Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (9 page)

Some of the basement windows were covered by vertical iron bars, so that it must be like being in prison to live behind them, she thought. One could peer up at feet going by, and the wheels of cars; but no sky, only the stuccoed wall of the area, the dead leaves blown there, a fern growing out of a crack in the plaster, or moss covering bricks; dustbins; or a row of flower pots containing old earth, but no longer anything growing.

But there was life stirring below stairs and, occasionally, a hint of cosiness. Smells of cooking came up: a man rose from a sagging wicker chair and yawned, stretched: blue-white television sets flickered in otherwise darkness: plates were being dealt out on a cloth-covered table.

Mrs Palfrey gave herself a little rest, re-settling her
old furs on her shoulders. She glanced down sideways at a lit-up aquarium in a room below her, at the black and golden fish weaving back and forth. Rude old woman, I am, she thought, smiling.

But the grit swirled about the pavement in this unkind wind, a piece of newspaper wrapped itself round her ankle, and she poked it away with her stick and went on.

In the back basement of a small hotel, she saw a boy cutting the rinds off rashers.

Arthur and I, she suddenly thought, would come back from our walk as it was getting dark, and he would carefully put little pieces of coal on the fire, building what he called ‘a good toast fire’. She could picture his hands with the tongs – a strong, authoritative hand, with hair growing on it. If I had known at the time how happy I was, she decided now, it would only have spoiled it. I took it for granted. That was much better. I don’t regret that.

After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life, that retirement – the furnished house in Rottingdean, had, simply, been bliss. They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art. People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.

She walked towards the Cromwell Road, and it was quite dark now with the stillness of fog settling down.
Back at home …, she began to think, and then checked herself. She stumped on grimly. It had come to her naturally – that the Claremont was home.

Ludo sped along the Brompton Road, going home from work. All about him the lights were blurred and shaggy, hanging in the mist. The rush hour. Andit was the stale time of the year, between Christmas and spring, and nothing new about it that he could ever find: it was an end, not a beginning.

Everytime he saw a pair of white boots flashing towards him, or standing in a bus queue, he thought of Rosie. In the middle of the day, he had gone for a walk, shrugging off stiffness. He passed and repassed the boutique where Rosie worked, he peered through the windows. It was teeming with the Sou-Ken flat girls, trying things on in their lunch-hour. Beatles beat forth. ‘Wednesday morning at five o’clock when day begins …’ Plaintive, beautiful. Shifting, coloured lights rayed the ceiling. He had entered, and hidden behind a rail of P.V.C. coats, his eyes on Rosie.

A middle-aged woman, who seemed to have strayed here by mistake, emerged from a dressing-room, looking battered, frantic, at the end of her tether. She unloaded on to Rosie an armful of garments. ‘The jackets are too big and the skirts too tight,’ Ludo heard her say. ‘Well, I don’t suppose you expected just to walk into something, did you?’ Rosie said coolly. When the woman had gone, slinking out into the street, Rosie said, but
without much rancour, ‘Silly bitch’, and began to hang up the clothes.

‘Bo!’ said Ludo, coming from behind the coats.

‘Oh,
you
!’ she had said, with an air of great weariness.

Indescribably delicate was her aloofness, her way, Ludo remembered – going along past the darker space of Brompton Square – her way of saying ‘You must be
joking\
or ‘Do you
mind’ –
so faintly, hardly said at all. Her beauty, and that untroubled air she had, made all the pert and worn-out phrases seem newly minted on her lips.

Going westwards was going away from the bright shop-lights. In the Cromwell Road there were shadowy patches of pavement, and darkness high up in the buildings against which the sky was a lighter, bruised colour. He passed the Claremont quickly, almost guiltily, as if his grandmother really
were
in there, waiting forlornly for a visit from him.

He turned off into a dimmer, quieter street, then into another, passed the hallowed Launderama and the hallowed Chinese Lantern, dived into a corner pub and bought two bottles of light ale, then hastened on to open and warm some spaghetti hoops. Rosie was coming to supper.

He thought – had begun to think in Harrods when his mind should have been on other things – that, after the first baiting splurge at the Chinese, they would have to begin again as he meant to go on – as he needs
must
go on; although he was far from sure that Rosie had the slightest intention of going anywhere, with him.

He thought – pinning the curtains together – that the evening would prove something.

At the last moment, hearing her footsteps, he lit the fire.

Mr Osmond was writing to the
Daily Telegraph,
as usual. ‘We are lucky to have such a fine body’, he wrote, ‘of men’, he added, after taking a sip of wine.

Mrs Palfrey, depressed, watched him. Action, she thought. He is taking action, he is expressing himself, keeping himself going. Some indignant thought made him give a little snort. She, for her part, did nothing, but sat with her hands in her lap. Her walk had left her tired, but in a fidgety and not a lulled way. She wished that she could look forward to bed time with a hope of real rest then, as once she had. She wrenched her mind away from thoughts of other days, and turned her head sharply.

‘Well!’ said Mrs Post, coming with her workbag to sit near by. ‘You really
do
look a little fagged. It’s this cold wind, perhaps.’

She was too vague, too bird-brained to achieve real kindness. She had always meant well – and it was the thing people most often said about her – but had managed very seldom to help anyone. Yet this evening, unintentionally, she was to help Mrs Palfrey, who was sitting there idly playing with her heavy rings, looking up at her dully.

