The Wrong Set and Other Stories

by Angus Wilson

  When Nurse appeared dressed for the street Lois felt a greater antipathy even than before. Really, she thought, she’s no better than a little shopgirl, an ‘amateur pro’. She had seen such little creatures with their black hair, badly put on lipstick and insolent eyes, hanging on the arms of soldiers in the Edgware Road. The sort of horrible women whose full animal natures only appeared when they were drunk, singing and shouting obscenities on the tops of buses. What an unsuitable person to be Daddy’s nurse, and she thought of those brown leather wallets of his smelling of lavender water and packed with letters from the women of his past, – clever, beautiful women, – actresses, wives of friends, models, all the distinguished bric-à-brac of Edwardian wild oats. How degrading that at such a time he should be making moribund passes – I didn’t mean those words, she thought with shame, they just slipped into my mind – flirting with a cheap Irish wanton. ‘A nice, reliable girl’ Doctor Filby had said, he must be insane. And then into her mind came other incidents – Daddy leaving her with an excuse at Leicester Square to speak, as she well knew, to a hardfaced, peroxide prostitute; Mummy finding that cretinous Welsh housemaid in bed with him; that nursemaid who appeared on the stairs with her hair down, laughing, and shouting curses at Mummy – My God, she thought, perhaps it isn’t so unsuitable after all. I’m allowing myself to dramatize the situation, she decided, after all I’m very overtired. The girl’s private life is no concern of ours, she a good competent nurse and she makes Daddy comfortable that’s all that matters.

  ‘Won’t you have a cup of tea before you go, Nurse?’ she asked.

  ‘Well now that’s kind of you. I’ll not say no.’ Really, the girl had a most pleasant smile.

  They sat uneasily in Lois’ room while the kettle boiled on the gas-ring.

  ‘Yours must be a tiring life, Nurse’ said Lois, at last, in dead tones. ‘But then I expect you wouldn’t have taken up nursing unless you had felt a great call to it. I mean it always seems to me to be a vocation rather than a profession.’ What a flat, Kensington platitude, she thought, and oh my God! the girl’s probably a Catholic, and she’ll think it blasphemous to say ‘vocation’.

  ‘It is grand work indeed to feel that you can help the poor things in their trouble’ Nurse replied. I am a fool, thought Lois, always seeing depth in people where they don’t exist.

  ‘We shall all have need of you’ she said ‘if war comes. That is if any of us are left alive after the first hour.’

  ‘Do you think it’ll come to war then?’ said the nurse, and her voice took on a sudden excited note, accentuating the brogue. ‘God in heaven, I pray not. But they do say they have the coffins ready for us, in their thousands, and made of cardboard too, such terrible massacres they’re expecting. Mind you, if it came it would be a righteous war, they’ve been doing the devil’s work there in those concentration camps. But there’s worse than that they’ve done, dividing father against son, destroying homes.’

  Really, thought Lois, I thought I was covering an awkward silence and I’ve let loose the Abbey Theatre. Aloud she said:

  ‘I can see you feel very strongly about it, Nurse. I wish I could feel as certain as you, but the papers are so lying, one doesn’t know what to believe.’

  ‘Oh if my brother could hear you say that, it’s what I’m always telling him. He’s turned a Red’ she said in a hushed whisper ‘and they’ll no more receive him at home. He fought in Spain with that dreadful International Brigade. It was fighting against God I told him, but he only laughs. He’s for ever speaking of the dreadful things the Fascists did at Barcelona and such places. “It’s the truth I’m telling you” he says, but how can one believe him? Oh why can’t they leave us alone?’ and to Lois’ ear she seemed almost to be wailing ‘don’t we have our own private thoughts that are aching in us?’

  She was silent for a few minutes and Lois suspected that she was embarrassed at her outburst, then putting down her empty cup, she handed Lois a blue envelope. ‘I must be going’ she said. ‘Will you give this to Doctor Filby, please, it’s a note of the patient’s temperature. You’ll be sure to give it to him?’ she added. ‘Of course’ said Lois. How hysterical she seems for a nurse, she thought, and then felt unjust, after all, she too, was probably overtired.

