Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  But Ray and Mark had caught their sister now and were scragging her in a jolly, ragging way, when Arthur stepped in.

  “You leave my little Judykins alone. I’ll have to be your protector, Judy, I can see.” And he scragged her neck too, but in a different way, in a grandfatherly way.

  Sylvia said, “Now, Arthur!”

  Harold was addressing the garden at large,

  “The Girls County High suffers from a peculiarly virulent form of conjunctivitis—status snobbery meets there with social snobbery. I’m afraid it sometimes affects Judy’s vision.”

  The girl broke from her grandfather’s hold and ran indoors.

  “I like my little granddaughter, Harold.” Sylvia noticed the two boys smile at Arthur in approval. She wished that she had said it, even if she was not sure that she really did understand Judy.

  “There used to be a high fence on this side of the garden. The architects made these concessions to the English mentality in their efforts to woo the executive group. Beth and I had it taken down at once. After all, if the New Towns have done nothing else they’ve taught us the one valuable lesson the famous American way of life has to offer—good neighbourliness. Now we’re no more cut off from our neighbours than we were at 592. There!” pointing down a road of white weather-boarded houses each with a door painted a different bold colour, “that’s Higgleton Road. And that road to the left, which by the way will take you to the shops, is Mardyke Avenue.” The houses in this street were set on top of a grass slope; their concrete porch roofs were supported by black painted metal tubes. To Sylvia it all seemed strangely like the other parts of Carshall that she’d seen on previous visits; but she could tell from the proud note in Harold’s voice as he said the names of the roads that she must not say this. She sought for an observation to make. “It’s very quiet, isn’t it?” Harold frowned. However, a moment later two young men in black leather jackets and white crash helmets came out of a house in nearby Higgleton Road and started revving up their motorcycles. As the noise became more deafening, Harold’s frown changed to a friendly smile. As soon as the motorcyclist had roared off, and they could speak again, “I like these ton-up types,” he said.

  Nobody answered him. His sons were busy with some private conversation. Neither Sylvia nor Arthur had any comments to make.

  The other side of the house was the surprise. Through a screen-work of leafless sycamores you could gaze far away across rolling countryside.

  “We’re on the very outer edge of Carshall here. The very last house in the whole New Town, Mother. There’s a circular road in the dip there that joins up with the trunk road, but you can’t see it. All you can see is the country.” Sylvia, checking his state-ment and finding it correct, said,

  “Yes, that’s right, Harold, you can’t see any road.” Harold frowned.

  “On the other side of those hills,” he pointed straight ahead, “is the Midlands.”

  Sylvia thought that he said it rather as though he had put them there. She had lived in many parts of England but always by the seaside; even as a country girl she had not been more than twenty miles from the sea. The idea of “The Midlands” struck chilly upon her; looking before her at the vast fields, she imagined them stretching on and on across the middle of England. She saw them as one huge ploughed plain and herself on an endless, lonely walk across it, rather as in the far distance she could see a solitary tractor at work, its sole moving companions a flock of rooks and seagulls that fed in its wake. The leafless sycamores high above her seemed suddenly now more dried up and sad than when she had glimpsed them from her bedroom window the night before. Under the heels of her fur-topped bootees cracked dead leaves and withering, winged seed pods. She pulled herself together.

  “You’ve got a lovely home, Harold.”

  “We have,” he corrected her and put his arm round her waist. The embarrassing physical gesture seemed to underline something in what he had said that had already made her uncomfortable. She shifted her large weight away from him, turned her gaze from the awful Midlands, and looked back to the front gate.

  “I like the front side of the house best though.”

