‘I spoke in haste,’ said Mrs Slape, turning the tap on the prepared herrings, ‘though I did not mean neurotic in an ugly sense. I meant no harm, but I’ll say I’m sorry.’ She dried her hands on her apron and tossed the first herrings on to a newspaper covered with flour. ‘There is cooking sherry,’ she said. ‘That is all I can offer you down here.’
‘Lovely.’
‘Gallelty should take a drop too,’ the other woman advised. ‘Gallelty dear, sit down again and take a glass from Mrs Slape. It is not every day you meet the dead.’
‘Have you had strong drink before?’ Mrs Slape enquired, feeling Gallelty to be her moral responsibility. ‘A girl we had here once went into a coma. She took a bottle when my back was turned and drank it all, thinking it was the thing she had a craving for: vinegar.’
‘I have drunk all drinks in my time,’ said Gallelty. ‘Gins and tonics, wine, port, champagne.’ She received the glass from Mrs Slape’s hand and finished the sherry in a gulp. ‘I am a Manx girl who has worked in Lipton’s and then in the women’s police. I have knocked about, I can tell you that. I was sent through my destiny to The Boarding-House of Mr Bird, who was a father to me, as he was to all.’
‘She knew him but a fortnight,’ said Mrs Slape, and added: ‘Destiny worked in Gallelty’s bladder.’ She laughed loudly, powdering the herrings with flour.
‘What a nasty word,’ one of the women protested. ‘Mrs Slape, please.’
‘Bladder,’ the other said, for Mrs Slape looked puzzled.
‘Gallelty was taken short. I opened the door and there she was with her haversack. “I am taken short,” she shouted and rampaged into the house.’
The daily women looked at one another and then at Mrs Slape and then at Gallelty.
‘I am in love with Mr Bird,’ cried Gallelty. ‘His fingers are running up and down my arm. I have known many a man, I can tell you that, but never a man like Mr Bird, who took me in and warned me of his premonition that I would meet my fate in Plymouth. He said it was a sailors’ town. Well, I knew that.’ Gallelty reached for the bottle of cooking sherry, and Mrs Slape said:
‘What are you doing?’
‘I am feeling faint, Mrs Slape. Mr Bird was a comfort, but now I am on edge.’
‘A very coarse word,’ said the woman who had objected to Mrs Slape’s vocabulary. ‘My hubby would not care to know that I heard that word today.’
‘He is coming back,’ cried Gallelty, staring at the door and pouring out the cooking sherry. ‘Here comes William Bird.’ But afterwards she admitted that Mr Bird had not come to the kitchen this second time. She agreed she had been having them on, trying on a pretence in order to distract attention from her hands on the sherry bottle.
‘Let us get down to our chores,’ Mrs Slape said then. ‘We are paid to work.’
Later that day Gallelty told the residents that Mr Bird had appeared to her and to a daily woman in the kitchen, that he had worn a hat for the daily woman but had come uncovered to her. Nobody paid much attention.
18
‘Mr Bird’s will is being broken,’ said Major Eele. ‘An attempt is taking place to defeat the ends of justice.’
All the residents except Mr Obd, who could not be interested in the crisis at The Boarding-House, having a crisis of his own, sat in Major Eele’s room. He had convened them there to pass on his news, which he now did.
‘I was informed by Mr Studdy that I should quit my room forthwith or on an agreed date. I was given my marching orders, and I protested at once; and later to Nurse Clock, thinking to find justice there.’
‘Yes?’ said Rose Cave.
‘They are in league, these two, apparently. Nurse Clock said all that Studdy said.’
‘What were the grounds?’ asked Rose Cave. ‘How could they request you to go. Major Eele? The will says no one must go, unless voluntarily.’
‘They said they were reading between the lines of the will. They said they had established its spirit.’
‘Established its spirit?’ said Venables, holding back laughter.
Miss Clerricot sat silent, contained within herself, thinking, as she had for some time thought, that she was a woman who had suffered a little blow, and thinking too that it was she herself who had delivered it.
‘They are up to no good,’ said Major Eele.
‘Did they give you no practical reasons?’ Rose Cave demanded. ‘Did they just say go?’
