Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  As though to warn them to hurry, there came the sound of a lumbering cart echoing down Church Lane. The Tuffield girl moved speedily to divide the articles in her bundles—first Myra’s clothes, then her own. Her alarm passed to Myra, who began to jump from one leg to another.

  “Quick, quick,” she begged. “Oh, it would be awful if anyone saw us. Awful, awful.” She echoed her mother’s horror at all things mal élevées. She tried so hard, Myra, even at the age of seven to capture grown-up emotions, her mother’s, that the parodies came out disjunctive, chaotic, creating havoc with her body, her movements. Now in caricature of distress, she snatched her clothes so quickly from the farm girl that all were tumbled in the dust of the road. “Oh, heavens,” she cried, “oh dear, what a fiasco.” It was a triumph of unconscious mimetic art and brought to the Tuffield girl a first intimation of the possibility of Mrs. Longmore thrown from her usual poise. She picked up the clothes and began to beat the dust out of them.

  “Your mother wouldn’t be angry, surely,” she said, “Why, she told us Wednesday she didn’t mind along there were no fuss. We mun not fuss.”

  “Oh, darling mummy, she’s always kind,” Myra cried. She was Mrs. Longmore now at histrionic heights the Tuffield girl had seen nothing of.

  But Mrs. Longmore kind or no, here was Snushall’s cart bringing muck down to his field along the churchyard side. Luckily Mr. Snushall with his occasional penny gifts after chapel was, though so different from Mrs. Longmore, kindness itself. The girl could see his happy absent smile as he sat there holding the reins of the cart horse, and his young Albert standing up among the muck leaning with both arms on the handle of a great rake. The farm girl quickly held her dress up in front of herself, and she tried, too, to cover Myra, but the young queen was now in too wild a pantomime of distress. She jumped on the roadway from one knickered leg to the other.

  “Oh dear. Oh dear. This is quite terrible.”

  Albert Snushall saw them first. He burst out with a guffaw; then uncertain, blushed scarlet and looked solemn. His laughter had roused his abstracted father. Snushall’s round surprised eyes stared out of his clownish, seal-like countenance. At first he just looked, then he too burst into laughter, and soon Albert had joined in, freed from all restraint.

  All Myra’s grandeur was outraged at this reception. “I’m the Queen”, she shouted pointing to her crown, but they only laughed the more. The Tuffield girl, too, did not quite like this reaction to a freedom of behaviour that should either have shocked or pleased; however, her good sense told her to be happy that the first adult reaction had not been anger. She was about to explain their predicament to Mr. Snushall before the cart had passed out of earshot when, suddenly, around the corner from the direction of home came Derek Longmore weaving brilliant circles on his bicycle from side to side of the bumpy, rutted road, increasing twofold the dust already raised by Mr. Snushall’s cart. When he saw the girls he stood up so high on the pedals that the Tuffield girl thought he would fall over the handlebars.

  “Myra,” he shouted. “Oh, you absolute little beast,” and he swung his bicycle across the road and whizzed back homeward again, calling “Mater! Mater!”

  It seemed only a second before Mrs. Longmore herself appeared from around the corner, still strolling gracefully as she had intended when she set out to follow Derek on his bicycle for a little walk before luncheon. She was there before Snushall’s cart had moved on. At the sight of this gracious lady in white with her elegant parasol, Mr. Snushall’s laughter died away; he even turned and gave his young son a cuff, telling him to stop his “gibble gabble”. Mrs. Longmore’s reactions to the unexpected sight were also affected by the presence of a man. For a moment, however, she could not see the two girls clearly through the shade cast by her parasol.

  “What are you two doing out here?” she called.

  “But Mater,” shouted Derek, “they’re being beastly.”

  “Oh, do stop shouting, Derek. What are you doing here, Myra?”

  “I’m the Flower Queen,” Myra began. Then something told her that her mother’s reaction would not be as gentle as they had expected. Immediately she began to cry. “She made me do it, Mummy, she made me do it,” she said, pointing at the farm girl.

