by Jane Gardam
She embarked on a full year for herself, captaining the Ladies’ Golf team, taking herself off in a group organised by Abercrombie & Kent to India, where she stayed in palaces, shuddered at the beggars, suffered with the food and made a couple of thoroughly nice friends. Thanks to Herbert’s nifty talent with investments the money was holding up well.
And the year passed and then some more years back in the South of England, with Holly within reach again, and Thomasina’s life went on. When at length, after rather a worryingly long time—some years—Holly became pregnant, Thomasina was to the world blasé yet comformingly ecstatic: a mixture of ‘And about time too’ and ‘We don’t know what she’ll be like with a child, I’m afraid. It’ll wreck her tennis.’
Away she went, Thomasina, to Challoners Health Farm for a week to prepare herself for the delights of grandmotherhood, full of good nature, good sense and sociability. She had won through. The obsession remained only in her memory of a long-gone shadowy time, a mad time that she could scarcely credit. Now she had at last filled the skin of the part she had played to rid her of it.
She had become the Thomasina that the world had always thought she was. She had been to Challoners before, and loved it. The weather was glorious, her room luxurious, the food—for she wasn’t one of those who went there to be dieted—fresh and delicious, and everybody most amusing. At tea on the first day she overheard what she thought of as an ‘old army voice’ at another table saying, ‘Just arrived. Anybody here famous this time? Apart from you and me, of course,’ and thought, What a very nice laugh. When she turned from her silver tea pot to see who owned it, she thought, And very nice teeth.
He was all of seventy, long as a lamppost, moustached, blue-eyed and wearing corded clothes of ancient and superb design. They made the other men in the room, who were mostly young and beautiful and wearing dressing gowns and examining their fingernails, look like advertisements for something.
‘But of course,’ the general called across to her (he looked one, he was one), ‘you must be famous. Let me think. Well, you’re not a film star. I hear Joan Collins was here last week and she was a network of lines. So they tell me. I don’t know who Joan Collins is but I suppose she’s a film star because everyone was so surprised.’ No lines on you, said his eyes; you’re an outdoor woman.
She thought, He’s very attractive. He still likes women. It’s not just that he knows what to say.
Later they sat cross-legged side by side at an exercise class.
‘To the left . . . bend. Now to the right . . . bend,’ and the circle of the self-indulgent, the alcoholic, the arthritic, the over-tired, the lonely, the sad, and people on the run from things, leaned first one way and then the other. ‘Stretch up. Good. Now forward.’
The general creaked to his feet. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘no go. Too late. All over. Packing it in for now.’
Thomasina, still lithe as a tendril after the years of golf and gardening, smiled up at his cheerful and admiring face.
The class over, she went for a walk in the woods. In the evening there was Bridge. He played very well, rather noisily, wittily, like a young man, calling out, ‘Well played,’ to others. At bedtime they found that their doors were opposite each other on the main, the most expensive, corridor; and Thomasina, lying in her bed watching television—she seldom read and neither, he had said, did the general, except for the odd military biography—wondered insanely if she should have locked her door.
All of seventy, she thought, and considered what his naked body would look like. Thin, anyway, and he’d at least wear clothes over it. Silk pajamas probably, not those awful boxer-shorts things and certainly not sweaty and nude—like in television plays—with great tufts sprouting about. She thought that the general would have some tufts but they’d be clean and in the right places. He would smell of coal-tar soap, she thought, and brush his teeth with that lovely toothpaste you can get in the Burlington Arcade. She fell asleep smiling, wondering if she could bear it if the general’s tufts turned out to be grey.
The general rose early next morning for a quick swim and a go on the exercise bikes in the gym. Thomasina was not at breakfast. He had his sauna and then his massage. He looked out for her over his mug of Bovril at twelve o’clock. He, too, had not been put on a diet but he had elected himself to one. Liked to feel he could still put himself through things a bit. Hard commons, early rising, never did anybody any harm. He realised after a few minutes that lean and slender Thomasina would not, of course, be on the diet either and would be eating in the dining room, so he swallowed the last of the Bovril and went to his room to change. No appearing in dressing gowns in the dining rooms for him.
But she was not there.
He walked to the after-lunch meditation class and she was not there either. He stayed for it, meditating on her, began to float, fell asleep.
Laughing at the end—‘I suppose I was snoring? Yes? Oh God, I do apologise’—he groaned to his feet and went in search of her again, finally deciding to knock on her door, though it was not the sort of thing he approved of. Not the way things should be done. God, she might be in her nightdress, resting.
But there was no answer.
The general made his way to the reception hall and front desk, where the big glass doors of the hydro stood open to the sunny park, and the professionally sunny receptionist in white starched overall told him that Mrs. Fox had had to leave. She had been unexpectedly called away.
Turning, the general saw through the doorway a humped old woman being shepherded into a car in the drive by a bald young man. The car drove off very fast.
4
How wet in the heather. But Jack did not notice. He sat up by the Saxon cross. It was morning. Holly Fox had been dead twenty-four hours.
He had heard the phone ring as he was leaving his private chapel but had not hurried particularly across the courtyard. It had been ringing on and on. His brother’s voice, so like his own. They had not spoken since last Christmas.
