Seven Lean Years

by Celia Fremlin

  She returned a little chastened.

  “He wouldn’t let me pick any,” she announced—in plain English this time, and Ellen reflected that the delicate and exact nuances of difference between the kinds of sentence which Adela and her friends would put into their pet jargon and the kinds which they wouldn’t would form a wonderful subject for research by some sociological body with months and months to waste.

  “But,” continued Adela, “I’ve brought the rest that he’s picked so far. Let’s do them.”

  With another jolt to Mrs Butler’s chair, and another ineffectual squawk from Jeremy, Adela got herself seated on the grass again, only to find that her Aunt Ellen had taken the basket away.

  “No, Adela,” said Ellen firmly. “There aren’t very many left, and your uncle likes to have some to do in the evening.”

  “Ooo! Greedy!” exclaimed Adela. “And he’s doing all the picking, too. Why should he have all the fun?”

  “Hush, dear,” said Melissa aggrie vedly, and entirely for show, since it was clear that she was on her daughter’s side. “Your uncle is a very old man, and so he likes work! He has so little to do, you see. Goodness, I wish I had a chance to feel like that sometimes. Don’t you, Mrs Butler?”

  “Indeed yes,” replied Mrs Butler warmly—and Ellen felt a familiar pang of irritation at the way her female tenants, who so ceaselessly complained about each other to her, were yet invariably cordial and pleasant when they met face to face. Making it seem as if it was she, Ellen, who was doing all the complaining, not them at all. She listened somewhat sourly as the two vied amiably with each other on the all-absorbing topic of what a lot they had to do.

  And they had, too. Both of them were very busy women, with good reason to feel proud of the way they organised their lives. Their eyes sparkled, their hands gestured excitedly as the amount of housework Melissa got done before breakfast measured itself exultantly against the amount of shopping Mrs Butler could fit into her lunch hour; the number of office notes Mrs Butler could write up while eating her supper jostled for place with the amount of ironing Melissa could do while listening to the midnight news.

  “You like it, Melissa!” Ellen burst out in sudden exasperation. “You know you do. You love it! You’d give up your money, your meals, and half the years of your life before you’d give up being rushed off your feet. So would lots of people. You say Father clings to his work because he’s old—it’s not that at all. You cling to yours in exactly the same way. The only reason you don’t seem as if you’re clinging to it is because no one is in a position to take it away from you. I mean, you could lose your job, of course, but you’d still be able to work harder than ever at home, mending and making-do and so on. Your busy-ness isn’t threatened; but Father’s is. People are in a position to take his work away from him. The old are terribly conscious of that, all the time; of being surrounded by people in a position to take their work away from them—and all in the name of kindness, too, which makes it worse. Look at these gooseberries I’m trying to save for Father to top and tail—it’s like trying to save them from a flock of vultures, really it is! You’re simply greedy about work, Melissa. You want more than your share!”

  Ellen stopped, quite out of breath. Melissa gave her short laugh.

  “So speaks the lady of leisure,” she commented; and Ellen was silenced. Because, of course, it was true; and she couldn’t even be offended. For though most people—certainly Melissa—would rather be accused of almost any vice or shortcoming than of having an easy life, the accusation still masquerades as a sort of compliment, and can thus be levelled at one’s friends with impunity.

  Roger, although to all appearances still comatose, must have noticed Ellen’s discomfiture, for he now opened one quizzical eye and fixed it on her.

  “It’s all a Capitalist plot,” he explained drowsily. “They’ve managed to persuade the workers that really they hate working, so that now the poor misguided creatures clamour to be allowed to do less and less work for shorter and shorter hours —which of course leaves more and more work for unscrupulous gluttons like Melissa.”

