by Jane Gardam
‘Pema,’ said Dolly. ‘I hope we shall be meeting Pema. Whoever she is.’
‘Oh, she’s been magnificent with Faith,’ he said. ‘Or, at least, so we all thought.’
‘It’s funny,’ said Dolly. ‘Nobody ever tells you about a new baby without saying it hasn’t got that crumpled red look. What is it? I’ve never seen it. Mine were lovely babies from the start. You looked like a curly little gold cherub, Jack.’
Jack’s bony Savonarola face lengthened the more.
He had had terrible days since the flight of The Missus. Andrew had announced that he had to be on duty, the first Jack had heard of it, and Jocasta had said she must be on call for meeting Pammie Jefford, to which Jack had agreed. He had been overcome with shyness at the thought of meeting Pammie himself. The Smikes were useless, forever alleging it was their day off or they were too busy in the fields. Then, an hour or so ago, just as he and Philip were setting off, the A-level girl had come wandering by to say that all the Tibetans would be leaving The Priors at Christmas.
‘Ah,’ he had said, looking away from her.
‘Sorry, Jack.’
‘But the looms? It was all done for you. It’s a charitable trust. Registered. Charity money. You were to stay into next year.’
‘There’ll be plenty want them. We could get them sold for you if you like. There’s someone in Liverpool.’
‘Ah. Liverpool.’
‘Yeah. We’re ever so sorry, Jack, but we don’t like it here.’
‘You mean with Alice gone? The food?’
‘God, no, we like our own. No, it’s just it doesn’t work here, see. Someone has to tell you. It’s different worlds. It’s all daft stuff after Liverpool. It’s not the teaching we expected.’
‘Jocasta? You’ll not find anyone better qualified. And all totally free, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
The girl gave him a look.
‘Well, don’t you agree?’
‘I guess,’ she said. ‘But she’s old, Jocasta, see. We’re sick of this negative-space stuff. It’s as long gone as Picasso. Out of date, like. We want to get into New Art and that.’
‘I’ll let her know,’ he said, standing like a pinnacle, staring towards the moor lane. ‘We’ve spent, the charity has spent, a great deal of money.’
‘I guess. But you’ll get someone else. You might get intellectuals or writers’ groups. They’re cheaper.’
‘Not through the winter. Oh, I might just say that there is a new housekeeper coming. Mrs. Jefford, who brought us Faith. Would that make a difference? I think she will be a very dependable woman.’
‘I saw her. Christ, Jack, you haven’t a hope. Lipstick and lady-dresses. She’ll never last here. Oh, and we’ve told Jocasta already. We told her last week. And the lads.’
‘The Smikes know? Jocasta knows?’
‘Yeah. Actually, Jack, Nick’s comin’ wid us.’
‘Nick? To Liverpool?’
‘Don’t go for me! I’m not bothered. “Suit yourself,” I said. “Come if you want.” But I tellt ’im it wouldn’t do ’im no permanent good wid me.’
‘You and Nick?’
‘He thinks so. I don’t. Not permanent. I’m getting to art school next year, the Slade if I can, and I will.’
‘Nick is leaving Ernie?’
‘I guess.’
What Jack was looking at then in his parents’ house was not the red bar of the fire but these revelations, particularly the bombshell about The Smikes, who had been in the Braithwaite family for years. They were not brothers. The name was a literary joke they both understood but pretended not to. They denied any education. They were not lovers either, Nick sturdy, short-legged, scowling, watchful-eyed, level-headed, Ernie away in a world of his own. They were mates, that was all they had told Jack when he took them on. Neither paid attention to the other’s partners and behaved as if they didn’t exist. Ernie expected Nick’s girlfriends to be slags and never addressed them. Nick, ‘on principle,’ whatever that meant, did not speak of the gay community of the esplanade fun palaces and considered them boring. He worried, though, about Ernie and AIDS and occasionally lectured him on the subject, buying him packets of coloured condoms as if they were sugar candy. He urged him to go for his check-ups. They were like unidentical twins. Some bond forged before their times in prison held them, probably Toots, who alone in their schooldays had reached the small but deep areas of their unpreposessing souls. After prison, it had been useful to get some work out of Toots’s dotty son and it had been Toots’s fierce eyes not Jack’s holiness that had made them behave on the whole very well as hirelings at the crazy Priors.
