‘Yes, that would be fun. Here is a rather bent Turkish one. Cigarette, I mean, not womb. Do you really think all this about me?’ Beth asked shyly, holding out the lighted match, her hand shaking.
‘Yes, I do,’ Tory said. ‘But I think it in a quiet way, not crossly like that. I feel you don’t live in this world any longer. But your husband and children do. I do, too. You will balls everything up with your indifference one of these days. I sometimes wonder if you love them.’ She stared in front of her.
‘Love whom?’
‘The children. And Robert.’
‘But, Tory!’
‘You do, then?’
‘I should have to be a monster not to love my own children. And Robert? Why, I love him so well I don’t even think about it any longer.’ She had never been so embarrassed in her life.
‘This cigarette is years old,’ Tory grumbled. ‘It smells of sealing wax and face-powder.’
‘Oh, I beg pardon,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, halting at the door and then, with a glance at the clock, coming into the room. Gathering up the tablecloth, she shook it over the carpet. ‘The sweeper’ll take that lot up,’ she exclaimed, and began to fold the cloth with one edge tucked under her chin. Tory winked at Beth as she threw the cigarette away, her lashes flicking down, still wet. Beth smiled back, and her hands fell apart in a bewildered little gesture.
Mr Lidiard, the curate, was due at three, and Mrs Bracey leant back with her face turned to the clock, but her eyes shut, for a watched clock never moves, she had long ago decided. She imagined the afternoon outside, the bitter, washed-out sky, the sea slapping down one wave after another on the shore, the grit swirling along the streets. And Mr Lidiard she saw, too, stepping out from the ugly brick vicarage where he lodged and slamming the nail-studded door, under his arm three or four books. She took him through the churchyard for a short cut. Here the old gravestones lay this way and that, dark slabs sunk into the rank grass, but farther away from the church the new granite block with the fancy lettering – ‘Alfred Bracey, aged 49’ – and a space underneath . . . her heart turned over at the thought. ‘I shan’t go out of here again, save when they carry me feet first,’ she often said to people. Now it occurred to her that it was true. ‘Oh, my God, let it not be true!’ she prayed. She opened her eyes. Five minutes more at least.
Maisie was in the shop with Mrs Flitcroft. Presently they came into the back room to try on a corset. Mrs Bracey watched with interest while Mrs Flitcroft took off her skirt and an old cardigan Beth had given her for polishing rags, next a petticoat and lastly what could only be called drawers. Mrs Bracey lay back smiling, hoping for Mr Lidiard to walk into the middle of this scene, longing to see Mrs Flitcroft making for the scullery in her combinations. Maisie was lacing her up.
‘Tighter, dear. I like to feel something in the small of the back.’
‘How’s the doctor’s wife?’ Mrs Bracey asked her.
‘They’re a funny lot. Her and Mrs Foyle had a proper set-to this morning. I come into the middle of it to do the dining-room. Mrs Foyle crying.’
‘Not she!’ Mrs Bracey said, full of scorn.
‘That’s right. She was standing up by the door crying. Temper. I never heard the like. Of course I had to creep away and come back later. They never saw me. That’s right, Maisie. That seems all right.’
‘What was it all about?’
‘Don’t ask me. “You’ll be a b. old woman before you can do something or other,” I heard her say. The language was something terrible. I always say it takes some beating when a couple of ladies let fly.’
‘Ladies!’ said Mrs Bracey. ‘I like that.’
‘I got nothing against Mrs Cazabon. Nothing at all. You have to speak how you find. Well, I think that’s the ticket, Maisie.’
‘Suspenders a bit on the long side,’ Maisie said.
‘When I goes out later in the morning to do the steps,’ Mrs Flitcroft continued, stepping into her drawers, covering her colourless, veined thighs, ‘there’s Mrs F. as merry as a lark with the old boy from the Anchor, and he’s cleaning her front-door brass for her. And laugh! You’d never think that an hour earlier she was crying her eyes out.’
‘What, old Pallister?’
‘No. The old boy staying there. Proper old sailor. Hemingway, that’s the name. A beard,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, drawing her fingers out from her chin.
‘What was he doing that for?’
‘Ask me another.’
