There was a visitors’ book on the hall table. Besides putting down their names and addresses, guests over the years had written their comments in a column where remarks were invited. ‘We had a wonderful time.’ ‘Smashing food!’ ‘Highly recommended!’ ‘Excellent.’ Henry leafed back to two years earlier. ‘First-class!’ his mother had written, in her bold, clear, self-assured handwriting. It was characteristic of her. Any time they travelled by train, his mother made it clear that they went first-class as a matter of course, and that some people did not – never would, never could.
As soon as the family of five left, Netherbank was full almost every night. His parents had found the house to their taste because they had it to themselves, and they were lucky. People often had to be told that there were no rooms left.
Henry tried to keep away from the guests as much as he could, but it was impossible not to ask Mrs Bawden each morning if there was anything she wanted him to do. ‘Maybe you don’t think it’s man’s work,’ she said, ‘but I could fair do with someone to strip the beds this morning and bring the linen down here for me to launder.’ As the days went by he found himself aproned, pulling linen from beds, vacuuming carpets, dusting furniture, cleaning windows and mirrors, polishing the bannister.
‘Next time we hear from you,’ said Mr Bawden, ‘you’ll be running a hotel. You’ve taken to it. But don’t tell me you like it. Believe me, I know – no one better. She’s a hard woman to refuse.’
A girl from Lincolnshire, about Henry’s age, passed him in the hall and said, ‘You must be blind. What’s that, then, if it isn’t carpet fluff? There,’ and she pointed. Later the same morning, egged on by a friend who was along on holiday with that family, the girl asked him, ‘Is this your career? Or is it a punishment?’
‘Have you been very bad?’ the other girl said, giggling.
‘Shoo!’ Henry waved a duster at them, and they ran away delighted and laughing.
Breakfast was at seven for the Bawdens and Henry, so that they could eat before the rush of holiday families to the dining room. ‘The Abercrombie children are sleeping three to a bed,’ said Mrs Bawden. ‘I told Mr Abercrombie it was the best I could do, and he was only too pleased to accept. The English family are just the same. There’ll be eighteen for breakfast. I’ve never been so busy.’
‘Why folk go on holidays I’ll never know,’ said Mr Bawden.
‘Do you want me to wait on the tables?’ Henry offered.
Mr Bawden gave him an uncertain look, and shook his head in a gesture of subdued bewilderment. ‘Eighteen,’ he said. ‘She could never cook and serve at the same time – not for eighteen.’
‘You ask them what they’d like,’ said Mrs Bawden, patting his hand appreciatively. ‘We have fruit juice. We have porridge and packet cereals. This morning we have kippers, and we have eggs, bacon, sausages, and those who want a fried breakfast are to be asked if they want black pudding with it. Some don’t like it, others love it. I never need to take a note, but it might be for the best if you were to write down the orders, like a proper waiter. Eggs scrambled, fried, boiled, or poached. Tea or coffee, and toast, jam or marmalade. And if someone high and mighty asks you for kedgeree, look daft and pretend you’ve never even heard of it.’
‘Should I get changed?’
‘Put on my big white apron and you’ll look the part well enough. And don’t be nervous. We’re not the Ritz,’ she said.
Mr Bawden slipped out into the garden with his second cup of tea.
Most guests chose to come down at eight-thirty, and within the space of a few minutes the dining room was full. Henry was surprised that they could be so fussy about what to eat.
‘Are the sausages fresh?’ a man asked.
‘I can’t see Mrs Bawden serving you a bad sausage, sir.’
‘What’s a black pudding?’
‘Black pudding,’ Henry said, with a hesitant shrug.
‘But what’s it made of?’
‘Hold on.’ He asked Mrs Bawden what black puddings were made of, and Mr Bawden, rinsing his cup at the sink, raised his eyebrows.
Henry came back from the kitchen. ‘Blood and lights,’ he said.
‘I’ll have two lightly poached eggs. No, wait a minute. Did you say there were scrambled eggs? In that case, I’ll have scrambled eggs.’
The two girls from Lincolnshire giggled as Henry stood in his apron with his pad and pen poised. The mother ordered them to hurry up. The father looked seriously at Henry, as if he thought he had been up to something.
