Complete Short Stories (VMC) (78 page)

‘Some shade,’ she explained, handing him his towel. ‘And that awful transistor-set. They oughtn’t to be allowed.’

He patted his wet, sunburned face with the towel, glanced towards the two girls, and then quickly back at Deirdre. ‘You look very pretty sitting under this umbrella,’ he said. ‘I wish I had brought the camera.’

On Friday it was their last evening. The Crouches and the Troughtons were leaving too, and seemed to be in an especially festive mood. Trying to make less of their jollity, Deirdre worked hard at her now. She was animated, smiling at Bunny and raising her wine-glass to her lips, as if at some deep and secret understanding between them. She gave her dazzled attention to every word he said – as if his fascination for her was endless.

‘What can she see in him?’ Mrs Crouch asked her husband, exasperated by curiosity.

‘Or
he
in
her
?’

‘No, but I mean, to keep it up like this? She must be very new to the game. Don’t tell me any woman can find her husband as enthralling as that all the time. Or any man his wife, for that matter. Well, the novelty has to wear off.’

‘I can’t see why she has to try so hard. Don’t look now. She just tapped him on the hand as if he’d said something
risqué
. Naughty, naughty.’

‘Perhaps she has to try so hard because they’re not married. She may be in a very insecure position. He may have a real wife somewhere.’

‘We shall never know.’

‘Well, they’ve kept themselves to themselves so much,’ Mrs Crouch complained, taking her husband’s arm.

‘
She’s
kept
him
to
herself
.’

When they had had coffee in the courtyard, Deirdre went upstairs to tidy her hair. The hotel lounge was being arranged for dancing, the chairs pushed back and the rugs rolled up.

She did her hair, put on an extra necklace, then went out on to the balcony, feeling suddenly limp, headachy. The dance band had begun to play. From below, she could hear the rhythmic beat which depressed her and made her feel nervy.

She wished that the evening was over, or that they might go away from the hotel on another drive in a
calèche
– just quiet – and she and Bunny on their own; but she had not liked to suggest it.

At last, she went downstairs, and rather self-consciously made her way to the lounge. Bunny was dancing with the American’s Moroccan bride, who was again wearing the lime-green shift. He looked miserable and embarrassed when he saw Deirdre hesitating by the door, seemed to be trying to send a message to her, as if to say, with his anxious expression, ‘Wait, I shall come to you as soon as ever I can’.

But she did not wait. She turned and went out into the deserted courtyard and sat down, shivering beside the fountain. Bunny found her there, nursing the little grey cat, for warmth, and consolation.

‘Did you
see
her face?’ Mrs Crouch asked her husband, as they reversed nattily out of the way of the large bulldozing Troughtons. ‘He’s obviously not allowed to dance with other women.’

‘Certainly not with the second most beautiful woman in the room,’ said Mr Crouch, gazing down at Brenda’s faded hair …

‘I couldn’t avoid it,’ said Bunny.

‘Avoid what?’ asked Deirdre faintly.

‘He came up to me in the bar and insisted on buying me a drink. She
was with him. We stood chatting. They are on their honeymoon. Then the band struck up. He said he didn’t dance.’

The fountain dribbled. A nightingale was singing. She lifted the cat and kissed its fur.

‘It was the least I could do,’ he went on. He could not say how grateful he had been for someone else to have spoken to him at last.

‘Will you come and dance with me?’ he asked.

‘I’d rather not.’

‘To please me,’ he implored.

Carefully she put the cat down, brushed her lap and went before him to the lounge.

Bunny was quite deft at all the old-fashioned dances. Deirdre was taken into his arms as if into a stranger’s embrace. She had no sense of rhythm. Stiffly she shuffled, stumbled, blushed. He smiled gallantly and held her tighter, guiding her as adroitly as he could.

To make up for everything, she smiled. She smiled until her cheeks ached. Then she whispered, ‘After this, can we go for a walk?’

On the next day, on Saturday, the new, pale intake from the north began to arrive. The porter kept bringing down luggage for departing guests and piling it up in the hall – suitcases, and other loot such as camel saddles, rolled-up rugs and brass trays.

The Crouches and Troughtons came in from their last sunbathe, and there were the Wallaces in the hall, ready to depart. At this moment, the American came leaping up the steps with an armful of lilies, and just as Deirdre was going through the hall door he put them into her arms and said, with the most beautiful smile, ‘In homage!’

