Delphine, enormously fat in her flowing caftan, was sitting now outside her own front door, basking in the shaft of sunlight which, at this time of the day, penetrated her domain. Jill lifted Robbie out of the buggy, and Robbie stuck his head through the railings and stared down at Delphine, who put down her newspaper and stared back at him from behind round, black sunglasses.
“Hello, there,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“To the park,” Jill told her.
“In this heat?”
“There’s nowhere else to go.”
“You should do something about the garden.”
Delphine had been saying this, at intervals, over the last two years, until Ian told her that if she said it once more, he, personally, would strangle her. “Cut down that horrible tree.”
“Don’t start on that,” Jill pleaded. “It’s all too difficult.”
“Well, at least you could get rid of the cats. I could hardly sleep last night for the yowling.”
“What can we do?”
“Anything. Get a gun and shoot them.”
“Ian hasn’t got a gun. And even if he had, the police would think we were murdering someone if we started blasting off at the cats.”
“What a loyal little wife you are. Well, if you won’t shoot the cats, how about coming down to the cottage this weekend? I’ll drive the lot of you in my car.”
“Oh, Delphine.” It was the best thing that had happened all day. “Do you really mean it?”
“Of course.” Jill thought of the cool country garden, the smell of the elderflowers; of letting Robbie paddle his feet in the shallow pebbly waters of the river.
“I can’t think of anything more heavenly … but I’ll have to see what Ian says. He might be playing cricket.”
“Come down after dinner and I’ll give you both a glass of wine. We’ll discuss it then.”
By six o’clock, Robbie was bathed, fed—on the juicy peach—and asleep in his cot. Jill took a shower, put on the coolest garment she owned, which was a cotton dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen to do something about supper.
The kitchen and the dining room, divided only by the narrow staircase, took up the entire ground floor of the house, but still were not large. The front door led straight into this, so that there never seemed to be anywhere to hang coats or park a pram. At the dining-room end, the window faced out onto the street; but the kitchen had enormous French windows of glass, which seemed to indicate that once there had been a balcony beyond, with perhaps a flight of steps leading down into the garden. The balcony and the steps had long since disintegrated, been demolished, perhaps—disappeared, and the French windows opened onto nothing but a twenty-foot drop to the yard beneath. Before Robbie was born they used to let the windows stand open in warm weather, but after his arrival, Ian, for safety, nailed them shut, and so they had stayed.
The scrubbed pine table stood against these windows. Jill sat at it and sliced tomatoes for the salad in a preoccupied sort of way, gazing down at the horrible garden. Encased as it was by high, crumbling brick walls, it was a little like looking down into the bottom of a well. Near the house there was the brick yard, and then a patch of straggling grass, and then desolation, trodden earth, old paper bags that kept blowing in, and the tree.
Jill had been born and brought up in the country and found it hard to believe that she could actually dislike a garden. So much so that even if there had been any form of access, she would not hang her washing out, let alone allow her child to play there.
And as for the tree—she positively hated the tree. It was a sycamore, but light-years away from the friendly sycamores she remembered from her childhood, good for climbing, shady in summer, scattering winged seedpods in the autumn. This one should never have grown at all; should never have been planted, should never have reached such a height, such density, such sombre, depressing size. It shut out the sky, and its gloom discouraged all life except the cats, who prowled, howling, along the tops of the walls and used the sparse earth as their lavatories. In the autumn, when the leaves fell from the tree and Ian braved the cats’ messes to go out and build a bonfire, the resultant smoke was black and stinking, as though the leaves had absorbed, during the summer months, everything in the air that was dirty, repellant, or poisonous.
* * *
Their marriage was a happy one, and most of the time Jill wanted nothing to be different. But the tree brought out the worst in her, made her long to be rich, so that she could damn the expense and get rid of it.
Sometimes she said this, aloud, to Ian. “I wish I had an enormous private income of my own. Or that I had a marvellously wealthy relation. Then I could get the tree cut down. Why hasn’t one of us got a fairy godmother? Haven’t you got one hidden away?”
