by Jane Gardam
‘What? Oh, of course you’re not. You can’t leave for Thwaite now. You can’t possibly travel alone—and Maitland and I can’t possibly do without you. We need you to be noticeable. With taxi-drivers and everywhere. We need you—to get the children home.’
‘No, no,’ he said, and cleared his throat so that the safari fire-irons jingled. ‘I am—her—um, going to leave—er—Thwaite.’
‘Leave Thwaite! You are going to leave Thwaite?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am—er—trying to say, Polly, that I am—in fact, in my will I have already done so—I am leaving you Thwaite, Polly. When I die.’
‘Will you be wanting anything more?’ asked the assistant, approaching with the tall box.
The next day we were at Liverpool Street at seven once again, but again there was no train. The blackboard was wiped clean.
No one to ask. No Jewish relatives. Nobody. There had obviously been some vital announcement that we had missed by visiting The Army and Navy Stores the day before. We walked about Moorgate and the City Road and London Wall and went to look at the Bank or England for a time, and up and down. ‘How do they stand it?’ asked Maitland. ‘The noise of it all? Look at all the white faces. And what are they all running for? Miss Polly, I’m sorry—I must sit.’
‘Oh yes. So must I.’
‘I’d thought we might look over a few of the city churches,’ said Mr Thwaite, who was growing more and more vigorous as the days went by and we grew weaker. ‘And there’s the Mansion House and Smithfield Market. Oh yes, and several excellent stations I believe. For instance, none of us may see Fenchurch Street in our lives if we don’t see it now.’
‘Well, see it you may but it’ll be alone,’ said imperious Maitland, who had confessed in the hotel the evening before that since the butler’s death and Lady Celia’s, she and Mr Thwaite had become very close: ‘Miss Polly and I need a cup of coffee.’
‘Or Bovril, Oxo, Ovaltine or even Mazawattee Tea,’ said I.
‘Perhaps one sherry,’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘If we can stop Polly from being an utter abstainer.’
‘No thank you. Look—it’s awful here. Maitland’s quite right. Listen to us shouting in this traffic. Let’s go back to see if there’s some news and if there’s not—well, we could go to a park somewhere or go and look at the river.’
‘It’s the river through Thwaite meadows I’ll be glad to see again,’ said Maitland. ‘If ever we do. We’re stuck with this Liverpool Street, it seems to me, for life.’
But at the station there was now a great change. Crowds were pushing, yelling, shoving and being issued with identity tags; and in a moment we were among them and being whisked up into the gallery of some sort of railway building. Below us streams of children were flowing in, and Red Cross ladies. Wild-looking government and railway officials ran among them, clutching armfuls of notes and the air was salty and sour with the smell of dirty hot children and cries in German and English together, and there was quarrelling and weeping. The children poured steadily, slowly into the hall below us as if the tide of them would never cease.
We sat in a row and Mr Thwaite dozed. Maitland and I were now electrically wide-awake. ‘He’s old,’ said Maitland. ‘He is old now. Tiredness hits him sudden. He’s over eighty. One forgets.’
‘I never think of him as any special age.’
‘And he has left you Thwaite,’ she said, her eyes on the confusion of the world below.
‘Oh Maitland—did we dream it? Has he?’
‘Yes. I knew already. He’s talked about it. After all, you know Polly, he is your grandfather.’
The family next to us were called by a ferocious Red Cross captain with a fine, permanent wave, and bulged and pushed past us wildly, treading on feet.
‘What!’
‘Your grandfather, of course.’
‘D’you mean—’
‘Emma—your mother—was his daughter.’
‘But how could—Maitland! D’you mean—? Aunt Frances?’
‘No, no. Mr Thwaite never cared for your Aunt Frances very much except as a sister. It was Miss Younghusband he was in love with, your Aunt Mary. She was a raving beauty when she was young—or so I understand.’
‘But you can’t mean—’ The world tipped and reeled as the uniting families tipped and reeled about us. ‘Aunt Mary!’
‘No—your Aunt Mary wasn’t your grandmother either, though she was old enough—twenty years older than your mother. Your Aunt Mary wanted to marry him but unfortunately—or fortunately since the result has been you, Polly dear—he then fell in love with her mother.’
