Had Mother been more than usually disagreeable to Mavis today? It seemed to Claudia all too likely; after that row about the selling of the field, what more probable than that Mother, baffled and knowing herself in the wrong, would have taken it out on Mavis? The whole business of the field had really been most unfortunate. It had been a mistake, really, to ask Mr Marvin to come this morning, without making sure first that Mother would be out at the time; but on the other hand there had been too much delay already, and it was particularly important to get the whole thing settled before Derek came back from his congress in Oslo. Derek could be very weak and vacillating, especially where Mother was concerned; the less that either of them had to do with the present transaction, the better for all concerned.
Of course, Mother couldn’t be kept out of the business entirely. As she had so truculently pointed out this morning, the property was in her name, and her signature would be needed on the documents, But Claudia had hoped to have the whole thing so nearly cut and dried before Mother got wind of it that the battle would be short and sharp, quickly over. For Mother must surely see, once it came to the point, that Claudia was right. The fact that she was right had been Claudia’s strong point all along; it was that which had made the temporary deception of her mother so perfectly legitimate.
Eight thousand pounds! Eight thousand! No one—not even someone as obstinate as Mother—could look that sum squarely in the face and refuse to sell. Think of all the things one could do with eight thousand pounds! Diplomatically, and in rehearsal for the battle to come, Claudia forced her mind away from the things that Claudia could do with it and on to the things that her mother could; for, of course, the money would be her mother’s during her lifetime. That’s what made it so generous of Claudia and Derek to be going to all this trouble about it all; it was all for Mother’s own sake, really; and now, instead of being grateful, all she could do was make trouble—deliberately, perversely, creating a family row out of nothing!
“I’m so sorry I’ve been so long, Claudia. I haven’t made us late, have I?”
Mavis was looking really very much better tonight, Claudia thought. Her hair was piled on top of her head, her face carefully made up, and she was wearing a clean, crisp cotton dress. It’s really doing her good, staying here with us, thought Claudia with satisfaction—and that in spite of Mother’s non-co-operation. Aloud she said:
“Oh no. Not a bit. It won’t take us five minutes in the car.”
It would take ten, actually, and they would be rather late, but Claudia did not want to upset Mavis by pointing it out; nor did she want to spoil Mavis’ picture of her as a person who never flapped, never fussed; a person strong enough to take other people’s weaknesses in her stride. Poor Mavis had a lot of weaknesses, of which unpunctuality was only one, and it must give her a great sense of security to watch them all being taken in Claudia’s stride, day in and day out.
“Sure you’re quite ready? Then we’ll go,” ordained Claudia; and she felt a tiny spark of disappointment as Mavis scuttled straight out of the room and through the hall without waiting to observe how unhurriedly Claudia got up from her chair, in spite of their lateness and the length of time she had been kept waiting.
“I do hope you’re going to enjoy it,” she said to Mavis, as they drove through the quiet streets. “I’ve just no idea what it’s going to be like. It may be a bunch of absolute cows for all I know. Still, it might be quite fun. Good for a laugh, anyhow.”
“Yes. Oh yes.” Mavis paused uncomfortably; and then, in a little shy voice continued: “Claudia, I hope it’s all right? I brought a poem to read.”
Claudia was taken aback, though she could not have explained why. Because it was out of character for Mavis to be writing poetry? Well, yes, it was; but that wasn’t quite it. No, there was something disconcerting about the way Mavis, by bringing this poem, was subtly allying herself, in advance, with the Poetry Group, without waiting for Claudia to decide whether they were old cows or not. For a moment Claudia felt obscurely snubbed. Then she reminded herself that such little spurts of independence in Mavis were entirely a good sign, welcome evidence that she was growing better and better. Under Claudia’s sympathetic encouragement she was rapidly becoming a person in her own right; this poem was indisputable evidence of it. Why, it was almost as if Claudia had written the poem herself.
Claudia smiled. “Of course it’s all right,” she assured Mavis warmly. “They’ll be delighted to hear it—and so will I. Here we are now—Number 67. I only hope the mystery man hasn’t beaten us to it.”
He hadn’t; but to Claudia’s dismay it seemed as if almost everyone else had. Although the meeting was not due to start for another twenty minutes, there were already half a dozen people in Daphne’s big sitting-room, and after a single glance at them Claudia made her diagnosis: Old Cows. All middle-aged, all women, and all talking at once; Claudia watched them pityingly, and nudged Mavis surreptitiously: what did I tell you, the bone in her elbow was saying.
But the thing that hurt—or, rather, the thing that was so futile, Claudia corrected herself—was that Daphne must have rung up the whole lot and asked them all to come early! She hadn’t specially chosen Claudia as a moral support after all! And that raised the further doubt—had Daphne ever really been frightened at all? All this publicity smacked of showing off rather than of fear. Daphne must have invited all this crowd not as body-guard but as audience—admiring witnesses to the pathetic little spark of danger that was flickering—or might possibly flicker—on the fringes of her boring life!
