The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Thank you. It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Kind?’

  It might have been a word of contempt. Unaccompanied as it was by any expression at all, but merely by the same extraordinary neutral flatness as before, it sounded like a sneer.

  ‘Your mother was always awfully kind to us.’

  ‘I can imagine so.’

  ‘I remember once,’ he said, trying to restore some normality to the conversation by echoing Maxie’s enthusiasm, ‘when she wanted to celebrate the Liberation. She made us the most marvellous peach-and-champagne cup. Ice cold.’

  ‘Liberation?’

  Again the word was like a sneer.

  ‘Yes. You know, 1944, the Liberation.’

  ‘What liberation? Liberation from what?’

  ‘From war,’ he said, ‘and so on—’

  ‘We’re still at war, aren’t we? We’ve never been anything else. Wars have to be helped along. You said so.’

  He didn’t say anything. He supposed they were still at war. There was an awful lot of war about, if you came to think of it. But not wars you could work up much enthusiasm about, as it were. Not like the old days.

  Presently Maxie came back, smiling, rubbing the backs of his fingers across his moustache in that self-approving way of his, bringing with him a large bottle of Mitsouko, handsomely wrapped in blue paper and tied with shining pink ribbon.

  ‘Ah! the water. Thank you very much, Mademoiselle. Merci. I’m dying for that.’

  Eagerly seizing a glass, Maxie drank deep, not merely once but a second and a third time.

  The girl watched impassively. Her large inhospitable brown eyes neither changed their expression nor flickered for a second.

  ‘Nectar,’ Maxie said. His wind-parched mouth felt eased at last. ‘Absolute nectar. Champagne couldn’t have gone down better.’

  ‘Not even the peach-and-champagne cup?’ Roger Baines said.

  ‘Not even that.’

  ‘Can’t agree. There was never any nectar quite like that.’

  Fired once again by the memory of that far-off nectar, Roger Baines stood idly wondering how many times he had, in those two summers, made love to la Comtesse. Impossible to remember. At the same time he seemed to recall that one chap, Forster he thought his name was, had rather foolishly put it all down in a diary. For his part he thought it was all a bit much in black and white. There were limits. Better to remember it as a chain of dreams.

  ‘I suppose your mother has married again?’ Maxie said.

  ‘No.’

  For an embarrassed second or two he felt bound to look at Roger Baines again but he thought better of it and merely glanced at the girl. It was all very awkward. Her face, at the same time, had taken on a curious brooding frown, darkly melancholy. She was silently staring into far distances, as if probing for something: it might have been for the truth about something that had long been withheld from her.

  To Maxie it seemed obvious that she was merely sulking. With penetrative insight he told himself that that was her way of attracting extra attention. She had an enormous chip on her shoulder—mere youth, perhaps? Or possibly something else?—he put the thought aside. Anyway, that’s how the young were these days—they dressed in black, the girls wore trousers and no lip-stick, they didn’t wash and didn’t comb their hair. It was all a way of attracting greater attention.

  So awkward was the silence becoming by this time that he was greatly relieved to hear Roger Baines say:

  ‘I must just walk round the garden before we go. I should just love to smell those melons again.’

  He walked away across the garden, down a long paved path that led, eventually, to an orchard of old apples and pears. There the wind was blowing with scorching roughness. Under every fruit tree a gold and green clutch of fallen fruit lay scattered. He stood for a few moments and stared, picking out from the wind-shaken scene a single particularly pleasant memory. He had made love to la Comtesse for the last time on a dark August evening there, under one of the many old, big apple trees. She had been exceptionally free with him on that occasion: perhaps because an enormous apple had suddenly fallen and struck him full in the middle of the back, making her laugh with near-hysteria. Love and laughter went very well together, he remembered her saying. They did indeed.

  Slowly he walked back, to be met half way along the garden path by Maxie, who said:

  ‘I’ve been wondering. I feel a bit sorry for the kid, somehow. Shall we give her the Mitsouko?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Parting gesture and all that. Might brighten her up a bit. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  They turned and started to walk back to where the girl, still with the empty bottle and the two glasses in her hand, was waiting by the wall of peaches.

