Complete Short Stories (VMC) (43 page)

‘You’re sure it’s the right house?’ she asked.

‘Dead sure, my darling.’

She had never been called ‘darling’ by a man and, however meaningless the endearment, it added something to her self-esteem, as their arriving first had added something to his.

She untied the scarf and gave it back to him. He had flicked on his cigarette lighter and was looking for something in the dash-pocket. For a moment, while the small glow lasted, she could study his face. It was like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s – small, alert, yet blank; the features gave the appearance of having been neatly painted.

He found the packet of cigarettes; then he put the scarf round his neck and tied it carefully. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said. ‘They must have double-crossed us and had one somewhere on the way.’

‘You drove fastest, that’s all,’ she said, playing her part in the game.

‘Sorry if it alarmed you, sweetheart.’ He leant over and kissed her quickly, just before the first of the cars came round the curve of the drive.

‘That’s the first evening gone,’ Ursula thought, when later, she lay in bed, rather muzzily going over what had happened. She could remember the drawing-room at Hilly’s. She had sat on a cushion on the floor and music from a gramophone above her had spilled over her head, so that she had seen people’s mouths opening and shutting but had not been able to hear the matching conversations. In many ways the room – though it was larger – had seemed like Pamela’s, with pub signs instead of bottle labels on the lamp-shades. Her sense of time had soon left her and her sense of
place grew vaguer, but some details irritated her because she could not evade them – particularly a warming-pan hanging by the fireplace in which she confronted her distorted reflection.

There had seemed no reason why the evening should ever end and no way of setting going all the complications of departure. Although she was tired, she had neither wanted to leave or to stay. She was living a tiny life within herself, sitting there on the cushion; sipping and smiling and glancing about her. Mike had come across the room to her. She turned to tilt back her head to look up into his face but at once felt giddy and had to be content with staring at his knees, at the pin stripes curving baggily, a thin stripe, then a wider, more feathery one. She began to count them, but Mike had come to take her home to bye-byes he said, stretching out a hand. ‘If I can only do this, I can do anything,’ Ursula thought, trying to rise and keep her balance. ‘I was silly to sit so low down in the first place,’ she decided. ‘I think my foot has gone to sleep,’ she explained and smiled confidingly at his knees. His grip on her arm was strong; although appearing to be extending a hand in gallantry, he was really taking her weight and steadying her, too. She had realised this, even at the time and later, lying safe in bed at last, she felt wonderfully grateful for his kindness, and did not at all mind sharing such a secret with him.

Pamela had put a large jug of water by her bed. An hour earlier, it had seemed unnecessary, but now water was all she wanted in the world. She sat up and drank, with a steady, relentless rhythm, as animals drink. Then she slid back into the warm bedclothes and tried to reconstruct in her mind that drive with Guy and became, in doing so, two people, the story teller and the listener; belittling his endearments, only to reassure herself about them. The sports car, the young man (he was not very old, she told herself), the summer darkness, in spite of its being so windy, were all things that other young girls she had known had taken for granted, at Oxford and elsewhere, and she herself had been denied. They seemed all the more miraculous for having been done without for so long.

Of recent years she had often tried to escape the memory of two maiden-ladies who had lived near her home when she and Melanie were girls. So sharp-tongued and cross-looking, they had seemed then as old as could be, yet may have been no more than in their fifties, she now thought. Frumpish and eccentric, at war with one another as well as all their neighbours, they were to be seen tramping the lanes, single-file and in silence, with their dogs. To the girls, they were the most appalling and unenviable creatures, smelling of vinegar, Melanie had said. The recollection of them so long after they were dead disturbed Ursula and depressed her, for she could see how she and Melanie had taken a turning in their direction, yet scarcely anything as definite as this, for there had been no action, no
decision; simply, the road they had been on had always, it seemed, been bending in that direction. In no time at all, would they not be copies of those other old ladies? The Misses Rogers, the neighbours would think of them, feeling pity and nervousness. The elder Miss Rogers would be alarmingly abrupt, with her sarcastic voice and old-fashioned swear-words. ‘They won’t be afraid of me,’ Ursula decided; but had no comfort from the thought. People would think her bullied and would be sorry. She, the plumper one, with her cat and timid smiles, would give biscuits to children when Melanie’s back was turned. Inseparable, yet alien to one another, they would become. Forewarned as she was, she felt herself drifting towards that fate and was afraid when she woke at night and thought of it.

