A Quiet Life

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Put the guard in front of the fire,’ shouted Father from the upstairs landing.

  Madge came back into the kitchen and started to drag the armchairs to the wall. Alan turned stiffly to watch her. She had a broad forehead, a prominent nose and pale lips. When she was younger it seemed to him that she resembled a bird, eager and watchful, running about the house, pecking at him; she was easily startled. After that she grew cheeky and moved more clumsily. At fifteen he thought she was at her worst: her full cheeks gave her a spiteful look.

  ‘You were seen,’ he repeated. ‘By Hilda Fennel.’

  ‘Hilda who?’

  ‘The girl in the choir. She saw you with that German.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You weren’t being chased,’ he said. ‘Not when she saw you. You were chatting to him.’

  She didn’t seem bothered. She pulled a strand of cotton through the gap in her front teeth.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said irritably.

  ‘I’ve been sucking grass,’ she said. ‘There’s a bit stuck.’

  ‘What were you saying to him?’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said. ‘I told you. I was running.’

  He didn’t know how to handle her. She had an answer for everything. She stared him out with round deceitful eyes.

  After a while she said: ‘You want to work out why that Hilda whatsit told on me.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ he said. ‘She was worried. She was quite within her rights.’

  She grew indignant then. ‘Worried?’ she said. ‘I bet she was. She was necking with that man.’

  ‘What man?’ he asked, startled.

  ‘The man who married the war widow from the library.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he cried. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘And I wasn’t chatting,’ she said. ‘I was running.’

  He’d tried in the past to reason with her, but it was never successful. He blamed his parents for indulging her, letting her play the clown. All through her life she’d got away with things. Like the time the man came to the door when Mother was out, asking if there were any old clothes to sell and Madge gave away her fur gloves and his new school blazer. She’d have parted with his raincoat too if Mother hadn’t come home. And the time before, years ago, when she was caught showing her bottom to the evacuees over the railway line. He would have been hit with the strap for less. They scolded her all right, but they weren’t disgusted, not deep down.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ Madge said, touching the sheeting bound about his throat. ‘Who’s a pimply old Alan?’

  She left him to put up the fireguard and lock the back door. When he crawled into bed he found it difficult to lie comfortably. He mustn’t mess the sheets with the poultice. The rough towelling spread on the pillow irritated his ear. He daren’t fidget too much in case he woke Father. Unlike Madge, he hated disturbing anybody. He could hear her coughing in the next room. She coughed every night, as soon as she lay down, for ten minutes or more. A harsh bark, like a dog. They took her to the doctor every three months or so, but he couldn’t explain or alleviate the condition. It happened as frequently in summer as in winter, so it wasn’t the coldness of the rooms at night.

  He heard his mother moaning through the wall. She said peevishly: ‘Please Madge, I’m worn out.’

  Madge was unobliging. She rustled the sheets. The bed springs jangled. She went on whooping in the dark.

  2

  He hadn’t known that his grandparents and his aunt were coming to tea. It meant he was expected to stay home and play cards. He ate breakfast while Father made the fires and scrubbed the scullery floor. The worn string mat was bundled behind the privet hedge. Being Sunday it wasn’t seemly to hang it over the fence in full view of the neighbours. Madge sat on the table to be out of the way of the tidying; she wasn’t asked to assist because she was always more of a hindrance than anything else. Mother lay upstairs in bed, her breakfast on a tray.

  ‘It’s not right,’ moaned Father, running in and out of the back door with mop and pail. ‘It’s not man’s work.’

  At Morning Service, Janet Leyland pretended he was invisible. She stood in the oak stall holding her hymnbook, a white frill at her throat, looking right through him as she sang the responses. He was sick of half-smiling and nodding his head in her direction. In the vestry he told Ronnie loudly that he wouldn’t be coming to Evensong. He couldn’t tell if she heard or not; she was into her coat and out through the door before he had his jacket off the peg.

  Mr and Mrs Drummond came on the three-o’clock train. Aunt Nora arrived later, by bus. They were always invited together. Alan supposed it was to be rid of several obligations at one sitting.

  Father shut himself in the scullery and Mother watched the road from the bedroom window. When she saw her parents turning the corner, she called downstairs: ‘They’re here. Tell your father, Alan.’

