Nell had as much responsibility as she had wanted, during the next five days, and more. There was no-one else to do it, so she had to talk to the police, and go through the dead woman’s desk to find the address of her sister in Cornwall, and break the news to her by telephone. She then asked her to come up to stay at Arkwood Road until she had disposed of all the necessary business. She told her no more than that her sister was dead—“and we’re—they’re—afraid that she did it herself.”
Miss Chloe Berringer took the news very quietly, answering her in a voice which the presumable shock seemed to have made no fainter than its natural tone. She accepted the offer of hospitality; she would arrive in the late afternoon of that day. When Nell put down the receiver, she felt that the worst was yet to come.
The five days which Miss Chloe Berringer spent at Arkwood Road were a painful and awkward time for everyone: they would have been painful anyway: it was Miss Berringer’s terrible shyness and her depth of feeling that produced the awkwardness. Her thinness, her silence, and the colours which she preferred to wear, together with the fact that she owned a flower farm, contrived to produce a personality irresistibly suggesting some dark, fading violet. Although her pet name for her sister, ‘Mu’, slipped out only once, while she happened to be alone with Anna, during the entire visit, it was plain that their love for each other had been the sole outlet of a nature burdened with passion. There were continual abrupt references to their shared childhood which showed that her thoughts were constantly returning to those days, with a hopeless yearning. Now she had left her her dog, and the flower farm: close human contact, Anna gathered, there was none.
They were all longing for the inquest and the funeral to be over and for Miss Chloe to be gone.
The Primula was closed. She had put it into the hands of house-agents; and was supervising the packing of her sister’s possessions, which would go down to Cornwall to rejoin the family nucleus from which they had been separated when the Berringer girls decided to live apart; and the staff of the tea-shop must set about finding itself new jobs.
Nell had been so occupied with the responsibilities laid upon her that she had scarcely realized she was out of work. When she did; when the first pause came in the discussing, the interviews, the arranging, the telephoning; she decided that she would not look for another post until everything was over.
A corner was found for Miss Berringer in Highgate Old Cemetery. She was buried on the Saturday morning, in mild September sunlight, and Nell’s strongest memory of the ceremony in after years was the perfect behaviour of Mary.
At the inquest she had worn her best clothes, referring to Tansy throughout the proceedings as ‘Mrs. Tanswood here’ and plainly relishing every minute. But at the funeral the Roman Catholic faith, effortlessly sweeping Mary Malone up into its two-thousand-year-old train, kept her in reverence, pity and love, and against the mechanically grieved air of the few other mourners, she shone by her faith; forgetful of self and thinking only of God and the dead. Nell, a Protestant to the last disc of her backbone, could never have made, or let herself be made into, the kind of person that Mary became for half an hour in the middle of that busy Saturday morning, but from then onwards she never met Mary without hearing her most innocently spiteful remarks against a background of timeless, fathomless peace and light.
The ceremony at the graveside being concluded, she decided against waiting with her parents until ‘the sister’ should be ready to accompany them back to Hampstead. She would walk home alone across the Heath.
She told them so, in a murmur, and was going briskly out of the lower gates of the cemetery, which lead into Swain’s Lane, with this intention, when she saw John, lurking almost in a large bush on the opposite side of the road. He waved to her mysteriously and she waved back.
He wore a black overcoat, too short for him, which he no doubt believed appropriate to the occasion, and a black Homburg; she thought that both objects must belong to his father.
“Hullo. How are you?” He came out of the bush and crossed the road.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“Where are you rushing away to?” He fell into step with her. “I say, is that the sister, in the tweed coat?”
“Yes. I’m going to walk back across the Heath.”
“How odd; she looks much more the type to kill herself than poor Lady Bottlewasher, doesn’t she? Don’t go home across the Heath, Nello; don’t go home at all.” He slipped his arm into hers, and she hoped that the parents, now getting into the hired car with Miss Chloe somewhere in the background, would not see. “Come and walk about in the old cemetery with me; it’s beautiful there; and then I know a little place, like a bird’s nest under a wall, over in Fortess Road where we can get egg and chips for our lunch.”
“Walk about in a cemetery?”
“Why not? I told you it’s beautiful. There’s a view from the top, at the back of the church—if it were a view in Italy or South America it would be famous all over the world.”
“I rather wanted some air.”
But she let him lead her back through the upper gates, made of old, soft iron painted a soft, faded red, and along the deserted paths, wide at first, then becoming narrower as they wound upwards between the neglected graves. The tombstones were almost buried in green plumelike weeds sweeping across them, dark rich moss obliterating once-beloved names glowed in the mild air, sheets of dry faded grass came creeping down to meet the tangle of briar creeping up. The place was deserted; not a step or a voice sounded but their own. Between the toppling stones London could now and again be seen; far below; grey towers rising up from a sunny mist.
John was looking about him with moderate content. “We’ll stay here for a little while,” he observed, as they came onto the broad, silent, crumbling terrace which crowns the summit of all the little upward-winding paths, and which is directly below the wall of Saint Michael’s churchyard, “then we’ll go and find some people.”