Nick and Ernie had moved about the landscape of Cleveland since then as a pair, always together. You couldn’t conceive of one Smike without the other.
‘Might I ask’—Jack looked hard at the girl—‘what is to happen to Ernie?’
‘Well, ’e’ll ’ave ter fettle, won’t ’e?’
So that Jack had been more than usually distracted on the journey down, what with the flux of The Missus, Nick and the Tibetans, the imminent arrival of the scarce-known southern matron Pammie—she might already be on the train, unstoppable now even if Alice Banks decided to come back after all. The withdrawal of the Tibetans would mean the withdrawal of funds. The Arts Council allowance that was all that saved the place from total collapse. And the baby? he eventually thought. The baby without the Tibetans? Would Pammie take her on again? As well as the housekeeping? Obviously not. Jocasta, then? But he knew that Jocasta would not.
‘Who’s going to look after Faith, then?’ Philip had asked in the car.
They were groaning along in low gear through sleet that fell on the miles of simmering chemical works. A caravan park lay in their foothills along the main road, old flaking grey vans sunk down in frozen mud. Some were boarded up, but on the step of another a child in nothing but a T-shirt stood braying at a door to get in. Piles of rubbish lay around in long shallow puddles of rain. It was inconceivable that whole lives were being passed in these tin cans, but from one the white old face of a woman looked out, chewing and ruminating like a beast.
‘A terrible place,’ said Jack and prayed for all who dwelt in it, closing his eyes to do so and narrowly missing a bus.
Philip yelled.
‘You’d better get yourself round there now, lad,’ said Toots (the boy looked tired), ‘before that woman brings her round here and sits listening in to it all with us.’
‘She’ll sit listening in round there,’ said Dolly.
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll speak to Alice alone.’
‘She’ll be ear to the door. Can you not take Philip with you to stave her off? He’s Alice’s friend, aren’t you, Philip?’
Jack rang the Middleditch bell pull, Philip beside him on the step, and they found The Missus seated on a shell-pink armchair like a sack of coal against a sunrise.
Jack sat down on the apricot settee and Philip stayed outside in the passage examining the brass medallions on the walls and triumphal certificates of the Boys’ Brigade. Mrs. Middleditch looked him over unenthusiastically before moving into her lounge to preside. She had dressed seriously for the interview in bottle green, with court shoes and earrings. She moved to the piano stool and cleared her throat.
Jack said, ‘I wonder if you’d be very good and get poor Toots a hot drink?’
‘We ought to get this settled first.’
‘It will be. I’m sure. Could I ask if Philip might go with you?’
‘I’m fine here,’ said Philip from where he was easing out the metal floor of the hall-stand with scientific interest.
‘Stop that at once,’ said The Missus and Mrs. Middleditch together, and somehow Philip and Mrs. Middleditch were side by side in the street and heading along the terrace for the other establishment, Mrs. Middleditch coatless and insulated only by he
r wrath.
Silence fell between Jack and The Missus, Jack basking for a moment, thankful that his professional pastoral manner had not quite left him and that he’d got rid of the opposition. Then the silence grew, and the deeper it struck, the shyer he and The Missus became.
‘Have you been comfortable?’ he asked in the end.
‘It’s been satisfactory.’
‘It is very good of Mrs. Middleditch.’
‘No. It’s what she lives to do. Get in on other people’s messes. And I’d no option. I’ll send her a present.’
‘Send? So you are coming home, Alice?’
She looked over his head at the plastic head of an Airedale that was attached to the wall with its tongue out.
‘This is a right tasteless place,’ she said. ‘Keeps showing me all over it and it’s scarcely two up, two down. She’s had her downstairs WC done up low-level glaze. Avocado. Joined tank, and a lavvy brush got up like an owl. Taps gold-plate, dead common.’
