The Man Who Understood Women (9 page)

Mrs Pettigrew winced as her oedematous feet forced their way into the shoes that only an hour ago had not really been too uncomfortable.

Mrs Fenwick, standing before the microphone, smiled encouragingly at Mrs Pettigrew, and Mrs Pettigrew smiled back indicating that she was prepared to do that which was expected of her.

Mrs Fenwick turned once more to her audience from whom wafted drifts of idle smoke. ‘Before we call upon our
Guest of Honour,' Mrs Fenwick said, ‘to start the ball rolling with the gift she has so graciously consented to make to the Bancroft Home, we have a little surprise for you. One of the girls who has been brought up in the Home is here today to offer a token of appreciation and, incidentally, a sample of the fine work done in the Home, to Mrs Pettigrew.

Mrs Fenwick looked towards the door. The incomplete silence granted to Mrs Fenwick became complete as they too twisted their heads to look towards the door. Mrs Pettigrew, from her seat of vantage, patted her moist upper lip with her table napkin and, watching expectantly too, waited.

The door immediately opposite Mrs Pettigrew opened, and into the room, up the gangway, slowly, came the most
beautiful
girl she had ever seen. She was no more than sixteen, tall, slim as a reed, walked like a princess and had honey-coloured hair cascading right down her back. She held a bouquet of apricot roses as fine as any that Ackroyd had ever produced, and she was the embodiment of everything that all her life Mrs Pettigrew had ever wanted to look like but never for one single moment had.

Her progress towards Mrs Pettigrew was painfully,
laboriously
slow. It wasn't, however, until she extended a milk-white arm and an artist's dream of a slim hand to feel for the edge of the table that Mrs Pettigrew realised that the girl was blind. With almost more of a shock she realised, too, that the apricot roses were artificial. The girl, chin lifted, extended them to her, dropping a straight-backed curtsey as she did so.

Mrs Pettigrew, with the kind of tenderness with which she
could have held a newborn baby, took the flowers. Her eyes on the girl's grey, unseeing ones, she was quite unable to speak.

Amid a thunder of applause the girl turned, and as slowly as she had come, one foot carefully in front of the other, made her way to the door. Until she had gone from the room Mrs Pettigrew kept her eyes riveted on the slim waist.

Mrs Fenwick was holding up her hand for silence. ‘And now,' she said when she had obtained it, except for the
occasional
small snuffle into the odd handkerchief, ‘I will at this point call upon our dear Mrs Pettigrew to make the first
donation
to our new drive for the maintenance and improvement of the Bancroft Home.'

She looked nervously, expectantly, at Mrs Pettigrew who was gazing fatly down at the apricot roses and fingering them delicately with her short plump fingers.

‘One hundred guineas,' said Mrs Pettigrew.

Taormina

1962

‘Taormina?’ Iris said, threading her needle with blue wool. ‘Surely, darling, that’s a place, not a person.’

‘This is a person,’ Jonathan said.

‘It’s like calling somebody Bexhill or – or Clacton.’

Jonathan perched on the stone coping of the terrace and looked down at his mother who was squinting at her tapestry.

‘I’d like to explain about Taormina.’

Iris decided on the right-hand corner as being as good a place as any to begin and inserted the needle.

‘I shouldn’t bother, darling. We survived the others, no doubt we shall survive Taormina.’

‘Taormina’s different.’

‘I’m sure she is, darling. So were Bo-Peep and Mary Grey and Samantha what’s ’ername, and Joanna, and the one with freckles, and who was that extraordinary creature with the orange hair your father couldn’t stand?’

‘Diana.’

‘That’s right. Diana.’

Jonathan dismissed them all impatiently with a wave of his hand.

‘Mother, this is serious …’

Iris was holding the tapestry at arm’s length and looking at it over the top of her glasses.

‘I do believe they’ve sent me the wrong blue,’ she said slowly. ‘They have, you know. Look at this!’

Jonathan sighed and jumped down on to the black-
and-white
tiles.

‘That blue is not the same as this, is it?’

‘More or less. No one will notice.’

‘That’s beside the point. Aren’t they the absolute end. You can’t rely on anyone.’

‘About the weekend,’ Jonathan said, leaning now against the balustrade and looking out on to the garden.

‘I’ve asked the Watsons for Saturday. Serena Watson’s been driving me mad for weeks trying to find out when you’d be down. One mustn’t be harsh. I suppose if I had three
daughters
, each plainer than the next, although I must say the
youngest
one’s improved tremendously lately … Jonathan!’

Iris took off her glasses and watched him in his dirty white plimsolls walk down the steps and on to the lawn.