  Now Mrs. Longmore could see clearly. “Good heavens!” she cried. “You little horrors! Put your clothes on at once. What do you mean by taking Myra’s clothes from her like that? And she’s hurt her leg! Put your clothes on, both of you.”

  “Oh please, Mrs. Longmore, ma’am,” the eldest Tuffield began, “we din’t feel free in them.”

  “Didn’t feel free in them! Didn’t feel free in your clothes!” Mrs. Longmore was indignant at the position she had been put into—alone in a farm lane with two small girls in their drawers and a yokellish sniggering farm labourer looking on. “Well, don’t hang about, Derek,” she cried. “You don’t need to let these little sillies spoil your ride!” Derek’s whizzing on up the lane was, as she had hoped, a signal to Mr. Snushall, who drove the cart off as briskly as his old horse could trot. Mrs. Longmore herself now felt a little more free; she began to remember many humorous principles of child management, she recalled the little Tuffield girl’s admiration and wonder. She said, leaning down towards the little girls, and speaking in a very soft voice, “Now, whatever have you been up to?” She meant to inject into her serious tones a touch of mockery to which, if the little Tuffield girl had any sense of humour, she would respond, but somehow she could find no mockery to allay her seriousness. Responding to this severity of her mother’s, Myra now passed from tears to desperate sobbing.

  “She made me do it, Mummy. She made me take them off. She wanted me to take everything off.”

  Now the mother in her turn responded to her small daughter’s histrionics. She drew Myra to her. “My poor, poor little Myra,” she cried, “you’re not to think of it ever again.”

  The farm girl’s bewilderment between the two of them was complete.

  “If you please, ma’am,” she cried, “Myra got herself proper hotted and I thought it best”-—she sought desperately for the right words—”to give her a change. Something as she’d never done before. Like you said.”

  Mrs. Longmore’s clumsy efforts to pull Myra’s clothes on quickly were chafing the girl’s sunburnt flesh. Anxious not to cry out and upset her mother further, she chose instead to bawl more loudly against the farm girl. “She’s a horrid girl, Mummy. She’s nasty.” The little Tuffield girl attempted to aid Mrs. Longmore in dressing Myra, indeed so quick and neat were her efforts that, despite Myra’s screams, she had her stockings and shoes and her petticoat on before Mrs. Longmore pulled her away fiercely by the arm.

  “Leave Myra alone,” she cried. Attracted by the noise, Violet and Rosie, Ted and Bertie arrived on the scene and were standing in a knot. “They’re rude,” they cried, “they’re rude. Ooh! They’re rude.”

  The uncomprehending prurience that underlay Myra’s complaints and the small children’s taunts touched something in Mrs. Longmore. For her a bad old world was being replaced by hygiene and fresh milk and elastic belts and continental breakfasts and Mind; the enemy was ignorance and brutality and fustiness and gross, heavy meals and narrow-minded Sundays and dirt— not so much clean dirt, as the sort of dirt that she feared to see in Mr. Tuffield’s eyes. She had suspected that she was paying too high a price for the farm eggs and milk, too high a price in Tuffield fustiness and ignorance, and, despite all Mrs. Tuffield’s cleaning, in Tuffield squalor. Now she knew it. At the base of all the sensible, up-to-date teaching that she professed for the bringing up of her children there lay one principal tenet—let there be beauty, especially beauty of mind. And now from this Tuffield squalor, from the least suspected member of the family—but corruption like fever is inescapable—something nasty, something beastly had come out to touch her children. She gathered Myra up in her arms, “It’s all right, darling,” she said, “Mummy’s going to take you away from here.” And she walked off down th
e lane towards the farm.

