Seven Lean Years

by Celia Fremlin

  What she was doing, of course, no one would ever know—least of all Melissa herself. Now and again the Butlers had posed (via Ellen of course) irate questions on the subject, and it always turned out that Melissa had been darning socks, or writing letters, or something equally sedentary, and had tiptoed across the floor just once to put out the light when she got into bed.

  But upstairs flats were like that, everyone knew. Ellen wondered idly whether the slightly changed rhythm of Melissa’s steps during the last few minutes suggested more that she was doing a tap-dance round the kitchen table (Mrs Butler’s latest, primly ironical, speculation) or that she was practising stilt-walking (that was the evening when the Butlers were working out their income-tax). Anyway, what about the Butlers themselves? Ellen herself found that nothing disturbed her more effectively than the sound of Mrs Butler elaborately tiptoeing up to the bathroom, every creak of the old staircase seeming to cry out: Look how considerate I’m being—careful not to disturb anybody even though it’s barely eleven…. Not like people who deliberately put climbing-boots on and then jump on and off the furniture till past midnight….

  Ellen knew she was being unfair. Mrs Butler really was being considerate when she tiptoed about like that; she was doing as she would be done by. But then, so was Melissa, who certainly would not have complained about anyone walking about above her head…. Ellen was too drowsy to work out the moral latent in all this, and yet too wakeful to lose the subject in sleep: instead, it whirred weakly in her mind, to the rhythm of Melissa’s steps; until, gradually, she realised that the steps had ceased; that the last conflicting statements about midday trains on Saturdays had long faded from the garden next door; and that it was she, alone, and for no external reason, who was staying awake.

  It was a heavy, sultry night, with no moon, and yet with no real darkness either. The vast dim glow of Greater London merged with the half-darkness of the midsummer night to throw a luminious near-visibility into every corner of the room; and Ellen lay, dulled and yet wakeful, staring into the familiar shadows and turning over in her mind the events of the day. Turning them over restlessly, compulsively, with an odd feeling of being trapped with them, like a mouse in a cage of tigers. Leonard angry…. Leonard loving and possessive…. Leonard aloof and moody, bundling poor Cousin Laura into a taxi straight after tea and taking her away with hardly a chance to say good-bye to them all. And Father, in his panama hat, blissfully—or at any rate determinedly—unaware of all the bickering cross currents—Father slowly picking gooseberries, hour after hour, all through the long summer day. Piles and piles of gooseberries, filling every bowl in the kitchen, and overflowing into the saucepans so that, what with the rhubarb wine as well, there had been nothing left for Mrs. Butler to cook her supper in. Ellen had had to borrow a saucepan for her from Melissa, who had asked, wide-eyed, But what on earth are you going to do with all those gooseberries? And Ellen had had to list all the people she was going to give presents of jam to, and all the bazaars and sales of work, until by the time she had finished she knew it sounded just like Good Works, the traditional last resort of the old maid, even though all Melissa had said was “Oh.”

  And so the heat of the day had passed, and after supper came the long slow beginnings of summer twilight, filling the big shadowy kitchen where she and Father sat topping and tailing gooseberries; they had scarcely spoken while they worked, but as the pile of prepared gooseberries grew, and the shadows deepened, and the tub of rhubarb wine frothed evilly in its dim corner, Ellen knew, and knew that Father knew, that this was the great festival of his year; it was worth all the bickering with Melissa to have saved most of the goosberries for him to do himself. How the old man’s eyes shone as he surveyed the pale mounds of fruit on every available surface! They hadn’t had such a crop as this for years, not since just before the war…. Which war, now?…. And as his thoughts travelled back, Ellen’s travelled forward, to the amount of sugar she would need for all that jam … the extra twelve pounds she had ordered would go nowhere. Thirty pounds would be more like it, for even the ones done in Kilner jars would need some sugar—not as much as the jam, of course …

  And so, what with all these thoughts still racing through her mind, without pause, and what with having heard every single quarter striking on the church clock since before midnight, Ellen knew for certain, when the sound first started, that she hadn’t been asleep.

