The Winds Of Heaven

by Monica Dickens

  "It's my fault," said the woman sitting with Louise. "I said I'd have it in my room, but then I changed my mind. Is that wrong of me?" she asked Louise when the waitress had left them with a grudging: "O.K." "I meant to work till dinner time, but then I got stuck, so I thought I'd come down and see a bit of life. But this is such a funny place. In some ways, you can do what you like, but then in others, you can't. Oh, dear— I shouldn't say that to you. You must be Mrs. Vernon's friend."

  "Yes," said Louise, "but I know what you mean."

  "Well—hullo, everybody!" Sybil exploded into the room, scattering good cheer like shrapnel. She slapped the pale young man on the back, which made him cough, and patted the top of the Colonel's head. "Tea time already? My God, I'd no idea it was so late. I've been fighting with a man who wants me to entertain the ironmongers' convention, or some ghastly thing. Have you met everybody, Lou? That's fine. YouVe made friends with Miss Garnham, I see. She's a real live author, you

  know. She writes books," she added explanatorily. "Isn't that an honor? Fancy us having a famous author in this vulgar old joint."

  Miss Garnham was embarrassed. "I'm afraid Fm not famous/* she murmured. "Not many people read my books/'

  "Oh, nonsense," Sybil cried. "No modesty here. Why, you're actually writing a book now, under my very roof." Being semi-literate, she had as astonished a regard for anyone who wrote as if they could do double back somersaults, or play the piano with their feet.

  "Isn't that something?" she asked, picking up Louise's teacup and taking a sip. "No, thanks. No more. Tea's not my drink. What's the book about, dear?" she asked Miss Garnham. She was bored with the subject now, but felt that she had to do something to liven up the quiet party in the lounge.

  "It's a biography," Miss Garnham said unwillingly, looking at her hands.

  "How too thrilling. What about?"

  "Well, you wouldn't have heard of him, I'm afraid. He was a social reformer in the last century. Not many people knew of him"

  "Why write about him then?" Sybil gave her husky laugh, which ended in a fit of coughing. "Never mind me, dear." She patted Miss Garnham's shoulder. "I'm just fooling. You'll get used to me. Good old Sybil, they call me. Nobody minds. Louise will tell you. Has anyone seen George?"

  Miss Dott looked up. "I saw him going off in the car as we came back."

  "The bastard," Sybil said. "The electric stove has shorted again and he's the only one who can deal with it. Oh, well. Cold dinner, folks. I'll open some claret for everyone, and pass it off that way."

  "How long are you staying?" Louise asked Miss Garnham when Sybil had gone out.

  "I don't know. I had meant to stay here and finish my book,

  but I don't know that I—it isn't quite what I expected. Do you live here all winter?" she asked unbelievingly.

  "Yes/' Louise said, "I have to. I've nowhere else to go." There she went again, blurting out the wrong things. How unkind that sounded to Sybil's generosity. "No, I don't mean that," she amended hastily. "I could stay with one of my daughters, but I like to come here and be with Sybil."

  "I see." Miss Garnham nodded thoughtfully. 'That girl's never brought my tea," she said. "How long does one wait before one abandons hope and goes back to one's room to eat chocolate?"

  After dinner, Miss Gamham put on her fiercest pair of spectacles, set her small, pale mouth, and told Sybil that she would have to leave.

  Sybil would not hear of it. People often stayed on for longer than they had intended, but nobody left before their time was up, unless for some good reason, like death or disaster. Miss Garnham's reason was not good enough for Sybil, although she had several reasons.

  The first was that her after-dinner working time had been shortened, because the meal was over an hour late. When George came home, he had insisted on fixing the stove and having a hot dinner cooked on it, instead of the cold food that the staff were already preparing. George did not like cold ham and tongue. This upset the cook, which upset everybody else, creating a situation which caused Sybil to remark in the bar when she heard the gong sullenly pounded: "Thank God. I guess we're lucky to get anything to eat at all tonight."

