Complete Short Stories (VMC) (26 page)

When Mrs Miller came back, he wanted to say to her, ‘Let me show you something true for one moment. Let me help you look into your son’s heart, or your own even. And if you are always to measure your condition against other people’s, let it not be for ever against people who do not exist. For life will never be what you have imagined. Not for five minutes even.’

As a girl she had been affected. ‘I live in a world of make-believe,’ she would laugh, boastfully, as one laughs when confessing to well-loved weaknesses.

He said nothing. He watched her unhappy eyes and mouth as she sewed. Then it occurred to him that all the time she really intended asking Lady Luna and the child to tea, that she was making a weapon of her reluctance so that she might drive them all to a frenzy with it when the time came. He could not determine how he knew this, but years of living with her had shown him that none of the simple, obvious things about her was true (her
calmness covered fury, her fury was deliberately indulged and delighted in), so that when he saw the forthright, he looked at once much deeper than that and through mazes of deception came usually to the reverse.

As she sewed, her eyes darted often to one thing after another in the room, and he thought that she must be measuring these things with the eyes of Lady Luna, who might see them thus if she came to tea. She seemed to dwell most upon those shelves where once the people of the house had kept their books, and where now china was carefully spaced out; but with a poor effect – it could not be denied.

The next day he brought home a row of old sermons bound in calf and gilded richly. She was pleased, and for once allowed herself to show her pleasure. ‘I dare say they’re quite clean, and it isn’t as if we shall be reading them. I’ve always said books are the making of a room.’ And her eyes travelled to the next empty shelf, along which she rearranged some china.

So Mr Miller began to collect books – sets of books with heavily gilded spines, in calf, in marbled paper, to tone in with the room, which slowly came to look, Mrs Miller said, more like a library every day. Coming home in the train he would even dip into these volumes and read a little, but the long ‘f’s’ worried him and tried his patience.

‘I suppose I must ask that woman over one day sometime,’ she said one evening, and although her voice was fretful, her eyes rested with satisfaction on her cosy room. ‘What about asking them for sherry?’

At once he could foresee how poor Timmy would be hastened into bed, nagged at and scolded, then later, to make up for it, allowed to sit up with a plateful of pieces from the snacks, rejected from downstairs, broken cheese straws and scorched almonds.

‘It would be nice for Timmy to have the little girl to tea,’ he began, as she had known he would.

‘I won’t have people to tea while I have to carry in my own tea-pot,’ she cried. Her voice rang tragically as she envisaged this disgrace.

He knew that another man would have laughed, but there was no laughter left in him, because his son was involved.

One of his friends had put his head in a gas oven and come by a peaceful end that way. This incident had made a great impression upon Mr Miller, who imagined in every detail himself doing the same thing. ‘You could make it quite comfortable with a cushion,’ he now thought. ‘Just be relaxed, breathe deeply, not fight against it, pretend you’re at the dentist’s without that hateful spinning back into consciousness with the taste of blood in your mouth and the voice saying, “Rinse, please.”’

‘What are you thinking?’ his wife suddenly asked.

‘About the dentist, dear.’

‘Well, I can’t see anything to smile about in that,’ she said restlessly, and she threw aside her library book, which was morbid.

In the morning she telephoned Lady Luna to ask her to tea at the end of the week.

‘But how lovely!’ cried Lady Luna. ‘Constance will be delighted.’

Her rapturous acceptance was overdone, Mrs Miller thought. In one who obviously had far more exciting engagements this enthusiasm seemed automatic, even absent-minded. But Timmy went to school happy the next day, and Mrs Miller called in the sweep so that she could be sure the chimney would not smoke.

On Thursday she did not sit down all day, she told her husband in the evening. She was a great one for not sitting down all day, not touching a morsel of food, never sleeping a wink all night and hearing every quarter of an hour strike from midnight until dawn.

In the larder tiny éclairs and meringues cooled on wire trays, silver was polished, apple jelly spooned carefully into cut-glass, rosettes of pink icing piped in the middle of biscuits. Two branches of white lilac stood leafless in a jar under the sink, the coolest, safest place, and were given an aspirin tablet every time Mrs Miller thought of it. The drawn-thread tray-cloth was dipped into sugar and water and ironed damp.

‘You’ll be too worn out by tomorrow to enjoy yourself,’ Mr Miller observed as he drank tinned soup.

