Starlight

by Stella Gibbons

  Mrs Pearson lay reading in the pink light of her bedside lamp. Suddenly, she lifted her eyes, in an unseeing stare.

  ‘Erika?’ she called, half raising herself, ‘schatz?’ There was no answer. In the hall, Erika turned to look at Mr Geddes with widened eyes.

  ‘Erika? Who are you talking to? Who’s there?’ Mrs Pearson called, her voice sounding faintly behind her door.

  ‘I come,’ Erika called, ‘now, I come, Mrs Pearson.’ Ignoring Mr Geddes, she made some attempt at speed up the stairs.

  ‘That’s someone at the door. Who is it down there? You know Mr Pearson doesn’t like visitors, schatz. Who is it?’ Mrs Pearson demanded, as she came into the room.

  The faint voice, commonplace in its lower-middle-class timbre, floated down to Mr Geddes, reassuring him. Here was no deep-toned Witch of Endor or shrill psychopath.

  ‘Mrs Pearson? It’s the Vicar – Mr Geddes. May I come up?’ he called at length. He thought that the owner of that voice would find it hard to tell anyone that they could not see her. He went quickly up the stairs.

  The pinkness and plumpness of the bed could have hinted at voluptuousness, and offended his modesty. But one sight of the face on the pillow banished every such suggestion; it was impossible for any man to look at that face, and its large eyes of pansy blue, and not want to protect and help its owner. A girl’s face, a good girl, he thought … but how shockingly ill.

  ‘Mrs Pearson?’ he said gently. ‘I’m afraid you aren’t at all well. It’s good of you to see me.’

  She made a movement with one hand towards a low chair beside the bed, and he sat down.

  ‘It’s nice of you to come … I expect you get rather fed up, visiting round to a lot of strangers, don’t you?’ A delightful smile, aged about thirteen, just looked out, and Mr Geddes was surprised into a laugh.

  ‘You’re quite right – I do – but it’s part of my work, you know; you and …’ he glanced at Erika, who had wandered up to the bed and was standing staring at them … ‘your household are part of my family – the Church’s family, and we have to keep in touch with you all.’

  ‘Schatz, give the Vicar a cigarette,’ said Mrs Pearson and then shook out one for herself, while Erika found, and extended to him, the gold case that was never used; there followed the small ceremony of lighting up. But he wished that she had not immediately begun to cough. The rose-petal quality of her looks was instantly shattered; it was, in any case, poised on the extreme edge between prettiness and its ghost.

  ‘Oh, I’m a bad one –’ she gasped, laughing, when the paroxysm had passed. ‘I smoke all day and all night too, don’t I, Erika? I thought …’ the great eyes wheeled sweetly on to his face … ‘you’d come to scold me about her not going to church again, p’raps?’

  ‘Naturally, I’d be very pleased if she came regularly.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I know one should … go … regularly.’ She was quiet, for an odd little moment, and he thought that she was still getting her breath back from coughing. ‘And … only you see Gladys Barnes took her along and I didn’t know … and … they ought to have asked my permission. Yes, that’s it. They ought to have asked my permission,’ she ended, on a higher note, turning her eyes away. How their colour changed in the light! They were certainly unusually beautiful. ‘But I don’t mind. She can go, if she likes,’ and she held out her hand to Erika, ‘do you like to go, schatz?’

  ‘I think you did not lak, Mrs Pearson,’ Erika said, looking straight out from under lumpy white brows.

  ‘Me!’ Mrs Pearson turned her head away quickly and restlessly. ‘I don’t mind … it’s only the bells I mind. They go through my head somehow and … I just like to be very quiet, you see,’ she confided, turning to him again and fixing her eyes pleadingly on his face, ‘because I’m not … well.’

  ‘What is your trouble?’ he asked and, behind the bluntness of the question, every curious story and hint that had been repeated to him, and every fear that had been expressed by the other people in the house, seemed to pass in warning procession. The sweetness, the gentleness seemed real; he would have been prepared to swear they were – but there was something else as well. He could feel it, unseen, in the silent, pink-lit room. The extraordinary sentence suddenly sprang to his mind: This room is a battlefield.

  ‘Oh … nerves.’ Mrs Pearson smiled. ‘My nerves are dreadful – have been for some years. I can’t go out or lead a … lead a … a normal life,’ she whispered, and away went her head again; and he saw a tear run down from one lucid eye.

