‘And what would you call a good price, Mr Martin?’
‘Well, No. 12 fetched five thousand and five hundred, but that was some years ago, and there has been a considerable drop in prices since then.’
Mrs Graham gave a high, sweet laugh.
‘Oh, but, Mr Martin No. 12! It doesn’t compare in any way!’
‘Ah, yes, but the Forster estate hadn’t been opened up then. Those modern labour-saving houses have made a lot of difference to what the older ones will fetch.’
‘Everyone says they are jerry-built.’
‘Now, now, Mrs Graham, that is really quite a mistake, if you will allow me to say so. There has been very good work put into them, I can assure you.’
Mrs Graham was not in the least interested in the Forster estate, which had been thrown on the market by an impoverished peer. She said quite tartly,
‘How much would Mr Blount pay? If he doesn’t make an offer, how am I to know whether it would pay us to accept it or not? We might go away on a cruise, but we should have to get something to live in when we came back. My daughter doesn’t think I am business like, but I have thought about that! And I think that a cruise would be very good for us both. A little change, you know – fresh people – not just seeing the same dull faces every day. I’m sure I get quite tired of seeing them go by!’
Mr Martin being one of the people who passed by her windows every day, he could hardly escape the implication. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Althea Graham must have a trying time of it, and that it would be good for her to get away for a change, though what she really needed was to get away from her mother.
Mrs Graham’s voice was fluting again.
‘So perhaps you will just find out what he is prepared to offer.’ A click at her end of the line informed him that she had rung off.
Althea was out when this conversation took place, but she was at home at two o’clock when Mr and Mrs Blount arrived with an order to view the house. She was not pleased, and perhaps her manner showed it.
‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘but I told Mr Martin yesterday that we are not thinking of selling.’
Mr Blount was a heavily built, ruddy man with a well-to-do kind of air about him. He put a hand under the elbow of his flabby, drooping wife and guided her past Althea into the hall. Without absolute rudeness it would not have been possible to keep them out. Mr Blount’s voice was resonant and good-humoured. He said,
‘Well, well – what a pity. I certainly understood from the house-agent… You are Mrs Graham?’
‘I am Miss Graham.’
He beamed.
‘Ah, then there is some little misunderstanding. Mr Martin said it was Mrs Graham he had been talking to. Perhaps we might see her…’
‘My mother is resting.’
‘Now isn’t that a pity! We certainly understood that she might be disposed to consider a favourable offer. Perhaps as we are here we might just have a look round. The fact is my wife has taken a wonderful fancy to the neighbourhood. Up and down and all over the place we’ve been, looking for somewhere to settle down now I’m retiring, and there’s been something wrong with all of them. Either the water or the soil, or too high or too low down – there’s always been something that didn’t suit. And what all the doctors say is, “Let her do as she wants, Mr Blount. Don’t push her, or you’ll be sorry for it.” Very interested in her case the doctors are. And what they say wrapped up in the doctor’s language, which I’m no good at and I don’t suppose you are either – well, it amounts to this, if there’s anything she wants, get it for her, and if she wants it badly get it for her quick. Now this house, we’ve been walking past and looking at it and she’s taken the biggest kind of fancy for it – haven’t you, Milly?’
Mrs Blount had sunk down upon one of the hall chairs. She had a limp discouraged look, from her stringy sandy hair to her toed-in feet. She drooped on the upright chair and looked past Althea with pale watery eyes. She didn’t seem capable of having a violent enthusiasm about anything. She opened the lips which hardly showed in the general pallor of her face and said,
‘Oh, yes.’
Althea found herself saying in the voice she would have used to a child, ‘I’m sorry, but we really don’t intend to sell,’ and with that the drawing-room door opened and Mrs Graham stood there. There could have been no greater contrast to the sagging Mrs Blount. Mrs. Graham wore her invalidism in a very finished and elegant manner, from her beautifully arranged hair to the grey suède shoes which matched her dress. It is true that she wore a shawl, but it was a cloudy affair of pink and blue and lavender which threw up the delicate tints of her face and complimented the blue of her eyes.
