The lifeboat house was deserted. He went in and walked round the boat as if it were someone lying in state. On the walls were painted the names of rescued vessels and the dates: the Scarborough Belle, the Bounteous Sea, Pride of Lowestoft.
The day seemed empty to him, he must at last acknowledge, because Mrs Foyle had gone to London. He remembered what Prudence had said of her. Divorced. Her husband had run off with what the girl had called ‘one of those women officers’. Odd how men did that so much. Women in uniforms were not women at all, he felt, could not move him, excite him. It was a pretty hat she had worn, he thought – grey with feathers. He liked a bright-haired woman in grey, so long as she kept to grey, resisted the little touches of other colours, no bits of red like a harlot. She had kept to grey. So she divorced him.
‘Will you divorce me, my dear?’ ‘But this is so sudden!’
He walked along the arm of the harbour and presently stopped and leant against the wall, looking down at the scum between the little boats, and the gulls putting beaks into their feathers. He took out his sketch-book and laid it on the top of the wall, then his pipe and filled it. ‘Voltaire,’ he thought, ‘started late in life. Sixty or so – if I remember correctly.’ Then he found that the point of his pencil was broken and began to search without any success for his pen-knife.
Lily Wilson went up the steep cobbled street past the church, the fish shop, the second-hand bookshop, the palmist’s, the old furniture shop with its crest china, its cracked, riveted plates painted with fruit and a glass dome full of broken shell-flowers. All the new shops were in the New Town round the Point. Here were the lees of a life which had receded and which no new life revived. In the shops of the harbour lay objects which, being still, taken from context, became important as symbols of the vanished life, suggestive of something greater, as a rock-pool is a microcosm of the sea; and significant as they could not be seen waveringly through crowds. Quite still, they lay, enlarged almost, like stones underneath water.
But Lily Wilson saw nothing thus, although she had reason to be bitterly aware that life was gone from the place, life and livelihood. She saw the strings of faded postcards against the window of the tobacconist’s, the Presents from Newby, the bald china head, mapped out and numbered, in the palmist’s window and the sign (behind which a light used to throb on and off): Phrenology, Palmistry, Crystal. Highly Scientific and Occult. She saw and set against it all the glitter of the New Town, to the detriment of the old.
In the little school, in the dimness filled with shifting chalk-motes, children chanted a lesson and a woman’s voice, domineering, without love, prompted them. On the window-sills hyacinth bulbs trailed cottony threads into jars of water, erupted a little into leaves: as if authority had tried to bring beauty inside and have it teach a lesson at the same time, an idea which Lily understood, for to her learning meant ‘a -bringing indoors’ and education the insinuation into children’s heads as painlessly as possible of a substance which might later turn out to have money-making properties.
‘Charles the First, Sixteen-twenty-five,’ the children were chanting as Lily turned into the Public Library. ‘Commonwealth, Sixteen-forty-nine,’ and then – something final and triumphant – ‘Charles the Second, Sixteen-sixty’ – as if they were all concerned militantly with the return of the monarchy. Hesitation followed, they fell into a minor key, for was he not the last real king for a long time; they paused briefly as a salutation to lechery and humour and eccentricity, qualities the English revere on the printed page or across a distance of time. As Lily closed the door of the Library she could hear the children, having refilled their lungs, trailing unevenly down the incline into the confusions of the House of Hanover.
The Library was part of the Institute. Behind a counter was an old man with an ink-pad and a large oval stamp, with which he conducted a passionate, erratic campaign against slack morals. His censorship was quite personal. Some books he could not read and they remained on the shelves in original bindings and without the necessary stigma ‘For Adults Only’. Roderick Random stood thus neglected, and Tristram Shandy, vaguely supposed to be children’s books. Jane Eyre, bound and rebound, full of loose leaves, black with grease, fish-smelling, was stamped back and front. Madame Bovary had fallen to pieces.
