by Anne Piper
We three tried feverishly to be amusing or even to find some topic of general interest like Oklahoma, but nothing induced the children to play up. The boy snorted when Oklahoma was mentioned and flicked the pages of Harpers on the table by him in a disgusted way. It’s positively the last time I try to find Prue a boyfriend, I can only hope she manages to pick someone up at the College. There must be plenty of fascinating double-basses who wouldn’t mind taking out an intense pianist. God, the intensity of the young.
I can remember spots but not this terrible highmindedness. Katharine is to thank for that I suppose, she enjoyed everything till she married that dreary doctor. She made anthropology sound as gay as Façade, and now what on earth am I to do with her daughter who can’t make anything gay for me or anyone else?
*
It’s been an awful day at the office with urgent reports wanted on coal, and Miss Blaine losing a vital letter from an Egyptian cotton magnate, and I get home shivering about seven o’clock to find Prue hasn’t even bothered to put a match to the sitting-room fire. I could cry with annoyance and exhaustion, and the chimney won’t draw against snow hissing down it. I kneel by the fire for about ten minutes holding newspapers in numb fingers. Minou purrs across the back of my calves, it might be a welcome but more likely he’s after his fish. Then in comes Prue, leans against the door, swinging it icily, and asks, “What time’s supper, Claire?”
I resist the temptation to conk her with the poker, and say instead, “Well, if you peel the potatoes, in half an hour, otherwise more like an hour.”
“Oh, an hour’ll suit me,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of work to do still.” And back she goes to her room. I brace myself against the slamming of her door — whoosh — bang — and I can relax again. This time I really do wipe off a few furious tears, but I have to laugh when I get to the kitchen and see my face black and blue with coal and cold. Moments like this I am weak enough to wish I’d married George, the boredom might well have been worth it for the sake of having an expensive cook to make you a good dinner on a cold night. I wouldn’t have noticed Prue in his big house either, it’s having her so on top of me that maddens me. The way she uses my talcum powder in the bathroom and leaves the top off, and never hangs up the bath mat. And hasn’t any shampoo when she wants to wash her hair, or darning needles.
It’s too long since I had a sister. I’m out of the habit of communal living, and I hate untidiness. I wouldn’t mind so much if it were only her own room, I need never go in there, but there are snail trails of Prue all over the flat. Her mending is shoved behind the living-room cushions, her half-written letters and empty ink bottles on the mantelpiece. I open my beautifully polished walnut desk and out falls a confusion of half-made parachute-silk knickers with reels of elastic and white cotton, and red tacking cotton and paper pattern, and tape measure and scissors. Why can’t she get a work basket and keep it in her own cupboard? On the glass shelf in the bathroom a pile of kirbigrips, and a half-eaten browned-off apple, on the kitchen airer her mackintosh and three pairs of bone dry stockings. Been there for days.
I start to cook in a thoroughly bad temper. We eat by the sitting-room fire which is burning up but having little effect on the temperature of the room. Minou, asleep in front of it, is doing his best to pretend it’s real.
“Is there anything else, Claire?” asks Prue after two helpings of everything.
“Cheese and dates, if you like, and want them enough to fetch them.” Myself, I’d stopped being hungry long before I finished cooking.
“Yes, please.” Bang the living-room door, bang the meat-safe door, bang the kitchen door, bang the living-room door — back where we started. Prue wolfs three hunks of bread and cheese as if she’d had nothing else first.
“Oh gosh — I’d forgotten the concert.” She dashes at the wireless, upsets the water jug, breaks a glass — out to the kitchen again with the same three bangs and back with dustpan and brush and cloth, she stands in the grate transfixed as Haydn’s Organ Concerto comes to life.
“Here, give them to me for goodness sake.” She hands over like a sleep-walker, and I clear up, clear away, wash up, and dry up, while Prue sprawls in my most comfortable chair apparently out of this world. Minou comes out to the kitchen with me and lies under the gas-cooker. He doesn’t seem to care for Haydn.
