At the back of the house was a stretch of rough grass, where gnarled apple trees stood about like aged men, their limbs supported by wooden props. At his first step, he trod on an apple. With the second step, he trod on another. Wherever he looked, the ground was a mosaic of fallen apples (‘I ought to be making apple jelly at this moment’). Beyond the orchard was a jungle. A frieze of towering acanthus fronds dominated it, like a last assertion of classical thought foundering amid the Dark Ages. In fact, it was the artichoke row at the foot of the kitchen garden. Hattie had frisked up a tree and was disporting herself overhead. Now she dislodged some more apples, which hit him on the back. She sprang into the neighbouring tree, and yellow apples fell instead of crimson ones. Apple jelly, forsooth! Tilth and order, and summer’s trailing rags disposed of in bonfires and compost heaps! Here he stood, in the fourth week of October, with nothing performed except the cockyolly birds. Even if he had known where to begin, it was too late for beginning.
‘I’ve finished,’ came Mrs. Lugg’s voice from the doorway. ‘So if it’s all the same to you, I’ll be getting back.’
Her footsteps echoed along the flagged path, were muted in the muddy lane, died away. There was a rip of claws slicing through lichen, and a softer, more living thud on the grass. Hattie was at his feet, rolling among the apples. He picked her up.
‘My dear Hattie, you don’t know what lies I’ve been telling about you. I said you kept canaries. I said you lived on an island, knitting.’
She squirmed out of his arms onto his shoulder, and began to rub the top of her head against his cheek, purring as though the world contained no pleasure comparable to this, for which she had been waiting in silence and reserve ever since that woman had thrust her into a hamper.
‘We’ve both suffered a great deal of ignominy, my dear. I wouldn’t think of offering you tough steak on a night like this. We will dine on partridge.’
Her purr and her warmth and her softness seemed to pull the dusk down over them. Already a light frost was stiffening the grass as he carried her indoors, turning his back on obligations that he would probably ignore. There had never been such an apple year. Canon Urchfont had died of it. Quite possibly this was what had been intended. God is an Oriental potentate, unaffectedly lavish and sumptuous. He would not think it extravagant to heap up all these apples into a cenotaph for a Rural Dean. Here was no need for jampots. They could stay in the attic.
AN ACT OF REPARATION
Lapsang sooshang—must smell like tar.
Liver salts in blue bottle.
Strumpshaw’s bill—why 6d.?
Crumpets.
Waistcoat buttons.
Something for weekend—not a chicken.
SO much of the list had been scratched off that this remainder would have made cheerful reading if it had not been for the last item.
Valerie Hardcastle knew where she was with a chicken. You thawed it, put a lump of marg inside, and roasted it. While it was in the oven you could give your mind to mashed potatoes (Fenton couldn’t endure packet crisps), bread sauce and the vegetable of the season—which latterly had been sprouts. A chicken was calm and straightforward: you ate it hot, then you ate it cold; and it was a further advantage that one chicken is pretty much like another. Chicken is reliable—there is no apple-pie-bed side to its character. With so much in married life proving apple-pie-beddish, the weekend chicken had been as soothing as going to church might be if you were that sort of person. But now Fenton had turned—like any worm, she thought, though conscious that the comparison was inadequate—declaring that he was surfeited with roast chicken, that never again was she to put one of those wretched commercialized birds before him.
‘Think of their hideous lives, child! Penned up, regimented, stultified. They never see a blade of grass, they never feel the fresh air, all they know is chicken, chicken, chicken—just like us at weekends. Where is that appalling draught coming from? You must have left a window open somewhere.’
‘What do you think I ought to get instead? I could do liver-and-bacon. But that doesn’t go on to the next day.’
‘Can’t you get a joint?’
A joint. What joint? She had never cooked a joint. At home, Mum made stews. At the Secretarial College there was mince and shepherd’s pie. No doubt a joint loomed in the background of these—but distantly, like mountains in Wales. When she and Olive Petty broke away from the college to share a bed-sitting room and work as dancing partners at the town’s new skating rink their meals mainly consisted of chips and salami, varied by the largesse of admirers who took them to restaurants. Fenton, as an admirer, had expressed himself in scampi and crêpes Suzette—pronounced ‘crapes’, not ‘creeps’—with never a mention of joints. Grey-haired, though with lots of it, he was the educated type, and theirs was an ideal relationship till Mrs. Fenton, whom he had not mentioned either—not to speak of—burst out like a tiger, demanding divorce. The case was undefended. Six months later to the day, Fenton made an honest woman of her. Brought her down to earth, so to speak.