The Librarian who performed this useful service to readers had certain fixed standards before him, as he sat there skimming through the pages, one hand fingering the rubber stamp. Murder he allowed; but not fornication. Childbirth (especially if the character died of it), but not pregnancy. Love might be supposed to be consummated as long as no one had any pleasure out of it. There were single words whose appearance called for the stamp at once. ‘Oh, God!’ the characters might cry in their extremity, but not ‘Oh, Christ!’ ‘Breast’ was not to be in the plural. ‘Rape’ sent the stamp plunging and twisting into the purple ink.
Lily went flicking through one book after another, but listlessly; for the choosing of the book brought the thought of the quiet evening when she would read it. The books themselves with their thick greasy boards sickened her, but gave escape into the land of the living. ‘Audley Court,’ she read, ‘lay low down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and fertile pastures.’ In the spell of these words she sank deeply as if under an anaesthetic, away from empty and makeshift reality; she went down willingly and pleasurably, relinquishing with eagerness the gritty irritations of the harbour streets, the smell of fish, the dusty shops with their cast-off clothes and furniture.
She took the book to the old man at the counter and stood there silently while he did a great deal of clerical work about it.
‘That’s a fine and powerful story,’ he said. ‘No need to be prejudiced against lady novelists. In literature the wind bloweth where it listeth.’
He would not give the book into her hands and she was compelled to listen, but looked vaguely beyond him at the dirt-marks shoulder high on the flaky wall where for years people had leant, bewildered, misled, searching for pornography in Jane Eyre.
‘Robert Elsmere, for instance. That’s a serious book. Who could object? No!’ he said, as if she had contradicted him. ‘Ladies – and you notice I say “ladies” – have their own contribution to make. A nice domestic romance. Why ape men?’ He put (at last) the book into her hands as if it were a prize she had won. ‘Under Two Flags,’ he added, as she walked away, ‘that’s another matter. That’s something of a very different complexion.’
Lily, without knowing why, was always conscious of something salacious beneath his Puritanical conversation, and found this old-fashioned prurience boring as well as disgusting, worse than Mrs Bracey’s Rabelaisian stories. She carried her book away, holding it with loathing, for it was warm still from his hands, and she climbed to the top of the hill for a breath of air.
Here, where the houses stopped, was slippery turf and the sudden wideness of the sky all round and below, and, stretched out on her left as she faced the sea, the long, curving glitter of the New Town: the white hotels, the cliffs of boarding-houses, the broad esplanade and the gardens and pier; all planned and clean and built for pleasure.
And then, below on her right, steeply huddled, the harbour buildings, children running out of school up the narrow streets, playing on the flights of steps, the sea, still, locked in the embrace of the stone wall, dotted with little boats, and, far out on the horizon, smudging the sky with smoke, escorted by wheeling birds, the fleet coming back.
She pressed fingers against her eyes, closing her lids against tears, and turned away from the sight of the place which only love had made tolerable. When her eyes were cleared of tears she opened them again, looking deliberately at the long sands on either side of the pier and the waves creaming over in silence far below.
Beth had been happy all the morning. Ink filled the nails of her right hand. She sat with her back to the window and thus, the words pouring out of her own darkness, she had taken her characters for a nice country walk and brought them back successfully, dra
wn them together at meal-times and let them talk (but not eat) and now, her eyes burning hotly, was hoping to have an only child dead before luncheon. ‘Oh, God, save her!’ cried the mother, wringing her hands, and Beth would have wrung her own if they had been less busy. Instead, she wept, but was relentless in intention. She had never seen a child die, but did not need to ask Robert about it. This was how God might have felt, called upon to watch His children suffer, whom He might have saved but would not. Beth, however, was an atheist.
‘What is it?’ she asked suddenly, sharply.
Her own child stood in the doorway.
‘I am home from school,’ said Stevie simply.
But with the dying child still on her mind, Beth could not bring herself to welcome this living one.
‘Then run and wash your hands,’ she said.
‘What Mrs Foyle does is no concern of mine,’ the curate said to Mrs Bracey.
‘We are all members one of another,’ she replied. ‘The strength of the chain is that of its weakest link.’
