“Perhaps Rowan could help you with that,” suggested Miss Balfour.
Mrs. Ferrier turned her long grey-blue eyes on Rowan and smiled at her.
“I wonder if you could tell me how I can get some people to dance for my old folks?” she asked.
“If a team from our class would do, I could easily ask our instructor,” said Rowan.
“Rowan’s class is jolly good!” Holly burst in rather too loudly. “It’s the advanced—”
“Holly, dear, don’t interrupt,” said her mother.
Holly glowered, and wished she had not spoken, if she was going to be pulled up like this every time she opened her mouth, and in front of Mrs. Ferrier too!
But Mrs. Ferrier was looking at her now, out of those beautiful eyes, and saying gently: “I’m sure she is good, and I think, Holly, that a team from your sister’s class would be just right.”
Rowan then promised to ask if her class could provide a team of four couples to dance at the Old People’s Home, concealing any qualms she might have at the prospect of asking Angus to take part. He would have to be asked, naturally. He was by far their best dancer; he was in the Edinburgh team; and if he would only agree to come, he might be persuaded into doing one or two solo dances as well.
“How good of you all to take such a practical interest in the old people’s entertainment,” said Mrs. Ferrier, as she got up to go. “I am accompanying the singers, and we are having one or two practices in my flat in Lyon Place. If you, my dear,” this to Rowan, “would like to come one evening when they are there, we could arrange the programme.” She turned to Mrs. Lenox. “Perhaps you could spare Holly too? I think she might like it.”
“That would be delightful,” said Mrs. Lenox.
Holly, crimsoning, muttered, “Thank you.”
“And I hope, Mrs. Lenox, that you will have tea with me one day soon, when Miss Balfour can come. We will have a quiet talk—”
All these invitations having been accepted, and days and hours fixed, Mrs. Ferrier said good-bye to her hostess and Miss Balfour, and was taken downstairs by Holly.
“Rowan dear, why didn’t you go down with Mrs. Ferrier?” asked Mrs. Lenox, as the drawing-room door shut behind her departing visitor.
“Holly was dying to do it, Mummy,” said Rowan. “It seemed a shame to spoil her simple pleasures.”
In the hall Holly, holding out her hand and giving Mrs. Ferrier’s gloved fingers a shake that made their owner wince, said hoarsely: “My sister Hazel can sing.”
“Can she?” Mrs. Ferrier, who had her own reason for wanting to meet Hazel, rescued her mangled fingers, and smiled at Holly’s eager anxious face. “I’ll ring her up, then, shall I?” she said. “And ask her to come with you and Rowan.”
“Oh, yes, please do! That will be lovely. Thank you, duchess,” said Holly and, Mrs. Ferrier by this time being halfway down the step, banged the front door on her retreating figure with a crash that shook the house. She was happily unconscious of having addressed her idol of the moment by the honorary title which she had given her, but Mrs. Ferrier, walking up the Crescent, wondered if she had heard aright. Certainly it had sounded as if Holly had said “Thank you, duchess.” Perhaps it had really been something else.
She dismissed it from her mind, and began to think out her entertainment for the Old People’s Home, which she was anxious should be a real success. All the details must be very carefully planned. It was no good thinking that the old people in the Home would be delighted with whatever they were given. They picked out an inferior performer and commented on the performance freely and fearlessly—and unfavourably.
Mrs. Ferrier knew that the man and woman whom she had already asked to sing were good and could suit their songs to their audience; the violinist would not be too highbrow and would certainty include a selection of reel tunes to set the ancient feet tapping. And they loved to see nice-looking young people, so they would enjoy Hazel, whatever her voice might be like, and the dancing was sure to go down well.
So brooding and planning she walked homeward, through the quiet grey streets where lights were showing in windows and lamps cast circles of pale radiance on the flags of the pavements.
CHAPTER 17
Rowan was brooding too. She had taken Murray’s advice and stayed away from the first of the Mixed Advanced dancing classes, but Angus had given no sign that he had noticed her absence. The second class was on the following evening, and she did not know whether to go or not. Now that she had promised Mrs. Ferrier to collect a dancing team she would have to attend, if only to ask the instructor about it.
