Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  MEG’S SECOND NIGHT at the cottage passed much more comfortably than her first. To begin with, she had managed to arrive quite early in the evening, and before darkness had fallen she was in bed, having thus avoided altogether the uneasy flicker of candle-light. Besides this, she was alone, with her own common sense for company instead of Mildred’s manufactured terrors.

  It was odd how infectious they were, these fancies of Mildred’s. Meg recalled the moments of suspense—no, of real, quaking fear—that she had shared with Mildred last night. And all to no purpose, for nothing had happened—nothing had ever been going to happen; it had all been in Mildred’s imagination. It was as if Mildred had a special gift of dragging others with her into silliness. Look at Isabel, only this afternoon. With what portentous solemnity she had related this idiotic fortune-telling business, impressed, apparently, against her will, against her intelligence, by Mildred’s monstrous gullibility.

  Well, Meg at least wasn’t going to be taken in by it any more. The fortune-telling was the final straw; it had rendered the whole thing farcical, as Mildred must surely see for herself any day now—had, possibly, already seen, if only her pride would allow her to admit it.

  With these comfortable reflections Meg had fallen asleep in the great bed. She woke once during the night, with a vague sense that some thumping sound had disturbed her, but it was not repeated, and before she had time to frame any coherent thoughts on the matter she was asleep again. This time she slept soundly till morning.

  Another fine day. Basking in the tranquil, mounting heat, the cottage no longer seemed sinister, though it was still disconcertingly dark inside—dark, and cold too, in spite of the warmth of the day. The windows were small and deep-set; only when it was near midday did fierce, improbable ribbons of sunlight stream across the two rooms facing south, while the two north rooms remained in shade unbroken for two hundred years.

  But Meg did not stay in the shadows. She wandered out through the tall weeds, opening as triumphantly as any prize blossoms to the sunshine, and out on to the cinder track, already warm to her bare feet.

  It was a nice little place, really it was. Meg quite enjoyed the thought of spending the remainder of the holiday here. And it was not nearly as isolated as it had seemed at first. Only a few hundred yards away ran the main road, with a little cluster of cottages alongside. It was only this odd, inconspicuous dip in the lie of the land which made the cottage seem so cut off from the rest of the world—that, and the fact that the quickest way to walk to it was not along the main road but across the deserted cliffs.

  Well, not deserted on a day like this. Nowhere, in the whole of Britain, could be deserted on a fine August morning just after Bank Holiday. From where she stood, Meg could hear the shrill, irregular shouts of picnic parties making their way across the cliffs—shouts eviscerated by distance so that they seemed to convey neither joy nor distress, neither excitement nor exasperation. Just shouts, as meaningless and repetitive as the cry of the seagulls.

  “Meg! Meg! I say!”

  This shout was not meaningless. Meg whirled round, hurting her feet cruelly on the rough path, to meet the cheerful salutations of Freddy, who was approaching jauntily along the path from the cliffs.

  “I’ve been sent to fetch you,” he announced, dispelling in his first sentence any notion she might have cherished that he had sought her out of his own accord. “They want you. To carry bags and things. And wipe the children’s faces. And fish wasps out of the jam. And help Isabel go without whatever there isn’t enough of.”

  “Who’s ‘They’? And what do they want me for? Do try to talk plain English, Freddy.” But Meg was laughing, as she rubbed the most painful of her feet.

  “English! You’re right! The very language to have a word for the ordeal I’ve been trying to describe. A Picnic. That’s it. They want you for a picnic.”

  “Who do? Where? You’d better wait while I put my shoes on.” Meg turned and led the way back to the cottage.

  “I sa-ay!” Freddy was gazing raptly at the cottage, though whether in mockery or admiration was not clear. “Is it real? May I touch it?”

  “You may even come inside,” said Meg, throwing open the front door with a flourish. “There you are”—ushering him into the dark little room. “At least twenty chairs to choose from. Sit on whichever one you fancy while I get ready.”

  She ran up the steep, creaking little staircase into the bedroom, and was just rummaging under the bed for her sandals when she realised that Freddy was in the doorway.

