Providence (17 page)

After that, they had sat together on the sofa and planned the dinner.

‘But what about the cooking?’ she had asked.

‘Oh Ma will lend me Manuela if I ask nicely. Or I’ll get somebody else. Don’t worry about the cooking. Worry about the guests, Kitty. Whom shall we have? The Redmiles, obviously.’

She pondered. ‘The Roger Frys?’ she asked. He had cast up his eyes and shuddered elaborately.

‘If you must,’ he had said. ‘If you absolutely must.’

‘He does come to your lectures,’ she reminded him.

‘And she, I suspect, is in love with you.’

He laughed at that, and said, ‘All right, but you’ll have to keep them amused.’

‘Of course,’ she had agreed. ‘We don’t need anybody else, do we? Six is enough, isn’t it?’

He had lost interest and had strolled to the window. Hands on hips, he had said, ‘Who is that extraordinary woman with the orange hair and the very high heels?’ She joined him at the window. ‘Oh, Caroline. Caroline Costigan. She lives next door.’ Where could Caroline be going on a Sunday? Had she perhaps encountered the man whose name began with J? In the entertainment business? Kitty was so filled with goodwill that she hoped it could be true, and resolved to invite Caroline to supper that evening. For the moment she loved everyone. Voluptuously, she returned to the subject of the dinner party. ‘Six will be enough, won’t it?’ she had asked. ‘Six what?’ he had said. He was lost in thought, miles away, his arms on the sill. ‘Six
guests,’
she had laughed. He had turned round to her, his mild distancing smile back in place. ‘Six? Oh, no, I think eight is a better number. I’ll think of two others.’ His earlier enthusiasm appeared to have waned.

But the promise of a dinner party had been the focus of Kitty’s thoughts ever since that day, and the prospect of the lecture had paled into insignificance by the side of it. She imagined that the dinner would be a formal occasion, and wondered, endlessly, if the honey-coloured dress would be adequate. Indeed, she spent most of her evenings, in Old Church Street, worrying about this, and had invoked Caroline’s advice on the matter. One evening Caroline had materialized in her doorway when she heard Kitty’s steps on the stairs, a voice behind her announcing, ‘And now we go over to our friends in Ambridge, where Sid Perks finds he has a problem on his hands,’ and had followed Kitty into her
flat. Caroline was of the opinion that Kitty looked too austere, that she need touches of colour, and had kindly offered to lend her some jewellery. ‘The thing is, Kitty, that your clothes are very well cut, but they need dressing up a bit. You can afford to make more of an impact.’ Caroline had then looked through Kitty’s wardrobe, draping garments appreciatively against herself or laying them on the bed. As she shook her head slowly over what she saw, Kitty resolved to wear the new dress anyway. Lady Redmile and the Roger Fry Professor’s wife, whose unfortunate name was Wendy, would hardly be likely to wear anything more elaborate. She said as much to Caroline, who then had to be invited to stay for supper. ‘True,’ Caroline agreed. ‘And you can slip off the jacket. That way you don’t need to worry about a coat. And I will lend you my gold chains.’ Kitty thanked her. Caroline sighed elaborately. ‘You are lucky, Kitty. I wish someone would invite me out.’ ‘No luck with the entertainment man?’ asked Kitty. ‘Not yet, but I went back to her last week, and she’s quite definite that I’ll be out of here by the end of the year and into something else.’ These evenings usually ended far too late, but they had become a bit of an institution. Caroline was as bizarrely attractive as ever, but Kitty, looking at her, and noticing for the first time a slight fattiness on the underside of her jaw, prayed to those indeterminate forces of which she was intermittently aware, ‘Don’t let her wait too long.’

