Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (45 page)

There was, too, so much to consider. Suppose he hated America when he got there? Could he ever save enough for the return passage? He knew no one there—not a soul. Here he knew everyone, and they knew him, and his mother, and his forefathers.

And that, thought young George, thumping his pillow, was what was wrong! He felt stifled in this closed little world. He must get away to live, to breathe, to be—simply—George Lamb, a man on his own, not just a son, a grandson, a workmate or a neighbour—but someone in his own right!

The letter from Wilbur's father was lengthy and full of good sense. There were plenty of openings. He gave him a rough idea of wages to be expected, and the cost of living. He pointed out certain difficulties a country-bred boy might find in a foreign town, and prejudices which might have to be overcome.

On the second page he came to his proposition. In a few months' time his assistant was leaving to take over a new restaurant which Wilbur's father was opening. If George's references were completely satisfactory (this was underlined heavily), he would consider taking him on when the vacancy occurred. If, at the end of a month, either of them wanted to end the arrangement, well—fair enough. There were plenty of caterers in New York who would give a steady young man a chance.

Until he found suitable lodgings he was very welcome to stay with Wilbur's family. Any friend of Wilbur's—and so on.

George's spirits rose as he made a note of the address. He would write as soon as he had talked with Sep.

***

The frail old man listened attentively to the boy's tale. He had lived in Caxley all his life, and knew something of Mrs Lamb's possessiveness. He knew, too, that young George would prosper wherever he went. Rarely had he had such a promising pupil. He was a lad brought up on hard work, ambitious and adventurous and with a strong sense of justice. It was this last, Sep surmised, which had sparked off his revolt.

He advised the boy to talk of the matter, yet again, with his family. He told him that he would be able to give him excellent references, and he suggested that his own solicitor, Mr Lovejoy of Caxley Market Place, might find out more about the proposed job and his employer, so that the affair could be put on a business-like basis.

Within a month it was almost settled. If only his mother would bow to the inevitable, thought George! He would go so much more cheerfully if she gave the venture her blessing, but she continued to play the martyr.

It was at this stage that Dolly Clare and Emily Davis entered the scene. They had called together in the late afternoon to buy stamps. Dolly Clare, who had been button-holed many times to hear about Mrs Lamb's woes, hoped that they would escape this time, but it was not to be.

Emily Davis had not heard the tale first-hand, Mrs Lamb noted with satisfaction, arranging her face into the drooping lines of suffering widowhood.

'And so, off he goes, in a few weeks' time, whatever happens, I suppose,' continued Mrs Lamb lugubriously, after ten minutes' brisk narration of George's unfilial actions.

'They're all the same, Miss Davis, aren't they? No thought for their parents. Everything taken for granted. What happens to us old folk, don't matter. They must do as
they
want, no matter who's hurt by it'.

'You don't expect him to stay here all his life, do you?' said Emily, smiling.

'John will,' replied Mrs Lamb.

'Then you are very lucky,' responded Emily. Mrs Lamb began to look even more disgruntled than usual. It was a fine thing when your own generation turned on you!

'I wouldn't mind so much,' said Mrs Lamb, changing her ground, 'if he was going to someone we knew. But to be thrust among strangers! Well, it's hard for a mother's heart to bear, I can tell you. To think of my boy, alone and friendless in that wicked city—'

'No worse than London, I expect,' said Emily mildly. Mrs Lamb ignored the interruption.

'With all its temptations—and we all know what those are for a young man! No, I wouldn't say a word against this trip,' went on Mrs Lamb, waxing to her theme, 'if I thought there was anyone there he could turn to, if he was in trouble. Just one, just one single person! It's all I'd need to set my mind at rest.'

'That's easy,' said Emily. 'I've a brother in New York. I'll give you his address.'

She put down her handbag and reached for a pen and paper. Mrs Lamb's jaw dropped. Here was a blow!

At that moment, she heard the sound of George's bicycle
being lodged against the wall. The door burst open and there stood the young man, wind-blown and boisterous.

