‘An’ sittin’ in my room!’ she suddenly almost shouted. ‘Cheek!’
‘I never knew it was yer room. He said, just make yerself at home, and I didn’t want to see nobody, so I was having a bit of a look round, had me tea early, upstairs, took it up meself, and – and I come in ’ere.’
‘You could see me name on the door, I s’pose.’
‘Wasn’t on the door.’
‘ ’Course it’s on the door.’ She whirled round and flung the door wide open. ‘You blind or sunnick?’
‘I never see it, Syl. The bleedin’ door was ’alf open. And if I had I’d – I wouldn’t have thought it meant you – I’d have thought it was just a – a sort of coincidence, like. ’Sides, it says “Sylvie”. You used to be Sylvia.’ His voice died off into a mutter.
Sylvie suddenly dropped onto the hearthrug; beside him, but at the other end.
‘Funny kind of place,’ she announced. ‘Quiet. Tea wasn’t too bad, I s’pose – did you ’ave any?’
‘I told yer. Early.’
While they had been exchanging these sentences which suggested in pitch and intonation the noises made by two animals rather than the voices of human creatures, the Seekers had also been making their contribution to subhuman sounds.
‘’Ere –’ said Sylvie in a minute after they had sat for some moments in silence staring at the floor. ‘Let’s ’ave another, shall we?’ She began to turn over the pile of records. ‘Wot you been up to since . . . two years, innit? I dunno . . . you was goin’ in with Blakers, wasn’t you?’
‘He went bust,’ said the boy sullenly.
‘Then wot you do?’ Sylvie put on a record and more sounds began.
‘None o’ your business . . . oh well, nothing much. Went around with Brian Holey and that mob.’
‘In them ’ouses back of the ’ospital.’
‘That’s right.’
‘They ’ad that groupie.’
‘That’s right. Doreen. Went off.’
‘They arst me, but I wasn’t ’aving any, thanks. Over Christmas, they said.’
He looked at her now, without lifting his head; then he said: ‘Funny if you’d of gone with them and I been there.’
‘Comes to the same thing, don’t it . . . know wot? I ain’t all that sorry to see a face I know.’
‘Nor me, Syl,’ he said, after a pause.
They said no more, but sat in the stifling heat, letting the waves of sound roll over them and stun them into a waking dream.
12
Christmas Day
On the evening of the third day, Wilfred acknowledged to himself certain feelings about the Yellow House. Certain strangenesses, that was the word, would not leave his mind. And they joined each other, as if making a chain. Or could it be an arrow – an arrow that pointed? And did it point in any direction? He didn’t know. It only seemed to point to – strangeness. In the middle of the cheerfulness, and the little jokes, and the eating, and the helping, and the kindness, it would roll into the front of his mind. Not frightening; not threatening; not even demanding to be thought about. Just – strange.
Everyone got up late on Christmas morning. Wilfred breakfasted in the kitchen with Mary and Miss Dollette, and Mary made them both laugh with stories of Mrs Levy and her great-nephew, Artie.
No one went to church, although behind Mrs Wheeby’s door about ten o’clock the sounds of a service being relayed from St Ethelburga’s, Little Hudnut, could be heard: boys’ voices soaring in ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, and piercing through the thumping and wailing coming from Sylvie’s room.
That boy did not seem so bad, to Wilfred, who had been aroused on the first night, just as he was dropping off, by slight sounds, and, turning a drowsy head, had seen a thin young silhouette with flowing hair peeling off its clothes in the moonlight.
The boy had apparently been still asleep when Wilfred got up on Christmas morning, but had lifted his head to mutter ‘’Ullo – Merry Christmas’, as Wilfred went out of the door. Looks rather crushed, the latter thought, hurrying downstairs towards a smell of bacon.
He had Mary to himself for the whole of Christmas morning in the room he had heard Miss Dollette call the drawing room. A coal fire burned in the gleaming grate; the flames ate voraciously yet lightly into the glittering jetty masses of coal that suggested precipices and crags to the dreaming eye; blue, green and orange flames, unchanged in the sixty-odd years that had passed since the six-year-old Wilfred had watched them in the little basket-grate in the cottage in Derby Row.
