Miss Hargreaves

by Frank Baker

  I opened the dining-room door. Mother rose hastily, gulping down her tea when she saw Miss Hargreaves and the hat. Father looked up for a moment, said nothing at all, dropped three lumps of sugar into his tea, then looked down to the evening paper again.

  ‘I’ve brought Miss Hargreaves,’ I said. ‘I understand father asked her to tea.’

  Mother forced a smile as Miss Hargreaves sailed valiantly forward.

  ‘So glad,’ she cried, extending her hand cordially, ‘to meet you! I have already had the pleasure of a chat with Mr Huntley amongst all the books. Books–books! My dear Mrs Huntley, where should we be without them? You, I can see at once, reverence literature as I do.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I like a good book,’ said mother shortly, fussing cushions into shape in her usual tea-party way and looking into the teapot. ‘I wish you’d told me you were bringing Miss Hargreaves,’ she said to me, ‘then we would have waited tea.’

  ‘Didn’t father tell you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Father spoke for the first time. ‘Miss Holway, isn’t it?’

  He offered her his hand which she took warmly. ‘How do you find the weather in your part?’

  ‘Oh, very fair–very fair!’

  ‘Let me see, you play the clarionet, don’t you? Now I’ve always thought that the clarionet wants very special handling. I’m thinking of giving a concert, and ’–

  ‘Oh, but the harp is my instrument, Mr Puntley.’ (I couldn’t make out whether she got his name wrong on purpose.) ‘I toy also with the piano and the organ. But I fear a clarionet is rather beyond me. I am always ready to learn, of course.’

  ‘H’m.’ Father munched a cream bun. ‘Can sell you a book on the clarionet, very cheap. Don’t think much of these buns, mother. Not enough cream in them. Are they Dumper’s?’

  Miss Hargreaves sat down in father’s special old leather chair with the ash-trays on the arms. Her eyes caught an old photograph of me, taken when I was two. Full of curls and petulance. I hate it.

  ‘Norman?’ she murmured.

  My mother nodded and rang the bell for Janie. Miss Hargreaves had taken the photograph from the mantelpiece and was studying it closely.

  ‘What extravagant curls! How proud you must have been!’

  ‘Yes,’ said mother shortly. ‘Not a bad baby.’

  ‘Children are quite certainly the arrows in the hand of the giant. Eh, Mrs Huntley?’

  ‘Could tell you a thing or two about giants,’ put in father, looking rather anxiously over to mother, who always scotches his yarns if she can. ‘Knew a giant once. Strange case. Grew every time he stretched. Melancholy chap, too. Said he’d eaten something from the garden, some weed, and that did it. It started with his legs one night when he stretched, feeling very tired. Then he yawned and he could never quite close his mouth after that. Positive chasm, that chap. He was a gamekeeper. Some weed, he said. Wife ate it, too. She died when she’d reached fourteen feet. Went on tour in a circus. Funny things happen. You never know, Miss Holway.’

  ‘Oh, do tell me what the weed was, Mr Puntley!’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Just a weed. Have some salad?’

  He pushed a bowl of lettuce and cucumber towards her.

  ‘We’re waiting for some fresh tea,’ explained mother. ‘And don’t take any notice of Cornelius’ stories, Miss Hargreaves. Are you staying long in Cornford, by the way?’

  ‘I think of coming to live here. It would be an excellent place in which to spend the twilight of my days, near your dear boy, yourself, and that splendid cathedral. I shall give a few little musical parties. But one or two matters have to be arranged with Grosvenor first.’

  ‘We close at one on Thursdays,’ remarked father. ‘Norman, pass Miss Harton the anchovy paste.’

  Janie came in and mother ordered some more tea rather curtly.

  ‘Talking about twilight,’ said father, who seemed to be in a very communicative mood that evening, ‘did you ever go to Norway?’

  Miss Hargreaves, instead of answering, looked over to me. ‘I cannot remember,’ she said. There was an expression of uncertainty in her face. ‘Did I ever go, Norman?’ she asked.

  I paused. How the hell should I know? But supposing ‘I think you did,’ I said, plunging wildly and hopefully.

