Tirra Lirra by the River (18 page)

‘I’m very sorry to intrude, but Mr Parker must see the house if he’s to sell the lease. Have you found anything yet?’

We said we hadn’t.

‘Well, I don’t want to hurry you. A week’s notice is the usual thing, but I’m sure Fred would want you to have a fortnight. That’s eleven more days, isn’t it? There was a cat in here, by the way. I put him out of the back door.’

‘Her,’ said Hilda.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘She’s a female.’

‘Oh, is she? Well, you’ll find her out in the square. Perhaps you would like to wait there, too, until Mr Parker has looked at the house.’

In the square we sat on a bench facing the house. Belle sat sedately at our feet.

‘We could do with two bedrooms,’ I said, ‘if one of us used the sitting room as a bedroom.’

‘And the other two walked through it to get to the kitchen,’ said Liza.

‘It would depend on the layout,’ I agreed.

‘
And
you wouldn’t get it for less than forty,’ said Hilda.

‘I can’t go on with this,’ said Liza quietly.

Hilda and I pretended not to hear. We all watched as Fred’s
sister and Mr Parker, at a downstairs window, examined the marks of Belle’s claws on the sill.

‘There’s my sister in Coventry,’ said Hilda.

We had already heard about Hilda’s sister in Coventry. A few years ago she and her husband had subdivided their house. A few weeks ago they had lost their tenants.

‘But we’ve decided not to leave London,’ I said.

‘What does it matter if we do?’ said Liza.

She had bent to loosen her shoelaces, to ease her swollen feet. Hilda and I exchanged glances across her back.

‘Well, nowadays it does
seem
,’ said Hilda carefully, ‘that the charm of London depends on how much
money
one has.’

‘Let us try London for one last day,’ I said.

‘Do you mind if I don’t come?’ said Liza.

Hilda and I set out early next morning. Released from the weight of Liza’s apathy, we sprang away confident and even gay. The day was windy and slightly rainy. ‘Refreshing,’ we said, putting up our umbrellas. When the rain increased we made no comment on it, nor on our wet shoes and stockings, but as we stood waiting for the bus to take us to our third flat, we stopped speaking and anxiously craned our heads out of the queue. While walking along strange streets, following directions given us, we spoke only to ask each other how much further, or could we possibly have missed the turning.

At about three o’clock Hilda said, ‘I must go to the loo.’

It was now raining heavily. ‘Can’t you wait till we get to this flat?’

‘Absolutely not.’ She showed me her road guide. ‘Look, it’s way up there.’

‘Then we’ll go to the nearest underground.’

Willesden Green was the nearest, though it took us away from our destination. As Hilda was washing her hands, I consulted a road map and a map of the underground.

‘Instead of retracing our steps in this rain, we could go by underground to North Wembley.’

She came and looked over my shoulder. ‘We would have to change at Baker Street, and from North Wembley it’s still a fair walk.’

‘We could get a cab.’

‘A cab?’

‘Just this once.’

‘A
cab
! Yes, let’s
do
that. Let’s get a cab from here to number six.’

What a relief it was to give in, to become passive, simply to accept whatever might happen. That first stage of our passivity was not sad like Liza’s, but childish and gay. In the taxi we chatted and laughed like schoolgirls.

It was fine next day when we all went to Coventry. Hilda’s sister and brother-in-law stood together in the doorway and greeted us as we crossed the strip of garden that separated their neat gabled house from the street. Together they conducted us over the empty first floor.

‘There are only two bedrooms, but the big one could be partitioned off down the middle.’

‘Of course it could,’ said Hilda.

‘Yes,’ said Liza.

I said nothing. From the window I could see the rectilinear pattern made by straight streets and a hundred neat roofs. Iron-grey and terracotta. Who would have thought that at my age I could feel it again—the old oppression, the breast breaker?

‘And we’ve got the colour television downstairs. Haven’t we, Tom? And we’re always glad of company. And there’s a fair-sized garden at the back you can have the run of. We’re letting the place cheap because after the last lot we had we’ve got to know who we’re getting. There’s only one thing. No cats. Tom’s allergic.’

Tom took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

We conferred in the train on the way up to London. ‘It’s cheap,’ said Hilda. ‘It’s not poky. And it’s really not far from London. We could go up quite often. What do you think, Liza?’

Liza’s little headshake was not in rejection, but in unwillingness to be aroused from her inertia. ‘I just want to get it over.’

