‘You are as bad as Beth,’ Tory laughed, holding the cup carefully because of the drips.
‘How dare you!’ Prudence said suddenly.
‘How dare I what?’
‘Speak of my mother in that way.’
‘My dear child!’
‘And I shouldn’t rely on that too much, either.’
‘Rely on what?’
‘My being a child.’
Tory put the cup down and looked carefully at Prudence. ‘Are my legs affecting my head, do you think?’ she asked. ‘Am I really hearing you say these things? And if so, what does it mean?’
The young have few weapons against coolness. Prudence became surly and incoherent. Despising herself, getting out of depth, she mumbled: ‘You know what I mean all right.’
But she could not frighten Tory as she had frightened her father. Tory merely looked back at her as if fascinated, a kind of look she kept for people who had views she disliked. She would never fly into a rage with her opponents, but let them state their case in such silence that they would eventually flounder and then notice the dreamy little shake of her head, the eyes, fascinated, smiling, as if she were saying: ‘I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself,’ incredulous, bemused, with the look of someone gazing at a cage of mandrills. This did not help Prudence to get her mumbling coherent and she snatched up the empty cup and hastened back to the kitchen.
As soon as she had gone Tory stopped smiling and sat very still, frowning at her bandaged legs.
Maisie Bracey had no high-flown ideas about life as her sister had. She laughed always at Iris’s make-believe, teased her during her bouts of hero-worship – that man in the concert party, to begin with, with his straw hat, his face smooth, unreal, with number nine grease-paint; then, later, Ronald Colman; now Laurence Olivier. Maisie had never pinned up photographs of film stars on the bedroom wall or woven dreams (how John Gielgud, coming out of the stage-door one night suddenly raised his hat and said: ‘I am sorry, but I have to speak to you,’ and the lines from his nostrils to his down-curving lips seemed more nervously beautiful than could be borne). For Maisie, what her mother said insincerely was really true, everyday life was good enough for her. She did not care for any devastating romance and knew that she would do her own hair till the day she died, and her own housework as well; that no one would wait upon her unless she were ill, and perhaps not then; that she would grow to be an old woman and say ‘I didn’t go to stay at Claridge’s after all,’ and not care in the least, as Iris would. She knew what she wanted and in the end it was only two things. She wanted to get married and she wanted her mother to die. When Eddie Flitcroft, whom Iris despised, had asked her to go to the cinema one afternoon, her mother had become fretful and importunate.
‘What’s to happen to the shop?’
‘Iris will be here.’
‘And if Iris is in the shop, what happens to me?’
‘The same as what happens when I’m here alone with you.’
‘Why should you want to go to the pictures? I haven’t known you go for years.’
‘That wasn’t because I didn’t want to,’ Maisie said quietly.
‘So I stand in your way, do I? Perhaps I’d be better dead. Isn’t it bad enough for me to be lying here year after year without you forever rubbing it in that I’m a nuisance to you?’
As the argument had gone beyond reasonable discussion Maisie said nothing. Her mother’s hands trembled on the counterpane. Deep inside her a little voice told her to let the girl go, that she had been a good daughter and had done nothing to provoke the vicious lashing of her tongue. And it was words merely, her suggestion that she should be better dead, for her egotism told her that she was still indispensable, that the world and all that is therein would fall to pieces any day that Rose Bracey failed to draw a breath. Yet she hushed the little voice of reason, or overrode it, and her words reared and plunged away like a wild horse.
‘It’s that Eddie. We were all right until he came. What does he want with you? You’re old enough to be his mother, anyway.’
‘Only if I’d had him when I was four,’ Maisie said.
‘Don’t be disgusting. You’ll let this business slide. I know. And then come grizzling to me when there’s no more left to live on. I didn’t work my fingers to the bone building up a nice little connection just for you to throw it all away on boys. All my hard work all these years and you’d let it go without a murmur. Without a murmur. And I must lie here helpless and watch you do it.’
‘I only wanted to go to the pictures. I’d have been back by half-past five.’
