Complete Short Stories (VMC) (32 page)

She was an envious woman: she envied Mrs Allen her pretty house and her clothes and she envied her own daughters their youth. ‘If I had your figure,’ she would say to Mrs Allen. Her own had gone: what else could be expected, she asked, when she had had three children? Mrs Allen thought, too, of all the brown ale she drank at the Horse and Jockey and of the reminiscences of meals past which came so much into her conversations. Whatever the cause was, her flesh, slackly corseted, shook as she trod heavily about the kitchen. In summer, with bare arms and legs she looked larger than ever. Although her skin was very white, the impression she gave was at once colourful – from her orange hair and bright lips and the floral patterns that she always wore. Her red-painted toe-nails poked through the straps of her fancy sandals; turquoise-blue beads were wound round her throat.

Humphrey Allen had never seen her; he had always left for the station before she arrived, and that was a good thing, his wife thought. When she spoke of Mrs Lacey, she wondered if he visualised a neat, homely woman in a clean white overall. She did not deliberately mislead him, but she took advantage of his indifference. Her relationship with Mrs Lacey and the intimacy of their conversations in the kitchen he would not have approved, and the sight of those calloused feet with their chipped nail-varnish and yellowing heels would have sickened him.

One Monday morning, Mrs Lacey was later than usual. She was never very punctual and had many excuses about flat bicycle-tyres or Maureen being poorly. Mrs Allen, waiting for her, sorted out all the washing. When she took another look at the clock, she decided that it was far too late for her to be expected at all. For some time lately Mrs Lacey had seemed ill and depressed; her eyelids, which were chronically rather inflamed, had been more angrily red than ever and, at the sink or ironing-board, she would fall into unusual silences, was absent-minded and full of sighs. She had always liked to talk about the ‘change’ and did so more than ever as if with a desperate hopefulness.

‘I’m sorry, but I was ever so sick,’ she told Mrs Allen, when she arrived the next morning. ‘I still feel queerish. Such heartburn. I don’t like the signs, I can tell you. All I crave is pickled walnuts, just the same as I did with Maureen. I don’t like the signs one bit. I feel I’ll throw myself into the river if I’m taken that way again.’

Mrs Allen felt stunned and antagonistic. ‘Surely not at your age,’ she said crossly.

‘You can’t be more astonished than me,’ Mrs Lacey said, belching loudly. ‘Oh, pardon. I’m afraid I can’t help myself.’

Not being able to help herself, she continued to belch and hiccough as she turned on taps and shook soap-powder into the washing-up bowl. It was because of this that Mrs Allen decided to take the dog for a walk. Feeling consciously fastidious and aloof she made her way across the fields, trying to disengage her thoughts from Mrs Lacey and her troubles; but unable to. ‘Poor woman,’ she thought again and again with bitter animosity.

She turned back when she noticed how the sky had darkened with racing, sharp-edged clouds. Before she could reach home, the rain began. Her hair, soaking wet, shrank into tight curls against her head; her woollen suit smelt like a damp animal. ‘Oh, I am drenched,’ she called out, as she threw open the kitchen door.

She knew at once that Mrs Lacey had gone, that she must have put on her coat and left almost as soon as Mrs Allen had started out on her walk, for nothing was done; the washing-up was hardly started and the floor was unswept. Among the stacked-up crockery a note was propped; she had come over funny, felt dizzy and, leaving her apologies and respects, had gone.

Angrily, but methodically, Mrs Allen set about making good the wasted morning. By afternoon, the grim look was fixed upon her face. ‘How dare she?’ she found herself whispering, without allowing herself to wonder what it was the woman had dared.

She had her own little ways of cosseting herself through the lonely hours, comforts which were growing more important to her as she grew older, so that the time would come when not to have her cup of tea at four-thirty would seem a prelude to disaster. This afternoon, disorganised as it already was, she fell out of her usual habit and instead of carrying the tray to the low table by the fire, she poured out her tea in the kitchen and drank it there, leaning tiredly against the dresser. Then she went upstairs to make herself tidy. She was trying to brush her frizzed hair smooth again when she heard the door bell ringing.

