Complete Short Stories (VMC) (4 page)

‘I cannot,’ Beatrice said.

‘For a day or two I tried to compete, but I will not be forced into the sort of competition I am bound to lose.’ Muriel frowned and with a weary gesture unclipped her gold ear-rings as if she suddenly found their weight intolerable. She walked on with them clutched, warm and heavy, in her hand. Beatrice could not bear the sight of her fiery ear-lobes. She was upset, as when people who always wear glasses take them off for polishing and expose their wounded-looking and naked eyes. Muriel was never without ear-rings and might have caused only slightly less concern by suddenly unpinning her hair.

Beatrice said: ‘An experienced woman is always held to be a match for a young girl, but I shouldn’t like to have to try it. Not that I
am
very experienced.’

They sat down on a seat under a rhododendron bush, for now they were in the avenue leading to the house and their conversation had not neared its end, as their walk had.

By ‘experience’ both meant love affairs. Beatrice thought of the engagement she had broken in girlhood, and Muriel thought of Hugh Baseden’s predecessor and his admiration for her, which she had rather too easily kept within bounds. It was, as Beatrice had said, very little experience and had served no useful purpose and taught them nothing.

‘And then,’ Muriel said, ‘there is the question of the marriage-bed.’ She was dropping the ear-rings from one hand to the other in her agitation. Far from never discussing her marriage, as she had assured Hester, she was not averse to going over it in every detail, and Beatrice was already initiated
into its secrets to an extent which would have dismayed Robert had he known. ‘There were always so many wonderful excuses, or if none came to mind one could fall inextricably into a deep sleep. He has really been fairly mild and undemanding.’

‘Unlike Bertie,’ Beatrice said, and her sigh was genuinely regretful.

‘Now I am afraid to make excuses or fall asleep. I scent danger, and give in. That may seem obvious, too. It is very humiliating. And certainly a bore.’

‘I sometimes pretend it is someone else,’ Beatrice said. ‘That makes it more amusing.’ She covered her face with her hands, bowed down, rocking with laughter at some incongruous recollection. ‘The most improbable men … if they could know!’

‘But you might laugh at the time,’ Muriel said, in an interested voice.

‘I do … oh, I do.’

‘Robert would be angry.’

‘Perhaps husbands sometimes do the same.’

Muriel clipped her ear-rings back on. She was herself again. ‘Oh, no!’ she said briskly. ‘It would be outrageous.’

‘Marriage-bed’ was only one of her many formal phrases. She also thought and talked of ‘bestowing favours’ and ‘renewed ardours’. ‘To no one else,’ she told herself firmly. ‘To no one else.’ They walked on up the avenue in silence, Beatrice still trembling, dishevelled with laughter. ‘To no one else?’ Muriel thought, in another of those waves of nausea she had felt of late.

As they went upstairs before dinner, she felt an appalling heaviness. She clung to the banisters and Beatrice’s voice came to her from afar. Clouded, remote and very cold, she sat down at her dressing-table. Beatrice took up the glass paper-weight, as she always did, and said, as she always said: ‘These forever fascinate me.’ She tipped it upside-down and snow began to drift, then whirl, about the little central figure. Muriel watched, the comb too heavy to lift. She watched the figure – a skating lady with raised muff and Regency bonnet – solitary, like herself, blurred, frozen, imprisoned.

‘Will she be at dinner?’ Beatrice was asking. She flopped down on the marriage-bed itself, still playing with the paper-weight.

Hester, at dinner, did not appear to Beatrice to be a worthy adversary to a woman of Muriel’s elegance. She said nothing, except when coaxed by Muriel herself into brief replies; for Muriel had acquired courage and was fluent and vivacious, making such a social occasion of the conversation that they seemed to be characters in a play. ‘
This
is how experienced people behave,’ she seemed to imply. ‘We never embarrass by breaking down. In society, we are impervious.’

Robert patronised their conversation in the way of husbands towards wives’ women-friends – a rather elaborate but absent-minded show of courtesy. When Hester spilt some wine, he dipped his napkin into the water-jug and sponged the table-cloth without allowing an interruption of what he was saying. He covered her confusion by a rather long speech, and, at its end, Hugh Baseden was ready to take over with an even longer speech of his own. This protectiveness on their part only exposed Hester the more, for Beatrice took the opportunity of not having to listen to observe the girl more closely. She also observed that clumsiness can have a kind of appeal she had never suspected.