‘No, it was not so simple. In fact, the more they spoke the more ominous it became. I stuck to my guns and in the end was offered the lordly sum of twenty guineas as compensation.’
Nurse Clock had said: ‘We cannot have people carried into The Boarding-House by night. You must readily appreciate that.’
But he had replied that he did not so readily appreciate that and had added that he had a right to remain, under the will of Mr Bird. He would not win in a court of law, according to Nurse Clock; since the law would not look kindly on drunken rowdyism at midnight. She was frightened to have him in the house, she declared, and made the point that a magistrate would soon see that. ‘I have friends at the police station,’ she added. ‘You would not stand a chance.’
‘This is all preposterous,’ said Rose Cave.
‘Well. I thought I had better report the matter to all of you, since goodness knows who will be next on that list.’
‘Quite right,’ said Mr Scribbin. ‘Quite right to tell us.’
‘What can be done?’ asked Rose Cave. She had feared this all along: she guessed there might be something in what the Major said, that they were all to go. The unexpected had happened apparently: Studdy and Nurse Clock had sunk their differences.
‘Oh, they are selfish and ungrateful,’ said Nurse Clock. ‘The things they say can cut you to the core. They are quite irresponsible in most of what they say. They become dirty, cunning sometimes, and unpleasant. But I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I’d rather nurse the aged than anyone else on earth. What is a bit of malice and unkindness when you can bring a spark of joy into their lives? Deep down they love you. I have an intuition that when they go to their Maker your name is first on their bloodless lips.’
Nurse Clock said these things many times and in many directions. It was a known fact in the neighbourhood that Nurse Clock loved the aged, especially when they had passed their ninetieth year. She said them now to Studdy, and he, stroking his nose, listened.
‘The leaves are coming down,’ Nurse Clock went on. ‘We must be fixed up by the time the days draw in.’
‘They are drawing in already. It is dark by half past eight. I have spoken to Mr Venables. It will cost us fifteen pounds if he is not to draw attention to the stipulations of that will. He wanted more, but for fifteen notes I think he will go quietly. I swore him to secrecy and said that others had already agreed. I put it to him, charitable work; he instantly understood.’
But Venables had afterwards taken the news badly, in the privacy of his room, where he cried for a while and then had gone out for a walk to think things over. Studdy, in fact, had offered him no money at all; Venables was frightened of Studdy and would do whatever Studdy suggested, though it made him feel sick to think that soon apparently, at the moment of Studdy’s bidding, he must prepare to leave The Boarding-House and seek a room elsewhere.
‘I must take fifteen pounds out of the till to bribe Mr Venables.’
Nurse Clock shuffled her feet so as not to hear.
In Major Eele’s room they came to no conclusion and were unable to formulate plans. They looked at the floor or at points on the wallpaper or at the window. It was a masculine room, a cheerless place, with a wardrobe and a table and a narrow bed. Major Eele’s ties hung outside the wardrobe on a string attached by two large drawing-pins to one of its sides. In a small fireplace a fan of newspaper gathered specks of soot behind three curved bars.
The room was too small for the number it now held. Rose Cave and Miss Clerricot sat on the narrow bed. Mr Scribbin was in a chair. Majo
r Eele and Venables stood, the former walking about. ‘I am sorry I can offer you nothing,’ he said, thinking he should have bought refreshments for the occasion, sherry perhaps,’ or beer.
They had never before talked in this close communal way. They had never felt that there was a single problem that affected them all. The Boarding-House in Mr Bird’s day had not presented such difficulties: there had never been a need to conspire together.
‘I think we should take them to task, demand an explanation,’ said Rose Cave. ‘It could do no harm.’ Her short grey hair shook as she spoke, as she moved her head to emphasize her serious attitude.
‘Or wait perhaps until another of us is asked to go,’ Miss Clerricot suggested, ‘just to see what is in their minds.’
Rose Cave said: ‘I would not have believed this of Nurse Clock,’ and the others shook their heads. By silent consent they agreed that they would indeed have expected such conduct of Studdy.
