When she turned into Cheshunt Avenue she realized that the mist that had hung undispersed since morning was thickening somewhat. She could not see to the end of the road, and it seemed like a cul-de-sac. On each side stretched two rows of quiet houses behind dirty hedges: all had secretive lace curtains and some had panels of stained glass let into the front door. They had iron gates and perhaps a yard of earth in front of them, now covered with snow. Like the rest of the district, it was not quite genteel and not quite common: through one window she saw a man in shirt-sleeves drinking tea, and outside a second stood a bicycle with a ladder tied to it, and a small signboard advertising a painter and decorator. A third had a card in the window announcing a make of corsets.
She rattled at the knocker of number fifty. After a while someone came down the stairs that rose inside flush from the front door, and opened it.
“Is Miss Parbury in, please?”
“Why, yes,” said the lady. “I’m her.”
Katherine had been wondering what she would look like, and was rather disappointed to find she looked ordinary. She was twenty-eight or thirty years old, and spoke with local accent. Rather tall, with a rosy complexion and fair hair, she looked like a large tea-rose gone well to seed.
She held up the handbag. “Is this yours, then?”
“Oh!” Miss Parbury, who had been holding the door defensively, as if suspecting that Katherine was canvassing for a refugee’s charity, now released it in relief. “That is good of you. I couldn’t think—but come in. Yes, please do. Everything is rather untidy——”
Katherine stepped into the house and followed Miss Parbury as she scuttled into the back room. The air smelt of cooking.
“This room—I would have asked you into the front, but there’s no fire, and it’s so bitter, isn’t it?” Miss Parbury was snatching things up, newspapers, and a library book with a knitting-needle to mark her place. She whisked away some object Katherine’s eye could not catch, and bundled some sewing into a bureau whose lid already would not shut. “Do sit down. This is good of you, to come all this way. Everything is rather——” She completed her extempore change of scene, and motioned Katherine to the armchair on one side of the small coal fire. Katherine sat down, undoing the belt of her coat.
“Oh, I’m so pleased you’ve brought it back, I was in such a state … Until I came to pay my bus fare, I didn’t notice I’d taken the wrong one. It was silly of me. And I knew I should put someone else to no end of trouble, I was so worried … I’m always doing these silly things. It was in the chemist’s, was it?”
Katherine nodded.
“I was wondering how it happened. I had been shopping, you know, and I was just about to go home when I remembered I hadn’t got some things for mother, so I was going up that little street—what is it called, now? I forget—and I noticed the shop and went in. After I’d paid—it must have been after—I put my bag on the counter, and took the things out of my basket to make more room, because I’d had a busy morning and I was just loaded—and I dropped a box of drawing pins and they went all over the floor.” Miss Parbury laughed at herself. “So what with all that, and knowing if I missed the bus it would make me late, particularly on Saturday with all the crowds, and then with the dinner waiting, I just rushed away as fast as I could, and I must have taken your bag by mistake, not thinking.”
“Not my bag,” said Katherine. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”
“Oh, I see. But you were in the shop, weren’t you? I remember you, now I come to think.”
“I bought some aspirins.”
“Yes, you did, I remember. But how did you know who I was—who it belonged to, I mean?” said Miss Parbury. She took up the thin little poker that hung from an ornamental fireirons-stand and prodded a coal uselessly.
“The chemist said your name and address were in it. He told me where you lived.”
“How lucky—because there’s nothing in your bag—in the other one, I mean. There was nothing I could have done, except perhaps take it back there to the shop. I was in a stew about it. Still, all’s well that ends well, though I shouldn’t say that, should I?—the cause of all the trouble. I’ll fetch your bag, it’s upstairs. And you will have a cup of tea, won’t you?”
“Well, I don’t——”
“Oh yes! But you must. It’s such a very cold day. I won’t be a jiffy.”
