Complete Short Stories (VMC) (55 page)

‘She wouldn’t come,’ Etta said. ‘She wouldn’t leave her dog.’

‘But, my dear, she has to leave him when she goes back to school.’

‘I know. That’s the trouble. In the holidays she likes to be with him as much as possible, to make up for it.’

Mrs Salkeld, who had similar wishes about her daughter, looked sad. ‘It is too one-sided,’ she gently explained. ‘You must try to understand how I feel about it.’

‘They’re only too glad to have me. I keep Sarah company when they go out.’

They obviously went out a great deal and Mrs Salkeld suspected that they were frivolous. She did not condemn them for that – they must lead their own lives, but those were in a world which Etta would never be able to afford the time or money to inhabit. ‘Very well, Musetta,’ she said, removing the girl further from her by using her full name – used only on formal and usually menacing occasions.

That night she wept a little from tiredness and depression – from disappointment, too, at the thought of returning in the evenings to the dark and empty house, just as she usually did, but when she had hoped for company. They were not healing tears she shed and they did nothing but add self-contempt to her other distresses.

A week later, Etta went the short distance by train to stay with the Lippmanns. Her happiness soon lost its edge of guilt, and once the train had rattled over the iron bridge that spanned the broad river, she felt safe in a different country. There seemed to be even a different weather, coming from a wider sky, and a riverside glare – for the curves of the railway line brought it close to the even more winding course of the river, whose silver loops could be glimpsed through the trees. There were islands and backwaters and a pale heron standing on a patch of mud.

Sarah was waiting at the little station and Etta stepped down on to the platform as if taking a footing into promised land. Over the station and the gravelly lane outside hung a noonday quiet. On one side were grazing meadows, on the other side the drive gateways of expensive houses. The Gables was indeed gabled and so was its boat-house. It was also turreted and balconied. There was a great deal of woodwork painted glossy white, and a huge-leaved Virginia creeper covered much of the red-brick walls – in the front beds were the salvias and lobelias Etta had thought she hated. Towels and swim-suits hung over balcony rails and a pair of tennis-shoes had been put out on a window-sill to dry. Even though Mr Lippmann and
his son, David, went to London every day, the house always had – for Etta – a holiday atmosphere.

The hall door stood open and on the big round table were the stacks of new magazines which seemed to her the symbol of extravagance and luxury. At the back of the house, on the terrace overlooking the river, Mrs Lippmann, wearing tight, lavender pants and a purple shirt, was drinking vodka with a neighbour who had called for a subscription to some charity. Etta was briefly enfolded in scented silk and tinkling bracelets and then released and introduced. Sarah gave her a red, syrupy drink and they sat down on the warm steps among the faded clumps of aubretia and rocked the ice cubes to and fro in their glasses, keeping their eyes narrowed to the sun.

Mrs Lippmann gossiped, leaning back under a fringed chair-umbrella. She enjoyed exposing the frailties of her friends and family, although she would have been the first to hurry to their aid in trouble. Roger, who was seventeen, had been worse for drink the previous evening, she was saying. Faced with breakfast, his face had been a study of disgust which she now tried to mimic. And David could not eat, either; but from being in love. She raised her eyes to heaven most dramatically, to convey that great patience was demanded of her.

‘He eats like a horse,’ said Sarah. ‘Etta, let’s go upstairs.’ She took Etta’s empty glass and led her back across the lawn, seeming not to care that her mother would without doubt begin to talk about her the moment she had gone.

Rich and vinegary smells of food came from the kitchen as they crossed the hall. (There was a Hungarian cook to whom Mrs Lippmann spoke in German and a Portuguese ‘temporary’ to whom she spoke in Spanish.) The food was an important part of the holiday to Etta, who had nowhere else eaten
Sauerkraut
or
Apfelstrudel
or cold fried fish, and she went into the dining-room each day with a sense of adventure and anticipation.

On this visit she was also looking forward to the opportunity of making a study of people in love – an opportunity she had not had before. While she unpacked, she questioned Sarah about David’s Nora, as she thought of her; but Sarah would only say that she was quite a good sort with dark eyes and an enormous bust, and that as she was coming to dinner that evening, as she nearly always did, Etta would be able to judge for herself.

