Complete Short Stories (VMC) (47 page)

‘I am sorry. Graham will be sad when he hears that.’

‘So I am to be her husband’s comrade, too!’ he thought.

As if she were in her drawing-room she invited him to sit down, but before he could do so, the younger children had run up from the sea and stood on either side of their mother, staring in curiosity at him and awaiting an explanation.

They were all variations of her, her four sons and daughters, and these two, a boy and a girl, with their unguarded, childish gaze, were more like her than the other two whose defined features were brightly masked to preserve the secrets of adolescence.

‘Lucy, this is Mr Lord. He gave you your fairy-tale book that you love so much.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And this is Ricky.’

‘What did you give
me
?’ the boy asked.

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps you were to share the book.’

‘No, it is only mine,’ Lucy said certainly.

‘He gave you lots of things,’ said Catherine.

‘More than me?’

‘No, Lucy, I am sure not.’

‘I think
I
only had the book.’

‘This isn’t a nice conversation. You should think of other things than what you are given. Go and help Chris to find some firewood. You can’t enjoy the fire and the supper if you do nothing to help.’

The children wandered off, but back to the edge of the sea. They left a vacuum. She had tried to fill it with what he disliked and had always thought of as ‘fussing with the children’ – the children whom he had half-loved, for having her likeness, and half-resented, for not being his, for taking her attention from him and forbidding their life together.

‘They’ve grown,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course.’

She put her hand deep in the sand, burying it in coolness. He watched her, remembering how once long ago she had done that and he had made a tunnel with his own hand and clasped hers and they had sat in silence, their fingers entwined beneath the sand. Such far-off lovers’ games seemed utterly sad now, utterly forlorn, dead, their meaning brushed away like dust.

‘Why did you come?’ she whispered, her eyes fixed on the young ones
building their fire; but fearing his answer, she caught her breath and called to her son. ‘Chris, darling, bring the others over to meet Mr Lord.’

They came over, polite and estranged, willing to be kind. Chris hadn’t remembered, but now he did. He introduced his friends, the same bright, polite boys and girls as himself. The boys called him ‘sir’, the girls smiled warmly and encouragingly. ‘You are quite welcome, don’t feel out of it – the fun, the lovely evening – just because you are old,’ their smiles said.

They diminished Catherine. They were all taller. She seemed to Peter now to be set apart as ‘mother’, their voices were protective to her, undemanding. (Once they had clamoured for her attention, claimed every second. ‘Look at me, Mummy! Look at me!’) They had set her firmly in her present rôle and, instinctively, they made her part quite clear to Peter.

They returned to the fire. Chris was peeling sticks and sharpening the ends so that they could hold sausages over the fire to cook.

‘What about the children?’ Sarah asked. ‘How long are you staying, Mother?’

This was Catherine’s dilemma which she had been pondering as she sat there with her hand buried in the sand.

‘They can stay up,’ she said. ‘We will all stay. It will be a special treat for the little ones and they can sleep late in the morning. You others shall have a party on your own another night.’

She looked away from Sarah and her voice was gentle, for she knew that
this
could not be Sarah’s special night, that the girl was desperate with disappointment. ‘This evening is nothing,’ Catherine tried to imply. ‘There will be so many others for you.’

‘We always like it better if you are here,’ Sarah said. ‘I was wondering about the children.’ She dreaded that her mother should feel old or left out, and she often was alone on these long holidays. Peter’s presence lightened the load of responsibility she felt towards her. For an hour or two, Catherine had someone of her own and Sarah could let go of her, could turn back to her own secrets, aloof, in love.

‘Has she a confidante among the other girls?’ Catherine wondered. Remembering her own girlhood she did not hope to be confided in herself; the very last, she knew – even if first to know, before Sarah sometimes, yet still the last of all to be told.

If she had taken Lucy and Ricky home to bed, Peter would have gone with her. Then they would be alone and nothing could prevent him from talking to her. To stay where she was not much wanted and to endure an evening of social exchanges before the children – painful though it must be – would be less menacing than that.

She turned to the picnic-basket, put a loaf of bread on a board and began to cut it into slices. ‘You haven’t changed much,’ she said. ‘Are you
happy in South Africa and is the work interesting? How is your brother?’

