Complete Short Stories (VMC) (86 page)

In the night, just before dawn, Gwenda woke up. Something had disturbed her, and she lay listening. There was silence, save for far-away cow-bells occasionally heard, then a floor-board creaked on the landing, and another. There was a gentle tapping on a bedroom door, and whispering.

She felt very cold, and sick, and deceived. She groped for her watch and peered at its luminous dial. It was nearly five o’clock. There was no real light in the sky, but perhaps a lessening of darkness.

Boards now creaked quite heavily along the passage, down the stairs. Gwenda got out of bed and went to the window, gently easing the shutters apart. As she did so, she heard an outside door open, and then a man’s voice, speaking in low tones just below her. As her eyes grew used to the dark, she could make out two figures. After a moment, they moved off towards the courtyard, and she could see then that they were Jean and Monsieur Devancourt, both carrying fishing-rods. After a while, she heard the car starting up. It drove away, and she listened to it fading into the distance. Then the church clock struck five.

She left the shutters opened, and got back into bed. The sky slowly lightened, and she turned about heavily on the rough, darned sheets, longing for day to come so that she could get on with it, hasten through it. She searched her mind for plans for escaping from this hated place and, faced with all the complications, found none.

At breakfast, Gwenda was tired and silent. She seemed to brood over her coffee, staring before her, the drooping lines of her face deeper than ever. Monsieur Devancourt and Jean returned, having caught a large pike. Jean quickly slipped on a white jacket and brought fresh coffee. Monsieur Devancourt joined his mother, and peeled her orange for her, was full of simple triumph at his successful expedition, and now wanted nothing but to devote the rest of the day to her. They discussed their plans with great pleasure.

As usual, Madame Devancourt stopped on her way past Gwenda’s and Polly’s table.

‘How early a riser would it be possible for you to be?’ she asked. She seemed playful, like a child with a secret. She hardly waited for Gwenda’s reply. ‘Then,’ she went on, ‘we have a little plan, Louis and I. We know your disappointment at not reaching the source of the river, and we think that if we can start early tomorrow we can make the journey and spend the following night en route. It would give us great pleasure. How does it strike you?’

It struck Gwenda very well, and she said so. She brightened at once. Polly, who never understood what Madame Devancourt said, had not tried to listen. When it was explained to her, she was appalled, and too artless to hide the fact. Gwenda touched her foot under the table to bring her to
her senses; but she could only stammer her thanks, while looking quite dismayed.

‘But it’s dreadful for
me
,’ she complained to Gwenda afterwards. ‘I can’t understand a single word they say. To have a long drive like that with them!’

She knew that she would have to go. She was not strong enough to resist Gwenda over this. After a while she forgot what was hanging over her. She was living in the present, and it was time to go to market with Jean. Gwenda, more relaxed now, let them go alone, while she visited the garage and made another fuss.

The next day, they left very early. Jean was up before them and brought them coffee and bread. It was a strange, cold dawn, and they moved about quietly, with lowered voices, putting things into the boot of the car. At the last moment, Polly found she had forgotten her wild-flower book and had to get out of the car and go and find it. It was her only solace – and such a small one to her in her altered life – that she might see gentians growing in the mountains. Jean stood ready to open the car door for her when she returned. His eyes rested mournfully upon her. As they drove off, she could see him standing there, staring after her, looking sulky.

Madame Devancourt was quite talkative this morning. She sat in front beside her son, and half turned her wedge-shaped face back towards Gwenda. Polly she completely ignored. She thought her an imbecile and wondered that Gwenda had not found a more intelligent and presentable partner. It seemed to her that they were not so very much in love, though in such cases, she found it difficult to tell.

They stopped for lunch at an inn full of memories for Gwenda. She was delighted. Her spirits had been rising all morning, as they climbed higher into the colder air. She became animated, and infected Madame Devancourt with her liveliness. Both had such recollections – and all along the route the two widows exchanged them. La Bourboule! Le mont-Dore! There were changes to be noted. Yet so much had remained the same. Monsieur Devancourt listened to them as he drove, smiling to see his mother so gay. It was unusual for her to have feminine companionship, and it seemed to do her good. Polly stared at the wild flowers along the way. She was obviously not allowed to stop to gather them. Monsieur Devancourt sometimes addressed a remark to her and then she started out of her dreams and became confused, and Gwenda had to rescue her.

