by Jane Gardam
He finished two sausages in this manner, then some bread and butter as well as the fried bread. She held the teacup to his mouth. ‘I can do that bit,’ he said, and took the cup into his paws.
She left him to it and took her own plate on her knee.
‘We’ll have to see to a civilised table tomorrow,’ she said.
‘D’you play cards?’ asked a gentle voice.
‘I do.’
‘There’s cards in the sewing table.’
‘Well—a sewing table. We had one in Rochdale in 1940. Is it for Mr. Jones? He looks a sewing sort of man.’
‘Now then!’ said Puffy. ‘He’s just a bit of a romantic.’
‘He has to be kept in his place. I’ll deal.’
They played for an hour, and she brought him cocoa.
‘He’ll be back to put you to bed, will he, or do I do that?’
‘No, no. That is for the nurse.’
‘Whoever else have you got?’
‘There is a gardener and an odd-job man and there’s the woman. And someone called The Silver Lady for the forks. And Henry Jones. And the Social Services call, and once a month someone comes to take our blood pressure. And the barber. And the doctor once a fortnight. Madeleine often misses the blood-pressure nurse; she’s away a great deal. They think I’m past doing anything.’
‘You’re not past taking two pounds off me in an hour’s bezique.’
‘I could take more off them. You’re a very good player, Miss Banks. But where’s the use? Where do I spend it?’
‘On all these servants, sounds like to me. I’m a good player because I play a lot with a little lad where I live. Mind, we don’t play for money there, it’s religious. By, you do look better than when I walked in: you’ve a sparkle in the eye. We’ll play again tomorrow.’
‘Miss Banks,’ he said as she got up to answer the door to the nurse, ‘you’d better hide my sausage plate. It will put them in a frenzy. They tell me I haven’t many more tomorrows.’
‘Well, they may as well be good ones, then,’ said The Missus.
37
The fearful weather and wind off the sea continued for a week after the departure of The Missus. Dolly and Toots thought of little but how she was getting on, and how the rest of them could possibly be managing up at The Priors.
The Priors filled their lives. They telephoned endlessly, sometimes getting a reply, more often not. For three days now they had not, and discussion raged about whether the lines were down or whether everyone was away with sheep or whether—this was Toots’s view, strongly supported by Mrs. Middleditch when she sat in on the matter—Jocasta somehow knew the tone of their telephone calls and did not lift up the receiver.
‘And that baby,’ said Mrs. Middleditch—often—‘how is she getting along? You’ve not seen her yet, have you? What a shame. You’ll be missing all her early little habits. They go so quickly. And the first smile. I must say if the weather was anything like, we’d take you up there ourselves. We’d drop everything. Very happy to. Bingham would be only too glad. He’s very fond of old people, you know. It really hurts him to see them neglected. He often says to me, “Mother, you need never worry we’d put you in a Home. I’d never allow it.” But then, Bingham’s not just anyone. I’m very fortunate.’
‘I’d put that Bingham in a Home,’ said Toots when she’d gone. ‘I’d out the whole bloody lot of them to a Home.’
‘She means it kindly, though, Toots. You know, when the weather improves, if it does before Christmas, I’d like to take her up on it. I mean it. I’d like to go. I don’t care about being beholden. I could make her a gingerbread. You never know with Christmas. What if it snows? We ought to take any chance we can, if it fairs up before.’
‘We’ll go our two selves alone,’ he said.
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘In a taxi. Just hang on. Hang on.’
Dolly woke, after several more days of sleet in the wind and the rattle of torn rose thorns against the glass, to darkness—no sign yet of dawn—and a strange silence. It was profound and she at once decided that it was the silence of death and went flopping downstairs without her slippers and not even stopping for the coat. Toots was lying with all the curtains drawn back on the dark. The church clock boomed out five.
‘That’s the clock,’ he said.
‘I know it’s the clock.’
‘The wind’s dropped. That’s why we hear it so loud. It’s to be a grand day. You’ll see. What’s the matter with you?’
‘I thought you were so quiet. The quiet brought me stark awake.’
