Complete Short Stories (VMC) (107 page)

Tom felt like running away. ‘I’m in for it now,’ he kept thinking – trapped, alone with her.

Although he could never have imagined that she would be so inconsolable about the loss of Hector, he now wondered if she could recover from it, and yet sometimes he felt that it was fear, rather than bereavement, which made her start and pale and open wide her eyes.

‘Then there’s the question of flowers,’ he said timidly.

‘Yes, yes.’ She spoke with impatience.

‘I’ll order yours for you, shall I? What do you think?’

‘Red roses. I remember he said …’

‘All right, I’ll see to it. Then there’s a Cousin Gertrude Stubbings. She wrote after the notice in
The Times
, if you remember. Oughtn’t something to be done about
her
?’

‘Ask her to luncheon if you wish.’

After all, it’s
her
cousin, he thought.

Mrs Clarebut enjoyed a brief importance in the village, and what
she
said in the shops her husband repeated in the Red Lion. ‘Very quiet,’ he told them. ‘Just the relations – an Honourable among them, so I hear. The missus will be officiating, sending Rupe to my sister for the day: no spirits, or beer. Just sherry, and sandwiches and so on. Some people have funny ideas about funerals. They’re meeting the deceased at the crematorium; he’ll be there before they arrive.’

No coffin carried from the house, as of yore. No lowered blinds. Many of those in the pub remembered the old days, and were sad, passingly, for their children.

Hilda was not going to the funeral. Her doctor, unnecessarily, forbade it.

‘Would you like your wreath sent here first, so that you can see it?’ Tom asked.

‘No, no, no, no!’ She shook her head, looking distraught. Those red shop roses he had said were his favourites, she remembered: her own favourites, the morning glories and the meadow daisies – what sort of funeral garland would
they
make? She began to cry hysterically.

On the funeral day, after the sherry and sandwiches, the undertaker arrived. He had a relaxed, but sympathetic manner; he kept an eye on his watch, and at last gave a nod to Tom. To be too early was distressing for the mourners, who then had to hang about until a different set of mourners had gone – though there was a waiting-room, with magazines: to be late was unprofessional, besides putting the next lot out. The undertaker’s timing was appreciated at the crematorium.

Hilda was kissed by a cluster of stifling relations. Under the circumstances,
they found little to say, some of them wondering how long it would be before they were summoned back again. All had come from a distance, and none was young, and they would be glad to be on the homeward road.

The house was so quiet when they had gone. Mrs Clarebut, appreciating the occasion, did a sort of muffled washing-up.

Hilda lay on the
chaise-longue
, her hands in her lap. Presently, she took up one of her kaleidoscopes, but found that she resented the shifting patterns. She touched all the dead things about her, shells, marbles, pebbles. She fanned herself, exasperatedly, with a paper fan, waiting for Tom’s return.

It was not long. He came in, looking strange in his dark suit. The relations had gone on their ways – to London, Hove and Bournemouth. He felt unreal, for he had had to do things for which he was not cut out, and was likely to have to do a great many more of the same kind.

Hilda did not refer to where he had been.

In the evening, to Tom’s relief, the doctor called. He talked to Hilda while Tom prepared a supper tray. The dining-room, since Hector’s death, was unused. Meals had become picnics on laps.

Tom, who had never wanted marriage, now knew that he had got the worst of someone else’s. He began to blame other people in his mind – a girl who long ago had refused his half-hearted proposal, his father for leaving enough money to save him from starving as a painter; but especially he blamed Hilda for turning him into a slave without his knowing it until too late. He thought about running away, but only as a daydream. To deserve his own – and universal – condemnation would make life not worth living. Between daydreams and nightmares, his comfort was Mrs Clarebut. She often stood as a buffer between him and Hilda, coaxing her with hot drinks, while allowing him to go shopping – his greatest pleasure now.

The business of Hector’s estate seemed involved and endless. Tom hated money and the affairs connected with it, was utterly bored and scarcely listened. Hilda simply moaned, while the solicitor inched round the subject of her own will.

‘If
you
should die,’ he began lightly, as if such a thing were hardly likely to happen.

‘Oh, I am sure you will sort it out.’

Everyone found her difficult, but Tom most of all.

