Possession

by Celia Fremlin

  “I don’t think you quite understand, Mrs Erskine,” she admonished me, in the new, crisp voice. “It’s important. I have to see you. It’s about Sarah. There’s something I have to tell you about your daughter Sarah.”

  The trump card, and she knew it. There was nothing I could do now but agree to the appointment; and at once all the sugary effusiveness returned. She’d be doing her teeny little bits of Christmas shopping in the morning, she explained archly; nothing much; just a few little purchases to celebrate the festive season. Perhaps we could meet in the restaurant of the big store where the said teeny little purchases were to be made? She said nothing more about Sarah, or about the reason for our proposed meeting. Having succeeded in frightening me into coming, she now leaned over backwards to make it all sound ever so innocent and jolly. I’d just love this restaurant on the fifth floor, she assured me; the view was so marvellous, the food was so marvellous, and had I ever tried their marvellous winter salad? So slimming, and so full of vitamins…. It would be such fun, wouldn’t it, just the two of us? We’d get a window table, and have a real old get-together, wouldn’t we just? Such a lot to talk about….

  There was, too; but neither of us seemed to know how to begin. I had come—and she must know it—simply and solely to hear whatever it was she had to tell me about Sarah: she, on the other hand, seemed determined to keep up for as long as possible this pretence that we were dear old friends meeting for a cosy girlish gossip about old times.

  It had been quite difficult to find her, actually. The restaurant was crowded with Christmas shoppers, and, as might have been expected at such a time of year, she had failed to secure a window table. It was in the darkest corner at the far side of the restaurant that I finally located her; as I have said, she was a very small woman, and at this particular moment she was so loaded up with the morning’s teeny purchases that little was visible from where I stood except her hat: a new hat, too, to add to the difficulty. Thus for a minute or more I stood in the doorway, helplessly, scanning all the five-foot-nothings within my field of view.

  She saw me at the same moment that I saw her. She waved; clutched at her toppling parcels, and waved again: and soon we were sitting opposite each other in the noise and dimness, trying to think of something to say. We had ordered the marvellous salad full of vitamins, and the marvellous cold ham, and had debated the relative marvellousness of orange squash and coca-cola; and now here we were, I trying to think of something to say that would bring us to the point, and she trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t. Or that’s how it seemed, anyway.

  “Well, what did you …?” I began; and simultaneously she hoisted onto the table one of her parcels, and began unwrapping it with little squeals of pride.

  “Look! Isn’t it lovely? It’s Norwegian! Just look at the quality of the wool!”

  It was lovely. I have to admit it. The wool was beautiful, and it was hand-knitted in an intricate pattern of white, silver-grey, and a dusky almost-black. It must have cost pounds and pounds.

  “It’s for Mervyn,” she explained—unnecessarily. “Don’t you think it’ll suit him? You know—with his blue eyes and his fair skin? And so soft! It’ll keep him lovely and warm!” She pressed the expensive softness of the garment lovingly against her cheek; even from across the table I could smell its newness, and its exorbitant price. “Isn’t it lovely?” she asked me again; and I agreed, rather coolly, that it was. I thought it was tactless of her to go on about Mervyn’s blue eyes and his Christmas presents when he had just jilted my daughter.

  “He’ll be buying me something lovely, too; I just bet you he will!” she prattled on, with inane pride. “He’s such a lovely boy, Mervyn is. So kind. So good-hearted. So thoughtful. But, of course, you must know all this. You must have noticed it?”

  “Well—.” It would have been a difficult question to answer, even truthfully. Kind was he, or spineless? Good-hearted, or just plain soppy? But of course my opinion wasn’t really being asked; I was only there to act as a sounding-board to hers. I murmured something indeterminate, and she went on. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about, really, Mrs Erskine. About Mervyn’s kind-heartedness, I mean. His sweet nature. It can be exploited, you see, that kind of lovely nature. People can take advantage of it. You know what I mean?”