Dolly never caressed Toots. For years she had not held his hand. But his days and nights were long and they both knew it. At some point they would be over for one of them. They both knew that that day would finish the one that was left.
Out of the window a low moon bowled along just above the trees, lighting the frost-crisp garden. ‘Still as doom,’ said Toots. ‘We might get up there today.’
‘Wherever?’
‘Up yonder. Priors. We ought to get there. Right away. Get yourself ready.’
‘It’s five o’clock in the morning.’
‘It’ll take time to get straight. Taxi place opens eight o’clock. We order it right off. On the dot. Get ourselves dressed, breakfast done with, all left shipshape. We could start now.’
‘We’ll have to tell people we’re going, else we’d cause a hue and cry. We can’t just take off.’
‘We’re telling no one. We’re off. We’ll take the presents, then they’ll be off our minds. You’re all set with them? All done up? And that cake you’ve made. And there’ll be keys to find and doors and drawers to lock and money for the man—did you get our pensions? And I’ll need my suit.’
‘You’ll need your breakfast. If you don’t calm down you’ll have a seizure. I never heard . . . ’ She went off and started breaking eggs.
‘No call for eggs,’ he shouted. ‘Hot tea’s all we want. And hot-water bottles.’
But he ate the eggs and wrote out some lists to be left lying on various stretches of the mantelpiece. While Dolly was upstairs dressing, he hauled himself along the passage to the bathroom and got himself into the warm combinations waiting over the radiator. Leaning on the zimmer he waited for her to bring him his clean shirt.
‘You should by rights have had a bath,’ she said. ‘I don’t like you going all that way without a bath.’
‘There’s none of them there spends time on baths from the look of them. That Jocasta’s a dirty-looking—’
‘Now then, stop that. She’s got a dark pigmentation, that’s all. Come here while I comb your hair, such as there is. Then I’ll get the luggage together.’ Up and down the stairs she tramped with Christmas presents. ‘We could get the taxi man to carry down the chair.’
‘What chair’s this? What are you giving away now?’
‘I’m giving her the chair that was her father’s. Faith. The nursing chair. It’s not big and it’s a good chance. Mrs. Middleditch’ll just make a song and dance if we ask her. There’s no room in that Bingham’s car, it’s all for show.’
‘Don’t start trying to get it down yourself, then. We’ve to get hold of the taxi yet. They’re not the sort at that place I’d want going round the bedrooms. We’ll see the whites of his eyes before we ask him.’
Toots was fast losing confidence. He fumbled for the taxi number. He wrote it down clearly on a page in an old exercise book and added: ‘Taxi Ordered 8:10 A.M.’ He closed the book and put it away.
‘Get on, then, Toots, order it. Here’s your frame. You can get down that passage again if you try. I want to put my hat on, it’s nearly quarter past. They’ll be open.’
‘I’ll give it five minutes. I’m a bit lame this morning. Can you not do it? I’ve the number here. I’ll listen.’ As she went off to dial he wrote
in his financial diary the name and address of the taxi firm and then ‘Maximum £5.’
‘Thirty pounds, he says,’ said Dolly. ‘I’ve cancelled it. Out of hand. It’s a try-on.’
‘We’ll see about that.’ Toots sprang off the bed and humped off down the passage at speed. He seized the phone.
‘See here, what’s all this? My godfathers! Toots Braithwaite, lad, d’you know who you’re talking to? We’re off on a Christmas visit. Thirty pounds, you’re highwaymen! I remember you. Red-haired. Five A. You were rubbish. Aye, well, I dare say it is a long way but it’s a clear road this time in the morning and there’s no snow falling. We’d have heard if it was blocked. Aye, we’re ready. Been ready an hour. You can come when you like. Twenty pounds, then? Ridiculous. All right, since it’s Christmas. I’d have thought you’d have done it for nothing, old people like ourselves, going to see their only grandchild. Have you a good taxi now? Last one stank of cigarettes and drink. And you’ve got to get a chair down.’
‘We’re going,’ he said. He looked very nervous now. ‘Don’t forget your heart pills. We ought to take the hot-water bottles. I’m not joking. But we’re not taking that plastic bed bottle, mind.’
