by Jane Gardam
‘He never knows when it’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘I shall just tell them not to put up any decorations and hide the cards.’
‘That seems harsh.’
‘Don’t be sentimental, Giles. We can pretend it’s Christmas when I get back. Then I shall have two.’
‘Won’t he hear about it on television?’
‘No. He hates television. Well, he used to like it but he hardly sees anything now. He can’t read the newspaper either. It’s the angle of his head.’
‘I’m sure the social services—’
‘Oh, no need at all. He has all sorts of people coming in to see him. They read to him and bathe him and dress him. I’ll just tell them to keep off the newspapers and not to let him switch on the wireless.’
‘You are a ruthless woman, Madeleine.’
‘No, Giles, I am a pragmatic woman, unashamed. I’ve lived far too close to Puffy for years. In foreign parts, you know—so much more space.’
‘I never thought there was a lot of space in Hong Kong.’
‘There are different kinds of space. Space for little separations. We were so wonderfully looked-after. Such fun.’
‘Madeleine, if you’re going to talk maids-before-the-war like a ghastly old dowager, goodbye. It’s suburban of you. You are a woman who has had everything she ever wanted.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but not for the nights.’
She won of course. A conversation with Thomasina, whom she had also run to earth, led to Thomasina’s conversation with Toots in the draughty passage of the house on Teesside, and then to the journey of The Missus south to pass her Christmas in a foreign land.
‘But you can’t mean that you’ve arranged for Madeleine to come with us?’ Giles had such a look of horror that it was almost a smile. ‘My good girl, it’ll snow and she’ll wander out and get pneumonia and die. Wherever could she stay?’
‘Wherever shall we stay, come to that?’ Thomasina looked very thin today. Rather lost. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve decided I can’t take that place on the moors with the whiplash waitress and I’m not staying at The Priors.’
‘It would be insulting not to, wouldn’t it?’
‘No. It’s not fit for anybody. I’ve done it. With Holly and Andrew. It is vile.’
‘But—Faith—lives there. Your grandchild. Isn’t that the reason we’re going?’
‘Oh, Giles,’ she said, ‘stop being a fool. Actually, Pammie Jefford will be there.’
‘Pammie Jefford?’
‘Yes. She’s going as housekeeper. I told you she’s rather keen on Jack. She’s religious. Andrew will be there, too, I imagine. And there’s Jocasta, Jack’s wife, and her little boy and some serf people who work there. Oh yes, and some Tibetan refugees.’
‘It does sound rather full. Yes.’
‘Doesn’t Madeleine know anybody up there? Someone with a decent house where we could all go?’
‘It’s rather short notice for Christmas, isn’t it? Less than a fortnight now.’ However, he rang Madeleine.
As usual, all his exasperation faded at the charm of her voice. The face he saw in the air was at once graced with the young shining hair of a girl; the body was slight and wore a silk dress. It sat on the terrace at Karnak. Its green eyes watched the Nile.
‘Hello, Maddie. We were just wondering if you’d thought of anywhere to stay up there. We’re not really fixed up yet. Not too comfortable, I hear, Thomasina’s grandchild’s place. Had you planned something?’
‘I’ll see to it,’ she said. ‘But, do you know, your wonderful Thomasina has actually found me someone. A housekeeper. She’s coming down on the coach and I was just going to ring and see if you’d meet her at Victoria and take her across to Waterloo to catch the Dover train. Henry and I will meet her there of course.’
‘Well . . . ’
‘I’ll ask Pammie Jefford,’ hissed Thomasina.
‘We’ll ask Pammie Jefford,’ said Giles. ‘She’s a—’
‘Oh, I know who Pammie Jefford is.’ Madeleine had acquired Pammie’s number, too, and the number of The Priors. ‘She’s up there already, I think, or soon will be. She’s the new housekeeper and they’re sending the old one down to me. That’s to say, to Puffy. Such nice people. Rather a strange man answered the phone. Beautiful voice but not worldly, I’d think. Seven-thirty?’
‘Seven-thirty?’
