Complete Short Stories (VMC) (5 page)

‘I live there now,’ she began.

In the darkness, which she had hardly noticed, the old lady had begun to stack up her empty flower-pots.

‘Then you will be able to do me a small favour,’ she said. ‘In connection with the graves. If it fails to rain tonight I should be obliged if you would water these plants for me in the morning. A good sousing. Before the sun gets strong.’

She pulled herself to a standing position with one hand on the gravestone. Her joints snapped with a frail and brittle sound as she moved.
Hester faced her across the grave and faced, too, the winey, camphorous smell of her breath and her clothes.

‘Only Father’s grave. I shall plant Mother’s and Linda’s tomorrow evening.’

She swayed, steadying herself against the stone, and then, with a swinging movement, as if on deck in wild weather, made off through the churchyard, lurching from one gravestone to another, her hands out to balance her, her basket hanging from her arm. She was soon lost to Hester’s sight, but the sound of her unsteady progress, as she brushed through branches of yew and scuffled the gravel, continued longer. When she could hear no more, the girl walked back to the house. She had forgotten the snakes and the bats and all the terrors of nature; and she found that for a little while she had forgotten Robert, and Muriel, too; and the sorrows and shame of love.

As she crossed the lawn, Hugh Baseden and Rex Wigmore came round the house from the garages. Stepping out of the darkness into the light shed from upstairs windows, she looked pale-skinned and mysterious, and both men were arrested by a change in her. The breeze blew strands of hair forwards across her face and she turned her head impatiently, so that the hair was whipped back again, lifting up from her ears, around which it hung so untidily by day.

‘I thought you were a ghost coming from the churchyard,’ Hugh said. ‘Weren’t you nervous out there by yourself?’

‘No.’

But her teeth began to chatter and she drew her elbows tight to her waist to stop herself shivering.

‘What
have
you been up to?’ Rex asked.

‘I went for a walk.’

‘Alone? How absurd! How wasteful! How unsafe! You never know what might happen to you. If you want to go for a walk, you could always ask me. I like being out with young girls in the dark. I make it even unsafer. And, at least, you could be quite sure what would happen to you then.’

‘You are cold,’ Hugh said. He opened the door and, as she stepped past him into the hall, brushed his hand down her bare arm. ‘You
are
cold.’

Rex’s remarks, which he deplored, had excited him. He imagined himself – not Rex – walking in the dark with her. He had had so few encounters with women, so few confidings, explorings, and longed to take on some hazards and excitements.

Rex, whose life was full enough of all those things, was bored and wandered off. He found her less attractive – hardly attractive at all – indoors and in the bright light of the hall.

Hester rarely spoke at meal-times, but next morning at breakfast she mentioned the old lady.

‘Miss Despenser.’ Muriel put her hand to her face as she had when speaking of the dead rabbit in the laboratory. She breathed as if she felt faint. ‘She came to tea once. Once only. I wondered if I should pour whisky in her tea. She is the village drunk. I believe her sister was the village idiot. But now dead.’

‘You shouldn’t go out late at night on your own,’ Robert said. ‘You might catch cold,’ he added, for he could really think of no reason why she should not go – only the vague unease we feel when people venture out late, alone – a guilty sense of having driven them out, or of having proved inadequate to keep them, or still their restlessness, or win their confidence.

‘It is a wonder she could spare time from the Hand and Flowers,’ Muriel said. ‘I am surprised to hear of her tidying the graves in licensed hours.’

‘And shall you water the plants?’ Robert asked in amusement.

‘I have done. She said, before the sun got too strong.’

‘What impertinence!’ Muriel said, and every lash at Miss Despenser was really one at Hester. She felt even more agitated and confused this morning, for Rex’s words with their innuendo and suggestion had been spoken beneath her bedroom window the previous night and she, lying in bed, half-reading, had heard him.