Miss Parbury went out, and Katherine heard her scamper up the stairs in her carpet-slippers. She was a quaint, sloppy person, and Katherine had been wondering increasingly how any such letter could have been written to her. Because it seemed so incongruous. In her woollen jumper and cardigan she was breathless and rather grotesque; her pale eyes bulged somewhat and her neck was too long. She was one of the people who do not look right till they are nearly fifty, when their eccentric appearance harmonizes with the caricaturing onset of age. But now, for she could only be thirty at the most, vestiges of youth still clung about her, and while she did not look as if she had ever been pretty, she still kept a gaucheness of manner that would have been suitable only in a very young girl. It made her laughable.
Left alone, Katherine looked round. Sometimes, when her own attic depressed her, she thought for comfort how miserable she would be living with a family, and looking round now she knew she sometimes forgot how ugly the English houses were. This room was overcrowded with gimcrack furniture, and the furniture overcrowded with trifling ornaments and photographs, fancy matchbox stands and little woolly dogs made of pipecleaners. On the wall were a few framed, coloured photographs, extraordinarily unpleasant to look at. On the small square table was a table-centre with a basket of wild flowers, somehow dried and coloured into permanency. But Katherine looked for other things than these. She wondered first who else lived there. There was nothing masculine in the room, nothing cross-grained; no pipes, or bottles of lighter-fluid, or textbooks on building construction or pigeons. In fact apart from the one Miss Parbury was reading, there were no books in the room except a small shelf in the window, and this was filled with dreary rubbish, such as a Holiday Haunts for 1928. This gave the room a slack, soulless air. Through the window she could see a depressing yard, with a bucket standing in the snow, and a high wall. Who else lived in the house beside Miss Parbury? She had mentioned her mother. Perhaps they lived alone together. What could be her “point of view”?
She yawned, and leaned back in her easy chair, which was less comfortable than it looked. Very faintly she could hear music, as if a wireless set were playing in the next house. Miss Parbury came flopping downstairs and went into the kitchen, where she could be heard rattling spoons and saucers and singing what sounded like a hymn. There was a small book of Common Prayer lying on the sideboard bound in crimson. Eventually she came in with a large tray, on which were two large cups of tea and another brown handbag.
“Here we are,” she said, beaming. “And here’s your bag. I hope your friend won’t mind, but I had to borrow fourpence from her to get home. Here is the money.” She gave Katherine the bag and four pennies from the pocket of her cardigan.
“Thank you,” said Katherine, slipping them in and snapping it shut.
“Now we can have a quiet cup of tea before you go out again. It was really very good of you to come at all.” She gave Katherine a cup, strong, and, as she discovered at the first sip, virulently sugared. “Have you far to go? Whereabouts do you live?”
“Oh, right in the city,” said Katherine. She instinctively disliked saying where she lived. “I have a sort of flat.”
“Oh, have you? I believe it’s frightfully difficult to find rooms these days. Do you share it at all?”
“No. I’ve been here about nine months. I came from London.”
“From London! It must have been terrible there while the raids were on.”
“It could have been worse. London’s a big place.”
“Oh, but I’m terrified. As soon as those sirens start, my bones turn to water. That awful moaning.” She drank some more t
ea as if to steady herself.
They talked for a little while about the war, and the circumstances that had brought Katherine to England. Miss Parbury was a very sympathetic listener. Katherine noticed she wore no rings on her fingers.
“I think it’s dreadful,” she said at the finish. “And so you just have to start all over again, in a foreign country—start a new life altogether!”
Katherine moved the spoon in her saucer. “Perhaps so.”
“When you think of it, we’ve nothing to grumble at in England, at least, I suppose I should speak for myself.” Miss Parbury smiled brightly. “A home and enough to eat. And I’ve lost no-one.”
Katherine agreed subduedly.
“Of course, it’s been terrible,” said Miss Parbury. She cocked her head as if thoughtful. “But if it had happened differently … I mean, I expect you won’t think so, but wouldn’t it have been rather—well—fun—to come to England?”
“I had been before,” said Katherine. Two hours and five minutes after midday.
