Complete Short Stories (VMC) (96 page)

‘Yes, with temper. Your feet are frozen.’

‘Of course, they’re frozen.’ Her voice blamed him for this.

‘My dear, don’t let
us
quarrel.’

‘I’m so tired. Oh, that – damned mosquito.’ She sat up, and tried to smack it against the wall, but it had gone. ‘It’s been such an awful day.’

‘I thought it was a perfectly beautiful day.’

She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes, drawing herself away from him, as if determined now, somehow or other, to go to sleep.

‘Didn’t you like your day?’ he asked.

‘Well, you must have known I was disappointed about the Cathedral. Getting there when it was too dark.’

‘I didn’t know. You didn’t give me an inkling. We can go first thing in the morning.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same. Oh, you’re so hopeless. You hang about, and hang about, and drive me mad with impatience.’

She lay on her side, well away from him on the very edge of the bed, facing the horribly patterned curtains, her mouth so stiff, her eyes full of tears. He made an attempt to draw her close, but she became rigid, her limbs were iron.

‘You see, she’s quietening down,’ he said. The weeping had gone through every stage – from piteous sobbing, gasping, angry moans, to – now – a lulled whimpering, dying off, hardly heard. And the man was silent. Had he dropped senseless across the bed, Melanie wondered, or was he still sitting there, staring at the picture of his own despair.

‘I’m so sorry about the Cathedral. I had no idea …’ said Leonard, switching off the light, and sliding down in bed. Melanie kept her cold feet to herself.

‘We’ll say no more about it,’ she said, in a grim little voice.

They slept late. When he awoke, Leonard saw that Melanie was almost falling out of bed in her attempt to keep away from him. Disquieting memories made him frown. He tried to lay his thoughts out in order. The voices in the next room, the nightmare of weeping and abuse; but worse, Melanie’s cold voice, her revelation of that harboured disappointment; then, worse again, even worse, her impatience with him. He drove her nearly mad, she had said. Always? Since they were married? When?

At last Melanie awoke, and seemed uncertain of how to behave. Unable to make up her mind, she assumed a sort of non-behaviour to be going on with, which he found most mystifying.

‘Shall we go to the Cathedral?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she said carelessly. She even turned her back to him while she dressed.

There was silence from the next room, but neither of them referred to it. It was as if some shame of their own were shut up in there. The rest of the hotel was full of noises – kitchen clatterings and sharp voices. A vacuum-cleaner bumped and whined along the passage outside, and countrified traffic went by in the cobbled street.

Melanie’s cheeks and forehead were swollen with mosquito bites, which gave her an angry look. She scratched one on her wrist and made it water. They seemed the stigmata of her irritation.

They packed their cases.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

‘When you are,’ she said sullenly.

‘Might as well hit the trail as soon as we’ve had breakfast,’ he said, trying to sound optimistic, as if nothing were wrong. He had no idea of how they would get through the day. They had no plans, and she seemed disinclined to discuss any.

They breakfasted in silence in the empty dining-room. Some of the tables had chairs stacked on them.

‘You’ve no idea where you want to go, then?’ he asked.

She was spreading apricot jam on a piece of bread and he leant over and gently touched her hand. She laid down the knife, and put her hand in her lap. Then picked up the bread with her left hand and began to eat.

They went upstairs, to fetch their cases and, going along the passage, could see that the door of the room next to theirs now stood wide open. Before they reached it, a woman came out and hesitated in the doorway, looking back into the room. There was an appearance of brightness about her – her glowing face, shining hair, starched dress. Full of gay anticipation as it was, her voice, as she called back into the room, was familiar to Melanie and Leonard.

‘Ready, darling?’

The other familiar voice replied. The man came to the doorway, carrying the case. He put his arm round the woman’s waist and they went off down the passage. Such a well turned-out couple, Melanie thought, staring after them, as she paused at her own doorway, scratching her mosquito bites.

‘Let’s go to that marvellous place for lunch,’ she heard the man suggesting. They turned a corner to the landing, but as they went on downstairs, their laughter floated up after them.

