Going Ashore (15 page)

In the time it took her to pick up the cheese and face the table again, Lily had added to her expression a permanent-looking smile. Her eyes, which were a washy blue, were tolerably kind when she was plotting mischief. The week in Nice, desired, became a necessity; Mrs. Freeport needed a scare. She would fear, and then believe, that her most docile boarder, her most pliant errand girl, had gone forever. Stealing into Lily’s darkened
room, she would count the dresses with trembling hands. She would touch Lily’s red with the white dots, her white with the poppies, her green wool with the scarf of mink tails. Mrs. Freeport would also discover – if she carried her snooping that far – the tooled-leather box with Lily’s daisy-shaped earrings, and the brooch in which a mother-of-pearl pigeon sat on a nest made of Lily’s own hair. But Mrs. Freeport would not find the diary, in which Lily had recorded her opinion of so many interesting things, nor would she come upon a single empty bottle. Lily kept her drinking to Nice, where, anonymous in a large hotel, friendly and lavish in a bar, she let herself drown. “Your visits to your sister seem to do you so much good,” was Mrs. Freeport’s unvarying comment when Lily returned from these excursions, which always followed the arrival of her income. “But you spend far too much money on your sister. You are much too kind.” But Lily had no regrets. Illiberal by circumstance, grudging only because she imitated the behavior of other women, she became, drunk, an old forgotten Lily-girl, tender and warm, able to shed a happy tear and open a closed fist. She had been cold sober since September.

“Well, there you are,” she said, and slapped down the plate of cheese. There was another person at the table, a Mrs. Garnett, who was returning to England the next day. Lily’s manner toward the two women combined bullying with servility. Mrs. Freeport, large, in brown chiffon, wearing a hat with a water lily upon it to cover her thinning hair, liked to
feel
served. Lily had been a paid companion once; she had never seen a paradox in the joining of those two words. She simply looked on Mrs. Freeport and Mrs. Garnett as more of that race of ailing, peevish elderly children whose fancies and delusions must be humored by the sane.

Mrs. Freeport pursed her lips in acknowledgment of the cheese. Mrs. Garnett, who was reading a book, did nothing at all. Mrs. Garnett had been with them four months. Her blued curls, her laugh, her moist baby’s mouth, had the effect on Lily of a stone in the shoe. Mrs. Garnett’s husband, dead but often mentioned, had evidently liked them saucy and dim in the brain. Now that William Henry was no longer there to protect his wife, she was the victim of the effect of her worrying beauty – a torment to shoe clerks and bus conductors. Italians were dreadful; Mrs. Garnett
hardly dared put her wee nose outside the house. “You are a little monkey, Edith!” Mrs. Freeport would sometimes say, bringing her head upward with a jerk, waking out of a sweet dream in time to applaud. Mrs. Garnett would go on telling how she had been jostled on the pavement or offended on a bus. And Lily Littel, who knew – but truly knew – about being followed and hounded and pleaded with, brought down her thick eyelids and smiled. Talk leads to overconfidence and errors. Lily had guided her life to this quiet shore by knowing when to open her mouth and when to keep it closed.

Mrs. Freeport was not deluded but simply poor. Thirteen years of pension-keeping on a tawdry stretch of Mediterranean coast had done nothing to improve her fortunes and had probably diminished them. Sentiment kept her near Bordighera, where someone precious to her had been buried in the Protestant part of the cemetery. In Lily’s opinion, Mrs. Freeport ought to have cleared out long ago, cutting her losses, leaving the servants out of pocket and the grocer unpaid. Lily looked soft; she was round and pink and yellow-haired. The imitation pearls screwed on to her doughy little ears seemed to devour the flesh. But Lily could have bitten a real pearl in two and enjoyed the pieces. Her nature was generous, but an admiration for superior women had led her to cherish herself. An excellent cook, she had dreamed of being a poisoner, but decided to leave that for the loonies; it was no real way to get on. She had a moral program of a sort – thought it wicked to set a poor table, until she learned that the sort of woman she yearned to become was often picky. After that she tried to put it out of her mind. At Mrs. Freeport’s she was enrolled in a useful school, for the creed of the house was this: It is pointless to think about anything so temporary as food; coffee grounds can be used many times, and moldy bread, revived in the oven, mashed with raisins and milk, makes a delicious pudding. If Lily had settled for this bleached existence, it was explained by a sentence scrawled over a page of her locked diary: “I live with gentlewomen now.” And there was a finality about the statement that implied acceptance of their ways.

