by Bates, H. E.
Pop cordially agreed, at the same time blandly suggesting that he himself had no objection if Mariette wanted to take the Daily Mirror away. What did it matter? It was all one to him. It was all in the family.
‘By the way’ Mariette said, ‘there’s some letters for you. One of them with a foreign stamp on.’
‘That’s it,’ Ma said, ‘go and read your letters. And bring us both a decent cold drink when you come back. It’s hot out here in the sun.’
Making a final survey of Mariette’s shining blue breasts Pop suddenly announced that he had a good mind to take up the painting lark himself. He knew Mr Charlton was thinking of taking it up too.
‘You should,’ Ma said. ‘It’s a wonderful thing. It’s so soothing. There’s nothing like it for passing the time.’
A second later an electrifying thought occurred to Pop: none other than that if he took up painting it might be possible to get somebody like Angela Snow to sit for him as a model. In the never-never, of course. Did Ma think she would?
Ma, with complete unconcern, said she didn’t see why not. Pop should ask her.
‘Daresay she’d love to be painted by you. By the way, how did you get on with Lady Violet? She’s no oil painting, poor thing.’
‘Perfick,’ Pop said. ‘Got two suits of armour and two sets of shields and battle-axes. Thought they’d look nice in the passage. Oh! and a present for you.’
‘That’s nice,’ Ma said, as if suits of armour, shields and battle-axes were no more unusual than apples, oranges and pears. ‘Give me a kiss.’
Pop promptly kissed Ma full on the lips, not with his usual protracted and burning intensity but rather as if casually taking a little light refreshment.
‘Still think they’re a bit too blue, Ma.’
‘Well, they’re going to be pinked up a bit in a minute if you’ll make yourself scarce so I can get on with it. Go and get the drinks, do.’
While Pop had gone into the house to fetch both drinks and letters Ma proceeded to touch in a few pink lights on the upper edges of Mariette’s breasts, remarking at the same time:
‘Suits of armour, eh? Going baronial and all that. Next thing you know we’ll be having a butler.’
Five minutes later Pop came back from the house carrying a tray of drinks and his letters in one hand and one of the three Regency chamber pots in the other. Ma started shaking and laughing like a ripe jelly and Mariette in turn was so overcome with cascades of laughter that for a moment she forgot all about the Daily Mirror, with the result that Pop had a brief and satisfying glimpse of his eldest daughter as Nature had made her. It merely served to convince him that Ma was altogether wrong about the blue, though he didn’t like to say so.
Ma now surveyed the rose-ringed chamber pot with tearful eyes.
‘What am I supposed to do with that?’ she said.
Pop remarked blandly that he thought hyacinths would look nice in it for Christmas, or tulips or something. There were three of them. They were very old. Regency.
‘Well, they’ll come in handy for something, that’s certain,’ Ma said and broke once again into rich, ripe laughter.
‘They’re all the fashion now,’ Pop said, ‘these Regency things.’
‘Now you’ve gone and put me off,’ Ma said and proceeded to lay her brushes and palette down on her paint box, afterwards wiping her hands on a piece of rag. ‘I’ll carry on after lunch. You’d better run and put your dress on, dear. And see if little Oscar’s awake and if he is bring him down.’
Pop had made a jugful of his new Moon-Rocket, double strength as usual, with plenty of ice, and he now gave it a final merry stir or two with a spoon. Its strength was such that it might well have reeked as he poured it out into large cut-glass tumblers, each holding nearly half a pint, but Ma merely said as she sipped at hers:
‘Lovely Just what I wanted. Delicious. One of the best you’ve ever thought of.’
Pop treated these compliments with airy modesty. It was nothing. One thing he was certain of, though – there was a bit more to it than Lady Violet’s sherry.
‘Ah! yes, tell me some more about Lady Violet,’ Ma said. ‘What else did you buy?’
Pop told her about the buggy and Ma said that was nice too. He also told her about the bassinet and Ma said they too were all the rage for putting flowers into nowadays. Then he told her about the little room, the dust, the dusty ginger nuts, the dead primroses and the staring owl. He knew they would haunt him for a long time.
