by Jane Gardam
‘Oh, she always liked the Fair.’
‘Made me go on that Ghost Train. Sick as a dog.’
‘Were you, Maureen?’ Marjorie carefully avoided her friends’ eyes in case someone laughed. Maureen was a card. ‘You shouldn’t have given way to her.’
‘No—I weren’t sick. She were. Olivia was the one sick. She didn’t care though. She loved them rotors, too. Stuck to the side of the drum she was with her skirt above her head. And she got me to take her up on them golden horses too—them things with barley sugars skewered through them diagonal and their heads tossed back and their teeth glaring out. Both arms round their necks and her hair all streamed out like Godiva.’
‘Maureen is sometimes quite coarse,’ said Marjorie to Jack over carré of lamb from the butcher in the High Street who delivered, and put frills on the cutlets. Olivia was out—probably something to do with the spastic or the old lady—not church, which she had given up. She had been uncommunicative that morning and since the Oxford entrance papers. ‘Maureen said that Livie used to scream at the Fair with her skirt over her face.’
‘Not much harm in that. And very long ago if it was when Maureen used to take her. By the way, which day does she hear?’
‘Oh quickly. The interview is this week. On Wednesday—Oxford is quite quick.’
‘Oh Lord—then I shall be away?’
‘Yes of course. Didn’t you know?’
‘At Cambridge I think they took longer to tell us. Or was it shorter?’
‘I don’t think you need worry about not being here. She’s much less fussed than either of us. And we’re only fussed because—well, not because she might not get in. That would be ridiculous. I suppose we’re really just excited. It’s an emotional time. It doesn’t seem a minute since this was happening to me. After all—it’s a very big moment, getting into Oxbridge.’
‘You know,’ said Jack, ‘I don’t remember it. It was taken for granted. Just part of life then if you were any good at all. Less pressure then.’
‘Oh—Livie’s had no pressure. Not from us. Good heavens, she knows, even if there were some lunacy and she didn’t—well, as if we’d think any less of her!’
‘Well, of course. Marjorie—I suppose she will get an interview?’
‘Well, of course she’ll get an interview. It’s only the absolute unknowns who don’t. And heavens, I’ve always been very close to Mabel Pye. It’ll cause a great deal of surprise if she doesn’t, I must say—I’ve written round several people to say that she may be looking in on Wednesday afterwards for a cup of tea. Goodness, at school they say she’s the best they’ve had in ten years. It’s not the possibility of interviews they’re all thinking about. It’s the kind of Award she’ll get. Just wait till we’re all hearing that she’s the first woman at All Souls.’
‘Now then Marjorie. This letter—the letter giving the time of the interview comes when?’
‘It doesn’t come. They all have to be at the college on Wednesday unless there is a letter. If a letter comes it’s to say they’re not wanted.’
‘A pretty devastating business. Rather cruel.’
‘It’s fairly new, I think. Oh, I don’t think we need worry about letters.’
Jack trickled perfect mint-sauce over his lamb. ‘We should chop back the mint,’ he said. ‘It’s tending to get above itself.’
‘I’ve done it. I’ve had the parsley out, too. Time to re-sow.’
‘It’s time to divide the irises. And bring in the dahlias.’ He looked at his disciplined garden, programmed for Spring. It was getting near Christmas. Next door a neighbour, a fashionable lawyer, was giving one of his drinks parties. The women could be heard screaming in gusts as the front door opened and shut. ‘I’d rather my women screamed at the Fair than next door,’ said Jack. ‘Just listen to them—baying for gin. The road’s changing.’
‘Oh—I don’t know.’
‘Oxford we’re going to find changed, too, you know. I warn you. I was talking—’
‘Oh well—of course we are. It must. To a certain extent. But there’ll always be some like us. A nucleus—’
‘Feminism,’ said Jack. ‘Lesbianism. Free love or whatever they call it nowadays. This pill business.’
‘We needn’t worry about Livie.’
