Complete Short Stories (VMC) (16 page)

At the window, waiting for her to appear, he felt that the dust and destruction had pinned down his courage. Day after day had left its residue, sifting down through him – cynicism and despair. He wondered what damage he had wreaked upon her.

Across the street, which once had been narrow and now was open to the sky, a nun went slowly, carrying bread under her arm. The wind plucked her veil. A thin cat followed her. They picked their way across the rubble. The cat stopped once and lifted a paw, licked it carefully, and put it back into the grit. The faint sound of trowel on stone rang out, desultory, hopeless, a frail weapon against so convincing a destruction. That piteous tap, tap turned him away from the window. He could not bear the futility of the sound, or the thought of the monstrous task ahead, and now feared, more
than all he could imagine, the sight of his wife hurrying back down the street, frowning, the picture-postcards in her hand.

Louise was late. Richard sat drinking Pernod at a table in the bar where he could see her come into the hotel. There was only the barman to talk to. Rather clouded with drink, Richard leant on his elbow, describing the town as it had been. The barman, who was Australian, knew only too well. After the ’14–’18 war, he had put his savings into a small café across the road. ‘I knew it,’ Richard said eagerly, forgetting the lacuna in both years and buildings, the gap over which the nun, the cat had picked their way.

‘I’ll get the compensation some day,’ the Australian said, wiping the bar. ‘Start again. Something different.’

When a waiter came for drinks, the barman spoke in slow but confident French, probably different from an Englishman’s French, Richard thought, though he could not be sure; a Frenchman would know.

‘She gets later and later,’ he said solemnly.

‘Well, if she doesn’t come, that’s what she’s bound to do,’ the barman agreed.

‘It was a shock to me, the damage to this town.’

‘Twelve months ago, you ought to have seen it,’ the barman said.

‘That’s the human characteristic – patience, building up.’

‘You might say the same of ants.’

‘Making from something nothing,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll take another Pernod.’

The ringing sound of the trowel was in his ears. He saw plodding humanity piling up the bricks again, hanging sacking over the empty windows, temporising, camping-out in the shadow of even greater disaster, raking ashes, the vision lost. He felt terribly sorry for humanity, as if he did not belong to it. The Pernod shifted him away and made him solitary. Then he thought of Louise and that he must go to look for her. Sometimes she punished him by staying away unaccountably, but knowing that did not lessen his anxiety. He wished that they were at peace together, that the war between them might be over for ever, for if he did not have her, he did not have all he had yearned for; steadied himself with, fighting in the jungle; holding fast, for her, to life; disavowing (with terrible concentration) any danger to her.

He wondered, watching the barman’s placid polishing of another man’s glasses, if they could begin again, he and Louise, with nothing, from scratch, abandoning the past.

‘First I must find her,’ he thought. His drinking would double her fury if she had been lingering to punish him, punishing herself with enforced idling in those unfestive streets; a little scared, he imagined; hesitantly casual.

She came as he was putting a foot unsteadily to the floor. She stood at the door with an unexpectant look. When he smiled and greeted her, she tried to give two different smiles at once – one for the barman to see (controlled, marital), the other less a smile than a negation of it (‘I see nothing to smile about’).

‘Darling, what will you have?’

She surveyed the row of bottles hesitantly, but her hesitation was for the barman’s benefit. Richard knew her pause meant an unwillingness to drink in such company, in such a mood, and that in a minute she would say ‘A dry Martini’, because once he had told her she should not drink gin abroad. She sat down beside him in silence.

‘A nice dry Martini?’ he suddenly asked, thinking of the man with the trowel, the nun with the bread, the battered cathedral, everybody’s poor start. Again she tried to convey two meanings; to the barman that she was casual about her Martini, to her husband that she was casual about him.

Richard’s head was swimming. He patted his wife’s knee.

‘Did you get the postcards all right?’

‘Of course.’ Her glance brushed his hand off her knee.

‘Cheers!’ She held her glass at half-mast very briefly, spoke in the most annulling way, drank. Those deep lines from her nose to her mouth met the glass.

‘Cheers, my darling!’ he said, watching her. Her annoyance froze the silence.

