Complete Short Stories (VMC) (36 page)

‘I know your father very well,’ Miss Priestley said. ‘Although I don’t suppose he would be able to place
me
. I was a reporter once upon a time on the
Ancaster Herald
and used to cover some of the Court cases when he was on the bench. And my late fiancé was in his regiment in the war. He didn’t come back,’ she added, in an affectedly casual voice she had learnt at the cinema.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Sophy murmured.

‘Yes, we had been engaged for eleven years. But you don’t want to listen to all my sad affairs.’

Although this was true, Sophy felt obliged to make a sound which she hoped suggested denial as well as a certain amount of discouragement. ‘If only there were something amusing in this,’ she thought. ‘Something with which to decorate the plain statement when I tell them at lunch.’ But there was not: the bereaved Miss Priestley with her chilblains was saddening and unattractive and the office was stuffy and untidy, not a good example to the pupils.

The sun was shining when Sophy stood, dazed by its brightness, on the steps in Market Street. The Town Hall clock struck twelve. She hurried back home and was there before Lalla returned from the hairdresser’s.

‘Just
see
what they’ve done,’ was Lalla’s piteous cry at luncheon. They had always done the same thing and Sophy only briefly glanced.

‘Why don’t you tell them?’ asked Colonel Vellacott and seemed to have an edge of exasperation to his voice.

‘I tell them and tell them. As smooth as smooth, I always say. Not a kink or a curl or I shall be so cross.’

‘It will settle down,’ Sophy said. ‘It always does.’

They had just finished what Miss Sully called ‘chicken and all the trimmings’.

‘They’ve caught that man,’ Miss Sully said, as she lifted the dishes off the table. ‘They gave it out on the one o’clock news.’

‘What man?’ asked Lalla, still fidgeting with her hair.

‘The one that assaulted that little boy and then smothered him.’

‘Oh dear!’ Lalage frowned.

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it, only I thought you’d like to know. It isn’t very nice at meal-times, I’m afraid.’ She stacked the plates and carried them away.

‘This is a very rum Baba,’ said Colonel Vellacott, as he always did when given this pudding, and Sophy felt the usual embarrassment, wondering – as she was also used to wondering – just how tedious her friend found this heavy jocularity. Then she remembered that her father was much more Lalage’s responsibility. The old situation was reversed. It should be Lalla’s task to try to prevent the inevitable phrases, to turn the conversations as deftly as she could as the stale quip rose ominously before them.

‘And I shall enjoy seeing how she does it, as time goes on,’ she thought. At present, Lalla was merely smiling her bright, usual smile, a guest’s smile, vaguely willing.

‘I met someone this morning who knows you, Father,’ Sophy suddenly told him, deciding that as any kind of approach to her embarrassment would lead to it, this would do as well as any. ‘In fact, I did not so much meet her as go to see her.’

Colonel Vellacott waited – with the calm of a man who has nothing to fear – for the mystery to unfold, but Lalla stopped eating, put her fork down on her plate and glanced anxiously at Sophy, who went on: ‘Though she says you would never be able to place
her
.
Can
you place someone called Miss Priestley, who has a secretarial school – no, college, so sorry – in Market Street?’

‘No. She is right. I can’t.’

‘Is she from your past?’ Lalla asked. ‘Poor Miss Priestley! I am glad that I am in your present.’

‘No, she simply wrote down in shorthand things you said in Court,’ Sophy explained. ‘And her fiancé was in the regiment and was killed, but I don’t think she blamed you for it.’

‘It was generous of her. Especially as I survived. I should have thought she would have resented that.’

‘Why did you go to see her?’ Lalla asked, taking up her fork again.

‘She is going to teach me to be a secretary.’

‘Oh no! Then I shall come too, I won’t be left here on my own. May I go, too, John?’

‘You know that we agreed not to be sisters,’ Sophy told her. ‘You have to learn to be my mamma and stay at home while I go off to school.’

‘I shall be lonely.’

‘Mothers are. Though perhaps they get used to it, and even rather like it in the end.’

‘Why did you go about the business in so odd a way?’ her father asked. ‘There was no necessity to be secretive. If you wanted to do it at all, you should have said so.’

‘I said, and said.’

