Isabella: A sort of romance

by R. A. Bentley

  There is a loud cry and out of the bungalow hurtles a stout, grey-haired woman in a wheelchair. A long ramp projects from the back porch and down this she flies, her big muscular arms frantically spinning the wheels. "Where the hell have you been, young lady? I've been worried sick. Don't they have telephones there? Don't they have stamps? Just you wait until I get my hands on you!"

  Rat gently takes the cardboard box from Bluebell. "Dear me, he looks a bit flat, doesn't he? I think he's still breathing though." He glances at Bella now dragged down into a noisy and reproachful embrace. "Come on, this could turn nasty. Best leave them to it. I expect you could all do with a cup of tea. As for pussycat here, I think we'd better get him to a vet."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  With a turn of a wheel Veronica Aubrey-Hole pirouettes about her kitchen, moving briskly from table to stove and stove to sink. Resting a saucepan on the sink's edge, she fixes Bella with a baleful glare. "If you really couldn't make it to the funeral, you could at least have rung. You might have known how upset I'd be, not knowing where you were at a time like this. Anything could have happened."

  "I said I was sorry," says Bella. "What else am I supposed to say? Look, hang on, I'll do that."

  "No thank you; I'm quite capable of straining a few potatoes."

  "I know you are. I just wanted to help, that's all."

  "There's plenty you can do. We'll want some plates warming for a start, and you can chop those carrots. You could have rung, that's all I'm saying. You could have reversed the charges if you didn't have any money. Why didn't you ring and reverse the charges?"

  Bella doesn't answer. She knew it would be like this. She takes down the plates and shoves them in the Aga.

  "Well?" says Veronica.

  "Look, can't you just leave it? I've been upset too, you know. I just needed to get my head together, that's all. I just needed a bit of time to sort myself out."

  "And that's why you didn't ring?"

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  Veronica sighs and drains the saucepan. Hot vapour rises around her. "Simon's been here."

  "Here!"

  "Yes. He drove all the way down, looking for you."

  Bella scowls. "That was stupid."

  "No it wasn't. He cares about you. He's a very nice young man. You don't deserve him."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "Are you going to chop those carrots or not?"

  Bella begins to scrape the carrots into the sink. "Did you really like him?" she asks.

  "Yes I did. So did your uncle; which, I needn't tell you, is praise from Caesar. Is it serious?"

  Bella shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe."

  "Well it ought to be." Her aunt glances out into the gathering darkness where Roz's lights have just come on. "How on earth did you get mixed up with that lot, anyway? Who is this McNab? Rat says he smells. What's this about driving yourself home?"

  "I didn't drive myself home. Pat drove me home."

  "You know I don't mean that, I mean before. Simon said —"

  "Simon's a blabbermouth."

  "He said you drove off in someone else's van."

  "It wasn't someone else's van; it was my van. Circumstances obliged me to distrain it. Anyway, it's gone now."

  "But you can't drive, Bella!"

  "Yes I can; I learned. I can drive very well. I'll put the potatoes in the baking tray, shall I? Where are the tablespoons?"

  "In the biscuit tin of course. Where's this van now? What's happened to it?"

  "I can't find it. You've moved everything."

  "No I haven't; it's in the thing drawer, where it always was. What happened to the van?"

  Bella shuts the drawer with a bang. "Oh, bloody hell! You never give up, do you? Look, I had an accident, all right? A little accident. It could have happened to anyone. I was trying to get home and it was dark and raining and there was this stupid cat and I crashed the van and Pat and McNab got me out. End of story."

  "There's no need to shout, Bella. Were you hurt? Was anybody hurt?"

  "I am not shouting. No-one was hurt. I'm fine." She holds up her arms and does a sarcastic little twirl. "See? No cuts, no bruises, no broken bones: a perfectly healthy Bella."

  Veronica observes her critically. "Isn't that dress a bit short?"

  Rat and Bluebell lean close together, peering into the cardboard box.

  "Do you know anything about cats, Uncle Rat?"

  "Not a lot," admits Rat, "but he looks pretty sick to me."

  "Then shouldn't we just take him straight to the vet? Have you got a car?"

  "Yes, but there won't be anyone there now; it's late. I've rung Mr Woodcock and left a message. I expect he'll call in later."

