Complete Short Stories (VMC) (73 page)

In the sitting-room, with frail and shaking hands, she offered him a chocolate box; there was one chocolate left in it. It was stale and had a bloom on it, and might be poisoned, he thought; but he took it politely and turned it about in his mouth. It was very hard and tasted musty. ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ his mother would say, when his body was discovered.

Mrs May began then to tell him about the fields and park and her pony. He felt drowsy and wondered if the poison were taking effect. She had such a beautiful voice – wavering, floating – that he could not believe in his
heart that she would do him any harm. The room was airless and he sat in a little spoon-shaped velvet chair and stared up at her, listening to a little of her story, here and there. Living alone, except for the mice, she had no one to blame her when she spilt egg and tea down her front, he supposed; and she had taken full advantage of her freedom. She was really very dirty, he decided dispassionately. But smelt nice. She had the cosy smell that he liked so much about his guinea-pigs – a warm, stuffy, old smell.

‘I’d better go,’ he said suddenly. ‘I might come back again tomorrow.’

She seemed to understand at once, but like all grown-up people was compelled to prolong the leave-taking a little. He answered her questions briefly, anxious to be off once he had made up his mind to go.

‘There,’ he said, pointing up the hill. ‘My house is there.’ The gilt weather-vane, veering round, glittered in the sun above the slate roofs.

‘Our old stables,’ Mrs May said quite excitedly. ‘Oh, the memories.’

He shut the gate and sauntered off, between piles of bricks and tiles on the site where more houses were being built. Trees had been left standing here and there, looking strange upon the scarred, untidy landscape. William walked round the foundations of a little house, stood in the middle of a rectangle and tried to imagine a family sitting at a table in the middle of it, but it seemed far too small. The walls were only three bricks high. He walked round them, one foot before the other, his arms lifted to keep his balance. Some workmen shouted at him. They were tiling the roof of a nearby house. He took no notice, made a completed round of the walls and then walked off across the rough grass, where Mrs May had ridden her pony when she was a little girl.

‘Do you
hear
me?’ his mother said again, her voice shrill, with anxiety and vexation. She even took William’s shoulder and shook him. ‘You are
not
to talk to strangers.’

His sister, Jennifer, who was ballet-mad, practised an arabesque, and watched the scene without interest, her mind on her own schemes.

William looked gravely at his mother, rubbing his shoulder.

‘Do you understand?’

He nodded.

‘That’s right, remember what your mother told you,’ his father said, for the sake of peace.

The next morning, William took a piece of cheese from the larder and a pen-knife and went to the building-site. His mother was having an Italian lesson. Some of the workmen were sitting against a wall in the sun, drinking tea and eating bread and cheese, and William sat down among them, settling himself comfortably with his back against the wall. He cut pieces
of cheese against his thumb as the others did and popped them neatly into his mouth. They drew him into solemn conversation, winking at one another above his head. He answered them politely, but knew that they were making fun of him. One wag, going too far, grimacing too obviously, asked: ‘And what is your considered opinion of the present emergency?’

‘I don’t know,’ William replied, and he got up and walked away – more in sorrow than in anger, he tried to convey.

He lingered for a while, watching a bulldozer going over the uneven ground, opening wounds in the fields where Mrs May had ridden her pony; then he wandered on towards the main road. Mrs May came out to her front doorstep and dropped an apronful of crumbs on to the path. Thrushes and starlings descended about her.

‘So you’re back again,’ she called. ‘I am shortly off to the shops. It will be nice to have a boy go with me.’ She went inside, untying her apron.

He tried to swing on the gate, but it was lopsided. When she came out after a long time, she was wearing a torn raincoat, although it was quite hot already. It had no buttons and hung open. Her dirty jersey was held to her flat chest with rows of jet beads.

William noted that they were much stared at as they passed the bus queue and, in the butcher’s shop, Mrs May was the subject of the same knowing looks and gravely-kept straight faces that he himself had suffered from the builders. He felt, uncomfortably, that this behaviour was something that children came to expect, but that an older person should neither expect nor tolerate. He could not find words to explain his keen uneasiness on Mrs May’s account.

