by Jane Gardam
19.
It will be yours,’ said Rosalie to Mr Drinkwater.
The Renoir had been secured in Drinkwater’s easel and stood near the bed where she could see it close, leaving behind it, high on the wall, a pale patch of sunnier summer green than Rosalie would have believed possible. The room long ago must have been perfectly garish! Booth had supervised that frightful gardener this morning and there had been great play with a huge pair of steps which still stood in the room, giving it an air of removals. The two tall triangles of the steps and the heavy easel nearby were upsetting Drinkwater.
‘Hope you’re not thinking of spring-cleaning,’ he said.
‘Not just now.’
‘No. Wouldn’t be wise. Unseasonable. Too much for us all.’
‘Yes. The Renoir, Edwin, is for you.’
‘For me?’ He went over and peered at it.
‘When I die. I have left it to you.’
‘Oh, no. No, no, no. Unnecessary.’
‘You will sell it,’ she said, ‘or rather my lawyers will sell it for you if you need the money.’
‘I’m quite well supplied,’ he said. ‘Quite adequately remunerated.’ Peering close he said, ‘It won’t be worth much.’
‘It is. Already. But one day it will be worth very much more. It is one of his best.’
‘Don’t like Renoir.’
‘You’re jealous.’
‘Not at all. Fat girls. No. I don’t want it. I’ll have a Crome if there’s one going.’
‘You sound as if you’re asking for a cream bun.’
‘That’s a cream bun.’ He tapped the Renoir like a barometer.
‘Rubbish! Don’t you really want it? I could leave you . . . ’
‘Leave, leave! Pairs of steps. Removals. Spring-cleaning—where you going? Not realistic.’
‘Realistic?’
‘To talk of moving. In your condition.’
‘I shall soon move, nevertheless.’
Prowling about the room Drinkwater said, ‘Lear lived for years. Always falling about.’
‘The king or the poet?’
‘The painter. All of them. Same old joke.’
They laughed.
‘You are a very clever man,’ she said, ‘but your brain hops too fast. Why don’t you want the Renoir? You mean it?’
He examined the pale brocade of a curtain—pearl green. He took a rose from the buttonhole in his linen suit and held it against the brocade. The rose was peach-coloured. He moved the rose and held it against a blue silk chair. ‘Either is good,’ he said.
‘There is a Crome.’
‘Ah!’
‘It was for Charles. All the pictures are for Charles except the Renoir, and the money—what’s left and it won’t be so bad—the money’s for poor Binkie. Nobody else. Booth a thousand.’
‘One in a thousand,’ said Drinkwater.
‘Let’s hope so,’ she said. ‘Two would be terrible.’ They laughed. She felt a heaviness in him after a moment as he wandered about. ‘Are you all right? Have you a headache?’
‘That girl—that child . . . ’
‘The little Renoir? What about her?’
‘Could do with seeing her. Like to paint her. No Renoir. No cream-bun element. Bony. Never cared for jam puffs.’ He shambled away behind her into the conservatory and Rosalie heard, with ears grown sharper as the rest of her faded, the slight movement of the door handle of the drawing-room and the door opening a jot. The hushed voices of Booth and the doctor were ending a conversation.
‘Good gracious, the steps!’ Booth cried out loudly as she came in, ‘I’m sorry, doctor. The man should have taken them away.’
‘I see the Renoir has approached,’ said the doctor. ‘Ha . . . yes. My word, it’s very fine. I shouldn’t move the steps, nurse. This should go back on high tonight. Or at any rate the windows ought to be locked.’
Rosalie said, ‘I wanted to see it close again. But . . . ’
The doctor looked at her. Then he said, ‘Nurse, could you leave us please?’ and Rosalie heard the crackle and bustle of Booth insulted fling out and the door close. She wondered if Booth would stand behind it listening and thought, probably not. The door is heavy. She must know by now that you could hear nothing. Where had she been while Drinkwater was in the room? She hoped well behind the shut door.