  Harold seemed unexpectedly pleased at this. “Oh, I knew you’d like Melling. It’s much more convenient here for the shops than at 592. And we’ve got a coffee bar of our own. Not like dear old Craighill where the ‘coffee cats’, as Beth used to call them, had to go all the way into the Town Centre to slake their thirst.” He looked tenderly at Sylvia. “That’s my chief memory of you and Beth together, Mother—clucking disapproval at the idle housewives who had time to spend gossiping over cups of coffee.” He laughed affectionately at the memory and then looking at Sylvia, abruptly became silent. After an embarrassed pause, he went on, “Of course, when you want to go to the Town Centre on your own, Mother, we’re wonderfully situated for the bus. It stops at the corner of Prideaux and Higgleton. Not a hundred yards away. I usually rely on the Zephyr to get to work, but Judy can tell you the bus times. Judy!” he looked round, “where’s she got to?”

  Sylvia could hardly believe that he had forgotten Judy’s departure, yet he seemed genuinely surprised at her absence. Arthur, who was holding forth to his grandsons, ended his sentence, “Of course, I told him exactly where he could put it.” Then, “She’s grown into a very pretty kid, that.” Harold frowned, but to Sylvia’s relief, Arthur added, “She’s very like Beth, Harold, very like,” and almost imperceptibly he winked at Sylvia. She had to give it to Arthur that you could never tell when he would turn up trumps.

  “I wish she were a bit more like, Dad. However, I’m glad you think so.” Harold gave an approving smile at his father. But Arthur had already returned to his story, “After that there was what the nobs call a marked coolness between the padre and yours truly . . .”

  “I do hope Dad’s not boring the boys too much,” Sylvia said.

  “It’ll do Mark good to listen for a bit.” At once he shouted across the lawn, “You sometimes deign to use public transport, don’t you, Mark? Come and tell your grandmother the bus times.”

  “If you’re so bloody keen on church parade,” I said. Arthur stopped a little grumpily in mid-sentence at the noise of his son’s shouting.

  “Oh, sorry to interrupt you, Dad. But it’s good for Mark to come down to earth and be useful now and again.”

  “Buses for what and where?” Mark’s forehead beneath his Beatle fringe was red with an eczema and his cheeks pitted with past acne. With his frown and his slight stammer. Sylvia didn’t know what to make of him. She could well believe that he was going through a difficult phase. Young people were so touchy now. Look at Tom Colman. In the other night’s episode when Mrs. Harker said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know”, just like everybody expected her to, instead of laughing at the funny old thing, Tom Colman had shouted at her, “That’s your trouble, and you never will.” The poor old thing had been so hurt, until Miss Dinneford—that was a new character, some sort of social worker—had explained that it was all due to young people growing up more quickly “in that way” nowadays and the crushes on the evening trains and that. Yet it was young Tom in another episode who got up the collection to replace old George Lampson’s cornet when it was stolen, although the boy seemed to hate cornets and played a guitar himself. It was certainly a case of “I really don’t know”.

  Harold’s voice raised in anger brought her back from “Down Our Way” to down her own way.

  “As I was responsible for the completion of the gazetteer of Carshall Streets, I suppose I may be expected to know the difference between Tidsbury Avenue and Tidsbury Crescent.”

  “Yes, you may and one glance at the gazetteer shows that you don’t.” Mark had put his chin down as he argued with his father so that his face was almost buried in his dirty suede jacket. Sylvia could see that Ray was afraid there might be a family quarrel. Süll smiling brightly at Arthur’s story, he half turned in a comic melodramatic posture towards Harold and Mark.

  “Wh
o dares to attack the faithful gazetteer? Oh, Mark Calvert, my lad, you’ll come to no good. The book we studied at our dear old mother’s knee ...” He stopped in mid-sentence, his handsome, squashy, tom-cat’s face flushed with embarrassment.

  “Ray’s made a gaffe.”

  “It’s hardly polite of you to point it out if he has, Mark. In any case your mother was the last person who would want a special hush round her name when she’s dead. Do try to be natural.”

  “Being natural, I now point out that when it comes to a sense of locality, you haven’t got one. You’d send poor Gran half round Carshall if she followed your routes.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I can find out the bus times for myself, I’ve still got a tongue.”

