At first, in the taxi, sailing down an empty Baker Street, Maurice was only aware that monotony had been broken; held up by lights at the Edgware Road junction, however, he became nervous of what he would find at the end of his journey. The urgent and mysterious voice on the telephone had enveloped him at once in drama; he couldn’t at that moment have handed over his part to his grandmother, however little he knew his lines. Now, however, apprehension made him search for evasions: if the Liebigs were in the caste, he thought, even courtesy Liebigs like Sylvia, it was bound to turn out to be some sordid melodrama. With the taxi in progress again, he felt the elation of duty; if the cause he was serving had neither quite the glory nor the high intent that he would have liked, at least there was a cause to serve – and this, as all his little group knew well, was what their generation had been cheated of. Besides how few of his friends were likely to be involved with mistresses who tried to commit suicide, he reflected with a glow of pride.
Pride, however, has its fall, and as the taxi-driver braked sharply to avoid a drunk at Westbourne Grove, Maurice was jolted into disgust at his childishness. He blushed with shame as though one of his friends – Gervase or Selwyn Adcock – had heard his thoughts. They were all agreed, of course, the whole group, that sin today was as drab and inglorious as virtue. ‘Simply the blowsy Britannia on the reverse of the fake coin,’ Gervase had said last term. By the time the taxi drew up at 42, Branksome Terrace, Maurice had found many reasons to support his anxious dislike of his self-imposed chivalry.
As he looked out at the dirty mid-Victorian house with its peeling stucco and straggles of grimy Virginia creeper, he saw a world whose unfamiliarity daunted him. He longed for the central heating, the books, the modern reading lamp, the iced drink, of his bedroom in his grandmother’s flat. There were theatres too cheap and squalid to play in. Maurice was about to tear up his contract and tell the taxi-driver to take him home, when the front door opened and a thin, dark-haired young woman in blue jeans came out on to the steps. ‘Mr Liebig,’ she called, in an over-refined, slightly petulant voice. ‘Mr Liebig? This is the house.’ Maurice got out and paid the fare.
‘I’m Freda Cherrill,’ the young woman said. ‘The person who phoned to you.’ Her thin, yellowish face looked so drawn and tired, and her voice was so languid that Maurice felt that he dared not question her. She drew him into a little ill-lit hall and bent her long neck – yellow and grubby above her blue and white striped shirt – down towards him. Her large dark eyes were vacant rather than sad. Her breath came scented but a little sour as she whispered into his face. ‘I’d better give you all the gen before you go in,’ she said, and pointing towards the door at their side. ‘She’s in there.’
Maurice felt able to assert himself. ‘Is the doctor with her?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Miss Cherrill replied a little petulantly. ‘He was dining in Putney, but he’s on his way.’
‘But surely,’ Maurice cried, ‘there was some doctor nearer.’
‘I only know Dr Waters,’ Miss Cherrill replied. ‘She doesn’t seem to have a doctor of her own.’ Her languid voice became quite sharp with disapproval. ‘So naturally I had to send for mine. He’s always been very good with my anaemia and he’s a very understanding man.’
‘I don’t know what has happened,’ Maurice said, cutting through her petulance with a certain hauteur.
‘Well, I couldn’t very well say everything on the phone, could I?’ Miss Cherrill was quite annoyed. ‘She doesn’t want Mr Morello and everybody else involved.’
‘Where is my uncle?’ Maurice asked.
‘Oh!’ Miss Cherrill said scornfully, ‘if we knew that…. She’s comfortable enough now. I kept walking her up and down the room at first, I thought I had to keep her awake, she was so dozey, but Dr Waters said she hadn’t taken enough to make it serious and in any case with aspirins …’
‘So she has tried to commit suicide.’
‘I told you so,’ Miss Cherrill said angrily.
‘I didn’t quite understand.’
‘Well, you can see the telephone’s in the hall. She asked me not to bring everybody into it. Morello’s room’s only down there.’ She pointed along the hall. ‘I don’t know them,’ she spoke quite loudly in her annoyance. ‘I heard her crying. My room’s next door. It went on for ages so I went in.’