‘Darling, I heard voices. Oh…’ she broke off.
Mr Blount advanced with his hand out.
‘Mrs Graham, permit me – I am Mr Blount, and this is Mrs Blount. We have an order to view, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Miss Graham…’
Mrs Graham smiled graciously.
‘Oh, yes. I had a little chat with Mr Martin this morning, Thea darling. I ought to have told you, but it slipped my memory. I didn’t think he would be able to arrange anything so soon. Perhaps you will take them over the house.’ She turned a deprecating look upon Mr Blount. ‘I am not allowed to do the stairs more than once a day.’
Impossible to have a scene in front of two strangers. Althea took them over the house, Mr Blount talking all the time and Mrs Blount repeating in every room the same two words – ‘Very nice.’ When she had said it in four bedrooms, a bathroom, the dining-room, the drawing-room, and the kitchen, they went into the garden, where two bright borders and a strip of grass led up to a shrubbery and a summerhouse. The slope was really quite a steep one, so much so that Mrs Graham considered it beyond her. Althea’s conscience took her to task for the feeling of gratitude which this induced and she had no defence against it. The place was a refuge, and the house afforded her none. There was no room in it where she could turn a deaf ear to the sound of her mother’s high, sweet voice calling her, or to the tinkle of her summoning bell.
Mr Blount looked at everything. He obviously didn’t know a delphinium from a phlox, or a carnation from a marigold, but he admired them all. He admired the old summerhouse, which was really, as Mr Martin could have told him, what used to be called a gazebo and was a good deal older than the house. In the days when Grove Hill was really a hill with wooded slopes it had been contrived to afford an agreeable view of fields going down to the river. Since it held some of Althea’s most deeply hidden memories, she was glad to find that Mr Blount was not interested in it, passing it over with the remark that summerhouses were draughty, and that Mrs Blount had to be very careful about draughts.
When they were gone she went back up the garden and sat down in the gazebo.
FOUR
NICHOLAS CAREY CAME back to Grove Hill because he had left a lot of kit there and he supposed he had better go through it. If he had thought about it at all in the last few years, it was to imagine that Emmy Lester would have taken it with her when she moved, or failing that, would have thrown most of it away. But no, the letter which greeted him on arrival in England informed him that she had left the attic positively stuffed with his things. There was a good deal on the lines of ‘You know the Harrisons have bought the house – some distant cousins of mine – and Jack Harrison couldn’t have been kinder about my leaving everything just as it was. But I don’t know his wife Ella quite so well, and I think she would be glad if you could go down and just sort out what you want to keep. We haven’t much room here, but anything we can take in…’
Emmy came up before him as he read the letter – a kind, vague creature with a heart as soft as butter. But no fool… He fancied that in the reference to Ella Harrison the sense could be reversed. After meeting Ella he was to be quite sure of it. Emmy had seen right through her, and didn’t like what she saw.
There is always something strange about the return to a place which has once
been very familiar. The you who lived there comes back out of the past. It is no longer you yourself, because you have gone on and left it behind. Its loves and likings, its sorrows and despairs, are no longer yours. The misty years have dimmed the memory of them and they can no longer give pleasure or pain. But when you go back in the flesh, walk the old streets, and see the old places, the mists have a tendency to wear thin. A snatch of verse came into his mind and whispered there:
‘Grey, grey mist
Over the old grey town,
A mist of years, a mist of tears,
Where ghosts go up and down –
And the ghosts they whisper thus and thus
Of the days when the world went well with us.’
The Harrisons had invited him to stay, and he had accepted. He told himself afterwards that Emmy’s letter ought to have warned him. He should have made it his business to be much too busy to come down except for the day. Ella Harrison was everything he disliked most in a woman, and poor old Jack couldn’t call his soul his own. He gathered that they had returned in the late spring from a cruise of the jazziest kind, and that every minute of it had been pure poison as far as Jack was concerned.
