Faith Fox

by Jane Gardam

  29

  Toots gave a bellow from his bed at teatime and Dolly came running to find him pointing a furious finger at the dark winter window. ‘She’s out there.’

  ‘Who? What are you on about?’

  ‘Her. Middleditch. Standing out on the grass, looking in.’

  ‘Don’t be so soft. When did she ever not walk straight in through the door? It’s what you can’t stand, the way she comes in. It’s years since there was by your leave.’

  ‘I tell you, she’s out on that grass, looking puzzled.’

  ‘It’s too dark to see anyone looking puzzled. It’s too dark to see if you’re rambling,’ said Dolly, ‘but just in case you’re not . . . ’ She tapped on the glass and called, ‘Mrs. Middleditch? Hello? Don’t stand in the cold.’

  No reply came from the frosty garden but some scuffling sounds were going on in the direction of the front door, a kind of stamping.

  ‘It’ll be the boot scraper,’ said Dolly. ‘She’s been in the flower bed. She’s gone off her head. What we have to put up with, being old, the sort of people we have to know, and all in the name of charity. It’s the worst thing she’s ever done, walking in from the flower bed.’

  ‘She’ll have buggered up the bulbs. I’ve a mind to tell the police.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t her at all. It might be muggers.’

  But in burst Mrs. Middleditch in her broderie anglaise and good cardigan and zip jacket and mackintosh and muffler. She erupted before them.

  Curiously she seemed to have nothing to say.

  ‘A cup of tea, Mrs. Middleditch?’ asked Dolly.

  ‘Oh, no, thank you. I have to be getting back. Actually, I’ve been thinking . . . ’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d both like to come round to me for a cuppa?’

  ‘Dolly can go,’ said Toots at once. ‘It’s after dark. I don’t stir after dark.’ His zimmer frame was by the bed, his calliper alongside on the blankets like a sword on a tomb. A thriller lay across his chest and bottle of whisky which could be reached at top speed was in the cupboard. ‘Do her good. Never goes out.’

  ‘Is it a birthday?’ Dolly warily asked.

  ‘No, no. Not at all. But . . . ’

  They had never seen her hesitant. Nonplussed.

  Toots thought, He’s left her. About time.

  ‘But,’ said Mrs. Middleditch, ‘we have a visitor and we don’t know what to do with her. I think one of you should come to her since she won’t stir. It’s that Alice Banks.’

  ‘At your house?’ The Missus?’

  ‘Yes. She’s landed.’

  ‘Now you must have asked her, Beryl,’ said Dolly, using the given name on account of the seriousness of the moment.

  ‘Asked her? Never. I hardly know the woman.’

  ‘She must be confused. She’s confusing you with us. She’s never been very normal.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. She calls me by my name. Arnold would be more au fait with what to do about her. Tonight he has to be out, of course, with his work for the Boys’ Brigade. She’s settled in and her car’s locked up in the road. For the night, it looks. Packed with stuff.’

  ‘She’s not been in that car—I don’t know when I remember her off in that car,’ said Dolly. ‘What if it snows? She’ll never get back.’

  ‘Packed full,’ said Beryl Middleditch, flushing, ‘to the gunnels. Packed up with shoes and boxes and heaps of rags. There’s an electric kettle and a whole pack of grapefruits. I’d think she’s left Jack.’

  ‘Dolly, get your hat on,’ said Toots. ‘And wrap up: it’s a cold night. Go after her and bring her round here. I’ll settle this.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure there’s no need for that.’ Mrs. Middleditch was bewildered by another’s taking command. She hadn’t known Toots at the height of his authoritarian powers. This was part of the trouble. She treated him as an old chap. ‘It’s just that I find her rather confused,’ she said.

  ‘Talking about Gracie Fields, I dare say?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact she is.’

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  Dolly departed with Middleditch. Toots shot out of bed and, ignoring the hardware around him, made for the cupboard on flat but confident feet. Sitting on the bed end, he took a good swig and filled up the bottle to its previous level from a bottle of ginger ale kept for the purpose. The whisky tasted filthy because of this process having been followed many times before, more ale now than grog. But still, there was something left to cheer the heart. The telephone rang and, being made amiable by the noggin, Toots eased himself down the passage to the hall chair and picked up the phone.

