One Fine Day

by MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES

1

THE place was England, the time early morning. The clock in the hall struck eight. Stephen Marshall knew that it was right, for he had wound it up only last night, and that meant that in a few minutes he must go. He moved his shoulders irritably. Cup in hand, he was standing frowning out into the garden.

“Terrible, terrible,” he repeated gloomily.

“But what can one do?” said Laura.

She got up from the breakfast table and joined him. Victoria, still seated, watched their familiar backs, curiously alike, her father’s long and slim, her mother’s long and slim. But there the resemblance ended. Her mother’s hair was so curly, a mass of springing curls all over her head. Stephen’s head was quite sleek, and right at the back, interesting discovery, there was a tiny thinnish patch under the hair. Victoria watched it, fascinated, as she chewed bacon toast.

“Voller’s a shocking worker,” Stephen was saying.

“He’s too old, poor old darling,” Laura said.

“It comes to the same thing. If Chandler could see it now — !”

Chandler could not, for he was dead in Holland. The gardener had died, ironically, in the gardener’s paradise, the land of neatly regimented pink and azure and fleshy white blossoms. My man’s good on roses, Stephen used to say to friends who motored down for lunch on Sundays before the war. He could hear himself saying it, leaning back in the deck chair as he squinted idly at the lovely creatures each in their separate compartments edged with box, Angèle Pernet like apricots, spicy Étoile de Hollande, the stout white matron Frau Karl Druschki, Shot Silk, the pale petal against the dark, the perfect buds proud among the shining leaves. The soil suits ‘em, he would say, as though they sprang up like buttercups. And they would sit there, looking at the roses, talking idly, enjoying the hot sun — was it imagination that all the summer Sunday afternoons before the war had been hot ? — until out from the house tripped Ethel or Violet, smart in a pretty uniform, to take away the coffee tray.

He swallowed the last mouthful of tea, still staring out of the window.

“It seems almost to bear a grudge,” he said.

The garden’s vitality was indeed monstrous and somehow alarming. The rose beds had disappeared in long grass. Since he came home, Stephen had dug a few free, but as fast as he cleared them the weeds blew in again relentlessly, twining, creeping, choking with nooses of line bone-white fiber. Old Voller, coming up from the village of Weakling two evenings a week on his tricycle, slowly hanging up his jacket on a nail in the potting shed among the mice and onions, slowly blowing his nose in a red cotton square and getting his spade and creeping down the path — at the thought of his maddening slowness Stephen’s shoulders squirmed irritably again. Old Voller was no match for the strength of seven practically unchecked years, when only Laura had been here to help him with a little muddling with a trowel now and then. The result was that a vegetable war to the death appeared to be on, green in tooth and claw. The flowers rampaged and ate each other, red-hot poker devouring lily, aster swallowing bergamot, rose gulping jasmine. Cannibals, assassins, they sat complacent with corners of green tendrils hanging from their jaws. The cutthroat bindweed slid up the hollyhock and neatly slipped the wire round its throat. The frilled poppy and the evening primrose seeded themselves everywhere, exulting in the death of Chandler.

The thought of so much to do and no one to do it often got between Stephen and his work in London, where he was proceeding at this moment. Holding on at the telephone, he would doodle voracious caterpillars on his pad. Down the rain would hiss on the sooty tiles beneath his window, and he would think of the confounded green things shooting up, guzzling and growing like mad. Damn it, he would mutter, slamming down the papers on the table top.

“I thought in the middle of the night,” he said, coming back to his chair, “couldn’t we get the Cochranes’ gardener along, now they’re leaving, even if it’s only for two or three evenings a week? Young Porter. I don’t see why not. You might drop in and see if you can fix it, Laura, before somebody else snaps him up.”

“Well, I’ll try. Some time today I’ve got to go and look for Stuffy.”

“Oh, she wasn’t back this morning?” He glanced over at the basket in The corner.

“I’m sure she’s gone off to the gypsy’s dogs again on Barrow Down.”

“Oh Lord,” he groaned, “more puppies!”

2

STEPHEN picked up the telephone bill, which the postman had only just dropped on the mat with as lighthearted a smack as though it were a love letter. So many trunk calls — had they really had them? The awful total suggested that Laura spent the whole day putting in frantic calls to her family in Cornwall, but of course there was no check-up, none at all. Laura was incorrigible on the telephone, there was no denying it. She rambled, she paid no attention to three-minute time signals exploding in her ear. And through his mind shot the depressing thought that before the war, in the long, warm Sunday afternoon into which all that time seemed to have condensed when one looked back at it, he would not have had to worry about telephone Dills and the paying of them. He looked at Laura across the table.

“You might,” he said sharply, “have been a bit more careful.”

He meant about keeping Stuffy shut in, or about the telephone, or about anything she chose to take it to mean. At the back of his mind he deplored his use of that uncivil, positively unpleasant tone to Laura before Victoria, who sat there stolidly eating, certainly paying no outward attention. He remembered the amiable truce of good manners which used to exist, apparently, between his own father and mother. If t hey were irritated with each other, they never showed it. If they ever fought, he and his brother and sister were not permitted to witness the awful, the incredible battle. But it was quite impossible, he excused himself instantly, to keep up any such polite appearances in these days when the child was always with them, day and night, when no starchy arm descended to remove her and give them a bit of a breathing space, when she must take her whack, so to speak, out of the great adult bowl of whatever happened to be on hand in the way of conversational hodgepodge. He glanced at her. She was staring out of the window, not listening anyway. “Frightfully careless,” he said coldly,

“I know,” said Laura.

She sighed. She looked across the table at him, her forehead wrinkled. Suddenly everything began to get much better.

“Honor Farleigh rang up, and I ran in from the garden to answer the telephone. I quite forgot about Stuffy and the door.”

“Well,” he said, “it can’t be helped.”

He got up. Everything was suddenly, mysteriously better, as though the accumulated annoyance about the jungle of a garden, the telephone bill, Laura’s bitch being allowed to sneak off and get herself in the family way again, had all come to a head and been lanced. The relief was really extraordinary. He came round the table and kissed Laura.

“I must go,” he said, “I’m late.”

What a morning! Later it would be very hot, but now the dew frosted the gray spikes of the pinks, the double syringa hung like a delicious white cloud in the pure air. The cat sat with its feet close together on the unmown grass, and suddenly, sticking out a stiff back leg, ran its mouth up and down as though playing a passage on the flute. Summer at last, thought Stephen, and about time, too. London would be an oven.

“If Voller turns up before I’m home,” he said, “tell him to net the raspberries. We’re going to lose the lot now the jays have got on to ‘em.”

He ruffled the mousy fair hairs which had escaped on the nape of Victoria’s neck from the two wiry pigtails. The back of her neck, he thought, was still babyish, innocent and touching. But elsewhere the world had caught up with her, clothing her in hideous navy-blue serge and white poplin, making wary the long-lashed eye. She was ten. What does a child of ten think about? he wondered. He was blessed if he knew, although there were so many opportunities for finding out. He tickled the back of her neck kindly and absently, as though it were the patch of warm fur behind a kitten’s ear. “Good-bye,” Victoria said coolly.

They hoard him banging about, in the hall. The drawer of the hall table was opened and shut, he muttered something, he leaped upstairs two at a time. Then down he came, stuck his head round the corner of the door, and asked Laura to pick a basket of gooseberries if she had time. “ I’ll take them up to the office tomorrow for Johnson and Miss Margesson —fruit is impossible in London.” Halfway out, he looked back to say, “Do send another advertisement to the Bridbury Herald today, Laura. You might be lucky this time.”Now he had really gone. The front door banged, and in a minute or two they heard the car coughing, failing, coughing again, and then its wheels crunching the gravel. He was off to pick up the fast London train at Ashton. The house seemed to rock, to sigh, to sink gratefully back into silence. Laura and Victoria, catching each other’s eye, exchanged a small female smile.

