Summer at the Haven (3 page)

MISS NORTON
negotiated the hall and passage and stairs successfully with the help of her stick which she used for guidance only; she was still erect and agile and needed no prop. She shut the door of her room with relief and triumph. Another day conquered and she could relax completely.

Mrs Thornton, who was the only person likely to visit her, would tonight, as she knew, be listening to a favourite music programme. Since her sight had worsened, each day was a battle to retain her dignity and independence. But she came of fighting stock in which self-pity in misfortune had had little part, though she allowed herself the indulgence of exasperation now and again. For instance, when she realised that she could no longer play her endless games of Patience, that it really was no good (even the largest cards got muddled up), she threw the pack across the room and it took her a long while to locate and retrieve each card. “That’ll teach me,” she said to herself. But such outbursts were few. In her own room, unless someone had moved any of her things from their accustomed places, she could manage pretty well still and she remained the most immaculately neat, clean and well turned out of all The Haven’s residents.

She did not sit down now before she had taken off her beautifully fitting though ancient black velvet gown
(definitely a gown and not a mere dress) and hung it carefully in her cupboard. She folded the little muslin scarf she had worn round her shoulders and placed it in her top right-hand drawer among her lavender-scented embroidered handkerchiefs. She took off a pair of elegant pointed shoes and fitted them with their trees, then felt for her slippers beside the bed. They were warm and comforting to her cold feet. Then she put on a loose wrapper and at last seated herself in an upright armchair and switched on her radio to hear the sporting news.

The picture which had caught Gisela’s attention dominated the room. It was an oil painting of her father on his favourite hunter with two cavorting foxhounds in the foreground and, behind, a grey stone house of pleasing proportions. Though Miss Norton’s eyes could no longer see the picture well, she did not need them to recall its every detail. Beneath it hung two miniatures, one of two children, a boy and a girl, the boy with an arm flung protectively round his sister, for it was easy to see the likeness between the two, though he was dark and straight-haired and she had pale brown curls. It was not difficult either to trace in old Miss Norton the same fine bone structure and the same small head set on a long neck, as in the child’s portrait.

The other miniature was of a very fair young man in an army officer’s uniform which seemed to eclipse his identity. He looked too young for it. He was indeed, like so many of his contemporaries, too young for what it signified at the time when the picture was painted. Miss Norton had been engaged to him once. He was her twin brother’s closest friend and both had passed out of Sandhurst together in the summer of 1914 and had been killed in Flanders in the first battle of Ypres. Her short romance seemed now as if it had happened to someone in a book she had read long ago and when she thought about it, she felt ashamed that she could hardly recall Paul’s face or his voice – the miniature had never seemed real. She could only remember how the back
of his hands and his arms were covered with fine golden hairs and that he had a habit of softly whistling to himself, whereas she could always still see her brother vividly and hear him speak and laugh.

There was no one else left to marry among the families that her parents knew and “afterwards”, as Miss Norton always referred to the years immediately following the War, her parents anyway needed her at home. Her father, always keenly interested in racing, grew reckless. “One must do something, Meg,” he had said to his daughter, “you understand, don’t you, a man must do something, but promise me you’ll never bet yourself.” Gradually racing debts piled up and, at his death, the estate and the old house and most of its contents had to be sold. Miss Norton and her mother took a flat in Darnley and there her mother died and, eventually, Meg Norton, whose sight had begun to give serious trouble, moved into The Haven.

She did not make friends there easily. “Stand-offish,” said Miss Blackett, but it was really that she had never learned to mix in a wider circle than the narrow one in which she had been reared. She found herself more at ease with Mrs Thornton than the rest. She had been the Squire’s daughter in a village and Mrs Thornton’s girlhood had been spent in a country parsonage. They had inhabited the same vanished world. It was Mrs Thornton, though, who had made the first overture. She noticed how blind Miss Norton was getting and wondered if she would like the morning papers read to her sometimes. Miss Norton agreed to the suggestion with some hesitation, though grateful for the offer, and Mrs Thornton soon found that she was not much interested. It took several sessions equally boring to both before Miss Norton brought herself to ask for the sports pages. She had kept her promise to her father but retained the interest which she had shared with him. By this time, however, Mrs Thornton had taken note of the row of silver cups on the long shelf opposite the window
and was not altogether surprised.

