“Elizabeth, where’s Daddy? I can’t jump till he comes! I promised him he should see me.”
“I expect he’s somewhere about. You go ahead and jump, and mind you win. Look, you’d better go back to the paddock; they’ll be calling your number soon.”
Could nobody find the courage or the right words to tell her? Oliver thought, but when Evelyn came riding towards him and stared up at him with agonised eyes, all he could say was: “Perhaps he’s in the house, watching from a window.”
“Oh, but he must—Oh, hold my pony a minute, could you, please? I must just—” Evelyn jumped off and flung Dandy’s reins at a nervous little man who was standing near. She scrambled up the protruding stones which made steps up the Ha-Ha, stumbled at the top, picked herself up and tore up to the house, negotiating the grass bank on all fours.
They had called her to jump twice before she reappeared at Oliver’s side. “I’ve looked in all the rooms; he’s not anywhere,” she said desperately. “Oh, Uncle Ollie, he must be here. Where is he? It’s not even as if he was so small I couldn’t see him.”
Violet was beckoning sweepingly at her to come down. The pony in the ring crashed through the last jump and, exalted with I having knocked so much over, bolted away to the edge of the field before its rider could stop it.
“Come on, Evie!” called the Master. “You can’t keep missing your turn.”
Even he could not deflect her. “Tell them to let me wait till last,” she whispered to Oliver. “I’ll go and see if he’s at the farm.” She was gone again before he could stop her. “Can she jump later?” he called. “She’s gone to get her whip.”
“What’s the matter with her?” grumbled the woman in the mackintosh. “She’ll miss her chance altogether if she doesn’t look out. Come on in then, Stewart, and remember what I told you about your hands.”
The smug little boy in the boots and jockey cap had finished a clear round and cantered out of the ring with his pony flicking its tail in contempt for the size of the jumps, and two other children had bucketed their way round before Evelyn came back, running under the wall, her eyes still scanning the field.
“Seen him?” She wavered uncertainly below Oliver, looking palely up at him like a little pond creature.
“Here, I wish you’d take your horse,” said the little man plaintively, who had been holding Dandy at arm’s length, gyrating as the pony moved so as to keep face to face with him.
“Come on, Evie!” They were yelling at her again from the ring, and the children in the paddock were goggling at her like a herd of sheep at a fox.
“What’s the matter, old girl, got stage fright? Come on, you go in there and win! Hup, she goes!” Mrs. Ogilvie put her hands under Evelyn’s knee and gave her a leg-up that nearly shot her over the other side. Evelyn gathered up her reins, still looking vaguely round. “I was waiting … I couldn’t see Daddy … I wanted to …” She stood in her stirrups and craned over the heads of the crowd.
“Gracious heavens, is that all? He’s gone out to tea; no wonder you couldn’t find him. Get a move on now!” She gave Dandy a slap on his quarters that made him start forward, nearly jerking Evelyn out of the saddle. The crowd made way for her and she cantered into the ring, flopping about like a sack of potatoes. Dandy liked jumping, and he got himself over the post and rails and the two brush fences, but when he came to the wall, which, in practice, had needed all Evelyn’s concentration to make him face, he simply stuck his head sideways and down, thrust out his lower jaw and bore her out to the right through a gap in the hurdles, scattering the spectators, while Evelyn sat on him like a passenger, barely pulling on the reins.
“What’s the matter with her? What’s the matter with her? Oh damn!” Violet danced up and down in her disappointment. She turned her back and slouched away as Stewart trotted smartly back into the ring, was given the red rosette and cantered twice round the ring with it in his mouth, the ripple of applause sounding thin in the open air.
Evelyn and Dandy had disappeared towards the farm. Oliver wheeled himself across the lawn, through a flower-bed and into the kitchen garden, from the far end of which he could see the garages. He had thought he heard a car on the drive, and as he reached the path by the marrow-bed he saw the family car lurch into the yard in the style in which Bob always cornered. He drove into the garage and from within came the destructive crashing which was Bob’s way of shutting car doors.
