Philip had never seen the girl, but he remembered Baines had a niece. She was thin and drawn, and she wore a white mackintosh; she meant nothing to Philip; she belonged to a world about which he knew nothing at all. He couldn’t make up stories about her, as he could make them up about withered Sir Hubert Reed, the Permanent Secretary, about Mrs Wince-Dudley who came up once a year from Penstanley in Suffolk with a green umbrella and an enormous black handbag, as he could make them up about the upper servants in all the houses where he went to tea and games. She just didn’t belong. He thought of mermaids and Undine, but she didn’t belong there either, nor to the adventures of Emil, nor to the Bastables. She sat there looking at an iced pink cake in the detachment and mystery of the completely disinherited, looking at the half-used pots of powder which Baines had set out on the marble-topped table between them.
Baines was urging, hoping, entreating, commanding, and the girl looked at the tea and the china pots and cried. Baines passed his handkerchief across the table, but she wouldn’t wipe her eyes; she screwed it in her palm and let the tears run down, wouldn’t do anything, wouldn’t speak, would only put up a silent resistance to what she dreaded and wanted and refused to listen to at any price. The two brains battled over the tea-cups loving each other, and there came to Philip outside, beyond the ham and wasps and dusty Pimlico pane, a confused indication of the struggle.
He was inquisitive and he didn’t understand and he wanted to know. He went and stood in the doorway to see better, he was less sheltered than he had ever been; other people’s lives for the first time touched and pressed and moulded. He would never escape that scene. In a week he had forgotten it, but it conditioned his career, the long austerity of his life; when he was dying, rich and alone, it was said that he asked: ‘Who is she?’
Baines had won; he was cocky and the girl was happy. She wiped her face, she opened a pot of powder, and their fingers touched across the table. It occurred to Philip that it might be amusing to imitate Mrs Baines’s voice and to call ‘Baines’ to him from the door.
His voice shrivelled them; you couldn’t describe it in any other way, it made them smaller, they weren’t together any more. Baines was the first to recover and trace the voice, but that didn’t make things as they were. The sawdust was spilled out of the afternoon; nothing you did could mend it, and Philip was scared. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ He wanted to say that he loved Baines, that he had only wanted to laugh at Mrs Baines. But he had discovered you couldn’t laugh at Mrs Baines. She wasn’t Sir Hubert Reed, who used steel nibs and carried a pen-wiper in his pocket; she wasn’t Mrs Wince-Dudley; she was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, ‘They need an electric drill’; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little closet room at Penstanley. There was nothing to laugh about. You had to endure her when she was there and forget about her quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep.
Baines said, ‘It’s only Phil,’ beckoned him in and gave him the pink iced cake the girl hadn’t eaten, but the afternoon was broken, the cake was like dry bread in the throat. The girl left them at once: she even forgot to take the powder. Like a blunt icicle in her white mackintosh she stood in the doorway with her back to them, then melted into the afternoon.
‘Who is she?’ Philip asked. ‘Is she your niece?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Baines said, ‘that’s who she is; she’s my niece,’ and poured the last drops of water on to the coarse black leaves in the teapot.
‘May as well have another cup,’ Baines said.
‘The cup that cheers,’ he said hopelessly, watching the bitter black fluid drain out of the spout.
‘Have a glass of ginger pop, Phil?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Baines.’
‘It’s not your fault, Phil. Why, I could really believe it wasn’t you at all, but her. She creeps in everywhere.’ He fished two leaves out of his cup and laid them on the back of his hand, a thin soft flake and a hard stalk. He beat them with his hand: ‘Today,’ and the stalk detached itself, ‘tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,’ but the flake wouldn’t come, stayed where it was, drying under his blows, with a resistance you wouldn’t believe it to possess. ‘The tough one wins,’ Baines said.
He got up and paid the bill and out they went into the street. Baines said, ‘I don’t ask you to say what isn’t true. But you needn’t actually tell Mrs Baines you met us here.’
‘Of course not,’ Philip said, and catching something of Sir Hubert Reed’s manner, ‘I understand, Baines.’ But he didn’t understand a thing; he was caught up in other people’s darkness.
‘It was stupid,’ Baines said. ‘So near home, but I hadn’t time to think, you see. I’d got to see her.’
