Old Baggage

by Lissa Evans

  ‘My dear Mattie!’ He stood as she approached the table; a short, square, blunt-featured man in a mustard tweed suit, its left sleeve empty and pinned in a loop to the shoulder. ‘You look extremely well,’ he said, a little too loudly, an eardrum as well as an arm having been lost at Vimy Ridge; the head waiter had, as usual, tactfully placed them at a corner table, where other diners would be less affected by the volume of their conversation.

  ‘Thank you, Arthur. Whereas you look as if you need a dose of fresh air, closeted in that office – there’s a rather pasty look to your complexion; almost nacreous.’

  ‘Nacreous?’

  ‘Pearly. Desirable in a painting of a sea-nymph, less so in a Wimbledon solicitor.’

  ‘Heavens. I hadn’t thought I was looking quite that bad,’ said Arthur, attempting to examine his reflection in a spoon.

  ‘Nothing that a brisk daily walk wouldn’t restore. Perhaps you should get a dog.’

  ‘They make me wheeze. Especially those with long hair. Surely you remember – the worst was that animal you once had that looked like a snowball. Bismarck.’

  ‘Boswell.’

  ‘Boswell. I could scarcely breathe when he was in the vicinity.’

  ‘He was highly intelligent – do you know, I taught him to distinguish between three different types of cheese? Unfortunately, once, when Angus was toddling, he grasped Boswell’s tail for balance and ended up with a nasty bite on the chin – he had a permanent scar.’

  ‘I don’t remember ever noticing it.’

  ‘It was exactly central, so looked like a natural cleft.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Yes, extraordinarily lucky. Did you ever see Boswell’s party trick? If one shouted, “Johnson has spoken!” at him, he would run and fetch a pencil.’

  Pomeroy tipped back his head and laughed – the same loud, well-spaced ‘Ha! Ha!’ that had marked their first meeting, and every encounter since; ‘I always thought you were a card, Mattie,’ he’d said, the first time he’d proposed to her.

  The sommelier was holding a bottle of claret for inspection.

  ‘The lady will taste it,’ said Pomeroy. ‘So why don’t you have a dog of your own at the moment? What was the name of the most recent?’

  ‘Susan B. Anthony. A beagle.’

  ‘And what happened to her?’

  ‘I’m afraid she swallowed a tennis ball. In answer to your question, I tend to wait for the dog to find me – living on the Heath, I’ve discovered that, sooner or later, another stray will always land on the doorstep. Yes, thank you, this is excellent, almost as good as the ’21.’

  She waited until both glasses were filled, and then raised her own.

  ‘Cheers, Arthur.’

  ‘Your very good health, Mattie.’

  ‘And how is Eliza?’

  ‘She’s very well.’

  ‘And the boys?’

  ‘Flourishing.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it.’

  Courtesies over, there was a short, comfortable silence while they studied the menus.

  ‘I shall have my usual,’ said Pomeroy, to the waiter.

  ‘And I shall have the quail followed by the Dover sole,’ said Mattie. ‘Now, before we talk of anything else, I need legal advice. You’ve heard me speak of my neighbour, Major Lumb?’

  ‘Several times, and never kindly. The motor-car again?’

  ‘On this occasion, no. He is threatening to prosecute me for criminal damage.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Pomeroy, leaning forward. ‘Whatever have you been doing?’ For all that he was a solicitor, his expression was one of someone eagerly watching a cinematic thriller.

  ‘I am running a girls’ club – rather successfully, may I say – and for two out of the last four weeks, our activities have accidentally resulted in various injuries to Major Lumb’s greenhouse. For which, I hasten to add, I have instantly offered financial compensation. However, he won’t be satisfied unless I promise not to use my garden for training, and I’m simply not prepared to do that. Until the girls are proficient, it would be careless in the extreme to practise in the public spaces of the Heath.’

  ‘Practise what?’

  ‘Javelin throwing. Archery. Use of the slingshot. And before you say anything, Arthur, I am not teaching these skills with violence in mind – they are exciting activities, which the girls relish, and which nicely balance the brain work which is also part of the club regime. The third leg of the curriculum involves a great deal of noisy running around, for which, of course, we use the Heath.’

