Complete Short Stories (VMC) (67 page)

She was dreading their next free day and was relieved when Silcox suggested that they should make a habit of taking the train to London together and there separating. If they came back on the same train in the evening, no suspicions would be roused.

In London, she enjoyed wandering round the department stores, looking without surprise or envy at all the frivolous extravagancies. She made notes of prices, thinking that her sister would be interested to compare them with those in Melbourne, and she could spend a whole day over choosing a pair of gloves, going from shop to shop, studying the quality. One day, she intended to visit the Zoo.

Silcox said that he liked to look in the jewellers’ windows. In the afternoons, he went to a News Cinema. Going home in the train, he read a newspaper and she looked at the backs of houses and little gardens, and later, fields or woods, staring as if hypnotised.

One morning, when she had returned to their bedroom after breakfast, he surprised her by following her there. This was the time of day when he took a turn about the garden or strolled along by the river.

When he had shut the door, he said quietly, ‘I’m afraid I must ask you something. I think it would be better if you were less tidy in here. It struck me this morning that by putting everything away out of sight, you will give rise to suspicion.’

Once, he had been a floor waiter in an hotel and knew, from taking breakfast in to so many married people, what their bedrooms usually looked like. His experience with his own wife he did not refer to.

‘I overheard Carrie saying what a tidy pair we were and she had never met anyone like it, not a pin in sight when she came into this room, she said.’

‘I respect your intentions,’ he said grandly, ‘but the last thing to serve our purpose is to appear in any way out of the ordinary. If you could have one or two things lying about – your hairbrush, perhaps – well, I leave it to
you – just a pot of something or other on the dressing-table. A wife would never hide everything away in the drawers. Carrie’s right, as it is there isn’t even a pin to be seen. Nothing to show it’s anyone’s room at all, except for the photograph.’

Edith blushed and pressed her lips tightly together. She turned away and made no reply. Although she knew that it had been difficult for him to make the suggestion, and sensible and necessary as she saw it to be, she was angry with him. She wondered why his words had so humiliated her, and could find no reason. He had reproved her before about her work – the water-lily napkins, for instance – but he had never angered her.

She waited for him to leave her and then she removed from the drawer a large, harsh-bristled brush, a boxful of studs and safety pins and a pot of Vaseline which she used in cold weather when her lips were chapped. In the early evening, when she came up to change, she found Silcox’s brushes beside hers, a shoe-horn dangled from the side of the mirror and his dressing-gown had been taken from his clothes cupboard and was hanging at the back of the door.

She felt very strange about it all and when she went downstairs she tried to direct all her thoughts towards her work.

‘He couldn’t be anyone else’s,’ said Carrie Hurt, the maid, looking at the photograph. She had the impertinence to take it up and go over to the window with it, to see it better.

‘He is thought to take more after his father’s side.’ Edith said, tempted to allow the conversation to continue, then wondering why this should be.

‘I expect it’s his father’s side that says it,’ Carrie replied. ‘Oh, I can see you. The way his hair grows on his forehead. His father’s got quite a widow’s peak.’

Edith found herself looking over Carrie’s shoulder, as if she had never seen the photograph before.

‘As a matter of fact, he is a little like my sister’s eldest boy,’ she conceded. ‘His cousin,’ she added, feeling wonder at the words.

‘Well, you must be proud of him. Such an open face,’ Carrie said, replacing the photograph in its right position and passing a duster over the glass.

‘Yes,’ said Edith. ‘He’s a good boy.’

She left Carrie and went downstairs and walked in the garden until it was time to go on duty. She went up and down the gravel paths and along by the river, but she could not overcome the excitement which lately disturbed her so, the sensation of shameful pleasure.

By the river’s edge, she came upon Silcox, who had taken up fishing in his spare time – a useful excuse for avoiding Edith’s company. He stood on
the bank, watching the line where it entered the water, and hardly turned his head as Edith approached him.

‘Where does he – where does Julian go to in the holidays?’ she asked.

‘He goes to relatives,’ Silcox answered.

She knew that she was interrupting him and that she must move on. As she did, he heard her murmuring anxiously, ‘I do so hope they’re kind.’

