Complete Short Stories (VMC) (19 page)

‘Where
is
Laurie?’

‘With his cat. She’s having kittens.’

She put her hand on the bell and, when Nancy came, gave orders for dinner to be served. ‘And tell Laurie it’s bedtime.’

‘Four kittens,’ Nancy said. ‘Isn’t that lovely?’

‘Thank you, Nancy,’ Ida said in her quelling way.

‘Whatever will you do with them?’ George asked. ‘Four kittens.’

‘Do? What do you imagine? Need we go into details?’

The rain, suddenly released, fell like knives into the flower-beds; bounced and danced on the paths. Different scents steamed up from the earth: the drenched lilac looked as if it would topple over with the weight of its saturated blossom.

Just as Nancy announced with her touch of sarcasm that dinner was served, Leonard’s car swept into the drive. They heard him slamming the garage-doors together. George drained his glass and put it reluctantly on the table. Leonard came running up from the garage, his head down and his shoulders stained dark with the rain.

‘And so she has borne you another son,’ said the doctor raising his voice a little, as one who quotes the Bible. He sat sideways to their breakfast table to show that he was just off.

‘Yes, we may use that word again,’ the father agreed. ‘It is odd that women do not
bear
their daughters, only have them.’

Sitting in his wife’s place, he began to pour out tea and handed the cups clumsily so that they rocked in their saucers. Overhead, floor-boards creaked, and at intervals the newly-born broke into paroxysms of despair as if it were being thrashed. Neither of the men seemed to hear this, sipping at their tea, passing their hands with a harsh sound across their unshaven chins.

The little maid brought in the children to their breakfast. They suffered the doctor’s jocularity passively, used to it, for he was good with children. Their bibs were tied, milk poured.

‘It is here,’ the boy said suddenly, pointing his spoon to the ceiling. ‘Crying like a real baby.’

The girl listened, food at a standstill in her mouth. When her brother said those words ‘It is here’, the truth dawned in her and she understood that it had been necessary to make that point about its being a real baby, because it had been an unreal one for so long. She came out of her daze and excitement broke loose in her. Wrenching down her mouthful, she began to cry.

The young maid tried to comfort her, but she was flurried herself. This event she had so secretly dreaded was now over and, in her relief, she could scarcely believe, after all the novels she had read, the stories she had heard, that the first thing to waken her had been that curious cry. ‘One of the children,’ her trained ear had warned her, the selective ear which had ignored the car arriving, the footsteps on the stairs, the doors opening and shutting. But the sound, so strident and protesting, was not from one of the peacefully sleeping children. It was the new one, the dreaded one. The little boy turned then and murmured in his sleep, flinging an arm across the pillow; but the girl sat up in bed and said: ‘There is a baby crying in this house,’ and listened, very still, the breeze from the window lifting her light hair up and back from her face.

‘Another cup?’ the father now asked the doctor.

‘No, I’ll be away. Cheer up, lass,’ he said, passing the little girl’s chair, putting his hand on her head, until she ducked away. ‘No tears today, you know,’ he added vaguely, and went on into the hall where he looked round sleepily for his hat and his case.

Upstairs, the baby was being bathed. Against the rush of air on his body, he had furiously protested, now he resisted the flow of water over his limbs. By the fire, flannel faintly scorched, waiting for him.

‘Then there’ll be a nice cup of tea for you,’ the old nurse was saying, for it is all cups of tea when a baby is born.

The mother lay back drowsily, high on her pillows, feeling like a great battered boat washed up on the shore, empty, discarded. ‘Enjoy this moment,’ she told herself, ‘before life breaks over you again. Enjoy the soothing peace, the sloughed-off responsibilities, the handing over to others. A whole moment of bliss …’

‘You did well,’ she wanted someone to say, as if she were an actress on a first night. Soon flowers would begin to come, the husband’s first, the six pink roses all lolling to one side of the wrong sort of vase.

‘I saw him born almost,’ she thought. ‘I propped myself up and watched him take his first breath, lying there, splayed out, mottled, veiled with a pearly film. His great chest arched up, his face darkened, the cry burst from him. “It is
vile
being born,” he seemed to cry, the cold air leaping at him.’

