Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  “Must have been a tramp,” said Meg, promptly. “Looking to see if the cottage was empty so that he could spend the night there. Or a stranded hiker, for that matter. Anybody.”

  “That’s what I told her,” said Isabel eagerly. “But she said it couldn’t have been. She said they weren’t the footsteps of a tramp, they—it sounds silly, but this is what she says. She says she recognised them.”

  “Well, who’s were they, then?” asked Meg practically. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Yes. She told me.” Isabel spoke gravely. “I don’t know what to think, Meg. She says they were Uncle Paul’s.”

  “Uncle Paul’s? But Uncle Paul is—” Meg stopped, the words only half spoken. Because, of course, Uncle Paul wasn’t dead—not so far as they knew. She had quite forgotten, after all these years, that Uncle Paul wasn’t dead. Queer to think that, somewhere in the world, he was still existing….

  “But it couldn’t be Uncle Paul,” she amended. “Uncle Paul is still in—”

  But that might not be true either, as Isabel, with a sort of headlong diffidence, hastened to remind her.

  “We don’t know that he still is,” she pointed out. “I mean, as Mildred says, after fifteen years…. That’s just the length of time….”

  Yes, it was just the length of time. Meg hadn’t thought of that. A life-sentence doesn’t actually last for a life-time.

  “But, Isabel, it’s fantastic!” she protested. “After all this time! And why should he? I mean, he’d surely want to start a new life—keep right away from it all. He’d have even more cause than Mildred to want to put it all behind him.”

  “Mildred doesn’t think so,” insisted Isabel, heavily. “I told her all that. Just what you’ve said. But she says no, he will come back. He will come back to take his revenge, she says.”

  For a moment Meg felt horribly credulous; helpless in the grip of possibility. For she seemed to be looking once again into Uncle Paul’s queer dark eyes, so melancholy, and yet so alert. How still he had stood as he surveyed the small girl in the doorway. She remembered the cool strength of the white hand that had taken her small red one with such courtly skill. She remembered the smooth black hair brushed shinily back from his pale forehead; the caressing, slightly foreign voice with which he had greeted her, Mildred’s little sister….

  “But it’s absurd!” she burst out, common-sense reasserting itself. “It’s just silly! As if anyone could recognise footsteps that they haven’t heard for fifteen years—and in the middle of the night, too, when they’re half drugged with sleeping tablets, as you say she was! It’s ridiculous! And Mildred must know it is, too, in her heart, or she’d go to the police. Honestly, Isabel, if she really believed a single word of it, can you imagine that she’d go on staying all by herself in a lonely cottage on a cliff? Would anybody, let alone Mildred! I’ll tell you what is it—” Meg was warming to her theme—“She’s just dramatising herself the way she does—working herself up into a phoney panic so that everyone’ll be sorry for her—and at the same time she’ll have a good excuse for moving into a comfortable hotel, with bathrooms and hot meals. After all, when you’ve just told everybody that you’re going to live the simple life and commune with Nature, you have to find some face-saving reason for packing it in after forty-eight hours. Just find her a nice, luxurious room in the best hotel in town, and you won’t hear any more about footsteps. You see!” Meg felt quite buoyant with that delicious sense of having solved someone else’s problem without so much as lifting a finger. Even Isabel brightened a little.

  “Do you think so, Meg? Do you really think so? It would be such a relief! And if you could only convince her that it’s all nonsense—”

  “I shan’t try,” retorted Meg briskly. “There’d be no point, because she knows very well that it’s all nonsense, I’m certain she does. Trying to call her bluff like that would only make her play it up harder than ever. No; just find her a room in a good hotel. Go now, if you like. I’ll look after the children.”

  Isabel shook her head hopelessly, and her shoulders drooped. For a moment Meg thought she would have to go through her arguments all over again; then she realised that Isabel’s facile anxiety was by now focused in another direction.

  “They look at you so,” she was saying. “As if they think you’re mad, coming and asking for a room in the middle of the season. And the big hotels—the kind Mildred would be happy in—you have to go across those miles of carpet to get to the enquiry desk, and I didn’t bring any stockings, because it seemed silly for a camping holiday—I mean this is camping, really, isn’t it, it’s no different, except that you can stand up straight instead of having to crawl about—”

  Meg burst out laughing.