‘We had the most marvellous time!’ Ella said. ‘Such a gay lot of people! Maria Pastorella – the film star, you know – eyelashes about a yard long, and the most marvellous figure! And her latest husband, an enormously rich South American with a name nobody could pronounce, so we all called him Dada! Really – these South American men! The things he said! He rather singled me out, and I don’t think she liked it! We really had a wonderful time! I’m telling all our friends they ought to go!’ She called across to her husband on the other side of the room.
‘Jack, I believe the Grahams are going to sell their house and go off! Winifred is getting all excited! She says that man who came to see it has taken the biggest sort of fancy to it! He offered five thousand, and she turned it down, and now he says he’ll go to six!’ She came back to Nicholas.
‘By the way you knew them, didn’t you?’ Her voice became rather arch. ‘Rather well by all accounts!’ She gave the laugh he disliked so much. ‘There’s nothing quite so dead as one’s old affairs, is there? But the poor girl has just sat here gathering mould ever since! Not an attractive occupation! I expect she was quite good-looking when you knew her.’
Emboldened by a position behind the sheltering pages of The Times, and perhaps a little by the presence of another man, Jack Harrison said,
‘She is very good-looking now.’
Ella’s laugh was not quite as ringing as it had been a moment ago.
‘Really, Jack! What extraordinary creatures men are! I should have said she had let herself go completely – but there’s no accounting for tastes. Of course Winifred makes a perfect slave of her, but that’s their look-out.’
Nicholas said that he thought he had better start in on his stuff in the attic.
He was astonished at his own anger. It might have broken out once, but five years of some very odd places had taught him self-control. His temper could still flare up at a spark, but he could keep the blinds drawn and the shutters barred whilst he dealt with it. In some of those places the merest momentary failure to control himself could have meant instant and imminent danger. He had walked strange paths, watched strange rites, kept strange company.
Ella Harrison, accompanying him to the foot of the attic stair, had no idea how much pleasure it would have given him to strangle her. He was better looking than in that old photograph that Emmy was so proud of. She admired slim, dark men, and naturally he would admire her. Just his type – bright hair, plenty of curves, plenty of colour. She felt very much pleased with herself and with him.
Up in the attic Nicholas was being appalled at the amount of stuff he had dumped there. There were three trunks full of things that had belonged to his mother. Some of them were valuable. All had been thought worth preserving. He had been going to go through them with Althea. There was an enormous blanket-box, the contents most carefully looked after and annually camphored by Emmy.
Only last May she had made a special journey from Devonshire for the purpose. There was a linen-chest. There were stacks and stacks and stacks of books. There were pictures – portraits of grandparents and great-great-grandparents. He remembered an enchanting Regency lady in clinging muslin with a blue riband in her hair. What was he to do with her – what was he to do with any of them? Leave them to the dust of Ella Harrison’s attic? He had a feeling that they would prefer it to her company downstairs.
He lifted the lid of yet another box and discovered photograph albums jammed down upon a mass of letters and papers. They would have to be gone through – but how and where? The idea of remaining with the Harrisons for more than the very briefest of visits filled him with horror. A dreadful woman and poor old Jack the completely trodden worm. Yet where if not here could he deal with such a mass of stuff? He couldn’t drag it to an hotel, he couldn’t cart it down to Devonshire, where Emmy would think him impious if he destroyed so much as a second-cousin’s photograph. So what was he to do except stick it out here and get on with the job as fast as he could? He supposed that quite three-quarters of the letters and papers would be for the scrap-heap. He thought he had better get going on them.
