Complete Short Stories (VMC) (39 page)

‘You two, my sons, shall make up for me,’ he told them. ‘Then I have not lived in vain.’ ‘I am the teacher of athletes,’ he intoned. ‘He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own. He most knows my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.’

‘Yes, Father,’ said his sons.

‘Walt Whitman,’ he added, giving credit where credit was due.

Lily, who had given up working in a shop to become a laundress, now had Saturday afternoons free. The full significance of this she told Harry when they were lingering over, postponing from minute to minute, their farewell embrace in the dark lane near her home. To draw apart was so painful to them that, as soon as they attempted it, they suffered too much and flew together again for comfort.

‘It must be gone eleven,’ she said. ‘Dad’s tongue will curdle the milk. But guess what, though. Did you realise?’

‘Realise what?’ he mumbled, and lifted her hair from her shoulders and kissed underneath it, along the back of her neck, with busy little nibbling kisses. In a curious and contradictory way, she felt that he was so intent on her that she no longer existed.

‘Why, Saturday afternoons, of course,’ she said. ‘You’ll be free: now I’ll be free as well.’ She could not help noticing that the kissing stopped at once.

‘Well, you do know week-ends in the season I have to give Dad a hand,’ Harry said.

‘It isn’t the season yet. We’ll have a fortnight before that. I can meet you any time after dinner. Sooner the better,’ she whispered and raised herself on tiptoe and put her warm mouth against his. He was unhappy and she became angry.

‘Say about tea-time,’ he suggested.

‘Why not earlier?’

She knew, although of course she could not see, that he was blushing.

‘Ever since we were little, Dad’s liked us to be together on Saturday afternoons.’

‘What for, pray?’

‘Just to have a quiet time together. It’s a family custom.’

Now she could feel him blushing.

‘If you ask me, he’s round the bend,’ she said loudly. ‘And even if you don’t ask me, he is.’

She pushed Harry away and began to walk down the lane towards her home. He followed her. ‘And so are you,’ she added. She did not turn her head as she spoke, but the words came back to him clearly. ‘No wonder that girl Vera Webster gave up going out with Godfrey. She could see the way the wind was blowing. “Dad likes this and Dad likes that.” I’m sick and tired of Dad and one of these days I’ll tell him so. “You and your Bawdyleer,” I’ll say, “you boring old …”’ her voice rose and trembled, ‘“codger,”’ she cried. ‘And you, too.’ She had reached her gate, threw it open and hurried up the path.

‘Saturday tea-time then?’ he called after her anxiously.

‘Saturday nothing,’ she shouted back, and she lifted the latch and went in boldly to face her father’s sarcasm.

‘You’re in early this morning,’ he said. ‘The milkman hasn’t been yet.’

The next day her beautiful anger had dissolved. She had enjoyed it while she indulged in it, but now her words haunted and alarmed her. Perhaps they had meant the end of Harry’s love for her and, so, of all her hopes. Her future life with him dissolved – a whole council-house full of day-dreams; trousseau, wedding presents, pots and pans, dainty supper-dishes, baby-clothes; cradle, even a kitten asleep on a cushion. She imagined him going to work and then on to his evening class, his head tilted proudly back, the stain of anger on his cheeks. The day after would be Saturday and if it turned out that he had taken her at her furious word, she could not endure to go on living.

‘Not going out with Harry?’ her mother asked her, when Lily began to wash her hair at the kitchen sink on Saturday afternoon.

‘I think love’s sweet song has run into a few discords,’ her father said. ‘
Very
hoity-toity words coming up the path the night before last.’

Lily poured a jug of water over her head and so her tears were hidden.

By four o’clock her hair was quite dry. Harry had not come. She was restless and felt herself watched by her mother and father. Soon she decided that there was, after all, nothing to stop her walking along the towing-path for a breath of fresh air. It was a public way and there was no one who could stop her. It would be a sorry thing if, just because of Harry Ransome, she could never walk along the river bank again.

It was a bright and blowy evening. She met no one. At every bend in the lane, she expected to see Harry come hastening, full of apologies, towards her. Then she came to the river and still no one was in sight. The water was high, after the winter’s rain, and flowed fast, covered with bubbles, bearing away scum and twigs and last year’s leaves. The sound and look of it completed her depression.

