by Angela Huth
‘It must have taken months of rehearsal to get it up to that standard. That girl, whoever she was, who played Mary. She was especially good. And yet I couldn’t help thinking … in fact I said to myself, I said : my, I’m sure that girl isn’t at all a Mary character. I’m sure she’s good at netball, or something like that.’
Emily sat up, respect increased.
‘How did you know that?’
‘What?’
‘That she’s netball captain?’
‘I didn’t know, of course.’ Marcia Burrows smiled. ‘I was only guessing. But there was something about her, the way she sat over the crib. It seemed to me her natural inclination was to pounce, jump high. Her cloak and halo couldn’t hide her sportswoman’s body. She must be the first Mary I’ve ever seen whose problem was to contain, not her body, but her mind. I felt, should a whistle suddenly blow, she’d be the first to leap up, and damn the baby in the cradle!’ Emily smiled. ‘That’s why she was so good, you see. All those spirits, contained, made her calm much more effective. Some genuinely dull girl with a placid face wouldn’t have been the same thing at all.’
Marcia Burrows was quite animated. Emily watched as two pink spots, at first quite small, spread rapidly over the entire plains of her cheeks. Her sudden warmth made Emily bold.
‘Do you disapprove of anything?’ she asked.
‘Well, of course. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes you look very disapproving, like at supper when Mama stubbed out her cigarette on her plate. Then just a little while later you say all those nice things about the play, and you guess right about Jennifer Plomber which I don’t suppose even Uncle Tom would have done.’ Marcia Burrows smiled but didn’t reply. ‘So what do you disapprove of?’
Marcia thought for a while.
‘Obvious big things,’ she said finally. ‘And then, on an everyday level, the things they spring from. Unkindness, for instance.’ She paused again. ‘And some methods of kindness.’ Her mouth shortened.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you really want to know? Well, simply, when there’s a choice in a way of doing things, I believe in absolute honesty from the start. Of concealing nothing. It saves so much …’
Suddenly her ball of wool fell from her lap and skittered across the floor. She reacted with a look of sadness out of all proportion to the happening. Emily returned the ball to her lap, not quite understanding, nor indeed wanting Marcia Burrows to go on. She tried a new subject.
‘Are you going to get married ?’
‘Oh yes, I hope so. One day.’ Marcia Burrows managed a real smile.
‘My mother married Papa when she was very young, you know.’
‘Your mother is a very beautiful woman. Gay and clever, too.’
‘I know.’
‘We don’t all have that good fortune.’
‘Oh, I think you’re quite clever. Mama can’t knit like you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyhow, I think you’d be a good wife to someone.’ Again Marcia Burrows smiled. ‘Has no one ever asked you?’
After a pause Miss Burrows replied, quite brusquely. ‘Do you want to know proper grown-up answers to all these questions, Emily?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, then, if you really want to know, a man did propose to me once. He was called Derek and he had one leg longer than the other.’ Emily giggled. ‘But I didn’t want to marry him-nothing to do with the leg, of course. He just wasn’t very – prepossessing, if you know what I mean. There was nothing you could put your finger on and say : that’s Derek.’
‘So what about the man you did want to marry?’
Marcia looked up, startled.
‘How did you know about him?’
‘How did you know about Jennifer Plomber?’
‘There’s not very much to say about him.’ Marcia had found a new, resigned voice. ‘We spent some happy times. He was good to me. But he didn’t know how to tell me he loved someone else more. He tried not to hurt me, but of course I found out. By that time there wasn’t much left for me … I don’t attract friends,’ she added. ‘There wasn’t a crowd of supporting people to turn to, was there? Just the knowledge that all the time he’d been someone else’s, not mine.’ A tear suddenly ran from one eye down her cheek. Emily was startled.
‘Miss Burrows!’
‘Forgive me, child. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what made me talk like that.’
‘Do you want me to fetch you a handkerchief?’
Miss Burrows shook her head. ‘Really, thank you. I usually have one. Now, it’s time you went to bed. Your mother said. I shall do just a couple more rows and go myself.’
Emily got up.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, ‘if I made you cry.’
‘It was nothing to do wtih you, dear. As my mother always said, the quickest way to self-pity is a glass of sherry. Now, up you go.’
