Complete Short Stories (VMC) (72 page)

‘I met his wife once,’ Pat said. ‘She came to call for him and they went out to lunch. Very dowdy. I’ll give you a hand,’ she added, and stirred slightly as Hilda began to stack up plates.

‘No, you sit still. Make the most of it while I’m here.’ But Hilda had begun to believe that she would never go. She would make herself so useful.

‘I wish I had your figure,’ Pat said, watching her mother moving neatly about the room. She said it in a grudging voice, as if Hilda had meanly kept something for herself which she, Pat, would have liked to possess. It was not and had not been the pattern of their lives for this to happen.

Hilda blushed with guilty pleasure. There was something so sedentary about her daughter – not only because of her office job, for as a child she had sat about all the time, reading comics, chewing her handkerchief, twisting her braided hair, very often just lethargically sulking. At this moment, she was slumped back in her chair, eating a banana, the skin of it hanging down in strips over her hand.

‘I might bring Mavis Willis back tomorrow evening,’ she said. ‘She’s thinking of sharing the flat with me. Let her have a look round and make up her mind.’ She got up and went to the area window and looked meditatively up at the railings.

‘Quiet here, isn’t it?’ she said. She stayed there for a long time, just
gazing out of the window, and Hilda, clearing the table, wondered what she was thinking.

Mavis Willis was a young woman of much refinement, and Hilda, watching her eat her supper daintily, was taken by her manners. ‘A rather old-fashioned type of girl,’ Hilda thought. If she had been asked to, she could not have chosen anyone more suitable to share the flat with her daughter. This one would not lead her into bad company or have wild parties; but Hilda had not been asked, and it was a disappointment to her that the question had not arisen.

When Mavis had been shown round the flat before supper, something in her manner had surprised Hilda; there was a sense of effort she could not define. The girl had gushed without showing much interest, had given the bathroom the briefest glance and had not opened the cupboard where she would be hanging her clothes – the first thing any normal young woman would do.

Now, at supper, she gushed in the same way about Hilda’s cooking. Pat’s compulsive grumbling about Mr Wharton was resumed, and Mavis joined in. She referred to him as ‘H.W.’ – which sounded more officey, Hilda decided, listening humbly.

‘One of these days, you’ll find yourself out of a job,’ she told Pat, who had repeated one of her tarter rebukes to her employer – ‘I gave him one of my looks and I said to him, “That’ll be the day,” I said. “When you get back before three o’clock. We’ll hang the flags out that day,” I said to him.’

Mavis took off her spectacles and began to polish them on a clean handkerchief she had kept tucked in her cuff. She looked down her shiny nose, smiling a little. Her face was pale and glistened unhealthily, and she reminded Hilda of the languid, indoors young women who had sat all day – long days then – in the milliner’s workroom, stitching buckram and straw and flowers, hardly moving, sadly cooped up in the stuffy room. She, in the shop itself, had seemed as free as air.

Mavis put back her spectacles and rearranged her hair, and at once she appeared less secretive. She insisted on helping Hilda to wash the dishes, while Pat spent the time looking for cigarettes and then for her lighter.

‘I hope Pat won’t leave all the work to you, if you come,’ Hilda said.

‘Oh, she won’t.’ Mavis wiped a glass and held it up to the light. ‘Once we’re on our own, she’ll be enthusiastic. You know, she’ll feel it’s more hers and want to take a pride in it. Of course, it’s been wonderful for her, having you to settle her in and get it looking so nice. Simply wonderful. You must have done marvels.’ She looked vaguely round the kitchen.

‘Well, it was in rather a pickle,’ Hilda said warmly. ‘All I hope is you won’t just live on tinned food.’

‘You can rest assured we won’t.’

‘I’m afraid Pat hasn’t been brought up to be very domesticated. I did try, but I ended up doing things myself, because it was quicker.’

‘Well, it always happens. I know I’d be the same.’

Pat, through the doorway, in the living-room, was looking for an ashtray. She moved clumsily about, knocked into something and swore. Hilda and Mavis glanced at one another and smiled, as if over a child’s head.

‘What did you think of her?’ Pat asked, as soon as she got back from walking with Mavis to the Tube station.

