The Fancy (22 page)

She felt she had let him down and was miserable for the three days while he was away. The flat seemed so wrong without him. How had she ever lived there alone before? She had not the heart to cook herself anything to eat, but lived on coffee and toast. She thought he might be angry when he came back, but that was what was so lovely about David : he never brooded. He could be furious with her one minute and shout so that Colonel Satterthwaite would knock on the wall, and the next he would seize her round the waist from behind as she sulked over the stove in the kitchen and demonstrate his affection for her so exuberantly that Colonel Satterthwaite would knock on the wall again.

He came home on Friday evening in tremendous spirits, and Sheila forgot her three days’ unhappiness in an instant. He had a bottle of gin under one arm and a whole tinned ham under the other. Sheila’s eyes nearly came out of her head.

“
Ham
, darling! Where on earth—? You didn’t steal it?”

“One of the Subs sold it me. He’s got a girl who smuggles him out trifles like this from her father’s eating-house. He’s an Armenian or a Greek or establish blyh something, and knows all the dodges to get stuff.”

“But that’s Black Market! D’you think we ought—?”

“You’re crazy! If somebody’s going to have it, why not us?” He threw the tin into the air and dropped it, making a dent in the bedroom door.

“Oh, David, look what you’ve done.” Sheila rubbed at it ineffectually.

“One more thing to explain to Kathleen when she comes home.”

“Oh, I know. I can’t think what she’s going to say when she sees the coffee stains on the carpet and that awful burn on the mantelpiece.”

“She won’t mind. Tell her I did it. I say——” he limped into the kitchen to get the corkscrew, “it’s going to be Hell if she ever does stop being evacuated. We’d have to find somewhere else.”

“It would be awfully difficult,” she called from the bedroom, where she was replacing her lipstick. “They say you can’t get flats for love or money.”

She had a sudden vision of herself staying out from the factory to tramp from agent to agent, viewing one impossible flat after another. She could almost feel her feet aching. Supposing she didn’t find anywhere? They couldn’t afford to go to a hotel for long, and at the thought that he might drift away from her if they were separated, the
round eyes looking at her from the mirror grew rounder with fear.

“Oh, you’d find something!” he called. “I can’t get the ice out of the fridge.”

Yes, she would find something, because he expected her to. That was at once the tiring and exciting part of being in love, living up to what was expected of you.

“I can’t get the ice out! What on earth have you done to this thing? It’s like an iceberg. Come and get it out, because we’re going to celebrate!”

“I’m coming.” The face in the mirror relaxed. She smiled at herself. Really, she was not looking at all bad these days. Love seemed to make your hair do what you wanted and your make-up stay on properly.

Later that evening, she said dreamily : “I’d give anything not to be going home tomorrow night.”

He was furious. He protested that she had never told him.

“I did, darling. You’ve forgotten.”

“I never forget. I don’t see why you have to go just when I get back. What am I supposed to do all the time you’re away?”

“It’s only one night. You’ll be all right. I’ve left you lots of food. You’ll only have to get your breakfast on Sunday, which you do Anyway on other mornings. Think, you’ll be able to have all the Sunday papers. I thought you’d probably go out for lunch, and I shall be back in the evening.”

“Don’t go.”

“Darling, don’t be unfair. You don’t think I want to? I haven’t been home for ages. I simply must go, or they’ll begin to suspect something. Mummy’s already beginning to say ‘What are you up to?’ in her letters.”

“Tell her what you’re up to, then. Do her good!”

“But, David, you don’t understand : I couldn’t. They’d simply die of shame. T that leaves you to singke bhey—oh, I couldn’t !”

It was a fantastic suggestion.

It seemed even more fantastic next evening in the blue-lit train approaching Swinley. She laughed to herself at the mere idea. To start with, they would never believe it. David teased her enough about ‘The Stately Home of Swinley’, but he didn’t really understand just how remote its life was from life in Museum Court, W.C.2. It was not that it was rich or stately ; it was just a house that knew what was going to happen in it at every minute of the day. Her parents were not even the Blimps he imagined ; they were just two people who had never gone abroad because of leaving the dogs. They might know less about life than their youngest daughter did at the age of twenty-two, but they knew what one did and did not do. She could never tell them.