“You ought to go too, Vicky,” said Laura.

“All right.”

“Don’t forget your music this lime.

“I’ve got to pick a bunch of flowers for Miss Grant. We’re taking it in turns.”

“Well, do hurry.”

The cat, interrupted in a difficult bit of flute playing, lifted its reptilian bead and stared at Victoria as she emerged. She hesitated. Where to begin? She broke off a bit of syringa. Already dropping, it showered her with petals. Slowly plodding along the weedy rampant flower border, she broke short heads of poppy, anchusa, raspberry-colored sweet cicely, a pansy, two pinks. Bunched tightly together, they looked charming. She glanced round the garden. It was perfect, she thought. They were always gloomy about it, her mother and father. Terrible, terrible, they said-as though a few old weeds mattered! She liked it shaggy.

“Victoria!”

“Coming!”

“The bus,” said Laura, thrusting satchel and music case into Victoria’s flower-filled hands.

“ If you go to the gypsy’s this afternoon to look for Stuffy, can I come?” asked Victoria rapidly.

“Aren’t you having tea with Mouse Watson?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, bother.” The Bridbury bus could be heard from afar, like a dragon ambling across the land, its snorts amplified by the high leafy banks of the lanes through which it was journeying towards them, full of school children, of cottage women sitting vacantly joggling with their hands folded over their baskets and purses.

“Good-bye!” screamed Victoria, waving and taking to her heels. The bus sighed to a standstill outside their gate, snapped up Victoria, and swayed on towards Bridbury. Laura relaxed against, the doorpost, staring at the gate through which Victoria had just disappeared, a sturdy little girl in an ugly gym tunic, her satchel bumping, petals showering from her bouquet, the music case jiggling by its metal bar from her hand.

3

SHE went slowly back into the dining room. The debris of breakfast things looked cold, awful, as though they were the mummified remains of some meal eaten a thousand years ago. But she sat down among them and poured out a last cup of tea. Ah, how good! Now, said the house to Laura, we are alone together. Now I am yours again. The yellow roses in the bowl shed half a rose in a sudden soft, fat slump on the polished wood, a board creaked on the stairs, distant pipes chirped. She knew all her house’s little voices, as she had never done in the old days when there had been more people under her roof. Then there had been nothing but cheerful noises all day long. In the kitchen, caps and aprons shrieked with sudden merriment over their bread and cheese elevenses. The butcher’s young man came whistling to the back door, on his shoulder a clean white enamel tray, reposing on it a leg of lamb which looked as though someone had just powdered it, and eight red and white cutlets, tiny and perfect as though they were doll’s-house viands attached by glue. Good morning, madam, he would say, touching his forehead pleasantly if he saw Laura. Oh madam! called the voices, Are you there, madam?

The telephone bell was always ringing through those petrified remembered summers. A popular young couple, the Marshalls. Voices of people who were now dead cried Laura! over the wires from flower-filled, book-lined rooms in London that were now dust, the exposed tints of their freakish walls fading and streaking Avidly in sun and rain. Oh, madam! called the voices. Guests arrived every week-end, turning up at cocktail time with dogs and little leather cases, an armful of magazines, grapes for Laura, chocolate drops for Victoria, who would be viewed, damp and delicious from the bath, in a fleecy blue dressing gown with a pink rabbit on the pocket. They had never been alone.

What had happened? Where had they gone? The pretty, hospitable house seemed to have disappeared like a dream back into the genie’s bottle, leaving only the cold hillside. Laura sat alone, the silence settled with the dust on the empty rooms, and the caps and aprons rustled their way— whither? Into factories, people said, where they would learn to assemble the bright and shoddy as they had learned to pack the capsules of splintered destruction. It was funny to think that Ethel and Violet, who had spent their days setting things in a precise pattern, plumping the sofa cushion, straightening the little mat under the finger bowl, drawing curtains against the wild stalking darkness, had learned to pack the capsule of hideous muddled death. They would never come back into the tame house again. Everyone said so.

Now, on this summer morning, when doors and windows stood open, it was possible to hear the house slowly giving up, loosening its hold, gently accepting shabbiness and defeat. Nature seemed to realize its discomfiture. Birds hopped boldly through the front door, evidently meditating a lodging; Laura’s dusting hardly discouraged the bold machinations of the spiders. As she sat drinking her tea, a yellow butterfly came in and settled on the faded plum and white pattern of the curtains as though it could no longer plainly distinguish between outside and in. It fluttered its wings comfortably, and the other half of the rose quietly, fatly fell, bearing down with it a shocked head of golden stamens.

Ought they to sell? Every now and then they asked themselves that, but the answer was always the same, thought Laura, for they both loved it. Stephen loved it especially, their first house, his first stake in the country; he had lived in a flat in London before they married. And, if they did sell, where were they to go? Everyone who was lucky enough to have a house was sitting tight in it, drawing in their horns, shutting up another room, or dividing with another family. Anything but that, Stephen said firmly. The house was not really big enough for that sort of thing, he said. Now that he was home, he could not abide the thought of other people’s bath water running out, meeting on the stairs with forced joviality, someone else’s life pressed up against one in a too small space, like a stranger’s overcoat against one’s mouth in a. crowd. He knew that, while he was away, women friends of Laura’s and their children had come and gone continually, for a few weeks, three months, a year or so. They had eaten light snacks off trays, used the telephone piratically without paying for it, shared the work, and night and day filled the air with the dull, frivolous yattcr which passes for female conversation. The contents of the glass and china cupboards had gone gray at their breath, their offspring had kicked the paint off the stairs and torn up the flowers in handfuls. That was all right while he was away, but now he was back it would not do. He was firm. His home was his own again. And things were bound to get easier, he said to Laura as they washed up in the evenings. He talked the situation over with the other men on the train, and they reported that things were getting easier. Bellamy’s wife had got a cook immediately the other day by an advertisement in the Bridbury Herald, he would say, critically holding the glass which he was polishing up to the light.

4

POOR Stephen, thought Laura, watching the yellow butterfly gaily making free with her curtains, quivering and flirting there as confidently as though it were on a common gorse bush beneath the undomestic sky. He hated the way they scraped along, scrambled and muddled along, though he said nothing. He took off his coat after dinner, hung it over a chair, and pitched into the washing up. Wretched victims of their class, they still had dinner. Without the slaves, they still cherished the useless lamp. Left alone, Laura would have settled and clung somewhere like that butterfly, sipping without ceremony, perfectly happy. While Stephen was away she had snatched her meals anywhere. But now there was a man in the house again they faced each other over polished wood, branching candlelight, the small ivory electric bell which was nothing but a joke.

During dinner, Stephen would expand, glow, visibly enjoy himself. Then a cloud of irritation descended on his brow, he took off his coat and hung it up without a word. The least he could do for her, he said, was that. He fetched the coal, stoked the boiler, cleaned shoes. Sometimes the wicker armchair in the kitchen gave a loud creaking report as they worked together straightening out the mess. Occasionally Laura wondered, though she did not invite Stephen to consider, whether the chair was creaking beneath the ghost, of some former cook — Mrs. Abbey,perhaps, who had been killed in a London blitz. An ectoplasmic Mrs. Abbey rolled against, the faded cushions, clapping her hand across her splitting mouth at the sight of Stephen with a dishcloth round his middle, frowning at a smear of grease on a glass. He was so good, so kind. He said little. But he was a neat man, hating mess and huggermugger. He could not take all this in his stride as she could.