Marriage, said the registrar, was a matter of give-and-take. Marriage, thought Valerie, was one thing after another. Now it was joints. Sunk in marriage, she sat at a small polished table in the bank, waiting for Fenton’s queries about his statement sheets to be thoroughly gone into, meanwhile enjoying the orderliness and impersonality of an establishment so unlike a kitchen or a bedroom.
And at an adjoining table sat the previous Mrs. Hardcastle who for her part had come to withdraw a silver teapot from the bank’s strong room, examining with a curiosity she tried to keep purely abstract the young person who had supplanted her in Fenton’s affections. Try as she might, abstraction was not possible. Conscience intervened, compunction and stirrings of guilt. It was all very well for Isaac; he had not drawn Abraham’s attention to the ram in the thicket. It was all very well for Iphigenia, who had not suggested to the goddess that a hind could replace her at the sacrificial altar. Isaac and Iphigenia could walk off with minds untroubled by any shade of responsibility for the substituted victim. But she, Lois Hardcastle, writhing in the boredom of being married to Fenton, had snatched at Miss Valerie Fry, who had done her no harm whatever, and got away at her expense. And this, this careworn, deflated little chit staring blankly at a shopping list, was what Fenton had made of her in less than six months’ matrimony.
‘Oh, dear!’ said Lois, and sighed feelingly.
Hearing the exclamation and the sigh, Valerie glanced up to discover who was taking on so. She could see nothing to account for it. The woman was definitely middle-aged, long past having anything to sound tragic about. Indeed, she looked uncommonly healthy and prosperous, was expensively made up, wore a wedding ring, had no shopping bags—so why should she jar the polish and repose of a bank by sighing and exclaiming ‘Oh dear?’ Leg of lamb, leg of pork, leg of … did nothing else have legs? A bank clerk came up with a sealed parcel, saying ‘Here it is, Mrs. Hardcastle. If you’ll just sign for it.’
‘Here, you’ve made a mistake! Those aren’t Mr. Hardcastle‘s——’ As Valerie spoke, she saw the parcel set down in front of the other woman. Fenton’s other one. For it was she, though so smartened up as to be almost unrecognizable. What an awkward situation! And what a pity she had drawn attention to herself by saying that about the parcel. Fortunately, Fenton’s other one did not appear to have noticed anything. She read the form carefully through, took her time over signing it, exchanged a few words with the clerk about the time of year before he carried it away. Of course, at her age she was probably a bit deaf, so she would not have heard those give-away words. The giveaway words sounded on in Valerie’s head. She was still blushing vehemently when the other Mrs. Hardcastle looked her full in the face and said, cool as a cucumber, ‘Mrs. Lois Hardcastle, now. What an odd place we’ve chosen to meet in.’
Pulling herself together, Valerie replied, ‘Quite a coincidence.’
‘Such a small world. I’ve come to collect a teapot. And you, I gather, are w
aiting for Fenton’s statement sheets, just as I used to do. And it’s taking a long time, just as it always did.’
‘There were some things Mr. Hardcastle wanted looked into.’
Not to be put down, Mr. Hardcastle’s earlier wife continued, ‘Now that the bank has brought us together, I hope you’ll come and have coffee with me. I’m going back to London tonight, so it’s my only chance to hear how you both are.’
‘I don’t know that I can spare the time, thank you all the same, I’m behindhand as it is, and I’ve got to buy a joint for the weekend.’
‘Harvey’s or Ensten’s?’
‘Well, I don’t really know. I’d rather thought of the Co-op.’
‘Excellent for pork.’
‘To tell the truth, I’ve not bought a joint before. We’ve always had a chicken. But now he’s got tired of chicken.’
Five months of love and chicken….