‘You’ve been very good,’ Maurice said. ‘Thank you.’
‘It was lucky I was washing my hair,’ Miss Cherrill replied – ‘I nearly always go out of a Wednesday. Besides, it’s not often anything happens in life, is it?’
Maurice felt disgusted by his own emotions expressed from another mouth, so he said, ‘I think I’d better go in and see her.’
‘Of course,’ Miss Cherrill said, ‘someone ought to be very stern with her. I told her myself that it could have meant a police case, and would do now if I hadn’t had a word with Dr Waters. Not that he probably won’t be pretty sharp with her himself, I expect. She’s got to be frightened.’ All Miss Cherrill’s sympathy, even her pleasure at events out of the ordinary were dissipating now that someone else was taking over: she was very tired, she was going out the next evening and her hair was still filthy. ‘Well,’ she said in final tones, ‘I’m glad there’s somebody else here she knows at last. She’s still very weepy and a bit dazed. She’s been awfully sick, you know.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Maurice, ‘that she doesn’t know me at all. We’ve never met.’ Miss Cherrill stared at him in disgust.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose it’s all right. You’re very young, aren’t you? But it’s only someone to sit with her. And, anyway, she doesn’t seem to have any real people.’ She opened Sylvia’s door and peered in. ‘She’s all right for you to come in,’ she said, and then her refined petulance leaving her for a moment, ‘The smell of sick isn’t too bad, is it? I’ve drenched the room in eau-de-Cologne.’ She whispered loudly and with relish. Maurice said nothing; even the faintest smell of vomit made his stomach heave in protest.
Apart from the double bed in the corner and one broken-down, hair-oil-stained armchair, the room seemed as bare as it was large. The only dressing-table was made from something that looked like an inverted packing-case. On it were crowded lotions, creams and powders; above it hung some home-made contraption that had brought the electricity by means of a profusion of wires from its lonely eminence in the centre of the high ceiling. The walls were cream-distempered and dirty; someone had started to cover one of them with a cheap ‘modernistic’ wallpaper. Over an old towel-horse hung a black skirt, a white muslin blouse, stockings and underwear. There were books and magazines in scattered heaps on the matting-covered floor; an uncovered typewriter crowded, with a portable gramophone and records, the small top of a rickety varnished bedside table. On the walls were pinned, in profuse disorder, Victor’s drawings, giving the room the appearance of a school art exhibition. In the bed Sylvia lay. Against the blue whiteness of her face the bed linen showed grey, and the pillow-case shone greasy under her thick but dirty fair hair.
Despite all the pallor and the grubbiness, however, she looked so young and delicious to Maurice – especially so much younger than he had expected, no older perhaps than he was – that he was unable to speak and he felt the giddiness and trembling of the legs which lust always brought to his repressed body. Her eyes seemed to him extraordinarily sensual under their drowsing, half closed, red lids; her white cheeks were nevertheless plump about their high pommets and her heavy lips were half opened in a Greuze-like pout. She looked altogether like some eighteenth-century print of a young dying harlot – ostensibly a morality, in fact a bait for prurient eyes.
Maurice felt embarrassedly that Miss Cherrill’s eyes were upon him, putting his manhood to the test. He summoned all his wits to find something to say – something that would mark his authority. Before he could find words, however, Sylvia’s sobbing swelled to convulsive breathing and then bu
rst into a loud, hysterical weeping – the hideous, uncontrolled crying of a frightened, spoilt child. With children Maurice knew himself to be powerless.
Miss Cherrill looked at him for a moment, then she walked over and shook Sylvia roughly. ‘Stop that noise at once,’ she said. ‘You’ll look a fool if the doctor finds you like this.’ Her action had no effect except that Sylvia hit out at her flat bosom.
‘Go away,’ she cried. ‘Go away all of you. I won’t see you or your bloody doctor.’
It seemed to Maurice that if he could do nothing with Sylvia, he could at least order Miss Cherrill about. ‘I think you’d better leave us,’ he said.
‘I’m sure I’ve no wish to stay,’ Miss Cherrill replied. ‘This has been a lesson to me, I can tell you.’