  ‘Toots!’ said Thomasina? ‘Dear Toots! You have a phone by your bed.’

  ‘Who? Thomasina? Well, my godfathers! Thomasina. I don’t believe it. How are you? By Gad, we think of you. Dolly’s out. There’s a mad woman sitting in somebody’s house. How’s our granddaughter?’

  ‘Thank you, dear Toots, for your lovely letter,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t answer. I went to Egypt.’

  ‘Very nice.’ He thought, I mustn’t forget to ask after Holly, and then remembered. He was doing that sort of thing nowadays. ‘By Gad,’ he said instead, several times, ‘Thomasina!’

  ‘I was thinking of coming up.’

  ‘Then you’ll stay here,’ he said at once. ‘We’ve three spare rooms now that I’m downstairs. And bring that sexy green dress.’

  She laughed and said he was a disgraceful old man and who was the mad woman down the street? He listened carefully, on his better ear, to her southern voice. Her face came back to him.

  ‘It’s very nice of you to ring here,’ he said. ‘We can’t be very interesting to you.’

  ‘You were always riveting, Toots. The things that went on.’

  ‘I remember you coming visiting here once,’ he said. ‘I remember you sitting on the piano stool. The first time they came back from California, the three of you together. You’ve lovely legs.’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  ‘I said “You have lovely legs.”’

  ‘Now then, Toots. Toots—’ she said ‘—I was just ringing. Wanted to hear you.’

  ‘You’re a brave woman, Thomasina.’

  ‘Oh no. I ran to Egypt.’

  ‘Well, who wouldn’t run? If we’d lost Jack or Andrew, I don’t know how far we’d run. If we had the money. That was our advantage. By, but we pitied you, Thomasina, how we pitied you. We wept for you, and for all of us.’

  ‘Don’t, Toots.’

  ‘Baby lovely, I hear.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I expect you know more about that. You’ll have seen her often.’

  ‘Well, now then, as a matter of fact—they’re very busy up there, you know. And there’s the weather. There’s always something going on. We’ll be going up there for Christmas, unless it snows.’

  ‘That’s what I was going to say. Christmas. If I could come up for Christmas—no, we’d stay in a hotel, I wouldn’t land the two of us on you. I have a friend. There’s a hotel up on the moors near The Priors. But we would see you both, Toots, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Unless it snows. They’re putting on a Christmas show up there—three kings and so on, and Faith’s to be christened. Nativity thing.’

  ‘And we would see you?’

  ‘You would. I’ll make sure of it. There’s sixes and sevens up there at present with this mad woman. Barmy about Jack for twenty years and she’s made off with a car full of shoes. Left him. Housekeeper.’

  ‘Not The Missus! Well! If she wants another job, tell her there’s one down here for her. A dotty old lady and a man called Puffy. We—my friends and I—are desperate for them.’

  ‘Oh, everyone’s desperate about old folk,’ said Toots, ‘I can’t think why. Everyone�
��s desperate about us two. “Where will it end?”—they hang about the gate saying it to each other—“Where will it end for the pair of them?” That sort of thing. You know, life’s very comfortable. It’s laughable if you don’t read the papers. There’s some terrible fools about. But it makes entertainment.’

  Ringing off, she thought, I like those people so.

  Ringing off, he thought, Well, how about that, then? Thomasina! Lovely woman. Beautiful voice. Like Holly’s.

  Dolly, having tottered home and into the overheated house, found him prone upon the bed with his braces loose, and smiling.

  ‘It’s The Missus all right,’ she said. ‘Just sitting there. She doesn’t say what she’s up to but she can’t stop talking and I’ve had to say she can come here if she wants. I don’t think she does. She’s laid back on that peach settee with her shoes off. And—Toots—she does smell of fry.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ She looked sharply at silent Toots. ‘What’s this grin about? Have you been in the cupboard?’

  ‘I’ve been having a conversation,’ he informed the light fitting, ‘with Apple Green.’

