by Jane Gardam
Certainly fifty pence per bloom sounds very ridiculous even for England and one would like to do something to help.
Will you write and instruct me exactly when the lilies will be needed? I imagine that you will want them on Easter Saturday. I shall probably be able to send them via my old friend Sir Henry Hatt—they travel home annually on Easter Saturday as he likes to attend his old church on Easter Day and afterwards spends the summer at home. His wife I have to admit may not be co-operative but I shall do my best with Henry. I should like precise details of the arrangements for collection at London airport and will send details of the estimated time of arrival of the Hatts’ flight. Fortunately there is still time for us to make all our plans water-tight.
The weather here is continuing to be beautiful and I have been painting unhindered all week. Your visit in no way hampered the picture’s progress and this is being a most successful spring. Your stay, as ever, brought only pleasure.
Sincerely yours, Paul Ingoldby.
My dear Paul,
How very good of you to take my request for Easter lilies so seriously. Alas, here at All Saints they are very uncertain of the sense of it and proceeding with the purchase of expensive lilies as before. I feel more and more that there is a great lack of imagination, spirit and ‘GO’ about this country nowadays and I have therefore stuck to my guns in the hope of a change of policy in future years. I am enclosing a cheque for £1 (one pound) and intend to meet the lilies myself on Easter Saturday and bring them directly back from the airport to arrange them in the church. I shall have completed my church work for Easter Day before I set out.
This will not be a particularly joyful Easter at All Saints incidentally, as the new Team Vicar has told us—just this week—the sad news that the church is to be closed down. The main reason is that the roof needs several thousand pounds spending on it. There are several other churches in the town and poor Father Banks is worked off his feet. Or so they say. He seems to me to be very seldom on them on account of all his committee meetings. I often wonder how these parsons would get on if they had had to stand before a class of children for six hours a day—and take games and supervise dinners. Better perhaps. But as to All Saints, we are all fairly poor now and we have given all we can over the past years—our jewellery, silver bits and pieces and between ourselves I have even given away the needlework picture of my great-grandfather the admiral. I know that I have bored you with all this for far too long when I was with you, and you are not, dear Paul, and never were even as a child, in any way religious. I remember to this day your stony stare when we were doing the Sermon on the Mount. But you will understand because you have a kind heart that the closure of All Saints where I was baptised as were my parents and grandparents (my grandfather of course was the first churchwarden) and where so many of us, and not only the old, spend a very great deal of time and prayer, will be a blow. It is not a beautiful building but it stands in blocks of identical suburban streets, all so dull, all so tasteful, all with the same expensive curtain linings to the windows and the same flicker of the television screen, all silent of life otherwise as one walks the dog late at night, that it stands out as something different and serious and I truly believe that temples of worship are needed by man as I said when we spent the delightful day driving to the golden temples of Hagar Qum.
Well, dear Paul, I am nearly eighty years old so that I shan’t be in need of the building or any building much longer in any case, but I am very glad to be able to make some gesture of—well, of positive farewell in the matter of the lilies, and I am grateful to you for that. As to your kind remarks about it being I who taught you manners that is rubbish. It was your Nannie taught you manners—a very nice woman. I remember her. A very good sort. Many Methodists of course can be good Christians.
Your sincere friend, Clara White.
‘Lilies?’ said Lady Hatt.
‘Just a bunch of lilies.’
‘What—to carry? Hand baggage?’
‘Yes. Nothing at all really,’ said Sir Henry nervously. His skin was like old porridge and he was hunched up in an ancient arm chair at the Xara Palace Hotel where he had lived for twenty years in a daze of memory and for five years trying not to see his new wife who slept in another room. She had been his nurse, and their marriage those few years ago had seemed a good arrangement. Vermilion trouser-suited, with spectacularly waved hair and a face painted into a 1940s mask, she was flinging pearls round her neck and prodding earrings into her ears. She twisted her face about in mimic agony and stared with fierce eyes at him through the mirror.
‘Who will carry them? Whatever is it all about?’