Oh, from the most unpromising material, he thought, but he did seem to see some glimmer ahead, if only of his own patience, his own perseverance, which appeared, in this frame of mind, in this place, a small demand upon him.

When I was a child, people’s ages did not matter; but age mattered. Against the serious idea of age I did not match the grown-ups I knew – who had all an ageless quality – though time unspun itself from year to year. Christmases lay far apart from one another, birthdays even farther; but that time was running on was shown in many ways. I ‘shot out’ of my frocks, as my mother put it. By the time that I was ten, I had begun to discard things from my heart and to fasten my attention on certain people whose personalities affected me in a heady and delicious way.

Though the years drew me upwards at a great pace, as if they were full of a hurried,
growing
warmth, the seasons still held. Summers netted me in bliss, endlessly. Winter did not promise spring. But when the spring came, I felt that it was there for ever. I had no dread that a few days would filch it from me, and in fact a few days were much when every day was endless.

In the summer holidays, when we went to the country, the spell of the long August days was coloured, intensified, by the fascinations of Mrs Vivaldi. My first thought when we arrived at the guest-house in Buckinghamshire was to look for some sign of
her
arrival – a garden hat hanging in the porch, or books from Mudie’s. She came there, she made it clear, to rusticate (a word she herself used, which put a little flushed constraint upon the ladies who kept the guest-house, who felt it to be derogatory); she came to rest from the demands of London; and she did seem to be always very tired.

I remember so many of the clothes she wore, for they seemed to me unusual and beautiful. A large hat of coarse hessian sacking was surprisingly lined under the brim with gold lamé, which threw a light over her pale face. In the evenings, panels heavy with steel-bead embroidery swung away from her as she walked. She was not content to appeal only to one’s sight, with her floating scarves, her fringes and tassels, but made claims upon the other senses, with scents of carnations and jasmine, with the rustling of moiré petticoats and the more solid sound of heavy amber and ivory bracelets sliding together on her wrists. Once, when we were sitting in the garden on a still afternoon, she narrowed her hand and wriggled it
out of the bracelets and tried them on me. They were warm and heavy, alive like flesh. I felt this to be one of the situations I would enjoy in retrospect but find unendurable at the time. Embarrassed, inadequate, I turned the bracelets on my arm; but she had closed her eyes in the sun.

I realise now that she was not very young. Her pretty ash-blond hair had begun to have less blond, more ash; her powdered-over face was lined. Then I did not think of her as being any age. I drifted after her about house and garden, beset by her magic, endeavouring to make my mark on her.

One evening in the drawing-room she recited, for the guests, the Balcony Scene from
Romeo and Juliet
– all three parts – sitting on the end of the sofa, with her pearls laced through her fingers, her bronze shoes with pointed toes neatly together. Another evening, in that same room, she turned on the wireless and fixed the headphones over my ears (pieces of sponge lessened the pressure), and very far off, through a tinkling, scuffling, crackling atmosphere, I heard Edith Sitwell reciting through a megaphone. Mrs Vivaldi impressed me with the historical nature of the occasion. She made historical occasions seem very rare and to be fastened on to. Since then, life has been one historical occasion after another, but I remember that scene clearly and the lamplight in the room with all the beautiful china. The two ladies who kept the guest-house had come down in the world and brought cupboards full of Crown Derby with them. The wireless-set, with its coils and wires, was on a mosaic-topped table that, one day, my brother stumbled against and broke. It disintegrated almost into powder, and my mother wept. Mrs Vivaldi walked with her in the garden. I saw them going under the rose-arches – the fair head and the dark – both very tall. I thought they looked like ladies in a book by Miss Braddon.

One afternoon I was alone in the drawing-room when Mrs Vivaldi came in from the garden with a basketful of sweet-peas. As if the heat were suddenly too much for her, she sat down quite upright, in a chair, with the basket beside her, and closed her eyes.

The room was cool and shadowy, with blinds half-drawn to spare the threadbare carpet. The house seemed like a hollow shell; its subfusc life had flowed out into the garden, to the croquet lawn, to the shade of the mulberry tree, where elderly shapes sagged in deck chairs, half-covered with newspapers.

