by Jane Gardam
V.’s narrow, birdish, sweet face for a moment almost lost its stiff upper lip. ‘I’m afraid there’s no hope of beans,’ she said and went on to discuss train time-tables back to Kent and her mid-week ticket which must not be wasted. She said that there was just time to see a film about Henry VIII that was on at Victoria.
During the bed scene with Anne Boleyn, V. had to leave as she felt a faint coming on, and they went to find a little something in the railway buffet. Nell went to Kings Cross and ate seven sausages and felt disgraceful. As soon as she got home to Leeds she sat down at once to thank V. for the wonderful outing.
‘Particularly the film,’ she wrote and paused. V. had pronounced the film shocking. ‘So realistic,’ she wrote with delighted malice.
‘Laughing?’ asked the cobbler.
‘Oh no,’ said Nell ashamed, ‘I’m very fond of V. She’s so poor you know. It’s just as well she’s a Dixie.’
‘I’d have thought you’d have got all you wanted, down in London.’
The cobbler was a heavy man who sat slumped with a pipe and would never put a bit of coal on the fire or draw a curtain, but he was splendid in bed which had been a glorious surprise to Nell who had expected something unpleasant or just to be endured. Her one experience of sex before marriage had been a fumbling on a landing with Major Dixie in Pickering when she was twelve, an experience she had shared with the governess had she known it (Mrs. Dixie had) and with many others. Her marriage, her female self, she never dreamed of even hinting at in her letters to V. and was delighted and surprised by her confident knowledge that she should not. She had mastered an area of etiquette that would never be demanded of the Dixie girls. And much else unknown to the Dixie girls.
At this time, and it was the first time, she began to find it difficult to provide material for letters to V. about sickness and death. It was a relief when the baby came and she could announce nappy rash and gripes and the possibility of infantile thrush, even though V. replied imprecisely about these, countering them, fielding them, with her own familiar symptoms, bravely borne.
So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell’s husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead. She took up residence on a pink housing-estate set out in crescents on the ugly edge of a pretty mediaeval town. Gulls screamed, you could hear the waves on rough days and there was a sea-light sometimes in the sky and wide sunsets, but all you could see from the windows were identical windows opposite, very nicely painted, grass well-cut and a shaped hedge.
It was an elderly crescent. Few children played. Nobody much passed by. Nell had one side of a twin-pack semi-det, Hilda the other, an excellent scheme. ‘I can hear her if she knocks through the wall,’ said Hilda, ‘and she’s not incontinent yet.’ Nell was grateful in her way and always waved as Hilda went charging down the next-door path each morning to her clean and glittering little car. Hilda, though retired from London, was becoming politically indispensable to the South-East coast. She shopped and cooked for her mother, bursting in each evening with supper from the microwave under a plastic dome. Sometimes on Sundays they ate lunch together. Nell often now called it Sunday dinner in the old way and in the old Yorkshire voice that had reasserted itself as had some nice old words she wondered at even as she spoke them. Her fitted, hot and cold bathroom basin for example had become ‘the wash-stand’ and the dustman’s crunching-lorry had become a ‘dray’.
When Nell had become ill with bronchial pneumonia one winter there had been a day when Hilda had stayed home from work to see the doctor who had suggested that now, or at least during the winter months, might not Nell move in with her daughter, but Hilda had said, ‘Now about that I have to be very firm. No choices. To be happy and secure, old people must have no choices,’ and the doctor, humbled, had gone away. He called on Nell once unexpectedly and found her writing letters in a chair by the window. ‘Oh, very thankful,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s very kind. I do just wish there was somebody in the day-time and the view is rather poor.’
Outings were suggested. Minibuses filled with doleful invalids arrived at the door. The invalids looked out at Nell on the step with little enthusiasm and Nell said to the woman in authority who was trying to lure her towards them that after all she didn’t feel up to it. ‘I get these little faints,’ she said in a Dixie voice and went in and shut the door and despised herself. ‘Your mother needs mental stimulation,’ the authorities told Hilda.
