The Penguin Book of English Short Stories

by Christopher Dolley

  ‘You should take him to a child psychologist’ said her sister.

  ‘Well, darling, I expect you’re right. It’s so difficult to know whether they’re frauds, everyone recommends somebody different. I’m sure Harry would disapprove too, and then think of the expense. … You know how desperately poor we are, although I think I manage as well as anyone could’… At this point Mr Codrington took a deep breath and sat back, for on the merits of her household management Grace Allingham was at her most boring and could by no possible stratagem be restrained.

  Upstairs, in the room which had been known as the nursery until his eleventh birthday, but was now called his bedroom, Johnnie was playing with his farm animals. The ritual involved in the game was very complicated and had a long history. It was on his ninth birthday that he had been given the farm set by his father. ‘Something a bit less babyish that those woolly animals of yours’ he had said, and Johnnie had accepted them, since they made in fact no difference whatever to the games he played; games at which could Major Allingham have guessed he would have been distinctly puzzled. The little ducks, pigs, and cows of lead no more remained themselves in Johnnie’s games than had the pink woollen sheep and green cloth horses of his early childhood. Johnnie’s world was a strange compound of the adult world in which he had always lived and a book world composed from Grimm, the Arabian Nights, Alice’s adventures, natural history books, and more recently the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. His imagination was taken by anything odd – strange faces, strange names, strange animals, strange voices and catchphrases – all these appeared in his games. The black pig and the white duck were keeping a hotel; the black pig was called that funny name of Granny’s friend – Mrs Gudgeon-Rogers. She was always holding her skirt tight round the knees and warming her bottom over the fire – like Mrs Coates, and whenever anyone in the hotel asked for anything she would reply ‘Darling, I can’t stop now. I’ve simply got to fly’, like Aunt Sophie, and then she would fly out of the window. The duck was an Echidna, or Spiny Anteater who wore a picture hat and a fish train like in the picture of Aunt Eleanor; she used to weep a lot, because, like Granny, when she described her games of bridge, she was ‘vulnerable’ and she would yawn at the hotel guests and say ‘Lord I am tired’ like Lydia Bennet. The two collie dogs had ‘been asked to leave’, like in the story of Mummy’s friend Gertie who ‘got tight’ at the Hunt Ball, they were going to be divorced and were consequently wearing ‘co-respondent shoes’. The lady collie who was called Minnie Mongelheim kept on saying ‘That chap’s got a proud stomach. Let him eat chaff’ like Mr F’s Aunt in Little Dorrit. The sheep, who always played the part of a bore, kept on and on talking like Daddy about ‘leg cuts and fine shots to cover’; sometimes when the rest of the animal guests got too bored the sheep would change into Grandfather Graham and tell a funny story about a Scotsman so that they were bored in a different way. Finally the cat who was a grand vizier and worked by magic would say ‘All the ways round here belong to me’ like the Red Queen and he would have all the guests torn in pieces and flayed alive until Johnnie felt so sorry for them that the game could come to an end. Mummy was already saying that he was getting too old for the farm animals: one always seemed to be getting too old for something. In fact the animals were no longer necessary to Johnnie’s games, for most of the time now he liked to read and when he wanted to play games he could do so in his head without the aid of any toys, but he hated the idea of throwing things away because they were no longer needed. Mummy and Daddy were always throwing things away and never thinking of their feelings. When he had been much younger Mummy had given him an old petticoat to put in the dustbin, but Johnnie had taken it to his room and hugged it and cried over it, because it was no longer wanted. Daddy had been very upset. Daddy was always being upset at what Johnnie did. Only the last time that he was home there had been an awful row, because Johnnie had tried to make up like old Mrs Langdon and could not wash the blue paint off his eyes. Daddy had beaten him and looked very hurt all day and said to Mummy that he’d ‘rather see him dead than grow up a cissie’. No it was better not to do imitations oneself, but to leave it to the animals.

  This afternoon, however, Johnnie was not attending seriously to his game, he was sitting and thinking of what the grown ups had been saying and of how he would never see his friends, the old ladies, again, and of how he never, never wanted to. This irrevocable separation lay like a black cloud over his mind, a constant darkness which was lit up momentarily by forks of hysterical horror, as he remembered the nature of their last meeting.