‘I haven’t time to spare,’ Baines said. ‘I’m not young. I’ve got to see that she’s all right.’
‘Of course you have, Baines.’
‘Mrs Baines will get it out of you if she can.’
‘You can trust me, Baines,’ Philip said in a dry important Reed voice; and then, ‘Look out. She’s at the window watching.’ And there indeed she was, looking up at them, between the lace curtains, from the basement room, speculating. ‘Need we go in, Baines?’ Philip asked, cold lying heavy on his stomach like too much pudding; he clutched Baines’s arm.
‘Careful,’ Baines said softly, ‘careful.’
‘But need we go in, Baines? It’s early. Take me for a walk in the park.’
‘Better not.’
‘But I’m frightened, Baines.’
‘You haven’t any cause,’ Baines said. ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you. You just run along upstairs to the nursery. I’ll go down by the area and talk to Mrs Baines.’ But he stood hesitating at the top of the stone steps pretending not to see her, where she watched between the curtains. ‘In at the front door, Phil, and up the stairs.’
Philip didn’t linger in the hall; he ran, slithering on the parquet Mrs Baines had polished, to the stairs. Through the drawing-room doorway on the first floor he saw the draped chairs; even the china clock on the mantel was covered like a canary’s cage. As he passed, it chimed the hour, muffled and secret under the duster. On the nursery table he found his supper laid out: a glass of milk and a piece of bread and butter, a sweet biscuit, and a little cold Queen’s pudding without the meringue. He had no appetite; he strained his ears for Mrs Baines’s coming, for the sound of voices, but the basement held its secrets; the green baize door shut off that world. He drank the milk and ate the biscuit, but he didn’t touch the rest, and presently he could hear the soft precise footfalls of Mrs Baines on the stairs: she was a good servant, she walked softly; she was a determined woman, she walked precisely.
But she wasn’t angry when she came in; she was ingratiating as she opened the night nursery door – ‘Did you have a good walk, Master Philip?’ – pulled down the blinds, laid out his pyjamas, came back to clear his supper. ‘I’m glad Baines found you. Your mother wouldn’t have liked your being out alone.’ She examined the tray. ‘Not much appetite, have you, Master Philip? Why don’t you try a little of this nice pudding? I’ll bring you up some more jam for it.’
‘No, no, thank you, Mrs Baines,’ Philip said.
‘You ought to eat more,’ Mrs Baines said. She sniffed round the room like a dog. ‘You didn’t take any pots out of the wastepaper basket in the kitchen, did you, Master Philip?’
‘No,’ Philip said.
‘Of course you wouldn’t. I just wanted to make sure.’ She patted his shoulder and her fingers flashed to his lapel; she picked off a tiny crumb of pink sugar. ‘Oh, Master Philip,’ she said, ‘that’s why you haven’t any appetite. You’ve been buying sweet cakes. That’s not what your pocket money’s for.’
‘But I didn’t,’ Philip said, ‘I didn’t.’
She tasted the sugar with the tip of her tongue.
‘Don’t tell l
ies to me, Master Philip. I won’t stand for it any more than your father would.’
‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ Philip said. ‘They gave it me. I mean Baines,’ but she had pounced on the word ‘they’. She had got what she wanted; there was no doubt about that, even when you didn’t know what it was she wanted. Philip was angry and miserable and disappointed because he hadn’t kept Baines’s secret. Baines oughtn’t to have trusted him; grown-up people should keep their own secrets, and yet here was Mrs Baines immediately entrusting him with another.
‘Let me tickle your palm and see if you can keep a secret.’ But he put his hand behind him; he wouldn’t be touched. ‘It’s a secret between us, Master Philip, that I know all about them. I suppose she was having tea with him,’ she speculated.
‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he asked, the responsibility for Baines weighing on his spirit, the idea that he had got to keep her secret when he hadn’t kept Baines’s making him miserable with the unfairness of life. ‘She was nice.’
‘She was nice, was she?’ Mrs Baines said in a bitter voice he wasn’t used to.
‘And she’s his niece.’
‘So that’s what he said,’ Mrs Baines struck softly back at him like the clock under the duster. She tried to be jocular. ‘The old scoundrel. Don’t you tell him I know, Master Philip.’ She stood very still between the table and the door, thinking very hard, planning something. ‘Promise you won’t tell. I’ll give you that Meccano set, Master Philip . . .’
