Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  Sylvia shut the book. It was neither here nor there. She went indoors and prepared their afternoon tea—tomato sandwiches and some little home-made Queen cakes. Just an ordinary, homely English afternoon tea, but, to her delight, Harold said more than once how much he was enjoying it.

  “I’m afraid you had a poorish time with old Sally.”

  “My dear Harold, whoever told you about it?”

  “She did. She’s worth her weight in gold where the average human is concerned. But in every hundredth case or so she fails. And when she does her touch is a bit elephantine.”

  Sylvia said nothing.

  “Of course, I blame myself, Mother. I suppose it is that I have such a fear of New Town neurosis that I ... But there’s no doubt we’ve tried to rush you. Shock tactics are all right for the majority of people. They just need that little push. But there is the minority and I think you’re one of them. You need to take your own rime.”

  “I think so, Harold. But Miss Buhner meant to be very helpful. And she said one or two very good things. About the tele, for instance. It’s often more of a drag really.”

  “Yes. I should get outside as much as possible if I were you. You can sit in the garden here while the weather’s good. And don’t worry about calling to neighbours over the fence if you want to. There’s no snobbery of that kind, thank the Lord. In fact it’s rather the ‘done thing’.” He laughed at the phrase. “If you do want to get out among people a bit, Gorman’s Wood is only a step. It makes a very pleasant walk. Or you can take the bus to Sugley Park. It’s not far from Craighill. I don’t expect we ever took you there in the old days, because Beth wasn’t keen on walking. And it still looked rather like a private garden then. But they’ve made a lot of changes—much of Sugley Manor’s been pulled down—I believe they’ve made it all most attractive.”

  Tuesday, if anything, was a finer day than Bank Holiday. Sylvia took Within an Ace out into the garden, but she really couldn’t get on with it. The high spirits seemed so forced. Of course, life may be all roses for the upper ten, but everything that concerned her at the moment Lady Violet seemed to have left out. She got up and walked round the garden, but apart from a very few daffodils at the foot of one of the sycamores, there was nothing to see. She almost thought of buying a few seeds—just some ordinary annuals—but she was too fat for gardening and anyway Harold might not like it. She did not care to look out on to Mar-dyke or Higgleton, for passers-by tried not to stare, and then, after what Harold had said, she was unsure whether she should speak to people—but what should she say to them? She stood by the sycamore trees and stared out over the distant green fields. Somewhere far off some machine was doing something or other. She supposed they sprayed everything much more now—but wasn’t it rather early for spraying? She’d forgotten so much. In any case, what is an old woman doing staring at the spraying of fields, and still more, gazing into the empty distance?

  She went indoors to choose a book from Harold’s shelf—she would go to the Library tomorrow. On the shelf with the Sydney Fox case were a number of other reports of murder trials. Hesitantly she picked out the Haigh case, knowing that she was feeding her own morbidity. Surely it had been in a hotel? She read a little, and it all came so alive to her—the dining-room conversations from one little table to another, the chats’ over coffee in the lounge, the meetings in the hall, even the hiring of a car at the reception desk. She had never worked in those South Kensington hotels, and the Onslow Court was clearly rather grand, but the trade was not so different from the seaside one. Telling herself that she should not do so, she took the book out into the garden, already reading on obsessively about Mrs. Durand-Deacon as she walked out.

  “This is my sister, Mr. Haigh. My only relative really.”

