by Francis King
‘‘Well, what was it like?’’ Karen was asking.
‘‘Oh, as I say, cool. Pleasant. There were no bathers, not a soul.… I’ve just thought why I woke up so early this morning,’’ the old woman added.
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘Excitement.’’
‘‘Excitement?’’
‘‘Aren’t you excited? The children coming,’’ Mrs. Bennett explained.
‘‘Oh, the children,’’ Karen said.
‘‘Evidently not.’’
‘‘Now please don’t try to make out that I don’t care for them, Mother. I do. And I’ve been very much wanting them to come. I just don’t get excited over things before they happen, that’s all. Unlike Max. I think his most intense pleasures and pains are in anticipation—or in retrospect.’’
‘‘What’s that?’’ Max asked, looking up.
‘‘Nothing, dear. Mother and I are talking because, unlike you, we haven’t any letters to read. I do envy Max his letters. They give him a status—the assurance that he is necessary in the world.’’
‘‘The children should give you that,’’ Mrs. Bennett said, staring out past her daughter and then suddenly giving a small bobbing nod.
‘‘ ‘Tiny’ Maskell?’’ said Karen.
‘‘Yes, dear.… The servants here all speak such good English that I wonder why he imagines he has to shout in order to be understood. Edith Maskell is showing her mid-riff. It looks odd at breakfast.’’
‘‘May I look round?’’
‘‘Yes, but wait a moment. They’ve guessed that we’re talking about them. People always do.’’
Karen at once swung round in her chair, so that if the Maskells had previously been in any doubt they then must have been sure; covering her face with a hand, she began to giggle. ‘‘She’d never dare in Wimbledon—or did she say Putney? I wonder what Dr. Maskell’s patients would say. And all those shoulder-straps—I can count at least three. What do you suppose they all support?’’
‘‘Oh, nonsense, Karen.’’ Mrs. Bennett laughed and then added. ‘‘If you’re going with them to Siena to-day, aren’t you being a little rude?’’
‘‘You stared first.’’
‘‘Yes, but I didn’t have to turn round to do so.’’
‘‘You’re not going to Siena, are you?’’ Max suddenly asked, lowering his prospectus.
‘‘Yes.… Why not? I told you about it and you said you didn’t want to go. You didn’t seem to have any objections to my going.’’
‘‘But the children,’’ Max said.
‘‘Well?’’
‘‘You’re going to meet them?’’
‘‘The train doesn’t get in until after seven. Of course I’m going to meet them.’’
‘‘It’s a long journey. Suppose the car breaks down. You know how disappointed they’d be if you weren’t on the platform.’’
‘‘Oh, really, Max!’’ Karen laughed, but without any kindness. ‘‘It’s bad enough that we should have to be at the station two hours early when we’re catching trains ourselves. You fritter away so much time just waiting for things.’’
‘‘My own time,’’ Max said. ‘‘You prefer to fritter away other people’s time, by making them wait.’’ He had taken out a gold pencil and was jotting some figures on the back of an envelope; Karen leant over.
‘‘Counting it again?’’ she asked.
‘‘Counting what?’’
‘‘The money. All the money.… I must go and ask the Maskells when they expect to start.’’
‘‘She’s no better,’’ Mrs. Bennett commented, as Karen went away, and added, ‘‘I feel so dirty. I can’t think why.’’
Then she knew the reason. The old man’s feverish scrabbling at her bare arms had given her the sense of being soiled, almost infected.
Chaper Five
MAX‘s Italian secretary, Lena, had large, masculine hands, a great deal of coarse black hair on her bare arms and legs, a figure which Mrs. Bennett had unkindly described as being ‘‘all anyhow’’ and a breathlessly efficient manner. Yet in spite of all these disadvantages Max had always thought her an attractive girl. She smiled readily and when she did so her oval, somewhat podgy face at once acquired charm; the teeth she showed were beautiful, her fine dark eyes glowed with good humour, a dimple appeared in her left cheek.
‘‘That’s enough for you to get on with, isn’t it?’’ Max had been lying full length on his bed, his hands over his eyes, as he dictated letter after letter to the girl.