While they were out on the river all the afternoon – Sarah rowing her in a dinghy along the reedy backwater – Etta’s head was full of love in books, even in those holiday set books Sarah never had time for –
Sense and Sensibility
this summer. She felt that she knew what to expect, and her perceptions were sharpened by the change of air and scene, and the disturbing smell of the river, which she snuffed up deeply as if she might be able to
store it up in her lungs. ‘Mother thinks it is polluted,’ Sarah said when Etta lifted a streaming hand from trailing in the water and brought up some slippery weeds and held them to her nose. They laughed at the idea.

Etta, for dinner, put on the liberty silk they wore on Sunday evenings at school and Sarah at once brought out her own hated garment from the back of the cupboard where she had pushed it out of sight on the first day of the holidays. When they appeared downstairs, they looked unbelievably dowdy, Mrs Lippmann thought, turning away for a moment because her eyes had suddenly pricked with tears at the sight of her kind daughter.

Mr Lippmann and David returned from Lloyd’s at half-past six and with them brought Nora – a large, calm girl with an air of brittle indifference towards her fiancé which disappointed but did not deceive Etta, who knew enough to remain undeceived by banter. To interpret from it the private tendernesses it hid was part of the mental exercise she was to be engaged in. After all, David would know better than to have his heart on his sleeve, especially in this
dégagé
family where nothing seemed half so funny as falling in love.

After dinner, Etta telephoned her mother, who had perhaps been waiting for the call, as the receiver was lifted immediately. Etta imagined her standing in the dark and narrow hall with its smell of umbrellas and furniture polish.

‘I thought you would like to know I arrived safely.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Sarah and I went to the river. We have just finished dinner.’ Spicy smells still hung about the house. Etta guessed that her mother would have had half a tin of sardines and put the other half by for her breakfast. She felt sad for her and guilty herself. Most of her thoughts about her mother were deformed by guilt.

‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

‘Oh, the usual,’ her mother said brightly. ‘I am just turning the collars and cuffs of your winter blouses. By the way, don’t forget to pay Mrs Lippmann for the telephone call.’

‘No. I shall have to go now. I just thought …’

‘Yes, of course, dear. Well, have a lovely time.’

‘We are going for a swim when our dinner has gone down.’

‘Be careful of cramp, won’t you? But I mustn’t fuss from this distance. I know you are in good hands. Give my kind regards to Mrs Lippmann and Sarah, will you, please. I must get back to your blouses.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t bother. You must be tired.’

‘I am perfectly happy doing it,’ Mrs Salkeld said. But if that were so, it was unnecessary, Etta thought, for her to add, as she did: ‘And someone has to do it.’

She went dully back to the others. Roger was strumming on a guitar, but he blushed and put it away when Etta came into the room.

As the days went quickly by, Etta thought that she was belonging more this time than ever before. Mr Lippmann, a genial patriarch, often patted her head when passing, in confirmation of her existence, and Mrs Lippmann let her run errands. Roger almost wistfully sought her company, while Sarah disdainfully discouraged him; for they had their own employments, she implied; her friend – ‘my best friend’, as she introduced Etta to lesser ones or adults – could hardly be expected to want the society of schoolboys. Although he was a year older than themselves, being a boy he was less sophisticated, she explained. She and Etta considered themselves to be rather worldly-wise – Etta having learnt from literature and Sarah from putting two and two together, her favourite pastime. Her parents seemed to her to behave with the innocence of children, unconscious of their motives, so continually betraying themselves to her experienced eye, when knowing more would have made them guarded. She had similarly put two and two together about Roger’s behaviour to Etta, but she kept these conclusions to herself – partly from not wanting to make her friend feel self-conscious and partly – for she scorned self-deception – from what she recognised to be jealousy. She and Etta were very well as they were, she thought.

