The Yellow Houses

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Never do eat anything up. Mum’s the same – tea and fags all day. How about you?’ She held out the packet.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You don’t want to take no notice of what they say. My grandad, he’s gone sixty and he’s smoked, oo, ’undreds a day, fer years.’

  ‘It isn’t that. I can’t smoke and buy food, and I like food best.’

  ‘I bet yer do.’ Sylvie’s giggle suggested the merriment of a spiteful elf. ‘You want to take a bit off, you do.’

  Mary’s patient expression began slowly to alter, until she was looking sulky. She turned her head and stared at the old wood and brass clock on the mantelshelf. Even Sylvie could not fail to notice a movement so deliberate, and she at once began to cough.

  ‘Same all day –’ she gasped, ‘first thing in the morning it starts, cough, cough, cough.’

  ‘You’re sticking that on,’ pronounced Mary, unimpressed.

  ‘Sticking it on, am I? I’ll bloody well show you if I’m sticking it on – ’ere –’ She fumbled in a pocket and brought out a stained paper handkerchief. ‘See? Blood.’

  ‘Lipstick, you mean. Blood isn’t salmon-pink.’

  ‘Calling me a liar now.’ Sylvie was scrambling to her feet. ‘I done someone, once, for calling me that.’ She glared through the fringe.

  ‘I’m not calling you anything. I just said that blood isn’t that colour. Do get weaving – I’m sleepy and I want to get to bed. I’ve got to be up at seven.’

  ‘Shoving me out, now . . . you aren’t half mean . . . I come up ’ere trying to be matey, and you call me a liar and shove me out. Bloody stuck-up, that’s what you are. You don’t know nothing about anything, yer clothes is awful and yer scared to smoke––’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ snapped Mary loudly. ‘And go away.’

  There was a silence. Sylvie stood, drawing on the cigarette, staring at the floor. The gas fire hissed, the clock ticked, and across the roof outside the window floated the notes of St Anne’s church clock striking eleven.

  Mary made a movement towards the door, and Sylvie looked up.

  ‘I been done,’ she whispered.

  Mary stared.

  ‘Taken in – deceived, do you mean?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Taken in! ’Course not. No – you know. Done. Two years this autumn it was. I started something and I had it took away.’

  ‘You mean . . . you had an abortion?’ said Mary, after a pause, and Sylvie violently nodded.

  ‘Just sixteen, I was.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mary said at last. She did not know what else to say.

  ‘Well yer bloody well needn’t be, thanks. I didn’t want no kid. It wasn’t my day, that was all. Might have happened to anyone.’

  She was silent, drawing smoke down into her narrow chest, then slowly expelling it. She crouched in front of the fire suddenly, and at the same time Mary sat down in the armchair. There was something she wanted to know.

  ‘I suppose . . . did you love him?’ she said at last.

  Sylvie did not answer at once. Her head was bent.

  ‘’E done ’is best,’ she muttered presently. ‘I will say that. Wasn’t above seventeen.’ And that was all.

  Mary’s thought was: a kid of seventeen, how could she? Then she reflected that she did not know what kind of a seventeen-year-old this father of Sylvie’s destroyed child had been. Some seventeen-year-olds were more like twenty. (Like Mrs Levy’s cousin’s boy – great lump.)

  Her pity for Sylvie was detached, like that felt for a repulsively shaped insect, and her curiosity was strong. Although she had always sulkily refused to listen to Sandra’s giggling confidences, she felt that she could both listen and talk to Sylvie. Sylvie had been on the far side of the fence that separated Mary from another country. She had been through what Mary thought of as terrible things.

  ‘I’d have wanted to keep the baby and get married to him. That’s what I’d have wanted. A baby! I’d . . . love to have a baby,’ she said, feeling so strongly that the words came out with no difficulty at all.

  ‘It’s easy done,’ giggled Sylvie. ‘I s’pose you think I’m awful . . . like a bit of shit or sunnick?’

  ‘I don’t think having sex with him was awful. It’s the not loving him that I can’t understand and . . . doing that to a baby.’

  But as she spoke, while she talked as she had never done to anyone, she realized that talking to Sylvie was like talking to a dog or a budgerigar: hopeless. She doesn’t even know what the words mean.