He and Honey emerged and Oliver was just going to call out to them, when he saw Evelyn come walking slowly round the corner of the garage with her toes turned in. “Well!” Bob hailed her. “And did you win, young lady? Don’t tell me—I know you did. My family always win anything they want.”
“You said you’d be there,” Evelyn said incredulously. “You said you wanted to see me jump. You went out to tea.”
“Sure, sugar.” Honey had her flapjack raised and was twiddling her horns of hair. “Grown-ups have important dates they can’t always put off to please little girls, you know.” Evelyn did not seem to hear her. She was still staring at her father.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, busy with the garage doors. “It was just too bad, but I’ll see you another time, hm? What d’you think Mrs. Barnet gave me for you? Why, where’s she—”? By the time he had finished with the stiff old lock and turned round, Evelyn had gone, back round the corner to the stables.
“Sulking,” said Honey, and linking her arm in Bob’s, she smiled up at him as they sauntered into the house.
“But she must go,” Mrs. North said for the twentieth time. “She’s his child; I can’t interfere. He wants to take her. He must be fond of her; he just doesn’t understand children very well.”
“He’s not fit to have a child,” Oliver said, also for the twentieth time since his mother had come down in her dressing-gown to hash the matter over. “And it’s no good your keeping on telling me that children are better with their own parents, because I shall just keep on saying it depends on the parents.”
“Maybe it will turn out all right,” said Mrs. North, trying to make her voice sound hopeful. “Bob’s such a sweet person, you know, even if he is a little thoughtless. He’d never let that woman spoil Evie’s life.”
“What’s he been letting her do ever since they came here then?”
“That’s just infatuation, dear,” said Mrs. North patiently, as if Oliver were too young to understand about sex. “They’ll settle down. You wait, in a few years’ time Evie will be coming back to see you and laughing to think how she once didn’t want to go to New York.”
“‘Didn’t want’ is putting it mildly. I can’t bear to think about tomorrow,”
“There she is, poor little lamb, with her bags all packed; just one left open to put in her golliwog in the morning. She’d never have gone to sleep if I hadn’t given her that half aspirin. She never cried though, but it was that lost kind of staring look that got me. And she hasn’t eaten a thing all day. She’s not fit to travel. Bob will be lucky if he gets to the States without a sick child on his hands.”
“She can’t go,” repeated Oliver, who could think of nothing else to say.
“It’s no good to keep saying that,” said his mother quite irritably, “and you know it. There’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well stop upsetting ourselves and talking each other into imagining all kinds of things. She’ll be all right. She’s his child; he’s got to take her if he wants to, so don’t let’s talk any more about it.” She emptied an ashtray into the paper basket and reversed a few books that Mrs. Cowlin had turned upside down in the bookcase when she cleaned the room. “Of course, it isn’t as if she’d enjoy the life,” she said, reopening the discussion she had just closed. “You saw what she’s been like all day. This is what she loves. It’s too bad she couldn’t have spent all her childhood in a place like this, but then again, she’ll have opportunities a lot of children would give their ears for.”
“She can’t go,” said Oliver flatly.
“You’
re quite right, she can’t go,” said Elizabeth in an unusually masterful voice. It was so unlike her to butt into a conversation that they both turned and stared at her standing in the doorway in a blue and white spotted dressing-gown over pale-blue pyjamas.
“Well, don’t you start,” said Mrs. North. “We’ve been telling each other for the last houi he can’t go, when we know all the time it’s got nothing to do with us. I’m going to bed and take a Slumbello. D’you know, Elizabeth, I never touched drugs till September the tenth, 1944—that was when I got the telegram about you, Ollie—but my nerves have had more shocks in the ten months since then than in the whole of the rest of their life. What a year this has been, Ollie! Everything that had to happen in our family has happened, just about. How’s Evie?”
“Sleeping now.” Elizabeth still had that unusually determined look on her calm face. “She sat up a little while ago when I went in, grabbed hold of me as if she was drowning and yelled out that she didn’t want to go. She was more or less asleep, of course, but it shows what must be going on in her brain. All those awful things she said to her father when he went to say good night, and he got so silly and shouted—excuse me Mrs. North. I suppose I shouldn’t talk like that about your brother.”