‘Your Mr Taverner doesn’t mind breaking the law, seemingly,’ observed Mary, from her deep armchair opposite his own.
‘What? Oh – the coal fire. Yes . . . funny.’
The strange wave, the pointing arrow, came singing softly forward in his mind. ‘That law’s been going for at least five years. I remember it being passed by the council . . . perhaps he doesn’t know. I don’t know how long he’s been living here.’
‘Doesn’t care, more like. Oh well. Suits me,’ said his daughter lazily. ‘I should think he’s like that.’
‘Like what? Don’t you like him, Mary?’
‘Oh yes, I like him.’ Mary paused, wearing her no-expression. ‘He makes me laugh. – Dad . . .’
Her tone changed, and she sat up and leant forward. Her hair streamed smoothly down onto a dark green jersey. As usual she wore her medallion on its silvery chain, and her skirt was dark red, slit at the side to show a striped red and green petticoat, made from one of those rolls of material, salvaged from fire or flood, and bought occasionally at cost price by Mary’s employer.
‘It is good for trade that few girls know how to make petticoat nowadays,’ Mrs Levy had observed sombrely, on parting with two yards of the striped stuff for fifty of Mary’s pence. ‘But I also think it good you sew, Mary. Is womanly.’
What a ghastly word, thought Mary, bestowing on Mrs Levy a grateful smile. Who the hell wants to be womanly?
Her father was thinking how charming she looked, and wondering uneasily if Mr Taverner, as well as living in a strange house, was – lawless. Lawless?
What secrets were singing under Mary’s well-brushed hair? She looked as reliable as Her Majesty herself; but what was he about to hear?
‘Not one single, solitary boy have I met in London that I’d give you half a penny for,’ announced his child. ‘Mind you, I haven’t met many. Only a couple of Sylvie’s (awful, they were, plain awful), and tourists coming into the shop. All sorts. Try it on if they get the chance, too. (Not all of them, ’course.) Mrs Levy’s usually there, and she’s very down on sex . . .’
‘I don’t see how you can say that, love.’ Her father was a little embarrassed, but also flattered by the calm, woman-to-man tone. ‘You can’t have goings-on in the shop, you know.’
‘Well, she is. Seems to think everybody wants to be at it all the time. Always on at me. And she’s made me learn “Good morning, can I help you?” in five languages.’
‘Well, that’s good for business, you know, if you get a lot of tourists in. What languages? Say some, love.’
‘Oh – some French I knew, of course – and some German, or half knew it. But Italian and Spanish and – just fancy – Japanese. Japanese! That really was the last straw. Thought I’d finished with school. I had to go to the Public Library.’
‘Let’s hear it – come on.’ Wilfred leant forward eagerly. ‘Say the Japanese one.’
Strange sounds came out onto the quiet air, where the silence was only deepened by the fluttering of the flames. They sounded odd indeed in the beloved, familiar voice. There was a pause.
Wilfred, strangely moved, turned away to look out of the long window curtained in faded pink brocade. Sparse flakes of snow, brilliant in the dark air, were falling singly. How quiet the house was! The snow was like a shower of white bells. And the peace! He wished the moment could last for ever.
‘It’s a queer sound. I’ve never heard Japanese spoken before,’ he said at last.
> ‘Nor me. I got a Japanese girl who came into the shop to correct my pronunciation. It’s right now . . . I wonder if Sylvie’s going to stay in bed all day? I’d like a walk.’ She turned to glance out of the window.
It was only natural that she should want to be with those of her own age, yet how he wished that she would stay!
‘Dad,’ Mary leant forward again. ‘You needn’t worry about me. The house is all right where I’m living, and Mrs Levy’s all right (a bit too all right, if you ask me) and . . . I’m all right. Really I am.’ She looked at him affectionately.
‘Then . . . you don’t think of coming home, love?’ he said timidly, after a pause, and she shook her head.
‘I thought so.’ He did not know what to say. He loved her so, his darling child. But what would her mother, with those plans for higher education and a really good job, have said?
‘You know, love,’ he blurted out at last . . . ‘I’d feel just that much better if you’d let me have your real address.’
