Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  “Now we’ve had your piece, Shirl, I’ll say mine. I was rather glad too. Teaching little boys is a disgusting job. They smell so.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Timbo, you’ll do something terrible to Mandy, like putting her off boys. . . .”

  “I don’t think little boys smell, Daddy. At least there is one boy at school, Marcus Campkin, who does smell a bit. He smells like...” ,

  “I don’t think we want to hear how Marcus Campkin smells, Mandy. Now go down and get lunch ready, Shirl. You’re a slattern. And you get back to your own bed, Mandy. If you’re well enough to come into someone else’s room, then you’re a double slattern to be in your nightgown.”

  Mrs. Egan got up and lifted Mandy out Sylvia’s bed. “Off we go.” Turning at the door she said to her husband. “Mrs. Calvert’s son, who’s coming to pick her up, teaches smelly little boys, darling.”

  “Oh, Lord! Said the wrong thing, did I? I’m sure it’s not at all the same kind of teaching, is it, Mrs. Calvert?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Harold. He often laughs at himself.” Sylvia hoped this was true.

  “Often laughs at himself? Whatever for?” Shirley Egan was puzzled. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, and Mrs. Calvert thinks Canadians are a bad lot too.”

  “Shirl’s determined to make mischief between us, Mrs. Calvert. But don’t worry, I shan’t be Canadian much longer. I’ll be back to British in three months’ time.”

  “Oh dear! I only meant in the Great War, and I’m sure it was only those noisy few.”

  “After saving Mandy’s life you have carte blanche to mean anything you like.”

  “To come and land myself on you and then to say things . . . I didn’t know. . . . What a thing for a guest to say.”

  “Look, Mrs. Calvert, get this clear. Shirley and Mandy both like you. As far as I’m concerned that’s all that matters. It’s the only criterion I make for guests in this house.”

  He gave her such a friendly smile that for a moment she almost thought he too was going to kiss her. She knew she wouldn’t have minded.

  “Oh, God! That’s them,” Shirley turned to her husband:

  “We’re very pleased to see Mrs. Calvert’s family, darling.”

  “Well, of course. It’s just that nothing’s . . . Oh, shut up and come on down and talk to them.”

  As they went from the bedroom Shirley asked: “What shall I say if they want to come up?”

  “Tell them I’m all right and that I’ll be down very soon.”

  From the passage Tim Egan’s voice carried, “If they want to come up? Really, darling, they’re her family, not the plumbers.”

  “Well, they might as well have been plumbers last night. ...”

  Sylvia tried to hear no more, but her sense of well-being was complete when Shirley’s highest note floated up the stairs to her, “I’m going to spoil her a little. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  She didn’t even try to tell herself that Mrs. Egan meant Mandy.

  For all that, it was a full minute before anyone was conscious of her arrival in the big parlour downstairs. Harold was holding forth to Tim Egan, and Arthur, with Mandy, now swathed in a thick blue dressing-gown, on his knee, was telling one of his stories to Shirley. Sylvia felt a pang of jealous fear that perhaps he had already taken over the little girl from her. The next second Mandy had clambered down from her perch and rushed towards her.

  “Her she is! Here she is! There was smoke too, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Well, when he,” pointing at Arthur, “was nearly struck by lightning there was only flame. That’s what he says.”

  Sylvia felt a rush of relief and with it a sudden affectionate warmth for her husband and all his old tricks. She walked across and kissed him on the cheek. He was genuinely moved, she thought, as he held her for a moment. Then he turned back to the Egans, and there were tears in his eyes.

  “Thank God! Old Sylvia’s all right.” His voice trembled. “I don’t want to go through another night of anxiety like last night, thank you,” he patted Sylvia’s arm, “but I’ll be all right—don’t worry.” Sylvia looked away. Some of his old tricks were a bit much. Happily he was quickly absorbed again in the story he was telling Shirley. “So this old magistrate cove looked down at me through his spectacles. ‘You appear to be a pretty disreputable sort of fellow,’ he said, ‘but you’ve donc a deed of great bravery.’ I couldn’t help smiling to myself, but I simply said, ‘Thank you, your honour.’ It never does, vou know, to argue with the law, especially in this country.”