He turned his head quickly and looked after her, but she had gone mooning back across the lawn. The expression of astonishment stayed on his face for a long time after that, and when she took up her position in the dining-room before lunch, he looked at her with concern, but she was her usual forbidding and efficient self again.

‘Don’t we ever go to see him?’ she asked a few days later. ‘Won’t they think us strange not going?’

‘What we do in our free time is no concern of theirs,’ he said.

‘I only thought they’d think it strange.’

He isn’t real, none of it’s true, she now constantly reminded herself, for sometimes her feelings of guilt about that abandoned boy grew too acute.

Sometimes, on Sunday outings from school, boys were brought by their parents to have lunch at the hotel, and Edith found herself fussing over them, giving them huge helpings, discussing their appetites with their parents.

‘They’re all the same at that age,’ she would say. ‘I know.’

It was so unlike her to chat with the customers and quite against Silcox’s code. When he commented disdainfully upon her unusual behaviour, she seemed scarcely to listen to his words. The next Sunday, serving a double portion of ice-cream to a boy, she looked across at his mother and smiled. ‘I’ve got a son myself, madam,’ she said. ‘I know.’

Silcox, having overheard this, was too enraged to settle down to his fishing that afternoon. He looked for Edith and found her in the bedroom writing a letter to her sister.

‘It was a mistake – this about the boy,’ he said, taking up the photograph and glaring at it. ‘You have not the right touch in such matters. You carry the deception to excess. You go too far.’

‘Too far?’ she said brightly, but busy writing.

‘Our position is established. I think the little flourishes I thought up had their result.’

‘But they were all
your
little flourishes,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘You didn’t let
me
think of any, did you?’

He stared back at her and soon her eyes flickered, and she returned to her writing.

‘There won’t be any more,’ he said. ‘From me, or from you. Or any more
discussion of our affairs, do you understand? Carrie in here every morning gossiping, you chatting to customers, telling them such a pack of lies – as if it were all true, and as if they could possibly be interested. You know as well as I do how unprofessional it is. I should never have credited it of you. Even when we were at that dreadful place at Paignton, you conducted yourself with more dignity.’

‘I don’t see the harm,’ she said mildly.

‘And I don’t see the necessity. It’s courting danger for one thing – to get so involved. We’ll keep our affairs to ourselves or else we’ll find trouble ahead.

‘What time does the post go?’

Without reading her letter through, she pushed it into an envelope. Goodness knows what she has written, he thought. A mercy her sister was far away in Australia.

The photograph – the subject of their contention – he pushed aside, as if he would have liked to be rid of it.

‘You don’t seem to be paying much attention,’ he said. ‘I only warn you that you’d better. Unless you hope to make laughing stocks of both of us.’

Before she addressed the envelope, she looked gravely at him for a moment, thinking that perhaps the worst thing that could happen to him, the thing he had always dreaded most, was to be laughed at, to lose his dignity. ‘I used to be the same,’ she thought, taking up her pen.

‘Yes, I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I admit it freely. But we shall stand by it, since it’s made. We can hardly kill the boy off, now we’ve got him.’

She jerked round and looked at him, her face even paler than usual, then seemed to gather her wits again and bent her head. Writing rather slowly and unsteadily, she finished addressing the envelope.

‘I hope I shan’t have further cause for complaint,’ he said – rather as if he were her employer, as in fact he always felt himself to be. The last word duly spoken, he left her, but was frowning as he went downstairs. She was behaving oddly, something was not quite right about her and he was apprehensive.

Edith was smiling while she tidied herself before slipping out to the pillar box. ‘That’s the first tiff we’ve ever had,’ she thought. ‘In all our married life.’

‘I find
her
all right,’ Carrie Hurt said to the still-room maid. ‘Not standoffish, really, when you get to know her.’

‘It’s him I can’t abide.’

‘I’m sorry for her. The way he treats her.’

‘And can’t you tell he’s got a temper? You get that feeling, don’t you, that for two pins he’d boil over?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry for her. When he’s not there, she likes to talk. And dotes on that boy of theirs.’

