The Goose Girl and Other Stories (11 page)

On the causeway-stones the wheels rattled, the hooves of the thin brown horse beat in steady rhythm an old-fashioned tune, and leather loosely slapped its hide. When the off-wheels were caught in a tram-line the carriage lurched and threw Latimer and Corinna close together, but in the same moment her attention was taken by a seagull, come inland from the Forth, that balanced solemnly on the rim of a large gilded mortar over the door of a chemist's shop; and he, having snubbed the panic impulse, now dreaded no mischance but felt stirring in his mind a high nonsensical pleasure.

‘There are more dull people,' she said as they passed two women in respectable drab clothes, one of whom was old, and a narrow-shouldered man of depressed appearance. ‘I couldn't bear to be middle-aged! I couldn't bear to be anyone else!'

‘Some of us have our compensations,' he told her.

‘Oh, but you're different.'

‘Though it's true that many are unlucky. I once heard a man say, “I never got much fun myself, but some of my friends have had an amazingly good time.”'

‘How terribly sad!'

‘So it seemed to me, but he didn't think so. He was a well-fed, apparently contented person.' ‘But how could he be?'

‘You don't know what secrets he had. You don't know anything about other people. You don't know what terrible strands of interest hold together those two dowdy women and the man with bottle shoulders.'

‘Do you?'

‘They may have a plot to strangle him after supper tomorrow, while he has a better plan to hit them on the head, with a stone in the toe of a stocking, after tea.'

‘That's not typical of life in Edinburgh.'

‘But you can't deny the possibility. You can't even tell me what the seagull saw that was sitting on the edge of a golden mortar outside a chemist's shop.'

‘Do you think there was anything in it?'

‘A rag and a bone and a little wooden box.'

‘What was in the box?'

‘The telephone number of an old man who's forgotten what nobody else ever knew.'

‘Goodness! You have got good eyes. Now tell me what he's looking
at.' She pointed to a sailor who was staring into a fishmonger's full window.

‘It can only be one thing, can't it?' ‘Something horrible?'

‘I'm afraid so. There's a flounder on the slab with his dead wife's ring in its mouth.'

‘What a shock for the poor man! But perhaps she was a bad woman?'

‘The worst woman in the world.'

They drove past houses set back from the road behind little gardens emptied by the winter, and looked at black or curtained windows, and the sky above them was as clear and cold as a great zircon. The old carriage groaned and rattled, and tall tramcars swaying on their shallow rails went shrilly past. Here and there, idly, Latimer read the name of a street: Roseburn, a shepherd's lyric deafened by stone, the remote Victorian echoes of Kew Terrace and Osborne Terrace, then a flour-mill and the vanished rural chaffering of the Haymarket, and so into shabbier thoroughfares till they saw mounting high and precipitous before them the darkly gleaming Castle rock. And all the way they spoke of nothing grave, of no material subject, and little even of themselves but for Corinna's recollection, now and then, of some ludicrous girl at school or a mistress's peculiar discipline and her outwitting. Latimer talked nonsense with an imagination as fluent as a hill-stream after rain—or a fortune-teller's patter in a booth—and Corinna's voice, like a swallow hunting evening flies, went to and fro in effortless arcs and charming cadences after topics so minute as almost to be invisible. But subsequently, when Latimer tried to remember what subjects had held them in conversation, he was inclined to believe that somehow they had touched—oh, lightly, it is true, but with conscious fingers—eternal themes and the poets' deeper chords.

He had made a joke about Byzantium—the architects of Edinburgh have sometimes had unlikely motives—but was it all a joke? He had described his sailing to the Fastnet in a leaking yacht improvidently manned, and made of dangerous misadventure a ludicrous tale; but surely in its burden had been the immemorial menace of the estranging sea? Corinna, talking of a concert solemnly attended by twenty schoolgirls, had described a plump and bespectacled friend's untimely woe, whom Gluck's
Orpheus
reminded that she had not prepared her necessary twenty lines of the
Aeneid
, Book IV, which they were reading—and then, oh surely then! they had fallen silent to think of Queen Dido in eternal grief upon the Africk shore. Such
notes they had struck, he was sure of it in after years, though honesty could find no certain words to substantiate his faith. But a vibration of remembered light suffused his memory, as of goldfinches' wings above a thistle-field in the sun; and a sonorous echo of emotion, like a bell at sea, kept it alive.

