Mrs Keegan told another story, about a commercial traveller called Artie Logan who had become drunk in his room and had sent down for so many trays of tea and buttered bread that every cup and saucer in the hotel had been carried up to him. ‘They said to thank you,’ her husband passed on, returning from the elderly trio’s table. Beatrice turned her head. All three of them were looking at her, their faces still slipping about a bit. Their glasses were raised in her direction. ‘Good luck,’ the old man called out.
It was then that Beatrice realized. She looked from face to face, making herself smile to acknowledge the good wishes she was being offered, the truth she sensed seeming to emerge from a blur of features and clothes and three raised glasses. She nodded, and saw the heads turn away again. It had remained unstated: the love that was there had never in any way been exposed. In this claustrophobic town, in this very lounge, there had been the endless lingering of a silent passion, startlingly different from the instant requiring of her own.
Through the muzziness of inebriation Beatrice glanced again across the bar. Behind her the Keegans were laughing, and the man she’d once so intensely loved was loudly laughing also. She heard the sound of the laughter strangely, as if it echoed from a distance, and she thought for a moment that it did not belong in the Paradise Lounge, that only the two old women and the old man belonged there. He was loved, and in silence he returned that love. His plump, bespectacled wife had never had reason to feel betrayed; no shame nor guilt attached. In all the years a sister’s dying had never been made use of. Nor had there been hasty afternoons in Rathgar Road, blinds drawn against neighbours who might guess, a bedroom set to rights before children came in from school. There hadn’t been a single embrace.
Yet the love that had continued for so long would go on now until the grave: without even thinking, Beatrice knew that that was so. The old woman paraded for a purpose the remnants of her beauty, the man was elegant in his tweed. How lovely that was! Beatrice thought, still muzzily surveying the people at the table, the wife who had not been deceived quite contentedly chatting, the two who belonged together occupying their magic worlds.
How lovely that nothing had been destroyed: Beatrice wanted to tell someone that, but there was no one to tell. In Rathgar Road her children would be watching the television, their father sitting with them. Her sister would die before the year was finished. What cruelty there seemed to be, and more sharply now she recalled the afternoon bedroom set to rights and her sister’s wasted face. She wanted to run away, to go backwards into time so that she might shake her head at her lover on the night they’d first met.
Miss Doheny passed through the darkened town, a familiar figure on a Saturday night. It had been the same as always, sitting there, close to him, the smoke drifting from the cigarette that lolled between his fingers. The girl by now would be close in a different way to the man who was somebody else’s husband also. As in a film, their clothes would be scattered about the room that had been hired for love, their murmurs would break a silence. Tears ran through Miss Doheny’s meticulous make-up, as often they did when she walked away from the Paradise Lounge on a Saturday night. It was difficult sometimes not to weep when she thought about the easy times that had come about in her lifetime, mocking the agony of her stifled love.
Mags
Neither Julia nor James could remember a time when Mags had not been there. She was part of the family, although neither a relation nor a connection. Long before either of them had been born she’d been, at school, their mother’s best friend.
They were grown up now and had children of their own; the Memory Lane they travelled down at Mags’s funeral was long; it was impossible not to recall the past there’d been with her. ‘Our dear sister,’ the clergyman in the crematorium murmured, and quite abruptly Julia’s most vivid memory was of being on the beach at Rustington playing ‘Mags’s Game’, a kind of Grandmother’s Footsteps; and James remembered how Mags had interceded when his crime of taking unripe grapes from the greenhouse had been discovered. Imposing no character of its own upon the mourners, the crematorium filled easily with such moments, with summer jaunts and treats in teashops, with talk and stories and dressing up for nursery plays, with Mags’s voice for ever reading the adventures of the Swallows and the Amazons.