Andrew sounded unhurried too. Very, very slow, with long pauses. Would Jack please tell their parents?
Jack said at last, ‘It’s for you to do.’
‘No. Better from you. I can’t.’
‘There’s a neighbour,’ said Jack. ‘She’s very good. I’ll get the vicar to tell them, and then the neighbour—Middleditch—can go round, just to sit with them.’
‘Can’t you get there?’
‘Yes. I’ll go now. Directly.’
‘Don’t ring anybody up. Just go.’
Jack paused for so long Andrew thought he had hung up. Then Jack said, ‘I’ll see what’s best. You can ring them yourself later—say, after midday. I’ll stay with them, but . . . ’
‘What?’
He could not say the seed potatoes were critical. He said, ‘I’ll stay with them all afternoon. The child . . . ?’
‘She’s fine. Fine. Called Faith. I have to go. I’ll ring them. Fuck you, Jack, I’ll ring them.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll see to it.’
‘Is it so much to ask?’ Andrew slammed down the phone.
Jack then had taken a piece of bread and gone, gnawing it as he walked from the house. He left by the doors of the Great Solar and crossed his courtyard of hollowed stones, went up through the tilting gravestones to the track, and climbed for a mile until he reached the ridge road and could see the tides of the moors mounting, mounting on each other’s backs, flowing always westward like the Vikings, the prows of crags probing up through the mists. Mounting and mounting, folding and folding. Even in the whitest, thickest, early mist, curlews were crying. Wobbling, liquid, long, long cries ripping the skin of the white lakes.
To Jack’s left—he sat on a sopping lump of turf, his back resting against the stone cross—the three golf balls of the early warning system floated on smoke. To his right were the loops of the highest road westward. In front an
d below were the swooping valleys, the heather giving way to rough stone walls whose pattern thickened towards the valley bottoms. The sun came through with a flourish, lit the miles, lifted the mist, glittered on the waterfalls of ragged bracken and outcrops of stone.
A van came along the ridge, roaring out music like a circus. It stopped beside Jack and a window was wound down, making the circus wild. A package was handed out. The postman said, ‘You’ll get right wet sitting there, Jack, on that bank.’
‘Good morning, Post. Thank you. No—quite all right.’
‘Saving me a journey down, then?’
‘Saving you a journey down.’
‘Yer looked peaked, Jack. On a grand morning.’
Jack stood up, skinny as a monk, and watched the sun across the next valley-but-two switch on like a light across a pale, heaving ocean. ‘Would you reckon rain, Jimmie?’
‘I’d not think so. Not today.’
‘Well. Beginning to come through again, the sun?’
‘Aye. I’ll be on my way, then. You don’t want a lift back down?’
‘No, thank you. God bless you.’
Before he turned down the track again, Jack felt in the little dip that lay high up above him on the top of the upright of the stone cross. Only your fingertips could tell if there was money there. If there was, you kept it. If there wasn’t, you left some. There was a hazard in it. It was bad luck to find no money when you had no money on you, and Jack in his worn-out shirt and tattered trousers never had any money in his pockets—or anywhere else.
But superstition is not Christian. It is for the invaders, the ones of the high prows, and horned helmets, the tin eyes, the old beekeeping sea-rovers who despised Christ and roughed up his dwelling places. Louts from Teesside now did the same, but they were ugly and resentful: nothing splendid about them. Jack smiled, thinking of the sweet dead warrior Holly Fox, and felt high up in the stone, where he found a single gold pound coin. ‘Well, well. American tourists.’
Down the track he went again. First he would pray for the child, then ask someone to help him start the car. Yes, he might ring his parents’ vicar and that neighbour person if he could find the number, just in case Andrew did ring up when the two old people were alone. Of course, he’d go down himself. If he could. To his ma and pa. Faith’s grandparents. His old saints. Yes.
The pound shall be for the child, he thought. She shall have it when she arrives.
5
We should get ourselves down there,’ old Braithwaite shouted, ‘that’s what we should do. What’s the good of us up here? Get me my clothes.’
‘What?’
‘Get me my clothes. I’m getting up.’
Dolly Braithwaite came padding down the stairs and looked in the dining room, where her husband now slept with a night table beside him bearing reading lamp, urine bottle, gold watch, four pencils, a book of geometrical exercises and seven bottles of pills. The reading lamp was switched on. Old Braithwaite was lying looking at the ceiling. It was three o’clock in the morning.
‘Get my clothes.’
‘Don’t be so silly.’ She sat down beside the dead fire in the grate and leaned forward to switch on an electric heater standing near it. She wore floppy flat slippers with matted furry edging, and an old coat. ‘Don’t be so silly. You’re an old man.’
‘Haven’t you a decent dressing gown?’ He had not looked at her, but he knew. This was automatic conversation, a duet between long-mated and now-moulting birds.
‘Of course I’ve a decent dressing gown. I just picked up the first thing I found. You frightened me, bellowing like that. I thought something was wrong.’
‘We ought to be down there. Down South.’
‘However could we get there? We’ve never been there. Where would we stay?’
