Complete Short Stories (VMC) (54 page)

Someone
must
talk to me, she thought, for it seemed to her that, through lack of conversation, her expression was growing sullen. She tried to reorganise her features into a look of animation or calm pleasure. She drank a plate of acid-tasting, red soup to its dregs. Chicken followed turbot, as her mother had assured her was inevitable. The Mayor, who went through the same menu nearly every evening, left a great deal on his plate; he scattered it about for a while and then tidied it up: not so Rhoda, who, against a great discomfort of fullness, plodded painstakingly on.

At last, as she was eating some cauliflower, the Mayor turned his moist, purple face towards her. She lifted her eyes to the level of the chain on his breast and agreed with him that she was enjoying herself enormously.

‘It is my first visit to Norley,’ she said gaily, conscious of Digby Lycett Senior’s eyes upon her. She hoped that he would think from her expression that some delicious pleasantry was in progress. To keep the Mayor in conversation she was determined. He should not turn away again and Digby Lycett, Senior or Junior, should not have the impression that she sat in silence and disgrace from the beginning to the end.

‘But I have a cat who came from here,’ she added.

The Mayor looked startled.

‘A Burmese cat. A man in Norley – a Doctor Fisher – breeds them. Do you know Doctor Fisher?’

‘I can’t say that I do.’

He was plainly unwilling for her to go on. On his other side was feminine flattery and cajolery and he wished to turn back for more, and Rhoda and her cat were of no interest to him.

‘Have you ever seen a Burmese cat?’ she asked.

He crumbled some bread and looked cross and said that as far as he knew he never had.

‘He came to London on the train all by himself in a little basket,’ Rhoda said. ‘The cat, I mean, of course. Minkie, I call him. Such a darling, you can’t imagine.’

She smiled vivaciously for Digby Lycett Senior’s benefit; but, try as she might, she could not summon the courage to lift her eyes any higher than the splendid chain on the Mayor’s breast, for she shrank from the look of contempt she was afraid he might be wearing.

‘They are rather like Siamese cats,’ she went on. ‘Though they are brown all over and have golden eyes, not blue.’

‘Oh?’ said the Mayor. He had to lean a little nearer to her as a waitress put a dish of pistachio ice-cream over his left shoulder.

‘But rather the same natures, if you know what I mean,’ said Rhoda.

‘I’m afraid I don’t care for cats,’ said the Mayor, in the voice of simple pride in which this remark is always made.

‘On all your many social commitments,’ the woman on his other side said loudly, rescuing him, ‘which flavour of ice-cream crops up most often?’

He laughed and turned to her with relief. ‘Vanilla,’ he said jovially. ‘In a ratio of eight to one.’

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Rhoda’s father asked her later, as they danced a foxtrot together. ‘I dare say this is the part of the evening that appeals to you – not all those long-winded speeches.’

It appealed to Rhoda because it was nearer to the end, and for no other reason.

‘You seemed to be getting on well with the Mayor,’ Mr Hobart added.

The Mayor had disappeared. Rhoda could see no sign of his glittering chain and she supposed that he disliked dancing as much as he disliked cats. She prayed that Digby Lycett Senior might not ask her to do the Old Fashioned Waltz which followed. She was afraid of his mocking smile and, ostrich-like, opened her bag and looked inside it as he approached.

Another middle-aged man stepped forward first and asked to have the pleasure in a voice which denied the possibility of there being any. Rhoda guessed that what he meant was ‘May I get this duty over and done with, pursued as it is as a mark of the esteem in which I hold your father’. And Rhoda smiled as if she were enchanted, and rose and put herself into his arms, as if he were her lover.

He made the waltz more old-fashioned than she had ever known it, dancing stiffly, keeping his stomach well out of her way, humming, but not saying a word to her. She was up against a great silence this evening: to her it was the measure of her failure. Sorting through her mind for something
to say, she rejected remarks about the floor and the band and said instead that she had never been to Norley before. The observation should have led somewhere, she thought; but it did not: it was quite ignored.

‘But I have a cat who came from here,’ she added. ‘A little Burmese cat.’