One day, something seeming miraculous to him happened. A journalist, interested in art, wrote to him of one of his paintings he had come across. He had done it years before. The gallery had quite forgotten him, but had found his address and forwarded the letter. The painting – he remembered it – was simply of rain: a window-pane, with the different-sized
drops coming down it. He had done it as a difficult exercise. Perhaps all his life he had tried to make things difficult for himself.

All day, after getting the letter, he was abstracted, did not much want to talk. Were there any more paintings? the letter asked. Could they be seen? An article might be written.

Hilda repeated something she had said, and he looked both blank and glum, hadn’t heard her.

‘I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else.’

‘Then I’m sorry, to have interrupted you.’

He still took no notice of her, but went across the room and looked out of the window.

‘I may be outstaying my welcome,’ Hilda said softly, as if to herself.

But, for once, he didn’t bother to listen.

The next day he went down to the studio in the garden. He hadn’t been inside it for months. But he only glanced about him, moved a canvas or two, and felt a great weight upon him. Then he locked the door, and went away. He kept the letter, but did not reply to it. The writer assumed that he had gone away, or died.

That evening was terrible to Tom; but all the evenings were terrible now. He suffered claustrophobia in that room with her, made any excuse to be out of it. And they were long evenings, for she would not go to bed. He was always tired, and he thought that she might as well be in bed upstairs, as doing simply nothing downstairs. But at the suspicion of his trying to bend her will, she would cry; and it did not become her to cry.

‘Why wash up at night?’ she asked him, as he came back into the sitting-room one evening. ‘We used always to leave it for Mrs Clarebut to do in the morning.’

‘She has plenty to do.’

‘No more than before. Less, in fact.’ She dabbed her handkerchief to her mouth. ‘These evenings on our own upset you, I know; but they upset me, too, I can tell you. They’re no joke to me.’ She began to smooth out her handkerchief now, turn it about in her hands as women do when they are quarrelling. She pulled out all the lace edges and examined them, pouting. But she was not – never had been – that kind of woman. He stood helplessly by.

‘The least you could do …’

‘What? What?’

‘You make it clear you think I’m an unconscionable time a-dying. Oh,
yes
!’

‘Please, Hilda …’

‘It’s not my fault I don’t die … and all these dreadful nights going on and on, when I can’t sleep, and you always trying to pack me off to bed, so that
they can begin earlier and earlier …’ Her voice had started to rise, but from habit she drew it down again. She was like some querulous, disappointed bride, had fallen into the behaviour as to the manner born. Tom was amazed.

‘Would you like to play bézique?’

‘No, I would
not
like to play bézique. It might keep you from your beloved kitchen.’

‘You really are not yourself this evening,’ was all he could think of saying.

So she began to cry in earnest. There was nothing he could do, but try to remember good times in the past and fondness for one another when they were younger: and to try to keep his patience. He reminded himself – as he so often did – that time would pass, and then he supposed that by this he could only mean that
she
would pass, and he had come to look on her as indestructible.

When at last she consented to go to bed, he went up first, as usual, to get her room ready, and took two sleeping-pills from her bottle for his own store, his escape route. He drew the curtains and arranged her pillows.

She could manage the stairs, leaning on him. On the small half-landing there was a chair for her to rest before the last few stairs.

She sat, breathing with effort, with her hands spread over her knees. She gasped, ‘Led you a bit of a dance. Sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry
for
,’ he said breezily.

‘Always seem to lead you a dance these days. Good of you to bear with me, I s’pose. Don’t know what …’ she fanned herself with her hand, her breathing coming back more steadily, ‘don’t know quite what I’d do without you.’

Tom wondered this all the time, woke in the night and wondered it.

‘No reason why you should have to,’ he said, as they began to go on upstairs.

Dirty confetti and the petals of cherry blossom edged the church path. When Jessie arrived, the path and porch were deserted. The building itself, the purple bricks and leaden windows, seemed to rock and swoon in the sudden thundery heat: though she herself was probably rocking more. She walked nervously towards the porch; but, as soon as she reached its cool shadow, began to shiver.

