Complete Short Stories (VMC) (28 page)

He knew that in any other place he would not have, but
here
he had expected to find her.

‘Of course, my hair was quite black then. That was my mother’s idea. She thought the black hair leant more to the occult. “Whoever heard of a mouse-coloured clairvoyant?” she used to say.’

Having warmed the tea-pot, she set out some biscuits on a flowered plate.

‘My mother was a medium, a spiritualist. She died five years ago.’

‘My own mother passed on – a little more recently than that. It merely
seems
longer,’ Ronald said.

When the tea had drawn, they sat and drank it and talked about their dominant mothers and how they missed them.

‘I have my cousin upstairs,’ Madame Olga said. ‘Mavis Lacey. By the way,
my
name is Lacey too. Winnie. But of course you must have known that.’

He had described to her, while still standing outside the front door, how he had managed to track her down. It was then that the fear had come over her face. ‘But Mavis has her own life,’ she went on now. ‘Bingo and that. I could never go out alone and she does – sometimes, since I was ill, a little walk down to the shops makes me feel nervous. But I see my clients.’ She glanced down at a skirt with a pinned-up hem and then away from it with a look of distaste.

‘Is it … remunerative?’ Ronald asked.

‘Well, I am slow at it so far. Everything takes too long. And sometimes things go wrong and have to be done again.’ She looked upset, as if some such calamity had recently happened.

Ronald had taken against Mavis and her selfish bingo-playing. ‘You need a little cheering up after an illness,’ he said.

He declined a biscuit. She nibbled at one as if it were a curious thing she had never tried before.

‘Well, now, about the promise of promotion you held out to me,’ he began.

She got up quickly to refill the tea-pot in her hand, staring at him.

‘I travelled abroad. I had a kidney stone,’ he went on.

He felt weak and confused. He accepted another cup of tea and sat back, easy, relaxed, as he had seldom been in his life. ‘You have some uncanny genius, no doubt of that.’

‘No longer. I am tired.’

‘The virtue has gone out of you,’ he said, not quite knowing what he meant. ‘You have given all of yourself. No one can do more. And there must come a time for packing it all in.’

As well as being interested in football (and of course football pools) he was now a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, and there was a man there who was always proposing votes of thanks and putting forward amendments and who spoke in a way that Ronald admired and often tried to copy. ‘We are all subject to our human condition,’ he added.

‘I
do
believe the palm shows certain characteristics,’ she said in a rather defiant voice, and then she looked straight at him and said, ‘but not the future; not the future, Mr …’

‘Ives. Ronald Ives.’

‘No, the future, Mr Ives, is hidden from us all, and that is as it should be. Sometimes, though, just taking someone’s hand and talking about the lines on it, sort of vibrations seemed to come through. “To someone like this, such and such might happen,” you’d think. If I sensed something terrible, I never mentioned it, and if I worried you about a kidney stone, I apologise. That wasn’t like me.’

The word ‘candour’ came into his mind. It was a word he had always admired; he believed he admired the quality itself and did so, as most people do, with reserve. He looked at Madame Olga with even greater interest. So her genius had been intermittent. It was not everybody’s hand, or the touching of it, that had inspired her.

‘There were times, I remember,’ she said, ‘when I felt dreadful things – that they might soon die. After they’d gone I’d go to the window and watch them going up the arcade, full of ideas about what I’d told them – about their lines of success, upwards emotional trends and so on, and they looked pleased with themselves, I thought. Probably treated it all as a bit of a joke, I thought, something to tell people back home. But I couldn’t shake off the feeling of terror. I hope I was always wrong. But then of course …’ and she smiled so brightly, so warmly, ‘sometimes I had just the opposite feeling. Instead of thinking, “They are going to die soon,” I’d be sure they would suddenly find their feet.’

‘As I did.’

‘I loved that happening. I could say it, come right out with it, and I’m very glad it was true for you. You see, this the first time I’ve ever found out if I was right or wrong. Are you sure you won’t have a biscuit?’

