She did not like the heat, and she kept the house curtained and cool. When Oliver wheeled himself through the french windows into the rose-scented dusk of the drawing-room, he collided with the furniture, because it seemed pitch dark after the garden. When she sat in the garden, his mother kept to the shade of the Cedar tree, while Oliver basked, against orders, in the full sun, with his father’s old Panama hat tipped over his eyes and a sawn-off pair of flannel trousers pinned across his stump. Dr. Trevor would not let him have his artificial leg yet, as he did not trust him not to do more with it than his heart could stand.
Now that he needed so little nursing, Elizabeth had been given the chance to leave, but after all these months of seeming never to have taken root, she preferred now to stay and help with the house and farm. Her rounded arms were taking on the colour of a brown speckled hen’s egg and her corn-coloured hair, bleaching in the sun, looked fairer still in contrast to the tanning skin, which made her eyes look bluer and her teeth whiter. She did not seem to want to go. Oliver gathered that she was thinking seriously about Arnold Clitheroe, and did not consider it worth while starting another job if she was going to be married. It would mean living in Golders Green, with a week-end cottage at Virginia Water, so he supposed she planned to make the most of the real country while she could.
He saw her and Evelyn coming down to tea one day from the hay field on the other side of the hill opposite the house. They came over the top of the hill, and he watched them all the way down, Elizabeth in a blue dress and Evelyn in boy’s shorts and a bright yellow shirt. Halfway down, they broke into a run, and soon their legs were going faster than their bodies, like bicycles without free-wheels. He heard them laughing as they disappeared under the lip of the Ha-Ha wall that divided the garden from the hill field.
Mrs. North puttered out of the house with the tea trolley like a shunting goods engine. She wore a striped tussore dress, white buckskin shoes with buckles and a straw hat with a flopping brim, which she pushed up to look down the garden through her dark spectacles. She looked different without her pince-nez; softer and cosier, more English, more like anybody’s mother.
“What are those two playing at?” she asked. “I can see them fooling around trying to climb the Ha-Ha at the highest place. Why don’t they come up the steps like sensible people? I do wish they’d hurry; I just can’t wait to tell Evie about her father’s letter. Oh, Evie!” she called. “Oh, Elizabeth!” No wonder she found the heat trying. It made even Oliver, who could soak up sun like a lizard, feel hot to see her fussing round the tea table, rearranging plates, going in and out of the house, and calling out at intervals to two people who would come, anyway, sooner or later.
“Oh my,” she said. “Violet said she might be stopping by for tea. That’ll mean another cup. All this going backwards and forwards makes my legs feel like melting candles.”
“Why not let her get it when she comes?” Oliver asked with the indolence of someone who knew he could not go himself.
“She’d only break it. Do you know, she’s broken nearly the whole of that tea set I gave her. I found Fred eating his tea off a tin flan dish when I went over the other day. And it wasn’t even tea-time. They have the craziest regime: tea at half-past six, and they were aiming to have supper after that at half-past seven—macaroni pudding, in this weather! Violet was eating a hunk of cold suet roll for her tea. Imagine, they have hot steamed pudding for lunch every Saturday, whatever the season. Still, I reckon Fred’s lucky to get any food at all, though Violet’s really becoming quite a good little cook since she’s consented to let me give her a few hints. She will use the same pan for everything, though, without scouring it properly in between. That’s not very hygienic, you know.” She pronounced it hygi-ennic, and stood for a moment gazing wistfully at a vision of her land where washing-up machines and rubbish pulverisers and cornerless floors could make the most casual woman sanitary.
“Here they are at last. Well, come along, you two! My goodness, anyone would think you didn’t want your tea. I’ve got a surprise for you, Evie.”
“Strawberries?” Her freckled face fell again as Mrs. North shook her head. “Much more exciting. Your Pa’s coming over next month to stay awhile and then take you back to the States.”
