Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  Meg stared out over the rooftops at the rainy summer twilight, and thought about consulting Freddy. About dialling his number, and then waiting the long seconds while he slid languidly off his divan and strolled across the room to the telephone; and then she would hear his voice, his soft, deceptively intimate voice, saying something aggravating.

  Or perhaps not answering at all. It must be nearly nine already. No time, now, for weighing up the subtle balance of pleasure and embarrassment involved in such a call. Meg hunted four pennies from the bottom of her bag and ran down the long flights of stairs to the telephone in the hall.

  “Oh—Freddy! So you are still there. Listen. It’s about Sunday. And I want your advice about something, it’s very—What? Oh! I’m sorry—this is Meg, I mean—”

  How he always managed to make one look silly!—and then, a second later, warmed one into utter forgiveness! Already the slow, mellow enticement—none the less fascinating for being almost certainly bogus—was back in his voice, and she could tell that the half mocking, half affectionate smile was beginning to flicker round his mouth. She could tell, too, that his long, musician’s fingers were at this moment coiling themselves round the receiver in the only, in the most perfectly comfortable position. Other people grabbed up receivers just anyhow.

  “Oh, I see. My advice.” Freddy’s voice, without the faintest trace of an accent, had yet somehow a faintly un-English quality that Meg could not define. “You mean,” he went on, brightening, “that you are going to tell me of some decision you have reached, and to order me to agree with it. But of course, my sweet. It’ll be a pleasure. I agree with it absolutely and entirely. We don’t need to go through all the wearisome formality of you telling me what it’s all about and me listening, do we?” he added anxiously.

  “Oh, Freddy! Stop it!” Meg was half laughing, half piqued. “Something’s happened. Really. At least, I think so. And I really do want your advice.”

  There was a little pause at the other end of the line. Meg seemed to see him shifting his position, hunching his shoulder yet more luxuriously against the instrument.

  “My advice? But why mine, darling? I mean to say, there couldn’t be a worse person than myself to advise a young girl living alone in the big city. My advice is usually immoral and always impractical. Anyone’ll tell you.”

  “Yes—but Freddy—Oh please stop being like that for a minute, and listen. You see, it’s the family. Isabel says—”

  “Quarrel with them,” came the instructions down the wire, decisively. “It’s the only way with families. Quarrel with them now, while you’re still young. If you leave it till you’re older, you’ll find that you owe them all so much money that you can’t afford to. So quarrel, girl, quarrel for your life! And then come round and have a drink. In about half an hour.”

  The telephone clicked into silence, and Meg turned away, laughing, and knowing that she should be annoyed. It ought to be humiliating to be so taken for granted by a man whom she had known for so short a time; but it wasn’t humiliating at all; it was fun; and when, a few minutes later, she stuffed the telegram into her handbag to show to Freddy, it seemed more like a ticket for some long-anticipated theatre performance then a disquieting piece of news.

  The interminable wet length of summer daylight was still stretching through the almost deserted streets when Meg reached Freddy’s block of flats. Freddy, like herself, lived on a top floor, but here there was a porter, and a lift, and Meg was soon hurrying along the corridor towards Freddy’s door, from behind which a piano could be heard pouring forth notes with astonishing speed and exuberance, and also with astonishing disregard (astonishing, that is, to anyone unacquainted with Freddy) of the inhabitants of the adjoining flats.

  “You’re wet!”

  Freddy, clad in a scarlet silk dressing gown, had flung open his door in a gesture of exaggerated welcome, and was now drawing back a pace in somewhat unreasonable dismay.

  “And you’re wearing a raincoat!” he continued, even more unreasonably. “Here I stand, my heart going pit-a-pat, my arms outstretched, waiting for my lady love, and when she arrives she’s wet. And wearing a raincoat!”

  Suddenly he grinned, an impish grin that lit his rather sallow, triangular face to extraordinary brilliancy, and seizing Meg’s arm he pulled her into his sitting-room and switched on the electric fire.

  “There! Now you can take that thing off! And first, before you tell me the long sad story of your life, tell me why you haven’t come here in a beautiful dress that sweeps the floor? And high heels? And something sparkling in your hair?”

