by Angus Wilson
“But, darling . . .”
“Now I know what you’re going to say. You mustn’t be shocked. And you mustn’t let it put you against your great-grandfather. Men are very vain. Even the best of them. Not that Tom hasn’t done useful things, putting colonies on an economic footing, drafting all sorts of important bills for ministers who were ninnies. But he’s not been one of the really important people, so what’s he want to add to the flood of books for? Sheer vanity! But it means that he’ll sacrifice anything for those old memoirs of his. Even his wife’s happiness. Of course, I don’t think of him as the real Tom, now. This is just what happens to the old.”
“But, darling . . .”
“When did I notice it first? Well, there you are, dear, you see. I’ve had one or two horrid spells of dizziness and so on. And so I called in the doctor here. Not a very clever man, I’m afraid. But when I bullied him and insisted that I should see a heart specialist in London, he agreed that I was probably right. But somehow, I don’t know why it is, I’ve never got there. Tom was determined I shouldn’t.”
“Oh, darling, are you sure? It sounds so silly . . .”
“Not silly, dear. He realized at once that he hadn’t got more than a year or two at the most to use me as secretary to get those old memoirs finished, and he wasn’t going to have that year wasted with me resting under doctor’s orders or anything like that. I don’t mind. At present I’ve decided to make the sacrifice. But as I said to you we mustn’t let ourselves become labels. So if I decide to run away, you shall hide me until they’re tired of looking. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course, darling,” Alexandra was about to add more, but she decided against it. “Don’t you think we ought to go back to Great-grandfather?”
“Indeed, yes. We don’t want to make them suspicious or they’ll put a double guard over me.” Lady Needham laughed bitterly. As they walked back to the house, she said, “Do you ever read Rhoda Broughton?”
“I’ve never heard of her before, I’m afraid.”
“I thought as much. How lucky you were here.”
And so she said to Sir Thomas. “You went to sleep, Tom. That silly woman wanted us to buy a house that belonged to Rhoda Broughton. But luckily Alexandra was here and she said at once that no one read her now. And when I said that Alexandra knew because she was a University student of English Literature, you should have seen the silly woman’s face.”
“Rhoda Broughton?”
“Oh, really, Tom. The famous novelist: Red as a Rose is She and all that sort of book. You’ll forget your name next. Anyway we mustn’t have that Mrs. Hoyland Leach here again. She tried to make mischief. Hinting that old people can’t accommodate themselves to the young. It wasn’t very pleasant in front of Alexandra. Do you like anchovy toast, Alexandra? I’ll go and talk to Harriet and see what she can do for us. She’s probably made some of her delicious little rice cakes. She’s always so pleased to have someone to make them for. She can’t do enough for any member of the family, you know, after all these years.”
She made a face over her husband’s head as she left the room. But Alexandra couldn’t tell whether it was a wink, or frown, or what.
However, there was clearly no time to lose, so she said abruptly, “Is there any madness in the family, Great-grandfather? I mean is that why my mother never had another baby?”
Sir Thomas looked at her for a moment or two, solemnly, then he said very deliberately, “I’ve always understood that she didn’t want another child. It was in the air then, you know. Had been since the Great War unsettled people. And your father’s a good enough chap, but he hardly rises above the idées reçues of the moment. Angry young man, as I remember.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“There are rather a lot of questions there, you know. Now to take one. Did your mother suppose that there might be hereditary insanity in the family? And then again, did this weigh with her in her decision not to have a second child? Now, those are two questions. If you were preparing a minute for a minister, you’d set them out separately. I can’t answer either of them definitely. I’ve the greatest respect and affection for Zoe, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t get bees in her bonnet.”
“Well could there be any reason for such bees? Don’t you see this is important to me. I’ve been so near breakdown and sometimes it seemed to me that it’s more than breakdown. You see surely that, however much I want to, I can’t have the baby if that’s at risk.”
She spoke as a child to a child.
“I see that you’ve worked yourself up in a way that does no credit to your education, my dear. The purpose of a University education, or one of them, is to teach people how to formulate questions. Get your questions straight and you may get the right answers to your problems.”
