‘Please don’t bother,’ I said as I pulled on the shorts. ‘May I ring my mother?’
‘Now you’re a boy – what do you make of that? Rather fun? How is your mother? I missed her at the chamber music last week.’
So that rumour was true! I had always suspected that although we were ordered by my father not to know the Shorts, she and my mother still met at Newford.
‘Rather chic, I think,’ she said, looking at me. ‘You must come down and get warm.’
We went along the corridor and round corners to a second flight of stairs, down to a kitchen and through a cloakroom with a telephone in it, and then across the hall into a large morning room, where there was a music stand with a sheet of music on it near a large window, and a violin propped against one wall. A radio was on a big table with books and newspapers and also on the same table there was a large, unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread out.
And that is how I remember Emma Short always: a small woman with small, brown brilliant eyes, as dark as Benedict was, wearing a plain but pretty dress, chattering and eagerly questioning herself as she stands before the large puzzle of some famous picture – a cathedral or a castle perhaps, with a river in the foreground. This one also had the figure of a man with a boat on the river. She is standing there picking up a piece and saying, ‘How beastly they are to put so much water in these things. It’s cheating. What a bore. Ah, now – here, do you think? No. No. Ah, perhaps here? You must look at the little wiggles.’ And she put a curly piece of the puzzle into its place.
‘You must know Mrs Figg,’ she said.
‘She teaches us French,’ I said, surprised.
‘I know!’ said Mrs Short with a laugh. ‘Too extraordinary. What do you make of her? Odd, do you find? Her hats! Is Augusta a friend of yours? She’s coming.’
Augusta Chambers, head girl of my school! Augusta – to see me dressed up like this!
I said again I must telephone to my mother to fetch me.
‘Glan will do that,’ she said. ‘You must have some tea to warm you up.’
Through the window I saw two or three cars arrive. People and their children were soon jabbering in the hall. I heard Benedict screeching at them. As they came into the room Benedict was pulling Augusta’s father by the wrist and saying, ‘Foxey, Foxey, you’re a murderer, a murderer. I’m going to report it to the police.’
‘The number is 3052,’ said Augusta’s father. ‘Shall I get it for you?’
There was a crowd of people taking off their coats in the hall. Benedict let Foxey’s hand go, and Augusta came to me and said, ‘What fun.’ She whispered, ‘Benedict is mad, as usual.’
I was muttering that I must go and getting nearer to the door to escape when Glanville Short stopped me. ‘I have told your mother,’ he said. ‘You’re staying to tea.’
Suddenly we were in a dining-room, sitting round a very large painted table, which seemed to be an astrological map.
‘Your marvellous table,’ said Augusta. And to me, ‘Emma designed it. Isn’t it wonderful?’
I was still embarrassed by my ridiculous clothes. I had never seen so many people in my life, all talking their heads off. At home we lived to ourselves, as my father said. Doors were always shut in our house. Here all the doors were open and names were flying about. Everyone was asking questions about other people. Benedict was screeching. The walls of the room were painted pale violet. A number of people I had never heard of were declared ‘mad’. A Mary somebody was ‘too extraordinary about her dogs’. There was news that someone called Stephanie had lost the manuscript of a novel she was writing, on a bus, for the second time.
‘What do you make of Chester?’ someone said.
The city or some person? I could not guess. I was out of my depth in this new language, but Benedict was listening eagerly, as if enchanted by mockery when his father spoke.
Augusta’s handsome brother sat between me and Emma Short. He asked where I lived and went to school. When I told him about school, he said, ‘Bad marks – it’s on the Right Bank,’ which amused him. It was a long time, almost a year, before I found out what he meant, and by then I was mad about him. People like the Shorts were sometimes called the Left Bank of an imaginary river like the Seine. Newford was very Right Bank, Fordhampton was very Left.
Suddenly tea was over. Emma Short groaned. ‘It’s still raining,’ she said. ‘What a bore. No croquet.’
‘But Emma,’ said Augusta’s brother, ‘we could take umbrellas.’
‘Yes!’ shouted Benedict, getting up. ‘Umbrellas, umbrellas – we’ll get umbrellas!’