‘I’m afraid you’ve been spoiling him,’ said Lois. ‘Keep him on cold veal for a few weeks and he’ll be thankful for chicken.’
‘I hadn’t thought of veal. Would veal be a good idea?’
‘Here come your statement sheets. Now we can go and have some coffee and think about the veal.’
‘Well, I must say, I’d be glad of it. Shopping gets me down.’
Tottering on stiletto heels and still a head shorter than Lois, the replacement preceded her from the bank, jostling the swinging doors with her two bulging, ill-assembled shopping bags. Lois took one from her. It was the bag whose handle Fenton, in a rush of husbandry, had mended with string. The string ground into her fingers—as fatal, as familiar, as ever.
The grey downs grew into lumps of sin to Guenevere in William Morris’s poem, and as Fenton’s wives sat drinking coffee the shopping bags humped on the third chair grew into lumps of sin to Lois. They were her bags, her burden; and she had cast them onto the shoulders of this hapless child and gone flourishing off, a free woman. It might be said, too, though she made less of it, that she had cast the child on Fenton’s ageing shoulders and hung twenty-one consecutive frozen chicken round his neck … a clammy garland. Apparently it was impossible to commit the simplest act of selfishness, of self-defence even, without paining and inconveniencing others. Lost in these reflections, Lois forgot to keep the conversation going. It was Valerie who revived it. ‘Where would one be without one’s cup of coffee?’
For, considering how handicapped she was with middle age and morality, Fenton’s other one had been putting up a creditable show of sophisticated broadmindedness, and deserved a helping hand—the more so since that sigh in the bank was now so clearly explainable as a sigh of regret for the days when she had a husband to cook for. Lois agreed that one would be quite lost without one’s cup of coffee. ‘And I always think it’s such a mistake to put milk in it,’ continued Valerie, who with presence of mind had refused milk, black coffee being more sophisticated. Two sophisticated women, keeping their poise on the rather skiddy surface of a serial husband, was how she saw the situation. For a while, she managed to keep conversation on a black-coffee level: foreign travel, television, the guitar. But you could see the poor thing’s heart wasn’t really in it; grieving for what could never again be hers, she just tagged along. Yes, she had been to Spain, but it was a long time ago. No, unfortunately, she had missed that programme. ‘I never seem to have enough time. Do have another cake.’ She seemed to have time enough now. The cake lay on her plate, the coffee cooled in her cup; still she sat brooding, and frowned as though she were calculating some odds, hatching some resolution. Could it be that she was going to turn nasty? All of a sudden, she looked up and exclaimed, ‘I know. Oxtail.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oxtail. Instead of a joint. Come on.’
Well, if it made her happy …
It certainly did. A wife Fenton hadn’t given her an idea of, a wife as animated and compelling as a scenic railway, swept Valerie to the butcher’s, summoned old Mr. Ensten himself, made him produce a series of outlandish objects totally unlike Valerie’s conception of what could be called a joint, chose out the most intimidating of the lot, stiff as a poker and a great deal longer, watched with a critical eye as he smote it into coilability, swept on to a greengrocer to buy carrots, garlic, celery and button mushrooms, then to a grocer’s shop, bafflingly small, dusky and undisplaying, where she bought peppercorns, bay leaves and a jar of anchovies, finally to a wine merchant where she bought half a bottle of claret. Whirled on in this career, consulted and assenting over God knew what next, abandoning all thought of the rest of her shopping list, Valerie fell from gasps to giggles. Why peppercorns, when pepper could be got ready ground? Why anchovies, when there was no thought of fish? And garlic? Now it was claret.
‘And a taxi, please.’
As though it were perfectly normal for wine merchants to supply taxis, the taxi was fetched. Valerie was put into it; the parcels and shopping bags were put in after her.
‘Seventeen Windermere Gardens,’ said Lois.
Once, escaping from the Secretarial College, Valerie and Olive Petty bought half-crown tickets for a Mystery Drive. The bus, thundering through a maze of small streets, had taken them past the Corporation Gas Works into the unknown. It had dived into woods, skirted past villages with spires and villages with towers, shown them an obelisk on a hill-top, a reservoir, a bandstand, an Isolation Hospital, a glimpse of the sea, a waterfall, a ruined castle. Then, with a twirl through some unidentifiable suburbs, it set them down by the War Memorial, a stone’s throw from the Secretarial College. Now it was to be the same thing. The Mystery Shopping Excursion would end at 17 Windermere Gardens. All that remained was to say something calm and suitable.
