School for Love (12 page)

He heard the sitting-room door open and glanced up. As he looked across the lawn and through the cage-shaped branches of the mulberry tree clouded with their sheen of leaves, he realised that the season had changed. The cold had gone. The air was softer than silk. There was an extraordinary delicacy about everything. Here was a quality he had seen before only as a sort of effusion of his mother – and now, seeing it apart from her, he was amazed by the beauty of the visible world.

Miss Bohun’s voice rang through the air as she stepped into the garden. She looked back and pointed dramatically, excitedly, at an old, striped rug that lay just inside the door.

‘I do hate this rug. I bought it out of kindness for a pound. But, oh, how thankful I have been to have it.’

She crossed the grass with a movement that was almost a waltz; her face was lit by an eager and happy expression that made it seem – what? Felix could only think of the word ‘generous’. She called out: ‘Feel-ix. Come and meet Mrs Ellis.’

Then Mrs Ellis stepped into the garden. Felix stood where he was, watching her. Miss Bohun had spoken of her as ‘young’, but he had not expected anyone really young. He had heard quite old women of thirty or forty called ‘young’. But Mrs Ellis was young. She was wearing a navy-blue jersey and trousers, and her hair was cut off. She was very slender. She would have looked like a boy of Felix’s own age had it not been for the jewellery and the red on her lips and finger-nails. That made her a young lady – a grown-up, a sophisticated person. For some reason, Felix suddenly blushed to the roots of his hair and he pretended to be absorbed again by the irises.

‘There he is,’ sang Miss Bohun, no trace of her usual irritation in her voice. It was as though she, too, had felt the spring and, with it, wonder and excitement. ‘What’s the matter with the boy? Is he deaf? F-e-e-l-iks!’

Felix raised his hot pink face and saw Miss Bohun aglitter, with Mrs Ellis behind her. Mrs Ellis was sauntering casually across the grass. To Felix she would have been the picture of self-sufficient indifference to himself and everything else had she not as she approached lifted her right hand with a rattle of bracelets and touched the corner of her mouth. Despite the magnificence of its scarlet, spiked finger-nails, and its great square topaz ring, her hand was trembling.

When Miss Bohun introduced them, Mrs Ellis said a casual ‘Hello.’ Felix tried to say ‘Hello’ in reply, but his mouth was dry and he found it difficult to speak.

‘What have you chanced upon?’ Miss Bohun asked excitedly. ‘What are they? Oh! Irises! Such interesting flowers.’ She stared blindly at them for a moment, then swinging quickly round she all but trampled them under her feet. ‘I’ve all
sorts
of rare irises in the garden,’ she said. ‘A young botanist planted them here. He was caught in the Middle East at the outbreak of war. He’d been everywhere getting these bulbs – Mount Tabor, Djebel Druse, the Lebanon – I don’t know where not. He was going to Cairo to join up and he didn’t know what to do with all these valuable bulbs – so I offered him a home for them.’

‘Has he never been back for them?’ asked Mrs Ellis in a husky voice.

‘No – but he did write from Tunisia and ask me to dig them up and post them to him. As though I knew where they all were! Some people have no scruples at all about putting others to trouble. I didn’t reply and I hope I shall hear nothing more.’

‘Won’t he be sad about losing them?’ asked Felix.

‘No doubt – but I rather suspected he intended smuggling these bulbs into England and it’s forbidden, you know. They carry plant diseases.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Felix appreciated Miss Bohun’s scruples, but he could not help feeling sorry for the young man. Mrs Ellis, however, appeared indifferent to the story. Her face was turned aside and Felix, glancing furtively at her, noticed the even china-white of her skin and her delicate, regular features. Her hair, a light chestnut, was
completely smooth. Felix had always regarded his mother’s blonde fluffy-haired prettiness as the ideal of feminine beauty, but now he looked at Mrs Ellis as though he were seeing beauty for the first time. Miss Bohun, also looking at her, said: ‘You’re admiring my potted plants, I see. I got them from an old Armenian woman down the road. She had them on a balcony and every time I passed I could see them wilting away. At last I knocked on her door and said: “Why don’t you water your plants?” She said they’d belonged to a lodger who had gone to Aleppo, so I said I’d take them and look after them. One day she came down the lane and saw how fine they’d grown and, if you can credit it, she asked for them back again.’

Mrs Ellis smiled, then, turning with a sudden, quick movement and seeing Felix watching her, her smile widened and she said: ‘I like your cat.’

