The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  A burst of fury rushed through Miss Baines. Her words were drops of strychnine.

  ‘Of course you’ve bought her trout.’

  Wilfred felt himself bounce off the pavement. For fully half a minute he seemed to soar somewhere far away from Miss Baines, floating in an icy sky. At the same time he suddenly recalled Dawn Edwards, her warm enthusiasm for Susie and the friendliness, almost the fondness, of her buttery golden eyes.

  ‘Look, I know you’re sceptical about all this. I know you don’t believe me. All I ask is that you should come back to the flat and hear Susie for yourself. She’s sung the same passage five times again already this afternoon.’

  ‘Thanks. There’s only two things I want at the moment. A good long cold drink or an ice and somewhere to swim.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of drink and plenty of ice at the flat and you can have a shower.’

  ‘All right. Let’s get it over with. Don’t let’s keep the prima donna waiting.’

  At the flat Miss Baines declined the offer of a shower and merely sat in the living room with an air of martyred discomfort, in the rocking chair, sipping a large gin-and-tonic from a frosty glass. Susie was still in the kitchen.

  ‘I won’t bring her in till she’s finished her supper. She seems to do it better after food.’

  ‘Unlike most other singers.’

  ‘Oh! and by the way I rang up the vet and told him all about it. He says he’s never heard of a phenomenon like it and he’s coming round first thing tomorrow to have a good look at her vocal cords.’

  ‘Oh! ridiculous. It’s probably croup or some sort of disease.’

  ‘Well, it may be. We don’t know. After all tenor-singing is a sort of disease.’

  ‘Oh! is it? I never heard.’

  Five minutes later, after charging Miss Baines’ glass, Wilfred went into the kitchen and brought back Susie, who seemed dazed, even dopy, from too much food.

  Miss Baines applauded the entrance pertly.

  ‘Oh! don’t do that. You’ll put her off.’

  ‘It’s the usual thing to applaud the artist, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but not this one. Just let her alone. Let her take her time. She’ll do it in her own good time.’

  Miss Baines laughed shortly, in rather a gritty sort of way.

  ‘I suppose she isn’t expecting kittens or anything? Then we could have a choir.’

  Wilfred could find no answer to this and sat in deeply repressed silence, watching Susie, who was now sitting on a sofa and licking her paws and reflectively washing her face with them. In impatience Miss Baines tinkled the ice sharply against the side of her glass, disturbing Susie, so that she looked quickly up.

  ‘Sssh! Don’t move. She’s going to start.’

  Suddenly Susie began to make strange sounds, at first sotto voce, then more loudly, on a rising, piercing scale. The inharmonious nature of the notes seemed utterly to fascinate Wilfred Whitmore, who sat enthralled, open-mouthed, eyebrows seemingly bristled with excitement, his two hands gently beating enthusiastic time.

  ‘There it is. That’s it. That’s the Schubert bit.’ His voice was the merest thistledown of a whisper. ‘Dah!—dah!—dah dah!—hear it? That’s The Trout.’

  To Miss Baines the sounds were like the unbottled echoes of distant caterwaulings on cold moonlight nights. She longed to hurl the contents of her glass at Susie, who seemed to be in mortal pain. Instead she drained the contents of the glass herself, slammed the glass down on the top of Wilfred Whitmore’s upright piano and got up.

  ‘I’ve just about had enough of this nonsense. I’m off. You’re heading for a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Now don’t go. Don’t rush off. Give her a chance. She’s only just started. That was just a sort of dummy run.’

  ‘Dummy, my foot. You’ll be telling me next she knows the difference between a diminished fifth and a cork leg—’

  ‘Look, I’m convinced the root of all this lies in some sort of reincarnation.’

  ‘Oh! you are? Well, I’ll tell you what. You get the vet to look at you in the morning. Not her.’

  ‘Now please. Don’t rush off like that. Will I see you tomorrow?’

  Miss Baines abruptly left without an answer. The door of the flat slammed with a cold rattle—a sound that Wilfred Whitmore felt he could still hear as he paced up and down outside the gates of the paint factory at lunch-time next day.

