Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (11 page)

‘But will you?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ he said. She wondered if this were a sort of Lady Swayne parlance – the being afraid of what might positively please him. ‘I’m expecting someone at home,’ he added.

Mrs Palfrey was quite astonished, having imagined him living rather like a hermit, once back from Harrods, and writing, writing.

‘A bird,’ he said, and he narrowed his eyes mischievously, endearingly.

‘A bird,’ she murmured, giving herself time, and took another great sniff at the bunch of violets.

‘Called Rosie.’

At that moment, out of the lift stepped brocaded Lady Swayne. Mrs Palfrey, who had sometimes in her life been majestic, but never graceful, thrust out the violets as Lady Swayne paused beside her.

‘A breath of spring,’ she said. She seemed un
coordinated, Ludo thought, like a robot that had gone wrong. Lady Swayne took full advantage of this state of mind, with a flowing, gracious gesture. ‘Exquisite,’ she breathed, in the softest of tones. ‘Alas, though! They never last.’

‘My grandson,’ Mrs Palfrey continued wildly, nodding towards Ludo.

‘Ah, I’ve heard of you; heard of you.’

‘Desmond,’ Mrs Palfrey added firmly. ‘Lady Swayne.’

‘You are at the B.M., I believe,’ said Lady Swayne.

Mrs Palfrey was alarmed, but Ludo’s pause was brief. ‘For my sins,’ he said, smiling. He had often thought of using this meaningless phrase, which was one of the Major’s favourites.

‘Do you know Carr Templeton?’

Mrs Palfrey was now mesmerised like a startled hare. ‘Only vaguely,’ said Ludo. He had quickly summed up Lady Swayne, and now decided that Carr Templeton must be grand, or would not have been mentioned by her. ‘I am hardly on that plane as yet,’ he said, and almost added ‘for my sins’ again, but took a grip of himself. He might have extricated himself by talking of being in different departments, if he had known what Carr Templeton’s department was. He was not even sure of his own, and felt that the British Museum background should be gone into in greater detail.

‘You are young,’ Lady Swayne was saying graciously. ‘Your time will come.’

‘My Grandmamma is going to give me a glass of
sherry.’ (Tor my sins’ would have gone beautifully with that, too.) He moved a little, and took Mrs Palfrey’s elbow.

‘That will be nice,’ said Lady Swayne. ‘Your grandmother has such peaceful, quiet evenings that you will make a little change for her. Unlike poor little me.’ (She was at least five feet ten, and with shoulders like a bison’s.) ‘I am whirled round London in a way more fitting to a deb than an old, old lady. Yes, a taxi, please, Summers. This evening …’ – she sighed – ‘I’m off to the Savoy,’ and then, to Ludo’s immense delight, she added, ‘for my sins.’ It is infectious, he decided.

They left her to pace about while poor Summers kept leaping off the pavement outside, waving his arms, whistling shrilly into the twilight, to no avail.

Mrs Palfrey and Ludo went to the bar end of the lounge, the bell was pressed and Antonio, the ancient waiter, shuffled in. ‘I always think Antonio is more the name for a
young
man,’ Mrs Palfrey said in a low voice, having given her order. ‘You came
so
well out of your ordeal, dear boy.’

She laid the violets carefully on the table. They were curling up already, Ludo noticed, as Lady Swayne so obviously had.

‘I am sorry to enmesh you in this falsehood,’ Mrs Palfrey said with dignity.

‘Oh, I adore it,’ he said. ‘I love hazards, as long as they aren’t the kind one can be put in prison for.’

‘Oh, I should hope
not –
if I thought …’

‘The Bristol Cream, the Tio Pepe,’ Antonio said.
His hands holding the tray shook – like most hands at the Claremont, Ludo supposed.
He
put his hands in his trousers, and tried, furtively, to reckon up how much money he had.

‘Do let
me
pay for this,’ he said, ‘for I suggested it.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs Palfrey. He had been sure she would. ‘I am quite delighted to see you.’

‘It was very kind of you,’ he said, patting the sweater. ‘I never had anything knitted especially for me before, except once my mother says she made me some leggings when I was little. When she sewed them up both feet faced the same way. No matter: I had to wear them. She crammed my little feet into them, and that’s why I always walk like this now.’ He got up and dragged his feet sideways across the carpet. Those same dangerous shoes, she noted.

‘Oh, you’ll be the death of me; you really will,’ Mrs Palfrey said, laughing so much. She had not laughed for a long time.

Mrs Burton, sitting opposite them, threw back her head and laughed, too, wishing to join in the fun.

‘Rather Bohemian,’ Mrs Post, at the other end of the room, whispered behind her knitting to Mrs Arbuthnot.

Ludo came back to Mrs Palfrey, patted her hand and sat down beside her again.

He drank some sherry, and then murmured to her, ‘I wonder about your friends here.’

She saw real concern on the face he turned towards her. ‘Are they all that nice? Are they nice enough for
you,
I mean?’

That night she lay awake for a long time, savouring the phrase –
Are they nice enough for you, I mean?
She had had cherished things said to her in her life, but they were far away in the past. But such treasures, she thought, no one can ever take away.

Then, that girl, Rosie, the bird, she remembered. Is she still there? Like a frantic, left wife, she put on the light and looked at her watch. One-thirty. She smiled peacefully, the little flurry of pique over. She would have gone long ago. And next Saturday he had promised to come to me, she thought; and then at last she fell asleep.

L
UDO sat in Harrods on a spring afternoon. The Exhibition Hall had been transformed into a garden with flower beds and bright green grass; fountains played and azaleas and carnations and lilies were all blooming together. Voices of people going round were muffled and wondering, they admired, bent to read labels and sniffed at roses. A record of birdsong was played. From beyond the lift hall, Ludo could hear it.

