Complete Short Stories (VMC) (22 page)

‘Don’t leave me.’

‘Come with me, then.’

‘Is it far?’

‘No, not far. Hurry.’

‘Stand there by the door while I get ready.’

Marian moved into the dark bedroom, and he stood leaning against the door-frame, waiting, with his arms folded across his chest. She came back quickly, wearing the raincoat, a scarf tied over her head.

They went downstairs into the bright kitchen, where Enid stood fixing candles into brass holders while her husband poured some brandy from an almost empty bottle into a glass. Enid drowned the brandy with warm water from the kettle and drank it off swiftly, her dark eyes expressionless.

‘Give some to the children,’ she said, without thinking. They stiffened at the word ‘children’ but took their brandy-and-water and sipped it.

‘It’s a cold night,’ said Enid. ‘Now go quickly.’

‘Marian’s coming with me.’

‘So I see,’ said Enid. Her husband drank the last spoonful from the bottle, neat. ‘The end house, Lorne Street, right-hand side, by the Rose and Crown,’ she said, turning back to the other room.

The fumes of the brandy kindled in Ron’s and Marian’s breasts. ‘Remember that,’ he said. ‘The end house.’ He unlatched the back door.

‘Next the Rose and Crown,’ she added. They slipped out into the beautiful, shocking air of the night.

When Ronny shone his torch down, they could see the yellow hands of the leaves lying on the dark, wet pavements. Now there was only a flick of moisture in the air. He had taken her arm, and they walked alone in the streets, which flowed like black rivers. She wished that they might go on for ever and never turn back towards that house. Or she would like it to be broad daylight, so that she could be at work, giggling about it all with the girls. (‘Go on, Marian!’ ‘How awful for you!’)

His arm was pressed against her ribs. Sometimes she shivered from the cold and squeezed him to her. Down streets and around corners they went. Not far away, goods trains shunted up and down. Once, she stumbled over a kerb, and in saving her he felt the sweet curve of her breast against his arm and walked gaily and with elation, filled with excitement and delight, swinging the beam of the torch from side to side, thinking it was the happiest evening of his life, seeing the future opening out suddenly, like a fan, revealing all at once the wonder of human relationships.

‘The Rose and Crown,’ she whispered. The building was shuttered for
the night, the beer smells all washed away by the rain, the signboard creaking in the wind.

‘The next house then.’ She felt tensed up, but he was relaxed and confident.

‘I’ve forgotten the name,’ she said.

‘Turner.’

They went up a short path on to a dark porch and knocked at the door. After a moment, a window at the front of the house was thrown up and a woman’s voice called out. They stepped back into the garden and looked up.

‘Who is it?’ the voice asked.

‘We’re from Mrs Baker’s,’ Ron said.

‘Poor soul! She’s gone then, at last. How’s your mother?’

Ronnie considered this and then said, ‘She’s tired.’

‘She will be. Wait there, and I’ll come along with you.’ She disappeared and the window was slammed down.

‘She seemed an ordinary sort of woman,’ whispered Marian.

They drew back into the shelter of the porch and waited. No sounds came from the house, but a smell of stuffiness seemed to drift out through the letter slot in the door.

‘Suppose she goes back to bed and leaves us here?’ Marian asked, and began to giggle. She put her mouth against his shoulder to stifle the little giggles, and he put his arm around her. She lifted her paper-white face in the darkness and they kissed. The word ‘bliss’ came into his mind, and he tasted it slowly on his tongue, as if it were a sweet food. Platitudes began to come true for them, but they could not consider them as such.

Suddenly, a step sounded on the other side of the door, bolts were slid back with difficulty, a chain rattled.

‘Here we are!’ said the brisk voice. The woman stepped out into the porch, putting on a pair of fur gloves and looking up at the night sky and the flocks of curdy, scudding clouds. ‘It’s a sad time,’ she said. ‘A very sad time for your poor mum and dad. Come on, then, lad, you lead the way. Quick, sharp!’

And now the footsteps of the three of them rang out metallically upon the paving-stones as they walked between the dark and eyeless cliffs of the houses.

After luncheon, Dosie took off her shoes and danced all round the room. Her feet were plump and arched, and the varnish on her toe nails shone through her stockings.

