Worse was Oliver’s trolley car. It was an old tradition with us, for which I was entirely responsible, that as Oliver had been cheated by war and postwar penury out of mechanical toys in his childhood, I would make it up to him year by year. In our early marriage, especially when we were short of money, I had spent solemn hours among windup monkeys and music boxes. Now the tradition was as empty to me as a Baptist communion, but I could no more give it up than Oliver could let me sleep in the guest room. So here was a battery-operated trolley car that buzzed and lit up, backed off from obstacles and changed directions. It was vulgarly painted in primary colors and had cost about half of what Mrs. Coombe lived on for a week. Grimly I boxed Oliver’s toy and Jill’s objet d’art. I was taping the paper around them when Oliver knocked.
“All right to come in?”
“All safe.”
“Virginia, what is this?”
I finished smoothing a corner and taping it down before I looked. Oliver had a fistful of canceled checks, and the top one he held out to me was made in the amount of thirty-six pounds to Mrs. Lena Fromkirk. I started and felt the heat rising, addressed myself to the other end of the package and knocked the roll of tape on the floor. I remember thinking as I bent to it that I’d already registered guilt, that it was going to come out now; and it was without any forethought or inspiration whatsoever that I straightened up, pouted and heard myself saying, “You’re not to ask.”
“You and your Christmases.” Oliver shook his head, only partly mollified, but bound as I was by our rituals to leave it at that.
The simplicity of it staggered me. All I had to do was cover the debt. The next morning I cashed an unusually large housekeeping check, bought a length of Harris tweed on sale at Ryder’s in Cambridge, and took it to a local tailor to be made into a sport jacket. The total cost would be twenty-two pounds. Five days later I cashed another check, and in the meantime took to complaining of the rising prices, real enough, of candles, Christmas trees, nuts and ribbons—an occupational indignation that I had always found extremely boring. But it was easy enough to carry over into grass seed and toilet paper. I found that I could substitute New Zealand lamb for English, and as long as I lied firmly enough, nobody would know the difference. I could cut down on French cheeses and take Genoa salami instead of Ardennes. I could wear holey tights under trousers and buy two ounces less of everything. I found, in fact, that although (because?) I was indifferent to our money, I wasted a good deal of it, and at this late date I found out what economy was.
On Christmas morning I gave Oliver the sport jacket and praised the tailoring skills of the Mrs. Fromkirk I had found. Notice especially the pocket detail and the cut of the armholes. Oliver was delighted. Well, it was a nice jacket. A few days later I went back to Mrs. Fromkirk with a month’s rent hoarded out of the housekeeping and the holiday budget. She was delighted too, both at having an empty room paid for and at being paid in undeclarable cash.
“These taxes,” she confided.
I bought a Marks and Spencer sweater and sewed a Harrods label into it. To Oliver I bitched of the promised January rise in eggs and petrol. I saw no reason I could not continue in this way indefinitely, and I registered with no little wonder how easy it is to steal one’s own money.
14
THE MINI BROKE DOWN on the way back to St. Margaret’s. It had been coughing and stalling for a few weeks, scarily sluggish passing on an uphill grade, corroding gangrenously at the points and in need of nightly transfusion from the recharger. But this time it quit dead. I’d pulled out around an empty farm truck to find myself facing an articulated lorry lumbering over the rise. There was time to get back but not through, which ought to have been evident to the farmer; it was not. He leaned on his brakes, which meant I had to slam mine, pump at them and snake back behind his swinging tailgate. I overshot and stalled on the grass verge, and the mini wouldn’t start again.
“The battery’s dead,” Jill opined.
“It can’t be. We’ve been on the road for twenty miles, and that recharges it, see? It’s more likely to go dead when it’s been sitting.”
“We’re out of gas?”
“Filled it yesterday.” I pumped, choked and revved, let it sit in case I’d flooded it, then pumped and revved again until the battery ran down like a record player and came finally round to Jill’s first opinion.
“It doesn’t want to,” she emended now.
“Honey, I think you’re right.”
