The Brontes Went to Woolworths (7 page)

‘This is unworthy.’

‘Your thought, here, suffers confusion.’

‘Your intention is pure, but we all feel the inherent worthlessness of such a nature as you depict.’

And:

‘Your Frenchman is, indeed, a laughable creature.
D’ailleurs
is wrongly inserted in this sentence.
You are the
Frenchman
, and must suffer him to be acquainted with his Mother Tongue.’ I was excited with annoyance. It was awful that my book should have been read and chuckled at . . . I was so pleased and happy, writing it.

‘
We
all feel
’

We, I suppose, were the publisher, his typist and his office boy. Something about the comments eluded me, and then it returned.

Of course! Term-end reports. There was a scholastic smack about the notes that used to permeate all our reports at school.

One has to wait until mid-day for the newspapers, which are sent from Keighley with the bread. We take in the
Mail
and the
Post
, and Katrine had just brought them in to mother, next day, and we were sharing the
Mail
, when mother looked up and said, rather breathlessly, ‘Dion Saffyn is dead.’

‘No, oh no!’ I cried, and then added, idiotically, ‘The
real
Dion Saffyn?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

It was in both papers. The
Mail
gave him a paragraph (
this well-known entertainer . . . concert parties in Arcaly . . . a
popular artist . . .
).

‘How?’ Katrine asked. She was rather white. I think I was, too.

‘ “Heart failure following influenza.” We mustn’t tell Sheil. She was so fond of him.’

‘And Pauline, and Ennis . . .’

‘I know . . .
poor
old Saffy. Well . . . he’s had a good innings.’

Katrine and I got up and went out.

We didn’t speak much as we flogged along. There was nothing to say, and too much. Katrine got the nearest to anything when she stopped and faced me in the sheep-track we were following, single file.

‘It’s . . . funny, isn’t it, that we haven’t the right even . . . to send him flowers!’

‘Or ring up the girls . . . ’

Part of our life was over. We both knew that Saffy might come back to us, or might not. He might have to, for Sheil’s sake.

‘How many years is it, now?’

I stopped again, to reckon.

‘Over ten.’

A singular thought struck me.

‘And Sheil’s never even seen him. Only photographs.’

At the end of a fortnight Miss Martin joined us. She was, in her contained way, unsettled. The place, of course, didn’t help her out, and her version of it was that it was ‘very wild.’ Her rendering of wrack was ‘quite weird,’ and as she became more de-Cheltenhamised, she also grew in unhappiness. She joined us on our walks, her neat feet and picked ankles decently navigating the scrambles, but she really preferred a trot up and down the high road in front of the Inn, while Sheil, swaddled in wraps, sniffed and coughed at her side.

After supper, Katrine said, ‘Let’s table-turn.’ She said it, I know, out of contempt for the whole place, and the forced inaction and the one post a day, and no bath, telephone, geyser or Sunday papers. For we all regard table-turning as the kitchenmaid of the psychic world. It’s too easy, too slavish to all of us, and tells far-fetched and clumsy lies, and altogether it’s like twanging the banjo when you might be playing a viola.

Mother, always a little self-conscious with Miss Martin, asked her had she ever done any table-turning? And Miss Martin looked hesitant and bright, and was evidently being torn between her duties to her Maker and her employer, plus an illogical conviction that the whole thing was ‘great’ rubbish. I very nearly said it all for her. Inevitably, rubbish and employers won, and we sat in a rough circle.

‘
Agatha
.’

‘Why, that’s me,’ squeaked Miss Martin.

‘Don’t take your hands off, Miss Martin. It means it wants you to ask it questions.’

‘Oh . . . dear.’ Miss Martin fluttered and tittered. ‘What – what do you want?’

‘
Where have you been
?’

‘Chah-Cheltenham.’

And then, in the maddeningly inconsequent way they always do, the table rapped out ‘
red hair
.’

‘No, oh no. Mine is brown.’ Katrine kicked me under the table and I said, ‘You’ll have to dye it, Miss Martin,’ and mother said, ‘S’sh.’

‘
Crellie and Keeper. Not pleased
.’

‘Crellie and – there isn’t a keeper here. Lor! I hope he hasn’t run a sheep,’ said Katrine.

‘
Crellie bit Keeper
.’

‘I bet he didn’t, did you, my fattest?’ I protested, slapping the sleeping Crellie’s stout stomach. Then, suddenly, ‘
Sheil come
.’

‘She can’t. She’s in bed,’ explained mother.

‘
Go back
.’

‘Where to?’

