‘I did meet her daughter.’
‘Oh, yes, poor Prue!’
‘Why “poor”?’
‘I don’t know. But what a dreary life for a girl! A little dusting for Mother, a little cooking, a lot of mooning about. She was going to start a job, but then she got bronchitis. There doesn’t seem to be anything for girls to do nowadays, to enjoy themselves, I mean. When I was young it was so different. Or, to look back upon, it was – a perpetual summer, like all those plays with young men in blazers coming through french windows – so many of them and all the same. It always seemed to be the week-end. And I suppose we, the girls, all looked the same, too – shingled hair, sashes tied round our behinds, no waists . . .’
‘No bosoms,’ Bertram cut in eagerly.
Tory gave him a quick haughty look and then laughed. ‘I had a peach-coloured georgette frock, all hung with silver beads, and it showed my knees, in very shiny pink silk stockings. It was called ‘sleeveless’ and that was precisely what it was, just like a dress with the sleeves taken out.’
‘It sounds as if you were rather fast.’
‘And if it ever was the winter I wore a fur coat made of squares of fur and big bobbles of fur for buttons, and a collar like a bolster.’
‘And a hat like a jelly-mould, I daresay.’
‘How long ago it was, and the only problems we had were which of the striped blazers to marry, not that it would make much difference in the long run.’
‘No war.’
‘No, we were the lucky ones. Our young men were just the very ones who’d escaped by a month or two. And yet we had come to the point of being grown-up in that world of telegrams, of girls rushing into their bedrooms and slamming the door. Perhaps we all got frightened of being left on the shelf as our elder sisters looked like being. Beth married when she was younger than Prue is now.’
‘The doctor? I’ve seen him, I think.’ He felt as if a jig-saw puzzle was falling into place.
‘Yes, I expect so. Would you like some prunes?’
Bertram could not really be bothered with a lot of stewed fruit, but he took it because at least it was something to eat.
‘What is he like?’
Tory feigned absent-mindedness. She turned to him and asked: ‘Who?’
‘The doctor.’
‘Oh – a tallish man, dark, rather pale, thin.’ She moved her hand sketchily, with impatience.
‘I know what he looks like. I meant what is he like?’
Tory, having deliberately turned the conversation to embrace Robert, could not endure it now that he was mentioned. She felt that even by saying he was dark and thin she was betraying him.
‘I have never known him well,’ she said. ‘He is rather taken up with his work.’
‘This year, next year, sometime, never,’ Bertram said aloud, spreading his prune-stones round his plate. To himself, he thought: ‘So she can describe everyone, but not him.’
‘Do prunes give you wind, too?’ he inquired in a polite voice, for she ate nothing, sat there with her fingers laced together in her lap.
‘If I could tell him,’ she thought. ‘If I had someone I could tell, some good friend. But Beth is the only real friend I ever had. And I cannot tell Beth.’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not prunes. Only bottled beer.’ She put her finger-tips upon the edge of the table and stood up. ‘Why, it is quite dark,’ she said.
Lily Wilson let herself into the dark house. She moved quietly as if there were those inside who slept. When a mouse stirred – and she knew that there were mice – fear rushed through her, she felt as if fingers were locked tightly round her ankles. She went stealthily to begin with, and then with a little rush up the last few stairs into the room whose door she could lock. She switched on the light and crossed to the window to draw the curtains. Sweat had sprung from her and now felt cold at her armpits, the backs of her knees.
The view outside calmed her – the light falling on the cobblestones, and the peace of the quiet buildings. Iris came out of the Anchor and walked along, her hair swaying on her shoulders. When she reached her home, Lily saw her put up her hand to protect her forehead curls from a gust of wind. Then the street was empty except for an old man – it looked like the old Librarian – strolling along beside the water, his hands clasped behind his back. Yes, it was he, for as he drew level with Lily’s house he looked up and she could see his face in the lamplight – even his lips curved moistly above the square-cut beard which gave him, Lily thought, the look of Elijah.