She got up, pulled a tray through the kitchen hatch, and began to clear away the breakfast things. Stuffy’s empty basket caught her eye, the blanket pathetically folded and waiting. Somehow she must find time to go and haul Stuffy back from Barrow Down. Then the gooseberries, Porter, the weekly shopping in Bridbury, the cooking — by the end of the day, shutting up the ducks and hens, putting down a drop of milk for the cat, she would be too tired to talk to Stephen, too tired to read. The print danced before her eyes, her head nodded, she fell into a stupor of sleep. But she was getting abominably dull. Stephen never said anything about that either. All those years she had existed on a nursery plane of conversation; domestic gossip over the boiled egg and the Ovaltine with Betty, with Rosamund, with Sonia, with all the other women without men who had stayed here. Words ceased to have any masculine gristle; they were purely feminine symbols with which one exchanged flabby facts about food, clothes, and shelter.

She balanced the tray on the sideboard for a moment, leaning towards the Regency mirror topped by its gilt eagle. The familiar face looked faithfully back at her, saying, Here I am, there You are, the Laura Marshall people see when they think of you. A bit thinner over the cheekbones, perhaps, the hair completely gray in front, though the back was still fair and crisply curling, like rear-line soldiers who do not know that defeat has bleakly overtaken their forward comrades. It was the first thing Stephen had noticed when he stepped back from their kiss after he got home. She had told him in her letters many times, joking about the gray hairs she was pulling out and then not bothering to pull any more. Everyone was going gray, she wrote-perhaps the shortage of fats in the food? But nothing has really happened until it speeds to the individual eye and bears down with pain on the heart. She’s quite gray, he had thought in visible shock, before taking her in his arms and kissing her again as though she had become more than ever dear, as though he felt remorsefully that he ought to have been there to stop whatever it was that had played this bad joke on his Laura. The lost years were suddenly unbearably sad to them both. Oh Stephen, she had said, and tears poured out of her eyes while the railway station banged and clanged, ran, shoved, opened and flowed together indifferently again round the spectacle of one more soldier and one more weeping woman.

5

THE yellow butterfly rose and fluttered away, the cat got up abruptly and made off across the hall, her tail erect as a purposeful sail. There were sounds coming from the kitchen, and Laura picked up the tray and followed her. It was Wednesday, one of the mornings on which Mrs. Prout came to circulate the dust a little, to chivy gray fluff airily round the floors with a gray mop, to get down creakingly on her vast knees and scrub the kitchen. Mrs. Prout obliged several ladies in Wealding, conscious of her own value, enjoying glimpses of this household and that, sly, sardonic, given to nose tapping and enormous winks, kind, a one for whist tables and a quiet, glass at the local, scornful of the floundering efforts of the gentry to remain gentry still when there wasn’t nobody even to answer their doorbells, poor souls. She was there now, panting with the exertion of the hill from Wealding, sighing, chirping to the cat, hanging a black oilcloth bag on the dresser, and popping something under the lid of the soup tureen. A little extra, brought for elevenses? Mrs. Prout was always tucking things away like a squirrel, under a drawer paper, under a lid, on top of a cupboard, tapping her nose, creaking, nodding inexplicable mysteries.

“Going to be a scorcher,” she said, plucking the flowered cotton away from her bosom and flapping it between finger and thumb, as though working a punkah upon the huge breasts beneath. “Ever so warm bicycling.”

“The tea is still quite hot, I think,” said Laura, setting down the tray.

“Well, I won’t say no to a cup.” No “madams” flowed from Mrs. Prout. She was independent, a regular Radical, always had been. She looked at Laura amiably, for she liked Mrs. Marshall. There was a way about her, no denying it, but a vague one, ever so dreamy, always forgetting to order more salt, letting the fish go bad, letting the precious milk boil over on the stove when Victoria called that there was a kingfisher tangled in the chicken wire. There the milk was, stinking in brown bubbles on the stove top, and Mrs. Marshall crouching on the lawn, nursing the brilliant little emerald and blue body in her hand, dreadfully upset when it suddenly turned up its little toes and its pale tan breast and died, as anyone could have told her. Where would she be without Mrs. Prout? Mrs. Prout often asked herself as she knelt and creaked and banged about the house, noting that it was going downhill, getting worse every week and nothing much you could do about it. A pretty house, no doubt, when it was kept nice. But now, with only Mrs. Prout banging the banisters three mornings a week, and Mrs. Marshall pottering as best she could, it was beginning to look down on its luck, a gentleman’s house which had seen better days.

Wasn’t it a shame, thought Mrs. Prout, Radical or no, that Mrs. Marshall couldn’t get her girls back again? Oh, what a lot they were, with their bare legs and their painted mouths, afraid of a job of work, only thinking about that trash on the movies, running around and getting themselves babies at an age when Mrs. Prout had hardly finished playing with her dollies. There were several in Wealding after the Canadians and them nigger fellas moved off. Little Nelly Bright, Mrs. Prout had seen her yesterday evening on her way to the whist drive, only a child herself, staggering along on her puny little slim legs, the heavy lump of a baby seeming too great a weight for her skinny little arms to bear. And all the Wealding ladies being so kind to Nelly and Mavis Porter and the others, smiling brighlly past their bulging skirts, finding them shawls and the like, talking about the difficulties of wartime villages and so on, when what the little hussies wanted, thought Mrs. Prout, was a good hard one-two on their bare behinds. She wheezed indignantly, drawing in the tea in good hot mouthfuls, and the thought suggested another.

“Stuffy turned up?”

“No. I’ll have to go over to Barrow Down this afternoon. I’m sure she’s gone over to the gypsy’s.”

“Well! Artful! Mostly they wait for the gentlemen to come to them, but not old Stuffy! Isn’t, shea one?” Mrs. Prout chortled and winked, throwing her stout figure back in the wicker chair. “ Do you want any raspberries for jamming? I hear t hat Mrs. Fowler is going to have a nice lot. Ours are going to be all miserable little scrumps this year, looks like — Prout says they’re too old.”

Too old, like Voller. “Do you know if Mrs. Porter’s son could come along and do some gardening for us two or three evenings a week?” Laura called from the larder.

“Couldn’t say,”said Mrs. Prout coldly. Prouts and Porters lived next door to each other in twoirregular, rose-hung Tudor hovels, the delight of all the artists, dark, insanitary, lit by lamps and candles, served by the ivied privy at the bottom of the garden between the beehives and the patches of sweet williams and the currant bushes. Laura, pursuing Mrs. Prout one morning round to the back door, had been startled by the sight of Prout enthroned under the ivy, peacefully smoking, a fat old man in his shirt sleeves, not visibly deranged by the spectacle of a lady appearing between the lilac bushes. He looked like an enormous Buddha, meditating beneath the clustering green berries. Grossness disappeared from the situation, and the only problem seemed to be to bow or not to bow, to break in upon that tranquil solitude or to tiptoe respectfully away.

“Mrs. Porter and me are not very good cousins at the moment,” said Mrs. Prout coldly.

Good cousins—ah! Every now and then the Elizabethan-sounding phrase dropped from Mrs. Prouts lips as though new-minted. No, further back than that. Yes, something robust and enduring breathed from Mrs. Prout, vast old mountain of becks and nods and lewd winks which would have needed no interpretation at the Lamb. Her gigantic varicose-veined legs straddled the centuries, her skirts blew in the air of a larger, dirtier, merrier yesterday. Laura, looking at her with sudden affection, said “I’ll go and start the beds.”

