by Jane Gardam
I caught another bus to Middlesbrough and another one to Ironstoneside West. It was very easy. By the time I had negotiated that last bus I was feeling more alert and pleased with life. The passengers were all “men at the works” or shopping ladies and made cracks among themselves in loud, hard Teesside voices. They tried to draw me into the talk and laugh, too, and I wished I could have joined in very much but not being used to it I couldn’t. I kept on blushing and pretending to read a book. “Ironstoneside Road,” called the girl. “Here’s yer stop, luv,” and out I got, frozen stiff but feeling that time and the hour wears out the longest day and whatever they were like the Roses couldn’t actually destroy me.
“It is exactly by the bus stop. Exactly,” father had told me Mrs. Rose’s voice had said on the phone. “Tell her when she gets out in front of her is number 16. It is just there.”
Funny thing was that it wasn’t.
Number 16 was there but it wasn’t a doctor’s. There was no doubt about that at all. It was a dentist’s—a very definite dentist’s. Over the front door—it was a detached house with a semi-circular asphalt drive—was a big white glass cube, the sort that lights up at night and had DENTIST printed on it in black letters.
I wondered what to do. I looked at the houses on either side behind their semi-circular drives but they didn’t say anything about being doctors. I walked back and looked at the first one. Number 16 all right. I went up the drive. There were two brown plaques one on each side of the door. One said Janice Rose, B.D.S. (Lond.) and the other Humphrey Rose, B.D.S. (Lond.). On each side of the door there was also a brass bell. Above the door were two windows side by side with a joint black balcony, all curlicues. The house was made of white lavatory brick and on either side of the front door was an identical mustard-coloured conifer. Two ever-mustards. The symmetry of everything was so marked that one felt there was a mirror about somewhere, a very cheap, clear mirror without powers of enhancement and there was a deadness and silence over the house that added to the unreality. I had never seen a building that struck such a chill.
Perhaps, I thought as I climbed the steps and stood wondering which bell to press, it is something in the atmosphere. When you think of it, all the people standing here on these steps, hundreds and hundreds of them, every half hour, six days a week, sweating and praying, “Oh God please don’t let there be anything the matter. It’s quite stopped hurting now. Please let it only be a scrape and polish”—it’s bound to make a difference to a place.
But I’m supposed to be a mathematician, I thought. Why do I suppose anything of the sort. Atmosphere! Really! And anyway, what about all of them coming out. It’s quite nice seeing people springing out of a dentist’s, all smiles. It’s over! Another six months. Whoopee!
Dentists are among the benefactors, the restorers to sanity, they’re marvellous people, dentists. You keep your dentist for years. You travel miles to get back to him again. Uncle Edmund got in an awful fit when his died in the Isle of Wight. Like homing salmon they are, patients of dentists following almost unfelt tingles, twinges, and pangs, crossing oceans, crossing mountains, up the rapids, dentistwards.
There’s nothing wrong with dentists. It was just that I’d been thinking of this country house.
I pressed the bell—Mrs. Rose’s—and a girl in a white coat, nipped in at the waist with a stiff belt, appeared with a pad and pencil and half-moon eye-brows and said, “Yes?”
“I’m Marigold Green.”
“Green?” She consulted the pad, “We haven’t got you down. Is it Mr. Rose?”
“No. It’s—” I felt myself going heavy and solid and glowery. “It’s Jack Rose.”
“Jack Rose. I’m afraid there’s some mistake. Just a minute.” She shut the door firmly and then came back with a second appointments book. “Could I come in?” I asked. “It’s a bit cold.” She didn’t look very keen but I picked up my suitcase and stomped by. “I’m sorry,” she said in a high voice which tried to sound a bit better than Ironstoneside, “you’ll have to wait. There’s some mistake.”
Just then, like one of those weather toys gone wrong, a door on the left of the hall and a door on the right flew open and two dentists sprang out, each holding a silver spike and dressed in long white coats and masks like gangsters.
The female dentist just stared.
They were very authoritative people. The surgery behind the female dentist was silent but from behind the male dentist came a scuffling, spitting sound.
A great question mark hung on the air.