  ‘You rang her? You’re drunk.’

  ‘She rang here. Just for a chat. What about that, then? Nice as pie. Voice like the Queen.’

  ‘Thomasina Fox rang us?’

  ‘Aye. She’s coming to stay,’ he said, ‘Christmas time. Never a dull minute. She’s coming and The Missus is coming. By the way, I’ve fixed The Missus up with another job.’

  30

  Jack scarcely ever visited his parents, though probably he had not realised it. When The Missus flew to them, however, or virtually to them, for the alighting on Mrs. Middleditch was only a preliminary settling, it was obvious even to him that he must be the one to fetch her home again.

  Jack was not one to seek explanations. Others came to him with their troubles, at which he never seemed surprised. Other people’s troubles were his workload. They poured them at his feet like offerings and were comforted by his loving face, or at any rate a face that had set into practised loving lines. His face was a strange face. It sometimes looked quite wooden. It always looked innocent, with candid eyes you never surprised or found assessing.

  What lay behind the eyes was a mysterious area for Toots.

  But then, Jack had always been a puzzle to Toots. If he’d been anyone else’s son he’d have said he was plain dippy, a cartoon loony, but, since he was his own and Toots had his pride, he kept quiet. ‘Wonderful boy,’ they’d all said when Jack was at school, the school where Toots taught. Toots had watched him effortlessly collecting honours. At the university Jack had won a cricketing blue and a First in Physics before becoming entangled with God. Then followed certain spells in the wilderness, ordination, and more spells in the wilderness. For some years Jack had been cut off from his parents and the North, descending upon them only once or twice from nowhere, sitting smiling in their kitchen, thin as a skeleton, looking at the food Dolly put before him with historical interest, faint reminder of old pleasures. Cricket talk with Toots had been the only thing to raise a flicker of interest.

  Toots had grown silent, too, with disappointment. He and Dolly did not discuss Jack together then. Only after the arrival of The Missus and the subsequent more or less straight course of Jack the parish priest did they begin to drop his name into general conversation again. They began to wonder sometimes if after all Jack might reach the high office everyone knew—of course—he deserved. Such ludicrous bishops about, not half as clever as Jack. Dolly always believed he was in with a chance, until he fetched up one day almost on his own home pad, The Missus in attendance like a snappish Sancho Panza, and began his crazy venture on the Yorkshire moors.

  By Gad, he’s been a funny fellow, the now bedridden Toots thought. Whatever was it we did wrong?

  He had never once discussed Jack’s career with him, never once said that he had been saddened by the fading of the golden years. Now he just brooded on the whole thing from the bed and, when the various Middleditches of the town enquired not quite innocently about Jack, Toots was taciturn but never judgemental. There were private explosions sometimes, though, and as he grew old some weeping sometimes in the night that Dolly knew about. The recent arrival of the Tibetans was the worst thing yet, in Toots’s mind, after the bizarre marriage to Jocasta. ‘The Snake,’ Toots called her. Jocasta had represented the depths of Toots’s mystification and sadness about his son.

  For Dolly, Jack had never done wrong. He could never disappoint. He was unique, her first-born, her star. Andrew, born so long after, walked his steady road uphill towards the London hospital, got clear of his old home, and his parents’ friends informed them of how proud they must be, overdoing it rather to try to blot out the embarrassment of Jack. Dolly would have none of it, cutting in on Andrew’s praises with anecdotes about her first-born. ‘It was Jack had the brains,’ she would say. ‘Oh, yes. Andrew was just run-of-the-mill. He was the one who had to work. It all just came to Jack.’

  The small bedroom that had once been Jack’s Andrew had moved into when his brother went to university, as it was a few feet bigger than his own, but when Andrew left home it became ‘Jack’s room’ again. Dolly carried all Jack’s things back into it and moved Andrew’s out. She kept it clean and tidy, the old school books dusted on the shelves. She secretly wished she could reconstruct Jack’s chaos again, the rubbish she had not been allowed to touch, the greasy plates shoved under the bed and forgotten, the dangling icons, the furniture eased into the middle of the room and surrounded by newspaper screens.