Her first drowsiness had worn off and her thirst kept her wakeful. She lay and wondered about the details of Pamela’s escape from her parents’ sad house and all that had threatened her there – watchfulness, suspicion, envy and capricious humours; much of the kind of thing she herself suffered from Melanie. Pamela’s life now was bright and silly, and perhaps she had run away from the best part of herself; but there was nothing in the future to menace her as Ursula was menaced by her own picture of the elderly Misses Rogers.

‘But
surely
,’ insisted the strained and domineering voice. The woman gripped the back of the chair in front of her and stared up at Professor Rybeck on the platform.

At the end of his lecture, he had asked for questions or discussions. To begin with, everyone had seemed too stunned with admiration to make an effort; there were flutterings and murmurings, but for some time no one stood up. Calmly, he waited, sitting there smiling, eyes half-closed and his head cocked a little as if he were listening to secret music, or applause. His arms were crossed over his chest and his legs were crossed too, and one foot swayed back and forth rhythmically.

The minute Mr Brundle stood up, other people wanted to. He was an elderly, earnest man, who had been doggedly on the track of culture since his youth. His vanity hid from him the half-stifled yawns he evoked, the glassy look of those who, though caught, refused to listen and also his way of melting away to one victim any group of people he approached. Even Professor Rybeck looked restless, as Mr Brundle began now to pound away at his theory. Then others, in disagreement or exasperation, began to jump to their feet, or made sharp comments, interrupting; even shot their arms into the air, like schoolchildren. World Peace they might have been arguing about, not George Eliot’s Dorothea Casaubon.

‘Please, please,’ said Professor Rybeck, in his melodious protesting voice. ‘Now, Mrs Thomas, let us hear you.’

‘But
surely
,’ Mrs Thomas said again.

‘Wouldn’t it be time to say?’ asked Mrs Wetherby – she sounded diffident and had blushed; she had never spoken in the presence of so many people before, but wanted badly to make her mark on the Professor. She was too shy to stand upright and leant forward, lifting her bottom a couple of inches from the chair. Doing so, she dropped her notebook and pencil, her stole slipped off and when she bent down to pick it up she also snatched at some large, tortoise-shell pins that had fallen out of her hair. By the time she had done all this, her chance was gone and she had made her mark in the wrong way. The one and only clergyman in the room had sprung to his feet and, knowing all the tricks needed to command, had snatched off his spectacles and held them high in the air while, for some reason no one was clear about, he denounced Samuel Butler.

‘I think, Comrade … Professor, I should say,’ Mr Brundle interrupted. ‘If we might return but briefly to the subject …’

Melanie closed her eyes and thought how insufferable people became about what has cost them too much to possess – education, money, or even good health.

‘Lightly come or not at all, is what I like,’ she told herself crossly and, when she opened her eyes, glanced up at Professor Rybeck, who smiled with such placid condescension as the ding-dong argument went on between clergyman and atheist (for literature – Victorian or otherwise – had been discarded) and then she looked for Mrs Rybeck and found her sitting at the end of the second row, still knitting. She gave, somehow, an impression of not being one of the audience, seemed apart from them, preoccupied with her own thoughts, lending her presence only, like a baby-sitter or the invigilator at an examination – well accustomed to the admiration her husband had from other women of her own age, she made it clear that she was one with him in all he did and thought; their agreement, she implied, had come about many years ago and needed no more discussion, and if the women cared to ask her any of the questions he had no time to answer, then she could give the authorised replies. With all this settled, her placidity, like his, was almost startling to other people, their smiling lips (not eyes), their capacity for waiting for others to finish speaking (and it was far removed from the act of listening), is often to be found in the mothers of large families. Yet she was childless. She had only the Professor, and the socks she knitted were for him. She is more goddessy than motherly, Melanie thought.