Evelyn’s skinny bare legs waved in the air as she solemnly turned head over heels and then rolled down the bank onto the lower lawn. During the anticlimax of climbing back up the bank, she remembered that it would be polite to say: “Of course, I don’t want to leave here—but oh, Aunt Hattie! Did he say anything about the ranch? Has he got my horse yet?”
When she had gone in to wash, Mrs. North said to Oliver: “I shan’t tell her the other news yet. Bob said he was going to write and break it himself. Once she gets used to it, she’ll probably like the idea of having someone to take her mother’s place. She can’t resent it. After all, she never knew Vivien; she was only a baby when she died.”
“She could be jealous of someone taking Bob away from her though. She seems to adore him.”
“Bob wouldn’t let that happen; he’s too nice a person. He adores Evie too. It’s just that he’s never had the time for her and she’d always been parked with nursemaids and convenient sisters. But now that she’s older he’ll probably take more interest in her, and this Irene, of course, will be able to make a home for the poor kid. I only hope she’s the right type. I never have trusted Bob’s taste since he got himself so involved with that terrible girl who played the cello, remember?”
“Irene,” said Oliver. “I’m sure it’s Irene, not Ireen.” They had this argument about twice a week until Bob’s arrival.
But when Bob Linnegar and his new wife arrived, it turned out that she was never called either Irene or Ireen, but Honey. Everyone, even Evelyn, must call her that.
“She can’t call her Mother,” said Bob piously, mentally removing his hat to the memory of his first wife. Evelyn had no intention of doing anything of the kind. She did not like Honey, who was tall and svelte, with a thirty years’ trail of interesting experiences behind her, which now, at forty-seven, showed in her face if not in her figure. Honey did not like Evelyn very much either. She did not like any children, especially unsophisticated ones. She arrived, however, laden with presents to make a good impression: a fabulous doll, dressed by Molyneux, which could take in drinks and get rid of them, a cabinet of paints good enough for an artist, boxes of chocolate and candy, and some precocious little dresses.
Evelyn had taken the doll shyly and politely, holding it as awkwardly as Violet held a baby, and left it upside down in a chair for days until Mrs. North took it away. She had taken the paints to school to show her friends and she had passed round the chocolates once and then disappeared with them for the rest of the afternoon.
The dresses terrified her. Mrs. North, afraid of offending her new sister-in-law, had at last argued Evelyn into trying them on, but she would not come downstairs and show herself, nor could she ever be found afterwards when Mrs. North wanted to fit them for altering.
“Beastly, horrible things,” Evelyn told Oliver through the window. “Weeny short sticky-out skirts like lampshades and blouses with words written all over them and great big soppy bows instead of buttons. I couldn’t wear them.”
“I suppose they’re what children wear in America, so she thought you’d like them too. It was jolly kind of her to bring you all those things, wasn’t it?” he said in a propaganda voice.
“I don’t like her,” said Evelyn sombrely. “She looks like a devil.” This was rather true. Honey’s face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones and thin, sarcastic lips, painted to look fuller. She had long greenish eyes and her eyebrows were plucked to go down in the middle and up at the sides. Her nose was not beaky enough to spoil her appearance, but it was bony and sharp, with cutaway nostrils. She wore her hair parted in the middle, with the front locks rolled into a black horn over each temple. She was extremely elegant, with perfect legs and feet and liked all her clothes, even
her suit, to cling everywhere. Her nails were talons dipped in venous blood and she liked musky perfume and barbaric, clanking jewellery and huge shiny handbags.
She had brought presents for Oliver too, books and sweets and cigarettes and a half-mocking sympathy, which said: “I understand you: you are my type. You and I are grown-up in this rather juvenile world.” Once, when she leaned over him to point at something in his paper, Oliver felt frissons travelling up and down his spine, and put it down, for his own peace of mind, to her nails. For Honey was attractive, in a serpentine, unwholesome way, to men, but not at all to women.