  After the nurse had left, Lois returned to sit in her father’s room. She felt overwrought after the alarm of yesterday and the first sleepless night of sitting by the sickbed. Nothing has changed, she thought, as she lay back in the armchair – the rows and rows of brown, highly polished shoes each with its shoetree; the ivory and silver brushes and combs with the Gothic monograms; the silver framed photograph of her parents taken on their honeymoon, and a later one of Mummy in a chiffon blouse with a cameo brooch – all these were objects of familiar vision; and she could guess at so many others – the neatly pressed grey check suits on their hangers; the stovepipe trousers of the old Edwardian narrowness, some even with shoestraps, the two grey bowlers which he was so proud to display in these degenerate, sloppy days; the photographs of Duke Rodney, his champion bulldog – everything smelling of his beloved lavender water. That familiar scent filled the room, closing all round her in her drowsiness, but behind it there was another scent, sharp, acrid, disgusting. Suddenly she was roused from the sleep that was enveloping her – for a moment she had been forgetting the awful thing that had happened, but that scent had recalled it – the sharp stench of vomit, the faint, sickly odour of faeces. That was why the room was so unbearably hot, why, although sunlight was pouring in through the windows, the gasfire was burning at full height. The stroke that had robbed Daddy of the power to move his legs, had left him perpetually numbed, so that he who had so loved fresh air seemed always to be complaining that the room was cold.

  Stroke was a well chosen name, she decided, for it had descended upon them so suddenly, out of the void, shattering their happiness. She had suffered moments of apprehension that such a blow would fall ever since Daddy had passed his seventieth birthday, but he was so active and gay, and people lived to such an age nowadays that she had always put the thought from her mind. She was too busy understanding him, letting him do what he wanted and preventing Harold from hearing of it. That was what had aged him, she felt no doubt of it, feeling dependent on Harold for his money. She never allowed him to feel that the little bit he got from her was anything but his own. But Harold was always grumbling at the way the money was spent, just like Mummy had done. She understood Daddy better than that, he was like a naughty child; of course he’d always been spoilt, but he was so sweet when he had his own way. He wanted the good things of life, needed the excitement of gambling. Harold was such a horribly good man, he never wanted to do anything he shouldn’t. It was true he would pay Daddy’s debts, but always with such a long face and sometimes even with a lecture. It hurt Daddy’s pride so, and she couldn’t bear to see him humiliated at his age, so that she was always interceding for him, pretending the money was needed for the household, getting at Harold when Daisy was not there. It was Daisy really who was so unkind, she who was not even one of the family, except by marriage. They were always suggesting that Daddy should live with them at Tunbridge Wells; but he would have hated it, away from the West End, his poker and his racing, treated like an old dependant. She and Daddy had fought them and had won. ‘You don’t want to be rid of your old Daddy, do you, Lois?’ he had asked, after one of Daisy’s visits, and she had knelt on the floor by his side, rubbing her cheek against his poor, worried face, running her fingers through his hair. ‘Silly’ she had said ‘I must have my old Daddy to bully or what should I do when I was cross?’ But now that this awful thing had happened, how were they to meet it? She could not afford to leave her job and who would look after him in an hotel? No one would say whether the paralysis was permanent. They would take him away from her, put him with the incurables. No! Ο God! No, rather let him die than that, she said half aloud, and for a moment she fancied that the drawn face on the pillow had smiled at her. Perhaps he would
recover, perhaps it was only a temporary thing, a warning for the future. Oh God! let him recover, and we will take such care not to offend again, she murmured. If only he could move about even a little they could carry on as before. The main thing was to know what was happening. That nurse knew, she had probably written it all in the letter – ‘Mr Gorringe has only three days to live.’ They had no right to ignore her so, it was bad enough to treat poor Daddy like an animal to be ordered about at will, just because he could not move, but she could not be treated so, she was still able to protect him. She picked up the blue envelope and tore it open. Nothing was written on the notepaper but temperature recordings and the times at which medicine had been given. She flung the paper down in disgust, and then on the reverse she saw what seemed to be a private letter – ‘What’s eating you, honey’ she read. ‘It’s over four weeks and more that I’ve never seen you, and none of my letters getting an answer. Darling you know I’m mad about you. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. When shall I see you again? You know where you can find me and I think you know I can make it worthwhile to you. For God’s sake give me a break, Fil. Kath.’ ‘Private thoughts that are aching in us’ thought Lois, My God, how disgusting!

