Lady Jean

by Noel Virtue

  A lone pigeon is perched on the roof of Mrs Meiklejohn’s house, unseen, close to the edge, directly above Mrs Meiklejohn’s head. The pigeon silently ruffles its feathers. Angling its head sideways to peer up at the sky, it then turns to walk up to the pinnacle of the roof. As it does so it ejects several globules of soft white faeces, one of which is jettisoned out over the edge of the guttering and, as there is not even a slight breeze, the globule plummets directly into the bowl of muesli and milk. Mrs Meiklejohn, at that precise moment, is peering to her right, lifting her head slightly so that she can see whether or not Jean Barrie’s french windows are open. She does not notice the addition to her breakfast, so concentrated is she on ascertaining that there is no movement on the other side of the wall. She does not hear the plopping sound the fallen faeces makes in her bowl. After a second or two, having satisfied herself that the french windows next door are still closed, she lifts another spoonful of breakfast to her pursed lips and sucks.

  Only Jean and Mr Harcourt are awake. She has got into the habit of taking him an early cup of tea and biscuits, which, he has told her, he deeply appreciates. He is a rather formal man, in manners as well as in speech. Jean pauses, in the act of leaving the room, hoping to chat, for Mr Harcourt is sitting up in bed in his red-and-white striped pyjamas examining one of Ivan’s tin toys, which Ivan had been showing him the evening before and left behind.

  ‘Isn’t that sweet!’ she exclaims, stifling the urge to laugh. ‘I had one of these when I was a child,’ Mr Harcourt responds.

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘Isn’t it extraordinary what triggers memory? I had entirely forgotten I had one of these toys. This is a replica, so I’m told. But it looks exactly the same as far as I can recall.’

  The toy is a green-and-brown painted tin mountain through which, at its peak, protrudes a thin length of angled wire on which is attached a small red aeroplane. Around the mountain and through tiny tunnelled gaps travels a miniature train in the opposite direction to which the plane whirls in circles. Mr Harcourt, glancing up with a grin, turns the key, releases a lever and holds up the toy for Jean to admire. His face is a study in constrained delight.

  Jean thought Mr Harcourt a trifle simple-minded yet she had warmed to him. He was obviously deeply fond of Christopher and was, to all appearances, a devoted father.

  ‘Mr Harcourt…’ Jean said, then stopped.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘It would be pleasant to have a chat. I am so grateful to you, Miss Barrie, for allowing me to stay, near Christopher. I must admit I was quite upset when Nell… Mrs Harcourt, forced him to leave. She takes no notice of me, of course. Hasn’t done for most of our married life. My opinions matter little.’

  Jean, still in her nightdress and dressing-gown, sat on a chair she’d brought up from the front reception room and which Mr Harcourt used to sit on in contemplation. He also spent a great deal of his time reading a London encyclopaedia, alone in his room but with the door left open, during the day while Christopher was out. He had problems walking and preferred to be indoors.

  ‘Christopher seems perfectly happy here,’ Mr Harcourt said.

  Jean nodded. ‘I’ve tried to make him feel at home. Your wife … Mrs Harcourt has not changed her mind? About him? Oh dear, that’s a silly thing to say, after you …’

  Mr Harcourt placed the tin toy down beside him on the bed. He stared at it and not at Jean as he responded. He shrugged rather tiredly.

  ‘She never wanted Christopher. I’m afraid she’s made that clear to him all his life. Forgive my bluntness. I love my son, Miss Barrie. I love him without reserve. Many would condemn me for confessing that I have never minded his, shall we say, close friendship with Fergus. It took me a while to accept it, and that wasn’t easy. I guessed, long before my wife found out, what was going on. Well, there was little, in fact, going on. Fergus is quite moral, in his way.’

  ‘You speak about it so calmly.’

  ‘Years of practice, observing Nellie’s particular excesses. I was, I’m rather ashamed to admit, relieved when she decided I had to go as well. She has all her church friends, dozens of them. I would never have left her, you see. It’s made me old before my time putting up with her all these years. We married late. Christopher came along late. I took care of him myself, mostly, when I could. Mrs Harcourt ignored him when she could.’