I raised the bonnet, a purely formal matter, since I did not really expect to see more than a mucky maze of inert guts.
“Well, it looks to me like we’re going to hitch. Are you up to it?”
“Sure.”
There was a choice to make. We were four or five miles from the village of Plunkton Green and fifteen from St. Margaret’s. We could either take the bags and hitch ponderously all the way, or we could leave them and go just as far as a tow truck. I put it to Jill.
“I’d miss assembly if we wait to get it fixed, wouldn’t I?”
“You may miss it anyway, but we can try if you like.”
“Yes, please.”
I slammed the bonnet and dragged out the two-suiter, the overnighter and the carrier bag. “Look, honey, do you mind missing assembly, or do you just think you ought to be there?”
She considered, one toe scratching an ankle, pigtails hanging like streamers from the monk-ugly shape of the St. Margaret’s hat. “I’d be embarrassed,” she conceded. “So I’d mind.” A real answer.
“Let’s go, then.” I took the suitcases and she the bag, and we started off through brown furze that was alternately bristly and puddly. At the first rise I dug out clean socks and Wellingtons for Jill, but I had no change of shoes, and began to feel the foam lining of my loafers squish like cold sponge. It did not seem to me a matter for serious belief that passing drivers, of whom there were a dozen in ten minutes, should race on by the spectacle of a fraught matron trying to close a suitcase on a country stile, and a uniformed gamin in plaits waving a Wellington boot. But then I was raised in California.
“Sod bugger!” I yelled after the dozenth. Jill ignored me and pulled on the boot. For a while there was no traffic and we walked on; it was better to walk than stand in the freezing wind. The suitcases dragged at my arms and jostled gorse and holly. The wind grew fangs. Jill trudged more equably than I, getting pink, chattering.
“You’re supposed to hold with your knees but I forget. But I like galloping best.”
She ran to a fence to exchange stares with a cow who sniffed her carrier bag and ground its cud. She raced back to me asking, “Do you know what Donald Duck was before he was a duck?”
“No, what?”
“A cow.”
“No, that’s news to me. Did you make it up?”
“No, it’s true! Well, the artist, I forget his name, I read it in a book.”
“Walt Disney?”
“No, no. Somebody that worked at Walt Disney. He was looking for something and he tried a cow but it wasn’t right, you know? And then he thought of a duck and that was Donald Duck. Forever after.”
“Amen,” I laughed, watching her nipped nose wrinkle with the excitement of pure information. She hopped and swung the bag, limber against the wind.
“It’s true!”
“Oh, I believe you. I have the same trouble all the time myself.”
“You don’t do Donald Duck.”
“No, but I mean, I have to work at my ideas until I find the right shape for them. It’s the same thing, I try a butterfly and I really need a praying mantis.”
“Huh. I never thought of that.” She thought of it, bounced her palm on a dry gorse bush and turned back to me mischievously. “Do you know what Mickey Mouse was before he was a mouse?”
“You tell me.”
“Mickey Mantis!” She sailed away shrieking with laughter, tripped on a rock and went down on her gray flannel hem in an ice-crusted puddle. The carrier bag split.
“Mickey Monster,” I said. “Mickey fucking muckup.” We giggled together while I swiped at her skirt with my handkerchief and then my coat. One of her braids came undone and she smeared her face pushing it back. We were both muddy and askew and wildly pleased with each other. When a line of cars crawled past us, held in check by a loaded poultry van, we made only minimally serious attempts to stop them. I cradled the burst carrier bag in my arms and held it out to the van. “Penny for the Guy!”
“Mickey Monster!” Jill shouted after him.
“Mickey Michaelmas!”
“Mickey Monkey!”
The cars shied past, furtive glances out the windows. They left a wake of icicle exhaust.
“Jill, this is nuts. We’ll freeze out here. We’ve got to pull ourselves together.”
“Why don’t they stop?”
“Because they think we’re a couple of escaped loonies. I think so myself. Here, hold the bag while I tie my scarf around it.”