‘There’s the shop bell!’ Maisie said. ‘Oh, it’s Mr Lidiard. Into the scullery, dear.’ She addressed all her customers as ‘dear’. Mrs Flitcroft gathered up her clothes and was bundled away, so that Mr Lidiard could be called in. One way and another it was being a delightful afternoon to Mrs Bracey.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Mr Lidiard, his face looking bitten by the cold.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ Maisie asked, fussing.
‘There’s Mrs Flitcroft’s cardigan. Take it out to her,’ said her mother. ‘She’s putting on her drawers in the washhouse,’ she explained to Mr Lidiard.
‘Oh, yes.’ He seemed to take it for granted that this should be, refusing to let her ruffle him or surprise him. ‘Where’s Iris to-day?’
‘She’s laying down on the bed. Just finished her dinner. Her feet ached.’ (‘If that silly fool’s coming, I’ll take my book upstairs,’ was what she had really said, going off in her stockinged feet, and taking a handful of toffees and Woman and Beauty.)
Mr Lidiard put two books on the bed and edged back again on to his seat.
‘What’s this? Little Dorrit? I don’t get on with Dickens, he’s too vulgar. Hakluyt’s Voyages. That looks better.’
‘It belongs to the Vicar, so don’t spill your dinner on it.’
‘You can take back the other,’ she said ungraciously. ‘I like a nice true book, something you can get your teeth into. If there’s any make-believe to be done, I can do it myself, out of my own head. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I enjoyed that. And Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But that was a bit tiring, to hold up I mean. The Newgate Calendar. Did you ever read that? And what was the other book I liked? Maisie!’
‘Yes, Mother?’ She came out of the scullery, followed by Mrs Flitcroft, fully dressed.
‘What was the book I liked so much?’
‘How do I know?’
‘Well, I said at the time. “A pity they don’t write a few more of the same kind,” I said. About one of the Gaiety Girls married an old titled gentleman. Her life story.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Maisie.
‘I’ve got no patience with all these novels Iris sticks her head into. Everyday life. That’s good enough for me. Are you comfortable, Mrs Flitcroft?’
Mrs Flitcroft nodded hurriedly.
‘I hear Mrs Foyle’s getting herself talked about again,’ Mrs Bracey went on, turning to the curate.
‘Mother, don’t gossip.’
‘Let him see her in her true colours.’
Mr Lidiard stiffened. He would have spoken up for Tory, but he realised it was useless. With Mrs Bracey there was nothing to do but wait for her to die, which she would probably do long after her time.
‘Did he go inside with her afterwards?’ she asked Mrs Flitcroft.
‘After what?’
‘Cleaning the brass.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ Mrs Flitcroft said, very off-hand, for the curate’s benefit, but nodding behind his back.
‘There’s the shop again, Maisie. When you’ve finished serving we’ll have a cup of tea.’
But it was not a customer. It was Bertram, carrying a bundle of shirts under his arm.
‘Good God!’ he thought, checked and confounded. ‘The things I let myself in for.’ His eyes went at once to Mrs Bracey and hers to him, as if each recognised in the other something above the stature of curates, charladies and young women. ‘Beauty in vile ugliness,’ he told himself, imagining he looked at her with the eyes of Rembrandt.
‘Oh,’ said Iris, coming into the room in her stockinged feet. She didn’t like Bertram catching her off her guard, with holes in her heels, her skirt crumpled. She looked reproachfully at her sister, who should have warned her.
‘I am getting to know everyone,’ Bertram was saying, and began to count them by name on his fingers: when he mentioned Mrs Wilson, Iris and Maisie exchanged glances; when he said ‘Mrs Foyle’ (and he said her name last) they all looked down. ‘And the place that’s shut up? Who lives there?’ he asked.
‘No one,’ Mrs Bracey said. ‘Not local people at all. Bloody interlollopers from London. They been coming down every summer for years and taking the fat of the land and soon as the weather gets bad they hop it.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Flitcroft (and she got a look from Mrs Bracey for butting in), ‘you can’t blame them. No visitors, no money.’
‘Are there visitors, then?’ Bertram asked, but he did not know how deep this question went with them, nor how little they cared to give an answer.