Never having been to a christening before, not even one of her own, she was angry at having let Gwen persuade her to come. That morning, in the bar, the prospect of being a godmother had fascinated her. (‘My godchild,’ she would be able to say.) Gwen knew no more than Jessie of procedure and etiquette, and with the smallest idea of what lay ahead, Jessie had acquiesced; had shut up the bar promptly at two o’clock and hurried to the church without having a bite to eat.

She opened her bag a little and peered in, not liking to be seen prinking outside a church, even if it was Roman Catholic. Her face looked veined and puffy, her eyes quite bloodshot. Screened by the handbag, she patted her nose and chin with a grubby puff; but now nothing would restore her but a cup of tea and a lie down.

The smell of the church terrified her. It was chilling, like the smell of a hospital. She settled her fox-fur on her shoulders and tried to stand in a casual attitude, at the same time drawing in her stomach muscles. Posture, she thought vaguely.

Then a group of people came down the path, all in black except for a dazzling white baby. They approached the church with calm authority. The men glanced briefly at Jessie and followed the women and the baby inside. She could hear their boots clanging on some gratings, and the sound added to her terror. ‘Perhaps I shall have to say things in Latin!’ she suddenly thought. The glaring heat of the dead Sunday afternoon, the unmoving trees, the shop windows with drawn blinds, the Guinness she had drunk, produced a feeling of stifled fury towards Gwen.

At last, she saw them coming along the street, three heads above the brick wall; Gwen, her Polish husband Nicky, and Frederick his friend.

Jessie faced them with hostility and fear. Frederick she had not bargained
for. Six weeks ago, they had argued and parted from one another, never to meet again, they had said: though obviously in a little town such as this they must continually meet, for any turn in the street was likely to bring them face to face.

Gwen looked frail. She wore her pale blue wedding suit, and the skirt was creased from having the baby on her lap. Her shoes were down-at-heel and one stocking laddered. When she had come into the bar with Nicky before they were married, she had always been neat and smart. Her marriage had changed that. She was not yet twenty, but looked already a down-trodden housewife.

‘Why is Frederick here?’ Jessie asked when they came near.

The two Poles looked like brothers, both blond, wide-shouldered, and wearing pale suède shoes and silvery raincoats.

‘He’s a godparent,’ Gwen said uncertainly.

‘You promised for me to be that. Otherwise, why the hell am I here?’

‘There can be more than one.’

‘Of course,’ Nicky said. He smiled and bowed. Frederick began to whistle softly through his teeth and stare up at the church roof.

‘We better get inside,’ Gwen said.

‘Don’t say you are not Catholic,’ Nicky warned Jessie. He put a hand under his wife’s elbow and, looking with solemn fondness at the baby, went towards the porch.

‘This is no fault of mine,’ Jessie said. Even her furs seemed outraged, their white-tipped hairs bristling.

‘Nor mine,’ Frederick shrugged.

‘You’re always shrugging or bowing, like a bloody penguin.’

‘I am sorry to offend.’

‘Oh, you don’t offend
me
. You can do a Highland fling or fall flat on your back for all I care,’ Jessie said, now in the church porch.

‘What is this – a mass christening?’ Frederick asked, looking at the knot of black-clad people and their baby, who with purpling face arched its back and snatched at the air with spidery hands, letting out frail sounds as a prelude to something louder.

At one end of the church, the two groups huddled, ostensibly opposed. Our sort of people seem so flimsy, Jessie thought. For one thing, we don’t have any relations. On an occasion like this anyone has to do, grab up a godmother out of the bar at the last minute. She sat very straight, holding the card with the Order of Service printed on it. Inside, she felt queasy, uneasy. The enemy baby (as she now thought of it) comforted her a little by beginning to wail. Curdled milk ran out of the side of its mouth.

Gwen’s baby slept. His bare, mottled feet stuck out of the shawl, and
when Gwen moved him his head bobbed weakly on his thin neck, but he did not open his eyes.

‘My godson!’ Jessie thought. ‘It is a responsibility. I’ll buy him a silver tankard with his name on and when he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge, I’ll visit him and he’ll take me round the colleges.’ Then, looking at Gwen’s laddered stocking, the skirt hanging on her (‘After all, she was six months gone when she bought it, though no one would have known,’ Jessie thought), this seemed all too improbable, even for daydreaming. ‘Glad I came, though,’ she decided. ‘Can lie down any afternoon.’