Complete Short Stories (VMC) (41 page)

‘Was it lovely?’ Myra asked Katie.

‘So lovely! Oh and someone spilt fruit-cup all down poor Natalie’s front.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Myra.

‘She doesn’t care though.’

‘But her mother … I feel so responsible.’

‘Oh, her mother’s awfully understanding. She won’t give a damn.’ (‘Unlike you,’ Katie’s voice seemed to imply.) ‘It was last year’s, anyway.’

Benedict was hovering at Katie’s shoulder.

‘Charles had torn the hem already, anyway,’ Katie said.

‘But how on earth?’

‘They won a prize in the River Dance.’

Myra had not the faintest idea what a River Dance was and said so.

‘The boys have to run across some chalk lines carrying their partners and he tore her skirt when he picked her up. She’s no light weight, I can assure you.’

‘I hope it hasn’t been rowdy,’ Myra said, but this remark was far too silly to receive an answer.

Frances had attached herself to Charles and Natalie, so that she would not seem to leave the floor alone; but she knew that Mrs Pollard had seen her standing there by the door, without a partner, and for the last waltz of all things. To be seen by her hostess in such a predicament underlined her failure.

‘Did you enjoy it, Frances?’ Myra asked. And wasn’t that the only way to put her question, Frances thought, the one she was so very anxious to know – ‘Did you dance much?’

‘We had better go back as we came,’ Myra said. ‘Have you all got everything? Well then, you go on, Benedict dear, with Frances and Katie, and we will follow.’

‘I wish she wouldn’t say “dear” to boys,’ Katie thought. ‘And she doesn’t trust us, I suppose, to come on after. I hope that Benedict hasn’t noticed that she doesn’t trust him: he will think it is his driving, or worse, that she is thoroughly evil-minded. Goodness knows what she got up to in her young days to have such dreadful ideas in her head.’

The untidy room was waiting for them. Five hours earlier, they had not looked beyond the dance or imagined a time after it.

‘Well, I don’t think that poor boy, Roland, will thank you much for asking him in your party,’ Frances said. ‘He was wondering how he would ever get away from me.’

She thought, as many grown-up women think, that by saying a thing herself she prevented people from thinking it. She had also read a great many nostalgic novels about girls of long ago spending hours in the cloakroom at dances and in her usual spirit of defiance she had refused to go there at all, had stuck the humiliation out and even when she might have taken her chance with the others in the Paul Jones had stuck that out, too.

‘He told me he thought you danced very well,’ Katie said.

This made matters worse for Frances. So it wasn’t just the dancing, but something very much more important – her personality, or lack of it; her plainness – what she was burdened with for the rest of her life, in fact.

Natalie seemed loth to take off her frock, stained and torn though it now was. She floated about the room, spreading the skirt about her as she hummed and swayed and shook her hair. She would not be back on earth again until morning.

‘Here is your safety-pin, Katie,’ said Frances.

‘And here, with many thanks, your necklace safe and sound.’

The trinkets they had borrowed from one another were handed back; they unhooked one another; examined their stockings for ladders. Katie took a pair of socks out of her brassiere.

One by one, they got into bed. Natalie sat up writing her diary and Katie thought hers could wait till morning. Benedict’s amusing sayings would be quite safe till then and by tomorrow the cloud that had been over the evening might have dispersed. The next day, when they were swimming in the lake, or cleaning out the rabbits or making walnut fudge, surely Frances would be re-established among them, not cut off by her lack of success as she now was, taking the edge off Benedict’s remembered wit, making Katie’s heart ache just when it was beginning to behave as she had always believed a heart should.

Turning in Benedict’s arms as they danced she had sometimes caught Frances’s eyes as she stood there alone or with some other forlorn and unclaimed girl. Katie had felt treachery in the smile she had been bound to give – the most difficult of smiles, for it had to contain so much, the assurance that the dance was only a dance and nothing very much to miss, a suggestion of regret at her – Katie’s – foolishness in taking part in it and surprise that she of all people had been chosen. ‘It is soon over,’ she tried to signal to Frances. ‘You are yourself. I love you. I will soon come back.’

And Frances had received the smiles and nodded. ‘There are other things in the world,’ she tried to believe.

