And he went on to explain that on Sundays his cleaning woman did not come and he had lunch at the hotel or at his brother’s. ‘When the Germans come over with the Munich book you must come down to the works. You must meet my brother, see my house.’
She interrupted sharply. ‘You must understand, G, I could not possibly do that,’ she said firmly.
They went to the park, where the sky was wide and open. There was a distant bellowing and screeching of animals from the zoo as they passed the absurd cricket matches and the couples clinging on the grass, the girls pulling down their dresses to their knees, and the older couples calling their dogs that raced away in wider and wider circles. A man was teaching his son to fly a kite; it twirled around and somersaulted again and again until at last it flew up high and twirled again and dived fast to the ground.
‘My son is getting too old for kites. He wants an aeroplane,’ George said.
They walked to the long lake where old ladies and children were feeding the ducks, and they laughed at the noisy parties in the rowing boats.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘There’s not much to eat in these cafés on Sundays.’
They went to a crowded place outside the park, and the day dawdled as he drove back to her flat.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re mad, George,’ but he gripped her hand and they went upstairs.
The dark had come as she watched the red light of his car vanishing down the street.
She felt in their walk through the park that she belonged to the real world now and that George had renewed her life and that she was part of things that lived, the growing trees, even the grass, the birds flying over, even dogs racing, the children and every person she passed – even the people, unknown to her, who lived in the distant houses that surrounded the park, even people in the sky, as an occasional aeroplane passed across it, flying to the east, the west, the north, or the south. And, mysteriously, she felt at one with his wife and his son. Now she worked with heightened alacrity on the book she was translating; she loved seeing the German words turned into English, as if she were giving new birth to them. She was becoming useful again after that long period when she had left the Institute. Her anger had gone. She was needed.
George brought the news that two Germans from the firm publishing the Munich book were coming to his brother’s works for the day and George wanted her to go down there to interpret. George’s son would be there, too; it was the time of the boy’s half-term holiday. George brought him to the station to meet her as she arrived. ‘Here’s Harry,’ he said.
She saw a plump boy with reddish hair who stared at her defiantly when they shook hands.
‘My mother is in hospital,’ he said. ‘She can’t talk.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I am very sorry. She and I used to work in the same office.’
‘Dad said,’ he said. ‘Are you a German?’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘But I speak German. That is why I have come.’
They went to the works. There was George’s brother wearing a white dust coat. Two Germans stiffly bowed. The boy followed them round as they looked at the machines and listened to her speaking English and then German. He was awed by her, and whenever she spoke he moved his lips trying to copy her, saying the strange words. At last, since no one paid attention to him, he began quietly mocking her, saying, ‘Vee fill, gobble, high Slosh, goramma de goramma, nine ten, volly gelob, Ya, Ya.’
‘Shut up,’ his father said.
So the boy followed them muttering. He hated her, and when they all went to look at a line of damp prints hanging on a line he gave her a sly kick on the shin. She glanced at him and said nothing. He was about to give her another kick when his father said, ‘Stop that or you go home.’ The boy was frightened and now followed her slowly.
‘Your father says you have got a grass snake,’ she said. ‘Where do you keep it? Will you show it to me?’
‘Ah,’ said the younger of the Germans. ‘Eine Ringelnatter. Where is it?’
After that the boy was quiet, and he dropped out of the procession. When the visit was over, she went to the boy and asked, ‘Where is your snake? Show it to me. What is its name?’
‘Snakey,’ he said.
The party walked to his uncle’s house and the boy ran into the garden and came back with the snake, which had wound itself round his arm. A triumph.
‘Oh, don’t let it come near me!’ Paula called out. ‘It’ll sting me.’
‘It doesn’t sting.’
The Germans laughed. Everyone laughed.
‘Stroke it,’ said the boy.
She touched it. ‘Oh, it’s cold!’ she said.
The boy jumped about.
‘Calm down,’ said George. ‘I think it wants to be in its box.’
‘Come on. I’ll show you where I keep it in the garden,’ said the boy.
‘Next time,’ said his uncle, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got to get to Brighton for lunch. You’ve been very helpful,’ he said to Paula. ‘Why are you limping?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘I knocked my shin against that machine.’
And so they went off to Brighton, over the Downs, to shouts of ‘Wunderbar!’ and jokes about the British Alps without any Schnee, and at last to the first sight of the sea flying out like a flag, and to lunch with speeches from the two Germans, and jokes about the esteemed lady, and glasses clinking and bows in all directions. They said how they would all meet in Frankfurt in a month’s time – or was it a week’s time? And when it was over and George was going to drive them to Gatwick airport, she begged him to put her on the train because her leg was painful.
‘You’d better stay here. I’ll get a room,’ he said.
‘Darling George,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I’m exhausted. Drop me at the station. I must get back to London. Don’t look so sad, George.’
‘Trains every half hour,’ he said. And he drove by a longer route on the outskirts of the town, passing a church in a long village street.
‘Church,’ he said, jerking his thumb. ‘See that? Parson coming out – see that? Kids riding ponies. Cricket field at the back. Nice place to retire to.’