Hilda looked at me. ‘Nora?’

‘It would mean getting a new owner for Belle.’

‘That will be easy. Belle’s so charming. We could manage very well, with the rent cut three ways.’

‘Could you still manage if you cut it two ways?’

‘For two I’m sure she would make it less. Why?’

Liza had shut her eyes. ‘Because Nora’s going back to Australia,’ she said.

‘If only we had more time,’ I said.

That night, Fred’s sister rang again, ‘It isn’t that I want to hurry you …’

Again we conferred. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Hilda, ‘that’s
it
. I’m sick of the whole thing.’

‘I don’t care where we go,’ said Liza, ‘as long as we get out of here.’

My heart gave an unexpected leap. ‘I’ve decided to go back,’ I said. ‘I will sell all my furniture, my china and glass, even my Persian rug. I’ll go back with two suitcases of clothes, and my books can follow me by ship.’

Energy infused me as I spoke. Many years before I had come to London because I was entranced by the knowledge that
nobody could stop me
. Did I return because I was in need of the energy generated by an equally drastic decision? Hilda and Liza looked at me for a while in silence.

‘You will be warm, anyway,’ said Hilda then.

‘And safe,’ said Liza.

In spring Belle usually spent much time in the square, her doings watched and commented on by us from our windows. But that last week, as we packed, she spent her days pacing from room to room. If one of us bent and extended a hand, she would approach, but would then turn aside just short of it and rub her head, from cheek to cranium, against a table leg, or she would caress a door frame with her flank. Nobody wanted her. We advertised, we canvassed acquaintances, we knocked on all the doors in the square, and even on doors in other squares, and asked if anyone would take a cat. We came home, shaking our heads, while Belle, in the hall, rubbed her head repeatedly against the umbrella stand.

When she was given to us she was already spayed, so no unpleasant decisions had had to be made. It was Liza who voiced this one.

‘She will have to be put down.’

‘You sound as if you don’t care,’ said Hilda.

Liza flared suddenly, shockingly, into life. ‘I have protested at too many hard fates. I can protest no more.’ Though her eyes were dry and angry, her voice was hoarse as if from weeping.
‘No more!’

As soon as Hilda and I were alone, I said, ‘If anything happens to impede these plans, Liza will crack up.’

‘Yes. It’s Liza or Belle. But
God
,’ said Hilda, ‘
I
can still protest.’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. ‘But,’ she said then, ‘that’s all I can do.’

The vet came twice with a cage, but neither time could Belle be found. ‘I’ll have to leave it with you ladies,’ he said. ‘You put her in, and I’ll collect it.’ Hilda and I meant to put her in together, but on the appointed day, the vet rang to postpone his call, so that it was I, the last to leave the house, who put her in the cage.

Neither Hilda nor Liza mentioned Belle in her letter. They are being ‘sensible’ about it. I shall be equally ‘sensible’ and not mention her when I reply.

A well-sprung mattress, a modern kitchen, an efficient hot water service. How glad I am that Grace made these concessions to the times. I have had the first before, but never the last two. In the morning I have a bath, long, deep, and forbidden, then put on a warm dressing gown and slippers and go to the kitchen.

The small pawpaw sent by Arch Cust has arrived at perfect ripeness and infuses the kitchen with its scent. A transverse sun entering the window has flung a lozenge of light on to the table. I carry the pawpaw, on its white plate, and set it down in this light. Memories of Arch make me handle it with a sort of humorous ritual. With deliberation and enjoyment, I shall eat it.

I cut it in two lengthwise, scoop out the shining black seeds, and bring the first spoonful to my mouth. Without a doubt, it is the most delicious fruit in the world, but like certain little jokes, it ought to be consumed only where it grows. At number six I once described the procreating methods of the male and female trees. How fascinated Fred was. I think he felt it should always be done in that way.

As my spoon cuts close to the skin (which I am trying, as in childhood, not to break), Lyn Wilmot comes into the kitchen with my pint of milk. She gives a shriek when she sees me.

‘Should you be here?’

‘Why not? I’m allowed to get up.’

‘He said only in a chair.’

‘I am in a chair.’

‘He didn’t say that kind of chair.’

And now she wants to bustle me back to bed and wait on
me, just as Una Porteous, after I had signed everything and was packing my suitcase, wanted to kiss me and bemoan with me the ‘tragedy’ of divorce.

