Complete Short Stories (VMC) (46 page)

At ten o’clock, Beryl, provocative in chiffon, as the magazines would have described her, burst into tears of rage. She could hear the laughter – so much louder now, towards closing-time – downstairs in the bar and knew that the sound of it had drawn Geoff back. She was powerless – so
transparently tricked out to tempt him – to do anything but lie and wait until, at bar’s emptying, he should remember her and stumble upstairs to bed.

It was not the first happy evening Geoff had spent in the bar of the Seaferry Arms. He had called there with the team, after cricket-matches in the nearby villages. Seaferry was only twenty miles from home. Those summer evenings had all merged into one another, as drinking evenings should – and this one was merging with them. ‘I’m glad I came,’ he thought, rocking slightly as he stood by the bar with two of his new friends. He couldn’t remember having met nicer people. They were a very gay married couple. The wife had a miniature poodle who had already wetted three times on the carpet. ‘She can’t help it, can you, angel?’ her mistress protested. ‘She’s quite neurotic; aren’t you, precious thing?’

Doris – as Geoff had been told to call her – was a heavy jolly woman. The bones of her stays showed through her frock, her necklace of jet beads was powdered with cigarette ash. She clutched a large, shiny handbag and had snatched from it a pound note, which she began to wave in the air, trying to catch the barmaid’s eye. ‘I say, miss! What’s her name, Ted? Oh, yes. I say, Maisie! Same again, there’s a dear girl.’

It was nearly closing-time, and a frenzied reordering was going on. The street door was pushed open and a man and woman with a murderous-looking bull terrier came in. ‘You stay there,’ the man said to the woman and the dog, and he left them and began to force his way towards the bar.

‘Miss! Maisie!’ Doris called frantically. Her poodle, venturing between people’s legs, made another puddle under a table and approached the bull terrier.

‘I say, Doris, call Zoë back,’ said her husband. ‘And put that money away. I told you I’ll get these.’

‘I insist. They’re on me.’

‘Could you call your dog back?’ the owner of the bull terrier asked them. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘Come, Zoë, pet!’ Doris called. ‘He wouldn’t hurt her, though. She’s a bitch. Maisie! Oh, there’s a dear. Same again, love. Large ones.’

Suddenly, a dreadful commotion broke out. Doris was nearly knocked off her stool as Zoë came flying back to her for protection, with the bull terrier at her throat. She screamed and knocked over somebody’s gin.

Geoff, who had been standing by the bar in a pleasurable haze, watching the barmaid, was, in spite of his feeling of unreality, the first to spring to life and pounce upon the bull terrier and grab his collar. The dog bit his hand, but he was too drunk to feel much pain. Before anyone could snatch Zoë out of danger, the barmaid lifted the jug of water and meaning to pour
it over the bull terrier, flung it instead over Geoff. The shock made him loosen his grip and the fight began again. A second time he grabbed at the collar and had his hand bitten once more; but now – belatedly, everyone else thought – the two dog-owners came to his help. Zoë, with every likelihood of being even more neurotic in the future, was put, shivering, in her mistress’s arms, the bull terrier was secured to his lead in disgrace, and Maisie called Time.

After some recriminations between themselves, the dog-owners thanked and congratulated Geoff. ‘Couldn’t get near them,’ they said. ‘The bar was so crowded. Couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on.’

‘Sorry you got so wet,’ said Doris.

The bull terrier’s owner felt rather ashamed of himself when he saw how pale Geoff was. ‘You all right?’ he asked. ‘You look a bit shaken up.’

Geoff examined his hand. There was very little blood, but he was beginning to be aware of the pain and felt giddy. He shook his head, but could not answer. Something dripped from his hair on to his forehead, and when he dabbed it with his handkerchief, he was astonished to see water and not blood.

‘You got far to go?’ the man asked him. ‘Where’s your home?’

‘Lissport.’

‘That’s our way, too, if you want a lift.’ Whether Geoff had a car or not, the man thought he was in no condition to drive it; although, whether from shock or alcohol or both, it was difficult to decide.

‘I’d
like
a lift,’ Geoff murmured drowsily. ‘Many thanks.’

‘No, any thanks are due to
you
.’

