Passing the smell of paint, he had the feeling that the air trembled and waited, and then, yes – light swung out boldly from the lighthouse . . . flash, wink, pause . . . endorsing what the artist had already decided, that the day was gone.
‘We are now frying God,’ Bertram read aloud off the café window, then stopping, mystified . . . ‘Oh! Cod!’ He laughed and turned into the pub.
The harbour, in its turn, observed Bertram. There had been other artists, but with easels, half-circled by children, and not so much before the season began. This man they half-suspected. He had none of the paraphernalia. The beard was naval, not Bohemian. They watched behind curtains from shop and house, and Mrs Wilson at the Waxworks looked out from her top front window and wondered if he was a spy, forgetting that the war was over. When she saw the light swinging over the water she felt terror and desolation, the approach of the long evening through which she must coax herself with cups of tea, a letter to her brother in Canada or this piece of knitting she had dropped to the floor as she leant to the pane to watch Bertram, the harsh lace curtain against her cheek, the cottony, dusty smell of it setting her teeth on edge.
Tory Foyle unwound the black chenille scarf from her hair. She was what was once held to be the typical English Beauty, her pink face, bright hair and really violet eyes.
‘I had a letter from Edward.’ She took a small piece of lined paper from her pocket and smoothed it.
Beth poured tea and waited, her heart-strings all ready to be plucked.
‘Dear Mummy,’ Tory read, ‘I hope you are well I am. Please send envelopes. It is not very nice here. And stamps. I have a bad throat. Other boys have pots of honey. I am having a lovely time. Regards. Yours truly Edward.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Beth. ‘They just don’t think what they’re saying. They write what they can spell. I remember when Prudence went away once. She wrote: “I am in agony. I cannot say what.” When I telephoned I discovered that she couldn’t spell diarrhoea – indeed, who can? – and was better anyway long before the letter arrived. I shouldn’t worry.’
‘At least I can send some honey.’
‘Yes, they measure affection by what comes in the post.’
Beth’s younger child, Stevie, stood by the table, one hand on her hip, drinking long and steadily the milk which Tory had brought for her. As she drank, her eyes became unfocused. Beth and her daughters had large, beautiful, but astigmatic eyes.
‘Put your beaker down and blink.’
Stevie did as she was told. She stood blinking, wearing a creamy moustache from the milk.
‘I read in a book that it relaxes the muscles,’ said Beth, pushing her spectacles up her little nose. She looked virginal, Tory thought, not even the mark of a kiss on her mouth.
‘The holy printed word,’ said Tory.
‘You can stop blinking now.’
The child took a deep breath and began to drink again.
‘Where is Prudence?’
‘She is doing the cats’ ears. I had a wonderful idea. I thought I would ask Geoffrey Lloyd to stay for a week-end.’
‘I don’t know Geoffrey Lloyd.’
‘I think you must do. You remember Rosamund Dobson at school?’
‘Only too well. When we were about twelve she told me that when one has a baby one’s stomach bursts open’ – Tory threw her hands apart – ‘and has to be stitched together again afterwards.’
‘Well, Geoffrey is her son.’
‘Then I hope he was born in the normal way. She must have been pleased and surprised.’
‘I thought he would be company for Prudence. He is stationed just outside the town in the Air Force.’
‘Why go on having an Air Force when it’s all over?’
Tory stood up and began to wind the shawl over her head.
‘It might start up again, I suppose.’
‘It only will if you talk like that,’ said Tory, laying a great responsibility upon her friend. ‘Ask him to tea first to see what he is like. I am sure he won’t be any good.’
‘He is only a lad. And Prudence has no friends.’
‘I’ll leave the jug until the morning.’
‘Thank you, my dear . . . I don’t know what Stevie would do . . .’
‘It’s nothing. I hate milk. If I kept it I’d only wash my face in it. I believe you are match-making, Beth.’ She turned her head away. ‘Find someone for me.’
‘Dear Tory, I wish I could. I don’t know any men. If I did, they wouldn’t be good enough.’
‘I must go.’
But she had nothing to go home for, except to get out of Beth’s husband’s way.