‘A nice girl. I thought slightly enigmatic,’ said Hilda, who took a pride in finding the right word.

‘Well, she’s decided to move in next Monday. I said I thought you’d be going back at the weekend.’

‘I might stay and clear up on Monday morning. Leave you a little supper, her first night,’ Hilda said, and pretended she did not hear a resigned intake of breath from Pat.

‘That girl Mavis,’ Hilda was thinking, ‘perhaps she’s no intention of coming; perhaps she’s wasting Pat’s time.’ Yet she sensed something arranged between them, something she could not understand. She used the word ‘duplicity’ in her mind.

They began to get ready for bed, and when Pat, stout in her dressing-gown, came from the bathroom into the bedroom, she found the room in darkness and her mother peeping through the curtains of the French windows. ‘What are you doing, Mother?’ she asked, switching on the light.

As guilty as a little girl caught out of bed, Hilda made for hers.

‘I really love London,’ she said. ‘All that panorama, at night, and yet it’s so quiet. I sat out there this afternoon for a bit, and it was so peaceful, like being in the country. It’s been like a lovely holiday here.’

‘It’s been good of you to come,’ Pat said, in a cautious voice.

When she had switched the light off, her mother turned on her side, put her hands under her cheek, and with faint purring, puffing sounds, fell lightly asleep. Pat lay on her back like a figure on a tomb, and presently began to snore.

On Hilda’s last day, it set in wet, and she could not go into the garden again. She went out shopping in the rain, said good-bye to the shop-assistants she had made friends of, and thought how extraordinary it was that the little High Street had become so familiar in such a short time. The view was obscured by mist. But the holiday feeling persisted and at twelve o’clock she entered the saloon bar of the little pub by the water trough and bought herself a glass of sherry. She had never been alone into a bar before,
and was gratified that no one seemed surprised to see her do so. The barmaid was warmly chatty, the landlord courteous; an old man by the fire did not even raise his head. A stale beery smell pervaded the room, as if everything – the heavy curtains, the varnished furniture, even perhaps the old man by the fire – was gently fermenting.

‘So cosy,’ said Hilda.

‘A day like this,’ the barmaid agreed, scalloping a damp cloth along the bar.

‘A fire’s nice.’

‘It makes a difference. You live hereabouts?’

Hilda told her about Pat and the flat, and Mavis Willis.

‘Nice to have a mother,’ the barmaid said.

‘I think she appreciates it. But I’ve enjoyed myself. It’s made a lovely break. I’d like a bottle of sherry to take away, if you please. I’ll leave it as a surprise for the girls – warm them up when they come in wet from work.’

‘Well,’ said the barmaid, wrapping the bottle in a swirl of pink paper, ‘let’s hope we see you when you’re in these parts again.’

‘Good-morning, madam. Thank you,’ the landlord added and Hilda, with her heavy shopping basket, stepped out into the rain. How very pleasant, she was thinking, rather muzzily, as she walked down the hill. The only pity was not having made friends with the people on the first floor. Glimpses of the toddler she had had from time to time, heard his little footsteps running overhead; but had not had a word with his mother. That had been a disappointment.

She made herself a cup of tea when she had hung up her wet coat. The flat was so dark that afternoon that she had to switch on the lights. The rain seemed to keep her company, as a coal fire does the very lonely – the sound of it falling softly into the ferns in the garden, or with a sharp, ringing noise on the
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dustbin lids outside the door. She could hear the splashing of cars going by on the road above the window, changing gear to take the hill.

Although she felt sad, packing her case, she cheered up when she was putting the finishing touches to the supper table, leaving the sherry on a tray with a note and two glasses. She watered the double daisy and added a reminder about it to her note. At three o’clock, she put on her still damp coat and was ready to go to the station. She locked the door and hid the key under the dustbin as they had arranged and, feeling melancholy, in tune with the afternoon, walked with head bowed, carrying her heavy suitcase up the hill to the Underground station.

At four o’clock the rain suddenly stopped. Already on her way back to Nottingham in the train, Hilda watched the watery sunshine on the fields and the slate roofs drying. She reminded herself that she was always sad on
train journeys. It’s a sensation of fantasy, she decided, having searched for and found the word.

