The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  With the Vicar’s phrases of gratitude giving her momentum, Kitty tacked down the drive between the shabby laurels, and out into the lane.

  ‘The Vicar’s having cold,’ she told Mrs De Vries, who was preparing a tajine of chicken in a curious earthenware pot she had brought back from Morocco.

  ‘Poor old Vicar,’ Mrs De Vries said absent-mindedly, as she cut almonds into slivers. She had a glass of something on the draining-board and often took a sip from it. ‘Do run and find a drink for yourself, dear child,’ she said. She was one of the people who wondered about Daisy Ashford.

  ‘I’ll have a bitter lemon, if I may,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Well, do, my dear. You know where to find it.’

  As Kitty knew everything about nearly every house in the village, she did not reply; but went with assurance to the bar in the hall. She stuck a plastic straw in her drink, and returned to the kitchen sucking peacefully.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ she enquired.

  ‘No, just tell me the news. What’s going on?’

  ‘Mr Mumford typed “Jam Fart and Custard” on the menu card.’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t! You’ve made me do the nose-trick with my gin. The pain of it!’ Mrs De Vries snatched a handkerchief from her apron pocket and held it to her face. When she had recovered, she said, ‘I simply can’t wait for Tom to come home, to tell him that.’

  Kitty looked modestly gratified. ‘I called at the Vicarage, too, on my way.’

  ‘And what were they up to?’

  ‘They are up to making marmalade.’

  ‘Poor darlings! They do have to scrimp and scratch. Church mice, indeed!’

  ‘But isn’t home-made marmalade nicer than shop?’

  ‘Not all that much.’

  After a pause, Kitty said, ‘Mrs Saddler’s on her way out.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Mrs Saddler?’

  ‘At the almshouse. She’s dying.’

  ‘Poor old thing.’

  Kitty sat down on a stool and swung her fat legs.

  ‘Betty Benford is eight months gone,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me something about people I know,’ Mrs De Vries complained, taking another sip of gin.

  ‘Her mother plans to look after the baby while Betty goes on going out to work. Mrs Benford, you know.’

  ‘Not next door’s daily?’

  ‘She won’t be after this month.’

  ‘Does Mrs Glazier know?’ Mrs De Vries asked, inclining her head towards next door.

  ‘Not yet,’ Kitty said, glancing at the clock.

  ‘My God, she’ll go up the wall,’ Mrs De Vries said with relish. ‘She’s had that old Benford for years and years.’

  ‘What do you call that you’re cooking?’

  ‘It’s a tajine of chicken.’

  ‘Mrs De Vries is having tajine of chicken,’ Kitty said next door five minutes later.

  ‘And what might that be when it’s at home?’

  Kitty described it as best she could, and Mrs Glazier looked huffy. ‘Derek wouldn’t touch it,’ she said. ‘He likes good, plain, English food, and no messing about.’

  She was rolling out pastry for that evening’s steak-and-kidney pie.

  ‘They’re having that at The Horse and Groom,’ Kitty said.

  ‘And we’ll have sprouts. And braised celery,’ Mrs Glazier added, not letting Mrs De Vries get away with her airs and graces.

  ‘Shall I make a pastry rose to go on the top of the pie?’ Kitty offered. ‘Mrs Prout showed me how to.’

  ‘No, I think we’ll leave well alone.’

  ‘Do you like cooking?’ Kitty asked in a conversational tone.

  ‘I don’t mind it. Why?’

  ‘I was only thinking that then it wouldn’t be so hard on you when Mrs Benford leaves.’

  Mrs Benford was upstairs. There was a bumping, droning noise of a vacuum cleaner above, in what Kitty knew to be Mrs Glazier’s bedroom.

  Mrs Glazier, with an awful fear in her heart, stared, frowning, at Kitty, who went on, ‘I was just telling Mrs De Vries that after Mrs Benford’s grandchild’s born she’s going to stay at home to mind it.’

  The fact that next door had heard this stunning news first made the blow worse, and Mrs Glazier put a flour-covered hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘But why can’t the girl look after the little – baby herself?’

  Kitty took the lid off a jar marked ‘Cloves’ and looked inside, sniffing. ‘Her daughter earns more money at The Horse and Groom than her mother earns here,’ she explained.

  ‘I suppose you told Mrs De Vries that too.’

