Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

  I am still describing the house to Betty, and now I say, as the twilight dulls and we rise reluctantly from the bench, ‘It wasn’t a house from the best period. The hall was rather narrow and the moulding wasn’t good. But it was pleasant. It was one of those pleasant houses.’

  ‘Peter told us about it.’

  I know by her tone that he has disparaged it. ‘It wasn’t to Peter’s taste,’ I say. ‘He said it had a funny smell. And he was right, you know. We used to notice it ourselves whenever we came back from the country. But then we got used to it all over again, and forgot all about it. I think it came from the cellar. Fred used to keep his wine there, but Hilda and Liza and I wouldn’t go near the place, because of the rats.’

  ‘Rats! Not really! Heavens, Nora, no wonder your friends are so happy to be out of it.’

  ‘They’re happy to have got a cheap flat.’

  But the apparent happiness of Hilda and Liza is, in fact, what makes me read their letters with such care after Betty goes. I read Hilda’s first, alert for the word, the note, by which she might betray herself. I don’t find it, and conclude that she is as cheerful as she sounds. I am not so certain about Liza, whose cheerfulness, on examination, gives a slightly wild, shrugging effect. She is less robust and adaptable than Hilda, and besides, of the three of us, she suffered most from the break because Fred had been for her, for so long, a kind of Lewie. When her husband was still alive, Fred was her neighbour in Surrey. His grandmother, who had brought him up, had died by that time, but not before she had implanted in Fred a fear that every woman who said a friendly word to him was ‘after him’. In consequence, all his friends were young men or old women. Liza was a special case. She was a neighbour, she was very thin, her happy marriage was a safeguard, and of course, she was ‘simpatica’. Even so, he would have his jumpy spells when alone with her, and Liza said she ought to have known better than to say what she did. Her husband had begun a long period at home, with a fractured knee, just as Liza had begun to redecorate the house, and one day she said to Fred, ‘Oh, the things I shall do when I get rid of Theo!’

  ‘I wish you could have seen him,’ she would tell us. ‘He gave a great equine quiver and ran away and hid himself for a month. No, really, a whole month. All I ever saw of him all that time was his hat gliding at great speed along the top of the hedge. I think he bought roller skates. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go and knock at his door. He would have run and hidden under a bed. And as for writing a little note! No, I could only do it in words, face to face. I almost caught him a number of times in the village, but he always saw me coming and managed to escape. But at last I caught him in the doorway of a shop. It was a narrow doorway, a real ambush. He raised his hat and tried to dodge past me, but I caught his sleeve, and that made him stop, because there were people around who knew us both. So he stopped, and I said, ‘Oh, you silly man. All I meant was that I was waiting for Theo to go back to work, so that I could get on with the house.’

  Very gradually, they became friends again, though Liza swore he never quite got over it. ‘It’s no good. He suspects me to this day.’

  Most of this she would say in his presence, and sometimes, when we were all together, and a silence had fallen, she would look at him and say, very quietly, ‘Look out, Fred.’ And Fred would hiss and duck his head and splutter with laughter. ‘That’s all very well,’ he would say, ‘but I don’t trust any of you. Just as well there are three of you. Safety in numbers.’

  None of us foresaw that this farcical mistrust would end by wrecking our association. One day Fred rubbed his chin and frowned.

  ‘I don’t trust that Australian,’ he said.

  We all looked at him. ‘What Australian?’ asked Hilda.

  But Fred was still rubbing his chin. ‘And that nephew of hers, that Peter Chiddy, the day he came here he stole two of my books.’

  He went out of the room. We all looked at each other. ‘What do you make of that?’ asked Hilda in a hushed voice.

  Liza bent her head and set her fingertips on her forehead. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  The next day Fred accused the milkman of cheating, and attacked him with his stick. The man was not hurt, and nothing came of it, but through the house worry and trepidation spread. For three days we saw nothing of him, though we could hear him moving about in his flat on the ground floor. On the third day he came into Liza’s sitting room without knocking. We were all there. He looked and sounded calm and businesslike.

