Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (7 page)

Mrs Arbuthnot was humble to the fountain-head for another reason. The time was coming, she knew, when she would no longer be able to manage for herself, with her locked and swollen joints, and so much pain. The Claremont was the last freedom she had left, and she
wanted it for as long as she could have it. She knew the sequence, had foreseen it. Her total incapacity: a nursing-home then, at more expense than the Claremont, and being kept in bed all the time for the convenience of the nursing staff. Or going to stay with one of her sisters, who did not want her. Or – in the end – the geriatric ward of some hospital.

Can’t die here, she thought, in the middle of this night. And there might be years and years until
that.
Arthritis did not kill. One might go on and on, hopelessly being a nuisance to other people; in the end, lowering standards because of rising prices. For her, the Claremont was only
just
achieved. Down the ladder she obviously would have to go.

And now she began to think most bitterly of Mrs Palfrey – with all that wine-drinking, and her flushed cheeks, and the young man to whom she had offered smoked salmon at five-and-sixpence a portion. They had leaned towards one another over the table, their eyes on one another’s faces, like lovers. Later, buttering a piece of bread – he had eaten so much butter that the waiter had grown sullen – he had said (Mrs Arbuthnot straining her ears): ‘Mummy’s a bit of a slattern; that’s putting it mildly.’ ‘I can’t let you speak of your Mamma like that,’ Mrs Palfrey had replied – and had immediately laughed, as if it were not her own daughter she should be defending. Mrs Arbuthnot had ears sharpened by malice, and she sat at a near-by table; but this was almost all that she had heard, although her head had ached with listening.

Mrs Palfrey is a dark horse, she thought. At this unintended little pun in her mind, she tipped her head back against the pillow and grimaced, by way of smiling. ‘You’re a dark horse, Mrs Palfrey’, I shall say. She turned her head to look at the clock, and there was a sound like the crushing of granulated sugar at the back of her neck as she moved it. Now she needed to make a journey to the lavatory down the corridor. So many times a night she must grasp her strength for this ordeal. She deferred, and drowsed and slept.

O
N Sundays – especially p.m. – Ludo was always depressed. Something lowering was in the air: at least three times during the day, for instance, the dreadful clanging doom of neighbourhood bells, the sauntering, church-people’s legs beyond the area railings. He squatted and squinted up at them, at the boring hats of the women going by – they were mostly women – and he was enraged with them for so lowering his spirits. They did so to the extent that he could not work: and he could not
go
to work.

From somewhere – most certainly not from his mother – he had inherited a feeling that Sunday was a day of rest, and so he fretted through it, and always came to the end of it with a sense of wide ennui and wasted time.

Sometimes, during this particular Sunday, he thought of his five-pound note, and was tempted to go out to spend it; but he did no more than walk to a pub at midday, where he knew no one, met no one. To be lonely in South Kensington on a Sunday was the utmost loneliness, he decided.

In the afternoon, from duty, he wrote to his mother. ‘Dearest Mimsie’ – grimacing as he wrote the word. This was to him simply a Sunday-afternoon task, going back so long – to pre-prep school, he supposed. He
could remember himself as a little boy in that bleak, battered playroom, drawing the letters laboriously on the page. ‘Dear Mimsie.’ Sometimes a tear had fallen. So, from the beginning, he had hated Sundays. And those early ones had probably been the worst ones of his life.

‘Dearest Mimsie,’ he wrote now. ‘Thank you for the postal-order.’ (For it was still like school.) ‘I really live sparsely now, and it made – the postal-order, I mean -briefly, the difference between starvation and survival. I am working hard at my novel, and, to reward me, I suppose, fortune cast an old lady down my area, just when I needed her, for it took my fancy to write about elderly women. I used to watch them in the boarding-house when I was in Rep in Woodbury, sitting like toads in dark corners, dropping off or dozing, or burrowing down the sides of armchairs for knitting-needles. It is an exercise of the imagination for me, but, all the same, I was glad enough to be able to examine a real old lady once more at close quarters – a rather fine example of the species. It is lonely here. In your love-nest, you never could imagine the Sou-Ken loneliness of Sunday afternoon. I imagine you and the Major flirting over the crumpets, having a delicious time, licking your fingers of the butter, making one another laugh. Whereas,
my
treat, is to go out soon to the launderette, and then wait impatiently for Monday.’ (He was really writing to himself.)

‘I have never been able to manage a Sunday. Even when I was in Rep, and busy. There is really no
escaping it. One has, at some time, to go out into the streets, and there are all the West Indians going to chapel in hideous hats and spectacles – even the tiny girls have felt basins on their heads, and gloves. I never saw
you
wear a hat or gloves in all my life. I’ll say that for you. My Mrs Palfrey I was telling you about was bare-headed; but she wore a pair of stout leather gauntlets, as if she had just returned from hawking.

‘I did, more or less save her life, and she gave me £5.’ (He scratched out ‘£5’, and wrote above it instead ‘dinner at her hotel’.) ‘Not your sort of scene; but I was so bloody hungry, having spent your nice postal-order on baked beans and getting my suit cleaned. (Perhaps your Major has some old suits. I should not be at all offended to receive one; for I have to trim mine with nail scissors before I go to work.)

‘She has bad legs, Mrs Palfrey.’ Then he thought that he was going on too much about Mrs Palfrey, and he was bored with it, and had been trained since early days not to bore his Mimsie. He tapped his forehead with his pen, half closed his eyes, went into a yawning daze, and suddenly wrote, ‘with love from Ludo’, and was done with it.

