The Yellow Houses

by Stella Gibbons

  As if everywhere weren’t noisy.

  Wilfred swallowed the last of his sapless meal.

  That bird was still at it. He would, he supposed, have to let Mrs Wheeby keep it. It seemed disloyal to old Pat.

  Pat had been so . . . certain . . . about everything. So practical; so sensible. So kind. This, and the smooth rosiness of her face, had attracted him as he met her, every day, going about her work in the Town Hall. Her modishly dressed hair had gleamed, her clothes were always bright-coloured and fitted close to her sturdy body, her shoes and her fingernails shone. She was ten years younger than him; and Mary had not come until they had been married longer than either of them had liked to be without a child.

  While Pat was still working at the Town Hall to pay for Mary’s fees at Redpaths House, the cancer which she had suspected but never spoken of to anyone had become obvious.

  There had been some weeks in hospital; daily visits from Wilfred (now retired and on a good pension); the ‘gallant fight’ expected by relatives and friends and neighbours; a bright expression, attention to hair and dressing-jackets and make-up. The approach of death had been ignored. But it had come: unconsciousness, incontinence, an unrecognizable face and body – then quietly, death.

  We were so happy, Wilfred thought, and pushed aside the empty bowl. He tried not to remember the acrid, tigerish smell of the dying: a live smell, although the body exhaling it would soon be alive no longer.

  So happy. We had our ups and downs, of course. She didn’t always understand how I felt. She liked to wear the trousers (bless her), but we were happy. And now I’ve got nothing. Nothing.

  But Pat’s cure for what she called the blues had been action. She had proved that it worked, she used to say, over and over again.

  After a moment or so of sprawling, weak in body and despairing in heart, Wilfred got up, and, having forced himself to rinse the bowl and spoon and inspect them, he put them away and went upstairs to fetch Mr Taverner’s handkerchief. He might as well fill up some time by washing and ironing the thing.

  He had mooned over his breakfast longer than he had realized, for nine o’clock was sounding on the autumn wind from St Peter’s as he passed Mrs Wheeby’s door, and, even as he did so, Dicky’s silvery torrents of sound stopped as if cut off by a switch. Mrs Wheeby had been as good as her word. But even as the thought occurred to him, he was brought to a stop by an outbreak from her room of another noise.

  At first he thought that she must be having some unprecedented and alarming form of what is loosely called an attack, and his selfish reaction was one of angry despair: how much more was he going to have to put up with?

  But, the sounds swelling and growing more peculiar, he decided that Mrs Wheeby had, so to speak, burst out in another direction (Hindi, perhaps, this time, or Urdu as she seemed attracted to the East) and had purchased, and was practising on, some exotic musical instrument.

  He wondered if she were going mental . . . And he was as nervous as he was angry when he sharply tapped on the door, which he himself had deftly, eighteen months ago, painted with glossy white Crown, and waited.

  During the brief pause that followed, the giant mewings, and the swooping and cooing sounds convinced him that they could not come from any imaginable sort of human throat. The door opened.

  Mrs Wheeby’s right hand was upon the doorknob and her left held a bowl of milk-sopped cereal. It added to Wilfred’s annoyance to see, on the table behind her, a packet of the same brand which he himself had recently been swallowing. Fate seemed bent upon linking him with Mrs Wheeby.

  ‘Mrs Wheeby!’ he exclaimed, his irritation increased by her unfuffled air, ‘what on earth is that extraordinary noise?’

  ‘Whales, Mr Davis.’

  ‘Wails! I should think it is wails – I never heard such a row in my life – I really can’t have this, you know. First that bird, and then––’

  ‘Whales, Mr Davis, hump-backed whales. Fish, if you can call them that. It’s on my gramophone. There was a wireless programme about them, most interesting, I never enjoyed anything on that Third before, it’s usually philosophy and that sort of thing, or those plays, meant to be clever, where the people talk like you and me only it means something different. This was taken on a tape recorder by some man who went after them (the whales, I mean). It’s them calling to each other, a kind of warning, and singing too. Fancy that! It said you could buy the record if you sent the money to some place in California, so I sent it, and back came the record – so neatly packed, all that way, quite surprising really. Listen!’ She held up the bowl of cereal, looking at him with bright eyes. ‘That’s them calling to each other across a hundred miles of sea. I love this part. Listen!’