Bob was crazy about her. He was a noisy, good-tempered, middle-aged man with a large fit body and a round grey head too big for its brain. His voice carried everything before it, not only by its volume but by the sweeping things it said. You could never have an argument with Bob. If he said a thing was so, it was so, and you soon learned to spare yourself the effort of contradicting. He would make the most fantastic statements and stick to them, shouldering aside all disagreement, like a buffalo coming through pampas grass. Mrs. North had always adored her brother, and his presence in the house woke her from her long comas of domestic absorption. She seemed to get less tired, and she could sit down and forget what was in the oven if he were talking to her. She could pass a clock ten times without looking at it and next quarter’s telephone bill would show that she had been less extravagant on TIM. She worried less and laughed more. She was as gay as a girl and reverted more and more to her mother tongue, which she refurbished with the latest expressions which she picked up avidly from the Linnegars.
Evelyn, who had not seen her father since she was old enough to realise him as anything more than a vast male presence, was a little afraid of him. She had worshipped him in the mind, encouraged by her aunt, and she worshipped him in the flesh, but from a safe distance, prowling round on the edge of her company, watching him, coming quickly to him if he called her, but slipping away as soon as the conversation side-tracked him from the bear’s hug he was giving his daughter. She swallowed all his stories and electrified her school with the information that New York was built on a foundation of rock no thicker than a paving stone and that an American train went so fast that its sound followed it through a station and had to have a signal of its own. She believed everything he told her, and he told her what he thought she wanted to hear.
When she asked him about the ranch, he said: “Oh, sure, sure, we’ll have a ranch, with a swimming-pool and whole herds of cattle and wild ponies and cow-punchers and hill-billies. You can have Gary Cooper too, if you want.”
“I think I’d rather have Rodeo Ralph, if you don’t mind,” said Evelyn, whose knowledge of film stars was confined to the retrogressive, second-feature cinema to which she sometimes went with Violet and Fred. “He could be head groom, but of course I shall look after my own horse myself. Have you bought him yet? What’s he like? Oh, I do so want a chestnut, with golden lights in mane and tail, but of course”—she looked at him anxiously—“if it’s not, I’m sure I should like another colour just as much.”
“You shall have the finest, high-steppingest chestnut in all California,” said Bob expansively. “You shall come with me and choose one. We’ll go on the Santa Fé Chief, in a state berth with satin sheets and perfume coming out of sprays in the wall. You start lunch in the Grand Central and get halfway across the continent before you’ve done.”
“I’ve seen a melon,” said Evelyn cautiously. “In a shop. Aunt Hattie said she wasn’t rich enough to buy it. Are we rich enough, Daddy, to buy a very big ranch?”
“Acres and acres of it.” Bob spread his arms and Oliver saw Honey frown at him and tap her foot. They did not intend to live anywhere but in New York, where an apartment was being fitted out for them by a fashionable interior decorator who looked like being Honey’s next experience.
Oliver thought it was about time someone started breaking it gently to Evelyn where she was going to live. It should also be broken to her that Honey was a permanency. She did not seem to realise that she would be going back to the States with her and her father. She thought he would leave her over here now that he had got a daughter for company.
“If she’s coming with us, Uncle Ollie, I’m not going,” Evelyn said determinedly, eating her supper in his room in a skimpy woollen dressing-gown with her hair in pigtails.
“But that’s the whole idea of their coming over here, to take you back with them,” said Oliver.
“They don’t want me. When I go out for walks with them, or in the car, which I don’t like because Daddy drives too fast, they talk to each other all the time and it’s dreadfully boring. She won’t let him talk to me. If he starts and we’re just enjoying ourselves, she calls out: “Oh Ba-arb!’” She gave a good imitation of her stepmother’s twanging city accent. “I’ve gotten a stitch in my side, or a thorn in my finger, or a stone in my shoe’—you know how she’s always shamming she’s got something wrong with her. Then he fusses over her like Heather used to do with Susan when she cried. She wouldn’t be any good on a ranch. She’d always be getting colds or hurting herself or getting her toenail trodden on by one of the horses. She kicked up an awful shindy when Dandy trod on her foot, and it couldn’t possibly have hurt because he hasn’t any shoes on, and he’s so light, anyway. He’s stood on my toe loads of times and I haven’t minded.
