The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  But once he was on his feet, things felt better. For the first few minutes his hands seemed to possess a disconcerting life of their own, quite unconnected with the rest of him. They wove mad, meaningless patterns in the air around him. But at some point, perhaps when he realized that he was at least holding the attention of his hearers, they grew quiet, and when it was over and he again met the knowing, dissipated gaze of the founder of the Society, it only acted as a reminder that he was to ring Ginny up to find out what had happened about that other portrait.

  The Decayed Gentlewoman…

  As he walked out into Piccadilly, he smiled at the memory. It had been Ginny who had thought of that name for the picture. Almost everything in her world in those days had possessed a private human identity and so naturally had needed a name. And all the other pictures at Ardachoil had had names of their own already. There had been the Laughing Cavalier, the Blue Boy, the Birth of Venus. So it had seemed only fair that the picture of the sad-looking lady, which had hung in a corner of the dining-room where the end of the sideboard had cast a perpetual shadow across it, should have one too.

  Colin remembered that he had found the name invented by Ginny exquisitely funny. For a time both the children, in love with the sparkling humour of it, had dragged the phrase somehow into almost everything they said, until the aunts, maddened, had tried to put a ban on it. They couldn’t, they had said, see anything in the least funny about it. Moreover, it wasn’t really very nice. Of course, that had only made the children laugh more uproariously than ever.

  Colin was meaning to go to the Underground station to ring Ginny up, but as he walked along he found Peter Schleier at his elbow, and, at Schleier’s suggestion, they went to the Earl Grey for a drink, then to a steak house in Leicester Square for dinner.

  Colin had known Schleier since his Imperial College days. Schleier had been a lecturer there when Colin had come from Glasgow University to do a Ph.D. Later Schleier had gone to Australia for some years, returning recently to become head of the department of biology at the new University of Crewe. He was a short, dark, dogmatic man who had come from Berlin with his parents just before the war, as a child of fifteen, and had never lost the accent that he had had then, although his vocabulary had rapidly become many times more extensive than any normal Englishman’s.

  He set out now to praise Colin’s recent research in heartwarming polysyllables. It gave Colin a cheering glow inside and along with the beer and a thick, tender steak, rounded off the day so agreeably that it was past nine o’clock when he again remembered that he was supposed to call Ginny. Hurrying the rest of the meal, he said good-bye to Schleier and went to the telephones in Leicester Square.

  When he heard Ginny Winter speak, he began an apology for having left the call so late.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she answered. There was a listlessness in her voice that had not been there before. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “Why, has something gone wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” she said.

  “What is it?” He thought it was probably that she was offended with him for not having rung up sooner.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to pay a hundred and ten pounds for the picture, so I stopped bidding and we lost it. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Oh well, that’s nothing to worry about, the aunts needn’t even know—” He stopped abruptly. The meaning of what she had said sank in. “A hundred and ten pounds!”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “For that picture—for our poor old Decayed Gentlewoman? It went for a hundred and ten pounds?”

  “Yes—unless it was one of the other things in the lot. But really they all looked far worse than she did.”

  “And you went on bidding… ?” The thought of what he had just escaped made sweat break out on Colin’s forehead.

  “Yes, I went on up to a hundred pounds, because I thought it must be worth the money if someone else wanted it so badly,” she said. “But at a hundred pounds I got cold feet.”

  “Thank God for that!” said Colin. “Who bought it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A man with a horrid pale-green face and a nasty voice. I hated him.”

  “Perhaps he was just trying to push you up for the owner and misjudged things.”

  “Do you think so? I could ask Joe Lake about that. He’s the auctioneer—I told you that, didn’t I? He looked very surprised at my bidding and made awful faces to stop me, but I got carried away. It’s a wonderful feeling while it lasts, but it’s terrible afterwards. A complete anticlimax. Almost a feeling there’s nothing left to live for.”

  “On the other hand… Colin said thoughtfully.

  “Yes?”

  He frowned out at the lights of Leicester Square, the dense stream of traffic, the glare of neon on a cinema. He was remembering the day when he had set out to take the picture to Edinburgh for cleaning. Just south of the point where the little road that ran along the edge of the loch to Ardachoil joined the main road south to Lochgilphead, a man, apparently hurt, had been lying across the middle of the road. Colin had stopped his car and got out to see what was wrong and was bending over him when something had come down on the back of his head. He had had to spend a week in hospital with concussion.

  “Yes?” Ginny said again after a moment.

  “I was just saying to myself,” Colin said, “suppose that picture is worth a hundred and ten pounds. Perhaps even more.”

  “Oh, that’s an awful thought,” she said, “because he’s got it—the man with the nasty voice. It’s gone. I lost it.”

  “Actually, no, because it happens to be stolen property,” said Colin. “If it’s the same picture, it still belongs to my aunts, whoever’s bought it since it was taken. At least, I think that’s the law. And if it’s even moderately valuable and not just the junk we thought it was, it might be worth some fuss and bother with the police to get it back. Have you thought of asking your auctioneer friend where he got it?”