She did not care to be seen peering out of the window, and put up her hand and drew down the blind.
Tory had let her room sink into darkness and silence; only the fire shifted the shadows round the walls. Bertram still sat on one side of the fire, she on the other, her feet up on the sofa. ‘I hardly know him,’ she thought, ‘and yet there can be this long, lazy silence between us, as if we have the rest of our lives together for talking.’ His presence laid a surface of calm over her nerves, but under that surface something raged inside her. Even sitting still she was conscious of the violence of the emotion which assailed her, as if it had an origin outside and away from her. Yet, although she felt that this violence would remain beyond her control, tormenting her forever, she also felt that she would never be overthrown. She was sure of herself, like a good sailor on a bad sea.
‘Well!’ Bertram began, slapping down his hands upon his knees, meaning that it was high time he went.
She switched on a lamp and half of her little room, with its white paint and blue glass, sprang back into existence.
‘Life is full of surprises,’ Bertram said, standing now with his back to the dying fire. ‘Yes, it is full of surprises. Something odd round every corner.’
‘Am I an odd thing round a corner, do you mean?’ Tory asked.
‘Yes.’ He took her hand as if he were going to kiss it in the most formal way but changed his mind and, turning it over as it came near his lips, he put the kiss into her palm instead. ‘Yes, you are certainly something rather odd.’
‘You don’t mean it cruelly, I know, but “odd” means someone who is left over when the rest are divided into pairs.’ She sat with her head bent, sliding a ring up and down and changing it from one finger to another.
‘My dear, when I say “odd” I mean someone – remarkable, someone strange, someone out of the ordinary.’
She struggled for words, could not speak, made a little gesture with her hand, as if cutting the air. At last she said: ‘Forgive me. I tried to be clever at your expense.’
‘At your own expense,’ he said gravely. And then in a different, brisker voice, he went on: ‘I shall be coming in to polish the knife-box, to do the copper saucepans. You will not easily get rid of me now, not until I go.’
She felt she did not want him to go and said good night to him with some reluctance, confronted once more by the ticking clocks, the empty house, standing there in the hall, shivering.
She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle and stood by the gas-stove waiting, her hot-water bottle in her hand. Going to bed on her own, in silence, was even now strange and dismal to her. For Teddy had been what is called a good husband, who danced attendance, who waited hand and foot, who filled water-bottles, for instance, and heated milk, and brought early-morning tea; and, in short, himself did for her all those things which in war-time money had been unable to do. ‘Until he suddenly sheered off,’ she now thought, lifting the kettle and pouring the boiling water into the bottle with such a reckless gesture that the water bubbled upwards, overflowed, and poured over her feet. She put the kettle down and groped behind her for a chair. The pain was cold first, then blisteringly hot. ‘My poor feet!’ she thought, ‘my best stockings!’ and fell forward in the darkness, her hands grazed upon the coconut matting.
7
As Robert had remarked, there had always been a good deal of running to and fro between Tory’s house and his own, which is often so between friends who live close toget
her, especially when one is as vague a housewife as Beth. Robert had a masculine dislike for all these little errands and messages, the borrowings and gossipings, the shared letters, the little screws of salt and butt-ends of loaves; even the gifts irked him – the tit-bits and samples of Tory’s cooking, pats of cream-cheese and bowls of lemon-curd. His own mother had taken a pride in never finding herself without supplies.
He tried to explain to Beth the usefulness, for instance, of a slate on the kitchen wall on which she might jot down oddments as they dwindled. ‘What a very good idea!’ she had exclaimed, wondering why no one had ever thought of it before. She hung the slate up at once and wrote ‘pearl barley’ upon it. After six weeks Stevie took her slate back and rubbed off ‘pearl barley’ and did a drawing in its place.