‘Shall we have a picnic tomorrow?’ Katie asked. She snuggled down into bed and stared up at the ceiling.

‘Let’s have one day at a time,’ said Natalie. She had filled in the space in her diary and now locked the book up with a little key that hung on a chain round her neck.

‘Do put out the light before the moths come in,’ said Frances.

They could hear Katie’s parents talking quietly in the next room. Frances thought: ‘I expect she is saying, “Poor Frances. I’m afraid she didn’t get many dances; but I am sure that Katie did what she could for her. It would really have been kinder not to have invited her.”’ The unbroken murmuring continued on the other side of the wall and Frances longed for it to stop. She thought: ‘She is forever working things out in her mind, and cruelly lets people guess what they are. It would be no worse if she said them out loud.’ She had prayed that before Myra came to fetch them from
the dance it would all be over; ‘God Save the Queen’ safely sung and her own shame at last behind her. As the last waltz began, she had longed for someone to claim her – any spotty, clammy-handed boy would do. Benedict and Katie had hovered by her, Benedict impatient to be away, but Katie reluctant to leave her friend alone at such a crucial moment. ‘Please go,’ Frances had told them and just as they danced away, Myra had appeared in the doorway, looking tired but watchful, her eyes everywhere – Katie accounted for, Charles, Natalie, then a little encouraging smile and nod to Frances herself, trying to shrink out of sight on the perimeter of the gaiety. ‘As I expected,’ her eyes said.

Gradually, the murmurings from the other room petered out and the house became silent. Then, in Charles’s room across the landing, Natalie heard a shoe drop with a thud on the floor and presently another. ‘Sitting on the edge of the bed, dreaming,’ she thought. She lay awake, smiling in the darkness and stroking her smooth arms long after the other two had fallen asleep.

After tea, the little conservatory was the only place with any sunshine. Helen left the table and went out to see what the children were doing: partly that, and partly because the thought of Lecky going had suddenly put something solid in her throat.

She stood there in the sunshine, breathing slowly to relax herself. ‘If you sing,’ she thought. ‘I heard that somewhere, or read it. Begin to hum, then you find you are singing and all the knots in your throat are untied …’

She watched Vicky going down the path on her tricycle and she began to hum. She couldn’t think of a tune and when Lecky came out to be with her she was buzzing away like a blue-bottle; and it was true, her throat had straightened out and she could even say, ‘Ah, you’re all leaving me now.’

He knew her too well to think for one moment that she was humming because she was contented or serene.

In the stuffy warmth he narrowed his eyes like a cat and folded his arms across his chest. The sunshine arrested time and induced day-dreaming. They stood very still.

‘What time tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Ten o’clock from King’s Cross.’

‘King’s Cross. That station suggests Infinity, Forster says. Do you remember?’

Yes, the long evenings before Vicky was born, Helen sewing in the rocking-chair, tipping back and forth, while he read – right through Forster, some Meredith, the beginnings of Henry James. Most bachelors attach themselves to some family and this was his. He had presented christening mugs, stood at the font on Sunday afternoons, remembered birthdays, read to the wife when her husband was away, partnered her young sister at dances, filled the fourteenth chair and, only last week, signed Harry’s will before he went away.

‘Embarkation leave,’ mused Helen. ‘Sometimes they come back again and have another. But mine won’t.’ She began to hum again. A washed-out butterfly expended itself upon the panes.

‘Put it out, Lecky,’ she cried. ‘I can’t bear touching them.’

‘A vile way of spending one’s life, certainly,’ he agreed. He caught the butterfly in his handkerchief and threw it out the open door.

‘Nearly Vicky’s bedtime,’ she said. The children’s bedtime. After that began the worst part of the day. You would pour yourself a drink, perhaps. ‘Ah, this is gay,’ you would think, kicking the coals on the fire, watching the sparks fly. The gin rolls on the tongue, a little oily. You go to the window to have a last look at the day and stand there, wringing your hands like a woman in a play. And at night you lay down calmly and quietly in the big double bed. Another day gone. A sense of achievement in this. Going cheerfully towards the grave.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked her.

‘About being a butterfly and not having very long to live. What it’s like,’ she lied.