‘At the coach station tomorrow? Seven thirty A.M. of course. She’s travelling down overnight.’
‘She must be mad.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Giles. It’s only nine hours. I thought we might all travel up that way, as a matter of fact. It costs twenty pounds instead of hundreds and they have a video and hot drinks and a WC and Big Macs. It’s not Dickens now, you know. Not post-horns and outside seats. It’s a bit tight round the knees—wouldn’t do for Puffy—but we’re all slender. Goodbye, darling, I must get Henry to see to the new person’s room.’
‘We are to meet this woman,’ said Giles, ‘at the Victoria Coach Station at seven-thirty A.M. We are then to cart her across London and put her on the train to East Kent. Why? Why us? Why at all? Is she infirm? Who fixed this ridiculous transportation of labour? It is inane.’
‘We?’ said Thomasina. ‘Not you, Giles, I’ll go. It’s my affair. I did it. On the phone in a silly moment. Why should you?’
‘Because I can stay overnight at my London club and you can’t. Leave it all to me. I’m responsible for Madeleine. We should never have gone to that wedding.’
‘You are very good. This is really my affair.’
‘It takes two to make an affair,’ he said.
‘About such things,’ she said, ‘Giles . . . ’
‘Not just now.’
‘You are looking shifty.’
He was hurt. ‘I have never been shifty. That I have not been. I’m going now. What do you want from London? I can walk over from Waterloo to Soho and get some pasta.’
‘Oh, lovely.’ (She thought, Better! How easy we are together again. How married we seem.) She said, ‘Thanks. See you for supper, then, tomorrow?’
‘Oh, long before that. Tea. At the latest.’
That evening she turned out the rest of Holly’s school things from her bedroom drawers and packed them up for Oxfam, even her school reports and her bears. In the morning I’ll nip in and get some figs for supper. Nice after pasta. Figs and cream. Or with fresh oranges. Funny old thing. Getting to be part of the fabric. And maybe a cake for tea.
All through the night the coach thundered south bearing Alice Banks away from all she stood for, the rectitude of the unswerving North.
Jack had brought her to the coach. They had been driven by Mrs. Middleditch with Philip sitting in the back. Mrs. Middleditch had not left the car. The Missus had said goodbye and thank you to her then, but had not been able to say a word to Philip, who sat glumly not looking at her, unravelling a thread in the upholstery. Jack and she together carried her three cardboard suitcases and watched them being stowed in the coach’s hold. As she climbed aboard, laden with plastic bags and packages, Jack panicked. The sight of her back going away from him, her head not turning, was unknown.
‘Alice!’
She did turn then. There were people behind her wanting to get on and Jack was in everyone’s way. In his old cassock and scarf and ragged duffle coat and a weird yellow semi-balaclava The Missus had once knitted for him he looked an unlikely divine, too intensely concerned with his passenger. Love and distress were in the air.
‘Alice, there’s no need for you to go. It’s not too late.’
‘It is too late.’
‘But what have we done to you?’
‘Move along, git on,’ said the driver, trying to get to his perch. Everyone was aboard now. ‘Git off, missus, if you’re not comin.’
She glowered down at Jack.
&nb
sp; ‘All these years, Alice.’
‘It’s more than I can tell you. You’ll find out and you’ll understand me then. But it isn’t my place to say.’
‘Could you write? Write about it? When you get there?’
‘I’ll see.’
Her intense love for him she disguised with a thrust of her pointed chin, a turning away, a dropping of parcels, and she disappeared down the centre aisle of the coach as he stepped back and trotted down the side of it to see where she settled. But alas, the windows were dark with tinted glass.
‘It’s to make it go faster,’ someone said. ‘There’s no waving off any more. Same on the trains. You don’t get much seeing-off at all now, it’s all self-help.’
Jack stood feebly waving at the bus’s shadowed flank and then its vanishing backside, before taking the midnight road back to his parents’ house. He was not being trusted with the moor road home at night.
