No More Meadows (3 page)

People coming to the house for the first time, travel – weary after the long, hopeless ride from Hammersmith Bridge, would say brightly: ‘Why, it's just like the country!' But they did not mean it.

Christine's mother had died in this house when Christine was fourteen. The night after the funeral Christine took ten shillings from her father's dressing – table while he slept and ran away to Eastbourne, to the landlady of a small hotel where she and her brother had spent several holidays when they were little. The landlady gave her a breakfast of cornflakes and two boiled eggs, bought her ticket back to London and sent her home. Aunt Josephine, who was now in charge of the house on Barnes Common, gave her another breakfast, and nobody scolded her except her brother, who would have liked to go to Eastbourne too.

Christine got off the bus and walked down the sandy side – road to her home. The house was called ‘Roselawn', but Aunt Josephine had let Christine's mother's roses go to ruin because she had not time for them, and the lawn, recovered from the scars of Christine and Roger's cricket pitch, had now succumbed again to Roger's children, who came there at weekends to play.

In the middle of the lawn was a small enclosure, crudely made from wire-netting bent round sticks pushed askew into the ground, and covered with a piece of sacking. Christine lifted a corner of the sacking. A round-headed, black-and-white puppy stood up clawing at the netting and bumped her face wetly.

Neither the puppy nor the wire-netting had been there when Christine left for work that morning. She shook her head and
smiled as she replaced the cover. The puppy squeaked and bounced up and made bulges in the sacking, but it was too little to get out.

Christine did not go into the house by the front door, because she had lost her key. Her father said the police should be notified. He believed, like many people of his age who were not brought up from scratch on the engineering marvel of the Yale key, that anyone finding it would easily discover which front door it fitted. Even if they had, Christine did not think there was anything in the house worth stealing. If a burglar had come after the unwieldy old silver or the incomplete sets of china in the cabinet, he would not get past her father's cantankerous alsatian, who hurled himself against the front door at the meekest knock, and had been terrorizing postmen for years.

So Mr Cope went on saying that the police should be notified, and the key went on being lost, and nobody did anything about telling the police or getting a new key cut.

Christine went in by the back door, past the dustbins and the coalshed, whose door had long ago been burst by an overflow of coke, and the bucket of garbage that Aunt Josephine put out for the man who kept chickens. The man did not really need the garbage, although Aunt Josephine insisted that she should help him, so he did not collect it too regularly, and the bucket smelled.

With eggs so scarce in the shops, Christine's father and aunt were always saying that they should keep chickens themselves. Eggs had been scarce since early in the war, so as it was now 1950 they had been saying it for ten years.

Aunt Josephine was in the kitchen, cooking supper and writing letters at the same time. She wrote hundreds of letters to her relations on thin paper, with the writing criss-crossed on the back. The Cope family was large and scattered all over the globe, and Aunt Josephine made it larger by discovering second cousins in New South Wales and step-grandchildren of Copes who had long ago emigrated to Canada and lost touch with family and home.

Aunt Josephine kept them in touch with unexciting news of who had married whom, and titbits about the royal family, and tidings of the death of people they had never known existed. She
was a great one, too, for graves. She kept a little notebook with the place and date of burial of anyone remotely connected with the family, and, if geographically possible, would stumble there at the anniversary on her large turned-over feet to lay some flowers on the grave and scold the cemetery gardener for neglecting it.

Once, a long time ago, when she had taken a trip to India to see her sister, she had discovered that a very distant cousin had been buried at sea in the Indian Ocean. She took a wreath on the ship with her, made the captain tell her when they reached the exact longitude and latitude, and cast the now withered wreath upon the sea, to the edification of passengers and crew.

While she wrote at the kitchen table with her feet twisted round the legs, she had an alarm clock standing by the stove. It shrilled as Christine came in. Aunt Josephine cried: ‘My pie!' and hurried to the oven, knocking papers off the table and smudging her forehead with ink as she pushed back her hair, which was like a thick, flecked off-white wool that she was still knitting into seaboot socks, because she did not see why merchant seamen should be neglected just because the war was over.