How much taller was he going to get? Surely he must now have stopped growing. How old was he? Twenty-four, nearly twenty-five. He dragged his feet along the grass, leaving marks in the dew, for it was still early, and slumped on to the wooden seat facing the pond. Adonis, Iris thought, looking
at his profile, the personification of careless youth: slim, no fat, cleanly outlined features, the flop of the fair hair. The age had an insouciance about it, a sort of unconscious splendour employed arrogantly, extravagantly, by those who were
unaware
of its ephemeral nature. No wonder the girls were mad about him. He hadn’t even to speak, just to lean, he was always leaning, against the lintel in a crowded room … and they’d be round him like butterflies, gazing up at him, eager …

Iris put on her glasses again and turned her attention to her tapestry. She had every reason to be content.

Taormina arrived on the six-ten. She wore blue jeans and sandals attached to her feet by a single thong between her toes whose nails were scarlet. From the window Iris watched Jonathan help her down from the shooting brake and kiss her. She came no higher than his shoulder. The embrace was a long one, and when they’d parted they stood with linked hands, gazing at each other. Such capacity to love, Iris thought, such vulnerability. No one can help them. They have to grow their own shells.

‘This is Taormina,’ Jonathan said at the dinner table. ‘My parents.’

She had changed into a silk cheongsam and very
high-heeled
white shoes. Her small, oval face was animated, only the grey eyes were wary, watching Iris and Miles.

‘There’s one thing about Jonathan,’ Miles said, taking her hand in his, ‘he has exquisite taste.’

Iris watched her turn to caress Jonathan for a moment with her eyes and Jonathan, equally volubly, return the love, and
thought next month it will be Dawn or Sandra or Pollyanna – how they delude themselves.

Over dinner Taormina, vivacious, laughing as easily as she talked, kept them amused. She flirted mildly with Miles who, through Jonathan’s girlfriends, tried to recapture his youth, if only for the odd moment. Jonathan himself, an anxious impresario, watched her every move.

It must be difficult for her, Iris thought, helping Taormina to strawberry cake. Soon the others will come.

But Taormina seemed to be happy. After dinner, when the Miller boys came and the four Sutherlands and the Farrows’ house party complete, they drifted noisily towards the sitting room, leaving Iris and Miles on the terrace with their cigarettes.

‘Thank heavens it’s not every night,’ Miles said as the music, blasting out of the open windows, became more and more deafening and the laughter and the clapping drowned out the evening serenade of the crickets.

They looked in through the open window on their way to bed. The oldest Miller boy, sleeves rolled up, red-faced, feet thumping on the floor, was at the piano; Jonathan sat
tailor-wise
on the floor with his electric guitar; and on the marble table in the centre of the room, barefoot, arms above her head, hair flying, Taormina was dancing.

‘I hope they remember to lock up,’ Miles said.

Iris yawned. ‘From the look of them, I doubt if they’ll be gone by breakfast-time.’

‘At least Jonathan is over the Finals,’ Miles said. ‘He can
dissipate
with a clear conscience.’

‘He always has done. I keep forgetting he’s a doctor now.’

‘It’s difficult for us to remember that youth is anything other than young.’

In the morning, by the time Miles appeared, Taormina and Jonathan were on the terrace sunbathing, Taormina in a pink bikini.

‘The energy of it,’ Miles said, ‘Taormina, where did you get your lovely name?’

‘Born or conceived on the Island, I should imagine,’ Iris said coming out through the French windows. ‘Sicily is so intensely beautiful, I think it was extremely clever of your parents.’

‘They had never been further than Brighton,’ Taormina said.

Jonathan jumped up. ‘Taormina, come for a swim!’

Ballet dancers, they leaped down the steps and over the lawn.

‘Odd,’ Miles said; ‘we don’t care to discuss our antecedents.’

‘She’s an odd child,’ Iris said. ‘Jonathan always picks slightly “off-beat” ones.’

‘Amusing, though,’ Miles said. ‘I shall be quite sorry when he starts bringing home plain Janes with glasses.’

‘He’ll have to settle down some time, especially if he’s going into general practice.’

A shriek of laughter floated over the hedge from the swimming pool.

‘I think I’ll go for a dip myself,’ Miles said.

Iris smiled. ‘Give my love to Taormina.’

For lunch Taormina changed into skin-tight pink trousers
and piled her hair into a knot on top of her head. Her nose had started to peel from the sun. She looked enchanting.

Next to the Watson girls, earnest in white, ready for tennis, Taormina looked not quite real. She didn’t play but picked up the balls for them, clowning all the while.

After tea, languid on the terrace, Jonathan played
snake-charming
music on his harmonica; Taormina, lithe,
apparently
boneless, was the snake.

Miles, watching her, said: ‘She’s extraordinarily graceful.’

Iris, from behind her sunglasses, was watching the
movement
, and the sunlight through the balustrade, and the faces of youth, and listening to the music and the laughter.

‘I wish it was always like this,’ she sighed.

‘We shall be glad of the peace on Monday.’

‘I have a horrid feeling that it can’t last, a sort of premonition.’

‘It’s always like this when Jonathan’s down.’