  ‘Oh! by the way, I asked her why she disliked England and she said for the same reason she disliked France. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘She’s obviously got the most enormous chip on her shoulder.’

  ‘Oh! enormous.’

  ‘Hates war like poison and all that. Probably one of those ban-the-nuclear-stuff fanatics.’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder. I suppose they get over it in time.’

  When they got back to the girl she was still staring with that melancholy probing frown into the far distance. She had almost to be woken up to hear Maxie say that he was afraid they would have to go now and would she perhaps accept, as a little parting gift, the Mitsouko.’

  ‘You know Mitsouko, I’m sure. The perfume.’

  ‘I never use perfume.’

  The rejection of the perfume was arid, toneless but not quite impersonal. It rejected them too.

  ‘Oh! please take it,’ Maxie said. ‘Do.’

  ‘Yes, do,’ Roger Baines said. ‘It would give us a lot of pleasure.’

  She abruptly switched her stare from the distance to the two men and now her eyes looked not merely sullen and melancholy but old and bruised.

  ‘You brought it for my mother, didn’t you?’

  Without waiting for an answer she turned sharply and started to walk back to the château. She had gone only six or seven yards before she suddenly stopped, turned and stared emptily back at them.

  ‘I’ll tell my mother you called,’ she said.

  She turned again and this time went straight on, the uncombed strands of her rag-tailed hair blowing octopus-like in the wind, until she disappeared.

  For a few minutes Maxie stared at the gay ribbon and paper that encased the Mitsouko and then said:

  ‘This is obviously where we came in.’

  ‘It is indeed.’

  They walked out of the shelter of the big garden wall and back to the car. The hissing lamentations of the whipped poplar leaves seemed louder than ever on the hillside. They got into the car and Maxie laid the Mitsouko on the back seat.

  ‘I’ll give it to my mother,’ he said. ‘Unless you want it?’

  ‘Oh! no, you have it.’

  ‘No, you, if you’d like it.’

  ‘No, you. I couldn’t care less.’

  They drove down the hill and across the valley.

  ‘And what,’ Roger Baines said, ‘do you suppose we’d done to deserve all that?’

  ‘God knows,’ Maxie said. ‘Search me.’

  ‘Strange kid.’

  Maxie pondered, thinking slowly to a bright conclusion, his fingers lightly brushing across his grey-brown moustache.

  ‘We should never have tried to give her the Mitsouko,’ he said. ‘I see that now. The Mitsouko was the big mistake. Still, it’s an ill wind—my mother will be pleased.’

  To Roger Baines the Mitsouko didn’t seem important. As he drove on it seemed more pleasant to think of walls of peaches, the smell of melons and an apple falling in the darkness.

  ‘Pity not to have seen la Comtesse,’ he said. ‘Sad not to have seen la Comtesse. Very, very sad.’

  In the distance a bend of a
river sparkled in the sun. Everywhere trees, driven by the summer gale, were in torment. Continuous flocks of dark cloud shadow scurried across the land like scattered helpless sheep.

  A Party for the Girls

  Miss Tompkins, who was seventy-six, bright pink-looking in a bath-salts sort of way and full of an alert but dithering energy, looked out of the drawing-room window for the twentieth time since breakfast and found herself growing increasingly excited. The weather, she thought, really was improving all the time it got better. It was going to be marvellous for the party after all.

  The morning had improved so much and so fast, in fact, that all the azaleas, mere stubby fists of rose and apricot and yellow the day before, were now fully expanded in the sun, raising the most delicate open hands to a cloudless summer sky. They were very late this year and perhaps that was why, she thought, they seemed to be so much more beautiful. After all, she told herself, you couldn’t hurry nature; everything had its appointed time; everything that was really good was worth waiting for. During all the wet cold weeks of May she had watched the barely colouring buds apparently clenching themselves tighter and tighter and once or twice she had actually prayed for them, in true earnest, against the dreaded threat of frost.

  Now they were all in blossom. Great banks of them rose splendidly from the far side of the lawn. As if by a miracle they were all at their best on the appointed day: the day of the party for the girls.

  ‘If that’s the telephone I’ll answer it,’ Miss Tompkins called to the invisible presence of Maude Chalmers, who was very busy filling the last vol-au-vent cases with cold fresh salmon and mayonnaise in the kitchen, ‘if it isn’t you go.’

