“When did she come?”
He wanted to hear every detail of the story again. And when he heard it, he wanted to go home at once to his wife and to tell her. She would storm, she would say terrible things, but she would understand him. And he would warn her to keep the gate locked.
XXVIII
Mary Phibbs saw him before he saw her. He was coming fast down the hill which hung like a stone waterfall between the trees and houses. He was nearly at the lamp standard on the Boystone side of the second railway bridge, which was one of their meeting-places. He took long steps, his chin was stuck out as if he were looking for a fight, his head was down staring at the pavement, though sometimes he looked up in a shy fierce manner as if the light were too strong. When he saw her, he slowed down and smiled all over his face as if he had been suddenly let out of a cage. A cage, a dream: these were what he lived in. She looked away to the wall to hide her confidence. She was taller than he was and, remembering how Sis said she was clumsy, she put out her hands to give herself a graceful floating appearance, and pretended not to see him. She was concealing a smile. In one hand she was carrying the book he had given her.
He was an impatient boy, wrapped up in himself, Sis said, morbid. “It's funny our Mary liking him, but she's young.'5
The letters he wrote to her! “You'll have to get a new drawer, Mary,” Sis said. And the words he uses. He talked about love at once, before he felt it. Talk doesn't make feelings. Sis said, “You want to say No, Mary, you're too young, and say you will always treasure his friendship. Have you got a snap of him? Fancy, our Mary! Only yesterday I was pushing her in a pram and now she's blushing.” In bed at night it was, “Don't squeeze me so tight, Mary, you're choking me and you're pushing me out. I'm not Henry.” “Oh, Sis, how can you say?” “Well, when you are married to him, you'll be in bed, silly girl.” “Don't talk like that, Sis, it isn't right.” “I bet you talk about it, Mary, you two.” “No, we don't.” “Oh, so pure, so pi, go on, tell us, Mary, what does he say? Go on, Mary.” “Nothing, Sis, truly.” “Pooh, he sounds dry, too wrapped up, the family's a stuck-up lot. That's what Dadda says. Has he kissed you, Mary?” “Yes.” “Where?” “Never you mind.” “He hasn't ever kissed you, you'd like him to, but he hasn't.” “Yes, he has, Sis, in the birch woods.” “Cuddle and squeeze, Mary, I am surprised! Well, Mary, as long as you keep your self-respect.” “We trust each other, Sis.” “Oh, so you have talked! I've caught you out, you little sinner.”
Sis put her arm round her and her hands on Mary's small breasts and yawned with boredom. “Oh I'm so fagged, Mary,” Sis said. “I've been at it all day. What's life for? it makes you wonder. There's a new boy, he asked me to a dance, but I don't know. Doesn't Henry dance? Bring him, Mary.” “Oh, he couldn't, he doesn't dance, his father wouldn't let him.” “His father! Oh, Mary!” and Sis laughed into the pillow. “I'm making this pillow wet. How can his father stop him?” “He's strict, Sis. He's afraid of his father, Sis. Mr Beluncle is not like dad.” “Well, he's got to choose, Mary, be sensible, between you and his father, a boy can't play fast and loose, I'd tell him straight. That sort let you down.” “Stop it, Sis. Henry's not like that. I won't speak to you if you go on like that.” “Oh,” said Sis, “did you wind that blessed alarm? Thank goodness.” “Oh well, you keep so close, you don't tell us anything, Mary. Are you asleep, Mary? I'm sorry I said anything. Have I upset you?” “No.” “Girl, you're not crying?” “No.” “Mary.” And Sis laughed quietly and stroked her sister's back. “I know how you feel, Mary. You wish it was Henry stroking you. You do, I know you do. Isn't it lovely when he strokes you like I am? Oh, when Tom did, there I'm telling you, I don't mind, I used to feel…” she shuddered. “My, your cheeks are burning. You're blushing. He doesn't, does he?” “Yes,” whispered Mary. “What—I can't hear you, Mary. Tes, did you say? But, Mary, Mary girl, I shall have to shake you—listen. Don't let him do any more, will you? It's wrong.” “I never did, Sis. We wouldn't think of it.” “I'm glad to hear of it, Mary. You'll have a lot more boys, it's soft to get potty on one.”