Mrs Troughton took off her sunglasses and stared at him.

He had gone down the steps and opened the car door for her, and Bunny wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it through the window.

‘In
homage
!’ Mrs Crouch repeated unbelievingly.

None of them had talked to the American before. His honeymoon state seemed to have insulated him; but when he came back into the hotel, Mrs Crouch could not contain herself. ‘Everyone departing,’ she said dramatically, throwing wide her arms. ‘After lunch, we’re off ourselves.’

‘I hope you have a good trip,’ he said politely. He was still holding the piece of paper in his hand.

‘Kind regards, Gerald Wallace, Morocco ’64,’ Mrs Troughton, a little behind him, read.

‘For my young brother,’ he said, waving the paper. ‘Sure he’ll be thrilled. I nerved myself last night and introduced myself. Maybe he gets tired of that, but he was pleasant all right, very pleasant.’

‘Gerald Wallace,’ Mrs Crouch said faintly. ‘But how did you know?’

‘Well, there’s the face in the photographs, and the name.’

‘
Gerald Wallace?
’ Mrs Troughton said, when the American had left them. ‘Well, really! That Bunny business put us off the scent. To think that Ralph’s been reading his book all the holiday – carrying it around, anyway! Where is it, my love?’ She took the paperback and looked at the photograph on the cover.

‘That must have been taken at least fifteen years ago. All that hair! Well, who would have thought it. How can that man have recognised him?’

‘Well, he did,’ said Mrs Crouch rather snappily. This was the nearest she had ever been to a celebrity, and she had let him slip through her fingers …

At lunch – since it could not now create a precedent – the Crouches were invited to join the Troughtons at their table.

They could talk of nothing else. ‘I wish I’d asked for his autograph,’ said Mrs Crouch, the most incredulous of them all. ‘Oh, the girls would have been fascinated, intrigued. Of course, Janice has got Sir Malcolm Sargent, you know. I could kick myself.’

‘It’s awfully odd, really,’ said Mrs Troughton. ‘Such a mild, henpecked little man, writing all those exotic stories.’

‘How does he get off the chain to find out about the underworld – all that violence?’ asked Ralph Troughton.

‘To think it’s the last meal,’ said his wife, gazing out of the window at the familiar scene, so soon to be a thing of the past.

‘All those spies and loose women, Buenos Aires and those sorts of places. Casablanca, Monte Carlo.’

‘We didn’t get to Casablanca after all, Ralph,’ said Mrs Troughton.

‘International harlots,’ said Mrs Crouch, flushing with excitement.

‘The last dates,’ said her husband, taking a few.

‘Well, we have tripped up,’ his wife said, in a more resigned voice. Then, as if suddenly she couldn’t get home fast enough, she put down her napkin and asked, ‘Have we time for coffee?’

She was back in Guildford in her mind, all the tiresome travelling suddenly over, and she was saying to the girls, and her daily help, and her friends at the bridge club, ‘Now you’ll never guess who we met on holiday. Staying in the hotel.’ They would never guess, and when they were told, they would crowd in with questions that she would be able to answer.

‘Now you’ve got our address,’ she said to the Troughtons. ‘And we shall never forgive you if you don’t drop in any time you’re in Guildford.’

Mrs Troughton let it go. Dreamily, she peeled an orange – knew that she was unlikely to be in Guildford, whereas everybody was in London at some time or another – especially in the part in which she and Ralph had their flat.

The Crouches went upstairs to finish packing, and Mrs Troughton smiled at her husband as if to say, ‘What odd people! But it’s over now.’ They would certainly go out to see them off in the car, before they got ready to leave themselves; but really the Crouches had already changed into shades – like the Tillotsons in Majorca and those people whose name they had forgotten in Corfu.

Guildford was gloomy, an anticlimax. The sun-lounge was dark and the large windows streaming with rain. The girls were glad to see their parents, and they listened dutifully – even appreciatively – to the holiday stories. A most united family.

The very next morning, after their homecoming, Mrs Crouch went out to the public library to look up Gerald Wallace in
Who’s Who
: W
ALLACE
, Gerald,
author; b.
3
July
1912. Looked older, thought Mrs Crouch. What a long list of books! European War – despatches three times. Who would have thought it? We were as wrong as could be, Mrs Crouch decided, peering at the rather small print, her finger underlining it. So very wrong. It was twenty-seven years ago that he had married Deirdre Imogen Burnett – his one and only wife.

