One afternoon, walking to the foot of the avenue to stretch his legs, Cronin found a small, elegantly painted board secured to one of the pillars. It faced the road, inviting those who passed to read the words it bore. He read them himself and expostulated angrily, muttering the words, repeating them as he made his way back to the house.
‘M’lady, this cannot happen. They’ve turned your house into an hotel.’
Lady Marston looked at Cronin, whom she had known for so many years, who had seen with her and her husband a thousand details of change and reconstruction. He was upset now, she could see it. His white, sparse hair seemed uncombed, which was unusual for Cronin. There was a blush of temper on his cheeks; and in his eyes a wildness one did not associate with so well-trained a servant.
‘What is it, Cronin?’
‘There’s a notice at the gate announcing “The Hotel of the Idle Moon”.’
‘Well?’
‘The Dankerses –’
‘Ah, the Dankerses. You talk so much about the Dankerses, Cronin. Yet as I remember them they are surely not worth it. Sir Giles said the man had repeated to him every mouthful of his breakfast. In the end he had to make short shrift of the pair.’
‘No, no –’
‘Yes, Cronin: they tried his patience. He gave them their marching orders, reminding them that the night was fine and the moon was full. There was a coolness between us, for I believed he had gone too far.’
‘No, no. You must remember: the Dankerses are still here. They’ve tidied up the orchard and now have turned your house into an hotel.’
Lady Marston made her impatient little shaking of the head. ‘Of course, of course. Cronin, I apologize. You must find me very trying.’
‘It has no meaning: The Hotel of the Idle Moon. Yet I fear, m’lady, it may in time mean much to us.’
Lady Marston laughed quite gaily. ‘Few things have meaning, Cronin. It is rather much to expect a meaning for everything.’
They played three games of cards, and the matter was not again referred to. But in the night Lady Marston came to Cronin’s bedside and shook him by the shoulder. ‘I’m upset,’ she said, ‘by what you tell me. This isn’t right at all. Cronin, listen carefully: tomorrow you must inform Sir Giles. Tell him of our fears. Beg him to reconsider. I’m far too old to act. I must leave it all to you.’
The house was busy then with visitors, and cars up and down the avenue. It thrived as the orchard thrived; it had a comfortable and sumptuous feel, and Cronin thought again of the past.
‘Ah, Cronin,’ Mrs Dankers said, pausing on the back stairs one day. ‘Tell me, how is poor Lady Marston? She does not come down at all, and we’re so on the go here that it’s hard to find time to make the journey to the top of the house.’
‘Lady Marston is well, madam.’
‘She’s welcome in the lounges. Always welcome. Would you be good enough to tell her, Cronin?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘But keep an eye on her, like a good man. I would not like her upsetting the guests. You understand?’
‘Yes, madam. I understand. I don’t think Lady Marston is likely to make use of the lounges.’
‘She would find the climb up and down too much, I dare say.’
‘Yes, madam. She would find it too much.’
Cronin made many plans. He thought that one day when Dankers was away he would approach the orchard with Sir Giles’s rifle and order the men to cut down the trees. That at least would bring one part of the sadness to an end. He saw the scene quite clearly: the trees toppling one against the other, their branches webbed as they hung in the air above the fresh stumps. But when he searched for the rifle he could not find it. He thought that he might wreak great damage in the house, burning carpets and opening up the upholstery. But for this he found neither opportunity nor the strength it demanded. Stropping his razor one morning, he hit upon the best plan of all: to creep into the Dankerses’ bedroom and cut their throats. It had once been his master’s bedroom and now it was theirs; which made revenge the sweeter. Every day for forty-eight years he had carried to the room a tray of tea-cups and a pot of Earl Grey tea. Now he would carry his sharpened razor; and for the rest of his life he would continue his shaving with it, relishing every scrape. The idea delighted him. Sir Giles would have wished to see the last of them, to see the last of all these people who strayed about the house and grounds, and to see the orchard settle down again to being the orchard he had left behind. And was not he, Cronin, the living agent of the dead Sir Giles? Was he not now companion to his wife? And did she not, in an occasional moment of failure, address him as she. had her husband? Yet when he shared his plans with Lady Marston she did not at all endorse them.