I forget everything else when I’m talking to Drinkwater she thought, except my delight in his madness. I’ve said unwise things. A thousand wouldn’t be bad for Booth after hardly two years, but . . .
‘What is it?’
The doctor stood where she would see him. She liked his sharp face and straight stare. He’s ruthless and professional, she thought. He thinks I’m brave but he knows that I know it. He knows that I’ve a reputation. People disagree about me. I’m said to be hard. I was always thought vain. But he doesn’t gossip about me—I’ll put my head on the block to that. He knows there’s nothing to be done for me but he doesn’t just come for the whisky.
‘I’m worse,’ she said.
He said nothing.
‘I can’t . . . ’
He waited.
‘I’m beginning to find that I can’t . . . ’
‘What?’
‘See. I see double. Almost all the time now.’
‘It’s part of the complaint.’
‘I’ve had it for a long time, but it is much worse. I . . . can’t see the Renoir properly.’
‘I’m afraid . . . ’ he said, moving from beside the Renoir to his doctor’s bag, opening it and taking out a stethoscope. ‘Don’t bother with that,’ she said. ‘It’s my eyes. If my eyes go there is very little point . . . ’
He did not try to disagree.
‘I shan’t last long,’ she said. ‘Now, thank God.’
He came over and held her twigs of hands. She said, ‘Doctor . . . the Renoir . . . I want it to go to a girl . . . well, I suppose she’s a woman now, Ellie—Elinor—I can’t remember her other name. In the village. The mother kept the post office. Did you know them?’
‘I’m afraid not. They are new people at the post office.’
‘I don’t know where she’s gone. My son knew her. Could you make some . . . ?’
‘Do you want me to see your son? Would you like to see your son here?’
She was quiet, thinking. He was still holding her hands as she dropped asleep.
20.
Did he see you? Bezeer-Iremonger?’
‘That’s all you think of!’
‘Well of course I do.’
‘What I think of is . . . ’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll find you something of Binkie’s.’
‘I’ve no shoes. I can’t wear Binkie’s shoes. They’re square. I couldn’t lift them off the ground. He’s insane—insane. Gassed in the War, my foot—he’s a lunatic. He ought to be in your mother’s Mental Home. And he’s sinister—there’s something odd about him.’
‘Some slippers. I’ll find some slippers. Maybe there’s an old pair of slippers. Don’t worry, Ellie—and a . . . wrap of some sort.’
‘So I’m to walk the streets in slippers and a wrap. Down Seaview Villas. Except that I’m not going back there.’ She swirled the bedcover round her and trailed over to the window with it flowing behind.
‘Come away from the window,’ he said fast.
‘Why?’ Far from turning she began to undo the catch and open it. Her big bare shoulders shone. Lifting both arms up she began to take long metal pins out of her hair. It dropped down lock by lock.
‘Ellie,’ he said, pulling her. ‘Come here. Come away from the window. Someone passing . . . ’
‘What?’ She turned and the bedcover slid down. He caught at it with a yelp. ‘It’s—the School. It wouldn’t do me any good at the School.’
‘You’d get sent to the Headmaster?’ She laughed and walked across and touched his face and ran a finger across his mouth.
‘You are so different, Ellie.’
‘No.’
‘Shy?’ she said and clasped both arms round his neck. Over her shoulder he saw some people hurrying across the park. They looked like some of his boys. He saw what they saw: a big naked female back, one camisole strap hardly visible, flesh-coloured; long locks of hair on creamy shoulders and his own narrow, squirrelish face peeping over one of them. He tugged her away from the window and found that it was down on to the bed. She unclasped her hands in order to put both arms round his neck, to the elbow, climbed on top of him and shut her eyes. ‘Ellie . . . ’ He felt worse now, lying there with his shoes on, grey flannel bags and his old green cardigan. He felt his toes were sticking up in the air. Even with Ellie lying along him like a fallen statue on a bank he couldn’t forget about shoes on the bed. Miss Pannell would have . . .
