by Ursula Bloom
It was Muriel who came in answer to his knock.
He stood looking at her, aware that he had longed for this moment, and that he felt feverish, and excited, and terribly glad. Here was the same red hair framing the small pale face, and the same bright eyes. Only last year she had worn her old clothes, and this year she was dressed up on holiday, in an art silk frock, with a lot of silly little frills, her wrist hooped with cheap tin bracelets, and in her ears a couple of pearl stud earrings. The earrings made a shocking difference to her. She had lost her personality, she had dressed up her real self and looked now like any rather common girl of his own age. Or had he grown older? Which? He was finding too much of this kind of thing these days. People and places changing, or himself changing, and never knowing where the answer was.
‘I have been to Hindhead, and came on here to see you,’ he said.
‘Well, isn’t that lovely?’ There was no mistake about her being genuinely pleased, and he knew it. ‘Oh, I do think that is nice of you. You’d better come in. The bike’ll be all right out there. Auntie!’ she called shrilly, ‘Auntie, here’s a friend of mine.’
The house was furnished modernly, and he saw at once that they were proud of it. There was nothing of the comfortable spreading Hindhead farm, for here was a threepiece suite in imitation leather, pictures in burdensome frames, a radio in one corner, a nest of silly little tables, and lots of silk cushions. Auntie was a large woman, in at the waist, out at the hips. She gave him the impression of a high mantelpiece, with an enormous yule log butting out behind it into the chimney. She wore a navy frock, blindingly dotted with white polka spots, and had suffered a devastating perm.
‘Any friend of Muriel’s is my friend,’ she said, ‘do come in Mr. what’s-your-name?’ and laughed.
‘Hugo Blair,’ he said.
‘I’m sure it’s nice to see you. You’ve had some supper?’
He hadn’t, but did not like to say so. Muriel recognised the look on his face. ‘I don’t believe you have,’ she said, ‘come along into the dining-room, and I’ll find you a bite. I don’t believe it’s been cleared away yet.’
‘Yes, that’s it, dear, you find him a bite.’ Auntie was relieved to be rid of him.
The dining-room was a worse edition of the ‘lounge’, light oak and pale orange walls. A massive picture of the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and on the table a meal half cleared. But the food was good, and he was ravenous.
‘I say,’ said Muriel, ‘have you got fixed up for the night? I mean, are you doing like you did before, cycling through?’
‘Yes. I hadn’t fixed up anything. I thought there might be another loft, or a stack, or something?’
‘Oh, it isn’t that sort of farm. Auntie’s done well for herself, and Uncle’s a gentleman farmer. It makes a difference, you know; I tell you I have to mind my Ps and Qs here. The house is full, but maybe they’d let me sleep with my cousin Sibyl, and then you could have my room.’
‘I wouldn’t like to turn you out.’
She laughed at that. ‘You eat your supper, and don’t you worry. I’ll see that you aren’t let down. Have some blancmange? It’s good. Auntie isn’t like us; she keeps a servant, you see.’
‘Fine!’
‘Oh, we have great times here. You’ll like it. I’ll just slip in and see her about the room whilst you get on with your supper.’
It wasn’t the same.
Nothing was the same, he supposed. Time came and went, chance came and went. You couldn’t go back. The girl in the cheap silk frock was not the Muriel that he had remembered. She too was a chameleon responding to her background. He ate his supper, aware that a buzz of conversation was going round the house. Then the servant came in, and looked at him for a moment in alarm; a boss-eyed girl, with a skirt which hung in hunches over her skinny hips, and an apron belt too loose and sagging. Muriel came back and with her was her cousin.
‘This is Sibyl, she went to High School, and we are ever such friends. When we can get together, I can tell you we make things hum,’ and she laughed. Sibyl was good-looking in an over-blown, blowsy way; she wore clothes of fashionable cut, and Muriel was undoubtedly wearing one of her cast-offs. ‘She says it’s all right, you can sleep in my room, I’ve moved my things out. Have you finished your supper?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid I ate a lot, but I was so jolly hungry.’