  Father, when told, said: ‘I’ll bet they are,’ and stayed where he was.

  Mr Drummond was tall and bulky; his leather shoes were blood-red with polish. He strode into the house, unbuttoning his grey topcoat. Mrs Drummond, weighed down by her brown fur coat, scurried into the hall.

  ‘Hello Alan,’ she exclaimed in surprise, as if he was the last person she expected to see. ‘Look who’s here,’ she told her husband. ‘If it isn’t our Alan.’

  Grandpa tipped his hat like a conjuror and flopped his gloves inside.

  ‘I know, Mother,’ he said curtly, bundling her into the lounge.

  He warmed himself at the fire, gazing out at the bleak garden, while Alan helped Nana out of her fur.

  ‘That’s a good boy,’ she said, sinking down into the grey armchair and making herself comfortable. She was so short her black court shoes dangled above the patterned carpet.

  Grandpa took her coat into the hall to lay over the banisters. He wandered into the front room and nosed about in the piano stool. He had been an accompanist to some singer when he was young; Mother boasted about it.

  Alan was left with his grandmother beside the fire. She rustled in a brown dress, the veil of her hat hooked back over the brim so that she could see out. She had a bulge in her rouged cheek where she kept her humbug.

  After a while they heard Mother coming down. Nana twisted in her chair – ‘Is that you, Connie?’ – but Mother had gone into the front room to talk to Mr Drummond. He could hear them greeting each other as if she was a little girl who had fallen down and grazed her knee. ‘Oh, Dad,…’ ‘There, there, Connie.’

  He tried again to persuade Father to go into the lounge. He tugged at the scullery door and caught him making a beetroot sandwich.

  ‘What are you doing, Joe?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘Mr Drummond’s here.’

  ‘What’s that to me,’ cried Father, defiant in his best suit.

  ‘Don’t talk soft,’ snapped Alan. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  Father bridled. He pranced a few steps up and down the scullery to show how little he cared.

  What right had he, thought Alan, to fume and bluster, to fill the house with anxiety? What was the point of the fire in the lounge, and the sardine sandwiches and the cakes set out on the tea trolley? How ridiculous the man looked, flaring his nostrils and curling his lip in that fashion. Madge said it was on account of his puritanical upbringing: he’d never been encouraged to study himself in the mirror; he had no conception of how exaggerated were his gestures or his facial expressions.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ he repeated.

  ‘Go to blazes,’ said Father.

  All the same, he wavered. He wiped his mouth on the roller towel behind the door and after a moment went sulkily into the lounge. Grey and peaky, he stood at the hearth and attempted to be civil.

  ‘So you’re here again,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a grand fire,’ said Mrs Drummond, used to his ways.

  The room was painted white. On the desk was a photograph of Madge, dressed in a party frock of gauze, a ribbon in her hair. There was a low tabl
e by the fire, with a glass vase filled with early daffodils. The curtains moved in the draught. Beyond the french windows the black pagoda, bare of roses, rocked on the brown lawn.

  Alan had to be careful of the starched antimacassar behind his head. There hadn’t been time to bathe the poultice from his neck; he wore a check muffler held in place with a safety pin.

  He wondered if Janet Leyland would be disappointed that he couldn’t walk her home. He went upstairs to look out of the bedroom window. The road was empty of her. He knew she would never come this way – she lived on the other side of the village. Still he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of her red frock walking towards the house. There was his Aunt Nora, head bent against the wind, hurrying up the path.

  He didn’t hear Mother come into the bedroom, until she shouted at him. Startled, he turned to face her. Under her pencilled eyebrows she stared at him without pity. He might have been a stranger.

  ‘What are you doing in here? How dare you, you great lout.’

  He was astonished by her outburst. What harm was he doing? He hadn’t sat on the pouffe covered in yellow taffeta, or dented the counterpane of her bed, or twitched the curtains a fraction out of place as he stood at the window.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, stung by the unfairness of it.

  Aunt Nora knocked at the front door. Mother in her best black, sequins on the bodice, trembled in front of the looking-glass. She opened the drawers, lifted the lid of the powder bowl on the dressing table.

  ‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever let me catch you in here again.’

