Complete Short Stories (VMC) (59 page)

She was really talking to herself.

Those treasure-hunts we used to go on, all about these very lanes, John suddenly remembered. Lovely summer evenings just like this one, tearing like demented things about the countryside, diving into the river in the early hours, parking cars at the edges of woods.

He kept his thoughts to himself, as if they were secrets of his own, and then he remembered that Helen had been there too. She had once swum across the river fully dressed, for a bet. It was difficult to believe.

‘A really beautiful frock,’ she was saying.

‘Unusual,’ he replied. ‘Not much of it.’ He suddenly laughed.

‘I meant Lillah’s.’

Presently she sighed and said: ‘He’s so wonderful to her always.’

John knew the pattern – the excited admiration invariably turned to dissatisfaction in the end – one of the reasons why these evenings ruffled him.

‘I’m sure that to him she’s as beautiful as on the day they married,’ she went on.

‘Still a very fine woman,’ he replied.

‘Is it because they’ve never had children, I wonder? The glamour wasn’t worn off by all those nursery troubles. All their love kept for one another.’

‘It is better to have children,’ John said.

‘Well, of course. Who ever’d deny it? You know I didn’t think that. But I wondered if it had drawn them closer together,
not
having them. They never seem to take one another for granted.’ ‘As we do,’ she left unspoken, though her sigh was explicit.

‘Well, we mustn’t compare ourselves with
them
,’ he said rather smartly. ‘And who are we to be talking about love? They’re the ones. They’re famous for it, after all. It’s their prerogative.’

Nothing could have been lovelier, Rose thought. For most of the day she stayed on the little balcony, looking out over the flooded fields. Although it was Friday, Gilbert had not come and she was sure now that he would not come, and was shaken with laughter at the idea of him rowing out to her from the railway station, across the river and meadows, bowler-hatted and red with exasperation.

This day was usually her busiest of the week, when she stopped pottering and worked methodically to make the ramshackle villa and herself clean and tidy. By four o’clock she would be ready, and Gilbert, who was punctual over his illicit escapades as with everything else, would soon after drive down the lane. Perhaps escapade was altogether too exciting a word for the homely ways they had drifted into. She fussed over his little ailments far more than his wife had ever done, not because she loved him more, or indeed at all, but because her position was more precarious.

On Saturday mornings he left her, having broken his long journey from the North, as he told his wife. He often thought how furious she would have been if she had known that the break was only twenty miles from London, where they lived.

As soon as he left her on Saturdays, Rose went down to the shops by the station, cashed the cheque he had given her, and bought some little treats for herself to while away the weekend – a few slices of smoked salmon, chocolate peppermint-creams, and magazines. She loved the rest of that day. Gilbert had gone – she could shut herself in and be cosy till he came again.

Only the faintest of regrets ruffled her comfort – little faults in herself that depressed her slightly but could easily be rectified later on. She was shamefully lazy, she knew, and self-indulgent. All the time she meant to save money, but never did. Gilbert was not very generous. His Friday nights were expensive and he knew it and very rarely gave Rose a present. She really had nothing.

Her fur coat, which she had worn all day as she leant over the balcony rail watching the seagulls on the floodwater, was shabby and baggy; he had given it to her years ago at the beginning of their liaison when she was still
working for him. It was squirrel, and his wife would not have been seen dead in it.

He certainly won’t come now, Rose decided, looking at the forsaken water. There had really never been the slightest likelihood of it, and that was just as well, she thought, catching sight of herself in a glass as she was making a cup of tea. A dark band showed at the parting of her golden hair and she had run out of peroxide.

Some young boy had come in a rowing-boat that morning – a Boy Scout, perhaps – and had offered to do her shopping. She had wrapped some money in the shopping-list and let it down in a basket from the bedroom window. Later he had brought back a loaf of bread and some milk, a pound of sausages and cigarettes, a dozen candles. She would have liked a half-bottle of gin, but had not liked to write it down. The peroxide she had quite forgotten.