“It is rather creepy,” Nell said. “I say, ought you to do that?’ for he was arranging his father’s coat for her to sit on.
“It doesn’t matter. He’s doing madly well now on I.T.A., he can buy himself another. There. Isn’t that a view?”
She looked down on the black cedar tree spreading its flat branches above the turf on a mausoleum of bleached white stone. The still, sunny, misty air fell away beyond it into a gulf, ending in a wall of motionless, heavy, yellowing trees, and then, far below and away—London: towers, spires, colonnades, cubes of chalk that were flats, steeples, the dark blue egg that was the dome of Saint Paul’s, pluffets of snowy engine smoke going up, and the low, humble, creeping, droning haze of the city’s common people and everyday life spreading far beyond the horizon and filling the gazing eye from end to end. It was all bathed in the sunny haze that Turner loved to paint: a muddle of light that, when it shone, as here, upon actual objects not transformed by a painter’s eye, did but make them appear more distinct, and real beyond ordinary reality.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. “In that little black cap and with your hair, against that background, you look like a page-boy in an Italian painting. They so often have queer long noses. What are you thinking about?”
“Miss Berringer,” reluctantly, at last, in a low tone.
He moved impatiently. “Why do you always feel the ordinary things, Nell?”
“I am ordinary.”
“No, not quite. That’s what makes it so—”
“I don’t mind being ordinary, John.” She turned to him with an expression that for a moment disconcerted him. “I like it, you know.”
The expression was calm and amused; in fact, Nell felt neither.
Useless for him to say to her Let’s forget about it; that particular request is not easy to forget, for some people, and particularly when it is the first time that it has been made, and when it has been made by someone about whom there is a constant, confusing agitation of feeling.
Nell’s strengt
h was in the fact that she had no wish, for her own part, to grant it.
She did not reflect much upon her own feelings, she had never honestly faced her feelings for John; she only knew that the reason why she did not want to grant it was because she was quite sure that, if she did, she would go into slavery. She was so often cross with him nowadays that she was beginning to think she might ‘stop all this kind of thing’ when once he had gone away into the Army. She was even beginning to hope that she might. To behave … like that … if he were to ask her again, would be sheer lunacy.
She did, now, want to escape. She had a lot to do; to get on with; she had to find herself a new job, in which she could earn even more money and try to persuade her mother to have some outside help with the housework, and to see Elizabeth before the latter left for Jamaica, to discuss possible mutual plans for next year … there was so much, enjoyably much, to be done.
But, sitting beside him here alone in the sunlit silence, it was difficult not to remember what he had asked.
Then she remembered that she had just seen the body of someone who had given way unrestrainedly to Love being lowered into the grave. It was impossible to believe, on such a day as this, that infinite mercy and endless peace were not for Miss Berringer, but … if one yielded utterly, that could happen. … Better, surely, to behave in such a way that one would have safety and honour and peace?
Her thoughts returned, soberly, to Miss Berringer and remained there. But she had fallen into the habit of listening to John when he talked, and he was talking now.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“… AND WITH THE BLOOM GO I!”
“… AND SUCH A type to kill oneself for; fifty-six—as the papers have kindly told us more than once. And fat. And bald. And with a distinctly roving eye.”
Nell turned to look at him. “How do you know?”
“Oh, I do know practically everything that goes on in our part of Hampstead. (I have my sources of information.) And of course, as for being fat and bald—it’s truly dramatic, all those passions seething under the commonplace exteriors. But it takes an artist to see the beautiful nuances in an apparently squalid story. Probably he was getting tired of her, you know. (She was pretty old herself.) And then—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But I do; don’t be selfish. And then, after the divorce, he turns on her, and tells her that she has ‘Upset his life’! Wonderful expression, isn’t it? ‘Upset his life!’ So the Sleeping Beauty wakes out of her dream—and promptly goes to sleep again—for ever, this time.” He laughed.
Nell continued to look at him. Under the coat that he had taken off, he was wearing his usual collection of pale, loose, rather odd clothes. Today they were crumpled and not noticeably clean. His white skin never became tanned, and so she supposed that most of the brown upon it must be dirt. His hair was certainly dirty, and caught in it there were a few minute fronds of fading bracken: he must have been lying on the Heath, and now that she was close to him she caught a faint scent that was not entirely unwashed boy: it was bracken; he must have been absolutely rolling in the stuff.
“I do wish you would wash more often,” she said, and he laughed again.
“I mean it, John. How can you?”
“I ‘can’ because I don’t notice being dirty—(if I am). You should see some of the people I know. And really, Nello, how rude you can be. Talking of dirt, I’ve heard from Benedict. (Dirt made me think of dear little Gardis.)”
“Have you? Are they still together?”
“Oh yes. They’re living with some men who are diving for salvage from a submarine that was sunk in the war, somewhere off the coast of Spanish Morocco. Benedict says the men have built themselves a house out of rubbish, underneath a terrific rock that overhangs the sea shore, and that’s where he and Gardis are living. They can hear the sea all day, and the Arabs from a village nearby come down and eat their rice and scraps of meat out of a tin with them. They don’t do anything but swim and sunbathe and watch the men diving. Doesn’t it sound marvellous?”
