Complete Short Stories (VMC) (68 page)

It was so much like the face of the middle-aged woman whom his arm encircled affectionately, who wore the smug, pleased smile of a mother whose son has been teasing her. She glowed with delight, her lips ready to shape fond remonstrances. She looked a pretty, silly woman and wore a
flowered, full-skirted dress, too girlish for her, too tight across the bust. They were standing by the wooden fence of a little garden. Behind them, hollyhocks grew untidily and a line of washing, having flapped in the wind as the camera clicked, hung there, blurred, above their heads. Julian had stared at the photographer, grinning foolishly, almost pulling a face. ‘It’s all put on,’ thought Edith. ‘All for effect.’

When her legs stopped trembling, she went again to the drawer and fetched the letter. She could only read a little of it at a time, because the feeling of faintness and nausea came upon her in waves and she would wait, with closed eyes, till each receded. After seeing ‘Dear Father’ she was as still as a stone, until she could brace herself for more, for the rest of the immaturely written, facetious letter. It contained abrupt and ungracious thanks for a watch he had received for what he referred to as his twenty-first. He seemed, Edith thought, to have expected more. A good time had been had by all, with Mum pushing the boat out to the best of her ability. They were still living in Streatham and he was working in a car showroom, where, he implied, he spent his time envying his customers. Things weren’t too easy, although Mum was wonderful, of course. When he could afford to take her out, which he only wished he were able to do more often, she enjoyed herself as if she were a young girl. It was nice of his father to have thought of him, he ended reproachfully.

Carrie Hurt pushed the bedroom door open at the same time as she wrapped on it with her knuckles. ‘I was to say would you come down at once, Edith. There’s some people in the dining-room already.’

‘I shan’t be coming down,’ Edith said.

‘Don’t you feel well?’

‘Tell him I shan’t be coming down.’

Edith turned her head away and remained like that until Carrie had gone. Quietly, she sat and waited for Silcox to arrive. He would do so, she knew, as soon as he could find the manageress or a maid to take his place for a moment. It would offend his pride to allow such a crisis, but he would be too seriously alarmed to prevent it.

Her hatred was now so heavy that it numbed her and she was able to sit, quite calm and patient, waiting for him, rehearsing no speeches, made quite incapable by the suddenness of the calamity and the impossibility of accepting the truth of it.

It was not so very long before she heard his hurrying footsteps. He entered the room as she had thought he would, brimming with pompous indignation. She watched this fade and another sort of anger take its place when he saw the letter in her hand, the photograph on the bed.

‘No, your eyes don’t deceive you,’ she said.

At first, he could think of nothing better to say than ‘How dare you!’ He
said this twice, but as it was clearly inadequate, he stepped forward and grasped her wrists, gripping them tightly, shook her back and forth until her teeth were chattering. Not for years, not since the days of his brief marriage, had he so treated a woman and he had forgotten the overwhelming sensations to be derived from doing so. He released her, but only to hit her across her face with the back of one hand then the other.

Shaken, but unfrightened, she stared at him. ‘It was true all the time,’ she said. ‘He was really yours and you disowned him. Yet you made up that story just to have a reason for putting out the photograph and looking at it every day.’

‘Why should I want to do that? He means nothing to me.’ He hoped to disconcert her by a quick transition to indifference.

‘And his mother –
I
was supposed to be his mother.’ He laughed theatrically at the absurdity of this idea. It was a bad performance. When he had finished being doubled-up, he wiped his eyes and said: ‘Excuse me.’ The words were breathed on a sigh of exquisite enjoyment.

Coming to the door for the second time, Carrie Hurt waited after knocking. She had been surprised to hear Silcox laughing so loudly as she came along the passage. She had never heard him laugh in any way before and wondered if he had gone suddenly mad. He opened the door to her, looking grave and dignified.

‘Yes, I am coming now,’ he said.

‘They’re very busy. I was told to say if you could please …’

‘I repeat, I am coming now. Edith is unwell and we must manage for today as best we may without her. She will stay here and rest,’ he added, turning and saying this directly to Edith and stressing his even tone by a steady look. He would have locked the door upon her if Carrie had not been standing by.

Edith was then alone and began to cry. She chafed her wrists that were still reddened from his grasp, and moved her head from side to side, as if trying to evade the thoughts that crowded on her.

