by David Miller
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘I’m swimming across the county.’
‘Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘If you’ve come here for money,’ she said, ‘I won’t give you another cent.’
‘You could give me a drink.’
‘I could but I won’t. I’m not alone.’
‘Well, I’m on my way.’
He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds – some stubborn autumnal fragrance – on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.
It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears. He had swam too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water. What he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean, dry clothes, and while he could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to the Gilmartins’ pool. Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes’ and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped, holding on to the gateposts for support, he turned up the driveway of his own house.
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn’t they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
THE BLUSH
Elizabeth Taylor
The writer Elizabeth Jane Howard was once asked to write a biography of Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) but she declined as she thought Taylor’s life had a lack of event. Born near Reading, the daughter of an insurance inspector, she worked as a librarian and teacher and married a man who ran a confectionary company. She died, aged sixty-three, from cancer. She wrote: “The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn’t. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.” Her work is not so much under-rated as under-read.
They were the same age – Mrs Allen and the woman who came every day to do the housework. ‘I shall never have children now,’ Mrs Allen had begun to tell herself. Something had not come true; the essential part of her life. She had always imagined her children in fleeting scenes and intimations; that was how they had come to her, like snatches of a film. She had seen them plainly, their chins tilted up as she tied on their bibs at meal-times; their naked bodies had darted in and out of the water sprinkler on the lawn; and she had listened to their voices in the garden and in the mornings from their beds. She had even cried a little dreaming of the day when the eldest boy would go off to boarding-school; she pictured the train going out of the station; she raised her hand and her throat contracted and her lips trembled as she smiled. The years passing by had slowly filched from her the reality of these scenes – the gay sounds; the grave peace she had longed for; even the pride of grief.
She listened – as they worked together in the kitchen – to Mrs Lacey’s troubles with her family, her grumblings about her grown-up son who would not get up till dinner-time on Sundays and then expected his mother to have cleaned his shoes for him; about the girl of eighteen who was a hairdresser and too full of dainty ways which she picked up from the women’s magazines, and the adolescent girl who moped and glowered and answered back.
‘My children wouldn’t have turned out like that,’ Mrs Allen thought, as she made her murmured replies. ‘The more you do for some, the more you may,’ said Mrs Lacey. But from gossip in the village which Mrs Allen heard she had done all too little. The children, one night after another, for years and years, had had to run out for parcels of fish and chips while their mother sat in the Horse and Jockey drinking brown ale. On summer evenings, when they were younger, they had hung about outside the pub: when they were bored they pressed their foreheads to the window and looked in at the dark little bar, hearing the jolly laughter, their mother’s the loudest of all. Seeing their faces, she would swing at once from the violence of hilarity to that of extreme annoyance and, although ginger-beer and packets of potato crisps would be handed out through the window, her anger went out with them and threatened the children as they ate and drank.
‘And she doesn’t always care who she goes there with,’ Mrs Allen’s gardener told her.
‘She works hard and deserves a little pleasure – she has her anxieties,’ said Mrs Allen, who, alas, had none.
She had never been inside the Horse and Jockey, although it was nearer to her house than the Chequers at the other end of the village where she and her husband went sometimes for a glass of sherry on Sunday mornings. The Horse and Jockey attracted a different set of customers – for instance, people who sat down and drank, at tables all round the wall. At the Chequers no one ever sat down, but stood and sipped and chatted as at a cocktail party, and luncheons and dinners were served, which made it so much more respectable: no children hung about outside, because they were all at home with their nannies.
Sometimes in the evenings – so many of them – when her husband was kept late in London, Mrs Allen wished that she could go down to the Chequers and drink a glass of sherry and exchange a little conversation with someone; but she was too shy to open the door and go in alone: she imagined heads turning, a surprised welcome from her friends, who would all be safely in married pairs; and then, when she left, eyes meeting with unspoken messages and conjecture in the air.
Mrs Lacey left her at midday and then there was gardening to do and the dog to be taken for a walk. After six o’clock, she began to pace restlessly about the house, glancing at the clocks in one room after another, listening for her husband’s car – the sound she knew so well because she had awaited it for such a large part of her married life. She would hear, at last, the tyres turning on the soft gravel, the door being slammed, then his footsteps hurrying towards the porch. She knew that it was a wasteful way of spending her years – and, looking back, she was unable to tell one of them from another – but she could not think what else she might do. Humphrey went on earning more and more money and there was no stopping him now. Her acquaintances, in wretched quandaries about where the next term’s school-fees were to come from, would turn to her and say cruelly: ‘Oh, you’re all right, Ruth. You’ve no idea what you are spared.’
