by Ursula Bloom
The Minister was in a bad mood, for if there was one thing he hated it was fish, and he had to eat it almost every day of his life.
The Minister was already feeling thoroughly annoyed when he ran into Mrs. Bunce, who looked upon him as a ministering angel.
‘You are the very man I wanted to see,’ said Mrs. Bunce.
The Minister did not warm; it wasn’t his lucky day. Life was full of Mrs. Bunces in the parish, and most of them had some bee in their bonnets which he could never hope to escape. ‘Oh yes?’ said he, he hoped pleasantly.
She said, ‘It’s about poor Miss Marvin,’ and dropped her voice into a theatrical whisper.
‘Is anything the matter with Miss Marvin?’
‘I don’t know, but she’s behaving queerly, oh so very queerly. Ever since she won that money in the pools, I don’t hold with pools, I think they’re gambling myself, but there you are ‒ well, ever since then, she has been very queer indeed.’
‘Oh!’ said the Minister. Officially he did not hold with the pools himself, and of course they were undoubtedly gambling, but at the same time he would have given a lot to win a hundred pounds out of them, and buy a few of the things that the manse most wanted. Oxtails would be one of them! ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘She has got a lot of pamphlets in her room,’ said Mrs. Bunce, ‘pamphlets for funny places. Nothing nice like Blackpool or Morecambe, but places abroad.’ She dropped her voice still lower. ‘Pompey and some of those nasty Italian places.’ She looked at him in horror.
‘Oh!’ said the Minister. At that moment he vividly remembered Italy. He remembered the war when he had landed with the B.E.F. in Italy, ministering to the sick and helping the alarmed. He was recalling one evening in a southern Italian village where the people were gathering the grapes, and singing as they plucked the fruit. There had been an attractive girl called Maria; she had dark lustrous eyes, and a gathered bodice which revealed a good deal more than it hid. She sang like a bird, and danced with those delightfully bare feet of hers. She had taken his hand and had made him dance too. It had been just one of those things, those remote wartime happinesses that come for a moment into the lives of men who serve. Maria had been so very different from his wife, who he knew was knitting balaclava helmets at home, and he could never have believed that dark-eyed enchantment could rouse such intense passion within him. She was adorable. She was entirely bad, he realised, a very naughty girl with a captivating veneer on her naughtiness. Her little soft hands had no lines across them, they were not beset with the brown spots of accruing years which marked his wife’s hands like the inside of a cowslip blossom, they were charmingly smooth, and so warm. Her lips were warm too, but he found that out later when they had tasted the wine. His teetotal youth had not equipped him for this sort of intoxicating adventure, and after a little while he honestly did not know what was happening to him.
He strove to forget that romance, but now his sympathies were with Miss Marvin, and if he could have got to one of those ‘nasty Italian places’ it would have been like a tonic far better than anything the doctors could prescribe.
‘Oh dear!’ he said. That was his official voice. One had to be official at Brestonbury because the place was full of old cats with scurrilously suspicious minds.
‘Awful, isn’t it?’ said Mrs. Bunce, ‘her age, of course. I think that someone should speak to her.’
‘Oh dear! Why? It’s her own life, and her own money.’
Mrs. Bunce scowled, lowering her voice still more. ‘That may be, but at the same time she ought not to be allowed to go mad. She is travelling out there in a couchette …’ there was a long pause, and then ‘with others!’
‘Oh dear!’ said the Minister. He wasn’t at all sure what a couchette was. It sounded suggestive. ‘How do you know?’ he enquired.
That was strategic. Mrs. Bunce realised in her heart that she ought not to know; she had done something quite wrong in reading the letter, but now she had got this far she wasn’t going back. She said, ‘I was dusting, and it was lying on her table. Anyone could have seen.’
‘Don’t tell me that you read her letters?’
Mrs. Bunce thought that uncalled-for! She had not seen it coming. ‘Of course I never read her letters; but no one could have missed this. It was there for all the world to see. Just lying there quite plainly.’