  “Isabel! Stop it! You’ll get stuck like it one of these days! Listen: I’ll find her a hotel. Right now. I’m sure it’s not impossible—people must sometimes cancel at the last minute —get ill—something. Don’t you worry. We’ll soon have her fixed up with the kind of smart, sophisticated holiday she’ll really enjoy. But remember, she’ll want to feel that she’s been made to do it—that we’ve forced her to leave the cottage against her will. Then she can tell herself ever afterwards that if only it hadn’t been for us she’d have stayed there for weeks, finding it utterly divine, earwigs and all.”

  “I do believe you’re right,” said Isabel, her face brightening each moment as more and more of the responsibility seemed to be sliding from her shoulders on to Meg’s. “Oh, it’s such a comfort to have you here, Meg. You’re the only one of us who really understands Mildred.”

  Meg smiled, a little complacently. She could not guess then how soon, and in what circumstances, she would be recalling those words of Isabel’s.

  CHAPTER IV

  “BUT I’VE paid for the cottage,” Mildred was insisting, with a fine show of obstinacy. “I’ve paid for it for three weeks. I’ve no intention of being driven out of it by anything.”

  But her eyes, Meg noted, were already glancing with surreptitious appreciation at the shining seaside shops; her high heels, though still bearing traces of their recent walk over the cliffs, were now clicking confidently along the pavement, like two little exiles speaking their native tongue at last.

  “Of course, I know you meant well, Meg,” continued Mildred, pausing for a barely perceptible moment in front of a select and pink-shaded hairdresser’s, “but you shouldn’t —you really shouldn’t—have actually booked the room for me. They’ll make me pay for it, you know. People seem to think I’m made of money.”

  Since Mildred appeared to spend a large part of her life trying to induce people to think this very thing, Meg found the complaint unanswerable; she merely assured Mildred all over again that the room was not actually booked; it was merely awaiting Mildred’s decision. “And we’d better hurry,” continued Meg, quickening her pace past the huge store, which, like a great crystal ambush, lay in wait for just such as Mildred—“They said they couldn’t keep it after midday, and I was to bring you to look at it as quickly as I could.”

  The Sea View Private Hotel was not, after all, the sort of place so dreaded by the stocking-less Isabel. Indeed, Meg was afraid at first that Mildred’s first sight of it might undo all the effect of the shops and the bright streets. The entrance was an ordinary, and rather shabby, front door, leading into an ordinary narrow hall—seeming narrower than ever at this hour in the morning, when it was filled with the spades, children, towels and sandshoes of those families who were still in the throes of that prolonged occupation known as Getting Down to the Beach.

  But there was an appetising smell of roasting meat coming from somewhere in the basement—really roasting meat, spitting and sizzling; not the silent, flabby pink lump you get out of a real old-fashioned cottage oven after you have spent the entire morning coaxing it with damp and insufficient supplies of real home-sawn logs. And in the lounge there were real armchairs, well-sprung and well-upholstered. No sign here of carved oak settles, whose unyielding hardn
ess has triumphantly outlived so many generations of mere human spines…. No antique rocking-chairs with one rocker more antique than the other if you put your weight on it…. Cautiously, Meg observed her sister taking in all these satisfactory facts. Mildred’s practised eye was already assessing those armchairs; fastening acquisitively on the most comfortable one … the one nearest the electric fire … and with the light comfortably placed behind it … and Meg knew that the battle was over.

  “Though of course,” insisted Mildred, after inspecting the comfortable little bedroom, “I still shan’t give up the cottage. I shall go up there for the whole day sometimes. Quite often. I need the peace, you know, after all I’ve been though. The solitude. I feel cramped—imprisoned—by all this artificiality.”

  She gestured vaguely towards the mirror, and the basin with its hot and cold water. Meg hid a little smile. The very lips that were uttering these words were artificially coloured with the newest shade of lipstick; the very eyes that condemned were mascara’ed and shadowed with painstaking artifice; the head that nodded its disapproval was crowned by hair recently dyed chestnut.