She observed technically at first – the fair thick hair which needed drastic shaping: it was bunched up with combs which looked more entangled than controlling. The face was set in an expression which was sulky yet capable of breaking into swift alarm – even terror – as when her hand had knocked against the wine-glass. The hands themselves were huge and helpless, rough, reddened, the nails cropped down. A piece of dirty sticking-plaster covered one knuckle. A thin silver bracelet hung over each wrist.

Then Beatrice next observed that Hugh Baseden’s protectiveness was ignored, but that Robert’s brought forth a flush and tremor. While he was sponging the table-cloth, the girl watched his hand intently, as if it had a miraculous or terrifying power of its own. Not once did she look at his face.

Beatrice thought that an ominous chivalry hung in the air, and she could see that every victory Muriel had, contributed subtly to her defeat. ‘She should try less,’ she decided. She was the only one who enjoyed her dinner.

The boys were all in from the fields and gardens before Robert and Muriel dined, but throughout the meal those in the dining-room were conscious of the school-life continuing behind the baize-covered doors. The sounds of footsteps in the tiled passages and voices calling went on for a long time, and while coffee was being served the first few bars of ‘
Marche Militaire
’ could be heard again and again – the same brisk beginning, and always the same tripping into chaos. Start afresh. Robert beat time with his foot. Muriel sighed. Soon she accompanied Beatrice out to her car, and at once Hester, rather than stay in the room with Robert (for Hugh Baseden had gone off to some duty), went up to her room.

Now, a curious stillness had fallen over the school, a silence drawn down almost by force. The ‘
Marche Militaire
’ was given up and other sounds could be heard – Muriel saying good-bye to Beatrice out on the drive, and an owl crying; for the light was going.

Hester knelt by her window with her elbows on the sill. Evening after
evening she thought thunder threatened, and because it did not come she had begun to wonder if the strange atmosphere was a permanent feature of this landscape, and intensified by her own sense of foreboding. The black hillside trees, the grape-coloured light over the church and the bilious green lawns were the after-dinner scene, and she longed for darkness to cover it.

Beatrice’s car went down the long drive. A door banged. So Muriel had come in, had returned to the drawing-room to be surprised at Hester’s absence. That averted look, which she assumed when she entered rooms where Robert and Hester were alone, would have been wasted.

Hester leant far out of the window. Only the poplars made any sound – a deep sigh and then a shivering and clattering of their leaves. The other trees held out their branches mutely, and she imagined them crowded with sleeping birds, and bright-eyed creatures around their holes, arching their backs, baring their teeth, and swaying their noses to and fro for the first scents of the night’s hunting. Her suburban background with its tennis-courts, laburnum trees, golden privet had not taught her how to be brave about the country; she saw only its vice and frightfulness, and remembered the adders in the churchyard and the lizards and grass-snakes which the boys collected. Fear met her at every turn – in her dealings with people, her terror of Muriel, her shrinking from nature, her anxiety about her future – (‘You are scrupulously untidy,’ Robert had said. Only a relative would employ her, and she had none but him.)

She made spasmodic efforts to come to terms with these fears; but in trying to face Muriel she fell, she knew, into sullenness. Nature she had not yet braved, had not penetrated the dense woods or the lush meadows by the lake where the frogs were. This evening – as a beginning and because nature was the least of her new terrors, and from loneliness, panic, despair – she moved away from the window, stumbling on her cramped legs, and then went as quietly as she could downstairs and out of doors.

In the garden, at each rustle in the undergrowth, her ankles weakened, but she walked on, treading carefully on the dew-soaked grass. A hedgehog zig-zagged swiftly across her path and checked her. She persisted, hoping thus to restore a little of her self-respect. She was conscious that each pace was taking her from her safe room, where nothing made her recoil but that phrase of Muriel’s that she carried everywhere – ‘Of course you are in love with Robert.’ ‘It was better when we wrote the letters,’ she thought. ‘I was happy then. I believe.’