  The ambulance lurched slightly as it avoided a careless cyclist. Mr Gorringe’s shoulders seemed to heave as he retched again, the green globules slipping down his beard in snail tracks. Lois wiped his chin with a hand towel. She could hear him murmuring faintly ‘I’m very ill, God help me, I’m very ill,’ and his eyes stared with fright as his body shook at a sudden hiccough. Harold held up the basin, ‘Poor old chap’ he whispered to Lois ‘He’s so very helpless.’ Lois pretended not to hear; it was just what Mrs Cooper had said at that awful interview in the hotel office – the interview that had finally sent Daddy from her. After the first moments of fury, she could have disregarded that disgusting cheap letter, have treated the nurse and Doctor Filby as though she had never read it, or at the worst doctor and nurse could have been changed, but Mrs Cooper’s statement had been so final, so irrevocable.

  There were residents at the St Mary Abbot’s Hotel who said that Mrs Cooper’s office was the most spacious room in the house and on this warm July afternoon their belief would have seemed amply justified. It was more of a sitting-room than an office with its rich lacquer suite from Maples, the noticeably antique grandfather clock, and the Edwardian curio-table containing silver spoons and ostrich eggs. On this particular afternoon the room was a riot of blue – delphiniums, lupins, love in the mist and anchusa all brought from Mrs Cooper’s country home near Midhurst – for Mrs Cooper loved blue, it was ‘her colour’, with her baby blue eyes and her carefully waved white hair she felt sure that ‘blue suited her’ as her turquoise ear-rings and butterflywing brooch could attest.

  Lois always felt at a disadvantage with Mrs Cooper; the hard eyes, the drawling voice, with its occasional glottal stop betraying an East End origin, seemed to assert success and comfortable security, to underline her own genteel penury. She hated to think that this vulgar woman knew so exactly Daddy’s financial vagaries, had even refused him little loans to meet gambling debts. This afternoon’s summons to the office had completely unnerved her, cutting through her private grief, overwhelming even the horror of that disgusting letter. It was so unlucky that Mrs Cooper should happen to be there, for in these last years a rising bank balance had taken her on cruises to Norway and to Greece, on trips to Monte and Bordighera and Biarritz, leaving more malleable manageresses as vicereines, but 1939 had brought an uncertainty that daunted even her.

  ‘Sit yourself down, Miss Gorringe’ said Mrs Cooper ‘I don’t think you’ve met my nephew’ and she waved her hand towards an overdressed young man with a Ronald Colman moustache.

  ‘Pleased to meet you’ said the nephew.

  ‘Now, Tony, you great lump’ said Mrs Cooper ‘stir yourself and get Miss Gorringe a cigarette.’

  ‘No thank you’ said Lois, and she thought Pray God that he goes soon. Why should I have to hear their conversation when Daddy’s so ill? She will try to separate us and I am determined to fight her, but if I have to talk about other matters I shall lose my resolution. She has done it on purpose to break my nerve.

  ‘I’ve just been telling this boy that if things go on like this he’ll have to be measured for a uniform’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘We’ll have you in khaki yet, Tony’ she added with a laugh.

  ‘If things come to a head I shall join the Air Force’ said the young man.

  ‘You’ll go where they send you, my lad’ said his aunt. ‘Hitler means war, you mark my words.’

