Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (20 page)

The tips were uncertain: some, as if they were still in rural Greece, left threepence; a few, not yet understanding the currency (and a Greek has to be very new in any country not to get the hang
of that)
left too much. Ludo, loving his tips, longed for some conformity.

Some mornings he set off early and on his way to The Plaka looked in at the art gallery where Rosie, dressed now as an Augustus John gypsy in crushed and trailing velvets, sold catalogues and answered the telephone. The job, although entailing long stretches of boredom, was less irksome than the bustle of the boutiques; the clientele was humble and quiet; tiptoed about, was easily bullied.

Rosie sat at a table just inside the door, usually eating something – apples or pizzas or peanuts – and gave out information when asked or hazarded guesses; but without moving from her chair. She was more offhand than ever. Her nonchalance lowered the temperature.

She was especially offhand with Ludo. He wondered if she was petulant about his working in the evenings, but could hardly believe that anything he did could rouse any such emotion in her. The hours they had spent together in his basement – eating baked beans or lying on the bed – had been marred for him by her indifference. She would languidly be made love to, get up, put herself to rights, hum a little tune, fancy, suddenly, some buttered toast. Or they would fetch a selection from the Chinese Take-Away, which she would eat in silence, finishing with a little sigh at the last grain of rice. Sometimes he would feel, even on the crest of making love, that he was scarcely present.

In the art gallery it was the same. The more she looked at him the more unreal he felt. Whatever he said seemed to glide away from her. People, wandering from picture to picture, lingered; listening to what he said, Ludo knew, listening to his faint-hearted suggestions being rejected. Rosie was always either going to the country to see her parents, or out, in his car, with somebody called Basil.

‘Basil
whom?’
Ludo asked sharply, and was at once ashamed of himself.

‘Hay-Hardy or somethink,’ Rosie said vaguely. (Her mother could not imagine where she had
that
pronun
ciation from. Rosie, when asked, said she thought it was from her old headmistress: or Sir John Gielgud, or somethink. ‘What’s it matter?’ she would ask, as her mother shuddered.) For they were smart Thames Valley residents, Rosie’s parents, and climbing the ladder a little higher every year. Rosie’s clothes and cockney twang they tried to be amusing and relaxed about at the Sunday-morning parties.

‘Well, Monday, then,’ Ludo urged in a low voice. On Mondays the Plaka was closed.

‘I happen,’ she said, ‘to have a job of work to do.’

This was Friday. ‘Sunday, then,’ he suggested.

He had intended to go to see his mother, then, but that could wait.

His mother, having paid the Putney rent, with Mrs Palfrey’s help, had moved into a basement flat round a corner from Harley Street. She was a caretaker for a doctor, so alone there at week-ends. She looked after his Pekingeses, as his wife, in Surrey, would not have them. Besides this, she did some typewriting, when need be, and answered the telephone. Like Rosie, she had discovered a little job for an untrained person. Ludo had done the same.

Rosie opened a drawer, took out a long nail-file and began to flash it grimly about her nails.

‘Sunday, I’m going to the Zoo with Basil,’ she said.

‘Well, you can’t spend all day long at the Zoo, and that’s for sure,’ Ludo said in a grumpy voice.

‘One thing leads to another.’

This was the trouble.

A man who had been peering at a Matisse print for an unlikely time, glanced over his shoulder at them, and then came to the desk. ‘I wonder if you would tell me …’

‘The price?’ Rosie snapped.

Receiving no immediate reply, she pointed with her nail-file at a price-list by the door, then returned her attention to her rasping.

‘Aren’t you ever coming to see me again?’ Ludo asked.

‘Well, you work such peculiar hours now,’ Rosie complained.

This reminded him that he was nearly due to go and lay up the tables at the Plaka.

‘Why don’t you come there one evening,’ he said hopelessly. ‘On me, of course. I’ll look after you. It’s quite fun.’

‘And now you really
have
to be joking,’ she said rudely.

Walking along the Fulham Road he thought about love – the appalling inequalities of it. There is always the one who offers the cheek and the one who kisses it. There was Mrs Palfrey doting on
him,
to his embarrassed boredom: and Rosie being doted on by him, to his exasperated sense of loss. But the French saying was not for always true: for instance, his mother had been the one to tilt her cheek, and now was left unkissed.

On Sunday, he went to see her – his dear mother, who
seemed to make his feet leaden and put bitterness in his mouth. He walked all the way, and walked again when he arrived, for the Pekingeses were ready for the park. Deadly ennui he felt, looking at the late roses, and feeling the Zoo so near to him, and wondering which thing had led to what, in Rosie’s day. The little feathery dogs made sharp forays at Alsatians and Boxers.

They walked back – and Harley Street, Wigmore Street and Wimpole Street were like shadowed and sequestered backwaters.

Ludo then typed some of his novel on the doctor’s typewriter, and glanced about him occasionally. He saw that his mother had bought a large box of chocolate mints, both
Vogue
and
Harper’s,
and was wearing what looked like a new sweater: but he had not the heart to challenge her.

In the evening, he walked home on what he now thought of as his waiter’s feet: still more to do before he went to bed. He rolled up his Plaka-smelling shirts and, taking
Madame Bovary
to read, went round to the launderette where he had first met Rosie. This night it was empty. He opened the book, but no printed page could be powerful against his sense of desolation.

O
LD people, those four of them at the Claremont, were early to detect the signs of summer over – a few crisp yellow leaves fallen, some twinges of rheumatism which could now be blamed on dampness in the air, winter clothes brought from the back of the wardrobe, although young girls still went to and from work bare-armed. Mrs Post watched them wistfully, looking out over the spotted laurels in the window-boxes.

