the meadow, were to tell Ellen at some time? What would happen then? The questions chased themselves round and round in Louise's brain until she was exhausted, and could think no more.
And then there was Anne. Louise had gone to the Stone Farm for the day to say good-bye to Anne, and had found her in bed, pasty-faced, and in a furious temper. She had had a slight hemorrhage. Frank was beside himself with worry.
"It was her own fault/' he told Louise, too upset to make any more excuses for his wife, who, he knew, would take care not to become pregnant again if she lost this baby. "She won't do as she's told. She won't look after herself. I had to go North for a sale, and while I'm gone she goes off to a party at the airfield and drinks whisky and that, and stays up nearly all night. She was taken bad the next day. I found her when I got home. She hadn't even called the doctor."
"But the baby s all right?"
"Touching wood. But the doctor says she's got to be more careful now, and you know what she's like. Tell her to do one thing, she does another. You must talk to her, Mother. She won't listen to me."
I can't, Louise had thought, dragging herself upstairs to do feeble battle with Anne. I can't cope any more. What was wrong with this family all of a sudden? She had wanted everything to go so well for the girls. She had wanted the futile thing she had made of her marriage with Dudley to be justified at least by the emergence of three happy lives. What had she done wrong that they should grow up into trouble? If it was her fault, there was nothing she could do to remedy it. Her daughters did not need her. They were intent on spoiling their lives in their own way.
The train slipped through the squalor of Vauxhall and on toward the meek suburbs. Louise took off her hat and watched London fall behind, glad to get away, hoping to find some peace, but knowing that as soon as she was settled in with
Sybil at the hotel, she would wish that she were back among her family again.
A pale October sun was touching the tops of the miniature waves in the Solent. It was cold on the deck of the paddle steamer, but the cabin was stuffy and srnelled of oil. Louise sat in the breeze with a scarf wound round her head and her second coat over her knees, and felt as though she were going abroad.
People who travel to and fro between Portsmouth and the island every day probably pay no more attention to the boat trip than if it were a bus ride. To Louise it was always exciting to chug out of the busy harbor, feeling proud about the warships, past the amusement park at Southsea with its skeleton switchback, and out among the little boats to cross the stretch of water, where the abandoned section of Mulberry Harbor stuck out of the sea like a memorial to the lost men of D-Day.
The island ahead looked enchantingly green. It was like a foreign country, so far away in the haze, and then all at once so close, with Ryde church appearing and the pier suddenly taking shape out of the background, and people beginning to collect suitcases, while the man stood by the rail to throw the rope for the gangway.
When she stepped onto the pier, the very air smelled different. The Portsmouth air smelled of oil and ropes and the mud in which small boys waded for worms. The air of Ryde still smelled of holidays, although the amusement buildings on the pier were closed now, the ice-cream stalls shuttered, and the paint and placards faded and weather-worn at the end of the summer season.
The little train that took her down the pier was only half full, with people who were soberly dressed, instead of degag^ in shorts and open shirts. The season was over. The island was itself again, and the residents came out and looked round thankfully, like birds after rain.
Sybil was waiting at the end of the pier in the green station wagon that said: 'Driffield Court Hotel. Mr. and Mrs. G. V. Vernon, props/
"You look ghastly/' she said, handling Louise's bags into the car with ease, since she was too impatient to find a porter. Sybil was a short, square, blonde woman, with muscles of iron, and legs like -gateposts.
"I expect "I got blown about on the boat," Louise said. She was used to Sybil's bluntness. "And I am a bit tired."
"Too much family," Sybil announced, zooming up the steep main street as if she were a Roman charioteer intent on mowing down the rabble. "How are all your girls, Lou?" Sybil was the only person who called Louise that. It was a relic of school days.
"Oh, they're fine."
"That all?" asked Sybil, who liked her conversation stimulating. "I should have thought all kinds of things must have happened since I last saw you. Your letters never tell me a thing, except about the weather, and cosy little bits about the children."