  Kitty went to the door with dignity. ‘Oh, no! I never talk from house to house. My mother says I’ll have to stop my visiting, if I do. Oh, by the way,’ she called back, ‘You’d better keep your dog in. The De Vries’s bitch is on heat.’

  She went home and sat down to lamb and bubble-and-squeak.

  ‘The Vicar’s having cold, too,’ she said.

  ‘And that’s his business,’ her mother said warningly.

  A few days later, Kitty called on Mrs Prout.

  Mrs Prout’s cottage was one of Kitty’s favourite visits. Many years ago, before she was married, Mrs Prout had been a school-teacher, and she enjoyed using her old skills to deal with Kitty. Keeping her patience pliant, she taught her visitor new card games (and they were all educational), and got her on to collecting and pressing wild-flowers. She would give her pastry-trimmings to cut into shapes, and showed her how to pop corn and make fudge. She was extremely kind, though firm, and Kitty respected the rules – about taking off her Wellingtons and washing her hands and never calling on Mondays or Thursdays, because these were turning-out days when Mrs Prout was far too busy to have company.

  They were very serious together. Mrs Prout enjoyed being authoritative to a child again, and Kitty had a sense of orderliness which obliged her to comply.

  ‘They sent this from the Vicarage,’ she said, coming into the kitchen with a small pot of marmalade.

  ‘How jolly nice!’ Mrs Prout said. She took the marmalade, and tilted it slightly, and it moved. Rather sloppy. But she thought no worse of the Vicar’s wife for that. ‘That’s really jolly nice of them,’ she said, going into the larder. ‘And they shall have some of my apple jelly, in fair return. Quid pro quo, eh? And one good turn deserves another.’

  She came out of the larder with a different little pot and held it to the light; but the clear and golden content did not move when she tipped it sideways.

  ‘What’s the news?’ she asked.

  ‘Mrs Saddler still lingers on,’ Kitty said. She had called at the almshouse to enquire, but the district nurse had told her to run off and mind her own business. ‘I looked in at the Wilsons’ on my way here. Mrs Wilson was making a cheese and onion pie. Of course, they’re vegetarians; but I have known him to sneak a little chicken into his mouth. I was helping to hand round at the De Vries’s cocktail-party, and he put out his hand towards a patty. “It’s chicken,” I said to him in a low voice. “Nary a word,” he said, and he winked at me and ate it.’

  ‘And now you have said a word,’ Mrs Prout said briskly.

  ‘Why, so I have,’ Kitty agreed, looking astonished.

  Mrs Prout cleared the kitchen table in the same brisk way, and said, ‘If you like, now, I’ll show you how to make ravioli. We shall have it for our television supper.’

  ‘Make ravioli,’ cried Kitty. ‘You can’t make ravioli. Mrs Glazier buys it in a tin.’

  ‘So Mrs Glazier may. But I find time to make my own.’

  ‘I shall be fascinated,’ Kitty said, taking off her coat.

  ‘Then wash your hands, and don’t forget to dry them properly. Isn’t it about time you cut your nails?’ Mrs Prout asked, in her school-mistressy voice, and Kitty, who would take anything from her, agreed. (‘We all know Mrs Prout is God,’ her mother sometimes said resentfully.)

  ‘Roll up those sleeves,
now. And we’ll go through your tables while we work.’

  Mrs Prout set out the flour bin and a dredger and a pastry-cutter and the mincer. Going back and forth to the cupboard, she thought how petty she was to be pleased at knowing that by this time tomorrow, most of the village would be aware that she made her own ravioli. But perhaps it was only human, she decided.

  ‘Now this is what chefs call the mise en place,’ she explained to Kitty, when she had finished arranging the table. ‘Can you remember that? Mise en place.’

  ‘Mise en place,’ Kitty repeated obediently.

  ‘Shall I help you prepare the mise en place?’ Kitty enquired of Mrs Glazier.

  ‘Mr Glazier wouldn’t touch it. I’ve told you he will only eat English food.’

  ‘But you have ravioli. That’s Italian.’

  ‘I just keep it as a stand-by,’ Mrs Glazier said scornfully. She was very huffy and put out these days, especially with Mrs De Vries next door and her getting the better of her every time. Annette de Vries was French, and didn’t they all know it. Mrs Glazier, as a result, had become violently insular.

