One Fine Day

by MOLLTE PANTER-DOWNES

22

VICTORIA could be counted upon to be late home from tea with Mouse Watson. There were perhaps a couple of hours in hand, thought Laura, before her child would turn up, overheated, tired, green on the seat of her gym knickers, bleeding at each knee, and completely radiant. All the same, she must hurry. From now on it was easy going, no more hills. She sailed along easily on her bicycle, feeling the rush of air pleasantly on her bare legs and down the front of her dress. The lanes were narrow now, a tangle of little more than tracks along which a haycart could just amble and leave here a swathe on the hooks of a blackberry briar, there a rakish tuft on a slender spray of pink and paler pink dog rose.

The finger posts had been conscientiously removed early in the war, in case it should prove vital to German strategy to learn how many hedges their tanks would have to hurdle to Grimsditch or Barrow. So far they had not all been put back, and walkers with maps slung round their necks in talc sporrans often wandered and wandered, ending up angrily in a plowed field or somebody’s sweet, dark, smoking midden. But Laura knew the way. Bv the broken-down cart shed she left her bicycle, putting the bag of sweets and the chocolate in her bag, for one could ride no further. There! The disreputable old thing sank obligingly into the nettles and the wild garlic, one wheel sticking out with an odd debauched effect of a female leg dangling. Had she brought Stuffy’s lead? She began to walk up the track towards the hut.

The ground was rough, embedded in places with patches of cut stones laid together by design. The Roman stones, thought Laura. How quiet it was! A twig cracked sharply under her feet and instantly, close at hand, a dog barked. Another answered it, and another, and — was it? Yes, without any doubt, she could recognize Stuffy’s shrill voice in the middle of the pandemonium. She turned through a break in the trees into a rough field. There was the hut, in reality an old railway carriage which stood hideous and forlorn in the bleached grass, out of its native element, as though some aged locomotive had wandered and spawned here, and crawled away into the bracken to die.

Four or five dogs, of vague greyhound and mongrel shape, ran forward towards Laura, barking furiously. Smoke rose from a small stick fire. Something was cooking, and garments flapped from a line, very domestic, very peaceful. Socks, a striped something, perhaps a shirt or a pajama coat? Stuffy’s voice sounded close and shrill, with no particular note of instinctive recognition, just companionably yelling with the rest. Sheets of corrugated iron at one end of the railway coach made a rough enclosure. Laura stepped up and looked in at her dog, who sat beside a bowl containing fragments of food.

“Stuffy!” she said. “You little wretch!” But she was so glad to see the little beast, for they got caught in traps, they died down rabbit holes. As usual, Stuffy rolled over on her back and paddled the air hysterically, a hypocrite, trading shamelessly on her sex and the mushy hearts of humans, for she was not in the least sorry. Given a chance, she would do it again and again, Laura well knew. But she lay there, rolling an eye, quivering ecstatically, beseeching, “Forgive! For the last time, forgive!” although somewhere in the loll of her tongue was the shadow of an impudent grin. “You horrid little nuisance,” said Laura, stooping to pat her.

The gypsy came round the side of the hut, stepping quietly on the tussocky grass.

“Ah, you’ve come for her,” he said. “I was going to wait till this evening, and if you hadn’t come, I’d have got on my bike and brought her along.”

“I hoped she’d come home by herself,” Laura said. “She does sometimes.”

“Not this time,” he said, smiling. “She was out on the spree, wasn’t you, old girl? But I’ve been out, and I shut her up there so you’d see her if you came over. I didn’t want her following me.”

“It was my own fault,” said Laura. “I left the door open for a minute, and she must have slipped off. I thought she was in her basket.”

“She was wore out,” the man said, “lying out there in the bracken asleep last evening, curled up like a little fox she was.”

He pulled back one of the corrugated sheets, and Stuffy slipped through, cheerful and unabashed. Laura picked her up. “Get down!” threatened the gypsy to one of the greyhounds. Which of those wagging tails, which cut of the nose, Laura wondered, would repeat itself a few weeks hence in the fat blind slugs floundering in the straw-filled wooden box? She sighed, feeling her dog’s stout body warm against her side.

“She has been a great nuisance for you, I’m afraid,” she said.

“No trouble,” said the gypsy. “Dogs do take to me, no denying it. Look what I’ve collected in my time! They’re fond of me, I’m fond of them. Get down!” he said again, gently, to the mole-colored greyhound.

“She’s had her dinner today, and a good dinner yesterday,” he said to Laura.

“That’s very kind of you. How much do I owe you?”

He looked at her, smiling, and she felt herself coloring. That was the wrong tone, her mother’s tone. Mrs. Harriot spoke like that, crisp and kind, when she stood at the doors of the little gray cottages from which she would carry away the fourteen-year-old child in her talons. How much do I owe you, so much more delicate than a blunt How much, implying a favor done, a little contract, a bond. So often Laura had heard her mother ask that, standing holding the sitting of ducks’ eggs or the cabbage plants or the bundle of Colonel Herriot’s shirts. But here it sounded wrong, a dreadfully false note.

“Why, it’s nothing,” said the man. “She just dipped in with the rest and enjoyed it.” He jerked his head towards the hill. “Plenty of rabbits up there for the pot.”

23

SHE thought how funny it was that, though he had lived up here in the old railway coach and she had lived down in her house in Wealding for years, she had no idea of his name. He was anonymous himself as one of the rabbits scuttling into the fern. Even Mrs. Prout called him “that gypsy fellow up on Barrow Down.” That gypsy fellow had been drunk again last Saturday in the Leg of Mutton, drunk as a lord, happy as a king seldom is, rolling off somehow on his bicycle with them dogs on a string. Talk about the blind leading the blind! Ernie Dummer, going out to look at an ailing sheep, had found him tumbled off his bike at the side of the road, curled up sleeping on a heap of road metal as though it were feathers, and the dogs stretched out beside him with their noses on their paws, quiet and knowing, not even growling when they heard Ernie coming.

