Tirra Lirra by the River (17 page)

I open my eyes and stare at the wall. The evasiveness of the Custs, the dust on the magpie embroidery, and Grace’s comment—‘
The Rainbow house is up for sale
 …’ combine in my mind to form an incredible pattern. Oh, but surely, an incredible pattern. To disperse it, to smash it by movement, I pick up the magpie embroidery and take it to the window.

Here, from another angle than on that first day, is the lawn, the cabbage-tree palm, the street. I shake the embroidery out of the window, releasing much dust, and then stand and stare, like Lyn Wilmot or Una Porteous, up and down the street. A little girl opens a garden gate and steps into the street, while from the other direction comes an old gentleman, very tall, thin, sallow, and all in white, Don Quixote dressed for bowls. They meet. He pulls his rag hat from his head, extends one foot, and bows very low. The little girl and I laugh at the same time. They cross and part, drawing further and further away from each other on the street, and I look longingly from one to the other until both disappear. I don’t go back to the chair. Even in winter and early spring the sun here is never as gentle as it seems at first. It has made me slightly sick. I go back to bed and in less than a minute I am asleep.

‘Nora. Nora.’

Betty Cust’s voice, very low, is testing the depth of my sleep. I want her to go away, but the recollection of all her kindness obliges me to open my eyes.

‘I’ve brought you two letters.’

They are from Hilda and Liza. I am too excited to find my spectacles. I pull open the bedside drawer, I give anxious cries and thump the bedclothes. It is Betty who finds them. She takes them from the back of the drawer and gives them to me.

I read bits of the letters aloud, and then put them aside to read carefully and privately later. I sit back and beam at Betty. How truly incredible my incredible pattern seems now, a product of sickness and loneliness. Smiling at my joy, Betty takes my place in the cane chair, with her sun-spotted hands folded in her lap, and asks if either Hilda or Liza had children. I speak vaguely of Hilda’s son, being dubious about explaining the breach between them when he ‘got off’ with her lover, but I can be quite frank about Liza, who in the war years suffered such drastic bereavement, losing her husband and all three of her sons.

I am sociable and talkative. I describe Liza’s hat shop and how Hilda and I tried to stave off her ruin by sending people to buy her hats.

‘But it was hopeless. She had always wanted a hat shop in London, and she didn’t even notice that young people weren’t wearing hats any more. It was through her that we met Fred. He was looking for tenants for the two top floors of his house. They had been vacant for years because his requirements were so particular. He wanted three thin old women.’

‘Why thin?’

‘He couldn’t bear fat women.’

Thin Betty, on behalf of all fat women, is offended. ‘Too bad about him!’

‘That’s exactly what we used to tell him.’

‘He sounds quite unreasonable.’

‘Oh, poor dear, he was. Is, I mean. He’s not dead.’

‘Was that the house where Peter visited you, the last time he went over?’

‘Yes. On Lansdowne Rise, not far from where he visited me the first time, when I was still in Holland Park. All the little back gardens in that block opened on to a private square. What we liked about the square was that it was
hilly
. Some of it was mown grass, but there were patches of old elms and beeches and broken paving and shrubs gone wild. If you stood under one of those big trees you could imagine yourself in a forest. Or if you were feeling urban you could sit out in the open, on one of the benches, and see people at the back windows of the houses. The houses were all the same, of course, three stories with cellars …’

I go on to describe Fred’s house, but as I speak I see the four of us in the square on a summer evening. We are all sitting on one bench, Fred sideways on an end, when Liza says, ‘Look.’ We look where she is pointing and see that Belle, having missed us, has extended her head round the garden gate. She sees us, comes through the gate, sits down and licks herself, and then sets out towards us at her leisure. The sunlight seems infused with a blueish smoke, though no fires are burning, and we all watch Belle stepping with deliberation across the grass, through shade and then through smoky sunlight, until, knowing herself observed, she sits down and cleans herself again. We all look away, pretending indifference, and presently she comes on again, with no sign of pleasure or recognition or even of her real intention, until she arrives at our feet. She then composedly sits, with her back to us, and we all relax, and look at the sky, and into the trees and the smoky light, and begin to talk in quiet voices.