  “Oh yes, and he said something about the estate of an old woman down here who died a few weeks ago. They were mostly her things Joe was selling today.”

  Colin was silent again, trying to make up his mind about several things all at the same time and to foresee what he might be getting himself into if he did what he suddenly had a very strong inclination to do.

  “You know, I think I’d better come to Oldersfield tomorrow,” he said.

  A little to his surprise, because he had somehow assumed that Ginny would jump at the suggestion, she did not answer at once. Then she said hesitantly, “Yes, that might be best. But the picture isn’t here any more, you know. The man took it away with him.”

  “Have you got his address?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Couldn’t you get it from your friend Joe?”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “I’ll come down in the morning then. Where do I find you?”

  “At the Green Tree Café. It’s in the market-place. It’s quite near the station. You won’t need a taxi. But, Colin—”

  “Yes?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter. It can keep till tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Good night,” he said.

  Picking up his briefcase, he left the call box and instead of going to King’s Cross, walked towards Bloomsbury to find a hotel.

  Next morning he took a train from Charing Cross to Oldersfield which deposited him there at a quarter to twelve. It took only a few minutes to find the market-place, which he reached by walking along an alley between half-timbered cottages, which branched out of the narrow, impossibly congested main street. It was a street of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. Almost everything in Oldersfield, he found, was old, except for its traffic problem.

  The market itself looked as if it had probably been carried on in the same place for hundreds of years. The stalls of flowers, vegetables, haberdashery, cheap jewellery, cakes, sweets, and second-hand china looked as est
ablished on the uneven cobbles of the square as the wavy-roofed old houses were around it.

  Some of these houses had had shop-windows cut out of their rosy brick or plastered fronts. Some had the brass plates of solicitors or house-agents by their doors. From one of them, a corner building, a faded awning projected over the pavement, covering a jumble of second-hand furniture. Written up on the side of this house were the words, lake’s saleroom. About three doors away from it was the Green Tree Café. It had a wooden sign hanging over its door, a cut-out of a tree that might have been anything from an oak to a Christmas tree, but at least was green, very green indeed. Colin made his way towards it.

  The café had one fair-sized window overlooking the marketplace. Across the window were two glass shelves, on which plates of scones, sponge sandwiches, fruit-cake, and shortbread biscuits were set out. They had a not very homemade and infinitely tired air. A menu-card, stuck to the inside of the window with pieces of Sellotape, announced that lunch, consisting of cream of tomato soup, steak pie and two veg. and bread and butter pudding or sherry trifle, would be served from twelve till two o’clock. The card was spotty and looked faded by exposure.

  Inside, Colin could see an old man sitting at a plastic-topped table with a cup of tea in front of him. He had bent shoulders and a lined face with blankly dreaming eyes. He looked as if he might have been sitting there over the same cup of tea for the last hour. A stout young woman in a mackintosh and headscarf sat at another table. She had a three-year-old child with her, whom she was feeding with teaspoonfuls of chocolate éclair. Her own lunch seemed to consist of tea and a bun. Someone whom Colin could not quite see was stirring behind a tea-urn on a counter. It might be Ginny.

  Suddenly Colin found himself remembering with extraordinary clarity the child that Ginny had been.

  She had had an exciting and curiously deliberate brand of recklessness, an inventive mind, a rather sarcastic turn of speech, and moods of loving dependance on him which generally followed tantrums that had occurred when she had a little too much crime on her conscience. She had been shy-mannered, bright-haired and feather-light in her movements. Colin had loved her, protected her, and sometimes feared her.

  And here she was now running this awful café.

  His hand dropped from the door. He turned away and walked off slowly across the market-place.

  He stopped when he came to a flower stall and bought a bunch of jonquils. The gesture helped to take his mind off the stale cakes and the spotty menu. Besides, the least he could do, he thought, on arriving like this after fifteen years to visit the first love of his life, was to come bearing flowers. Grasping the jonquils, he returned to the café, pushed the door open, and went in.

  He saw then that the woman behind the counter was not Ginny. She was at least seventy, had a hare-lip, a large pale, placid face, and grey hair. When she started to ask him what she could do for him, she spoke with a strong local accent.

  But the tinkle of the bell on the street door brought another woman darting out of a door at the far end of the room, and although she had grown rather taller than Colin had for some reason expected and was wearing an overall of apple-green nylon, an anonymous sort of garment that might have robbed anyone of identity, he had no difficulty in recognizing her. Her fair hair, cropped so short that it looked like a thick sort of golden fur growing on her small, delicately shaped head, her high, slightly bulging forehead, her long-lashed grey eyes, her thin cheeks were all more unchanged than he would have thought possible.

  In a way it was disturbing that she was so unchanged. It made her look more like an elongated version of the child that she had once been, than a young woman who had had fifteen years in which to do some growing up.

  She gave a soft exclamation of surprise when she saw him. It might have been at the jonquils, or at his size, or even at his being there at all. Taking the flowers from him, she made a slightly exaggerated show of pleasure over them.

