Summer at the Haven (2 page)

“Granted that Miss Blackett is not the ideal warden,” said the chairwoman, Lady Merivale, to her secretary, “but she is conscientious and hard-working and she is also cheap, which, I need hardly say, is a sad but inevitable necessity in these times.” The secretary had been hinting that Miss Blackett seemed sometimes to lack sensitivity.

She had been a matron in a boys’ preparatory school for some years but had then thought that old ladies might be
easier to manage. She found she was mistaken. You generally knew where you were with small boys, but with “them”, as she always thought of the old ladies, you never knew – they were so unreliable. “Unreliable” was her favourite term of disapproval. She bore “them” a grudge for the mistake she had made but she did not feel like another change.

Miss Blackett’s room was the extreme opposite of Mrs Langley’s. It was spotless and very neat, her papers stacked in tidy piles on her desk, on the top of which stood the one picture in the room, a small faded photograph of a kitten. Miss Blackett sat at her desk and wrote:

As she finished the last note, a large ginger cat rattled imperiously at the door and was immediately let in. He sat down at once on the top of Miss Blackett’s papers. She sighed resignedly and stroked him. This was Lord Jim, so christened by a Mrs Wilson, a late resident, the widow of a naval officer, who had read nothing but Conrad’s novels and made his wife read them too. Miss Blackett knew nothing of Conrad and thought the name a compliment to her cat’s proud manners. She was therefore pleased with the name. Everyone knew that Lord Jim could do no wrong in her eyes and everyone thought her one photograph was of him, but in this they were wrong. It was of her
only childhood’s pet, passionately loved but put to sleep when he reached maturity because the aunt who had brought her up said he ruined the furniture and harboured fleas. Miss Blackett could not believe that Lord Jim was not a privilege and pleasure for all the old ladies and good for them, too. This happened to be true as regards Mrs Thornton, Miss Norton and Miss Brown, but quite untrue of Miss Dawson and Mrs Perry. Mrs Perry’s passion was flowers and she it was who lovingly tended that herbaceous border beneath her window. Unfortunately Lord Jim’s favourite daybed was precisely on this plot. It was sunny and sheltered from cold winds and he enjoyed both sleeping there and trying to catch the butterflies that hovered over the lavender and pinks and buddleia.

“Lord Jim does love your little garden, Mrs Perry,” said Miss Blackett approvingly. “He’s made quite a nest for himself so cleverly there, do you see?’

Poor Mrs Perry did indeed see, but she said nothing for she knew the situation was hopeless both from Miss Blackett’s point of view and Lord Jim’s. As for Miss Dawson, her passion was for birds and ever since Lord Jim, with that inspired tactlessness not seldom to be observed in cats, had laid a dead thrush at the door of her room, there had been a bitter one-sided feud between her and the warden – one-sided because Miss Blackett was quite unaware of it. Even had she seen the thrush, she would have considered it a signal sign of regard for Miss Dawson on Lord Jim’s part for which she should have felt gratitude. Birds, after all, were designed by Nature among their other uses to provide healthy amusement for cats.

Unfortunately the thrush was not an isolated casualty and with each pathetic little corpse, whether laid at her door or found elsewhere, poor Miss Dawson suffered anew and raged inwardly.

MISS DAWSON’S
room on the second floor was always in a green gloom. Very close to the window were the boughs of the deodar tree. This tree was a perpetual joy to her, not only in itself, its alien mysterious world, the association with a far country of great mountain peaks, but also for its population. Miss Dawson had travelled and bird-watched wherever she went, and photographed and lectured on birds, and her walls were decorated with beautiful prints of rare birds. Seen dimly in the shadowy room, they sometimes seemed alive. But there was no doubt about the busy life that went on among the branches of the deodar. Miss Dawson knew all the tree’s regular visitors and residents better than she knew the residents of The Haven, for she was something of a recluse. There were tree creepers, wood pigeons, of course, robins and tits, best of all a pair of gold crests. Miss Dawson was never tired of watching them and listening to their varied conversation. She knew many of the other birds besides, not just the ones that belonged to her tree. The thrush that Lord Jim had brought her had nested for three years past in the old shrubbery lilacs. He had become very tame, which of course was his undoing. Painfully crippled though she was with her arthritis, and only able to walk with sticks, Miss Dawson had managed to wrap up the thrush in a handkerchief and placing it in the bag which she always wore slung round her neck, she edged
herself down to Mrs Perry who promised to bury it out of reach of Lord Jim. Not that actually he ever did eat his prey, he was too well fed for that and killed merely for sport.

“I believe you know every bird in this garden,” said Mrs Perry to Miss Dawson.