  ‘Of course,’ she said instantly. ‘It all comes back to me now! Those beautiful fjords–the midnight sun–the folk-tunes on the long pipes and all the icy glamour of the Scandinavian geist! Shall I ever forget how–’

  ‘I was just going to say,’ continued father, ‘that before I was married–did you hear me, Dorothy?’

  ‘Yes, I heard you, Cornelius. Before you were married.’ She smiled indulgently as she took up some needlework. All the things that happened to father were before he met mother.

  ‘Before I was married I spent some time in Oslo. Now, there isn’t any twilight to speak of in those parts; you go from one thing to another. I found that this curiously affected one’s behaviour. Did you, Miss Harton?’

  ‘Oh–decidedly!’ She nodded her head rapidly.

  ‘How did it affect you especially?’ asked father.

  ‘Ah!’ she said. No more. But father seemed to understand.

  ‘H’m,’ he said. ‘Funny things go on. Have some salad?’

  One of the most surprising things about Miss Hargreaves was the way she immediately took to my father and he to her. For what seemed hours they talked, neither paying much attention to the other, of course. Mother and I spoke hardly a word.

  ‘Yes, I should like to start an archery club,’ father lit his fifth cigarette. ‘Ever tell you, Miss Holton, how the poet Swinburne took to archery?’

  ‘I think not, Mr Hunkin. My name is Hargreaves, by the way.’

  Mother sighed.

  ‘Amazing!’ said father. ‘He made his own arrows, you know, and used them to write with as well. Atalanta in Calydon was written entirely with arrows, Miss Hargreaves. He’d take the manuscript, pin it to the board, and fire at it. Any words that the arrows pierced, he’d take out. Like that. You know the verse:

  O, thy luminous face

  Thine imperious eyes,

  O the grief, O the grace,

  As of day when it dies!’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember. Beautiful!’

  ‘Well, before Algernon Charles aimed at that verse, it ran:

  O thy lustrous and luminous face,

  Thine inclement, imperious eyes.

  O the grief, O the gall, O the grace

  As of darkening day when it dies!

  Algy killed about three million adjectives with those arrows. He used to say, “the pen that writes them in can shoot them out”.’

  ‘How very remarkable! Then, we might say, had not the poet indulged in this archaic sport, many gems might not have been lost to English poesy?’

  ‘H’m. It depends, Miss Holgrave. Depends what your idea of a gem is.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. True. I myself, Mr Puntley, have–

  ’Father rose quickly. ‘Must go now. Got some microscope slides to go through. You must come up to my den one day, Miss Halton. Bring your harp.’

  Almost immediately father had left the room, mother put down her needlework and asked the question I knew would come sooner or later.

  ‘And how long have you known Norman, Miss Hargreaves?’

  She smiled. ‘Ask him,’ was all she said. Stretching out her hand to a cigarette box, she took one and asked me for a light.

  ‘An occasional vice!’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh–we’ve known each other for a–long time,’ I said vaguely to mother.

  ‘Really? And where did you first meet, then? It’s funny, Miss Hargreaves, but Norman has kept us quite in the dark concerning his friendship with you.’

  ‘In the dark? Tut! I do not care for that!’

  ‘There’s an ash-tray on the arm, there.’

  ‘Thank you; thank you.’ She smiled and blew a puff of smoke towards me. ‘I really can
not remember a time,’ she said, ‘when I did not know Norman. We are such very old friends.’

  ‘Well, fancy! I thought I knew all Norman’s friends.’ Mother laughed a bit petulantly. ‘I do think you might let me into the secret now that Miss Hargreaves is here,’ she said to me.

  It was a critical moment. What should I say? Could I say I didn’t remember? Should I again try to tell the extraordinary truth? No. It was too dangerous. She would probably collapse in her chair, even die, and we should have the frightful task of burying her, advertising in all the papers for a possible Duke of Grosvenor who would, if he ever came to light at all, be as difficult to get rid of as his niece. The hat would be kept as a relic to be stowed away in the theatrical chest on the landing; every time I saw it I would choke a sob and remember my villainy.

