The Hours Before Dawn

by Celia Fremlin

  Miss Brandon approached, with a reassuringly bright smile.

  ‘But of course – I understand – thank you so much. Perhaps I will dry off a bit before I go upstairs, since you are so kind. That little electric fire in my room – it’s more for the summer, isn’t it?’

  Now it’s coming, thought Louise. She wished she had had more experience as a landlady, Was it usually at the end of only twenty-four hours that tenants came to lodge their first complaints? And was one expected to take a firm, take-it-or-leave-it sort of attitude? (Well really, Miss Brandon, I’m sorry you’re not satisfied, but you must realise that at the rent you’re paying …’) Or did one meekly, ineffectively, promise to put everything right …?

  But, to Louise’s surprise, Miss Brandon did not pursue the subject of the one-bar electric fire which, according to Mark, was all that the wiring in that part of the house would stand. Nor did she embark on the other dangerous topic – that of the baby’s crying in the night. She merely moved closer to the fire, and, standing with her back to the warmth, she gazed with interest at Louise and Michael. Louise felt a little embarrassed under this scrutiny. She drew the shawl more closely around Michael, and said, to break the silence:

  ‘A dreadful evening, isn’t it?’

  Her visitor started a little, as if her mind was elsewhere. Then she answered:

  ‘Why – yes. Most unpleasant. More like winter again.’

  Clearly the conversation was not going to prosper. Michael drew away with one final, smacking suck, and his head, heavy with the sudden sleep of satiation, flopped against Louise’s shoulder. If only he would sleep like this at night! thought Louise, shifting him higher on to her shoulder, so that the dead weight of his head lay warm and with lovely trustfulness against her neck. From now until half past nine or ten he would sleep as if drugged; as if stunned; no power on earth would wake him. But after that …

  ‘He’s a lovely baby. Very big and forward for his age, is he not?’

  Louise looked up to meet Miss Brandon’s civil, enquiring gaze.

  ‘Why, yes,’ she answered, pleased both at the compliment and at the breaking of the uneasy silence. ‘I suppose he is. He’s quite different from my other two. They were both quite small babies: Harriet was barely six pounds when she was born.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Miss Brandon was clearly making an effort to keep the conversation going. ‘But then, you’re not so very big yourself are you? I suppose this one takes after your husband?’

  ‘Well – no – I don’t know that he does, really,’ said Louise, squinting round towards the pouting, unconscious little face so close to her own. ‘He’s so much darker, for one thing. Now Margery, when she was a baby, she was the image of her father. Some people say she still is—’

  Louise stopped, uneasily conscious that she was beginning to run on about her children in just the kind of way that up-to-date mothers must be so careful to avoid. To talk shop if you are a mother is not socially permissible as it is if you are a typist or a bus conductress.

  But to her relief, Miss Brandon did not look bored at all. On the contrary, she pursued the subject of her own accord:

  ‘Margery? That’s the older one, isn’t it? Yes, I suppose she is like her father – she has his colouring, anyway. That shade of red hair – most unusual.’

  Louise was a little surprised that Miss Brandon should already have noticed so exactly the colour of Mark’s hair. Last night Mark had been working late, and had not encountered Miss Brandon at all; and the evening before – the evening when Miss Brandon had come to look at the room – she and Mark had only met for that few moments on the doorstep, in the deepening dusk, before Mark had bolted so unceremoniously into the kitchen.

  It’s nice of her, though, thought Louise, to try to take an interest in my family like this. Or perhaps, she reflected more cynically, this is just a rather cultured way of making me put a two-bar fire in her room. I expect she believes that the way to a woman’s heart is through her children. Of course, she doesn’t know that it isn’t a matter of my heart at all; it’s a matter of the wiring on the top floor.

  The conversation seemed in this last minute to have petered out. Miss Brandon leaned closer to the fire, though her usually pale face already looked scarlet with the heat. Before the silence had had time to become painful, the slam of the front door and a cheery shout announced that Mark had returned from work; and had returned in high good humour, too, in spite of everything. He swung into the room, his coppery curls glistening with raindrops, and had given both Louise and the baby a resounding kiss before he noticed the visitor by the fire.

