“Oh, Mildred, don’t be so silly! Don’t waste your money like that!” protested Meg; and she embarked with some warmth on the usual arguments of the rationalist. And with the usual results, too; for Mildred simply stared through her and past her, and kept repeating, with a sort of dreamy superiority: “You don’t understand, dear.”
And now Captain Cockerill must needs chip in on the side of lunacy, with a series of unconfirmed and rather long-winded anecdotes about prophesies and forewarnings that he had encountered during his sojourn in India. At the end of which Isabel suddenly roused herself, as if from deep sleep, to say: “India? Did you say India, Captain Cockerill?”
Since Captain Cockerill had said “India” at least twelve times during the past half hour, one would have expected him to show at least a little irritation. Instead of which, he seemed delighted, and continued to beam happily throughout Isabel’s inane query as to whether he mightn’t have met her husband Philip? He’d been in India, too, some time or other, she explained.
“When were you there?” she concluded, in a belated attempt to bring the thing within the range of possibility.
“Let me see.” Captain Cockerill treated the matter with courteous gravity. “I went out first in 1937—” Automatically he glanced with some trepidation at Cedric as he made this rash assertion, but meeting for once with no contradiction, he proceeded to enquire civilly about Philip’s career.
But when it came to actual facts, Isabel was vague to a degree which made the subject even duller to the rest of the company than it would have been in any case. Fearing that Captain Cockerill might offer to escort them all the way to the caravan, bandying with Isabel these unpronounceable places and uncertain dates the whole way, Meg decided that they had better return to the hotel after all, and set off to the caravan by themselves later.
As they entered the hotel, they found a little crowd blocking up the entrance to the lounge. Voices were raised, in varying tones of reproach, envy and self-righteousness:
“What! All the afternoon? Shame on you!”
“And the electric fire on, too!”
“But it’s been lovely out! So fresh!”
Curious to see who could be the intrepid spirit who had dared to defy tradition and public opinion to the extent of staying indoors when it wasn’t actually raining, Meg squeezed her way through the throng and into the lounge. There, comfortably ensconced in the best armchair, with his feet up on the best footstool, and with the electric fire full on, sat Freddy.
“Yes, it is a coincidence, isn’t it?” he agreed amicably, in answer to Meg’s bewildered stare. “Out of all the hotels in town, I happen to have picked on the very one where your sister is staying. Extraordinary. But then, you know, coincidences tend to run in your family. I seem to remember one or two others, of which you have told me yourself.”
CHAPTER VIII
FOR THE NEXT two days it rained; rained with a steady, drenching passion which made Meg think, for the first time in years, of the Bible story of the Flood.
“And the windows of Heaven were opened….” How the words conveyed the reckless, triumphant quality of rain like this! And the caravan, flimsy, overcrowded and self-contained, was just like the Ark. Except, of course, that in the Ark they didn’t have to play Ludo. Not that any self-respecting aunt minds playing Ludo once, or even twice. But when it comes to playing it five—six—even seven times …
And through the pounding of the rain on the thin roof, and the sputtering of the over-filled saucepan on the stove, Isabel was still talking about her raincoat belt. If only she’d known, she explained for the third time, that they’d be going back to the hotel after all, she’d never have taken the raincoat on that walk, and then she’d never have lost the belt. But Meg had been so absolutely positive that they weren’t going back….
“Oh, don’t be silly. You know you’d have been frozen without it,” Meg retorted, padding her counter round another of those endless zigzag bends.
Isabel didn’t exactly deny this; but she managed to convey that not going back to the hotel would have made an extra reason for taking the coat; and that losing a belt for two reasons was somehow more economical than losing it for one.
“Auntie Meg! You could have caught me!”
Johnnie’s voice was reproachful, not triumphant. A year ago he would have been delighted at such an oversight on the part of his opponent: now he was merely critical. “You’re not playing properly, Auntie Meg.”
“I’m sick of playing, that’s why,” explained Meg candidly. “Wouldn’t you rather go for a swim?”
Why had she said that? Now Isabel would say once more:
“But it’s much too wet to swim,” and Johnnie, agog all over again with infantile wit, would squeal: “But, Mummy, you have to get wet if you swim!” It was like an endlessly repeated gramophone record, and this time it was Meg herself who had put it on.