‘I don’t expect to enjoy myself,’ his wife replied, for once truthful. ‘I’ve got a splitting head.’

‘Well, have some supper, old girl.’

‘I couldn’t bring myself to. And, Robert, I do wish you wouldn’t call me “old girl”. Even when we’re by ourselves. It isn’t very kind.’ Her mouth dropped, her voice quivered.

‘I meant it kindly. Have a drop of gin.’

‘Of course not. You know I only drink in company. To be sociable. I don’t really care for it at all, the taste is so nasty. I can’t understand people going so mad over it, when it’s so expensive, too. Think what you could do with the money.’

He couldn’t really think of anything, so he went on with his soup.

‘Oh, my back’s breaking,’ she continued. ‘What with leaning over that bath washing Timmy, and then the sink all day …’ He scarcely listened. Her head was splitting and her back was breaking and, still wearing an apron, she perched for a moment on the arm of a chair and cheered him on as he ate his supper.

‘She ought to have gone on the stage,’ he thought. ‘She’d have had them crying their eyes out.’

She was late to bed. She put her hair into curlers and creamed her
hands, then, wearing a pair of cotton gloves, got into bed and lay there, twitching slightly with fatigue, and going back over the day’s work and forward over tomorrow’s. As she took it for granted that her husband was lying beside her doing the same, she felt no hesitation in making her observations aloud from time to time.

Yet in spite of the hell she had made of the house for two days, when Timmy came from school next day at half-past three he found his mother good-humoured and at ease, the worst over, wearing her best shoes, but a tweed suit which would show Lady Luna that she regarded the occasion as of little importance. He was warmed by her good humour, responding at once to her mood with the intolerable sensitivity of those who live with the quick-tempered. He inspected, with Constance’s eyes, the little biscuits, the pale meringues. Two of the best apple logs were laid on the bright fire. The lilac was seen to be magnificent now that it had been taken from under the sink, and the rows of books looked as if they had been in the family for years.

Mrs Miller stood by the window, feeling like a good producer who knows that every detail has been attended to, every difficulty foreseen, and who can await the lifting of the curtain with confidence and even pleasure.

‘I wish it could always be like this,’ thought Timmy vaguely.

And then – it was twenty to four – the gate creaked and Auntie Flo appeared with little Valerie and came waving and calling up the path.

Across the road Nanny was rinsing out pillow-slips in Sanitas. At twelve that morning, just as the music mistress arrived, Constance, practising scales in the schoolroom, paled and then vomited all over the piano and into her lap.

While Nanny sponged the keys and changed Constance’s blouse and skirt, Lady Luna took Miss Hayday, who was fond of painting, to see a Gainsborough of her great-great-grandmother in the drawing-room.

Constance, so suddenly ill, was quite as suddenly restored, and it would be a pity, her mother said, to have brought Miss Hayday from one end of the village to another for nothing. So, a little late, they sat down to the lesson, in a room still smelling rather of sick, only partly covered up by disinfectant, and Constance, in a clean blouse, started off on her arpeggios, her tongue between her lips, her straight hair falling forward over her shoulders, and Miss Hayday, sitting beside her on an upright chair, breathing in a panic-stricken way into a little scented handkerchief.

Afterwards Constance ate a good lunch, and while she did so her mother remarked a great deal on the way children are down one moment
and up the next. After this Constance went to lie on her bed with a book, and very soon was sick again, this time all over the pink eiderdown.

Auntie Flo was Mr Miller’s sister, and she had come on the bus with an oilcloth bag containing a dozen eggs and a jar of pickled cabbage. She seemed so very pleased to see her sister-in-law and called ‘Yoo-hoo’ through the letter-box, always being full of high spirits.

‘Oh, God, how could’st Thou?’ Mrs Miller cried in silent anguish as she opened the door. Her world swayed and crashed at the thought of mingling together Auntie Flo and Lady Luna. Even her neck was flushed as she gave her cheek to be kissed, and Timmy watched her with anxiety.

Auntie Flo never talked, she always shouted, and she shouted now. ‘Take them eggs into the scullery for your auntie, Valerie. No, leave your pixie on, that’s a good girl. She’s had the ring-worm. All over now, of course, but the hair doesn’t seem to grow very quick. Never mind. Well, this is lovely, dear. A lovely home.’

