If only I hadn’t bought that lipstick. With only my two shillings, we couldn’t pay for lunch.
The train broke out of the Downs, where there was a white horse carved on the hill, and into unknown country, herds of cows in the fields, farms, chickens, horses galloping away. This flat country went on, mile after mile. Farther and farther. I worried where we would go in Bath, where we would sleep the night. Terrible tales came into my mind of girls attacked on trains. I was thinking about what my father had said about the Shorts.
‘You’re not giving a concert,’ I said. ‘You can’t even play.’
‘I can,’ he said. He opened his case and got his violin out, but I asked if he had got any money. He pulled out a few coppers from his pocket. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the buffet car. I’ll tell them to send the bill.’
But before we could move the inspector came back with a young man who stood in the doorway studying us and murmured something I couldn’t catch.
‘Stand up, Ben,’ this man said.
‘My name is Benedict,’ said Benedict. He could be as cool and ironical as Glanville.
The young man said, annoyed, ‘Where’s your school cap?’
I burst out, ‘A boy threw it on the line at Newford when the train was coming in.’
‘What was his name?’ asked the man.
‘Fatty,’ said Benedict.
‘Better check at Castle Wadney,’ said the young man to the inspector. They went off down the corridor.
The train was gliding past wide fields of mustard, a few big clouds were hanging still in the sky. Presently the train slowed down almost to a standstill, and when I looked out I saw a gang of men standing back: they were working on the line. I can still remember every one of their faces looking up at me. Then we crawled past watercress beds to Castle Wadney, a town on a hill but with no castle that I could see. The train had stopped.
‘Police,’ whispered Benedict excitedly.
The inspector came back and said, ‘Soon get you back, Miss. You’re getting out here.’
At that busy station porters were rolling milk cans down the platform. We were taken to the station-master’s office, a dark room smelling of ink and tea. The stationmaster was drinking a cup in between talking on the telephone, and there was a machine somewhere that clicked dot, dot, dash. A man at another table called ‘Brighton on the line for you’ to a very clean young man with hair short at the neck, who went to the telephone.
One of these new men looked at our train passes and asked our names again. I showed him mine on my exercise book. Someone was having a row with the stationmaster, who held the phone away from his ear.
‘Sure it’s not Knowles?’ the smooth young man asked Benedict.
‘Short. Short. Short,’ Benedict jeered.
‘Short,’ I joined in. ‘I mean he’s Short, I’m –’
‘I’m asking him,’ said the smooth young man. ‘How do I know your name’s Short, son?’ he asked.
And then Benedict did a thing I’ll never forget. He turned his back to the man and pulled the neck of his jacket clear of his neck until the name tape was showing.
The detective held the jacket and called to the two new men. ‘Take a dekko at this.’
‘“Short”,’ they both said. ‘OK, Sonny.’
‘Hold on, they’re on the line,’ said the stationmaster into the telephone. Then he beckoned to us.
Glanville was on the line. Emma, too. And my father. When we had stopped talking to them the two inspectors had gone and so had our train. We were going to be sent back on the 3.44.
One of the detectives said, ‘Sorry, Miss.’ And the other said, ‘On the lookout for a lad from Brighton. You won’t miss your concert,’ he said to Benedict and went off.
‘Watch out,’ whispered Benedict. ‘They’ll follow us.’ He was delighted.
The stationmaster took us to the buffet and told the woman there to give us what we asked for and to give the bill to him. He told Benedict his daughter was taking piano lessons. We were put on the 3.44 to Fordhampton, and I felt sad going back.
‘It was the Brighton Cliff Murder,’ said Benedict. ‘They thought we were in on it.’
And indeed a youth had taken the hand brake off his parents’ car, jumped out, and left them to go over the cliff. There was a picture of a boy very like Benedict with curly hair. We saw it all when a man got in at one of the stops with the picture on the inside page and a headline saying ‘HUNT MOVES TO WEST COUNTRY’. I muttered to Benedict, ‘Keep quiet or I’ll strangle you.’
