For the rest, she told him nothing, and he hadn’t much to tell about himself. Lovemaking over, he read his evening paper and she went on with her petit point. Occasionally he read her bits from the Stock Exchange column about the rise or fall of her investments – she was shrewd and prudent in placing her money – or racing tips, for she liked a gamble. Time went on, methodical as the petit point. She contented him. It was what he wanted; it was all he asked for; above all, he was sure of it.
The thought of giving her pleasure never occurred to him. He gave her chocolates at Christmas, flowers at intervals (but she was always well supplied with flowers), his clothing coupons – she had asked for them. Once, a sudden ambition entered him. She lived on a plateau of middle age, always using the same scent and never seeming to grow older; but she must have a birthday somewhere about in the year. Birthdays are to be celebrated, presents must be a surprise. Allowing an artful interval, he asked the date of her birthday, the name of her scent. It was a French name, and she wrote it down for him. The date lay conveniently near the day of his next visit. His chemist sold perfumes, some with French names, but none with this name. He went to another, and another. It gave him a quickened sense of manly pride to be taking so much trouble to please Millie. He went to perfumery departments in stores; he went to small crystalline shops in the West End. Some had never heard of it, others did not stock it. Only on the eve of his visit did a grey-haired shopwoman with silver fingernails read the name as though it were a commonplace to her, unlock a glass cupboard, and from the top shelf reach down an oblong navy-blue package – one of several, all of the same size and looking as unvoluptuous as wardresses. But the name on the label was right. “How much?” he asked, thinking he might ask her to wrap it ornamentally, with bows. “Seven guineas,” she said, as though he were uneducated not to know it.
Trembling at this step into the world Millie’s bosom had opened to him when he sat bleeding on the doorstep, he blinked and paid. Afterward, he reflected that he knew more about scent than his mother did, and had got a bit of his own back.
For he still bore his mother a grudge, and for anything that went wrong with him still blamed her: shrimps made him sick; hand-knitted socks gave him nettle rash. The passage of time merely enforced her, for he was impaled on her anniversaries. On the twelfth of May his Aunt Maud shed her hair, the last Sunday in August haled him to Bishops Totterby; on March 15th poor old Pickwick, the faithful terrier, died in agonies. As he had inherited her retentive mind, he went on accumulating anniversaries of his own. He knew the length of service of everybody in the firm; he remembered wedding days whether or no he was invited to them; deaths were engraved on him as though on marble. He was a ledger of anniversaries. He asserted himself by not observing them. The bottle of scent for Millie was different. He was positively glad she had been born on April 17th and that on August 28th her little beam of light had caught him as he sat bleeding on the doorstep of No. 47.
The tenth anniversary was past. He had been aware of it because it was an anniversary, but not till later did he realise that a tenth anniversary, an anniversary in double figures, calls for a special acknowledgment: that he ought to give Millie a present; that he would like to do so. He was standing outside a jeweller’s window, looking at an assortment of brooches on a black velvet pad (he had decided that a brooch would be best, though his first impulse had been a ring), when a girl tweaked his sleeve. “Thinking of giving me a present, Romeo?” He walked away. She followed him. To escape her importunities, he signalled a passing taxi. It slowed, he hurried towards it, slipped off the pavement’s edge, lost his balance . . . There was a clamour of screaming brakes, bellowing horns, voices. He tried to get up, and a lacerating pain felled him.
He was still hopping on one leg when five days later he crutched himself to her door.
“Why, what’s been happening to you? And didn’t you get my telephone message? Sit down and tell me all about it . . . Wait a minute, I’ll just fetch your slippers.”
As he had not brought a present, he did not go into the whole story. He told how the taxi-driver had insisted on driving him to the hospital, how long he had waited before anyone came to attend to him, how he had been wheeled to the X-ray department and again kept waiting there, how easily it could have been a Pott’s compound fracture.
She listened, questioned, sympathised, put the slipper on his uninjured foot as solicitously as though it had been the injured one.