‘If we wait,’ said Major Eele, ‘what in the meanwhile becomes of me?’
‘That is a point,’ Miss Clerricot conceded.
‘Go on refusing, at all costs, and no matter what happens, whatever the picture is,’ Rose Cave advised. ‘We will all back you up. I knew that trouble was on the way the moment Nurse Clock walked down that night and said that he had died.’
‘He thought himself he would,’ Mr Scribbin interjected. ‘“I am not long for this world,” he said to me.’
‘He should not have left that will,’ said Rose Cave.
‘Could it not be contested?’ suggested Mr Scribbin. ‘You hear of things like that.’
‘We are wandering miles from the point,’ said Major Eele. ‘What on earth is the use of contesting the will?’
‘I thought–’ Mr Scribbin began.
‘No use at all,’ said Major Eele.
Major Eele had often shuddered in private since the night he had taken Mrs le Tor out to dinner. He was well out of those clutches, he assured himself. He saw Mrs le Tor as worse than Mrs Andrews.
‘You cannot behave like that, bringing your fancy women here,’ Nurse Clock had reprimanded him, as though she knew all there was to know, which probably she did. ‘Disgraceful scenes in the Jasmine Café too.’
‘Nothing happened in the Jasmine,’ But Nurse Clock did not believe that. She said she had spoken to the Misses Gregory.
‘You have upset Nurse Clock,’ Studdy had said. ‘Best that you pack your traps, you know.’
‘I have done nothing wrong.’
‘Nurse Clock is a most respectable woman. She says we are trying to keep a decent house.’
Major Eele felt far from safe. He knew that they had the upper hand; he knew that they could say enough to turn the other residents against him; they could make out a good case for his dismissal. Rose Cave would not like to know that he had been to Hot Hours.
‘You cannot believe all those two say,’ he said now, experimentally.
‘Oh?’ said Rose Cave. ‘Nurse Clock?’
‘Mr Bird told me once that he did not believe all Nurse Clock said, and implied the same of Studdy. They have a way of blackening people’s characters.’
That morning, in the lavatory at the office, Venables had found himself bent with a pain. He could not straighten up; when he tried to he felt the pain pulling inside him. He had been twenty minutes bent down, trying to fight it. Eventually it had gone and not returned. He felt quite well now.
There was a silence in the room for a while, that was broken in the end by a sound that seemed extraneous and odd.
‘What was that?’ someone asked.
‘Scribbin,’ said Major Eele. ‘Scribbin here has begun his muttering.’ But Scribbin denied that he had muttered or made any noise at all.
When Mr Bird had written his will and had read it over he became aware that he was laughing. He heard the sound for some time, a minute or a minute and a quarter, and then he recognized its source and wondered why he was laughing like that, such a quiet, slurping sound, like the lapping of water. It was something that occasionally had happened to Mr Bird, this abrupt awareness of some performance of his own. It had happened to him when he found himself peeping over the banisters to observe the return of a resident to The Boarding-House, or when he discovered himself staring at Venables’ navy-blue blazer or Nurse Clock’s precisely cut finger-nails or the small eyes of Major Eele. Most of all, though, Mr Bird had found that when recording the idiosyncrasies of his residents he had been wont to do so with a ghost of a smile upon his lips. Invariably he came to, as it were, with a jolt, unable to explain to himself the presence of humour in his expression, and he made a point always of wiping away that ghost of a smile and murmuring a few words of apology. As he laid down the paper on which he had written his will and as he banished the soft ripple of his laughter, he recalled how recently he had lost himself in the study of a periodic and unconscious movement in Rose Cave’s left set of fingers and how he had found himself, again, naughtily, smiling a little.
Venables could not bring himself to say that he, too, had been approached by Studdy and had in his weakness agreed to leave The Boarding-House, although no offer of money had come his way. He tried to tell them, but when he opened his mouth, with the sentence already formed, he felt a dryness about his tongue that seemed to make speech difficult.
‘I am making a list,’ said Nurse Clock, ‘of all that we need at first. It would surprise you, Mr Studdy, some of the articles that the elderly require.’