I am still describing the house to Betty, and now I say, as the
twilight dulls and we rise reluctantly from the bench, ‘It wasn’t a house from the best period. The hall was rather narrow and the moulding wasn’t good. But it was pleasant. It was one of those pleasant houses.’

‘Peter told us about it.’

I know by her tone that he has disparaged it. ‘It wasn’t to Peter’s taste,’ I say. ‘He said it had a funny smell. And he was right, you know. We used to notice it ourselves whenever we came back from the country. But then we got used to it all over again, and forgot all about it. I think it came from the cellar. Fred used to keep his wine there, but Hilda and Liza and I wouldn’t go near the place, because of the rats.’

‘Rats! Not really! Heavens, Nora, no wonder your friends are so happy to be out of it.’

‘They’re happy to have got a cheap flat.’

But the apparent happiness of Hilda and Liza is, in fact, what makes me read their letters with such care after Betty goes. I read Hilda’s first, alert for the word, the note, by which she might betray herself. I don’t find it, and conclude that she is as cheerful as she sounds. I am not so certain about Liza, whose cheerfulness, on examination, gives a slightly wild, shrugging effect. She is less robust and adaptable than Hilda, and besides, of the three of us, she suffered most from the break because Fred had been for her, for so long, a kind of Lewie. When her husband was still alive, Fred was her neighbour in Surrey. His grandmother, who had brought him up, had died by that time, but not before she had implanted in Fred a fear that every woman who said a friendly word to him was ‘after him’. In consequence, all his friends were young men or old women. Liza was a special case. She was a neighbour, she was very thin, her happy marriage was a safeguard, and of course, she was ‘simpatica’. Even so, he would have his jumpy spells when alone with her, and Liza said she ought to have known better than to say
what she did. Her husband had begun a long period at home, with a fractured knee, just as Liza had begun to redecorate the house, and one day she said to Fred, ‘Oh, the things I shall do when I get rid of Theo!’

‘I wish you could have seen him,’ she would tell us. ‘He gave a great equine quiver and ran away and hid himself for a month. No, really, a whole month. All I ever saw of him all that time was his hat gliding at great speed along the top of the hedge. I think he bought roller skates. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go and knock at his door. He would have run and hidden under a bed. And as for writing a little note! No, I could only do it in words, face to face. I almost caught him a number of times in the village, but he always saw me coming and managed to escape. But at last I caught him in the doorway of a shop. It was a narrow doorway, a real ambush. He raised his hat and tried to dodge past me, but I caught his sleeve, and that made him stop, because there were people around who knew us both. So he stopped, and I said, ‘Oh, you silly man. All I meant was that I was waiting for Theo to go back to work, so that I could get on with the house.’

Very gradually, they became friends again, though Liza swore he never quite got over it. ‘It’s no good. He suspects me to this day.’

Most of this she would say in his presence, and sometimes, when we were all together, and a silence had fallen, she would look at him and say, very quietly, ‘Look out, Fred.’ And Fred would hiss and duck his head and splutter with laughter. ‘That’s all very well,’ he would say, ‘but I don’t trust any of you. Just as well there are three of you. Safety in numbers.’

None of us foresaw that this farcical mistrust would end by wrecking our association. One day Fred rubbed his chin and frowned.

‘I don’t trust that Australian,’ he said.

We all looked at him. ‘What Australian?’ asked Hilda.

But Fred was still rubbing his chin. ‘And that nephew of hers, that Peter Chiddy, the day he came here he stole two of my books.’

He went out of the room. We all looked at each other. ‘What do you make of that?’ asked Hilda in a hushed voice.

Liza bent her head and set her fingertips on her forehead. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

The next day Fred accused the milkman of cheating, and attacked him with his stick. The man was not hurt, and nothing came of it, but through the house worry and trepidation spread. For three days we saw nothing of him, though we could hear him moving about in his flat on the ground floor. On the third day he came into Liza’s sitting room without knocking. We were all there. He looked and sounded calm and businesslike.

‘Someone has been drinking my burgundy,’ he said. ‘The stuff closest to the door. I know who it was. It was that Australian.’

‘Oh, Fred dear,’ said Liza, ‘don’t be silly.’

