Westwood (21 page)

‘Don’t!’ said Margaret; the image was unpleasantly vivid.

‘Yes, he look out. I haf seen him!’ She was silent for a moment and the hand which was clasping Margaret’s arm began to tremble. ‘Und my fader und mudder haf seen him also, und all my people. Since a very, very long time ago he haf live there, und when he look out he see only darkness und sad cruel things. Efen the sunlight to him it is sad.’

‘The song called
Auch Kleine Dinge
wasn’t a bit sad, or that one called
Theresa
,’ protested Margaret.

‘No; there are other peoples live in the cottage too, and they are not mad. But der madman, he is always there, you may be sure of dot.’

There was silence for a moment. A slight rain was falling and making the dark pavements slippery.

‘Sometimes he come out of der cottage too,’ said Zita with a long shuddering sigh. ‘Gott help us all when he come. Now’ – she gave the arm a sudden pressure – ‘we speak no more of these sad things. You think I am unkind to ask for the money-ticket, oh yes,’ shaking her head as Margaret tried to protest. ‘I know. I see in your face. And I am sorry I ask. If I was still in Hamburg und you were staying with me und my parents, I have you for my guest and I nefer, nefer think to ask. But now I am so poor! And I am not use to it, Margaret. I do not know how to be poor, and I hate it.’

‘I am so sorry,’ said Margaret, pressing the thin arm linked through her own and feeling for the first time a genuine warmth towards Zita, ‘I should never have let you ask; I ought to have offered to pay for myself when you first suggested our going. Let’s always go halves in future, shall we? Hilda and I always do.’

‘As you say, Margaret,’ said Zita dejectedly. ‘It will be better. Hilde? She is anoder of your friend?’

‘Oh yes! My oldest friend, really.’

‘You like her better than me.’ It was a statement, made over Zita’s shoulder while she took two tickets from the machine.

‘No, I don’t, Zita, truly. I like you both in different ways.’

‘It iss the same thing,’ said Zita, standing on the moving staircase and gazing up at her with miserable dark eyes. Margaret could only helplessly shake her head, and presently Zita’s smart appearance attracted the attention of a foreign soldier who gazed at her with such marked admiration that she began to giggle.

‘You know vere ve are going?’ she suddenly interrupted herself to ask as the train drew near to Highgate station, ‘I take you to tea at home.’

‘At Westwood?’ exclaimed Margaret. ‘Oh, thank you, Zita, but won’t you come back to tea with me? Mother does half-expect us.’

Zita made what used to be described as a
moue
, and tilted her tiny hands from side to side.

‘Thank you, I come some other day, perhaps,’ she answered rather dryly, and Margaret gathered that the idea of a hostess who only half-expected her guest was not attractive. Poor and plain and a refugee Zita might be, but there was no doubt that she could take care of herself.

Westwood was shut up and chilly and dark, and everyone appeared to be out. Zita hurried her
in by a back entrance and upstairs and along dim corridors, and up and down dark little crooked flights of stairs, until she was bewildered. At last, however, Zita opened a door, exclaiming, ‘We are here! Go in, Margaret,’ at the same time turning on a light.

‘Grantey has blacked-out,’ she went on, going over to the window and rearranging the folds of the curtains. ‘Now we will make ourselfs comfort.’

Presently they were seated on a Victorian couch before the fire, eating cakes and sipping scalding tea. The change from cold and darkness to warmth and light was so pleasant that for a little while Margaret did not take much notice of her surroundings, while Zita sat upright with a cake held in one hand and her cup in the other, looking like a marmoset and gazing pensively into the fire.

‘You like dese?’ she asked suddenly, holding up a cake. ‘I make them. It iss a German way.’

‘Very much,’ nodded Margaret. ‘You have a nice room,’ she added shyly, glancing about her.

Zita shrugged her shoulders. ‘Mrs Challis let me bring a lot of things from other rooms because ven first I come it iss so empty.’

