‘Yes, Sammy and I sold the lot when we bought the hotel.’
‘All of it? Oh, Rhoda!’
‘We ought to have kept the silver,’ Rhoda said. ‘We’d have got ten times the price now. Money is money, isn’t it? As Sammy says, no good hoarding everything. Things need a change. It cheers them up, he says.’
‘It’s cheered up the Captain coming here, I must say,’ I said pointing to the portrait. ‘You couldn’t see him properly at Lodge. We had him cleaned.’
Rhoda sniffed at the Captain. ‘Imagine the life of his wife, polishing all that stuff, chained to it, while he was at sea,’ Rhoda said.
‘But you used to love things, Rhoda,’ said Miranda. ‘It seems so sad but I suppose it was sensible. There wouldn’t have been enough room in your hotel.’
‘We’ve sold the hotel,’ said Rhoda. ‘All those tourists taking photographs and talking about “art”. It was too much for Sammy’s nerves – I mean the old people you get always complaining about their washbasins and quarrelling with one another, some are quite mad. And the bells going all day.’
Miranda said, in her discreet, orderly way, ‘We’ve never been quite sure what Sammy does. I do so wish you’d brought him with you. What does he do now?’
Miranda had never quite believed my account of Sammy when I came back from our accidental meeting so long ago at my bank. What had struck me particularly in the fleshy young man was his trousers: his jacket was open and the trousers were braced high over his wide waist, almost to his ribs. He had black hair with a curl over his forehead and a damp, glistening crimson face, his fists, his nose, his lips were heavy; his body looked too full of blood, like that of a boxer or a publican or one of the security guards at the bank. Rhoda had said: ‘I want you to meet Sammy. He’s my lover.’ They looked as though they had hired each other. He came forward and said ‘Pleased to meet you,’ in a confidential way that suggested: this bird and I have just done a deal. And he looked back shrewdly at the bank clerks at the main desk as he might have glanced back at a bar when he was going to offer a new pal a drink.
‘We are in a rush,’ Rhoda had said. ‘We’ve only got half an hour to get to the airport. We’re going to Italy.’
‘S’right,’ Sammy said.
Rhoda looked proudly amused by the disparity of their accents – a ‘dig’ at me, of course.
‘Come on,’ she said to Sammy, and he lazily followed her steps out of the bank.
Sammy called back to me, ‘Be seeing you.’
One thing I was certain of: he was afraid of Rhoda.
Now, as Rhoda was passing her cup to Miranda, she said: ‘He’s got a nightclub now. It’s much better for him. Poor Sammy, he’s allergic to the sun in Italy. It upsets his eyes. He’s shortsighted. He likes night work – he sleeps all day.’
I remembered how the hulking fellow blinked when he was introduced to me. I had said to Miranda when I got home, ‘Rhoda’s shortsighted too. They probably don’t see each other.’
‘We get a crowd,’ Rhoda was saying now, ‘especially at the weekends.’
Her businesslike words brought to Rhoda’s little eyes that miserly gleam the family used to tease her about at Lodge, which had evidently lasted: the clothes she was wearing looked cheap. But the plaintive drooping mouth of her ‘wawnting’ was not there. Her lips curled up happily when she talked of Sammy.
‘Money is very necessary to Sammy, you know,’ she said to me.
‘We all need money nowadays,’ I answered, laughing.
‘You don’t understand, Philip,’ she said. ‘He needs it for his gambling.’
‘Oh, Rhoda, you don’t mean you’ve got a gambling club?’ cried Miranda.
‘He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t even drink wine in Italy. He doesn’t mind if I do. He needs to gamble,’ Rhoda added, ‘psychologically.’
‘Oh, Rhoda, I don’t know. Isn’t it awful for you? I know those places make money, but they lose more. It’s lucky you haven’t a family.’
‘But I have,’ Rhoda said. ‘There’s Sammy’s little boy. He’s sweet. He calls me Mamita.’
‘We didn’t know Sammy was married before,’ we said together.
‘He wasn’t. He had an Italian woman,’ said Rhoda.
And she sat back looking from one to the other of us with a storyteller’s glee. She sighed.
