Complete Short Stories (VMC) (7 page)

‘I am his headmaster’s wife!’ Muriel thought indignantly; but her heart had cantered away.

‘She
will
be angry,’ Robert thought, as he caught sight of her. But it was she who had suggested bringing him. Robert – blame-evading – had known that Rex would behave like a bounder. Then, to his amazement, he saw that Muriel was smiling. She looked up at Rex, who shook his head teasingly, and then sank deftly back to his nestling embrace.

His eyes stopped following the girl in the green dress, for there was fun closer at hand.

‘We shouldn’t keep Mrs Brimmer waiting too long,’ Miss Despenser said. She put the scrubbing-brush down on the hall-table. ‘I must give the cat his supper before we go. Wander about. Make yourself at home.’

A great, gooseberry-eyed, striped cat walked stiffly out of the darkness, stretched, hooped up its back. ‘Naughty cat, doesn’t deserve supper. What is this? Another mess on the Soumak rug?’ She took some newspaper from the clutter on the table and bent down to wipe at the clotted fringe. The cat leant against her legs as she did so, staring up at Hester, callously detached.

‘Well, that’s that!’

But it wasn’t and, to escape the smell, Hester followed her to the kitchen, thinking: ‘Only the graves can she keep clean.’

In the kitchen, the richness of litter was as if a great cornucopia of dirty dishes and decaying food had been unloaded over tables, chairs, shelves
and stove. Flies had stopped their circling and eating and excreting for the day and now slept on the walls and ceiling. Miss Despenser tipped a cod’s head out of a saucepan on to a dish on the floor, and Hester half-faintly wished she had stayed in the hall. The cat sniffed at the boiled, clouded eyes and walked away.

‘Have you no help?’ Hester asked.

‘Not now. Gone are the days, alas! when there was a maid to do my hair. But if a woman of my age cannot dress her own hair she should be quite ashamed.’

‘But not your hair. I meant all the dishes.’

‘I have all day.’

She picked up a sticky-looking wine-glass and drank something from it. ‘That was careless of me,’ she said. ‘I hate waste. And now for Mrs Brimmer!’

‘How sweet the outside air,’ Hester thought. As they walked down the lane to the village, warmth flowed between the hedges and she felt a great lassitude and unhappiness.

Miss Despenser struck along beside her, seemed conscious of her mood, and kept glancing up. ‘Like some nauseating little dog asking for attention,’ Hester thought, and looked at the hedgerow, ignoring her.

‘If they’re not good to you at that school, I am not surprised,’ Miss Despenser said at last. ‘I didn’t like the wife. And he’s as poor a nincompoop as ever there was, I think. Nimminy pimminy; but
she’s
a thundering dunderhead, as my father used to call the Vicar. There was a beautiful panel in the drawing-room, and she has moved it away and put shelves up for her collection of mediocre china. It was a clever painting with a great deal of work in it. Detail. Rich in detail. Neptune, d’you know, simply smothered in barnacles and sea-weed; sea-serpents; tritons; dolphins. A great painstaking monsterpiece. I suppose she thought it indecent. The boys would’ve liked it, I am sure. If ever things get too much for you, you know, you must come and tuck in with me – at any time of the day or night. I have a spare room … Linda’s room.’

Hester tried not to imagine poor Miss Linda’s room (herself tucking into it), where she had lived, ‘not quite all there’ – and probably died.

‘They are good to me,’ she said.

‘I thought you seemed rather on the mopy side.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps in love?’

‘Not in love. No.’

‘Linda and I once were. With the same man fortunately. That was nice. We could discuss him at night. We always shared everything. Oh, we used to laugh, comparing notes, d’you know. If we met him … he used to ride a
grey mare called Mirabella – you see, I remember the name even – he always raised his hat. Once I was hurrying to the post with a letter in my hand and he stopped and offered to take it for me.’ She paused, reflecting on this long-ago kindness, then said: ‘Well, you
ought
to be in love, I should say. Now is the time for it. Ah, there is Mrs Brimmer on the look-out for me.’

In the lighted bar-window of the pub a huge, cardiganed woman appeared. She raised her arms and laid a cloth over a bird-cage, then receded. She did not seem to see Miss Despenser.

Over the pub doorway, Hester saw the notice – ‘Melanie Brimmer, licensed to sell Beer, Wines and Spirits.’

‘Here I am at last, Mrs Brimmer,’ Miss Despenser said, stepping into the flagged passage-way.

Mrs Brimmer, behind the bar, nodded vaguely at them. She then opened a bottle of Guinness, which seemed to flop into the glass in an exhausted way, and beside this she placed a glass of Madeira.