‘I think I’ll allow myself to be tempted after all,’ he said. ‘Since you twisted my arm.’ That was one of the Chamber-of-Commerce man’s phrases.

‘To be quite honest,’ she went on, ‘those sorts of feelings about people were very few and far between. If it hadn’t been for my mother, I’d have been doing
this
all my life, I suppose.’ She made a gesture towards the sewing-machine and sighed. ‘I should never have set the Thames on fire, as they say. It was interesting in the arcade, though such a short season. I couldn’t make do. Then fell ill.’

‘What form did your indisposition take?’ He remembered the jeweller’s sinister if muddled implications. ‘Or perhaps I shouldn’t ask?’

She tapped her chest. ‘Bronchial,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t shake off and was very lowering. I became quite depressed, all on my own here.’

She was wearing a hand-knitted jersey of rust-colour wool. The only other time he had seen her she had worn a flowing red dress with bead embroidery.

‘In a way, I suppose I was dominated by my mother,’ she said – as if the idea suddenly, in his company, had occurred to her.

‘And perhaps I was too,’ he said.

They talked for a while of those two strong characters who had marred their lives, and they spoke in admiration and with a sense of loss.

Suddenly he realised that it was past five o’clock. ‘I’ve kept you from your work for more than half the afternoon,’ he said, and remembered her saying how slow she was at it.

‘You’re not to worry about that. Mrs Mason’s alterations can wait another day. She goes on diets, you see, so I am forever taking in or letting out.’

‘Very trying. I can understand that.’

‘Well, it’s my living now.’ And she grinned, as Madame Olga would not have allowed herself to do.

‘A fourth thing you said …’ he began and now she looked not frightened, just waiting to hear. ‘You spoke of a fortune. That’s hard enough for anyone in my walk of life to take in; although, of course, what’s a fortune to one is just peanuts to another. However, my football pools came up.’

‘Why, it’s like a fairy story,’ she said, with wonderment unsuitable to an ex-clairvoyant. Her pleasure for him, her childish excitement, was unlike anything he had ever known. She – still like a child – did not even ask him how much.

He was reluctant to go away, to end their conversation, without finding out far more about her that he wanted to know – about her childhood, her father (not yet mentioned), the sort of people who had visited her in the arcade, her mother’s séances.

‘What about a bite out this evening?’ he suggested.

‘A bite out?’

‘I believe the Dolphin puts on quite a presentable dinner.’

She hesitated, and he believed she was worrying about clothes. His mother’s first words on receiving an invitation had always been, ‘But I’ve nothing to wear.’

‘We can just be informal – go on with our chat,’ he said.

‘I should like it more than anything,’ she said, having remembered a white mohair coat that her cousin, with persuasion or bribes, might lend her.

At the door he took her thin hand. ‘I shall call at, say, seven-thirty. I’ll get a taxi.’

She flushed with pleasure and he smiled from the same emotion.

Walking back to Fernbank, he took the cheque from his wallet, tore it into little pieces and dropped them into a litter-bin. He felt ashamed that he had ever thought of giving her money – and relieved, so relieved, that he had not.

A few weeks after the funeral, Catherine went back to stay with the Ingrams. Uncertain, during those weeks, how much grief was suitable to her – for she and Noël had not been officially engaged and in the eyes of the world she saw her status as mourner undecided – she had shown no sign of sorrow, for one tear might release the rest and one word commit her to too many others. Her fortitude was prodigious, even alone after the funeral when all that she had keyed herself up to was over. She avoided the drawer where his letters were; the air about her, at the art school by day and with her parents at home, was full of warnings and tensions. She felt jolted and stunned, as if she had been in his car at the time of the accident, and she walked about slowly and carefully, suffering from a stiffness of her limbs and a sensation of vertigo. By the end of the first month her effort had told on her – the energy spent in fending off other people and the sympathy they might offer, the holding back of tears, left her weak and apathetic. The boredom of her grief was not its easiest part to bear – the irritation of having nothing but her loss ever enter her mind now, when once she had had so many thoughts, dulled all her days and her dreams at night. Her parents were thankful when she took herself off to the Ingrams and they could come down from their tightrope and relax.