  ‘Oh! it’s you, Mr. Whitmore. I thought for a moment it couldn’t possibly be. We don’t often see you at lunch-time.’

  He turned to see Dawn Edwards, who had been wondering most of the morning what colour she should dye her hair next. She was getting rather tired of the golden-green.

  ‘You’ve no idea when Shirley might be coming out to lunch, I suppose?’

  ‘She’s taking lunch late today. Mr. Robertson’s dictating letters till two o’clock. He wants to get away early for the weekend.’

  Wilfred Whitmore’s face seemed sad, even depressed, at the news.

  ‘You look rather down in the dumps. It isn’t your cat, is it? How is she today?’

  ‘Oh! she’s very well, thank you.’

  ‘Still singing?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I think she’s singing better than ever.’

  ‘In really good voice, eh? How wonderful. I’d love to hear her. You did say I could some time.’

  ‘Of course. By the way, I had the vet to her this morning.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s very musical. He didn’t strike me as having much taste.’

  ‘Oh! you never know with those fellows. They look at everything so scientifically.’

  Miss Edwards’ eyes seemed to melt as she said this. A sympathetic glow seemed to spread across her face, prompting Wilfred Whitmore to say:

  ‘I don’t know how you’re fixed for time. I don’t want to upset your lunch hour but it wouldn’t take five minutes if you wanted to hear Susie now.’

  ‘Oh! goodness, I’d love to.’

  At the flat Wilfred Whitmore set Susie on a yellow cushion, in the middle of the sofa, and again she gently washed her face with her paws before suddenly beginning to make the strange sotto voce sounds, rising to a piercing crescendo, that had seemed to Shirley Baines like nothing more than the unbottled echoes of distant caterwaulings on cold moonlight nights.

  This is exactly what they seemed like to Dawn Edwards too. She thought the noise too ghastly for words but she merely transfixed the black, crying figure of Susie with her melting buttery eyes and said:

  ‘But it’s beautiful. She’s a soprano too.’

  ‘You recognise the Schubert? You know the song?’

  ‘Of course. I used to play it a bit at one time.’

  ‘You did? You don’t sing as well, I suppose?’

  ‘I used to. I was in the school choir and then later—’

  ‘If I played would you sing the Schubert? The Trout, I mean. It would be rather nice.’

  ‘I couldn’t today. I haven’t got the time today.’

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ve got to have my hair done tomorrow. It takes hours.’

  ‘Well, Sunday then?’

  Before answering him Dawn Edwards leaned down and began to stroke Susie’s black soft fur with the back of one hand. Against the bright yellow cushion the blackness of the fur seemed of unusual depth and brilliance and she said:

  ‘Do you like black? I mean not just in cats. I mean does it sort of do something to you?’

  How could she possibly know? he thought. He would never have guessed she was a girl of such perception. She didn’t look the type and he was delighted when she said:

  ‘All right, Sunday then. If you’re sure that’s all right? I mean what about Shirley?’

  ‘We haven’t arranged anything for Sunday. And even if we had—’

  ‘All right, let’s make it Sunday. Make it the evening, shall we? About six.’

  ‘About six. And I’m th
rilled you’ve heard Susie. I’m thrilled you like her.’

  ‘Like her?’ Again the melting buttery eyes spread their warmth. ‘If I sing it half as well I’ll be satisfied.’

  When she arrived back at the flat on Sunday evening, thirty-five minutes late, Wilfred Whitmore found it for some moments hard to recognise her. The head of mossy golden hair, lightly shot with green, had disappeared. The sensational glowing black mane that had replaced it had a passionate depth in it and a strange light that smouldered at the edges with a touch of midnight blue. It seemed even richer and softer than Susie’s fur.

  Throughout the evening Dawn Edwards alternately drank gin-and-tonic and sang, in a very light soprano, brief snatches of Schubert. Wilfred Whitmore caressed the notes of the piano with vibrant hands. The evening grew dark and finally, as he and Dawn Edwards sat on the sofa together, he found himself caught up in yet another momentary hallucination. It was that Susie was ever so gently caressing his face with her fur. It was some time before he discovered, with an explosive jolt of excitement, that it was really Dawn Edwards’ black, sensational hair.