By ten o’clock, Henry and Mrs Bawden were alone in the kitchen, tired out and hot and sipping tea. ‘My twenty-of-everything set of breakfast china came in handy,’ she said. Most of it was stacked beside the sink. ‘The Lord be thanked, nobody wants lunch. Rooms next, then laundry. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Henry. Next year I’ll have to get a village girl to come in.’
Mr Bawden appeared with the mail.
‘It’s another letter from your mother!’ Mrs Bawden said. She gave it to Henry. ‘Go on, read it.’
His mother’s cadences were in every line. They had been here, there, and seen that and other things. They had developed a taste for Chinese and Malayan food, although they’d been a bit suspicious at first.
‘Is it so private that you can’t read it out to me?’ Mrs Bawden asked. Her husband hurried outside with a cup of tea in one hand and his watering can in the other. ‘Does she say anything about the climate this time?’ she said, remembering the first letter. ‘Have they got over that exhausting journey? I didn’t like the sound of the airport at Karachi.’
He glanced through the rest of the letter, to make sure his mother hadn’t written anything embarrassing, thinking that it was only to be expected that an old woman who showed her snapshots to all and sundry would take it for granted that a letter should be shared. He read out his mother’s account of the strange food, the deliciousness of which his parents had come round to accepting, and the sightseeing. ‘ “Daddy’s had to fly up to Penang for a couple of days, so I’ve been left on my own. Everyone’s extremely kind, and I’ve been playing a very great deal of bridge but as yet no mah-jong, thank goodness. We’ve been out for dinner every night since we arrived, and I shall be quite plump when I see you next. We look forward to a quiet evening by ourselves. Our bungalow is bijou but not quite as colonial as I would have liked. I’m not very geographical, as you know, and I wasn’t quite sure where Singapore was, but I know now, Henry, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s ABSOLUTELY TROPICAL. It was so nice of you to press a flower in your letter. It made me feel quite homesick.”” ’
‘What a nice young man you are for doing a thing like that,’ said Mrs Bawden. She patted his hand. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I knew it’d be hot there.’
A girl from an Edinburgh family asked Henry if he played tennis. He said he did. She asked if there was a court. He told her where the nearest one was, two miles away in the village.
‘I don’t have anyone to play with,’ she said. She didn’t sound as if she wanted particularly to play with Henry.
Her mother appeared at the door of the sitting room. ‘Are you coming with us, or are you staying behind?’ The woman’s voice stated these options firmly, and Henry recognized the predicaments of both girl and parents.
Mrs Bawden came to the sitting-room door.
‘Have you asked him?’ the woman said to her daughter.
‘It’s two miles away,’ the girl said, meaning that the court was too far to be practical.
‘We’ll drop you off at the court,’ said her father from inside, through a rustle of newspaper.
‘You haven’t had proper company for nearly a month,’ Mrs Bawden said to Henry. ‘Go and play tennis if you want. I can answer the door and do what needs to be done. I can manage well enough without you.’
He ran upstairs, changed, got his racquet and a box of tennis balls. When he came down, the family of three was waiting in the hall, and the front door was ope
n. The breeze disturbed the potpourri in the bowl on the hall table.
‘I’m told that your father and mother are in Singapore,’ said the man when they were in the car. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Very interesting.’ Henry had the impression he had been vetted and found to be a suitable companion for the girl.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her as they strolled to the tennis court.
‘Louise,’ she said.
‘I know what it’s like. At least yours haven’t gone to Singapore.’
‘I wish they would.’
‘My mother’s forgotten something, and it probably hasn’t dawned on her yet. I’ll be fifteen in a couple of weeks and she won’t be here.’
‘It isn’t much of a tennis court,’ Louise said.
She got bored and sat down, ignoring Henry’s tepid but ironic serves as they bounced close beside her. Looking at her, he thought that there might be two major ways in which only children could turn out: they became either super-obliging, obedient models of courtesy and good behaviour or, like Louise, rebelliously surly and aggrieved. He never allowed his own grievances to show, and doubted if he ever would.
‘When did your father say he’d pick us up?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘What do you think of Mrs Bawden?’
‘She certainly doesn’t have any secrets.’
‘And Mr Bawden?’
‘I didn’t know there was one. I thought she was a widow.’
