‘But he wasn’t bad, really. He told us like it was a bit early to be sure, but the signs were mostly pointing, and we’d do best to make plans. She told him then, she’d got money off George, “Quite a bit,” she said, “there ought to be a law.” Honest – she’s not bad, you know, Lu – when it’s not you she’s after… Then, that night, she rang him again. It was good, Lu. I heard her. She really gave it him. “I could finish you,” she said. “I could finish you. A girl young enough to be your daughter. Where’s your shame then?” And I don’t know what he said but she got back at him: “You should be thankful, Mr Turnbull, it’s only brass you’re losing. Elizabeth’s lost a lot more than that…”’
She pushed the empty plate and glass into the fireplace. ‘I’ll be glad to be gone, though,’ she said, massaging her toes again. ‘If she’s said it to me once – “you’ve let me down, you’ve let me down” – it’s a dozen times. I’ll be daft with it yet.’
‘But – where will you go?’
‘Another hotel. It’s all arranged. For when we know it’s certain – when he gives a kick like – I’m going to my Uncle Harry’s. Uncle Harry and Auntie Iris. They’ve a pub, Windermere way. It’ll not be too bad, Lu, I’ll help, you know – serve in the bar. And they said I’ve to wear a wedding ring, and look sad like. He got killed in a motor bike accident, Lu.’
‘But the baby, what about the baby?’
‘Oh, him!’ she said airily. ‘He’s to be adopted. And when the season starts – May or so – I’ll be back, and I’ll either get another job this way – or if they’ll let me, I’ll get one miles from all of them. Heck, I dunno, Lu.’ She yawned again. ‘I could kick myself – I mean, when you think, Lu, of folk trying every night. Then there goes George – once in and out. I mean, well it’s daft, isn’t it?’
The clock in the room struck four and she jumped up: ‘I’m on this evening, Lu. I’ll have to get a bus from station.’
‘Heck,’ she said prancing about the room, ‘I don’t feel different.’ Then, ‘Know this?’ she asked, beginning to hum. ‘Twelfth Street Rag –’ She looked around: ‘Got any records here, Lu? I wanted “Twelfth Street Rag”, Peewee Hunt.’ Jerking her hips from side to side, ‘do whack a do, whack a do,’ she sang, her head going up and down: ‘do whack a do, whack a do …
‘You ought to look a bit more cheerful, you know,’ she said suddenly. ‘Really you ought, Lu. Heck, how’d you like to be me, eh?’
The hot weather continued. I would find myself thinking suddenly of my mother – with her bursts of reminiscence; her string of endless cloudless summers which never ever could have been. The sink full of plates, Pugin’s scraps dried and going off, lapsing into a croquet dream – eighty in the shade and home-made lemonade.
‘Then there was this smell, this scent – when you came into the cool, from outside. Perhaps it was only flowers, beeswax – but I’ve never smelt it again, anywhere else, ever …’
Often now, brought up in this furry world where past and present were so often not separated, so deliberately blurred, I felt I was in a strange country. The Ingleson household was full of immediacy. They spoke mostly of brisk arrangements – of what old so and so had said, or done, or should do, or would do. Polite with each other, they were so in a remote way; almost as if, I thought sometimes, they didn’t care enough to quarrel.
Only Nell kept up her irritated, argumentative state of war with her mother. It was a new thing, she told me; ‘I never used to bother. She never used to bother.’ In the end, after a blazing row on the stairs – Alice Ingleson striding past me, face flushed, ‘you think of no one but yourself, my dear!’ – she went to stay with friends in Dublin for ten days. She would be back just over a week before the wedding.