  If she had been, it certainly wouldn’t have woken her. Even as it was, the sound had been repeated three times before it made any real impact on her consciousness, absorbed as she was in that buzzing intensity of trivial thought characteristic of insomnia. Indeed, as she lay, bemusedly alert, waiting for the fourth repetition, it seemed to Ellen that really it had hardly been a sound at all; more a sort of muffled vibration in the house, carried along the old beams behind the plaster as along hidden nerves.

  Yes, here it came again; and only someone who had lived in the old house all her life, and knew its every wheeze and tremor, would have known that the sound came from somewhere upstairs.

  Five…. Six….

  Ellen found herself counting the barely perceptible tremors as one might count the strokes of a clock … only this time it wouldn’t be twelve strokes as a maximum, it would be sixteen.

  Ellen started up in bed, wide awake at last. Why should it be sixteen? Why had this number come into her head with such certainty, with such unquestioning expectancy? She didn’t even know what was causing the sounds, let alone how long they would go on.

  Eleven…. Twelve…..

  A branch of a tree swaying against the wall of the house, perhaps. And as for the mysterious number sixteen—why, it must have been pounds of sugar she’d been thinking of … sixteen pounds of sugar would make thirty-two pounds of jam….

  Thirteen…. Fourteen…. Fifteen….

  Whatever it was would be going on all night, obviously. No sense in counting.

  Sixteen….

  And then silence.

  When had all this happened before? And what had happened next? For a second, Ellen felt that she was slipping back into some dreadful, long-forgotten dream; a dream that was somehow coming alive again, gathering new strength, in the windless darkness of the summer night.

  Ellen clambered out of bed, shivering in the warm air, scolding herself. Either there was something amiss in the house or there wasn’t; and in neither case was it sensible to lie in bed working herself into a childish fright. Perhaps Father was up to something; you could never be sure what Father would take it into his head to do, nor when he would choose to do it. It was nothing for him to be up at half-past four messing about with something that could just as well be done any time during the day—as the Butlers would point out, without heat—even, sometimes, in the form of an icy little joke. Sometimes Ellen felt that the Butlers dominated her life like some exacting and obscure religion, whose unrewarding rituals could neither be evaded nor whole-heartedly embraced.

  Not that it could be half-past four yet. Ellen switched on the light and looked at her little clock. Not yet two. All the same, she had better go and look at Father, make sure that he was all right.

  Father’s room was much darker than her own had been, for he always had his heavy curtains drawn right across the window, however hot the night. But even so, Ellen could make out the dim ridge of his wiry old body under the blankets; could hear his regular breathing, peaceful as a child’s. Certainly he was asleep now; but could he have been awake and out of bed a few minutes earlier? Ellen laid her hand against the candle on the chair by his bed and felt the dead coldness of the wax; no trace of softness to suggest that it had recently been alight. Certainly, whatever Father had been doing, he would have lit his candle first. There was electric light in his room, of course, but Mr. Fortescue always insisted that a candle was more practical in a bedroom; you only had to strike a match to light it, and you could blow it out with a single puff “without all that messing about with switches”.

  Ellen remembe
red now how this patently nonsensical attitude on her uncle’s part had driven the practical Melissa almost to distraction when she first came to live here—though how it could have affected her in any way Ellen still could not see. However, under pressure of his wife’s near-frantic altruism, Roger had fixed up an arrangement of string and pulleys by which the old man could switch the light on and off from his bed. Mr. Fortescue hadn’t argued; but he had watched the evolution of this contraption one Saturday afternoon with a sort of guarded malevolence and Ellen always felt that it must have been sheer will-power on his part that ensured that, when the exhausted Roger finally tried out the completed mechanism, the pulley should have come away from the wall bringing several square feet of plaster and a bit of picture rail with it. After that Mr. Fortescue, bubbling over with fiendish triumph (and for months afterwards showing visitors the bill for the broken plaster) was allowed to keep his candle: Ellen resumed her accustomed task of clearing up trails of wax wherever her father’s nightly peregrinations might have taken him: and Melissa devoted her missionary energies to persuading Ellen to buy an electric mixer; which Ellen agreed to do, and then forgot about, which seemed the simplest solution all round.

