Complete Short Stories (VMC) (104 page)

She was lonely, though did not know it, having been too busy for years, with the trays for upstairs, and the bell ringing, and the afternoon readings-aloud, the bothers with bowels and bedsores, the staving-off of unwanted callers. To go shopping had been an adventure; but there was little she now needed to buy, eating frugally, absent-mindedly.

She passed her time drifting about the rooms, or making little forays into the webbed-over, tangled garden.

Now, the wallpapers worried her. Mr Mavory, drinking
his
glass of whisky without shuddering, saw thoughts come and go on her anxious little face.

Rummaging in her mind, oblivious of him, she put a hand to her mouth, then touched her frizzy hair. Her home – her life-long home – was creeping into decay. She saw the signs of it about her, and remembered others in other parts of the house.

Mr Mavory had come to the conclusion that she would never move from here, would not know how to. He discarded that idea, and began to talk instead about the improvement of the property. The word ‘house’ he never used. He threw in suggestions, which seemed to bounce back from the walls. Money no impediment, he so constantly reaffirmed.

‘But I could not have men traipsing about the house. And everything would have to be moved. I couldn’t bear it.’

Mason & Toope would take over, Mr Mavory assured her.

‘Oh,
they
came once when we had a burst pipe, and made such a noise, and charged us so much. Mother was quite upset.’

‘Then do as Dr Jenkins advised you. Take a holiday. Have a rest. Let others do things for you for a change.’

He went on to tell her of a nice guest-house where his aunt sometimes stayed. It was in Hove, in a quiet street away from the sea. The food was excellent, he said; but food meant nothing to Miss Partridge.

‘I don’t think I could,’ she said: he saw a flicker of doubt on her face; she was beginning to recover from shock and fatigue.

The next day he called again, with a book of wallpaper patterns he had borrowed from Mason & Toope. Turning the leaves, she murmured with pleasure and surprise, at the beauty of entwined roses, lovers’ knots, satin stripes and embossed fleurs-de-lis. She was almost as enthusiastic as if any part of it were to do with her.

When he went away, he left the book. And, in the evening, having nothing better to do, she took it on her lap and began to turn the great pages. Again and again, she went back to the pink roses latticed on pearly grey. It was her favourite, she decided.

Then, at last, she looked up, and gazed for a long while at the yellowing willow leaves upon the wall.

So, after a short time, Miss Partridge took herself off to the Fernhurst Guest Home in Hove, and Mason & Toope moved in to deal with the decorating.

Fernhurst was all that Mr Mavory had described. The food was simple and light, and the service was hushed. No one spoke to Miss Partridge. At first, she sat at a table by the door but, later, as guests departed, was promoted to one by the window, overlooking a hedge of golden privet and a quiet road. The season was nearly over and she walked along an almost deserted front, or sat in an empty shelter listening to the sea on the pebbles, sometimes thinking about the rose wallpaper, and wondering how far Mason & Toope had got with it. Real roses, they looked. She had felt that they might almost be scented.

After a week of Hove she began to be restless, to wonder what on earth she was doing at the Fernhurst. After ten days, she paid her bill, packed her suitcase, got on the train and went home.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon when she arrived back. She took a cab from the station, and the driver came with her to the front door with her suitcase. The door was wide open, and the house smelled of paint: no one was about.

She went into the drawing-room. Furniture was pushed into the middle of it and covered with a dust sheet. On one wall the roses blossomed, brightened by sunshine from an uncurtained window. The other walls still showed only grey plaster.

Miss Partridge stood entranced before the rose-covered wall, and could imagine the whole room in bloom. It would be quite beautiful. Her mother would have been horrified – at the change, at the expense. She had always been careful about money.

After a time, Miss Partridge became conscious of men’s voices coming from the garden at the back. She went out of the front door and round the house, and discovered two young men in white overalls sitting in the last of the sun on the old garden seat. They were drinking tea, and on the iron table before them were paper bags and thermos flasks.

‘Good-afternoon, miss,’ one said. He was George Toope, younger son of
the
Toope. The other she recognised as Sandy Wright, who had once delivered newspapers.

‘We wasn’t expecting you,’ George said. He did not rise, but shifted along the seat, patting the space beside him.