  Miss Garnham's second reason was that although she had moved her table all over the bedroom, seeking the light like a moth, she still could not see to type. Her third reason was that her room was cold; her fourth that the pipes behind the wall knocked like a bevy of plumbers whenever anyone took a bath; and her fifth, desperately added when she saw that she was

  getting nowhere, was that she was worried about her parents and thought she should return to them.

  Sybil did not believe this. Knowing the business of all her guests, she knew that Miss Garnham had received no letters or telephone calls. Miss Garnham tried to be firm, but Sybil overrode her with impregnable bonhomie. She would not hear of Miss Garnham going. My goodness, anything that was wrong could be put right in a matter of moments* No trouble at all. She wanted everybody to be happy, and Miss Garnham, the famous author, must be the happiest of all.

  Miss Garnham could not get a word in edgeways. She took off her heavy glasses and blinked in perplexity. The scene was taking place in the lounge, with everybody listening over the dregs of their chicory-laden coffee. Miss Garnham had tried to get Sybil alone, by saying: "May I speak to you for a moment, Mrs. Vernon?" but Sybil had merely patted the sofa beside her and said; "Speak away, my dear. I'm all ears/*

  So was everybody else. Miss Garnham felt that they were on Sybil's side, except possibly Louise, who looked as though she might understand. She was fighting a losing battle. Her resolution to leave in the morning buckled beneath the onslaught of Sybil's unanswerable hospitality. Miss Garnham should move to a better room, for the same price, and should have a coal fire burning all day in the grate, and all night too if she wanted it. Sybil sent for Goldie to see about this immediately, before Miss Garnham could draw breath. She should have Sybil's own desk lamp, and a tin of biscuits and a bowl of fruit, and right at this moment, she should come into the bar with Sybil to celebrate the happy outcome.

  "It's your temperament, I expect/' Sybil told her forgivingly. "I know what writers are. Up one minute and down the next. You just take it easy. You'll be as happy as a grig here. Everybody is." She sounded like the matron of a girl's reform school, soothing a recalcitrant inmate. Miss Garnham, looking hunted, followed her out to the bar, abandoning all hope of work that night.

  "Coming, Lou?" Sybil turned at the door. "A little snifter will do you good. YouVe lost all your pep since I saw you last."

  Mrs. Maddox cleared her throat juicily, and dealt her patience cards with angry slaps. She did not approve of snifters, or any other kind of drink.

  "Shall I ask them to send something out here for you, Mrs. M.?" Sybil asked, winking at Louise.

  "No, thank you," Mrs. Maddox decimated the knave of hearts. Sybil went out humming. Mrs. Maddox's uncongenial presence and reluctance to have any extras on her bill were more than compensated for by the rate she was charged for her room.

  Miss Dott and Mrs. Arbuthnot were already in the bar, whither they had adjourned when the conflict in the lounge cooled to defeat, and there was no further entertainment to be had from it. They sat at one of the low tables, drinking creme de menthe and smoking filter-tipped cigarettes. They could not sit on the high stools at the bar, because they were both stiff-bodied and tightly corseted. They were the same shape, with the same bluish hair set in a hundred spiral curls. People often mistook them for sisters.

  The pale young man, who was introduced to everyone as Johnny, so that no >one knew his other name, was with them, drinking stout reluctantly, for his health. The two ladies had met him in the corridor and swept him into the bar between them, determined to be nice to him, because he looked lonely. Johnny was too polite to refuse, although he had been on his way to his room to read. He drank his stout as quickly as he could swallow it, fretting to get away to his books, for he was trying to catch up with the work he was missing at Oxford.

/>   When Sybil entered, she was greeted with acclaim from the bar, where several of the local regulars were leaning or perching. There were always at least half a dozen people in the bar every night, and in the summer it was crowded, and thick with

  chatter and smoke. "Let's nip down to Sybil's/' they said. "Best pub on the island." Or: "Think I'll just pop over to old Sybil's for half an hour, dear," to a wife who sighed, and stayed with the children, and knew that her husband would not come home before closing-time.