  Meg glanced down thoughtfully at her brogues.

  “Well—it’s raining,” she observed. “I mean, it would be silly to dress up to walk all this way in the rain. You’d just look a mess at the end of it.”

  Freddy shook his head sadly.

  “What an outlook! What an attitude to life! When skies are grey, my dear—didn’t any of your aunts ever tell you that one? No, I suppose not; aunts aren’t like that any more, they all go out to work. But now—let me see—” Pulling the raincoat from Meg’s shoulders, he stepped back and surveyed her, head on one side, with the air of a connoisseur. “I want to see you as my Ideal Woman for a moment. Green and silver, I fancy—very full in the skirt and very tight in the bodice, with perhaps a touch of lace just here. And silver shoes—no, sandals—very high heels, of course. And the hair piled high—great masses of it—a sort of Edwardian style—”

  Suddenly bunching up her light brown curls between his hands, he turned her face towards the mirror. “See? It suits you. Really. Have it done that way.”

  For a moment Meg caught a glimpse of her own flushed, excited face in the mirror, before it stiffened into self-consciousness under her own scrutiny. Hastily she shook herself free, laughing, but a trifle brusque.

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. It would be an awful bother to look after. And it wouldn’t look like me.”

  Freddy sighed.

  “Well—there—I never said it would,” he agreed amicably. “I only said it would look like my Ideal Woman. Well, never mind. Let’s hear about the family skeleton, since that’s what you’ve come for. If we can’t talk about ideal women—why, then, we’ll talk about skeletons. Of course. Why not? Do you keep it in your handbag?” he added with interest, as Meg proceeded to fumble for Isabel’s telegram.

  “Here,” she said, extracting the envelope. “Read it, and I’ll explain….”

  The explanation took a long time. At the end of it Freddy, with the air of a schoolboy going over his history homework, leaned earnestly towards her.

  “Let me see,” he began. “Just check that I’m getting it right, will you? Mildred is your half-sister, twenty years older than you are, and she managed your father’s house and looked after you like a mother. Or, anyway, like an aunt. Or—” holding up his hand to forestall Meg’s interruption—“or like a French governess. Anyway, she went through the motions of bringing you up after your mother’s death. Right? And Isabel is your own sister, a few years older than yourself, only far less competent—no, don’t interrupt me, please. Both these sisters of yours are, in their different ways, contrary, self-centred sort of creatures—‘Highly strung’ was, I believe, the euphemism that their long-suffering little sister has just applied to them—and they have both formed the touching habit of expecting her—the little sister—to help them out of any jams they choose to muddle themselves into. And really, you know, this habit doesn’t surprise me. For poor little Cinderella, in this case, is clever as well as angelic. She can manage other people’s affairs much more competently than they can themselves, and so naturally the two wicked step-sisters—”

  “Oh, Freddy, they aren’t!” protested Meg. “They aren’t my step-sisters at all. I’ve explained to you. Mildred’s my half-sister—my father was her father too—and Isabel—”

  “Spare me the family tree all over again!” cried Freddy, with an air of exaggerated suffering. “Tryin
g to make out who is related to who in families where someone has married twice gives me pins and needles. Really it does. It’s a sort of complex. They made me learn about the Wars of the Roses when I was too young, I think. Besides,” he continued, returning to the attack. “Your sister’s done it too, hasn’t she? Married twice, I mean.”

  “Isabel? Oh, yes, she has, of course, but—”

  “And Mildred? The redoubtable Mildred, who manages so cunningly to keep you all dancing attendance? Has she any other husbands to her name? Or is there only the elderly and evanescent Hubert, whose recurrent absences from home you have been so graphically describing?”

  “No—I mean, I didn’t really say that Hubert—hat is—”

  Meg stopped. Had she been giving away too much already of Mildred’s private affairs? Giving them away to a comparative stranger—a man whom she had met for the first time barely a month ago? Not that Mildred herself was particularly reticent about her problems. Indeed, she would sometimes hold forth about her wrongs in the most surprisingly assorted company, retailing, with apparent gusto, intimate grievances and slights that most women would have preferred to keep hidden. But there were other times, too, when she could be excessively touchy at any reference to her troubles, even if (or, Meg sometimes fancied, particularly if) it took the form of an offer of help. Mildred had always been perverse and difficult; had she been growing more so of late?