‘No secrets?’
‘I feel sorry for Bobby,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand it if my parents talked about me like that.’
‘She misses him,’ Henry said charitably, although he was interested that Louise disapproved of Mrs Bawden’s lack of reticence as much as he did.
‘I think I’d like to travel,’ Louise said. ‘My father says that air travel will grow enormously in the next few years. I would like to be an air hostess.’
‘It’s Bobby’s room I’ve got. I think I’d like him. I imagine myself talking to him. I ask him what he’d do in my circumstances.’
‘And I suppose you get some sort of mysterious answer,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Do they have a gramophone in that house? I haven’t heard a single decent record since we came away.’
‘He doesn’t say anything,’ Henry said. ‘But I see him winking at me. I don’t know what it means. Do you ever try to figure out what your dreams mean?’
‘Isn’t there somewhere we can get lemonade or something?’ she said peevishly. ‘I’m parched.’
‘We could buy some in the shop,’ he said, ‘but there isn’t a café.’
‘What a dump!’
‘I don’t think you like being in the country.’
‘I don’t like being with my parents. I’d rather be in the city with my friends. At least there’s something to do.’
‘Is your father coming back for us?’
‘I doubt it. I think we’re expected to walk.’
She was unsympathetic and, Henry decided, stupid. She was also unhappy. It was her unhappiness that made her interesting. Her dislikes, her petulant good looks, her tone of voice gave the impression she was festering on the edge of a bitter family insurrection. He wondered what his father had found appealing in his mother. Louise made him think that his mother might have been like her at that age, twenty years before, in the nineteen-thirties. All that would have been different was that other kinds of music, other friends were being missed.
They walked back slowly. When they reached Netherbank, Louise’s father’s car was parked outside with several others. Her parents were in the garden with the Bawdens. The clear light peculiar to Galloway seeped out of the hill and fields and met a great arc of early-evening light rising from the sea. Louise’s parents were holding hands. Henry thought that if his parents had been there, too, he would have experienced a moment in which the significance of how people exist to each other was clear and unmistakable. People who mattered less clouded the issue. He pressed Louise’s hand, but she pulled it away.
At mid-morning the following day, Louise’s father said to Henry, ‘Do you keep an address book? If you don’t then you should. Everyone ought to. Say goodbye, you two,’ he said, looking at Louise. Henry felt that Louise had given a glowing report of him to her parents, even though, in his company, she had been standoffish, pert, and sardonic. ‘You should exchange addresses and keep in touch,’ her father added. He was strangely open and affable.
Louise produced her address book, and Henry dictated his address to her.
‘I think that’s very nice,’ said Mrs Bawden. ‘I think it’s so nice,’ she said to Louise’s mother, ‘that young people should exchange addresses and keep in touch.’
Mr Bawden came in by the front door, surprised to find guests still in the house that late in the morning. He could hardly turn round and go out again and found himself in the company.
‘They’re exchanging addresses. Isn’t that nice, John?’ his wife said.
Mr Bawden smiled at his wife, with whose obsessive and candid garrulity he was very tenderly and very gently browned off.
‘Write letters,’ she urged Louise. ‘Write letters and use the phone only when you have to. Letters are much nicer. You can keep letters, but you can’t keep phone calls. Have you taken a note of Louise’s address?’ she asked Henry.
‘My book’s upstairs. I’ll take it from the visitors’ book.’
As Mrs Bawden went out of the front door with Louise’s parents, Henry followed with Louise. ‘We don’t have to write,’ he said.
‘I’m not good at letters. If you write first, you’ll have a wait for an answer.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know if you’d understand why.’ She looked at him, and laughed quietly, but she was complimented by a surprising remark that sounded serious and mature. Her wave from the departing car was curious and concerned.
Henry waved back, and then went upstairs to strip those beds that needed to be freshly made for the arrival of new guests in the late afternoon and early evening. He suspected that a time would come when his parents would regret the three months in which they had hived him off to the Bawdens. He thought about the crisis that his awakening independence would cause in their lives; still he doubted if when it arrived they would be able to trace it back to his weeks in that safe, homely, and respectable house, or to that quaint old couple who lived in daily expectation of a letter from their son Bobby, in whose room Henry slept.