When he did not answer this, either, she thought that he must be deaf and raised her voice. ‘There is a doctor here who breeds them. Perhaps you have come across him – a Doctor Fisher.’

‘No, I can’t say that I have.’

‘He sent the kitten to London by train, in a little basket. So pretty and gay. Minkie, I call him. Have you ever seen a Burmese cat?’ She could not wait for his answers, lest they never came. ‘They are not a usual sort of cat at all. Rather like a Siamese in many ways, but brown all over and with golden eyes instead of blue. They are similar in nature though, if you can understand what I mean.’

He either could not, or was not prepared to try and at last, mercifully, the music quickened and finally snapped off altogether. Flushed and smiling, she was escorted back to her father who was standing by the bar, looking genial and indulgent.

Her partner’s silence seemed precautionary now. He handed her over with a scared look, as if she were some dangerous lunatic. Her father, not noticing this, said: ‘You are having quite a success with your Mayor, my dear.’

‘My Mayor?’

She turned quickly and looked after the man who had just left her. He was talking to a little group of people; they all had their heads together and were laughing.

‘He took that chain off then?’ she said, feeling sick and dazed. It was all she had had to distinguish him from the rest of the bald-headed and obese middle-aged men.

‘You couldn’t expect him to dance with that hanging round his neck – not even in your honour,’ her father said. ‘And now, I shall fetch you a long, cool drink, for you look as if the dancing has exhausted you.’

Etta’s desire was to belong. Sometimes she felt on the fringe of the family, at other times drawn headily into its very centre. At meal-times – those occasions of argument and hilarity, of thrust and counterstroke, bewildering to her at first – she was especially on her mettle, turning her head alertly from one to another as if watching a fast tennis match. She hoped soon to learn the art of riposte and already used, sometimes unthinkingly, family words and phrases; and had one or two privately treasured memories of even having made them laugh. They delighted in laughing and often did so scoffingly – ‘at the expense of those less fortunate’ as Etta’s mother would sententiously have put it.

Etta and Sarah were school-friends. It was not the first time that Etta had stayed with the Lippmanns in the holidays. Everyone understood that the hospitality would not be returned, for Etta’s mother, who was widowed, went out to work each day. Sarah had seen only the outside of the drab terrace house where her friend lived. She had persuaded her elder brother, David, to take her spying there one evening. They drove fifteen miles to Market Swanford and Sarah, with great curiosity, studied the street names until at last she discovered the house itself. No one was about. The street was quite deserted and the two rows of houses facing one another were blank and silent as if waiting for a hearse to appear. ‘Do hurry!’ Sarah urged her brother. It had been a most dangerous outing and she was thoroughly depressed by it. Curiosity now seemed a trivial sensation compared with the pity she was feeling for her friend’s drab life and her shame at having confirmed her own suspicions of it. She was threatened by tears. ‘Aren’t you going in?’ her brother asked in great surprise. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ she begged him. There had never been any question of her calling at that house.

‘She must be very lonely there all through the holidays, poor Etta,’ she thought, and could imagine hour after hour in the dark house. Bickerings with the daily help she had already heard of and – Etta trying to put on a brave face and make much of nothing – trips to the public library the highlight of the day, it seemed. No wonder that her holiday reading was always so carefully done, thought Sarah, whereas she herself could never snatch a moment for it except at night in bed.

Sarah had a lively conscience about the seriousness of her friend’s private world. Having led her more than once into trouble, at school, she had always afterwards felt a disturbing sense of shame; for Etta’s work was more important than her own could ever be, too important to be interrupted by escapades. Sacrifices had been made and scholarships must be won. Once – it was a year ago when they were fifteen and had less sense – Sarah had thought up some rough tomfoolery and Etta’s blazer had been torn. She was still haunted by her friend’s look of consternation. She had remembered too late, as always – the sacrifices that had been made, the widowed mother sitting year after year at her office desk, the holidays that were never taken and the contriving that had to be done.

Her own mother was so warm and worldly. If she had anxieties she kept them to herself, setting the pace of gaiety, up to date and party-loving. She was popular with her friends’ husbands who, in their English way, thought of her comfortably as nearly as good company as a man and full of bright ways as well. Etta felt safer with her than with Mr Lippmann, whose enquiries were often too probing; he touched nerves, his jocularity could be an embarrassment. The boys – Sarah’s elder brothers – had their own means of communication which their mother unflaggingly strove to interpret and, on Etta’s first visit, she had tried to do so for her, too.

