Felix said nothing. It would never have entered his head to complain about Nikky, whose good looks and aloof manner always made him feel his own insignificance. Reflecting upon it now, he waited in silence for Miss Bohun to continue her story.
In those days Frau Leszno had a bedroom on the first floor while Nikky slept in the attic. Miss Bohun earned the money as a sort of father of the family while Frau Leszno did the housework and cooking. Nikky, trained only as a gentleman, undertook a few odd jobs. They lived together on an equal footing.
‘Not unhappily,’ commented Miss Bohun with a sigh.
Change came when, during the war, she was asked if she would board an army officer ‘at a generous rate’. It was then she realised how valuable her house could be. ‘The only suitable room for letting was the one you now have,’ she said, and Felix wondered why his was the only suitable room. What about the front room? Before he could ask this question, Miss Bohun continued: ‘Well, Frau Leszno was installed in your room in those days. I had to persuade her to move out to the little room in the yard. I cannot tell you the trouble I had with her. That yard room is a nice little room, but she knew it had been designed for a servant – and that was enough! The wails, the obstinacy, the sitting at table with tears streaming down! Oh dear! But I had to steel myself. It was impossible for me to go on as I had been – working to keep both of them and the house going. I had to be firm for all our sakes. If I’d collapsed, where would they have been? In the end I got her out and the officer moved in. Then there was fresh trouble. He’d never heard of a servant eating at the same table as her employer. Poor man, he couldn’t get used to Frau Leszno bringing in the food, then planting herself down beside him. I could see how it embarrassed him. He did not like her. He felt just as you did about her. She isn’t a pleasant woman; and Nikky can be so boorish, too. And she neglects herself so – dear me! that smell of sweat in the hot weather. In the end I persuaded her to take her meals in the kitchen and suggested Nikky should eat with her, just for company. Again, what a struggle! Really! each time I suggested any small change, there was always a painful scene. She had to go, though. I insisted on it. But she’s a foolish woman, incapable of facing facts. She pretended to herself that these new arrangements were only temporary – war-time measures, as you might say. She was sure when the officer went she’d be back in her old room and eating in here just as before. I said nothing, but I felt I simply could not have it all over again. So, as soon as the officer told me he’d been posted, I got him to recommend one of his friends, who moved in the day he moved out. I kept doing this all during the war and it worked very nicely until a few weeks before you arrived, when, with the officers all leaving, I was finding it a little difficult to get someone suitable. Then, of course, she started insisting that she must come back into the house. I was distracted! She’s such an insistent person, you know. She wouldn’t let the matter drop. I felt myself being battened down – then, as good luck would have it, I got a letter from Mr Shipton. About you. Just in time, you see! I was able to do you a good turn, and you, in a way, did me one. But before that, of course, Mr Jewel came. Oh dear, oh dear! That was another exhausting business. The poor old man was homeless. I felt I must take him in the attic. Months before, I’d suggested Nikky should find himself a job and pay a little towards his keep. After all there were two of them and only one of me. But he’s bonelazy. I’m fond enough of the boy, but I felt I owed it to myself not to let him take advantage. I gave him the alternative of finding himself a lodging elsewhere or taking himself down to the kitchen. I said I’d give him a mattress.’
‘Does he sleep in the kitchen, then?’ asked Felix, who knew that he did, yet somehow had never been able to absorb the fact.