  “Of course. See how things go,” agreed Meg, with the hearty but vague acquiescence of one whose interests lie in avoiding argument. She had little doubt now of the outcome. The phrase “Spend the day there” would soon turn into “Go for a stroll in that direction”: and after that the subject of the cottage would fade altogether from Mildred’s conversation.

  Back in the lounge, in a different dress and different shoes, Mildred already seemed to belong to the place. She moved with a proprietary air towards the armchair that she had already mentally assigned to herself—and then stopped, with a look of affront that nearly made Meg giggle aloud. For now the precious armchair was occupied—or, at least, the seat of it was occupied—by a pack of patience cards laid out for a game of Picture-Frame. In front of the chair crouched a boy of about twelve, frowning intently as he fingered a five of spades; and leaning over him, remote and unheeded as a guardian saint, his mother gabbled patiently.

  “Come along, Dear. Hurry up and finish, Dear. It’s a shame to waste a nice morning like this indoors. Look at the sunshine, Dear. We ought to be down on the beach long ago. Haven’t you nearly finished, Dear? It’s such a pity to waste the fine weather. Come along, Dear.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Dear, placidly, and without moving a muscle. The five of spades would have to go on the rubbish heap after all. A pity, when the three and the two and the ace were all there waiting to be used….

  “Excuse me—if your son wouldn’t mind using the table …?

  At Mildred’s words the guardian saint grew flustered to her very hair:

  “You see, Dear? I told you not to set it out just when we were starting for the beach. Now, come along, Dear. I’m so sorry—” she turned to Mildred. “I’m so terribly sorry, but he’ll clear it up at once, won’t you, Dear, it won’t take him a minute—”

  Or an hour, either. Or a day. It was all the same to Dear.

  “Yes, Mother,” he repeated contentedly, moving a nine of clubs up to the centre; and Mildred tightened her lips.

  “If I might be allowed to sit down….”

  “Of course—of course! He’s just going to clear them up this minute—” The mother’s voice now held a piping, panicky note, like a lost soul; and Meg judged it time to intervene.

  “You can’t possibly get it out now; both your eights of diamonds are buried,” she announced authoritatively. “You’ll have to shuffle it up and start again.” Sweeping the cards from the seat of the chair, she piled them pell-mell on to a small polished table nearby.

  “I wasn’t trying to get it out, actually,” observed the boy, crushingly. “I was just working out the probabilities—” However, he made no further protest, but with dignity removed himself from the combat area, and proceeded to settle himself and his cards in another quarter of the room.

  Neither Mildred nor the mother seemed as grateful to Meg as might have been expected at this summary solution to their problem; they both eyed her with a cautious hostility which suggested that it was their game she had spoiled, just as much as the boy’s. And perhaps she had? Perhaps, in a place like this, it was as important to have something to complain of, some vitalising focus of conflict, as it was to have a comfortable seat.

  However, victory is victory; and the best armchair, even more indubitably, is the best armchair; and Mildred was soon comfortably settled with a pile of magazines and with a hot lunch to look forward to in the not too distant future.

  Meg took her leave, and set off along the sea front in the direction of the caravans. This is the first time since I got here, she reflected, in some little surprise, that I’ve actually seen the sea. You can’t see it from the caravans at all, although it’s so close, because of all the other caravans; and further on you can’t see it because of the bathing huts; and after that you can’t see it because of the parked cars and the sweet kiosks. The sea is like an animal kept at the zoo: you have to go in by a special entrance…. Open Bank Holidays and Sundays…. Please do not feed the Sea….

  She expressed something of these thoughts to Isabel, whom she met some minutes later hurrying down to the beach with a bag containing buns, towels, sun-glasses, raincoats, comics, extra woollies and a piece of lemon-coloured plastic sheeting. The more Isabel carried in her bag, the more harassed she tended to look; and far from being amused by Meg’s whimsical notion, she looked, for a moment, quite stricken.