Cicily, whose friend at school she’d been, remembered Miss Harper being harsh, accusing Mags of sloth and untidiness, and making Mags cry. There’d been a day when everyone had been made to learn ‘The Voice and the Peak’ and Miss Harper, because of her down on Mags, had made it seem that Mags had brought this communal punishment about by being the final straw in her ignorance of the verb craindre. There’d been, quite a few years later, Mags’s ill-judged love affair with Robert Blakley, the callousness of Robert’s eventual rejection of her, and Mags’s scar as a result: her lifelong fear of ever again getting her fingers burnt in the same way. In 1948, when Cicily was having James, Mags had come to stay, to help and in particular to look after Julia, who was just beginning to toddle. That had been the beginning of helping with the children; in 1955 she’d moved in after a series of au pair girls had proved in various ways to be less than satisfactory. She’d taken over the garden; her coffee cake became a family favourite.
Cosmo, Cicily’s husband, father of James and Julia, recalled at Mags’s funeral his first meeting with her. He’d heard about her – rather a lot about her – ever since he’d known Cicily. The unfairness that had been meted out to Mags at school was something he had nodded sympathetically over; as well as over her ill-treatment at the hands of Robert Blakley, and the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, to whom she’d always been so devoted, and with whom, after the Robert Blakley affair, she had determined to make her life, her father having died when she was three. This is Mags,’ Cicily had said one day in the Trocadero, where they were all about to lunch together, celebrating Cicily’s and Cosmo’s engagement. ‘Hullo, Cosmo,’ Mags had said, holding out a hand for him to shake. She did not much care for men he’d thought, gripping the hand and moving it slightly in a handshake. She was tall and rather angular, with black untidy hair and unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were a little chapped; she wore no make-up. It was because of Robert Blakley, he’d thought, that she did not take to men. ‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you, Mags,’ he said, laughing. She declined a drink, falling instead into excited chat with Cicily, whose cheeks had pinkened with pleasure at the reunion. They talked about girls they’d known, and the dreadful Miss Harper, and Miss Roforth the headmistress. At Mags’s funeral he remembered that surreptitiously he had asked the waiter to bring him another gin and tonic.
They were a noticeably good-looking family. Cosmo and Cicily, in their middle fifties, were grey-haired but stylishly so, and both of them retained the spare figures of their youth. Cosmo’s noticeably blue eyes and his chiselled face had been bequeathed to his son; and Cicily’s smile, her slightly slanting mouth and perfect nose had come to Julia. They all looked a little similar, the men of a certain height, the two women complementing it, the same fair colouring in all four. There was a lack of awkwardness in their movements, a natural easiness that had often caused strangers to wonder where Mags came in.
The coffin began to move, sliding towards beige curtains, which obediently parted. Flames would devour it, they all four thought simultaneously, Mags would become a handful of dust; a part of the family had been torn away. How, Julia wondered, would her parents manage now? To be on their own after so long would surely be a little strange.
They returned to Tudors, the house near Maidenhead where the family had always lived. It was a pleasant house, half-timbered, black and white, more or less in the country. Cosmo had been left it by an aunt at just the right moment, when he’d been at the beginning of his career in the rare-books world; Julia and James had been born there. Seeing Tudors for the first time, Mags had said she’d fallen in love with it.
After the funeral service they stood around in the long low-ceilinged sitting-room
, glad that it was over. They didn’t say much, and soon moved off in two directions, the men to the garden, Cicily and Julia to the room that had been Mags’s bedroom. In an efficiently drawn-up will some of her jewellery had been left to Julia and an eighteenth-century clock to James. There’d been bequests for Cicily and Cosmo too, and some clothes and money for Mrs Forde, the daily woman at Tudors.
‘Her mother had that,’ Cicily said, picking up an amber brooch, a dragon with a gold setting. ‘I think it’s rather valuable.’
Julia held it in the palm of her hand, gazing at it. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. It had been Mags’s favourite piece, worn only on special occasions. Julia could remember it on a blue blouse, polka-dotted with white. It seemed unfair that Mags, the same age as her mother, should have died; Mags who had done no harm to anyone. Having never been married or known children of her own, it seemed that the least she deserved was a longer life.
‘Poor old Mags,’ her mother said, as if divining these thoughts.
