Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  When Arthur came down to join her in the sitting room, she could not remember when she had felt so pleased to see him, although she also could not prevent herself from saying,

  “Oh, Arthur! Really! Half past three. Half the day’s gone, and you’ve got your pyjama jacket on again under your shirt.”

  Happily he too seemed anxious to preserve a pleasant atmosphere, for he did not rely to her criticism with his usual battery of curses.

  “How about a pot of tea, Sylvia? This damned central heating dries up my mouth.”

  She made him a nice fresh pot and brought it to him with some ginger nuts on a tray. Sitting there opposite him in front of where the fire should have been, she felt so glad of his company that she even said nothing when he dipped the biscuits into his tea.

  “Well, I suppose Harold knows what he’s doing. He’s meant to be so brilliant. But I’ve never seen such a god-forsaken hole as this place in my life. All this talk about bridge, I haven’t smelt a card yet, let alone a bridge player.”

  “We’ve only been here a week, dear. And the weather’s been so bad.”

  “A bloody week too much as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Oh, now, Arthur. I feel a bit lost too. But it’ll be all right as soon as the furniture’s arrived. We can make our room like home then. You’ll have a nice comfortable chair. Then you won’t want to stop in bed all day.” She added quickly, “There I’m nagging you again.” She laughed. But she saw that Arthur wasn’t laughing at all. He had got up from his chair and was staring out of the window, then he came back and stood over her. He was trembling with one of his sudden angers.

  “It’s no good Sylvie. I can’t live here. You’ll have to tell Harold. We’ll leave as soon as ruddy Christmas is over.”

  She had to say firmly: “Now, Arthur, you know you’ll never live within your pension. We must just make the best of it. We’re very lucky old people really.”

  His familiar rage had brought back memories and she feared that she would cry from sheer nostalgia. But her own words soothed her. In him they produced the feeble storm she expected.

  “I wish to Christ you’d have me quietly put to sleep. It would be far better for all of you to have me out of the way. Serve your country, lose your bloody lungs, and they can’t even give you a decent enough pension to live on. Ruddy charity, that’s what we’ve had to take . . . .”

  Sylvia waited for it come to an end and so, abruptly, it did. He sat down opposite her again and said,

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t for this blasted central heating. Dries you up to nothing.”

  “They say it gets rid of all the draughts, dear.”

  “Draughts! You can always have screens, can’t you? Give me the old-fashioned coal fire every time.”

  “I like them better too. But they do mean more work.”

  “Well, we’ve always had them, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, but we’ve always had a hotel staff. And I must say it’s warmer here in the passages.”

  “Warmer in the passages! Who the hell wants to sit in the passages? I don’t know.”

  Sylvia laughed. “I don’t know. I really don’t,” she put on Mrs. Harker’s accent. Then because he looked so forlorn, “I’ll put the temperature down for you. Ray showed me how to do it the other day. Of course it’ll take some time to have any effect.” When she opened the little gauge she clicked her tongue. “70. Well, really! Anyone would think it was summertime. 60 will be quite enough, won’t it Arthur?”

  “Quite enough. What does Harold think we are. Ruddy monkeys in the jungle?”

  Just the fact that they’d altered the temperature to suit themselves made them both feel more at ease. Sylvia had to smile, for only ten minutes later, Arthur said, “Ah, that’s more like it. I can breathe now.” She knew the temperature hadn’t changed that much yet. But they said so much is in the mind, didn’t they?

  They sat watching television together quite happily so that when Judy, always the first home, came in, they were content not to call her to them as they usually did, but to let her go straight upstairs to her room to study. They watched a whole Western and for once Sylvia didn’t complain about the noise of the shooting and Arthur didn’t say that it was all kid’s stuff. They were pleased to see Harold, of course, when he came in, but at the back of her mind Sylvia thought how nice it would have been if the family had been out—just Arthur and herself with the tele and a nice Welsh rarebit on a tray.

