The Major himself opened the door.
“Peevers,” he cried in self-introduction, holding out his hand. “Wakefield, I presume?”
He was a lean, bony man of less than middle height, with spare white hair at the back of his cassowary-like skull, and protruding grey eyes. He wore a black suit and a black tie.
I introduced Marguerite and the silent Deirdre.
“Better put the car somewhere safe,” said Major Peevers. “There is a good place over the top of the hill and turn right. Not more than half a mile.”
“Oh, surely,” I demurred, looking up and down the empty street.
“It’s all right now,” said the Major, “but it’s later the trouble starts.”
“We’ve got to leave again in a couple of hours,” I protested.
“It’s not our car,” Marguerite reminded me. So I expelled the small pieces of luggage, and drove off. I saw that the Major had picked up all three objects and stuck them about his person, like a continental railway porter.
Needless to say, the garage proved to be full right up, and at the next one I found the Black Country dialect impossible to penetrate. The third garage was one of a large chain, and could find room even for Neptuna’s dinosaur, though rather at a price, I thought; but unfortunately it was now quite a walk back to the Major’s abode. In fact, it was almost dark when I arrived.
Once more it was the Major who let me in. “Hell, isn’t it, with no street lights?” he said. “We’ve all been going at the Trustees for years, but nothing happens.” Inside they were having tea. The room, papered in pale watered green, contained a dry, yellow plant in a darker green earthenware pot on a wooden stand, a wall-case of medals, and opposite the fireplace a big pastel of a youth in private’s uniform; amateurish but eye-catching. The seats seemed to be of the adjustable variety: wide armchairs and chaises-longues with straight, sloping backs upheld by crossbars fitting into grooves; all in scratched dark wood, almost as much of it as in an early loom, with faded green slabs of upholstery, tolled out hard and thin by use.
“Meet my wife,” said Major Peevers. “She won’t get up. Trouble with the muscles.”
I bowed. Mrs. Peevers was also dressed entirely in black, though in many different bits and pieces of it. She looked patched up, and likely to fall to pieces if the patches were removed. Nonetheless, she was holding forth as we entered, and had obviously been doing so for some time.
“Please don’t let me interrupt,” I said.
“Have some food,” said the Major.
There was nothing on view but the usual Birmingham pile of dry sandwiches, and some sliced Scribona.
“Thank you, but I mustn’t eat too much. We’ve got the Lord Mayor’s reception just ahead.”
“You won’t get much there,” cried the Major. “I advise you to tuck in before you go.”
I helped myself to one of the sandwiches.
“Elsie, give Wakefield a fresh cup of tea. He can’t listen when he’s dried right out.”
Mrs. Peevers, in fact, passed me a cup that had been already standing there full. Her arms seemed as weak as her legs, and I had to leap forward and snatch it.
“I’ve been telling them about Harry,” said Mrs. Peevers, regarding me very seriously. “Harry is our son.” She indicated the big pastel.
“A good-looking young man,” I said, chewing flavourless near-ham. “Got his father’s eyes, I see.” The tea was duly quite cold.
“For us it’s the most beautiful picture in the world,” said Mrs. Peevers.
“Who painted it?” I said; merely, of course, because I had to say something.
“It was painted by a dear friend of our son. His name was Jim Tale. They were like brothers: right back in the old days at Erdington, and all the way on.”
What lay behind was more or less obvious, but it was Marguerite who put it into words.
“Mrs. Peevers’s son was unfortunately missing in the war,” she said.
“I am sorry to hear that. Where did it happen?” I became aware that the Major had come up behind me, and was standing silently with a hand on each side of the high, adjustable back of my chair.
“Your wife didn’t say Harry was dead,” replied Mrs. Peevers sharply. “Missing, not dead.”
“Yes,” I said, “but he must have been missed on some particular occasion. Surely they always tell you that?” As a matter of fact, I was far from certain.
“Not always, it seems,” said Mrs. Peevers.
I put down my cup on the floor. The tea was not only cold, but Birmingham-strong. On the instant, the Major darted down and picked it up.
“More tea, Wakefield?”
“No, thank you. It’s very welcome, but one cup’s enough.”
“Really?” said the Major, a little ambiguously. “Then go on, Elsie.” He returned to the back of my chair.
“I’d better start again right at the beginning,” said Mrs. Peevers, speaking as if the trouble, though now indispensable, could quite easily have been avoided by a little more thought on the part of others.
“I’d be most interested to hear all about it, but I am sure I can pick up from where you’ve got to. My wife can fill in for me later.”
I noticed that the girl Deirdre seemed to be sitting there quite listlessly. No one could say that she appeared to be paying any particular attention, but on the other hand, she wasn’t perceptibly doing anything else—thinking, remembering, knitting.
“Well,” said Mrs. Peevers, “I suppose you have to go to this reception or whatever it is, so I’ll simply carry on. Where had I got to?”
“Harry was just going to his first school,” said Marguerite.
“His first school? In Erdington? Not the Grammar School?”
“His first school, I think,” said Marguerite.