“Oh, had you? I only thought that it would be nice to be suddenly on one’s own—if there wasn’t a war, of course.”
“If there wasn’t a war, I shouldn’t be here.”
“Everything would be different, of course.”
Miss Parbury sighed.
“But to be on one’s own is very lonely,” said Katherine. “Don’t you agree?”
She said this as a kind of bait for whatever lay unrevealed in this depressing, bright room.
“I expect so,” said Miss Parbury, adding primly: “I’ve always lived at home.”
“Oh yes.” Angling in the dark, she said: “It isn’t like having a home of one’s own.”
Miss Parbury shook her head. She did not seem communicative on this. But later she said: “After Father died, I felt I had to look after Mother.”
“Yes, of course.” Katherine could still see no trace of any other person in the house. “Is she out now?”
Miss Parbury looked up, as if startled out of a train of thought. “Oh no, she’s upstairs. She’s ill.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Katherine prepared to abandon the subject. “I hope she’ll soon get better.”
“No, she’s an invalid.” Miss Parbury sounded a little impatient that Katherine did not understand.
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry.”
“When Father died,” said Miss Parbury flatly, after a pause, “she had a sort of stroke.” In the silence the wireless sounded still, now relaying a tango orchestra and she moved her head. “I think she likes to listen to the wireless,” she said with a return to cheerfulness. “I think it cheers her up.”
Katherine nodded vaguely.
“But the neighbours complain sometimes,” said Miss Parbury, with the faintest indignation. “Of course, she does have it on all day. Though as I say, it’s different when someone’s ill, isn’t it? You have to make allowances.”
“Yes, of course.”
Miss Parbury brooded a little.
“It is hard when a person’s ill,” said Katherine. “Won’t she ever get better?”
A shade had come over Miss Parbury’s face, as if speaking of sad things made her sad, in a childish way. Midway between youth and middle age as she was, her appearance called up both: it was easy to imagine her in ten years’ time, more withered, more wispy, the veins showing on the backs of her hands, perhaps wearing rimless spectacles; but all the same there were moments when she looked simply like an overgrown girl, in her flat-heeled slippers. From the gawkiness of youth she was passing to the grotesqueness of age, and at no point would she touch the handsomeness of maturity.
“No,” she said. “I’m afraid she won’t. Just after the war started she had another stroke. She can’t move now, it paralysed her right side. The doctor says she may live for some years yet. But eventually one will be fatal.”
She put her head on one side and stared at the grate.
“What does she do all the time?” said Katherine. “Can she read?”
“Oh dear no,” said Miss Parbury. From her decided tone Katherine might have suggested something far more unusual. “No, she doesn’t read now, though once she did…. She can’t, her mind sometimes wanders. One just has to be patient with her.”
“Wanders?” said Katherine, with misgiving.
“Oh, she’s all right some of the time. But sometimes she doesn’t know who I am.” Miss Parbury looked at Katherine as if willing to let her find this comical. “And she has sort of delusions. She thinks I’m trying to harm her—poison her food, and that kind of thing. The doctor says I mustn’t take any notice. But I don’t know what to do if she won’t eat what I give her.”
Katherine said nothing. The fire was burning sluggishly, as if resentful of the cold.
“And then she’ll say—oh, all sorts of funny things, like that Daddy comes at nights and talks to her. I often hear her talking in the night. Of course, she means no harm, but it’s not nice when there’s no-one in the house.” Miss Parbury spoke in a reasonable, slightly complaining voice, as if explaining why she was behind with her rent. She had an apologetic air. “She says he warns her that I’m trying to harm her. It’s just impossible to make her see reason, because she doesn’t know what she’s saying or doing. Once I was ill for a week and we had a nurse in. We had to, you see. And she tried to give the nurse all sorts of things—anything—spoons, vases, one of the clocks. Of course the nurse told me about it and didn’t take them. But after she’d gone I found she’d taken mother’s fur, a lovely fur I’d wrapped up in tissue and mothballs, one she wouldn’t ever have used again. Mother must have said she could have it. She wouldn’t answer when I asked her if she had.”