‘Funny life it must be, not hardly ever seeing him.’

‘She’s going to soon, so she was telling me, when it’s his birthday. She was showing me the sweater she was knitting for him. She’s a lovely knitter.’

Silcox found Edith sitting in a secluded place at the back of the hotel where the staff were allowed to take the air. It was a cobbled courtyard, full of empty beer-crates and strings of tea-towels hung to dry. Pigeons walked up and down the outhouse roofs and the kitchen cat sat at Edith’s feet watching them. Edith was knitting a white, cable-stitch sweater and she had a towel across her lap to keep the wool clean.

‘I have just overheard that Carrie Hurt and the still-room girl discussing you,’ Silcox said, when he had looked round to make sure that there was no one to overhear him. ‘What is this nonsense about going to see the boy, or did my ears deceive me?’

‘They think we’re unnatural. I felt so ashamed about it that I said I’d be going on his birthday.’

‘And when is
that
, pray?’

‘Next month, the eighteenth. I’ll have the sweater done by then.’

She picked up the knitting pattern, studied it frowning.

‘Oh, it is, is it? You’ve got it all cut and dried. But his birthday happens to be in March.’

‘You can’t choose everything,’ she said. She was going on with her knitting and smiling.

‘I forbid you to say any more about the boy.’

‘You can’t, you see. People ask me how he’s getting on.’

‘I wish I hadn’t started the damn fool business.’

‘I don’t. I’m so glad you did.’

‘You’ll land us in gaol, do you realise that? And what is this you’re knitting?’ He knew, from the conversation he had overheard.

‘A sweater for him, for Julian.’

‘Do you know what?’ he said, leaning towards her and almost spitting the words at her, one after the other. ‘I think you’re going out of your mind. You’ll have to go away from here. Maybe we’d both better go, and it will be the parting of the ways.’

‘I don’t see any cause for that,’ said Edith. ‘I’ve never been so happy.’

But her happiness was nearly at an end: even before she could finish knitting the sweater, the spell had been broken.

A letter came from her sister, Hilda, in Melbourne. She wrote much less
frequently than Edith and usually only when she had something to boast about – this time it was one of the boys having won a tennis tournament.

‘She has always patronised me,’ Edith thought. ‘I have never harped on in that way about Julian. I don’t see why I should have hidden his light under a bushel all these years.’

She sat down at once and wrote a long letter about his different successes. Whatever Hilda’s sons may have done, Julian seemed to find it easy to do better. ‘We are sending him for a holiday on the Continent as a reward for passing his exams,’ she finished up. She was tired of silence and modesty. Those qualities had never brought her any joy, none of the wonderful exhilaration and sense of richness she had now. Her attitude towards life had been too drab and undemanding; she could plainly see this.

She took her letter to the village and posted it. She imagined her sister looking piqued – not puzzled – when she read it.

Silcox was in the bedroom when she returned. A drawer slid quickly shut and he was suddenly busy winding his watch. ‘Well, I suppose it’s time to put my hand to the wheel,’ he said in a voice less cold than it had been of late, as he went out.

Edith was suspicious of this voice, which was too genial, she thought, and she looked round to see if anything of hers had been tampered with. She was especially anxious about her knitting, which was so precious to her; but it was still neatly rolled up and hanging in a clean laundry-bag in her cupboard.

She opened the drawer which Silcox had so smartly closed and found a letter lying on top of a pile of black woollen socks. A photograph was half out of the envelope. Though he had thrust it out of sight when she came into the room, she realised that he had been perfectly easy in his mind about leaving it where it was, for it would be contrary to his opinion of her that she would pry or probe. ‘He knows nothing about me,’ she thought, taking the photograph to the window so that she could see it better.

She was alarmed at the way her heart began to leap and hammer, and she pressed her hand to her breast and whispered ‘Hush’ to its loud beating. ‘Hush, hush,’ she implored it, and sat down on her bed to wait for the giddiness to pass.

When she was steadier, she looked again at the two faces in the photograph. There was no doubt that one of them was Julian’s, though older than she had imagined and more defined than in the other photograph – the one that stood always on the chest of drawers.