by Helen Harris
His voice at the other end of the line was the first familiar, friendly thing in the whole distressing morning, and that must have been why, when he was so terribly sweet and understanding and said, ‘Good heavens, what a fearful shock for you,’ I suddenly started to cry.
I didn’t go back to the museum, as he suggested, until the following day. In the afternoon, Alicia’s social worker came round and began to make the first arrangements for disposing of the house and of Alicia’s many possessions. My presence plainly put her out, as it had put out the chubby ambulance man, because I didn’t fit into any officially recognized category, yet she could hardly evict me from the house.
She was a scurrying mousey woman, who seemed half-crushed by the weight of her official cares and worries. But she went about her business with determined good humour, drawing up lists and looking in room after room in the hope of finding some scrap of paper which would indicate Alicia’s last wishes. Only when the long and dusty search had proved fruitless, and it became clear that the entire task of tidying up Alicia’s affairs would fall on her, did one uncharacteristically sharp remark escape her: ‘It’s quite impossible to get these old things to make a will, you know. Really, anyone would think they thought they were immortal.’
Mr Charles was looking out for me on Tuesday morning. He leapt up when I appeared in the doorway of his room and, beckoning keenly, called, ‘Come in, come in!’
He motioned me to the leather armchair. ‘Sit down, my dear. How are you feeling?’
My knees folded beneath me and I sat down with a bump. Mr Charles had said ‘my dear’, Mr Charles had called me ‘my dear’. Dazedly, I mumbled, ‘I – I’m fine, thank you very much, Mr Charles.’
He clasped his hands tensely in front of his waistcoat and he said, ‘You must take it easy these next few days, Alison. I know there’s a great temptation to soldier on regardless, but you shouldn’t push yourself. Please don’t take any more on board than you feel you want to.’
I thanked him and I tried to crack a feeble joke about how nice it was to hear advice like that from one’s boss.
He more or less ignored my joke and went on, ‘Now, I don’t know if you’ve made any arrangements for today, but, just in case you were free, I’ve booked us lunch at the Pescatore. If – if that appeals to you, of course?’
All morning, as I sat at my desk, dutifully not working and browsing through back numbers of fine arts magazines, I mused on this significant development. Unmistakably, it seemed to me, Mr Charles was revealing his intentions at last. He had never called me ‘my dear’ before. When lunch-time came, I took one of the flowers from the beautiful bouquet he had left in a vase on my desk and made myself a buttonhole of it.
He pretended the flowers were just ‘a token of thanks’ for all the hours I had put in on his book when I tried to thank him for them over lunch. But it was quite clear to me from the way he blushed that, of course, they were nothing of the sort.
The Pescatore is several notches above the Sovereign Grill. Italian waiters fussed around us with giant menus and starched serviettes and when the food had been brought, they kept popping up again beside us to offer an outsize pepper mill and to enquire if everything was to our taste? It was a pity really that I didn’t have much appetite, because the meal was delicious. I did my best, toying with the fettucini and the escalope, but the combination of the upsets of recent days and now this overture from Mr Charles made it almost impossible for me to swallow a mouthful.
Mr Charles looked at me with concern. ‘Why, Alison,’ he said, ‘you’re eating like a bird.’
I blushed; I didn’t want him to suspect that half the reason was my tense good behaviour in the face of his advances. ‘Oh, it’s all delicious,’ I assured him. ‘It’s just that I haven’t had much of an appetite, I’m afraid, the last couple of days.’
Mr Charles nodded sympathetically. ‘That’s only to be expected, I suppose, isn’t it?’ he said kindly. ‘Just don’t overdo it now, will you? I should hate you to waste away.’
He suggested a little digestive stroll along Knightsbridge after lunch, before we went back to our desks. I wished rather childishly that someone I knew would walk past and see me strolling beside him, such a smart, distinguished-looking figure.
Rob was due back from Swansea on Tuesday evening. On the desk in his study, he would find the note which I had left for him, informing him of the decision I had reached. It said that at a mutually convenient time I would come back to collect my belongings. All evening, I sat taut in Alicia’s front room and waited for the phone to ring. I hadn’t told him where I’d gone to, but I was quite sure he would guess. When the phone didn’t ring and it at last got so late that I knew Rob wasn’t going to call, I felt quite aggrieved. I had wanted him to ring, repentant, in floods of tears.
On Wednesday morning I rang him in the end, myself. My pretext was to check that he was safely back, that he was ‘all right’. But at the sound of his voice at the other end, I had such a strong physical reaction that, for a moment, I could barely speak.
