Complete Short Stories (VMC) (56 page)

‘You are doing that,’ his daughter told him – for Etta was blushing as she always did when Mr Lippmann spoke to her.

‘What’s a nice book, Babs?’ he asked his wife, as she came out on to the terrace. ‘Can’t you find a nice story for this child?’ The house must be full, he was sure, of wonderfully therapeutic novels if only he knew where to lay hands on them. ‘Roger, you’re our bookworm. Look out a nice story-book for your guest. This one won’t do her eyes any good.’ Buying books with small print was a false economy, he thought, and bound to land one in large bills from an eye specialist before long. ‘A very short-sighted policy,’ he explained genially when he had given them a little lecture to which no one listened.

His wife was trying to separate some slippery cubes of ice and Sarah sprawled in a cane chair with her eyes shut. She was making the most of the setting sun, as Etta was making the most of romance.

‘We like the same books,’ Roger said to his father. ‘So she can choose as well as I could.’

Etta was just beginning to feel a sense of surprised gratitude, had half turned to look in his direction when the betrothed came through the French windows and claimed her attention.

‘In time for a lovely drink,’ Mrs Lippmann said to Nora.

‘She is too fat already,’ said David.

Nora swung round and caught his wrists and held them threateningly. ‘If you say that once more, I’ll … I’ll just …’ He freed himself and pulled her close. She gasped and panted, but leant heavily against him. ‘Promise!’ she said.

‘Promise what?’

‘You won’t ever say it again?’

He laughed at her mockingly.

They were less the centre of attention than they thought – Mr Lippmann was smiling, but rather at the lovely evening and that the day in London was over; Mrs Lippmann, impeded by the cardigan hanging over her shoulders, was mixing something in a glass jug and Sarah had her eyes closed against the evening sun. Only Etta, in some bewilderment, heeded them. Roger, who had his own ideas about love, turned his head scornfully.

Sarah opened her eyes for a moment and stared at Nora, in her mind measuring against her the wedding dress she had been designing. She is too fat for satin, she decided, shutting her eyes again and disregarding the bridal gown for the time being. She returned to thoughts of her own dress, adding a little of what she called ‘back interest’ (though lesser bridesmaids would no doubt obscure it from the congregation – or audience) in the form of long velvet ribbons in turquoise … or rose? She drew her brows together and with her eyes still shut said, ‘All the colours of the rainbow aren’t very many, are they?’

‘Now, Etta dear, what will you have to drink?’ asked Mrs Lippmann.

Just as she was beginning to ask for some tomato juice, Mr Lippmann interrupted. He interrupted a great deal, for there were a great many things to be put right, it seemed to him. ‘Now, Mommy, you should give her a glass of sherry with an egg beaten up in it. Roger, run and fetch a nice egg and a whisk, too … all right, Babsie dear, I shall do it myself … don’t worry, child,’ he said, turning to Etta and seeing her look of alarm. ‘It is no trouble to me. I shall do this for you every evening that you are here. We shall watch the roses growing in your cheeks, shan’t we, Mommy?’

He prepared the drink with a great deal of clumsy fuss and sat back to watch her drinking it, smiling to himself, as if the roses were already blossoming. ‘Good, good!’ he murmured, nodding at her as she drained the glass. Every evening, she thought, hoping that he would forget; but horrible though the drink had been, it was also reassuring; their concern for her was reassuring. She preferred it to the cold anxiety of her mother hovering with pills and thermometer.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Lippmann, ‘we shall see. We shall see. I think your parents won’t know you.’ He puffed out his cheeks and sketched with a curving gesture the bosom she would soon have. He always forgot that her father was dead. It was quite fixed in his mind that he was simply a fellow who had obviously not made the grade; not everybody could. Roger bit his tongue hard, as if by doing so he could curb his father’s. ‘I must remind him again,’ Sarah and her mother were both thinking.

The last day of the visit had an unexpected hazard as well as its own sadness, for Mrs Salkeld had written to say that her employer would lend her
his car for the afternoon. When she had made a business call for him in the neighbourhood she would arrive to fetch Etta at about four o’clock.

‘She is really to leave us, Mommy?’ asked Mr Lippmann at breakfast, folding his newspaper and turning his attention on his family before hurrying to the station. He examined Etta’s face and nodded. ‘Next time you stay longer and we make rosy apples of these.’ He patted her cheeks and ruffled her hair. ‘You tell your Mommy and Dadda next time you stay a whole week.’