‘But why is Mrs Foyle a weak link because I met her on the station? What weakness is there in going on a train?’
‘The destination. I’ve watched that woman for years. By that, I mean I used to watch her, before God took away the power.’ She looked briefly at God’s deputy and then went on. ‘There isn’t a man who comes within sight of her can withstand her . . .’
‘This one can,’ said the curate untruthfully.
She despised the men who fell under Tory’s spell, but she was more contemptuous still of those who didn’t.
‘A clergyman should have no thoughts for women.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Mr Lidiard, who had a great many.
‘Did you hear that one about the parson who went on a cruise?’
‘Mother, for heaven’s sake!’ said Maisie.
‘Yes, I did hear it,’ Mr Lidiard said quickly.
‘When I was in hospital that time I noticed the Catholic priest visited every day. Yes, they told me twice a week regular he’s round calling on the sick in their homes. Twice a week.’ She ruminated upon this. ‘There’s something in a religion such as that.’
‘You belong to God. You cannot auction your conscience between two clergymen to see which bids higher.’
‘I’ll auction my conscience to the devil, if I choose, and not ask your permission either.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Lidiard?’ Maisie asked.
‘I should like one very much, please,’ and he turned to her while he spoke and his voice was no longer boisterous, not tugged at by laughter as when he was speaking of Mrs Bracey as a child of God or trying to circumvent her stories.
‘Where else’d she be going but London? If you ask me, she’s always been a bloody sight more partial to the big city than this place. What’s kept her here so long, I wonder?’
‘Perhaps the fact that it’s her home.’
‘Perhaps not. You can call them men in, Maisie, for a cup of tea.’
The painters came in and stood in the doorway while they drank.
‘What’s going on this morning?’ said Mrs Bracey, exacting payment for the tea.
‘Nothing much.’
One of them said: ‘Nice little craft out there just now. Come round the Point. Right out to sea.’ Having made this effort he seemed to sink down from the desultory conversation, drinking his tea with his face kept close to the cup.
The other said: ‘Who’s this old codger with the beard always strolling up and down and in and out of the Anchor?’
‘He’s a retired naval officer,’ Maisie said. As she poured tea she rested the other hand on her hip. ‘Staying there.’
‘Staying where?’ her mother asked sharply.
‘At Mr Pallister’s,’ Maisie said quietly. Their eyes met. She saw her mother’s look, empty, fretful. Her own was calm and warning.
‘Why don’t I get told nothing?’
‘Iris can’t remember everything.’
‘No, of course not. I forgot the Anchor was like the bloody Leicester Lounge with half London flocking in and out. Of course she can’t remember.’
Maisie’s warning look always failed.
‘You are indefatigable in your determination to think us all in a conspiracy against you,’ said Mr Lidiard.
‘And you can shut your trap. I was talking to my daughter.’
‘Mother!’
The two decorators seemed draped on either side of the door, leaning there, in their whitish aprons, looking into their cups. They were of Mrs Bracey’s generation and did not mind a row.
Mr Lidiard put his cup very carefully into its saucer and stood up. ‘I must be off.’ He made a little bow to Mrs Bracey. ‘I shall call next week if I may.’ His glance included Maisie.
‘I shall most likely have gone over to Rome by then,’ said Mrs Bracey.
The decorators made way for him, drawing back a little in contempt for his cloth.
‘And you can bring me a book next time,’ Mrs Bracey suddenly shouted after him. ‘A travel book. A nice book about the South Sea Islands.’ She chuckled. ‘Some of the tricks these natives get up to, the dirty monkeys!’ But all her face softened with tenderness and affection.