Finally he told her about the cigar and how he thought it had made her happy. He didn’t expect Ma to laugh about it and he was really glad when she said, half-reproachfully:
‘What did you do that for? You’ve probably gone and made the poor thing bad by this time.’
‘She went at it as if it was Christmas pud and turkey,’ Pop said. ‘Like a meal. I half wish I hadn’t done it now.’
He drank deeply at his Moon-Rocket and then filled up the two glasses again.
‘Think she’d be offended if I took a bit of grub-round when Montgomery and me go to fetch the buggy the day after tomorrow? She looks as if half a puff of wind would blow her away.’
‘We’ve got that big ham in cut,’ Ma said. ‘And I’m making Quiche Lorraine and sausage rolls tomorrow. I’ll make a bit of a basket up. By the way, who’s your foreign letter from?’
Pop, laughing, his sadness about the morning receding now, said he was damned if he knew. He didn’t know anybody in foreign parts. Not a soul.
‘Well, open it and see.’
‘I’ll just mix another jugful first,’ Pop said. ‘When the ice starts melting it waters it down a lot. Hullo, here comes Charley with Blenheim.’
Mr Charlton now appeared from the direction of the house, carrying his baby son in one hand and a large glass of lager beer in the other. Pop delighted in calling his grandson Blenheim; it was such a nice round apple of a name.
‘Well, how’s Charley boy? And how’s my little apple?’
Pop at once started to treat his grandson as if he were a pink rubber ball that had to be frequently bounced about a bit, but Ma instantly made loud noises of remonstration and said the child was only just awake and did Pop want salt water in his drinks or what?
‘Give him to me,’ she said and Mr Charlton’s little son instantly disappeared like a rosy fledgeling into the vast bolster of her bosom, nuzzling eagerly against her. ‘And you needn’t go in there, young man, either. There’s nothing there for you.’
Mr Charlton now found himself staring down at the rose-ringed chamber pot, which Ma had placed by her camp stool.
‘Oh! you might well look,’ Ma said, laughing ripely again. That’s Pop’s present to me. And there’s two more.’
Accustomed as he was to living in the Larkin household, Mr Charlton was now never surprised by anything, even by the newest kind of present Pop had decided to give to Ma. He had already seen the pick-up heavily laden with its morning load of junk and even the suits of armour hadn’t raised in him the slightest ripple of surprise. He remembered a day when Pop had bought a church organ, fifty-odd pews, about the same number of hassocks, a brass lectern and a pulpit.
He now merely took a calm swig of his beer and gazed with enraptured admiration at Ma’s blue interpretation of his wife’s bust and then heard Pop say:
This letter’s all in Dutch. Or German or summat. Here, Charley boy, you’d better look at this.’
Mr Charlton took the letter, which was in a neat slanting hand, and looked at it.
‘French,’ he said, ‘not Dutch.’
‘It’s all Dutch to me,’ Pop said. ‘Who the pipe’s it from?’
Mr Charlton indulged in a short flutter of laughter.
‘It seems to be from your old friend,’ he said. ‘Mademoiselle Dupont.’
‘Well, I’ll go to Jericho,’ Pop said.
‘Love letters from France now, eh?’ Ma said laughing again. ‘What perfume is it soaked in?’
‘Well, translate,’ Mariette
said. ‘Let’s hear. We’re all waiting.’
Mariette had returned from the house less than a minute before, but without little Oscar, who was still asleep. She was now wearing a light purple blouse and rather tight pale green shorts, against which her bare limbs shone like brown butter.
‘Well, she first of all presents all her dearest felicitations to the whole Larkin family, from Milord Larkin down to little Oscar. Scarcely a day passes but what she thinks of them and of England. She thinks especially of the milord and the Rolls Royce with the monograms and also the nightingales. She says the nightingales arouse in her an impassioned nostalgia –’
‘Good God,’ Pop said, ‘sounds like some form of asthma.’