‘You finished your knitting,’ Mrs Post said. ‘I hope your grandson was pleased with it.’

‘I quite forgot to give it to him. It’s still in the drawer upstairs,’ Mrs Palfrey said. Then, lowering her gaze to stare at the carpet as if at a thought slowly taking place, ‘I quite forgot,’ she said again.

‘Oh, well,’ Mrs Post said easily. ‘He’ll be back again soon, I’m sure.’ She withdrew into her own world, arranging her hands about her knitting, settled, began to click the needles together. Mr Osmond ostentatiously closed his eyes, then covered them with his left hand, obviously trying to concentrate.

As they rose, one by one, to go in to dinner, a party of middle-aged people there for a mild celebration, all instinctively sat up and straightened their backs. They tried to look more alert, and to forget their future.

Mr Osmond closed the door and followed Mrs Palfrey at a distance; remembering an old, old risque anecdote, he told it to the manager,
en passant.

Silence, almost, in the dining-room. They lowered themselves into their chairs. As they aged, the women seemed to become more like old men, and Mr Osmond became more like an old woman.

O
N a Saturday afternoon, knowing that the Major would be at Twickenham (‘Twickers’ he called it, ‘Rugger at Twickers’), Ludo went to Putney to see his mother.

Perhaps from his father he had his sense of duty, and from his mother its sporadic quality. She still – even now – seemed to feel a little of it towards him, occasionally sent him a birthday-card of sick humour, or a funny anecdote to write into his novel: once, had pressed on him a pair of the Major’s socks she could not be bothered to mend. They were a mustard yellow. ‘Perhaps really fit only for Oxfam,’ she suggested doubtfully. ‘Oh, they’ll come in,’ he had said cheerfully, unable to hurt anyone. Even in disposing of them, he had hoped they would come in. Some tramp or drop-out might peel them off the gilded railing-points outside the Garibaldi Hotel, and be glad of them.

‘Just dropped in as I was passing,’ he said, when his mother opened the door of the house in Putney. (And he thought, I rather doubt if we’ve ever said anything true to one another since I was about six, and learned better.)

He followed her up the stairs to her flat on the first floor: her rump slid from side to side as she went, but under control, not floppy. As he must not cram his mind
with useless details, he tried to ignore her appearance. He was paying a call, merely.

The sitting-room was beautifully warm to him -warmer than Harrods, even – with focal points of heat from two electric fires, and no damp coming out from anywhere, as it always did at home, after ten minutes of the gas-fire. Used as he was to basement darkness or artificial light, he was charmed by windows filled with white sky and branches.

‘How’s himself?’ he asked.

‘He’s gone to a football match. I expect they’re all boozed by now. They stand about in the car-park, drinking out of boots.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I mean, they keep their bottles in the boots of their cars. And seem to go from one to the other – like a pub-crawl.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘It sounds rather like a point-to-point meeting.’

‘You talk a very strange language, Mimsie.’

‘Do I, darling? Then let’s talk about you instead. How is your novel coming along?’

‘They don’t do that. They have to be pushed a bit.’

‘I’m sure.’ She sat down in a sagging chair, and from it leaned forwards and began to pick things off the floor – bits of newspapers, and chocolate papers and some sewing things. A frowsty little love-nest, Ludo thought.

‘I really,’ she began…. ‘No, I shouldn’t say it. I should’ve said it right at the start, and I’m sure I did.

But, not that Fm interfering … I only wonder – I did just wonder – if switching boats midstream is sensible. Oh, I really loved you being an actor. “My son’s on the stage”, I used to say, and everyone was thrilled and dying to hear more.’

He wondered to whom she had said it: for she seemed to have no friends.

‘I was hardly ever on the stage once the curtain had gone up.’

‘But every great actor started that way. Fm sure Sir Laurence did his stint. You lack his patience and his perseverance.’ She smiled, as if to make this seem a bit of a joke.

Ludo believed that patience and perseverance were his two strong points.

‘Besides,’ she added, more to the point, ‘it’s so lonely, just sitting there scribbling away, day after day. And it lacks glamour.’

One of her favourite words. No one else he knew ever used it. Kept woman though she was, she had none of it herself.

‘What does the Major think about it all?’ he asked. He shuffled his fingers about in a near-by box of chocolates, but came on nothing but empty paper cups.

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that.’

‘Everyone else does. In the pub, they shout out “Hows’ tricks, Major? What’s the Major having?” ‘

‘I think he would like it if you called him Dickie’.

‘Then I
will
try to remember. After all, it makes no odds to me.’

‘Well, what Dickie thinks is that it’s up to you, of course.’

To keep out of the way, Ludo thought. Which I do.

The porter saw Mrs Palfrey across the Cromwell Road. She was always nervous of the fast traffic, especially with a bulky parcel under one arm. It was this speed and noise which put Bournemouth in her mind from time to time, where there could be quiet roads, and seasonal terms, too, which at the Claremont, though advertised, meant very little. ‘And during the Motor Show, when there’s not a bed to be found in London, they positively hate us,’ Mrs Arbuthnot had said.

‘That’s good of you, Summers,’ Mrs Palfrey said, when they reached the other pavement.

It had been good of him; for, at the top of the steps, backed by the manager, some new arrivals waited for a taxi. In such cases, the manager thought that the residents must look after themselves. Summers dashed back, and then kept making dangerous little forays into the road, waving his arm; but it was always difficult for cabs along this stretch.