Music at Long Verney (11 page)

“You're bleeding.”

A helmet, the bulk of a trousered uniform, a woman's voice . . .
one of those air-raid wardens who would sweep him into a rest centre.

“It's nothing. A bit of glass, and I've pulled it out.”

“Lucky it didn't get your eye.”

“Many killed?”

“Five for certain. There may be more underneath.”

Talking made the blood flow faster. He mopped. The saturated handkerchief was stiffening.

“You must get stitched at the First Aid Post – second turning on the right. That handkerchief's no good now. Take this.” She opened her coat, dived into her bosom. It was as if she had opened the coat on a different world, a world of warmth and sleep and riches. The handkerchief was soft as a rose petal and smelled of roses.

“I can't bleed on this; it's too expensive.”

“Nonsense.”

He went on expostulating. His mother, who liked things dainty, had made him aware of best handkerchiefs sprinkled with lavender water, and this was far beyond her finest.

“Very well,” the woman said. Her voice was tolerant and fatigued, as if she had been humouring fractious children all day. “If you feel like that, you can return it. This is my address. Now go off and get seen to.”

The First Aid Post smelled of blood and disinfectant. But when he got away, the handkerchief still retained its smell of another world. He scarcely connected it with the woman. When it came back from the cleaners smelling of the cleaners, he retrieved the card from his pocket. Miss Millie Roberts, and an address off the Fulham Road. As he passed the Cancer Hospital he noticed the flower seller and bought six carnations.

She came to the door of her flat wearing a dressing gown. If it had not been for the smell of roses, he would not have known it was she.

“How kind of you – and carnations, too.” She pressed her nose into the jaded flowers. There was the noise of a man's shoes being kicked off.

“I'm sorry I'm engaged just now. Perhaps you'll look in tomorrow. No, not tomorrow; the evening after. Tomorrow I'm on duty.” Catch me, he thought, going away indignantly. It was easy to see what she was.

But on the evening of the aftermorrow he went again. The woman in the helmet who had preceded the woman in a dressing gown stood in the way of his intention. The helmet hung just inside the door, and she was wearing a black dress and a cardigan; and though she was evidently expecting him, it was rather as though she were expecting him to have come about the gas. For a moment, he wished he had and could escape on it. But already she had got him to her sitting room, had offered him a cigarette, was talking about the weather and the war. Her glance rested on his cheek. He wished he had taken off the strip of pink plaster. A black patch would have looked less unheroic. She asked how the cut was getting on, and he replied, thankful to have a subject for conversation, that it was mending and no longer festered – adding that he was always a bad healer.

“This should help,” she said; and while he was expecting her to produce a tube of ointment she leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

During the next ten years he loved her with all his cold heart. She never changed her scent, so it seemed to him she grew no older. She aroused no jealousy in him, and no particular desire. She contented him. He was one of her Regulars – she concentrated on Regulars. He visited her once a fortnight, which was just right. He kept a pair of slippers there, and when he arrived they had been put out for him. He brought an evening paper.

No doubt there were other pairs of slippers; he vaguely
pictured a sort of filing cabinet. At times he vaguely speculated about the other Regulars, not all of whom might be so peaceably satisfied as he. As well as the filing cabinet, was there a cupboard where she kept whips, chains, outsize women's underclothes? He inquired a little, but did not press his inquiries. “Some people have the funniest notions of what it's all about,” she said. “You can have no idea.” Her eyes under the unchanging symmetry of their plucked brows were candid as a cat's, and he remained with no heightened ideas. Her plump white skin bruised easily. He averted his recognition from the bruises; they were professional, even honourable, scars, fleeting medals acquired in the course of duty. His real curiosity directed itself as his mother's would have done: who was she, where did she come from, how much money had she got, did she pay her bills weekly or let them run on? The answers to his mother's more imperious questions he knew already. She was not respectable, her teeth were her own, she was irreproachably clean.