Henry and Mary exchanged books. They were walking to the countrified edge of the town where the birch woods were falling to the builders at the south end. The trees went on trembling as if they had faces between them, till they stopped at the edge of the small, clay cliffs of Boystone pond, where youths stopped their motor-bicycles and threw stones into the water.
“Sis,” said Mary, “says I must be in love. She used to say it was calflove, but now she says it is love. Sis says you ought to speak out to your father. I mean, it is him or us, isn't it? I often think I'll give him a piece of my mind.”
“You mustn't,” said Henry, thinking of his father's sarcastic smile. Between Langford Avenue and Dean Road they spoke of Mr Beluncle, getting off the subject quickly for it led to Mr Chilly. What would Mr Chilly think of her?
“Let's sit down,” Henry said.
“If we can find a place,” said Mary, blushing. “In there I'll tear my dress. You should have heard Sis the last time I tore my green. You know my green?”
“We can go round by the gate.”
“When mother was a girl,” Mary said, climbing over, “it was considered wrong for a girl to show more than her ankles, not that I think much to shorts, except on bicycles.”
And sitting by the tree, as he put his arm round her and kissed her and put his hand into her small cold breasts, she pulled her frock down modestly over her legs.
“You worry me,” she said, feeling his skin burn against hers. “I often worry about you. Last night, I was thinking about you. Sis was asleep …”
“You sleep with Sis?” he said sharply, his hand going still on her breast.
“Of course,” she said. “Silly boy. Where do you think I sleep? I was thinking—you carry on too much. You're so wrapped up. I don't mean morbid. You've got your thoughts. I was thinking about you. When you're walking you look proud—there, I've given myself away. I wasn't going to tell you, you'll think it is flattery.”
“Last night, was that?” he said. “What time was it?”
“Late,” she said. “A good thing Sis was asleep. You never think of me.”
“I do. Last night I did.”
“Pooh,” she said. “Only last night?”
“Every night,” he said. “All the time.”
“You don't. You say you do. Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“Sis says we're too young and dad laughs. And mum, she looks so wise.”
“You talk about it to them?” said Henry, taking his arm away and looking at her.
“We've got no secrets in our family. It would be wrong to have secrets.”
“I don't tell anyone. I don't want to,” he said. “I've got to get home soon, before he gets back. It's deceiving, I know.”
“People who stop you when they've got no right get themselves deceived,” she said.
“It starts the whole thing—mother, Mrs Truslove, everything,” said Henry boastfully.
It was time for Henry to tell one of his stories. Mary hated his stories with all her heart. She hated not the stories themselves but their importance to him and his pride in them. She believed them but they frightened her. “You exaggerate,” she said.
“But it's true,” he said.
“That is why I hate it,” she said. “And you laugh!”
She tried to distract him by talking about her family, but there was little to be said of them.
“Dadda and mother have never had a cross word in their lives,” said Mary complacently. “We laugh at them. He loves her and she loves him. That's how it ought to be. If she's ill he never leaves her side; if he is ill, she hardly speaks to us. She has eyes for him alone. Like two doves.”
“Mine quarrel the whole time,” said Henry proudly. “They never stop. Five nights of the week they're at it, hammer and tongs.”
“That isn't love,” said Mary. “It can't be.”
“They oughtn't to have ma
rried,” said Henry fiercely.
“He kisses her when he comes in. He sits and holds her hand on the sofa,” said Mary. “Oh, you two, Sis says. Jealous? Dadda says. You have to smile.”
Henry could hear his father's voice after he had come from a church meeting. “That man Phibbs is nothing but a damn5 fool. Soft, socialistic, something wrong there. It's the Miss Wix lot.”
Henry's spirits sank and he took his arm from Mary's soft, heavy arm for a moment, to strike for the shore away from the happiness where the Phibbses swayed in the listless contentment of the drowned. He also wanted to gesticulate.