She made tea on the primus stove Gilbert had bought for their river picnics. These were in July always, when his wife went to stay with her mother in the Channel Islands. Then he moved in with Rose for a whole fortnight; from niggardly motives made love to her excessively, became irritable, felt cramped in the uncomfortable little house and exasperated by the way it was falling to pieces. The primus stove was hardly ever used. It was too often raining, or they were in bed, or both. Rose was afraid it would blow up, but now, with the floodwater in the downstairs rooms, she had to overcome her fears or go without tea.

The sun was beginning to set and she knew how soon it got dark these winter days. She took her cup of tea and went out on to the balcony to watch. Every ten years or so, the Thames in that place would rise too high, brim over its banks and cover the fields for miles, changing the landscape utterly. The course of the river itself she could trace here and there from lines of willow trees or other landmarks she knew.

Beyond, on what before had been the other bank, a little train was crossing the floods. The raised track was still a foot or two above river level. Puffing along, reflected in the water, it curved away into the distance and disappeared among the poplar trees by the church. There, all the gravestones were submerged, and the inn had the river flowing in through the front door and out of the back.

‘Thames-side Venice,’ a newspaper reporter had called it. The children loved it, and now Rose saw two young boys rowing by on the pink water. The sun had slipped down through the mist, was very low, behind some grey trees blobbed with mistletoe; but the light on the water was very beautiful. The white seabirds scarcely moved and a row of swans went in single file down a footpath whose high railing-tops on either side broke the surface of the water.

Rose sipped her tea and watched, intent on having the most of every second of the fading loveliness – the silence and the reflections and the light, and then the silence broken by a cat crying far away or a shout coming thinly across the cold air.

‘I’m glad he didn’t come,’ she said aloud.

At this hour, other men, husbands, those who had not sent their families away, would be returning. The train was at the station and they would take to their boats and row homewards, right up to their staircases, tying up to the newel-post and greeted from above by their children. Rose imagined them all as lake dwellers and hoped that they were enjoying the adventure.

She was curious about her neighbours – the few of them scattered along the river bank. She wondered about them when she passed by on her way to the shops, but she had never spoken to them or been inside their houses, and she had never wished to do so. Her solitariness suited her and her position was too informal. She would not embarrass other people by her situation.

But she made up stories to herself about some of them, especially about the people at the white house nearby who came only at week-ends. They seemed very gay, and laughter and music went on till late on Saturday nights. From where she was, she could just see the eaves of their boat-house sticking out of the river, but the house itself lay farther back and out of sight.

It was growing dark very fast, and the water, a moment or two earlier rosy, whitened as the sun went down. Under the high woods, out of the wind, the fields were frozen, their black and glassy surface littered with broken ice that boys had thrown.

Suddenly, at last, Rose could bear no more. The strangeness overcame her and she went inside and washed her cup and saucer in the bathroom basin and emptied the tea-pot over the banisters into the flooded passageway.

A swan had come in through the front door. Looking austere and suspicious, he turned his head about, circled aloofly, and returned to the garden. It was weird, Rose thought. This was a word she often used. So many things were to her either weird or intriguing.

The sunset, for instance, had been intriguing, but the sudden beginning of the long evening, the swan coming indoors, the smell of the water lying down there was very weird. She drew the curtains across the balcony doors. They would not meet and she clipped them together with a clothes-peg to keep the darkness hidden.

The bedroom was crowded with furniture and rolled-up matting rescued from downstairs, and looked like a corner of a junk shop. Nothing was new
or matched another thing. It had all no doubt been bought off old barrows or hunted for in attics, so that the house could be called furnished when it was let. Wicker uncurled from the legs of an armchair and caught Rose’s stockings as she passed by, and in the mornings when she made the bed she picked up dozens of blond feathers from the eiderdown.

