Complete Short Stories (VMC) (29 page)

The girl had the most extraordinary feeling of dizziness from so much sudden beauty – the beauty of Mrs Ingram herself whose footsteps were now light and hastening on the oak staircase, and the house and garden and this room scented with pinks and sounding of the river.

On the wall above the writing-table hung a water-colour drawing of Esmé and Noël as children – vaguely done, insipidly pretty and not worthy of their mother’s room. They sat on a sofa together and had a picture-book open across their knees. The smocking on their blouses was painstakingly tinted in and Esmé’s tawny curls were carefully high-lighted though nothing much could be made of Noël’s straight black hair. His eyes were round and unseeing and bright as forget-me-nots. Fond drawing by a relative, Catherine thought. She herself had never drawn Noël, either fondly or objectively. The nearest she had got to that, she reflected, was once sketching his foot when he was lying on the lawn after swimming. She had been drawing the gable of the boathouse and branches of a chestnut tree and, for some reason turning to look at him, began on a corner of the paper to draw his foot with its bony ankle and raised veins. Then he had slapped one foot against the other to chase off a fly. She had rubbed out the sketch, blown at the paper and quickly covered up the smudge with a clump of rushes. She had trembled as if hoping to hide some misdemeanour, but was calm again when he stood up and came to look at her drawing. She had added an imaginary dragonfly above the rushes and then, at his request, a heron. What became of the drawing she could not now recall.

Mrs Ingram was in the hall when Catherine went downstairs. The uncarpeted staircase could be an ordeal, so much of it exposed to the hall, and now Mrs Ingram looking up and smiling as she stripped leaves from the peonies. Voices echoed here, and whatever Esmé said as he came from the library carrying a decanter was lost to Catherine.

She took her glass of whisky and Esmé pulled a chair out from the table for her where she could watch Mrs Ingram’s flower-arranging. A pale greyhound lay on a window-seat, and Esmé sat down beside it, fingering its silky ears.

‘Other women I know do the flowers in the morning,’ he said.

‘You need not stay with me.’

She tore some leaves from a stalk with an asperity to match her voice, an asperity Catherine had never heard before, but which she always had felt to be a dreaded possibility in people as decisive as Mrs Ingram.

Esmé sat far back in the shadows stroking the dog’s ears, not replying.

This hall was at the heart of the house – open to the garden in fine weather, a place for casual conversations and chance meetings. The last time Catherine was there it had been filled with wreaths, cushions of carnations propped against chair-legs, Mrs Ingram’s hoop of roses and camellias lying on the table. It had had a drab symmetry about it, with its suggestion of flowers bought by the dozen, and Catherine had seen the glance it received, the weary contempt with which it was put aside as beyond improving.

Now Mrs Ingram carried the big soup tureen of flowers and stood it against the wall, stepped back to view it while Esmé yawned and clapped his hands, then called to his dog and went out into the garden.

Mrs Ingram sank into a chair the moment he had gone as if she had no need now to be busy.

‘I shall send you to bed soon,’ she told Catherine. ‘You look tired after your journey.’ And then as Catherine was obediently finishing her whisky she asked, ‘How are you getting over Noël?’

At home, no one had dared to say this name and Catherine was unprepared to hear it and could think of no reply.

‘Don’t defer it, or try to pay off in instalments,’ Mrs Ingram said. ‘One only pays more in the end.’ She sat so still with her elbow among the litter of leaves on the table and her cheek resting on her hand. ‘I knew you would take it in this way, poor Catherine, and that is why I asked you to come here.’ She gave the smile that was always so much remembered when Catherine had left her and was trying to reassemble the look of her, feature by feature, in her mind. The smile was the only uncertain thing about her, wavering, pleading; deep lines broke up the smoothness of her face and her regality – the Blue Persian look, Noël had called it – vanished.

‘I love her,’ Catherine thought. ‘I could never withstand her, no matter what she wanted of me.’

