Wish Her Safe At Home

by Stephen Benatar

  And perhaps I was one of the luckier ones too. A survivor. Unexpectedly strong.

  After lunch I went round the secondhand bookshops. And just before I stepped into the third, I positively knew that I was going to find it there. I scarcely felt dismayed when the owner shook his head. He was a wizened little fellow who good-humouredly invited me to browse. Yet I did so for barely a minute.

  The man stared at my discovery as though unable to believe what his eyes were telling him. “I’d have sworn I hadn’t seen one of these in years!”

  I felt so pleased. “It was right there in the middle. The shelf was even at eye level.”

  “Was it now!”

  “You know what must have happened? Whenever you had your back turned this wise and precious book made another little jump towards the centre!”

  And I couldn’t have explained it but I almost believed in what I was saying. Only when he answered, “Yes, a lovely little game of leapfrog!” did I fully acknowledge its absurdity.

  But how my heart had bounded—and for the second time that day. Even despite my certainty.

  There was no price pencilled inside, no sticker on the thin fawn cover. The man shrugged and said, “Oh... 20p.” I was immensely moved. He had seen how much I wanted it. He could have asked for ten times that amount and I would willingly have paid. People were sometimes so very kind. I walked home in a glow, almost skipping, almost dancing, nearly as much on account of people’s kindness as because I had the book.

  I didn’t start to read it straightaway. I made myself a pot of Lapsang Souchong and carried this upstairs as I did almost every afternoon. My sitting room looked warmly inviting with its many polished surfaces, its softly filtered light and quantities of fresh flowers.

  I set the tray down on a small gateleg table with a red chenille cloth, stood at one of the windows for a moment enjoying the geraniums on my balcony, then glanced appraisingly in the antique mirror over the Adam fireplace—after lunch, before going out again, I had changed into a cooler dress. At last I poured the tea and carried it across to my chair. I didn’t want a biscuit. When I had taken a few appreciative sips I placed the cup and saucer on an occasional table by the chair.

  I picked up my purchase of the afternoon.

  The book had fewer than sixty pages and its print was large. Even then much of the prose was irrelevant, the style long-winded and pontificating. I read the whole thing in an hour.

  Nevertheless it was an hour during which I lived intensely.

  There plainly wasn’t a lot known about Horatio Gavin. The author had probably consulted whatever records he could find but most of the work was surely based on supposition. One paragraph I liked in particular: “He may have thought, that fine Spring morning, as he cantered past the cathedral, of all the faith and hope and backache that had gone into its creation, this immense project begun in one man’s lifetime, perhaps not finished even in his grandson’s. He may have thought of all the myriad small miseries of daily life, so erosively familiar to anyone in any age, like headache, constipation, haemorrhoids, or family tiffs. Young Gavin may have thought of all these stirring things as he cantered past—yet, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that he did, since his mind that morning must have been very full of what he was about to say to Wilberforce.”

  A biography like that, even with nothing more to offer, must soon become a favourite on anybody’s shelf!

  But this one—at least to someone like myself—had a great deal more to offer. It told the story, however fictional, of a lonely brooding idealistic young man, son of a merchant in Bath, who upon his father’s death had moved with his mother to live near a widowed aunt in Bristol. It told of his championship of the underprivileged, his entry into politics, his meeting with Wilberforce and of the instant rapport established between them. It told of his tender feelings for a Miss Anne Barnetby and of the great blow when on the eve of their nuptials she eloped with some far more worldly man: a shock from which, averred the Reverend Lionel Wallace, the young Horatio had never quite recovered. The author speculated that when he had died—as the result of a burst appendix—he had not found anyone to take her place.

  “I say a burst appendix, where another man might say a broken heart. I claim, however, that that other man would be mistaken. Hasn’t he yet discovered the balm of self-immersion in a noble cause?”

  When I had finally closed the book I sat for a long time. I meditated, I conjectured. I wove a brightly-coloured tapestry. I began to picture myself as that shallow fickle woman whom he had so much loved, that sad deluded woman who—incredibly—hadn’t appreciated such devotion.