But that was all Mrs. Prout knew about him. He had never had a wife, he appeared never to have had parents. He made a bit of money helping with the harvest, mending pots and pans and the old rush-seated chairs out of the cottages, or doctoring people’s sick animals. He had a wonderful way with him there. Many in Wealding would rather have the gypsy to look at their cow or tyke than Miss Stemp, the vet from Bridbury, who bustled out in her smart jodhpurs with her smart little case, like a regular doctor. But the beasts themselves seemed to have more confidence in the smell of the gypsy’s hand. You saw him down in Trumper’s shop, buying his rations while the dogs waited outside. You saw him in the Leg of Mutton when he came down off the hillside for his weekly spree. You never saw him in anyone’s house, sitting in the armchair having a friendly chat. No, when he had made his little round, he sheered off back to the old railway coach again. Mrs. Prout had to say, however, that no one spoke anything bad of him, and he had set her tabby cat’s paw lovely, speaking all the time to old Tib as though she was a human.

Laura looked at him, wondering about him. For instance, how old? Difficult to tell: he was sparely built, and this queer solitary life up here had failed to stamp him with any of the usual identification marks. He was like a letter without a postmark, no clue given as to how far or how long he had traveled. The letter was not blank, far from it, only it was written in a handwriting she did not recognize. She looked at him, slightly puzzled.

“Well, I’m awfully grateful to you,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough.”

“That’s all right,” he said. He put out his hand and very tenderly scratched Stuffy’s head. She tried to squirm towards him, wriggling under Laura’s arm. The other dogs had wandered off, flopping down with permanent contented airs at the door of the dreadful old hut. How ugly it was, really hideous, high and dry under the great oak tree. The door stood open, and it looked very bare inside. Laura tried to picture the gypsy in there, doing little chores, frying bacon, washing out those socks which hung so domestically on the line. But the appalling little place refused to come to life as a home. It remained anonymous, too, casual as a mountain hut in which climbers shelter for the night and pass on, leaving the folded blankets and the stacked firewood for the next man.

You could shake a house like that off overnight, thought Laura, suddenly envious. No voices in there cry Clean me, polish me, save me from the spider and the butterfly. No sonorous or silvery voices tick through the night, saying that Time is passing, but that bricks and mortar must grind human bones to make its bread. Was it not, perhaps, extraordinary wisdom to live as casually as this, with Barrow Down for your back door and England for your front yard? She looked ahead of her and said aloud “Oh!” For it was higher here than she had remembered. The country was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady’s workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of brown stuff, a thread of crimson, a slab of silver, a round, polished gleam of motherof-pearl. It was all bathed in magic light, the wonderful transforming light in which known things look suddenly new.

“Oh,” said Laura, “how perfectly lovely it is today!”

“Yes, it’s grand,” he said.

“You can’t see Wealding from here, can you?” she asked, searching among the thick, woolly skeins of the heavy summer foliage for the familiar roofs.

“No, it lies there, behind those trees,” he said pointing. “You’ll see it as you go higher.”

24

I’M not going higher, she thought, I’m going home. We do not all, she thought with an odd inward surge of exasperation, live in an appalling old shack with a pack of mongrels, my good man. Victoria will be home. Old Voller will be hobbling along to net the raspberries and set out the tender little lettuces in rows with maddening slowness. And suddenly an awful thought struck her. Had she shut the larder door when she put Miss Margesson’s gooseberries on the shelf? The fish, and the cat left in the kitchen — no, already in her imagination it was eaten, and the cat was washing itself neatly, complacently, shaking out a paw daintily like a fan. Oh horrors, horrors! You cannot, Mrs. Vyner had observed earnestly in the echoing church, you cannot, no matter what the Walk of Life, escape from its Responsibilities — she had broken holly, and seemed to bless it with a damp glance—and still retain your Self-respect. True, true, thought Laura with depression, noticing that the gypsy was far from clean, that his dark eyes might even be sly.

“But it’s dreadfully lonely for you here,” she said. “In winter especially, I should think.”

Her mother’s voice again, a shade patronizing, just about to offer a blanket or a bowl of good, nourishing soup. He shook his head cheerfully.

“I don’t miss company,” he said. “The old hill gives me plenty.”

“I suppose you’ve got a wireless in there?” she asked, nodding towards the dreadful railway coach.

“No,” he said.

He laughed out loud, as though the idea amused him. She had to smile too, for the sound was so curiously, unusually — yes, that was the only word for it — so curiously merry. Children laughed like that, but grownups hardly ever. Mrs. Prout’s huge bosom shook, Mr. Vyner boomed and brayed, Mavis Porter’s giggles floated out of the twilight at the end of the lane, irritating as the soulless shakes and whistles of Mrs. Bunt’s canaries. The gypsy, however, laughed merrily, merrily, under the greenwood tree. He laughed richly, contentedly, as a fat man laughs, as though there were layers of jolly fat on his spiritual bones. For actually he was so thin his old trousers were too big for him, and they were tied round his waist with a bit of string.

“I’m not the one for a wireless,” he said.

She had still a half-irritated wish to trap him somehow, to bring him down into the native reservation with the rest of them. For we all have to do it. We stand in queues, shuffling our feet, waiting for the wrath of Mr. Kellett, the fishmonger, to descend like icy, dirty water on our meek heads. We put on our bowler hats and journey to London, though the day calls for us to live like gods. We get into the bus, the door clicks like a mousetrap, and it rolls forward towards Miss Grant and the hot classroom, Miss Trasker and “Water Lily Elves” and attention to the slurs. We conform, we conform, all of us. Why should anybody escape?

“But sometimes you come down into the village,” she said.

“When I want to buy something to eat or something to drink,” he said.

He laughed again. Somehow he knew that she knew he had wobbled off his bike and slept on the heap of road metal.

“Mr. Marshall wants someone to do a bit of gardening,” she said suddenly. “Do you garden? Would you be able to come some evenings?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll call round one night and take a look at the job. Yes, maybe I’ll come along with the dogs one night and talk to Mr. Marshall.”

But he wouldn’t come. She knew that perfectly well.

“Good-bye,” she said, “and thanks again for looking after my dog.”

