Summer at the Haven (6 page)

Mrs Thornton was sitting by the window in her turret watching for the mid-morning train. She liked to see it punctually on its way.

“Oh, Mrs Thornton,” said Miss Blackett, “there is a boy, recommended by the vicar, coming to help till we can fill Brenda’s place more adequately. He’s to sleep in the little attic. I hope he won’t be a nuisance to you.”

“She doesn’t really hope anything of the sort,” thought Mrs Thornton, well aware by now of the warden’s wish to remove her downstairs.

“I certainly hope not, Miss Blackett,” she said coldly.

There was a slight pause and then Miss Blackett went on: “I am sure there is nothing to worry about, but I think perhaps you should know that, though a nice enough boy – he came to see me yesterday – and highly spoken of by both his school and the vicar, he is rather simple.” She would have preferred not to mention this and to have let Mrs Thornton discover Tom’s deficiencies for herself, but although she was convinced that he was harmless, he certainly was odd and her conscience told her it was only fair to warn Mrs Thornton of this. Miss Blackett was in the habit of obeying her conscience.

Mrs Thornton grew more and more indignant and
apprehensive as she listened. “This is really too bad,” she thought, “not only a boy, but a mentally defective boy on my doorstep. I shan’t pretend not to mind.” She didn’t.

“I was afraid you might not like it,” said Miss Blackett, “but it really can’t be helped. I am sure you see that he is needed and there is nowhere else to put him. When Mrs Langley goes you can always move down there, you know, such a nice room.”

She turned and walked briskly away.

“Oh, indeed I can, can I?” said Mrs Thornton grimly, not caring whether she was heard or not. She recognised that the warden had reason on her side but over this she herself could not be reasonable. She looked round her room with something like desperation: its charms and its privacy seemed all the more precious now that they were threatened. She thought of her lost home with a fierce nostalgia. Her attic represented the last little bit of personal choice left to her and she was determined not to be driven out of it by all the demented boys in Christendom.

Gisela had been crying again. Her letter from home was overdue and still hadn’t come that morning. When she brought in Miss Blackett’s eleven o’clock coffee she was sniffing.

“If you’ve caught a cold, it’s your own fault, Gisela,” said Miss Blackett. “In all this cold weather we’ve been having, you’ve been going about in short-sleeved flimsy dresses. We have a very sensible old English saying: “Ne’er cast a clout till May be out.’ That means, don’t leave off your warm clothes till the end of the month. Some people think it refers to the blossom May, but I am sure the month is meant. The boy, Tom Hobb, is coming this afternoon. I want you to take him up to his room and tell him to give it a good sweep out. You must show him where everything is kept.”

Gisela now felt aggrieved as well as unhappy. She hadn’t got a cold and her clothes were the right ones for the time of
the year – it was a stupid saying, that! It didn’t even know what it meant, if people had to guess at it – and she resented having to bother with a rough boy. She had not at all liked his clothes or his clumsy looks, so that when Tom arrived she would not shake hands but marched on ahead of him ordering him to follow her. Tom was carrying a small bundle.

“What’s that for luggage!” said Gisela disdainfully as they reached the attic and he put it down. He was looking at her with his unblinking direct gaze. “Why do you look at me so, it is not good,” she said.

“You be so pretty,” said Tom.

Gisela knew she was not pretty. She was, in fact, used to being called the plain one of the family. She was tall and thin with straight string-like fair hair. She was too pale, even her eyes were too pale a blue and her nose was long and a little crooked.

“Like one o’ they moon daisies,” said Tom.

Gisela, in her turn, gazed at him. Just as Miss Blackett had done, she sensed at once that he was not being rude and she began to stop feeling cross and smiled at him unwillingly, for it was rather nice to be called pretty for once, even though it was only by a rough poor boy, and then something in the way his yellow hair stood up like a brush reminded her of her youngest brother, the one she liked the best.

“Come,” she said, “you like that I help you with the room?”

Tom nodded and looked round the attic. When he saw the dummy with the lampshade hat, he pointed at it and crowed with laughter. Gisela laughed too and suddenly she felt happy. Even if he was a peasant boy, he was young and, since Brenda had left, she had felt so lonely among all the ladies and Miss Blackett and Mrs Mills and Fred – all so old.

They set to work together moving everything out on to
the landing so that they could clean and sweep properly. They pushed open the window, stiff with years of neglect, and Tom stuck his head out and crowed again with pleasure.

“I’ve never slept so near the sky afore,” he said.

Mrs Thornton had heard all the noise and laughter with dismay. It was going to be just as bad as she had feared. She was too upset to tell herself that it was unreasonable to pass judgement so soon. In this mood she spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, waiting for every fresh sound, until at last she realized she must take herself in hand, so she found her
Radio
Times
and turned the pages anxiously. Yes, she was in luck, and soon the divine melody of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto flooded the room, routing for the time being the world, the flesh and the devil.