‘But, Alice, she’s not even a friend of yours. You landed on her. Don’t you see how good—?’
‘Bed that soft you can’t get out of it of a morning and running about with cups of Ovaltine half the night. You can hear them on and on talking about Toots and Dolly—and you. And how Philip’s being neglected and fourpence in the shilling and that Bingham! Stinks of scent. You have to open the bathroom window so’s to let in the filth from the works—it’s disgusting, but it’s better. That Bingham’s far too fat. He eats rubbish. They all do. Over the telly. She puts a sheet down. And he’s forty-two.’
‘Alice—’
‘Little pasties all half-cooked. Never a decent meal. She’s got a negligee. This Arnold’s supposed to be the great man for running the church but it’s all desk work. Never speaks. Not person-to-person.’
‘There is absolutely no reason, Alice, why he should.’
‘And she took me clothes and put them through her washer. Said you can’t be too careful, coming from farms. I ask you! Left me a great dressing gown to get into, all appliqué reveres. Far too long. Sitting in that box of a kitchen you couldn’t get past me, watching all me clothes going round as if it was typhoid. The thing began to scream. That was the drier, if you please, all in one, like the WC. They come out bone hard, past ironing—not that she does any, just smoothes them over them Aga domes. Ridiculous in this hen coop, Aga’s just showing off, half the size of the house, boils the place out. Not a decent bite for breakfast, mush, skim-milk and hard apples. I’ll get ’er some bacon before I go.’
‘So—you will be leaving?’
‘Oh aye, Jack. I’ll have to go. I can’t stay ’ere with satin reveres, I’m not Gracie Fields.’
Again there was silence.
‘Alice, could you perhaps tell me . . . ? After all you’ve been to me, all you’ve done for me—I know I’m not aware of things sometimes, but what have I done in particular to make you leave me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Then—?’
‘It’s the rest of them. It’s not right.’
‘Has someone insulted you?’
‘Not me. Nobody insults me. Not even this Middleditch. I’m going to give her me auntie’s gold brooch while she’s still deriding me round half Cleveland. That’ll shame ’er. No. It’s not me. It’s you they humiliate, Jack. And I won’t have it.’
She sat glaring.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘but, Alice, it doesn’t happen, you know. I don’t notice, and so it doesn’t happen.’
‘You can be humiliated unawares,’ she said darkly.
‘I can take it.’ He moved across to her to take her hand. It looked unnaturally clean, softer, older, very small. He kissed it.
‘You can leave off that rubbish, I’m no film star. I know me limitations and I’m old as your mother just about. But I won’t sit by to see you humiliated, Jack, and so I’ve got to go.’
Looking into Jack’s candid eyes the enormity of what had happened at The Priors swept over Alice Banks again, the horror of the scene in the gatehouse, the shattering of the whole structure of the Christian presence which she had thought Jack had created, the shock of watching the anonymity of sexual desire. Andrew’s vacant face turned to her. His sweaty back, Jocasta lying there, her legs wide, her skin shiny.
‘Where shall you go?’
‘There’s a job south. Someone of Holly’s.’
‘Alice! A job south?’
‘I’ve not even been to London,’ she said proudly. ‘I’ve never been drawn. I’ve met plenty of them, God knows, and I’m not impressed. I keep myself apart and I shall do. But I’ll go south now if I have to. I’ll go anywhere. Don’t ask me no more, Jack.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘It’s a mystery.’
‘Oh, please stop,’ for tears were coursing. Her warrior’s small head seemed to be vibrating as if it were balanced on a shuddering volcano. Her hands gripped the great black handbag on her knee. ‘If you could see to my stuff I could go tomorrow. Toots knows all about where. It’s convenient. I’ll go.’
‘I’ll see to things.’ He knew he couldn’t but maybe Jocasta might. Or Pammie?
‘Pammie Jefford is coming.’
‘So. I’m replaced. It didn’t tek long. Very good. Very good.’
But the tears still flowed.
‘I’m going to take you out to lunch now. Just you and I and Philip.’
