Now she knocked at Marigold’s door, heard, as expected, a voice heavy with preoccupation, and went in. Also as expected, Marigold was hard at work. This afternoon it was her address-book she was hard at work on, but it might just as well have been her knitting-patterns, her screen with the coloured cutouts from newspapers and magazines, her wardrobes, her photograph-album, her correspondence, the objects on and in her dressing-table; these last were in constant need of rearrangement.
‘Who is it?’ she asked in the same tone; to see who it was she would have had to turn through an arc of nearly ninety degrees, and also raise her head.
‘It’s Adela, dear. I was wondering if you felt like a stroll. The rain seems to have—’
‘Yes, I could do with a breath of fresh air. I’ll just get my bootle-pootles on.’
This was unexpected. Normally, Marigold would conduct a full debate with herself, most though not all of it aloud, on the question whether or not to accompany Adela on her daily afternoon stroll, and when she agreed it would be with an air of concession. Now, she seemed almost eager.
If Adela had ever had a friend, it was Marigold. They had met at school in 1912. Their contemporaries there had often remarked on how nice (most of the time) Marigold was to Adela and how devoted (all the time) Adela was to Marigold. When Marigold’s husband had his final and fatal heart-attack in 1969, leaving her what finally turned out to be a few hundred pounds, some furniture and nowhere to live, it had been obvious common sense to throw in her lot with Adela. Adela had the benefit of her company, and kept house too. Not many people, perhaps, could have put up with the constant presence of a couple as objectionable as Marigold found Bernard and Shorty, but Marigold managed it, with an ease that sometimes surprised her.
The two women, one protected against the mud and wet grasses by scarlet plastic boots, the other by wellingtons, left the cottage by the back door and made their way into the woods under a flat grey sky. Water dripped off trees and bushes, and there was an occasional beating of wings. Otherwise it was very quiet.
‘I hope you enjoyed the party, dear,’ said Adela.
‘Oh yes, I thought it went off reasonably well, considering. I just wish your brother would learn to control his temper when we have guests. And Shorty was rolling drunk, of course.’
‘Oh, I think Bernard was only being a bit sort of gruff. He’s probably been having trouble with his, you know, disposal arrangements. And Shorty, well, he doesn’t seem to realize that at his age he can’t—’
‘We all have our troubles, it’s quite true, and we’ve just got to try not to be too hard on one another.’
This, coming from Marigold, might have struck a different observer as the very rough equivalent of an assertion by a Jew that Himmler had perhaps been judged too harshly, but Adela said no more than,
‘Yes, tolerance is the great thing. Actually, Bernard’s not too bad there, he can be not too bad sometimes. He was telling me only this morning he thought young people were much nicer than people say. Than a lot of older people say, I mean. It’s only when he—’
‘Darling, something rather silly happened today.’
‘Oh yes? Tell me about it.’
Marigold did not at once respond to this encouragement. She and her companion came into a small clearing where there was moss, a tree-stump and a thick drift of dead leaves. Just then, Shorty was seen approaching. His course was far from straight, though it was true that his path bent to and fro among birch and ash trees and that he was pushing a wheelbarrow. He had used it to take a load of empty bottles, tin cans and the like to a large hole in the ground a couple of hundred yards away and dump it there, as he did every other day or so; a chore, and almost certainly illegal, but cheaper and more effective than trying to bribe the dustmen, who called only once a week, into removing the stuff, which must regularly have exceeded some unproclaimed quota.
‘Hallo, girls,’ said Shorty as he crossed to them. ‘Look what I’ve got.’
What he had got, lying in the barrow, was a large hen pheasant, soaking wet but otherwise, to all appearance, in excellent condition. After some initial surprise, Adela responded to the sight with interest, Marigold with obvious discomfort.
‘It was just lying by the path; can’t have been dead long.’
‘You can’t tell,’ said Adela. ‘It might be a day or two.’