She was a tall, ungainly woman, who moved with bent knees and elbows stuck out. Her gestures were large and uncontrolled. She was always knocking things off mantelpieces and catching her heel in lamp flexes. She and the alsatian, who swished his muscular tail among the lower furniture, caused quite a lot of havoc in the house, which was one reason why there was nothing much left to burgle.

‘Not done!' cried Aunt Josephine in disgust, pulling the pie out and pushing it in again with a shove that nearly sent it through the back of the oven. ‘I can't understand it. I set the clock so carefully, but things are always either raw or burnt.'

‘It would be easier if you watched them, really.' Christine took off her beret and shook out her short hair. ‘The gas pressure's always going up and down these days, so you never know.'

‘It's the Government,' said Aunt Josephine bitterly. ‘Well, they needn't think I'm going to hang over my stove just to please a lot of Socialists. I've got far better things to do.' She
reset the alarm clock and went back to her letters, treading on one of the cats, which screeched and ran under the stove.

Another cat, a smug tortoiseshell, crooned on the window-sill among Aunt Josephine's plants and pots of chives and parsley. Two love-birds heckled each other in a cage on the wall, goldfish swam idly in a glass bowl on top of the refrigerator, and a very old snuffling fox-terrier slept on a blanket by the stove. Some cheese rinds and half a bun lay near his nose, but he either did not know they were there or could not be bothered to eat them.

Christine's own dog, which had watched for her in the road and come in with her, snatched up the cheese and the bun, rolling his eye at the fox-terrier, which would snap at him if it woke. He was a mongrel, a formless, brown-and-white wriggler, who was more like a long-legged spaniel than anything else. Sometimes you thought he would have looked better if his tail had been cut at birth. Sometimes you thought that would have made him look worse. He loved Christine with spaniel eyes all the time, and loved Aunt Josephine with drooling jaws at mealtimes.

Aunt Josephine often grumbled and muttered about having to feed and look after all these animals, but it was she who was responsible for the presence of the cats and the birds and the goldfish and the fox-terrier, and she who had bought the mongrel for Christine when he looked at her through the bars on one of her roving visits to the Battersea Dogs' Home.

The alsatian was not her doing. She fed it, and let it in and out every time it wanted to go and rave in the garden at innocent passers-by, but she did not like it, because its selfish, belligerent nature reminded her of her sister's husband, who had finally drunk himself off the map in Australia. It was her brother's dog. Ever since he came to this house he had always had an alsatian as a protection against the wild barbarism of Barnes Common.

‘Well, I see you got another child,' Christine said. ‘What's that out there on the lawn?'

‘My goodness, I forgot all about her.' Aunt Josephine ran her long tongue over an envelope flap and banged it down with her fist. ‘The poor little thing will die of cold. Run out and get her, there's a dear. I haven't got my shoes on.'

She was wearing the black leather slippers, like coffins, which
she always put on as soon as she came into the house. Since she had to clean the floors, she saw no sense in bringing dirt in from outside for herself to sweep up and take out again.

She was illogical in her care of the house. She was particular about the floors. She could not bear to see dirt on them, and yet the furniture was covered with dogs' hairs, the mirror in the hall gave you a foggy reflection, and the telephone was thick with dust and so clogged with raw pastry from times when she had left her cooking to answer it, that you could hardly dial a number. At week-ends Christine was sometimes stirred to do some cleaning, but she got no thanks from Aunt Josephine, who liked to be the sole motive power of the house, with everybody else as passengers.

‘It's a sweet little thing,' Christine said as she came in with the puppy, slapping down her own dog, which was trying to jump up and smell the newcomer, ‘but do we really need another dog?'

‘It wouldn't hurt,' her aunt said, ‘but it isn't ours, so don't get excited. The Grahams have gone away for the weekend, so I said I'd look after it for them.'

‘You said you'd look after the Fishers' cat over Christmas,' Christine said. ‘That was four months ago, and it's still here.'

‘I forgot, I can't think how. And by the time I remembered, it didn't want to go. You can't blame it. The Fishers don't know how to look after animals. They expected it to live off the mice it caught.'

