Monday Lunch in Fairyland and Other Stories

by Angela Huth

  ‘I will, I will. Never doubt that.’

  But Mr Potterville failed to keep his word. As Mrs Willoughby had no address for him, and felt reluctant to go back to the hospital to see his wife, lest she should take it wrong, there was nothing she could do. Still, with so much coming and going these days there was little time to think. Mr Potterville’s few visits had been pleasant while they lasted, but there were still many others, even if they weren’t handsome men with bottles of sherry. As Mrs Willoughby said one evening to Tina, testing her leg for a small skip, ‘I’m happy as a lark.’

  Two weeks passed in which neighbours dropped in three or four times a day. Then a district nurse came and took off the bandages. She declared Mrs Willoughby fit enough to go out now, provided she took care. She found herself strangely disappointed at the news. Eileen had got into the way of doing her shopping, bought just the right brand of soup without being told. With some reluctance she explained to Eileen she had to get back to normal now: there was no need to carry on with her kindness. Eileen appeared quite huffy, and in the following week only dropped by once for a few moments.

  It took Mrs Willoughby a week or so to realise that visits from her new friends, as soon as her health was back, were dropping off. They still smiled at her slightly should she see them in the lift, but it seemed as if the sudden flare of their interest had been eaten up. They needed her no more: as a target of their transitory benevolence, or curiosity, she was a spent thing. Gradually, the small flat returned to its former quietness: only Tina chirruped on, without cease. Funny what a fall does for you,’ Mrs Willoughby said to her one evening. ‘They’re all round you, to help, then they’re gone. We’re back on our own again, Tina, but very fortunate, all things considering. Very fortunate indeed.’ And for the first time for several weeks she took down the photograph album of her wedding. This reversion to her old ways, her old reliance on the past, took a little getting used to, but it wasn’t long before she accepted the inevitable pattern of things once more. Though just occasionally she had to exert a little extra self-control, like the morning she went shopping and found it was a windy day, very much the same kind of weather as the day of the fall. She stood at the edge of the kerb, for an irresistible moment, where it had all happened. Holding on to her hat, she remembered. And a wicked thought suddenly came to her.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if . . .? She wouldn’t really be sorry if . . .

  Quickly, she cocked her chin in the air, ashamed of herself. Then, she raised her stick defiantly, stepped off the pavement, and crossed the street without misadventure.

  Azaleas for Sale

  The Azaleas for Sale notice was nailed outside the fence, uneven letters painted in tar on a piece of board, and immediately you entered the gate you saw them: plantations of azaleas, frail bushes not more than a couple of feet high, and here and there the first spotted flower.

  The house itself, a great slab of a house, grey stone, defied the daylight to make it sparkle. Its heavy portico was supported by plain thick pillars, and one of those shrubs that clings to stone grew thickly round the windows, its blackish leaves gloomy as funeral gloves. In the cold January day of Marina’s visit, dull sky, it was a forbidding place: difficult to imagine that fifty years ago a butler flashed instantly in the door at the sound of wheels and, according to Colonel Adlington, gay young things tripped across the lawns to pluck azaleas for buttonholes and hair.

  No one heard Marina arrive. She pushed open the huge front door, stood shivering for a moment in the flagstone hall. She could feel the bite of salt in the dank air, though the coast was a mile away. High on the walls stuffed things in glass boxes began to register – fish and birds. There were footsteps, squeaks, the muffled thump of doors. Then the husky bray of Mrs Adling-ton’s voice which had, as late as 1940, she claimed, thrilled audiences all over the country.

  ‘Marina!’

  ‘Isabella!’ The names small bells in the semi-darkness.

  ‘What a morning! Bloody dank, gets into you. You arrived? Marvellous, marvellous. Come on in and have a drink. Gerald can’t wait to see you.’

  They kissed. Isabella’s breath, staled by years of gin, was superficially refreshed by the drink she carried in one hand. She swilled the liquid around.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind I didn’t wait? Got to have something to keep out the cold. Should keep your coat on for a bit, if I were you. Gerald, you know, has been hopping up and down all morning waiting for you. Filthy old thing.’ She pulled her cardigan more tightly round her large bosom which once, too, no doubt, had thrilled audiences. The cardigan was an aged, matt thing, dullest ever navy, which must have been pulled from years of slumber in a drawer earlier this morning, and was still clumsy with lack of use. ‘You look marvellous, darling,’ croaked Isabella, ‘you really do. Gerald’ll have a seizure.’

