by Angela Huth
Mrs Fox took off her coat. Her long strings of bead necklaces clacked against her plate as she leant over it. As she chattered I only half-listened to her, leaving Joshua to reply. I studied him with intense concentration, trying to imprint every small movement on my mind. The way he cut his roll – he cut the top off like other people slice the top off a boiled egg, then, without looking, pulled out the doughy inside with finger and thumb, rolling the bits into hard pellets and dropping them under the table-cloth. The way he looked right into his glass when he took a sip of wine: the way he caught his bottom lip under his top teeth to trap a smile while he listened to Mrs Fox. And when the story came to an end, the way he laughed with his mouth wide open, so that the polo-neck of his jersey was tipped over by his chin. I pushed the plate of butter towards him and briefly he held my hand.
‘You’re beautiful to-day, Face,’ he said. Quietly, so that Mrs Fox shouldn’t hear.
When lunch was over we walked along the front. Joshua between Mrs Fox and me. We each took an arm.
‘In the old days,’ Mrs Fox was saying, ‘the bands in the tea-houses along the front were something remarkable. During the season, Edith and I spent most of our afternoons drinking tea in one or other of the places, just listening. There was one place we especially liked, I remember. Rusco’s, I think it was called. They did a very good chocolate cake. It was so full of rum you had to eat it with a spoon. Well, at Rusco’s, the leader of the band took a fancy to Edith. I could tell. He would always give a special bow in her direction at the end of every piece. He always wore a carnation in his buttonhole, this man, and he had the shiniest black hair I ever saw, right flat on his head, almost like another skin. – Edith was pretty in those days, mind. She had curls all round her face. Well, one day the waiter brought us over a little note from the band-leader. Ladies, it said, is there any request you would like us to play for you? But Edith, being so shy, just turned her head away and blushed. After that, she wouldn’t go to Rusco’s any more. I often think of the chance she might have missed.’
It was quite warm, walking fast, in the sun, although a sharp wind was blowing from the sea. The grey waves dipped and swooped restlessly, and above them a few gulls imitated their movements in the air.
‘It’s funny about Brighton,’ said Mrs Fox, ‘it’s where all the best things have happened to me. It was on the train from Victoria to Brighton that I met Henry. In truth, I was going to Hove. But we got on so nicely on the train that some instinct made me get out at Brighton, too. We lived close by the station, then, so he walked me home. The next day he came round in the afternoon and asked my mother if he could take me out for tea. Well, my mother, of course – she was very old fashioned – was very shocked. Someone I’d picked up on the train, she called him, and sent him packing. But he was on holiday down here, staying with his aunt, and he had nothing to do, so he came every day with the same request, but each time my mother sent him away. I was afraid he would give up. But then, luckily, my mother found out that his aunt was a very respectable old lady reputed to be worth a fortune. So at last she said yes, just for tea. Well, we didn’t bother with tea, of course. We just walked for miles and miles, in the rain, all over Brighton. Then we walked all along the beach and got quite soaked, and it began to thunder. We sheltered under the pier for a while, and do you know what he said? He said: “Ethel Smith, I’m a penniless medical student and there’s nothing I can give you, but I love you.” Then it came on to rain even harder, and we decided we’d better make a dash for it. So we ran home. And then, of course, my mother scolded us, and what with all the flurry of drying our clothes and making hot drinks I never had a chance to tell him that I loved him too.’
Mrs Fox came to a standstill, and pointed towards the town.
‘Funnily enough, although it’s all changed now with all these new blocks of flats, I believe we could still take the short cut to my mother’s house that Henry and I took that day. Shall we try?’
On the way there she told us she had heard the house had been a bed and breakfast place now for many years. But she would like to see the outside again.
It was a small, redbrick house between two creamy stone Regency houses. The only things it had in common with them was a bow window on the first floor, and a bed and breakfast sign on the front door. Joshua was enthusiastic to see inside, but Mrs Fox tried to restrain him.
‘You know how unsympathetic landladies can be,’ she protested. But he disentangled himself from her arm and rang the front-door bell. It was answered by a middle-aged woman with a bunch of dazzling blonde curls perched precariously on her head, stage make-up and a stained apron.
‘I have a friend here,’ said Joshua, dragging the reluctant Mrs Fox towards him, ‘who lived in this house till just after the First World War. We’ve heard so much about it from her, we wondered if we could just glance at the inside?’
‘Well, I don’t mind if you do. There’s no-one staying at the moment. Come on in.’ She gave us a welcoming landlady smile and we followed her.
The room stretched from one end of the house to the other, a window at each end. Three different wallpapers covered the walls: one flowered, one geometrical and one covered with storks flying through pink clouds. Mrs Fox gasped, and dabbed at the flowers and cherry in her hat. She turned slowly round, taking in the lurex glitter of the curtains, the television on its spindly legs, the flight of paper angels left over from Christmas, above the modern brick fireplace with its electric fire, the leatherette three-piece-suite and the jumbo ashtray from Torquay.