  ‘I can make ravioli,’ Kitty said, letting the mise en place go, for she was not absolutely certain about it. ‘Mrs Prout has just been teaching me. She and Mr Prout have television trays by the fire, and then they sit and crack walnuts and play cards, and then they have hot milk and whisky and go to bed. I think it is very nice and cosy, don’t you?’

  ‘Mr Glazier likes a proper sit-down meal when he gets back. Did you happen to see Tiger anywhere down the lane?’

  ‘No, but I expect he’s next door. I told you their bitch is on heat. You ought to shut him up.’

  ‘It’s their affair to shut theirs up.’

  ‘Well, I’m just calling there, so I’ll shoo him off.’

  She had decided to cut short this visit. Mrs Glazier was so bad-tempered these days, and hardly put herself out at all to give a welcome, and every interesting thing Kitty told her served merely to annoy.

  ‘And I must get on with my jugged hare,’ Mrs Glazier said, making no attempt to delay the departure. ‘It should be marinating in the port wine by now,’ she added grandly. ‘And I must make the soup and the croutons.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll be going,’ Kitty said, edging towards the door.

  ‘And apricot mousse,’ Mrs Glazier called out after her, as if she were in a frenzy.

  ‘Shall I prepare your mise en place?’ Kitty enquired of Mrs De Vries, trying her luck again.

  ‘My! We are getting professional,’ said Mrs De Vries, but her mind was really on what Kitty had just been telling her. Soup and jugged hare! She was thinking. What a dreadful meal!

  She was glazing a terrine of chicken livers and wished that all the village might see her work of art, but having Kitty there was the next best thing.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, as Kitty put the jar of apple jelly on the table.

  ‘I have to take it to the Vicarage on my way home. It’s some of Mrs Prout’s apple jelly.’

  Mrs De Vries gave it a keen look, and notched up one point to Mrs Prout. She notched up another when she heard about the ravioli, and wondered if she had underestimated the woman.

  ‘I shooed that Tiger away,’ Kitty said.

  ‘The wretched cur. He is driving Topaze insane.’

  Kitty mooched round the kitchen, peeking and prying. Mrs De Vries was the only one in the village to possess a mandoline for cutting veget-ables. There was a giant pestle and mortar, a wicker bread-basket, ropes of Spanish onions, and a marble cheese-tray.

  ‘You can pound the fish for me, if you have the energy,’ said Mrs De Vries.

  As this was not a house where she was made to wash her hands first, Kitty immediately set to work.

  ‘I was just going to have pears,’ Mrs De Vries said, in a half-humorous voice. ‘But if the Glaziers are going in for apricot mousse I had better pull my socks up. That remark, of course, is strictly entre nous.’

  ‘Then Mrs De Vries pulled her socks up, and made a big apple tart,’ Kitty told her mother.

  ‘I have warned you before, Kitty. What you see going on in people’s houses, you keep to yourself. Or you stay out of them. Is that finally and completely understood?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Kitty said meekly.

  ‘My dear girl, I couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t eat another thing,’ said Mr Glazier, confronted by the apricot mousse. ‘A three-course-meal. Why, I shouldn’t sleep all night if I had any more. The hare alone was ample.’

  ‘I think Mr De Vries would do better justice to his dinner,’ said Mrs Glazier bitterly. She had spent all day cooking and was exhausted. ‘It’s not much fun slaving away and not being appreciated. And what on earth can I do with all the left-overs?’

  ‘Finish them up tomorrow and save yourself a lot of trouble.’

  Glumly, Mrs Glazier washed the dishes, and suddenly thought of the Prouts sitting peacefully beside their fire, cracking walnuts, playing cards. She felt ill-done-by, as she stacked the remains of dinner in the fridge, but was perfectly certain that lie as she might have to to Kitty in the morning, the whole village should not know that for the second day running the Glaziers were having soup, and jugged hare, and apricot mousse.

  Next day, eating a slice of apple tart, Kitty saw Mrs De Vries test the soup and then put the ladle back into the saucepan. ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart cannot grieve over,’ Mrs De Vries said cheerfully. She added salt, and a turn or two of pepper. Then she took more than a sip from the glass on the draining-board, seeming to find it more to her liking than the soup.

  ‘The Vicarage can’t afford drinks,’ Kitty said.

  ‘They do confide in you.’

  ‘I said to the Vicar, Mrs De Vries drinks gin while she is cooking, and he said, “Lucky old her”.’