After lunch, they went on to the source. The river they had driven beside became, at last, a thin fast trickle down the mountain-side. The road
ended. They got out of the car and felt the air cold on their faces, and Polly looked about for flowers. The gentians were higher up, Gwenda told her, and she said that she for one was determined to climb to the summit, as she and Humphrey had done. They could be taken nearly there in the funicular.

Madame Devancourt declined. She would sit in the car and wait for them, and be quite happy reading her novel, she explained.

‘Your mother is charming,’ Gwenda told Monsieur Devancourt as they waited for the lift to come down.

‘It is altogether a charming day,’ he said.

As they were hauled up by the cable-car, Polly, although dizzy, peered down at the rocks for flowers. She saw miniature daffodils, drifts of white anemones, and then, in a crevice, a patch of gentians. The funicular swung high above them and came to a stop.

This much higher up, it was windy. Strands of hair kept lashing her cheeks. She hated the wind, and she hated being so high. Above them, at the top of a zigzagging path, she could see two tiny figures waving from the highest rock.

‘I shouldn’t like to go up there,’ she said to Gwenda.

‘But that’s why we’ve come,’ Gwenda said with a tone of scorn. ‘Humphrey …’ Then she changed her mind about what she was going to say. She would climb to the summit alone with Monsieur Devancourt and say not a word about her husband all the way.

Polly, on this lower slope, was quite content to scramble about and pick flowers. The tiny daffodils were exquisite, and there were varieties she could not classify until she got back to the car and found them in her book. But she could find no gentians. They seemed to grow in rockier parts. Here, there was only shabby, wind-bitten grass and patches of dirty snow. Barbed-wire ran along the edge of the ridge. Beyond it rocks went sheer down to the valley.

From the summit, Gwenda and Monsieur Devancourt, rather out-of-breath, paused triumphantly and looked about them at the wide view. They could see Polly below, darting like a child or a bee, from one flower to another, and they called to her, but their voices were snatched out of their throats by the wind. Then Gwenda began to shout in earnest, for she could see that Polly was trying to crawl under the barbed wire. She was lying on her stomach, reaching for something. Gwenda and Monsieur Devancourt called out in warning and began to scramble down the slippery path as quickly as they could. Before they could come within Polly’s hearing, there was a dreadful rushing noise of bouncing and cascading scree, of rocks dropping with an echo upon other rocks. The noise continued long after Polly had disappeared and Gwenda and Monsieur Devancourt had come to the
newly-opened fissure. Beside it was a handful of flowers, and a piece of gentian-blue chocolate-paper which Polly must have been reaching for.

Monsieur Devancourt had been a tower of strength. He had interviewed police officials and undertakers, intercepted newspaper-men, booked the flight home, arranged about the coffin, sent telegrams, and brought Gwenda back to Selonac to pack the cases. And every now and then he bewailed the fact that the tragic excursion had been his idea.

Gwenda was stunned, rather than grief-stricken. She leant on his kindness. She let him do everything for her.

Madame Devancourt now seemed to have withdrawn. Her son’s solicitude was irksome and disturbing, and looks of suspicion were cast on him and Gwenda. The episode had been distasteful, encroaching – and she had had enough of her, this Englishwoman, with her demanding ways. Instead of taking command, as one of her kind should have done, she had clung to a man like any silly girl.

‘I can never say “thank you” enough,’ Gwenda said. She had come to them in the salon to bid them good-bye. ‘When you visit England, I hope you will stay with me, in my house in Surrey.’

Madame Devancourt nodded forbiddingly; but Gwenda hardly noticed. In her mind, she was introducing Monsieur Devancourt – he had asked her to call him ‘Louis’ – to her friends. ‘Do you play bridge?’ she very nearly asked him; but she stopped herself in time. She shook hands. Once more Louis blamed himself for Polly’s death, and his mother clicked her tongue impatiently.