“Are you going up to the top?” he asked. “Seems a pity, as you’re so near. It’s wonderful fine up there today.”

“No, I must go home,” Laura said. “I’ve left my bicycle down at the bottom of the track.”

“Good day, then,” he said.

She turned and walked out of the clearing. He whistled to the dogs to stop them following her. When she got on the other side of the trees, she set Stuffy down and hitched the lead onto her collar. Now, she thought, quickly home to the fish, the cat, to Victoria, to the domestic cave. But she stood quite still, looking up the track where it twisted higher between the sunken banks and the smooth roots of trees which seemed to splay and float in the surf of last year’s leaves, like the roots of seaweed which would float up, up, into the lighter green wash far above. Perhaps she might go to the top after all, she thought. Why not? It was suddenly immensely important that she should climb Barrow Down. There was so seldom the time or the opportunity to step even so slightly out of the common round, the horribly trivial task. She looked over her shoulder to see if the gypsy had followed and was watching her through the trees. But there was not a sound, not a sign. The rough clearing and the nasty little cabin might have been a dream.

“Come along,” she said to Stuffy, giving a little pull to the lead, for her dog seemed to be holding back, pulling back towards the railway coach and the gypsy.

They began to climb the hill.

25

AT the top, a slight breeze fanned her hot face. Down below, it had seemed that there was not a breath of air, the heavy trees were billowing feather beds in which even the birds were languidly silent. But up here there was a hilltop freshness which just stirred the tops of the few gaunt trees with which Barrow Down was crowned. Some said the clump was something to do with Druids; others, that it had been planted by the whim of a bygone Cranmer. It made, at any rate, a convenient shelter for picnic parties and their wavering spirit lamps. Today there were no picnic parties.

Halfway up, Laura and Stuffy, by mutual consent, had stopped and disentangled themselves from each other. After all, thought Laura, stooping to unhook the lead, it is pretty safe to say that there will be nobody up here. On Sundays there were always walkers with ash sticks and dogs, and at least one stout, panting woman toiling goodhumoredly to the top with a gray little man in a town Sunday suit. On Sundays, too, came the riders from the livery stables in Bridbury, bouncing young women in open-necked shirts, young men whose sleek pasted hair would lift in the wind as they lolloped along on the knowing old hacks. On a weekday, it would be a surprise to meet anybody but, perhaps, an occasional shepherd. “So you should be all right,” said Laura to Stuffy, who had been apparently working herself towards an apoplexy. But directly she was released, she ran busily along, showing no inclination to double back to the gypsy’s greyhounds. This unexpected bonus of a walk was delightful. Love was forgot ten. She ran, she sniffed, she barked furiously on the track of squirrels who lightly, scornfully, shinned up the masts like cabin boys.

And Laura had been right. They had Barrow Down to themselves except for an army of rabbits who leaped in the air and vanished. Some sheep appeared by the dew pond, saw Stuffy, and began running with the tucked-down chins, the braced behinds, and rapid little steps of elderly ladies trying to catch a bus. Laura followed in the same direction. She felt that she would die if she did not rest for a moment, she was so sticky and out of breath. Her heart was pounding. She must be in terribly bad training! When she had walked halfway round the Barrow clump, she threw herself down on the grass and stared up at the sky. It was softly, deeply blue, paler than at midday, and the larks singing invisibly high up in it threw down their eerie, other-world thread of song to Laura lying on her back among the little milky blue and pink flowers. The ground beneath her seemed just faintly to rock and sway in a lovely, sleepy movement. It shook with a mighty, gusty roaring, the pounding of Stuffy’s paws and her panting as she approached and tried affectionately to lie down on Laura’s face.

“Go away,” said Laura.

She sat up, rolling Stuffy over with one hand while with the other she pushed the damp hair up from her neck. Ah, how delicious! She sighed, and for the first time dropped her gaze into the great humming bowl of England which lay at her feet. It startled her by being so much vaster than she remembered. For it was years since she had climbed up here — no, not since the first summer of the war. Then some woman friend had been staying with her, Sonia Peel, it was, and they had packed tea and brought it up on Barrow Down as a little celebration of Mark Peel’s sixth birthday. Stephen was in camp up in Yorkshire, Sonia’s husband was on a destroyer somewhere or other, the wireless went on quietly and reasonably saying awful things every evening when they sat in the somehow stillborn, depressing coziness of two women having a sherry together.

It was not altogether for Mark that they made the little effort of the picnic party. Cutting the bread, spreading the jam, screwing up the thermos flask and the children’s milk bottle, were calming ritual gestures, promising that the everyday world would continue. The pink and white birthday cake, elegantly fluted — for there was still a cook in Laura’s kitchen — was normal and reassuring as a cheerful known face. But as they lit the candles, somewhat unsuccessfully, among the paper bags and the ants up on Barrow Down, Laura had suddenly sat back on her heels and said Isn’t it —? and it was, unmistakably, a distant siren moaning from the coast. Then Bridbury’s siren had spoken, and before anyone had bitten into the birthday icing, the sky was chattering with machine-gun fire, high, seemingly harmless, until down came the planes, turning, groaning, bellowing in their agony as the black smoke puffed out. One — two — three, shouted Victoria. Poor Sonia Peel, who was expecting another baby, sat like a large white tent, a hideously visible target exposed on the top of Barrow Down. The noise died away. After a pause, the sirens breathed a gentler, one-syllable song. They gathered up sandwich papers and brushed away crumbs. What a nice birthday, said Mark.

26

So on that occasion Laura could not remember giving much attention to the view, and before the war, somehow, she and Stephen had little time to climb up to Barrow Down. It loomed over them always, it was the background of their days. But scramble up to it — ah no, very seldom. They knew it was there and that the view from the top was the best, people said, in three counties. Sometimes they walked an energetic week-end guest up there. God, to have this at your door! the guests would exclaim, scooping the wonderful air into their fogbound lungs, planting their shiny city brogues firmly on the moss and thinking vaguely of the Druids, of Drake, of this precious stone set in a silver sea, of the imminent Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. To which the Marshalls would make a modest murmur and avoid catching each other’s eye. For how often did they make the effort? In the week-ends there were always people coming, there was tennis, Stephen was shooting at Cranmer. And since the war had ended, Laura thought, they were still more bound to the tyrant house, she to the kitchen, Stephen, when he was home, to the lawn mower and the woodpile, the dirty boots and the devilish bindweed. When had they been up here last together, simply together? She could not remember.

