Complete Short Stories (VMC) (65 page)

‘I can’t just walk out of the house like that,’ she had told him. ‘There are all the things I have to do here – arrangements to make.’

To escape his critical eye, she had slipped round with the wool – anything to get out of the house – and had sat in the peaceful little room for over half an hour, trying to improve her self-esteem.

‘I should go and get it over with,’ Mrs Swan advised, thinking of her niece, Evie, and her bright face when she said good-bye, and her quick, light step going towards the bus-stop.

Phyllis did not see Mrs Swan again until she had returned from the funeral. She had delayed her journey too long, and, as she opened her mother’s front gate, bracing herself for the usual sarcastic greeting, she had looked up and seen one of the neighbours drawing the blind over the bedroom window.

She went to stay in a small hotel rather than remain in the house. Eric came up to join her for the funeral, at which she knew the neighbours were watching her and whispering. Their eyes were lowered, their lips set together whenever she turned to look at them, but she guessed what they were saying. They had known her when she was a child, but she had forgotten all of them and their names meant nothing.

She had not pretended to grieve, not even in order to shelter herself from Eric’s words of blame. ‘You could just as easily have gone the day before,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know what these people think of us.’

‘And I’m sure I don’t care,’ she said. But she cared very much, and her face burned as she walked out of the chapel after the coffin, feeling the hostility of the other women, the neighbours who had sat with her mother and taken in her meals.

‘You’ll have to thank them properly,’ Eric said. ‘Do something to show your gratitude.’

She refused to speak to them. ‘I know what they’re like,’ she said. ‘They lean over one another’s fences all day long and wag their wicked tongues. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to this place again.’

All the unspoken words had hurt her and those spoken ones of Eric’s, too. She had such a different picture of herself from the one other people seemed to see, and she was frightened and astounded by glimpses of how she appeared to them, for they perceived traits she was sure she had never possessed – or only under the most serious provocation. She thought so much about herself that it was important to have the thoughts comfortable, and many desolate hours had been made more bearable by gazing at her own reflection. Warm-hearted, impulsive, she was sure she was – herself hardly considered, and then always last, as she bustled about the countryside doing good. ‘No one knows what people in this village owe her.’ The words were clear, though the person who said them was only dimly imagined. ‘She herself would never tell, but I doubt if there’s a cottage in the parish where there isn’t someone with cause to be grateful. In this village, it’s a funny thing, if anyone is in trouble, it’s the pub they go to for help, not the vicarage.’ From her bedroom window, she could look across at the churchyard and would imagine the procession of villagers winding up the pathway under the chestnut trees, in black for her own funeral. ‘There wasn’t a dry eye,’ she told herself.

Then Eric’s sharp phrases splintered the image – ‘Your own mother.’ ‘You think only of yourself and what you are going to put on your back.’

She tried not to listen, and could soon comfort herself, just as when she looked in a mirror and the freckled skin and sandy hair were transfigured into alabaster and Titian red.

Sitting at lunch in the train, flying past dreary canals and grey fields, she endured her husband’s sullen silence, and buttered bread rolls; buttering and nibbling, to comfort herself, she stared out at the sour-looking pastures.

She was glad to be back in her own picturesque village. The Thames valley consoled her, but uncertainty still hovered about her and she wondered if, after all, she had failed her own image of herself. She had not yet dared to unpack her new dress. It was too bright a colour and she dreaded
Eric’s comments. She kept it hidden on top of the wardrobe, although she knew that the pleasure of putting it on for the first time was perhaps the only way there was of dispelling her sadness.

To escape the atmosphere of disapproval, she unravelled one of her old sweaters and took the wool to Mrs Swan, not admitting to herself that, because of past aloofness, there was no other house in the village where she could drop in and exchange a word or two. In the past, an afternoon’s shopping had always cured despondency, and, in the evenings, beer and backchat were even better distractions. However, deference to her bereavement seemed to have sobered customers for the time being – the last sort of behaviour to raise her spirits.

Mrs Swan was not alone. She had called Mrs Rippon in from the garden to give her a present of a pot of blackberry jelly, and they were sitting at the table, drinking tea.

Phyllis joined them, nervously praising the look of the jelly and everything else she could see.