They were having tea together in Mrs Perry’s room which had been the morning room. It was one of the lightest and most cheerful in the house, on the south side and with a bow window overlooking her own garden patch. She suffered from a chronic bronchial condition and was always grateful that she had been able to have this particular room. Though she would not admit it, even to herself, Miss Dawson was sometimes quite glad, especially on chilly days when the radiator didn’t radiate much, to leave her dim retreat for a time. She had eased herself into the comfortable chair that was always kept free for her and was enjoying the pleasant illusion of an early summer’s day provided by the jar of warm coloured wallflowers on the round table and the row of robust polyanthus and primula pot plants on the windowsill. Though a born solitary, she was human enough to feel the need of congenial company sometimes and she had discovered that she and Mrs Perry shared a love of nature, though in somewhat different aspects and ways, for Mrs Perry’s feeling for flowers was not in the least professional. They were drawn together, too, by the treatment they had suffered at the paws of Lord Jim.

“It’s a wonder there’s a bird left for me to know with that wretched cat around,” said Miss Dawson.

“He’s been taking his usual siesta on the top of my poor pansies,” mourned Mrs Perry gently.

“As if birds hadn’t enough to put up with,” went on Miss Dawson, “with all the destruction of nesting sites that goes on and ghastly pesticides poisoning their food, without cats, and there seems more of them about every year.”

“I don’t blame Lord Jim so much,” said Mrs Perry, “but he is so spoiled. Miss Blackett lets him do just as he likes. She has never attempted to train him.”

“You can’t train cats,” snapped Miss Dawson. “The only thing to do is to get rid of them.”

Mrs Perry was silent. She respected her friend too much to contradict her but she knew that you could train cats. Their family cats had all been trained to take “No” for an answer, to keep off flower beds and never to thieve food from tables. She poured herself out another cup of tea.

“I believe Miss Blackett takes the top off all our milk for him,” she said, “it’s so thin.”

“
Most
likely,” said Miss Dawson.

“But to do her justice, she probably gives him all the cream off hers first.”

“More fool her,” said Miss Dawson.

They were interrupted in this comforting talk by Gisela coming in to collect the trays. She seemed upset and nearly dropped a cup. She was easily given to tears and appeared on the brink of them now.

“What’s the matter, Gisela?’ asked kind Mrs Perry.

“It’s that Miss Norton. I do not understand at all. She had beautiful picture of a white horse and many dogs and I try to please and I say: ‘Miss Norton, what a beautiful picture of a white horse and many dogs,’ and Miss Norton speak quite cross, and she say, ‘They are hounds not dogs and the horse, she is grey,’ and the horse is white, white, WHITE,” her voice went up the scale almost to a shriek, “and I speak English,
not
German and say ‘dog’ properly and not ‘hund’.”

It seemed too difficult to try to explain so Mrs Perry merely said, “Never mind, dear, you are getting along very nicely with your English.”

Miss Dawson, who took not the slightest interest in Gisela or Miss Norton, simply waited until the room was quiet again.

“Yes, the only way with cats is to get rid of them,” she then repeated.

“I can’t see how Lord Jim is to be got rid of,” said Mrs Perry.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Miss Dawson, so firmly that Mrs Perry felt a little disturbed. She wished Frances Dawson had something else to think about than her birds and her tree. She herself had a loving family most of whom, though they were at a distance, regularly phoned or wrote, and there were a couple of nice grandchildren who managed to visit her fairly frequently, and sometimes brought her cuttings and plants, for gardening was a family addiction. She was afraid, too, that Frances was often in pain, she was such a valiant creature that she never complained, and sometimes perhaps it was better to complain a little. She thought she would change the subject.

“The apple blossom’s scarcely shown yet, it’s been such a cold spring, but the lilac’s brave as usual, and the warden was picking a lot of it this morning, for the committee meeting tomorrow, I suppose. It’s a funny thing about lilac, sometimes it behaves well when it’s picked, but more often than not it wilts in a most tiresome fashion.”

“Oh, if there’s a committee, I suppose the dining-room will be out of action and we’ll have meals in our rooms,” said Miss Dawson with some satisfaction.

“Why don’t we ask Gisela to bring yours in here and we’ll have them together,” suggested Mrs Perry.

“No, thank you, Mary,” said Miss Dawson. There was a limit to her capacity for companionship and this was reached fairly quickly and often quite suddenly. She was subject, too, to a queer feeling, almost of disloyalty, if she were absent too long from her room and her tree. Mrs Perry did not press her, accepting though not understanding her friend’s ways by this time, so that she was sorry but not in the least offended.

The two continued to chat amiably until it was time to
prepare for supper. Although the main meal at The Haven was in the middle of the day, the old ladies had been used in past years to changing for dinner and as long as they were able, they did so still. It was part of the courageous losing battle that was perpetually being waged within those discreet walls. Miss Blackett, who shared the midday meal, only “saw to” the supper. She and Lord Jim ate together later when the day’s work was almost done and she could relax. It was the favourite hour of her day when, with her television set switched on and Lord Jim purring expectantly at her feet, they could enjoy a snack of whatever took their fancy.