‘We thought you were joking.’

‘Yes, I knew you thought that.’

‘And I might have been consulted, I should have thought. I could have done much better for you than this Miss Whatshername, of whom I certainly have never heard.’

‘Then why did you do nothing?’

‘Now, Sophy, don’t try to be cool with me. You are only just home from Switzerland and there was all the time in the world to make arrangements.’

‘I never like to do things at a leisurely pace,’ Sophy said, looking calmly at him. ‘One may as well get on with life.’ As you did, her voice implied.

‘But we know nothing of this Miss Thingummy. She seems a strange end to your education.’

‘It is what I want, Father.’

Lalla, murmuring ‘coffee’, left the room.

‘I was bringing it,’ said Miss Sully, who was never caught out. The tray was in her hands.

Instead of going ahead to the drawing-room, Lalla ran upstairs murmuring ‘handkerchief’.

In the dining-room Colonel Vellacott and his daughter were arguing. ‘Unlike you, Sophy,’ Miss Sully heard.

‘I’ve put the coffee in the drawing-room,’ she said, then hurried forward to rearrange the fire. But there was nothing for her to listen to but the sound of their chairs being pushed back. ‘Madam will be down directly,’ she added.

This was unanswerable and unanswered. Sophy crossed the hall to the drawing-room and without sitting down, carelessly poured out her father’s coffee and her own. She took hers over to the window-seat and began to sip it, lifting the cup only a little from its brimming saucer. She supposed that Lalla was upstairs, waiting for them to finish their quarrel.

Displeased and austere Colonel Vellacott remained for days, wearing what Sophy called his Doge’s face. With Lalage, too, and in private, he was reserved. Rebellion was in the air – a youthful contagion that he intended should not spread. Don’t
you
go running to some Miss Thingummy, or even worse, his mood seemed to warn her.

That Sophy’s action was hardly drastic he constantly reminded himself, but her way of taking it had been cold and secretive. For her to earn her own living was nothing other than he intended and desired, but it seemed
to him that there was no desperate need and that for a month or two she might have helped him out with Lalla. ‘Helped me out’ was his own phrase. He had seen what he called ‘Bride’s despondency’ in Lalage’s eyes, in spite of her bright smiles and her laughter. He did not know how to cheer her up; his time was so much given over to public work and there was no theatre here in Ancaster. She was lonely and suffering reaction from the sudden adventure of their courtship and wedding. He could not hide his anxiety that the house was dull and silent and – with all his Italian décor long ago perfected – too completed. She had simply taken over what was there and had had nothing to contribute. Although he was pleased with what he had done, he began to wonder if it was what a bride would hope for. ‘One day, we will have a change,’ he had promised, but could not bring himself to move one fern or sconce. She had insisted – not knowing what was good for her – that nothing should be touched and that she loved it exactly as it was.

Sophy’s home-coming had raised her spirits and he himself had felt freer and happier and less anxious. He looked forward to entering the house when he returned from his meetings. People who have had the best of both worlds are the crossest of all when the best in one is lost, and he knew this and scolded himself, but the Doge’s face remained and, inhibited by his new habit of sternness, he found himself unable to make love to Lalage. The marriage, Miss Sully thought, was crumbling even more quickly than she had predicted.

At Miss Priestley’s, Sophy was by far the eldest girl and the slowest one at learning, too. Miserably, she bowed her head over the abominable hooks and dots of her shorthand, or touch-typed rows of percentage signs or fractions where should have been ‘Dear Sirs, We beg to confirm receipt of your esteemed order.’

The other girls had left school at sixteen and seemed as quick as birds with their taking down and reading back, always put their carbon paper in the right way round and never typed addresses on upside-down envelopes.

The class-rooms were on the first floor of the old house, a building now given over to offices. The boards were bare and the long tables were ribbed and splintered and ink-stained. Miss Priestley felt the cold and even in May the windows were kept shut, so that the air was chalk-laden and smelt of lead pencils and glue and india-rubber and girls. The windows faced south, over the top branches of budding lilac trees. Below was a tangled garden into which Sophy found herself more and more inclined to stare. At twelve and four, the heavy notes of the Town Hall clock descended on the roof tops in the most gracious – Sophy thought – signal of release. She was the first to have her books closed, knowing before the chimes began that they
were imminent; she could feel the air growing tense and the clock gathering itself to strike, and her face would put on its bright, good-bye look, turned expectantly towards Miss Priestley for dismissal.