And Alice sat in the bus regarding the back of the seat in front of her hardly twelve inches from her nose. Beside her reclined a blond gorilla, who began to snore at Boroughbridge, kept snoring through Wetherby, over the Leeds roundabout, along the Doncaster bypass, through Sherwood Forest, Stamford, Peterborough and the A1 interchange. At first to her left were the Cleveland Hills, invisible. To her right, beyond the gorilla, was the darkened plain that lifted itself far away into the Pennines and the Lake District and subsided again south towards her own Lancashire. Through the night the coach vibrated with the snorts and farts and coughs and moans of people’s dreams. Lads swilled lagers in the back and at one time there was some shouting and a clattering of cans and tuneless singing. Shadows blundered up and down the aisle to the WC. The drinks bar alongside it clonked and fizzed. The atmosphere grew fetid and foul. By Worksop quite a few people were smoking. In Northamptonshire, somewhere beyond the Oundle turn-off, Cambridge to the east, The Missus realised that she had not moved a muscle since she stepped aboard.
She reflected objectively on this, presupposed the pains in her joints and decided they could be postponed if she didn’t disturb them. She risked uncrossing her feet and recrossing them the other way, winced, and shut her eyes. She did not turn to the packet of sandwiches on her knee. She forgot the thermos of tea Dolly and Toots had insisted upon, Toots even ringing Mrs. Middleditch about it and Mrs. Middleditch saying what sort of woman did they think she was, she knew her duty.
In the dawn The Missus saw London for the first time, grey and windy and strung with millions of lights like lighted barbed wire in grey air. Hendon came and went and it could have been anywhere. Stockton-on-Tees, say. Swiss Cottage was nothing of the sort. St John’s Wood just blocks of flats. Lord’s Cricket Ground was a stretch of wall. As they reached Baker Street, Oxford Street, Marble Arch, where she might have seen the big shops, at last she slept, leaning sideways on the gorilla’s elbow like a small dead tree. Buckingham Palace with its tumbril spikes was left behind unnoticed, and in the bleached dawn the coach surged into Victoria Station.
Alice found that she could scarcely move. She was longing to pee but never, never, would she use the upright coffin provided at the back of the bus and certainly not now when the coach was stationary. Maybe there would be somewhere else? As she stood waiting for her luggage she was nearly knocked over several times.
‘OK, missus?’ asked the driver and the familiar title made her small green face soften.
‘D’you have toilets down here?’
‘Over there, missus.’
‘What happens to me luggage?’
‘Is someone here for you? OK then, I’ll watch it.’
But she was not sure of this and began to gather the luggage and her packages together in a heap against the coach-station wall, making trips back and forth. She hid the smaller bundles behind the bigger ones. But still she disliked the idea of leaving them all, and there were notices saying you mustn’t. That would be bombs, she thought. She looked about her and saw that David Niven stood nearby, observing her from lamp-post height. ‘Miss Banks?’ If he was a mugger or a kidnapper or a rapist it was odd that he knew her name. He was springing about now like a grasshopper, calling up a taxi. All of seventy. Whoever was he?
‘Hop in. I’ll take you somewhere for breakfast.’
‘I need the WC.’
‘Oh yes, of course. I shouldn’t think they’re very nice here.’
‘I can see the sign. I’ll not be long.’
Looking back doubtfully at the luggage and the man presiding over it, she thought, Or maybe the Anthony Eden type.
She made off and once inside the ladies room didn’t want to leave it. She felt a little weak and sick and was not at all sure she wasn’t dreaming. All them buses, she thought, threading her way back among them. They were multiplying as she watched, nosing in like great salmon returning to their birthplace. There was Edinburgh, and over there Exeter, and lined up ready for off, just spawned, was Liverpool. And Glasgow. The board beside Liverpool had Preston written underneath in smaller letters. It’d be stopping there. Not far from Oldham and Wigan and Bury and Bolton and Rochdale. Home.
She was almost swept away by the desire for the Rochdale bus. What would they all say, eh, when she walked in the door, her mam at the fireside with her knees apart making toast on the brass fork with the Medusa head on it, and her dad supping his tea? ‘Saucering it,’ he called it, and no shame. And that cat. It’ll be that pleased to see me. They all died in the war, though.