  But I decided it didn’t suit me to be sad or deluded—any more than I would ever opt, of course, to be either flighty or shallow. For the moment I saw myself, more comfortably, as her successor.

  I wondered if despite Mr. Wallace’s denial he could have found a woman to replace her? The departure of Anne Barnetby was factual; what had come afterwards was nothing but surmise.

  I had once seen a play called Berkeley Square : about a man becoming his own ancestor and falling timelessly in love before needing to return to the present. Did I believe in reincarnation? I wasn’t sure. But what a delightful thought and yes why not? Supposing it had been foreordained that twentieth-century Rachel should be returned to the house in which eighteenth -century Rachel had been able to mend a young philanthropist’s heart and lovingly restore his will to live... ?

  I laughed. Though not by any means through sheer frivolity.

  “No wonder I’ve always felt so very much at home!”

  18

  She was a gentle thin-haired deferential lady who offered me a jam tart with my cup of tea. On the telephone I had invited her to have tea with me but after a good deal of hesitation—and even some apparent reluctance that we should meet at all—she’d finally admitted she would much prefer to stay at home. So I’d taken her a box of chocolates and half a dozen roses and once I was actually there it was pathetic the way she kept on telling me how glad she was to have a visitor, and the way she kept on thanking me—surely five or six times—for those two extremely simple gifts; saying how I shouldn’t have done it, oh I shouldn’t have done it! She was quite endearing but how I hoped that I myself, as I grew older, would be spared from being pathetic.

  “There was a painting,” I said, “which Mr. Wallace mentions. ‘The portrait that now hangs above me as I write.’ Do you know what became of it, Miss Eversley?” I had hoped I would see it as she ushered me into the sitting room of her flat (however, her home turned out to be entirely more modest than that: purely a bed-sitter) but this time it had been only a hope, nothing stronger.

  “Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. “That great big monstrosity of a picture!”

  I was surprised. “But Mr. Wallace said he had a nice good-natured face with a most intriguing smile.” I remembered it precisely: “‘A smile that somehow grew more pronounced, increasingly captivating, the better that you came to know the painting.’”

  She was nodding even before I had finished. “Oh, I’m not saying anything against it, please don’t think that. I’m sure he did have a nice face just like the Reverend Wallace wrote. But somehow it was all so dark; so, I don’t know, so... ”

  “Sombre?”

  “Yes! It was all so sombre that in certain lights you couldn’t even see it was a face. Not if you were standing in the wrong position.” She raised her hands. “And the dust it used to collect!

  But in some ways I wish I was still dusting it today. It wasn’t such a bad life. All in all.”

  I had a vision, briefly, of the past she was remembering. To me it seemed quite dreadful: daily ministrations to some prosy and pedantic old clergyman. Grey, all grey. Yet nearly anything was better, I supposed, than—what?—to be in your middle-to-late eighties. Wrinkled fingers; dewlapped throat. No hope of change. How terrible no longer to have any hope of change. No hope of finding love.

  “More tea?” she asked. “Another tart?”<
br />
  “Not a thing. It was delicious.”

  I wiped my mouth on my lace-edged handkerchief.

  “Do you happen to know what became of it? The picture.”

  “Well, you’d have to ask Mr. Lipton who came and cleared the house for me. I kept one or two little things of course”—she gestured towards a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and her bed—“just enough to meet my needs in this place, but otherwise Mr. Lipton bought it all; a very fair gentleman, I will say that for him, a very fair gentleman indeed.”

  “Is he a local man?”

  “Oh, yes. The Reverend Wallace said his shop was better than any Aladdin’s cave. He bought me this old tin-opener at Mr. Lipton’s, the best I’ve ever had.” And she rose with some difficulty, her cup of tea unfinished—expressly, as it turned out, to show me this very ordinary tin opener. “10p,” she said. We both stood and admired it.

  Then she gave me detailed directions on how to get there. “But if you’ll forgive me, Miss Baring, asking you something you’ll maybe think much too personal... ?”

