‘My name is Geoffrey Lloyd. Your mother . . .’
‘Oh, I know – she will be here in a few seconds,’ Prudence said without confidence. She knelt down on the rather matted sheepskin rug and struck a match.
‘Perhaps I have come too early,’ he suggested.
‘Good heavens, no!’
Flames threaded their way through the trellised firewood, and Prudence and Geoffrey sat on the edges of their chairs on either side. They watched the fire growing as if it were of tremendous importance to them.
‘You’re stationed here?’ Prudence asked quickly, to cover up a little bubbling noise in her inside.
‘Yes, over in the New Town.’
‘Oh, yes!’
Her features became disorganised as she attempted a look of animated interest.
‘My mother won’t be long now,’ she said after a pause.
‘I think the wood is damp.’
‘Yes, I think it is.’ She lifted a log with the poker.
‘Our mothers went to school together, didn’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve heard mine mention Mrs . . . your mother.’
‘Mine mentions yours, too.’
‘Oh, does she?’
‘They were in the same form, weren’t they?’
‘Yes, I think they were.’ He pulled down his sleeves, thinking his wrists looked rubbed and crimson. They could not for the moment find anything more to say about their mothers and sat there staring into the fire as if they were an old married couple at the end of a long life together and everything said for ever.
Suddenly Geoffrey brightened. ‘Mine was hockey-captain.’
Prudence started. ‘What?’
‘My mother.’
‘Oh, was she? . . . I hated hockey,’ Prudence added.
‘I can’t believe that,’ he said. Feeling that he had boasted about his own mother he went on: ‘I have been reading one of your mother’s books.’
He had rushed into the town and bought one the day he had received her invitation. It was ill-afforded but could be given to his mother for her birthday.
‘What was it like?’ But Prudence felt no curiosity about her mother’s books.
‘Well . . . you know what I mean . . . witty and observant and . . .’
‘My mother? She never made a joke in her life. And she’s as blind as a bat.’
The door-handle began to wobble and they both looked at it expectantly.
‘Oh!’ said Stevie. She came in and looked round the room as if she had never seen it before. ‘Why is there a fire in here?’
Prudence flushed.
‘This is my little sister Stevie,’ she said and put her hand out as if to draw the child tenderly towards her.
‘How did you get those flowers?’ Stevie asked, staring at the bowl on the window-sill and ignoring Geoffrey.
‘From the garden,’ Prudence said shortly.
‘You knew my father said not to pick the hyacinths. He will be in a bate.’ At last she let her eyes dwell upon Geoffrey. ‘Unless it was a special occasion,’ she added, staring at him. ‘Now I must go upstairs and be excused.’
‘Why, Geoffrey!’ Beth cried, hastening, unpowdered, into the room. ‘How horrid of me not to be here. So you and Prudence have met again at last.’
‘Again?’
‘The last time, the only other time, Rosamund and I took you back to school to the Old Girls’ Tennis Match – both of you in little silk smocks. We only did it to boast of what we’d got, to show the staff that at last we’d got the better of them. We went to the same school, you know,’ she explained to Geoffrey.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
When at last Mrs Flitcroft brought in the tea they were all relieved.
‘What darling little cups!’ Stevie exclaimed, as if she were a stranger to the house.
Tory had a terrible afternoon, going from room to room of the silent house, trying to still herself. As the light was fading a letter dropped into the hall and for a moment she was afraid to pick it up. ‘It is from Robert,’ she thought, knowing that it could not be. It was from her son. She sat down on the hall chair and read it.
DEAR MOTHER,
I hope you are keeping quite fit I am. I am writing again as you will see. My father came to see me last Mon. and brought his wife a rather young woman he calls Dorthy, a rather nice woman. Please send honey. I miss you. Also more stamps. Excuse the writing. I am quite fit. A boy here called Henry says bloody and other words better not write them down in case of trouble. If you come to the school concert it would be best not to wear that hat with the red currents. Yours faithfully, E. Foyle.