  "Will he be able to find his way here in the dark?" asks Narcissus, looking concerned. "He might fall in the harbour."

  "Don't be silly," says Primrose. "He's a grown-up."

  "Uncle McNab gets lost all the time and he's a grown-up."

  "That's because he gets pissed. Anyway, he's not a proper grown-up."

  "You mustn't say pissed," admonishes Bluebell. "It's not nice. You must say inebriated."

  "I'm sure Mr Woodcock will be able to find his way," says Rat. "And I've never known him inebriated. Not seriously, anyway." He gently fingers the little cat's torn and scabby ears. "We had a cat of our own once, a long time ago, remarkably similar to this one as it happens." Suddenly he bends and looks more closely, an odd expression on his stern-kindly face. Reaching into the box he gently lifts the stubby tail and stares at its tip, the last inch of which is bent almost at a right angle. "Quite remarkably similar. How very odd."

  Veronica bowls briskly in from the kitchen. "Come on Ratty, set the table; we're nearly ready. What's that box doing in here?"

  "Don't let her see him, she doesn't like them." hisses Rat.

  Bluebell snatches up the box. "It's all right. I'll take him away now."

  "Him?"

  "It's just a cat. Bella ran him over," explains Rat. "He needs a vet. I've asked Reg Woodcock to call."

  "You mean to tell me she brought the thing home with her?"

  "Well she could hardly leave him by the side of the road."

  "It was me that picked him up, not Bella," protests Bluebell. "It's me that rescued him and if it wasn't for me he'd be dead."

  "Good thing too if you ask me," mutters Veronica, sotto voce.

  "Can someone please put the mats out?" says Bella, "These plates are hot."

  "Where's your mother, Bluebell?" asks Veronica. "And that McNab? We're ready to eat."

  During the pudding a silence falls, broken only by the moaning of the wind round the bungalow and McNab's rather noisy eating.

  Listen to that wind," says Bella. "It tells me I'm really home. It almost always blows here. When it doesn't, it feels sort of strange, as if something is about to happen."

  "This is nothing, of course," says Rat, taking up the conversational baton. "When we get a really big blow you have to shout to be heard. Then the shingle starts flying about like bullets. It comes off the top of the bank. That's why we've got shutters on the windows."

  "Will the shingle break Roz's windows?" asks Narcissus, suddenly wide eyed and anxious.

  "Oh goodness no, dear," says Veronica reassuringly. "It's only if we get a really big storm, in the winter."

  "Is this real silver?" asks Bluebell, toying with her dessert spoon. "This little mark means silver, doesn't it?"

  "Yes," says Veronica. "It's a nuisance, you have to clean them."

  "Why do you use them then?"

  "Shush!" whispers Pat. "That's rude."

  "We haven't enough stainless to go round, I'm afraid," explains Veronica. "We don't get much company here."

  "Oh dear, and here we are imposing," says Pat. "You've gone to so much trouble, and so soon after your poor sister —"

  "No, not at all. I didn't mean that." says Veronica, hastily. "It's really nice to see someone new, isn't it Ratty? We don't get out much. I don't, anyway."

&
nbsp; "Good for us. Take us out of ourselves," agrees Rat. "Anyway, we've got something to celebrate for once: the Return of the Native." He raises his glass. "I give you the Native. Safe home again and looking even lovelier, if that's possible."

  "The Native," echoes McNab, draining his own glass with a flourish and banging it down.

  Bella smiles and lowers her eyes modestly.

  "More like the prodigal if you ask me," mutters Veronica.

  "It's been a lovely meal," says Pat eagerly. "It's really nice to eat someone else's cooking for a change."

  "What are these green tubes?" asks Narcissus, pulling a face.

  "Chives. Just eat them."

  "I don't like them."

  "Eat them and then you can have your pudding. You're all behind, as usual."

  "Have you always been in a wheelchair, Aunty Veronica?" pipes up Primrose.

  "Primrose!" cries Pat, horrified.

  Veronica shakes her head in a not-to-worry sort of way. "No, I was in a car crash, dear."

  "Like Bella?" says Primrose.

  "Yes, very like Bella," agrees Veronica, looking sourly at her niece. "People think they can drive when in fact they can't and then bad things happen."

