Starlight (21 page)

‘I say, I do wish you’d be a bit nice to me sometimes.’

She paused, as if thinking about an answer, then said indifferently:

‘I suppose you mean let you kiss me.’

‘Right first time,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re what my erks in the R.A.F. would have called a caution, aren’t you? Care to make any further suggestions? I’m game if you are.’

‘No thank you …’

‘I’m clearing out this afternoon, so you can draw a deep breath.’

Peggy said nothing, but smiled once more; it was as if a stormy sunlight had touched her face.

He was staring at her miserably.

‘You’ve absolutely landed me, you know,’ he added suddenly. ‘Hit me for six. You could do anything you liked with me – even marry me, and
that’s
something I’ve never said to any woman yet. I don’t know how you’ve managed it – you’ve been ruder to me than any girl I’ve ever known – and when you smile like that – I could die for you. That’s exactly how I feel, and I’ve never felt like it in my life. Never. About any woman. I could die for you.’

‘Ah,’ said Peggy, getting up from the table, ‘you should read Kipling on that – ‘
I am dying for you and you are dying for another
’. That’s what he wrote about our situation – if it is a situation. He’d come across it before, perhaps.’

She went out of the room.

‘But I love you,’ he said, as if in astonishment, to the elegant disorder of the big table and the impersonal afternoon light, ‘I love you.’

By tea-time, he had gone. Peggy settled herself into the routine of the house with cat-like satisfaction. The servants waited on her with obvious dislike and a curiosity about her comings and goings which amused her; she had the dogs for company.

She saw Arnold from time to time when he looked in for his letters; sometimes, he would telephone to ask if there were any for him and keep her for a few minutes in conversation – to listen to her voice, she supposed, indifferently.

She didn’t believe that he had never spoken of marriage to any woman. In her experience, men of Arnold’s type frequently spoke of marriage, but always in such a way that no definite proposal could be extracted from their remarks. They looked on themselves as glittering prizes, and enjoyed dangling themselves tantalizingly in front of women’s noses. She sometimes gave a thought to poor Gwen Palmer, and she did not think it would kill Arnold Corbett to see that he and his money were not always wanted. Whether it would ‘do him good’ or not, she neither knew nor cared.

Once a week, she went over to see her mother. Her relationship with her father expressed its tensions in cool short exchanges, often with a sting in them, but his satisfaction in Mrs Pearson’s improved health and spirits since her settling into Lily Cottage was so strong that he could not keep it to himself, and it burst out in questions. ‘Doesn’t your mother look better? Haven’t you noticed it too? She’s livelier, isn’t she? She enjoys her life, now.’

He spoke of enjoyment as a thing other people experienced. Bliss he knew, and cessation of suffering, but never ordinary simple enjoyment. His mother had laid the foundations of passion and pain in him both strong and four-square. Her dour nature, absorbed always in the moral problems looming beyond the practical ones of their poor life, had pressed like an iron clamp on the soft voluptuous one of a little half-Eastern boy; and Thomas’s jokes, Thomas’s joys, were not felt like those of ordinary men.

He went about his business during the day; meeting his managers or looking in at the fruit and vegetable shops in crowded Stratford or comfortable Ealing; sometimes taking a ten-shilling note or some silver and coppers from the hand of the derelict in charge of one of his junk shops as he walked past it; telephoning the rent-collectors who went round his dilapidated properties in Islington or Kennington.

All his projects were on a small scale … but his wiliness and persistence and his contempt for the law, blent with a natural dexterity in handling money, made him successful.

He owned solid
things
: houses, ship-loads of half-spoiled fruit, dilapidated little shops, collections of other people’s battered and abandoned possessions. He could never wring from them enough money to buy the laughter and the security his mother had denied him when he was a child.

And in the evenings, when his crowded, yet curiously shapeless, day was over, he would go home to the small house with the bearded mask sneering by its door.

