The Yellow Houses

by Stella Gibbons

  The folder had been a Christmas present last year from the ill-used Joan – or perhaps from Sheila or Shirley – brought back from a visit to Italy. Or it may have come from France or Spain.

  All the Shirleys were voracious travellers – abroad was ‘so much more beautiful and interesting’. (They scorned to say that tobacco and alcohol were cheaper.)

  The east wind did not penetrate the Yellow House. Wilfred had started what he thought of as pampering himself in small ways. When Pat had been alive, decorating and endless small jobs in the house and garden had taken up all his spare time, and he had felt that a few minutes spent in pampering would have been selfish. A luxuriously long shave, ten minutes passed in choosing a new tie, and other harmless indulgences left over from a normal male adolescence, had been sacrificed to the demands of family life.

  Pat had been understanding. She had not liked, and had said as much, the sight of the aproned man at the sink, and she had not asked him to wash up – ever. But in return for her concession, he had silently made his own sacrifices. Old and Sweet, his tobacco, had been the most cherished of these minor Isaacs.

  But now he gradually began to resume his ‘pamperings’: polishing his shoes to Army standard; venturing on a Swiss breakfast food made of raw grains, brown sugar, dried fruit and other delicious things, instead of flakes in a glaring packet offering him a miniature tank or tin trumpet in return for coupons. The Swiss breakfast food only had a picture of the Matterhorn against blue skies.

  It’s there, you know, he would think, sitting at his solitary breakfast. I’ll never see the Matterhorn in the flesh, so to speak, not now. But I can think of it being there. Sets you up for the day, as they say. Real and beautiful.

  Not that he needed setting up. He was happy in the Yellow House.

  He had always felt fond of Kichijoten – if one could use the word ‘fond’ about so remote and beautiful a being – and now he felt fond of the toasting-fork, important at those cosy teas in the kitchen to which he was often invited. He loved his cane armchair, and felt affection for his books.

  Once he had wandered up to the spacious attics, one furnished only with comfortable chairs and a colour television set; and one even barer, and whitewashed, with a ping-pong table in the middle and a dartboard on the wall.

  ‘Felicity had . . . has – a whole world-full of nephews and nieces,’ Mr Taverner had explained.

  He had seen no more shadows or – or – whatever he had seen – and surely there were none between his friends; though Mr Taverner’s face might sometimes look as if caught up in a deep sadness, or Wilfred might surprise an expression of fear on the small countenance of Miss Dollette.

  Mrs Cornforth was the one with whom he felt least comfortable, because her brilliance and warmth reminded him of Pat’s brightness and cheerfulness, and called to his manhood. She would swirl into the kitchen from shopping, fling her parcels down on the table, and pour out a story of some encountered excitement so ringingly and dramatically that it was as good as a play on TV; and such occasions would always leave Wilfred feeling uneasy.

  Mary had not written for over a fortnight. It was the beginning of April. The buds were out and the birds nesting, and still she did not write.

  Wilfred was so worried that he confided in Mr Taverner, one evening when they were washing up. Wilfred had enjoyed a supper to which he had been invited. Mrs Cornforth was out and Miss Dollette watching a television programme about hamsters.

  ‘Telephone,’ said Mr Taverner.

  ‘She won’t like that,’ Wilfred said unhappily.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mr Taverner. ‘Who can forget the furious impatience in a youthful voice when someone over thirty rings them up? Let her, bless her, get on with it. Got the number?’

  ‘Yes, I have, as a matter of fact, though I don’t think she wanted––’

  ‘Natürlich. Blow all that. Off you pip. I’ll finish these,’ and he waved a saucepan.

  The telephone was in one of the two niches in the hall, facing Kichijoten, and it was possible to talk in some privacy.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Dad,’ said Mary’s voice. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong this end, Mary. But I haven’t heard from you for nearly three weeks and––’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry and all that, love, but we’ve been awfully busy and – and –’ her voice changed. ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes, love?’ (Oh, what was coming? Pregnant?)

  There was a pause.

  Then he heard another voice – young, high, yet unmistakably male.

  ‘Hullo, Mr Davis. I am a new friend of Mairly’s. Name Yasuhiro Tasu. I am living in Mairly’s house. I want to present myself. Good evening.’ The last words had the inflection of a greeting.

