Bilgewater (3 page)

“Why d'you stay here, Paula?”

“Because you're always askin' for stories,” Paula said. “I've been taken kind-hearted. Seems to me I'm a very nice woman.”

She went on with the
Ode to a Nightingale
and Terrapin—I remember now that it was Terrapin—made faces at me of peculiar horror from the sick-room bed, leaning out of it from the knees so he could see me and looking fit as a flea.

I never felt that Paula found me very important though. Far from it. She never had favourites. There is a great sense of inevocable justice about her and although one had the sensation that her devotions and emotions ran deep and true you never found her ready to discuss them—not the loving emotions anyway.

Whether it were ridiculous Terrapin, friendly Boakes or wonderful divine and heavenly Jack Rose, the hero of the school, she treated them all alike. For me she had had from the start a steady unshakeable concern that wrapped me round like a coat. She never fussed me or hung about me and since I was a little baby I don't remember her ever kissing me or hugging me. Every night of my life she has looked in on me at bedtime to tuck me in, and when I had the measles or the chicken pox I had them over in the Boys' Side with her and I knew absolutely for certain though I never asked that she would always be within call.

But she has never tried to mother me. She's not a soft woman, Paula. She cannot stand slop of any kind and again and again she says—it is her dictum, her law unquestionable—
BEWARE OF SELF PITY
.

Yet you can tell her anything. She is never shocked, she is never surprised. She accepts and accepts and accepts. Puffy Coleman keeps falling in love with the very little boys (“Well, it's not as if he
does
anything”); dear Uncle Edmund Pen HB climbs ladders and weeps for love of anything vaguely female (“He's romantic the dear knows”); one of the boys gets howling drunk at The Lobster Inn after failing all his O levels (“He's to be sobered and pitied and set to do them again at Christmas”). And she never thought that it was in any way odd that I could not read at the age of ten. “If the eyes are right,” she said, “and we have now got them right, the reading will come. I've no opinion of these mind-dabblers and I.Q.s and dear knows.” And the reading did come. In the end.

And Paula never, ever, gives me the impression that I am ugly and once when I said something of the kind she went off like a bomb. “You get no sympathy from me on that score, my lover,” she declared, thumping and clattering about with a sewing-machine.

“I've no friends,” I wailed. (It was after the measles. I was in a bad way.)

“More fool you.”

“Everyone hates me.”

“Don't be conceited. Oh help me and save me the thing is all busted to bits.”

“Not surprising when you've dropped it on the floor. That was my
mother's
sewing-machine,” I said. I remember I took pleasure in saying this. I intoned it. “My father gave it to my mother. She always loved it.”

“Pity she didn't use it a bit more then. To think when I came here and you a naked worm wrapped in old bits of blanket and not a gown prepared!”

“She was unworldly—”

“Then she's best off where she is.”

“Paula!”

“
BEWARE OF SELF PITY
,” she thundered, bright-eyed and beautiful, “
BEWARE OF—
”

“I've no mother. I can't read. I'm ug—”

“You can read as well as many. You're a witch at your figures. You can play difficult piano by ear and you can keep up with your father at his chess. What's more—”

“I'm ugly.”

“You've got lovely skin and hands and hair.”

“Oh Paula, my hair's terrible. It's frizzy. It's fluorescent. It gives you a migraine. It's the joke of the place.”

“You wait,” said Paula, solemn as an oracle, sticking the needle of the sewing-machine through her little finger and out the other side and bellowing like a beast, “I'm injured, I'm bleeding, I'm stuck to the needle!”

Rescued, rocking herself, she added, “You're the best girl in the world. You're my best friend in the world.”

“Well, you're mine, too, I suppose,” I said and we looked at each other, no nonsense. Then I said, “Actually you're the only friend, just as I'm yours. We haven't got any more.”

“That's true,” said Paula clutching her hand up into a ball and sitting on it to kill off the pain, “This god-forsaken loanely place.”

“Well why d'you stay here?”

Which was where we began.

 

Thursdays were always the evenings when these conversations with Paula took place and had done so “from long since” as our Mrs. Things say, because Thursdays were the evenings when father received visitors.