I remember to be meek. ‘Doctor Rainbow does let me go to the bathroom.’

‘Oh, does he? I didn’t know.’

‘But if you really think I shouldn’t be here …’

‘Oh no, I suppose it’s all right. He must know what he’s doing. Just because I like Doctor Smith best doesn’t mean I think Doctor Rainbow’s no good. His manner puts me off, that’s what it is. Gives me the creeps. But to be honest, I don’t know if it’s really his manner, or knowing about his mother committing all those murders.’

I nod without looking up from my pawpaw. My pattern of yesterday was credible after all, but if horrors are to be recounted, I prefer to hear them from Betty or Jack Cust. I fold the unbroken pawpaw skin (as in childhood) like cloth. ‘I wonder if pawpaw is bad for arthritis,’ I say, as I carry the plate to the kitchen bin. ‘I do hope not.’

I go back to bed. The story of Dorothy Rainbow’s fate having progressed from accident to suicide, and from simple suicide to suicide with murder, it is understandable that by the time Betty Cust arrives my imagination should have supplied a choice of further progressions, so that Betty’s story of the axe, and of Dorothy’s husband and all her children but one, Gordon, killed in their beds, does not really surprise me. One has read of such things. As Betty speaks, she stands as if toeing a line, with both hands pressed to her cheeks and her eyebrows squirming as if in a recreation of bewilderment.

‘There was only Gordon. He woke up and saw her, and ran away and hid under the house. There was a big old packing case there, a piano case. The children used to use it for a cubby. He curled up in a corner and pulled cloth and papers over his head.
He told them he heard her moving about looking for him, but in the end she went off again. Then he heard her in the house, and after a while everything was quiet, so he crept out and crept back upstairs. But when he saw all the others, and her with her head in the gas oven, he ran off again. They found him the next morning, trying to catch yabbies in an old jam tin in the creek behind the school. They asked him why he hadn’t run for the police, but he was only eight.’

‘Could anyone else have been saved if he had?’

‘No. Only her.’

‘Poor child.’

‘Oh, yes!’

I have heard the story, I have accepted the facts, so why should shock come now like a wall collapsing. ‘But,’ I say,
‘an axe!’

‘Nora, I know. None of us ever, ever, understood how she could do it.’

I feel the imminence of an angry speech. ‘If one of you had, she may not have done it.’ I am glad I suppressed it. What reason have I to suppose that anyone could have stemmed a tide of that sort?

‘She was so gentle,’ says Betty.

‘She was anxious to please, I remember that. She can’t have been gentle.’

‘Gentle when she was her true self.’

‘Perhaps when she was one of her true selves. But how many selves did she have? And how many of those selves did her life call upon? We can only know this—one of them was not gentle.’

‘That one never showed. Truly, Nora, never. She did have a sort of a breakdown just before the war. But nothing violent. Only refusing to leave the house, and hiding when anyone knocked. You know the kind of thing?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know the kind of thing.’

‘Nowadays they call it suburban neurosis. But in those days there were plenty of people who said she needed a good slap, or that she ought to have something real to worry about. Still, others recognised it as a sickness, and she did have treatment, sedatives and things. She always said it was Grace who pulled her out of it in the end. When the war started Grace took her to the Red Cross, and wouldn’t let her give up when she wanted to. And she did get to love it, Nora. Truly. I’ve never known anyone work so hard. She was tireless.’

I find nothing to say that can be said. Betty gets my breakfast, but I can’t eat it. ‘I am so cross with Lyn Wilmot,’ she says. She attributes my fatigue and lack of appetite to the revelation of Dorothy Rainbow’s tragic end. She does not know, of course, about my rashness in having had that long bath.

It is Saturday, and after Betty goes I lie and wonder if noises sound so clear and isolated because it is not a working day, or because I know it is not a working day. I move my lips and hear myself say again, ‘But
an axe
!’ And this time I recognise that part of my shock was caused by the ugly grisly method. Poison or bullets, equally deadly and perhaps slower, would not have shocked me so much. The axe is an offence, evidently, against the aesthetics of murder. Though disgusted by this evidence of my own wincing ‘good taste’, I am not surprised. For a long time I have been critical of this one of my many selves, this sickly and over-fastidious creature, and indeed I have often wondered what effect it has had on my life. And though by my awareness of it I have possibly been saved from its worst excesses, I always conclude that its effect has been bad, almost entirely bad.