Dolly had dropped into sad silence.
‘What is it?’
‘We might get stuck up there, Toots. We’d be a nuisance to them. We’re old people. It’s selfish putting the mountain rescue on alert. It’s what we’ve always said ourselves: people are plain selfish going off this weather in ordinary shoes and no proper clothes.’
‘We’ve good clothes and shoes and we’re not leaving that taxi. So don’t be so silly. “Climbing.” It’s not Everest and crampons. It’s Sutton Bank in a station taxi.’
But as they waited he wrote several more notes. One he propped by the mantelpiece clock for those who would perhaps need information. ‘TAXI 8:30,’ he wrote. ‘THE PRIORS. Return journey commences 2:30 latest. Estimated arrival home, five o’clock latest. Aim for 4:30 sharp. Tel. No. see hall table, lines possibly down. Documents bottom wardrobe.’ He repeated the information in his notebook, adding, but not showing Dolly, the name of the funeral director he favoured and the telephone number of Andrew’s London hospital. ‘Milk,’ he said, ‘cancel,’ and began to write a note to be attached to the front door knob.
‘That’s just inviting burglars, you’re going off your head. Here,’ said Dolly, ‘I’ve done up the thermos and I’ll fill the hot bottles when I hear the taxi.’
‘Eight thirty-five. Not here. The bugger’s late. It’s all off.’
‘I’ll ring again.’
‘No. It’s all off. Forget it. We’re not right. We’re wandering, Dolly. It’s dotage. I don’t know what we were thinking of, setting off this daft game. I’m not feeling very well. We’ll have to call Middleditch.’
‘It’s here,’ she said, from the front door. ‘Here’s your coat.’
At The Priors the low moon lit the ruined arches and the moors but left the dell where the new buildings stood in darkness. There were sheep clumped up together in the dipping place beside the chapel, keeping each other warm. Sometimes there was a cough or a rattling short bleat from them, but they stood as they had done all night, tense but quiet. Here and there the moon lit their eyes, green staring lanterns. They were to be Ernie’s job today. These were the sick sheep brought away from the others. He was to anoint their green eyes with penicillin. Jack would hold them, Ernie squeeze the ointment over both top and bottom lid and let each sheep spring away. Ernie was good with sheep, better than Jack, whose hands were too slight to hold them steady. Nick was strongest of them all, but awkward. The two wide-shouldered Tibetan men had helped once but hadn’t caught the knack. It had made Jocasta wonder if they were Tibetans at all. Jack had said perhaps they worked only with goats. The Missus had said for her money they weren’t from any mountains, all they liked was rice and you don’t grow rice in the Himalayas. Jocasta had said Yes, you do. The matter rested. The Tibetans went back to their sheds and ate chocolate.
‘What happens if you just leave their eyes?’ the A-level girl asked Ernie, and he had said, ‘They go blind. They stoomble about.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does to them. And they break their legs and walk over edges. It’s nasty. It’s very infectious, this disease.’
‘Maybe it’s what Faith had.’
‘You never know.’
Jack, listening, considered whether the maggots of sheep might serve for a sermon on seeing, but did not see Faith in the picture.
Jocasta was best of all of them with sheep, small as she was. She had hard hands. Ernie wanted her help today rather than Jack’s and had suggested it and it had been agreed. The backcloth was nearly finished and Philip was now boarding at school. They were going to get on with the job at first light, for it would take most of the day.
It was now five days since The Missus had left, four since Jack had killed Jocasta: that’s to say, killed the dark fairy who had haunted him since the minute he met her. The woman who moved about The Priors, now, he saw for the first time. She was deft, thoughtful, abstracted by her own thoughts, but efficiently getting on with each day, managing well the curiosities of Alice Banks’s ménage, preparing rather nice food, helping all round. Maybe she had always been so. Neither of them spoke much. Neither mentioned either the Missus or Andrew.