A few days ago Tory would have run to Beth at once with this letter, worried and complaining. ‘Look, Teddy is being deceitful. He didn’t tell me he saw Edward. He is trying to take my child from me now.’ And Beth would have listened and agreed. They would have hatched a little plot together and drunk some tea and she would have come back steadied and sane.
This evening, she walked up and down with the letter in her hand, feeling confused and wretched. Presently she sat down at her desk to write to Edward, something amusing if she could think of it. She drew a sheet of paper towards her and wrote carefully in script: ‘2, The Harbour, Newby,’ but then in a sudden convulsion she scrawled the words ‘Dear Robert, help me!’ across the centre of the page. She dropped the pen and sat staring at what she had written, her hands tight together between her knees and her body trembling.
Late that night Iris sat on the bed cutting her toe-nails with a large pair of scissors.
‘Don’t get those bits in the bed!’ Maisie said. She leant forward to the little mirror which, propped at an obliging angle by a book called The Madcap of St Winifred’s, gave back her face in a bluish, misty way. With her mouth and eyes wide, she plucked her eyebrows and as she dimmed the glass with her breath she reached up and wiped it quickly with her sleeve.
‘I always remember this job the night my maid’s out,’ Iris said. ‘These working-class people, they go off for their own pleasure and never wonder how you’re going to manage without them, and not putting out my frock to-night either. She just ran my bath and said: “I’m off, Madam,” just like that, and when I get back into the boudoir I can’t find the key to my jewel-case and I have to wear my second-best pearls I’d been wearing all day, that single rope I had on my twenty-first . . .’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Maisie.
Iris breathed heavily, reaching forward to her feet and snipping. She sat on the lumpy double-bed with its three brass knobs. The fourth had been unscrewed and lost long ago when they were children. The wall on one side of the bed was covered with photographs of film-actors. Behind the faded striped wallpaper, the plaster had fallen away unevenly and in places the paper was broken and letting out a little chalky dribble. In one corner was a large china doll with a matted wig and dusty eyelids. On the mantelpiece stood a china clock painted with violets. ‘It will do for the girls’ room,’ Mrs Bracey had said years ago when it had stopped working. A curled-up photograph of Maisie looking more than naked in a wet cotton bathing-dress was propped against a vase of chenille catkins, and two stuffed love-birds sat on a lichened branch in a case which had lost all its glass; their beady eyes were smug as if they were on their honour to remain and would do so.
The façade of the old doll’s house swung loose on one hinge and inside it a headless doll sat up before a meal of plaster lobster and a chipped swiss-roll. Maisie’s best dress hung against the wall, its hanger hooked on to a picture of Hope. The rest of their clothes were in a wicker hamper under the bed.
‘This is the second night running Mrs Wilson’s been in,’ Iris said, brushing bits of toe-nail off the honeycomb quilt. ‘To-night the old boy took her home again . . .’
‘Do you think he . . .?’ Maisie began, leaning close to the mirror.
‘He goes indoors with her. Silly old fool. He’s old enough to be her father. I’ve never been kis
sed by anyone with a beard.’
‘Dad had one.’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t fancy it, but she may like it. Tastes differ.’
‘I think it’s rather a shame,’ said Maisie, turning round quickly.
‘What’s that?’ Iris cried, covering her bosom with the blouse she had just taken off.
‘Good night, girls!’
It was Eddie Flitcroft banging on their door on his way to the next bedroom.
Neither of them answered. When they heard his door shut they began to talk again, but in lowered voices, and Maisie undressed rapidly and climbed into bed beside her sister.
‘Don’t tell Mother about Lily Wilson,’ Iris whispered.
‘Of course not.’
‘You’re right over my side,’ Iris complained, her face to the wall.
‘Oh, no, I’m not.’ Maisie put up a hand and felt for the middle rail of the bedstead and drew a line down between their two pillows. ‘It’s you,’ she said, hitting Iris’s behind.
‘Shut up!’
‘Don’t kick.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Now girls!’ came Eddie’s voice from the other side of the wall.