However, here she was, she thought in some surprise. Because she had heard the telephone and run in from the garden, leaving the door open, because Stuffy had slipped off to a light-of-love by hole in the hedge, and field track, and mysterious, beckoning scent in the damp ditch — here she was. Her day which had begun so prosaically in hot Bridbury, dangling a limp, resigned basket outside Rosemary’s Tea Shoppe, had landed her on top of the lonely hill. Ah Stuffy, what a good turn you really did me, she thought, gently tickling the stout stomach of her dog, a sagging pinkish carpetbag worn shapeless with careless maternity. You and Mrs. Porter, she thought, what a pair of you. Easy come, easy go, does it matter who, a greyhound or a fat corporal named Tuck, a black mongrel or a thin Canadian? And really, said Stuffy’s rolling eye, it does not matter, not in the least. Love beamed from Stuffy’s eye and from her panting mouth, love unselective, uncritical, bestowing its favors without calculation. Annabel Trumper would marry Mr. Rudge, and An excellent thing, Mrs. Cranmer had pronounced it. But Live lightly, preached Stuffy and Mrs. Porter as they frisked in the bracken. Live lightly, the gypsy had said without a word as he stood looking at her outside the awful little shack, looking at the gray-haired Wealding lady who had come fussily, leash in hand and tip in purse, searching for her dog.

It is all very well, thought Laura, fretfully, but what can I do? I cannot cut and run like Stuffy away from the dull basket and the all too familiar bowl. I am a perfectly happy married woman, simply getting a little grayer, duller, more tired than I should be getting, because my easier sort of life has conic to an end. Neither can I drag Victoria and Stephen to live in an old railway carriage planted on a hillside. Unfortunately we are all slaves of the turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood redecting the civilized candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath. No, she thought, there was nothing to be done. Beside her, Stuffy suddenly ceased to pant, withdrawing her tongue and closing her jaw with a slight click, as though a switch had been turned off. Closing her eyes, pillowing her dusty head, she slept, vurtuous, undreaming. So much wiser than humans, who would excuse or accuse or hate somebody, she had loved and been lost. Found again, full of happiness at regaining Laura, she sighed, stretched out on the grass, and slept deeply. The pinkish carpetbag bulged and collapsed peacefully, soothingly, with her breathing.

27

I WISH, thought Laura, that Stephen were here, looking at the view beside me. If he Avere here, she would say to him — what would she say? She did not know, but there was something to be said, something which was often on the tip of her tongue but which eluded her in the rushed moments at breakfast, the evenings when he was tired and she was tired. But if he were here beside her, stretched out on the grass looking at England, she might think of it. She sat clasping her hands together round her knees, her scratched and reddened left hand uppermost, on which the thin gold wedding ring looked surprised and bright. Over there was the sea, a misty streak sharply outlined by a broad ribbon of white light. Tomorrow, Laura promised herself, she and Victoria would be there, eating their sandwiches among the sand dunes. Why had they not done it today? Why, for that matter, had she not taken the time to climb the hill and look at the view all these years? Barrow Down was at her door, it was too idiotic, but there she was all the time, down in her house in Wealding, struggling to keep up a way of life which had really ended. Ah, fool, she thought. Foolish matron sitting beside that other wiser matron, the snoring Stuffy, who simply gamboled off to find what she wanted beneath the broad blue sky of this fine summer day.

She sat looking at the view. It drew the eye on to distant hills, to aerial villages, to unsubstantial, heavenly wraiths of towns which flashed a sudden signal from a golden window. If Stephen were here, he would identify them all, for he was a methodical man, he loved maps, names and populations, the height of this and the depth of that. But Laura looked vaguely at the spirit shapes of towns which could not possibly be urban communities containing cinemas and Wesleyan chapels and shops where the shopping women stood, dangling their limp, resigned baskets.

The little breeze fanned her cheek, the distant golden window — or was it the windscreen of a car? — flashed again. And suddenly she thought that she would speak to Stephen this evening, she would suggest that they might go away together for a little holiday. Since he had come home from the war, they had never been away alone together. Victoria, like the poor, was always with them, no longer conveniently removed by stout Nannie and produced again in the evening, clean and delicious in her little blue dressing gown with the pink rabbit on the pocket. He picked his way, poor Stephen, through a house littered with the navy-blue pools of little girls’ gym knickers, lying still warm on the floor where Victoria had hopped out of them. Hideous contraptions of wire glittered on the bathroom shelf, seeming to grin at him when he went in to shave in the morning. Sorry! Victoria would say airily, palming the thing into her mouth and running down to practice. One, two, three, galumphed the infernal “Water Lily Elves,” while Stephen stood shaving, listening, visibly suffering.

He would have liked a son, Laura knew that. He loved Victoria, but he would have liked a boy; he bent to knock out his pipe in the evenings after the fiendish wireless had said its say, and sometimes, quite unconsciously, he sighed deeply. Perhaps in a queer sort of way he even missed the war, sitting there surrounded by his female household, knocking out his pipe. Ah, but we used to have such fun together, thought Laura in amazement. Sitting eating those delicious little rum cakes while the stout piano and the thin violin shook the life out of Verdi, and the serious men bent over the chessboard, and flies settled on the newspapers on the racks. And little adventures, even, happening to them all the time. Being lost on mountains, stranded in godforsaken little villages smelling of snow and cow dung, but everything coming out right in the end, with hot drinks and a fire, a clean little wooden room like the inside of a cigar box, a great deal of laughter and always somebody enchanting to talk to, a woodcutter or a priest or a jolly woman making an omelette for them.