  “Do you mind?” he enquired detachedly, as he stared about him. “I thought I’d like to explore. I say—what a whopper!” He was gazing in admiration at the great wardrobe. “Now, that’s where you should keep the family skeleton, instead of in your handbag. I should think there’d be room for a dozen in there.” He had stretched himself full length across the bed now, and was peering—as probably every visitor peered—into the tantalising crack of the door.

  “Moths,” he diagnosed at last. “I can hear them eating. But what will the poor things do when they’ve finished the garments in there? How will you get a new supply in to them?”

  He yawned, and for a minute lay luxuriously back against the pillows, blinking in the sharp thread of sunlight which had begun to creep past the corner of the window. Then, abruptly, he sprang to his feet.

  “Come on, girl! Hurry up, they’re all waiting. I’m supposed to be fetching you. Get on then: be fetched.”

  “I’m ready,” declared Meg, a trifle coldly. “So if you’ve quite finished your inventory of the place we could start. But where to? And who are all waiting? You still haven’t told me. Is it just Isabel and the boys?”

  “Oh, Lord, no.” Freddy groaned in affected dismay, but with inner relish. “Your sister Isabel is, I suppose, the crux of the affair—the hub, as you might say. She is the one who has cut the most sandwiches, worried most about the weather, and changed her mind most about where to go. But there are many others in her train. Mildred and her diminutive military admirer—or is he yours?—”

  “You mean Captain Cockerill?” Meg was somewhat nettled. “He’s not all that much smaller than you are. And anyway he’s—”

  “—Ever so much more admiring, eh?” finished Freddy provokingly. “Where was I? You shouldn’t interrupt so much. Oh yes. Captain Corkscrew. And that woman. You know.”

  For some inexplicable reason, Meg did.

  “You mean Mrs Forrester?” she supplied unhesitatingly. “The one with the boy who knows everything—Cedric?”

  “That’s the one,” said Freddy happily. “And as I know everything too, we ought to get along famously. Come along; they said they’d go slowly on towards the Point. And slowly will be the word, if I know anything of any of them.”

  And, indeed, the party had not gone far by the time Meg and Freddy came in sight of them. Captain Cockerill, chivalrously laden with so many rucksacks, bags and baskets that he looked like a little tree in need of pruning, led the way, with Mrs Forrester at his side valiantly trying to get her breath enough to go on being fascinating. Following behind came Isabel, pushing Peter in his chair and carrying two floppy canvas bags. Even Captain Cockerill’s gallantry had evidently not sufficed to separate Isabel and her bags. Johnnie was dragging along beside her, and even from this distance Meg could see, from the line of Isabel’s head and shoulders, that she was painstakingly and at length answering some question that he had already forgotten he had asked. Last of all came Mildred, and for a moment Meg almost failed to recognise her. She had had her hair done in a new way—a short, windswept style that suited her very badly—and she was wearing low-heeled sandals which, from this distance at least, seemed to alter the whole line of her figure, making her look dumpy and old. Philip was nowhere to be seen, and Meg concluded that he must have been called away on business again. She was not sorry. The unacknowledged tension between husband and wife could be uncomfortable for everyone.

  Soon after Meg and Freddy had jo
ined them, the whole party reached the cove that Isabel had fixed on for the day’s outing, and they settled down in a large untidy circle under the cliff face. Isabel seemed less harassed than usual, Meg thought, in spite of the extra work that all these sandwiches must have caused her. Perhaps getting away from the Place had done her good—or was it Freddy’s presence, which always seemed to brighten her up? She was laughing with him now—something about the hard-boiled eggs; and here was Captain Cockerill leaning across them both to take one of the eggs into his hand.

  “I’ll show you a funny thing,” he said. “You see this egg? Now, if I were to squeeze it in my hand, with all my strength, w-what do you think would happen?”

  “You’d feel a sort of tingling ache in your biceps,” said Freddy, evidently not pleased at the interruption. Isabel, more co-operative, replied:

  “Why, it would break, of course.”

  Captain Cockerill beamed.

  “It wouldn’t, though,” he declared. “Watch!”

