, as thunder broke out.

They were getting wet and Desmond did not like it. Mrs Palfrey thought that she had been through so much in the last three-quarters of an hour that rain, even on her navy crêpe, did not matter. She enjoyed his discomfort, so much more than she could deplore her own.

‘Well, the last thing I thought I should be doing this evening was walking about in South Kensinton in a thunderstorm with my Granny,’ he said, resigning himself to keeping pace with her. He might instead have finished his chapter on embroidery, he thought.

‘It seems an awfully noisy place,’ he said, as they came back to the traffic. ‘I should have thought somewhere quiet and peaceful in Bournemouth or Torquay, or somewhere like that, would have been better for you.’ Not that he cared.

‘Peace and quiet are the last things old people want,’ said Mrs Palfrey. ‘We like to be where something’s going on.’

‘And what about those old ones in the lounge we weren’t allowed to disturb on any account?’

Oh, he
is
a rude young man, she thought: refused to answer him: could not. He would quite have shamed

her at the Claremont. She was so relieved to have had Ludo there instead of him.

‘I expect you’ll be able to get a taxi,’ she said, at the foot of the steps.

‘As I’m already wet through, I certainly shan’t waste the money. I shall go by Underground from Gloucester Road.’

‘Splendid,’ she said, ‘and thank you for coming.’ She made her way up the steps.

‘Thank you for the walk,’ he called after her.

‘Mrs Palfrey, you’re soaked!’ cried Mrs de Salis, who was in the vestibule, giving an order for her breakfast in bed. ‘We wondered what on
earth
had become of you.’

‘I hardly expected such a downpour.’

‘It was forecast,’ Mr Osmond said, standing by the door and looking down at the lights blurred on the wet road. ‘“Skettered rine,”
she
said. That accent! I can’t think why they have her.’ He wondered if he should write to the
Daily Telegraph
about her, although he had had practically no luck with the
Daily Telegraph.
Many, many years ago, long before he had come to the Claremont, it had printed a letter of his about the distribution of
Fritillaria Meleagris
in the South of England, and of the interesting derivation of its name – a scholarly letter he had been proud of. Since then letters on decimalisation, fluoridation, artificial insemination, the migration of birds, racial integration, drugs and thuggery (with the interesting derivation of the word ‘thug’) had all been ignored.

Mrs Palfrey collected her key from the desk and
passed her handkerchief over her damp face. Someone, up above, had left the lift door open, and Summers went pounding upstairs in a temper to close it.

Mrs Burton, on her blundering way to bed, joined Mr Osmond at the door. ‘My, it’s really tipping down,’ she said.

As you’ve been doing all the evening, he thought, edging away from her in dislike. She was getting worse, he decided. Mrs de Salis was having a bad effect by keeping them up much later, so that more was drunk by Mrs Burton as they all chatted, chatted. What happens to all the old men? he wondered, as he often did. He supposed that they were dead. The fact that he lingered on among the ladies made him feel epicene, isolated.

‘You kept your gorgeous grandson from us,’ Mrs de Salis said. Having ordered her orange juice and scrambled eggs, she joined Mrs Palfrey at the lift gate. Her voice sank very low upon the word ‘gorgeous’.

Thinks she’s sexy, I wouldn’t be surprised, thought Mr Osmond.

‘Only this once,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘We had some family business to discuss.’ She shivered.

‘You need a hot bath,’ Mrs de Salis said. ‘And order a hot whisky and lemon to be sent up.’

‘Oh, no!’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘I’ll have the bath, though, if the water’s still all right.’ She never ordered anything to be sent to her room. There was an extra charge for it.

The lift came whining down and Summers, cursing, clashed back both the gates.

Desmond did not, that evening, finish his chapter on Cycladic embroidery. Having hung his wet clothes to dry, put on his dressing-gown, he switched on a lamp under a black shade in his dark, dark room and wrote to his mother, knowing that he would never sleep with so much indignation in his head. Better, he thought, to get it down on paper.