At the end of the first movement she heard a slight scuffling noise outside the room and quickly opened the door. Someone, crouched against it outside, nearly fell in. It was a boy –
the
boy, she supposed. She switched off the radio and demanded angrily what he was doing there. Tom replied by humming, in time and in tune, the concerto’s opening theme. Mrs Thornton stared down at him and he hummed the tune again and then, pointing beyond her into the room he said:

“Can you play a bit more o’ that, Lady, please?’

Mrs Thornton was amazed. She said, “So you were listening to the music, were you? Have you ever heard that piece before?”

Tom shook his head vigorously.

“And you liked it, I can see. Do you like music?” Tom nodded as vigorously.

Mrs Thornton experienced a blessed sense of relief. She could put up with much from a boy who could hum a Beethoven theme correctly after a first hearing, and there was something else as well as relief. The boy obviously really loved what he had heard. She was as convinced of
that as Miss Blackett and Gisela had been of his admiration of them. There was no one at all at The Haven besides herself to whom music mattered. Mrs Perry enjoyed Gilbert & Sullivan and Strauss waltzes from early associations, Mrs Langley loved hymn tunes, and Gisela sometimes strummed “Ach du liebe Augustin” on the old piano in the sitting-room, but that was as far as it went, and now this boy, whose invasion on her attic floor she had so resented, was apparently a comrade in felicity. She felt profoundly grateful that, even in old age, life offered such surprises.

TOM’S PECULIAR
crow of laughter became a familiar sound at The Haven during the weeks that followed. To Gisela it brought a sense of fellow feeling and made her giggle. Mrs Thornton, too, liked to hear it. She became thoroughly interested in Tom and quite often of an evening she would invite him into her room to share a radio concert with him. She found that he was always affected by the music, but that she could not tell beforehand how he would react. Sometimes he could not remain still but jumped about in a queer clumsy dance, or clapped his hands and nodded his head to the rhythm; sometimes he sat motionless as if enchanted, sometimes he rocked to and fro with laughter and sometimes he put his fingers to his ears and rushed away out of the room. She made an attempt to teach him to play on the sitting-room piano, but, though he could pick up quite complicated tunes very quickly and hum them correctly, the mysteries of the keyboard were obviously beyond him, or else he simply wasn’t interested.

Old Mrs Langley was always especially kind to Tom because she got it into her head that he was her Susan’s love-child. “He always was happy from a baby,” she told everyone.

Mrs Perry said it was good to hear him laughing about the house, it reminded her of her grandchildren. Dorothy Brown only heard it faintly.

“You grow deafer every day,” said Leila, aggrieved. Leila hated Tom. “I never could bear defectives,” she said, “and that noise he makes gives me the creeps. I’m a very sensitive person, I’m afraid, but I don’t think it’s fair to employ a boy like that here. I shall complain.”

As for Miss Blackett, she found the laughter disquieting, she did not know why, but it was part of her uncomfortable inability to place Tom in her scheme of things. She could not make him out and this annoyed her. At the end of the first week she had decided to keep him on for there was no doubt he was a good little worker, thorough and willing and much quicker and neater than she had expected from his looks. But he had odd habits. For one thing, as the summer advanced, he seemed to wake earlier and earlier and would come down and set about his work before anyone else was astir. At first she determined to put a stop to this, not that anyone complained, for he was a surprisingly quiet worker and the offices in the annexe were shut off from the rest of the house. But it was not what she was used to.

“You must not come downstairs so early, Tom,” she told him, “there is no need – there is plenty of time for you to do your work later.”

But the day after she had spoken and all the mornings that followed, it was just the same. She expostulated but she might as well have not spoken. It was most irritating, yet there was no denying that after all it was pleasant to find everything swept and tidy when she herself got downstairs, and the boiler fire giving no trouble, and the breakfast trays set out for Gisela, who on the other hand was apt to be late, and Miss Blackett often had had to see to these herself. And there were little extra jobs done without the asking, such as Lord Jim’s breakfast Whiskas tin opened and his evening snack plate cleared up, and the kettle on for her early cup of tea. But then, there was the affair of the bats. A pair of them had taken
up daylight residence in a corner of Tom’s attic and Miss Blackett, who looked upon bats as vermin, told Tom to get the kitchen steps and get rid of them, but Tom had said, “Best let ’em bide and have their sleep out, Lady Miss Blackett,” and when she went up the next day to inspect, they were still there. She had a horror of the creatures and could not bring herself to go near them, but she was unwilling to confess this or to own up to the fact that apparently she was powerless to get Tom to do as he was told – so the bats remained.

