‘Will you dance with me, Alice?’
She shook her head. Her clothes were sticking to her now. Her armpits were clammy.
‘Won’t you dance, dear?’
She said she’d rather not, not today. Her voice shivered and drily crackled. She’d just come to tell him about Poppy, she said again.
‘I’d like to be friends with you, Alice. Now that Poppy has –’
‘I have to go home, Grantly. I have to.’
‘Don’t go, darling.’
His hands had crossed the table again. They held her wrists; his teeth and his eyes flashed at her, though not in a smiling way. She shouldn’t have come, her own voice kept protesting in the depths of her mind, like an echo. It had all been different when there were three of them, all harmless flirtation, with Poppy giggling and pretending, just fun.
There was excitement in his face. He released her wrists, and again, beneath the table, she felt one of his legs against hers. He pushed his chair closer to the table, a hand moved on her thigh again.
‘No, no,’ she said.
‘I looked for you. I don’t know your other name, you know. I didn’t know Poppy’s either. I didn’t know where you lived. But I looked for you, Alice.’
He didn’t say how he’d looked for her, but repeated that he had, nodding emphatically.
‘I thought if I found you we’d maybe have a drink one night. I have records in my room I’d like you to hear, Alice. I’d like to have your opinion.’
‘I couldn’t go to your room –’
‘It would be just like sitting here, Alice. It would be quite all right.’
‘I couldn’t ever, Grantly.’
What would Beryl and Ron say if they could see her now, if they could hear the conversation she was having, and see his hand on her leg? She remembered them suddenly as children, Beryl on the greedy side yet refusing to eat fish in any shape or form, Ron having his nails painted with Nail-Gro because he bit them. She remembered the birth of Ron and how it had been touch and go because he’d weighed so little. She remembered the time Beryl scalded herself on the electric kettle and how Lenny had rung 999 because he said it would be the quickest way to get attention. She remembered the first night she’d been married to Lenny, taking her clothes off under a wrap her mother had given her because she’d always been shy about everything. All she had to do, she said to herself, was to stand up and go.
His hands weren’t touching her any more. He moved his body away from hers, and she looked at him and saw that the excitement had gone from his face. His eyes had a dead look. His mouth had a melancholy twist to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I fancied you that first day, Alice. I always fancied you, Alice.’
He was speaking the truth to her and it was strange to think of it as the truth, even though she had known that in some purely physical way he desired her. It was different from being mad for a person, and yet she felt that his desiring her was just as strange as being mad for her. If he didn’t desire her she’d have been able to return to the dance-rooms, they’d have been able to sit here on the balcony, again and again, she telling him more about Poppy and he telling her more about himself, making one another laugh. Yet if he didn’t desire her he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any of that.
‘Can’t fancy black girls,’ he said, with his head turned well away from her. ‘White women, over sixty if it’s possible. Thirteen stone or so. That’s why I go to the dance-rooms.’ He turned to face her and gazed morosely at her eyes. ‘I’m queer that way,’ he said. ‘I’m a nasty kind of black man.’
She could feel sickness in her stomach, and the skin of her back, which had been so damp with sweat, was now cold. She picked up her handbag and held it awkwardly for a moment, not knowing what to say. ‘I must go,’ she said eventually, and her legs felt shaky when she stood on them.
He remained at the table, all his politeness gone. He looked bitter and angry and truculent. She thought he might insult her. She thought he might shout loudly at her in the dance-rooms, calling her names and abusing her. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all to her. He sat there in the dim, tinted light, seeming to slump from one degree of disappointment to a deeper one. He looked crude and pathetic. He looked another person.
Again, as she stood there awkwardly, she thought about the room in Maida Vale, which she’d furnished with lilies and brightly coloured cloths. Again his grey hands undid her corset and her brassière, and just for a moment it seemed that there wouldn’t have been much wrong in letting him admire her in whatever way he wanted to. It was something that would disgust people if they knew; Beryl and Ron would be disgusted, and Lenny and Albert naturally enough. Grantly Palmer would disgust them, and she herself, a grandmother, would disgust them for permitting his attentions. There was something wrong with Grantly Palmer, they’d all say: he was sick and dirty, as he even admitted himself. Yet there were always things wrong with people, things you didn’t much care for and even were disgusted by, like Beryl being greedy and Ron biting his nails, like the way Lenny would sometimes blow his nose without using a handkerchief or a tissue. Even Poppy hadn’t been perfect: on a bus it had sometimes been too much, her shrillness and her rushy ways, so clearly distasteful to other people sitting there.
Alice wanted to tell Grantly Palmer all that. Desperately she tried to form an argument in her mind, a conversation with herself that had as its elements the greediness of her daughter and her son’s bitten nails and her husband clearing the mucus from his nose at the sink, and she herself agreeing to be the object of perversion. But the elements would not connect, and she felt instinctively that she could not transform them into coherent argument. The elements spun dizzily in her mind, the sense she sought from them did not materialize.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, knowing he would not answer. He was ashamed of himself; he wanted her to go. ‘Goodbye,’ she said again. ‘Goodbye, Grantly.’