‘And for God’s sake leave well alone. Everything’s arranged – and I’ll write non-stop thank yous when I get back, and Oh God yes I’ll go to bed early, every night –’
The days dragged on. One evening, with the car parked in the Tewit Well Road, I wept in Richard’s arms. He told me:
‘Look – you will feel better, I promise you. Soon.’ Caressing me: ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t perhaps – what do you think -like to move the wedding forward again? It could be awfully quiet – as quiet as you like, darling. And it isn’t as if, you know, by then, we won’t have somewhere to live –’
For the last few weeks we’d been looking at houses. It was the new pastime. There were tours of likely double cottages, vicarages, town houses: ‘Because you do agree, don’t you darling, about having somewhere fairly large at once?’ (Already I’d agreed that of course – but of course – we wanted a baby right away); viewing large dark kitchens, never once seeing myself in any of them, I listened to talk about dry rot, damp course, freehold and leasehold, conversion (‘Now, the best chap for that would be …’).
All the time it felt like a game: a preliminary to playing houses.
Then one morning Alice Ingleson said, giving me a list of errands: ‘You might call in at Quentin’s place. There should be a brass fender he’s picking up for us. With Nell away – he’s impossible.’
I agreed to go of course; but I didn’t want to: I felt certain he’d mock me in some way. Although he was kind enough when I saw him these days, I had the memory of the dress still, and didn’t want to see him alone.
The first thing to frighten me was the bell in his shop, which went on clanging and clanging long after I’d shut the door; there was so much about too, such a sheer quantity of bric-à-brac, that I was afraid of moving in case I bumped into something and began a fearful chain of destruction. Brightly coloured stuffed birds in glass cases – some in wicker (Miss Lister, oh horror) -heaped-up Victorian jewellery, china stacked to perilous heights, a piano with ranged along it a row of waxed dolls, lolling in faded cream silk.
‘Lucy Locket!’ exclaimed Quentin, coming through from somewhere at the back, ‘lovely Lucy.’ He hugged me warmly. ‘Come on in – this fearful place. Into my office.’
Then the shop bell rang and almost at once he disappeared again. Still-apprehensive, I sat down to wait for him, huddled up in the corner of an old leather sofa, horsehair curling out of one of its arms. The room was small and dark and slightly damp: piles of books lay on the floor, collections of old periodicals tied up with string, bound Girl’s Owns and Punches; against one wall were several paintings in great heavy frames.
Coming back, he opened a cupboard and took out two patterned china cups, unmatched, and a tin, marked Fortnum and Mason. ‘Coffee, Locket? Too coarse for café filtre this, so we’ll have to use a rather grubby percolator, tasting unforgivably of metal I’m afraid.
‘All right then,’ he said, when he’d fetched out sugar, milk. ‘Tell me all about it. How’s Cornwall Road – I haven’t been up for days. How’s Alice?’
Very busy I told him, describing the atmosphere. ‘She’s sent me about a fender …’
‘Ah yes. Well I have it, actually, but I fear me it isn’t going to be to her taste. Richard pronounced against it yesterday –’
The shop bell rang again; he wasn’t gone long this time. Back, he said at once: ‘Now tell me, Locket – how’s the fairy tale?’
‘All right, everything’s all right.’ I shifted uneasily on the sofa: ‘Why call it that?’
He looked at me curiously, lifting his eyebrows. ‘Oh, but it is,’ he said, smiling. He’d sat down opposite me, sunk deep in an old chair bucketed by its broken springs. ‘It really is, you know – once upon a time. La Belle Dame sans (well, sans anything but the spurious charm she wields so well), with Richard in tow, or thrall if you like. Then just when everything goes amiss – along comes the princess. Round and soft and full of sympathy, and just a hint of Cinderella too. She thinks him Prince Charming, and – you know the rest. All in the best fairy tale tradition. All you have to do now is live happily ever after, Locket.’
The coffee spluttered in the glass lid; he bent to turn the gas flame down. ‘I’m sorry, I’m mocking. I’m incura
ble. What I don’t understand, I laugh at –’
He poured out the coffee. ‘Very much in love?’
I nodded. I supposed that I must be; my feelings only buried, not gone; they would come back, gloriously, to prove that I spoke the truth.