‘Doesn’t it seem strange without Geoff?’ Mrs Midwinter asked her husband. He was back from the Starter’s Orders, had taken off his collar and tie and was staring gloomily at the dying fire.

‘Les and Ron home yet?’ he asked.

‘No, they won’t be till half-past twelve. They’ve gone to the dance at the Town Hall.’

‘Half-past twelve! It’s scandalous the way they carry on. Drinking themselves silly, I’ve no doubt at all. Getting decent girls into trouble.’

‘It’s only a dance, Dad.’

‘
And
their last one. I’m not having it. Coming home drunk on a Sunday morning and lying in bed till all hours to get over it. When was either of them last at Chapel? Will you tell me that?’

Mrs Midwinter sighed and folded up her knitting.

‘I can’t picture why Geoff turned from Chapel like that.’ Mr Midwinter seemed utterly depressed about his sons, as he often was at this time on a Saturday night.

‘Well, he was courting …’

‘First time I’ve been in a church was today, and I was not impressed.’

‘I thought it was lovely, and you looked your part just as if you did it every day.’

‘I wasn’t worried about
my
part. Sort of thing like that makes no demands on
me
. What I didn’t like was the service, to which I took exception, and that namby-pamby parson’s voice. To me, the whole thing was – insincere.’

Mrs Midwinter held up her hand to silence him. ‘There’s a car stopping outside. It can’t be the boys yet.’

From the street, they both heard Geoff’s voice shouting good-bye, then a car door was slammed, and the iron gate opened with a whining sound.

‘Dad, it’s Geoff!’ Mrs Midwinter whispered. ‘There must have been an accident. Something’s happened to Beryl.’

‘Well, he sounded cheerful enough about it.’

They could hear Geoff coming unsteadily up the garden path. When Mrs Midwinter threw open the door, he stood blinking at the sudden light, and swaying.

‘Geoff! What ever’s wrong?’

‘I’ve got wet, Mum, and I’ve hurt my hand,’ Geoff said.

On his last evening in England he broke two promises – one, that he would dine with his brother, and another, older promise made to a woman whom he loved. When he and Catherine had tried, years before, to put an end to this impermissible love for one another the best they could decide was to give it no nourishment and let it wither if it would. ‘No messages,’ she had said when they parted, ‘no letters.’ His letters had always incapacitated her: on days when she received them, she moved slowly at her work, possessed by his words, deaf to any others, from husband or children or friends. ‘I don’t want to know how you are getting on,’ she told him, ‘or to think of you in any particular place. You might die: you might marry. I never want to know. I want you to stop, here, for ever.’ (
Then, there
, an autumn night, a railway station.) As his train moved off he saw that her face had a look of utter perplexity, as if the meaning of her future were beyond her comprehension. The look had stayed in his mind and was in his imagination this evening as he walked from the bus-stop in the village and out on the sea-road towards the house. This house, which she rented each summer for the children’s holidays, was where they had sometimes been together. The recklessness, the deceit which, in London, they suppressed, they had indulged here, as if a different sort of behaviour were allowed at the seaside. Returning to her husband, who had no part in those holidays, she would at once feel so mortified and so uneasily ashamed, that their few meetings were humiliating to them both and full of recriminations and despair; and it was after such a summer that they had parted – for ever, both had believed.

The road under the sea-wall was sheltered. Inland, sheep cropped the salt-marshes where he and Catherine had walked in the evening when the children were in bed. When it was dark, they would kiss and say good-bye, then kiss again. He would walk back to the village along this sea-road and she would tiptoe into the house, so that the children’s nurse would not be wakened or discover how late she had stayed out.

Memories agitated him as he walked along the road. The landscape seemed to have awaited him, to have kept itself unchanged to pain him now with a great sense of strangeness. He had no hopes for this visit, no
vestige of confidence in it, knew that it was mistakenly made and fraught with all perils – her anger, her grief, her embarrassment. In him, love could not be reawakened, for it had not slept. He did not know what risk faced her; how she had dealt with her sadness, or laid him away in his absence. He was compelled to find out, to discover if he were quick or dead in her mind, and to see if the look – the perplexed expression – had hardened on her face, or vanished. But as he came round a bend in the road and saw the chimneys of the house and the beginning of the garden, he was so appalled by his venture that he walked more slowly and longed to turn back. He thought: ‘She will be changed, look different, wear new clothes I have never seen, the children will be older, and, oh God,’ he prayed, his heart swerving at the sudden idea, ‘let there be no more! Let her not have had more children! Let her not have filled her life that way!’