  He winked at Ellen so languidly that his eye stayed closed at the end of it; and Ellen was left wondering whether it was she or Melissa who was being mocked. Perhaps Melissa was wondering this too, for an uncomfortable little silence fell, broken only by Adela’s tuneless humming and by the uneven drumming of Jeremy’s feet as he lay on his stomach reading the copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy that Ellen had brought down from the attic a few days before. She had not really expected the book to appeal to him, and for a moment felt surprised and a little flattered by his absorption in it. But only for a moment; a second later, she realised that he wasn’t, in fact, reading it at all. His interest, such as it was, was centred in a small, aimless pattern that he was pricking with a pin all down the margin of the page—careless, uneven figures-of-eight winding stupidly into each other, and here and there encroaching on the print itself.

  “Jeremy!” Ellen snatched the book away from him, for once oblivious of whether or not she was behaving like a typical maiden aunt. “Look what you’ve done! A lovely old book like this, nearly a hundred years old!”

  Jeremy blinked up at her, expressionless.

  “Sorry,” he said, disinterestedly, but Ellen was not going to be pacified so perfunctorily. She was turning the pages over with quick, angry fingers to see how many others he had defaced.

  “Look! And this too! Really, Jeremy!”

  Justifiably angry, she held up the book for all to see, open at yet another damaged page—defaced this time not with a pin, but with scissors; the whole of the top of the page had been idly snipped into a fine fringe about half an inch deep.

  “Just look!”

  Ellen’s sharp voice had roused the whole company now. Even Cousin Laura was awake, and looking round, bewildered, for the source of the commotion. Jeremy was sitting up, roused at last to peevish self-defence:

  “I didn’t do that, Aunt Ellen. I didn’t. I couldn’t have. There aren’t any scissors here.”

  That was certainly a point. That senseless fringe had been cut by someone bored and idle, not by someone energetic enough to get up from the grass, walk across the hot lawn, into the house and up the stairs to rummage in a drawer for scissors. At this point, Melissa broke in in Jeremy’s defence. Like many mothers, she was quite sensible about reprimanding her children herself, but couldn’t bear to hear anyone else doing it; it forced her into a sort of aggressive leniency quite foreign to her real nature:

  “No, he couldn’t have done it, Ellen,” she said sharply. “Look”—she took the book into her hands—“whoever did it, it was done years and years ago. The paper’s all yellowy along the cuts. See?”

  It was, too. Complacently, she passed the book to her husband for confirmation and he, without looking at it, handed it on to Mrs Butler; and thus the book passed from hand to hand, while Jeremy, quietly registering the growing likelihood that the pin-pricking incident was going to be completely sidetracked, applied himself with renewed vigour—if such is the word—to bisecting bits of grass with his pin; and Ellen, shrugging her shoulders, resolved for the twentieth time never to interfere with other people’s children.

  She was relieved when an interruption came in the form of a sharp summons from the house.

  “Ellen! Ellen! Come here!”

  Ellen jumped to her feet. Surprisingly, the voice seemed to come from somewhere above her head, and shading her eyes against the glare, Ellen peered upwards. Leonard’s face, looking strangely white and misshapen as it pressed against the glass of the landing window, was staring down at her, and he gestured with fierce, unintelligible urgency.

  “Ellen!” he repeated. “Come up! Come up quickly!”

  CHAPTER VII

  “WHY DID YOU bring her here, Ellen? Why?”

  Leonard’s voice was urgent, accusing; yet Ellen found it hard to fix her attention on what he was saying. The air on this upstairs landing was stifling, and thi
ck with dust, too, for Mrs Hammond seemed to have taken it into her head this blazing afternoon to give her room a Good Turn Out. Two chairs with frayed horsehair seats, a suitcase full of Picture Posts, and a dusty black sheepskin rug had already been pushed out on to the landing; and Ellen guessed, from the peaceful silence now emanating from Mrs Hammond’s room, that their sojourn here was likely to be a long one. At some stage or other of her Good Turn Outs, Mrs Hammond always decided that Well Begun is Half Done, and made herself a cup of tea; and Well Begun the whole business would remain for some unpredictable number of hours or days.