He turned his back on her; he wouldn’t promise, but he wouldn’t tell. He would have nothing to do with their secrets, the responsibilities they were determined to lay on him. He was only anxious to forget. He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared. ‘A 2A Meccano set, Master Philip.’ He never opened his Meccano set again, never built anything, never created anything, died the old dilettante, sixty years later with nothing to show rather than preserve the memory of Mrs Baines’s malicious voice saying good night, her soft determined footfalls on the stairs to the basement, going down, going down.
3
The sun poured in between the curtains and Baines was beating a tattoo on the water-can. ‘Glory, glory,’ Baines said. He sat down on the end of the bed and said, ‘I beg to announce that Mrs Baines has been called away. Her mother’s dying. She won’t be back till tomorrow.’
‘Why did you wake me up so early?’ Philip complained. He watched Baines with uneasiness; he wasn’t going to be drawn in; he’d learnt his lesson. It wasn’t right for a man of Baines’s age to be so merry. It made a grown person human in the same way that you were human. For if a grown-up could behave so childishly, you were liable to find yourself in their world. It was enough that it came at you in dreams: the witch at the corner, the man with a knife. So ‘It’s very early,’ he whined, even though he loved Baines, even though he couldn’t help being glad that Baines was happy. He was divided by the fear and the attraction of life.
‘I want to make this a long day,’ Baines said. ‘This is the best time.’ He pulled the curtains back. ‘It’s a bit misty. The cat’s been out all night. There she is, sniffing round the area. They haven’t taken in any milk at 59. Emma’s shaking out the mats at 63.’ He said, ‘This was what I used to think about on the Coast: somebody shaking mats and the cat coming home. I can see it today,’ Baines said, ‘just as if I was still in Africa. Most days you don’t notice what you’ve got. It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.’ He put a penny on the washstand. ‘When you’ve dressed, Phil, run and get a Mail from the barrow at the corner. I’ll be cooking the sausages.’
‘Sausages?’
‘Sausages,’ Baines said. ‘We’re going to celebrate today.’ He celebrated at breakfast, restless, cracking jokes, unaccountably merry and nervous. It was going to be a long, long day, he kept on coming back to that: for years he had waited for a long day, he had sweated in the damp Coast heat, changed shirts, gone down with fever, lain between the blankets and sweated, all in the hope of this long day, that cat sniffing round the area, a bit of mist, the mats beaten at 63. He propped the Mail in front of the coffee-pot and read pieces aloud. He said, ‘Cora Down’s been married for the fourth time.’ He was amused, but it wasn’t his idea of a long day. His long day was the Park, watching the riders in the Row, seeing Sir Arthur Stillwater pass beyond the rails (‘He dined with us once in Bo; up from Freetown; he was governor there’), lunch at the Corner House for Philip’s sake (he’d have preferred himself a glass of stout and some oysters at the York bar), the Zoo, the long bus ride home in the last summer light: the leaves in the Green Park were beginning to turn and the motors nuzzled out of Berkeley Street with the low sun gently glowing on their windscreens. Baines envied no one, not Cora Down, or Sir Arthur Stillwater, or Lord Sandale, who came out on to the steps of the Army and Navy and then went back again – he hadn’t anything to do and might as well look at another paper. ‘I said don’t let me see you touch that black again.’ Baines had led a man’s life; everyone on top of the bus pricked his ears when he told Philip all about it.
‘Would you have shot him?’ Philip asked, and Baines put his head back and tilted his dark respectable manservant’s hat to a better angle as the bus swerved round the Artillery Memorial.
‘I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I’d have shot to kill,’ he boasted, and the bowed figure went by, the steel helmet, the heavy cloak, the down-turned rifle and the folded hands.
‘Have you got the revolver?’
‘Of course I’ve got it,’ Baines said. ‘Don’t I need it with all the burglaries there’ve been?’ This was the Baines whom Philip loved: not Baines singing and carefree, but Baines responsible, Baines behind barriers, living his man’s life.
All the buses streamed out from Victoria like a convoy of aeroplanes to bring Baines home with honour. ‘Forty blacks under me,’ and there waiting near the area steps was the proper reward, love at lighting-up time.
