No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  Christine smiled, rolled up the photograph again and put it away with the pictures of herself in the cricket team and the swimming eight, and the panoramic photograph of the whole school and all the mistresses making funny mouths, taken with a slowly turning camera on the tennis courts in Jubilee year. She got into bed and turned out the light. The room was not dark now and she shut her eyes and began to worry about having to get up in a few hours’ time, and what she would feel like at work.

  She was late getting up in the morning. A weight pressed on her eyes and her mouth was dry as sandpaper. When she went downstairs she could hear Aunt Josephine in the hall, telephoning to Geoffrey’s mother. Christine went into the kitchen, where her aunt had put coffee and toast and half a grapefruit on the table for her. The butter was under a plate, because of the cats.

  When Christine had a hangover it always made her hungry. It seemed a long time ago that she had eaten dinner with Geoffrey, and much had happened since then. She finished the grapefruit and the toast and was cutting a slice of bread when Aunt Josephine came in. She wore a net over her yellow-grey hair and a stiff new flowered overall that looked like the loose cover for a sofa. She sat down at the kitchen table and poured herself a cup of coffee. A cat mewed against her leg.

  ‘How did Aunt Lottie take it?’ asked Christine.

  ‘Badly. Being woken so early gave her a sense of calamity. If she would get up at a reasonable hour like we do she wouldn’t take things so ill.’

  ‘My hour isn’t so reasonable,’ Christine said. ‘I’m dreadfully late, even worse than usual. Mr Parker doesn’t mind, but sooner or later someone’s going to find out I’m never in on time, and then I shan’t be the estimable Miss Cope any more.’ The manager had once called her that at a staff conference, and the family had never let her forget it.

  ‘You won’t have time to get my wool then,’ said Aunt Josephine sadly.

  ‘Oh Lord, I’m sorry, no. I’ll have to go straight to my own department. I’ll go early on Monday and get it. I promise.’

  ‘I could have done two or three of those pilches over the weekend.’

  ‘Well, the Balkan Orphans can wait a few days. They’re in bad enough shape as it is.’

  ‘That’s just the trouble.’ Aunt Josephine leaned on the table despondently. She bore the world’s troubles on her back. She saw all the babies from all the ruined homes behind the Iron Curtain running about freezing to death because Christine had not got up early enough to buy her some wool to knit drawers for them.

  ‘I tell you what,’ she said, brightening. ‘Why don’t you take Geoffrey’s car to work?’

  ‘He’d never let me. It’s his treasure.’

  ‘Don’t ask him.’ Aunt Josephine levered one side of her face into her brand of wink. ‘I don’t want him wakened, anyway. You’ll be back with it when he goes this afternoon. His mother’s coming to take him away after lunch - “in the Rolls,” she informed me, as if I didn’t know she had one.’

  The idea of driving comfortably to work in Geoffrey’s car instead of waiting on the windy road at the corner of the common for the bus and then joining the battle for the train at Hammersmith Broadway was so tempting that Christine did not let herself think twice about it. She took the car and got to Goldwyn’s early enough to buy Aunt Josephine’s wool from the flushed woman in Art Needlework, and get to her own department in time to hustle the juniors over their dusting.

  ‘I say, Miss Cope, you do look rough this morning,’ Alice said gaily. ‘Aren’t you quite the thing?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Had a night out, I expect,’ Alice said. ‘I must say that’s the only thing I’m glad I’m so young for. It doesn’t show on me.’

  Christine went away to tell Margaret of the night’s adventures. Since Mr Parker would not be in this morning, they went into his little jumbled office and lit cigarettes, with one eye for shadows coming up to the stippled glass partition.

  Saturdays were usually fairly quiet. Most people were busy buying food, and the chief customers were college students looking for technical books and children clutching five shillings in an agony of choice. Christine and Margaret usually had a cigarette or two on a Saturday morning. Even if you did not especially want one, it was enjoyable because it was illicit, like smoking in the ward bathroom on night duty, when Night Sister might come round on rubber soles at any time and catch you.