‘Take the will for the deed, Cronin. Leave these people be.’ ‘But they are guilty. They may have killed Sir Giles.’
‘They may have. And does it matter this way or that – to chop off a few dwindling years?’
Cronin saw no reason in her words. He pitied her, and hardened himself in his resolve.
‘I am sorry to speak to you like this, Cronin,’ Dankers said, ‘but I cannot, you know, have you wandering about the house in this manner. There have been complaints from the guests. You have your room, with Lady Marston to talk to; why not keep more to the region we have set aside for you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Of late, Cronin, you’ve become untidy in your appearance. You have a dishevelled look and often seem – well, frankly, Cronin, dirty. It’s not good for business. Not good at all.’
The moon shall not be idle, Cronin thought. The moon shall be agog to see. The moon shall clear the sky of clouds that the stars may ponder on the pillows full of blood.
‘Mr Dankers, sir, why is this place called the Idle Moon?’
Dankers laughed. ‘A foible of my good wife’s. She liked the sound of it. Quite telling, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The moon shall like the sound of her. A shriek in a severed throat, a howl of pain.
‘See to it, Cronin, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
So Cronin kept to his room, descending the back stairs only for his food and Lady Marston’s. The weeks passed, and more and more he sat entranced with the duty he had set himself. Sometimes, as though drunk with it, he found himself a little uncertain as to its exactitudes. That was when he felt tired; when he dropped off into a doze as he sat by his small window, staring at the sky and listening to the faraway hum from the house below.
Then one morning Cronin discovered that Lady Marston had died in her sleep. They carried her off, and he put away the pack of cards.
‘It’s a sad day for us all,’ Dankers said, and in the distance Cronin could hear Mrs Dankers giving some brisk order to a servant. He returned to his room and for a moment there was an oddness in his mind and he imagined that it was Sir Giles who had said that the day was sad. Then he remembered that Sir Giles was dead too and that he was the only one left.
In the months that followed he spoke to no one but himself, for he was concentrating on the details of his plan. They kept slipping away, and increasingly he had a struggle to keep them straight.
When the razor was there the faces on the pillows were vague and empty, and he could not remember whose he had planned they should be. There was the pattern of moonlight, and the red stain on the bed-clothes, but Cronin could not often now see what any of it meant. It made him tired, thinking the trouble out. And when, in the end, the shreds of his plan came floating back to him he smiled in some astonishment, seeing only how absurd it had been that late in his life he should have imagined himself a match for the world and its conquerors.
Nice Day at School
Eleanor lay awake, thinking in advance about the day. The face of Miss Whitehead came into her mind, the rather pointed nose, eyes set wide apart, a mouth that turned up at the corners and gave the impression that Miss Whitehead was constantly smiling, although it was a widely held view among the girls whom she taught that
Miss Whitehead had little to smile over, having missed out. The face of Liz Jones came into Eleanor’s mind also, a pretty, wild face with eyes that were almost black, and black hair hanging prettily down on either side of it, and full lips. Liz Jones claimed to have gypsy blood in her, and another girl, Mavis Temple, had once remarked to Eleanor that she thought Liz Jones’s lips were negroid. ‘A touch of the tar brush,’ Mavis Temple had said. ‘A seaman done her mum.’ She’d said it three years ago, when the girls had all been eleven, in Miss Homber’s class. Everything had been different then.
In the early morning gloom Eleanor considered the difference, regretting, as always, that it had come about. It had been nice in Miss Homber’s class, the girls’ first year at Springfield Comprehensive: they’d all had a crush on Miss Homber because Miss Homber, who’d since become Mrs George Spaxton and a mother, had been truly beautiful and intelligent. Miss Homber told them it was important to wash all the parts of the body once per day, including you knew where. Four girls brought letters of complaint after that and Miss Homber read them out to the class, commenting on the grammar and the spelling errors and causing the girls to become less carefree about what they repeated to their mums. ‘Remember, you can give birth at thirteen,’ Miss Homber warned, and she added that if a boy ever said he was too embarrassed to go into a chemist’s for preventatives he could always get them in a slot machine that was situated in the Gents at the filling station on the Portsmouth Road, which was something her own boyfriend had told her.