‘It’s your niece,’ Philip said, recognizing the white mackintosh, but not the happy sleepy face. She frightened him like an unlucky number; he nearly told Baines what Mrs Baines had said; but he didn’t want to bother, he wanted to leave things alone.
‘Why, so it is,’ Baines said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have a bit of supper with us.’ But he said, they’d play a game, pretend they didn’t know her, slip down the area steps, ‘and here,’ Baines said, ‘we are,’ lay the table, put out the cold sausages, a bottle of beer, a bottle of ginger pop, a flagon of harvest burgundy. ‘Everyone his own drink,’ Baines said. ‘Run upstairs, Phil, and see if there’s been a post.’
Philip didn’t like the empty house at dusk before the lights went on. He hurried. He wanted to be back with Baines. The hall lay there in quiet and shadow prepared to show him something he didn’t want to see. Some letters rustled down and someone knocked. ‘Open in the name of the Republic.’ The tumbrils rolled, the head bobbed in the bloody basket. Knock, knock, and the postman’s footsteps going away. Philip gathered the letters. The slit in the door was like the grating in a jeweller’s window. He remembered the policeman he had seen peer through. He had said to his nurse, ‘What’s he doing?’ and when she said, ‘He’s seeing if everything’s all right,’ his brain immediately filled with images of all that might be wrong. He ran to the baize door and the stairs. The girl was already there and Baines was kissing her. She leant breathless against the dresser.
‘Here’s Emmy, Phil.’
‘There’s a letter for you, Baines.’
‘Emmy,’ Baines said, ‘it’s from her.’ But he wouldn’t open it. ‘You bet she’s coming back.’
‘We’ll have supper, anyway,’ Emmy said. ‘She can’t harm that.’
‘You don’t know her,’ Baines said. ‘Nothing’s safe. Damn it,’ he said, ‘I was a man once,’ and he opened the letter.
‘Can I start?’ Philip asked, but Baines didn’t hear; he presented in his stillness an example of the importance g
rown-up people attached to the written word: you had to write your thanks, not wait and speak them, as if letters couldn’t lie. But Philip knew better than that, sprawling his thanks across a page to Aunt Alice who had given him a teddy bear he was too old for. Letters could lie all right, but they made the lie permanent. They lay as evidence against you: they made you meaner than the spoken word.
‘She’s not coming back till tomorrow night,’ Baines said. He opened the bottles, he pulled up the chairs, he kissed Emmy again against the dresser.
‘You oughtn’t to,’ Emmy said, ‘with the boy here.’
‘He’s got to learn,’ Baines said, ‘like the rest of us,’ and he helped Philip to three sausages. He only took one himself; he said he wasn’t hungry, but when Emmy said she wasn’t hungry either he stood over her and made her eat. He was timid and rough with her and made her drink the harvest burgundy because he said she needed building up; he wouldn’t take no for an answer, but when he touched her his hands were light and clumsy too, as if he was afraid to damage something delicate and didn’t know how to handle anything so light.
‘This is better than milk and biscuits, eh?’
‘Yes,’ Philip said, but he was scared, scared for Baines as much as for himself. He couldn’t help wondering at every bite, at every draught of the ginger pop, what Mrs Baines would say if she ever learnt of this meal; he couldn’t imagine it, there was a depth of bitterness and rage in Mrs Baines you couldn’t sound. He said, ‘She won’t be coming back tonight?’ but you could tell by the way they immediately understood him that she wasn’t really away at all; she was there in the basement with them, driving them to longer drinks and louder talk, biding her time for the right cutting word. Baines wasn’t really happy; he was only watching happiness from close to instead of from far away.
‘No,’ he said, ‘she’ll not be back till late tomorrow.’ He couldn’t keep his eyes off happiness. He’d played around as much as other men; he kept on reverting to the Coast as if to excuse himself for his innocence. He wouldn’t have been so innocent if he’d lived his life in London, so innocent when it came to tenderness. ‘If it was you, Emmy,’ he said, looking at the white dresser, the scrubbed chairs, ‘this’d be like a home.’ Already the room was not quite so harsh; there was a little dust in corners, the silver needed a final polish, the morning’s paper lay untidily on a chair. ‘You’d better go to bed, Phil; it’s been a long day.’
Twenty-One Stories Page 13