‘She is bewitched – no, perhaps enchanted is the better word – by the thought – no, the desire, the constant desire – to come to England. The desire, she says, has lately become irresistible and would it any way incommode the Larkin family if she could come soon? Ah! yes, she goes on – for the special occasion –’
‘Special occasion?’ Ma said. ‘What special occasion?’
Mr Charlton folded up the letter and said in his mild way that he’d be damned. It wasn’t often that he was damned but this was one time when he clearly was and he now reminded Ma that they all seemed to have forgotten something.
‘After all you did ask her to be godmother to little Oscar. I wrote to her myself. And after all one of his names is Dupont.’
‘All right,’ Ma said in the blandest possible way, ‘what about it?’
‘She wants to come for the christening.’
‘Christening?’ Pop said, exactly as if this were some strange, outlandish tribal rite of which he had heard only very recently. ‘Christening? We never said nothing about no christening, Ma, did we?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Well, if Ma says we didn’t, we didn’t, and that’s that. What’s he got to be christened for?’
‘Well it is customary,’ Mr Charlton said, with an irony so faint that it was utterly lost on Pop. ‘Well, in most families anyway. It is done.’
‘Never?’
‘Certainly Mariette and I are going to have Blenheim done.’
‘Never?’ Pop seemed astounded, even pained, by this startling announcement. ‘Never had none of ours done, did we, Ma?’
‘My God,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Not one?’
Mr Charlton for once felt shocked. It was heathenish. It simply wasn’t the thing. It had been hard enough for him to get used to the fact that Ma and Pop weren’t married and that in painful consequence all the seven children, including his own wife, had been born out of wedlock, but this new discovery was too much.
‘But why?’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Got plenty else to do, hadn’t we, Ma?’ Pop said and swiftly gave her one of his bolder winks which she returned just as swiftly with a handsome and deliberately seductive smile. ‘Eh?’
‘Busy as bees,’ Ma said. ‘I had four in five years once, with the twins.’
‘Really never had the time,’ Pop said.
Crushingly defeated by this blank, simple statement of historic fact Mr Charlton could only sip at his beer resignedly, saying that anyway even if it was too late to do anything about Montgomery, Mariette, Zinnia, Petunia, Primrose and Victoria they could at least have Oscar and little Blenheim done. That was if Ma and Pop had no objection?
‘Oh! no objection at all,’ Ma said. ‘Any excuse for a party.’
This remark not only made her laugh again but reminded her that it was getting on for lunch time. Pop had better start carving the ham while she put on the potatoes. And if Mariette wanted to help she’d find three melons cut ready on the kitchen table. They were French and a bit expensive but that was all the more reason for having a drop of port in them. There was no sense in buying expensive melons if you were going to be measly about them, was there?
Pop agreed and said in that case they might just as well have port to drink anyway and urged Mr Charlton to go and put a bottle on ice right away. Mr Charlton, quiet now, went into the house, followed by Ma carrying little Blenheim and Pop carrying the chamber pot, which he now and then struck sharply with his knuckles, so that it gave out a ringing, almost clarion sound.
‘Good quality,’ he said, ‘this ‘ere Regency stuff.’
Over large plates of the tenderest ham, princely in flavour – Pop had raised the pig himself – together with new potatoes richly buttered and freckled with fresh parsley, Mr Charlton presently opened a discussion on the question of godparents for the two babies and the eventual date of the christening.
‘We shall have to consult the Rev. Spink,’ he said, ‘and fix a day.’
‘Oh! old Frog-face,’ Pop said. ‘Gawd A’mighty.’
The prospect of the christening, especially by the Reverend Frog-face, began to please him less and less. The Reverend Frog-face struck him as a damned old humbug. Very tall, elderly, cadaverous, onion-skinned and altogether of half-perished appearance, Spink rode aloofly about the village on a bicycle of antique design that had a strange net-work saddle rather like a sagging tennis racquet left out in the rain. Half-intoxicated with popery, Spink-intoned Sunday services in Latin, which no one could understand even when they could hear it, which was seldom, with the result that most Sundays there were rather more people in the choir than in the congregation.
A conviction that it was just as good to worship the Lord of creation in a wood of bluebells as in an atmosphere stale with incense and the odour of spent candles had long since struck Pop as being a right and sensible one and now he felt plunged in gloom.
