Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  “A phone call, Mrs Er,” she said accusingly, “from a neighbour of mine. She’s heard I’ve got a new woman, someone seems to have seen you coming in this morning, and she wants to know if you’ve got any time left to work for her? She wants to talk to you about it. Now, you will remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you undertook to do mornings for me. You won’t let me down, will you? From what Mrs Day tells me, I think she may be going to offer you forty-pence an hour, but you will remember, won’t you, Mrs Er, that you get your lunches here. A really good lunch, every day….”

  Luckily, Mrs Graham was so thoroughly wrapped up in these anxieties that she did not notice the way Milly almost danced across the hall to the telephone: nor did she hear the breathless relief in Milly’s voice as she settled for three afternoons a week with this Mrs Day. It was her own sense of relief, not Milly’s, that was engaging Mrs Graham’s whole attention: the colour was visibly returning to her cheeks as it slowly became clear from Milly’s side of the conversation that there was to be no real betrayal. It was only afternoons Mrs Er was engaging herself for with the perfidious Mrs Day!

  But the suspense, while it lasted, had made Mrs Graham irritable.

  “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she grumbled, as Milly put the phone down. “The way you can’t keep anything to yourself in a place like this! I never told anyone I’d got a woman … I don’t know how these things get about! I mean, you’ve hardly been in the place two hours, and she has to phone up …! Oh, well….”—Mrs Graham made a visible effort to recover her poise. “It’s not that I mind Mrs Day having you in the afternoons, Mrs Er, not a bit, I’m only too glad, if that’s what suits you both. It’s only that I do wish people wouldn’t go round telling everybody…. You won’t let me down, Mrs Er, will you?”

  And Milly, graciously, as became the great lady she had so recently become, promised that she would not.

  CHAPTER VIII

  MILLY HAD RARELY in her life felt happier than she did that afternoon, as she walked home along the sea-front with one pound forty in her pocket, and with a lunch of lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts still warming her through and through, like remembered joy. The wind had dropped, and through the gathering mist of the winter afternoon Milly could hear the invisible small waves slapping and sighing along the shingle, and she felt herself alive, and tingling with hope, in a way that she had not known since her teens. Oh, she had experienced hope all right, in adult life: wild, desperate, frenzied hopes, sometimes to be fulfilled for a while, more often to be disappointed, to be shattered and destroyed under her very eyes. But this was something different. Adult hopes are hopes of something … that this or that will happen or not happen. What Milly was experiencing now was the sort of hope that belongs normally only to the very young: not hope of anything in particular, but just Hope, its very essence, huge, unfocused, as undefined and as ungraspable as Eternity itself.

  It was because she was young, of course: younger than she could ever remember, only three days old. Propelled by disaster grown too big to grasp, she had finally been hurled like a thunderbolt out of all her worries, all her fears, out of all the burden of her mistakes and crimes, and had crashed down into peace: into the still, golden winter mist, by the side of the quiet sea. It was like dying and going to heaven … it was like dying as a peculiarly intense form of life … it was new, new! And in all this new heaven or new earth, whichever it might be, Milly was the newest thing of all!

  What a success she had made of her new life, so far! Last night’s euphoria was still with her, quite undiminished by that brief panic over the telephone call this morning. Rather, that moment of overwhelming terror and guilt seemed to have done something to her which had wiped out guilt and terror for ever. Because her fears at that particular moment had proved unfounded, she now felt immunised against fear.

  It was like being vaccinated—something like that. She was innoculated, now, against trouble, in some way that the doctors don’t know of. The sea-mist gleaming all around her was like the lifting of the anaesthetic after an operation … there was that same dazed, exalted feeling that the pain is all over … when in fact it may sometimes be only just beginning.

  But not all the gains were illusory: Milly was sure of that. She had done well as a Daily Help: astonishingly, unprecedentedly well, considering how few things she had succeeded in doing well in her former life. She had cleaned Mrs Graham’s kitchen and dining-room really thoroughly: she had kept Alison quiet: she had helped cook lunch; and (she was sure of it) provided real moral support to her employer when, at twelve-fifty or thereabouts, disaster struck, in the form of Professor Graham coming home to lunch a full ten minutes earlier than expected.