  “But what good,” Freddy was saying, judicially, “do you think you can do by getting involved in it all? It sounds to me as if there’s a family row going on, and you’re well out of it. Particularly if, as you say, they’ve only got a four-berth caravan to have it in. Whoever’s side you take by day, you’ll also have to take their blankets by night. You’ll be a mixed blessing, my dear. Very mixed.”

  Meg shook her head.

  “My family don’t have rows, exactly,” she said. “They get into states, and then somebody’s got to do something. I mean, if Hubert’s left Mildred again, and Mildred’s gone dashing down to the caravan because she can’t bear to be alone at the flat—and of course there won’t be room for her at the caravan, so they’ll have to find a hotel for her, and the hotels’ll all be full up at this time of year, and Philip will be furious, because he can’t stand Mildred in any case, even when he isn’t being expected to chase round finding a room for her, and that’ll make Isabel go sort of helpless the way she does when Philip’s in a temper—”

  “My dear child! Listen to yourself! Just listen! It terrifies me. Really it does. If you let yourself talk like that, you’ll soon find yourself living like that, too. Your whole life will become a rigmarole like the one you have just recited—and with the same lack of punctuation and main verbs. I’m warning you. I’m warning you now. Keep out of it. Let them get on with it. I’ll take you for a drive at the weekend instead. A hundred miles each way—with punctuation and main verbs. There. I can’t say fairer than that.”

  Meg shook her head.

  “No, Freddy. Really. I’ve got to go. Isabel wouldn’t have sent the telegram if it wasn’t important. At least, it mightn’t seem important to outsiders, but—”

  Freddy suddenly switched his ground, and grinned at her provokingly.

  “I’m beginning to feel that I’d like to meet these two selfish sisters of yours,” he declared. “I’ve always felt like that, you know, about the Cinderella story. We have Cinderella, so sweet, so obliging, so beautiful—why, naturally she gets the prince. Why shouldn’t she? It’s dull. It’s obvious. It’s like water running down a drain pipe—it couldn’t go any other way. But the Ugly Sisters—Ah, that’s the challenge! Ugly, selfish, thoroughly dislikeable—yet they still almost get the prince. They come within a hair’s breadth of it. That was the achievement; that was the real core of the story. A glorious failure, beside which Cinderella’s success is limp and insipid. Don’t you think so?”

  But Meg was looking at the clock.

  “It’s nearly eleven!” she cried, jumping up with an appearance of greater dismay than she really felt in order to cover up her inability to think of any witty and appropriate response to all this. “I must go at once, or I may not be able to get in, and then I’ll have to knock someone up, and—”

  “And lose your reputation, all for nothing,” finished Freddy, nodding his head sympathetically. “I quite see your point. Never mind. Sure you wouldn’t like to stay a little longer and hear some more of my new and original interpretations of the well-known fairy tales? No? I could do Bluebeard for you, if you like,” he added invitingly.

  “No—no, thank you! Another time.” Meg hastily and rather ungracefully huddled herself into her coat, and stuffed her handbag under her arm. “Another time, when I feel more like Bluebeard’s wife.” Did that sound witty? Sophisticated? As if she knew what he was talking about? “And I might—if I’m back that is—I’ll be seeing you on Sunday?”

  He grinned enigmatically.

  “Did Cinderella see the prince on Sunday? After she’d polished off the ugly sisters. I don’t remember. I must look it up for you. Yes, I’ll certainly look it up and let you know —in answer to the postcard you are going to send me with your address, and your window marked with a cross. I’m sorry, your caravan chimney. Or your tent pole. Or the spot where they arrested you for vagrancy when it turned out that there was no room for you in the caravan, just as I said. Goodbye, my sweet; and don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  CHAPTER II

  THE WASHING LINES strung between the caravans were all sagging, but Isabel’s sagged more than most. Meg felt that she would have recognised her sister’s caravan at once, even without the detailed and painstaking directions that had arrived this morning, following on the telegram. It was the most lop-sided one; the one adjoining the expanse of dusty stinging-nettles that is to be found somewhere on every caravan site; and its door was warped so that it either couldn’t be opened or else couldn’t be shut.

