The Fancy

by Dickens, Monica

  The Blakes always had the wrong sort of dogs, too, untrained gun dogs that had got sloppy through living indoors, spaniels, with limpid eyes, and ears infested with canker. There was usually a shrill terrier about, so bad-tempered that he was á burden to everyone including himself, and in a permanent state of moulting white hairs all over the furniture. The furniture of Swinley Lodge was not quite right, either : it was neither comfortably homely nor elegantly formal, but just inelegantly uncomfortable. Chairs and sofas repelled you forwards instead of inviting you backwards, tables were ill-proportioned things with legs opposite all the chairs, the fireplaces let in draughts and let out heat, and all the flower vases were too tall and narrow.

  The house itself, over whose threshold Mr. Blake, who always did the right thing, had staggered with his substantial bride in 1901, would have been more at home in Dulwich than in the black-and-white Worcestershire village. It seemed to have got there by mistake, like a day tripper who has missed his train home and is stranded in the country in all the wrong clothes. Its red brick had darkened but never mellowed, and threw off creepers before they had reached the first-floor window sills. The garden was on a slope, with lawns that devoured a gardener’s energy like vampires and a summer-house that lost the sun at midday. There was a vegetable garden and a fruit cage, but the rose garden had chronic greenfly and the flowers in the herbaceous borders all bloomed at different times.

  The Blakes had had four children at regular intervals : a boy and a girl, a boy and a girl, all free from squints or hairlips or embarrassing complexes. They had all gone to the wrong sort of schools at the right sort of fees and been taught the right recreations by wrong people like Noakes, the groom, who would ‘shake ’em down in the saddle’ by beating tin cans behind the pony’s rump and sending it scuttling and bucking away with a child in floods of fears clinging on by reins, mane or arms round its neck. Everything possible had been done for their happiness. A pool had been dug and cemented in the upper lawn, too deep for a paddling child and too shallow to swim in. Beyond the thicket of evergreens that darkened all the windows along one side of the house, there was a tennis-court, end-on to the evening sun, made of a special substance which melted in the heat and went into tarry whorls if you turned your foot quickly.

  By living in took a step nearer to her mother, it was see such a house in such a village as Swinley, which was three miles from the station at the end of a single track line, the Blakes managed to combine the disadvantages of the country with none of its advantages. One by one the children had gone away, but Mr. and Mrs. Blake continued to live, in the country yet not of it, in expensive inconvenience which grew more expensive and more inconvenient with the coming of another war. It never occurred to them to make any radical change like moving to a cottage which could be run with one servant, or having fewer courses for dinner. Things were not given to occurring to Mrs. Blake. Had it ever occurred to her to wonder for what purpose she rose each morning and dressed carefully in cashmere cardigan sets and heather mixture stockings, she might never have risen at all.

  Unlike most country houses, the front door at Swinley was locked, and Sheila had to ring and be admitted by the female half of the ‘Good Little Couple’ whose male half had driven her the chilly three miles behind the common, slovenly cob. The Good Little Couple were both tall and gaunt and evil-visaged, and reminded Sheila of the gardener in Nathaniel Gubbins’ column who spent all day with his feet on the kitchen stove reading Karl Marx and prophesying Armageddon for his employers. But her mother, who had acquired them through an advertisement one dreadful week when it had seemed she would have to do all the housework and her husband’s shoes, was convinced, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that they were the real old retainer type and that the Good Little Couple, whose name was Geek, would stay for ever and defend Swinley Lodge with their lives in the event of invasion.

  Mrs. Geek took Sheila’s case without a word and disappeared down the hall with a martyred back, although Sheila had intended to carry the case herself. Geek shut himself out into the frosty night and Sheila beard him swearing at the cob. The grandfather clock whirred and said “Nin e o’clock”, and across the hall, where a bar of light shone from under the drawing-room door, the wireless was switched on to the announcement of the News.

