‘Not that I don’t need myself,’ said Meredith. ‘How do you set about it? If I ask here they’ll treat me like shit.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jos. ‘Anyway, I doubt if I’d give my consent.’
‘Then I’ll leave it on a doorstep,’ said Meredith.
‘You’re a bitch,’ said Jos.
‘And you’re a bastard.’
‘Why?’ said Jos, sharply. Meredith had closed her eyes. He chewed his bottom lip viciously. They were on such bad terms it could do no more harm to tell her straight out that he was finished with her and wanted a divorce so that he could marry George. He didn’t know why he didn’t come out with it, perhaps a vague memory of George’s instructions.
He left before time. The thing was, when you looked at Meredith from a distance, as he was standing looking at her from the door of the ward, she was so small and slight and wan-looking that you really felt sorry for her and wanted to rush over and comfort the poor little thing. It was when she opened her mouth, or when you got in close enough range to see the hardness in her eyes that you realized she didn’t need comforting. She said her family and upbringing weren’t important, that they had nothing to do with her, and he’d always agreed. But now he felt he’d like to know all about them to see if it helped to work things out.
‘How was she?’ said George.
‘Fine,’ said Jos, ‘her usual glowing self.’
‘Did you see the baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was it like?’
‘Just a baby.’
‘Is Meredith proud of it?’
‘Very. Absolutely bursting.’
‘I told you,’ said George. ‘What does she want to call it?’
‘Constance,’ said Jos.
‘Really? Why?’
‘She thinks it’s such a nice virtue.’
George laughed as they walked off.
‘Did she like the flowers?’ she asked.
‘Adored them. Guessed immediately it was all your idea and sent her thanks.’
He didn’t know why he was making up such a lot of silly rubbish. It would upset her so much to hear what Meredith had really said and a temporary deception couldn’t do any harm, except to shock her all the more when Meredith came out and started talking about adoption. But, as he planned by then to have George safely removed from her influence, that didn’t matter much. The important thing was to prove how happy they could be together, even without whisky, then he would have something concrete to base his arguments on. Furthermore, he was glad he hadn’t mentioned George to Meredith. It would be far better if they simply fell apart as though there was no one else. He would wait.
Chapter Five
THE DAY MRS L. died was the same day that Meredith’s baby was born, which, if they had been even remotely connected would have been very interesting, especially to those who believe in reincarnation. There was about her death the same abruptness and a similar measure of panic hung over the proceedings.
To begin with, she wasn’t even ill. That is, she was the robust hypochondriac she’d always been, comfy in the knowledge that she had the gradual deterioration of all her ageing limbs taped. She had a touch of lumbago, regular mild bouts of heartburn, the odd liverish turn and a mixed assortment of recurring glandular disorders. Unlike most hypochondriacs, she had the unusual distinction of not relating what was wrong with her to her nearest and dearest, or even the absolutely distant. She kept them all to herself, gloating over them quietly, and presented to the world a glowing picture of health. It gave her great pleasure when people remarked on how well she was looking to know that it simply wasn’t true. Even more peculiar was that she hadn’t seen a doctor for five years, preferring the masochistic thrill of divining and prescribing for herself with the aid of a shelfful of medical dictionaries.
James knew she liked reading these tomes and sometimes added one to her collection. Actually, he was rather proud of her interest in medicine and used to tell his friends that there was no doubt Nelly would have been a doctor if she’d had the chance. That, and her beauty, were the two greatest comforts to him, and really he needed comforting because otherwise there was nothing but emptiness between them. Nelly was always pleasant. They had most of their meals together and she kept quiet or responded to his conversational gambits as he willed. She always looked smart and lovely, she did whatever he wanted with apparent enjoyment, and yet she had nothing to give. She was completely negative, and James could not see that it was he who had made her so.
