The Man in the Wooden Hat (16 page)

“But where’s all our . . . Where’s my
house
? Our white carpet? Wedding presents? What’s Eddie been up to? The black chair?”

“I’ve no idea. There seems to be plenty still to unpack. There’s a huge
red
chair, none too clean.
Superb
rooms! However did he get them? Rooms in the Temple are like gold. Oh, well, I suppose he is made of gold now. Mr. Midas.”

Elisabeth walked to the window and looked across the river at the rising post-war blocks of cement.

She said, “What’s happened to them? They’ll have got bread and milk in for me, and ordered the papers. They’ll worry.”

“Hush. Too soon.”

“Tell me.”

“No. Well, oh, all right. Ebury Street is being pulled down. The hospital knew but didn’t want to tell you. You said it was fragile. All the bombing . . .”

“Pulled down! No! Not in three weeks.”

“No. Not yet. But they’ve started demolition at the Victoria end. They said—your pals—“Don’t let her come back.” They’ve mostly been rehoused already.”

“What about Mozart Electrics? Across the road?”

“Someone told me—I went round there—that he’s gone into a home. Very crippled.”

“And Delilah? And the butler? And the greengrocer?”

“The greengrocer’s gone to Lowestoft. I found the building firm. Teddy had organised the furniture to come here to the Temple and they gave me a key to have a look around. I collected your post off the floor.”

Elisabeth stood watching the river for some silent minutes and said, “Well, he’s taken everything from me now.”

“Oh,” said Isobel. “
No
! Poor Teddy! And working like hell.”

“He could have told me.”

“He was told not to upset you. The Chambers know. They’ll be coming. He arranged everything, except me. He doesn’t know we know each other—remember?”

“Yes. But I forget why.”

“Don’t think too hard. Listen, you’re going to have help here—shopping and ironing and so on.”

“You are
crowing
!”

“Why?
Crowing
? Me?”

“Because I shouldn’t have married him. You said so.”

“God’s truth!” shouted Isobel. “I traipse round builders, I look up neighbours, I get your post, I fetch you home . . .”

Elisabeth turned back to the river and said, “Had they started the demolition?”

“Yes. The bank on the corner has closed and the little paper shop, and there’s scaffolding up. At the back in those gardens . . .”

“Yes?”

“They were chopping down the trees. Listen, get Teddy home and stop crying. You’re menopausal.”

“I can’t. I’m not. I’m rational and sad,” she said.

“Then go off with bloody Veneering! I can’t do more,” and Isobel slammed away.

Elisabeth walked to another window in the new lodgings, to try to see Lizzie cross the Temple yard towards the alley to the Strand and the Law Courts. It was very quiet in the new apartment that was presumably now her home. She saw that there were flowers in cellophane with cards pinned to them, a pile of letters on a desk. She looked in the one small bedroom with two single beds, fitted end to end. A midget kitchen and a bathroom made for giants, with a bath on feet. And silence. Silence from the corridor outside and the scene below, and from the uncaring river.

She thought: I’m on an island in an empty sea. I’m cast away. Her legs felt shaky and she sat down trying to remember that being alone was what most of the world found usual. She thought that in childhood she’d been in crowded Tiensin, a crowd of Chinese servants day and night. In the Shanghai Camp, people and people, a slot in a seething tent; my hand always held by my mother, or riding on my father’s back. The crowded ship to England, the crowded London school, the crowds of students at her all-women Oxford college, the return to Hong Kong and the infrastructure of Edward’s world. Now this solitude. Double-glazed silence. I suppose I must just wait. It’s the anaesthetic still inside me. I have memory so I must still be here. I have nobody, but I have memory. There was a knock on the door.

But the door of the apartment seemed a mile away and she could not move. She stared at the door and willed it to open of its own accord and after a moment it did, and Albert Ross walked in.

“No! Get out! Go away!”

He took off the broad brown hat and sat down on the red chair and looked at her from across the room.

“Go away. I hate you.”

He twirled his shoes, regarded them and, without looking at her, said, “I’ve come to apologise. I dealt you the Five of Clubs. It was a mistake. I seldom make a mistake and I have never apologised for anything before, being of a proud nature.”

