Complete Short Stories (VMC) (83 page)

She looked away shyly. There had been almost a note of praise in his voice. ‘Tomorrow,’ she thought. ‘I hope I don’t cry.’

At the station, it was Benny who cried. All the morning he had talked about his mother, how she would be waiting for him at Paddington station. Laura kept their thoughts fixed on the near future.

Now they sat on a bench on the sunny platform, wearing their name-labels, holding bunches of wilting flowers, and Laura looked at her watch and wished the minutes away. As usual, she was too early. Then she saw Benny shut his eyes quickly, but not in time to stop two tears falling. She was surprised and dismayed. She began to talk brightly, but neither replied. Benny kept his head down, and Sep stared ahead. At last, to her relief, the signal fell, and soon the train came in. She handed them over to the escort, and they sat down in the compartment without a word. Benny gazed out of the further window, away from her, rebukingly; and Sep’s face was expressionless.

As the train began to pull out, she stood waving and smiling; but they would not glance in her direction, though the escort was urging them to do so, and setting an example. When at last Laura moved away, her head and throat were aching, and she had such a sense of failure and fatigue that she hardly knew how to walk back to the car.

It was not Mrs Milner’s morning, and the house was deadly quiet. Life, noise, laughter, bitter quarrelling had gone out of it. She picked up the cricket-bat from the lawn and went inside. She walked about, listlessly tidying things, putting them back in their places. Then fetched a damp cloth and sat down at the piano and wiped the sticky, dirty keys.

She was sitting there, staring in front of her, clasping the cloth in her lap, when Harold came in.

‘I’m taking the afternoon off,’ he said. ‘Let’s drive out to Minster Lovell for lunch.’

She looked at him in astonishment. On his way across the room to fetch his tobacco pouch, he let his hand rest on her shoulder for a moment.

‘Don’t fret,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve got them for life now.’

‘Benny cried.’

‘Extraordinary thing. Shall we make tracks?’

She stood up and closed the lid of the keyboard. ‘It was awfully nice of you to come back, Harold.’ She paused, thinking she might say more; but he was puffing away, lighting his pipe with a great fuss, as if he were not listening. ‘Well, I’ll go and get ready,’ she said.

‘England was like this when I was a child,’ Gwenda said. She was fifteen years older than Polly, and had had a brief, baby’s glimpse of the gay twenties – though, as an infant, could hardly have been really conscious of their charms.

It was France – the middle of France – which so much resembled that unspoilt England. In the hedgerows grew all the wild flowers that urbanisation, ribbon-development and sprayed insecticides had turned into rarities, delights of the past, in the South of England where Gwenda and Polly lived.

Polly had insisted on Gwenda’s stopping the car so that she could get out and add to her bunch some new blue flower she was puzzling over. She climbed the bank to get a good specimen and stung her bare legs on nettles. Gwenda sat in the car with her eyes closed.

Polly, having spat into her palm and rubbed it on her smarting legs, began to search for the blue flower in
Fleurs de Prés et des Bois
, instead of looking at the map. Crossroads were on them suddenly and she had no directions to give. Gwenda pulled to the side of the road, having taken the wrong turning, and reached for the map, screwing in her monocle. As she was studying it, frowning, or looking up at the sun for her bearings, Polly said, ‘I suppose it’s a sort of campanula. What on earth does “
lancéolées
” mean? Oh, I
wish
I’d brought my proper flower book from home.’

‘It’s
this
road we want,’ Gwenda said, following it on the map with her nicotined finger. ‘If you could remember, we turn off
here
, and about eight kilometres further on bear right.’ She handed back the map. Polly had scarcely glanced at it, but she took it obediently, although she could never read it unless they were travelling north, which at present they were not.

‘And when we’ve surmounted
that
little problem, you’d better look in the Michelin for somewhere for tonight,’ Gwenda added, and began to wrench the car round grimly, as if it were a five-ton lorry.