He stopped in the road and listened for children’s voices in the garden but in the still evening the bleating of sheep was the only sound. High up on the orchard trees red apples shone in the sun. An old net sagged across the tennis-lawn. The gabled, hideous house with its verandas and balconies came into view. At the open windows, faded curtains flapped over the newly-cleaned tennis-shoes bleaching on sills and sandy swim-suits and towels hung out to dry. The house, which looked as if it had been burst asunder, and left with all its doors ajar, had a vacant – though only lately vacant – appearance.

In the conservatory-porch a tabby cat was sleeping on a shelf among flower-pots and tennis-racquets. A book lying open had all its pages arched up in the sun and a bunch of wild flowers were dying on a ledge. He pressed the bell and away at the back of the house heard it ringing. The heat under the dusty panes made him feel faint and he stepped back from it, away from the door. As he did so, a girl leant from an upstairs window and called down to him. ‘Do you want Mother?’

Hit by the irony of the words, the shock of seeing Catherine’s eyes looking down at him, he could not answer her at once. Her daughter did not wait for his reply. ‘She’s on the beach. They’re all there. I’m just going, too. One moment!’ She moved from sight, he heard her running downstairs, then she came to the door.

‘You are Sarah?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, Catherine’s eyes, those eyes!’ he thought. ‘The miracle, but the enormity, that they should come again; clearer, more beautiful’ – he would not think it. ‘You don’t remember me. I am Peter Lord.’

‘I remember the name. I remember
you
now. I had only forgotten. You came here once and helped us with a picnic on the beach; lit a fire, do you
remember that? It’s what they are all doing at this moment. I was waiting for a friend.’ She hesitated, looked towards the gate. ‘But they didn’t come.’

‘“They” because she will not say “he”,’ Peter thought. ‘The embarrassments of the English language!’ She was bright with some disappointment.

‘Shall we go down together and find them?’ she asked; then, in the patronising tone young people use when they try to carry on conversations with their elders on equal terms, she asked: ‘Let me see, you went abroad, didn’t you? Wasn’t it South America?’

‘South Africa.’

‘I always get those two muddled. And now you have come back home again?’

‘For a short time. I am off in the morning.’

‘Oh, what a pity; but Mother
will
be pleased that you came to say goodbye.’

They crossed the road and climbed the bank to the top of the sea-wall. There they paused. The tide was out and the wet sand far down the beach reflected a pink light from the sun, which was going down in an explosive, Turneresque brilliance above the sand-hillocks. Farther along, they could see figures busily bringing driftwood to a fire and two children at the sea’s edge were digging in the sand.

Seeing Peter and Sarah on the skyline, one of the group waved, then turned away again.

‘He thinks you are my friend,’ Sarah said. She wore Catherine’s anxious look. ‘That’s Chris. Do you remember Chris? He is fifteen – nearly two years younger than me.’

‘Yes, I remember him.’ Peter was feeling tired now, rather puffed by keeping up with her across a stretch of hot white sand in which his feet sank at every step. This sand, seldom washed by the sea, was full of dried seaweed and bits of old newspapers. Clumps of spiky reed grew in it and sea-poppies and thistles.

‘Who are all those other children?’ he asked. He stopped and took off his shoes and socks, rolled his trousers above his ankles. ‘A fine sight,’ he thought crossly. ‘Completely ridiculous.’

‘Our friends,’ said Sarah, turning and waiting for him.

He could see Catherine. She was apart from the others and was bending over a picnic-basket. When Sarah called to her, she turned and, still kneeling in the sand, looked up towards them, her arm shading her eyes. The incredulous look was on her face as if it had never left it and at the sight of the agitation she could not hide from her children and their friends, he realised the full cruelty of his treachery. She took his hand, and recovered enough to hide shock beneath a show of superficial
surprise, glossing over the grotesque situation with an hostessy condescension.

‘Are you on leave?’ Her voice indicated his rôle of old friend of the family.

‘No, my father died. I had to come over in a hurry.’