Complete Short Stories (VMC) (33 page)

They had written to one another for ten years. She had admired his novels since she was a young woman, but would not have thought of writing to tell him so; that he could conceivably be interested in the opinion
of a complete stranger did not occur to her. Yet, sometimes, she felt that without her as their reader the novels could not have had a fair existence. She was so sensitive to what he wrote, that she felt her own reading half-created it. Her triumph at the end of each book had something added of a sense of accomplishment on her part. She felt it, to a lesser degree, with some other writers, but they were dead; if they had been living, she would not have written to them, either.

Then one day she read in a magazine an essay he had written about the boyhood of Tennyson. His conjecture on some point she could confirm, for she had letters from one of the poet’s brothers. She looked for them among her grandfather’s papers and (she was never impulsive save when the impulse was generosity) sent them to Edmund, with a little note to tell him that they were a present to repay some of the pleasure his books had given her.

Edmund, who loved old letters and papers of every kind, found these especially delightful. So the first of many letters from him came to her, beginning, ‘Dear Miss Fairchild’. His handwriting was very large and untidy and difficult to decipher, and this always pleased her, because his letters took longer to read; the enjoyment was drawn out, and often a word or two had to be puzzled over for days. Back, again and again, she would go to the letter, trying to take the problem by surprise – and that was usually how she solved it.

Sometimes, she wondered why he wrote to her – and was flattered when he asked for a letter to cheer him up when he was depressed, or to calm him when he was unhappy. Although he could not any longer work well in England – for a dullness came over him, from the climate and old, vexatious associations – he still liked to have some foothold there, and Emily’s letters refreshed his memories.

At first, he thought her a novelist manqué, then he realised that letter-writing is an art by itself, a different kind of skill, though with perhaps a similar motive – and one at which Englishwomen have excelled.

As she wrote, the landscape, flowers, children, cats and dogs, sprang to life memorably. He knew her neighbours and her relation to them, and also knew people, who were dead now, whom she had loved. He called them by their Christian names when he wrote to her and re-evoked them for her, so that, being allowed at last to mention them, she felt that they became light and free again in her mind, and not an intolerable suppression, as they had been for years.

Coming to the village, on this hot morning, she was more agitated than she could ever remember being, and she began to blame Edmund for creating such an ordeal. She was angry with herself for acquiescing, when he had
suggested that he, being at last in England for a week or two, should come to see her. ‘For an hour, or three at most. I want to look at the flowers in the
very
garden, and stroke the cat, and peep between the curtains at Mrs Waterlow going by.’

‘He knows too much about me, so where can we begin?’ she wondered. She had confided such intimacies in him. At that distance, he was as safe as the confessional, with the added freedom from hearing any words said aloud. She had written to his mind only. He seemed to have no face, and certainly no voice. Although photographs had once passed between them, they had seemed meaningless.

She had been so safe with him. They could not have wounded one another, but now they might. In ten years, there had been no inadvertent hurts, of rivalry, jealousy, or neglect. It had not occurred to either to wonder if the other would sometime cease to write; the letters would come, as surely as the sun.

‘But will they now?’ Emily was wondering.

She turned the familiar bend of the road and the sea lay glittering below – its wrinkled surface looking solid and without movement, like a great sheet of metal. Now and then a light breeze came off the water and rasped together the dried grasses on the banks; when it dropped, the late morning silence held, drugging the brain and slowing the limbs.

For years, Emily had looked into mirrors only to see if her hair were tidy or her petticoat showing below her dress. This morning, she tried to take herself by surprise, to see herself as a stranger might, but failed.

He would expect a younger woman from the photograph of some years back. Since that was taken, wings of white hair at her temples had given her a different appearance. The photograph would not, in any case, show how poor her complexion was, unevenly pitted, from an illness when she was a child. As a girl, she had looked at her reflection and thought ‘No one will ever want to marry me’ and no one had.

When she went back to the living-room, the cat was walking about, smelling lobster in the air; baulked, troubled by desire, he went restlessly about the little room, the pupils of his eyes two thin lines of suspicion and contempt. But the lobster was high up on the dresser, above the Rockingham cups, and covered with a piece of muslin.