When she opened the door, she saw quite plainly a look of astonishment take the place of anxiety on the man’s face. Something about herself
surprised him, was not what he had expected. ‘Mrs Allen?’ he asked uncertainly and the astonishment remained when she had answered him.

‘Well, I’m calling about the wife,’ he said. ‘Mrs Lacey that works here.’

‘I was worried about her,’ said Mrs Allen.

She knew that she must face the embarrassment of hearing about Mrs Lacey’s condition and invited the man into her husband’s study, where she thought he might look less out-of-place than in her brocade-smothered drawing-room. He looked about him resentfully and glared down at the floor which his wife had polished. With this thought in his mind, he said abruptly: ‘It’s all taken its toll.’

He sat down on a leather couch with his cap and his bicycle-clips beside him.

‘I came home to my tea and found her in bed, crying,’ he said. This was true. Mrs Lacey had succumbed to despair and gone to lie down. Feeling better at four o’clock, she went downstairs to find some food to comfort herself with; but the slice of dough-cake was ill-chosen and brought on more heartburn and floods of bitter tears.

‘If she carries on here for a while, it’s all got to be very different,’ Mr Lacey said threateningly. He was nervous at saying what he must and could only bring out the words with the impetus of anger. ‘You may or may not know that she’s expecting.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Allen humbly. ‘This morning she told me that she thought …’

‘There’s no “thought” about it. It’s as plain as a pikestaff.’ Yet in his eyes she could see disbelief and bafflement and he frowned and looked down again at the polished floor.

Twenty years older than his wife – or so his wife had said – he really, to Mrs Allen, looked quite ageless, a crooked, bow-legged little man who might have been a jockey once. The expression about his blue eyes was like a child’s: he was both stubborn and pathetic.

Mrs Allen’s fat spaniel came into the room and went straight to the stranger’s chair and began to sniff at his corduroy trousers.

‘It’s too much for her,’ Mr Lacey said. ‘It’s too much to expect.’

To Mrs Allen’s horror she saw the blue eyes filling with tears. Hoping to hide his emotion, he bent down and fondled the dog, making playful thrusts at it with his fist closed.

He was a man utterly, bewilderedly at sea. His married life had been too much for him, with so much in it that he could not understand.

‘Now I know, I will do what I can,’ Mrs Allen told him. ‘I will try to get someone else in to do the rough.’

‘It’s the late nights that are the trouble,’ he said. ‘She comes in dog-tired. Night after night. It’s not good enough. “Let them stay at home and mind
their own children once in a while,” I told her. “We don’t need the money.”’

‘I can’t understand,’ Mrs Allen began. She was at sea herself now, but felt perilously near a barbarous, unknown shore and was afraid to make any movement towards it.

‘I earn good money. For her to come out at all was only for extras. She likes new clothes. In the daytimes I never had any objection. Then all these cocktail parties begin. It beats me how people can drink like it night after night and pay out for someone else to mind their kids. Perhaps you’re thinking that it’s not my business, but I’m the one who has to sit at home alone till all hours and get my own supper and see next to nothing of my wife. I’m boiling over some nights. Once I nearly rushed out when I heard the car stop down the road. I wanted to tell your husband what I thought of you both.’

‘My husband?’ murmured Mrs Allen.

‘What am I supposed to have, I would have asked him? Is she my wife or your sitter-in? Bringing her back at this time of night. And it’s no use saying she could have refused. She never would.’

Mrs Allen’s quietness at last defeated him and dispelled the anger he had tried to rouse in himself. The look of her, too, filled him with doubts, her grave, uncertain demeanour and the shock her age had been to him. He had imagined someone so much younger and – because of the cocktail parties – flighty. Instead, he recognised something of himself in her, a yearning disappointment. He picked up his cap and his bicycle-clips and sat looking down at them, turning them round in his hands. ‘I had to come,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Allen.

‘So you won’t ask her again?’ he pleaded. ‘It isn’t right for her. Not now.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Mrs Allen promised and she stood up as he did and walked over to the door. He stooped and gave the spaniel a final pat. ‘You’ll excuse my coming, I hope.’

‘Of course.’

‘It was no use saying any more to her. Whatever she’s asked, she won’t refuse. It’s her way.’

