Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (4 page)

‘Oh, yes. Desmond will be coming. He knows where to find me. We have always – had a link, d’you know. It is a relationship which sometimes skips a generation.’

‘I like to see a young face.’

Mr Osmond had waylaid the waiter, who stopped -but impatiently – beside his chair.

‘Something I thought would interest you …’ Mr Osmond mumbled. ‘Suddenly occurred to me … must tell Antonio … on me travels … Italy, it was … your
country … frescoes…’

The old pink face had a false, waylaying animation, for it was strenuous work holding his listener captive. Mrs Burton looked on dispassionately, pushing up her hair, for she could hear only snatches of his hurried, muffled talk: but suddenly Mr Osmond glanced across at her and said, ‘Here must I lower my voice.’ He half rose towards the waiter’s sideways-bent head, and then shouted, as if the man were deaf’… the most enormous sex organ. Quite enormous.’ Then he lowered his voice again, and said in a more intimate way, ‘Frescoes. Italian frescoes. I gather you know what I mean.’

Mrs Burton had given a snort of laughter which she turned into a cough. Mrs Palfrey looked casually away and took a sip of sherry. So that’s the poor old sort of man he is, she thought.

‘Enormous!’ Mr Osmond said again, and the waiter scuttled away. Alone, Mr Osmond sat very still in his chair and smiled. He had had his conversation.

‘Dirty old fellow,’ Mrs Burton whispered behind her handkerchief.

Silence from the other end of the room. Mrs Post was casting off stitches and Mrs Arbuthnot had retreated into her world of pain. Soon Mrs Burton got up and pressed the bell again.

At half-past seven, Mr Osmond was the first to stroll casually towards the dining-room, then came Mrs Arbuthnot moving slowly, looking spectral, step by painful step, with the two sticks inching along before her. She was like an injured insect. As she came to Mrs
Palfrey – ignoring Mrs Burton – she paused. ‘What have you done with that grandson of yours? she asked. ‘If we don’t see him soon, we shall begin to think he doesn’t exist.’

‘Oh, he will come,’ Mrs Palfrey said, and she smiled. She really believed that he soon would.

After dinner, she fetched her knitting and joined the others at the window end of the room, having made a stand to establish her personality. Mrs Burton returned to the bar with her brother-in-law, who was now the one to get up and press the bell and who looked as if he had done a great deal of it in his time.

D
ESMOND did not come. The sweater Mrs Palfrey was knitting for him neared completion, and everyone knew that he had not come to claim it. Saving face had been an important part of life in the Far East, and Mrs Palfrey tried to save hers now. Trouble usually comes from doing so, and it came to her, for it involved her in telling lies, and in being obliged to remember the lies when she had told them. She had to invent illnesses for Desmond, and trips abroad connected with his work – which she knew quite well did not involve trips abroad. She found this a great strain, and along with it went her secret grief that she had no one of her own in London after all, and that the studious, rather prim young man she had always been proud of seemed utterly unconcerned about her. He had not even answered her letters, her invitations to dinner at the Claremont. Young men are always hungry, and very often hard-up, she had believed; but it was now clear that her grandson was neither so hungry nor so hard-up as to need any help along those lines from her. She felt not only slighted, but indignant. A question of upbringing was involved. Letters should be answered. She could not help mentioning this lapse when writing to her daughter – ‘just wondering’, as only she was able. She often ‘just wondered’ or ‘only mentioned’ or
‘merely suggested’. Her daughter made the lightest reference to this ‘wondering’, and in her usual bracing language, without apology or surprise. ‘They’re all the same. I’ve taken a scunner against the young.’ She affected such Scottish words and they made her Scottish husband wince. He could not ‘thole’ them, as she would have put it.

Whether she reproved her son or not, Mrs Palfrey did not discover. He still neither came nor wrote, and she heartily wished that she had never mentioned him at the Claremont. She began to feel pitied. All the other residents had visitors – even quite distant relations did their duty occasionally; they came for a while, over-praised the comfort of the hotel, and went relievedly away. It was inconceivable to Mrs Palfrey that her only grandchild – her heir, for that matter – should be so negligent.

Mrs Arbuthnot, on one of her worst arthritis days, condoled with her spitefully, and that night Mrs Palfrey could not sleep. She fretted through the small hours, feeling panic at her loneliness.

I must
not
get fussed, she warned herself. Getting fussed was bad for her heart. She put on the light and took a pill, and wondered if the morning would never come. She tried to read, but her heart lurched so uncertainly that its throbbing rang in her head. At these times, she felt that anything would be better than being alone – a nursing-home, where someone else would be awake at night, even living with her daughter, supposing such had ever been suggested. In the morning – as
she now promised herself – courage would return, the certainty that she would not give in. She would stay at the Claremont for as long as she could, and from there, at last, be taken to hospital and hope to die as soon as possible, with no trouble but to those who were paid to deal with her.

‘The young are very heartless,’ Mrs Arbuthnot had dared to say.

‘He would come if he could,’ Mrs Palfrey had replied, pressing her lips together, for they had trembled.

‘We poor old women have lived too long,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said with a smile.

Her very tone of voice when speaking of her husband, Mrs Palfrey had noticed, blamed him for dying, for leaving her in the lurch. He would have been so useful to her in the circumstances, have helped her to get about, fetched and carried: she might still have had a home of her own. But she was not alone like Mrs Palfrey. She had sisters who came and went, who sometimes called for her in cars and took her for drives, or to see her old friend Miss Benson in hospital. Miss Benson had lived at the Claremont before her illness.

‘She had no one,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, meaning no one but Mrs Arbuthnot. ‘Not a soul in the world. She was entirely alone.’ Her eyes rested on Mrs Palfrey. ‘No one ever came to see her. In all our years together here. Although she had been a well-known woman in her time.’