In a state of disgust with the world most unlike her, Rowan went off to spend the day looking after her small charges. At least if the telephone rang while she was leading the three little Tinkers through the mazes of their infant lessons, she need not bother, for it would not ring for her.
“So. Pat. And. The. Pussy. Sat. On. The. Mat,” intoned the middle Tinker, Viola.
“That’s wrong! Isn’t it wrong?” squeaked the elder sister, Rosalind. “It’s Cat, not Pussy. Silly thing!”
“Is a Pussy,” said Viola, sticking her lower lip out and preparing to cry.
The youngest, Orlando, who only had a book by courtesy to keep him quiet—vain hope—while his sisters did their reading, roared with laughter.
“Silly Vi! Silly Vi! It’s CAT!” he shouted.
“Please be quiet, Orlando, or I shall take your book away,” said Rowan, calmly. “And Rosalind, don’t be so dreadfully clever. Now, Viola. It is a Pussy, but when the book calls it a Cat, you must read Cat. If you don’t, people will think you can’t read at all.”
This reasonable explanation produced a lull, and Viola continued laboriously to read her sentence.
The telephone, which had been ringing madly during this short passage of arms, had evidently been answered by Mrs. Tinker, for she now put her head round the door and said: “It’s for you, Rowan.”
“For me?” Rowan jumped up, told the children each to draw a picture of anything they liked until she came back, and followed Mrs. Tinker into the dark untidy hall, where the telephone lived in an even darker and untidier cupboard.
She supposed it must be her mother, wanting her to do some urgent errand on her way home, and as she disapproved of her family ringing her up at work, her voice was chilly when she said: “Hullo. This is Rowan.”
Then she almost dropped the receiver, for the voice at the other end was Angus Todd’s.
He sounded extremely surly. “What a time you’ve been,” was his opening remark.
“I’m at my job, which you seem to have forgotten,” replied Rowan. “Do you want me for anything in particular?”
“Yes, of course I do. I wouldn’t have rung if I didn’t,” he said crossly. “Are you coming to dancing this evening or not?”
Rowan’s heart jumped up, but she steadied her voice and said as carelessly as she could: “Oh, I expect so. Why?”
“Why?” he exploded, so that the receiver crackled at Rowan’s ear. “Why? You seem to have forgotten that you were supposed to be my partner. A fine fool you made me look last week! I’m not going to stand for—”
“I thought you hoped you would never see me again?” Rowan said very gently.
There was silence at the other end, and Rowan wondered whether he was completely taken aback, or merely too angry to speak.
At last he said quite quietly: “So you’re holding that against me? I might have known. But I wrote in a rage, and—”
“I don’t hold things against people,” said Rowan. “And I must stop speaking to you. I can hear the infants raising Cain, and I’m not paid to neglect them. I’ll see you this evening.”
“May I come for you?”
“No, Angus. But if you’ll try not to be quarrelsome you can see me home. Good-bye.”
And Rowan put down the receiver and flew back to her charges, who were each loudly deriding the others’ pictorial efforts.
Viola, as usual, was
in tears, Rosalind looking smug, and Orlando had snatched this heaven-sent opportunity of covering the end pages of the big atlas with a spirited battle-scene in some bright red substance which Rowan recognized as lip-stick. Orlando’s pudgy hands, his round, intent face and the front of his jersey were all smeared with it as well, and he was blissfully happy and absorbed.
Rowan dealt briskly with the situation, praised Viola’s picture and thus stopped her copious weeping, told Rosalind that as she was the eldest her drawing ought to be better than her sister’s, and turned to Orlando.
“Little man,” she said. “Show me what you’ve been drawing, and give me your drawer.”
It was useless to ask Orlando for a pencil. In his simple, practical vocabulary anything that drew was a drawer, just as a pen was a writer and a spoon or fork an eater.
Orlando was always perfectly ready to fall in with Rowan’s wishes, even when he found them a trifle difficult to understand. With everyone else he was quite intractable.