She let herself out of the large, untidy house and into her own beautiful, hyacinth-scented one. She sat down in the bay-window of her bedroom and combed her hair before the mirror. She took it all down and built it up again, but there was no one to see what she had done.
Mrs Bracey liked a coarse jest, but the girls didn’t. In the room behind the old-clothes shop, Iris was getting ready for work and holding a pair of stockings before the fire. She turned them primly. Steam rose from them. Her mother, lying on the bed by the wall (paralysed from the hips down), shook with laughter. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, wiping her eyes, ‘ “Don’t be so damn familiar,” he said. “You and your kissing!” And all the time he was . . .’
‘All right, Mother,’ said Maisie, coming in from the kitchen. ‘I think we’ve had enough of that word for one evening.’
‘What could be more familiar than that, I ask you?’ Mrs Bracey went on, laughing still. ‘Depends how you look at it, I suppose. Bloody class-distinctions even over . . . all right, all right. You’ll be late, Iris,’ she added sharply.
‘You’re telling me!’ She drew the stockings on carefully.
‘Five to six already. You’ll be crippled with rheumatics before you’re forty,’ her mother said in a pleased tone.
Iris crammed her feet into her shoes and was off.
‘Ta-ta,’ her mother shouted, but got no reply. ‘No one to have a good laugh with,’ she sighed. ‘What’re you doing with that coatee, Maisie?’
‘I thought I’d press it up a bit. Mrs Wilson at the Waxworks said she’d give me five bob for it for the Duchess of Kent.’
‘Not showy enough for Royalty. Let’s have a try on of it. Where’d it come from?’
‘The Vicarage. The cook brought down a lot of things.’
‘Shouldn’t fancy it then. That’s no way to treat velvet. Put the iron underneath and the steam’ll run up through the pile.’
‘And me standing on my head while I do it, I suppose?’
Mrs Bracey folded her hands and sighed with elaborate patience. Bored, she was, frustrated; not only her body, but her mind, her great, ranging, wilful imagination. In the old days, on summer evenings, she had liked to sit outside the shop on a chair in the doorway, watching the boats go out, or chatting with people on their way to and from the Anchor, shouting innuendoes at the fishermen, taking sides in children’s quarrels. Now the brilliance, the gossip, had gone from life. When Iris returned from the Anchor she would flop into a chair and pick up her serial story, waiting, her feet out of her shoes, for Maisie to bring the cocoa.
‘She’s had nearly five hours of the outside world and don’t bring me back a crumb,’ her mother would think, waiting nervously for the tit-bit that never came.
‘Who was in to-night, Iris?’ she would ask at last, exasperated, yet humble.
‘Oh, the usual,’ Iris would say, turning a page.
‘She don’t give a crumb of it away. Thinks I’m being nosey. Let her wait for her turn.’
Mrs Bracey waited with optimism for others to have their turn.
‘These girls nowadays,’ she thought, as she watched Maisie so calmly working. ‘What do they believe in? Nothing in their lives.’ She was obscurely annoyed always because her blasphemy left them unmoved. ‘Bloody little atheists. Don’t even believe sex is funny. Get told the facts of life too early, before t
hey can appreciate the joke. All this so-called biology. Takes the flavour out of it, makes it uninteresting. O Lord, why didst Thou not inflict that Mrs Wilson, for instance, instead of me? She don’t want to do nothing but sit indoors and look out of the window. I would always’ve visited her, very good to her I would have been. “Good morning, Mrs Wilson, I just run round to see was there anything you wanted. I brought a drop of my veal broth” – turning the cup upside-down to show how solid with richness was the jelly – “I’ll hot it up on the gas for you. We got to bear one another’s burdens like Our Lord said. What’s religion worth if it’s all bloody talk and no do? While you drink that I’ll just sit here and have a chat. No, I’m in no hurry. There’s a good one I heard along at the Anchor last night about a Duke and a chambermaid” . . .’
‘What’re you grinning at, Mother?’ Maisie asked, shaking out the velveteen jacket.