‘By his own choice,’ said Miss Bohun gravely. She paused, her lips compressed, then sighed and said: ‘Others have come to this country with no more to recommend them than Nikky has and yet they’ve worked and made some sort of position for themselves. Nikky has never done anything. He says he’s a member of the intelligentsia, whatever that may mean. I suppose while there’s someone to be imposed on, there’ll be someone to do the imposing.’ Another pause, then her voice lilted up strongly and happily: ‘Well, there it is! And now, to keep Frau Leszno quiet, I’ve had to promise to get someone in to do the rough work. You see how I have to face up to one expense after another? Fortunately I’ve been able to find someone nice and cheap, an old Armenian woman called Maria. She’s arriving in a day or two. No doubt Frau Leszno will impose on the poor old soul, so we’ll have to do what we can, you and I, Felix, to help, by not imposing on her ourselves. She may not be much use, but I feel it’s one’s duty to help support the aged.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Felix. In all he had heard he felt wholeheartedly on Miss Bohun’s side. He could see, of course, the basis of Frau Leszno’s grievance, but it lost significance in the light of his own dislike of her. How horrid, how really horrid, she had been to him! And he was sure she had been just as horrid to poor Miss Bohun. He could see clearly the point of Miss Bohun’s wishing to get both the Lesznos out of the house and her wisdom in keeping them out. His mother would have hated them, too; she would have felt as revolted as he did by the thought of sharing the meal-table with anyone as stale-smelling and disagreeable as Frau Leszno. A wave of sympathy came from him towards Miss Bohun that gave her reality and humanity and made her seem to him almost lovable. He was her ally.
‘I would like to ask you, Felix,’ she said, ‘. . . of course you’re still young and inexperienced, but when Frau Leszno said that terrible thing to me, I could not help wondering: “Have I treated them fairly?”’
‘Of course you have. They’re beastly. Frau Leszno must always have been beastly.’
‘Well, perhaps. But Herr Leszno was a delightful old man – so handsome, so distinguished-looking. Nikky takes after him. I became quite attached to him. For the few months he was spared to me, we were real chums. I must admit I never felt quite the same for Frau Leszno.’
Felix said: ‘I can’t think why you ever took them on in the first place.’
She replied with quiet importance: ‘You see, the situation is rather more complex than it appears.’ As she paused, gazing down at her plate, Felix felt the whole mystery of the grown-up world behind her manner. He did not hope for an explanation, yet Miss Bohun seemed to try and give him one. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you think God is telling you to do something – then, too late, you realise you’re mistaken. I used to think God had led me to the Lesznos’ door, now I’m not so sure. You see, apart from my promise . . .’ she hesitated before repeating more firmly, ‘apart from my promise, there is the religious question. Under my influence Frau Leszno joined the “Ever-Readies”. Of course she’s not the only person of Jewish blood in the “Ever-Readies” – dear me, no, there are a number – but she and Nikky are the only Orthodox Jews we’ve brought into the fold. I’m sure I could never have done it with Herr Leszno – he was such a strong character, such a patriarch. I had to respect his faith; I did all my praying for him in secret, which may be why it didn’t do much good because God helps those who help themselves. But Frau Leszno was a different kettle of fish. She just wanted something to lean on . . . and Nikky, of course. . . .’
‘Nikky!’
‘Certainly,’ Miss Bohun sounded somewhat exasperated, ‘I told you before that Nikky is a member. How could we have helped him otherwise? Anyway, it was all one to him – he’s got no true religion. But with Frau Leszno it was different. It was a big change-over for her and it separated her from her own community. She’d been getting some assistance from a charity – well, that stopped, of course. It meant she was thrown much more on me than she need be; and, of course, she’s never let me forget my responsibility. You’d have thought she’d done me a favour. They couldn’t see it as I did; they couldn’t see that I was saving their souls alive. I keep telling her she’ll be among the elect when the Day arrives.’
‘What day?’ Felix managed to ask qui
ckly.
‘Judgment Day, of course,’ Miss Bohun said casually and went on: ‘No, she thought she was doing me a favour by joining. Really, it was just as though she imagined she was repaying me for all I’d done for them, and, at the same time, increasing my responsibility towards them. I didn’t like it. I’ve often regretted her conversion. It’s been a nuisance.’
‘Do you think perhaps if Frau Leszno didn’t work for you she’d leave the “Ever-Readies”?’
‘She might. I must say it would be the best thing. She could drift back to her own people and get them to help her for a change. Still, I’d be sorry to lose Nikky; he’s our only young blood.’
‘Does he go to the meetings?’
‘Yes,’ Miss Bohun replied irritably, then, on second thoughts: ‘Well, not to the meetings exactly, but he still comes to the entertainments.’
