Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

by Diana Athill

  She would cast back for the scene, the face, the overheard remark that might start to spread ripples, and each time the same things would come up, either done already or weightless as a dead leaf. What had happened to her, ever, except the old sad things, or else the trivia like the nonsense with Max? How do they do it, she wondered, the ones like Bouncer?

  ‘Today I will start a story about a solicitor who has been embezzling his clients’ money . . .’ and tap, tap, tap they go. Was it because she was a woman? But look at Mrs Borrowdale. In the time left her by marriage that silent woman spent five or six years accumulating her material on aspects of Roman history, then, with her book whole in her mind, would leave Mr Borrowdale to his sister and go away for a few months to write it. A dull woman she would be, if you did not know those admirable books. No, a woman does not have to be like me, thought Cecilia humbly.

  Hearing Charles drive away, she went downstairs to wait for dinner. The rain had stopped so she joined Salviati on the lawn outside the dining-room. Had he really slept with Rosa? Yes, he probably had. He was a man who would choose the simplest way available to dispose of a distracting need. Philip shouted from his window to ask the time and soon afterwards came to join them. The other two would not appear until Kerridge sounded the gong.

  Evenings at Hetherston went slowly. They all tried – civilised behaviour was a small price to pay for Mrs Lucas’s hospitality – but after the first few evenings they had little to talk about. Mrs Borrowdale would fall silent over her embroidery as soon as the talk turned on ideas. Laura would go back to her room. Salviati would attempt an argument with Philip only to have his dogmatism defeated by flip- pancy. Charles Opie was often out, but when he was in would be little help, irritating the others by talking when they wished to read or listen to records, or infuriating them by not listening when they wished to talk. Cecilia and Philip would sometimes take the station wagon and drive to the nearest town for a visit to the cinema, or to a village pub for darts and beer, but these resources were growing stale. The only unifying factor in the group was a slight regression towards their schooldays on the part of everyone but Mrs Borrowdale as a result of even so mild a degree of institu- tional living. They joined in a disproportionate interest in what Mrs Lucas said or did, or in childish amusement at some daring infringement of the notices – the time, for example, when Philip had hung his grotesque straw hat on Mr Lucas’s pride. They also, and as often, split. Laura had become waspish when Cecilia had been invited to after- dinner coffee with their hostess on a Thursday, and Philip’s good nature had cracked when Charles had helped himself to a third glass from the modest ration of sherry provided (together with beer and cider with meals – other drink they had to buy for themselves).

  This evening they did not go out because Philip had letters to write. It was warm again, sweet-smelling as darkness fell. At about ten, bored by the pluck of Mrs Borrowdale’s needle through canvas and by Salviati in a lecturing mood, Cecilia decided to go for a walk. She took the path through the rose garden where reaching branches from the ramblers scattered her with drops and petals, out through the little iron gate and down to the stream which ran through the park. She had not remembered that walking alone in country darkness was so frightening. Her senses became as twitchy as a rabbit’s and she jumped when a water rat plopped, a disturbed moorhen scuttered.

  When she had made her way almost to the wall of the park she sat on a fallen tree trunk to smoke. The prospect of almost two more months of such evenings, and all for nothing, was oppressive: there was no point in staying much longer. She could find enough money, somehow, to keep her going until she got another job, and if she had really gone dry, this one had better be a solid one. Tomorrow, she decided, she would tell Mrs Lucas that she was leaving.

  Her feet were wet and beginning to grow cold. Now that it was really dark it would be easier to get back by striking up through the groups of oaks until she came to the front drive. It was farther away than she expected, and when she had almost fallen because of an invisible dip in the ground, stumbled into a patch of thistles and trodden in a cowpat – an old one, luckily – she began to feel rattled. Gravel under her feet at last, and, I came too far, she was thinking, when there was a loud snort and a shape rose up in front of her. A heifer, as startled as she was, lumbered to its feet and swung its head towards her, there to stand blowing indignantly. Its signal brought other shapes into movement, there was a scrambling of hoofs, more snorting and Cecilia realised that she was surrounded by the herd of young beasts which, unlike the milk cows, were left out all night. Quickly she said to herself, ‘I am not afraid of cows,’ but her heart was thumping with the shock.

  ‘Good cows,’ she said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. ‘Don’t be silly, it’s only me,’ and she advanced two steps. The creature ahead of her backed away but the others, with their usual inquisitiveness, began to gather nearer. Their blowing was gentler now but from what she could make out of their shapes their heads were down. Forgetting that in day- light the stance of a curious heifer held no terrors for her, she thought in panic, They’re going to charge! She pulled off her scarf and flicked it at them. ‘Shoo! Go away!’ she shouted, and they jumbled about among themselves but stayed where they were. Oh Lord, thought Cecilia, what an idiotic plight, what am I to do?

  She had not heard the Alvis coming along the road beyond the park wall to stop at the gate. Not until Charles put it into gear to come through did she realise that help was at hand. In the time it took him to shut the gate and get back into the car she managed to pull herself together so well that when his headlights caught her she had started walking again, as though making her way calmly through the herd.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said, pulling up beside her.