  ‘There will be a lot of red faces about this village if you go on like this,’ said Mrs De Vries, making her part of the prophecy come true at once. Kitty looked at her in surprise. Then she said – Mrs De Vries’s flushed face reminding her – ‘I think next door must be having the change of life. She is awfully grumpy these days. Nothing pleases her.’

  ‘You are too knowing for your years,’ Mrs De Vries said, and she suddenly wished she had not been so unhygienic about the soup. Too late now. ‘How is your novel coming along?’ she enquired.

  ‘Oh, very nicely, thank you. I expect I shall finish it before I go back to school, and then it can be published for Christmas.’

  ‘We shall all look forward to that,’ said Mrs De Vries, in what Kitty considered an unusual tone of voice.

  ‘Mrs De Vries cuts up her vegetables with a mandoline,’ Kitty told Mrs Glazier some days later.

  ‘I always knew she must be nuts,’ said Mrs Glazier, thinking of the musical instrument.

  Seeing Kitty dancing up the drive, she had quickly hidden the remains of a shepherd’s pie at the back of a cupboard. She was more than ever ruffled this morning, because Mrs Benford had not arrived or sent a message. She had also been getting into a frenzy with her ravioli and, in the end, had thrown the whole lot into the dust-bin. She hated waste, especially now that her house-keeping allowance always seemed to have disappeared by Wednesday, and her husband was, in his dyspeptic way, continually accusing her of extravagance.

  Kitty had been hanging about outside the almshouses for a great part of the morning, and had watched Mrs Saddler’s coffin being carried across the road to the church.

  ‘Only one wreath and two relations,’ she now told Mrs Glazier. ‘That’s what comes of being poor. What are you having for dinner tonight? I could give you a hand.’

  ‘Mr Glazier will probably be taking me to the Horse and Groom for a change,’ Mrs Glazier lied.

  ‘They are all at sixes and sevens there. Betty Benford started her pains in the night. A fortnight early. Though Mr Mumford thinks she may have made a mistake with her dates.’

  Then Mrs Benford would never come again, Mrs Glazier thought despondently.
She had given a month’s notice the week before, and Mrs Glazier had received it coldly, saying – ‘I think I should have been informed of this before it became common gossip in the village.’ Mrs Benford had seemed quite taken aback at that.

  ‘Well, I mustn’t hang around talking,’ Mrs Glazier told Kitty. ‘There’s a lot to do this morning, and will be from now on. When do you go back to school?’

  ‘On Thursday.’

  Mrs Glazier nodded, and Kitty felt herself dismissed. She sometimes wondered why she bothered to pay this call, when everyone else made her so welcome; but coming away from the funeral she had seen Mrs De Vries driving into town, and it was one of Mrs Prout’s turning-out days. She had hardly liked to call at the Vicarage under the circumstances of the funeral, and The Horse and Groom being at sixes and sevens had made everyone there very boring and busy.

  ‘I hope you will enjoy your dinner,’ she said politely to Mrs Glazier. ‘They have roast Surrey fowl and all the trimmings.’

  When she had gone, Mrs Glazier took the shepherd’s pie from its hiding place, and began to scrape some shabby old carrots.

  ‘Kitty, will you stop chattering and get on with your pudding,’ her mother said in an exasperated voice.

  Kitty had been describing how skilfully the undertaker’s men had lowered Mrs Saddler’s coffin into the grave, Kitty herself peering from behind the tombstone of Maria Britannia Marlowe – her favourite dead person on account of her name.

  It was painful to stop talking. A pain came in her chest, severe enough to slow her breathing, and gobbling the rice pudding made it worse. As soon as her plate was cleared she began again. ‘Mrs Glazier has the change of life,’ she said.

  ‘How on earth do you know about such things?’ her mother asked in a faint note.

  ‘As you didn’t tell me, I had to find out the hard way,’ Kitty said sternly.

  Her mother pursed her lips together to stop laughing, and began to stack up the dishes.

  ‘How Mrs De Vries will miss me!’ Kitty said dreamily, rising to help her mother. ‘I shall be stuck there at school doing boring things, and she’ll be having a nice time drinking gin.’

  ‘Now that is enough. You are to go to your room immediately,’ her mother said sharply, and Kitty looked at her red face reflectively, comparing it with Mrs Glazier’s. ‘You will have to find some friends of your own age. You are becoming a little menace to everyone with your visiting, and we have got to live in this village. Now upstairs you go, and think over what I have said.’