‘Eating between meals,’ Mrs Baines said. ‘What would your mother say, Master Philip?’
She came down the steep stairs to the basement, her hands full of pots of cream and salve, tubes of grease and paste. ‘You oughtn’t to encourage him, Baines,’ she said, sitting down in a wicker armchair and screwing up her small ill-humoured eyes at the Coty lipstick, Pond’s cream, the Leichner rouge and Cyclax powder and Elizabeth Arden astringent.
She threw them one by one into the waste-paper basket. She saved only the cold cream. ‘Telling the boy stories,’ she said. ‘Go along to the nursery, Master Philip, while I get lunch.’
Philip climbed the stairs to the baize door. He heard Mrs Baines’s voice like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice, louder than people ought to speak, exposed.
‘Sick to death of your ways, Baines, spoiling the boy. Time you did some work about the house,’ but he couldn’t hear what Baines said in reply. He pushed open the baize door, came up like a small earth animal in his grey flannel shorts into a wash of sunlight on a parquet floor, the gleam of mirrors dusted and polished and beautified by Mrs Baines.
Something broke downstairs, and Philip sadly mounted the stairs to the nursery. He pitied Baines; it occurred to him how happily they could live together in the empty house if Mrs Baines were called away. He didn’t want to play with his Meccano sets; he wouldn’t take out his train or his soldiers; he sat at the table with his chin on his hands: this is life; and suddenly he felt responsible for Baines, as if he were the master of the house and Baines an ageing servant who deserved to be cared for. There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.
He was not surprised when Mrs Baines was agreeable at lunch; he was used to her changes. Now it was ‘another helping of meat, Master Philip,’ or ‘Master Philip, a little more of this nice pudding.’ It was a pudding he liked, Queen’s pudding with a perfect meringue, but he wouldn’t eat a second helping lest she might count that a victory. She was the kind of woman who thought that any injustice could be counterbalanced by something good to eat.
She was sour, but she liked making sweet things; one never had to complain of a lack of jam or plums; she ate well herself and added soft sugar to the meringue and the strawberry jam. The half light through the basement window set the motes moving above her pale hair like dust as she sifted the sugar, and Baines crouched over his plate saying nothing.
Again Philip felt responsibility. Baines had looked forward to this, and Baines was disappointed: everything was being spoilt. The sensation of disappointment was one which Philip could share; knowing nothing of love or jealousy or passion he could understand better than anyone this grief, something hoped for not happening, something promised not fulfilled, something exciting turning dull. ‘Baines,’ he said, ‘will you take me for a walk this afternoon?’
‘No,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘no. That he won’t. Not with all the silver to clean.’
‘There’s a fortnight to do it in,’ Baines said.
‘Work first, pleasure afterwards.’ Mrs Baines helped herself to some more meringue.
Baines suddenly put down his spoon and fork and pushed his plate away. ‘Blast,’ he said.
‘Temper,’ Mrs Baines said softly, ‘temper. Don’t you go breaking any more things, Baines, and I won’t have you swearing in front of the boy. Master Philip, if you’ve finished you can get down.’ She skinned the rest of the meringue off the pudding.
‘I want to go for a walk,’ Philip said.
‘You’ll go and have a rest.’
‘I will go for a walk.’
‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said. She got up from the table leaving her meringue unfinished, and came towards him, thin, menacing, dusty in the basement room. ‘Master Philip, you do as you’re told.’ She took him by the arm and squeezed it gently; she watched him with a joyless passionate glitter and above her head the feet of the typists trudged back to the Victorian offices after the lunch interval.
‘Why shouldn’t I go for a walk?’ But he weakened; he was scared and ashamed of being scared. This was life; a strange passion he couldn’t understand moving in the basement room. He saw a small pile of broken glass swept into a corner by a waste-paper basket. He looked to Baines for help and only intercepted hate; the sad hopeless hate of something behind bars.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he repeated.
‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you’ve got to do as you’re told. You mustn’t think just because your father’s away, there’s nobody here to –’
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Philip cried, and was startled by Baines’s low interjection:
‘There’s nothing she wouldn’t dare.’
‘I hate you,’ Philip said to Mrs Baines. He pulled away from her and ran to the door, but she was there before him; she was old, but she was quick.
‘Master Philip,’ she said, ‘you’ll say you’re sorry.’ She stood in front of the door quivering with excitement. ‘What would your father do if he heard you say that?’
She put a hand out to seize him, dry and white with constant soda, the nails cut to the quick, but he backed away and put the table between them, and suddenly to his surprise she smiled; she became again as servile as she had been arrogant. ‘Get along with you, Master Philip,’ she said with glee, ‘I see I’m going to have my hands full till your father and mother come back.’
She left the door unguarded and when he passed her she slapped him playfully. ‘I’ve got too much to do today to trouble about you. I haven’t covered half the chairs,’ and suddenly even the upper part of the house became unbearable to him as he thought of Mrs Baines moving about shrouding the sofas, laying out the dust-sheets.
So he wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again, as he looked this way and that way, it was life he was in the middle of.
Chapter 2
IT WAS THE pink sugar cakes in the window on a paper doily, the ham, the slab of mauve sausage, the wasps driving like small torpedoes across the pane that caught Philip’s attention. His feet were tired by pavements; he had been afraid to cross the road, had simply walked first in one direction, then in the other. He was nearly home now; the square was at the end of the street; this was a shabby outpost of Pimlico, and he smudged the pane with his nose looking for sweets, and saw between the cakes and ham a different Baines. He hardly recognized the bulbous eyes, the bald forehead. It was a happy, bold and buccaneering Baines, even though it was, when you looked closer, a desperate Baines.
Philip had never seen the girl. He remembered Baines had a niece and he thought that this might be her. She was thin and drawn, and she wore a white mackintosh; she meant nothing to Philip; she belonged to a world about which he knew nothing at all. He couldn’t make up stories about her, as he could make them up about withered Sir Hubert Reed, the Permanent Secretary, about Mrs Wince-Dudley who came up once a year from Penstanley in Suffolk with a green umbrella and an enormous black handbag, as he could make them up about the upper servants in all the houses where he went to tea and games. She just didn’t belong; he thought of mermaids and Undine; but she didn’t belong there either, nor to the adventures of Emil, nor the Bastables. She sat there looking at an iced pink cake in the detachment and mystery of the completely disinherited, looking at the half-used pots of powder which Baines had set out on the marble-topped table between them.
Baines was urging, hoping, entreating, commanding, and the girl looked at the tea and the china pots and cried. Baines passed his handkerchief across the table, but she wouldn’t wipe her eyes; she screwed it in her palm and let the tears run down, wouldn’t do anything, wouldn’t speak, would only put up a silent despairing resistance to what she dreaded and wanted and refused to listen to at any price. The two brains battled over the tea-cups loving each other, and there came to Philip outside, beyond the ham and wasps
and dusty Pimlico pane, a confused indication of the struggle.
He was inquisitive and he did not understand and he wanted to know. He went and stood in the doorway to see better; he was less sheltered than he had ever been; other people’s lives for the first time touched and pressed and moulded. He would never escape that scene. In a week he had forgotten it; but it conditioned his career, the long austerity of his life; when he was dying he said: ‘Who is she?’
Baines had won; he was cocky and the girl was happy. She wiped her face, she opened a pot of powder, and their fingers touched across the table. It occurred to Philip that it would be amusing to imitate Mrs Baines’s voice and call ‘Baines’ to him from the door.