  ‘And how many girls are in the club?’

  ‘Four the first week, seven the second, and now – eight weeks in – there are twenty-nine.’

  ‘Twenty-nine javelins!’

  ‘Three javelins; the girls take turns. And I also make certain there is no one at all in the next-door gardens during our practice sessions. I’m not a fool, Arthur.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. You know that I have never – would never – think you a fool. So tell me precisely what happened.’

  ‘The Major sent me a letter, indicating that he would contact his lawyer if the garden activities continued.’

  ‘And did you respond?’

  ‘I told him that I had no intention of complying.’

  ‘Was that in writing?’

  ‘No, we spoke.’

  ‘Formally?’

  ‘Over the garden wall.’

  ‘When you say “spoke” …’

  ‘I may have raised my voice,’ said Mattie, rather stiffly. ‘There is something rather dreadful, rather low about someone who overhears youthful high spirits and desires only to quash them.’

  The quail had arrived, and she began, energetically, to dismember it. By contrast, Pomeroy took a single mouthful of his soup, and then laid the spoon down.

  ‘Mattie.’ The tone was delicate, as of someone tapping on a slammed door.

  ‘What is it, Arthur? Do you have some advice for me?’

  He paused, evidently to consider his phrasing. ‘I suppose I’m wondering why it is that your neighbour earns quite such a degree of opprobrium. You’re not the sort of person who would normally care very much about a carelessly parked motor-car, or a scraped wall, or even a threatened prosecution – in fact, were it anyone else, your first instinct would be to find the incidents amusing. But when it comes to Major Lumb, you appear entirely to lose your sense of humour. Which makes me wonder whether there is another aspect to this particular story.’

  Mattie carried on carving for a moment or two, and then dropped her knife on to the plate with a clatter that turned heads.

  ‘Damn it, Arthur,’ she said. ‘You should have been a barrister.’

  ‘No, I’m far too dense. I barely matriculated.’

  ‘You would make up with shrewdness what you lacked in examination technique.’

  ‘All right, then.’ He attempted a stern expression, leaning forward on his single arm. ‘Will the witness please answer the question?’

  She tried to smile, but the acuteness of his observation still smarted. She fortified herself with a mouthful of claret.

  ‘Just after I bought the Mousehole, I rather recklessly invited the neighbours for a glass of Christmas punch. A friendly gesture, I thought. I cannot describe to you the almost unremitting ennui of the resulting afternoon. Are your neighbours dull?’

  ‘Yes, quite dull, but then I’m rather dull myself.’

  ‘Nonsense. False modesty on your part, I have never once been bored in your company. Whereas listening to Mr and Mrs Wimbourne on the topic of their grandchildren is akin to being chloroformed. And servants – do you have any idea of how much the average middle-class woman has to say on the subject of servants? Mrs Wimbourne, Mrs Holroyd, Mrs Lumb – all ululating on the difficulty of keeping a housemaid. So out of self-preservation I began to talk to Major Lumb – the alternative being to hang myself with my own stockings. It transpired that he’s a magistrate and we began to have quite a meat
y discussion on the subject of prison reform.’ It was strange, now – painful, even – to recall that she’d rather taken to him: a sharp little man, intelligent and sardonic. Their conversation had twanged and thrummed like a vigorous tennis match.

  ‘So is that the reason for your antipathy? His opinion on prisons?’

  ‘No.’ Mattie paused. ‘No. It dates from Wimbourne joining us.’ Conversation had instantly withered; the man was a garden roller, flattening all before him. ‘He said that his son was thinking of the Army and, as Lumb had been a regular, he wanted to sound him out about regiments. And, of course, talk turned to the war. As it always does. Wimbourne had been in the Pay Corps.’

  ‘And Lumb?’

  ‘A staff officer for Ferrier-Brown.’