‘Prue, darling!’ Beth called suddenly in the middle of her morning writing. ‘Will you pop into Tory’s for a spoonful of mustard?’ Her mind seemed to divide sometimes and run forward along two different tracks, so that now, with her imaginary family sitting round listening to the reading of the will, she could still find herself thinking about lunch. ‘Robert will hate his cold beef without any,’ she went on and as she spoke she wrote the words: ‘When Allegra turned away to the window, the lawyer’s voice became a faint . . .’ She crossed out ‘faint’ and wrote ‘vague’. But a vague what?
‘Isn’t there any?’ Prudence asked in a grumbling tone. ‘And the toilet roll’s finished, too, in the downstairs lav.’
‘There are plenty more in the linen-cupboard.’
‘No, there aren’t. I looked.’
‘Well, in the boot-cupboard, then.’
‘There aren’t any,’ Prudence said distinctly.
‘Oh dear! Never mind. These things happen in the best regulated houses, so naturally they happen much more often in ours.’
‘Yes, but what are we to do?’
‘Use your brains, dear. There are those paper serviettes with the Union Jacks on we had for Stevie’s party. You really must be a little more resourceful. You have got spoilt by living in the lap of luxury. What do you suppose our soldiers did at the front?’
‘I haven’t the least idea,’ Prudence said disdainfully.
‘Well, fetch the mustard, dear, and give Tory my love. I will pay it back when the grocery comes.’ She dipped her pen into the ink. ‘Vague what?’ she began to wonder once more. ‘This isn’t writing,’ she thought miserably. ‘It is just fiddling about with words. I’m not a great writer. Whatever I do someone else has always done it before, and better. In ten years’ time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust. And, even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares? People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written. They could not easily care less. No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on? The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if “vague” will do better than “faint”, or “faint” than “vague”, and what is to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game.’
‘There is a green hill far away,’ Stevie sang coming in from school, slamming a door. ‘Without a city wall.’
Prudence had knocked on Tory’s door and presently heard her coming very slowly along the passage. She wasn’t in the least prepared for the metamorphosis of Tory, with her hair loose on her shoulders, her mouth colourless. She forgot all about the mustard in her agitation. ‘What is wrong? Why are you in your dressing-gown?’
‘My legs,’ Tory said faintly, and sat down on the hall chair. ‘I scalded them last night.’
‘Last night?’
Tory inclined her head as if words were now beyond her.
‘Why didn’t you . . .?’ Prudence began. ‘I will fetch Mother.’
Tory began to count to steady herself. Beth was there before she reached thirty.
‘My dear pet, don’t worry. Robert’s here. He is just coming.’ She knelt by Tory and took her hands and began chafing them. ‘You’re frozen. Poor dear Tory!’
‘Not Robert!’ Tory said. ‘Please not Robert.’
Robert came into the hall and saw Tory looking up at him with the strained and anxious expression of a hurt child.
‘What is it, Tory?’ he asked rather sternly.
‘Her legs are scalded,’ Beth said.
‘Some of the skin came away with my stockings,’ Tory began, and then she retched a little, her hands over her face.
Robert put down his case and lifted her. He carried her into her little sitting-room and put her on the sofa.
‘Beth, would you remove this child,’ he said angrily, for Stevie had come in, and was insinuating herself into a good vantage ground.
‘Yes, I will sit her up at the table and let her begin her lunch or she will be late back to school. I will come back later, Tory. You are in safe hands, my dear. Robert will know more than I what to do. I have put two kettles on,’ she added proudly, feeling like a doctor’s wife in a novel. Stevie went unwillingly, for her father had now lifted Tory’s gown and was peering at the watery, puffy skin.
‘Tory, what is the meaning of this?’ he asked presently, his head bent over his case while he snipped at something she could hear, with some little scissors. She tried not to imagine what he was going to do.
‘Oh, I was filling my bottle and I suppose I was dreaming . . .’
‘I didn’t mean that, as you know. But why did you not come in last night?’