  Ellen came out of the curtained room into the glimmering less-than-darkness of the hall, where the light from her closed bedroom door threw a thin crack of brightness across the floor. The sounds—if such they could be called—had come from upstairs. Perhaps Melissa was trying to cheat the relentless flight of time by ironing all night, or catching up with her correspondence, or something—whatever Melissa did, however sedentary, always caused thumps. It must be something to do with the speed at which she worked, like breaking the sound barrier, thought Ellen vaguely.

  Now the dim width of the staircase was in front of her, huge and vague in the darkness, and Ellen began to mount, finding an added comfort in the feel of the harsh, relatively modern hair-cord carpet which protected her bare feet from the ancient lovely oak beneath. She walked on tiptoe, some instinct which she would have described as consideration for the other people in the house preventing her from switching on any more lights.

  Upstairs everything was as silent as on the ground floor, and much darker. No lights shone under the doors; there were no sounds of movement. Ellen moved a cautious step across the landing, stumbling a little as she left the support of the banisters; and it was then that something soft and quite silent touched her ankle.

  She managed not to scream. With a quick, choking gasp she drew back—and half-choked again as she breathed in the ancient, familiar dust rising invisibly all round her.

  Mrs Hammond’s old sheepskin rug, of course. Ellen remembered how she had seen it this afternoon, bundled in a slatternly heap across one of the chairs. The slight jolt of her stumbling must have upset its haphazard equilibrium, and it had slid silently on to the floor.

  And, just as silently, a figure had appeared at the end of the landing. No, it had been there all along. It was only Jeremy; but he was standing so still and his pyjamas hung in such straight pale lines that in the darkness he looked more like a curtain or a piece of draped furniture than a child.

  It was Ellen who spoke first.

  “Jeremy? What are you doing? Was it you making a noise just now?”

  Even as she spoke, the question seemed ridiculous; it was like asking a pale towel hanging on a bathroom rail if it had been making a noise.

  The figure shook its head; then, almost to her surprise, it spoke as well:

  “No, Aunt Ellen. It wasn’t me.”

  Something in his voice held Ellen’s attention.

  “Who was it, then? You heard it? A sort of thumping?”

  “No, Aunt Ellen. I didn’t hear it.”

  Not “I didn’t hear anything”, but “I didn’t hear it.” As if he knew quite well what “it” was—but hadn’t heard it, of course. Ellen felt baffled.

  “Are you sure, Jeremy? I thought it must have woken you—why are you awake, then?”

  Again Jeremy shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Fair enough. Ellen didn’t know why she had been lying awake either, if it came to that.

  “Well—you’d better get back to bed,” she said, weakly. Then, realising that her questions must have been rather disturbing to a child, particularly if he really hadn’t heard anything himself, she added reassuringly:

  “It must have been the branch of a tree swaying against the wall” (Would Jeremy have noticed that it was a windless night?) “They often do that. Don’t be frightened.”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “I’m not.”

  Silently, Jeremy now turned back into his room, and Ellen completed her tour of the upper floors, without result. It must have been Jeremy, she decided, up to some mischief that he did not wish to divulge. Ellen felt that she understood Jeremy so little that she could make no sort of guess as to what kind of thing he might have been doing but it was almost certainly something quite trivial from an adult point of view. Anyway, his misdemeanours, if any, were Melissa’s business, not hers. Reassured, and beginning to feel sleepy at last, Ellen made her way back down the old creaking stairs, and regained the welcoming brightness of her own room—she was glad now that she had left the light on, though she had only done so by accident. The sheets looked cool and inviting, and with a yawn Ellen slipped gratefully between them.