For a second Claudia wondered how it was that she recognised Daphne’s motives with such certainty, and also why it was that the pathetic little ruse should annoy her so much. Really one should laugh—feel sorry for her. Yet Claudia felt her annoyance growing, moment by moment, as she realised that all these people had not only been invited to come early, but also seemed to know much more about the situation than she did herself:
“… such strange eyes …”
“… told me he’s a real poet. He’s published something …”
“… says she’s sure she’s seen him before somewhere …”
“… as if he was deaf and dumb …”
“… couldn’t get a word in edgeways, I don’t suppose … you can’t wonder …” (shrill laughter).
The gabble went on. It could have been fascinating if only there had been some way of joining in, something that Claudia could contribute that the others didn’t know. But there was nothing, and soon the silliness of it all began to make Claudia feel quite sick—the more so because poor Mavis seemed quite hypnotised by the ill-informed chatter. Her light blue eyes darted from one speaker to another continuously. Touching her arm lightly, Claudia drew her to one side. “I’m so sorry, Mavis. I never guessed it would be a bunch like this, or I’d never have brought you. Just look at them! Did you ever see such a circus?”
Mavis laughed, a trifle uncertainly. “Yes. I suppose so. But mightn’t they be all right really? I mean, they might write good poetry, or something? And a different lot might come in when it’s properly time for the meeting, mightn’t they?” she hazarded, watching Claudia anxiously.
“What a hope! No, I’ve been to these do’s of Daphne’s before, and it’s always the same. I don’t know why I ever thought that this might be different. She ran the Drama Guild once, you know, and after that the Literary Circle; and, my dear, you should have seen them! I don’t know how she does it! When she advertises the meetings, she doesn’t actually say ‘Ladies Only’ or ‘Under-fifties not Welcome.’ She doesn’t put placards up saying: ‘Happy, well-adjusted People Keep Out!’ But really you’d think she did, because that’s exactly the effect it seems to have! Just listen to them! At the mere thought that a Man might turn up! No wonder he took to his heels after one look!”
Claudia laughed as she spoke. She was feeling much better now, sharing these witticisms with Mavis; and it was only then that she noticed that something was going wrong with t
he sharing. Mavis wasn’t laughing properly, wasn’t gazing up at Claudia, stimulating her to further sallies. What on earth was the matter with the girl?
“My poem?” whispered Mavis in a small, hurt voice. “Aren’t these people—I mean, isn’t there any point in my reading it to them, then?”
Claudia stared. Mavis’ wretched poem! Why drag that into it, just when they were beginning to have such fun quizzing everybody! Mavis could be very insensitive, sometimes, to the mood of the moment. The trouble was that she hadn’t really got a sense of humour, and Claudia, for all her understanding and sympathy, couldn’t instil one into her. A sense of humour was something you were either born with or you weren’t. Those who were, must simply bear with the others, and remember that it was in no way their fault. Claudia smiled tolerantly.
“Why—of course you can read it. If you want to. Though I wouldn’t have thought that, with an audience like this … I mean, it won’t be exactly like having Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley and T. S. Eliot to judge it for you, now will it?”
“No,” agreed Mavis in a small voice; and at this moment the quality of the clamour changed. A preparatory upheaval was beginning; chairs scraped across the floor; someone clapped their hands; handbags and folders shuffled on and off various surfaces; the sustained blur of conversation broke up into polite little ejaculations: “Plenty of room here, dear”… “No, no, you have it, I prefer a hard chair” … “Wouldn’t you rather have the cushion?”…
The meeting had begun.
Claudia steeled herself for an hour and a half of total boredom. The mysterious stranger, the white hope of the evening, hadn’t come; and now there was to be nothing but slab after slab of puerile doggerel interspersed with inane comments from a bunch of old women who understood nothing about poetry and cared less.
Claudia did not understand much about poetry either—this she would readily have admitted—but at least she understood enough to know that everything that was going to be read out this evening was going to be bad. She allowed her eyelids to droop wearily, so that she need be only partially conscious of what was going on around her.
“This is the third canto,” a slightly cracked voice was beginning to explain—anxious, self-deprecatory, yet determined—God, how determined! They had a will of iron, these people who wanted to read things aloud, nothing would stop them. “On the surface, of course,” the voice went on, “it’s just a fairy story, and I want you all to tell me whether the symbolism comes across, I want you to tell me honestly….”
What lies! What rubbish! She’d have a fit if you told her honestly! And just look at that loony of an old maid, Miss Fergusson, leaning forward in her chair, eyes bright and expectant, as if she was expecting to hear Shakespeare himself reading his early sonnets! Or something. Claudia had never read Shakespeare’s early sonnets, but naturally she knew that they were good, which was more than Miss Fergusson did; you could tell by the intent way she was listening to this rubbish that she couldn’t tell one line of poetry from another.
The Canto went on, and on, and was followed by a love lyric. Love, if you please, and the author sixty if she was a day, with straight grey hair and lace-up shoes! It rhymed, too, Claudia noted vaguely, eyes and skies, something like that. Rhyming, she knew, set the final seal of worthlessness on a poem, and the subsequent twitter of approval from the company sickened her. They were all buttering each other up, of course, because they wanted nice things said when it came to their turn. The futility and boredom of it all began to be more than Claudia could go on contemplating, and by the time it came to Miss Fergusson’s turn to read she had almost managed to close her ears as well as her eyes. This was really going to be the last straw; a poem written by Miss Fergusson! Claudia did not even hear the title, so completely had she withdrawn her attention: she just sat back, eyes closed, and waited for the jingling, jog-trot lines to end.