  The loss of his friendship was a very serious one to the little boy. It had met so completely the needs and loneliness which are always great in a child isolated from other children and surrounded by unimaginative adults. In a totally unselfconscious way, half crazy as they were and half crazy even though the child sensed them to be, the Misses Swindale possessed just those qualities of which Johnnie felt most in need. To begin with they were odd and fantastic and highly coloured, and more important still they believed that such peculiarities were nothing to be ashamed of, indeed were often a matter for pride. ‘How delightfully odd’, Miss Dolly would say in her drawling voice, when Johnnie told her how the duck-billed platypus had chosen spangled tights when Queen Alexandra had ordered her to be shot from a cannon at Brighton Pavilion. ‘What a delightfully extravagant creature that duck-billed platypus is, caro Gabriele’, for Miss Dolly had brought back a touch of Italian here and there from her years in Florence, whilst in Johnnie she fancied a likeness to the angel Gabriel. In describing her own dresses, too, which she would do for hours on end, extravagance was her chief commendation. ‘as for that gold and silver brocade ball dress’ she would say and her voice would sink to an awed whisper ‘it was richly fantastic.’ To Miss Marian, with her more brusque, masculine nature, Johnnie’s imaginative powers were a matter of far greater wonder than to her sister and she treated them with even greater respect. In her bluff, simple way like some old-fashioned religious army officer or overgrown but solemn schoolboy, she too admired the eccentric and unusual. ‘What a lark!’ she would say, when Johnnie told her how the Crown Prince had slipped in some polar bears dressed in pink ballet skirts to sing ‘Ta Ra Ra boomdeay’ in the middle of a boring school concert which his royal duties had forced him to attend. ‘What a nice chap he must be to know.’ In talking of her late father, the general, whose memory she worshipped and of whom she had a never ending flow of anecdotes, she would give an instance of his warm-hearted but distinctly eccentric behaviour and say in her gruff voice ‘Wasn’t it rum? That’s the bit I like best.’ But in neither of the sisters was there the least trace of that self-conscious whimsicality which Johnnie had met and hated in so many grown ups. They were the first people he had met who liked what he liked and as he liked it.

  Their love of lost causes and their defence of the broken, the worn out, and the forgotten met a deep demand in his nature, which had grown almost sickly sentimental in the dead practical world of his home. He loved the disorder of the old eighteenth-century farm house, the collection of miscellaneous objects of all kinds that littered the rooms, and thoroughly sympathized with the sisters’ magpie propensity to collect dress ends, feathers, string, old whistles, and broken cups. He grew excited with them in their fights to prevent drunken old men being taken to workhouses and cancerous old women to hospitals, though he sensed something crazy in their constant fear of intruders, Bolsheviks, and prying doctors. He would often try to change the conversation when Miss Marian became excited about spies in the village, or told him of how torches had been flashing all night in the garden and of how the vicar was slandering her father’s memory in a whispering campaign. He felt deeply embarrassed when Miss Dolly insisted on looking into all the cupboards and behind the curtains to see, as she said ‘if there were any eyes or ears where they were not wanted. For, caro Gabriele, those who hate beauty are many and strong, those who love it are few.’

  It was, above all, thei
r kindness and their deep affection which held the love-starved child. His friendship with Miss Dolly had been almost instantaneous. She soon entered into his fantasies with complete intimacy, and he was spellbound by her stories of the gaiety and beauty of Mediterranean life. They would play dressing up games together and enacted all his favourite historical scenes. She helped him with his French too, and taught him Italian words with lovely sounds; she praised his painting and helped him to make costume designs for some of his ‘characters’. With Miss Marian, at first, there had been much greater difficulty. She was an intensely shy woman and took refuge behind a rather forbidding bluntness of manner. Her old-fashioned military airs and general ‘manly’ tone, copied from her father, with which she approached small boys, reminded Johnnie too closely of his own father. ‘Head up, me lad’ she would say ‘shoulders straight.’ Once he had come very near to hating her, when after an exhibition of his absentmindedness she had said ‘Take care, Johnnie head in the air. You’ll be lost in the clouds, me lad, if you’re not careful.’ But the moment after she had won his heart for ever, when with a little chuckle she continued ‘Jolly good thing if you are, you’ll learn things up there that we shall never know.’ On her side, as soon as she saw that she had won his affection, she lost her shyness and proceeded impulsively to load him with kindness. She loved to cook his favourite dishes for him and give him his favourite fruit from their kitchen garden. Her admiration for his precocity and imagination was open-eyed and childlike. Finally they had found a common love of Dickens and Jane Austen, which she had read with her father, and now they would sit for hours talking over the characters in their favourite books.