‘Will you have the same?’ Miss Despenser asked Hester.

‘The same as which?’

‘I like to sip at both.’

Miss Despenser began to pull at her skirts and pat herself and at last brought out a purse.

‘Oh, I should like … if I could have a sherry …’ (‘Oh, God! I didn’t know it would be a pub!’ she thought. ‘I have no money – nothing.’) Again, she felt like running.

The sherry was handed to her by the silent Mrs Brimmer.

‘And you, yourself, Mrs Brimmer?’

At last Mrs Brimmer spoke: ‘No, I won’t touch anything tonight if it’s the same to you. I had one of my turns after tea.’ She began to tap her fingers rhythmically between her lower ribs. ‘Heart-burn. Stew keeps repeating.’ She belched softly and gravely.

Hester sipped, then moved her eyes slowly round the room. Two old men played dominoes at a trestle-table. By the empty fireplace, Hugh Baseden had risen from his chair and stood waiting awkwardly to be recognised.

After the next absurd circling in the dance, Muriel faced a blank – the chain of men had thinned, broken, just in front of her as the music stopped. Robert, not far away, knowing how she hated to feel conspicuous or unclaimed even in the smallest ways, made a little gesture of frustration to her, as if to say he would have helped her if he could. She smiled and put on an exaggeratedly woebegone expression and moved aside.

‘Time to knock-off for the old noggin,’ Rex said, putting his arm through hers. He had been a fighter-pilot in the war and in certain situations tended
to resuscitate the curious
mélange
of archaisms and slang which once had been his everyday language.

‘So you were left, too?’

‘I didn’t go in. I was stooging round the perim as it were, on the lookout.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘I hope you have no objection, ma’am.’

‘None.’

After two whiskies, they went into the garden. The music came to an end with a jarring clash of cymbals, then clapping; but Rex and Muriel walked on down the terrace.

‘The landed gentry don’t do themselves half badly,’ Rex said, slapping a statue across the buttocks as they passed it. ‘Hardly a hot-bed of Bolshevism.’

Inside the marquee a man’s voice rose above the confusion of sound which then gradually sank. ‘Forty-nine!’ was shouted and repeated. After a moment, clapping broke out again.

‘Oh, that is the raffle,’ Muriel said.

Couples made their way back across the lawns towards the marquee, but she and Rex walked on.

‘Do you want to go and see if you have won a bottle of rich old ruby port or something?’ he asked. ‘Let’s sit down here, or will it spoil your dress?’

She did not even glance at the stone seat, but sat down at once.

‘Are you warm enough?’ He rearranged her lace stole round her shoulders. Her diamonds shone in the moonlight, and he put his warm hand to her throat and touched them.

‘Heavenly!’ he said. ‘You have some lovely jewels, ma’am.’

‘Perhaps he is going to steal them,’ she thought, in a flash of panic and candour with herself. ‘I must have been deluded to think he just wanted to be with me.’ But his hand turned over and lay palm down against her beating throat. ‘Or he will strangle me first,’ she thought, putting nothing past him.

‘Why did you ask me to come tonight?’ he asked. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’

She closed her eyes.

‘Do you?’ he persisted. ‘So often seen your face go smooth and expressionless at things I’ve said.’

‘I don’t understand men like you.’

‘What sort of man am I then?’

She had an impulse to flatter him, though it was strange for her to flatter any man. ‘Although I’m older than you, you make me feel inexperienced and immature.’

‘It wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘You were just plainly looking down your nose at me, ma’am.’

‘Don’t call me “ma’am”,’ she whispered.

‘What then?’

For a moment she didn’t answer and then murmured, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Mustn’t call you “Muriel”. Not respectful in one so young, so junior. Mrs Evans, then?’

He slid his hand down her throat and under her armpit. She began to tremble, and at this he leant forward and kissed her.

‘I might call you “darling”,’ he suggested. ‘I wonder how that would sound.’

‘This is absurd,’ she said shakily. ‘We must go back.’

‘Back to the marquee, or back to where we were before tonight?’

‘Both.’

‘Just as you say, my dear.’ He moved away from her, but she did not move. He let the humiliation of this sink into her for a moment, then took her hands. Her fingers twisted restlessly in his, but fastening and not freeing themselves. ‘Nothing so avid as a married woman,’ he thought complacently and began to kiss her and embrace her in ways of the most extravagant vulgarity such as she had not encountered outside literature.

In the Hand and Flowers, political discussion, though not really raging, was of enough strength to redden cheeks.

