“Just something about a cake,” repeated Daisy. “I can’t remember any more than that.”
“No,” said Dan, “I can’t either. Except I’m sure it would have been a chocolate cake: the kind you used to get before the war—there was a little shop off Rosslyn Hill.”
He gave a sigh.
“Penny for them?” offered Daisy.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all, really. I was only thinking.”
“Yes?” She nodded, encouragingly.
Dan smiled. His eyes grew moist.
“Only thinking that those were the days,” he told her. “Those were the good old days.”
41
When she was dusting the shelves one morning, taking the books down and giving them a bang—a job she normally tackled like an automaton, while thinking about something else—Marsha came across a copy of a classic she had lent to Erica years before and then forgotten. She gazed a moment at the soft maroon composition-leather cover; she opened it and looked at the flyleaf. Four-and-sixpence written in pencil, in figures just decipherable. In the bottom lefthand corner, a tiny printed sticker: ‘The Delphian Arts, 6 Wilton Court, Marina, Bexhill-on-Sea’. She nearly cried.
She stood there and put the book to her nostrils and smelt the binding.
She had known how it would smell.
Twenty-five years ago. A full quarter of a century. 1956. August. The sun slanting into the small bookshop; the owner—a nice man with grey hair and kind eyes—talking about the excellent tea you got at Susan Throssil’s; herself deliberating between a Pearl Buck, a Philip Gibbs and a Frances Parkinson Keyes.
“Here! Read something decent for a change!”
Malcolm had held up Wuthering Heights.
“I saw the film,” said Marsha. “It was very sweet.”
“Well, read the book,” said Malcolm. “You’ll like it even better.”
“Oh, no. Jane Brontë. Isn’t she a bit on the heavy side?”
“Emily Brontë. And there could never have been anyone less so. This book is as romantic as even you could wish for.”
“Well, darling, I’m not honestly quite sure.” She looked for a moment at the opening page. “Perhaps another time.”
“No nonsense. I’m buying it for you.”
It had been a perfect holiday. She remembered her first sight of the sea, from the train, near Eastbourne; she had felt like a child again. Sitting on one of the seats along the front they had shared a box of Bassett’s liquorice allsorts.
She didn’t like Wuthering Heights. Indeed she had read only the first two or three chapters—mercifully they were short—and then Malcolm relented. “All right, go back to your Elinor Glyn,” he said. “You’re hopeless.” In fact, she went back to her Georgette Heyer.
She remembered another dose of culture—surprisingly less painful. The film of Hamlet had been revived at the Playhouse. She wouldn’t say that she enjoyed it but—well, no, she wasn’t bored. She rather sympathized with Gertrude; Gertrude, who had so much loved her son. Hamlet himself reminded her a little of Malcolm. Except that Hamlet had been older.
For there was no disguising the fact that Malcolm as well could sometimes be a mite difficult. Moody. Of course, he’d inherited this from his father. But several nights after supper he had gone off for lengthy walks on his own, along the beach towards Hastings. Marsha wondered if he’d found himself a girlfriend although he kept on denying it. She wouldn’t have minded, she told him; she’d just have liked to be let in on the secret and to hear some of the details. While he was away she usually sat and talked with Mrs Anderson in her kitchen. She and Malcolm were quite her favourite visitors, the landlady had said, and, as always, Marsha never cared much for her own company. Sometimes, when they could get away, the Andersons sat on the beach with them. Mr Anderson had very white legs above his stocking tops and wore suspenders to hold those stockings up. His brown leather brogues gleamed in the hot sunshine. He was in his fifties. He intimated, very nicely, that he fancied Marsha. On their last day in Bexhill she let him go to bed with her. Rather unexpectedly he made a good lover; she wished she had discovered earlier. But it was not—she realized even then—it was not really very much of a conquest; although a small conquest was naturally better than none at all. As you grew older you were thankful for even that.
