Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  ‘I think she is going to the storeroom. There are mice there.’

  ‘Yes, pussies love mice,’ mused this country child. ‘Poor mice. Well, I hope she doesn’t find them.’

  ‘I think these mice must be clever. They have been living in the storeroom for some time.’

  ‘But the cat is bigger than they are.’

  ‘But they are clever,’ said Emily. ‘They hide when she chases them.’

  ‘I wonder where they hide?’

  ‘Mr. Lane leaves his outdoor boots in the storeroom. I expect they hide in those.’

  ‘Yes, and the cat can’t get into the boots, can she?’

  ‘No, the mice creep right down into the toes and wait until the cat goes off and they can creep out.’

  ‘I wonder what the mice like to eat best?’

  ‘I think, cats.’

  ‘And cheese,’ said the child. ‘I like cheese.’

  ‘Let’s look and see.’ And Emily and Josie went to the storeroom. On the way the child picked up Mrs. Mew, who remained limp until they reached there, when she energetically twisted free and ran off back to her chair.

  Emily and Josie surveyed the plenty of the pantry. The eggs rose up a wall on their racks, and Josie said, ‘I think a mouse would like to eat the eggs, but how would it get through the shells?’

  ‘A clever mouse would push an egg off and it would crash on the floor and then all the mice could gather around and eat it.’

  ‘Look, there are Mr. Lane’s boots. If the egg fell into a boot I expect Mr. Lane would be cross with the mice.’

  ‘Or suppose Mr. Lane put on a boot and found something wriggling down at the end, and he said, Who is that nibbling at my toe?’

  Josie found this hilarious and flung herself on to the floor to laugh.

  Back in the little room where her toys were, she ignored them and said, ‘Tell me some more about the mice.’

  And then began the epic tales of the mice, their adventures with the stores, the eggs, the cheese, the cat…Emily had had no idea she could do this, keep up the invention of storytelling as long as the child said, ‘And then? What happened then?’

  Mary Lane came back, said that Phyllis was probably going into labour but the midwife was coming. She heard some of Emily’s inventions and, like the child, said, ‘Do go on, Emily.’

  And Emily went on.

  Next morning, a little friend of Josie’s came with her to spend the day with Mary Lane and both at once clamoured for ‘A story – tell us about the mice.’

  The children could not get enough of the mice and their adventures, of Mrs. Mew and hers, and then there were the birds in the branches, visible through the windows on to the garden.

  ‘More!’ chanted the children.

  Mary sat in a rocking-chair in a corner and smiled, and said again, ‘Emily, you are so good at it. Where do you get all these ideas from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Emily.

  More children came. They crowded into the little room and Mary provided milk and cake and apples.

  Then some bigger children arrived, among them Alfred’s boys, but would they be satisfied with the adventures and ordeals of mice and blackbirds?

  Emily widened her repertoire to include the many dogs of the farm, as well as the cats, the rabbits that could often be observed from these very windows. She found herself enquiring from Harold and Mary about the habits of ferrets, foxes and badgers. Then a message came from Mr. Redway, brought by the boys, that he would be obliged if she could go there and confirm that Tom really did have some musical talent, which was what his teacher had said.

  Along went Emily through the fields, and found Mr. Redway, Mrs. Redway, Alfred, a pretty fat woman, who was Betsy, and the two boys.

  There was a good grand piano in the Redways’ sitting-room: all the farmhouses and cottages had uprights. The children sang easily and without shyness, and snatches of music were part of the storytelling.

  Tom stood by the piano as she played, watched by the family, and Emily put him through his paces, said, ‘Yes, your teacher is right. He should have music lessons.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ said Mr. Redway at once.

  ‘I don’t know where he gets it from,’ said Betsy. ‘Not from me.’

  ‘It’s my father,’ said Alfred. ‘The child’s grandfather. I think he has spent his life in that church, playing the organ.’

  Messages were coming to the Lanes for Emily, from all kinds of parents, asking her to come and judge their off-spring’s talents.

  Meanwhile, the storytelling was going on, and every day there were more children.

  ‘They are hungry for it,’ said Emily.