‘You’ll miss her terribly.’
‘Yes, we shall.’
In the garden Cosmo walked with his son, who happened in that moment to be saying the same thing.
‘Yes, Cicily’ll miss her,’ Cosmo replied. ‘Dreadfully.’
‘So’ll you, Father.’
‘Yes, I shall too.’
The garden was as pleasant as the house, running down to the river, with japonica and escallonia now in bloom on a meadow bank. It was without herbaceous borders, sheltered by high stone walls. Magnolias and acers added colour to the slope of grass that stretched from wall to wall. Later there’d be roses and broom. It was Mags who had planned the arrangement of all these shrubs, who had organized the removal of some cherry trees that weren’t to her liking, and had every week in summer cut the grass with her Flymo. It was generally agreed that her good taste had given the garden character.
‘There’d been some man, hadn’t there?’ James asked his father as they stood on the bank of the river, watching pleasure boats go by.
‘Robert Blakley. Oh, a long time ago.’
‘But it left a mark?’
‘Yes, it left a mark.’
In the room that had been Mags’s bedroom Cicily said:
‘Misfortune came easily to her. It somehow seemed quite expected that Robert Blakley should let her down.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Just said he’d made a mistake and walked away.’
‘Perhaps it was as well if he was like that.’
‘I never liked him.’
It seemed to Cicily, and always had, that though misfortune had come easily to her friend it had never been deserved. The world had sinned against her without allowing her the joy of sinning. Ready-made a victim, she’d been supplied with no weapons that Cicily could see as useful in her own defence. The best thing that had happened in Mags’s life might well have been their long friendship and Mags’s involvement with the family.
Before lunch they all had a glass or two of sherry because they felt they needed it. It cheered them up, as the lunch itself did. But even so, as Julia said goodbye to her parents, she wondered again how well they’d manage now. She said as much to James as they drove away together in his car, the French clock carefully propped on the back seat, the jewellery in Julia’s handbag. When all these years there’d been a triangular quality about conversation in Tudors, how would conversation now continue?
It would not continue, Cosmo thought. There would be silences in Tudors, for already he could feel them gathering. On summer weekends he would start the Flymo for Cicily; they would go as usual to the Borders in July. But as they perused the menu in the bar of the Glenview Hotel they’d dread the moment when the waiter took it from them, when they could put off no longer the conversation that eluded them. At Christmas it would be all right because, as usual, Julia and James and the children would come to Tudors, but in the bleak hours after they’d left the emptiness would have an awful edge. Mags had chattered so.
Changing out of the sober clothes she’d worn for the funeral, Cicily recalled a visit with Mags to Fenwick’s. It was she who had suggested it, 1969 it must have been, ‘I insist,’ she’d said. ‘Absolutely no arguments.’ The fact was, Mags hadn’t bought herself so much as a new scarf for years. As a girl, she’d always done her best, but living in Tudors, spending most of her day in the garden, she’d stopped bothering. ‘And if Fenwick’s haven’t anything then we go to Jaeger’s,’ Cicily had insisted. ‘We’re going to spend the whole day sorting you out.’ Mags of course had protested, but in the end had agreed. She was quite well off, having inherited a useful income from her mother; she could easily afford to splash out.
But in the event she didn’t. In Fenwick’s the saleswoman was rude. She shook her head repeatedly when Mags stood in front of a looking-glass, first in yellow and then in blue. ‘Not entirely madam’s style,’ she decreed. ‘More yours, madam,’ she suggested to Cicily. In the end they’d left the shop without anything and instead of going on to Jaeger’s went to Dickins and Jones for coffee. Mags wept, not noisily, not making a fuss. She cried with her head bent forward so that people wouldn’t see. She apologized and then confessed that she hated shopping for clothes: it was always the same, it always went wrong. Saleswomen sighed when they saw her coming. Almost before she could open her mouth she became the victim of their tired feet.