  But Harold raised his voice and drowned hers.

  “And I suppose you’re going to produce computers that make perfect maps and foolproof gazetteers?”

  “How did you guess? We’re working on them at the moment. And to replace headmasters. Eliminating the purely hackwork type of manpower in fact.”

  Sylvia found it difficult to know exactly what was happening, for although they both laughed all the time as though the whole thing was a leg-pull, yet from the look in their eyes and the edge in their voices she guessed that they soon might lose their tempers.

  “Oh, indeed, well if you want to be in at the death you’d better buck your ways up a bit and get through your exams, Mark. Otherwise you may find Electrometrico have eliminated you before your apprenticeship’s finished.”

  Mark’s voice rose now, almost hysterically.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll probably all be eliminated long before then.”

  “Oh, no! Oh no! Not again! Not the same old cry! And you call yourselves the cool generation. Can’t you even discuss the times of buses without whining about the bomb? Have some sense of proportion.”

  Once more Ray intervened,

  “That’s what they told the customer at the geisha, Dad. When he complained about the radioactive fish.”

  Mark brushed aside his brother’s assistance.

  “Oh very funny. Ha-ha! Excuse me if I don’t laugh.”

  “It’s a good try, but not you at your top form, Ray. It’s a non sequitur. It lacks that logic that is the basis of all good jokes. You see, no sense of proportion would help a Japanese gentleman, however honourable, once he’d consumed radioactive fish.”

  “Oh God!” Mark cried, “oh, wonderful! And he doesn’t even realise what he’s said.”

  Harold was blushing now; Sylvia hadn’t seen that happen since he was a boy.

  “If you’re so content with a cheap debating point, you can hardly expect me to believe that you’re much in earnest. Of course a sense of proportion won’t save a radioactive world. I never suggested it would. But it will save us from panicking and so . . .”

  Arthur interrupted,

  “Well, if you won’t think it rude, Harold. I shall toddle in. This cold air isn’t exactly what the doctor orders for an old geezer like me.” He gave the brave smile that Sylvia knew so well.

  Now perhaps they could all go quietly indoors and forget this quarrel about politics or whatever it was. Surely there must be some work to get on with, and, if not, the best thing would be a nice book. She followed Arthur’s move.

  “I think I am a little bit cold, too.”

  “I’m not surprised. Once Mark gets on to his hobby horse we could all freeze to death before he’d notice. That’s a point, by the way. With all your apprehension of total atomic annihilation, Mark, you have no concern for the many natural disasters that might eliminate three-quarters of the human race. It’s all or nothing with you. Your morality seems to be a simple matter of the counting of heads. ...”

  Ray went quietly up to his father and whispered loudly in his ear, “TFFTST, or even TFFTSU. That’s to say, if you haven’t heard, Dad, Gran and Granddad are freezing to death.”

  Coming from Ray, Harold seemed to take it. He laughed. “Well, there it is, Mother. The Calvert Estate. As to the garden, as you see, we don’t have any. Just the little apple orchard and the rest is lawn, and that’s electrically cut. By the way, it’s lucky for you, Dad, that you’ve come at this time of the year, otherwise you’d have to add the electric mower to the many infernal machines we’re going to instruct you in. Beth and I were very un-English about gardens. We were far too busy to bother with one. Far too extrovert, I suppose you’d say.”

  “I don’t believe Gran would say that at all,” Mark mumbled. And then he and his brother began a pantomime of military drill.

  “Introver—shun. Extrover—shun,” they cried.

  Arthur was delighted.

  “Good lads,” he said, “they know their drill.”

  And so, laughing, they all moved indoors. Sylvia thought what a happy lot they were really; although she didn’t understand them very well. Someone had said about Mark being a pacifist and here he was playing at soldier’s drill. Well, of course, you had to admire pacifists but only so long as they really had the courage of their convictions. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to think too much about such difficult questions. She and Arthur had never been clever, never been anything really, although Arthur talked so big sometimes.