‘She
has
stayed a whole week,’ said Sarah.

‘Then a fortnight, a month.’

He kissed his wife, made a gesture as if blessing them all, with his newspaper raised above his head, and went from the room at a trot. ‘Thank goodness’, thought Sarah, ‘that he won’t be here this afternoon to make kind enquiries about
her
husband.’

When she was alone with Etta, she said, ‘I’m sorry about that mistake he keeps making.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Etta said truthfully, ‘I am only embarrassed because I know that you are.’ That’s
nothing
, she thought; but the day ahead was a different matter.

As time passed, Mrs Lippmann also appeared to be suffering from tension. She went upstairs and changed her matador pants for a linen skirt. She tidied up the terrace and told Roger to take his bathing things off his window-sill. As soon as she had stubbed out a cigarette, she emptied and dusted the ash-tray. She was conscious that Sarah was trying to see her with another’s eyes.

‘Oh, do stop taking photographs,’ Sarah said tetchily to Roger, who had been clicking away with his camera all morning. He obeyed her only because he feared to draw attention to his activities. He had just taken what he hoped would be a very beautiful study of Etta in a typical pose – sitting on the river bank with a book in her lap. She had lifted her eyes and was gazing across the water if she were pondering whatever she had been reading. In fact, she had been arrested by thoughts of David and Nora and, although her eyes followed the print, the scene she saw did not correspond with the lines she read. She turned her head and looked at the willow trees on the far bank, the clumps of borage from which moorhens launched themselves. ‘Perhaps next time that I see them, they’ll be married and it will all be over,’ she thought. The evening before, there had been a great deal of high-spirited sparring about between them. Offence meant and offence taken they assured one another. ‘If you do that once more … I am absolutely serious,’ cried Nora. ‘You are trying not to laugh,’ David said. ‘I’m not. I am absolutely serious.’ ‘It will end in tears,’ Roger had muttered contemptuously. Even good-tempered Mrs Lippmann had looked down her
long nose disapprovingly. And that was the last, Etta supposed, that she would see of love for a long time. She was left once again with books. She returned to the one she was reading.

Roger had flung himself on to the grass nearby, appearing to trip over a tussock of grass and collapse. He tried to think of some opening remark which might lead to a discussion of the book. In the end, he asked abruptly, ‘Do you like that?’ She sat brooding over it, chewing the side of her finger. She nodded without looking up and, with a similar automatic gesture, she waved away a persistent wasp. He leant forward and clapped his hands together smartly and was relieved to see the wasp drop dead into the grass, although he would rather it had stung him first. Etta, however, had not noticed this brave deed.

The day passed wretchedly for him; each hour was more filled with the doom of her departure than the last. He worked hard to conceal his feelings, in which no one took an interest. He knew that it was all he could do, although no good could come from his succeeding. He took a few more secret photographs from his bedroom window, and then he sat down and wrote a short letter to her, explaining his love.

At four o’clock, her mother came. He saw at once that Etta was nervous and he guessed that she tried to conceal her nervousness behind a much jauntier manner to her mother than was customary. It would be a bad hour, Roger decided.

His own mother, in spite of her linen skirt, was gawdy and exotic beside Mrs Salkeld, who wore a navy-blue suit which looked as if it had been sponged and pressed a hundred times – a depressing process unknown to Mrs Lippmann. The pink-rimmed spectacles that Mrs Salkeld wore seemed to reflect a little colour on to her cheekbones, with the result that she looked slightly indignant about something or other. However, she smiled a great deal, and only Etta guessed what an effort it was to her to do so. Mrs Lippmann gave her a chair where she might have a view of the river and she sat down, making a point of not looking round the room, and smoothed her gloves. Her jewellery was real but very small.

‘If we have tea in the garden, the wasps get into Anna’s rose-petal jam,’ said Mrs Lippmann. Etta was not at her best, she felt – not helping at all. She was aligning herself too staunchly with the Lippmanns, so that her mother seemed a stranger to her, as well. ‘You see, I am at home here,’ she implied, as she jumped up to fetch things or hand things round. She was a little daring in her familiarity.

