The Forgotten Smile

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘How’s Judith?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s married. A barrister called Brian Loder. They have two children. Andrew is married too. And Bridie … you remember Bridie? My younger daughter? She trained at the R A D A. Now she’s doing quite a lot in Radio and Television. She’s in that radio programme: The People Next Door. I don’t suppose you ever listen to it.’

  ‘I’ve heard bits of it, once or twice. Can she manage the accent?’

  ‘They don’t have an accent on that programme.’

  ‘I know. It must be very difficult to sound like somebody who is neither U, nor non-U, nor urban, nor suburban, nor provincial, nor rural. Completely sterilized diction.’

  ‘A lot of people do sound like that nowadays. Actually I’ve never heard Bridie. She joined the programme after I came here and we don’t get it on our radio. She’s the girl the younger son is engaged to. The intellectual son. She lives in terror that the authors will decide to make them break it off, for then she’d lose her job.’

  ‘Have you been here all this time, without ever once going back?’

  ‘I went back for three months, during the first winter. Our house, in Edwardes Square, is sold.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I called there, the summer before last, and found you’d all gone away.’

  ‘Yes. It had got too big for us. My husband has a flat in Chelsea.’

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ exclaimed Potter the lout, adding hastily: ‘I mean … I’m very glad he isn’t.’

  For a few seconds their mutual confusion was so great that they could say nothing.

  ‘So why am I here?’ she asked, getting her breath back. ‘Various complicated … my health, for one thing. I was ill when I went back. But you? What have you been doing all these years?’

  He made no reply. She would not, probably, have asked, if she had not been so flustered. During the ensuing pause each knew that some unspeakable disaster must have befallen the other. They exchanged glances of apology.

  ‘How do you like Keritha?’ she began brightly. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it? But of course there’s nothing here.’

  ‘So everybody keeps saying. I don’t know why. I’ve heard a rumour that the people here are three thousand years behind the times.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s such a little place. Nobody ever came here. So it’s always stayed pretty much the same.’

  ‘History must have washed up a thing or two from time to time. Obols … Christianity … and Coca-Cola …’

  ‘Yes. But only like things washed up on a high-tide line. A few more each century. It never washed all over Keritha, quite blotting out the past. The people took anything that came along and added it to what they’d got. They never scrapped anything. I should think they’ve got a very low I Q. There’s nothing particularly important or interesting about them.’

  ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much. What did Milorthos Frethi think?’

  ‘He disliked people who come asking impertinent questions.’

  ‘Dr Challoner wants to know why we gave the sea a bottle of Coca-Cola at the end of the trip. I think I must tell him it was an offering to Poseidon. It would annoy him so very much.’

  She flushed angrily.

  ‘I’m sure they’ve never heard of Poseidon. I thought you were a good-natured person, even if you did go about breaking furniture. Why tell people what you know will annoy them? If you’ll come in I’ll show you your room.’

  Turning away, she went up to the house again. He followed, apologizing:

  ‘I’m sorry. I won’t say anything. But I don’t think I was good-natured, you know. Only dumb.’

  His room was almost as princely as that assigned to Dr Challoner and his appreciation was eloquent.

  ‘What a lovely archaic bathroom! Will the maids come and give me a bath?’

  ‘I’m sure they’d like to. But if anyone does, it ought to be the staid housekeeper, surely?’

  ‘Who’s she? Eugenia?’

  At this he got a startled look.

  ‘The people on the boat said she lives here,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh? Well … yes … I suppose you might say she’s a very staid housekeeper. But she won’t give you a bath.’

  ‘Shall we see her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She has her own rooms, across the court at the back. I think she’ll stay in them unless Dr Challoner sends for her.’

  Left to himself, Selwyn sprawled on a chair by the window, languidly wondering about several things. Why had Mr Benson been thus jettisoned? Who and what was Eugenia? Was there, after all, ‘something’ on Keritha to justify Freddie’s distrust of busybodies?

  These old customs, superstitions, folk-lore, survivals of paganism, were not particularly remarkable. They could be observed everywhere, from Woking to Paraguay. The busiest body could do no more than prate about some former Numen on Keritha, long extinct, commemorated now in a few meaningless words or gestures. Milorthos Frethi? What could remain for him to guard?

  The scene at the grave flashed out vividly and was dismissed. For a moment Selwyn Potter had escaped from the prison house of a single existence, had melted into some other, larger, person, had spoken in a voice not his own. If Keritha should offer more moments of that sort his stay there would be short. They were dangerous.

  In a panic he began to count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine … That was a great safeguard, counting, when he was alone. It was not so fatiguing as his defence when in company: his performance in the role of a man to whom nothing much can ever happen – noisy, insensitive, and flippant. He kept on counting until the gong rang for dinner.

  PART TWO

  ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MRS BENSON!’

  Ladybird, Ladybird, why do you roam?

  I’m off on a ramble to visit the moon.

  Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home;

  Your house is burnt down and your children all gone.

