The Winds Of Heaven
Page 13
"Don't be such a snob, Simon," Louise said tartly, coming into the room. "I never heard of a child talking like that."
'Well, you hear now," Simon said rudely. He was tired, too. Louise did not like to reprimand him with Miriam in the room. She wished that Miriam would do it herself.
Miriam dried her hands and tipped hand lotion into them. "I didn't know you were going to see your car salesman friend, Mother."
"Beds," interrupted Ellen laconically.
"I thought you were going to the cinema. Why didn't you tell me?"
"You mean, you wouldn't have let Ellen come," Louise said wearily, sitting down on a chair by the wall. How nice it would be to come home to a peaceful welcome, instead of to the cross-examinations that invariably greeted anyone who had been away from the house for a few hours.
"If you want to know/' she said, feeling like having a quarrel with someone, and wishing that the children were not here so that she could have it, "I didn't tell you because I knew you'd scoff."
"I? Scoff?" Miriam raised her symmetrical russet eyebrows. "How ridiculous. Why should I scoff? I think it's delightful that you've made a new friend. Why don't you ask him down here sometime?"
"Oh, no. That wouldn't do. I mean, I don't think he'd like it really."
"You mean we'd bore him."
"Of course not. Don't try and misunderstand me. I mean he's a bit shy."
"Oh, Granny, he's not!" Ellen, like the other children, had been following the conversation closely. "He wasn't a bit shy with us at lunch. Even when I took my plate out, he didn't mind. Oh, Lord"—she clapped a hand to her mouth—"I shouldn't have said that/'
'Where is it now?" Miriam removed the hand and looked at Ellen's teeth.
"In my bag," Louise said. "It hurts her, Miriam."
"You know she has to wear it. How do you think I'm going to like taking about a daughter with protruding teeth when she grows up? Mother, I wish you wouldn't always give in to the children. It makes it so difficult for me."
The quarreling impulse had died in Louise. Seeing how small and downcast she looked, Ellen changed the subject. "Mummy, can I have the hammer to hang a picture up in my room after supper? I bought it in London with that half crown you gave me."
"I gave you that to buy a book with," Miriam said. "Now
why on earth go and buy a picture? Where did you get it, anyway?"
"In the Portobello Road market. Mr. Disher took us there/*
"What an extraordinary way to spend the afternoon/' Miriam said distantly.
"It wasn't/' Louise said. "It was wonderful. They had some lovely things. I bought you this little lustre jug." Perhaps this was not the right time to offer it, with Miriam on edge; but she could not sit holding it in her lap any longer. "I thought the woman on it looked rather like you/'
Miriam took the jug, and thanked her graciously, knowing that it must have cost more than her mother could afford.
"The Sailors Farewell It is a little like me, too." But the man with the chubby cheeks and the boyish stance was nothing like Colin; and she had not drooped like that when she said good-bye to him before he joined his ship and sailed out of her life. She had stood by the window with her head up, and pretended to believe, as he did, that it was all for the best.
She read the verse on the little jug. Why had she been thinking of Colin all day today? And now this . . . the pain of separation, mingles Bitter with the Sweet. Bittersweet. That had been one of Colin's words when he was being synthetically romantic, as he was that last evening, when Miriam had waited to cry until he had shut the front door and run too briskly down the steps.
"Mummy, can't you hear me?" Ellen was standing behind her. "I'm asking you, can I have the hammer to hang my picture?"
Miriam shook away the dead and useless past. "You know you're not allowed to knock nails in those walls," she said impatiently. "They crumble. Don't keep on about it r Ellen. I've said no/'
After supper, Ellen went to her room to look at the picture, but Judy was sent up to bed almost at once, and Ellen quickly pushed the picture back into the drawer. She went to bed
herself when Judy was asleep, and waited in the dark until the house was still before she took the picture out again. She must have dozed off while she was waiting. The atmosphere of the house felt as if it was very late and the grown-ups had all gone to bed.