He shrugged his shoulders suddenly: ‘Enough.’ Then, changing the subject:
‘Doris Hirst was in here last week. I can’t recall what after –’
Vigilance relaxed I listened then to a couple of stories about Juliet’s behaviour in Rome (‘Richard besotted or no – we really were bloody fools to invite her –’). So that I was taken quite unawares when, a moment later, he asked:
‘Lucy – what does your father think of all this? Richard sweeping you off your feet, his being left alone, your being so young – what does he think?’
‘He’s pleased about it,’ I said hurriedly.
Quentin took my cup:
‘Good. Coffee again? The off flavour’s novel if nothing else. Fortnum’s, we cannot blame –’
He handed me the cup, and without any warning I began to cry: great slow scalding tears -I saw one splosh onto the leather. He leant forward at once, his face concerned:
‘Locket love – what is it?’
‘Everything –’ The tears were gushing out now. ‘Nothing -I mean nothing’s the matter.’ I was crying into the coffee. He took the cup from me:
‘It’s not Richard, is it?’
I shook my head, and then in a firm but for him surprisingly gentle voice, he said:
‘Could we talk then – do you think?’
There was silence for a moment. And then as if unleashed by the tears, out they tumbled – a profusion, a confusion of thoughts, comments, reactions.
‘But Locket,’ he protested, ‘steady on.’ He raised his hands in bewilderment, ‘I’m lost –’
Once begun though I couldn’t stop: gulping, swallowing, I babbled on, confusion piled on confusion. They did get on, or they thought they did – only by the first time I remember -I had to take sides you see, when there’s a war on you have to take sides, and first it was him and me, then – Oh God, I can’t stop crying- then I moved over to the enemy -I mean, then I changed over to my mother’s side, and later there were the letters. I found these letters, you see –’
He held up his hand, stopped me.
This is rather awful,’ he said, ‘and calls for a drink.’ He went back to the cupboard and taking out a bottle of manzanilla, poured two glasses. Then he went through to the shop; I heard the outer door bolted.
Coming back, ‘Shut for lunch,’ he said, sitting down. Then, very patiently, he tried to make sense of it all. For the next half hour, calming down gradually I talked, and sipped, and talked. At intervals, I apologized:
‘Nonsense – Nell has wept on me, you know. Many many times –’
About Elizabeth, about Patmore, Gervase, the tea-parties: I can’t think in retrospect that he said anything particularly wise, or particularly helpful for that matter, but he did listen, and listen well.
Once he remarked:
‘You do talk to Richard don’t you? You can talk to him?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, remembering. Then I added; ‘It’s just that, since I lived there –’
‘That I can understand.’
When eventually, and very late for Alice Ingleson’s errands, I left, he said:
‘I take it as a compliment- Having a crise de nerfs on my premises, Locket. Come again, if you’d like. Life’s enormously dull, with my Nell chased out of Harrogate –’
‘The fender though. What am I to say about the fender?’
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Tell her anything.’
Surprisingly, it was better, I was better, all the rest of that day. The warmth I felt towards Quentin, towards Richard, towards everybody was the first I’d felt about anything for what seemed to me a very long time.
That evening Richard and I went out to dinner – it had been arranged a few days before, and accepted, apathetically by me. But I knew that I was getting better, because as we drove back again afterwards, warm and relaxed, through the summer evening, it was desire, and not its pale ghost, that sprang up again.
I did go back to see Quentin, a few days later. I’d had a letter from Gervase, even more confused than usual, which had upset me. Richard had already left for work when it arrived, and after I’d walked what seemed twice round Harrogate for Alice Ingleson, collecting and delivering shoes, dry cleaning, electrical gadgets, I found myself just near Quentin’s shop, with the letter in my handbag.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’
‘Show.’