‘She’s called “Faro”.’ Felix blushed again, this time with pure pleasure.

He lifted Faro down from his shoulder and held her in his hands thinking Mrs Ellis might want to take her, but Mrs Ellis merely put out a white, claw-thin hand and gave her a chuck under the chin. Felix realised that, to her, Faro, who for weeks had been his companion, talking, feeling and thinking exactly as Felix did himself, was only a little animal. Felix, looking into Faro’s eyes, seemed to see them blank and unthinking and, as he watched her, she turned her gaze entranced upon the movements of a fly. Of course she was not a human being like Mrs Ellis, but a cat whose reactions were to warmth, mice, birds and flies. As this thought passed through his mind, Faro wriggled and jumped to the ground, where she lifted one
of her front paws so that she could stab at her creamy front with her pink, darting tongue.

When Felix looked up he found that Miss Bohun was watching him; she looked cross and, catching his eye, said:

‘As a matter of fact she’s my cat.’

‘She’s a beauty,’ said Mrs Ellis politely.

Miss Bohun made a movement as though offering to conduct Mrs Ellis away, but instead she walked off, saying: ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to get to know one another while I order luncheon.’

As Miss Bohun disappeared into the house, Mrs Ellis gave a laugh: ‘She’s a joke, isn’t she?’

Felix looked in surprise towards the door, then laughed himself. Suddenly it seemed that that was, of course, the explanation of Miss Bohun. She was a joke.

‘But she’s quite clever, really,’ he said quickly, ‘she teaches English.’

‘Oh, she’s all right.’ Mrs Ellis paused, her hands in her pockets, looking down at her feet, then she added in an aside and in a tone different from any she had used before: ‘She rang me up and said she wanted to offer me a home. I should be grateful. It’s more than anyone else has done.’

‘She offered me a home, too,’ said Felix, ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

‘Haven’t you any relations out here?’

‘Only Miss Bohun, and she isn’t really a relation. You see, when she was a little girl she was an orphan. Well, not an ordinary orphan; she had some money left her, but she hadn’t a mother or a father. My grandfather gave her a home, the same as she’s given me. But his wife died and he got married again and he had some real children – I mean, they belonged to him, and, of course, Miss Bohun
didn’t, and she was a lot older by that time. My mother thinks she wasn’t happy and it made her funny. My mother said: “It’s given her an inferiority thing” – do you know what that means?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Mrs Ellis laughed in at herself.

‘But I don’t think she feels inferior.’

‘Neither do I. Rather the reverse.’

They stood silent a moment; then she jerked her hand nervously, her bracelets rattled, and she said: ‘I must go and unpack.’ Without glancing at him again, she returned to the house.

Felix wandered around, troubled, the garden and the spring no longer beautiful in themselves but somehow now oddly related to his own disturbance. He disliked this disturbance and when he saw Faro sitting alone on the garden seat, he was swept with remorse that put everything else from his mind. He crossed to her and started to stroke her, but she turned her head and bit his hand with quiet decision. The bite did not hurt; it was no more than a warning; not understanding, he tried to lift her and in one instantaneous movement she caught his wrist between her paws and bit him sharply. He drew his hand away with a cry, and she stared at him with a sort of defiance. Looking into her eyes he seemed to see her retreat into cold, animal independence, but behind this there was resentment.

‘Faro,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but as he put out his hand again she backed from him, and as he rose she ran up the mulberry tree out of his reach.

He stood under the tree thinking Mrs Ellis must be noticing him from her window, but when he caught a glimpse of her through the glass she was absorbed in putting her frocks into the wardrobe. With a pang such
as he had never felt before in his life, he knew she had not seen him at all.

Miss Bohun, sitting with a piece of cold meat before her, kept one hand on the bell that she had now rung twice. She glanced towards the stairs as though she could better hear Mrs Ellis’s descent if she looked in that direction, but there was no sound. She clicked her tongue.

‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘I hope we’re not going to have this sort of thing. I don’t like to ring three times. I don’t want her to think I’m annoyed,’ but she gave the bell a little shake and at once, as though as a result, Mrs Ellis’s door could be heard opening and Miss Bohun at once became quite cheerful.

‘Ah,
here
you are,’ she said as Mrs Ellis appeared, ‘I always like to get the luncheon over in good time. I never know when one of my pupils may turn up early. They’re so eager, you know, and I don’t think it does to have food on the table when they arrive.’

Mrs Ellis smiled as she sat down, obviously not relating Miss Bohun’s ideas to herself.