She died with quite typical consideration. James had gone to a race meeting with Ted in tow, and they arrived back about 7 p.m., hungry but satisfied. James was satisfied because one of his horses had won two lucrative races, and Ted was satisfied because he’d been present. There was a cold but very appetizing supper laid out in the dining room, which James prevailed upon Ted to share, man to man. He had been particularly nice and considerate to Ted for some time lately. They polished off practically a whole cold chicken, an enormous salad, some liver pâté, cheese and a bottle of Nuit St Georges. Then Ted made coffee in the electric percolator on the sideboard, and they sat drinking port and smoking cigars. It was one of Ted’s big moments and James relished the fact almost as much as he.
‘I haven’t seen George lately,’ James said, when they’d finished the first glass of port.
‘Nor have we,’ said Ted. An edge of gloom threatened to creep over his enjoyment. ‘You wouldn’t think we were her parents the way she hardly ever comes in, even when she’s here for her classes.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mr James, she’s a great disappointment to her mother and I.’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ said James.
‘She is, really. She’s not something we can be proud of, going around the way she does. I’ve tried to talk to her, but she won’t listen.’ He paused. ‘Funny how it’s turned out,’ he said, and then gaining courage from James’s sympathetic puffing at his cigar, he added, ‘You know, I used to dream of your son marrying my daughter – I could see it, plain as anything, even though I knew it could never have happened, we being what we are, even if you’d had a son.’
‘I never had any children,’ said James.
‘I didn’t mean to bring it up,’ said Ted, confused. He knew how very much James minded his lack of children.
It was then that Doris came in and announced with no finesse at all that Mrs L. had been taken ill an hour ago and was now dead upstairs. Ted laid into her afterwards furiously for the way she’d gone about it, just blurting it out, like that. He said she should have told him first and he would have broken it as he thought it should be broken.
Doris, it appeared, had been putting out their supper when she’d heard a crash upstairs. She thought it was the cat pulling over the flower vase on the landing and had gone upstairs, swearing. Mrs L. was lying beside her bed with a medical dictionary flung on the floor beside her. The doctor had got there in fifteen minutes, which considering it was the rush hour was good going, but Doris had known she was quite dead before then. Her face was blue and pinched, and there was a thin trickle of blood coming out of her nose and ears. After the doctor had gone, she’d rushed out to find someone to help her lay Mrs L. out properly. Ted stopped her going into the details of such an unnecessary errand It was a slight on James to think she’d behaved like any common woman dashing into the street instead of demanding that the doctor should take care of everything.
While Doris was telling her tale and Ted was bickering with her, James was trying to pluck up the courage to go and see the dead Nelly. He was so overcome with horror at the thought that he felt no grief at all. It was expected of him to go and see her. He told Ted and Doris to stay where they were and walked stiffly up the stairs as though on parade. Outside Nelly’s bedroom door, he stood still, his heart thudding uncomfortably high in his chest. He cleared his throat as the sweat started to gather on his forehead, and at last opened the door. He stepped in, closed it loudly, and stood with his ey
es tight shut for five minutes before groping behind him for the door handle. He found it, opened the door again, stepped out and opened his aching eyes.
Downstairs, he said huskily, ‘She looked very peaceful.’
Doris kept quiet. She didn’t think Mrs L. looked in the least bit peaceful. In fact, she looked to Doris as though she’d had a few very bad moments indeed.
‘Did she suffer much?’
‘It was thrombosis – the heart,’ said Doris, and was about to elaborate when Ted cut her short.
‘A quick and merciful death,’ he said, soothingly.
‘Thank God,’ said James.
‘She probably never knew what hit her,’ said Ted.
‘Did something hit her?’ said James.
‘No, no. Only my way of putting it,’ said Ted. ‘I meant she didn’t have time to realize what was happening before it was all over.’
‘What do we do now?’ said James.
‘I’ll take care of everything sir,’ said Ted, instantly. ‘You’ve had a dreadful shock. Why don’t you go and lie down? Reaction might set in any moment – it really would be better if you lay down.’
