She sat down at the table, her hands clasped in front of her, worrying already about his homecoming and how long he would be likely to endure it; how long it might take him to get home at all.
‘Thanks, Kit.’
‘Don’t mention it. I keep on telling you I’m a decent sort of chap.’
‘Yes – you are.’
He went on talking, telling her easy, uncomplicated, amusing things about the Crown, the Kellers, Faxby’s mayoral family, the new blonde Arnold Crozier had discovered selling newspapers behind a station bookstall and who was reputedly costing him more than his Rolls Royce to maintain.
‘Here – drink your tea. And talking of flappers, I suppose you’ve heard the Swanfield wedding is off? For the time being at any rate. Poor Roger Timms. Appendicitis, they’re saying. A bad attack. A big operation. They say he’ll be laid up for some time. So Polly’s on the loose again.’
‘Hardly. They’ll watch her.’
‘I dare say. Now come on, Claire – drink your tea.’
‘Do you think he’ll be – all right? Euan I mean?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
Sitting down beside her he put one large square capable hand over both hers – a small, but in its way complete, possession.
‘Probably not. But there’s nothing you can do for him, Claire.’
‘Oh – I know that.’
‘And since we’re on the subject – why don’t you move over to the hotel now that he’s gone? Better for everybody I’d say.’
‘Would you, Kit?’
‘I would.’
‘I’ll think about it …’
The pressure of his hand increased slightly.
‘I want you there, you know.’
‘Yes.’
She looked up and warmly, quizzically, he smiled at her ‘I told you one day I might stop feeling like the son of a cook.’
‘And have you?’
‘No. I’ve done better than that. I’ve learned to be proud of it.’
Chapter Twenty
That Roger Timms had almost lost his life was not disputed. The attack had been ferocious, the operation highly dangerous – his mother believed she would never get over it – while his own recovery to good health continued sure, perhaps, but slow.
Too slow for Miriam.
‘Perhaps we could have the wedding just before Christmas?’ she suggested hopefully, wanting Polly off her hands by then.
Edith Timms did not think so.
‘Roger is far more delicate than he looks.’
But to Polly, as she sat by his bedside on what should have been her wedding day, he looked like nothing so much as a slightly perspiring whale washed ashore in red and blue striped pyjamas and amiably gasping for air: lacking the sense, she thought, to know that he was choking to death. Glancing at her watch – an engagement present from Roger in platinum and diamonds – she realized two things, that, had it not been for the intervention of his appendix, he would have become her legal husband ten minutes ago, and that apart from the time spent in his car, when he was either driving or trying to kiss her and unfasten her blouse, she had never been alone with him.
And at no point, either during those clumsy, easily called-to-order attempts on her virtue, or among the crowded excitements of cocktail bars, nightclubs, houseparties, had they ever had a conversation.
‘How are you feeling now, Roger?’
‘Oh – getting along nicely.’
He said the same thing to her every day.
‘I’ve brought you some chocolates.’
What else could she bring him? What else would interest him or please him?
‘You could give me a kiss, Polly.’
She smiled. And shivered. Had he become her husband, ten minutes ago, she would have been obliged to give him much more than that.
She went home and stared at her wedding dress, hanging in splendid isolation in a special wardrobe. It was her own design, the most wonderful Faxby had ever seen, except, of course, that no one, not even the maids at High Meadows, not even the bridesmaids, had seen it yet in case its impact should be spoiled by gossip. She had given hours of thought to each floating panel, some of them stiff with seed pearls, others gauzy, diaphanous, taking wing on the slightest breeze so that she would appear to be moving in the centre of a jewelled cloud.
The bride of the season. The most beautiful bride of any season drifting down a red carpeted aisle, mighty organs playing, to a bridegroom she knew to be Roger, had to be Roger podgy, amiable, slow – but who, in her mind’s eye, so easily became the hard, lithe young warrior who had not even cared whether or not he broke her heart.