‘What about asking Edith Pilchester to be one of the godparents for your little Blenheim?’ Ma said. ‘That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it?’
Mr Charlton said firmly that he couldn’t agree. He hated to say it, but Edith was too old. The essence of the thing was that a godparent should be young. Comparatively so, anyway.
‘Got anybody in mind?’ Ma said.
‘Well, as a matter of fact we’ve already asked Angela Snow.’
Pop instantly perked up as if pricked by a hot pin.
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh! she was delighted.’
‘You never told us,’ Pop said. ‘You don’t suppose she’d act for little Oscar too, do you?’
‘It’s entirely up to her,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘If she feels up to the responsibility.’
‘I’ll ring her up tonight!’
With the gloom on his horizon suddenly largely dispelled, Pop watched with great relish the first strawberries of the year come to the table. They were fat, shining as if enamelled and half-drenched in cream.
Their summeriness suddenly excited all his thoughts about Angela. It would be good to sort of have her in the family. She was still as sensationally beautiful as ever and he couldn’t help thinking that it was, after all, a good thing she hadn’t married the Brigadier. It was the sensible thing; now they were just good friends. The Brigadier had rightly decided that he was too old for her and it didn’t seem right, as Pop had often remarked to Ma, to cramp her style.
‘Well, I must be off,’ he said, after a third plate of strawberries and another glass or two of port. ‘I think I know where I can lay hands on a nice little pie-bald for the buggy.’
‘Buggy?’ Mariette said. ‘What buggy?’
‘Pop’s bought a nice little buggy from Lady Violet this morning,’ Ma said.
‘I thought it would be nice for Oscar and little Blenheim to have rides in,’ Pop explained. ‘Round and round the meadow, so they wouldn’t get run over.’
‘Oh! Pop,’ Mariette said, ‘you still think of the nicest things,’ and suddenly gave him one of those full-mouthed generous kisses that always reminded him so powerfully of Ma in the prime of her youth.
Out in the garden, in the hot sun, a combination of the rich calling of birds, the smell of earth warmed and grass juicily rising and finally the sight of Ma’s canvas, stool and easel inspired
him to remember Mariette posing in the never-never and also the idea that he too, perhaps, might yet take up the painting lark.
That, he thought, would be the day.
3
Two days later the morning was so beautiful, drenched with all the full essence of summer, that Pop decided to walk the piebald pony over to Lady Violet’s bungalow himself, leaving Montgomery to feed turkeys, hens, guinea fowl, pigs, geese, cats and anything else that might need nourishment about the junkyard. It was only a mile away.
He felt wonderfully calm and at peace with the world. He thought the pony was very pretty with its cocoa and cream markings and the idea had already occurred to him that he ought to try and lay his hands on a couple of silver bells for the harness, one to be engraved Oscar and the other Blenheim, so that there would be a smart old jingling as pony and buggy jogged along. The children were going to call the pony Blossom and the only thing that worried him at all was whether it would be man enough to draw Ma, if and when the occasion arose.
He was surprised, at the bungalow, to see a thinnish, straight-haired woman of forty or so on her hands and knees in the middle of the garden path, armed with an ancient pair of scissors, prising up weeds. Her face, yellowish in colour, looked very like a deflated chamois leather bag. Her stony eyes were depressingly neutral in colour and they seemed to jump, as if frightened, when he greeted her.
‘Morning. Beautiful morning. Lady Violet in?’
‘I’m awfully afraid she isn’t up yet. She isn’t feeling very well.’ She darted nervous glances towards the bungalow. ‘I’ll call my husband.’
She at once fluttered desperately back up the garden path, to be met on the threshold of the bungalow by an ebullient man, beer-faced and with a walnut-brown, well-kept moustache, dressed in a thick red flannel shirt, a yellow tie and green linen trousers.
‘For Jesus Christ’s sake, woman, why must you always run? Don’t run everywhere! I’ve told you a million times.’
There’s a gentleman – a man –’
‘All right, all right. He won’t eat you, will he?’