‘What, the—? The battle-axe bosom? Grandmother Younghusband? The one who had Fanny Hill?’
‘I know nothing of any Fanny Hill. I don’t think she had more children still, though from all accounts the Archdeacon might not have noticed—’
‘But she couldn’t. She couldn’t! Mr Thwaite must have been so young. And Grandmother so very old.’
‘He was twenty. She was forty. I am told.’
‘But it’s terrible.’
‘A little strange,’ said Maitland, ‘but Victorian life is full of surprises. And the Archdeacon, you know, was almost obsessed with stones—and God, of course. I think I’ll just pop out on to the station and see about some more sandwiches.’
I sat looking at Mr Thwaite. Mr Thwaite at twenty, the lover of the warrior mother of Aunt Mary, the ice-maiden. I thought of Aunt Mary in the taxi on the way to Aunt Frances’s wedding, her face growing whiter and whiter under the wonderful ancient hat. And Mr Thwaite clearing his throat all the time and looking at the rain. And the tension mounting, mounting, so that at last it broke in the storm of my crying. And how I had been unable to stop the crying because of the awful confusion in the air.
Poor Mr Thwaite—conceiving my mother in some fit of pubic madness (I looked at his face—a long brown map, the eyes closed in their deep sockets just like—well, yes: the photograph of my mother in the cardboard mountains with the crease down the middle, tired out in Liverpool.) Had he loved her—his daughter? Had he even been to see her? He must have had to stop coming to the yellow house quite suddenly after it happened. And no explanation to Aunt Mary.
I mean—how could he have explained? How tell a girl he had wanted to marry that he had conceived a child by her mother? Well—but it was Borgian!
Poor Aunt Mary—her spoons and her prie-dieu.
Well then, and what a frightful, frightful man, this Arthur Thwaite. What a villain. And yet—oh no.
But what a grandmother I had had! What a terrible woman. And yet—the loneliness, the husband, quietly turning pages, singing hymns as he bounded into the sea. Gazing at stones. Poor woman.
So much never to be known.
And all that church!
Mr Thwaite stirred and woke and looked at me with blue eyes—oh heavens, mine again—and smiled.
‘No progress?’
‘No progress. Maitland’s gone for sandwiches. It’s all going awfully slowly.’
‘I’ll just nod off again then.’
I could not stop looking at him—dropping again easily into sleep, his hands (Oh Lord! My thumb!) crossed on the head of the silver-headed walking-stick.
Oh Lord God—men!
What men I’d known—cautious, inadequate, shadowy, grasping, dull. Maybe it was just bad luck. At any rate Mr Thwaite on one occasion had been none of these things. My grandmother on one astounding night (though maybe more? Maybe dozens? Maybe not even at night?) on at least one astounding occasion had admitted to some forgotten bed at Thwaite or the yellow house or even Danby Wiske—springs squeaking, feathers heaving—oh Lord!—one gloriously incautious man.
‘Egg and cress,’ said Maitland. ‘He’s dropped off again. Did I shock you, Polly? Are you sorry to know?’
‘No, no—of course not. Did—what did Lady Celia know?’
‘Everything of course. She and Mr Thwaite were very close. Always close.’
‘You were saying—’
I looked at the egg and cress, the taut dried-out upward curve of the railway sandwich—‘You were saying that you and Mr Thwaite are very close, too?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘He’s been quite a—successful sort of man with women hasn’t he? I mean, I always adored him as a girl. It’s interesting to know that there are such men. Usually they’re only in novels.’
‘Oh, he’s very successful,’ said Maitland comfortably. ‘He’s always needed quite a full-blooded life you know. Those arty, bohemian people at Thwaite—he found them very milk-andwater.’
We sat in our rows in the gallery. The children’s names were called out, oh so slowly; and the children in the morass below us thinned out, oh so slowly—talkative children, tired children, very young children—babies really—numbed grey children, fierce tough children and children who looked older than Abraham. All were beautifully dressed in clothes far too hot for the weather and rather too big. Each had a big luggage label round its neck. Some carried parcels, some carried dolls and bears, some leaned against each other on the benches with fingers in their mouths. As time passed, some slept.