Margaret could believe this, for there were many draperies and cushioned chairs, and it was obvious that Zita’s oriental taste for luxury had overlain the austere, shabby elegance of the room’s original furnishings. Portraits of lively Jewish faces were on the mantelpiece; groups of smiling girls in white dresses and gentlemen in long coats and top-hats, and ripe little dark-eyed boys; and in spite of the fact that the room could have existed nowhere but in the house of well-bred English people, there was no incongruity between it and the photographs of a vivacious alien race, for there were a gilt dancing Buddha and Burmese swords and a Chinese cabinet already at home there, and they all looked like loot gathered in by English Empire-builders and set down carelessly yet harmoniously with the grey and white chintz and the worn red carpet and the red and gold Moorish curtains at the windows.

‘Is it at the back?’ asked Margaret. ‘I’m hopelessly lost.’

‘It look out at the garden’ said Zita, and just then the door opened and a voice said:

‘Zita? Are you having tea? May I join you? Oh no – I’m so sorry –’

And the smiling lady who had opened the door was already withdrawing when Zita hurried across to her, exclaiming:

‘Oh, please do come, Mrs Challis! It iss my friendt Margaret, Miss Steggles; we haf been to a concert, and we should be so please if you haf tea with us.’

‘If you’re sure I’m not butting in,’ said Mrs Challis, and came over to the fire and knelt down and stretched her hands to the warmth.

‘Isn’t it a revolting evening?’ she said, turning her large amused eyes upon Margaret. ‘And now there’s a fog coming up, of all things.’

Margaret murmured something. The mixture of admiration, envy and despair which she was experiencing made her forget her manners.

‘Don’t we have to thank you for finding our ration books and mending our fuses and all sorts of things?’ Mrs Challis went on, putting down her cup and slipping out of her coat. Margaret recognized the perfume of the previous evening, and to her extreme annoyance found herself tongue-tied at the moment when she most desired to make a favourable impression. Mrs Challis chatted on:

‘What heavenly tea! I was nearly dead with the cold. Is everybody out? There’s nobody in the kitchen.’

‘I think Mr Challis write in his study,’ said Zita solemnly. ‘Mrs Grant haf taken the children home und Cortway iss not yet come back.’

‘Not yet?’ said Mrs Challis, pausing with a cake half-way to her lips and staring. ‘Oh dear. Old Mrs Cortway must be ill.’

‘Or perhaps deadt,’ said Zita, dropping her voice.

‘Oh, come, we hope not,’ said Mrs Challis with one irrepressible glance at Margaret. ‘I expect he’ll be here by dinner-time. Well, was it a good concert? Was she in good voice – dear old thing. Are you a great concert-goer, Miss Steggles?’ she added, turning her sweet flushed face upon Margaret with such a kind interest that the latter received an impression of actual warmth like sunlight.

‘Not really, but Miss Mandelbaum – Zita – was kind enough to take me and I’ve
never
enjoyed anything so much in all my life,’ she answered; with too much vehemence, she felt.

‘What fun,’ said Mrs Challis. ‘Isn’t Madame an angel? I adore her bun; she never varies it, and it suits her
too
marvellously. Oh well, there are lots of lovely things to go to this month, and when you can’t get into town you must come in and listen with Zita in the Little Room; it’s quiet in there and you can imagine you’re having the concert all to yourselves.’

She stood up and brushed crumbs from her dark wool dress, which was fitted closely to her figure by means of intricate seaming and had no ornaments except its own folds and cut. Margaret had seen photographs of such dresses in
Vogue
, but never before on a living woman.

‘Thank you very much, Mrs Challis; it’s awfully kind of you and I should love to,’ she murmured, overjoyed but conscious that Zita’s dark eyes were glancing suspiciously, jealously from Mrs Challis to herself.

‘There’s Grantey now,’ said Mrs Challis. ‘I can hear her riddling the Esse. Thank you for my lovely tea. Good night, children,’ and she nodded radiantly at them both and went away, with her fur coat hanging over one shoulder.

Margaret glanced inquiringly at Zita.

‘Riddling –?’

‘The Esse. It iss the cooking stove and ven you rake him out it is called riddling! I know not why,’ said Zita crossly, beginning to pack up the teacups.

‘Let me help,’ said Margaret, getting up.

‘No, no. I do it. I haf to begin work again soon, so why not now?’ cried Zita, whose mood seemed to be going rapidly downhill. But Margaret took the cups which she was ill-temperedly clashing about and neatly stacked them on the tray, whilst she, defeated, stood watching with her arms folded.

