Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (23 page)

“I just feel we can't afford it.”

“It doesn't cost anything to have a baby.”

“No, but it costs a lot to bring them up. And buy them shoes. Do you know what it costs to buy Robbie a pair of sandals?”

Ian said that he didn't know and he didn't want to. They would manage somehow. He was an eternal optimist and the best thing about his optimism was that it was catching. He gave his wife a kiss and went out to the off-license around the corner and bought a bottle of wine which they drank that evening, with their supper of sausage and mash.

“At least we've got a roof over our heads,” he told her, “even if most of it belongs to the Building Society.”

And so they had, but even their best friends had to admit that it was an odd house. For the street, at its end, turned in a sharp curve, and Number 23, where Jill and Ian lived, was tall and thin, wedge-shaped in order to accommodate the angle of the bend. It was its very oddness that had attracted them in the first place, as well as its price; for it had been allowed to reach a sad state of dilapidation and needed much done to it. Its very oddness was part of its charm, but charm didn't help much when they had run out of the time, energy, and means to attend to the outside painting, or apply a coat of Snowcem to its narrow frontage.

Only the basement, paradoxically, sparkled. This was where Delphine, their lodger, lived. Delphine's rent helped to pay the mortgage. She was a painter who had turned, with some success, to commercial art, and she used the basement as a London pied-à-terre, commuting between this and a cottage in Wiltshire, where a decrepit barn had been converted into a studio, and an overgrown garden sloped down to the reedy banks of a small river. Every so often, Jill and Ian and Robbie were invited to this enchanting place for a weekend, and these visits were always the greatest treat—a feast of ill-assorted guests, enormous meals, quantities of wine, and endless discussions on esoteric subjects usually quite beyond Jill's comprehension. They made, as Ian was wont to point out when they turned to humdrum old London, a nice change.

Delphine, enormously fat in her flowing caftan, was sitting now outside her own front door, basking in the shaft of sunlight which, at this time of the day, penetrated her domain. Jill lifted Robbie out of the buggy, and Robbie stuck his head through the railings and stared down at Delphine, who put down her newspaper and stared back at him from behind round, black sunglasses.

“Hello, there,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“To the park,” Jill told her.

“In this heat?”

“There's nowhere else to go.”

“You should do something about the garden.”

Delphine had been saying this, at intervals, over the last two years, until Ian told her that if she said it once more, he, personally, would strangle her. “Cut down that horrible tree.”

“Don't start on that,” Jill pleaded. “It's all too difficult.”

“Well, at least you could get rid of the cats. I could hardly sleep last night for the yowling.”

“What can we do?”

“Anything. Get a gun and shoot them.”

“Ian hasn't got a gun. And even if he had, the police would think we were murdering someone if we started blasting off at the cats.”

“What a loyal little wife you are. Well, if you won't shoot the cats, how about coming down to the cottage this weekend? I'll drive the lot of you in my car.”

“Oh, Delphine.” It was the best thing that had happened all day. “Do you really mean it?”

“Of course.” Jill thought of the cool country garden, the smell of the elderflowers; of letting Robbie paddle his feet in the shallow pebbly waters of the river.

“I can't think of anything more heavenly … but I'll have to see what Ian says. He might be playing cricket.”

“Come down after dinner and I'll give you both a glass of wine. We'll discuss it then.”

By six o'clock, Robbie was bathed, fed—on the juicy peach—and asleep in his cot. Jill took a shower, put on the coolest garment she owned, which was a cotton dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen to do something about supper.

The kitchen and the dining room, divided only by the narrow staircase, took up the entire ground floor of the house, but still were not large. The front door led straight into this, so that there never seemed to be anywhere to hang coats or park a pram. At the dining-room end, the window faced out onto the street; but the kitchen had enormous French windows of glass, which seemed to indicate that once there had been a balcony beyond, with perhaps a flight of steps leading down into the garden. The balcony and the steps had long since disintegrated, been demolished, perhaps—disappeared, and the French windows opened onto nothing but a twenty-foot drop to the yard beneath. Before Robbie was born they used to let the windows stand open in warm weather, but after his arrival, Ian, for safety, nailed them shut, and so they had stayed.

