Complete Short Stories (VMC) (106 page)

Hilda deplored the golf course, for she would have preferred real country. Beyond the lower lawn, a green could be glimpsed, and the sort of people she would wish to avoid grouped about, or trundling golf-bag trolleys. Even this morning, an acquaintance, looking for a lost ball, parted the top of the hedge and peered through. ‘Hi! Hilda!’ she called. ‘Garden’s looking great. You too.’

Hilda nodded without smiling. The hedge was one of her failures. Nothing made it put on growth.

Meanwhile, Tom had come back. He unpacked his basket on the kitchen table, and told Mrs Clarebut of news from the butcher’s.

In the village, he was known as Hilda’s ‘fancy man’. Mrs Clarebut had often given out that the three slept in different bedrooms, that she had never seen any sign of what she called ‘hanky-panky’. The village, though, could not take in the strangeness of a woman living with two men, one of them related to her in no way, yet her slave. Mrs Clarebut, knowing more than most, had a glimmering of the way in which Hilda was able to claim a man’s allegiance without sexuality. She wondered if it had not been rather like training a dog – a matter of getting the whip-hand from the start.

As Tom was gossiping and unpacking the basket, Hilda came to the kitchen door. ‘Mrs Clarebut won’t mind doing that,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you could give me a hand with something in the garden.’

She was dogged by her ginger-haired familiar, who said, ‘If she bent down she might die.’

Like lightning, Mrs Clarebut streaked across the kitchen, seized him in a frightful grip above his thin elbow, shook him, hissed at him, making matters a hundred times worse.

‘Groundsel,’ Hilda said to Tom, as if nothing else were happening. ‘Will you come and see?’

They went into the garden, soon to be followed by a snivelling Rupe.

As they walked down a grass path, Hilda said, taking a pencil and pad from her apron pocket, ‘I’d like those delphiniums out when they’re finished: they’re too much on top of the phloxes. Perhaps it’s a good thing
poor old Stack died. He can’t be faced with all these weeds. Although, of course, if
he
were here,
they
wouldn’t be. All the same, I sometimes feel that I’ve betrayed him. Can’t seem to help doing that. No doubt he’ll understand.’ And, belying the doubts she had earlier implied to Rupe of the existence of an after-life, she sent a rueful smile heavenwards.

In spite of the soft earth, plantains broke off at roots, groundsel snapped, as Tom cursed them. ‘All right,’ Hilda said. ‘If you fetch my kneeling mat, my little fork, and help me down, I’ll manage. I’m sorry that I bothered you.’

The future of the garden – her realm – was threatened with incompetence and indifference.

‘Do they have gardens in Heaven?’ Rupe enquired.

‘How the hell do
I
know?’ Hilda asked.

‘When Charlie goes to Heaven, Jesus might mistake him for a sheep.’

‘He may well do that.’

‘But
I
know a sheep when I see one.’

‘So you’re one up on Jesus.’

‘You’re not allowed to say that.’

Tom returned with a small garden fork, and a trug, but no kneeling mat, and he applied himself to the weeds.

‘Because it’s rude,’ said Rupe.

It was not illness that imposed the pattern of Hilda’s days. She had always liked to do the same things at the same time – mornings, out and about in her apron; afternoons a rest, lying on a
chaise-longue
with – still – her little possessions at hand, for there was a table drawn up with her favourite gardening books, shells and pebbles in a bowl, kaleidoscopes to divert her, pills, spectacles, a fan, large amber worry beads and alabaster hand-coolers. Tom had once brought for her from Greece a lump of Parian marble; when she was feverish she held it against her brow. All these treasures were within a hand’s reach, so that she need not stir.

Rupe, tagging along as usual, sometimes sat beside her, staring at the drooping face as Hilda napped and his mum washed up. He would quietly take up a large freckled shell and hold it to his freckled ear, and try to imagine the crashing, then dragging, rattling sound of the sea on the pebbles at Brighton, where once he had been for a day, sitting a lot of the time in a dampish shelter with a comic to shut him up. Shaking the shell about, clamping it to his ear, he simply felt that something had gone muffled in his head. It was annoying like catarrh; not at all like the sea. He yawned, quickly remembered to say ‘Pardon me’, and then, even more polite he thought, he leant forward and whispered, ‘This is very nice. Can I have it when you are dead?’