It was ten years since she had been in this part of France; with her husband then. They had travelled along the Dordogne valley, from the mouth to the source, crossing from bank to bank. It was in the year that he died, and she remembered with a turn of her heart, how, as she was driving, she
would give secret glances at him, knowing him so well that he could never hide the signs of pain coming on – the difference in breathing, the slight shifting in his seat, the hand going involuntarily to his chest, and then at once returning to his lap to grip hold of the map. He could read maps in whichever direction they were heading.

Polly had put the flower book into the dashboard pocket and had her head in the Michelin guide. She was dreadfully short-sighted, but would not wear spectacles, however much Gwenda nagged her. She would not even use the subterfuge of lenses in sunglasses, which had been suggested.

‘There’s one with two pairs of those scissors at a place called – I think it’s Sebonac.’

‘Selonac,’ Gwenda said. ‘How much?’

‘I can’t see.’

‘I’ll have a look later. Can you find it on the map?’

‘I already have,’ Polly said with pride.

Gwenda was always fussing about money – heading Polly off the
menu gastronomique
on to the eleven-franc one. Although it was Polly’s money, Polly sometimes thought.

Gwenda’s husband had left her poorly provided for, and she had taken a job managing an hotel until Polly’s mother, her own godmother, had begged her to look after Polly,
poor
Polly she always called her, and administer her affairs. This was before the operation from which she did not recover (as the doctor put it, but Gwenda did not), ‘if anything should happen’, as she put
that
. Polly was left very comfortable indeed. Long ago, people had thought Gwenda’s parents clever to have chosen so rich a slight acquaintance to be Gwenda’s godmother.

As soon as Mrs Hervey had died, Gwenda moved into her place; into the house in Surrey – red brick with a green dome, monkey-puzzle trees and dark banks of rhododendrons, everywhere smelling of pine trees. Polly was acquiescent. She could not have managed on her own. This was clear to everyone. And at twenty-seven it was thought unlikely that she would marry. In spite of the solid worth of her position, men seemed uncertain with her, found her scatter-brained and childish conversation maddening, wondered among themselves if she were really all there. She was like a lanky child with her pale, freckled face, soft, untidy hair, her awkwardness. She was forever tripping over carpets or walking into doors. She got on people’s nerves.

The responsibility of having quite a little heiress on her hands was one Gwenda felt she could shoulder. She was ready to deal with impoverished widowers or ambitious younger men; but few came their way in Surrey. Fork luncheons for women was their manner of entertaining, or an evening’s bridge which Polly did not join in. She would sit apart, sticking
foreign stamps crookedly into an album. Besides stamps, she collected Victorian bun pennies, lustre jugs, fans, sea-shells, match-boxes and pressed wild flowers. There was a pile of albums full of pressed flowers, and what she seemed to love best about being in France was the chance of collecting different varieties. She hoped that Selonac, when they arrived there, would have more surprises. In a foreign country there was always the delight of not knowing what she might discover next – some rare strange orchid, perhaps, that she had never found before.

But Selonac was, at first sight, a disappointment – a few straggling houses on either side of the road. They were nearly through it when they saw a sign – ‘
Auberge
’ – pointing down a lane to the right. ‘There!’ shouted Polly, trying to be efficient, but Gwenda was already turning the corner. They came to a little cobbled
place
, with a church and a baker’s shop and a garage and the
auberge
– with one or two umbrellaed tables and some box trees in tubs on the pavement before it.

‘I’ll go and ask,’ Gwenda said. She always did all the fixing-up, while Polly sat mooning in the car over her wild flowers, or squinting shortsightedly at the
guide Michelin
, looking up for the twentieth time the difference between a black bath-tub and a white.

When Gwenda came back, she was followed by a young man, who dragged their suitcases out of the boot and lurched back into the darkness of the hotel with them.

It was a very dark and silent hotel. Polly felt depressed, as she went upstairs after Gwenda. She was never asked for her opinions about where they should stay. They never shared a room, and Gwenda always told her which was hers – and it was never the one nearest the bathroom or with the best view. She was glad that sharing a room was not one of Gwenda’s economies. Gwenda snored like a man. She had heard her through many a thin wall.

