Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  “And became your great-grandfather,” finished Meg.

  “No—Oh no.” Freddy looked surprised. “She married the first one. Of course. What woman would want to marry a man who looked such a sight as the second poor fellow did after the whole performance? And they were very happy, too. At least, if having eleven children and dying at the age of ninety-four is your idea of happiness. Anyway, it just shows.”

  “Just shows what? Have some more coffee?” invited Meg.

  “No, thanks. Shows? Why, it shows that girls like you and my great-grandmother should always marry a man who keeps his feet dry, and doesn’t let them get away with any such pig-headed silliness. Particularly so in your case, as you haven’t got an alternative young man who does plunge into ditches for you. Or have you? And do you still love him at the end of it?”

  At once Meg wanted to claim a host of admirers, all queueing up to plunge into ditches on her behalf. In her mind she reviewed the half dozen or so young men who had at various times flitted into her life and out again. Suddenly, enchantingly, she realised how dull, how insipid they all seemed now that she knew Freddy. For all she cared, the whole lot of them could fall into ditches and stay there. But Freddy mustn’t know this; not just yet.

  “I’d like a young man who could get me the spray without messing himself up,” she declared haughtily.

  Freddy laughed pityingly.

  “What would be the good of that?” he enquired. “Surely the whole idea is that he should be sacrificing himself for you? If he didn’t get scratched and covered with mud, where would be the sacrifice? You women make a great mistake,” he continued musingly, “in imagining that an unselfish, considerate sort of man makes a good husband. He doesn’t. He makes a terrible husband. You see, if a man really loves his wife, he will treat her exactly as he treats himself. If he is generous with his own time and possessions, then he will be generous with hers, too, and how will she like that? If he stints himself of decent clothes and meals for some admirable reason, then (if he really loves her), he will stint her even more, for some even more admirable reason. It’s only logical, isn’t it? But the selfish man—Ah!—” Freddy’s tone of self-congratulatory complacence here made Meg burst into giggles—“He is the perfect, the utterly desirable husband. Selfish, greedy, idle—as his wife, without ever needing to be greedy or selfish yourself, you will luxuriate in the proceeds of his selfishness, will guzzle the spoils of his greed. On downy cushions you will share his idleness—”

  Suddenly Freddy stopped, aghast.

  “I say, I haven’t been proposing to you, have I?”

  Meg laughed delightedly.

  “Yes, I suppose you have, actually,” she said. “But it’s all right; you were talking so continuously that I never got a chance to say ‘yes’!” and jumping up she ran, still laughing, from the room.

  CHAPTER XIII

  MEG WANDERED ALONE down to the beach. She had no plans for this rare, hot afternoon; and, encased in happiness, she needed none. She did not wonder whether the conversation with Freddy had been anything more than a trivial flirtation. It did not seem to matter. It was enough that it had brought her, however unreasonably, such happiness as this; had made her, at least for one golden afternoon, in love. To understand—to analyse—to predict—such coarse processes cannot be applied to so fragile a thing. Instinctively, like a tight-rope walker, she trod gently, abstractedly across the crowded sands, lest some sharp movement, some sudden call on her attention, should dislodge her from this precarious joy.

  And it did, of course. A sharper movement than she had anticipated, in the form of the edge of Peter’s spade, brandished with enthusiastic welcome about the level of her knees. His squeals of rapture were soon reinforced by Isabel’s voice calling from somewhere among the thickets of deckchairs; and Meg realised that her wanderings had brought her inadvertently to the Place.

  “Hullo, Meg. Why are you looking so solemn?”

  Meg smiled to herself at her sister’s greeting. Was that how great happiness made one look? And if so, could the other expressions on people’s faces be equally misleading? Isabel’s expression, for instance; that anxious, self-absorbed frown that Meg’s arrival had only momentarily dispelled?

  “Why are you looking so solemn, if it comes to that?” she said lightly, settling herself on the sand by her sister’s deckchair. “Is the family playing you up?”

  Isabel’s frown deepened.