“Go right ahead.” She spread her hands resignedly. “Oliver’s been slanging him good and plenty for the last hour.”
“He’s not fit to have a child,” repeated Oliver, who seemed incapable of making any more than a kind of gramophone accompaniment to the conversation.
“She’ll be worse again tomorrow,” said Elizabeth. “How can you send her out to that life? You can’t let her go.”
“Well, really, Elizabeth,” said Mrs. North with the coldness arising from an uneasy conscience, “I think it’s hardly your business.”
“It is my business,” said Elizabeth firmly and shut the door. “That’s why I came down. I want to tell you something.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about Evelyn going to New York,” said Mrs. North wearily. “It’s settled she’s going, so there’s no need for everyone to get so dramatic about it. Really, the way you two go on, one would think no one had ever had a stepmother before.”
“Oh yes, people have had stepmothers,” said Elizabeth bitterly. “I’m not going to talk about Evie, I’m going to talk about myself. I wasn’t ever going to tell you. I wasn’t going to tell anyone, not ever; but perhaps if I do now, I can make you see, and you’ll have to do something. You can make most people do what you want, Mrs. North, so surely you can manage your brother.”
“Don’t give me that line of talk,” said Mrs. North. “I’m much too tired to go for flattery. What do you want to tell me? Make it snappy, whatever it is, because I want to get to bed. Believe it or not, but I, even I, have had enough talk for one night.”
“I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone,” repeated Elizabeth. She sat down on the footstool, crossed her feet neatly, arranged her dressing-gown over her knees and linked her hands round them, leaning back and staring before her. “When a thing as shattering as that happens, you don’t tell anyone, because it’s part of you. It’s the things that haven’t really gone deep into you that you tell, and pretend they’re your innermost feelings.”
Mrs. North looked at Oliver and raised her eyebrows. Elizabeth had never talked so introspectively before.
“I hope you don’t mind my talking about myself,” went on Elizabeth, with the deference born of habit, because she had every intention of talking about herself, whether anyone minded or not. “It won’t take long. It’s quite an ordinary story, I suppose. It must happen to lots of people, though that’s no reason why it should happen to one more—Evie, I mean.
.…
“You know, I think, that my mother died when I was quite young—twelve and a half, to be exact; two days before I was going to be twelve and a half. We always celebrated half-birthdays in our family. We loved anniversaries and celebrations and presents, so we found every excuse to have them. My mother and father celebrated everything: not only their wedding day, but the day they met, the day he first kissed her, the day he proposed by letter, and the day he got her answer back. They always gave each other something—flowers or sweets—not anything much, you know. We weren’t terribly well off, but comfortable enough. We had a little house in Wimbledon, with dahlias in the front and a coco-nut for the birds and a lawn at the back where you could sit and watch people driving off the fourteenth tee of the golf-course. I expect Oliver would say that’s typically suburban, because he’s rather a snob about things like that, but nobody who hasn’t lived there can possibly know how nice it was. I don’t know if you think so, but it always seems to me as if the sun used to shine more in those days. Surely we had whole weeks of it in the summer, but now we get excited about two sunny days running.
My father worked in London and always, if we were not going to be back before him—if I had a dancing class, or we were going out to tea—my mother would leave a present on the hall table for him to find when he got home, or if not a present, a note. Always something. Then when we got home he’d have done something: laid out my night clothes—probably the wrong ones—or cleaned the shoes, or made something for supper. I dare say it all sounds rather ingenuous and silly told like this, and I don’t care if you think so, because it wasn’t.