"Well—Simon broke his arm," Louise said, playing safe, for Sybil was the last person to tell your troubles to unless you wanted half the population of the Isle of Wight to know them. "He fell off his pony. He's all right though. They only kept him in the hospital a few days, and he's had to go back to school, much to his disappointment. But tell me about you. What sort of a season was it? You grumble at my letters, but you never write at all.'*
"Too busy. We've been up to the eyes all summer. Oh, my dear, we've had such funny people! God knows where they come from—but thank God they do come, or we shouldn't be in business. One couple weren't married—I mean, not that some of the others weren't, too; you can always tell—but with this pair, the girl's parents turned up in the middle of the night. They'd chased her all the way from Scotland, of all things, and they made a terrible scene, waking everybody up,
and boohooing, and talking to me as if I were a brothel-keeper. George went for the police. He hates to be woken up, but the quaint old couple nipped off, taking their daughter with them/'
"What about the man?"
"Oh, he stayed on and had a damned good holiday. Took up with a chesty girl in a sweater."
Sybil chattered exaggeratedly all the way to the hotel, which was a few miles outside the town along the coast. Louise sat back and relaxed. Sybil talked so much and so fast that she hardly noticed whether anyone was listening. As long as she could talk, all was well with her world. She had talked her way through two husbands and was halfway through her third. George Vernon, like her first and second husbands, had started out as a normally communicative man, but had retreated into monosyllables before the battering-ram of Sybil's voice.
Sybil was a tonic. Everyone said so. She was one of the features of the hotel, which was small, expensive, badly run, and just too far from the sea. It had acquired a reputation, however. People who had stayed there recommended it to their friends, as if to dispel their own doubts as to whether their money would not have been better spent at a hotel where you received the comforts for which you paid. Many of the guests returned year after year because Sybil had the knack of making them feel that they were privileged friends, who were only presented with staggering bills as a trifling afterthought.
"Old Sybil's a character," they said, even new guests finding that they could use her Christian name after the first few days, when they had ceased trying to complain that their room had not been cleaned or that lunch was late, realizing that it got them nowhere, except into the bar for a drink on the house.
People brought their friends over for a drink from all round the island, to show them Sybil and enjoy her company. The trade in the bar keeps a hotel going, Sybil knew, and felt justified in spending a large part of her time there, ready to drink with all comers.
Driffield Court, ivy-clad, and with additions of different
, '65
periods stuck on in surprising places, had been a private house until George and Sybil Vemon bought it and converted it into a hotel They had not made many alterations. It still had more the air of a house than a hotel, which was part of its charm, although inconvenient for the staff. They grumbled incessantly about the inadequate kitchen and pantries, and teas served in three small lounges instead of one large one, and breakfast trays to be carried up narrow, crooked staircases. They seldom stayed for more than one season, or even for the whole of one season. Sybil's life, when not at the bar, was beset by the problem of tryi
ng to find staff. She charmed them into coming, and bawled at them insultingly when they left. If they stayed, she upset them by interfering with their work, or changing their routine on a sudden whim. They quarreled with her and among themselves. There was always some complicated vendetta going on behind the scenes, and once there had been an Italian with a knife, who had chased a kitchen porter through the dining room while the guests were having lunch. The guests had enjoyed it. It was just one of those things that went with staying at SybiFs.
No one thought of it as 'staying at George's/ George was a background figure, poker-faced and unsociable. He would greet guests unsmilingly if he met them about die house, and would carry their bags upstairs without a word if all the male staff had left at the same time; but for the most part he stayed in the private sitting room behind the baize door, or in the office, brooding over the ledgers, counting the cash, and locking up the safe when Sybil had left it open.
The only member of the staff who remained from year to year was an elderly woman who had been Sybil's maid a long time ago. She had retired to Shanklin, and when she read in the paper about the opening of Driffield Court, she had arrived on Sybil's back doorstep, wearing her apron underneath her coat, determined to work for her.
