by S. T. Haymon
The housekeeper’s voice was not exactly musical, but not negligible. Not at all like my father’s records of Tetrazzini and Galli-Curci, but not like the ladies who sang in charity concerts either. It was deep and powerful, a voice with teeth in it. It took the song by the throat and shook it, the way a terrier shakes a rat to show it who is master. Mesmerized by the sheer volume of sound I almost stopped playing, except that I was afraid to, especially when the singer advanced into the room with her slow massive gait that was like a statue moving; approached the piano and put her hands on my shoulders, her head pushed forward a little to peer at the text. Abandoning the melody line for the accompaniment pure and simple, I soldiered on, thinking how very different Indian love songs were from English ones.
‘Pale hands, pink-tipped, like lotus-buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would have rather felt you round my throat
Crushing out life than waving me farewell.’
Mrs Benyon’s breath, curling round my cheeks, smelled sweet, much too sweet for comfort. As she stood there, puffing it out over my shoulder I felt myself positively drowning in its dreadful sweetness, which was no perfume I recognized – that is to say, not lavender water, Parma violets nor eau de Cologne, nor that Evening in Paris scent Phyllis went in for and which I always felt – not that I would have dreamed of mentioning it – smelled like cat’s litter slightly the worst for wear. With that smell wafting about me, hitting the piano front which promptly batted it back into my face, I could easily have brought my tea up, except that I was hanged if I was going to be parted from the only decent meal that had come my way since coming to lodge at Chandos House.
I hurried to the end of the song as fast as I dared, and then stood up, dislodging the podgy hands from my shoulders as if by accident: full of a desperate admiration as I edged towards the french window, seeking air.
‘How marvellously you sing!’ I gasped, I gushed. ‘You ought to be in opera!’
‘Opera!’ Mrs Benyon looked as if I had insulted her. ‘I hope I got something better to do with my time.’
‘Do you sing in the church choir?’
‘I do not!’
‘The chapel, then?’ I persisted, unwilling to let go this possible key into the closed life of this closed woman. I hated not knowing about people.
‘I don’t sing anywhere!’
‘Except here,’ I corrected winsomely, my lungs recharged. ‘I’ll always be happy to accompany you.’
The housekeeper was looking annoyed. It was strange that such flat, immobile features could convey emotion, but they could, to perfection.
‘How many times I got to say I don’t sing anywhere, ever?’
‘But we just –’ I stammered.
‘But we just what?’
‘Sang. “Pale hands I loved” – you know –’ I managed feebly.
‘Pale hands I what?’ Mrs Benyon drew herself up and I saw that she too stuck out front and back like the old-fashioned ladies on the song sheets – except that you could tell by the look in her eyes, whatever the others might or might not have known, she knew all right whether she was coming or going.
Both at the same time, it wouldn’t have surprised me.
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Chapter Ten
On Saturday morning the sun shone, birds sang. The leaves outside my bedroom window quivered excitedly, or so it pleased me to imagine. ‘Food!’ I distinctly heard them rustling, as I hurried through my dressing. ‘Lovely food!’
I ran downstairs, anxious to put away my meagre breakfast without delay; get off to the city and on with the task of stocking my private larder. The thought of putting myself into a position where I no longer felt compelled to think about food all the time intoxicated me. I was high on hopes of, at last, contriving to fill the churning crater which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my innards. Mrs Benyon’s teas, during the week, had been extraordinarily variable in quantity, the magnificent opulence of the first afternoon never repeated, and subsequent teas ranging between fair and two desiccated triangles of bread without so much as a smidgeon of butter between them. I had given up trying to puzzle out whether it was some inadvertent blunder on my part which determined my allotment on any given day. Like Jehovah, and equally unknowable, the housekeeper at Chandos House was that which she was, stony as marble and unpredictable as Fate.
