Complete Short Stories (VMC) (74 page)

To be reprimanded for what he had not wanted to do, for what he looked on as a duty, did not vex William. It was the kind of thing that happened to him a great deal and he let it go, rather than tie himself up in explanations.

‘You did hear what I said?’ his father asked.

‘Yes, I heard.’

‘Your mother has her reasons. You can leave it at that.’

It happened that he obeyed his parents. His father one day passing Mrs May’s garden came on her feeding her birds there. He raised his hat and saw, as she glanced up, her ruined face, bewildered eyes, and was stirred by pity as he walked on.

As the nights grew colder, Mrs May was forced to light a fire and she wandered about the building-site collecting sawn-off pieces of batten and wood-shavings. She met William there once, playing with another boy. He returned her greeting, answered her questions unwillingly, knowing that his companion had ducked his head, trying to hide a smile. When she had wandered on at last, there were more questions from his friend. ‘Oh, she’s only an old witch I know,’ he replied.

The truth was that he could hardly remember how once he had liked to go to see her. Then he had tired of her stories about her childhood, grew bored with her photographs, became embarrassed by her and realised, in an adult way, that the little house was filthy. One afternoon, on his way home from school, he had seen her coming out of the butcher’s shop ahead of him and had slackened his pace, almost walked backwards not to overtake her.

She was alone again, except for the birds in the daytime, the mice at night. The deep winter came and the birds grew fewer and the mice increased. The cold weather birds, double their summer size, hopped dottily about the crisp, rimed grass, jabbing their beaks into frozen puddles, bewildered as refugees. Out she hurried, first thing in the mornings, to break the ice and scatter crumbs. She found a dead thrush and grieved over it. ‘Oh, Bertha, one of ours,’ she mourned.

Deep snow came and she was quite cut off – the garden was full of strange shapes, as if heaped with pillows and bolsters, and the birds made their dagger tracks across the drifts. She could not open her door.

Seeing the untrodden path, William’s father, passing by, went to borrow a spade from the nearest house and cleared the snow from the gateway to the door. He saw her watching from a window and, when at last she could, she opened the door to thank him.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who you are,’ she began.

‘I live in the old stables up on the hill.’

‘Then I know your little boy. He used to visit me. It was very kind of you to come to my rescue.’

William’s father returned the spade and then walked home, feeling sad and ashamed. ‘Oh, dear, that house,’ he said to his wife. ‘It is quite filthy – what I glimpsed of it. You were perfectly right. Someone ought to do something to help her.’

‘She should help herself. She must have plenty of money – all this building land.’

‘I think she misses William.’

‘It was just a passing thing,’ said his wife, who was a great one herself for passing things. ‘He simply lost interest.’

‘Lost innocence, perhaps. The truth is, I suppose, that children grow up and begin to lose their simple vision.’

‘The truth is,’ she said tartly, ‘that if people don’t wash themselves they go unloved.’ Her voice was cold and disdainful. She had summed up many other lives than Mrs May’s and knew the tone to use.

The thaw began, then froze in buds upon the red twigs of the dog-wood in Mrs May’s untidy hedge. The hardening snow was pitted with drips from the branches.

Mrs May was afraid to venture on her frozen path beyond her doorway, and threw her remaining bits of bread from there. There was no one to run an errand for her. The cold drove her inside, but she kept going to the window to see if the ice were melting. Instead, the sky darkened. Both sky and earth were iron.

‘It’s my old bones,’ she said to Bertha. ‘I’m afraid for my old bones.’

Then she saw William running and sliding on the ice, his red scarf flying, his cheeks bright. He fell, and scrambled up, laughing.

‘It’s falling I’m afraid of,’ Mrs May whispered to the window-pane. ‘My old bones are too brittle.’

She went to the front door and opened it. Standing shivering on the step, she called to William. He seemed not to hear and she tried to raise her voice. He took a run and, with his arms flung up above his head, slithered across a patch of ice. He shouted to someone out of sight and dashed forward.

Mrs May shut the door again. ‘Someone will come,’ she told Bertha
briskly. She straightened her father’s sword suspended above the fireplace and bustled about, trying to tidy the room ready for an unknown visitor. ‘There’s no knowing what might happen. Anyone might call,’ she murmured.