‘I was sorry to hear of your loss,’ said Mrs Swan, whose neighbour kept her eyes averted and suddenly took up the pot of jelly and said good-bye.

‘I brought some more wool.’ Phyllis saw the half-finished blanket spread over the back of a horsehair sofa, and began to praise that, too, and got up to study it – the uneven stitches and the cobbled-together squares, the drabness already beginning to break into gaudiness since her last visit. She returned to her chair, feeling that the brightness she had brought was symbolic. ‘Yes, poor Mother,’ she said. She bowed her head and sighed and looked resigned. ‘It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but I can’t be sorry, for
her
sake. It really was a merciful release.’

That’s what young Evie will say about me when I go, Mrs Swan thought. And so it will be, too, for her.

‘It’s peaceful here,’ said Phyllis.

The cat lay asleep by the fender, moving his ears and beating the end of his tail rhythmically against the rug, as if he were in the midst of a dream that bored and angered him. Above the fireplace hung a strip of sticky paper, black with flies, some dead and some dying a wretched death. Others had evaded it, and circled the room slowly and warily.

Phyllis leant forward and sniffed at a vase full of nasturtiums edged with their little round leaves. The smell tantalised her, reminding her of something. Was it mustard, she wondered, or some medicine – or just nasturtiums? They had grown in Consett. Those and dusty, insect-bitten hollyhocks were all she could remember in the shabby strip of garden where her father had kept rabbits.

‘Aren’t they pretty?’ she said, sniffing the flowers again, and then she determined not to praise another thing, lest she should sound
condescending. ‘That’s your husband, isn’t it?’ she asked, nodding at an old photograph in a frame made of sea shells.

‘He had that taken the day he joined up, when he was twenty-five. And he wore a moustache like that till he was fifty. Then he began to go bald, and that great bush looked silly then, he thought, so he shaved it off. He hadn’t a hair between his head and Heaven by the time he was sixty.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ Phyllis said. She supposed she did remember seeing him in the public bar, but she had never bothered to give him a name.

‘It’s a pity having to leave your mother all that long way away,’ Mrs Swan said. ‘My own mother’s buried down in Bristol and the train fare’s out of the question. I’d dearly like to go.’ After a pause, she said, ‘I expect the flowers were lovely, though it’s not an easy time of the year. I find plenty of garden flowers for Charlie, but they’re no use for a burial. Gladioli don’t make up well and shop roses are exorbitant.’

‘We sent carnations, Eric and I.’

She got up to go and stood looking down at the cat, whose dream seemed to have taken a better turn, for he lay relaxed now, with crossed paws and a smile on his face. Phyllis felt peaceful, too.

‘Well, come again,’ Mrs Swan said, from politeness.

‘I really will,’ Phyllis promised.

Enlivening Mrs Swan’s life became an absorbing pastime and something of which, for once, Eric could not disapprove. Phyllis was always dropping in to the cottage, and found ingenious ways of giving presents tactfully, not knowing that the tact was wasted, since Mrs Swan had grace enough to be pleased with the gifts and to accept them simply, unbothered by motives. She thought of them as charity, and had no objection to that. She only wondered why there was so little of it about nowadays.

‘The hens are laying like wildfire,’ Phyllis would say. If she met anyone she knew on the way home, she always explained her outing. ‘I was just taking a few eggs to poor old Mrs Swan.’

One day she asked her to go back to the Plough for a glass of sherry, but Mrs Swan thought it a mistake for widows to drink. ‘I haven’t taken any since Charlie died,’ she said.

‘You’re very good to that old lady,’ one of the customers told Phyllis.

‘I’m not at all. I just like being with her. And she’s got no one else. It means a lot to her and costs me nothing.’

‘Most people wouldn’t bother, all the same.’

‘It’s a terrible thing, loneliness.’

‘There’s no need to tell
me
that.’

The bar had only just opened for the evening, and he was the only customer so far. He was always the first to arrive, and although he came so regularly, Phyllis knew very little about him. He was middle-aged and not very
talkative, and never stayed drinking for long. ‘Very genuine,’ she said, when other people mentioned him. It was an easy label and she made it sound utterly dull.