Emily bent down and kissed her, carefully choosing the cheek without the tear.
‘Papa’ll be back in the morning,’ she said.
‘That’s good,’ said Miss Burrows. ‘You’re lucky to have such a nice father, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Emily.
She couldn’t sleep. She lay, eyes open, thinking of Marcia Burrows and her odd-legged admirer. Perhaps he had run after her shouting his proposal behind her, only of course he wouldn’t have stood a chance of catching her up if she had been going fast. So after a while he would have had to have given up, sit on a bench and get his breath, and wonder what to do next. If he had decided to go along to her house and knock on her door, would she have slammed it in his face ? Or would she have asked him in to tea and called him ‘dear’ as if nothing had happened, as if he had never chased her round the park, people laughing, people shouting? That chase he was bound to lose. Perhaps it was a bit mean of Marcia Burrows to say no to Derek if she really didn’t mind about his leg. Surely she would have been better off with a man with a limp than no man at all? She didn’t look particularly happy on her own. And she ought to be happy because she was a nice woman. Kind. Gentle. She wouldn’t frighten any sort of man, as perhaps Mama would. No one could imagine a man with a limp chasing after her. Wouldn’t dare. Well, it would be silly. All her boyfriends before she married Papa, she once said, were young Lochinvars who swept her off her feet to exciting places before she had time to say no. She had liked that, and she had probably been good to be with once they were at the places. Whereas Marcia Burrows, it had to be admitted, wouldn’t be the most lively person anywhere, however exciting.
The church clock struck twelve. The square of night sky in Emily’s window was filmy still with snow. It was absolutely quiet. Then, immeasurable time later, the noise of the car’s engine.
Emily sat up. She strained her ears. Voices downstairs, but no words. She heard a laugh, Papa’s laugh. He was back, back. The moonlight shapes about her began marvellously to flower : now her room was a ship in a stormy sea pitching towards him-she swayed back and forth. Certainly they wouldn’t capsize. Now it was Aladdin’s cave : she had only to rub her tooth-mug and magically he’d spring up out of the floor. Actually, why wasn’t he coming up to say goodnight to her?
Suddenly impatient, Emily jumped out of bed, crept down the attic stairs and along the passage. She peered over the banisters that led directly into the kitchen. Thus she could see her parents, but they could not see her.
They sat at the kitchen table, Idle at his own place at the end, Fen at one side. They had plates of very hot soup. Emily could see the steam and smell the onions. Idle looked tanned, his hair unusually white against his dark skin. His glasses, which he sometimes wore when he was tired, had slipped down over his nose. Fen wore an apricot coloured jersey with a high neck. It colour, in the candledight, reflected up into her face, making it a summer gold. It was as if she had never experienced etiolation. Her cheeks, pale as they had appeared earlier in the snow, must have been an illusi
on.
‘So now tell me what you’ve been doing,’ Idle was saying. Fen hesitated.
‘We’ve been mostly here,’ she said. ‘Tom came one weekend. I told you in my letter. He brought Kevin McCloud with him, and some new bird of his called Janie.’
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘Didn’t I ? Well, it wouldn’t have been your kind of weekend. God knows how Tom’ll end up. Each of his blondes is stupider than the last. This one was the epitome.’
‘He doesn’t need any of them, so it doesn’t matter for a while.’
‘No,’ said Fen. She sipped her soup from the bowl.
‘And you. Have you been all right?’ Idle touched her hair.
‘Of course.’
‘It’s the longest I’ve ever been away.’
‘I’ve great reserves of activity,’ Fen smiled. ‘No trouble in filling my days.’
‘I think after all these years I’ve begun to believe you. You really are good at being on your own.’ Fen nodded, hands cupped round her bowl, blowing softly. ‘More than I would be,’ Idle added.
Emily shifted her position on the stair. She was getting cold. She decided soon to go down and surprise them. They couldn’t be cross, not tonight. Idle was pushing his soup away, unhungry, lighting a cigarette.
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘what contortions of the mind distance brings about. Terrible fantasies, quite unreal. Nightmares. Wracked nerves. I’d wake up shaking every morning, for no reason. Quite ridiculous.’ He smiled to himself. Fen raised her eyebrows a little. She sounded concerned.