And Mrs Lacey would be glad when Maureen could leave school and ‘get out earning’. ‘“I’ve got my geometry to d
o,” she says, when it’s time to wash up the tea-things. “I’ll geometry you, my girl,” I said. “When I was your age, I was out earning.” ’
Mrs Allen was fascinated by the life going on in that house and the children seemed real to her, although she had never seen them. Only Mr Lacey remained blurred and unimaginable. No one knew him. He worked in the town in the valley, six miles away, and he kept himself to himself; had never been known to show his face in the Horse and Jockey. ‘I’ve got my own set,’ Mrs Lacey said airily. ‘After all, he’s nearly twenty years older than me. I’ll make sure neither of my girls follow my mistake. “I’d rather see you dead at my feet,” I said to Vera.’ Ron’s young lady was lucky; having Ron, she added. Mrs Allen found this strange, for Ron had always been painted so black; was, she had been led to believe, oafish, ungrateful, greedy and slow to put his hands in his pockets if there was any paying out to do. There was also the matter of his shoe-cleaning, for no young woman would do what his mother did for him – or said she did. Always, Mrs Lacey would sigh and say: ‘Goodness me, if only I was their age and knew what I know now.’
She was an envious woman: she envied Mrs Allen her pretty house and her clothes and she envied her own daughters their youth. ‘If I had your figure,’ she would say to Mrs Allen. Her own had gone: what else could be expected, she asked, when she had had three children? Mrs Allen thought, too, of all the brown ale she drank at the Horse and Jockey and of the reminiscences of meals past which came so much into her conversations. Whatever the cause was, her flesh, slackly corseted, shook as she trod heavily about the kitchen. In summer, with bare arms and legs she looked larger than ever. Although her skin was very white, the impression she gave was at once colourful – from her orange hair and bright lips and the floral patterns that she always wore. Her red-painted toe-nails poked through the straps of her fancy sandals; turquoise-blue beads were wound round her throat.
Humphrey Allen had never seen her; he had always left for the station before she arrived, and that was a good thing, his wife thought. When she spoke of Mrs Lacey, she wondered if he visualised a neat, homely woman in a clean white overall. She did not deliberately mislead him, but she took advantage of his indifference. Her relationship with Mrs Lacey and the intimacy of their conversations in the kitchen he would not have approved, and the sight of those calloused feet with their chipped nail-varnish and yellowing heels would have sickened him.
One Monday morning, Mrs Lacey was later than usual. She was never very punctual and had many excuses about flat bicycle-tyres or Maureen being poorly. Mrs Allen, waiting for her, sorted out all the washing. When she took another look at the clock, she decided that it was far too late for her to be expected at all. For some time lately Mrs Lacey had seemed ill and depressed; her eyelids, which were chronically rather inflamed, had been more angrily red than ever and, at the sink or ironing-board, she would fall into unusual silences, was absent-minded and full of sighs. She had always liked to talk about the ‘change’ and did so more than ever as if with a desperate hopefulness.
‘I’m sorry, but I was ever so sick,’ she told Mrs Allen, when she arrived the next morning. ‘I still feel queerish. Such heartburn. I don’t like the signs, I can tell you. All I crave is pickled walnuts, just the same as I did with Maureen. I don’t like the signs one bit. I feel I’ll throw myself into the river if I’m taken that way again.’
Mrs Allen felt stunned and antagonistic. ‘Surely not at your age,’ she said crossly.
‘You can’t be more astonished than me,’ Mrs Lacey said, belching loudly. ‘Oh, pardon. I’m afraid I can’t help myself.’
Not being able to help herself, she continued to belch and hiccough as she turned on taps and shook soap-powder into the washing-up bowl. It was because of this that Mrs Allen decided to take the dog for a walk. Feeling consciously fastidious and aloof she made her way across the fields, trying to disengage her thoughts from Mrs Lacey and her troubles; but unable to. ‘Poor woman,’ she thought again and again with bitter animosity.
She turned back when she noticed how the sky had darkened with racing, sharp-edged clouds. Before she could reach home, the rain began. Her hair, soaking wet, shrank into tight curls against her head; her woollen suit smelt like a damp animal. ‘Oh, I am drenched,’ she called out, as she threw open the kitchen door.
She knew at once that Mrs Lacey had gone, that she must have put on her coat and left almost as soon as Mrs Allen had started out on her walk, for nothing was done; the washing-up was hardly started and the floor was unswept. Among the stacked-up crockery a note was propped; she had come over funny, felt dizzy and, leaving her apologies and respects, had gone.