“I’ll pop up and help in a jiffy. The crocks can wait,” said Mrs. Prout.

6

SHARING this morning ritual, heaving mattresses, stooping, moaning Deary me! over yet another sheet worn thin as thin, Mrs. Prout became pure Elizabethan. The Shakespearean old nurse, bedding the pretty lovers, plumping the pillows knowingly, smoothing the linen in a light band with a swollen red hand into the puckers of which the broad gold ring seemed to have been forced. Mrs. Prout savored the intimacy of the moment, saying nothing as she folded Laura’s nightgown, but unable to quell the irrepressible quivering eyelid which signaled, Faded, seen better days, but how it goes to nothing in the hand! Only a scrap of chiffong, saucy as you like. And she swept one of Stephen’s shirts off a chair contemptuously, shaking him out, eying him with a stare, stuffing him under her arm as though she had reduced him to a hank of hair and a bone, a limp bundle of dreams and desires which she, Mrs. Prout, knew all about and had no patience with. Men! she would say, sniffing, throwing out the cigarette ash, banging the books untidily stacked beside his bedside clock as though she would have liked to shake the nasty man-made life out of their covers.

“Split her pajamas proper again, I see,” she said, seizing Victoria’s rumpled night attire. “No thought for the kewpongs, have they?”

She looked across the bed at Laura, thinking. The child is like her ma, dreamy, never knowing whether she has her dress on to the back or the front.

“Pity you never had but the one,” she said to Laura suddenly over Victoria’s bed.

Out it popped, she didn’t know why. The thing had come into her head on an impulse of liking and scornful pity for the poor thing with her soft hands, her gentle smile, her one chick. Success, for Mrs. Prout, was measured by fertility — how many seeds from the packet, how many yellow balls of fluff sailing over mirrored sky behind the maternal rump, how many piglets sprawling on the spotted pink sofa of the sow’s belly. Herself, she had buried four, reared four, all boys. From her vast skirts four men had sprung. No girls for her, mooning and spooning, staggering along on their little while shanks, lugging a great child, like Nelly Bright.

“Yes,” said Laura, “it is a pity. I should have liked more.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Prout jovially, “plenty of time to put that right.”

Laura laughed obediently, sighing. Mrs. Prout pounded downstairs to clear up the kitchen, and soon she could be heard above the gush of water, shouting words of cheer to the cat, singing a tuneless ditty. After that, she would get the sweeper, the dusters, the tin of polish, and bang round the rooms for a couple of hours, pausing to admire the photograph of Mrs. Marshall in her wedding dress, to say Pretty dear! to Victoria looking wide-eyed, niddlenoddle, for the photographer’s birdie, to loss her head at Stephen on the piano. Men! and her duster would flick over him as she moved across to finger the curtains, calculate how much a yard, picture how pretty the room had looked when it was kept up just so. All this would be locked in her bosom, to be retailed when she felt like it, at Mrs. Bellamy’s, or at Miss Sewell’s, when she popped in one afternoon a week to do the silver and launder Miss Sewell’s smalls. You’re a fool, with your heart., Flo my dear, to take on so much — thus her crony Mrs. Sparks at the Leg of Mutton would chide her. But it was power, it was the draught of life to her. She could not do without it.

Laura, going to her room to fetch her purse (the next bus would be along soon, and she must follow Victoria in to Bridbury), heard Mrs. Prout’s singing, and felt suddenly cheerful. The house, which had seemed melancholy as it creaked and chirruped and sighed to itself, as the yellow rose fell and the yellow butterfly settled, now appeared to ride confidently on the wave of Mrs. Prout’s song. The trickle of sound gave continuity, promising a little retrenching and repairing, a shaking of dusters and spreading on of wax polish, a refusal to abandon the house entirely to defeat. Once more the mistress, Laura looked in her mirror, ran a comb through her short curling hair, and took up her bag. Ah, the beautiful morning, she thought as she ran downstairs, crying “ Leave me a salad for lunch, will you : Must fly!” And she was off, running like Victoria to the gate.

Sardonic, from the pantry window behind the low berberis hedge, Mrs. Prout watched her go, thinking that there was nothing much of her, running there swinging her basket, thinking that it was a pity she’d never had but the one, thinking that it would be stuffy this morning in the bus, no doubt, and — drat it! there went a cup, the last of the flowered ones. Breathing heavily, Mrs. Prout bent down and gathered up the fragmentsof white china, rose-garlanded, blue-ribboned, off ihe floor in her wet red hands. Oh dear, what a pity! She did like nice china, and such a scruffy lot of odd jobs they had now on the dresser. Mr. Marshall had his breakfast porridge out of a plate which had come down from nursery days, a rabbit in blue trousers was on it, pushing a girl rabbit in a wheelbarrow. And now the last of the roses. Majestically, Mrs. Prout stumped out to the dustbin, pushed back the lid, and consigned the shards to gray fluff and sardine tins. There! Out of sight, out of mind. She resumed her song.

7

THE bus that brought Laura back from Bridbury was full of women, sighing, sweating gently under the arms of their cotton dresses as they held onto their baskets and their slippery, fretful children. A spaniel on the floor at somebody’s feet shifted cautiously, lifting a red-cornered eye towards his owner, hoping and trusting that no one would tread on his paw. She would get off at the church, the other end of the village, and call in at the Porters’ cottage on her way home. At the Leg of Mutton, several people got out, the hot air changed and soaked up new smells as new people climbed in. The spaniel smell, armpits, onions went, and were replaced by sweet peas, more armpits, and old Voller, clambering aboard and sitting down very suddenly beside Laura. He smelled strongly of earth, like some tiny, antique animal who lived in a bank. His hand, lifting a red cotton handkerchief to mop his forehead, was a knobbly collection of knuckles, earth-darkened and spatulate, but his wrist was thin, blue-veined, touching as a child’s.

“Terrible warm,” he said. A ghost of a voice whistled from Voller like wind through a keyhole. “Going to see my darter at Gospel Oak,” came the fluty little keyhole voice.

“Will you be able to come along this evening, then?” shouted Laura. He was deaf as an adder, poor old Voller. Only the keyhole of sound and hearing remained through which he could receive crumbs and drops of the world, a prisoner, walled up in that frail, brittle, ancient body. He nodded. He would come along. The raspberries, Laura said, would he net the raspberries? That, too, was pushed through the keyhole, and back came the little shrill whistle. Oh yes, he would net them. If he netted himself, the birds would see no difference. He would bud, he AA’ould blossom, his toes would take root in England, his fingers would splay down comfortably into the soil.

“Good,”shouted Laura, smiling and nodding down at him as she got up to go. Poor old Voller, she felt guilty going off now to see if she could not get a lusty young Porter to supplant him. Was the daughter at Gospel Oak kind to him? Laura knew her by sight, a big fresh woman like a horse dressed in blouse and skirt. Incredible to think that she existed owing to an impulse of old Voller’s! Over his head loomed the shadow of the Institute, the yellow brick building on the hill where the old people crept in the sun, eking out the week’s little wad of tobacco, meekly eating the bread of charity and idleness. She would talk to Stephen tonight, thought Laura, working with her basket past the fat knees, the bundles, the squirming children, towards the fresh air. Even if George Porter can come to us, we must keep on old Voller. She got out of the bus, feeling its hot exhaust fan out at her as it moved off.

