Complete Short Stories (VMC) (60 page)

‘Next door.’

The light came bobbing back across the threshold. Holding the torch was a young man, wading carefully through the water, his trousers rolled up
above his pale knees. He came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her. His smile was the beginning of laughter, and he seemed to be deeply enjoying the novelties of the situation.

‘Are you all alone?’ he asked. Then he hurried over the indiscretion and, giving her no time to reply, said, ‘Don’t you mind being up there? We saw the light.’

She was tempted to say that she did mind. Then perhaps he would come up the stairs and talk to her for a little while. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she replied.

‘We saw your light,’ he said again. ‘I just wondered if you were all right. “She might be lying there ill for all we know,” I said to Tony.’ (‘Dead,’ he had really said.) ‘“We’d better make sure,” I said.’

They were both a little drunk. So endearing, Rose found this. It was a long time since she had been with anyone who was in the least intoxicated; Gilbert dully carried his drink and often remarked upon the fact.

‘We went to get some whisky.’

He seemed not to notice the cold, standing there in the icy water.

‘What fun,’ she said. She smiled back at him. As she leant over the banisters, he spotlighted her with the torch and could see the top of her breasts, white against the green of her jersey as she bent towards him.

A jolly nice bosom, he thought. She seemed to be what he and Tony called a proper auntie. I shall bring out the maternal in her, he thought, and between the banister slats examined her pretty legs. So many plump women have slim ankles. He had often noticed this.

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ he said. ‘I can carry you to the boat.’

‘Don’t be silly. More like I’d have to carry you.’

‘Well, paddle, then. It’s not cold. It’s lovely in.’

She had put her hand up to her hair, so he knew that she would come; but, before, would go through all the feminine excuses about her appearance.

‘There’s only us,’ he said. ‘You look very nice to me. What my brother thinks is of no importance. I can’t stand in this water much longer, though.’ He held out his arms.

‘I’ll take off my stockings, then.’

She went quickly back to her room. When she had rolled off her stockings and put them into her coat pocket, screwed up the top of the ink-bottle, she took up her shoes and blew out the candles. The hardly started letter was left lying on the table.

‘I
could
do with a drink,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like to ask that errand-boy to fetch some gin. Breaking the law, I suppose.’

The torchlight led her down the stairs, and there the young man took her shoes from her and put them in his pockets. He steadied her with his arm as she hitched up her skirt and stepped down into the icy water.

‘Oh, my God,’ she gasped and began to giggle, wading on tiptoe towards the doorway.

‘Got her?’ Tony shouted. He was sitting in the boat, holding on to the rustic-work porch.

If it all comes away in his hands, Gilbert will go mad, Rose thought, smiling in the darkness.

They helped her into the boat, and Tony, letting go of the porch, gave her a cigarette, lighting it first and putting it into her mouth with the intimacy which comes easily in time of peril or exultation.

‘You can put your stockings on now,’ said the young man whom Tony called Roger. ‘No more paddling. We row straight in through the French windows to the landing-stage at the foot of the stairs.’

Tony gave a final push at the rustic-work porch and swung the punt towards the next-door garden. Bottles jingled against one another under the seat, and when Roger had wiped Rose’s feet with a damp handkerchief, he reached for a whisky bottle, took off the wrapping-paper, and let it blow away across the water.

‘Keep the cold out,’ he urged Rose, trying to hold the bottle to her lips. ‘Your teeth are chattering. Never mind, nearly there, and we’ve a wonderful oilstove going upstairs.’

As the boat swayed, whisky trickled over her chin; then she put her hands over his and, steadying them, took a long drink.

‘I’ll bet she’s been a barmaid,’ thought Roger.

‘Jolly boating weather,’ Tony sang, and the punt slipped over the still water, and the white house next door came into sight.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Rose murmured.

‘Not to be missed,’ said Roger.

The next morning she slept late. It was nearly noon before she was properly awake, and any errand-boys who might have called her from below had gone away unanswered. Even when she was wide awake at last, she lay in bed staring at the curtains pinned across the window, striving to remember all she could of the evening before.