Behaving beautifully – memorably, she faintly hoped – Hilda opened her eyes, looked at the shell, and gently said, ‘Yes, you may. But it is not really good manners to ask for things.’ She had trained herself to pitch her voice very low, and it seemed to give her an advantage over others.

After Rupe and his mother had gone, Tom would bring her a cup of tea. At five-thirty, she went up for her bath, and he roamed about the landing, dreading a sudden splash or a long silence.

And then it was evening. As time went on, she became too tired to go into the garden again. She lay on the
chaise-longue
, arranging the shells on their dish, examining each minutely; or turning her kaleidoscopes.

‘What I like about the patterns,’ she once said, ‘is that they don’t stay. Everything should vanish. And, of course, everything does.’

Hector roused himself, got up for more whisky. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he said vaguely.

‘I find that a comfort.’

He refilled her glass of campari, and she fished out the lump of ice and sucked it, then held it in her hand, and studied it, as if she had never seen ice before. ‘Very strange,’ she said, in a puzzled voice.

The lilac was over, and cut back again for another spring.

‘I hope it will be lovely for you again next year,’ Hilda said in her intolerable way.

‘I wouldn’t notice if
you
weren’t here,’ her husband said glumly. ‘This whole place is the last place I could put up with. If anything happened, which I’m damn sure it won’t, I’d skedaddle.’

Hilda looked at him, appalled.

‘The garden,’ she said.

‘P’raps shouldn’t’ve said that,’ Hector mumbled.

‘But the
garden
!’

‘Of course, whatever you say.’

Tom, followed by Charlie, came into the room, and saw her face. She was trembling.

He thought, ‘At last her courage has gone.’ It had been a great wonder to him that it had lasted so long. He looked at Hector, who shook his head slowly.

Hilda said to Tom, ‘Would
you
leave this garden – for it to go to rack and ruin?’

‘Just put me foot in it,’ Hector said. He waited for Tom to take over the situation. All his life, he had been used to ordering things, and had done so with calm and mastery; but not in this house.

After dinner, Tom went to fetch the slides and the screen, because conversation was becoming impossible. They looked – and Hector sipped while looking – at the wide and shallow Loire; at men fishing, bone-white
châteaux
, themselves. Hilda smiled at last. ‘
En pays connus
,’ she said. ‘Weren’t they the loveliest holidays of all?’

It was not Hector’s lucky evening. ‘We can’t live in the past,’ he said; became furious, had fallen into another trap, of which there were so many.

Tom quickly slipped in a photograph of Hilda standing in the garden of an
auberge
in front of a trellis of morning glories.

‘A beautiful, simple flower.
They
do the vanishing trick, too. Though I love field daisies more. What’s your favourite, Tom?’

‘I think those striped camellias.’

‘Oh, clever you. Hector?’

Was he forgiven? He stirred suspiciously. ‘Red roses,’ he said in a staunch voice. ‘From a shop.’

Her ripple of laughter was a relief to the other two, whether it was sarcastic or not. She felt – though had no reason to feel – that she had won her way, and that the future of her garden was secure.

‘Bedtime,’ Hector said.

‘Oh, no! There’s a lot more left to this day,’ Hilda protested.

‘Well, I’ll push off,’ her husband said. He got up stiffly from his chair.

The time had come when Hilda went about the garden in a wheelchair. By now, Tom had forgotten that he had ever been a painter. The little he had always paid, from a private income, towards the running of the house was now inadequate, he knew; but he could not bring up the matter. He worked harder with the weeds, and the shopping, and brushing Charlie and taking him for walks, and sometimes he wondered about his life when Hilda was dead. He determined to serve her till the end.

‘Hector, you look so fagged,’ Hilda said on a Saturday morning. ‘Why
must
you go to golf?’

‘Do me good, d’you know.’

‘But after a hard week …’

‘The only exercise I get.’

‘If it’s exercise you want, you could push me down to the village. I should like that.’

He reddened and hesitated.

Tom knew how much Hector counted on his golf, and on his friends at the club as an escape from work and worries.

‘I’m going to the village, Hilda; I’ll take you,’ he said quickly. ‘You’ve always refused when I’ve asked you before.’

‘There’s been the garden to think about, but today I felt like a little holiday.’

‘We can have a drink in the garden at the Red Lion.’

‘It would be nice,’ Hilda said coolly, ‘but I begin to wonder if I shan’t change my mind.’

She changed her mind, and, sitting at home waiting, it seemed to her that Tom was an absurd time buying a few things for Sunday lunch.