‘Well, you will hardly have to carry them at all. Nobody will. Someone will hand them to you at the airport and the steward will put them on the rack for you. At London the steward will get them down again and you will simply have to carry them through customs and hand them to this old friend of Ingoldby. There’s a permit—all has been seen to. They’re for a church at Easter.’
‘And all is left to me?’
‘I intended to take them. I can’t help being unable to come. It is the doctor—’
‘I don’t dispute you can’t come. Just as you don’t dispute I have to go—’
‘No, no.’
‘I have to open up the house. For when you are well. I am ready to do this for you and to come back and fetch you. But I don’t see why I should take these—bloody—lilies.’
He drooped in the faded velvet chair and the Maltese light shone through the window and the leaves of a vine. His paper-pale face sagged. Her brilliant trouser-suit and white frothy blouse glared in the old room, with its old stone walls. ‘The car has come,’ he said.
She kissed the top of his shiny, freckly head in a businesslike way and straightened his rug. ‘Old Ingoldby’ll come and see you. You’ll be all right.’ She fiddled at the catch of her pearls round the front of her neck, and then with a big diamond brooch. He said, suddenly urgent, shaky, ‘Take the lilies.’
Miss White at about the same moment was settling her dog with a bowl of water and checking windows and doors. She then put on her gloves and hat and walked down the hill to the station. She changed to the underground at Earls Court—a long wait—and at last got on to a train direct to London Airport. It was an excellent train, new and bright and clean, and she was in no way over-excited by it for it had served her very well earlier in the year on the way to her holiday.
She felt odder, though, than then. Rather weak. Her feet prickled. They did not quite touch the floor. Her heart beat very loud and to try both to still it and to distract attention from her distress—as she had done since she was a child—she grinned her zany grin about the carriage. The few people lolling opposite, this Easter Saturday afternoon, took little notice.
She reached the airport far too soon and thought that she would find a cup of tea, and it was while she was standing with her tray for the tea that the pain hit her in the chest like the piercing of a sharp knife. She bent over the tray and had to stand still. There was a wide space between her and the cash desk, but she could not go on. People behind her—it was quiet at the airport today—the rush had been yesterday (Good Friday—to travel on Good Friday!)—people behind her took their trays round her back, not looking at her. ‘I could die here,’ she thought, ‘and no one would notice.’ She thought of a newspaper report of how somebody had died in London Airport and no one had noticed for seven hours.
‘Though why should it matter where one died?’ she thought. ‘To Christians at any rate—taught at All Saints.’ ‘Dying is only moving into another room,’ she said to the triangles of chocolate cake behind the glass boxes on the shelves.
After a while she slid the tray along to the cash desk and paid for the tea. Then, tottery, she made for a near table. The tray seemed heavy. She felt very small. ‘I am very small,’ she thought. ‘I have always been small. I have always thought o
f myself with—she paused, facing secret sin—well, with some sort of tall man near me.’
She sat on the plastic orange bucket seat and her feet again did not quite touch the ground. She thought of Paul Ingoldby. Such a nice boy. She hung on to the safe thought that he was one of her boys. Her pupils. He must be ten years younger. She had been a new teacher of twenty and he had been a little boy of ten. They were now eighty and seventy. She thought of her letter to him. How that in some way it had not been proper. She had shown too much of her heart in it, she thought.
Then she thought, ‘Oh dear Lord God, if I had only sometimes shown more of my heart.’ She closed her eyes.
When at last the little letters made of green lights on the board above her head swam into place and said that the Malta flight had at last landed, she noticed how late it was. She had been sitting at the table for over an hour. She must have slept. At some point she must also have drunk the tea for her cup was empty.
‘Landed’ said the green lights, so she got up and went down the huge hall and, holding the rail, she climbed the stairs and walked back along the long stretch to the railing where people waited for the passengers.
There were not really many people but it was not easy for her to get up against the rope rail, so she walked back to the place where the airport attendants were keeping a space clear for the people coming off the plane to pass.