She tried to dismiss the look of patronage which he gave her as absurd; but then it suddenly appeared to her as a sneering emphasis of all the unfairness that life suddenly brings to the innocence and good intentions of youth. He was Sauron or perhaps the guileful Gollum, playing on her pity for the confusions of old age. If she refused all such pity and attacked him directly, perhaps all the forces of cruelty and hatred and unconcern which had brought blackness to the clear skies of a year ago—of the first happy love times of the three Hobbits last year—would burst down upon her in a storm that would end in the return of sunshine, of goodness and of love and innocence and the hope of a new world.
“And Great-grandmother? Is she normal?”
She had so expected him to blast her with lightning or to shrivel away to nothing before her eyes, that she was disconcerted when he sighed, as it seemed with relief, wearily it is true, but nevertheless with relief.
“Ah! So that’s it. My dear girl, there are many good aspects about being very old. One doesn’t compete, one doesn’t act regardlessly, one doesn’t expect. Very useful negatives. But it brings, of course, attendant miseries. Of body and of mind. Lucy’s told you a lot of stuff, I expect, about her heart being bad, hasn’t she? And probably a lot of other troubles too. All pure fancy! And you mustn’t encourage them. She could become a miserable hypochondriac. But we won’t let her. I shall need your help in that, Alexandra. No, it’s typical of one of Hardy’s life’s little ironies. She’ll live to be over a hundred, probably. The more the nervous imagination plays up like that, the longer the person lives. Just see if she’s coming back, will you? No? Well, then I can tell you this: and I can do so with a clear mind, and, anyway, it won’t harm you to have somebody else’s woes to take your mind off your own problems. I shan’t live long. It doesn’t matter. I’ve had a good life. It’s comedy not tragedy. The doctor’s a humane man. He won’t let me suffer more than is necessary. Meanwhile I must press on with the memoirs. If they do nothing else, they keep Lucy’s mind off her imaginary ills. Ah! There you are, Harriet! And a smell of delicious newly baked cake. The fatted calf, in fact. Well, Lucy, I think I’ve been able to help this prodigal.”
“Alexandra’s not a prodigal, dear. She’s just been unlucky.”
“Ah, yes. ‘One more unfortunate, weary of breath.’ But we won’t go on with that quotation. Trouble is she’s got her questions all wrong, you see. Fatal when you have a problem. Now I’ve sorted them out. What you need, my dear, is intellectual discipline. You know what I think, Lucy? She shall stay down here with us and help with the memoirs. She can have her baby here. Harriet’ll feed her up, won’t you, Harriet?”
“Harriet—do you remember those meringues you used to make for Miss Alexandra when she was quite tiny? Coffee, weren’t they?”
“That’s right, my lady.”
“Could you make them again, do you think?”
“I think so, my lady. I’d be glad to for Miss Alexandra.”
“There you are, Alexandra. Harriet’s not forgotten any of us.”
Their voices sounded so sweet and menacing, so tender and silken and cooing and cruel. How can you know what is siren song? How can you tell the
purring of the great cats? How can you pierce the fair elfin mist, or penetrate the great Boig, when you’re only beginning life?
“It’s not fair. It’s not fair,” Alexandra cried, and she began to scream as the faces closed in on her.
*
They sat at this chromium fitted table in the chromium fitted room that couldn’t have altered for twenty or so years, for it had a kind of pink plastic sugar thing on the table that you pushed for the sugar, which the Little Mam said had been part of the war austerity. And there were those big coffee machines you still see sometimes that make a lot of hissing. The coffee was that kind too, all froth. And the Little Mam said He and Uncle Leslie had lived off it when they were students. It was all Italy then, apparently, like movies now, but shirts and suits as well then.
All this the Little Mam told her, as she could guess, to take her mind off things. And what with the shush, shushing of these chromium monsters and those awful clattering staccato voices Italians use to talk to each other, and sudden violent swooshes of traffic every few minutes, as though they were sitting under a fly-over, instead of in a dirty-book kind of little street quite a long walk off the Tottenham Court Road, she found it very hard to listen to her grandmother who spoke, as always but a bit more so in public, in a soft chuckling voice that she must have learned from exchanging intimate chaff with the customers at the bar.