  ‘Starving for it,’ said Mary. ‘And, so, what are you going to do, Emily?’

  At this point Daisy came down to visit her parents, partly because Emily was there. She arrived at suppertime and the four went to the table.

  Mary had been cooking all morning. ‘Daisy does like a nice bit of stew.’ ‘She loves rice pudding, if it has some nutmeg.’ Daisy’s appetite had always been something for any mother to despair over, but Mary seemed to have forgotten that, and Emily held her peace.

  Daisy’s weekend case was smart and new and so was her jacket, and Emily thought, That’s for the benefit of Rupert, then. Daisy didn’t much care about smartness. Rupert was Daisy’s fiancé, and almost before they sat down Harold said, ‘And when are we going to have the honour of meeting this chap of yours?’

  Mary had met Rupert at a lunch in London, but Harold had only been told. ‘He’s very nice,’ Mary had reported, but there was a tone in her voice that meant more could have been said. ‘I thought of bringing him down for a weekend soon,’ said

  Daisy and Emily knew Daisy was carefully not saying how very busy her distinguished surgeon was.

  Mary did go up to London to see Daisy and there had been shopping trips, and she had seen where Daisy worked, watched the life of the busy hospital, but she did not know what Daisy did, thought, or how she spent time off. Her experience had been so far from her daughter’s yet she longed to know more. Her over-timid questions to Daisy were meant to provide information she could understand, even start discussion. Daisy did not like this probing and replied briefly.

  The table was laden with hardly touched dishes, though Harold took second helpings, mostly to please Mary.

  ‘And I expect you girls will want to have your talk,’ said Mary, and got up to light the candles on the sideboard. She was prepared to concede the usefulness of electric light, but she preferred lamplight and candles.

  When Emily and Daisy went into the room Emily had been using, Daisy lit a candle beside her bed and Emily lit hers.

  Daisy put on a nightdress with sleeves and a high neck, but Emily had pyjamas of dark blue, with scarlet piping. They sat up in bed and brushed their hair. Daisy had kept her coil of already greying fair hair, and Emily had a shingle. She had been saying to Mary that a shingle needed cutting once a week and she thought she’d give it up. The shingle and the bobs Emily’s smart friends wore had begun because of the riots and civil wars that marked the end of the Hapsburgs. The insurgents and rebels wore very short hair. Turkey, falling into the same chaos of rebellion, provided the fashionable world with coiffures supposed to be modelled on what people imagined of the seraglio.

  Both women vigorously brushed while the candle flames swayed.

  Then Daisy remarked, ‘Mary wrote and told me that you have all the children of the district hanging on your words.’

  Emily let her brush drop and said, ‘Oh dear. Oh, Daisy, what have I done?’ And she burst into tears, and flung herself back on her pillows.

  Daisy let her brush rest and said, ‘But, Emily, whatever is the matter?’

  ‘Have I done wrong? Did she complain? Oh, Daisy…’ And the sobbing intensified.

  Daisy sat up straight, and said, ‘Emily!’ in a scandalized voice. ‘What has got into you, Emily? Stop it at once.’

  Emily muffled her so
bs. ‘All these children coming here and Mary feeding them and being so kind.’

  ‘But, of course, she loves it.’

  ‘I didn’t know it would happen, Daisy. It just – happened.’

  ‘But, Emily, it’s wonderful. Stop it.’

  ‘Is it? Is it?’

  ‘Everyone admires you for it. You never did things by halves, did you? Stop crying.’

  It was occurring to Daisy that Emily had recently lost a husband, but Daisy had secretly believed her friend would be pleased to get rid of him. William, as a poetical young doctor, had had all the nurses in love with him. But William Martin-

  White was a different matter, stiff and severe, and people were afraid of him. She was. It did not occur to her that she herself was a pretty formidable figure in the hospital hierarchy.

  Daisy enquired, ‘Are you thinking of marrying again, Emily?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Emily, forcefully.

  This confirmed what Daisy had thought and now she said, ‘Put out your candle. I want to tell you something.’

