Complete Short Stories (VMC) (17 page)

She was always underlining my youth, emphasising her own age. I wanted to say, ‘You looked beautiful,’ but I felt clumsy and absurd. I smiled foolishly and wandered out into the garden, leaving my book in the room. The painted balls lay over the lawn. The syringa made the paths untidy with dropped blossom. Everyone’s afternoon was going forward but mine. Interrupted, I did not know where to take it up. I began to wonder how old Mrs Vivaldi was. Standing by the buddleia tree, I watched the drunken butterflies clinging to the flowers, staggering about the branches. Why did she pretend? I asked myself. I knew that children were not worth acting for. No one bothered to keep it up before us; the voices changed, the faces yielded. We were a worthless audience. That she should dissemble for me made me feel very sad and responsible. I was burdened with what I had not said to comfort her.

I hid there by the buddleia a long time, until I heard my mother coming up the path, back from her walk. I dreaded now more than ever that her step would drag, as sometimes it did, or that she would sigh. I came out half-fearfully from behind the buddleia tree.

She was humming to herself, and when she saw me, she handed me a large bunch of wild strawberries, the stalks warm from her hand. She sat
down on the grass under the tree, and, lifting her long arms, smoothed her hair, pressing in the hair-pins more firmly. She said: ‘So you crept out of that stuffy little room after all?’

I ate the warm, gritty strawberries one by one, and my thoughts hovered all over her as the butterflies hovered over the tree. My shadow bent across her, as my love did.

‘I was
hours
with Jennifer,’ Mrs Miller said, and she lifted the lump of sugar out of her coffee to see how much of it had melted. ‘I went in at ten o’clock at night, and she didn’t arrive until after tea the next day.’

Mrs Graham, not really attending, had a sudden vision of Jennifer, quite grown up, stepping out of a cab with all her luggage, just as it was getting dark. Such pictures were constantly insinuating themselves into her mind, were sharply visual, more actual than this scene in the teashop in the High Street among her friends, from whose conversation she often retracted painfully, to whose behaviour she usually reacted absurdly.

‘… and dares to tell me there are no such things as labour pains,’ Mrs Miller was saying. ‘“It’s all psychology,” he said, and I said, “So are too many things nowadays.”’

Mrs Howard said, ‘He told me just to relax. Well, I relaxed like mad and I still had to have seven stitches.’

Her voice had risen in her indignation, and Mrs Miller gave a little sideways warning glance at a man at the corner table, who had turned up his coat collar and was rustling his newspaper.

‘Well, it was certainly the worst experience I ever had,’ Mrs Howard said emphatically. ‘I hope never to go through—’

‘I thought neuralgia was worse,’ Mrs Graham forgot herself enough to say.

At first, they were too surprised to speak. After all,
men
could have neuralgia. Then Mrs Miller gave her own special little laugh. It was light as thistledown. It meant that Mrs Graham only said that to be different, probably because she was a vegetarian. And was always so superior, so
right
about everything – had said that there wouldn’t be a war at the time of Munich, when they were sitting in this very café surrounded by the dried fruit and the tinned food they had been so frantically buying, and the next year, when they
hadn’t
bought the fruit, she
had
.

‘My God, Dolly! What
have
you done?’ Mrs Miller suddenly exclaimed.

Groping tragically before her, like Oedipus going into exile, Mrs Fisher came stumbling towards them, a bandage over one eye, her hat crooked.

They all scraped their chairs back, making room for her.

‘Conjunctivitis,’ she said faintly.

‘You poor darling! Is it infectious?’ Mrs Howard asked all in one breath.

‘It’s the same as pinkeye,’ Mrs Miller said.

‘In a more virulent form,’ Dolly Fisher added. ‘Coffee,’ she said to the waitress. ‘Nothing to eat. What’s that you’ve got, Laura?’

‘A scone, dear,’ Mrs Miller said.

‘I thought you’d given it up.’

‘Oh, I did – for at least three weeks. It didn’t do any good.’

‘A scone and butter,’ Dolly Fisher said to the waitress when she brought the coffee.

‘Wherever did you pick
that
up?’ Mrs Miller went on, and her voice made the affliction sound very sordid indeed.

‘I’ve been run down,’ Dolly said.

‘You don’t get it from being run down. You pick it up.’ Mrs Miller spread margarine over half a scone and popped it into her mouth.