  Ellen looked sombrely at the pile of objects. Melissa would complain. Mrs Butler, on her way up to the shared bathroom, would complain. Not to Mrs Hammond herself—oh no. Ellen had learned that for tenants to complain straightforwardly to each other was a rare and wonderful occurrence. No, they would complain to her, the landlady. It was she who would have to knock on Mrs Hammond’s door, brace herself guiltily to meet the disarmingly cordial welcome; the cup of tea and the slab of sagging home-made cake, pathetically stale because of Mrs Hammond’s having had so few visitors since she made it. It was Ellen who would have to find a way of tactfully inserting the substance of the complaints into a conversation devoted either to the doings of the Royal Family or to the difficulties Mrs Hammond used to experience in filling in the late Mr Hammond’s sickness benefit forms.

  “Ellen! Why don’t you answer me? Are you trying to hide something?”

  Ellen started.

  “Of course I’m not! Don’t be silly, Leonard! It’s just that—oh—it’s so hot—and so——” She gestured helplessly towards Mrs Hammond’s piled up possessions. “Let’s go downstairs—somewhere cooler….”

  “Ellen you’re changing the subject! You must answer me. Why did you bring my mother here when I specially asked you not to?”

  “Well——” Ellen stopped. Had he specially asked her not to? Well, yes, he had; but then Leonard so often changed his mind, contradicted himself, and then blamed her for doing the very things that he himself had asked her to do. Of course, according to Melissa, all men were like that….

  “I didn’t think you really meant it,” she said. “And it seemed such a shame that Cousin Laura should be cooped up indoors this lovely afternoon. And then Melissa offered to fetch her in the car…. It hasn’t tired her in the very least, you know, Leonard. She’s really enjoyed it.”

  “But what about your father? Has she been talking to him? What did they say?”

  Leonard’s frown had not relaxed, but Ellen sensed that his anxiety—anger—whatever it was—had become more diffuse, and was no longer directed particularly against her. She spoke with more confidence:

  “Oh, it went off very well. They didn’t take a lot of notice of each other really. I suppose, at that age, five years is nothing, and they hardly feel that she has been away at all. Besides, Father was busy with the gooseberries most of the time, and didn’t speak to anybody except to tell them to leave things alone when they tried to help. You know what he is.”

  Leonard was half turned away from her now, looking out of the window through which he could still, presumably, see the little party on the lawn. He spoke without turning round:

  “When you fetched her, Ellen, from my flat—what was she doing? How did she seem?”

  “Oh, quite all right!” Ellen felt properly within her depth now. “She was asleep when we arrived, but when she woke she was very pleased to see us; and she certainly liked the idea of coming back here for the afternoon.”

  “Yes, yes.” Leonard’s face, seen in profile, twitched impatiently. “But—she wasn’t doing anything, then? Not sorting her papers—anything like that?”

  Sudden, unreasoning guilt caught Ellen wholly by surprise. She felt like a schoolgirl in the headmistress’s study: question after leading question was going to bring them inexorably to the burning of the letter.

  So spoke her guilty conscience. A moment later, her common sense took over, and she realised that Leonard had asked a perfectly simple question which had absolutely no bearing on her action, impulsive and foolish though it might have been.

  “I think she had been sorting things, before she went to sleep,” she answered. “There were a whole lot of papers scattered in front of her, anyway. She must have been either sorting them or looking for something.”

  “Looking for something?” Leonard was on to it in a flash. “Did she say she’d mislaid anything?”

  “Why—no …” Again the stab of guilt. “Has something been lost, then?”

  Leonard turned and looked at her now, his expression indecipherable against the bright square of afternoon light.

  “I don’t know.” He stopped, as if considering his next words. “There are some business documents that should be in her possession … but perhaps she never had them … her things are in such a muddle….”

  His eyes were still fixed on Ellen in the same sombre, questioning way, but now Ellen felt nothing but relief. By no stretch of the imagination could the letter she had burnt be described as a business document; whatever Leonard was worrying about, it could have nothing to do with that. There would be no need after all to confess her rather silly, high-handed behaviour: though why she should be so unwilling to confess it to Leonard when she had not minded Melissa’s actually witnessing it—this she did not think of asking herself.