It had been nice in those days because Eleanor didn’t believe that any boy would try stuff like that on when she was thirteen, and the girls of the first year all agreed that it sounded disgusting, a boy putting his thing up you. Even Liz Jones did, although she was constantly hanging about the boys of the estate and twice had had her knickers taken down in the middle of the estate playground. There were no boys at Springfield Comprehensive, which was just as well, Eleanor had always considered, because boys roughened up a school so.
But in spite of their physical absence boys had somehow penetrated, and increasingly, as Eleanor passed up through the school, references to them infiltrated all conversation. At thirteen, in Miss Croft’s class, Liz Jones confessed that a boy called Gareth Swayles had done her in the corner of the estate playground, at eleven o’clock one night. She’d been done standing up, she reported, leaning against the paling that surrounded the playground. She said it was fantastic.
Lying in bed, Eleanor remembered Liz Jones saying that and saying a few months later that a boy called Rogo Pollini was twice as good as Gareth Swayles, and later that a boy called Tich Ayling made Rogo Pollini seem totally laughable. Another girl, Susie Crumm, said that Rogo Pollini had told her that he’d never enjoyed it with Liz Jones because Liz Jones put him off with all her wriggling and pinching. Susie Crumm, at the time, had just been done by Rogo Pollini.
By the time they reached Class 2 it had become the fashion to have been done and most of the girls, even quiet Mavis Temple, had succumbed to it. Many had not cared for the experience and had not repeated it, but Liz Jones said that this was because they had got it from someone like Gareth Swayles, who was no better on the job than a dead horse. Eleanor hadn’t ever been done nor did she wish to be, by Gareth Swayles or anyone else. Some of the girls said it had hurt them: she knew it would hurt her. And she’d heard that even if Gareth Swayles, or whoever it was, went to the slot machine in the filling station it sometimes happened that the preventative came asunder, a disaster that would be followed by weeks of worry. That, she knew, would be her fate too.
‘Eleanor’s prissy,’ Liz Jones said every day now. ‘Eleanor’s prissy like poor prissy Whitehead.’ Liz Jones went on about it all the time, hating Eleanor because she still had everything in store for her. Liz Jones had made everyone else think that Eleanor would grow into a Miss Whitehead, who was terrified of men, so Liz Jones said. Miss Whitehead had hairs on her chin and her upper lip that she didn’t bother to do anything about. Quite often her breath wasn’t fresh, which was unpleasant if she was leaning over you, explaining something.
Eleanor, who lived on the estate with her parents, hated being identified with Miss Whitehead and yet she felt, especially when she lay awake in the early morning, that there was something in Liz Jones’s taunting. ‘Eleanor’s waiting for Mr Right,’ Liz Jones would say. ‘Whitehead waited forever.’ Miss Whitehead, Liz Jones said, never had a fellow for long because she wouldn’t give herself wholly and in this day and age a girl had to be sensible and natural over a matter like that. Everyone agreed that this was probably so, because there was no doubt about it that in her time Miss Whitehead had been pretty. ‘It happens to you,’ Liz Jones said, ‘left solitary like that: you grow hairs on your face; you get stomach trouble that makes your breath bad. Nervous frustration, see.’
Eleanor gazed across her small bedroom, moving her eyes from the pink of the wall to her school uniform, grey and purple, hanging over the back of a chair. In the room there was a teddy-bear she’d had since she was three, and a gramophone, and records by the New Seekers and the Pioneers and Diana Ross, and photographs of such performers. In her vague, uninterested manner her mother said she thought it awful that Eleanor should waste her money on these possessions, but Eleanor explained that everyone at Springfield Comprehensive did so and that she herself did not consider it a waste of money.
