by Jane Gardam
I’ll go for the paint, she thought, finish the backcloth. That’s alright anyway. It’ll be good. I’ll finish it whatever, before I go. I’ll leave it for them, even if they throw it away afterwards. It will be my present to Jack. Forever. God knows if he’ll have a clue what it means. But it is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
She passed Ernie near the early warning system globes, head down over the bike, helmeted like Camelot. He raised a great black arm in greeting as she went by and she tooted back, surprised and pleased by the salute.
So pleased that she found tears in her eyes.
He’s only a kid, she thought; poor little soul, what is there for him? Nick gone, he’ll be in trouble in five minutes. All Jack will do is pray for him and stand around helpless. Poor lad, he’s never made a good decision in his life. It’ll be drugs and AIDS by the time he’s thirty. Poor little rat.
‘Where’s Philip?’ asked Jack when she reached The Priors.
She said, ‘Oh God—I forgot him.’
35
And so, my dear Madeleine, who’s to meet her at the other end, if I may ask? I thought you were?’
‘Goodness, no. I only got up to London last night. I have my Christmas shopping to do; one can’t do it in Deal. Dear Henry’s meeting her.’
‘How can he know which train? And who’s Henry?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows which train these days. I’ll telephone him in a minute. They amalgamate them all, you know. If they don’t get enough in one train they let it lie about and fill up with the ones aiming for the next one. I wonder what they do with the extra drivers. Oh, it’s all so different, Robert—’
‘Giles.’
‘Giles. I often wonder if there are any drivers, as a matter of fact. You never see them. Each end looks exactly the same, like caterpillars. I expect it’s all computers. Darling Giles, how we all take our lives in our hands. It was so much safer in the war.’
‘We must telephone Henry whoever-he-is at once,’ said Giles. ‘I don’t think that woman’s been about much.’
‘She seemed very much in control to me. Very au fait. Not at all overawed by anything. She’s like these people you see in television plays or on the radio. You rarely meet any in real life. I don’t think these creative people, writers and so on, go about very much outside their own sort. Much less than Alice Banks. Of course, you don’t have to. Look at Balzac: far too busy to do any research. But then, he knew something to start with.’
‘I hope she gets something to eat on the train,’ said kind Giles. ‘She must be eighty.’
Madeleine looked vain—and indifferent. ‘They put a trolley on at Ashford. Henry’s my man, Giles.’
‘Your man?’
‘Those trolleys are marvellous when they remember to put them on. Curry sandwiches. Beer. I do rather enjoy beer. Shall we go to the Academic Ladies?’
‘Whoever are they?’
‘My club, beloved Giles. Where I stayed, of course, last night.’
‘Why “of course?” I thought you couldn’t leave Puffy overnight. I thought that was why we had to find you Miss Banks?’
‘And you did find me Miss Banks, you and dear Thomasina, and I can’t tell you how grateful . . . and I did get up and come to the station this morning at a very early hour to look her over, didn’t I? Whatever would we have found to talk about if we’d gone down together to the coast? No. I’ve seen her. She will be marvellous. So now, you and I shall set off for the Club. I’ll give you breakfast and you shall give me lunch. Don’t be silly, you’ve plenty of time. Then we’ll do a little Christmas shopping and go to the cinema. We’ll go to the Chelsea Classic in the King’s Road.’
‘It’s been gone these twenty years, Madeleine.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘they disappear before you can say you loved them. “What’s become of Waring . . . ”’
Giles paid off the taxi and they went into the Academic Ladies’ Club, where various academic ladies were quietly eating toast.
‘Breakfast’s over,’ said the severe academic lady on the desk.
Madeleine smiled at another one chomping bacon in a corner.
‘We are only obliging Dr. Crass.’
‘Then do oblige us. We are ravenous after a journey.’
‘You had breakfast at seven o’clock, Lady Madeleine, at some disturbance to the kitchen.’
But breakfast was brought. When the coffee had been returned and replaced for some that was hotter, Madeleine smiled around the shabby pastel dining room, lightening the colourless December day.