“It sounds very uncomfortable,” Nell said, “a house made of rubbish,” and after reflecting he admitted that he agreed with her. “And of course after a time I should get bored with no houses and no conversation. I’m not fond of uncivilized living—at least, I like to know that civilization is there if I want it.”
“And have you heard from Nerina?” she asked.
“Not from Nerina (I didn’t expect to). But I had a letter from her parents.” He paused, looking away from her, across the immense valley filled with a city. “It was rather a nice letter. Thanking me, you know, and that sort of bull. They’re nice people actually, I think, nice ordinary people (not like television stars or ‘characters’), Nerina sent me her love.”
“Good.” But there was no little pain now. “I expect she’ll be all right.”
In fact she thought that the worst part of Nerina’s experience was yet to come, although it would at least be undergone in the shelter of her home and family. But this led back to those thoughts upon the unwisdom of giving oneself entirely over to Love which she did not wish to pursue, so she remarked that she was getting hungry.
“Are you? I suppose I ought to be. (Nothing since some canapés at someone’s party last night, Nello.) I’ve nearly had enough of it here. But don’t let’s go just yet.”
Nell kept her head turned steadily towards London. The remark about his last meal had brought back her concern for his entire way of living; those glasses of milk bought on borrowed money and gulped with a kind of languid gusto, which had to serve for lunch and supper as well; the chips bolted on the tops of buses or in the cheapest seats at a French film; the ham rolls, the sausages; the apples chewed in the small hours on the sofa in someone’s bed-sitter … wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it be a relief when he was sitting down to four square meals a day in the Army?
It was the first time that the idea of relief had mingled with the pain of his going away.
In a moment he announced that he had had enough of it now, and stood up, holding out to her, as she sat on the coat, his long powerful hands covered with long red scratches. “Blackberry bushes,” was his explanation, “on the Heath.”
He pulled her up, and they wandered down the steps and entered the maze of narrow paths winding and twisting among the graves. The hour sounded coolly across the air from the church spire; women in black were now moving between the graves on the slopes below; watering plants, refilling jars, carrying sheaves of flowers.
“It’s so nice, your being out of work, Nello,” he said as they went handfasted down Swain’s Lane, “why must you get another job? I like to have you there whenever I want you.”
No comment. What was the use of feeling the sweetness?
“Where do you think of trying for one?”
“The Rosa di Lima, first. They pay well and the tips are simply marvellous. I was talking to La Gouloue about it.”
“The red-haired girl? Yes … you know, you’ll have a good chance of getting taken on there because they choose girls with definite colouring. Haven’t you noticed? La Gouloue is red, and Barbara is so blonde, and Katrin is truly black. Your hair is really dead-leaf, you know; don’t let me ever find you putting horrible little ‘rinses’ on it to ‘brighten’ it.”
“I think dyed hair is the complete end.”
“Oh no, Nello. It can look marvellous, but not on you. The other thing against the Rosa di Lima is that you are, and none of those girls are virgins, of course.”
Again no comment; it was wiser from every point of view not to say one word.
“And if you get a job such miles away from Hampstead we shall never see each other.”
“We shan’t see each other at all soon, anyway.” She could not resist trying to find out whether he would mind.
“Oh, the bloody Army,” vaguely, and after a pause, “yes, I shall miss you horribly.” He went on to say in exactly the same tone that he would miss Hampstead and the flat
and London horribly too, and she thought it served her right for asking.
He led her through the back streets to Fortess Road; Nell scarcely knew Outer Highgate, and was not attracted by the secretive, melancholy rows of tall brown houses marching up and down steep hills, the quietness, the huge deserted churches built to shelter three hundred people crowning some sooty silent ridge that overlooked the distant Heath, the great grey mansions and old blocks of flats falling in solid ranks down to the roaring main roads. She observed that it was rather dreary, and he smiled.
The café they went to was one of those tiny hollows, scooped in the curve of an arch or clinging, as he had said, like the nest of a bird to a railway hoarding or the precincts of a garage, which abound all over London from Hendon to Bromley. This one just held four customers and the proprietor; in front it was all boarded up with wood ‘left over from an air raid’, the owner explained, adding without resentment that there wasn’t no toilet only the railway bank. Made it kind of awkward, but he was moving out soon. When the shaky door was shut and they could see through the steamy panes the blue of the late summer sky, dimmed yet still royal, and the tea-urn was hissing and the food set steaming before them on the scrubbed table, John looked contentedly about him and observed: “In twenty years there won’t be many places like this left.”
Nell, naturally interested in her surroundings, made some non-committal mutter. It would not do to offend him by explaining that she was repelled by the extreme, the almost fierce cleanness of everything and the air of poverty just kept at bay and the copiousness of the greasy food.
“These places are some of my favourite ones,” he said, and then they ate in silence for a while.
Here Be Dragons Page 34
