Another Kind of Cinderella and Other Stories

by Angela Huth

  I saw a look pass between them, then, and Mr Arthur gave an almost invisible sigh. The words I had ready to shoot at them were exploding in my head in such blinding lights that I could not quite read them – something to do with bitterness at the waste of my life, nothing but the satisfaction of two spoilt old men to show for it: the regret at so meagre an achievement, and the sadness – could they not understand the sadness?

  They seemed to be waiting for me to go on. But anger had left me inarticulate. Words, insults, evaporated. So I began to moan, a noise similar to the wind. As I picked up the huge pottery bowl Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald looked scared. I thrust the fruit at them, moaning louder. A brilliant aim: figs caught Mr Arthur on the chest, making smeary pink marks on his clean shirt, and bursting obscenely over his fingers when he put up a hand to shield his face. An over-ripe peach slobbered down Mr Gerald’s temple. I laughed again. I picked random crockery from the dresser and began to throw it on to the stone floor. The shotgun explosions of cups and saucers and the large dinner plates were pure music: pottery breaks into noisy crumbs. Glass, next. Half a dozen wine glasses landed in the stainless steel sink. They smashed with a high-pitched scream, drowning the noise of the wind. Then a jar of olives – they rolled about the messed-up floor like jet marbles, smearing it with olive oil. The homemade jams: two large jars, Mr Gerald’s favourites, burst on to the floor, sticky plums sploshing among the olives and china. And finally the inspiration of a bag of flour. As I picked up a kitchen knife to slash the bag for speed, Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald turned a matching deathly white. In a moment they were whiter still as I held it high and let it scatter down like a snowstorm. I loved its silent descent into random piles that covered everything.

  This is . . .’ Mr Arthur stood up, a floury spectre. Flour fell mistily from him.

  ‘. . . too much, Mrs Hawker.’ Mr Gerald, still troubled by peach in his eye, stood up too.

  Something told me they were right. Besides, the energy was ebbing, just as the words had done earlier on.

  ‘If I’ve caused you just a moment’s thought, Mr Arthur Mr Gerald,’ I said, ‘then this has been worth it.’

  Head very high, I left the room.

  That was all some four hours ago. Since then, back in my room, I’ve been writing like a lunatic. All this stuff. Giving vent to, as they say. Letting it all out. As I pause for a moment I look out of the window and notice the trees are still. A bee-eater on the telegraph wires, eyes speared on to the lavender bush below, does not sway. The wind has died. Only the scratching of my pen in the silence.

  Then the buzzer goes, frightening. I pick up the telephone.

  ‘Mrs Hawker? It’s almost eight o’clock.’

  ‘So it is, Mr Arthur,’ I say.

  ‘Dinner-time,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll be along, Mr Arthur.’

  I stand, stretch. It’s one of those dusky blue evenings I love so much. The crickets will start up again now the wind has gone. Funny how much I’ve enjoyed the writing. The hours just flew. Perhaps I shall try it again. Perhaps that’s how I shall spend my time off in my old age, writing stories at last. I brush a streak of flour from my sleeve. I am very calm.

  In the kitchen Mr Gerald is laying the table – three places. Very unusual, for I only dine with them at Christmas and on my birthday. He wears one of my aprons. Candles are lighted. A bottle of good wine is open. Over at the oven Mr Arthur is prodding expertly at the chicken casserole and tossing a salad. There’s no sign that anything untoward (a favourite word of Mr Gerald’s) has ever taken place. China and glass from the cupboard have replaced the missing things on the dresser. There’s a bowl of olives – one of them must have been down to the village to buy more – and the flour jar is filled. What an afternoon they must have had! I try not to smile. I say nothing.

  ‘Sit down, Annie,’ says Mr Arthur, back to me.

  ‘It’s our turn to wait on you, Annie,’ says Mr Gerald, without looking at me.

  I do as they ask, and we have the dinner of a lifetime.

  Now, it’s past midnight. Even as I finish this story I find it hard to believe it all happened. The merging of fact and fiction in memory, however soon after the event, is intriguing. How much of what I have described was exactly like that? I have tried to be accurate, but if someone were to ask Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald to describe the events of today, some years from now, I’ve no doubt they would tell quite a different story What I do know is that everyone is entitled to such terrible days now and then, and that, in the end, is what Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald understood, and that’s why I love them and will work for them for the rest of my days.