‘No more wild-goose chases, please!’ he began. (It was very beautiful italic handwriting.) He went on to declare that his grandmother was dotty. ‘Barred the way; bundled me down the steps. Almost as if she were ashamed of me, or of where she
was;
although from what I was allowed to see it appeared very clean and respectable, more than somewhat, really. An admirable sort of hotel for an elderly lady. However, she says I am not to go again, so don’t blame me if I don’t. I can’t cope with your long-range charity. All the same, I am a little mystified, a little taken up with what goes on there. Odd behaviour always fascinates me, and this behaviour -
her
behaviour – was odd in the extreme. I might just, some time, if I am in that ghastly part of London, pop in (
your
phrase) again. And take a raincoat next time. I am sneezing already. Incidentally, apart from everything else, Grannie has become a very, very rude old lady.’

He had a sense of unreality, as if he were doing something completely out of character, by writing to a mother in Scotland, about a grandmother in the Cromwell Road – two places which seemed quite irrelevant to him. He had always had a leaning to an Anglo-Irish background (almost felt it his due), or, even, Anglo-French,
(Guinnesses or Hennessys would do.) He wanted to suggest casual grandeur derived from true grandeur, and he longed to be in the line of intellectual forebears (instead of half sport, half slogger) – to be not the only one in the family who ever mentioned Proust or Joyce. What he could achieve from hard work he already had. Grandmothers he had envisaged, ancient, high-born, eccentric (not quite the same as dotty), laying down the law or placing their bets. What he particularly did
not
want was an old party, poor on her feet, keeping him company on a rainy, London walk -and resenting it, too, he was obliged to admit to himself.

Mrs Burton felt as if she were swimming along the corridor towards her bedroom, glancing off the wails like a balloon, gliding past pairs of shoes put out to be cleaned. She pulled up at number fifty-three, steadied herself, made a forwards movement with the key. Calmly does it. Miraculously, she hit the keyhole first time. She opened the door and entered the room with dignity. Once in, she sat down in the armchair and stared in front of her, listening to something she could not place ticking with regularity in her head. What could it be? Her watch? She raised her wrist to her screwed-up eyes and thought that it might be eleven o’clock, or five to twelve. A pleasant evening it had been. And conversation. She liked conversation, but could not remember what it had been about.

Presently, she shivered. Her hands were cold and
shaky, and she would have liked a hot water bottle, but it was beyond her to organise such a thing. Instead, she got up and took a flask of brandy from her top drawer. She poured some into a tooth glass and drank it quickly as if it were medicine, still holding the flask in her other hand, at the ready.

After the second drink, she sat on the side of the bed and kicked off a shoe.

She began to sing in a wavering voice:

I love the moon. I love the sun.

I love the forest – the flowers – the fun.’

She broke off and glared at the wardrobe which seemed to be advancing on her, closing in.

‘The forest, the flowers, the fun,’ she repeated, suddenly puzzled by the meaningless string of words.

Then she sagged, slumped. With a last effort she snatched at her other shoe, threw it across the room and, saying ‘Bugger it’, fell back upon the bed and closed her eyes.

M
R OSMOND was now beset on all sides – or so it seemed to him – by busy chatter. Mrs de Salis was the instigator of it – the talk about hats and hairdressers, the summer sales, fashions at Ascot, and Royalty, Royalty, Royalty. There was always something in the newspapers to set that talk going. The Queen Mother topped – here at the Claremont – the popularity poll. Her air of independence was taken as an inspiration to them all. ‘Though money helps. There’s no gainsaying it,’ said Mrs Post, and sighed. It seemed to her that only straitened means prevented her from having just such a colourful widowhood – salmon-fishing in waders, film premières, in tiara and lace crinoline; or talking in paddocks to horses and trainers and jockeys. It was a life as remote from the Claremont as almost anything could be; but was vicariously lived there, and admired.

Rubbish, thought Mr Osmond. Poppycock and twaddle. And to take part in such balderdash only Mrs Palfrey, he observed, seemed disinclined.

‘I don’t envy them their job,’ was all she had to say upon the Royal matter.

‘But of course not!’ The other ladies came dashing in; for it went without saying that none of them – nor the meanest and most miserable of its subjects – would
ever envy the Royal family its job.

On a summer’s evening, they sat about in the lounge discussing the Queen. There had been one of the usual Ascot thunderstorms and in the evening newspapers there was a photograph of Her Majesty making her way to the paddock under a large black umbrella. Everything looked grey and awash; pale shoes were ruined, floppy hats had flopped.