She took the picture into hed with her, and shone her flashlight on it, traveling the beam over each tragic detail. How sad it was! It wasn't really the man who was dying, but Granny must be protected from too intense a grief. Ellen's eyes grew pleas-urably moist. She turned on the light the better to indulge her emotions.
Judy sat up suddenly, her red-gold hair in a rumpled cloud above her flushed face. "What are you doing, Elly? What's the matter? Is there a fire?"
Judy was a child who suffered from night terrors, which was why she shared a room with Ellen. She had delusions that she smelled burning, and that there was a cellar full of spikes on to which her bed would drop through the floor, although she knew that there was nothing below the room but the familiar kitchen; and Ellen was constantly having to crawl under her bed to look for bombs or snakes.
"It's nothing," Ellen said. "Go to sleep."
"I want to see. Let me see." Judy ran barefoot across the floor in her flowered nightdress, and jumped on top of Ellen's legs. Resignedly Ellen turned the picture towards her. Judy took a long look, and then abrupdy threw back her head and screamed.
She continued to scream uncontrollably, while Ellen tried to muffle her with a pillow. In no time at all, the room was full of grown-ups, all fully dressed, to Ellen's surprise, for what seemed to her like the still watches of the night was only ten o'clock.
Simon arrived, too, holding up his pyjamas, and Judy, catching her breath for a moment to see what kind of an audience she had, continued to scream and sob more hysterically than ever.
It was all Ellen's fault. That was agreed, and although Louise was on Ellen's side, she could not make her voice heard, because Arthur was shouting against the noise that Judy was making. Shouting when he was angry was the one fault he had not been able to exorcise when he was cultivating the controlled, mature manner, lighted by dry wit, which his profession demanded of its ambitious young men. He was occasionally guilty of shouting in court, when a witness was obtuse. He always recollected himself quickly and dropped his voice back to the acid purr of cross-examination, hoping that people would merely think: That young Chadwick is a firebrand.
The distressing commotion in the bedroom was ended by Arthur taking the picture away and saying that he would bum it. Ellen began to cry then, and Simon said: "Oh, for heaven's sake!" and shuffled back to bed.
Miriam picked up Judy, now quieted and hiccuping.
"I want to stay in your bed all night!" Judy wailed.
"Perhaps you shall, my pet, as you've had such a fright. It's a shame." Miriam, usually so hard to deceive, and so sharp where Ellen was concerned, was vulnerable about Judy, and Judy knew it.
"No, Mother," she said, as Louise lingered. "Don't stay and pet Ellen. She's not a baby. Certainly old enough to know better than to frighten little Judy like that. You go to sleep now, Ellen, and we'll say no more about it. You should have been asleep long ago."
Ellen lay awake, and heard her mother moving about in the room next door. It sounded as if it would be comforting in that room. Judy was singing softly to herself in her mothers bed. Presently her father came up, and Ellen heard his voice and her mother's, with Judy's chirp interrupting now and again. Discussing her, no doubt.
She heard the click of the light switch and someone getting into bed. Her father yawned, and there was silence. Ellen got out of bed, opened her door stealthily and pattered down the
corridor to the door at the end, where the moonlight lay In squares on the carpet. Slipping into the room like a ghost, she crept into her grandmother's bed, and finished her crying unchided unt
il she fell asleep.
Eva came down for the day to go to the Cobbs' garden party. She could not think why she had accepted the invitation, except that she had an arresting red dress and it would give her an opportunity to see Miriam and her mother, without making a meaningless visit. She liked to see Miriam occasionally, although they often quarreled. Miriam was a stable element in a precarious world. She was one of the few people Eva knew who seemed to have come to terms with what life had dealt her, without wishing it were different. Eva did not like Miriam's conventional way of life, but that did not prevent her from thinking sometimes how soothing it must be to be able to accept conventionality and abandon the search for Arcadia.
She liked to see her mother, too, and knew that she should see her more often. There never seemed to be enough time. The days spun round Eva in a whirl of scattered events, all shot through like taffeta with the bright, nervous colors of love.