  And, as she spoke, she was once again standing there, the sting of brandy on her tongue, the reddish winter light giving spurious warmth to the high-ceilinged room, Mrs Holroyd shrieking, ‘My dear, they’re not like you and I. These girls simply have no loyalty,’ and the slow, dreadful realization – a creeping agony, as if she were being peeled and salted – that the man in front of her had issued the orders which had trapped her younger brother and his battalion behind enemy lines at Mons, barely a fortnight after the war had begun, fighting a hopeless action that only a third of them had survived. Shrapnel had sheared away a triangle of Angus’s skull and a wedge of brain matter beneath; a mortal wound that had nonetheless taken almost two years to kill him. He had lost his speech and his ability to walk, and most of his sight, but his charm had remained intact – not the gimcrack variety, that coat of gilding over a cheap material, but a charm that seemed woven into his very substance. To put it simply, one had wanted to be with him. And when he had been moved to an army hospital for incurables on the south coast, Mattie had followed, taking a job as a history teacher in a nearby girls’ school so that she could visit as often as the hospital allowed, and this, then, was what she had seen of the Home Front: ward after ward of splintered, hollow men, who writhed, screamed and died, and were replaced.

  ‘So there we have it,’ she said, the bright dining room dropping into view again like a theatrical backcloth. Pomeroy’s features, unsuited to displaying the subtler emotions, were clenched in sympathetic understanding.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Is Lumb a Major or a Major General?’

  ‘I’ve only ever heard him referred to as “Major”.’

  ‘So, quite junior. You do realize it’s likely that the orders at Mons originated from a far more—’

  Mattie made a sudden gesture that knocked her fork halfway across the table.

  ‘To be frank,’ she said, restoring it to its place and ignoring the swivelled heads of other diners, ‘I would rather not discover the true extent of his culpability. You may be right, but what if you are not? It is only the slight uncertainty that keeps my responses within the bounds of legality.’

  For in the half-decade since the housewarming, in their quotidian encounters she had only managed to speak to her neighbour with anything approaching civility by looking past his right ear and addressing whichever tree, gatepost or trellis he was standing in front of.

  ‘Speaking of legality …’ said Pomeroy.

  ‘Yes, back to the subject. And do, please, eat. Though I always find consommé a dreadful disappointment; one might as well add gravy browning to tap water.’

  ‘I shall make sure I pass your compliments to the chef. So tell me more about this club. For instance, what possessed you to start it?’

  ‘An encounter with an old colleague and the realization that I was no longer swimming steadily upstream but treading water.’

  He listened intently as she explained.

  ‘And what sort of girls are they? Ladylike? Rough? High-spirited? Hoydenish?’

  ‘You are asking – are you not – which class the girls are from?’

  ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘We have a mixture. I altered the time that we meet from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon, so that those who work for a living are more likely to attend, but we also have a large contingent of schoolgirls.’

  ‘And did you say there’s an element of education in the proceedings?’

  ‘It ingrains everything. The other activities are, if you like, the Trojan Horse in which the education is smuggled.’

  ‘Well, there you have it!’ said Pomeroy. ‘No magistrate could be seen to oppose a scheme to educate the working classes – all you need to do is to make sure that your aims are publicized. Why not write about it in your column? Or, better still, let someone else praise you – the paper must be able to send a journalist along. You could even mention the tolerance of your forward-thinking neighbours.’

  Mattie snorted. ‘But a very good suggestion,’ she said. ‘Really rather cunning.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Should we order another bottle of this? Did I ever tell you, incidentally, the name of the Wimbournes’ house? Bear in mind that they are teetotallers.’

  ‘Temperance Towers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Locked Cabinet?’

  ‘Ha! Very good – no, it’s called Many Waters.’

  ‘I think that’s quite poetical.’

  ‘Yes, but doesn’t the name remind you of someone? Every time I walk past I find myself humming “Take a Pair of Thparkling Eyes”.’

  ‘Minnie Waters! Your room-mate at Somerville! “I am thtudying Thocrateeth.”’

