He couldn’t understand what had happened to the snuff box. He needed some stamps. Surely he had seen it on the mantelpiece only yesterday. He, too, banged his fist on the window to attract Louise’s attention, but she immediately moved further down the garden, her back resolutely turned on him. He remembered that he had left his raincoat in the vestry. Perhaps he had absentmindedly slipped the snuff box into one of the pockets. He left the house by the front door, ignoring Keith, and crossed the road to the church.
Pamela was unlocking the boot of the car when Keith came up the path carrying his bucket. He stood in the entrance of the garage and looked down at the picture propped against the wall.
‘Were you going to clean the car?’ asked Pamela. She tried not to sound nervous.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked, squatting down and examining the photograph.
‘It fell,’ she said. ‘Graham knocked it down. I’m taking it to be reframed.’
‘You get in,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it in the boot.’
Pamela got into the front seat and felt the car rock slightly as the boot slammed shut. In the mirror she saw Keith going down the path and into the house. She reversed expertly out of the garage and felt a bump as she backed on to the path by the bins. He must have left his bucket in the way, she thought, and then beyond the bonnet of the car saw the picture lying face down in a slick of oil.
The photograph was damaged beyond repair. The face of the man had been shredded by the broken glass.
Louise heard Pamela’s cry of rage, of hatred. ‘Damn you,’ she was screaming. ‘Damn you.’ Sometime soon, thought Louise, I shall have to ask her to leave. She watched as Pamela ran into the house like a madwoman. Perplexed, she looked at the car parked outside on the path.
When she went into the garage she thought at first it was a rag lying there on the oil-stained concrete, and then she noticed the shards of glass. She turned the buckled piece of card over with her foot and stared down at the photograph. The face of her father had gone. All that remained was the handle of the cricket bat clenched in a blackened fist.
The snuff box wasn’t in the raincoat pocket. Graham tried thinking back to the last time he had seen it, the last time he had needed stamps, but he couldn’t remember. He went out into the empty church and stared hopelessly at the cross above the altar, at the flowers withering in the vases. He thought of Louise and then of Pamela. Thank God he had resisted the temptation to do more than kiss her. But then, the sad truth was that he hadn’t been tempted. Even that small fall from grace had been denied him.
Suddenly he heard a noise coming somewhere from the left of the church, a soft footfall. He knew who it was. He ran across the aisle as if he was running for the crease, his face contorted, and hurled himself into the vestry. Keith was half way to the door. Graham jumped on him from behind, seizing a clump of his black hair in his fist, forcing him to his knees. He was calling the boy names, dreadful names. He was tugging his head back on his neck as if he would tear it from his shoulders. ‘You rotten lump of shit,’ he was slobbering. ‘Give me back my snuff box. Give it to me.’ Gathering saliva in his mouth and gobbling like a turkey, he spat full into Keith’s upturned, terrified face.
Louise was standing facing the house when Graham came stumbling up the garden towards her. She stood quite still, her eyes blank. ‘Louise, help me,’ he pleaded. He was holding out his hands to her as if he was drowning.
She stepped back from him in disgust. ‘Get out of my sight,’ she said. ‘I shall never speak to you again,’ and she, too, held up her hands, fending him off, her fingers smeared with oil.
She kept her word. The house was as silent as the grave. After almost a week Pamela could stand it no longer. There was something wrong, she felt, something beyond the matter of the picture. It had something to do with Keith. She had seen him that morning, lounging against the fence as Graham went down the path. Graham had spoken to him, though she couldn’t hear what he said. And Keith had laughed. And then Graham had come back into the house and he was crying. He had gone into the front room and locked the door behind him. It was Keith that was poisoning their world. She would write to him and tell him what he must do.
She sat down at the table in the living room and began to write. She felt inspired.
Dear Keith (she wrote),
I cannot stand by and see a family destroyed. You must know that it would be better if you stopped coming here. Graham believes that he is doing you more harm than good, and it is dreadful for him.
You must tell Louise that it was you who put the photograph for me to drive over. In some way, she holds Graham responsible.