  ‘Good evening,’ Wilfred gulped. What was this? Mustn’t take it too seriously, mustn’t be nosey, mustn’t . . .

  ‘Oh, pleased to meet you, even over the phone,’ he said, in the manner known as jokey. (At least the boy had some manners.) ‘Well, it’s very cold up here . . .’

  ‘Not very cold in London,’ said the oh-so-alien voice.

  ‘And . . . and how are you two young people spending this cold evening?’ lilted the father, knowing he sounded idiotic and unlike himself.

  But there seemed to be advantages for over-anxious parents in talking to Japanese boyfriends.

  ‘We talk,’ announced the voice firmly. ‘We sit in my room and talk. About a great Japanese hero, Mishima . . . Spent most of my money this week on flowers,’ it added, with a laugh that Wilfred was surprised to find attractive, ‘so can’t go to cinema. You heard about Mishima?’

  ‘Er . . . no . . . I’m afraid not . . .’

  Pip. Pip. Pip.

  ‘Must go. Mairly says “goodbye”.’ The line went dead.

  Looking dazedly around as he replaced the receiver, Wilfred encountered the stare of Kichijoten. It struck him as distinctly sly this evening, and suddenly he shook his fist at her.

  Mrs Anstruther, in her over-full life, had made time to ‘tackle’ Slutty Singer – in her study, where the fact that Slutty was accustomed to going over the rugs with the Hoover every morning did not prevent an unfamiliar sensation coming upon her as she sat opposite her employer, listening to the unemotional yet curiously reproving voice flowing on and on.

  Slutty almost listened.

  Recipient of genuine if incoherent thanks from the men she entertained, she felt little need of kindness from anyone. She slopped along, exercising her gift of strong sexual response, and being feted by those she benefited.

  But she was fond-ish of her five children, especially the two youngest, and spent quite a lot of the men’s presents on their clothes. The children’s meals, though unwholesome and irregular, were abundant; and although they slept in an indescribable bed, and their hair was touched only when some acquaintance of Slutty’s snatched up a brush, the cottage just down the street from old Mr Davis’s was always warm.

  Julia began in as mother, woman-to-woman a tone as she could summon, as if taking it for granted that Slutty would want to get Samantha into a primary school as soon as possible. She talked, uninterrupted, for nearly ten minutes.

  Slutty’s eyes were taking in Julia’s necklace and her (this morning) firmly fastened, smooth hair.

  ‘And now about Kelly.’ Julia pushed herself into the new subject, ignoring a slight hoarseness at the back of her throat. ‘She ought to go to a nursery school––’

  ‘Costs money, that does,’ said Slutty, also hoarse, but from gin and cigarette smoke.

  ‘I was just coming to that. The council is opening Torford’s first nursery school this year, in Caversham Road––’

  ‘I ’aven’t ’eard nothing about no nursery school.’ Slutty’s expression was now suspicious; she associated the word ‘council’ with nosiness and interference. They were her kids, weren’t they?

  ‘It’s free,’ said Mrs Anstruther, ‘except for their dinner money.’

  ‘’Ow much’ll that be?�
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  ‘I don’t know to a penny, Mrs Singer, but about fifty pence a week, I should think.’

  ‘Might manage that,’ mused Slutty, twiddling a strand of hair.

  ‘I’m sure you can . . . You aren’t likely to move, are you? Move house?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Slutty stared at the curtains.

  ‘I’m thinking of some years ahead. They do so much better at school if they’ve a settled background. Have you a long lease on your . . . place?’

  ‘Dunno. I’m all right, I s’pose.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . Mr Anstruther and I would always keep an eye on the little girls, you know. Now –’ she turned to her desk. ‘Now you’re going along to the Town Hall tomorrow to put their names down for the school.’

  She did not add any coaxing ‘aren’t you?’ but handed Slutty a sheet of scarlet paper, boldly printed in white Roman capitals. ‘Here’s the address of the Town Hall.’ (She’ll remember the colour; not so likely to lose it.)

  ‘Soon got onto old Davis’s place,’ confided Slutty suddenly. ‘Paintin’ it up pink already, they are. There’s another, up the other end, wot they’ve done too. Change the ’ole street, we reckon.’