‘Time’s nothing to you. It’s only those in pain know how heavily even a minute goes by. I can’t manage any more,’ she added, pushing aside her dinner-plate with a few fish-bones left upon it.
Maisie took the plate and went on eating her own meal calmly, but the tears were deep down in her breast.
‘All right, go then,’ her mother said presently, in a different, broken voice. ‘You can tell me all about it when you come back. It will be something for me to look forward to all the afternoon.’
‘I shan’t go,’ Maisie said.
‘Yes, you go, girl. I don’t mind. You’re quite right, just because I can’t have any pleasures myself I mustn’t stand in the way of yours.’
‘Some people just say to themselves: “I’ll go to the pictures” and then go,’ Maisie marvelled to herself, but she said nothing.
‘You’ll be late if you don’t hurry,’ her mother said sharply.
‘I’m not going.’
‘Oh, if you’re going to sulk and be a martyr. Your father used to be just the same. You can’t expect happiness in this life if you’re not prepared to make a little effort. Everything’s too much trouble.’
Maisie took the plate out into the scullery and stood gazing at the pot of maiden-hair fern. She took up a jug and poured some water into the muddy saucer, but she did it like a sleep-walker. ‘I wish she’d die,’ she thought. ‘I wish she’d die.’ The idea was at home with her now and could not shock her as it once did. She let it come bubbling up easily to the surface of her mind.
When Eddie came in and raised his eyebrows at her, she shook her head. He frowned quickly in annoyance, but she could only shrug her shoulders.
‘This is a lovely cup of tea, Maisie,’ her mother said, having had her own way.
Stevie had her own world, down among the skirts, the trousers of the grown-ups. These skirts, these trousers constantly impeded her. She dodged among them, avoiding the glances of the eyes above her, the faces swimming moon-like overhead having less meaning to her often than all the inanimate things she encountered on her own level – doorknobs, railings, flowers. She was acquisitive. She liked picking flowers and collecting old envelopes and wearing her jewellery – she had a gold cross threaded on a piece of wool, a string of corals and various brooches and rings which Tory had worn in plays when she was a girl. There were arguments in the house about her jewellery, because she liked to wear it to school and Beth would not let her, was quite shocked at the idea. ‘She’s only five,’ Robert would say. ‘Bless her heart, let her get it out of her system while she is young.’ And, although Stevie hated the look of distaste on her mother’s face at the diamond and emerald brooch pinned in the middle of her Viyella smock, she could not resist the glory of it.
At school she fell into violent adorations of bigger girls and mistresses, even cherishing their defects; stammering a little like one girl; blinking like another; closing her eyes while she talked, as Miss Simpson closed hers. As soon as she reached the school gates and said good-bye to her father she unwrapped a piece of wire from her handkerchief and fitted it across her front teeth, in imitation of a girl in the Second Form. She desperately desired to wear spectacles but too deeply to be able to speak about it. She also told lies – about dresses she did not possess or deeds she had never done; how she had been a bridesmaid at a wedding, was recently vaccinated, was learning to play the vi
olin. She also had a baby sister called Rosie who cut teeth when she was a few days old, but after that did not seem to progress. Miss Simpson forgave her her lies, even the one about being cruelly treated at home, because her mother was a writer, and where there is bad blood, as they say, it will out. ‘Well, that is a lovely story!’ she would exclaim in her bright, sane way, having listened to a description of Robert’s and Beth’s wedding, with Stevie one of the bridesmaids in red silk and pearls.
Prudence, at school, had been quite different; a little backward, kind people might have said, when she was still trying to matriculate at the age of eighteen, and not managing it. Slow she had been, with a strange lack of co-ordination, Miss Simpson explained in her reports, between brain and hand, reason and action, a girl who made neither friends nor enemies, always standing a little outside the edge of the crowd, not yet quite alive.
