Starlight (10 page)

‘Here,’ he said, holding out a glass of the drink he had prepared, and, smiling, he added a word or two in another language than English, at which his wife smiled back as she took the glass.

‘That’s what you always say.’ Mrs George, emboldened by drink, put in curiously. ‘What’s it mean, anyhow?’

‘Between Nora and myself, that,’ Pearson said indifferently, without turning to look at the questioner.

‘Why’ve you still got that accent, too?’ Mrs George, who was becoming drunk, went on aggressively. ‘You been over here long enough. You talk like some foreigner.’

‘I suppose,’ he paused, then went on with a faint smile, ‘I remember I was born in the sloms of Tashkent. My mother was a “lady” there. She made me take her name, not my father’s. She was a priest’s daughter.’

‘Go on. Tell us something true for a change,’ Mrs George dared to sneer.

‘It is true. A Scottish priest. And there was a man in the old quarter – farther down, even, than we lived, who was Scottish too.’

He paused again. Through her increasing drunkenness, Mrs George’s curiosity was alive and eager: her first impression of Thomas Pearson, when they had met him in Brighton a year or so ago, had been of what she called
a nasty customer
and she had long wanted to know more about him. Her curiosity even conquered her real fear of him.

‘He’d been a soldier. Fought at Egeram or one of those places in the First World War, perhaps, and I believe he had a still down there, where he lived. A deserter, I am sure. My mother used to get whisky from him and it kept me alive in the winters. They are – were – very cold, our winters. She made me …’ he broke off, turned quickly, looked across the room and saw two avid masks turned towards him, lit with the pure essence of curiosity and hardly drawing their breath. He smiled contemptuously.

‘So. Perhaps my blood remembers the sloms of Tashkent and that’s why I speak with a foreign accent,’ he ended, and turned back to his contemplation of the great fire.

‘You do talk a lot of bloody rot, Tom,’ Mrs George said stupidly, again, after a pause. ‘Like George. You men.’

‘Perhaps. Now come along, Nora, you’re tired,’ rousing himself.

‘Yes, you get her off to bed quick or she’ll have one of her turns, and I can’t stand that, it gives me the horrors. So get out, both of you,’ Mrs George almost shouted, with a distorted face.

He turned and glanced at her once, and she drew in her breath on a renewed half-shout, and was instantly silent. Pearson put his arm about his wife and helped her from the room.

There was an eiderdown that covered the entire expanse of their double bed, and slippers trimmed with fronds of feathers, a delicate nightgown, a rosy ribbon to band her heavy, magnificent hair; and he helped her to undress and at last lay down beside her. Their quiet talk about the house that was being prepared for her passed gradually into silence, then to tender kisses, and at last into passionate love-making. The god’s presence is not to be mistaken, and he was there.

Every few days, Peggy would slip out of the house, usually in the late afternoon while Mrs Corbett was playing bridge with her three old friends – and make her way down, past trees and open water, to the hotel amidst the desolation lying around Warren Street.

The dogs had become devoted to her. They would hear her step in the hall, scratch at the door of the room where the bridge game was going on, eager to follow.

‘No, no, Cee, it’s only Peggy. She’s going O-U-T,’ Mrs Corbett would explain to the three sagging, painted faces round the table, the six hands whose rings winked above the cards. ‘Be quiet, A., lie down.’

‘Working out all right, is she, Cora?’

‘Oh, very well.’ Mrs Corbett would study her cards. ‘She’s a sly little thing, though. I was surprised.’

‘Shy?
I
wouldn’t have said shy.’

‘I said SLY, Dorry, not shy. You really ought to wear your aid, dear, you’re getting worse and worse.’

‘I don’t notice it getting any worse. Cis, do you notice my hearing’s any worse? I hate that thing, it cost me seventy guineas and I’m always so conscious of it.’

‘I was saying only the other day to Madge, I thought it was worse. I think it’s worse since you had that thing.’

‘She doesn’t wear it half the time. Naughty.’ Mrs Corbett glanced at the crystal and gilt clock. ‘Nearly tea-time – shall we be devils, girls, and have crumpets today?’