Her mother was sitting on the floor playing roulette with some of her friends. She was always called Auntie except by Dosie, who ‘darlinged’ her in the tetchy manner of two women living in the same house, and by her son, Thomas, who stolidly said ‘Mother’, a
démodé
word, Auntie felt – half insulting.

On Sunday afternoons, most of Auntie’s ‘set’ returned to their families when the mid-day champagne was finished. They scattered to the other houses round the golf course, to doze on loggias, snap at their children, and wonder where their gaiety had fled. Only Mrs Wilson, who was a widow and dreaded her empty house, Ricky Jimpson, and the goatish Fergy Burns stayed on. More intimate than a member of the family, more inside than a friend, Fergy supported Auntie’s idea of herself better than anyone else did, and, at times and in ways that he knew she couldn’t mind, he sided with Dosie and Thomas against her.

In some of the less remote parts of Surrey, where the nineteen-twenties are perpetuated, such pockets of stale and elderly gaiety remain. They are blank as the surrounding landscape of fir trees and tarnished water.

Sunshine, especially blinding to the players after so much champagne, slanted into the room, which looked preserved, sealed off. Pinkish-grey cretonnes, ruched cushions with tassels, piles of gramophone-records, and a velvet Maurice Chevalier doll recalled the stage-sets of those forgotten comedies about weekends in the country and domestic imbroglio.

Auntie’s marmoset sat on the arm of a chair, looking down sadly at the players and eating grapes, which he peeled with delicate, worn fingers and sharp teeth. His name was Rizzio. Auntie loved to name her possessions, everything – her car (called the Bitch, a favourite word of her youth), her fur coat, the rather noisy cistern in the WC. Even some of her old cardigans and shawls had nicknames and personalities. Her friends seemed not to find this tiresome. They played the game strenuously and sometimes sent Christmas presents to the inanimate objects. In exchange for all the fun
and champagne they were required only to assist the fantasy and preserve the past. Auntie thought of herself as a ‘sport’ and a ‘scream’. (No one knew how her nickname had originated, for neither niece nor nephew had ever appeared to substantiate it.) ‘I did have a lovely heyday,’ she would say in her husky voice. ‘Girls of Dosie’s age have never had anything.’ But Dosie had had two husbands already, not to count the incidentals, as Thomas said.

Thomas was her much younger brother, something of an incidental flowering himself. ‘Auntie’s last bit of nonsense,’ people called him. Fifteen years and their different worlds separated brother and sister. He was of a more serious generation and seemed curiously practical, disabused, unemotional. His military service was a life beyond their imagination. They (pitying him, though recoiling from him) vaguely envisaged hutted sites at Aldershot, and boorish figures at football on muddy playing-fields with mists rising. Occasionally, at week-ends, he arrived, wearing sour-smelling khaki, which seemed to rub almost raw his neck and wrists. He would clump into the pub in his great Army boots and drink mild-and-bitter at his mother’s expense, cagey about laying down a halfpenny of his own.

He made Fergy feel uneasy. Fergy had, Auntie often said, an impossible conscience. Watching bullocks being driven into a slaughterhouse had once taken him off steak for a month, and now, when he saw Thomas in khaki, he could only remember his own undergraduate days, gilded youth, fun with fireworks and chamber-pots, débutantes arriving in May Week, driving his red MG to the Beetle and Wedge for the Sunday-morning session. But Thomas had no MG. He had only the 7.26 back to Aldershot. If he ever had any gaiety, his mother did not discover it: if he had any friends, he did not bring them forward. Auntie was, Fergy thought, a little mean with him, a little on the tight side. She used endearments to him, but as if in utter consternation. He was an uncouth cuckoo in her nest. His hands made excruciating sounds on the silk cushions. Often, in bars, she would slip him a pound to pay his way, yet here he was, this afternoon, making as neat and secret a little pile as one would wish to see.

He played with florins, doubling them slowly, giving change where required, tucking notes into the breast pocket of his battle-dress, carefully buttoning them away as if no one was to be trusted. He had a rather breathy concentration, as he had had as a child, crouching over snakes-and-ladders; his hands, scooping up the coins, looked, Auntie thought, like great paws.

