She was sitting motionless and frantic when Alan came in, switching on the light in the hall.
‘Well, Meg—Why are you looking so wrought up? Didn’t the vet come? Couldn’t he do his stuff?’
‘Oh, yes, that was all right. But Charlotte’s not back.’
‘When did they say they’d bring her?’
‘Adela didn’t say exactly. She said, a good long day. But it’s long over that—Adela knows how particular I am about bedtime.’
‘Why not ring up?’
‘But I am sure they must have started by now.’
‘Well, someone would be about. They’ve got that cook. What’s their number?’
She heard him in the hall, dialling. Then he came back saying the line seemed to be dead. Ten minutes later, a car drew up and Charlotte rushed into the house, followed by Mrs. Flaxman.
‘Mother, Mother! It’s been so marvellous, it’s been so thrilling. We were struck by lightning. There was a huge flash, bright blue, and the telephone shot across the room and broke ever so much china, and there was an awful noise of horses screaming their heads off and Mr. Flaxman tore out to see if the stables had been struck too, and then ran back saying, “They’re all right but our bloody roof’s on fire.” And there were great fids of burning thatch flying about everywhere, and Mr. Flaxman went up a ladder and I and Mrs. Flaxman got buckets and buckets of water and handed them up to him. And I was ever so useful, Adela said so, wasn’t I, Mrs. Flaxman?’
‘I don’t know what we’d have done without you, my pet,’ said Mrs. Flaxman to Charlotte, and to Meg, ‘She got very wet, but we’ve dried her.’
‘And then people came rushing up from the village and trod on the bantams.’
‘No, nothing’s insured except the portraits and the horses. Giles won’t, on principle. Yes, calamitous—but it could have been worse. No, no, not at all, it’s been a pleasure having her.’
Adela was gone, leaving the impression of someone from a higher sphere in a hurry to return to its empyrean.
For the present, there was nothing to be done but listen to Charlotte and try not to blame the Flaxmans for having let her get so over-excited. Both parents lit cigarettes and prepared themselves for a spell of entering into their child’s world; after all, fifteen minutes earlier, they had been fearing for her life. They smoked and smiled and made appropriate interjections. Suddenly her narrative ran out, and she said, ‘Where’s Moodie?’
For by the time one is ten one knows when one’s parents are only pretending to be interested. Back again in a home that had no horses, no bantams, no curly golden armchairs, no portraits of gentlemen in armour and low-necked ladies, was never struck by lightning and gave her no opportunities to be brave and indispensable, Charlotte concentrated on the one faithful satisfaction it afforded and said, ‘Where’s Moodie?’
Mastering a feeling like stage-fright, Meg said with composure, ‘Darling. Moodie’s not here.’
‘Why isn’t he? Has he run away? Has anything happened to him?’
‘Not exactly that. But he’s dead.’
‘Why? Why is he dead? He was quite well this morning. Why is he dead?’
‘You know, darling, poor Moodie hasn’t really been feeling well for a long time. He was an old cat. He had an illness.’
Charlotte saw Moodie’s broad face, and his eyes staring at her with that thirsty expression. Moodie was dead. Mother had explained to her about death, making it seem very ordinary.
‘You remember how horrid his breath smelled?’
‘Yes. That was his teeth.’
‘It wasn’t only his teeth. It was something inside that was bound to kill him sooner or later. And he would have suffered a great deal. So the vet came and gave him an injection and put him to sleep. It was all over in a minute.’
Moodie had gone out and sat in the rain. The child’s glance moved to the window and remained fixed on the lawn—so green in the sunset that it was almost golden. It was a french window. Without a word, she opened it and went out.
‘Poor Charlotte!’ said Alan. ‘She’s taking it very well. I must say, I think you rubbed it in a bit too much. You needn’t have said he stank.’