In bright moonlight they had brought her home in the boat and their singing must have carried a long way across the water. I don’t care if the boat capsizes, she had thought.

When she waded indoors they called good-night; and she went upstairs and, still with wet bare feet, watched from the window until they were out of sight.

Quite clearly across the water, she heard Roger say, ‘Well, that worked out all right, didn’t it?’

A moment later, a gust of laughter came back to her, and she had wondered
uneasily if they were laughing at her. But they were high-spirited boys, she reminded herself. They would laugh at anything. Perhaps Tony had let go of the punt pole.

Before her return home, there must have been hours and hours of sitting on the floor and drinking in what they called ‘Mamma’s bedroom’. An oil-stove threw a shifting daisy pattern on the ceiling, and two pink candles had been burning on the dressing-table – must surely have burnt themselves out.

‘How long was I there?’ she wondered. ‘And how did we pass the time?’ While it was happening it had seemed one of the loveliest evenings of her life and she was sorry to have forgotten a moment of it.

The peach-coloured bedroom was draped with satin, and a trail of wet footprints went back and forth across the white carpet. Mamma’s wedding photograph was on a little table, and Rose had at one point suddenly asked, ‘Whatever would your mother say about this?’ By ‘this’ she meant herself being there, not the empty bottles and the cigarette smoke and the dirty glasses.

‘We’ll clear up afterwards,’ Roger said. The other bedrooms were full of furniture from downstairs. They had been sent from London to rescue it.

Now it was Saturday morning and she could not walk down to the shops to buy her little week-end treats. Today there was no cheque to cash, and for the first time she realised how much she was at Gilbert’s mercy.

She got out of bed and began to search the room for money, found thirty shillings in one bag, some pennies dusty with face powder in another, half a crown in her mackintosh pocket, and a florin in a broken cup on the chest of drawers. She could survive the week until he came again, just as she could survive until Monday on stale bread and the rest of the sausages.

Yes, I can survive all right, she told herself briskly, and pulled off her nightgown and began to dress.

A glimpse in the wardrobe mirror as she crossed the room depressed her. She was getting too fat and her sister would see a difference in her.

‘But when?’ she wondered. There was the unfinished letter on the table. When she had made herself a cup of tea she would make an effort to write it. I shall go on surviving and surviving, and growing fatter and fatter, she thought, and her lips were pressed together and her eyes flickered because she was frightened.

She lit the primus stove and then unpegged the curtains and opened the balcony windows. Outside, a great change had taken place while she slept. The floods were subsiding. Along the bank of the railway tracks she could see grass, and in the garden the tops of shrubs and bushes had come up for a breath of air and were steaming in the sunshine. She remembered that last night, as the two young men punted away, she had heard one of them say, ‘The water’s going down,’ and she had felt regret, as if a party were nearing its end.

It was going down more rapidly than it had risen, draining away into the earth, evaporating into the air, hastening down gratings. The adventure was nearly over and in its diminuendo had become an exasperation. What had been so beautiful yesterday was now an inconvenience, and Rose, on her island, would have to drink her tea without milk.

Surely those two dear boys will come, she thought. They had concerned themselves about her last night when they did not know her; it seemed more likely that they would do so today. She so convinced herself of this that, in the middle of sipping her tea, she went into the bathroom to make something of her face.

But they did not come and the day went slowly. She watched from the window and it was a dull, watery world she saw. The crisis was over and the seabirds beginning to fly away. She finished writing her letter and propped it up against the clock, which had stopped.

When it was dark she pinned the curtains together again and sat down at the table, simply staring in front of her; at the back of her mind, listening. In the warm living-room of her sister’s house, the children in dressing-gowns would be eating their supper by the fire; Roy, home from a football match, would be lying back in his chair. Their faces would be turned intently to the blue-white shifting screen of the television.

Rose’s was another world, candlelit, silent, lifeless. The church clock chimed seven and she got up and wound up her own clock and set it right; then sat down again, stiffly, with her hand laid palm downwards on the table like an old woman.

They asked me for fun, she told herself. It was just a boyish lark – quite understandable; a joke they wouldn’t dream of repeating. If I ever see them again, other week-ends, they’ll nod, maybe, and smile; that’s all; not that, if their mother’s with them. At their age, they never look back or do the same thing twice.

As she had come towards middle-age, she had developed a sentimental fondness for young men – especially those she called the undergraduate type, spoilt, reckless, gay, with long scarves twisted round their necks. Roger had, as he predicted, brought out the maternal in her. Humbly, with great enjoyment, she had listened to their banter, the family jokes, a language hardly understood by her, whom they had briskly teased but gallantly drawn in. So the hours must have passed.

Their mother won’t be best pleased about that carpet, she thought, and she got up and took the last cigarette from the packet.

All of Sunday the waters receded. Morning and evening the church bells rang across the meadows in which ridges and hillocks of sodden grass stood
up. One or two cars splashed down the lane during the afternoon, keeping to the crown of the road and making a great wash.

By Monday morning the garden path was high and nearly dry. Rose looked over the banisters at the wet, muddy entrance and found it difficult to believe that the swan had ever swum about down there. It was all over.

She could go out now and post her letter and fetch what she wanted from the shops; and on Friday Gilbert would come, and on all the Fridays after, she supposed, though she could never be quite sure. So she would survive from year to year, and one day soon would begin a diet and perhaps save some money for her old age.

It was like being in prison, she thought of the last few days. Sunday had been endless and she had cried a little and gone to bed early, but remained awake, yet on other Sundays she most often stayed indoors all day or pottered about the garden, and had always been contented.

Now she was set free and she put on her coat, took the letter from the shelf, and looked out of the window once more to make sure that it was really safe to go out and walk on the earth again. And that really was the sum of her freedom – for the first time the truth of it dawned in her. She could go out and walk to the shops, like a prisoner on parole, and spend the money Gilbert had given her, or save it if she could, and then she would turn back and return, for there was nothing else to do.

The clock ticked – a sound she knew too well. There were other sounds which were driven into her existence – the church bells and the milkman’s rattle – and they no longer sufficed and had begun to torment her. Her contentment with them had come to an end.

The exciting thought occurred to her that it was in her power to fly away from them for ever. Nothing could stop her.

For a moment she stood quite still, her head tilted as if she were listening, and then she suddenly turned her handbag upside down and tipped the money on to the table. ‘What will Gilbert do?’ she wondered, as she counted the coins. He would never have visualised her doing anything impulsive, would stand in the porch bewildered, amazed that she did not open the door at once and, when he had sorted out his own key and let himself in, his face would be a picture, she thought.

‘I’d like to see it,’ she said aloud, and scooped up the money and dropped it back into her bag. Where would he break his journey that night? she wondered. Or would he perhaps go petulantly home to his wife?

She was smiling as she quickly packed her suitcase, almost shook with laughter when she slammed the door and set off down the muddy path. Such a dreadful mess she had left behind her.

She felt warm in her fur coat as she picked her way down the lane. The floods had shifted the gravel about and made deep ruts, the hedgerows were
laced with scum; but the valley was recovering, cows were being driven back to the pastures and hundreds of birds were out scavenging.

The letter was still in Rose’s hand but, as she stopped for a moment by a stile to rest, she suddenly screwed it up and tossed it over the hedge, knowing she would reach Beryl first.

The boat brought people and took others away. In summer it came three times a week to the island, and the sisters, sitting outside the waterfront café, would watch it appearing round the point. It came with the most beautiful inevitability – however late. Quayside life would begin to stir and, as the deep sound of the ship’s hooter came across the bay, little boats would put out from the shore. They were low on the water, with packed and standing people holding aloft baskets, trying to wave goodbye. The same boats, on their return journey, were watched more critically. Exposed and bewildered, and perhaps sick and tired as well, the newcomers stepped on to the broken marble of the waterfront and looked about them, shading their eyes from the sun and the fierce brightness of the white buildings. Their baggage would be seized by old men or young boys with handcarts and donkeys, and they would follow it on foot as if dazed with the suddenness of their arrival, wiping away sweat and trying to smack down flies.