Complete Short Stories (VMC) (11 page)

‘There you are, you see,’ said Miss Despenser.

‘If you would only marry me!’ said Hugh, and at once began to cloud the proposal with doubts and apologies. ‘I know so little about girls – no time to learn … I had to work so hard, and I’ve so little money. I’m awfully dull, I know …’

‘As dull as ditchwater,’ Miss Despenser said, but her remarks were now automatic. She had covered her retreat with them, and exhausted, with her efforts and her disappointment, could say no more. She took a pace back in the shadowy hall and when at last Hugh stood up and helped Hester to do so, she closed her eyes and could watch no longer.

‘Good-bye,’ Hester said, turning to her. ‘I’m sorry, and thank you. I had better go back after all.’

Miss Despenser kept her eyes shut; a hard tear was under each lid.

Hugh looked away from Hester for the first time and saw the old woman’s wedge-shaped face, so angrily grieved, her down-turned mouth. With the palm of her hand she was pressing to her skirt the photograph of her dead sister. From his own timid loneliness, he had knowledge of such a poverty of love. He said: ‘Thank you for taking care of her.’ The tragic mask could not move, or the eyes open. When Hester and Hugh had gone, she lifted her lids and two tears dropped out and made tracks down her face to her chin. She picked up the cat and wiped her wet face on his fur, then she gathered up the photographs and crammed them back into the mother-o’-pearl-inlaid box.

Not long after, just as Mrs Brimmer at the Hand and Flowers was saying: ‘Well, we choked her off, gentlemen,’ Miss Despenser entered the bar. ‘So sorry I am late. Some visitors called,’ she said cheerily.

‘A pleasure, I’m sure,’ Mrs Brimmer replied. ‘And now last orders, if you please.’

At the school, Hester was enveloped by tact – Muriel, relieved at her re-appearance, seemed unconcerned and talked of trivial things, though lapsing sometimes into sad preoccupation. Robert’s lack of allusion was almost imbecilic. Hugh, suddenly masterful, had arranged with him that no
words should pass and they did not, although sometimes Hester felt swollen with the rehearsed explanations she was not allowed to make.

As day after day went by, poor little Mooney began at last to wonder if he had escaped expulsion; but Robert’s abstracted ways prolonged the boys’ uneasiness. Dissociation became the policy under this cloud – the copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, or Latin cribs, lost their value; the shrubbery, or Hell’s Kitchen, where the older ones smoked, was deserted.

One day, after lunch, when Robert had said Grace he still stood there, as if he had more to say. They paused and turned their faces towards him, candid, innocent. Only Mooney looked down desperately at his plate – the five prune-stones at its edge:
this
year.

The announcement of Hugh’s and Hester’s engagement was a tremendous relief. Robert’s attempt at joviality brought forth sycophantic cheers and smiles. They were all in a good humour, especially as one wedding present would do for both. ‘It is better for them not to marry “outside” people,’ the head boy explained. ‘Now what we want is for Matron to marry Mr Wigmore!’

Hugh’s first biology class of the afternoon was in a mood of refreshment and good humour.

‘Congratulations, sir.’

‘Thank you, Palmer,’

‘Congratulations, sir.’

‘I will take Palmer as spokesman for all of you,’ Hugh said firmly. ‘Page fifty-one.’ They opened their books.

‘So that’s the solution,’ Beatrice said. ‘You were quite right to be patient and let things work their own way out.’

‘I don’t know that I did that,’ Muriel said. ‘And it has taken a long time and she hasn’t gone yet.’

‘She seems too moony, too dull a girl to fall in love, be fallen in love with.’

‘Is love the prerogative of the bright ones? He is very dull himself, you know, and it is a good thing if two uninteresting people marry and keep their dullness to themselves. Though she has changed a little for the better – looks less
driven
, and doesn’t knock things over quite as much as she used; can sometimes drink a glass of water without spilling it.’

‘Well, if marriage stops her being clumsy it will be something.’ Then Beatrice asked slyly: ‘How has Robert taken it?’

‘Nobly. He arranged Hugh’s new job for him and still has nobody to take his place.’

‘I meant – about Hester.’