‘Me thoughts.’ It was like a blow to find herself lying on her own bed instead of sitting beside Mrs Wilson’s. ‘It’s a damn shame, Lord. No doubt I deserved it in many ways, but no worse than the others. Strike down some of the sodding little atheists, I say, not one of Thy servants who could have been out in the world doing useful work. Such as sitting out on me chair poking me nose into other people’s business or drinking a nice draught Bass in the bar,’ she added, for she was no humbug. ‘I’ll get me reward in heaven. Wonderful comfort I’ll get seeing the tables turned, having worked out me own salvation in pain down here. Well worth waiting for, seeing Iris’s face, hearing Our Lord say: “What good’ve you done? Just sit there night after night reading your drivelling little Women’s Chat without a civil word in your head.” If I was in me last agony, she’d finish this week’s instalment before she run out for Doctor Cazabon.’ Her hands plucked at the hem of the sheet as her thoughts raced on.
‘Yes,’ said Bertram, ‘I blocked in the skyline, just a sketch, you know.’
They were drinking light ale in the bar. Iris sipped Guinness, wiping her lips with a lacy handkerchief.
‘We never had an artist in the winter before,’ said Mr Pallister. ‘One or two might turn up during the season, but that was before the war. They make for anything old. I always think the New Town round the Point, that should make a nice picture, pier and all, and the Italian Gardens. But for the harbour, we’d be finished. Mrs Wilson along at the Waxworks, how she keeps going beats me; lost her hubby in the war, too. But what does she get out of it? People go in out of curiosity, to poke fun. How long’s that going to last? Then the Fun Fair. That’s shut up, of course. Every season I wonder if they’ll come down or not. Flashy London people they are, don’t belong down here. Mrs Wilson, she does. Her man took over from his father, same as I did from my Guvnor. In those days this was a resort, bathing-machines under the sea-wall. Why, a concert-party we had once. Remember, Iris? Remember that chap in the pink and white striped blazer and the straw hat? Forget his name.’
‘Why, I was only a kid, Mr Pallister,’ Iris said, surprised. But Bertram could see that she did remember, that the pink and white striped blazer had been one of those visions which quicken the child’s imagination, that she remembered his name, too.
‘But that’s all done,’ said Mr Pallister. ‘People don’t care so much for the smell of fish nowadays. You’re a sailor, that’s different.’
‘I don’t see what being in the Navy’s got to do with fish,’ Iris put in. ‘Besides, Mr Hemingway was an officer.’
‘You can’t get away from it,’ Mr Pallister said. He put a block of wood on the fire, and when he shifted it with his boot little green flames shot up all round it. Red serge curtains covered the windows, yellow varnish shone stickily. ‘We Do Not Recognise The Possibility of Defeat’ a soiled card announced, hanging crookedly over the bar.
‘Quiet to-night,’ Mr Pallister went on. He said it nearly every night except Saturday, when he altered it to ‘Quiet for a Saturday.’ He still contrived to sound surprised.
‘Now, here’s a little picture for you,’ he said, unhooking something from a dark corner. ‘Oil painting,’ he explained reverently, handing it to Bertram. ‘I should like to have an expert opinion on it. A Mr Walker did it one year. He was staying here at the time, had that same front room as you, and when he went he gave that to me.’
‘View of the Harbour,’ he read, peering at the bottom of the canvas.
There was the lighthouse, the harbour wall, the lifeboat shed, all painted in brown gravy. Peering closer, Bertram could distinguish a sepia boat and a bird. The waves, out on the open sea, mounted up thickly in rows.
‘Yes,’ said Bertram, handing the picture back. ‘I must paint you a little companion for it.’ ‘Glue and mulligatawny,’ he thought, and saw his own picture shimmering with light. ‘A little gem by Bertram Hemingway.’ ‘Who is the lady with the jug?’ he asked.
‘He means Mrs Foyle,’ said Iris.
‘Ah, Mrs Foyle from next door. She slips round for her beer at dinner-time. Lady with a black scarf?’
‘Yes.’
A little silence fell over them. Iris glanced up from picking at the chipped varnish on her nails. ‘Lovely colour eyes,’ she added vaguely, thinking of Tory. Oh, God, how dull life was! Suppose the door suddenly opened and Laurence Olivier walked in, down here, perhaps, on location. ‘For nothing else would make him come,’ she thought bitterly.