“But it’s much too wet—” Isabel was beginning; and for a moment Meg could have fancied that her ill-timed suggestion had stirred into clockwork life not only Isabel but the caravan itself; for it began to lurch and groan; a clumsy, thunderous movement on the steps outside set the counters shuddering on the Ludo board, and the door burst open to admit a swirl of rain, a plastic mackintosh, and a flapping surge of newspaper. This invasion resolved itself within a few moments into Mrs Hutchins, her golden curls still miraculously neat under the sheltering newspaper, and in her hand a sodden telegram.
“For you, dear,” she announced, dripping exuberantly all over the tiny space as she thrust the telegram in Isabel’s direction. “I ran into the chappie coming along, and I thought it would save a bit of time if I brought it along myself. My, what a day! And yesterday too! Oh my!”
There was awe in her voice as well as injury. Had she, too, felt in touch with that first drenching of mankind, ten thousand years ago? For there was this to be said for the caravans, you were truly in contact here with the primitive tyranny of weather. Not for the caravan dwellers the surreptitious enjoyment of a cosy afternoon indoors with the rain pattering companionably on the windows, pleasantly emphasising the warmth and security within. Here the rain made a different sound; a purposeful, imperious sound, as if it knew that the people here were at its mercy. Sooner or later it would find cracks and weak places in these flimsy structures, and would be able to get in. Here there was no cosiness indoors, only cramped boredom, and the feel of sodden shoes when you haven’t a spare pair. Yes, here the rain was real, the discomforts were real, and as old as mankind itself.
“Not bad news, I hope?”
Mrs Hutchins was not really asking a question; she was commanding Isabel to get on and open the telegram, instead of fingering it, turning it this way and that, peering at it, like a wary purchaser testing the quality of a piece of material. After all her trouble bringing it here, Mrs Hutchins was not going to be done out of the opening of it; of the excitement, distress, or astonishment which might, even at second-hand, enliven the deadly boredom of the day. Her large body fidgeted peremptorily within its enveloping plastic.
“Yes—Oh, well, I think it’s just from my husband, to say when he’s coming. Or that he can’t come.” Isabel still fingered the telegram busily, as though the repeated imprint of her fingers might somehow alter the message inside, bring it more into line with her hopes, whatever these might be.
“Here, I’ll open it.” Meg seized the envelope and tore it open. “Yes, it’s only Philip. He’s arriving on the six o’clock train.” Then, as she handed it back to her sister: “Why on earth are you looking so flabbergasted? You said it was probably that.”
“I know. I’m not. I mean it’s—Oh dear, just look at the rain! I don’t know what Philip will say!”
She gazed at the downpour wide-eyed, and with such an idiotic air of self-reproach that Meg burst out laughing.
“He’ll say you should have called in the plumber, I suppose,” she teased. “Unless he’s a do-it-yourself addict, and thinks you should run abou
t catching the drops with a teaspoon. I mean—really, Isabel!”
But Isabel was not even listening. “And all these comics!” she went on distractedly. “And Johnnie’s matchbox tops! Philip’s always saying I shouldn’t encourage such pointless hobbies, but I don’t see how I can make Johnnie just throw them away, can I? And the shrimping nets just inside the door, but I don’t know where else we can keep them. And I can’t turn the sink back into a table every time, because as soon as you’ve finished washing up it’s time to do the potatoes, and—”
“The particular sort, is he?” Mrs Hutchins was by now exuding sympathy from every plastic fold as she sensed a problem within the range of her experience. The caravan lurched alarmingly as she settled herself on an upturned box and continued: “My hubby was like that, particular, when he came out the Army, but it don’t do to give in to them too much, you know. It’s no kindness to them, not in the end it isn’t, and then you’ve got to consider the kiddies too. Very sharp with the kiddies my hubby was, very sharp: ‘Do this!—‘Do that!’”—the caravan rocked again at Mrs Hutchins’ idea of a parade-ground command—“Always on at them, one thing and another. The eldest one mostly, he was the trouble.”
“Oh, do you find that too? Oh, I’m so glad!”