He had done this since before the war, even before he was married, and the visitors had always been the same: one or two, never more than three Old Masters. Uncle Pen and Puffy Coleman were inevitables and the third was often an amalgam of cobwebs and dust called Old Price. Every term-time Thursday at about seven-thirty these people came roaming round like elderly, homing snails. They unwind garments in the hall when it is not cold, drop walking sticks—Uncle HB has a shooting stick—into the hall-stand and trail dismally into the study. Paula takes them coffee and glasses and father slowly unlocks the shelf-cupboard in the bottom of his desk and brings out a bottle of wine which he never opens until well after they have all arrived and would probably never open at all if he were not kept very firmly at it by Uncle HB who often brings a personal hip-flask, too, though I don't think father has ever noticed.

Uncle HB as the minutes after the coffee wear on thumps the hip-flask about and moves it into very conspicuous places because he is a good man and loathes cowardice of all kinds and believes in straightforward honesty where weaknesses are concerned. “I drink,” he says, “but never secretly,” and he glares round the room as if everybody else has a still in the wardrobe. My father doesn't drink secretly either and I'm sure Puffy doesn't—only lots of ginger beer with the boys—and if Old Price drank more than two sips he'd go up in a little wisp of smoke. I often wonder how the convention of father providing the wine began and why he is expected to produce a weekly bottle of what Paula calls Rosy when he seems to need so very few of the usual pleasures of life. On his own he would never get any further than the mechanics of gazing at the bottle and peering about under exercise books, old tea pots and the odd sock for the corkscrew and at long last, standing like a priest at Mass gazing at the pinkness of the wine held aloft towards the window or the slinky, chilling sexy face of Primavera over the fireplace. In the end Uncle Pen who never notices the colour or the Botticelli takes the bottle from him, smells it, complains of it and pours it out. Paula then leaves them, taking the tray, and the four of them sit on until about half-past ten.

 

Sometimes, when I was little, I was allowed to sit with them for a bit—well, not so much allowed. I just did. They did not seem to notice and I learned much. When I was four or five I would sit for ages under the desk playing with a heap of old shoes my father keeps there. They were friendly shoes with names and I had good long private conversations with them before Paula descended like a valkyrie. “Now excuse me of course and such-like, but she's 'ere and I'm 'avin' 'er out. Under that desk. Yes. I've looked the school over. Ought to be 'shamed! She'll be stunted of growth. Five year old and after eight o'clock at night! No don't disturb yourself Mr. Hastings. Hold on to your flask it'll topple”—and her arms would come scooping down and gather me up and I'd be flown through the air above all their heads, yelling “I'm not
tired
. I'm busy. You're not
KIND
Paula,” etc., dangling by its laces a shoe which would never see home or family again.

As I grew older I became too large to fit under the desk and also if I may be forgiven for mentioning it, the smell down there was getting a bit on the fruity side, and I abandoned the Thursday receptions for Paula's sick bay readings and learned there much more interesting, universal, and philosophic things.

I have read novels now full of intelligent conversations. In novels there is often a set-piece thrown in called The University or College Conversation. This can take place between students or long afterwards, in the evenings of the students' days. There are a great many pauses in it and as the pipe smoke rises and the firelight flickers on the rows of mellow old volumes, wisdom and gentle nostalgia hang in the air. The nature of God, the reality of solid objects, the non-existence of Time are touched upon, tossed gently to and fro. Not so with father's lot. Up with Paula, the floor above—and Paula has had no education at all—we talk on and on about:

sin

death

love

harmony

ethics

particularly ethics, e.g. when Posy Robinson comes in all tearful for his mama and we have only two eggs and two rashers and two spoons of cocoa, our four feet on the fender and a lovely play coming on the wireless after the news.

But downstairs! Here is a sample of the chat on one of the Learned Thursdays:

“Cold night.”

“Rather better.”

“Pretty cold. Got your coal yet?”

“No. Got your oil?”

“No!”

“Time this House had oil. No more expensive.”

“Smells.”

“Not at all. No shovelling what's more.”

“Your House has a Man.”