  “No,” I said equably; and she looked a little taken aback. She waited for me to say more; to produce, I suppose, something nearer to the cue-line on which she had been counting. But I just wouldn’t; and anyway, our food had arrived by now. I began eating. I didn’t see why I should help her; she was the one who had got me here, and who knew what was the bombshell that she meant to drop. Let her get on with it.

  She waited a moment, then picked up her fork and began spearing at the lettuce, the cubes of beetroot, with delicate little jabs. All those vitamins. At last she spoke.

  “And so that’s why I wondered if you could have a word with your daughter?” She produced this non-sequitur just as if I had been following her train of thought throughout the minute of silence—I had, of course, but that is by the way. I stiffened, waiting for the blow. “About exploiting his kindness, I mean,” she went on, “His sweet nature. Of course, I know Sarah doesn’t mean to do it—” she spoke hurriedly now, working up to her climax—“She’s a dear sweet girl; she wouldn’t hurt a fly, I’m sure. That’s just why I feel it would only need just one word from you … just one little hint. I’m sure she wouldn’t deliberately go on causing pain….”

  “Do tell me what you are talking about,” I said cheerfully, with my mouth full. Sometimes I wonder if Janice gets her bad manners from me; but on the other hand, I only behave badly when the provocation is extreme.

  The eyes in the small face widened, and stayed that way so long, registering so much surprise, that really they must have begun to hurt. I pretended not to notice. Perhaps her eyelids would get stuck like that. Her next words were going to be ‘But surely you know …?’—followed by something which she knew I didn’t know, and which she knew was going to hurt. All right: let her have her dramatic moment. But I didn’t actually have to help, did I, to make the scene a success? I’ve never been to any drama school; I don’t belong to any Actors’ Union. Let her run her show by herself.

  “You know, don’t you?” she said. “That your Sarah has been trying to get in touch with Mervyn ever since—well, ever since that day when they agreed they weren’t really suited to each other? You know she’s been ringing up? Writing to him?”

  “Yes, of course I know,” I lied. She didn’t believe me, naturally, but all the same I think it spoilt the scene for her a bit, that I should pretend to so much nonchalance.

  “It’s rather distressing for him,” she observed reprovingly. “Naturally it is; and he does so hate to hurt her. But you will make it clear to her, won’t you, Mrs Erskine, that—well—that it is absolutely no use! She’ll never get him back by pestering him. When Mervyn’s mind is made up, it’s made up!”

  “I’m sure it is,” I agreed smoothly. “He makes up his mind a lot, doesn’t he? He’s done it twice since we’ve known him. Once to marry our daughter, and once not to. Two decisions in one month. He must be a most decisive man.”

  Her fork speared and darted among the greenery; her little sharp teeth masticated busily. Browsing on vegetation like a small goat, I thought absently, as I waited for her reply.

  “Do you know that Sarah rang up late last night?”—she resumed the catalogue of her grievances as if I had not spoken at all—as if she simply had not heard, or had not taken in, a word I had been saying. All that satisfying rudeness wasted—or else she was a first-class actress. “It was after midnight, poor Mervyn was already in bed after a really hard day at the office. She kept him talking for over an hour.”

  “Did she?”

  What did Mrs Redmayne expect me to say? To apologise? To undertake to stop my grown-up daughter talking to her grown-up son? It was none of my business; nor, I was very ready to point out, was
it hers.

  “I didn’t get a wink of sleep, worrying about it,” the indictment continued. “That’s why I rang you so early—I knew you, as a mother yourself, would understand. I’d been awake the whole night long, and I couldn’t bear it any longer. I wanted to warn you—that is, to tell you—well—that it can’t go on. It just can not go on!”

  Her voice pierced the confused rumble and clamour of the crowded restaurant, and I noticed a middle-aged woman at the next table look guiltily away from us, taut with interest. I thought how lucky she was. When I overhear conversations at the next table, they are never about this sort of thing. This woman had really been getting her money’s worth.

  I think Mrs Redmayne had noticed our audience too, for her voice dropped to a low, tense whisper.