When she was in bed, she wondered why such a thought had come to her, when there was no longer anything Mrs Ingram could want of her, no longer anything she could ask her to relinquish. Strangeness and the physical beauty of the place overtook her. She was under this roof again, but the old reason for being there was gone. Listening to the weir, lying in the flower-scented room, between the cool sheets (Mrs Ingram’s linen was glassier than anyone else’s, she thought), she fell under the spell of the family again, although the one of it she loved was dead. Missing him, it was in this place she wanted to be, no other.

She heard Esmé crossing the gravel again and calling in a low voice to the dog.

In the morning, the garden, drenched with dew, flashed with rainbow colours; the meadows on the other side of the river gently steamed. The sun had already warmed the carpet under the windows. Catherine stood there barefoot looking down on the dazzling scene. She could hear the grating sound of oars in rowlocks before Esmé appeared round the river-bend under the silvery willows. She watched him coming up from the boathouse. His footprints were dark on the dewy grass and the dog’s paw-prints ran in circles about them. He was especially tender with his dog, would be with all animals and with children, as some bachelors are, she guessed.

When Catherine had stayed in the house on other occasions, Mrs Ingram had always had breakfast in bed. She had a clever way of not being seen coming downstairs, but of being discovered later very busy about the house, at her desk or coming from the kitchen with a list in her hand, as if she had been about since daybreak, the reins gathered in her hands for hours. This morning, Catherine, coming downstairs, was surprised to hear Mrs Ingram and Esmé talking in the dining-room. ‘If you object, I can go to
his
place instead.’ That was Esmé. Then his mother said quickly, ‘I don’t object …’ and paused, as if she were about to add a second clause that would take the meaning from the first. She got as far as saying ‘but’ and then heard the footsteps in the hall and Catherine came into the room to a tense silence and rearranged expressions.

Mrs Ingram was standing by the window, drinking coffee. Esmé rose from the table and, doing so, scattered some pages of a letter over the carpet. His mother glanced, then glanced away. ‘She really does look as if she has been up since dawn,’ Catherine thought. ‘Perhaps
she
doesn’t sleep, either.’

The warmth of Mrs Ingram’s smile welcomed her and Catherine regretted the stiffness and timidity of her own that answered it. She felt full of a jerky vagueness, and the beginning of a fear that the house with its associations might undermine her and expose some nerve in an intolerable way. She was constantly alarmed at the possibility of behaving badly and trembled to think of the presumption of not holding back a grief that Mrs Ingram herself seemed able to contain. The strain was not merely of never being herself, but of not knowing who she any longer was.

She took a chair opposite Esmé’s and Mrs Ingram came back to the table to pour out coffee, but without sitting down.

‘Are you going out sketching this morning?’ she asked Catherine; for that was how she had spent her mornings on other visits.

Catherine stared down at her boiled egg as if she were wondering what
curious object she had been given, so dismayed was her expression. Esmé, who had put away his letter, looked across at her but wished that he had not. There was a sign of a crack in her sedate composure.

She said: ‘Yes, I think I will do that.’

‘Then we shall all meet at luncheon.’

Mrs Ingram was brisk, as if now Catherine was disposed of for the morning. This was unlike her, Esmé thought: but his mother was definitely up to something and he wondered for whom ill was boded, Catherine or himself. Some wonderful ill, no doubt, he thought; done for one’s good; a great, bracing, visionary ill. ‘Even if I want to paint again,’ Catherine thought, ‘I don’t want to be in the painting
mood
– so exposed and inviting.’ She had brought her painting materials with her and knew that she must rouse herself to work again and better here, perhaps, than at her own home with its too patent watchfulness, the irritating parental concentration upon her and all her doings and the secret discussions she could imagine just as if she had overheard them. ‘Now she is painting again. Such a good sign. We will pretend not to have noticed.’

So after breakfast she went down to the river and along the bank until she reached the lock. Much about the Thames valley is Victorian – the canopied steamers and the red-brick lock-keepers’ houses and the little shelters with spiked edges to their wooden roofs like miniature railway platforms. The garden beds of marguerites, calceolarias, were edged with whitewashed stones and slung about with whitened chains; all was neat and two-dimensional, like a primitive painting, captivating, bright and unconvincing.

