Starlight (40 page)

‘Up all them stairs? Oh Glad, I can’t. I’m that tired.’

‘Tired? You been sitting down two hours.’

‘Well, I am. And all that stuff to carry.’

‘Oh come on. I’ll help you. We don’t want to bring Georgie down all this way.’

Collecting their carrier-bags, and Annie’s old friends the coats, and their small ancient suitcases and their paper parcels, they made their way slowly along the platform and across a bridge that offered them a view of quiet fields, fading into a twilight misty with heat, below a cloudy sky flooded with rose-red. Annie paused, partly to ease her aching arms and partly to consider the prospect. But she said nothing: she was thinking vaguely that it looked lonely but not sad. A distant scream recalled her. ‘Not a sign of him!’

She found Gladys in not quite amiable conversation with the elderly ticket collector in charge at the exit.

‘What – no caff, not even a refreshment room?’ she was exclaiming; on their previous visit they had been carried off so briskly by Georgie that they had had no opportunity to investigate the resources of Osney station. ‘I couldn’t half do with a cuppa and my sister’s wore out.’

‘There’s the Ladies. On the platform,’ said the collector, lingering at the open door of a little office where a storage-heater, turned off for the summer months, offered its sole and sullen company in the long twilight. There was also the scent of hay and dew, but that was not company.

‘Thank you for nothing – I should think so,’ said Gladys. ‘We just come all that way up.’

‘There’s a waiting-room, I meant,’ and he returned into his cell.

Gladys marched out through the dusky little entrance, past the ticket office, and piled her parcels on a melancholy old seat with a damaged back. The hotel, glowing with discreet lights and hung with flowery window baskets, still stared aloofly. A pale road, lampless, bordered by a dusty tall hedge, wandered off into the unknown under the fading pink sky. The air was silent and very warm.

‘Can’t go in there, cost the earth,’ said Gladys, studying the hotel with a stare as critical as its own. ‘Don’t expect he’ll be long.’ She sat down.

‘Had a breakdown, p’raps,’ suggested Annie.

‘Go on, be cheerful,’ said Gladys mechanically. She turned to her sister, ‘Best put one of them round you, catch your death,’ and she snatched a coat from her unresisting arm and draped it carefully round her shoulders, in spite of Annie’s protest that she was ‘boiling alive now’.

They sat beside their bulging parcels and composed themselves for a wait. At intervals, Gladys got up, explored the outside of the station, peered in through the window, not without mutters, at the collector reading his paper by the dim yellow light of a gas lamp beside the unsympathetic person of the storage heater, and returned to her seat.

‘’Ere he is!’ cried Annie, as a car approached, announcing its arrival moments in advance by the comet of its headlights flaring some miles down the road. But it dwindled into the distance, with an appearance of heartlessness.

‘I can’t get over it all,’ Annie murmured presently, ‘seems like a dream. I keep thinking about young Erika. Going to be a nurse. Paying for her and everything (not what Government won’t help). She’ll make a fine little nurse.’

‘If she don’t stifle the poor souls smoking,’ was Gladys’s detached comment, without removing her severe gaze from the view, growing ever more lost in twilight, down the road. ‘What I can’t get over is Mrs L. coming back to our church – used to tell me she was fed up with it. Always saying so. Keeping on about it. Used to say she
envied
me. A bit soft, I always thought.’

‘She ’ad a fright, Glad. A bad fright.’

Indeed, the fright had been bad; it was quite a year before Mrs Lysaght recovered herself sufficiently to resume her picking of ecclesiastical holes and her badgering of Mr Geddes and her alleged study of esoteric religions.

‘That Mrs Geddes was ever so kind, I will say,’ Gladys said presently, ‘it’s a draughty old place, I wouldn’t live there for keeps not if you was to pay me, and there wasn’t never enough tea –’

‘You was everlasting saying so.’

‘– and
they
got you down, going off to pray and that, and those
black robes
. I didn’t half want to laugh the first time they come in the kitchen wearing them things.’

‘But they was ever so nice to us, Glad.’

‘And that old rackman. Doing himself in. Best thing for him, wasn’t it – poor Mrs P. But it’s all for the best,’ she ended vaguely, and added a comment which, in this case, was true, ‘merciful release, really. Send Mrs Geddes a card at Christmas.’

