Fantails (2 page)

“What else is there to do? Children need to grow up with a sense of security and permanence, and above all of being loved and wanted. I could give them all that. In any case, there’s no one else.”

Thoughtfully Geoffrey Baynes studied the girl facing him across his desk, the round young face, the generous mouth, the gentle, troubled brown eyes.

“Are there no other relatives who would take them; have them in their own homes?”

“Possibly, but only if they were separated. There’s no one who would take all three. And think how miserable the twins would be if they were parted! And Jane, poor scrap, losing both her parents, then the twins—no, I couldn’t let that happen. Besides, if anyone did take them on it wouldn’t be because they wanted to, but from a sense of duty. And no child ought to grow up in a house where he’s a duty, not a pleasure.”

The lawyer nodded thoughtfully. “H’m. You’re right, of course. But how about finances? Do you realise there will be practically no money except what the sale of Swan House and the practice may bring in? It’s going to be a very tight squeeze, I’m afraid. Could you manage, do you think?”

“I’ve got to,” Alison said. “I have a little money of my own—not much, but if it’s pooled with theirs it’ll go further.”

So, a month later, she and the three children moved from Swan House to the flat above the stables. Meanwhile the house and practice had been sold to a doctor from the Midlands whose wife hankered to exchange the life of a great manufacturing city for that of a small country town. Such of the contents of the house as would be superfluous in the smaller quarters they were going to, had been sold too. A builder had been carrying out the necessary structural alterations over the stables, while Alison herself did a good deal of painting and distempering, and cut down curtains from the larger windows of Swan House to fit the smaller ones of Fantails, as they had named the flat when Logie said, inspecting the alterations, “We’ll be like a flock of pigeons living in a loft!”

Looking back on the ten years that followed, Alison sometimes wondered how she had contrived to make ends meet. Her own resources amounted to barely a hundred pounds a year; the children’s income from the shares bought with the money from the sale of Swan House and the practice was a scanty one for all that must be done with it. But Providence had as usual been kind to the shorn lambs. Andrew had won a scholarship at a public school; Miss Phelps, who owned the day school where the girls were educated, made a reduction in her fees. Patients who remembered Robert Selkirk’s care of them with gratitude and affection were unfailing in their kindness to his children, bringing gifts of game and country produce, sacks of kindling, even logs enough to last all through the winter, which more than halved the housekeeping expenses. And if most people grumbled at the scarcity of clothing coupons, Alison was thankful for it, since it meant that they were not alone in shabbiness.

Jane came in, buttoning up her frock of blue-and-white checked gingham as Alison brought in the breakfast tray. “Letter from Andrew?” She pounced on the opened envelope lying on the table and began to read its contents, though it was addressed to Alison. Letters from Andrew were communal property.

“He’s sent us a parcel with dried fruit and almonds,” Alison said.

“Yes—and he’s sent you a pair of nylons, Logie!” Jane exclaimed. “Your minds do work on the same lines—you sent him a pair of socks for your joint birthday, didn’t you?”

“Nylons?” Logie was thrilled. “How marvellous!
Darling
Andrew!” She seized Jane round the waist, letter and all, and waltzed her round the room, finally pushing her on to the chair by her breakfast. “You smell of toothpaste,” she observed.

“Miss Granville says it’s only stupid people who make obvious remarks. Of course I smell of toothpaste at this hour of the day. Now if I’d smelt of—of paraffin or gin, that
would
have been worth talking about.”

Happily the three discussed the news in Andrew’s letter—of George the gander, the regimental pet, having laid an egg on the Regimental Sergeant-Major’s bed and having to be rechristened Georgina; of the snake found by the mess cook in his fish-kettle; and the camel that had produced a foal—or would it be a calf, they wondered?—outside Andrew’s tent.

When they had finished Jane went to tidy her room, which she had left in chaos. Logie and Alison stacked the dishes on a tray and Logie took it to the kitchen while Alison followed with the coffee-pot.

Logie, her back turned as she ran hot water in the basin, said abruptly, “Alicey—I’m the most ungrateful pig that ever was! Instead of being simply thrilled over those nylons, I keep on thinking that I’ll never have the chance to wear them. Suddenly it’s come over me in the most depressing wave that nothing ever happens here and nothing ever will.”

“I know. A liver-coloured wave, with purple streaks, and when it breaks it’ll be bilious green.” Alison tossed some soda in the basin. “And when you’re in the middle of it, you think life will go on being like that for ever. But it won’t. There are the loveliest patches of blue sunny water waiting ahead if only one could realise it.”