Try to be brave. You must tell Louise the truth. We can’t go on like this. You must tell her you’re leaving. If you don’t tell her, I will. Believe me, it’s for the best.
Pamela
When she had read it over to herself she thought it wasn’t long enough. A little too abrupt. She began it again and covered both sides of the notepaper, and had to use another piece for the last part, which she left unchanged.
When it was finished she put it in her handbag and tidied up the table. She found the silver snuff box under a pile of bills and replaced it on the mantelpiece. The telephone rang in the hall.
Keith had been outside the French windows, watching her. When she left the room he entered and listened for a moment to the murmur of her voice. He opened her handbag and taking out the folded letter thrust it into his pocket. He heard the click as Pamela replaced the receiver and slipped out again into the garden.
Pamela knocked on Graham’s door. There was no reply. ‘That was Mrs Crombie,’ she said. ‘She says you promised to run her and Mrs Haley to the OAPs’ Bingo night.’
He unlocked the door and stared at her. ‘That was Mrs Crombie,’ she said again.
‘I heard you the first time,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to leave for another half hour.’
‘You rest,’ she said. ‘Things will be all right now. I’ll call you when it’s time to go.’
She sat on the stairs, gazing at the locked door, rocking backwards and forwards.
Keith took the letter to show Louise. He told her it was important. She said she wasn’t interested, either in a letter or in him. She was tying the rambler rose to the fence with a length of wire. The cricket bat lay on the grass at her feet.
He walked away from her to the other side of the garden, the letter still in his hand, and crouched down behind the privet hedge.
Sitting on the stairs, guarding Graham’s sleep, Pamela indulged in fantasies. She would tell Louise that it was she who had destroyed the picture. Graham would overhear and be moved by her selflessness. You dear one, he would say, or something like that. And then she’d tell him that she was going away, so that he and Louise could grow close again. He would beg her to change her mind, or better still, offer to come with her. And of course she’d say he couldn’t.
She felt sad but also relieved. I will go away, she thought. I don’t really want him to leave Louise. It would be nice if before she went she could patch things up between them. Perhaps she should talk to Louise now, tell her about the letter she had written to Keith. Louise would be pleased with her, and then when she went to wake up Graham she could tell him that everything was truly all right.
‘Louise,’ she called excitedly, as she opened the back door into the garden.
Louise was trying to hammer the rose stake deeper into the ground. The bat was heavy and she didn’t seem able to hit the wood squarely. There came to her a memory of a holiday in Hastings just after the war when her father and she had played cricket together on the sands. It was a child’s bat she held, and her father was shouting at her to swing it from the shoulder. She shut her eyes because she was frightened of the ball. ‘Loosen up, Louise’, he told her. She could hear his voice quite clearly now, and she turned as he called her name again and swung the bat with all her strength.
When she opened her eyes, Pamela was lying face downwards on the
grass. One of her shoes had come off.
‘Drop it,’ said Keith. She stared at him blankly. ‘Drop the bloody bat,’ he repeated. She let go of it. ‘Take off your gloves,’ he ordered, and when she made no move he tugged them from her hands. ‘Walk away,’ he said. ‘Walk away. Don’t look round.’ He had to take her by the shoulders and set her off down the garden like a clockwork toy. ‘Stay there till I tell you,’ he called. ‘Don’t look back.’
First he took the bat and the shoe to the garage, and then he returned and gripped Pamela under the armpits, dragging her across the grass. He had to leave her beside the car while he went into the house to fetch the keys from Graham’s raincoat in the hall. He opened the door of the car, bundled the body on to the back seat and laid the shoe beside it. He ran into the house again and took the raincoat to cover her over. He shut the car door, and carefully balanced the cricket bat against it. The letter, he thought, the last page of the letter, and taking it from his pocket he unlocked the car again and thrust the single sheet of paper into the glove compartment beneath the dashboard. Then he slipped into the house for the last time and left the keys on the window-sill in the hall.
Graham woke five minutes before he was due to pick up Mrs Haley. He had another headache. He picked up the cricket bat by its handle and placed it carefully outside the garage, propped against the fence. As he reversed the car down the path he saw in the glare of the headlights two figures standing in the dark garden, facing away from the house.