“There are no more appointments today,” said the male dentist firmly.
“I’m Marigold Green,” I said back.
“Oh God! I’d forgotten,” said the female dentist. “Hang on.” She disappeared. The male dentist said, “See to this will you, Phyllis,” and disappeared, too. The receptionist and I stood looking at each other with no enthusiasm whatsoever.
I had arrived at the Roses and it was not going to be much fun.
CHAPTER 15
Behind Mrs. Rose’s surgery there was a waiting room and behind this along the back of the house a sitting room and there I was led and left and stood with my suitcase beside me for what seemed a great time. Then, at last, there was a faint clicking of doors and a released sort of voice saying thank you and goodbye, the shutting of the half-glazed Victorian vestibule door and then Mrs. Rose was upon me, drying her hands vigorously on a very clean towel.
“Sorry about that,” she said briskly, getting the towel well down into the cuticles. “Silly of me. Thought you were coming with Jack.”
“Oh—I thought father had said—”
“He did. He did. I was mixing you up.”
She was a biggish woman and there was something of Jack about her manner. Her face was not at all like his—pop eyes, yellow perm, round pouting lips rather spluttery—but something in the set of the shoulders suggested that she would make a useful three-quarter. “Glad to see you,” she said. “Glad you could make it. Play golf?”
“Oh—er. No I don’t.”
“Pity. Thinking of what to do with you tomorrow.”
“Oh—er—that’s all right.”
“What do you usually do on Sundays?”
(Church. Chess. Talk to Paula. Read. Stroke the cats.) “Oh, nothing much.”
“Oh. Well. Never mind.” She looked quickly round for a clock. “Quarter to six. Jack home soon. Like to go up?”
“Er—up?”
“Unpack? Then drink or something?”
(Had she known my mother? Could she have known my mother?)
“Oh—yes. I’d like to unpack.”
We both looked unhopefully at the small bag at my feet. It wouldn’t take long.
Then the door bunt open and in came the male dentist. He was without his uniform and had presumably finished with his towel because he advanced on me with big pink dry hands. “Hello there,” he cried. “Sorry for the welcome. Mind on other things. Nasty wisdom job. Flaps infected. Two more to come out Monday. Interesting roots. What about a dry martini?”
“Er—hum—her—” I said.
“Marianne—it is Marianne isn’t it?—is just going to unpack,” said Mrs. Rose. “I’m going to change.” (So they did change, just like Dorset.) “I’ll take you up shall I? Or can you find your way? Left hand side over the front door.”
“Oh—yes. Of course. I’ll find it,” I said and scurried out.
“That’s fine,” said Mrs. Rose.
I went out and stood in the hall. The half-moon eye-brows had gone and both surgery doors were shut. On the hall table was a box for the Dentists’ Benevolent Fund. On the walls were many large framed notices saying how well Mr. and Mrs. Rose had done at college. On a shelf up near the ceiling were ranged about half a million silver cups saying how well Mr. and Mrs. Rose had done at tennis, hockey, rugger, lacrosse, running, and swimming, and two
huge oars showed how good Mr. Rose had been at rowing. The carpet was of very good quality and covered every bit of the floor and the stair-carpets and wallpapers and landing curtains were tremendously thick and all absolutely colourless—or perhaps fawn mixed faintly with grey. The hall-stand had a little metal tray in the bottom to catch drips from patients’ umbrellas and at the foot of the stairs there was a gigantic and terrible china tree trunk with china lichens on it and growing out of it was a fearsome and watchful leather-leaved plant. It looked as if it had been put there to tangle with patients who tried to escape, and I passed it by respectfully as I made for the upstairs. And as I did so I heard from behind from the two relaxing dentists a bark of a laugh. “God knows,” I heard Mr. Rose say. “Cheer up. You’ll go straight to heaven for inviting her. Jack and the other one’ll be here soon.”