28

BUT suddenly there was no more fun, there were no more adventures, George Porter’s blue eyes regarded a sofa, Stephen bent and knocked out his pipe, sighing deeply. If they could be quiet together for a little while, with a hill to walk on and a sea to swim in, might not something come back? For we are so lucky, so enormously lucky, thought Laura. Up here, in this clear rarefied light, their luck seemed immense. They were alive, they were all together. Sonia Peel, who had sat here like a large white tent while the planes clanged overhead, was now a widow; Desmond Peel had never seen the new baby. The oily waters had closed over Jim Trumper’s red head. Laura’s friends had left their husbands for someone else, or their husbands had left them for someone else. But here they were, the Marshalls, still a unit, still making sense in a world which every day seemed to signify less. Their wonderful, stupendous luck, thought Laura. Now that she had a free moment in which to stand back and look at it, it struck her as stupendous.

She began to plan. She would ask her mother to stay on, after the expedition to Mr. Briggs in Wimpole Street, and look after Victoria for a week or two. The house, she thought, feeling lighthearted already, could go to pot —absolutely to pot! Mrs. Herriot and Mrs. Prout would, she knew, conduct an embittered war to the death until her return, pitting the sniff delicate against the sniff insolent, pursuing Laura with endless dispatches from the battle front, of plaintive, voluminous letters and cryptic postcards, written with squared elbows at the Prout kitchen table. But let them fight, she did not care. It was as simple as that. Aunt Vi could stop and look after her father in St. Pol. He would grumble, but as long as the indispensable female figure was there behind the tea cozy, he would not really mind. The hens, the ducks, the fine shades of the weekly shopping which had to be arranged so that she was calm and pleasant with Mr. Kellett, gay and rallying with Mr. Tubbs, the butcher — would her mother manage it all? But the idea had come to her, she refused to waver or be discouraged. Let them all fight, she thought, nothing matters but Stephen. And now I must go home, for it is certainly getting late.

She did not stir. The golden eye blinked again, far out in the warm haze. Yes, it was a car, for it was moving. She watched it half sleepily, listening to the hum floating up from the great bowl. It was the summer voice of England, seeming to say in the rattle of the haycarts, the swish of the blades laying sorrel and clover in swathes, the murmur and buzz of the uncut fields, the men’s deep voices calling peacefully across the dead quiet, We are at peace. An aeroplane flew south, trundling along, flashing a silver blink to the gold blink below, and Laura watched it go as idly as she had watched the car crawl and dip along the unknown road. Planes were no longer something to glance up at warily. The long nightmare was over, the land sang its peaceful song. Thank God, thought Laura.

The feeling of thankfulness was so overwhelming that the view suddenly misted, gathered and hung shining, and she rummaged in her bag for her handkerchief. Heaven knows, she thought sarcastically, the fact should have registered before, she had had occasions in plenty to get her weeping done with official sanction. The fireworks had thrown their nests of squirming gold and silver caterpillars high in the air, the bonfires had crackled on the green and up here on Barrow Down. For a whole week, rich boozy brass voices had gone on beseeching everybody to roll out the barrel, assuring the silent woods and fields that there would always be an England. The young women had whisked their best dresses at a Victory ball, the young children had been gorged into fretfulness at a Victory tea, by Saturday victory was sour on everyone’s tongue, as cold as the ashes of the bonfires. Let us give thanks, Mr. Vyner said, very simple, very quiet, when the handful of the faithful bowed their tired knees before God. But never, even then, had Laura felt quite this rush of overwhelming thankfulness, so that the land swam and misted and danced before her. She had had to lose a dog and climb a hill, a year later, to realize what it would have meant if England had lost. We are at peace, we still stand, we will stand when you are dust, sang the humming land in the summer evening.

Laura lay back again on the grass for a moment, only a moment, pressing her cheek against the milky little flowers as she looked sideways, through half-closed eyes, down into the singing bowl. It must last for Victoria, the beautiful weather. And again the earth beneath her seemed to give its delicious half sway. I want a good deal for Victoria, she thought drowsily, but not the same things that my mother wanted for me. Nothing better than this. A quiet evening, a house and a child in the valley, time to climb a hill by herself. But it is only possible, she thought confusedly, if we are left alone, if the good weather lasts.

She slept.

29

VICTORIA MARSHALL approached her home. Laura’s guess had been accurate. She was green on the seat and dirty on the knees, and she had also torn her blouse and lost a hair ribbon. She was extremely happy. In her hand joggled the music case, grown portly with a package containing cream cheese which Mrs. Watson at the last moment had crammed down between “Water Lily Elves” and “Little Gavotte.” “Daddy will enjoy it for his tea tonight,” Mrs. Watson had said. “They don’t have tea, they have sort of dinner,” Victoria had said gloomily, “but I’m sure he’ll enjoy it all the same.” Her own stomach felt tight as a drum. Tea at the Watsons’ was a major event. Everyone came and sat down comfortably round the big table in the kitchen, Mouse, her two elder sisters, Maud, the chicken girl, and Mr. Watson if he was home. “Eat up, now,” Mrs. Watson urged, piling buttery potato cakes on Victoria’s plate, and there was more butter on the table, sometimes a little dish of cream as well, and a dark fruity cake, and saffron buns which melted in the mouth. Victoria, overeating with scientific greed, had thought enviously of Mr. Watson’s Jersey cows even now standing in their stalls waiting to be milked, pretty as Siamese cats, their moist brown noses shining. Why, oh why, hadn’t her father seen fit to own a farm? There sat Mouse, hardly eating a thing, used to it. “Yes, please,” said Victoria to a third slice.

She leaned back, the girdle of her gym tunic pleasantly constricted. It was nice in the Watsons’ kitchen. No wonder they preferred to sit here always rather than in the front parlor, a glacial apartment dominated by an upright rosewood piano, a fan of pleated pink paper ironically imitating flames in the glistening grate, and many photographs of wedding groups and Mr. Watson’s prize cattle, looking not so very different. Bob’s photograph was also there, in the place of honor on the piano top under the plumes of dried pampas grass. Bob had been killed in the war, and Victoria thought it was a shame that he had been banished to the front parlor, past which even the animals, the cat and the old terrier, sheered in a hurry as they made for the fire and the shabby rag hearthrug. Today, of course, the fire was not so comforting. The door stood open into the cool flagged scullery, every window was wide, Mrs. Watson’s forehead was flushed and shining. “Thunder about,” said Maud, the chicken girl, lifting an arm as though it were a wing, and she a hen herself, and slowly, luxuriously scratching her shoulder.