‘How nice it is here. D’you remember how we used to go up the cliffs to watch the baby seagulls? Will you take me, Philip, while I’m here?’
‘I am sure Philip will take you,’ said Miranda. ‘When he’s done his letters.’
I took the hint and went to my study. There was a photograph of an oil rig being towed out to sea on one wall and a watercolour of boats on Hong Kong harbour, one of Miranda’s, but all I could think of was Rhoda’s long grey hair over her shoulders. ‘She’s mad. She’s mad. It’s the usual tale of an old woman trying to look young, being bled for her money by a layabout.’ The scene in my bank kept racing across the page as I started to write a letter, and I had to give up. Perhaps Sammy had sent her over here to get money out of Miranda?
An hour went by and then Miranda opened my door and, looking back cautiously, said loudly, ‘Are you ready now to take Rhoda to see the baby seagulls while I start cooking?’
Miranda looked behind her, listened, and then whispered, ‘I think she’s looking for a house.’
‘Here? Oh, God! Not here!’
‘She’s on about starting an antique shop . . .’ – but she stopped as we heard Rhoda’s heels in the hall.
‘He’d love to take you, Rhoda,’ Miranda called.
Rhoda and I got into the car. When the sun goes down into the sea here it often sets off a firework display, sending out pink rockets, but this evening there was no more than a slow, yellowing light above a bank of low cloud that was coming in. The daylight was going and the sea was as dull as slate.
‘It’s going to be too late to see the baby seagulls,’ I said as we slowed down at the turning to the cliff.
‘I don’t care whether I see them or not,’ Rhoda said. ‘Peter and I will see them tomorrow – Peter Ogbourne. I’ve got to get off early. I’m picking up Peter and we’re driving to Falmouth. He’s got another sale there. Let’s go to Lodge.’
So all this talk of seagulls was a trick to get me to Lodge, to ‘drop in’ on the Bulwers. I was not going to have that. ‘Just to pass it,’ she said wistfully. I was wrong.
So the drive was to be a sentimental trip on a cloudy evening. There is something bemusing about the narrow roads in this part of the country. A stranger can easily get lost in them, they wind between banks of stone slabs with high hedges on top of them, so that you are tunnelling and see nothing of the country, simply the sky. North, south, east and west vanish. At the sharp corners there are often signposts showing four ways, with different distances, for getting to the same village. Tourists laugh at them, forgetting these roads were built not for getting from village to village but from farm to farm. The only dramatic sight is the number of dead trees one passes, tall silver skeletons with their branching arms stuck up, like dead preachers.
Rhoda was counting the skeleton trees with excitement. She said, ‘There is one at Lodge.’
And so there was.
‘I’ll slow down. I can’t stop – it’s a nasty corner,’ I said, for I was still suspicious. ‘You won’t be able to see anything.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said again. ‘Just to feel myself passing it.’
The sight contented her, and very slowly we passed the gate of the overgrown drive.
The old concrete pill-box we had built just inside the drive during the war was still there, but with nettles growing out of it now. The sight of that pleased Rhoda too. She used to stand there watching us build it.
‘I liked the war,’ she said. ‘It was fun. Very good for women.’
‘Not for your mother or anyone with children,’ I said. ‘No more servants. They went into the factories.’
‘T
hat’s what I mean,’ she said. ‘They got decent wages for once. Mother was hell to the village girls we had.’
‘Women have a worse time now,’ I said.
We got into the usual argument but she rattled on until she suddenly stopped and said, ‘Do you remember Captain Blake? He turned me out of the tower. I was furious with him – putting a machine-gun post up there. Stupid idea. It was my room. I had all my things there. I think that’s where I lost my Coronation mug.’
Her indignation died.
‘Poor Captain Blake. Why did they arrest him?’
I could have said, ‘You know why, Rhoda. Don’t look so innocent,’ but she carried on.
‘I know he was rather – you know – but he really did like little girls. He was only cuddly. He called me the pocket Venus.’
I said I thought it was the pocket Cleopatra.
‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘It was Venus.’
We had now passed the gate, thank God, and had gone beyond the wood at the end of what used to be the garden.
