by Angus Wilson
“Oh! You’re going to teach us how to bowl now too, are you? Let’s see, when were you champion of the BTBA League? 1921? Or could it be that ten pin bowling hadn’t come in then?”
Sylvia was wondering whether she’d expected too much of Miss Priest’s letter, but the aggression in Jack Cranston’s voice forced its way through her reverie. She looked up to see that rarest of sights—a flush of embarrassment on Arthur’s cheeks.
Ray said, “What’s it to be, all? What’s yours, Gran? Renee? Mr. Tucker?” He drew them all in.
Harold said weightily: “Dad is a natural athlete. I’ve never known anyone in my life who gets the finer points of a new game quicker. I’ve no doubt he’s mastered the tender art since he’s been here, eh, Dad?”
“I’ve given it a dekko once or twice. Like to see the pretty girls.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Renee said.
Arthur decided to concentrate on Mr. Tucker. “Hullo, you old scoundrel. Who spread the news of your funeral?”
“Don’t you pick on Dad, Captain Calvert. Pick on someone your own size.”
Arthur, man to man, ignored the women. “How come so long time no see at the bookies, Tucker. I had a good thing for you the other day. Marzipan. Romped home at 60 to 1.”
“Marzipan! Oh, that would have been too sticky for me,” Mr. Tucker’s laugh echoed miserably round the bar.
Renee put on her version of a posh accent. “We don’t all have private fortunes.” She and Jack laughed in a loud hostile way. “Your tips come too expensive, Captain,” Jack said.
Looking at Arthur, Sylvia knew from experience exactly what had happened. She made up her mind to settle it all with the Cranstons before Harold could find out. She would have a quiet word with Renee and reassure her that they wouldn’t be losers.
“Hullo, Mrs. Calvert,” Renee said. “I thought you were too good for us.” But her tone was friendly.
To her surprise Sylvia found herself saying, “I’ve been rather upset lately. Perhaps you’ve read of this murder in Spain. Well, I knew the aunt, Miss Priest. Of course I wrote to her. But perhaps I expected too much from the answer. . . .”
Renee was entirely bewildered, but their attention was immediately drawn away by the raised voices of the men.
“No, no, no, Harold. Believe me you’ve got it all wrong. I hadn’t looked into it before, but...”
“I’m particularly sorry to hear you take this line, Jack. I’ve always considered you the backbone of New Town life. ...”
“And I’m sorry to disagree with an old friend, but if what you want is to maintain Carshall as the blokes who started it intended, then there’s no question about it. Let Goodchild’s meadow go. Anything better than extending the boundaries, making the place geographically larger. That way you are going back on the original intention. . . .”
“Oh, of course, it’s a choice of evils. I grant you that. But this new housing is needed if we’re to get a multi-status community. To accommodate you and Renee, for example, with what you’ll be wanting soon.” Harold explained the general phrase in personal terms.
“You can count us out for a start! Multi-status community! No, thank you. That’s all right for you, Harold. Not to be rude, you like to be—what do they call it?—a trout among minnows. Anyway you’re a County Council man. That’s quite different. But executive people in industry don’t want to live among their work-people and their work-people don’t want them there either. No, no, Renee and I’ll be moving out to the country as soon as we can find a place.”
Harold took a deep draught of his bitter and wiped his mouth slowly with his handkerchief. “Then I’m afraid you’ll be ratting on a fine experiment, Jack.”
Arthur belched, and leaned on the bar staring through triumphant narrowed eyes at Cranston’s discomfiture by his clever son. Sylvia looked round in desperation for Ray. She saw him in a huddle in a corner of the now crowded bar with Mr. Corney and two rough-looking youngsters—one had filthy old blue jeans on, and the other, a dark chap, looked as though he needed a good wash and shave.
“Mr. Corney!” He was just the one to cheer them all up. She remembered his help at the party. “Hullo, Mr. Corney “ she heard herself say quite loudly across the crowded bar. “Come along and join us.” The face Mr. Corney raised to her call was startled and worried. Before he could reply Ray had shepherded him and their two friends out of the bar. As they left she heard the dark, gipsy-looking one say, “What’s the hurry, Radiance?”
“I’m only glad to think you don’t realise the nonsense you’re talking, Jack.”
“Jack’s not one of your boys at school, Harold,” Renee remarked.