  ‘Someone has been drinking my burgundy,’ he said. ‘The stuff closest to the door. I know who it was. It was that Australian.’

  ‘Oh, Fred dear,’ said Liza, ‘don’t be silly.’

  ‘I think you had better keep quiet, Liza. We all know what you’re after.’

  In nervous response to this old joke, Hilda laughed. Fred went wild.

  ‘Bloody women!’ he shouted. ‘With your great bloody tits!’

  We all sat perfectly still. Fred went out, muttering and tumbling over his feet. ‘Did anyone see where I put my spectacles?’ asked Liza in a dazed voice, and Hilda said briskly, ‘Yes, over there by the clock.’

  Fred did not return to the house that night, nor the next.

  ‘Hadn’t we better get in touch with his sister?’ I asked.

  ‘I daren’t,’ said Liza. ‘You know how he hates her.’

  ‘Hers are bigger than any of ours,’ said Hilda.

  ‘Oh, Hilda,’ said Liza sadly.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Hilda.

  ‘I think we should ring Mr Pope,’ said Liza.

  Mr Pope was Fred’s lawyer. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know where he is. You will hear in due course.’

  ‘You see?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Liza, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Due course,’ said Hilda. ‘I never know what that means.’

  I reminded them that Fred had gone away without notice the year before. ‘And he was only in Cornwall.’

  But Hilda said, ‘What will happen if he has gone mad and violent?’

  ‘He will have to be put away,’ said Liza.

  ‘No, I mean,’ said Hilda, ‘what will happen to us?’

  None of us wanted to think about it. The lease of the house was Fred’s, and in spite of rises in costs, our rents had not changed since we had moved in ten years before, at a time when all our incomes had begun to wither. Fred had been our friend and benefactor, and in our worry for him we were mortified by our worry for ourselves.

  At last his sister rang. Fred had been arrested for belabouring a bus conductor and was now in a mental hospital. A few days later she appeared at number six.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, no one can see him. He wouldn’t know you, in any case. He’s in a very good place, getting the best possible care, but they don’t hold out any hope of recovery. Not this time. It’s the place he went to last May.’

  ‘But last May he went to Cornwall.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  She had been given legal power to act for him. She remarked that our arrangement with him seemed to have been very personal and casual. ‘Mr Pope says no records were kept. What exactly were you paying him?’

  She nodded when we told her. ‘That’s what Fred told Mr Pope, but I simply couldn’t believe it. Well, I’m very sorry, but that’s all over now. This house must be made to pay its way. Fred’s expenses are enormous.’

  None of us could even begin to pay the rents she had decided on.

  ‘I’m very sorry, but this is the welfare state, after all. We taxpayers can hardly be expected to pay individually as well.’

  None of us could refute this argument.

  ‘And I know you would not want to deprive Fred of the best possible care.’

  So it was necessary to look at once for a flat.

  ‘We will need three bedrooms,’ said Liza.

  ‘Of course,’ said Hilda. ‘But we won’t be silly, and look in Kensington.’

  ‘There are parts of Wes
t Kensington,’ said Liza vaguely.

  ‘Maida Vale used to be cheap,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think it is now,’ said Hilda. ‘But there was a part of South Hampstead, over near Kilburn.’

  We knew, of course, that London had changed. Fred, who went out more often than any of us, had come home sometimes and said, ‘We are positively surrounded by tatt and chaos, but so far, so far, we’re safe here.’ And it was the safety of our sanctuary that had prevented us from feeling the change, instead of merely knowing of it. We were still able to believe that ‘London is made up of villages. Here we all live in our own little village.’ But when we went out into London, without our sanctuary at our backs, when we went out into London and exposed our needs to it, we realized that all those villages were now meshed by the flow of traffic into one huge hard city, whose constant movement confused us, and whose noise beat upon our brains.

  And of course we knew, too, that rents had gone up. But our rents had not gone up. Again, our knowledge had not been personal. And impersonal knowledge has not much cutting edge.