By the time the weekend actually came round I had, in my dreams, spent Alfred’s pound note twenty times over. Every idle moment had been taken up with a writing of lists, with a weighing of pros and cons of great moment. Penny for penny, did monkey nuts fill you up better than shortbreads? Were doughnuts to be preferred to sticky buns, and which of the two went stale first? Was chocolate, however delicious, a better buy than almond brittle which, given an iron determination, you could suck practically from one week to the next before the last sliver dissolved on the tongue? How long before apples went soggy and Cornish pasties grew mould? Would Dutch cheese, when Mrs Benyon came into my room to dust, give itself away by the smell?
My choice of cache being strictly limited, I had nominated the book box under the bed as my hiding-place. If I hid the food under a good thick layer of books, the housekeeper would never know.
Or would she? I decided, quite calmly, without any crass upsurge of anger, that if she did, I would kill her.
Tremulous with anticipation, I took my seat at the breakfast table; smiled into the smiling faces of Miss Locke and Miss Gosse. Miss Gosse was dressed in a green Aertex shirt and a white skirt, Miss Locke actually wore trousers. There was a different, a weekend, atmosphere – no school gong, as it were, lurking over the horizon, ready to sound off with its horrible, triumphant sound. Instead, leisure, pleasure, food. Food! It was going to be a lovely day.
Miss Gosse handed me my shilling pocket money, happy to do so, I could see, even though it wasn’t her own money she was giving away. Money seemed to make her less shy; the way, I had often noticed, it did with a lot of people. She informed me that Saturday, beginning at noon, was Mrs Benyon’s time off – that she had every Saturday afternoon, as well as alternate Sundays, when she had the whole day. It did not necessarily mean that on such days she left the house, the choice was hers: simply that, at such times, in or out, her services were unavailable under any circumstances. On Saturdays, cold collations would be left out for whoever wanted them, to be taken or not as desired. On Mrs Benyon’s Sundays, of which, incidentally, tomorrow was one – Miss Gosse paused in her exposition of Chandos House ways to remark comfortably: ‘But then, you’ll be spending your Sundays with your brother, won’t you?’
I blushed scarlet. What had my mother, a woman incurably addicted to saying whatever she thought her listeners would be best pleased to hear, led my landlady to believe? That I should never be hanging about the premises to trouble the schoolmistresses’ sabbath peace?
For some reason I found it impossible to say outright that actually I had no plans to spend my Sundays with Alfred: in fact, quite the contrary. I hoped he wouldn’t think I was sulking, that I was jealous of Phyllis, which I wasn’t, not in the least. I loved my brother, I wanted him to be happy. I was a great believer in happiness. I simply had not the words to explain to him or to anybody else that the death of my father had made me realize, as perhaps my brother himself did not, that, in the natural way of things, the time had come for us go to our separate ways, each waving lovingly to the other across an ever-widening distance. Freedom came into the equation somewhere, though I was not sure how: my father free of life, myself at last free to live, nobody’s daughter or dear little sister, but the irreducible me. Sometimes they seemed bleak alternatives rather than choices. At others, I wanted to jump up to the sky with the excitement of what was in store for me.
As it was, I managed to get out that I needed to go into the city that morning to make some small purchases; and finally, hot with effort, let it be known
that, shopping apart, I had no plans to go anywhere, Saturday or Sunday. It was my intention to stay home catching up on as much as I could of the school work I had missed during my absence. Amid my stumbling and stammering, it was with surprise and some elation that I heard myself calling Chandos House home.
Miss Gosse looked taken aback, I thought, but pleased in her shy way, as if she too had noticed the word. Miss Locke, intent on forcing her napkin back through its ring, her straight nose and brow inclined over her task, glanced up to comment mockingly, ‘A model child!’
She made me blush all over again, of course: at that time almost anything could set me off. Miss Gosse said, smiling affectionately at her friend: ‘You mustn’t mind Miss Locke, Sylvia. She’s a great tease!’
I ran upstairs, put on my blazer and opened the left-hand drawer of the chest of drawers to take out Alfred’s pound note.