With her head turned towards the river and not in the direction of the cottage, she walked along the lock-side. She went on beyond it a little way and then turned and sauntered back. The kitchen window was dark, but from the parlour a light fell faintly through the wooden shutters which had been drawn across the outside of the window. This seemed quite strange to Lily, for it would not be dark for some hours to come and in all the months she had known Harry she had never seen anyone go into the parlour except to fetch a book. She remembered Harry’s shame and reluctance when she had tried to make plans for this afternoon and an unreasonable suspicion overtook her that he was in that shuttered room making love to someone, that he had known beforehand that he would be doing so, and knowing, had gone on kissing Lily; though he had had, she admitted, the decency to blush. She stepped quietly on to the little plot of grass and hesitated, glancing round her. There was no one in sight and not a sound
except for the river. She went softly across to the window and listened there; but there was a shameful silence from within. Her heart beating with great violence unnerved her and only the extreme tension of her jealousy enabled her to lay her hand on the shutter and move it gently towards her.

The light in the room was not so very bright; but standing upright in a strange stiff pose with hand on hip and one knee slightly bent, she could see Mr Ransome facing her not two yards away, his beard jutting forward and his expression fixed. A rosy glow from an oil-stove close beside him fell over his completely naked body.

Their eyes met, his widened with surprise, Lily’s with horror. Then she slammed back the shutter and leant against it for a moment, sick and trembling. Through the narrow slit between the shutters she had not seen the two sons, sitting unwillingly but dutifully behind their easels. Terror, in any case, had quite put the thought of Harry out of her mind. She was afraid that Mr Ransome would come leaping out of the house after her and chase her down the towing-path, naked and mad as he was, shouting Balzac and Voltaire after her. She summoned all her strength and turned and ran across the lawn, as fast as she could go, away from the cottage, and her legs were as heavy as lead, as if she were running in a nightmare.

In the morning, Charles went down the garden to practise calling for three cheers. When he came to the place farthest of all from the house and near to the lake, he paused among clumps of rhubarb and mounds of lawn-clippings, and glanced about him. His voice had broken years before, but was still uncertain in volume; sometimes it wavered, and lost its way and he could never predict if it would follow his intention or not. If his voice was to come out in a great bellow or perhaps frenziedly high-pitched, people would turn towards him in surprise, even astonishment, but how, if it sank too low, would he claim anyone’s attention after the boisterous confusions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’? He could hardly be held responsible for it, he felt, and had often wished that he might climb to the top of a mountain and there, alone, make its acquaintance and come to terms with it. As he could not, this morning in the garden at home, he put on what he hoped was an expression of exultant gaiety, snatched off his spectacles and, waving them in the air, cried out: ‘And now three cheers for Mrs Frensham-Bowater.’ He was about to begin ‘Hip, hip, hooray’, when a bush nearby was filled with laughter; all the branches were disturbed with mirth. Then there were two splashes as his little sisters leapt into the lake for safety. ‘And now three cheers for Charles,’ they called, as they swam as fast as they could away from the bank.

If he went after them, he could only stand at the edge of the water and shake his fist or make some other ineffectual protest, so he put his spectacles on again and walked slowly back to the house. It was a set-back to the day, with Natalie arriving that afternoon and likely to hear at once from the twins how foolishly he had behaved.

‘Mother, could you make them be quiet?’ he asked desperately, finding her at work in the rose-garden. When he told her the story, she threw back her head and laughed for what seemed to him to be about five minutes. ‘Oh, poor old Charles. I wish I’d been in hiding, too.’ He had known he would have to bear this or something like it, but was obliged to pay the price; and at long last she said: ‘I will see to it that their lips are sealed; their cunning chops shut up.’

‘But are you sure you can?’

‘I think I know how to manage my own children. See how obedient you yourself have grown. I cross my heart they shall not breathe a word of it in front of Natalie.’

He thanked her coldly and walked away. In spite of his gratitude, he thought: ‘She is so dreadfully chummy and slangy. I wish she wouldn’t be. And why say just “Natalie” when there are two girls coming? I think she tries to be “knowing” as well,’ he decided.

