‘I will say goodbye now. I’ll be off at six o’clock. I never eat breakfast,’ she said.
Then she wanted a needle and cotton to mend the lining of her beret, which – it turned out – was Sammy’s.
So we left her and went up to our room. I said to Miranda, ‘Sammy must be a saint to live with a woman like that.’
‘She does worry me,’ Miranda said. ‘That dream of hers about struggling with me in the sea. Do you think I was beastly to her when she was a child? I do hope she’s comfortable.’
I could not get to sleep until three in the morning. I looked out of the window: the light from the sitting-room still lit up the lawn. When I woke up about seven I had an alarming thought about the Trafalgar Captain. I went downstairs and was relieved to see he was still hanging on the wall. I went to the front door. Her car had gone but on the doorstep there was Granny’s little stool propped up against the bootscraper. Had she thought of taking it? Had she forgotten or changed her mind?
Rhoda’s voice buzzed in our ears in the next few days. She did not telephone or write. Months went by without news. I suppose we shall hear at Christmas. Miranda thinks Rhoda is like one or two of the old village people here who seem to be made of weather rather than flesh and blood. They live in their fancies and ‘seeings’, trying out their lives in the air, trying their feelings on the market, shrewdly watching the bidders.
‘She was trying out herself and her ideas on us,’ Miranda said. ‘Crystal-gazing like a gypsy. Making up her mind about Sammy.’
I don’t know. Six months after she left, that Peter Ogbourne fellow came to the house, touting for antiques, and I sent him away with a flea in his ear, but we did ask him about Rhoda.
‘Very kind old lady,’ he said politely. ‘She gave me a lift to Plymouth.’
‘I thought she was giving you a lift to Falmouth,’ I said.
‘The funny thing is I’ve never been to Falmouth in my life,’ he said.
‘She said something about showing you a picture of children – a Primitive,’ I said.
‘Not me. It must have been some other dealer. Or my father,’ he said. ‘But she did give me your address.’
A Change Of Policy
Soon after six on a rainy London evening, when the traffic was clogged and bleating in the streets, Paula got back from Chelsea to her flat off Baker Street. She had been reading to a learned old lady whose sight was failing, a friend of her sister, and she was about to change from her red dress – the one with the large gilt buckle on it – when there was a long aggravating ring at the doorbell. No doubt some stupid messenger had mistaken her bell for that of the sportswear shop on the ground floor. She went down the steep stairs and when she opened the door there was the sharp back of a man with greying hair who was shouting at a woman who was trying to get her car into a parking place on the other side of the street. He turned around.
‘Hullo, Paula,’ he said. ‘Usual thing. Can’t keep my nose out of other people’s troubles. That’s a lie – protecting my property. Don’t want that silly woman smashing into my car.’
Paula stared at him and, astonished, said, ‘Mr Southey!’
‘Same as the poet,’ he said.
‘George! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you. Well, come in. You’ve grown a beard.’
As he followed her up the narrow staircase he said, ‘I’m glad you noticed. A small Vandyke – keeping up with the lads at the works. Just got in from Munich – actually Istanbul.’
Paula’s small sitting-room had tall windows and was made to look larger by a long discreet mirror that set off her height. A woman of taste: sets of small leatherbound books on the shelves on either side of the fireplace.
‘Why didn’t you telephone?’ she said. She was easily irritated by people who dropped in. ‘And do sit down.’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘A message for me at the airport – from my brother – said the proofs of the Quarterly were two months late. I said, “That’s not like Paula,” saved time and went straight to the Prof Shop. No dice. They said you’d left, packed in the job, sent in your cards. Glowry gone, Featherstone too. New girl at reception.’
‘Do sit down, George,’ she said.
‘I mean we’ve been printing the Quarterly for how long is it – years. What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did resign. I am not in touch with anyone there. There has been a change of policy.’
She wished he had not called the Institute ‘the Prof Shop’. It was a learned institution, a century old, internationally respected.
‘But you ran the place,’ said George. ‘Arranged all the foreign lectures, introduced them . . .’
‘How did you know my address, George?’ she asked. She was a woman for rules, and there was a rule that no private addresses could be given.
‘That was easy,’ he said. ‘You’ve forgotten. I dropped you and your sister here one night, five years ago. After that lecture – Herr Doktor Wafflenbloater or something, on the Catholic Church and the Third Reich. You sneaked me in.’
‘Dr Grein,’ she said stiffly.
‘There I go, flat on my face as usual. That’s it – Grein, of course. I call them all Wafflenbloater. You introduced him, the only thing I understood. It was pouring with rain, like tonight, and your sister and some friend of his couldn’t get a taxi afterward and I drove you here, all of you. I remembered you said there was an antique shop on the ground floor. I see it’s a sports shop now. Things change.’
‘I remember now; you were very kind,’ she said. ‘She was Dr Grein’s wife, Sophie. And it is kind of you to come now.’
‘You told me not to drive too fast,’ he said. ‘Not kind at all. Business is business. We’re worrying about the contract for the Quarterly – we’ve had it for years. What do you mean you resigned? Did you storm out, or what?’