  “Just like the ones at Ardachoil,” she said, with a somewhat artificial little sigh. “They’d gone wild all up the hillside at the back, hadn’t they? Wonderful Ardachoil! Come in and tell me all about it.”

  In fact the flowers that had gone wild on the hillside behind the house, after having been very carefully naturalized there by the aunts, were daffodils. Ginny’s memory of the place was apparently not so very clear.

  Following her through the café into the kitchen from which she had just emerged, Colin saw a woman, almost as old as the one behind the counter, working at the stove. Ginny murmured something to her about calling her if she was needed, and led the way across the kitchen and down some stone steps into the basement. She took him into a big room, furnished as a bed-sitting-room and badly lit by two barred windows at pavement level.

  Switching on the light and an electric fire that stood in the old fireplace, she asked, “Have you had any lunch yet? If not, we could have some bread and cheese here, or go out and have it somewhere decent. I’m not trying to manoeuvre you into taking me out for an expensive lunch. I’d prefer the bread and cheese. But just in case you require more solid food, I’m telling you the alternatives.”

  “What about the tomato soup and the steak pie and two veg.?” Colin asked.

  “Oh, that—it’s off. Been off ever since mother went away, but I keep forgetting to take the card down. Or perhaps I leave it up on purpose, because of the sense of power it gives me, being able to say, ‘It’s off.’ You can see the shock of it go right through people.”

  “Then what do you give them to eat in this place?”

  “Sandwiches and buns and ice-cream and beans on toast, when the Heavens sisters are feeling up to it. By the way, their name really is Heavens. I didn’t make it up. One couldn’t make up a name like that.”

  “Well, if you can be spared, wouldn’t it be a good idea to go out to a place where we can have a drink and a square meal?” Colin suggested. “I’m quite hungry.”

  She gave him a sweet, brief smile. “I remember you always were. But I’ll have to put these flowers in water first.” She picked up a plain black pot from the top of a bookcase, turned it upside down, at which three buttons and a safety-pin fell out on the floor, and went to the door. “Colin, it was lovely to be given them!” she spoke with sudden intensity. “And I’m very glad you came, because I’ve a lot of things to tell you. I shan’t be long.”

  She disappeared into some other shadowy part of the basement.

  Waiting for her, thinking that she was taking longer than necessary to put the flowers in water, he supposed that she must be smartening herself up to go out. However, when she reappeared presently, she was still in her green overall. She was carrying a tray with some bread, butter, and cheese on it, as well as the jonquils arranged in the black pot.

  She put the tray down on the table in the middle of the room.

  “I thought after all it would be better to eat here,” she said. “Don’t you think so really? It’ll be easier to talk. And I can manage the drinks all right. Mother generally has some of most things.” She opened a corner cupboard and revealed rows of bottles. “What would you like—sherry, gin, vodka, whisky?”

  Colin dropped into a chair. An odd sense of familiarity had suddenly gripped him. He had the feeling that he had been here before. Ginny had so often played the same trick on him. She had let him have the illusion that she was ready to do whatever he preferred, go out, stay at home, play cowboys, play chess, then she had done what she had intended all along. Or at least what she had discovered that she wanted to do as soon as he had revealed that he wanted to do something different.

  She poured out beer for him and sherry for herself, then sat down facing him across the table.

  “Ginny, I don’t get any of this!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? What’s your mother doing here?”

  “I told you, Mother isn’t here,” she said. “She’s in Spain on a bus tour. She’s one of the queer people who like bus tours. She likes being pushed around among a
lot of other people and being told what to do next.”

  “I meant, what are you trying to do with this place?” Colin asked. “What’s been happening to you both?”

  “That it’s come to this?” She laughed. “Mother calls it a teashop, because she thinks it has a refined, pre-war sort of sound, but of course it’s just a caff and always will be.”

  “What made her start it?”

  “Well, she was at a loose end and Joe Lake persuaded her it would be a sure-fire thing if she did the right things with it.”

  “Joe Lake seems to be quite an influence in your life.”

  “In a way,” she agreed. “He worries about Mother and wants to put her on her feet. He doesn’t realize she hasn’t really got feet to stand on.”

  “Presumably then she hasn’t done the right things.”

  She met his eyes for a moment and Colin realized suddenly that there was nothing youthful in them. It was as if something behind them had aged so fast that the immature shell of her body had had no chance to keep up.

  “She didn’t start very well,” she said. “There was the problem of the Heavens sisters, for instance. Mother took them over with the rest of the fittings, and said it would be a shame to push them out, as they were so old. But they were more than a little set in their ways and always discouraged all Mother’s bright ideas. And Mother discourages very easily when it comes to a job of work.”

  “And where do you fit into it all?”

  “At the moment I’m just making use of some free board and lodging and keeping an eye on things and doing a few odds and ends of decorating. I’ve done this room, for instance, and repainted the sign over the door. Did you notice it?”

  “Yes, very handsome,” Colin said. “Are you a painter?”