‘But you hang them longer than that, don’t you, Adela? I’m going to take it home and dry it off and string it up in the larder.’
Adela was dubious. ‘Of course, we don’t know how it died. It might have eaten poison. Put down by somebody. To kill vermin and things.’
‘Unlikely, I’d say. You never see a soul in these woods.’
‘I don’t care how it died,’ said Marigold violently, ‘I’m not having anything to do with it.’
Frowning, she picked the bird up by its feet and threw it backhanded into the trees, where it thumped faintly to the ground and disappeared.
‘Well, that takes care of that,’ said Shorty. ‘It was just a thought.’ He had instantly grasped that Marigold’s action was the result of genuine feeling, not of any desire to make an impression, and in the second place that that feeling was not caused simply by confrontation with a dead pheasant. He resolved to stay about for a while and see what more of the same there might be to come. ‘Are you ladies proceeding further? If so, I request permission to accompany you, leaving my trusty barrow where it now stands.’
‘If you don’t terribly mind, Shorty,’ said Marigold with hidden effort, ‘there is something rather particular I wanted to say to Adela, so …’
‘So I’ll go rejoicing on my way. Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
When Shorty, just not quite falling over as he pushed the barrow out of the clearing, had left them, Marigold turned to Adela.
‘As I said, darling, it is only a silly little thingle-pingle, but it has been sort of bothering me. You remember I mentioned that letter from Emily Rouse, where she said she was—’
‘Oh, I can see how that might bother you, but you really ought to feel cheered up by the way she’s improved. People can—’
‘It isn’t that, it isn’t that. Would you kindly let me say what I have to say?’
‘I’m sorry, dear.’
Marigold spoke with unaccustomed deliberation. ‘I came across that letter for the first time this morning. At least, I thought it was the first time, it felt like the first time, but it was dated twelve days ago and it was out of its envelope – I couldn’t even find the envelope. So I must have read it before. And forgotten all about it. It was all new to me.’
When she was sure she understood, and that there was no more to come for the moment, Adela said, ‘You might have opened it and then been interrupted by something and not come across it again till this morning.’
‘I’d written “Received 26th October” on it; it must have been a long time in the post, because it was dated the 21st.’
‘You still might have been interrupted just after writing it, writing down the date you received the letter.’
‘I can’t remember writing it or receiving the letter.’
‘I shouldn’t worry, dear. Things slip my mind all the time. Look at the way I forgot the telephone bill and had us cut off for three days. It was the second time running, too.’
‘Adela, that’s just forgetfulness. You’ve always been a bit like that, not a hundred per cent efficient. This is senility.’
‘Oh, really, such nonsense. You’re the least senile person I know. Of our sort of generation, I mean.’
‘I can’t stand the thought of ending up a vegetable.’
‘Oh, honestly. A lapse of memory over a letter, that’s hardly being a vegetable. You must keep a sense of—’
‘People don’t turn into vegetables overnight, not necessarily anyway. It can be a gradual process and that means it has to start somewhere.’
&nbs
p; ‘Well, dear, at our age we can’t expect everything to be just as—’
‘We can’t expect not to begin falling apart at the seams. How frightfully clever of you to have thought of that. All I can say to you is tunkalunks.’ (‘Thank you’ or ‘thanks’ in Marigold’s very own lexicon.)
‘I should have a word with the doctor if you feel …’
Adela stopped speaking because Marigold had turned and started walking back towards the house. It was no use going after her: some people might have been able to find the right words of apology and comfort, but Adela knew she was not one of them. She continued for a little way in the original direction. At this time of the year it was hard to find anything worth seeing, apart from deadly nightshade and rowan berries. She looked at them, and heard the song of a blackbird. It lasted only a few seconds; by now, she thought to herself, there could not be much left for him to sing about.