The calm of Wealding enfolded her. Now Bridburv was the dream. The clock said See-saw four times, immediately striking twelve reticent notes. For what it is worth, it seemed to say, the hour is noon. The midday sky had the sheen of a tightly stretched width of royal-blue silk. A high insect hum came from the long grass and moon daisies of the churchyard. She pushed open the cottage gate, descended a deep step between rows of lilies, and walked round to the Porters’ back door. Roses poured down from the crumbling cottage wall, wreaths and swags of crimson and pinkish yellow. The lilies were magnificent. Mrs. Porter gave them little attention beyond tipping out a pot of tea leaves round them now and then to keep off the blight; the little Porters made water against the stalks when they felt inclined. But the lilies were superb white tapers, thickly clustering, heavy with bees. No one in Wealding had such phloxes. Everything grew here in this patch of damp black soil, worked for generations. At the back door Laura paused, glancing at a pair of old boots, a child’s battered tricycle upside down in the path, the privy open as usual beneath the ivy. No one sat there today, no Prout, no Porter. A hen throatily clucked, scratching among the currant bushes.

She knocked.

8

THE Porters were inside, eating dinner. She had banked on catching them at home now. Someone put down a fork on a plate, there was the silence of people listening with their mouths full, and then Mrs. Porter opened the door, wiping her lips with her fingers, crying “Oh good afternoon, m’m. Excuse me not asking you in, m’m — we’re having a bit of dinner.” She edged herself out, half closing the door, so that all Laura could see was a patch of damp wall and a calendar depicting two gray kittens sitting in a man’s boot. Inside, the eating noises began again.

“Summer weather at last, m’m,” said Mrs. Porter, smiling, looking Laura up and down. The respectful address escaped her continually like a soft hiccup. She was no Mrs. Prout, she recognized the gentry even if they were going through difficult times. The “m’m” bubbled from her as though from a deep old spring. Her smile revealed shocking teeth, blackened ruins tumbling one upon the other, but her dirty dress was a cheerful blue, the color of a sugar bag; in her improbable yellow hair, grips and bits of rag bristled like leeches, but would later be drawn off and replaced by a jaunty, grubby blue bow. One of these days, she often said, she would go to Doctor Comstock and find out about getting a fine set of teeth. Her dirty feet, veined with purple nodules, were thrust into broken-down evening shoes. She smiled at Laura, respectful,slippery, false as a cat. She was a light one, all Wealding knew it. When the Army were here, she was seen smoking cigarettes, drinking at the Leg of Mutton, larking in the fields with soldiers young enough to be her sons. A fat corporal named Tuck was forever hanging round the cottage. Mrs. Porter sat on his knee, Mrs. Prout had reported to Laura, with Porter looking on, a dummy in his own chimney corner. Shrieks and giggles and slaps had floated out from among the roses. After Tuck left, she took up with a Canadian, a nice young fellow. The men of the Observer Corps, sitting waiting for Heinkels on Barrow Down, had seen the blue dress frisking spryly among the bracken, t he khaki patch following after, khaki and blue sinking from sight, among the fronds, sinking, drowning from sight in the green breakers, not rising again. It had relieved the tedium of their afternoon nicely, Mrs. Prout had implied, winking, tapping her nose as she stood at Laura’s sink.

“I was wondering—” began Laura.

“Yes, m’m,” said Mrs. Porter, her light, blue eyes sliding with false humility over Laura’s dress and face.

A chair squeaked along the floor in the dark little room behind her. How many there? George, the eldest son, was back from the war. One of the elder girls, Dolly, looked after old invalid Mrs. Grant in the village. Mavis Porter had come to grief, light, like her mother. She had gone off in the W.A.A.F.’s and come back with a child, fathered by a Pole. Married, of course, with a wife and family out there somewhere, Mrs. Prout had reported to Laura with a gale of sniffs. Men! she had cried, whacking the soap powder into the washing-up water in a frenzy of contempt. No doubt he had kissed hands, quite the foreign gentleman, taking in poor Mavis, who was a nice girl though not really strong in the head. Men! Mrs. Prout had snorted, shaking them violently out at the back door with the dusty floor mat.

Yes, Mavis was here, George, Dolly, but of the younger Porters Laura could not keep account. Mrs. Porter threw them off so lightly. The blue dress bulged, it clung concavely again, and again a bundle lay in the old pram outside the back door. Between bouts in the bracken, Mrs. Porter always had a child in her arms, and she loved them all, she named them so ambitiously. Victoire, the one who was born when the bonfire flared on Barrow Down, had been named, and goodness only knew, Mrs. Prout had said tartly, whether it was going to look like a fat corporal or a thin CANADIAN. Goodness only knew, Airs. Porter did not. She enjoyed life, she took what came. The evening shoes, the afternoon bow which would follow the morning curlers sucking the life from her yellow hair, were somehow pathetic, Laura thought.

9

YES, m’m,” Mrs. Porter was saying now, while an infant Porter suddenly appeared at her skirts, straddling on bandy legs, smiling shyly at Laura with a messy mouth, “Colonel Cochrane is leaving. Going to live near his sister in Ireland, isn’t he, m’m? No, he hadn’t said nothing to George about the new people taking him on.”

“Then do you think—?” asked Laura.

“George!” called Mrs. Porter over her shoulder.

“Don’t disturb him if he’s at his dinner,”said Laura.

“Oh, he’s just about finished, m’m. Meals don’t take so long nowadays, do they? It’s a job!

Now appeared George Porter behind his mother, the first-born, the opposite end of the line from the tiny creature swaying beside the blue skirt, showing its bare tail beneath its petticoats as it nearly lost its balance. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning. Laura had not seen him since he got out of the Army. Before that, he had been one of the boys of the village, shambling about in gangs, hanging over walls on Sundays to see the cars go by to the coast. Good gracious, thought Laura, what a magnificent young man he has become. Masculine beauty is now so rare, tamed into a genteel quality known as “attractive,” that the occasional authentic bright gleam takes away the breath. Thus should men be, stated George calmly, emerging in his splendor from the poky dark cottage, springing like a god from the union of a woodman who could hardly read and a slut. Had Mrs. Porter wandered into the bracken in her youth with a handsome stranger? But no, there was an unmistakable reminder of his father about the chin, just as there was something of his mother in his blue eyes, but all refined, gilded with immortal powder. They were waiting for her to speak, and there she was, caught staring, dreaming as usual.

“Well,” said George reflectively when she had finished.

He looked at her amiably, as though she were a nice sofa. That, must be the penalty of the gray hairs, the tired shadows under the eyes; that must be the beginning of getting old. She had noticed it. Young men looked at you as though you were a nice sofa, an article of furniture which they would never be desirous of acquiring. The signal flags were hauled down, the lights went out, all commerce between the sexes to cease forthwith. Certain faithful, seasoned admirers remained loyal. Philip Drayton, now a dignified K.C., a terrific swell, still remembered to send the right flowers (lilies of the valley) on the right days with the old card, “ Por Laura — Phil.” Yes, she thought fretfully, while with placid face she stood talking to the Porters, yes, indeed, was not Doctor Comstock particularly gallant when they met in the village, twinkling at her out of his old Yauxhall, saying, No need to visit you on my round, I can sec that, Mrs. Marshall? Did not even Mr. Tubbs, the butcher, revive when she came in, sparkle and crack a joke and become a dog, leaning forward tenderly to whisper, even though they were alone in the shop. Would you like a tail?, diving into the cold room and returning to place the precious oxtail in her basket as though he alone, for her sweet sake, had hacked it off the infidel in the Holy Wars? But the young men — she drooped and admitted it —the young men like George looked at you and saw a sofa. Sad, sad, sad!