And, to Jocasta, Jack now seemed sterner, more self-reliant, without a trace of homage for her. He gave sensible orders to the lads, did the accounts at the kitchen table at night undistracted by her presence or by anything. He made phone calls about orders of feed, subsidies, veterinary bills. He never consulted her. Maybe he never had. She watched his lean body out over the fields in all weathers, never tired, never considering the life hard. She liked this.
They were at once aloof from each other like people dazed after an earthquake and yet aware that they shared something cataclysmic known to no one else. It was not so much that each was sloughing the other off as that they were both becoming aware of what had been there all along, unshared under the skin.
So that the day when Jocasts had sat so quiet and lost in the Whitby supermarket and had forgotten Philip had been the day when she was not so much beginning to change as beginning to emerge under her own colours. When Jack had almost hit her when she came home without Philip she had been terrified and not tried to hide it. She had shielded her face and gasped. Jack had been horrified, both by himself and by the fact that the cowering had looked so experienced. Jocasta had been hit before.
He’d said, ‘Oh Jocasta—oh, God! I’m sorry. You didn’t really think I would . . . ?’
She’d said, in the controlled, old-world, educated voice that her hippie years hadn’t touched, ‘No, no. Of course not. I’ll go for Philip. It’s no distance. I’ll go now. I’ll ring him. He’s mine.’ She was shivering.
‘I think Nick might go. Or Ernie. Wherever they are.’
‘I’m afraid for Philip, in the sidecar.’
‘Yes. Of course. Come and sit down.’
In a while he said, ‘I’m going to phone the school and ask them to keep him for the night. No, don’t argue. The Head’s wife is a nice woman; she’s suggested before.’
‘Has she? Yes, Phil likes her. I expect they think we’re not their sort.’
When he brought her a mug of tea he said rather distantly, ‘All fixed. Quite all right. I’m so sorry, you’ve had a lot to bear lately, Jocasta.’ And she thought, He sounds like some counsellor.
When she had drunk the tea she said, ‘So have you, Jack.’
They both thought of Andrew. There had been no word. And no word of The Missus. Nor of Pammie, whose date of arrival was still vague though Jack had telephoned her affectionately several times, Jocasta in the same room.
‘I’ve done all the big shopping now,’ she said, ‘all the stuff for the Tibs. And our turkey. It’ll ha
ve to go in the freezer. It’s a shame, but it’s just too long a time to leave it out. It was too early, really, to do the Christmas stuff today, but if the weather goes really wrong . . . ’
‘Could you—do you know how to cook a turkey? That’s if you stay, of course.’
‘I could cook a turkey, I suppose. If I stay.’
They sat on, looking into their tea mugs.
‘I hope it’s big enough. I can’t make out how many are coming.’
‘A host of motley,’ he said. ‘There’s Toots and Dolly, they’re the essentials. They still haven’t . . . ’
She was looking at him and he held her stare. There was guilt in the air. She said, ‘I know. They haven’t seen her yet. It’s dreadful. Andrew and I did try. We nearly made it, you know, when they decided to keep her in the hospital, but the weather . . . ’
He said, ‘And we have been otherwise engaged.’
He was disappointed when she got up then and began to unpack all the shopping. ‘Must you do that?’
‘A lot of it’s for the freezer, it can’t hang about. The Tibs need theirs right away, they’re almost out. They’re doing all their own cooking now.’
‘Yes. Jocasta. It’s Nick and Ernie’s night off. We are on our own tonight. Is that going to be all right?’
‘Yes. All right. I bought some smoked salmon. I had a cheque sent for Christmas.’
He thought, Andrew. I won’t eat Andrew’s smoked salmon. Or maybe it’s another man. The father of Philip, whoever he is. She’s a dark woman.
‘It was from Thomasina. To buy you a present in case something stops her coming.’
‘She’ll make every excuse not to come, I’m afraid. She always does. Ever since poor Holly . . . I don’t know why.’
‘She’s still very frightened of seeing Faith,’ said Jocasta.
‘Is she? I’d no idea.’
‘I knew you hadn’t,’ said Jocasta. Had it not been the raw, exposed, adulterous Jocasta, he’d have said she was looking at him with simple kindness. Almost affection. ‘She’s afraid of hating her, Jack.’