They drove slowly up Castle Hill, and leaving the victoria on the Esplanade climbed to St Margaret's Chapel and looked northward over the Forth to the lands and the hills of Fife, dove-grey and glinting with gold. Corinna was confident of her geography and told him where the Bonny Earl of Moray had been slaughtered on the sea-wet rocks.

‘Physical beauty was very rare in earlier times,' said Latimer. ‘Beauty needs good food, and our ancestors fed poorly or foolishly. And because beauty was so rare it inspired a romantic devotion, while nowadays our appreciation is aesthetic—'

‘Is it?' asked Corinna.

‘Yes, I believe so. And aesthetic appreciation—'

‘Is a little bit bogus, isn't it?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Well, you're not really good-looking, but I like you.'

‘I'm very glad. But are you being logical?'

‘Oh, logic doesn't affect
people!
'

Slowly they walked down the Esplanade again, and climbed into the waiting carriage. ‘We'll be in Murrayfield before the match is over,' said Latimer. . . .

That was ten years ago, and he had not seen her since. War had invaded their uneasy climate, and Latimer, going to France in 1939, had retired hurriedly from Dunkirk a few months later, and served thereafter, sometimes dangerously on the field and sometimes in the mingled strain and camaraderie of a Divisional Headquarters, in North Africa and Italy. He had been more fortunate than many. He had recuperated pleasantly from a winter wound in Amalfi, and after demobilisation returned to his previous occupation without grave reluctance. His wife had suffered from the tedium and the huge accumulation of war's minor difficulties more deeply than he, and it was she who proposed, in the first autumn after the fighting stopped, that they should spend a few weeks in the relatively untroubled air, and among the splendid fleshpots, of non-combatant Ireland.

When the war was over, the victorious but thin-ribbed English discovered that Ireland, for so long a synonym of hunger and discontent, had become something like an Egyptian granary. The victims of old oppression had meat upon their tables and butter in their
lordly dishes, while the heirs of the haughty Ascendancy, of the barons in their Pale and the squires in their parks, fed sadly on offal from the Argentine and the confected fats of chemical industry. So week after week, in their hungry thousands, the famished conquerors were humbly crossing the narrow sea to fill their bellies with neutral beef and mutton that had not—they now were thankful—been sacrificed to any common good.

After three weeks in Kerry, the Latimers were spending a few days in Dublin before returning home, when he, going into their hotel one evening, was halted outside by a girl who held in front of him a wooden collecting-box.

‘What's it for?' he asked.

‘For the language,' she said.

‘What language?'

‘The Irish language, of course.'

‘I don't understand. Why should you collect money for a language?'

‘So that we can teach it. It's to pay the teachers.'

‘And who's going to be taught to speak it?'

‘Every one of us. Or so they say.'

‘Do you think that's a good thing?'

‘I do not!' said the girl. ‘I wouldn't speak it myself!'

‘Here's half a crown for honesty,' said Latimer, and climbed the steps.

In the lounge he discovered his wife in a group of six or seven people seated round a table on which were twelve or fourteen cocktails, for which two warm and hearty men were disputing the privilege to pay. He was not much surprised. He knew that his wife had arranged to meet an old school-friend and her husband, and he was well aware of her faculty for gathering company, both old friends and new, with a celerity that he could never match. But he was astonished beyond measure when, in the midst of inaccurate but genial introduction, he perceived, with her back to the light, Corinna.

‘You know her, don't you?' said his wife. ‘She told me that you're old friends. Her husband is Nick's cousin, but he's not here and Nick hasn't come either. So like the Irish, isn't it? Darling, we've all been drinking far too much, you must hurry and catch us up.'

‘This is a surprise,' he said.

‘You haven't changed a bit,' she answered.

‘But you have.'

‘My hair,' she said. ‘I used to hide behind it. But then I realised what a nuisance it was, and had it cut off.'