An Oriental’s day; devious, and full of coffee-drinking and long, apparently aimless conversations which caused blistering private comment among the enslaved creatures he employed. From these conversations, something solid always emerged which profited Thomas Pearson.

Mrs Geddes, a silent, calm, stout lady in her late seventies, began her régime at the Vicarage by a gesture which – had anyone there had the kind of imagination to see it as such – would have appeared symbolic.

She threw away the piece of rag that had been used for nearly a year to mop up burnt milk and spilled tea-leaves.

She also banished a pensioner known to Mr Geddes and Gerald simply as ‘the cat’, which for nearly as long had held insolent and unshakeable squatter’s right over the kitchen.

But, where a lesser woman would have had it put to sleep and then suffered retrospective qualms of conscience, Mrs Geddes’s triumph lay in her dispensation of justice with mercy; she banished it from the kitchen, indescribable saucers and all, but made for it a home in the ruined air-raid shelter at the end of the garden, where it had its saucers and its horrid old bed and was happier than it had ever been, and felt such gratitude towards Mrs Geddes that it haunted the back door in the hope of having her scratch its ears or call it Pussy, though all she ever said to it while doing so was: ‘Go away, you know I don’t like cats.’

She then began, naturally, to cook the kind of meals she had always cooked for her parson husband and the little only son who had also taken Orders; in the huge primitive kitchens of huge, icy rectories up and down England; potato soup and treacle tart, fruit cakes, kedgeree for breakfast and pot roasts.

Gerald Corliss, who had always taken this kind of food for granted, did not realize how much his system and spirits had been suffering from the lack of it until they began to revive on its return.

He had intended to mention old Mr Fisher’s story about his new landlady’s alleged trance. But, dazed with the reinstallation of comfort and eatable food at the Vicarage, he simply forgot.

One morning towards the end of February, when they were seated at lunch, Mrs Geddes said:

‘A funny old man called to see you this morning, Robert. He had some little straw dolls on a tray that he wanted to show you.’

‘Very old? With a face like a sheep?’

‘He has, now you come to suggest it.’

‘That’s Mr Fisher … dolls on a tray?’

‘Yes, rather nicely made. I don’t think he was selling them.’

‘I do know him – though he isn’t a church-goer,’ said the Vicar.

‘I thought you’d want me to do something about it, so I gave him a shilling. He showed me the dolls, and then, though he didn’t
say
anything, I think he expected me to give him something.’

‘That was all right; remind me to give it to you.’

There was a pause, while Mrs Geddes served a perfect apple tart.

‘Oh, by the way,’ put in Gerald, ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you only it completely slipped my memory – I found him asleep in the church – on – Christmas Night, it was.’ He paused, looking guilty. ‘Nearly six weeks ago – I’m so
very
sorry, I ought to have mentioned it before.’

‘It doesn’t matter, you know we get homeless people in there from time to time. It’s part of our job to keep the church open, I expect he was just having a rest.’

‘No, I didn’t think you’d mind that. But he told me something about his landlady that was worrying him, and I said I’d tell you.’

‘Trouble there, is there?’ Mr Geddes said resignedly, ‘well, it did strike me it was all a bit too rosy to last.’ He checked an impulse to add that when people were all over each other in the first few days, it seldom did. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘No, it isn’t the usual kind of trouble these peop – that … er … seems to crop up with landladies. He said she – Mrs Pearson – suffers from trances.’

‘
Suffers from trances
? What on earth …?’

‘She had one on Christmas Night – if one can talk about someone “having” a trance – she fell into one, apparently, and “talked in another voice”, he said. And he said she seemed like a lost soul.’

There was a silence. Cold February light looked in through the tall, shrub-darkened windows at the three faces; Mrs Geddes’s calm as usual, the curate’s earnest and a little disturbed, the Vicar’s perplexed, with pursed lips.