  Sybil ordered brandy for Miss Garnham and Louise, without asking them what they wanted, and was absorbed into the jocular group along the bar. She climbed onto a stool with great agility, although she was nearly the same age as Louise, locked her hideous legs round it and settled down with a contented sigh, like a man coming home to his favorite chair. The barman, a glum young man, who was under notice, had been there long enough not to ask what she would have. He set a glass of gin before her without a word. Sybil stroked its rounded sides. She did not need to drink it for a moment. It was satisfying just to have it there in front of her.

  Louise and Miss Garnham took their drinks over to one of the little tables, which had pictures of drunks clinging to lampposts set into the surface. Sybil had gone to town to buy a new carpet for the first-floor landing, and had bought the tables instead, unable to resist them.

  The brandy ran like fire down Louise's unaccustomed throat. She usually refused it at Miriam's, so as not to feel embarrassed when Arthur periodically complained about the wine merchant's bill. It was a double brandy. When she had finished It, tipping back her head like a bird to get the last drop out of the awkward glass, she felt more reassured than she had for days. Perhaps, after all, she was silly to worry so much about her family. However much she worried from the other side of the Solent, it would make no difference to them. They would carry on their lives without her, pausing now and then, she hoped, to say: "I wonder how Mother is getting on." The winter would pass, and perhaps when she went back, everything would be all right.

  Not Ellen, though. Ellen would never be all right. I must not

  lie before she's grown up and married, Louise thought. Whatever happens, I must not die and leave her. She cared for Ellen nore than she had ever cared for any of her children, and ;he knew, guiltily, that Ellen loved her better than her own •nother.

  "Let's have another/' Miss Garnham said. 'The evening's all ?one to pieces, anyway. We might as well tear it right up/ 7 She went to the bar and ordered two more brandies. "What will you lave, Mrs. Vernon?" she asked.

  "How sweet of you/* Sybil said, and the barman silently Drought her another glass of gin.

  "I hope you're not too worried about your parents, Miss Sarnham," Louise said, when she came back to the table. "I suppose they'd have to be dying before Sybil would let you

  ;o.;;

  "One way to run a hotel. Please call me Ruth. No, Fm not :oo worried, really. It's just that they're old, and they're so used to having me with them that I feel a little mean coming off on my own like this; but my publisher has set a date for me, and [ have to get the book finished. But it congeals on me. I've been it it so long, I'm beginning to hate it."

  "Oh, surely not," Louise envied her for having something so important and definite to do. Even if not many people would read it, at least it was going to be published, and would be a :oncrete thing, with covers and a jacket.

  "I have a friend who writes books," she said, thinking of Gordon Disher crouched over the table in his room under the roof, stabbing the typewriter with his thick fingers. 'Thrillers. He writes them in two weeks."

  "I've been on this thing nearly two years," Miss Garnham said gloomily. "That's why I came down here. It's impossible trying to write at home with Mother and Father coming in all the time and asking me how I'm getting on, and have I forgotten that the shops will be closed if I don't go out soon. They're darlings, but they don't understand/'

  "You live with them, then?"

  r/7

  "Yes, I look after them. They haven't anyone else. Fve got a temporary woman in for them now, although they don't like her, Fin afraid. A permanent housekeeper would be expensive, even if I could find one they could stand. And I think they'd be hurt, if I said I wanted to go and live on my own. Fve been with them for so long, you see."

  "I see." Louise paused, and then said: "Parents are quite a problem, aren't they?"

  "They can be. But then one loves them, you know, and when they've looked after one at the beginning of one's life, the least one can do is to see them through the end of theirs."

  "I suppose so." Louise sighed over her brandy. The reassurance which the first glass had brought her was evaporating. She pictured Miriam or Eva or Anne talking to a stranger in a bar about having a duty to their mother. She began to feel sad, and hoped it was only the brandy.

  "I think Fd better go up now, Ruth," she said. "I may be getting a little drunk."

  "I feel delightful," Miss Garnham said. "I begin to see why people like hotel life. Insidious though."

  Sybil, enjoying herself with her friends, had remembered them, and was offering them another drink.

  "Heavens, no." Louise got up and made two passes at her bag before she picked it up. "We're going to bed."