Logie sighed. “Yes. If one could!” She slid an arm round Alison and hugged her. “You always understand,” she told her gratefully. “Goodness—I must fly or angry patients will be dancing on the doorstep.”

A moment later Alison heard her hurrying through the garden to Swan House. She made a rueful grimace, half amused and half exasperated as she reflected on the selfishness of youth, absorbed so deeply in its own affairs and feelings that it had no thought to spare for those of others. Did Logie never dwell a moment on the fact that while the best years of her life lay still ahead, ten years of Alison’s had been sacrificed to the young Selkirks? One of these days, she thought, I’ll have to point out a few things to Logie, for her own sake as well as mine!

Jane came to dry the dishes, chattering of school and happenings there. She wanted a new tennis racket. Did Alison think they might go together this afternoon to see if Goffin’s had one the right weight? Eleanor Purcell’s mother had got her one from there last week—a beauty.

Alison, meeting the dark blue eyes that met hers with such innocent candour, yet held a quality of reserve, thought how little one knew of the most intimate thoughts and feelings even of those who were the greater part of one’s own life. Where did Jane’s thoughts linger when they came to rest? What stirred the force of her imagination? Did she dream still of childhood’s pleasures, or of all that lay ahead—romance and love, a home and children? ... How lonely, she reflected, are our lives. And yet how terrible it would be if this were not so, if the last stronghold left us, thought, were vulnerable to invasion.

Together they made their beds. Jane asked, “Any jobs for me to do?” There were many things she might have done to make Alison’s morning easier, but Alison sent her off to spend the morning out of doors. Jane had been growing too fast, and Dr. Sinclair wanted her to have as much fresh air as possible.

A door in the passage opened on to a flight of steep steps going down into the coach-house. Jane went down them and out into the sunlit stable yard, where the Rhode Island hens came running hopefully, though Alison had fed them before breakfast, and a tortoiseshell cat rubbed, purring, against her bare legs. Jane picked her up and, carrying her, went to inspect her kittens which were lying in a nest of hay in one of the stalls in the stable, a nest she shared with one of the hens, who always laid there. Neither seemed to mind the presence of the other. The hen was sitting there now, and looked at Jane with a suspicious gold-rimmed eye. She fluffed out her feathers, bridling, as Jane slid a gentle hand beneath her and withdrew a stripey kitten a few days old, its eyes not open yet. She held it out to Miniver, the cat, who nosed it with a gentle crooning sound but seemed quite unconcerned when Jane replaced it and it crawled back under the enveloping feathers to rejoin its black brother. Jane left her sitting there beside the hen, washing herself industriously, and went out again into the sun’s warm embrace.

An old high wall of rose-red bricks skirted the garden from Swan House to the stables. In it, at one end of the yard, was set a wooden door. Jane opened it and stepped through, closing it behind her, then leaned against it, drawing a long, deep breath of satisfaction.

She was standing on a short flight of stone steps that led down to the river bank. Below her lay an overgrown path, nowadays seldom used except by lovers seeking privacy and small boys looking for adventure. Here, partly hidden by elderberry bushes and wild roses, one might find traces of landing-jetties and the remains of a few ancient, tumbled sheds, relics of the days when Market Blyburgh traded with the sea. Willows and a few tall poplars grew on the far side of the river, and beyond them lay the reed-grown marshes. Down the steps went Jane on to the path. Lightfoot she followed it downstream, brushing aside the bushes plucking at her skirt, the late wild roses snatching at her hair, looking about her with bright, eager glances. She came in a few minutes out of her green tunnel into a small clearing by an old wharf. Its planks and timbers were in mouldering decay and the remains of what had been a shed were buried deep in vegetation, while the road that once had led from here into the town had long ago been overgrown by grass and bracken and hawthorns, so that to-day no trace of it was visible.

This was Jane’s private world, the world she knew by instinct. Here she had come day after day, year after year, a child made solitary by the six years dividing her from the twins, to live the fantasies of her secret second life. Here she had played many parts—had been the mother of a family of cherished dolls, a highwayman, the leader of a gang of smugglers, the hero of a lost cause hiding from pursuit. Here she had narrowly escaped disaster in a derelict boat that she herself had reconditioned after a fashion. Here she belonged as surely as the heron standing sentinel in a shallow pool, the water-rat whose course was marked by a bright silver arrow moving on the water, the flight of a kingfisher. She was as much a part of this place as the distant crying of the redshanks on the marsh, the moist warm smell of rotting vegetation, the weeds that streamed like verdant hair down in the dappled water.

