Complete Short Stories (VMC) (25 page)

‘She’s getting fatter,’ he said.

Ethel struggled against her growing hatred of the cat. She felt, though, that the hatred had always been there in the room with her and had merely taken the form of a cat. The fact that it seemed to love Fred so passionately made her struggle more difficult. Every evening it lay on his shoulder, and every morning it cried when he went away; but during those hours between four and six-thirty, it seemed to turn the whole weight of its attention upon Ethel, so that she could not read or relax, and the time seemed longer than ever.

One afternoon, she begged Mrs Dring to shut the cat outside the door, but for two hours and a half the animal wailed, while Ethel, on the other side of the door, wept madly from nerves at the sound.

Fred came home to find both of them distracted.

‘Mrs Dring shut her out by mistake,’ Ethel explained.

‘Poor old Simone. Did she want her mother, then? You must tell Mrs Dring to make quite sure before she goes another time.’

The next day the cat remained by the fire, but Ethel fancied that now it had that grudge against her and hated her that much more.

‘Perhaps I am going mad,’ she began to think. ‘Afraid of a cat!’ Yes, she was sure the cat was watching her, waiting for some change.

‘Oh, don’t bring me books about France,’ she said one morning to Mrs Dring. ‘I can’t bear anything about France. It’s worse than China. Why can’t people write books about their own country? Showing off.’

‘Look at that cat!’ Mrs Dring replied. ‘More like a human being – sitting there looking out of the window.’

Fred appeared not to notice that between his wife and the cat there was only this uneasy bond – the nervous watching of one another. ‘Pussy’, she called it, never ‘Simone’. She did not fondle it, and it lay out of her reach always at the foot of the bed.

‘If I fell asleep!’ she thought. ‘If I fell asleep while I was alone with it!’ She kept herself rigidly from dozing and would not read.

From the priest, the doctor – her only visitors – she hid the secret of her fear and hatred with cunning answers. When they asked her why she was less well than before, she evaded them with trivial reasons – neuralgia, she admitted, the headaches – but she crumbled the aspirins she was given into the bedclothes, afraid to be lulled off her guard by them. She fell into the habit of nursing her cheek with her hand; the pain seemed real to her. After a while, she herself believed that it was there. She guessed that they were all watching her, thinking her half-mad, waiting for her to say, ‘I am afraid of the cat,’ so that then they would know, and Fred would be free.

Then one afternoon, with rain lashing at the window, the fire smoking a little, her strength suddenly cracked. She could play the game no longer. As the hands of the clock crawled, limped round after one another, the weakness began to break her. She sobbed without covering her face, her mouth squared with distress, like a child’s. The cat watched, moving its tail evenly from side to side like a pendulum. Knowing herself beaten, Ethel staked everything on seeking to propitiate it.

‘Pussy!’ she sobbed. ‘Good pussy!’

It crept up the bed towards her, so that she could reach it with her hand, timidly pleading with it. It growled at her a little and, as she snatched back her hand in terror, sprang forward and drew its claws down her cheek.

Fred found her sobbing hysterically, with blood smeared on her face, and the cat licking a paw in a corner.

‘What is it, old girl? What on earth has happened?’

‘The cat,’ she cried, for she had been driven past the thought of the asylum and no longer cared. ‘I hate it! I can’t have it! Please, Fred, I can’t have it here any longer!’

‘But, dear, it was only to please you. If you don’t like her, she shall go at once. Some people don’t like them, I know; but why didn’t you say so before?’ He wiped her cheek gently with his handkerchief. ‘Vicious little devil! Buck up, old girl. What shall we have for supper?’

‘When will you take her away?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tonight.’

In her urgency, she gripped his wrist until her fingers whitened.

‘First thing tomorrow. I’ll leave a bit early and drop her in on the way to work. I can tell old Hussey she hasn’t settled.’

‘Tonight. Please go tonight.’

He wiped away sweat from her forehead and upper lip. She seemed exhausted with shock.

‘All right.’ He patted her hair and straightened himself. Then he began to whistle and put on his overcoat. Without a word, he picked up the cat and tucked it into his breast. He put a large piece of coal on the fire and then wiped his fingers on his navy trousers and grinned. ‘Shan’t be long.’

‘Yes, be long,’ she said suddenly. ‘Call in and have a game of darts … be a change for you … don’t hurry back.’