  Suddenly, with two quick steps, Leonard was beside her. His arms were round her, and he was kissing her—tiny, agitated kisses all over her face.

  “Ellen, I can trust you, can’t I? I have to go up to Leeds for a couple of days next week, and I must feel I can trust you while I’m gone. I can, can’t I? You’ll stick by me?”

  “Of course I will, Leonard!” Although she didn’t know what he was talking about, Ellen felt her whole soul blossoming in response to his deep, rarely admitted dependence on her. Her soul, but not her body. For his arms were holding her too tight, it hurt, and these quick, moist kisses where like a bird pecking…. Ellen sidestepped the thought in panic, appalled at such a symptom of old-maidishness. Fancy not liking to be kissed by her own fiancé! She was repressed, that’s what it was; Melissa would say so; everyone would say so, even the women’s magazines. They would tell her to relax and allow herself to enjoy it.

  So Ellen thrust aside her brief repugnance and allowed herself to enjoy Leonard’s kisses; indeed, she set herself to enjoy them as one might set oneself to learn a Latin declension; and when she began to feel herself half-stifled, she remembered that it must be just the heat, and the dust, and the untidiness of the landing at which she was peeping beyond Leonard’s shoulder. Poor Leonard; you must remember, too, that he was terribly worried about something….

  “Of course I’ll stick by you,” she repeated after a minute. “But—but what about, Leonard? Is there some sort of trouble?”

  It was the wrong thing to say at such a moment. Would every other woman in the world have known this, except herself? For Leonard drew back from her at once; he leaned once more against the window frame, with an air of patronising, faintly hostile superiority.

  “I can’t possibly explain it all to you, Ellen,” he said, with weary impatience. “It’s a business matter—it doesn’t concern you at all. I turned to you hoping for womanly comfort, not for a business consultation. God knows I get enough of those in my day’s work!”

  He turned away and set off down the stairs, leaving Ellen to her agonising sense of failure—the failure of her femininity.

  Or was he being utterly, absurdly unfair?

  Dexterous as a juggler after seven years’ practice, Ellen shelved the question, swallowed all protests, even in her own mind, and ran downstairs after him. Smiling now as if nothing had happened, she took his arm, and together they walked out into the afternoon heat. The little party on the lawn were still sitting just as Ellen had left them, except that Adela was now squatting at the feet of Cousin Laura, apparently reading a passage aloud from the much-abused copy of Littl
e Lord Fauntleroy.

  But Cousin Laura could not have been listening much, for when Leonard spoke to her she started as if woken from sleep. She looked up into his face with wide, puzzled eyes.

  “I hate him!” she muttered. “I hate him, hate him, and I’ll never forgive him. I wish he was dead!”

  The words themselves were not frightening; how could they be, spoken by so old and helpless a woman? No, it was their very pointlessness that was frightening; their awful, hopeless ineffectiveness. Such words, such feelings in the very old were like political prisoners who have been chained in darkness for so long that not only has their strength wasted beyond all hope of further fighting, but the very things for which they once fought have ceased to have any meaning in the new and changing world.

  “Tea’s ready!” called Melissa across the grass; and Ellen thankfully watched the old lady’s face clear and brighten.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THAT NIGHT ELLEN could not get to sleep. At first she thought she was being kept awake by the people next door, making complicated and ear-splitting arrangements with their parting guests about meeting in Bexhill next month. Then it was Melissa’s ceaseless walking to and fro in her kitchen just above Ellen’s head that seemed to be disturbing her—though this, in a way, was a soothing sort of noise, because if Melissa was walking to and fro just above Ellen’s head, she couldn’t also be walking to and fro just above the Butlers’ heads, and so there wouldn’t be any complaints in the morning. Ellen wondered drowsily what Melissa could possibly be doing; even if she was transferring every single article she possessed, one at a time, from the cupboard on one side of her kitchen to the shelves on the other, it was still hard to see how it could involve so much walking.