She closed the window of the car and tidied her hair, spreading it carefully over her shoulders, looking like a witch once again, and said, ‘By the way, Peter is not my lover. Actually I’m not interested in sex anymore.’
This was the most startling remark I had ever heard Rhoda make.
‘I didn’t think he was,’ I said laughing. ‘You’ve only known him a day.’
‘Two days,’ she said.
We were back in the maze of high-banked lanes, and I put the headlights on.
‘I showed the children to Peter,’ she suddenly said. ‘I’ve got them in the car.’
A home-going tractor with no lights came suddenly out of a blind side turning when she said this and I had to brake suddenly.
‘Bloody fool,’ I called out. ‘What do you mean – children?’
‘The Captain’s children – the picture with his wife. They’re in the back of my car. I brought them with me. Peter says I ought to take them to Sotheby’s and get them valued, they’d fetch a good price. Did Miranda tell you? Sammy and I are going in for antiques – not in Italy, Italy’s finished.’
And then she said, ‘I saw that in Exeter.’ She was talking to herself, not to me.
‘Saw’ was a word of hers I had forgotten. It is really the most important. When Rhoda ‘sees’, she is having a sudden vision or revelation, which comes into her mind out of the blue, driving out all calculation for the moment. I think it must have started in her religious phase and was something she got from the Brethren, something like a ‘call’, although you hear a ‘call’ but you ‘see’ a vision. Miranda and I used to be distressed or angry about the mess she seemed to make of her life – those ‘lovers’ always left her, she did not leave them, and then her money was obviously being thrown away on Sammy; it seemed to us a bad end to it. What kept her going were these sudden ‘seeings’.
‘I don’t know anything about shops. I’m an engineer. Don’t shops require capital? I don’t know anything about antiques.’
‘But Peter does,’ she said.
I knew what was going to happen as our headlights lit up our pink house. Rhoda would rush in to Miranda, alight with vision, and say that I had said the idea was splendid.
That is almost what happened when I was getting the drinks and Miranda came in from the kitchen. Miranda and I exchanged glances: What has she told you? What do you know? Did Miranda think Rhoda and Sammy were breaking up? What about this Peter? What was going on? Miranda was signalling: I don’t know. Do you? We were like actors sketching our way through lines in a plot that only Rhoda knew. I said, to forestall Rhoda, ‘No baby seagulls.’
‘We went to Lodge,’ said Rhoda.
‘Just passed it,’ I said, to calm Miranda.
Rhoda paid no attention to us.
‘I’ll get the children,’ she said and carrying her drink with her, she went out to her car.
I said to Miranda quickly: ‘The Captain’s children. She’s going to sell the picture.’
Rhoda returned, holding her glass high in one hand and carrying the picture, which was nearly as tall as herself. It was wrapped in old sacking and roughly tied. She put it against a chair and swallowed her drink, then she knelt down and started picking at the string. Bits of the dirty sacking made a mess on the carpet. I tried to pick it up. I hate a mess in a room. We saw the picture at last.
Unlike our portrait of the Trafalgar Captain, this picture was quite large – we always said that was why Rhoda had chosen it. It was exactly as it had been at Lodge – darkened by age, which made the faces small and yellow. The Captain’s wife was sitting on a stone bench, under a tree, and with her were three little girls in once-white dresses with blue ribbons, one child looking down at a little dog. A country scene but, rather absurdly, the painter had put in the mast of a ship in the background. Our Captain at any rate looked rosy and alive; his family were peaky and stiff, like dolls. Rhoda came to business. Peter had seen it and said, ‘It’s a primitive. Primitives fetch a price.’ And what was certain, he said, was that it would fetch three times as much if the Captain was sold with it.
‘Rhoda! What a sad thing to do with a family thing. Sell the children? You don’t mean it,’ Miranda said.
Rhoda watched our faces.
‘Well, I can tell you this – we’re not selling the Captain, are we, Miranda?’ I said. Let Rhoda sell what she liked. My temper was rising at the sight of Rhoda proposing to sell our things under our noses and turning our house into a saleroom. Rhoda went one better.
‘I’ll sell them to you if you like,’ Rhoda said, dropping her mouth open like a haggler.
‘We don’t want them,’ I said. ‘Do we, Miranda?’