‘In one sense of course that’s our business,’ said Mr Geddes at last, ‘because she is a parishioner. But in another it isn’t at all. She hasn’t asked for our help. This is just a report from a neighbour, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. And he’s such an extraordinary old creature – a little unbalanced, wouldn’t you say –’

‘Eccentric. Eccentric, not unbalanced. He’s like a child,’ said the Vicar impatiently. He had to go to tea with his tiresome ex-parishioner in Hampstead, and had much in the way of deskwork to fit in before he left … ‘What did you say he said – “
a lost soul
”? Extraordinary – he really is a queer old boy.’

‘
A lost soul
. It made – an impression on me at the time. I don’t know how … I came … to forget it for more than six weeks.’

‘There’s a lot on, here,’ Mr Geddes said dryly. ‘It isn’t exciting, but there’s always plenty of it. Lost souls don’t often come our way. The small things smother the big ones, I suppose.’

‘What C. S. Lewis called “the bustle, the notices, the umbrellas”,’ said Mrs Geddes in a low tone.

‘Suppose you try to tell me exactly what he said,’ Mr Geddes went on.

Gerald, now feeling thoroughly guilty, brought his excellent brain, which had found no difficulty in co-ordinating the minute details of exegesis or in mastering Greek, to bear on recalling what Mr Fisher had said.

Yet it was a version, rather than a report, because his own articulacy gave to the old man’s vague phrases a clarity they had lacked. However, it left the Vicar with a strong feeling that something must be done, though all he said was, ‘He may be exaggerating. Most people love a bit of drama.’

‘Shall … do you think … ought I to go?’ said Gerald hesitatingly. ‘I suppose, that is … the thing to do is to visit her.’

‘I’ll go. It may be a case for a psychiatrist, though I have small confidence in
them
, as you know.’

‘Yes, I thought that at the time.’ Gerald let the matter drop, hoping his relief did not sound in his voice.

The Vicar went off to his study and the curate lingered for a moment, to see if Mrs Geddes needed help in the kitchen.

‘Thank you, I’d be glad of it,’ she said, and he busied himself with stacking plates on to the trolley while she went to the kitchen to see if the huge, wasteful boiler had hot water to offer.

Gerald carefully folded three starched white table napkins with a vague sensation of pleasure. He had noticed their appearance at the vicarage table without wondering how they came to be starched, accepting them as part of the general improvement under the Rule of the Vicar’s mother.

Now he began to wheel the laden trolley out of the room and across the hall and down a paved corridor which echoed hollowly to its passing. He had spent all his childhood and boyhood in lofty, spacious places, and the heights and breadths of the vicarage’s rooms provided one of the few familiar sensations in this new world.

‘Put them in that drawer; thank you,’ commanded Mrs Geddes, seeing out of the corner of her eye that he was moving the napkins absently up and down in one hand, ‘and will you open the door to the cat; it wants its lunch.’

Gerald opened the door and the cat strolled in, glancing at him balefully.

‘Go away,’ Mrs Geddes observed, moving so that it could rub itself against her ankles. ‘Gerald, give it its fish on the dresser, will you. Half will do.’

He shrinkingly obeyed, and the cat began to toy with the white wet flabby stuff in languid style. Some proud remark about its daintiness would have been called forth from any natural person; Mrs Geddes continued to clean plates with a mop and hand them to her helper in silence; presently the cat stopped assing about, and ate its portion with appetite.

‘Let it out, Gerald, will you.’

He opened the door and stood expectant. The cat walked over to Mrs Geddes and gazed up at her passionately, waving its meagre tail and purring in a kind of croak.

‘You know very well I don’t like cats,’ said Mrs Geddes, stooping to manipulate – the action does not merit the word fondle – its ears.

Gratified, and taking its time, the cat strolled past Gerald and out into the garden.

‘That’s all; thank you; that was a great help,’ said Mrs Geddes, beginning to open a packet of old-fashioned starch, and, glad at heart, he followed the cat’s example and went off on his own affairs.