‘I get the impression that this is the last time; that it will never be quite the same again.’

‘It’s obvious,’ Miles said, getting up, ‘that you could do with a Pimm’s. You’re getting broody.’

Iris was watching Jonathan watching Taormina ‘There’s something going on,’ she said. ‘I feel it in my bones.’

After dinner there were twenty of them, most of the girls in floating dresses. Jonathan got out the floodlights and the record player and they danced on the lawn, Taormina, in gold lamé trousers, took off her shoes and leaped to the music like a firebird. Wherever she was, always laughing, was the centre of the crowd.

When Iris was woken by the birds at six next morning she heard them calling ‘Goodnight.’

Miles went to church alone, Taormina had letters to write, Iris had a headache, and Jonathan was waiting for a telephone call.

At mid-morning Iris, topping and tailing gooseberries in the shade of the big elm, watched Jonathan, in his
open-necked
white shirt and grey trousers with grass stains at the knees, pace up and down kicking at nothing on the lawn.

‘Want any help?’

This was unlike him. Iris showed no surprise. ‘That would be nice.’

He squatted beside her and picked up a gooseberry.

‘Mother?’

‘Mm?’

‘About Taormina.’

A sudden crystallisation of her earlier premonitions swept over Iris. She put a gooseberry in the colander topped but not tailed.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ Jonathan said. Iris looked at him.

‘You want to marry her,’ Iris said slowly.

‘No, it isn’t that.’

Iris let out a breath of relief.

‘We’re already married,’ Jonathan said.

The gooseberries, topped-and-tailed and not-topped-
and-tailed
, scattered over the lawn.

‘I’m sorry to spring it on you like this … I tried on Friday …’

‘Just say it again, will you, dear? Slowly,’ Iris said. ‘I have a bit of a headache and I’m not sure that 1 heard you correctly.’

‘Taormina is my wife,’ Jonathan said. ‘We were married last month in Cambridge.’

‘Jonathan,’ Iris said, ‘you’d better explain quickly because I feel very shocked and I simply don’t understand. There was no reason why you shouldn’t get married, we expected it. You’ve passed your Finals and you’re going into partnership with Dr Slocombe, but why the secrecy?’

‘I’m afraid that’s something else I have to tell you,’ Jonathan said, throwing the gooseberry he had been holding into the pond. ‘I’m not going into practice with old Slocombe.’

‘You’d better start at the beginning,’ Iris said, and noticed the bead of sweat on Jonathan’s forehead although they were in the shade.

‘Taormina’s parents died when she was small,’ Jonathan said, ‘within a year of each other. I might as well explain about her name. They hadn’t a lot of money, her parents, but a great deal of imagination. Each year before their annual holiday in Brighton they’d go to the travel agent and get all the leaflets and information about a glamorous holiday resort somewhere in the world. In their dreams they’d go there. In the year that Taormina was born it was Sicily.

‘Anyway, after they died Taormina was looked after by an aunt. Because she seemed to have talent the aunt put her on the stage when she was fifteen, and she became a dancer. After a couple of years she decided that she would rather do
something
for mankind other than entertain it and she took up
nursing. She was doing her final year for the SRN in
Cambridge
when we met.’

‘Taormina a nurse?’ Iris said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘She is,’ Jonathan said, ‘and a good one.’

‘But I still don’t understand …’

‘The next bit is more difficult. Taormina and I got on together right from the start. Taormina will surprise you when you get to know her …’

‘She seems a sweet girl,’ Iris said. ‘Why didn’t you bring her home and get engaged and married in the usual way? There’s nothing sinister, is there?’

‘Nothing at all. Taormina, I told you, has no parents. Her aunt isn’t very well off …’

Iris sat up. ‘You were worried about the wedding. Darling, you know that Daddy and I … You are our only son, we could have had a marquee in the garden and Follis to do the catering. They did the Beauchamps’ superbly.’

‘That’s just the point,’ Jonathan said.

‘What is?’

‘That you would have been willing to spend hundreds of pounds feeding strawberries and cream to half the county.’

‘Why on earth not? Your father can afford it.’

‘Because we want you to give us the money instead. The money you would have spent on our wedding if we hadn’t got married in Cambridge.’

‘The money, Jonathan? What on earth for?’

‘To feed bread and potatoes to people who have never seen strawberries and cream.’

Iris waited.

‘Taormina and I are young. All over the world there are people suffering, children dying. I’m a doctor and she is a nurse. We are going to help them.’

‘Darling, it’s terribly high-minded of you,’ Iris said, ‘but there are people needing your help in Dr Slocombe’s practice. I really can’t see why you have to go to the ends of the earth …’

‘For the most part, the crowd in Slocombe’s waiting room won’t die for lack of attention. Besides, there’ll never be any difficulty in finding someone to take over there. It’s a plum practice. Any young man would be glad of the opportunity in this county, particularly with the lure of the Watson girls.’