‘Ah, there you are!’ Beth said foolishly. ‘What a very clever colour!’
‘Clever?’ Prudence repeated suspiciously.
‘I meant, dear, with your hair and your grey eyes. I didn’t know that you could sew.’
How cautiously she trod, as if her daughter were a dangerous lunatic to be smoothed and flattered into tractability. Prudence sewed quickly, with large, slanting stitches, gathering a wide skirt into a narrow bodice – though ‘gathering’ was scarcely the word to describe the wild bunching-up that was going on. Ends of cotton and pieces of material littered the floor. Beth picked up a few, but without any hope of tidying the room.
‘Are you warm enough up here?’ she asked, looking vaguely round.
Prudence stood up, scattering pins from her lap, and held the dress against her, turning slowly before the mirror.
‘Well, you have tacked that together quickly,’ Beth said in a heartening way.
‘I don’t know what you mean by “tacked”. I suppose you are being sarcastic. If I were not so poor, I shouldn’t have to be cobbling up my own clothes out of cheap material. I could go out and buy something new.’
‘You have your allowance. It is not very kind to talk in that way.’
‘My allowance!’ The words seemed to scorch themselves up and fade as soon as she said them. Beth felt scorched, too, as Prudence had intended she should. ‘The same wretched pittance I had when I left school! Can I help it that I’m not allowed to earn anything of my own? Am I to go on for the rest of my life pinching and scraping on eighty pounds a year? I know just what you’re thinking – that it’s vulgar to talk like this, but you shouldn’t come up here worrying me with your sarcastic remarks. I thought . . .’ – and then all desire to hurt, to cut her mother, left her and tears came into her voice. ‘I thought it looked very nice.’ And she held the frock uncertainly in front of her, staring at her reflection.
‘But it does!’ Beth said eagerly. ‘It shows that you have a real cleverness about clothes that I never guessed at – a cleverness like Tory’s, only much cleverer, because you have done it all yourself. I only thought that some of the stitches were a little on the large side, but you know how short-sighted I am and how easily I might be mistaken over such a thing. And as for the money, I daresay something can be arranged, but I wish you had mentioned it when it occurred to you, not in a sudden rush now because all this needlework has unnerved you . . . I had no idea of your difficulties.’
Prudence sat down to her sewing again. ‘No, I don’t think you had,’ she said calmly. ‘I don’t think you have the slightest idea of what goes on under your nose. Not the slightest.’
‘I cannot be expected to read your thoughts,’ Beth agreed. She went over to the window and looked down at the harbour. Stevie was wandering along the quayside with a bunch of gulls’ feathers in her hand. Dreamily she seemed to walk, her brows drawn thoughtfully together, her lips moving. Sometimes she stooped to pick up another feather. ‘I know the world she walks in,’ Beth thought. ‘The lovely world of her own choosing. She has sunk into it, as I sink into my Allegra’s world, a world that is small and enclosed like a rock-pool, as safe as the womb, a world where grief is never dull, as it is in real life, nor joy clouded always by feelings of guilt or anxiety, where one does not suffer continually from frustration or from stubbing one’s toes against unexpected sharp edges.’ (She thought of Prudence’s moodiness, and her furious, unaccountable sewing.)
Now Stevie stroked her cheeks with the feathers and smiled to herself. Beth watched her as she came towards the house, her rather moon-like face, her pale, straight hair and her enormous eyes, the sort of little girl who might one day be a beautiful woman, or might not be. The fine features were there, but they awaited some illumination from within or, later, some cleverness from without.
Just as she came to the door, and as if Beth had called out, Stevie lifted her head and looked straight up at her mother, and her face seemed to clear, all her pretending thrown back like a veil. She smiled and held up her bunch of feathers, and Beth waved.
‘Who is that?’ Prudence asked sharply.
‘It was Stevie. What a lovely day it is!’ For the sea danced and glittered with little points of light, as if composed of minute strokes of colour.
‘I will give you my coral bracelets,’ Beth said suddenly, turning round. ‘They will look well with that silvery-green, and I shall never wear them again myself. Bracelets are for young wrists.’