  ‘Why – hullo – good evening,’ he said, glancing at Louise enquiringly.

  ‘I asked Miss Brandon to come in and warm herself, and meet some more of the family,’ said Louise hastily, trying to remember what, if anything, she and Mark had decided about ‘keeping themselves to themselves’ or otherwise. Was he going to be annoyed that she had so readily invited this new tenant into the family sitting-room? Was he going to—?

  ‘MUM-MEE! I CAN’T FIND MY OTHER GARTER, THEY WERE ON MY GREY ONES, AND THE ONES IN THE DRAWER YOU SAID LOOK IN ARE MARGERY’S, AND THE OTHER—’

  By this time Louise had reached the upstairs landing, and was able to stem the flow of this ear-splitting narrative.

  ‘Hush, dear, hush! Why can’t you come downstairs and tell me instead of standing there yelling like that? Look – aren’t those yours? Under the chair?’

  By the time Harriet and her garters were re-united, and Michael was settled in his cot, it was time to turn the potatoes down and put the fish in the oven. Louise was surprised, when she returned to the sitting-room, to find that Miss Brandon was still there, and deep in conversation with Mark, who was looking both pleased and interested.

  ‘I should have thought the Medea was a bit advanced for your fifth-form girls,’ he was saying. ‘The theme of it, I mean. – Her feelings about Jason. I should have thought the point would be rather lost on teenagers who’ve seen nothing of life.’

  ‘It isn’t life I’m supposed to be teaching them,’ retorted Miss Brandon. ‘It’s Greek. And as far as language goes, the Medea is a great deal simpler than many plays with possibly more suitable themes. Particularly the choruses—’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ interposed Mark eagerly. ‘I agree entirely. But surely the theme is important too? How can those girls understand the play if they don’t understand the complexity of Medea’s character? They don’t know anything about the feelings of a real grown woman.’

  ‘Hardly anyone nowadays does know anything about the feelings of a real grown woman,’ said Miss Brandon quietly. ‘Most women simply feel what novels and magazines tell them they feel. And as for most men – why, if they ever came across a real grown woman, you wouldn’t see their heels for the dust! She’d be too strong for them, you see. True femininity isn’t weak at all; it’s the strongest, fiercest thing on earth. Euripides sees that clearly enough. What he doesn’t see – what he gets quite upside down – is the mainspring – the motive – of that strength and fierceness.’

  ‘But, good Lord, I should have thought that’s just exactly what he does see!’ exclaimed Mark, obviously enjoying himself. ‘It’s a wonderful piece of character-drawing! What stronger motive could she have? What worse injury can a man possibly do to a woman than to desert her, with two little children, after she had given up everything for him? Her home – her reputation – years of her life – and has even done murder for him?’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ insisted Miss Brandon quietly and obstinately. ‘Men can do women a worse injury than that. And they do. Often feeling themselves very virtuous in the process. However,’ she continued, with a sudden change of tone, ‘there are some very fine speeches in the Medea. Particularly where her jealousy and hatred are laid bare. Her hatred …’ As she repeated the word, Miss Brandon’s glance fell, somehow, on Louise. Only for a moment; a second later she was looking once again into Mark’s eager face as he defended his
best-known classical author:

  ‘A splendid piece of writing,’ he was saying. ‘Even you can’t deny that. You remember the speech after Aegeus has gone out—?’ He broke off: ‘Look, have you got a copy of it handy? Let’s thrash this thing out properly, while we’re about it.’

  ‘I’ve got eighteen copies of it, to be exact,’ said Miss Brandon with a little smile. ‘I’ve to distribute them in class tomorrow. Would you care to come up—?’

  ‘Oh – jolly good! Rather!’ and a moment later Louise watched the two of them going up the stairs together, still arguing enthusiastically.

  When Mark came down to supper, after having to be called three times, he was still bubbling over with eagerness.