  ‘Indeed? Yes, well, of course they’re the kind of little places people like . . . You’ll go along to the Town Hall tomorrow, won’t you, Mrs Singer?’

  ‘Might as well,’ said Slutty, clasping the scarlet paper and responding to the briskness in Julia’s tone. Then she heaved herself up, half nodding at her employer, and slouched to the door.

  ‘Good,’ and she smiled. ‘Such pretty children, both of them.’

  ‘Ain’t bad,’ Slutty admitted, pausing at the door, the faintest sparkle in her eyes. ‘Might see ’em on the telly one o’ these days.’

  Over my dead body, thought Julia, dismissing the mother of her protégeés with a smile.

  Her husband was waiting for her outside the school in the late afternoon light, beside their shabby car. It struck her that his appearance matched it.

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ she said. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘Everything, but I’m used to that. No, couldn’t stand the office another minute, so I thought I’d come and meet you. You’re late. It’s nearly six.’

  She told him about Slutty and the little girls, to which his comment was ‘Christ’. Julia glanced at him.

  ‘Have you been home?’ she asked.

  ‘I have. Babette was there. Been in since three. Apparently she cut some game or other . . .’

  ‘Basketball,’ Julia put in mechanically.

  ‘. . . wanted to try out some eyelashes she’d bought.’

  ‘Well, Jeremy, I know it’s irritating, but she is nearly twelve. They see the older girls . . . It’s only a phase . . .’

  ‘Look here, Ju. We may as well get this over while we’ve five minutes to ourselves. I’ve decided. She’s going to the Comprehensive.’

  Julia was utterly unprepared. She had taken it for granted that Babette would stay at Redpaths, take her A levels there, and try for a university place. Julia had set her heart upon Oxford or Cambridge.

  But something kept her silent. She had turned quickly to look at her husband; had seen the reflected glare from the traffic lights shining on his sullen, ageing face. But it was the lingering March afterglow that was doing the real damage – revealing, with its delicate light, just what had happened to the laughing, loving man she had married.

  It isn’t life that’s done this to him, she thought, in an instant of guilt and repentance. It’s the life I’ve made him live.

  He did not look towards her, and for a few minutes she did not feel able to speak. Her day had been an unusually hard one; the upper school was in the middle of examinations; that morning her secretary had announced with a stony face that she was four months pregnant. Julia had divined that, beneath the stoniness, there squirmed and howled a longing for the Head to take things over and arrange . . . something. And then the interview with Slutty Singer.

  Oh well, she thought, with an uncharacteristic frivolity more like that of her mother (young in the ’20s), there are always house plants.

  Babette was crouching in the living room, by the dying fire. The room was almost in darkness.

  ‘Hullo – what have you been up to?’ Julia said, switching on the lights. Babette did not move. She kept her head still and blinked once. ‘Yes,’ said her mother sharply. ‘I see them. They look ridiculous. The eyeshadow’s the right colour and you’ve put it on quite well, but––’

  ‘I know. “If you were sixteen, it would look more suitable,”’ Babette interrupted drearily. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter, Mummy. I feel rather depressed. And I was looking forward awfully to these –’ fluttering the eyelashes.

  ‘Well, if you cut games – which you know means a row – and do that to your eyes – which you know I don’t approve of, yet – and sit by a fire that’s nearly out in a room that’s nearly dark – how do you expect to feel?’

  Babette gave a reluctant giggle, as her father came in from putting away the car.

  ‘Heavens! Raquel Welch in person!’ he exclaimed, striking an attitude.

  ‘No, but honestly, Daddy, how do you think they look?’

  ‘Like something from the souks of Algiers,’ he pronounced, after a survey. ‘I prefer you straight.’

  ‘I know. I think it looks wrong, somehow.’ She scrambled up and surveyed herself discontentedly in a looking-glass on the wall. ‘They cost nearly a pound, too.’

  ‘Then you’ve wasted it, haven’t you?’ her mother said coldly. ‘You know perfectly well – I told you – what profits the manufacturers make on those things. For heaven’s sake get them off . . . Jeremy, break it to her, will you? I’ll get tea.’ She hurried out.

