The Oracles

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘How he puts up with Martha Rawson and her set I can’t think,’ she commented. ‘Or why he does those awful statues.’

  ‘If we knew more about Art we mightn’t think them awful,’ said Dickie.

  ‘Dickie! You do annoy me sometimes. We know about Art. We’ve been to Italy and you’re always buying Phaidon books.’

  ‘Bobbins may think the earth of Mr. Swann’s work.’

  ‘Oh no. Even at that age you can tell if a child is going to be mentally deficient.’

  She continued to scoff at the party until Dickie was secretly relieved when, on Sunday evening, she decided that she could not go. The sitter upon whom she had relied was afraid of going out in the thunder.

  ‘It’s you they want, not me, anyway,’ she said, as they sat down to Sunday supper. ‘So it’s just as well that Mrs. Simpson has failed me, under the circumstances. Or in the circumstances, as you say I ought to say.’

  ‘Do I? Well, it’s right, you know. Circumstances are all round us, not on top of us.’

  ‘Under is what everybody else says.’

  ‘Not everybody.’

  ‘Everybody we know, unless they’re Martha. She just can’t talk like other people. Do you remember the time she said she was something of a donkey-hoty? Nobody could think what she meant, except that we agreed with the donkey part of it.’

  ‘Martha,’ said Dickie gravely, ‘is a keyhotic type.’

  Christina laughed. She had a delicious laugh, soft and merry, which set her, in Dickie’s opinion, above all the other women in East Head. They roared and hooted and tittered. He had begun to fall in love with her on the day when he first noticed that laugh, and told himself that Christina Forbes was not like other girls. She had turned out to be more like them than he originally supposed, but he still loved to hear her laugh.

  ‘Keyhotic!’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

  She made a note of this witticism to pass on to her friends. None of their husbands would have thought of it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dickie. ‘What is this we’re eating? It’s very nice.’

  Christina smiled complacently. She believed that her cooking set her above all the other women in East Head.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d notice. Oh dear! That was quite a flash. It’s coming nearer again.’

  ‘Are you … shall you mind being left alone?’

  ‘Oh no. Not really. I’m not nervous of thunder. And it would be a shame if you missed your old party. I won’t tell you what this is because I can’t pronounce it, but we had it in Milan and you liked it. I found the recipe in a magazine.’

  ‘It’s absolutely delicious.’

  ‘It took me some time to get it right. I tried it out at lunchtime before I fed it to you. Ooh!’

  ‘Don’t sit facing the window if you don’t like it.’

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not dangerous. Only it makes me jump. You know, it’s a funny thing, you remember Rita? This, that we are eating, was really the reason why I sacked her. I mean her attitude about it. Just watching her slouch around over her work was bad enough, but when it came to actually criticising me … “Ow, Mrs. Pattison! I wonder why you bother!” Some people! The most awful thing they can imagine is having to take a lot of trouble over anything. How can you get anything good if you think saving trouble is more important than what you want to do? But people like Rita! As long as food isn’t downright uneatable, as long as it doesn’t poison you, they think: It’s good enough! It’ll do. It’ll get by. They don’t know what good is.’

  Dickie nodded amiably. He had heard this indictment of Rita before, and was a little tired of it. But he listened without protest, just as Christina listened to him when he complained of his clerk.

  Christina was a lovely girl. Her sweet mouth, high cheekbones, and slanting eyes would, he sometimes thought, have delighted Botticelli. He listened and nodded, his thoughts straying elsewhere, while she chattered on. Anybody looking at them through the window, unable to hear the conversation, might have been excused for supposing that he hearkened to the siren’s song.

  ‘So I said to her, I said: Now, Rita! Is there anything … anything in the world you would take trouble for? In your own house, I mean; or over your clothes or anything? No, she said. She didn’t believe in ever taking any more trouble than she had to. And that meant just enough so that she could say: It’s not too bad! I can’t stand people who don’t even know they’re lazy. So I said: Bye-bye, Rita! You needn’t come after the end of this week. So now she’s washing up in the Blue Kettle. Which is why I never go there. I know what Rita’s washing up is like, thank you.’