  He often thought that she was punishing him for something he had done when he was small. She had left Father for good, three times – packed a bag and gone to stay with her parents. She’d come into his room and asked him if he wanted to go with her. She never asked Madge; she held his sister’s hand as if she would never let go. He longed to be with his mother. If only she had told him to leave, not asked him to choose. How could he abandon Father? And each time she closed the front door, he thought he would never see her or Madge again. He thought they had left for ever. When Mother came back, the relief he felt made him stubborn; he could never run to her.

  His grandparents, at the arrival of Nora, acted thunderstruck.

  ‘Good Lord, Nora,’ Grandpa said. ‘Fancy seeing you.’

  ‘Is that Nora?’ cried Nana. ‘Well, bless my soul.’

  ‘I turn up everywhere,’ said Aunt Nora drily. She looked like Father, with her thin mouth and her overemphatic eyes. She had a mocking laugh, low and infectious, that ended in a loose cough and a spit into her handkerchief.

  ‘Call your mother,’ ordered Father. ‘Tell her your auntie’s come.’

  He wouldn’t. Let Madge do it; he was sick of playing games.

  Madge dominated the room. She pirouetted in front of the fireplace in her Sunday frock, telling them about school. She glanced at herself in the mirror as she spoke, as if to make sure she was there. ‘I’m top in English … Miss Williams is a dope … Don’t you think they ought to abolish Geography?’

  Mother came down and peered through the door.

  ‘Oh, you’ve arrived, Nora,’ she observed huffily, as though his aunt had been hiding from her.

  Aunt Nora rolled her eyes sardonically. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter.

  ‘How’s business, Dick?’ asked Grandpa.

  ‘Can’t complain, Mr D.,’ said Father, for once.

  Alan wasn’t sure what his father did for a living. His interests were varied. He didn’t have an office or go to work at regular hours. He conducted his business on the telephone in the front room, or in public houses in the city. He wasn’t a drinker. Sometimes he took Mother with him, dressed to kill. Only last week he had pulled off some deal involving a factory in South Wales. He came off the telephone rubbing his hands and smiling delightedly. He and Mother whispered together in the scullery. She chuckled with satisfaction. He scribbled down figures on the back of an old brown envelope and added them up. The house seemed brighter, more spacious. Mother said it was time Alan was fitted for a new suit. He didn’t want one; he hated the idea of spending the next twelve months worrying about his creases, and being reminded of how much the material had cost. Years ago Father had been more prosperous – that’s why Mother married him. Then a slump came and he lost his money and with it the big house and the maid and the rose garden. Even so, he owned a car, and no one else in the street sent their children to private schools. It was because he was an honest man and a good manager. It was a sin to buy things you couldn’t afford. He’d been in shipping, he said. Since then he’d been in paint and cloth and timber. Laid out on the boxroom floor was a quantity of corks in cotton bags with drawstrings. Alan understood he had just finished being in medicine bottles. Madge said he was a commercial traveller, but it wasn’t that simple. He didn’t go from door to door with a little suitcase full of boot polish.

  Father helped Mother wheel in the tea trolley. He handed round napkins and patterned plates. The firelight and the sandwiches made him cordial. He began to discuss an acquaintance who had accumulated a fortune in scrap metal. He was impressive about percentages and profit margins.

  Grandpa listened politely. ‘Get away,’ he remarked at intervals. ‘You don’t say.’

  Mother talked to Aunt Nora about hats. She loosed a remnant of material from under the clock and held it to the light.

  ‘Would you say that was green or blue?’

  ‘More blue than green,’ said Aunt Nora, wrinkling her eyes with effort.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mother. ‘It’s green.’

  She ignored Mrs Drummond. Madge said she disliked her because she was common and wouldn’t improve herself. It was true that when Grandpa went on his cruises before the war Nana had stayed at home. She didn’t care for his butterfly collection either, or the Everyman Library books he bought every month. Nana’s idea of a good read was ‘Home Chat’ or ‘Red Letter’. Mother had never forgiven her for confiding to Madge that she’d worked in a lollypop factory as a child. She told Madge that Nana was making it up out of mischief, but Madge knew better. Grandmother had also had rickets when she was a baby. Madge told all her friends at school. It would have killed Mother, had she known. Whenever she took Nana out for tea in Southport, she bullied her and spoke waspishly. She criticised her clothes and her posture. When they got up to leave, Madge said Nana pocketed the tip Mother left under the muffin dish for the waitress.