  ‘But why ever, Jack?’ (His wonderful young face.)

  ‘It’s too big. I don’t need all this space.’

  ‘Why do you sleep on the floor?’

  Jack had grinned and looked away and Toots had said, ‘You’re a fool, boy. You do no work, just lying there. You’ll fail.’

  But inside the paper screens something must have been going on, for Jack always passed out top.

  ‘Well, I’m sure—I don’t know,’ Dolly had said proudly.

  Sometimes even now she sat alone in the narrow room. She said to friends that it was a way of getting a break from Toots, the stairs now being far too steep for him. She sat in the three-cornered art-nouveau chair beside the iron bedstead and looked out at the church spire across the allotments, the steelworks behind blossoming scarlet and gold. A solemn church bell. She thought of little Jack hearing the dreary thing all those years (she forgot Andrew) and wondered if that was what had been wrong. If we’d put him looking over the street or towards the sandbanks, she thought, there might have been less religion. But he was a lovely boy. She sat dreaming of his gaiety. Now when Jack came down very occasionally to see them she had to adjust to the fact that this gaunt, hesitant man had been the quicksilver larky boy who had never once given any hint that what he wanted to do was try to live like Christ.

  ‘Very funny boy, your Jack,’ Mrs. Middleditch had said after Toots had been insulting her more than usual. ‘I remember him, just. He used to like sleeping under his bed. I never thought it was quite nice.’

  Yet even Mrs. Middleditch was balked by the Jack of today. He met her torrents of instruction to the world with a sweetness—and silence—that threw her off course. She would have liked to tell him a thing or two like you ought to be able to tell a parson, but then she’d known him as a boy and that was always difficult. She’d like to have told him about Toots’s drinking and betting with Nick Smike, and the trouble Dolly had bathing him, and his poisonous rudeness to people—quite respectable people—and Dolly’s breathlessness going upstairs. But the disturbingly loving face of Jack had her beaten.

  She pursed her lips as one who might say much, but ‘please yourself, if you don’t want to ask.’ She scratched the backs of her hands, shuffled on her bottom hoity-toity, wondering how she could get across to Toots and Dolly that Jack was not the Lord God. Now and the
n she hinted he might do more for them and described the wonderful sense of duty in her own son, Bingham, who lived at home at forty-three and saw to all their shopping.

  When Jack at last arrived in quest of The Missus it was with Philip.

  It was a cold and nasty day well into December—he hadn’t hurried. He was wet, with no coat over his cassock, and Philip not much better in an anorak that had a broken zip and was much too small for him. Jack sat down in the Windsor chair and stared gently at the electric fire. In and out of his mind floated the conviction that God must be with him since Mrs. Middleditch hadn’t spotted his car at the door and was not yet present. Toots lay staring at the ceiling. Dolly looked down at Jack’s wet shoes. One of them had a string for a lace. Philip had disappeared upstairs to wash his hands. ‘Is he still washing them?’ she said. ‘He was at that last time. Every half-hour. I wonder if his bladder’s wrong.’

  ‘Is that possible at eleven?’ Jack still examined the electric element. ‘We’d better get Andrew to look at him.’

  ‘Is Andrew still up there?’

  ‘No, no. I mean next time.’ He felt Dolly’s eyes shift to his soil-begrimed hands and put them out of sight.

  Toots said, ‘So you and Philip are down here on your own, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll think I’m making excuses, but they wouldn’t let me bring her. I was driving. No one would hear of it.’

  ‘They’re ready to risk Philip, then?’

  ‘Well, he’s quite a help. He warns me of the traffic lights.’

  There was silence between the three of them, all apart yet all aware of what the others thought.

  Jack said, ‘You’re both coming, then, on Christmas Eve? To the christening? And Jocasta’s putting on a tableau. That’s all fixed if Mrs. Middleditch can only bring you and take you back. Faith will be just three months old, I’m to tell you. I’m told it is a lovely age. The eyes have cleared up—they come and go rather. Pema has been going on to Jocasta, saying that a baby looks its brightest and best at three months and all the crumpled red look gone.’