‘I think it will have to be Cocky Olly,’ said Glan Short.
And they all shouted, ‘Yes, Cocky Olly!’
‘I don’t know it,’ I said.
‘You do know it,’ Benedict insisted. ‘You must do. This is Cocky Olly Lane – everyone plays it. It’s Prisoner’s Base.’
‘Cocky Olly’ is the name that jumps into my mind even now when I drive past the signpost to Fordhampton. And when I look back on it who could have been more of a Cocky Olly than myself, chasing the runaway boy across the fields.
‘Cocky Olly!’ we all shouted.
‘No one to go into the bedrooms,’ said Emma Short. ‘Library and bathrooms are free.’
‘Including, I hope,’ said Foxey, ‘the pig’s bathroom.’ He meant that Glanville had kept half a pig in brine in one of the bathrooms during the war. I had heard of this at home, and I had been told that it was illegal to cure a pig without registering the fact with the agricultural inspector. My father always said Major Short ought to be reported to the inspector and sent to jail.
And so with Foxey as Cocky Olly to start us off, the grown-ups and we children raced up the stairs and hid all over the house. Soon we were shouting warning cries of ‘Cocky Olly on the back stairs!’ as everyone raced away. ‘Cocky Olly in the library!’ ‘Cocky Olly in the passage!’ ‘Cocky Olly in Annie’s room!’ and we raced up another flight, and Augusta, who had been caught, was shouting, ‘Rescue, rescue!’ and Benedict was crying for rescue, too. I got to him and touched him. He was free. He was the most excited of us all. Round the house, up and down, we went. On a desk in the library, where Glanville worked, I came upon a huge book called The Building of the Pyramids. It was written, Augusta told me, by that old man with the long black beard – the one I had seen peeing into the hedge, whose portrait was on the wall, not easy to see because the afternoon was dark. The rain was still coming down. Then the hue and cry came again, the sound of scattering people. I ran along the passage and made for a door where the passage turned a corner. Benedict had scooted there. We collided and stepped back into a small room where the curtains were drawn. Suddenly Benedict locked the door. ‘That’s not fair,’ I said. I can hear myself, even now, saying it.
Benedict said in his shrill voice, There’s a dead body in here.’
I was not going to be scared by him. I remembered what Foxey had done when Benedict called him a murderer.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ve reported it. It’s on the floor. Give me the key or I’ll put the light on.’
He gave me the key at once.
‘This is your room,’ I said.
‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘It used to be Nanny’s, but we threw her out.’ I told him he couldn’t scare me, and, in fact, after that I couldn’t get rid of him. He followed me everywhere as we chased round in the game.
The grown-ups had gone down to the drawing room and eventually, hot and puffed, we went in to join them. It was a greenish silky room. Glanville was handing out orange juice to cool us down, and small glasses of gin, I suppose, to the grown-ups and to Augusta’s brother, too. Glanville moved slowly, politely, with a sly conspiring look in his eyes as he gave us our drinks. He had been in the middle of telling a story when we rushed in, and now he continued. He had been on a jury at Winchester, he said, and there was evidence from a policeman who said he had seen the prisoner signalling to a confederate on a racecourse, and
then the judge had said, ‘A signal, officer? Would you be kind enough to do the signal for us?’ and the officer made strange movements with his hand. The judge said, ‘Officer, would you mind doing that again?’
Glanville had a gift for acting. He could make you feel guilty by rolling his eyes and looking mysterious. In a fish shop in Fordhampton when I was with my mother we once heard him saying in his quiet accusing voice to the fishmonger, ‘Have you fish?’
I looked round at the pictures on the walls of the drawing room. There were two clowns and there was a painting of a sculptured head of a girl in profile, mounted on a short marble stand, a girl with large eyes, very beautiful.
‘It’s a Stolz,’ Augusta whispered to me.
‘No, it isn’t,’ said her brother. ‘It’s a Webb in her Stolz period.’ And to me he said, in Mrs Short’s manner, ‘What do you make of it?’