  Emily obeyed. It was a little blue enamel candlestick, and the candle was a stump. She loved the pretty candlestick, and often left the candle burning, as a sort of company.

  ‘Now, Emily,’ said Daisy, lying down, but leaving her candle burning enough to see if Emily had become herself again, ‘I haven’t told you this, I am pretty sure, I’ve been running around and around, because of Rupert. He wants a wedding soon…But, you see, he is involved with a society for the children of the East End. I am sure you know this, but there is such dreadful poverty there.’

  Emily had not for years been conscious of much poverty. The people who had come to her parties were all well-off, if not rich. When she came to think of it, servants were the closest she had come to London poverty. Here, in the weeks she had been with the Lanes, she had visited the Redways in their fine house and had not been in the cottages of the farm workers. Their children, she thought, were not lacking in anything. They were warmly dressed and had plenty to eat. She believed their schools weren’t up to much, though.

  Britain was wealthy, was booming, was at a level of prosperity the leader writers and public figures congratulated themselves and everybody on. Britain had not had a war since the Boer War; nor were there wars in Western Europe, which was on a high level of well-being. It was enough only to contrast the dreadful situation of the old Austrian Empire and the Turkish Empire, in collapse, to know that keeping out of war was a recipe for prosperity.

  Various skirmishes in Africa, which could have grown worse, were damped down, because ‘Why spoil what we have?’ France, Germany, the Low Countries were booming.

  But the riches of Britain, which was as full of big houses and high-living people as it in had been Edwardian times, did not seem to percolate downwards.

  Daisy, keeping an eye on Emily in case she would start her crying again, sat up, and told her that the children of the East End (‘and I’m only talking about London, mind you’) were as pitifully ill-fed, unclad, dirty ‘as a lot of little savages, Emily. Anyway, Rupert is going to set up this society, and we have a good many well-known supporters. We aim to change the East End. It is a disgrace that a great rich city like London should tolerate such poverty.’ She went on for a while, saw that Emily had gone to sleep, and went to sleep herself.

  Next day, Emily said she had taken in what Daisy had told her, and now that she was herself again, please would Daisy repeat it. While Emily and Mary admitted the hordes of children, ‘Tell us a story, Auntie, tell us a story,’ Daisy briefed Emily, and begged for her support. ‘You are so good at this kind of thing, Emily. We need your energy, your efficiency. I’ve told Rupert you must be with us, and he says he remembers you very well from your time at the hospital. So all you have to do is to say yes.’

  Emily said yes, but meanwhile other plans were hatching, which she discussed with Mary, who remarked that she wondered where Emily had got all her knowledge about books and stories. This caused Emily to write to her stepmother and ask if she could come and see her old books, if they still existed.

  ‘Your room hasn’t been touched, and your father, I am sure, would like to see you.’

  Emily went to London, feeling she was leaving her true self behind. Perhaps she should find a farmer to marry, she mused.

  The house in Blackheath had not changed, with not so much as a lick of paint. She refused to remember childhood scenes and feelings and went straight in to her father, who was, these days, very large and red-faced.

  ‘You have had a loss, I hear,’ said he. She had sent him a letter about her husband’s death. ‘He had a heart-attack, did he? I had a bit of a stroke myself.’

  ‘Yes, it was a bad heart-attack.’

  ‘I am careful what I eat and drink.’

  She discussed her father’s health for a while and then went up to her room, which her stepmother said had not been touched.

  She found it the same as when she had left it twenty-two years ago. She briefly swung open the door of the wardrobe, caught a glimpse of her schoolgirl clothing, and shut the door hard. She was furious.

  There was an old oak bookcase under the window, and she sat in front of it, on the floor, and looked hard at the faded old books. First, there was a pile of maps, and atlases: yes, she had done well at geography. On what principle had these books been chosen? Books had just appeared, addressed to her, and she had taken them to her room. The Moonstone, The Woman in White. Sherlock Holmes. Peter Pan: yes, indeed, she had wept over Peter Pan. George Meredith, all of Dickens, from the look of it. All of Trollope. Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss. William Blake: yes, she had had to recite ‘O Rose, thou art sick’ in class, but had had no idea what it was she was saying. The poems of Byron, Matthew Arnold, Shelley, Words-worth, Tennyson. Thomas Hardy – but not Jude the Obscure. Moby Dick, Hawthorne, John Keats. Shakespeare. The Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. Lamb’s essays. Plain Tales from the Hills. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Vanity Fair…She had read lying on her bed, read here, where she was sitting. Books – a place of peace and calm, where she had been able to hide away from…Books were good. Reading was good. ‘Are you going up to read, Emily? That’s good.’