  After a few steps she turned and said coldly, “I shall have to tell your mother, you realise that. What she does about it, of course, is her affair. But it is only fair to her as a mother to know what has been going on.” As she looked at the grave, square face in front of her, it did, indeed, seem difficult to think that anything terrible had been going on; but, then, what could not ignorance and poverty (Mr. Tuffield was a very unsuccessful farmer, otherwise they would not take summer boarders) do in the way of corruption? If only the girl were to make one little graceful gesture of appeal, to recall for one moment that sense of wonder she had seemed to show in Mrs. Longmore’s presence, it might have been possible to relent (and Mrs. Longmore ached to relent, for somehow she felt that she was heading for all sorts of ridiculous, even incommoding behaviour), but the stocky little figure stood quite stiff and stubborn—how easily the wrong sort of environment could harden even children! Mrs. Longmore turned away in anger at such stubbornness, such refusal to help herself, or indeed, oneself in a dilemma that threatened absurdity. She set off with Myra to announce to Mrs. Tuffield their intention of leaving: she would go to nearby Felixstowe, they knew her there at the Grand; it was hardly exciting, but the children enjoyed the beach, and she could wear something a little bit frivolous in the evening now and again which would be amusing. But, before she left, it would give her a real satisfaction to bring home to Mrs. Tuffield how little, for all her chapel going and her cleaning of the house, she had kept clean her children’s minds.

  The indistinguishables ran before Mrs. Longmore in a chirping, clucking, grunting quartet; out of their general noise, their mother, who understood them very well, learned that the eldest had deserted her charges, had done something “rude”, and above all, involved “the lady”. Mrs. Tuffield was on the scene before Mrs. Longmore had turned the corner out of sight of the corruption, indeed before the corrupt girl had been able to do more than put on her petticoat. Mrs. Tuffield walked straight past the elegant though anxious figure of Mrs. Longmore, and hit her little daughter twice very hard across the head. The girl cowered down into the ditch by the bank. “That’s no good cruddlin’ down there,” her mother said. “You’ve got a proper good few things to hear, you bad, gatless little girl. Leaving Violet and them to play around and leaving the linen when I’m everlastin’ working to keep things together”.

  Mrs. Longmore said, “I’m afraid it’s not just that, Mrs. Tuffield. If only it were just that. After all, all work and no play . . .” She left Mrs. Tuffield to finish the proverb, which she had only produced as a means of communicating with the semi-literate.

  “I’m afraid that’s just what it is for her, ma’am. All work. That’s what the Almighty made for her. That’s been the trouble, as I doubted it would—all that crubble and playin’ ‘em air games. That’s all right for the gentry, but that’s not for ‘er.” She roughly pulled her daughter up from the ditch and hit her again. “Wicked little thing,” she said, “that’ll be lucky if the Devil don’t take you.”

  “Oh, don’t!” Mrs. Longmore cried. “What she did was bad. But she wants talking to, not hitting.”

  “Ah, talking, she’ll get a mobbin’ all right. And more ‘an that. She’ll get a bastin’. A real bum bastin’ from her father. That’s what you’ll get, my girl. ‘Es angry enough, the wheat being crackly and that.”

  Satisfied with having contradicted Mrs. Longmore and sufficiently frightened her daughter, she now felt ready to ask what had happened. “What’s she done then, ma’am?”

  “She took Myra’s clothes off.”

  “What she want to do that for?”

  Mrs. Longmore, faced by the question, felt more sure of her sophisticated, sinister fears, yet quite unable to put them into clear words. Woman to woman, it should have been so easy, but there were certain crudities .... Mrs. Tuffield grew impatient with waiting for an explanation, she turned to her daughter. “What you want to do that for? Muckin’ them up! and where’s your bonnet?” Myra immediately began to cry loudly for her adorable ribbons, but Mrs. Longmore appeased her growing guilt by a certain stylish lavishness about straw hats.

  “My dear Myra! You’re not too young to acquire some sense of proportion. Never fuss about lost possessions. It has a mean look.”

  “Well, you’ll not get another bonnet,” Mrs. Tuffield was saying to her daughter. She felt no such sense of lavishness. “That went in the water to keep company with ‘ers,” the girl explained.

  “Water, what water?”

  “In Knapp’s meadow hinder.”

  “What you go there for? What you done all this for?”

  “I wanted to do something different.” The girl looked towards Mrs. Longmore in hope. But Mrs. Tuffield was in full spate before anyone could intervene.