A new motorway had made a different landscape of that part of England I loved as a child, cutting through meadows, spanning valleys, shaving off old gardens and leaving houses perched on islands of confusion. Nothing is recognisable now: the guest-house has gone, with its croquet-lawn; the cherry orchard; and Miss Alliot’s and Miss Martin’s week-end cottage. I should think that little is left anywhere, except in
my
mind.

I was a town child, and the holidays in the country had a sharp delight which made the waiting time of school term, of traffic, of leaflessness, the unreal part of my life. At Easter, and for weeks in the summer, sometimes even for a few snatched days in winter, we drove out there to stay – it wasn’t far – for my mother loved the country, too, and in that place we had put down roots.

St Margaret’s was the name of the guest-house, which was run by two elderly ladies who had come down in the world, bringing with them quantities of heavily riveted Crown Derby, and silver plate. Miss Louie and Miss Beatrice.

My mother and I shared a bedroom with a sloping floor and threadbare carpet. The wallpaper had faint roses, and a powdery look from damp. Oil-lamps or candles lit the rooms, and, even now, the smell of paraffin brings it back, that time of my life. We were in the nineteen twenties.

Miss Beatrice, with the help of a maid called Mabel, cooked deliciously. Beautiful creamy porridge, I remember, and summer puddings, suckling pigs and maids-of-honour and marrow jam. The guests sat at one long table with Miss Louie one end and Miss Beatrice the other, and Mabel scuttling in and out with silver domed dishes. There was no wine. No one drank anything alcoholic, that I remember. Sherry was kept for trifle, and that was it, and the new world of cocktail parties was elsewhere.

The guests were for the most part mild, bookish people who liked a cheap and quiet holiday – schoolmasters, elderly spinsters, sometimes people to do with broadcasting who, in those days, were held in awe. The guests returned, so that we had constant friends among them, and looked forward to our reunions. Sometimes there were other children. If there were not, I did not care. I had Miss Alliot and Miss Martin.

These two were always spoken of in that order, and not because it was easier to say like that, or more euphonious. They appeared at luncheon and supper, but were not guests. At the far end of the orchard they had a cottage for week-ends and holidays. They were schoolmistresses in London.

‘Cottage’ is not quite the word for what was little more than a wooden shack with two rooms and a veranda. It was called Breezy Lodge, and draughts did blow between its ramshackle clap-boarding.

Inside, it was gay, for Miss Alliot was much inclined to orange and yellow and grass-green, and the cane chairs had cushions patterned with nasturtiums and marigolds and ferns. The curtains and her clothes reflected the same taste.

Miss Martin liked misty blues and greys, though it barely mattered that she did. She had a small smudged-looking face with untidy eyebrows, a gentle, even submerged nature. She was a great – but quiet – reader and never seemed to wish to talk of what she had read. Miss Alliot, on the other hand, would occasionally skim through a book and find enough in it for long discourses and an endless supply of allusions. She wrung the most out of everything she did or saw and was a great talker.

That was a time when one fell in love with who ever was
there
. In my adolescence the only males available to me for adoration were such as Shelley or Rupert Brooke or Owen Nares. A rather more real passion could be lavished on prefects at school or the younger mistresses.

Miss Alliot was heaven-sent, it seemed to me. She was a holiday goddess. Miss Martin was just a friend. She tried to guide my reading, as an elder sister might. This was a new relationship to me. I had no elder sister, and I had sometimes thought that to have had one would have altered my life entirely, and whether for better or worse I had never been able to decide.

How I stood with Miss Alliot was a reason for more pondering. Why did she take trouble over me, as she did? I considered myself sharp for my age: now I see that I was sharp only for the age I
lived
in. Miss Alliot cultivated me to punish Miss Martin – as if she needed another weapon. I condoned the punishing. I basked in the doing of it. I turned my own eyes from the troubled ones under the fuzzy brows, and I pretended not to know precisely what was being done. Flattery nudged me on. Not physically fondled, I was fondled all the same.

In those days before – more than forty years before – the motorway, that piece of countryside was beautiful, and the word ‘countryside’ still means there to me. The Chiltern Hills. Down one of those slopes below St Margaret’s streamed the Cherry Orchard, a vast delight in summer of marjoram and thyme. An unfrequented footpath led through it, and every step was aromatic. We called this walk the Echo Walk – down through the trees and up from the valley on its other side to larch woods.