The outskirts of a town are nothing at all, neither town nor village. No focal point provides a starting-place nor draws back those who have gone, who, indeed, experience no nostalgia for the built-over hillsides, the corner shop or the bus-stop. For the rest, the wind blows hard, there are few trees or birds – certainly no owls at night – and on summer evenings before the nine o’clock news a continuous clatter of mowing machines is heard; cheerful or dreary according to one’s mood. Always dreary to Iris.

On bad mornings, as she washed up by the kitchen window, she could see the sides and backs of other bungalows and their doors would be shut fast beyond the sheets of rain which fell and fell over the slate roofs and into the rows of cabbages. But on bright mornings, the doors would fly open like the doors of those little weather-houses, and women in coloured overalls would pop out and shake mats, go from one fence to another for a chat, clean shoes on the back doorstep, hang out washing and go down the garden with a basket for runner beans. And from all their wirelesses would come the sounds of the cinema organ.

‘Oh, God!’ Iris would cry, wringing out the dish-cloth and hanging it at the edge of the sink. She was fond of music and naturally the cinema organ, even without its being multiplied, was irritating to her. Her love for – say – the Archduke Trio was only to be increased by having someone to observe her loving it. Her husband had grown too familiar with this sight not to be able to marvel at it and, while she was alone with him, she had been known to sew, or even read, through a programme of chamber music, without tears coming once.

It was through – or with the aid of – the Archduke Trio that she came to know Brin. He waited at the bus-stop outside the next house every day, a slight dark young man with a music case. Every day at three o’clock. She played a little trick on him with Beethoven on the gramophone in the front room. She was always playing little tricks and this was the first which had ever come off. He edged along the privet-hedge, stood there outside, looking down at the pavement, as if listening to some music inside himself. The bus came and filled and went. He stood there frowning.

When he realised about the bus, he looked round in perplexity, and saw
her standing at the window. He came to the gate and up the path to ask her about the next one.

‘Not for half an hour.’

‘Oh.’ He looked away down the road. ‘I was …’

‘I know.’

It was the end of the record. The gramophone clicked.

‘Come in …’ she said, for she was from London and did not know how to behave in a provincial suburb. ‘Come and listen to the rest.’

Wherever
he
may have come from, he agreed and, before he took himself off to play – help play – ‘Selections from The Geisha’ and ‘Bittersweet’ in a café, he had heard the rest of the Archduke and begun again at the beginning, seen the tears fill her eyes to the brim, been vaguely stirred by her, seen some likeness to Emily Brontë, smoked one or two cigarettes and promised with great willingness to come again for the Brandenburg Concertos. He was half an hour late at work, and the pianist frowned at him over the music of his fourth solo.

The early afternoon is not a time for intimacies or great revelations of one soul to another. Not before four o’clock and only then in winter. Yet this was all they had. In the mornings he played for coffee-drinkers – in any case, the morning is useless – then again at tea-time and then at half-past seven for those who dined. Her husband, a vague and agreeable man, was home early in the evenings, correcting exercise books or staring at his tomato plants or smoking. But every day now, for Iris, there was something to look forward to, her boredom was cut into by another’s admiration.

‘… You know, the one painted by Branwell, which is cracked all over like old pottery,’ said Brin Morris, laying ‘Portsmouth Point’ on the turntable.

‘Oh, how unkind!’ she cried, for she was enormously pleased. ‘I always think she looks cross –
and
crossed-eyed.’

His eyes adored her as he wound the gramophone (she was a snob about the other kind) and, for he was very young, he said: ‘She looks proud and fine. Even painted by a drunkard.’

‘You’re doing your hair a new way,’ her husband observed that night.

‘Yes.’ She looked into the mirror above the mantelpiece and arranged a lock of hair on either side of her face. ‘Do you like it?’

‘All right for a change.’ He thought it looked absurd, snaky and greasy; but knew it wouldn’t be for long.