  I told her the reason for my interest was that I now lived in Mr. Gavin’s house: a fact which seemed to cause her a good deal of gratification. “And I’d love to return your hospitality,” I said. “I’m hoping that you’re shortly going to visit me there.”

  But she began to shake her head.

  I gently coaxed. “I would arrange for a taxi to fetch you and to bring you home.”

  “That’s very kind,” she murmured. “Perhaps... when the days draw out a bit. When it gets a little warmer.” We were coming to the end of July.

  “I see you’ve got no television.”

  “No. I never cared for it. Nor the wireless either.”

  “I was just wondering, then, if you’d like to come and watch the Royal Wedding with me. Make a day of it. In colour.”

  I could see that she was tempted. “I’ll have to give it a little thought,” she told me.

  “Shall I phone you next Tuesday?”

  “Well, we’ll see. I don’t know if I shall be able to come to the telephone next Tuesday.”

  I nodded and experienced a great surging wave of gratitude. Gratitude for being somebody like me, not somebody like her. Gratitude for having so many good years still temptingly in store, so much sheer quality of life!

  And I vowed that I was going to make the most of every minute. I was young! I had time! Today was the past I’d be looking back on in another thirty years. Thirty or forty or fifty. And looking back on with such serenity. Such pleasure. I could have hugged her!

  However, apart from my sudden desire to express an all-embracing tenderness, I felt relieved that she probably wouldn’t accept my invitation. I had no wish to see the Royal Wedding. None whatsoever.

  “Well, if you can’t come to me,” I suggested, “shall I come to you? I don’t mean that day in particular. Any time. We could read the newspapers together or simply sit and talk?”

  “That would be nice,” she smiled—with an expression, I thought, of genuine appreciation. “I’ll let you know when it’s convenient.”

  She held her finger to her lips.

  “But sometimes they don’t like it here if you get too many visitors. They’re a bit funny that way. They get jealous and say some very nasty things. One has to be so careful.” She was still whispering.

  “Who? The other residents?”

  “And the wardens. But they’re really very fair. On the whole. I will say that for them.”

  Oh dear.

  Yes, it was frightening to see how people’s already tiny worlds could contract yet further, into something so engrossing that neither pestilence nor flood nor royal wedding could intrude. And it was as sad as it was frightening since those tiny worlds were in any case so full of whisper and of menace. So immensely far from the haven you’d believe the elderly ought to have found. Despite myself, I had to smile. The rays of the evening sun reflecting on the water. Wasn’t that how Mrs. Pimm had put it?

  I said: “But to return to what we were speaking of... ”

  For some reason she looked hopeful as if I might supply the answer to a question which either she hadn’t dared ask or hadn’t known how to.

  “I’m also wanting to write a book on Mr. Gavin.”

  “Ah?”

  “Though I don’t think it will be a biography, not like the Reverend Wallace’s. It’s going to be a novel. Don’t you feel that’s wonderfully exciting?” I had forgotten to keep my voice down.

  She returned her finger to her lips. “How very interesting!” she said. “But I was never a big reader.”

  Oh, Miss Eversley! No novels, no television, no radio. The greyness of her life appalled me. This self-imposed greyness even in a land of colour. No escape. No possibility of escape.

  “Yes—all my life I’ve hoped to write a novel!” I laughed. I was so much wanting to infect her with a little of my own gaiety. “And now it seems I’ve found my hero!”

  She didn’t laugh but she certainly did smile. “Oh, I’m sure a lot of people may have seen him in that way.”

  I was impressed.

  “And myself, too—I think of him whenever I look at this tin-opener and remember all that junk in Mr. Lipton’s shop.”

  “Oh, I see, no—”

  “But thank you for coming, Miss Baring. And thank you for all those lovely flowers and chocolates you brought. You really shouldn’t have.”

  She was sweet in her appreciation. “I know what I shall do,” I cried. “I shall go right out and buy you a jigsaw!”

