Complete Short Stories (VMC) (20 page)

The Vicar drove up in his little car which he left on the road. He walked down to the water’s edge, in clerical-collar and his shirt-sleeves and wearing an old baize apron that he had borrowed from his manservant. The swan was coaxed out of the water with pieces of sponge-cake. The men moved forward slowly, the Vicar motioning them in to form a half-circle. Very gently and in silence they closed in on the swan. At this moment of great tension, Mrs Wheatley from the Stag and Hounds – unstable woman – suddenly screamed and was shushed and nudged by her neighbours.

The Vicar gathered up the swan against his apron and held him tenderly in his arms. In a most graceful and affectionate movement the bird curved his shining neck against the Vicar’s shoulder. His lower feathers, his spread,
webbed feet dripped dirty water as he was carried up the bank towards the car, the crowd surging after.

The swan sat on the front seat beside the Vicar and the manservant sat behind. When they drove away, the crowd waved and cheered as if seeing off bride and bridegroom. The swan surveyed them with indifference. His feet were splayed out in an ungainly way on a piece of sacking and, as the car moved forward, he crooked his neck and began to cleanse from his plumage the trace of human hands.

Men leapt on to their bicycles with their children across the bars or perched behind. The Vicar drove slowly and the procession went away down the side of the common, past the Stag and Hounds where the bar had been left entirely in the hands of the village dipsomaniac, who had strange visions of his own and was not tempted from his vocation by such a happening, but had the decency, long remembered to his credit, to come out and lift his glass as they all went by.

They streamed on between high hedges and ditches full of cow-parsley and Queen Anne’s Lace, the swan now turning his head, his beak parting and closing as if he were thirsty or afraid. The Vicar watched the road and the manservant watched the swan. The bicyclists kept up – a noisy throng; some had bunches of buttercups pinned to their caps. When the car was slowed up by cows crossing the road, the bicyclists came up to the car window and looked in approvingly.

‘Sits up in the manner born,’ one said, with pride.

When they moved on down the lane, which was steaming and smelling strongly of cow-pats, the swan began to lurch about unsteadily. He turned his head and gave the Vicar a long and strange glance, and the manservant leant forward protectively. Then the beak sank into the great rounded breast and the eyes were covered, as if he slept.

The Vicar stopped the car at the field-gate and stepped out to face the throng, his hand raised high. ‘I want all done in silence now,’ he said. ‘Nothing to confuse him, so stand afar off.’ So important was the occasion that he fell easily into biblical oratory and might have added ‘All of ye’ without knowing or being noticed.

They stood afar off among the polished grasses. It was an evening of great peace. The shadows were long ovals under the elm trees. Cows moved slowly through the yellow fields and the water of the pond, still as a glass, reflected a mackerel sky.

The Vicar and the manservant lifted the swan from his seat in the car and carried him to the edge of the pond, where they put him tenderly to the breast of the water, then stood aside.

It was a moment of great emotion, like the launching of a ship. The bird took to the pond and became two swans. In this clear water his reflection
could be seen for the first time and his foolish-looking feet paddling along. ‘Look!’ cried a little boy and his father put a hand over his mouth to silence him.

The swan went forward in great majesty, as if at last conscious of his true nature, and his wake spread out and followed like a train.

The Vicar lifted his hand for a second and then touched his eyes. As he came back up the bank, his shoes wet, his baize apron plastered with clay, his parishioners – if such most of them could be called from the fact of living in the same parish – looked at him with respect. He had appeared to them a natural leader, a man of courage and decision.

They returned to the village and crowded into the Stag and Hounds. Some of them took their beer outside and looked over the common to the empty pond. Their lives had been touched so lightly by magic that perhaps only the seeds of a legend were left, or less – no trace at all, but they felt easeful, thinking of the swan in its new home. The Vicar, who would have been an embarrassed man in the Stag and Hounds and no longer a leader, went home and began to prepare his sermon – ‘Cast your bread upon the waters.’

The swan, when they had all gone, swam about for a while, plunging his beak deep into the water and ruffling his feathers. Then he came to the pond’s edge, and out of the water. He stood there preening himself, an heraldic swan with wings half-lifted. At last, with a tottering run, clumsy, seeming off-balance with his huge breast-bone thrust forward and his neck out-stretched, he made a great commotion with his wings and took the air. As he rose level with the setting sun his feathers were golden. Then he went higher and became a grey shape. The scent of far-off water came to him and he flew on, away from that countryside for ever.

