A Stranger with a Bag

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  ‘Of course she winks. She’s always winked. But in her case, it’s nervous. It only comes on when she’s angry. And it’s quite uncontrollable; she can’t be blamed for it. Not like you two, winking at each other all through meals, like semaphores.’

  Donald started. Audrey had kicked him sharply on the ankle. ‘We seem to have lost sight of the duck,’ he began. ‘As I said, if you want a duck, I might be able to——’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort. I said I wanted two ducks. And I mean to have them. I don’t call five shillings a great deal for a duck.’

  ‘Twenty-five shillings!’ shouted Donald, roused at last.

  ‘Twenty-five shillings, if you like,’ said his mother airily. ‘Are we going to have anything besides soup, Audrey?’

  Donald could be relied upon to put up a pretty good fight when money was concerned so Audrey took her time over dishing up the braised lamb. Their voices grew increasingly louder, increasingly alike. Donald was certainly engaged; she would leave him to it for a little longer. In the event, she left him too long. When she took in the lamb, he was saying, ‘Well, I wash my hands of it.’ The lamb was eaten in silence. During the pudding there was a little conversation about the cuckoo.

  Apparently Donald had also washed his hands of the washing up, which he ordinarily helped in. When Audrey returned to the sitting room he had turned on the wireless and was listening to a talk about the thraldom of writers behind the Iron Curtain. Mother’s neck was no longer crimson. Her hooked nose, which in moments of wrath asserted itself as it would when she lay dead, had sunk back into the mass of her face and she looked as composed as a sea anemone digestively sealed on its prey. Excerpts from The Merry Widow followed the thraldom of Soviet writers. Donald continued to listen. When she had settled Mother in bed, he was having a bath. She waited for him to come out, and pounced.

  ‘Well, Donald. So you’ve decided to give in.’

  ‘No. Not exactly. But I think we should give way. Not to the ducks, of course. That’s palpably absurd, and you must get round it. But give way about this Sullivan person. After all, she is our mother.’

  ‘You mean, Mother is.’

  Donald for a moment looked exactly as Mother had done before ejaculating ‘Fool!’

  ‘As you say, Audrey, she is our mother. Her life is monotonous, she lives in the past, she has never realized that her money is only worth half what it was twenty years ago. She has set her heart on seeing Mrs. Sullivan. Anyhow, it won’t be for long. They are bound to quarrel. Mother quarrels with everyone after a week. Are we to grudge her this little pleasure?’

  Stalking down the passage in his bare feet and his plaid dressing gown, he looked positively apostolic. Even in the nursery she had made it her business to shelter her little brother. The little brother was now going bald. The sheltering process had gone on too long.

  Two days later, and with a great quantity of small pieces of luggage, Betty Sullivan arrived.

  ‘Betty!’

  Poppy!’

  ‘After all these years!’

  ‘But I’d know you anywhere!’

  They continued to exclaim. Audrey continued to carry the small pieces of luggage upstairs. One of them was so unexpectedly heavy that she exclaimed, too. Mrs. Sullivan turned round. ‘And is this your Audrey?’

  ‘How do you do.’

  ‘Why, you might be your great-aunt! Poppy, isn’t she exactly like your Aunt Ada? Don’t bother with that parcel, dear. It can stay. Poppy! You’ll never guess what I’ve brought. All my old snapshot albums.’

  Though Mrs. Sullivan’s face was more ravaged than Mother’s she had kept some modicum of her waist and seemed the younger of the two. In fact, as Audrey realized when called on to look at a snapshot of two pigtailed girls in skirts down to their ankles, Poppy and Betty were exact contemporaries. Now they sat on the sofa with the albums, elatedly identifying people with names like Bertie and Nina.

  Ducks require basting, so Audrey had to forgo Evensong. The oven door was open and the basting in process when Donald looked in.

  ‘What’s she like? She seems to talk a—— You don’t mean to say you bought those ducks?’

  ‘I gave way, Donald. After all, she is our mother.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s too late now. But I wish you hadn’t.’

  Having left the kitchen, Donald speedily returned. ‘Audrey! What’s this frightful smell all over the house?’

  ‘I expect it’s Mrs. Sullivan’s scent.’

  ‘Good God! But it’s everythere.’

  ‘She’s been everywhere. Mother’s been showing her round. She put some on Mother, too. I t’scalled Méfie-toi.’