‘I think you had better keep quiet, Liza. We all know what you’re after.’

In nervous response to this old joke, Hilda laughed. Fred went wild.

‘Bloody women!’ he shouted. ‘With your great bloody tits!’

We all sat perfectly still. Fred went out, muttering and tumbling over his feet. ‘Did anyone see where I put my spectacles?’ asked Liza in a dazed voice, and Hilda said briskly, ‘Yes, over there by the clock.’

Fred did not return to the house that night, nor the next.

‘Hadn’t we better get in touch with his sister?’ I asked.

‘I daren’t,’ said Liza. ‘You know how he hates her.’

‘Hers are bigger than any of ours,’ said Hilda.

‘Oh, Hilda,’ said Liza sadly.

‘Sorry,’ said Hilda.

‘I think we should ring Mr Pope,’ said Liza.

Mr Pope was Fred’s lawyer. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know where he is. You will hear in due course.’

‘You see?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Liza, ‘I don’t.’

‘Due course,’ said Hilda. ‘I never know what that means.’

I reminded them that Fred had gone away without notice the year before. ‘And he was only in Cornwall.’

But Hilda said, ‘What will happen if he has gone mad and violent?’

‘He will have to be put away,’ said Liza.

‘No, I mean,’ said Hilda, ‘what will happen to us?’

None of us wanted to think about it. The lease of the house was Fred’s, and in spite of rises in costs, our rents had not changed since we had moved in ten years before, at a time when all our incomes had begun to wither. Fred had been our friend and benefactor, and in our worry for him we were mortified by our worry for ourselves.

At last his sister rang. Fred had been arrested for belabouring a bus conductor and was now in a mental hospital. A few days later she appeared at number six.

‘No, I’m sorry, no one can see him. He wouldn’t know you, in any case. He’s in a very good place, getting the best possible care, but they don’t hold out any hope of recovery. Not this time. It’s the place he went to last May.’

‘But last May he went to Cornwall.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

She had been given legal power to act for him. She remarked that our arrangement with him seemed to have been very personal and casual. ‘Mr Pope says no records were kept. What exactly were you paying him?’

She nodded when we told her. ‘That’s what Fred told Mr
Pope, but I simply couldn’t believe it. Well, I’m very sorry, but that’s all over now. This house must be made to pay its way. Fred’s expenses are enormous.’

None of us could even begin to pay the rents she had decided on.

‘I’m very sorry, but this is the welfare state, after all. We taxpayers can hardly be expected to pay individually as well.’

None of us could refute this argument.

‘And I know you would not want to deprive Fred of the best possible care.’

So it was necessary to look at once for a flat.

‘We will need three bedrooms,’ said Liza.

‘Of course,’ said Hilda. ‘But we won’t be silly, and look in Kensington.’

‘There are parts of West Kensington,’ said Liza vaguely.

‘Maida Vale used to be cheap,’ I said.

‘I don’t think it is now,’ said Hilda. ‘But there
was
a part of South Hampstead, over near Kilburn.’

We knew, of course, that London had changed. Fred, who went out more often than any of us, had come home sometimes and said, ‘We are positively surrounded by tatt and chaos, but so far, so far, we’re safe here.’ And it was the safety of our sanctuary that had prevented us from
feeling
the change, instead of merely knowing of it. We were still able to believe that ‘London is made up of villages. Here we all live in our own little village.’ But when we went out into London, without our sanctuary at our backs, when we went out into London and exposed our needs to it, we realized that all those villages were now meshed by the flow of traffic into one huge hard city, whose constant movement confused us, and whose noise beat upon our brains.

And of course we knew, too, that rents had gone up. But
our
rents had not gone up. Again, our knowledge had not been personal. And impersonal knowledge has not much cutting edge.

We sat in cafés, our slipped shoes under the table.

‘Imagine asking fifty for that grisly place,’ I said.

‘I bet Crippen lived there,’ said Hilda. ‘Come to think of it, wasn’t there a plaque?’

‘I think there was,’ I said, ‘But even so, it was better than that one at sixty.’

Liza stirred her tea without a smile. ‘I’m sick of the whole thing.’

When we got home on the third day, we found Fred’s sister in the hall, with a man.