by S. T. Haymon
I might as well have saved myself the trouble. No answer came to my summons, neither there nor round at the back where, having put away my bicycle, I tried my luck at the scullery door, banging on it with the handle of a mop which I found propped outside. Desperate, I took the mop round to the side of the house, to Mrs Benyon’s bedroom window, and swished it against the glass, at first diffidently, then with a reckless abandon that took no heed of the consequences.
Nothing. Doubly opaque with net curtains and drawn blind, the window stayed blank, no frame for an enraged housekeeper awakened from her beauty sleep. The thought struck me: could it be that Noreen was not the only mouse to be out playing that night whilst the cat was away? – that Mrs Benyon had deserted her post, was living it up in town until the small hours, even, it was conceivable, not planning to return until morning?
I went round the house again, hopelessly seeking an open window. All that offered was a ventilator over the sink in the scullery, too narrow for me to squeeze through at the best of times, let alone after having supped on savoury pasties, trifle and chocolate cake. Tiredness possessed me. Taking my bicycle lamp by the way of better illumination than was offered by Perseus, Andromeda et al., up there in the sky, I went down the garden to the bothy, reflecting that Noreen, at least, would be pleased: no chance of Mrs Benyon finding out the true state of things and giving the game away.
I could have done with my cardigan. It was chilly and damp inside the little house, not even the thought of my money in the nest of drawers sufficient to warm me. The squeaks and scuffles which I had heard coming up the path ceased abruptly as I crossed the threshold, carrying my lamp. The mice knew when they were not wanted.
I set up one of the folded deckchairs, found two spider-webbed sacks with which to cover myself. I left the lamp on to keep the mice away, only to find besotted moths blundering in from outside, and an amazingly varied proliferation of creeping things moving across the floor to the light source like pilgrims processing to a shrine. I knew that in such horrifying conditions I would not be able to sleep a wink, an error persisted in until the moment a familiar voice awoke me with the waggish inquiry: ‘Chucked you out at last, then, have they?’
Mr Betts lost no time in restoring me to the interior of Chandos House. Having, the two of us, rung bells and banged on doors to no purpose, the gardener went back down the garden to the bothy, returning with a step-ladder and a tattered umbrella that might well have been lying there since old Mr Gosse’s day. He placed the steps under the scullery ventilator, climbed up and inserted the umbrella, crook handle down, jiggling it about until, more by good luck that judgement, it engaged with the catch on the window beneath. A jerk and the casement was open, as simple as that.
‘You’re younger ’ n I am,’ announced Mr Betts. ‘You hop in an’ get the door open.’ Which, excited with the adventure of it all, I did, sliding on my bottom down the draining-board before jumping down to the red-tiled floor. I looked a mess, I knew, spiders’ webs in my hair and my linen dress a honeycomb of creases, but I felt gloriously swashbuckling just for that moment when I stood in Chandos House scullery on my own, guilty of breaking and entering.
I withdrew the bolts on the back door and let Mr Betts in. For a moment we stood smiling at each other, congratulating ourselves on our joint cleverness. Only then did we become conscious of the noise.
It was not so much a snore as a bubbling, like the sound Saracens in films about the Crusades made smoking hookahs, or the kind of noise you get when, seeking out the site of a puncture, you slowly rotate an inner tube in a basin of water. Bubba-lubble it goes, once you have found the hole.
‘Hold on!’ Mr Betts ordered.
He pushed open the door into Mrs Benyon’s bedroom, myself at his heels. Whatever he said, it was no time to be holding on. The room was too dark for anything much to be seen, but the bubba-lubble went on unremittingly. The gardener made his way to the window and tugged the cord at the bottom of the blind. Full of energy and as if waiting for that moment, the blind sprang up, wound itself round its roller and only then desisted, the acorn bobble at the end of the cord swinging against the window pane and away again until it finally calmed down. The room was suddenly full of light and a bad smell and the massy landscape of Mrs Benyon on her back on the bed, legs apart, nightgown rucked up to her armpits, her mottled stomach rising and falling in time with the bubba-lubbling.