  There is another silence.

  "I understand you're heading for Plymouth," says Rat, finally.

  Pat shakes her head. No, Bristol, actually."

  "Plymouth," growls McNab.

  "It was Bristol. He said Bristol," says Pat. "Goodness me, I should know." She turns to Veronica. "A friend of ours went on ahead, you see, to try and find us a pitch, near Bristol, but he hasn't been in touch for weeks. I'm quite worried about him really."

  "Likely doin time," mutters McNab.

  "Oh rubbish, of course he's not."

  McNab shakes his head sadly. "He canna haud his bouse, ye ken. Wi'oot me tae mind him he's like a wee bairnie. Gat intae a fecht, like eneuch."

  "You're the one that gets into fights," says Pat, crossly. "And then he has to rescue you."

  "I expect they have letterboxes and telephones even in prison," muses Veronica. "I understand they have them everywhere except, for some reason, between here and London."

  Bella feigns not to hear. She has been drawing a smiley face on her discarded napkin with her finger nail, but now she changes it to a cross face and adds a little stick figure in a wheelchair. She wonders how soon she can decently slip away. She hardly knows how to sit still when the Stones are out there waiting for her, so near in the lovely dark and wind.

  "Are you sure I can't tempt you to some wine, Pat?" asks Rat. "It's rather a nice claret."

  "No no, strictly teetotal, I'm afraid," says Pat, covering her glass. "Boring, aren't I?"

  "Not at all, very wise, I daresay," says Rat gallantly. "You don't mind if we . . ? "

  "No, you go ahead. It's just me. I don't really care for it. I never have."

  "Another for you, McNab? I don't suppose you'll need any persuading."

  "Och, that'd be a fine an' guidly thing, Rat," says McNab. "An' ah ken Carol's verra pairtial tae claret."

  "Then she shall have one," says Rat, reaching over with the decanter.

  "What a lot of pictures," says Narcissus, who has been gazing about him. "Is that one you, Uncle Rat?"

  Rat turns in his chair to look at a wall packed with framed photographs. "This one? Yes it is. You've got sharp eyes. There are quite a few of me actually, proper rogues' gallery."

  "That's a first lieutenant's uniform isn't it?" says Bluebell.

  "Yes it is. Well done! And the next one is my first command, an MTB. That's a motor torpedo boat. The one next to it is H.M.S Falcon, a destroyer, and the one next to that —"

  "Were you in the war then?" interrupts Bluebell.

  "Yes I was."

  "Did you kill anyone?"

  Rat raises his bushy grey eyebrows, almost the only hair on his long, boney head. "Well yes, I expect so. That's what happens in wars I'm afraid."

  "What do you mean, you expect so?" says Bluebell, frowning. "Surely you must know?"

  "Bluebell, that's enough! cries Pat. "Oh goodness, I really am awfully sorry. They're not usually like this. Whatever must you think of us?"

  "I was only asking," protests Bluebell. "I wasn't being rude or anything."

  "You're asking to be sent to bed!"

  "How am I supposed to know things if I don't ask?" grumbles Bluebell sulkily. "You're always saying, 'Find it out. Find it out'. How am I supposed to do that if I don't ask?"

  "It's quite all right; it's a fair question," says Rat. "The honest answer, of course, is yes, I did kill people; but it was all rather remote you know, a bit like dropping bombs out of aeroplanes."

  "And how do you feel about that?" asks Bluebell.

  "Bluebell!"

  Rat looks thoughtfully at her. "I'm not avoiding your question, but I think we should continue this another time."

  "When?"

  "Tomorrow if you like."

  "All right then."

  Veronica turns to Pat. "That one there is the bungalow when we first moved in. Look at all the junk. It took us a week just to clear it out."

  "Have you been here long?" asks Pat.

  "Twenty-three years, but we're still working on it. Little improvements you know. There was no proper bathroom or anything to start with. We had to put it all in."

  "Much like you with your splendid bus, I should imagine," says Rat.

  Pat shakes her head. "Oh no, I'm not a bit practical. She was already fitted out fortunately."

  "She cost eight hundred pounds, complete with furniture and curtains," says Bluebell, proudly.