Outside, Vicky’s fat legs went slowly up and down as she tricycled along the path. For a moment a young boy was visible, jumping across flower-beds with a pole.

‘There’s my skinny one,’ she laughed, and he was gone.

It was a boring little garden, and old-fashioned – full of colourless hydrangeas and snails and tongue ferns, with those curly glazed earthenware edgings to the paths.

‘Those frightful pink Dorothy Perkins,’ Lecky said, filled with gloom as he looked at them. There was some association of thought there, but it eluded them.

‘Yes, I must soon put Vicky to bed,’ she said again, sensing his depression and wishing she had not said that about King’s Cross and Infinity.

But it was warm and pleasant in a rather stuffy way and she was too lazy to move. Birds flew down suddenly from the eaves outside. The white shelves with their peeling paint were empty save for a tin of Daisy-Killer and a bleached euonymus clattering its dry leaves in a tiny draught.

‘It has been …’ he began, but that could not be continued. He frowned through the window at Vicky as if she were annoying him, going up and down so placidly.

Did he love Helen? The burden of some emotion towards her oppressed him this evening. He was hastened into this emotion by the flight of these last few hours of his last leave. To go away, see her, perhaps, no more, after all these years of kind companionship, to say nothing, explain nothing, all of this suddenly unthinkable. Which was the
more
unthinkable was what he had to decide.

She felt the pressure of his attention and stirred uncomfortably, leaning her cheek against a warm pane which she dusted first with her handkerchief. She picked up a dead wasp by its wing and examined it. Its small body was drawn round, concaved, in an attitude of pain, which seemed
human, universal. But the face! She looked at it more closely. Beautiful, it was, fantastic and frightening, like a Japanese mask.

‘I shall be lonely,’ she sighed. ‘With Harry gone, you gone. The children are sweet, but they are not really
company
.’

He imagined himself in a tent on a rainy day, the soaking canvas taut and heavy. If he were to put up his hand to touch that canvas, some deluge would begin, which he would have no power to stop. ‘But I
know
that,’ he warned himself. ‘I
know
that.’

All the same, he suddenly turned, his lips parted, and he began: ‘Helen!’

She frowned and reddened, with displeasure, he thought. He observed this with a sense of complete panic. Then she put up her hand and rapped the window with her knuckles.

‘Vicky!’ she cried sharply. ‘Off that garden at once!’

They watched the child smile with guilt and go slowly away, up the garden, with bent head, towards more mischief.

Then they looked at one another and smiled, too. The relief made them laugh. It ran sweetly through them.

‘Now I really
must
,’ she said. ‘I really must put her to bed.’

Sitting outside on the sill, the cat watched Melanie through the window. The shallow arc between the tips of his ears, his baleful stare, and his hunched-up body blown feathery by the wind, gave him the look of a barn-owl. Sometimes, a strong gust nearly knocked him off balance and bent his whiskers crooked. Catching Melanie’s eye, he opened his mouth wide in his furious, striped face, showed his fangs and let out a piteous mew instead of a roar.

Melanie put a finger in her book and padded across the room in her stockinged feet. When she opened the French windows, the gale swept into the room and the fire began to smoke. Now that he was allowed to come in, the cat began a show caprice; half in, he arched his back and rubbed against the step, purring loudly. Some leaves blew across the floor.

‘Either in or out, you fool,’ Melanie said impatiently. Still holding the door, she put her foot under the cat’s belly and half-pushed, half-lifted him into the room.

The French windows had warped, like all the other wooden parts of the house. There were altogether too many causes for irritation, Melanie thought. When she had managed to slam the door shut, she stood there for a moment, looking out at the garden, until she had felt the full abhorrence of the scene. Her revulsion was so complete as to be almost unbelievable; the sensation became ecstatic.

On the veranda, a piece of newspaper had wrapped itself, quivering frenziedly, round a post. A macrocarpa-hedge tossed about in the wind; the giant hydrangea by the gate was full of bus-tickets, for here was the terminus, the very end of the esplanade. The butt and end, Melanie thought, of all the long-drawn-out tedium of the English holiday resort. Across the road a broken bank covered with spiky grass hid most of the sands, but she could imagine them clearly, brown and ribbed, littered with bits of cuttle-fish and mussel-shells. The sea – far out – was staved with white.