  But Harold was in very happy, friendly form. He had received the proof of the family Christmas card back from the printers. The Calvert Christmas cards were famous in Carshall and even farther afield. Harold and Beth had invented such amusing ones. One year it had been a drawing of Harold wearing wings and singing in the bath like he always did—”Hark the Harold Angel Sings,” it had read. Another year, there’d been a picture of a great Christmas pudding, and, in reproduction of Harold’s writing, an inscription, “Our monster pudding—but we shan’t give Beth Any”, and then, in Beth’s handwriting, “God forgive him his puns.” Always something original and personal. Of course, not everyone liked them. Sylvia remembered how when old Miss Mitton at the Palmeira had seen one of them on the mantelpiece in their room, she had said it was a mockery of Christ’s birth. Sylvia had tried to explain that they weren’t a religious family in the strict meaning of the word, but there was obviously offence given.

  Harold handed the proofs to his mother.

  “There you are, and you too, Dad.” And he smiled slyly. It took Arthur and Sylvia rather a long time to read the card because it was in verse and the first letter of each line was sort of old-fashioned in colours with little drawings inside the spaces. It read:

  Calvert’s Yule-Tide News announces:

  Harold’s Hastings still not come.

  Ray still shines, the King of Rayon.

  Judy’s Punch, it seems is dumb.

  Sylvia—what is she? Our granny.

  ”The Sycamores” is now her home.

  Mark got lost at Aldermaston.

  Arthur’s here no more to roam.

  So happy Christmas to you all.

  Sylvia’s mind was still with the Western—she’d guessed the girl’s brother was a bad lot even before they’d taken the mask off the dead cattle thief. She found the poem so difficult to understand, especially the pictures, although probably they were clues. She wasn’t too happy either about having her Christian name and Arthur’s sent out like that to strangers; and then nobody knew them, why should they? It looked so forward.

  However, Harold was waiting. “Well?” he asked.

  “The picture of the house is ever so good dear. Who drew it?”

  “I made rough sketches,” he said rather impatiently, “and Ray and Judy did the final drawings between them.”

  There was a silence. “Well?”

  “It’s lovely, dear, though I don’t understand it all. Fancy putting in Arthur and me. I don’t know what people will think. Two old nobodies.” She added, “Your father did his bit in his time, but they won’t know that.”

  Harold took the card from them and laid it on one of the many coffee tables.

  “They’ll think, as I intended, that we’re happy and proud to have my mother and father living with us at ‘The Sycamores’. Or, at any rate, anyone whose friendship I care about will think it.”

  Arthur rose to the occasion, “God bless you, my boy. You’ve made two old people very happy.”

  To Sylvia’s amazement he got up from his chair, and, drawing Harold’s head down in his cupped hands, he kissed his balding crown. There were tears in his eyes.

  Sylvia was glad she had some knitting to bend down over so that no one could see she was not weeping. She supposed she was wrong not to feel as strongly as that; she was pleased, just as pleased as Arthur if it came to thät. But family feelings aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for every day. And the Calverts weren’t a family to show emotion. The affection was there, there was no need t
o speak of it. What was it Mrs. Harker had said the other day to that silly sister of hers who was always having hysterics? “‘Tisn’t tears, my girl, that’s needed. More water than tears can make has flowed under our bridge through all these years.” Or something like that; it wasn’t quite clear. But she had so agreed with the old thing. And now . . .

  “I don’t quite get what this bloke with the hockey suck’s got to do with your mother.”

  Sylvia signed to Arthur to keep quiet, but, in fact, Harold was delighted.