He watched the butcher unhook a drab piece of liver, slap it on the counter and cut off a slice.

‘When I think of the saddles of mutton, the sucking pigs …’ said Mrs May vaguely, counting out coppers.

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said the butcher’s wife, with a straight face turned towards her husband.

Outside the shop, Mrs May continued the list. ‘And ribs of beef, green goose at Michaelmas,’ she chattered on to herself, going past the dairy, the grocer’s, the draper’s, with quick, herringbone steps. William caught glimpses of themselves reflected in the shop windows, against a pyramid of syrup tins, then a bolt of sprigged cotton.

‘And what are
you
going to tell
me
?’ Mrs May suddenly asked. ‘I can’t do all the entertaining, you know. Are you quite warm up there in the stables? Have you beds and chairs and all you need?’

‘We have even more beds than we need.’

‘Well, don’t ask me to imagine it, because I can’t. Shall we turn back?
I’ll buy an egg at the dairy and I might get some stale bread for the birds. “My only friends,” I say to them, as they come to greet me.’

‘You have the mice as well.’

‘I can’t make friends with mice. The mice get on my nerves, as a matter of fact.’

‘You could get a cat,’ he suggested.

‘And seem more like a witch than ever?’

There appeared to be no stale bread at the baker’s. At sight of Mrs May, the woman behind the counter seemed to shutter her face; stood waiting with lowered eyes for them to go.

When they reached Mrs May’s broken gate – with only the slice of meat and the egg – William would not go in. He ran home as fast as he could over the uneven ground, his heart banging, his throat aching.

When he reached it, the house was quiet and a strange, spicy smell he could not identify came from the kitchen. His mother, as well as her Italian lessons, had taken up Japanese cooking. His sister, returning from ballet class, with her shoes hanging from her neck by their ribbons, found him lying on the floor pushing a toy car back and forth. Her suspicions were roused; for he was pretending to be playing, she was convinced, with an almost cross-eyed effort at concentration. He began to hum unconcernedly. Jennifer’s nose wrinkled. ‘It smells as if we’re going to have that horrid soup with stalks in it.’

‘I like it,’ he murmured.

‘You would. What have you been doing, anyway?’

Still wearing her coat, she practised a few
pliés
.

‘Never waste a moment,’ he thought.

‘Nothing.’

But she was not interested in him; had been once – long ago, it seemed to her, when his birth she hoped would brighten up the house. The novelty of him had soon worn off.

‘The death duties,’ Mrs May explained. Because of them, she could not light a fire until the really chilly days and sometimes had only an egg to eat all day. These death duties William thought of as moral obligations upon which both her father and husband had insisted on discharging while dying – some charitable undertakings, plainly not approved of by Mrs May. He was only puzzled by the varying effect of this upon her day-to-day life; sometimes she was miserably conscious of her poverty, but at other times she bought peppermint creams for herself and William and digestive biscuits for the birds.

Every time she opened or shut the garden gate, she explained how she would have had it mended if it were not for the death duties.
The
death
duties made them sound a normal sort of procedure, a fairly usual change of heart brought about perhaps by the approach of death and clearly happening not only in Mrs May’s family.

The days were beginning to grow chilly, too chilly to be without a fire. The leaves on the great chestnut trees about the building-site turned yellow and fell. William went back to school and called on Mrs May only on Saturday mornings. He did not miss her. His life was suddenly very full and some weeks he did not go at all and she fretted for him, watching from a window like a love-sick girl, postponing her visit to the shops. She missed not only him, but her glimpses – from his conversation – of the strange life going on up in the old stables. His descriptions – in answer to her questions – and what she read into them formed a bewildering picture. She imagined the family sitting round the bench in the old harness room, drinking a thin soup with blades of grass in it – the brisk mother, the gentle, dreamy father and an objectionable little girl who kept getting down from the frugal meal to practise
pas-de-chat
across the old, broken brick floor. She had built the scene from his phrases – ‘My mother will be cross if I’m late’ (more polite, he thought, than ‘My mother will be cross if she knows I came to see you’), and ‘My father wouldn’t mind.’ His sister, it seemed, complained about the soup; apart from this, she only talked of Margot Fonteyn. But confusions came into it – in William’s helping to clean silver for a dinner party and having been sent to bed early for spilling ink on a carpet. Silver and carpets were hard to imagine as part of the old stables.