  He had done well for her, her father. And on a table, piled tidily, copies of Walter Scott, in dark red leather bindings, but no one had read them. That was odd, wasn’t it? She went down to say to her father, ‘Thank you. You have no idea how well it has served me – reading.’ But he was asleep and snoring. She found her stepmother and suggested that surely it was time to get rid of her girlhood clothes.

  So, with the chill of that ancient rupture from her father still on her, she left, while at the same time blessing him: Thank you.

  She visited several bookshops, said she would be ordering a lot of books, and enquired about trade prices.

  She went back to the Lanes’, triumphant.

  ‘Thank you, Mary. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go and see what books I had,’ and, when supper was over, she told Mary and Harold her plans, watching their faces for signs of doubt or disapproval. But both were pleased.

  Harold said, ‘I knew you wouldn’t just mope about. It isn’t in you.’

  Mary said, ‘I knew you’d come up with something really good.’

  Harold went off to his lair, and the two women talked, until Mary said that Emily would need a good lawyer.

  During this talk it emerged that Daisy would be in on these schemes. Not a word had been said by Daisy to her mother, nothing about her future, only that she wanted a quiet wedding, in a registry office, but if she, Mary, insisted, they could have a reception in a hotel – a small one.

  Emily ended her news, saying, ‘You’ve been so good to me, Mary. A girl doesn’t need a mother if she has a friend like you.’

  The two wept in each other’s arms, but for very different reasons.

  * * *

  Emily wrote to Cedric Martin-White, and the two met in Emily’s house
, which she entered reluctantly. What a pleasant, bright, airy place it was, how much nicer and brighter than the Lanes’ house, yet she felt it like a shadow enclosing her. It disapproved of her! Why? Oh, how fanciful and silly.

  Cedric and Emily sat at the great table that had held so many of William and Emily’s dinner parties. Cedric, told he would have to take notes, had brought notebooks and pencils and sat there, opposite Emily, the very essence of a responsible businessman. He was, in fact, a lawyer.

  Having so recently expounded her plans to Mary, Emily had them at her fingertips and it did not take long to tell Cedric what she wanted.

  He said at once that it did not seem clear what Daisy’s and her Rupert’s role was in all this. Were they discussing one or different organizations?

  ‘I think we want roughly the same things.’

  ‘I can make provisions for a society with similar parallel aims, or two societies. You are very sure of what you want, Aunt Emily.’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Then, why don’t you set up a society or trust, or whatever we decide, run entirely by yourself? There is a great deal to be said for a single controlling voice. The more people you add, the more possible disagreements, and even quarrels. Do you know this Rupert?’

  ‘Everyone knows of him. Rupert Fenn-Richards.’

  ‘Oh, him. You should have said so. Because you’ll need a list of people like bishops and the eminent to add respectability and renown to your proceedings.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘But if you are going to run this thing alone, I want to suggest you have me in. You can always twist me around your little finger, Aunt Emily. I am not likely to oppose your wishes. I like everything you say about it. A lawyer is always a good thing to have, you know.’

  ‘Ideally, I’d like myself, Daisy Lane and you, then.’

  ‘Would her husband be happy to be sponsor, to add a general sheen of honour? If he could rope in some more of his kind, so much the better.’

  Emily said, ‘And, after all, I know quite a lot of people of that kind.’ So her dinner parties were turning out to be useful. ‘As for Rupert, he’s so busy I doubt he’d do much in the way of actual work. For that matter, if Daisy’s going to be married, I expect the pressure will come on for her to stop.’ Emily had no idea how resentful she sounded.