  Johnnie’s affection for them was intensely protective, and increased daily as he heard and saw the contempt and dislike with which they were regarded by many persons in the village. The knowledge that ‘they had been away’ was nothing new to him when Mr Codrington had revealed it that afternoon. Once Miss Dolly had told him how a foolish doctor had advised her to go into a home ‘for you know, caro, ever since I returned to these grey skies my health has not been very good. People here think me strange, I cannot attune myself to the cold northern soul. But it was useless to keep me there, I need beauty and warmth of colour, and there it was so drab. The people, too, were unhappy crazy creatures and I missed my music so dreadfully.’ Miss Marian had spoken more violently of it on one of her ‘funny’ days, when from the depredations caused by the village boys to the orchard she had passed on to the strange man she had found spying in her father’s library and the need for a high wall round the house to prevent people peering through the telescopes from Mr Hatton’s house opposite. ‘They’re frightened of us, though, Johnnie,’ she had said. ‘I’m too honest for them and Dolly’s too clever. They’re always trying to separate us. Once they took me away against my will. They couldn’t keep me, I wrote to all sorts of big pots, friends of Father’s, you know, and they had to release me.’ Johnnie realized, too, that when his mother had said that she never knew which was the keeper, she had spoken more truly than she understood. Each sister was constantly alarmed for the other and anxious to hide the other’s defects from an un-understanding world. Once when Miss Dolly had been telling him a long story about a young waiter who had slipped a note into her hand the last time she had been in London, Miss Marian called Johnnie into the kitchen to look at some pies she had made. Later she had told him not to listen if Dolly said ‘soppy things’ because being so beautiful she did not realize that she was no longer young. Another day when Miss Marian had brought in the silver framed photo of her father in full dress uniform and had asked Johnnie to swear an oath to clear the general’s memory in the village, Miss Dolly had begun to play a mazurka on the piano. Later, she too, had warned Johnnie not to take too much notice when her sister got excited. ‘She lives a little too much in the past, Gabriele. She suffered very much when our father died. Poor Marian, it is a pity perhaps that she is so good, she has had too little of the pleasures of life. But we must love her very much, caro, very much.’

  Johnnie had sworn to himself to stand by them and to fight the wicked people who said they were old and useless and in the way. But now, since that dreadful tea-party, he could not fight for them any longer, for he knew why they had been shut up and felt that it was justified. In a sense, too, he understood that it was to protect others that they had to be restrained, for the most awful memory of all that terrifying afternoon was the thought that he had shared with pleasure for a moment in their wicked game.

  It was certainly most unfortunate that Johnnie should have been invited to tea on that Thursday, for the Misses Swindale had been drinking heavily on and off for the preceding week, and were by that time in a state of mental and nervous excitement that rendered them far from normal. A number of events had combined to produce the greatest sense of isolation in these old women whose sanity in any event hung by a precarious thread. Miss Marian had been involved in an unpleasant scene with the vicar over the new hall for the Young People’s Club. She was, as usual, providing the cash for the building and felt extremely happy and excited at being consulted about the decorations. Though she did not care for the vicar, she set out to see him, determined that she would accommodate herself to changing times. In any case, since she was the benefactress, it was, she felt, particularly necessary that she should take a back seat, to have imposed her wishes in any way would have been most ill-bred. It was an unhappy chance that caused the vicar to harp upon the need for new fabrics for the chairs and even to digress upon the ugliness of the old upholstery, for these chairs had come from the late General Swindale’s library. Miss Marian was immediately reminded of her belief that the vicar was attempting secretly to blacken her father’s memory, nor was the impression corrected when he tactlessly suggested that the question of her father’s taste was unimportant and irrelevant. She was more deeply wounded still to find in the next few days that the village shared the vicar’s view that she was attempting to dictate to the boys’ club by means of her money. ‘After all,’ as Mrs Grove at the Post Office said, ‘it’s not only the large sums that count, Miss Swindale, it’s all the boys’ sixpences that they’ve saved up.’ ‘You’ve too much of your father’s ways in you, that’s the trouble, Miss Swindale,’ said Mr Norton, who was famous for his bluntness ‘and they won’t do nowadays.’