Thirteen
‘Gentlemen will please refrain,’ sang Shorty to the tune of Dvořák’s Humoresque, ‘from making water while the train, is standing stationairy at the plat-form …’
He reeled out of the ground-floor lavatory, dealing himself with the doorpost a buffet that almost sent him back whence he had come, then, after a wide sweep, entered the kitchen. Here, as happened half a dozen times a day, Mr Pastry and Pusscat were locked in their peculiar form of combat, one that started as a mixture of fight and game in about equal proportions, with an escalating trend in favour of the fight element. The dog snarled and began digging his teeth in; the cat, pinned down on her back, yelled and scrabbled at his belly with her hind claws.
‘Let her be, you bloody fool,’ said the man, and kicked Mr Pastry in the ribs hard enough to cause a sharp howl and an abrupt departure. After he had got up off the rush mat, where the sudden shift of balance involved in the kick had laid him full length, Shorty added to Pusscat, ‘And you’re a stupid bitch to let things get that far. Need your brains tested.’
He crossed the narrow part of the hall to the foot of the stairs, weaving this way and that like a man in a top-heavy ship. ‘Hoboes lying underneath, will get it in the eyes and teeth, and they won’t like it any more than you.’ The banisters made the ascent less of a directional problem, but put a good deal of strain on the arms. At the top, he stood almost still and considered. He ought to have brought the gardening-tools bottle from the coal-house instead of just swigging out of it. Now it was between the wardrobe bottle and the suitcase bottle. In his present state, unusually advanced for the time of day because of the lunch-time session, he might well bring down the whole wardrobe instead of just what lay on its top. That made it the suitcase. He got himself into the box-room – would have found it difficult to keep himself out once launched towards it – knocked over, not on purpose, one of the many piles of George’s books ranged there, tried vainly to restore it, and uncached the Dr Macdonald’s. Half full; just right.
In the room he shared with Bernard, he took off his cardigan and trousers, though not his socks, and got into bed. It was a single bed; Bernard’s bed, of the same order but higher quality, stood on the far side of an unfolded folding screen; the two men had never shared a bed except to make love, and that not for over thirty-three years. When, in 1946, civilians at last, they had met again for the first time since before the war, Bernard’s proposal that they set up together had been very specific on that point. It had been all one to Shorty, who, though finding the physical attentions of men far from unpleasant, had never had much real sexual feeling for them. (He had never had much for women either, come to that; a tart every month or six weeks had seen him through nicely until the whole shooting-match had stopped mattering one way or the other.)
Now he poured something like a gill of booze into the King George V Jubilee mug that had miraculously survived continual use – perhaps not so miraculously, for it was Shorty’s boast that, whatever else he might break, a vessel containing liquor was always safe with him, that he had once fallen head-long drink in hand, sprained his left wrist and not spilt a drop.
He sipped, lit a Player’s No. 6, sipped again. This was the squaddie’s literal seventh heaven: he was dry, warm, indoors, off duty, smoking, pissed, and getting more pissed still. ‘And no chance of getting collared for guard,’ said Shorty.
Fourteen
Mr Smith and the shoemaker enjoy discussing politics, read Bernard. The farmer, Mr Butcher and the baker belong to the same bowls club. Mr Farmer is not the smith. The trouble was, he had got the hang of these things now. But he might as well finish the puzzle as not.
In the past, he had been a man of many interests. The athletic ones – fives, racquets, cricket – had gone when they had had to go and he did not want to read about them. Military tactics and strategy, the history of the Empire, anything concerned with India (the land of his birth and early childhood and of eight years’ service between the wars), pioneers in aviation, chess, the life of the Duke of Wellington, the works of George Meredith, all had gone too, thoroughly and for good, even though they had not had to, or not in any obvious sense. To try any of them these days, to look at Kim or The Egoist, was to come up against something with as little point as a railway-platform conversation between a departing traveller and the man seeing him off. So all he did was pass the time.