“No, Renee, I should teach him a bit of sense if he were.”
“Now look here, Harold. Cool off, can’t you? This business isn’t the end of the world. . . .”
“If you’re ready, Mother, Dad?”
“Oh, now, Harold, be your age. . . .”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Jack. He’ll come round in time.”
The hall, crowded, noisy, brightly lit, was large, but the match between the Mellingerers and the Bowling Budgies had by competition rules to be played on adjoining lanes ten and eleven, right in the centre of the hall, so it wasn’t going to be easy to avoid trouble with their supporters scarcely on speaking terms. Sylvia could see that Arthur smelt trouble, for, after clapping Mark and his captain, Jimmie Forrester, on the back a few times and giving loud hearty advice to the Mellingerers, he moved off down the hall. Sylvia watching him, thought, selfish old thing, he knows his onions; then, seeing that he had transferred his attention to the girls’ match, she thought, silly old thing! She was really worried about Harold now. He was talking so much and ignoring the nearby Cranstons so tremblingly. Ray, who had joined them again, seemed preoccupied and made no effort to help. Surfacing up from the depths of her own depressions with a vast effort, she began to ask Harold questions about the game. He showed her the shoes, the balls, a score card, explained the lit-up numbers, showed last season’s honour rolls with the Mellingerers’ name inscribed. She guessed that his heart was as little in the conversation as hers, but she persisted.
“Is it tenping bowling in all the lanes?” she asked.
Ray beside her whispered, “Pin, lovey.”
Instinctively she looked into her bag, “I’m sorry, I haven’t got one.” Then, realising her silly mistake, she blushed and felt unable to say more. She sat then looking so miserable that Ray took her to one of the little spectators’ tables and gave her a cup of coffee from the bar. He sat with her, drinking a coke, equally gloomy and silent, as the booms of the balls and the crackling crashes of the pins brought back to her once more the horrors of the bombing.
“Ray,” she said at last, “I wrote to Miss Priest, you know. And her reply seemed so ordinary. I don’t know what I’d expected. I suppose I’d got things out of proportion. I mean, just because she was involved in a murder story . . .”
“I don’t know, lovey. You’re right out of my class. I’ve never known any murderesses.”
She could tell he hadn’t listened. He’d come back so soon from his friends, she wondered vaguely if there’d been a quarrel. They sat then, hearing Harold’s voice raised in loud, knowin’g, technical cries.
“A beautiful working ball! . . . Lovely turkey! ... Go for the poison ivy, Mark.” Once he called back to Ray and Sylvia, “Oh! This lane’s a piece of cheesecake.”
Jack Cranston was competing in loud commentary. Ray only spoke once and then more to himself. “When Dad goes all pop, he certainly goes pop.”
Sylvia felt out of it all. Most of the crowd were teenagers—all this Mods and Rockers! Well, it was easy enough to tell which was which, but so what? as they used to say. There were some family parties at the lanes, but at the coffee bar it was all kids really with cokes and hamburgers. She saw Arthur talking to two girls with no proper make-up, only heavy eyeshadow; they giggled then turned away from him. Silly old thing, she thought, but she
feared from the Cranstons’ remarks that the old cycle was beginning again—she didn’t know how she could get through it all this time, depressed as she was, and with no hard work to keep her mind off things. Mr. Corney appeared at the doorway and beckoned to Ray to come out. She sat on by herself—she must look like some forgotten dozy old mountain to all these youngsters, she thought. Every few minutes she could hear Harold or Mr. Cranston holding forth; then suddenly there was a general buzz of voices around Lane 10 and above the clamour Harold called: “I appeal against a breach of etiquette.”
She turned to see him, red-faced, pointing at the Cranstons, like somebody on the stage. “Such continuous distracting comments from spectators constitute a recognised infringement.”
Renee was red-faced and defiant. “Oh, for God’s sake, man, your son’s choked his ball, and not surprising with all your shouting at him, but stop trying to find excuses.”
Sylvia could see Mark glowering at his father. He stepped forward, but his captain, a tall fair-haired young chap, held him back. The captain himself addressed Harold. “If there are any appeals to be made, Mr. Calvert, I think I’m the bloke to make them.”
“Well, go ahead and do so then, Jimmie.”
The young man looked hesitant. He stammered, “I ... I’m not too sure ...”
“For the Lord’s sake, boy, haven’t you got rid of that stammer?”