  ‘I can’t believe he can be so crazy’ said Lois.

  ‘Can’t you?’ replied Mrs Cooper ‘I can. Well, Tony, give my love to mother. See you next month, Hitler willing.’

  At last he has gone, thought Lois, now I must be firm. Attack is the best defence.

  ‘I’m so glad you asked to see me, Mrs Cooper’ she said ‘I was intending to come down anyway. There are one or two things my father will be wanting now that he is ill.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Mrs Cooper, without appearing to hear, then she said rather distinctly. ‘You’ll miss him, won’t you, Miss Gorringe? But Tunbridge Wells isn’t far, you’ll be able to run down whenever you want to. Has your brother made arrangements yet?’

  ‘My brother couldn’t possible accommodate my father’ said Lois firmly.

  ‘Couldn’t he? What a pity! Well, I expect he’ll find a nearby nursing home.’

  ‘Daddy wouldn’t like that at all. He values his independence so much. Besides’ Lois added ingratiatingly, ‘he’s so fond of the hotel.’

  ‘And we’re so fond of him’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘He’s the nicest guest I’ve got. You tell him that from me, it’ll cheer the old dear up. Don’t worry, my dear, they often rally from these strokes, but he’ll be an invalid, of course. He couldn’t possibly get the attention he needs in an hotel. Poor old chap, he’s so very helpless.’

  ‘But we’ve got a nurse’ said Lois.

  ‘Now, my dear Miss Gorringe, do you imagine I’d ever keep any maids if all the guests had nurses in attendance? You know as well as I do how badly that class get on with each other. Why! there’s been trouble already. No, you make other arrangements; shall we say not later than a week from today?’ and Mrs Cooper turned to her account book.

  ‘Aren’t you rather presuming?’ began Lois.

  Mrs Cooper laid down her fountain pen and her smiling blue eyes were quite unflinching. ‘No. my dear, I’m not’ she said sweetly. ‘The situation’s quite impossible. You’re tired out or you’d see the point at once. You take my advice and ring your brother up now. Doctors can be very callous sometimes, they see so many of these cases, of course. It would be a pity if he insisted on sending your father to the hospital, it’s so difficult to get them out once they’re there,’ and she returned to her accounts.

  The movement of the ambulance had become faster but yet more smooth. Lois guessed that they had reached the open country. Mr Gorringe was seized with a new bout of hiccoughs, great shaking, bursts of wind that seemed to rack his whole frame. His cheeks were flecked with green, and dull white patches appeared on his cheekbones which reminded Lois of his appearance in a fit of rage. It was quite possible, she thought, that he was in a rage; he kept murmuring, but the words were too faint to be understood. She helped Harold to prop his body forward with the pillows, whilst the attendant wiped his forehead. His face was suffused with sweat after the exertions caused by the hiccoughs and Lois noticed that the sweat smelt rank, almost as though the body was putrefying. At last the bout came to an end, and he lay back, exhausted and snoring. Harold looked apprehensive ‘I don’t like that stertorous breathing at all’ he whispered, but soon the patient was sleeping more quietly. ‘I don’t want to say anything against Dr Filby, but I shall be glad when Doctor Grimmett sees the old man. Filby’s diagnosis seems so vague, in fact his whole handling of the case wants a bit of explaining. Oh! don’t think I’m complainin
g’ he continued as he saw a shadow cross his sister’s face. ‘You’ve done your best in a very nasty jam, but I think it was just as well the old man was moved when he was.’ The awful thing is, thought Lois, that I can’t defend myself. Dr Filby’s whole behaviour was most unsatisfactory, he never really came to the point, but what could I have done? If Harold knew of that letter from the nurse he’d make an awful row. She noticed that the bedclothes had slipped away from the patient’s feet, and, as she tucked them in, she saw again the strange, brown scabs on her father’s legs. The whole of that perplexing unsatisfactory interview with the doctor came back to her.