‘Over-work—’
‘Livie’s never over-worked. Her mind’s not even been stretched yet. She’s not a worrier. Livie’s the most peaceful person I know.’
They walked, Jack and Marjorie, on the Common that afternoon meeting several friends. Most of these also walked in pairs, for divorce and early death are remarkably rare in the enclave. Most were without children. Their children were grown and flown. The Partridges called out to them and they called back in similar pleasant old-fashioned voices. ‘Any news of Adrian?’ ‘Is Francesca still at the BBC?’ ‘I hear Camilla’s in at Girton—not a bit surprised.’ ‘Good luck to Livie on Wednesday.’
The calls were passwords, codes, the names of the measures of a dance. They meant more than they seemed to mean. They meant, ‘We are a tribe. A club. We think alike. We have done our best. We have brought up our children to follow us on, which is ancient and natural but nowadays courageous. We act for the common good.’
The calls said that there had been many shared years—first with prams, then push-chairs, then small bikes, then ponies from the riding school: changeless Miss Thompson’s dancing class, Guy Fawkes parties and Hallowe’ens; that there had been year after year of birthdays on the Common, the cake carried, with candles separate, to be assembled in the long grass with the flowers in it by The Causeway or The Pound or in the secret, woody parts round Queensmere. The calls said that all nice children have clean hair, that to Christmas tea parties they bring small presents, prettily wrapped, and the boys wear bow ties and the girls long white socks and pretty dresses, not jeans.
The words said, ‘We and our children belong to a time before the Beatles, before the recession, before we all drank wine every day although it was so cheap, to a time when you could buy cakes like you make at home in the High Street and none of us had heard of a video centre or seen a launderette; a time when you could drive down Church Road in tennis fortnight and even park there. And the tennis players were still gentlemen like Robert Graves. When at the Fair the Golden Horses flew.’
The words said, ‘We are the elect. By many we suppose we are considered dreadful. We are all true blue, even if we are radicals, or the odd eccentric socialist. We are staunch, we are loyal, we are innocent in a way, bless us. We are rather happy people and when bad times come we comfort one another.’
The enclave was out in force that afternoon, their dogs bounding round them. Such people and dogs not of the enclave who passed, passed like shadows. Marjorie, contented, thought, ‘This is my landscape,’ and uncharacteristically took Jack’s hand, as the sun went down suddenly behind Queensmere in a scar of white light.
On Tuesday after the second post and the last nonsensical thought of a rejecting letter was past, Marjorie went down the hill to the station to buy Olivia’s return ticket to Oxford for the next day. She had decided, rather wisely she thought, not to drive her there. ‘It is Livie’s day,’ she said to herself on the hill, ‘Livie’s life. I have always seen to that.’ She remembered all at once the long-ago Rounders game by the twisted chestnut tree on the corner of South Side, and Livie, reflective in the long grass; how she had turned away from the child, not wanting Livie to feel that she was watching to see whether or not she caught the ball. ‘And Livie knew,’ she thought. She stopped in surprise. ‘Livie knew—Livie has always known all about me. And Jack. She’s never said anything. Never said that she—loved us, for instance. We never said these things to each other, any of us. We never said it to her even when she was a baby.
‘She’ll be touched, though, that I’ve been down to get the ticket,’ she thought. ‘When I get home
I will put it into her hand.’
But when Marjorie got home Livie was not about. The enclave was silent. Marjorie made herself tea and sat by the telephone to wait for Jack’s call to say that he had safely reached Bangkok. Rathbone Road was still. Marjorie slept.
Later, two waited with her, Maureen in the kitchen in her coat, motionless, and Mr. Jackson outside, standing like wood beside the bleached and undivided irises.
Marjorie at the end of the garden savaged the earth around the hydrangeas. She wept and dug, dug and wept.
THE EASTER LILIES
Miss White, who was a dotty little woman with a queer, grinning glare and had long ago taught kindergarten at a good school, came back from Malta full of the lilies.
‘They grow everywhere. Like weeds. At the roadsides in clumps. All among the stones,’ she said.