At four o’clock in the afternoon there were still sixty or so children left below us. The benches around us full of relations were emptying. We had been brought tea, and something to eat. I ate and drank nothing. I looked. Two children were mine? Which, which, which?
‘Why are we so near the end? Haven’t they come? I can’t see properly. They all have their backs to us now.’
‘It is administered alphabetically,’ said Mr Thwaite, awaking from the present nap. ‘We shall be near the end.’
‘A great many Jews are zeds,’ said Maitland. ‘Let’s hope these of Polly’s are top of the zeds.’
But they were not. By six o’clock the great mass of children had thinned to a scatter, but ours were still not called.
Which, which, which.
Theo’s children. Theo’s and mine.
Seven o’clock. They had thinned to half a dozen, and the half a dozen didn’t look very special ones. Six times at least my heart had thumped when I thought I saw Theo’s turn of the head, Theo’s smile—or Rebecca’s red hair, long legs. Very quiet, wan children these last ones, crumpled on the benches now, and I allowed myself to think, in order to prepare myself for disappointment: mine may be resentful, sullen, ugly-minded children. Think what has been happening to them. Worse—I tried to think very rationally—they might look or be like Delphi Vipont—the Delphi who had looked at me forty years ago and at whom I had looked back and our dislike had bitten into both of us.
If two small Delphis awaited me?
But, ‘Zeit? Flint?’ nodded the Red Cross captain in my ear and I went down alone to the hall and saw two thin girls standing by the desk. One was curly and one was straight. They had the wooden faces of people blotched with tiredness but refusing to cry. The taller girl was clutching a book, she had kept her finger in the place she had reached when she had been called away to me. The little one held a doll, a bear, a china horse, and a lop-eared rabbit and had Theo’s eyes.
We said goodbye to Maitland and Mr Thwaite at York, Maitland most anxious and reluctant to go, Mr Thwaite, with a porter behind him pushing the luggage and the topee box, clearly relieved that all was done.
I was totally confident, rattling along in flowing German and as comfortable as if I had visited London every week of my life.
Hepzibah, Rebecca and I.
We changed trains at Darlington into the little train that ran down through the steel-works and out on to the marsh—or where the marsh had been. The great flames and plumes of fire still rose from where they were smelting the iron bars, the same long crocodiles of trucks, long puddles in the mud, long clanking pipes and rough old machines, and on the hills opposite, the woods still grew sparse so that the light shone through them like knitting-loops when you draw the needle out.
But the marsh was almost invisible now. So small.
It was afternoon—the afternoon of the next day and of course, since we were getting near the yellow house, it had begun to rain. ‘I did so want you to see it sunny,’ I said. ‘Look Hepzibah—do look out of the window even if it’s dreary. It’s where Daddy lived. Leave the book for ten seconds.’
‘Oh pretty,’ said Hepzibah, looking at The New House as the train clattered by. ‘What’s that thing on the roof?’ and then back to the book—which as far as I could see was rubbish.
‘A telescope.’
‘They’re doing something to it,’ said Beccy.
‘It was your father’s. I’m afraid they’re taking it down. They keep doing that. It’s because of the—’
‘The War,’ said Beccy looking at the lop-eared rabbit.
‘Daddy’ll get here,’ said Hepzibah firmly. Beccy leaned her head against my side.
‘It’s quite near,’ I said, when we reached our station, ‘we can walk if you like. Mr Boagey will bring the luggage on later for us. Would you like that?’
‘I won’t leave my things,’ said Hepzibah, ‘I’m not moving without my things.’ She was thirteen. There was trouble coming.
‘I’m staying with Tante Polly,’ said Beccy. ‘You go in the taxi, Hep, with the luggage.’
So Beccy and I came striding over the tarmac road and across the last tail-end of marsh to the yellow house.
‘Is that ours?’ she said.
‘Yes. Ours. It’s a funny old house.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘like a big ship.’
