The Forgotten Story (7 page)

But when they had restarted her mood changed again.

‘You know, Anthony, mine was a funny sort of marriage. The way it happened, I mean. When I first saw Tom in court I admired tremendously the way he defended us. I thought him very good looking then. Of course he was in his element; I didn't realise that. But you don't marry a lawyer for the way he behaves in law courts any more than you'd marry a sailor for the way he sails his ship. I was silly; but there you are. He came to me when it was over and asked me to go out with him the next evening. I said yes. Joe started raising steam when he heard of it. I was living at home again when this second case came off, and we were good friends again; but me wanting to go out with the lawyer who, in his view, had just let him down was more than he could endure. So of course we had another quarrel and the more he said I wasn't to go out with Tom the more I went – and so it developed quickly.'

Anthony said nothing, but he could well understand that much. Joe had been trying to govern someone with a bit of himself in her.

‘So there you are,' she said moodily. ‘That's the way it is, as you'll find when you're older. People never are what they seem. Nice people turn out nasty and nasty people nice. Tom has awfully pretty manners when he likes. I – I thought I was in love with him. In a way for the time I was. A sort of infatuation, I suppose. I was absolutely in earnest, though it may not seem so now. After we were married things seemed to change.'

‘How did, it change? he asked, all attention.

‘Oh, you – you wouldn't understand,' she said, and again the conversation lapsed.

But now she was like a moth fluttering round a flame; at each remembrance she singed her wings and sheered away, but the flame still burned, attracting her back. She persuaded herself that there was pleasure in explaining to someone who did not matter. In fact she was glad to speak more fully than she had ever done since her return, to justify herself – but whether to him or to herself was a moot point.

‘They live in a big house in Penryn, you know.'

‘Who do?' he asked, for he had been watching a yawl dipping out to sea.

‘The Harrises. There's Tom and his mother and an aunt. He took me there for the first time after we were married. That was the first shock.'

‘What was?'

‘Well, the house was big and old and full of big old furniture that looked as if it could never be moved. It's the sort of house you'd never expect anyone would ever dare to sneeze or giggle in. That didn't matter much of itself. Surroundings aren't very important, and you can be happy in a public house or a museum if you go the right way about it. But Mrs Harris and Miss Harris and their surroundings were all of a piece. A – a stiff elderly maid let us in and another stiff elderly maid showed us into the drawing-room, and there were two stiff elderly old ladies waiting for us for tea. I hadn't – it had all been such a rush that I hadn't met either of them before, and I think Tom must have had a bit of a quarrel with his mother the morning before he left when he told her he was going to marry me. That didn't make for a good beginning …'

‘Didn't he tell her till then?'

‘It had only been decided the day before. Then we went away for three days and came straight back to the house. I think now that Tom was in a hurry in order to
forestall
criticism. He thought that once we were married they would make the best of a bad job and put a cheerful face on it. But I didn't want anybody to start looking on me as a bad job that had to be made the best of. That isn't the way to start married life. Anyway, they didn't try hard enough to deceive me. You see – you see, when I went there I felt very happy, bubbling over with good spirits. Their reception was a sort of smack in the face. It didn't take me long to see what the position was. They thought I wasn't good enough for Tom.'

She stopped to push some grass through a gate to a pony.

‘Of course I could see his mother's point of view. She wanted him to marry well, keep up the tradition, in the same house with the same furniture, be gracious, entertain the right people and live to be seventy-seven. In some ways she was nice, and could have been nicer if she'd tried.' Judicially she repeated: ‘ I could
see
her point of view, but she couldn't expect
me
to fit into it, could she? Sometimes she made a real attempt to be agreeable, and we got on fairly well then, though I was always thinking “ What an effort it must be for her!” and “She doesn't really like me, she's only trying to,” and “ I wish I didn't mind being patronised, she doesn't really intend it as that.” '

They turned and walked slowly on.

‘I wonder what it is that makes some people seem so afraid of coming unmelted. Tom has grown up in a house where every feeling and emotion has to be – to be muted and restrained, kept under lock and key because it's bad form to let them go free. Why are some people so scared of their dignity, Anthony?'

Anthony did not know.

‘I was really thinking of Aunt Phoebe then,' she said. ‘I
might
have got on with his mother if there hadn't been Aunt Phoebe. She … I never could make up my mind which was the tightest about Aunt Phoebe, her mouth or her stays. Sorry if you're shocked, I keep forgetting you haven't had a sister. Aunt Phoebe disapproved of me from the start. I was socially inferior and hadn't been educated in the wooden-face school. I was too flighty and unstable. She didn't give me a chance before she started picking holes.' Patricia choked as if the memory were not to be borne. ‘ Naturally, the more holes she picked the more opportunity I gave her. You may say this isn't anything to do with Tom, but it is. You see, Tom couldn't understand us at all. He didn't seem to try. In his own house he was different, seemed a part of it. It was
fantastic
. You can't be legal in a home, not if it's going to
be
a home. You can't weigh up things as if you were a judge, and then give so much credit to this side and so much credit to that. You may be able to
see
both sides, but you can't
take
both sides. If he'd come down on one side or the other, then I should have known where I was earlier.

‘After three weeks it was about as bad as it could be. Then Dad was taken ill and I wanted to rush home and nurse him. Tom didn't want me to do that. He raised all sorts of objections that were just silly. He even offered to pay for a nurse for Dad, but I wouldn't have that. Joe wouldn't either, you may be sure. In the end of course I could see what it was: living with his family had convinced Tom that my manners needed a bit of tightening up – when I met a stranger I didn't say “ How d'you do-o” as if there were a nasty taste in my mouth; I went up and shook hands – and I'd committed the terrible sin of being found in the kitchen, talking to the tweenie. Anyway, I think he thought that if I stayed at Mount House long enough I should get like them, but Smoky Joe's was a bad influence for me. As if I'd lived anywhere else since I left school! He thought that if I went backwards and forwards between one house and the other I never would improve. So then I told him that I didn't want to improve by getting like him and his mother and his aunt, and that if he wanted someone like that I didn't know why he'd married me, and anyway the Veals had a longer pedigree than any Harrises he could find, and whether he liked it or not I was going to nurse Dad, and I wouldn't bother to come back and lower his prestige any more …'

Towards the end of this statement her breath had been coming as quickly as her speech. They began to go down the other side of the hill. Anthony glanced at his cousin. In talking to him she had relived some of the emotions of that time. Until two days ago she had put all this behind her, tried to shelve it and forget it. Tom Harris's visit had brought it all up anew. She looked neither so young nor so happy as she had done a week ago.

‘Was Uncle Joe very ill then?'

‘Oh, yes. We thought he was going to die. He's better now. I'm watching his diet so that he takes regular meals.'

‘Is that why you're not going back to Tom Harris?'

‘Oh, no,' she said. ‘That doesn't make any difference. I'm never going back to him. I'm never going back.'

Anthony looked down the hill and saw Ned Pawlyn coming up it to meet them.

It became a regular practice for Anthony once or twice each week to row his uncle out to some ship in the harbour. One week it was
The Grey Cat.
Then it was
Lavengro.
Then it was
Pride of Pendennis.
This was followed by
Lady Tregeagle.
Then
The Grey Cat
returned from Liverpool. There were two barquentines, a schooner and a tops'l schooner, all around three hundred tons; tidy little craft busy about their owner's business. And the owner was J. Veal. How many, if any, more there might be trekking across the oceans of the world on the business of J. Veal, Anthony did not know.

Sometimes he sat in the little master's cabin and listened, less than half comprehending, to discussions on freights and port dues and insurance costs. He noticed that whenever the conversation was turned by one of the captains upon what they considered necessary repairs to their ships Smoky Joe had a talent for turning the conversation to something else. If they insisted that the repair or replacement was urgently necessary he always ended the discussion with, ‘Well, we'll consider it, mister, we'll consider it.'