Angrily, but methodically, Mrs Allen set about making good the wasted morning. By afternoon, the grim look was fixed upon her face. ‘How dare she?’ she found herself whispering, without allowing herself to wonder what it was the woman had dared.
She had her own little ways of cosseting herself through the lonely hours, comforts which were growing more important to her as she grew older, so that the time would come when not to have her cup of tea at four-thirty would seem a prelude to disaster. This afternoon, disorganised as it already was, she fell out of her usual habit and instead of carrying the tray to the low table by the fire, she poured out her tea in the kitchen and drank it there, leaning tiredly against the dresser. Then she went upstairs to make herself tidy. She was trying to brush her frizzed hair smooth again when she heard the door bell ringing.
When she opened the door, she saw quite plainly a look of astonishment take the place of anxiety on the man’s face. Something about herself surprised him, was not what he had expected. ‘Mrs Allen?’ he asked uncertainly and the astonishment remained when she had answered him.
‘Well, I’m calling about the wife,’ he said. ‘Mrs Lacey that works here.’
‘I was worried about her,’ said Mrs Allen.
She knew that she must face the embarrassment of hearing about Mrs Lacey’s condition and invited the man into her husband’s study, where she thought he might look less out-of-place than in her brocade-smothered drawing-room. He looked about him resentfully and glared down at the floor which his wife had polished. With this thought in his mind, he said abruptly: ‘It’s all taken its toll.’
He sat down on a leather couch with his cap and his bicycle-clips beside him.
‘I came home to my tea and found her in bed, crying,’ he said. This was true. Mrs Lacey had succumbed to despair and gone to lie down. Feeling better at four o’clock, she went downstairs to find some food to comfort herself with; but the slice of dough-cake was ill-chosen and brought on more heartburn and floods of bitter tears.
‘If she carries on here for a while, it’s all got to be very different,’ Mr Lacey said threateningly. He was nervous at saying what he must and could only bring out the words with the impetus of anger. ‘You may or may not know that she’s expecting.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Allen humbly. ‘This morning she told me that she thought …’
‘There’s no “thought” about it. It’s as plain as a pikestaff.’ Yet in his eyes she could see disbelief and bafflement and he frowned and looked down again at the polished floor.
Twenty years older than his wife – or so his wife had said – he really, to Mrs Allen, looked quite ageless, a crooked, bow-legged little man who might have been a jockey once. The expression about his blue eyes was like a child’s: he was both stubborn and pathetic.
Mrs Allen’s fat spaniel came into the room and went straight to the stranger’s chair and began to sniff at his corduroy trousers.
‘It’s too much for her,’ Mr Lacey said. ‘It’s too much to expect.’
To Mrs Allen’s horror she saw the blue eyes filling with tears. Hoping to hide his emotion, he bent down and fondled the dog, making playful thrusts at it with his fist closed.
He was a man utterly, bewilderedly at sea. His married life had been too much for him, with so much in it that he could not understand.
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br /> ‘Now I know, I will do what I can,’ Mrs Allen told him. ‘I will try to get someone else in to do the rough.’
‘It’s the late nights that are the trouble,’ he said. ‘She comes in dog-tired. Night after night. It’s not good enough. “Let them stay at home and mind their own children once in a while,” I told her. “We don’t need the money.” ’
‘I can’t understand,’ Mrs Allen began. She was at sea herself now, but felt perilously near a barbarous, unknown shore and was afraid to make any movement towards it.
‘I earn good money. For her to come out at all was only for extras. She likes new clothes. In the daytimes I never had any objection. Then all these cocktail parties begin. It beats me how people can drink like it night after night and pay out for someone else to mind their kids. Perhaps you’re thinking that it’s not my business, but I’m the one who has to sit at home alone till all hours and get my own supper and see next to nothing of my wife. I’m boiling over some nights. Once I nearly rushed out when I heard the car stop down the road. I wanted to tell your husband what I thought of you both.’
‘My husband?’ murmured Mrs Allen.
‘What am I supposed to have, I would have asked him? Is she my wife or your sitter-in? Bringing her back at this time of night. And it’s no use saying she could have refused. She never would.’
Mrs Allen’s quietness at last defeated him and dispelled the anger he had tried to rouse in himself. The look of her, too, filled him with doubts, her grave, uncertain demeanour and the shock her age had been to him. He had imagined someone so much younger and – because of the cocktail parties – flighty. Instead, he recognised something of himself in her, a yearning disappointment. He picked up his cap and his bicycle-clips and sat looking down at them, turning them round in his hands. ‘I had to come,’ he said.