‘You always tempt us. I put on six ounces last week. Oh well – perhaps just this once.’

‘Six ounces! You’ll have to “watch out”, as they say.’

‘I don’t know why you all bother about it, fussing over ounces. Harry likes me well-covered.’

Three of the old women said nothing. The one they called Madge was the last of them whose husband was alive, and she was full of triumph because of the simple fact. Every incident, every detail concerned with her hair-dressing, her clothes, her shoes, her make-up, was referred to it.

Two of her old friends confided to one another their contempt for her boasting: only Mrs Corbett, of the three, found in it a cause for wistful envy. ‘Ah … she’s lucky,’ she would sigh, ‘she doesn’t realize how lucky. Poor Madge – she’s got it all to go through – but she has got those lovely grandchildren.’ A heavier sigh.

The front door would shut on the overheated rooms, the forced flowers, the harmless stuffy silence. Peggy would move forward into the open air, with the light step that years of riding had made no clumsier, under the great trees now stripped and iron-coloured against the soft bloom of the winter sunset; she would drift like one of their blowing leaves down the dim road.

Sometimes, Arnold Corbett’s car would draw up as she left the house, bringing him back from his afternoon’s golf.

‘Hullo’ – he would quickly let the window down and lean out – ‘getting away from it all for a few hours?’

Peggy would smile, or perhaps, let the effect of a smile come through the mask of her face, but she would barely stop.

‘Care for me to run you down?’

‘No, thanks all the same.’

‘You surely don’t want to hang round waiting for that bloody bus?’

‘I’m walking.’

‘Walking?’

‘Over the Heath.’ She would drift away from him, with a backward, faintly-smiling valedictory glance.

‘You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?’

He would smile after her, not troubling, in those early days, to watch her disappear in the dusk. He took it for granted that she was going to meet a man in these damp, gloomy, hemmed-in meadows lying at the end of the avenue, beyond the great soot-marred beeches.

Women were always meeting men, and even he, sometimes, was one of the men a woman met.

He would drive the car in and put it away, and go up to his own sitting-room, his ‘den’ as his mother called it, and there pass the time until six o’clock with the evening paper and recalling the afternoon’s game: at six, he would loaf downstairs to join his mother for their first drink. The old women were gone by then, each one gliding in her car a few hundred yards down the road to another comfortable great house. The Corbett house would begin to smell faintly of the coming dinner, and there would be a faint anticipatory stir within Arnold because of this, and because of the promise of relief from boredom in the voices from the television.

Peggy usually covered the miles between MacLeod House and the hotel in just under an hour; almost sixty minutes spent with moist grass under her feet, and untainted air moving coolly past, and the indistinct shapes of trees above her in the dusk; the tiny barbed or mailed insects in their winter sleep around her in their millions; the warm birds sweeping silently, or with a last lonely chirrup, over her head.

But during the hour she was never out of sight of London’s lights on the valley, and though, by comparison with life in MacLeod House, this was freedom, to her it was only a wider cage.

She learned Mrs Corbett’s language, during the next fortnight or so; setting herself to master it precisely as she would have done the sounds necessary for communicating with a horse or a bird. It was a simple language. Peggy thought the late A. J. Corbett had summed his wife up accurately when he had called her ‘a fool, but good-tempered’.

One day at luncheon, she asked if it would be all right for her to go that afternoon to see her mother?

‘Quite all right, if you can manage to be back by not later than six … there’s this party. Not a real party as I said, but I shall want someone to help hand things,’ explained Mrs Corbett. ‘I daren’t hire anyone, haven’t for years, the servants get so upset … we’ll have our real party on Christmas Eve, of course, as usual. How is your mother, dear?’ pausing on her way to her afternoon rest. ‘Better, I hope?’ She stood, half-way up, looking down at the dark, slender, beautiful being in the hall below.

Yes, thank you, Peggy thought that she was better. She seemed pleased at the idea of having her own home again. Peggy smiled up at Mrs Corbett, all grand-daughterliness.

‘Ah, yes.’ Mrs Corbett glanced out through a window half-way up the stairs, at the busy suburb down behind the screening trees. ‘There’s nowhere like your own home, I always say.’ She climbed ponderously on, and Peggy went off on her own affairs.