  The waiter, approaching with the next course, flinched at the blast of laughter.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Pomeroy. ‘I’ve not thought of her in decades. Did you stay in touch?’

  ‘No,’ said Mattie, sobering. ‘She was firmly against votes for women. Possibly because she could not pronounce the word “suffragette”.’

  Pomeroy, a piece of steak halfway to his mouth (the meat discreetly sliced in the kitchens before serving), had to lower the fork again, in order to wipe his eyes, and the gesture and its cause seemed to encapsulate all Mattie’s pleasure in the friendship: both the simple fact that it was flattering to be found so consistently entertaining, and the more complex truth, troubling yet comforting, that Pomeroy was the only living person who spanned her memories: he had known her as a child, a student, a campaigner, a prisoner; he had wept when Stephen, by then a surgeon with the Red Cross, had been killed by a Boer sniper; he had stood bail for Angus after his arrest in Parliament Square; he had wired money to Mattie in Serbia; he had dragged her father’s tangled will through the thorny hedge of probate, enabling her to buy the Mousehole; he had been as much a brother to her as Stephen or Angus – this being one of the reasons (and the one she had chosen to give him) why she had refused his proposals. For she would never have wanted him to know that, for her, a husband would have required not only steadfast kindliness but actual brilliance, or a rare magnetism; her brothers had spoiled her for more ordinary men. And neither did she choose to share the reason that underpinned it all – a kind of horror at the idea of standing still, of choosing a single existence, as if life were a sprint across quicksand and stasis meant a slow extinction. Long ago, as a child in a pinched and stifled century, she had seen her own mother gradually disappear.

  ‘I shouldn’t mock,’ she said. ‘Minnie Waters could hardly help the gaps in her teeth. I instruct the Amazons both to refrain from and to rise above petty teasing – there are a number of youths on the Heath who follow us around with catcalls – and here am I succumbing to exactly the same urge, solely for the purpose of making you laugh.’

  ‘We’re all human,’ said Pomeroy, cheerfully. ‘It’s one thing the Papists get right, in my opinion. Regular forgiveness for trivial transgressions.’

  ‘In my own case, it’s what Fuller termed a constitutionary sin, riveted in my temper and complexion. Do you still attend church, Arthur?’

  ‘Yes, every Sunday.’

  ‘And do you still believe in a supernatural creator?’

  ‘I believe in … something. I don’t t
hink I’m capable of defining precisely what it is. I believe that we go on.’

  ‘But go on doing what? Singing praises? Paddling in the glassy sea? Buffing our crowns with Brasso? Imagine the terrible, terrible boredom – an eternity of agreement, an infinity of nodding heads. Without grit, Arthur, how can there be pearls?’

  ‘I say, that’s rather good. Is that your own aphorism?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘So what do you think happens to us after death?’

  ‘Nothing at all. We blink out like brief candles. Again, not one of mine.’

  He smiled, rather sadly. ‘It seems an awful waste, Mattie – all that knowledge, all that experience, gone for ever.’

  ‘Which is why one should try to spark a few fresh lights along the way. To be a tinderbox rather than a candle.’

  ‘Yours?’ asked Pomeroy.

  ‘Mine,’ she said.

  There was no clock in her parents’ flat, but Ida had just heard St Pancras striking the half-hour, and if she didn’t leave soon to catch the bus, she’d be late for the Amazons. ‘I’ve finished these,’ she said, pushing the darning needle back into its felt sheath, and balling the socks to add to the pyramid she’d already completed. ‘I’ll have to go in a minute or two.’

  ‘What, already?’ Her mother looked wounded.

  ‘I’ve been here two hours, Mum. Nearly.’

  ‘Oh dear, Danny, d’you hear that? It sounds as if your sister’s been counting the minutes.’ Her mother gave the baby’s head a stroke; he was sitting on her lap, sucking one of the buttons on her housecoat. Even in the faded print wrap, her blonde hair twisted into a knot, she looked pretty; a soft, quilted prettiness, though there were pins in the fabric.

  ‘No, I mean – it’s just that Miss Simpkin doesn’t like us to be late.’