‘It looks chopped off,’ I said. I saw Augusta’s brother was disappointed in me.
I looked at the heads of all the people in the room. They seemed to be like people from another planet. I was in love with them all and did not want to leave. And then Foxey said, ‘We must go,’ and Augusta said to me, ‘We’ll drop you.’
‘No, I’ll walk. It’s only up the lane.’
‘You must come again,’ said Mrs Short.
‘I wonder whether we shall see more of the apple girl,’ said Glan in his conspiring mocking tone. ‘I think we shall.’
I remember sitting next to Augusta’s brother in the back of the car and Benedict waving frantically to us.
‘Where are your clothes?’ my mother asked when I was dropped at our house.
I had forgotten them.
‘What a sight you look.’
I could not stop talking about everything and everyone I had seen – the house, the huge tea table, the puzzle on Mrs Short’s table, the Persepolis in the bathroom. I explained that it was not my fault I had gone there, but I was worried about what my father would say. Mother made light of it. All she wanted to know was whether Benedict had played his violin.
This startled me.
‘He is going to be good,’ my mother said in her thrilled voice. She was astonished that I did not know.
I could not go to sleep for thinking about it all: the rooms, the stairs, the girl’s head, Benedict locking me in the room, and Augusta’s brother. I looked at my room and hated our furniture and the smell of polish, and wanted to run away.
It was only in the morning that I remembered I had not seen the swimming-pool.
I admit that I left my wet clothes behind so that I would be able to return. The following morning, I went back to Lower Marsh openly by the road and down the avenue of elms, with a bundle of the Shorts’ clothes under my arm, but kept back the shirt until it could be washed. The air was fresher after the storm. The front door of the house was open. There was no bell or knocker. I could hear Glanville talking on the telephone, which perhaps for some secret reason was in the cloakroom. At our house we had a proper telephone fitted in our hall.
I heard Glanville say on the telephone, ‘So you think well of Gentle Annie do you? I had rather fancied –’ and I think he said ‘Monte Cristo’. And then, ‘Rather dangerous, do you think? The going will be heavy after all the rain. Well, we must hope.’ Then he must have changed the subject, for in a conspiring, private voice he was saying, ‘I am inclined to agree with you, Foxey. I fancy that Oedipus is coming into the open. He is digging a grave in the garden – indeed, two graves. But we don’t despair, Foxey. There is a filly, and we’re pinning our hopes there. We shall have to see how it goes. Goodbye, Foxey.’
Now what was that about?
Then he came out of the cloakroom and saw me.
‘Ah, what have we here? The apple girl without her apple. She has brought a parcel. What can that be?’
He took the parcel and then, in his plotting way, said, ‘We must discover where the frightful Benedict is. Do you think he may be in the garden? Shall we go and see?’
I had decided that when he was buried under tons of earth by a land mine, or whatever it was, in the First World War, Glanville must have saved his life by asking himself innumerable questions. Perhaps that is silly, but he always looked at me or anyone else so steadily as he spoke that he was outside time and his blue eyes cast a spell. This made me shy, because he was not an old man. Now he led me through the house onto the long veranda and we looked down across the lawn. No sign of Benedict, so we went round the side of the house and there, in the paddock, we saw him. He was digging with difficulty in the tufty grass, and when we got to him we saw he had taped out two long rectangles side by side and had dug a few spadefuls of earth out of the end of one. As we watched, Benedict stuck the garden fork into the ground and danced around it.
‘Can he be looking for buried treasure?’ the Major asked.
Benedict jumped about crying, ‘Guess, guess, guess. Don’t tell her, Glan.’
I said he was making a flowerbed.
‘No, no, no,’ he called out. ‘Guess.’
Mrs Short came up from the garden and the Major explained why I was there. Benedict was annoyed because we were not talking to him.
‘He says it is a swimming-pool – one for men, one for ladies,’ said Mrs Short.
We all laughed.
Benedict looked from one to the other of us. ‘I have changed it,’ he said. ‘It’s an Egyptian tomb for Pharaoh.’
‘And this one, perhaps, for his wife?’ said the Major, pointing to the second rectangle.