His disregard of her order in certain matters, though never rude or defiant, naturally upset her and it did not happen only to her. Fred Mills, the old gardener, complained that Tom picked flowers from the garden occasionally without asking leave, and Mrs Perry, with some unwillingness, confirmed this.

“I’ve told the lad they’re not his flowers and he’s no right to them,” grumbled Fred, yet Tom continued to make up his little nosegays quite openly.

What he did with them Mrs Perry later discovered when one day she noticed Miss Brown with a bunch of her treasured clove-pinks pinned to her flat chest.

“What lovely flowers,” Mrs Perry shouted pleasantly.

Miss Brown actually blushed. “Tom brought them to me,” she said. “He brings me flowers now and again, and I like to wear some of them sometimes, just to show how I appreciate them.”

Mrs Perry, who had always felt a little sorry for Miss Brown, said no more. “She obviously doesn’t wonder where he gets them from. Poor thing, I wonder if anyone’s ever bothered to give her flowers before,” she thought.

As for old Fred, he was completely won over by what happened when, before the repairs to the fence had been completed, Mr Jackson’s bullocks staged another marauding expedition. This time, however, Tom was on
the scene. “I never seed the like. That lad just told ’em to go home, just went up to that little devil of a leader, he did, and stood right in his way and put out his hand to him, coaxing like, and talked to him, and he turned tail and home he went afore he’d done any harm, and the rest just followed him. How did ’e manage that then? I axed him and he said, ‘I tells ’im he was a silly ole duffer to come wandering into a mucky wood, leaving his nice medder, and how every step he took lost him a bite of his own good grass, and he saw sense.’ He do have a wonderful way with animals, that’s for sure.”

That was another thing: at first Miss Blackett had been pleased that Lord Jim and Tom had taken to one another. It was a credit mark for the boy. But, as time went on, she began to resent the cat’s marked preference for his company, even above her own. She would not admit that she was so foolish as to be jealous, but what she was beginning to feel was undoubtedly very like jealousy.

When she learned about Tom’s picking Mrs Perry’s flowers (it was difficult not to hear about things at The Haven), Miss Blackett felt she must apologize to her but Mrs Perry secretly thought that far more harm was done to her treasures by Lord Jim than by Tom.

“I don’t really mind, Miss Blackett,” she said. ‘I think he believes all the flowers in the garden belong to us all, himself included, as if we were all one family, I mean, and perhaps too it’s because he’s used to picking wild flowers wherever and whenever he likes. Anyway, I don’t mind at all, so please don’t say anything to the boy.”

Miss Blackett sniffed. “Much good it would do if I did, with Tom,” she thought.

The little incident of the nosegay of pinks, however, made Mrs Perry observe Dorothy Brown more closely.

“Don’t you think Miss Brown’s changed lately?” she
said to Miss Dawson. “In spite of her deafness, which seems to be getting worse, she’s brighter somehow. I don’t mean more cheerful exactly, but less of a shadow. One used scarcely to be aware of her. Now, if only it wasn’t for that dreadful Miss Ford with her all the time, I believe she could be quite a nice friendly person.”

“I can’t think why you want everyone to be friendly,” said Frances Dawson, though without rancour, adding “but I suppose you can’t help it.”

“Can it be just Tom’s nosegays that have changed her?” mused Mrs Perry, taking no notice of Miss Dawson’s remark.

But though Tom’s offerings were not without their effect, the change in Dorothy Brown which Mrs Perry had noticed had come about through a completely chance event. Yet this too was connected with the boy. Leila Ford had managed to keep him out of her room by bribing Gisela to do extra cleaning with some of the chocolates she always kept near her, but she could not avoid him altogether. One day, when she and Dorothy were returning to their rooms after dinner, they saw him coming towards them down a passage. Pleased at the meeting and feeling that he had not yet managed to show that he wanted to be friends with Lady Miss Ford, Tom ran towards her with his hand held out in his usual greeting. To her horror Dorothy then saw Leila raise the stick which she now always used to support her great bulk and strike at his outstretched arm, so that it fell to his side.

“Get away – you!” she cried, but Tom stood still. Dorothy, as if impelled by an almost reflex action, immediately stepped up to him and kissed him. Then she went into her own room and shut the door.

At first she was overcome with rage at Leila and surprise at herself. Gradually both anger and surprise faded away. She sat down on her bed ignoring, indeed not even hearing, the imperious tapping on her wall, Leila’s
customary summons. She knew that something very important had happened to her and that she had to find out what it was. She sat on, and eventually certain facts presented themselves to her. First, that she hated Leila and had done so for years: secondly, that the Leila she had once loved had never existed; thirdly, that Leila had never cared for her and perhaps had never cared for anyone; and lastly, that she had been too cowardly at the beginning and latterly too tired to admit all this to herself. It was as if Leila’s stick had struck down not just Tom’s arm but the whole false defensive wall that Dorothy had built all these years out of her longing and her pride – a defence against reality. She sat on and felt an extraordinary lightening of spirit. “The truth shall make you free.” She knew now something of what these words meant.