  With a great display of teeth-clenching and knuckle-whitening he gripped the egg in his fist. Nothing happened. Glowing with modest triumph, he handed it to Isabel.

  “See? You try.”

  Isabel tried, with equally negative results.

  “Fancy!” she said amiably. “You’d never believe it was so difficult. Why ever is it?”

  “You could try banging it on a stone,” suggested Freddy, helpfully; but Captain Cockerill ignored him.

  “It’s the evenness of the pressure inside, you see,” he began happily. “Although an eggshell is in itself a fragile thing …’

  The explanation had gone on for some minutes, and Meg had eaten three sandwiches, before she realised that something was missing.

  “Cedric?” she said. “Where is he?” She felt that a polite voice saying, “No, it isn’t” was just what was needed to round off Captain Cockerill’s monologue. “Isn’t he coming?” She addressed her query to Mrs Forrester, who, rather to her surprise, turned to Mildred.

  “Yes—did he say anything to you, my dear? You saw him last. When you went back for your sun glasses?” and then, not waiting for Mildred to reply (perhaps fortunately, for Mildred, Meg noted, was wearing her vague expression), she turned back to Meg.

  “He is a tiresome boy! A lovely day like this, too! He said he’d follow us in just a few minutes, when he’d finished his patience game. He must have started another one. Oh dear, it is a problem, bringing up a boy without a father!” She sighed, and Meg tried to look sympathetic; but it was difficult, recalling as she did the similar sighs of Isabel as she enlarged upon the problem of bringing up a boy with a father.

  She glanced at her sister, who was munching a sandwich and looking dreamily serene. Was she really feeling serene for once—or was it just that article she’d been reading about children and meal times? Peter was going through a phase of being “difficult” about his food, and the article had asserted with unnerving brightness that all you needed to do was to remain serene and uninterested in whether the child ate his food or not. And so, for some days now, Isabel (as often as she could remember) had been serene and uninterested at meal times; while Peter, equally serene and uninterested, had continued to leave his food.

  It was nearly three o’clock when Cedric arrived, pale and composed as usual, in spite of the heat.

  “Not specially,” he replied to his mother’s reproachful concern as to whether he wasn’t terribly hungry. Further anxious enquiries elicited the information that he wasn’t specially thirsty either; nor specially hot, nor specially tired. Neither had it seemed a specially long walk—“Only three and a quarter miles, you said it was five”—the whole account culminating in the information that his lateness wasn’t due to anything special.

  However, he condescended to accept the sandwiches that Isabel had saved for him. Unsmiling, he examined the contents of each one, and then proceeded to devour the lot with considerable appetite.

  Shortly afterwards, it was announced by somebody that the boys would love a game of rounders; and since all three boys flatly refused to play, a rather attenuated version of the game was got up among the adults—all the adults, that is, except Mildred, whose youthful hair style seemed to have done little to reduce her somnolence after lunch. So she lay in the sun, her eyes half closed, talking, in the absence of other male company, to Cedric, and extracting (one could only hope) at least occasional monosyllables from him.

  Captain Cockerill turned out to be dismayingly good at rounders; but it soon became apparent that his enthusiasm for hitting the ball greatly exceeded anyone else’s enthusiasm for running a quarter of a mile to fetch it; and as the game petered out, Meg found herself for the first time that afternoon alone with Freddy. Isabel had gone back to Mildred and the children, and Captain Cockerill was consoling himself for the abandonment of the game by taking Mrs Forrester down to the water’s edge and showing her how to play ducks and drakes. Freddy, after one disgruntled glance at Captain Cockerill’s provoking skill at this pastime also, had taken Meg’s arm and pulled her out of range of the display, on the pretext of taking her for a walk along the cliffs.

  But it was rather a dull walk. Freddy was unusually silent; and it was not until they were returning that Meg, scouring her mind for some subject that would interest him, thought of complimenting him on the good effect he had on Isabel. She half hoped that in acknowledging the compliment he would also unwittingly answer the question she had several times asked herself—what it was that he found attractive in Isabel—Isabel who most of the time seemed so drab, so preoccupied, so careless of her appearance?