Only Mrs Wilson’s concentration could match his, but she had none of his stealthy deliberation. She had lost a packet, she proclaimed, but no one listened. She kept putting her hand in her bag and raking about, bringing out only a handkerchief, with which she touched the corners of her mouth.
The others seemed to her quite indifferent to the fortunes of the game – Fergy, for instance, who was the banker, pushing Thomas’s winnings across to him with no change of expression and no hesitation in his flow of talk.

Auntie gave a tiny glance of dislike at her son as he slipped some coins into his pocket. She could imagine him counting them all up, going back in the train. In her annoyance, she added a brutish look to his face. She sighed, but it was almost imperceptible and quite unperceived, the slightest intake of breath, as she glanced round at her friends, the darlings, who preserved her world, drinking her whisky, switching the radio away from the news to something gayer, and fortifying her against the dreary post-war world her son so typified. Mrs Wilson, also, was a little dreary. Although trying gallantly, she had no real flair for recklessness and easily became drunk, when she would talk about her late husband and what a nice home they had had.

‘Oh, Dosie, do sit down!’ Auntie said.

Dosie was another who could not drink. She would become gayer and gayer and more and more taunting to poor Ricky Jimpson. Now she was dancing on his winnings. He smiled wanly. After the game, he would happily give her the lot, but while he was playing, it was sacred.

What Dosie herself gave for all she had from him was something to conjecture. Speculation, beginning with the obviously shameful, had latterly run into a maze of contradictions. Perhaps – and this was even more derogatory – she did only bestow taunts and abuse. She behaved like a very wilful child, as if to underline the fact that Ricky was old enough to be her father. Rather grey-faced (he had, he thought, a duodenal ulcer, and the vast quantity of whisky he drank was agony to him), he would sit and smile at her naughty ways, and sometimes when she clapped her hands, as if she pretended he was her slave, he would show that this was not pretence but very truth, and hurry to carry out her wishes.

Dosie, with one hand on the piano to steady herself, went through some of the
barre
exercises she had learnt as a child at ballet class. Her joints snapped and crackled with a sound like a fire kindling.

‘You are a deadly lot,’ she suddenly said, and yawned out at the garden. ‘Put ten shillings on
rouge
for me, Ricky. I always win if you do it.’

At least she doesn’t lose if it isn’t her money, Mrs Wilson thought, wondering if she could ever, in a rallying way, make such a request of Fergy.

The hot afternoon, following the champagne, made them all drowsy. Only Ricky Jimpson sat up trimly. Fergy, looking at Mrs Wilson’s bosom, which her décolleté blouse too generously tendered, thought that in no time it would be all she had to offer. He imagined her placing it on, perhaps
zéro –
her last gesture.

Quite frightful, Auntie thought, the way Thomas’s brow furrowed
because he had lost two shillings. He was transparently sulky, like a little boy. All those baked beans in canteens made him stodgy and impossible. She hadn’t visualised having such a son, or such a world for him to live in.

‘We can really do nothing for young people,’ she had once told Mrs Wilson. ‘Nothing, nowadays, but try to preserve for them some of the old days, keep up our standards and give them an inkling of what things used to be, make a little oasis of gaiety for them.’ That had been during what she called ‘the late war’. Thomas was home from school for the Christmas holidays. With tarnished pre-war tinsel Auntie was decorating the Christmas tree, though to this, as to most things, Thomas was quite indifferent. He had spent the holidays bicycling slowly round and round the lawn on the white, rimed grass. In the evenings, when his mother’s friends came for drinks, he collected his books and went noticeably to his room. The books, on mathematics, were dull but mercifully concerned with things as they were, and this he preferred to all the talk about the tarnished, pre-war days. He could not feel that the present day was any of his doing. For the grownups to scorn what they had bequeathed to him seemed tactless. He ignored those conversations until his face looked mulish and immune. His mother arranged for his adenoids to be removed, but he continued to be closed-up and unresponsive.

Dosie was so different; she might almost be called a ringleader. She made her mother feel younger than ever – ‘really more like a sister,’ Auntie said, showing that this was a joke by saying it with a Cockney accent. Oh, Dosie was the liveliest girl, except that sometimes she went too far. The oasis of gaiety her mother provided became obviously too small and she was inclined then to go off into the desert and cry havoc. But Auntie thought her daughter mischievous, not desperate.

‘Either play or not,’ she told her sharply, for sometimes the girl irritated her.