  ‘And you’re having treatment, I suppose,’ he pursued. Let’s find out if anything’s being done for her medically, first, he thought, before we take any peculiar plunges.

  ‘Oh no. My husband agrees with me – we both can’t bear doctors – all I need is peace and quiet. Peace and quiet, that’s all … I … I am getting better. Aren’t I, Erika schatz, aren’t I getting better?’ Erika still stared, louringly, in silence. ‘Later on I’ll go out – see the lights – touch the pavements with my feet – to the pictures and … and everything … just like I used to.’

  He thought it better, at this moment, to look away. What an extraordinary phrase. It would not leave his inward ear. Touch the pavements … she was wiping her eyes with a fragile handkerchief now, scented by one of the too-sweet fragrances of the shops.

  ‘Well I’m glad to hear that, anyway … Tell me about yourself, now. We like to know our people … have you any family?’

  ‘Oh yes. A daughter. Just the one girl. She’s away from home, in a job at Hampstead. She’s a funny girl – she doesn’t seem to want to get married. She’s mad … mad on animals. That’s what she’s there for really, to help this lady with her four little dogs. Sweet little things they are. So lively. I used to see them when we were all at the seaside (that was where we met this lady). She’s very wealthy, a widow. It’s a great big house, Peggy says, more like a little palace. Old-fashioned but very stately. She’s a lovely girl to look at, my Peggy. Dark, like her father. “She walks in beauty, like the night”,’ Mrs Pearson ended in a murmur. ‘That’s exactly Peggy.’

  Mr Geddes stared for an instant; he had expected to hear some unusual things, but not Byron.

  ‘It was under a picture in some magazine …’ Mrs Pearson added in explanation, ‘I saw it and I thought: “That’s Peggy”.’ Her eyes came round to him again. ‘Now if you could get her to go to church … she frightens me sometimes, she’s so obstinate … (Erika, schatz, go and get me my tea – you’ll have some, won’t you, Mr Geddes? – no? Then you don’t mind if I do, do you?) I can’t live without my tea, can I, schatz?’

  ‘Does she like her job?’ Mr Geddes inquired; keep the simplest kind of chat going, he thought, just so that I get a foot in … she knows my name … perhaps Gladys or Mr Fisher told her.

  ‘Oh I suppose so … she doesn’t seem to like anything much, except dogs and the country and horses … she’s horse-crazy.’ Mrs Pearson brooded for a moment, her face all sadness. ‘She was at this riding-school in Sussex … I’m sure something went badly wrong there for her.’ She paused again. ‘A man,’ she said, with a soft rueful smile. ‘Girls … you know what they are.’

  In fact, beyond a few bracing jokes, Mr Geddes didn’t know; the girls in his set having jumped straight from the awkwardness of an unattached ‘spooniness’ – it was the precise word – into life-long happy wifehood.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said ineptly, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘You can’t stop them. She must just go her own way. She has to learn, and she’s going to learn.’ Mrs Pearson’s voice trailed off, and she took another cigarette. He lit it for her, glad to let the subject slide away.

  ‘I wish –’ he began deliberately, when she was lying back on the pillows again, ‘you would see a doctor. If I may say so, you do look … not at all strong. They do marvellous things for nervous cases now – (I’m not speaking of psychotherapy, only of medicine). Surely your husband …’

  He
had not wanted to introduce this name. The man’s reputation was as bad as it could be. Yet, so far, according to Gladys Barnes, no actual harm had been done to his tenants, and the woman looked cherished as some sultana in a harem.

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘Tom would never have it, Mr Geddes. He doesn’t trust them.’

  ‘But surely –’

  ‘He got through so many illnesses when he was a little boy, in Tashkent, he thinks you can cure anything, now, with hot whisky and water. I could tell you some stories –!’ Her eyes were laughing, challenging him.

  ‘Tashkent? But that’s down near Samarkand – right down near the Pamirs – don’t tell me you were born there, Mrs Pearson?’

  ‘Me? Good lord, no, I was born just round the corner, in Margrave Road.’

  ‘Your husband, then –?’

  ‘Oh yes, he was born in Tashkent – “in the sloms of Tashkent”, as he always says; his mother was a Scottish lady, governess to a Russian family, and she married an Armenian out there.’