“About all I can do for you today, I suppose,” she said.
In fact, it was all he wanted: her warmth, her composure, her painless familiarity, her scent. He leaned back and sighed with pleasure. “I’m glad I came. Do you know, I nearly didn’t come. It’s the first time I’ve been out.”
“So that’s why you didn’t get my message. The girl at your office said you hadn’t come in yet but she’d give it to you when you did. She might have had the sense to post it on. But she didn’t.”
There had been a telephone message. His slippers had not been put out. He began to think.
“What was the message? Are you expecting someone else?”
“No, no, Bor! All that’s over and done with. I’m retiring.”
But why was she retiring? She was as good as ever.
“That’s why I telephoned. To ask you to dine with me instead. I thought we’d have a little farewell celebration.”
Had she come into a fortune?
“Is this a new idea, this retiring?”
“New idea? We’ve been saving up for it for years, Fred and me.”
“Fred?”
“Fred Larter. He’s the wine waiter at the East Anglia Hotel. He was odd-job boy at the boatyard, twiddled outboard engines, patched sails. He could put his hand to anything. Uncle Bartle paid him five bob a week, and always said he’d go far – be it London, be it the devil. He was the first one who ever kissed me proper, was Boy Fred. Chased me into the water and kissed me among the swans. You’d never think it to see him now, so responsible and stately. Nor me, neither.”
It was as though the hoyden virgin stood there, drenched with joy and defiant. Her professional competence was gone. She suddenly looked much older and unrecognisably young.
“I’m sure I hope you’ll be happy,” he said at last.
“We’ll be happy, all right! We’re going to live in France, in the brandy country. Fred’s bought the house. He got it through a friend in the trade. It’s nightingales everywhere, he says. And roses.”
She appeared to catch sight of him from a distance. “If you should happen to want an introduction, there’s a friend of mine who’d be just what –”
“No!”
It terrified him to hear the fury in his voice.
Tebic
WHEN THE AIRLINER detached itself from english soil, and Rosalind, the Warburtons’ only child, was off with a husband and a trousseau to settle in Australia, Humphrey Warburton was aware of a profound and yet quite trifling sense of relief, which he could not account for until Lydia, coming out of a muse, remarked that it would seem very odd to have grandchildren who as a matter of course ate plum pudding in the dog days – and did he suppose they set fire to it?
“Set fire to what, my dear?”
“Christmas plum pudding – in Australia.”
Christmas. That was it. That was why he was feeling relieved. It was annulled – his ignominious bondage to a recollection of how, one Christmas when a miniature tallboy, perfect in every detail, one of his best finds, had proved half an inch too tall to fit into Rosalind’s dolls’ house, Rosalind had referred to “that silly old Santa Claus.” One may laugh off such things, but if one is a man like Humphrey Warburton one continues to brood over them, and all subsequent presents to Rosalind were, as far as he was concerned, poisoned at the source. But henceforward Rosalind would receive his presents in another hemisphere, and he would be able to give his whole mind to filling the Christmas stocking for Lydia – Lydia, whom he had so discerningly chosen when to people
of less connoisseurship she was still just one of Archdeacon Barnard’s pigtailed daughters, and whom he had never ceased to love, and whose tastes he could be sure of, and who was so easy to compliment at any season.
One reason he could be sure of Lydia’s tastes was that they were so engagingly eclectic – as if some part of her were still feasting on lemon drops in the rectory schoolroom. It was also very engaging that Lydia should be so honourable that for some weeks before Christmas she always entered the room humming with artificial spontaneity and keeping her gaze directed on the ceiling, in case she should surprise Humphrey wrapping something up. In point of fact, Humphrey began amassing things for Lydia’s stocking so far in advance that he was exposed to surprise from January onwards, and by the time they were given, all wrapped up with such artifice that not a revealing contour protruded, he was often as much astonished as she. In the stocking of Christmas 1957, for instance, the glass top hat, the Portuguese reliquary with its half-dozen minute splinters of bone in cut-paper ruffs reposing on crumples of blue velvet under a crystal dome, and the new patent kind of clothes brush warranted to take up cats’ hairs, all came as novelties to him. So did a small round sky-blue plastic container.