She had forgotten what a family was like, and had never had much chance of learning – only child and childless wife. William was too young to be a satisfactory informant. He was haphazardly selective, interested too much in his own separate affairs, unobservant and forgetful of the adult world; yet she managed to piece something together and it had slowly grown – a continuous story, without direction or catharsis – but could no longer grow if he were not to visit her.

Holding the curtains, her frail hands shook. When he did come, he was enticed to return. On those mornings now, there were always sweets. But her questions tired him, as they tire and antagonise all children, who begin to feel uneasily in the wrong rôle. He had by now satisfied his curiosity about her and was content to let what he did not understand – the death duties, for instance – lie at peace.

‘You shall have this when I’m gone,’ she began to say, closing the lid of the sandalwood box in which she kept the old photographs. Also promised was her father’s sword and scabbard, in which William was more interested, and a stuffed parrot called Bertha – once a childhood pet and still talked to as if no change had taken place.

One morning, she saw him playing on the building-site and went out to
the gate and called to him, lured him into the garden and then the house with witch-like tactics, sat him down on the spoon-shaped chair and gave him a bag of sweets.

‘And how is your mother?’ she enquired. She had a feeling that she detested the woman. William nodded absent-mindedly, poking about in the sweet bag. His hair was like gold silk, she thought.

‘People have always lost patience with me,’ she said, feeling his attention wandering from her. ‘I only had my beauty.’

She was going on to describe how her husband’s attention had also wandered, then thought it perhaps an unsuitable subject to discuss with a child. She had never discussed it with anyone else. Such a vague marriage – and her memories of it were vague, too – seemed farther away than her childhood.

A mouse gnawed with a delicate sound in the wainscot and William turned his gaze towards it, waiting for the minutes to pass until the time when he could rise politely from the dusty chair and say good-bye.

‘If only he would tell me!’ Mrs May thought in despair. ‘Tell me what there was for breakfast, for instance, and who said what and who went where, so that I could have something to think about in the evening.’

‘Oh, well, the winter will come if it means to,’ she said aloud. Rain had swept in a gust upon the window, as if cast upon the little panes in spite. ‘Nothing we can do can stop it. Only dig in and make ourselves comfortable – roast chestnuts on my little coal shovel.’ William glanced from the wainscot to the empty grate, but Mrs May seemed not to see its emptiness. ‘Once, when I had a
nice
governess, we roasted some over the schoolroom fire. But the next governess would never let me do anything that pleased me. “Want must be your master,” she said. She had many low phrases of that kind. Yes, “want must be your master”,’ she said again, and sighed.

The visit was running down and her visitor simply sitting there until he could go. Courageously, when he had refused another peppermint cream and showed that he did not want to see again the photograph of her home, she released him, she even urged him to go, speeding him on his way, and watched him from the open door, her hands clasped close to her flat chest. He was like a most beloved caged bird that she had set at liberty. She felt regret and yet a sense of triumph, seeing him go.

She returned to the room and looked dully at the stuffed parrot, feeling a little like crying, but she had been brought up not to do so. ‘Yes, want must be your master, Bertha,’ she said, in a soft but serene voice.

‘I can’t see harm in it,’ William’s father told his wife. Jennifer had seen William leaving Mrs May’s and hurried to tell her mother, who began complaining the moment her husband returned for lunch.

‘She’s stark, staring mad and the place is filthy, everybody says so.’

‘Children sometimes see what we can’t.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that. I forbade him to go there and he repeatedly disobeyed me. You should speak to him.’

So his father spoke to William – rather off-handedly, over his shoulder, while hanging his coat up in the hall, as William passed through.