The scrubbed pine table stood against these windows. Jill sat at it and sliced tomatoes for the salad in a preoccupied sort of way, gazing down at the horrible garden. Encased as it was by high, crumbling brick walls, it was a little like looking down into the bottom of a well. Near the house there was the brick yard, and then a patch of straggling grass, and then desolation, trodden earth, old paper bags that kept blowing in, and the tree.

Jill had been born and brought up in the country and found it hard to believe that she could actually dislike a garden. So much so that even if there had been any form of access, she would not hang her washing out, let alone allow her child to play there.

And as for the tree—she positively hated the tree. It was a sycamore, but light-years away from the friendly sycamores she remembered from her childhood, good for climbing, shady in summer, scattering winged seedpods in the autumn. This one should never have grown at all; should never have been planted, should never have reached such a height, such density, such sombre, depressing size. It shut out the sky, and its gloom discouraged all life except the cats, who prowled, howling, along the tops of the walls and used the sparse earth as their lavatories. In the autumn, when the leaves fell from the tree and Ian braved the cats' messes to go out and build a bonfire, the resultant smoke was black and stinking, as though the leaves had absorbed, during the summer months, everything in the air that was dirty, repellant, or poisonous.

*   *   *

Their marriage was a happy one, and most of the time Jill wanted nothing to be different. But the tree brought out the worst in her, made her long to be rich, so that she could damn the expense and get rid of it.

Sometimes she said this, aloud, to Ian. “I wish I had an enormous private income of my own. Or that I had a marvellously wealthy relation. Then I could get the tree cut down. Why hasn't one of us got a fairy godmother? Haven't you got one hidden away?”

“You know I only have Edwin Makepeace, and he's about as much good as a wet weekend in November.”

Edwin Makepeace was a family joke, and how Ian's parents had even been impelled to make him godfather to their son was an enigma that Jill had never got around to solving. He was some sort of a distant cousin, and had always had a reputation for being humourless, demanding, and paranoically mean with his money. The passing years had done nothing to remedy any of these traits. He had been married, for a number of years, to a dull lady called Gladys. They had had no children, simply lived together in a small house in Woking renowned for its gloom, but at least Gladys had looked after him, and when she died and he was left alone, the problem of Edwin became a constant niggle on the edge of the family's conscience.

Poor old chap,
they would say, and hope that somebody else would ask him for Christmas. The somebody else who did so was usually Ian's mother, who was a truly kind-hearted lady, and it took some determination on her part not to allow Edwin's depressing presence to totally dampen the family festivities. The fact that he gave her nothing more than a box of hankies, which she never used, did nothing to endear him to the rest of the party. It wasn't, as they pointed out, that Edwin didn't have any money. It was just that he didn't like parting with it.

*   *   *

“Perhaps we could cut down the tree ourselves.”

“Darling, it's much too big. We'd either kill ourselves or knock the whole house down.”

“We could get a professional. A tree surgeon.”

“And what would we do with the bones when the surgeon had done his job?”

“A bonfire?”

“A bonfire. That size? The whole terrace would go up in smoke.”

“We could take it out into the street, bit by bit.”

“Through Delphine's flat?”

“At least we could
ask
somebody. We could get an estimate.”

“My love, I can give you an estimate. It would cost a bomb. And we haven't got a bomb.”

“A garden. It would be like having another room. Space for Robbie to play. And I could put the new baby out in a pram.”

“How? Lower it from the kitchen window on a rope?”

They had had this conversation, with varying degrees of acrimony, too many times.

I'm not going to mention it again,
Jill promised herself, but … She stopped slicing the tomato, sat with the knife in one hand and her chin resting on the other hand, and gazed out through the grimy window that couldn't be cleaned because there was no way of getting at it.

The tree. Her imagination removed it; but then what did one do with what remained? What would ever grow in that bitter scrap of earth? How could they keep the cats away? She was still mulling over these insuperable problems when there came the sound of her husband's latchkey in the lock. She jumped, as though she had been caught doing something indecent, and quickly started slicing the tomato again. The door banged shut and she looked up over her shoulder to smile at him.