‘I bought it thirty years ago,’ said blonde curls, ‘and spent every penny I had doing the place up. It was a right shambles. Then only last year I did it right through again. Cost me a fortune, but it’s worth it. I’m fully booked years ahead.’
Mrs Fox didn’t seem to hear her. Suddenly, she smiled.
‘You’ve certainly improved the place,’ she said. ‘I never could have imagined it so lovely and bright.’ She struggled to take off her fur coat. I helped her. Its warm satin lining smelt faintly of her violet scent. ‘It was always chilly, too, in spite of the coal fire. You’ve got it lovely and warm, haven’t you?’ Again she looked in some amazement round the sparkling room. ‘When we lived here, this was two poky little rooms. Here, in this part, the front room, my father would play his violin on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t allowed near him. It was very dark, I remember, and filled with huge mahogany furniture which seemed to suck up all the light, and it always smelt musty. It seemed so much smaller.’
The landlady looked at her kindly and invited us to join her in a cup of tea. When she had gone out to the kitchen, Mrs Fox snapped back to the present.
‘But still,’ she said, thinking out loud, ‘you should never go back. It’s a silly thing to do. A silly thing to do.’
She sat down on one of the leatherette arm-chairs. It squeaked, and the embroidered antimacassar skidded sideways behind her head. Joshua and I stood in front of the electric fire, close but not touching. Mrs Fox looked up at us.
‘We’ve had some good times,’ she said. Joshua laughed. ‘You’ll have to meet Clare’s husband,’ he said. Mrs Fox sniffed.
‘I’m not looking forward to that. It isn’t that I’m not pleased that it’s all worked out so well. It’s just that I’m used to you two. We’re all used to each other, aren’t we?’ She was unusually subdued. But then the landlady came back with a tray of tea, and switched on the lights. Mrs Fox slid forward on her chair.
‘Edith would never have believed her eyes,’ she smiled, and for some reason the rest of us laughed.
When we left the landlady Mrs Fox had one more request before we turned to London. She wanted to take a short walk on the beach.
The wind was colder now and the afternoon light had almost faded. Street lamps made pale holes in the sky, and the pier stuck out into the sea like a huge, dusky barn on stilts. As we walked along the front an old, shadowy man came towards us, distorted into strange shapes by the instruments t
hat hung about him.
‘You’d never believe it!’ Mrs Fox cried out in delight, ‘who would have expected such luck? A one-man band. I wonder if he would play for us?’ She skipped up to him like a child and put a hand on his arm. She asked him to play.
‘I’m on my way home, aren’t I, lady?’ he replied, nicely. Mrs Fox pleaded with him further. Eventually, they struck up some kind of a bargain. Then while the musician tuned up-weird squeaks and thumps flew from his various instruments – Mrs Fox led Joshua and me down a flight of steps to the beach.
‘He’ll be some time,’ she explained. ‘Those things go out of tune as soon as you finish playing them.’
The tide was high. There was only a narrow strip of shingle along which we could walk. Mrs Fox pranced along the stones making them clatter and crunch in a kind of harmony with the small crashes from the breaking waves. She stopped, stooped down, and picked up a smooth white pebble. Fast and skilfully she curved back her arm, lunged forward and threw it with all her force. It made a brief white arc in the sky, then plummeted down into the dark sea.
‘Did you see that? Did you see where it went? Not bad for my age, in a fur coat, is it? So out of practice, too.’ She picked up another pebble. ‘Henry and I would compete for hours. He was a marvellous pebble thrower, Henry.’ She broke off to throw again. This time the pebble didn’t go so far. ‘Not such a good one. You have to choose your pebble carefully. You can blame a poor shot quite a bit on the pebble, you know.’
Joshua chose himself a flat white stone, and with less grace than Mrs Fox, hurled it into the water.
‘Not bad! Not bad at all. But just you see, I can beat you.’ She bent down again to look for another stone.
At that moment the musician on the pavement high above us stepped forward. A street lamp behind him threw his huge shadow down on to the beach, a bulging monster shape. With a nice sense of the dramatic, he raised his arms for a second, like a conductor, so that his shadow became a bird shape. Then the wings dropped and he began to play.
‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ thumped down upon us. Bang clonk oink doom, clonk… Mrs Fox paused mid-throw to laugh.
‘Cheeky!’ she said. ‘I’ll show him I’m not in need of any looking after, am I?’ and she thrust another pebble into the sea.
Joshua and I began to compete with her. Faster and faster we chose our stones and threw them with diminishing skill. The musician’s shadow lapped over us, shrinking a little and swelling a little according to which instruments he played together. Joshua took my hand and whirled me round in a mad dance. Mrs Fox joined us. We skipped round in a circle, singing. The shingle slipped and scraped beneath our feet. On every fourth beat we paused, bent down, picked large stones and threw them, with one gesture, into the black chips of the waves. The wind, no longer cold, smelt of seaweed. A solitary gull cawed steeply up into the thick sky. We were confused with laughter.
When the tune came to an end, the dance came to an end. We clapped, but the noise was barely audible above the sea. Mrs Fox panted a little, and held her side. Joshua took her arm, suddenly concerned. She looked up at him, her face pale but excited.
