Westwood (25 page)

‘It’s grand,’ said her father heartily, giving her a grateful glance. ‘Now come on, Dick, that’s settled,’ and he took his friend by the arm and moved towards the door, followed by the Wilsons, to whom everybody began to express their thanks for a delightful evening.

Dick Fletcher, who now looked both tired and ill, said to Mrs Steggles: ‘It’s awfully nice of you; I’m afraid I’m giving you a lot of trouble,’ and she answered:

‘Oh, that’s nothing, we’ll soon fix you up, Mr Fletcher, if you’re sure you don’t mind about the blackout,’ in a tone which she managed to make sufficiently pleasant; and the party, having waved good-bye to the Wilsons as they stood in the lighted hall with Hilda leaning smiling upon her mother’s arm, set off down the damp, silent road. They were all tired, and Mrs Steggles’s thoughts were running upon pillow-slips.

‘That’s a pretty girl,’ said Dick Fletcher suddenly.

‘Isn’t she!’ said Margaret eagerly, pleased with the praise of her friend, and turning to him as they walked side by side. She hoped that he would continue to talk of Hilda, but he said no more, and the conversation was carried on by Mr Steggles, who asked Margaret what were the names and pre-war occupations of all the young men who had been at the party, while Mrs Steggles commented upon the attire of the young women.

‘Since you were so ready to ask him here, you can make his bed,’ whispered Mrs Steggles in a low angry tone, as soon as she and Margaret were upstairs, the men having gone into the dining-room. ‘Shouting out like that – I never heard anything like it. Whose house is it, I should like to know?’ She jerked open a cupboard and began to collect bed linen.

‘Well, Mother, we
do
owe him Dad’s job,’ said Margaret in the same tone, taking the sheets. ‘If it wasn’t for him we shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ said Mrs Steggles grudgingly. ‘As a matter of fact, I’d forgotten that. But what I’m complaining about is
you
taking it on
yourself
to ask him here.’

Margaret suddenly put an arm round her shoulders and gave her a quick kiss.

‘You know you don’t really mind!’ she said.

‘That’s all very well,’ grumbled Mrs Steggles. ‘There, you’ve upset my hair.’ But her tone was softer, and when Margaret fixed an improvised blackout at the spare-room window she expressed approval. (I believe if I kissed Mother more often we should get on better, thought Margaret, as she made the bed, but the trouble is that I
cannot
kiss people unless I really feel like it. Poor Mother, she doesn’t get many kisses.)

‘You surely won’t make coffee at this hour?’ said Mrs Steggles as they went downstairs.

‘Depends if they want it,’ said Margaret, almost as blithely as Hilda would have done, and went into the dining-room. Both men looked up as she entered.

‘Now how about that coffee?’ she asked, smiling.

‘That’s a very good idea,’ said her father cheerfully, stirring the fire. ‘Dick, you’ll have some?’

‘Thank you, I’d like some very much.’

‘It doesn’t keep you awake?’ she asked.

‘Keep him awake? You should see him in the Reporters’ Room, swilling it down in bucketfuls, black as your hat and no sugar,’ laughed her father.

She smiled and went into the kitchen to begin her preparations.

‘Oh dear, I
am
so tired,’ said her mother, leaning against the dresser and yawning. ‘Do you
think I need stay up?’

‘Of course not, you go up to bed, I’ll look after them,’ said Margaret. ‘We needn’t be up very early tomorrow.’ (This was one of the privileges of the Christmas holidays which she much appreciated.)

‘Poor Mr Fletcher, it’s so sad for him, that awful woman,’ said Mrs Steggles, beginning to go up to bed but lingering, as some people do.

‘What awful woman? Oh yes, of course, he’s divorced, isn’t he? He divorced her, I mean.’ Margaret was putting the milk on to heat.

‘Yes. Oh well … I’m going up. Good night, dear. Don’t be too late coming up.’