They lay down quietly. ‘Mother’ll turn him out if he goes on like that,’ Iris said.
They listened to him whistling, the floor creaking as he walked about, both of them sharply conscious of him there in the next room.
Maisie felt wide awake. She lay for a long time quietly, her cheek on her hand. Iris began to snore a little and seemed to uncurl in sleep, sprawling loosely in the bed, arms splayed out. ‘Move over,’ Maisie hissed, suddenly pushing her. After a while Iris began to snore again. Maisie lay there awake a long time.
5
As soon as Robert had gone off in the morning Tory came hastening round. ‘Well . . .’ she began, throwing open the door, her face bright with laughter. Then she saw Prudence clearing the table and she put an end to her laughter, which had not been real. ‘Was it a nice tea-party?’
Prudence gave her a brief look and went out with the tray.
‘Well, what is Rosamund’s little boy like?’ Tory asked Beth.
‘He is rather big. An ordinary sort of boy, shy and fashionable.’
‘Fashionable?’
‘I mean his literary tastes are all so up-to-date, loving the right ones – Donne and Turgenev and Sterne – and loathing Tolstoi and Dickens. At any moment he will find himself saying a good word for Kipling. He has already said one for Tennyson.’
‘So that is what you mean by being fashionable? Is he coming again? Has it led anywhere?’
‘Yes. He asked if he might bring some of his own poems and read them to me.’
‘What about Prudence?’
‘Prudence?’
‘I thought it was Prudence who was so lonely.’
‘Prudence seems to have no interest in literature.’
‘Perhaps she takes an interest in young men. For that matter I don’t take any interest in literature.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Tory. You have been educated. Girls of Prudence’s age seem not to be educated at all. When they leave school they know one play of Shakespeare’s inside-out and nothing else.’
‘All the same, he might have taken Prudence to the cinema.’
‘Perhaps he will.’
‘It doesn’t sound hopeful. He sounds like the sort of son Rosamund would have.’
‘What on earth can Robert want?’ Beth asked, at the window.
‘Robert?’ Tory seemed to flatten herself against the sideboard.
‘Yes, he’s come back.’
Forcing her eyes away from the mirror, Tory stood quite still, as if roots had run down from the soles of her feet. They heard Robert going along the passage and into the surgery.
‘He has forgotten something,’ Beth said.
‘I had a letter from Edward—’ Tory was beginning when Robert opened the door.
‘It is odd,’ she thought, ‘for life to fall into such a symbolic pattern at half-past nine in the morning.’ There was Beth at the window, dense and dreamy; she herself facing the mirror; over the room a little silence not longer than a second or two; and Robert . . . Robert said: ‘Good morning, Tory.’
‘Good morning, Robert,’ she replied, and gave a little stiff, sideways bow, as if she were Royalty.
‘I forgot this,’ he was saying to Beth, holding up a case. He gave Tory a look, but she did not know what it meant.
‘Well!’ Beth laughed when he had gone. ‘You and Robert are so very formal with one another, it is quite amusing.’
Tory sat down at the table, which was still covered with a crumb-scattered cloth, ringed with cocoa-stains in Stevie’s place and littered with torn-open envelopes. Staring at all this, Tory almost said: ‘We love one another.’ Her fingers gathered up the crumbs on the table, pleated an envelope. She could not speak. ‘I love your husband,’ she thought she would say. ‘So please help me now, as you have always helped me before.’
‘Oh, Edward’s letter,’ she said instead, and took it from her pocket and gave it to Beth. Seeing Tory’s face, Beth was prepared for something disquieting. ‘She is as nervous as a cat about the boy,’ she thought. ‘She will make herself quite ill.’
‘Teddy is rather naughty,’ said Tory disdainfully. She lolled back in her chair flicking crumbs across the tablecloth. ‘Rather naughty and deceitful. He promised he would go only once a term to see Edward.’
‘But he’s his father,’ Beth objected.
‘He has other things. I have only Edward.’