So one day when it was extremely dark and wet, dark and wet as it can only be in sea-side Kent in winter, and when Hilda had no committees, she put her mother in the car and took her for a drive. They sizzled along the sea-front, windscreen wipers going a-lick, lorries flinging spray all over them and the wind banging. Somewhere along the road beside the invisible white cliffs of Dover Nell said it reminded her of Pickering.
‘Pickering?’ said Hilda. ‘Pickering’s in the middle of moors.’
‘Oh, it’s quite near the sea.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I like the East coast. Pickering’s North East. I’m glad you brought me East again, Hilda. It’s better than London.’
‘I can’t see you in London.’
‘I’ve been down here before you know. V. lived down here for years. Vi and May moved down to join her. They all lived somewhere down here at the end.’
‘Are they all dead now, those women?’
‘I got out of touch,’ said Nell, ‘after V. died.’
‘Awful snobs. I couldn’t bear them,’ said Hilda.
‘I liked V.,’ said Nell and found herself weeping. The tears wetted her round cheeks. She thought of the schoolroom in snow-light, the golden serrip and the Duchess of Kent. ‘V. was the last person to write me a letter every week,’ said Nell. ‘It’s a sad thing when there’s nobody to write you a weekly letter.’
‘Nobody writes me a weekly letter,’ said Hilda.
‘That’s because I live with you. I’d be writing to you if I didn’t.’
Hilda remained unmoved by this information.
‘I have to think to find people to write to now,’ said Nell. ‘It’s people’s children I write to now, and some of them are getting old. I miss V.’
‘Was she the one who was always having little rests? Frustrated spinster?’ A container truck from Belgium bore down on Hilda’s car and tried to fling it into the sea but she stuck to the wheel and held her course, thrusting upward her jaw. ‘Those women needed a good analyst. Idle. Depressed. We’re almost there. I’m not sure it’s not too wet to get out.’
They were visiting Walmer castle where the Duke of Wellington had breathed his last. It was one pound fifty, seventy-five p. for old-age pensioners and open until six o’clock. Both Nell and Hilda were old-age pensioners so that it was a cheap outing, and also there were few steps, which suited Hilda who had a hip. The gloom of the afternoon had turned to the dark of evening for it was after five o’clock. The rain fell.
Hilda let her mother, whose hips were in order, unlatch herself from her seat-belt and watched her walk light-footed to the ticket-office inside the dark stone keep. Then she went to the car-park, for the tickets were to be her mother’s treat.
The ticket-collector looked surprised to see Nell. There was no sign of other visitors. ‘What weather,’ said Nell, but he turned his shoulder from her and went on reading the East Kent Mercury. Nell went to wait for Hilda on the half-landing of the shallow staircase between the portraits of Wellington and Napoleon after Waterloo. ‘Such a proud nose, Wellington’s,’ thought Nell. ‘So strained you can almost see the bone shining through. It’s a bit like Major Dixie’s.’ She turned to Napoleon who was surveying the world that had bowled him over the cliff. The pale, pale fa
ce. The wisps of blown scant hair. The plebeian neck. Too big a hat, like Marina of Kent. The eyes burned with the desolation of the eternal dark. Hilda coming up, dot and carry, said it was an upsetting picture.
They walked along a cold corridor in to the Duke of Wellington’s death chamber where the shabby chair he died in stood untouched since he had last sat in it. Near it stood his iron camp-bed with its single dreary blanket. ‘It’s very austere,’ said Nell. ‘Of course, that’s the Army.’ Standing in the greenish shadow of the window alcove was a woman, lean, shoulderless, colourless, in faded clothes. She seemed to be part of the texture of the scoured grey wall behind her. Nell thought, ‘It’s V. She is not dead,’ but as the woman came forward she saw that it was only May.
They stared at each other for a moment and then May said, ‘Why, it’s little bread and serrip. I thought you were gone long ago Nell.’
