Complete Short Stories (VMC) (105 page)

It was late autumn. The beech woods had a brief glory, then frosts, followed by high winds, bared the branches. A foggy, mushroomy, pre-Christmas smell filled the air.

By Christmas, George and Sandy had finished, were promised elsewhere – up at the Hall, in fact, where Lady Leadbetter was having all the rooms done with William Morris wallpaper – an aberration which amused the three of them as they discussed it at tea-time.

Miss Partridge was of course alone for Christmas. Her four expected Christmas cards arrived and were set up on the chimneypiece. On Christmas Eve, when she was feeling at her most depressed – even wishing her mother was still upstairs to run up to with a warm mince pie – she found another card lying on the doormat. She opened the envelope excitedly.

A boozy old Santa Claus was holding up a cocktail glass and saying
‘Complimentsh of the Sheashon’. Inside, signed in two different hands, was ‘All the best, Sandy and George’. Smiling, she set it in a central place between those of distant relations and the printed one from Mr and Mrs C.E. Mavory, with that crossed out and ‘Charles and Margery’ written above it – a friendly and informal touch, Miss Partridge thought.

But in spite of the unexpected card and the fire crackling busily in her bright new room, she could not fight off her depression. Christmas is always a bad time, she reminded herself; but it will pass. And after Christmas, what? she wondered – with George and Sandy up at Lady Leadbetter’s pasting on all those hideous wallpapers. She did not know Lady Leadbetter, but was positively cross with her, and positively jealous, too. ‘She won’t make scones for them,’ she said aloud. ‘Or China tea. They’ll find a difference.’

Apart from the cards, there was nothing Christmassy about the house. In the meat safe were two lamb chops; one for Christmas dinner, the other for Boxing Day. No one would ever make a mince pie for herself; and she had not.

Pacing about the room, grasping at anything which might help her state, she began to wonder if Mr Mavory might drop in for a minute or two after church in the morning. In her mother’s day, he sometimes had. If he did, there was plenty of sherry. It became important to her that he should call: otherwise no one would – all day, and the next. Dr Jenkins, dressed up as Father Christmas, would, she knew, be carving turkeys at the hospital.

She remembered the holly tree in the garden, and decided to go out to pick a sprig or two in case of her visitors.

It was almost dark. She took a torch, and stepped out into the damp air. It was warm, un-Christmassy. ‘I’ll pick the holly and arrange it nicely,’ she thought: ‘and then it will be time for a drink.’ Tomorrow really depended on Mr Mavory coming.

Such a tangle of old, dying apple trees and high nettles. The torch beam wavered among it, as she stumbled over rank grass, determined on her holly. It was a poor winter for berries, but she tore off a few twigs. Making her way back she thought of the garden of the Sleeping Princess, the stinging leaves, the arched, branched briars. It seemed sadly out of place with her bright house. Coming round the side of the house, by softly dripping hydrangeas, she suddenly stopped, swung the torch about, over high-grown hedges and recidivist flower-beds. She was tense, like an explorer on the edge of new terrain.

The words
landscape gardeners
had come into her head – an idea which dawned wonderfully in her.

After a while, she went indoors and arranged the meagre holly in a vase. ‘That’s better,’ she said. She read again ‘All the best from George and Sandy’. She poured herself out a glass of whisky, and put a knob of coal on
the fire, then, remembering her new financial position, another and another. I am a comparatively rich woman, she thought, sipping her whisky. She went to the window and drew aside the curtain, but of course, could see nothing but blackness. In her mind, though, she saw men out there – two men, probably – gum-booted, rain-coated, clumping about, measuring, digging, planting, sitting on the old seat drinking pale tea, eating hot scones. She would hear them all day, calling out to one another, joking and whistling. At night silence would fall; but in the morning they would come again.

It was the year that the white lilac came up to expectations. This evening, against a thundery sky and among tenderly green leaves, the blossom crowded up as white as paper. In a freshening wind, the sky darkened, thickened, and the lilac heads jostled together, nudging each other.

Branches of other trees swayed, as if they were strange plants at the bottom of the sea.

‘It has paid for lopping,’ Hilda Warfield said, pausing by the sitting-room window as she so often did. ‘It has never been more beautiful.’

She had her back to the two men who watched her.