Had he done so? There had seemed no point in thinking about it. He had left Faxby shortly after her mother’s party. She had got engaged to Roger. Today she would have married him. It had all been arranged. No doubt it would be arranged again.
But in the meantime there was Roger’s convalescence to be got through, the tedious business of sitting at his bedside trying to think of something to say, trying not to look at him too often since the sight of his plump body in those loosely-fitting pyjamas made her think of herself in bed beside him, having made her promises to honour and obey.
And she did not like it.
She arrived a little late the following afternoon, later still the day after.
‘My dear.’ Edith Timms immediately took her to task for it. ‘Roger has been fretting for you.’
She had seen in Edith Timms the mother she believed she had wanted. But she was Roger’s mother, after all.
‘Roger darling – here is Polly for you. I feel sure she won’t keep you waiting again.’
Here is Polly for you. Once she had given him a pony, a Persian kitten, a bicycle, a motor car. Now – prettily wrapped in her best silk nightie – here is Polly.
Fixing her eyes on the sparkle of her diamond ring, she smiled – and shivered.
Claire wrote to Miriam expressing regret at the postponement of the wedding and offering the information – of no particular interest to Miriam – that Dorothy was now comfortably installed in Faxby Park. She sent a basket of fruit to Roger Timms, a short note to Polly, and then, without a word to anyone but her mother, gave up her flat in Mannheim Crescent and moved to the staff wing of the Crown, a small bedroom and sitting room next to Mrs Tarrant’s and directly below the very comfortable attic flat Kit had arranged for himself.
Dorothy, who still knew exactly what Edward would have thought about it, was not certain whether she approved or disapproved herself.
‘It means I’m always on the spot, which can be important. It means I don’t have to think about cooking my own meals or lighting fires.’
It also meant she would be closer than ever to ‘that man’. ‘I don’t sleep with him, mother,’ she said bluntly.
‘Oh.’ Dorothy looked surprised. ‘Do you think you will?’ Had Dorothy really said that? Edward – poor old soul – would have been horrified.
‘I don’t know, mother.’ Claire was delighted. ‘Do you think I should?’
‘Just don’t get pregnant,’ said Dorothy, feeling oddly wise and rather peculiar but suddenly very sure of herself. ‘That’s what I think.’
Claire had no reason now to see the Swanfields. Only Toby still came to the Crown as he had always done for his leisurely luncheons, lingering until long past teatime, more often than not, over his Napoleon brandy, offering snippets of information which she received with a flickering smile, swiftly rekindled each time it went out. Polly, alas – clearly Toby thought it a pity – was still chained to her fiancé’s bedside by command of their respective mothers. Eunice was busy with the children, fussing over Simon’s examination results – or lack of them, that is – and positively fuming because Benedict seemed a lot less than keen to take Justin into the business. One quite saw her point of course. It was a family business and Justin, as Aaron Swanfield’s eldest grandchild, had certain rights. So Eunice was insisting, at any rate, and certainly, if
his Uncle Benedict refused to employ him, nobody else would. Eunice had even tried to call a board meeting to get Benedict overruled, but of course there’d been no chance of it. All she’d managed to do was upset herself and make things rather more awkward than usual for Toby at the office for a day or two. Benedict had even told him to keep his wife in order which was pretty rich, after all, coming from a man whose own wife spent her time traipsing around the town rescuing young girls from sin, with a bottle of gin inside her and another in her handbag. She’d have been drunk in charge a dozen times over by now if she hadn’t been Mrs Benedict Swanfield. But Toby, of course, hadn’t thought of that while Benedict was berating him and freely admitted he would have been too scared to say it even if he had.