  Margaret enjoyed the story about Geoffrey, whom she had disliked ever since Christine had brought him to a party at her house and he had criticized the colour of the curtains. The story of the man in the Old Harrovian tie fell rather flat. She was not shocked. She listened without comment, but in the telling it became, not a romantic adventure, but something quite sordid.

  Margaret suddenly got up and went to the door. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’ She threw it out casually, not looking at Christine, as if she were almost embarrassed about announcing a baby after twelve years.

  ‘Darling Maggie, how wonderful!’ Christine looked at her, intrigued by the secret changes unguessed within the familiar neat exterior. Margaret seemed suddenly remote. Pregnant women lead an introverted life that no one else can share.

  ‘I think it’s terribly exciting!’ Christine was over-enthusiastic, as always at news like this, to smother the little jealous stab that wished it could be her. ‘Isn’t Laurie pleased?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so. He’s surprised. He treats me as if I were a phenomenon, producing at my age. It makes me feel terribly old.’ Margaret went briskly off among the books. Miss Burman came up to Christine with a muddled query about encyclopaedias, and the morning went on.

  Since they were not busy, Christine had time to feel tired and a little sick from last night. She was buoyed up by the thought of driving home in Geoffrey’s car. If she could come to work in a car every day, life would be a fine thing. Her father never let her take his stolid black car, which had been laid up with bricks under the axles during the war and had never run properly since.

  Christine overtipped the car-park man, because Geoffrey’s grey coupé made her feel grand, and drove rather showily among the westbound traffic, looking without pity on the lines of people at the bus stops, who might have been herself.

  Miss Burman, who was getting a lift to West Kensington, squeaked and exclaimed and leaned forward, holding on to the door. She was gratifyingly though sickeningly impressed. If only she would not keep saying: ‘My stars! I don’t get a ride in a car from one year’s end to the next’, one might be more sorry for her.

  ‘Here’s where you get out,’ said Christine. ‘I’ll stop for you while the lights are red.’

  Miss Burman had dropped her handbag on the floor and could not find it. She had difficulty getting out of the car, and by the time she had staggered to the pavement with her hat askew, leaned in to tell Christine once again how surprised Mother would be to see her home so early and shut the door without latching it properly, the lights had been green and were now red again.

  Christine turned on the radio and opened the window so that the man in the old car next to her could hear that she had a radio. The car made her feel superior. Ordinarily, she did not have much to be superior about. After Hammersmith Bridge she let Geoffrey’s car out far over the speed limit and arrived home feeling happy.

  Aunt Josephine met her at the door with a face that wiped some of the smile off Christine’s. ‘The doctor’s been,’ she said hollowly.

  ‘How’s Geoff?’

  ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’ Aunt Josephine bent to straighten the rugs that the alsatian had scattered when he heard the car stop.

  ‘What do you mean? Is it a fractured skull? Is he dying or something?’

  ‘Heavens, why should he be? He’ll be all right, but the doctor says he can’t be moved for at least a week.’

  ‘Oh gosh,’ said Christine. She looked at her aunt. Her aunt looked at her. With Geoffrey ill upstairs, it would be unkind to say what they thought.

&nb
sp; Aunt Josephine made a face. ‘I shall look after him like my own child,’ she said theatrically and went away to dish up lunch.

  After lunch Christine followed her aunt into the kitchen and said: ‘I’ll do the washing-up, if you want to get off to the Incurables.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ Aunt Josephine said in a martyred voice, rolling up her sleeves and turning on taps.

  ‘Of course you are.’ Aunt Josephine went every week to read to the inmates of the Putney Home for Incurables. They loved her. Other visitors read what they thought was good for the Incurables. Aunt Josephine read them what they liked, which was love stories and thrillers.

  ‘They’ll die if you don’t go,’ Christine said.

  ‘They’re dying, anyway,’ said her aunt gloomily. ‘I can’t go, with that body upstairs to look after.’

  ‘I’ll look after Geoffrey. Don’t be difficult. Here, get away from that sink and let me get on with the dishes.’

  Aunt Josephine put on a heavy coat like a travelling rug and a red felt toque which she clung to in the teeth of all opposition, and went off to Putney. When Christine had put away the plates and silver she made coffee and took a cup into her father’s study. He was working, crouched like an ape over the big varnished desk under the window which looked over the neglected lawn.