  It was ages since Sheila had listened to the News. There was no need to with David; he always knew it already, with some sort of confidential embroidery tacked on. She was impressed by his grasp of the War and would listen devotedly while he expounded on some thing complicated like the Caucasus or inflation, agreeing with him heartily but stumped if he asked her a question that he had not already answered himself. Then he would laugh at her and they would talk about silly things instead of the War.

  She longed for him now and wondered whether he felt as low as she did. He was probably in a restaurant, one of their own haunts, even, for he was not sentimental about things like that. Perhaps it was just as well for them to be apart now and again. Sheila had read in a magazine that you should never let your man get used to you, Make your life together as exciting as those halcyon days of courtship.

  Their courtship, which had only lasted a week, had not been particularly halcyon from Sheila’s point of view. Its working hours had been spent in making mistakes because her mind was elsewhere—wondering why he had not written or telephoned, or worrying over the implications of his most casual remark, and in her off duty she had not moved from the telephone except to meet David at whatever peculiar hour or place he might suggest. However, she followed the magazine’s advice faithfully, changing her hair style and the colour of her lipstick, and greeting him one evening in a gingham apron with a ribbon in her hair and the next in a sophisticated black dress with her hair swept up and earrings.

  Her hair was tousled now by the ” said Edward. “It. bscarf she had worn on the drive, and she tidied it before she went into the drawing-room in case her mother should think it was meant to be like that and beseech her to go to a reliable hairdresser. Mrs. Blake herself came up to London twice & year for a perm, and at other times was shampooed and set by a man called I. B. Littlejohn in Worcester, whose sets, no matter what style he attempted, always came out looking the same. The ladies who patronised him in preference to Dorée Smart, whose assistants wore apple-green overalls and said “Righto, dear”, had heads which resembled both each other and the wigs in I. B. Littlejohn’s window. Mrs. Blake’s head was too large for the amount of hair she possessed, but I.B. managed to eke it out into his basic set : a side parting, showing a wide lane of pink scalp in her case, one deep scallop over the right temple, descending in gentle waves to a curl well forward over the ear, backed by a double row of curls in various stages of tightness or ravel, according to the age of the client’s perm.

  Mrs. Blake had been, it was said, a handsome girl, and was now a fine woman, but, then, horses are fine and handsome, too. She had a square chin and a large nose with curving nostrils, red inside like a rocking-horse ; she carried her head high and her bosom well forward. She was always dusting things off her lapels, or shaking them up or hoisting and lowering her double pulley of pearls, unconsciously titivating this proud portion of her anatomy. When Sheila came into the drawing-room, she looked up and said “Ah!” and her husband, who had Sheila’s runaway chin and a pair of pince nez on a chain, looked up and said “Ah!” too, and they both waited in their chairs to be kissed, as if they were not consumed with a degree of pride and affection which she had never suspected.

  She had been full of things that she was going to tell them, oddments of news about the factory and the flat, but there was no need, because her mother started right in on local news. Her father went on listening to the wireless, sitting facing it, with crossed legs and a patent leather pump dangling from one toe, nodding approval if it said anything sensible. Sheila, with her coat still on, sat thawing on her own tapestry stool in front of the fire, and as the atmosphere of her home closed around her as familiarly as hot bath water,
she was no longer the girl from London, David’s girl, whose life was hectic and blissful. She was once more the yawning girl in a plain expensive jumper and tweed skirt, sleepy from a too-heavy lunch, looking at magazines or playing with the dogs’ ears, passing the time until a stubborn parlourmaid should bring in the tray with the silver pot and the spirit lamp, hot anchovy toast and two home-made cakes.

  It was no stubborn parlourmaid, however, but the herring-gutted Mrs. Geek who answered the bell when she rang for her dinner. David said that in the next world, by which he meant the world after the War, the people who pressed bells so confidently were going to find that nobody answered them. Sheila and he both agreed that this would be a good thing, but it did not prevent them from going to expensive hotels and restaurants whenever they could afford it and pressing bells without a qualm.