  Disconcertingly, Freddy seemed to recognise at once the question behind the compliment.

  “Oh, but she is fascinating, your Isabel!” he exclaimed. “She is like a darkened room—and all you need do is switch on the light. Just the woman for a lazy man like me. Switching switches is just the kind of activity that suits me.”

  “You seem to know where the switch is better than most,” remarked Meg, steering the perilous way between disparagement of her sister and the risk of changing the subject before her question was fully answered.

  “The switch? Ah!” Freddy spoke in the knowing, mysterious way that often, Meg suspected, helped him out of the tight conversational corners in which he was apt to land himself by being a little too clever. “Your sister is a worrier, you see,” he went on, at a tangent. “I’ve always flattered myself that I’m a good influence on worriers. Or bad, of course, according to how you look at it. Because, you know, cheering up worried people is really a vice—a sort of sabotage”—Meg smiled to see how Freddy straightened his back and walked more briskly as a paradox presented itself. “After all, you’ve only got to look around to see that it’s the worriers who get the world’s work done. What do you suppose would happen to a business whose manager didn’t worry himself into a gastric ulcer? How would any laws get passed, any wars won, if politicians and generals didn’t sit up all night worrying? Do you think that aeroplane over there would stay up for a single minute if the pilot wasn’t worrying about it? And if the people at the factory and the testing place hadn’t worried about it? Ah, yes; it’s not love that makes the world go round at all, it’s worry.”

  “Well, in that case, I can only say I’m glad to see Isabel not making the world go round, now and again,” began Meg; but Freddy interrupted her.

  “What a shocking thing to say! Isabel, above all others, needs to worry. For one thing, she’s a mother, and mothers have to worry. It’s part of their job, just like providing meals and arranging for diphtheria injections. The human race has only survived because mothers worry all the time, about everything. And as for Isabel in particular—” He stopped, and smiled enigmatically. They were now in sight of their own party once more.

  “Is-a-bell necessary on a bicycle?” he quoted cryptically. “In your sister’s case, I would say, most decidedly, Yes.”

  CHAPTER XV

  THE WALK BACK across the cliffs seemed very
long, and as the whole party straggled in single file across the grass towards Isabel’s caravan, Meg wished heartily that she had slipped away back to the cottage as soon as the packing up began. But it had seemed mean to abandon Isabel at this stage, just when she might be most in need of help; and, besides, there was no food to speak of at the cottage and she hoped to find some shops still open if she returned to the town with the others.

  But the return journey had proved every bit as wearying as she had anticipated. Freddy, no doubt still in his rôle of the Worriers’ Friend, had allowed himself to be monopolised by Mrs Forrester, while Meg had found herself buttonholed by Mildred, who proceeded to natter at her all over again about the danger of staying at the cottage. And as they both got hotter and tireder, so, it seemed to Meg, the whole business got sillier and sillier; and she finally snapped at Mildred to such effect that Mildred fell into a fit of sulks and lagged behind altogether, while Meg marched on, cross and remorseful, and disinclined for conversation with anybody.

  And now, on top of all this, Isabel had had the foolhardiness to invite the whole party to stop and have a cup of tea at the caravan before continuing their journey to the hotel. Meg could see that her sister had already repented of the invitation, issued on the crest of her precarious light-hearted ness earlier in the day, but could think of no way of getting out of it; and so here they all were, filing up towards the caravan like prisoners to the scaffold, and never did executioner look less equal to his task than did Isabel, already scowling desperately over her calculations of numbers of cups and quantities of milk.

  And now, here was the last straw. Sharkey. Peter, almost asleep until this moment, had suddenly woken up and precipitated himself from the push-chair all in one movement, and was now crouching by the steps demanding on behalf of Sharkey the usual tribute of synthetic terror.

  “Ow,” said Isabel patiently as she hurried up the steps, her soul already hovering over the gas stove: and “Ow—Oo” squeaked Captain Cockerill sportingly, as he scuttled helpfully behind. “Ow yourself!” snapped Freddy; and so, one after another, in their various ways, they all managed to satisfy Sharkey’s importunate owner, until it came to Cedric.