‘But Rhoda, the two pictures are not by the same painter,’ Miranda said. ‘You can see that by the signatures. The children were done by some local man – Barnes or something. Ours is a Drummond.’
Rhoda was startled but shook the idea out of her head.
‘Peter says it’s a Drummond,’ she argued.
‘Soon settle that – look at the signature.’
It was illegible. On the back a label said: ‘Flora Barnes. Falmouth.’
Miranda said shrewdly, ‘Does Sammy want you to sell it?’
Rhoda put on an airy manner and gave one of her dry cackles. ‘Sammy doesn’t know I’ve got it here,’ she said. ‘He’d go out of his mind. I packed it up when he was at the club or with that woman of his.’
Her eyes went into slits of pleasure at the memory of her trick.
Miranda said, ‘Have you left Sammy?’
‘I’ll never leave Sammy,’ Rhoda said. ‘And Sammy won’t leave me. When he finds out I’ve got the picture and gets my letter about Peter and the prices things fetch he’ll be over here on the next plane. Sammy will do anything for money. He’ll bring the little boy.’
She went into a brisk dream.
‘Gamblers love children and that woman hates them.’
‘You mean and bring the – er – lady?’
Rhoda, Sammy, and his mistress on our doorstep!
‘No,’ said Rhoda. ‘I don’t mind what women he has, but he’s had this one long enough. I know how to manage Sammy.’
Neither Miranda nor I could think of anything to say. Rhoda held out her glass and I gave her another drink. Rhoda saw that her proposal had failed and when her ‘visions’ fail, she always throws them away. She looked down at her shoes thoughtfully and said in her sly and deedy voice, very slowly sketching her way into a new idea: ‘I actually don’t think I will sell the picture when Sammy gets here. I haven’t any children of my own. The boy is rather sweet. He likes the picture: he thinks they’re mine.’
And then she said, shrewdly, ‘Peter says when you go in for antiques it’s always a good thing to have something you won’t sell in a shop.’
And Rhoda knelt on the floor and began to put the picture back into its sacking. I helped her.
I said, ‘I can’t see Sammy in an antique sho
p. You can’t sleep all day in a shop.’
‘I’ll run the shop,’ she said. ‘I’m going to talk to Peter tomorrow. He might come in with us. They’ll get on – they’re both keen on money – and he’s younger than Sammy. That’ll keep Sammy awake.’
We both shouted wih laughter and Rhoda was surprised for a moment and then looked very clever. She went to sit on the stool.
Miranda said that dinner was ready and as she went into the kitchen called back, ‘Is Peter married, Rhoda?’
‘God, no,’ Rhoda called back, and looked at me suggesting that there was something stupid in our married condition.
We went to eat in the alcove at the end of the room. When we were served she put her head almost down to her plate and looked up to see what our forks were putting into our mouths before she began.
There was no more talk about pictures or Peter or Sammy, but we laughed about old times at Lodge – the soldiers there, how kind Captain Blake was to her the night Plymouth was bombed and how Miranda had found her sitting on the captain’s knee in her nightgown and she had fallen asleep and had a terrible dream that she was struggling with Miranda in the sea.
Rhoda said, ‘I thought you were drowned. I was trying to save you.’
Miranda said drily, ‘And you brought me a cup of tea every morning for a week afterwards. I wondered why.’
‘It was weird,’ said Rhoda, ignoring this. ‘Mother was so upset. I was only talking to poor Captain Blake. He was only being cuddly – he wasn’t my lover, you know . . .’
‘I should hope not. You were only a child,’ said Miranda.
‘He was after you – but you had Philip,’ Rhoda said and turned to me and said, ‘What was all the fuss about? Anyway, he told me he was impotent . . .’
‘Shut up, Rhoda,’ I said.
She looked mischievously at me but obeyed.
After this there was no more fuss until bedtime. Then she insisted on having her travelling-bed put up alongside the empty bed in the spare room, and when this was done she complained that it blocked the way to the window. She said she would sooner sleep on the floor in the sitting-room, so we let her bring her sleeping-bag down, and we helped her dismantle her travelling-bed. She said she wanted to slip away in the morning without disturbing us.
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 9