Etta herself was too much absorbed by the idea of love to ever think of being loved. In this house, she had her first chance of seeing it at first hand and she studied David and Nora with such passionate speculation that their loving seemed less their own than hers. At first, she admitted to herself that she was disappointed. Their behaviour fell short of what she required of them; they lacked a romantic attitude to one another and Nora was neither touching nor glorious – neither Viola nor Rosalind. In Etta’s mind to be either was satisfactory; to be boisterous and complacent was not. Nora was simply a plump and genial girl with a large bust and a faint moustache. She could not be expected to inspire David with much gallantry and, in spite of all the red roses he brought her from London, he was not above telling her that she was getting fat. Gaily retaliatory, she would threaten him with the bouquet, waving it about his head, her huge engagement ring catching the light, flashing with different colours, her eyes flashing too.

Sometimes, there was what Etta’s mother would have called ‘horseplay’, and Etta herself deplored the noise, the dishevelled romping. ‘We know quite well what it’s instead of,’ said Sarah. ‘But I sometimes wonder if
they
do. They would surely cut it out if they did.’

As intent as a bird-watcher, Etta observed them, but was puzzled that
they behaved like birds, making such a display of their courtship, an absurd-looking frolic out of a serious matter. She waited in vain for a sigh or secret glance. At night, in the room she shared with Sarah, she wanted to talk about them more than Sarah, who felt that her own family was the last possible source of glamour or enlightenment. Discussing her bridesmaid’s dress was the most she would be drawn into and that subject Etta felt was devoid of romance. She was not much interested in mere weddings and thought them rather banal and public celebrations. ‘With an overskirt of embroidered net,’ said Sarah in her decisive voice. ‘How nice if you could be a bridesmaid, too; but she has all those awful Greenbaum cousins. As ugly as sin, but not to be left out.’ Etta was inattentive to her. With all her studious nature she had set herself to study love and study it she would. She made the most of what the holiday offered and when the exponents were absent she fell back on the textbooks –
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and
Wuthering Heights
at that time.

To Roger she seemed to fall constantly into the same pose, as she sat on the river bank, bare feet tucked sideways, one arm cradling a book, the other outstretched to pluck – as if to aid her concentration – at blades of grass. Her face remained pale, for it was always in shadow, bent over her book. Beside her, glistening with oil, Sarah spread out her body to the sun. She was content to lie for hour after hour with no object but to change the colour of her skin and with thoughts crossing her mind as seldom as clouds passed overhead – and in as desultory a way when they did so. Sometimes, she took a book out with her, but nothing happened to it except that it became smothered with oil. Etta, who found sunbathing boring and enervating, read steadily on – her straight, pale hair hanging forward as if to seclude her, to screen her from the curious eyes of passers-by – shaken by passions of the imagination as she was. Voices from boats came clearly across the water, but she did not heed them. People going languidly by in punts shaded their eyes and admired the scarlet geraniums and the greenness of the grass. When motor cruisers passed, their wash jogged against the mooring stage and swayed into the boat-house, whose lacy fretwork trimmings had just been repainted glossy white.

Sitting there, alone by the boat-house at the end of the grass bank, Roger read, too; but less diligently than Etta. Each time a boat went by, he looked up and watched it out of sight. A swan borne towards him on a wake, sitting neatly on top of its reflection, held his attention. Then his place on the page was lost. Anyhow, the sun fell too blindingly upon it. He would glance again at Etta and briefly, with distaste, at his indolent, spread-eagled sister, who had rolled over on to her stomach to give her shiny back, criss-crossed from the grass, its share of sunlight. So the afternoons passed, and they would never have such long ones in their lives again.

Evenings were more social. The terrace with its fringed umbrellas – symbols of gaiety to Etta – became the gathering place. Etta, listening intently, continued her study of love, and as intently Roger studied her and the very emotion which in those others so engrossed her.

‘You look still too pale,’ Mr Lippmann told her one evening. He put his hands to her face and tilted it to the sun.

‘You shan’t leave us until there are roses in those cheeks.’ He implied that only in his garden did sun and air give their full benefit. The thought was there and Etta shared it. ‘Too much of a bookworm, I’m afraid,’ he added and took one of her textbooks which she carried everywhere for safety, lest she should be left on her own for a few moments. ‘
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
,’ read out Mr Lippmann. ‘Isn’t it deep? Isn’t it on the morbid side?’ Roger was kicking rhythmically at a table leg in glum embarrassment. ‘This won’t do you any good at all, my dear little girl. This won’t put the roses in your cheeks.’