‘Coffee’s good.’ Giles was warming up, too, beginning to accept the bizarre morning (and still scarcely after nine). ‘What a surprise, you and I here together, Madeleine.’
‘Not exactly. Such a chance. To meet alone. After so very long.’
The sunlight on her skin lit the pale freckles on her hands. A fawn blotch like the map of Northern Ireland shaded her left cheek. He felt love and sadness.
They lunched at the Royal Academy and proceeded on foot to the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery (‘Such a strange hobby for a grocer’) and then on to the Courtauld exhibition in the Strand.
‘We might have tea in a McDonald’s. There’s one by the Law Courts somewhere.’
‘Can you sit down in them?’
‘You’re not tired, Miles?’
‘Giles. No. Wonky leg.’
‘Oh, men and their legs. Tea, my dear child. China, please.’
‘I think you order from the counter, Madeleine.’
‘Then you shall order for me. Child, excuse me. May we have a smoking table, please. A silly thing to have to say; it sounds as if we’re on the slopes of Mount Etna. What? None of them? Oh how strong-minded you all are these days. What a curious menu—all kinds of fried things and sauces, and three o’clock in the afternoon. I shall have the chicken nuggets—no, the fish.’
‘Fish?’ Giles was having a cup of tea.
‘Yes, it’ll save us bothering with any dinner. I shall dine at the Club.’
‘Madeleine,’ he reached for her hand, ‘you’ll do nothing of the sort and you know it and you are lying. You’ll ring up some old flame and get taken to Claridge’s.’
‘You’re my only old flame, Richard.’
‘Rubbish. Giles.’
‘Giles—you are my one volcano. My conflagration.’
‘Well, I’d never have guessed.’ (Why the hell couldn’t she have been like this at twenty?)
‘Giles, how strange, they’ve put this fish in a paper bag. Inside a bread roll. And where are the knives and forks?’
‘I don’t think they have them. Shall we order two milk shakes?’
‘How lovely. I feel American—fish and milk shakes at tea time. Ralph, d’you see how they’re looking at my fur hat? Am I overdressed? Ralph, it’s years since I had such fun.’
‘Giles. Yes. I suppose life’s not very jolly for you with Puffy, poor old boy.’
But she said at once, ‘Life is no fun at all for Puffy, that’s what one has to remember. England has died for him. He probably suffers more than any of us. He looks the stupidest of us, but he is in fact the most intelligent. I’ll never leave Puffy, Giles. Never. He is heroic and wonderful. Yes, please, delicious tartar sauce, and what a pretty little plastic thing it’s in, just like an aeroplane. We can take it home, where there will be scissors, and spread it on something. No, Puffy is a wonderful man. That’s why I have employed this excellent though expensive woman. Dear Thomasina—so clever to find her. Thomasina, Giles, will be in time a woman who can accomplish anything. Anything. She will become the strongest of us. At present she’s only the most astringent. The most inarticulate and very much the loneliest. But she will become the strongest.’
He saw her into a taxi, en route for some Scarlatti and her granddaughter, whom she’d got him to te
lephone from the McDonald’s wall phone. ‘She’s the fat one who got married the other day. A frightful wedding. They kept blowing hunting horns and all the people round the church gate were wanting to chop up foxes. I’ll tell you all about it one day.’
‘Anthony,’ she said from the taxi, ‘think whether you can cope with somebody so serious as Thomasina. She might kill you. Goodbye, my love.’
Crossing the bridge back to Waterloo for the train to Surrey, he remembered he was supposed to have been buying pasta for supper and reaching Thomasina well in time for tea.
36
The grey-faced Missus slept through most of Kent, missing the hop-poles and the oasts and the regiments of poplars protecting the bagatelle boards of the orchards. A refreshment trolley did appear at Ashford but it had run out of tea. She asked for a cup of water but was told that the urn was dry. There was Coke at a pound, orange fizz or alcohol, and she gave the fat teenager with the sad face a look.