Prudence did not feel inclined to mourn her mother’s lost youth for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, but rather grudgingly, and without looking up.
Little blobs and clots of colour lay isolated over the canvas. This puzzled Bertram. The sea was composed of little strokes of colour, he had decided, and he had told himself that he had only to take things calmly, go slowly at it, and he could translate it to his canvas . . . (‘a dazzling little marine study by Bertram Hemingway’) . . . but it was as if there were mocking devils between him and his canvas, and the paint, which should have drenched the scene with light, had the congealed appearance of sealing wax. Each little blob was separate, meaningless. ‘It has no prevailing light,’ he thought; but would go on. ‘For it will have to do,’ he decided. ‘I promised a picture and they shall have a picture. After all, it’s better than that other effort in the bar. Far better. All the same, I won’t sign it.’ (Though he had scarcely meant to creep away at the end of his stay, meek and anonymous.)
Above the speckled water he was now painting in the scabrous, flaking walls of the Fun Fair, violet shadows, picturesque, if hackneyed, upon the white; shutters mouldy, an acid green like the patina on bronze.
‘It does not quite come off,’ he thought, painting recklessly, for all his self-admonishing. ‘Never mind; it is, after all, a new medium to me. Better luck next time.’ The thought occurred to him then, as he painted-in their building, that the Fun Fair people had never come. After hearing so much about them. No visitors either. One or two elderly people, that was all. Like being in a dead world. ‘And now!’ (he laid a bar of shadow at Mrs Bracey’s window, representing Mrs Bracey herself), ‘time to knock off for a pipe.’
‘It is for you,’ Stevie said, coming to lean against Robert’s knees as he read. ‘It is a shaver.’ She laid the bunch of soiled gulls’ feathers upon Robert’s waistcoat. They were loosely bound with coloured wools.
‘Is it indeed?’ Robert said, scarcely lowering his paper.
‘It is for putting the soap on your face with instead of a shaving brush.’
Then he picked up the feathers and examined them. When he had thanked her he glanced across at Beth, and they smiled gently at the thought of him dipping these grubby feathers into lather and painting his cheeks with them. Amusement and affection linked them together for a moment.
‘You see how soft it is!’ Stevie said, entranced by her own generosity and the loveliness of the gift.
‘It is very soft indeed,’ Robert agreed, flinching away. (‘What the devil do I do in the morning when I shave?’ he wondered.) ‘Next you should make a hat for your mother,’ he said, his eyes challenging Beth’s. ‘A nice feather hat for her to wear when she goes to London.’
‘Of course not,’ Stevie said. ‘I am too young to make hats.’
Beth nodded with triumph and malice at her husband.
‘Dear Mother,’ (Tory read, walking back along the hall from the front door),
‘I am sorry this is such a short letter. Please send a 100 what bulb and flex also battery. Please send at once. Father’s wife sent me a book about ghouls that drink blood out of a corpse. It has been taken away. I am sorry this is such a short letter. I am a bit off colour. Please send things urgently. I hope you are quite fit.
Kind regards – EDWARD
P.S. If you send a note saying I have got masstoid I don’t have to learn boxing. I don’t want to learn boxing you might get hurt. Yours – EDWARD FOYLE.’
Tory wandered into the kitchen. As this letter wo
rried her in almost every possible way, she sat down upon a chair, trying to be calm.
Lily climbed the street to the Library. As she reached the crest of the hill, the landscape seemed to spill and flow away inland like a broken wave, bearing on its crest the stricken trees, their branches streaming before them, the scattered stone cottages, the solitary macrocarpas: below, like a great coral reef, lay the white buildings of the New Town.
The Institute was railinged off and set among bleached coarse barley-grass and convolvulus. The narrow Gothic windows excluded sunshine, the fusty smell was sharp as the slash of a knife as Lily pushed open the door and entered, coldness, darkness falling over her.