  “Different! You’ll be different along of when your father’s finished with you. You’ll be as God made you, you scringin’ little thing.”

  “Oh, don’t talk to her like that, Mrs. Tuffield,” Mrs. Longmore cried. “I know she’s done wrong. But she can be good. She can be quite a special little thing when she likes.”

  “Special! There’s nothing special about ‘er! Nor about none of us, ma’am. God put ‘er here to work for others. That’s what’s she’s to do. Special!” Such a rage against Mrs. Longmore and her foolish wicked ways seized Mrs. Tuffield that she turned away from her for fear she should lose control and strike her. She concentrated on her daughter. “You wanted to be different! Well, you’re nothin’. Nothin’. And you always will be.” With each word she pulled the girl roughly by the arm.

  “Poor little thing! You’ll dislocate her shoulder or something. Let her put her dress on at least.”

  “She won’t need no dress where she’s going, and that’s bed. And if I were you, ma’am, I’d send that one to the same place. She’s old enough to know better than what she’s done.”

  “Well, you’re not . . .” Mrs. Longmore began when she detected a shockingly shrill note in her own voice. She started again in her quietest, most reasonable tones. “I’ve no wish to quarrel, Mrs. Tuffield. How you manage your children is your affair. But it is evident that I can’t have my children here when things like this can happen. We shall leave tomorrow. I know that we spoke of a four week stay, and, of course, you’ll receive the full four weeks’ money.” If Mrs. Longmore’s “of course” had expected any disclaimer from the farmer’s wife, it misfired, for she made no reply at all, but dragging the eldest girl by the arm and driving the rest of her brood before her with her apron, she made off back to the farm. The eldest Tuffield girl looked back once; she had shed no tears, only she was shivering a little; Mrs. Longmore began to smile a little smile of comfort, but something in the girl’s eyes froze the smile and she turned instead to call to Derek, who had had a spiffing ride.

  It was late—about nine—when Mrs. Longmore heard Mr. TufEeld come in. There was something in his step that suggested that he was what Mrs. Tuffield had apologised for on their first evening as “a bit foggy”. At the time she had wondered whether it was his “fogginess” that drove Mrs. Tuffield to the chapel or Mrs. Tuffield’s grimness that drove him to the local inn. But the rector and his wife, whom she had visited that afternoon to telephone to the Grand Hotel at Felixstowe and to order a taxicab to take them to Woodbridge Station, had said that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Such charming people— the rector and his wife—not at all old-fashioned; she had the prettiest collection of Hokusais and he was most interested in Maeterlinck. They had been always shocked, it appeared, that Hypatia Clark (a Church of England clergyman’s wife) should have boarded at the Tuffields’ at all—the Tuffield reputation in the village was a terrible one. It was just as well that it had all come to a head and that they were leaving. But the whole incident had completely exhausted Mrs. Longmore—in this heat! She was only so happy, having got Myra and Derek to bed. to relax on the little plush sofa in the parlour.

  But her relaxation was not to be com
plete. For, first, Mr. Tuffield was shouting and lurching up the stairs; and then, suddenly, there were screams so loud and terrible that Mrs. Longmore thought that all she had imagined about fear (that emotion which had ruined her childhood) had indeed been but a child’s imagining, and that only now did she know what real terror might be. She walked up and down the stuffy little parlour in an agony of hatred and disgust—for the wicked man, for the vile cruelty of an ignorant, squalid world, for herself. She went to the door once or twice with the intention of intervening, but physical fear drove her back to the sofa each time. Finally she sat there, rigid, her forefingers pressed into her ears, feeling disgusted and infinitely ridiculous. But she could still hear the screams. At last they died away.

  It was about ten minutes later that someone knocked on the parlour door. She could not find any words in her alarm; but the door opened all the same, and there stood Mr. Tuffield. Mrs. Longmore thought if he were more like a gipsy now, a Heathcliff of a man, one could perhaps find some meaning in his violence, but as it was his flashing black eyes were set in a little dried-up, pursed-mouthed toad’s face. She looked away from him in disgust.