Then lightning cracked the sky, and the rain came hissing down, bouncing off the marble-topped garden table.

‘I’m so glad it’s been good
this
year,’ Hilda went on, almost as if she were talking to herself.

‘Oh, God!’ her friend, Tom, thought, ‘she is going to say “As it’s my last”.’

He got up, and went into the kitchen, so that he should not hear her saying it. She insisted on talking about her death, referred to it constantly and casually, as if it were some familiar pet of hers, running always at her heels, like Charlie, her Bedlington terrier.

‘It’s that damn doctor,’ her husband Hector – a mild man, despite his name – had said to Tom, later on that dreadful day when she had returned from London with her news.

They had lived, the three of them, in amity and comfort until this terrible thing had settled down in their midst, always tagging along with them, now, so never to be entirely ignored. When Hector woke in the night, it was on his mind in a leap. Sometimes he crept into Hilda’s room, could not rest until he had done so; but she was always sleeping peacefully. He went back to his bed and lay marvelling at that.

He could not properly settle to work in his office by day; his alarmed thoughts accompanied him up in the train in the morning and down in the evening. Looking out at villas set in gardens, golf courses and new motor roads, he saw nothing: his hands holding his newspaper up for protection sometimes suddenly trembled, and fellow commuters looked at him stealthily. It was no secret about Hilda. ‘I like and respect the truth,’ she had told
the specialist, and he had talked to her of her inoperable condition: ‘but it will be for your heart to decide how long,’ he had said finally, thinking her an amazing woman. She thanked him calmly for her death sentence, shook hands firmly, and went away … she, too, back past the villas and the golf courses and all the budding trees. On that journey a certain peace, and disbelief, had fallen over her, strangely, at the same time and, presumably, from the same source.

Because of her respect for the truth everybody knew, and everyone seemed to be waiting with her, and watching her. She had become special, and set aside.

Her husband, in spite of those middle-of-the-night peeps into her room, now hated being left alone with her. Tom was a great help to him, and this evening of the storm, Hector was cross with him for going off to the kitchen just as Hilda said those dreaded words. He had to listen to them all by himself.

He drank whisky, passed a hand over his tired face, yawned. ‘Getting past all this travelling up and down,’ he thought. He was to retire next year. But that was the forbidden future, and his mind swerved away from it. He drank more whisky, loosened his tie, leant back in his chair, very red across his cheeks and forehead, dark and crumpled in his London clothes, unlike the other two so comfortably dressed.

And now the lilac was full of rain, the blossom like sodden sponges too heavy to be tossed about any more. Tiny, star-like florets had been shaken down on to the grass. When the shower was over, the garden dripped steadily. A rainbow appeared against the mulberry-coloured sky and all the trees were sharply green. ‘How beautiful!’ said Hilda.

In the kitchen, Tom snipped chives into the soup, carried the bowls into the dining-room. Mrs Clarebut had left everything ready.

He was glad to be out here, pottering about, and, apart from his own wishes, thought that Hector should have a little time with Hilda. He, Tom, was with her all day long.

At supper, Hilda asked, ‘Shall we have some music after? Or those old holiday slides?’ A silence from the other two, bent over soup. Neither wanted either – harking back to the
châteaux
on the Loire and themselves there, or picnicking on the banks of the Cher, brought back what had been – which, in view of what was to be, was overwhelmingly too much. Also, those rather old, blurred Chopin and Schumann records were of a twilight sadness they could no longer abide. Hector especially hated them. Never knowing what to look at when they were going on, he always closed his eyes. ‘My nerves!’ he thought; then dozed. He would have liked to have been like other businessmen at the end of a day’s work, slumped down
uncritically before a television-set. Hilda would not have one in the house. She said that they barred conversation, became an addiction, and only coronations and royal weddings were any good on them.

Tom took up the soup plates and went to fetch the chicken pie. ‘You choose, Hilda,’ he said on his way. Hector looked out of the window at a rather awkward backwards angle for him, and crushed up toast melba.

‘Then I choose neither,’ Hilda said, with a shrug. ‘
Ça ne fait rien
.’

While she was waiting for Tom to return, she took off some heavy Celtic-like jewellery from her breast, laid it on the table and studied it carefully, as if she were loth to waste the briefest chance of looking at something lovely. She arranged the chain on the table, and peered at the milky stones set in silver, gathering it up quickly and reclasping it to her when Tom came in and handed her a plate.