It shrivelled them; you couldn’t describe it in any other way; it made them smaller, they weren’t happy any more and they weren’t bold. Baines was the first to recover and trace the voice, but that didn’t make things as they were. The sawdust was spilled out of the afternoon; nothing you did could mend it, and Philip was scared. ‘I didn’t mean …’ He wanted to say that he loved Baines, that he had only wanted to laugh at Mrs Baines. But he had discovered that you couldn’t laugh at Mrs Baines. She wasn’t Sir Hubert Reed, who used steel nibs and carried a pen-wiper in his pocket; she wasn’t Mrs Wince-Dudley; she was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, ‘They need an electric drill’; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little closet room at Penstanley. There was nothing to laugh about. You had to endure her when she was there and forget about her quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep.
Baines said, ‘It’s only Phil,’ beckoned him in and gave him the pink iced cake the girl hadn’t eaten, but the afternoon was broken, the cake was like dry bread in the throat. The girl left them at once; she even forgot to take the powder; like a small blunt icicle in her white mackintosh she stood in the doorway with her back to them, then melted into the afternoon.
‘Who is she?’ Philip asked. ‘Is she your niece?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Baines said, ‘that’s who she is; she’s my niece,’ and poured the last drops of water on to the coarse black leaves in the teapot.
‘May as well have another cup,’ Baines said.
‘The cup that cheers,’ he said hopelessly, watching the bitter black fluid drain out of the spout.
‘Have a glass of ginger pop, Phil?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Baines.’
‘It’s not your fault, Phil. Why, I could believe it wasn’t you at all, but her. She creeps in everywhere.’ He fished two leaves out of his cup and laid them on the back of his hand, a thin soft flake, and a hard stalk. He beat them with his hand: ‘Today,’ and the stalk detached itself, ‘tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,’ but the flake wouldn’t come, stayed where it was, drying under his blows, with a resistance you wouldn’t believe it to possess. ‘The tough one wins,’ Baines said.
He got up and paid the bill and out they went into the street. Baines said, ‘I don’t ask you to say what isn’t true. But you needn’t mention to Mrs Baines you met us here.’
‘Of course not,’ Philip said, catching something of Sir Hubert Reed’s manner, ‘I understand, Baines.’ But he didn’t understand a thing; he was caught up in other people’s darkness.
‘It was stupid,’ Baines said. ‘So near home, but I hadn’t got time to think, you see. I’d got to see her.’
‘Of course, Baines.’
‘I haven’t time to spare,’ Baines said. ‘I’m not young. I’ve got to see that she’s all right.’
‘Of course you have, Baines.’
‘Mrs Baines will get it out of you if she can.’
‘You can trust me, Baines,’ Philip said in a dry important Reed voice; and then, ‘Look out. She’s at the window watching.’ And there indeed she was, looking up at them, between the lace curtains, from the basement room, speculating. ‘Need we go in, Baines?’ Philip asked, cold lying heavy on his stomach like too much pudding; he clutched Baines’s arm.
‘Careful,’ Baines said softly, ‘careful.’
‘But need we go in, Baines? It’s early. Take me for a walk in the park.’
‘Better not.’
‘But I’m frightened, Baines.’
‘You haven’t any cause,’ Baines said. ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you. You just run along upstairs to the nursery. I’ll go down by the area and talk to Mrs Baines.’ But even he stood hesitating at the top of the stone steps pretending not to see her, where she watched between the curtains. ‘In at the front door, Phil, and up the stairs.’
Philip didn’t linger in the hall; he ran, slithering on the parquet Mrs Baines had polished, to the stairs. Through the drawing-room doorway on the first floor he saw the draped chairs; even the china clock on the mantel was covered like a canary’s cage; as he passed it, it chimed the hour, muffled and secret under the duster. On the nursery table he found his supper laid out: a glass of milk and a piece of bread and butter, a sweet biscuit, and a little cold Queen’s pudding without the meringue. He had no appetite; he strained his ears for Mrs Baines’s coming, for the sound of voices, but the basement held its secrets; the green baize door shut off that world. He drank the milk and ate the biscuit, but he didn’t touch the rest, and presently he could hear the soft precise footfalls of Mrs Baines on the stairs: she was a good servant, she walked softly; she was a determined woman, she walked precisely.