‘Now then, Gran,’ said one. ‘Keep back now. You don’t want to be trampled under. You’ll get lost.’
‘I have to stand at the front,’ said Miss White. ‘You see, I’ll know her but she won’t know me.’
‘How you going to know her?’
‘She’ll be carrying lilies.’
‘Lilies. I doubt that,’ said the man. ‘Not allowed—lilies.’
‘There is a permit,’ said Miss White. ‘It has all been properly cleared. It was arranged by a Captain in the Navy.’
‘Navy, eh?’ said the man watching Miss White’s queer grin. ‘Ah—boyfriend.’
Miss White’s eighty-year-old lips set firm. Shocked, she turned away and saw Lady Hatt coming towards her, lurching a little, brick-red in the cheeks and vermilion in the body and on her face an expression of fierce malice. She was carrying her big bottle of duty-free whisky, a large crocodile handbag and her frothy blouse was escaping from the waist of her trouser suit, her hair untidy. Her over-thin legs above wobbly ankles tottered pathetically above high heels. In her arms as well as the whisky was a clutter of parcels, and between them and below the dangle of unsteady-looking earrings was a huge sheaf of newspaper from which stuck the heads of many tight-foiled, greyish lilies.
‘Oh, how kind, how kind!’ Miss White leapt forward. ‘Oh how very kind of you!’
Lady Hatt glared. She shuffled the lilies off her heap of belongings and let them fall very heavily into Miss White’s arms. An earring swung. She marched on.
Miss White ran after. ‘Oh, please. I do want to thank you. I’ve brought some chocolates—’
‘Oh—certainly not. No thank you.’
‘I don’t even know your name, so can’t write—’
‘I hardly think that’s necessary at all.’ Lady Hatt smelled of gin. Her eyes were hard blue, the whites reddish. She had released the lilies like a package of poison, and not quite knowing the source of her hate she seethed against them as she might have seethed at the touch of an angel’s wing. She had been manipulated into the lilies—uncharacteristic emblems of other people’s worlds. She had been manipulated into them by her husband whom she despised and for a cause she despised. Easter, she thought. ‘Churches. Women like this. Chocolates—my God!’ She strode away—a chauffeur appearing from somewhere and taking her belongings and her overnight bag and her whisky. She disappeared leaving Miss White with the chocolates and the bundle.
‘I so hope they weren’t a trouble,’ Miss White called—and at once realised that they must have been, for the bundle was large and bony and really extremely heavy. She cradled it in her arms and found that she could scarcely see over it. Going down the stairs, buffeted about—the airport was getting more crowded now—she found she could only go a step at a time as she could not spare a hand for the hand rail. Waiting at last on the platform for the underground train again, she tried to peer in to the top of the sheaf round the tight-packed pages of The Times of Malta, secured with firm string and excellent naval knotting. She thought, ‘They don’t look so beautiful after all. I hope—’ and then the knife twisted in her chest again and she stood very still and closed her eyes and grinned very wide. When it had passed she said, ‘I hope they’ll improve when they’re put in water.’
She took a taxi when she got to her own station. It was a dreadful extravagance but she felt unequal to the hill and it was now dark. A sweet, spring darkness and the cherry blossom smelling in all the pleasant gardens. The blossom whitened in the April evening. In some rooms in the decorous streets lights were coming on. In some—really rather prettily, she thought, ‘I don’t know why I ever despised them’—the lights of television sets flickered blue. Dark as it was someone was giving his patch of grass the first mowing of the year in St Agnes Road and the wet, summery, heartbreaking smell of the sap hit her as she stepped from the cab at the door of the church. It seemed the smell of all her life—the essence of the best of all her life—a new moon, she thought, suburban grass and summer coming. She thought how happy she had been in this place.