She watched him.

“The Five of Clubs means ‘a prudent marriage not for love.’”

She watched him.

“I am very much attached to your husband. I saw only your faithlessness. It affected the pack. I was wrong.”

“You were always wrong. You stole his watch once.”

He became purple in the face with rage and said, “Never! He gave it to me when I had nothing. It was all he possessed. He trusted me. It was to save my life.”

“You are cruel!”

“Here is a telephone number you must ring. It will be to your advantage.”

“I don’t need your help.”

He sighed and put out a hand to his hat and she thought, He may have a knife. He could kill me. He is a troll from a stinking pit.

But he brought out of the hat only the pack of cards, looked at it, then put it away.

“This is a transition time for you. You still don’t see your way. This telephone number is from someone who cares about you. Her name is Dexter,” and he put a visiting card on the table and was gone.

A dream, she thought.

She did not move, but slept for a minute or perhaps an hour, then crossed to the table where there was no visiting card. She searched everywhere, under the table, even along the passage outside the door. Nothing.

Then the telephone rang and a voice said, “Might I have the honour of addressing Mrs. Edward
Feathers
?”

“Delilah!”

“Aha,” said the familiar phantom voice. “Seek and ye shall find! I am speaking from the West Country. From Dorsetshire. England.”

“Dorset?”

“You will remember that we have our country estate in Dorset? Well, it is, by some, designated ‘country cottage.’ Now that we have been cast out of our London home we have taken refuge in it.”

“But where exactly, Delilah?”

“Well, we are not
exactly
on the estate, but some fifty miles away in the fine city of Bath where mercifully Dexter has been granted God’s gift of
The Admirable Crichton
.”

“Who—?”

“The
comedy
of that name written in honour of the immortal figure of the English butler. Second only to the incomparable
Jeeves
. Five performances a week plus matinées, good cheap theatrical lodgings thrown in. Alas, however, he is in at the final curtain every night and grows a little wearier each day.”

“Oh, Delilah!”

“But we find ourselves affluent, well-housed, awaiting the compensation for our London home. Our country property is deserted. We hear that you are recovering from surgery and our little empty dacha in the woods awaits you, if you would like to stay in it. For ever if you like.”

“
Like to
!”

“It is yours to use as long as you like. I am in touch with dear Eddie’s clerk. He will make all the arrangements. Why do you weep?”

“With joy and disbelief. Oh, Delilah, it’s like a musical!”

“There is, I fear, no music at our dacha,” she said, “except the music of the rooks and the morning chorus of a myriad other species of feathered creature; the pizzicato of the rain and the crashing tympani and singing strings of the west wind. There’s no electricity, dear, no running water and no abominable telephone.”

“Oh, it’s
not
abominable! How else could we be talking?

“Milk and bread are delivered daily to the lane—a little climb up from the back of the house. Also the daily papers. You can give them lists of groceries and you will pay in the basket provided before you go home. No one will disturb you. Dexter has a splendid theatrical library, if a trifle damp, and there is the evening softness of lamplight.”

“Delilah—I’m a bit potty at the moment. I’ve had surgery and I’m still full of anaesthetic. I’ve just had a hallucination. Is this another?”

“Hallucination, dear? No. Hallucination demands vision. Nor am I an aural manifestation. The return fare from Waterloo to Tisbury Junction is modest and you will be met. Contact Eddie’s clerk. Bring a wrap for the early mornings so that you can walk in the dew. And an insect repellent. You will be quite alone.”

“Are we going to meet there, Delilah—dear, beloved Delilah? I’m so bloody lonely.”

“Very good for you, dear. And I hardly think we’ll meet. My duties to Dexter are very onerous. He sends his love. We shall possibly meet again one day, of course. These things may happen. I don’t suppose”—her voice trailed away to nothing, then came back like a thread on a lute string—“you’ve heard anything about the gardens? They haven’t cut them down, have they? My London forest trees?”

She said, “No, no. I’m sure not,” and the line clicked shut.

