‘What about the mushrooms?’ Valerie inquired. She had rubbed the mushrooms and did not intend to see them slighted.
‘They go in later on.’
‘Well, as you seem to be managing all right, perhaps I’ll …’
‘Yes, do.’
One of the things Fenton particularly liked about Valerie was her habit of awaiting him. A man likes to be awaited. At the end of a dull day’s architecture, to find a wife quietly sitting, undistracted by any form of employment, not even reading a book, but just sitting and waiting and ready to look pleased is very agreeable. Today he happened to be forty minutes later than usual, a conversation with a man called Renshaw having delayed him. His expectations were forty minutes livelier, and as he closed the garage and walked towards his door he said to himself that there was really quite a dash of the Oriental in him. The discovery of this dash—he had not been aware of it till Valerie—had even reconciled him to the prospect of baked beans or scrambled eggs on cold toast, if such was the price of being awaited. Besides, he always had a good substantial lunch at the Red Lion. But today Valerie was awaiting him amid a most exhilarating smell of cooking. It would be gross to comment on it immediately: to mulct her of the caresses of reunion, to fob off her proper desire to hear what he had been doing all day. And though she did not comment on his unpunctuality, he was at pains to tell her of his unforeseen encounter with Renshaw—not the Renshaw who skated and had been instrumental in bringing them together but his cousin E. B. Renshaw; to recount what E. B. Renshaw had said and to give a brief account of his character, career and accomplishments as a slow bowler. Only then did he say, ‘No need to ask what you’ve been doing. What a wonderful smell! What is it?’
‘Oxtail.’
‘Of course! Oxtail. I thought I knew it.’
‘Do you like oxtail?’
‘Immensely—when it’s not out of the tin. I can smell that this isn’t.’
‘Oh, no!’
He snuffed again. Lois had added the mushrooms and the anchovies and was now administering claret.
‘Delicious! What’s in it?’
‘All sorts of things. Button mushrooms.’
Her smile struck him as secretive—no wonder, with this talent up her sleeve. And all performed so casually, too, so unobtrusively; for there she sat, reposeful, not a hair out of place, none of the usual cook’s airs of flurry and inattention, not a single ‘Just wait one moment’ while he was relating his day and the meeting with E. B. Renshaw.
‘When will it be ready?’ he said with ardour.
‘Not just yet. Do you like my nail varnish? It’s new. I bought it today.’
‘Very pretty. Do you think you ought to go and stir it?’
‘Oh, no! She’ll do all that.’
‘She?’ Had Valerie gone and got a cook? A cook from whom such odours proceeded would demand enormous wages, yet might almost be worth it. ‘She? What she?’
‘Your other wife. She’s in there. She’s been doing it all the afternoon.’
‘Do you mean Lois?’
‘Of course I mean Lois. You haven’t any other wives, have you?’
This pertness when referring to his previous marriage was customary, and did not altogether displease. Now he didn’t even notice it. He had a situation to grapple with, and the better to do so removed part of it off his knee.
‘How did this happen?’
‘We met at the bank—she’d gone there for some teapot or other. We couldn’t sit there glaring at each other, so we began to talk.’
About him, of course. What confidences had been exchanged? What invidious——
‘She told me you liked cold veal.’
A total misrepresentation. Lois had always been malicious, seizing on some casually expressed liking to throw in his teeth. ‘What else did she say?’
‘Nothing much. I had to do most of the talking. And before I knew where I was, she was wanting to come and cook you an oxtail. I couldn’t very well stop her, could I? Of course I paid for it. The worst of it is, she was in such a rush to get here that I hadn’t a chance to ask Strumpshaw about that sixpence, or to get the waistcoat buttons or the right liver salts or your China tea. She isn’t what I’d call considerate.’
‘I shall have to go and see her.’