‘Where is the pyramid?’ I said.
‘It’s going to be a barrow,’ said Benedict. ‘An ancient mound.’
The Major and his wife strolled away, and Benedict and I were left alone. I picked up the garden fork and tried to dig. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, and pulled the fork from me, rather frightened. ‘It’s boring,’ he said.
It was a lazy morning, one of those long mornings – how long they are when one is young – when you wander about and every minute is as long as an hour.
‘I’m going to see the dead bird,’ he said at last.
I did not want to go home. I thought, This is where I want to stay, so I followed him. We crossed the hedge into the water meadow, where the air was cool, and listened to the swish of our shoes against the wiry grass and watched the insects jump away and stopped to listen to the larks singing like electric bells high up in the sky and tried to see them, and we seemed to walk from one electric bell to another. Like Benedict I was playing at running away. First he went ahead fast, but I soon caught up and passed him.
‘Beat you,’ I said, and rumpled his head as I passed. He began to chase me. We passed the end of the wood where the dead bird was and got across the stream, where we messed about with sticks in the water and startled birds. Then we began to climb. I wanted to get to the top of the barrow, but it was longer and higher than I had imagined it would be. The view grew wider and wider and went on for miles, and there was no sound now. We were high above the singing larks. I could see our house and Benedict’s standing quiet with the sun on them. We stopped and sat down. We were sitting on the bones of people who had died millions of years ago. There was no sound here except the wind, but then we heard the baaing of a ram. It sounded to me like the voice of a buried man, but I did not say this. We got up from where we were sitting and looked for it but could see nothing. The sound must have come from the ram far below. I nearly said, ‘The heights! How I love them!’ but I didn’t. Benedict, I thought, is too young; I was centuries older than he was. I wanted to stay there for ever – not with Benedict but, say, with Augusta’s brother, and when we stood for a last look on the miles of flat fields and clumps of trees where there would be a church tower and little houses on the far side, with a road wriggling round a wood, I wanted to go there, too. Suddenly – I don’t know why – thinking of Augusta’s brother, I marched up to Benedict and kissed him and ran off. He didn’t like this and picked up a thorny stick and chased after me.
‘I hate it,’ he said at once. ‘It’s boring. I’m not going back.’
The Devil was there, he went on. Benedict and the Devil! The Devil was dressed in red, he said. This time the Devil was the man who taught music there at his school. He was ignorant, stupid.
It was getting late. We went stumbling down the steep path, and as we got lower I could hear the skylarks again, no higher than my shoulder but far out over the fields below. I could almost have caught one of them.
When we got down to the meadow Benedict was angry when I said I had to get back home. ‘Stay, stay,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you dig.’ But I said no, I didn’t want to dig. He followed me across the meadow to our hedge, still saying ‘Stay.’ I said I had to pack up and go back to school in the afternoon. When I got through the hedge and called out ‘Goodbye,’ he shouted ‘I hate you!’ I saw him walking away and then suddenly he ran and then he was out of sight. I don’t know why I kissed him when we were on the barrow.
Everything changed at my school in Newford after that party at Lower Marsh. Augusta, who was a good deal older than I and taller, had never taken much notice of me, but now she came floating round me like a swan. She had long golden hair and large grey dreaming eyes that narrowed and dwelled on you in an inspecting way. She said, ‘I didn’t know you knew the Shorts,’ in a way that suggested I had hidden a secret from her. Her voice seemed to float on romantic secrets. She was also our chief mimic and gossip. She’d do Mrs Figg’s sarcastic voice, and she knew which teacher was in love with an old don at Oxford who was married. She called two girls who doted on the art master ‘Picasso’s Doves’, and the headmistress ‘the blessed St Agnes’. To be with her was like reading a novel in serial parts; she paused and we knew there were chapters to come.
I told her that we did not really know the Shorts, though my mother, I thought, often met Mrs Short at a musical quartet at Newford.
She narrowed her questioning eyes. ‘I adore Glan and Emma, don’t you?’
And before I knew what I was saying I said there was some trouble about fir trees.
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 4