  Hastily I searched my mind for an answer vague and yet satisfactory. Where does one meet people? From what sort of a place might one begin a friendship with an old lady? Church? Theatre? Cinema? (She might have been grovelling for her gloves in the darkness.) Concert hall? Pleasure gardens? Bookshop–

  ‘In Blackwell’s, at Oxford,’ I said, hardly realizing the words were out of my mouth. Mother looked at me quickly. It was a plausible lie, of course, because I often had to go to Blackwell’s to buy or sell books for father.

  ‘Ah, me!’ murmured Miss Hargreaves, heaving a reminiscent sigh and spilling ash down her blouse. ‘Ah, me! What a memorable day that was! You know Blackwell’s, Mrs Huntley? Yes? Yes? You remember the little iron spiral stairway which leads up to foreign books? I had been up there referring to some Norwegian literature it must have been shortly after I returned from the Land of the Midnight Sun. Shall I ever forget the dreadful moment when I lost my footing and fell crashing to the bottom? Ah, well, Mrs Huntley we are sent many a blessing in disguise. For, without that catastrophe, I should never have met your good son.’

  ‘Really? What did he do?’

  ‘Everything, my dear Mrs Huntley. Everything! A compound femoral fracture could not, I am sure, have met with wiser treatment. Oh, those splints, Norman! Oh, dear, dear, dear!’

  She burst into little peals of delighted laughter. Did I remember ‘those splints’? I shifted about uncomfortably in my chair.

  ‘The ones I made from the newspapers?’ I suggested, knowing that, once again, I was on the Spur; once again, could not turn back.

  ‘Precisely!’ she said. ‘Nobody, my dear Mrs Huntley–except perhaps my dear Uncle Grosvenor–could have handled a critical situation with keener presence of mind. If it were not for your brave son, I doubt whether I should be here–I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Well, fancy! Who’d have thought it! Fancy Norman never telling me!’

  Mother stared at me, half admiringly, half suspiciously. I smiled sheepishly. ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘one doesn’t talk about such things, you know.’

  ‘Not alone flowers,’ declared Miss Hargreaves, ‘but many good deeds were born to blush unseen. Not that this is desert air, Mrs Huntley–not that this is desert air, indeed!’

  ‘After that,’ said mother, ‘I suppose you saw quite a lot of each other?’

  There was a tense silence. I was aware that Miss Hargreaves was leaning forward towards me, almost impatiently waiting for me to open the game.

  ‘I met her again’–I gulped–‘in the–in the–Albert Hall.’

  I sank back in my chair, pleased. I didn’t care a damn now. Nothing mattered. You had to go on at this game.

  ‘You mean when you went up for that big Choir Festival?’

  ‘Oh–the heat that day!’ cried Miss Hargreaves.

  ‘Shall I ever forget,’ I murmured, ‘those’–(raspberries?)–‘strawberries?’

  Miss Hargreaves clapped her hands.

  ‘Oh, how happy we were! Happy–and foolish! There was an interval, you see, Mrs Huntley, between the rehearsal and the actual festival. Norman and I suddenly felt we must have strawberries; nothing but strawberries it must be! So we bought a little punnet and set out for the park. Norman suggested it would be pleasant to eat our fruits on a boat in the Serpentine. So off we set, Norman handling the oars most awfully well. And then’–she raised her hands–‘the catastrophe!’

  She paused and looked at me. It was my move.

  ‘The strawberries fell overboard,’ I ventured.

  ‘And you stretched out your hand over the side–’ she continued.

  ‘And you did the same–’ I said.

  ‘And–’

  ‘The boat turned turtle–’

  ‘And there we were,’ she said, crying mate as it were, ‘floundering about in the Serpentine!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed mother. ‘You might have caught your death, to say nothing of drowning!’

  ‘It is such incidents,’ remarked Miss Hargreaves, ‘that link Norman and me very closely together. Very closely.’

  The door opened and Marjorie came in. I wasn’t prepared to face her, leave alone Jim. Suddenly my courage deserted me; I felt the ground slipping away from under my feet. Excusing myself vaguely, I rushed out and went up to father’s room.

  He was seated before his roll-top desk, examining a water-beetle under his ’scope.

  ‘My God!’ I groaned. ‘I’m going mad!’

  I fell down on the sofa by the window. Horace, the penny-coloured Tom, spat at me and leapt on to a pile of George Eliot stacked on the floor.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe these things had so many legs,’ said father. ‘I’ve counted eighteen already. Or are those whiskers? Come here and have a look. What’s the matter with you this evening?’