I cried out: ‘Fetch the doctor! She’s dying!’
‘She’s dead,’ Mr Betts corrected calmly. ‘Dead drunk.’
I don’t know what I would have done without Mr Betts. Assaulted by the smell of vomit in Mrs Benyon’s bedroom, it was all I could do, after the rich fare of the night before, not to throw up myself. In the nick of time the gardener opened the window as far as it would go, and the lovely fresh air poured in, saving me from humiliation. As for attending to the housekeeper’s personal needs, as one woman to another in her predicament, that was something which, sick or well, I simply wasn’t up to.
I never knew whether Mr Betts had a wife or not, drunken or sober, but either way he evidently knew all about what went on a woman between being naked and being properly dressed, because when he eventually emerged with Mrs Benyon into the kitchen – she leaning heavily on his arm – she was in her usual get-up of flowered overall over a grey skirt, her stockings unwrinkled, which must have meant that she had on her corset and suspenders as well. The only thing that was out of place was her hair, which was sopping wet, with her perm turned into wiggly corkscrews which reminded me of the serpents on Miss Malahide’s brass knocker; the gardener’s first step in her rehabilitation having been to drag her to the sink and force her head under the tap.
I had been told to put on the kettle and make some good strong coffee. With Mrs Benyon screaming like a stuck pig as the cold water cascaded over her head and down the front of her nightgown it did not seem the best moment to inquire how many spoons. I had never made coffee before and had no idea how much to put in the pot. In the event, I found a pound packet in the larder and put in half – the gardener, after all, had stipulated strong. Later, as the three of us sat drinking at the table, Mr Betts said it was the first cup of coffee for which he could have done with a knife and fork; but he was ready to admit that it did wonders for Mrs Benyon. After three cups of it she looked almost normal – normal for her, that is; which was to say, as awful as usual.
She turned on me that familiar glazed look of hers as if, in the course of her cooking, she had set her eyes in aspic.
‘What’ve you been up to? You look as if you’d been dragged through a hedge backward.’
You’re a fine one to talk! I thought angrily, but I didn’t say anything. To have told about sleeping in the bothy would have meant giving Noreen away, and I had promised.
Her ill temper with the gardener was more specific. No gratitude for his services rendered: quite the contrary. He had, she alleged, been the root cause of what she called her little accident. She had suspected it at the time and now she knew for a certainty. That last bottle he had brought her had been definitely ‘off’.
‘Any more like that,’ she finished balefully, ‘and you know what.’
Mr Betts’s habitual expression of knobby good humour did not waver. ‘An’ what,’ he asked, with the air of one launching a paper dart into the wind for the sheer interest of seeing how far it would go, ‘if, when she gets back, I give the missus a blow by blow account of how I found you this morning?’
‘Tell her what you like,’ the housekeeper returned with a shrug. ‘I got too much on her. She’ll never give me the push, no matter what.’ And to me: ‘And that goes for you too, little Miss Know-all.’
Never had my room seemed such a haven. I sat down on the bed with my head in a whirl. I knew now that Mr Betts paid his blackmail to Mrs Benyon in gin, which I had been brought up to believe a very bad thing, making people go blind, or worse. I knew it was gin apart from what had been said because there had been several empty bott
les labelled ‘Gin’ lying about her bedroom. But what was it that the housekeeper had on Miss Gosse?
Part of the whirligig in my head was due to pleasant excitement that so much was happening to me. Not all, though. After an unsuccessful attempt to block off all thought of it, I gave in and thought about the horribleness of Mrs Benyon’s body, the mountainous stomach, the triangle of grizzled hair that looked like a fur the moths had had the best part of.
I needed to change anyway, so I took off all my clothes, stood on my chair to get a good look, and, for the first time in my life, consciously examined my own body in the looking-glass. It seemed OK, if a bit on the skinny side. I could see my ribs. I felt better for seeing them because it came to me that even if, by a stroke of ill fortune, I grew up to have a horrible body like Mrs Benyon’s, once I had been dead long enough I would end up a skeleton as elegant as any film star or mannequin. Dead, we would all be elegant together.