She
was
motherly, although she looked otherwise, the girl decided. Lying in bed at night, in the room she shared with Sarah, Etta would listen to guests driving noisily away or to the Lippmanns returning, full of laughter, from some neighbour’s house. Late night door-slamming in the country disturbed only the house’s occupants, who all contributed to it. Etta imagined them pottering about downstairs – husband and wife, would hear bottles clinking, laughter, voices raised from room to room, good-night endearments to cats and dogs and at last Mrs Lippmann’s running footsteps on the stairs and the sound of her jingling bracelets coming nearer. Outside their door she would pause, listening, wondering if they were asleep already. They never were. ‘Come in!’ Sarah would shout, hoisting herself up out of the bed clothes on one elbow, her face turned expectantly towards the door, ready for laughter – for something amusing would surely have happened. Mrs Lippmann, sitting on one of the beds, never failed them. When they were children, Sarah said, she brought back
petits fours
from parties; now she brought back
faux pas
. She specialised in little stories against herself – Mummy’s Humiliations, Sarah named them – tactless things she had said, never-to-be-remedied remarks which sprang fatally from her lips. Mistakes in identity was her particular line, for she never remembered a face, she declared. Having kissed Sarah, she would bend over Etta to do the same. She smelt of scent and gin and cigarette smoke. After this they would go to sleep. The house would be completely quiet for several hours.

Etta’s mother had always had doubts about the suitability of this
ménage
. She knew it only at second hand from her daughter, and Etta said very little about her visits and that little was only in reply to obviously resented questions. But she had a way of looking about her with boredom when she returned, as if she had made the transition unwillingly and incompletely. She hurt her mother – who wished only to do everything in the world for her, having no one else to please or protect.

‘I should feel differently if we were able to return the hospitality,’ she told Etta. The Lippmanns’ generosity depressed her. She knew that it was despicable to feel jealous, left out, kept in the dark, but she tried to rationalise her feelings before Etta. ‘I could take a few days off and invite Sarah here,’ she suggested.

Etta was unable to hide her consternation and her expression deeply wounded her mother. ‘I shouldn’t know what to do with her,’ she said.

‘Couldn’t you go for walks? There are the Public Gardens. And take her to the cinema one evening. What do you do at
her
home?’

‘Oh, just fool about. Nothing much.’ Some afternoons they just lay on their beds and ate sweets, keeping all the windows shut and the wireless on loud, and no one ever disturbed them or told them they ought to be out in the fresh air. Then they had to plan parties and make walnut fudge and de-flea the dogs. Making fudge was the only one of these things she could imagine them doing in her own home and they could not do it all the time. As for the dreary Public Gardens, she could not herself endure the asphalt paths and the bandstand and the beds of salvias. She could imagine vividly how dejected Sarah would feel.

Early in these summer holidays, the usual letter had come from Mrs Lippmann. Etta, returning from the library, found that the charwoman had gone early and locked her out. She rang the bell, but the sound died away and left an even more forbidding silence. All the street, where elderly people dozed in stuffy rooms, was quiet. She lifted the flap of the letter-box and called through it. No one stirred or came. She could just glimpse an envelope, lying face up on the doormat, addressed in Mrs Lippmann’s large, loopy, confident handwriting. The house-stuffiness wafted through the letter-box. She imagined the kitchen floor slowly drying, for there was a smell of soapy water. A tap was steadily dripping.

She leant against the door, waiting for her mother’s return, in a sickness of impatience at the thought of the letter lying there inside. Once or twice, she lifted the flap and had another look at it.

Her mother came home at last, very tired. With an anxious air, she set about cooking supper, which Etta had promised to have ready. The letter was left among her parcels on the kitchen table, and not until they had finished their stewed rhubarb did she send Etta to fetch it. She
opened it carefully with the bread knife and deepened the frown on her forehead in preparation for reading it. When she had, she gave Etta a summary of its contents and put forward her objections, her unnerving proposal.