Complete Short Stories (VMC) (42 page)

Melanie waited as a bowed-over, mufflered man, exercising a dog, then a duffel-coated woman with a brace of poodles on leads completed the scene. Satisfied, she turned back to the fire. It was all as bad as could be and
on a bright day it was hardly better, for the hard glitter of the sun seemed unable to lift the spirits. It was usually windy.

The creaking sound of the rain, its fitful and exasperated drumming on the window, she listened to carefully. In one place at the end of the veranda, it dropped more heavily and steadily: she could hear it as if the noise were in her own breast. The cat – Ursula’s – rubbed its cold fur against her legs and she pushed him away crossly, but he always returned.

‘A day for indoors,’ Ursula said gaily. She carried in the tea-tray, and set down a covered dish on the hearth with the smug triumph of one giving a great treat.

‘I am to be won over with buttered scones,’ Melanie thought sulkily. The sulky expression was one that her face, with its heavy brows and full mouth, fell into easily. ‘One of Miss Rogers’s nasty looks,’ her pupils called it, finding it not alarming, but depressing. Ursula, two years younger, was plumper, brighter, more alert. Neither was beautiful.

‘Oh, sod that cat of yours,’ Melanie said. He was now mewing at the French windows to be let out. Melanie’s swearing was something new since their father had died – an act of desperation, such as a child might make. Father would turn in his grave, Ursula often said. Let him turn, said Melanie. ‘Who will look after him while you’re away?’ she asked, nodding at the cat. Ursula put him outside again and came back to pour out the tea. ‘How do you mean, look after him? Surely you don’t mind. I’ll order the fish. You’ll only have to cook it and give it to him.’

‘I shan’t be here.’

The idea had suddenly occurred, born of vindictiveness and envy. For Pamela had no right to invite Ursula to stay there on her own. Melanie was only two years their senior; they had all been at the same school. Apart from all that, the two sisters always spent their holidays together; in fact, had never been separated. To Melanie, the invitation seemed staggering, insolent, and Ursula’s decision to accept it could hardly be believed. She had read out the letter at breakfast one morning and Melanie, on her way out of the room to fetch more milk, had simply said, ‘How extraordinary,’ her light, scornful voice dismissing the subject. Only a sense of time passing and middle-age approaching had given Ursula the courage (or effrontery) to renew the subject. For the first time that either she or Melanie could remember, her energy and enthusiasm overcame the smothering effect of her sister’s lethargy.

‘She means to go,’ Melanie told herself. Her sensation of impotence was poison to her. She had a bitter taste in her mouth, and chafed her hands as if they were frozen. If Ursula were truly going, though, Melanie determined that the departure should be made as difficult as possible. Long
before she could set out for the station she should be worn out with the obstacles she had had to overcome.

‘You can’t expect me to stay here on my own just in order to look after your cat.’

And lest Ursula should ask where she was going before she had had time to make her plans, she got up quickly and went upstairs.

The cat was to stay in kennels and Ursula grieved about it. Her grief Melanie brushed aside as absurd, although she was at the same time inclined to allow Ursula a sense of guilt. ‘A dog one can at least take with one,’ she told her. She had decided that the cat reflected something of Ursula’s own nature – too feminine (although it was a tom); it might be driven, though not led, and the refusal to co-operate mixed, as it was, with cowardice resulted in slyness.

The weather had not improved. They could remember the holidays beginning in this way so often, with everything – rain, flowers, bushes – aslant in the wind. ‘It will be pretty miserable at Pamela’s,’ Melanie thought. She could imagine that house and its surroundings – a parade of new shops nearby, a tennis club, enormous suburban pubs at the corners of roads. She was forever adding something derogatory to the list. ‘Dentists’ houses always depress me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could stay in one – with all that going on under the same roof.’

What awaited herself was much vaguer.

‘It will be like being at school – though having to run to the bell instead of ringing it,’ Ursula said, when she had picked up the prospectus for the Summer Lecture Course. ‘A pity you can’t just go to the discussions and not stay there. Breakfast 8.15,’ she read. ‘Oh, Lord. The Victorian Novel. Trollope, 9.30.’

Melanie, in silence, held out her hand for the prospectus and Ursula gave it to her. She did not see it again.