She sat a while upon the sun-warmed planks, absorbing all she smelt and saw and heard and felt. Presently she slipped off her dress. Under it she wore her bathing-dress. She stood a minute poised above the water for a dive, slim as a reed, less angular than a year ago, more delicately curved.

She thought in that delicious moment of anticipation, how terrible to be Logie, cooped up among medicine bottles and the smell of disinfectants!

It was after she had dived and swum and dried in the sun and put on her dress that the frightening thought came to her.

Logie once loved to come here. When I was quite small I came here for the first time by myself, and found her here, and she was furious—as I should be if someone came here now—and said this was her place, her private special place. But when I came again, after a bit, she never even knew. She’d given it up.

A passing cloud covered the sun. The world was momentarily darker. Jane shivered. Impossible to imagine that one could forsake this other world, this secret life, for the prosaic interests grown-ups seemed to find so engrossing. Frightening, too. Or wouldn’t one? Could one be different from other people? Was one perhaps peculiar? She detested
Peter Pan;
to her it seemed a piece of whimsy-whamsy nonsense. Yet there might be something in the idea of never growing up.
O, Time, stand still!

An hour ago she would have watched with sympathetic interest the travail on a twig beside her, where a grotesque embryo creature that would presently become a butterfly was in the throes of struggling from its chrysalis, leaving the familiar security of an outgrown shelter for an unknown world.

Now, lost in thought, she did not see it. If she had, she might have taken comfort.

Left alone, Alison set to work with mop and dusters. Ruefully she wondered whether she were spoiling Jane. Many a time she had wondered the same thing in regard to the twins. This business of a new tennis racket, for instance. It was going to be expensive, more expensive than they should afford. Ought she to have a talk with Jane concerning money matters? Point out to her that while Eleanor Purcell’s family was well off, Jane’s was not; that she must go without many things that might be Eleanor’s for the asking? Was carefree childhood the best preparation for the difficulties to be encountered later? Was it a handicap—or a treasure beyond price, a treasure that one ought to try to give to every child, untarnished by the shadow of ways and means and dismal calculations? Oh, if only adult problems were as simple as those of childhood, when conscience told one that a thing was right or wrong and that was
that!

Into her mind drifted the echo of something Logie had said earlier this morning:
“Didn’t you miss being with girls of your own age? And men
?”

For the moment Alison became again a girl in her twenties, all her time and energy devoted to cooking, cleaning, washing, mending, planning and contriving for three children, dearly loved but not her own, while youth slipped by, bringing no opportunity for having any life apart from them.

She switched her thoughts back from herself to Logie. “
It suddenly came over me in the most depressing wave that nothing ever happens here, and nothing ever will
.”
Poor pet! thought Alison—she wants young company and gaiety and the opportunity to fall in love and marry. She
needs
them. How am I to give them to her?

Peeling potatoes, creaming margarine and sugar, greasing a pudding basin, she wrestled with the problem of Logie’s future. The residents of Market Blyburgh were for the most part elderly, being chiefly retired army and naval men, doctors, clergymen, schoolmasters, and business men who had retired here with their wives. Their grown-up families had gone elsewhere for a livelihood, since there was little here to occupy them. How then should a girl of Logie’s age find any of the things that youth desires and needs in these surroundings? Jane, too, when her turn came?

Presently, as she began to clean the silver, Alison squared her shoulders and her lips took on a happier curve. She had found escape, as she had often found it in the past, in an imaginary world where she retreated when the realities of the world of everyday became oppressive.

This morning, in that other world, some distant cousin of whose existence she had never heard left her a fortune. All of them equipped with ravishing new clothes, she and Logie and Jane set out for Switzerland, where Jane was left at a boarding school where she was rapturously happy. Alison then took Logie to an hotel, where they made charming friends who invited them to stay in London on their return to England. Logie was taken to theatres and dances and fell happily in love with an adoring and delightful young man, possessed of enough money to ensure that no financial cares should come her way. They bought a charming country house where Andrew on his leaves and Jane in her holidays might make a home with them, and all lived happily ever after. And Alison was freed to take up the threads of life in Edinburgh, renew old friendships, take up forsaken interests, stretch the wings that had so long been cramped.