Then I must have drifted off.
I woke suddenly. The grandfather clock down in the hall was striking two o’clock; at first I couldn’t think where I was. Then in seconds, everything was back. Memory; yesterday, last night; my father, Juliet.
Completely wide awake I lay rigid, cold in this strange room that had always obscurely depressed me. Out in the garden an owl hooted eerily. Moonlight piercing thinly through the gap in the curtains lit up the edge of the chintzy bedspread, made weird shapes of my clothes heaped on the chair. The whole room, as I gazed, seemed slowly to grow lighter. I heard myself say, out loud, suddenly: ‘He has betrayed my mother.’ I said it over several times: ‘He has betrayed my mother, betrayed my mother, betrayed my mother.’
I couldn’t bear to name him at all. Then ‘But she is my mother,’ I thought, with a sort of cold horror. ‘My stepmother Juliet. Juliet, my wicked stepmother. My stepmother, wicked Juliet. Wicked Juliet…’ I muttered, mumbled, repeated the words over and over again, an incantation, a charm. Somewhere, beneath the black ice I could sense emotion moving, stirring; cracking painfully the surface. I shut my eyes: not to think, not to know.
But it was too late. I thought, very calmly, that if I had a straw effigy of Juliet, I would set it on fire; a waxen image, and I would jab it with pins. From the real flesh and blood Juliet I shied away. Feeling, terrifyingly, at my finger-tips, the strength that could crush her tiny bones. Then, gradually, I admitted that too; and for a long while I lay there, secure in anger. I thought only of her. Who else, after all, was there to be angry with?
During the next few days, everyone was very kind. To keep my mind off everything, I was made particularly busy: with Nell and Quentin’s wedding so near it wasn’t hard to find errands for me. I went for the last fitting but one for my bridesmaid’s dress. I should also have gone for my ring, but I forgot to collect it.
I waited for a letter from France. ‘Letter follows’ had been the wording. I wanted to look at the telegram again but no one had seen it; I searched, surreptitiously, through four waste-paper baskets, and later a dustbin, buzzing with flies, before giving up.
On the Sunday, Richard went with me to see my grandmother. He felt very bad, he said, that we hadn’t thought of her before. I, too, worried. On the way, he said: ‘Will she live with them – or what do you think? I can’t see, I must say, Juliet coping –’
I said that I thought since money wasn’t a problem (and even as I spoke remembering suddenly my mother’s remarks – at the height of her anger. ‘I came to realize, Lucy, that he’d expected me to bring money out of Patmore. I was to be worth something.’ Evident in their untruth. Ironic now.) they’d find a comfortable way round. He was always devoted, I said – although I wouldn’t have called her possessive. Most of her fussing had been over my grandfather.
The few times Richard had seen her he’d got on well with her; I felt ashamed now that it was he who had thought of her, and worried how she might have taken the news – if indeed, she had heard it.
She received us in the front room: since the first time I’d brought Richard she’d insisted on using it even when, as today, we’d plainly not been expected. Wearing a polka dot dark brown dress, her hair looking newly washed, she surprised me by her spry, alert manner.
Yes, she’d certainly had the news. That she had … ‘Fancy!’ she kept exclaiming, ‘fancy Peter playing a trick like that on me. Springing surprises on me, at my age!’ She seemed excited, beside herself.
‘She’ll give him a son, that’s what,’ she said at one point. ‘Happen, she’ll give him a son –’ Her voice was a little shaky: ‘I wrote Arnold,’ she said. ‘I’ve told your Uncle Arnold.’ Going over to the window she adjusted the net curtains; sunlight sprang in momentarily. ‘I’ve heard said – she’s quite a catch.’
Richard, trying to change the subject began talking, rather desperately, about some building he’d noticed – a gutting and complete restoration of a house three or four doors down.
But she answered with vague politeness, as if from far away. Temporarily the conversation dried up; then looking about her -as if trying to catch again what it was that had preoccupied her -she put her hand to her forehead:
‘He should’ve asked Alfred,’ she said in a tone of surprise. ‘He never asked Alfred, you know.’ She looked first at Richard then at me: ‘Shouldn’t he have?’
I said nothing. And Richard, carefully, to humour her, something like: ‘Well… if…’, shrugging his shoulders. She laughed. She looked almost witchlike, her face caught in the light: neat features, exaggerated now by age, were my father’s, mine.
‘Damn it,’ Richard said, walking back with me through the Valley Gardens, up to Cornwall Road, as concerned as I was. ‘Damn it. I wonder whose problem that’s going to be?’
We went out for a drive together afterwards. He was very understanding about my inability to feel anything, my reluctance to touch, to be touched.
‘You’ve had a rather frantic three months, you know. Good and bad. That, and the shock –’
But sitting beside him, as now, physically frozen, hearing the voice I had worshipped sounding harsh and grating (as indeed were so many sounds now) I would try – and fail – to come to life again. The evening before, he had held me in his arms: I had stood rigid, returning the gestures mechanically; moving gradually away; stealthily, in frantic fear that touching my breasts, my lips, my thighs he might discover that now I was made of wood.