  “No—that is—it’s Johnnie. Philip’s taken him fishing.”

  “Well—how nice! I mean, isn’t it?” Suddenly Meg fancied she saw daylight. “Oh, you mean they’ve gone out in a boat and you’re afraid Johnnie will get himself drowned? He won’t, you know. Philip’s terribly reliable, and he’s had a lot of experience sailing. You told me so yourself.”

  “Oh, I know. But I don’t mean that.” Isabel was sitting bolt upright now. She managed to look more uncomfortable in a deckchair, Meg reflected, than most people would on a dunce’s stool. “I’m not afraid he’ll be drowned,” Isabel was continuing, “I’m afraid that he’s going to look bored. After the first novelty’s over, I mean. And Philip will be so terribly cross, after all the trouble he’s taken to arrange it all. And do you know—” Isabel lowered her voice here, as if awed by the hideousness of the revelation she was about to make—“Do you know, I believe Johnnie’s taken a comic with him! Can you imagine what Philip will say if he starts reading a comic just when he’s showing him how to splice his line, or whatever it is—”

  “I should think he’ll yell at him to put it away,” said Meg, unimpressed. “And Johnnie will, and that’ll be the end of it. Honestly, Isabel, I think they get on much better when you’re not there interfering.”

  She stopped, feeling that Isabel might reasonably be offended by this unsolicited criticism. Yet surely it was a kindness—even a duty—to give her a jolt occasionally—make her realise the destructive quality of her anxieties. For destructive they were, and growing daily more so—or was it just that Meg was noticing them more? Had Isabel, perhaps, always been like this?

  Meg cast her mind back to Isabel’s first marriage when scarcely more than a schoolgirl. There had always, Meg felt, been something a little unreal about that brief union with poor Bill—perhaps, in retrospect, it was its very brevity that made one feel like this. People had hardly stopped saying: “I just can’t think of Isabel as a married woman”, when they found themselves having to think of her as a widow, with two small boys to bring up. And Isabel herself neither crushed with grief nor unbecomingly resilient: only a little vague—a little unhappy—a little anxious about the future….

  But not anxious as she was now—now when, by any ordinary standards, she had at last found security again, and a settled home. She was meeting with difficulties, of course—she was bound to—and Philip, no doubt, was proving something less than perfect as a husband and father, but all the same….

  Meg realised that Isabel had still made no answer to her possibly ill-timed comment. Fearing that she might have caused real hurt, Meg glanced quickly up at her sister’s face. She was reassured. Isabel seemed scarcely to have noticed that she had spoken. She was shading her eyes with her hand and gazing out across the multi-coloured landscape of heads and magazines towards the anaemic remnant of the sea.

  “I can’t see them any more! I think they must have come back early—and that means that it hasn’t gone well! Oh dear! Philip was planning to stay out till supper-time!”

  “Isabel!” Meg almost took her by the shoulders and shook her. “You’re impossible! Any other wife in the world would worry if her family were back late from a fishing trip, and here are you worrying that perhaps they’ll be early! If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, then you’re a lucky woman!”

  The cliché slid from Meg’s tongue thoughtlessly, almost without meaning. But its effect on Isabel was surprising. She seemed to be finding in the hackneyed words something both profound and new.

  “A lucky woman,” she repeate
d slowly. “Oh, Meg, if you only knew!” She broke off. “And yet—to worry about that I wonder….”

  Fear? Bewilderment? Relief? So puzzling, so contradictory were the expressions which now in quick succession smoothed and puckered Isabel’s features, that Meg felt positively relieved when the familiar look of anxiety finally returned and overlaid all else.

  “Oh, I’ve just remembered!” Isabel wailed, “I haven’t brought enough tea! I thought it would be just Peter and me, but if they’re going to be here too … and you as well … and if I go back for the other thermos someone will get our Place….”