‘If you didn't feed ours so much they might catch some mice. There's one in my bedroom cupboard.'

‘Well, you shouldn't keep biscuits in there.' Aunt Josephine made some flourishes over the paper and started another letter.

‘I get hungry.' The alarm shrilled, Christine's dog barked and the puppy wriggled out of her arms and plopped on the floor. The dog and one of the cats chased it into a corner, where it stood at bay while introductions were performed.

Christine stopped the alarm, looked at the pie and turned off the oven. ‘You only have pie when I'm going out,' she complained.

‘Oh dear, are you going out?' Aunt Josephine looked up, her thick eyebrows drawn together in disappointment. ‘I thought
we'd finish that hand of Canasta. I kept the cards on the table. Bruce knocked them off with his tail, but I put them back again.'

‘With all the wild cards in your hand.'

‘Naturally. And I'd planned a nice dinner for you, because I thought you'd be tired. The sales,' said Aunt Josephine vaguely, beginning to write again. ‘I know what it is.'

‘The sales were two months ago,' Christine said. ‘You live in a world of your own. I'm sorry, but I told you I was going out. To that dance with Geoffrey.'

‘Dreadful creature,' said her aunt. ‘He has no sex.'

‘That makes no odds. He's my cousin. Oh dear,' she said dutifully, as Aunt Josephine raised her head and made her face look stricken. ‘I'm sorry. Have I hurt you?'

Aunt Josephine was supposed to have been engaged to a first cousin forty years ago. The cousin had spurned her and married a girl with money, and this was Aunt Josephine's ‘tragedy', sacred in family history, a thing to be respected; not unmentionable, because however great her distress and shame at the time, she was now proud of it. Her blighted love was one of her treasured possessions, like her amber beads and the family Bible which her father had entrusted to her instead of to her brother. You could refer to it, but you could not speak of it lightly.

‘I'm sorry,' Christine said. ‘It was different with you, of course.'

‘Yes.' Aunt Josephine fetched up a sigh. ‘It was different with me.'

‘Well, anyway -' Christine changed the subject before her aunt could start off about: I remember the dress I wore that night he told me… ‘Well, anyway, I'm discouraged about what to wear. Did you by any chance mend the zipper of the black velvet?'

Aunt Josephine clapped her hand to the side of her head with a sound like wood-chopping.' My darling, I forgot! How could I have forgotten?'

She was always forgetting things. Names, telephone numbers, engagements slipped through her mind like water. If you particularly wanted her to do something, you had to write it down on the pad that hung in the kitchen, called ‘The Housewife's I MUST', but she forgot to look at the pad.

Christine and her father were used to her bad memory, but Aunt Josephine herself was constantly surprised by it, although she had been forgetting things for as long as Christine could remember.

‘I'll have to wear the blue then,' Christine said, ‘and I look like a milk-churn in it. Not that it matters with Geoffrey. He's too busy thinking about what he looks like in his midnight-blue dinner jacket.'

‘Then why worry?' said Aunt Josephine comfortably.

‘Oh, but then, you know -' Christine turned her head away. ‘Other people see you, and one ought always to …'

Like any unmarried girl - and some married women-she was never without the idea, at the start of any party, that this time, tonight, she might meet someone who …

Party after party went by, but she never did. Sometimes she thought she had, but they always turned out wrong.

But the ritual of bathing and dressing and grooming yourself for a party excited you all over again to the possibility of someone who…

She fiddled about for a long time with the neck of the blue dress, pinning it this way and that, trying the cameo brooch in different places until the draped collar was marked by pin-holes and a smudge of lipstick from her little finger.

The front-door bell rang while she was still fiddling, and the alsatian rushed through the hall with his booming bark, his nails rattling on the polished boards. Christine was getting desperate about the dress, beginning to think that she would have to make some excuse to Geoffrey and tell him she could not go. The bell rang again. Geoffrey was always punctual. He was a stockbroker, successful, according to his views, and he attributed his success to things like being punctual and knowing head waiters at the right places, instead of to the fact that he had inherited a ready-made job in his family firm.