Until that moment, she had seen the threat in Hester’s youth, defencelessness and pathos; but she had not thought of her as being desirable in any more obvious way. Rex’s words – automatic as they were, almost meaningless as they must be from him – proved that the girl might also be desirable in the most obvious way of all. Muriel’s distaste and hostility were strengthened by what she had overheard. Still more, a confusion in herself, which she was honest enough to ponder, disquieted her. To be jealous of Hester where Robert was concerned was legitimate and fitting, she thought; but to be jealous of the girl’s least success with other men revealed a harshness from which she turned sickly away. There was nothing now which she could allow Hester, no generosity or praise: grudged words of courtesy which convention forced her to speak seemed to wither on her lips with the enormity of their untruthfulness.

Her jealousy had grown from a fitful nagging to a chronic indisposition, an unreasonableness beyond her control.

She went, after breakfast, to her bedroom without waiting to see Hester follow Robert to his study. The days had often seemed too long for her and now pain had its own way of spinning them out. To go to her kitchen and begin some healing job like baking bread would have appeared to her cook as a derangement and a nuisance. She was childless, kitchenless; without remedy or relief.

Robert, she thought, had not so much become a stranger as revealed himself as the stranger he had for a long time been. The manifestation of this both alarmed her and stirred her conscience. Impossible longings, which had sometimes unsettled her – especially in the half-seasons and at that hour when the light beginning to fade invests garden or darkening room with a romantic languor – had seemed a part of her femininity. The idea that men – or men like Robert – should be beset by the same dangerous sensations would have astonished her by its vulgarity. Their marriage had continued its discreet way. Now, she could see how it had changed its course from those first years, with their anniversaries, secrets, discussions; his hidden disappointment over her abortive pregnancies; the consolation and the bitter tears – all embarrassing now in her memory, but shouldering their way up through layers of discretion to wound and worry her. She had allowed herself to change; but she could tolerate no change in Robert, except for the decline in his ardour, which she had felt herself reasonable in expecting.

In rather the same spirit as Hester’s when she had faced the terrors of the churchyard the night before, Muriel now went into Robert’s dressing-room and shut the door. She knelt down before a chest, and, pulling out the bottom drawer, found, where she knew she would find them, among his old school photographs, the bundle of letters she had written to him when they were betrothed.

She felt nausea, but a morbid impatience, as if she were about to read letters from his mistress. The first of the pile began: ‘Dear Mr Evans …’ It was a cool, but artful, invitation. She remembered writing it after their first meeting, thinking he had gone for ever and wanting to draw him back to her. ‘I am writing for my mother, as she is busy.’ Not only had he been drawn back, but he had kept the letter. Perhaps he had had his own plans for their meeting again. She might well have let things be and sat at home and waited – so difficult a thing for a young girl to do.

That first letter was the only time he was ‘Mr Evans’. After that, he progressed from ‘Dear Robert’, through ‘My Dear Robert’, ‘Dearest Robert’, ‘Robert Dearest’, to ‘Darling’. In the middle period of the letters – for he had preserved them chronologically – the style was comradely, witty, undemanding. (‘Intolerably affected,’ Muriel now thought, her neck reddening with indignation. ‘Arch! Oh, yes!’ Did Hester write so to him and could he, at his age, feel no distaste?) The letters, patently snobbish, shallow, worked up, had taken hours to write, she remembered. Everything that happened during the day was embroidered for Robert at night – the books she read were only used as a bridge between their two minds. The style was parenthetic, for she could not take leave even of a sentence. So many brackets scattered about gave the look of her eyelashes having been shed
upon the pages. When she had written ‘Yours, Muriel’ or, later, ‘Your Muriel’, there was always more to come, many postscripts to stave off saying good-night. Loneliness, longing broke through again and again despite the overlying insincerity. She had – writing in her room at night – so wanted Robert. Like a miracle, or as a result of intense concentration, she had got what she wanted. Kneeling before the drawer, with the letters in her hand, she was caught up once more in amazement at this fact. ‘I got what I wanted,’ she thought over and over again.

His letters to her had often disappointed, especially in the later phase when possessiveness and passion coloured her own. Writing so late at night, she had sometimes given relief to her loneliness. Those were momentary sensations, but his mistake had lain in taking them as such; in writing, in his reply, of quite other things. ‘But did you get my letter?’ Muriel now read – the beginning of a long complaint, which she was never to finish reading; for the door opened and Robert was staring at her with an expression of aloof non-comprehension, as if he had suddenly been forced to close his mind at this intimation of her character.