‘Oh, I’m late!’ said Mrs Liddell. She put down her empty shopping basket and pulled up a chair. ‘I haven’t started yet. I wonder is there any fish about?’

‘There
was
some halibut,’ Mrs Miller said. ‘I went for mine as soon as I’d taken Arthur to the station.’

‘Oh, dear! Wasn’t there anything else?’

‘I seem to remember some sprats.’

‘But, Dolly, dear! What have you done?’

‘She’s picked up pinkeye from somewhere,’ Mrs Howard said. From somewhere not very nice, she implied.

Oedipus sat munching her scone. ‘It’s the worst pain I think I ever had,’ she said defiantly.

The man at the corner table stood up hastily and called for his bill.

‘Now what are you hiding from us?’ Mrs Miller asked Mrs Liddell, who blushed and said, ‘Oh, of course, none of you’ve seen it. Hughie gave it to me.’

She had been hiding nothing but had turned her hand a great deal in the light and now laid it in the middle of the table, as if she were pooling it.

‘What a lovely ring!’ they cried.

‘For my birthday.’ She drew it off and let it lie in the palm of her hand.

‘Oh, do let me!’ Mrs Miller begged. ‘If my poor old hands aren’t too fat.’

The ring was, after all, rather loose on her.

‘It’s so unusual!’ Mrs Howard said. ‘I wonder where on earth he got it.’

‘It really has character,’ Mrs Miller announced, after long consideration
and turning her hand this way and that to catch the light. ‘Yes, it really has. And it’s
your
ring.’ She passed it back to Mrs Liddell. ‘Clever Hughie!’

‘That will be the day,’ Oedipus said, ‘when Sidney gives me a ring for
my
birthday.’

‘It’s a very old ring, he said,’ Mrs Liddell began.

‘What of it?’ Mrs Miller said generously. ‘You will often get far better value with second-hand things.’

‘Last year, he gave me a set of saucepans we had to have anyhow.’

‘Cheer up, Dolly, we’re all in the same boat. None of
our
husbands gives us rings.’

‘I shall have to go,’ Mrs Liddell said, finishing her coffee quickly. She had had her little triumph and now must hurry with it to the fishmonger’s.

‘I must come, too,’ said Oedipus. They left together, and Dolly went off down the High Street towards the hills of Cithaeron.

‘Well!’ Mrs Miller said. ‘Fancy Hughie!’ She gave her famous laugh.

They looked at one another.

‘It was a very beautiful ring,’ said Mrs Graham, who always liked to be different.

Mrs Miller put down her cup. ‘I wouldn’t have it as a gift,’ she said. ‘Personally.’

The wall running round the small garden was pitted with hundreds of holes, and rusty nails flying little rags were to be seen in the spaces between the espaliers, the branches like candelabra, the glossy leaves, the long rough brown pears, the thin-skinned yellow and the mottled ones which lay against the bricks.

‘There is no one to eat the fruit,’ said Sybil. ‘Take what you want.’ She handed her sister-in-law a small ripe William and sauntered away down the garden.

‘Well, I certainly will,’ said Kathy, following eagerly after, ‘I could do with some for bottling.’

‘Take them, then. Take them.’ Sybil sat down on a stone seat at the end of the path. The day was nearly gone, but the brick wall still gave out its warmth. ‘Mind the wasps, Audrey,’ she said. ‘They’re getting sleepy.’ (‘Audrey!’ she thought, watching her little niece coming carefully up the path. ‘What a stupid name!’)

The garden was filled with the smell of rotting fruit. Pears lay about on the paths and wasps tunnelled into their ripeness. Audrey stepped timidly over them. She was all white and clean – face, serge coat and socks. Her mother held the William pear in her gloved hand. ‘You shall have it when we get home,’ she promised. ‘Not in that coat, dear.’

Sybil sighed sharply.

‘Well, if you really mean it, I could slip back home for the big garden-basket,’ Kathy went on. She was doubtful always and nervous with her sister-in-law. The others had long ago given up calling on Sybil.

‘She’s had trouble,’ they admitted. ‘We can grant her that. But she makes no effort.’

Kathy was the only one who was too kind-hearted to give in. Every week she called. ‘You see, she’s all on her own,’ she would tell the others. ‘We’ve got one another, but she’s lost everything – husband and son. I try to think what that would mean to me.’ (Not that she had a son; but she had Audrey.)