Beth stood up and handed back the letter. She looked shocked for once.
‘Tory, you mustn’t make a battlefield of the child. You and Teddy tugging him in different directions.’
‘Teddy is not to tug at all.’
‘He can’t help it. He can’t suddenly give up being a father.’
‘That’s what it amounts to,’ Tory said distinctly. ‘I didn’t ask him to leave us. He chose to. If that frumpish young woman means more to him than I do’ – she glanced again in the mirror – ‘or his home here, and his son . . .’ She shrugged. ‘He wants to eat his cake and still have it put out for tea every day. I shall refuse to allow him to see the child ever.’
‘You can’t do that. It would be cruel to Edward.’
‘Don’t you think I know what is best for Edward?’
‘No,’ Beth said. ‘No, I don’t.’
They looked at one another with the frightened and astonished expression of people who have never quarrelled before. Then Tory glanced quickly away. She got up and went to the door.
‘Tory, what are you worried about? You are always Edward’s mother. Who can alter that?’
‘You talk as if you were Auntie Beth in one of the women’s papers,’ said Tory, scornfully. ‘You’ve no idea of what is real, and how real people think.’ She put her hand to her breast, as if she were saying: ‘I am real.’ She was suddenly swept away on a tide of words such as came from Beth only through her pen. ‘Writers are ruined people. As a person, you’re done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper . . . you’ve done it since you were a little girl . . . I’ve watched you for years and I’ve seen you gradually becoming inhuman, outside life, a machine. When anything important happens you’re stunned and thrown out for a while, and then you recover . . . God, how novelists recover! . . . and you begin to wonder how you can make use of it, with a little shifting here, and a little adding there, something can be made of it, surely? Everything comes in handy. At school you fell in love with the English mistress . . . it was the sort of thing . . . so sloppy . . . one writhes about it when one’s grown up . . . laying bunches of roses on her desk, writing poetry, drawing her name in golden syrup across your porridge. But it was real then. I could respect that. For years you tried to forget, and God knows I wouldn’t remind you, although I was as likely to fall in love with the gardener’s boy as that cr
eature; and then suddenly you start churning it round again, brisk and business-like . . . “What can we make of this at three guineas a thousand?” ’ Beth looked up, as if she were watching a sleep-walker, but Tory swept on: ‘Oh, I know! There you flicker into life. “Oh, but it is four guineas,” you want to say, or five or ten. Your writing pride is hurt. The only pride you have. Damn the English mistress, whatever her name was – Eirene Crichton, that was it. She spelt it in the Greek way so that there was no mistaking she was different from everybody else – oh, and damn me, and your children and that boy you loved before Robert, who turned up in the last novel but one. I know you so well. I know you too well. Geoffrey Lloyd. I expect he’ll come in handy, too. Damn Prudence and her loneliness. You are so used to twisting things that you can see nothing straight. One day something will happen to you, as it has to me, that you can’t twist into anything at all, it will go on staying straight, and being itself, and you will have to be yourself and put up with it, and I promise you you’ll be a bloody old woman before you can make a novel out of that.’
She put her arm up across her face and turned away.
Beth led her to a chair and stood close to her, timidly, her hand on Tory’s shoulder, although she disliked touching people.
‘Tory, you seem all of a sudden to hate me,’ she said in a gentle but perturbed voice. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I don’t. I don’t,’ Tory sobbed, her tears hot through her sleeve. Beth had never seen her cry before. ‘I really think I love you more than anyone else, except Edward.’
She lifted her face, and it was still pink and smooth, Beth was surprised to find, rather like a wet rose, certainly not -without charm, and not in the least swollen or disintegrated.
She blew her nose loudly. ‘I think it is the change of life,’ she said, looking haughty.
‘My dear Tory!’
‘Have you a cigarette?’
‘Of course.’
Beth got up and began to search, looking in all sorts of unlikely places.
‘We must have a nice talk about our wombs some time,’ Tory laughed, dabbing her eyes.
A View of the Harbour Page 7