‘There used to be,’ Mrs Bracey said, after allowing a little silence to rebuke him, ‘when I was a girl’ (she saw herself, black-stockinged, the white wings of her pinafore standing up on her shoulders, playing hopscotch, or patting a ball against a brick wall, or running out with a jug for a pint of vinegar), ‘when I was a girl this was shipbuilding country. And for years before that. Building yards where you’re sitting this minute. Out in the wash-house there’s an old mooring-post. Iris!’ she said suddenly, raising her voice, ‘take this gentleman to see the post.’
‘Oh! Mother, he doesn’t want to see that.’
‘Yes, he does. Don’t you? And leave off picking at your nails like that, Iris. If you must put that muck on them for God’s sake leave it be.’
Iris sighed theatrically and stood up. ‘You’d better come,’ she said to Bertram, ‘for peace and quiet.’
He stood up eagerly, for Mrs Bracey was right. He did want to see. Curiosity about what was out of sight had always dominated his life and led him into difficulties, disasters and much boredom. He wanted to see not so much the mooring-post but what was behind the door, and he went out into the dark scullery with Iris and looked round quickly. ‘Yes,’ he said to her, ‘that’s interesting.’ But what he found interesting was the cracked mirror above the sink, Iris’s dinner plate not washed up, Eddie’s shaving brush on the window-sill beside a flower-pot all overgrown with maiden-hair fern, and the tap dripping into a bowl of water. Iris stood by sulkily, dissociating herself from all her mother’s doings.
‘Yes, that’s interesting,’ he repeated for Mrs Bracey’s benefit, returning to the kitchen, his head bent as he came through the low doorway.
‘My mother remembered when they used to carve figureheads on the boats, great women with big busts and drapery and crowns on their heads. Painted.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, nodding.
‘And then the industry died out or shifted?’ Bertram asked.
‘Went up north. Then they opened that hotel on the hill. “The Newby Bay.” Visitors started to come. We had a concert party every summer.’
‘Yes, I heard about the concert party,’ Bertram said.
‘Oh!’ Mrs Bracey glanced at her two girls.
‘Then the New Town began to grow round the Point?’ Mr Lidiard, a foreigner, suggested.
‘Yes. It’s milder there. More sheltered. They got a pier and Italian Gardens.’
‘Ice Cream Parlour,’ said Mrs Flitcroft.
‘Cinema,’ the girls added.
And then a little silence fell over them.
‘What happens at the Fun Fair?’ Bertram asked.
‘Slot-machines and pin-tables and those funny mirrors.’
‘I hate them,’ said Mrs Flitcroft.
‘Every summer I think they’ll make it their last, but they always turn up. One morning it’s peaceful, and the next they’re in and the shutters up and music coming from one of those penny-in-the-slot machines all day long.’
‘You hear it right out over the harbour, my man says,’ Mrs Flitcroft put in.
‘And he stands out the front with his arms folded and bawling his head off London ways. Fair people, I always say they are. And pigging it in those upstairs rooms.’
‘When do they come?’ Bertram asked.
‘You’ll see. They’ll come all right.’
Mrs Bracey thought how it would be: one morning she’d hear the braying, tinny music and would know the summer had come. And though she pretended she hated it, she would always call to Maisie to leave the shop door open, and her heart would quicken, feeling life stirring outside.
Bertram guessed that the opening of the Fun Fair had some especial meaning to them all, as if they could not face a time when the London interlopers did not come, when they would be abandoned. It was, perhaps, to them the measure of the outside world’s recognition.
He stood up to go and, bending to take Mrs Bracey’s hand, he picked up the book from the bed. ‘Hakluyt’s Voyages,’ he said aloud, holding the book as if he were judging the weight of it, and looking at her with eyes which seemed to judge her, too. ‘I could do so much for you,’ he thought, and the old desire to make himself felt, to make himself indispensable, came over him. ‘Shall I come again?’ he asked her.
‘You can please yourself,’ she said.
‘Well, then, I will.’ He laid the book down on the bed again.
‘Good day to all of you,’ he said, grandly, to the other four. Maisie went after him to see him out. As he passed Iris he smacked her hands down, for she was picking her nails again, absorbed.