There were two periods of acrimony during the evening, Mrs Brimmer knew. The first was soon after opening-time, when the regulars came in fresh from the six o’clock news and such disasters as it had announced. Later, some of the contentious went home to their supper: others stayed and played darts. By eight o’clock, a different clientele, more genial, out for the evening, had begun to arrive. Politics, at this stage, were tabu. Towards closing-time, however, geniality might wear thin and argument erupt in one place after another. Mrs Brimmer, leaning on the bar, or going ponderously down into the cellar to bring up the half-slopped pots of beer, was always brief or silent unless describing her indigestion, but towards ten o’clock she would sometimes say abruptly: ‘I’m Labour anyway,’ as in a few minutes she would say ‘Time now, gentlemen.’ Mrs Brimmer held one or two unexpected opinions which were all the same ground inextricably into her personality. Another of her beliefs which she often made clear was that women should not go into public houses. She served them silently and grudgingly and would have horse-whipped every one, she often said. She really did not approve of drinking at all, apart from the gin-and-pep she sometimes took to shift her wind. However, having lived in the pub as a wife, she duly carried on as a widow.

‘What they want is to have us all equal,’ Miss Despenser said, ‘and the only way to do that is to level everyone
down
. Not to raise everyone
up
. No, it’s down, down, down all the time. When we’re finally in the gutter, then we shall have true democracy.’

‘But surely …’ said Hugh Baseden.

‘When I was young everyone was better off and do you know why?’

‘Well …’

‘Because we all knew our proper places. No one was ashamed to serve. Why, my mother’s maid was like a sister to her. Two sisters. Peas in a pod.’

‘That’s right.’ Mrs Brimmer nodded.

‘But when she had helped your mother to dress, she didn’t go to the dance with her. She stayed and tidied the bedroom,’ Hester said. She glanced at Hugh, who looked gravely back in agreement. Some of his gravity, however, was his anxiety at Hester’s having drunk too much.

‘She didn’t want to go. That is what I am saying. She didn’t want to go. That is why she was so happy.’

‘My mother was in service,’ one of the dominoes players said. ‘Happiest days of her life, she reckoned. No worries. All found.’

‘There you are, you see,’ Miss Despenser said.

‘It’s wrong to be happy like that … not to have your own life,’ Hester said. At the back of her mind, she felt a great sense of injustice somewhere, of sacrifices which ought not to be asked or made. ‘Kow-towing,’ she murmured and, looking flushed and furious, sipped her sherry.

‘Kow-towing fiddlededee,’ Miss Despenser said. ‘You talk as if the educated classes exist for nothing.’

Mrs Brimmer drew her blouse away from her creased chest, glanced down mysteriously, blowing gently between her breasts, then fanned herself. ‘I hear Charlie’s gone,’ she said.

‘He’s gone, has he?’ asked the gaitered gamekeeper. His setters stretched by the fire, blinking their bloody eyes, nosing their private parts.

‘So Les Salter said when he came with his club money.’

‘I said to the missus I reckon old Charlie’s going at last. I said that only last night when I saw the lamp upstairs.’

‘That’s right.’

‘When was that?’

‘This morning. They sent along for Mrs Brown about eight o’clock. He’d just gone then.’

‘Would you like a drink?’ Hugh asked Miss Despenser.

‘Most kind.’

‘What may I get you?’

‘Mrs Brimmer knows.’

He stood awkwardly before Hester. ‘The same?’ ‘If I take her back drunk,
I take the blame, too, I suppose,’ he thought. To his relief she shook her head.

‘How are you getting home?’ he asked quietly.

‘I shall look after her,’ Miss Despenser said, and she laid her hand on Hester’s arm. Hester looked down at it with loathing. Under the shiny, loose skin the high veins seemed to writhe and knot themselves as if separately alive. Nothing was said. He turned to the bar and watched Mrs Brimmer reluctantly pouring out the drinks.

‘He is rather familiar,’ Miss Despenser said. ‘After all, he is not quite in the same position as you. You could spend the night with me if you are nervous.’

To be saved for one night from her dreams would be so very wonderful, she thought. She and Hester could sit up until morning and talk. Her dreams were usually distressing. There was one in which her father kept entering the library, always from the same door, crossing the room, disappearing, only to come in again in the same way, with the dread inevitability of dreams. Then there was the one in which her mother told her to pull down her clothes, but her skirts shrank and shrank. Because of her nightmares, she had tried to sleep in the daytime, for bad dreams come in the dark; but to be awake in the quiet house – especially as it seemed to be only
just
quiet – was frightening, too.