  The afternoon wore on; the day darkened. They cut into the sponge cake and drank several cups of weak sweet tea. Madge begged to be allowed out to the shore. Grandpa dozed before the fire.

  It was time to play cards. Alan fetched the Indian table with the brass tray, from under the stairs. The closet was damp and smelt of mildewed clothes. He leant his face against the old raincoats and thought of Janet Leyland at Evensong.

  They had to lift back the settee to set up the table. Grandpa pushed at the rug with his shoes to manoeuvre his chair out of the way. Mother never said a word.

  ‘Can’t I go for a walk?’ whined Madge. ‘I don’t like cards.’

  ‘No you can’t,’ said Mother. ‘We’ve visitors.’

  Father went upstairs to find his cotton bag full of pennies. He tipped them on to the table and they spun and rolled across the brass tray that was honey-pale in the firelight. He enjoyed the thought of winning a few pence off his father-in-law. He gave them back when the game was over. He enjoyed that even more; he thought Mr Drummond was a mean old skinflint and it gave him pleasure to show him up. It made Alan unhappy, watching Mother, beady-eyed on the settee, praying that Grandfather would refuse, and being disillusioned time without number.

  They played Rummy for Madge’s sake; she was hopeless at anything else. She lacked concentration and was inclined to cheat. Aunt Nora played a losing game. She bit her yellow arm in anguish when she was left with a palmful of aces. She lay back in her chair and covered her mouth with her handkerchief.

&
nbsp; ‘That time in Blackpool,’ she wheezed. ‘When we had a Pontoon night.’

  Nana nodded. Shrewdly she counted her cards.

  ‘It was the air, Nora. It was that bracing.’

  Grandpa sat with his watch chain dipping across his belly. He kept them all waiting while he studied the hand he’d been dealt.

  ‘It’s been beautiful,’ said Mother. ‘The last few days.’

  ‘Have you been anywhere nice?’ asked Nana. ‘Been for a run in the car, have you?’

  ‘Cold but not windy,’ said Mother. ‘Until today.’

  ‘In Spain,’ recalled Grandpa, ‘it was mild this time of year. The sun on the mountains … the white houses in the villages …’

  ‘Beautiful,’ murmured Mother, gazing at him with love.

  ‘There was nothing to disturb the eye, no blot on the peaceful landscape. You could hear the bells. While in the distance the—’

  ‘What’s wrong with the lad’s neck?’ asked Aunt Nora.

  ‘Boils,’ said Father.

  Madge grew restless. She slumped against Mother and let everybody see her cards. She wanted Grandpa to play the piano.

  He said he would, all in good time.

  ‘I love us singing round the piano,’ she said. ‘We all seem close.’ They thought she was an old-fashioned child. Alan knew what she meant.

  When Grandpa played, they stood shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘Bless this house O Lord we pray

  Keep them safe by night and day

  Bless the people here within

  Keep them safe and free from sin …’

  sang Father, with his arm about Mother.

  ‘Let’s go into the front room,’ nagged Madge. ‘Let’s play the piano.’

  ‘The dining room,’ corrected Mother.

  All the same, she wouldn’t allow it. She couldn’t have two rooms messed up in one day.

  The game continued. While the scores were added, Alan went into the hall. He was still smarting from his mother’s attack. He opened the door a moment to cool his face. The branches of the sycamore tree tapped the pane of the upstairs room. For years Father had been threatening to cut it down – he said the roots were undermining the foundations. Every spring Mother in her gardening gloves tugged out the new shoots growing in the borders, choking her antirrhinums and her dahlias, and every autumn Father gathered the rust-coloured leaves that choked his drains. He burnt them in a heap beyond the greenhouse, beneath the tall intact poplars. They would never cut down the tree. It was part of the house. Mother complained it blotted out the sunshine, but if it didn’t she would surely draw the curtains to keep the carpet from fading. Madge called it a willow. She said fancifully that she liked a garden with a weeping willow tree.