Carrie Hurt returned presently with a glass of brandy. ‘It can’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘He told me to leave you alone, but there might be something she wants, I thought.’

She put the glass on the table beside the bed and then went over to draw the curtains. Edith sat still, with her hands clasped in her lap, and waited for her to go.

‘My mother has these funny spells,’ Carrie told her. Then, noticing the letter lying on the bed, she asked, ‘Oh, you haven’t had any bad news, have you?’

‘Yes,’ Edith said.

She leant forward to take the glass, sipped from it and shuddered.

‘Not your
boy
?’ Carrie whispered.

Edith sighed. It seemed more than a sigh – a frightening sound, seeming to gather all the breath from her body, shuddering expelling it.

‘He isn’t ill, is he?’ Carrie asked, expecting worse – though Silcox, to be sure, had seemed controlled enough. And what had his dreadful laughter meant?

Edith was silent for a moment and took a little more brandy. Then she said, in a forced and rather high-pitched voice: ‘He is much worse than ill. He is disgraced.’

‘Oh, my God!’ said Carrie eagerly.

Edith’s eyes rested for a second on the photograph lying beside her on the bed and then she covered it with her hand. ‘For theft,’ she said, her voice strengthening, ‘thieving,’ she added.

‘Oh dear, I’m ever so sorry,’ Carrie said softly. ‘I can’t believe it. I always said what an open face he’d got. Don’t you remember – I always said that? Who could credit it? No one could. Not that I should breathe a word about it to a single soul.’

‘Mention it to whoever you like,’ Edith said. ‘The whole world will know, and may decide where they can lay the blame.’

She drained the glass, her eyes closed. Then, ‘There’s bad blood there,’ she said.

When Silcox had finished his duties, he returned, but the door was locked from inside, and there was no answer when he spoke, saying her name several times in a low voice, his head bent close to the keyhole.

He went away and walked by the river in his waiter’s clothes, stared at by all who passed him. When he returned to the hotel, he was stared at there, too. The kitchen porter seemed to be re-assessing him, looked at him curiously and spoke insolently. The still-room maid pressed back against the passage wall as he went by. Others seemed to avoid him.

The bedroom door was still shut, but no longer locked. He stood looking at the empty room, the hairbrush had gone from the dressing-table and only a few coat-hangers swung from the rail in the clothes cupboard. He picked up the brandy glass and was standing there sniffing it when Carrie Hurt, who had enjoyed her afternoon, appeared in the doorway.

‘I don’t know if you know, she’s packed and gone,’ she said, ‘and had the taxi take her to the train. I thought the brandy would pull her together,’ she went on, looking at the glass in Silcox’s hand. ‘I expect the shock unhinged her and she felt she had to go. Of course, she’d want to see him, whatever happened. It must have been her first thought. I should like to say how sorry I am. You wouldn’t wish such a thing on your worst enemy.’

He looked at her in bewilderment and then, seeing her glance, as it
swerved from his in embarrassment, suddenly checked by something out of his sight, he walked slowly round the bed and saw there what she was staring at – the waste-paper basket heaped high with her white knitting, all cut into little shreds; even the needles had been broken in two.

Before the new couple arrived, Silcox prepared to leave. Since Edith’s departure, he had spoken to no one but his customers, to whom he was as stately as ever – almost devotional he seemed in his duties, bowed over chafing-dish or bottle – almost as if his calling were sacred and he felt himself worthy of it.

On the last morning, he emptied his bedroom cupboard and then the drawers, packing with his usual care. In the bottom drawer, beneath layers of shirts, and rolled up in a damask napkin, he was horrified to discover a dozen silver-plated soup-spoons from the dining-room.

She looked grave and timid, leaving heavily against her mother’s knees, nursing a dirty teddy-bear. This evidence of her clinging nature, the shabby animal contrasted with her expensive clothes and her neatly plaited pigtails. It had comforted her when she felt apprehensive; she was lost without it. Her mother, who cared for appearances, had tried to transfer the devotion to other less shaming toys, this morning in another department of the shop had offered a white fur poodle who could sit up on its hind legs and beg. ‘Perhaps I might take it as well,’ said Deborah, who had not come down with the last fall of snow, her nanny said.

