Complete Short Stories (VMC) (71 page)

‘It sounds nice and lively. Big and clean and everything new. Not like this dirty old place.’

‘Well, why not go then? You seem to be all right for money,’ he said angrily.

She walked on in silence, thinking, ‘I shan’t have a penny.’

They came to the terrace of houses alongside the canal. There was a light in her father’s room and a car outside the front door.

‘I’ll have to go in, I suppose,’ she said. She crossed the road, away from him, reluctantly. ‘See you!’ She turned and shouted, her hand on the door knob.

‘Hush, girl,’ said the doctor, opening the door suddenly to come out. ‘Better go in to your mother.’

‘Why, has something happened?’

‘You’d better run along in. See what you can do for your mother.’ Even he seemed to have a poor opinion of her.

‘I can’t face it,’ Rita thought, but she went in, closed the door after her and leant back against it, trying to summon her courage.

Her grandmother sat by the kitchen fire, her screwed-up handkerchief
held to her mouth. She stared at Rita, but for once no phrases came to her lips. Then she was suddenly overcome by grief, got up stiffly, and went from the room.

‘Oh, Lord, how long does this last?’ Rita wondered. She filled the kettle at the tap in the scullery and was bringing it in to set it on the kitchen range when her mother came downstairs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Was going to make a cup of tea,’ Rita replied.

‘Don’t overstrain yourself.’

Rita set down the kettle and looked at her mother, who stood very straight on the other side of the table, a letter in her hand.

‘All these weeks,’ she began, ‘you know how wicked you have been. I wouldn’t like anyone else in the world to know the wicked things you’ve done. That was money your father and I scraped and saved …’ Her voice trembled, and she paused for a moment, looking down at the table, and then at the letter in her hand. ‘He knew all the time, poor man. He just thought it would be easier for us to carry on as if he didn’t … so good always …’ She read the few lines of the letter again with her tear-blurred eyes. ‘He put this in his drawer all that time ago, when he came back from the hospital … all that time ago, the poor man … Where are you going now?’ she asked sharply, her voice changing.

‘Nowhere. Just to put out some cups and saucers.’

‘You can stay where you are for the time being. I’ve got something to tell you about yourself that it’s about time you knew. There’s a shock coming to you, my girl, and you’ve been deserving one for a long time.’

Rita shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the arm of the chair, staring at the fire glowing between the bars of the grate and listening to the gently humming kettle, hardly at all to what her mother had to say.

‘As if I should care,’ she thought.

The furnished flat in a London suburb fell vacant on a Monday and Hilda Provis, having collected the key from the agents in the High Street, walked down the hill towards Number Twenty. It was half-past eleven in the morning and early summer. In the quiet road, houses – some quite large – stood in dusty gardens full of may trees and laburnums, past blossoming. There had been no rain for a fortnight and, in the gutters and under garden walls, drifts of powdery dead petals and seeds had collected. The air had a dry, polleny smell.

It was a strange land to Hilda, and a great adventure. She was to be here for a week, to see her daughter settled into the flat; had quite insisted on coming, had been obliged to insist; for Pat had thought she could manage very well on her own, had begged her mother not to put herself to so much trouble, coming so far – from the country near Nottingham, in fact. There was no need, she had written. But Hilda desperately maintained that there was.

When Pat first went to work in London, living there in a hostel, Hilda, left alone and nervous at night, moved to her sister’s, thinking that anything was better than seeming to hear burglars all the time; but she and her brother-in-law did not get on well together, and she longed for a home of her own and to have her daughter back. It was with a joyful excitement that she descended the hill this morning and pushed open the heavy gate of Number Twenty.

It was a tall house with a flight of steps to the front door and below them a basement area. The garden was neglected, growing only ferns and the grass between the broken tiles of the path. The lawn at the back was on a lower level – in fact, the house was found to be built on a hillside. Down below, beyond the roofs of other houses, was London itself – grey, but for one or two bone-white church spires, sudden glitterings from windows or weather vanes struck by the sun, and one green dome floating in haze.

Hilda stood by the side door with the key in her hand and looked down at the view. It is a panorama, she thought; that really is the word for it. She could imagine it at night – dazzling it would be. She had never seen anything like it. Life teemed down there – traffic strove to disentangle itself,
Pat pounded her typewriter; but to Hilda it was a lulled and dormant city, under its nearly midday haze, nothing doing, nothing stirring. She could not imagine anything happening beneath those pigeon-coloured roofs going down, street after street, lower and lower into the smoky mist.