He stopped by the door, looking surprised.

‘Please!’

‘All right, I’ll see.’

When he had gone, she lay back and closed her eyes, and smiled. She heard him going downstairs. Hatred was taken away; only love remained, and she felt unbelievably happy.

As they met the cool air, the cat went close to his breast, patted his chin with her soft paw. He fingered one of the silky ears and ran his lips for a second across her head; then he thrust her deeper into his coat and went quickly down the road to the bus-stop.

At the end of the village, the house which was of a dazzling whiteness in summer now stood sulphurous and dark against the snow, the plaster discoloured and flocky like ill-washed woollens, and the formal garden and the shrubbery a mass of strange humps. But none of this was without grandeur to Mrs Miller, who fretted as she drew the curtains in her smaller house across the road.

Her view was across the lane and clean through the wrought-iron gates. Beyond these gates a life went on which absorbed and entranced her – the chauffeur brought his shining car to the front steps; a uniformed nanny emerged into the lane with the pram, from which white fur mittens vaguely waved; a bowed and earthy gardener threw maize over the frosty ground; and cockerels – magnificent with their glistering plumage, their crimson combs – danced forward savagely, printing their dagger-like tracks over the snow.

Symbols of all that seemed worth while in life passed and crossed on that gravelled courtyard – symbols of order and of plenty, of service, of the lesser devoted to the superior, and wages paid by the week; not, as Mrs Miller paid her own charwoman, by the hour.

Since children make friends simply and quickly (being less on their dignity, less fearful of rebuff, than adults), in no time, as soon as the Millers moved in, their little boy had insinuated himself into the Big House, was riding the little girl’s pony, had invaded nursery tea and even (for this he was scolded by his mother) Lady Luna’s solitary breakfast. His mother scolded, but listened to the description of Lady Luna pouring coffee for herself at one end of the cleared and deserted table at half-past nine of a morning, the white-and-red room rosy with a great fire, and, said Timmy Miller, ‘a good invention, a little cage on the table where you put bread in and it comes out toast.’

‘That’s nothing,’ his mother said discontentedly, ‘your granny has one just the same. And remember, I won’t have you bothering over there at all hours of the day.’

Then the telephone rang and a light, inconsequential voice said: ‘Oh, you can’t know me, my dear. I am Lady Luna from just across the road. We should so love it if you could come over for tea.’

So the telephone bridged the narrow lane and dismissed for Mrs Miller those intricacies of card-leaving she had often pondered in bed at night. She pondered many things at night, all those things that worried her – her husband, for instance, saying ‘front room’ instead of ‘lounge’ in the smaller house they had graduated from, and now her faint suspicion that ‘lounge’ itself no longer did.

‘I wish we had more books …’

‘Books?’ he echoed, looking worried at once. ‘What for?’

‘For all those built-in shelves. I’d like to call that room the library.’

‘What’s it matter what it’s called?’

‘Books are such an expensive item and I don’t fancy them second-hand. You can’t tell where they’ve been nor what they harbour.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed; for he always agreed; worried, depressed as they are – the husbands of ambitious women.

‘And we ought to get an electric toaster. We waste bread’ (she was using an argument he would like) ‘toasting it like that out in the kitchen.’

He knew she would remain discontented for ever, comparing life, as she did, with accounts of Edwardian house parties she had read in novels; so that each day was wrong from the start with its three boiled eggs instead of the great dishes on the sideboard (lifting one lid after another – the mushrooms, the devilled kidneys, the fish kedgeree – and casting remarks of great brilliance over one shoulder to those who sat at the table slitting open with silver knives invitations to weddings, to garden parties and balls). That fantasy, in all her experience, was most nearly approached by the house across the road, and she lingered over drawing the curtains at tea-time; so Lady Luna’s voice on the telephone sent her hastening to her wardrobe to survey her potentialities.

While she painted her nails she assembled and had in readiness a few phrases against awkward pauses in the conversation, of which, had she known, there would be none with Lady Luna, whose murmurings were gentle and continuous like those of doves in summer. For Lady Luna asked questions which she did not intend should be answered; she cooed, murmured and agreed; without sympathy, she uttered sympathetic phrases; and always her eyes had a flitting, heedless restlessness, like the darting, purposeless motions of little fishes.