She moved away from him, forcing herself to think about the house in Paper Street, about entering it and changing her clothes before Lenny returned. She’d bought two chops that morning and there was part of a packet of frozen beans in the fridge. She saw herself peeling potatoes at the sink, but at the same time she could feel Grantly Palmer behind her, still sitting at the table, ashamed when he need not be. She felt ashamed herself for having tea with him, for going to see him when she shouldn’t, just because Poppy was dead and there was no one else who was fun to be with.
Leo Ritz and his Band were playing ‘Scatterbrain’ as she left the dance-rooms. The middle-aged dancers smiled as they danced, some of them humming the tune.
Last Wishes
In the neighbourhood Mrs Abercrombie was a talking point. Strangers who asked at Miss Dobbs’ Post Office and Village Stores or at the Royal Oak were told that the wide entrance gates on the Castle Cary road were the gates to Rews Manor, where Mrs Abercrombie lived in the past, with servants. No one from the village except old Dr Ripley and a window-cleaner had seen her since 1947, the year of her husband’s death. According to Dr Ripley, she’d become a hypochondriac.
But even if she had, and in spite of her desire to live as a recluse, Mrs Abercrombie continued to foster the grandeur that made Rews Manor, nowadays, seem old-fashioned. Strangers were told that the interior of the house had to be seen to be believed. The staircase alone, in white rose-veined marble, was reckoned to be worth thousands; the faded carpets had come from Persia; all the furniture had been in the Abercrombie family for four or five generations. On every second Sunday in the summer the garden was open to visitors and the admission charges went to the Nurses.
Once a week Plunkett, the most important of Mrs Abercrombie’s servants, being her butler, drove into the village and bought stamps and cigarettes in the post office and stores. It was a gesture more than anything else, Miss Dobbs considered, because the bulk of the Rews Manor shopping was done in one or other of the nearby towns. Plunkett was about fifty, a man with a sandy
appearance who drove a pre-war Wolseley and had a pleasant, easy-going smile. The window-cleaner reported that there was a Mrs Plunkett, a uniformed housemaid, but old Dr Ripley said the uniformed maid was a person called Tindall. There were five servants at Rews Manor, Dr Ripley said, if you counted the two gardeners, Mr Apse and Miss Bell, and all of them were happy. He often repeated that Mrs Abercrombie’s servants were happy, as though making a point: they were pleasant people to know, he said, because of their contentment. Those who had met Plunkett in the village agreed, and strangers who had come across Mr Apse and Miss Bell in the gardens of Rews Manor found them pleasant also, and often envied them their dispositions.
In the village it was told how there’d always been Abercrombies at Rews Manor, how the present Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had lived there alone when he’d inherited it – until he married at forty-one, having previously not intended to marry at all because he suffered from a blood disease that had killed his father and his grandfather early in their lives. It was told how the marriage had been a brief and a happy one, and how there’d been no children. Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had died within five years and had been buried in the grounds of Rews Manor, near the azaleas.
‘So beautifully kept, the garden,’ visitors to the neighbourhood would marvel. ‘That gravel in front, not a stone out of place! Those lawns and rose-bushes!’ And then, intrigued by the old-fashioned quality of the place, they’d hear the story of this woman whose husband had inopportunely died, who existed now only in the world of her house and gardens, who lived in the past because she did not care for the present. People wove fantasies around this house and its people; to those who were outside it, it touched on fantasy itself. It was real because it was there and you could see it, because you could see the man called Plunkett buying stamps in the post office, but its reality was strange, as exotic as a coloured orchid. In the 1960s and 1970s, when life often had a grey look, the story of Rews Manor cheered people up, both those who told it and those who listened. It created images in minds and it affected imaginations. The holidaymakers who walked through the beautifully kept garden, through beds of begonias and roses, among blue hydrangeas and potentilla and witch-hazel and fuchsia, were grateful. They were grateful for the garden and for the story that went with it, and later they told the story themselves, with conjectured variations.
At closer quarters, Rews Manor was very much a world of its own. In 1947, at the time of Mr Abercrombie’s death, Mr Apse, the gardener, worked under the eighty-year-old Mr Marriott, and when Mr Marriott died Mrs Abercrombie promoted Mr Apse and advertised for an assistant. There seemed no reason why a woman should not be as suitable as a man and so Miss Bell, being the only applicant, was given the post. Plunkett had also been advertised for when his predecessor, Stubbins, had become too old to carry on. The housemaid, Tindall, had been employed a few years after the arrival of Plunkett, as had Mrs Pope, who cooked.
The servants all lived in, Mr Apse where he had always lived, in a room over the garage, Miss Bell next door to him. The other three had rooms in a wing of the house which servants, in the days when servants were more the thing, had entirely occupied. They met for meals in the kitchen and sometimes they would sit there in the evenings. The room which once had been the servants’ sitting-room had a dreariness about it: in 1956 Plunkett moved the television set into the kitchen.