He never saw his uncle consult with anyone ashore, though Joe sometimes ventured forth in the morning on his own business with ship's chandlers, Board of Trade authorities and the like. Once Anthony pulled the cork out of the floorboard of his bedroom and saw his uncle in the office below counting a heap of gold into little piles. There were twenty or thirty such piles by the time he replaced the cork.

There is something about a spy-hole which has an irresistible fascination for a young boy, even the most honourable young boy, and Anthony on a number of occasions took out the cork and stared down on the greying head of his uncle as he was writing or sorting out papers or adding up figures in a huge ledger. Once a knock came on the office door, and the boy noted with what care Joe put everything away – this in the safe, that in a drawer – before unlocking the door to admit, as it happened, Uncle Perry. Uncle Perry looked round the room curiously and made some joke and laughed: it was clear that he had not often been in this room before; and Joe answered his questions tightly and disapprovingly as if to make it plain that he did not like to be interrupted.

On another occasion, hearing gruff and unfamiliar voices in the room below, Anthony saw the master and mate of
Lady Tregeagle
being entertained to a glass of rum and milk. This was the first time he had seen anyone invited into that private office. When they had finished their drink Joe brought out a piece of foolscap paper and signed his name on it, and they both signed their names after him. He did not however give them this paper but kept it himself; and when they had gone he sealed it up in an envelope and stood hesitantly in the middle of the floor for some seconds. Eventually he went to a small oil painting of an old lady on the wall and taking it down clicked it open on some sort of a hinge, so that between the painting and the back there was room to slip the paper.

Anthony tried to take a firm hold on himself over this matter of peeping. He seldom yielded to the temptation without feeling mean about it afterwards; also he had no lock on his door and knew that if someone were to come into his room while he was so engaged he would never live down the shame.

No word came to him during these weeks from his father. He had received one letter only since his mother's death, and he anxiously awaited another. He was quite happy in his new life, chiefly because of Patricia; but he longed to see his father. He longed above all to be in the company of someone to whom he personally belonged. He could not-quite get over the feeling of not
belonging
here. It was as if he had been in the centre of a circle of friends, and suddenly he had lost that circle, and now he was attached to another circle, but was only at the extreme outer edge.

He did not come to know Aunt Madge any better than the day he first arrived. That small precise face built upon its column of chins seldom carried much expression beyond a certain vague distaste for the vulgarity of the world around it. The large, shapeless body, with its fondness for ornament – overburdened, one felt, as much by clothes as by flesh – seemed to dominate the kitchen without stamping the impress of a personality upon it. The weak, husky voice was what Anthony chiefly remembered when she was not before him, its habit of breaking off before its objective was reached, its capacity when angry of endless reiteration without being raised a semi-tone.

But he sympathised with Uncle Joe for having married her even though she was so unattractive; for she was a real commercial asset. With her to do the cooking, Patricia to charm the clientele with her pretty ways, and Joe himself to drive his hard bargains at the door, the supremacy of the restaurant was secure.

The only times Anthony was really uncomfortable were on the Friday and Saturday evenings. These nights might have improved since the law case, but they were still rowdy enough. The boy had few thoughts on the ethics of the matter, but he didn't like Patricia being in contact with a crowd of singing roisterers and he always felt a sensation of relief when Saturday drew to a close without having given rise to another mêlée.

This business of Friday and Saturday evenings was the only one on which Uncle Perry condescended to compromise his amateur status. When the fun got fast and merry he was usually somewhere in the middle of it with his laughing buccaneer face and Spanish-black hair. Sometimes he would be persuaded to sing, and he had a fine repertoire of comic songs with an occasional bawdy number thrown in. He would stand under the figurehead of the
Mary Lee Melford
, which had sunk off Maenporth, smile his attractive wayward smile, and sing his songs accompanied by the lame accordionist, while the crowded room roared the choruses.