“Well, I don’t know,” George was saying, looking from her to his mother, “I don’t know that I’m staying much longer,” he said.

“He’s been offered a job,” Mrs. Porter said.

“A pal of mine in Coventry,” said George. “A garage. There’s prospects.”

“I see,” said Laura.

“There’s nothing doing here in Wealding,” he said, staring round in disgust, glancing at the privy, at the old not curtains laid over the currant hushes.

“No cinema nearer than Bridbury, never a dance hardly, m’m,” said Mrs. Porter. “It does make it difficult for the young folks to settle. Mavis is just, the same. She’s seen life, I can’t seem to settle, Mum, she says.”

Mavis had seen life. Mrs. Porter’s smile continued placidly to reveal the blackened ruins. The Polish baby, then, had been no more than a souvenir stone, a brass ash tray, a length of embroidery, slipped into the returning daughter’s suitcase as proof that, she had made the tour.

“He’s been to ever so many places, m’m,” Mrs. Porter was saying. “India, haven’t you, George?”

“Yes,” he said somberly, “ India.”

The cottage seemed to dwindle. George stalked superbly across a blazing landscape, peacocks screamed, sacred old carp moved lazily beneath the pads of blue lilies in the lead tank. The Porters were all-pervading. They pushed out tentacles to Poland and to India. They gazed hungrily at the Bay of Naples. For centuries their blue English eyes must have been staring over the unwieldy prows of ships towards the still, untested, threatening shores.

She said, “Well, I’m sorry you can’t come. I’ll tell Mr. Marshall.”

“Yes,” he said nodding. “Sorry, but that’s how it is. You must go where money is these days.”

“And where the girls is, eh?” cried Mrs. Porter, forgetting her soft, servile hiccup, laughing shrilly.

“Yes,” he said simply, “where girls is, too.”

A child began to erv indoors. That was little Roy, Mavis’s baby, said Mrs. Porter, once more smirking, sliding, respectful. “Go and get him to show Mrs. Marshall, George,” she said, “for Mavis isn’t fit to be seen. He’s a lovely kiddie,” she said to Laura, as George came back carrying the baby, lie wore only a vest with his Army trousers, and his muscular sunburned arms hold the little boy with peculiar gentleness. Roy’s tears hung on his long lashes, but he settled down happily in George’s arms. Out of dark, insanitary, crowded holes like this, thought Laura, often comes the astonishing tenderness of George’s sort of man for their young. Stephen and his sort do not know it.

She looked at Gnrge, unself-consciously nursing his small nephew who had brought Poland into this English Tudor hovel, and thought. Yes, he will go.

I see it all. He will leave Wealding, following his fortune to the city. Like a gypsy gazing in a crystal, she saw him prospering, building a home, nursing his own babies. All the Georges will leave Wealding, and what will be left? Old Voller, sucking a pipe in the chimney corner, Roy, the baby, still content to play in the sun.

“What a darling,” she said, touching the child’s cheek.

“He’s a proper rogue,” said Mrs. Porter proudly. “Mavis do have a time with him.”

Mavis, a young Mrs. Porter, buttoned with such obvious insecurity during the war into the W.A.A.F. uniform, good-natured, easily laughing, always ready for a slap and a giggle — the crystal revealed only too clearly where she was going, too. She would leave Roy here with the other Porter broodlings, and off she would skip, spry as a young cat, returning now and then to dump another kitten in the straw before making off again. The Porters were the adventurers. Without moving from Wealding, Mrs. Porter would sow blue eyes and fair skin over the earth.

“I must go,” said Laura suddenly. “Good-bye, Mrs. Porter. Good-bye and good luck if I don’t see you again,” she said to George.

“Cheerio,”he said, indifferently and amiably gazing at this pleasant sofa, this nice piece of female furniture which had turned up at his back door. He turned, shoving the door open with his shoulder.

“Good-bye!” cried Laura, fleeing.

10

SEE-SAW, said the clock. As though the See-saw had released him like a carved wooden figure from a weather house, Mr. Vyner shot from the church porch, saw her, and waved a hand.

“Halloa, halloa!” he called.

He ran down the stops and crossed the road, lowering his voice as he said, “You’ve been visiting my bad patch, I see. Who was it, Prouts or Porters? The Porters?" He shook his head, smiled, and sighed. “Young George is leaving, his sister told me. I’m sorry. We could do with more of him in Wealding. But they really are — they really are —”

He made a vague, helpless gesture, he laughed helplessly, looking towards the Porters’ humpbacked roof as though they overpowered him even at that distance. The Vicar, thought Laura, the traditional butt of kindly comedy, the chevalier of spinsters, crowned with the wilting cucumber sandwiches of a thousand garden parties. And it was Mr. Vyner’s fate to look and sound the part of the fruity-voiced churchman, the hearty curer of souls, destined to lose his trousers before the curtain fell on the second act of the roaring farce. He boomed and brayed through the village. He had served in India for many years as an Army chaplain, and he made religion sound like a sort of church parade, with God as the C.O. counting the boots as they clumped in. But he was really good, a saint who had the misfortune to sound like a bore. Laura liked him immensely. He sweated from one end of the village to the other, no distance too long, no hour too late to bring comfort to one of the poor human souls over whom he yearned with such compassion,

“ I was trying to get George along to help in the garden,” she said, “I hadn’t heard that he was going.”

“ Yes, they’re all going,” he said, “they can’t stick it here — not enough doing for them. German prisoners at all the farms — I suppose you’ve seen them? Splendid workers, Mr. Watson was telling me.” He looked up at the sky. “Really hot today. We’ve got old Mrs. Pallett’s funeral this afternoon.”

“Good-bye,” he called, turning in at the wicket gate in the high hedge, while Laura walked on with her basket.

How hot it was! The midday heat was rising to a head, like milk to the boil, singing in a clotted hum of bees, of crickets among the sorrel and daisies, of gnats dancing above the cresses tugged all one way by the trickle of water running under the hedge. An old woman came out with a pail, hobbling across the lane to the tap dripping among the mosses. She had lived to see men hying overhead like birds; to stand among the hollyhocks watching bombs spluttering across the stars to kill a family forty miles away; to turn a switch and hear the great voice from Westminster correcting her kitchen clock. All the same, she had to hobble with a pail to the tap among the mosses and the green viper tongues of ferns. At night, large shadows would set oil lamps above the potted geraniums in the tiny windows.

And Laura turned thankfully in at her own front gate. The house was closed, each window carefully shut before leaving by Mrs. Prout, to whom Weakling was full of threatening characters with an eye to Mrs. Marshall’s tarnished silver. I am not at home, said the house coldly with blank eyes and pursed lips. Those tiles, Laura was thinking as she felt in her purse for her key, must really be seen to, or we’ll get a flood in the next heavy rains. She went round to the kitchen door and let herself in. Silence of an empty house just ticking over with the faint arterial life of a coal dropping in the grate, a pipe sizzling, a chair creaking as though some ghost had quitted it. A whiff of Mrs. Prout, compounded of sweat and flowered cotton and peppermint drops. The cat sat with her feet exactly together, coldly unwelcoming. Stuffy had not. returned.

She had just put her basket on the table when the telephone bell shrilled through the closed rooms.