Mrs Miller had begun to sweat. One absurd excuse after another for getting rid of Auntie Flo swept through her panic-confused mind – such as taking her to one side and saying she awaited the doctor (‘They suspect a touch of cancer’), or a lover, or children with diphtheria coming to tea. While she thought, she smiled frostily at Valerie and glanced continually towards the window.

Valerie sat on the edge of a chair, swinging her legs and fidgeting with a loose tooth, and she seemed to have the smirk on her of a child who knows it is the apple of its mother’s eye.

Auntie Flo rattled on.

‘And although I say it, she really does talk lovely since she went to the private school. It’s worth every penny of the money, not a penny of it would I begrudge them, the lovely way she talks now. My next-door neighbour, she said to me only yesterday, “Mrs Shaw,” she said, “doesn’t your Valerie talk lovely now she goes to the private school? I was saying to Will last night,” she said, “doesn’t young Valerie next door talk lovely, you’d never credit it …”’

Mrs Miller, her throat choked with tears, looked out of the window, wringing her hands. ‘I must get rid of her. I must get rid of her. In five more minutes she must be out of this house, and her horrifying little Valerie with her.’

At half-past five Lady Luna lowered the bound volume of
Little Folks
she had had as a child and stopped reading aloud in the middle of the story.

‘Oh, my God!’ she said to Constance, who was now properly in bed
eating arrowroot mould. ‘We ought to’ve gone to tea across the road. I’ll have to telephone.’

‘Oh, not till the bottom of the page,’ Constance wailed, taking advantage of her indisposition.

Her mother agreed without argument, for the story lulled her nerves with beautiful nostalgia for her own cosy childhood, when nobody had ever heard of the Labour Government and servants were grateful for their jobs.

Timmy lay still, too rigid with apprehension to draw his cold feet up into a warmer place in the bed. Downstairs his parents quarrelled. They quarrelled all the time Mrs Miller was getting supper; the dissenting voices swelled or diminished as doors were opened or closed, and the argument went on from room to room.

‘You let my own sister go away without even a cup of tea,’ cried Mr Miller, ‘after her coming all that way to see you, out of the kindness of her heart.’

‘The child had ringworm. She had no business to have come …’

‘You know full well you let her go because you’re such a bloody snob; she wasn’t good enough to meet her ladyship …’

‘How dare you swear at me!’

‘It’s just about time someone did, to knock some sense into your empty head … Damn fine friends, too, without the manners of a …’

‘Don’t shout!’

‘I’ll shout as much as I bloody well please.’ He became exhilarated with his success. He had never answered her back before, and she was frightened, he could see.

Her head wheeled and hammered. She sat down at the table with her arms before her and put her head down on them and began to cry.

The thought of Timmy hearing this deflated Mr Miller. He put a hand on her shoulder, hoping to steady her.

‘Poor old Flo,’ he conceded. ‘I suppose she is a bit of a rough diamond.’

‘It was the ringworm,’ Mrs Miller sobbed into her sleeve.

‘All right. All right. Let’s get on with some supper and have a nice quiet sit-down by the fire.’

‘I don’t know what to have for supper.’ For her plans had not extended beyond tea-time.

‘Well, we can make do with something – a bit of cold meat out there, and a nice jar of pickled cabbage, I saw. That’ll be a change. Now don’t go off again. What’s the matter now? The boy’ll hear you.’

She went out into the kitchen and held her handkerchief under the cold water and then put it to her aching forehead.

‘And there’s all these nice cakes,’ her tactless husband went on. ‘We can follow up with some of these.’

‘All right,’ she said meekly.

His very air was one of mastery and decision; even cutting his meat, forking pickled cabbage on to his plate, he seemed different, she thought.

She was very subdued. She ate nothing, her head ached so. When the telephone rang, she started and began to tremble.

There was the cool, inconsequential voice.

‘My dear, it’s Winifred Luna, I know you will never forgive me. We’ve had such a day … Constance vomiting the whole time … and Cook’s afternoon off … it simply is one thing after another with children … they’re up one minute and down the next … what Nanny and I have had to put up with this day … but now she has had an enormous amount of arrowroot mould and gone fast to sleep, like a baby, though my babies were never so marvellous as all that about sleeping … and Nanny and I are just exhausted … and on top of it all the dreadful feeling that you are not going to forgive my rudeness and thoughtlessness … but I expect you will be very understanding and give us just one more chance. Perhaps we could pop over tomorrow, instead …’