‘Oh, Hester!’ Muriel’s voice was light with annoyance. ‘I think I
imagined a great deal of that.’ If Hester were going, her own agitation would sink; then she wanted her old life again, her picture of serene marriage, of Robert’s devotion to her. She regretted having confided in Beatrice, who made past miseries more real by her knowledge of them. To turn the conversation she said: ‘I will give her a lovely wedding … I suppose that she has some friends she can invite – school-friends if nothing better. I have chosen the dress-material. Just think, Beatrice, when we were married we wore those hideous short frocks. It would be our luck to strike that fashion. I wouldn’t let anyone see my wedding photographs for all the world.’ With tender condescension they recalled the nineteen-twenties and the gay and gentle girlishness of their natures then.

Muriel began to feel energy and optimism, as the holidays and the wedding grew nearer. She worked to bring to life one imagined scene, the beginning of peace for her; foresaw Hester and Hugh going down the steps to the car – ‘She was married from my house,’ she would tell people.

‘She was like a daughter to me’ – and when the car had gone (for ever, for ever) down the drive, she and Robert would turn and go up the confetti-littered steps to begin their new – or, rather, their
old
– life, together and alone.

She worked on the wedding and discussed it incessantly. ‘Suppose it rains!’ Robert said abruptly one night. Muriel was sitting up in bed while he undressed. She was brushing her hair and at his words parted it from her face, looked up at him in perplexity. ‘Are you angry about it, then?’

‘Angry? I only said “Suppose it rains!”’

‘You sounded so sarcastic.’

He got into bed and closed his eyes at once. Smoothing her hair back, she dropped the brush to the floor and put out the light. ‘You do love me, Robert?’ she asked in her meekest voice.

‘Yes, dear.’

‘You aren’t still angry with me about Hester? It has turned out well in the end for her.’

‘I hope so.’

‘He will be very good to her, I am quite sure.’

‘Yes, I am sure, too. Good-night, Muriel.’

‘Good-night, Robert.’

He turned over and seemed to fall asleep: yet she doubted if he did so, and lay and listened for a long while to his regular, unbroken breathing. Once, to test him, she touched him gently with the back of her hand, but he did not turn to her as years ago he would have done. ‘I cannot make him come to me,’ she thought in a panic. ‘I cannot get my own way.’ She became wide awake with a longing for him to make love to her; to prove his need for her; so that she could claim his attention; and so dominate
him; but at last wished only to contend with her own desires, unusual and humiliating as they were to her. She lay close to him and masked her shame with a pretence of sleep. When he did not, would not, stir, her tenderness hardened to resentment. She raised herself and looked down at him. His profile was stern; his hair ruffled; he breathed steadily. ‘He cannot be asleep,’ she thought, as she bent over him, put her cheek to his brow, no longer dissembling or hiding her desire.

His stillness defeated her and after a while, hollowed and exhausted by her experience, she turned away and lay down on her side, listening to her thunderous heart-beat, feeling giddy. ‘If I could be young again!’ she thought. ‘If I could be young!’

Two thrushes were singing in the garden before she fell asleep. The night had dishevelled her, her hair was tangled on the creased pillow, her body damp in the hot bed. But in her dreams, a less disordered Muriel took command. She dreamed that she was making Hester’s wedding cake – white and glistering it rose before her, a sacrificial cake, pagoda-shaped in tier on tier, with arcades of sugar pillars, garlanded friezes. Delicate as hoar-rimed ferns she made the fronded wreaths of flowers and leaves. It blossomed as she worked her magic on it with the splendid virtuosity of dreams. ‘Yes, that is how it will be!’ she thought. ‘And no one must ever touch it or break it.’ She had surprised herself with her own skill, and, standing back to view her work, felt assuaged, triumphant, but bereft, too, as artists are when their work is done and gone for good.

‘Give the credit where it is due,’ Mrs Crouch said, smiling at her son.

We had, of course, been marvelling at her youthfulness. Every gesture she made, even the most simple, seemed calculated to defy old age. She constantly drew our attention to her eighty years, referred to herself as an old fogey; insisted on this when we were obliged to demur. And then insisted on insisting. We offered her a drink. She became husky, Marie Lloydish, a little
broad
. Her glass of gin she turned into a music-hall act. A further little speech was made over a cigarette, my brother waiting with his lighter flaring ready, while she launched off into an explanation about herself: how she liked a bit of fun, liked young people, was as old as she felt, merely.