“You know I only have Edwin Makepeace, and he’s about as much good as a wet weekend in November.”
Edwin Makepeace was a family joke, and how Ian’s parents had even been impelled to make him godfather to their son was an enigma that Jill had never got around to solving. He was some sort of a distant cousin, and had always had a reputation for being humourless, demanding, and paranoically mean with his money. The passing years had done nothing to remedy any of these traits. He had been married, for a number of years, to a dull lady called Gladys. They had had no children, simply lived together in a small house in Woking renowned for its gloom, but at least Gladys had looked after him, and when she died and he was left alone, the problem of Edwin became a constant niggle on the edge of the family’s conscience.
Poor old chap, they would say, and hope that somebody else would ask him for Christmas. The somebody else who did so was usually Ian’s mother, who was a truly kind-hearted lady, and it took some determination on her part not to allow Edwin’s depressing presence to totally dampen the family festivities. The fact that he gave her nothing more than a box of hankies, which she never used, did nothing to endear him to the rest of the party. It wasn’t, as they pointed out, that Edwin didn’t have any money. It was just that he didn’t like parting with it.
* * *
“Perhaps we could cut down the tree ourselves.”
“Darling, it’s much too big. We’d either kill ourselves or knock the whole house down.”
“We could get a professional. A tree surgeon.”
“And what would we do with the bones when the surgeon had done his job?”
“A bonfire?”
“A bonfire. That size? The whole terrace would go up in smoke.”
“We could take it out into the street, bit by bit.”
“Through Delphine’s flat?”
“At least we could ask somebody. We could get an estimate.”
“My love, I can give you an estimate. It would cost a bomb. And we haven’t got a bomb.”
“A garden. It would be like having another room. Space for Robbie to play. And I could put the new baby out in a pram.”
“How? Lower it from the kitchen window on a rope?”
They had had this conversation, with varying degrees of acrimony, too many times.
I’m not going to mention it again, Jill promised herself, but … She stopped slicing the tomato, sat with the knife in one hand and her chin resting on the other hand, and gazed out through the grimy window that couldn’t be cleaned because there was no way of getting at it.
The tree. Her imagination removed it; but then what did one do with what remained? What would ever grow in that bitter scrap of earth? How could they keep the cats away? She was still mulling over these insuperable problems when there came the sound of her husband’s latchkey in the lock. She jumped, as though she had been caught doing something indecent, and quickly started slicing the tomato again. The door banged shut and she looked up over her shoulder to smile at him.
“Hello, darling.”
He dumped his briefcase, came to kiss her. He said, “God, what a furnace of a day. I’m filthy, and I smell. I’m going to have a shower, and then I shall come and be charm
ing to you…”
“There’s a can of lager in the fridge.”
“Riches indeed.” He kissed her again. “You, on the other hand, smell delicious. Of freesias.” He began to pull his tie loose.
“It’s the soap.”
He made for the stairs, undressing himself as he went. “Let’s hope it does the same for me.”
Five minutes later he was down again, bare-footed, wearing an old pair of faded jeans and a short-sleeved shirt he had bought for his honeymoon.
“Robbie’s asleep,” he told her. “I just looked in.” He opened the fridge, took out the can of lager and poured it into two glasses, then brought them over to the table and collapsed into a chair beside her. “What did you do today?”
She told him about going to the park, about the free peach, about Delphine’s invitation for the weekend. “She said she’d drive us down in her car.”
“She is an angel. What a marvellous thought.”
“She’s asked us down for a glass of wine after dinner. She said we could talk about it.”
“A little party, in fact.”
“Oh, well, it makes a nice change.”
They looked at each other, smiling. He put out a hand and laid it on her flat and slender stomach. He said, “For a pregnant lady, you look very toothsome.” He ate a piece of tomato. “Is this dinner, or are we defrosting the fridge?”
“It’s dinner. With some cold ham and potato salad.”