The train made four stops at little stations on the way to Swinley, and as each one was called out there accumulated around Sheila more
and more associations to draw her back to the life from which she had escaped.

‘Cot’nam!’ That was where they always clanged milk cans about on the daytime trains. ‘Ardrey Bridge!’ They had once got out there and driven four miles in a governess cart to have tea with some people called—Rogerson, was it?—whose son was six years old and couldn’t feed himself. He had been a family joke for years afterwards.

‘Park Halt!’ Funny to hear a woman calling that. That was Mrs. Munday, who lived in the cottage by the level crossing and had dozens of tattered children swinging on the gates. The children were grown up now and gone away. Some were in the Forces, perhaps. Sheila remembered one little boy who always called ‘Yah!’ and made a rude face at the train. She had seen him once when he was older, holding open a gate when she was out hunting and looking as if he would still like to say ‘Yah!’

By the time she had passed ‘Six Elms!’ with its memories of trips there to buy a special sort of red sweet, and was reaching for her case as the train slowed down for Swinley, she was so steeped in the old atmosphere that she might have been ten years old, or any age. She half expected to see her legs stepping on to the platform in black woollen stockings, so exactly did she feel as if she were coming home from school for the holidays. The thought of David and the flat brought up her head and made her walk with conscious poise to the gate. She was different now, a visitor from Town. She was someone from Town looking at the country, instead of someone from the country looking at Town as a place where you went to buy clothes and see matinées and have tea at the underground Fullers below Jaegers.

She was someone to whom things had happened, who knew what she was alive for. Why, then, as she stood in the station yard, trying to see which of the lights were the lamps of the dogcart, did she feel as if she belonged here, where nothing ever happened? If I don’t look out, she thought, I’ll start feeling guilty, and I’ve managed to avoid that up till now.

The dogcart had been brought out of retirement when it became apparent that if Mr. Blake were going to drive to his office in Worcester in the car there would be no petrol to spare for anything else. There was no question about his taking the car, for apart from the roundabout train journey there was a quaint Victorian custom in the Blake family that Father had first go at everything, including the red gravy under the joint.

He was the senior partner in a firm of solicitors which had the confidence of every local family whose secrets were worth knowing, but was disappointingly stuffy impossible to believe.pa about betraying that confidence in the home. With a brother-in-law and cousin as mature junior partners, he could have retired by now, but he had nothing better to do.

So the dogcart had beer brought out of the barn, where it had rested so long on its haunches with its shafts slung up to a beam, dreaming of the days when it used to develop a rare turn of speed down Swinley Hill, especially when Nigger shied at the goats half-way down. But Nigger was gone long ago. to shy at goats from between the shafts of a jobmaster’s buggy, and gone, too, was Noakes, the town-bred groom, to whom all horses were potential criminals, controlled only by a lot of jabbing and whacking and come-hupping, you Devil.

Although they were both country people and dressed and spoke the part, Mr. and Mrs. Blake did everything wrong in the country. They engaged the wrong sort of groom, because he had the right sort of references and transfixed them with a glib line of talk. They bought the wrong sort of horses—showy chestnuts with pale slender legs which buckled at the mere sight of a road, pretty, tricky ponies with little mean eyes on whom the children sat for delightful photographs but by whom they all, except Roger, the eldest, who had no imagination, were put off riding for life.

The Blakes always had the wrong sort of dogs, too, untrained gun dogs that had got sloppy through living indoors, spaniels, with limpid eyes, and ears infested with canker. There was usually a shrill terrier about, so bad-tempered that he was á burden to everyone including himself, and in a permanent state of moulting white hairs all over the furniture. The furniture of Swinley Lodge was not quite right, either : it was neither comfortably homely nor elegantly formal, but just inelegantly uncomfortable. Chairs and sofas repelled you forwards instead of inviting you backwards, tables were ill-proportioned things with legs opposite all the chairs, the fireplaces let in draughts and let out heat, and all the flower vases were too tall and narrow.