I glanced at her son; but not as if he were anything within my, or anybody’s, reach. He was flashy, cynical, one of those men who knows about everything; makes sinister implications of rumours in the City, panic in the Cabinet; hints at inside information; has seen everything, seen through everything; known everybody, loved nobody; bought everything, at a special price; and sold it again, at a great profit. His mother admired him of all her children the most. She displayed him, was indebted to him, gave credit to him, as she was doing now.

He looked in her direction and smiled, a little bored with the elderly bird-watcher, who had sat down beside him to describe without pause his day on the marshes. He was right to be bored by the bird-watcher – a relation of ours, who menaced our every summer.

The evening light enhances those marshes. We sipped our drinks, narrowed our eyes, gazing down over the green flatness where masts in the middle of a field seemed to indicate the estuary. Little silences fell over us from time to time. The gentle vista before us, the gradual cadences, the close-cropped grass tufted with rough weeds which the slow-moving sheep had left, untidy little sheets of water, far off the glitter of the sea – all of this held our attention, even from one another, for English people love a view. Only the bird-watcher droned on.

Mrs Crouch twirled her glass, brushed at her skirt, examined her rings, wondering, I guessed, what the Spotted Crake had to do with her
and how remarkably she carried her age. She decided to begin a counter-conversation and turned to my brother, raising her voice, for she was a little deaf and usually shouted.

‘I hope, my dear, you won’t think I tie Roy to my apron-strings. As a matter of fact, I am always saying to him, Roy, I say, you ought to be taking out a beautiful young blonde instead of your old mother. But he won’t have it. Of course, I love my little outings, going out and meeting young people. When I’m asked how it is I carry my age so well, I say it’s being with young people, and most of all being with Roy. He won’t
let
me settle down. Come along, Mother, he says, let’s go off on a binge.’ She savoured this word, chuckling. My brother fidgeted gloomily with his wrist-watch. Roy Crouch fidgeted with his, too.

‘No,’ said the bird-watcher, as if contradicting himself, ‘not a common sight, but a remarkable one, the male bird sitting on the nest. No mistaking that, even at a distance, through field-glasses. The female is smaller and duller.’

‘Quite,’ said Roy nastily.

‘I’ve had a full life,’ his mother was saying. My brother swallowed and glanced out across the salt-marshes.

‘Did you ever see a Richard’s Pipit?’ Roy suddenly asked.

‘No,’ said the bird-watcher shortly. ‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

The bird-watcher turned right round in his chair and stared at him. He could not call him a liar, but he said: ‘Then you were very fortunate, sir. May I enquire where?’

‘In Norfolk,’ Roy said carelessly.

‘Very fortunate,’ the bird-watcher repeated, still glaring.

‘I think that’s why Roy likes to take me out, because I enjoy myself.’

‘I expect so,’ my brother agreed.

I refilled glasses. The bird-watcher recovered. He began to talk of the Water-Rail, how he had lain in a bed of reeds and counted seven pairs that morning. A wonderful sight. Perhaps not Richard’s Pipits, you bounder, he seemed to imply. But a wonderful sight all the same.

‘Talking of wonderful sights,’ said Roy, getting into his stride, ‘I was staying near the Severn Estuary in the spring and saw a very unusual thing – rather a romantic sight …’ He laughed apologetically. ‘I happened to look out of my bedroom window one night when it was quite dark and I could see something moving down in the water-meadows, something rippling’ – he rippled his fingers, to show us. ‘Something that shimmered’ – his hand shimmered. ‘I stood very still and watched, hardly able to believe my eyes, but at last I realised what it was.’ He looked at the bird-watcher and at me. My brother was out of this conversation.

‘But I really don’t think,’ Mrs Crouch was telling him, ‘that the new tunes are half so jolly as the old …’

‘And what do you think it was?’ Roy asked us.

We did not know.

We did not know, we said.

‘Eels,’ he said impressively, ‘young eels, or rather, I should say “elvers”,’ he corrected himself. ‘I shall never forget that sight. It was ghostly, unreal. In a silver flood, they rippled through the grass in the moonlight, through a little stream and then on up the slope … beautiful. They come up from the sea, you know. Every spring. I’ve heard people say they
couldn’t
travel across land, but there it was, I saw with my own eyes.’

My brother was nearly asleep. Mrs Crouch said suddenly, testily, ‘What are you all nodding your heads so solemnly about?’