Good Lord – was it really four o’clock? Toby shrugged frail shoulders and smiled. Not much point in going back to the office now, he supposed. Not much point in going home either, with Justin lounging about all over the place sulking because his mother couldn’t get him a job as a managing director or a cabinet minister or something, and Simon bickering with Eunice because neither of them could work out how to do his sums, and the little boys making one hell of a racket now that Eunice had got rid of their nanny and decided to look after them herself. No – he wouldn’t go home. Not yet. No point really, with Eunice so set on protecting him from the boys’ bad behaviour that it was quite a strain pretending he didn’t know all about it. Particularly these days when Justin – and Simon too he supposed – had gone a step further than pinching the loose change from his pockets and had started helping themselves to his silk shirts and ties and cravats which Eunice kept on frantically replacing. Poor Eunice. She’d do better to buy herself a new dress. But if he suggested it – well, he’d tried once or twice and she wouldn’t have it. Wearing herself out of course. Wearing him out too if it came to that. Sometimes his heart bled for her. Not much use in that either. No, he wouldn’t go home. He’d sit in the lounge for a while and glance at the newspapers, if that was all right? Quiet as a mouse he’d be. In nobody’s way. And then, when MacAllister opened, he’d have a Martini or two in the cocktail bar, although even that didn’t seem the same somehow – these days.
Claire realized that he meant ‘without Polly’.
The postponement of Polly’s wedding had also put off the ordeal of seeing Benedict again, although Nola still slipped into the Crown from time to time for a quick drink before dashing off to analyse the dreams and, therefore, pinpoint the neuroses of some harassed and penniless mother of twelve whose main obsession would probably turn out to be how to borrow a shilling or two to pay the rent.
The holiday in Italy had not been a great success. Nola had embarked upon it as upon a crusade, in search of the maternal instinct which her own self-analysis, conducted in accordance with Freudian practice as laid down by Miss Drew, had taught her that she did not naturally possess. Her intentions had been of the noblest and the best. She wished to sacrifice herself entirely for her children, even if it meant returning to a husband who made her feel uneasy and ashamed. She knew he did not like her. She hoped he never would. It was her way of walking barefoot on hot ashes in penitence for her infanticide. She followed him, head bowed, through Rome and Venice, as extreme in her obedience as in everything else. She followed him through Florence and Pisa, as silent as her increasingly bewildered sons. ‘Where would you like to go now?’ he asked her. Once, only a year ago, she would have gone rushing off alone to Vienna to find an analyst of the Freudian school and lay herself, an ardent disciple, at his feet. The thought entered her head and went out again. She was too tired.
‘Anywhere,’ she said.
‘Home?’
Thank God. These self-contained, critical boys did not want her sacrifice. They wanted – yes – money, that was it. Like herself they had been brought up to understand affection in terms of what it cost, and it was their father who held the purse-strings, their father who paid for all this first-class travel, these luxurious hotels, this rich living, as her own father had done. She saw, somewhat dimly, having dined rather richly herself, that Christian and even Conrad, who was deeper – her own son, she’d thought – admired this in Benedict. What did they admire in her? It struck her that she was an embarrassment to them, a person for whom, should they ever become articulate enough, they would feel bound to apologize. And what better service could an embarrassment perform than remove itself? She went down to the Arno that night rather thinking she might drown herself but, confused by Chianti and Cointreau, did not immediately notice that the river was dry, returning to the hotel not as some cold, dead Ophelia in the arms of pall-bearers, but on her own exceedingly muddy feet.
Even suicide, it seemed, was more difficult than she had expected and by the time she had scraped the mud from her shoes and the hem of her dress and then, realizing the futility of the task, had thrown them away, she had lost the urge to try it again in any case.
‘Home,’ said Benedict, looking as if his perseverance too was deserting him.
Home. But not High Meadows. Going at once to All Saints’ Passage she rushed straight into the cubby-hole of an office occupied by Miss Drew, completely ignoring the several dozen people who had been waiting, some of them all morning, on the benches outside.
‘I am quite desperate,’ she said.
‘Oh dear –’ Miss Drew, accustomed only to desperation among the lower classes – ‘ladies’usually have been brought up with the good taste not to mention it – looked startled.
‘I thought, if I could just devote myself to them that I’d get over it. But they wouldn’t let me. I got drunk and fell in the river and they were polite to me. I was supposed to be committing suicide. I couldn’t even manage that.’