  ‘That woman. She mesmerizes me. What am I to do? I went crazy. Made up tales about us both, and she confirmed them all–even added to them.’

  ‘Women are like that. Dare say the female of this species here are constantly saying they’ve got more legs than they really have. Wish I knew which were whiskers.’

  ‘Damn your water-beetles! There she is downstairs, probably spinning the most ghastly yarns. I wanted to make it up with Marjorie this evening, too. What am I to do?’

  ‘Have a drop of whisky. There it is, on The Times Gazetteer.’

  ‘I honestly believe,’ I said bitterly, ‘that if I was to say I’d been up in a balloon with her, she’d agree with me.’

  ‘I was impressed with that story of hers about Norway,’ said father. ‘Wonder if she ever met–who’s that fellow? Wrote plays–ah, Gynt, that’s the chap. Lord Gynt.’

  ‘I never heard a story about Norway.’

  ‘You never do listen. I say–look at this–this beetle’s not dead. It moved.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it move if it wants to?’

  ‘But it’s dead. Remarkable. Pity we can’t get your Miss Molway under this thing. No knowing what we might not see.’ Jim suddenly came in. I could see she was cross.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Norman!’ she said. ‘What the devil do you mean, leaving us stranded with this wretched woman?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jim. She got too much for me.’

  ‘Well, she’s certainly too much for us. Looks as though she’ll stay all night. Come down and get rid of her.’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything about a balloon, has she?’

  Jim looked puzzled. ‘Balloon?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’ll come.’

  When we got downstairs Miss Hargreaves was still holding forth. Marjorie looked at me coldly as I came in; poor mother was stifling her yawns.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Miss Hargreaves was saying. ‘Norman and I have had many adventures together. And I have no doubt but that we shall have many more. Old I may be, but I am still ready for–’

  I interrupted. I didn’t want to hear what she was ready for.

  ‘Isn’t it time Dr Pepusch was covered up?’ I suggested.

  She looked up. ‘Ah, there you are, dear! Yes. Perhaps I had better go. Will you see me to my lodgings? Yes? I am temporarily staying in Canticle Alley, Mrs Huntley. My furnit
ure is in store, of course. But as soon as I find a suitable property, I hope to get settled. Then you must all come and dine with me. I look forward to many musical evenings, many feasts of reason. By the way, my dear Mrs Huntley, I completely forgot. Are you quite recovered from this unfortunate fever?’

  ‘Fever?’

  ‘Scarlet, I believe.’

  This wouldn’t do at all.

  ‘Come along, Miss Hargreaves,’ I said very loudly.

  ‘Who on earth told you I had scarlet–’ began mother. But I interrupted with a shout.

  ‘Look!’ I cried. ‘A stag-beetle! Mind out, Marjorie–’

  Marjorie, who is really soft about the mothiest moth, screamed and waved her hands round her head. I flew to the curtains and poked about noisily.

  ‘Must catch it!’ I said. ‘Always wanted to breed them. Mother, call father. He’d be furious to miss this.’

  ‘Oh, what nonsense–’

  ‘Go on! Get father, I tell you.’

  ‘Wait!’ cried Miss Hargreaves. ‘Let us be calm. Close all the windows and place this screen before the chimney. I will get my butterfly net–’

  ‘Too late!’ I screamed. ‘He’s escaped. All your fault, Marjorie. Miss Hargreaves, run out and see if you can shoo him back.’

  ‘Father!’ mother was crying from the hall. ‘There’s a stag-beetle here.’

  For a few moments the wildest confusion prevailed. Fever, scarlet or otherwise, was forgotten.

  ‘No good getting father now,’ I said.

  Miss Hargreaves returned from the front door. ‘It has often occurred to me,’ she said a little breathlessly, ‘that since there exists a beetle who resembles a stag, there may possibly exist a stag who resembles a beetle. The frolics of nature tend often to mimicry.’

  While she spoke she went to the mirror and adjusted her hat which, in all the sudden rushing about, had sustained a slight list. We all looked at her wonderingly as she patted it more to one side and carefully arranged the veils.