  But Sylvia was drawn away from Arthur’s exploits by her son’s attentions.

  “So you’re a heroine, Mother. I’m very glad of it. Very glad.”

  He kissed her on the forehead and smiled across to Tim Egan at the little tableau. Tim didn’t smile back.

  “Do you realise, Mother, that Egan leases Goodchild’s Meadow? I’ve just been trying to explain to him what an important chap he is. The Committee’s been trying to get in touch with him for months. We’d hoped to get him along to a meeting, but these farmers are so busy. However, as he’s on our side anyway . . .”

  “That’s it.”

  “We’re demanding a Public Hearing from the Ministry, you know.”

  “Oh, you’re those people. ...” Shirley cried.

  Tim interrupted Shirley, “I’ll freshen your drink, Calvert,” and he moved off with Harold’s glass. As Tim seemed intent on his duties as host Harold addressed the room at large.

  “That Carshall people should have good farm-land well-farmed running through the centre of their conurbation lies at the basis of everything the New Towns stand for.”

  After a silence, Shirley said, “Well, if sincerity can raise mountains . . .”

  “Remove,” Tim said, “or better still level.”

  Shirley giggled. Sylvia realised that up to that moment she had not heard any of the Egans laugh.

  “Our neighbours the county and the farmers don’t seem so keen on Carshall New Town.”

  “Oh, the county! Aren’t they ghastly?”

  “I’m not devoted to them as a class,” Harold underlined the mock moderation of his words, “but it’s the positive aspect I want to stress. The artificial division between town and country. ...”

  “Look, I think I’d better make things clear. I’m appealing for the right to keep my lease of Goodchild’s Meadow purely out of sentiment. And not my own sentiment either. My aunt’s. The land had belonged to her family for centuries and when the New Town came along it almost broke her heart. However the fact that the architect’s plan allowed for the survival of this strip of meadow, even though it was only on a lease, was something. It seems absurd, but I understand how she felt. All the rest, Murrel Farm and Oakhurst, belonged to my uncle—he was a rich man anyway. But this was what my aunt had brought to him on her marriage. And so I’m willing to offer a piece of good land from here in place of Goodchild’s Meadow, which by the way is only passable grazing. It’s quite insane, but it makes up for all sorts of bad conscience which is my own personal affair. And if I don’t win the appeal, well I shall have done my best.”

  There was a silence after this speech too. As Shirley had covered up for Harold, Sylvia thought she ought to say something now—a woman can often tide over these tensions.

  “I don’t think anybody could say fairer than that.”

  But Harold was unappeased. “Well, I shan’t give up hope of bringing the wider issues home to you. We’ll send you the literature we’ve got out.”

  “He’s going to send the literature, Timbo. We’ll surely read that, Mr. Calvert.”

  As they left Mandy said, “What time will you come tomorrow?”

  “Oh, you’ve had enough of me to go on with.”

  “No, we haven’t, have we, Mummy?”

  “I wish you would come, if you can. I’ll come and get you in the car. I don’t want Mandy going back to that school for a while. Not after that shock
. If you could be with her . . . I’m just so busy on the farm. Besides, I’m just getting so I can understand every word you say, which is more than I do with most British.”

  “That’s ‘cause she’s not talking funny any more.”

  Sylvia blushed with pleasure at the confirmation of her own guess.

  “Well, really, I don’t know . . .”

  “You’d better make up your mind to come often, Mrs. Calvert. You’re Mandy’s latest craze. And then Shirley likes to see people. The right people that is. She doesn’t see too many these days. You heard her view of the county.”

  Harold said finally, “Mother will look forward to it, won’t you?”

  “Well, you seem quite a favourite with them, Mother,” he told her as they drove back to “The Sycamores”. “This may be very important. It’s been impossible to get in touch with these people before and I can’t feel even now that Egan is as strong a support as I’d like.” He added, “We’re glad to have you back safe and sound though.”