Mr Apse was sixty-three now and Miss Bell was forty-five. Mrs Pope was fifty-nine, Tindall forty-three. Plunkett, reckoned in the village to be about fifty, was in fact precisely that. Plunkett, who had authority over the indoor servants and over Mr Apse and Miss Bell when they were in the kitchen, had at the time of Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement held a position in a nouveau-riche household in Warwickshire. He might slowly have climbed the ladder and found himself, when death or age had made a gap for him, in charge of its servants. He might have married and had children. He might have found himself for the rest of his life in the butler’s bungalow, tucked out of sight on the grounds, growing vegetables in his spare time. But for Plunkett these prospects hadn’t seemed quite right. He didn’t want to marry, nor did he wish to father children. He wanted to continue being a servant because being a servant made him happy, yet the stuffiness of some households was more than he could bear and he didn’t like having to wait for years before being in charge. He looked around, and as soon as he set foot in Rews Manor he knew it was exactly what he wanted, a small world in which he had only himself to blame if the food and wine weren’t more than up to scratch. He assisted Mrs Abercrombie in her choosing of Mrs Pope as cook, recognizing in Mrs Pope the long-latent talents of a woman who sought the opportunity to make food her religion. He also assisted in the employing of Tindall, a fact he had often recalled since, on the nights he spent in her bed.
Mrs Pope had cooked in a YWCA until she answered the advertisement. The raw materials she was provided with had offered her little opportunity for the culinary experiments she would have liked to attempt. For twenty years she had remained in the kitchens of the YWCA because her husband, now dead, had been the janitor. In the flat attached to the place she had brought up two children, a boy and a girl, both of them now married. She’d wanted to move to somewhere nicer when Winnie, the girl, had married a traveller in stationery, but her husband had refused point-blank, claiming that the YWCA had become his home. When he died, she hadn’t hesitated.
Miss Bell had been a teacher of geography, but had been advised for health considerations to take on outdoor work. Having always enjoyed gardening and knowing quite a bit about it, she’d answered Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement in The Times. She’d become used to living in, in a succession of boarding-schools, so that living in somewhere else suited her quite well. Mr Apse was a silent individual, which suited her also. For long hours they would work side by side in the vegetable garden or among the blue hydrangeas and the azaleas that formed a shrubbery around the house, neither of them saying anything at all.
Tindall had worked as a packer in a frozen-foods factory. There’d been trouble in her life in that the man she’d been engaged to when she was twenty-two, another employee in the factory, had made her pregnant and had then, without warning, disappeared. He was a man called Bert Fask, considerate in every possible way, quiet and seemingly reliable. Everyone said she was lucky to be engaged to Bert Fask and she had imagined quite a happy future. ‘Don’t matter a thing,’ he said when she told him she was pregnant, and he fixed it that they could get married six months sooner than they’d intended. Then he disappeared. She’d later heard that he’d done the same thing with other girls, and when it became clear that he didn’t intend to return she began to feel bitter. Her only consolation was the baby, which she still intended to have even though she didn’t know how on earth she was going to manage. She loved her unborn child and she longed for its birth so that she herself could feel loved again. But the child, two months premature, lived for only sixteen hours. That blow was a terrible one, and it was when endeavouring to get over it that she’d come across Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement, on a page of a newspaper that a greengrocer had wrapped a beetroot in. That chance led her to a contentment she hadn’t known before, to a happiness that was different only in detail from the happinesses of the other servants.
On the morning July 12th 1974, a Friday, Tindall knocked on Mrs Abercrombie’s bedroom door at her usual time of eight forty-five. She carried into the room Mrs Abercrombie’s breakfast tray and the morning mail, and placed the tray on the Queen Anne table just inside the door. She pulled back the bedroom’s six curtains. ‘A cloudy day,’ she said.
Mrs Abercrombie, who had been reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints, extinguished her bedside light. She remarked that the wireless the night before had predicted that the weather would be unsettled: rain would do the garden good.
Tindall carried the tray to the bed, placed it on the mahogany bed-table and settled the bed-table into position. Mrs Abercrombie picked up her letters. Tindall left the room.
/> Letters were usually bills, which were later passed to Plunkett to deal with. Plunkett had a housekeeping account, into which a sum of money was automatically transferred once a month. Mrs Abercrombie’s personal requirements were purchased from this same account, negligible since she had ceased to buy clothes. It was Tindall who noticed when she needed a lipstick refill or lavender-water or more hairpins. Tindall made a list and handed it to Plunkett. For years Mrs Abercrombie herself hadn’t had the bother of having to remember, or having to sign a cheque.
This morning there was the monthly account from the International Stores and one from the South Western Electricity Board. The pale brown envelopes were identification enough: she put them aside unopened. The third envelope contained a letter from her solicitors about her will.
In the kitchen, over breakfast, the talk turned to white raspberries. Mr Apse said that in the old days white raspberries had been specially cultivated in the garden. Tindall, who had never heard of white raspberries before, remarked that the very idea of them gave her the creeps. ‘More flavour really, ‘Miss Bell said quietly.
The Collected Stories Page 65