Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  Isabel had stopped munching. Peter’s bun, with the currants and shiny top licked off it, waited motionless, three inches from her lips. Her face, pinched and cold from her recent bathe, was turned towards Meg with an expression of dismay quite inconsistent with the comfortable news Meg had supposed she was conveying.

  “What on earth’s the matter?” asked Meg; and then, rather irritably, for she, too, was cold: “I do wish you’d put that bun down; it isn’t really helping you to be horrified. It just looks silly.”

  “I’m sorry.” Isabel lowered her hand with a nervous little laugh. “It’s stupid of me, Meg, but I hadn’t realised you were going away at once. I mean, I know you said you’d come for the weekend, but I didn’t know you meant it so literally. I thought you’d stay with me and see it through.”

  “But I have seen it through!” declared Meg, impatiently. “I told you—Mildred’s perfectly all right now. When she gets sick of that little hotel—which I daresay she will soon—then she’ll go back to Hubert. Yes, yes, I know she’s never going to speak to him again, not even if he comes to her on his bended knees—but he won’t; he’ll come in a Rolls, just when her money’s running out. There’s no point in my staying any longer. I suppose I could take next week as part of my holiday, but—”

  “Oh, could you, Meg? Could you really? Oh, if only you’d do that—!”

  Meg did not know quite why she gave in—why she always gave in, to either of her sisters’ pleadings. Not, surely, because she was a weaker character than they. On the contrary, was it not her very strength that forced her, the youngest, into this rôle of protector to them both?

  Isabel’s gratitude was disarming. Meg could not help laughing.

  “Anybody would think that I’d saved your life!” she chided gaily; and wondered, a little, that Isabel did not smile in answer.

  CHAPTER V

  IT WAS A little tiresome, thought Meg, that however wet you were, however cold and tired, you still had to scream and rub your ankle as you went up the caravan steps. And, moreover, she had only herself to blame. For was it not she, herself, who had first suggested to Peter that there were sharks to be fished for under those steps? Would a more experienced aunt, she wondered, have realised at once that this momentary inspiration for keeping her nephew amused would have this prolonged and wearisome aftermath? That Sharkey, in the form of a battered twist of plastic clothes line, would dwell for evermore beneath those steps, and demand his tribute of hollow cries and simulated terror? And you couldn’t just hurry up the steps, screaming briskly, and be done with it. Oh no; you had to wait while Peter extricated himself from his pushchair and clambered under the steps to arrange Sharkey in his most menacing pose; and then you had to wait another chilling minute while Sharkey wriggled limply on the grass, uttering shrill, hissing cries like a repressed steam-engine, and finally, after many fruitless gyrations in the hands of his master, flipped feebly against your ankle. Then, and only then, were you allowed (indeed compelled) to utter your screams of terror and escape up the steps. If, in the hope of curtailing this ritual by some precious seconds, you screamed too early, while Sharkey was still writhing on the ground, you were merely sent back to the bottom of the steps to begin all over again.

  And it was worse still, mused Meg, when you had to queue up for the performance. Watching Isabel dutifully rubbing her ankle, and enunciating “Ow, ow, ow” Meg wondered bemusedly if it were perhaps different if you were the mother. Perhaps some preliminary softening of the rational faculties was as necessary to the whole business as the swelling of the breasts in preparation for suckling?

  “Ow, ow,” she was beginning resignedly, in her turn, when an exclamation, sharp and sudden, brought the performance to an end, even Sharkey falling meekly to the ground in mid-attack.

  “Someone’s been here!”

  Isabel, turned to face them in the doorway above, was looking shaken, and she clutched her bulging bag to her body as if for mutual protection. “Someone’s been sitting on my bunk!”

  Meg burst out laughing.

  “I’m sorry!” she apologised, breathlessly, hurrying up the steps to her sister. “But you sounded just like Mother Bear! What do you mean, someone’s been here? How can you tell?”

  The question was justifiable. Indeed, any outside observer might have found it hard to conceive that any form of intrusion, from a smash-and-grab raid downwards, could have increased the chaos habitual to Isabel’s caravan. But, like most untidy people, Isabel had a very clear idea of the invisible order which (for the perpetrator) underlies even the wildest confusion.