*
Today we are invited together to a sherry party. I do not at all like the idea of becoming a chaperone at thirty-three. Prue is quite unimpressed by my advice about clothes and insists on wearing a lumpy electric green dress. She also spends an hour in the bathroom achieving an effect which I can only describe as disastrous. She has put a thick layer of calomine lotion over her spots and topped it up with what must be the original rice powder mixture, and has jabbed her mouth with heavy orange lipstick. Bertram Mills could not have done better.
“I think you’ve put on a little too much lipstick,” I suggest mildly, not quite knowing where to begin.
“Really, Claire,” she replies stiffly. “I’m eighteen now, you know.”
I refrain from saying, “Old enough to know better,” and we set off for over half-an-hour’s journey in a 73, lurching in and out of snow ruts. These friends of Prue’s live somewhere in Bloomsbury. By the time we get there my spirits, not high to start with, have frozen into the tips of my nylons. Our hostess’s bedroom looks like a decrepit zoo with every type of cheap fur and fur fabric piled up on her double bed. Prue peels off her boots and puts on her party shoes. I feel for a moment that I am Nannie, and should blow Prue’s nose before we go in. But it would take more than a nose blow to make her face human now. I close my eyes as I notice the effect the cold has had on the orange lipstick.
Inside the living-room Prue is at once claimed by her friend Liz, whose sister is giving the party. I realise in a flash that there is no likelihood of my knowing any of these dilapidated university types. I have seldom seen gathered in one room so many precarious hair styles — buns and bangs and upsweeps all look equally unsafe. I giggle to myself as I wonder what would happen if at a given moment, say midnight, the hair should all fall down.
“Hullo — what’s so funny? I regret that I have not yet had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”
I look up, into eyes which, although obviously practised at turning on the charm, still succeeded in doing so. This man, I feel, must have had a walk-over in this environment, if I am seeing a cross-section of his usual competitors. He is holding out a drink for me. I feel very kindly towards him.
“Thank you. I’m Prue’s aunt. Are you by any chance Liz’s brother-in-law?”
“I am. We seem to be practically related. Come and sit down over here where we can talk.”
He forces a way through the crowd to a window-seat, backed with red velvet curtains and an intimate little draught, but as long as he talks to me I shall not complain of the cold. “Do you know anyone here?” he asks.
“Not a soul. Are they mostly your colleagues?”
“They are indeed. A formidable collection of intelligences.”
“Very probably. What is your particular line?”
“I’m a botanist.”
From there we go on to a number of books he’s read and I haven’t and vice versa, but quite friendly all the same. He jumps up from time to time to give drinks to other guests but he doesn’t introduce me to anyone, and returns to our retired window seat with flattering regularity. In one of his absences I notice that Prue is actually talking to a man. A very old man with a long venerable beard, but it’s a beginning, and from here she looks quite animated.
Now my handsome host is coming back, but this time followed by a cosy little woman — bother. However little cosy turns out to be Mary of whom I have heard so often from Prue. She is a sweet, small blonde (like Liz, only stouter, in powder blue and an interesting condition).
“I’m so glad to meet you,” she says, as if she really meant it, and we have a jolly motherly chat about the difficulty of dealing with the under-twe
nties.
Liz lives with her and goes to a dramatic school. I think Liz charming, compared with Prue, and say so frankly, but she assures me earnestly that Liz is also impossible, and that her own little children are much easier to cope with.
“How many have you?” I ask politely.
“Well, nearly three,” she says, patting her stomach with an alarming lack of reticence. I am terrified that we are about to descend to obstetrics, delighted to see her lovely husband coming over to rescue me.
“The Wainwrights want to say goodbye, darling.”
“Oh yes — excuse me a minute.”
She leaps away with surprising agility.
“Ought she to move so fast?” I ask him.