As a result, Alexandra found herself brooding over this awful extra week away from the University, as always when her mind wasn’t artificially filled. It made her feel ashamed because it was at her request, whenever she felt imprisoned, that the poor Little Mam heaved herself (well hardly, because she was so tiny, petite they probably said then) out of the comfort of Number 8 and went with her to cinemas, cafés, parks, even amusement arcades. As if she hadn’t done enough, handing over the restaurant to an untrustworthy manageress and coming to London just to live with her grand-daughter!
And Alexandra really did want to respond to this kindness, for the Little Mam had been so truly good—not the “brick” that He had tried to make her out—but really aiding; not Gran and Grand-daughter playing at being pals which His awful picture of the plucky Little Mam had made her fear; nor “darling, there isn’t really any difference between the generations, not when it comes to fundamentals, there isn’t, I promise” that poor Mama sometimes tried out; but really concerned and loving. To begin with she asked all about Rodrigo and Ned often and about the way they moved and about the hair on their chests, though she pretended resolutely to think that only one of the two could be “serious” and clearly hoped it was Rodrigo. She had seen at once why Alexandra loved the little line of blond hairs that ran all the way down Rodrigo’s backbone. She agreed that being kissed by beards (although apparently for some reason she knew much more about moustaches) could, if you gave yourself up to it, be a good sensation in itself, quite apart that is from the delights of the lips and the tongue and the kiss itself. And then, except when she was worried by one’s being in a state, as now—and even that was probably because They’d got at her, or Mama and her doctors had, and exaggerated it all—the Little Mam just listened and sat and asked sensible questions and (getting on terribly well with Concepcion) saw to it that one had nourishing but also delicious meals with lots of kinds of ice-creams, and put one’s swollen feet and ankles up.
But now, as she strained to catch the Little Mam’s words and could not, Alexandra’s straying attention began to wonder whether, this week late for term on the doctor’s orders, and Them moving out, and the Little Mam coming up, was not a pacifying sequence too good to be true. If, here and now, the Little Mam proved to be too good and too patient, it would perhaps reveal that they were keeping her in London to prevent her from being with Rodrigo and Ned (although she had spoken often to them on the telephone), or that the mental illness had really begun, or that They were driving her into it so that They could have an excuse to abort, however late, and break her will with Theirs.
To test the sincerity of her grandmother she began, against the slow stream of the Little Mam’s reminiscence, another stream, siphoning the sugar out of the horrible pink plastic penis-shaped device upon the table until it made the beginning “Gaud” in sugar writing, for she needed magic protection.
She did not, however, prove her grandmother false, for the Little Mam ceased her talk and said sharply, “Stop it, Al. If you’re not careful you’ll turn into a slut. And if you’re going to be a girl on your own, that way lies the gin bottle. I’ve seen it too often and too much not to warn you, duck.”
So Alexandra thought of another way of testing the Little Mam. She began herself to talk very fast.
“And you see, although apparently the kidney tests were all perfectly clear, as soon as she saw this swelling thing of my ankles, Doctor Dunkerley got into this state. And then Mama, of course, became quite hysterical. And She got Concepcion worked up. You know how superstitious peasants are about childbirth. I’m sure she didn’t understand a thing about what Mama said to her about the Dreaded Toxæmia, although of course that was nonsense too, as Doctor Dunkerley said, I mean I’m only four and a half months. But anyhow, she, I mean Concepcion, had seen a mouse in my room, or said she had, but I don’t believe it for a moment, for though Number 8’s an old house, sort of not quite Regency, there aren’t any mice, or if there are it’s her fault. Anyway apparently mice are terribly unlucky for pregnant women in Spain and the baby’s born dead or mad. And Mama was terrified I should hear all that, although why she should think my very real fears would be affected by Concepcion’s superstitions, I don’t know. So they all began screaming. Poor Pa! I mean, all those women, including me, of course. So there had to be this absolute promise not to go back until the end of the first week of term. And I agreed but not if They were to be there. It would have been awful having Them about, but mainly I think I just wanted to impose my will. It’s part of an hysteric state, you know. And making Them go to an hotel from Their own home was quite a triumph, you see. I mean you could call it a sick thing, but still it’s a victory. And for the person to be with me I chose poor you . . .”