  Since he retired from his job in the Ministry of Pensions he had occupied himself by translating French novels into rather stilted English. It was not very lucrative work, and he was slow at it, because, although he had been brought up in France, his French had rusted over the years and he spent more time consulting dictionaries than actually writing anything, but it kept him busy and he enjoyed it. It made him feel that he was part of the literary world. When he had to enter his occupation on any form, he did not put ‘Retired Civil Servant’; he put ‘Author’, and he behaved as temperamentally about his work as any creative writer.

  Christine took another cup of coffee up to the spare room. Geoffrey was lying in twilight with the curtains drawn. He had been sitting up, but when he heard the door handle turn he slid down under the bedclothes and lay flat with his eyes closed.

  ‘How do you feel, Geoff?’ Christine asked, coming up to the bed.

  ‘Got a headache.’

  ‘Poor dear. I’ll just take your tray. Oh, good, you’ve eaten your lunch. That’s fine.’

  ‘Well, I just had a taste of soup,’ Geoffrey grumbled without opening his eyes. ‘What was it made of? Bones the dogs wouldn’t eat?’ But the bowl and the plate of toast were empty, and Christine had seen the amount of soup Aunt Josephine had taken up.

  She knocked against the bed as she picked up the tray, and he gave an irritable exclamation and opened his eyes, which were pale and unfamiliar without his glasses. With the bandage low on his forehead, he looked like Suzanne Lenglen in her bandeau. His hair stuck up in points above the bandage.

  ‘I thought I heard my car a while ago,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been driving it, have you?’

  Aunt Josephine had said that he was not to be excited. ‘How could you possibly hear it from this side of the house?’ Christine hedged.’ Quite a lot of cars go along our road.’

  ‘I’d know the sound of mine anywhere.’ He closed the eye under the wound and looked at her with the other one. ‘Have you been driving it? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Christine put down the tray and went to the window to move the curtains.

  ‘Well, in any case,’ he said sulkily. ‘I want you to take it to a garage today. It can’t stand out all the time.’

  The nearest garage was far away. If she took the car there she would have to walk back right across the Common. ‘But, Geoff,’ she said, coming back to the bed, ‘it wouldn’t hurt. It’s quite warm and it isn’t going to rain. Why, Americans leave their cars out all the time, even in winter. Hardly any of them have garages.’

  ‘I don’t care what the Americans do!’ he said loudly, raising himself bolt upright like Lazarus in his coffin. ‘Horrible people. It’s my car, and it’s all your fault that I’m lying here, and the least you could do –’

  ‘Whatever is going on?’ asked Geoffrey’s mother, surging into the room all furs and bags and umbrellas. ‘Geoffrey, my darling boy!’ She hurried to the bed and dropped magazines and flowers on his feet. ‘You’re dangerously ill and you’re supposed to be kept quiet, and my goodness, how uncomfortable you look! Christine, whatever are you thinking about, and you a nurse!’

  Echoes of the remark made so often to Christine by so many irate ward sisters. ‘How did you get in, Aunt Lottie?’ she asked sulkily. ‘I didn’t hear the bell.’

  ‘The front door was open, in your usual charming country style,’ said Aunt Lottie coldly. She swarmed over the bed. She was a large woman, and she gave forth a lot of voice and perfume and a kind of invisible ectoplasm of high-pressure living that took up a lot of space in the air around her. ‘Oh, my poor Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘This is surely a terrible thing. I don’t for the life of me see how it could have happened. Tell me all about it.’

  ‘It was all the fault of that damned dog,’ he began, putting on the whining tone of a small boy with a doting mother.

  ‘I knew it! All those animals. I knew they’d be the ruin of this family some day. The house is like a menagerie. Why, when I came in a great brown-and-white monster came at me with slavering jaws, and if I hadn’t run for my life up the stairs –’

  ‘That was my dog,’ said Christine. ‘Timmy wouldn’t hurt a fly. If he was slavering, it was because he can smell his dinner cooking.’