  “Oh, God!” his wife had greeted him, glancing up from her typewriter with a hunted look. “What’s happened, Arnold? You said one o’clock! You said you wouldn’t be back for lunch till one!”

  Milly, peering through the kitchen door, saw a tall, scholarly-looking man with greying hair settling his umbrella carefully in the umbrella stand. Then he straightened up and walked towards the sitting-room door. At the door he paused, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, all steamed-up from the sudden change from outdoors to the central-heated flat, and set himself to polishing them assiduously with his handkerchief. His mild brown eyes blinked owlishly without them, creating a barrier of gentle non-seeing-ness between himself and his aggrieved wife. Only after he had settled the glasses on his face again and returned the handkerchief to his pocket, did he seem constrained to answer her.

  “I got a lift,” he explained. “Carstairs has to go to the Library Committee lunch, and so he offered to drop me on the way. But don’t worry, dear, finish what you’re doing, I’m in no hurry.”

  “Finish what I’m doing!” His wife, with a huge sigh, pushed her papers aside and ostentatiously fitted the lid back on to the typewriter. “I sometimes think I’ll never finish anything I’m doing! First Alison woke up early from her morning sleep—and now you’re home! You don’t know how lucky you are, Arnold, being allowed to work when you’re working! How I envy you that room of yours at the University … all your things to hand…. No one bothering you …!”

  “They do bother me, you know, dear, sometimes,” he pointed out mildly. “The telephone goes a lot in my room, you’d be surprised. Committees. Visiting lecturers. Trouble in the typing pool. All sorts of things. I can’t always get on with my work as I’d like to.”

  “But you don’t have Alison screaming her head off!” countered Mrs Graham. “And lunch to see to … and then I’ve got this new woman this morning, I’ve had to settle her in. It’s amazing how many questions they seem to have to ask … Mrs Er!”—here she raised her voice to a ringing shout to reach Milly in the kitchen—though in fact Milly could already hear every word of her clear, carrying, complaining voice.—“Mrs Er! Could you hurry the potatoes a bit? Professor Graham is back earlier than he planned….”

  How one hurried potatoes, Milly wasn’t quite sure. They boiled at the speed they did boil, no matter who went down on their knees to them. But she judged (rightly) that the shouted instruction was meant more as a reproof to Professor Graham than as a command to Milly: and so she simply went on with her preparations for the meal as quickly as she could, and radiated respectful sympathy—on, off, on, off—as Mrs Graham flapped in and out of the kitchen bemoaning her unfinished correlations.

  Thanks to Milly, lunch was on the table, and Alison strapped in her high-chair, on the dot of one, and so Professor Graham had nothing to complain of, as his wife assured him, three or four times in succession. He’d said one o’clock, hadn’t he?

  And indeed he wasn’t complaining. He sat consuming his lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts with obvious enjoyment, a copy of Scientific American propped against the bottle of ketchup in front of him, and on his face the look of a man at peace with the world: a look off which his wife’s barbed attempts at conversation bounced harmlessly.

  So after a bit she turned her atten
tion to Milly, and began explaining to her about Alison’s diet, and how important it was that she should have plenty of salad now that she was eleven months old and on mixed feeding. She pointed out to Milly, with modest maternal pride, that a tomato and a shredded lettuce leaf had been added to Alison’s share of the meal: and Milly murmured suitable words of approval, meanwhile watching with fascinated admiration, Alison’s skill in extracting from the mush in front of her every scrap of tomato and lettuce leaf and throwing it on the floor. Like most babies in this diet-conscious age, she had a passion for all non-protein, non-vitamin foods, and it seemed to Milly that she and her mother had evolved a very good working arrangement: Mrs Graham talked fluently and enthusiastically to all comers about how much salad she gave Alison and how many vitamins it contained, and what a good effect they had on the child’s teeth and complexion (which were indeed perfectly all right), while Alison stuffed herself contentedly on mashed potato flavoured with ketchup. This way, they were both happy. The only loser was Milly, whose task it proved to be to sweep, wipe and scrub Alison’s vitamins from the floor after the meal was over.

