Now, later, she lay in bed, naked, as she liked to be, with a cat on either side; silken fur against her flesh; cold, padded feet upon her. She felt oppressed by the sudden view of her parents as human beings, a view she had not formerly imagined possible. To a girl who had taken for granted that her mother and father were sub-human creatures, from whom might be expected no emotions stronger than irritation or anxiety, or a calm sort of pleasure, this sudden view opening out was not easily to be borne. She felt shame and disgust and terror. She was not prepared to pity her mother, whom she had always rather despised, nor to despise her father, whom she had loved. That he deserved to be despised she did not for a moment doubt. At the first signs of her house cracking, she saw it lying in ruins, and that he was false to her mother and had lived with Tory (her mother’s best friend) in adultery (and by ‘live’ she meant ‘popping in and out of her house at odd times’) for years and years, she believed without hesitation. Her parents had encouraged the idea of themselves as stoics, they had never displayed affection for one another in front of the children and, although sometimes they bickered slightly, they had always stood together and hidden any deep displeasure. ‘We are the meal-providers, the rule-makers,’ they seemed to say. ‘Do not embarrass us by demanding more.’ Prudence could not imagine her mother crying or using harsh words. She had listened to Tory’s muffled sobbing and raised voice with incredulity that morning, standing by the kitchen dresser hanging up cups, and feeling her wrists weaken and terror strike at her. She lay in bed remembering all this. Then she saw another picture, of the day Stevie was born. She was fifteen. She came in from school, and her mother was telephoning in the hall, wearing her old dressing-gown. She heard her say, ‘Good-bye, Robert. Don’t hurry,’ and there was a ring of whiteness round her mouth, but she turned and smiled at Prudence and said: ‘Hullo, dear. Did you have a good day?’ as she always asked when she was not busy writing. She looked different, and yet her voice was carefully the same. ‘Do you want tea here or with Tory?’ she had asked. ‘I’ll go in with Tory,’ Prudence said, knowing the rules of this game. ‘She must have been in pain,’ she thought now. ‘And then, when her books come out, perhaps she is excited after all, perhaps she feels it is a special day, different from the others. And perhaps she is sometimes frightened or disappointed. And now may be grieved.’ But her new picture of her mother was no more like the real Beth than the old one.
She gently lifted the cats’ claws from her bare sides and they came burrowing through the bedclothes until their cold noses were thrust against her neck.
The real Beth was undressing. She put on a wide, old-fashioned nightgown, which Robert called Big Top, and began to brush her hair.
‘We forgot Prudence’s vapour-lamp,’ Robert began when he came in.
‘Oh, so we did. But she seems better.’
‘She was out this evening. It really is maddening.’
‘Stevie seems tougher than poor Prue.’
‘She’s not tougher in her mind.’
‘No. At tea-time we were just having a cosy time, and she suddenly said: “Which do you want to be when you’re dead? Burnt or buried?” I hope she is not going to be morbid.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, I said it didn’t matter either way, because when you’re dead you’re not there.’
‘She wanted an answer.’
‘What would you have said?’
Beth looked so worried now, sitting there looking at him through the mirror, that he laughed.
‘I should have said that both were so delightful I wouldn’t know which to choose.’
And then she laughed, too, and began to brush her hair again.
6
As the days went by it seemed to Lily Wilson that her very happiness was staked upon Bertram. The pattern of her life was reversed and all her days bent towards the evening. No longer did she fear the light failing and all those wretched thoughts about the future, about loneliness and old age, about money, seemed not to accompany her into bed if she were warmed with wine. Her mind would go backwards over the evening, not groping timorously into the future. In the warmth of Bertram’s kindness her personality seemed to unfurl; she became, she thought, someone different, someone she would always have liked to have been. His curiosity melted her reserve. He was an inquisitive old man, she knew; but his interest in her life gratified her, so that everything she did had importance now and she fell into the habit of remembering incidents for him, and all that occurred to her during the day she tried to see with his eyes and would furbish every turn of phrase for his delight. She knew that he would not stay for ever; but ‘surely he will help some miracle to happen to me before he goes,’ she would think, so deeply did she now rely upon him.