  Sylvie said nothing; and in a moment Mary said decidedly that she was going to bed.

  ‘Tell you what!’ gabbled Sylvie, seizing her arm. ‘Let’s go on the town Saturday afternoon – what say? Up Oxford Street – there’s men selling beads there – smashing – you meet me outside the Dominion –’

  ‘I haven’t any money – not to spare. Besides, I’ve got to work. I’m sorry, I’d have liked to come.’ Mary was implacably moving towards the door. ‘P’raps one day next month.’

  ‘We might knock something off and sell it.’ Sylvie’s pale bluish-green eyes were shining lights.

  ‘Don’t be silly . . . I’m thinking about writing to my dad for some money.’ Mary had just come to this decision, and was rather surprised to hear it expressed in words, as she hadn’t realized she was intending anything of the kind.

  ‘My dad’s in prison,’ said Sylvie.

  *

  After his visit to the Yellow House, Wilfred’s mind often turned to Mrs Wheeby and what he should do about her. The feeling that Lamorna was empty, dead – a mere show place since Pat and Mary had gone – was growing on him. Dead was the word for all these enamelled and Formica and Perspex surfaces. Only Pat’s interest in them and her energy had maintained any feeling of life. What a housewife she had been! She had washed, and rubbed, and polished, and kept a sergeant-major’s eye on it all. No new device for getting through the work more efficiently; no little rubber-suck-in-gadget for attaching tea towels to the side of the refrigerator, no new wax designed to keep a near-eternal shine upon wood, had escaped her keen eye and testing hand.

  Wilfred had more than once had one of his ‘kinky notions’ about the furniture. Continually criticized with a view to its improvement – and the upholstered stuff every three years subjected to Pat’s skilled needle – it was gasping for breath. In vain, for it was polished with some stuff that ‘sealed’ its surfaces. And if you can’t breathe, you are dead, Wilfred thought now.

  Its breath had stopped with Pat’s.

  What was the use of staying on here, in a house full of dead things? How he detested hoovering the carpets! Polishing he damned well drew the line at and, only that morning, dusting had crossed the rubicon. And cooking! How often, lately, had he nearly hurled the sausages or the baked beans into that bucket with a lid you lifted up with your foot . . . Only where’d I go?

  He was so accustomed to passing the days in solitude that when a smart tap came on the kitchen door, he jumped. He looked unbelievingly at the clock – nearly midnight.

  ‘Come in.’

  Mrs Wheeby was fully dressed, but her hair was concealed by a net and ribbon cap.

  ‘Is anything . . . up . . . Mrs Wheeby?’ Wilfred was pouring milk from the saucepan into a brightly decorated mug.

  She came in and sat down at the table, where preparations for imbibing Mil-ko were immediately beneath her gaze. Hell, thought Wilfred, and asked her if she would like some.

  ‘Oh, no thank you, Mr Davis. I could never drink that heavy Mil-ko. Eggeen is my nightcap, very light, you hardly know you’ve had anything. Made out of the whites only. I often wondered it they use up the white left over from those egg shampoos. Rather a disadvantage’ (pause, wheeze) ‘in some ways being so light. But better than tossing and turning all night is what I’ve always said. I’ve had such a strong feeling all day, Mr Davis. It’s been growing on me, and I felt I could not close my eyes until, as you might say, I had spoken out. I feel you may be going t
o make changes here, and we must prepare our plans.’

  Wants to leave – what luck! he thought – just when I was wondering what to do about her. Then he paused, the saucepan tilting in his hand, staring at her. Prepare our plans?

  Before he could get a word out, she was going on, with the pace and weight of a small steamroller.

  ‘Of course, Mr Davis, let me say here and now that wherever you went, I should go too. You can be sure of that. Because if you were there, it couldn’t feel strange, could it? – in spite of the furniture being different.’

  Wilfred’s silent response to this Ruth-like avowal was strong dismay. What! Laden with Mrs Wheeby and Dicky and the whales for the remainder of his life?

  ‘So don’t be afraid that I shall ever desert you, Mr Davis,’ Mrs Wheeby said, with alarming earnestness, and a nodding of the net and ribbon cap.