  Still, one pound forty! Not to mention Mrs Graham’s heartfelt “Well, thank you, Mrs Er! You will be back tomorrow, won’t you? Ten o’clock, as usual?”

  Rich, and successful, and sought-after, Milly had sailed down in the lift to the ground floor, and swept like royalty out of the central-heated building and into the sudden, exhilarating cold of a January afternoon, with the white, glittering fog rolling in from the sea.

  By the time she had re-lived this triumphant morning in every detail, as she strolled along, Milly had reached the point where she must leave the sea front and turn inland. Actually, this was by no means the quickest way from Mrs Graham’s to Milly’s lodgings, but somehow she had wanted, in her happiness, to walk along by the side of the sea; to let the sea share it with her, its soft waves rippling in through the mist, just as it had shared with her, thirty-six hours ago, the long night of storm, and darkness, and despair.

  CHAPTER IX

  WHEN MILLY ARRIVED home—for this was how she already felt about No. 32 Leinster Terrace—she was greeted by a wonderful smell of freshly-baked cakes. Very tentatively—because she didn’t yet know what, apart from not having baths after eleven, lodgers were allowed to do or where they were allowed to go—she peered in through the half-open kitchen door. Mrs Mumford, in a torn but colourful print overall, was at that moment up-ending a large round cake-tin over a rack on the scrubbed wooden table. Delicious steam, like incense, rose all around the tin and on either side, intent as acolytes at some holy rite, sat Jacko and Kevin, sniffing the sacred fumes and watching the mystic procedures with reverent adoration.

  “I tell you, I’m not touching it till Sunday!” Mrs Mumford was scolding. “It’s for Sunday, this cake, d’you think I’m going to be shamed in front of them all by serving a cake for Sunday tea that’s been cut into? What d’you think I am? And it’s not a scrap of good the two of you looking at me like that, you can keep sitting there till they come and take you away in your coffins, I’m not giving you a single crumb …!”

  All the while this tirade had been pouring from her lips, Mrs Mumford had been scrabbling about in the table drawer. Now she brought out a long, sharp knife, and, still scolding, she proceeded to cut two generous slices from the big golden-brown cake. Steam surged up from the incisions, and as Mrs Mumford plonked the slices in front of her two devotees, Milly could see the lightness of the texture and the thick scattering of raisins.

  “Ah, that’s the stuff!”

  “Good old Mums!”

  Both boys spoke with their grateful mouths already crammed; and Mrs Mumford pursed up her lips in an attempt to hide the smile of pleasure and culinary pride that was threatening to undermine her authority.

  “Not a scrap more, not one scrap!” she was beginning threateningly when Jacko at that moment caught sight of Milly hovering outside the door.

  “Barney!” he managed to choke out hospitably through his mouthful of cake. “Hi! Barney!” Then, turning back to Mrs Mumford, he cleared a space in his mouth to enunciate more intelligibly: “Hi, Mums, Mrs Barnes is back! Let’s have her in to the tea party! Come on in, Barney!”

  At this, Milly could hardly do less than put her face round the door and apologise (for what, she was not quite sure, as she had done nothing at all, but it was obvious that an apology was called for). Mrs Mumford meantime contemplated this new arrival with an air of both irritation and relief. “There goes another slice of my cake!” she seemed to be thinking sourly: and also “Thank goodness, another woman, she’ll understand how put-upon I am!” Accordingly, she set a large slice of cake before Milly, put on the kettle for tea, meanwhile enlarging on the trials and tribulations of being landlady to a pair of idle layabouts who thought that cakes grew on trees, and that three pounds fifty a week entitled them to pester the life out of her all day long, and to eat her out of house and home into the bargain. “See what I mean?” she finished, planting two further slices of cake on to the boys’ plates. “Now I’m going to have to make another cake for my son and that minx on Sunday! I can say goodbye to this one, that’s for sure!” She gazed with ill-concealed satisfaction at the remnant of her much-appreciated creation, poured Milly a cup of strong, hot tea, and then settled down to telling her visitor about the price of raisins, and how her daughter-in-law had never even written to thank her for the Christmas pudding she’d taken over last year. “Full of best brandy, too!” she grumbled. “It’s the last time I’m making the Christmas pudding for that lot, and that’s a promise …!”