  1

  Kate Benson first came to Keritha on a cruise organized by a firm called Wanderers Ltd, which undertook to cater for those who yearn for the unbeaten track but shrink from physical hardship. She had seen one of their advertisements and sent for particulars, since the idea had occurred to her that she ought, for a time, to ‘get away from everything’.

  Everything was Edwardes Square and the Benson family, which had ceased to be the agreeable entity which Selwyn had so much admired several years earlier. It had become less well integrated and less good-humoured. All the birds had flown from the nest. Judith and Andrew were married. Bridie lived in a students’ hostel. There were no more buffet suppers for young people. Kate, for the first time since her marriage, had nothing much to do. A sensible woman, she thought, would make use of the bleak leisure thus bestowed and broaden her mind by travel.

  They could all manage very well without her for a while. If obliged to do so, they might make up their minds, settle amongst themselves, how much they still expected of her. This was an open question. Although all three were resentful of any interference with their personal lives, each one of the three was constantly invoking her interference in the lives of the other two. It was still her function, apparently, to set all right if anything went amiss.

  An attractive brochure arrived from Wanderers Ltd. For three weeks in June a boat called the Latona would dawdle about the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, calling at small and little-known ports or islands. There would be no guides, no sites, no ruins, no antiquities. Picnic lunches, bathing, and a leisurely enjoyment of the scenery were the main pleasures offered to patrons unconventional enough to appreciate ‘something different’.

  Kate liked the idea and promptly booked the cruise without saying a word about it to the children, since they would certainly tell her that she ought to have done something else and she was tired of standing up for herself. Judith and Andrew were scolding her for letting Bridie train at the R A D A, predicting a waste of time and money; Bridie wa
s not cut out for the Stage. Bridie and Andrew held her responsible for the bad manners of Brian Loder, Judith’s husband. He had called Holy Communion ‘Holy Theophagy’ in the presence of a touchy churchgoer who happened to be Andrew’s best client; none of Kate’s own children would have been permitted to do this and her plea that a son-in-law cannot be dragooned was dismissed with scorn. Judith and Bridie prophesied Andrew’s probable death from food poisoning; his wife never scrubbed her draining board and her kitchen stank to high heaven. A mother who really loved her son would have dropped a hint about it a long time ago. Poor Kate felt that she could do nothing right, and had no wish to hear their comments on the cruise, although she was not sure whether it would be condemned as too cheap, too expensive, too short, or too long.

  She did, however, mention the project to her husband before finally committing herself. He merely asked for the date, made a note of it in his pocket diary, and agreed that it was an excellent idea. For years he had been agreeing with everything that she said before she had quite finished saying it. This had formerly been convenient, when the children were small and when she was always busy. There had been no time to waste upon arguments or discussions with Douglas, nor had she ever been disposed to pay him much attention. She came of a matriarchal tribe. She was one of the five daughters of Old Mrs Mortimer, who had dominated West Kensington from 1885, when she came there as a bride, till 1947, when she dropped down dead in the middle of a successful altercation with the dustman. And Old Mrs Mortimer had been one of seven daughters born to Old Mrs Nayler, who had dominated East Anglia from 1854 to 1910.

  In this century-old clan of sisters, mothers, aunts, and cousins, little attention was paid to husbands, who earned money, begot children, and did as they were told. Kate alone had been something of a deviationist. She had never, complained the Naylers and the Mortimers, managed to behave quite like everybody else. As a child, in the Addison Road, she had insisted upon making friends with the weird Challoners next door, at whom all sensible people laughed. By turns tempestuous and humble, she was seldom satisfied with herself. That Mortimer standards in ethics, taste, art, music, literature, and social deportment were high enough to content any reasonable creature, so much she would allow, but she would not dismiss, as tiresome eccentrics, those who demanded something better. She had been known to rebel against the Mortimer-Nayler axiom that a mother, should her children’s interest be at stake, is morally justified, in any action, however shady, in any lie, however black. As she grew older she continued to form friendships beyond the family circle; her unaccountable affection for people ‘who did not belong to her’ remained a standing grievance with her sisters. Nor, when she married, would she allow her husband’s shortcomings to become a topic of tribal merriment and discussion.

  These oddities, however, were only apparent to the clan. She ruled the roost in Edwardes Square, and Douglas did as he was told, largely because she had incomparably the stronger character of the two. In the eyes of the world she was one of the Mortimers – efficient, self-satisfied and domineering. People who liked that family sometimes maintained that Kate was the nicest of them. Those who did not, generally allowed that Kate was the least intolerable.

  Now that she was more at leisure she would have welcomed a little rational conversation with Douglas, from time to time, but he no longer wanted to talk to her and shut her up by a technique of monotonous agreement. Of course she must take the June cruise, since the Wanderers had nothing to offer in July. Certainly she must be free in August, so that she might take Judith’s children to Cromer while their parents got off on a little holiday by themselves. Naturally he would himself prefer August for his annual trip to Skye with an old school friend. Undoubtedly Andrew and his wife would need Kate’s services in September, when they would be moving from their flat to a house which they had bought. Yes, to be sure, June was the only possible month. She must know, better than anybody else, whether the change would be beneficial and whether the expense would be justified. Yes … certainly … of course yes.