The entertainments! The word echoed and re-echoed in Felix’s mind and he wondered why, if the ‘Ever-Readies’ needed young blood, Miss Bohun did not invite him in straight away. Perhaps his eagerness was conveyed to Miss Bohun, for she gave him a reflective glance, then said: ‘I’m afraid my experience with the Lesznos has made me think twice of introducing people who might . . . well, who might prove a responsibility.’
Felix, subdued by the implication of this remark, stared down at the tablecloth and began to draw on it with his finger-nail.
‘Don’t do that, there’s a good boy!’
Felix let his hand drop to his lap. In the silence that followed, as Miss Bohun carefully folded her napkin and put it into an olive-wood ring, Felix remembered again the question he wanted to ask, and asked it:
‘Miss Bohun, couldn’t Frau Leszno have had the room at the front? The one you were preparing?’
Miss Bohun held her mouth very firm for several moments before replying with withdrawn quiet: ‘I would rather you did not question me about the front room, Felix.’
Felix murmured an apology. There was silence again. The spate of Miss Bohun’s confidences had passed and the air had cooled between them. Suddenly Miss Bohun shook off her quiet and, giving a quick look round at the alarmclock on the dresser, said: ‘Well, Felix, time for bed.’
3
Felix was doing his best to study, but as the days became brighter and the garden greener, his ability to concentrate grew weaker. If he sat in the garden everything and anything distracted him. He could bear the confinement of his room only if he had Faro in with him, but she was the worst distraction of the lot.
It was late January; the coldest time of the year. Felix was allowed to have an oil-stove upstairs on condition he cleaned it himself and filled it from the kerosene drum in the kitchen. The stove gave off more smell than warmth, so on grey days he shivered at his desk; when the sun did appear, sliding round the room in a great, shield-shaped block of light, it was surprisingly hot. Faro would leave Felix’s knee and follow the sunlight from the bed to the floor, from the floor to the basket-chair, from the chair to the desk.
One afternoon when he came up from luncheon, Felix found her sprawled across his open books, her fur hot with sun, her paws limp and tender with sleep. He sat and looked at her for a while, then said: ‘How do you expect me to work while you’re on top of my books?’ She lifted an ear at his voice but did not move. At last he made a half-hearted attempt to push her to one side, but when she murmured complainingly in her throat, he said with mock-resignation: ‘Oh, all right,’ and, glad of any excuse to delay the moment of settling to work, tickled the very soft fur at the base of her ears. Her eyes opened, a flicker of blue; she gave a token purr of recognition, then, stretching her chocolate-coloured paws to their full length, rolled over into a ball, uncovering his Hall & Knight’s ‘Algebra’.
The sight of the plum-coloured binding was enough to set him yawning. Slowly and extremely unwillingly, he forced his attention on to the three problems set him that morning by Mr Posthorn. When he looked at the back of the book and found that, somehow, he had got two correct answers, he regarded his day’s work as done. He picked up Faro’s toy, a rabbit’s paw, and threw it across the room. Faro, who would scarcely have bothered to move if Felix had dropped a shoe, heard the soft, familiar fall and awoke, alert.
‘Get it,’ urged Felix, and Faro, sailing like a flying-fox off the table, retrieved the paw. While this game was going on, Felix stumbled against and overturned the basket-chair, the only ‘easy’ chair in the room, and looked with surprise at the heavy folds of cob-webs inside. This made him gaze up at the ceiling-corners, as he had seen his mother do, and he realised how dirty the house was. His mother, who described the thinnest film of dust as ‘squalor’, would have been shocked. Felix supposed this dirt was shocking, but to him it was merely another proof of how the Lesznos were imposing upon Miss Bohun.
At that moment he heard her voice as she opened the dining-room door on to the garden and emerged just below his window: ‘Oh, I do love the sun,’ she was saying, ‘and a walk round the garden will do us both good.’
Felix, glad of a new distraction, crossed to the window and saw her hurrying out across the grass with her pupil following her. She was wearing her electric blue dress. She apparently had only two, one blue and one rust-coloured. Each was short and cut straight from shoulder to hem, with sleeves that ended at the elbow. The rust dress was decorated with fringe; the blue embroidered with wool. To-day she was wearing a large straw hat which Felix had seen for the first time last week. She had said to him: ‘I call it my “cartwheel”. It’s such a nice hat, such an old friend! And this scarf is genuine batik. I made it myself years ago. Very valuable.’ Because his mother had always spent more than she could afford on clothes, he supposed the age and limitations of Miss Bohun’s wardrobe must result from poverty.