I'm just telling your mother,' said Emily, still writing busily, 'that I hope you'll look up my brother in New York. He's a policeman there. Been there nearly twenty years. He's married with four children. He'd love to see you. This is his address.'

George held out his hand gratefully, and studied the slip.

'This isn't far from Wilbur's father's place from the look of it,' he said. 'I'm very grateful, Miss Davis.'

'Well,' said Emily, with a hint of mischief in her voice, 'your mother said she wouldn't mind you going one bit, if there were someone there you knew. So now you are settled.'

Mrs Lamb's face was a study in suppressed wrath. Her heavy breathing boded no good to George when the ladies had left, he knew well. He could have laughed aloud at the situation. This had taken the wind out of the old girl's sails all right!

'I'll write to my brother to tell him you are on your way,' promised Emily. 'How lucky that I called in! It must have been meant, mustn't it, Mrs Lamb? Good luck, George. I'm sure you're doing the right thing!'

Eyes sparkling, Emily Davis followed Dolly Clare through the door.

'Doing the right thing,' echoed Mrs Lamb, when the couple were out of earshot. 'That Emily Davis! Always was too fond of interfering in other people's business.'

'It pays off sometimes,' said George, tucking the address in his pocket-book.

He had such a grin on his face that for two pins his mother would have reached up and boxed his ears, but she forbore.

She would keep her recriminations for that meddlesome Emily Davis next time she saw her, the hussy!

'You look pleased with yourself,' said one of George's regular customers, offering a dollar bill. 'Had good news?'

'Not really. Heard of a death actually.'

'Gee, that's sad! Sorry I spoke.'

'That's all right. She was a very old lady—over eighty.'

'Don't suppose she's many friends left to mourn her then. Not at that age.'

'You'd be surprised,' said George, handing over the change. 'You'd be surprised! Emily Davis has got a lot in common with our John Brown.'

'Our John Brown?' echoed the man, puzzled.

'Sure. The chap whose body lies a-mouldering in his grave.'

'And whose soul goes marching on?'

'That's the lad. Emily Davis is right beside him, take my word for it.'

The customer nodded and made his way to the door. These English guys had the screwiest ideas, no matter how long they'd lived in a decent God-fearing country, he told himself.

T
HE
day of Emily's funeral was quiet and grey. No breeze stirred the leaves or rustled the standing corn beyond the churchyard yew trees. Only a wren, hopping up and down the stairway of the hedge, added minute movement to the scene.

The church at Beech Green was small and shadowy. It was also deathly cold, despite the warmth outside. The congregation shivered as they waited for Emily to make her last journey up the aisle.

Dolly Clare sat in the front pew with several of Emily's nephews and nieces. Doctor Martin, who had attended both friends, sat behind her with Mr and Mrs Willet beside him.

Other Fairacre friends were nearby. There were relations and friends from Caxley, and a great many from Springbourne. But very few were Emily's contemporaries, for she had outlived the majority of them.

Among those from Springbourne was Daisy Warwick, whose husband was a bank manager in Caxley. She represented Springbourne Women's Institute, on this occasion, for she was the President of that branch. But she was also there on her own behalf, for she had been very fond of Emily Davis, and grateful to her for the care and affection she had shown to her only daughter Susan.

Daisy Warwick contemplated her well-polished shoes as she waited, and wished she had put on a thicker coat to withstand the bone-chilling damp of the church. Her fore-arms, protruding from the three-quarter length sleeves of the sober grey coat which had seemed the most suitable garb in her wardrobe, were covered with gooseflesh, and her hands grew colder and colder inside her gloves.

This would not do any of them any good, she thought practically; particularly poor old Miss Clare, and the vicar, Mr Partridge, who served the parish of Beech Green as well as Fairacre, and had recently returned from hospital. At least he was warmer waiting outside for the coffin to arrive.

At that moment, the sound of the bier's wheels on gravel was heard, and the congregation rose as the voice of Gerald Partridge fluted the unforgettable words at the west door.

'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.'

Later that evening, Daisy Warwick made a note on the telephone pad in her hall. It was the last of several such notes. The page now read:

1 yard black petersham
Buttons or zip?
Mary's baby
Lunching at Aunt Bess's on Sunday
Cushions?
Miss Davis dead.