“Come on,” Mouse said in a low voice to Victoria, and off they went.

They scuffled about for a while in the granary and Victoria tore her blouse on a nail. Zip! The tear ran up her arm like a mouse. Then they went to look at the bull, huge, melancholy, a ring through his pink nose and a frizzled puff of white wool on his vast forehead. Victoria stood very still, staring, fascinated. How perfectly huge, how sad! “Catch,” said Mouse, digging her in the ribs, and they tore away, squealing, kicking up their heels, rolling in the orchard grass. Exhausted, they lay there and told each other stories.

Victoria liked the way Mouse spoke, rolling, a little slurred in some of the sounds. What a dreadful accent that friend of Victoria’s has! she had overheard her grandmother say, one day when Mouse had come to tea and Mrs. Herriot was staying with them. It’s only Wealding, her mother replied — Victoria was outside the kitchen, where the two of them were working, covering jam pots. rather like it, her mother had said, and Victoria, guilty but interested, heard the snap of an elastic band going round another jar of gooseberry jam. do not, said her grandmother decisively, Victoria will be picking it up next, and her nice little voice will be spoiled. Everything so dreadfully mixed now, Victoria heard her grandmother mourning I rather puzzlingly as she edged out of hearing. For half an hour she was self-conscious about her nice little voice. She was a frail flower. Then she forgot about it until this minute. Dreadful accent, indeed! What rot they talked!

“ I must go,” she sighed regretfully, a couple of hours or so later. And here she was, plodding home, tired, extremely happy. There was a short cut across a field and through the churchyard. The iron gate clanged, and there she was among all the dead people. In this new part of the graveyard, there were rows of green tin cornets and jam jars, stuffed with tight bunches of roses and Canterbury bells, and the grass was neatly trimmed, and the gravel was weedless, as though people were trying to soften the stern mystery and deny the pitiless rains with the homey touches of flowers and a snug turf eiderdown. The graves had almost a convalescent look. At any moment Hannah, wife of William, and Nathaniel, departed this life September, l938, might sit up, push back the bouquets, and declare themselves a good deal better. Further on, the possessive love of the living had long ago died too, and the long grass and moon daisies waved round the anonymous wedded tombstones, heeling gently over together under the confetti of the Scotch briar petals. This part was really much nicer, thought Victoria,

At the church door she could not resist a peep inside. The empty church had the fascination of the shop seen through a window on early-closing day, its stands bare, its busy life arrested. Nobody was in the church, stealthy old Nobody, mouthing from the pulpit, lurking in the folds of the red plush curtain behind which Mr. Vyner kept his surplice. Stepping in here, after the warmth and buzz outside, was like stepping under the sea. At the far end of the dim green grotto, where angels or mermaids swam with their golden hair flowing, the gold cross shone steadily.

She tiptoed out very fast, closing the wire grille carefully after her, and when she was through the lych gate she began to run, the strands of her loosened pigtail flopping. Here was her gate, her familiar weedy gravel. She came in with a skip, noticing a tricycle pushed just inside the garage doors — so old Voller was here. Bursting with the burden of all she had to say, Victoria skipped up to the front door. It was locked. So was the back door, where the cat, plaintively waiting, greeted her with rapture. But there was always a spare key hidden under a flowerpot, which thieves were supposed not to lift, and Victoria let herself in, throwing her music case on the hall table, crying “Mummie!”

She ran through the kitchen, along the passage, into the hall, expecting at any monent to hear Laura’s voice answering Halloa, darling, from upstairs somewhere, perhaps from the depths of a cupboard where she was sitting surrounded by their old clothes, making one of her occasional ever ambitious raids of tidying up.

Silence. Nobody answered, frightening old Nobody, who had followed her back from church and now was taking possession of the empty rooms where a little clock ticked loudly and a bee buzzed wearily, wearily, against the glass. Laura was always there waiting, calling Halloa, darling! Now there was old Nobody.

30

STEPHEN MARSHALL let himself down into the seat of his car, outside Ashton station, with a grunt of relief. He threw his hat and the evening paper over his shoulder onto the back seat. The other men went by, finding their cars in the park. Some of them lived in Ashton itself, a horrible hole, a nice old town which had been ruined by a cancer of stockbrokers’ desirable residences, of Tudor cafés and Georgian banks and Assyrian picture palaces, so that now its only virtue was that you could leave it by fast train for London every half hour. A few of the men traveled up and down daily from homes in Bridbury; two or three, like Stephen and Hector Bellamy, came from even further afield.

There went Bellamy now, thought Stephen, pressing the self-starter. A remarkably handsome fellow, owning a pretty wife and a well-kept house and garden, wearing the right sort of tie, laughing on the right easy, friendly note, confound him. He had done extremely well in the war, and now here he was, plant ing his glossy shoes so confidently on the dusty ground, looking round complacently with his slightly prominent blue eyes as though he fully intended to do extremely well in the peace too. Every morning they traveled up in the same carriage, and Bellamy unfolded his copy of the Times, shook it out, and glanced along the headlines, faintly smiling, thoughtfully stroking his small clipped mustache, the picture of a well-tubbed, well-shaven, well-breakfasted man who was at peace with all the world. Here I am again, thank God, on the good old 8.47, Bellamy seemed to be confiding to his mustache. This is what I missed all these years, this is what I dreamed about.