‘When can the children come?’ she asked drowsily.

‘Not till he’s bathed and dressed and you’ve had your tea. Plenty of time for them.’

‘But they want to see him
new
.’

‘He won’t change much in half an hour.’

But he was changed already – his folded mauve fists emerging from the frilled sleeve, his hair like damp feathers brushed up.

‘There he is then,’ cried the nurse, enchanted at her work.

There he was, frilled, feather-stitched and ribboned, rushed into the uniform of civilisation, so quickly tamed, altered, made to conform. His head bobbed grotesquely, weakly, his lashless eyes turned to the light.

‘And
there
he is,’ the nurse continued, ‘and there he
is
then.’

And she twisted him in his shawl and laid him down beside his mother in the bed.

‘God, I’m so tired,’ the mother thought, bored. She forced her thumb into his fist, examined the little nails, stroked with the back of a finger the damp and silken hair, the tender cheek, breathed in the smell of him. Then her eyes drooped heavily, her body seemed dragged down backwards, into sleep.

‘You must take him away, nurse,’ she said. ‘Show him to the children. I’m …’ She began to succumb to the heavy weight of sleepiness; but the nurse believed that mothers like to have their babies nestling beside them for a little while after they are born; the sight of this pleased her always and put the finishing touches to the birth, she thought.

Just as she was slipping away, down a fast stream of sleep, the door was tapped and the husband came in, shaved now and carrying tea.

‘I am just off,’ he announced. ‘All is well downstairs.’

Waking again, she suddenly asked, wailing a little: ‘But is it
really
well? And did they have their cod-liver oil?’

‘Now, now,’ soothed the nurse, thinking of the milk.

‘Yes, they had it,’ he said, and he bent over his new son with conventional clucking noises, making a fool of himself, they all thought. The baby began to cram tiny fingers into his mouth. The nurse stirred the tea, standing by.

The husband knew he was being dismissed. It was his third time of being a father. He bent over and kissed his wife. ‘You did well,’ he said, and she smiled peacefully, for nothing could hold her back now. She went swiftly, feet first, it seemed; sliding, falling, swimming, into darkness. Beside her, his mouth closing upon, then relinquishing, his bent knuckles, the baby turned his eyes with a look of wonder to the light outside.

The village stood high in scarred and quarried country. The hillside had been broken into in many places, and some of the wounds, untended, were covered with coarse weeds. Other English villages, with a good foundation of thatched cottages and leafy lanes, improve on their conscious beauty with loving care. Grass verges are shaved neatly, flowers over-hang walls and fruit trees, lime-washed to their chins, stand in orchards full of daffodils. This village lacked even the knowledge of its own ugliness and nothing was done consciously in any direction. Gardens, in which scarcely a blade of grass remained, were littered with chicken-droppings and feathers. On the common, round which the cottages stood, pieces of old bicycles rusted among nettles. Tin cans floated in the muddy water which filled – in winter-time – the deep hollows. In one, an iron bedstead was half submerged. On this, the biggest pond, a swan was found one morning circling disconsolately among the rubbish.

Nights, for a long time, had been muffled with fog. By mid-afternoon, the sky would have begun to congeal in a phlegmy discoloration and then the village was cut off and abandoned to its own squalor.

The swan, arriving unseen, stayed so until late in the morning when the fog shifted and began to roll down the hillside, leaving the crown of the hill standing in an uncertain light. Children, coming out to play on the common, saw what their fathers bicycling to work could not have seen. They crowded the edge of the pond and one boy threw a stick at the swan, trying to make it fly. That was the first and last unkindness the bird ever suffered in the village. The children discovered that more response came when food was thrown, and soon the pond and the trodden grass around were littered with crusts of bread and bacon-rinds, orange-peel and apple-cores. Even in its charity the village was backward and untidy, yet the swan, coming to it out of the fog and remaining as it did, stirred its imagination and pride. On the market bus and in the pub and post office it was the subject of conjecture and theory. Whence had it flown, they wondered, and in what direction? Was it maimed and could fly no farther? Flattered as they were, the villagers could not believe that the muddy pond had ever been its true objective, heart’s desire. They talked about the swan and
worried over it. The Vicar referred to it in his sermon on the Mysterious Ways of the Lord.