Nothing ruffled Miss Simpson. She could deal with everything – new girls who sobbed for a week, children who used bad language or kicked her on the shins, little girls who told lies. ‘She is going through a funny little phase,’ she would say, smiling calmly. Even children who passed from one funny phase to a funnier, could not disturb her. ‘We can cope,’ she would tell the mothers. ‘We can cope.’ Then the mothers who could not cope, who sometimes at home gave a sharp slap instead, felt ashamed, as if they must seem tawdry and hysterical in her eyes. They did not realise that she could even cope with mothers.
When Robert returned to the house at six o’clock he found a great scene going on and Stevie passing through a very funny little phase indeed, clinging to the banister rails and howling.
‘What is this?’ he cried, striding forward in great urgency, for it was time for surgery.
‘She won’t come to bed,’ Prue said, and as fast as she uncurled the little fingers from the banisters they gripped it again.
‘Where is your mother?’
‘She is in with Tory.’
Tory seemed to have upset his day in every way she was able. He sat down beside Stevie on the stairs.
‘What is wrong?’
‘I haven’t done my homework.’
‘It’s all nonsense,’ Prudence put in quickly. ‘She doesn’t have homework at her age.’
‘I do. I do. It’s a punishment.’
‘Stop screaming!’ Robert said. ‘Why were you punished?’
‘I said a rude word,’ Stevie improvised, not realising that Robert was leading her up the stairs.
‘What did you say?’
‘Just rude.’
‘I saw a new baby to-day.’ He was tired or he would have known that this was a useless change of tactics. At once, Stevie, sensing the red herring, began to howl and clung to the banisters again.
Beth came hurrying to the hall. ‘Stevie, darling! What is the matter?’
Robert straightened up suddenly. He resented the way Beth came hastening to her child as if he had been treating her brutally.
‘You’d better deal with her,’ he said crisply. ‘I’ve work to do.’
‘But what is wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps she is overtired.’
‘I know I am overtired. She has exhausted Prudence and me. Perhaps, coming freshly to it, you will have more success.’
‘It’s my geometry,’ Stevie sobbed. ‘I’ve got to do my geometry.’
‘Of course, darling one,’ cooed Beth. ‘We shall do it together when you are in bed. You shall sit up and we’ll pin some drawing paper to the pastry-board and do a nice lot of geometry.’
‘What is geometry?’ Stevie asked, crossing the landing.
‘You shall see. As soon as you are in bed. You shall see.’
Taps were turned on, their voices drowned.
‘Well, I could have got out of it that way,’ Robert thought, going into the surgery and tipping the cats off his chair. ‘The child is thoroughly spoilt, I suppose.’
This evening Mrs Bracey was in a good humour. She even did a little mending for Maisie, but her geniality was tentative and spasmodic, like the approaches of a child who has been naughty and is not sure of being forgiven. Eddie had gone out in a huff; Iris was at work. The little room was brightly stuffy, in contrast to the chilly darkness of the shop with its rows of hanging clothes, the lighthouse beam glancing there on a paste buckle in a pile of old shoes or on the moonlike bowl of water Maisie had set on the floor to absorb the smell of paint.
‘What’s for supper?’ Mrs Bracey asked.
‘If you don’t mind being left for three seconds I’ll slip along to the café for a bit of fish,’ Maisie said coldly.
‘I could fancy a nice piece of skate,’ her mother agreed, instead of grumbling in the usual way that she’d had fish for her dinner and soon would be looking like a fish, with fish-bones sticking out of her bodice and a bloody fine fish’s thirst in her throat.
So Maisie unlocked the shop door and stepped out on to the pavement and went along to the café, where a dim, yellowish light lay over the tiled tables and Bertram was eating a plate of sprats the size of safety-pins.
Stevie sat up in bed, drawing circles round egg-cups, which was Beth’s notion of geometry. She covered a great many sheets of typing-paper in this way, then suddenly tired, she climbed down out of bed and padded across to the window.
‘Stevie!’ Beth called from her own bedroom down below.