Lily removed the fly netting from the cheese. There was her bit left over from luncheon. It was the end of a portion of Dutch so dry it had split. Mrs. Freeport would have the cream cheese, possibly still highly
pleasing under its coat of pale fur, while Mrs. Garnett, who was a yoghurt fancier, would require none at all.

“Cheese, Edith,” said Mrs. Freeport loudly, and little Mrs. Garnett blinked her doll eyes and smiled: No, thank you. Let others thicken their figures and damage their souls.

The cheese was pushed along to Mrs. Freeport, then back to Lily, passing twice under Mrs. Garnett’s nose. She did not look up again. She was moving her lips over a particularly absorbing passage in her book. For the last four months, she had been reading the same volume, which was called “Optimism Unlimited.” So as not to stain the pretty dust jacket, she had covered it with brown paper, but now even that was becoming soiled. When Mrs. Freeport asked what the book was about, Mrs. Garnett smiled a timid apology and said, “I’m
afraid
it is philosophy.” It was, indeed, a new philosophy, counseling restraint in all things, but recommending smiles. Four months of smiles and restraint had left Mrs. Garnett hungry, and, to mark her last evening at Mrs. Freeport’s, she had asked for an Italian meal. Mrs. Freeport thought it extravagant – after all, they were still digesting an English Christmas. But little Edith was so sweet when she begged, putting her head to one side, wrinkling her face, that Mrs. Freeport, muttering about monkeys, had given in. The dinner was prepared and served, and Mrs. Garnett, suddenly remembering about restraint, brought her book to the table and decided not to eat a thing.

It seemed that the late William Henry had found this capriciousness adorable, but Mrs. Freeport’s eyes were stones. Lily supposed this was how murders came about – not the hasty, soon regretted sort but the plan that is sown from an insult, a slight, and comes to flower at temperate speed. Mrs. Garnett deserved a reprimand. Lily saw her, without any emotion, doubled in two and shoved in a sack. But did Mrs. Freeport like her friend enough to bother teaching her lessons? Castigation, to Lily, suggested love. Mrs. Garnett and Mrs. Freeport were old friends, and vaguely related. Mrs. Garnett had been coming to Mrs. Freeport’s every winter for years, but she left unfinished letters lying about, from which Lily – a great reader – could learn that dear Vanessa was becoming meaner and queerer by the minute. Thinking of Mrs. Freeport as “dear Vanessa” took flexibility, but Lily had that. She was not “Miss” and not “Littel;” she was, or, rather, had been, a
Mrs. Cliff Little, who had taken advantage of the disorders of war to get rid of Cliff. He vanished, and his memory grew smaller and faded from the sky. In the bright new day strolled Miss Lily Littel, ready for anything. Then a lonely, fretful widow had taken a fancy to her and, as soon as travel was possible, had taken Lily abroad. There followed eight glorious years of trains and bars and discreet afternoon gambling, of eating éclairs in English-style tearooms, and discovering cafés where bacon and eggs were fried. Oh, the discovery of that sign in Monte Carlo: “Every Friday Sausages and Mashed”! That was the joy of being in foreign lands. One hot afternoon, Lily’s employer, hooked by Lily into her stays not an hour before, dropped dead in a cinema lobby in Rome. Her will revealed she had provided for “Miss Littel,” for a fox terrier, and for an invalid niece. The provision for the niece prevented the family from coming down on Lily’s head; all the same, Lily kept out of England. She had not inspired the death of her employer, but she had nightmares for some time after, as though she had taken the wish for the deed. Her letters were so ambiguous that there was talk in England of an inquest. Lily accompanied the coffin as far as the frontier, for a letter of instructions specified cremation, which Lily understood could take place only in France. The coffin was held up rather a long time at customs, documents went back and forth, and in the end the relatives were glad to hear the last of it. Shortly after that, the fox terrier died, and Lily appropriated his share, feeling that she deserved it. Her employer had been living on overdrafts; there was next to nothing for dog, companion, or niece. Lily stopped having nightmares. She continued to live abroad.

With delicate nibbles, eyes down, Lily ate her cheese. Glancing side-wise, she noticed that Mrs. Garnett had closed the book. She wanted to annoy; she had planned the whole business of the Italian meal, had thought it out beforehand. Their manners were still strange to Lily, although she was a quick pupil. Why not clear the air, have it out? Once again she wondered what the two friends meant to each other. “Like” and “hate” were possibilities she had nearly forgotten when she stopped being Mrs. Cliff and became this curious, two-faced Lily Littel.