For this was the evening when she made her weekly telephone call to Susan in London, and unless she had a list before her she found that the precious minutes had slipped by, and the
things which she really wanted to tell the girl had been forgotten.

The weekly list was always a source of great hilarity to her husband whenever he waited by the telephone. There was something surrealistic about the juxtaposition of such items as: 'Uncle John's asthma cure' and 'Try really ripe Stilton', or 'Theatre tickets' and 'Bed socks'. The present week, with its jumble of dress-making, births, deaths, lunches and cushions, was well up to standard, and he commented upon it to his wife.

'Well,' she said truthfully, 'life's like that.'

And her husband was obliged to agree.

Susan Warwick shared a flat in Earls Court with four other girls. The rooms were large and lofty. The windows were the sash variety, of enormous size, and as the flat was on the first floor, it was light. This was one of its few advantages.

Susan shared a bedroom with Penny Way. The other three shared the second bedroom. The sitting-room, heated by an archaic gas-fire whose meter gulped down shillings at an alarming rate, overlooked the front garden. The kitchen and bathroom, both small and dismal, were huddled together on a landing at the back of the house half a floor below. It was hardly surprising that the girls lived mainly on toast, made over the gas fire, with various spreads upon it, or bowls of soup which could be heated easily on the kitchen gas stove and carried aloft to be drunk by the fire.

The house had been built in 1890 when three resident servants had been considered the absolute minimum for keeping such an establishment running properly. It was now owned by a gentleman who lived very comfortably in Switzerland, and whose interest in this house, and a number of others which he owned, was purely financial.

Susan's house was now divided into four parts. The ground floor and basement were occupied by two young men, one with a sable coat and a pink rinse, the other with a black velvet cloak and a blue rinse, who minced off at eleven each morning and returned long after midnight, invariably squabbling at the top of their high-pitched voices.

On the floor above lived two young couples, and a newlyborn baby who cried nightly, and wrung Susan's soft heart with its misery.

Up in the attics, where once the three maids had slept in more affluent days, lived a middle-aged artist who sometimes emerged with a portfolio of drawings, but more often sat in a haze of cigarette smoke, a bottle beside him, in his eyrie, and contemplated fame—preferably without working for it.

Of all the motley inhabitants, Susan found him the most repulsive. They occasionally met on the stairs. During the year in which she had lived there, she had watched him deteriorate from a slovenly, garrulous good-for-nothing into a shaking, morose wreck of a man. He had lost a great deal of weight, his eyes watered, his head trembled uncontrollably. His clothes, always stained and spotted, were now filthy and torn. Susan suspected, from the reek of the man, that he was now drinking methylated spirit. She flattened herself against the wall, and held her breath as he passed, praying that he would not engage in facetious conversation. She need not have worried. He now scarcely noticed her as he groped his way up and down the stairs.

After a year of London life under these conditions, Susan was beginning to have doubts. During her last year at school in Caxley, the thought of living in London in a flat, away from all who knew her in Springbourne, seemed the height of sophistication. Oh, to be free!

She was happy at home, and fond of her parents and brothers. The two boys were some years older than she was, and were already out in the world. Susan envied them, and was rather sorry for herself, left behind, over-duly cosseted, in her opinion, by her father and mother.

It was too much, she felt, to be obliged to be in by ten every night. And why on earth, she asked herself privately, should she tell her parents who she was with every time? Couldn't they trust her? Heaven knows, at seventeen she was old enough to look after herself!

Or was she? In her less rebellious moments, Susan admitted that her parents were only doing their duty. There were occasions when Susan had found herself non-plussed—even frightened. There had been that drunken youth at the bus-stop. Only Susan's speed and natural agility had kept her from his unwelcome embrace. Then there was that dubious party at Roger's where everything was plunged in semi-darkness and everyone seemed remarkably gloomy until mysterious tablets were passed round. Susan had had the sense to make her way to the bathroom, throw away her tablets, and creep from the house.