  While Poppy and Betty continued to evoke the past—to recall hockey matches, blue voile, fox terriers, confirmation classes, the Bishop’s boots; while Mother, animated by these feasts of memory, grew increasingly demanding and autocratic and Audrey increasingly jaded and fatalistic, Donald was being driven frantic by Méfie-toi. He bought aerosols, he sprayed the bathroom with disinfectant, he soaked his handkerchief in citronella and pressed it convulsively to his nose whenever Mrs. Sullivan came near him. He pressed it so convulsively that after a few days his nose became inflamed. Mrs. Sullivan, calling him her poor boy, insisted on applying a cooling lotion—one of the Méfie-toi series. Trying to remove the stink from his nostrils with carbolic soap and a nailbrush, Donald rubbed himself raw. This wasn’t so obsessive in the train, for there he could hold up his newspaper. But one cannot walk through the streets of London with a newspaper before one’s face, and it seemed to him that people were either looking at his nose or avoiding looking at it. Then Holiday, with whom he lunched on Tuesdays, said to him, ‘You ought to take care of that nose, Drew.’ The same evening, when he turned to Audrey for sympathy, she blinked at him as though he were a very long way off and remarked that she had a pain in her stomach. Donald replied that he was sorry to hear it—Audrey had expressed no sorrow about his nose—and added that it was probably colic, arising from the richness of the food since Mrs. Sullivan had been with them. As Audrey did the cooking, the remedy was in her own hands.

  Two evenings later Audrey fell off her chair during dinner and lay writhing on the floor. When they tried to pull her up she screamed. Dr. Rice Thompson was sent for, and she was taken to hospital in an ambulance and operated on for acute appendicitis.

  When Audrey came round from the anaesthetic and saw only strange faces bending over her she gave a sigh of relief and burrowed back into unconsciousness. Some time later—how much later she did not know or care—she opened her eyes and there was Donald. A voice from somewhere said, ‘Not more than five minutes, Mr. Drew.’ Donald sat down and gazed at a kidney basin.

  ‘How are you all getting on?’ she asked.

  ‘Splendidly!’

  ‘Oh.’ She felt a vague relief and also a vague surprise. ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘You needn’t worry about us. Betty got Hannah.’

  Hanna. Hanna in the wilderness. Probably some kind of patent food. Well, if it satisfied them…. Then her conscience woke up and told her that poor Donald was putting a brave face on it. ‘What is——’

  At the same moment Donald continued, ‘Hannah is her old servant. Betty telegraphed and Hannah came by the next train, and does everything. I must say, Betty has been very helpful. I’ve never eaten better pastry. And Betty’s arranged with her to stay on for a week after you’re back to ease you in.’

  ‘Oh. Where does she sleep, this Hannah?’

  ‘She’s sleeping out. She fixed it up with the greengrocer. He’s a Wesleyan, too. They’re thick as thieves, and he lets her have asparagus for next to nothing. I could never be a Wesleyan myself—but there’s something rather beautiful in such a simple outlook.’

  No one is wholly pleased at learning that he has been replaced by someone who does as well or better. Only by exerting her lower nature, by reflecting on such domestic offices as cleaning round the bathroom taps and washing the milk bottles, was Audr
ey able to repose on the thought that Betty Sullivan’s Hannah, lodging at Powell’s and coming in to get Donald’s breakfast, would be there when she got home.

  Betty Sullivan arrived in a hired car to fetch Audrey away and throughout the drive was everything that was kind and everything that was hospitable. ‘I want you to feel as free as if you were staying in a hotel,’ she insisted. ‘A nice restful little hotel, where you’ve only got to ring a bell. I’ve put one of your mother’s bells in your room. It’s absurd for her to have five hand bells, even if they do have associations. So you’ve got the one that Madge Massingham-Maple gave her as a wedding present. She never really cared for poor old Madge.’

  ‘How is Mother?’

  ‘In wonderful form. Top-hole. Fit as a flea.’

  Audrey had scarcely greeted her mother before she was being put to bed. Tea, with homemade cake, was brought in by Hannah. It was a Saturday, and presently she heard Donald mowing the lawn. The millennium could not last. The bills would be appalling. Mother looked dangerously red. Betty had somehow got at the best tea service and Hannah would undoubtedly break it. Sooner or later, there would be the devil to pay, and Méfie-toi would hang about the house for months. Meanwhile she would make the most of this unexpected sojourn in a nice restful little home where she had only to ring Madge Massingham-Maple’s bell.