And when the train ran into the dirty, echoing station, Bellamy would fish his bowler hat out of the rack and put it on his head, settling it deeply on his forehead as though it were a crown. He would fold the Times neatly under his arm, square his shoulders, shoot an impatient blue glance over the heads of the lesser men getting off the train in front of him, and off he would go to conquer London. Until this moment it had not occurred to Stephen that he envied Bellamy. To be so absolutely sure that you had got what you wanted, to have held tightly on to something for so long, and to find it waiting for you unflawed! Stephen began to edge out of the car park, and Bellamy, two cars away, raised his hand and called “So long, old man.”So long indeed, thought Stephen, braking to let one of the station taxis get past. Twenty years long, by his count.

Barring another major interruption, Stephen could think of no reason why he should not be traveling up on the 8.47, watching Bellamy sing his silent Te Deum to his mustache, for the next twenty years or so. The prospect filled him with two things — first, with dreadful gloom, and second, with surprise that he had done it for so many years already, but had only, this first summer of the peace, realized that the prospect filled him with dreadful gloom. There was not a thing to be done about it. But sometimes in the night — he was a poor sleeper — he would lie there imagining the most ridiculous things, seeing them selling the house, going abroad somewhere — Canada, Rhodesia, New Zealand? — seeing Laura in a print dress picking extraordinary blue and flame-pink trumpet-shaped flowers from a white picket fence, seeing a lot of young horses in a big paddock, and beyond them an immense stretch of lovely rolling gray country without a single smudge of smoke in the sky, and himself with an axe, cutting down something in the background.

It was all a dream, blurred, changing shape and color, and all the time he knew that it wasn’t true, it would never be so. He would never leave England. He loved it too much. He would go on sitting opposite Hector Bellamy on the 8.47, and when it happened over again next time, there he would be, trapped, waiting to be overtaken by the final catastrophe which he had not had the wits to dodge. For it would remain just an idea to play with. Sometimes the house was white, sometimes it was built of wood, sometimes it was surrounded by orange groves watered by streams of melting snow running down from the mountains, and sometimes there was nothing but forests in which he would learn to watch the birds, like Edward Cranmer. But it did not matter. It was all just nonsense, for he would never leave England. He knew that perfectly well.

The traffic lights held him up in the High Street.

What a mess of a street, what a mess we have made of the whole thing, thought Stephen, but somehow he rather liked its typical English muddle and laziness this evening. He waited for the lights to go yellow, his hand ready on the gear lever. Two young girls went along on the pavement, off to meet their boys, probably at the Ashton Lido, for towels and bathing suits hung in their hands. He watched them idly. Were they fifteen or nineteen? Since he had been home, he had noticed that it was impossible to tell the ages of the young girls: they all had the same bright manes of hair, the same cool stare, the same mouth drawn in the same boring color on the same little round face. These two girls wore cheap cotton frocks, short, probably shrunk with washing, and showing lots of bare leg. All right in summer, thought Stephen, to whom the unstockinged legs of the women of England, blue with December cold, splashed depressingly with mud as they scuffled after buses, had been one the most unpleasant of the minor post-war shocks. But these little creatures had pretty sunburned legs and arms, and as they hurried along, chattering like birds, their long soft hair flopped gently up and down on their shoulders.

The taller of the two had bright red-gold hair, a wonderful color, burning and rippling. Glancing at the car as she passed, she caught Stephen’s eye and gave him a collected, impudent smile. I know why you are looking at me, her smile said, I know, I know, and I am delighted by it. She gave a little flick to the white bathing suit she was carrying, and Stephen found himself smiling back. He twisted his head to have a last look at that amazingly lovely hair. She hastened away, away from him, a nymph fleeing back to the fountains and the uncut laurels. Stop! he wanted to cry to her. But she hurried along, not giving a damn, going to meet some wretched youth with a smooth face and a flat stomach, who would swim the crawl stroke the length of the Lido and hoist himself out, breathing as evenly as though he were stepping out of a punt. And suddenly Stephen realized that a car was hooting behind him. The traffic light had changed, there he was blocking the way, staring like a fool after a redheaded child. Good Lord! he thought, the beginning of the end. He made a screaming mess of the gear change and shot forward, turning to the left where the signpost pointed to Bridbury.

31

WHAT an evening, he thought. London had been infernally hot today. Miss Margesson’s nose looked pinched and damp; when he went out to lunch the road gave slightly to the feet, sticky as warm toffee; the exhausts of all the throbbing buses and taxis rose on the glittering air and seemed to press down in a tight, acrid ceiling on St. Paul’s huge dome and the sooty chimneys.

Sometime during the day he had thought, Why does one do this? He had suddenly wanted Laura to be there, so that he could ask her if she did not agree that it was supremely silly. But when he wanted to ask her something, she was never there, and when he got home she would be standing in the kitchen stirring something, a smudge of flour across her face which she would raise abstractedly to his kiss. Yes, she would say, listening abstractedly, yes, darling, and suddenly an expression of anxiety would curdle her air of attention, she would whip open the oven door and snatch out some dish, planting it on the top of the stove with the sigh of relief of a runner tumbling into the tape. There seemed to be few of the old quiet moments for talking. All through their meal they would be jumping up and down. In the old days, food appeared before one punctually and pleasantly, an illusion produced with no creaking trap doors or flashing of mirrors, the digestion and the mind could work calmly together, but now there was always this infernal jumping up and down.

Perhaps Laura was not particularly clever about it. For he could not help noticing that the house was getting every day more and more like a last year’s bird’s nest beginning to crumble and fall away dustily from the eaves. Laura and old Prout did their best, no doubt, but gray fluff lurked under the beds; when he pulled out a book last night a pressed spider and a few strands of cordy, cobwebby stuff fluttered from between the pages. Oh dear, said Laura, but the trouble was that she did not really mind. Coming from the Herriot home, where the very silver seemed to form fours on the gleaming mahogany, she had the oddest Bohemian streak of not caring, of being quite prepared to perch happily as a bird among a mess which would set his own teeth on edge. And Victoria, his daughter, so obviously took after Laura in that way. She was hopelessly untidy.