  “A jigsaw?”

  “Yes. They’re such absorbing things. And you don’t paint, do you? You don’t work tapestry? Then you simply must have a jigsaw.”

  “But I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” She gave her head a puzzled shake.

  “I shall get you one with mountains and a lake and a little village nestling on the slopes. And a castle and a church spire and a café. And a woman with a barrow selling flowers.”

  She seemed a trifle overwhelmed by this.

  “And an organ-grinder with a monkey!” (I was trusting I might find something roughly like it in either W H Smith or Woolworths.) “Why, Miss Eversley”—it suddenly came home to me—“you haven’t even got a record player!”

  “Oh, no, please,” she said. “What should I want with an organ-grinder and a monkey?”

  I was delighted by her sense of humour.

  “Please not,” she said.

  But when she actually opened the door she had her finger pressed to her lips again. And then we only mimed the rest of our goodbyes.

  19

  I had hardly been home ten minutes and was just wondering whether to make myself a proper cup of tea when the doorbell rang and I had a visitor. What an eventful day! The employment exchange in the morning, followed by coffee and a scone at The Good Hostess, Miss Eversley in the afternoon, my stroll back through the park singing, “Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me, oh how they weigh me down... ” (and doing my best not to think of the Reverend Lionel Wallace as I did so!) and now this. A visitor. Or, rather, two visitors. Even three. Standing on the pavement in the sunshine were a tall young man in a smart brown suit and a slim and pretty woman who had in her arms a sleeping baby. The three of them made a charming tableau.

  “Roger!” I exclaimed.

  “Don’t say you recognize me with my hair brushed!”

  “What a lovely surprise.”

  “May I introduce my wife, Miss Waring? This is Celia. And this —this normally rather noisy newcomer to the southwest—is Thomas.”

  “How lovely. Oh, how lovely.” My vocabulary seemed limited. “And I didn’t even realize you were married. Do come in. I was just about to make some tea.”

  “What terrific timing!” laughed the young man. “I’m parched.” In a moment he was filling the hallway like a glowing Dane. “But perhaps that wasn’t very polite. I am sorry. Perhaps I should be saying I do hope we’re not disturbing you but that we
were just passing and—”

  “We were just passing,” said his wife. “Please, Miss Waring, pay no attention to my exuberant husband.”

  “I assure you I won’t,” I said. “Is he always like this?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh, how unbearable! But at least you must get him to wear off some of his energy by taking Thomas from you—because I’m afraid my sitting room is on the next floor and you can see the stairs are somewhat steep.”

  He said, while obediently taking his son, “But tell her, Miss Waring, I don’t need to be all stiff and formal with you, do I? Tell her we’re old buddies.”

  “We’re old buddies, Mrs. Allsop.”

  “Celia,” he said.

  But it seemed she was too busy looking about her even to have heard. “Oh, this is gorgeous, Miss Waring. It’s delightful. Have you done it all yourself?”

  They were my first real visitors to my first real home. I felt very proud yet tried my hardest not to show it.

  “Well, I may not have done it all myself but at least I’ve had it all done... myself.”

  “And in the ability to delegate,” said Roger, “lies the hallmark of genius.”

  She exclaimed over nearly everything she saw. So did her husband. It was the most intoxicating stuff. And I too exclaimed: over their bright-eyed adorable baby. We all appeared very well pleased with one another. I went away to make the tea. The baby had awoken on his journey up the stairs and in my absence Celia fed him. She changed his nappy in the bathroom. She seemed so terribly organized and efficient. While we drank our tea and they ate the dainty iced cakes that I’d dashed out to the teashop for, Thomas cooed and gurgled contentedly—this noisy little newcomer to the southwest—and clutched his father’s finger. How I wished that Sylvia could have seen us. “Oh, you are such a strong little boy, aren’t you?” said his mother. “Such a powerful little grasp already!” I visualized that sea of tight golden curls beneath the crisp beige shirt on which his head reclined; and, feeling myself begin to flush, had to look away abruptly.