‘I had no intention of coming here, but suddenly, this morning, it seemed so unreasonable, so falsely dramatic – our promise.’

‘No, sensible.’

‘I’m sorry I gave no warning.’

‘You could have telephoned,’ she said lightly, her back turned to him.

‘You would have said “No”.’

She wrapped the slices of bread in a napkin and put them back in the hamper. ‘Being needlessly busy,’ he thought. ‘Fussing with the children, anything to exclude me.’

‘You
would
have said “No”, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You haven’t changed either,’ he said at last, dutifully.

She was smoothing her hair, thinking, ‘I don’t know what I look like.’ She wished that she could glance in a mirror, or that she had done so before she had left the house.

In her brown hair, some strands, coarser than the others, were silver. Fine lines crossed her forehead, and deeper ones curved from the corners of her eyes.

‘Graham all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, very well. Very busy. He gets tired.’

‘And bloody cross, I bet,’ Peter thought. He imagined the tetchy, pompous little man, returning from the city, briefcase full of documents and stomach full of bile.

‘And is he as rich as ever?’ he asked.

‘I’ve noticed no difference,’ Catherine said angrily. ‘Have
you
prospered? You always had such money-troubles.’

‘Father’s dying should help.’

He had always refused to see Graham as anything but a monstrous begetter of money and children, and showed himself up in contrast – the bachelor beyond the gates, without home or family, whose schemes came to nothing as his love-making came to nothing, neither bearing fruit. His insistence on her wealth was partly from a feeling that she had shared too much with her husband and he could not bear her to share any more, not even anxieties about money.

‘They are nice children,’ he said, looking on the sunnier side of her marriage. ‘A great credit to you.’

‘Thank you.’ Her eyes filled with tears and at that moment Sarah, standing by the fire, turned and looked curiously at her, then at Peter.

The fire was burning high and the young people moved about it continually as if performing some ceremony. As the sun went down, shadows fell across the beach from the sea-wall, cooling the sand quickly. Catherine
spread out a rug for Peter to sit on and then sat down herself on a corner of it, as far from him as she could.

‘Come by the fire,’ Chris shouted to her.

‘It is too smoky for her,’ said Sarah.

‘Not on the other side.’

‘It blows about.’

Catherine had not asked her the one question she had dreaded – ‘He didn’t come then?’ – and so in turn she would protect her mother. She, Sarah, no longer prayed for him to come, for her thoughts of him were angry now. Absorbed in this anger, she asked only that no one should speak of him. Waiting for him and the gradual loss of hope had been destructive, and a corrosive indignation worked on her love; it became non-love, then nothing.

‘Is that Ronnie coming?’ Chris asked, mopping his eyes with a handkerchief, waving away smoke.

A figure in the dusk appeared on the sea-wall, then a dog followed and flew down through the sand, crashed over the stretch of loose shingle to the wet, runnelled sands where the children worked, murmuring and intent, over their digging. Lucy cried out as the dog bounded towards her and a man’s voice – nothing like Ronnie’s – called the dog back.

Sarah was glad that she had not moved forward to wave or made any mistake. Standing quite still by the fire, she had kept her patience; but all the carefully-tended hatred had vanished in those few seconds, love had come hurrying back with hope and forgiving. ‘It is worse for her now,’ Catherine thought, and she felt hostility towards men. ‘As it is worse for me.’

The man and the dog disappeared. Lucy and Ricky, disturbed into realisation of the darkness falling, began to trail up from the sea. The water between the hard ribs of sand felt cold to their bare feet and they came up to the bonfire and stood watching it, at the fringe of their elders and betters who laughed and danced and waved their speared sausages in the air to cool.

‘Let them cook their own,’ said Catherine, and Chris handed the little ones two sticks and fixed on the sausages for them. They stood by the fire holding the sticks waveringly over the flames. Once, Ricky’s nervousness broke into a laugh, his serious expression disintegrated into excited pleasure. ‘It will never cook like that,’ Chris said. ‘Keep it to the hot part of the fire.’ He sighed affectedly and murmured ‘Pesky kids’ to one of the girls, who said haughtily: ‘
I
think they’re sweet.’