Now, watching her, he wished he had not given all his mother’s dresses to Mrs Shipton but had saved some of them for poor Miss Bohun.
‘This is a leaf. L-E-A-F, leaf,’ she started her lesson by raising her voice to a high, clear sing-song, then she darted over to a low stone wall where some sheltered geranium bushes were still hung with autumn leaves. ‘This is a dead leaf. A dead – D-E-A-D – leaf,’ her tone changed suddenly to normal as she said: ‘Perhaps, Mr Liftshitz, you’d be good enough to help me pluck off these dead leaves – these-dead-leaves. Pick-them-off. That’s right. They do so disfigure the plant.’
Felix settled himself comfortably, feet up on the window-ledge, to watch Miss Bohun and Mr Liftshitz in the garden. He had watched them before – she darting about like a very active insect, almost a flying insect, while Mr Liftshitz, fat, unhappy, soon shiny with sweat, did his best to keep up with her. Felix thought Mr Liftshitz in his skin-tight, dark suit extremely funny, but Miss Bohun, because he was her friend and ally, he did not find funny at all. To-day he could not see her face; only the cartwheel hat which almost hid her body. Indeed, at times, the hat seemed to be moving by itself from one geranium bush to another.
Felix’s mother had been tall. She had said sometimes: ‘With my figure, I could earn a fortune as a model girl in Mayfair,’ yet something about her had made Felix feel at times the elder, the more responsible. Miss Bohun, tiny as she was, so impressed Felix with her authority that he often forgot he was no longer a small boy. His mother, of course, had had no faults; but she had not shared with Miss Bohun such obvious virtues. With Miss Bohun, listening to her talk, he was always reflecting how honest she was, how good to people, how right in her judgment. It did not seem to him possible she could be anything but right, even in her disapproval of Mr Jewel, whom Felix liked in spite of everything. There must be a reason for this disapproval. After all, she knew Mr Jewel very well; Felix did not. . . .
She called from under her hat: ‘Pick, Mr Liftshitz, pick with a will.’
Mr Liftshitz slowly picked a leaf here and a leaf there until he had made a neat bunch of half-a-dozen leaves. This he offered to Miss Bohun.
‘No, no,’ she brushed him off irritably, ‘don’t hand them to me. Sc
atter them. Scatter them, as you would scatter your bounty.’
‘Please?’ asked Mr Liftshitz frowning, his body tense with effort to catch a familiar word.
Miss Bohun ignored him. She passed rapidly to some potted plants that stood in the shade of the wood-shed. Felix recognised her as being what older people called ‘active’. She was much more active than his mother, who had always said things like: ‘Don’t ask me to climb up there, Felix darling,’ or ‘My dear boy, I can’t possibly go out in this heat,’ and had always rested in the afternoons.
Sometimes Miss Bohun’s arms and legs shot out from under the hat. Despite the cold, these were bare; they looked no more than bones covered with skin as brown as roasted chicken-skin. Her elbows were sharply pointed and when straightened they disappeared into whirlpools of wrinkles. In dry weather she always wore camel-hide sandals that had grown too big with age so that her thin, mummy-brown feet slid about inside them. She did not seem to mind the water in the grass, but Mr Liftshitz kept looking down miserably at the neat, pointed toes of his black shoes. Miss Bohun was now bending over some pots. She stuck a finger into the earth of each in turn.
‘Come over here,’ she sang to Mr Liftshitz. He trotted over, panting a little, and gazed with her at the largest flower-pot. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is a plant that had been put into too small a pot. It was wilting and dying, so I bought it cheap. I said to myself: “I will put it into a larger pot and see how it will reward me.” Now you can see what a fine plant it has become. I hope, Mr Liftshitz, if God is ever good enough to put you into a larger pot, you’ll reward Him in the same way.’
School for Love Page 4