  ‘Damned interesting woman, that,’ he announced, as he drew up his chair. ‘Did you know she’d written a book on Homeric civilisation? Apparently it was very well reviewed. I told her she was wasted, teaching those lumps of grammar-school girls, but, as she says, there’s very little else you can do with a classics degree. Unless you get a University lectureship, of course. Apparently she came very near that a few months ago, but it fell through. Still, she’ll get other chances – Margery! Louise, can’t you get that child to look what she’s doing occasionally?’

  ‘Margery! Oh dear—! Well, you’d better get the cloth, dear, and wipe it up. But Mark, isn’t it rather puzzling? I mean, if she’s written books and all that sort of thing, why should she be pigging it in our attic? – No, Margery, not the floor cloth – the one hanging by the sink – I mean, you’d think she must be quite well off.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it! A scholarly work like that doesn’t bring in anything. Anyone’ll tell you. But there’s an odd thing, Louise – all the while I was talking to her, I had the feeling that I’d met her before somewhere, but I couldn’t for the life of me think where. As if she’d looked very different before – or in very different surroundings – something like that—’

  ‘Perhaps you met her when you were up at Cambridge,’ suggested Louise. ‘Naturally she’d have looked very different then.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mark thoughtfully. ‘I must ask her some time what year she was up.’

  ‘If you want her to go on contradicting you about Euripides, I wouldn’t ask anything so tactless,’ said Louise, smiling. ‘She was probably up years before your time, and she won’t thank you for forcing her to admit it! – Margery! – For goodness sake don’t flap it all over the food like that! – Here, I’d better do it. – But I still think it’s funny – her taking a room like that, I mean. Harriet, that’s far too much butter! No no – it’s no use putting it back now it’s all jammy—’ And for the time being the subject of Vera Brandon had to be shelved.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was Saturday, the first Saturday in April, and it seemed to Louise that with one dizzying lurch of the thermometer summer had struck. The radiance of the afternoon sun seemed to be soaking gloriously into her tired limbs just as if, she reflected ruefully, her tired limbs really were out in the sunshine like everyone else’s, instead of grovelling about in this tool-cupboard in search of Mark’s canvas shoes. But then, she remembered, as a tin half full of dried-up paint fell viciously on her elbow, the first sudden sunshine of the year was always like that once you had become a housewife. It drove you not outdoors, but in. Fishing in long-shut drawers for the children’s summer frocks. Ironing them. Restoring missing buttons. Rootling about in dark cupboards for the garden cushions; for the deckchairs; for the ropes of the swing. And now Mark’s shoes, for which she could only search half-heartedly because of a growing conviction that they must have been left behind at Westcliff last summer – a mishap which would undoubtedly prove to have been all her, Louise’s, fault. By the time all this grubbing about was finished, the sunshine would probably be over, and she would have missed it all. And yet, somehow, mysteriously, she wouldn’t have missed it at all; not while Harriet’s voice sounded out there, piercing as a blackbird’s through the sun-warmed air; not while the sturdy thudding of the two pairs of sandalled feet sounded so purposefully on the stone path and then on the linoleum. In and out…. In and out. Into the kitchen…. Into the garden…. Back into the kitchen again…. What were they doing?

  Oh, the Tent, of course. Louise felt suddenly very tired when she thought about the Tent – that fearsome erection of kitchen chairs, table, clothes horse, ironing board … all of which would have to be brought in again at nightfall, by Louise…. And they’d want the ground-sheet too, of course … it was probably somewhere in here….

  At this point in her meditations, Louise was interrupted by Mark’s voice – already edged with that grim patience which a week-end so often calls forth in fathers.

  ‘I say, Louise!’ he yelled from somewhere upstairs. ‘Can’t you make those kids keep the back door shut? There’s a howling draught up here – my papers are blowing all over the place.’

  ‘Harriet – Margery!’ yelled Louise obediently. ‘Shut the door!’

  A vigorous slam was followed barely five seconds later by a renewed bursting open of the offending door, and a fresh hurtling of breathless small bodies along the passage.

  ‘Shut the door!’ called Louise, this time mechanically. Another slam. Another scurrying of feet. Again the door was open. Again Mark yelled down in protest. ‘Shut the door!’ called Louise; and again: ‘Shut the door!’