They went to D. H. Evans that day and bought a dreary wool dress in a shade of granite. It made Mags look like an old-age pensioner. ‘Really nice,’ the saleswoman assured them. ‘Really suits the lady.’
That was the trouble, Cicily reflected as she hung up the coat she’d worn for the funeral: Mags had never had the confidence to fight back. She should have pointed out to the saleswoman in Fenwick’s that the choice was hers, that she didn’t need to be told what her style was. She should have protested that Miss Harper was being unfair. She should have told Robert Blakley to go to hell. Mags had been far better-looking than she’d ever known. With decent make-up and decent clothes she could have been quite striking in her way.
Cicily brushed her hair, glancing at her own face in her dressing-table looking-glass. No saleswoman had ever dared to patronize her; her beauty saw to that. It was all so wretchedly unfair.
Later that day Cosmo sat in the small room he called his study, its walls lined with old books. He had drawn the curtains and turned on the green-shaded desk light. In the kitchen Cicily was preparing their supper, cold ham and salad, and a vegetable soup to cheer it up. He’d passed the kitchen door and seen her at it, ‘Any Questions’ on the wireless. It was his fault; he knew it was; for twenty-seven years, ever since Mags had become part of the family, it had been his fault. He should have had the wisdom to know: he should have said over his dead body or something strong like that. ‘I don’t care who she is or how she’s suffered,’ he should have insisted, ‘she’s not going to come and live with us.’ But of course it hadn’t been like that, because Mags had just drifted into the family. Anyone would have thought him mad if he’d suggested that with the passing years she’d consume his marriage.
‘Cosmo. Supper.’
He called back, saying he was coming, already putting the moment off. He turned the desk light out but when he left his study he didn’t go directly to the kitchen. ‘I’m making up the fire,’ he announced from the sitting-room, pouring himself a glass of whisky and quickly drinking it.
‘Julia seemed well,’ Cicily said, pushing the wooden bowl of salad across the kitchen table at him.
‘Yes, she did.’ It was singular in a way, he thought, that he and Cicily should have taken to their hearts a person who was, physically, so very much the opposite of them. Mags had been like a cuckoo in the midst of the handsome family, and he wondered if she’d ever noticed it, if she’d ever said to herself that it was typical of her tendency to misfortune to find herself so dramatically shown up. He wanted to talk to Cicily about that. They had to talk about everything. They had to clear the ai
r; certainly they had to agree that they were at a beginning, that they could not just go on.
‘I suppose it was her looks,’ he said, aware that he was putting it clumsily, ‘that in the end didn’t appeal to Robert Blakley. I mean, not as much as he’d imagined.’
‘Oh, he was a horrid man.’
‘No, but I mean, Cicily –’
‘I don’t want to talk about Robert Blakley.’
Neatly she arranged ham and salad on her fork. Any time she wanted to, he thought, she could pick up an affair. Men still found her as worth a second look as they always had: you could see it at cocktail parties and on trains, or even walking with her on the street. He felt proud of her, and glad that she hadn’t let herself go.
‘No, I meant she wasn’t much to look at ever,’ he said.
‘Poor Mags had far more than looks. Let’s not dwell on this, Cosmo.’
‘I think we have to, dear.’
‘She’s dead. Nothing we can say will bring her back.’
‘It’s not that kind of thing we have to talk about.’
‘She wanted her clothes to go to Oxfam. Except what she left to Mrs Forde. I’ll see to that tonight.’
When, seven years ago, Cosmo had had an affair with a girl in his office the guilt he might have felt had failed to come about. His unfaithfulness –the only occasion of it in his marriage – had not caused him remorse and heart-searching, as he’d expected it would. He did not return to Tudors after an afternoon with the girl to find himself wanting at once to confess to Cicily. Nor did he walk into a room and find Cicily seeming to be forlorn because she was being wronged and did not know it. He did not think of her, alone and even lonely, while he was with the girl. Such thoughts were unnecessary because Cicily was always all right, because there was always Mags. It had even occasionally seemed to him that she had Mags and he the girl.
The Collected Stories Page 118
