Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (3 page)

‘My name is Elvira Arthbuthnot,’ the crippled woman said curtly, dragging herself away. ‘We always like to look at the serial,’ she said. ‘It makes a break.’

Mrs Palfrey was satisfied with her first evening. Someone had spoken to her: she had a name to remem
ber. Tomorrow, at breakfast, she could nod and say ‘Good morning’ to Mrs Arbuthnot. That would make a pleasant start to the day. And, afterwards, she would go out to buy her crispbread and pot of marmalade and some wool. (What on earth could she knit, she wondered, and for whom?) In this way, she would be busy all the morning.

She helped her new acquaintance to find a chair in the darkened room. She herself sat down on a hard seat behind a row of easy chairs. Heads with thinning hair rested on the antimacassars. Someone turned round stiffly and looked at her for a moment, as if warning her not to stir. She became very still. Of the serial she made very little, coming to it too late.

All night long the hotel was silent; even the London traffic seemed to be passing in another world, muffled and lulling. Mrs Palfrey slept badly and was glad when at last she heard someone going along the passage outside, and the sound of water being turned on with a rush. She got up and put on her dressing-gown and sat ready, sponge-bag hanging on wrist, waiting for the steps to come back. When they did, she was out of the door with discreet haste, and along the passage, and had her hand on the bathroom door before anyone else could even turn the corner.

The bathroom was warm and steamy, the floor mat was damp and in the wet bath was a coiled grey hair. She sluiced it out and tried not to think about it. She
bathed quickly (out of consideration to others), her lemon-scented soap overcoming the earlier smell of carnations.

Later, dressed in her maroon woollies, her morning pearls and walking-shoes, she made her way to the dining-room and nodded just slightly to one or two people she passed on her way to her table in the corner. The elderly waitress stood glumly by while Mrs Palfrey hesitated between prunes and porridge, haddock and sausages.

As she waited for prunes, Mrs Palfrey considered the day ahead. The morning was to be filled in quite nicely; but the afternoon and evening made a long stretch. I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be. When she was young, it had always been later.

I could go to the Victoria and Albert Museum, she thought – yet had a feeling that this would somehow be deferred until another day. There was always so much going on in London, she had told her daughter, who had suggested Eastbourne as a more suitable place for her to live. In London, there were a great many free entertainments, and a great diversity of people.

Net curtains covered the windows of the dining-room, but she had a feeling that it had begun to rain again.

When she had finished breakfast, she went out into the vestibule and stood by the revolving doors, looking at the people scuttling by in the wet road, bowed under
umbrellas, splashed by buses. Going to work. It was a proper Monday morning, Mrs Palfrey decided, and she went to the lounge, and began a cheerful letter to her daughter.

At eleven, she decided to brave it and set out to post her letter and do her shopping. This took up much less time than she had planned and, in spite of her varicose veins, she walked all round a neighbouring square. In the gardens in the centre were asphalt paths, a summer-house and dripping shrubs. The square was like a dogs’ lavatory. All the pekes and poodles from the near-by blocks of flats had made their little messes by the railings. She had to keep an eye on the pavement.

I shall be able to watch the lilacs coming out, she thought. It will be just like the garden at Rottingdean. The setting could scarcely have been more different; but she felt a determination about the lilac trees. They were to be a part of her rules, her code of behaviour. Be independent; never give way to melancholy; never touch capital. And she had abided by the rules.

At twelve o’clock she returned. She had been out an hour.

‘England’s manners!’ cried Mrs Post, who came through the revolving doors after Mrs Palfrey. ‘What has happened to them? They used to be so good.’

She dabbed at her gunmetal-coloured stockings, splashed by a passing car. ‘No consideration.’

Mrs Palfrey clicked her tongue in sympathy.

‘You arrived last night,’ Mrs Post said – scarcely giving information. ‘How long are you staying?’

Mrs Palfrey was purposely vague about this.

‘I must hurry away and tidy my hair,’ Mrs Post said, making for the lift. ‘My cousin is coming for lunch. I have made this my home, you see; and all my entertaining has to be done here.’

As they went up together in the lift, a little constraint at first fell over them. They eyed each other’s feet. At last, Mrs Post made an effort. ‘Do you have any relations in London?’ she asked.

‘My grandson lives in Hampstead.’

‘Oh, then, you will be seeing a great deal of
him,
I expect. It will make all the difference. Do you want this floor?’

They stepped out of the lift and walked along the passage together.

‘Relations make all the difference,’ Mrs Post said. ‘Although one would never make a home with them.’

‘Never,’ said Mrs Palfrey.

‘Hard as one’s pressed. But I like to see them; I like them to come to see me. If it weren’t for all my London relations, I do believe I should go to live in Bournemouth. The climate’s milder, and there’s always something going on.’

‘I should have thought there was always something going on in London,’ Mrs Palfrey said.

‘It’s true there is, but one just doesn’t seem to
go
to it.’

A
S the days went by, went slowly by, Mrs Palfrey was able to sort out her fellow guests into long-term residents and birds of passage. The residents were three elderly widows and one old man, a Mr Osmond, who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind. He tried to detain in conversation the aged waiter in the dining-room, hung about chatting to the porter, waylaid the manager.

The bar was really only a part of the lounge where one pressed a bell and someone from the dining-room would come in time and unlock the cupboard where the bottles were kept. Here, at this end of the room, Mr Osmond sat in the early evenings. From the other end of the room came always the clicking of knitting-needles and the muffled hum of the Cromwell Road traffic beyond the heavy curtains.