“I’m starving. Let’s eat it and then go and beat Delphine up. You did say she was going to open a bottle of wine?”
“That’s what she said.”
He yawned. “Better if it was two.”
* * *
The next day was Thursday and as hot as ever, but somehow now it didn’t matter, because there was the weekend to look forward to.
“We’re going to Wiltshire,” Jill told Robbie, flinging a load of clothes into the washing machine. “You’ll be able to paddle in the river and pick flowers. Do you remember Wiltshire? Do you remember Delphine’s cottage? Do you remember the tractor in the field?”
Robbie said “Tractor.” He didn’t have many words, but this was one of them. He smiled as he said it.
“That’s right. We’re going to the country.” She began to pack, because although the trip was a day away, it made the weekend seem nearer. She ironed her best sundress, she even ironed Ian’s oldest T-shirt. “We’re going to stay with Delphine.” She was extravagant and bought a cold chicken for supper and a little punnet of strawberries. There would be strawberries growing in Delphine’s wild garden. She thought of going out to pick them, the sun hot on her back, the rosy fruits fragrant beneath their sheltering leaves.
The day drew to a close. She bathed Robbie and read to him and put him in his cot. As she left him, his eyes already drooping, she heard Ian’s key in the latch and ran downstairs to welcome him.
“Darling.”
He put down his briefcase and shut the door. His expression was bleak. She kissed him quickly and said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m afraid something rotten has come up. Would you mind most dreadfully if we didn’t go to Delphine’s?”
“Not go?” Disappointment made her feel weak and emptied as though all her happiness were being drained out of her. She could not keep the dismay out of her face. “But—oh, Ian, why not?”
“My mother rang me at the office.” He pulled off his jacket and slung it over the end of the bannister. He began to loosen his tie. “It’s Edwin.”
“Edwin?” Jill’s legs shook. She sat on the stairs. “He’s not dead?”
“No, he’s not, but apparently, he’s not been too well lately. He’s been told by the doctor to take things easy. But now his best friend has what Edwin calls ‘passed on,’ and the funeral’s on Saturday and Edwin insists on coming to London to be there. My mother tried to talk him out of it, but he won’t budge. He’s booked himself in for the night at some grotty, cheap hotel and Ma’s convinced he’s going to have a heart attack and die too. But the nub of the matter is that he’s got it into his head that he’d like to come and have dinner with us. I told her that it was just because he’d rather have a free meal than one he has to pay for, but she swears it’s not that at all. He kept saying he never sees anything of you and me, he’s never seen our house, he wants to get to know Robbie … you know the sort of thing…”
When Ian was upset, he always talked too much. After a little Jill said, “Do we have to? I wanted so much to go to the country.”
“I know. But if I explain to Delphine, I know she’ll understand, give us a rain check.”
“It’s just that…” She was near to tears. “It’s just that nothing nice or exciting ever happens to us nowadays. And when it does, we can’t do it because of somebody like Edwin. Why should it be us? Why can’t somebody else look after him?”
“I suppose it’s because he doesn’t have that number of friends.”
Jill looked up at him, and saw her own disappointment and indecision mirrored in his face.
She said, knowing what the outcome would inevitably be, “Do you want him to come?”
Ian shrugged, miserably. “He’s my godfather.”
“It would be bad enough if he was a jolly old man, but he’s so gloomy.”
“He’s old. And lonely.”
“He’s dull.”
“He’s sad. His best friend’s just died.”
“Did you tell your mother we were meant to be going to Wiltshire?”
“Yes. And she said that we had to talk it over. I said I’d ring Edwin this evening.”
“We can’t tell him not to come.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” They gazed at each other, knowing that the decision was made; behind them. No country weekend. No strawberries to be picked. No garden for Robbie. Just Edwin.
She said, “I wish it wasn’t so hard to do good deeds. I wish they just happened, without one having to do anything about them.”
“They wouldn’t be good deeds if they happened that way. But you know something? I do love you. More, all the time, if possible.” He stooped and kissed her. “Well…” He turned and opened the door again. “I’d better go down and tell Delphine.”