And then, after a steep climb, he got her to the station barrier, and there in the clanging of luggage trolleys she said, ‘I loved seeing Harry. He’s like you.’ And she tapped him on the chest. ‘When do you go to Frankfurt?’
He pulled out his diary and said, ‘Ten days’ time.’
She snatched it from him and, looking at it, said, ‘All those “X”s. Who’s that?’
‘You,’ he said. ‘Let’s get onto the platform.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I hate platform goodbyes.’
Five days later he rang her and was at her door in the afternoon. The trip to Frankfurt had been brought forward.
‘It’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Change your mind and come with me.’
‘I can’t possibly come. I’ve invited my sister,’ she said. ‘She’ll be here while you’re away. You are annoying, G.’
He looked at the small pile of typescript on her table and at the page that was sticking out of her typewriter and then at the open German book. ‘Well, if you can’t come, read some to me,’ he said suddenly. ‘I want to hear you speak it, like when the Germans were here, and then I’ll think of it all the bloody week while I’m away. Anything, just to hear your beautiful voice.’
‘G, how strange you are today.’
In the end she agreed and picked up the book, opened it at random, and read.
‘A bit more,’ he said.
So she read on and then laughed at him. ‘You didn’t understand a word.’
‘I did. Frauen something.’
‘Frauenkirche,’ she said.
He said, ‘That’s it. The way your throat moved. Say it again.’ And then he had his arm around her and she was struggling against him.
‘You were thinking of your pretty German wife,’ she said, and she struggled until she was helpless, as she had been th
at first time. ‘Not here, George,’ she said. ‘No, not on the floor.’
And when she got up from it she said, ‘Tell your son you’re the snake. The German is Schlange.’
The next day he left for Frankfurt.
‘Ring me when you get there!’ she called after him.
‘You bet,’ he said. She worked all day and that evening he rang her. ‘It’s hell,’ he said. ‘You’d hate it. Hundreds of publishers sniffing round one another like dogs. Chinese, Japanese, American, half Europe, all the disunited nations. How many pages have you done?’
‘You love it, you old fraud,’ she said. ‘Have you rung the boy?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The next evening he rang again, and the next day, he said there was going to be a trip down the Rhine.
On the third day he said he was calling to ask how many pages she had done. ‘It’s calming down here,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow there’s going to be some excursion. I don’t know where – to some wine place. No, wait a minute – that’s the day after tomorrow. By the way, our German friends, especially the big one – you remember – want to be remembered to you. I think he’s going to send you a present. I wonder what. How many pages?’
On the fourth day there was no call and she rang the hotel and someone said he was out at the museum, not in his room, and someone else said, ‘Not at the museum, on the excursion.’ There was a gabble of voices on the hotel exchange, and after a long time she heard a man who said he was the manager and asked who was speaking and she said, in German, ‘I simply want to speak to Doctor Southey, with the British delegation, who is staying with you. It’s urgent.’ And she said vehemently, ‘This is his wife, speaking from London.’
And she heard the man say to someone, ‘You fool, why didn’t you tell me this lady was his wife?’ And she could clearly hear him say, ‘You rang his brother? Where is his brother, at the hospital?’
She was trapped in a net of angry voices. And then the manager spoke again: ‘Madame, we have supposed his brother must have told you. You must prepare yourself for bad news. I assure you we got in touch with his office at once. We supposed his brother would have passed the knowledge to you. Doctor Southey died in hospital yesterday, after a riding accident.’
‘Get off the line!’ she shouted. ‘I am speaking to someone.’
The manager repeated his sentence. ‘Not deaf,’ he shouted. ‘Dead. Tod. Doktor Southey ist gestorben.’ And he repeated one of his long, riddlelike sentences.
Paula felt her face collapse. The strength went out of her hands and out of every object in the room, and indeed her whole body seemed to be jumping away from her and leaving her. She dropped the telephone, which hung squawking on its cord.
‘George, you conceited fool –’ she began.
‘Stop that!’ she shouted at the telephone.
She felt her body shrinking to nothing and then suddenly grossly bursting, as if to mock her. She seemed to hear George say those words that always annoyed her when he was caught out and was trying to smooth his way out of something – words that now grew fainter and fainter: ‘There I go, flat on my face.’
‘George, why didn’t you tell me?’ she whispered as if she were looking for him in the room.
And then the news became real to her. ‘That poor boy,’ she said. And now she did believe the news. ‘His poor wife,’ she said. ‘This will kill her.’
She felt that half her life had been ripped out of her, that she was hanging in suspense between the present and her earlier memories of him, which became more vivid and real than the recent ones. Almost cautiously, she went from room to room, not able to believe that he would never again be sitting on that chair or this, or walk up the stairs. And then she could hear him making those telephone calls to the hospital and to his son at school.
Some days later a formal card announcing the memorial service arrived, saying ‘Funeral Private.’ With it there was a short typed letter from George’s brother thanking Paula for her beautiful letter and the lovely wreath. Paula had also sent her love to the boy, and from him in time there came a letter written on lined paper from his school:
Dear Mrs Paula. I hope you are quit well. A beastly dog got Snakey. I have got a new one.