  Aunt Lottie ignored her. She hovered with voluptuous exclamations over Geoffrey, who lay back, looking quite flat, like a typhoid patient sinking into the mattress.

  Christine brought a chair up to the bed. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea, Aunt Lottie.’

  ‘I don’t care for any, thank you. I’ve just had my lunch, but I dare say Robbins would be grateful for a cup, if you would invite him into the kitchen. Don’t you bother about me. I just want to talk to my son. Now tell me, Geoffrey. I want to hear all about this dreadful accident.’

  Dismissed, Christine went downstairs and brought Aunt Lottie’s chauffeur into the kitchen and gave him tea and cake and talked to him about murder trials, while she mixed scones to surprise Aunt Josephine when she came home from the Incurables.

  She had her hands in the dough when the spare-room bell rang.

  ‘Just as if I was a servant,’ Christine said.

  ‘I know, miss,’ said the chauffeur with feeling. ‘Wouldn’t it drive you off your natural.’

  ‘Something always happens when you start to make scones.’ Christine scraped the dough off her fingers into the bowl, washed her hands and went up to the spare room. Aunt Lottie was winding herself into her blue foxes.

  ‘I’m ready to go now,’ she said. ‘Geoffrey wants to sleep, and the poor boy must have all the rest he can. I only wish we could have got him home.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Christine. ‘I mean - you’d be happier to have him with you.’

  ‘Please have Robbins go to the front door for me,’ said Aunt Lottie, as if she were ordering her carriage and pair round to the door.

  She was coming down the stairs as Christine came back from the kitchen. ‘Geoffrey has told me the whole story,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t embarrass you, Christine, by saying so in front of him, but I consider it was foolhardy of you, very foolhardy indeed. Rash of Geoffrey, of course, but he was only trying to be gentlemanly.’

  ‘He would have left me to get in by myself,’ Christine protested, ‘if I hadn’t absolutely made him help.’

  Aunt Lottie’s attention was diverted by the large cardboard box of clothes and toys which Aunt Josephine had put out for the nuns to collect. She poked at it with her umbrella.

  ‘You never know what you’ll find standing about in the hall of this house,’ she said, and went out, raising her suède-gloved hand to Robbins as if she were hailing a cab.

  Wh
en Roger arrived on Sunday morning, the first thing he saw was his sister walking through the hall with a tray of dirty bandages and bloodstained cotton wool.

  ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘The estimable Miss Cope. What’s happened? One of the tykes been fighting?’ He always called the dogs the Tykes, just as he called his father The Aged Parent, or The Aged P., and his wife The Little Woman. He seldom called anything by its right name, because he liked to make a joke about everything in the world, even the war, which he referred to as ‘that small scrap we had with the Nastys’. He called Aunt Josephine Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy, or simply Dogface, and his two children, who bore the lyrical names of Clement and Jeanette, were always known as Champ and Boots.

  The children followed their mother into the hall, round-eyed, looking for trouble. They opened the door of the grandfather clock and played with the weights, while Christine unfolded the story of Geoffrey.

  Roger roared with laughter, but his wife Sylvia frowned and said: ‘I don’t think it’s funny at all. Poor Geoffrey might have been killed.’

  ‘The little woman wasn’t born with our sense of humour,’ Roger said. ‘Now, kids, don’t let your grandfather catch you messing about with that clock.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ said Jeanette. She meant: He will mind, but we don’t mind if he minds. The elder Cope so seldom spoke to them without censure that it bothered them no more than a fly on the window-pane.

  ‘Well, anyhow, run along and muck about somewhere till lunch-time,’ their father said. ‘Champ, your flies are undone again. That boy! He’ll be arrested yet. Where’s Dogface? In the galley, I suppose.’ He went down the passage past the stairs to the kitchen.

  He was a large man with too much energy and no acquaintance with relaxation. The house was noisy and restless on Sundays when he was there. His wife was quiet and unobtrusive, perhaps because she had long ago given up hope of competing for attention. Christine supposed that she loved Roger because he was her brother, but they had never been close. Ever since she could remember, he had always laughed at her, and she had never been able to share her emotions with him or take him her problems.