Complete Short Stories (VMC) (63 page)

Sometimes there were holes in the clouds and through these Barbara could peer down from the plane and see a green landscape crossed by slate grey roads. It looked neat and dark and alienating. She had no feeling of coming home and could not believe that she was here. They flew over reservoirs and gravel pits filled with milky water, and then over the Thames itself – a broad reach lined with houseboats and launches and fringed with willows – a very sedate-looking river. Coming in to land, she saw the houses tip suddenly sideways and the fields scudding past, and she imagined her husband somewhere down there, waiting for her.

When at last she saw him, standing outside the customs office – looking pale, she thought – his pleasure at having her back affected her deeply. They drove home slowly and from time to time he took her hand, as if to reassure himself that she was with him again.

‘So Jane decided to stay?’ he asked.

‘I went all that way for nothing.’

‘You had to go. And it has done you good.’

‘Is everything all right at home?’

‘There have been one or two upsets, but never mind now.’

‘But I
must
know.’

Gradually she learnt the list of calamities – the children with chicken-pox at their grandmother’s; the cat who had disappeared (from loneliness? from neglect? she wondered), the tree that had blown down in a gale and the daily help who had given in her notice. She was filled with despair and guilt. ‘You should have told me,’ she said again and again.

‘I wanted you to have your holiday. And I wish I hadn’t to tell you now.’

It was a dull, warm night. While she had been away, the summer had come and the trees had grown dark and weighty. All along the lanes was a bitter smell of dusty leaves. They turned into their own drive and she looked about her with a despondent curiosity. The lilac had bloomed and faded in her absence. As they went into the hall together, she put her arms round him, blinded again with tears. ‘Oh, thank you, my darling, for managing,’ she said.

No letter came from Jane, although Barbara, after her first letter, wrote a second, then a third. Her tan faded in the mild, dark weather, but images of the island stayed vividly in her mind. She fretted for some word from it and about it, feeling – where she now was – less than half alive. Jane’s water-colour sketch – of the harbour and the grey sky – which she had brought home with her, was propped up on her desk – a lack-lustre little painting, but all she had.

Her home seemed lack-lustre, too, and she could no longer see what strangers – exclaiming at its beauty – must see, and the gentle view from upstairs windows – the blue-and-green Thames valley which she had always loved – was tame and vapid now.

Leonard thought her merely unsettled by travelling, or else worried about Jane. The children – returning spoiled by their grandmother’s indulgence – sensed her inattentiveness and continued their misbehaviour. Serena, who had never lived up to her name, gave way to even more spectacular tantrums. Robert, her brother, simply did damage. Each day he left the mark of destruction on the house. ‘It is like having a poltergeist among us,’ Barbara said, gathering up the fragments of a lustre jug.

She wondered why she had the strange belief that if only Jane would write, she could find her old contentment and see the island in the right perspective – as merely a place where dwelling was primitive, the weather fairer than at home, and life uncluttered – with no fine china to be broken, no cupboards full of clothes to be looked after and no telephone to keep on ringing. Jane’s letter, when it came, would reconcile her, she felt, to all these frustrations and annoyances; Serena would stop casting herself down on the floor howling; Robert would go more carefully about the house, and she would find herself once more enchanted with her surroundings. How any letter could accomplish all this she did not ask herself; but she knew that without it she was left in the air, her visit abroad not finally rounded off. And then the letter came at last and there was news of the island, but no reference to Barbara’s ever having been on it. This made it seem more remote to her – a different place.

Sometimes, increasingly, she wondered about Roland Bagueley and how
he was faring in Hampstead. His association with the island, the fact of his coming so much into her recollections of it, began to give him an illusory charm; but he, too, was lost in silence – had failed even to send the promised photographs. On an impulse, she wrote to invite him and his wife to lunch on Sunday. This she very soon regretted having done and she began to await their arrival in a state of nervous agitation.

‘I wish I hadn’t asked them,’ she told Leonard at breakfast. ‘I don’t know why I did. He’s boring, really.’

‘They won’t be here for ever,’ he said.

‘But why on earth should I inflict such tedium on you?’

‘An hour or two of tedium can’t hurt anybody.’

He was so equable, she thought; so good-natured. However disastrously things turned out, he would never blame her.

On Sunday, Roland and Iris got out of their car at a quarter to one, just as Robert had shut Serena’s fingers in a door and was shouting guilty disclaimers while she was hysterical on the floor. Barbara, with her face hot from the oven and from embarrassment, too, opened the door while Leonard carried the shrieking child to the bathroom.

At first, there was too much to say all at once – introductions, greetings, explanations, apologies – and then, suddenly, standing in the hall with the door shut, there was nothing at all.

‘Poor little girl,’ said Roland, glancing upstairs.

Only her curiosity quietened Serena. Feeling that she was missing something, she allowed her screams to die down into a tremulous whimpering; she freed herself from her father and appeared on the staircase, with tears over her face and her lips quivering.

‘Poor little girl,’ Roland said again – and he held out his arms to her as she descended the stairs slowly and suspiciously. She was far from being a shy child, but decided to feign timidity. She skirted the visitors widely and hid her face against Barbara, refusing to be coaxed away from her.

Leonard came downstairs, wearing a jovial and anticipatory look, which even Iris Bagueley’s gushing voice did not diminish. ‘Delightful!’ she kept exclaiming. ‘Your
garden
. “Oh,” I said to Rollo, “the garden, Rollo! The irises. What a
show
.” Oh, she’s a
shy
girl, is she? Who’s lost her tongue?’

‘I hope she won’t talk like this to Robert,’ Barbara thought fearfully.

‘Have you any animals?’ Iris suddenly asked in a low and confidential voice.

‘Only guinea-pigs,’ Barbara said hesitantly.

‘Then have you any objection if Chummy comes in? We take him everywhere and he’s such an unhappy boy when he’s left in the car. Girlie see doggie?’

Chummy was an evil-looking chow with a curled tail, a rather matted
coat, and tongue hanging loose in a wicked wolf’s mouth. He was brought through the hall, looking balefully about him. He panted, his ears pricked at every sound, claws pitter-pattered on the parquet floor as he restlessly and scornfully explored the room. Serena clung closer to her mother and her whimpering gathered force.

‘Aren’t you a Mummy’s girl?’ asked Iris brightly, tapping her on the head with her gloves.

‘Go away!’ Serena muttered angrily into her mother’s skirt.

Robert, who had been comforting himself with a long drink, sidled in, his face stained with purple juice.

‘And here’s the son and heir,’ said Iris.

She seemed to twinkle at him – her spectacles, ear-rings, necklace and her shiny straw hat – and Robert backed away, scowling.

So far, Roland had said very little, except to demur about the dog’s being brought in, and ignored. Now – with a glass of sherry in his hand – he looked across at Barbara and said: ‘
Yassoo!
’

She smiled self-consciously and glanced at him – for the first time, she realised – and saw how utterly unfamiliar he looked in his dark suit – a different person, a different
kind
of person.

‘Oh, Rollo and his Greek,’ said Iris, laughingly. ‘Cheers, my dears. You see,
I
can only say it in English. Before he went away, I thought I should go mad – he was everlastingly going about the house, practising sentences out of his phrase book, quite determined to be able to talk to the natives when he got there. Weren’t you, Rollo?’

The nickname, thought Barbara, did not seem to attach itself to him, however constantly it was used; it glanced off him.

He had blushed when his wife spoke of his attempts to learn Greek and said that he had simply wasted his time, and Barbara – with Serena still clinging to her skirt – went on one of her little trips to the kitchen to lift saucepan lids and look into the oven. She had been drinking rather hastily, from nervousness, and felt hot and confused. The thought of finishing off the cooking, dishing-up, the gathering together of them all at the table, oppressed her unbearably.

‘You
didn’t feel drawn towards Greece?’ Leonard asked Iris when they were in the dining-room at last. It was late. The potatoes had taken so long to brown that Barbara despaired, and several times Iris had peeped at her watch. She had refused a second drink. Then – just when everything was ready – Chummy had wanted to go out and had to be taken and waited for.

Leonard now clashed the carving knife against the steel and Barbara watched anxiously, as he cut off the first slice of beef and, from habit, laid it aside on the dish for himself.

‘No,’ said Iris. ‘I was never taken with the idea. An aunt of mine went deaf from typhoid on the island of Rhodes.’

‘A long time ago,’ said Roland.

‘“Don’t drink the water and don’t eat the salads,” I told Rollo before he went. No, do serve the kiddies first, I implore you.’

‘Stop kicking your chair,’ said Barbara to Robert, who ignored her. She blushed, hearing in her mind what Iris must be thinking – ‘Such behaviour! What spoilt kiddies!’ ‘You lost your tan,’ she said to Roland.

‘And you.’

‘No, I think “abroad”, as I call it, is terribly over-rated,’ Iris told them. ‘Perhaps we haven’t been awfully lucky. Goodness, don’t you remember when we went to the Costa Brava, Rollo? The people there. They really were rather … well …’

‘Mixed,’ Roland said quickly. It was the best he could think of in a hurry and doubtless had staved off worse.

‘Yes,
mixed
.’ She smiled at him gratefully. ‘And the
food
.’ She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she seemed encouraged to see the plate of decent English food in front of her, even though she could not have felt proud of the potatoes if
she
had cooked them. ‘Delicious,’ she said, in a faint and trailing-off voice as she took up her knife and fork.

She may have been pretty when she was younger, Barbara thought. In her mind, she brightened the hair, took off the spectacles, smoothed out the lines of discontent and eye-strain, and was just able to imagine Roland – a shy and unpractised young man – allowing himself to be carried away. In Greece, she had known that he had nothing but solid worth to recommend him. He had been dogged – even about his holiday, until staying on the island – out of the world, out of context – he had achieved an undreamt of air of negligence. They had ridden up to the convent, she reminded herself. Sweating, sunburned, untidy, he had stretched himself out under a tree and fallen asleep, spread-eagled in the dappled light. It was a different man, she thought, glancing at the trim, anxious one who was listening to his wife with an attentiveness he must have wisely acquired to make up for everyone else’s lack of it.

These weeks, since his return from the island, must have been worse than hers, she realised – as the rest of his life would be worse. His experience must have been deeper, his brief escape desperately planned and wearily paid for. It was something for her – for Iris – to deride along with the other things. Once he had liked music, he had told Jane in answer to one of her off-hand enquiries: later the sisters had laughed about it, but Barbara could not have laughed now. She could see too clearly the history of discarded interests.

It would have been better to have asked them to dinner, with the children safely in bed, she thought, slipping a clean plate under the wine-stained table-cloth. Robert had knocked over the glass of wine and water, which plainly Iris thought he should not have been given.

‘And who is a little bit tipsy?’ she was saying.

‘Are you?’ Robert asked.

Her laughter, her effusive ways with them, revealed her hatred of all children – and these particularly. They were what she did not want to be reminded of.

‘Robert!’ said Leonard, warningly.

Ignoring his father, staring at Iris, Robert said, with contempt in his voice: ‘You aren’t really laughing. I know.’

‘I am,’ said Serena. She threw back her head and half closed her eyes and gave a passable imitation of Iris’s trilling laugh.

Affecting not to notice exactly what the child was doing, Barbara said: ‘Any more silliness from either of you, and you will be sent upstairs to rest until you’re sensible again.’

‘You would
like
that, wouldn’t you?’ Robert said in a low voice, with a glance at Iris.

‘Well, then it is no use,’ Barbara said. ‘You must go upstairs this minute, Robert.’ She was very nervous lest he should refuse to, and wondered how she would deal with so much loss of face if he did. To her relief, he slid down at once from his chair, walked round the table, and as he went out of the door was heard to say how glad he was to go. ‘Horrible old gooseberry tart,’ he chanted loudly, as he stamped upstairs. ‘Horrible, beastly old cream.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Barbara said.

‘Goodness, only a very silly person would take offence at anything a child says,’ said Iris.

‘And that is what we are all afraid of one doing,’ Leonard thought.

When they had finished lunch, Roland gave Barbara his holiday photographs. ‘They’re really no good,’ he apologised. ‘I think the light was too strong.’

‘I told you to allow for that,’ said Iris. ‘You had the meter.’