The fan of light stopped short near the land. It swept far over the sea, it raked the sky. Lo! it said, and was gone. Prudence knelt in the dark at her bedroom window, her arms on the dusty sill. Yvette and Guilbert, her Siamese cats, pushed their heads ecstatically against her knees, roving, thrilling, purring ceaselessly. Her face, under the heavy Trilby fringe, was like a piece of paper in the moonlight that now illumined the front of the stone house and the scabrous plaster façades along the harbour. Below, various lights spread out over the cobblestones, the lamp above the door of this house, the doctor’s house, and the pavement shining red under the serge-draped windows of the Anchor; nearer the sea-wall, lamps cast down circles of greenish light encompassed by blackness. And always there was the sound she no longer heard, since she had been hearing it from the beginning, water slapping unevenly against stone, swaying up drunkenly, baulked, broken, retreating.
Out on the quay two old men stood under a lamp talking about a boat. The lamplight painted the folds of their dark jerseys with silver. A piece of newspaper was taken up by the wind and went dancing idly forward, to be impaled upon a coil of wire and hang there quivering. When the pub door was opened a river of yellow ran out across the cobblestones. In it Bertram stood for a moment before he shut the door. Prudence watched him, leaning a little forward, her bare arms upon the rough stone of the window-sill. Did her thoughts about him make him look up, for she saw his face lifted in her direction, she could see his beard and, as he walked away, a little ring of paleness at the top of his head where his hair had thinned. He joined the two men under the lamp and added his voice to theirs. He was asking them about her, she guessed, and they would shrug and say ‘The doctor’s eldest girl’ or something of the kind, since she was nothing to them, only a child who had grown up under their eyes. But Bertram – she did not know his name – had looked up at the exact moment when she stopped being a girl and became – she felt dizzy with her power – a woman. That he was an old man was not important, for it was her own power to distract with which she now experimented for the first time.
‘Prudence!’ her father called – the voice came winding up the stairs – for she was subject to bronchitis and not allowed to lean from windows at night, taking all the dampness into her lungs.
‘I am twenty,’ she thought, ‘and I have never been kissed in love!’
‘Prudence!’ The voice came spiralling up more clearly. He had reached the first floor. She tiptoed to the door and switched on the light and then going out to the landing leant over the banisters, looking down the core of the house.
‘Yes, Father?’
He stopped, with
one foot on the bottom stair.
‘Don’t stay in your cold bedroom. It’s time for supper.’
‘I was doing my hair.’ She put up her hand and smoothed the fringe.
‘You haven’t made much headway,’ he observed, wondering why his children were both of them such liars. ‘Beth and I,’ he thought, descending the stairs again, ‘so literal, so truthful. Where do they get it from? Where do we fail?’
He was always worrying about something, and this did to go on with as he went into the dining-room, where the gas-fire roared unevenly in its broken ribs, and the magazines had been cleared from the large table so that supper might be laid there. But although the magazines were put away, the ghosts of patients still sat upon the leather-covered chairs, waiting their turn. The room was full of them.
Beth sat at the table, waiting, too, her hands in her lap, her eyes vaguely dreamy. He kissed her forehead and put his hand on her short, curly hair, which was so soft, so untidy. The gesture meant nothing to either of them.
‘Is Prudence coming?’
‘She said she was.’
Beth thought that perhaps the shrimps in the sauce might make it look less lumpy than it really was.
‘Did you do any writing?’
‘Oh, Robert, one thing after another happened. Twice I sat down and the telephone rang and then Stevie came home early from school and I had to get tea and Tory came in . . .’
‘Tory!’ He whipped out his napkin from its ring, took it by a corner and waved it open. ‘What did she want?’
‘She had more milk than she needed and brought it for Stevie . . .’
‘But don’t you see, the child has enough milk. Her appetite is poor because she drinks so much.’
‘She loves it,’ said Beth, not thinking. ‘I shall have to write to-night instead.’ But she was glad, so comfortably glad, at the thought of shutting herself up with her books until one o’clock, two o’clock.
‘I thought we might have gone to the cinema.’
‘Tory thought she would go.’
A View of the Harbour Page 2