Margaret sat before the fire and poured the coffee for her father and their guest. The house was hushed, and outside there was the dead quiet of the first black, damp, starless night of the New Year. She was silent, listening to the talk of the men, which, while not profound, was sufficiently different to the feminine conversations to which she most frequently listened to hold half of her attention: the other half was still turned dreamily towards the mansion on the hill.

At this hour its owner was still sitting by the fire in his study, with a drink and a cigar, at the end of an evening’s work on his play. Seraphina was seeing in the New Year with a gay party somewhere.

He looked much as Margaret had imagined him. His profile
was
outlined against the radiance from the lamp, and in the shadows there
were
volumes bound in gilded calf-skin, and the velvet curtains, of the rich hue of a redcurrant,
did
hang down in sumptuous folds; there was even the bust of a Roman emperor of the Silver Age, with sensual lips and ox-like curls.

The firelight played over the plaster mouldings on the ceiling and deepened the colour of the carpet, which was that worn red drugget, once of excellent quality, only to be found in old-fashioned hotels and the homes of the English upper classes. Tall green candles in massy silver sconces stood upon the marble mantelpiece, which was carved with the heads of pouting cupids, and coils of vine and sprays of curling feathers. At one side of the fireplace were stacked some large logs of solid beech, their silvery surface covered with a thin green lichen where for a hundred years the west wind had blown upon them with its burden of rain. A third rested upon the fire, with green and bluish flames just beginning to lick over its round dark sides. The time was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

Mr Challis was thinking about the evening which he had spent with Hilda and trying to analyse what was her charm for him, but he could get no further than that she reminded him of the sharp fresh taste of a young apple, while her colouring had the apple-blossom’s pink and white, and her eyes the blue of the sky between the apple-blossom leaves; she even had the apple-blossom’s cool fragrance. He had enjoyed their evening together, but not as much as he had anticipated, for he had by now reached a stage in vanity and loneliness when another human being only served him as an audience, a mirror, or a thurifer, and Hilda was not fitted for any of these offices. True, she had been friendly and polite and cheerful, but this was not at all what Mr Challis wanted; he was a subtle, dissatisfied adult being (he told himself) and demanded a response for these qualities in
the women he entertained. She had also, towards the close of the evening, displayed a puzzling interest in his welfare; asking him in the taxi if he felt a draught, making him promise to go straight to bed when he got home, and so on; and much as he would have liked to he could not attribute this solicitude to a passion for himself. He could not make up his mind quite
what
it was due to; unless she was intensely motherly and liked, so to speak, to tuck her admirers up? He hoped not. It was many years since he had been tucked up and he had never felt the want of it.

The evening had not been a complete success, though she seemed to have enjoyed it all; even the dreadful film about two excitable young people, Judy somebody and a dwarfish boy-man all over freckles, who kept singing and dancing. Mr Challis had suffered considerably, but had passed the time by reflecting how far gone in degeneracy was Western culture. He would have preferred to take her to see a revival of
Carnet de Bal
, but feared that he might see someone he knew there, and so had deferred to her choice.

And as that evening, in which sweetness and weariness were so strangely mingled, drew towards its end, he had begun to experience a division of personality which was disturbing; he had put it down to the noise and the excessive tedium of the film. It was as if he were at once two people; his own cultured, detached, fastidious self, and another man; a much simpler man who did not care where he was so long as he was with Hilda, and could drink in the sharp sweetness of her voice and laugh and catch the blue flash of her eyes as she glanced sideways. By the end of the evening this simple man had been completely in the ascendant, and Mr Challis, after one practised attempt in a taxi which Hilda had dealt with by forthright impatience, had pleaded as abjectly as any boy of eighteen for a good-night kiss.

It made him hot to remember how he had pleaded, and he would not let himself think about what Hilda had said, and yet he could not forget it; it returned again and again to his thoughts, making him move restlessly as if under a stab of pain.

At last he got up, and stood with his arms leaning upon the marble of the mantelpiece, staring down into the fire while the light played over his beautiful discontented face.

It’s no use, Marcus, I don’t like you enough yet. I don’t mean to be rude, but I just can’t
.