Mr Osmond drank wine. He sat very still with the glass beside him as if it were keeping him company. He waited for the manager, who occasionally looked in. He could not hide his annoyance when Mrs Burton came down to his part of the lounge and kept pressing the bell for whiskies. She spent a great deal of money on whisky, which was a marvel to the other ladies – throwing money down her throat, Mrs Post said. She had other extravagances, such as mauve-rinsed hair, and
what Mrs Arbuthnot always referred to as chain-smoking, although it was not. Mrs Arbuthnot, perhaps because of her arthritis, found it in her nature to be disparaging.

Mrs Palfrey, although deeply desiring to find her place and be accepted in it, had the strength of character to wish to make up her own mind about Mrs Burton. ‘I speak as I find’ might have been her motto, if she had not thought it servants’ parlance.

The chief gathering-place for the residents was the vestibule where, about an hour before both luncheon and dinner, the menu was put up in a frame by the lift. People, at those times, seemed to be hovering – reading old church notices on the board, tapping the barometer, inquiring at the desk about letters, or looking out at the street. None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food: but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had.

When the card was fixed into the frame, although awaited, it was for a time ignored. Then, perhaps Mrs Arbuthnot, on her slow progress to the lift, would pause nonchalantly, though scarcely staying a second. There was not much to memorize – the choice of two or three dishes, and the fact (which Mrs Arbuthnot knew, but Mrs Palfrey had not yet learned) that the menus came round fortnightly, or more often. There were permutations, but no innovations.

Mr Osmond would not condescend to join in the evasions of the old ladies. He strode towards the menu when he thought he would, and stood manfully four-
square to it and read aloud, and hummed and hah’d: would call across to the porter, ‘Well I hope the bread-and-butter pud’s better than last time. All watery. Bloody awful
that
was, take my word for it.’ Man to man. It was rather strong language to Mrs Palfrey, and she frowned (before she, too, edged up). Her husband had never sworn before her, although she was sure he had often done so, at the right time, in the right place. She vaguely envisaged recalcitrant natives.

Mrs Burton hardly ever appeared for the menu-waiting. She had other things to do – such as pressing the bell. But on Mrs Palfrey’s sixth evening, she happened to be passing through the entrance hall on her way back from the hairdresser’s, and she and Mrs Palfrey, waiting for the lift together, took turns to read the menu. Mrs Burton sighed. ‘Oh, the Friday fricassee,’ she said. The lift came whining down, and they stepped into it. This was sometimes a means of making acquaintances, of striking up conversations, Mrs Palfrey had found. It was not good manners to remain glumly silent. ‘Open to non-residents,’ Mrs Burton quoted scornfully. ‘That notice outside always amuses me. I doubt if anyone has ever been lured in by it.’

She had about her a strong smell of hair-spray and her lunch-time whisky. Her hair was mauver than ever, and she wore a net over it dotted with tiny velvet bows.

She had lived at the Claremont for five years, she explained, and very few non-residents had she seen stray into it. ‘Nor have I seen a Friday without fricassee,’ she added. ‘The monotony! But they are all the same.
Before this I was at the Astor. Do you know the Astor? That’s Bloomsbury. Ah, dear me, Bloomsbury! How very sad
that
can be on a winter’s afternoon – especially Sunday. Now, why don’t we have a little drink together before dinner?’

Mrs Palfrey, accepting the invitation, felt that the lift had really worked some magic, and she was quite excited at the thought of the stir she would cause – and not a stir of approval, she guessed – as she took her place in the bar with Mrs Burton.

Descending later, she tried to decide between a medium-dry sherry or Dubonnet. She felt both dashing and defiant. She wore one of her maroon dresses and it had a scattering of bead-embroidery across the chest. She had left her knitting-bag behind. With a slight flush, she walked to the far end of the lounge, and picked up an old, old copy of
The Field.
She turned the pages casually, keeping her head bent. Soon Mrs Burton came and pushed the bell with great authority. Staring at them across this part of the room was Mr Osmond. He had a glass of wine on the table beside him, but did not touch it. He sat patiently still, with his hands on his knees, as if waiting for the drink to drink itself.

Mrs Burton had removed her hair-net and filled the creases of her face with powder. Her face had really gone to pieces – with pouches and dewlaps and deep ravines, as if a landslide had happened.

‘The drink has really taken its toll,’ whispered Mrs Arbuthnot to Mrs Post at the other end of the room:
but Mrs Post shook her head primly, although not in disagreement, counting stitches, her lips moving. When she had finished, she gave Mrs Burton a long, clear look, and shook her head again. ‘It is very sad,’ she said, as if out of her great compassion.

The waiter came at last, and Mrs Palfrey, having plumped for sherry, sank back to ride out the hostile interest from the other end of the room.

‘My brother-in-law’s coming to dinner,’ Mrs Burton said. ‘Hence the hair-do.’ She gently touched it, but it did not yield. ‘He keeps an eye on me, does Harry. Have you any relatives in London?’

She was not the sort of woman, Mrs Palfrey decided, with whom she would ordinarily have been in company … not quite … but life was changed, and to save her sanity she must change with it.

‘I have a grandson who works at the British Museum. No one else. His mother lives in Scotland. No, I don’t smoke, thank you.’

‘Ah, you would have been nearer to him at the Astor. Will he be coming to see you?’