Benedict started bouncing with delight on his seat. He said that Glan had told him all about the murder. And he started to tell me. The Devil would be in it, I knew.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Not now. You promised me.’
The train was a slow one. The man got out at Stockney. And then I said, ‘Why did you say you were going to Bath?’
‘To see the Roman ruins,’ he said.
‘But you said London, too, to give a concert,’ I said. I couldn’t keep up with him.
‘I am going to the College of Music next term,’ he said.
I began to tease him. ‘There was a devil on this train – it was you,’ I said and gave him a push.
There is nothing to say about our arrival at Fordhampton, except that my mother was talking to Mrs Short, and Benedict was talking all the time to Glan, telling him how he had shown his name tape to the detective. Father was talking to the stationmaster, who was shaking his head.
‘I gave the stationmaster at Newford a blowing up,’ Father said. ‘I mean, suppose they’d been troops?’
‘It’s the staff, you know what I mean,’ said the stationmaster. ‘Your daughter’s here.’
‘Oh,’ said my father, astonished to see me. And then he saw Glanville and stiffened. ‘All present and correct,’ he said sarcastically.
In the car driving home I began telling my father and mother what had happened, but Father said, ‘Wait till we get home.’
Mother said, ‘You should have pulled the alarm cord.’
Father said, ‘Costs five pounds. I haven’t got five pounds.’
I didn’t say anything about Benedict’s saying he was running away. Father was already revelling in the war he was now beginning with the railway company. He was going to write to the chairman at once. He was going to get someone at the War Office to blow them up. Mother’s eyes shone.
When I went to school on Monday Benedict was not on the train, but Mrs Figg had heard the story, because Mother had rung the school. Augusta knew, too. Then she told me that once a man had exposed himself in a train when she was there, in a full compartment!
What did she do? ‘Nothing,’ she said grandly. ‘I turned my head away and looked out of the window.’
That weekend my mother picked me up at my school and Benedict at his and drove us back to the Shorts, and I was invited for tea. Father said it was the least they could do.
Mrs Short was standing by her puzzle when I got there, a new one of a castle.
‘It’s a beast,’ she said. There were a dozen people at that beautiful table and Benedict was crowing and interrupting his father. Then it was Cocky Olly again and all of us racing around.
A Trip To The Seaside
After she had dropped her sister off at the hotel Sarah drove Mr Andrews (as she pointedly called him) along the sea front to the station. They were stiffened by silence. He got out and said coldly, ‘Thank you. Goodbye,’ but she got out too and said, ‘Oh, no. I’m coming on to the platform to see you on to the train.’ He looked at his watch: for seven minutes he would have to put up with her. She even stood close to him; until the London train came she was not going to let him out of her sight. Even when, to escape, he excused himself and went to the door marked ‘Gentlemen’ she marched with him and stood outside, vigilant. When he came out and the train arrived at last she almost pushed him into the nearest compartment, and would have closed the door but other passengers were crowding after him.
Still she did not move, and at the open door she started muttering short sentences. She said: ‘We don’t want you down here messing up her life again and trading on her feelings.’
Andrews did not speak. He sat in his corner seat, his face as pink as Aberdeen granite, looking straight ahead of him, ignoring her, his chin raised, his nose on its dignity. She was a short and avid woman with dry grey hair and about his age. Just before the door was closed by a porter and the train gave a starting jolt she shouted: ‘I hope we never set eyes on you again.’
Some passengers raised their newspapers after a glance at him. Others stared. In the first five minutes as the train picked up speed he sat without changing his expression. Then he got up and left the compartment with a look of contempt for everyone there and, checking his ticket, made for an empty compartment in the first-class coach. There he was alone, looking blankly at the villas, trees and fields wheeling back in the watery spring dusk.