‘You up?’ Eleanor heard her mother calling now, and she replied that she was. She got out of bed and looked at herself in a looking-glass on her dressing-table. Her night-dress was white with small sprigs of violets on it. Her hair had an auburn tinge, her face was long and thin and was not afflicted with spots, as were a few of the faces of her companions at Springfield Comprehensive. Her prettiness was delicate, and she thought as she examined it now that Liz Jones was definitely right in her insinuations: it was a prettiness that could easily disappear overnight. Hairs would appear on her chin and her upper lip, a soft down at first, later becoming harsher. ‘Your sight, you know,’ an oculist would worriedly remark to her, and tell her she must wear glasses. Her teeth would lose their gleam. She’d have trouble with dandruff.
Eleanor slipped her night-dress over her head and looked at her naked body. She didn’t herself see much beauty in it, but she knew that the breasts were the right size for the hips, that arms and legs nicely complemented each other. She dressed and went into the kitchen, where her father was making tea and her mother was reading the Daily Express. Her father hadn’t been to bed all night. He slept during the day, being employed by night as a doorman in a night-club called Daisy’s, in Shepherd Market. Once upon a time her father had been a wrestler, but in 1961 he’d injured his back in a bout with a Japanese and had since been unfit for the ring. Being a doorman of a night-club kept him in touch, so he claimed, with the glamorous world he’d been used to in the past. He often saw familiar faces, he reported, going in and out of Daisy’s, faces that once had been his audience. Eleanor felt embarrassed when he talked like that, being unable to believe much of what he said.
‘You’re in for a scorcher,’ he said now, placing a pot of tea on the blue formica of the table. ‘No end to the heatwave, they can’t see.’
He was a large, red-faced man with closely cut grey hair and no lobe to his right ear. He’d put on weight since he’d left the wrestling ring and although he moved slowly now, as though in some way compensating for years of nimbleness on the taut canvas, he was still, in a physical sense, a formidable opponent, as occasional troublemakers at the night-club had painfully discovered.
Eleanor knocked Special Κ into a dish and added milk and sugar.
‘That’s a lovely young girl,’ her father said. ‘Mia Farrow. She was in last night, Eleanor.’
His breakfast-time conversation was always the same. Princess Margaret had shaken him by the hand and Anthony Armstrong-Jones had asked if he might take his photograph for a book about London he was doing. The Burtons came regularly, and Rex Harrison, and the Canad
ian Prime Minister whenever he was in London. Her father had a way of looking at Eleanor when he made such statements, his eyes screwed up, almost lost in the puffed red flesh of his face: he stared unblinkingly and beadily, as if defying her to reply that she didn’t for a moment accept that Princess Margaret’s hand had ever lain in his or that Anthony Armstrong-Jones had addressed him.
‘Faceful of innocence,’ he said. ‘Just a faceful of innocence, Eleanor. “Good-night, Miss Farrow,” I said, and she turned the little face to me and said to call her Mia.’
Eleanor nodded. Her mother’s eyes were fixed on the Daily Express, moving from news item to news item, her lips occasionally moving also as she read. ‘Liz Jones,’ Eleanor wanted to say. ‘Could you complain to the school about Liz Jones?’ She wanted to tell them about the fashion in Class 2, about Miss Whitehead, and how everyone was afraid of Liz Jones. She imagined her voice speaking across the breakfast table, to her father who was still in his doorman’s uniform and her mother who mightn’t even hear her. There’d be embarrassment as her father listened, her own face would be as hot as fire. He’d turn his head away in the end, like the time she’d had to ask him for money to buy sanitary towels.
‘Lovely little fingers,’ he said, ‘like a baby’s fingers, Eleanor. Little wisps of things. She touched me with the tips.’
‘Who?’ demanded her mother, suddenly sharp, looking up. ‘Eh, then?’
‘Mia Farrow,’ he said. ‘She was down in Daisy’s last night. Sweetest thing; sweetest little face.’
‘Ah, yes, Peyton Place,’ her mother said, and Eleanor’s father nodded.
The Collected Stories Page 21