“It was Mr. and Mrs. Meatyard’s,” said Mrs. Peevers. “Perhaps you know it?”
“Unfortunately not,” I replied.
“They take all ages of boys, from toddlers to university leaving, and they have a splendid record, in terms of character-building as well as tuition. There’s no one of good class right through the Midlands who doesn’t know and respect Hugh and Letty Meatyard.”
“Private schools must have a much harder time of it nowadays,” I remarked; again because one had to seem interested.
“The Meatyards don’t worry about that. They know they’ll win through somehow, even if no one else does.”
I did wish, among other things, that the Major would go and sit down. Instead, he went on standing at my back, listening raptly to his wife as if he had never heard any of it before.
“It was there that Harry first met Jim Tate,” continued Mrs. Peevers. “Right down among the three- and four-year-olds.”
“I suppose there were girls too at that level,” I said, continuing to appear alert.
“Not at all. Hugh Meatyard says that boys should be only with boys right from the very start. He lays great stress on it. And Letty Meatyard always agrees. In any case, I can’t imagine our Harry looking at a mere girl when he had Jim Tate.” In fact, Mrs. Peevers was almost smiling even at the thought of it.
Marguerite looked distinctly irritated, and it was, of course, an odd thing to say, especially nowadays.
“But later,” said Marguerite, “Harry went on to a grammar school?” A perhaps odder thing was that whereas before my arrival Mrs. Peevers appeared to have been discoursing fluently, now she was halting and in need of being helped forward. Probably she was accustomed, in Midlands style, to talking seriously only when alone with her husband or with women,
“To the fine new one at Farmer’s Bridge,” said Mrs. Peevers. “Hugh Meatyard thought he’d be better for a change. Harry had always been a very sensitive child—in his own way, of course. He passed the Entrance with all colours flying,” she added proudly.
And so we went on. With Marguerite patiently prompting and leading, though it was obvious to me, who knew her, that she can have been interested in none o
f it, with the girl Deirdre reclined like a slender gipsy on the wide, slope-backed chair, with even me putting a word in from time to time, we wended our way through the hopes and fears, scholastic and athletic, they had held for Harry, his actual successes and failures, his and their feelings about the different masters, his long expeditions with Jim Tate, who had continued with the Meatyards and therefore could be met only after school hours and in the holidays, the prizes he had won, and those Jim Tate had won. Major Peevers actually left his place to go to a cupboard and bring out a presentation volume in brown and gold.
“Take it in your hands,” said Mrs. Peevers.
It was entitled Early Man in the Western Midlands, and appeared to be illustrated abundantly with conjectural reconstructions. It had been awarded, as a fanciful bookplate confirmed, for “All Round Excellence”. “The Headmaster’s special prize,” said Mrs. Peevers, “given to the boy of his personal choice.” It was by now a little less than pristine. “They ask first what subject the winner would like the book to be about. Harry replied ‘Anthropology.’ ” The word alone seemed to imply what a deep chap Harry already had been.
“ ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ ” said the Major, staring at me.
“A very interesting subject. Did Harry become an anthropologist himself?”
“Certainly not, nothing like that,” replied Mrs. Peevers. “It was just a hobby. Hobbies can be very important to a sensitive boy.”
“Was painting Jim Tate’s hobby?”
“Certainly not. Jim Tate became a proper pukka painter. There is a portrait of Alderman Concannon by Jim Tate in the Municipal Offices. It’s not on view to the public, but they might show it you at the reception if you ask them. He was only twenty-two when he did it, but Alderman Concannon had made quite a favourite of him. He was Chairman of the Parks and Gardens at the time.”
“We’ve a school of art here,” said the Major, still watching me. “Equal to anything abroad. Much better, some say.”
Marguerite surfaced again. “What did Harry do next?”
“When he left school, you mean?”
“Yes, Mrs. Peevers, when he left school.”
It was the Major who replied. “He knocked around; got to know the world, you know; became a man.”
“I see,” said Marguerite.
“Jim Tate gave him all the time he could,” added Mrs. Peevers defensively. “They were like David and Jonathan.”
“You know how it is, Wakefield,” said the Major, beginning to move up and down. “I was in business myself at the time. Sort of. But Harry just didn’t want it. I didn’t blame him, either. I still don’t. The war was the best time in my life, and I don’t care who hears me say so. The first war, I mean, of course. We were men then, and England was England. I don’t care what they say. It was just as well about Harry, too. In 1938 the business popped right off. We’d have all starved if I hadn’t been able to wangle us in on the estate. Best job of work I did since the war ended for me. The first war, I mean. A real home for heroes, and I should think so too. They even give us a small allowance, you know, Wakefield, to supplement our pensions. God knows the pension’s small enough. The allowance pays for our luxuries.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“It paid Harry’s fines too,” said the Major with a sudden laugh which made his eyes protrude still further. “Kept him out of jug. Except once when he went too far. You know what I mean?”
He seemed to expect an answer, but Mrs. Peevers released me. “Harry is a good boy,” she said. “Harry has never been anything but a good boy—in himself, I mean.”