“How I love and adore little round boxes,” said Lydia, smoothing out the silver paper it had been swathed in. “How does it open? What’s inside?” She turned it over. “Look, here’s the head of Athene embossed on its back. It’s not a tape measure, for there’s nothing to pull out. Oh, it’s got its name on it! Tebic . . . Humphrey, what is Tebic? What does it do?”
“Its duty – as Woolworth’s expects of it. Now go on to something else; you’re still only halfway down.”
He could not be more explicit because for the life of him he could not recollect where he had bought Tebic, or when, or what it was for. Ashamed to disclose this, he waited until Lydia had got to a vanilla bean, and then began the unobtrusive tidying in the course of which he proposed to smuggle Tebic out of sight and into the wastepaper basket.
“I’ve always thought it so unenterprising of people with hothouses not to grow their own vanilla,” she was saying. “Do you suppose it climbs, or is it more like a horned poppy? No, Humphrey, not that sprigged paper! It’s just what I need for lining the satinwood desk. Goodness! Do you know what you nearly did? Rolled up Tebic and threw it away. Why should it be scorned because it came from Woolworth’s?”
Lydia’s chivalry had been aroused, and all was lost. When the stocking presents were laid out for review, Tebic was in the front row, between the reliquary and an Indian miniature of a lasciviously squinting rajah. All being lost, he had to make a clean breast of it.
“I have no idea what it’s for, and I don’t even remember where I got it. All I know is that I have been concealing it from you for months.”
“I’d love it for that alone. And I’m sure that when we’ve found out what it’s meant to do, it will be an answer to prayer. Perhaps it’s for withering away that immovable tape people will do up parcels with – in which case, what a godsend! Or for putting in damp cupboards, or mending china, or adding vitamins to soups.”
“I am positive it is nothing to do with food,” said Humphrey.
“Well, that’s a step towards the truth. Perhaps – Humphrey! Where are my glasses? It says something in very small letters round the rim. ‘Do not open till required for use.’ Oh!”
She replaced it with deference between the rajah and the reliquary. “Perhaps it’s something immensely powerful for putting out fires with. Anyhow, we won’t open it.”
Humphrey wished to hear no more of Tebic. Tebic threatened to prey on his mind, a trumpery variant of the miniature tallboy. But perhaps it would only prey passingly; for during the first weeks of new years Lydia was accustomed to discard with great tact and disingenuity (the children of the late Archdeacon Barnard had been schooled never to tamper with the truth, but had been permitted, in cases of extremity, to draw a veil) any stocking presents she had not really liked.
Thus, the reliquary was sent to Rosalind, on the ground that one of the worst things about life in the colonies must be that one so seldom saw anything with associations; Humphrey hoped that, in a like spirit, Tebic might be bestowed on old Mr Tovey, who complained that there was no mystery left in modern life, or on one of those recurrent jumble sales held for the upkeep of the Village Hall, a fabric that Humphrey, who was an architect, would gladly have assisted to destroy. But on the first of February Tebic again met his eye, looking even more ostentatiously blue now that the sun had returned from fetching new lust from Capricorn. It was on the upstairs windowsill where Lydia kept her special geraniums. Could it be that she had run its purpose to earth, and that it was one of those concentrated tonics that indoor gardeners poke into flowerpots?
He looked at it more closely and saw that the lid had not been removed. And suddenly Tebic no longer arraigned him for an inadequacy, a lapse, a horrid little piece of ill manners he had hoped to forget about. Quite the contrary. The boot was plainly on the other leg. For here was Lydia, who had been so quick to get rid of that really charming reliquary just because she could not adjust herself to a few fragments of unpedigreed bone, cherishing with an equal degree of superstition a ghastly little box of sky-blue plastic, while at the same time – so indifferent was she to his gifts, or by now probably bored to death by them – making no attempt to discover the use of what it contained. He was still looking out of the window and trying to master a sense of injury when Lydia came along the passage carrying Bianca to her kittens.