As the severest test, she set herself the task of walking through the churchyard where a mist hung over gravestones and nettles. The sound of metal striking flint checked her, and more normal fears than fears of nature came to her almost as a relief; as even burglars might be welcomed in an
excessively haunted house. The dusk made it difficult for her to discern what kind of figure it was kneeling beside a headstone under the church walls; but as she stepped softly forwards across the turf she could see it was an old lady, in black flowing clothes and a straw garden-hat swathed with black ribbon. She wore gardening gloves and was planting out salvias and marguerites.

Hester tripped and grazed her arm against some granite. At her cry of pain, the old lady looked up.

‘Oh, mercy!’ she exclaimed, holding the trowel to her heart. ‘For pity’s sake, girl, what are you doing?’

Her white face was violin-shaped, narrowing under her cheek-bones and then widening again, but less, on the level of her wide, thin, lavender-coloured lips. The sagging cords of her throat were drawn in by a black velvet ribbon.

‘I was only going for a walk,’ said Hester.

‘I should call it prowling about. Have you an assignation here? With one of those schoolmasters from the house?’

‘No.’

The old lady drove the trowel into the earth, threw out stones, then, shaking another plant from a pot, wedged it into the hole. The grave resembled a bed in a Public Garden, with a neat pattern of annuals. The salvias bled hideously over a border of lobelias and alyssum. Their red was especially menacing in the dusky light.

‘I think a grave should have
formality
,’ the old lady said, as if she knew Hester’s thoughts and was correcting them. ‘“Keep it neat, and leave it at that,” I warned myself when my father died. I longed to express myself in rather unusual ways; my imagination ran riot with azaleas. A grave is no place for self-expression, though; no place for the indulgence of one’s own likings. These flowers are not to my taste at all; they are in
no
taste.’

‘Is this your father’s grave, then?’ Hester asked.

‘Yes.’ The old lady pointed with her trowel. ‘The one you are lolling against is Grandfather’s. Mother chained off over there with my sister, Linda. She did not want to go in with Father. I can never remember them sharing a bed, even.’

Hester, removing her elbow from the headstone, peered at the name. ‘Then you lived in the house?’ she asked. ‘This name is carved over the stables.’

‘Our home since the Dark Ages. Three houses, at least, on this site and brasses in the church going back to the Crusades. Now there are only the graves left. The name going too. For there were only Linda and I. Families decline more suddenly than they can rise. Extraordinarily interesting. The collapse of a family is most dramatic … I saw it all happen … the money
goes, no sons are born – just daughters and sometimes they are not quite the thing … my sister Linda was weak in the head. We did have to pinch and scrape, and aunts fastened to us, like barnacles on a wreck. Some of them drank and the servants followed their example. Then trades-people become insolent, although the
nouveaux riches
still fawn.’ She turned up a green penny with her trowel, rubbed dirt from it and put it in her pocket. ‘Our disintegration was fairly rapid,’ she said. ‘I
can
remember a time before it all overtook us – the scandals and gossip, threadbare carpets, dented silver,
sold
silver, darned linen. Oh, it usually goes the same way for everyone, once it begins. And very fascinating it can be. Dry rot, wood-worm, the walls subsiding. Cracks in plaster and in character. Even the stone-work in the house has some sort of insect in it.’ She nodded proudly at the school. ‘Unless they have done something about it.’

‘Do you come here often?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do. I tend the graves. It makes an outing. I once went to the school to have tea with Mrs Thingummy. A nice little woman.’ This, Hester supposed, was Muriel. ‘Interesting to see what they made of it. I liked the school part very much. I went all over, opened every door. I thought the chance might not come again. Into the servants’ wing where I had never been before – very nice dormitories and bathrooms. The bathrooms were splendid … little pink, naked boys splashing under showers … a very gay and charming sight … I could hardly drag myself away. They scuttled off as shy as crabs. I expect the look of me startled them. What I did
not
admire was the way she had managed the private part of the house where we had tea … loose-covers, which I abhor … I thought it all showed a cool disregard for the painted ceiling. Never mind, I satisfied my curiosity and no need to be bothered with her again.’

Hester, though feeling that Muriel might in fairness be allowed to furnish her drawing-room as she pleased, was none the less delighted to hear this censure, especially over matters of taste. She longed to talk more of Muriel, for she had no other confidante, and this old lady, though strange, was vigorous in her scorn and might, if she were encouraged, say very much more.