Sibyl eyed him. He knew that she was assessing him. Muriel thought that everything that Sibyl did was lovely, and hung admiringly on every look and word; she had even copied Sibyl’s perm, an over-baked crimp with a mass of little sausage curls on the neck.
‘Well now, and what shall we do?’ Muriel asked, ‘the thunder seems to have passed off. It’s a shame to waste the evening sitting indoors, and there’s nothing to see in the vill. I wish we could have persuaded Uncle to let us have the car, and go somewhere a bit gay.’ She hadn’t been like this last time. She had been simpler, quieter, and her gaiety jarred.
‘I’d like to see something of the Forest,’ he said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Well, it’s dull enough,’ said Sibyl, ‘just a lot of old trees and the Rufus stone, and that. But if he wants to see it, let’s take him out.’
She caught Muriel’s eye and they began to giggle. It was some unseen joke between them, but it made him feel most uncomfortable.
He went up and had a wash in the spruce bathroom with the red carbolic soap set in the tray, so different from the pump trough where the water stung, and there had been a reality about things. Then he went downstairs again, brussels carpet, and oak stair-rods, and a lot of eggshell enamel.
The girls were ready to take him out, giggling together on the step. He had hoped to get Muriel to himself, but she insisted on bringing Sibyl, and they reacted badly to one another. For the first time he compared her with Wynne: Wynne who was so polished and glamorous, and these two who behaved so queerly. Sibyl going off into peals of laughter over some private joke, and nudging Muriel till she joined in.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
When she had recovered herself sufficiently, Sibyl would glance at Muriel with tears in her eyes from so much laughing, and would blurt out in a voice weak with amusement, ‘She knows,’ whereupon they would both have another peal whilst he watched helplessly.
Muriel confessed. ‘Sibyl always carries on like this. She makes me die. She’s so fond of fun, and high-spirited,’ then off they would go again.
Perhaps he was too old for it. This last year had made an enormous difference to him, and he couldn’t bear this. Eventually he got Muriel alone for a moment, because a dark young man, with a sprig of mignonette in his buttonhole, and a quiff, and a freemason’s medallion dangling from his watch chain, stopped Sibyl for a word.
‘Isn’t there anywhere where we can talk alone?’ he asked.
‘You don’t like Sibyl? And she’s such a sport and always so full of fun.’
‘Yes, I like her all right, but that giggling is a bit irritating. Besides, I came to see you.’
That sobered Muriel. ‘Let’s walk on. That’s Dick Martin and he’ll keep her talking. She has all the men on a string. When we get round the corner we can run, and then we’ll find somewhere where we can talk.’
They went round the corner.
They turned into a field which stretched down to a little stream with silver birches beside it. There was a light mist about the crowns of the birches, white as a bride’s veil, and the elder flowers grew nearby with their over-strong scent. There was a little haystack, already half chopped in two, with a step beside it made of hay. They sat down.
‘Quick,’ she said, ‘Sibyl can’t see us here.’ It was sheltered and warm, their backs to the stack, their feet stuck out before them, like a big sofa. Besides, there was the summery smell, and the sound of the stream where a broken reed made a dam, and caused it to gurgle. ‘I’m sorry you don’t like Sibyl.’
‘I do like her, but she makes you so different. I don’t wan
t you to be different, because I liked you as you were last time.’
‘Why, I wasn’t even grown-up then.’
‘You were very good to me. Remember when I had had too much beer?’
‘You’ve changed a lot, Hugo. You’re a man now, you look like a man and talk like one. You were only a boy then, and I seemed to be lots older than you, but not now.’
‘Perhaps it is having started to work in my father’s office.’
‘Then you didn’t go to sea?’
‘No.’ But it was satisfactory that she should have remembered that much about him.
‘You will,’ she said, ‘you will,’ and clasped her knees with her arms. All the tin bracelets jangled like so many sheep in the Cheviot country.
‘It doesn’t look like it. I hate the tea business, the office is beastly, and everything is so dull. There is always trouble with the blenders, or the distributors, or the customers, always some row going on.’