“Man! Idle oik. If we got oil we could get rid of him.”

“Get rid of Gunning? Get rid of
Gunning
?”

“'Bout time. Been here since the zeppelins.”

Uneasy pause while it is considered whether Old Price has been here since the zeppelins.

“I once saw the zeppelins,” says Puffy Coleman kindly. “I was just a boy. There was a burst of flame out over the sea—off Scarborough, and then we saw a lot of little flames dropping into the water. Little flaming men. That was a terrible war.”

“Terrible.”

“What was terrible?”

“That war.”

“Which war?”

“Well—the Last War. The—zeppelin war.”

 

“I can remember,” says a very feeble voice in the corner if it is a warm evening—he comes on chosen evenings, Old Price, like Masefield's blackbird—“I can remember the zeps. All the boys ran out along the cliff tops cheering. In their pyjamas.”

“Ah,” says Puffy Coleman, lowering his teeth.

“Ah,” says Uncle Pen HB. Then, “It wasn't
that
war.”

“Yes it was. What d'you think it was? The Napoleonic War?”

“Scarborough was bombarded in the Napoleonic War,” whispers Old Price.

“Now then Price, you weren't in the Napoleonic War,” says Pen.

“No. No. I onIy said—uff, uff, uff—”

Father gazes at the uplifted wine. The Primavera watches through her wicked eyes.

“D'you think Price was in the Napoleonic War, William?”

“What's that?”

“Uff, uff, uff—”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” says father, bewildered, looking round sweetly, kindly, at one and all, not at all sure, for he is a good bit younger than the others, what might or might not be so.

They reflect.

Oh it's wild stuff.

W
hat all this rigmarole is meant to lead up to is the fact that although I had spent, quaintly and princess-like, so much of my life among people years and years older than myself and knew something about the peculiarities of grown-ups, I knew absolutely nothing about myself and others of my age and this is what made the first revelations when they came so unnerving.

There were two of these in particular and they were several years apart, nor dramatic or exciting to anybody else but a swarm of troubles and misconceptions and shynesses and agonies sprang out of them.

Both of them were to do with the boy Terrapin.

The first was when I was thirteen and I was sitting in my bedroom towards the end of summer quite late one evening. It was still light—one of the occasional northern summer nights when it doesn't ever get completely dark at all and you remember that Norway is only a few hundred miles away, nearer than Cornwall. It was a night as warm as Cornwall, light, shadowy, soft, not heavy or thundery; a basking, sleepy, scented night that makes you sigh and slowly blink and gaze.

My bedroom window is a big one, low, with a sash, and I had been lying on my stomach doing my homework.

I had finished this now and by lying with my elbows supporting my hands which were under my chin my nose rested on the bottom of the sill. Thus above the sill were only my great glasses and my luminous and disgusting orange hair.

I am very long-sighted. I took my glasses off and gazed across the evening. There stood our garden first, pretty as a fire-screen, a lovely hazy embroidered mixture of hollyhocks, tobacco plants and roses all tangled up together against an old brick wall. Beyond the garden was the kitchen garden of the House with the Fives Court at the end of it, surrounded by tall trees, and then to my eyes more clear than all the rest was the distant high line of moors drawn with a sharp point across a great gentle sky. There were late sounds from the Fives Court, plonk, ker-plonk, thud, bump, and yells of boys' voices. Somewhere about I could hear a boy practising on a flute. One, two, three notes, pause. Yell, ker-plonk, “Oh blast you Jenks.” One-two-three-four pause. Twitter of birds. The evening breeze. Ker-plonk. Onetwothreefour (go on, well done) fivesix, came the notes, then down again. Pause—then the whole phrase, effortless this time, complete. Mozart. Wonderful.

I was utterly content with the content of being in the right place at the right time. I, Marigold Green, a figure properly set in a picture, an equation on a page, a note in a bit of music, non-transposable, irreplaceable. Ugly, quaint and square lay I, happy and at home where I belonged. Sleepily and happily I watched the boy with the flute—it was nice ordinary Boakes—walk mazily through the lettuces, beneath me across the lawn.