She was talking at the church lunch.
Mrs. Wellington, a warden’s widow munched.
‘They would,’ she said. ‘Why not? They are weeds in other countries. In Australia they are called pig lilies.’
‘But they’re free. They just grow anywhere. Beautiful.’
‘I know.’
Mrs. Wellington’s husband had been RN, stationed on Malta in the great days. They had had a house between Marsa and Siggiewi among orange and lemon trees, a paved courtyard where they had held cocktail parties, with fairy lights and dance music on a gramophone. Three adoring, barefoot Maltese maids had looked after her and there had been a full time gardener. The lilies round the courtyard had had to be hacked. ‘Hacked away,’ said Mrs. Wellington. ‘To make room for the roses.’
‘But think of Easter,’ said Miss White.
‘Easter?’
‘The Easter lilies. Didn’t they have Easter lilies in Maltese churches?’
Mrs. Wellington looked into space for a moment, or rather she looked across the church hall at other champing women in brave feathery hats who were consuming rolls and paté and a single glass of claret—a pre-Lent treat. This was a progressive church. ‘There were lilies,’ she said, ‘in the Anglican cathedral. But they were not the pig lilies. They were gigantic, waxy things, like swirled up flags. Several hundred of them we had up in the chancel. Sheaves of them, specially grown. They were—d’you know I suddenly remember—they were a penny each.’
‘And the wild lilies were free?’
‘We never picked the wild lilies. Weeds. Of course they were free.’
‘But they are lovely. They’re as good as the Easter lilies here. Just a bit smaller. And we give fifty pence each here, just for one.’
The bowl in fact was coming round the tables for the Easter lily money. A bowl had come round earlier for the luncheon expenses. The lunch cost fifty pence too. Now the second bowl approached.
‘Lily money,’ said the Sunday School teacher, rosy faced and good.
The coins clonked onto the felt bottom of the bowl. When she reached Miss White, however, there was a pause. Mrs. Wellington dropped her money in—there were a lot of half p’s. Mrs. Wellington kept half p’s in a jam jar in the kitchen since the Captain died. They were for this sort of occasion. She brought them all to church in an envelope and showered them in. The bowl then hovered beside Miss White and Miss White peered down at it for quite a time and then said, ‘No. No. I think not, dear.’
It was a surprise. A surprise to the Sunday School teacher and a greater one to Mrs. Wellington. She knew that Miss White was poor but she was notoriously generous. In the seventy-odd years she had been a member of this church she—or her family, now all dead—could never once have failed to pay for an Easter lily.
‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Mrs. Wellington.
Miss White said, ‘Yes. It is ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous! At Easter?’ (The Church was High.)
‘The roof is coming in. The Hall is leaking. Father Banks couldn’t live if he didn’t eat Irish stew round half the parish four times a week, poor soul. And we spend fifty pence each on Easter lilies. I shall get some from Malta.’ She gave her dotty grin, the grin which at school they had all imitated in the cloakrooms. In the breathy, high voice that had not changed in all the years and which they had also imitated, in the playground and even in front of her if she had come out to clap her hands for quiet (and she had never minded and they had always obeyed), she said, ‘I’ll write to Malta and get some sent.’
In the pink, tipsy-looking house built under the walls of Rabat, half-covered with ramshackle clematis and dark red roses, old Ingoldby read Miss White’s letter.
Then, holding it, he walked into his garden and stood by the well and read it again, looking up at last to regard the great clumps of lilies all about his feet. ‘Gone crackers,’ he said.
Then he went in and poured himself a bowl of cornflakes and took it into the garden to eat. It was one of the things the Maltese knew about him and rather respected. The old Maltese, that is, the ones who remembered the eccentric pink-faced English roaring about. They often ate cornflakes in the garden, played bagpipes on their roof-tops, blustered over whisky and became obsessive about the difficulty of growing sweet peas, while their thin, sweet-natured wives talked over tea-trolleys. Malta had been gentle to the English wives. For some mysterious reason the Maltese women and the English women had loved and understood each other, respected each other’s religion, liked each other’s children. Mistresses and maids had wept at parting when terms of Service were up and the ships had gone sailing home.