She was a heavy statue. Though softening and warm.
‘Ellie . . . ’
‘Mmm?’
‘We have to talk. Listen. What happened?’
But now she appeared to be sound asleep.
And it would be indecent, he thought, indecent of me not to make love to her. It would be wrong not to. She is back. I am forgiven. She intends it. She has taken charge.
And that is the trouble. She has taken charge. In the end even Ellie has taken charge of me. What is it in me which women are determined to command? It is because Ellie never commanded that I . . .
Yet he could not say ‘I loved her’ even now. For all the years of her absence he had assumed that he had loved her, had discovered it only when his mother had won the day. At first, after the débâcle and their flight to Devonshire it had not been so much like love as a haunting, a bird on the shoulder that would not fly away. Then later, with the work—teaching and books and years passing—her image had diminished—not exactly dimmed but hazed over a little, softened and sweetened. He never once had mentioned her to Binkie or on the one or two occasions when he had seen his mother again, and found self-respect of a kind in the fact that they were more shaken by silence than by any reproaches or signs of regret.
To Binkie it had been simple—clear from the start that he had done wrong to give the girl up. He had paid for it too—rejecting Ellie for an inheritance and then losing the inheritance in the subsequent quirk of Rosalie’s turning the Hall over to a purpose which would suit her children’s left-wing ways. But she had accepted that this was a fact, thinking that Charles was after all a weak man, easily fooled and in need of care. In his face she saw bland kindness rather than passion denied and assumed therefore that he suffered less than most. Sex (she held) was after all more necessary to the uneducated. By asserting that she herself needed sex less because of Cambridge she did in fact need it less. Girton—though not in any way romantic—had become the equivalent of romance and had grown with time softer and sweeter, rather as Ellie had become for Charles. She considered herself perfectly fulfilled in this physical department and her troubles now (she felt) had nothing to do with the lack of a man.
Charles however she believed to be in no particular need of fulfilment. He had always been quiet. In spite therefore of the specific twelve-year silence about Ellie she did not think it a brooding silence springing from any passionate source. He was witty company and very tidy and she continued to command him and he to think that Ellie’s wish to be commanded had been the golden gift he had rejected and his great mistake.
All right then! Charles thought now, when he put his cardiganed arms awkwardly around her, over her warm smooth shoulders—when he had loved her . . .
As he still loved her.
The bird had not flown away.
He slid his fingers under the camisole strap and eased it off and Elinor sighed and moved her head against his neck and the last heavy locks of brown hair fell down over his hands.
And why at this moment did the room seem full of his upturned shoes, the toecaps erect and gleaming at the end of the bed, polished by Binkie this morning, the laces so neatly tied? I can see nothing else, he thought, nothing else—because I don’t want to think: I don’t want to recognise that this woman bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one I used to know. That one had been little and precise, withdrawn and self-conscious to the point of agony. Almost to invisibility. And inarticulate and very likely, which was what would have made it all possible, cold. For there had been nothing more physical than hand-holding in the years past, once or twice unsatisfactory kissing in Eastkirk woods, some dreaming about under the big sycamore down by the dry stream bed and the private bridge with the wicket gate. Well . . .
This woman now was—well, bold. And—well, shameless really.
And large.
He blinked again and swallowed, remembering that she had had a child two months ago. Yet here she was. And very heavy.
He moved out from underneath her, and she sighed as he began slowly to untie his shoelaces. He placed the shoes as he always did at night side by side at the end of the bed. He said, ‘I think I’ll lock the door.’
‘Why? Nobody’s here.’
‘They might burst in.’
‘Parsons, ironmongers,’ she said, ‘Binkie! Oh, I should like to see Binkie’s face. Oh, don’t look so sad!’ She laughed and held out her arms.
And ‘Charles,’ she said afterwards, ‘I’m glad.’
The window she had left unlatched suddenly blew open and banged to again. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s just the wind.’
‘But there is no wind. There’s been no wind. The earth’s—oh, Charles—stood still this summer.’