Mrs. Freeport’s pebbly stare was focussed on her friend’s jar of yoghurt. “Sugar?” she cried, giving the cracked basin a shove along the table.
Mrs. Garnett pulled it toward her, defiantly. She spoke in a soft, martyred voice, as though Lily weren’t there. She said that it was her last evening and it no longer mattered. Mrs. Freeport had made a charge for extra sugar – yes, she had seen it on her bill. Mrs. Garnett asked only to pay and go. She was never coming again.

“I look upon you as essentially greedy.” Mrs. Freeport leaned forward, enunciating with care. “You pretend to eat nothing, but I cannot look at a dish after you have served yourself. The
wreck
of the lettuce. The
destruction
of the pudding.”

A bottle of wine, adrift and forgotten, stood by Lily’s plate. She had not seen it until now. Mrs. Garnett, who was fearless, covered her yoghurt thickly with sugar.

“Like most people who pretend to eat like birds, you manage to keep your strength up,” Mrs. Freeport said. “That sugar is the equivalent of a banquet, and you also eat between meals. Your drawers are stuffed with biscuits, and cheese, and chocolate, and heaven knows what.”

“Dear Vanessa,” Mrs. Garnett said.

“People who make a pretense of eating nothing always stuff furtively,” said Mrs. Freeport smoothly. “Secret eating is exactly the same thing as secret drinking.”

Lily’s years abroad had immunized her to the conversation of gentlewomen, their absorption with money, their deliberate over-or underfeeding, their sudden animal quarrels. She wondered if there remained a great deal more to learn before she could wear their castoff manners as her own. At the reference to secret drinking she looked calm and melancholy. Mrs. Garnett said, “That is most unkind.” The yoghurt remained uneaten. Lily sighed, and wondered what would happen if she picked her teeth.

“My change man stopped by today,” said Mrs. Garnett, all at once smiling and widening her eyes. How Lily admired that shift of territory – that carrying of banners to another field. She had not learned everything yet. “I
wish
you could have seen his face when he heard I was leaving! There really was no need for his coming, because I’d been in to his office only the week before, and changed all the money I need, and we’d had a lovely chat.”

“The odious little money merchant in the bright-yellow automobile?” said Mrs. Freeport.

Mrs. Garnett, who often took up farfetched and untenable arguments, said, “William Henry wanted me to be happy.”

“Edith!”

Lily hooked her middle finger around the bottle of wine and pulled it gently toward her. The day after tomorrow was years away. But she did not take her eyes from Mrs. Freeport, whose blazing eyes perfectly matched the small sapphires hanging from her ears. Lily could have matched the expression if she had cared to, but she hadn’t arrived at the sapphires yet. Addressing herself, Lily said, “Thanks,” softly, and upended the bottle.

“I meant it in a general way,” said Mrs. Garnett. “William Henry wanted me to be happy. It was nearly the last thing he said.”

“At the time of William Henry’s death, he was unable to say anything,” said Mrs. Freeport. “William Henry was my first cousin. Don’t use him as a platform for your escapades.”

Lily took a sip from her glass. Shock! It hadn’t been watered – probably in honor of Mrs. Garnett’s last meal. But it was sour, thick, and full of silt. “I have always thought a little sugar would improve it,” said Lily chattily, but nobody heard.

Mrs. Freeport suddenly conceded that William Henry might have wanted his future widow to be happy. “It was because he spoiled you,” she said. “You were vain and silly when he married you, and he made you conceited and foolish. I don’t wonder poor William Henry went off his head.”

“Off his head?” Mrs. Garnett looked at Lily; calm, courteous Miss Littel was giving herself wine. “We might have general conversation,” said Mrs. Garnett, with a significant twitch of face. “Miss Littel has hardly said a word.”

“Why?” shouted Mrs. Freeport, throwing her table napkin down. “The meal is over. You refused it. There is no need for conversation of any kind.”

She was marvelous, blazing, with that water lily on her head.

Ah, Lily thought, but you should have seen me, in the old days. How I could let fly… poor old Cliff.

They moved in single file down the passage and into the sitting room, where, for reasons of economy, the hanging lustre contained one bulb. Lily and Mrs. Freeport settled down directly under it, on a sofa; each had
her own newspaper to read, tucked down the side of the cushions. Mrs. Garnett walked about the room. “To think that I shall never see this room again,” she said.