‘We are summoned to the banqueting-hall,’ said the Professor, raising his hand in the air, as a bell began to ring. This was the warning that lunch would be ready in ten minutes, the Secretary had told them all when they arrived, and ‘warning’ was a word she had chosen well. The smell of
minced beef and cabbage came along passages towards them. To Melanie it was unnoticeable, part of daily life, like other tedious affairs; one disposed of the food, as of any other small annoyance, there were jugs of water to wash it down and slices of bread cut hours before that one could crumble as one listened to one’s neighbour.

One of Melanie’s neighbours was an elementary school-teacher to whom she tried not to be patronising. On her other side was a Belgian woman whose vivacity was intolerable. She was like a bad caricature of a foreigner, primly sporty and full of gay phrases. ‘Mon Dieu, we have had it, chums,’ she said, lifting the water-jug and finding it empty. The machine-gun rattle of consonants vibrated in Melanie’s head long after she was alone. ‘Oh, là, là!’ the woman sometimes cried, as if she were a cheeky French maid in an old-fashioned farce.

‘You think “Meedlemahtch” is a good book?’ she asked Melanie. They all discussed novels at meal-times too; for they were what they had in common.

Melanie was startled, for Professor Rybeck had spent most of the morning explaining its greatness. ‘It is one of the great English novels,’ she said.

‘As great as Charles Morgan, you think? In the same class?’

Melanie looked suspicious and would not answer.

‘It is such a funny book. I read it last night and laughed so much.’

‘And will read
War and Peace
between tea and dinner, I suppose,’ the elementary school-teacher murmured. ‘Oh dear, how disgusting!’ She pushed a very pale, boiled caterpillar to the side of her plate. ‘If that happened to one of our little darlings at school dinner, the mother would write at once to her M.P.’

At Melanie’s school, the girls would have hidden the creature under a fork in order not to spoil anyone else’s appetite, but she did not say so.

‘A
funny
book?’ she repeated, turning back to the Belgian woman.

‘Yes, I like it so much when she thinks that the really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew if you wished it. Oh, là, là! For heaven’s sake.’

‘Then she did read a page or two,’ said the woman on Melanie’s other side.

A dreadful sadness and sense of loss had settled over Melanie when she herself had read those words. They had not seemed absurd to her; she had felt tears pressing at the back of her eyes. So often, she had longed for protection and compassion, to be instructed and concentrated upon; as if she were a girl again, yet with a new excitement in the air.

As they made their way towards the door, when lunch was over, she could see Professor Rybeck standing there talking to one or two of his admirers. Long before she drew near to him, Melanie found another
direction to glance in. What she intended for unconcern, he took for deliberate hostility and wondered at what point of his lecture he had managed to offend her so.

In a purposeless way, she wandered into the garden. The Georgian house – a boys’ preparatory-school in the term-time – stood among dark rhododendron bushes and silver birches. Paths led in many directions through the shrubberies, yet all converged upon the lake – a depressing stretch of water, as bleary as an old looking-glass, shadowed by trees and broken by clumps of reeds.

The pain of loneliness was a worse burden to her here than it had ever been at home and she knew – her behaviour as she was leaving the dining-room had reminded her – that the fault was in herself.

‘Don’t think that I will make excuses to speak to you,’ she had wanted to imply. ‘I am not so easily dazzled as these other women.’ ‘But I wanted him to speak to me,’ she thought, ‘and perhaps I only feared that he would not.’

She sat down on the bank above the water and thought about the Professor. She could even imagine his lustrous eyes turned upon her, as he listened.

‘I give false impressions,’ she struggled to explain to him. ‘In my heart … I am …’

‘I know what you are,’ he said gently. ‘I knew at once.’

The relief would be enormous. She was sure of that. She could live the rest of her life on the memory of that moment.

‘But he is a fraud,’ the other, destructive voice in her insisted, the voice that had ruined so much for her. ‘He is not a fraud,’ she said firmly; her lips moved; she needed to be so definite with herself. ‘Perhaps he cannot find the balance between integrity and priggishness.’