In the end we were picked up by a 1947 maroon Rolls-Royce taxi with pigskin seats. It came over the hill, snooty-grilled and grunting comfortably against the wind, very like a Walt Disney version of a miracle.
“I don’t believe it,” I said to Jill.
“I don’t believe it,” I said to the septuagenarian driver who wafted to a stop and loaded our bags in the plush-lined boot.
“Oh, ay,” he answered mildly, “I’m often round about here in the mornings.” Mr. J. G. Hartley, he was, who’d passed our stranded car a bit back and had an eye out for us; who’d had his Rolls as a bequest of Lady Morris-Grigson at her demise; who’d been her chauffeur man and boy for fifty years, and now got by quite tolerably trundling folk back and forth between the villages.
“I think we must lead a charmed life,” I insisted, settling muddily back against the leather. Nevertheless the charm in the atmosphere receded. Jill and I fell silent while Mr. Hartley entertained us toward St. Margaret’s with goings-on in the old days at the Morris-Grigson manor. The closer we got the more aware I became that it was a full year since I’d first brought Jill to boarding school, and that I was no more settled in my mind about it now than I was then. There was something symbolic about our arriving this time so unkempt in so royal a conveyance, but what it might be symbolic of I couldn’t decide. The heat comforted us, then made us drowsy. Jill slumped in the seat studying her hands, closing a fist now and again to watch the cracks in the drying dirt.
There were no girls on horseback in the village, but as we passed the stone cottages with their impeccable thatched roofs and tidy gardens Jill raised her stare to those, nodding at each one, frowning slightly.
“They read our letters,” she said out the window, at the houses.
“They what, baby?”
“They read what we put, in our letters home.”
“Oh.”
“They make us write every week, and then Miss Meridene reads them.”
“Well. Do you want to say things you don’t want her to see sometimes?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes. I wanted to put when Penny Mountjoy broke my riding crop.”
“Miss Meridene wouldn’t have minded your telling me about that.”
“No,” she agreed indifferently. But it was not the point.
“You can call me anytime you want to.”
“Okay.” But it was not the point. She stared at the distorted lifeline in the film of dirt on her palm, unable to convey, as I was unable to acknowledge, that she had a sense of privacy beyond the closing of bathroom doors, which St. Margaret’s unaccountably ignored.
“Jill,” I said rashly, with a sudden single hard pound of heart muscle, “do you want to come back and live at home, and go to school in Eastley Village?”
“Oh, no.” She turned to me quite blank, quite bewildered at this illogical leap. “Why, no, Mummy, I love St. Margaret’s.”
And we drew up into a gaggle of uniforms streaming out of assembly hall; we unwound into their giggles, the comical pair with the paper bag in the tourniquet and the thistles in their socks; disheveled out of the purple pumpkin into the arms of Miss Meridene: “You poor dears! Come straight in and get warm by the fire!”
Mr. Hartley drove me all the way home, stopping in Plunkton Green to arrange for a tow truck and repairs. The garage called next day, collect, to say that they could put it right for a hundred pounds. Oliver didn’t trust them; he had more faith in our bloke in Migglesly, who duly towed the mini from Plunkton Green. Our bloke in Migglesly said I needed brake shoes, carburetor cleaning, clutch assembly, a whole exhaust system, a new starter motor, a battery and two tires. He could do it for a hundred and eighty, but if I didn’t mind his saying so, it wasn’t worth it. If I didn’t mind his saying so, it was time Mrs. Marbalestier had a new car. I put the alternatives to Oliver, who said we’d have to give it some thought. I gave it some thought by scanning the classifieds for a mini a few years younger. Oliver gave it some thought by bringing home brochures on new Rovers and Volvos.
“I don’t need anything wonderful, I just need something to get me from here to there.”
“You don’t want to be running around in an old crate.”
“I’ve been running around in an old crate for five years.”
“We’ll have to give it some thought.”