  Dawn Edwards is now Mrs. Whitmore. Miss Baines continues to work at the paint factory. There is a certain brittleness in her manner and a certain aloofness, almost hauteur, in her bearing. She becomes increasingly irritated by Mr. Robertson and he, in turn, by her. In order to sleep at night she takes increasing doses of phenobarbitone which in turn, as time goes on, have a diminishing effect on her.

  Sleeplessly she lies and thinks of Wilfred Whitmore, Susie and Susie’s strange cold discords. There frequently runs through her mind the whole of Die Forelle, The Trout—of which she now has a gramophone record—and particularly that beautiful passage in it that starts

  And over and over again, as she hears it and sees in imagination the trout turning in its rippling waters, she wonders why cats are so popular.

  More especially those who sing.

  The Trespasser

  ‘Good gracious,’ Aunt Leonora suddenly yelled, ‘that damned cow’s eating the lupins again!’

  A moment later, gold spectacles prancing, she was rushing with revengeful haste through the open french doors of the sitting-room and into the garden, snatching up on her way out one of the many old ash-plants, gnarled as twisted parsnips, that she kept handy for the purpose of chastising trespassers, stray animals, tramps, idlers, salesmen and anyone else who might be standing about and up to no good in the process.

  ‘Shoo, you beast! Get out of it! Cow, do you hear?’

  I followed her immediately, searching the calm sunny borders of the June garden in vain for a single sign of any trespassing cow. I should have known that none ever came there, that they were as mythical as the marauding herds of deer that nightly threatened beetroot and bean-rows, bringing Aunt Leonora downstairs with beating sticks and flashing lanterns.

  I saw instead a tubby, mild-looking man, with a white top-knot of hair and a very scrubbed pink complexion, who looked not at all unlike a round fresh radish, standing with an air of absent surprise on the edge of the lawn, beyond which large colonies of lupin rose in gold and purple spires. A floppy black umbrella, on which he was pensively leaning for support, gave him the estranged appearance of someone who had been unexpectedly dropped into the garden by parachute and did not know, in consequence, quite where he was.

  Aunt Leonora, who was baggy and big-limbed and looked not at all unlike a rampaging cow herself, meanwhile rushed onward to enlighten him. It was still not clear to me whether, in her short-sighted way, she could distinguish between man and beast and I was half-horrified, a moment later, to see her brandishing the ash-plant with violent challenge in the direction of the tubby man, obviously in readiness to beat him furiously about the rump.

  A providential turn of his body brought him face to face with her, just in time. Undismayed, she yelled an instant demand to know what had happened to that damned cow she had seen trampling all over the place a couple of minutes before?

  ‘It’s yours, I suppose, isn’t it? It would be!’

  A look of almost ethereal surprise enveloped the tubby man so completely that he stood there as if embalmed. The gravity of things was evidently still not clear to him and when his mouth finally opened it was merely to let fall a single hollow word.

  ‘Cow?’

  ‘Yes, cow. A damned great red and white one. Chewing the lupins. Trampling all over the place.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘They’re always at it. They’re in here every day.’ It was a blatant lie, though I am sure she was unaware of telling it. ‘Trampling and gorging everywhere. Where’s it gone to? One can’t grow a thing without its being chewed up like a—like a—’ Aunt Leonora made a questing search of the air for a suitable damning word—’like a field of tares!’ she suddenly spat out. The word tares, delivered with a final hiss, had a positive fire in it and set the tubby man back another pace or two. ‘Who are you anyway? Take your cow home. You’re trespassing.’

  After a glare of stunning power had struck the little man like a point blank charge of shot he managed somehow to find an answer.

  ‘I rather thought I was in my sister’s garden,’ he started to say, ‘but—’

  It was a most unfortunate remark to have made and Aunt Leonora at once seized upon it with peremptory scorn.

  That’s a damn-fool thing to think,’ she said. ‘Sister? What sister? Whose sister?’

  The tubby man, looking about him with deepening apprehension, almost despair, said he was terribly sorry but he could have sworn that this was The Limes. A flutter of repeated apologies ran from his lips in a muted scale, ending with the words ‘even the lupins looked the same—’

  ‘Good God, man, The Limes. You mean you belong to Old Broody? Her? She’s your sister?’