  “Such a charming man, my dear. I think he’s retired from the army. But quite young. And such a good business head. He’s so interested in my little scheme for plastic fingernails that you’ve always laughed at. Doesn’t think it impractical at all.” And the conversations about the scheme—from the few words in the book they all came pouring into her head: the setting, the tone of voice, everything. “Now, you know I don’t like coffee sugar. Take it away and bring me some ordinary lump sugar. I cannot get them to bring me the right sugar, Mr. Haigh. I can’t bear all those little bits of coloured sugar. Perhaps I’m old fashioned.” “No, I think you’re perfectly right, Mrs. Durand-Deacon. Like a lot of modern inventions, they’re a fussy waste of time.” “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that, Mr. Haigh. They seem to invent all the things that nobody wants and never think of the simple things that we’re all longing for. . . .” Sylvia could hear Haigh’s admiring little chuckle. “Now I have a scheme for making plastic fingernails which nobody will take seriously, but . . .” As Sylvia began to read the reported conversation from the trial, she realised that she had been supplying all the rest herself; but she knew for certain that that was how it had happened, the words, the stirring of the coffee in the little cups, the whisky nightcaps, the interchange of reminiscences coloured up a little to entertain. So that was what people meant by her “knowing human nature”. Well, then, she also knew into what dark places it led. She could follow into them. Not with Haigh; she could not guess what lay behind that fat-faced, dark-eyed, soft-voiced, smooth urbanity, what horrors jumped out at him from the wardrobe of his small bedroom on the top floor. But Mrs. Durand-Deacon—she could follow her every step, in her long-sleeved black semi-evening dress as she made her way up to bed, every breathy step of that tall fat body— the regal, individual but smart hair styles and dress, the slight nervousness before addressing new residents followed by the bright but always reservedly dignified conversation, the charm and the occasional irritability with the servants but each alike in condescension, the determined independence, the physical exhaustion never shown. Sylvia knew what would jump from the big wardrobe in Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s large first floor room: loneliness—black, screaming, strangling loneliness. She saw it looming over the tall white-haired woman in her Persian lamb coat as she got into the hired Daimler on that sunny, windy, fateful morning. She had eavesdropped at all the preliminary conversation, had indeed whispered them like a prompter when the printe’d pages of the trials report dried up. “I’ve seen the city people, Mrs. Durand-Deacon. They’ve got everything tied up at the end. It only remains to sign the documents. Shall I have them sent straight to your solicitors?” “No, certainly not. I always see to everything myself first.” “But you’ll consult them in fairness to me. Otherwise your sister, your family quite rightly ...” “My dear Mr. Haigh, if I bothered with my family . . . No, no, I decide everything myself. . . .” “Well, anyhow, that’s the financial side of our little venture. I don’t mind saying I shall be pleased to see the back of it. As you know, it’s the technical side that interests me. What I confess I’m looking forward to showing you is the little workshop I’ve bought for us in Haywards Heath. I have a feeling that until you’ve seen that, you won’t really know what a working proposition the whole thing is.” . . . “Dread the discomfort of the railways. Never really recovered from the war. . . . Why not let me hire a car? . . . Harrods . . . charming Sussex countryside. . . .” The yard of the workshop must have seemed bare and empty when, with Haigh’s soft voice pouring, she was let in through the wooden gate. . . . Small and poky for her great enterprise now realised, more like a disused junk dealer’s yard. The strips of wood, the rusting tools, a cobwebby shelf with dusjy bottles, some pails with slops of rainwater, an old enamelled bath on four clawed legs. ... “I believe you’d get the best idea of the technical process if you’d just look into this bath where I am at present experimenting. ...” The crushing snap in her head and then all her unanswered love, all her unappeased loneliness breaking apart into the night black emptiness of space.

  Sylvia was trembling when she had read the report of this scene. After that all the horrors and squalors of the acid bath seemed a stupid footnote, the contemptuous dissolution of an unwant
ed human. And as for the other victims—the jolly dolls’ hospital owners with their loved Alsatian, the unknown woman in the army hut, the old dingy Pimlico couple and their young deserter son—their stories roused her only to the sad nausea with which she normally left murder trials unread. She closed the book, opened it again at the earlier pages, then forced herself to close it once more and resolutely returned it to Harold’s shelves.

  But the story did not leave her. Again and again as she dozed off in her deck chair that afternoon its details returned to her, and she could only exorcise Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s demon by walking down to the sycamores and staring out across the country in contemplation that held her own lonely fears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wanderings Abroad

  ON THE next day she decided to take Harold’s advice: out of doors, but not away from Carshall; she would explore the country in the town. And here indeed between Melling and the Industrial Area lay Gorman’s Wood, a copse preserved to enrich and soften the lives of those who lived on the estate. She did not, as Harold had predicted, find herself among people. She passed only two schoolgirls who giggled and stuffed their handkerchiefs in their mouths as she went by them. She had thought herself fat and old, but unnoticeably ordinary; now she wondered whether she could be growing odd looking. But a minute or two later, around a bend in the path came a little queer old hunchbacked woman, dressed in a cheap flowered cotton dress and a man’s blue raincoat, and talking to herself. No doubt it was this old woman who had set the girls off: heaven knew! with her hump, she was odd and creepy enough to give anyone the giggle-jumps. But what the hump had set off, her own fatness perhaps had kept going. The thought was disquieting enough to complete Sylvia’s disenchantment with Gorman’s Wood. The trees were mostly firs whose evergreen darkness seemed disappointingly shabby and dusty, when elsewhere, all around, deciduous trees were showing their subtle range of colours. The undergrowth was a mass of brambles, bruised and purple from winter’s ravages, just when anemones and primroses and celandines should have carpeted the ground. But even if there were some stray clumps of wild flowers in Gorman’s Wood, Sylvia could not find them, for the only footpath was cut off from the trees on each side by close-meshed wire fences. To offer this narrow, well-trod, ant-infested way as some substitute for the ranging, unbounded choice of the solitude of the countryside seemed to Sylvia such a cheat that had she been younger and more agile she would have climbed the fence in defiance of authority to tread down the undergrowth if only in protest. Others had defied the limits, as scraps of paper, cartons, here and there a bottle, two socks, a French letter, and mysteriously an old broken wicker armchair witnessed; but then others were slimmer and younger. After she had walked for a quarter of an hour the brambles gave way to docks and nettles, the firs to elder bushes, and immediately she was out upon the bypass road across which she could see the broad glass arches of the Electrometrico factory. There was nothing more to do but return along the same damned path by which she had come. She came back to “The Sycamores” quite out of temper.

  At supper she said, “I wonder they don’t build on that Gorman’s Wood, Harold, instead of Goodchild’s meadow. That would be no loss to anyone.”