‘It suits you,' he said, and looked at her with a sudden greed of attention while the great artery above his heart beat with a perceptible and disconcerting vigour. The soft roundness of her face had become an exquisite tension between cheek-bone and jaw, her eyes seemed the larger in consequence, and her short hair, finely curling, showed the delicate firmness of her head.

‘It's incredible,' he said.

‘That we should meet again?'

‘That Time should be your beauty-parlour.'

‘That's Italy!' she said. ‘Your wife told me you were in Italy. You've been practising compliments in Rome.'

‘On the contrary, I assure you. I was in Trieste with Tito's votaries.'

‘Tony spent most of the war with the Northern Patrol and running convoys to Russia. His notion of being romantic is to build a roaring fire, close all the windows, and create a fug that brings the tears to you eyes.'

‘Tony's your husband?'

‘Yes. I'm an old married woman now. I've got two children.'

‘We have three.'

‘What a lot can happen in ten years! A war and two families!'

‘I've had a very quiet ten years, except for a battle or two.'

‘Well, so have I. There wasn't much hectic gaiety in being a wife and mother in the south of England during the war. It's only in the last few weeks that I've got my hands clean.'

‘Do you remember driving to the Castle in Edinburgh?'

‘Of course.'

‘Do make the conversation general!' cried Mrs Latimer. ‘We're all trying not to listen, but my own ears are vibrating furiously, and I'm not the worst. Where have you been, darling?'

‘I went to see Michael again.'

‘Is he any more cheerful?'

‘Someone has asked him to write an article about a very brilliant young Irish dramatist, whose name I can't remember, and he's had to refuse because he isn't quarrelling with him at present. Apparently no Irishman can write about any other Irishman unless they're in a state of open hostility.'

‘How very odd. So incense doesn't make the heart grow fonder?'

For half an hour they spoke of the meals they had lately eaten. Food, food and drink, was the English topic in the first years of their victory—the world had rarely seen a hungrier triumph—and in their laurelled heads were childish dreams of sugared cakes. They spoke of
steaks with reverence, of cheese with sober joy. Ireland, said one of them, was in danger of acquiring a population of new Protestants, as hunger, that once had stripped her, now drew to her green acres her over-taxed and undernourished neighbours. Ireland of the many famines, now glistening with fat, was England's dream of joy; and the conquerors talked of cream.

Then Corinna said she must go. She had to call for her husband; they were dining with a cousin of his.

‘Let me take you,' said Latimer.

‘Don't be late,' said his wife. ‘We have a table at Jammet's.'

They went out, Corinna cool but he embarrassed.

With shuddering decision a taxi-cab was pulled abruptly to a halt, and the driver leaned towards them. He was an oldish man, burly of frame, with a friendly purple face and a watery eye. Latimer gave him the address, and got in. As violently as he had stopped, the driver started again, and a moment later nearly ran a cyclist down.

‘He isn't very clever, is he?' said Corinna.

‘Does it matter?'

‘It may, if he meets someone as stupid as himself. I don't want to die with you.'

‘Did your Uncle Henry ever discover that we didn't see the match?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘You didn't tell him?'

‘I never told anyone.'

‘Nor did I.'

‘I've often tried to remember what we talked about. We talked all the time, and I've forgotten everything we said. What did we talk about?'

‘Queen Dido and Byzantium.'

‘It doesn't seem likely, but tell me more.'

‘Dublin is ten years west of Edinburgh. We've less time than we had.'

The driver swerved widely to pass a halted tramcar, and in the lurching cab, filled momentarily with yellow light, Corinna fell into Latimer's arms, and made no move to escape again when his hands closed upon her shoulder and her side. The minutes passed—three, four, or five—before she moved away and said, ‘We must be nearly there. Do I look as though you had been kissing me?'

‘You look as if God had been kissing you,' he answered a trifle breathlessly.

‘I don't think Tony would believe a story like that,' she said, and took
out her powder-box. Then peering through the window, exclaimed, ‘But where are we? We haven't come the proper way! I'm sure we haven't!'