‘
Go back
.’

‘Please explain,’ mother asked, with that matter-ofcourse courtesy which she would play impartially upon servants or demons.

‘
Remember Maria
.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘
Remember Maria
.
Remember Elizabeth
.’

‘Is it “Maria” or “Elizabeth” speaking?’

Pause. ‘
No
.’

‘
And remember Anne
.’

‘Dear! . . . all the queens of England!’ chirruped Miss Martin. ‘Where is “Anne?”’

‘
Not here. You would say dead. Not here. Further. Sea
.’

‘Which sea?’ I asked, for Miss Martin was, like Doctor Watson, ‘a little nettled at this want of confidence.’

Pause. ‘
North
.’

‘ “Anne dead in the North Sea,” ’ I commented.

‘
Not in. By
.’

‘This is rather slow,’ complained Katrine. But the table was at it again.

‘
We will come
.’

‘What, all of you?’ smiled mother.

‘
The two who came before
.’

‘That means Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth,’ said Miss Martin. ‘Anne was so much later.’

‘
Not Queens. C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E and A-N-N-E
.’

‘When will you come?’ enquired mother hastily.

‘
Not yet. Not free. Shall we see you
?’

Then, as we returned no answer, ‘
K promise
.’

Katrine yawned and said, ‘All right.’

‘
D promise
.’

‘Very well,’ I said.

‘
R promise
.’

But mother is too old a hand to be caught that way, and I could see that she removed her hand for a second, and made the sign of the cross.

If one could say of a table that it expressed contempt in sound, that is the word I should select for the performance of ours. At this gesture, it was for all the world like the rappings of overbearing knuckles.

‘
Anglican. No Popery
!’

Mother smiled to herself, and Miss Martin went ‘hoo!’ right up in her head. We silenced the hail of raps with our promises, the table rocked into a corner and we shuffled with it.

‘
Sheil – go – back – in – time
.’

After that it would say nothing.

Miss Martin said it was perfectly weird.

As I moved about the bedroom, Sheil stirred in her sleep, and gave a husky little crow.

I stood a minute in the middle of the floor, and slinging my dressing-gown round me, opened the door. Mother’s room was at the end of the passage.

Outside, she was coming towards me.

‘Well . . . what about it?’

‘I agree with you,’ I answered.

‘There’s nothing serious the matter with her, but at the same time
’

‘I know.’

We packed the following day.

And so, Katrine and I were able to be at Dion Saffyn’s funeral. We hid in a back pew, and when those with a right to be present had laid their wreaths and driven away, we came forward and put our flowers with the rest.

In the church, I could recognise nobody, but Katrine pulled my cuff and whispered, ‘That’s Pauline – the fair girl up in front. She’s changed a bit, but it’s Pauline. I remember her face . . . ’ As we left the churchyard, I said, ‘K, I do hope you don’t want hymns for your funeral. They make one feel
’

‘Not much! Have what you like, if I do go off first. I’d like some of German’s
Nell Gwynne
dances.’

‘Why can’t they let one have a medley of all the music one’s ever liked? After all, it’s more “us” than
The Day Thou
Gavest
or anything of that kind.’

‘I know. I love all sorts of things:
Gathering Peascods
, and
Vanity of Vanities
, and
I’m One of the Ruins Cromwell Knocked
About a Bit
, and if one asked for them, they’d say one was irreverent. Aren’t people incredible? What are we going to do now?’

‘Cinema? That ought to kill or cure.’

‘Couldn’t stick it.’

‘Tea?’

‘Couldn’t down a thing.’

‘Better be on our own.’

‘Right you are.’

I walked and walked, confused with the way things were going and by the fact that I was in London in August. Somehow, the sight of town was rather improper, like seeing your grandmother in her combinations. You knew she wore them, but the shock was none the less. London in August was one of the sights automatically kept from you, like major operations, and yet I have always suspicioned I could love it at forbidden times. One misses so much by slavery to dates and clocks. How many Londoners have seen the vegetables unpacked in Covent Garden? Or the day dawn in Kensington Gardens, or breakfasted at Greenwich and gone back by steamer? And if it comes to that, how many of us have seen the country in October, with wet apples thumping overnight on to the ground? Poor little Pauline and Ennis. What a break-up! I wonder what they do? Saffy really has got a London office, and when I am in Leicester Square, I pass it and look up at the windows.

Sheil is better already, but she and mother must go away again and finish up the business. Saffy’s death would throw Pauline out of a job, I had said to mother, and then I remembered that probably she had never been in it . . . she may even be married . . .