  Mrs. Geek stood in the doorway in, a long, unbleached apron, like Death come for them all.

  “My whisky, please,” said Mr. Blake.

  “And Miss Sheila’s dinner,” added his wife. “She can have it in here on a tray.”

  “I ’ad laid it in the dining-room,” said Mrs. Geek, implying the Herculean labour of transferring two knives, two forks and a spoon from the dining-room” said Edward. “It. b table to a tray.

  “Yes-well, “said Mrs. Blake, “she’s going to have it in here.”

  “And a fresh syphon,” said Mr. Blake. “There was barely enough at dinner time. I do wish you’d keep a full one always on the sideboard. I’ve asked you so often.” How dared they speak to her like that? Sheila wondered, as the door closed. Didn’t they know that if the Geeks chose to leave they would never get another maid? But her mother didn’t seem aware of these things. She was constantly being surprised in shops by being unable to buy hot-water bottles or lemon squash.

  Sheila got up. “I’ll go and get my dinner,” she said. “I don’t see why she should bother.”

  Her father looked at her, surprised. “We haven’t quite come to that yet, my dear,” he said.

  “She really hasn’t got much to do,” said her mother. “We hardly ever have anyone to dinner, and most of the bedrooms are shut up.” She lowered her voice automatically, for the Billeting officer was her bogey.

  “Why don’t you take off your coat, darling? D’you know, it smells terribly of oil or something? You’d better leave it down here and let me get it cleaned for you.”

  “Sorry.” said Sheila, “I came straight from the factory. The fire draws it out, I expect.” She went to the back of the room, where it was cold, and hung her coat over the back of the only comfortable chair in the room, which was never sat in because it was so far away from the fire. Nobody had ever thought of bringing it closer.

  “How is the factory?” asked her father.

  “Oh, it’s all right. We’re working quite hard. We’re doing a new type of engine now ; it’s a lot more complicated.” She could never make it sound interesting or amusing, as she could when she talked about it to David. She could usually make him laugh, but when she tried to be entertaining at home, she could hear herself being a bore.

  While she ate her dinner, her mother watched her, sitting with her thick legs well apart and her skirt high, showing grey silk directoire knickers. “You’re too thin, Shee,” she said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I like to be thin,” said Sheila. “Clothes look better.”

  “You’ll lose your looks. I used to love you in that blue velvet. I’ve been keeping it in the landing cupboard in a moth-proof bag, but you could never wear it now ; you’d look scraggy.”

  “I wouldn’t want to wear it now,’ said Sheila, “or ever again. It was a hideous dress.”

  “Oh, no,” said her mother, with a smiling, grown-up shake of the head. “I remember you in it at that last Christmas party before the War. You looked a dream.”

  “A jolly solid one,” said Sheila, with her mouth full, remembering and blushing for her bouncing, bulky girlhood. The blue velvet dress might have been all right once, but she had come a long way since then. Her mother and father didn’t seem to have progressed at all. They were still living, with minor unavoidable alterations, exactly the same life, when here before them at last was this wonderful chance to live differently. They didn’t seem to want to live differently. They thought that the next world—after the War—was going to be exactly the same as the dull, expensive, that leaves you to singke bprivileged one they had always known. Sheila knew it was not. David had said so. She wouldn’t tell them yet about communal feeding centres and no first class on trains and public schools open to East Enders, because it was no good upsetting them sooner than necessary. She wasn’t quite sure what would happen to solicitors. She would have to ask David.

  “Enjoying your dinner, Girlie?”

  “Yes, thank you, Daddy—I was starving.”

  “What had you for lunch?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mummy—sandwiches or something.”