The hedgerow was beaded with silver. In the fog, the leaves dripped with a deadly intensity, as if each falling drop were a drop of acid.

Through the mist, cabs came suddenly face-to-face with one another, passing and re-passing, between station and school. Backing into the hedges – twigs, withered berries striking the windows – the drivers leant out to exchange remarks, incomprehensible to their passengers, who felt oddly at their mercy. Town parents especially shrank from this malevolent landscape, wastes of rotting cabbages, flint cottages with rakish privies, rubbish heaps, grey napkins drooping on clothes-lines, the soil like plum-cake. Even turning in at the rather superior school-gates, the mossy stone, the smell of fungus, still dismayed them. Then, as the building itself came into view, they could see Matron standing at the top of the steps, fantastically white, shaming nature, her hands laid affectionately upon the shoulders of such boys as could not resist her. The weather was put in its place. The day would take its course.

Tory was in one of the last of the cabs. Having no man to exert authority for her, she must merely take her turn, standing on the slimy pavement waiting for a car to come back empty. She stamped her feet, feeling the damp creeping through her shoes. When she left home, she had thought herself suitably dressed; even for such an early hour her hat was surely plain enough? One after another she had tried on and had come out in the end leaving hats all over the bed, so that it resembled a new grave with its mound of wreathed flowers.

One other woman was on her own. Tory eyed her with distaste. Her sons (for surely she had more than one? She looked as if she had what is often called a teeming womb; was like a woman in a pageant symbolising maternity), her many sons would never feel the lack of a father, for she was large enough to be both to them. Yes, Tory thought, she would have them out on the lawn, bowling at them by the hour, coach them at mathematics, oil their bats, dubbin their boots, tan their backsides (she was working herself up into a hatred of this woman, who seemed to be all that she herself was not), one love-affair in her life, or, rather, mating. ‘She has probably eaten her husband now that her
child-bearing days are over. He would never have dared to have asked for a divorce, as mine did.’ She carried still her ‘mother’s bag’ – the vast thing which, full of napkins, bibs, bottles of orange-juice, accompanies babies out to tea. Tory wondered what was in it now. Sensible things, a Bradshaw, ration-books, a bag of biscuits, large clean handkerchiefs, a tablet of soap and aspirins.

A jolly manner. ‘“I love young people. I feed on them,”’ Tory thought spitefully. The furs on her shoulders made her even larger; they clasped paws across her great authoritative back, like hands across the ocean. Tory lifted her muff to hide her smile.

Nervous dread made her feel fretful and vicious. In
her
life, all was frail, precarious; emotions fleeting, relationships fragmentary. Her life with her husband had suddenly loosened and dissolved, her love for her son was painful, shadowed by guilt – the guilt of having nothing solid to offer, of having grown up and forgotten, of adventuring still, away from her child, of not being able to resist those emotional adventures, the tenuous grasping after life; by the very look of her attracting those delicious secret glances, glimpses, whispers, the challenge, the excitement; not deeply sexual, for she was flirtatious; ‘but not,’ she thought, watching Mrs Hay-Hardy rearranging her furs on her shoulders, ‘not a great feather-bed of oblivion. Between Edward and me there is no premise of love, none at all, nothing taken for granted, as between most sons and mothers, but all tentative, agonised. We are indeed amateurs, both of us. No tradition behind us, no gift for the job. All we achieve is too hard come by. We try too piteously to please one another, and if we do, feel frightened by the miracle of it. I do indeed love him above all others. Above all others, but not exclusively.’

Here a taxi swerved against the kerb, palpitated as she stepped forward quickly, triumphantly, before Mrs Hay-Hardy (whose name she did not yet know), and settled herself in the back.

‘Could we share?’ Mrs Hay-Hardy asked, her voice confident, melodious; one foot definitely on the running-board. Tory smiled and moved over much farther than was necessary, as if such a teeming womb could scarcely be accommodated on the seat beside her.

Shifting her furs on her shoulders, settling herself, Mrs Hay-Hardy glanced out through the filming windows, undaunted by the weather, which would clear, she said; would lift. Oh, she was confident that it would lift by midday.