‘I couldn’t. I fainted,’ she said proudly.
‘But as soon as you could? And all this morning. Surely you have deliberately stayed away.’
‘You insist on an answer because you know it is one it will give you pleasure to hear. You want me to tell you I didn’t come because I am in love with you. Only the very words and me saying them will satisfy you. You deserve to be struck off the roll, or whatever it is.’
He shut his case and went out without a word. ‘I am playing merry hell with him,’ she thought complacently, her head a little lightened, empty, with fatigue and nausea. When he came back, though, he looked very calm and not in the least mortified by her words, and was carrying a hot-water bottle which he laid to the soles of her feet.
‘I’ll send Prudence in to make you a cup of tea,’ he said, and he looked very stiff and formal, except that he had one of her shoes in each hand. ‘And I’ll come in this evening after surgery.’
‘What time will that be?’ she heard herself asking.
‘I have no idea,’ he said coldly.
She bowed.
And then Beth came hastening in with a cup of hot soup.
The day seemed pleasantly disorganised to Stevie. As there was no one to spur her on with her dinner she leant back in her chair, her eyelids at half-mast, her head on one side. It sickened her to look at such a quantity of food that must be got inside her, unless by a miracle, by her own craft or the weakness of adults, she might be let off.
When her father came in she squeezed a couple of tears, one from each eye, and forced them down her cheeks.
He was clashing the carving-knife against the steel but suddenly stopped.
‘Stevie, put out your tongue.’
She put it out and the tears accumulated beautifully and spilt over; she felt them everywhere, in her throat, behind her nose, her breast was full of them, her eyes overflowed.
Her tongue, however, was nicely pink.
Robert came round the table and wiped her cheeks. ‘What is it, then, my dear?’
‘I didn’t like. Tory’s legs,’ she sobbed. A voice outside her seemed to whisper to her the right things to say.
‘You had no business to be there. Can’t you eat your -pudding?’
‘No, I don’t think I can.’
‘Would you like something different just for this once?’
She thought she would very mu
ch like a chocolate biscuit, but the voice outside warned her against saying so.
‘No, I don’t want anything.’
‘You can get down, then. Sit quietly in a chair and look at a book until you feel better.’
‘Couldn’t I just pop up and be excused?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He carved himself some beef and tipped salad all over his plate. Upstairs in the lavatory Stevie sang loudly:
‘Jesus bids us shine
With a pure clear light
Like a little candle
Burning in the night.’
He could hear her banging her heels against the pedestal and then yards and yards of toilet-paper being unwound.
‘In this world of darkness
So we shall shine
You in your small corner
And I in mine.’
She gave a great kick and then there was a brief silence and the cistern being flushed.
He glanced at the plate of cold rice pudding, knowing he had been fooled. Now she was in the bathroom, running water into the basin. She was muttering to herself, as if engrossed, sometimes singing a snatch of a hymn but in an absent-minded way. ‘Playing with the water,’ he thought; but, deliberately turning his mind away, sat chewing the greyish beef and wondering about Tory’s behaviour and her words. ‘I am a middle-aged doctor. I am a father’ – here Stevie broke loudly into song once more – ‘Crown him! Crown him!’ – and the water went hastening suddenly down the pipe as if drawn by a great parched throat – ‘A father,’ Robert continued to himself, ‘weighed down by a mass of routine and habit and daily duty, never again to be free of it. I am not,’ he thought, reaching for the mustard-pot, ‘some young Shelley, capering about with old-man’s beard in my hair, breaking women’s hearts to left and right.’
The mustard-pot was empty. He left the lid off as a protest.
‘I must get surgery over quickly to-night,’ he decided.
Prudence made a cup of tea for Tory as her father had told her, and carried it in on a tray, standing by rather grimly as Tory lifted the cup out of the saucer which was half-full of slopped tea.
A View of the Harbour Page 10