“That cat of yours has no maternal feeling,” he said.
Lydia looked momentarily startled, but retorted, “Neither would you have if they were getting their teeth.”
Bianca, under the usual female misapprehension that men are susceptible to flattery, scrambled onto his shoulder and purred in his ear. Disregarding her, he continued, “This object, Lydia – this object which has just caught my eye – how long has it been here?”
“Oh, for some time. I put it there to remind me to send back the library books.”
“And did it?”
“Ten days ago,” she said virtuously. “But that’s not all. Now it’s there to remind me to tell you a rather unpleasant piece of news. Perhaps I’ll do it now. I’ve had a letter from Mary Fitzgerald, and she wants to come to lunch. Look us up, she said, but it means lunch. And lunch will have to mean tea. I know it ought to mean asking her to stay the night, but I cannot, cannot endure being told the latest way to suck eggs and how to remove bloodstains from old baths for longer than four hours at a stretch. So I said Thursday week.”
“Thursday week. I shall be out all day. Lydia, if you must keep a memento mori on this window sill, why can’t you find something that isn’t an eyesore?”
“Why are you so set against poor Tebic? I admit it’s rather flaunting, but you did buy it for me and keep it all those months. Even if we don’t know what to use it for, it would be a pity not to use it. Besides, I like wondering what’s inside.”
“Have you taken any steps to find out what’s inside, Lydia? Have you asked anyone?”
She shook her head.
“Well, you’d better ask Mary Fitzgerald.”
“Heaven forbid! I’d sooner perish.”
“But haven’t you even any theories about it? It’s not like you to be so totally without speculation, my love.”
To call her his love reminded him, even at a moment when he might more properly have addressed her as his hate, how entirely his happiness depended on loving her. So he handed her Bianca, since just then he had nothing else to give, and said encouragingly, “That head of Athene on the back, for instance – that ought to be a clue. What do you associate with Athene?”
“Owls.”
He laughed, and felt safe. Tebic’s brief power to sow discord between them was at an end.
But snakes that have missed their strike renew the poison under their fangs, and when an object has shown itself potentially malign, it is best
to be on the safe side and not leave it lying about to ripen a second assault. Humphrey decided to find some other remembrancer to sit on the windowsill; he would find it between now and Valentine’s Day, so that it could accompany the ritual gloves. Unfortunately, just then an extinct cesspit at Coldkettle manifested itself under the half-built Gothic-style summerhouse that was to be the main feature of a garden layout Humphrey had designed for a Mr Clark, who had handsomely stepped in to save Coldkettle – that splendid example of secular Pugin – from demolition and was doing it thoroughly. So Humphrey had to travel into Northumberland to deal with the problems arising from the pit, and he stayed on in order to oversee the rather ticklish restoration of a gatehouse that the War Office in 1940 had converted into a machine-gun post; and, as Coldkettle had been commissioned by one of the Victorian eccentrics as a sort of personal La Trappe, and stood on the moors miles from anywhere, which was no doubt the reason why the War Office thought that crucial engagements would take place around it, Humphrey was unable to do any shopping, and had to come home without a substitute for Tebic. He came home on a Wednesday, and in his satisfaction at being home he conceived an entirely new system on which to arrange his books; and by midday on Thursday all the books were on the study floor, and everything was in a state of creative chaos, at which point Lydia looked in and said, “You remember, don’t you, that you are going to be out all day? Because Mary Fitzgerald will be here at any moment.”
“Good God! Well, in that case there’s no time to change my plans. I shall lurk here, and later on you can creep in with something on a tray.”
“But then I shan’t be able to explain that you were obliged to go out.”
“Tell the truth and shame the Devil, then. Say I am arranging my books.”
“I’m sorry, Humphrey, but that won’t do. For one thing, it might hurt her feelings. For another, she’d come in and help you.”
Music at Long Verney Page 9