‘You can’t surprise Mr Studdy.’ He wagged his head, a man of the world, a man who had been places, into many a house, a man who knew the elderly well and recognized all their foibles, who knew the middle-aged, too, and the young and the very young.
‘I am going to an auction,’ said Nurse Clock, ‘after two commodes.’
‘Definitely,’ said Studdy.
In Major Eele’s room Rose Cave said:
‘There is that sound again.’
‘It is Scribbin,’ said Major Eele. ‘Scribbin goes a-muttering on.’
Mr Scribbin repeated his denial and began to protest that he should continue to be accused. Venables opened the door and peered outside.
‘It is only Mr Obd on the stairs,’ he said, ‘going up and down, talking and talking.’
In the kitchen Mrs Slape and Gallelty sat in silence, reading two magazines. Mrs Slape was in her big armchair, a chair that once had been upstairs, that Mr Bird one day had said she might have below to rest herself in, since it needed repairs to its upholstery and did not look right in a public part of The Boarding-House. Gallelty had spread her magazine on the scrubbed deal of the table. She crouched over the print, her slight body shaped into a series of angles. She read in an absorbed way a story about an architect in love. By chance, Mrs Slape was reading, in a magazine given to her by Nurse Clock, the very article that Nurse Clock had been reading when Mr Bird had died.
‘I would love to see Balmoral,’ said Mrs Slape, sighing. But Gallelty, concerned with the fate of the architect in love, did not hear her. Mrs Slape sighed again and turned the pages to a story about an architect, a different one, but one who was also in love.
It was ten o’clock. The two read on, unaware that far above them the fate of The Boarding-House was bouncing about like a tennis ball.
‘We will not go,’ they said, nodding their heads in agreement in Major Eele’s room.
‘They cannot,’ said Rose Cave, ‘they have no right.’
On the landing and on the stairs and in the hall, Mr Obd, allied neither with his fellow residents nor with the partnership of Studdy and Nurse Clock, was beyond them all and concerned with none of them.
Studdy and Nurse Clock continued to sit in Mr Bird’s room, compromising, making the allowances on which their alliance was built.
‘What was that?’asked Nurse Clock.
‘Nothing,’ said Studdy.
But Nurse Clock went to the door and opened it, and examined the gloom beyond. She saw Mr Obd moving about the la
nding, a dark figure in the greater darkness. He was speaking as he moved, for Mr Obd had imagined again that he had met Mr Bird in his wanderings and had said hello to him.
Nurse Clock shrugged her fattish shoulders and returned to the calculation they had been engaged upon. Studdy was sleepy. He rolled and lit a cigarette to keep him occupied and awake. Nurse Clock said:
‘Multiply twenty-four by four.’
‘Ninety-six,’ said Studdy, doing the sum on the back of an envelope.
They gave no thought to Mr Bird, but Mr Bird lived on in the mind of Mr Obd, and in the mind of Mr Obd he laughed his soft laugh, like thickened water lapping.
19
It was reported in the newspapers that a girl would attempt to swim the English Channel under the influence of hypnosis. New insecticides in household paint caused a man in Cumberland to form a society for the preservation of the house-fly. Further cargoes of Australia butter were promised; a tiger sat on a child and caused no damage; a man in Tel-Aviv bit a dog.
The people of The Boarding-House read such items day by day, as did others in London and beyond it, as did all those who recently had crossed the paths of the people in The Boarding-House: Mrs Rush and Mrs le Tor, Mr Sellwood, the Misses Gregory and many another. Mrs Maylam no longer read a daily newspaper: her eyes, she said, could not steady themselves on the print.
In The Boarding-House they were all worried by now, all except Nurse Clock and Studdy.
‘I heard it at table,’ Gallelty reported. ‘They spoke in whispers: the house is up for sale.’
‘Never,’ said Mrs Slape.
But the atmosphere that obtained seeped through to Mrs Slape, and she in the end believed that all was hardly well. ‘Are you selling out?’ she put it directly to Nurse Clock, and Nurse Clock shrieked with laughter. They are selling out, thought Mrs Slape, and felt her stomach shiver, remembering the day she had come, remembering Slape and his ways.
The Boarding-House Page 19