  ‘Quite a romance,’ said Mr Geddes, not absolutely certain that he believed in the romance.

  ‘It’s romantic all right … I s’pose so. But I often think to myself – it’s the quiet, happy things that are the really romantic ones, not the queer foreign ones … I’ve had enough of them.’

  ‘Yes … well … perhaps, yes.’ Mrs Pearson was undoubtedly a character, thought Mr Geddes. Unusual. And quite unlike what he had expected.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t mean that about getting Peggy to go to church. She never would … you … you wouldn’t ask her or ever mention it, would you? She’d be so furious – and with me, too.’

  ‘If ever I try, I will choose my time carefully,’ he promised.

  ‘I shouldn’t like you to see my Peggy in a temper.’

  ‘An alarming young lady.’ Mr Geddes smiled stiffly.

  ‘Yes, she is. That’s just what she is.’ Mrs Pearson spoke earnestly, raising herself on her elbow. ‘She’s like her grandmother, my husband’s mother. She was like iron. A terrible old lady, I’ve sometimes thought. Very quiet, never raised her voice to you. But you could feel it – like iron. I was just nineteen. I can tell you, I nearly turned and ran, when I saw her.’ A faint laugh. ‘But there was Tom’ – she actually breathed a soft, amorous sigh – ‘oh, my Tom. I thought I’d risk it.’

  ‘You were very young,’ Mr Geddes said, with an effect of indulgence for some half-forgotten folly. He would have strongly disliked such a conversation; hints about the men in a girl’s life, sighing about a husband (really!) and so forth – had it been outlined in advance. But in Mrs Pearson, vulgarity simply did not exist. It was changed, in some way, into something merely amusing, pleasing. He found his lips smiling.

  ‘Where did you meet your husband?’ he pursued. ‘In Tashkent? Were you working out there?’

  ‘Me?’ Again the innocent suburban cry. ‘No – I was on holiday. A whole gang of us was on holiday, just after the war. Government temps, we were – under twenty, all of us – me and Vera Coe and Iris Sutter and Linda – Linda – I forget her name (fancy my forgetting Linda’s name!) and Elaine Ward and Lily Bott – six of us. All in this party. In Venice, for two weeks.’

  ‘In Venice!’ exclaimed Mr Geddes. ‘How … surprising.’

  Venice seemed a million miles away from this room. But even farther away, in some other world, were the young faces of Vera, Lily, Iris, Linda, Elaine and Mrs Pearson in Venice, on holiday, just after the war. They were all laughing; their laughter was reflected now, like the ghost of old sunlight, on Mrs Pearson’s haggard face.

  She was sitting up to take the tea-tray, which Erika carried into the room.

  ‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’ she babbled, smiling, drawing the folds of her robe closer about her neck, ‘then if you’ll excuse me …’ She drank thirstily. There were some superior-looking cakes on the tray, and Mrs Pearson pointed.

  ‘Excuse me pointing … Gladys made those … now I know you’ll try one.’

  ‘I mak dem,’ interrupted Erika gloomily.

  ‘Did you, schatz?’ Mrs Pearson cried. ‘Well, you are getting on, aren’t you?’

  ‘Dey was for a zurprise,’ explained Erika, with ever-deepening Götterdämmerung.

  ‘Surprise, were they? and I thought Gladys made them, well, I am sorry. They’re lovely, dear. Delicious.’

  Mr Geddes thought he had better take one, to assist in healing Erika’s pride, and did so.

  ‘Delicious,’ he pronounced in turn.

  ‘Dey better dan Glad’s,’ pronounced Erika, sitting down by the fire with the plate, and the sturm-und-drang beginning to lighten.

  ‘… there were all these boys, you see,’ Mrs Pearson was explaining, ‘after us girls. We were so blonde – all blondes (those that weren’t to begin with soon were, when they saw how the Eye-ties liked blondes), and we used to go and walk round those gorgeous shops in that big square at night. Under the arcades. (Things were just getting back into the shops in those days, you know, just after the war.) Tom was with them. He was the quiet one. They used to walk round behind us, calling remarks. But he always used to look at me, and – oh, I did like him. Lovely dark eyes, he had (still has, for that matter). All on his own in Venice, in one room, but he’d got one or two irons in the fire – only twenty-one, but started out on his own already.’