The quivering leaves at the window seemed especially agitated. It may have been that they had never before seen me standing naked on a chair and it bothered them. Or perhaps they had been worried to discover that my bed had not been slept in.
‘Where were you?’ they seemed to be saying, pressing against the pane in their anxiety. ‘Are you all right?’
I got down from the chair, went over to the window, put my face against the glass, cool, calming. Whispered, reassuring the leaves and myself: ‘I’m all right. All right!’
In the afternoon, Alfred called by to ask if I would like to come with him to see how the house was getting along. I answered that I would have loved to, only I had homework to do, which was both true and untrue, as I think we both understood. I came out with him to the car and we parted very lovingly, waving to each other across the unbridgeable abyss which had again opened up between us and was getting wider by the minute.
Chapter Nineteen
Oddly enough, once her secret was out, Mrs Benyon became, if not exactly friendly, at least a good deal less overtly hostile to my presence in Chandos House. It was almost as if she took it for granted that by the very act of uncovering a weakness in herself, I had laid bare a corresponding one in me. By staying quiet about her alcoholism – and what else could I have done, anyway? – I had assumed my own burden of guilt – one, in my case, not to be lightened by a tumbler of mother’s ruin. For one thing, tea became a much less unpredictable meal than hitherto. Often, without being asked, she provided me with stale bread for Bagshaw.
On one occasion she gave me the best part of a loaf which seemed quite fresh, and I hurried off with it down the garden to the back gate in case she changed her mind. Bagshaw and I shared the windfall together, the donkey staring dourly when he finished up his allotment long before I had come to the end of mine. I got back to the house to find Mrs Benyon in a state. She must have taken more drink that day than she had thought, because what in fact she had done was give me all the bread in stock, and Miss Gosse and Miss Locke had not yet come in for their tea, to say nothing of breakfast next morning.
Armed with fourpence three-farthings, the price of a large white, I sprang gallantly to the rescue, whizzing down the Sprowston Road on my bike as if the Red Indians were after me; down to the baker’s, only to find, as at that time of day I should have anticipated, that the shelves were bare except for a lopsided cottage loaf that nobody, for good reason, had wanted. In fact, the baker knocked a penny off the price which I purloined without shame. Whatever else it had achieved, living at Chandos House had not improved my moral tone.
The housekeeper, as I should also have anticipated, was not best pleased with my acquisition. I guessed that, awaiting my return, fearful that the schoolmistresses might arrive first, she had fortified herself with additional potions of Mr Betts’s blackmail. I was unable to convince her that I had purchased the loaf faute de mieux and that I had not – repeat, had not – lopsided it on the way home.
‘You’ll get me sacked,’ she growled, snatching up the bread knife as if she would be at least as pleased to use it on me as the bread. Privately, I thought her remark quite amusing in the circumstances, but of course I said nothing to show what I was thinking.
One afternoon, as she was clearing away my tea, she asked, out of the blue: ‘How would you like to have a little chat with your pa?’
My face went red, my heart pounded against my ribs. My father still had not been long enough dead for me to be able to talk about him or to hear him referred to by others without those tiresome physical reactions being instantly in evidence. And anyway, what did the woman mean?
The woman explained that what she meant was that a good friend of hers, whom she said was called Madame Sadie, possessed a wonderful gift for getting in touch with people who had, as she put it, passed over. Twice a month people who had been bereaved gathered at her home, where she was able to be a great comfort to them, passing on messages from their loved ones. Since I was looking peaky, the thought had occurred to Mrs Benyon that a visit to Madame Sadie might cheer me up something wonderful.
In St Giles we had taken several newspapers so that I knew quite a bit about séances, which were always fakes or they would never have got into the papers in the first place. Whilst recognizing that mine might be a prejudiced view, nevertheless, so soon as the pounding stopped and the red ebbed out of my cheeks, my first impulse was to say no thank you, restraining myself with difficulty from adding that if I were indeed looking peaky, which I took leave to doubt, it was more likely because I didn’t get enough to eat than because of anything to do with my father. My second impulse also was to say no, for a different reason. Over the weeks the two of us, my father up in heaven and I down below in Chandos House, had, slowly and painfully, come to an accommodation, evolved a relationship I felt it dangerous to disturb. Might I not, if I unilaterally changed the terms of engagement, risk losing him altogether? Apart from anything else, what would he be likely to think of a Madame Sadie getting in on the act? She didn’t sound my father’s type at all.