11

WHEN Laura came back from speaking to her mother, there were immediately a great many things to do. She unpacked the packages she had bought in Bridbury, thinking, as she picked sodden bits of the Times leader off wet. fish skin, How horribly dead food is, how much deader than one ever suspected when it turned up by magic, nicely browned, with crescents of lemon, waiting above little lamps on the sideboard. “Mr. Molotoy — she picked him off the fish Scales; “the position in Trieste today must—” and with a gesture of irritation, she whipped the position in Trieste away from the damp mournful slab which had surely never swum and sported among sunlit rocks and weeds. The position in Bridbury today had been a shortage of fish, so that Mr. Kellett, the fishmonger, was in a bad temper with the long line of waiting women, slapping the gray neutral slabs into their baskets, or, to the favored few, offering more recognizably maritime creatures with ugly flat heads and accusing goggle eyes. “It’s terrible,”Mr. Kellett had grumbled, diving his scarlet hands into a bucket of goggling monsters, “it’s never been worse, not even in the war, it hasn’t.” The line of women had swayed and sighed, murmuring uneasily, staring with depression at the dwindling pile of fish, summoning up a false brightness when their turn came to step forward under Mr. Kellett’s angry little blue eye. And tonight, chewing the dead slab which she would disguise as something or other, Stephen would say thoughtfully that it was odd what had happened to the soles. Had they disappeared from the seas, a wartime casualty? Not that this was not, of course, perfectly delicious, he would add kindly.

She moved round the larder and pantry, opening lids, taking down jars, slowing away the seedcake, Stuffy’s biscuits, the oranges which had crowned the morning’s expedition. Mrs. Prout had washed the lettuce and left Laura’s lunch tray set on the side, its silver and glass and neat napkin seeming to say, with a loss of Mrs. Prout’s head, What’s the odds? Let the poor creature eat her bit of rabbit’s food in the style to which she has been accustomed. No body in it, Mrs. Prout would sniff over the wet lettuce, but let her pretend to have a real meal with all the refinements of side plate and folded damask and glass goblet, (one of the remaining four survivors). But first, thought Laura, she would start some of the evening’s cooking before eating. She began to move pans back and forth off the stove. She used the colander, the grater, wooden spoons of various sizes, and a small army of basins. Her cheeks became flushed. Would the sauce bind ? And lo, it bound, while her heart did likewise. But with a hiss, something else boiled over disastrously, so that the cat, who knew Laura, got up and withdrew in prudent haste. A sad brown smell invaded the cluttered kitchen. Mopping up the ruins, Laura thought of Mrs. Abbey, their former and best cook, Mrs. Abbey, who had been killed by a flying bomb while taking a cup of tea with her niece Flo in Putney. Mrs. Abbey’s kitchen, while dinner was brewing, had been marvelously neat, on the stove the saucepans boiling peacefully, on the enamel table top, under the clinical light, the egged and breaded fillets of sole lying waiting in a row. And now Laura, in Mrs. Abbey’s unrecognizable kitchen, went through the same gestures of trimming bread crusts, draining, chopping, but with the slowness and slight stiffness of the performing poodle who had learned the routine too late in life. Phew! She straightened up from the stove, pushing the curly hair away from her forehead. It was hot, terribly hot in the kitchen. She wanted a drink of water. And now she would carry the tray into the garden and eat her salad.

The lawn was thickly powdered with daisies, over which Stephen swore hopelessly in the evenings when he dragged the lawn mower out of the potting shed. Laura thought them prettier than the bare patches of burned leaves which followed his overheavy-handed sprinkling of lawn sand, for Stephen was another performing poodle, struggling clumsily through the routine of the departed Chandler. Between him and old Voller, most things were too late or too early, frost took them, mice ate them, unknown blights descended. In the week-ends, Stephen struggled frantically with the garden, which turned a sour face and mourned for Chandler.

12

WATCHTNG a beetle blunder through the daisies, hastening on in his unending pilgrimage over the earth, Laura remembered with slight depression that her mother was coming to stay. She would tell Stephen tonight over dinner, and he would say instantly, Oh splendid! Then a careful pause. How long is she coming for? he would ask casually. Only a week, she would be able to say reassuringly. Just while she sees Briggs.

“Such a nuisance, darling,” Mrs. Herriot had mourned on the telephone, delicate and clear over the air from Cornwall. “I broke a tooth, and I’ll have to see Briggs about it.”

Mr. Briggs of Wimpole Street — for years the Herriots had gone to him. Surely, Stephen would say, there must be excellent dentists in Truro, for instance, without your mother trailing all the way to London for that sort of thing? But in certain things Mrs. Herriot was inflexible, following, like a mesmerized hen, a chalk line of behavior which the years had laid down. One went to Briggs for teeth, to the Army and Navy Stores for wine, to Woolland’s for hats, to a guild of distressed invalid gentlewomen in Kensington for underclothes, to the Times Book Club for the latest biography. Right through the war Mrs. Herriot had come up from Cornwall on her little foraging expeditions, not bothering about the blitzes, as indomitable as Mr. Briggs himself, who, when not-so-distant crashes shook the windows of his consulting room, would simply select another instrument and say One really can’t notice this sort of thing, can one? The lip a leetle more relaxed, if you please.

“What about Daddy?” Laura had asked on the telephone, and Mrs. Herriot had replied, “Aunt Vi will come and see to him for the week.”

Dependable Aunt Vi, thought Laura, the indispensable female relative always ready to hand, always bright though without more than a churchmouse pittance, herself a distressed gentlewoman though not making French knots on Mrs. Herriot’s nightgowns in Kensington. Mrs. Herriot used Aunt Vi quite remorselessly, calling her from her room in a private hotel in Bayswater only when there was work afoot — a domestic crisis, or a village shindig involving bran tubs and endless bread and butter cutting, or Arthur to be ministered to while his wife headed for Wimpole Street. Colonel Herriot could not be left unattended. All his life he had been looked alter, for years he had barely put on his own boots, and if he were alone for even a few days he visibly wilted, became mournful and bloodshot as an old spaniel padding round the house. Aunt Vi, turning up staunchly from Bayswater, would supply the necessary female figure to sit, behind the coffeepot, at breakfast, to say Change your socks, Arthur, when he came in wet from gardening, to offer suggestions after dinner as he groaned over the Times crossword puzzle, sitting in the chintz armchair near the gruesomely dashing photograph of himself as a young cavalry officer.

“Poor old Aunt Vi,” Laura had said, suddenly smitten with compunction at the thought of the slight mustache, the cheerful meekness (she never failed to remember Victoria’s birthday, accompanying the little gift with a pretty card of bunnies or kitties inscribed in elegant writing “From your old Auntie Vi”). “How is she, Mother?”

“Oh, Vi’s always strong as a horse,” Mrs. Herriot had replied, with the slight touch of annoyance which followed attention diverted from herself. Her voice became softer. ‘How are you, childie? Stephen isn’t letting you do too much as usual, I hope?”

“No, oh no,” Laura had said brightly and hypocritically.

“And my Victoria? Give her a hug from me, and tell her” and the conversation tailed off in grandmotherly endearments, a few afterthoughts, and a storm of time signals going off like Chinese crackers.

“Good-bye until Tuesday, then, darling, Mrs. Herriot. had said. Laura, hanging up, had pictured her mother doing the same thing at home, waiting for a moment, in the hall where the telephone stood on an Ashanti stool beneath crossed assegais and a miniature of a military ancestor. Through the open door, the garden would be humming with heat and color as Laura’s garden hummed. Mrs. Herriot would remain gazing out for a moment at the queer tropical spikes of the yucca, the little stone figure of an Indian god with his fingers chipped off by one of the evacuees who had been with the Herriots during the war. For a brief interval, Laura guessed, her mother would be still, marshaling her forces, staring with faded blue eyes into the sunshine, before she picked up the receiver again, and, giving the London number as slowly and crisply as though the St. Pol post office spoke nothing but Hindustani, set about, summoning from the air the soothing genie of Mr. Briggs.