‘I am only on my pot,’ Stevie shouted, standing by the window and looking out at the sea beyond the low parapet – for her bedroom was tucked high up under the roof. Between the tiles grew little plants like stiff rosettes, and gulls had left long chalky splashes on the slate. It was almost dark, and the sea looked taut and smooth, like silk stretched in a frame. Looking out at the lighthouse, she murmured: ‘Please send me a nice dream about new-born babies and me being a nurse. Or if I can’t be a nurse, let me be a lady. And have corsets. Amen.’ She stood quite still by the window, shivering, and when at last the lighthouse threw its hurried beam over the water, she could feel that her prayer had been noted, and trotted back to her bed.
‘Your surgery was over quickly,’ Beth said, pouring out coffee in her own reckless way. Prudence looked at the swimming saucers and then at her mother with anxious, searching eyes.
‘Did you do any writing?’ Robert asked.
‘Yes, but I have one of my characters in bed with pneumonia, and it is always dull writing about illness. It has been done so much before. This evening, thank heaven, we are through with the crisis.’
‘How did it go?’ Robert asked politely.
‘Oh, badly, thank you. How long before I can let her die, do you suppose? Two or three days?’
‘There is no need for anyone to die of pneumonia these days,’ Robert said in a rather high-handed and unhelpful way.
‘I’m afraid she must.’
‘The average expectation of life in your novels can’t be high. In fact, the death-roll is quite alarming.’
‘You might as well let her get it over,’ Prudence said, flicking over the pages of a rather dull medical journal and then throwing it on one side. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Allegra. Like Lord Byron’s daughter.’
‘How funny. I didn’t even know he got married,’ Prudence said.
‘I should never dare to give a name like that to a child. It is too much of a challenge,’ Robert said. ‘She would be almost sure to grow up fat and flat-footed and terribly Andante.’
‘Yes, like a girl at school called Honor Collins, who was an awful liar and told tales,’ Beth said. ‘Are you going to see Tory to-night?’
‘Yes, I said I’d look in. Are you coming?’
‘No. Tell her I’ll look in directly after breakfast. Geoffrey Lloyd said he’d bring some of his verse to read to me this evening.’
‘How awful for you!’ Prudence said suddenly.
‘I have some mending to do. It doesn’t matter. But you’ll be here, dear, won’t you?’
‘Good heavens, no. I loa
the poetry. Especially the sort people have written.’
‘Oh, dear! I thought you would like it.’
‘I can’t imagine why.’
‘Where are you going, then?’ Robert asked sharply. ‘I don’t want you out of doors after dark, you know.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘What a pity!’ Beth was saying. ‘He seems such a nice lad.’
‘Is his poetry any good?’ Robert asked, and glanced at the clock.
‘Well, my dear, I am only a wretched novelist,’ Beth said proudly. ‘I don’t understand about poetry.’
‘I must go,’ Robert said. ‘Funny how inferior novelists feel – from Jane Austen down.’
Prudence had the idea that his mind proffered one set of words and his tongue another. She watched him as he leant forward to kiss her mother’s brow, just as Beth bent forward suddenly for the coffee-pot. Nothing came of the kiss; it scarcely happened and certainly Beth was oblivious of the attempt. ‘If there’s anything Tory wants . . .’ she was saying.
‘Teddy would foam at the mouth if he were to see us drinking this,’ Tory laughed.
‘Damn Teddy!’ Robert said, putting his brandy glass on the table.
‘There’s one advantage in being the one who is left. It means a great loss of face for the other to go round gathering up possessions. I did quite well out of Teddy. All his things were here at the house when he was bewitched and he never could get them away – not with any dignity, that is. I gave a lovely Harris tweed suit to my young brother and sold the rest of his clothes to old Mrs Bracey. He must have found that the course of true love never does run smooth.’ She paused. ‘Which it does not,’ she added quietly.
He found unnerving the way in which women can drop from nonsense into a passionate seriousness. ‘What can I say to her?’ he wondered. ‘How can I begin to talk?’
‘Don’t you want to look at my bad legs?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Then why did you come?’
‘To talk to you.’
A View of the Harbour Page 11