‘Now,’ said Margaret with determined brightness, ‘where do we wash them up?’

Zita shook her head. ‘I shall not tell.’

‘Then I’ll take them down to Mrs Grant,’ and Margaret moved towards the door.

‘Do not – do not!’ hissed Zita, darting in front of her. ‘She does not like me to haf friends to tea!’

‘You should take no notice of that, if Mrs Challis doesn’t object. Mrs Grant is only the cook.’

‘It iss eassy to talk,’ retorted Zita gloomily, and Margaret (in spite of a triumph when the enemy suddenly rushed across the landing and showed her a housemaid’s cupboard and sink) had a fleeting suspicion that it was.

‘I am bad to you!’ announced Zita, when they had washed and dried two saucers and a knife.

‘Oh, no,’ soothingly.

‘Yes, yes, I am. You will want me no more.’

‘Don’t be so –’ (She was going to say silly, but substituted ‘sensitive, Zita,’ instead.) ‘I like you very much indeed and I hope we shall be real friends and have lots of good times
together.’

‘You are so kindt!’ said Zita, weeping, and mopped her eyes with the teacloth; then exclaimed in disgust and flung it on the floor. ‘You forgive me when I am bad,’ she added, taking out a handkerchief.

‘Well,
do
be happy again,’ and Margaret rescued the teacloth. (‘Cheer up’ hardly seemed a phrase which Zita would comprehend, for ‘cheer’ was such an English word in all its implications.)

‘I will try,’ sniffed Zita, resuming the drying-up, and in five minutes was laughing over an arrangement to meet Margaret at the Old Vienna Café in Lyons Corner House one day next week.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Margaret came out of the side entrance to Westwood. This was one of the rare occasions of her life when she felt extremely tired, but it was not bodily tiredness; it was the temporary exhaustion produced in the nervous system by dealing with a strong, capricious and moody human personality. In return, she had had two hours of a new and exquisite pleasure – a pleasure so rare that it could truthfully be called happiness – and she had secured, as easily as picking a flower, an invitation from Westwood’s mistress to drop in frequently to Westwood. But the continuance of such advantages depended upon her remaining friends with Zita, and she really was not sure if (as Hilda would say) she could take it. How very, very tiring Zita was!

As she turned into her own road, a disturbing idea struck her. ‘I wonder if I ever tire people like that?’ she thought.

The Wilsons had lately had an addition to their household; an Alsatian dog named Bobby. As was usual with the Wilsons’ pets, he had been given to Hilda by a young pilot – as a parting gift when the latter had been posted abroad – and on the afternoon that Zita and Margaret went to the concert, Hilda, wearing a scarlet Juliet cap and scarlet jacket, was exercising Bobby on the Heath. That wide path which runs along the edge of Kenwood and looks down upon London was one of Hilda’s and Margaret’s favourite walks, and Hilda (who had that pleasure in walking even on a dull day which has increased noticeably among Londoners during the last twenty years) was enjoying the keen wind, the slow sighing of the beech trees above her head, and the glimpses of Saint Paul’s dome through the mists in the valley, and whistling as she went.

Another and very different procession was wending its dismal way through the wood itself while she was walking on the outskirts. This was none other than Grantey, Barnabas, Emma, their new brother Jeremy, and, of all things, their grandfather. A number of circumstances had conspired to produce this surprising (and so far as Mr Challis was concerned, undesirable) circumstance. The Nilands were staying the week-end at Westwood for the christening party, and after lunch Hebe and Seraphina had gone off with Beefy to spend the last hours of his leave at a film, leaving the children with Grantey. Mr Challis, encountering them as he crossed the hall on the way to his study and a quiet, fruitful afternoon of creative labour, had stopped to speak to them and, never knowing what to say to children, had commented upon the weak sunlight struggling
through the grey clouds, falsely saying that he wished he could accompany them on their nice walk home to Hampstead.

‘Oh, do come, Grandpa; oh, do come!’ shouted Barnabas, seized with one of those illogical and maddening desires which frequently overtake children, and Emma also began to squeak and implore. The baby slept, small and warm in the deep shell of his pram.