Mrs Ingram met her at the station. Catherine saw her first, standing on the platform, scanning the carriages as the doors began to open. She was wearing a mauve gingham frock and her white hair was blown back from her forehead and from that plane below her high cheekbone which Noël had had, too, and which made, Catherine thought, those two faces the most beautiful she had ever known.

‘I am here,’ she said, setting down her suitcase for a moment while she was kissed.

‘Dear Catherine, I am so glad you came before it was dark.’ Her seemingly meaningless phrases were often found, later, to have some meaning after all.

A soldier, for Mrs Ingram’s sake, not Catherine’s, had lifted the suitcase and was carrying it out to the station-yard. A wake of devotion always followed her and Catherine joined her own homage to the rest.

They got into Mrs Ingram’s tinny little shopping car and drove away through the red-brick Thames-side village and down darkening lanes scented with elder-blossom.

‘Esmé is still with us,’ Mrs Ingram said. ‘I wanted you to come before his leave was over.’

Esmé was Noël’s elder brother, adored first-born, whom Catherine had heard of for years, resented somewhat on Noël’s account and seen fleetingly at the funeral, to which he had come from abroad.

‘You will be someone young for him,’ Mrs Ingram said.

She drove as if she were a goddess in a chariot, her white hands confident, her head erect. Sometimes she waved to children who pressed back against the hedges, staring.

They turned through iron gates into the tunnel of trees leading up to the house; a haze of gnats danced under the bitten leaves; cow-parsley was grey in the shadows. The drive ended suddenly and they were under the high façade of the house with its rows of Georgian windows diminishing in height at each storey and the panelled door and rounded fanlight. Lights were on on the ground floor and a young man came out of the house and down the steps towards them.

Not quite up to the shock of seeing even a slight resemblance to Noël, Catherine was obliged to look up at what she had steadfastly at the funeral ignored. This brother had the same eyes, shrewd and alert, lines from laughter beneath them – for as a family they seemed to have laughed a great deal. When Mrs Ingram did so, she became even more beautiful – a rare thing in a woman; laughter enlivened her features and never disorganised them. Esmé was heavier than Noël; his features less defined; his colour paler. The beautiful flatness under the cheekbone he lacked. Catherine could imagine him in middle-age rather puffy under the eyes and stout and inactive and even, later, gouty as his father had been.

Catherine saw the house in the last of the light – perhaps its most magic al time. It was ashen and flat against the dark trees. Beyond the lawns the river slid by and she could hear and smell the tumbling water at the weir. Moths followed them into the lighted hall. Damp had drained colour from great patches of the crimson walls, but the room was in brilliant contrast to outside. The tall clock only tocked, never ticked, Noël had said. On a table was a disarray of flowers and baskets and vases, for Mrs Ingram had left for the station in the middle of building a great pyramid of honeysuckle and peonies. She now, leading Catherine to her room, looked back regretfully at her interrupted work. ‘Could not Esmé have fetched me, then?’ Catherine wondered, apologetic as always. ‘Or wouldn’t he?’

From her bedroom’s two long windows she would be able to see the river when it was daylight again.

‘I hope the weir won’t disturb you,’ Mrs Ingram said, as if Catherine had never stayed in the house before. ‘I never hear it now.’

When Esmé had brought in the suitcase and gone, Mrs Ingram embraced Catherine again. ‘So lovely that you are here,’ she murmured. ‘Come down soon and have a drink after your long journey.’

She looked round the room, pulled at a curtain and rearranged some white geraniums in a pewter mug before she left Catherine alone.