He would have to open the kitchen door, take the full assault of that witching smell, see Lois cooking as of old—an unassimilable answer to prayer. For of course she mustn’t come again, she mustn’t go on doing this sort of thing; nor was he a man to be won back by fleshpots. Yet be knew himself moved. Poor Lois, making her way back almost like an animal, forgetting her jealousy, her prejudice, all the awful things she had said at the time of the divorce, trampling on convention and amour-propre, just to cook him a favourite dish. What had impelled her to do this? Remorse, loneliness, an instinctive longing to foster and nourish? For many years her feeling for him had been almost wholly maternal—which made her insistence on the divorce even more uncalled-for. What had set it off? Seeing the teapot, perhaps. They had both been fond of the teapot. It was Georgian.
Or was it all a deliberate scheme to lure him back?
He sprang to his feet, straightened his waistcoat, left the sitting room, entered the kitchen. It was empty. She had gone. Tied to the handle of the stewpan was a visiting card, on the back of which she had written: ‘This will be ready by seven. It should simmer till then. Don’t let it boil.’
THEIR QUIET LIVES
THE window was shut. Outside was an April sky, tufted with small white clouds, and a semi-rustic landscape dotted with red-roofed new bungalows whose television masts controverted the anarchy of some old apple trees, a sufficient number of which had been preserved to justify the title of The Orchard Estate.
Once again, Mrs. Drew consulted her watch. The watch was attached to her bosom by a matching enamel brooch; to turn its face upwards and bend her own over it involved a certain degree of effort, and made her grunt. But though there was a clock on the mantelshelf, she preferred to consult her watch. For one thing, it had sentimental value; her husband had given it to her as a honeymoon present, fifty years earlier. For another, she could trust it. Audrey had more than once forgotten to wind the clock.
Three minutes to eleven. No doubt her Bovril would be late. Dr. Rice Thompson had said repeatedly that with a digestion like hers regularity was everything. But one does not expect too much. One has learned not to. Two minutes to eleven. At eleven precisely, the door burst open. Audrey came in with her stumping tread.
‘Mother! Mother! Did you hear? The cuckoo?’
‘What, dear?’
‘The cuckoo. The first cuckoo.’
‘What, dear? Has something gone wrong?’
There was nothing wrong with the tray, that she could see. The toast was nicely browned, the pepper caster had been remembered. So why did not Audrey put it down?
‘The first cuckoo, Mother. Spring has come.’
‘Who has come? I wish you’d tell me. I can stand up to bad news better than suspense. And do put that tray down. If you aren’t careful, you’ll slop it.’
Audrey put down the tray and slopped it as she did so.
‘The cuckoo, Mother.’
‘Oh. The cuckoo…. I can’t hear it.’
‘No. It’s left off.’
So much confusion and nonsense about a bird that came year after year and more or less at the same date. But the Bovril was delicious. It swept down her, a reviving tide, and renewed her interest in life.
‘Has the paper come?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Tchah! It’s always late now. Why is it always late?’
‘Because it comes with the milk.’
‘But it has always come with the milk.’
‘Yes. But now there are all these new houses, you see, all having milk, so the milkman takes longer to get to us.’
‘I don’t see at all.’
For the last eighteen months this conversation about the newspaper and the mi
lk had taken place daily.
But everything, thought Audrey, is more or less daily. Daily, her brother Donald caught the 8.5 in order to reach his office at 9 with a few minutes in hand to feed the city pigeons. Daily at 10.50 she squared the crust off two slices of bread and put them in the electric toaster to accompany the eleven-o’clock Bovril. Daily at 2.30 she arranged her mother on the sofa for an afternoon sleep and had an hour or so to herself. Daily at 5.55 the bell of St. Botolph’s sounded its twenty strokes and she slipped off to Evensong. Nightly at 10.30, having settled Mother in bed and emptied the sink basket, she noted down the day’s expenses, wrote in her diary and read the Psalms for the day. The milkman, the postman, the baker, the B.B.C. announcers—all rolled round in a diurnal course along with Wordsworth’s Lucy; though Lucy rolled unconsciously, being dead.
Luncheon, too, was daily; and today it involved both mincing and sieving, so she would have to set about it immediately. As she was leaving the room, her mother said, ‘By the way, you’ll have to order extra milk if …’ There she stopped.