And so we blew in through the great front door, held open for us by Alice, with Hepzibah and the luggage alongside her in the hall. The doors slammed and the sea crashed and the windows shook, and we were all safe home.
THE END
AVictorian study. Shelves floor to ceiling, almost empty of books, but a few objects: a sewing box, a sherry decanter, a framed drawing.
A large sash window shows an expanse of moving sky—big, seagoing, creamy clouds. The furniture is contemporary (1986) sparse but pleasant. A gigantic television set has its back to the audience. One corner of the room is shadowy.
Beside the door an answerphone and an old woman—still tall, her hair still thick and brown and swept up on to the top of her head in a frisky twirl. Ankles rather swollen. Her cheeks, once round and rosy, have dropped a bit, pinching up the mouth. She wears a flamboyant shawl.
She speaks into the answerphone:
POLLY FLINT: Could you speak louder? The traffic—
Could you speak louder? The door is very thick.
Oh dear me, yes. The memoirs.
I’d forgotten the memoirs.
Oh dear, oh dear—I should be locked up.
Well I suppose I am locked up. I’ve locked myself up. Just a moment. Just a moment. Will you wait till I find the key?
She flicks down the switch, walks vaguely here and there, dabbing about on the shelves, on the chimney piece.
In the shadowy corner a shadowy figure begins to become apparent. It sits facing the television set. After a time POLLY FLINT eases her old self down into a chair also facing the set. Outside the yellow house the traffic zips past continually. At its gates there is a busy roundabout. Beyond them the old Iron-Works stand, dwarfed by the huge chemical city which has grown round them, its chimneys like silver pencils, its cooling towers like vast Christmas puddings decorated with a spaghetti of pipes. They are beautiful and weird. The yellow house sitting in the middle of them is bizarre.
At the back of the house the great front door is little changed but a journalist is sitting on the steps. She has cock’s-comb hair, all-in-one leather hose, is knitting a fluffy sweater and smoking a cigarette.
Round the corner after a time a car comes bumping and a black-eyed, dumpy, talkative woman gets out.
BECCY BOAGEY The traffic’s frightful. I can never park outside. Some day I’ll sink in this sand. Good morning. I’m Beccy Boagey. I’m the parson’s wife.
JOURNALIST I’m Charlotte Box. North-Eastern Gazette.
; BECCY Well, there’s no point waiting, dear, I’m afraid. She won’t see you. She won’t see reporters. She’s very old.
JOURNALIST It’s an appointment. She’ll see me. I’m not on about this nuclear thing. I was in her Confirmation Class. She knows me. I’m after her memoirs.
BECCY You’ll be lucky.
JOURNALIST Yes, I will. I am. She likes me. She has a laugh at me. Being called Charlotte Box. I don’t know why.
BECCY She’s had a time lately.
The vicar’s wife, Beccy Zeit, rings the bell, screams into an answerphone that she’s Beccy and please let me in Tante Polly. The metal grille crackles but there is no reply.
She does this I’m afraid. Locks herself in. Then when she comes to look for the key she forgets what she’s looking for.
She gives another great peal on the bell and then sits by Journalist.
JOURNALIST I don’t blame her, do you? Not moving. I wouldn’t move. Not to make way for nuclear waste I wouldn’t. Making way for rubbish. It’s a lovely house. It ought to be preserved or something.
BECCY I believe it was once, but then there was a compulsory purchase. She dug herself in. With the nuns. The house is let to some nuns. They’ve dug themselves in, too. They live round at the back.
JOURNALIST Oh, they’ll never do it–The Government. The nuclear waste. The dumping of nuclear waste. They’d never dare.
BECCY There’s plenty of room for it, you know. There always has been. Under the Hall Estate there are great salt caves you can run lorries round. They’ve been used for years as store rooms though nobody seems to have known about it.
JOURNALIST They catch on slow round here.
BECCY I never saw the salt caves. For this nuclear waste. But we weren’t here for very long, when I was young. The war came and we were evacuated to Thwaite School.
JOURNALIST That started here, didn’t it? Thwaite School? You’re Miss Flint’s some sort of daughter, aren’t you?