‘Alone?’
‘No, with a man.’
‘The Major?’
‘He doesn’t look like a major. He’s got a musical instrument with him and he’s very dirty. Come on, Fanny, leave those to soak –’
And so it was. My mother sat in the hall drinking a whisky-and-soda and recounting in her birdlike voice with what incredible adventures she had escaped from the Riviera. The major with whom she had been living for some years, always having greatly preferred the Germans to the French, had remained behind to collaborate, and the man who now accompanied my mother was a ruffianly-looking Spaniard called Juan, whom she had picked up during her travels, and without whom, she said, she could never have got away from a ghastly prison camp in Spain. She spoke of him exactly as though he were not there at all, which produced rather a curious effect, and indeed seemed most embarrassing until we realized that Juan understood no word of any language except Spanish. He sat staring blankly into space, clutching a guitar and gulping down great draughts of whisky. Their relationship was only too obvious, Juan was undoubtedly (nobody doubted for a moment, not even Aunt Sadie), the Bolter’s lover, but they were quite incapable of verbal exchange, my mother being no linguist.
Presently Uncle Matthew appeared, and the Bolter told her adventures all over again to him. He said he was delighted to see her, and hoped she would stay as long as she liked, he then turned his blue eyes upon Juan in a most terrifying and uncompromising stare. Aunt Sadie led him off to the business-room, whispering, and we heard him say:
‘All right then, but only for a few days.’
One person who was off his head with joy at the sight of her was dear old Josh.
‘We must get her ladyship up on to a horse,’ he said, hissing with pleasure.
My mother had not been her ladyship since three husbands (four if one were to include the Major), but Josh took no account of this, she would always be her ladyship to him. He found a horse, not worthy of her, in his eyes, but not an absolute dud either, and had her out cub-hunting within a week of her arrival.
As for me it was the first time in my life that I had found myself really face to face with my mother. When a small child I had been obsessed by her and the few appearances she had made had absolutely dazzled me, though, as I have said, I never had any wish to emulate her career. Davey and Aunt Emily had been very clever in their approach to her, they, and especially Davey, had gradually and gently and without in any way hurting my feelings, turned her into a sort of joke. Since I was grown up I had seen her a few times, and had taken Alfred to visit her on our honeymoon, but the fact that, in spite of our intimate relationship, we had no past life in common put a great strain upon us and these meetings were not a success. At Alconleigh, in contact with her morning, noon, and night, I studied her with the greatest curiosity, apart from anything else she was, after all, the grandmother of my children. I couldn’t help rather liking her. Though she was silliness personified there was something engaging about her frankness and high spirits and endless good nature. The children adored her, Louisa’s as well as mine, and she soon became an extra unofficial nurserymaid, and was very useful to us in that capacity.
She was curiously dated in her manner, and seemed still to be living in the 1920s. It was as though, at the age of thirty-five, having refused to grow any older, she had pickled herself, both mentally and physically, ignoring the fact that the world was changing and that she was withering fast. She had a short canary-coloured shingle (windswept) and wore trousers with the air of one still flouting the conventions, ignorant that every suburban shopgirl was doing the same. Her conversation, her point of view, the very slang she used, all belonged to the late twenties, that period now deader than the dodo. She was intensely unpractical, foolish, and apparently fragile, and yet she must have been quite a tough little person really, to have walked over the Pyrenees, to have escaped from a Spanish camp, and to have arrived at Alconleigh looking as if she had stepped out of the chorus of No, No, Nanette.
Some confusion was caused in the household at first by the fact that none of us could remember whether she had, in the end, actually married the Major (a married man himself and father of six) or not, and, in consequence, nobody knew whether her name was now Mrs Rawl or Mrs Plugge. Rawl had been a white hunter, the only husband she had ever lost respectably through death, having shot him by accident in the head during a safari. The question of names was soon solved, however, by her ration book, which proclaimed her to be Mrs Plugge.
‘This Gewan,’ said Uncle Matthew, when they had been at Alconleigh a week or so, ‘what’s going to be done about him?’