‘You work so much too hard. You just push yourself and push yourself. One day you’ll go too far. You’ll get an ulcer or have a nervous breakdown.’
‘No, no. Of course I won’t. But I suppose I was overtired. Distress is tiring, and it was distressing. The conditions in the compounds, the feeling of defeat, of utter weariness, the hope almost gone. Then the endless official justification for the way of things. The refusal to have any kind of open mind : the stubborn persistence that within the closed mind lay good reason.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘But those were the living nightmares. The worse ones were about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Perhaps if I tell you about them that’ll do the trick of exorcism.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I had a funny instinct that this time I was away too long. That some kind of pressure would be put on you, or you’d be lonely down here, whatever you say – it’s not like when we were in London – or perhaps you wouldn’t miss me. I don’t know.’ He put his hand over Fen’s.
‘Of course I missed you,’ said Fen. ‘So did Emily. Terribly.’
‘Good,’ said Idle quietly. ‘But I shall try never to be away again for so long.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I can never believe, even after ten years’ absolute trust, that you’ll still be there. Every time I come back I gear myself to thinking that my time must surely be up, and you’re off at last with some younger Lochinvar.’ Fen smiled briefly.
‘You are in a bad way,’ she said. ‘Tonight you must take a sleeping pill, and tomorrow I’ll see no one disturbs you.’ She seemed a little brusque, as if she wanted to shake off his mood. Emily, on her stair, stood up. At the same time so did Fen, taking a soup bowl in each hand. Idle looked up at her.
‘Darling love,’ he said. ‘You’re thinner, aren’t you? You haven’t been looking after yourself.’ Fen bent down to him. They kissed lightly.
‘Me not looking after myself,’ she said. ‘I like that.’
Idle, too, got up. He wandered quietly round the room touching things, letting his hands curve over the mound of eggs in a basket: he rubbed an apple on his trousers then returned it to the pile of autumn fruit, he tested the weight of a log then threw it on the fire, and smiled at the instant flames. There was a kind of tired pleasure in his journey. He came to rest at the sink, beside Fen, and put his arm round her shoulders.
‘It’s all the same,’ he said. ‘I must have been quite mad.’
Fen didn’t answer and Idle, hearing a creak on the stairs, looked up. He cried out with surprise, rushed to the bottom of the stairs. Emily threw herself into his arms, speechless. He smelt of faraway sun and familiar blue shirts. He hugged her till laughingly she had to shout to him to stop. Fen turned round quite slowly and smiled at them. Idle at last put Emily down on the rug by the fire.
‘Papa!’
‘You’re awake! ‘
‘I was waiting for you. You’re a funny colour.’
‘Here, shall I get you your present now?’
‘Ooh, yes please.’
From a dark corner of the room Idle brought forth a wooden giraffe – brown spots on pale wood, as tall as Emily herself.
‘An old man in Kenya carved it. They let it sit on the seat beside me on the aeroplane.’
‘It’s lovely,’ said Emily. She touched its nose. ‘Isn’t it, Mama?’
‘Lovely.’ Fen was putting away plates.
‘I’m so sorry about the play, Em,’ said Idle. ‘The wretched aeroplane.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I wasn’t very good, and anyhow.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Fen.
The giraffe was admired for many moments. They all sat on the same armchair and sometimes one of them would stretch out a hand to touch its smooth wooden skin. The room smelt of smoke and onions, and burning apple boughs. Outside, the snow turned to rain and smattered against the windows.
‘Good thing Marcia Burrows is asleep,’ said Emily. ‘Do you know what she told me ? She told me that a man called Derek with one leg miles longer than the other wanted to marry her.’ For some reason this made her parents laugh. She saw them looking at each other, and joined in. When it seemed the laughter might stop Emily sprang from the chair and ran round the room in imitation of someone with a limp, and it flared up again. All the time they could hear the rain.
‘Hope it turns back to snow for Christmas.’ Finally exhausted, Emily flung her arms round the neck of her giraffe.
‘God,’ said Fen quietly, ‘Christmas.’ Suddenly all the gold left her face. She went and knelt by the fire.
‘Your best time of the year,’ said Idle.
‘Maybe.’
‘Only six days. And do you know it’s one o’clock and I’m not at all tired?’ Emily had heard the church clock strike.