A coal spat suddenly. The room was dark enough to have the light on. Katherine said:
“But you mean you have to do everything by yourself?”
“She’s quite helpless.”
“Helpless,” repeated Katherine. “But with the work for you—it would be better if she were in a hospital,” she added, rebelling against this conspiracy to make Miss Parbury into a tragic personality, which she was not, being rather comic.
Miss Parbury said in a surprised voice:
“But there’s nothing she needs that I can’t——”
Katherine blinked. Miss Parbury had taken the point exactly the wrong way round. More gently she said:
“It would be easier for you.”
Miss Parbury seemed to consider the suggestion, though she must have thought of it many times before. She moved her head on her long neck, like a timid animal.
“No,” she said finally, “I couldn’t do it. These places, you know, they haven’t the consideration, and the nurses eat the things you send. She wouldn’t be happy there.”
“But it isn’t right, that you should have to be the one who suffers.” As Miss Parbury continued to look enquiringly at her, as if she had never heard this viewpoint, Katherine sought to be reasonable. “I think, if someone is entirely dependent on you, there’s something wrong somewhere. It shouldn’t be asked, or given.” And if she had listened to what she was saying, she would have visualized life and happiness like ration tokens, that once spent are never recovered, and are allotted equally to everyone. “When you make kindness a duty, everybody resents it—it’s such a mistake, I think.”
“One has to do what one can,” murmured Miss Parbury, “surely.”
“For a definite time, perhaps—three or six months. But for always—I should insist on a definite arrangement. It is always a mistake to be kind, because people are cross if you leave off then for a moment, and you are tied for life.”
“To do for the best,” Miss Parbury was excusing herself bewilderedly. It grew darker and their exchange died away in a mutter of Katherine’s protesting it was none of her business, having just thought that no doubt that there was not enough money to send the mother to a hospital: the dull light hid their faces. But Miss Parbury settled this as quickly as if she had heard it asked, saying in a voi
ce disclaiming personal implication:
“There is the money, of course. Father was in the navy and so there’s a pension, but it would cost too much to—I have been having to think that over, as I have a friend who suggested we become engaged, and that would make things very much more difficult. Then——”
“Then she would have to be taken care of.”
“Or live with us. That’s what I think the best, because you can’t ask an old person to make such a change, can you? But that doesn’t suit all parties. My friend is very strongly against that, and, really, I can see his point of view, because it’s always such an unsuccessful arrangement, isn’t it? But what I say is, it’s inevitable, and we should just have to make the best of it, that is, if we——”
“Well, and you are right, I think.”
“The only thing is,” said Miss Parbury, who, having started to tell the story because it oppressed her and because it showed that someone besides her mother needed her, was now quite wound up in the problem again and free from whatever embarrassment hindered her volatile spirit, “my friend says he is willing to help with what it would cost, sending her away.”
Katherine looked across the hearthrug to where she sat, oddly like an incarnation of some loved childish grotesquerie—Rhoda Rabbit or Lolly Flopears—and thought that she had heard nothing stranger than this, a man paying to have Miss Parbury with him always, and that man to be Anstey: and at this she happened to see both of them less as people than as the “other person” who is so necessary. Looking at her, still hearing the unexpected sentence, she glimpsed the undertow of peoples’ relations, two-thirds of which is without face, with only begging and lonely hands.
“And so,” she said interrogatively.
Miss Parbury laughed, self-reproachfully. “I’m silly,” she said. “I always have been. I know I’m silly, but, do you know, I can’t decide. I don’t like the idea, even now. It would be convenient, and so easy, and no-one could say anything very well, but I should never feel quite happy in my mind about it. It’s the real test, you know, isn’t it, when you feel: ‘I shouldn’t like it to be done to me.’”
A Girl in Winter Page 18