  Milly, beginning to suspect that this was a promise that had been made, and broken, ever since the son’s marriage, answered non-committally, but with all due sympathy. She was beginning to like this snappy little woman and her warm, untidy kitchen: and as for Jacko and Kevin, she felt that she had known them all her life. This was her home. This was where she belonged.

  So it was all the more of a shock, when she went up to her room half an hour later, to find a strange suitcase standing just inside her door. It was large, and shabby, tightly strapped, and covered with foreign labels … Geneva … Beirut … Delhi … Milly stared at the exotic names in a sort of trance of dismay, while her mind slowly came to grips with the idea that someone else must be moving into her room! Some horrible person with real money instead of a dud cheque-book … with real luggage instead of an implausible story about the left-luggage office! The sense of betrayal rose in Milly’s throat like sickness. Why had Mrs Mumford said nothing?—Why had she welcomed Milly into the kitchen to cake and tea, like an old friend, and never a word about this plot to throw her out into the street? Out into the street, right back to the beginning, all her efforts, all her achievements, fallen about her like a house of cards! Had Mrs Mumford heard some rumour about her new lodger—had she guessed something? There had been nothing in the papers this morning, of that Milly had made sure: but what about the evening papers? The evening papers from London? Had there been a photograph? Had Mrs Mumford, seeing the likeness, decided that Better Safe than Sorry, that When in Doubt, Don’t—any one of those countless depressing maxims which make life so difficult for anyone trying to get away with anything, and so boring for everyone else? But in that case, why the cake and tea, and the friendly conversation? … Least Said, Soonest Mended, no doubt … Milly felt fury boil up inside her, only to curdle slowly into despair. To roam once again homeless through the winter night…. To fight death off yet again, for what, for what …? And at this moment a clatter of feet on the stairs announced the arrival of Kevin and Jacko from the kitchen. Were they in the plot, too? After all their friendliness this morning, after all that exchange of inmost thoughts, of life-stories true and false, not to mention the Ricicles … had they, too, connived at her betrayal? She came out on to the landing to confront them: she tried to speak, but something as big as a billiard-ball in her throat seemed to choke her.

  “What ho, Barney!” Jacko
greeted her gaily: and Kevin, close behind, added: “Have you looked in your room, Mrs Barnes? There’s a surprise for you!”

  “A surprise …!” Milly almost gagged on the word … but now the two young men were upon her, almost dragging her into her room.

  “See?” Jacko was swinging the alien suitcase above his head like a trophy: and Kevin added, more soberly: “It was my idea, Mrs Barnes. I got it from a chap I know in Medical School. Old Mums fell for it like a monkey falling off a log….”

  “Yes,” interrupted Jacko, “she’d been going on half the morning, you see, about how funny it was that this Mrs Barnes hadn’t fetched her luggage yet: and when the Mums starts saying something’s funny, then you know it’s serious. So we thought it over, Kev and I, and we came up with this idea—”

  “I came up with it,” Kevin interposed. “You only—”

  “Yes. Well. Anyway.” Jacko looked momentarily aggrieved at this interruption to the flow of his narrative: then his native ebullience took over again. “Anyway, like I said, we got this idea of borrowing some luggage for you. Something real classy, to stop the Mums in her tracks! And it so happens that Kev has this classy friend in Medic., so—”

  “He’s not a friend, I just happen to know him,” interrupted Kevin defensively: and Milly understood at once that to admit to upper-class friends would be damaging to his status in the student community. Lads like Kevin and Jacko, busy trying to live-down their glaringly non-working-class backgrounds, had to be careful about this sort of thing.

  “He’s not a bad guy, though, in some ways.” Kevin resumed. “He said it was OK about the suitcase, so long as he could have it back for the summer, and so—”

  “We lugged it in as if it weighed a ton.”—Jacko took up the story again, swinging the empty suitcase this way and that to emphasise the cleverness of the trick. “We made sure that the Mums heard us coming in, and when she stuck her nose out to see what was going on, we told her we’d fetched your case from the station for you. It was too heavy for you to fetch yourself, we said! Oh, you should have seen us, Barney, humping it up the stairs, gasping and straining at nothing—Look, like this!”