  Besides, they called me Annie. Of course – and I must stop now, I’m feeling suddenly tired – I know that was only for tonight. Mrs Hawker is how they like me to be, and why not? So Mrs Hawker I’ll be again in the morning. But at least I have been Annie for a night.

  I set my alarm.

  Men Friends

  Conrad Fortescue, on his way into the church, trod on a beetle. In the silence of the Norman porch he heard the tiny crackle as it crushed beneath his foot. Looking down, he saw the smashed shell, each fragment shiny as his own highly polished black shoes, linked by a web of blood. Damn, he thought: how Louisa would have hated this – Louisa who would rescue dying flies from summer window-panes. Conrad felt his throat clench. He coughed. Up until this moment he had been all right, in control. Death of the beetle shattered his calm.

  He made his way into the church. He was early. Walking up the path banked with expensive wreaths of flowers at the foot of the yews, he had been pleased to think he was probably the first. He wanted time to himself to think about Louisa. But he was not the first. Half a dozen others were already seated, curious vulture eyes upon him, people behaving as if the gathering was for a party rather than a funeral. Conrad took a service sheet from an usher, chose a seat by a pillar from which he would not quite be able to see the coffin. Louisa Chumleigh, he read: 1st Sept 1956 – 2nd April 1992. Not a long life. The organ began to play a Bach prelude. Conrad closed his eyes.

  They first met seven years ago, one of those smudged summer afternoons when the tremor of heat makes everything illusory. He stood on a thyme-planted terrace, leaning over the balustrade to admire the descending shelves of impeccably mowed lawns. Friends had brought him to the house for tea, drinks – he couldn’t remember which. He had stood transfixed as he watched Louisa, in the shimmer of heat below him, take the arm of an old man with a stick. She supported him as he stepped from the lawn on to the path. Her solicitousness – she had no idea she was being watched, she later told him – was mirage-clear even from so great a distance. She kept hold of the old man’s arm – Jacob, it was, her husband. They walked towards Conrad, joined him on the terrace. As Jacob pointed his stick towards the arboretum, spoke lovingly of trees, Conrad regarded his wife. It was a case of instant enchantment. Something unknown to him before.

  They had had five years. Five years of adultery, though Louisa would never use such a word. She had made it easy for him – writing, ringing, taking the initiative to get in touch, so that he was spared taking the risk of contacting her. She never involved him in her deceits. She even managed to make him feel, sometimes, that the woman in his arms was/ree. But that was the one thing she was not, nor ever would be until Jacob died. Until that time, her husband came first. If she did not ring Conrad for a week – and the agony of silent days never lessened – he knew it would be because Jacob had made some demand that she would not dream of refusing, although when she did ring she gave no explanation for her silence. And Conrad knew better than to ask.

  Once, they had managed three whole days together: Jacob was on business in America. Louisa took the opportunity to visit relations in Paris. Conrad followed her on the next flight. Louisa saw little of her relations. On a warm spring afternoon in the Bois, Conrad declared his intention to wait for her: to wait until Jacob, thirty-six years her senior, died. He saw at once his mistake. Louisa, who had been laughing
only moments before, retracted from him, though she kept hold of his hand. Conrad, apologising for his clumsiness, felt a lowering of the afternoon. ‘Who knows what will happen – then?’ Louisa said. ‘It’s something I can never think about, Jacob’s dying.’

  Soon she was laughing again. Back in England nothing seemed to have changed. Conrad accustomed himself to the imperfections of loving another man’s wife, and privately determined to wait, however many years it might be.

  Then, two years ago, there had been such a long silence that Conrad had been forced at last to write. What had happened? Louisa rang at once, her weak voice apologetic. Some wretched bug, she explained. She hadn’t wanted to worry him. She had been forced to stay in bed for two weeks.