“What a beautiful array you have there, Miss Norton,” she said.

“I used to be quite a successful show jumper as a girl,” said Miss Norton, “but most of these cups were won by my brother – he was a fine all-round athlete.”

Mrs Thornton felt a pang of sympathy and pity, while at the same time she was glad that her shelves held books and not silver cups. She possessed a living heritage from the past and she thought, not for the first time, that old age bore more grievously upon those whose main interests had been in physical activities. So from then on she patiently ploughed through reports of race meetings and when these were exhausted, accounts of cricket, tennis and football events in their due seasons, and followed the careers of notable sportsmen and women of many nationalities for Miss Norton’s sake. And then, one day, when she had finished reading about how “Sandhurst Prince won the Sirena Stakes at Kempton Park with consummate ease”. Miss Norton surprised her by asking if she knew anything about “Talking Books”.

“Indeed I do,” said Mrs Thornton. “I have a blind cousin who would not know what to do without them. There is a great variety to choose from, too. Is there any special author you would like me to try and get for you?”

“Do they have any of Shakespeare’s plays?” asked Miss Norton. “I am very fond of the plays.”

“Now,” said Mrs Thornton to herself, “this just shows that nobody really knows anything about anybody when they think they do.”

Miss Norton went on, “Of course, I don’t understand them properly but you don’t need to understand Shakespeare, do you? I mean, not when you have seen him acted. We lived near Stratford, you see, and Harry – that’s my brother – was very fond of the theatre. We used to go off together in his holidays, on our bicycles. Coming home at
night in the summer it was never really dark. Sometimes there was a bright moon – the honeysuckle smelt so nice in the hedges. It was the old theatre that was burnt down, you know, it had an outside stircase by the river. We used to go down to the river in the intervals – there were no crowds in those days. Then, ‘afterwards’, I used to go alone. It didn’t matter riding home alone at night, then, did it? You might think I wouldn’t want to go afterwards, but I did.
Twelfth
Night
is my favourite play and then
Henry
V
.”

So then Mrs Thornton read Shakespeare aloud, too, quite regularly. She tried once or twice to interest Meg in other authors but it was no good. Shakespeare and the sports pages of
The
Times
were enough for her. When the plays were being read, Meg Norton would sit perfectly still with her eyes shut and her lips a little parted in rapt attention, as though she were seeing again the long dead actors and actresses playing their various parts.

“She looks like ‘Patience on a monument smiling at grief’,” thought Mrs Thornton, and then the aptness of the phrase pierced her. “Smiling at grief”, “Count your blessings”, “Smile at grief”. “It ought to be written up over our front door.”

But Mrs Perry, seated before the television on the evening when Miss Blackett had picked the lilac and Miss Dawson had experienced her miracle and Mrs Thornton was listening to her music, had really no grief to smile at. She was quite happily knitting a garment for her second great-grandchild and looking up now and again at the Box. She always knitted while she watched. She had been taught as a child that idleness was a sin and though she no longer believed this, the habit of constant employment remained with her. Besides, she liked it, and her knitting was a refuge when the programmes became boring or unpleasant: Mrs Langley did not mind what she watched, she liked the animation of movement and sound and it was for her like the constantly changing kaleidoscope patterns that had
delighted her as a child. She nearly always dropped off to sleep after a while, Miss Ford and Miss Brown generally preferred ITV, so ITV it was. Mrs Perry felt ashamed that what she often enjoyed most were the advertisemens. Many of them were really clever, she thought, and funny too and the voices that accompanied them, cajoling, menacing, sensational and portentous by turns, never failed to entrance her – they were so ridiculous. She liked it when there were gardening programmes but the best of these were often on the other station and, generally, while supper was in progress, so she missed them. But she liked travel films, too, and some science fiction ones and pleasant family series. What made her concentrate on her knitting was the drearily monotonous sex pictures, always the same with hideous close-ups of people embracing. Really, the human face when blown up to giant proportions was too grotesque. She had read
Gulliver’s
Travels
once at school and sympathised with Gulliver’s disgust at the huge Brobdingnags. The other boring activity was men hitting each other or firing off guns that made her jump and there seemed more of these every week. Still, it all made a change and when she had had enough she gently woke up Mrs Langley and took her safely back to her room before she went to her own. Invariably she left the other two still watching.

Leila Ford, who had been a third-rate actress in her youth, was really only interested in the personalities of the various performers, but Dorothy Brown, whose experience of life had been largely vicarious, lived out each drama, identifying herself, where possible, with the characters and the action so thoroughly that it was a recurring shock to hear Leila’s comments. But tonight it was the background rather than the story or actors that gripped her. The scene was set in Greece and for Dorothy this was the land of pure enchantment, where long ago “the light that never was on land or sea” had shone for her once and for all. And, as if it were not enough to be drunk with its
beauty, it was in Greece that she had first met Leila, not the monstrously overweight Leila with her bronze wig, now seated beside her in the only really comfortable chair in the room, but a Being in tune with all the magic of the wonderful country around her, a nymph with flowing red-gold hair and a dazzling smile, and outrageously daring clothes and exotic scent unknown in Dorothy’s world – and this glorious Being unbelievably had chosen her as a friend and confidante for the rest of that marvellous holiday. The meeting with Leila had shaped the rest of Dorothy’s life, whether for better or worse she was not the sort to enquire.

“Look, Leila,” she said, “it’s Greece!”

“Oh, is it?” said Leila indifferently. “Well, wherever it is, it’s not worth looking at any more. That woman is far too old for the part and as for Derek Jones, he’s the same boring understudy for Noel Coward whoever he’s playing. Let’s go to bed.”

“Oh, no, Leila,” said Dorothy, “do let us stay a bit longer; they might go to Delphi.”

Leila turned her head slowly and looked at her. She had singular eyes, large, dark and opaque. “You can stay if you like,” she said, “but you know I can’t sleep if I don’t get off when I feel like it.”

Dorothy knew it too well, and she also knew that Leila could not easily undress herself now. She said no more but helped Leila to her feet, as she did so looking her last on all things lovely, the golden glory which the warden would switch off at the regulation time of ten o’clock.

Dorothy Brown was formerly an unsuccessful school teacher. In a modern large comprehensive school she would have been a total failure, but luckily for her when she started her career the times were not yet ripe for this and the girls’ school in which she taught was on the whole well mannered and misbehaviour was unobtrusive.

“Oh, heavens! I haven’t done my Latin prep. What
shall
I do?”

“Do it in Brownie’s geog. lesson; she’ll never notice, and if she does, she won’t say anything.”

Unhappily this was true. Dorothy suspected that her lessons were dull and inefficient, and poor exam results confirmed this, but geography was a second-class subject and so results did not matter all that much and she kept her job, staying on and on because she did not know what else to do until, most unexpectedly, an uncle left her a house and quite a substantial sum besides. Her mother, who had died when Dorothy was a girl, had been his favourite sister but he had lived mostly abroad and she scarcely knew him. She had a stepmother and a father who were not very interested in her, nor did she see any reason why they, or indeed anybody else, should be. She was not particularly able or amusing and, though she had nice grey eyes behind her spectacles, the rest of her appearance was easily forgotten. She could hardly believe in this legacy. She gave in her notice at once and at the end of the next term she left without regrets. Unreasonably, though, she hoped against hope for some sign of regret in others. Two more of the staff were leaving at the same time and they had presents and cards. On the last morning there was actually a card in her pigeon-hole, but it was only a regulation one from the Headmistress – a photograph of the school with “All good wishes for your future” written on it. This somehow made things worse, but travelling home with a wait at a railway junction, her eye was caught by a picture of the Parthenon on a magazine cover. On an impulse she bought it, read an article on “Touring in Greece” and thought wildly, “Why not? I could go there if I wanted to, I, Dorothy Brown, could go to Greece.”