The question put an end to it effectually. “The trouble is, Mr. Calvert, that your behaviour has been just as bad as . . .” Now at last Mark broke forth with a voice that sounded beyond lanes 9 and 12 to lanes 8 and 13 and even to 6 and 14. “Take your resentment somewhere else then, Dad, but get out of our way.” Harold turned and walked out of the hall. As he passed Sylvia she tried to speak to him, but he strode by her.
She went over to Arthur, “Harold’s gone off in a temper.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! He’s not a kid any longer, Sylvia. He’ll get over it. What do you want to do? Change his nappies?” He turned back to lane 5. “That little red-head rolls a beautiful straight ball.”
Later, as the game was ending, Harold reappeared rather sheepishly. When the Mellingerers’ victory was announced, he went up to congratulate his son, but Mark turned his back on him.
Arthur said, “You shouldn’t have upset the boy, Harold.”
“Do you mind, Dad? Surely you must have some idea of how ashamed I feel.”
They returned a depressed party. Sylvia didn’t know what to do to help. As Miss Priest had written, there’s nothing much you can do, except practical things. Going to the kitchen, she found a tin of Ovaltine and came back to the sitting room with a cup all round for everyone. Judy had returned, but there was no sign of Mark.
“Good God, what’s that?” Arthur asked.
“Not for me, Mother, thanks.”
“Thank you, lovey,” Ray sat stirring dreamily.
“Oh, Gran, I couldn’t, thank you. Not after all that punch.”
“Was it a nice whatever it was, dear?”
“Oh, lovely. The moon was just right for the barbecue. And then we had a treasure hunt with super local clues. Of course, I was terribly lucky, I went in the Trenchard-Bourne’s car.”
“Why was that lucky?” Harold asked.
“Oh, you know, Daddy. They have that lovely old Jacobean house—Rumpett Hall. But they’re awfully nice people. Absolutely simple and friendly.”
“My God! That I should have produced a snob.”
Ray tapped with his spoon against his untouched Ovaltine, “Bed, I think,” he cried.
Sylvia reheated Mark’s Ovaltine and put the cup in his bedroom with the saucer on top to keep it hot.
When Arthur was undressing, she said to him with all the kindness she could muster through her exhaustion, “Have you got into a mess again, Arthur? Do tell me if you have. We’ll manage to pay it off somehow without Harold knowing. And then we can forget it.” He was sitting in one of the mustard chairs, pulling off his vest; the face he raised to her was pitiably old and anxious.
“It can’t be as bad as that, Arthur.” He was about to speak, but his doddery hands got the vest caught over his head. He began to swear. Sylvia got out of bed and helped him off with the vest.
“Oh dear, Arthur!”
“These bloody things. I wish I was dead.”
“That wouldn’t help, dear.”
Nor did her remark. The moment died away in irritability. The next morning at breakfast, when the telephone rang, Ray ran to it before Harold could get there. When he replaced the instrument, he looked quite relieved. He went straight upstairs. Ten minutes later he was down with a suitcase and Mark’s cup of Ovaltine.
“I’m afraid he won’t be drinking this, lovey. That was him on the ‘phone. He’s staying round at Jimmie Forrester’s for the moment. I’m taking his suitcase there on my way to work.”
Harold put his head in his hands. “Whatever I do is wrong since she left us. God knows, I tried to meet him on his own ground, but it’s a curse to be a teacher. Poor old, mixed-up Mark! He of any of us so desperately needed a woman about the house.”
Ray looked at Sylvia with a friendly grin and patted her arm. To his father he said, “Don’t upset yourself, Dad. He’ll be better at the Forresters’ for a bit. He’s been wanting to get away for some time.”
One afternoon that May, in the course of her wanderings, Sylvia was sitting on a bank in the shade of a hazel bush and picking the cleavers off her skirt. She was intent on the task for she had become ashamed of her melancholic rambles in the country and tried to conceal all evidence of them from the family. She jumped with alarm when a woman’s voice sounded quite near to her. There, hoisting herself down on to the bank next to Sylvia, was the little humpbacked old woman. Near to, she seemed even older and uglier, with a loose, protuberant lower lip and a wart on her right nostril; but her dark eyes gleamed with lively brightness. To Sylvia’s astonishment, after one or two casual remarks about the fine weather and the growing dust in the country lanes, the old woman, her short cotton skirt hitched up above the knee of her wrinkled stockings, began to tell her life story. It seemed to Sylvia to last for hours. At first she found it difficult to attend, her eyes kept travelling to that horrid hump. But as the narrative went on the woman’s physical presence was quite swallowed up in her words. Although there were many names of places and people that were unknown to her, and although the woman’s singsong foreign accent was not at all easy to follow, she found herself quite carried away; yet when the story was ended, she felt only torn and sad.