He had known her well once, in the early days of the Quarterly, when he used to bring in the proofs himself and they went through them together. She had been a tall, calm, rather distant young woman with a quiet, clear, serious voice.
‘You have changed your hair style,’ he said. He remembered she had dark hair that had gravely framed her head. He had heard a lady sitting next to him at that Grein lecture say she looked exactly like George Eliot, whoever that was – very calm and certain. Now her hair was shorter, freer. It even looked chopped and wild.
‘You’ve come to life,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
She really had ‘stormed out’. She remembered it all: how the chairman had called her to his grand office, where he sat with the large Edwardian portrait of the founder of the Institute and the small one of the first committee, looking portentous on the grey wall behind him. The chairman said that the committee had decided that the Institute must be modernised. They intended to go for something called Communications, and they had put in a popular journalist to turn the Quarterly into a magazine, with newsy extracts from lectures instead of the full text. The new man had already brought in a young woman to run Personality Closeups.
George listened to her without expression. ‘His mistress, I suppose,’ he said.
‘I have no idea,’ she said in her principled voice. ‘That could possibly have been a consideration.’
‘So you stormed out?’ he said.
‘They didn’t fire me, George,’ she said. ‘They wanted me to run the library. The Old Folks Home, the Black Hole of Calcutta, we used to call it. No one ever used it. If they had asked me to go on the committee I would have stayed. Yes, I suppose I stormed.’
She was remembering how on the afternoon when she left the Institute a flight of pigeons clattered out of the square near the British Museum and, it seemed to her, flew the news of her angered virtue to those parts of London where standards and integrity still had meaning. She had influential, well-placed friends who had rallied to her in London and in the country, when she went there to stay. In those early weeks, she felt that she was w
alking a yard or two above the earth. The trouble was that her friends had outlived their influence; it had leaked away. When you lose an important job, there comes a time when there are silences: you embarrass, you find yourself in a limbo, you become a curiosity. Even the target of indignation loses its focus. After the promising interviews that, one by one, came to nothing, her story seemed to dissolve. Her money was running out. This very day, as she came back on the crawling bus from the old lady’s flat, she had felt that the people who were crowding into restaurants and shops and bars or rushing along with parcels were employed. They had homes, and soon, if nothing happened, she would be forced to get out of hers.
‘There was nothing personal in the reason for my leaving,’ she said, annoyed by any insinuation that jealousy was at the heart of her decision.
He nodded. ‘From our point of view, of course,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter what the Institute wants. We print anything. That Quarterly gave us prestige. We took trouble with it. But if they want a comic, we can do it. If they want a colour magazine, we can do it. We print anything for anybody. Travel brochures, coloured wrappers, mottoes, anything from calendars to the Koran, printing for Eskimos, Malays, Arabs – we do a lot for Arabs. Even Old Masters, popular reproductions of the classy stuff. But why am I doing all the talking?’
‘You do talk a lot, George,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘More than you used to in the old days, when you came in and we did the proofs.’
‘That was because I couldn’t make out what the Quarterly was about until you read out a sentence or some of those foreign names. What on earth are you doing reading to an old lady?’ he said seriously. ‘We’ve got to do something about that. I get ideas, you know. I run into a lot of people.’
The ‘we’ made her raise her fine eyebrows. She pointed to the typewriter on the table. She said she was doing some translation.
There he sat, not so much staring at her, she thought, as staring at himself in the tall mirror.
‘You’ve changed,’ she said. Working with him, she had taken him for granted as part of his trade. She had even felt she was, in some detached way, superior to him. But now, being in limbo, she began to see him as a man.
‘As a matter of fact I have an offer to go to Kenya,’ she said.
And it was true that the rich old lady had said to her in an erratic way, ‘Why don’t you come to Nairobi with me?’ Clearly she didn’t mean it; she was too old to move and was simply remembering her travels.
Why did I say that, Paula suddenly thought. I must be mad. She looked at his face. It was as set as a gambler’s: he had drawn it out of her. She knew why she had talked. The virtue had gone out of her; the euphoria had disintegrated. If she could have got hold of that woman who had taken her job she would have slapped her face.
He seemed to know all this as he studied her.
‘Derailed,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Nothing. Old family saying. Didn’t I tell you – my father worked in the shunting signal box at Euston when he started as a boy. First week, he put a truck of fish or something off the line. It upset him. He gave in his cards. Anyone loses their job in our family, like my sister’s boyfriend not turning up on their wedding day, breaking the engagement – remind me to tell you about that – derailed, that’s the word we use. I can hear him. Forget it – things come up in your mind.’
‘You are ridiculous, George,’ she said, and she laughed for the first time.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘That is what the old man used to tell us. Derailed. There it is.’
His excitement went. The flush went from his talking face and he stared at her. ‘Come and have dinner with me,’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘My sister will be here.’
‘Bring her along. I remember her – she was with you when I picked you up after that meeting.’
Paula remembered her sister saying, ‘Who was that awful little man – very kind, of course.’ Just imagine it!
‘Anyway, you’ve had a long flight. You must be exhausted. Your family is expecting you.’
‘Oh, that’s fixed,’ he said. ‘The boy’s away at school.’
