Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

by Barbara Comyns

  The next morning May asked me how I had enjoyed myself, and I told her I had had a heavenly evening, and she asked me how I had met Rollo, so I told her about him painting Sandro and that he was starting a portrait of me this afternoon. I could see she was longing to ask about the new clothes, but didn’t know quite how to put it, and while she was hesitating I started talking about the day’s meals and ginger puddings and things like that.

  I hardly knew how I did my work that day. I only discovered just in time that I was putting Keating’s Powder in the pudding instead of ginger; but somehow the morning passed and the lunch was eaten and washed up. As soon as my duties were over I tore upstairs and changed my clothes and hurried down the fields. I could feel the Redheads shaking their heads over me.

  When I arrived at the cottage the door was open, so I went straight in. It gave me a lovely feeling to be so intimate with Rollo. He was in the kitchen priming a canvas and looking rather worried. He said, ‘Darling, however am I going to paint you in this tiny cottage?’ We hadn’t thought of that. All the rooms were minute. Eventually, he decided to paint me in the garden. I was a bit scared of this idea, in case any of the village people passed and saw me on their way to the church.

  He painted me lying on the grass in the sun, which suited me very well, because I loved to be in the sun and hoped the village people couldn’t see me unless they came and peered right over the hedge, but forgot they could see Rollo standing in front of his easel, and after a time there was quite a row of heads wearing various frightful hats bobbing over the hedge. So we thought it was time to go in and have an early tea and I got it ready while Rollo washed his brushes.

  We had tea in the sitting-room, and it was a relief there were no animals this time. When we had finished our tea, Rollo came and sat beside me on the old-fashioned sofa, and I hoped he would make love to me; but when he did I felt all shaky and kind of worried. When he asked me to marry him, I didn’t like to answer in case it was a mistake and he hadn’t really said it; but he asked me again, so I knew it was real. I looked at him and thought what a marvellous husband he would be. He would never eat children’s birthday cakes before they saw them, or take the money out of their money-boxes; but even if he did I would still love him and think him wonderful. Then I told him about Fanny and all about Peregrine and his disgusting wife, and any odds and ends of awful things I could remember doing. He heard them all, but it only seemed to make him love me even more. We became engaged to be married.

  37

  The Redheads stopped shaking their heads over me when I became engaged, and I had letters of congratulation from Ann and my brother. My brother’s letter was very pompous, but Ann asked if I would like to spend a weekend with her in London. I told Rollo about this invitation and he thought it would be a good idea. He could come to London at the same time and show me his father’s house. Then I could see if I would like to live there when we were married.

  I asked the Redheads if I could go away for the weekend, and May was most helpful and offered to look after Sandro while I was away, because it would be rather a squash for us both to stay at Ann’s flat; in any case, I don’t think he was included in Ann’s invitation.

  We went on this London visit the first weekend in June and we travelled together in the train. It was wonderful to be coming back to London after three years, and when we arrived I refused to use a taxi. I was so longing to go in a red bus again. We went straight to Ann’s flat and I could see Rollo made a great impression on her. She gave us some sherry and there was a great deal of talking. Then Rollo ’phoned Premier’s and reserved a table for dinner. I enjoyed that dinner so much, and I still have a box of book matches in the shape of fish that I took home that evening.

  On Sunday we went to see Rollo’s house in St John’s Wood. I would have preferred to have gone without Ann, but she had been so kind about my engagement I had to ask her to come, too. Rollo looked a little disappointed when he called for me in a taxi and discovered she was coming as well; but she enjoyed exploring the house so much we were quite glad we had brought her afterwards. It was a delightful house — early Victorian, with a high-walled garden. The blossom was over, but there were masses of roses just coming out and the flowerbeds were filled with tree-lupins in the most beautiful colours. Against the house there was a grape-vine. I couldn’t believe I could be queen of all this. I said, ‘Oh, Rollo, please let’s live in this heavenly house. Don’t let it to anyone. We must keep it ourselves.’ He laughed, because I hadn’t even been in the house yet, but I knew I would love it and I did. All the rooms on the hall floor had three large windows that opened inwards, and they had small iron balconies. The house seemed filled with sun and air. The kitchens were semi-basement, but were large and homely, with great cupboards and dressers let in the walls, and the floors were made of red tiles. There were three large bedrooms and a small dressing-room upstairs and the most wonderful modern bathroom that his father had put in quite recently. There was another narrow flight of stairs that led to the attics, but only the maid’s bedroom was furnished; but one room was simply stiff with lovely, old-fashioned toys, a snorting rocking-horse and a huge Noah’s Ark filled with beautifully made animals, not beastly flat animals like they have in modern arks. I couldn’t bear to leave the toys, but there was so much to see. Most of the rooms were furnished with very beautiful antique furniture, and there were some elegant Georgian mirrors on the walls; but the pictures were mostly rather heavy and dark with the exception of the ones Rollo had painted himself. We decided to scrap all the old paintings, and some of the curtains were a bit fussy. We thought it would be a good idea to repaint and distemper the whole house, so Rollo wrote down in a notebook all the things we thought wanted doing to the house.