Ted had never enjoyed three days more in his whole life than he enjoyed those three immediately after Mrs L.’s death. It was all he could do to stop himself singing as he went about the work of arranging the funeral and seeing to everything. He was indispensable to James, who didn’t seem able to do or say anything except to tell Ted to look after things. Ted guarded what he called ‘the privacy of mourning’ zealously. He took James all his meals, sat with him in the evenings, wrote letters for him to sign and patted him often in a comforting way on the shoulder – a liberty he’d never taken before.
The funeral was tasteful and quiet, the only flaw being the absence of George in spite of telegrams, phone calls and letters informing her that her presence was vital. She answered none of them. Not only did she not turn up, she sent no message of condolence to James, not a single word, and not so much as a bunch of daisies from her joined the heaped floral tributes on the day. Ted gnashed his teeth with mortification, though James didn’t seem to notice, and covered up his ungrateful and unfeeling daughter by sending a lavish wreath of lilies with the inscription ‘In memory of a most kind aunty, her ever loving Georgy.’ It went on the coffin with the ones from the immediate family, as they were rather weedy. James looked very imposing all in black. Never had Ted seen such a fine figure of a man, so absolutely appropriate in dress and bearing, at a funeral. He didn’t make an exhibition of himself, like some of them did, but conducted himself soberly and in a most dignified way. Ted was very proud of him.
Not that Ted was slow to perceive that it wasn’t so much James’s sorrow that made him so quiet as the suddenness of it all. He was a man who had always had everything planned, organization was his be-all and end-all. If he’d arranged for Mrs L. to die he wouldn’t really have minded, but to have it happen like that was an insult to all he stood for. Ted understood this. If he died before James, he prayed that he would have time to make the approaching event apparent.
Mrs L.’s death, like so many deaths, wasn’t really as appreciated as it should have been until well after it was over. Doris was perhaps the first to realize how very welcome it was. Without Mrs L. to harry and annoy her life was smooth and untroubled. The chip she’d always carried on her shoulder about being a servant was considerably lifted. It was like having her own house, with James as a rather special guest. She began to believe what Ted had always told her about being so lucky – not that she for one moment thought it could last. The snag would be somewhere, of that she was sure.
Ted had never been annoyed by Mrs L., so he was slower to share Doris’s pleasure. It was only when he noted the increasing hours James required his company that it occurred to him this was because Mrs L. wasn’t available. He was the only one able and willing to give James his undivided attention. He looked ahead to the comfortable years of this uninterrupted bliss as he felt his grip become surer and firmer. James showed no desire for anyone else’s company. No one came near the house. He sat and drank and brooded, and didn’t seem to have any interest in any of his various concerns. Ted saw nothing peculiar about that, but Doris waited daily for it to end and a new régime begin.
Exactly what was going on in James’s head neither of them, of course, knew. Once Nelly was buried, the terrible fear of seeing her, which had hung over him, disappeared, though he had occasional uneasy moments when he wondered if she really was dead as he hadn’t seen the proof with his own eyes. He then went through a brief period of tremendous depression. It was not that he missed Nelly passionately, indeed the feeling was only incidentally to do with her death at all. What depressed him was the continued silence of George, whom he had by now expected to have installed in a nice flat somewhere and be enjoying the pleasure of visiting her. It had been at the back of his mind for weeks, a constant nagging irritation, but it didn’t really trouble him until Nelly died. Then it goaded him every minute of the day.
He had seen her only once since the day he’d taken her to Richmond, and had been so sure she would come round to his way of thinking that he hadn’t contacted her again. Let her get in touch with him, he’d given her enough rope to find the way. If he pestered she would just get put off. What had made him so extra sure had been her line of talk during the dinner he’d taken her to, and also the small but important fact that she’d made some attempt to dress up. She wasn’t wearing her leather coat, she was wearing a green astrakhan affair, and she had on quite a nice dark green dress and earrings.