I handed him the letter. Shaky writing sloping downwards over three black-edged sheets of writing paper, it was a strange mixture of conventional phrases of mourning, and cries of pain, as if suddenly, Gervase had realized:
‘She has gone to a happier place, but we, how are we to go on? “For peace her soul was yearning, And now peace laps her round –” Where is my last link with the life that was, where? “Her cabin’d ample spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. Tonight it doth inherit The vasty hall of death.” She has pierced the veil – how is it with her? How is life on the other side? “… the woman I loved, Needs help in her grave, and finds none near” – there is only the past left, that’s all. I had so little of it, so little of her. All that I can remember, so quickly gone. Summer lightning. I never reproached her though, she will tell you that. Never, never –’ Desperately, tailing off without a signature, he wrote, “O my whole life that ends today, The woman is dead that was none of his …”’
‘Browning and Arnold,’ said Quentin, handing me back the letter. He asked: ‘Who takes care of him?’
I explained about the nuns. ‘They’d notice I’m sure, if he got really bad. It’s just that-’
‘I know.’
Outside in the shop the bell rang.
‘I wonder,’ he said, coming back, ‘I wonder how angry he was – really? His girl being pinched like that yet never a cross word. It’s quite remarkable. Tell me – was Richard good with him? I should think exceptionally so –’
Very good, I said; very, very good.
We decided then that I’d discuss it all with him this evening. If we were worried, we could perhaps write to the Reverend Mother?
‘And now a drink,’ Quentin said. ‘It’ll have to be a short one today, I’ve a crate of magazines to sort by lunchtime.’ When he’d poured out two glasses, Campari this time, he said: ‘Tell me something amusing, Locket. Some of the lighter part of your saga …’
I told him about Miss Lister. ‘But Locket,’ he exclaimed in delight, ‘I never knew such excitements went on in the Cold Bath Road –’
‘She was awful,’ I said, ‘and anyway she didn’t get rid of my accent. Looking back, for my mother’s sake, I’d have liked to get rid of it – for her. And also,’ I said hesitantly, ‘sometimes, you know, with you all – with the Inglesons – I wonder if they don’t mind?’
‘Love, that you can forget. They never notice anything.’
He collected up my glass. ‘I’m outrageously rude about them. Often. But members of the snobocracy they definitely are not. And anyway where should I be if they were? Jewish blood, for a start. Then – school okay, regiment okay – but, imperfectly anglicized, a Wop for all that. If niggers begin at Calais, Locket, how can Rome hope to escape?
‘Reassured?’ he asked. He looked at his watch:
‘Locket – that crate.’
I stayed behind to help. We sorted the magazines into three piles, saleable, reparable, and rubbish. Inevitably, we dipped.
‘Nell will go wild over these,’ he said. ‘Just listen. Girl’s Own, 1888. “To Grumpy: there are surgical instrument makers in London who might supply a finger, as well as a whole hand –”
‘Locket,’ he said, ‘imagination boggles, what could she have asked?’
That evening my father telephoned. I hadn’t seen him for a fortnight, since we
’d met last at my grandmother’s. He’d meant to get over to see me, he said, or at least to meet me somewhere. He’d been trying, he said now, to decide what to do about the house.
‘It’ll have to wait though. I’m off to London tomorrow.’ He said something else, his voice sounding as if he’d taken his mouth from the receiver.
‘What’s that?’
‘I said, I might go abroad …’
The line was crackling badly. There was an awkward pause, and then, his voice sounding warily friendly: ‘I hear you’re house hunting,’ he said, ‘any luck?’
Yes, well, there was one place, I told him, ‘It needs a lot of doing up though.’
He asked where it was; the name; some comment. But the line had worsened and I couldn’t hear him at all.
‘What did you say?’
‘I’ll write,’ he shouted. His voice came as through cotton wool. ‘I said, I’ll write:
The next morning, I had a present from him. A suitcase: bright red with a great assortment of straps and an enormous handle, and quite unlike any suitcase I would have bought for myself. There was a note with it too: he’d never given me an engagement present, he said. Here was a ‘going away’ suitcase.
I was overwhelmed by the present – and by the note. When had he last written to me, unless to say ‘milk gone off’ or ‘sleeping in Harrogate’ or ‘quarter streaky bacon ration in brown dish in larder’? Sitting up in the guest room I read and re-read it: between gazing at and touching the suitcase.
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