But the phone number? She couldn’t call Delilah back. She must telephone Chambers. She must think of timetables on the Southern Railway. She must make lists of supplies. She must phone Edward. She must think of supper.

In the fridge she found milk and food, and on the table yet another bouquet of flowers from Edward and a note from the Inn with the times of Sunday services at the Temple church. Then the phone began to ring again and again, friends from near and far. The world grew smaller and smaller and so crammed with kind enquiries that she left the receiver off. Kind and rowdy, the city surged up to her from the river and the Embankment and the Strand, rich and glorious. Tomorrow she would be coping with rooks.

Then she saw, in the mail on the desk, a packet from Hong Kong lying beside the cards and she took it across the room and slowly and carefully opened it. Inside was a short double string of pearls with a diamond clasp and a note saying,
He is better. He will live. Return these at your peril. For ever V. PS: Where did you go?

I
t was a train ride of pure celebration. A train ride like childhood’s. Edward’s Chambers saw her on to the platform and right into the reserved seat for Tisbury Junction. The clerks gave her chocolates and told her that there would be a taxi waiting. At Tisbury she climbed out upon the single-track platform and sat on a seat in the sun and, like an old film, a man came along and said in a country voice, “Taxi, ma’am? Let me take your case.”

He drove along the lanes and she saw a tree above a hedge like a hen on a nest, then a long stone wall, and in a gap in the wall she looked down upon a dell and a massive stone chimney pot attached to something unseen. The driver and the bag went ahead down the slope until they were on a level with the chimney pot and looking at an almost vertical track below and a thatched roof.

“I’ll never get the case down there. This must be the back. There must be a front way somewhere.”

“What shall we do?”

“I’ll have a try.”

He trundled and slithered, Elisabeth following, and they arrived at a paved yard and a back door. She paid him.

“You O.K. here, miss?”

“Yes,” she said, liking the “miss.” “Thank you,” and leaving the luggage in the grass she went looking for the front door where she had been told there would be a key under a mat. She could find neither door nor key and the silent valley beyond watched. In an outhouse which was an earth closet there was a huge black iron key and she thought she would try it in the back door, and set off further round the gentle, sleeping house and came to a front door with a Yale key in it, waiting to be turned. Inside were dark rooms and the smell of damp books. She saw furniture under dust sheets, a paraffin lamp with a cloudy globe, a box of matches alongside and a fresh loaf on the table.

It was not yet dusk and so, after standing a kettle on a black stove that seemed to be warm, she walked outside again into the garden.

It was a glade cut out from woodland. The stretch of grass that led to more faraway trees was not so much lawn as meadow where vanished trees were waiting somewhere to reclaim their home. She felt the stirring of life under the grass and saw spirals of bindweed standing several feet high seeking some remembered support. They swayed as if they were growing under water. There was nothing more, only the dwindling path, the dwindling light, the pearly quiet sky.

She returned to the house, removed the kettle, found a staircase behind a cupboard door, reached a bedroom with wooden walls and smelling of cedar trees. She opened the window and looked at the glimmer of the evening and without even a drink of water, without locking the house or turning a key or taking off her coat, she lay down on the patchwork quilt and listened to the end of the day. Soon all the small sounds stopped, and she slept.

It was an eerie dawn, blowy and cloudy, and she had no idea where she was. When she remembered, she listened for the rooks but they were silent. She was afraid for a while that yesterday’s journey belonged to someone else. Then, rolling from the bed, walking to the window, she saw that this was a strange place but in some way she knew it. The window looked at a wall of vegetation so close to the glass that she could stretch and touch if she opened it. She saw the roof of a shed that must be the earth closet. Yet she had remembered golden space.

And then she remembered that she had chosen the tiny back bedroom to sleep in. The other room with its mighty feather bed had seemed too intimately a part of the Dexters’ lives to disturb. She went downstairs, dragged the black kettle across the wood-burning stove until it was over the hotplate—still hot. More wood was needed and when she looked, there it was. She found a tin teapot and a tea caddy that said it was a present from Blackpool. A jug of milk stood in a bowl of water on the pantry floor. Across the top, it had a muslin cloth weighted down with little coloured beads. The pantry stones were cool under her bare feet.