One morning, they read in the Deaths column of the
Daily Telegraph – ‘
ARBUTHNOT, –
On Sept. 10, at The Braemar Nursing Home, Banstead, Middlesex, Elvira Anne, beloved sister of Constance and Dorothy Proctor. Funeral private. No flowers.’

They re-read the notice, Mrs Burton having first drawn their attention to it. There was a shocked silence.

‘It seems only yesterday,’ Mrs Post said at last, ‘that I was waving her good-bye.’

‘I would have gone,’ said Mr Osmond crossly.’ I should have hired a car.’ He glanced at Mrs Palfrey. They might have gone together to pay their last respects, dressed suitably, and in a suitable frame of mind.

‘We are not even to know where it is to be,’ Mrs Burton complained.

‘Or when,’ added Mr Osmond. He looked again at the newspaper. In spite of his feeling quite upset, he
could not ignore the gratification of seeing in print the name of somebody he knew.

‘It would have been nice if we could have sent a wreath,’ Mrs Post said. ‘“ From her friends at the Claremont”, or something like that.’

Having read the other Deaths, they turned their attention to the Stock Exchange Prices. But a little later, ‘I never
did
like the sound of those sisters,’ Mr Osmond said furiously.

They could not take their thoughts from poor Mrs Arbuthnot, as she now was to them, as once it had been poor Miss Benson; but
she
had turned out to be a little too awesome for such an epithet. They had read of
her
death, too. ‘Good God!’ Mrs Burton had shouted out one morning. ‘Old Miss Benson, O.B.E., it says. Well, she got that for something, no doubt. Augusta Vivian. Phew! Daughter of the late Helenus Benson. Memorial Service.’ They had all got quite excited. Memorial services were like the weddings of their youth and middle years. Now there were no more weddings for them, but the memorial services needed no invitations. ‘We’ll go together,’ Mr Osmond had suggested. ‘It is the least that we can do.’ ‘Oh, what a …’ Mrs Post began. She had been about to say ‘treat’. She slapped her hand over her mouth, her little eyes looking appalled.

But Mrs Arbuthnot’s sisters had denied them another outing. They were piqued about it, feeling, for one thing, that a life and a death were not rounded off without a funeral. Mrs Arbuthnot was left vaguely in an unsatisfactory vacuum. She would be ‘poor Mrs
Arbuthnot’ now for as long as they remembered her.

It was the Masonic Ladies’ Night.

Mrs Palfrey came out of the lift at six-thirty, in her evening dress with metallic beads down her sloping breast, her fur cape over her shoulders, and only her rubber-tipped walking stick not ‘partyfied’. She wore rather scuffed bronze shoes to match the beads, and a neat crepe bandage under one thick stocking.

Mr Osmond was waiting for her, looking pink and shiny, and smelling of after-shave lotion. Mrs Post happened to be drifting about, glancing at the menu -or out at the rush-hour traffic. She was a little disturbed. She had known Mr Osmond so much longer than Mrs Palfrey had; and was forced to realise that she had been overlooked for someone of more appeal. She found this puzzling, for she thought Mrs Palfrey – though noble -very mannish in her attitude: that large hand clasping the little evening-bag, for instance, the masculine haircut. Mrs Post had once been thought pretty: Mrs Palfrey could not have been.

The stir in Mrs Post’s heart was of jealousy. ‘Even if he’d asked me, I’d have been too afraid to go,’ she told herself – being alone with him in the taxi, having to meet his friends, wondering what to talk about, having to drink things (Mrs de Salis’s party had put her off
that),
not knowing what to expect: it would have worried her to death. But he hadn’t asked her.

Summers had found a taxi and, on the other side of the revolving doors, Mr Osmond offered his arm to Mrs Palfrey.

Love of excitement, the longing to participate, suddenly drove all jealousy from Mrs Post’s heart. She hastened after them, and waved them good-bye.

Mr Osmond looked out from the cab and raised a hand vaguely. ‘I thought for a moment she might have a bag of confetti,’ he said, then blushed, unnoticed. ‘I mean, I should think she has been a great confetti-thrower in her time.’

Mrs Palfrey said nothing.

‘Well, that’s a turn-up for the book,’ Mrs Burton said, coming up the hotel steps.

‘They’re going out to a banquet,’ Mrs Post said.

‘Well, poor old them.’

‘Yes, it will probably be quite a bore, I suppose,’ Mrs Post said in a sophisticated tone.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Mrs Burton said. ‘My brother-in-law’s coming to dinner. I insist – I bloody
insist –
on you joining us. He’s not a bad old sport, taken by and large.’

Life was dangerous at the Claremont, and Mrs Post began to tremble.

‘See you yonder around seven,’ Mrs Burton said, nodding towards the lounge as the lift came down.

Mrs Palfrey and Mr Osmond were placed at the end of one of the prongs of the E-shaped table arrangement. She conversed a little with the man on her right while turtle soup was ladled into their plates – with a little dice of the meat for everyone. She ascertained that he lived in London and spent his holidays on the Costa
Brava, and then she turned to Mr Osmond to say what a pleasant change this evening was making for her.

She had noticed earlier while they were drinking sherry that he did not seem to have many friends: the few people whom he introduced to Mrs Palfrey had not the sort
of bonhomie
to match his own; in fact, their eyes almost at once began to range the room for some escape. Rather like a small boy, he had shown off, overdone the familiarity, button-holed men he hardly knew. He was not snubbed; but he was not encouraged. Mrs Palfrey was sorry for him about this and tried to make up for it by giving him her whole attention.

Rolled-up fillets of sole masked with a pinkish sauce followed the soup. The wine, Mr Osmond assured Mrs Palfrey, would not upset her. ‘It is quite a far cry from
some
we have been obliged to drink. This is one of the things I know about,’ he said, in a tone that implied that there were many others.