  The bug needed treatment – radiotherapy. Conrad visited her occasionally when Jacob was away. He observed her thinning, beautiful skin gleaming with an incandescent menace. Noticeably more frail each visit, she lay back against a bank of linen pillows in the huge marital bedroom whose windows looked on to the garden. Conrad would look down on the lawns, misted with rain, and see the brilliance of that first summer day. A nurse filtered in and out, filling water jugs, straightening covers. Conrad brought pansies, in which Louisa silently buried her face, and elderberry jelly. She spread it thinly on toast, but could only eat a mouthful to please him. They held hands, talked about the past. But mostly sat in silence watching the rain on vast window-panes. Sometimes, Louisa felt like being up for a while. Once they walked down to the lake and back, which exhausted her.

  Conrad learned of her death in The Times. None of their mutual friends knew of their affair so, not surprisingly, offered no condolences. He had written at once to Jacob, who replied by return, a stiff polite letter in an infirm hand, inviting Conrad to the funeral and lunch afterwards at the house.

  Now Louisa was dead, Conrad would never marry. She was the only woman in whom he had found all the qualities he had never known he needed until he found them in her. He doubted he would ever love anyone else.

  The church was filling up: men in black ties, women in dark hats. A large man with extraordinarily wide shoulders sat in front of Conrad, uncomfortable on the narrow bench of the pew, shifting about. Conrad recognised Johnnie Lutchins, a childhood friend. Louisa had sometimes talked about their times together in Cornwall.

  Cornwall, Scotland, the south-west of Ireland – Johnnie and Louisa had spent many holidays together. Johnnie’s widowed mother had been the best friend of Louisa’s mother. She and her son spent much of their time with Louisa’s family. Johnnie remembered his first sight of Louisa, a skinny angel in filthy dungarees. Feeble, he remembered thinking, at ten: but within the day he had discovered she was tough and daring as any boy. They climbed trees, sailed in brisk seas – the rougher the better, Louisa used to say. They teased an old donkey, put pretend spiders in the cook’s tea – always laughing, always daring the other into greater mischief. At fifteen, Johnnie kissed Louisa in the greenhouse among unripe tomatoes. Then he couldn’t stop kissing her. When he went up to Oxford three years later, she would visit him several times a term. He was the envy of all his friends, and showed off the beautiful creature at every opportunity. After he had graduated, and found a decent job in antiquarian books, he finally declared his love and proposed. But he had been beaten to it by Jacob – Jacob, a man older than Louisa’s own father. When Johnnie had recovered from the shock, he had tried to dissuade her from such madness. Then he had turned to teasing. ‘I can only conclude you’re marrying the old boy for his money and his house,’ he had laughed, bitterly. Louisa denied this. Neither Johnnie nor anyone could stop her from becoming Jacob’s wife.

  Still, as Johnnie soon found to his delight, the marital state made little difference to their friendship. Jacob, who had known Johnnie since he was a boy – indeed, he was Johnnie’s godfather – issued constant invitations to the house. Johnnie was urged to look after Louisa, keep her amused, when Jacob was away on business. Which meant that with a half-clear conscience they could go out together in London. Opportunity was on their side: Johnnie considered himself the luckiest man in the world. He knew Louisa loved him, even if not in quite the same way as he loved her. It was only a matter of waiting . . . sometimes she had frustrated him by her silences, but he knew they meant she was being dutiful to Jacob, and he had no right to be either impatient or greedy. When she had become ill he had spent hours, days, by her bedside, laughing at the many flowers and cards sent to her by ‘admirers’ whom, she claimed, she hardly knew. Johnnie believed her.

  He saw her on the day before she died – asleep, but holding Jacob’s hand. The old man sat with fresh tears replacing dried tears on his cheeks, making no effort to brush them away. But when he rang Johnnie next morning with the news, his voice was firm as usual. He was a dignified old boy. He would have been horrified by Johnnie’s uncontrolled weeping.

  To deflect his thoughts, Johnnie glanced round the church. Hundreds of pansies were woven into ivy round the pillars, and along ledges where they mixed with the reflections of stained-glass windows, and twined into edifices on the altar. Candles burned as if it were Christmas Eve. The pews were full. People were hunting for seats in the side aisles. Many of them resigned themselves to standing. One of those, Johnnie realised, was Bernard Wylie. Johnnie had met him and Louisa one day in Bond Street, very briefly. He had only just caught the name. Later, he remembered to ask Louisa about him. She said Wylie was a solicitor – something to do with her late father’s affairs. They had both laughed about the slickness of his coat, with its too-wide velvet collar. Today, Johnnie recognised the coat before the face.