The ladies, in their brave array, a few pieces of jewellery sparkling on old fingers or fastening wraps, sat at an oblong mahogany table in the dining-room. Like them, this table was a relic of a more dignified and prosperous past and made the plastic and steel chairs look like the undeveloped embryos of real furniture. The ladies had to trust themselves to these, however, three on one side and three on the other and one at the end facing the warden.

In the centre of the table was a pot of bright pink hyacinth lolling their top heavy blooms over the edge. Mrs Perry didn’t exactly hate them – she couldn’t hate any flowers – but she compared them unfavourably with every other spring flower she could think of and their particular shade of pink with every other colour. She herself always grew the more delicate Roman hyacinths that never lolled.

Supper consisted of tomato soup (Heinz), macaroni cheese, not very strongly flavoured and the kind of bread-and-butter pudding that lacked all pleasant surprises. Miss Blackett considered it a good nourishing supper and very suitable for the old. Mrs Thornton, mindful of Nanny, classed it as one of those meals to which she would willingly have summoned as a substitute for herself a starving citizen from the Third World. Miss Dawson did not notice what she was eating, Miss Leila Ford enjoyed it because she
loved all food, Mrs Langley smiled happily to herself throughout. Who knows what bygone meal
she
was consuming. Miss Norton, whose sight was very bad, was concentrating too hard on getting the food to her mouth without degrading spillings, to care what it was. Mrs Perry, controlling an itch to tie up those hyacinths properly, thought complacently of a little secret store in her own room which was regularly replenished by thoughtful relatives and friends. She decided that after supper was over she would take some particularly nice shortbread, sent by a niece in Scotland, to cheer up Miss Brown who was eating as little as she dared without attracting Miss Blackett’s attention.

The ladies always sat in the same places and when the warden had once tried to change them round, it met with such obvious disapproval that, as it did not really matter at all to her, she gave up the attempt and let the old sillies have their own way. Mrs Thornton, whose seat was between deaf Miss Brown and Mrs Langley, would herself have benefited by a change, but she understood and partly shared in the half-conscious desire for territorial security which, having lost their homes, made each cling to their own place at table and the same chair in the common sitting-room. Conversation at meal times could not be called animated unless the day had brought any unusual visitors or news of any interesting happening from the outside world. Miss Blackett, used in the past to the chattering of noisy small boys, welcomed at first the negative calm of meals at The Haven, but after a while it oppressed her.

“I’ll be getting as dumb myself, shut up day after day with the old things,” she had complained to Brenda and Gisela one day. She felt it was beneath her dignity to talk in this way to the girls but they hardly noticed. As far as they were concerned, she was already almost in the same category as the old ladies and neither she nor they possessed any real relevance to life.

Supper over, all but Miss Norton, Mrs Thornton and Miss Dawson went into the sitting-room to watch television. As no one was allowed to touch the controls because the warden thought, probably correctly, that this would cause friction, the majority decided on the programmes and she switched them on, very loud and very bright, as she thought this was both necessary and nice. Miss Norton never watched because of her defective sight, Mrs Thornton had her own small set which from her attic fastness she knew could disturb no one. Miss Dawson vehemently disliked all television on principle. This evening, too, she felt very tired but she knew that the pain from her arthritis would only become worse in bed and although allowed two pain killers, doled out to her each evening, she did not allow herself to resort to these so early in the night. She wrapped herself in shawls and a rug and sat in her favouite chair by the window and prayed for the miracle that sometimes some kind magic worked for her. She never knew when it would happen and it was not often, but when it did it was far better than any pain killers. Somehow she thought it might tonight. There was a full moon rising and the softly moving branches of the deodar tree threw shadows on her walls, for she had not switched on her light. The window was slightly open and the distant hoot of an owl floated into the room. Nearer at hand a blackbird was still hard at it and Miss Dawson knew that a thrush or two would follow, singing late into the May night.

The bird’s song, though so native, did not seem to conflict with the faint exotic scent from the deodar but mingled subtly with it, creating in Miss Dawson’s mind a strange compound of past and present, of scenes near at hand and far away in time and space. Gradually these impressions became more vivid and more compelling. Frances Dawson was now a girl in her father’s garden, listening to the promise of summer in the evening bird chorus all about her, excited beyond measure at the mysterious summons of
their song. Almost simultaneously she was a much older but a no less happy Frances Dawson. The curtains of her room had changed to the canvas flaps of a tent open to vast distances glimpsed through a fringe of Himalayan pines, standing like huge sentinels round her camping site. She was so high up in the world that she felt almost as free as the bright tropical birds she had been watching all that day. The deep peace of that freedom enveloped her. She turned and stretched luxuriously on her campbed – she nodded and slipped down in her old chair at The Haven and slept deeply and dreamlessly at last. Her miracle had worked once again.