Emily went over to the table and touched the knives and forks, shook the salt in the cellar nicely level, lifted a wine-glass to the light. She poured out a glass of sherry and stood, well back from the window – looking out between hollyhocks at the lane.

Unless the train was late, he should be there. At any moment, the station taxi would come slowly along the lane and stop, with terrible
inevitability, outside the cottage. She wondered how tall he was – how would he measure against the hollyhocks? Would he be obliged to stoop under the low oak beams?

The sherry heartened her a little – at least, her hands stopped shaking – and she filled her glass again. The wine was cooling in a bucket down the well and she thought that perhaps it was time to fetch it in, or it might be too cold to taste.

The well had pretty little ferns of a very bright green growing out of the bricks at its sides, and when she lifted the cover, the ice-cold air struck her. She was unused to drinking much, and the glasses of sherry had, first, steadied her; then, almost numbed her. With difficulty, she drew up the bucket; but her movements were clumsy and uncertain, and greenish slime came off the rope on to her clean dress. Her hair fell forward untidily. Far, far below, as if at the wrong end of a telescope, she saw her own tiny face looking back at her. As she was taking the bottle of wine from the bucket, she heard a crash inside the cottage.

She knew what must have happened, but she felt too muddled to act quickly. When she opened the door of the living-room she saw, as she expected, the cat and the lobster and the Rockingham cups spread in disorder about the floor.

She grabbed the cat first – though the damage was done now – and ran to the front door to throw him out into the garden; but, opening the door, was confronted by Edmund, whose arm was raised, just about to pull on the old iron bell. At the sight of the distraught woman with untidy hair and her eyes full of tears, he took a pace back.

‘There’s no lunch,’ she said quickly. ‘Nothing.’ The cat struggled against her shoulder, frantic for the remains of the lobster, and a long scratch slowly ripened across her cheek; then the cat bounded from her and sat down behind the hollyhocks to wash his paws.

‘How do you do,’ Emily said. She took her hand away from his almost as soon as she touched him and put it up to her cheek, brushing blood across her face.

‘Let us go in and bathe you,’ he suggested.

‘Oh, no, please don’t bother. It is nothing at all. But, yes, of course, come in. I’m afraid …’ She was incoherent and he could not follow what she was saying.

At the sight of the lobster and the china on the floor, he understood a little. All the same, she seemed to him to be rather drunk.

‘Such wonderful cups and saucers,’ he said, going down on his knees and filling his hands with fragments. ‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’

‘It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. It’s the lobster that matters. There is nothing else in the house.’

‘Eggs?’ he suggested.

‘I don’t get the eggs till Friday,’ she said wildly.

‘Well, cheese.’

‘It’s gone hard and sweaty. The weather’s so …’

‘Not that it isn’t too hot to eat anything,’ he said quickly. ‘Hotter than Rome. And I was longing for an English drizzle.’

‘We had a little shower on Monday evening. Did you get that in London?’

‘Monday? No, Sunday we had a few spots.’

‘It was Monday here, I remember. The gardens needed it, but it didn’t do much good.’

He looked round for somewhere to put the broken china. ‘No, I suppose not.’

‘It hardly penetrated. Do put that in the waste-paper basket.’

‘This cup is fairly neatly broken in half, it could be riveted. I can take it back to London with me.’

‘I won’t hear of it. But it is so kind … I suppose the cat may as well have the remains of this – though not straight away. He must be shown that I am cross with him. Oh, dear, and I fetched it last thing from the village so that it should be fresh. But that’s not much use to you, as it’s turned out.’

She disappeared into the kitchen with her hands full of lobster shells.

He looked round the room and so much of it seemed familiar to him. A stout woman passing by in the lane and trying to see in through the window might be Mrs Waterlow herself, who came so amusingly into Emily’s letters.