‘‘If you’d like to go on, don’t worry about me,’’ Lena assured him. ‘‘Today I feel indefatigable.’’
‘‘Yes, but today I feel far from indefatigable,’’ Max replied with a smile. ‘‘It’s sweet of you to offer, though. I really ought to go on, because I know that to-morrow there won’t be a moment, with the children just arrived.’’
‘‘The children! Of course, I’d forgotten! They come this evening,’’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘‘How pleased you must be. And Mrs. Westfield too! I am so glad for you.’’
‘‘Yes, we are pleased,’’ Max said, feeling his words to be somehow limp and tepid after the girl’s.
She was pushing her dictation pad into the battered portfolio which she always took about with her as she said: ‘‘I think you work too hard, Mr. Westfield, considering this is your holiday.’’
‘‘The work has to be done. Besides I came here partly on business.’’
‘‘It must be a great strain, feeling that you are responsible for so much money, for so many people. And yet it must be exciting, very exciting.’’
‘‘Oh, I’ve long ago ceased to think myself important. Six months ago one of my fellow directors was killed in an accident. He had a great opinion of himself, obviously considered himself indispensable. But apart from a certain amount of administrative fuss and bother, the difference his death made to the firm was nil. That made me think.’’
‘‘I believe you’re too modest.’’ She sat looking at him, her portfolio clutched in her hands and her face glowing with the adoration she would never dare to voice. Nor was it necessary that it should be voiced, since Max had long since guessed.
‘‘Well, I think that’s all then, Lena.’’
‘‘Oh—I—I—wonder, Mr. Westfield,’’ she began as she went to the door, ‘‘I—I was wondering if—if I might be allowed to come to the station to encounter your children’s train. I’d keep in the background of course, but I should just like to see them. I’ve heard so much about them,’’ she ran on hurriedly, her face becoming more and more red and a chain of small bubbles appearing on her long upper lip. ‘‘ I feel I know them really well, and of course you needn’t introduce me or anything, it’s just if I can remain there and observe them, that’s all, just observe them. I should consider it indeed an honour,’’ she concluded breathlessly, and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve to run across the tip of her nose.
Max felt touched. ‘‘Of course you can come, the more the merrier. The children will be delighted to have a reception committee for them. I can pick you up in the car, if you like.’’
‘‘You mean I come here?’’
‘‘No, I can pick you up at your house. I have the address somewhere, haven’t I?’’
‘‘At my house?’’ As she echoed the words, a number of questions collided in her mind. What on earth would he think of the shell-chipped block of apartments? Should she ask him in? Introduce her mother? Offer him something to drink? ‘‘Oh, that’s really not necessary,’’ she said.
‘‘But why should you have the long, hot walk here?’’
‘‘I can bicycle.’’
‘‘Even bicycling exhausts one in this sort of weather. No, I can easily pick you up. At about seven o’clock.’’
‘‘I’ll be waiting on the steps so as not to delay you.’’
‘‘Is your mother better?’’ Max asked kindly as Lena prepared to go out.
‘‘She still has pain i
n her abdomen, Mr. Westfield.… If I close the shutters, perhaps you would like to sleep? You look tired,’’ she added tenderly. ‘‘You are Atlas supporting the world.’’
She reminded him of someone and when she was gone he lay for many seconds thinking who it could be. Each time that he was almost on to the connection, his mind seemed to shy away, as if it were afraid, until suddenly with an odd, jolting shock, he at long last knew: Ethel, his first wife.… Oh, they were not really alike, because Ethel had been frail, with mouse-blonde hair, a soft, almost inaudible voice and small hands which perpetually fluttered as she talked. But the smile, yes the smile; and the same douce, almost cloying, tenderness which at one and the same moment made him want to relax with a sigh and to run far away.… For both women his work was a mystic dedication to be spoken about as the wives of politicians speak about their husbands’ careers; whereas for Karen it was merely the source of holidays in expensive hotels, a town and country house, and the children’s education. Never for a moment did Karen flatter him with the thought that what he did could be done by no one else; but for poor Ethel, as now for Lena, that belief had been implicit.