The heartless-seeming words were spoken with such a desperate fellow-feeling that no one could have taken them amiss; it was almost as if Isabel was flinging herself into her visitor’s arms in her desperate need for sympathy. “It’s worst of all when we’re on holiday like this,” Isabel continued. “Holidays are terribly difficult, don’t you think, everybody on top of each other, and nothing to do?”
Mrs Hutchins nodded her head sympathetically, and with a fresh shower of drops on the cushions.
“It’s a job, isn’t it?” she agreed. “But it’s only a fortnight, that’s what I always say. You can keep going for a fortnight.”
“But it’s three weeks for us!” wailed Isabel. “And besides, it isn’t just the holiday itself. It’s the thinking about it beforehand. It hangs over you half the summer, getting it arranged and wondering if it’s going to go off all right. And then, as soon as that’s over, you have to start worrying about Christmas!” she concluded dismally.
Neither of them, Meg noticed, seemed to find anything funny about the conversation. Mrs Hutchins was nodding her head in grave acquiescence.
“It’s a job, isn’t it?” she repeated—her sympathy evidently more extensive then her vocabulary. “But you don’t want to let it get you down. And you must make them help, you know, dear, when you’re on holiday. It’s no holiday for you, is it, if you got it all to do the same as at home.”
“Oh, I don’t mind the work!” declared Isabel fervently. “That’s nothing. The actual work is never more than a tiny bit of running a home. No, it’s the—sort of—the keeping everyone happy—not annoying each other—that kind of thing. When you’re at home you have to spend half your time doing that, and when you’re on holiday you have to spend all your time doing it. That’s what’s so exhausting.”
Mrs Hutchins nodded again, more in sympathy than in clear understanding.
“Of course, your kiddies are still little, that’s what it is,” she said. “They’re just like mine were when their Dad came back from overseas. You wouldn’t credit it, what I had to go through. You see, Georgie—that’s the oldest one—Georgie’d been only a little lad, about like your Peter, when his Dad went away, and Stevie, he wasn’t there at all, he wasn’t born for another six months. My hubby was gone the best part of three years, and so when he came back there was Stevie, just the same age Georgie’d been when he went away. And I reckon he felt Stevie was the kiddie he really knew—being just the same age he remembered, if you understand—while Georgie was the strange one, grown up out of all recognition. That’s how I reckon it was, because he took to Stevie at once, but he couldn’t seem to get along with Georgie at all. The kiddie got on his nerves, back-answering, one thing and another. It nearly drove me barmy, I don’t mind telling you. But it doesn’t do to interfere, not beyond a point, though I could have knocked their two heads together sometimes with the aggravation of it. Not now, though. They’re real pals now. My hubby thinks the world of Georgie.”
In spite of the limited vocabulary, the clumsy inadequate repetitions, the happy ending of this story shone forth in all its sturdy triumph; the triumph of a narrow, ill-cultivated mind stretched to the very limit of its powers to meet the demands made on it for understanding, tact, and imagination; and meeting them successfully.
Could such a triumph ever be Isabel’s? Isabel, with her far better equipped mind, her far broader imagination, and yet her curious lack of—what? Meg looked at her sister questioningly. Was Philip really such an ogre as Isabel’s behaviour would indicate? The news of his imminent arrival seemed to have caused her not the faintest flicker of pleasure. Was this fret and hurry and anxiety the sum total of her feelings towards her husband? And did he know it? Did she even know it herself?
“… And now we’ll have to have something proper for supper!” Isabel was lamenting. “I’ll have to go down to the shops again, and I suppose I’ll have to take the boys too, they’ve been indoors all day, they’ll be so fidgety by this evening if they don’t get out … and Peter’s other shoes are still soaking …!”
It was a good thing, as it turned out, that Meg had volunteered to go with them, for Isabel’s parcels, topped by a sodden parcel of haddock, would never have balanced on the push-chair at Peter’s feet all the way home. So Meg carried the shopping bag, and the parcel of haddock grew wetter and wetter, and Johnnie kept getting his feet in front of the push-chair, and Isabel kept thinking of more and more things which weren’t on her list, but which she might as well get while they were here. And it all took longer than ever because of Isabel’s shopping methods. She would stand with an air of infinite leisure and detachment while the assistant wrapped up her purchases, and then, at the very end, as he stood waiting for the money, she would suddenly rouse herself, as if astonished beyond measure, and plunge frantically for her purse in the depths of her handbag; frowning, peering, scrabbling, and growing more and more flustered under the assistant’s impatient gaze.