  Then Rollo rang the old-fashioned bell in the drawing-room and the maid, who had been acting as caretaker since his father died, came. I had already met her in the kitchen. Rollo told her to bring some sherry, and it came like magic on a heavy silver tray, and I thought that when I was married I could ring that bell.

  The weekend passed so quickly; but it didn’t matter much, because it was only a foretaste of the happiness that was coming when I married. When I returned to the farm I used to lie awake at night thinking of our beautiful house and the cupboards stacked with china dinner-services and tea-sets, and elegant glasses for every kind of drink. There was a great linen cupboard all warm and stiff with real linen, and the eiderdowns had been put away in muslin bags to keep them clean. I hoped the Redheads would come and see me when I was married. I was leaving them in three weeks’ time and a grim woman with a knobby face was coming to take my place. They said they were scared of her.

  Rose came to stay for a few days before she went abroad. Her husband brought her down by car, but he didn’t stay, and I think May was glad to have her on her own so that she could spoil her. She was going to have a baby already, and she was delighted, because it gave her a really good excuse to be lazy, and she lay about eating sweets all day and looked very charming. She didn’t even stir up the bees. May bought some baby wool and tried to interest her in knitting small garments, but she said as she had all the bother of making the baby someone else could make the clothes.

  There was one thing that cast rather a blight on my marriage. Rollo didn’t want Foxy to live with us for some reason. He would have been so happy in St John’s Wood. He could have had one of the attic bedrooms and that lovely garden to play in, but Rollo was adamant about not having him; perhaps because he had made a mess in the broom cupboard, and once by the willow brook he had bitten his leg, but not very badly. I hoped he would relent right until my last day at the Redheads’. He had returned to London, so I sent him a telegram asking if he was sure he didn’t want Foxy, but he replied, ‘Quite sure.’ Men are much firmer than women. On my last evening, Sandro and I went down to the woods with Foxy and let him play by us and when he wasn’t looking we just went away. In the night I heard him barking in the garden and went out to him in my nighty an
d he jumped up into my arms, so I took him back and had him in my bed all night. But early in the morning I took him a long way away, several miles. I carried him all the way. There was a heavy dew and all the birds were singing. When we came to the place where they reared pheasants I put him down, and I put a large piece of the Redheads’ joint beside him, but he wasn’t interested; he kept skipping about and sniffing the birds and quite forgot me, so I went away and felt too sad to cry. I felt guilty like the father in Hansel and Gretel.

  I felt kind of sorry when I said goodbye to the Redheads after breakfast. It wasn’t like parting with Foxy, but they had been very kind really, and the years there hadn’t been too unhappy, just dull and lonely. I said goodbye to Auntie and caught her in the act of hiding some bacon in her petticoat, but we didn’t mention it. Then one of the farm men took us to the station in the milk float and I wasn’t a cook any more. Those days were over for ever.

  I took Sandro to stay with my brother and his wife, because we couldn’t very well take him on our honeymoon. He didn’t like being left there much at first. Then he discovered a stream at the end of the garden and he started to make a boat out of a log and hardly noticed me going. Then I went to London and Rollo met me at the station and he looked so happy and pleased to see me it didn’t seem so bad about parting with Foxy. We had lunch together and he told me he had made arrangements for us to go to Portugal for our honeymoon. Everything had become so wonderful. He loved to surprise me with thrilling things we were going to do. I’d hardly got over the excitement about Portugal when he suggested we went to buy a trousseau, and directly we left the restaurant we did, and we went on buying it for three days. Then we had to buy some trunks to put it in.

  We were married in a register office. Ann and a friend of Rollo’s called Simon were witnesses, and after the wedding we had an enormous lunch at Boulestin’s. We drank a lot of wine and felt quite dazed when we came out into the hot sunshine. We said goodbye to the witnesses and took a taxi to St John’s Wood. We sat in the garden drinking tea under the apple trees and I said it would be nice to have a goldfish pond, and Rollo went into the house quite suddenly, and I felt lonely and worried in case I’d said something to distress him. Perhaps his mother had been drowned in a goldfish pond at some time. When he returned he told me he had been telephoning a landscape gardener, and when we came home there would be a goldfish pond complete with fish, and if there was anything else I would have done to the garden that would be done as well.