  But nothing whatever went wrong. Hannah was an excellent manager as well as an admirable cook and seemed prepared to stay on indefinitely. So, of course, did Betty Sullivan, but this was not altogether a matter for regret. Not only was Betty an adjunct to Hannah; not only was she contributing, and pretty handsomely, to the household expenses; but since her arrival Mother had become a changed being, a being with an interest in life. They talked untiringly about their girlhood—about the winters when they went skating, the summers when they went boating, the period when they were so very pious, the period when they were pious no longer and sent a valentine to the curate: the curate blushed, a crack ran out like a pistol shot and Hector Gillespie went through the ice, the fox terriers fought under old Mrs. Bulliver’s chair, the laundry ruined the blue voile, the dentist cut his throat in Centry Wood, Claude Hopkins came back from Cambridge with a motorcar and drove it at thirty miles an hour with flames shooting out behind, Addie Carew was married with a wasp under her veil. From time to time, they pursued themselves into their later years—into marriage, maternity, butter coupons, the influenza epidemic, the disappearance of washstands, poor Lucy Latrobe who took to drink, Mr. Drew going out for an evening paper and being brought back dead, Addie’s pretty granddaughter rushing from one divorce to the next. But over these years the conversation did not flow so serenely. There were awkward passages where Betty boasted, where Poppy criticized. So presently they travelled back to the days of their youth, and told the same stories over again and laughed with inexhaustible delight at the same misfortunes. The windows stood open, summer curtains frisked in the breeze and Mother felt so well that she and Betty made several excursions to London, to choose new chair covers, to lunch at little places in Soho.

  Audrey and Donald wallowed in unprincipled peacefulness—to Audrey, at any rate, it seemed unprincipled, for she was ill-acquainted with pleasures not snatched from the jaws of duty.

  ‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking?’ said Donald. They were in the garden, collecting slugs by twilight. From the kitchen came the sound of Hannah washing up, from the sitting room the story of Hector Gillespie going through the ice.

  ‘No, what?’ she said apprehensively.

  ‘That now’s your time.’

  ‘Now’s my time?’

  ‘Now’s your time. To get away. If you went to Africa now, Mother would scarcely notice it. Listen to her! She’s completely happy, living in the past. And if you go, Betty will certainly stay on. It would be just the excuse she needs for staying here, in reach of London.’

  ‘But if now’s my time, isn’t it your time, too?’

  ‘It’s not so urgent for me. And not such plain sailing.’

  ‘You’re thinking Mother couldn’t live without you—without your salary?’

  ‘I’m thinking nothing of the sort,’ he said with acerbity. ‘Betty’s very well off. You’ve only to look at her—you’ve only to smell her to know that. Besides, I happen to know.’

  ‘But how? Did she tell you?’

  He scooped up another slug with his teaspoon and dropped it into the jar of salt water.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I sent Lorna—my secretary—to the Probate Office to have a look at Gerald’s will.’

  A voice from indoors exclaimed, ‘Betty, you’ve got that wrong again! You always get it wrong. Bertie Gillespie was dancing with me—not with Mabel.’

  ‘Very well, very well. Have it your own way, dear.’

  Their tones made it apparent that Betty Sullivan was winking, that Mother’s neck was crimsoning. From time to time, they had these girlish tiffs.

  ‘But, Donald—I shall have to tell her.’

  ‘You can tell her that Sister Monica has invited you to go there for a month, to convalesce.’

  Such resourcefulness, such solicitude for her vocation, such readiness to stand aside and let her get away…. Poor Donald! How she had misjudged him! For years she had thought him selfish. Yet now he stood beside her, a strong brotherly presence, prepared to suffer in her stead—not only Mother, either; for he suffered as much as ever from Méfie-toi, which was why he was sharing the slug hunting, and why he often did not come home till the last train, making a supper of sandwiches on the Embankment or in some quiet city churchyard in order to avoid it. For years, Audrey had been misjudging Donald; and within half an hour she was misjudging him again. The more she thought of it, the more penetrating became her impression that Donald had something up his sleeve and was trying to get rid of her.