The sunshine was short-lived. The dark purple clouds soon gathered over again and in London, crowds surging towards stations, queueing for buses, were soaked. The pavements steamed in the hissing rain, and taxis were unobtainable, although commissionaires under huge umbrellas stood at kerbs, whistling shrilly and vainly whenever one appeared in the distance.

In a positive deluge, Pat and Mr Wharton drove up to Number Twenty. He, too, had an umbrella, and held it carefully over her as they went down the garden path and round the side of the house.

‘
Excusez-moi
,’ she said, stooping to get the key from under the dustbin.

‘Could be a nice view on a nice day,’ he said.

‘Could be,’ she agreed, putting the key in the door.

‘Was this when you were pretty?’ William asked, holding the photograph in both hands and raising his eyes to the old lady’s with a look of near certainty.

‘I was thought to be beautiful,’ she said; and she wondered: ‘How long ago was that?’ Who had been the last person to comment upon her beauty, and how many years ago? She thought that it might have been her husband, from loyalty or from still seeing what was no longer there. He had been dead for over twenty years and her beauty had not, by any means, been the burden of his dying words.

The photograph had faded to a pale coffee-colour, but William could distinguish a cloud of fair hair, a rounded face with lace to the chin, and the drooping, sad expression so many beautiful women have. Poor Mrs May, he thought.

The photographs were all jumbled up in a carved sandalwood box lined with dusty felt. There was a large one, mounted on stiff cardboard, of the big house where Mrs May had lived as a child. It had been pulled down between the wars and in its grounds was built a housing estate, a row of small shops by the bus-stop and a children’s playground, with swings and slides. William could look out of the narrow window of the old gardener’s lodge where Mrs May lived now and watch the shrieking toddlers climbing the frames, swinging on the swings. He never went to the playground himself now that he was six.

‘It was all fields,’ Mrs May would often say, following his glance. ‘All fields and parkland. I used to ride my pony over it. It was a different world. We had two grooms and seven indoor servants and four gardeners. Yet we were just ordinary people. Everybody had such things in those days.’

‘Did every child have a pony?’ William asked.

‘All
country
children had one,’ she said firmly.

His curiosity endeared him to her. It was so long since anyone had asked her a question and been interested in the answer. His curiosity had been the beginning of their friendship. Going out into her overgrown little garden one afternoon, she had found him leaning against the rickety fence staring at her house, which was round in shape and had attracted his attention. It
was made of dark flint and had narrow, arched windows and an arched door studded with big square-headed nails. A high twisted chimney-stack rose from the centre of the roof. Surrounded by the looped and tangled growth of the garden – rusty, black-leaved briars and crooked apple trees – the place reminded the boy of a menacing-looking illustration by Arthur Rackham in a book he had at home. Then the door had opened and the witch herself had come out, leaning on a stick. She had untidy white hair and a face cross-hatched with wrinkles; but her eyes weren’t witch-like, not black and beady and evil, but large and milky blue and kind, though crows had trodden about them.

‘How can your house be round inside?’ William asked, in his high, clear voice. She looked about her and then saw his red jersey through the fence and, above it, his bright face with its straight fringe of hair. ‘How can rooms be round?’ he asked. He came up to the broken gate and stood there.

Beyond a row of old elm trees which hid the lodge from the main road, a double-decker bus went by, taking the women from the estate to Market Swanford for their afternoon’s shopping. When it had gone, William turned back to the old lady and said: ‘Or are they like this shape?’ He made a wedge with his hands.

‘You had better come and see,’ she said. He opened the gate at once and went in. ‘She might pop me into the oven,’ he thought.

One room was half a circle, the other two were quarters. All three were dark and crammed with furniture. A mouse streaked across the kitchen floor. The sink was stacked with dirty china, the table littered with odds and ends of food in torn paper wrappings.

‘Do you live here alone?’ he asked.

‘Except for the mice; but I should prefer to be alone.’

‘You are more like a hermit than a witch.’

‘And would rather be,’ she said.

He examined a dish of stewed fruit which had a greenish-grey mantling of mould.

‘Pooh! It smells like beer,’ he said.

‘I meant to throw it away, but it seemed such a criminal waste when the natives are starving everywhere.’