“Well, we’re very sorry about it all,” said Marguerite, saving me in turn.
She even got us out of the room and upstairs “to change”, though it was still too soon, and the spare bedroom was both chilly and ill-lit.
“Where’s Deirdre been put?” I asked Marguerite, who had plainly been upstairs before.
“I don’t know at all,” said Marguerite.
Deirdre had, for some reason, not come up with us.
“Anyway, she’s not in here.”
There was only a double bed, an arrangement which neither of us liked. The bed was made of the same wood slats as the furniture below, and looked far from strong.
“No,” said Marguerite.
“Just as well.”
Marguerite did not feel like changing into anything much lighter (while I merely changed into something a little darker), and the girl Deirdre, who proved to be awaiting us below, could not change at all because she had nothing to change into. They said, therefore, that they were willing to walk up the road with me and over the top of the hill to the chain garage. Marguerite and I had already got through some waste time trying to read our papers by the bad bedroom light.
In the course of this stroll, Deirdre made her first remark which I found noticeable.
“I feel so sorry for the Peeverses,” she said,
“Yes, they do seem to have had a rough passage,” said Marguerite, fitting in.
“I should like to help them,” said Deirdre, in the nowadays familiar tone of young people about to join the Peace Corps or start an anti-apartheid riot.
“I’m not sure it would be too easy,” said Marguerite. “Older people get set in their ways, especially when they have very little money.”
“I think I may be able to help,” repeated Deirdre, “and I want to.”
I was quite surprised by her.
The Lord Mayor’s reception was, as I have already implied, dreadfully tedious. The Lord Mayor himself could not think of anything much to say about the importance of the occasion and it was embarrassingly plain that the people nominated to speak for Business Art were quite inexperienced in addressing civic dignitaries. Nor were the subsequent less formal sociabilities more successful: the two contingents present seemed totally unable to achieve intercourse. The only exception that I saw was a professor-like man who succeeded in driving the Lord Mayor himself into a corner and there holding him down for perhaps as much as ten minutes, after which the Beadle, or whatever the functionary is called, came to remind the Lord Mayor that he had two more receptions that night. Marguerite and I rather obviously belonged to neither contingent, so could not even join one of the alternative groups which were discussing respectively the plan for a new swimming stadium and the difficulty artists experience in holding their clients to agreed payments. There remained the magnificent civic architecture of Birmingham, with Hansom’s splendid Town Hall just outside the windows, and floodlit: it was simply, as so often, the people who were the trouble.
Neptuna dug us out and explained that for a group there was to be a party afterwards at the Queen’s. She thought that we could probably be fitted in, and indeed pressed us to come, but she said that Deirdre couldn’t be asked, as two more would have to be the limit. No doubt the society’s funds were involved, but I felt that Neptuna was annoyed because Deirdre’s young man, in whom she was probably more interested than in Deirdre, had gone back to London. The question arose, of course, of getting Deirdre back to No. 47.
“There are plenty of taxis,” said Neptuna.
“That really wouldn’t be fair,” said Marguerite, She meant that Deirdre almost certainly lacked the money, but I doubt whether Marguerite really wanted to go to the party herself.
“She must learn to look after herself,” said Neptuna.
This time it was for me to rescue Marguerite. “It’s quite a long way and rather a rough area,” I said.
“I think we should take Deirdre back if you can spare your car until tomorrow morning,”
“Take her back then, and afterwards come on to the Queen’s.”
“Could we possibly leave that open and see how things go? We’d love to come, if we can.”
“It’s in what they call the Guy of Warwick Room. Do come. Laurie’s promised to do his strip-tease.”
“Do you want to go to the party?” asked Marguerite, as we looked for Deirdre, who at the recept
ion had been invisible as well as silent.
“Not if you don’t,” I replied.
Most of the people at the reception had gone somewhere else before we found Deirdre. We really had quite a search, with Neptuna irrupting at intervals as she accumulated her party, and bidding us give it up and come on.
Deirdre proved to be sitting by herself on the parapet of the big Chamberlain Fountain in the square outside. She had apparently spent most of the time there, even missing the speeches. The Birmingham youths were jeering at her when we found her, but, for some reason, they remained on the other side of the fountain, and she did not seem to have come to any harm.
“Aren’t you cold?” asked Marguerite.
Deirdre just shook her head.
“Would you like to go now?” I asked.
Deirdre nodded: not, I thought, with emphasis, or even with much interest. We walked off to the huge municipal car park on the site of the former canal basin. The night appeared to be cold enough to make Neptuna’s car difficult to start, but Birmingham stands high, and is often windy.
Just as we neared No. 47, there was an incident which, though apparently irrelevant, seemed to upset Marguerite at the time very much.
“Look out,” she cried after we had all been silent for a longish spell.
The estate, as will be remembered, had no street lighting, and most, possibly all, of the houses were in darkness as well, so that it took Marguerite’s vision, much better than mine, to see what was really no more than a shapeless heap on our side of the road. The object must have been a little blacker than the night, or even Marguerite could not have seen it.
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 39