‘Can’t you get another job?’ she asked.
No, she was told, and: ‘They’ve even stopped us using the lifts to get an urn fill-up at the depot. It’s to save electricity.’
‘I’d run up and down the stairs if I was you,’ said The Missus, and the trolley wended its depressing way.
A station or so later; so did the only other passenger in the compartment. The train clattered on through the desolation round the entrance to the French tunnel. At Dover the sea arrived and then the white cliffs with long yellow-ochre stains running down them from the rain. Like lavatory pans, thought The Missus.
A castle stood on a green hill, looking like a toy. The Missus thought it not a patch on Whitby Abbey and probably a fake. The train groaned into a small tunnel of its own and stopped. In the dark silence The Missus listened to the whisper of the sea. The train ground out of the tunnel and for a time the sea seemed to be lapping its rails, slapping its flanks. Stony beaches lay below, like glittering whirlpools in the wet. The sea had a thick streak of blue-black horizon with bumps on it. France.
South, thought The Missus. You won’t get me over there. South does for you. I don’t travel. Gracie Fields.
The train stopped at her station and she flung out her suitcases one by one, and then the bundles, climbing down after them. There was a nicely painted footbridge over the line to a ticket office, where hanging flower baskets were waiting for summer. Posh. A couple of damp-looking youths were horsing about the platform shelter but when they saw The Missus they ran off. The Missus couldn’t understand what they said. Maybe they were over from France.
She gathered her belongings about her in the shelter and sat on the cold bench. ‘I’m not shifting till I’m fetched. That’s the head and tail of it,’ she said. Rain clattered on the roof and the wind blew. ‘The long and the short of it,’ said The Missus. She began to eat her sandwiches, which were damp and limp as wet handkerchiefs but very welcome. After half an hour she said, ‘That’s the top and bottom of it. Here I stay.’
A figure was crossing the bridge towards her. Dressed in a pillbox hat and a short cloak that swung as he walked. He stood before her in the shelter and looked her over.
‘Miss Banks?’
‘I am.’ She crumpled her sandwich paper and stood up and held out her hand. It was ignored.
‘I am Henry Jones. I am the Seton-Fairley manservant.’
‘Oh, you are.’
‘I am in charge of staff.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m very sorry to be late but I have only just received the time of your arrival.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. I thought they’d forget. Where’s the car?’
‘I’m afraid the Seton-Fairleys are both too old to own a car.’
‘Well, the taxi.’
‘Taxis have to be ordered in advance and it is no great distance. You seem to have a lot of luggage.’
‘Well, I’m supposed to be here for permanent. Get me a taxi.’
‘I’m sure we shall manage.’
Again the cases were heaved up, the bundles clutched, and they set off, Henry Jones swinging his cloak ahead of her along the edge of the little town, up a steep wooden staircase to the ramparts, down into a cobbled street of medieval houses.
‘They’ve got this in York,’ said The Missus, ‘but bigger.’
‘This is one of only three perfect medieval towns in the country, built on the old grid system. It attracts a particular class of person. We live to a great age here, what with the golf and the good medical attention. Like Frinton. We have standards here.’
‘Didn’t think there was anything perfect in this country any more.’
‘Times have certainly changed,’ said Henry Jones, inclining his head. (Thinks he’s a butler. He’s seen that film. Can’t be thirty. Nice boy, though.) ‘For example, staff is very short these days. Living-in-staff, that’s to say. I’m worked off my feet about the town. I look after half a dozen. Dying off now, of course, a great many of them, the India and Kenya expats. You used to be able to get eight different kinds of chutney in The Stores. I should prefer one place only but it’s out of the question. I get calls from all and sundry. Often at night.’
I can imagine the sundry, she thought. ‘Is everybody old here, then? Sort of sheltered accommodation place?’
‘It is elderly.’
Godalmighty, thought The Missus.
‘Here we are,’ said he.