  “That’s all I wanted to tell you, Mrs Erskine. Just that. Just to ask you to tell your daughter that she is wasting her time. Mervyn will never marry her now. Never! She has got to get that into her head once and for all, and she has got to stop worrying him. All this telephoning must stop, do you hear, and it must stop now. If it doesn’t, you will be sorry. And so will Sarah. Yes, I am afraid Sarah will be very, very sorry.”

  CHAPTER XII

  WITHIN A WEEK, of course, the news of Sarah’s broken engagement was all over the neighbourhood; not because anyone in particular had betrayed us, but simply because news is like that. As was observed some three thousand years ago, news has wings and is uncontrollable by mortals, or even by the gods. And that was when they didn’t even have telephones.

  One thing about it: I was spared the humiliation of telling people myself. Even the conductress on the number thirteen bus knew, and condoled with me in her own individual fashion. There wasn’t a man on earth, she assured me, who was worth crying over: she didn’t care if it was the Emperor of Timbuctoo himself, a girl was better off without him. She could tell me some—and she did, too. The bus was pretty empty that morning, and we had gone right through her own two husbands and had just begun on the character old enough to be her daughter’s grandfather when we reached my stop, and I had, regretfully, to get off. She had made me feel better. Better able to face the two heavy-eyed daughters who greeted me on my return home—if “greet” is the word for a lugubrious confrontation in which Sarah asked me if I had seen the postman down the road, and Janice remarked that I had bought liver again, didn’t I remember that she hated liver? They also informed me that Liz had telephoned; she was anxious to get in touch with me as quickly as possible.

  I knew why, of course; I was being welcomed back into the Failed Parents’ Association, in which poor Liz has been languishing for so long. I knew she would be delighted to have me; we are fond of each other, Liz and I, and she longs to tell me about her troubles; but how could she while Sarah and Janice were doing well and causing no trouble? But now, with Sarah newly jilted and Janice a black thundercloud of mysterious teenage obstructiveness, she could seize her chance and tell me all about Giles, Pete, and Tony. The borrowed money; the chucked jobs; the neverending breakfast time that goes on in her kitchen like a Mad Hatter’s tea-party throughout the daylight hours—all this could now be revealed without reserve; it could fairly be swapped for Sarah’s humiliation and Janice’s bad temper. I saw her point. Indeed—and this is the final, unmistakable sign of having joined the Club once more—I felt the same myself. I longed for the comfort of her troubles just as she longed for the comfort of mine; within minutes, it was arranged that I should come straight round.

  I didn’t knock or ring. As I have told you, Liz’s front door is always ajar to let trouble in—or, more rarely, out. But before I had time to push it open, a sort of hiss made me look up. Liz was leaning out of the top floor bathroom window—it is a big house, as I think I have indicated—and she was mouthing at me the words: “Come up here!”

  Her manner was conspiratorial, and I took the hint. I pushed the front door open softly and tiptoed through the large draughty hall. The door of the big living room was open; through it I could hear a bombardment of singing from a transistor radio, and could just see a pair of bedroom slippers, the worn toes pointing to the ceiling and beating time gently to the music. From the kitchen came a smell of burning fat, and a loud, argumentative voice was saying: “But I told you you’d need a lot of newspaper; now look what you’ve done!” and from yet a third doorway came the now all-too-familiar sound of weeping.

  I tiptoed on up the stairs, and on the first landing was confronted by a little boy in a torn vest. He looked about three, and small for his age; his face was smudgy, his nose running, and he sucked his thumb with baleful intensity, as if sharpening a weapon. His eyes, heavy from insufficient sleep, followed me with unnerving, expressionless concentration.

  “Hullo,” I said, as one has to; but he didn’t answer; he never does. I am not even sure if it is always the same little boy—I get the impression that several of Tony’s, Pete’s and Giles’ girl friends have little boys like this, relics of some earlier episode in their stormy, misunderstood lives. Anyway, whatever his origin, there nearly always is a child like this at the Hardwick’s, and he always dislikes me, and receives my hypocritical blandishments with this same blank, unswerving stare.