After the brilliant out-of-doors, she was hit by cold dismay when she unlocked the door and stepped inside – such darkness, such an unfriendly smell of other people’s belongings. The flat was clean, but not up to Hilda’s standards. She went from the hall into a kitchen. The previous tenants had left remains – a little flour in a bin, some sugar in a jar, a worn-out dishcloth and a piece of dirty soap. She disposed of these before taking off her hat. A spider sat in the sink and she swilled it down the drain.

The living-room window looked into the area. She opened it and let in the sound of footsteps on the pavement above. Furniture was either black and in the Jacobean style, or Indian with trellis-work and brass. So many twisted chair-legs needing a polish. A green stain had been allowed to spread from bath taps to plug, but Hilda knew a way of removing it. The bedroom was full of sunshine, for the smeared windows looked out over the lawn at the back and at the panorama beyond it. It smelt of sun-warmed carpet and cushion dust. She opened the windows, and then the drawers of the chest. They were lined with old paper and there were oddments left behind in most of them – curtain-rings, safety-pins, a strip of beading which she could see had fallen off the wardrobe. This she could glue on again, though it was not her duty to do so. Of the two beds, she thought Pat would prefer the one by the window.

In the afternoon, she went shopping. The street where the shops were climbed steeply towards the heath and, turning corners, looking down side streets, she was sometimes surprised by a sudden openness and glimpsed from different sides the city below.

Everything she bought added to her pleasure and excitement. She was reminded of being a bride again. It seemed a long time since she had planned a meal or chosen a piece of fish or done anything on her own. Knowing no one in the shops, she felt shy; but her loneliness was wonderful to her and her slow pace, as she sauntered along, was tuned to it.

The leisurely afternoon was very pleasant. Babies lay awake under the canopies of their perambulators, staring sternly upwards, making purling sounds like doves, or fidgeted, turning their wrists impatiently, arching their backs and thrusting limbs out into the sunshine. Hilda peeped at each one, stooped to look under the canopies, and blew kisses. If she had been childless herself, she thought she must have looked in another direction. As it was, she just felt momentarily wistful; it was nothing distressing. The young mothers all paused for her, quite patient while they shared their marvels.

Everything glittered in the fine air of this high suburb. A warm rubbery
puff of air flowed out from the Underground station at the crossroads; and out of it, too, in a couple of hours, Pat would hasten – on a tide of rush-hour workers, gradually thinning themselves out in different directions, she down the hill under the trees to Number Twenty.

Outside a greengrocer’s, on the wide pavement, was a stall of bedding plants and, although her basket was full, Hilda stopped to buy a pot of bright red double daisies. (‘Chubby daisies’, Pat had called them when she was a little girl.) She was tired, for she had scoured the bath, and polished all the curly furniture, and was not used to doing so much. At her sister’s, she was inclined to indispositions and began most days with a health bulletin which was taken in silence – discourteously, she thought. They were selfish people – her sister and brother-in-law – she had long ago decided; too much wrapped up in themselves, in the manner of childless people.

The front door of Number Twenty was open, and there were sounds of life. A toddler with wide-apart legs, napkins dropping, came on to the steps, then an arm swooped after him and lifted him back out of sight. ‘I could get to know them,’ Hilda thought. ‘I could keep an ear open for the baby while they went for a stroll in the evening.’ She even chose a pub in which they – whoever they were – could sit and have a quiet drink. She had noticed a nice one on her walk home from the shops; it had a horse-trough outside and a chestnut tree – like a country pub.

The flat was cool and smelt better now. She had discovered that other people’s belonging were more interesting than her own – which by now were so familar as to be invisible. She had innovated, improvised with the material to hand and was pleased with the effect. Unpacking her basket, stacking food on bare shelves, she remembered her first home, her first shopping – such a young bride she had been that she had thought of it as running the errands, until the moving truth had dawned on her that she herself must choose, and pay for, and bring home. Again, after all those years, she had a feeling of being watched, of not being entirely spontaneous. Methodically, she put the food away, washed some lettuce, found a saucer for the pot of daisies and began to lay the table for supper. ‘Hilda’s managing well,’ she seemed to hear a voice say. It was as if she were doing everything for the first time.