“The other one?” Who was the other one—oh heavens! Was there going to be somebody else? Why ever had I come? Why ever had I come? Who could it be? I thought through the First XV and felt sure most of them would be going home for Half Term. They had all had more than enough of each other, as father said, by Half Term to want to go visiting each other. Must be someone without a decent home, I thought. I wondered if it was Terrapin. I wondered what I’d feel if it was Terrapin—with all the rumours of his dreadful background, it just might be. He was supposed to be terribly poor. I thought of many small events—Jack Rose’s hand jerking back Terrapin’s obscenity at the dormitory window long ago, Jack Rose laughing at Terrapin at the Boys’ Entrance door and telling him that I, Bilgewater, was no longer a child and could read James Joyce. No—it wouldn’t be Terrapin. He’d not get an invitation here.
I went into the room on the left facing me on the landing—very plushy. Carpet ten inches thick, wallpaper cream with a grey relation of the plant at the foot of the stairs crawling all over it in bas-relief, a wooden, rather over-shiny bed, mountainous with satin eiderdown (cream) under cream candlewick. Cream bedside light. On the wall at the foot of the bed was a large fawn etching of the head of an airedale.
When I had unpacked my washing things and arranged them on the basin (the flannel didn’t look so hot. It was an old one out of Paula’s lost-property box) I put my spare pants and tights away in a drawer and looked round again. Wardrobe. Dressing-table. No books. It seemed early to be going down again. Passing quickly by the long mirror so that I saw only the merest suggestion of the ginger zig-zags, I went over to the french windows and out on to the balcony and stood there for a bit looking at the lights of distant Middlesbrough, for Ironstoneside was on a rise—a very superior neighbourhood. I’d been told that. That’s why I had imagined the country—a sort of park-land and a terrace with stone jars. I hadn’t imagined this square light over the door now just beneath my feet, with Dentist on it whose electric wire looped across the balcony and divided my room from the one next door.
As I stood there—and it was freezing cold—this light suddenly blazed out, lighting me up and the rooms behind me. I hoped it wouldn’t stay on all night. And then, not exactly thinking what I was doing I stepped over the wire and took a look into the room next door along the balcony.
It was shadowy and I poked the french window with a finger and surprisingly it opened. I stepped in and saw a room identical to my own—cream and sumptuous bed, thick, soft carpet, picture too dark to see what but the same style and size as the airedale and in exactly the same place; wash-hand-basin with very clean glass upside down like mine, wardrobe, dressing-table with little lacy mat. The room was waiting for someone just as mine had been a minute before. It was a twin, but there was a difference, and as I stood there I noticed a lovely sweet romantic smell of summer and saw that on the lacy mat on the dressing-table there was a cut-glass vase and a bunch of flowers—shop flowers, freesias, rose-pink, lavender, dark yellow, and white. I’d seen some freesias, in the flower shop at home last week and they were 35p a bunch. There must have been at least two bunches here, and some asparagus fern as well.
I stepped quickly out of the room again feeling worse than I’d felt yet because the flowers told me two things—(1) that the other guest was more important than me (which didn’t matter) but also (2) that the other guest arriving any minute with Jack was a girl. You wouldn’t put out freesias for someone in the Rugger XV. Perhaps it was only some aunt-woman of course. Some cousin or something, I thought, trying to cheer up; but just as I thought it and stepped out back on to the balcony again there was a great swoosh and honk on the drive below and Jack Rose’s laugh and by the light of the dentist lamp I saw looking down the top of his handsome head as he leapt out and ran round to the passenger seat.
Slowly I saw two long and perfect legs emerge from this seat, in jeans. Above them came a sheepskin coat, and then, her glorious hair emblazoning the night, came Grace Gathering.
CHAPTER 16
I let the hearty cries of welcome in the hall below subside and sat on my bed for a while after a door had shut leaving a great deal of silence behind it. Then with Paula’s clear voice beating in my ears (“Beware of Self Pity.” “It is not oneself who is at the centre of things.” “To be happy, forget yourself and take an interest in the rest,” etc. All that unhelpful stuff) I got up and without a glance in the mirror went down to the sitting room.
I felt Jack there almost without seeing him—his big dark figure handing a glass. Mrs. Rose now sitting easily back in a vast sofa, lighting a cigarette, and Mr. Rose his feet in a heavy rug looking as if the world was a good place behind a glass of gin, his eyes on Grace as if they would never look away. For all three it was obvious, though goodness knows how one realises it just by opening a door and one be-spectaded glance (I’d gone back to the glasses), that the evening for them all had great possibilities.