That morning Andrews had arrived from London just to spend the day, even possibly a week if things went well. You could never tell. Anyway there would be a sniff of sea air to clean his kippered London lungs. He thought of fish as he walked from the station, had lunch at a hotel called the George, which seemed to be the best place, fancied oysters, a Dover sole, a glass of white wine, which brought out that pink in his face. Then, better dressed than the Easter crowd, he went for an inspecting stroll. He was a widower of sixty-five who had spent his business life in the carpet trade. It had struck him as a good omen and a compliment to his gifts as a salesman that the lounge of the hotel had a new chocolate-coloured carpet with a design of huge chrysanthemums on it – one of his ‘lines’, the Demeter Floral. It wore well. He had indeed the muted walk of a man for whom the streets were carpeted and the smile of a public benefactor with a quiet surprise in his pocket. He was looking for a wife. He looked at one or two houses that were for sale, for a house was what he wanted: a house by the sea. The prices were very high: the dream had to go. He turned off to the address of Miss Louisa Browder, who had been his secretary for years before his job had come to a sudden end. As he came up in the train he had thought of her as a possibility, if also a faute de mieux.
To call on Louisa Browder would require nerve, for she had walked out of his office after a row five years before, but he was not a man to entangle himself in the rights and wrongs of the past. He knew the trouble had started at a trade exhibition in Brighton – a much larger resort than this – and he put it down to her age, or perhaps her mother’s death, to those family things like the bother with her jealous sister who had never liked him – things that upset women and make them take it out on others, just as his wife Daisy used to do. In her jealous way – jealousy her only fault – she would shout ‘Louisa’s a woman and don’t you forget it.’ Yet Louisa had often stayed for weekends at their house, almost a friend of the family. He was shocked that she had not written him a letter of condolence when his wife died. He sent her the newspaper notice of Daisy’s death and, as a rebuke, with no comment of his own. There was no answer for a long time and then a short letter did come, signed formally Louisa Browder, saying she was sorry to read the sad news and that Daisy had been a ‘loyal wife and a wonderful mother to his children’. The curt note could, of course, be called a riposte if you like to take it that way, but what struck him most was the cause of the delay in her reply. She had moved out of London. She had gone to live in this town in a house by the sea. The address transformed her: a new life in a pretty house with a sea view, that was what he repeated to himself like a song these days.
Andrews had not told Louisa he was coming: in dealing with women surprise was essential. He passed the sedate terrace houses of the sea front and was disappointed to find himself in a side street and standing at the door of a mean little villa, with no sea view and with the degrading word Vacancies on a card in the window. She had gone downhill. There was an old white car in the garage at the side of the place. The thumping and miauling of canned music was coming out of the front room as he pushed the door bell. There was no answer. He rang again. When the door was opened the music rushed out, swamping his voice, which he had to raise when he spoke to a gingery young man with a book in his hand. His long hair seemed to be dancing to the tune.
‘Come along in,’ the young man said and, bawling up the stairs ‘Sally, an old gent for you,’ went back to the front room. Andrews winced at the sight of linoleum on the floor of the hall. The house was cold and smelled of polish. Sarah – not Louisa – came to the top of the stairs and called out ‘We’re full up,’ but came down, rubbing her hands together, half cringing, half ready for battle – the whole Browder family, even Louisa (Andrews remembered) had always cringed. She said again, ‘I said we’re full up.’ And she shut the sitting-room door before she looked at him. Then she stepped back.
‘Mr Andrews!’ she said and seemed to swallow a huge lump of unbelief and suspicion. ‘What do you want?’
Still a public benefactor, but now hard-eyed, Andrews said, ‘I was hoping to see Louisa – I happened to be here on business and I thought I’d drop in for a moment.’
‘She’s gone out,’ said the sister, studying him. ‘What do you want to see her about if I may ask? Is she expecting you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a little surprise. When will she be in? She wrote to me so kindly when Daisy died – my wife you know.’
‘I know,’ said the sister briskly. ‘She showed me the letter.’