  This was one of the occasions when it couldn’t be opened, and as Meg set down her suitcase in order to struggle with it more efficiently, she began to feel annoyed. Probably the Calor gas stove would turn out to be the only one on the site that wasn’t working, and one of the bunks would keep coming off its hinges.

  Not that any of this would be poor Isabel’s fault. She must have rented the caravan by letter, and it was the owner’s responsibility to see to this sort of thing, not hers. All the same, why did Isabel’s arrangements always have to turn out like this? Why did Isabel herself always have to be—well—so Isabel-ish? Meg felt, confusedly, that Isabel ought to have changed more. Surely, when she marries a new husband, a woman should become, in some way, different? Should wear different clothes—read different books—something. Should at least go away for a different sort of holiday. Glancing round at the worn, untidy grass, Meg felt that though this seaside place might have a different name from the others, it was really the same. Too much the same. Was Isabel becoming one of those women with the devastating knack of carrying sameness about with them, like a suitcase, all over the world?

  “You have to bash it, sort of.”

  Meg looked round in some relief.

  “Hullo, Johnnie! Haven’t you grown!”

  Like most young and inexperienced aunts, Meg had resolved at the outset never to make this idiotic remark to any of her nephews or nieces. But, when it came to the point, it was beyond one’s control. After a few months’ absence this was, so overwhelmingly, the first thing one noticed about a child. A swollen, outsize sort of look—a new ring in the voice—an unfamiliarity. As always, it only lasted a moment; already he had shrunk to just Johnnie again, exactly the same, even to the piece of grey sticking plaster peeling off his knee.

  “You have to bash it—like this.”

  With the unnerving skill and assurance of the expert, Johnnie hurled himself side on against the door, which burst open, revealing immediately Isabel’s beach bag, knitting, library book and mackintosh, all piled together on the seat of a canvas chair.
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  Well, at least it’s probably not the same library book, Meg reflected, and turned to pick up her suitcase. Half way up the steps she stopped, undecided.

  “Johnnie,” she said. “Do you know if I’m supposed to be staying actually in the caravan? Will there be room, I mean? Did your mother say anything about it? And where is she? Am I early?”

  Out of this list, Johnnie expertly selected the question he deemed worthy of an answer.

  “No,” he said. “You’re just in time for the bathe. I’m not allowed to without a grown up.” Grabbing off the floor of the caravan a sandy shred of navy blue worsted, twisted, as children’s bathing-suits always are, into a tight figure-of-eight, he waved it towards Meg in an encouraging half-circle that flipped damp sand in every direction. “Come on.”

  “No, Johnnie, wait!” Meg protested, laughing and brushing the sand off her skirt. “I can’t just rush into the sea with you like that. I haven’t unpacked yet—and I don’t even know where I’m supposed to be staying. Where’s your mother? On the beach?” She looked this way and that among the crowded ranks of caravans. It was hard to guess, here, even the direction of the sea.

  “What?” said Johnnie. But he noticed, now, that Meg had a suitcase in her hand. Grown ups with suitcases, he had already observed, accurately but incuriously, always went on like this.

  “I suppose I can’t bathe, then,” he summed up gloomily. He hadn’t listened to his aunt’s last speech, but this, he was sure, was what it all amounted to. “And they won’t let me bathe after tea, either. I’ll have to play cricket with Daddy.”

  Meg could not help laughing.

  “Don’t you like playing cricket?” she asked: but even this seemed, at the moment, to be beyond the range of Johnnie’s one-track mind.

  “I was going to bathe with the bungalow lot,” he went on doggedly, “but they’ve gone out in a car, or something. And then Mummy said she’d be back in time to bathe with me, but she isn’t, and—”