She was surprised to see that the Seton-Fairley establishment was far from large. It was also far from medieval, being a sensible bungalow on a 1950s estate protected from its neighbours by a wattle fence that waved a little in the rainy wind. A heavy roof was clamped down over low compressed-brick walls. The metal windows had rusty trickles of damp from the corners and were shrouded in thick net curtains. Inside, in the stingy sitting room, was a gleaming orthopaedic chair of giant proportions, a hoist with handle and bar hanging above it like a gallows. On the chair, reclining at a steep angle, lay colossal Puffy gazing upwards at a small chandelier.
‘This is Miss Banks,’ said Henry Jones. ‘Colonel Seton-Fairley.’
Again The Missus held out her hand and again it was ignored. She regarded him.
‘I shall make tea,’ said Henry Jones. ‘The colonel and I have had our lunch.’
When he had left the room The Missus with difficulty walked round the chair. Puffy blew air out of his lips and turned his head away. The Missus saw great legs, the fat paws of a bear, the head of a dying lion.
‘Thank you, Mr. Jones,’ she said when he came in with the tea, ‘I’ll manage now. I’ll cook myself something. I’ve come a long way. Off you go.’
He was halted by this. He had removed his pillbox hat and his pigtail lay over his shoulder.
‘You remind me of our Ernie,’ she said. ‘A very nice boy, though you’d not think it to look at him. Quite my favourite except for Philip. I’ll tell you about Philip later on. Now Ernie stays aloof. Feckless but good-hearted. Not like his friend Nick, oh dear me no. Nick’s not your nancy-boy type, he’s been a burglar. There’s a lot of crime where I come from. Very rough place now.’
Henry Jones made to speak.
‘A lot of good things, too, mind you. I’ll enjoy telling you. From the telly, you see, you get the wrong picture. Different habits. Shaking hands for one. It’s thought to be polite with us, shared with France, though I’d not go near the place myself. Well, it’d be us taught them, the Normans. We’d likely been shaking hands before the Normans, having natural good manners when you understand us. Maybe from the Romans. We still have history up there, you see. Not that Nick type, though. Mind you, if Romans is Italians I’d doubt it—they’re all for kissing. No, where I come from we’re formal. Surnames and titles. So you’ll be Mr. Jones to me and I’m Miss Banks. Now, if you’ve poured that tea for the colonel you can go.’
‘I’m afraid that I am in charge h
ere, Miss Banks—’
‘Not now, you’re not, Mr. Jones.’
‘I think your manners are not French at all. They are uncouth.’
‘Now then, stop that. I’m old enough to be your granny and you don’t talk to me like that. Leave your phone number in case there’s disaster in the night. I’m not sure of this hoist. Well, I’m not sure of nursing at all and it wasn’t mentioned, but we’ll see how we get on.’
‘I think that you and I should have a discussion . . . ’
‘Yes. Well. When her ladyship gets herself back’s time enough. Just take me things to me bedroom, will you, and then get yourself away.’
He went.
He turned with a petulant flourish at the door but she waved him on. She looked her bedroom over and thought little of it after the hospitium, returned to the sitting room and again walked round the chair.
‘Did you get any decent dinner?’ she enquired.
A blue eye rolled in her direction and a surprisingly soft voice, high and courteous, said, ‘Thank you, yes.’
‘You’ve drunk that tea?’
‘Just now.’
‘No cakes or biscuits?’
‘Alas—not allowed.’
She went to the kitchen and saw that salads had been put out for supper. She began to cook a pound of pork sausages she had brought with her in one of her bundles and when they were thoroughly blackened and shining she added onions and a lot of butter. In the speckled fat she made fried bread and carried it all on two plates along with a fresh pot of strong tea into the sitting room.
‘How do you eat?’
‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that you feed me.’
‘It’s sausages.’
‘I’m not allowed sausages.’
‘Oh, bugger that,’ said The Missus.
She experimented with the chair and at length managed to manoeuvre it into a more upright position. She pumped at a lever to lower it and stuck a bit of sausage into the rather dizzy Puffy’s mouth. He munched.