Out in the courtyard, the car was waiting – ready at last; ready too late – and Jean was packing the cases into the boot. Gwenda had forgotten all about him. Madame Peloux stood by to wish her ‘
Bon voyage
’.

She looked into her bag for a tip, and advanced with it folded in her hand, ready to slip it into Jean’s. He slammed down the lid of the boot and, as Gwenda came up to him, he turned sulkily aside, and walked away.

His face was swollen; he made a blubbering noise, like a miserable child, and, going faster and faster, made off across the orchard.

‘Ah, Jean! Jean!’ his mother said, with a sigh and a shake of her head, looking after him.

Gwenda got into the car. It started perfectly. She waved to Madame Peloux and to Louis Devancourt, who had come out of the inn to watch her go, and drove away, towards the airport.

Outside the hospital entrance the gravel was bright and unrelenting. She stood with the other mothers and waited for the doors to open. Each had a basket; the clean clothes and picture books, barley-sugar, the bunch of pansies from the garden.

‘What will he do?’ she wondered. She was prepared for tears and pleading and an appalling scene at the end. Some of the mothers chatted as they waited. These had been before, knew the ropes, knew the way in and the nurses by sight. She stood a little apart, with her back against the warm roughness of the brick wall, feeling immature – she could never overcome the sense that she was too young to have a child and she was uncertain of her voice and of her eyes, always too readily filled with tears.

In the hot sunlight the weathervane over the clock tower flashed brightly; the smell of the hot gravel mingled with the other dry midsummer scents, of crumbling grey earth and geraniums, tar and the brick wall; but little wafts of coolness came occasionally from the hospital windows, little cool dreadful smells which froze her bowels, hollowed her inside.

The rounded, solid notes of the clock stuck two. The women sauntered closer and then the doors were opened. As they passed into the vestibule, she was conscious of another smell, the damp sharp sweat of the other mothers in their summer frocks. Then the cold neutral air of the hospital engulfed them as they went forward. She felt like Alice going down the rabbit hole. They kept passing room with half-open doors, but there was never time to look into the rooms; just a glimpse of a nurse writing at a desk, a place filled with strange shining apparatus, flowers in the centre – of a large ward, a white kitchen.

She followed the others into the children’s ward.

‘Hello, Mummy.’

She came straight to him, was at once confronted by the brightness of his little face, made strange by the bandage over his brow. He was facing the door – in a draught, she thought immediately.

Their greeting was casual in contrast to the embraces of all the others. Again she felt her immaturity. She felt that she would never look motherly.
In her sandals and blue cotton frock she seemed too young for the part. She did not even have the womanly smell of the others.

‘How are you, darling?’

‘All right. Better.’

‘And what’s it like, being here?’

‘All right. They think you’re really babyish. They give you a plate with Bo-Peep on it.’

‘How amusing.’

‘And cut up your meat.’

‘Perhaps they are afraid you’ll spill your gravy.’

‘One girl has her legs burnt. They paint them blue and she screams like mad. Her mother upset a saucepan over her.’

‘How frightful for her mother.’

‘Frightful for her, you mean.’ He laughed excitedly.

She looked round quickly and turned over his temperature chart. It jagged halfway across the paper.

‘They don’t tell you what your temperature is.’

‘No. They never do. It
is
nice to see you.’ She sat on the bed and took one of his rough warm little paws in her hand. His wrists were impossibly thin, had always been. He kept shoving up the bandage which had slipped over one eye. Cotton-wool with bits of lint stuck out in all directions. Tufts of hair stood up from the top of his head like feathers. His bed was like a battlefield. She tried to straighten the sheets, looking round at the neat children sitting up in tidy cots and beds, while their mothers displayed one thing after another from their baskets.

‘I brought you a present,’ she said, suddenly remembering, and conscious that he waited. ‘But I want you to keep it till I go.’

‘Why?’

‘It will be something to think about after I’ve gone.’

‘Oh.’

‘What did you have for dinner?’

‘Mince and rice.’

‘Are you good?’

‘Yes. One of the nurses said I’d wet my bed. “Oh, you dirty little boy,” she said to me. And I hadn’t done any such thing.’

‘Oh, darling. So what did you say?’