The Librarian was counting out coins from an old Oxo tin. He had a habit of running his tongue between his lips so that they were perpetually moist between his moustache and beard. He looked up at Lily and nodded and then went on counting. The room was empty. Lily hesitated. She was always at a loss before these shelves of books, especially standing as she was now, in a strange no-man’s-land with fiction behind her (‘For real life is far better,’ Bertram had said), and non-fiction such an unknown conglomeration, from books on etiquette to Buddhism or Backyard Poultry-keeping.
‘Clinical Survey of the Manic-Depressive,’ she read at the heading of a page and she slipped the book back into its place and chose another: The History of Newby by some old-time vicar. She turned the book sideways, looking at the engraved plates – the pictures of boats on the open sea, sails bellying out, gravid as the clouds above, which were like thumb-bruises on the sky: a little shawled woman came out of the Cazabons’ house, her mittened hand steadying her bonnet; Mrs Bracey’s shop looked like a warehouse, with a front of clap-boarding: Lily’s own house was a pub, leering, tottering like a palsied thing, a lamp stuck out over the flight of steps at the side, and the name – The Pilot Boat Inn – painted between two upstairs windows: the lighthouse, the Cazabons’ house, the Anchor, were the same; bare-footed children played along the foreshore; a woman with a fish-basket on her head lifted her skirts crossing a great stretch of puddles at the foot of the steps leading down to Lower Harbour Street.
‘Bad times, evil tunes,’ the Librarian said over Lily’s shoulder. She started, even dropped the book, which he picked up and opened again, glancing through the pages. ‘Every fifth house a public house and gin a penny a measure. Your nerves are in a state, Mrs Wilson. I apologise for making you start. Yes . . .’ he glanced back at the little picture . . . ‘children without shoes, filth and squalor everywhere. And vice . . .’ he said this word lingeringly . . . ‘vice indescribable. It goes with poverty, hand-in-hand, the pawn-shop and the brothel.’
Lily blushed at this. She had been brought up so rigidly that only since the war had she known that the word did not mean a soup-kitchen, and still in the midst of her confusion saw the picture of a painted harlot in a swansdown-bordered negligee ladling soup from a large tureen and handing it to the poor.
‘And now if you have selected your book I am afraid I must lock up. It’s past closing-time,’ the old man was saying, and she noticed then a large key dangling from a piece of string on his fingers.
‘Yes, I will take this,’ she said, receiving the book from his warm hands, in a panic at the thought of being shut in alone with him, with his talk of vice and brothels.
He followed her to the door, lifted his hat from a peg, and they went out together.
‘Perhaps I might accompany you down the hill,’ he suggested. ‘Such a beautiful evening.’
It was like emerging from a cave to come out into the sunlight. Down below them the sea was encrusted with silver.
‘That little yacht!’ he said, and pointed with his walking-stick. ‘A picturesque sight. I’ve noticed it several times of late.’
‘Yes,’ said Lily, wondering how she could be rid of him. His manner of speaking was so lofty, yet the words themselves were rooted in . . . She paused to wonder what. ‘In filth and squalor,’ she decided, going down the hill beside him. ‘In filth and squalor.’
The sunlight filled the room as if it were wine in a glass, flashed on the knives and forks, showed up the smeary windows. The meat was tough, so conversation was spasmodic. Red-currant jelly gradually subsided into hot gravy and was lost, the cauliflower was stifled beneath a heavy sauce with a hard skin on it.
‘Such a lovely evening!’ Beth said.
No one answered. Robert chewed and chewed, and Prudence, reaching forward for bread, split her new frock under the arm.
‘What was the trouble with Stevie?’ Robert asked presently. ‘I heard her screaming long before I turned the corner.’
‘She wanted me to read another chapter, but I had said only one as she was in disgrace.’
‘For what?’
‘For rudeness. I told her to get out of the bath and she refused. And then she looked at me and said: “You can put that in your pipe and smoke it.” She gets those stupid little sayings from school . . .’
‘It would be nice,’ Robert said, ‘to find a mother whose child originated some of these rude words and phrases. I have never met one yet. And what did you do when she screamed? Gave in, I suppose.’
‘Not exactly. I said I would read a little more on the strict understanding that she would be very good to-morrow.’