‘It’s over now,’ he said. ‘A storm coming.’
‘Listen,’ he said long afterwards. The window clattered again.
‘It is a storm,’ she said. ‘A wind rising. That’s why those people were hurrying crossing the park. Funny—nobody’s been hurrying for months and months. I thought—I thought the heat would last forever. All those still days . . . ’
‘Stop talking,’ he said.
‘Oh, Charles—that’s better. You’re like you were.’
‘At Queen’s?’
‘Oh no—much, much before that. You’re as you were when we played on the Afghan rug.’
‘This is better than an Afghan rug.’ They lay peaceful as the wind blew nearer and nearer and battered against the house. It had grown quite dark. She said, ‘I think there’s going to be thunder.’
Rain splashed like hail on the glass and there was thunder. The window swung. Very far away there were some loud cracks like falling trees, or guns.
The narrow room, like the rest of the house, usually full of light till late evening, was now almost completely shadowed, and pulling the bedcover over themselves they lay in the twilight. The window swung again.
‘I’d better get up and shut it,’ he said but still did nothing.
Then way across the sandhills the loud crackling noises came again, each one preceded by a long fizzing explosion.
‘Rockets,’ he said. ‘It’s the lifeboat. Who’d have thought a storm would come up now? Someone must be in trouble on the rocks.’
21.
Lydia and Marsh did not hear Margaret pass the dining-room door, but ten minutes later did hear Elinor gasp and stumble as she passed and caught a flash of her staring face as she stood there, her mouth slightly open and ready to ask if someone would go and bring in Margaret from the beach.
Then she was gone, running, slamming the front door behind her. Lydia removed Marsh’s hands, which had stayed frozen on her back, one of them by now inside her hooks-and-eyes. They were both standing pressed up between the wall and the corner of the knobbly sideboard, which had not been built for love.
Lydia turned and left the dining-room and went straight up to the top of the house to her own bedroom. It was a small room built out over the bathroom at the back and looked out through a scant net curtain on a string over the backyard and beyond to the few well-kept rows of vegetables and clumps of flowers. The one sm
all fruit tree surprised her by suddenly shaking itself about, and she saw that the sky had changed and there were clouds. When Marsh followed her up to the door of her room she felt him there. They stood quite intent, Marsh breathing rather fast. ‘Weather’s gone then!’ she said.
She heard him easing his feet about on the slip mat outside her door. He cleared his throat, and she leaned forward against the glass and rolled her head to let her cheek rest against it. ‘Hadn’t yer best git after ’er?’
The room, right up under the roof, had darkened fast and her big body blocking the window made it darker still. Behind her the hot room smelled fiercely of Lydia and Woolworth’s scent. There was an iron bedstead, the curtain over the corner for her clothes and a cheap chest of drawers, mostly hanging open with clothing sticking out of them untidily. The dressing-table—an orange monster from some other sphere where it can never have been made much of—was thick with a dust of peach face-powder and a dirty, peach-coloured swansdown powder puff with a bedraggled blue ribbon lay there beside three or four orange and rose lipsticks. Bits and pieces of nameless things had been pushed under the swing mirror—hair-pins, cotton. A dirty brush and broken comb and a huge, sixpenny bottle of Devonshire Violets were muddled together with some giant metal hair-curlers, some spidery heaps of what might perhaps be hair-nets and some discarded puff-balls of hair. There was the Gladstone bag, one upright wooden chair and on the wall a picture of Jesus clinging to a precipice and with a free hand trying to catch hold of a substantial and unenthusiastic lamb. Above the bed was a text saying Feed my Sheep and propped on the dressing-table a big glossy photograph of Errol Flynn. The bed was narrow and high and sagged.
‘You not been up ’ere.’ Lydia was making a statement, not asking a question. ‘Is it plain enough for yer? No temptations of the devil ’ere, is there? Or don’t you like the look of Errol Flynn? Errol Flynn’s about all there is of me own. The lambs and sheep is fixtures.’