‘Why is the office beastly?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It just is.’ Soon the green creeper, which was the first whisper of spring in that back alley off Ludgate Hill, would be dyed claret, waving the banners of autumn. To-night it was high summer, and no need to think about that, he told himself hurriedly. To-night there was the moon and the stars, and the sweet scent of the elder, and the song of birds going to rest. ‘I hate the office,’ he said bitterly.
‘It won’t be for always.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘I just don’t think so.’
‘You had a hunch about me before.’
‘Yes, and I’ve got a hunch now that all of us, you and me, and everybody else, we’re all going to change. Change a lot, I mean, in quite another sort of world.’
She was very different when she got away from Sibyl, more like what she had been in the hay-loft, the Muriel that he had remembered. It was just Sibyl who made her so silly.
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘I don’t know. I only know that it will happen.’
‘You ought to go in for this sort of thing, Muriel, and be encouraged to tell people’s fortunes; you’re fey.’
‘Not really.’ He noticed that she had the same slim waist, and that the full curve of her lips was attractive, only he wished that the rope shoes were still on her feet, and not the silly over-smart French ones. ‘It’s just that I get ideas. I got one about you. I’ve thought of you a lot.’
‘I’ve thought about you. I wrote to you, and you never wrote to me. I was fed up over that.’
‘Sorry, but I’m not much of a one for writing. I never know what to say and then get impatient and tear it all up.’
‘I was very disappointed.’
‘Well, it’s no good asking me to write. I’m not any good at it.’
They did not stay too long, because she was worried that Sibyl would notice, and he realised that all the time she had one eye on the road, and was anxious not to make a bad impression on her cousin.
‘Sibyl’s a town girl,’ she kept saying, ‘different to me. She knows what’s what, and makes me feel an awful fool at times, but then she’s so clever.’
They walked back across the grass, which was already moist with dew, and clung to their shoes. They went into the lane now striped with heavy shadows, and on towards the house, its bright lights showing cheerfully among the trees. Sibyl, her mother and father were all sitting in the lounge listening to a noisy radio. It was ‘Music Hall’.
‘Well, you two love-birds?’ challenged Sibyl, but her eyes were bright with anger.
It was no case of being love-birds, and it annoyed Hugo to hear Muriel giggle, and to see her redden, and also to know that he himself went awkwardly shy for no reason at all.
The uncle said, ‘Now, what about a good glass of something? A good glass makes the world go the smoother. We’ve all been in love, my lad, at some time or another, all been through it, haven’t we, Mother?’
The stout mantelshelf which was Mother’s bust waggled approvingly; she giggled and said that they had, hadn’t they just? All the time Hugo knew that they were spoiling an emotion that had been beautiful. He refused the beer. Then, of course, Muriel had to tell the story of last time, and she and Sibyl had to laugh a lot, and wipe their eyes, and shake their sausage curls, whilst Uncle and Auntie dropped a few wisecracks of Adam’s date. He hoped that none of them noticed that he had gone very quiet. Eventually he went up to Muriel’s room.
‘I bet you’ll sleep sound,’ winked Uncle knowingly, and shut the door on him.
It was a little room, with an over-patterned paper, of chunky red roses and forget-me-nots and stiff lupins. It was almost too clean, because its cleanliness assailed him and kept on reminding him of its presence as he sat down on the slender bed. The dressing-table had been cleared, by the simple means of pushing a few things aside into a corner. There was a pot of face cream, almost finished, with the grease congealing on its wide mouth in a slime, a box of powder spilt in a pale dust, and an old packet which had once contained a well-known brand of hair shampoo, and was now stuffed untidily into a corner.
The room had a faint smell, the pomade scent of a woman’s hair, the cloying sweetness of perfume gone stale, something which lacked the freshness he had associated with the loft. He pulled the blinds, throwing up the window with some difficulty, because it had obviously not been opened for a long time. He leaned out. How different everything was from last year! How horribly different!