She knew that none of this sounded convincing, but she had been so full of what she now called ‘the cause’, so horrified at the thought of a couchette, that she had not been prepared for the Minister’s attitude; she had looked upon herself as behaving very properly in drawing the Minister’s attention to what in her eyes was a misbehaviour.
‘But,’ said he coldly, ‘about the couchette? That could not have been obvious without reading the letter could it?’ He did not want to be dragged into a row; in recent years congregations had dropped considerably. He desired to do nothing whatsoever to lessen the congregation, and if he had complied with the suggestion of speaking to Miss Marvin, he would undoubtedly lose her, and in all probability Mrs. Bunce as well.
She said, ‘I turn to you to ask you to help me, and you’re accusing me of having done something wrong. Me, who wouldn’t touch anything wrong! I’ve never wanted to stick my nose in where it wasn’t wanted, and just because I try to do my duty, you turn on me and say it’s my fault! When I was a girl the chapel was the chapel and it tried to help people. This isn’t helping.’
The Minister mopped his brow and he clutched the rush basket quite savagely. If he was kept waiting here much longer, sprats would be the only fish left, and he couldn’t bear the thought. He tried propitiation; he would certainly call round, and try to learn what plans Miss Marvin was making and dissuade her from doing anything foolish.
He got away in the end, not entirely satisfactorily, because he realised that Mrs. Bunce was very cross with him, as perhaps was only to be expected.
He went as fast as his legs would carry him to the fish shop, but now they had only fresh herrings, a few old kippers in battered brown suits, and a cartload of sprats silvery and shining, showered in a great sparkling heap on the very centre of the slab. He went home with fresh herrings, and when he got back found that in spite of what she had previously said, his wife would have preferred sprats!
‘Aren’t women awful?’ he thought.
Tonight he would have to go round to see Miss Marvin. ‘I can’t take it,’ the Minister told himself.
Miss Marvin began to think about the holiday, and she decided that probably it would end in a lot of trouble. She wouldn’t come back in the same gay mood in which she started. She wouldn’t have the right clothes to wear out there in the heat, and couldn’t afford fresh ones. Whatever had she been thinking of? It wasn’t just a case of affording tickets and hotel expenses, there was very much more to it.
When she had read that letter and had come to the part about an overnight journey in a sleeper or a couchette, she had become nervously alarmed. They sounded really rather dreadful, more particularly the couchette. It wasn’t at all a nice idea to be couchetting with French men and women, and whatever else happened, Mr. Swinnerton must arrange something more suitable for her.
She ate her school dinner, which was cold salt beef, and ending with a rice pudding that had obviously been made in a concrete mixing machine. It was the afternoon for history, all of which was very dull indeed, so that she almost dozed off to sleep during the lesson, whilst uninterested little girls coped with Plantagenet political views.
When Miss Marvin started for home just after half past four, she noticed that the spring evening was already growing lighter; there was a disturbing primrose in the sky, and the trees were fast thickening. A gay little robin was singing on a flowering currant in somebody’s front garden, and quite soon the rosy blossom would be dangling on the currant. England could be so very pleasant in the spring, it would be a shame to miss it by going to a place that was merely a name to her, and anyway Cap Rabat was a very
funny name to have! She had decided to cancel the whole thing. It had been one of those silly dreams that come occasionally into quiet lives, and it should be banished as being a silly dream, and there must be no nonsense about it.
As she opened the door she was aware that Mrs. Bunce had been waiting, for Mrs. Bunce was one of those women who can never conceal their feelings, and she had been lingering behind the bead curtain hung half way down the passage to divide front sitting-room from back kitchen. The bead curtain tinkled ominously; it always tinkled in the wind when the door opened, but that was one of those tinkles that everybody knew, particularly Miss Marvin. This tinkle was louder and much more disturbed, so that she called quickly, ‘Mrs. Bunce?’ aware that her return had been anticipated, and not knowing why.
‘Your tea’s ready, and waiting,’ said Mrs. Bunce, ‘and the Minister is upstairs.’
‘What is he doing there?’ asked Miss Marvin, dismayed. She always liked to get home and have a wash, as her hands were covered with ink and school grime and made her feel dreadfully dirty. She wanted to change her shoes, for these brogues hurt at the end of the day, and she kept a pair of old bedroom slippers that were very pleasant to wear in the evening. If the Minister was waiting, the room being a bed-sitter, she would not be able to change her shoes. Spring played havoc with the corns!
‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘whatever does he want?’
‘I don’t know,’ lied Mrs. Bunce. Of course she knew! Her eyes revealed it.
‘She’s been up to no good,’ thought Miss Marvin as she mounted the stairs, a little more slowly than usual, for she felt vaguely irritated. What with February and the corn and the brogues that she couldn’t change and the hands that she couldn’t wash, she was perturbed.
The Minister was sitting in the one comfortable chair, which meant that she must take the plain high-backed one that was left over; he looked at her with the virtuous expression of a choirboy who has been caught making handkerchief rabbits in chapel, and intends to swear that he didn’t do it.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
She smiled wanly. ‘Something you want?’ she enquired.
‘No, no, nothing I want,’ he lied, but not with proficiency. ‘I just happened to be passing and came in to enquire if you had made any plans for the Easter holiday?’
She realised instantly that he had gathered what was afoot. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Oh, I just thought …’ he began.
She looked dubiously at him, and her irritation rebelled. ‘What have you and Mrs. Bunce been up to?’ she asked peevishly. ‘Has she been reading my letters?’
At that very moment there was the sound of a stir on the landing beyond the door. Mrs. Bunce, who was now disturbed that she had done the wrong thing, and did not want to be let in for further complications, had followed Miss Marvin up and had bent down to spy through the keyhole; she did not usually stoop to such behaviour, and therefore was not properly trained in the method. She stuck. Rising too suddenly, her starched apron crackled like the sound of a train coming bouncing out of a tunnel. Miss Marvin walked across the floor and opened the door swiftly. There was Mrs. Bunce, actually disclosed in the act of rising.
‘So you listen at doors as well?’ said Miss Marvin.
She had never known that she had this irritation in her.
The Minister sat there and said ‘tst tst’ to himself in dismay as he licked his new upper set, wishing that it didn’t hiss at him like a serpent when he said ‘tst tst’. Of course he should never have come here; if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had told his wife about it and she had insisted that it was his duty to do something, he would have let the affair pass. Women spurred a man on to have a row, it was always the women who were the cause of most of the trouble in this world.
Miss Marvin said, ‘I shall leave this room at the end of the week.’ After six years it would be an upheaval, but she was so sick of ‘God is Love’ in forget-me-nots that from that point of view alone she would be glad.
‘I was only doing up my shoes,’ pretended Mrs. Bunce, ‘you don’t think I was listening, do you?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Miss Marvin.
The Minister came to. ‘Ladies, ladies!’ he wailed, ‘I implore you not to quarrel, because it is never right. Nobody is at fault.’
Miss Marvin wasn’t having this. ‘I suggest that you keep out of this,’ she said. ‘Why did you come here in the first place?’
‘I understood that you were going away,’ he said somewhat reluctantly, ‘that you were taking a holiday or something?’
‘You mean that Mrs. Bunce told you?’
He said nothing, for at this moment the upper set, which had been hissing like mad, had now made a high jump that was horrifying. ‘Heavens!’ he thought as he spluttered and dived for a handkerchief with which he could pretend to be blowing his nose.
Mrs. Bunce said, ‘No, I never did anything of the sort. Now he’s putting it on to me because I said that the chapel was going down.’
Miss Marvin, however, was not giving up. ‘You read my letter from the travel agency and you told him,’ she said. ‘How dare you!’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have left it about. It was there for anyone to read.’
‘I leave on Saturday,’ said Miss Marvin.
The Minister rose considerably confused; he had got the upper set into place again, but was not sure that it would stay there. He was petrified at what was happening. With as much dignity as he could command he said, ‘I will return later; this is not the time to talk. I hate to see women lose their tempers, and am most surprised, at what is going on here. I will return later.’
‘You needn’t come back,’ said Miss Marvin.
He would have replied in the way that she deserved, but the teeth did another high jump leaving him speechless. He could only blunder past Mrs. Bunce down the stairs and go out into the street. He was furious.