After dinner, she went into the garden and threw a ball for her dog, Charlie, who tore across the squelching lawn, but knew better than to dive into flower-beds. Breathing heavily, Hilda stooped and retrieved the ball from among dripping leaves.

‘How has she been?’ Hector asked Tom.

‘The same. Not much lunch. She had her rest.’

They talked then of other things, not thinking of them, though. Hector spoke of his city day, Tom of sowing radish seed.

I used to ask him about his painting, Hector remembered guiltily. But we were younger then.

From a window, they caught glimpses of Hilda wandering in the garden. Charlie looked like a bedraggled sheep. Tom saw her looking up into the lilac tree, her hands clasped above, resting on her large bosom. ‘Rapt’ was the word which came into his mind. He remembered reading about Colette on her death-bed, her absorbed and heightened passion for the little things about her, and he wondered if he could stand much more of the same thing. On week-days, Mrs Clarebut came at nine-thirty, with her little boy, Rupert – Rupe the Terrible, as he was known to Hilda and Tom. He did not do much damage, except to nerves; nor did he tear about: but he insinuated himself, was always
there
, and talked incessantly. Tom went shopping for as long as he could, pottering about the village, collecting gossip. Hilda, who was supposed to love children, and to grieve that she had none of her own, was obliged to stay at home and endure Rupe, only occasionally lapsing into asperity – as when he addressed her as ‘Auntie’.

‘Why are you looking out of that window all the time, Auntie?’

‘Mrs Warfield.’

‘I can’t say that.’

‘Then “Hilda”. But
not
Auntie.’

‘Why?’

‘To answer your other question, I was looking at the white lilac tree – because this is the very best time for it; soon the flowers will topple over and die.’

‘Everybody will topple over and die one of these days,’ Rupe said, watching her. ‘In an emergency,’ he added, because it was his newest long word.

‘So true,’ said Hilda coldly.

In the mornings, she wore a hessian apron with a large pocket across its front, her kangaroo pouch, she told Rupe, who gave her a sideways, scornful glance. Into this pocket, to save her journeys, went everything she might need – scissors and bast and secateurs, pencils and spectacles. She had a walking stick with a rubber tip, and leant on it heavily as she went about the garden, making mental notes of little jobs for Tom when he returned from his interminable shopping.

The garden was beautiful, and very hardly kept up – with its lawns on different levels; the iris lawn, the cedar lawn, the lower lawn, the tea lawn. There were box-hedges and bowers, grass walks and borders, and the famous lilac tree.

Beyond the lower lawn was a white-painted wooden building, which Tom had once used for a studio; still thought he did. He had become, under Hilda’s expert direction, less and less of a painter, more and more a gardener.

On her slow perambulating round the paths, Rupe attended Hilda, talking usually of death, since it seemed to him to be a forbidden subject. One ‘hush’ from his mother was enough to commit him to it. He touched on the idea of Charlie’s death quite cheerfully, and then, with his sideways glance through sandy lashes, on Hilda’s.

‘We all come to it,’ she said.

‘And go to God.’

‘That’s as may be.’

‘Do you mind dying?’

‘It looks as if we haven’t much choice.’

She poked with her stick at a bit of new spring groundsel. ‘Pull it up, like a good boy.’

He snapped it off and left the root.

‘Oh, dear, now I shall have to ask Mr Bonchurch to do it.’

‘Why can’t
you
do it?’ Again that steady, sideways look.

‘I become giddy if I bend down.’

‘You might die of being giddy.’

‘I might. What a bore you are with your small talk.’

‘What’s that?’

She sighed and turned back towards the house. By now, she was waiting impatiently for Tom’s return. Such lots of little jobs she had for him to
do, now that she no longer could. When old Stack, her gardener, had died, she had really felt bereft – her great partner and ally gone. Together, they had made the garden, from nothing more promising than a piece of sloping parkland and a damaged cedar tree. She had begun to train Tom as her assistant, not knowing then that he must be her successor; for Hector did nothing in the garden beyond snoozing in a deckchair, said he would be just as happy in public gardens doing that – and much less expensive, he added. At week-ends, he played golf, and drank.