He unclenched his fist now, displaying a scarlet palm, and let Rowan take the mangled remains of the lip-stick from him.
“Bloody picksher,” he remarked conversationally, gazing with admiration at his work.
“Orlando’s naughty,” said Rosalind. “That’s Mummy’s lipstick, and he’s been eating it too, and now he’s said a Bad Word.”
“I don’t know why you didn’t ask him not to,” said Rowan. “Orlando, you will have to come and wash. Keep your hands off the table-cloth and the books just now, please. It’s time for your rest, anyhow. Rosalind, you can draw a map, and leave Viola alone. And Viola, here’s the history book. See if you can tell me what the pictures are about when I come back. Now, Orlando—”
“Picksher!” said Orlando, hanging back.
“Oh, of course. I haven’t looked at it yet, have I?” Rowan picked up the atlas. “‘We’ll take it with us and look at it while you’re washing your hands and face.”
While Orlando performed his unwilling and perfunctory ablutions, Rowan glanced at his gory picture.
Young though she was, and in sympathy with the children, especially Orlando, whom she considered worth a dozen of his sisters, the look she gave his work of art was the indulgent, half-amused look of an adult.
Then she blinked and looked again, neither amused nor indulgent but frankly bewildered. Her technical knowledge of drawing and painting was almost nil, but she could not help seeing that Orlando’s “bloody picksher” was not the production of an average child at all.
None of his former scribblings with a pencil on small pieces of paper had looked like this. He had needed the softer, broader medium of his mother’s lip-stick and the space afforded by the double end pages of the atlas to express himself in this extraordinary representation of a horse fighting a man. The drawing was crude and faulty, of course, but the figures were perfectly recognizable. It was as lively and full of rough movement as the prehistoric scratchings on the cave walls of Combarelles or La Moute, which it resembled.
Orlando, having transferred most of the lip-stick to the towel, came to stand beside her, his untidy brown head bobbing about below the open atlas, which Rowan was holding up.
“You won’t tear it up, will you?” he asked, anxiously.
“Certainly not. I’d like to keep it and look at it while you are having your rest, if I may,” said Rowan.
He nodded. “Awright. Was it bad of me to do it?”
“Well—you mustn’t go on drawing in books, Orlando. But I’ll get you a proper drawing-book, a big one, and some chalks,” Rowan promised, and he allowed himself to be tucked up under his quilt without protest.
After looking in on the little girls and seeing that they were peacefully occupied, she sought out Mrs. Tinker, whom she found preparing lunch in the kitchen.
“May I speak to you for a minute, Mrs. Tinker?” she said.
“If it’s about your pay, Rowan, I’m terribly sorry, but I just haven’t got it!” exclaimed Mrs. Tinker, dropping a spoon with a clatter on to the unswept floor.
“No, no! It’s not that at all!” cried Rowan, flushing and far more embarrassed than her employer.
Her pay was more often than not in arrears, and she knew that if her mother had any idea of the hugger-mugger household in which her daughter was employed, she would insist on Rowan’s leaving the Tinkers and finding another job. But Rowan did not want to leave, because of Orlando. She would have parted from Viola with very little regret and Rosalind with none at all, but Orlando was a darling. Until he went to school she wanted to look after him.
“No,” she said again. “It’s just—look at this!” And she laid the atlas down on the table among a clutter of dishes and crumbs.
“Who did it?” asked Mrs. Tinker, after a pause.
“Orlando,” said Rowan, with pride. “And he’s only just four.”
For answer Mrs. Tinker burst into tears. “I can’t bear it!” she cried.
Rowan could not understand. “Do you mean—the atlas and your lip-stick? I’m sorry about them, and it won’t happen again. But aren’t you glad that he’s inherited his father’s talent? At least, it looks to me as if he has.”
“Glad? No, I’m not glad. How can I be? One artist in the family is more than enough!” said Mrs. Tinker, tears pouring down her thin cheeks. “I want Orlando to be a doctor or a stockbroker or a lawyer. Oh, I know you think it’s frightful of me, and, of course, I am proud of Martin’s work. But being proud of him doesn’t pay the milk bill, or the rent—or you!”
