No More Meadows (42 page)

‘What's eating you, Matt?' Vinson said acidly. ‘I thought all you Kansas University boys were isolationists.'

When everyone got up to go to the other end of the room for coffee Christine took his arm and drew him aside. ‘Vin! You were horrid to Matt. He was only trying to be nice to me by sticking up for England.'

‘It wasn't his place. If anyone's going to stand up for my wife, it's me.'

‘Well, why didn't you?'

‘He didn't give me a chance. He jumped right in with his slick talk. Just like he's been trying to jump in ahead of me ever since we were children. That smarty pants. It's a damn good thing I saw you first, or he'd have jumped in there too.'

‘Don't be silly. He wouldn't have been interested in me. He's got a girl.'

‘He's always got a girl. A different one every month. You watch out.'

‘Oh, Vin, don't talk such nonsense. He's your
brother.'
'

'I'd still kill him if he ever tried to make a pass at you.' He gripped her arm and stared at her. Looking into his flecked eyes, strange and bitter with unreasonable jealousy, Christine could believe that he meant it.

‘When you two love-birds have finished your tête-à-tête there,' Milton called out, ‘come on over, Vin, and pour us a drink.'

Vinson went over to them and Christine finished clearing the table. The kitchen was suffocatingly hot. Mrs Gaegler said that no one should use an oven in this weather, and perhaps she was right.

Christine opened the back door and stepped out on to the grass. It was almost as hot outside. The storm could not be very far away. There was that breathless, suspended pause on the earth and air, when every leaf hangs motionless, waiting for the rain. Thick clouds covered the stars and moon, and away to the left, above the roofs of the town, the black sky was slit by a streak of yellow light. In the night's silence Christine could hear very clearly the sugary throb from one of the Meenehans' television sets and a tap dripping in the kitchen behind her.

The music stopped and the burst of studio audience applause
which followed it almost drowned the first rumble of thunder. Here it came again, like barrels rolling down a distant cobbled street. Christine waited, her face to the sky, longing to feel the first drops of rain. She did not want to go indoors to the crosscurrents of the family party. She wanted to stay out here where the night was quiet and smelled of meadows, and the grass and trees were beginning to stir in the first hint of breeze. For a moment, as the breeze blew suddenly into a wind and flung a gust of raindrops against her lifted face, she thought she was in England, and all the summer storms of her childhood came back to her in a wave of homesickness.

She stood tiptoe on the grass as the rain fell drop by enormous drop, ceased suddenly as the wind held its breath in a pause while the thunder rolled, and then came all at once hissing down in a torrent on the earth, on the houses, on the trees and bushes, and sent Christine running indoors.

‘It's coming! The storm's coming!' she called. As she ran into the living-room a deafening clap of thunder exploded over the house, and Mrs Gaegler screamed and fell off the sofa on to the floor.

Everyone looked at each other for a moment, and then began to laugh because they had been frightened.

‘Come on, Mother.' Vinson stooped to help her up. ‘They didn't get you that time.'

‘I've been struck! I was struck by a thunderbolt!' she wailed. ‘No you weren't.' Vinson settled her rigid body back on the sofa. ‘You just got a fright, and so – whoops!' The lightning stabbed, the thunder clashed and Mrs Gaegler screamed and fell against the back of the sofa with her eyes closed.

‘I'm in shock,' she announced, opening her eyes very wide and staring round at them. ‘I'm in a state of shock. My head … Vinson, give me another shot of whisky. The thunderbolt must have knocked my glass over.'

‘Do you think she should?' Vinson looked at Christine, who was on her knees with Matthew, picking up the pieces of the glass which Mrs Gaegler had broken.

‘Of course,' his mother snapped. ‘Why ask her? She's always talking about when she was a nurse, but she's never done any good for
me.
I must have a stimulant. I feel that I'm failing.
My heart… my nerves….' The storm was a heaven-sent opportunity for her to go through most of the symptoms in her repertoire. Christine had never seen her put on such a good act. When Vinson handed her the glass of rye and water she took a greedy gulp and almost immediately gasped and clutched at her stomach. ‘A stabbing pain – right through me! And you needn't all look at each other,' she said, as the family exchanged glances. ‘You'll never know the pain I was in there for a moment. I think I'll go and get myself a sedative.'