  “Yes, that drawing does want a bit of touching up. What you reasonably call a hockey stick is a shepherd’s crook, Dad. You know, ‘Who is Sylvia? What is she; That all our swains commend her.’“

  “I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  Harold seemed so pleased that Sylvia ventured to ask some questions about the drawings too; and, of course, when you heard the answers, it seemed silly not to have known them all along. Arthur remembered perfectly well about King Harold at Hastings when he was told; and Sylvia remembered well about King Arthur and the sword, she’d heard it as part of Iris’s homework in the old days. It was more confusing about Mark, because she’d read about the Aldermaston march, but she didn’t know that he’d been on it; and it seemed he hadn’t, it was a sort of joke to tease him. As to Punch and Judy there was more to it than just that, but they couldn’t have known because it was a horse’s name.

  “For once,” Harold said, “Judy’s snobbish equine attachments came in useful. Thank God! Because it would have been difficult to find anything to say about her. She hasn’t the personality of the other two.”

  “She’s got a very pretty little figure has my little granddaughter, let me tell you that.”

  “As long as you don’t tell her, Dad.”

  “Mind you,” Arthur said, “the card’s very clever. But I don’t exactly see you as poet laureate, Harold. After this.” Harold was delighted.

  “I challenge anybody to write nine such feeble lines between interviewing a paranoid parent of a cretinous child and telling one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors just how bad I thought his report on the School’s mathematics performance was.”

  Arthur didn’t exactly understand, but he recognised the tone of his son’s speech.

  “That’s the stuff to give the troops,” he said.

  “Well, Mother,” Harold bent down and kissed her cheek again, “I’ve tried to tell you how happy I am to have you here. I hope you’re not too disappointed with the place. It’s a poor thing, but mine own. Or rather not exactly that because as you know the philosophy of the New Towns precludes freeholds. But who knows? Today’s heresy is tomorrow’s dogma.”

  Sylvia made every effort to sound enthusiastic.

  “I’m very happy, dear. It’s a lovely home.” Then she felt the pulses in her temples throb as a sudden courage welled up in her. “But I shall be happier still if you let me do more. I don’t like vou and the boys, or Judy while she’s studying so hard, doing housework and cooking while I sit about all day. It’s bad enough my not being able to get out and do the shopping.”

  It was a hard struggle for Harold. At first he tried holding the untenable front of her blood pressure, but—”Oh, no, Harold. The doctor was most anxious that I shouldn’t be idle. Worry—that’s the thing to avoid; that and back-breaking work. Well, the work here wouldn’t break the back of a mouse. As long as I get my afternoon rests. I’m much more likely to worry, sitting about.”

  Arthur broke in to help her. “Yes, you’d much better let your mother get on with it. She’s broad enough in the beam without sitting about on her b-t-m all day.”

  Then Harold fell back on stronger defences.

  “I know this may sound silly to you, Mother. But it’s really a matter of principle. From the very start, as early as they could be useful, Beth brought the children up to live the co-operative way. We all did a full day’s work and we all ran the house. Anything else, as Beth said, belonged to the era of slave and owner, wives and chattels, and the rest.”

  “But I don’t do a full day’s work, Harold.”

  “My dear Mother, everyone’s a right to retirement some time even in Utopia. To be frank, it’s the children I’m thinking of. Of course Ray and Mark are adults, they’ll choose for themselves; though I think I know how they will. But Judy isn’t, and she’s got enough false notions already.”

  He was so agitated that Sylvia could only say, “Very well, dear.” But she couldn’t keep a quaver out of her voice. When Harold saw that there were tears in her eyes, he filled his pipe embarrassedly.

  “Now, Mother, we’re not a family to give way to tears.” But then suddenly he agreed to compromise; Sylvia could run the house on weekdays, the rest of the family on Saturdays and Sundays.

  “Well, that’s all settled then,” Arthur said comfortably.

  And indeed his parents’ content reached Harold, for any annoyance he had shown soon gave way to high spirits.

  “All this problem of retirement and families has been grossly worked up by the professional sociologists,” he said. “While they’ve been arguing, some of the more practical of us have been solving it for them. The basic answer’s simple enough—the notions of freedom and companionship that we’ve stood for, and still stand for, are by no means incompatible with our grandparents’ ideals of responsibility and manliness.” Sylvia couldn’t make any sense of it. His grandparents! Her parents were not much of an advertisement, and Arthur’s had been dead since the year dot. Nor could Arthur; and he changed the subject.