  No answering word came from Maude Chalmers, her companion-housekeeper, who was working in a silent and practical vacuum at the vols-au-vents, with the kitchen door closed, unable to hear the ringing of the bell that flew with tremulous persistence through the house. Sometimes Miss Tompkins vowed that Maude, who was seventy-eight, actually feigned deafness: either that, she thought, or her hearing deliberately deteriorated the moment she wanted it to get worse.

  ‘I think it’s the telephone after all!’ she called and rushed into the hall, picking up the receiver and pouring excited ‘Hullos’ into it, only to discover after some seconds that the line was dead. ‘No, it isn’t. I’ll go. It’s the front door.’

  ‘Oh! it’s the smoked sprats! You splendid man!’ She took from the fishmonger’s man a small parcel, hands clutching it with new excitement. ‘How clever of you to have got them in time. They’re such lovely things for someone who’s never had them before.’

  She had read about the sprats in a magazine. They were one of the things by which she hoped to give the party a touch of the unusual, a bit of exciting tone. For the same reason she had decided it should be a morning party. Morning parties were, she thought, different. For one thing they were kinder to the girls, most of whom were no longer quite so young. Some were early-to-bedders; many of them played bridge in the afternoon or had sleeps and later went out to tea. At noon they would, she thought, be fresher, in the mood to peck at something and ready for a well-iced drink or two. They could wander in the garden, gaze at the azaleas, take their plates and glasses with them and chat happily in the sun.

  A bell rang stridently in the house again and automatically she picked up the telephone receiver, at the same time calling:

  ‘Maude, the smoked sprats have come. Isn’t that heaven?’

  ‘Is that you, Tommy?’ a voice said over the phone. Most of her friends called her Tommy; she never paused to wonder if it suited her. ‘It’s Phoebe here. What was that about sprats? You sound like a warbling thrush.’

  ‘Oh! I am—I did. I feel like that. Did I say sprats? I suppose I did—I didn’t want you to know. What is it, Phoebe? Could something be the matter? Don’t say you can’t come.’

  ‘Not a thing, dear. It was simply—I wondered if you’d mind—’

  ‘Mind? Mind what?’

  ‘I just wondered if I might bring Horace, that’s all.’

  ‘Horace? Who’s Horace?’

  ‘My brother.’ Phoebe Hooper’s voice was deep, throaty, oiled and persuasive in tone; over the telephone it greatly belied her years. ‘He’s eighteen months younger than me.’ Phoebe Hooper was a mere seventy. ‘Would you mind? He’s here staying with me for a week or two.’

  ‘Well, it was really a party for the girls—’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you know how it is. Either I’ve got to leave the poor man cold lunch on a tray or something or he goes to the pub for a lonely Guinness and a sandwich. He’s harmless, really. He just needs pushing around, that’s all.’

  A sense of uneasiness, touched with disappointment, crept over Miss Tompkins. The fond bright illusion of her female party seemed suddenly to fade. She had created in her mind for so long a picture of the girls wandering through the house, all permed and gay in summer dresses, and about the garden, against the background of azaleas in all their freshest colours, that the thought of a solitary male stranger among them seemed now to obtrude unpleasantly.

  ‘But it’s just for the girls, Phoebe. It’s all hen, I mean. I’m sure he’ll be frightfully, frightfully bored—’

  ‘Oh! not Horace. He’ll make himself useful. He’ll buttle for you. He’ll mix the drinks. He mixes beautiful Moselle cup. I’m sorry I left it so late, Tommy—’

  ‘Late?’ Miss Tompkins felt suddenly helpless and at the mercy of time. It always went so much faster when you thought it was earlier than it was. ‘Is it late? What time is it now?’

  ‘I make it five to twelve. Is it really all right about Horace?’

  ‘I must fly. Twelve? It was half-past ten five minutes ago. Yes, it’s all right about—yes, please—perfectly—’

  ‘You’re a lamb, dear.’ Phoebe Hooper’s voice, smooth as oil, sent yet another tremor through Miss Tompkins, once more despoiling her confidence. ‘We’ll be over in a few minutes. Heavenly day.’