All this consumed ten days. On the first of them I rode into East Anglian with Oliver, but he made it so evident that this was a trial to him—he’d be in Tippet in the afternoon and could have gone straight back from there—that at the end of the day I packed a portfolio and prepared to work at home for the duration. Once I took a taxi into Migglesly to see Frances, but I was not anxious to press my luck on concealed expenses, so I explained to her about the car and said I might not be back till it was fixed. She looked at the television screen and said she understood. She hid her hands under the covers and said it didn’t matter.
I called her every afternoon but telephone conversation was predictably impossible, and after the first couple of days we tacitly agreed on a minimal exchange of nonnews and pleasantries. I worked at home, badly, and felt as isolated as a mountaineer. Finally I called our bloke in Migglesly and told him to do the absolute minimum, which he agreed to with the assurance that in a few months’ time I’d be sending good money after bad.
But the parts didn’t come, and one of the mechanics got the flu, and it was February before I was mobile again. As soon as I was, I pushed the poor patched mini to East Anglian and dumped my stuff into Design Print.
“I thought I’d die without you!”
“We’ve been hitting the bottle ourselves,” Malcolm said. “Where you off to now?”
“Gotta see Clive Tydeman. Put on the kettle, I’ll be right back.”
Clive jumped up from his drawing board—paisley with lilies of the valley—and took me by both hands.
“They told me you’d been away. Come see, come see.”
He drew me out and along the walk toward the tapestry weaving barn. “You haven’t missed a lot, we’ve only got one color running so far. Wouldn’t you know we’d have four broken slab stocks all at once, and it took forever to get them down from Gorringer’s.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been three weeks getting a starter motor and a couple of tires.”
“Well, but wait till you see. The texture reverse is better than I thought, and they’ve got a new polyester fiber that you’d swear to God came out of the flax fields of Flanders. Absolute linen to the life, except that it won’t scrunch up and you can throw it in the washer …”
He said something else, but by now we were into the noise of the machines. He rolled his eyes at the roar and led me back to where one of the newest looms, the kind with two shuttles meeting at the center, was throwing itself thread by thread into the pattern of Frances’s Rubigo. It was in the pale scheme, a slightly luminous eggshell ground with the rougher beige design set deep in it. It fed from the loom bed in lazy folds like foam over the edge of a dam, and laid itself richly ba
ck and forth at our feet.
“You like?” he shouted.
I nodded, covering my mouth for pleasure and wishing Frances were here, to see it come this way weighty and authoritative toward her, an object arguably useful, arguably handsome as an apple tree.
“Can I have a cutting?”
I took a three-yard piece back to Design Print to spread out for the others.
“Before anybody suggests that I’m trying to take over furnishing fabrics, let me suggest that I’m trying to take over furnishing fabrics.”
“Wow,” said Dillis.
“No, actually, it’s a one-shot,” I said. “I just didn’t think it’d do for dress print.”
“Oh, mother, that’s something.” Malcolm ran a forefinger over it, crushed a corner in his palm and smelled it. “Superfine gorgeous. Hey, isn’t it that whatsit you didn’t use?”
“The Rubigo, yes.”
“But what’d you do to it?”
“It’s another version.”
“I’ll say. Thought through again from scratch, eh?”
“Pretty well thought through from scratch.”
“Oh, you had a call,” said Dillis.
Mom held the swath against the wall and pinched it deftly into curtain folds. “Whatever made you think of doing this?” she asked. “Isn’t it old damask weave?”
“It was Clive Tydeman’s idea.”
“Here it is; Miss Gavin at Migglesly hospital. She said to call her back.”
Miss Gavin was the nurse in the pony tail. I called apprehensively. Well, nobody had told her to get in touch with me, she was calling on her own, but she thought I’d want to know that Miss Kean had put her fist through the hospital window.
The curtains were drawn for deliberate gloom. She was propped up in bed staring at the blank television screen. Her right hand, this time, was bandaged, this time voluminously, into a clumsy paw shape.
“Oh, Frances.” I sat down beside her. She looked at me from beetled brows and grunted nasally. I could see both that she was sedated and that it wasn’t working very well.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here for so long. I’d have come if you’d let me know.”
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