Seven Lean Years

by Celia Fremlin

  “Come on, Ellen, we must be getting on.”

  Melissa, who dealt with Saturday morning gossip as expeditiously as she did everything else, was already manœuvring her wheeled basket towards the exit, avoiding the hazards of push-chairs and nyloned ankles with a skill that Ellen could only envy. Hastily gathering up her change and bidding good-bye to Miss Bassett, Ellen followed her cousin out into the glittering noisy street. When they had moved a few paces away among the crowd, Melissa commented:

  “I thought I’d better rescue you from that old gas-bag! I don’t know how you stand her. Personally, I can’t endure people whose interests are so narrow.”

  “I don’t see what’s so elevating about knicker elastic, either, if it comes to that,” retorted Ellen, all her unwilling identification with Miss Bassett now driving her to that lady’s defence. “She was only asking after Cousin Laura, anyway.”

  “I bet she was!” Melissa gave her short, wondering laugh, and Ellen knew that something caustic would follow. “I suppose she was pumping you to find out if Cousin Laura was going to come and live with you; and how your father felt about it; all that sort of thing. Of course, if you live as narrow a life as Miss Bassett does, cooped up in two rooms with a mother who’s about a hundred, then even a scandal thirty-five years old must seem quite a thrill.”

  “Oh, rubbish!” said Ellen crossly. “She knows as well as you do that Father and Cousin Laura have been perfectly good friends for years and years. Lots of divorced people are. And actually, Miss Bassett doesn’t lead a narrow life at all. She teaches all the week, and——”

  “Well, that’s narrow, too,” said Melissa comfortably; and then, rather at a tangent: “Of course divorced people can be good friends—I never said they couldn’t. Look at the Lawsons—she still does all his mending for him, and he goes round to baby-sit for her every Saturday night while she goes out with her boy-friend. And the Whittakers: all the time he was living at home, he used to go to his mistress at weekends and talk about how his wife didn’t understand him; and now they’re properly separated he comes home every weekend and talks to his wife about how his mistress doesn’t understand him. It sounds rather fun. I was saying to Roger only last week that perhaps we’d get on better if we were divorced, but he says it works out very expensive, and anyway he doesn’t mind quarrelling, if I don’t…. Anyway, to go back to Cousin Laura: if she and your father are still such good pals, why don’t you ask her round? To sit in the garden, or something? She must be sick of being cooped up in Leonard’s flat. In this weather, too!”

  “Yes, I was thinking of it,” said Ellen, a little confusedly—she did not want to admit that Leonard had expressed the very same misgivings as Melissa had just scornfully attributed to Miss Bassett—“but it’s a bit difficult, you see—it isn’t as if Leonard had a car … and she must be tired after the journey….”

  “Listen!” interrupted Melissa. “I could fetch her, if you like. This afternoon. Roger’ll be back with the car by lunch-time, and I don’t suppose he’ll be wanting it for anything, he hates driving at weekends. Shall I do that?”

  “Well—it would be awfully nice of you,” began Ellen cautiously. It would, too. But it would also be one more efficient, helpful thing that Melissa managed to find time for in her busy life, while Ellen, with all the time in the world, couldn’t even drive a car. For a moment, that seemed to sum up the whole difference between them. And anyway, what would Leonard say …?

  “Leonard thinks it might upset her,” said Ellen, carefully, steering a precarious way between her wish to confide in her capable cousin and her reluctance to expose Leonard—and hence herself—to Melissa’s brisk mockery. “She hasn’t seen any of us for ages, you see,” she proceeded cautiously. “He feels it might be too much for her, all at once.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Melissa briskly. “That’s what he said before she got here, I expect. Now that he’s had her on his hands for forty-eight hours, he’ll turn round and say he never said anything of the sort, and why the hell are you neglecting the poor old soul like this. You know what men are!”