  The sound was hurrying along in waves: a mooing, wavering rush of notes that brought suddenly into Wilfred’s mind the clear gloom of the ocean where it is deepest and furthest from man. Lonely beyond any loneliness the human imagination can conceive, yet inhabited. Oh yes, inhabited – by vast sombre indigo bodies gliding under the ever-darkening and deepening weight of three miles of salt water, and singing and calling one to another as they glide.

  He came back to the white door, and the narrow passage and Mrs Wheeby, feeling oddly cooled in mind, even faintly chilled in body, and as if he had been, for a moment, a very long way away under. The unhuman sounds were swooping on.

  ‘Whales, is that it?’ he murmured, staring over her head and out through the open window. ‘What a . . . I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ The sounds were dying away; they ended. He heard the faint noise of the disc revolving.

  ‘Nor me, Mr Davis. I’ll have that record, Edith my girl, I thought. You’ve listened long enough to the electric kettle boiling, and Mrs Davis’s Hoover, and those jumbo jets – not half as nice, not one quarter, as a real jumbo – give me elephants every time. And layabouts on the wireless singing about how they’ll overcome. What, I should like to know? What will they overcome? Soap and water, or a visit to the barber or those drugs? A pity they don’t make a start by overcoming them. But the whales, they’re free, Mr Davis, and don’t have to sing about overcoming anything. You and I, Mr Davis, aren’t free to walk across the road in safety, in the town we were both born in, so that’s why it does me good to hear those whales and so it will you. You come up here any time you like, well, say in the evenings, when we all feel a bit solitary – I know I do – and you’ll be welcome as sure as my name is Edith Wheeby. We’ll listen together. Goodbye for now, Mr Davis.’

  3

  Old Mr Davis

  The days, with their dull little duties, soon began to have one hope only: a letter from Mary.

  None came. And her father did nothing, told no one about her flight. But four days after she had gone, there came a telephone enquiry from the school. The secretary would like to know, please, why Mary had been absent since last Friday. Was she ill? If so, why hadn’t the school been informed? Wilfred muttered something about writing.

  While putting down the receiver, however, he decided that he would go to see Mrs Anstruther, the headmistress.

  Absent since Friday. She must have taken the day off to make arrangements . . . frightening, sensible Mary.

  With shoes shining, and collar turned up against the stiff breeze that rakes the streets of east coast towns, Wilfred walked across Torford. He left behind the tree-lined roads of small, red-brick houses for wider roads of larger ones, whose frontages had been replaced by shop windows full of goods that wearied his eye by excess of choice.

  There seemed to be more cars about than people; the moving air bit the cheek and rang with noise; all was busy, prosperous, and ugly. Only the sky, the East Anglian sky of Cotman and Constable, offered consolation. Its noble autumnal colour was occasionally stained by the roar and stench of a passing air-liner, but the blue remained. The blue remains thought Wilfred, briskly carrying his load of pain across Torford, and remembering Pat saying, everybody has their troubles and there’s always someone worse off than you, a
nd thinking that, true though these sentences were, they did him no good this morning, while the blue remains did.

  The new Town Hall loured at him across the square, too large for its setting; heavy, menacing, adorned by a frieze of concrete bars divided into bundles, each bar set askew. He actually shut his eyes as he walked past its purple brickery. He had agreed with Pat that its design was ‘fully contemporary’, and therefore must be admirable, but he had never liked it.

  We mustn’t live in the past: it’s morbid.

  Why mustn’t we? Wilfred found himself thinking, Why mustn’t we?

  As for the Town Hall . . . fit for witch doctors, it was, and enough to frighten the primary school children.

  He remembered the decorously festive week in which it was opened, and how tired he had grown of the words civic pride.