‘Well, Matthew dulling,’ she larded her phrases with the word darling, and that is how she pronounced it. ‘Hoo-arn saved my life, you know, over and over again, and I can’t very well tear him up and throw him away, now can I, my sweet?’
‘I can’t keep a lot of dagoes here, you know.’ Uncle Matthew said this in the same voice with which he used to tell Linda that she couldn’t have any more pets, or if she did they must be kept in the stables. ‘You’ll have to make some other arrangements for him, Bolter, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, dulling, keep him a little longer, please, just a few more days, Matthew dulling,’ she sounded just like Linda, pleading for some smelly old dog, ‘and then I promise I’ll find some place for him and tiny me to go to. You can’t think what a lousy time we had together, I must stick to him now, I really must’
‘Well, another week if you like, but it’s not to be the thin end of the wedge, Bolter, and after that he must go. You can stay as long as you want to, of course, but I do draw the line at Gewan.’
Louisa said to me, her eyes as big as saucers: ‘He rushes into her room before tea and lives with her.’ Louisa always describes the act of love as living with. ‘Before tea, Fanny, can you imagine it?’
*
‘Sadie, dear,’ said Davey. ‘I am going to do an unpardonable thing. It is for the general good, for your own good too, but it is unpardonable. If you feel you can’t forgive me when I’ve said my say, Emily and I will have to leave, that’s all.’
‘Davey,’ said Aunt Sadie in astonishment, ‘what can be coming?’
‘The food, Sadie, it’s the food. I know how difficult it is for you in wartime, but we are all, in turns, being poisoned. I was sick for hours last night, the day before Emily had diarrhoea, Fanny has that great spot on her nose, and I’m sure the children aren’t putting on the weight they should. The fact is, dear, that if Mrs Beecher were a Borgia she could hardly be more successful – all that sausage mince is poison, Sadie. I wouldn’t complain if it were merely nasty, or insufficient, or too starchy, one expects that in the war, but actual poison does, I feel, call for comment. Look at the menus this week – Monday, poison pie; Tuesday, poison burger steak; Wednesday, Cornish poison –’
Aunt Sadie looked intensely worried.
‘Oh, dear, yes, she is an awful cook, I know, but Davey, what can one do? The meat ration only lasts about two meals, and there are fourteen meals in a week, you must remember. If she minces it up with a little sausage meat – poison meat (I do so agree with you really) – it goes much further, you see.’
‘But in the country surely one can supplement the ration with game and farm produce? Yes, I know the home farm is let, but surely you could keep a pig and some hens? And what about game? There always used to be such a lot here.’
‘The trouble is Matthew thinks they’ll be needing all their ammunition for the Germans, and he refuses to waste a single shot on hares or partridges. Then you see Mrs Beecher (oh, what a dreadful woman she is, though of course, we are lucky to have her) is the kind of cook who is quite good at a cut off the joint and two veg., but she simply hasn’t an idea of how to make up delicious foreign oddments out of little bits of nothing at all. But you are quite, absolutely right, Davey, it’s not wholesome. I really will make an effort to see what can be done.’
‘You always used to be such a wonderful house
keeper, Sadie dear, it used to do me so much good, coming here. I remember one Christmas I put on four and a half ounces. But now I am losing steadily, my wretched frame is hardly more than a skeleton and I fear that, if I were to catch anything, I might peter out altogether. I take every precaution against that, everything is drenched in T.C.P., I gargle at least six times a day, but I can’t disguise from you that my resistance is very low, very.’
Aunt Sadie said: ‘It’s quite easy to be a wonderful housekeeper when there are a first-rate cook, two kitchenmaids, a scullerymaid, and when you can get all the food you want. I’m afraid I am dreadfully stupid at managing on rations, but I really will try and take a pull. I’m very glad indeed that you mentioned it, Davey, it was absolutely right of you, and of course, I don’t mind at all.’