It was Monday again. I felt certain that today a letter would come, and I was first downstairs. But though I turned and turned again everything from the fat pile on the doormat, none was from him.
At breakfast, Richard – late because he was a heavy sleeper -asked me had I remembered we had a party tonight? ‘And the ring. If you could collect that, darling?’
Nell wasn’t down yet. Alice Ingleson, reminding me that today was the last fitting for my bridesmaid’s dress, said:
‘Nell will have to pull herself together today. No sitting around canoodling at the back of Quentin’s shop.’
The weekend had been one of sunshine. Today it was close, heavy; even indoors, a sticky thundery heat oppressed the air. Bernard Ingleson, going out, thrust a ten shilling note into my hand. ‘Get your hair done for tonight,’ he said. ‘Always cheers a woman, a hair-do.’
By ten o’clock the house was empty. Nell had gone to help Quentin. ‘Why don’t you come too, love?’ Mrs Johnson had left at nine for her thrice-weekly shopping expedition. I waited now until I had seen Alice Ingleson go out of sight down the road, bound for a meeting and coffee morning in nearby Brunswick Drive; then I went upstairs and packed my old suitcase – placing reverently at the bottom my mother’s letters, and carefully and quietly let myself out of the house.
Outside the air was still heavy; there were thunderbugs everywhere. As I came through the garden I felt them settle on my skin, my hair. Standing at the bus stop – keeping a wary lookout for familiar faces – I saw them dotted black all over my hands: minute irritants.
At the station, I asked about trains to London. There was one in two hours’ time, and leaving my suitcase in the left luggage, I went up to the nearest post office where I took ten pounds – my all – out of my savings book. Back at the station, I bought a third-class ticket to King’s Cross.
Nearly two hours to fill. I walked along James Street, past the War Memorial and the windy corner, down the hill and into the Valley Gardens; as I went through the gateway, the first drops of rain were falling, heavy, sluggish. I turned into the Sun Colonnade, and in one of the inner rooms, sat down to wait.
The smell of chrysanthemums in the small space was heady, strong; shaggy orange, bronze, yellow blooms; beads of water on their leaves. Outside, of a sudden, the rain was released: like some tropical downpour it cascaded from a sky full of it, coursing relentlessly in torrents down the glass.
I had no idea, no sensation of time passing. It grew very close inside; condensation from the steamy
heat ran down the windows in droplets. Then somewhere far away, a clock struck the half hour; I leaped up: terrified now that I might miss the train.
But without my noticing the rain must have eased, because when I turned to walk back down the colonnade, it had stopped completely; the air fresh again, the gardens nearly deserted.
I walked straight to the station. I didn’t see anyone that I knew on the way there, or on the journey itself. At King’s Cross, I read a notice about a Y.W.C.A. hostel. I spent the night there, and in the morning set out to look for a secretarial job.
The White Rose diploma was quite a help, and by afternoon I was fixed up. Later in the evening, I wrote to Richard.
They came after me of course. There was immediate, enormous concern for me. I was under age, my father could have ordered me back. But I had by that time found a bedsitter; and my calm, frighteningly controlled manner deceived and persuaded them sufficiently to leave me alone.
Within the year, Richard had married; very suitably. He has two daughters, both of them grown up now. One is a very successful show jumper locally.
Elizabeth’s baby was a boy. She married, very soon after the birth, a Canadian she’d met at her uncle’s hotel. She lives in Winnipeg now.
Nell and Quentin surprised everyone by having six children, and thriving on it. Quentin has grown very plump.
My father and Juliet live in an old vicarage outside Leeds. They have an Italian villa also, on Lake Orta. I have a twenty-one-year-old stepsister – very beautiful. I saw her once in an old copy of the Yorkshire Tatler; Juliet worries about her constantly, I’m told.
Jennifer gives me all my information. She got in touch three or four years ago after seeing my picture in a newspaper article about my husband. She is married to a doctor and has three boys, and hasn’t changed at all.
Gervase died in 1953; suddenly and very peacefully. The day before, he’d spent repairing the scenery for the convent’s Nativity play: I had a long letter about him from Sister Xavier.
And me: in 1956, after seven lean years in which I expected and received nothing, I met a Hungarian, a pianist who’d come over after the uprising. We married in 1958 but have no children. We live nowhere permanently, and are very happy.
I have never been back to see my father. I used to worry, those first years, that he might be happy. Now, I worry only that he might not.
I am reproached nightly, for after more than twenty years I’ve begun to dream of Gunter’s again. My mother, Uncle Gervase, my young self – we are all there; even my father – who was never there – sits with us now. But his back is turned, and he never speaks.
Gervase, worried and confused, would like to tell me something. I am a little goose, my mother says, her head on one side: ‘Don’t you think, Lucy, you may perhaps have got it wrong?’
Certainly. But what to do – except dream the dreams out?
Or, I could go and see my father. Easy enough, God knows: all I need is a train ticket, King’s Cross to Leeds, I could do it this year or next year: sometime; never?
But nothing less will do, that is certain. He’s not a ghost – yet.
for Tony
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Pamela Haines 1974
First published by William Heinemann Ltd
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ISBN: 9781448207565
eISBN: 9781448207251
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Tea At Gunter's Page 25