‘I couldn’t eat.’
‘There’s a very good fish-and-chip shop.’
The tears lessened.
In the chip shop she and Jack sat together to heaped plates; Philip had refused to budge from the car. The Missus after a time began to pick about, then to apply herself. She asked for more vinegar and said the plastic tomato cruets needed a scrub. She spoke of the insanitary aspect of the chip-maker’s naked torso above his swimming bath of boiling fat. ‘’Is very sweat’ll drop in it,’ she said, ‘and look at them disgusting tattoos.’
31
Madeleine and Puffy were not native to Farnham. They did not live at the house of the bride in whose garden Madeleine had been drifting on the morning of the Seton-Fairley wedding. That had been her husband’s family territory.
Puffy travelled only to important weddings and funerals nowadays and even these were having to be rationed. He lived with Madeleine in East Kent, on the coast, but with no view of the sea. This did not worry Madeleine as she forgot the sea until she saw it again, but it troubled Puffy. He thought of the sea a great deal, tipped back in his orthopaedic chair.
The tiny room he sat in was furnished in Madeleine’s aristocratic lack of taste—frills and rosy covers and dozens of photographs in tarnished silver frames of people with dressed hair, a swirl even of a royal signature (Edward VIII), everyone a little sepia. Limoges and Dresden were dotted about and a small television set was hidden in the Adam-style fireplace behind gold-and-white cupboard doors. Madeleine found herself these days spending more and more time away from this low-ceilinged sitting room where Puffy floated like a giant balloon. She had plenty of help, which she took for granted. She had always been an employer of staff. There was a skinny cleaner and a young man called Henry Jones who would do anything, even feed Puffy little bits of food into his mouth like a mother blackbird. Henry Jones cooked a midday meal and always looked in at night to see that the old pair were all right. Henry was what Madeleine called a pansy and Puffy might have called a woofter if he had been able to address the subject. Henry was very fond of old ladies and of Madeleine’s swimmy green eyes.
‘But I’ve simply no one for the nights,’ complained Madeleine. ‘Our only difficulty is the nights. Well, that was always the way with marriage, wasn’t it? If the nights are all right, then . . . How very outspoken I am! Poor old Puffy.’
Agonised by her beached-whale straining to hear the sound of the sea that was becoming only a memory on
the horizon to him, Madeleine had lately taken to calling for a taxi to get her to the London train, and then, wondering at about Ashford whether she had told Puffy she was going, getting off, ringing him up, missing the next train, getting into conversation with people on the platform, sometimes joining their train and finding herself home again.
Or not home again, which was worse. Once she had taken off with an Indian student who said he was a horticulturalist and ended up with him in the Chelsea Physic Garden and writing him a cheque for fifty pounds. She took him out to tea and found she hadn’t a penny in her purse to pay for it. When she rang Puffy to ask him where she had been going in the first place, he panicked and struck the alarm signal on his breast, but that did no good at all because when the police arrived he had forgotten the reason for summoning them. Henry Jones wrung his hands over the Chelsea Physic Garden and said that the student might have been a serial killer. Something was obviously going to have to be done.
But Madeleine would not hear of moving to a Home—or even two Homes—and had become convinced that all would be resolved if she could only get a little break on her own. Just a tiny one. No, not with Puffy. ‘Beloved Puffy,’ she said, ‘but I can’t get near him in that chair or near anything else. He’s swelling like a watermelon. He’s a bull in a china shop. He’s tethered but he’s still a bull. I must get away with darling Giles and that woman. Henrietta. Very nice woman, but nervy. I could probably help her. So hard on Giles. Let’s see . . . three months. He’ll just be beginning to think of extricating himself. I don’t believe in health farms. You form attachments that would be unthinkable if you were in your clothes. Massage makes you careless.’
A little of this she hinted to Giles, whose telephone number she had procured and was making use of several times a day, leaving many messages when he was out.
‘I’m afraid Thomasina and I are going to Yorkshire for Christmas,’ he told her. ‘We’re not sure how long we shall stay. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to leave Puffy over Christmas.’