In the evenings at the Anchor she still sat by herself upon the stool and he still played dominoes with the old men, but from time to time he came over and bought a drink for her and for Iris, and always at closing-time he offered his arm to her and carried her off with such grandeur that they might have been going down the aisle of a church together. When they reached her home there were little jokes about Dr Crippen and Mrs Dyer, and upstairs, cups of tea and Bertram going up and down the room, picking up ornaments, peering at old photographs, talking, asking questions, explaining things to her about her own possessions, things she had never wondered about – how the ship got into the bottle, how the glass paper-weight became full of bubbles, how the bead-work stool was made. A kitchen chair became something different as he took it up and described how the legs were turned, how the back was bent, when it was made and from what woods. Then it stopped being the kitchen chair and became an extension of his personality. He was everywhere in her house and whispered from every corner, from the lustre jug, which she had never thought beautiful before, and the picture painted on glass with its look of a thunderstorm which she had not found as funny as it was. Even Bob’s mother’s wedding photograph she smiled at now as she would scarcely have dared to do before – the bride who looked, Bertram thought, so like a little girl dressing up in lace curtains for a charade, and the bridegroom less real than the models downstairs, beneath their feet a strip of rucked-up carpet and behind them apparently rocks of a great height and a cascade.
Bertram belittled her discontent, dismissed her ambitions. ‘My dear child, of course you don’t want to go and live in the New Town. There you are nobody, here you have a place among people who know you. There, everything is artificial, here there is character.’ So character began to be something she comforted herself with; it compensated for everything, he implied, comfort and luxury and cleanliness. She saw that there was much to laugh about in her life, for just so long as she might share her laughter.
He talked, and drank his tea, and went, and since she had no reason to be ashamed of their relationship she innocently believed she would not be gossiped about, especially as he was old enough to be her father, as Iris had said.
Once he called in the daytime to see the waxworks, but then she felt awkward and shy, finding nothing interesting to say and evading his direct questions. She did not know why. He looked out at the harbour from her front window and found all the buildings arranged differently. From here – for the foreshore curved slightly – the Cazabons’ house stood forward, a square stone house, built, said Bertram, about seventeen-forty, its slates tucking down under a parapet (even the slates had names to Bertram – Duchesses and Countesses and Queens) and two front windows blocked in to save the tax (Lily had sometimes wondered why); this curiosity did not extend merely to those who now lived in the house but to the ones who had built it and all those who had gone in through its front door in so many different kinds of clothes from seventeen-forty onwards.
This view of life was novel to Lily, who had always thought of the past in two sections – what seemed to her to be living memory, and then the great stretch of darkness behind that curtain which had come down so finally, so sharply-dividing, on January the first, nineteen-hundred. Now, people bega
n to peek through this curtain at her, and she found herself wondering about them.
‘Lady Audley’s Secret, forsooth!’ Bertram said one day, picking up her library book. ‘What do you want with this?’ For he, like Mrs Bracey, found life richer than fiction.
Next day Lily took her book and changed it, so that she never found out what Lady Audley’s secret was, although she sometimes idly wondered. Instead, she took home a book about Queen Anne, in whom she felt a vague interest, for she reflected Bertram faintly, the poor Queen; she was stupid and was bullied, and all her children died, he said. But the book was rather dull, and was not given colour, as Bertram’s talk was, by gossip, by irrelevancy, by trivial but beguiling detail. On the whole she rather regretted Lady Audley.
The Librarian had been nonplussed. ‘What’s this? Non-fiction?’ he had said, warming the book in his hands as he always did. No one read non-fiction, apart from the book on poultry-keeping. (Mrs Bracey would not have library books in her house, for they carried infection, she said. Germs, which she imagined as rather like invisible tadpoles, were her sly and lively enemies, and Maisie was always made to inquire carefully about the clothes she bought from people, especially the wardrobes of the deceased, as her mother called them. ‘I’ve known folks take leprosy that way,’ she sometimes said, frightening the girls.) When at last the Librarian put the book into Lily’s hand he felt as if he gave something of himself with it, and the idea was delightful to him – indeed, he did give some warmth, but Lily quickly drew on her knitted gloves.