But no real improvement resulted. Mrs Beecher said ‘yes, yes’ to all suggestions, and continued to send up Hamburger steaks, Cornish pasty, and shepherd pie, which continued to be full of poison sausage. It was very nasty and very unwholesome, and, for once, we all felt that Davey had not gone a bit too far. Meals were no pleasure to anybody and a positive ordeal to Davey, who sat, a pinched expression on his face, refusing food and resorting more and more often to the vitamin pills with which his place at the table was surrounded – too many by far even for his collection of jewelled boxes – a little forest of bottles, Vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamins A and C, vitamins B3 and D, one tablet equals two pounds of summer butter – ten times the strength of a gallon of cod-liver oil – for the blood – for the brain – for muscle – for energy – and this and protection against that – all but one bore a pretty legend.
‘And what’s in this, Davey?’
‘Oh, that’s what the panzer troops have before going into action.’
Davey gave a series of little sniffs. This usually denoted that his nose was about to bleed, pints of valuable red and white corpuscles so assiduously filled with vitamins would be wasted, his resistance still further lowered.
Aunt Emily and I looked up in some anxiety from the rissoles we were sadly pushing round our plates.
‘Bolter,’ he said, severely, ‘you’ve been at my Mary Chess again.’
‘Oh, Davey dulling, such a tiny droppie.’
‘A tiny drop doesn’t stink out the whole room. I’m sure you have been pouring it into the bath with the stopper out. It is a shame. That bottle is my quota for a month, it is too bad of you, Bolter.’
‘Dulling, I swear I’ll get you some more – I’ve got to go to London next week, to have my wiggie washed, and I’ll bring back a bottle, I swear.’
‘And I very much hope you’ll take Gewan with you and leave him there,’ growled Uncle Matthew. ‘Because I won’t have him in this house much longer, you know. I’ve warned you, Bolter.’
Uncle Matthew was busy from morning to night with his Home Guard. He was happy and interested and in a particularly mellow mood, for it looked as if his favourite hobby, that of clocking Germans, might be available again at any moment So he only noticed Juan from time to time, and, whereas in the old days he would have had him out of the house in the twinkling of an eye, Juan had now been an inmate of Alconleigh for nearly a month. However, it was beginning to be obvious that my uncle had no intention of putting up with his presence for ever and things were clearly coming to a head where Juan was concerned. As for the Spaniard himself, I never saw a man so wretched. He wandered about miserably, with nothing whatever to do all day, unable to talk to anybody, while at mealtimes the disgust on his face fully equalled that of Davey. He hadn’t even the spirit to play his guitar.
‘Davey, you must talk to him,’ said Aunt Sadie.
My mother had gone to London to have her hair dyed, and a family council was gathered in her absence to decide upon the fate of Juan.
‘We obviously can’t turn him out to starve, as the Bolter says he saved her life, and, anyhow, one has human feelings.’
‘Not towards Dagoes,’ said Uncle Matthew, grinding his dentures.
‘But what we can do is to get him a job, only first we must find out what his profession is. Now, Davey, you’re good at languages, and you’re so clever, I’m sure if you had a look at the Spanish dictionary in the library you could just manage to ask him what he used to do before the war. Do try, Davey.’
‘Yes, darling, do,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘The poor fellow looks too miserable for words at present, I expect he’d love to have some work.’
Uncle Matthew snorted.
‘Just give me the Spanish dictionary,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll soon find the word for “get out”.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Davey, ‘but I can guess what it will be I’m afraid. G for gigolo.’
‘Or something equally useless, like M for matador or H for hidalgo,’ said Louisa.
‘Yes. Then what?’
‘Then B for be off,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘and the Bolter will have to support him, but not anywhere near me, I beg. It must be made perfectly clear to both of them that I can’t stand the sight of the sewer lounging about here any longer.’
When Davey takes on a job he does it thoroughly. He shut himself up for several hours with the Spanish dictionary, and wrote down a great many words and phrases on a piece of paper. Then he beckoned Juan into Uncle Matthew’s business-room and shut the door.
They were there a short time, and, when they emerged, both were wreathed in happy smiles.
‘You’ve sacked him, I hope?’ Uncle Matthew said, suspiciously.