The unprecedentedly fine weather, the dry sunny evenings, made Kitty long to dispense with all distracting company and to sit or walk alone, thus able better to concentrate on her extraordinary fortune. As it was, she was confined to a dusty calculating world of clothes strewn all over the bed, or condemned to stand in her petticoat in her grandmother’s flat, a lay figure, unwilling to lend herself to the business of her own adornment,
which, she felt, should be accomplished by herself, alone, in secret. She looked forward to that Saturday evening when, in decent obscurity, and with no accompanying remarks, no rectification of the shoulder seams, no strictly professional appraisal, she would prepare herself and sit quietly at the window, savouring the enormous and unbearable pleasure of waiting for the taxi that would take her to Maurice. She would have liked to shut her door to Caroline whose intention, she knew, was to oversee every stage of the ritual, from the vantage point of a greater experience of the world. But Kitty also knew that she had her own ritual to follow, and that it was fraught with superstition, that if she did not obey her own imperatives, something would be wrong and the evening would be ill-omened. She could not have said what this ritual was, but she perceived that it was something to do with acknowledgment of the luck that had come to her, that in fact her earlier bewildered searchings and dreads had been neutralized, sanctioned, that she was no longer a petitioner, that plans had been made in which she had a part. For this supreme leniency on the part of fate she did not know what or whom to thank, but made a polite obeisance in the direction of what she now regarded as Providence, and for this, she needed to be alone.

As she sat in the garden of her grandparents’ house, she was aware that the time had come to say goodbye to those who had been with her on the first half of her journey, and that she must now prepare to live a different sort of life. No more clairvoyants, no more waiting in hotel rooms, no more glum acceptance of Caroline’s advice. From now on she would be more definite, more admirable, she thought. She would eat reasonable meals, she would not panic before her lecture, she would deal sensibly with everyone, but would not allow anyone to dominate her. She was saying
goodbye to her very pliancy, the quality that had kept her, like her mother, a girl for far too long. And I am thirty she said to herself. I am already thirty. It is time.

For two days she sat in the garden or walked about the streets, and she would remember those two days as a curious interval, when all things seemed possible, an almost mystical time of promise and anticipated fulfilment. The hours of the day were uniform in their bright silent intensity, and the sun did not appear to move. There was a suspension of appetite and of all agitation, replaced by an extraordinary concentration of the faculties, a stillness, something strange and new. It was as if some genuine metamorphosis were taking place, yet she did not know what it was.

From time to time she returned to the dusky interior of the house, to the smells of coffee and Vadim’s plum brandy, to the hushed atmosphere that always accompanied Louise’s concentration on her task. Kitty cleared away the plates from which snacks had been eaten hastily, abstractedly; a crust of bread already hardening in the heat, a rind of sausage or cheese, the peel of a fruit, empty mustard glasses containing the dregs of wine. She recorked the bottle and put it away, then silently emptied the ashtray and replaced it at her grandmother’s elbow. The heavy dull yellow silk lay in a pool in her grandmother’s lap, although the jacket was finished, had been pressed by Vadim, and was now displayed on the dressmaker’s dummy in the spare room, where it strained over the descending swan-like bosom and flared over the unindented hips. But the dress, the dress! Sometimes it seemed to Kitty as though it would never be finished, as if the minute stitches would go on for ever, as if there were always another seam, another pleat, as if it might have to be dismantled and started again. And she did not think she could bear to sit either in the silent room or in the silent garden
much longer. For now impatience, like a deeper than normal heartbeat, was beginning to make itself felt in her, and she wanted to get through the intervening time between this moment and that Saturday, to abolish the journeys and the fitting and the lecture and all the meals she would have to eat between now and then, and to find herself sitting at her window, in her final moment of waiting, before the beautiful evening was to begin.

At the end, the tension in the sitting room was too much for her. Louise seemed not to have moved from her chair for two days. Kitty carried out with her, into the sunshine, an image of Louise, in her dusty black dress, with a powdering of sugar on the breast, her face impassive, her swollen feet propped on a footstool, stitching with rapid unhesitating strokes. Vadim moving silently around her, his expression watchful, almost severe. The room indifferent to the splendour outside, aromatic and enclosed. In the garden Kitty sat and waited for the hours to pass. It stayed light until very late and she had no idea of the time. Finally, on the Monday, as she was sitting, she heard the window above her open, and turning, saw her grandfather’s head emerge, and heard him say,
‘Ça y est. Viens, Thérèse.’