  Marina followed her through tall dark passages past doors that smelt faintly of cloak-rooms and kitchens. Isabella finally flung open the door of the drawing-room, with a theatrical sense of timing.

  ‘We’re in here in honour of you,’ she said. ‘Your first visit. It’ll warm up soon, the fire. Gerald! She’s here.’

  Gerald stood at the window – huge panes, eighteen inches high – surveying all he could of his land through the mist that rolled in from the sea. He turned towards them, his nose bigger than Marina remembered, his cheeks one tone deeper than the old rose of the walls. If in reality he had been hopping up and down all morning in anticipation of Marina’s arrival, the exercise had exhausted him: for now his very stance was tired. His tweed shoulders sagged. Lustreless eyes revealed nothing of the wicked desires that his wife warned were raging within him.

  ‘Look at him waiting for you, Marina, you see! What did I tell you? Gerald, come along! Open the bottle. What are you dithering for?’

  Gerald shuffled towards Marina, greeted her politely.

  ‘Like to come and see the pantry?’ he asked. ‘We’ve turned one of the old kitchens into a pantry, makes it much nearer.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, darling!’ Isabella clutched at Marina’s arm. ‘For God’s sake, don’t! He’d pounce on you before you can say knife, wouldn’t you, Gerald?’

  Ignoring the question with a dignified tilt of his head, Gerald moved towards the door.

  ‘I’ll go alone, then,’ he said.

  Marina huddled on a stool by the fire. The flames crouched pathetically low over the three damp logs, overawed by the size of the chimney into which they were expected to rise. They gave no heat. Isabella thumped down on to a sofa, spreading her legs. She had fat knees and good ankles.

  ‘We’re keeping body and soul together,’ she said, ‘skin of our teeth. Economising like crazy, just the odd nip to keep ourselves going, and we see a lot of the grandchildren, which is nice.’ Her voice was a bandaged rattle, the sound of an old steamboat grinding sluggish water. With it, once, she had lured an international film star to love her. And, for a time, to marry her. ‘We’re having oysters, as I promised on the telephone. Oyster pasties and a bit of lamb. Now, tell me your news.’

  A long time later Gerald returned, a champagne-shaped bottle in his hand.

  ‘Pushing out the boat,’ said Isabella. ‘I told you, darling, the old boy’s nutty about you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not the real thing. Just something sparkling.’ Gerald opened the bottle with difficulty, poured two glasses. Isabella heaved herself up.

  ‘Don’t try to give me any of that rubbish, now. I’m off to have a decko at the pasties. For Lord’s sake scream, darling, if the old sod gets too fresh.’ On the way out of the room she filled her glass from the bottle of Gordon’s Gin which stood beside a small vase of pale dried flowers on the mantelpiece.

  Gerald chose an armchair as far as possible from Marina’s seat by the fire. Due to his deafness, conversation had to be a series of barked shouts. Marina enquired about the progress of the azalea farm.

  ‘Very good, really,’ Gerald replied, ‘considering Admin, isn�
��t all it might be, but we’re seeing to that. It’ll all fall into place, gradually. But we get a lot of orders, you know. We get orders from all over the place. People seem to like azaleas.’ His slow eyes flitted among the damp patches that bruised the old pink walls. ‘Course, when it all takes off, we’ll be made. No more worries. Be able to get it all done up a bit.’

  ‘I’d like to buy about a dozen bushes, if I could,’ said Marina. They make such good presents.’

  ‘Really? Want to buy a couple, do you?’ Gerald sounded surprised. ‘Ah, well. We could see about that after lunch, perhaps.’

  ‘Didn’t Isabella tell you that’s what I’d come for? I wrote you several letters asking you to send them. In the end I thought it best to come myself and collect them.’

  ‘Don’t think she did,’ said Gerald, ‘but then we don’t look at the post much these days. Think she just said you were coming all this way for lunch, wasn’t that nice? She thinks the world of you, of course. Wish the bloody mist would clear, and I could show you the view.’

  Isabella returned to announce that lunch was ready. She was unable to resist enquiring how their five minutes alone had passed.