He would have liked to slip downstairs now, to get his bicycle and ride away, so that in the morning he would have gone, and they would not have the power to tarnish further the memories which had been bright. There was much in what his father had said about leaving women alone!
He sat staring out at the night, with the wind blowing in, and disturbing the girl’s scattered mess on the table; then he knew that he must not leave it too late, and started to undress. By the bed was a sleeping net like a spider’s web trailed through a briar bush, for it was trimmed with an attempt at rosebud trimming, and a pair of old bedroom slippers, the fur worn down to the hard white rabbit skin. He was ashamed of himself for feeling so put out.
Last year there had been a sense of freedom when he was with Muriel, something that he could not recapture; a proximity to the earth itself, and to the warmth and beauty of that earth. But all this was artificial and meant nothing at all. The Muriel he had known had changed. Last year she had been a country girl, and although she had seemed to him to be grown-up and sophisticated, she had been nothing of the kind really. Now she was aping her cousin, and her cousin was a town girl, who had been to High School, and had boy friends and wore cheap jewellery. He would so much rather never have come here at all than be forced to suffer this disillusion.
He could not sleep. He lay there hungry for the Muriel that he had lost, and wondering if all women were the same. Muriel. Wynne. If this was the way that the world worked, with everything beautiful one moment, yet losing its beauty the next, it made life very hard. Nothing really mattered.
By the morning he felt exhausted.
Part Two
Five
It was 1936.
To Hugo life had been changing rapidly, but always against the same background. It was incredibly dull in the office, fifty weeks a year of it, and they seemed to be unbearable. Fifty solid weeks of the morning train, the tube, the bus, of sitting in his little box of a room and going through the same routine. Tea had never interested him, and there were the constant complaints from the plantations, the importer’s troubles, the strikes, and the arguments. His father ruling everything with that inexorable iron hand merely bored him. Minch had the same iron hand, but he fawned to the son, and sometimes Hugo felt that Ebenezer Minch’s fawning was worse than the iron hand.
Once he challenged his father on the score of a strike that was holding up business alarmingly, and which was being handled badly. James Blair did not understand that the old days of rigour had gone, that now it was
futile to be so autocratic.
‘Surely it would be better if you met the men?’ said Hugo.
James Blair stared at him with those sullen eyes in which the fire had long since died, but where the malignancy still lived. ‘When you and I change places, that will be time enough for you to give me orders,’ he replied, ‘and I may tell you that will be over my grave.’
Argument was futile.
Twice Hugo saw Jessie Minch, once in early January when he had found her outside the office, and again in spring. She was the sort of woman he would never have thought that Ebenezer would marry, fresh-faced, with soft brown hair and eyes in which a strange but natural girlishness lingered. He had been attracted to her, probably because of the fellow feeling, and he had thought a lot about her. One afternoon, when he had been sent out on an errand to the West End, he met her again in a big store, buying a man’s wallet, the sort of present that he would never have imagined that she would give to Ebenezer. Recognising one another, they stopped to talk; he offered her a cup of tea, it was one of the first hot days of spring and she was looking tired, and they had tea in a sundae bar, which seemed to be the nearest place. Here were two people, entirely different, yet both prisoners chained by the same chains to the one inexorable personality. She left hurriedly, because she suddenly saw the time, and had to get back before her husband, or he would be so angry, and she went off in a state of perturbation, almost forgetting her bag. Hugo watched her as she went, moving between the wicker chairs and tables of the sundae bar, looking very young, and scared. In her eyes there was an emotion that he had never thought could be kindled in any woman by a man like Ebenezer.
He chafed against the office, and loathed the evenings at home, which brought him into close communication with his father, who was the most uncompanionable companion. It all irked. Even the green leafy loveliness of the walnut tree in summer had lost much of the significance which it had held for him as a child. Now, when he lay under it, he could no longer imagine that it was a ship with the same realism. The ship had drifted away on a sea of dead dreams. He knew that he was ravenous for youth, but youth was denied him, because James Blair would not have young people to the house, and yet complained if Hugo went out.