Muriel said shakily: ‘I came across our old letters to one another – or rather mine to you … I could not resist them.’

He still stared, but she would not look at him. Then he blinked, seemed to cast away some unpleasant thoughts, and said coldly, holding up a letter which she still would not glance at: ‘Lady Bewick is running this dance after the garden party. I came up to ask how many tickets we shall want.’

‘I thought you were taking Latin,’ Muriel said naively.

‘They are having Break now.’ And, indeed, if she had had ears to hear it, she would have known by the shouting outside.

‘I should let her know today,’ Robert said. ‘Whom shall we take?’

Muriel was very still. Warily, she envisaged the prospects – Hester going along, too. Hester’s brown, smooth shoulders dramatised by her chalk-white frock. Robert’s glance at them. Muriel’s pale veined arms incompletely hidden by her lace stole. Perhaps Hester was a good dancer. Muriel herself was too stiff and rather inclined, from panic, to lead her partner.

‘Why could we not go alone?’ she asked.

‘We could; but I thought we should be expected to take a party.’

‘Whom do you think?’

‘I had no thoughts. I came to ask you.’

‘I see.’ ‘He wants it every way,’ she thought. ‘For her to go, and for me to suggest it.’ She tied up the letters and put them away.

‘You should take Hester,’ she said suddenly. She began to tremble with anger and unhappiness. ‘I can stay at home.’

‘I had no intention of taking Hester.’

‘I suppose you are angry with me for reading those letters. I know it was wrong of me to open your drawer. I have never done such a thing in my life before.’ She still sat on the floor and seemed exhausted, keeping her head bent as she spoke.

‘I can believe that. Why did you now?’ he asked.

For a moment, gentleness, the possibility of understanding, enveloped them; but she let it go, could think only of her suspicions, her wounded pride.

The tears almost fell, but she breathed steadily and they receded. ‘I was bored. Not easy not to be. I remembered something … I was talking to Beatrice about it yesterday … I knew I should have written it somewhere in my letters to you. I was sure you wouldn’t mind my looking.’ Her excuses broke off and at last she dared to look at him. She smiled defiantly. ‘I wrote them, you know. You seem as cross as if they were written by another woman.’

‘They were,’ he said.

She was stunned. She slammed the drawer shut and stood up. She thought: ‘Those are the worst words he ever spoke to me.’

‘I shall have to go,’ he said. ‘I suppose I can leave this till this afternoon.’ He held up the letter in his hand. ‘I didn’t want to discuss it at lunch, that was all. The point is that Lady Bewick hoped we could take a partner for her niece who is staying there – she thought we could ask one of the staff. I wonder if Hugh …’

‘But he’s so boring.’

‘We need not stay together.’

‘Take Rex.’

‘Rex?’

‘Why not? He dances well.’

‘But he’s so impossible. You have never disguised your scorn for him.’

‘He would be better than Hugh – not so achingly tedious.’ Irritability, the wish to sting, underlined her words. ‘You are achingly tedious, too,’ she seemed to imply. Her voice was higher pitched than usual, her cheeks flushed. He looked at her in concern, then said: ‘All right. Three tickets, then.’ He put the letter in his pocket and turned away.

As soon as he had gone, but too late, she broke into weeping.

They dined at home before the dance. Muriel was intimidating, but uncertain, in too many diamonds. When she brought out her mother’s jewels, Robert always felt put in his place, though never before had they all come out at once. Her careless entrance into the drawing-room had astonished him. She was shrugged up in a pink woollen shawl, through which came a frosty glitter. Rex’s look of startled admiration confirmed her fear that she
was overdressed. ‘She has never erred in that way before,’ Robert thought: but she had shown several new faults of late; flaws had appeared which once he could not have suspected. There was, too, something slyly affected about the cosy shawl and the stir and flash of diamonds beneath it.