“Well, never mind about me. I can wait,” said Rowan. “And you’re taking part in a radio play this evening, aren’t you? That will mean ready money for milk and things. Now sit down quietly and I’ll go on getting lunch. The girls are quite good and happy.”
Mrs. Tinker gasped, blew her nose, and sank on to a wooden chair.
“I feel ashamed of myself,” she said. “But—honestly, there are days when I don’t see how we are to carry on. Martin is good, but he doesn’t sell enough to pay for his paints and canvases. The real truth is that artists shouldn’t marry unless they have private means. What a good girl you are, Rowan! You ought to leave us, you know. It isn’t fair on you, pigging along here teaching the infants for next to nothing—and that in arrears.”
“I like it, so unless you are giving me the sack, please don’t say any more,” Rowan begged, finding a ragged apron and tying it round her waist.
“It’s Orlando, isn’t it? Not Rosalind and Viola,” said Mrs. Tinker, and Rowan nodded.
“Poor Orlando, I wonder what will become of him,” went on Mrs. Tinker dreamily, as she watched Rowan’s quick assembling of the meal’s ingredients. “He isn’t mine, you know. Martin’s, but not mine. The girl died when he was born. I’ve tried to make no difference between him and the girls—indeed, I’m very fond of him, funny little boy—”
Rowan, though shaken badly by this disclosure, gave no sign. She guessed that it was doing Mrs. Tinker good to talk, so she continued her work, hardly listening, her mind full of Orlando, her opinion of Martin Tinker lower than before. If he had been worth anything as a man, she thought, he’d teach drawing in a school or something, not sit back and say he’d sooner starve. He ought to consider his family and work for them instead of shutting himself up in his studio painting pictures which never sold, while his wife tried to make a little money at the B.B.C. And the children should be at the local school, and would be if he weren’t such a snob.
The stress of the day left her tired and limp, and she went to her dancing class feeling quite unequal to coping with Angus if he was in a bad mood.
The thought of the wretched Tinkers lay on her heart like a real weight pressing her down. From remarks made by Rosalind, she had gathered that the family affairs were much worse since the end of the summer term. Rowan had silenced Rosalind instantly, of course, but she could not help remembering what the horrid child had said.
The “painting holiday” so airily alluded to by Mrs. Tinker, the
children’s “nice long stay with my relations” assumed darker colours in the new knowledge Rowan had of the situation. Because Martin Tinker refused to remain in Edinburgh during August and September, he dragged his wife away from her B.B.C. work to the country. There they took a temporary job for her as cook or housemaid or both, while he painted when the spirit moved him and spent money they did not possess in the local pubs.
Nor were the children much better off, dumped on a reluctant aunt of Mrs. Tinker’s, who had grumbled about the noise and mess they made all the time they were with her.
What on earth was going to happen to them, wondered Rowan, as the bus carried her towards her dancing class. It was obviously impossible for them to go on getting deeper and deeper into debt, until they were turned out of the squalid house they rented furnished. The disagreeable aunt, if appealed to, would do something; but not very much, and only for the girls.
Yes, the girls would be all right. It was Orlando who worried Rowan almost sick. He was a practical and sensible little boy, quite different from any of the other Tinkers, but he liked stability. If she left the wretched house, Orlando would feel lost, and worse, he would lose confidence; and Orlando was a worth-while person already. He mattered, Rowan thought. For his sake she must stick to the Tinkers as long as Mrs. Tinker’s conscience would permit.
After that—but Rowan could not bear to think of it. She sat clutching her dancing shoes, tense and pale.
The familiar sights and sounds of the big hall, filling with chattering couples, steadied her. By the time she had hung up her coat, changed her shoes, and met Angus just inside the door, she was able to greet him with a faint smile.
“Hullo,” he said. “I’ve got places for us in a decent set at the far end. Come on.”
Near Neighbours Page 17