  A silence followed.

  His lips were parting, when the steamroller moved on.

  ‘A man needs a woman’s company, Mr Davis, especially as he gets older; it’s then he feels the need of it most. And you having been used to being married – you feel it, of course you do. I know I do myself, and my cousin James’ (pause, wheeze) ‘Jim we used to call him – he was quite desolate when Maddie went. Not that I ever saw all that much in her, but of course with him it must have been different, and finally, I suppose in desperation, he married Lilian Brewer, and of course it turned out exactly as we all expected.’

  Mrs Wheeby paused again to gasp, and Wilfred had time to hope that some offer of a home for her might emerge from among those who had expected things from the marriage with Lilian Brewer. Evidently Mrs Wheeby had had a family. Where was it now, when it might make itself useful? Dead, no doubt: Jim, Lilian Brewer, the lot. Still faintly hoping to be reprieved, he allowed her to continue.

  ‘Of course, Mr Davis, cooking is what I could not undertake, having been married to a vegetarian and believer in health foods for forty years. No, if I was to undertake cooking for you and Mary’ (pause, wheeze), ‘should she ever want a break, as they call it, from that job in Walthamstow or wherever you said it was, Mr Davis, we should come to grief, as sure as my name is Edith Wheeby . . .’

  Wilfred was lifting the Mil-ko to his lips when the simple thought came to him: to hell with Mil-ko. How about iced beer? and, opening the refrigerator, he began to hunt amongst his store of tins.

  He and Pat had rarely, yet sometimes, had a beer together on their return from the last house at the Majestic Cinema. He took out a tin now and hesitated.

  ‘. . . and so I decided to put your mind at rest, Mr Davis, and lay my cards on the table–– iced beer! How delicious! If there’s anything I do enjoy, especially late at night, it’s a glass of beer, and iced – delicious! Now, I’ll get the glasses while you open the tins, Mr Davis.’

  Wilfred, too surprised to speak, took out another tin, and turned to the gadget, screwed to the wall, used for opening them. He was actually smiling, seeing Mrs Wheeby now as an old sport rather than an old nuisance.

  Mrs Wheeby neither hesitated nor sipped, but took a good pull of her beer.

  ‘It’s nice to have a friend,’ he said suddenly, as he set down his glass.

  He had had no intention of saying any such thing.

  ‘Well, you have, Mr Davis. You have. Believe me.’

  Wilfred had a second’s fear that she would stretch a pudgy hand across the table to seal the new bond. That would have been too much. Pat would have thought they were both drunk – and perhaps he was, a little? Certainly, he felt odd. There’s no . . . stability . . . nowadays, he thought muzzily. Nowhere. He drained his glass.

  ‘Well, I must be off to Bedfordshire,’ Mrs Wheeby said. ‘I’ll just rinse these . . .’ Really, she was the right sort of old woman; rinsing glasses, going off to Bedfordshire – he and Pat had misjudged her.

  ‘I just wanted to have things quite clear, Mr Davis,’ she said at the door. ‘About our sticking together, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you, Mrs Wheeby. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Davis.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  7

  The bargain

  The next morning, Wilfred was in Dill’s, the butcher’s, buying the two slices of liver which Pat had persuaded him to eat once a week for the anaemia which she suspected, after reading an article in the Sunday Times, that he might be suffering from. He was not anaemic, and he disliked liver, but he continued, under her posthumous influence, to buy, cook and chew the stuff every week.

  He was surprised when Mr Dill, having handed him the slices of liver in a plastic bag, leant across the counter and said in a mutter:

  ‘Thinking of selling your house then, Mr Davis.’

  It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Well I am, as a matter of fact. But how on earth did you know?’

  Wilfred tried to think who had told him. Only those people in the Yellow House . . . and, instantly, he was certain that none of them would have talked to Mr Dill.

  None? Mrs Cornforth?

  Mr Dill was going on:

  ‘The fact is, I’d like a word with you. How about The Black Swan? Do you know it?’

  ‘Carmichael Street, on the corner,’ Wilfred said automatically.

  ‘That’s right . . . half past six suit you? In the saloon bar?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes . . .’ Wilfred held out some metal – you couldn’t call it silver and coppers nowadays – and wandered out of the shop thinking Damn.