Not that he had ever really enjoyed being Ethel’s hero. Even as a young man, when the taste of adoration is kinder to the palate, he had often wanted to vomit up her sweet, uncritical devotion. And indeed, what had first attracted him to Karen, apart from her pathos, was precisely her refusal to find him impressive, as Ethel had done. Moreover her very scepticism had driven him up and up to heights which he doubted if he would ever have scaled with only Ethel to satisfy. All at once, on marrying Karen, his ambitions had swollen; for, whereas, with Ethel, it had been enough to have made a success out of his uncle’s business in Detroit, to own a six-bedroomed house and a comfortable Ford tourer, and to have a single coloured maid, under Karen’s grudging eye these achievements soon began to seem small. And so the business ceased to be a Detroit business, or even an exclusively American business; and with a strange mingling of joy and fear he had discovered in himself abilities which, because of the atrophying effect of Ethel’s praise, he had never known he possessed. Karen demanded so much, the most ingenious and reckless of deals winning from her no more than a ‘‘Not bad, darling”, that each success only served to make him struggle higher in the determination that one day he would really show her, one day she would really be impressed.… And he had come so much to enjoy the tireless pushing upward, that sometimes the thought of attaining this object would make him feel afraid. After that, what would be left? he would ask himself. Would life seem all at once empty?
Ah, but the climbing so often made him feel giddy; and then, like the traveller in the desert who suddenly thinks nostalgically of tea in his suburban home (soggy toast, fruit cake and damson jam in a crystal dish), Max would think of the six-bedroomed Detroit house, of Ethel padding up and down stairs in slippers to ‘‘peep’’ at the sleeping children, of picnics, visits to the cinema, and holidays in a bungalow on the Cape. Perhaps he didn’t really wish to go back to these things any more than the traveller really wants to return to his suburb; but there were times when an intense, parched longing for them would fill his whole being. To return, only to return!
As if to break from this craving, he got off the bed and thumbed through some of the letters and papers which Lena had arranged on his desk. The man in Vienna was obviously inefficient, perhaps should be sacked. What news from London? Rome—he’d have to go there.… Suddenly, a physical giddiness, the counterpart of the mental unease he felt as he turned the typed papers, made him clutch the side of the desk. Up and up, up and up.… He remembered how at one of his college initiations he had had to climb a pole blindfolded, while below the members of the fraternity had belaboured him with plimsolls, belts and rulers. He had seemed to climb for hours to escape from their encouraging shouts, their laughter, and their sharp, stinging blows; nor had he ever wholly escaped from them, since in the end they had pulled him down and told him that would do.… ‘‘ That will do’’; he had never heard Karen use the phrase.
He wandered into her room and, as if deliberately to humiliate himself, began to pick up and sort the possessions she had strewn everywhere on chairs, floor, and bed. Dirty underclothes lay on clean dresses which the maid had brought the day previously from the laundry; her last night’s evening-dress had been chucked in one corner; on the dressing-table there was a handkerchief stained with lipstick, a confusion of bottles, pieces of soggy cotton-wool and odds and ends of paper, and littered among them, the whole contents of one of her jewel-cases. Suppose the maid had come in and taken something? And if she had, would Karen have ever missed it? Max began to take up the rings, brooches and necklaces and place them one by one in their crocodile-and-gold box. He liked Karen to dress well; and since, in spite of her untidiness, she succeeded in doing so, he never for a moment grudged her the money thus spent. But without being mean, he was naturally careful of money, and it grieved him that she should waste and spoil what he gave her by her indifference to its value. Whereas his own straitened upbringing had made him always ‘‘careful”, on Karen the same sort of upbringing had had the precisely opposite effect; marrying Max, she had decided that she would never again worry about money.
Sorting out the jewellery, Max came on a circular diamond-and-ivory brooch, in an old-fashioned setting, which he stared at for many seconds, holding it in both hands. It was one of the few, perhaps the only really valuable piece of jewellery he had given to Ethel; and when he had become engaged to Karen, it was the first of his many presents to her. The brooch had been his mother’s. Karen had never really cared for it and had talked of having it reset, without ever doing so; but when, the year previously, he had suggested that, since she never wore it, they might give it to Pamela, his daughter, on her sixteenth birthday, Karen at once refused. From then on she had worn the brooch at increasingly long intervals.