‘One is up so early, it seems midday now,’ Tory complained.

But Mrs Hay-Hardy had not risen until six, so that naturally it still seemed only eleven to her, as it was.

‘She will share the fare,’ Tory thought. ‘Down to the last penny. There
will be a loud and forthright woman’s argument. She will count out coppers and make a fuss.’

This did happen. At the top of the steps, Matron still waited with the three Hay-Hardys grouped about her, and Edward, who blushed and whitened alternately with terrible excitement, a little to one side.

To this wonderful customer, this profitable womb, the headmaster’s wife herself came into the hall. Her husband had sent her, instructing her with deft cynicism from behind his detective novel, himself one of those gods who rarely descend, except, like Zeus, in a very private capacity.

‘This is the moment I marked off on the calendar,’ Edward thought. ‘Here it is. Every night we threw one of our pebbles out of the window; a day gone.’ The little stones had dropped back on to the gravel under the window, quite lost, untraceable, the days of their lives.

As smooth as minnows were Mrs Lancaster’s phrases of welcome; she had soothed so many mothers, mothered so many boys. Her words swam all one way, in unison, but her heart never moved. Matron was always nervous; the results of her work were so much on the surface, so checked over. The rest of the staff could hide their inefficiency, or shift their responsibility; she could not. If Mrs Hay-Hardy cried: ‘Dear boy, your teeth!’ to her first-born as she did now, it was Matron’s work she criticised and Matron flushed. And Mrs Lancaster flushed for Matron; and Derrick Hay-Hardy flushed for his mother.

‘Perhaps I am not a born mother,’ Tory thought, going down the steps with Edward. They would walk back to the Crown for lunch, she said. Edward pressed her arm as the taxi, bulging with Hay-Hardys, went away again down the drive.

‘Do you mean you wanted to go with them?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Don’t you like them?’

‘No.’

‘But why?’

‘They don’t like me.’

Unbearable news for any mother, for surely all the world loves one’s child, one’s only child? Doubt set in, a little nagging toothache of doubt. ‘You
are
happy?’ she wanted to ask. ‘I’ve looked forward so much to this,’ she said instead. ‘
So
much.’

He stared ahead. All round the gate-posts drops of moisture fell from one leaf to another, the stone gryphons were hunched up in misery.

‘But I imagined it being a different day,’ Tory added. ‘Quite different.’

‘It will be nice to get something different to eat,’ Edward said.

They walked down the road towards the Crown as if they could not make any progress in their conversation until they had reached this point.

‘You
are
warm enough at night?’ Tory asked, when at last they were sitting in the hotel dining-room. She could feel her question sliding away off him.

‘Yes,’ he said absently and then, bringing himself back to the earlier, distant politeness, added: ‘Stifling hot.’

‘Stifling? But surely you have plenty of fresh air?’

‘
I
do,’ he said reassuringly. ‘My bed’s just under the window. Perishing. I have to keep my head under the bedclothes or I get ear-ache.’

‘I am asking for all this,’ she thought. When the waiter brought her pink gin, she drank it quickly, conscious that Mrs Hay-Hardy across the hotel dining-room was pouring out a nice glass of water for herself. She was so full of jokes that Tory felt she had perhaps brought a collection of them along with her in her shopping-bag. Laughter ran round and round their table above the glasses of water. Edward turned once and she glimpsed the faintest quiver under one eye, and an answering quiver on the middle Hay-Hardy’s face.

She felt exasperated. Cold had settled in her, her mouth, her heart too, felt stiff.

‘What would you like to do after lunch?’ she asked.

‘We could look round the shops,’ Edward said, nibbling away at his bread as if to keep hunger at arm’s length.

The shops were in the Market Square. At the draper’s, the hats were steadily coming round into fashion again. ‘I could astonish everyone with one of these,’ Tory thought, setting her own hat right by her reflection in the window. Bales of apron-print rose on both sides, a wax-faced little boy wore a stiff suit, its price-ticket dangling from his yellow, broken fingers, his painted blue eyes turned mildly upon the street. Edward gave him a look of contempt and went to the shop-door. Breathing on the glass in a little space among suspended bibs and jabots and parlourmaids’ caps, he watched the cages flying over-head between cashier and counter.