There. It was out. And surely it wasn’t much to ask – most fathers . . .
Mary considered, and the snow bells drifted down, and Wilfred waited.
‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘It’s only fair, really. That one pound fifty has just made all the difference. Dad, you are an old dear.’ And she got up and came over to him and put her arms round his neck and gave him a great kiss. ‘Thanks a lot,’ she ended.
Her father said: ‘That’s all right, love,’ in a rather muffled tone. And then Mary said, ‘I’ll write it down now, while I remember,’ and was feeling in her shoulder bag when the door opened and Sylvie’s head, freshly goblined and gooed, came round the door.
‘’Ullo.’
‘Hullo.’ Mary had begun to write, and continued without looking up. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘’Ere’s Derek,’ announced Sylvie, half turning to an impression of reluctance, shuffle, height and flowing hair behind her. ‘Come on in – don’t be shy,’ with a shrieking giggle.
Then Mary did look up, saw a dark thin sulky boy and turned down a mental thumb at one glance, though she remembered her mother’s training, and smiled and said: ‘Hullo – Merry Christmas.’
The boy nodded.
Mary glanced at the window.
‘Feel like a walk, Syl?’
‘In the snow? You nuts? We come down see’f you’d come up and play some records. Comin’?’
‘All right.’ Mary smiled at her father and dropped an old envelope on the table beside him. ‘See you, Dad.’ She was off.
He leant back and watched the falling snow, now ordinary again; no longer brilliant in dark air, no longer like white bells; then glanced at the address she had scribbled. It made him feel a little nearer to her.
He ventured to break up a small piece of coal with a long brass poker. In the midst of which action, necessary to relieve his feelings, Mrs Cornforth came in, smiling to see him thus engaged.
Katherine’s reddish hair flowed about her face; her housecoat of thin red cloth moulded her statuesque shape. The room was pleasantly warm, yet surely it was warmer since she had come in? (The wave, the arrow, moved stealthily forward again in his mind.)
‘Have you seen Mrs Wheeby this morning?’ he asked, forcing the feelings away from him.
‘Oh yes, I looked in on her after breakfast. She’s enjoying herself.’ Katherine nodded, her large dark eyes dwelling on his – affectionately?
‘Oh – I’m – I’m glad to hear that. You see, the fact is, I was certain Mary would enjoy it here because she and I like the same kind of people and places . . . I wasn’t quite sure about Mrs Wheeby.’
‘She’s pure gold and steel.’ Katherine came forward and sat down in the chair Mary had occupied. ‘A marvellous mixture.’
‘And . . . I was just a bit afraid . . . she doesn’t get on your nerves?’
‘I have no nerves,’ said Mrs Cornforth. ‘I ride on Life, and the bigger the waves the more I enjoy them.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ he said softly, watching a face that seemed to him as beautiful in its way as Mary’s.
‘Is it?’ She smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t let Laf hear you.’
‘Why? . . . Doesn’t he – approve?’
Katherine shrugged, and her smile faded.
Wilfred was not unaccustomed to being alone with women, and talking to them. There were Pat’s friends: bright-natured women, slightly overweight by modern standards, who joked about diets, and tried to diet and failed, and tried again; loyal friends; good citizens; kind, firm mothers who managed their husbands and the family income with success. He listened, rather than talked, when he chanced to meet one out shopping or give one a lift in the car. Sometimes they had a bone to pick with him, and said so, and Wilfred disliked bones. It had sometimes seemed to him that these bones were too small to be of importance, and had been disinterred because Pat’s friends enjoyed lecturing a man and telling him what he ought to do.
He was not accustomed to sitting alone, in silence, with women like Mrs Cornforth . . .
If there were any other women like Mrs Cornforth.
The thought came with the wave–arrow sensation before he could check it. She was not like any woman he had ever met or ever seen – except in certain pictures. That was it – in certain pictures. The Belle Dame who leans sideways on the knight’s charger in that forgotten Edwardian painting; the red-haired girl, drowsy with love, caught up in the shepherd’s arms in An Idyll; the women in other drawings by Maurice Greiffenhagen, who illustrated the books by Rider Haggard that Wilfred had taken out from the Public Library when he was fifteen. A picture-woman; that was it; a romantic, beautiful, unreal picture-woman.