THE OLD WOMAN’S STORY
“Do you know that I shall be seventy-six in August? Yes, I was born on the nth of August 1887. It seems hard to believe that I am so old. And very few people do believe it. ‘No, you cannot yet be sixty, I am sure, Mrs. Kragnitz,’ the greengrocer told me only the other day. ‘And you are so active.’ But then, of course, I had such a healthy, strong childhood with everything that money could buy. And the child makes the woman, as you will read in Grillparzer, however hard the later years may be. Oh yes, everyone remarks on how young I am looking. Except that Edna. She is my niece—my nephew’s wife—no relation by the blood. And sometimes Jerzy also—when he wishes very much to please her. That is why I am walking so much all times and weathers. To keep out of her way. When Jerzy is there she cannot attack me, but at other times. ... I won’t say to poison my food, that is too fanciful. Although these peasants do so, you know, my dear. Oh yes, I have known many cases in Poland and in Pomerania and in the Urals. Even in China, where the respect for the old is remarkable. However, she is better than the other one. So I must live my life out with her—a creature that has never even read a book. But I take care—I say always that I have survived the British Army and the Gestapo and the Ogpu and the Japanese, so I don’t intend to be put to death by Edna.
“I was born near Cracow. Do you know that town? Very beautiful! Not at all as the rest of Poland. When I went with my husband to Italy for our honeymoon—to F
lorence and Siena, but I knew it already. It was just Cracow come alive again. You must know that in that time Cracow and the countryside where we are living—all is Austrian. Not really, of course; really it was and it always has been Poland. And we were Polish, you know, although we lived under the Hapsburgs. But people like my uncle Ladislaw would not have anything to do with them. He would not speak to any of them—not to an Austrian or to a Russian or to a Prussian. ‘But there are such charming Austrians, my dear fellow,’ my father said. ‘Let them leave our Poland and I will see all their charms,’ my uncle replied. He cared only for Poland and he was quite right. I know that now. I should be there too. What matters about all these Governments? Conservative, Socialist, Communist, Imperial and Fascist. I have seen them all. They go. It’s the place where you were born. That’s what counts, my dear. As the great Count Tolstoy says—this is my homeland. But my father was a different kind of man. A very good Catholic, but a practical man. ‘The Austrians are the best that we shall get,’ he said. And so he accepted them, even worked with them. He held a position in the Commission of Forestry near Lake Morskie Oko—that is the Black Lake, a very deep lake. And we moved in the best Austrian society. At Zakopane once I skated with the Archduke Ferdinand. There were no winter sports then, of course. Oh no!
“And then I had to go and marry a Prussian! You’re laughing already, I see. A protestant from Pomerania! You may imagine the horror of my family—oh yes, and also of Willibald’s family. My father liked Willi at first, of course, when he was just a visitor—they hunted together and talked of trees and trapping. But to marry! Even though the von Kragnitzs were an excellent family, older, more illustrious than the Adamowiczs I must say— a Junker family. My father refused to see me, but it was not serious to him, I was only the girl of the family. It was more terrible for Willi—his father cut him off from his will. Fortunately he had some money from his grandmother. So we went to Italy for our honeymoon and then to the East Griqualand to help make the New Germany overseas. Do you know where East Griqualand is? I am sure you do not. Why even at Hamburg when I boarded the ship, there was a lady in the hotel, ‘Be sure to visit Milos,’ she said, ‘Milos is indispensable.’ She thought I spoke of Griechenland. And she was a German! Willi was quite shocked to think a German woman should know so little of her own Empire. But then the Hamburgers are very stupid—Dumm wie einer Hamburger—it was well known. We started with an ostrich farm. In those days, as you will remember, everything was ostrich feathers. Later woman—capricious woman, that is how Lermontov describes us—changed her mind. And so all the ostrich farmers lost their money. But by that time we Germans had been made to go from Africa, so it did not concern us.