He sat on a squashy sofa beside one of the country women he knew so well from Harrods – up for the day, for Harley Street and shopping, and dog-tired.

He could not attend to his work. Soon it would be warm enough to stay at home all day. Although being in a crowd was distracting – especially so this afternoon for some reason – he was rather repelled by the thought of long, lonely hours behind his basement bars. Feet going by above him he would watch as if hypnotised, trying to imagine the rest of the bodies he could not see.

He now began to examine the legs of the woman sitting next to him on the sofa – ginger lace-ups, wrinkled stockings, a neat crêpe bandage round one ankle. His eyes slyly travelled upwards. With a keen, sideways glance he quickly took in buttons of plaited leather on heather-mixture tweed, military-looking gloves.

None of this was of any use to him. He was simply wasting time and he knew it, and was filled with the dreadful despair of every writer who knows he is doing that. Not getting an armchair was to blame, he tried to believe. After he had come back from the Gents, his previous chair had been taken. Sometimes he had to hover about to get a chair at all, studying the incomprehensible Stock Exchange prices, sauntering up and down, waiting for one of the seated to be claimed by somebody, or feel rested enough to gather up parcels and go. Then he would pounce, as if playing musical chairs. He had become adept at guessing which person was likely to leave first.

He leaned back and shut his eyes. Typewriting could be heard – a spasmodic clacking. Above the sound of birdsong, the lift ladies chirrupped ‘Going up’, in their refined voices.

He stole another sideways look. The woman had a silver-mounted eagle’s claw pinned to her lapel. It was difficult to let his eyes travel higher than this, without staring into her face, meeting her eyes, perhaps. Presently, he shifted his position, cleared his throat and took a quick glance at her, as if looking expectantly beyond her for someone to emerge from a lift. Beret of brown crocheted wool. She turned her head. Pebble spectacles, he noted, and looked away, at the clock, to emphasise his mood of expectancy, of impatience, even.

As if tired of being studied, the woman sighed and stirred and collected herself, got up and walked away, dragging one foot a little. Pepper and salt hair.

He wrote down
Pepper-and-salt hair,
so that he should be writing something. Then began to look about him again, at people passing to and fro, or sitting near by.
Physiognomy,
he wrote above
Pepper-and-salt hair,
and underlined it. From time to time he added to a list as if he really were making a serious study.
Cleft chin, widow’s peak, Hapsburg lip
and
jive o’clock shadow.
By simply rearranging these words he could later make a poem out of them, he decided. He knew nothing about poetry, apart from assistant-stage-managing
The Cocktail Party
when he was in the repertory company.
Dowager’s hump,
he wrote.
Port-wine nose, wasp-waist,
and
club-foot.
He ceased to look about him, and continued the game from inside his mind with
pony tail, crow’s-feet
and
cauliflower ears, hang-nails
and
hammer-toes
and
fallen arches. Pursed lips, parched lips, eye-teeth, dog-teeth, wisdom-teeth, buck-teeth. Bone-idle.
Brought up by the oddness of this, he paused. What on earth did
bone-idle
mean? He frowned.
‘Wall-eyed’,
he quickly scribbled, suddenly seeing someone with this affliction.

‘I have brought you a steak and kidney pie,’ Mrs Palfrey said, standing before him.

In hasty confusion, as if he were a schoolboy found reading something pornographic, he hid his writing behind his back, and rose.

‘A steak and kidney pie?’ he asked.

‘I glimpsed you there as I went through to the Food Hall to buy some Garibaldi biscuits. I often nibble a biscuit in the night if I can’t sleep. Then I went to look at the wedding-cakes – such a sign of spring, I always
feel. I love to see them – and they were just bringing in a fresh lot of pies. “Just the thing for Desmond’s supper,” I thought. It’s still warm, in fact; but you’ll need to put it in the oven for a while.’ She held out her parcel for him to take it, her eyes bright with pleasure.
Dancing eyes,
he thought, as if he were now possessed of a tic.

‘Do sit down,’ he said, indicating with the pie the place beside him.

‘Oh, no, I mustn’t interrupt your work,’ she said firmly.

There was no sarcasm in her voice. After all, she could not know what he had been writing.

‘I have come to a block,’ he said. ‘Please sit and chat me up for a moment.’

She sat down and settled herself, and smiled.

‘You are too kind to me,’ he said, looking at the pie. He sat down beside her, holding it carefully on his knees, the pages of writing now stuffed into his pocket.

‘You have been kind to me,’ she said, ‘on more than one occasion.’

‘Well, it will be such a treat. I don’t know when I last had one of these. Pies, I mean. Why don’t you come along this evening and share it with me?’ (What am I
saying?
he wondered. He seemed to have no power over himself this day.) ‘I’ve been so stuck with my writing I need company.’ The evening was wasted from the start, with Rosie at her Judo class.

Mrs Palfrey blushed.

‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said.

‘I can’t think why not. Surely a pie like this is big enough for two?’

‘You can hardly want an old woman’s company.’

‘As for that, people’s ages mean nothing to me,’ Ludo said airily, secure in his youth. ‘And it was my idea,’ he added.

Mrs Palfrey now looked flustered, clearly having in her mind accepted his invitation. ‘Then I shall go off again and forage for some cheese. Oh, it will be such a chance,’ she said warmly. ‘I always look at the cheese and wish I had an occasion to buy some. One misses one’s housekeeping and shopping. I shall go on my own,’ she insisted, as he looked as if he were about to accompany her. She now had a mind to buy other things as well – Bath Olivers and chocolate mints, and whatever else might take her fancy.