She had—as Sacristan of course she had—a key to the church and went in and felt for the light switches. She switched on the chancel light and the lady chapel and the light of the vestry. Looking at all the great arrangements of flowers shining to themselves through the night waiting for Easter morning, she grinned her grin and switched on every light in the place. There seemed, she thought, to be a great many lilies—two great vases on the altar and two more on the chancel steps. Pounds and pounds worth. Well of course they’d all gone silly. Bravado, she thought, sentimental bravado because the church was going to be closed.
They could have saved fifty pounds, she thought, towards the roof.
She put down the heavy pig lilies on the steps of the lady chapel and went looking for a vase or two behind the organ. There wasn’t much left. Only the old green bucket thing that was always left till last and was usually stuck up at the back of the bookstall where it didn’t show. She rummaged and found a great old glass jar—something to do with the Guides. She swilled both these out with water and took them back to the lady chapel.
Feeling now very tired, she undid—not easily—the traceries round The Times of Malta and let the lilies fall out loose, scatter and breathe on their hard dark stalks. She shook them and spread them until they lay released across the blue chapel carpet. Lying in their midst was a magnificent string of pearls.
‘Her pearls!’ thought Miss White. ‘They must be Paul’s friend’s pearls. They must have dropped off. Oh, how very dreadful!’
She touched them with her fingertip. ‘They are beautiful,’ she thought. ‘How dreadful. I must put them in the safe. She won’t know what’s happened to them.’
The pearls glowed among the lilies. The light of the vestry where the safe was, looked far away. Miss White looked at the lilies and then at the pearls and thought, ‘The pearls are more beautiful. It ought not to be so. The lilies are weeds after all. And they are dead. I am old and a fool.’
Tears came into her eyes. For safety, she picked up the pearls and fastened them round her neck. ‘I’d like to see them on,’ she thought, ‘I love pearls.’ But the glass where Father Banks looked at himself and his vestments over in the vestry before service, swinging about, handsome and grand (How different from Paul. If I had had Father Banks to teach he would not—), the glass was far away in the vestry, too.
‘Vanity,’ said Miss White to herself, and twisted the pearls out of sight under the collar of her old jersey. Then, feeling tireder still, s
he put down her round head among the pig lilies, and died.
She had left everything to the church, of course, and there was practically nothing except her small flat—and the pearls, which everyone was astonished to hear about. They were spectacular, said a sympathetic local jeweller, and he gave two thousand pounds for them. Lady Hatt, by the time Miss White’s body had been found lying peaceful among the dead lilies on Easter morning, had had her hysterics, mounted her first wave of accusation against the airline and was well on the way with her claim to the insurance company, which was unfriendly but at length paid up. Paul Ingoldby did not hear for some time of his old teacher’s death on Easter eve for she had left him no bequest, thinking it inappropriate. He felt satisfaction, however, when he heard that the lilies had reached their destination.
The church with its new roof survived.
THE FIRST ADAM
My woman’s made of paper. She’s spread on the bed. She’s figures and drawings. She’s called The Tender, and she’s not my wife. She’s not young, neither—she’s knocking on.
She’s my mistress, this one. My tender mistress. Wife’s at home in Welwyn and this sweaty midnight, whilst I’m sitting on the hotel bed, looking across at the other one, with the whisky on the floor and a mosquito pissing around and God knows how at seven floors up and netted windows—this moment, damp evening, Moira’s waking to the Welwyn thrushes and a cold dawn.
She’s lying under the Danish goose-down duvet and waiting for the Teasmade. Dead centre she’s lying in our Heal’s kingsize, dead centre on the winter side of the mattress. Alone.
Faithful? Yes she is. God knows why she is or why I’m sure she is. She’s past fifty, mind, and men never meant that much to her. I never meant that much to her. I meant more I’d say as time wore on and I was abroad more. She likes being on her own. Less mess. Can take her time washing chair covers. Doesn’t have to cook. Less washing up. And plan! How she plans. She’s planned the Extension two years—ever since we came home together from KL with all the cane furniture. ‘All that beautiful cane furniture,’ she says, ‘still in the roof. Crying out for that Extension. Can’t you build that Extension now you’ve retired?’