Moreover, it transpired that Mrs Benyon’s words about my having a chat with him were overstating the case. The dead people (the housekeeper called them ‘the people on the other side’) did not actually converse with their grieving relatives. Perhaps they were too far off to make themselves heard without shouting. Instead, they spoke via Madame Sadie, who had this amazing ability to hear across the endless reaches of eternity.
What if you wished to say something back, I wanted to know. Mrs Benyon brushed the question aside: no problem. Madame Sadie would convey the gist of it, if it was something that needed to be said, which she doubted. They already knew all there was to know about us.
Obstinately, because I was reluctant to reach the point where I would have to make a final decision one way or the other, to go or not to go, I persisted: ‘Suppose you couldn’t find the key to a certain cupboard and only the dead person knew where it was?’
‘Get in a locksmith!’ snapped the housekeeper. She was clearly coming to the end of her patience, always on a short leash. ‘Do you want to go or don’t you? I thought I was doing you a favour.’
Mrs Benyon said that naturally people paid Madame Sadie for her services. She had to pay the butcher’s bills like everyone else. She didn’t normally take children, but she would make an exception of me as a favour to a friend. Her charge was half a guinea a sitting which – cutting across my expression of horrified surprise – could easily be met by deducting it from the fifteen shillings still outstanding between us, leaving a mere 4s 6d to close the account. Evidently prepared for my compliance, Mrs Benyon took two florins and a sixpenny piece out of her overall pocket, plunked them down on the table in front of me and declared, ‘Now we’re quits!’
One didn’t need to be clever to know one was being had. I wouldn’t have minded betting that no half-guinea would change hands as the price of my admittance to Madame Sadie’s next get-together. She would be bound to let me in for nothing to oblige an old acquaintance. But it was no good. Deep down
, from the moment that the possibility of going to the séance had been broached I had recognized that there was no alternative.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll go.’
The séance took place the following Saturday afternoon. Mrs Benyon and I travelled into town on the bus, the housekeeper being unreceptive of my suggestion that we walk down to the tram terminus so that I could use one of my Scholars’ Tickets and save myself the bus fare. I did not protest too much at this, as I saw it, unnecessary expense as we were rather loaded down with packages. Mrs Benyon carried one bag and I another. My bag, when she handed it to me, felt strangely warm, and once we were on the bus I dared to open it a little, not enough actually to see inside, which Mrs Benyon would have been sure to have spotted, but enough to be able to identify an unmistakable aroma of the casserole we had had for lunch. At last I had the answer to something which had puzzled me from my first days at Chandos House – the reason why though, thanks to Miss Gosse’s frugal carving, the joint was customarily removed from the table barely dented, it never reappeared cold or in any other guise. Now I knew where it went – into the mouths of Mrs Benyon’s cronies. The housekeeper had already informed me that after the séance I would have to make my own way home: she herself would be staying behind for a meal with Madame Sadie and her husband Bert. Surely, over the years, Miss Gosse must have noticed the unaccountable disappearance of the ribs of beef or the legs of lamb. Why had she never said anything?
The smell from the casserole was somewhat overlaid by the strange sweet smell that came from Mrs Benyon. Another small mystery was resolved when she opened her handbag and took out a pretty little tin, small as a snuffbox, with a design on it, so far as I could see, of an Eastern maiden complete with a veil, baggy trousers and shoes that turned up at the toes. The printing on the box said Shem-el-Nessim, whatever that was. The housekeeper prised the lid off the tin and offered me one of the minuscule greyish tablets with which it was filled. ‘Don’t swallow it, don’t chew,’ she admonished. ‘Let it melt slowly.’