  There was only one person in the world who ever got any unofficial counsel or advice from Douglas Benson. This was a Mrs Shelmerdine, a client and an old friend, with whom he often drank a glass of sherry on his way home from Lincoln’s Inn. She was very rich and he managed her money for her. She never knew what she could afford or how much she had in the bank. She could not have told the difference between a passport and a visa unless some man had explained it to her.

  Ten days before sailing Kate drove up to Swiss Cottage with a sewing machine which she had promised to lend to her daughter-in-law. Andrew and Hazel, since their marriage, had perched on the top floor of a converted house there. They seemed to be settling down very well. Kate could have wished for her son a wife with more sense, but Hazel was a dear little creature and responsibility for her welfare had steadied Andrew. He no longer spurned all manner of work which was not ‘essentially creative’ and was resigned to security with a firm which built houses in dormitory towns, an opening secured to him at some sacrifice of Benson capital.

  The sewing machine was heavy and the stairs to Andrew’s flat were steep. Parking her car by the privet hedge in front of the house, Kate honked her horn twice, hoping that Hazel would recognize the signal and come down to lend a hand. No Hazel appeared, although a couple of young men, who were working in the garden, poked their heads over the hedge.

  At last she got out and toiled up the stairs. These ended abruptly at a blue door with a comic brass knocker which annoyed her whenever she came to Swiss Cottage. She rapped, waited, listened, and rapped again. Footsteps pattered along the passage. The door opened. Hazel stood there, dripping wet and wrapped in a large bath towel.

  ‘Oh …’ she panted. ‘Oh! It is you! I’m so frightfully sorry. I was having a bath.’

  ‘I said I’d come at six.’

  ‘I know. But I didn’t realize it was six. Goodness, I’m sorry. Do come in….’

  Warm, wet, glowing, her tousled curls in her eyes, Hazel might have been five years old. Kate’s heart melted, as it always did towards anything very young.

  ‘You run and get something on,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m in no hurry.’

  She turned into the living-room, was, as usual, appalled by its sluttish disorder and repressed, as usual, an impulse to tidy it a little.

  There seemed to be a smell hanging about which she did not like. It was not the accustomed stench of a dirty kitchen. It might be, in itself, an agreeable smell, but it had disagreeable associations. She stood sniffing until she identified it as something called Opal 5, much prized by Pamela Shelmerdine. Douglas was always buying expensive little bottles of it and sending them to the woman.

  Kate despised jealousy. She did not, however, think about Pamela unless obliged to do so. The whole business was, to her mind, intolerably silly. Downright infidelity in Douglas she could have forgiven and understood. Had Pamela been his mistress there might have been some sense in it. With mere sentimental philandering she had no patience. Sherry, sighs, lingering looks, expressive silences, and flattering attention were all that any man had ever got from Pamela.

  She captured the fools by asking helplessly for their advice and by encouraging them to talk about themselves for hours together. She had nothing to do save listen. She had no children. Servants did her housework. She had not even a husband since Mr Shelmerdine had died in Brazil after running away with his secretary. Ever since then Pamela’s little house, close to South Kensington Station, had been a port of call for husbands whose wives had no time for them.

  These husbands believed her to be a woman of wide reading and considerable culture on the strength of some trite quotations from the minor poets with which she made considerable play. She could always impress them by invoking Cynara, killing the thing she loved, thanking whatever Gods there be, wishing herself in Grantchester or hearing the bells on Bredon. Her theme song for Douglas was, so Kate understood, some flummery about a golden journey to Sam
arkand. They were going to take it some day, or had taken it, or sadly longed to take it. Some reference to it always accompanied those expensive little bottles of Opal 5.

  To meet that smell in Andrew’s flat was disconcerting, although it was a perfectly respectable smell, patronized by many women of impeccable taste. Hazel’s preference had hitherto been for something called Love Affair, but there was no reason why she should not have decided to smell otherwise. Opal 5 did not invariably indicate humbug and mischief. Yet it repelled Kate so much that she stuck her head out of the window in order to avoid it. The young men in the garden below were planting dahlias.

  Fifty-nine in June, she thought. I shall have my birthday on that cruise. I mean to enjoy that cruise very much. It will do me good. Soon I shall be dead. Everything has gone by too quickly. They are grown up. It’s over. But we are all very fond of each other really.

  To tell herself this was her defence against a haunting sense of failure. The children scolded and criticized. They bickered amongst themselves. Douglas had a grudge against her for being more of a mother than a wife. Her groping, untutored efforts to give them something better than she herself had known in the Addison Road might have been, after all, a mistake. They presented a less united front than other Mortimer households, although she clung to the belief that they had, amongst them, more genuine sympathy and affection, a firmer regard for one another’s rights and feelings. They were, at least, quite honest. Nothing underhand had ever gone on in Edwardes Square. Her own mother had not scrupled to listen at doors, eavesdrop on the telephone, or read any letters which her daughters might have left lying about. Stephanie, Moira, Georgina, and Fanny had adopted the same tactics with their own children. Love, in their eyes, imposed no obligations in the way of candour and plain dealing.