What with one thing and another, it was nearly five o’clock when they reached the caravan, and Meg was able thankfully to let the haddock and its few remaining shreds of paper slump into the sink. Why the smell of the sloppy, wearisome thing should suddenly remind her of a summer afternoon in childhood, hot and still, she could not imagine; and certainly there was no time to speculate about it now, for Isabel was already working herself into a frenzy of haste and clumsiness. As the minutes ticked on, bringing Philip’s arrival nearer and nearer, Meg found herself infected, against all reason, by Isabel’s mounting anxiety; so much so that, when her brother-in-law actually did arrive, she experienced a moment of senseless panic, so sharp and unexpected that she scarcely knew how to greet him.
But she was curious too. Who, essentially, was this man whom Isabel had apparently cared for enough to marry barely a year ago, and who now seemed to inspire her with such terror—there was no other word for it? Hovering on the outskirts of the family reunion, Meg studied her brother-in-law with a new and critical intensity. The firm, rather tight-lipped mouth, whose severity was enhanced by the neatly clipped moustache; the wiry, muscular figure, held so uncompromisingly upright as to make him seem both taller than his medium height and younger than his fifty years. A forbidding sort of man; a man who could not be trifled with; and yet, perhaps, a man who longed to be trifled with, just now and then? This last thought occurred fleetingly to Meg as they sat down to supper, and she fancied she caught in her brother-in-law’s stern glance a flicker of bewilderment at the quietness and constraint which his presence seemed to occasion.
“Well, Johnnie, have you been a good boy while I’ve been away? Have you been a help to your mother?”
His tone was not unfriendly, and Meg fancied he was trying, unskilfully, to make
contact with the child.
“What?” said Johnnie incuriously, and apparently oblivious of the look of irritation which now crossed his stepfather’s face. Yet the look might have passed, Meg fancied, as quickly as it had come, if Isabel had not noticed it and plunged with headlong tactlessness to the rescue.
“Oh yes, he’s been very good! He’s helped me a lot. He—he—he fetches water for me,” she finished lamely. “Don’t you, Johnnie?”
“You haven’t given me my penny for fetching it after tea,” observed Johnnie, with an obtuseness almost beyond belief; and he went on munching placidly while his mother’s dismay and his stepfather’s disapproval met and clashed for a terrible silent moment above his head.
“Do you mean to say you expect to be paid for helping your mother?”
The sharpness in Philip’s voice seemed to startle Johnnie rather than frighten him.
“Yes,” he said simply. “But I have to remind her about it. Mummy,” he continued, with indomitable perseverance, “you owe me—”
Isabel almost choked in her haste to put matters in a more becoming light.
“It isn’t quite like that, Philip,” she gabbled. “It’s just that—that I do give him a penny or two now and then—for a treat—because it’s holidays you know—but it’s not exactly for fetching the water—I mean—”
She glanced in wild appeal towards her son. Why, oh why, her glance seemed to say, couldn’t he help her to gloss over these things a little? Not by actual lying, of course, but—
“It’s twopence, actually,” Johnnie corrected himself. “Because you never gave me the penny for the time the jug broke. You see, it didn’t break until on the way back, so I’d done all the work of it really. If it had broken on the way there, then of course I’d only have wanted a halfpenny,” he conceded, with manly generosity.
Driven by Isabel’s agonised looks, Meg hastily intervened with some banal questions addressed to Philip about his journey. Politeness demanded that he should take the frown from his face while he answered her, and Meg could at once feel across the table that Isabel’s tension was lessening. What did it feel like, she wondered, as she struggled to keep the wearisome conversation going—what did it feel like to possess a frown of such apparently devastating potency? A frown that could reduce another human being to trembling inanity; and then, by its mere withdrawal, allow her to become human again? And what did it feel like to be the victim? And, above all, did either of them realise how uncomfortable it all was for the onlooker?
Uncle Paul Page 8