  She paused, with her cup suspended, looking down. When she spoke again, her babble had been replaced by a more deliberate speech.

  ‘Some people will tell you,’ she said, stirring her tea, ‘that Tom’s hard. Well, you have to be, to get on in this world, and a hard woman brought him up. All I know is, he’s never been hard to me. Never. He’s the best husband in the world.’

  She looked defiantly and sadly at Mr Geddes; as if awaiting some verdict.

  ‘It’s always good to hear a wife say that,’ he said gently, at last, ‘and now, do you know, I’m afraid I must be going.’ He got up from his chair. ‘I’ve got a lot to do this evening when I get home.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you’re awfully busy … it was kind of you to come. Oh, I have enjoyed our chat about old times.’

  ‘I hope you’ll let me come again soon, or my curate, and hear some more about that holiday in Venice.’ He took her hot, sweet-scented fingers for a second in his. It was like touching damp petals.

  ‘Erika, dear, you take the gentleman downstairs … good-bye, then … au revoir!’

  He left her lying on the pillows, smiling, moving her fingers towards him with a fluttering childish movement, and shut the door.

  When Erika returned, after seeing him out and performing one or two small tasks in the kitchen, she did not see Mrs Pearson for a moment. The bedside lamp was out, and the room in shadow. A lump, smooth and curved, lay under the eiderdown. Erika paused in the doorway, staring.

  ‘You sleep, Mrs Pairson?’

  ‘Gone,’ keened a high voice she had heard before, after a silence, ‘and gl –’ There followed some tentative squeaking sounds, more animal-like than anything else; exploratory, ending in a tearing-silk noise of disgust. ‘Can’t! Can’t! … stopped … not come again … never …’ – then, in a rush of words – ‘put my feet on the pavement like –’

  The words broke off. Erika cautiously began to pick up the tray with the cakes, groping forward in the shadows and the now heatless glare cast by the electric fire.

  ‘Keep him away!’ burst out a thin, minute squeak. ‘Keep him away!’ Glancing incuriously towards the bed, she saw two small steady lights, of a reddish-brown colour and very bright, shining out from the darkness. The hump outlined against the pale wall stirred.

  Balancing the tray, Erika shut the door behind her with her foot, and went downstairs: she was afraid only of hunger and cold and homelessness, nothing else. If Mrs Pearson had had one of her ‘bad turns’, as Gladys called them, it was sad, when the room had been so warm and there had been laughing. But she had the cakes, and she would take them away and eat them
in the kitchen.

  25

  The little street was deserted. Mr Geddes had nearly reached the corner, and was about to turn into the wider one, when he saw a man coming down towards him through the dim lamplight, a short stout figure in a dark overcoat. When they drew level he received such a threatening look from the eyes under the brim of the dark hat that he was horribly startled.

  His muscles drew themselves together in a kind of readiness, and he walked on, listening, waiting …

  The expected thing happened. The footsteps stopped.

  ‘Here … you …’ called a voice behind him, ‘where’ve you been? You been to my house, worrying Mrs Pearson?’

  Mr Geddes turned. The man was almost on top of him! He must move like a cat …

  ‘I’ve been to see her, yes. I went to try and help her,’ he said, raising his voice, speaking firmly, looking full into the dark melancholy eyes. ‘I’m a priest, and that’s my work in the world.’

  ‘We don’t want your help. Keep out.’ A clenched fist began to swing at his side, as if driven by the force of his anger. ‘Or I’ll teach you.’

  ‘If you love her you’ll want –’ Mr Geddes was beginning, when the man spat at him.

  It struck his coat, and with it there came into him the controlled impersonal rage which had been useful forty years ago, when he boxed at Cambridge. The spring followed, but he stepped lightly sideways, and, as Pearson lunged at him, landed an uppercut to the left jaw; not hard, not vicious, just enough to stop him. The force of his own movement carried Pearson beyond the blow, and he lost his balance and fell into the gutter. His hat fell off, into some rubbish.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mr Geddes said, ‘had to stop you somehow,’ and held out his hand.

  The evening’s most surprising event then occurred; Pearson let himself be helped up. He stood silent, while Mr Geddes brushed him down; then gave him his hat, and turned his attention and a handkerchief to the spittle on his coat. All this was done in silence.