This time they had the same view from their windows – across an orchard to a row of silvery trees which looked as if they bordered a stream. There was very little difference between the two rooms. Madame Peloux, the proprietress, showed Polly and Gwenda both, as if there were any chance of Polly making a choice; and then she began to chivvy her son, Jean, about the luggage. He was a clumsy, silent young man, and seemed to be sulking. His mother nagged him monotonously, as if from an old habit.

Like some wine, Polly did not travel well. She became more and more creased and greasy-faced. And the clothes in her suitcase, among the layers of tattered tissue-paper, all were creased, too, and all a little grubby, yet not
quite
grubby enough, she decided, to warrant all the fuss of getting them washed.

‘Aren’t you ready
yet
?’ asked Gwenda at the door. ‘After all that driving, what I need is some
violent
exercise.’

She usually said something like this, and once upon a time Polly had had amusing visions of her running across-country or playing a few chukkas of polo. Now she knew that all that would happen would be that Gwenda would drape her cardigan over her shoulders and go for a stroll round the garden, or amble round the village, stopping to look in shop-windows – longest at the
charcuteries
to marvel at terrines. She examined them with a professional eye; for her own pâté was quite the talk of their part of Surrey. When she was asked for the recipe, she became carefully vague and said she had none; that she just chucked in anything that came to hand.

This evening there was a pâté on the ten-franc menu, so she was happy. She had had her stroll through the orchard, and Polly, still unpacking, had watched her from the bedroom window. Gwenda pushed her way through the long grass, lifting her neat ankles over briars. She had a top-heavy look, especially when viewed from above. Her large bosom was out of character, Polly thought. It was altogether too motherly-looking. And to think of Gwenda with children was impossible.

In the end, the unpacking was done, and the little walk was over, and they went into the almost empty dining-room. There were red and pink table-cloths, and large damp napkins to match, and Jean, Madame Peloux’s son, had combed his frizzy hair, and was waiting inexpertly at table.

‘Mosquitoes,’ Gwenda was saying. ‘I’m afraid there might be. I went up and closed the shutters.’

There
was
a stream at the bottom of the orchard, across a narrow lane. She had come to it on her wanderings, and had been bitten a little by midges.

‘The pâté’s not bad,’ she said, dipping into the jar of gherkins.

Polly thought it a bit ‘off’ – well, sour anyway; but she said nothing. She was too often told that the taste she objected to was the very one that had been aimed at, the absolute perfection of flavour.

Jean annoyed Gwenda by saying the name of everything he put on the table – as if she and Polly were children. ‘
Truites
,’ he announced, setting the dish down. They looked delicious – sprinkled with parsley and shredded almonds.

Gwenda, whose French – like everything else – was so much better than Polly’s, asked if they were from the stream below the orchard, and Jean looked evasive, as if he could not understand her. ‘
Truites
,’ he said again, and turned away, knocking over a glass as he did so.

The only other guests sat across the room. They were obviously not newcomers. They were favoured by the best table at the garden window, whereas Gwenda and Polly looked out on to the square. They had a bottle
of wine with their name scribbled on the label, and the man poured it out himself, looking very serious as he did so. The woman drank water, holding the glass in a shaking hand, tinkling it against her false teeth. She was ancient. He was in his sixties, and she was his mother.

As they were French, Gwenda had to listen with a little extra concentration to what they said – although they said little, and that in muted voices, as they stared before them, waiting for Jean to bring the next dish.

The old woman was thin and ashen and wore a sort of half-mourning of grey and mauve, and a hat – a floppy, linen garden hat. The only real colour about her was her crimson shiny lips, crookedly done, which she kept pressed together, and smudged, after every sip of water, with a purple handkerchief. Large diamond rings kept slipping on her old fingers.

‘Mother and son,’ Gwenda said in a low explanatory voice to Polly.

Jean had brought a tart to be cut from. Glazed slices of apple were slightly burnt. He made a great business of cutting their slices, frowning and pursing his lips as if it were a very tricky job.

Monsieur and Madame Devancourt, as he then addressed them, waved the tart away. Gwenda fastened on the name; repeated it once or twice in her mind, and had it secure.