As she stepped from the train at die little station, grey with the threat of rain, Eva sniffed the soft air and felt that London and her resdessness were a hundred miles away instead of twenty. For a moment she wished that she lived in the country. Life was much easier to handle. It did not go so fast, and you knew where people were. They could not slip away from you in the crowd.
Miriam was waiting for her in the black family car, which signaled Arthurs respectable prosperity from every one of its smugly rounded highlights. As they drove, the sisters gossiped idly about family matters and people they both knew.
Miriam said: "By the way, I met Susan Pierce the other day."
"That hag. I never could see why you were friends with her,"
'Tin not, really. She's just one of the people one knows, and asks to parties. She s been to Portofino—but you know that, of course. She was staying in your hotel, wasn't she?' 1
"Yes/' Eva spoke casually. She had known this would come sooner or later. "I only saw her once though. We left the day after she arrived."
"She told me. She said you were with an attractive man. Quite the lover, Susan said. You know the way she says things in that high, surprised voice. David, I suppose. But I thought Mother said you were in a party/ 5
"We were," Eva said defiantly.
"Don't get excited. I don't care if you weren't. Go ahead and make a fool of yourself, if you want to. I suppose you traipsed round Portofino holding hands and being starry-eyed over bottles of Chianti in romantic little cafes. Lovely for you, my dear/' Miriam said brisldy, "and I'm sure you don't care about people like Susan Pierce. But don't tell Mother that David is married."
"How do you know he is?"
"He married a rich girl, didn't he? Her father makes biscuits, or something, and she was the Number One Deb of God knows when. Arthui remembered seeing the wedding pictures in the papers. Arthur remembers things like that/*
'Well, they're separated," Eva said. "She's a bitch. Perhaps Arthur knows that, too, since he's so well informed. Mother knows about it, anyway. I told her."
"That was silly. What's the point of upsetting her?"
"She'll have to know sooner or later, when their divorce goes through. We're going to be married."
"Indeed, indeed." Miriam nodded her head. "Well, congratulations, my dear."
"Why are you so crabby about it?"
"I'm not. I'm delighted. Why are you so touchy?"
Who wouldn't be touchy? Eva thought. Who wouldn't be, when they were in love with a man, like a hopeless disease, and
they did not even know where he was today while they were out of town?
She did not even know when she would next see him. She wasted hours waiting in the flat for the doorbell or the telephone, hating the hum of the lift, because it did not stop at her floor; watching the telephone until she was sick with its silence.
Suddenly, he would call, or he would be there, and everything would be rapturous, and he would only laugh, if she asked: 'Where have you been? Why do you leave me?"
"I always come back to my love/' he said. 'Why worry?"
"No one but us," the Cobbs said gaily, "no one but us would have a garden party at the end of September. But you know us—we're crazy!"
All morning, the sky had been clouded with damp, heavy grey. You could almost fancy that you felt the drops of rain, although none were yet falling. Women who had bought new dresses for the party regretfully decided to wear raincoats. Women who had not bought new dresses were glad that they had not.
"Poor Sidney and Alice," everyone said. 'What bad luck, when everything is arranged, and their garden is so lovely." Their sympathy was not unmixed with secret pleasure that something had at last gone wrong for the Cobbs, who had too much money, and showed it.
At lunch-time, the skies cleared, and the blurred clouds contracted into healthier white masses. Women changed their minds about the raincoats, and said: "Isn't that just Sidney and Alice s luck! It's going to be fine after all."
Louise, however, cherishing her new hat, although she still did not like it any better, took her umbrella when she started off in the car with Miriam and Arthur and Eva. The children waved them off from the lych-gate, looking a little forlorn. They thought that they should be going, too, but no children had been invited, since the Cobbs had none of their own, and
their garden was the sort that did not take loudly to running small boys.