GEORGINA HAMMICK
Grist
‘All my love for you, Sweetheart,’ he always said. He invariably said. ‘All my love for you.’ So when one night he didn’t say it, Babe knew he didn’t love her. She waited until next time – the next time his body relaxed on hers – to be sure. But it was only a formality. For by then, the space of two or three days, there were other signs. He stopped touching, fingering, you might say, with one long finger, her shoulder blades and her arms, in the way he did (as though he were drawing pictures on them). He stopped shovelling dog shit from the lawn. He didn’t bring surprise whiskies to the ironing board. In their supermarket, he no longer vanished in Cereals so that he could materialize seconds later in the Pet Food aisle: ‘Excuse me. You are the Most Beautiful Person in the World, and I claim my Lifetime of Happiness.’ A talkative man at home, a mimic, a raconteur, he became silent. His silence grew and grew and filled the house. It was October, and the grass hidden by a weight of wet chestnut leaves, but he, usually the first to attack onerous tasks and the last to abandon them, seemed not to notice. When Babe got out the rake and barrow and started to pull the leaves into heaps, he put on his old garden coat, the garment of his she liked the best, and went for a walk by himself. (He, who’d never allowed her to take so much as a step without him!)
A horrible ten days passed, in which he pretended black was white and white black, in which he played the torturing husband in Gaslight, while Babe was stuck with the Ingrid Bergman role (but w
ithout Bergman’s beauty: without the sure and certain hope of rescue before the credits). At the end of the ten days they had a show down. He turned everything they’d shared on its head. Then he cleared out his darkroom, packed his belongings and left.
When Babe felt able to, she drove over to Aunt’s and told her about it. Not all of it, and not all at once. Babe was seeing a lot of Aunt just then. Aunt was dying, or, more accurately, living with Death. Death was giving Aunt a hard time. He followed her up and down stairs, and from sitting-room to kitchen; he had a sweetish, stomach-turning smell. He leant over her shoulder when she was playing patience or doing The Times crossword, he kept her awake all night. Aunt had no time for Death, and she didn’t want to give him cottage room. Apart from her animals, she’d always lived alone. Depending on the strength of her pain, and on the weather, she fought or ignored him. Or she mocked him. Once, when she’d chucked Babe a cigarette and lit one for herself, she offered the packet over her shoulder. ‘Go on,’ she said, shaking the pack impatiently, ‘take one. Feel free. It’ll do you good. He’s a humourless bugger,’ she said to Babe.
Aunt smoked like a chimney, and the ceiling above the corner table where she did the crossword and played round after round of patience was dark brown, like the ceiling in a pub. Those who loved Aunt found this strange, it seemed out of keeping, because in all other respects Aunt was fastidious. Even with three cats and a dog, there was nothing messy about her tiny sitting room. Except for the overflowing ashtray, of course. Still, as Aunt said, you couldn’t worry about getting cancer when you already had it.
Babe convinced herself that telling Aunt her troubles might, if not cheer Aunt up exactly, at least give her something else to think about (although Aunt was always interested in other people; always thinking about them). Aunt was upset by Babe’s news. Upset for Babe and upset, in a way, for herself. And surprised. She hadn’t seen it coming. Only the month before, Babe had brought his new book of photographs, just published, for her to see. ‘That is nice,’ Aunt had said, looking at the flyleaf on which he’d written ‘Your Book, from Your Person’ and underneath, his initial, enclosed by a heart. (Babe hadn’t told Aunt then her worries about private, lovey-dovey inscriptions, the awful poignancy of them in secondhand bookshops: ‘Binkie, Beloved Angel – All My Love for Always, Tiddles. Xmas, 1926.’ ‘For Clive – as fine a man as any girl could wish for – Denise.’ But she had told him. And he’d smiled. And drawn a picture on her shoulder blades.) Aunt had sat at her table with the book of photographs, turning the pages slowly, studying each one. There were shots of Babe’s grown up sons; views of her house and garden the photographer had called home. There was a whole section devoted to portraits of Babe. ‘Is that really you?’ Aunt had asked, peering. ‘It’s not the you I know. I’m not sure I want to see you in bed. Do I?’ Aunt had said, of another, ‘Though I must say your chins are tactfully lit.’
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 68