  “Now, Sheila, you don’t mean to tell me that you only——”

  “Oh, no—I remember, I went to the canteen,” she lied. She had actually had a stale cheese roll and coffee made with essence at a workmen’s café on the main road with Dinah. She was enjoying her dinner. It was roast mutton and cauliflower and rhubarb tart with the top of the milk, which was like cream down here. There was something to be said for having food brought to you under silver covers when you were hungry and tired, instead of having to clear up the breakfast mess and start opening tins and discover that you were out of milk.

  Mrs. Geek brought in her coffee and picked up her tray as glumly as if it were a bedpan.

  “I’ll wash up if you like to leave it,” suggested Sheila. “I expect you want to get to bed.” She wanted to have a quiet session in the larder to see what tins she could take home. Mrs. Geek’s lips tightened as if she knew this. She hated anyone in her kitchen, and if you went through with an order would stand and talk to you in the doorway so that you couldn’t get in.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but Geek and I don’t go to bed just yet. We haven’t finished.” She went out, her long feet crushing the carpet like the treads of a tank.

  The telephone rang surprisingly, with its continuous rural trill.

  “Sandow about golf,” said Mr. Blake, without looking up from his book. He thought of a message to give. He had established the tradition that he never telephoned, which saved him a lot of bother.

  “For Miss Sheila,” said Mrs. Geek, reappearing. “Mr. Fielding.” Sheila blushed scarlet, scrambled up and flew into the hall, banging the drawing-room door behind her, She was still flushed when she came back five minutes later, but shivering half with pleasure and half from the draught. The telephone was on a wall bracket in the kitchen passage, where people knocked into you with trays as you leaned either against the banisters or among the coats and ulsters on the other side. She had had to speak quietly because the kitchen door was open and she knew the Geeks were listening.

  “Who was that, dear?” said her mother, pleasantly. She was writing a letter at her desk.

  “Oh, just someone I know—someone in London.” Sheila sat down on her stool again and stared at the fire, smiling.

  “Long call to make from London,” said her father. “He must be either very devoted or very rich.” He laughed his silent laugh, which went on inside his face without emerging from it. Sheila’s smile grew slightly rueful as she thought of her telephone bill. With David in residence, it was staggering. He was so used to being able to pick up a telephone in the office and get through to Glasgow or even New York at will that he that leaves you to singke b thought nothing of trunk calls in the home. He always said “Let me know what it is, darling, and I’ll pay you back,” but, of course, she wouldn’t dream of asking him for the money.

  “What did he want, dear?” asked her mother, whose life was so dull that even somebody else’s ’phone calls were interesting.

  “Oh, nothing much. He wanted to fix up a date for dinner.” It wo
uld be lovely to be able to talk about David, just drivel on to somebody sympathetic, She indulged this craving sometimes to Dinah, but lately she had had the suspicion that Dinah, who was certainly was no prude, oddly did not approve. In any case, no one who didn’t know David could understand his perfection. They would never believe that any man could be quite all the things he was.

  “You never tell me about any of your London beaux,” complained her mother, licking an envelope saver with a wry face. “I’m sure there must be somebody, because Timothy’s mother says you never write to him ; he’s told her so in his letters.” She sighed. “You know, I always thought you two would make a go of it. Perhaps you will yet, when this maddening War’s over. I must say I shall be glad when we can use proper envelopes again. I’m sure these sticky things are poisonous.” Sheila smiled indulgently, thinking of Timothy with his voice that urchins mimicked in the street and the thinness of his legs in riding breeches. How she ever could have even toyed with the idea! But she hadn’t known David then.

  “By the way, he said—this man who rang up—to be sure and listen to the Midnight News. He couldn’t say anything over the ‘phone, but apparently something pretty exciting’s happened.”

  Oh? And how does he know?” Her father took off his pince nez, raised his eyebrows and replaced the pince nez. “There was nothing on the Nine O’clock News.”

  “Well, he’s on a newspaper, you see. They hear things at the office before they’re announced officially.”

  “Journalist, eh? What’s his paper?” Sheila named it, anticipating the answer, which came : “That rag! Well, I hope he’s not as common as his paper, that’s all.”