  On this side of the town the roads were wide and some big trees, once growing in meadows, had been left standing when Torford’s largest houses had been built here a hundred years ago, by Torford’s richest men. Each house stood in an acre of garden, where hothouses had once glittered in the sun; at the back of one or two, there were stables. Dark green conifers spread their shadows on the neglected grass. Redpaths: School for Girls had once had its yard and stables, and the stables had had a weatherboarded tower with a clock that chimed the hours.

  Gone, now, the creamy wood slats covering the pepperpot tower; gone the softly insistent note of the bell. The paved yard contained a compressed-looking, concrete building with too many windows: the new Science Wing. Murderous powers seemed imprisoned in it and bursting to get out.

  Wilfred went through a low wooden gate, and along a drive past a mighty cedar, and up six steps raying out in a satisfying half-circle, and rang a brass bell-push.

  The door was opened by ‘Slutty’ Singer, now aged (if the town’s collective memory was reliable) forty-three, and the despair of Torford’s social workers.

  Five illegitimate children, whose fathers were not even putative, were flourishing like dwarf green bay trees on the Torford ratepayers’ money. Slutty was generally assumed to be mentally deficient, the ratepayers preferring to take this attitude rather than face the fact that there was, alive and well and living in Torford, someone who had more than once said, to trained psychiatrists, ‘Mind your own effing business.’

  Wilfred had never accepted the mentally deficient theory, believing, for his part, that Slutty was what Pat had called careless, and the twelfth century would have called fruitful.

  But he was decidedly not pleased to see her at Redpaths. The school, with its wide, lofty hall paved in black and white marble, and certain esoteric and threatening contemporary pictures on its apricot walls, had for him an aura of half-comprehended values that had nothing to do with getting on or with money. A nice class of girl went to Redpaths. But if Redpaths was employing Slutty Singer, it must be hard pressed indeed for staff, and could it be going downhill?

  Mary had been at the school for nearly seven years, and Pat had worked hard and fiercely to earn the fees: Redpaths was a part of the Davis family history and he did not want it to go downhill.

  ‘Hullo, Mr Davis,’ beamed Slutty, all crumpled white working coat and dusty red hair; she knew him, of course, because of living in the same street as his father, a fact which Pat had not liked.

  ‘Good morning,’ he answered unsmilingly, being in no state of mind to smile at unmarried mothers – and was going to say ‘I want to see Mrs Anstruther’ when there came from Slutty a kind of warning howl.

  ‘Oh she don’t see nobody not without a ’pointment, never does, can’t be done – but I’ll see what I can do for you, Mr Davis,’ she ended with a conspiratorial smile. Then out from an office (formerly the morning room) swept Miss Turner; mini-skirted, mermaid-haired, cool and tidy as a plastic flowerpot, and hopelessly entangled with a married man twenty-two years older than herself.

  ‘I’m Mary Davis’s father,’ Wilfred said, looking her full in her wide hazel eye. ‘I want to see Mrs Anstruther.’

  Miss Turner gave Slutty, who was lingering, precisely the right smile, and Slutty wandered off.

  ‘Mrs Anstruther doesn’t usually see parents without an appointment. But – do sit down, Mr Davis,’ said Miss Turner, and went away.

  Wilfred sat. On a black William Morris kind of chair which might have been part of the house’s furniture at the time of the sale, thirty-six years ago. The notices on the green-baize-covered board stared at him whitely.

  Miss Turner reappeared.

  ‘Mrs Anstruther will see you, Mr Davis’ – and he followed her across the hall and down a passage to a door, at which she knocked.

  Mrs J. Anstruther was sitting at a desk in a pale blue and dark blue room; not luxurious – the curtains were hessian, the carpets felt – and making no attempt to be impressive.

  Nevertheless, her plain pale face, fair hair drawn upwards into a knot, neutral wool dress, and bracelet and brooch of carved cornelian, impressed Wilfred. He had only seen her, previously, at a distance on the school’s Open Days; had never spoken to her, although Pat had always made it a duty (which he was certain she had feared) to have a word with the Headmistress.

  He had never before been face to face with a woman who seemed to him both gentle and hard. It must, he supposed vaguely, be something to do with education.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Davis. Do sit down. Now what is the matter with Mary? Is she ill?’