  When they had all sat down to their beers and sherries before dinner that morning, Harold said, his eyes twinkling just like his father’s,

  “You may have noticed, Mother, that in the opinion of the younger generation, I’m a monster of obstinacy and insensitivity. As a matter of fact, strictly between ourselves, I have a strong suspicion that they’ve got a point there. But unfortunately there it is. That’s the nature of the beast.”

  Sylvia wondered whatever she was supposed to answer. Of course, Beth would have known. She could not help wishing that Beth were there, and then, of course, she herself need not be. She was quite ashamed of such ungrateful sentiments. Ideas like that came into her head, no doubt, because she had too little to do. Harold was making her too comfortable.

  “I think you’d find the whole thing would come to you much more easily, Mother, if you really tried to grasp the basic principles on which electric cooking and heating rest,” Harold had said this on the two previous evenings; he was looking content patiently to say it again on a third. All the same Sylvia thought she could detect an extra edge in his voice that evening; and who could blame him? She was so horribly slow to learn. Heaven knew she’d tried hard! But there was such a lot to know and Harold talked so much, so fast, and so indistinctly with his unfilled pipe waggling at the corner of his mouth that she really could hardly remember feeling more uncomfortable than she had on these three last evenings in that spacious modern kitchen.

  “I’m awfully stupid, Harold, you know. But I’ve still got a very good memory. I think, if you were just to show me the various switches, with that chart you gave me I could pick it all up by myself. I’ve got a very good sense of timing.”

  “My dear Mother, with an autotimer, there’s no need to have a sense of timing.” He laughed and, wiping the saliva from the stem of his pipe on the corner of his blue and white plastic apron, he put it away in the apron pocket. Sylvia wished that she could get used to these aprons on men. Pablo at the Palmeira had worn a plain white chef’s cotton apron, as had Giuseppe before him, but they were not only professional cooks but foreigners. Here Harold had this blue plastic thing, Mark a green one, and Ray one in orange and white. And all the aprons had frills.

  “We’ve relegated instinctual cooking to the lesser breeds without the law. And they aren’t going to put up with it for long. Now take this meal we’re cooking this evening. Of course, it’s not a normal meal. I’ve specially designed it to illustrate all the equipment,” he smoothed his moustache with a certain pride. “The goulash in your top oven. And just for this evening—an example of conspicuous waste—an apfelstrudel in your lower oven. Of course, that’s really reserved for the big fellows, turkeys and such and for any fiestas. We’ll bake there for this little party we’
re giving for you before Christmas. Then, on the drop-in hob—soup for Dad on the simmerstat, and on the two hob points two veg, also for my conservative-minded parents”—he winked at her— “and then a special treat for Dad whose true blue palate can’t take goulash—a half chicken for the grill. Frankly I shouldn’t have pandered to him like this if it hadn’t been a very useful way of demonstrating the roto-roaster.”

  Sylvia felt she ought to say something if only to check Harold’s flow of words so that she could concentrate.

  “Well, you know what Dad is, Harold.”

  “Yes. Though I must say that the leopard seems to have got rid of some of his worst spots, doesn’t he? Now set your top oven here and your lower oven here.” He turned the knobs.

  “I don’t see the numbers very clearly without my specs, I’m afraid, Harold. But...”

  “Well, it isn’t the end of the world if you don’t. That was exactly what I explained last night. With this heatview you’ve got a double check—this marker is going up and down the whole time, it’s just as if you had your beloved gas flame . . . .”

  “I didn’t want to have gas, dear. I told Mr. Hooper at the London Office ten years ago when they modernised the Palmeira that electricity would be cleaner. But it was a question of economy . . . .” She had not liked to tell Harold that, in any case, they’d only installed two gas cookers at the hotel and those reserved for breakfasts, otherwise they’d kept the old boiler type ranges.