To Alexandra’s real fright, the Little Mam brought her gloved hands flat down upon the table—bangers in Up Jenkins that she’d played with the Little Mam as a child—and a terrific bang it was with her many rings. And clouds of sugar Gandalf filled the air like Christmas Tree frost. You could sense the people behind looking round. Scenes are so awful. But the Little Mam was unperturbed, for she shrilled, “Shut up! Shut up!” Not the intimate chaffing widow behind the bar (“Two bouncing boys? I don’t believe it.” “Sorry, duck, it’s true.”); but another Little Mam, buried now in the past, putting those out who had taken liberties. “Shut up, Al. I don’t want to hear any more.”
Then more quietly she took her hands up; and you could see people going back to their coffees and their pizzas and their Bologneses.
“You said all that four or five times to me the first two days when I came to Number 8. You said it again only this morning. Why are you repeating it all now? No, don’t say because you’re worked up. We know all that. But you’re an artful little thing. It’s part of your charm and your trouble. Even this mistake of yours. You use it. And I don’t say you shouldn’t, love. Any girl on her own has to use anything to hand. But all that stuff. You were watching me, Al, when you said it. Why? I mean I expect I bore the tits off you, dear, as my friend Edna Ashe used to say. But I’m doing my real best, dear. I can’t talk books. You knew that anyway. But all that stuff. Twice in a day. I’m not Lady Needham—a bit missing in the upper storey. Give us a chance. How old do you think I am, Al? I suppose a hundred and two to you. But I’m not senile, my memory’s not quite gone.”
The Little Mam’s Slav wooden doll face, with its funny all-over pancake sort of make-up, set, as she said this, in such sad, lost lines that Alexandra felt desperately ashamed. It was this stinky illness, making her suspicious of everyone. Soon she would have no friends left. Big tears formed in her
eyes and began to roll slowly down her cheeks. But there was no hysteria, none of the usual shaking or sobbing; she was too tired for that.
The Little Mam left her seat, came round the table and sat next to her grand-daughter, put her arm round her, pressed her tightly.
“Oh, Ally Pally! for crying out loud! You do make a fuss of it all, don’t you, lovey?”
“I thought you were just being nice. I thought They’d got you here to stop me going back. And I do want to go back, Gran. I want so much to go back to life as it was. I don’t want to be like this. I want to be like I used to be.”
“Yes, dear. I know. And up to a point . . .”
“Oh, I know I’m an escapist. Or I seem so. But truly I do realize that it can’t be the same. Not with the baby. But I started it and I must give it all I can.” She sat up straight in her chair. “That’s why I must go back, Gran. I shall need a good degree if I’m to do all I want for that child. I should think another coffee, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I shouldn’t, Al.” The Little Mam burst out laughing. “How you do act it all. It’s like a play. But you’re right about the baby. I know that winter I had the bad influenza, they couldn’t stop me going back to work. At the Bag of Nails, it was. And a girl there. Ida. She always seemed a real bitch. But she stood in for me two or three times marvellously. You know, when I felt I couldn’t stand on my feet. But I’d got three mouths to feed. So you see, Al, people aren’t all that bad. There are swine, of course, everywhere. But people don’t have the time for all this pretending and taking you in and making you do what you don’t want to. Like you seem to think. Or so it seems to me.” She took her gloves out of her bag. “I’ve had enough of this fug. Are you coming or not? Or do you still think that I’m pulling a fast one?”
“No, no. I want to come with you.”
“All right then. Just to show. I’m going to phone that Doctor Whatsit. She doesn’t seem a bad female. And I’ll tell her I’m sending you back to the University tomorrow. On my own authority. Get back with your boys, that’s what you need. And your work. You’ll take it easy when you ought to. Nature has its way. Zoe fusses too much. She was brought up differently. And Perry’s an old sentimentalist. All this about my hard life bringing two boys up. ’Course it was hard, but there’s more to it than that. Leslie knows. I suppose it’s the compensation Nature gives them. Understanding a bit what we women feel. And now I’ll pay and we’ll get out of this fuggy dump. That doesn’t do you any good. A bit of a walk would do no harm. London’s changed and not for the better, but I may as well see what they’ve done to it while I’m up here. And as soon as you say, ‘Gran, I’m tired’—taxi.”