  Dickie nodded for the dozenth time, and tried not to see that she was frightened of the lightning, because, if he had to see it, he would not be able to go to the party with a clear conscience. He was still managing not to see it when he went upstairs to change into his best suit.

  Bobbins slept soundly in his cot at the foot of their bed. He had kicked off his coverings and lay coiled up with his fists under his chin. Dickie wondered if he would get curvature of the spine, but when he called over the banisters, to ask if it was all right, Christina said that it was.

  ‘It’s the ante-natal attitude,’ she called, as she carried a tray into the kitchen. ‘The book says so. Normal at his age.’

  She did not say that it might be a symptom of retarded development, if it persisted too long, because she did not want to have Dickie ringing up the doctor if Bobbins did not drop the ante-natal attitude on the very night of the correct birthday. ‘Dr. Browning! Dr. Browning! My son has got retarded development!’ Dickie, she considered, took books more seriously than he need. He did not seem to realise that they all say different things, and are always changing what they say. Sensible people merely select what suits them, out of books; they use their own judgment.

  She smiled as she shook soap powder into a basin. She was remembering the book which had accompanied them on their honeymoon. Mrs. Hughes, the minister’s wife, had given it to them; it was a bright, aseptic little book about the technique of a happy marriage. Christina had refused to look at it, but Dickie read it from cover to cover with earnest attention. The wonder was that he did not actually take it to bed with him, and at last she protested. What could this book have to tell him which he did not know already? She was not the first woman in his life; conscience had driven him to confess as much, when they were engaged.

  ‘I’ve never been married before,’ he explained. ‘This book describes how a girl feels when … when she’s a bride. It says that some brides are very shy, and the man makes mistakes, and never finds out until it’s too late. So the marriage is wrecked.’

  ‘Oh dear! How sad! Poor things! Oh, I do think life is sad. Well, darling, next time you want to have a read in this sa-ad book, you must look in the waste-paper basket, for that’s where I’ve put it.’

  ‘Tina! The chambermaid might read it.’

  ‘She couldn’t. She’s Italian. And if she could, I expect it would give her a good laugh. If you ask me, she knows more about it than the people who wrote that book.’

  ‘I’ve thought that sometimes,’ said Dickie, who had caught Angelina’s eye once or twice.

  ‘You have? The idea! You’ve no business to go thinking anything at all about the chambermaid. On your honeymoon too!’

  They eventually got rid of the book by posting it to an imaginary couple, invented by Dickie, a Mr. and Mrs. Huntingtower, who lived in New Brighton and needed advice very badly. As the young Pattisons grew easier together, more secure in their own happiness, they got a good deal of fun out of the fantastic ineptitudes of this luckless pair. Dickie, in soaring spirits, was always inventing a new mistake for them to make, in order to hear Christina laugh.

  Nowadays, she reflected, they did not seem to laugh so often. They were not in love, like that, any more. They had settled down. She realised it with a faint pang, the same kind of regret which she sometimes felt for the lost joys of childhood. It was a pity that anything
delightful had to end, but she did not want to go back. The present was a great deal more satisfying than the past, for now she had Bobbins.

  Yet the regret lingered in her mind. When she went upstairs she kissed Dickie, and told him to have a good time at his party. As she did so, an unusually bright flash made her wince and start. Involuntarily she clung to him.

  ‘I oughtn’t to go,’ he murmured, holding her closer to him, aware of her fear. ‘You don’t really like it, whatever you may say. You hated it last night.’

  But she was determined not to be selfish. At the back of her mind she knew that Bobbins was not, for him, so complete a compensation for that which they might have lost.

  ‘It was only that one awful flash and crack,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe something hadn’t happened. I don’t expect there’ll be another like that.’

  He still held her, stirred by the appeal of a frightened woman.

  ‘Do I want to go to this party?’ he whispered. ‘I’ll come back early. Don’t be asleep when I come back.’