There was an empty clothes-basket in the corner which would do nicely to hold the discards. He had it about a third full, when he picked up a battered book on engineering. He couldn’t remember having ever possessed such a thing, but when he turned to the fly-leaf it had his grandfather’s name in it. As he tossed it into the basket, half-a-dozen unmounted photographs fell out from between the pages and fluttered down upon the attic floor. They were at least seventy years younger than the book. They were, in fact, no more than six years old, and he had taken them himself. They were all photographs of Althea Graham, some of them taken in the garden here, and some of them in the Grahams’ garden. There was a very bad one of her with Emmy’s cat Ptolemy on her lap. Ptolemy was hating every moment of it, and when Ptolemy hated anything he made himself felt. The scene came flashing back. The photograph was a bad one, because Althea was trying not to laugh, Emmy kept saying ‘Don’t!’, and just as he touched the camera off Ptolemy scratched and fled. The whole thing came back with extraordinary vividness – Emmy in her gardening clothes with earth on her hands and her hat falling over one ear, Allie in a green linen dress. Her eyes were a sort of mixture of brown and grey, but the dress and the garden setting had made them look almost as green as Ptolemy’s. It was a very bad photograph, but it didn’t go into the discard. None of the photographs were really good. Besides, what did a photograph ever do except set memory and imagination to conjure up a lost image?
He went on looking at the pictures for a long time. He had an impulse to tear them across. The conjuration of the dead is an unhallowed rite – he would have no part in it. But in the end he put them away in his pocket-book and tore up a number of letters from an uncle who had been his guardian and whom he had most particularly disliked. An irreverent satisfaction in being able to think of him as a scapegoat touched his mood and lightened it.
He went back to his sorting with a growing wonder as to why on earth one ever cluttered oneself up with all these lendings and leavings. After five years of being foot-loose it seemed to him to be pure insanity.
It was next day that he discovered he was expected to attend a cocktail party given by Mrs Justice. The Harrisons were not only going to it but had already told her that they were bringing him along, added to which she had rung him up, talked exuberantly about old times, about Sophy and Sophy’s husband and children, with a special mention of the recent twins – about Emmy, and about how nice it would be to see him again. He had always liked Mrs Justice, one of those large rolling women who went her way like a benevolent juggernaut, flattening people with kindness, enthusiasm and good advice. The red-haired Sophy had been a friend of Allie’s – a rollicking creature who always managed to keep one young man ahead of the g
ossip about her, and was now, he gathered, bringing up a family in the West Indies. Sophy and a tribe of children! It made him feel elderly.
FIVE
EVERY RETURNED WANDERER is not greeted with enthusiasm. When you haven’t seen a ne’er-do-well stepbrother for several years you are not always disposed to order in even a portion of a fatted calf. Mr Martin had a rueful expression when Fred Worple walked into his office and shook him by the hand. He was fond of his stepmother – always had been. A good wife to his father and a good mother to himself and Louisa. But as to young Fred, the son of her first husband, well the less said about him the better. Up to every kind of trick at home and always in trouble at school. He was sharp enough, but you couldn’t rely on him. Old Mr Martin took him into the office, but he wasn’t any good there. He was invalided out after six months of his military service and went off into the blue. His mother worried herself sick about him, wanting to know where he was and why he didn’t write, but Mr Martin had always had the feeling that the fewer inquiries you made about Fred the better. And now here he was, quite prosperous-looking, in one of those suits with a fancy cut and a handkerchief and tie which he wouldn’t put up with in one of his clerks. He said, ‘Well, Fred?’ and then, ‘Have you seen your mother?’
Mr Worple nodded.
‘Staying with her. Come on Bert – aren’t you going to say you’re pleased to see me?’
Mr Martin said, ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether you’ve come back to worry her.’
Fred laughed.
‘You are pleased, aren’t you! Well, I can tell you one thing, she is. Cried over me and kissed me as if I’d brought her the Crown jewels. And you needn’t worry – I haven’t come back to sponge on her or on you.’
‘That is a good thing.’
The Gazebo Page 3
