Judith and Brian departed. Kate was conducted to a small spare room which she was to share with Douglas. Hazel bustled about with hot-water bottles while Bridie unpacked the overnight bag, and exploded into apologies as soon as she got her mother to herself.
‘That awful letter I sent you! Did you get it? Oh, I could kill myself. I can’t tell you how …’
‘Darling, let’s put the whole thing right out of our minds.’
‘But I must, must say this: Of course I realize now what an utter fool I was. I don’t quite remember what I said. But afterwards, when we all thought … when we believed … when I started remembering the past, and you, and our home, and all those happy days, and what it meant … to write about it as if it was something that could be tossed away. I mean I started thinking about the past quite differently.’
‘I know. I know. But please …’
‘You were always so wonderful,’ murmured Bridie fondly.
No I wasn’t, thought Kate, and nobody thought that I was. If they think it now it’s because they don’t quite believe in me.
‘And that beast of a Pamela! Letting everybody down!’
‘What happened exactly?’
‘Didn’t they tell you? The moment, the very moment she heard the news, she dropped Father and Andrew completely. Threw over the plan for the firm in Bruton Street. Went abroad. Now she’s in Jamaica. Father couldn’t believe it at first, that she’d behaved so badly.’
‘Bridie! We’d better not talk about it. We’ve all been stupid. Let’s forget it.’
‘As long as you understand that we do appreciate what you were, what you did for us …’
Hazel here appeared with a hot-water bottle. After kissing them both good night Kate fell into one of the twin beds, which felt very small after her stately couch on Keritha. Presently Douglas came in and stood beside her. She said:
‘What nice pyjamas!’
‘The girls gave them to me for Christmas. They’re called Dry-Drip. I wash them in a basin and hang them up.’
‘Drip-Dry. Your Mrs Thing ought to wash them for you.’
‘Mrs McKintosh? Oh, I couldn’t ask her to do that. It’s amazing all she manages to get through. She’s a wonderful woman.’
He kissed her, climbed into his own narrow bed, and turned off the light.
Mrs McKintosh now, thought Kate sleepily. He had to sentimentalize over somebody. She had always thought that Pamela would fly the coop if ever in danger of having to marry him. Now it was this Mrs Thing. A small flat; only Ronnie and Douglas to look after, and she couldn’t wash their pyjamas. Men! Silly creatures!
In the morning she woke up worrying over Edith, abandoned so suddenly on Keritha. Eugenia had now learnt to give the injections but Edith’s sight had begun to fail and she depended upon Kate for many comforts. They read together a good deal. Reading aloud had been a standard Benson diversion. Kate read well. She and Edith had been in the middle of Guy Mannering when Douglas and Andrew snatched her away.
Day-time noises were going on in the little house and Douglas was no longer in the other bed. It must be quite late. Just as she came to this conclusion Hazel appeared with a breakfast tray, daintily set out like a tray in a women’s magazine. There was no salt but the egg was concealed in a coy little cosy like a penguin, and there were snowdrops in a vase. Andrew might once have denounced good little suburban housewives on the Benson pattern, but no Benson, thought Kate, had ever been quite as suburban as this. Against the vase of snowdrops was propped a letter from Fanny.
‘But you shouldn’t,’ protested Kate. ‘I’m not an invalid. Why … Hazel dear … what’s this?’
She held up a little string of pearls.
‘Just something of yours I’ve been looking after,’ said Hazel, with unusual finesse. ‘It’s so lovely to be giving them back.’
That string had originally belonged to Kate’s mother-in-law, and she had never much cared for it. The Mortimers set little store by conventional jewellery. She had been aware that Hazel hankered after this class symbol and would have given it to the child long ago, had she not feared that Douglas might be hurt.
‘Oh, but I always meant to give it to you sometime! You must keep it now. I’d like you to. Really!’
‘Oh, I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I’d feel awful. Besides … Judith and Bridie …’
Hazel paused, embarrassed.
‘You mean they’ve got things of mine too?’
‘It seems so awful of us, now …’
‘Not a bit. Very sensible. We mustn’t let that kind of thing worry us. I think we’d better let most of it stand. Anything I specially want back, I’ll ask for. My favourite things …’
Hazel still looked worried.