  ‘Break what?’ Babette was now sitting on the low, old brass fender. ‘Something ghastly, I bet . . . I say, what did you mean about Algiers?’

  ‘We’ll leave it at that . . . I don’t know whether you’ll think it’s ghastly, but I think it’s necessary. You aren’t being what the sociological boys call stretched, my love, and so you’re off to the Comprehensive in September – if they’ll have you.’

  She sprang up, mouth open, eyes widened. A piece of eyelash fluttered to the floor.

  ‘The Comp? Truly? Do you mean it? But I say – how’s Mummy taking it? Isn’t she simply rampaging?’

  ‘She seems to think it may work out. Now, as a personal favour to me, Babs,’ said Jeremy, on the note he would have used to a beloved woman, ‘will you try not to make a fuss?’

  Babette’s face was crimson. She pulled off the eyelashes from her right eyelid and tried to put them on the mantelpiece but she was staring at her father and missed, and they floated down into the fire.

  ‘FUSS! Make a fuss? Do you know they let you wear what you like there? No more beastly mini skirts and jerseys . . . Jane Jones has got a maxi-skirt, all over wigwams, and she’s going to have a Tibetan coat for her birthday . . . there’ll be boys! Alan Hannigan goes there! Jane says you have a man to teach you filthy physics. He’s smashing. He plays the guitar in his leisure time to lay a spot more bread on himself . . . fuss? I’m only afraid there won’t be a place for me – no such luck.’

  ‘Well . . . I’m glad that . . .’ her father said, settling into his usual armchair and taking out his cigarette case, with smiling eyes fixed on her face. ‘I didn’t know you . . . I thought you quite liked it at Redpaths.’

  ‘Pretended to, to please Mums,’ she answered at once.

  When Julia came back with the tea tray, what was left of the eyelashes lay on the table, beside a crumpled paper handkerchief stained blue and green. Babette was sitting on the arm of her father’s chair and saying earnestly:

  ‘Make-up’s dishonest. Jane says it’s absolutely OUT, for her . . .’

  Jeremy caught Julia’s eye, and winked. But Julia lowered her own quite presentable eyelashes as she primly poured out the tea, and would not let herself return the wink.

&
nbsp; I’ve got Giles, she thought, priggy though he is. And I’ll buy some house plants, I actually will. It would amuse me. And I’ll hang on, like – a leech, to Samantha and Kelly.

  21

  Old Mishima

  Mary was sitting in Yasuhiro’s room, wondering whether she should ask him, right out: ‘Why do you go on so about this old Mishima?’

  She was finishing her second cup of coffee, on a cold, light evening at the end of March, surrounded by the gazing presences of dozens of daffodil buds arranged with intimidating perfection, and feeling strongly that it was time old Mishima bowed out and Mary Davis had a look in.

  A delicious shiver caused her suddenly to smile.

  ‘Why do you laugh, Mairly?’ demanded Yasuhiro disconcertingly, pausing in an account of his hero’s introduction to Hagakure, the eighteenth-century manual of bushido, which Mishima wrote in 1967.

  ‘I wasn’t laughing, just smiling.’

  ‘Did I made a joke?’ His thunderstorm look was coming down.

  ‘(Make a joke.) No. Can’t smile if I want to?’ she demanded, feeling impatient.

  ‘Of course, of course. I wish you to do anything you wish (no, want sound better) under my roof,’ he said grandly. ‘But also – why did you smile? In that way? You look down in your face. Your hairs on your eyes look like the moon when she is very young, but black . . . (I see in the newspaper the Americans up there again.)’

  Oh, go on about my eyelashes, Mary longed to say. But now, damn, it was the Americans.

  ‘Well,’ she began, ‘I expect you’ll be furious – you know – very angry –’

  Yasuhiro raised his eyebrows, so black and delicate they looked at first glance as if painted, and waited in silence.

  ‘I only wondered why you talk about Mishima all the time,’ Mary said at last, ‘and – and I was wishing –’

  ‘Continue to speak, Mairly. Please.’ The thunderstorm had lifted, and the diamond-sword sparkle had returned.

  ‘I – I –’ she could not go on, and also felt it more prudent not to.

  He nodded. ‘I know. I know it, Mairly.’