  Well, here was the ground-sheet, anyway – this stiff, sticky, unyielding block of obstinacy. She yanked it out, accompanied by a clatter of miscellaneous metalware, and dragged it into the garden.

  ‘Here you are, children—’ she was beginning, when a voice from over the fence interrupted her – a precise, over-ladylike voice, trembling with something more than ladylike emotion:

  ‘Mrs Henderson,’ it said, ‘I don’t want to seem to complain. I can put up with a lot, anyone will tell you that. But that blessed door of yours’ (the ladylike diction began to slip as justifiable indignation came into its own). ‘That blessed door has been going slam, slam, slam the whole blessed afternoon till I can’t put up with it any more. It’s more than anybody’s nerves can stand, Mrs Henderson, and I don’t mind telling you. It’s just about driving me crazy….

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Philips,’ said Louise helplessly. ‘I’ll see it doesn’t happen again.’ She turned back towards the house. ‘Don’t shut the door!’ she nearly called; and then, remembering Mark still within, she substituted, ‘Shut the door quietly!’ Even as she spoke, she was overwhelmed by the futility of such a command. As if the children could shut doors quietly! Better, perhaps, to prop it open a few inches….

  ‘Louise!’ came Mark’s voice for the third time, as the draught whistled through the house all over again. ‘Can’t you get those damn kids to—’

  For a moment Louise stood quite still. What would they all do, she wondered, if she were to lie down on the floor, then and there, and have hysterics? If she screamed, and sobbed and gibbered, and yelled out: ‘I can’t – I can’t do any more about any of you! I CAN’T.’ Would Mark rush downstairs, all concern and tenderness? Would Mrs Philips wipe that expression of watchful disapproval off her face and hurry round with offers of neighbourly assistance? Would the children stand round, awed and bewildered, shocked at last into silence …?

  ‘Mummy!’

  For one mad second, Louise wondered if it had happened; if she had in fact fallen into hysterics. For Margery’s eyes were round, and a little awed; her voice rather prim and unnatural: ‘Mummy,’ she repeated. ‘There’s a lady out in the front, and she says do you know baby’s crying? She says he was crying when she started out to do her shopping, and he was still crying when she came back, and so she said she thought she’d better enquire if he was being looked after, and she said—’

  Louise knew that this recital would continue without intermission for as long as she cared to stand there listening to it. Hastily pulling herself together, she managed to say brightly: ‘All right – thank you, darling. I’ll go and s
ee to it. Oh – and Margery. I wish you and Harriet would try to shut the back door quietly. You heard Mrs Philips complaining, didn’t you? Or, better still, don’t keep on coming indoors. Can’t you stay in the garden and play with the things you’ve taken out already? What do you keep coming in for?’

  ‘What?’ said Margery, bringing her gaze back from the vacancy she had been so comfortably contemplating since her mother began speaking. ‘What, Mummy?’

  But Michael’s yells from the front garden had now reached a pitch that could leave no doubt as to which was the most urgent task. Louise hurried through the house, leaving Margery, Mrs Philips and the back door to unravel their destiny as best they could.

  It was nearly teatime before Louise remembered that her mother-in-law was expected that evening.

  ‘I wish I’d thought of it this morning,’ she said, as she set a plate of bread-and-jam on the rickety garden table. ‘Then I could have asked Miss Brandon about it before she went out. We can’t very well barge into her room and take the books without asking her.’

  ‘Why not? Does she lock her door?’ asked Mark obtusely, heaving himself up in his deckchair. ‘I say – it’s getting damn cold. D’you think it’s such a good idea having tea out here after all?’

  ‘Well—’ Louise looked across the lilacs to the sinking sun. Half an hour ago it had been so brilliant, tea indoors had seemed out of the question. Now the sun hung red and dimmed, surrounded by a thickening mist that augured rain for tomorrow. And thank goodness, too! thought Louise. I couldn’t have stood another day of Mrs Philips and the back door….

  Aloud she said: ‘I think we might as well have it here now it’s ready. And with Michael just settled on his rug, too – he’ll only scream if we go in. Children! Tea! – Listen, Mark, about your mother coming this afternoon—’