‘Bridie has all those. That jade bracelet and the big opal. It would be hard on Bridie if all her share …’
‘We needn’t settle it now. Let’s wait and see how things work out. You keep these, anyway. I’ll see to it that Bridie doesn’t suffer.’
‘Angelic of you,’ murmured Hazel, shamefacedly bearing off the pearls.
Trust Bridie to collar the really nice things, thought Kate as she opened Fanny’s letter. No. That was unfair. Bridie and she were alike; their tastes often coincided. She read:
Dear Kate,
Just a line to welcome you home. I’d have come to the airport if I wasn’t tied by the leg here. Bill has scarlet fever and can’t go back to school! A lovely thing to happen in the Xmas holidays! Do write at once and tell me what really happened. Why didn’t they find out sooner you were in this place in Greece? Didn’t you write? Weren’t you surprised they didn’t write? Was there some sort of upset?
Anyway you’ve given us all an awful shock, so don’t do it again. I could laugh, though, when I think of the Memorial Service and all the soppy things we said about you. And the letters! Stacks of them! From the most unexpected people. Judith and Bridie were weeks answering them. I hope they’ve kept them. You’ll be surprised to discover what a wonderful woman you were. At the time it didn’t seem so odd, somehow, but it does now.
Do you remember that awful Mrs Bucket who used to do loose covers for us? The one you always thought pinched your silver punch ladle? She wrote to me saying she’d ‘read where I’d had an irrapable loss’ and you’d been so kind getting leegal ade for her husband when he was in trubble.
Well, don’t go dying again in a hurry. Nobody is going to call you irrapable twice. Yrs affectly Fanny.
This repulsive letter was, in its way, reassuring. Fanny did not think her an angel, or regard her with awestruck compunction. Fanny was, it seemed, quite unchanged; as insensitive and irritating as ever.
There was no reason, discovered Kate as she attacked her cold and saltless egg, why Fanny should be changed. They had never been fond of one another; the news of that plane crash had disturbed nothing in Fanny’s world.
After re-reading the letter she unkindly hoped that Bill’s scarlet fever would keep Fanny in Sussex for a very long time, so that they need not meet. Nobody else in the world would have been so coarse as to mention the Memorial Service and the letters. That such things must have been Kate now realized but she shrank from knowing any particulars. They must be forgotten as quickly as possible. Since they had been hers on false pretences, they had now become a parody of human sorrow and human loss, robbing natural words and ceremonies of their innate dignity. Delicacy, she was sure, would keep everyone else silent about them.
Douglas knocked at the door and came in with a newspaper. He glanced, with some alarm, at Fanny’s letter on the quilt. Kate laughed and tore it up, saying:
‘Fanny, as you might expect, says all the wrong things. How long are we going to stay with Andrew and Hazel?’
He looked at her helplessly. She realized that very seldom, in their life together, had she asked him that kind of question. Formerly she would have told him exactly how long they were going to stay with Andrew and Hazel.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Andrew hopes
you’ll stay quite a while and look after Hazel a bit.’
‘Of course … if I could be of any use…. But you wouldn’t want to stay here? It’s not very comfortable.’
‘No. And the food is beastly. That poor girl can’t cook. I don’t wonder Andrew wants you to teach her.’
‘Does he?’
‘That’s his idea.’
‘She mightn’t welcome it. We must see. I could stay for a bit till we can make definite plans. Why don’t you go back to Ronnie and your Mrs Thing? You’d be much more comfortable.’
‘Oh, it would look rather odd, don’t you think?’
‘Everything that we do will be apt to look odd for quite a while,’ said Kate. ‘So we might as well do what we like.’
He gave her a long speculative look and went away. He had been going to say something and then thought better of it, for which she was glad. The less said between them, the better, but she feared that he would not have the sense to leave well alone.