A sudden roar of laughter filled the room, and Claudia started upright in her chair. What on earth …? People were absolutely rocking in their seats … tears of laughter were in their eyes … and in the midst of it all, modest but a little pink, sat Miss Fergusson, clutching her precious manuscript, with becomingly downcast eyes, nursing her delight.
So it has been a funny poem, and a highly successful one at that! Claudia felt cheated, made a fool of; as if someone should have warned her that this one was going to be worth listening to. How on earth could she have known, after all those others? However, she hastily put a smile on her face and laughed with the rest; and for the next two or three readings she even found herself listening a little, uneasily, for fear of missing something, and of being seen to miss it.
But of course there wasn’t anything else worth hearing; and her face must soon have settled back into its old expression, because here was her hostess whispering anxiously to her, under cover of a burst of general discussion: “I do hope you’re not too bored, Claudia? I feel awful having asked you to come since he hasn’t turned up. I feel such a fool, now, ever to have thought that he might …” and even as she spoke, the door of the sitting-room opened silently, and a slight, furtive figure sidled into the room.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST THING that startled Claudia was that he was so short; the second that he was so young. It was odd that she should be startled, because she had not, in fact, had any picture in her mind at all of Daphne’s intruder. Her imagination had been entirely engrossed by the picture of herself—talking to him, drawing him out, coping with the situation—while a shadowy audience looked on admiringly. But the man himself, she realised now, had not come into the picture at all as a visible presence. Tall or short—dark or fair—young or old—she simply hadn’t thought about it. And now here he astonishingly was—young, small, mousy-fair. All absolutely wrong.
Wrong for what? By what standard? Claudia abandoned introspection, and instead leaned forward to study the boy more intently as he slipped into a vacant chair quite close to her.
No, he wasn’t as young as all that, after all; not a boy at all, in fact. It had been the unlined, unused look of his smooth, pale face that had misled her; but she could see now, as the light from the standard lamp fell across his features, that this was not the smoothness of extreme youth. Rather it was the face of someone who has remained untouched, unaware, for too long; someone who has led so sheltered a life that no powerful emotions, no stresses, no anxieties, have ever come his way. Or could it be, perhaps, the face of someone who had led so terrible a life that he has learned to have no emotions—to turn a blank, impassive front to the whole world? Something stirred in Claudia—some tiny, warm knot of feeling that she could not identify. She wanted to reach out across the intervening persons and touch his hand. Almost at the same time she became aware, disconcertingly, that the whole room was staring at the newcomer just as she was. Even the hostess, whose business it surely was to greet him in some way, seemed struck dumb like the rest. Clearly, it was Claudia who must save the situation.
“Hullo,” she said vivaciously, leaning across her unresisting neighbour in his direction “You’ve missed quite a bit of the reading, I’m afraid, but ….”
You would have thought, you really would, that Claudia’s presence of mind in being the first to open her mouth would have entitled her to at least a few words of conversation with the young man. But oh no; the moment that her voice had broken the paralysed silence for them—before she had completed so much as five words of her sentence—everyone else must needs break in; pushing, clamouring their way into the interchange like ducks after a crust of bread. Did he write much poetry? What was his name? He’d been here before, hadn’t he? Was he living in the neighbourhood? Was he a student, then? Or working at the aircraft place? Did he write the modern kind of poetry? Did he like it? Would he be coming regularly? Had he had anything published? Had he brought a poem to read?
Up to this point the young man had submitted to the volley of questions in dazed silence—a sort of drowned, bewildered look, as if someone had turned
the garden hose on him; but at this last question he seemed to come alive. He still did not speak, but bending down to the suitcase at his side, he heaved deftly out of it a wad of manuscript so gigantic that even this company, with all their experience, were taken aback.
“Well—how splendid!” faltered Daphne, eyeing the pile uneasily. “Er—you must have got quite a number of poems there?”
“Just over eleven hundred,” answered the young man immediately; and now that they had heard his voice at last Claudia noticed, with a curious sense of self-congratulation, how well it suited his appearance; it was light, lacking in warmth, guarded. Yet he did not seem shy, exactly. In fact, he was already shuffling through his mound of papers purposefully, snatching at the invitation to read, determined that it should not be allowed to lapse.
“I wonder which you’d like to hear?” he mused loudly, stilling the voices in his vicinity. “It’s a bit difficult to choose. They’re all on the same subject, you see.”
Eleven hundred poems all on the same subject. The company stared in awe. “Well I never,” observed Miss Fergusson at last, summing up the general feeling as best she could; and amid the soft murmurs of assent to this sentiment, the young man launched into his poem.
“Bars!” it began—and it was not clear if this was the title or the first line, but naturally nobody would ask such a question, especially of a new member:
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