  He disliked events to move quickly. Pat had often told him he needed more time than was necessary to think things over – a year wouldn’t seem too long for you, she used to say.

  Dill . . . Dill . . . lived over the shop, and had two little children, who occasionally put a face round the door – an old-fashioned place.

  Suppose I ought to go into Ratchet’s, thought Wilfred, and ask what houses in our road are fetching . . . I suppose he wants to buy it himself. He probably wants to get out of that place; it must be a hundred years old, at least.

  Damn and blast, all the same. I wonder if she did tell him?

  He didn’t want to go home; he didn’t want to drop in on his father; he was restless, and mildly worried, and the prospect of returning to the house was unbearable. He saw in his mind’s eye the white faces of gadgets glaring at him round the kitchen and he hated them.

  I’ll go to the sea.

  The thought came like a flash of sunlight, I’ll take the car. It was a day when the clouds were racing. There ought to be white horses.

  It was the first time that he had driven since Pat’s death; he was a nervous driver, who had taken the test five times before passing, and he never enjoyed driving. Pat had always done it.

  The trees were bare but for a few shrivelled leaves fluttering like golden rags, and where there was a wide prospect the fields were cinnamon-colour to darkest purple; the willows bordering stream and pond had a pale and ghostly look. Gradually the beauty of the landscape crept upon him, and he drove almost in a dream. He knew that this was both dangerous and the act of a bad citizen, but he felt rebellious. If he were the kind of driver who became slightly drunk on fields and willow trees, was that his fault? But who would believe such a defence if he put it forward in court? How extraordinary it would sound . . . as if I were some barmy poet.

  He drove through small, Indian-red brick Benton, perched on its cliffs; past the handsome houses in large gardens on its outskirts; and there was the sea, the colour of a black pearl under the racing pewter sky, running in at the land with its thousands upon thousands of white-toothed waves, as if it were grinning in rage.

  He stopped the car above the narrow ‘promenade’, whose concrete was already cracking, and stared out over the stupendous dark expanse, breathing in cold salt air. There were no other cars about; it was lunchtime, and everybody sensible was indoors eating.

  He stepped out onto the wiry turf, and walked down some steps leading to the path immediately above the sea. An
expanse of gleaming sand suggested that the tide was going out; and, attracted by the band of pebbles with here and there the whiteness of a shell, he descended some old wooden steps and stood there, with the hissing loud in his ears and spray drifting into his face.

  The prospect was forbidding: dark sky, darker sea, shrilling wind. It must, he supposed, be the movement everywhere – skies racing, waves rushing, dry sand flying along in pale clouds – that made it exciting. He felt his spirit lift to meet it. As if he were ready to set out on an adventurous journey.

  And I wish to God I were, he thought, turning away and trudging up the damp, shingly slope. The world’s big enough. There’s Brazil. Places where no one’s ever been. And I will have had some money from the house . . . And when I got there, I’d be as lonely as hell, and there’d be all those insects, and cutting your way through all that jungle . . . anybody’d think I was fourteen . . .

  But I could get a bit drunk, he thought as he went up the old wooden steps. I’ll go to The Woodman and have a whole bottle of wine. That’s what I’ll do.

  The Woodman was small, ancient, and dying. Its position in a longish, remote lane leading to nowhere in particular was disadvantage enough, without a landlord who could not be bothered to be jovial.

  Wilfred knew that there had once been a stock of wine there, because he and Pat, on one of the rare occasions when he could persuade her to use the car for idle exploring, had come upon The Woodman one afternoon in summer and eaten a lunch of dry biscuits which had so outraged Pat that Wilfred had ordered wine in a spirit of reparation.

  A bottle of red stuff with a foreign name had been produced.

  ‘Last two bottles. Been down there three years; didn’t see the use of ordering more than the ’alf dozen,’ explained the representative of Bacchus whose task it was to keep the atmosphere in The Woodman genial and its fortunes prosperous. ‘All they ever drink’s wallop.’

  Wilfred could remember nothing about the wine, except that it had tasted unexpectedly strong, and had made him a little drunk. The Woodman might have been pulled down by now, he thought. That lunch must have been all of three years ago.