For some time he took it that she was socially a cut above him: her manner, her clothes, her appurtenances implied an accustomed superiority; there was nothing flashy or artistic. It was partly a relief, partly a disappointment to learn that her father had been a postman. Like Howard, she was born and bred in the provinces, though on the opposite side of England – Lincolnshire against his Staffordshire. Like him, she was early fatherless; but she was one of five sisters, and their mother had been high-spirited and indulgent: “larky” was the word she used. The house was noisy with girls and canaries – gifts from Uncle Bartle in Norfolk, who bred them as a hobby. His nieces went to him for their yearly holiday, boating and sailing on the Broads, where he kept a boatyard for summer visitors. A happiness such as he had never felt was reflected on him as she talked of the boatyard and the pocket money the five girls made, scampering barefoot on errands for the houseboat
people, swabbing decks, selling early-morning mushrooms. Two of them had gone the same way as herself – Ivy, who was the beauty and died after an abortion, and Cindy, the runt, now married to a rich man in Canada and opening church fêtes.

It was so real to her, this incompatible past, that she spoke of it as though the rough pleasures, the exploits, the eight half-crowns tossed into her dinghy from the deck of the towering black-sailed wherry were still at her command. She told stories of local hauntings – the mourning coach with a headless driver, the hanged Abbot of St Benet's, Old Shuck the enormous goblin dog – as though she believed them. She turned to the rasping singsong of the dialect as easily as turning over in bed, used local idioms, said “Bless your flesh,” called him “Bor”. Bore he might be; but it had shocked him that she should choose a moment of endearment to tell him so.

For the rest, she told him nothing, and he hadn't much to tell about himself. Lovemaking over, he read his evening paper and she went on with her petit point. Occasionally he read her bits from the Stock Exchange column about the rise or fall of her investments – she was shrewd and prudent in placing her money – or racing tips, for she liked a gamble. Time went on, methodical as the petit point. She contented him. It was what he wanted; it was all he asked for; above all, he was sure of it.

The thought of giving her pleasure never occurred to him. He gave her chocolates at Christmas, flowers at intervals (but she was always well supplied with flowers), his clothing coupons – she had asked for them. Once, a sudden ambition entered him. She lived on a plateau of middle age, always using the same scent and never seeming to grow older; but she must have a birthday somewhere about in the year. Birthdays are to be celebrated, presents must be a surprise. Allowing an artful interval, he asked the date of her birthday, the name of her scent. It was a French name, and she wrote it down for him. The
date lay conveniently near the day of his next visit. His chemist sold perfumes, some with French names, but none with this name. He went to another, and another. It gave him a quickened sense of manly pride to be taking so much trouble to please Millie. He went to perfumery departments in stores; he went to small crystalline shops in the West End. Some had never heard of it, others did not stock it. Only on the eve of his visit did a grey-haired shopwoman with silver fingernails read the name as though it were a commonplace to her, unlock a glass cupboard, and from the top shelf reach down an oblong navy-blue package – one of several, all of the same size and looking as unvoluptuous as wardresses. But the name on the label was right. “How much?” he asked, thinking he might ask her to wrap it ornamentally, with bows. “Seven guineas,” she said, as though he were uneducated not to know it.

Trembling at this step into the world Millie's bosom had opened to him when he sat bleeding on the doorstep, he blinked and paid. Afterward, he reflected that he knew more about scent than his mother did, and had got a bit of his own back.

For he still bore his mother a grudge, and for anything that went wrong with him still blamed her: shrimps made him sick; hand-knitted socks gave him nettle rash. The passage of time merely enforced her, for he was impaled on her anniversaries. On the twelfth of May his Aunt Maud shed her hair, the last Sunday in August haled him to Bishops Totterby; on March 15th poor old Pickwick, the faithful terrier, died in agonies. As he had inherited her retentive mind, he went on accumulating anniversaries of his own. He knew the length of service of everybody in the firm; he remembered wedding days whether or no he was invited to them; deaths were engraved on him as though on marble. He was a ledger of anniversaries. He asserted himself by not observing them. The bottle of scent for Millie was different. He was positively glad she had been born on April
17th and that on August 28th her little beam of light had caught him as he sat bleeding on the doorstep of No. 47.