‘I'll get it for you,' Christine said.

‘I wouldn't dream of bothering you,' Mrs Gaegler said coldly. She got up with the face of a martyr and went upstairs to sulk because no one believed in her pain.

The family talked desultorily, while the thunder rumbled into the distance and the sheets of rain lifted to a spatter and gradually ceased. Christine opened the window and the cool air came in like a draught of water.

Milt and Edna, who had a long drive home, were getting ready to leave when Mrs Gaegler came down the stairs. ‘I've just vomited,' she informed them. ‘In the basin,' she added, as if that made it more interesting. They tried to respond suitably to the news, although they only half believed it. She had made herself sick before now by pushing a spoon down her throat.

Edna found her shoes, retrieved the canoe-shaped hat from the top of the refrigerator and followed Milt out to the car over the cool wet grass.

‘Let's drive Matt home,' Christine said, as she and Vinson turned back to the house. Vinson always insisted on guiding people down the driveway from the garage in case they cut up his bank.

‘Didn't he come in Mother's car?'

‘No, it's being mended. He ran into a bus the other day, but don't tell your mother. He came over in a cab tonight.'

‘Let him take one back then.'

‘He could, but I'd like to go for a drive. The air's so wonderful now.'

‘We'd have to take Mother. She won't like being left alone.'

Mrs Gaegler, however, said she felt much too ill to go out. She would crawl into bed – not that she would sleep – and pull
the sheets over her head. That was all she was able for. ‘But you go ahead and have your fun. Don't worry about me. I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment. You go. Leave me. Why shouldn't you? Why should you worry about me?'

Having successfully made them feel bad about leaving her, she made her exit, hauling herself hand over hand up the banisters, pausing on every third step to gasp a little. She looked smaller than usual, and her girlish ankles weakly climbing were suddenly pathetic.

‘We shouldn't have left her, Vin,' Christine said as they went out.

‘She's all right. I think she's a little tight as a matter of fact. That's all that's wrong with her.'

Matthew wanted to drive, but Vinson would not let him. They all sat on the front seat with Christine in the middle, and Matthew sang ‘Allentown Jail'. He had a pleasant, mournful voice. Christine felt cosy driving along with the three of them close and friendly together. Once or twice Vinson glanced across to see how near to her Matthew was sitting.

When they got to the house where Matthew was staying, his friend Bob came out and insisted that they should come in for a drink. Christine had Coca-Cola and Vinson had several drinks and became more happy and relaxed than Christine had seen him since his mother arrived. Bob played the piano and Matthew sang, and Bob's wife, who was half Hawaiian, took off her shoes and danced a hula.

They stayed for quite a while. Every time Christine said they ought to go Bob said he would not hear of it. Christine was quite happy to stay because Vinson was enjoying himself. It was easy, friendly company, and although she was tired she could sit back and dream to the music and nobody bothered her.

Some time after midnight she asked Vinson: ‘Don't you think we should ring up your mother and tell her we'll be home soon, in case she's worrying?'

‘No, it's all right.' Vinson waved a careless hand from the piano, where he was singing now, not quite sober. ‘She's O.K., I told you; it was the whisky. She's probably in a dead sleep by now.'

‘But just in case she isn't.' Christine was troubled by the
instinct that makes a nurse go back and look at a patient just once more. When she rang her home number, there was no answer. Her mother-in-law must be asleep. No need to worry then. Her instinct had been wrong.

Nevertheless, when they did get home much later, she quietly opened the door of the room that was to be her baby's, and looked in at her mother-in-law.

Mrs Gaegler was not there. The bed was tumbled, but empty. Honeychile jumped yapping off the bed, skittered between Christine's legs and fled downstairs.

‘Vin, come quickly!'

‘What's wrong?' His voice was vague with drowsiness and whisky.