‘It will be all right,’ Keith told her. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I expect she said something to annoy you.’
‘I’m frightened,’ said Louise.
‘That old bloke in the shop,’ he said, ‘the one I bashed … when I asked him for fags he said hadn’t I heard the word please. He looked at me as if I was dirt.’
‘I’m frightened,’ she repeated.
‘It wears off,’ Keith said. ‘It isn’t our fault. We was driven.’
As he was approaching the corner, Graham passed Mr Mahmood and his family. He waved at them and drove on.
Mr Mahmood was wheeling his bike. From the handlebars hung various carrier bags and a frying pan. Behind him, in single file, walked his wife and four children, each carrying a suitcase.
POLES APART
Mrs Evans had just got back from the library with her friend Miriam Fortesque when Avril Scott telephoned to ask her for Christmas.
‘How very kind,’ murmured Mrs Evans. ‘But I really think that this year the journey might be a little too much for me.’
‘Nonsense,’ Avril said. ‘It’s Sussex, not the Outer Hebrides. You can take a taxi to the station and either Jim or I will meet you this end. It will be lovely. I’ll give you a tinkle nearer the time to arrange things.’
‘Oh hell,’ Mrs Evans said, replacing the phone.
‘Another invitation?’ asked Miriam Fortesque, knowing it was a foregone conclusion. Her friend was always in demand at Christmas, was never short of invitations to parties during the run-up to the big day, to lunches the week before, to mulled wine dos on Christmas Eve, to festive dinners with all the trimmings, to elegant suppers on Boxing Night. Nor was she stuck in a corner with some child who had been bribed to keep her company. On the contrary, she was always in the forefront, on the captain’s table, so to speak, and people vied to sit next to her.
‘How can I get out of it?’ demanded Mrs Evans, prowling irritably round the sitting-room and kicking Miriam Fortesque’s stick to the carpet. ‘I shall freeze to death in Sussex. They only turn the central heating on after the Six O’Clock News.’ In her spring-chicken fifties and her autumnal broiler sixties she had appreciated the attention paid to her. Now, five years short of her eightieth birthday, she was less enthusiastic. Really, all she craved was to be left alone by her own fireside, a bottle of gin at her elbow and The Towering Inferno on the television.
‘You’re a fool to yourself,’ certain friends said to her – certain geriatric acquaintances, who, though deaf, half-blind and often incontinent, sensed perfectly well the difference between sufferance and welcome – when Mrs Evans complained that this person or that had only a moment ago telephoned to ask her here, there and everywhere; to Sussex, Majorca, or worse, Edinburgh. ‘If you can’t do what you want at your age,’ they told her bitterly, ‘when will you?’ ‘Don’t rub it in,’ she would reply. ‘I know I’m an egotist. I can’t help feeling a refusal would offend. All my life I have walked backward into the limelight.’
Mrs Evans wasn’t a distinguished woman. She had never done anything special; she hadn’t discovered something, or written anything, or excelled in any given field. She had never been notorious in her own right. All the same, throughout her life – her early days, that is – she had managed to be connected with someone who had. For instance, she had just happened to be in Italian East Africa, in the station square at Diredaua in 1937 when the Duce had been present at the unveiling of some monument or other. She had caught his eye – God knows what she had been doing – and she had been asked to join his party for drinks afterwards. She swore that she had refused, but one could never tell. She described the memorial plinth as unmistakably phallic, as thrusting upwards to the heavens. ‘It seemed to pierce the clouds,’ she elaborated. And then she had unaccountably been sitting in some restaurant in Saragossa – of all places – with the infamous Bunny Doble, when Kim Philby, head bandaged after being blown up in a shell attack by Franco’s troops, had burst in wearing a woman’s fur coat. ‘His hands trembled so much,’ Mrs Evans recounted, ‘that the food fell off his fork. And the fur was bloodied into little spikes, sharp as the nib of a mapping pen.’