Meg repressed the retort that if Alan could have done it so much better he might perfectly well have done so. In silence, they watched Charlotte walking about in the garden. It was a very small garden, and newly-planted, and the gardens on either side of it were small and newly-planted too, and only marked off by light railings. To Meg, whose childhood had known a garden with overgrown shrubs, laurel hedges, a disused greenhouse and a toad, it seemed an inadequate place to grieve in; but from the 18th century onwards people have turned for comfort to the bosom of nature, and Charlotte was doing so now, among the standard roses and the begonias. She walked up and down, round and round, pausing, walking on again. ‘Going round his old haunts‚’ said Alan. Moodie, as Meg knew, shared her opinion of the garden; he used it to scratch in, but for any serious haunting went to Mopson’s Garage where he and the neighbourhood cats clubbed among the derelict cars. A sense of loss pierced her; knowing Moodie’s ways had been a kind of illicit Bohemianism in her exemplary, rather lonely life. But it was Charlotte’s loss she must think of—and Charlotte’s supper, which was long overdue.
‘I wish she’d come in—but we mustn’t hurry her.’
Alan said, ‘She’s coming now.’
Charlotte was walking towards the house, walking with a firm tread. Her face was still pale with shock, but her expression was composed, resolved, even excited. I must give her a sedative, thought Meg. Charlotte entered, saying, ‘I’ve chosen the place for his grave.’
After the bungled explanations that one couldn’t, that the lawn would never be the same again, that it wasn’t their garden, that the lease expressly forbade burying animals had broken down under the child’s cross-examination into an admission that there was no body to bury, that the vet had taken it away, that it could not be got back, that it had been disposed of, that in all probability it had been burned to ashes as her parents’ bodies would in due course be burned; after Charlotte, declaring she would never forgive them, never, that they were liars and murderers, that she hated them and hoped they would soon be burned to ashes themselves had somehow been got to bed, they sat down, exhausted, not looking at each other.
‘That damned cat!’
As though Alan’s words had unloosed it, a wailing cry came from overhead.
‘O Moodie, Moodie, Moodie!
‘O Moodie, Moodie, Moodie!’
Implacable as the iteration of waves breaking on a beach, the wailing cries rang through the house. Twice Meg started to her feet, was told not to be weak-minded, and sat down again. Alan ought to be fed. Something ought to be done. The mere thought of food made her feel sick. Alan was filling his pipe. Staring in front of her, lost in a final imbecility of patience, she found she was looking at the two dahlia stalks whose petals she had torn away.
‘O Moodie, Moodie, Moodie!’
The thought of something to be done emerged. ‘We must put off that new kitten,’ she said.
‘Why?’
Completing her husband’s exasperation, Meg buried her face in her hands and began to cry.
‘O Moodie,’ she lamented. ‘Oh, my kind cat!’
A LONG NIGHT
HENRY SPARROW had been directed to the endmost of the two-seat tables in the dining car; and as it had grown too dark to look out of the window and dinner was not yet being served and the young man sitting opposite had not struck him as the kind of fellow-traveller he would enjoy talking to he resumed the dissatisfied speculations which the notice above the young man’s seat had been intermittently arousing in him during a course of years:
PRIÈRE D’EXIGER UNE NOTE POUR TOUTE SOMME VERSÉE
The French official mind emerges from an unswervingly applied education, which includes (under grammar) verse forms, the caesura, rimes riches and rimes suffisantes, together with admired passages of declamation to be scan
ned, analysed and learned by heart. So it was natural enough that a notice in a wagon-restaurant should open as though it meant to be an Alexandrine. But the author couldn’t keep it up; he fell into that torrent of syllables and was swept on, helpless, till he clawed himself back onto the classic manner with his ‘versée’—a preposterous word in the circumstances, thought Henry Sparrow, who had learned during the Medium and Advanced French of his school days to associate it with flowers and tears.
The car had filled up, a man had come round with the basket of rolls, the train had entered the Simplon Tunnel and Henry, who did not like being beaten by a trifle, applied himself yet once again to rescuing that foundered Alexandrine. A bold, but permissible, expedient would be to treat the opening as a half line:
Prière d’exiger
Une note, Messieurs les Voyageurs….
But this only postponed the crisis, besides demanding a larger expanse of public advertising space.