“We used to listen at night to them,” said Henry. “It was Mrs Parkinson, the Trusloves or the business. When we were at Romwich it was terri.”
He did not tell the true shames of Romwich: the carpet-less house, half the furniture gone, the man knocking at the front door one morning and his mother answering. “Name of Beluncle?” the man said. And his mother's lie that had held them transfixed in whispering and watching for days. “No one of that name here,” Mrs Beluncle said. “You not Mrs Beluncle?” “I'm the maid. Carter here”—her mother's name. Her voice was clear and firm and the man went. They watched him cross the road from behind the lace curtains of the front room.
“Mum, you said a lie.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“She said she was the maid because she was dirty in her apron,” Henry explained. And that they had all believed.
“Oh,” Mrs Beluncle suddenly moaned, and rocked tears out of herself in a chair. “It's the High Street, the summons, you wicked man.”
Henry did not tell Mary that part of the story. He jumped to the end of the family's life at Romwich. There was a difference in mental kind between himself and Mary, the difference between the wounded and the unwounded. He did not wish for sympathy. He did not wish for love. He wished to show himself. It was a kind of honesty which was to make clear to her that there was a distance between them, and that to be loved she must be like him. From the beginning his conversations were a warning; what he said of others, he was saying of himself.
The week they had left Romwich was the end of happiness and the beginning of passion. People talked about the war he did not remember; but the real war had begun during that week. He was a soldier in it, encamped, bored, drastic, never secure.
There was a white fog one morning outside the Beluncles' window, a fog like cold bed-clothes over the town. No one wanted to get up. They knew something was wrong when instead of his mother coming in and saying, “Get up you boys, you'll be late for school,” in came Mr Beluncle already dressed.
“Are you going now?” George asked, fearing that his father was going away.
“Get up, there's good children,” said Mr Beluncle gently. And his voice seemed to forgive them.
They got up in hurried silence and went downstairs. There were two strapped suitcases in the dark hall and against the dining-room window was the wall of white fog. The morning milk cart could be heard somewhere, crawling and rattling in it. They sat at the table. Their mother came in with her yellow hair done, her hat and coat on. It was frightening to see her in her best clothes and not in her apron. She looked like a woman and not a mother. She was sniffing tears from her face. She banged a plate down hard in each place, and with each bang, came a large sob as if she had a bird inside her.
“Get and eat it,” she said, and went out. The food might have been poisoned. Mr Beluncle followed her at a distance, stood still in the room, smiled. Too startled to eat, the children smiled boldly at him. “We are ready to be on your side,” their eyes said.
“Gome on in, Ethel,” Mr Beluncle called in a tired voice from the door, and then went to find her. Once more she came in with a teapot and carrying her large handbag, too; and, at the same distance, Mr Beluncle was following her. This time he had the expression of one silently whistling. Down went the teapot on the table and some tea gulped out of the spout and made a small pool on the cloth. That annoyed Mr Beluncle.
“The cloth,' he said sharply, and opened his mouth to say the price of it, but did not do so. Moaning, sobbing, Mrs Beluricle wandered in a dazed way round the table, talking to herself. They watched her with interest. Was she mad?
“Sit down,” said Beluncle quietly.
“Oh,” Mrs Beluncle suddenly screamed, “don't you dare talk to me.” The children lowered their eyes and very slowly raised their forks to their mouths.
“Is Grandma Garter dead?” said George, out of feeling for the squalor of tragedy.
“Stop that boy saying wicked things,” cried out Mrs Beluncle.
“Get on with your breakfast, George,” said Mr Beluncle.
“Where are you going, mum?” said Henry.
“Away,” said Mrs Beluncle, looking at Henry with contempt, “—away from the lot of you.”
Leslie was out of his chair and under the table at once. George dropped his knife and fork and cried into his plate. Henry's heart rang inside him like a hammer, in hard, regular, workshop blows.
“She'll look after you, no doubt,” cried Mrs Beluncle. “She'll do it all, without a maid. You'll have her….”
“Who?” said Henry.
“Bring that woman down here,” cried Mrs Beluncle, pointing to their father. He smiled apologetically and kindly at them.