‘No, indeed, I’ve not sacked him,’ said Davey, ‘on the contrary, I’ve engaged him. My dears, you’ll never guess, it’s too absolutely glamorous for words, Juan is a cook, he was the cook, I gather, of some cardinal before the Civil War. You don’t mind I hope, Sadie. I look upon this as an absolute lifeline – Spanish food, so delicious, so unconstipating, so digestible, so full of glorious garlic Oh, the joy, no more poison-burger – how soon can we get rid of Mrs Beecher?’
Davey’s enthusiasm was fully justified, and Juan in the kitchen was the very greatest possible success. He was more than a first-class cook, he had an extraordinary talent for organization, and soon, I suspect, became king of the local black market. There was no nonsense about foreign dishes made out of little bits of nothing at all; succulent birds, beasts, and crustaceans appeared at every meal, the vegetables ran with extravagant sauces, the puddings were obviously based upon real ice-cream.
‘Juan is wonderful,’ Aunt Sadie would remark in her vague manner, ‘at making the rations go round. When I think of Mrs Beecher – really, Davey, you were so clever.’
One day she said: ‘I hope the food isn’t too rich for you now, Davey?’
‘Oh no,’ said Davey. ‘I never mind rich food, it’s poor food mat does one such an infinity of harm.’
Juan also pickled and bottled and preserved from morning till night, until the store cupboard, which he had found bare except for a few tins of soup, began to look like a pre-war grocer’s shop. Davey called it. Aladdin’s Cave, or Aladdin for short, and spent a lot of his time there, gloating. Months of tasty vitamins stood there in neat rows, a barrier between him and that starvation which had seemed, under Mrs Beecher’s regime, only just round the corner.
Juan himself was now a very different fellow from the dirty and disgruntled refugee who had sat about so miserably. He was clean, he wore a white coat and hat, he seemed to have grown in stature, and he soon acquired a manner of great authority in his kitchen. Even Uncle Matthew acknowledged the change.
‘If I were the Bolter,’ he said, ‘I should marry him.’
‘Knowing the Bolter,’ said Davey, ‘I’ve no doubt at all that she will.’
*
Early in November I had to go to London for the day, on business for Alfred, who was now in the Middle East, and to see my doctor. I went by the eight o’clock train, and, having heard nothing of Linda for some weeks, I took a taxi and drove straight to Cheyne Walk. There had been a heavy raid the night before, and I passed through stree
ts which glistened with broken glass. Many fires still smouldered, and fire engines, ambulances, and rescue men hurried to and fro, streets were blocked, and several times we had to drive quite a long way round. There seemed to be a great deal of excitement in the air. Little groups of people were gathered outside shops and houses, as if to compare notes; my taxi-driver talked incessantly to me over his shoulder. He had been up all night, he said, helping the rescue workers. He described what he had found.
‘It was a spongy mass of red,’ he said, ghoulishly, ‘covered with feathers.’
‘Feathers?’ I said, horrified.
‘Yes. A feather bed, you see. It was still breathing, so I takes it to the hospital, but they say that’s no good to us, take it to the mortuary. So I sews it in a sack and takes it to the mortuary.’
‘Goodness,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s nothing to what I have seen.’
Linda’s nice daily woman, Mrs Hunt, opened the door to me at Cheyne Walk.
‘She’s very poorly ma’am, can’t you take her back to the country with you? It’s not right for her to be here, in her condition. I hate to see her like this.’
Linda was in her bathroom, being sick. When she came out she said:
‘Don’t think it’s the raid that’s upset me. I like them. I’m in the family way, that’s what it is.’
‘Darling, I thought you weren’t supposed to have another baby.’
‘Oh, doctors! They don’t know anything, they are such fearful idiots. Of course I can, and I’m simply longing for it, this baby won’t be the least like Moira, you’ll see.’
‘I’m going to have one too.’
‘No – how lovely – when?’
‘About the end of May.’
‘Oh, just the same as me.’
‘And Louisa, in March.’
‘Haven’t we been busy? I do call that nice, they can all be Hons together.’
‘Now, Linda, why don’t you come back with me to Alconleigh? Whatever is the sense of stopping here in all this? It can’t be good for you or the baby.’
The Pursuit of Love Page 20