  ‘Oh, Dickie! What moments you choose for feeling sentimental!’

  At that he released her, chilled, as he often was, by the limitations of her vocabulary. Had she always talked like this? Perhaps she had, in the days when they had laughed so much over poor Mr. and Mrs. Huntingtower, but he had not minded. He had not noticed. He had only heard the siren’s song.

  He ran downstairs and she stood by the window to watch him go. The night and the storm were closing in. Below her lay the town, cowering down, flattening itself beneath clouds so huge and solid that they seemed to be fighting for room. They piled up, toppling, one upon another. They were pushed earthwards to hide the hills and the sea.

  Dickie came briskly out of the house. He did not know that she was watching, so gave no parting wave, but got into his car and drove off, under that menacing sky. He looked spruce and handsome and pleased with himself.

  Poor Dickie! she thought.

  For no discernible reason she suddenly felt sorry for him, as she sometimes did when she watched him bustling about the business of life, especially if he seemed to be enjoying himself. That he should often be worried, anxious and disappointed struck her as more natural. Then she was sympathetic and tried to help him. It was his cheerfulness which made him seem forlorn—which had some mysterious power to wring a sigh from her.

  4

  EVERY set has its hangers-on—a sprinkling of nondescript enthusiasts who are suffered by their betters because they run errands and fetch the beer. These satellites may be useful, but they contribute no lustre to the constellation, and sometimes they bring it into disrepute. Within the charmed circle they are meek and mannerly; they sit upon the floor and air no opinions. Outside it they make up for this by assuming a borrowed prestige. They boast of their distinguished friends, and offer to the rabble their own version of the current dogma.

  Martha Rawson had got three of them; Billy, Rhona and Nell. Billy was the most harmless, since he had a bad stammer and could repeat nothing that he heard. Rhona and Nell were both talkative and silly; they repeated, with considerable inaccuracy, everything that they heard. Rhona was a fat girl with a large nose; she lived near the harbour with a widowed mother, and worked in a folk-weaving centre which Martha had inaugurated. Nell had the misfortune to be the daughter of Sir Gregory Manders, the principal landowner of the district, a notoriously disagreeable man. He came of a quarrelsome line and was, moreover, obliged to live in an age which had divested him of nearly all the power enjoyed by his forebears. Unable to tyrannise, he still did his best to make himself a nuisance. Poor Nell had suffered all her life from his universal unpopularity and had been very short of friends until Martha took her up.

  Sir Gregory disapproved of the acquaintance but could do nothing to prevent it save deny the use of his car to Nell whenever she went to see Martha. She therefore had to foot it on the night of the Summersdown party, and got down the hill from Chale Park in a series of panic rushes, since she was terrified of thunder. Rhona, whom she met by appointment in the town, did not like it either. They would not have missed the party for anything, but the walk up to Summersdown daunted them. They staggered for a little way through the empty streets, clinging to one another, and came to a halt outside the Cellar Bar of the Metropole Hotel. Rhona suggested that a drink might pull them together, but neither of them had any money.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ she suggested. ‘Somebody might stand us a drink. I can’t go on without one.’

  ‘Supposing they didn’t,’ suggested Nell. ‘We should look so silly, just standing wistfully there.’

  Rhona, whose secret ambition it was to be thought a little devil, decided to face this risk. She pushed Nell down the steps into the bar, thrust her into the arms of the nearest man, and announced that her friend was fainting.

  ‘Could be,’ he agreed, surveying Nell’s white, chinless face. ‘You want a hearse?’

  Nell had closed her eyes. She opened them at this and shut them again hastily, for his ugliness was really terrifying. He had a face like a gargoyle, crimson, pug-nosed, with abnormally protuberant eyes. Nobody in the bar had ever seen him before, but his appearance had already provoked comment.

  ‘A glass of water …’ she murmured.

  ‘Water,’ he told her, ‘is dangerous in a thunderstorm. Siddown and I’ll get you what the doctor ordered.’