A few years ago two new London ladies became noticeable in the village of X. They settled in a cottage near the church at the top of the long street and walked every day to the post office in the afternoons. In fact, only the tall gaunt one with the thick grey hair who takes long steps is, strictly speaking, a Londoner. The little one with the reddish dyed hair is well known to be the sister-in-law of the printer who lives two miles away on the outskirts of the town. She trots along with a scraping step, chattering to the tall one, who, when they first came to live there, was thought to be a nurse, for it was known that the little one had been for a long time in the hospital in the town, lying there in a coma for goodness knows how long, after a stroke. About that, she has nothing to say, of course, for that part of her life is missing, but what she does not fail to say, with pride, too, about herself and the tall one called Paula is that they had been friends since they worked in the same office in London, at a place called the Institute.
‘When we were girls,’ she says. ‘That is where I met my husband.’
Her husband is buried in the new plot of land the church had taken over some years back: a man said to have been in his time a fast bowler in the village cricket team.
About Paula, the tall one, little is known beyond the fact that once or twice a week she drives in a small car to the university ten miles away. Three or four of the village people even went to a lecture she gave on some German subject at the Literary Society in the town. There was a poster on the door of the Village Hall, and the daughter of the woman who runs the post office and village shop and has a big black dog went to the lecture. And so, indeed, did the printer and his wife. The village also knows that it is Ethel’s, the little one’s, son who comes down at weekends. He is a good-looking young man who often goes for a walk up on the Downs with Paula. His mother goes only as far as the footpath at the end of the village because she can’t manage the steep climb.
Their cottage is really two small flint-and-tiled cottages turned ingeniously into one. Ethel has a room on the ground floor, with a door giving onto the long lawn because she finds stairs tiring. Paula works in a room upstairs, where one wall is lined with books, and she sleeps in a narrow room that looks out onto the churchyard. Behind the house is a public footpath and a handsome row of sycamores and then the cricket field and the pink villas of the newer part of the village. In the afternoons and some evenings the two ladies sit in a sitting room, which is almost luxurious, for it is furnished with one or two treasures Paula brought down from her London flat there. There is a long, tall gilded mirror on one wall, a chaise-longue, and a cabinet with one or two pieces of china in it. The chairs are pleasantly low-seated, the windows are long and look out across the garden hedge to the public footpath, and it is pleasant to hear the gate slamming at the end of it and to see who has gone by.
Quite a number of distinguished visitors come to the house, especially one or two professors from Paula’s university, and this is the time for Ethel to show her gift of bringing in large glasses, like globes, containing her speciality: well-iced and powerful gin-and-vermouths. When she comes into the room she always catches the ends of the sentences she hears and repeats them as if to give the impression that she had not been out of the room. If she hears a visitor saying ‘In my opinion the film is a disaster to anyone who has read the book,’ she glides in saying, ‘– To anyone who has read the book,’ to join in the conversation. When her son is there and perhaps says, ‘It was three-one at half-time,’ she will eagerly repeat, ‘Three-one at half-time.’ She is making up for the time she was in hospital for all those years and heard nothing. She is particularly quick to pick up Paula’s exclamations in the garden when Paula finds a climbing rose has gone wild and says, ‘Nothing to be done with them. Cut
them back or they go on, regardless with ideas of their own.’ Ethel says, with fervour, ‘– With ideas of their own.’ When someone says, ‘Munich has the finest collection of pictures in Europe,’ she repeats, ‘the finest in Europe,’ as if she had been visiting there all her life.
Ethel’s son has turned into a plump and dressy young man with the habit of making a hissing noise between his teeth when he is bored. On Saturdays there is sometimes a sharp bang, like a shot, from the gate to the footpath at the side of the house. The gate slams loudest when the children from the pony club ride through.
‘I wish that woman from the riding school would take her horses some other way,’ says Paula.
‘– Her horses some other way,’ says Mrs Southey as she limps into the room. She adds, ‘The noise interferes with Paula’s work. How can she concentrate?’
But both women are thinking of George’s death. His widow says, ‘It was all conceit. I could understand if he had had a woman – but a horse! I’m not being funny.’
And she rambles into memories of the Institute and says to Paula, ‘Everyone thought you were going to marry Mr Featherstone. He made sheep’s eyes at everyone. You don’t know the whole of it.’
Her son listens. He would sooner be down at the village pub but he knows the ladies expect him to take them out to dinner on Saturdays at some restaurant or other. He likes his food and always wants to try a new place.
‘Where shall we go?’ Paula asks.
He pulls out his diary and looks down a list of telephone numbers.
‘All those telephone numbers – just like George,’ Paula says.
‘I collect them,’ he says. ‘I started when I was at school. Dad used to ring me up from all over Europe.’
‘Yes,’ says Mrs Southey primly. ‘We’ve got all his diaries, with numbers from all over the world.’
The shabby diaries are a guide to George’s life when she was absent from it.
‘He even telephoned from Turkey,’ the young man said.
‘And,’ said Paula, ‘sometimes from my house to the hospital and to your school.’
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 12