  “Pretty little girl that, but spoilt. Why the hell they wanted to toast the sandwiches, I can’t think.”

  “It’s the American way, Arthur.”

  “They’re Canadians actually, Mother.”

  “Well, dear, Mr. Egan is. But Mrs. Egan comes from the United States, I believe.”

  But Harold couldn’t agree. “I think you’ll find they’re Canadians.”

  Whatever they were, throughout those warm, sunlit June and July days, Sylvia found them wonderful company, not least wonderful because it was she they called on to entertain them, to surprise them. And, in surprising them, she often surprised herself.

  It was the fiction that she was at Murrel Farm only, or almost only, for Mandy. And in the first weeks for whole afternoons the fiction would reign. She and the small girl would set out for country walks together; but they never went far. Long country walks were out of the question; neither Shirley’s anxieties nor the small girl’s remembered fears nor Sylvia’s own physical powers would allow them to go further than the kitchen garden or the paddock. The stroke, that might have seemed an inevitability to Sylvia in her days of depression, a savage beast camouflaged amid the sad, grey flora of her melancholy world, had struck her now in her new-found happiness as a warning, as a challenge to survive. She ceased to fuss herself about her health, but she took more care than she had ever done in her life before.

  The long walks were out, Sylvia’s corpulence even allowed them the happy excuse of a joke: between Mandy and her it was quite agreed that if fat people walked too long in the heat, they just melted away like candle grease.

  For Mandy, walking between the box hedges, freeing a blackbird from the nets over the currant bushes, helping to pluck asparagus, helping to pick strawberries, just helping, were all activities that demanded a constant transfusion of Sylvia’s childhood memories—all to be retailed to her mother with quick-fire wonder: “Do you know, she used to think you could tell who liked butter by putting flowers under their chins?” “Do you know, she wore a pinafore and a straw bonnet, and donkeys wore bonnets too?” “Do you know, her mother used to put a peeled onion in her ear if she had the earache? Isn’t it awful?” “Do you know, she knew an old woman that had drunk soup made of mice to cure a cold?” Do you know, do you know? Sylvia once coming into the room and hearing Mandy talking about her, thought suddenly, “I’m the fat lady in the fair”; but happy fat lady if she was loved so much.

  It was all in the telling and retelling for Mandy. Real buttercups picked in the paddock and held under her chin soon palled; Sylvia trying to recall the few real names of wildflowers she had once learnt from Mrs. Longmore, early renounced her efforts, for Mandy only wanted to know “What did you call them?” Grandmother’s steps remained a constant favourite in anecdote, but failed entirely as a game played before the walnut tree, even with Shirley enlisted to swell the team. Sylvia had not known she could remember so much about her childhood, and not only her own but Ted’s—”Do you know what? Her brother Ted went to sea and nobody knows if he got drowned or not!”; and Bertie’s— “Do you know, her brother Bertie went to Australia and nobody ever missed him, isn’t that terrible not to be missed?”; and Violet’s —”She had a sister called Violet whose nose was always running, wasn’t that horrible, but she isn’t dead like the others, she lives in Leeds”; and Rosie’s—”She had an awful sister called Rosie who was mean as mean.” Yet she did remember them more and more—memories that came from she couldn’t really tell where of long, happy summer country days, or so they turned out to have been as Mandy picked them up in wonder and turned them over and handed them back for more detail and more wonder.

  These childhood days retailed to Shirley by Mandy then became even more wondrous and sweeter, for Shirley, to Sylvia’s surprise, was a mother careful to extract the smallest grit from the knowledge her child digested. “I don’t think Mrs. Calvert meant that her father actually kicked the cat, dear. Though heaven knows we all want to kick things sometimes,” or again, “Mrs. Calvert’s mother talked about hellfire, dear, like lots of people did in those days. But it was only a way of speaking. I expect we say a lot of things that’ll sound pretty funny fifty years from now.” She explained her view directly to Sylvia. “I know kids have to have a lot of roughage in their food, but I think there’ll be time enough for all the other kind of roughage later on. And that doesn’t mean I want Mandy to play ‘Pooh Sticks’ or any awful whimsy like that.”