The evening began to go slowly. She wandered about, waiting for Pat, putting finishing touches, glancing at the clock, straightening pictures (‘Too awful,’ she thought – heathery moorlands, a rosy glow on the Alps), turning the chipped side of a vase to the wall.

She would have liked to unpack the big suitcase which had arrived from the hostel, but she had done this for her daughter before, and been told that she was interfering.

She sat down in the living-room, and stared out of the window, waiting
for Pat’s legs to appear above the area. She was by now quite nervous with anticipation, and felt that the girl would never come.

As long-awaited people come in the end as a surprise, so Pat did.

‘Hello, dear,’ Hilda said, almost shyly, when she had hurried to open the door.

‘My
feet
!’ Pat said, flopping into a chair, dropping gloves and parcels on the floor. She kicked off her shoes and stared down at her large, bare, mottled feet. Her heaviness – of bone and features – suggested sculpture.
Seated Woman
she might have been, glumly motionless.

‘Did you have a bad day?’ Hilda asked timidly.

‘Oh, I had a bad day all right,’ Pat said, as if this went without saying. She leant back now – almost
Reclining Woman
– and shook a lock of hair off her forehead. ‘That man!’ She yawned and her eyes watered. Even looking at her made Hilda feel weary. The man was Mr Wharton, Pat’s employer – a big Masonic Golfer, as she described him. He had a habit of returning from lunch at half-past three and then would dictate letters at a great rate to make up for lost time, and Pat, trying at the end of the day to keep up, was worn out, she said, by the time she left to join the rush-hour traffic. Mr Wharton was a very real person to Hilda, who had never seen him.

‘Inconsiderate,’ she said, made quite indignant by Pat’s long plaint.

‘Comes back reeking – face the colour of those daisies.’

‘Disgusting,’ Hilda murmured, following Pat’s glance. ‘I bought them this afternoon. “Chubby daisies”, you used to call them.’

‘Did I?’ Pat was not so much in love with herself as a child as her mother was and Hilda always found this indifference strange. ‘Expense accounts,’ Pat went on, and blew out her lips in contempt. ‘Eat and drink themselves stupid, and then go home and tell their wives what a hard day they’ve had. Well, it all looks very nice,’ she said at last, glancing round. ‘Even my cardigan smells of his bloody cigars.’ She sniffed at her sleeve with distaste. ‘You literally can’t see across the office.’

A huge man, like a bison, Hilda visualised. She felt great respect for her daughter, cooped up in that blue haze with such a character – managing him, too, with her icy reminders, her appearance at other times of praying for patience, her eyes closed, her pencil tapping her teeth. Hilda could see it all from her descriptions – Pat giving him one of her looks and saying briskly ‘Do you mind’ when he stood too close to her. It was not a question.

Mother and daughter had changed places, Hilda sometimes thought. She felt like a young girl in the shade of Pat’s knowledge of the world. Yet once she herself had worked for her living – serving in a milliner’s shop, full of anxieties, trying to oblige, so afraid of displeasing and being dismissed.
To earn one’s livelihood is a precarious affair, and even Pat would say, ‘Well, if I can hold down a job like that for all these years …’ She held it down firmly, her clever eyes on those who might try to snatch it from her; but she made it sound a desperate business.

‘Well, it’s nice not to be in that perishing hostel,’ she said. Hilda glowed with pleasure when they sat down at the table and Pat began to eat, as if she were quite content to be where she was. ‘Canteens!’ she said. ‘The Lord preserve me from them. Tinned pilchards. Cottage pie. Never again.’

Hilda had been worried for years about the food, especially as she had heard about working girls in London going without lunch – window-shopping or having their hair done instead. ‘It will all be different now,’ she thought, watching Pat’s knife and fork slashing criss-cross at the food which, though not commented on, seemed to be approved. ‘I can’t at her age,’ Hilda thought, ‘tell her not to talk with her mouth full’ – for all the time the knife and fork were shredding and spearing and popping things into her mouth, Pat was describing Mr Wharton’s private life. Hilda found it all trivial and uninteresting. She did not care enough to try to visualise Mr Wharton gardening on Saturday, playing golf on Sundays and going to cocktail parties, of which there seemed to be so many in the Green Belt where he lived. She saw him more clearly in his smoke-filled office.