‘If what, Mother?’
‘If you make a milk pudding.’
Poor Mother! It was sad to see her trying to assert her former hold on life.
‘Yes, Mother. I’ll remember.’
Hearing the door close, Mrs. Drew chuckled. Good Lord, that had been a near thing! It was no part of her plan to mention Betty Sullivan until she was sure of her. Fortunately, she had kept her head, and turned it off with a pudding.
The milkman came in his diurnal course, and Audrey carried in The Daily Telegraph. Mother turned with avidity to the Deaths. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grass hopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast. On days when it failed to record the death of someone Mother knew, it would almost certainly provide a name familiar to her, and this would be dwelt on with speculation and gathering confidence.
Today the name was Polson.
‘Polson. Gertrude Polson. Pepper, please; you never put in enough pepper nowadays. I met her at Malvern. We were staying in one hotel and she was staying in another, and we met at the lending library. Such a charming woman, and I’m almost sure her name was Gertrude. She looked frail even then, though. Gertrude Polson, in her eighty-seventh year. I don’t suppose you remember her.’
‘I don’t think I do.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. We were at Malvern in 1917, when you were three. There was a Mr. Poison, too—he etched or something. But the announcement doesn’t mention him, it just says that she died peacefully in a nursing home at Castle Bromwich. I expect there was a divorce.’
In some ways, Mother’s presumptive deaths were even better than her valid ones. They afforded her more scope. But though Mrs. Polson brightened lunch, tea was clouded by the usual disappointment. ‘Where are the letters? Hasn’t the post come?’
‘Yes, it’s come. But there were no letters for you this afternoon.’
‘No letters? Are you sure? Did you look carefully?’
‘Yes, Mother. Two for Donald, and a circular for me. Nothing else.’
‘Are you sure there wasn’t a letter for me? With a Devon postmark?’
‘Were you expecting a letter from Devonshire?’
Mrs. Drew looked at her daughter as though seeing her steadily and whole, and said, ‘Fool!’
At 5.55 the bell of St. Botolph’s rang for Evensong. Audrey went to church through an exquisite evening, the evening of the day when she had heard the first cuckoo; and prayed to be made perfect in patience. Mrs. Drew continued to extort patience till her bedtime.
‘What’s wrong with Mother?’ Donald inquired when Audrey came downstairs to empty the sink basket. ‘Has anything upset her?’
‘She didn’t get some letter she was expecting—from Devonshire. I do wish she could get more letters, poor old thing!’
‘Perhaps she’ll have one tomorrow.’
The expected letter, addressed in a curly, dashing hand and post-marked Exeter, was in the morning post. Mrs. Drew tore it open, read it with obvious satisfaction, replaced it in the envelope and said she would have a poached egg for her breakfast. It was after she had drunk her eleven-o’clock Bovril that she remarked, ‘There’s not much on a duck, so I think you had better order a couple. Why are you looking at me like that? Didn’t you hear me? I said, order a couple of ducks.’
‘But ducks are still very expensive, Mother. It’s only April, you know. And one duck is more than enough for three.’
‘Four.’
‘Four ducks?’
‘No! Two ducks. Four people. Betty Sullivan’s coming. I suppose you can remember her, at least.’
‘Oh yes. She was your great friend when you were a girl, wasn’t she? And married a lawyer. What day is she coming?’
‘The day after tomorrow.’
‘How nice! You will enjoy seeing her again. For lunch?’
‘To stay.’
‘Over the weekend? I’ll get the spare room ready.’
‘For a couple of months.’
‘Months, Mother?’
‘Months, Audrey. Or longer, if she likes. And I wish you’d go and have your ears syringed. I’m not strong enough to have to say everything twice over. And don’t bother about the spare room. She’ll be bringing a lot of luggage with her—she’s giving up the lodgings she moved into after Gerald Sullivan died and that odious daughter-in-law of hers insisted that they’d inherited the house and moved into it with a pack of children. It can’t possibly all get into the spare room, so she will have to have your room and you can have the spare room. Has the paper come?’