Unlike Karen, Ethel had never cared for jewellery, putting on the same few pieces day after day. There was her engagement ring, which he had bought for forty dollars because she wouldn’t let him spend more, her wedding-ring, a cultured pearl necklace, a hideous spray of flowers in jet and pearl—the bequest of an aunt—some diamond ear-studs, and of course this brooch. When she died, bleeding stanchlessly after child-birth, she whispered ‘‘I’ve nothing to leave you, dear. Just my few bits and pieces. And of course the kids.’’ He had told Karen this story and she had at once turned away, making him think she was smiling, because the remark had struck her as sentimental. But then she turned back; her eyes were full of tears, and he felt strangely and pleasantly relieved.
Having put the brooch away among the rest of the jewellery, Max set about collecting the soiled handkerchiefs, scraps of paper and cotton-wool. Ethel had been so tidy, so irritatingly tidy. (‘‘What’s the matter, darling?’’ ‘‘I can’t find my socks. I do wish you’d leave things where I put them.’’ ‘‘ But they’re not lost, darling.’’ And the socks would invariably be produced.) She wore heavily starched white blouses, her skin always smelled vaguely of coal-tar soap, and after each meal she would go into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She kept a Christmas-card list, sent and received.…
But now his whole being went out to the dead woman, as sometimes in the lonely years before he had met her, his whole being would go out to his dead mother. Yet, while he thought of her, it was only half her features that he saw. Strangely, the rest were the girl Lena’s.
Chapter Six
‘‘I hope you don’t feel too uncomfortable after the luxury of your Packard,’’ Mrs. Maskell said.
‘‘No, of course not,’’ Karen assured her.
‘‘They’re plucky little cars, these Hillman Minxes.’’ On the back of ‘‘ Tiny’’ Maskell’s head there was a grey-flannel cricket hat such as Karen could not remember having seen since the days at her mother’s school. His heavy jowl shone after its morning shave like a slab of purple meat and she noticed, glancing at his massive hands on the wheel, that he
wore a broad gold wedding-ring on his fourth finger.
‘‘You must be excited about the children,’’ Mrs. Maskell said, and then, clutching at her hair, ‘‘Could you shut the sunshine roof a little, Tiny?’’
‘‘What’s the matter? Losing the old toupée?’’ His bell-like guffaw jangled back and forth, deadened only by the stifling upholstery. ‘‘Yes, you must be pleased about the brats,’’ he said.
‘‘Have you any children?’’ Karen asked.
‘‘No,’’ Mrs. Maskell answered in a small voice from the back of the car.
Tiny sighed. ‘‘It’s not for want of trying,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s nothing we want more. Still, we have some nephews and nieces, we get a lot of fun out of them. And I always say a doctor has to be a father to his patients.’’
‘‘I love your dress,’’ Mrs. Maskell said. Unlike her husband she did not care to talk about their childlessness and believed him to be insensitive for doing so.
‘‘Do you? I’m so glad. I got it in Paris when we stopped there on our way through.’’
‘‘We hurried through Paris as quick as we could, to avoid the temptations.’’
‘‘What temptations?’’ Tiny asked jocularly, but Mrs. Maskell’s voice surmounted this obstacle, merely by rising a little, as the car was at that moment surmounting the bumps in the road:
‘‘Fifty pounds is so little,’’ she said. ‘‘One feels so ashamed, having to niggle and scrape all the time. It can’t be good for British prestige.’’ Plumply middle-aged, she had a fresh complexion, a round, indeterminate face and a tendency to wear the sort of clothes and hair-styles which she saw in fashion magazines on girls of half her age. At present, as she leant forward, the white flesh of her bare mid-riff was creased into three rolls. ‘‘Someone thumbing for a lift,’’ she said, as out of the dust before them a khaki-clad figure with a rucksack on his back could be seen with raised arm. ‘‘No, don’t stop,’’ she told Tiny who had begun to slow down. ‘‘ We’re cramped enough here already, what with the picnic basket and those two empty Chianti bottles I keep telling you to throw away.’’