‘With a little more practice I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t take on Henry one day,’ she said. ‘But I’m definitely not as good as I used to be. Give me a few days here, though, and I’d soon be up to my old standard.’
‘I think we’ve done enough for one day, don’t you?’ Joshua let go of her arm. The musician began to play the march from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
‘Just one more throw,’ said Mrs Fox, ‘to see if I can’t beat you.’
Still panting, she stooped to choose another stone.
‘This is a beauty. You couldn’t find a better one on the whole beach.’ It was flat, white, and almost perfectly round. She curved her arm again, tightened her mouth into a determined line, and threw. But this time it was feeble. The stone sank a few yards into the water. Mrs Fox sagged with disappointment.
‘It’s no good. Like Henry says, you should know when to stop.’ Her hands fell to her sides. Her fingers plucked at bits of blue fur which straggled from her long sleeves. ‘Well, perhaps we had better go.’
Joshua took her arm again and led her back towards the dark flight of steps. In slow motion they climbed the steps, in time with the music. On the pavement of the front again, now brilliant with lights, the wind seemed colder and fiercer. With a bare hand, her rings sparkling, Mrs Fox rammed her hat farther down on to her head.
‘We must thank the man for his kindness,’ she said. ‘We must thank him for his splendid playing.’
Then, quite upright again, dignified and full of purpose, she marched towards him.
*
‘D’you think I’ve remembered everything?’
‘I think so.’
‘All those new shirts?’
‘Yes.’
‘Plenty of socks?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pentels?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t look after me badly, do you?’
Joshua was in the bath. Lying back, in the steam, not washing. I was on the three-legged cork stool.
‘That was good, that chicken thing for dinner, wasn’t it? We should have tried that place before.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we should.’
‘We always meant to. You should have reminded me.’ Pause. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Nothing much.’
He offered me a soapy hand.
‘Did you remember to get my sun lotion stuff?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a spare typewritter ribbon?’
‘Yes.’
He grinned. Began to rub soap under one arm.
‘You’re marvellous, Face.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He grinned again and began under the other arm.
‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right now? I mean, your stomach and everything?’
‘Yes, thank you. Fine.’
‘You’ll take care for a while, though, won’t you? Thing like that takes a bit of getting over. Make Jonathan treat you carefully. Say you haven’t been too well. Or are you going to tell him?’
‘No.’
‘What are you going to tell him about the last six months?’
‘Nothing very much. I think it was part of our contract that we shouldn’t make each other confess about whatever we’d been doing.’
‘What do you think he’s been up to?’
‘I can’t imagine. I expect he’s been lonely. He’s not very good at being alone. Perhaps he really has been writing in his Roman attic.’
‘Perhaps he’s just about to have an epic novel published.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘So you’ll be rich and famous.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Will you ever want to see me again?’
‘If you want. – Would you want to?’
‘Not really. Small talk with Mr Lyall. “And perhaps you’d sign my copy for me, Jonathan old boy.” You can imagine.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Still, we might run into each other sometime, somewhere.’
‘We might.’
‘Not that we know many of the same people.’
‘Well, just in the street.’
‘Well, yes, we might, in the street.’
Joshua sat up, lifted a foot from the soap-misted water, and with intricate care began to wash each toe.
‘Mrs Fox seemed tired this evening.’
‘I think she overdid it.’
‘Will you go on seeing her?’
‘Of course. I’ll probably go round to-morrow afternoon.’
‘I’ll send her lots of postcards. I wonder how she’ll take to Jonathan?’
‘Oh, she’ll be won over by him in the end, I expect. He’s got great charm.’
‘So you’ve always said. But what else will you do?’
‘When?’
‘To-morrow.’
‘Oh, to-morrow. To-morrow I’ll finish packing up and tidying up here, then I’ll go home and begin to get things ready for Tuesday.’
‘For when Jonathan comes home?’
‘Yes.’
Joshua dropped his first foot back in the water and picked up the other one.
‘Well, you know my address in Mexico.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could send on anything I’ve forgotten.’
‘Of course.’
‘But I don’t think I have forgotten anything, do you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘All my new shirts?’
‘We’ve been through all that.’
‘So we have.’
He turned on the hot tap so that for a while we could not go on speaking. When the bath was full he lay back again, knees bent, hands tracing patterns under the water, an occasional finger surfacing to break a floating bubble of soap.
‘D’you think it’ll work?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. I know it will.’
‘Good. I always wanted you to go back, you know, all along.’
‘Why?’
‘Nothing to do with your not being the right person for me. Just because I always knew you believed implicitly in marriage, and that really you wanted it to work.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But that’s not to say….’ Pause. This was my last chance to find out what I still didn’t know. I would risk his anger. ‘Was I ever all right for you?’ I asked.
Joshua lifted a dripping arm and touched my chin with two fingers.
‘Oh, Face,’ he said, ‘don’t be silly.’
He stood up, then, and began to dry himself with a small black towel. I squeezed striped toothpaste for him on to his toothbrush.