‘Wet Paint,’ he read aloud off the pavement and looked up at the half-finished shop-front; then he smiled at Maisie and walked away.
Mrs Flitcroft was favourably impressed. ‘Look at the quality of these shirts,’ she said, leaning over quickly to finger his bundle of washing. ‘I only hope Maisie does them justice.’
‘My Maisie knows how to wash and iron,’ Mrs Bracey said calmly.
‘So friendly,’ Mrs Flitcroft marvelled.
Mr Lidiard was called upon to agree.
Mrs Bracey withheld comment, but when Maisie brought in the tea she gave a smooth, pleased sigh. ‘It’s been a nice afternoon,’ she said, smiling round at them all, but she had to add, ‘for once.’
Lily Wilson sat behind the lace curtains with Lady Audley’s Secret on her lap, but it was too dark to read. Although awaited, the first flash of the lighthouse was always surprising and made of the moment something enchanting and miraculous, sweeping over the pigeon-coloured evening with condescension and negligence, half-returning, withdrawing, and then, almost forgotten, opening its fan again across the water, encircled, so Lily thought, all the summer through by mazed birds and moths, betrayed, as some creatures are preserved, by that caprice of nature which cherishes the ermine, the chameleon, the stick-insect, but lays sly traps for others, the moths and lemmings. ‘And women?’ Lily wondered, and she turned down a corner of Lady Audley’s Secret to mark the place, and stood up yawning.
She banked up the fire with small coal and put on her coat, for ‘Why sit alone when I might be in company?’ she asked herself uneasily. Downstairs the waxworks seemed to stand in a greenish, submarine light. She hurried between them and, opening the door, was struck by the buffeting wind, which she took into her lungs with relief.
‘Each evening I go a bit earlier,’ she thought, hurrying along to the pub. ‘Bob wouldn’t like it.’ (‘But he shouldn’t have left me,’ the little voice in her breast whispered, the little voice the bereaved try not to hear, for it is full of reproaches to the dead, who have forsaken them but are beyond blame.)
During the evening Prudence met Bertram on the quay and walked with him beside the rocking water, complaining of her life and how, as soon as she made plans, bronchitis overtook her – and it had been the same always as long as she could remember.
‘Oh, the young!’ he thought. ‘The egotism of the young.’
‘It is hateful,’ she said, meaning her youth, her life. ‘The old ones keep everything to themselves.’
‘Except the things they cannot keep,’ he said. ‘Beauty, the unwrinkled eyelid, the round cheek, the bright hair.’ He continued the catalogue to himself, looking at her in the lamplight.
Passing Tory’s house, she had the feeling of having touched something loathsome unexpectedly, the quick recoil and the will summoned to make an effort of forgetting, and she looked away from the lighted window as if some frightening image might be printed upon the thin curtains. She had such a feeling that her father was in Tory’s house, that when he drove up at his own front door she felt shocked.
Bertram said good night and strolled back towards the pub, and Prudence was forced to arrive at the doorstep at the same time as her father.
‘What are you up to?’ he asked, sorting out his bunch of keys.
‘I went for a breath of air.’
‘And did you get it? Who is that man?’
‘Mr Hemingway.’
‘For God’s sake, Prudence, don’t go wandering round the harbour in the dark. It’s the worst thing for you.’
‘Don’t fuss me.’
He opened the door and let her in. His first movement was always towards the telephone-pad, which he read with absorption and annoyance.
Prudence felt that the shabby, badly-lit hall was unbearable in its changelessness. It was, perhaps, a desire to explode its calm dreariness, the feeling that all alteration must be for the better, that made her suddenly say: ‘Mother and Tory had a quarrel this morning. Would you believe it?’ she added, laughing in a frightened way.
He looked up from the pad in his hand and stared at her. She could not believe that she was looking at her own father; his expression was for a second incredulous, full of panic. ‘He is afraid to ask me about it,’ she thought.
He unhooked the old-fashioned telephone with a movement so agitated that he might have been trying to get the fire brigade. Running his tongue between his lips, he waited, and at last gave the number. Prudence walked past him and upstairs, and as she reached the half-landing she heard him saying: ‘This is Dr Cazabon and I want Matron, please.’
A View of the Harbour Page 8