  The prawn’s eyes travelled round the room and spied two chairs behind a table in a secluded corner. Timmy Hughes, the son of the Congregational minister, sat in one of them; he always kept out of sight, as much as possible, in the Cellar Bar because his father had forbidden him to go there. The other chair was empty. Nell was brought over and put into it and Timmy was ejected, to make room for Rhona.

  ‘Excuse me, George! Fainting ladies,’ said the stranger blandly.

  ‘It’s worked,’ whispered Rhona, as their cavalier went off to get drinks.

  ‘But he’s such a horrid-looking man, and he’s got a cockney accent.’

  ‘Don’t be so drear. Nothing can happen to the two of us.’

  Rhona liked to bully Nell, whom she would have had to call Miss Manders in any other circle.

  Their friend returned with three double whiskies, sat himself on the table in front of them, and suggested that they were easily scared.

  ‘Actually,’ said Rhona, nettled, ‘thunder happens to be the only thing I am scared of.’

  This should have convinced him that she was a little devil, but he merely asked what she would do if she met a boa-constrictor. Nell, who had swallowed some whisky, and felt better, replied for her:

  ‘Actually I’ve always been rather fond of snakes. I had a grass snake once, but it got lost.’

  He started and gave her a sharp look. She said bin rather than been, and lawst rather than lost. His accent might be cockney, but hers was exceptionally aristocratic. After thinking it over he advised them to go home, as soon as they had put their drinks back.

  ‘It’s a fierce night,’ he said, ‘and you’re both scared cuckoo. Where d’you live?’

  Nell looked helplessly at Rhona.

  ‘Here and there,’ suggested Rhona, with a mysterious smile.

  ‘I see. Just a couple of little waifs. But you must be going somewhere. I’ve got a car coming. I’m waiting till they find one for me. I could drive you anywhere you want to go.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Nell, ‘we’re going to a party.’

  ‘A party, eh?’

  He surveyed them from head to foot, taking note of their slacks and untidy horsetails.

  ‘Gamine get-up,’ he decided. ‘A wild, wild party?’

  Nell was affronted by his manners but did not know how to snub him when she was drinking his whisky. She told him that it was not the sort of party he might expect in East Head.

  ‘Me, Gertie? I expect anything, anywhere, any time.’

  Even Rhona began to feel that he must be sat on.

  ‘You mayn’t,’ she said coldly, �
�have heard of an Australian sculptor called Swann.’

  At this his eyes popped more than ever.

  ‘Swann? Conrad Swann? It’s his party?’

  ‘You have heard of him? He lives here, you know. He’s a great friend of ours.’

  This seemed to make an impression upon him. They told him all about the party. He listened with such an air of bewilderment that Nell kindly explained to him who Apollo was, and what would be wrong with a representational treatment.

  ‘Nobody’s seen it yet,’ she concluded. ‘Conrad never lets anybody see his stuff till it’s finished. So we’re all very excited.’

  ‘We?’ He showed signs of revival. ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘His friends here. A few people of his ilk.’

  ‘Ilk? What’s ilk? Some kind of shellfish?’

  ‘His sort, I mean.’

  ‘No. Look it up in Fowler’s English Usage, I would.’

  Nell gaped at him, disconcerted, and exclaimed:

  ‘I can’t make you out. I believe you knew who Apollo was, all the time.’

  ‘You aren’t at your brightest this evening, I expect. My fault, giving you whisky. If I’d made you out sooner, it would have been a mild sherry.’

  ‘So you think you’ve made us out?’ cried Rhona archly.

  ‘I think so. At first I took you for a couple of mysteries, as the wide boys say. Don’t look so flattered. They don’t mean what you mean.’

  Rhona decided not to ask what the wide boys meant, but Nell did. He answered sharply:

  ‘Silly kids who don’t know how to look after themselves.’

  ‘You aren’t very polite,’ pouted Rhona.

  ‘Nothing to what I might have been. You were lucky to pick a family man like me. Your friend’s accent is a give-away.’