He must say something; the silence was becoming embarrassing.
‘I hope you’ll let Mary and her friend help with all these fires, Mrs Cornforth,’ he said, clearing his throat and summoning all his social sense. ‘What a terrible lot of work fires make!’
Katherine roused herself, smiling.
‘That’s sweet of you. I’ll certainly ask them, if we get desperate. But I think we can manage – we have a couple who – who live quite near and come in at the crack of dawn – as if dawn cracked, you know; it ought to creep! They get us started for the day. You see, I thought Mary and that little goblin friend of hers might like a real laze. I know girls are strong; one forgets how strong; but they haven’t got their full strength in their late teens, and Sylvie looks half starved.’
‘More than I can say for Mary,’ and he laughed. ‘Though she’s lost weight. That’s London, I expect, and being on her own.’
‘But I expect she looks after herself sensibly, doesn’t she? I feel she is very sensible – and so beautifully calm. One hardly ever sees a calm girl nowadays; it isn’t a fashionable quality, of course. You’re her father, Mr Davis –’ Katherine leant forward, with bright, dwelling eyes. ‘Is she really calm? Inside, I mean? Or is it a mask?’
At that moment Miss Dollette came in, and Wilfred turned to meet her smile with a feeling of relief.
If Mrs Cornforth made him think of a picture-woman, turning the air warmer with her colours, Miss Dollette was like a – a snowdrop.
13
Enter the hero
The room was the best in the house: the largest and the quietest. Forty acres of garden and cultivated land absorbed the ceaseless roar of traffic.
It was also the only room into which no hint or suggestion of the West had been allowed to intrude.
Its shutters, open to let in the radiance of full summer, filtered the light to a golden glow, reflected from the pale matting. Bright reds and violets glowed in the picture above the shrine, and the air was very warm because, in spite of the morning’s heat, a charcoal fire glowed in its pot.
Great-grandfather, once a sailor who had fought at Port Arthur against the Russians and who had risen to the rank of Admiral, was now ninety-three, and head of the family of Tasu, and he felt the cold.
Yasuhiro knelt with hands l
aid flat on his thighs and his eyes lowered. He could see the pallor of the matting, the dark greens and shining greys of the garden, glowing beyond the open shutters.
As always in this silent room with its sacred memories, he felt that he was two people: Yasuhiro Tasu who had grown up in an exquisitely ordered world ruled by Great-grandfather’s thin, remote yet loving voice; but also a graduate of Tokyo University who rushed about on a motorcycle, and sat chattering with girls in coffee bars. The student Yasuhiro felt slightly self-conscious in the dark blue robe embroidered with storks which had been Honourable Great-grandfather’s parting gift. He would be relieved to get back into shirt and jeans.
He was just beginning to feel slightly cramped (or bored, if he told himself the undutiful truth) when Great-grandfather spoke.
‘I could say many things for your instruction, but time is short. (It has been short, to me, since The Ending – yet too long.) All I have to say to you is this: do not return to the home of your ancestors with a demon-woman as your chosen wife.’
Yasuhiro bowed his head in surprised silence.
He too felt the disgrace of The Ending, the defeat of Japan in 1945, and the descent of the Divine Emperor to the status of an ordinary man. He felt it proudly and keenly, but not of course with the perpetual shame and despair with which it afflicted the ancient spirit of Honourable Great-grandfather. Yasuhiro had not been born when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. It was the reference to his possible wife, not to what Great-grandfather called The Ending, that had surprised him.
He moved his young body stealthily inside the stiff, archaic robe. Great-grandfather’s idea of honour was an older one than his great-grandson’s, though a branch of the same tree.
‘May I speak, Honourable Great-grandfather?’
‘Speak, dear one.’
The head, suggesting that of a tortoise, inclined slightly forward above the silvery-grey robe, in an effort to concentrate the hearing, while the heavy lids lifted slightly to focus the failing sight.
‘This dutiful one,’ said Yasuhiro, keeping his voice on its deepest note when it attempted to slide up into a boyish squeak, ‘seeks only to improve his English.’
The Yellow Houses Page 14