Something now to do. He could go out and post his letter. He crammed into a polythene bag one sheet, two shirts, two pairs of pants and some towels, and then, for a reason he did not know, suddenly decided to unpin the curtains and take them down. They had a strange, musty smell. He pushed them into the bag and set out.

The streets were as dull as ditch-water. He decided
that, when he had finished his novel about how dull they were, he would go to live abroad, where even (for he had been to Spain with Mimsie) the Sunday bells sounded better, and the cold was drier.

The launderette (coin-operated) had overhead fluorescent lighting, which enabled him to read easily his George Gissing.

Next to him, in the before quite empty launderette, came and sat down a young girl. The little patent leather shoes with straps, he first noticed, peering over, down, from his book like an old man. One of the tiny shoes went to and fro impatiently. The tights were white. Still from under his lids, his eyes travelled slowly up, over the slim white knees, to a hem of dusty black velvet. Ludo hoisted himself up in his chair, read another paragraph, and then glanced more frankly across at the top of her head, making a show of bored yawning, wrist-watch winding. Her long hair was straight, and dyed an old woman’s grey. Her pale face was touching in its unhealthiness, the mournful eyes, the colourless lips. She was staring ahead of her.

‘Quiet tonight,’ he said.

‘Don’t bother to chat me up,’ she replied.

At the Claremont, the Sunday passed. It could be said to have passed, decided Mrs Arbuthnot. It was another Sunday wrested from the geriatric ward, she told herself. And why? what for? she wondered. What has it
been
for?

Mrs Burton, in a new fur hat, went to church. Mr Osmond, after a word from the hall porter, retired to do up his fly-buttons and also went to church. Roast beef and Yorkshire, and snoozing over the colour supplements. A dread lethargy. Soon, tea. Tiny cucumber sandwiches which repeated, as Mrs Post kept saying, tapping her bird-cage chest.

Mrs Arbuthnot had been taken for a little drive, and now, in the evening, sat pale and anguished. Her sisters had, with difficulty, shifted her about a little, so something had been achieved. She had had a breath of fresh air, a change of scene, and was supposed to be better for them both. Her sisters were certainly better. They were, at the moment, having a nice drink, flushed with relief, and the knowledge of duty done.

Mr Osmond listened to the weather forecast, with a transparent hand, like a shell, curved behind his ear. He was disgusted – not so much by the future weather as by the accent it was read in. He kept snorting and turning his head in annoyance. ‘I don’t want a damned Aussie telling me about my English weather,’ he complained. ‘“Minely derigh!” I should have thought there were plenty of wholesome English girls who could have done a simple job like this. Minely derigh!’

‘Well, it will be a nice change from the rain,’ said Mrs Post.

‘They never speak the truth,’ Mr Osmond replied.

Later, they made a move to the television room and, after the serial, stayed on for the news and the demonstration. There was usually a demonstration on
Sundays, with milling crowds in Trafalgar Square and forays into Downing Street. The policemen and the horses were always sympathised with. They had the Claremont solidly behind them. ‘Oh, those poor horses!’ Mrs Post kept exclaiming. ‘What have they ever done to deserve this?’

‘Long-haired louts,’ Mr Osmond said from time to time.

Mrs Palfrey, with her new stake in youth, said nothing. She was confident that Ludo would never shame her by carrying a banner, or throwing a paving-stone. He seemed to believe in nothing, and she was glad of this.

After the demonstration, united in their disgust of it, they returned to the lounge, and peace. There were strangers, booked in for one night only, on their way somewhere, properly whispering, sitting in a corner, drinking coffee.

Soon, there was the soft, slapping sound as Mr Osmond shuffled a pack of cards for a game of patience: against this, the knitting sounds, and sighs, and stomach gurglings (quickly coughed over).

‘Well, another Sunday nearly gone,’ Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart. She had presence of mind.

‘Now don’t you wish your life away,’ warned Mrs Burton; but she tapped her bright finger-nails against her teeth, from boredom; and she yawned and yawned until she thought her poor jaw would give way.

Mr Osmond laid out the cards slowly. He had bony, shiny hands, with whorled wrinkles above each joint.

‘Ho, ho, ho!’ yawned Mrs Burton, holding nose and chin together for safety – might dislocate her jaw. Then she wiped her eyes, suddenly burdened with, defeated by drink. ‘I’m for beddy-byes,’ she said at last, struggling to gather herself together.

‘It is three thousand days ago today that my wife died,’ Mr Osmond said, to no one in particular.

‘Birmingham,’ said Ludo.

‘Birmingham what?’ asked the girl in the white tights.

She turned her head a little – bored concession.

‘That’s where you come from. I’ve just been trying to place the accent.’

‘I happen to come from Pinner.’

‘I adore the way you say “Pinnah”.’

‘I didn’t say “Pinnah”.’

At least they were having a conversation, he thought.

‘Is that in the Harrods’ delivery area?’

‘I simply don’t know
what
you’re talking about.’

She said ‘what’ with a great whirring sound, as if to emphasise Pinner.

‘It
is
rather important,’ he said.

‘Important? I suppose you’re a director of it,’ she said, looking down languidly, chin on hand, at his broken shoe.

‘No. In all fairness, I am
not
a director,’ he said. ‘But it is my place of work.’

‘Oh, Christ, you bore me,’ she said. ‘I told you not to chat me up. How many more times?’

‘Doris,’ he said presently, as if talking to himself. ‘Mabel. No, Edith.’

She could not help saying, ‘Mabel, Edith what? Or are you mad? Talking to yourself.’

‘Trying to guess your name. You look quite like a Mabel to me. I settle for Mabel.’

‘Do you
know
what someone called Mabel looks like?’ she asked in a dangerous tone.

‘I told you, I am only trying to guess.’