Standing on a sheet in the middle of the floor, she submitted while Louise dropped the dress over her head, while Vadim turned her round and secured it, while Louise then lifted the dress on the shoulders and let it settle. She stood quite still as Louise stepped back, lit a cigarette, and contemplated her handiwork. She stood until the cigarette was smoked, the inspection finished. Not a word was exchanged. Then Louise turned to Vadim and nodded to him. His face broke into his great smile and he kissed her cheek. Then Kitty was allowed to see herself in the glass. The dress was exquisite, so light, so easy, with the famous pleats breaking about the knees, and the long graceful jacket. I cannot possibly
wear any of Caroline’s jewellery with this, thought Kitty. I shall have to put it on to save her feelings and keep it in my bag for the rest of the evening. I must remember to put it on when I get back to Old Church Street in case she is still up and about. Then she turned to her grandmother who motioned her to walk up and down, and then when she was back on the sheet and her grandmother seated, she said, ‘It is perfect.’ She took the dress off and gave it to Vadim who packed it carefully in layers of tissue paper and put it into a bag. As if I were a customer, thought Kitty, with a pang. She knelt by the side of her grandmother’s chair, longing to lay her head on the worn velvet of the arm. When she could speak, she said, ‘Thank you.’ Louise looked at her, with no apparent emotion, even a certain distant gravity. Then she reached out her hand, pinched Kitty’s chin and said,
‘Vas-y, ma fille.’

They all had a cup of coffee together, and it was so late, and they were so tired, that they had little to say to each other. Kitty wanted to see them both into bed, but they never would allow that. With a sigh, she realized that she must leave them, that the long day had finally come to an end, that the time of contemplation was behind her and the time of action about to be inaugurated. She was irritated by this solemn thought and anxious to be done with it for it had no place in her new life, in which everything was possible. So she collected the cups quite briskly and marched into the kitchen and put it to rights, and tried to break the mood that had intensified around them. She gathered up her things and kissed them both goodnight, and went out into the evening air, breathing deeply. As she turned to give them a last wave, as she always did, she saw their two faces at the window, white masks that dwindled as she walked backwards down the hill, still waving.

Kitty, waving goodbye at the gate, saw Pauline Bentley stow her mother carefully into the car. She had offered to stay at home and mind the dog while Pauline undertook the one annual outing to which Mrs Bentley remained faithful, despite her loathing of being transported anywhere by any means she could not control. They were going to a fête at a large house in an adjoining village; Mrs Bentley had known the previous owners and considered it her duty as an upholder of the old regime to support the nurses’ charity to which the proceeds would go, although she voiced her loud disapproval every time someone shook a collecting box under her nose. They were, Mrs Bentley had told Kitty, to sit in the rose garden, which she had always admired, talk to one or two people, have a cup of tea, and come home.

Kitty, lingering by the gate, saw them in her mind’s eye, as if admitted to a larger gathering or assembly than she had ever enjoyed, conversing with people of greater breadth and ease. What were they wearing, she wondered? What would be suitable? Mrs Bentley had gone off in her sandals, with her tin in the pocket of her usual cardigan; Pauline had worn an unimpressive pair of trousers. She herself would have tried harder, she thought.

But Pauline, steering her mother over tussocks of bleached grass, and quite unaware of Kitty’s disapproval, felt that she was trying quite hard enough, particularly as her mother had forgotten where she was and was demanding reassurance in her usual carrying tones.

‘I can’t remember what I am doing here,’ said Mrs Bentley, stopping dead and shading her sightless eyes, ‘although I dare say it makes a change. But what sort of change is it making, my dear? Are you smuggling me into an old folks’ home? Will you abandon me in the middle of this field, or whatever it is? More to the point, have I got time for a smoke?’

‘You know perfectly well, Mother, that this is the most splendid treat and that you are going to enjoy every minute of it.’

‘Then when is it going to start?’ asked Mrs Bentley with interest.

‘The moment we get out of this apology for a car park and into the main garden. I thought we might sit by the roses and inhale.’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Bentley, ‘I remember. The Gretton’s place. Open Day, and people I have never met telling me how marvellous I am looking. Shall we have tea?’

‘It is only three-fifteen, Mother.’

‘I see nothing wrong with that.’

‘If I could remember where I put the car, we can do whatever you like,’ said Pauline, looking over her shoulder.

‘I do wish your friend could have joined us. It can’t be much fun for her with just the dog for company. Although he appreciates it, of course.’