Lily ate fish and chips at the Mimosa Café, her book propped against a bottle of sauce. The fleet had come in and up at the market the floor was deep with fish, blue and black-barred, a mass of dinted silver, crimson-eyed. At the Anchor Iris was busy for once, with not a minute to wipe down the wet counter or to collect glasses. All over the harbour waters was a frenzied screaming of gulls. Mrs Bracey waited with impatience for her dinner and for her daughter to return at closing-time. Smells of stew crept round the kitchen. She trembled with exasperation, imagining the greyish meat slipping off the bone, the rings of onions, the pearl-barley, the golden sequins of fat glinting on the surface. And she thought too of the jug of draught stout Iris would bring back and her hands plucked peevishly at the bed covers.
They were late, too, at the doctor’s house. In the end Beth said they would wait for Robert no longer. She ate vaguely, her daughters on either side; Prudence, sulky, with cats on her lap, forking up shepherd’s pie with an expression of contempt, and Stevie, absorbed, thinking of school.
‘Miss Simpson! I mean, Mummy!’ she began, ‘do you know what happened this morning? Millicent was very naughty.’
‘Your mouth is full.’
‘Your mouth is full, too.’
‘I spoke because I had to correct you. Not from choice.’
‘Oh!’ Stevie appeared to think this reasonable. After a while she went on: ‘After prayers we were doing our frames . . .’
‘Doing your frames?’
‘Learning to lace-up and tie bows. It’s on frames. And Millicent said “Please, Miss Simpson, may I be excused?” and Miss Simpson said “Yes” and she went to be excused . . .’
‘Excused from what?’
‘She means going to the lavatory,’ said Prudence shortly.
‘Then say so, dear, another time.’
‘Being excused is what we call it.’
‘But that is not what the word means.’
Stevie’s eyes grew large with tears. ‘Miss Simpson means it to mean that.’
‘You’d probably be expelled for saying “Can I go to the W.C.?” ’ Prudence said coolly.
Beth looked worried.
‘Well,’ Stevie went on between mouthfuls, ‘when she put up her hand and said “Please may I . . .” ’
‘Do you really have to put up your hand and ask to be let out, as if you were cats?’
‘Cats don’t put up their hands.’
‘What happened to Millicent in the end?’
‘She didn’t get there in time.’ Stevie laughed carelessly.
‘In time for what?’
‘Mother!’ Prudence cried, exasperated.
‘She wetted her knickers,’ Stevie said.
‘Darling, don’t be disgusting. I don’t want t
o hear about hateful Millicent’s wet knickers when I am having my lunch.’
Stevie looked slyly at Prudence and smiled. Their mother seemed unreal to them.
‘And so Miss Simpson said . . .’
‘Your mouth is full again.’
When Mrs Flitcroft brought in the semolina Prudence turned her shoulder and looked disdainfully out of the window.
Presently Robert came home. He kissed the top of Beth’s head as he went to the table.
‘Do any writing?’ he asked mechanically.
‘Yes, my dear, thank you.’
‘Good.’
‘May I be let off?’ said Stevie.
‘Have you been eating sweets?’ Robert asked. ‘Or drinking milk before lunch?’
‘No, there is no extra milk to-day,’ said Beth. ‘Tory has gone to London.’
‘What the devil for?’
‘To buy a hat,’ said Prudence, lolling in her chair, fingering the cats’ ears.
‘Really because she is depressed,’ said Beth.
Robert had looked quickly from his daughter to his wife and then at his plate. ‘Depressed!’ he repeated angrily. ‘What has she to be depressed about?’
‘We all think we are the only ones with any right to be depressed,’ said Beth.
‘I don’t think anything of the kind.’
‘She leads a very lonely life.’
‘May I go to school now?’ asked Stevie.
‘Run and wash your face, then. Prudence, see to her, please, my dear.’
‘If she is so lonely, why does she stay here?’ Robert went on. ‘Why not go and live in London?’
‘It would be difficult to sell that house now, I daresay.’
‘Not at all. Very quaint place. Kitchen like a slum, no garden, cobbled yard like a mews, all very fashionable nowadays,’ said Robert, his eyes resting upon his own mahogany sideboard and the empty decanters with their huge cut-glass stoppers. The shepherd’s pie seemed very dry and he waited for the cheese to be placed before him.
A View of the Harbour Page 4