‘Not yet. It comes with the milk, you know.’
‘That’s no reason for it to be late.’
‘It isn’t late, Mother. It comes later, that’s all. But, Mother, about Mrs. Sullivan …’
‘Well?’ Mrs. Drew’s neck crimsoned.
‘I didn’t know she was a widow,’ said Audrey hastily. For though Mother’s blood pressure would sooner or later carry her off—whereby everything would be greatly simplified—Audrey did not wish to bring on a stroke in order to avert Mrs. Sullivan. That must be Donald’s part. A son has more authority. And it was only fair that Donald should undertake Mother occasionally, instead of talking about Quietism and leaving everything to her. After a few words about Mrs. Sullivan’s widowhood (which, bursting on Mrs. Drew through the column of Deaths, had called forth a letter of condolence, and a renewal of former intimacy), Audrey said no more and spent the afternoon tidying the spare room.
Nuns, she recalled, are contented with their narrow cells. Considering the spare room in this light she felt that with a transference of pillows and a removal of all the pictures and ornaments she might be quite happy in it. For one thing, it would make a change; for another, it was at the other end of the passage from Mother; for yet another, it was definitely more cellular, and so might be thought of as a sort of ante-cell to the little whitewashed room under a beehive roof that awaited her in South Africa. ‘We will take you at any moment,’ Sister Monica had said. ‘Just send a cable and get a plane.’
Chief among the things which Mrs. Drew’s blood pressure would ultimately simplify was the matter of her children’s religious vocations. Audrey’s was the more compact. She was an oblate of an Anglican sisterhood, and at a retreat she had met Sister Monica, on leave from the daughter house in Africa. By the end of the retreat Audrey felt sure of her vocation and Sister Monica had provisionally accepted her. It was only a question, as the nun remarked, of keeping her passport up to date and waiting on the Lord. While Audrey waited on the Lord, Donald was going through more complicated spiritual adjustments. There were times when he even thought of becoming a Buddhist. Just now he felt almost certain that he would become a Roman Catholic and enter a contemplative order. But all this had to be kept from Mother, who prided herself
on despising all forms of religion impartially—though if she were to discover Donald’s present way of thinking she would be ready to shed the last drop of his blood for the Protestant faith.
Instead of coming straight back from Evensong Audrey intercepted Donald at the station and told him about Betty Sullivan. He pooh-poohed it, with every sign of alarm. ‘I shan’t say a word about it,’ he declared, ‘unless Mother does.’ And while Audrey was getting dinner he retired to the tool shed and oiled the lawnmower.
The lawnmower had been put away dirty—he would not say by whom—so he had to clean it, too. He could not but think it unfair that he, working all day in the office, should find himself expected to deal with poor Mother’s vagaries the moment he got back. That was a daughter’s part. And it was all very well for Audrey to secrete a vocation to be a nun in Africa, but here and now her vocation was to be a daughter in Middlesex.
At 7.30, Mother sat down at the head of the table, made sure that the pepper caster was within reach, and said, ‘Audrey, have you remembered to order those ducks?’
Audrey glanced meaningly at Donald, who said, ‘Duck? Are we going to have roast duck? How delightful!’
‘No, Mother. We can’t afford them. I asked, and they are twenty-five shillings each. Isn’t it wicked?’
Disregarding the moral issue Mother said, ‘And may I ask who pays for the food in this house? You haven’t got that power of attorney yet, you know.’
Donald raising his voice remarked, ‘Audrey, this is very nice soup.’
Audrey’s silence and Mother’s ominous sotto-voce ‘Not yet, not yet, not yet!’ drove him to speak again.
‘By the way, Mother, returning to the duck, do you particularly want a duck? I might be able to find a cheaper one in London.’
‘I never said I wanted a duck. I want two ducks. I wish you and Audrey would listen to me occasionally, and not wink at each other. You’re as bad as Betty Sullivan.’
‘Who is Betty Sullivan?’ ‘Does Mrs. Sullivan wink?’ Donald and Audrey spoke simultaneously.
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