  “They’ve been sitting on my bunk,” she insisted. “I know, because when I didn’t make the beds this morning I didn’t pick the pillows up either, and now two of them are back on the bed. And I didn’t pull the rug over it like that … or take Johnnie’s matchbox-tops off it … or …”—Isabel’s voice became shrill again at this new discovery—“I didn’t cook any scrambled eggs! Look!” With a clatter of disregarded crockery she yanked a saucepan from the pile of utensils awaiting washing up. “Look! It’s had scrambled eggs in! All stuck to the bottom. See?”

  Meg looked. Scrambled eggs it certainly was—or rather had been.

  “And they haven’t even put it to soak!” continued Isabel distractedly. “How am I ever going to get it clean now? And without hot water—”

  With practised skill, Meg steered her sister back to the point.

  “I should think Philip must be back,” she suggested. “He must have cooked himself some lunch and then gone to look for you on the beach. What’s so odd about it?”

  But Isabel only stared at her, in irritating bewilderment.

  “Philip?” she repeated, as if she had never heard the name before. “Philip? Oh no. It couldn’t be Philip.”

  Her bland and unexplained rejection of Meg’s commonsense suggestion was infuriating.

  “Why couldn’t it be Philip?” Meg demanded. “You said yourself he might be coming back today. What’s the matter with you?”

  But Isabel, fluttering and suspicious as a bird whose nest has been tampered with, had spied yet another alien feature.

  “The clothes!” she exclaimed. “The jerseys and pants I hung out before we went. They’ve been brought in! All folded in a pile, here.” She pressed one of the offending garments to her cheek. “They’re dry, too,” she observed, as if this added, somehow, to the enormity of the interference.

  “It must be Philip—” began Meg again; but was silenced —indeed stunned—by the violence with which Isabel turned on her.

  “It can’t be!” she almost shrieked. “I told you it can’t be! He—he—” she stopped, flushed, and with a curious swallowing movement seemed to recover her self-control. “I’m sorry, Meg—I didn’t mean to shout at you. It’s just that—well—there isn’t a train … I mean he couldn’t be here so early … that is …” she gave a quick look round, as if to assure herself that the children were out of hearing; but having done so, all she said was: “I simply must tidy up a bit. If Philip were to come, and found it like this … and all Johnnie’s comics … He was brought up very strictly, you know—Philip, I mean. He was never allowed to buy comics at all, and so he does rather—”

  “Coo-ee, dear! You there?”

  The cheerful slightly intrusive voice brought Isabel’s rather rambling discourse to an end; and with a nervous, wholly ineffectual pat at her damp and untidy hair, she turned to greet the newcomer—turned to face her perhaps would be the better expression, for rarely had Meg seen anyone look so much like an animal at bay.

  “There you are, dear!” cried Mrs Hutchins, surging up the steps with every blonde curl a-quiver. “I thought you must be back, and then when I saw the kiddies—Oh, by the way, love, I hope you don’t think it was a bit of cheek, but I took your washing in for you. Looked as if it might rain, and I can’t bear to see a nice dry bit of washing all getting wet again. No matter whose it is, I can’t bear to see it. Funny, isn’t it?”

  I
sabel’s mouth smiled the casual gratitude due for such a service; while her eyes, as if harnessed to a different soul, registered only the mounting fear that perhaps, henceforth, she would be expected to take in Mrs Hutchins’ washing when it looked like rain? Was, perhaps, already being criticised for not having done so in the past? And then, as Meg watched, all else was wiped from her sister’s face by the realisation that Mrs Hutchins must have been inside the caravan and seen the state it was in.

  “We set out terribly early this morning, before I’d done any of the work—” Isabel plunged headlong into complex and unskilful falsehood—“It’s so lovely first thing, don’t you think, we didn’t want to miss it…. And so we thought we’d have an early bathe and tidy up afterwards….”

  Deeper and deeper into her morass of contradictory fabrications plodded Isabel, floundering this way and that as she stumbled up against such recalcitrant facts as that Mrs Hutchins must have seen her setting off for the beach at a quarter to twelve. Really, thought Meg, sheer practice alone should by now have made Isabel better at telling these ridiculous lies.