‘Will you want Mother’s fur?’ she asked, when she began to pack. ‘I just thought … evenings, you know, it might be useful …’

‘I shall have evenings, too,’ Melanie reminded her.

Their mother could not have guessed what a matter of contention her ermine wrap would turn out to be when she was dead.

‘How is Melanie?’ Pamela asked.

‘Oh, she’s well. She’s gone on a little holiday, too.’

‘I’m so glad. I should have liked to have asked her to come with you,’ Pamela lied. ‘But there’s only this single bed.’

Ursula went over to the window. The spare room was at the back of the house and looked across some recreation grounds – a wooden pavilion, a
bowling-green; and tennis courts – just as Melanie had said there would be.

That evening, there was the pub.

All afternoon the front-door bell had rung, and Pamela and Ursula, sitting in the drawing-room upstairs, could hear the crackle of Miss Potter’s starched overall as she crossed the hall to answer it. Patients murmured nervously when they entered, but shouted cheerful good-byes as they left, going full tilt down the gravelled drive and slamming the gate after them.

‘I’m sorry about the bell,’ Pamela said. ‘At first, I thought it would send me out of my mind, but now it’s no worse than a clock striking.’

Ursula thought it extraordinary that she had changed so much since their schooldays. It was difficult to find anything to talk about. The books they had once so passionately discussed were at the very bottom of the glass-fronted case, beneath text-books on dentistry and Book Club editions, and Ursula, finding Katherine Mansfield’s Journal covered with dust, felt estranged. Perhaps Pamela had become a good cook instead, she thought, for there were plenty of books on that.

Melanie would have scorned the room, with its radiogram and cocktail cabinet and the matching sofa and chairs. The ash-trays were painted with bright sayings in foreign languages; there were piles of fashion magazines that later – much later, Ursula guessed – would be put in the waiting-room downstairs. The parchment lamp-shades were stuck over with wine labels and the lamps were made out of Chianti bottles. The motif of drinking was prevalent, from a rueful yet humorous viewpoint. When Pamela opened the cigarette-box it played ‘The More we are Together’, and Ursula wondered if the clock would call ‘Prosit’ when it struck six.

‘That’s the last patient,’ Pamela said. ‘Mike will come up panting for a drink.’

Her full skirt, printed with a jumble of luggage-labels, flew out wide as she made a dash to the cocktail cabinet. She was as eager to be ready with everything as if she were opening a pub.

Panic now mingled with the feeling of estrangement, as Ursula listened to the footsteps on the stairs. ‘Hello, there, Ursula,’ said Mike as he threw open the door. ‘And how are you? Long time, no see, indeed.’

‘Not since our wedding,’ Pamela reminded him.

‘Well, what will you be after taking?’ Mike asked. He slapped his hands together, ready for action, took up a bottle and held it to the light.

‘I suppose he feels uneasy because I am a schoolmistress,’ Ursula thought; ‘And perhaps also – lest I shall think Pam married beneath her.’

Pamela put out the glasses and some amusing bottle-openers and corkscrews. Ursula remembered staying with her as a girl, had a clear picture of the gloomy dining-room: a dusty, cut-glass decanter, containing the
dregs of some dark, unidentified liquid had stood in the centre of the great sideboard, its position never shifting an inch to the right or left. From that imprisoning house and those oppressive parents, Mike had rescued his betrothed and, though she had shed Katherine Mansfield somewhere on the way, she seemed as gay as could be that she had escaped.

Now she kissed her husband, took her drink and went downstairs – to turn the waiting-room back into a dining-room, she said. Mike’s uneasiness increased. He was clearly longing for her to return.

‘You must be a brave man,’ Ursula said suddenly. ‘I remember Pam’s mother and father and how nervous I was when I stayed there. Even when we were quite well on in our teens, we were made to lie down after luncheon, in a darkened room for ages and ages. “And no reading, dears,” her mother always said as we went upstairs. At home, we never rested – or only when we were little children, but I pretended that we did, in case Pam’s mother should think badly of mine. They seemed so very stern. To snatch away their only daughter must have needed courage.’

For the first time, he looked directly at her. In his eyes was a timid expression. He may have been conscious of this and anxious to hide it, for almost immediately he glanced away.

‘I girded on my armour,’ he said, ‘and rode up to the portcullis and demanded her. That was all there was to it.’

She smiled, thinking, ‘So this room is the end of a fairy tale.’