It was the first time she had ever had a house to herself. After years of living with her married sister, it had seemed wonderful to put the frying-pan on her own stove and fry her own sausages in it, and she had felt a little self-conscious, as if she were playing at keeping house and did so before an audience, as in the imaginary games of her childhood.

For a time she could not be quite natural on her own. Look at me all the way round, from any angle, I really am a housewife. You won’t catch me out, she often thought. But no one was ever there but Gilbert, and he, indifferent to the intriguing notion of her keeping house, sat with his back to her and read his pink newspaper.

In the end the magic had gone, she tired of her rôle, and the home was not one, she saw, that anyone could take a pride in, especially this evening, with candlelight making the crowded room macabre.

‘I shall never get the place straight afterwards,’ she said. She talked to herself a great deal nowadays.

She had forgotten the beauty of the flooded landscape and was overcome by wretchedness. The woman at the post office had warned her of the filth the receding water would leave behind, the smell that lingered, the stained walls and woodwork, and doors half twisted off their hinges.

Earlier that week, as she watched the rockery slowly going under, then the lower boughs of shrubs and very soon the higher ones, Rose had felt apprehensive. She had never had any experience in the least like it. Yet, when the worst happened and the house was invaded, perched up above it, enisled, as if she were hibernating in these unusual surroundings, she had begun to feel elated instead.

Her sister, worried to death from reading about the Thames-side Venice in the newspapers, wrote to ask her to stay. The letter had come by boat and was taken up in a basket through the bedroom window. ‘Roy and I wish you would come back for good, you know that,’ Beryl had written. The children missed her. They had been told that she had gone away to work, and the same story did for the neighbours, but they were less likely to think it true.

Roy said that his sister-in-law was wasting herself and ruining her chances. Once a girl takes up with married men, he had told his wife, she will find herself drifting from one to the other and she’ll never get married herself. This Beryl left out of the letter.

Rose had been frank about her plans but, wary from long practice of
secret affairs, had kept Gilbert’s name to herself. ‘The man I’m going out with,’ she had called him at the beginning, and so she still wrote of him. She would have made someone a good wife, her brother-in-law often said, knowing what men liked. The house was pleasanter when she was there and the children were easier to manage.

A letter must be written to still her sister’s fears. All day, Rose had put it off, but now began to look for some writing-paper. The wardrobe door swung open as she crossed the room and she saw her reflection in the blurred glass front. ‘My hair!’ she thought. She had a suspicion that she might be beginning to let herself go, a serious mistake for one in her position.

When she had found the paper and a bottle of green ink, she cleared a corner of the table and began to write. ‘Dear B, you’d laugh if you could see me at this minute.’

She glanced round the room and then, smiling to herself, began to describe it. She was a born letter-writer, Beryl said, and she tried consciously to display her talent.

The church clock struck seven. The chimes had a different sound, coming across water instead of grassy meadows. She paused, listened, her chin on her hand and her eyes straying to the curtained door. She thought now that she could hear something moving on the water outside and went to the window and parted the curtains.

Below her, she could see two figures in a punt, one standing and using the pole, the other sitting down and fanning torchlight back and forth across the darkness.

‘Going next door,’ she thought, as she sat down again and dipped her pen into the ink. ‘It’s up to the second stair now,’ she wrote, and then had to jump up, to go and see. Last thing at night, first thing in the morning, and a dozen times a day she would go out to the landing to see if the water had risen or fallen.

The house was open to anyone and the keys of the upstairs rooms had long ago been lost. The swan had come in and so might rats. Nervously, she peered over the banisters.

The water was disturbed and was slapping the threshold and swaying against the staircase. She could hear laughter and then a man’s voice echoing up the well of the staircase, calling out to ask if she were safe. ‘Quite safe and well?’ the voice persisted. Torchlight ran up the walls and vanished, and a boat grated against some steps outside.

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she called. ‘Who is it?’