3
After another day in Chiswick, he fled to his widower’s burrow. Kate gave a vague promise to visit him there as soon as he could. She must, he said, meet Mrs McKintosh and Ronnie would wish to pay his respects to her. This last she doubted. Ronnie despised women and had been so invariably rude to his friends’ wives that he now had very few friends left. As for ‘the Haggis Hag’, as Andrew called her, all the children had hinted that their mother’s first task must be to eliminate the creature.
It was a task which Kate felt inclined to postpone. She preferred to avoid Douglas as long as there was any danger that he might insist upon telling her that he now saw the past quite differently. They were all given to doing this, but his particular version of it was sure to be the most exasperating. Upon one excuse or another, she kept away from Chelsea.
She must, she declared, go to Blackheath as soon as possible, in order to kiss her grandchildren. She must make an expedition to an outer suburb where Bridie, who had finished her training, was playing a very small part in a very small theatre. She must teach poor Hazel to cook.
This activity was thrust upon her by Andrew who now saw the past quite differently and spoke of Edwardes Square as a domestic Paradise. Pamela’s ill faith, the collapse of the Bruton Street fantasy, had made a strong impression upon him. He no longer demanded a decorative wife, elegant bohemianism, or meals from the delicatessen round the corner. Hazel was not merely expected to know the difference between the two ends of a vacuum cleaner. Since he had come, in retrospect, to overrate his mother’s achievements, he now demanded an impossibly high standard in cookery and housecraft.
Hazel welcomed advice. The sweetness of her temper preserved her from any grievance against this Canonized Mother. She had, so Kate discovered, no idea at all of the many ways in which she could save herself trouble, or the number of occasions when the use of a tin opener is perfectly justified. The cooking lessons, after a day or two, took on a slightly cynical turn.
‘If he gets what he likes,’ Kate told Hazel, ‘he’ll think you a wonderful cook, however little trouble it’s been. He likes ice-cream. You can get that anywhere, so why make pancakes? … Don’t look as if you toil and moil. If you bring in a turkey with all the trimmings, looking as if you’d roasted yourself along with it, he’ll think you inefficient, however perfectly it’s cooked. If you trip in airily with a Heat ’n’ Eat dish that’s only taken you five minutes, he’ll think you a cordon bleu. … Talk a lot about herbs. Everyone uses them, of course, but men think it’s a magic word. They go about solemnly telling other men: My wife cooks with herbs … Ask him for the dregs of the sherry for the soup. That always sounds impressive …’
Bridie, dropping in one day, overheard these counsels and took her mother to task.
‘You’re not teaching Hazel cookery! Only artfulness.’
‘Well? Why not?’
‘You never used to be artful. You never put on an act with Father over herbs and sherry.’
This was true, since Kate had never striven to please Douglas as poor Hazel was now striving to please Andrew.
‘Your father,’ she said, ‘never demanded as much as Andrew does.’
‘Quite. Andrew is perfectly unreasonable. He expects far too much. She should tell him where he gets off.’
‘I think it’s only a phase,’ pleaded Kate. ‘It will wear off. It’s a pity to have a quarrel over a phase. If she humours him a little, he’ll settle down.’
Bridie gave her a look of profound disapprobation and said accusingly:
‘You’ve changed!’
‘Mayn’t I? People do. You’ve changed. You used to say that nothing would induce you to go into a Provincial Repertory Company and now …’
‘I’ve altered my opinions. I’ve been through a lot these last few months.’
‘So have I.’
Bridie’s silence suggested that people who have been dead for six months go through nothing, and have no excuse for changing their opinions.
The visit to Blackheath was wrecked by a violent cold which Kate had caught whilst sitting in a draught watching Bridie act. She was forbidden to kiss her grandchildren, or even to breathe over them. They showed no signs of remembering her, although the elder asked suddenly if Jesus had a lift in His House.
‘We told them you’d gone to live with Jesus,’ explained Judith, when they were washing up after lunch. ‘At least, I did. Brian didn’t approve. He said one should always tell children the truth. We ought to have said we didn’t know where you’d gone. I said: “It’s what my mother told us, when anybody died. What was good enough for her is good enough for me. I consider we had a perfect childhood.”’
‘You didn’t always think so,’ said Kate. ‘When you married you told me you didn’t mean to bring your children up as I’d brought you up. You said I’d been too domineering.’