  ‘Miss Elphinstone—yes, she’s my sister.’

  Aunt Leonora let out the rudest of snorts and said Good God, she’d never known that Broody had men in the family and then, as if the withholding of this family secret from her was a sort of un-neighbourly crime, glared at him with furious disbelief, plainly thinking him a liar. There was something ironical in the idea of her accusing someone else of not telling the truth and the little man stuttered as he said:

  ‘Oh! yes. There are three brothers.’

  ‘Married?’ She threw the awful word at him with typical point-blank candour, clearly determined that no second family secret should escape her.

  ‘Oh! yes, we’re all three married. In fact my eldest brother and I have each been married a second time.’

  ‘Caught twice, eh?’ she said.

  Unabashed, she bared her big friendly teeth and laughed into the tubby man’s face with an expansive crackle and then a moment later further confused him by turning sharply to me and saying:

  ‘This is my nephew. He just called to bring me some aubergine plants for the greenhouse. Raised them himself. I’m mad about aubergines. Like them stuffed. Do you garden?’ Before the tubby man could attempt an answer she glared at me again, baring big teeth, and shook the stick. ‘You saw that damned cow, didn’t you?’ she said to me.

  I started to say that I hadn’t seen anything of the kind. Somewhere in the distant past a solitary wandering cow had so far trespassed as to reach its neck over the fence and take a few modest bites from a lilac bush. Since then Aunt Leonora’s complex had developed from strength to strength and now rampaging cows were everywhere.

  ‘I think it must have been this gentleman you saw,’ I said. ‘After all the light’s very strong this morning—’

  ‘What’s it got to do with the light?’ she said and suddenly hurled at me a dark accusation. ‘Your eyes wander,’ she said. ‘I could hardly mistake a man for a cow, could I?’

  I kept silent; spectacles seemed to do little or nothing for her acute short-sightedness, and I refrained from reminding her that once, on a misty September evening, she had mistaken me for a wandering deer as I returned from a mushroom trip and had struck me a number of severe blo
ws about the elbows before I could stop her. Deer were worse than cows; she was convinced that they actually jumped the fences; they could gorge a whole garden in a night.

  ‘On a long visit?’ she said, once again taking the tubby man by surprise with that fresh, alarming candour of hers, ‘or just here today and gone tomorrow?’

  Startled again, he began to explain that he was here for a week and then, looking hastily at his watch, said that he thought he ought to be going. It was rather later than he thought; his sister was inclined to be particular about meal-times. He didn’t want to upset her.

  ‘Which one are you?’ she said. ‘Charley? Now I come to think of it I think I’ve heard Old Broody talk of Charley.’

  ‘Oh! no, Charley’s my elder brother. I’m Freddie.’

  ‘Oh! you’re Freddie, are you?’ she said, rather as if there were some awful mistake about his birthright, and then suddenly turned on him a smile of such masterful charm, her big teeth positively glowing, that I could have sworn his face reddened a little further. ‘Oh! yes, of course. I think I’ve heard Broody talk of you too.’

  ‘Well, I must go. I must bid you good-morning. It was awfully silly of me about—you know—and I—’

  ‘We were just having a glass of sherry and a piece of saffron cake,’ Aunt Leonora said in the sweetest of voices, ‘Would you care to join us before you go?’

  It was another blatant lie; we had been doing no such thing; she was merely putting it on for the trespasser.

  ‘I honestly think I ought to go—’

  ‘Oh! Broody and her lunch can wait. I suppose it’s risotto anyway?’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact it is risotto.’

  ‘Oh! I gave her the recipe years ago. She always has it on Thursdays. She’s no imagination.’

  Back in the house I poured sherry into cut glasses at a side-board and turned once or twice to see the tubby Mr. Elphinstone’s eyes blinking and winking sharply in their effort to re-focus themselves after the blinding outdoor light of noon. This gave him an air of fidgeting discomfort, or as if he were dying to ask a question that had been bothering him for some time. And presently the question came: