Complete Short Stories (VMC) (64 page)

Barbara’s hands trembled with eagerness when she took the photographs from him, and her disappointment was great as she looked at one after another. She and Jane – standing beside donkeys or lemon trees or the masts of fishing-boats – were blurred albino figures, their pale lips parted; or marble statues bleached in moonlight. The curving waterfront, the white village was like a heap of tripe.

‘I think the light was far too strong,’ he said again.

She could distinguish the café with all the chairs outside, and Spyros’s apron like a trail of ectoplasm among them. ‘Don’t you remember …’ she began. She looked up from the photograph and saw that his expression, though gentle, was forbidding.

He was right, of course, she realised. There could be no resurrection of those days – even the photographs had failed.

‘Would you like to walk round the garden?’ Leonard suggested.

Watched malignly from an upstairs window by Robert, Iris and Roland were shown the garden, flowers were picked for them, Chummy was called off the herbaceous border and shooed away from the guinea-pigs. Soon after three they went away.

‘Oh dear,’ said Iris, as they drove through the Sunday afternoon traffic, ‘my
head
.’ She pressed her hands to her forehead. Chummy, sitting up in the back of the car, panted loudly, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. ‘Those
children
,’ Iris said.

‘I must admit they were rather out of hand. What did you think of Barbara?’

‘Quite frankly,’ said Iris, ‘I wasn’t terribly impressed.’

Barbara took tea on to the lawn. There was no sun, but it was warm. Robert, having been freed and forgiven, lovingly ate cold gooseberry tart and cream. It was a peaceful tea-time. At the end, Serena, getting up from the grass, asked: ‘Can we get down?’

For a little while, she and Robert played amicably together and Barbara and Leonard watched them contentedly.

‘I wonder if they’re back in Hampstead yet?’ she said. ‘I’d like to know what they are doing at this moment. They must have finished talking about us by now. I’m sorry about the awful fiasco. I let you in for it.’

‘He was quite a decent sort of fellow.’

‘But
she
!’

‘Yes, she certainly
was
rather …’

‘Mixed.’

They laughed, and the children, swinging in a hammock, looked across at them. To hear their parents laughing together was a sound they loved very much. Hearing it, they thought they would be good for ever, so that it would never stop. The world then became a settled, a serene place to be in.

‘Oh, darling! I’m so glad I have you,’ Barbara told Leonard.

Four widows lived in the almshouses beside the church. On the other side of the wall, their husbands’ graves were handy. ‘I’ve just seen to Charlie’s,’ Mrs Swan called out to Mrs Rippon, who was going down the garden path carrying a bunch of phlox.

They were four robust old ladies, and their relationship with one another was cordial, but formal. Living at close quarters, they kept to themselves, drank their own tea in their own kitchens, used surnames, passed a few remarks, perhaps, when they met by chance in the graveyard or weeding their garden plots or, dressed in their best, waiting for the bus to go to the village and draw their pensions.

The almshouses were Elizabethan, with pretentious high chimneys whose bricks were set in a twist. In an alcove above the two middle front doors was a stone bust of the benefactor who had built the cottages and endowed them for the use of four old people of the parish. He wore a high ruff and a pointed beard, and rain had washed deep sockets to his eyes and pitted his cheeks so that he looked as if he were ravaged by some horrible disease. His name was carved in Latin below the alcove – a foreigner, the old ladies had always supposed.

Outside each front door was a wooden bench where they could have sat in the sun to warm their ageing bones, but this they never did. In fine weather it was much too public, with sightseers in and out of the old church taking photographs. They photographed the almshouses without asking permission, and once Mrs Swan, going down the garden to pick a few gooseberries, had been requested to pose within her porch wearing an old black apron. ‘Saucy monkeys,’ she had said to her niece’s daughter, who was indoors visiting.

She was there again this afternoon, sitting in the greenish light that came through heavily leaded panes and slanted in from the open, leaf-fringed doorway. The path outside was shaded by a yew tree, and Mrs Rippon had passed by it carrying her bunch of phlox.

‘That grave’s a novelty to her,’ Mrs Swan said to her grand-niece when her neighbour was out of hearing. ‘It’s only human, after all. I know I was over there every day when Charlie had just died.’

The niece, Evie, seemed to stiffen with disdain.

‘I wish I could bring her down to earth,’ Mrs Swan thought. ‘What’s wrong with going to the graveyard, I should like to know.’

‘I couldn’t bring myself to grieve,’ she went on. ‘Poor man, he did suffer. From here to here they opened him.’ She measured off more than a foot of her own stomach, holding her hands there.

‘Yes, you’ve told me,’ Evie said, refusing to look.

‘“It’s a fifty-fifty chance,” the doctor said, before he operated.’

As if he would have, Evie thought.

Her mother had told her to take a present to her aunt, and on the way from work she had bought some purple grapes. They were reduced in price, being past their prime, and they lay now on the table in a dish shaped like a cabbage leaf. Dull, and softly dented, they gave a sweet, beery smell to the room. Tiny flies had already gathered round them. They rose for a moment when Mrs Swan waved her hand over the dish, but soon settled again. Grapes were for the dying, she had always believed, and ‘deathbed grapes’ she called the purple kind. She would rather have had a quarter of a pound of tea.

It was no use Evie glancing up at the clock every few seconds, she thought. The bus would come along no sooner than it was due, if then. It was a wasted afternoon for them both. Mrs Swan could imagine the argument at her niece’s house. ‘You really ought to go, Evie. No one’s been near her for months.’ ‘Why pick on me?’ Evie would ask, and be told that the others had their families to occupy their time. So Evie – as if being so far unmarried and having to live at home were not enough – was made to do the duty visits, give up her free afternoon. No wonder, Mrs Swan thought, that she looked as morose as a hen.

She herself had planned a busy afternoon and had brought from the garden a large striped marrow to be made into jam. It matched the white-and-amber cat who had settled beside it on the sofa, as if for company or camouflage. The cat slept most of its life – at night from custom and by day from boredom. On the sofa now he drowsed, had not quite dropped off, for his eyelids wavered. His front legs were folded under him, like a cow’s, his whiskers curled down over his alderman’s chains – the bib of white rings on his breast.

Mrs Swan, glancing regretfully at the marrow, noticed him and said mechanically, ‘Isn’t he a lovely ginger, then?’

The cat at once feigned a deep sleep.

‘He must be company,’ Evie said.

Mrs Swan was often told this, and, although it was not true, she never disagreed. She was not a person who could make a friend of a cat, and had never found the necessity. They bored one another. She had had him to
keep away the mice. Instead, he brought them in and played evil games with them on the hearthrug.

‘He’s no trouble,’ she said.

Mrs Rippon passed the open door without glancing in, on her way back from the churchyard. The clock made a sudden rustling noise and struck four with an old-fashioned chime, and Mrs Swan got up and put the teapot by the kitchen range to warm. Evie racked her brains for something to say, and began a tedious description of the bridesmaids’ dresses at a wedding she had been to. She thought her aunt could not fail to be grateful for this glimpse of the outside world.

While she waited for the kettle to boil, Mrs Swan took up her knitting. She was making a blanket from little squares sewn together, and there was already a carrier-bag full of them knitted from oddments of drab-coloured wool – a great deal of khaki left over from the war. The needles clicked steadily and she let her eyes move about the room as her thoughts settled like moths on her possessions. She might wash the muslin curtains tomorrow if the weather held. Evie was dropping cigarette ash on to the rag hearthrug, she noticed. She would put it on the clothes-line in the morning, and give it the devil’s own beating.

‘The two grown-up bridesmaids were in a sort of figured nylon organza,’ Evie said. She tried hard to give an accurate picture, but her aunt did not understand the words. The water in the kettle had begun to stir, so she put aside the knitting and finished laying the table. She had some stewed raspberries to eat with the bread and butter. This was her last meal of the day and she always enjoyed it, but she knew that Evie would say ‘Nothing for me, Auntie’, and light another cigarette.

‘In a mauvy-pinky shade, lovely with the sweet-peas,’ she was saying.

‘The girl’s clothes-mad, though it’s only natural,’ her aunt thought as she poured out the tea and suffered boredom.

Evie lit another cigarette to stop herself yawning, remembering the freedom of stepping on to the bus after these visits, the wonderful release, and the glow of self-righteousness – duty done, sunshine bestowed, vistas widened.

Mrs Swan stood by the wall of her front garden, knitting, as Evie’s bus drove off. It was a summer’s evening, with a scent of blossom from the trees in the churchyard. The vicarage doves were strutting about the roof, making peaceful sounds, over the tiles white-splashed with their droppings.

Mrs Butcher from the Plough Inn had got off the bus before it turned to go back to the town, taking Evie on it. She walked slowly – looking angrily hot, as red-haired people often do – carrying a cardboard dress-box. It was an awkward shape, and the string cut into her fingers. She had hoped to get into the pub without her husband, Eric, noticing it and,
seeing him crossing the yard, she stopped to have a chat with Mrs Swan until he should have disappeared again.

‘Lovely evening,’ she said.

‘Yes, very nice,’ Mrs Swan responded cheerfully, although usually the woman passed by without speaking, intent on her own business, full of dissatisfactions and impatience. She drank too much at night and laughed for no reason, Charlie used to say when he returned from his evening glass of bitter. But all day long she was morose.

‘You’re busy.’ Phyllis Butcher nodded at Mrs Swan’s knitting, determined not to move on until Eric was back in the bar. She would leave the dress-box in the outside Ladies, until after opening-time. Her husband was more observant about parcels than about clothes. Once a dress was unwrapped, she was safe, and if a customer praised a new one and he glanced at it suspiciously, she would look quite surprised and say, ‘Why, it’s been hanging in my wardrobe for at least three years.’

‘I’ve got lots of odd wool,’ she said, when Mrs Swan explained about the blanket she was making. ‘The sweaters and things I’ve started in my time. I’ll bring it round tomorrow.’

‘It’s very good of you,’ said Mrs Swan. ‘A different colour makes a change.’ ‘I’ll believe in it when I see it,’ she thought, knowing the sort of woman Mrs Butcher was.

Yet she was wrong, for the very next afternoon Mrs Butcher came to the cottage with a great assortment of brightly coloured wool. She sat down in the kitchen and drank a cup of tea. She had been crying, Mrs Swan thought, and presently she began to explain why, stretching her damp handkerchief from corner to corner, and sometimes dabbing her eyes with it.

Mrs Swan sorted the wool and untangled it. The colours excited her, particularly a turquoise blue with a strand of silver twisted in it, and her fingers itched to begin knitting a new square – an adventure she must put off until she had finished one of mottled grey.

Phyllis Butcher’s mother was poorly. Listening, Mrs Swan thought it did the woman credit that she should weep.

‘I’ll have to go up there,’ Mrs Butcher said. ‘Up north. Real Geordie country,’ she added scornfully. ‘I hate it there.’

‘I was in service in Scotland once,’ said Mrs Swan. ‘Nice scenery and all, but I was happier when I moved down south. I shouldn’t care to go back.’ The very thought was tiring. She visualised the road to Scotland, climbing steeply all the way, a long pull uphill, ending in a cold bedroom under the slated turret roof of a castle. ‘I saw an eagle once,’ she said. ‘A wicked great bird. There were stags, too, and cattle with great horns. Five o’clock us girls got up, and some days I could have cried, my hands were so cold.’

‘Oh, Consett’s not romantic,’ Phyllis Butcher said, ‘It’s all mining round there. I can’t stand it, that’s a fact, and never could. I know I ought to go more often, but you can’t think how it depresses me.’

Eric had put it more strongly – hence the tears. ‘Your own mother,’ he had said. ‘You’ll be old and lonely one day yourself, perhaps.’

‘I’d rather be taken!’ she had cried.

‘Mother’s not easy,’ she told Mrs Swan. When she had drunk her tea, from habit she turned the cup upside down in the saucer and then lifted it up again and examined the tea leaves. There were always birds flying, and she had forgotten what they meant.

‘What’s her complaint?’ Mrs Swan enquired, for she was interested in sickness, and when younger had longed to be a nurse.

‘Oh, I don’t know. If it’s not one thing it’s another. The house is full of bottles of medicine. Illness gives me the creeps. She’s always been chesty, of course.’ She was still studying the cup and, turning it in her hands, had found the promise of a letter and what she thought was a threatened journey. ‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Get things straightened up here and set off in the morning. “Hello, stranger,” she’ll say when I walk in. That’s enough for a start to make me want to turn round and go back the way I came. If she wasn’t so catty, I’d go more often. I couldn’t do enough for her, if she was only pleasant.’

‘Why not go straight away?’ Eric had said when she received the letter. ‘She might be worse than she makes out.’