  ‘How awful. Really.’

  ‘My wife is not a monster. She’s just – oh, how can I put it? – over-convinced that her form of religion is the only way she, or anyone, should live. There are reasons for it, but I’ve no desire to talk about those. One shouldn’t necessarily talk about the past. It makes no difference, anyway, going over that which is gone.’

  ‘I know. I know that only too well,’ Jean said quietly.

  ‘I’d like to take Christopher across Europe. I’ve thought about it for some time. Years. Just the two of us. I fear I’ve left it too late. He’s utterly attached, devoted to my brother-in-law. They seem to fit together. In the last day or so I have never seen Christopher so happy, so contented, as he is here and now. I grew up in a strictly conventional way. I want him to find the happiness I was never allowed or offered. Fergus may well provide that. He’s a good man. A little eccentric but basically good and kind. He’ll provide. For Christopher. My son’s an unusual boy. No, young man. It’s his birthday in a week or so.’

  ‘I didn’t realize!’

  Mr Harcourt glanced up at her and quickly looked away.

  ‘Well no,’ he said very slowly. ‘He never told you. Look, if it is any imposition at all, my being here, then do say. I could easily book into a hotel. I may travel soon. I’ve been abroad so infrequently. Nellie never wanted to leave London. I’d rather like to visit Rome. Australia attracts. On my own, I imagine. Christopher would not wish to leave his … leave Fergus. Not now.’

  ‘Perhaps you could all three travel together?’

  Mr Harcourt shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think that would be ideal. I would like to see Christopher settled before I left.’

  Again he looked up at her and was about to say something more, but instead he simply shook his head and smiled. The rims of his eyes had turned red.

  Freida had sold her house, receiving the asking price which she had held out for.

  ‘I’m a rich bitch, Lady!’ she told Jean. ‘Well, richer. I’d suggest we celebrate but you are far too … busy with the Hibbert boy.’

  ‘Enough of the “boy” if you don’t mind. He’s in Zurich.’

  ‘Well, he is. A boy I mean. Never imagined it’d go this far. You’ve surprised me, I’ll give you that. He’s a rather tasty piece of chicken.’

  A family of five had bought the house. Freida did hear from the agent that she could have held out longer and been offered more.

  ‘Glad to be rid, Jean, to tell the truth. You know, I quite fancy somewhere close to Brighton. A little haven beside the sea. You gave me the idea, years ago. I might pop down in a few weeks, have a scout round. Fancy coming? You may feel the need by then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. Come on, go put something girlish on and we’ll go out for lunch. My treat. I fancy lobster. Huge, pink, dripping-with-butter lobster. Two. I feel the need right now to suck some sweet white flesh. Oh my, what am I saying?’

  ‘What do you want to do for your birthday, sugar plum?’ Freida asked. They had each enjoyed a brie salad and crisp white wine – having decided to eat locally and not finding a seafood venue in the high street – and now walked from the restaurant down to the end of the street and across into Regent’s Park. The day had turned a little cooler with a few scattered clouds hovering in the white sky, though it was still far too warm. They’d entered the park near the mosque, which Freida hated as she claimed it was ugly architecture and offensive to all those with loose morals. She enjoyed glaring at anyone who entered as she marched past. Finding a bench near the boating lake, Jean had begged to sit beneath the shade of an oak tree. The sun was st
rong and she found it uncomfortable. They were not wearing hats.

  ‘What have you planned?’ Jean asked.

  Freida snorted. ‘Absolutely nothing, Lady. Zilch.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Honest! I am as honest as the day is cold,’ she said, fanning her face with a newspaper someone had left on the bench.

  ‘Peaceful,’ Jean mused. ‘I’d like a peaceful day sipping gin and lime juice.’

  ‘Is Christopher’s father going to stay?’

  ‘For a while. We had a chat this morning. He’s a gentle, rather sad man. Thoughtful. He seems simple-minded, but I’m not sure. I like him.’

  ‘You like everyone,’ Freida said. ‘Lady Jean the Tolerant. That’s your weakness. You’re too bloody nice. And impulsive.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Doo Lally’s announced she’s going to slow down, did she tell you? She’s not been herself lately. She does look a mite peaky.’