It wasn’t there.
It wasn’t anywhere. I had tucked the money inside the folds of the handkerchief Alfred had brought me back from Switzerland. With its blue gentians embroidered round the edges it was my favourite, and I had selected it especially. I could not possibly have been mistaken.
On the chance, nevertheless, that I was mistaken, I pulled all the handkerchiefs out of the sachet, pulled out everything in the drawer, everything in all the drawers. Then I levered out each one in turn and examined the space behind, coated with fluff and a dead ant or two. On the chance that the note had dropped down to the floor, I squeezed myself into the narrow space between the chest of drawers and the window. There was so little room to move that when I turned round my nose pressed up against the window, up against the quivering leaves, only the glass between us. I could tell by the way the leaves stared at me that they knew. They knew who had stolen my money.
As I did myself, for that matter. Who else could it have been? I slid the drawers back into place, slammed the handkerchiefs and clothes in all anyhow, and sat down on the bed to consider what I was going to do about it. Actually, I knew even before I sat down what the answer would be.
Nothing.
I saw myself crossing the landing, going downstairs, along the hall and through the door into the dining-room, to tell Miss Gosse and Miss Locke that their housekeeper had stolen a pound note from my drawer when she had come into my room to tidy it up or make my bed – I saw myself, my eye! Either they wouldn’t believe me, or they would – which, if anything, would be worse. In the latter case they would feel obliged to sack the woman, send away the servant upon whom all their creature comforts depended. Bad as it was to steal – they wouldn’t be able to deny that, that was something at least – I was the one who would come in for the real blame, the tale-bearer who, taken up with her own selfish concerns, had turned their cosy world upside down.
Either way I would have to go. Go to ghastly London, to that ghastly house – I had never seen it, but I knew exactly how it must be. And only a matter of minutes before I had called Chandos House home.
It was! It was!
I dug deep into my blazer pocket to finger the ninepence that was there untouched, and my shilling pocket money. I picked up my last and definitive shopping list from the top of the chest of drawers, crumpled it up and threw it into the wastepaper basket. I wondered fleetingly if, when I telephoned Alfred as promised, I shouldn’t tell him what had happened, and decided that I couldn’t possibly. For a second or two I thought about my dead father, just long enough to hope he had something interesting on in heaven that morning and so wouldn’t be looking down and getting upset about what had happened to me. In case, however, he was looking, I put on the best face I could contrive to show how well I was coping with the disaster. Not even crying – at least, not so that you’d notice.
I went down the road to the call-box at the crossroads and got through to my brother at his office. We spoke for a very short time, not because he was not glad to hear from me – the warm concern in his voice almost broke down my defences – but because Saturday morning was his busiest time of the week. I could hear a blur of noises in the background, phones ringing, typewriters tapping, a richness of living that made me long to be grown up and out in the mainstream instead of timorously on the bank, barely dipping a toe in the water. Alfred took down the number of the box so that he could phone me back and it wouldn’t cost me another tuppence, which, in the circumstances, was something to be grateful for. He said he needed to make arrangements as to the best time for picking me up next day, taking me over to the house of Phyllis’s parents. There were plans to take a boat out on the Broads – would I like that? Or was there something else I would rather do? When I announced my intention of staying indoors at Chandos House to do schoolwork he sounded quite proud of my conscientiousness but upset that my weekend would contain no fun. The high regard my brother placed on fun was one of the things I loved him for, even if, sometimes, it made me feel that I was the grown-up and he the child.
I promised to telephone at the same time next week.
‘Are you sure you’ve got everything you want?’
‘Everything,’ I answered, fingering the coins in my pocket; and we said goodbye even before the first tuppence ran out.