“Good gracious yes. Keeps the muscles supple. She does the most wonderfully Thurberesque limbering-up exercises.” I don’t find the idea of this as funny as he seems to, and change the subject to the theatre.
The party is breaking up all round us now, and I start saying goodbye to him.
“Listen, Claire,” he says, “we must meet again.” I take it the immediate use of Christian name is part of his technique; but can’t help all the same being pleased. “What about lunch one day?” he goes on. “As you work in the West End it should be easy.”
“By all means,” I reply, but not too eagerly, and give him my office number, without fixing anything definite.
Tom rang up the following Tuesday and we lunched the next day. Nothing special, a pleasant little meal at the Etoile.
“When did you shave off your moustache?” I asked him. “Prue described you to me a long time ago with an Army moustache. You sounded awful.”
“A war-time aberration,” he replied. “I kept it till 1945. It made me feel braver, more like a military type.”
I was glad it had gone, it must have been a crying shame to hide that mouth.
“We must do this again,” he said. “What about next Wednesday?”
“I can’t, I’m afraid. I’m going to Manchester on Tuesday for the night.”
“Good God — in this weather? What a fate. The frost will be coming down there in sheets of thin ice.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve got to see a man about cotton.”
“Well, I’ll come and wave goodbye to you at Euston.” He did too. One of the coldest afternoons of that whole abysmal February. We huddled in the refreshment-room until what should have been the last minute, but then the train started late and we had to put in time stamping up and down the platform.
“I expect the driver is trying to pinch a few bits of extra coal to get the fire going,” Tom said. “I’m glad you’ve a fur coat to keep you company anyway.”
“What are you doing tonight?” I asked idly.
“The Times crossword, paying bills, reading, why?”
“Mary hasn’t had her baby yet?”
“No. That’s not till March.”
“You must both come to dinner some time soon.”
“Thank you, but I think Mary would probably feel safer at home at the moment. She falls down so easily on the slippery pavements.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Mary and I each have our own friends you know. We’ve been married a long time, eight years now.”
“Does that make a difference? I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh yes, we feel the need of wider contacts, outside the home circle. Mary is very much taken up with the children.”
“But surely in that case she needs the wider contacts more than you do? You must know all those splendid scientists I saw at your house the other day.”
He looked slightly annoyed, and pushed a hand into his thick black hair which stood more on end than ever.
“If you’ve never been married, Claire, I can’t quite explain, certainly not here and now, and in a hurry. When can we have dinner together?”
“Dinner?”
He was really impatient now. “Yes, for God’s sake, dinner. What’s wrong with that? I’m not asking you to see my etchings.”
No, but you soon will be, I thought.
“Well, the weekend’s no good.”
“Monday then?”
“Yes, Monday — where?”
“I suppose you couldn’t manage to rub up two sticks and a boiled egg for us? I’d like to see your flat.”
I bet you would. But you aren’t going to get away with it as cheaply as that, just because I’m an experienced woman living on my own, it doesn’t mean all your meals free as well.
“I’m sorry,” I said sweetly. “But Prue has some friends coming in on Monday, so we’d better dine out and just go back for coffee.”
I stepped smartly into the train, but he came up to the carriage door and held out a little box with a smile that I for one was not prepared to resist, and inside it was a bunch of violets. Not exactly extravagant, but thoughtful.
“I thought they’d look pretty on your coat,” he said, going all bashful, and rather pink and charming.
“They will, thank you, my dear. I’ll put them in my tooth-mug in the Grand tonight and think of you.”
“Will you? I shall be thinking of you.”
“It seems odd that flowers manage to grow anywhere. I don’t believe the sun will ever shine again.”
“Oh yes it will,” Tom said. “It’ll be spring sooner than you think.” He lifted my hand from the window and kissed it lightly as the train began to move. I was surprised to find a slight spring tingling in my veins. It took me some time to settle down quietly to Sir Osbert Sitwell’s Left Hand, Right Hand. I’d put my glove on again but still the strange warmth moved in my left hand. Tiresome not to be proof against such a practised charmer. And at my age too.