This evening, instead of opening his newspaper, he seemed inclined to talk. ‘Living in lodgings palls in the end,’ he said. ‘I never married, and it gets lonely, the evenings and weekends. I sometimes think what I’d give to have some nice family where I could drop in when I wanted, and be one of them – remember the children’s birthdays, give a hand with the gardening, that sort of thing. Everyone ought to have some family like that where they’re just accepted and taken for granted, given pot luck, not a lot of fuss. It’s tiring always being a guest. Well, I find it so.’

‘It sounds to me as if there’s a fairy godfather being wasted,’ Phyllis said.

He smiled. ‘You feel you’d like to have your stake in someone else’s family if you haven’t got one of your own. Will you have a drink with me?’

‘Thank you very much,’ she said brightly. ‘I’d like a lager.’

‘Well, please do.’

‘What a lovely rose,’ she said. ‘I’ve always noticed what lovely roses you wear in your buttonhole, Mr …’ Her voice trailed off, as she couldn’t remember his name. ‘Well, here’s all you wish yourself,’ she said, and sipped the lager, then wiped her lips on her scented handkerchief.

He had taken the rose from his buttonhole and handed it to her across the bar. ‘Out of my landlady’s garden,’ he said. ‘I always look after them for her.’

‘Oh, you are sweet!’ She twirled the rose in her fingers and then turned to the mirrored panelling behind the bar and, standing on tiptoe to see her reflection above the shelf of bottles, tucked the rose into her blouse.

‘That reminds me of that picture –
The Bar at the Folies-Bergère
– one of my favourites,’ he said. ‘All the bottles, and your reflection, and the rose.’

‘Well, how funny you should say that. We had it for our Christmas card one year. Everyone liked it. “Well, we didn’t realise they had Bass in those days” – that’s what everyone said. “In Paris, too!” There’s those bottles on the bar, if you remember. It makes the picture look a bit like an advertisement. Look at my lovely rose, Eric.’

‘Good evening, Mr Willis,’ Eric said, carrying in a crate of light ale. ‘Yes, it’s quite a perfect bloom, isn’t it? I suppose she cadged it off you.’

‘It’s a pleasure to give Mrs Butcher something,’ Mr Willis replied. ‘As far as I have seen, it’s usually
she
who does it all.’

Phyllis was happier, gentler than she had been for years. In Mr Willis’s eyes she saw her ideal self reflected.

‘Oh, I haven’t had time to powder my nose,’ she would say, scrabbling through her handbag, which she kept on a shelf beneath the bar.

‘I suppose you’ve been off on one of your errands of mercy,’ said Mr Willis.

‘Don’t be silly. I’ve had a very nice tea party with my old lady in the almshouse. What errand of mercy is there about that? Oh, you really shouldn’t. What a gorgeous colour!’

Every evening now, he brought her a rose. When he had left the bar to go back to his lodgings for supper, the other customers teased her. ‘Your boy friend stayed late tonight,’ Eric would say.

‘He’s sweet,’ she protested. ‘No truly. Such lovely old-world manners, and he’s so genuine.’

The evening before her birthday, he came in as usual, admired her new blouse, and gave her a yellow rosebud. ‘And that may be the last,’ he said.

‘Oh, you aren’t going away!’ she exclaimed, looking so disconcerted that he smiled with pleasure.

‘No, but the roses have already gone. Unless we have another crop later on.’

‘What a relief. You really frightened me. I can do without the roses at a pinch, but we couldn’t do without you.’

‘You’re always kind. I enjoy our chats. I couldn’t do without them, either.’

She turned her head away, as if she dared not meet his eyes.

‘How’s your old lady?’ he asked. In the silence that had fallen he was conscious of his heart beating. It was a loud and hollow sound, like an old grandfather clock, and he spoke quickly lest she, too, should hear it. They were alone in the bar, as they so often were for the first quarter of an hour after opening time.

‘My old lady?’ she repeated, and seemed to be dragging her thoughts back from a long way away. Then she smiled at him. ‘Oh, she’s very well.’

‘Have you seen her lately?’

‘Well, not many days go by when I don’t pop in.’

But she had not popped in for a long time. There had been other things to occupy her mind, and shopping had become a pleasure again.

‘You must be sure to come in tomorrow and have a drink with me,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

Instead of pinning the rosebud to her blouse, she put it in a glass of water. ‘I’ll keep it for tomorrow night,’ she said.