‘You’re looking better, Mum,’ she said to her mother an hour later.

‘Am I, dear?’ Mrs Pearson smiled. ‘I expect it’s the idea of having a place of my own again, after all these years wandering about. You don’t remember that little wooden house we had in Tashkent, do you?’

‘“The sloms of Tashkent” – I’ve heard that one ever since I can remember.’

‘That’s your father … it
was
a slum, I s’pose, but it was pretty. Fancy having a house with a wooden staircase up to the front door because of the mud the river brought along! That’s what I’ll always remember about it – and how we were always laughing, Dad and I, and when the storks came that first spring and nested on our roof “I’m sure of having a baby now,” I said, and your dad said, “Leave that to me.” He could be very naughty, in those days. We were ever so happy,’ she ended, in a wondering tone. ‘We were young, of course,’ she added, as a child repeats an excuse it has overheard used by adults, ‘I was eighteen and your dad was twenty-two. Easterns grow up so quick.’ She sighed.

Peggy tried to see the picture, the little wooden house, stork’s nest, laughing young pair, through her mother’s eyes for a moment. Her expression was touched by derision and a little disbelief. No: it was useless. She could not see her young parents laughing in their happiness.

‘I wish you’d tell me why things went wrong,’ she said at last, lying back in the chair she had drawn up beside the bed, and put out her small hand, with its muscles made strong by handling horses, and gently covered her mother’s skeletal one.

‘How do you mean – wrong, dear?’ Mrs Pearson turned away, groping uneasily for the cigarettes under the pillow; her face was almost hidden in trailing silky curls. One corner of her lips, white now, showed between the gold.

‘Well, isn’t something wrong? You aren’t like most people’s mothers, are you, for a start?’

‘I’ve always been a good mother to you, Peggy, I’ve done my best, I’ve always put you first, I had such a struggle you wouldn’t believe with your grandmother, she was so harsh with you …’ Mrs Pearson dashed the curls aside, revealing her frightened face. ‘You don’t remember what it was like, you were too little –’

‘It’s all right, Mum, keep calm. I’m not complaining. I only wonder sometimes how your being ill started. That’s all.’

‘Your dad always saw to it you went to good schools,’ Mrs Pearson went on wildly, keeping her head turned away.

‘All right. All right. I hated them.’ Peggy’s voice was so calm that it seemed to quieten her mother. In a moment, Mrs Pearson tried to light a cigarette, then dropped it on to the eiderdown. ‘Light it for me, there’s a dear – ta.’ She drew in smoke, then let it out in a gasp and went on more quietly, ‘I had this power, you see …’

‘You mean you believed you had it and a lot of fools believed it too,’ Peggy said hardly.

‘It isn’t like that, dear.’ Her mother looked at her in gentle surprise. ‘I did have it. Some people do. I’ve been told I could be one of the great mediums.’

Peggy shrugged. ‘It’s all absolutely beyond me … but go on.’

‘– and we were so poor, Peggy – your grannie, too. She put your dad out to work almost before he could walk properly. I’ve never forgiven her for that – herding sheep and running errands – and if she caught him begging or stealing because he was hungry she’d whip him. Whip him? – he was nothing but a baby. She’d always kept her self-respect, you see – read her Bible every day.’

‘Look, Mum. I’ve heard all this before, or most of it. But you’ve never told me how you first got ill.’

Mrs Pearson did not answer for a moment. She lay on her side, the cigarette drooping between her lips and sending its delicate smoke upwards in one wavering grey column, while her beautiful eyes looked away; to somewhere or at something that was not in the room. She began to speak slowly, in a low, reminiscent tone.

‘We were so poor, and I had this power, and I could see into the future, you see, I could touch a ring or a scarf, and know … and once, it was one very cold morning and you were crying because you were hungry and there was hardly a bit in the house. And your dad –’ she paused, and her eyelids fell, covering her eyes. ‘I’m not blaming him. He couldn’t find work and we were almost desperate. And he was proud of me, too. He brought someone along.’