  Feeling in some vague way menaced, she took refuge in a precautionary inertia. The way of escape stood open—at least, Donald assured her it did. Mother needed her no longer, infinitely preferring Betty’s company and Hannah’s cooking. Nothing tied her to a home where, since she slept in its spare room, she was already in part a stranger. She had not even to buy an outfit, for when she arrived at the convent she would put on her novice’s habit. Inoculations, topee, sunglasses—everything would be provided. She had only to make up her mind. But instead of letting itself be made up, her mind drifted away to suppositions and excuses. Was she well enough? Had Sister Monica really meant it? Oughtn’t she to wait till Mother died? Was she sure of her vocation? What was Donald really up to? And when Donald inquired if she had written to the convent, if she had found out about flights, she put him off with adhesions, old letters that must be sorted and disposed of, a bank manager that must be visited.

  ‘I warn you, Audrey. Time is getting short.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why is it any shorter than it was last week?’

  ‘It is a week shorter. Didn’t you hear Mother yesterday evening?’

  ‘Yesterday evening? Yes, they did have rather a tiff, but they often have tiffs. And then they make it up again.’

  ‘Before very long, they’ll have a tiff and not make it up again. Mark my words, Audrey. Time is getting short. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  These words provoked the inevitable reaction. Audrey laughed in an elder-sisterly way and said that if Donald had seen as much of Mother as she had done, he wouldn’t think much of yesterday evening. Donald, his nose standing out like Mother’s at its most embattled, said he would say no more, and added that he would be away for the weekend.

  The sight of Donald going away with a little bag, to mind his own business instead of hers, restored Audrey’s confidence in her purpose. She checked her passport and sent a cable to Sister Monica; on Monday she would go up to London and book her flight. All this took no time at all, and she spent the afternoon tearing up old diaries and parcelling clothes to be sent to the Church Army. Walking to Evensong through a downpour of thundery rain, she seemed to be m
oving under an invisible umbrella that sheltered her from alternatives and second thoughts far more efficiently than the visible umbrella, which had holes in it, sheltered her from the downpour. In the same heavenly frame of mind she walked home and entered the house.

  The sound of violent altercation came from the sitting room.

  ‘I tell you, you’ve got it wrong. You’ve been singing it wrong ever since I first knew you.’

  ‘Well, that’s a lie, anyhow. You first knew me when we were at the kindergarten—and they hadn’t been published then. We’re not so young as you try to make out, Betty.’

  ‘I didn’t know you at the kindergarten—not to call it knowing. I merely disliked you, because you sat on your hair and never left off saying so.’

  ‘I can sit on it to this day.’

  ‘Well, suppose you can? Is that the be-all and end-all of existence? But we’re not talking about your hair, Poppy. We’re talking about the Indian Love Lyrics. And I tell you again, you get it wrong. It goes like this: “Less, pom-pom-pom, than the dust, pom-pom-pom, be-Neath, pom-pom, thy chariot Whee-heel.” The way you sing it, it sounds like a hymn.’

  ‘The way you sing it, it sounds like a railway accident.’

  Terrified of what she might overhear next, Audrey crept away. Her umbrella was still in her hand. She opened the kitchen door. ‘Hannah. May I leave my umbrella to drip in the sink?’

  Hannah sat at the table, shelling peas. ‘Leave it where you like, Miss Drew. I don’t know what Mr. Powell thinks he’s doing, calling these fresh garden peas. Maggots in every pod! I’ve got more than a mind to throw the whole lot back in his face.’

  Audrey crept away from the kitchen. She went up to the spare room, fell on her knees among the tidy confident parcels for the Church Army, and prayed with her hands over her ears. During dinner she tried so slavishly to speak peace to Mother and Betty that they unitedly bit her head off. Well, if it united them….

  For the time being, it did. Sunday might almost have been called a day of rest, if it had not been for Hannah, who slammed in and out looking harried and injured, and when offered praises of a gooseberry tart replied ominously that no one could say that she hadn’t always tried to give satisfaction. The next day, as is usual after Sunday, was Monday. Audrey had dedicated Monday to seeing her bank manager and booking her passage. But she did neither, for in the course of discussing whether their next outing should be to Windsor or Box Hill Mother became so curt and Betty so bridling that she was afraid to leave them alone together. All day she longed, as she had never thought it possible to long, for Donald’s return; and when she saw him at the gate, she rushed out and drew him into the tool shed.