Miss Marvin turned on her. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’ll have my tea, and then I shall go out and find other rooms.’
‘You couldn’t leave me?’
‘Could I not? I leave on Saturday.’
Mrs. Bunce was disturbed. ‘But you’ve been here six years; you can’t go out like this!’
‘Yes, I can. I had no idea what sort of woman you were, and I refuse to stay with one who reads private letters and listens at doors. Bring me my tea at once,’ and she slammed the door on fat Mrs. Bunce.
From the inside she tried to twist a paper pellet into the keyhole, but failed, only succeeding in blocking the key so that she could no longer lock the door, which was maddening. Whilst she was trying unsuccessfully to get the pellet out again with a hairpin, the tea arrived. Mrs. Bunce snorted when she saw what was happening.
‘I’ll trouble you not to put things into my keyholes,’ she said; ‘if you bust them up, then I shall charge you for them,’ and going out slammed the door hard.
The tea was cold. The muffins, once reputed to be hot and buttered, were tepid, and the butter was sparse. Staying here till Saturday would be a ghastly ordeal. Miss Marvin did not complain about the tea because she daren’t; she finished what she could, and then went out into the chilly street to settle her future. The primrose had faded in the west, and now the night was raw and moist with the promise of rain. Cap Rabat would be a very different proposition, and she had now decided that whatever happened or whatever anybody said, she intended to go to Cap Rabat.
She went into the news vendor’s at the corner of the road, where sometimes little advertisements on rather grubby postcards were pinned up on a board. Going inside, she explained what had occurred, and her urgent need.
‘Oh,’ said the news vendor, ‘but I thought you were going away to Italy or somewhere abroad?’
Miss Marvin moistened the corners of her mauve mouth with a pale tongue. So the news had travelled round! ‘I’m spending Easter in the south of France,’ she said, ‘but I want to change my present rooms.’
‘You aren’t leav
ing Mrs. Bunce?’ he asked. ‘Well, upon my sam!’
‘Mrs. Bunce has been reading my letters, and listening at my door, and I won’t have it,’ said Miss Marvin with pious indignation. ‘What’s more, she fetched the Minister in to stop my visiting France, and I won’t have that either. I am a responsible person and can go where I like. Is there anybody wanting a quiet lodger? for I am quiet. I want a bed-sitter with food included, and it must be reasonable.’ The news vendor was sorry for her. He had never liked Old Chatterbunce, as he had nicknamed Mrs. Bunce, and if he could help her by putting a spanner in her works, he would be only too pleased to do so. Digs were uncommonly hard to find, as he knew, and undoubtedly Old Chatterbunce was sitting back and chewing her fat and saying to herself ‘She-may-want-to-go-but-she-won’t-find-a-place’. It so happened that there was a place just round the corner. It was a smaller room than any Mrs. Bunce had, the news vendor said, but the people were nice. Mr. Haines was a local grocer who was also an ardent Salvationist, calling everyone ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’; he had married a lassie who had tapped a tambourine under his nose at a revivalist meeting and had smiled pleasantly. Romance had sprung from that ecstatic moment, and later he had married her. Mrs. Haines was a dear; she had travelled abroad in her twenties, learning a lot about cooking, which interested her; she wasn’t north country, and although her Yorkshire pudding was a disgrace (and every woman in Brestonbury was quick to drive that fact home), what she could do with a chop, an egg, a sauce, or a little bit of fish, was wonderful.
The Haineses had told the news vendor that they would prefer a Salvationist lodger, which was only natural, but it seemed to him that Miss Marvin appeared to be on the rocky path leading to a quarrel with the Minister, and that a hint might be dropped to the Haineses that before long they could undoubtedly reform her, and bring her into the enthusiastic circle of Blood and Fire.
‘I think I could work something. Half a tick,’ he said.
She had to mind the shop for him while he ‘nipped round the corner’. She sold three ‘Evening News’, and a girl came in for a box of matches, and bought birthday cards as well. A young man with reindeer romping on a virulent knitted jumper, bought ten cigarettes, and called her ‘Ducks’, to which she strongly objected but daren’t say a thing.