I knew that Mrs Vivaldi had not seen me. I was reading, sitting in my ungainly way on the floor, with my body slewed round so that my elbows and my book rested on the seat of a chair. Down there among the legs of furniture, I seemed only part of the overcrowded room. As I read, I ate sweets out of a rather grubby paper bag. Nothing could, I felt, have been
more peaceful than that afternoon. The clock ticked, sweets dissolved in my cheek. The scent of the flowers Mrs Vivaldi had brought in began to mix with the clove smell of pinks outside. From the lawn came only an occasional grim word or two – the word ‘partner’ most of all, in tones of exhortation or apology – and the solid sound of the mallet on the ball. The last smells of luncheon had faded, and the last distant clatter of washing-up. Alone in the room with Mrs Vivaldi, I enjoyed the drowsy afternoon with every sense and also with peaceful feelings of devotion. I liked to be there while she slept. I had her presence without needing to make her love me, which was tiring.

Her presence must have been enough, for I remember that I sat with my back to her and only once or twice turned to glance in her direction. My book was about a large family of motherless children. I did not grudge children in books their mothers, but I did not want them to run the risk, which haunted me, of losing them. It was safer if their mother had already gone before the book began, and the wound healed, and I always tried to choose stories in which this had happened.

From time to time I glanced a little beyond the book and fell into reverie. I tried to imagine my own mother, who had gone out walking that afternoon, alone in the cherry orchard that ran down from hilltop to valley. Her restlessness often sent her off on long walks, too long for me to enjoy. I always lagged behind, thinking of my book, of the large, motherless family. In the cherry orchard it would be hot and scented, with bees scrambling into flowers, and faded-blue butterflies all over the chicory and heliotrope. But I found that I could not imagine her walking there alone; it seemed an incomplete picture that did not contain me. The reality was in this room, with its half-drawn blinds, its large gros-point picture of a cavalier saying good-bye to his lady. (Behind him, a soldier said good-bye in a less affecting way to a servant.) The plush-covered chairs, the Sèvres urns were so familiar to me, so present, as never to fade. It was one of those stamped scenes, heeled down into my experience, which cannot link up with others, or move forward, or change. Like a dream, it was separate, inviolable, and could be preserved. Then I suddenly thought that I should not have let my mother go out alone. It was a revolutionary thought, suggesting that children have some protection to offer to grownups. I did not know from what I should have protected her; perhaps just from her lonely walk that hot afternoon. I felt an unwelcome stir of pity. Until now I had thought that being adult put one beyond the slur of being pitiable.

I tried to return to my book, to draw all those children round me for safety, but in my disturbed mind I began to feel that Mrs Vivaldi was not asleep. A wasp zigzagged round the room and went abruptly, accidentally,
out of the window. It did not leave the same peace behind, but unease. I could see myself – with
her
eyes – hunched up over my book, my frock crumpled under me, as I endlessly sorted out and chose and ate and brooded over my bag of sweets. I felt that I had intruded and it was no longer a natural thing to be indoors on such a day. If she was awake, I must get up and speak to her.

Her hand supported her head, her white elbow was on the plush arm of the chair. In that dark red chair she seemed very white and fair and I could see long blue veins branching down the inside of her arm.

As I went towards her, I saw, through the slats of her parted fingers, her lashes move. I stood in front of her, holding out the bag of sweets, but she did not stir. Yet so sure was I that she was awake that I did not know how to move away or leave her. Just as my hand wavered uncertainly, her hand fell from her face. She opened her eyes and made a little movement of her mouth, too delicate to be called a yawn. She smiled. ‘I must have dropped off for a moment,’ she said. She glanced at the basket of flowers, at the clock, then at my bag of sweets.

‘How kind of you!’ she murmured, shaking her head, increasing my awkwardness. I took a few steps to one side, feeling I was looming over her.

‘So you were here all the time?’ she asked. ‘And I asleep. How dreadful I must have looked.’ She put her hand to the plaited hair at the nape of her neck. ‘Only young people should be seen asleep.’