They walked together round the Duke’s apartments. They examined the furniture that had belonged to an assortment of the great—William Pitt, Lord Byron. ‘It’s rather damp here,’ said Nell. ‘It needs some warmth to put the bloom back in it, and a warmed wax polish.’
May said that Queen Victoria and all her children had used the castle for sea-side holidays. ‘Just think,’ she said, ‘all the little crinolines swinging about.’ Conversation waned.
‘I expect there’s central-heating now,’ said May. ‘In the State apartments. Where the Queen Mother stays. She often comes here you know. But then, she’s used to draughts in Scotland.’
‘I’m sure they must have done something about a radiator for the Queen Mother,’ said Nell.
‘Of course the Duke had no need of it,’ said May. ‘The Army doesn’t hear of it.’
‘Well, I do,’ said Hilda, ‘and I think we should be hurrying up.’
The two old women went out by the draw-bridge, Hilda limping behind. ‘I’ll write,’ said Nell. ‘It has been wonderful. When did—? Did Vi—?’
‘Vi went seven years ago. Two years after V.’
‘Time goes,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll write. You have my address? We’re in the book.’
‘Goodbye,’ they all said. ‘Goodbye,’ and left May in the dark rain looking autocratically about for a taxi.
As Nell had forgotten to ask May for her address, nothing came of this meeting. No telephone call came to the crescent and Nell found that somehow she didn’t want to look up May’s address. Hilda forgot. In the Spring, though, another outing took place and as Nell and her daughter flew between the tall trees and the sea near St Margaret’s Bay Nell said, waking from some dream, ‘The Dixies. They used to live here. This is where I stayed with V. and Vi. Oh—in the forties. Oh, I could take you straight to the house.’
‘Well, all right. Something to do,’ said Hilda swinging seawards, missing a cat. Up and round the sandy curving road they went, past good houses in wide blowy gardens. ‘It reminded them all of Brittany,’ said Nell. ‘One year the Major took them all to Brittany. It was before tourists.’ She felt proud to have known people who knew where to go abroad without being told. ‘Not many knew Brittany before the War,’ she said.
‘I suppose the Bretons did,’ said Hilda. ‘I don’t know why you’re so in love with those Dixies.’
‘Not in love,’ said Nell, ‘I don’t know what it is. Here. Up here,’ she said. ‘That court-yard.’
And so it was. ‘You’ve still a memory,’ said Hilda accusingly. ‘But you’d better take a grip I’m afraid, Mother, because you’re going to be disappointed. I very much fear,’ and she crashed the brakes and hobbled from the car to ring a door-bell with authority. She gazed about her as if the courtyard needed dealing with, which it did not.
The door opened, Nell saw, on pine walls, an Aga cooker, dried herbs in bunches, a wine-rack and a girl who looked fourteen with a baby under her arm and a tail of hair swinging cheerfully about behind her as she turned to look for an address. Music and a smell of garlic and warmth floated out towards Hilda’s car.
‘Moved,’ said Hilda, returning, buckling herself in, ‘four months ago. Can’t find the forwarding address but it’s a nursing-home down the road. She described it. Not far from the castle. D’you want to go and find it?’
Nell, surprised by choice, said yes, she did and looked sideways at Hilda’s strong profile, grateful. ‘After all, nothing else to do,’ said Hilda, ‘unless we go back for another look at Wellington’s death-chamber. Shouldn’t take long.’
But there were several candidates for May Dixie’s latest resting place. At least six large, gable-ended houses that could only be nursing-homes flanked the castle and the sea. Hilda disappeared inside the huge unlocked front door of one of them, a grey-green flaking edifice with shutters drawn across many windows and heavy net obscuring others. Nell sat in the car in the silent circular drive. In one window stood three drooping peacock feathers. From another a white monkey-face peeped. Nell looked at the empty flower-beds.
After some time Hilda returned, looking shaken. ‘No reply,’ she said. ‘Nobody there.’
‘Nobody?’