  We sat in cafés, our slipped shoes under the table.

  ‘Imagine asking fifty for that grisly place,’ I said.

  ‘I bet Crippen lived there,’ said Hilda. ‘Come to think of it, wasn’t there a plaque?’

  ‘I think there was,’ I said, ‘But even so, it was better than that one at sixty.’

  Liza stirred her tea without a smile. ‘I’m sick of the whole thing.’

  When we got home on the third day, we found Fred’s sister in the hall, with a man.

  ‘I’m very sorry to intrude, but Mr Parker must see the house if he’s to sell the lease. Have you found anything yet?’

  We said we hadn’t.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to hurry you. A week’s notice is the usual thing, but I’m sure Fred would want you to have a fortnight. That’s eleven more days, isn’t it? There was a cat in here, by the way. I put him out of the back door.’

  ‘Her,’ said Hilda.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘She’s a female.’

  ‘Oh, is she? Well, you’ll find her out in the square. Perhaps you would like to wait there, too, until Mr Parker has looked at the house.’

  In the square we sat on a bench facing the house. Belle sat sedately at our feet.

  ‘We could do with two bedrooms,’ I said, ‘if one of us used the sitting room as a bedroom.’

  ‘And the other two walked through it to get to the kitchen,’ said Liza.

  ‘It would depend on the layout,’ I agreed.

  ‘And you wouldn’t get it for less than forty,’ said Hilda.

  ‘I can’t go on with this,’ said Liza quietly.

  Hilda and I pretended not to hear. We all watched as Fred’s sister and Mr Parker, at a downstairs window, examined the marks of Belle’s claws on the sill.

  ‘There’s my sister in Coventry,’ said Hilda.

  We had already heard about Hilda’s sister in Coventry. A few years ago she and her husband had subdivided their house. A few weeks ago they had lost their tenants.

  ‘But we’ve decided not to leave London,’ I said.

  ‘What does it matter if we do?’ said Liza.

  She had bent to loosen her shoelaces, to ease her swollen feet. Hilda and I exchanged glances across her back.

  ‘Well, nowadays it does seem,’ said Hilda carefully, ‘that the charm of London depends on how much money one has.’

  ‘Let us try London for one last day,’ I said.

  ‘Do you mind if I don’t come?’ said Liza.

  Hilda and I set out early next morning. Released from the weight of Liza’s apathy, we sprang away confident and even gay. The day was windy and slightly rainy. ‘Refreshing,’ we said, putting up our umbrellas. When the rain increased we made no comment on it, nor on our wet shoes and stockings, but as we stood waiting for the bus to take us to our third flat, we stopped speaking and anxiously craned our heads out of the queue. While walking along strange streets, following directions given us, we spoke only to ask each other how much further, or could we possibly have missed the turning.

  At about three o’clock Hilda said, ‘I must go to the loo.’

  It was now raining heavily. ‘Can’t you wait till we get to this flat?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ She showed me her road guide. ‘Look, it’s way up there.’

  ‘Then we’ll go to the nearest underground.’

  Willesden Green was the nearest, though it took us away from our destination. As Hilda was washing her hands, I consulted a road map and a map of the underground.

  ‘Instead of retracing our steps in this rain, we could go by underground to North Wembley.’

  She came and looked over my shoulder. ‘We would have to change at Baker Street, and from North Wembley it’s still a fair walk.’

  ‘We could get a cab.’

  ‘A cab?’

  ‘Just this once.’

  ‘A cab! Yes, let’s do that. Let’s get a cab from here to number six.’

  What a relief it was to give in, to become passive, simply to accept whatever might happen. That first stage of our passivity was not sad like Liza’s, but childish and gay. In the taxi we chatted and laughed like schoolgirls.

  It was fine next day when we all went to Coventry. Hilda’s sister and brother-in-law stood together in the doorway and greeted us as we crossed the strip of garden that separated their neat gabled house from the street. Together they conducted us over the empty first floor.