  ‘Coming back from a walk,’ she answered coldly.

  ‘Hop in,’ and too quickly she was in the car, safe with the smell of brandy and cigars. Then, unable to keep up the pretence, she began to laugh.

  ‘Thank goodness you turned up,’ she said. ‘There I was, ambling happily through the night, and suddenly a herd of savage cows sprang out of nowhere.’

  ‘They didn’t look very savage to me, but you did. You looked as though you were offering to strangle them with your bare hands.’

  ‘Well, they took me by surprise. How was your party?’

  ‘Not a party, just the family. You ought to have come. The only pretty woman I had to look at all the evening was his great-great-great something or other by Kneller, and she looked prim. And you didn’t work after all, so you were just being tiresome. I hope you suffered for it.’

  ‘I did rather. First Mrs B told me how much she saved by using coke instead of anthracite in her boiler, then Salviati began to lecture me on the follies of expressionism. I wish she’d talk about her work and he wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wish you’d talk about yourself.’

  ‘The subject bores me,’ she said.

  He drove past the front door, through the arch into the stable yard where the garage doors stood open. Running the car in beside the station wagon, he switched off ignition and lights together and they were side by side in complete darkness. The engine made ticking sounds as it settled, and, Bother! thought Cecilia, he’s going to slide his arm along the back of the seat.

  Instead of doing this, Charles reached across her knees and opened the door.

  ‘I want another drink,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle of brandy upstairs. I’ll bring it down and you must have a nightcap with me to make up for your perversity.’

  ‘I’d love one,’ she said, relieved.

  When they went out in the evenings, Kerridge put the key of the back door under a brick in the roots of the ivy by the kitchen window. They groped their way in and through to the drawing-room. Cecilia kicked off her sandals and settled on the sofa with her feet under a cushion to warm them. He’s not so bad, she thought, while
he was upstairs fetching his bottle. Why shouldn’t he sell well if that’s what people like to read? And a carnation a day is no sillier than Philip’s straw hat. But when he came back he began at once on a story about Laura Preston in Greece, refusing to eat dinner because she had seen the lamb on her plate waiting to be slaughtered, lying all day in the sun with its feet tied together, its tongue swollen with thirst. Listening to his mockery of Laura, Cecilia felt fond of her for the first time.

  ‘I’d have done the same,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘But you tuck into your mutton chops here,’ he said.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly, that isn’t the point.’

  ‘Have another drink and move your legs over,’ he said, coming to sit at the other end of the sofa.

  He leant back and looked at her. Again she saw Max’s eyes narrowed with automatic charm in Charles’s face. They’ll still look at women like that when they are eighty, she thought, and then it will be touching – ‘What a one he must have been!’ – but there’ll be years in between when it will be gruesome.

  ‘Why won’t you come to bed with me, you silly girl?’ he said.

  ‘Oh Charles, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to.’

  ‘You’d enjoy it, you know.’

  ‘I would not.’

  ‘You would, you know. You ought to let up sometimes on all this doomed love. That’s what you go in for, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

  They have that knack, she thought, seeing a tribe of Charleses and Maxes. They know what kind of woman one is by instinct, on sight, and sometimes it’s such a comfort and sometimes, like now, it’s infuriating.

  ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I get bored talking about myself.’

  ‘Of course you do, if you go on doing such boring things. If you’d just relax and come to bed with me for the fun of it you’d find yourself much better company.’

  ‘Look, Charles,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come to Hetherston to flip in and out of bed with you or anyone else.’

  ‘You don’t know yourself, moppet,’ he said.

  It was far from easy to believe in a fatuousness so complete, but it was not that which made Cecilia lean forward and peer into his face. Do they even share a language? she thought. ‘You don’t know yourself, moppet.’ Different circumstances, of course, but oh Max! He had taken a handful of the hair at the back of her neck (she had worn it longer then) and pulled her head gently back against the arm of the sofa – the cover had been glazed chintz, rather unpleasant – and he had used those very words. And he had been right, too. She had never suspected herself of being able to live six whole months of warmth and easiness, without a bad ending – small but solid to remember even now, and to set against all the rest. Unreal, unimportant, but coming at the right time such a meeting could touch something deeper than its surface implications, might even, had she been another kind of woman, have changed . . .

  ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. She still stared at Charles and he stared back.

  ‘Will you?’ he said.

  ‘Will I what? Oh – oh no. . . . No, of course I won’t.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure – but thank you very much, thank you a thousand times, dear Charles,’ and she began to laugh, while he looked a little hurt at her senseless response. All that raking through the ashes and she had never even remem- bered Max except to dismiss him. ‘You don’t know yourself, moppet.’ The girl would have to be someone different from her, more like Ellen (and she remembered a girl with whom she had shared rooms for three months two years ago). Oh my God, can this really be going to work?