‘Miss Banks? Hello there. Are you all right?’
The general armed her to the taxi and they drove up Victoria Street and over the river, which glimmered in the winter morning but Earth had many things to show more fair than the buildings that looked down upon it.
‘We’ll have some breakfast on the platform,’ he was saying. ‘There’s a good snack bar. There’s rather a long time to wait, I’m afraid.’ (Over an hour. I suppose I must stay with her. Good God, what to talk about?) ‘Never here before? Good gracious me. That was the River Thames—so sorry it’s dark. And there’s the Shell Building. In the distance you can see the National Theatre. Concrete but dressed with a pattern of planks.’
Alice remained unmoved. They left the taxi and on Waterloo’s great staircase she spoke at last. ‘What’s this, then? Backstreet India? Why don’t they move them all on? ’Umans in cardboard boxes is a disgrace.’
At the ticket office she insisted on paying her own fare, insisted so ferociously that people turned to look. She returned the stares. ‘I’ve seen this ticket queue on the telly,’ she said. ‘It was on the news. Someone got murdered in it once for not being quick enough.
‘I’m from the North,’ she told the man behind the glass. ‘I can’t think what I’m doing down ’ere.’
‘Nobody can,’ he said.
The general wondered, too. He wondered very much. There was no porter, no trolley to get the luggage up the escalator, which Alice wouldn’t use anyway though she’d been on the ones in Middlesbrough Binns. They had to make several journeys up and down the stairs alongside. Then they trundled it all by slow degrees along passageways and down a stairway to the platform for the Dover train, and then halfway along this to the snack bar, which was shut up and in darkness.
Rain was falling silver and cold on the lines, spitting and hissing against the roof. Now and then a blustering wind flung drops in handfuls across their legs and feet. The overhead signal boards that predicted coming trains creaked. They were all blank.
‘Ha,’ said the general. ‘Well.’
‘No trains,’ said Alice Banks. ‘It’s no better here than anywhere else.’
‘My dear, none whatever,’ said a sweet voice. Seated on a bench, wrapped round with rugs, a fur hat on her head and the Financial Times on her knee, sat Madeleine.
32
Philip, after refusing to go into the chip shop with Jack and Alice, had decided that he couldn’t even ac
cept the glossy newspaper parcel of cod and chips Jack had come out waving at him through the car window. Jack had gone back inside and stood looking helpless, whereupon The Missus had said, ‘Give us ’ere,’ and risen to her feet.
‘Just you eat it,’ she’d shouted through the glass to Philip. ‘Open that window. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I want to wash my hands. I don’t like this chippie.’
‘You’ve just washed your ’ands at your granny’s and you can go and wash them there again in ’alf an hour if you want.’ She had rattled at the car until he opened his window for her to drop the package in.
Jack’s face had brightened when he saw her coming back into the chippie without it. The Missus had not quite disintegrated after all.
After he’d left her at Mrs. Middleditch’s and arranged about the journey south for the following night, he and Philip had set off back to The Priors, and at the caravan park Jack stopped the car without warning and gazed at the site. It was the bleakest of days, worse than this morning. It was four-thirty and workers were going home. The narrow old trunk road had now for an hour or so become a teeming motorway. A car behind missed bashing into them by two inches and faces from following traffic blazed at them sideways as they passed.
Jack had stopped in the fast lane.
‘You’ll have us dead, Jack.’
Jack stared tenderly at the mobile homes.
‘What’s up, Jack?’
‘I was thinking. Philip—when the Tibetans go at Christmas, there are people here we might approach.’
‘These aren’t homeless. They’re in their homes. They may like them. They’d think you were after rehousing them.’
‘I feel I should make contact. I don’t think this is accidental. I think we may have been directed here today. I think I should call.’
‘Oh please, Jack, no. I want to get back. I’ve got my homework and I’m going over to the sheds to see my sister.’