It was the first time that his kisses had ever been refused, and his vanity writhed and writhed again. He had the usual theories about amorous experts, and when Hilda had admitted with a laugh that she often kissed her boys good night (‘and good morning and good afternoon too, if they’re good’), the thought of her exchanging hearty hugs with amateurs in the Services was to him as inexplicable as it was humiliating.

He would have salved his vanity by thinking that she suffered from all sorts of peculiar complexes, but his intelligence rejected the solution: apple-blossom and complexes do not go together.

No, thought Mr Challis, standing upright with a sigh, I confess it; I cannot understand her, and as he sighed, the clock silverily struck one.

At breakfast at the Steggleses the next morning there was only the usual conversation about how the members of the party had slept and comment upon the war news, and Dick Fletcher did not join in it much, but he looked rested. As was usual when she had dispensed hospitality and found the experience less disagreeable than she had anticipated, Mrs Steggles was in a gracious mood and addressed most of her remarks to him, telling him among other things that now he had found the way there he must come out and see them again.

‘Yes, you can give me a hand in the garden, Dick,’ said Mr Steggles, winking at Margaret.

‘Oh, Dad’s no gardener,’ said Mrs Steggles instantly, laughing, ‘and Margaret’s busy at school all day and I’ve got my hands full, queueing and cooking and cleaning, I’m sure I’m ashamed of that wilderness out there.’

‘Are you a keen gardener, Mr Fletcher?’ asked Margaret.

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t even got a window-box.’

‘Hasn’t your flat got a garden?’ asked Mrs Steggles.

‘Only about two square feet, and that belongs to the people downstairs.’

‘Oh, a garden’s a great joy, I always think, but it does bring the dirt into the house. I used to say to Mr Steggles when we were in Lukeborough – garden as much as you please, I’m sure no one likes to see flowers about the place better than I do, but you leave your boots outside the scullery door before you come into the house, I said,
if
you please,’ and she laughed.

‘Yes, it does tread the dirt in,’ said Dick Fletcher, after a pause. Margaret had the impression that he would rather not have spoken and only did so because she and her father kept silent, and for an instant his face wore the impatient, gloomy look which she had brought to it by her own sneering remark on the previous evening. That thin face showed all changes of expression very plainly.

‘You ought to come up one Sunday and help Dad dig up our wilderness; stay to lunch and go for a walk on the Heath in the afternoon,’ said Mrs Steggles, while Margaret listened in surprise. Had her mother taken one of her sudden likings to Mr Fletcher? ‘Get some of our Highgate air into your lungs.’

‘It’s awfully kind of you, but I’m afraid my Sundays are always booked up,’ he smiled.

‘
Every
Sunday?’ cried Mrs Steggles archly.

He nodded, still smiling.

‘Well, Dick, I suppose we ought to be moving,’ said Mr Steggles, getting up from the table, and shortly afterwards they went off, and Margaret and her mother began upon their morning’s work.

‘Poor man!’ exclaimed Mrs Steggles, after a silence, running more hot water into the basin, ‘I expect it’s a change for him to come into a real home.’

‘Why? Is his flat so uncomfortable?’

‘Oh, I expect so. He does everything for himself.’

‘Can’t he afford a housekeeper?’

‘I don’t know, Margaret,’ said her mother mysteriously, ‘that’s just what puzzles me. He gets the same as your dad, I believe, yet he looks – doesn’t he?’

Margaret nodded, bored.

‘Shabby,’ said Mrs Steggles. ‘Did you notice?’

This was the type of conversation which Margaret disliked more than any other, and she was silent. Mrs Steggles went on: ‘Poor fellow! No wife to look after him – no wonder he’s let himself go. I’d whip such women, that’s what I’d do – have them publicly whipped.’ She scrubbed a saucepan vigorously.

‘Who was his wife?’ asked Margaret, at last, knowing that her mother would become irritable if she did not make some comment.

‘Oh, some girl up in Birmingham. She was mixed up with the Repertory Company there somehow. I don’t know the rights of it; I don’t think she was exactly an actress. She was
very pretty
, by all accounts.