  Disgruntled, Charles got up to refill his glass and she rose too, released by movement and able to say good night and leave him. Going up the shallow curving stairs she ran her hand along the banister and remembered Max’s stud-box, dark pigskin, polished with use, and the lotion he used after shaving, too expensive to smell vulgar. Once she had come into a room and had known that he had just left it – the smell had still been there, making her smile. Reaching her room she crossed to the window, opened it and leant out, but she hardly noticed the scent of the roses growing below. Things were hooking onto each other – smells, words, gestures – not yet amounting to a sequence of events but weaving a feeling of Max, a response to that feeling in which at any moment something might happen. I’ll call him Louis, she thought, and now I’ll be strong-minded and go to bed, because if this is going to work it will still be here in the morning.

  She could not sleep. The typewriter squatted on the desk in the darkness across the room. She remembered that Ellen wore a yellow kimono-shaped dressing-gown and saw her sitting cross-legged on an unmade bed in it, watching Max knotting his tie. He was saying: ‘Our house was almost burnt down in a bush fire when I was nine. The animals all streamed away from the fire, just like they say, and an old man with a long beard on a white horse came soaring over the gate into our yard.’ Ellen had always been Desdemona-like for traveller’s tales, that would have been his first attraction for her. What would happen? Cecilia did not know but her ignorance was not worrying. She was feeling the ache under her ribs, becoming more certain every minute that in the mist out of which these details were emerging there was hidden a solid shape. There had been something in the Max nonsense that was not nonsense after all, and if she went slowly, carefully, held onto each detail as it came, she would surely get at what it was.

  Putting on her dressing-gown she went to the desk and found a pencil. ‘Yellow kimono,’ she wrote, then ‘bush fire story’, ‘stud-box’ and (to her surprise – it had never happened) ‘she finds his wife’s nightdress under pillow – doesn’t mind – is astonished at this.’ Good gracious me, she thought, what are we going to get up to? and went back to sit on her bed feeling restless, not ready to start work but unable to relax.

  I want to go home, she thought suddenly. Absurd, with almost two months of leisure left to her. She would sit at that desk tapping away as busily as Laura and Charles, sleep- walking down to lunch, smugly accepting the tribute of Kerridge’s respectful silence, the slippered maids’ withdrawal from her room when they found her in it (they were used to leaving it till last, knowing it would often be empty during ‘silence time’). She would be a credit to Hetherston before she was done. ‘All I needed,’ she would report to Mrs Lucas, ‘was to have my bottom pinched, so to speak, by a best-selling novelist in a yellow waistcoat.’

  She heard footsteps creaking slowly down the passage. They stopped outside her door and she held her breath. There was a gentle tap, repeated a few seconds later when she did not answer. If this is Charles, she thought, I am going to give him such a flea in his ear . . . and she walked quickly to the door and opened it wide. The man who almost fell on top of her was Philip.

  ‘Philip!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He took her hand from the knob and shut the door with elaborate care. Then he turned on her a proud smile.

  ‘I’m drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m exquisitely drunk.’

  ‘But weren’t you writing letters?’

  ‘I got bored – went out. I am so glad you’re still up, let’s do something gay.’

  ‘But, Philip dear, we can’t – everyone’s in bed.’

  ‘You aren’t. What were you doing?’ He walked rather stiffly to the foot of her bed and sat down.

  She laughed – and suddenly knew that she, too, was feeling drunk. ‘I think I was writing a story at last.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you do all the time?’

  ‘It hasn’t been, not since I’ve been here,’ she said, the shameful secret coming out easily.

  ‘I’m not surprised. How any of us can work in this hellish place beats me. Silence, notices, tact, clinic stuff – and the evenings. If I had somewhere to go I’d go, and that’
s what you should do – we all ought to. Get drunk and hire a motor coach and drive away singing “On Ilkley Moor”, like they do on Outings.’

  ‘But it’s all right really. It’s only us feeling recalcitrant. And don’t you think it might be a good idea to go to bed?’

  Looking mournful now, he shook his head. Cecilia wished he had not put into words what she had been feeling herself.

  ‘If I go home,’ she said, ‘it will be hell. I lent my flat to a couple who never go away when you come back – they’ll stay and sleep on the floor. And the pipes will leak and the sash- cords will break and bores will ring up and I’ll have to buy food – and now I’ve got this damned story to cope with. It really would be awful.’

  ‘You’ll go,’ said Philip, and her heart lightened to hear him.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You must think of something mad for us to do before I get unhappy.’

  ‘Why not take your hat down and hang it on the antlers?’ she said absently.

  ‘Done it. And a scarf, too.’

  ‘Why not detach a lustre from the chandelier?’ – and she could have bitten her tongue, because when he lurched to his feet crying, ‘Cecilia! You’re a genius!’ she saw that he was really drunk and not pretending to be more so than he was. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing her hand. ‘That’s just what we’ll do.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said sharply. ‘You know quite well I didn’t mean it. Now you must go to bed or I’ll get angry.’

  ‘Oh come on – we’ll do it like mice and you can have it as a trophy.’ He had already pulled her to the door and got it open so that her protests necessarily became whispered. Snores came from Salviati’s room and the uneven tick of the tall clock on the landing was loud.

  ‘Philip honey,’ she whispered. ‘Stop it – do be sensible,’ but a giggle had started to rise in her throat. He hushed her and began to tiptoe heavily towards the stairs, still holding her hand.