‘They’re all yours, then,’ said lordly Chris.

‘I never had anything like this when I was young,’ Peter said. ‘I didn’t even know any girls.’

The children had their feast and Catherine and Peter sat and watched them; even, Catherine thought, in Peter’s case, sat in judgement on them – ‘as if he were their father and jealous of their youth, saying “
I
didn’t have this or do that when
I
was a boy; but was made to do such and such, and go without et cetera, and be grateful for nothing. And look at me …” If he were their father, that is how he would be; if he had not come back to me this evening, I should never have thought such a thing of him. How I loved you, my darling, darling. The passion of tears, the groping bewilderment of being without you, the rhythm of long boredom and abrupt grief, that I endured because of you; then my prayers, my prayers especially that Sarah shall have a happier time, and a more fortunate love.’

The children brought them sausages wrapped in bread. The young girls were attentive to Catherine. ‘I
adore
your jersey,’ one said, and Catherine would not conceal her pleasure. ‘But it’s so old. It’s Chris’s, really.’

‘Then you shouldn’t let him have it back,’ the girl said. ‘
He
couldn’t look so nice in it.’

‘All right!’ said Chris. ‘You may cook your own sausages now. Didn’t you know that the whole family wear my old cast-offs?’

‘Not I,’ said Sarah.

‘Not I,’ said Lucy.

Peter had glanced at the jersey in annoyance. He was beginning, Catherine knew, to harden against Chris, identifying him with his father, comparing himself and his own lost opportunities with the boy and the life lying before him. When Chris brought sausages, said ‘For you, sir’, he refused to eat.

‘Then coffee,’ Catherine suggested, beginning to unscrew a flask.

‘Oh, dear, it is so cold,’ Lucy cried, and she flung herself against Catherine’s thighs, burrowing under her arm.

‘Steady, my love, I can’t pour out,’ Catherine said, and she held the flask and the cup high out of reach and for the first time looked truly at Peter and laughed.

‘Come to me, then,’ he said, and he lifted Lucy away and held her to him. She lolled against him, her salty, sticky hair touching his cheek. ‘That isn’t good for you,’ he said, taking the half-eaten sausage, which was pink inside, uncooked, and throwing it away across the sand.

‘Fishes will eat it,’ Ricky said. ‘When the tide comes up.’

‘Coffee!’ Catherine called out and they came over to fetch it, then went back to gather round the dying fire. The girls began to sing, one of their school songs, which the boys did not know and Chris said: ‘What a filthy row.’

‘Did you read that fairy book to me when I was in bed?’ Lucy asked Peter drowsily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Do you remember then?’

‘No, Mummy told me.’

Then Catherine had talked of him! He had often wanted to talk to someone about
her
, to say her name. In Africa, he had nicknamed a little native girl – his servant’s child – ‘Catherine’, for the sake of saying the name occasionally. ‘Good-morning, Catherine’ or ‘What a pretty frock, Catherine!’ The child could not understand English. He might, he had sometimes thought, have said anything, out loud, bold and clear. ‘I cannot forget you, Catherine, and my life is useless without you.’

Lucy had crawled inside his jacket for warmth, he rubbed her cold, sandy legs, held her bare feet, and once kissed her forehead. Catherine sipped her coffee, looking away from this display of tenderness, thinking: ‘A barren evening. Nothing said; nothing felt, but pain. The wheel starting to creak again, starting to revolve in agony.’

‘If any … regrets … have arisen from my visit,’ Peter said, trying to speak obscurely, above Lucy’s head in two senses, ‘I couldn’t blame myself more or detest my own egotism.’

‘There is no need to say anything,’ she said hurriedly. ‘No need at all. I would rather you didn’t.’

‘Are you …?’

‘No,’ she interrupted him, afraid of what Lucy might hear. ‘Am I what?’ she wondered. ‘I am in love with you still. In love, certainly. And there isn’t a way out and never will be now.’

Her eyes might say this without Lucy knowing, and she turned to him so that before he went away he could be a witness to her constancy; but their situation was changed now; the observant eyes of the children were on them, Sarah’s, the other girls’, and Chris, brusque and guarded, goodness knew what thoughts
he
had about her.