Maurice opened the door for her. ‘Thank you very much for all you have done,’ he said, but she went without looking at him.
He stood for a moment staring at Sylvia. He was embarrassed at the pleasure her crying brought to him. It was not, however, his first intimation of the quirks of sexual desire. He hastened to efface the disturbing emotion with redoubled kindness. ‘I should like very much to help you if I can.’ The words when they came seemed very inadequate and stiffly formal; their effect on Sylvia however, was immediate.
‘Get out of here, get out of here,’ she screamed. ‘I want to be left alone.’
The request seemed to Maurice so reasonable that he was about to walk out, when Sylvia leaned over the side of the bed and, picking up a slipper from the floor, she threw it at his head. Her half-doped aim was feebly wide of the mark. Nevertheless, it produced a strange effect on Maurice; he walked very deliberately over to the bed and smacked Sylvia’s face. Then he kissed her clumsily and excitedly on the mouth. Her breath, sour through the eau-de-Cologne fumes, checked his excitement. The whole chain of his behaviour was so surprising to him that he just sat on the bed and stared not at Sylvia but slightly over her head.
‘You look like a fish,’ she said. She was not crying now, but he realized that her ordinary speaking voice was strangely husky.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I came here to help you.’
‘You do,’ she said.
To Maurice her strangely direct but slightly goofy manner recalled so much that he had heard in the theatre. If he had met neither the tragedy nor even the melodrama for which he had been prepared, here surely at least was English comedy at its best. He tried to forget the appearance of the room. Decor was after all an overrated aspect of the stage. He, too, must be laconic, off hand, bohemian, modern.
‘Why did you do it?’ he asked.
The question, alas, only brought on crying so violent that he could hardly hear himself speak. ‘You’ll only bring Miss Chertill back,’ he shouted.
‘She’s an interfering cow,’ Sylvia sobbed. ‘I hate her.’
‘She’s been very kind, I should have thought.’
‘She wasn’t, she just wanted to gloat.’
‘Oh! please,’ Maurice cried, ‘don’t let’s discuss that. Can’t you tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Why should I?’ Sylvia asked, ‘I don’t know you.’
This, however, seemed unreasonable, so Maurice said, ‘Why did you get Miss Cherrill to ring up my grandmother if you didn’t want our help?’
This again set Sylvia crying. ‘You think I didn’t mean to do it. You think I got frightened. That’s what you’ll tell Victor, isn’t it? It’s easy to say someone is just a hysteric.’ And when he made no answer, ‘Go on, that’s what you think, isn’t it?’ she cried.
It was, in fact, what Maurice was thinking, as far as he could in her presence; but as he had had no experience of hysterics, he did not feel fully justified in making the judgement; and, in any case, if she was, it was surely most important to calm her, since both shaking and slapping which he had always supposed to be the sovereign remedies had failed. ‘I think you must be very unhappy,’ he said, ‘and if I can help you I should like to do so.’ It was not perhaps the high purpose in life which his generation was seeking, but it was a sincere wish.
It did, indeed, also succeed in calming Sylvia a little. ‘I’m in such a mess,’ she said, ‘such a terrible mess. I’ve let myself love a man who’s a liar, a real hopeless liar. And that’s a terrible thing to do!’ She announced this gravely as one of the profound, the ultimate truths of life. ‘He says there isn’t someone else,’ she said, ‘but I know better. I know her name. It’s Hilda. Isn’t it awful?’ She began once more to sob.
Maurice could not feel this so deeply, but he said, ‘It’s not a very nice name certainly.’
Sylvia immediately began to pound on his leg with her small clenched fists. ‘Oh, you silly little fool,’ she shouted, ‘Victor’s left me. Can’t you understand? He’s left me. All Thursday I guessed he was going and I said to him, “Victor, if you don’t love me any more, well then tell me. I can take it,” I said. But he just smiled, smiled to madden me. “You want me to get mad at you,” I said, “so that you can have your excuse. Well, I’m not going to do it. I can take the truth,” I told him. Well,’ she cried, turning suddenly on Maurice, ‘if I am hard and tough before I should be, what made me that way? What’s life done for little Sylvia Wright?’