  These last words were balm to Ellen’s insecure pride: she could have skipped along the shimmering pavement like a ten-year-old for sheer relief. That was just exactly what Leonard would say. It was wonderful to be told so authoritatively that this sort of irritating unfairness wasn’t a special defect in Leonard; it was simply characteristic of the whole male sex. “You know what men are”—an affectionate, feminine shrug of the shoulders…. Ellen felt delightfully included in Melissa’s circle of young wives; and filled, too, with tolerant fondness towards Leonard. Not a romantic fondness, of course—that would be too much to expect after seven years—but a warm, bright, practical feeling—just the way all these cheerful married women jostling in the sunlit street felt about their husbands.

  “All right. That would be lovely,” she agreed happily. “We’ll both go, then, and bring her back for a nice long afternoon in the garden. You’re quite right, Melissa; she’ll love it.”

  *

  Laura Rivers was sitting alone in the little back room of Leonard’s flat, staring at the awful array of her suitcases, her hold-all, and her big tin trunk. Tears of sheer tiredness came into her eyes at the mere thought of having to unpack them, ever. Even the thought of having Leonard and his landlady unpack them for her filled her with a restless exhaustion that she did not know how to control. It was stupid … absurd … she mustn’t be found crying over something so trivial! Laura shut her eyes tight to hold back the tears. Shut them tighter … tighter….

  When she woke, two or three minutes later, Laura felt as if she had slept for hours. The cases were still there, but now the sight of them filled her with a wonderful vigour. This would be a splendid chance to go through all her things … to throw away the rubbish … to get all her papers sorted, tied up in nice little packets with rubber bands, each with a neat little oblong label, printed clearly in block capitals, so that there would never be any muddle again. The thought of those neat little labels was delightful … her muscles felt stronger, her brain more alert. Her fingers were quivering to begin. The square black box on the chair, that was the one….

  But how heavy it was! And how the fiddly little key slithered about on the brass lock before it slipped into place! By the time she had the lid open, Laura was tired again, almost in tears … but the sight of the letters revived her. Particularly the old ones…. As she touched them, peered at their pale ink, she felt creeping back into her a tiny fraction of the strength that had been hers when first she had unfolded them—forty—fifty—even seventy years ago. One after another, with growing strength, the years dropping from her like dust from the shoes of one leaving an old neglected house and going out into the sunshine, she read them, smiled over them, and laid them before her on the table. Another … and another … and another….

  CHAPTER V

  ELLEN HATED TO FIND Leonard’s flat so dark this June afternoon. She and Melissa had arrived soon after lunch and had been told by his landlady that Mr Rivers was out, but that the old lady was in, perhaps resting in her room, she would go and see … and with that she had shut the door on the bright day outside and had led them up to this cheerless, sunless sitting-room. So here they were now, waiting; Ellen feeling depressed, almost imprisoned in one of the two big armchairs that even now, at midsummer, still faced senselessly towards the hearth. The dim summerless blankness of the room was spoiling, inch by inch, that warm, happy affection she had felt towards Leonard this morning.

  Was any woman ever so unreasonable? Ellen pulled herself up sharply. This was on a par with disliking Jeremy because of his small mouth and his pale eyelashes. Just because a man was unlucky enough to live in a flat that faced north, and hadn’t any garden—was that anything to hold against him? I’m a mean-spirited, carping pig, said Ellen to herself: and was by that much the more determined to contradict whatever Melissa might be about to say in disparagement of Leonard’s flat when she had finished he
r obviously disapproving survey of the gloomy room.

  And sure enough, Melissa gave her short laugh.

  “You don’t seem to have brightened it up for him much in seven years, do you, my pet,” she observed. “What about the indefinable touch of a woman’s hand, and all that?”

  Ellen laughed too, ruefully.

  “Indefinable touches are wasted on Leonard,” she pointed out. “Just as they are on Father. They both hate to have their things interfered with, even with the best of intentions. Particularly if it’s with the best of intentions, in fact.”

  “Well, naturally,” said Melissa, with comforting certainty. “Men hate being done good to. And you can’t blame them, really,” she added thoughtfully. “It’s something that can’t be fought, you see, and men always hate being confronted with something that can’t be fought. It frightens them, like a secret weapon. All the same,” she went on, surveying the drab, bleak surfaces, “You could make him a few bright cushions, or something. If he’s anything like Roger, he’ll say they’re frightful, and that he hates cushions anyway; but he’ll be awfully pleased really. You try it.”