Mrs Allen shut the front door after him and stood in the hall, listening to him wheeling his bicycle across the gravel. Then she felt herself beginning to blush. She was glad that she was alone, for she could feel her face, her throat, even the tops of her arms burning, and she went over to a looking-glass and studied with great interest this strange phenomenon.

At eleven o’clock, Emily went down to the village to fetch the lobsters. The heat unsteadied the air, light shimmered and glanced off leaves and telegraph wires and the flag on the church tower spreading out in a small breeze, then dropping, wavered against the sky, as if it were flapping under water.

She wore an old cotton frock, and meant to change it at the last moment, when the food was all ready and the table laid. Over her bare arms, the warm air flowed, her skirt seemed to divide as she walked, pressed in a hollow between her legs, like drapery on a statue. The sun seemed to touch her bones – her spine, her shoulder-blades, her skull. In her thoughts, she walked nakedly, picking her way, over dry-as-dust cow-dung, along the lane. All over the hedges, trumpets of large white convolvulus were turned upwards towards the sky – the first flowers she could remember; something about them had, in her early childhood, surprised her with astonishment and awe, a sense of magic that had lasted, like so little else, repeating itself again and again, most of the summers of her forty years.

From the wide-open windows of the village school came the sound of a tinny piano. ‘We’ll rant, and we’ll roar, like true British sailors,’ sang all the little girls.

Emily, smiling to herself as she passed by, had thoughts so delightful that she began to tidy them into sentences to put in a letter to Edmund. Her days were not full or busy and the gathering in of little things to write to him about took up a large part of her time. She would have made a paragraph or two about the children singing, the hot weather – so rare in England – the scent of the lime and privet blossom, the pieces of tin glinting among the branches of the cherry trees. But the instinctive thought was at once checked by the truth that there would be no letter-writing that evening after all. She stood before an alarming crisis, one that she had hoped to avoid for as long as ever she lived; the crisis of meeting for the first time the person whom she knew best in the world.

‘What will he be like?’ did not worry her. She knew what he was like. If he turned out differently, it would be a mistake. She would be getting a false impression of him and she would know that it was temporary and
would fade. She was more afraid of herself, and wondered if he would know how to discount the temporary, and false, in her. Too much was at stake and, for herself, she would not have taken the risk. ‘I agree that we have gone beyond meeting now. It would be retracing our steps,’ he had once written to her. ‘Although, perhaps if we were ever in the same country, it would be absurd to make a point of
not
meeting.’ This, however, was what she had done when she went to Italy the next year.

In Rome, some instinct of self-preservation kept her from giving him her aunt’s address there. She would telephone, she thought; but each time she tried to – her heart banging erratically within a suddenly hollow breast – she was checked by thoughts of the booby-trap lying before her. In the end, she skirted it. She discovered the little street where he lived, and felt the strangeness of reading its name, which she had written hundreds of times on envelopes. Walking past his house on the opposite pavement, she had glanced timidly at the peeling apricot-coloured plaster. The truth of the situation made her feel quite faint. It was frightening, like seeing a ghost in reverse – the insubstantial suddenly solidifying into a patchy and shabby reality. At the window on the first floor, one of the shutters was open; there was the darkness of the room beyond, an edge of yellow curtain and, hanging over the back of a chair set near the window, what looked like a white skirt. Even if Edmund himself threw open the other shutter and came out on to the balcony, he would never have known that the woman across the road was one of his dearest friends, but, all the same, she hastened away from the neighbourhood. At dinner, her aunt thought she might be ill. Her visitors from England so often were – from the heat and sight-seeing and the change of diet.

The odd thing to Emily about the escapade was its vanishing from her mind – the house became its own ghost again, the house of her imagination, lying on the other side of the road, where she had always pictured it, with its plaster unspoilt and Edmund inside in his tidied-up room, writing to her.

He had not chided her when she sent a letter from a safer place, explaining her lack of courage – and explain it she could, so fluently, half-touchingly yet wholly amusingly – on paper. He teased her gently, understanding her decision. In him, curiosity and adventurousness would have overcome his hesitation. Disillusionment would have deprived him of less than it might have deprived her; her letters were a relaxation to him; to her, his were an excitement, and her fingers often trembled as she tore open their envelopes.