Then, being free, she was suddenly loth to go home to Lalla’s ‘I knew you’d hate it!’ The other girls clustered together and showed one another their work, but Sophy took down her jacket from its peg. She knew that the others exchanged looks when she left them and when she called out ‘good-bye’ only one or two answered her, and then in a surprised tone as if it were strange of her to address them.

Sometimes, instead of going home to tea, she would buy an evening paper and read it in a little café in Market Street. The idea of punishment being in the air, it suited her to think of her teacup on the tray at home, unfilled. There, in the Oak Beams Tea Shop, she met Graham Dennis again. He was working in a solicitor’s office nearby and had so grown up that she had not recognised him.

The Dennises’ parties were famous in Ancaster, and Sophy had been going to them for as long as she could remember. Mrs Dennis always described herself as putting herself out for her young people and was not content with Christmas and birthday parties. There were Hallowe’en parties and garden parties, and parties at the New Year and on Guy Fawkes’ Day. Her husband could find no escape. If there were not children bobbing for apples in the hall, they were playing charades in several rooms, or hunting for treasure all over the house. ‘I shall rope Herbert in,’ Mrs Dennis told her friends, who, rather aggrieved because she put themselves so much to shame, wondered how she could manage it. Herbert had been roped in to let off fireworks or be Father Christmas. Lately, as Denise and Graham were no longer children, he was roped in to make claret cup or dance with an odd girl out.

Sophy remembered even the first parties, when she was a little girl. After the exquisite orderliness of her own home, the great, shabby, untidy house with its lighted windows and its noise infected her with delicious excitement.

Mrs Dennis was always kindness itself. ‘You are only young once,’ she often told her children and their friends and made sure that, as well as youth, they had as many other delights lavished on them as she could find time and money to bestow. At the back of her mind, she knew that the two most important parties of all would come at the end: even in nursery days, watching the little ones departing with their balloons and presents, she felt that she was only rehearsing for the culmination of it all – Denise’s wedding and Graham’s twenty-first birthday. Now, both were looming in the same year and ‘loom’ was her own word for their approach. She was
confident that she would surpass herself – the Dennis wedding would be talked about for years; but, for the last time of many, Denise would say, as she drove away: ‘Thank you for doing it all.’ Beyond, lay a blank future for her mother. But first would come Graham’s twenty-first birthday and any champagne left over from that would come in later for the wedding. Only one thing perplexed her, as they went over the list of invitations. Lalage, when staying with Sophy, as she so often was, had always been invited too. For years and years, she had attended the Dennis parties.

‘We couldn’t leave her out now,’ Mrs Dennis said.

‘And how possibly ask her?’ Graham said. ‘Husbands and wives go to parties together. You’d have to ask that old man.’

‘He is only your father’s age,’ Mrs Dennis said, but she knew that that was what Graham meant. It was an awkward situation. She realised that she and Herbert were only at the parties themselves in order to see that the food and drink were plentiful and available. Herbert knew his place and preferring it, made off to his study as soon as he was able, and Mrs Dennis was always in and out of the kitchen.

‘How sad to leave her out, after all these years, poor girl,’ she said.

Lalage felt both sad and embarrassed when Sophy’s invitation came. Her husband, watching her show of unconcern, realised for the first time the consequences of their romance. The marriage, surviving important hazards, seemed now as likely as not to founder upon trivial matters, on this invitation, for instance, and others that would follow. Lalage had been ardent and generous in her love, to come first in someone’s life exalted her and, radiant and incredulous, she had given herself in gratitude. Yet, at the sight of an invitation to a party, she appeared to falter, she glanced away and was confused and could not hide her feeling that she had placed herself in a special position with her contemporaries, was being markedly pushed by them into the ranks of the middle-aged.

Sophy, her father realised, was no longer making things easier, but worsening them. The sooner she could go away and leave them, the better for them all. He could perfectly see this now and wondered how he could hasten what he had so lately tried to prevent.