I stammered, ‘Rob?’
There was a short pause before he replied, ‘Well, well.’
‘I wanted to check you were OK,’ I said unconvincingly.
After another pause, he said, ‘I’m fine.’ Then he asked, ‘You’re with your aged soul-mate, I presume?’
I said, ‘Yes,’ which wasn’t entirely a lie. I didn’t dare tell him what had happened. I was worried that left here all by myself, I wouldn’t stay convinced for long that I had made the right decision, that Rob was really such a good-for-nothing after all, if he decided to stage a comeback. But he didn’t.
‘Well, I don’t think there’s very much more to say then, really, is there?’ he said sullenly. ‘When do you want to come over and pick up your stuff?’
Furiously, I answered, ‘Oh, whenever. Preferably when you’re out.’
How dare he take it so casually? I thought indignantly. He obviously doesn’t care at all.
Rob gave a little hard, hurt laugh. ‘Well, you can come any time over the weekend, then,’ he said shortly. ‘I think I’ll probably be off in Swansea again.’
As I put the phone down, I was startled by a ring at Alicia’s front door. Someone, a big figure, had come up to the door while I was talking to Rob and now stood imperiously on the other side of the stained glass.
I opened the door apprehensively to face a large black lady, who appeared so astonished at the sight of me that her eyebrows shot up towards her fuchsia sunhat and she exclaimed, ‘Goodness gracious, whatever are you doing here?’
It was Mrs Cunningham, Pearl, Alicia’s little-loved home-help. For a moment, I wondered how to break the news to her. But I didn’t imagine she’d be that upset, and I thought that maybe she knew anyway and had been sent along to help clear up. So I just said, ‘Well, you’ve heard what happened? You know Mrs Queripel died?’
I was quite unprepared for Pearl’s reaction. She gasped, ‘Oh God!’ and clutched onto the door jamb, collapsing before my eyes like a deflated balloon.
‘Come in,’ I said hastily. ‘Come in, sit down.’
I led her into the kitchen and, even though I was going to be late for work yet again, I made us both a cup of tea. I told her briefly what had happened. She seemed terribly distressed. She took off her sunhat, as though respectfully uncovering herself, and sat there, shaking her head sorrowfully. Finally she said, ‘Well, at least she’s in peace now, poor soul.’
I nodded solemnly,
‘I suppose I should get on with the cleaning anyway,’ she added, ‘since no one’s told me to the contrary.’
As I got ready to leave for the museum, she asked me when the funeral would be.
I exclaimed tactlessly, ‘Gosh, will you be coming?’
Pearl looked me defiantly in the eye. ‘Can you give me one good reason why not?’ she asked. Then she relented. ‘She won’t have anyone else much, will she, poor dear?’
As I got my bits and pieces t
ogether in the hall, I could hear her sigh all the way from the scullery; a great gusty sigh which seemed to carry all the cares in her world.
All week, Mr Charles continued to cosset me. He didn’t give me anything the least bit taxing to do and turned a blind eye to my late arrivals and long lunch-hours, during one of which I stupidly cycled over to Holland Park and rode twice past Rob’s house, looking casually up at his open study window. I wondered if Mr Charles suspected that it was more than Alicia’s death which was affecting me. He has never asked me anything about my private life of course – he wouldn’t dream of it – but I thought that now things were beginning to change between us, maybe he might. But, although he continued to be as solicitous as ever, he still didn’t ask me a thing.
Then, on Friday afternoon, I had to take time off for the funeral. As I was leaving the museum, Mr Charles stopped me in the corridor and said, ‘Off now, are you? Oh dear, never joyous occasions, I’m afraid.’ He seemed to have something else on his mind. He hesitated and drummed on a nearby radiator with his long fingers. Then, in a staccato rush, he added, ‘Please don’t take this amiss, my dear. I have no idea what your plans are for the weekend. Maybe my concern is quite misplaced. But I wondered if maybe you might like my home telephone number, just in case? Forgive me if I’m stepping out of line here. But I don’t want you sitting alone, feeling low, over the weekend.’
It wasn’t much of a funeral. I couldn’t help thinking how sniffy Alicia would have been if she had seen it. There were only four people there apart from the clergyman: Pearl, Miss Midgley and I, and the Indian shopkeeper, Mr Patel, to whom I had thought to mention it when I dropped in to buy my supper the previous evening. It was the people to whom Alicia must have been the nastiest, I thought, the new black faces in her neighbourhood, whom she regarded as cockroaches in her larder, who had rallied round her in the end. We stood in a small silent row at the front of the empty crematorium chapel and, when the short service was over, we all shook hands as though to congratulate one another on having done our duty. Then Miss Midgley gave us a lift back to Shepherd’s Bush tube in her Mini, which smelt of dog.