But what a holiday it had been—perhaps the one she now looked back on with the most affection. They hadn’t done much: seen Twinkle at the White Rock Pavilion and another typical seaside show at the De La Warr. They’d been to the Playhouse a second time and also to the Ritz (Interrupted Melody, she thought—or was that the following year? In any case it had been a mistake to try to repeat it. Even the Andersons had packed up and gone to Aldershot.) They’d had their morning coffees and afternoon teas each day at one of three or four not dissimilar places—though mainly at Susan Throssil’s for its meringues and The Nell Gwyn for its flapjacks and macaroons and for the spruce young waiter with his red hair, white jacket, spotlessly clean fingernails. And before bed they had wandered along to an ice-cream parlour to have a milk shake or an Ovaltine and a packet of wafer biscuits—a packet each; they were only small. It had been a fortnight of near-heaven…though perhaps while it was actually taking place she hadn’t fully realized it. At the time, maybe, she had even been a little bored at odd moments or positively out of sorts: for instance, one afternoon when they’d been playing miniature golf and her Elixir of Senna just hadn’t worked that morning. She castigated herself later and got depressed because she hadn’t reminded herself, all the while, that she was happy. She hadn’t really taken it in. Even a mere week after they’d left Bexhill she had discovered, to her chagrin, that she couldn’t remember the pattern on the kitchen lino.
She had told Malcolm about this. She recalled that he had shrugged: disconcertingly mature for a boy of only sixteen. He said, “It’s often the same with a holiday. Good to look forward to—good to look back on—not always so hot while it’s going on.”
“But it shouldn’t be like that!”
“Should or shouldn’t doesn’t come into it. Just is.”
It was meant to be comforting; she supposed it was in a way—other people plainly suffered the same thing, but it hurt her slightly too—hadn’t he thought it just as special as her? He must have seen she was hurt. He added quickly: “Did you know that an awful lot of crackups occur during a holiday or else immediately after? People who’ve been hanging on by just the skin of their teeth expect it to provide the magic cure. Of course it doesn’t—can’t. And as the imperfections pile up, they blame themselves for allowing the first, which activated the second, which led on to the third, et cetera. Why couldn’t they just have cut the thread?” He shrugged again and laughed. “I think I sound like Reader’s Digest.”
She didn’t understand him; she found him almost frightening. How could she have given birth to somebody like Malcolm? She felt touched by the very miracle of it. “But do you realize,” she asked, returning to much easier things, “that this time two weeks ago we’d have been sitting at our table by the window eating supper, with the Thompsons at their table on one side and Miss Price at hers on the other? Always with her bottle of Wincarnis and the pencil lines on the label? And you said that when she ran out of label she’d clearly have to stick on another one, lower down, and shouldn’t we prolong our holiday to see whether she did?”
“Perhaps she’d patented a sliding label,” answered Malcolm, “else, what had happened at the start?” It was an intriguing little mystery, one which they both savoured.
But of course it hadn’t really been so bad: returning to London. Joan was there. Beryl was there. In fact it had been a thoroughly happy homecoming. For one thing, she had bought them rather handsome presents. There had been the joy of giving those.
Also she had carried back a bag of macaroons and a bag of flapjacks—regretfully, she’d had to militate against meringues: too fragile for the journey and the cream could so easily have gone off—and they’d ha
d a lovely little party, all four of them!
So she’d made a little promise to herself: that no matter what had gone before, from then on she would really make the most of her life; she would do her best to appreciate every little experience, whether good or bad, and she would try to do something a little new, she would try to broaden her outlook just a teeny bit, every day.
She would even read Wuthering Heights…!
Yet she never had.
She’d never managed to get past those opening chapters.
And—now—she never would. She’d lost all impetus; she’d lost the urge; the feeling that she still had time.
No point in even trying.
For the greater the success—now—the sharper the regret. Obviously.
With a sigh, she was just about to replace the book when she noticed something held between its pages. It was a postcard, unused, which had made her laugh when she had glimpsed it on its rack outside a souvenir shop and Malcolm had hurried back—without her knowing—and got it as a bookmark. “Not quite suitable for Miss Brontë,” he had said, “—oh, I don’t know, though—but eminently suitable for you.”