  Ellen considered this. Leonard would certainly say they were frightful; would he also be awfully pleased really? Warmed once more by the inclusion of Leonard in Melissa’s “men are like that” generalisations, she was quite prepared to regard her cousin as an expert in this tenuous and delightful battle of the sexes. Yes, she would make Leonard some cushions.

  “But I do wonder,” Melissa was saying, “that he doesn’t find somewhere a bit more cheerful. He doesn’t have to stay here, does he?”

  “Well, no,” said Ellen. “But he’s used to it, I suppose. And after all, it’s only until——”

  She stopped. The implications seemed worse than ever with the old lady, perhaps sleeping, in the very next room. But all the same, after being engaged for seven years, it was rather hard if you couldn’t even mention your marriage without feeling that you had said something heartless. “Until we get married,” she finished firmly.

  Melissa’s short laugh again; and Ellen felt herself grow tense.

  “‘Until you get married!’” quoted Melissa ruthlessly. “Honestly, Ellen, I don’t want to be unkind, but I do think it’s time you were made to look things in the face, before you waste your whole life on this business. Why do you suppose Leonard hasn’t married you already, if he really wants to?”

  “Well….” Ellen was nonplussed. The impossibility of Leonard’s marrying her while his stepmother was still alive had been so fixed an assumption, for so long, that she could not remember ever having queried it.

  “Well, because he has Cousin Laura to support,” she said quite unable, after so many years of acceptance, to judge whether this was or was not an adequate answer.

  “Well, and you’ve got Uncle Richard to look after, but it would none of it be a scrap more difficult if you were married,” said Melissa. “I don’t know the ins and outs of your finances, of course, but whatever are the various incomes the four of you are living on now, they’d still be the same, and you’d still be able to live on them. In fact, you might be a lot better off, because Leonard wouldn’t have to keep this miserable flat any more, and you could have his mother living with you, and save all those nursing-home fees. You’ve got a big enough house, goodness knows, and I don’t suppose that two old dears would be much more trouble than one, they’d keep each other amused….”

  Ellen had been listening with both respect and an uneasy sense of illumination to the first part of Melissa’s speech; but now, when Melissa began arranging all their lives for them in this airy, almost mocking way, as if she was arranging toys in a doll’s house, Ellen felt herself growing angry.

  “I don’t know whether it would work out at all,” she said shortly. “You can’t just dump people on each other like that and say that they’ll keep each other amused. How would you like it if I invited—oh—let’s say Miss Bassett—if I invited Miss Bassett to share your flat, and explained to you that it was all right because you’d keep each other amused! I bet you’d——”

  But before Ellen could enlarge on this hypothetical conflagration, they were interrupted. The landlady returned with the information that old Mrs. Rivers wasn’t lying down after all, and they could go in to her. She then retreated, with an air of disclaiming all responsibility, which Ellen couldn’t, for the moment, account for.

  Cousin Laura’s bedroom was darker even than the sitting-room; and there seemed to Ellen something dreadful about the fact that the gas-fire was burning on this golden midsummer day. Its quiet sighings and poppings seemed like the peevish relics of some long-past winter—a winter dark, and dull, and always indoors.

  Cousin Laura seemed to be dozing. Not in bed—the landlady had been literally correct in saying that she was not lying down—but sitting up in a wooden chair, her back very straight, but her head sunk a little forward in sleep. She must have dropped off in the middle of going through her papers, for the table in front of her was littered with documents of every sort, old and new—far more than could possibly concern just her present affairs.

  It was Melissa who noticed the letter first. Her quick brain and deft fingers had identified and abstracted it from the muddled spread of papers while Ellen was still absorbing the all-too-familiar atmosphere of the whole. This was just like Father’s room at home: the smell of the long-dried brownish ink; the brittleness of the old paper and the old emotions, faded past nostalgia into dullness. The awful unfinished-ness of a life drawing to its end, its tangled threads rotting in their tangles, its problems disintegrating while still unsolved.