“Hello, darling.”

He dumped his briefcase, came to kiss her. He said, “God, what a furnace of a day. I'm filthy, and I smell. I'm going to have a shower, and then I shall come and be charming to you…”

“There's a can of lager in the fridge.”

“Riches indeed.” He kissed her again. “You, on the other hand, smell delicious. Of freesias.” He began to pull his tie loose.

“It's the soap.”

He made for the stairs, undressing himself as he went. “Let's hope it does the same for me.”

Five minutes later he was down again, bare-footed, wearing an old pair of faded jeans and a short-sleeved shirt he had bought for his honeymoon.

“Robbie's asleep,” he told her. “I just looked in.” He opened the fridge, took out the can of lager and poured it into two glasses, then brought them over to the table and collapsed into a chair beside her. “What did you do today?”

She told him about going to the park, about the free peach, about Delphine's invitation for the weekend. “She said she'd drive us down in her car.”

“She is an angel. What a marvellous thought.”

“She's asked us down for a glass of wine after dinner. She said we could talk about it.”

“A little party, in fact.”

“Oh, well, it makes a nice change.”

They looked at each other, smiling. He put out a hand and laid it on her flat and slender stomach. He said, “For a pregnant lady, you look very toothsome.” He ate a piece of tomato. “Is this dinner, or are we defrosting the fridge?”

“It's dinner. With some cold ham and potato salad.”

“I'm starving. Let's eat it and then go and beat Delphine up. You did say she was going to open a bottle of wine?”

“That's what she said.”

He yawned. “Better if it was two.”

*   *   *

The next day was Thursday and as hot as ever, but somehow now it didn't matter, because there was the weekend to look forward to.

“We're going to Wiltshire,” Jill told Robbie, flinging a load of clothes into the washing machine. “You'll be able to paddle in the river and pick flowers. Do you remember Wiltshire? Do you remember Delphine's cottage? Do you remember the tractor in the field?”

Robbie said “Tractor.” He didn't have many words, but this was one of them. He smiled as he said it.

“That's right. We're going to the country.” She began to pack, because although the trip was a day away, it made the weekend seem nearer. She ironed her best sundress, she even ironed Ian's oldest T-shirt. “We're going to stay with Delphine.” She was extravagant and bought a cold chicken for supper and a little punnet of strawberries. There would be strawberries growing in Delphine's wild garden. She thought of going out to pick them, the sun hot on her back, the rosy fruits fragrant beneath their sheltering leaves.

The day drew to a close. She bathed Robbie and read to him and put him in his cot. As she left him, his eyes already drooping, she heard Ian's key in the latch and ran downstairs to welcome him.

“Darling.”

He put down his briefcase and shut the door. His expression was bleak. She kissed him quickly and said, “What's wrong?”

“I'm afraid something rotten has come up. Would you mind most dreadfully if we didn't go to Delphine's?”

“Not go?” Disappointment made her feel weak and emptied as though all her happiness were being drained out of her. She could not keep the dismay out of her face. “But—oh, Ian, why not?”

“My mother rang me at the office.” He pulled off his jacket and slung it over the end of the bannister. He began to loosen his tie. “It's Edwin.”

“Edwin?” Jill's legs shook. She sat on the stairs. “He's not
dead?
”

“No, he's not, but apparently, he's not been too well lately. He's been told by the doctor to take things easy. But now his best friend has what Edwin calls ‘passed on,' and the funeral's on Saturday and Edwin insists on coming to London to be there. My mother tried to talk him out of it, but he won't budge. He's booked himself in for the night at some grotty, cheap hotel and Ma's convinced he's going to have a heart attack and die too. But the nub of the matter is that he's got it into his head that he'd like to come and have dinner with us. I told her that it was just because he'd rather have a free meal than one he has to pay for, but she swears it's not that at all. He kept saying he never sees anything of you and me, he's never seen our house, he wants to get to know Robbie … you know the sort of thing…”