‘Astonishing good health, my dear,’ Mike said, lifting his glass.

Melanie took her coffee and, summoning all her courage, went to sit down beside Mrs Rybeck, who gave her a staving-off smile, a slight shake of her head as she knitted, her lips moving silently. When she came to the end of the row, she apologised, and jotted down on her knitting-pattern whatever it was she had been counting.

‘What a stimulating evening,’ Melanie said.

‘Have you not heard George Barnes lecture before?’ Mrs Rybeck was obviously going to be condescending again, but Melanie was determined to endure it. Then – what she had hoped – Professor Rybeck came in. She felt breathless and self-conscious as he approached.

‘Darling!’ he murmured, touching his wife’s hair, then bowed to Melanie.

‘Miss Rogers,’ his wife reminded him quickly. ‘At St Winifred’s, you know, where Ethel’s girls were.’

‘Yes, of course I know Miss Rogers,’ he said.

His dark hair receded from a forehead that seemed always moist, as were his dark and mournful eyes. As soon as they heard his voice – low, catarrhal and with such gentle inflections – some of the women, who had been sitting in a group by the window, got up and came over to him.

‘Professor Rybeck,’ one said. ‘We are beside ourselves with excitement about your lecture tomorrow.’

‘Miss Rogers was just saying that she thought highly of George’s talk this evening,’ said Mrs Rybeck.

‘Ah, George!’ her husband said softly. ‘I think George likes to think he has us all by the ears. Young men do. But we mustn’t let him sharpen his wits on us till we ourselves are blunt. None the less, he knows his Thackeray.’

Melanie considered herself less esteemed for having mentioned him.

‘How I love
Middlemarch
,’ some woman said. ‘I think it is my favourite novel.’

‘Then I only hope I do it justice tomorrow,’ Professor Rybeck said. Although he seemed full of confidence, he smiled humbly. Nothing was too much trouble.

Pamela had insisted that the three of them should squeeze into the front of the car and Ursula, squashed up in the middle, sat with rounded shoulders and her legs tucked to one side. She was worried about the creases in her skirt. The wireless was on very loud and both Pamela and Mike joined in the Prize Song from
Die Meistersinger
. Ursula was glad when they reached the Swan.

The car-park was full. This pub was where everybody went, Pamela explained; ‘at the moment,’ she added. In the garden, the striped umbrellas above the tables had been furled; the baskets of geraniums over the porch were swinging in the wind.

‘Astonishingly horrid evening,’ Mike said, when some of his acquaintances greeted him. ‘This is Pam’s friend, Ursula. Ursie, this is Jock’ – or Jean or Eve or Bill. Ursula lost track. They all knew one another and Mike and Pam seemed popular. ‘Don’t look now, the worst has happened,’ someone had said in a loud voice when Mike opened the door of the saloon bar.

Ursula was made much of. From time to time, most of them were obliged to bring out some dull relation or duty-guest. (‘Not really one of us’), and it was a mark of friendliness to do one’s best to help with other people’s problems – even the most tiresome of old crones would be attended to; and Ursula, although plump and prematurely grey, was only too ready to smile and join in the fun.

‘You’re one of us, I can see,’ someone complimented her.

‘Cheers!’ said Ursula before she drank. Melanie would have shivered with distaste.

‘We are all going on to Hilly’s,’ Pam called to Mike across the bar at closing-time.

This moving-on was the occasion for a little change-round of passengers
and, instead of being squeezed in between Pamela and Mike, Ursula was taken across the car-park by a man called Guy.

‘Daddy will give you a scarf for your head,’ he promised, opening the door of his open car. The scarf tucked inside his shirt was yellow, patterned with horses and when he took it off and tied it round Ursula’s head, the silk was warm to her cheeks.

They drove very fast along the darkening roads and were the first to arrive.

‘Poor frozen girl,’ said Guy when he had swung the car round on the gravelled sweep in front of the house and brought it up within an inch of the grass verge. With the driving off his mind, he could turn his attention to Ursula and he took one of her goosefleshy arms between his hands and began to chafe it. ‘What we need is a drink,’ he said. ‘Where the hell have they all got to?’

She guessed that to drive fast and to arrive first was something he had to do and, for his sake and to help on the amiability of the evening, she was glad that he had managed it.