The house itself, over whose threshold Mr. Blake, who always did the right thing, had staggered with his substantial bride in 1901, would have been more at home in Dulwich than in the black-and-white Worcestershire village. It seemed to have got there by mistake, like a day tripper who has missed his train home and is stranded in the country in all the wrong clothes. Its red brick had darkened but never mellowed, and threw off creepers before they had reached the first-floor window sills. The garden was on a slope, with lawns that devoured a gardener’s energy like vampires and a summer-house that lost the sun at midday. There was a vegetable garden and a fruit cage, but the rose garden had chronic greenfly and the flowers in the herbaceous borders all bloomed at different times.

The Blakes had had four children at regular intervals : a boy and a girl, a boy and a girl, all free from squints or hairlips or embarrassing complexes. They had all gone to the wrong sort of schools at the right sort of fees and been taught the right recreations by wrong people like Noakes, the groom, who would ‘shake ’em down in the saddle’ by beating tin cans behind the pony’s rump and sending it scuttling and
bucking away with a child in floods of fears clinging on by reins, mane or arms round its neck. Everything possible had been done for their happiness. A pool had been dug and cemented in the upper lawn, too deep for a paddling child and too shallow to swim in. Beyond the thicket of evergreens that darkened all the windows along one side of the house, there was a tennis-court, end-on to the evening sun, made of a special substance which melted in the heat and went into tarry whorls if you turned your foot quickly.

By living in took a step nearer to her mother, it was see such a house in such a village as Swinley, which was three miles from the station at the end of a single track line, the Blakes managed to combine the disadvantages of the country with none of its advantages. One by one the children had gone away, but Mr. and Mrs. Blake continued to live, in the country yet not of it, in expensive inconvenience which grew more expensive and more inconvenient with the coming of another war. It never occurred to them to make any radical change like moving to a cottage which could be run with one servant, or having fewer courses for dinner. Things were not given to occurring to Mrs. Blake. Had it ever occurred to her to wonder for what purpose she rose each morning and dressed carefully in cashmere cardigan sets and heather mixture stockings, she might never have risen at all.

Unlike most country houses, the front door at Swinley was locked, and Sheila had to ring and be admitted by the female half of the ‘Good Little Couple’ whose male half had driven her the chilly three miles behind the common, slovenly cob. The Good Little Couple were both tall and gaunt and evil-visaged, and reminded Sheila of the gardener in Nathaniel Gubbins’ column who spent all day with his feet on the kitchen stove reading Karl Marx and prophesying Armageddon for his employers. But her mother, who had acquired them through an advertisement one dreadful week when it had seemed she would have to do all the housework and her husband’s shoes, was convinced, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that they were the real old retainer type and that the Good Little Couple, whose name was Geek, would stay for ever and defend Swinley Lodge with their lives in the event of invasion.

Mrs. Geek took Sheila’s case without a word and disappeared down the hall with a martyred back, although Sheila had intended to carry the case herself. Geek shut himself out into the frosty night and Sheila beard him swearing at the cob. The grandfather clock whirred and said “Nin e o’clock”, and across the hall, where a bar of light shone from under the drawing-room door, the wireless was switched on to the announcement of the News.

It was ages since Sheila had listened to the News. There was no need to with David; he always knew it already, with some sort of confidential embroidery tacked on. She was impressed by his grasp of the War and would listen devotedly while he expounded on some
thing complicated like the Caucasus or inflation, agreeing with him heartily but stumped if he asked her a question that he had not already answered himself. Then he would laugh at her and they would talk about silly things instead of the War.

She longed for him now and wondered whether he felt as low as she did. He was probably in a restaurant, one of their own haunts, even, for he was not sentimental about things like that. Perhaps it was just as well for them to be apart now and again. Sheila had read in a magazine that you should never let your man get used to you, Make your life together as exciting as those halcyon days of courtship.

Their courtship, which had only lasted a week, had not been particularly halcyon from Sheila’s point of view. Its working hours had been spent in making mistakes because her mind was elsewhere—wondering why he had not written or telephoned, or worrying over the implications of his most casual remark, and in her off duty she had not moved from the telephone except to meet David at whatever peculiar hour or place he might suggest. However, she followed the magazine’s advice faithfully, changing her hair style and the colour of her lipstick, and greeting him one evening in a gingham apron with a ribbon in her hair and the next in a sophisticated black dress with her hair swept up and earrings.