She burst noisily into tears and Miss Drew, finding herself unable to cope with hysteria in a woman wearing fox furs and emeralds rather than the more usual apron and blanket shawl, called on the stalwart Miss Pickles for assistance who, looking Nola up and down, pronounced at once, ‘The trouble is, my dear, that you haven’t enough to do. Work is the thing, you know. Care to give it a try?’
They set her to filing their papers to begin with until Mr Kilmartin voiced timorous doubts as to her ‘suitability’ –‘These are confidential documents, ladies, containing the most intimate details of our clients’ lives, not to be bandied about in a cocktail bar’ – after which they released her, in small doses, upon the clients themselves who, in general, were quite happy to tell anybody anything.
Not their ‘best’clients, of course, not the ‘interesting’cases, not the girls who were best responding to Miss Pickles’ methods of scouring front doorsteps with pumice stone or baking ginger parkin, not the tortuous, emotional webs Miss Drew was so expert at untangling; not the girl in St Jude’s Terrace who was in love with her mother’s husband; not the musician at the end of Taylor Street who had developed hysterical paralysis of the hand which had been convicted of a minor forgery: not the bold young harlots who might, one never knew, turn ‘theatrical’and whose conversation, even now, was entertaining: not those who challenged or intrigued Miss Drew, nor any of those who, in the opinion of both these ladies, might, with careful handling, be encouraged to adopt better ways.
But Nola, perhaps, might care to interest herself, not in the stars of Faxby’s criminal community, but in certain minor members of its chorus, the hopeless cases who, being incorrigible or incurable, could not really be made worse by anything Nola did to them; the dull cases; the pettier of the petty thieves; the commoner of the common prostitutes; the inarticulate, the sub-normally intelligent who – after so many years of them – frustrated Miss Pickles and bored Miss Drew.
Nola was not ideal. They were well aware of it. But they were overworked, hardly paid at all. And she was willing.
‘Mrs Swanfield, would you be so kind as to deliver this dear old gentleman to the Salvation Army?’ The man was abusive, had a most suspicious tendency to scratch, and filled Nola’s car for hours afterwards with an odour of unw
ashed skin and sweat-soaked, very probably urine-soaked cloth which stung her eyes. When he asked her for ‘beer money’meaning a few pence at the most, she gave him a five-pound note, having nothing less in her purse, with the result that he walked away from the Salvation Army Hostel and never came back again.
‘Nola dear, could you be a love and take this old granny to wherever it is she lives? She’s had a drop too much, you see, and if the police should pick her up – for singing or shouting or for just falling asleep in doorways again – then the magistrates have faithfully promised to send her to gaol.’
‘Granny’who looked at least ninety and as frail as a half-drowned sparrow, was not only drunk but could not remember her address.
‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Drew when Nola brought her back to All Saints’Passage. ‘Just drive her around the town a little – it might jog her memory. If not then – well, I don’t suppose the Salvation Army will take her after last time, so you’ll have to drop her off somewhere, as far from the police station as you can.’
Neurotics were Miss Drew’s speciality. Not vagrants, who took their neuroses away with them, nor drunkards who had forgotten theirs.
‘Do the best you can, dear,’ she said, never for one moment expecting that Nola would take the old woman to the kitchen at High Meadows, causing what would have been a complete walk-out of the staff had Benedict not put a stop to it, and hysterics in Polly and Miriam who went about for days afterwards searching the entire house for fleas.
‘Mrs Swanfield – could you just talk to this woman?’ That seemed safe enough. But the woman in question was voluble, psychopathic, making up a new life story every day of the week, boring but harmless to Miss Pickles and Miss Drew who had met the type before and knew all she really wanted was an audience to play to. But so plausible, so fascinating to Nola, who was so utterly convinced by the image presented to her of a gentlewoman down on her luck, that she took her to lunch at the Crown, offending Councillor Redfearn who happened to be at the next table and had once ‘sent her down’for something or other, and considerably embarrassing Kit when it was discovered that all the toilet soap and towels and somebody’s chinchilla wrap were missing from the powder room.
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