It began to be autumn, a dull time with a few leaves coming down off the tress and a bonfire at the end of each strip of garden. The gramophone played less and less. It was always put out ready, but sometimes he never seemed to get beyond screwing in the new needle.

She knew he loved her, but his self-control was abominable. Once she
went down into the town and walked to the restaurant where he played. This mortified him so that she promised never to go again. ‘It is bad enough playing such trash, you see,’ he tried to explain, ‘but for you to hear it … I can’t …’

‘All right.’

His shoes needed mending and his trousers were frayed. She was touched by him and vowed to uphold his pride. He saw in her a soul in miserable captivity.

‘Your husband …’ he began one day. Her eyes looked wild in the second before she covered them up with her hands.

This was another little trick that worked. He was on his side in no time, begging her pardon, and kissing her, for she had not covered her mouth.

He had uneasy thoughts playing his ’cello – a poor instrument it was – that afternoon. Her husband – though she had not actually said so – was evidently coarse-grained, a drunkard who could not even paint, a lecher, no doubt. He bent darkly over his ’cello, like a witch drawing up endless evil from a well. They were playing ‘To a Wild Rose’ – quite a favourite.

Meanwhile, Iris had dried her eyes and paced the room like a caged animal. When her husband came home they had boiled eggs for tea, and went to the pictures. On the way home, they stopped at the corner pub for gin and ginger ale. It was warm and cheery there. A pleasant evening, if not memorable.

On one Sunday which grew dark around eight o’clock, her husband went down to a school concert. The school was evacuated at the beginning of the war; but, even in London, she had nothing to do with it and certainly would not go to its concerts. This evening Brin came for her. On Sundays he had his holiday. He had arrived at the stage now, the neighbours noted, when he entered the back door without knocking. She was in the bedroom. ‘No!’ she cried tensely, barring his way. ‘Not in there!’ He saw her crucified upon the marriage-bed, and great vials of pity were tipped and spilled within him. ‘Let’s get out of this house!’ he cried.

They walked to where the rough road stopped and the fields began. Once the road was to have continued across these fields, heaven knew how far, but then the war had come. The foundations of the little bungalows had been dug out, but now were overgrown by the fine uneven grass. They climbed into one of these. ‘This is my dining-room,’ she cried, trying to be gay, and standing on a little patch – too small to be a room, surely? They sat down. Across the allotments came thin voices and drifts of bonfire-smoke. The moon – the harvest moon, he said – rose clear of the curd-like clouds. In the darkening grass were wild snapdragon and scabious flowers like white lace.

‘This is the only house we have,’ he said. ‘One without walls or roof or floor.’

‘It cannot imprison us then,’ she cried.

After a while, he said: ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

‘Because he’d follow me – and I’m afraid.’

It was then, probably, that he decided to kill him.

‘Let’s not discuss him,’ she begged. ‘It is too lovely here.’

She always took his love fiercely and crossly as if she bore him some grudge. He mistook this for passion. In a way, she did hate him for this affair, the first in which she had been unfaithful to her husband, though not the first time she had considered the idea. She was, in any case, incapable of passion, standing too far apart, as if a witness.

‘Let’s not discuss him,’ she had cried, her fingers tugging, snapping up grass, plucking at harebells. But from that time on, they did discuss him a great deal. From the slack-seeming conversation Brin collected many facts to be sorted over methodically when he was alone. Some details – such as what time he rose (she could not mention the cup of tea he always brought to her then), what he taught at school and thought about the war, were useless. But others – such as the times of leaving the house and his work, which way he walked, what he did in the evenings – were stored carefully.

‘Which pub?’ she cried in astonishment. ‘Oh, we … he … always drinks at home.’ That is always worse.

At night, Brin, wakeful with his new obsession, sorted and rejected. The only time he would ever be alone would be going to and fro between home and school, across the fields as a quick cut, and soon he would be doing it in the dark twice a week, when he stayed on for an extra class.

Iris found that she was often bored now with Brin. They talked no more of music or the spirit or Emily Brontë. She parted her hair at the side again and felt that the Archduke Trio might never have been. He still made love, however, in a tender and grateful way, and his eyes, full of admiration and pride, would travel over her face.