If she had intended an answer to this vital question, Maurice was not to hear it, for at that moment there was a noise of braking outside the house, of voices raised, of bells rung. Among the voices Maurice could hear his grandmother’s. He moved to the door, wishing that he could kiss Sylvia again before Mrs Liebig came on the scene.
‘You can’t even bother to listen to me and yet you ask me how it happened. I think you are despicable,’ Sylvia said.
It was true that he had ceased listening to her as soon as a rival noise came to attract his attention, but then her torrent of words had been so sudden and so uncontrolled.
‘You think because I’ve been in prison …’
‘I knew nothing about that,’ Maurice interrupted. ‘But in any case I can’t let my grandmother stand out there for ever.’
When he came into the hall, a little old woman in a dressing-gown was making her way crabwise and very slowly down the stairs. ‘Everyone’s in such a hurry nowadays,’ she said, ‘I’m coming as quickly as I can.’
‘I think they’re ringing for me,’ Maurice said.
‘Well, I didn’t suppose they were ringing for me,’ the old woman replied, but she began slowly and with heavy dragging of her feet to go back up the stairs.
Before Maurice could get to the front door, however, another door at the end of the passage opened and a plump, dark young man, also in a dressing-gown, stuck his head out. ‘If that ringing’s for you,’ he said, ‘I should be obliged if you’d answer it quickly.’ Before Maurice could answer, he added, ‘If you’re connected with Mrs Liebig I may as well tell you now that I have the whole matter under review.’ The door closed again and he was gone.
When Maurice opened the front door he found a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in evening dress standing on the step. He was smoking a pipe and looked, Maurice thought, like a naval officer. There was no sign of Mrs Liebig.
‘Liebig?’ asked the man shortly. It was clear that he found the name unpleasant to pronounce.
‘Are you Dr Waters?’ Maurice asked; he had already resented the delay in the doctor’s arrival sufficiently to pronounce his name with equal distaste.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dr Waters impatiently. ‘I’d better see this young woman as soon as possible.’
‘I’m her nephew,’ Maurice announced himself. ‘I think she’s all right now.’
‘That’s really for me to decide, old chap. It’s far from what Miss Cherrill said. I suppose she’s with the girl.’
‘No,’ Maurice said, ‘she’s gone up to her room.’
Dr Waters turned and grinned boyishly, ‘Well, I dare say we can get over that little loss,’ he said. ‘Lead the way, old
chap, will you?’
Maurice indicated Sylvia’s door. ‘If you don’t mind I think I ought to look for my grandmother. I heard her voice outside.’
‘There’s an old girl knocking daylight out of a taxi-driver,’ Dr Waters said, and he knocked on Sylvia’s door. Maurice, wondering if the doctor were drunk, went out into the darkness.
There indeed was Mrs Liebig arguing with a taxi-driver. She had reacted to the emergency by putting on a pair of royal blue slacks, a short fur coat and a cyclamen silk scarf wound turbanwise around her head. It was the costume in which she had braved the air raids, but as Maurice’s memory did not go back to this time, he felt only acute embarrassment at her appearance.
When she saw her grandson, she called raucously, ‘Well, it’s all right, my dear, he’s going to wait.’ She came up the steps puffing and grumbling. ‘What do they think we are?’ she asked. ‘Paupers? “You’ll get good money,” I told him. Ring for another taxi? What does he mean? I’ll pay him to wait. I’ve got the money. “Ring up and perhaps there aren’t any more taxis,” I told him.” I’m an old woman!” I told him. “Do you think I want to wait about all night in a place like this?’”
Maurice said sharply, ‘Sylvia’s been very ill. The doctor’s with her now. She tried to kill herself but she only made herself sick.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Mrs Liebig said, ‘Victor should never have picked up with her.’
‘You’ve no need to worry about him,’ Maurice said bitterly. ‘He’s left her for some other woman.’ And when he saw that his grandmother was about to defend her son, he interrupted violently, ‘He’s lucky not to have a murder on his hands.’
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 30