Miss Partridge, with hardly any hesitation, sat down. ‘I found my holiday very tiring,’ she said. ‘I walked about too much, for there was nothing else to pass the time.’

‘You could do with this, I reckon,’ George said, for he seemed to be the spokesman. He unscrewed the top of his thermos flask and poured tea into it.

‘Oh, how kind! I could,’ Miss Partridge said.

He offered sugar in a screw of paper, and she watched him shake some into her cup; then he took a pencil from behind his ear and stirred her tea with it.

‘You needn’t have brought your own sugar,’ she said. ‘There is plenty of it in the larder. You should have helped yourself.’

‘And have that old bitch Murphy after us?’ Sandy said, speaking at last. ‘No
thanks
.’ Miss Partridge flushed.

‘It is not Mrs Murphy’s sugar,’ she said, with unusual firmness. Of course, she would not have said that to, or before, Mrs Murphy.

Sandy held out a meat sandwich on a crumpled paper bag.

‘I can’t take your … tea,’ she said, confused as to what time of day it was. He wagged the paper bag up and down in the palm of his hand, commandingly. She took a thick triangle of sandwich and began to nibble it and twist it about her mouth. Doing so, she looked at the forlorn garden.

‘Fag?’ asked Sandy, when she had at last finished the sandwich.

‘Fag? Oh, no, no; thank you.’

She wondered about this relaxed time they were having, for in less than an hour they would knock off work. But, though wondering at it, she approved of it, and she felt peaceful sitting there with them in the sun.

When they went back to their work, she went on sitting there, listening to them treading about the bare and creaking floorboards in the drawing-room, their voices echoing excitingly. When they left at five o’clock, the house seemed very silent.

Miss Partridge sat out the days which followed in the crowded dining-room, among the sickly green-and-white chrysanthemums, which did not seem to her at all like real flowers, and were soon to be replaced by poppies, cornflowers and intersecting ears of corn. Every now and then – drawn there – she would peep in at the nearly finished room with its mass of roses, and marvel at its beauty. Twice a day she made tea for her ‘boys’, as she thought of them. They were no trouble – nothing like the nuisance she had imagined they would be.

‘Here we are then!’ Miss Partridge called out gaily, waiting for the drawing-room door to be opened, lest there should be a can of paint, or George or
Sandy on a ladder on the other side. At once there was a subdued hustle: the door was opened, and George took from her the heavy tray with the silver tea-pot, and freshly made scones.

‘Quite a party!’ he said, winking at Sandy.

‘When I was a child, I longed for a party,’ Miss Partridge said. ‘Did you ever have one?’

‘Oh, the various old rave-up.’

She nodded, and turned back to the door.

‘Only
two
cups?’ George asked. ‘We can’t have parties on our tod – not just me and Sandy. I’ll get another one out the kitchen.’ She sat down on a dust-sheeted sofa, and smiled. She had not allowed herself to expect to be asked.

George returned with the extra cup and saucer. ‘Shall I do the honours?’ he asked. He lifted the tarnished tea-pot questioningly, his little finger quirked. ‘Shall I be Mother?’

‘He is never at a loss for words,’ Miss Partridge thought, as Sandy went off into a fit of laughter.

‘Is this real silver?’ George asked, sobered by the pale amber stream coming from the spout.

‘It is hall-marked seventeen hundred something.’

‘Might be worth a fortune.’

‘It is rather dented, as you can see.’

‘Never mind: silver’s silver. It could be melted down.’

‘And why not?’ Miss Partridge wondered placidly.

‘It
could
be an antique,’ Sandy said slowly, feeling that it was time he should speak. ‘It could be worth its weight in gold.’

‘Bloody nit,’ George said, cramming a scone into his mouth.

Miss Partridge – hardly drinking, not eating – looked at the walls, and said, ‘It’s just like a garden. With
real
flowers, I mean. A bee could fly in here, and feel quite confused.’

‘It could feel b. well confused,’ said Sandy, who rarely rose to such heights of humour.

‘Well, back to work! Do a bit more,’ George commanded. ‘Tomorrow we begin on the second reception room.’

The second reception room was really the dining-room, where the received, during the last half-century, could be counted on the fingers of two hands. It was papered with the white-and-green chrysanthemums, gone dark now, against a darker ground.