Tom, it was true, had lingered about the village, gazing in shop windows without seeing anything, reading all the advertisements at the post office – for daily help, and help in gardens, for babysitters and second-hand prams; so many cries for aid, none offering any. He considered buying a cracked soup tureen at the junk shop. He stopped to chat to people about dogs and babies and the weather, gave news of Hilda and received messages for her, though she had never been popular, and her protracted and much-talked-about dying seemed to have made her less so. Mitchell, the butcher, would be his last call, because a leg of lamb is heavy to carry. The butcher’s was the source of all gossip, the very spring-head, from which information dribbled to the general stores, the ironmonger and the barber.

There was a little queue, and it turned at once to stare at Tom. The shop was at a standstill with incredulity, and then feet shuffled in the sawdust, glances veered away. A leader seemed needed, and Mr Mitchell came round the chopping block in his bloodied apron, steel swinging from waist, a knife in hand. He looked alarming, and said in a low voice, to be remembered and described by everybody present, ‘A word with you outside, Mr Bonchurch, if I may.’

Tom meekly left the shop with him, and at once someone else came in and took his place in the queue, to be immediately informed of the morning’s happenings.

‘On the first green,’ one said, already half into the story.

‘It’s Mr Warfield. He’s dead,’ another said, filling the gap.

‘They were looking all round the village for Mr Bonchurch to tell him. Only just walked in here.’

‘Heart attack, I suppose. It usually is. What about
her
? Likely she’s had one by now, too.’

‘No, we’d have heard.’ (‘Standing in this place,’ they thought.)

‘Mr Mitchell out there telling him.’

The newcomer stepped quickly back and looked over her shoulder out of the shop window, but Tom and Mr Mitchell were out of sight.

So that was how Tom learnt of Hector’s death – incredulously, in a lean-to full of bits of carcasses and hanging birds.

‘I must go,’ was all that he could say, with dread in his heart.

Mr Mitchell said kindly, ‘Len can drive you back in the van.’

Indeed, Tom’s legs felt too weak for walking. He nodded distractedly. Mr Mitchell was too kind.

‘And don’t worry about tomorrow’s dinner,’ Mr Mitchell said. ‘I’ll get Len to pop a little something through the back door this afternoon. A small shoulder, I should think.’

The shop was full of concern when Mr Mitchell returned. No one complained of having been kept waiting. All felt braced – eye witnesses almost.

‘He didn’t get his joint,’ some silly, practical woman said.

When Tom got back to the house, Mrs Clarebut was standing by Hilda with a glass of brandy. The doctor was awaited, and she wished him to know, when he came, that she had done the right thing. Rupe had been shut in the kitchen and was hollering.

Hilda stared at Tom, and he went across the room and stood by her, but could only mumble her name – no other words came to him. At last, she put out a hand and took the brandy and drank it steadily, as if it were a glass of milk. Mrs Clarebut took the empty glass to the kitchen where she gave Rupe a clout. He was too outraged to care. He, who had always been so interested in people dying, was now excluded from the excitement of it. This seemed to him to be intolerably unfair.

After a time, staring before her, Hilda whispered, ‘I told him not to go.’

In the next days, having to arrange the cremation, Tom was in a state of great bewilderment. He kept thinking, absurdly, that this was the sort of thing he would have left to Hector.

Hilda rarely spoke. She ate little, and she looked afraid – not sad, or grief-stricken, but terrified. At night Tom, who could not sleep himself, knew that her light was on.

When he was forced to speak to her of things to be done, she shuddered, her lips pressed together. She wheeled herself out to the garden, but almost at once turned restlessly back.

Death, which had seemed like a fantasy to her, was at her heels now, with the reality of menace to herself. Here was the truth she had said she loved.

Hector was now a non-person, though his things still lay about. Disregarding all her suffering – she thought – Tom kept asking her for decisions, such as the time of the funeral, the fitting-in of Hector’s disposal in a tight crematorium schedule. (‘We could manage it at eleven-thirty, or two o’clock. Well, two o’clock would be splendid for us,’ the undertakers had said.) Then, long-ignored relations Hilda must be hostess to, it seemed. And police, solicitor, doctor, vicar were all bothering her, who should not, she felt, be bothered at all. Not as a rule a tearful person, she began to cry a great deal, hopelessly, with the tears trickling between the trembling fingers she spread over her face, her mouth, when glimpsed, squared and ugly, like a furious baby’s.