I loved my mother. She was like me, and always understood what I was getting at, but I think I loved my father more. He was a sort of hero and God to me, like Evelyn’s father used to be to her. He was gay. He wasn’t big or boisterous or jolly; he was quite a little man really, with a soft moustache and brown eyes, and he was just quietly gay. He didn’t sing about the house; he hummed. He had his own tunes, about two or three of them, so you always knew who was coming. It reminded me so much of him when I read that book about Gerald du Maurier: how his father was always singing Plaisir d’Amour, so you could hear him before he turned a corner. My father made his songs his own, just like that. Greensleeves, one of them was. For a long time after—but I haven’t got to that yet—I couldn’t bear to hear it played or sung, but I’ve got over that long ago. I’ve got my life very well ordered. Things don’t upset me.
We none of us thought about our life ever changing. We never visualised getting any older or richer or poorer, or living anywhere else, or being turned upside down by a family crisis. Our life was just us, just right. We were never deliriously happy or miserably depressed. We were content, secure and snug. Smug, you’ll say, I suppose.
My mother died having a still-born baby, which she hadn’t wanted, because the three of us had been so happy we didn’t need anyone else. They didn’t want another child but me. I can say that now without conceit, because it’s like talking about another person. What I was then, I’m not now. After she died, I remember being ashamed of a thought I had. I remember thinking that I’d rather it was her than my father. If he had died, it would have been the end of everything. As it was, I still had him, and I had a sort of new pride in looking after him all by myself. I must have been quite grown up for my age, to be able to run the house. My mother had taught me how to cook and clean and do accounts, and although we had a morning maid, I used to find plenty to do when I wasn’t at school. My father used to let me miss school often, so that we could do things together. That’s probably why I’m so badly educated.
Quite soon, surprisingly soon, he started humming Greensleeves again, and we realised we had made a life for ourselves. A different sort of life, of course, and one always had the feeling in the back of one’s mind that there was something missing, but we were more intimate, and we enjoyed feeling responsible for each other. We still stuck to the present-giving, though we left out my mother’s anniversaries; we weren’t quite all that sentimental. Before, it had been my mother who bought the things for him; now it was me, and I loved that. He paid for them really, because if I wanted to give him a present he had to give me more pocket-money, but that didn’t matter.
At the week-ends we used to
go for long walks with our dog. He was my dog really, but he liked my father better. We were both mad on walking, and my legs got frighteningly well developed. I was rather thick and square in those days, but it all went afterwards in hospital, because of the food. Sometimes we walked over Wimbledon Common, across Robin Hood Corner and through Richmond Park to that hotel—fancy forgetting its name—all green tiles, where you used to be able to get stone ginger and pickle sandwiches. Sometimes we’d take a bus or a train into the country and walk all day. Hiking, they call it now.
Am I making my life sound frightfully dull and goody-goody? I don’t think I was really a prig; I was just rather ingenuous and unenterprising. I had no ambition, absolutely none. I never wanted anything but that life in Wimbledon. The other girls at school used to plan how they were going to be famous, but I didn’t even want to have a job. I just wanted to stay at home and be the perfect little housekeeper. My father was very interested in food, not greedy, but keen on it in the right way, and he was fun to cook for. I can remember holding my breath sometimes when I put a dish on the table—Œufs mornay perhaps—oh yes, we’d been to France in the holidays—in case when he tried it the eggs would be hard and he’d be so disappointed. I’d rather have it that way than someone like Lady Sandys. Remember how she used to smoke during meals and never notice what she was eating?
I didn’t want to marry either. We talked sometimes about a mythical husband for me, with a kind of patronising pity for any man who thought he could possibly intrude. I didn’t see now I was ever going to like anyone as much as my father. I suppose psychologists would say I had a father-complex. I dare say I had, but it made me jolly happy.
It was when I was nearly sixteen and going to leave school in a few months’ time that he met my stepmother. He’d been out to dinner without me and I was in bed when he got home. On the hall table I’d left him one of those twopenny packets or biscuits you used to be able to get—remember? Four biscuits with a bit of cheese in the middle; he loved those. I heard him humming as he opened the front door. I called out to him to come up and laugh about the people he’d, met, but he didn’t hear. I heard him go into the sitting-room, and make up the fire, and I heard him move his armchair in front of it and creak about geting his pipe and things, and I fell asleep before he came up.
The Happy Prisoner Page 35