Now, after tea the days were prolonged a little and the blue veils came down later over the harbour. In the country at that time of the year the birds sing, staking their claims upon every branch, but at the seaside there were only the gulls, and these walked stiffly on the quayside or rose up, their yellow claws to their bellies, at the approach of the fishing trawlers, wheeling over them as they slowly came in from the sea, their holds full of fish, the waves combing away on either side.
Lily took a little walk before turning in at the Anchor. She almost went in to see Mrs Bracey, knowing it was time she did, but the evening air seemed so sweet that she was reluctant to leave it. She abhorred ill people, pity could never overcome her shrinking. ‘The longer I stay away,’ she thought, ‘the more courage I shall have to find in the end. If it were me I should think it a very little thing for anyone to do.’ But then, she could not imagine people ever shrinking from herself. It was different.
She walked for a little along the sea-front to where the path ended under the cliff, with its stunted trees and the slate-coloured stone among which valerian grew in summer, and which shone now with recent rain. When she went into the Anchor Bertram was not there. She ordered her drink and sat alone, for Iris leant over the bar at the other end, watching Eddie Flitcroft playing darts.
Lily would not ask about Bertram, so she sat still and sipped slowly, and pretended to watch the game and waited. Each time the door opened, which it seldom did, she turned her head.
‘And so you loved your husband?’ Bertram asked.
A pinkish light came through the fluffy curtains as if it were left entangled in the muslin after it had gone from the outside world. Tory sat on the sofa with her feet up and her lap full of fashion papers.
‘At least there was a history of passion behind us,’ she said calmly, looking at her shoes. ‘He was rather a stupid man,’ she added, ‘but, then, I am rather a stupid woman.’
‘Is he no longer stupid, then?’
‘No, I don’t mean his stupidity is a thing of the past, but that he himself is. At least, as far as I’m concerned.’ She turned and looked at him and laughed. ‘You insinuate yourself into people’s lives,’ she said, and moved her hand to and fro so that it looked like a fish weaving its way through weeds.
‘Yes,’ he thought to himself, ‘they will all remember me. Years after, they will say to one another, “that was the summer he came,” like the man in the concert party who wore the pink-and-white striped blazer and whom they all remembered and so often talked about. Where was he now? But wherever he was he had left something of his personality in the place as other visitors had not, a thumb-print, something not tangible like Mr Walker’s oil painting hanging in the Anchor, but the very gent-lest of mementoes, a stirring-up of the imagination merely. And I will leave both,’ Bertram decided, ‘the tangible and the intangible, the souvenir and the memory itself, the thumb’s pressure and the painting in the bar parlour.’
‘I am a painter,’ he suddenly said to Tory, who had been thinking of her husband.
‘A real painter?’ she asked, looking up.
That was the question. All at once he felt like telling her the truth as he glimpsed it at that moment, that he was not a painter and never would be, that he would have no immortality, leave nothing to linger after him, had no hope of greatness, day-dreamed merely, frittered time away, let curiosity beguile him. But he could not bear the truth, even for a second, not for himself, still less to share.
‘That is not for me to say,’ he replied primly. And looked old suddenly and exhausted.
But he soon recovered. He began to walk about the room, examining all the little treasures, as he did at Lily Wilson’s, turning the Dresden china upside-down so that Tory laughed and asked if he expected to find the price written on the bottom. ‘He is a goatish sort of man,’ she thought to herself, ‘a mischievous, a prying kind of man.’
Bertram still thought about his painting as he went restlessly from one ornament to another, and he stood with a piece of Bristol glass in his fingers and said: ‘Unlike Picasso,’ – and he gave what he considered a dry laugh – ‘I do not trouve, nor even cherche. I merely hope to get overtaken.’ He could bear as much of the truth as that and could even add: ‘I am devilish lazy.’