‘Well, I most certainly am,’ said Idle. ‘Bed. Come on.’ He picked her up and carried her protesting up the stairs. From the place on his shoulder where she had lain her head she saw the picture of her mother flicker through the banisters, flame shadows on her flame jersey, her face turned up towards them, all smiling again.
Six
Emily’s wish was granted : there was snow at Christmas.
Down on the south coast there was snow on the ground and thin icy rain in the air which, when it fell, needled through the whiteness and turned it to slush. Wind blew through the skeleton trees and gloomy laurels in the gardens of the large houses whose plainness was only dimmed by high summer. They had expensive wreaths of holly and scarlet ribbon hanging on their front doors, these houses, funereal rather than festive : and out at sea a red flag snarled its warning above the vicious waves.
Mrs Whicker, Emily’s grandmother, lived in one of the largest of the ugly houses. With some triumph she had bought it after the death of her fourth husband : for all their goodness to her – and each one of them had been generous in his own way-none of her husbands had been persuaded that an English seaside town was the Mecca Mrs Whicker believed it to be. Thus only in widowhood she had achieved what in marriage she had always missed-a stiff breeze the year round, when she opened the window last thing at night, to give her courage. (In fact her room was a good mile from the shore : noses less keen than Mrs Whicker’s had been known to miss the salty fumes that her nostrils alone were able to detect.) However, the move to the south coast was on the whole a failure. As Mrs Whicker was the first to admit, the timing was wrong. The need for the particul
ar courage she required was long over. So, with a common sense she was not much renowned for, she transferred in her mind the benefits of the sea breezes – they gave her strength to face her old age. But they were poor compensation for lack of entertainment.
Having had sixty lively years of heterogeneous marriages, Mrs Whicker was little skilled in tolerating dull widowhood. Rich enough to buy pleasure, she lacked imagination about what to purchase, and scoffed at all advice. The days bored her. Her neighbours she considered a dying breed and made no attempt to associate with them. Her few friends (also a dying breed) lived in Kensington and had many excuses for not being able to visit outer Bournemouth. Her only son, Idle, was dutiful, but abroad much of the time. She had no desire to renew uneasy acquaintance with her dead husbands’ relations – they had been bad enough at the time they had to be endured. And so she was left with an uneventful life. Her grumbles about the present were rare, but coruscating memories of the past fell upon the ears of one person alone – Marble, her companion of thirty years.
Marble had started her days as housekeeper to Mrs Whicker, a considerable position when she first took it. She was in charge of nine indoor servants and a cupboard of linen that contained no less than sixty pairs of double sheets. (Mrs Whicker had been Lady Warren at the time : the house – a Georgian mansion near Crewe.) But such are the perversities of English domestic economics that Marble, by remaining faithful to her employer, found her status diminishing rather than ascending. Now, the permissive society took its toll. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the charwoman’s days off, Marble herself was forced to use the electric floor polisher. She also had to serve afternoon tea, in the unlikely event of a visitor, and cook Sunday lunch. Thirty years ago, in her heyday, such activities on her part would not, of course, have been tolerated. The very idea of the housekeeper lowering herself in such a manner would have been risible. But Marble was something of a sport about keeping up with the times, and went about her new and alien duties with a stony face. Besides, there were rewards. Her relationship with Mrs Whicker, for instance, had grown undeniably closer. With all husbands gone, some barriers between mistress and servant were relaxed. Mrs Whicker would sometimes come into the kitchen for her elevenses and, sitting at the high old-fashioned table, give way to sweet memories of her husbands. As far as Marble could remember, they hardly tallied with the truth as she recalled it. But to be made recipient of the reminiscences at all was an honour Marble appreciated, and it wasn’t her place to disagree. From her part, she could return little to Mrs Whicker’s other than a sympathetic ear. Her own philosophies, she knew in her heart, bored her employer. They were based on a complicated version of the powers of the solar system. On a rainy morning she would observe, ‘Well, what can you expect? It’s Tuesday, after all. The sun’s conspiring.’ Details of her theories, such as the difference between conspiring and aspiring, may have confused Marble : nothing would shake her faith in the broad principles of the idea, and the idea from any angle failed to arouse Mrs Whicker’s interest.