  “How lovely for them,” said Meg unkindly. And then, with compunction: “I’ll look after the Place, Isabel, while you go for the thermos. But don’t bother about any tea for me. I’ve only just had lunch. Or I’ll go and get it if you like,” she added, overcome with pity as she pictured Isabel trudging joylessly through the sunshine, her eyes fixed on the ground and her mind on the time, on whether the thermos had been washed up since yesterday, and on whether the gas pressure would be high enough.

  But Isabel preferred to go herself; and when she had vanished among the deckchairs, with Peter and a bucket of dead starfish trailing alongside, Meg gave a sigh of relief. She reached for one of the shapeless plastic garments with which Isabel’s holidays always seemed to be festooned, bundled it up to serve as a pillow, and lay back in the sand. Lying like this, with her eyes closed, the sun hot on her face, she could forget that this was a seaside place, and remember only that it was by the sea. The voices, the shouts, the laughter—now that their source was unseen they blurred to a uniform medley of sound, as impersonal as the beating of the waves. The sand that ran warm and silky through her fingers might have been the sand of a desert island; you would never guess from the serene and ancient feel of it that it had been dug and mauled by ten thousand spades; that it had been jostled side by side with ten thousand ice-cream cartons; that chocolate wrappings and lolly sticks had found their home in it no less than prehistoric shells. Its infinite tolerance rested in Meg’s fingers for a moment; trickled through them and was gone.

  As time went on, she began to wish that she had not been so positive about not wanting any tea. It would put Isabel into a terrible fuss if she changed her mind about it now. She pictured Isabel, in the caravan, anxiously counting spoonfuls, calculating quantities of water. Philip would like it strong … on the other hand, Johnnie would want it weak…. Would one of them want three cups? … or one? … or none? And what about bringing extra milk? Would there still be enough for breakfast…? No wonder everything Isabel did took so long.

  But not as long as this, surely? Meg glanced at her watch. She had been lying here nearly an hour. Allowing ten minutes to get to the caravan, ten minutes to come back … surely even Isabel couldn’t spend forty minutes making a thermos of tea?

  But apparently she could. At this very moment Meg caught sight of her, threading her way gingerly through the deckchairs, and carrying the thermos in both hands as cautiously as if she were competing in an egg-and-spoon race. For all her flurries, Isabel never actually did anything briskly, Meg reflected, as she watched her sister’s anxious yet leisurely progress across the sand. Her personality could have been a very restful one, gentle and undemanding, if only she herself would allow it to be. There was no harm in being slow and ineffectual—these could even be lovable qualities if only you didn’t keep on battling with them, apologising for them….

  “I’m terribly sorry I’ve been so long,” exclaimed Isabel, tripping slightly over the leg of the deckchair and dumping the thermos—hitherto carried with such care—heavily on to the sand. “But you see, Mrs Hutchins was up there—she’d got a message for you, actually, Meg, she was looking for you—anyway, we got talking, you know how it is, and so—”

  “Message? What was it?” Meg’s thoughts flew, with a sharp lurch of happiness, to Freddy. So he had come out to look for her. Not finding her at the caravan, he had left a message with Mrs Hutchins that she was to meet him—where?—when?

  “It was from Mildred,” Isabel was saying, unaware of the dizzying disappointment inflicted by her words. “She says—are you listening, Meg?—she says she’s arranging for you to take over her room at the Sea View. She says you’re on no account to go on staying at the cottage, it’s too lonely.”

  “Oh.” Meg was too disappointed to pay much attention to all this. “Was that all? No other message? From anyone?”

  “Why—no.” Isabel looked surprised. “Isn’t that enough? Are you going to?”

  “Going to what?” For once it was Meg who was vague and inattentive.

  “Going to take over her room, of course,” said Isabel. “I think it would be a good idea, you know. I was worried myself last night, thinking of you all alone up there.”

  “I wasn’t all alone, Mildred was there,” said Meg; and then, as the message at last began to register on her mind: “Do you mean Mildred’s giving up her room to me and going up to the cottage herself? Because that’s ridiculous. If it’s too lonely for me, then it’s too lonely for her—and she’s the one who’s frightened, anyway. It’s absurd.”