‘And I,’ Tory said, yawning into her two hands.
‘It is odd for a woman like you to crop up in a place like this,’ he went on, looking at her grey, draped frock which he knew to be fashionable as well as beautiful.
‘Crop up!’ she repeated. ‘In what way do I crop up?’
‘I should expect a woman with untidy hair and a fisherman’s jersey and trousers to live in such a place.’
‘It used to be our holiday house. My husband liked sailing. He was inclined to be rich.’
‘Is that a thing which still goes on, or has it stopped as far as you’re concerned?’
‘He pays me money, as he should and must. A man cannot be allowed to reserve a woman’s beauty for himself until it is gone, and then throw her on to the market again with nothing left to sell.’
‘You are trying to hurt yourself,’ he said gently. ‘Thank heaven, a woman’s beauty is different from a flower’s. Her petals do not drop as soon as she reaches perfection. She remains at that stage – at your delightful stage – for many a long year.’
‘Her petals do not drop,’ Tory conceded, ‘but little lines appear here and there, at the corners of her mouth, between her eyebrows’ . . . she put up her fingers and smoothed her forehead . . . ‘and then the edges of her face grow vague, the skin wrinkles . . .’ she pinched up a little of her arm, which was scattered unevenly with freckles like a linnet’s egg . . . ‘Young skin doesn’t wrinkle.’
‘If that is the worst that will happen . . .’ Bertram began.
‘Oh, but it isn’t. It is only the beginning. The invisible enemy against which one slaps on cream, and massages, and tries out all the little tricks these books . . .’ she tapped her -fingers on the fashion papers in her lap . . . ‘put one up to. To stave it off for one day longer, to have one day more of looking beautiful.’
‘You talk like a courtesan,’ he told her.
‘Every birthday one wonders: “Shall I go out of this year as I entered it?” ’
‘Oh, birthdays!’ she thought to herself. ‘Birthdays on my own. Trying to be gay for Edward’s sake. Beth giving me some bloody silly present because she is full of absurd notions such as it is the thought that m
atters, not the gift. And the evening going slowly by, full of memories – memories of parties, of toasts, of little jokes, of cakes with too few candles, of the glossy brown and pink deckle-edged cards Teddy always found, pictures of nineteen-eighteen flappers, curly roses, kittens with hand-painted eyes – “To My Dear Wife” and then a little verse.’ Her bosom rose sharply in a sigh and then she laughed.
‘I must polish this old knife-box for you,’ Bertram said. He lifted the lid a little. It was full of papers. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. The best thing is a soft cloth wrung out in hot water, and then an even softer cloth to bring up the surface.’
‘You have lived in ships far too long,’ she said. ‘If I make a little omelette, would you slip in next door for the beer?’
She swung one foot, then the other, to the ground and stood up stretching, her hands clasped behind her head. ‘The pink jug on the hall-table,’ she added.
‘So now I’m the one who carries the jug,’ Bertram thought, going along the pavement in the gathering darkness.
The bar was very quiet. Lily sat on her stool and she turned her head as he opened the door.
‘Now, what are you going to drink?’ Bertram asked her, coming up briskly.
‘No, I couldn’t really,’ she said quietly; and her glance slid uneasily from the pink jug he had put down upon the counter. She took up her glass of beer and drank it bravely, trying to smile at him.
‘Why must we drink this flat beer?’ Bertram asked, flopping some out into a glass where it stood without a bubble upon it. ‘Why can’t I get some bottled ale?’
‘It gives me wind,’ Tory said. When she cut the omelette in half grey mushrooms fell out. It was delicious, he thought, but not enough. Women never give one enough to eat, he decided, taking more bread. God knows why men ever marry any of them.
‘If you are a painter you ought to meet my friend, Beth, who lives next door,’ Tory was saying. ‘She would love a nice chat about Picasso or anyone of that type.’
A View of the Harbour Page 9