  ‘No. She isn’t ill – so far as I know.’ He sat leaning slightly forward, with anxious eyes fixed on Mrs Anstruther’s. ‘She’s run away.’

  ‘Has she!’

  He was astounded; there was no disapproval or surprise in her voice. What was there? It couldn’t be – enthusiasm? He stumbled on.

  ‘She – she left a note. She wants to work in a dress shop.’

  Mrs Anstruther nodded. She put up a hand (roughened by housework, Wilfred noticed, and the fact, curiously, comforted him) – and pushed back a hairpin.

  ‘This is a small school, Mr Davis,’ she began, ‘and because there are only a hundred and twenty girls here, I know them all, and something about each one. Would you like me to tell you what I know about your Mary?’

  Your Mary: a delicious warmth of feeling flooded him. Just to think I love her lessened his pain. He looked gratefully at Mary’s headmistress.

  ‘She isn’t an intellectual girl,’ Mrs Anstruther continued. ‘She works hard, and her results are quite good, but no more than average, in spite of her application. The taste, the – passion – for learning, simply isn’t there––’

  ‘I’ve always thought so,’ he interrupted, ‘always. And I didn’t care. Mary’s . . . enough for me as she is. It was her mother. My wife never . . . had the benefit of a university education, and she felt the want of it, always did. She was the one who was ambitious for Mary.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a common mistake parents make, especially mothers . . . Mary, Mr Davis, is the type of girl who marries young and has three or four children rather quickly, makes a thoroughly good wife and mother, and is perfectly content to be what she is.’

  He was leaning forward listening to what she said as if he were drinking it in.

  ‘But seventeen, Mrs Anstruther – not yet seventeen! And in London, alone. I’m so afraid some bad type of boy will get hold of her . . .’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Anstruther paused, considered, and plunged. ‘That might not be such a tragedy as it sounds. Experience deepens and enriches character. The richer the temperament, the more likely a woman is to satisfy––’ She broke off. ‘I don’t think you need be afraid. Mary won’t let a bad type of boy get near her.’

  ‘Really? You honestly think so? You . . . aren’t just saying that to . . . relieve my anxiety?’

  ‘Indeed I’m not. Mary’s strongest characteristic is common sense. I’ve always thought so. That was why – I’m talking to you quite frankly – I was, well, rather pleased just now to hear she’d run away. It isn’t good for the young to be to
o sensible. If they don’t get adventure out of their systems while they are young, they try to do it when they’re middle-aged, and then the results are seldom satisfactory. Not that one wants it all got out of the system, of course, especially for women––’

  ‘So you wouldn’t go to the police?’ he interrupted.

  ‘The police? Oh no, not unless you want to make things much worse. I . . . my husband says that my prophecies, which often come true, are just . . . lucky. But they aren’t, Mr Davis, they’re based on really knowing about girls: what they’re truly like, their potentialities, and what they want from life – things they sometimes don’t know about themselves. I am quite certain about your Mary. She is going to be . . . what you, as her father, would think of as perfectly “all right”. Has she any money, do you know?’

  ‘Well! I never thought of that. (Her mother would have, of course.) She’s got forty pounds in the Post Office. To tell you the truth, I haven’t had the gu—I just haven’t really looked round her room. But I will do. Soon as I get home. I’d feel better if I knew she had that Post Office book with her.’

  Mrs Anstruther glanced down at some papers on her desk, and instantly he got up and made a movement towards the door.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Anstruther, and thank you.’

  She smiled, and managed to convey ‘goodbye’ with her head.

  She spoke again as he reached the door.

  ‘Mr Davis.’

  He turned and looked at her.

  ‘I’ve talked to you absolutely candidly, of course, because I’m so sorry you’ve had this new worry, following on your loss, but also because I know you’re someone one can talk to candidly . . . Will you keep this conversation private, just between ourselves, as two parents?’

  The school, with its small Board of not-too-obtuse Governors, was flourishing as only a school offering something better than the state or grammar schools offered, could flourish, in a town where the level of prosperity was rising steadily every year. Mrs Anstruther did not want her views on the enriching of the female nature by running away from home to reach the ears of parents who had daughters aged eight or nine to be educated.