‘I didn’t know that she had moved down here,’ he said.
‘I suppose she can move if she wants to,’ said the sister.
‘A nice little town. Really,’ he said boldly, ‘I’ve been looking around for a place for myself. You look well, Sarah.’
She did not: she looked scrawny and yellow.
‘A place here?’ Sarah said. ‘I told you we are full.’ But now she looked frightened. She studied him from his nose to the tips of his shoes. ‘You mean you’re looking for a house here?’ She hesitated. At that moment the telephone on the hall table rang. ‘Come into the dining-room,’ she said.
She pushed him into a room and said, ‘Stay there.’ The room had a french window looking onto a cold little garden. The spring plants, he saw, were late this year, held back by the east wind.
He heard her answering the call: then he heard footsteps in the room above and a rush down the stairs and Louisa’s voice.
‘Still a liar,’ said Andrews.
The room was small. The furniture was of the kind that is bought at a discount. There was a polished oak table with a dispirited runner on it, chairs that stood at the table like orphans, a sideboard with a bottle of ketchup on it. On the mantelpiece was a vase of artificial flowers and a photograph of the old Browders standing in their garden like tired and hardened pensioners. They had been a poor family, supported by Louisa, the cleverer of the daughters. There was a bleak armchair with wooden arms that dared anyone to sit on it. Andrews accepted the dare and sat, patting the arms as he waited. The call stopped and he now heard the voices of the sisters: Sarah’s voice came through the door as one whispering, arguing hiss: Louisa’s, saying little in her practical way, a voice warm though with iron in it. He remembered how little she had moved her lips when she spoke; even in his harassed moments with her he had admired the way the voice tersely filled his office (and even the street outside when they left the place together) with proverbial facts to be borne in mind. She had been piquant in a spinsterish way, slender, mannish and brisk during the years she had worked with him in his office. It had always astonished him when his jealous wife said, ‘She knows what she’s after.’
Now the door was opened and in came Louisa alone, wearing a heavy grey overcoat and carrying a large handbag. It was a principle with Andrews, especially in dealing with women, to smile and put them in the wrong at once.
‘Sarah told me you were out,’ he said. ‘I just dropped in’ (this being his privilege).
‘I was dressing to go out,’ she s
aid in her equally correcting way, but with a laziness that was new to him. ‘Sarah says you’re here on business.’
‘Not really.’ He smiled.
And then he came out with it, all charm: ‘I came especially to see you, to know how things are. And to thank you for your letter.’
Except for the changeless voice, he could not believe that this dawdling woman was the Louisa he had known so well – even feared. All the way down in the train she had seemed to skip across the hedges and disappear into woods – a tall busy woman, often not more than a pair of eyebrows and big dutiful eyes. In the office she had skilfully drooped her shoulders, because he was shorter. Now, in this room, she seemed short and there was more engaging shape and body to her. Her hands, which she used to clench, were now open and at ease. Her glossy black hair was waved and though she had aged and now wore glasses, the two streaks of swan-white hair over her ears looked dashing and her lips were firm, her teeth were not set in the old attentiveness. With no desk to work at, no papers to hand to him, no telephone to answer, no memory of detail to store for him, she stood easily free. She had often worked late at the office with him because – as he knew – she hated going back to her home. She had been good-humoured but she rarely laughed. She had lived for the office, but now the nervous lines cut by office life had gone, her face was on holiday and open.
Still, after they had talked a little, she did say with an old school-teacher’s satisfied mockery: ‘So you are a widower, Morton.’
She spoke of him as a species. Morton was his second name. She had never used his first Christian name, which was Alfred. That belonged to his wife at home.
‘Yes,’ he said, rather boasting of the fact.
‘It is hard,’ she said, ‘to lose someone you love. I know how I felt when Mother died. I appreciated what I had lost.’
Remarkable, when one thought of her complaints about her mother. He was annoyed that he had to grimace in order to indicate that he had a tear to hold back.
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 6