Her recollections were so banal, so trivial, that it was obvious she was telling the truth. Why, she had shared a taxi with Moss Hart, the night his first play had opened on Broadway, and all she could remember was the boil on his brother’s neck. And the afternoon Fatty Arbuckle had ground – for want of a better word – the life out of that young lady from Minnesota, Mrs Evans had been a guest in the house next door, and remembered how, no more than ten minutes later, Fatty had run along the gravelled drive, clad only in the loin cloth of a monogrammed towel – screaming, so she said.
‘You could wait a few days,’ Miriam Fortesque said, ‘and then I could ring up and say you’d broken your hip.’
‘I daren’t risk it,’ said Mrs Evans, gloomily. ‘It would be just my luck.’
Even as a child she had suffered from her imagination. She still remembered the occasion, sixty years before, when unable to produce her arithmetic homework she had told her teacher that her father had suffered a brainstorm and run berserk through the greenhouse. ‘My mother was cut by flying glass,’ she had said. ‘The blood dripped on to the page of my exercise book and I was forced to tear it out.’ A year later a man in Wimbledon High Street, crazed by drink and carrying a sheet of plate glass, stumbled into her uncle Henry and severed the artery of his right leg. Another time, anxious to avoid the proposed visit of a school friend, Monica Formby, she had made the excuse that her brother Reg was at death’s door with rabies. ‘He froths at the mouth,’ she had lied. ‘We are forced to wear protective clothing.’ Two days later, Monica Formby’s cousin George was bitten by a monkey at the pet shop on Park Way and his arm blew up like a balloon.
‘I shall say that it had slipped my mind that someone was coming to stay,’ Mrs Evans told Miriam Fortesque. ‘At our age we’re expected to forget things.’ She dialled Avril Scott’s number immediately. ‘That’s perfectly all right, darling,’ said Avril. ‘Any friend of yours is more than welcome. Bring her with you. There’s plenty of room.’
‘It’s a he,’ Mrs Evans said. ‘And he’s very queer. I don’t think he’d mix.’
‘Really,’ Avril said. ‘What’s his name? What does he do? Is he one of your theatrical friends?’ Mrs Evans’s mind became blank. She glanced desperately at Miriam Fortesque, who was pretending to be engrossed in her library book. ‘Oates,’ Mrs Evans said. ‘Lawrenc
e Oates. He’s exarmy and very keen on horses. He’s rather insufferable … very right-wing. He wouldn’t go down well with Jim.’
‘Rubbish,’ cried Avril Scott. ‘He can muck out Jason’s pony.’
A week later after a snifter of gin, Mrs Evans rang Avril again. Avril listened patiently, and when Mrs Evans had finished, said, ‘The Russian boy is no problem. Don’t give it another thought. He can bunk up with Jason. As for the special diet, Mrs Creswell is jolly good at coping. I can’t say I’m familiar with pelican hootch, but it’s bound to be in Mrs Beeton. And we can certainly rustle up the Huntley and Palmer biscuits. All I have to do is ring up Harrods.’
‘Help me,’ appealed Mrs Evans, telephoning Miriam Fortesque twenty-four hours before she boarded the train for Sussex-by-the-Sea. Mrs Fortesque was unsympathetic. She herself had enough to do preparing for Christmas Eve, when she would be plucked from her cosy flat in South Kensington and transported to the depths of Esher where her son, his suicidal third wife, and at least one grandchild addicted to heroin were said to be longing to receive her. ‘Just go blank,’ she advised Mrs Evans. ‘Pretend you’re in your dotage.’
‘God Almighty,’ cried Mrs Evans, flinging down the phone.
Jim Scott met her at the station. When she inquired politely as to the state of his health, he replied, as always, that he was a bit under par. ‘Nothing that I can put a finger on,’ he said. ‘I’m just not 100 per cent.’
‘Join the club,’ she said merrily, and drew her coat more closely round her. Outside the car window there was not one tree in leaf. The ploughed fields on either side of the road were rimmed with frost. Several cows, frozen in their tracks, stood in a stolid circle about a frozen pond. Even fifty miles from Camden Town the temperature seemed to have dropped appreciably.
Collected Stories Page 16