‘Oh, my God! Prudence, when you have finished tying up your frock with bits of cotton, would you pass the cauliflower? You really spoil Stevie, Beth. Of course she screams. It pays her to. She’s no fool and obviously everyone does what is to their advantage. Next time she’ll try it on still more.’
‘Surely her promise is worth something?’ Beth protested.
‘Not a thing. No, she’s quite pampered. When I was a boy, if I’d behaved as she behaves, I’d have been thrashed. I was never read to at bedtime or any other time . . .’
‘Well, I was,’ Beth said. ‘And I was spoilt, and had my own way. And look at me now. Every bit as nice a person as you are, Robert. So it seems as if all your misery was wasted.’
‘I didn’t say it was misery.’
‘Well, it certainly didn’t sound much fun.’
‘Fun or not, I wasn’t allowed to be rude.’
‘Then perhaps you exhausted your politeness when you were young, for you’re very often rude now.’
Both Robert and Prudence looked up in amazement, but Beth went on calmly trying to cut her meat and at last put some of it into her mouth and began to chew. Since she apparently had no intention of saying any more, Robert asked in a voice that was like the snapping-off of icicles: ‘Perhaps you will tell me in what way I am rude.’
‘Of course,’ Beth replied, in the tone of one who does not bear malice. ‘Firstly, you often speak very roughly and inconsiderately to me . . .’
‘Firstly? Is there to be “secondly” as well?’ he cried.
‘And secondly, it seems to me that although I don’t care in the least for etiquette or meaningless gestures such as your standing up when I enter the room, or walking on one side of the pavement rather than the other, sometimes I do carry very heavy trays and you never move to help me, and I run to and fro fetching things, and rather wait on you, like a . . . servant.’ She smiled calmly and pleasantly as if she had been praising him. ‘And thirdly,’ she continued, ‘your patronising airs, as if only men’s work is important, and my writing an irritating and rather shameful habit . . . “If we ignore it, she will grow out of it,” you seem to imply.’ She laid her knife and fork neatly together and looked up.
‘I see,’ Robert said and tried to weight with meaning these meaningless words – a grim sarcasm, perhaps, or the -implication that he said merely that because he could not trust himself to say more. But it was obvious to the three of them that he said no more because he was too confounded to think of anything.
‘There is nothing else to eat,’ Beth said, and stood up with an air of triumph. ‘The junket has not set and there is no cheese.’
She left them and went out to make the coffee.
‘People who are outspoken all the time,’ she was thinking, ‘must grow dulled to the excitement of seeing people shocked, the jaws dropping, the incredulous eyes. So stimulating.’ Very light-heartedly she stirred the coffee.
‘Well, I’m damned!’ Robert said when she had gone and still at a loss for words. He was very much put out, for it seemed to him that he had jogged along for years, unobserved, uncriticised. Now it appeared that Beth had been observing him all the time with meticulous concentration, and criticising him, too – dispassionately. The thought connected with others and left him profoundly disturbed. ‘I must go and tell Tory,’ he told himself, wondering how he could slip away.
Prudence had now split her frock under the other arm and ran frantically upstairs to mend it.
‘Coffee’s ready!’ Beth called gaily.
The sun was slowly drained from the room as wine is drained from a glass, leaving a faint flush only to show that it was ever there.
‘My Dear Edward’ (wrote Tory),
‘I am afraid I am unable to say that you have mastoid, as this clearly is not so. I cannot think of any way out of it and I am sure your father would say that it would be good for you to learn boxing . . .’
(‘He is so in my power,’ she thought, her chin resting on her wrist, her mouth drooping.)
‘Dear Mr Bancroft,’ she began again, drawing another sheet of paper towards her, ‘I should be grateful if Edward might be excused boxing lessons for the time being, as he has occasionally been troubled by slight . . .’
(‘And that, of course, is bringing the child up to be a liar . . .!’)
Just as she was tearing the paper across Robert came to the door.
‘You must help me,’ she said, leading him back into the room. ‘I am torn in two.’
A View of the Harbour Page 21