  But, as it turned out, Isabel suffered no worse fate than is common to most liars; namely, the loss of her audience through the sheer dullness of her fabrications. Long before the narrative was finished, Mrs Hutchins had turned the whole of her not inconsiderable attention on to Meg.

  “You just arrived, dear? You’re the sister, aren’t you, the one that works in town. Insurance, or something? My hubby, he used to be in Insurance. When he come out the Army. But he never took to it, not really. Promotion was too slow, he always said, but I don’t reckon you want to worry about that, not while you’re young, like you are. There’s plenty else to think about while you’re young, that’s what I always say.”

  She giggled, vaguely, bored herself by the pointlessness of the innuendo, and reverted, with feigned casualness, to the topic which had really brought her here:

  “By the way, there was a gentleman round this morning, looking for you two ladies. Find you all right?”

  “Why—no—who was he?” began Meg; and simultaneously Isabel: “Not my husband? It wasn’t my husband, was it, Mrs Hutchins?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say. It isn’t as if we’ve seen such a lot of your hubby, is it, dear, with him popping off to town such a lot. I haven’t really seen him, you know, only the once. A dark gentleman, isn’t he, middling height and a moustache? Or hasn’t he a moustache? See what I mean? I’m no good at faces, no good at all.” Mrs Hutchins spoke with the modest pride which everyone, for some reason, displays when claiming this particular incapacity. Then, fearing that the subject of the mysterious gentleman might fizzle out for lack of data on her side, she was obliged to modify the splendid depths of her inability to remember faces:

  “I’d have said this chappie was a bit younger than your hubby, dear,” she ventured, with an unsuccessful attempt at uncertainty. “Though he was dark all right. Very dark. And about the right size, too, I should say.” She stared at Isabel speculatively, as if one could assess the exact size of a husband by a sufficiently careful study of his wife.

  “And a moustache? Did you say he had a moustache?”

  Meg could hear the tenseness in Isabel’s voice: Mrs Hutchins apparently could not, for she continued, as casually as ever: “Oh no, dear, I didn’t say that. I only said I thought your hubby had a moustache.”

  The subject of the moustache seemed as if it would go on, at cross-purposes, for ever, neither Isabel nor Mrs Hutchins seeming capable of giving it a decisive function in the argument; so Meg intervened briskly:

  “Did he speak to you? Leave any message? And” (with sudden recollection) “had he been scrambling eggs?”

  Mrs Hutchins stared, helplessly, and a little aggrieved. By what features, she seemed to be wondering, could you be expected to recognise that a man had (or had not) been scrambling eggs? Meg realised that she had in some obscure way discomposed her informant and hastened on: “I mean, we were wondering, my sister and I—as soon as we came in we noticed that someone had been in the caravan, and we found that they’d been cooking scrambled egg. In a saucepan.”

  Mrs Hutchins shook her head, still helplessly. The scrambled egg had evidently put her right off her stroke, and in an uneasy sort of way she was blaming Meg for it.

  “I don’t know, I’m sure,” she began, deflated; and then, suddenly, her curls once more began to quiver, and she became taut, plump and vigorous again:

  “There he is!” she cried, pointing, forgetful of the laboriously acquired manners of her youth, along the lane between the caravans. A dark, trim figure, looking very out of place in its neat town suit and shiny shoes, was moving towards them with a sprightly grace that Meg at least knew well.

  “Freddy!” she cried; and went on to greet him with the words uppermost in her mind rather than those most suitable to the occasion: “Have you been cooking scrambled eggs? And how on earth did you get here?”

  Freddy’s answer to this last question was forestalled by the necessity of introducing him to Isabel and Mrs Hutchins; his answer to the first, however, was full and explicit. Yes, he admitted, with a disarming smile at Isabel, it was he who had scrambled the eggs; and he did hope that she didn’t mind. Her caravan, he explained, had reminded him so much of his sister’s studio, where everyone dropped in to scramble eggs whenever they felt like it, at any hour of the day or night. He apologised most charmingly for taking such a liberty—at least, one could only presume that he was doing it charmingly, for his actual words were immediately drowned by Isabel’s rival apology for not having invited him to lunch herself … for not having been there when he arrived … for everything being in such a mess … for the weather being so dull….