In the shadow of all this her child, Constance, sat still and unperturbed; looking well-bred, no doubt, thought Mrs Miller, deprived of her chosen phrases; well-bred, but plain, colourless and straight-haired; not cute, as she would have liked a little girl of her own to be.

Mrs Miller felt insulted by the flowing, indifferent talk of her hostess and by the tea itself, over which no trouble had been expended. She felt vaguely that had she also been titled the cake would have contained cream;
not knowing that if the Queen of England Herself (a phrase she often used) had been expected, the same dry little rock buns with their swollen, burnt currants would have been proffered.

After tea, Nanny brought in the baby and proved a better hostess than her mistress, with her compliments on Timmy Miller’s good colour; and what a pity Constance did not fill out in the same way, she said, and then, dandling the vaguely stamping, whimpering baby, her fingers in his closed fists, astonished Mrs Miller, who did not talk often to nannies, by saying: ‘We’re a little constipated today, I’m afraid, and that makes us fretty and cross. We shall have to try a spoonful of the prune purée at bedtime. Shan’t we, darling?’ The baby put his feet down emphatically but without control; his chin was wet with dribble and his eyes stared.

Meanwhile Lady Luna had lapsed into a drowsy silence as if, her murmurings done, she waited only for her guest to go. Her carefully tended but worn-out little face looked still and empty.

‘Manners!’ thought Mrs Miller, her colour rising. Only her son (and children have their own private agonies) noted this.

‘And you are sure you will not have a sherry?’ Lady Luna asked suddenly in the hall. ‘For the road,’ she added, pleased with the contemporary phraseology she acquired so spasmodically and used too late.

That evening there was nothing of all Lady Luna’s talk which Mrs Miller could remember or pass on to her husband when he came home. He had brought the electric toaster, for the sake of peace and quiet, but even that fact could not smooth out the gathers on her brow.

‘Did you have a nice tea?’ he asked at last.

She made a bitter, scoffing noise, and presently said: ‘Buns I’d not hand to a charwoman.’

‘Then you will have to put her to shame with some of your nice confections,’ he said gently; tenderly jocular, as if to a sick and peevish child.

‘I’m not likely to ask her. Timmy, it’s your bedtime.’

The little boy looked up from his game, the dice rattling still in the egg-cup in his hand. This rather grubby little hand was dreadfully pathetic, his father suddenly decided.

‘Good-night, old chap,’ he said kindly.

The boy looked strained, his eyes widened by tears he could scarcely keep back.

‘Why? Why won’t you ask her?’ he began.

Mrs Miller reached for a piece of embroidery, and her husband thought that the only time she appeared relaxed or casual was when she was working herself up into a great storm of anger. She chose a strand of green silk and began to embroider an eye in a peacock’s tail. The three of them watched and listened to the needle passing through the linen.

‘Your mother,’ said Mrs Miller quietly, and as if she were not talking of herself, ‘has no cook, nor house-parlourmaid, nor nanny …’

They waited still.

‘She has only herself,’ she continued, ‘to scrub the floors and bake …’

She produced a formidable vision of vast flagged floors and great bread ovens, her husband thought.

‘And wash and mend,’ she concluded. She drew her needle out to the length of the silk and, looking up at them, smiled bravely.

‘But doesn’t Mrs Wilson do the scrubbing?’ Mr Miller asked, as if to erase this picture of intolerable human suffering.

He could not understand the intricacies of housewifery, Mrs Miller implied by her brief look and her silence.

‘But …’

‘Yes, Timmy?’

‘I wish …’

‘Don’t stammer, dear. Would you like shredded-wheat for your supper?’

‘Yes, please.’

Dreadful, his father thought, seeing a child biding his time, trying to weather his mother’s caprice and bitterness. Too young to be learning worldly wisdom, that unengaging quality.

Mrs Miller, like a good mother, laid aside her embroidery and went to see her child to bed. His father could not help him. He went quietly away to his shredded-wheat.

‘Yet,
she
suffers, too,’ Mr Miller suddenly thought. ‘
We
suffer because of
her
suffering. Whatever she lacks in life, whatever she fails to grasp,
we
pay for.’ For himself, he no longer cared, but he did not like to see his little boy going to bed so quietly, with his requests weighing heavily in him until a suitable occasion for cajolery arose.