“There’s cold chicken for supper.”
“In that case I’ll see if I can rustle up enough loose change for a bottle of wine. We both need cheering up.”
* * *
Once the dreadful disappointment had been conquered, Jill decided to follow her own mother’s philosophy—if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. So what, if it was only dreary old Edwin Makepeace, fresh from a funeral; it was still a dinner party. She made a cassoulet of chicken and herbs, scrubbed new potatoes, concocted a sauce for the broccoli. For dessert there was fresh fruit salad, and then a creamy wedge of Brie.
She polished the gate-leg table in the dining room, laid it with the best mats, arranged flowers (bought late yesterday from the stall in the market), plumped up the patchwork cushions in the first-floor sitting room.
Ian had gone to fetch Edwin. He had said, his voice sounding shaky over the telephone, that he would take a taxi, but Ian knew that it would cost him ten pounds or more and had insisted on making the journey himself. Jill bathed Robbie and dressed him in his new pyjamas, and then changed herself into the freshly ironed sundress that had been intended for Wiltshire. (She put out of her mind the image of Delphine, setting off in her car with no one for company but her easel and her weekend bags. The sun would go on shining; the heatwave would continue. They would be invited again, for another weekend.)
Now, all was ready. Jill and Robbie knelt on the sofa that stood in the living-room bay window, and watched for Edwin’s arrival. When the car drew up, she gathered Robbie into her arms and went downstairs to open the door. Edwin was coming up the steps from the street, with Ian behind him. Jill had not seen him since last Christmas and thought that he had aged considerably. She did not remember that he had had to walk with
a cane. He wore a black tie and a relentless dark suit. He carried no small gift, no flowers, no bottle of wine. He looked like an undertaker.
“Edwin.”
“Well, my dear, here we are. This is very good of you.”
He came into the house, and she gave him a kiss. His old skin felt rough and dry and he smelt, vaguely, of disinfectant, like an old-fashioned doctor. He was a very thin man; his eyes, which had once been a cold blue, were now faded and rheumy. There was high colour on his cheekbones, but otherwise he looked bloodless, monochrome. His stiff collar seemed a good size too large, and his neck was stringy as a turkey’s.
“I was so sorry to hear about your friend.” She felt that it was important to get this said at once.
“Oh, well, it comes to all of us, yerknow. Three score years and ten, that’s our alloted span, and Edgar was seventy-three. I’m seventy-one. Now, where shall I put my stick?”
There wasn’t anywhere, so she took it from him and hung it on the end of the bannister.
He looked about him. He had probably never before seen an open-plan house.
“Well, look at this. And this”—he leaned forward, his beak of a nose pointing straight into Robbie’s face—“is your son.”
Jill wondered if Robbie would let her down and burst into tears of fright. He did not, however, simply stared back into Edwin’s face with unblinking eyes.
“I … I kept him up. I thought you’d like to meet each other. But he’s rather sleepy.” Ian now came through the door and shut it behind him. “Would you like to come upstairs?”
She led the way, and he followed her, a step at a time, and she heard his laboured breathing. In the sitting room she set the little boy down, and pulled up a chair for Edwin. “Why don’t you sit here?”
He sat, cautiously. Ian offered him a glass of sherry, and Jill left them, and took Robbie upstairs to put him into his cot.
He said, just before he put his thumb into his mouth, “Nose,” and she was filled with love for him for making her want to laugh.
“I know,” she whispered. “He has got a big nose, hasn’t he?”
He smiled back, his eyes drooped. She put up the side of the cot and went downstairs. Edwin was still on about his old friend. “We were in the Army together during the war. Army Pay Corps. After the war, he went back to Insurance, but we always kept in touch. Went on holiday once together, Gladys and Edgar and myself. He never married. Went to Budleigh Salterton.” He eyes Ian over his sherry glass. “Ever been to Budleigh Salterton?”
The Blue Bedroom: & Other Stories Page 18