Two short-skirted bosomy blondes were gazing at a guard on sentry duty—of whom you only saw the back. One was confiding to the other:
“I do love the way they always stand so stiff!”
Somehow that card just seemed the final straw.
Mr Anderson with his smooth white legs and his suspenders and his well-kept shoes (but had she ever known his Christian name?) had been the last, the very last, whom she had ever had. And she had only been forty! Forty! So why was there nothing that ever told you: this is the last? The last time you’ll ever hear your favourite tune; the last time you’ll ever have a bath—or a cup of tea—or a lover. The last Christmas. The last book. The last slice of buttered toast.
And would it have been better, or would it have been worse, if you had known?
Marsha sat down and put a hand across her eyes and wept.
42
One of the bitterest blows of Marsha’s and Daisy’s last years, or year, was the emigration of Malcolm to Canada; they forgot that these days they didn’t see much of him anyway. “I always knew there was no good in that Phoebe-girl of his!” declared Daisy roundly, when they first heard of his intentions—by which time it had been virtually a fait accompli. “It’s all her doing, of course,” she said to Marsha. “That scheming little hussy!”
Remembering the days when Daisy had so often referred to Phoebe as being one in a million—following the visits of the three of them to Notting Hill or of Malcolm and Phoebe to Hendon—Marsha was not greatly impressed by this present claim to prescience.
“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “You used to think she was the bee’s knees.”
“That only shows how little you know about it!” answered Daisy, as a prelude to a quantity of mutterings on the subject of people whose poverty of language was such they could express themselves merely in cliché; she had forgotten that it was she herself who was being quoted. But it was certainly true that, in Daisy’s eyes, since the day of the court hearing Malcolm and Phoebe’s stock had fallen meteorically. It had never recovered or looked like it ever could. “Besides, who are you to talk about knees? If anyone’s an expert on knees around here—always having to drag them up and down these hard, cracked pavements, a disgrace even to Hendon—that person is not you! No! You were usually interested in something a little higher up!”
Yet as she told this mainly to the wall and Marsha didn’t catch more than one word in every three it fizzled out into just an angry murmur, a Daisy-type variation on the woodpecker’s thrum.
In any case, although Malcolm had somehow contrived to keep this from the household in Alderton Crescent, it was now nearly five months since Phoebe had walked out on him and shortly afterwards married a widower from her office. “Good riddance!” Daisy had exclaimed, in a not completely successful attempt to comfort her nephew, when eventually he had told them about it. “I can’t imagine what the idiot sees in her! Probably another of these weak-willed specimens who likes to have his life controlled by a bossy woman.” Turning now to Marsha: “I’m sure you, if anyone, would agree with that!” But, of all things, Phoebe had never been a bossy woman. Daisy had momentarily got muddled and been thinking of what she’d heard about Andrew’s wife Janet. For to Daisy all women, once they fell from grace—along with those who had never been there in the first place—were shrews, irredeemably so. “Anyhow, Malcolm, you’re well out of it and no mistake.” So it was not in any way an accurate reading of the situation but even if it failed lamentably in its proper objective it still had the secondary effect of cheering up Daisy herself, who, despite all endeavours to correct her, very quickly came to believe it and liked to imagine Phoebe giving hell to the widower’s children, and the widower’s children giving hell straight back again, with interest.
Malcolm and Phoebe had been together for a dozen years. Malcolm was devastated. After she had left him it seemed he couldn’t settle to anything; a totally new way of life appeared to be the answer. He had friends in Canada who suggested he might like to join them.
There was a bittersweet corollary to this. Well, bitter for Marsha but certainly rather sweet to the taste of her sister-in-law and even to that of her brother. On reading Malcolm’s accounts of the higher standard of living to be found in Canada, Andrew or more probably Myra had quickly become envious. They had applied for entry there. It was refused: advertising men were far less in demand than architects. By then, though, the wanderlust had got them. They settled for Australia, which they now let it be known would have been their first choice anyway, if they hadn’t been swayed by their consideration for Malcolm. They went. Marsha dabbed her eyes at the dockside. Daisy said she felt that, after all, she might have been a little hasty in her judgment of Phoebe.