‘I have been abroad a great deal,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘One gets out of touch.’

‘One probably does. We need to keep our friendships in repair. I think Doctor Johnson said that. But you, of course, you have your grandson.’

‘Yes, I have Desmond.’ I am not really like that poor Miss Benson, she assured herself. To Mrs Arbuthnot she explained, ‘My daughter is so far off, in Scotland.’

‘And you wouldn’t care to live in the North?’ Mrs Arbuthnot asked, probing.

Mrs Palfrey had not been invited to, and she did not get on well with her daughter, who was noisy and boisterous and spent most of her time either playing golf or talking about it. ‘I doubt if I could stand that climate,’ she replied. In London, the rain was pouring down: in Scotland, it was coming down more steadily, as snow. They had watched it on the television that evening.

‘No, of course not,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said quietly, with her eyes on Mrs Palfrey once more. They were such very pale blue eyes as to make Mrs Palfrey uneasy. She thought that blue eyes get paler and madder as the years go by. But brown eyes remain steady, she decided, with a little pride.

In some desperation (for she had not yet discovered that her fellow guests talked a great deal more about visitors than was warranted) Mrs Palfrey wrote to one of her old school-friends, who lived in Hampstead. She knew her address, as they had exchanged Christmas cards for sixty years, although that was perhaps hardly
what either Mrs Arbuthnot or Doctor Johnson would have called keeping their friendship in repair.

Mrs Palfrey invited Lilian Kibble to luncheon at the Claremont and Lilian Kibble, thinking that Hampstead to the Cromwell Road was too expensive a taxi-ride, replied that she would love to and very soon would drop Mrs Palfrey a line, suggesting a date – which Mrs Palfrey thought she might have done equally well at the time of writing. Of course, she heard no more from Mrs Kibble, but for a week or two she allowed herself to hope for a letter. It had always been an uneven friendship. Mrs Palfrey had been the staunch, good, unexciting school-friend to whom Lilian had returned again and again after her skirmishes – those raids upon others’ ‘best friends’, quarrels which followed, passions for mistresses, jealousies and betrayals. She had gone out of Mrs Palfrey’s life after school, apart from the Christmas cards; but had had three husbands, Mrs Palfrey knew, and still had one of them.

Another old acquaintance from Foreign Service days lived in Richmond. It was rather a long way from the Cromwell Road; but all the same Mrs Palfrey decided to try to rustle her up. She wrote to her, too, and invited her to lunch – but the poor creature was in even worse case than Mrs Palfrey, was lying immobile of a broken hip. She did not, however, suggest that Mrs Palfrey should go out to Richmond to see her. Mrs Palfrey thought she should have done, and would have gone.

After that, she could think of no one else to invite.
She had learned a little at the Claremont and she did not make the mistake of telling Mrs Arbuthnot that her friend Lilian might be coming to lunch one day. She began to feel more and more like poor Miss Benson.

Time went by. It could be proved that it did, although so little happened.

At the Claremont, days were lived separately. One sat at separate tables and went on separate walks. The afternoon outing to change library books was always taken alone. Mrs Arbuthnot could not venture so far, and Mrs Post went for her, and nearly always brought back the wrong book: she got Elizabeth Bowen muddled with Marjorie Bowen, and could never remember that there were two Mannings and two Durrells and a couple of Flemings. ‘So kind of you to take the trouble,’ Mrs Arbuthnot would thank her, laying the book aside.

Mrs Palfrey felt quite elated when Mrs Arbuthnot -her usual slave having a cold – one afternoon asked her to change her book at the library. It was like being back at school again and asked to run an errand for the head girl. She was just going out for one of her aimless walks, to break up the afternoon, and was delighted to be given an object for it.

‘Something by Lord Snow, perhaps,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘I cannot stand trash.’

‘But if you’ve already read it…’ Mrs Palfrey began nervously.

‘One can always read a good book twice,’ Mrs Arbuthnot snapped. ‘In fact one always
should
read a good book twice.’

Mrs Palfrey took the rebuke quite steadily. After all, Mrs Arbuthnot was the one who was doing the favour. She set off, resolved to bring back such a treasure – the very latest Snow, perhaps, – that Mrs Post would have lost the job for ever. She knew that in thinking this she was behaving like her erstwhile friend Lilian, but was dogged about it. (Lilian would have been defiant.) The Claremont was rather like a reduced and desiccated world of school. Of course, the food was better; but, for grown-ups, would have been uneatable if it had not been.

It was beginning to grow dusk as Mrs Palfrey, triumphantly clasping the latest Snow, returned from the library, from one quiet and now familiar street to another. A drizzle blurred lights and slimed pavements. She walked slowly, feeling tired, keeping close to the railings of areas. Basement windows in those streets were lit up and some had curtains still undrawn, so that she could see – though a little ashamed of looking – the interiors of rooms, sometimes bleak kitchens, sometimes cosy sitting-rooms with a tablecloth laid and a bird in a cage.

How dreadfully the veins in her leg ached, so that putting one foot in front of the other was pain each time; but she had passed the afternoon well, and there was only sitting down ahead of her, a long evening of just sitting and resting. She could not have spent the whole day doing that. The walk had taken her out of herself, as well as out.

Suddenly – she could not afterwards remember how, her ankle turned, or she skidded perhaps on the greasy pavement – she stumbled, tried to save herself and fell with the sickening crash of a heavy, elderly person.

At first, she felt only shame. She struggled to recover herself, her dignity, although the street was at that time empty; there were no passers-by to see her sprawled there. She felt shaken – the breath shaken from her -and afraid. Every heartbeat threatened to be her last. She dragged herself up by the railings and leaned there, trying to quieten herself. I shall never get home, she thought, and tears, from her shocked dismay, threatened.