“Your mother is upset, not very well, has a headache,” he said. He hummed, at a loss, and then began to sing. ” 'Oh dry those tears, oh calm those fears,' ” Mr Beluncle sang.
“Ah, ha, ha!” laughed Mrs Beluncle, in hysteria, pushing past her husband, and because she laughed, the children laughed too. Leslie came out from one side of the table to look.
They were ashamed by their laughter. They stopped laughing when they saw their mother stop and look at them with the quivering fear of a cornered rabbit. Her fear created fear in them. She gave them one incredulous look and then left the room for the hall. They heard her open the front door. Henry ran from the table to the hall. George followed him. Leslie took a piece of bacon from a plate and remained in the room, undecided, eating it; Mr Beluncle tickled his neck as he passed the little boy and went out to her. Leslie went round to the other plates.
She was standing in the hall, pulling at a brown fur with a fox's head on it. It had bead eyes and little soft paws; it was a fur that smelled of train tunnels, and with that round her, though she could be a pretty woman, she looked choked and wolfish.
“Ah,” she said, “you think you have trapped me here, chaining me up like that dog outside, with three young children, look at their stockings all holes, you made a mistake.
“A large mistake,” she said. “I'm going.”
Mr Beluncle was not outwardly alarmed but stood back at the foot of the stairs to make room for them. The hall was tiny. The builder at Romwich (Mr Beluncle had said) had never tried swinging a cat in it. Mr Beluncle stood back like a producer.
“You'll understand this better when you're grown up,” he said to Henry, who stood weighing up his father and his mother. And to his wife, he said:
“The door is open. There is nothing to stop you.”
“I'm going. I'm going, I tell you,” said Mrs Beluncle. They were all suddenly indignant with her.
“I'm staying with dad,” said George, taking his father's hand. Henry's heart had gone; he swayed from one party to the other and while he swayed his mother gave him a sharp look.
“Henry,” she said, “come here.” And at the same time, she put out her hard hand, caught his wrist and pulled. Henry looked back at his father for forgiveness, but Mr Beluncle smiled.
“Get your coat on,” she said to Henry.
“You're hurting my wrists.”
“Here,” she said, and she pulled his coat off the peg, dragging other coats down with it; and still holding him she made him put it on. He stepped away when his hand was free, but she caught him by the wrist violently.
“You're to come with me,” she said.
And she opened the door
wide, the fog came in like an inane and wet, white face, and Henry was pulled after her, looking back to signal, “I am sorry. You see how it is. I am forced.”
Leslie, the small boy, laughed.
“You'll laugh,” Mrs Beluncle said, pulling Henry into the front garden, “on the other side of your face when they drag the canal.”
“You've forgotten the suitcase,” called Mr Beluncle.
Confused by the sudden jeer, the sudden dead silence of a London street where the fog had stopped all traffic, hurt by his mother's grip on his wrist, Henry half trotted to keep up with her racing step.
“Don't run, mother.
“I can't keep up.”
He was pulling her back, ashamed of her. Her small face in its fur was as keen as a rat's, intense, hunting, unhealing. He was glad of the emptiness of the street, dreaded this boy or that coming out of the gates of their houses. He was glad of high hedges to the gardens, and he ducked by the low ones.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “Let me go.”
And yet, also, he felt enormously important at being alone with her. Their steps raised hard echoes in the fog along the walls of the houses which could be known only by their smells. They turned the corner at the bottom of the street. They crossed the next road blindly. They took a sudden turn to the right. He could not guess where they were going and she did not speak once.
And then the ground softened and he saw they were under the trees going to the park, and through its wide stone gates they went, stumbling over the soft riding way and across to the high banks of spilling laurels where the fog seemed to hang over them in grey waves and to come blowing down as cold as sea water.
They took an asphalt path, then left it for the grass, and now into empty acres of whiteness they went, as if the place were a steppe in some slow and noiseless blizzard. Then he heard within two or three yards of them the cluck of waterfowl, secluded and untroubled, on their empty lake.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 23