Two girls were coming. His sister, Katie, was picking sweet-peas for the room these school-friends were to share with her.

‘You are supposed to cut those with scissors,’ Charles said. The ones she couldn’t strip off, she was breaking with her teeth. ‘What time are they coming?’

‘In the station-taxi at half-past three.’

‘Shall I come with you to meet them?’

‘No, of course not. Why should you?’

Katie was sixteen and a year younger than Charles. It is a very feminine age and she wanted her friends to herself. At school they slept in the same bedroom, as they would here. They were used to closing the door upon a bower of secrets and intrigue and diary-writing; knew how to keep their jokes to themselves and their conversations as incomprehensible as possible to other people. When Charles’s friends came to stay, Katie did not encroach on them, and now she had no intention of letting him spoil that delightful drive back from the station: she could not imagine what her friends would think of her if she did.

So after luncheon she went down alone in the big, musty-smelling taxi. The platform of the country station was quite deserted: a porter was whistling in the office, keeping out of the hot sun. She walked up and down, reading the notices of Estate Agents posted along the fence and all the advertisements of auction-sales. She imagined the train coming nearer to her with every passing second; yet it seemed unbelievable that it would really soon materialise out of the distance, bringing Frances and Natalie.

They would have the compartment to themselves at this time of the day on the branch line and she felt a little wistful thinking that they were together and having fun and she was all alone, waiting for them. They would be trying out dance-steps, swaying and staggering as the train rocked; dropping at last, weak with laughter, full-length on the seats. Then, having been here to stay with Katie on other occasions, as they came near to the end of their journey they would begin to point out landmarks and haul down their luggage from the rack – carefully, because in the suitcases were the dresses for this evening’s dance.

The signal fell with a sharp clatter making Katie jump. ‘Now where shall I be standing when the train stops?’ she wondered, feeling self-conscious
suddenly and full of responsibility. ‘Not here, right on top of the gents’ lavatory of all places. Perhaps by the entrance.’ Nonchalantly, she strolled away.

The porter came out of the office, still whistling, and stared up the line. Smoke, bowing and nodding like a plume on a horse’s head, came round a bend in the distance and Katie, watching it, felt sick and anxious. ‘They won’t enjoy themselves at all,’ she thought. ‘I wish I hadn’t asked them. They will find it dreadfully dull at home and the dance is bound to be a failure. It will be babyish with awful things like “The Dashing White Sergeant” and “The Gay Gordons”. They will think Charles is a bore and the twins a bloody nuisance.’

But the moment they stepped out of the train all her constraint vanished. They caught her up into the midst of their laughter. ‘You can’t think what happened,’ they said. ‘You’ll never believe what happened at Paddington.’ The ridiculous story never did quite come clear, they were so incoherent with giggling. Katie smiled in a grown-up way. She was just out of it for the moment, but would soon be in the swim again.

As they drove up the station-slope towards the village, they were full of anticipation and excitement. ‘And where is Charles?’ asked Natalie, smoothing her dark hair.

Tea was such great fun, their mother, Myra Pollard, told herself: though one moment she felt rejuvenated; the next minute, as old as the world. She had a habit of talking to herself, as to another person who was deeply interested in all her reactions: and the gist of these conversations was often apparent on her face.

‘They keep one young oneself – all these young people,’ she thought as she was pouring out the tea. Yet the next second, her cheek resting on her hand as she watched them putting away great swags and wadges and gobbets of starch, she sighed; for she had not felt as they all felt, eager and full of nonsense, for years and years. To them, though they were polite, she was of no account, the tea pourer-out, the starch-provider, simply. It was people of her own generation who said that Charles and she were like brother and sister – not those of Charles’s generation, to whom the idea would have seemed absurd.

Frances and Natalie were as considerate as could be and even strove to be a little woman-to-womanly with her. ‘Did you ever find your bracelet, Mrs Pollard? Do you remember you’d lost it when we were here last time? At a … a dance, wasn’t it?’ Natalie faltered. Of course, Katie’s mother went to dances, too. Indeed, why not? Grotesque though they must be. She was glad that her own parents were more sedate and did not try to ape the young.