  Jean shook her head. Across from them a family were playing an impromptu game of lawn tennis. The father was showing his young son how to hold the ball and how to twist it as he made a serve with his racket. He had powerful, muscular legs and arms and a cleft chin.

  ‘No more late nights, Doo Lally said,’ Freida went on. ‘She’s just bought a hundredweight of vitamins and minerals. Lectures Fergus on his slothful ways. Wants to take up aerobics again. Silly old tart. I do love her. She’s really got it in for Ivan. I sense trouble.’

  Ivan had taken to sitting upstairs for hours in his rooms, now reading English history and attempting to write a definitive book on golf. He had bought a small, second-hand typewriter, and the sound of it drifted down the stairs in the afternoons when Aunt Dizzy took a rest. She and Ivan had had words, nearly fallen out over the noise, and Jean suspected that the disagreement hadn’t ended there.

  ‘Birthday?’ Freida suddenly said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t really said. What you’d like to do.’

  ‘As I said. Just stay at home. Drink gin. I enjoy the others being about the house. It’s like … family.’

  ‘Well, you could take up knitting. No, petit point. You could sit petit pointing cushion covers in an old rocking-chair. Homilies, framed for the walls. They’d hang well beside Doo Lally’s dreary paintings. There’s No Place Like Home. Bless This Our Peaceful Dwelling. You could join the Women’s Institute if it still exists. Bake scones and chocolate cake and have tea parties. Tupperware. Announce plans for a knitathon for the poor …’

  ‘Oh, do shut up. I am not in the mood.’

  Freida fell silent for only a minute.

  ‘I met someone in a bar a few nights ago,’ she said. ‘Wants me to go and live with her in a condo in Chicago, if you please. Just came out with it. Come to Chicago with me. You’d love it! My ex-husband would adore you!’

  ‘So when are you leaving?’

  ‘Jean! I told her no. I have to remain in London, I said airily, to take care of my dear, sweet great-aunt who has filled her house with human oddities and threatens to become old. Why do Americans find me so irresistible?’

  ‘I’ll be fifty-eight,’ said Jean.

  ‘I know, dearest. Rotten, isn’t it?’

  Freida moved closer and slid her arm through Jean’s.

  ‘Two old ducks,’ she said, ‘quacking our way to senility.’

  The following two days were dominated by domestic trivia. Freida, having agreed to stay on at the house indefinitely but with Brighton in mind for the future, suggested they tidy or clear the reception room opposite her bedroom.

  ‘I would like more space, Lady,’ she told Jean. ‘I could entertain my occasional lapses into sexual deviation in there. You can’t move, right now, with all Doo Lally’s paintings stacked up. At least she’s stopped buying them. No taste whatsoever. Money to burn.’

  Most of the artwork Jean had insisted be stored in the room, away from the stairs and the morning-room and the hallways, where Aunt Dizzy had left and forgotten about them. Jean, Freida and Christopher spent mornings clearing the room, washing down the walls, carrying boxes of books and old videos and small pieces of furniture as well as paintings upstairs to the pull-down stairs that led up into the roof space above Ivan’s rooms. Ivan was spending time at the British Library. With a borrowed card he was researching golf clubs and the changing state of the game, something Aunt Dizzy had been loudly vocal about.

  ‘The height of damned mediocrity,’ she’d scoffed. ‘A boring subject for a bloody boring man.’ As she never said such things to his face, Ivan was quite unaware of her animosity towards him. Aunt Dizzy was researching, she said, health farms. ‘So I can get away from this den of boredom,’ Jean overheard her telling Christopher. She slept a great deal during the day. She was often withdrawn and pensive.

  Anthony telephoned from Zurich. His wife was not contesting their divorce. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about Jean.

  ‘I’ll be ready and able to marry you sooner than we expect,’ he told Jean.

  ‘We?’

  ‘You will marry me. There’s no question about it.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘I have to stay another couple of nights. The damned author’s being the usual mix of ego and hysterical complaint.’

  ‘I miss you,’ Jean told him.

  ‘I love you,’ Anthony replied.