  The day after we were married we got up very early and flew to Lisbon. It seemed years ago I’d been driven to the station in the milk float. Before we left the house in St John’s Wood I went into every room so that I could remember how beautiful it was while I was away, and I went into the garden and marked the place where I wanted the pond made. I didn’t want any other alterations, because it was all so perfect.

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  This is the end of my book, but not the end of my story, which will go on until I die; but now we have come to such a happy part of my life there is very little to say about it. At first, because I wasn’t used to happiness and freedom from worry, I would be terrified that disaster was coming round the corner at any minute. I expected that Rollo would suddenly say he didn’t love me any more, or that the house was mortgaged up to the hilt and we must sell everything we had got and go and live in one room, and almost every time he went out without me I thought the telephone would ring to say he had been run over, and if he caught cold I believed it was the end and he was going to develop pneumonia and die. When none of these things happened I worried about Sandro, but there was nothing wrong there either, so gradually I ceased to imagine all the dreadful things that might happen.

  Although Rollo was rather grave and quiet, he had a number of friends, and most of them became mine, too. We used to entertain quite a lot and I became rather famous as a cook, so my time at the Redheads’ wasn’t altogether wasted. It was lovely to cook and know someone else would tidy up all the mess and wash up. One of Rollo’s friends, called Simon, became engaged to Ann, so the perfect bachelor girl was no more, but perhaps she would turn into the perfect wife.

  Once rather a nasty shadow from the past crept near me like a dark spider, but it vanished again. It was at the private view of an exhibition of Rollo’s paintings, and I was feeling so proud of him. I walked about among the people to hear all the nice things they were saying about his paintings. Across the gallery I saw a girl called Helen. I was very fond of her and hurried over, and she was laughing at me struggling through the people. Just as I reached her I noticed someone looking very intently at a painting of me with a lap full of large shells and I didn’t speak to Helen; I just looked at that man — it was Peregrine. He looked all gruesome, very yellow, thin and bitter. I turned away quickly before he could see me, and there was Helen looking so surprised, and I said, ‘Come away.’ We went to a small room at the back of the gallery. There were some drinks there to jolly customers along when they were making up their mind to buy a painting. We had a drink and sat there for a little time. Then I sent Helen back to see if the man with the disagreeable yellow face was still there; but he had gone.

  The exhibition was a great success and almost every painting was sold and Rollo received a number of commissions. One of them was to paint an elderly general who was about to die any minute. Rollo had to go to the country to paint this portrait. It was the first time we had been parted and I missed him so much. The house and all my treasures seemed nothing without him, and in our bedroom in the wardrobe all his suits were waiting for him. Everything seemed to be still and waiting for his return; even the bathwater seemed to come out of the taps all hushed.

  I ’phoned Helen and asked her to keep me company. I told her about the waiting suits and hushed taps, so she came straight away. I took her into the garden to show her the pond. The goldfish had had some black children. Then she saw the bicycle I used to use when I lived in the country. Now Sandro used to ride it in the garden although it was much too large. As soon as she saw it she wanted to ride. She had no idea how people rode bicycles, but she would keep trying, and I had to run up and down the garden pushing her. It became very warm, but although she kept falling off she would persevere. I was delighted when the brake became bent and prevented the wheels going round any more. Then we sat peacefully in the sun until the maid came out to tell us lunch was ready.

  We brought our coffee into the garden. We would have liked to have eaten our lunch in the garden, too, but I thought the maid wouldn’t approve. Once when she had an evening out she had come back early and discovered Rollo and me eating in the kitchen. She had looked quite hurt. She didn’t really like me to do any cooking, so I only did it when we had people to dinner; but she was a dear old thing and it was marvellous having her.

  We sat in the sun and drank our coffee. It was very strong and sweet. Helen talked about her husband, who was called Harold, and I looked at disturbed ants who were dashing about with large eggs. Suddenly she stopped talking about Harold and said, ‘Was that sinister man your ex-husband?’ For a moment I didn’t answer. Then I told her about Peregrine. It was a waste to talk about such distressing subjects on such a lovely spring afternoon, but she listened and I talked on and on and the ants carrying their eggs walked over our bare legs and we hardly noticed, and that is really how I came to write this story.