‘Well, with Andrew. He’s not too grand to give us a bed, is he? He’ll have a spare room.’
‘He’ll be looking after her mother. He rang from her mother’s. I wouldn’t go and stay there.’
‘I’d stay wherever. What’s so wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know. We shouldn’t judge. She’s probably a nice enough woman, poor soul. But she couldn’t take people like us dropping on her now. You couldn’t expect it.’
‘People like us. We’re not “people like us,” we’re us. Just because she was got up in apple green.’
‘Well, at her age.’
‘She’s a lot less than your age. She might just be in her fifties. She might be your age, mind you, though you’d never guess. It’s being South.’
‘Well, she’s not had to put up with what I’ve had,’ said Andrew’s mother, ‘and she’s always had plenty of money.’
‘Well, we’ve plenty of money. For what we want. And with the social services. They’re marvellous. And you’ve got a better dressing gown than you make out. From Newhouses.’
‘For goodness’ sake, will you shut up about dressing gowns. You’ve a widowed son, and there’s this baby . . . ’ Tears fell.
Soon Toots Braithwaite wept too. The tears wandered down his face to his neck and the pearl button that fastened the top of the Chilprufe vest he wore under his raspberry-striped winceyette pyjamas.
‘I’ll get a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Give me your bottle to empty,’ and she went along the passage holding the brimming plastic urine conch and began to drop things on the kitchen floor, looking for matches.
‘Take care what you’re doing.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll set us alight.’
‘Of course I’m all right.’
She came back to the dining room. ‘D’you want your wireless on? There’s the World Service. You’ll go back to sleep after your tea.’
‘I’m not ill. For God’s sake—I’m lame, that’s all, and I’d not be lame if I could get out for a walk. I never get taken out, so I get no practice. That’s all it is. Down to that ruddy seat by the churchyard and back again, waddling behind that frame.’
‘Here’s your tea.’
‘Like a dying grasshopper.’
‘You should be thankful for the frame. You were worse before you had it. You were impossible.’
‘Saw a whole row of them the other day.’
‘What, grasshoppers?’
‘Old crocks like me. Going along in a row one behind the other off a bus. Ye gods! Like a centipede. A hiccupping centipede.’
‘They couldn’t all have come off a bus. How could they have got a busload of walking frames on a bus same time as a busload of people?’
‘It was an outing. It’d be a special bus. A disabled bus. Built for it,’ he said.
‘Maybe we should go on outings.’
‘We’re not poor. Outings are for the poor. “Under-privileged,” they call them now. And we’re not old enough. What we should have is a taxi now and then to Scarborough. You see some things going on in Scarborough. We’re not ninety. We’ve got money.’
Dolly sat, knees apart to the cold fireplace, the electric fire turned away from her towards Toots’s bed, her head bowed.
‘Now, there’s no use,’ he said. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’
‘Oh, Toots. There’s nothing to be done.’
‘Stop crying. Stop saying there’s nothing to be done. What time is it?’
‘Four o’clock. It’s getting light. The birds are started . . . Oh the poor thing. The poor things. That baby . . . ’
‘What they calling her, you say?’ he asked, into a silence.
‘Faith.’
‘It’s a plain sort of name. I’m not altogether taken with it.’
‘It’s some sort of joke business, apparently. They were all saying, “Holly had faith,” “At least she had her faith”—that sort of business. So they called her Faith.’
‘I’m not sure that’s good taste. At a time l
ike this. Puns.’
‘Well, it’s true. Holly was a good Christian girl and you don’t expect that from down there somehow.’
‘Aye. Mind, she let you know it,’ said Toots.
‘You shouldn’t say that, Tom. And she didn’t. She was a lovely . . . Oh Lord.’
‘Hush, now. Hush, lassie. This what’s-this—“Faith?” Did he say?’
‘Of course he didn’t say. It was all he could do to talk to us at all. Clipped like he is. Like a sneer when words did come out. Not crying. I’m glad Mrs. Middleditch had told us first. She broke the back of it a bit. I think . . . It did . . . When it . . . ’
‘It didn’t make it easier,’ he said. ‘Nothing makes it easier. And that woman—Middleditch. Where’s she got it from? Who’d told her? I suppose the whole place knew it before us. She comes round here with that bowl of soup. Middleditch.’
‘It was all kindness.’
‘Kindness! All she fills her time with is kindness and ferreting things out. And that mouth of hers. Like a hen’s bottom.’
‘She can’t help her appearance. And she’s been a very good friend to us. Gets us our pensions and she ran the ruby wedding. Ran it single-handed.’
‘Holly would have done that. Holly said she would have come all the way up here to run it if she’d only known. And she’d have given us a proper do, too, not tea and whisky and those sandwiches. We’d have had sherries and tartlets and guests of our own class and education.’
‘Mrs. Middleditch has had education. A lot of education. She was highly trained in a college.’
‘Trained what in? College dinners, likely, judging from the look of that soup. Why have we got in with these kinds of people? We’re sitting ducks for them, that’s why. Told our own news like geriatrics. This ought to have been our affair. Private and personal. Sent in a letter as it was in times past, and we should have been allowed to keep it to ourselves for a bit. Half the parish arriving.’