‘But your wife . . .’
He looked at her steadily. ‘No wife,’ he said.
She waited for him to say more but he said nothing. He’d been married twice – he had told her. Separated? Surely he had not left that pretty, fair-haired girl who had worked in Reception and to whom they had all given a present when she married him? She remembered Featherstone, who was on the committee, saying in his disappointed way, ‘I hope she doesn’t regret it. The descendant of the poet is a bit of a rake.’ But the laconic ‘No wife’ struck her as being a final refusal to speak.
‘Don’t you know?’ he said.
‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.
He had not been to the Institute more than once in the last two years. A young assistant had been sent in his place. She had supposed that was because he had become a partner in the firm, travelling about.
‘If I may, I’d like to use your telephone to ring my son,’ he said now. ‘I always ring every day when I am away, to tell him where I am and when I’m getting back. I rang from Munich today – or yesterday – I’ve got the days all wrong. Boys worry. But they love long-distance telephone calls at school, it makes them feel important. I ring my wife first – I mean, I ring the hospital. My wife had a stroke nearly two years ago. She’s at the Grafton Forster Hospital. She’s been unconscious ever since. No change. She doesn’t know who I am. No sign. I go and see her twice a week when I’m at home. Just lies there, eyes open. It happened when I was on the Australian trip. I came back at once.’
‘George, why didn’t you tell me? What a terrible story. I can’t believe it... It must have been awful for you this time in Munich.’
‘I had to go,’ he said. ‘You might as well be anywhere. I mean when you’re nowhere . . .’
And she had been talking to him of the Institute, losing her job! Her limbo was petty compared with his.
He was totally transformed in her eyes. He was no longer the bouncing talker. That talk was hysteria. Even if she could not yet believe in the catastrophe, it had turned him from an actor into a human being who was himself. Even more terrible than the hospital visits were those daily telephone calls to the boy. She was ashamed of her own commonplace troubles.
And then her telephone rang. They both looked at the instrument on her desk.
‘I gave the hospital this number,’ he said. ‘I always leave a number wherever I am. I’m a string of telephone numbers.’
She rushed to the telephone and answered it.
‘Not for you,’ she said, for George was on the edge of his chair. A man was talking.
She said dryly, ‘You are a rare bird, aren’t you? When did she let you out of the cage? No, I can’t. I simply can’t. Absolutely not. I have people here. Quite impossible.’ And then she said, ‘You should think of these things earlier.’
And then, rather grandly, glancing back at George she felt impelled to let George hear her telling a lie. It was like a confession. She seemed to grow taller.
‘My sister and her husband are here, staying with me. We’re going out to dinner. No, not tomorrow, I shall be in the country.’ And putting down the receiver she looked angrily at it and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She was blushing.
He was looking with admiration at her. ‘I remember you at the Institute like that,’ he said. ‘Now you will have to say you will come to dinner with me. I have an idea. No need to go to Kenya. I know a Greek restaurant. We’ll have to cross two parks to get there. It’s a good place. Noisy. Full of young people. That means you can’t hear what anybody is saying and they can’t hear you. Very private. Real clatter.’
He got up and put out his hand to pull her up.
‘All right,’ she said, and, surprised, she let him pull her up. ‘I am sure this is very bad for you. I’ll just change into somethi
ng.’
‘May I telephone? The boy,’ he said.
In the days when he used to come to the Institute she remembered she had seen him going off with one or the other of the girls at the reception desk of the office. Now, she thought as she went upstairs, he is not that man. She changed into a silk blouse that had a pattern of large green and blue leaves.
‘Is this all right?’ she asked when she returned.
‘Just the job,’ he said.
‘Now,’ she said when she was in his car and they drove out of her street, ‘what was the news?’
‘No change,’ he said.
‘The boy?’ she said. ‘Was he all right? What did he say? You didn’t tell me his name.’
‘Night jungle,’ he said as they drove away, waving at the park. ‘Rainy season. His name’s Harry. The bother with boys is they’re always asking questions. Mania for details.’
‘I’ve got nephews,’ she said.
‘I had to go over the whole flight home. Change at Frankfurt – he never lets me miss out a change of plane. Wanted to know if I had seen any snakes in Munich. Mixing it up with when I came home from Australia two years ago. He’s got snakes on his brain. Cobras or mambas. I cheated and said there was a dancing snake in the Munich Zoo that ends up hanging from the tree in a figure of eight. Actually, I think that’s true,’ he said. ‘Now he’s taken to horses, and I’ve taken up riding.’
He leaned forward, peering ahead as a traffic light changed. ‘We’ll skip Baker Street,’ he said knowingly, ‘and take a right. Fantastic dream.’
In the side streets she saw he was one of those drivers who cannot resist a sharp turn or a shortcut. Some passing motorist hooted at him.
‘Now what did he mean by that?’ he said.
‘Your driving,’ Paula said. ‘You’re not on a horse.’
Between a warehouse and a house with corrugated iron covering its windows was a door with a travel poster saying ‘Come to Greece’. They had arrived.
He helped her out of the car, holding her arm. ‘Mind you don’t fall down the step.’
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 10