Perched on a stile at the edge of the wood, one called out messages to be rung back across the flinty valley. Once, alone, I called out, ‘I love you,’ loud and strong, and ‘I love you’ came back faint, and mocking. ‘Miss Alliot,’ I added. But that response was blurred. Perhaps I feared to shout too loudly, or it was not a good echo name. I tried no others.

On Sunday mornings I walked across the fields to church with Miss Martin. Miss Alliot would not join us. It was scarcely an intellectual feast, she said, or spiritually uplifting, with the poor old Vicar mumbling on and the organ asthmatic. In London, she attended St Ethelburga’s in the Strand, and spoke a great deal of a Doctor Cobb. But, still more, she spoke of the Townsends.

For she punished Miss Martin with the Townsends too.

The Townsends lived in Northumberland. Their country house was grand, as was to be seen in photographs. Miss Alliot appeared in some of these shading her eyes as she lay back in a deckchair in a sepia world or – with Suzanne Lenglen bandeau and accordion-pleated dress – simply standing, to be photographed. By whom? I wondered. Miss Martin wondered, too, I thought.

Once a year, towards the end of the summer holiday (mine: theirs) Miss Alliot was invited to take the train north. We knew that she would have taken that train at an hour’s notice, and, if necessary, have dropped everything for the Townsends.

What they consisted of – the Townsends – I was never really sure. It was a group name, both in my mind and in our conversations. ‘Do the Townsends play croquet?’ I enquired, or ‘Do the Townsends change for dinner?’ I was avid for information. It was readily given.

‘I know what the Townsends would think of
her
,’ Miss Alliot said, of the only common woman, as she put it, who had ever stayed at St Margaret’s. Mrs Price came with her daughter, Muriel, who was seven years old and had long, burnished plaits, which she would toss – one, then the other – over her shoulders. Under Miss Alliot’s guidance, I scorned both Mrs Price and child, and many a laugh we had in Breezy Lodge at their expense. Scarcely able to speak for laughter, Miss Alliot would recount her ‘gems’, as she called them. ‘Oh, she
said
… one can’t believe it, little Muriel … Mrs Price
insists
on it … changes her socks and knickers twice a day. She likes her to be nice and fresh. And …’ Miss Alliot was a good mimic, ‘“she always takes an apple for recess”. What in God’s name is recess?’

This was rather strong language for those days, and I admired it.

‘It’s “break” or …’ Miss Martin began reasonably. This was her mistake. She slowed things up with her reasonableness, when what Miss Alliot wanted, and I wanted, was a flight of fancy.

I tried, when those two were not there, to gather foolish or despicable phrases from Mrs Price, but I did not get far. (I suspect now Miss Alliot’s inventive mind at work – rehearsing for the Townsends.)

All these years later, I have attempted, while writing this, to be fair to Mrs Price, almost forgotten for forty years; but even without Miss Alliot’s direction I think I should have found her tiresome. She boasted to my mother (and no adult was safe from my eavesdropping) about her hysterectomy, and the gynaecologist who doted on her. ‘I always have my operations at the Harbeck Clinic.’ I was praised for that titbit, and could not run fast enough to Breezy Lodge with it.

I knew what the medical words meant, for I had begun to learn Greek at school – Ladies’ Greek, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning called it, ‘without any accents’. My growing knowledge served me well with regard to words spoken in lowered tones. ‘My operations! How Ralph Townsend will adore that one!’ Miss Alliot said.

A Townsend now stepped forward from the general family group. Miss Martin stopped laughing. I was so sharp for my years that I thought she gave herself away by doing so, that she should have let her laughter die away gradually. In that slice of a moment she had made clear her sudden worry about Ralph Townsend. Knowing as I did then so much about human beings, I was sure she had been meant to.

Poor Miss Martin, my friend, mentor, church-going companion, mild, kind and sincere – I simply used her as a stepping-stone to Miss Alliot.

I never called them by their first names, and have had to pause a little to remember them. Dorothea Alliot and Edith Martin. ‘Dorothea’ had a fine ring of authority about it. Of course, I had the Greek meaning of that, too, but I knew that Miss Alliot was the giver herself – of the presents and the punishments.