‘Have you ever seen chrysanthemums like them?’ Miss Partridge asked, as George and Sandy began to scrape them away.

‘I never thought of them as chrysanths. Just flowers like.’

‘Some of those flowers, as you call them, have over forty petals,’ Miss Partridge said. ‘When I didn’t feel up to what was given me for lunch, I’d be obliged to sit there all afternoon, until whatever it was was gone. Forty-something petals, I counted them through my tears.’

‘My dad just used to larrup me if I didn’t finish my greens,’ Sandy said. Miss Partridge twisted her hands together.

‘I can’t bear to think about that,’ she said.’

‘Did me no harm. I learnt to like my greens all right in the end,’ Sandy said in a loaded voice, for the benefit of George, who laughed briefly, as he worked.

‘Oh, if only I
could
!’ Miss Partridge said, in an imploring voice. The scraping down of those walls was so wonderful to her that she felt she must be part of it. She looked at the discoloured rubbish on the floor in excitement.

‘Look,’ said George sternly, ‘it was your Mr Mavory got the estimate: he won’t let up on it. Every second we let slide, not working up to our full capacity, Sandy and me, costs
my
dad money. Real money.’

She thought of the dreamy interludes in the garden, with thermos flasks and sandwiches, and their lack of hurry and bustle. Perhaps now the autumn had set seriously in.

Sandy made a frowning face at George, who then handed over the scraper to Miss Partridge. ‘OK. But I don’t want this about the village, or everyone will be wanting to have a go. Might have Union bother. So please keep it to yourself.’

But to this Miss Partridge scarcely listened. Flushed with enthusiasm – and at the honour of such responsibility – she scraped away at the background of her childhood, her life.

In the evening, she walked about the flowered drawing-room, entranced by its beauty, and, because there was no longer silence all day, she did not mind the silence of these lonely hours. She knew that the next day would bring the clanking of pail-handles, the snatches of talk, the whistling of ‘Galway Bay’. Week-ends, however, were long enough to remind her of the past deprivations.

Mrs Murphy grumbled about the upheaval. She said that the white paint would show the dirt; and said it in a hopeless way, as if there would be nothing she could do about it. She detested George and Sandy, and told tales behind their backs. When it came the turn for Miss Partridge’s bedroom to be decorated, she stood in front of the sprays of forget-me-nots and said that her and her sister Gladys’s bedroom had been done like that when they were in service. ‘It was thought good enough for kitchen-maids,’ she added.

But George and Sandy were enthusiastic. It was they who chose the
violets for the landing, and Sandy said he intended to have the same if he married, which George said his mother would never let him do.

Mr Mavory, feeling slightly responsible for the changes, thought them all unbearably crude; but Dr Jenkins, seeing the results in Miss Partridge herself, approved. ‘If she’d had strings of upside-down baboons eating bananas, I’d have been for it,’ he told Mavory. ‘Her circulation has improved.’

When the cold weather came, George and Sandy were glad of their indoor work. As one room was finished, they moved on to another. It became such a long-drawn-out job that George’s father, Mr Toope, was obliged to ask Miss Partridge for ‘a little something down’, as he embar-rassedly put it. She was stretching the work far beyond the matter of the original estimate, he explained. He was glad of the business, but there were difficulties. Miss Partridge wrote a cheque for three hundred pounds and – for the days of taking cheques upstairs for her mother to sign were over – wrote ‘Elinor Partridge’ on it with a flourish. She had waited a long time for that much authority.

George and Sandy brought with them each day all the gossip of the village, so that she began to feel set in her surroundings and a part of them for the first time. When she went shopping she
knew
about the people she met – knew that the girl at the grocer’s had won twenty pounds at Bingo, which was a good thing, Sandy said, as although she didn’t show yet she had an expensive time coming up: the butcher’s wife was expecting, too, forlornly awaiting her fifth daughter – ‘wishing it on herself,’ George said. ‘She needs to talk herself into a son.’ And Miss Partridge knew who was out of work, and would be glad of a little job of upholstery or window-cleaning. Such simple jobs as unblocking a sink or mending a fuse George and Sandy, those marvellous men about the house, would do for her.