  I didn’t want to arouse the child’s mother, or adopted uncle, or whatever, from behind one or other of those doors; so I edged past him cautiously, and tiptoed on up the final flight of stairs, and made my way to the disused bathroom which, as I know well by now, is Liz’s final retreat when the rest of the house becomes untenable.

  This morning they were both there—Liz and Bernard, I mean. They were sitting on the edge of the bath, drinking whisky. Bernard was immaculately dressed in his dark, city suit; his legs, in their flawlessly creased trousers, were crossed in a precise and almost dandified manner, and his elegant bottom perched on the bath-edge with all the easy poise of importance and success. And of course he is important and successful; his working life is spent in great glass offices with wall-to-wall carpeting, in converse with obsequious secretaries and respectful subordinates. It is only at home that he has to cower in a disused bathroom, like a cockroach seeking sanctuary from giant trampling feet whose comings and goings it can neither predict nor understand. Neither his education nor his training have prepared him for this situation, and so he copes with it as best he can.

  Like a true gentleman, he rose and offered me the strip of rusty enamel he had just vacated, and enquired, in a conspiratorial whisper, whether I would like my whisky with or without water from the tap? Liz, meantime, had softly shut and bolted the door behind me.

  “Pepita’s back,” she explained, now that we could safely raise our voices above a whisper. “You remember Pepita? She was the Au Pair at that place where Giles went for maths coaching, and there was that awful row with the wife so that they all had to come and stay here? The husband and Pepita, I mean? Well, it turns out that she was married to an Italian all along, and now he wants her to go back to him, but the trouble is that his girl-friend’s expecting a baby, and so….”

  “And so they all have to stay here,” put in Bernard grimly. “Mattresses on every floor in the house. Italian radio programmes. People crying….”

  “But it’s only for a day or two, darling!” Liz interrupted placatingly. “Just until they’ve got it all sorted out.”

  “A day or two?” Bernard’s work has to do with the law. He has watched this sort of thing being “all sorted out” over long decades. He knows it has no ending, and so does Liz, really.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” she said, contrite, and laid her hand on his, wobbling a little on her perch as she did so. “But what can we do? I mean, Giles can’t let Pepita down at a time like this—”

  They both stared glumly into their whisky. Bernard, the successful legal adviser, the brilliant man of affairs, sat there on the edge of the bath, and could find no answer. I could feel his helplessness, I could recognise his deep fear; a man’s fear of his expanding, demanding, overwhelming children towering unto ad
ulthood under his very eyes. You can see this secret terror everywhere nowadays; middle-aged fathers being hunted down under their own roofs by an alien pack from which their wives can no longer protect them. Sometimes such a man will turn and run; run from the wife he loves, from the home he has built up with loving toil, and take headlong refuge with some woman who may be plain, who may be stupid, who may even be cruel, but who possesses the one quality which by now he values above all others—childlessness.

  I don’t think Bernard will take this way out. He loves Liz too much. I think he will just go on as he is now, counting the days, the months, the years to that ever-receding mythical time when the children will be “off his hands.”

  But why should they ever be? Why should three ordinarily selfish young men ever choose, of their own free will, to leave a large, warm, comfortable home where everything is provided, nothing demanded, and where their girl-friends are welcomed, food laid on, and no restrictions (so far as I could see) imposed on their behaviour? Where was the Utopian landlady, the super-human wife, who would provide them with even a fraction of what they were enjoying now?

  “Why don’t you throw them all out?” I asked bluntly. “The boys, I mean. All three of them. They’re old enough to fend for themselves.”

  Both parents leaned forward to look at me pityingly.

  “But we do,” said Liz pathetically. “Don’t we, Bernie? But they just don’t go.”

  “That’s right. They either laugh, and think we’re joking, or they agree to go and then don’t. What can you do? You can’t get an eviction order against your own sons!”