The tenth anniversary was past. He had been aware of it because it was an anniversary, but not till later did he realise that a tenth anniversary, an anniversary in double figures, calls for a special acknowledgment: that he ought to give Millie a present; that he would like to do so. He was standing outside a jeweller's window, looking at an assortment of brooches on a black velvet pad (he had decided that a brooch would be best, though his first impulse had been a ring), when a girl tweaked his sleeve. “Thinking of giving me a present, Romeo?” He walked away. She followed him. To escape her importunities, he signalled a passing taxi. It slowed, he hurried towards it, slipped off the pavement's edge, lost his balance . . . There was a clamour of screaming brakes, bellowing horns, voices. He tried to get up, and a lacerating pain felled him.

He was still hopping on one leg when five days later he crutched himself to her door.

“Why, what's been happening to you? And didn't you get my telephone message? Sit down and tell me all about it . . . Wait a minute, I'll just fetch your slippers.”

As he had not brought a present, he did not go into the whole story. He told how the taxi-driver had insisted on driving him to the hospital, how long he had waited before anyone came to attend to him, how he had been wheeled to the X-ray department and again kept waiting there, how easily it could have been a Pott's compound fracture.

She listened, questioned, sympathised, put the slipper on his uninjured foot as solicitously as though it had been the injured one.

“About all I can do for you today, I suppose,” she said.

In fact, it was all he wanted: her warmth, her composure, her
painless familiarity, her scent. He leaned back and sighed with pleasure. “I'm glad I came. Do you know, I nearly didn't come. It's the first time I've been out.”

“So that's why you didn't get my message. The girl at your office said you hadn't come in yet but she'd give it to you when you did. She might have had the sense to post it on. But she didn't.”

There had been a telephone message. His slippers had not been put out. He began to think.

“What was the message? Are you expecting someone else?”

“No, no, Bor! All that's over and done with. I'm retiring.”

But why was she retiring? She was as good as ever.

“That's why I telephoned. To ask you to dine with me instead. I thought we'd have a little farewell celebration.”

Had she come into a fortune?

“Is this a new idea, this retiring?”

“New idea? We've been saving up for it for years, Fred and me.”

“Fred?”

“Fred Larter. He's the wine waiter at the East Anglia Hotel. He was odd-job boy at the boatyard, twiddled outboard engines, patched sails. He could put his hand to anything. Uncle Bartle paid him five bob a week, and always said he'd go far – be it London, be it the devil. He was the first one who ever kissed me proper, was Boy Fred. Chased me into the water and kissed me among the swans. You'd never think it to see him now, so responsible and stately. Nor me, neither.”

It was as though the hoyden virgin stood there, drenched with joy and defiant. Her professional competence was gone. She suddenly looked much older and unrecognisably young.

“I'm sure I hope you'll be happy,” he said at last.

“We'll be happy, all right! We're going to live in France, in the brandy country. Fred's bought the house. He got it through
a friend in the trade. It's nightingales everywhere, he says. And roses.”

She appeared to catch sight of him from a distance. “If you should happen to want an introduction, there's a friend of mine who'd be just what –”

“No!”

It terrified him to hear the fury in his voice.

WHEN THE AIRLINER
detached itself from english soil, and Rosalind, the Warburtons' only child, was off with a husband and a trousseau to settle in Australia, Humphrey Warburton was aware of a profound and yet quite trifling sense of relief, which he could not account for until Lydia, coming out of a muse, remarked that it would seem very odd to have grandchildren who as a matter of course ate plum pudding in the dog days – and did he suppose they set fire to it?

“Set fire to what, my dear?”

“Christmas plum pudding – in Australia.”

Christmas. That was it. That was why he was feeling relieved. It was annulled – his ignominious bondage to a recollection of how, one Christmas when a miniature tallboy, perfect in every detail, one of his best finds, had proved half an inch too tall to fit into Rosalind's dolls' house, Rosalind had referred to “that silly old Santa Claus.” One may laugh off such things, but if one is a man like Humphrey Warburton one continues to brood over them, and all subsequent presents to Rosalind were, as far as he was concerned, poisoned at the source. But henceforward Rosalind would receive his presents in another hemisphere, and he would be able to give his whole mind to filling the Christmas stocking for Lydia – Lydia, whom he had so discerningly chosen when to people of less connoisseurship she was still just one of
Archdeacon Barnard's pigtailed daughters, and whom he had never ceased to love, and whose tastes he could be sure of, and who was so easy to compliment at any season.