Beyond the lock was a stretch of river, darkened and smothered by dusty, summer chestnuts; the oily, olive-green water slid by, was brown when the sun went in; a boat tied up in the rushes had no reflection. The other bank, in contrast, was silvery with aspens and willows, with shifting white leaves and light.

She sat on the bank and unpacked her water-colours. The sun was strong now, the light banal, she thought fretfully, narrowing her eyes to blur what she saw too sharply and with too many irrelevances. She felt a deep reluctance to begin painting on this lulled and buzzing mid-morning, and felt too that she had been expelled, excluded from Mrs Ingram’s presence where she wanted to be, and sent off to do her painting as a child might be sent to practise scales.

She slapped at the horse-flies biting her bare legs. They were always a plague – the towing-path flies – and on other summer days Noël had sat beside her and waved them away with his handkerchief while she painted. Her irritation suddenly heeled over into grief and she dropped her brush, stunned, appalled, as the monstrous pain leapt upon her. Her painting – the
faint washes of grey and green which had lifted the paper – dried in the sun, the jar of water was scarcely coloured. She rested her elbows on the drawing-board and covered her eyes with her hands, waiting for this moment to pass. Esmé, going along the tow-path to the pub, saw her before she heard his footsteps and would have turned back, but as he hesitated he thought that she had heard him. He was a reticent man but could see no reason for turning his back on sorrow, so against his inclination he went over to her. His dog, following him, sniffed at the paint water and stretched himself out in the shade of some rushes.

Catherine kept her head bent, and began to pack up her painting things as Esmé sat down beside her. She had not been crying. Her face was pale, but her cheekbones were red where her hands had pressed against them. In a few seconds this colour receded and she seemed more in command of herself.

She unpinned the drawing-paper from the board and tore it across.

‘Not a good morning?’ he asked.

‘I am bitten to death by horse-flies.’

‘Come with me to the pub and have a drink. I will carry all the paraphernalia.’

He had Noël’s voice, though he talked too rapidly and stumbled over words. His tongue was not quick enough to keep up with his desire to have the words done with and his part of the conversation over. His manner of speaking was, from nervousness, over-decisive and just when he meant to be tender he sounded stern.

They walked along the towing-path in silence until they reached the Rose and Crown – there, the bar was empty until a woman came through from the kitchen, drying her hands, to serve them. She drew the beer and went back to her cooking. Catherine and Esmé sat on the varnished window-seat and looked out at the river. Conversation was uneasy between them. What they had in common was felt by both to be tabu and he, from lack of interest and living abroad, had no idea of what sort of girl she was. This morning, he began to be moved by her forlornness and blamed his mother for letting her mope: something strenuous and gay should surely have been arranged – though he could not think what.

‘Would you like to play darts?’ he asked her. She did not in the least want to play darts and did not know how, but his solicitude was so masked, his voice was so abrupt that she timidly agreed. He was patient and encouraging as her darts struck the brick wall, once a tin lamp-shade, but rarely the board, until, as part of her haphazard throwing – and she had no idea that such a thing could happen – two darts landed together in the bull’s-eye. She glowed at his amazement and praise. He called in the landlord’s wife to draw them some more beer and to see Catherine’s
score and said that he had never done such a thing in his life and would never do it.

‘But I didn’t
know
,’ Catherine said happily. ‘They might just as easily have gone out of the window.’ She could not have imagined that doing something well in a game could be so stimulating.

They left the pub and walked back along the towing-path. Mrs Ingram was sitting on the steps in the sun and she, too, listened to Esmé’s account of Catherine’s first game of darts and she smiled radiantly, as if this was the nicest, gayest thing that could happen. At luncheon, the three of them were drawn together: by some simple magic, which Catherine could not understand, Mrs Ingram no longer seemed cross or embarrassed with her son, but rather as if she were acquiescing to some delightful plan he had for the future. Only when they were drinking coffee on the terrace and Esmé suggested an afternoon on the river did she detach herself from them again, making too many excuses – a little headache and a letter to write and a vague notion that one of her friends might call. She would not let them delay one moment. They must go alone and if they wanted tea it could be packed for them.