After a week or two – the swan still circling on his muddy pond – strangers were seen about the village, which was becoming a popular diversion from the ennui of the Sunday walk. Mrs Wheatley, at the Stag and Hounds, began to serve afternoon teas. Her son and some of his workmates removed the rusting bedstead from the pond and threw it into a bluebell wood. Eyes so long indifferent became critical and much was suddenly seen to be wrong. A committee was formed to put the common in order and was given its title – The Local Amenities Enhancement Council – by the Vicar, who had a gift for words. To encourage beauty, a prize was offered for the neatest cottage-garden and a notice-board was set up beside the pond with the words ‘Rubbish Prohibited’.

It was the first time that the village had worked together on any project. The swan – the unacknowledged instigator – took all for granted, seemed indifferent to amenities, but grew noticeably less aloof; for now he would wait at the edge of the common for the children to come from school. Fussy about his food, he would peck about and reject most of it. His first meal of the day was at half-past six when the men bicycled off to work at the brickkilns. They would throw pieces from their ‘slicers’ or lunch-packets. Later, the children, going to school, showered down all the crusts they had had no need for at breakfast, but the swan trod among them at the water’s edge or avoided them as they floated on the pond.

Wet weather, dark days, did not suit his looks. Not quite fully grown, he still had some of his dark plumage and this was stained by the orange clay in the water. Standing forlornly and unsteadily in the mud, he seemed stiff with misery and perhaps rheumatism.

‘Old chap looks rough,’ the men would say anxiously, coming from work. When strangers arrived on those days and appeared amused or made disparaging remarks, the children suffered a painful indignation – a foretaste of parenthood.

But as the spring came and the wild cherry blossomed above the quarries, the swan began to dazzle with the same white brilliance. The flowers grew in the cottage-gardens. They did not blossom well from so stamped-down and untended a soil, but a few wallflowers of a ghastly yellow were bedded out. Hand-written notices swung on gates and fences announcing ‘Lemonade – A Penny Per Glass’ or ‘Cut Flowers – Sixpence the Bunch’.

The swan, preening himself daily into greater beauty, was in himself a lesson, an example in seemliness, and the village began to preen and trim itself, too; but with neither habit nor aptitude for grace. Fair weather, throughout that spring, encouraged a refurbishing, a hurried business with buckets of white-wash and pots of paint. This fermenting creativeness had
strange results. So many white curtains were taken down to appear later on clothes-lines, a dull but curious green or indigo or raspberry. Garments – even underclothes – of the same colour hung beside them; for a bowl of dye is usually a great temptation. Few of the experiments were an improvement and most, in their new self-consciousness, went too far; yet, insidiously, the idea of charm spread through the village. A guilty tawdriness was its expression, naive and peasant-like, but here without steadying ritual or tradition. The Vicar, having once despaired at apathy, now winced at exuberance, at red, white and blue rabbit-hutches, the new neon-lighting outside the Stag and Hounds and one of his sidesmen wearing a daffodil in his button-hole at Evensong. He tried to control the general mood of recklessness, but its infection was at its height and beyond him.

In the midst of the wonderful weather, and because of it, the villagers could not avoid the knowledge that there had been summers – especially after such a spring – when the water in the pond had dwindled and gone, leaving a patch of cracked earth and rusty tins. Already it seemed to have receded, and nightly inspection of its level took place, a grave ceremony, like the inspection of a wicket, and confined to the men. They would report back to their women and the news spread among the children – the water was down a quarter of an inch perhaps, or more, or seemed to remain the same. They all watched the sky for rain.

By the beginning of June when the swan had been with them for nearly six months, the water had fallen so low that a meeting was called. When it was over the men went off on their bicycles to look for better accommodation for the swan, who seemed too negligent to do so for himself.

The nearest stretch of water was over a mile away – a deep, clear pond in a buttercup field. Having inspected it, the men went home, and the next evening a great crowd came out on the common to watch the swan-moving.