Mrs Crouch left the library, put up her umbrella and picked her way through the streets to the coffee-shop.

‘Goodness, how brown you are!’ her friends said enviously, who were waiting for her among the horse-brasses and copper warming-pans.

‘Did you have a marvellous time?’ they asked.

She sat down and drew off her gloves, smiling as if to herself; then she raised her head and looked round the table at her friends’ pale faces and, ‘Guess,’ she began, ‘guess who …’

Here was London – Willie, Vron and Aunt in the station hotel restaurant. Aunt had brought them from the country, to settle them in their new homes; but before taking them – Vron to the hostel, Willie to lodgings – she had stopped at one or two discreet-looking bars and, finally, at a shabby corner public house – discretion, by then, having ceased to count for anything.

Vron and Willie loved her in a vague way, rather as they had after a fashion still loved their animal pets when the novelty of them had worn off: but it was from a sense of responsibility that they had come back to the station with her, to see her safely on to the train. It was, after all, because of them that she had taken to drink, although they had always suspected that she must in the first place have been a little that way inclined.

It was early evening and the restaurant, luckily, was almost empty. A pale light fell on the white table-cloth and the silvery dish-covers the waitress lifted off their in-between-meals food – poached eggs on toast, with baked beans under the eggs for Willie and sardines (the waitress had looked aghast) for Vron.

They watched Aunt put her knife uncertainly into her egg; and, as the yolk ran out, she seemed to recoil. Nevertheless, they intended her to eat something. Having stowed her in the train, with food in her, they could feel at peace, and forget her. At the other end, the village taxi-driver would meet her, and he knew her habits. They might call at the Bell on their way home. Safely there – the Bell
or
home – she was in her own country. There were people to lift a finger.

‘But will you ever find your way back?’ she now asked
them
, and for the fifth or sixth time. ‘Keep seeing one another to and fro could go on all night.’

‘I
dote
on sardines,’ said Vron. ‘I feel I could never have enough of them. Even when they make me sick, the minute after, I’m ready for them again. What could
you
never have enough of, Willie? Aunt?’

Well, the latter of course she knew, and Willie never answered such questions, which seemed to him like talking for the sake of talking.

‘I do hope you’ll both be all right,’ Aunt said. She carefully lifted her
fork to her mouth, and runny yolk dropped through the prongs on to her blouse. Vron inexpertly dabbed at her.

‘I shall miss them,’ Aunt thought. (In fits and starts, but such very terrible fits and starts.) The angelic siblings, who had never quarrelled, whose rare gravity, even, was amiable. They had the charmed relationship she and their mother had had until the hour of her death. That was a grief, a lack, which did not come and go in fits and starts; but remained, like a long, tired yawn, in the depth of her heart.

She glanced mistily at the two – Vron and Willie – the fluorescent light falling on their silky, beige hair, their pale, composed faces. Vron ate her disgusting mixture with style – as she did everything – appreciatively, but without absorption. Then Aunt put her knife and fork together, defeated. She longed to be home. She sat quite still, with bent head, attempting to assemble facts; but it was like trying to catch goldfish with her hand – the facts slithered from her grasp. She was at the end of her tether, not daring to ask questions, lest she had asked them before, and before that, and had perhaps all day done nothing else but ask. However, no clue from her muddled mind coming to aid her, she said suddenly, in an off-hand voice, barely saying it, looking at the same time into her handbag, ‘Let me see, I
did
give you your money, didn’t I? You’re all
right
?’

‘Yes, Aunt,’ they said, not glancing at one another – their manners towards her too good for that.

Willie paid the waitress, and Vron put Aunt’s arms back into her coat-sleeves; then, one on each side of her, they made their way to the platform. The train was in, and they found an empty, first-class compartment.

‘Don’t wait, darlings,’ she said, leaning out of the window. They looked so pale and slight, standing there together, looking up at her. Could she be doing the right thing, she wondered; leaving them in London, so young, only just left school? Today, London had seemed like a jungle to her, with noisy, discordant public houses, terrifying traffic, jostling throngs. Other hazards of London, not being in her experience, she did not envisage for them.