  "Really? Well you can't complain at that," says Rat, emptying his glass. He fills it up and McNab's as well. "Vron?"

  "No thanks."

  "Bella?"

  "Please, Uncle."

  "This is certainly a braw room," says McNab, nodding about him admiringly. "Ah like the pentit match-boardin' espeicially."

  "It's all like that," says Rat. "The whole thing's wood, not a brick in it. Used to be the company shipping office and canteen. The good thing about it is the space, it's enormous. The summer room alone is twenty by forty. That was the canteen of course. I'll show you later. And the views are the best in Dorset."

  "And it's so wonderfully peaceful," adds Veronica. "My father used to bring me down here sometimes, when he came to see the manager. And once I was allowed to come to the Christmas dance. They had one every year for the staff. I never dreamt I'd end up living here."

  "Was it your father's company then?" says Bluebell, casting a wary glance at her mother.

  "Yes. He opened the first pit about twelve years before the war. At one time we were shipping out over ten thousand tons of clay a year. This was a very different place then. Scores of men, the roar of machinery. The clay came down off the heath on a light railway to be processed in those sheds out there and loaded onto barges. Then they'd take it down the harbour, and transfer it onto ships at Bradport quay."

  "Why didn't the ships just come here?" says Bluebell.

  "Not enough water. The harbour's quite shallow really. Even to get the barges up to the jetty the channel had to be constantly dredged."

  "And now it's almost completely silted up, more's the pity," says Rat. "You can hardly get our launch up, except at high tide, let alone a barge."

  "Excuse my ignorance," says Pat. "But what exactly is ball clay."

  "Do they make balls out of it?" asks Primrose.

  Rat laughs. "No, it goes for pottery, most of it, or did then. As a matter of fact you've been eating off some of it, made locally."

  "Some of us still are," sighs Pat, glancing at Narcissus; now ploughing through his pudding.

  "They say the name comes from the special spade they used to dig it up," says Veronica. "It was called a tubil or tubal."

  "Then they started to bring in pneumatic spaders," says Rat, "but it was still very labour-intensive."

  "And now it's all been turned into cups and
saucers and things," says Bluebell wonderingly. "All those thousands of tons. It must have left an awfully big hole."

  "Not really. The workings covered quite a wide area, a couple of hundred acres, but they didn't go very deep. And, you know, the heath soon grows back. You can hardly tell where it was taken out now, apart from a few ponds."

  You haven't got a clue, thinks Bella. And really it's just as well. All that destruction and the millions who died; it'd send a normal person mad to think they might have caused that, or been involved in it. Thank God they didn't touch the Stones or it would have been Armageddon I shouldn't wonder. She is now so filled with nervous energy that she is having to waggle her knees to help dissipate it. On her napkin is a superb, if necessarily ephemeral, fingernail sketch of the Tenstones.

  "Wad onybody be wantin that drappie o wine at aa?" enquires McNab.

  Bella notices that his scarlet aura is beginning to flash portentously. As usual, it outshines all the others; her aunt's pinky-brown, her uncle's soft, maritime grey, even Bluebell's smouldering, adolescent glow. She passes him the decanter. "That's the last. Make the most of it."

  Rat pushes his chair back a little. "Anyone mind if I smoke?"

  "I'll make coffee," says Veronica. "Take them through, Ratty."

  "It's well gone bedtime, Bluebell," says Pat, glancing at the antique clock on the sideboard. "Off you go. Make sure the twins are tucked in and see they clean their teeth."

  "Yes Mum," sighs Bluebell.

  "I'm not tired," protests Narcissus. "And I haven't finished my pudding."

  "Yes you are. And you should have eaten it faster."

  "Ah'll jist gang oot awee, if ye dinnae mind," says McNab, and makes, a little unsteadily, for the door.

  Bella smiles. "I expect he's gone for his fiddle. He won't want to waste a window of opportunity."

  "I thought that went very well, in the end," says Rat, forcing the kitchen door closed against the wind. "Do you know? That fellow is going to sleep under the bus, with Carol! I offered them a room but he said no, they were used to it. He's got a tent apparently but he hasn't unpacked it. Must be tough as old boots. Plays a mean fiddle though, I'll say that for him."