*
On Monday night I came home early from the office only to find Prue already in the bathroom. “Will you be long, Prue?” I shouted.
“I’ve only just started — why?”
“I’m going out to dinner, I told you this morning and I’d like a bath first.”
“Oh, well — I’ll be as quick as I can.”
I went into my room to do my nails, struggling against irritation. Annoyance of any sort is very bad for the appearance. I wanted to look bland, poised and carefree for Tom. Prue took twenty minutes to be as quick as she could. I had to lie soaking in bathsalts for another ten before I began to rise above pettiness. I was late at the restaurant in Knightsbridge. I saw Tom through the glass door looking miserably at his watch. His face lightened happily when I walked in.
“Did you think I wasn’t coming?” I asked.
“I was beginning to wonder.”
“I’m so sorry. Prue was in the bath.”
It was a delicious supper with some good claret. Afterwards Tom found a taxi.
“Where to?” he asked. “Any particular film you’d like to see? I’m afraid we’re too late for the theatre.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “What about that coffee I promised you? With any luck Prue and friend might have gone to the flicks.”
“That would be nicer than anything.” He jumped in after me, and felt for my hand.
“Such enchanting soft hands you have.”
“Why not? I’m a poor spinster, I wash not, neither do I toil all day for ungrateful children.” I drew my hand away, but not rudely. His touch was too exciting, and I didn’t want him to guess — yet.
“Claire, don’t sound so bitter, I’m sure you could have married ten times over.”
“Did I sound bitter? I didn’t mean to. I would much rather be me than married. I don’t like babies at all. And other people’s husbands are often more attentive than one’s own.”
“I’m sure they are, Claire. There must be dozens of men in love with you.”
“Oh not quite as many as that.”
“Claire — Claire darling —”
The taxi stopped in Sheffield Terrace.
“Here we are,” I said. And I talked madly all the way upstairs to the top floor. Every light in the flat was on, and from the wirele
ss boomed something by Shostakowich in a bad temper.
“Welcome home,” I bellowed to Tom. We walked into the sitting-room together to find Prue and girl friend lying all over the floor (both fine tall girls,) reading the score. Little piles of dirty plates stood about the carpet, not even on a tray.
“Hullo Claire, hullo Tom,” Prue said, shaking her hair out of her eyes without getting up. “Where’s Mary? This is Lena.”
“Mary wasn’t feeling very well,” Tom said.
“Come and help me make the coffee,” I suggested. Tom and I retreated to the kitchen.
“Oh dear,” I said. “We can’t very well sit in my bedroom, it’s impossibly cold.” I lit the gas under the kettle.
“Is this your room?” Tom asked, opening the right door with unerring instinct. “It wouldn’t be too bad with the electric fire on.” He switched it down with his foot to demonstrate. “This is a good room. Not too feminine and fussy. I like these greys and golds better than pink. What a large bed for one person.”
“I’m a very restless sleeper.”
“What are you reading in bed? Always such a give-away — The Fortunate Mistress, (really Claire) Etiquette in 1840, Agatha Christie, Walter-de-la-Mare’s Love Anthology. Left Hand, Right Hand, what a mix up. Come over here let’s see your hands in the light.” He was sitting on the bed by now. I came and held out a hand for inspection. He pulled it closer and held it to the lamp. “Most interesting. Mount of Venus very well developed.”
“What a good line,” I said. “No woman can resist having her palm read.”
“I’ve noticed that,” he said.
The kettle whistle went off in a frenzy.
“What on earth?” shouted Tom, leaping to his feet.
I went out laughing. “Only the water is now boiling so you can have what you came for — coffee, if you remember.” Tom walked into the kitchen after me. “I’d go miles for a cup of coffee,” he said. “My favourite drink.”