I had already decided that one-and-seven was not worth going into Norwich for. Nineteen penny bars of chocolate or, alternatively, nine whipped cream walnuts and a penny change over sounded a glorious abundance when you said it, just like that; but spread over the gut-crimping hunger of a week or more, it was nothing. I had often read in stories of high adventure that when there was only very little to eat over a prolonged period you could get used to it if you persevered, the way heroes in adventure books invariably did, because your stomach shrank. By the time I figured that I could, with a fair degree of credibility, apply to Alfred for a further subvention, my stomach could very likely have shrunk so much I wouldn’t need any more money for food after all.
Not noticeably cheered by these consolatory musings, I set off back to Chandos House, though not by the way I had come. I didn’t want to risk running into Miss Gosse and Miss Locke and having to explain that I had changed my mind about going into town. I couldn’t feel certain of being able to preserve the necessary smiling exterior without cracks, of not letting the cat out of the bag about Mrs Benyon in a sudden irrepressible caterwaul that I had been robbed. Instead, I turned into the Catton Road and walked down it looking for the opening to the path that led along the backs of the Wroxham Road houses. Other things apart, it was something to do on a day that now stretched arid and undernourished till bedtime. I would go and commune with Bagshaw. We could at least be miserable together.
In the event, I almost overshot my objective. Head-on to the road, a van was parked in the entrance to the track, taking up practically its full width and masking its very existence: a white van with plenty of rust showing and one headlamp hanging out on a cable like an eye from its socket. As I drew abreast a man came round from the back, scarcely able to squeeze into the driving seat through the meagre slit that was the utmost he could get the door open. A wild rose in the hedgerow reached down and playfully scratched a thorny signature across the raddled coachwork.
The man, who was young, had two front teeth missing and could have done with a shave, saw me and grinned cheerfully through the open window.
‘Lucky I didn’t bring the Rolls.’
Once I had signified that I wished to turn into the track he said: ‘Jest goin’, lovey. On’ y came in fer a leak’; started the engine and nosed the van out into the road. From behind, the vehicle, if that were possible, looked even more disreputable than from the front, the double doors tied together with string and looking ready to burst open at any moment. I watched it trundle up to the crossroads and turn right for the city.
The track all my own, I trailed along slowly, feeling frail and not in a hurry to get anywhere. The brief human encounter had made me feel better than I had felt before, but the path put me down. Under a sun already hot and promising hotter, amid a buzz of insects whizzing ab
out like ballet dancers and a frenzy of blossom, of fruit and seed, it had no time for me. Left out, affronted, I found a stick and took out my spleen on some nettles that edged the path, only to have one of them get its own back by stinging my knee badly.
I saw a few strawberries which I must have overlooked the day before, lying on the rutted ground looking fresh and undamaged. Restraining the impulse to guzzle them myself, I picked them up to give to Bagshaw. The donkey, who was standing, head down, at the further end of the field, looked up morosely when I called his name, thought about it, and finally came shambling over. When he neared the barbed wire I steeled myself to thrust my hand through the gap unflinchingly, holding out the berries, only to have them butted out of my palm as if by a billy-goat, in what I could only interpret as an access of indigestion. Perhaps Bagshaw had found out the hard way that strawberries and donkeys did not mix, unless it was the punnet that was the trouble. I did not know; only that neither of us was in any mood to comfort the other.
It would have been too much, in the mood I was in, to have given prior thought as to how I was to get back to Chandos House through the bolted door at the bottom of the garden. Examining it now, the difficulties did not seem insuperable. There were battens to afford footholds, and the spikes at the top, whilst nobody could have called them inviting, were not so unchallengeable that, cautiously and taking care not to get your knickers caught on the points, you couldn’t expect to lift your legs over, one after the other, in safety;
Conscious of the donkey watching me with the pleased, anticipatory expression of a bystander hoping for an accident to happen, I began the ascent, not so much climbing the door as scrambling up it. As nobody was about and my mother had made a particular point of my taking care of my clothes, I took off my blazer and dress and left them neatly folded for recovery later; tackled the door with teeth gritted in a determination which, after several abortive tries, took me to the top.