Suddenly she became conscious of Leila’s insistent renewed angry tapping. She felt emptied of both love and hate and, instead, an immense pity filled her heart. She got up and went to attend to her friend.

Miss Dawson was not much aware of Tom at first. She did not usually care for boys, classing them with cats as the natural enemies of birds. Mary Perry had told her that Tom was a nice boy, but Mary was too apt to think everyone nice. Still, she admitted that as yet she had nothing against him. There had been a native boy on one of her Himalayan trips of whom she had once been quite fond and though he was all grace and this boy was uncouth, yet Tom reminded her of him somehow. They both had the same open, gentle look.

One day, sitting by her window, she heard a sound she hated. It was Lord Jim, yowling triumphantly to let the world know that he had successfully tracked down and caught his prey. The peculiar unmistakable tone of the cry was occasioned by his mouth being full of his wretched victim. Miss Dawson peered out. Yes, there
the beast was, carrying what looked very much like another thrush, pitifully quiet and still. Thrushes were especially vulnerable, being slow and trusting birds, and this was the third that she had known Lord Jim take already this summer, and there might of course have been others. Then she saw Tom and so did Lord Jim. He swerved away from the shrubbery where he had intended to deal with his catch privately and at leisure, and instead laid the bird at the feet of Tom, who stooped and picked it up. Miss Dawson called out to him to bring it up to her – she knew that a cat will sometimes carry a bird unharmed until some cover is reached – but she was too far away to make him hear. She saw him holding the thrush quietly in his hands for a little while without moving, then he walked out of sight still holding it, accompanied by Lord Jim, prancing gaily along at his side and waving his tail. As soon as she could, Miss Dawson sent for Tom.

“What did you do with the poor thrush that that wretched cat caught this afternoon?” she asked.

“He be safe and sound, Lady Miss Dawson,” said Tom. “He baint hurt at all, only dazed like. I knew where he belongs, down in the copse, there be four on ’em, all from one nest.”

“That’s a good boy,” said Miss Dawson approvingly, “but what about the cat?”

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” said Tom, “he thought as how I’d be pleased, but he knows now I don’t like it. He can’t rightly reason it out but he knows. I tell him he gets plenty o’ good food given him and there be no need for him to go after the birds at all, but my Gran says once he didn’t.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Miss Dawson, “whenever did your grandmother suppose that Miss Blackett didn’t overfeed her cat?”

“Not Lady Miss Blackett,” said Tom, “but ever so
long ago, afore any of us were born, he didn’t get fed, so he still thinks he’s in the right to catch all he can – but I’ll see as he don’t get them thrushes.”

Miss Dawson was not optimistic all the same, but she felt assured that Tom would try his best to protect the birds and admitted to Mrs Perry that he was a thoroughly well-meaning boy, “Though what he meant about the cat I don’t know.”

Old Mrs Langley was giving a party. The only visible guest was Tom, but the unseen ones – unseen, that is to say, by all but herself – were the friends and relations she had invited nearly seventy years ago on the occasion of her son’s first birthday. Through Tom, who every week took the warden’s shopping list to her grocer’s and brought back the goods, she had managed to acquire a large chocolate cake and a bottle of sherry. Mrs Langley had happened to meet him when the idea, or memory, or vision of the party had floated into her butterfly mind, and she had firmly added the cake and the sherry to Miss Blackett’s list. She had instructed Tom to bring them straight to her. It was Tom, too, who had provided the flowers that filled every vase, and there were a good many of these in Mrs Langley’s room. The wild honeysuckle he had found in the copse, but the red roses had come from Fred Mills’s beds and the white lilies had been Mrs Perry’s pride. The room smelt very sweet.

Mrs Thornton wondered anxiously about all this when she inadvertently also became a guest. She had been passing Mrs Langley’s door that afternoon when she heard Tom’s unmistakable laugh, and then the quavering sound of Mrs Langley’s voice raised louder than usual in one of her favourite hymn tunes. Stopping to listen, Mrs Thornton was able to distinguish the words of “All things bright and beautiful” and then Tom joined in with his humming accompaniment.

“All creatures great and small,” trilled out Mrs Langley.

It was really not a wholly inappropriate birthday song, but Mrs Thornton was ignorant of the celebration when first she opened the door and went in. Mrs Langley, looking flushed and joyful, had an empty glass in one hand and was beating time with the other. Tom, too, was waving an empty glass about and on all the little tables scattered round were more empty glasses and plates and the remains of the cake. The room was full of sunlight and flowers and happiness.