“She wasn’t such a bad type, I believe, au fond. You know, dear, God moves in a mysterious way…”
And Dan, to whom this had been primarily addressed, answered conspiratorially: “Oh, Lord, I’m sure that Myra is going to have a most difficult and testing voyage!”
“If that’s true so is everybody else!”
“She’s not up to much at the moment.”
“I’m afraid she never was!”
Brother- and sister-in-law were rarely so united.
The fact of the matter, in Dan’s case, was that he had once viewed Myra’s hypochondria with tolerance and even compassion although he and Erica had long suspected the reports of her stoicism came indirectly from the lady herself. But when Erica had been discovered to have cancer and Dan had been forced to witness what real bravery could be in the face of real illness his amusement at the varied trials of Myra had abruptly ceased.
Unfortunately, however, Andrew hadn’t learned not to propagate these tales of his wife’s courageousness until hearing what were possibly the most uncharitable sentiments ever to issue from his uncle’s lips.
But on the evening of the day they sailed, some neighbours to whom Marsha had spoken of the impending separation while standing in a queue at the greengrocer’s called at No 10 to extend their condolences. They were a husband and wife who were not yet in their seventies but unluckily, because they both seemed more infirm than Dan and spoke rather more loudly, Daisy rashly assumed they were equally hard of hearing. In answer to their umpteenth round of polite observations regarding Andrew, Myra and the boys—“It must be such a wrench for you all; we know so well ourselves what it feels like to be left behind!”—and while Marsha was nodding gratefully and murmuring, “Yes! Oh yes!”, Daisy smiled sweetly and said, “Poppycock!”
The visitors imagined they’d misheard and then compounded their mistake by not asking her to repeat what she had said. They commiserated further, as though they hadn’t already done so quite sufficiently, and Daisy, like a precocious child who’d been encouraged by its initial success, continued to whisper pertinent asides, masked, as she supposed, by her sis
ter-in-law’s flow of platitudes. Certainly Marsha carried on quite innocently and not even the hint of a smile came to poor Dan’s face to signify awareness of the witty enjoyment that so narrowly eluded him.
“Yes, that’s right, we’re heartily glad to be shot of them. We call them ‘the dear departed’ although the adjective is controversial. They’re only dear because they have departed, if you see what I mean. But then you’ll fall into that same category yourselves in an hour’s time, or six, more likely, from the way you’ve settled in. What did you really come for? To find out if the curtains could be half as gruesome on the inside as they appeared from the outside, from your vantage point by the postbox? To scrounge a glass or two (or three or four) of best sherry? Well, you’ll be lucky, in this household! You interfering old biddies. We know what it’s like to be left behind, indeed! Yes, I’ll bet you do! Silly asses! Who in their right minds would ever aim to take you with them?”
She snorted. She looked up contemptuously from her own empty glass and was suddenly aware that everyone else had stopped talking. How long ago? Panic-stricken, she wondered if she could possibly have gone a bit too far on this occasion: swept away by her natural gaiety, her lively and unquenchable sense of adventure. Moreover, while she’d been practising all that happy tomfoolery, had she remembered to wear her jolly smile of good neighbourliness? She said:
“Did you ever know such a woman as that silly ass Thatcher?”
She looked around expectantly. As a stock conversational gambit she had to acknowledge that it had usually met with more success.
43
Afterwards, Marsha physically assaulted her. Or very nearly. At one point she looked as though she actually meant to shake her. And she screamed like a fishwife. She dredged up every sin that Daisy was supposed to have committed in the last seven hundred and fifty years and told her she was evil—evil! It was degrading and frightening and obscene. Daisy could hardly drag herself away from it all fast enough but even then Marsha ran in front of her and barred the door like some terrible ogress, at least ten inches taller than she really was.
When I Was Otherwise Page 24