But old Ingoldby had never had a wife. He’d been RN until the end and been about a bit of course, but he’d kept away from women. Kept away from most people after retirement. Lived in the lop-sided ancient house and painted. He knew Malta better than any Maltese. He knew a stream on it, a small river, though all the guide books said there was none. He painted on the south shore, taking his gear in the back of a battered old Ford, walking laden with it over little plots of vineyard above the threads sewn over the earth to keep the birds away, leaping on now rather stiff old legs a chasm between rocks with purple sea beneath them, totally alone, watched only by one or two men lying on their stomachs with guns, hunting larks, he painted endlessly the sea. Miss White’s fortnight’s visit, just over, had disrupted his life very little. She had stayed at a good, quiet hotel in St George’s Bay, meeting him for supper now and then. Twice he had taken her for a drive. He was not actively missing her.
‘Crackers,’ he said again at lunch time on the rock, taking out a packet of old-fashioned egg sandwiches wrapped tightly in greaseproof paper with envelope ends. ‘Off her rocker. It’s not allowed.’
He was scarcely younger than Miss White. He had been one of her first and older pupils. He had never forgotten her and had written to her all his life, at sea, during the First and Second Wars, from his shore-station, from Malta in his retirement—always for Christmas and Easter. She sent him tea-cloths on his birthday and handkerchieves and a copy of the school magazine. He had never found her female or attractive or even wise but nevertheless, though he did not know it, he loved her and she was the only woman he had ever felt his own.
‘What’s the ruling on sending flowers to England these days?’ he asked in the shop in the village—to very great amazement.
‘Exporting?’ they said.
‘No. Sending a present.’
‘You’re allowed to take a bunch,’ they said. ‘People do sometimes. Just like you can still sometimes bring in pheasants.’
‘There was English families over St Julian’s who used to take in potatoes.’ Everyone laughed and smiled.
‘Wouldn’t happen now,’ said an old Maltese lady in Maltese, swelling in a dark corner like bread. She blinked straight ahead of her, looking at old tourists and their babies, now parents themselves who never came back, remembering all the blonde hair and the buckets and spades and how the English children had loved the Maltese sticky sweets. The streets had been
packed then, not only with holiday people but with the proper English Maltese who had loved Malta.
‘I want to send a parcel of Easter lilies to England,’ said the Captain. ‘I thought I would send them with someone going over. Someone might consent to carry a bundle just over the arm. Not many—say fifty. Packed tight they would be no trouble.’
The shop was bewildered, but being Maltese did not show it. They smiled dazzlingly and agreed that it was a beautiful idea. Somebody said that the Captain ought to find out about a permit. He ought to go in to Valletta, they said, glittering happily at him, knowing that he had not been to Sliema for years, let alone Valletta.
The Captain said yes, and went away so helplessly that an old man sitting on a kitchen chair outside the shop playing patience, looked up and said that if the Captain liked, his son could drive to Valletta tomorrow and a woman—the granddaughter of the shop, huge with a great-grandchild to come, ran after him and said, ‘No—you leave it to us, Captain. Leave it to us. We have a nephew in the Customs and Excise. Buy the lilies and tell us when.’
Dear Miss White,
Thank you for your letter. I am more than glad that you enjoyed your holiday here and found Malta still pleasant after so many changes and so long. We must not let so many years pass before you visit us again. For my part, seeing you again, you who taught me manners, was as always a very great pleasure.
As to the query about lilies, although at first very doubtful that there would be any chance of export, owing to the cool relationships between governments and the endless formalities in such matters, I hear from Maltese friends that one bunch of flowers, taken as a gift, is in order. A difficulty might obtain at your end as plants are prohibited imports to Britain. If however we make sure that there are no bulbs attached to the lilies and I can get the necessary note from the Powers that Be, I think I might be able to arrange something.