Miss Bohun, as she sliced the meat, talked loudly and with a wild gaiety. Felix could not keep his eyes off her. He had never seen her so animated, so – yes, happy. He realised that Miss Bohun was happy. Little pink patches glowed on her cheek-bones; her eyes were not half-shut now but open and shining.

Felix glanced at Mrs Ellis to see if she were as surprised as he was, but Mrs Ellis, staring over his shoulder at the garden behind his head, was obviously far away in her own thoughts. And why, after all, should she be surprised? She did not know Miss Bohun.

As Miss Bohun sliced the meat, her voice rose higher and higher in a sort of exaltation of gaiety: ‘I do hope you’ll be comfortable in my room. It gets the morning sun which I always enjoyed so much, but you must not worry about me. I shall be very happy in the attic. Very happy. The carpenters have done a wonderful job, and – this is important – I shall be nicely tucked away up there. I shall have
quiet
. I cannot tell you what that means to me! You must realise, when I’m seeking inspiration for my sermons – the voice is so thin, the thread that carries it so very, very thin, and the birth-pangs so terrific, that the slightest sound can disturb it; the slightest jar.’ She touched Mrs Ellis’s arm confidentially causing her to turn in a startled way: ‘I must tell you about that one day.’

‘About what?’ Mrs Ellis asked.

‘My religion. It is something only for chosen spirits, but I shall tell you.’

Felix looked up to see if he were included, but Miss Bohun was looking only at Mrs Ellis. Mrs Ellis, lifting her last scrap of meat to her mouth, murmured a vague interest.

‘Will you have another piece of meat, Mrs Ellis?’ Miss Bohun asked, almost eagerly.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Nor I. I find I am happier and healthier, and my brain is clearer, on vegetables.’ Miss Bohun rang the bell, then noticed Felix: ‘Oh, what about you, Felix? You’re always hungry.’

‘No, thank you.’ Felix had lost his appetite, but Miss Bohun did not notice; she chattered on:

‘Now, don’t forget, Mrs Ellis, I want you to feel free to bring in a guest if you wish. There’s room at the table.
I can always poke myself in the corner.’ Mrs Ellis looked up as though startled. ‘I’m just a little wisp of a thing,’ went on Miss Bohun, ‘no flesh on my bones, but you’re a hundred per cent feminine and fully-fashioned. I used to be so sorry for myself being so flat-chested, but now I know things like that don’t matter. I’m very wiry.’

‘Oh!’ Mrs Ellis made no attempt to appear interested. A long silence followed.

Maria had brought in the joint, but it was Frau Leszno who entered to take it away. Apparently she had come with a purpose, for, as she trudged round the table she fixed on the new lodger such an expression of suffering resentment, Mrs Ellis, suddenly seeing it, opened her mouth with surprise. Frau Leszno, going off with the meat dish, seemed satisfied.

‘Is she annoyed about something?’ Mrs Ellis asked.

Miss Bohun nodded darkly: ‘She’s under notice. She goes at the end of the week, but she has nothing to complain about. I’ve found her another position and I’m letting her son remain, although, goodness knows, he does little enough for his keep.’

‘Is that the handsome young man I saw in the yard?’

‘Handsome? I suppose he is handsome, although he hasn’t half his father’s looks. I’ve had to promise to let him have his mother’s room when she goes although it’s Maria’s by rights. Still, Maria is a good creature; she doesn’t complain, and after all, she’s never had much better than she’s got.’

The door opened again; Miss Bohun whispered: ‘This is Maria.’

Maria, coming in with a rice pudding, smiled in a pleasant, motherly way at Mrs Ellis, who smiled back. Miss
Bohun seeing this exchange, smiled herself and gave her hands a clap of delight. ‘Isn’t this nice! I’m sure we’re going to be just one big happy family.’

Mrs Ellis looked a little startled, but Miss Bohun did not notice. ‘I know what we’ll do,’ she said in the manner of someone promising a treat to children, ‘to-morrow we’ll all go together and pay the rent.’ This time she did notice Mrs Ellis’s expression, and she explained: ‘Oh, perhaps you think that’s not amusing. Actually, it’s quite an expedition. The landlord is an Imam at the big mosque. I have to go early, when the mosque is open to Christians, and present my salaams and so on. Dear me, I do feel so sorry for landlords; they are not allowed to raise their rents, you know, and rents here are so small. This house, for instance, is controlled at £60 a year. My landlord would be much worse off if I had not voluntarily – voluntarily, mind you! – offered to pay him more.’