  Her own tastes in Sylvia’s reminiscences were more adult. She couldn’t hear enough about hotel life in England: “Eight maids slept in one room? The old people get reduced rates by agreeing to give up their rooms in the summer? It’s not true! I don’t believe it! Well, I guess we have the same kind of thing at home, I just don’t happen to have run into it. And yet again I don’t believe it! ... No medicine bottles allowed on the tables! For heaven’s sake, what was it, a convalescent home? Chamber pots in every room! They had to carry them downstairs! Bread and dripping for the staff supper—well what’s that? ... It has all got such an awful, grey British sound. ‘Private Hotels! ‘ Why do they have to be private anyway? Isn’t that typical? And so like Victoria. Can you blame Mother for deciding to sell everything and go to California as soon as Dad died? She writes me, ‘I just can’t wait to get to Monterey and thaw out a little! . . .’ Oh my God, just think of those hotels.”

  Sylvia was driven to laughing self-defence. “You wouldn’t give me a very good reference as a manageress.”

  “Oh, you! I know you were wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have manage me. It’s just the set-up. Though sometimes you make me mad! You let them just trample all over you. Well, it’s not going to be that way now.”

  Sylvia protested at all this praise. “I really did nothing, you know, just a job,” and, “You’ll be giving me a swelled head and that’ll never do.”

  But, in fact, she never felt in danger from Shirley Egan’s praises any more than from Mandy’s wonder, for she didn’t really take any notice of what Shirley said; she just let herself relax in the affection which was given her; after all Shirley was almost as much a child as Mandy. She was a little more scared of Tim— catching his English eye at times, she felt as though unwillingly they were in some plot together.

  Then one evening he announced that he would drive Mrs. Calvert back to “The Sycamores”. She couldn’t think what to say to him; he seemed so ill at ease.

  “That oat field’s coming on well.”

  “You won’t always be a seven day wonder like this, you know. Mandy’s a kid. And . . . Shirley’s a very enthusiastic person.”

  “Oh, of course, they’re bound to get tired of me. But you don’t mean that I’m coming too often.” Her throat had constricted. But it was he now who was horrified.

  “Good Lord! No! Don’t get me wrong. Shirley’s the loyalest person you can imagine. If you’re in with her you’re in for life. I only meant that . . . well, you won’t mind if the red carpet’s repla
ced one of these days by the ordinary rugs.”

  From that moment she was no longer afraid of him either. That he should prove to be such a child as to believe her to be so simple.

  “As long as my gabble amuses them . . . But if it didn’t . . . well, you don’t know what you’ve all done for me.”

  “What you’ve done for us would impress most people more.” She didn’t protest. They weren’t the kind of people you had to make polite noises with. And, as a matter of fact, Sylvia felt no great sense of imposing on them. It was true that she talked as she had never done before, but that did not mean that either Mandy or Shirley were silent. They had the power—she couldn’t think how—of talking and listening and asking questions all at the same time. Of course, they were young; she could hardly expect to have their energy. It was good enough that she kept up her own end and enjoyed it.

  As Tim had predicted and as she had expected, in the second week of July the situation changed. Perhaps it was that for a few days the beautiful warm weather gave way to a strong south-west wind driving squally showers before it. Mandy, who could not go out, suddenly showed a passionate affection for Miss Hurry, the school, and all the children in it.

  “Well, you can’t go back this term, because there isn’t any term to go back to. They’ve shut down until the fall.”

  Mandy then changed her tack to her general isolation from other children.

  “I don’t like being an only child. It’s bad. Always being with old people.”

  “Oh, not that again!”

  But Mandy was stuck fast in the groove of an old record that Sylvia had not heard before.

  “You had lots and lots of brothers and sisters, didn’t you, Mrs. Calvert? And you had a very, very happy childhood.”