The poodle now lay wrapped up on the seat beside Mrs Daubeny and Deborah was stroking her teddy’s threadbare ears, humming softly to him as she watched the other children – one exuberantly riding a rocking-horse (for the shoe department was as full of diversions as a dentist’s waiting room), others walking obediently up and down trying new boots. At one little boy, who screamed and kicked when his feet were measured, Deborah looked with smug distaste. She had never screamed in her life.

‘Darling, do stand up,’ her mother said. ‘You’re twisting the seams of my stockings.’ Exasperation came easily to her and this showed on her face. Her daughter reminded her of her own Aunt Hester – the clinging vine, as she was called in the family. Despite the difference in age, in both of them timidity was tinged with obstinacy and compliance always had its shadow of censure. So now Deborah, removing herself at once, looked aloof.

An argument over the rocking-horse had begun between two boys. As each was ordered by his mother to give in, neither could. Rough children, Deborah thought, and she hid her teddy-bear in her muff.

‘Now, little lady,’ said the shop assistant, coming at last. ‘Let’s sit you up here beside Mummy.’ Thinking nothing of the liberty she took, she swung Deborah off her feet and put her into a chair.

‘Dancing slippers,’ her mother said. ‘Bronze kid, with rosettes.’ This kind she had worn herself as a child and she could imagine nothing better.

‘Hello, Teddy!’ the assistant said, shaking his paw. She was good with children, mothers and nannies thought, although most of the children themselves thought that her brain had softened.

‘Terribly, terribly precious,’ Mrs Daubeny murmured. ‘Although he is so d-i-r-t-y.’ The moment she had said this, she was angry with herself for being apologetic to a shop-assistant.

Soon, shiny white boxes were heaped on the floor and every kind of dancing slipper but bronze with rosettes was unpacked – white buckskin with little bows, patent leather with buckles, red kid with pink pearl buttons and gold kid with cross-over elastic. Deborah tried them all, walked up and down, and turned about. They all pinched, she said when questioned. Not very badly, though, she added, trying to please.

All the time, she kept kissing Teddy and whispering in his ear and smoothing his knitted jersey, to reassure herself. Some of the rough children were staring at her. The victorious rider of the rocking-horse, bucketing back and forth with maniacal exertion, shouted something derogatory about a pair of red shoes. Deborah, growing pale, tried to remove them. Stupid as she found grown-ups, on the whole she preferred them to other children.

‘Try the black ones again,’ her mother said. ‘What a rude little boy.’ She had seen Deborah’s look of fear and was depressed by the thought of her passing from one stage to another and never managing to stand on her own feet, always shrinking at every raised tone, never answering back, just as Hester had shrunk and remained silent. The only time she – Hester – had been known to express a definite decision was when she had said ‘I will’ on the day she had married Uncle Archie who, fortunately, had been a millionaire.

Watching her daughter, as the black slippers were put on over the cream mesh socks, Mrs Daubeny skipped in her imagination over the next fifteen or so years, deleting the unsatisfactory schooldays, finishing and coming-out, the obstinate withdrawals from all forms of competitions – muscular, intellectual, sexual – and hastily, in her mind’s eye, threw a white veil over Deborah’s composed features and dumped her down before the altar. Having her own way to the last, Deborah carried Teddy instead of stephanotis.

‘Which feel most comfortable?’ Mrs Daubeny asked. ‘Oh, Lord, Nanny, we had a dreadful morning,’ she would say when they got back. Dropping her furs on a chair in the hall, she would discard Deborah and go in search of a decanter.

Deborah looked up anxiously, as if not sure how she could best oblige. Which pair, she wondered, did her mother want her to say was most comfortable? All had associations for her with the dreaded dancing-class, with thoughts of strange children who might ask her name and prance about her and push her on the slippery floor.

‘Are
those
all right?’

She nodded.

‘You won’t, the minute we get home, say that they’re too tight?’

She shook her head.

‘Very well, then.’ Mrs Daubeny’s voice sounded grim and threatening. ‘Take your plait out of your mouth, dear.’

The assistant tied up the box and put Deborah’s hand through a loop in the string and said: ‘There you are, little lady. I hope you will wear them to some lovely parties.’