  They talked for over an hour. Freida kept moving back and forth across the hall from her room to the half-emptied reception room, blowing kisses and wearing less and less clothing until she eventually appeared clad only in bright scarlet frilly knickers, posing in the hall with a long-stemmed rose held carefully between her teeth. Christopher appeared shortly after that with the Hoover and commenced to busy himself noisily with it in the morning-room, until Jean shouted for him to stop. Mr Harcourt sat out in the garden with Ivan, who was showing him and reading aloud from articles in his stack of National Geographies. Aunt Dizzy, as usual, was upstairs resting. She had begun to worry Jean a little: she’d become too quiet and did not always appear for breakfast. Forsaking her brightly coloured garb, including the endless pairs of hot pants, she had taken to dressing in long, silken ancient dresses and shuffling about the house in fluffy slippers, usually with ice cubes wrapped in tea towels held to her head. The heat was getting at her, she said, quite cheerfully, when Jean asked if she was unwell. She kept making the odd acerbic remark, mostly about Ivan Fitzpatrick, deriding him to everyone behind his back. Christopher and Fergus failed to interest her in Scrabble or accompanying them on their constant outings when Christopher wasn’t up at the library. It was a while before Jean started to take notice of the change in Aunt Dizzy, involved as she was in taking care of Mr Harcourt and Ivan. Both of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves, to attend to laundry or cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen after bathing or attempting to prepare meals, tasks which, Jean suspected, had previously been done for them.

  ‘I’m a barrel of bounce, a festoon of frivolity, Jean,’ Aunt Dizzy stated one morning as she came slowly down the stairs, half undressed and wig in disarray, long after everyone else had finished breakfast. Her tone of voice did not convince.

  Anthony arrived at the house after three days, straight from the airport, dishevelled and laden with duty-free, dropping everything as Jean answered the door and throwing his arms around her as if they’d been forced apart for several decades. At ten thirty in the morning Jean found herself in bed with him, eagerly returning the passion he exhibited with such astonishing depth as if she was in love with him. They spent the better part of an entire day lying beneath a silk sheet, entwined and uninhibited for the first time, Jean going downstairs for coffee and snacks like the bedraggled aftermath of sexual indulgence. She went with him back to his apartment. She had extra keys cut so that he could come and go from the house whenever he chose. They went dancing late at night and ate out.

  Ivan and Mr Harcourt started to go out together to one of the local pubs in the evenings, usually straight af
ter dinner. Freida had begun to accompany Fergus and Christopher to night-clubs and to exhibitions during the day. Ivan rarely appeared during the day except at mealtimes, bleary-eyed and filled with enthusiasm for his creative efforts on his typewriter, the noise of which continued unabated. Aunt Dizzy’s complaints continued. She slept, or said she slept. She sat alone in the front reception room or sometimes in Freida’s room playing solitaire with cards or watching television, rarely venturing out of the house. She acted cheerful, resigned to her new solitary ways.

  ‘I am quite content, Jean. You mustn’t fuss, it’s irritating,’ she kept saying whenever Jean asked if she needed anything.

  Jean had come back to the house having spent the night in Covent Garden with Anthony. It was just past eleven o’clock in the morning, only a few days before her birthday. She had suspicions that something had been organized; Christopher kept dropping hints.

  Dirty breakfast dishes were strewn all about the kitchen and on every surface in the morning-room. Freida, Ivan, Christopher and his father were out in the garden. A hose-pipe ban having just been lifted, Christopher was watering the garden, with his father seemingly offering unheeded but humorous directions, as Christopher was loudly sniggering. Freida and Ivan sat chatting to each other, Ivan even laughing occasionally and slapping his thighs. Coffee mugs sat on the grass like featureless china gnomes. Jean stood silently watching from the comparative shade of the morning-room. It was a brilliant white-hot day already. For a few moments a feeling of deep satisfaction touched her. She had not drunk more than anyone else for weeks. She was sleeping deeply. She awoke in the mornings with voices reaching her from other parts of the house, sounds which brought mild expectation and a cheerfulness that pleased her. She did not even mind being at Anthony’s apartment any longer.