“Look.” She kicked off her slipper and showed him the crinkled, blackened big toenail of anyone who has much to do with horses.
“Fred doesn’t like her either, because she said his bulls ought to wear knickers. He thought that was rude and so do I.” She tore savagely at a crust of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar and her pale-lashed eyes brooded their dislike of her stepmother.
Oliver cleared his throat. “Perhaps you won’t live on the ranch just at first,” he said tentatively. “You might live in New York for a bit; you’ll love that. You live in a flat like a palace with beds like clouds, higher up than the top of the Wrekin, and the lift takes you up in one go—swish—without stopping.”
“Daddy said we were going to have a ranch,” said Evelyn doggedly.
Oliver sighed. “Probably later on you will. You could leave Honey in New York while you and he went to California.”
“He wouldn’t go without her. He won’t go anywhere without her.” Which was true.
Bob followed his new wife about like an infatuated St. Bernard. If she got up, he would ask where she was going, and when she was sitting down he would ask her it she was comfortable and did she want anything fetched and wasn’t she tired and wouldn’t she like a small shot of rye, of which he seemed to have brought an inexhaustible supply in his baggage. When they had been at Hinkley for a week, Honey decided that her hair needed resetting and her nails resharpening.
“I’ll make an appointment for you with my man in Shrewsbury,” Mrs. North said obligingly, already moving towards the telephone. “It’s only a little place, but Mr. Meechayul is a very skilled man. He used to be with Antoine.”
“Thanks a lot, Hattie,” said Honey with a patronising smile, “but I couldn’t go to anyone but Julian in Dover Street. He always does me when I’m over here. Barb is going to take me up to town. Have you wired the Dorchester yet, dear?”
“Blimey,” said Violet, flabbergasted, “all the way to London to have your hair washed? You must be potty.” Her status as Mrs. Williams with a home of her own and no one to tell her what to do all day had given her more poise with people like this. Instead of being paralytic as she once would have been, the uneasiness which Honey’s presence caused her manifested itself in an outspoken bravado of rudeness.
“You ought to hold your head under the pump like I do,” she went on. “We haven’t had any water at the cottage since the drought.” Honey shuddered and leaned well back as Violet reached across her for another piece of cake.
“Say, isn’t that terrible?” she said. “I’d just pass out if I didn’t have my bath every evening.”
> “I should think everyone else passes out if you do that in this house. There’s never enough hot water for more than one bath at night.”
“Violet!” Her mother quickly changed the subject. “You never told me you hadn’t any water. That’s terrible. Why don’t you and Fred come up here for baths?”
“Should think you’d got enough people having baths without us too,” said Violet, glad to have the point handed to her. “We’re O.K. You ought to see us washing in the morning. Fred pumps while I wash, then I pump while he washes.”
“Quite a charming little idyll,” said Honey, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke down her nostrils, and Bob made everybody jump by going “Ha-ha-ha!” like the hooter on a calliope.
When Evelyn heard that they were going to London for the week-end, she went dead white and stared at her father unbelievingly. “But you can’t, Daddy, you can’t. It’s my school sports. I told you!”
“So you did. Say, isn’t that just too bad? You’ll have to tell me all about it, hm?”
“But you promised you’d come. You know I might win the high jump, and I wanted you to see me. All the other girls’ parents go.”
“I’ll come, of course, dear,” said Mrs. North, “and perhaps Violet and Fred will too.”
“Yes, I know—thanks awfully—but I mean—well, you always come, and they know you. Nobody’s got a father who’s an American, and I did so want him to come. Daddy, do. They have lovely teas,” she said hopefully. “Miss Mann makes the most super baps, with strawberry jam and cream—”
“What in heaven’s name is a baps?” asked Bob.
“A bap,” said his sister. “It’s a sort of round, doughy thing you make on a griddle.”
“You mean a hot biscuit,” said Honey.
The Happy Prisoner Page 32