Mrs Salkeld had contrived the visit because she wanted to understand and hoped to approve of her daughter’s friends. Seeing the lawns, the light reflected from the water, later this large, bright room, and the beautiful poppy-seed cake the Hungarian cook had made for tea, she understood
completely and felt pained. She could see then, with Etta’s eyes, their own dark, narrow house, and she thought of the lonely hours she spent there reading on days of imprisoning rain. The Lippmanns would even have better weather, she thought bitterly. The bitterness affected her enjoyment of the poppy-seed cake. She had, as puritanical people often have, a sweet tooth. She ate the cake with a casual air, determined not to praise.

‘You are so kind to spare Etta to us,’ said Mrs Lippmann.

‘
You
are kind to invite her,’ Mrs Salkeld replied, and then for Etta’s sake, added: ‘She loves to come to you.’

Etta looked self-consciously down at her feet.

‘No, I don’t smoke,’ her mother said primly. ‘Thank you.’

Mrs Lippmann seemed to decide not to, either, but very soon her hand stole out and took a cigarette – while she was not looking, thought Roger, who was having some amusement from watching his mother on her best behaviour. Wherever she was, the shagreen cigarette case and the gold lighter were nearby. Ash-trays never were. He got up and fetched one before Etta could do so.

The girls’ school was being discussed – one of the few topics the two mothers had in common. Mrs Lippmann had never taken it seriously. She laughed at the uniform and despised the staff – an attitude she might at least have hidden from her daughter, Mrs Salkeld felt. The tea-trolley was being wheeled away and her eyes followed the remains of the poppy-seed cake. She had planned a special supper for Etta to return to, but she felt now that it was no use. The things of the mind had left room for an echo. It sounded with every footstep or spoken word in that house where not enough was going on. She began to wonder if there were things of the heart and not the mind that Etta fastened upon so desperately when she was reading. Or was her desire to be in a different place? Lowood was a worse one – she could raise her eyes and look round her own room in relief; Pemberley was better and she would benefit from the change. ‘But how can I help her?’ she asked herself in anguish. ‘What possible change – and radical it must be – can I ever find the strength to effect?’ People had thought her wonderful to have made her own life and brought up her child alone. She had kept their heads above water and it had taken all her resources to do so.

Her lips began to refuse the sherry Mrs Lippmann suggested and then, to her surprise and Etta’s astonishment, she said ‘yes’ instead.

It was very early to have suggested it, Mrs Lippmann thought, but it would seem to put an end to the afternoon. Conversation had been as hard work as she had anticipated and she longed for a dry martini to stop her from yawning, as she was sure it would; but something about Mrs Salkeld seemed to discourage gin drinking.

‘Mother, it isn’t half-past five yet,’ said Sarah.

‘Darling, don’t be rude to your mummy. I know perfectly well what the time is.’ (‘Who better?’ she wondered.) ‘And this isn’t a public house, you know.’

She had flushed a little and was lighting another cigarette. Her bracelets jangled against the decanter as she handed Mrs Salkeld her glass of sherry, saying, ‘Young people are so stuffy,’ with an air of complicity.

Etta, who had never seen her mother drinking sherry before, watched nervously, as if she might not know how to do it. Mrs Salkeld – remembering the flavour from Christmas mornings many years ago and – more faintly – from her mother’s party trifle – sipped cautiously. In an obscure way she was doing this for Etta’s sake. ‘It may speed her on her way,’ thought Mrs Lippmann, playing idly with her charm bracelet, having run out of conversation.

When Mrs Salkeld rose to go, she looked round the room once more as if to fix it in her memory – the setting where she would imagine her daughter on future occasions.

‘And come again soon, there’s a darling girl,’ said Mrs Lippmann, putting her arm round Etta’s shoulder as they walked towards the car. Etta, unused to but not ungrateful for embraces, leant awkwardly against her. Roger, staring at the gravel, came behind carrying the suitcase.

‘I have wasted my return ticket,’ Etta said.

‘Well, that’s not the end of the world,’ her mother said briskly. She thought, but did not say, that perhaps they could claim the amount if they wrote to British Railways and explained.

Mrs Lippmann’s easy affection meant so much less than her own stiff endearments, but she resented it all the same and when she was begged, with enormous warmth, to visit them all again soon her smile was a prim twisting of her lips.