  ‘Kept his hands off you, sly old fox, has he? I only have to turn my back, you know. Any pretty face. You’d never think he’d had two heart attacks in the last eighteen months, would you?’

  ‘Never,’ said Marina, watching Gerald totter to the door, one arm weighed down with the half-empty bottle of sparkling white wine. They made their way through a series of high ceilinged rooms: faded walls, curtains drained of colour, left only with the skeletal print of patterns: the odd dark portrait clenched in a gilded frame. There was no heating in any of the rooms, but each one was furnished with a single bottle of gin. To keep out the cold as you passed through, Marina supposed.

  Lunch was in the kitchen. Here, any risk of disturbing ancient planning by modernisation had been avoided. No bright formica noises – sounds redolent of the past: drip of tap into an enamel sink, splutter of kettle on top of ungainly black Aga. Smells of coal and sprouts and steam: tenebrous light through the one small window, designed in the days when it was not considered that staff required much light to work by.

  Isabella had laid the lunch with care. Small silver knives and forks – the last of the Georgian stuff, she said – were arranged on the pitted wood of the table. Real linen napkins, unaired, so limp they dipped into the shape of the Crown Derby side plates. Fine – stemmed wine glasses, home-made mint relish in a crystal bowl.

  ‘Got to keep things going,’ said Isabella, and Gerald uncorked a bottle of dusty claret.

  Lunch, it was evident, was the high spot of the Adlingtons’ day. After their morning chores, checking the wood store, pottering among the azaleas, peeling potatoes, stretching up to dust some of the high fireplaces, it was there to reinvigorate them, to give them strength for the lesser delights of the afternoon (shuffling bills) and the long, cold evenings. Besides, the kitchen was warm: only warm room in the whole bloody house, for God’s sake, said Isabella: and the two high-backed benches each side of the table made an agreeable feeling of enclosure. This was the vantage point of their fortress against worrying conditions. Here, armed with the knowledge that they could flog the remaining silver as a last resort, they allowed the warmth of possibilities to cocoon them for a while. In the First War, shoulders braced, Gerald had received the VC for bravery. He had been taught to face the enemy without flinching. In old age, a new kind of enemy, he did not find it hard to adapt. Same tactics, really. Take each blow as it comes, and plan to fight the next one. But don’t let them shoot you out. Stick to your territory. Be cunning in your strategies. (Azaleas turned into a business.) Gerald would happily die starving in his house, but while he lived he would protect it from being sold for institutional purposes – and who, these days, would want it for anything else?

  Fired by the mixture of gin, claret, and oyster pasties, the courage of the Adlingtons grew. It took diverse turns, but Marina recognised it in all its disguises, and admired. Isabella, in a vitriolic attack on paper napkins, showed the strength of her own determination. She banged a speckled hand on the table. The English upper classes would never allow all their standards to slip, no matter what happened to the pound, she said. We had all reduced our living standards, of course, but who cared about that? We had probably had it too good for too long. Besides, the war had trained us to regard hard times as a challenge. Well, they were a challenge. And we should face them. But paper napkins – no, never. Paper napkins would be like . . . the Blues giving up horses in favour of Japanese cars.

  Gerald said she had gone too far, as usual. Isabella shook her head, agreeing. She poured her husband more wine with a merry lack of reverence for its age, making it swirl in the glass like her own gin. Gerald averted his eyes from the swaying liquid.

  ‘I’m off to the South of France for a short break in March,’ he said.

  ‘By himself,’ explained Isabella. ‘I never want to go further than the village these days, you know. Had my travelling. Bloody South of France every year when I was young. Grew out of it. Bloody mean Frogs.’

  ‘You didn’t see many of them in the Negresco,’ said Gerald.

  ‘Don’t like to imagine what he gets up to down there by himself, anyway.’ Isabella bent towards Marina. ‘He comes back looking a wreck, I can tell you.’ She turned to Gerald. ‘Anyway, unless the azaleas take off whizz, bang, ducky, what about the fare?’

  ‘Marina’s come to buy,’ explained Gerald. He smiled. Suddenly, the idea of selling her two plants seemed like his whole salvation. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  Isabella’s mouth fell open in surprise.