  Bernard Wylie wore his favourite coat accompanied by expensive black leather gloves, and a black satin tie lightened with the tiniest white spots which he had judged would not be offensive. He stood clutching his service sheet to steady his hands, staring straight ahead, feeling the uncertainty of his knees. And he wondered for the millionth time what it was about Louisa that had so bewitched him that his life, since meeting her, had fallen apart.

  She had come into his office one November afternoon – some trivial matter to do with her father’s estate – wearing a hat of grey fur sparkling with rain. Completely confused by the legal niceties of the matter, she had suddenly said, ‘Oh, I give up, Mr Wylie,’ and had laughed her enchanting laugh. ‘In that case,’ he had said, ‘let’s go and have tea while I explain it all to you very slowly’

  So slowly that their tea at the Ritz drifted into champagne, and then dinner. He had driven her back to her flat, come in for a drink, stayed the night. There had been dozens of nights since – nights and lunches, little notes and presents from her, calls from all parts of the world when she was travelling with Jacob. Then, a year or so before she fell ill, there was the final note. ‘I’m awfully sorry, darling B, but we can’t go on. I realise now it was all infatuation on my part . . . and know it was not real love for you either, but great fun, and thank you.’

  For the rest of his life, Bernard would regret not having made his declaration – Christ, he had loved her from the moment she walked into his office. But he had bided by Byron’s principle of never telling your love, merely conveying it. Had his conveying been invisible? Too late he wrote to her, pages of the long-contained passion now set free. But she did not reply. The last time he saw her was at a party laughing in the distance with some unknown man. She had not seen him. Bernard had left at once.

  And now instead of Louisa he had a second-best wife at his side who would never know the loving man he once was . . . She nudged him, this loyal, unexciting wife, her sense of occasion offended by the sight of a young man standing not far from them in a dark jacket, grey trousers and no tie. In the unknown youth’s eye, Bernard thought he saw reflected the same despair that lodged in his own heart: but it may have been his imagination.

  The young man, Felix Brown, had cried for many nights. Cold, exhausted, drained, he feared he might faint during the long service, but there were no seats left. He it wa
s who late last night, and at dawn this morning, had transported pansies from the greenhouse to the church, and arranged them on his own. Only three years ago, Lady Endlesham – as he still thought of her, as he would always think of her – had come into that very greenhouse and admired them. Said they were her favourite flowers. They had talked of planting and pruning, and made plans for the south bed. Felix had done his best to conceal the mesmeric effect the shape of her breasts beneath a pink cotton shirt had had upon him. He had told her how happy he was to be working in the garden. He could scarcely believe he had been promoted to being in charge only two years after leaving horticultural college, he said. Lady Endlesham had smiled, and said they must make more plans. Then he gave her a pot of pansies for her desk.

  Some weeks later she came into the tool-shed, admired his clean and gleaming tools that hung in order of height on the walls. The warmth of that evening was almost tangible. In the stuffy air that smelt of dry earth Felix was embarrassed by the pungent smell of his own sweat. He could also smell Lady Endlesham’s scent, a mixture of fragile flowers. In the shadows it seemed to him she hesitated, planning perhaps to mention some gardening matter. Then she put out her arms, and said, he thought – though he could never be quite sure of the exact words – Come here, you handsome thing. Handsome? Gathered to him, Felix could hear the racing heart of his employer’s wife. They ran like children through the orchard to a hidden place Felix knew. Lord Endlesham was away, she assured him, but not in a rejoicing way. She sounded almost lonely. Felix was twenty-one at the time.

  Since then they’d made love in every corner of the garden, and, in winter, in the hayloft. Felix would marvel how one moment his mistress (as he liked to think of her) was laughing in his arms covered in grass or hay, and the next he would see her in the distance walking beside her aged husband, immaculate, admiring the flowerbeds whose geography she and Felix had discussed between a thousand kisses.