  When Isabel’s self-reproaches reached this degree of irrelevance, Meg always interrupted, on principle. She was on the point of doing so on this occasion when Isabel, suddenly and surprisingly, stopped of her own accord. Even more surprisingly, she began to laugh.

  “How idiotic!” she exclaimed. “Meg, why don’t you stop me?” and then, turning back to Freddy: “But what would you have done, Mr—er—Oh, all right, Freddy. What would you have done, Freddy, if it had turned out to be the wrong caravan? I mean, you couldn’t have been sure, just from a cardigan that looked like Meg’s.”

  “No caravan need turn out to be the wrong caravan if it is entered in the right spirit,” pronounced Freddy gravely; and Isabel, astonishingly, rose to his banter.

  “And what is the right spirit for entering my caravan?” she asked, with a gravity equal to his own; and Meg felt both pleased and surprised that the two of them seemed to be getting on so well.

  She continued to be surprised, though progressively less and less pleased, as the afternoon went by, and Freddy stayed firmly at Isabel’s side, laughing and talking with her, and paying the barest minimum of attention to Meg. He threw himself with extraordinary zest into Isabel’s preparations for a family afternoon on the beach; and, once there, he agreed with apparent alacrity that Meg should go and bathe again with the children while he and Isabel settled down in the Place. The tide was out—out, indeed, almost to vanishing-point; and when Meg returned, mottled with cold from partial and intermittent immersion in eight inches of water, followed by a quarter-mile walk through the wind in her wet bathing suit, she found the two of them warm and laughing, and the Place hardly seeming like a Place at all. Admittedly, Johnnie’s wet towel and Peter’s stubbed toe soon did something to restore the familiar atmosphere; but even in this field Freddy seemed determined to excel. He bought them each a choc-ice, carried Peter home on his shoulders, and, on reaching the caravan, gave a most satisfactory display of terror at the onslaughts of Sharkey. Indeed, he not only screamed and rubbed his ankle in the approved manner, but actually fell flat on the ground with shrieks of most realistic agony. Meg looked on without enthusiasm at this addition to the repertoire.

  “I suppose you realise,” she remarked, a trifle acidly, “that now we’ll all h
ave to do that, every time, as well as rubbing our ankles?”

  Freddy sat up and grinned at her.

  “Poor old Auntie!” he sympathised. “What you need is a nice cup of tea. Why don’t you go and make us all one?”

  So saying, he lay back on the grass once more, closing his eyes against the sun which had burst through the clouds in belated evening glory.

  Isabel was pottering ineffectually inside the caravan, as usual. Or, rather, not quite as usual, for her inefficiency now had a dreamy, contented quality. She seemed perfectly happy striking match after match and holding them to the gas burner that wouldn’t work; and when Meg snatched them from her she looked quite surprised.

  “Try rubbing two sticks together,” advised Meg, sourly. “Meanwhile, I suppose I’d better make the tea.” She lit the good burner, which leapt into life with an irritable pop that matched her mood exactly; while Isabel padded amiably down the steps to join Freddy outside in the sunshine.

  Alone with the noisy, fussy little stove, Meg reviewed her grievances. Why had Freddy turned up like this, uninvited and unannounced, and with no explanation whatever? Being Bohemian was all very well, but there was such a thing as good manners. Poor old Auntie, indeed! Even as she fumed, Meg was aware that Freddy’s unconventional behaviour would have been wholly forgiven—indeed, it would not even have struck her as unconventional—if he had only given the impression that he had come to see her, Meg, instead of flirting with Isabel all the afternoon. And the annoying thing was that Isabel wasn’t really Freddy’s type at all. Freddy liked smart, sophisticated women—or so he claimed; and yet here was Isabel, with her untidy hair, her ill-fitting cotton frock, her drab, anxious ways—

  Bother! Isabel would have a whistling kettle that, instead of whistling, spat a jet of boiling water a yard across the room without warning. Meg dabbed briefly at her scalded knuckles; and it was in no very amiable manner that she stumped down the steps and planted the tea-things on to the rickety box that served as an outdoor table.