‘Knocked on five doors. Great big doors. Golf-clubs in the hall—awful, sandy-looking old tiles. Golf-clubs had spiders’ webs in them. Everything silent but after you’d knocked it grew more silent. Listened at one door first and there was a medical sort of voice. I knocked and it stopped. You could smell the hypodermics. And that other smell. That rich, geriatric smell.’
‘I don’t like a poor geriatric smell,’ said Nell who had once lately been in a public geriatric ward. ‘It doesn’t sound like the Dixies. I didn’t know you had such a fancy, Hilda.’
‘You’re never to go to a place like that, Ma, never,’ and Nell in sudden joy looked at her with love and said she didn’t intend to and thank goodness she had no money. ‘I wouldn’t mind a nice State home though, where you all sit round nodding off or watch the telly. And you get your meals brought on trays. And all the respectable ones change their characters and start swearing.’
Hilda rolled the usual hostile glance.
‘And you all wear old bits, and have nips of sherry.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Hilda. ‘God help us all at the end, that’s all. All I hope is that I go fast and soon.’
‘Oh, not too soon,’ said Nell. ‘Not too fast.’
‘Couldn’t be too fast for me,’ said Hilda. ‘Here, what’s this one? This looks more like Dixies.’
A very spruce, large house on a corner, newly-decorated in rich deep cream which showed off the red brick, stood before them. A brass plate announced The Grove and beneath it a brown plate added ‘Retirement Home. No tradesmen.’ Along all the pretty french windows on the ground floor only the top of one white hospital screen was sinister. Polished fat bulbs were coming up in all the borders and on one of the balconies upstairs, facing the sea, there already stood a summer basket chair. ‘I remember that chair,’ said Nell.
Hilda marched up the path and a smiling, very clean young man with a gold earring and holding a bright orange duster answered the door. There were two or three moments of intense conversation and Hilda came back and sat firmly and sensibly behind the wheel again. ‘Bad news,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid, Mother. Bad news. She’s only just died. About a month ago.’
‘So odd,’ said Nell. ‘Coming to the door with a duster. She wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘They’re very upset,’ said Hilda. In her new vulnerability after the cobwebbed golf-clubs, the whispering demon doctors, she looked warily towards her mother to see how she had taken it.
‘D’you know, I thought she might be dead,’ said Nell. ‘Somehow I had a feeling. I never really liked May. She had a mean little face when you come to think about it.’
They drove more slowly away. ‘She didn’t die there,’ said Hilda. ‘Not at The Grange. They’d had her temporarily moved while they were being re-decorated.
They sounded genuinely upset. That man said she was one of the old school. Proud she was going to go through with something. The young man said it had been a big shock to them.’
‘Well, it would be,’ said Nell. ‘Very expensive those places. It must be quite difficult to fill them up. I wonder if she took the old furniture. I expect she left them that chair. I wonder who got the rest? I never really liked May.’
‘But a nice young man,’ said Hilda and thought, ‘There’s something queer here: I’m beginning to talk like her and she like me.’
‘Diamonds in his ears,’ said Nell. ‘There’s a lot of that about. I’d not have thought May would have cared for it. I wonder why she died.’
‘Shock. Heart. Being moved at that time of life. Too old for hotels.’
‘I’ve always had a fancy for hotels,’ said Nell. ‘I never stayed in one.’
‘The Grand Duke,’ said Hilda. ‘Good Lord—there it is.’
‘That!’ said Nell. It was a tall slit of a building painted purple with dark red curtains and dirty brass rails across the inside of the windows, which were grimy. A tremendous noise of shouting and bleeping, the booming of fruit-machines and a general din of youth issued from within. A second door stood beside the open door of the pub. Painted beside it with an arrow pointed upwards was the word ‘Rooms’. Hilda’s car had been halted outside this pub on a roundabout solid with traffic en route eastward for France and westward for the Medway towns. They were greatly intertwined. A frightful place. Nell unclicked her seat-belt and got out.
‘What in hell are you doing?’ said Hilda, reversing.
‘Oh, I must just have a—’
‘Get back in the car at once.’ But behind her the seething lorries bellowed and honked.