She was small and spare, whittled down by the years, but
bright-eyed and sharp-tongued, taking neither orders nor impertinence from anybody, and treating the inconstant staff with disdain, which was one of the reasons for their inconstancy. Her name was Mary Ann Bunt, but she was known as 'Goldie,' although neither she nor Sybil could remember why. Her hair had never been yellow. It had been snow white ever since Sybil had known her, owing to a shock in early youth, at which Goldie liked to hint darkly, but could never reveal, since she had long ago forgotten what it was.
'Old Goldie' was as much a feature of the hotel as 'Old Sybil/ All the guests knew her name, and although she left mops and dustpans in their rooms and mixed up their laundry if she did not like them, they over-tipped her when they left and sent her Christmas cards.
Sometimes she got on Sybil's nerves because you could never tell her anything she did not know. She could hardly ever be persuaded to take a day off because she felt, with some justification, that the hotel would go to pieces without her. Goldie could turn her knotted, blue-veined hand to anything, wherever staff was short. She cleaned, she cooked, she ironed and mended, she waited in the dining room in creaking shoes, and cut the thin bread and butter for teas. She had even served behind the bar in a crisis, when the barman had flung away from the hotel in a fit of temperament just before a bank holiday week end. Goldie had tied a white apron over the skimpy, faded print she loved to wear, and muttered up and down among the glasses and bottles, giving scrupulous measure, washing the glasses noisily in a pan of filthy water, and raising a face of quelling indignation above the bar if anyone offered to buy her a drink.
She was waiting at the hotel entrance when the station wagon drew up. She carried one of Louise's bags up the steps, pushing away Sybil's hand when she tried to restrain her.
"Goldie, you old fool," Sybil said. "That's much too heavy for a feeble old creature like you."
"You're not so young yourself," Goldie retorted. "Did you get the scones? Forgot. I knew you would. Now I'll have to bake, as if I hadn't got enough to do/'
"Oh, shut up grumbling/ 7 Sybil said. That was the way they talked to each other. The guests said it was as good as a music hall.
Louise greete.d Goldie affectionately, and the old woman unleashed a grim, unpracticed smile for her. She had been good to Louise when she was here last year, bringing her extra comforts, like early-morning tea and an electric fire, for which Louise would never have asked since she was paying so little. Sybil was generous in letting her stay so cheaply, and she had impulsive fits of unloading dresses and scarves onto Louise and giving her liqueurs after dinner, but at week ends when the hotel filled up she would often forget all about her, and Louise would go about feeling like a charity patient, trying to keep out of the way, appearing only at meals, and hastening over her food at her little table in the draughty corner.
Goldie took her up to her room. "See, I got you one of the better ones," she said, opening the door of one of the front rooms on the first floor. "She said you should have the one you were in last year, but I didn't see why you should have that poky hole when this one was free."
She turned back the counterpane and clicked her teeth. "Slut," she said. "That new girl doesn't know how to make beds. She won't last long once I get after her."
"That's all right/' Louise said. "Ill make my bed every day, as I did last year. Thank you for getting me this room. It's nice." She went to the window and looked out across the front lawn, past the putting green and tennis courts to where the little closely-hedged fields jostled each other down to the sea. "Who else is staying here this winter?" she asked.
"The regulars? Well, there's old Mrs. Maddox with the kidneys. She's been here all summer, too, worse luck. I can't think why she stays, because my lady treats her very casual Then there's the Colonel. You remember him from last year. Dear
old gentleman, he gives no trouble. There's a funny sort of woman come yesterday. Says she's a writer and wants peace and quiet. Hah! She's come to the wrong shop, I'd say." Goldie looked round the room, tweaked at a towel, straightened an ashtray, and flicked on the light to see if there was a bulb in it.