The lights flickered, and went out.
For a moment, no one spoke. The noise of the trains grinding up the incline took over, and was portentous. Someone farther down the car clicked a cigarette lighter; someone else struck a match. A voice from across the table exclaimed, ‘Oh, thank God!’
With more clicking of lighters, striking of matches, everyone began to talk. There was a dawn chorus of cheerful expostulations, and car attendants appeared with little lanterns. Under cover of this, Henry said, ‘Why? Why “Thank God”?’—for the voice had sounded so abjectly relieved that curiosity was too much for him.
‘I always think I’ve gone blind. Silly, isn’t it?’
In the train journey that took Henry to and from his boarding school there had been a certain tunnel—not long enough to warrant lighting up but long enough to impose that darting panic, that interval of accepting the worst. Even when familiarity had taught him not to be an ass he still dreaded the tunnel, because, though it could no longer frighten him, it could remind him how horribly frightened he had been. ‘Most people feel like that, at some time or another,’ he said. ‘Especially when they are young. When one is young, one has a great deal of superfluous fear. Young animals——’ He was about to instance colts when the lights came on again, and the attendants began serving the first course.
There sat the young man whom Henry had decided he would not enjoy talking to. A weedy specimen: long, thin neck, high, spotty forehead, callow chin beard—everything about him was weedy. With his shabby-jaunty air, and his pale eyes flinching in their dark circles of sleeplessness, he was at once pathetic and unprepossessing. But a contact had flashed between them; conversation must be kept up.
‘I suppose it was a fuse,’ Henry said. ‘I’m glad they put it right. The tunnel would seem even more interminable if we had to sit in the dark.’
‘How long is it?’
‘I believe it takes about twenty minutes.’
‘Twenty minutes? I don’t call that much. I’ve been through a tunnel in Norway that takes thirty-eight minutes.’
Henry said ‘Really?’ and hoped the conversation might now languish.
Presently the young man revived it.
‘The whole of this journey strikes me as interminable. I loathe these internationalized trains. They’re so artificial. … Garçon! Un Coke.’
‘Have you been travelling long?’
‘I haven’t had a proper sleep for the last four nights. I don’t know if you call that long.’
The train had altered its voice. Like an underground stream, it was hurrying down to the valley of the Rhône. Henry, knowing that this was not the solicited inquiry, inquired, ‘Have you much farther to go?’
‘Liverpool. What’s this mess? Veal, I suppose. It’s always veal.’
‘A l’ Ambassadeur. In a cream sauce, with mushrooms,’ said the attendant, in English.
This is insufferable, thought Henry; I shall get out at Sion…. And why not? He had long wanted to hear that venerable organ which had snored and tweedled through so many centuries; he was not particularly expected at home; so why not get out at Sion? All that would be required was the strength of mind to discount the cost of his sleeper and to reclaim his suitcase and passport from the wagon-lit attendant. There would be time to finish his veal, which was excellent; then he would assert himself as a freeborn Englishman, rise, pay and escape from the odious young fellow.
Meanwhile the odious young fellow was talking on. ‘The only way to travel is on foot. It’s the only way you get to know the real country, the real people. Live with peasants and help with the harvest. Drink the local wines. Stay in little fishing ports, go out in the boats, sing, get to know everybody. When I’m in a place like that, I always make a point of going to church.’
‘What do you do in Rome?’ asked Henry. He knew this would be wasted, and it was.
‘Rome? Don’t talk to me of Rome. I’d no sooner got into this train than a ghastly slum family was shoved in on top of me—father, mother, three kids, all their earthly belongings in bags and baskets. And they’d come on from Rome—they said so. One of the kids is some sort of cripple, and does nothing but whine and fidget. And his dear Mum does nothing but jump up and down, getting this out of one basket and that out of another, to tempt his appetite. I don’t know what they’re doing on a rapid. They ought to be in a cattle truck.’
This, too, was overheard by the attendant, who had removed Henry’s neat plate and hovered uncertainly over the young man’s mauled remains.