‘She was like it before,’ they reminded her. ‘Before ever Ralph died. Or Adam. Always queer, always moody and lazy and rude. She thinks she’s too clever for us. After all, it’s safer to be ordinary.’

Kathy would try to explain, excuse, forgive, and they would never listen to her, for it was instinct which guided them, not reason. ‘She led Ralph the hell of a dance, anyway,’ they would always conclude.

Kathy glanced at Sybil now, sitting there on the stone seat, leaning back against the wall, with her eyes half-closed and a suggestion about her of power ill-concealed, of sarcasm, of immunity from human contact. Kathy – the others said she was deficient in instinct – saw nothing she could dislike; merely a tired woman who was lonely. There was nothing against her, except that she had once been brave when she should have been overcome and had spoken of her only child with too much indifference – and as for leading Ralph a dance, she had merely laughed at him sometimes and admired him, it seemed, somewhat less than they had always done at home.

‘Well, fetch your basket,’ she was saying.

Kathy hesitated. ‘Coming, Audrey?’

‘Oh, she can stay,’ said Sybil.

‘Well, mind your socks, then they’ll be clean for school tomorrow. I’ll be back in a minute or two. Be a good girl.’

Audrey had no idea of being anything else. She sat down timidly on the edge of the seat and watched her mother disappear round the side of the house.

Sybil looked at her without enthusiasm.

‘Do you like school?’ she asked suddenly, harshly.

‘Yes, thank you, Auntie.’

Sybil’s fingers wandered over the seat as if from habit until the tops of them lay at last in the rough grooves of some carved initials – the letters A. K. R. She had smacked him for that, for always cutting his name into other people’s property, had taken away his chisel. When she did that, he had stared at her in hatred, wild, beautiful, a stain on his mouth from the blackberries or some purple fruit, and a stain of anger on his cheeks. Her fingers gripped the seat.

‘So you like school and never play truant?’

‘Oh, no, Auntie.’ A little shocked giggle. The child swung her feet, looking down placidly at her clean socks.

‘Thank God I never had a daughter,’ thought Sybil.

‘Would you like some fruit?’

‘Mummy said not to in this coat.’

‘What
would
you like?’ Sybil asked in exasperation, thrusting her hair back with a gesture of impatience.

The child looked puzzled.

‘A swing? Would you like a swing?’

Audrey’s mouth shaped a ‘No’, but, seeing her aunt’s look, she changed her mind and smiled and nodded, feigning delight.

She sat down on the swing and put her shiny shoes primly together. Even the seat of the swing was carved with initials. She knew that they were her cousin’s and that he was dead, that it had been his swing; she remembered him refusing to allow her to sit on it. She did so now with pleasurable guilt, looking primly round at the clump of Michaelmas daisies, as if she half expected him to come bursting from them in anger. She allowed herself to rock gently to and fro.

Aunt Sybil stopped on her way to the house.

‘Can’t you go higher than that?’ she said, and she took the seat in two hands, drew it back to her and then thrust it far away, so that Audrey went high up into the leaves and fruit. Birds rose off the top of the tree in a panic.

‘That’s how Adam used to go,’ Sybil shouted as Audrey flew down again. ‘Right up into the leaves. He used to kick the pears down with his feet.’

‘I don’t … I don’t …’ cried Audrey.

As she flew down, Sybil put her hands in the small of her back and thrust her away again. ‘Higher, higher,’ Adam used to shout. He was full of wickedness and devilry. She went on pushing without thinking of Audrey. The garden was darkening. A question-mark of white smoke rose from the quenched bonfire beside the rubbish-heap.

‘There you go. There you go,’ she cried. And she thought, ‘But what a boring little girl. “Yes, Mummy. No, thank you, Auntie.” I’d never have Adam tied to my apron strings. I’d push him out into the world. Push him!’ She gave a vehemence to her thought and Audrey with her hair streaming among the branches flew dizzily away. Frantically now her aunt pushed her, crying: ‘There you go. There you go.’

The child, whiter than ever, was unable to speak, to cry out. She sensed something terribly wrong and yet something which was inevitable and not surprising. Each time she dropped to earth, a wave of darkness hit her face and then she would fly up again in a wild agony. A strand of hair caught in some twigs and was torn from her head.

Sybil stood squarely on the grass. As the swing came down, she put up her hands and with the tips of her fingers and yet with all her strength, she pushed. She had lost consciousness and control and cried out each time exultingly: ‘There you go. There you go’ – until all her body was trembling.