  But they were not cool—only on one side, at least. On the other, on the side away from the wall, Ellen’s body met a patch of rumpled, flattened warmth. For a second she was merely disappointed at this marring of the smooth coolness of her bed, then, slowly the meaning of it came to her.

  All the while she had been roaming about upstairs in the darkness, someone had been sitting silently on the edge of her bed: and whoever it was had only just gone.

  CHAPTER IX

  LAURA COULD HAVE danced for joy as she looked down into the sunlit street. Well, no, not danced, of course; absurd for an old woman like her to think about dancing. But it was a funny thing, when you tried to remember when, exactly, it was that it had become absurd to think about dancing, you realised that there hadn’t really been any such time. It was simply that once you were dancing—goodness knows how long ago—and it had seemed unusually tiring, and you had said to yourself, quite cheerfully, “Goodness, I must get my weight down!”

  But somehow you didn’t bother; your weight didn’t go down; and before you knew where you were you hadn’t danced for years and years; instead you were toiling up the hill from the Post Office, saying to yourself—again quite cheerfully: “Goodness, I must get some really strong comfortable shoes; the hill seems a terrible drag with these….”

  But you hadn’t got around to getting the really strong comfortable shoes; and presently you had quite forgotten that once you could walk up the hill from the Post Office; instead, you were thinking, confidently, that the stairs would be perfectly easy again once you’d got a man to fix the rods properly … that getting out of a chair would be the simplest thing in the world if you had one that didn’t sag so much … that——Good Heavens! This is what is called being Old! A series of tiny obstacles that you didn’t bother to remove at the time … a series of trifling ailments that you forgot to recover from … Laura felt, sometimes, that it was nothing but sheer carelessness that had allowed her to get old.

  But you could still be happy. That was the odd, the unexpected thing. Indeed, happiness now sometimes had a gay, carefree quality that Laura could never remember before, not even in her earliest childhood. And how bright the sun was sometimes, now she was eighty-five! Brighter than she could ever remember it—brighter even than the suns of dreams, shining across the buttercup fields of eighty years ago.

  Laura smiled to herself, like a mischievous child; for that was just what she felt like. Because she was playing truant this morning. Not a very dramatic truancy, perhaps, by some people’s standards—all she had done was to get herself out of Leonard’s dark, sunless flat on the north side of the house, out on t
o this nice little landing where the morning sun streamed in. But to Laura it seemed the greatest fun; she smiled as she bent to sniff the little stout geranium plant that flourished so gallantly in its too-small pot on the sunny window ledge. The bright, sturdy little flower seemed to be sharing Laura’s tiny escapade, her gay, miniature abandon.

  Leonard had no flowers in his flat. What a dismal way the boy lived—it was high time he married Ellen, before he sank too far into these drab bachelor ways. What were they waiting for, Laura wondered? Certainly she was putting no obstacle in their way—had it not been her own idea to go and live in that Old Ladies’ Home, rather than risk imposing herself on her stepson and his future wife?

  And now Leonard was finding another Home for her; he had insisted on doing it, though she would have been perfectly capable of going through advertisements and writing to the places herself. That is, so long as she didn’t try to do it in the evening, or when she had only just woken from sleep; Laura knew that at those times her brain was not as clear as it used to be. But she could have coped with it perfectly well in her own time; much more sensible, too, to find out a few particulars by letter before rushing round looking at the places, as Leonard was insisting on doing.

  Leonard seemed to have no idea of how capable she still was; he kept fussing her, saying she shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that…. Why, he had even tried to sort her precious papers for her, but Laura wasn’t having that! Oh no; not when she had those neat little oblong labels so clear in her mind, and the elastic bands round the little packages. She was looking forward to settling down to the job some time when she had a quiet afternoon … though in her heart Laura knew that all her afternoons were quiet … that once the papers were spread in front of her she would feel baffled, beaten, and all this bubbling energy would melt away … yet still the picture of those neat little packets with their neat little labels lured her on, like the sight of distant palm trees in the desert….