He hoped things were soon going to get better, for he had never seen anyone so distracted as Emily when he arrived. He had been prepared for shyness, and had thought he could deal with that, but her frenzied look, with the blood on her face and the bits of lobster in her hands, made him feel that he had done some damage which, like the china, was quite beyond his repairing.

She was a long time gone, but shouted from the kitchen that he must take a glass of sherry, as he was glad to do.

‘May I bring some out to you?’ he asked.

‘No, no thank you. Just pour it out and I will come.’

When she returned at last, he saw that she had washed her face and combed her hair. What the great stain all across her skirt was, he could not guess. She was carrying a little dish of sardines, all neatly wedged together as they had been lying in their tin.

‘It is so dreadful,’ she began. ‘You will never forget being given a tin of sardines, but they will go better with the wine than the baked beans, which is the only other thing I can find.’

‘I am
very
fond of sardines,’ he said.

She put the dish on the table and then, for the first time, looked at him. He was of medium height after all, with broader shoulders than she had imagined. His hair was a surprise to her. From his photograph, she had imagined it white – he was, after all, ten years older than she – but instead, it was blond and bleached by the sun. ‘And I always thought I was writing to a white-haired man,’ she thought.

Her look lasted only a second or two and then she drank her sherry quickly, with her eyes cast down.

‘I hope you forgive me for coming here,’ he said gravely. Only by seriousness could he hope to bring them back to the relationship in which they really stood. He approached her so fearfully, but she shied away.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It is
so
nice. After all these years. But I am sure you must be starving. Will you sit here?’

‘How are we to continue?’ he wondered.

She was garrulous with small talk through lunch, pausing only to take up her wine-glass. Then, at the end, when she had handed him his coffee, she failed. There was no more to say, not a word more to be wrung out of the weather, or the restaurant in Rome they had found they had in common, or the annoyances of travel – the train that was late and the cabin that was stuffy. Worn-out, she still cast about for a subject to embark on. The silence was unendurable. If it continued, might he not suddenly say, ‘You are so different from all I had imagined,’ or their eyes might meet and they would see in one another’s nakedness and total loss.

‘I
did
say Wednesday,’ said Mrs Waterlow.

‘No, Thursday,’ Emily insisted. If she could not bar the doorway with forbidding arms, she did so with malevolent thoughts. Gentle and patient neighbour she had always been and Mrs Waterlow, who had the sharp nose of the total abstainer and could smell alcohol on Emily’s breath, was quite astonished.

The front door of the cottage opened straight into the living-room and Edmund was exposed to Mrs Waterlow, sitting forward in his chair, staring into a coffee-cup.

‘I’ll just leave the poster for the Jumble Sale then,’ said Mrs Waterlow. ‘We shall have to talk about the refreshments another time. I think, don’t you, that half a pound of tea does fifty people. Mrs Harris will see to the slab cake. But if you’re busy, I mustn’t keep you. Though since I am here, I wonder if I could look up something in your Encyclopaedia. I won’t interrupt. I promise.’

‘May I introduce Mr Fabry?’ Emily said, for Mrs Waterlow was somehow or other in the room.

‘Not Mr
Edmund
Fabry?’

Edmund, still holding his coffee-cup and saucer, managed to stand up quickly and shake hands.

‘The author? I could recognise you from your photo. Oh, my daughter will be so interested. I must write at once to tell her. I’m afraid I’ve never read any of your books.’

Edmund found this, as he always found it, unanswerable. He gave an apologetic murmur, and smiled ingratiatingly.

‘But I always read the reviews of them in the Sunday papers.’ Mrs Waterlow went on, ‘I’m afraid we’re rather a booky family.’

So far, she had said nothing to which he could find any reply. Emily stood helplessly beside him, saying nothing. She was not wringing her hands, but he thought that if they had not been clasped so tightly together, that was what would have happened.

‘You’ve
really
kept Mr Fabry in the dark, Emily,’ said Mrs Waterlow.

‘Not so
you
to
me
,’ Edmund thought. He had met her many times before in Emily’s letters, already knew that her family was ‘booky’ and had had her preposterous opinions on many things.