  ‘Hadn’t a clue. That’s lovely, darling. Awfully generous idea. But of course we’ll give you some, can’t let you pay.’

  Marina was firm.

  ‘No, really,’ she said, ‘business is most especially business among friends.’ She felt her strength to be ineffectual in the wash of their generosity.

  ‘Well, we’ll throw in some extras,’ conceded Isabella.

  ‘We might go down after lunch, what about that?’ asked Gerald. ‘Choose some good ones. Then I better ring the travel agent, confirm my ticket. March nearly upon us . . .’

  ‘Sleep, for me,’ said Isabella, cutting into a beautiful apple pie. ‘We have very regular lives, you know. We like being old. Nothing much changes. My energy runs out a bit quicker, perhaps. But Gerald’s the same as ever, the old dog . . .’

  ‘God Almighty,’ interrupted Gerald, looking deeply into his wine, nose quite blue now.

  ‘Yes, I sleep. Only go to the village when I have to,’ went on Isabella.

  ‘You should come to Monte this year. Give you a break.’ Gerald nodded at his wife with the optimism of one who knows his own suggestion will be rejected.

  ‘Never! Me, risk an aeroplane just to see you hobbling after starlets, making a fool of yourself? Never. Besides, someone’s got to stay at home and look after the flowers.’

  Her voice had ground incredibly low. The claret was finished. Gerald blinked at his own drowsiness. Marina judged it time to go. They protested at her leaving, but could find no reason to urge her to stay.

  ‘Just the plants,’ said Marina. ‘Could we put them in the car? So sorry for the trouble.’

  Azaleas! The very thought of them caused the Adlingtons a sudden, mutual exhaustion. They struggled against it.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Gerald. ‘I’ve got to get on about the wretched tickets before three, but we could send them to you. Trust me to pick out the best ones.’

  ‘Or better still, you could come back!’ Isabella was clinging to Marina’s arm in the hall. Echoes of their footsteps overlapped. ‘Just write and give us a little warning and we’ll have them ready, won’t we, Gerald?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘And it’s been so lovely having you, darling. Someone young about. I’ll see Gerald doesn’t go too far next time, sexy beast.’
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br />   They were steering her across the gravel, through the cold, grey, salt air. They were waving goodbye, shouting at her to promise to come again. Azaleas . . . good excuse, what?

  She drove away along the drive, past the acres of thriving plants, wonderfully protected from audacious buyers. They stretched into the distance, finally to be lost in mist now coming more thickly from the sea: mist which by tea-time would quite obscure the Adlingtons’ afternoon, blot out their view entirely, so that the azaleas would only exist in their imagination again, a brave idea with which to defend themselves against alternatives too terrible to contemplate.

  Up-State New Jersey

  She thought they were going somewhere Up-State New Jersey, wherever that was. Later, when someone told her no such place existed, she laughed. Its non-existence was appropriate.

  But it had taken place somewhere, that strange weekend, an hour or so from New York. Although as the years passed – what was it now? – five? – and still none of those involved ever referred to it, bound by some unspoken bond of silence, Imogen often found herself wondering at its reality. At the time, she remembered, she had thought of herself as the comi-tragic heroine. But in retrospect she could see that each one of them had been heroes or heroines in their own eyes. Even today she did not know precisely what had happened to anyone except herself. From off-stage screams and cries and wild laughter she had come to various conclusions, but had no way of knowing if she was right. It was not possible to ask any of the others. It never would be, perhaps, until they were very old and the memory had become a light tracing of the facts in their minds. Besides, they were all scattered now: Olivia and Giles divorced, Piero and his wife living in Denmark, Imogen herself back in England. It was unlikely there would be a reunion.

  Imogen vowed she would write about it when enough time had passed to clear the obscurities. She waited, but those obscurities never cleared. Equally, her own part in the spontaneous charade never dimmed. She still laughed at the thought of her blustering vanity, and the way it had been felled in one swipe. In the cool reason of retrospect she still stuck to the declaration she had made at the time, out loud, colourless dawn blasting into her sleepless eyes; it was a moment of growing up, at the age of thirty. A time to be remembered with some of the same awe as first communion, first sex, wedding day, divorce day, death. Yes: in a way it had been a kind of dying – that is, if you believe in the deathliness of self-disillusion.