  Harold narrowed his eyes as he answered and his tone was prickly with irritation. “You may have formed that opinion, Mother, but I hope you won’t broadcast it about. As far as the preservation of countryside amenities within New Town areas is concerned—and that’s essentially our case—Gorman’s Wood and Goodchild’s Meadow are exactly on all fours. You would do our case a lot of harm by public expression of the opinion you have just stated.”

  “I don’t know why anyone should take account of your mother’s views on local politics.”

  “Just because she is my mother, Dad.”

  On Thursday she carried Queen or Duchess and Within an Ace back to the Public Library. From the Town Centre she took a bus out to Sugley Park, Harold’s third suggestion for open-air neighbourliness. When she got off the bus and followed the gravel path between shady oak trees and crossed a wooden bridge over a minute stream, she felt hopeful that here she would find some gentle, lively peace. There were golden marsh marigolds growing by the stream’s edge, and she caught a glimpse of the bushy grey softness of a squirrel’s tail among the oak leaves. The path turned into the park, and there, indeed, as Harold had said, were people. One part of the old garden by the rhododendron shrubbery had been covered in concrete and here were as many children as filled Higgleton Road and Mardyke Avenue, clambering over swings and roundabouts, playing in sandpits, crawling through a great concrete tunnelled mound that formed the centre piece of the play centre; they slid with whoops down the chute, they swung with screams from ring to ring. She walked on past neat ovals in which newly bedded out plants as yet not in flower were protected in their soggy hollows by a surround of wire hoops. Here around a small ornamental pond with a rock for an island at its centre sat all the young wives of Craighill (though they might just as well have come from Melling) surrounded by babies and toddlers, and competing in their rhythm of happy chatter and contented, silent sewing with the alternate quacking and underwater grubbing of the ducks. Beyond this again she came upon another shrubbery of huge overgrown rose bushes and of tall bamboos, and suddenly she found herself in the backyard of the old manor house.

  It was not really picturesque, all red brick and no beams, but still some of those old brick houses—Queen Anne, surely—were said to have lovely rooms, so Sylvia decided to walk round to the front and look in. As she passed the side of the house two young men in dark suits went by her and eyed her curiously, then peering into the first ground-floor room, she found herself looking into the staring eyes of a young woman seated before a typewriter; this young woman said something to three or four others who all looked up and stared. Sylvia hurried on. On the sides of the entrance were a series of name plates: National Assistance Board, Registrar, Corporation and County Council Joint Consultative Committee, Rents Advice Bureau, Maintenance and Parks, J. B. Glamish, Mrs. Thurso ring three times. There was also a white painted sign—Enquiries: Ground Floor, Walk In. A stoutish, middle-aged man came out, belching slightly; he put his hand to his mouth when he saw Sylvia, got into a small motorcar and drove away. Sylvia made no enquiries. Not liking to follow the car down the drive because of the curious eyes that no doubt still looked out from the house, she passed quickly by the other downstairs windows, and found herself among the builders’ litter. In the next dusty shrubbery she really feared that she had lost her way when suddenly a sign pointed up a rutted drive among rhododendrons to Rectory School—Boys 6-12 girls 6-18. Headmistress: Miss Hurry. Sylvia walked up the drive between laurel hedges. It was such a pretty house, with two bow windows and a small conservatory at the side, but a cruel kind of house to work in as she knew from experience. The place seemed deserted, so she walked round to the back door where the dustbins smelled a little mouldy, and peered in at one or two of the windows. It was all much as she had expected, but a strange gale of memories blew her back into the past; and, when at last she reached the main road again and the bus, she felt more confused than ever, as though she had found and lost herself again in a few moments of time.

  Since Easter she had returned from the world of fiction to food and family. Yet as she sat silent at the supper table, she was as effectively cut off from those around her by a thickening fog of memories as she had been by Mrs. Harker, Queen Anne and Wardress Webb.

  “Well, lovey,” Ray said, “sulking on your ownio again?”

  He had adopted this loving direct teasing as his only means of reaching her.

  She smiled absently, “Yes, I went all round a school.”

  “School?” Harold was amazed.

  “Did you have your dinner out?” Ray intervened quickly. But Harold repeated, “School? What school?”

  “The Rectory School, dear.”

  There was a silence. Then Ray said in despair, “You do have tactless walks, Gran, you really do.”r />
  “Your Grandmother can hardly be expected to realise the scandal of a private school of that type being allowed to trade on misplaced snobberies in a New Town like Carshall. Even of its kind, I believe the school is what Judy would call very crumby. No doubt you can tell your grandmother more about the place, Judy?”

  “Oh, it’s an awful place, Gran. A frightfully bad education. Mrs. Ogilvie says she couldn’t imagine who would send a girl there. I mean as soon as she had decided against one of the really good boarding schools, she knew there was only the County High possible for Caroline.”

  “Say no more, Judy, or I shall begin to feel sorry for Miss Hurry or Scurry or whatever her name is. Anyway, now you know, Mother. Even the county rejects it.”