He had become quite good at that, having long since proved the importance of rules and limitations. No brain-work of any kind before luncheon: nothing but a long sojourn – from necessity, not choice – on the lavatory, a careful shave, an unhurried bath, minutes spent on the selection of shirt, tie, socks, more minutes on tidying his half of the bedroom, the rest of the period got through with the aid of wireless, tonic-water, cigarettes and doing George. Games only between tea and dinner: bridge problems – nowadays he hated bridge, but did not mind bridge problems – or patience. In this field he had emerged as something of a virtuoso and authority. His exhaustive library on the subject included a first edition (1890) of Patience Games by ‘Cavendish’, once his father’s property, and was ready to hand, not incarcerated behind the doors of his bookcase. Finally, after dinner, some sporadic talk, an inattentive glance at television or half-listen-in to the wireless, and dozing.
He solved the puzzle. He would check, although he felt sure he had got it right; he did and had: Mr Shoemaker was the farmer. He could not try another puzzle, not at once. Then it occurred to him that he had not yet read the Daily Telegraph, but it was not to be seen. He had put it down somewhere when the Fishwicks arrived. Where? Not in the hall, nor the kitchen. Perhaps Shorty had taken it upstairs to read, or fumble uncomprehendingly through, before he settled down to his Egyptian physical jerks. (His phraseology, like Marigold’s, sometimes had the power of acquiring an unwarranted currency in the minds of others.)
In their bedroom, Bernard looked round the edge of the screen at Shorty, who was asleep and had not got the paper anywhere about him. His mouth was open, but he was not snoring. Bernard continued to look at him. Shorty had gone the way of military tactics and the rest through no fault of his. Here was someone whom he, Bernard, granted to deserve a certain respect, not much, perhaps, but some; and, given their shared history, he had a claim on affection as well. It was about five years since Bernard had finally satisfied himself that he had become incapable of either feeling. The incapability held for Adela, George, Marigold – though in her case there had never been the least affection – and anyone else he might run into. There were not many in that last category nowadays. He had purposely missed the last two reunion dinners of his regiment: not the regiment he had been virtually sacked from, the inferior one he had been allowed to join when men were needed in 1939. It was such a business getting to London, and so crowded and noisy when one got there.
He would not have said that he found the company at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage altogether without savour. There was still a little satisfaction to be had out of scoring off them in talk, but it did seem to be on the decrease. He must see
if he could not come up with some less subtle means of venting on the four of them his lack of respect and affection. What had happened, what was the change in his circumstances that had led him to this decision? Well, anyhow, such a project would help to pass the time.
The Telegraph was in the kitchen after all, partly concealed by the fruit-bowl which he was nearly sure he had seen Adela removing from the luncheon-table. She would hear about that at dinner.
Fifteen
A few days later, Marigold sat in her room trying to write a letter to her friend Emily Rouse. She found it hard work, she who had always found such activity a durable pleasure, because this morning she was in a state of acute fear. Ever since coming across Emily’s letter as if for the first time but in fact for the second, or third, she had not been able to suppress the fear, and a further incident had sharpened it; nevertheless it was worse at the moment because Dr Mainwaring was due to call in response to her summons, and she would have to tell him what had happened and hear what he had to say.
Round her were her numerous possessions, each in its place: fern, footstool, china menagerie, postal scales, cylindrical cushion with tassel, miniature said to be of ancestor and said to be by Cosway, and many a flower-vase, paperweight and candlestick. She ran her eye over them and found them all reassuringly in order; after so many years it failed to take in what would have struck many observers as the most unusual feature of the room, a coverlet divided into six sections, each bearing an incompetently-appliquéd slogan. In order, these ran: milkie-pilkies, sardeenies, mousie, bunnie-wunnie, collar-wallar with bellsie-wellsies, and creamie. They had been in some sense intended to please (even Marigold could not quite have said how) one or other long-forgotten predecessor of Pusscat, who now herself lay in a rough disc on one corner of bunnie-wunnie.
Ending Up Page 6