(The beetle had overturned on a plantain root and had a few moments of humiliating misery, working its legs and blue-black overlapping plates, before Laura moved it. over with a blade of grass and it hastened away. She got up and carried her tray indoors. She washed up, fed the cat, and got a bowl for the gooseberries. And out she went again, snatching up an old hat, for it would be grilling sitting there among the spiny bushes.)

13

HER mother, Laura thought, had not adapted to things. The war had flowed past her like a dark, strong river, never pulling her into its currents. Now, said Mrs. Herriot, thank God it was over, and everything could get back to normal again. She brushed her hands together and looked round commandingly. Mr. Briggs and the Army and Navy Stores had survived, the distressed gentlewomen had crawled out of the basements and were executing French knots and hand-faggotting again from their couches of pain. Now, darling, said Mrs. Herriot, the servants will be coming back, they will be glad to get out of those awful uniforms, out of those appalling huts into a decent house with hot baths and a nice bed. And when they did not, she simply could not understand it. Down in St. Pol, the girls had not yet caught on to the new ideas. Mrs. Herriot swooped down occasionally like an eagle on the depressing slate-roofed cottages and carried off another fourteen-year-old child, raw but willing, who would learn to cram her red wrists through neat white cuffs and to bring in the Colonel’s grog tray every evening. So the mahogany continued to reflect the silver polo cups pleasantly, the Herriot world held together for a little longer in its deadness of glacial chintz strewn with violets and side tables strewn with the drooping-mustached faces of yesteryear. The war had been horrible, really ghastly — had not the Carrutherses lost three nephews, the Whyte-Jevonses two airmen sons and a daughter drowned in a torpedoed ship, Colone! Herriot’s niece Betty her husband in a Jap prison camp? But mercifully it was over, said Mrs. Herriot, and Laura must really pay attention to her appearance a little more now that Stephen was home.

(There hung the gooseberries, fat grayish-green lanterns and smaller red ones, hairy as a man’s chest. Laura sat down on the ground with the bowl in her lap and began to pick. The heat, rising to its midday head, seemed to have throbbed and spilled over, or else it was the shade of the fruit bushes, for it was pleasant sitting here. She reached for a bough of large gooseberries, and the bough spitefully jabbed its long thorns into her hand.)

Your hands, Laura darling! They used to be so pretty, quite one of your best features, Mrs. Herriot would cry out in horror. Hands are such a giveaway, she often said complacently in the old days, surveying her own well-shaped fingers. When she came to stay with Laura, she sat looking round, on her charming crumpled face the ghost of a sniff more subtle and disparaging than any of Mrs. Prout’s. The disparagement, Laura irritably knew, was all directed against Stephen. Colonel Herriot had been looked after all his life, he had to be constantly coaxed and stayed with the female comforts of Aunt Vi behind the coffee tray, the little maid to bring his shaving water and his grog tray, but his wife still kept up the pleasing fiction that the male was the protector.

“Stephen should see that it’s too much for you,”she said to Laura. “It worries me to death thinking of you struggling along here with the housework and cooking and the child. Victoria had an enormous split in her blazer yesterday — had you noticed it? She said it had been like that for weeks. My darling, you’re looking dreadfully fagged out,. During the war of course it was necessary, but now Stephen must absolutely insist—”

The ghost of Mrs. Herriot’s delicate sniff would haunt Laura for the week that her mother was in their home. It would gently vibrate the cobweb which Mrs. Prout’s broom always by-passed on the picture rail, it would ruffle ihe dishwater in which Laura was guiltily washing up, it would pursue Laura and Stephen into their beds. Sitting knitting a jersey for Victoria (the indignant speed of her needles seemed to envisage a granddaughter naked as well as unkempt), her back very straight, her horn-rimmed glasses on her pretty pinched nose, Mrs. Herriot had said on the occasion of the last sortie to Briggs, “After all, Laura, here you are, only thirty-six—”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight, then.” Carefully controlled annoyance for a moment passed over Mrs. Herriot’s face. “Quite young enough, at all events, to be enjoying yourself more than you do. So far as I can see, you spend the entire day doing the work of an unpaid domestic servant. When I think how you were brought up — ”

She made a sweeping gesture with a knitting needle. In the arc of the movement, she seemed to be contemplating for a reproachful moment the tennis parties, the little trips to Italy, the hunt balls. Laura had never learned how to dust, a room in her life. Though the Herriots were only modestly well off, they managed to get value for their money, living quietly down at St. Pol, and people liked Laura, asked her to stay, mounted her on their horses. At a hunt ball she had met Stephen Marshall, staying with friends in the neighborhood. A young man called Marshall from London, “something in the City” Mrs. Herriot had disliked the sound of it from the very beginning. Her needles clicked in and out of the blue jersey for Stephens daughter. She looked absently at the photograph of Laura in her wedding dress, a tall girl in a mist of tulle and Grandmother Herriot’s old Limerick.

“Such a lovely dress,” she said. She sighed. “By the way, how is Philip? Doing very well, so I heard from someone the other day — who was it? Oh, his aunt, of course, old Miss Crompton. Still so wonderful, after having had soldiers in her house all through the war and dozens of evacuees and heavens knows what.” She counted stitches. She sat bolt upright, her feet in the worn brocade slippers close together as a cat ‘s. Philip Drayton, her silence said louder than words, would know how to look after his wife. If you had married him, as I wanted you to do, you would not he slaving away here with your hands spoiled and your hair gray. She looked up at Laura.

“Thirty-eight,” she said. “I can’t believe that you’re thirty-eight, darling. How this frightful war has eaten up everything.”

Daughters ran away, away. One doesn’t really know what’s going on, her eyes had said pathetically. Laura kissed her. Mrs. Herriot straightened her glasses, and the crisp governing note came back into her voice. “That charwoman of yours, darling,” she said. “That Mrs. Prout, isn’t it? Does she never say ‘madam’?”

(Laura’s bowl was half full, but she had made very little impression on the forest of grayish-green lanterns. The garden had been planted in the cheerful belief that there would always be plenty of hands to net, to pick, to bottle and make jam. Beyond the lichen-gray forest of gooseberries hung the currants, white and red. The jays screamed and bounced over the raspberry canes, and a blackbird landed beside Laura, cocked his head and punctured a hairy red berry before he noticed her and fled with a startled “Mink!” Laura’s left foot had gone to sleep. She shifted her position.)

Once or twice a year, Philip asked her out to lunch, a pleasant reunion, comfortably padded by two successful marriages. How’s Stephen? Fine, thanks. And Cicely? Cicely’s wonderful. The boys, too. Have I told you about Hugh— ? And he would tell a little anecdote about the boys, affectionate, sardonic, for he adored them, but had never in his life held them with the womanish tenderness with which George Porter had held the illegitimate son of his sister Mavis. The world’s mess had by-passed the Draytons, merely setting a higher value, in its desperate need, on brains such as Philip’s. He was going into politics, Mrs. Herriot had heard from old Miss Crompton, Ciccly would be an immense help to him, and their house in Westminster had not even lost a window in the blitzes, they had a treasure of an old family cook and an older family parlormaid, who called him Mr. Philip and did not know that the age of the Common Man had arrived. He felt guilty about their luck, he said last time he and Laura lunched together, for most of their friends were existing in appalling discomfort. His aunt, old Miss Crompton, had shut up a wing, the Bumpings were selling Rysdale. With charming tact he averted his eyes from Laura’s hands, which he used to admire.

(And now the bowl was quite full of gooseberries. There was no more room for even one.)

(To be continued)