  ‘There are only two bedrooms, but the big one could be partitioned off down the middle.’

  ‘Of course it could,’ said Hilda.

  ‘Yes,’ said Liza.

  I said nothing. From the window I could see the rectilinear pattern made by straight streets and a hundred neat roofs. Iron-grey and terracotta. Who would have thought that at my age I could feel it again—the old oppression, the breast breaker?

  ‘And we’ve got the colour television downstairs. Haven’t we, Tom? And we’re always glad of company. And there’s a fair-sized garden at the back you can have the run of. We’re letting the place cheap because after the last lot we had we’ve got to know who we’re getting. There’s only one thing. No cats. Tom’s allergic.’

  Tom took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

  We conferred in the train on the way up to London. ‘It’s cheap,’ said Hilda. ‘It’s not poky. And it’s really not far from London. We could go up quite often. What do you think, Liza?’

  Liza’s little headshake was not in rejection, but in unwillingness to be aroused from her inertia. ‘I just want to get it over.’

  Hilda looked at me. ‘Nora?’

  ‘It would mean getting a new owner for Belle.’

  ‘That will be easy. Belle’s so charming. We could manage very well, with the rent cut three ways.’

  ‘Could you still manage if you cut it two ways?’

  ‘For two I’m sure she would make it less. Why?’

  Liza had shut her eyes. ‘Because Nora’s going back to Australia,’ she said.

  ‘If only we had more time,’ I said.

  That night, Fred’s sister rang again, ‘It isn’t that I want to hurry you …’

  Again we conferred. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Hilda, ‘that’s it. I’m sick of the whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t care where we go,’ said Liza, ‘as long as we get out of here.’

  My heart gave an unexpected leap. ‘I’ve decided to go back,’ I said. ‘I will sell all my furniture, my china and glass, even my Persian rug. I’ll go back with two suitcases of clothes, and my books can follow me by ship.’

  Energy infused me as I spoke. Many years before I had come to London because I was entranced by the knowledge that nobody could stop me. Did I return because I was in need of the energy generated by an equally drastic decision? Hilda and Liza looked at me for a while in silence.

  ‘You will be warm, anyway,’ said Hild
a then.

  ‘And safe,’ said Liza.

  In spring Belle usually spent much time in the square, her doings watched and commented on by us from our windows. But that last week, as we packed, she spent her days pacing from room to room. If one of us bent and extended a hand, she would approach, but would then turn aside just short of it and rub her head, from cheek to cranium, against a table leg, or she would caress a door frame with her flank. Nobody wanted her. We advertised, we canvassed acquaintances, we knocked on all the doors in the square, and even on doors in other squares, and asked if anyone would take a cat. We came home, shaking our heads, while Belle, in the hall, rubbed her head repeatedly against the umbrella stand.

  When she was given to us she was already spayed, so no unpleasant decisions had had to be made. It was Liza who voiced this one.

  ‘She will have to be put down.’

  ‘You sound as if you don’t care,’ said Hilda.

  Liza flared suddenly, shockingly, into life. ‘I have protested at too many hard fates. I can protest no more.’ Though her eyes were dry and angry, her voice was hoarse as if from weeping. ‘No more!’

  As soon as Hilda and I were alone, I said, ‘If anything happens to impede these plans, Liza will crack up.’

  ‘Yes. It’s Liza or Belle. But God,’ said Hilda, ‘I can still protest.’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. ‘But,’ she said then, ‘that’s all I can do.’

  The vet came twice with a cage, but neither time could Belle be found. ‘I’ll have to leave it with you ladies,’ he said. ‘You put her in, and I’ll collect it.’ Hilda and I meant to put her in together, but on the appointed day, the vet rang to postpone his call, so that it was I, the last to leave the house, who put her in the cage.

  Neither Hilda nor Liza mentioned Belle in her letter. They are being ‘sensible’ about it. I shall be equally ‘sensible’ and not mention her when I reply.