  Breathlessly Miss Tompkins flew to the kitchen, actually unwrapping smoked sprats as she went and finally saying to Maude Chalmers: ‘It’s twelve already. That was Phoebe Hooper on the phone. She wants to bring her brother to the party. His name’s Horace. I thought we’d put the sprats on the green dish—you know, the Spode. The green would match so well with the gold.’

  ‘Green dish? Spode? People are going to eat them,’ Maude Chalmers said, ‘aren’t they? Not use them for interior decorating.’

  Maude Chalmers, who spoke tartly, was surprisingly solid, almost beefy, for a woman in her late seventies. Her hair was dark and strong, if rather stringy, and untidy bits of smoky whisker grew out of her upper lip and under-chin in irregular tufts, rather as if left there after a hasty shave.

  ‘What about the drinks?’ Miss Tompkins said. She was going to serve sherry and gin with tomato juice for those who preferred it, though most of the girls, as she knew, adored gin in some form or another. But looking distractedly round the kitchen she saw neither drinks nor glasses and was unpacified by Maude Chalmer’s level, practical voice saying:

  ‘The drinks are where they should be. On the sideboard in the drawing-room. What are people going to eat the sprats with by the way? Their fingers?’

  ‘Oh! forks, forks.’

  Ignoring this desperate remark except for a sideways hitch of her hairy chin, Maude Chalmers picked up a large Sheffield plate tray filled with canapés, delicate little sandwiches sprinkled with emerald threads of mustard and cress, cold chipolata sausages, rounds of stuffed hard boiled eggs and slices of toast spread with liver pâté and topped with olives. While Miss Tompkins had been fussing with idle fears over the weather, the sprats and whether the azaleas would open in time or not she had prepared every crumb of food herself. Everything, as far as she was concerned, was done. Everything was ready.

  ‘I feel there’s such heaps still to do,’ Miss Tompkins said. ‘Shouldn’t we have a table or two put out on the lawn? Don’t you think?—’

  In
fresh, fussy alarm, she followed Maude Chalmers to the drawing-room, taking out her powder compact as she went. Drinks, glasses, plates, dishes, napkins, olives, radishes, cigarettes and even forks were, to her trembling astonishment, placed about the room in perfect order everywhere. The silvery tray of food brought in by Maude Chalmers merely crowned the waiting pattern.

  ‘Everything looks so cool,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To fetch your precious sprats, dear.’

  ‘Oh! I see. Yes, yes, I see.’ Miss Tompkins held the mirror of her compact so close to her face that she actually recoiled sharply from the reflection of the one jellied uneasy eye that stared back at her. ‘Oh! I look a mess. I’m an absolute sight.’ She hastily salted herself with ill-timed generous dabs of her powder puff, making her face look more sharply pink than ever. Powder flew everywhere, prompting her to give three or four spurting little sneezes, cat-fashion, the last of which seemed to be echoed in a gentle buzz at the front door-bell, so polite as to be almost a whisper.

  ‘Was that the bell?’ she called. ‘Maude, was that you? Did you hear?’ Maude, she thought, was feigning deafness again, but a moment later Maude was answering with customary tartness from the kitchen:

  ‘It’s the Miss Furnivals, you bet your life. They’re always on the dot. Can you go? I’ve still got to do the sprats—’

  Two ladies of undernourished appearance, greyish and wrinkled as a pair of barely wakening chrysalids, almost fell into the house, as if from sheer surprise or weakness, or even both, as Miss Tompkins opened the front door. Wheezes of timid breath escaped from them in matching rhythm, offering greetings that were not really audible as words. Their shrunken little bodies seemed to float across the hallway, their sharp triangular noses thrusting piercingly ahead, as if already scenting food.

  Before Miss Tompkins could dispose of the two drifting bodies with politeness, Maude Chalmers was back from the kitchen, carrying in her hands a golden star of sprats, shining on a green dish, phosphorescently. A moment later a car hooted with a challenge of greeting from the drive-way outside, but before Miss Tompkins could recover from the start of surprise it gave her the front door was actually opened to admit a throaty solo chorus of laughter, followed by words which came with liquid undulation: