All the Days and Nights (52 page)

One would have expected this arrangement, so useful to both women, to be lasting, but the friendship of women seems often to have embedded in it somewhere a fishhook, and as it happened the mistress of Cleeve House was born with a heavier silver spoon in her mouth, and baptized in a longer christening gown, and in numerous other ways was socially more enviable. On the other hand, the money that had originally gone with the social advantages was, alas, rather run out, and it was without the slightest trace of anxiety that the woman in the castle sat down to
balance her checkbook. Weekend guests at the castle tended to be more important politically or in the world of the arts — flashy, in short. And the weekend guests at Cleeve House more important to know if it was a question of getting your children into the right schools or yourself into the right clubs. In a word, nobby. But how the woman who lived in the castle could have dreamed for one minute that she could entertain a member of the royal family and not bring him to tea at Cleeve House, to be amused by the catalogue of its inconveniences and the story of how it came to be thrown together out of three dark, cramped little cottages by an architect who was a disciple of William Morris, it is hard to say. Perhaps the friendship had begun to seem burdensome and the duties one-sided. Or perhaps it was the gradual accumulation of tactful silences, which avoided saying that the woman who lived in the village was top drawer and the woman who lived in the castle was not, and careless remarks, such as anybody might be guilty of with a close friend, which frankly admitted it. In any event, one does not go running here, there, and everywhere with a member of the royal family in tow. There is protocol to be observed, secretaries and chauffeurs and valets have to be consulted, and the conversation doesn’t threaten to run out because what you have, in these circumstances, isn’t conversation in the usual sense of the word. But anyway, the mistress of Cleeve House sat waiting for the telephone to ring, with the wrinkles ironed out of her best tablecloth, and her Spode tea set brought down from the highest shelf of the china closet, and the teaspoons polished till you could see your face in them, and her Fortuny gown taken out of its plastic bag and left to hang from the bedroom chandelier. And, unbelievably, the telephone did not ring. In the middle of the afternoon she had the operator check her phone to see if it was out of order. This was a mistake, because in a village people are very apt to put two and two together. By nightfall it was known all up and down the High Street that her in the castle was entertaining royalty and had left her in the big house to sit and twiddle her thumbs.

Not that the mistress of Cleeve House cared one way or the other about the royal family. No, it was merely the slight to a friendship of very long standing that disturbed her. And for the sake of that friendship, though it cost her a struggle, she was prepared to act as if nothing unusual had happened when the telephone rang on Sunday morning, and to suggest that the mistress of Cleeve Castle bring her guests to tea. The telephone rang on Monday morning instead. To anyone listening in, and
several people were, it was clear that she was speaking a little too much as if nothing unusual had happened. However, the invitation — to drive, just the two of them, in the little car, over to the market town and have lunch at the Star and Garter — was accepted. And because one does not entertain royalty and then not mention it, the subject came up finally, in the most natural way, and the mistress of Cleeve House was able to achieve the tone she wanted, which was a mixture of reasonable curiosity and amused indifference. But it was all over between them, and they both knew it.

They continued to see each other, less often and less intimately, for another three or four months, and then the woman who lived in the largest house in the village finished it off in a way that made it possible for her to carry her head high. The husband of the woman who lived in the castle had, unwisely, allowed his name to be put up for a London club that was rather too grand for a man who had made a fortune in wholesale poultry. Even so, with a great deal of help from various quarters or a little help from the right quarter, he might have made it. There were two or three men who could have pulled this off single-handed, and when one of them came down to Cleeve House for the weekend, it was the turn of the mistress of the castle to sit and wait for the telephone to ring. On Monday morning, the nanny of the children of Cleeve House (who were really the woman’s grandchildren) took them to play with the children of the castle, as she had been doing every Monday morning all summer, and was told at the castle gate that the children of the castle were otherwise occupied. Though they had not been in any way involved and did not even know the cause of the falling out, the children of the castle and the children of Cleeve House were enemies from that day forth, and so were their nannies. The two husbands, being more worldly, still exchanged curt nods when they met in the High Street or on the railway platform. As for the two women, they very cleverly managed never even to set eyes on one another.

Weekend guests at Cleeve House were taken for a walk, naturally, because it was one of the oldest villages in England, and when they saw the castle, with rooks roosting in the apertures of the keep, they cried out with pleasure at finding a place so picturesque that near London. When the mistress of Cleeve House explained that she was no longer on friendly terms with the castle, their faces betrayed their disappointment. And with a consistency that was really extraordinary, people who were staying at
Cleeve Castle sooner or later came back from a walk saying, “The village is charming, I must say. But who is that fascinating grey-haired woman who walks with a stick and lives in that largish house on the High Street? We’re dying to meet her.”

C
ITY
people get over their anger, as a rule, but it is different if you Uve in a village. For one thing, everybody knows that you are angry, and why, and the slightest shift in position is publicly commented on, and this stiffens the antagonism and makes it permanent. Something very large indeed — a fire, a flood, a war, a catastrophe of some sort — is required to bring about a reconciliation and push the injured parties into one another’s outstretched arms.

One winter morning, the village learned, via the wireless, that it was in the direct path of a new eight-lane expressway connecting London and the seacoast. The money for it had been appropriated and it was too late to prevent the road from being built, but the political connections of Cleeve Castle working hand in glove with the social connections of Cleeve House could perhaps divert it so that some other village was obliterated. After deliberating for days, the woman who lived in the castle picked up the telephone and called Cleeve House, but while the telephone was still ringing she hung up. The injury to her husband (what a way to repay a thousand kindnesses!) was still too fresh in her mind. There must be some other way of dealing with the problem, she told herself, and sitting down at her desk she wrote a long and affectionate letter to a school friend who was married to a Member of Parliament, imploring his help.

After considering the situation from every angle, the woman who lived in the largest house in the village came to the only sensible conclusion, which was that some things are worth swallowing your pride for, and she put on her hat and coat and walked up to the castle. But when she came to the castle gate, the memory of how her grandchildren had been turned away (the smallness of it!) filled her with anger, and she paid a call on the vicar instead.

In due time the surveyors appeared, with their tripods, sighting instruments, chains, stakes, and red flags, and the path of doom was made clear. The government, moved by humane considerations, did, however, build a new village. The cottages of Upper Cleeve, as it was called, were all exactly alike and as ugly as sin. There was no way on earth that you could
join three of them together and produce a house that William Morris would have felt at home in. The castle was saved by its rocky situation, but its owners did not choose to look out on an eight-lane expressway and breathe exhaust fumes and be kept awake all night long by trucks and trailers. So the rooks fell heir to it.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a man of no particular age, a carpenter, whom all kinds of people entrusted with their secrets. Perhaps the smell of glue and sawdust and fresh-cut boards had something to do with it, but in any case he was not a troublemaker, and a secret is nearly always something that, if it became known, would make trouble for somebody. So they came to his shop, closed the door softly behind them, sat down on a pile of lumber, and pretended that they had come because they enjoyed watching him work. Actually, they did enjoy it. Some of them. His big square hands knew what they were doing, and all his movements were relaxed and skillful. The shavings curled up out of his plane as if the idea was to make long, beautiful shavings. He used his carpenter’s rule and stubby pencil as if he were applying a moral principle. When he sawed, it seemed to have the even rhythm of his heartbeat. Though the caller might forget for five minutes what brought him here, in the end he stopped being interested in carpentry and said, “I know I can trust you, because you never repeat anything …” and there it was, one more secret added to the collection, a piece of information that, if it had got out, would have broken up a friendship or caused a son to be disinherited or ruined a half-happy marriage or cost some man his job or made trouble for somebody.

The carpenter had discovered that the best way to deal with this information that must not be repeated was to forget it as quickly as possible, though sometimes the secret was so strange he could not forget it immediately, and that evening his wife would ask, “Who was in the shop today?” For people with no children have only each other to spy on, and he was an open book to her.

Sometimes the person who had confided in him seemed afterward to
have no recollection of having done this, and more than once the carpenter found himself wondering if he had imagined or misremembered something that he knew perfectly well he had not imagined and would remember to his dying day. In the middle of the night, if he had a wakeful period, instead of thrashing around in the bed and disturbing his wife’s sleep, he lay quietly with his eyes open in the dark and was a spectator to plays in which honorable men were obliged to tell lies, the kind and good were a prey to lechery, the old acted not merely without wisdom but without common sense, debts were repaid not in kind but in hatred, and the young rode roughshod over everybody. When he had had enough of human nature, he put all these puppets back in their box and fell into a dreamless sleep.

For many years his life was like this, but it is a mistake to assume that people never change. They don’t and they do change. Without his being able to say just when it happened and whether the change was sudden or gradual, the carpenter knew that he was no longer trustworthy — that is to say, he no longer cared whether people made trouble for one another or not. His wife saw that he looked tired, that he did not always bother to stand up straight, that he was beginning to show his age. And she tried to make his life easier for him, but he was a man firmly fixed in his habits, and there was not much she could do for him except feed him well and keep small irritations from him.

Out of habit, the carpenter continued not to repeat the things people told him, but while the secret was being handed over to him he marvelled that the other person had no suspicion he was making a mistake. And since the carpenter had not asked, after all, to be the repository of everybody’s secret burden, it made him mildly resentful.

One day he tried an experiment. He betrayed a secret that was not very serious — partly to prove to himself that he could do such a thing and partly in the hope that word would get around that he was not to be trusted with secrets. It made a certain amount of trouble, as he knew it would, but it also had the effect of clearing the air for all concerned, and the blame never got back to him because no one could imagine his behaving in so uncharacteristic a fashion. So, after this experiment, he tried another. The butcher came in, closed the door softly, looked around for a pile of lumber to sit on, and then said, “There’s something I’ve got to tell somebody.”

“Don’t tell me,” the carpenter said quickly, “unless you want every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know.”

The butcher paused, looked down at his terrible hands, cleared his throat, glanced around the shop, and then suddenly leaned forward and out it came.

“In short, he wanted every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know,” the carpenter said to his wife afterward, when he was telling her about the butcher’s visit.

“People need to make trouble the way they need to breathe,” she said calmly.

“I don’t need to make trouble,” the carpenter said indignantly.

“I know,” she said. “But you mustn’t expect everyone to be like you.”

The next time somebody closed the door softly and sat down and opened his mouth to speak, the carpenter beat him to it. “I know it isn’t fair to tell you this,” he said, “but I had to tell somebody …” This time he made quite a lot of trouble, but not so much that his wife couldn’t deal with it, and he saw that the fear of making trouble can be worse than trouble itself.

After that, he didn’t try any more experiments. What happened just happened. The candlemaker was sitting on a pile of lumber watching him saw a chestnut plank, and the carpenter said, “Yesterday the one-eyed fiddler was in here.”

“Was he?” the candlemaker said; he wasn’t really interested in the fiddler at the moment. There was something on his mind that he had to tell somebody, and he was waiting for the carpenter to stop sawing so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice and run the risk of being overheard in the street.

“You know the blacksmith’s little boy?” the carpenter said. “The second one? The one he keeps in the shop with him?”

“The apple of his eye,” said the candlemaker. “Had him sorting nails when he was no bigger than a flea. Now he tends the bellows.”