  “Look! Ellen! Fancy her keeping it all these years!”

  Melissa spoke in a noisy whisper, unfolding the deeply-creased paper. Together they leaned over it; and together—or so it seemed to Ellen—their minds travelled back across twenty-five years to that Christmas holiday when they were nine years old, and Melissa was staying at the Fortescues’ home. Leonard and his stepmother were staying there too, Ellen remembered; and in the afternoons the three children were sent up to the attics to play while the grown-ups enjoyed some peace and quiet downstairs.

  It had been cold up there in the attics; cold, and dusty, and very exciting. Often they had just sat round on the old trunks and boxes and played Snap, or Happy Families; but sometimes, as the short winter afternoon faded, Leonard would devise other, more exciting games: ghosty, creepy games, that involved tiptoeing about in the fading light … hiding behind the heavy, shadowy humps of furniture and old boxes under the eaves….

  It was during one of these games that the letter had been found. Leonard had found it, in one of Father’s old boxes of papers: he must have been looking through them to while away the time as he squatted in his hiding place. Ellen remembered how the game had disintegrated as he crouched there, in sudden thrilling preoccupation, over the old paper.

  “Hush!” he had kept saying; and “Shut up!” and “I’ll show you in a minute.”

  And in a minute he had.

  “I say,” he had exclaimed. “Just read this! My stepmother’s going to kill your father, I should think, Ellen. And you too, I wouldn’t be surprised. Just look what she wrote to him when he left her and went off to marry your mother!”

  And Ellen had looked. She remembered the numbness of her fingers that winter afternoon, and the sad and lovely feeling of the Christmas holidays drawing to their end; she could almost feel again the sagging lumpiness of the old trunk on which she had sat as she puzzled over the grown-up handwriting. And in the end Leonard had had to read it to them, and explain it too. By the fading winter light through the little window, he had read out with schoolboy glee the words written in fury and despair ten years before. The denunciations, the proud, despairing anger, the unspeakable misery—with instinctive childish showmanship Leonard, at thirteen, had managed to do justice to them, and to hold his small audience speechless with horror and excitement.

  And it had all seemed like a game. Rou
nd-eyed, the nine-year-old Ellen had listened to it all; had shivered in delicious terror—and had gone on loving and relying on Cousin Laura exactly as she had before. For the dramatic tale, delightfully horrifying as it was to listen to, seemed to have nothing whatever to do with ordinary life. The story of the rejected wife (Cousin Laura) plotting dire revenge on the faithless husband (Ellen’s father) and on her beautiful rival (Ellen’s mother) had made her gasp and shiver; but never had she really connected it with any of the people concerned. Her own mother, of course, she could not remember; no wonder, then, that she should be merely a beautiful wraith in the story. But the rejected, vengeful wife had seemed equally a wraith, Ellen reflected, looking back. Never, so far as she could remember, had she really connected this fiery figure of frustrated passion with stout, sensible Cousin Laura, living, at that time, only a few minutes’ walk away; always kind, always reliable, always on hand in any crisis. Indeed, Ellen now smiled to remember that, waking one night from a dream of the revengeful wife, it had been to Cousin Laura that she had called; Cousin Laura who had come and sat heavily on Ellen’s bed, rocking the springs with her clumsy bulk, and had administered comfort—affectionate, common-sensical, and surprisingly apt, considering that Ellen could not bring herself to explain exactly what she was crying about. For although the woman of the story had no connection in Ellen’s emotions with the real Cousin Laura, Ellen must have experienced a certain intellectual embarrassment at their identity.

  And her father—he, perhaps, of all the figures in the drama, was the only one who to Ellen’s nine-year-old imagination retained just a little of the quality of his real-life self. And that was probably because Father, in those days, had always seemed to Ellen something of a story-book figure in any case. For one thing, he had always been old—more like a grandfather than a father, and quite remote from a child’s interests and occupations. He had always been proud and fond of her, yes; but irritable, and out of touch; too old, Ellen realised now, to adapt himself to fatherhood after a life of almost bachelor freedom.