"She's got a mess of papers, though. I looked at one that was in her typing machine. Couldn't make head nor tail of it. Well, 111 leave you. You'll meet the rest of the menagerie by and by. Tea will be on in an hour or so, if I'm lucky with my scones/'
Louise wandered about the room, examining its contents, trying to become at home in the strange, lonely world of a hotel room. Sybil's hotel was less lonely than most, however. How lucky I am, Louise thought determinedly, not to have to live in one of those dismal 'residentials,' where they farm out most widows. That might have happened to me. People have been kind.
She had started to unpack, but she left her bag open on the bed and sat down at the ink-stained antique table, which was beautiful but groggy, to begin the chain of letters to her daughters, with which she would try to keep herself occupied through the long winter.
Miriam wrote back regularly; neat, amusing letters, which made Louise think that Pleasant-ways was a jollier place to live in than she found it to be when she was actually there. Anne wrote seldom, and without grammar or spelling. Eva had written quite often last year; affectionate, choppy letters, which gave the impression that she was living at great speed. Louise wondered whether she would write at all this year. Perhaps she would not; but Louise would go on writing to her as if nothing had happened between them.
She tore up the letter which she had started to Miriam, and took another piece of Sybil's grandiloquent notepaper.
'Darling Ellen, here 1 am, and everything is just the same as last year, including Goldie. I like it, except that I -wish you were here too,' she wrote, and meant it. She wanted to be with Ellen now more than ever. She wanted to take her away from
her Invidious position and make up to her with love for the wrong that had been done to her.
When she judged that it was time for tea, Louise went down to the lounge. Although the place was so familiar to her, she felt as self-conscious as most solitary women when they enter the public rooms of a hotel. They may, like Louise, have been unhappy with their husbands, but when they find themselves without them, they realize what support a husband gives in public, however unsatisfactory he may be in private.
Having got over her own entrance, greeted the Colonel, and been introduced by him—for Sybil was not there—to the other tea-drinking residents, Louise took the table farthest from the fire, which was all that was left, and watched the diffident entry of a woman who must be the writer, although she did not look it. What did a female writer look like? The ones Louise had met at Miriam's were either smart, enameled journalists, or intellectuals, with uneven skirts
and big, questioning, unpow-dered noses.
The woman who stood in the doorway was about forty, neatly dressed in clothes that would never be noticed, modestly made up, and with a tight, nervous smile that trembled round the room, looking for somewhere to sit.
Mrs. Maddox glared at her, pushing her long, bristly eyebrows together. She was a great, swarthy old woman, with a coarse skin and two moles on her chin from which long, black hairs waved like feelers. The Colonel, small and sandy and harmless, was having trouble with one of the many Driffield Court teapots that leaked. The pale young man, who was the son of one of Sybil's friends, recuperating from pneumonia, did not look up from his book. Miss Dott and Mrs. Arbuthnot, who ran a successful dress shop in Ryde and lived here all th^ year round because they could not be bothered with housework, passed each other scones and jam and did not stop talking.
The newcomer rested her taut smile on Louise. "Come
sit over here," Louise said. "There's room for two at this table. We'll get the girl to bring you a tray. What's your name, dear?" she asked the waitress who came into the room and surprisingly answered her imperious finger.
"Ellen/' the girl said, pouting a mouth that was swollen with glistening fuchsia lipstick.
"What a coincidence!" Louise said. "I have a granddaughter called Ellen. I am Mrs. Bickford. I stay here in the winter, you know." She believed in getting on friendly terms with the staff as soon as possible, even though they usually left before she could make friends with them, and she had to start all over again with their successors.
The waitress looked blank. What is that to me, her pudding face said, whether you are Mrs. Bickford, or whether you have a granddaughter called Ellen?
"Will you bring us one more tea, please?" Louise asked.
Ellen looked round the room, nodding her head as she counted: "Six teas," she said. "They told me there would be but the six teas."
The Winds Of Heaven Page 17