Grace was draped in a chair, still in her jeans, gazing at the huge electric bars that had been fastened across the old marble fireplace. They were sturdy bars and all switched on and the room had several very efficient-looking radiators, too. I grew damp and prickly under the ginger wool the minute I opened the door for the dress had long sleeves and a high neck and was about three-quarters of an inch thick. Our House is very cold with stone floors meant for monks. You get used to it but you always wear a lot of layers. Not here.
Yet Grace—and the Head’s House is no warmer—appeared to be wearing only a long cotton shirt over her jeans, very tight and not even a bra, you could tell, though she was so lovely and thin it didn’t matter. The sheepskin was lying all over the back of her chair and her luggage—a sort of canvas nose-bag with a long bit of string—lay on the rose-coloured carpet. “No, just orange,” she was saying as I came in and looked up into Jack’s face with a slow, sweet smile.
“Bilgie!” cried Jack swinging round. “You’re here. That’s great. Come on—you have Grace’s gin and tonic then,” and he thrust a great big cut-glass drink into my hand, about a quarter of a pint of it. “Found your way? Good. Here’s to you. We won, Humphrey.”
I looked round for someone else and then realised he was talking to his father. “That’s the stuff,” said Mr. Rose. “Let’s have another to celebrate.” He helped himself. “Good game?” They began to talk rugger, Mrs. Rose joining in. She spoke yery knowledgeably, in short bursts, about tries and penalties and conversions. When she wasn’t talking she lit cigarettes. The glasses were refilled again and Mr. Rose waxed very jolly and going across to get himself another gin bent down and whisked away my glass which I saw was empty. I realised that I was feeling very warm and pleasant inside. I had not drunk gin before, associating it either with night clubs which I had not come across or with the sort of person I had sat next to on the bus.
But it was nice. It was making me grin.
“Bilge is grinning.” It was Grace, sipping an orange juice, dropping her eye-lashes. It was the first thing she’d said that acknowledged that I was there. Everyone looked at me and for some reason they all began to laugh, even Grace, throwing her head back
and taking in my ginger dress which was getting all steamy under the arms. Jack laughed, too, as if he didn’t really want to but couldn’t help it. Mrs. Rose exploded briefly and Mr. Rose boomed. It wasn’t quite kind the way they laughed. It was at me not with me or for me.
“That’s the stuff,” bellowed out Mr. Rose passing me another quarter pint. “Drink up folks. Dinner’s ready isn’t it Janice?”
We all trooped down into the bowels of the house where there was a room full of curious oak furniture with bulbous legs and an oak hatch through which two hands of an unseen servant kept appearing. Messages were called out in loud voices to this servant by both the dentists—messages full of very good will like “Wotcher, Mac,” and “This looks like just the job, Mac,” “Pretty good nosh, girl. Get plenty yourself,” and you could hear the knife and fork of this person through the hatch, munching apart.
There was prawn cocktail, coq-au-vin and a wonderful chocolate pudding or rather collection of chocolate puddings—round éclair things stuffed with cream and smothered in dark chocolate sauce like Sunday House-gravy. Then there was a huge obtuse-angled triangle of soft creamy cheese and there was with all the courses a lot of wine and I had some of each kind, after drinking the second glass full of gin in a bit of a hurry before we came down.
I didn’t know that there even existed food like this and I ate and ate. I wondered whatever Paula and father would make of it. I wondered how poor Jack Rose managed on our House food at school. I kept on drinking but my glass always seemed to be full and Mr. Rose and Jack walking round and round the table with more bottles. Dimly, as the evening wore on I perceived Grace, cool, silent, beautiful, leaning back with tiny teaspoonfuls of food on her plate, not bothering with it much, or relaxed, watching, smoking a cigarette. Mrs. Rose was now red and shiny in the face, Jack had a really rather silly look on his and Mr. Rose was looking like something that has been boiled for hours and turned into scarlet rubber.