Over the weekend, inevitably, a few regrets began to surface. It wasn’t much fun sitting alone in Alicia’s house, listening to the noises in the roof. I had an especially low moment when I went over to Rob’s flat to start packing up my possessions. There were too many to move in one go, so we had agreed I would only take with me what I wanted immediately and Rob would bring over everything else in the Jagannath during the week. As I went through the silent rooms, separating what was mine from what was his, I wondered whether he really was with Sarah Anderson, or whether he had just suggested her to provoke me into changing my mind. I tried to imagine what she might be like. Bitterly, and I am sure quite unjustly, considering Rob had said something about her work telephone number, I suddenly thought, ‘I bet she’s unemployed. I bet Rob’s taken up with her to get good background material for his play.’ I remembered reading the first satirical section of Print-Out, in which clerks with scratchy quill pens labour over ledgers in a Dickensian counting-house. I remembered recognizing one or two of my own quirks in one of the characters and worrying that maybe that was all Rob had originally wanted me for; as a study of an old-fashioned personality. It was a pretty silly line of thought, but it got me angry enough to leave the flat on a wave of righteous indignation, turning the Chubb smartly behind me and thinking, ‘I’m well rid of him.’
Once or twice, towards the end of Sunday, I was very tempted to take up Mr Charles’s offer and telephone him at home. But I resisted the temptation; I didn’t want him to think I was too keen at the beginning.
It was wonderful to get back to my cubby-hole on Monday morning. I wore the blue and white dress which I had finished sewing on Sunday afternoon. I must say, I was a little disappointed that Mr Charles didn’t pay me any compliment on it because I thought it looked particularly pretty. As I walked in through the hall, Milton wolf-whistled and called out to me, ‘Hey-hey, who’s the lucky fella, Alison?’ Mr Charles never has made any comments about my appearance, come to think of it, but now I somehow expected that he would.
I whiled away the first part of the morning, until coffee-time, doing little odds and ends in my room. Reluctantly, I threw away the wilted flowers from my desk and wondered when I might receive some more.
It was still just as hot and, as the day wore on, I found myself more than once drifting off into a trance. Mr Charles was busy next door, entertaining a visitor from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. As I lolled at my desk, I could hear his voice intermittently in the distance, grave and authoritative like a BBC announcer. I knew the visitor from Vienna was inviting Mr Charles to a conference next spring and I indulged in a sleepy fantasy in which Mr Charles invited me to come with him. I imagined the two of us sitting in a Viennese café, eating chocolate cake; me in my blue and white dress, and Mr Charles, the picture of an upper-class Englishman on holiday, in a striped blazer and a straw hat. I even imagined, the height of schmaltz, a background of gypsy violins.
Mr Charles took his Viennese visitor out to lunch and they were gone for a long time. I whiled away my lunch-hour reading in the sun in the museum garden and inside afterwards I found it almost impossible to keep my eyes open. The noise of the tea-trolley in the corridor brought me to with a jolt. Why, the afternoon was nearly over and Mr Charles hadn’t been in to see me all day. I smarted as I realized from the silence next door that the Austrian gentleman must have left, without Mr Charles even bringing him in to introduce us. Suddenly, a snaky doubt wriggled through my trance. What if I had got it all wrong? What if, now that the worst of my upset was over, Mr Charles was just going to return to the way things had always been between us before? I thought over the years that he and I had worked together and how slight the signs were on which I had started to build our future. I worried that Mr Charles might really be rather a chilly repressed person.
About the Author
For the last ten years Helen Harris has lived in London, writing short stories and working first as a translator and a tourist information officer, and then as a freelance magazine researcher. She has travelled very widely, including India and the Middle East.
Playing Fields in Winter, her first novel, won the Author’s Club First Novel award and was short-listed for the Betty Trask Award. Her short stories have appeared in a great many magazines and anthologies, including Punch and the Penguin Firebird collection.
By the Same Author
PLAYING FIELDS IN WINTER
Copyright
This ebook published in Great Britain by
Halban Publishers Ltd.
22 Golden Square
London W1F 9JW
2014
www.halbanpublishers.com
First published in Great Britain in 1987 by
Century Hutchinson Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Publishers.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–905559–76–3
Copyright © 1987 by Helen Harris
Helen Harris has asserted her right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act,1988 to be identified as the author of this work.