‘Such an unexpected pleasure to meet you. You’ve quite changed the day for me.’
‘But I’m coming, too. I’m coming to cook the oxtail. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Mind? My God, I’d be thankful! And more.’
The ring of sincerity transformed the poor girl’s voice. To say ‘transfigured’ would, however, be going too far. Transformed it. Unmuzzled it.
No act of reparation, thought Lois, sitting in the taxi, can be an exact fit. Circumstances are like seaweed: a moment’s exposure to the air, an hour’s relegation to the past tense, stiffens, warps, shrivels the one and the other. The impulse to ease even a fraction of the burden she had imposed on that very different Miss Valerie Fry of the divorce proceedings—an impulse first felt in the bank as an amused acknowledgement of a faint sense of guilt, which at the word ‘joint’ had fleshed itself in the possibility of a deed, and a compassion against which she had soon ceased to struggle—for only someone in a state of utter dejection could have eaten three of those appalling little cakes—would fit neither the offence nor the moment. Probably even the medium was ill chosen. She happened to like oxtail herself, but very likely the girl would have preferred rolled ribs. Only one static element would resist the flux of time: Fenton’s planet-like, unconjectural course. The Borough Offices where he worked as an architect closed at midday on Saturday. The planet-like course then took him to lunch at the Red Lion, and then to a healthful swim in the public baths, and then to his club; and he would be home at six.
‘I’m afraid, as I wasn’t expecting you, there won’t be more than bread and cheese,’ said the voice, now back in its muzzle.
‘Nothing I should like better. It will give us more time to cook in. When does Fenton usually get home?’
‘Four, or thereabouts.’
Even Fenton wasn’t the same. She glanced with admiration at the young person whose society was two hours more alluring than hers had been; then at her wristwatch.
‘Well, if I don’t dawdle over my bread and cheese, that should be long enough. At any rate, it should be well on its way by then.’
‘By then? All that time to cook a tail? You must be fond of cooking!’
The tone of spontaneous contempt, thought Lois, was just what anyone trying to apply an act of re
paration might expect, and therefore what she deserved.
The taxi turned down Windermere Terrace. Seeing the iteration of small houses, each carefully designed to be slightly at variance with the others, each with a small identical garage and small front gardens for demonstrations of individuality, Lois observed that in some of the gardens the ornamental shrubs had grown larger, in others had died. They entered the house.
‘I should think it must feel a bit queer to you, coming back like this,’ Valerie said.
‘No. Rather homelike. What a pretty new wallpaper—new wallpapers, that is.’ A pink wall with squiggles, a blue wall with stripes, a yellow wall with poodles, kiosks and the Eiffel Tower, a black wall with marbling. And did Fenton come home two hours earlier to gaze on these?
‘I put them all on myself. And one with fishes in the bathroom. I expect you know your way to the bathroom?’
‘I must not, will not, be censorious,’ said Lois to herself. And Valerie, arranging ready-sliced bread and processed cheese for two, muttered to her four walls, when she was left alone with them, ‘If she goes on being a condescending old ray of sunlight, I’ll murder her.’
There was no time to expect that Lois knew her way to the kitchen. She was in it in a flash.
‘I haven’t really got around to decorating this yet. To tell the truth, I’m not all that struck on cooking.’
‘Where do you keep the large stewpan?’
The large stewpan was traced to the cupboard under the stairs, where it held jam pots and spiders. But at some time it must have been used, for Lois had left it clean. The cooking knives were rusty, the wooden spoons had been used to stir paint. Moths and skewers were in every drawer she opened. Without a flutter of pity, of compunction, of remorse, of any of the feelings that should accompany an act of reparation as parsley and lemon accompany fried plaice or red-currant jelly jugged hare, Lois searched, and cleaned, and sharpened, and by quarter to three the oxtail was in the large stewpan, together with the garlic, carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns and celery.
A Stranger with a Bag Page 13