‘Talking of travelling—yes, take it away, I’m through—I ran into a bit of real life in Turkey. Have you ever been in Turkey?’
‘Only on the beaten track.’
‘The what? Oh, yes, the beaten track. Well, this wasn’t the sort of thing you’d find on the beaten track. It was off in the mountains. I’d been walking all day. I’d seen one shepherd in the morning; after that, no one—just a few eagles. And it had got dark suddenly. You know how suddenly it gets dark in Turkey; even on the beaten track you’d notice that. It looked like a case of under-the-stars for me—not the first time, either—when I saw some tall white things: they were tombstones in a cemetery. And beside it was a broken-down old mosque. Well, I thought, no smoke without fire; where there’s dead folks, there’s live folks. Sure enough there was a village. Well, knowing how hospitable these mountain Turks are—hospitality’s a sacred duty with them—I knocked at a door. No answer. I knocked at another door. No answer. I called. A dog began howling. That was all. There was a storm coming up, and a perishing wind. So I went back to the mosque and curled up just inside. Last thing I knew was the dog howling. When I woke, it was daylight, and the dog was still howling. And the floor of the mosque was covered with stiffs. I must have picked the one place where there wasn’t a stiff. And every one of them had spots. Plague spots! Did I hop it? Just think!’ said the young man, leaning over the table. ‘Just think! If a flea off one of those stiffs had bitten me, I’d have got plague!’
‘A near thing,’ said Henry. It was the best he could do. The story, told by old Dr. Protheroe, had made a deep impression on him when he was eight years old and newly allowed to sit up for Sunday supper. In the Protheroe version it was typhus, and there was no dog. The dog was a good touch, and if the young man had supplied it, it did him credit. Ars longa, thought Henry. Two world wars, the Spanish Influenza epidemic, Auschwitz, Hiroshima had gone by and were in process of being forgotten. Old Dr. Protheroe’s story was as lively as ever; in time it would certainly be told on the moon. Art is long, and tough, and never loses a tooth. This Ninon de l’Enclos of a narrative was fastened in the very flesh of the poor braggart sitting below Prière d’exiger. By dint of telling, it had become his story, it had happened to him. His neck swelled, his eyes bulged, there was sweat on his forehead; if one had taken his hand, how horribly clammy the palm would be! Now he would dream about it, and cry out in his sleep. But on reflection, the poor wretch would not be in a way for nightmares; he was spending the night in that crowded compartment with the si
ckly child and the fidgeting mother.
Coffee was served, the case of liqueurs brought round. Henry had a brandy and offered one to the young man.
‘No, thanks. I don’t drink alcohol. In any form.’ Earlier in the conversation, he had been drinking the wine of the country with peasants—but no matter.
Bills were made out and laid on the tables. The head of the service came round with his cashbox. The young man glanced at his bill, pulled out his wallet, put down a couple of notes. The head of the service, a stout, Father-Christmasy Swiss, shook his head. ‘These are lire notes, Monsieur. The charge is in francs.’
When the bill had been settled, the young man said to Henry with a limping smile, ‘That’s done for my breakfast.’ It was the first unfeigned remark he had made since his ‘Oh, thank God!’ and Henry was completely at a loss how to answer it. ‘Unless they’ll take these.’ With a flourish, the young man threw some Turkish notes on the table and looked at Henry as much as to say, ‘There! Now do you believe me?’
Henry was prepared to believe the young man had been in Turkey; he had a vivid mind’s-eye picture of him going for a walk beyond a bus stop, trembling at every dog, kite and skin eruption. He knew he ought to ask appropriate questions. He also knew that he ought to offer to change the notes. If he had been asked to, he would have done it willingly enough. However, he was glad he had not been asked, as then he would have put himself under an obligation (for every obligation is two-sided, the one who obliges being tied by the acceptance of the one obliged) and he did not want to be under an obligation to this boasting, flinching mongrel, whom he was now quite inordinately disliking. Besides, it was too late. He had thought about it. Such acts are only possible if one does them suddenly, and Henry was not a person who did things suddenly.
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