‘You’re looking very smart,’ he’d said to her, right away.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I had to dress up for my only admirer hadn’t I?’
That had pleased him and he’d ventured further.
‘You know, you could be a smasher,’ he’d said.
‘You mean with time and money spent on me,’ she said in he didn’t know quite what tone.
‘Yes. I don’t know any reason why I shouldn’t be frank with you.’
‘Oh, by all means be frank.’
‘Well then, you need knocking into shape. I’ve always seen that. You’re no beauty and nothing could make you one. But you’re unusual. All you need is a good stylist. I’ll see you get it.’
‘That will be nice,’ she said.
‘You need confidence,’ he’d gone on. She’d laughed, and he asked what she was laughing at, but she’d said nothing. ‘I’d give it to you,’ he’d finished.
‘I’m sure you would,’ she said.
‘You think I’m ugly, don’t you?’ he’d asked, abruptly.
‘No.’
‘Old then?’
‘Not old.’
‘Well, what’s holding you back?’
Again, she’d laughed as though he’d made some great joke, but at least she wasn’t being silly. She was sitting there, quiet and polite and treating him seriously. Long after they’d finished the meal, they’d gone on sittingthere and she’d shown no desire to go.
‘Don’t you want to try me first?’ she asked, abruptly.
‘Try you? I don’t need to. I don’t want you just for that.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Certainly not.’
He was angry and embarrassed, and calling the waiter paid the bill quickly. He took her home again and she’d seemed genuinely grateful when she thanked him for the evening. She didn’t come out with any of her bitter or nasty remarks, and when he said ‘Let me know soon’ she smiled nicely and said she would, but he might not hear for a bit because she felt she had to stand by her flat mate who was having a baby.
That was five months ago. It was absurd to pretend that she was going to turn up any day, and yet he refused to believe she had turned down his offer good and flat. There was no one else, never had been and never would be, there was nothing in life for her except her dancing classes and that flat of hers. She could never turn down the only offer she’d had, it just wouldn’t ma
ke sense. A girl like that wanted a man, a home and a family. They wanted them more than the pretty ones.
To go after George again seemed to James a foolhardy line of action. What he really needed was to know what had happened all these months, to know what was going on, and to find out this information he needed a go-between so that she wouldn’t suspect. The obvious and only person to fill that role was Ted. After all, he was the girl’s father.
‘How’s George?’ he said, one evening about two weeks after the funeral. ‘Haven’t seen her about recently.’
Ted turned a dark, angry red.
‘Neither have I,’ he said. He was afraid James had noticed her absence at the funeral. He didn’t miss a trick. ‘She hasn’t been near the place.’
‘What about her classes?’ said James.
‘She hasn’t had one of those for two months, but mind you it’s the school holidays.’
‘Seems odd,’ said James.
‘She is odd,’ said Ted. ‘I can’t understand her.’
‘Aren’t you worried about not hearing from her? Isn’t her mother worried?’ pressed James. It would be better if Ted sought her for his own reasons if possible.
‘She’s done it before,’ said Ted. ‘Takes these spells of going off for months, never saying where she’s been or anything. She’s very moody.’ He made it sound a sin.
‘She might be ill,’ said James.
‘Not her,’ said Ted, ‘she’s as strong as a horse. Eats like a navvy and never ails anything, I’ll say that for her.’
James saw he was getting nowhere rapidly, so he came straight out with it. ‘I think you should go and see if she’s all right,’ he said. ‘Find out why she hasn’t been. Don’t mention I was worried or she might think I was interfering. I’d rather she didn’t know I worried about her.’
‘It’s a waste of your time worrying about her,’ said Ted, touched by this further evidence of James’s kindness. ‘You know how it breaks my heart that she doesn’t seem to appreciate anything. It’s not as though she doesn’t know who’s been responsible for everything she’s had. She knows, but she just doesn’t seem to be grateful. She’s been spoiled. It’s terrible to think of everything you’ve wasted on her, Mr James.’
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