‘I’m that thirsty,’ Annie was beginning, then broke off with a pleased cry as a biggish car, driven at a reassuringly sane pace, bumped gently round a corner from a lane, which they had not observed, at the side of the station. Both got up, peering anxiously.

It stopped, and there, smiling at them from the driver’s seat, was a large rosy face.

‘Georgie!’ cried Gladys, all affection.

‘There you are, Auntie – hullo, Auntie Annie – sorry I kept you waiting, had a bit of trouble getting her to start, she does that sometimes. Your box has come all safe,’ Georgie went on, referring to a large ruinous theatrical basket containing those of their possessions not contained in the carrier bags and little suitcases. ‘I got your rooms all nice and ready. Come along.’

They bustled about in the owl-light, helping him to stow away their bundles and Annie’s coats. The ticket collector came out to watch and assumed a new (and slightly embarrassing, in view of Gladys’s previous talk with him) identity for them by being called Mr Skeggs and being familiarly known to Georgie.

A gentle sensation of home-coming pervaded the occasion, particularly for Gladys, whose ‘own boy’ Georgie had always been. There was, too, a feeling of wonder that it should be Georgie, whom they remembered with a comforter settled immovably in the middle of his large rosy face, and sitting in his pram in the charge of their two proud fourteen-and-twelve-year-old selves, who should be giving them a home in their old age. All be together, Gladys was thinking comfortably, as she climbed into the car.

‘There is a rug, Auntie,’ he now said mildly to Annie, ‘look … on the seat.’ He eyed the coats expressionlessly: his aunts wouldn’t want those old things now they was living with him. But there was plenty of time for the disposal of them.

Georgie had been born with the assumption that there was plenty of time, and, as a result, looked forty when he was sixty. As he was also uncursed with ambition or any overwhelming amorous drive, and was by nature secretive and rather good at using what brains he had, he had succeeded in getting exactly what he wanted from life; his fair share, and comfort. This had been George Barnes’s war aim. He had also, to his surprise, neatly killed two men.

‘Not thinking of getting married, Georgie?’ asked Annie unexpectedly, when they had been driving for a little while along the twilit road. A rabbit, its fur gleaming silvery in the headlights, dashed across in front of the car and they all exclaimed and laughed; even Annie, who had suddenly been struck by the thought of some bit of a girl intruding on their new comforts. But Georgie’s laugh came again, on a shy, but also sly, note.

‘Not me, Auntie,’ he said, in the tone with which he had greeted this question for the past forty-seven years, ‘I know when I’m well off. You and Auntie Glad are all the wives I want.’

There was more enjoyable laughter, followed by the agreeable revelation that a toad-in-the-hole was keeping hot for them in the oven; Georgie was a good cook. They would be in time, too, for an exciting telly programme.

They could see the house lights of Osney now; two modest rows of gold curving along a village street between dim fields where mist was rising. It was quite quiet, but of course they could not hear the quiet because of the noise the car was making, and there was nothing notable in sight except that lovely curve of the street, unexpected as the flick of a quiet personal will, meandering past a few lightless shops, where the colours of cotton dresses and packets of processed foods and cartons of chips all glowed gently in the benevolence of the almost-faded afterglow.

Soft and clear they glowed, in their unpleasing shapes, and a stout old church, looking down on Osney from its place on a little rise at the beginning of the village, caught just the very last ghost of the light on its stones, and glowed faintly too.

They had seen all this before. It was like coming home, knowing the place already.

Gladys wondered what time the shops opened in the morning and which was the best place for stockings, and who the butcher would be and if there would be real country vegetables. She thought for an instant of the shops in the Archway, and of Joneses, then forgot them.

The last prospect before the shops and cottages closed in on either side caught her eye, on the left; a field of pale stubble leading on to woodland, dark against the almost vanished pink. A big bird flew up leisurely from the field as the car went past, and winged off to the distant trees. Gladys’s eye watched it go. It wasn’t hurrying itself. Well, in the country things didn’t. She spoke, but something in the view held her memory, and she did not turn her head.

‘Looks just the same, doesn’t it?’ she observed, ‘like when we used to be little. The country,’ and Annie, her eyes already fixed on the white front of Georgie’s bungalow, next to the fantastically carved wooden façade of the Old Guard House, echoed her in the same tone.

‘Just the same. Not changed a bit. Eh, Georgie? Just like when we was all little.’

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Published by Vintage 2011

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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1967

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