The garden party was quite an extravagant affair. A small band played thinly by the terrace steps. Hired waitresses stood behind white-clothed tables on the lawn, dispensing tea and coffee and Fortnum and Mason refreshments, and clutching at their caps when a breeze arose. On the terrace, there was a long bar, stocked with more whisky and gin than anyone else was able to get hold of in 1951, and presided over by two genuine barmen from the club, with white jackets and oiled hair,
"It puts me in mind of our church f£te," the vicar said, drinking claret cup and surveying the pleasant English scene benignly. "All you need is a hoop-la stall." He had caught Alice for a moment, but she was gone immediately, with a nod and a smile and a pat on his arm, which she fancied would compensate for not going to church.
Alice was shrilly in her element as a hostess. She skittered about in a fantastic hat, making holes in the damp grass with her high heels, tearing people apart who were happily talking, and introducing them to people they did not want to meet. Sidney stayed on the terrace most of the time with a glass in his hand, his broad, foolish face gradually deepening to a shade of red that clashed with the vast clove carnation he wore in the buttonhole of his aggressive suit.
Miriam moved with self-possession among the crowd, whose chatter sounded thin on the wide lawns, talking to the many people she knew, and appraising those who had come from London for this event, which Alice and Sidney considered was the biggest of the year.
Eva, as she had expected, attracted some attention in her red dress, which was cut a little lower and a little tighter than was normally seen in Monk's Ditchling.
"Miriam ChadwicFs sister. She's an actress, you know/' women said, as if that excused them from looking a little dingy
by comparison. A .personable young man called Harvey Upjohn, from Sidney's London office, had made a bee-line for Eva as soon as she appeared, and was following her about with conversation that was more daring than his usual cautious line; but he was not getting anywhere with her. Eva was playing at being enigmatic, her small, nervous face shadowed under a huge wheel of a hat. This seemed to encourage Harvey Upjohn. He plied her with drinks, coffee, ice cream, cigarettes, and was even so bold as to offer to show her the greenhouses. Eva was not trying to encourage him. She was merely bored, and mysterious silences or dead-end answers seemed the easiest way out.
Apart from wanting to see Miriam and Louise, she had come to the party because she wanted to try herself out on her own. It was so long since she had been anywhere without David, for their mutual friends always asked them together now, and if Eva received a separate invitation, she took David along if she could, or else did not go.
She
wanted to see whether she could enjoy herself without him. It was her last fling at independence, and she was disgusted with herself when she found that she could not. She, who had always treasured her freedom, who had given up so many men at the slightest hint of possessiveness from them, was now hopelessly dependent on a man who preferred her not to be, and hated her to cling.
But the party would have been all right if David were there. He would have been delighted with her dress, and the looks it drew. They would have drunk together, and sat under a yew tree and watched the people, and laughed about them, and made up stories about what Sidney and Alice talked about on the rare occasions when they were alone together.
Waiting on the terrace for Harvey Upjohn to fight his way back through the crowd round the bar, Eva looked unseeingly out over the teeming lawn. Where was David now? He had said he might be at the studio, but she did not think they had even started rehearsing yet. Perhaps when the sky had cleared
at lunch-time, he had called her up, wanting to go out In the car, and found her not there. Where would he go instead? He had so many friends. He might go round to Clarissa's, and she would make him drink. Eva wished that she had never embarked on this unrewarding expedition. She should not have left town. David might ring this evening, wanting to take her to dinner. He would not remember that she had told him she was coming down here. He seldom remembered things that she told him about her plans.
"Eureka!" cried Harvey Upjohn, approaching with a tall drink in his hand. "I finally made it, Tom Collins. That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"
"I did say gin and lime, but this will do/' She had asked for a Tom Collins, but since she was having a difficult time, she did not see why she should not make it difficult for Harvey Upjohn, too.
Louise had lost sight of her family soon after they arrived. She knew some of the guests, having met them during her visits to Miriam, but they all seemed to be talking, so she went to one of the refreshment tables and fed herself, trying to look nonchalant about it so that the waitresses would think she was alone from choice.