  Isabel looked helpless.

  “I don’t think she means to do that,” she said uncertainly. “Mrs Hutchins didn’t say—I mean, I never thought of asking—that is, I think Mildred means to go somewhere else altogether. You see, Meg, I think she’s not only frightened of the cottage now. She’s frightened of her room at the hotel, too.”

  “Why—what on earth?” Meg stopped at the sight of Isabel’s confusion.

  “I oughtn’t to have told you that, really, Meg. Mildred asked me not to. She said you’d just think she was being silly.”

  “I think she’s being silly anyway,” said Meg crisply. “So you might as well tell me. Especially now you’ve told me that much.”

  “Yes. I suppose I’d better,” said Isabel slowly. “Perhaps you’ll be able to manage her if you know all about it. You remember that fortune teller?”

  “Fortune teller? Oh. Yes. That awful walk. Mildred had her fortune told while we looked at the six-headed pigs and things. Well?”

  “Well—you know she said she meant to go again—to the woman’s house—for a ‘proper reading’? And you told her not to? Well, she did go. Yesterday. And the woman told her that she was going to meet a Dark Man out of the Past.”

  Meg laughed.

  “I wonder how much prompting our Mildred gave her for that one? What happened then? Mildred asked her if the Dark Man spelt Danger, I suppose? And this miraculous woman said ‘Yes’?”

  “Well—yes; something like that.” Isabel laughed uneasily. “But she told her something else, too—the fortune-teller woman, I mean. She told her exactly when the danger would be. Next Thursday. At seven in the morning.”

  “Well! My opinion of fortune-telling goes up a bit!” said Meg, smiling. “They don’t usually stick their necks out with a prediction as exact as that. But I suppose she can wriggle out of it. When Mildred goes to her on Friday and complains that nothing happened, she can say it was a spiritual danger, and that Mildred’s wonderful courage and purity overcame it while she wasn’t noticing. Mildred’ll love that. But why Thursday, do you suppose? Because it’s early closing?”

  “Oh—well—” Isabel laughed a little apologetically. “She didn’t exactly say Thursday, not in so many words. It’s just that Mildred thinks it must mean that. What she actually said was the Mildred’s vibrations are for the number seven. Or aren’t. Or something. Anyway, she meant that Mildred must watch out for the number seven. The seventh hour—the seventh day—that sort of thing. And Mildred has worked it out that since she was born in February, that makes August the seventh month for her. And Thursday is the seventh of August. And, you know, it was on the seventh of August that Uncle Paul was arrested. So it all sort of fits in—”

  “Isabel! You almost sound as if you believe in it yourself! But you still haven’t told me what it’s got to do with her being frighte
ned of her room at the Sea View. I suppose it’s No. 7, is it?”

  Meg had asked the question sarcastically. She was taken aback by the eagerness with which Isabel snatched at the mocking suggestion.

  “Oh, is it, Meg? Do you think it might be? I was so hoping that you’d know for certain, since it was you who booked the room for her. You see, if I could only feel sure that it’s only that that she’s frightened of, and not—well—something more…. Was it No. 7? Oh, Meg, was it?”

  The intensity of Isabel’s concern was disturbing; but it was also ridiculous. Meg chose to concentrate on this latter aspect, and she laughed, perhaps more scathingly than she intended.

  “I daresay it was. Or No. 77, very likely, that would be better still. How thoughtful of her, in that case, to offer it to me! But I suppose my vibrations are different. Honestly, Isabel, it’s all such nonsense, I’m not going to pay any attention to any of it. I’ll go to the cottage tonight just as I’d planned. She’s sure to change her mind before evening, anyway, and then she’d be furious to find me established in her room just when she’s discovered that her vibrations are really Number Thirteen after all, and there are no other rooms half so comfortable at the price. No. I’m keeping out of it all, thank you. And now, Isabel, what about all this tea? It doesn’t look as if Philip and Johnnie are coming, so let’s drink the lot.”

  CHAPTER XIV