‘Did I? I was talking rot. You were wonderful!’
Judith’s sharp face softened into the fond reminiscent smile which Kate had come to know so well and to detest so much.
‘I was thinking the other day of that time when we got caught in a raid and Andrew suddenly panicked and clutched you and said: Oh, Mother! We’re going to be killed! Don’t let us be killed! Mother! Don’t let us be killed! And you said: All right, I won’t, but we’d better take the Duke of Wellington’s advice, and told us what it was, and escorted poor Andrew to the loo, which he badly needed. So we all laughed and felt better.’
Oh, hell, thought Kate. I don’t care what I did. What do I do now? Nobody thinks of that.
‘Brian, of course,’ continued Judith, her face sharpening again, ‘would say it was deceiving a child to say you wouldn’t let it be killed. His mother hasn’t the faintest idea of managing children. You can’t think what a nightmare it was at Freshwater this summer. If she’s upset, she goes into a flat spin and lets the children see it. Fatal! No wonder Brian has no sense of security!’
‘He strikes me,’ said Kate, ‘as being a good deal more self-confident and sure of himself than Andrew.’
‘Oh, that’s all on the surface. Underneath he’s in a wild panic about the state of the world. If I so much as murmur that life is much nicer nowadays for masses of people, he starts roaring at me: Do you realize? Do you REALIZE? And goes into ghastly statistics about radioactive fall-out. Although he says himself he can’t think what’s to be done about it.’
‘I’m glad you’ve got a dish-washer,’ said Kate hastily. ‘I never regretted getting ours, though it was so expensive.’
‘Well … this is yours, actually. Of course, as soon as you and Father … by the way, Hazel has your pearls. Did you know?’
The news that Hazel was to keep the pearls had a poor reception. Kate declared that she was past caring what she wore; none of her jewellery need be returned. This apparently raised a new problem. Most of the jewellery, said Judith, had gone to Bridie since she had taken none of the furniture, of which Andrew had secured the bulk, since he was at the moment moving into his Chiswic
k house. Judith and Brian had thrown out some shabby pieces and replaced them with better, brought from Edwardes Square. Much of this furniture would presumably be needed, when Kate and Douglas set up house together again. Bridie would therefore be the chief gainer by her mother’s generosity.
‘Not that we grudge returning the furniture for a minute, Mother. I’m sure you know that. Only I thought I ought just to mention it.’
‘You deed’t,’ snapped Kate, whose cold was growing rapidly worse. ‘I’b dot a borod.’
Judith, startled at this display of temper in a returned angel, became solicitous and talked about temperatures.
‘I’b all right. Just a cobbod or garded cold.’
‘It sounds awful. Perhaps, if you don’t mind, you’d better keep right away from the children.’
This plea was reasonable. Kate, knowing that the children must shortly be given tea and baths, suggested that she return to Chiswick, but was not allowed to do so until Brian came home. He was coming early, on purpose to give her a drink and to drive her back. She was taken into the living-room, where a fire was lit for her by which she sat shivering while infant clamours echoed through the rest of the house. This room now contained a fine tallboy, and two small pictures, a Wilson and a Cox. All three were Mortimer property; they had originally come from the Addison Road.
There had been some spirited scenes at old Mrs Mortimer’s death. Kate had been in bed with influenza on the day when Moira, Stephanie, Georgina, and Fanny descended upon their old home in order to strip it bare. Each had taken what she wanted and left the rest for Kate, as they blandly explained later. They thought the arrangement fair since the rest made up in bulk for what it lacked in quality. It included all the furniture from the servants’ bedrooms, several fumed oak overmantels, a mammoth sideboard, a settee upon which nobody had ever sat, a harp without strings, innumerable chamber pots and some bound volumes of a magazine called Good Words. Kate’s words, when she discovered this, had been forcible and fluent. They prized, after some lively wrangling, the tallboy and a Louis-Quinze table out of Stephanie, the pictures out of Georgina, and a Worcester dinner service out of Moira. Fanny had firmly stuck to what she had got.
The Forgotten Smile Page 17