  "Bye-bye, then." Sybil waved gaily. "See you in the morning, loves," she said, although it was doubtful whether anyone would see her before noon. She looked as if she was settled in for the night, her fingers grown round the glass like a vine.

  George had not appeared at dinner. He often had his meals brought to him by Goldie in the sitting room. Louise did not see him until she left Ruth Garnham, after helping her to find her new room, which involved surprising the Colonel in bed without his teeth. She groped her way along the corridor. The light was out, and she could never remember where the switch was. The lights were always turned out much too early, or left wastefully burning all night.

  A figure came round the corner of the passage, and she stepped to one side and stood against the wall. Her head was undoubtedly whirling. The sooner she reached her room the better. How disgraceful at my age, she thought, but rather nice for a change.

  The figure brushed past her and stopped by the corridor window, tall, with hunched shoulders, and powerful, hairy hands seen in the misty moonlight. It was George, locking up the windows.

  "Hullo, George," she said. "It's me. Louise."

  "Hullo," he said flatly, and walked on.

  Louise would not have been surprised to hear him say: "You here again?" She could never think why Sybil had married him. It had been a mystery at the time, when Louise had gone to see her school friend married for the third time, and George had lowered at the guests, and been unable to produce a word when called on for a speech.

  It was a mystery now, but it appeared to work out satisfactorily. They seldom saw each other, but Sybil seemed content, and between them they were running a profitable hotel. Sybil had a separate room, for which Louise did not blame her. She would not like to find herself alone in a bedroom with George, even if she were married to him.

  Louise s days at DrifBeld Court dawdled by, but there were too many of them, and they crawled too slowly. The winter stretched before her in meaningless eternity, broken only by the prospects of Christmas at Miriam's. She tried to fill her days with reading, walking, writing letters, but it was hard to find any purpose to life beyond appearing punctually at meals, and keeping her room tidy to help the raw young maid.

  Phyllis, the little maid, was a local girl in her first job. When Goldie was not hectoring her, and stalking her round the bedrooms to pounce on her mistakes, Ellen was scoffing at her downstairs and telling her that she did not know she was born,

  the barman was leering greasily, and the cook was incessantly asking her: Who did she think she was"?

  Phyllis was very unhappy. Each week she bicycled home to her parents, and was always in tears when she returned. Louise, taking a late stroll after dinner, found her weeping in the bicycle shed.


  "Come up to my room, Phyllis/' she said, "and I'll make you a cup of tea/' Goldie had found a battered electric kettle somewhere, and had bequeathed it to Louise, with a small teapot and a packet of tea stolen from the rationed hotel stores. Miss Garnham was jealous of the kettle and the teapot. It was just what she needed to revive herself when she had let the fire go out, and her hands and feet were numb from sitting too long at the typewriter; but she understood that she could expect no favors from Goldie until she had worked her apprenticeship as a hotel guest. Goldie never committed herself to kindness until you had been there at least two weeks.

  Phyllis did not think that she ought to go to Louises room, and once there, she did not feel that she ought to sit down. She stood gawkily, warming her grubby, childish hands round the teacup, her big, tear-misted eyes looking nervously round the room, as if she did not see it every day when she came in with her hated mop and duster.

  She was only sixteen and looked a child. She reminded Louise of her granddaughter. In olden times, this could have happened to Ellen. A brutal father, refusing to keep another man's child under his roof, and a mother ashamed of her folly might have turned her out, even at eleven years old, to drudge amid dust for a pittance, and cry herself to sleep in an attic.

  "You're cold, dear," she said to Phyllis. "You haven't enough on for bicycling on a night like this. You should have a jersey under your coat. Have you got one?"

  "No'ni," Phyllis said tonelessly.

  "Look here, IVe got one I never wear. It's the wrong color

  for me, and too small." Louise went to a drawer and took out the cardigan that Eva had given her for her birthday, which she had never worn, because it was too nice for anything except a special occasion, and she was still waiting for the special occasion. "You take it. Td like you to have it"

  Phyllis looked in wonderment at the soft wool and the glorious cherry color. She shook her head.

  'Yes, please/' Louise took the cup from her and thrust the cardigan into her hands. "To please me."