But she wasn’t angry when she came in; she was ingratiating as she opened the night-nursery door – ‘Did you have a good walk, Master Philip?’ – pulled down the blinds, laid out his pyjamas, came back to clear his supper. ‘I’m glad Baines found you. Your mother wouldn’t like you being out alone.’ She examined the tray. ‘Not much appetite, have you, Master Philip? Why don’t you try a little of this nice pudding? I’ll bring you up some more jam for it.’
‘No, no, thank you, Mrs Baines,’ Philip said.
‘You ought to eat more,’ Mrs Baines said. She sniffed round the room like a dog. ‘You didn’t take any pots out of the waste-paper basket in the kitchen, did you, Master Philip?’
‘No,’ Philip said.
‘Of course you wouldn’t. I just wanted to make sure.’ She patted his shoulder and her fingers flashed to his lapel; she picked off a tiny crumb of pink sugar. ‘Oh, Master Philip,’ she said, ‘that’s why you haven’t any appetite. You’ve been buying sweet cakes. That’s not what your pocket money’s for.’
‘But I didn’t,’ Philip said. ‘I didn’t.’
She tasted the sugar with the tip of her tongue.
‘Don’t tell lies to me, Master Philip. I won’t stand for it any more than your father would.’
‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ Philip said. ‘They gave it me. I mean Baines,’ but she had pounced on the word ‘they’. She had got what she wanted; there was no doubt about that, even when you didn’t know what it was she wanted. Philip was angry and miserable and disappointed because he hadn’t kept Baines’s secret. Baines oughtn’t to have trusted him; grown-up people should keep their own secrets, and yet here was Mrs Baines immediately entrusting him with another.
‘Let me tickle your palm and see if you can keep a secret.’ But he put his hand behind him; he wouldn’t be touched. ‘It’s a secret between us, Master Philip, that I know all about them. I suppose she was having tea with him,’ she speculated.
‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he said, the responsibility for Baines weighing on his spirit, the idea that he had got to keep her secret when he hadn’t kept Baines’s making him miserable with the unfairness of life. ‘She was nice.’
‘She was nice, was she?’ Mrs Baines said in a bitter voice he wasn’t used to.
‘And she’s his niece.’
‘So that’s what he said,’ Mrs Baines struck softly back at him like the clock under the duster. She tried to be jocular. ‘The old scoundrel. Don’t tell him I know, Maste
r Philip.’ She stood very still between the table and the door, thinking very hard, planning something. ‘Promise you won’t tell. I’ll give you that Meccano set, Master Philip …’
He turned his back on her; he wouldn’t promise, but he wouldn’t tell. He would have nothing to do with their secrets, the responsibilities they were determined to lay on him. He was only anxious to forget. He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared. ‘A 2A Meccano set, Master Philip.’ He never opened his Meccano set again, never built anything, never created anything, died, the old dilettante, sixty years later with nothing to show rather than preserve the memory of Mrs Baines’s malicious voice saying good night, her soft determined footfalls on the stairs to the basement, going down, going down.
Chapter 3
THE SUN POURED in between the curtains and Baines was beating a tattoo on the water-can. ‘Glory, glory,’ Baines said. He sat down on the end of the bed and said, ‘I beg to announce that Mrs Baines has been called away. Her mother’s dying. She won’t be back till tomorrow.’
‘Why did you wake me up so early?’ Philip said. He watched Baines with uneasiness; he wasn’t going to be drawn in; he’d learnt his lesson. It wasn’t right for a man of Baines’s age to be so merry. It made a grown person human in the same way that you were human. For if a grown-up could behave so childishly, you were liable too to find yourself in their world. It was enough that it came at you in dreams: the witch at the corner, the man with a knife. So ‘It’s very early,’ he complained, even though he loved Baines, even though he couldn’t help being glad that Baines was happy. He was divided by the fear and the attraction of life.
The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Page 12