  “Your mother and I have got something to show you this evening, Harold. We’ve made the house a bit more like an Englishman’s castle and a little less like the snake house at the Zoo.”

  It was Harold’s turn to appear puzzled. Sylvia’s heart was in her mouth; she signalled to Arthur with her knitting needless to say no more. But out with it all he came. “So you see,” he ended, “that your mother’s perfectly competent to tinker about with all these blasted machines.”

  Harold swung round on her. “Who showed you how to alter the thermostat?”

  “Ray did, dear, but... .”

  “Well, he had no right to. The temperature of the house and, for that matter, the barometer are the affair of the head of the house. They always have been.” He cut himself short. “In any case, these gauges are very delicate mechanisms. Unless absolutely necessary they should not be altered except in October and March.”

  “And your mother and I, I suppose, are to be dried up to bloody dust.”

  “Of course, if you find the house so uncomfortably hot, the temperature must be lowered. But I should still prefer that you should ask me before you ... In any case we’ll leave it as it is now and hope that we shan’t all catch our death of cold. But when vou’ve got your own room fitted up, Mother, perhaps you’ll be good enough to get me to set the temperature there as you want it and we can restore the rest of the house to some degree of modern comfort.” He laughed, “I’m being absurdly pompous. It’s a matter of generations—you live in the glorious age of draughts, we don’t.”

  But it was too late to pacify Arthur, despite Sylvia’s frowns. “As soon as our bloody furniture comes, Harold, you won’t see me again in your posh lounge, I can tell you that. Not a comfortable chair to sit on.”

  Sylvia felt she must back up Arthur a little. “We’re in the house all day, you see, Harold. You wouldn’t want us to be uncomfortable.”

  For answer Harold cut himself off behind a barrier of evening newspaper and thick pipe smoke. Yet the feud was not ended. It flared up between Arthur and Harold later at supper with all the family present. As Sylvia was refusing a second helping of risotto from Mark, Harold said in his announcing voice, “Well, Ray, it seems your grandmother’s out of your tutorial clutches.”

  “Yes, you’ve got your ‘L’ plates off, haven’t you, dear?”

  “The question then comes, who’s to teach your grandfather the elements of domestic economy.”

&nb
sp; Arthur, intent on his chump chop, looked up in surprise. “Count me out, laddie. I’d only . . . well, I won’t say what I’d do to the works in front of my pretty little granddaughter. But they wouldn’t be the same after I’d messed them about; that’s all.”

  “My dear Dad. You’ve always wanted to live by pressing a button: Now’s your chance.”

  “Thank you very much, Harold. Unless you’d let me look after the barometer,” he winked at me boys. “Your father runs the weather here, you know, as well as the temperature. No, I had enough blasted buttons in the ranks to last me a lifetime. Unless you can produce Alf’s button.”

  The grandchildren had never heard of this, and addressing himself to them, he told the whole story in Old Bill tommy’s language. “ ‘Strike me pink, Alf said, and so the genie blighter struck him pink.’“ They all laughed with him except Harold.

  “Don’t you agree with me, Mother, that a little housework would work wonders with the old man?”

  It wasn’t so much that Sylvia wanted to be on Arthur’s side, although that came into it, but more that the absurdity was too great for her.

  “Oh dear, Dad hasn’t got out of doing everything all these years to start now, Harold.”

  She saw that Judy thought it a bitter remark to make about her granddad, for she turned to him and said, “I know what I’d do, Granddad, if I had Alf’s button. I’d wish us two absolutely super horses to ride off together on.”

  But Harold was angry, “Very well, Mother, I wash my hands of it. You’ve preferred to spoil him all your life. You must take the consequences.” His hand shook as he helped himself to more sugo.