  “Oh, Meg, I wish you hadn’t said that!” she exclaimed. “It reminds me of—Oh, I don’t know! All those rows and rows of caravans, whichever way you look. It’s worse than a street, really, because at least in a street there’s a one side and another side—if you see what I mean,” she added, rather hopelessly.

  “Can we bathe as soon as we get there, Mummy?”

  Isabel darted an anxious glance, not at Johnnie nor at the sea, but back towards the caravans as though the answer to Johnnie’s question was to be found among the dry, tired shingle over which they had walked; somewhere among the curled, crisp bits of old orange peel, the scraps of blue chocolate paper and the broken shells, washed only by the winter tides.

  “Yes—that is—yes, I think so, Johnnie. But come along; we must hurry!”

  She quickened her pace, laboriously. They had the whole day before them, and so, Meg concluded, this haste must just be one of Isabel’s anxious habits—one of those many uncomfortable little traits which this second marriage of hers seemed so to have emphasised.

  “When’s Philip coming back?” Meg asked, following her train of thought perhaps a little unguardedly; but Isabel appeared not to hear her; she hurried on, her head bent down against the sunshine as most people bend their heads against the rain; and in a few minutes they were out on the sands.

  “This is our Place,” said Isabel, rather bleakly, dumping down her bag beside the breakwater; and then picked it up again as the sand squelched beneath it. “But it seems wetter this time. I don’t know why.”

  “Well, let’s go farther up,” said Meg, looking round for an empty space among the encamped families, who had by now ranged themselves with an extraordinary degree of equi-distance all over the beach. “Look—up by that concrete sort of thing, where it’s all powdery and dry.”

  But going to a different Place seemed more of an undertaking than anyone as inexperienced as Meg could have anticipated. The sand wouldn’t be right; and the distance from the sea wouldn’t be right; and only two encampments away would be the Horrid Boy—the one who trod on things, and gave endless, unasked advice about moats.

  And Isabel was, if anything, even more conservative than her sons. The thought of a new Place seemed to throw her into a flutter of miscellaneous forebodings. The direction of the wind; the safety of the children; the impossibility of seeing the pier clock—after a few minutes of this, Meg herself began to feel appalled at the immensity of the change she had proposed; and humbly enough she helped Isabel to spr
ead out the raincoats and the bit of plastic sheet on the damp sand of the Place.

  By the time they had finished their bathe the sun had gone, and a cold, inhospitable wind was whipping among the deckchairs. The whole beach was astir with people bending down to pull woollies out of their bags, and turning their chairs this way and that to modify the chill. Isabel cowered closer into the Place; Johnnie dripped his wet bathing suit into the bag of buns; and Meg proposed an immediate return to the caravan.

  But this, apparently, could not be. They had only just come, Isabel explained, and they hadn’t had their buns yet. And it wasn’t as if it was actually raining, she pointed out, conclusively but without triumph, rather as one might point out to some hopeful invalid that he hasn’t got a temperature and can go back to work.

  This, for the moment, seemed unanswerable; and Meg reached out resignedly towards the bag of sandy buns that Isabel was holding out. Then, noticing that there were only three, she withdrew her hand.

  “No—do take it,” Isabel encouraged her. “It’s meant for you. I never bring one for myself, because Peter doesn’t eat his. He likes to be given it, you see, with everyone else, and then, when he doesn’t eat it, I have it.”

  The contemplation of this depressing little manoeuvre seemed to cheer Isabel quite astonishingly, and she began to asked after Mildred and her new quarters.

  “Oh, she’s fine.” Meg was cheerfully confident. “I left her in the best armchair, eyeing the other inhabitants in quite her old style. It’s exactly what I said—now she’s back in the comforts of civilisation, she can’t be bothered any more with footsteps and shadows from the past. Besides, she’s got a promising feud lined up already. About the armchair. That ought to give her all the drama she wants for days to come. And if that should fizzle out, there’s always the guest who keeps on opening windows—or is it shutting them? I can never remember. Anyway, I told her we’d come over and see her soon; but it’ll have to be you, actually, Isabel, because I have to be back at work first thing on Monday—”