  She had returned from this unfortunate morning’s shopping to find Mrs Calkett on the doorstep. Now the visit of Mrs Calkett was not altogether unexpected, for Miss Marian had guessed from chance remarks of her sister’s that something ‘unfortunate’ had happened with young Tony. When, however, the sharp-faced unpleasant little woman began to complain about Miss Dolly with innuendos and veiledly coarse suggestions, Miss Marian could stand it no longer and drove her away harshly. ‘How dare you speak about my sister in that disgusting way, you evil-minded little woman,’ she said. ‘You’d better be careful or you’ll find yourself charged with libel.’ When the scene was over, she felt very tired. It was dreadful of course that anyone so mean and cheap should speak thus of anyone so fine and beautiful as Dolly, but it was also dreadful that Dolly should have made such a scene possible.

  Things were not improved, therefore, when Dolly returned from Brighton at once elevated by a new conquest and depressed by its subsequent results. It seemed that the new conductor on the Southdown ‘that charming dark Italian-looking boy I was telling you about, my dear’ had returned her a most intimate smile and pressed her hand when giving her change. Her own smiles must have been embarrassingly intimate, for a woman in the next seat had remarked loudly to her friend, ‘These painted old things. Really, I wonder the men don’t smack their faces.’ ‘I couldn’t help smiling,’ remarked Miss Dolly, ‘she was so evidently jalouse, my dear. I’m glad to say the conductor did not hear, for no doubt he would have felt it necessary to come to my defence, he was so completely épris.’ But, for once, Miss Marian was too vexed to play ball, she turned on her sister and roundly condemned her conduct, ending up
by accusing her of bringing misery to them both and shame to their father’s memory. Poor Miss Dolly just stared in bewilderment, her baby blue eyes round with fright, tears washing the mascara from her eyelashes in black streams down the wrinkled vermilion of her cheeks. Finally she ran crying up to her room.

  That night both the sisters began to drink heavily. Miss Dolly lay like some monstrous broken doll, her red hair streaming over her shoulders, her corsets unloosed and her fat body poking out of an old pink velvet bail dress – pink with red hair was always so audacious – through the most unexpected places in bulges of thick blue-white flesh. She sipped at glass after glass of gin, sometimes staring into the distance with bewilderment that she should find herself in such a condition, sometimes leering pruriently at some pictures of Johnny Weismuller in swimsuits that she had cut out of Film Weekly. At last she began to weep to think that she had sunk to this. Miss Marian sat at her desk and drank more deliberately from a cut glass decanter of brandy. She read solemnly through her father’s letters, their old-fashioned, earnest Victorian sentiments swimming ever more wildly before her eyes. But, at last, she, too, began to weep as she thought of how his memory would be quite gone when she passed away, and of how she had broken the promise that she had made to him on his deathbed to stick to her sister through thick and thin.

  So they continued for two or three days with wild spasms of drinking and horrible, sober periods of remorse. They cooked themselves odd scraps in the kitchen, littering the house with unwashed dishes and cups, but never speaking, always avoiding each other. They didn’t change their clothes or wash, and indeed made little alteration in their appearance. Miss Dolly put fresh rouge on her cheeks periodically and some pink roses in her hair which hung there wilting; she was twice sick over the pink velvet dress. Miss Marian put on an old scarlet hunting waistcoat of her father’s, partly out of maudlin sentiment and partly because she was cold. Once she fell on the stairs and cut her forehead against the banisters; the red and white handkerchief which she tied round her head gave her the appearance of a tipsy pirate. On the fourth day, the sisters were reconciled and sat in Miss Dolly’s room. That night they slept, lying heavily against each other on Miss Dolly’s bed, open-mouthed and snoring, Miss Marian’s deep guttural rattle contrasting with Miss Dolly’s high-pitched whistle. They awoke on Thursday morning, much sobered, to the realization that Johnnie was coming to tea that afternoon.