‘Your mother – she's not here.' Christine ran downstairs and met him coming slowly up. They searched the house. There was no Mrs Gaegler, and her dog went leaping everywhere in a frenzy, scattering the rugs, its ridiculous front legs beating the air.

When the telephone rang Christine got to it first. It was Dr Bladen, the doctor who had stuck a hypodermic needle so many times into Mrs Gaegler.

‘I've been trying to get you for some time,' he said. ‘I've been ringing your home every half-hour since we took Mrs Gaegler senior away.'

‘Took her away? What's happened? What's happened to her?' Christine pushed at Vinson, who was trying to get hold of the telephone.

‘She called me about eleven o'clock – said she was alone and very sick, and asked me to come right over. When I got there I called the ambulance at once. Mrs Gaegler is in Saint Mary's Hospital. She had an emergency appendicectomy at twelve-thirty…. Oh yes, her condition is satisfactory. The appendix was a nasty-looking thing, though. I wish I could have got hold of you before, but Mrs Gaegler said she didn't know where you were.'

‘But she did know, Vin!' Christine said when she had rung off and told him what the doctor had said. ‘She knew Bob's telephone number. She's often rung Matt up there.'

‘Perhaps she was too ill to remember,' Vinson suggested.
They agreed on this, but as they looked at each other they saw that neither of them believed it.

Mrs Gaegler had won. She had triumphed over them. She had something really wrong with her at last. They had not believed her, and so she had ensured that they should feel as bad as possible by letting them stay out drinking and smoking while she was under the surgeon's knife.

Mrs Gaegler lay like a martyr in the hospital, suffering no complications, but behaving as if she were the sickest person in the place and driving the nurses frantic. Whenever Christine and Vinson went to see her a doctor or a nurse would stop them in the corridor and ask them when they were going to take Mrs Gaegler home. Mrs Gaegler, however, did not want to go home. She was enjoying herself, and Christine and Vinson were in no hurry to have her back. She would have to spend a week or two recuperating with them before she could return to Kansas, and they clung to their breathing space of peace as long as possible.

Vinson was going to give Christine an evening out. They were going to the theatre and then out to dinner. To Christine this innocent diversion seemed very exciting. Washington, the capital of one of the largest countries in the world, has fewer theatres than the capital cities of the smallest countries in the world. Vinson said that this was because Roosevelt had ordained that negroes could sit down with white people for an evening's entertainment, and so the white people stayed away and the theatres closed down or became cinemas. Christine only half believed this, because Vinson was prejudiced against both Roosevelt and the coloured race.

Whatever its cause, the dearth of theatres was a sad blot on an otherwise cultured city, and if the touring company of a second-rate Broadway show came to Washington the drama-starved inhabitants rushed as hungrily to see it as if it were a smash hit with an all-star cast.

Christine had booked the tickets weeks ahead and had been looking forward eagerly to her evening out. As she kissed Vinson good-bye on the morning of the day, she made him promise to come home in plenty of time to change and get to the theatre
on time. He was not home at six o'clock. He was not home at seven o'clock. At seven-fifteen she had come to the distressing conclusion that he had forgotten. She was just going to ring him up when the telephone rang as she walked to it.

It was Vinson. He was terribly sorry, but an admiral had just flown in from the west coast and had called a conference for eight o'clock. He would not be able to take her to the theatre. Could he take her out to dinner, anyway? No, the conference might go on for hours. He was terribly sorry, but that was how it was.

Yes, that was how it was. The Navy! There were times when she hated it. The Navy came first. She was just a wife, and who was a wife disappointed of her evening out compared with an admiral who had just flown in from the west coast?

Honeychile, who had developed quite a healthy appetite since Christine had taken her off vitamin pills and cod-liver oil and hormones, came whining round her ankles for food. Christine went into the kitchen, fed the dog and was drearily contemplating whether she would boil or poach an egg for her supper when the telephone rang again. It was Matthew. Bob and his wife had gone out and Matthew was alone and bored. Could he come over?

Christine told him what had happened to her evening. ‘Why don't you and I go to the theatre instead, Matt?' she said, her spirits reviving. ‘If you go straight there and I take a taxi from here we could just make it in time.'