Only this morning — he frowned — he had found the bathroom floor soaking wet, a damp towel thrown carelessly into the basin, and on the glass shelf, leering at him, the frightful wire thing which she wore round her front teeth. He stopped frowning, and he had to smile when he remembered the irritated yelp he had let out, and the cool, injured little way in which she had said Sorry, taken the beastly object, and scooped it into her mouth. The sideways flicker of her fair lashes, the way in which her glance had, for a second, taken him in from top to toe, standing there yattering in his dressing gown, was a sudden adult imitation of somebody else giving a quelling look to an inferior. Was it her grandmother, Mrs. Herriot? When he had gone away, she had been a towheaded baby clasping a yellow duck. Now she was a square little girl, watching him, summing him up from an already chosen position, already taking out of the funny box of inherited possessions the sort of adult family mask which later she would be able to adopt at will. There goes my daughter, he had thought, feeling helpless, positively helpless as he stood at the bathroom door and watched her skipping downstairs and, almost directly, heard floating up from the unfresh stillness of the unopened room the hideously clear one, two, three of her determined practicing.

32

BUT Laura — he returned to Laura. Last night when they were undressing to go to bed, it had suddenly struck him how frightfully tired she looked. Outside the open windows the long summer twilight had come at last, bats whirled up and down against the glimmering green sky, some scent in the shadowy jungle garden, tobacco flower or stock, still floated up, faithfully sweet. “It looks like a fine day tomorrow,” Laura said. She was sitting before her lighted dressing table, brushing her hair. She wore her old blue dressing gown, and she looked frightfully tired. He had caught sight of her reflection in the glass suddenly, sharp with the very slight distortion which a mirror gives. There she was, practically gray-haired at thirty-eight —— why, he remembered his own mother, who must have been older than that at the time, with ropes and coils of dark hair almost without a gray hair. She had seemed younger, as he remembered, than Laura did now, when she used to have lunch in his rooms at Cambridge. He remembered her once on a hot day, wearing a coquettish little hat trimmed with white birds, and looking a rather prettier elder sister to the young lady who, for Stephen’s benefit, had accompanied her. But his Laura, tired and gray — there she sat, brushing her hair and saying something about the hens. He interrupted her.

“I’m going to give you a new hat,” he said. Of course it was a confused memory of his mother’s coquettish white birds that had done it, but also there was a desire to give her something gay and frivolous, something new which she would put on and suddenly become Laura Herriot, the very tall, dreamy-looking girl in the water-green tulle dress, waltzing in the arms of someone in a pink coat. She is going to marry Philip Drayton, Connie Trehearne had told him as they rollicked round the room just behind the water-green tulle, but she had not, she had married him instead, to Mrs. Herriot’s badly concealed disappointment. Thank God, he thought as he got into bed, thank God that Laura’s mother, at any rate, has not descended on us lately. For he knew perfectly well that, in her subtle disparaging way, she blamed him for everything — for letting the European war happen, for letting Laura’s hair go gray, for not being able to keep her in the comfort to which she had been accustomed, for growing middle-aged. All this, and more, Stephen could read into one of Mrs. Herriot’s unuttered sniffs. Thank God, he had thought, that for quite a while she has been apparently lying low and minding her own business down in St. Pol.

Laura had put down her brush, stared, and begun to laugh.

“How sweet of you,” she had said, “but, darling, I don’t wear hats any more, except on Sunday. And I’ve already got my —”

“No,” he had said firmly, “I shall buy you a new hat. Come up and lunch with me one day soon, and we’ll choose it.”

And today, on his way to lunch with someone at Boodle’s, he had kept a sharp eye open for women wearing pretty hats. Extraordinary things they were, he thought, like tilted saucers filled with flowers, which their owners had perched above Britannic expressions of anxiety as though an infernal engine were ticking somewhere in the clouds of pale blue and white veiling. He tried, and failed, to picture Laura in any of these. But while he was looking across the street at one as he walked up St. James’s Street, someone called his name, and there was Nigel Fox, whom he had last seen in 1943. Old Nigel, fatter and redder than ever — good Lord, said Stephen, he was tremendously glad to see him. It was true, he was tremendously glad, suddenly much happier, in some queer way, than he had been all day, or for days past. He could feel the mysterious lightness of his heart, the wonderful bounding of his spirits, just because he was standing beaming into old Nigel’s red harvest moon of a face. It was a curious relief, as though suddenly there were nothing to explain, nothing to try and tell, because here was someone who knew it all. We know all about it, old cock, Nigel’s grin seemed to say. And it seemed utterly ridiculous that he had not tried to get hold of him before! Utterly ridiculous! Where had he been all this time? Well, said Nigel, just around. Getting himself married for one thing.

“No!” said Stephen. “Not that dark girl, what’s-her-name, Ruth? A nurse, wasn’t she?”

“No,” said Nigel, looking annoyed, not in the least that dark girl, what’s-her-name, Ruth. Somebody very different. He explained.

“Bring her down for the week-end,” said Stephen grandly.

“You’re still down at — where was it? — Wealding, wasn’t it?” Nigel asked.

And old so-and-so, and this name and that — they began walking aimlessly together, the wrong way for Stephen to go, as they talked. The day was amazingly lovely. The hot sunshine was delicious, the people went by looking happy and relaxed. „

“Look here,” said Stephen, “come and lunch. No, damn it, I forgot — I’m lunching with Baxter.”

“I’ve got a date too,” Nigel said, looking at his watch.

“Let’s lunch next Monday,” Stephen said.

But suddenly old Nigel became vague. He couldn’t lunch on Monday. Wednesday — well, could he ring Stephen? He got out a notebook and took down the number. They would certainly lunch soon, or better still, dine, if Stephen would stay in town for the night. He wrote down the number very large and distinct, as though its largeness and distinctness ought somehow to reassure Stephen.

He smote Stephen on the shoulder. “Haven’t changed a bit,” he said fondly.

But it wasn’t true of either of them. They were different. Evasiveness came down like a shadow over Nigel’s crimson face, he tapped his breast on the spot where he had stowed away his notebook, cried “I’ll ring you!” and lumbered off into the sunshine. Stephen had a feeling that he would never see him again. Stop! he wanted to cry to Nigel Fox as, this evening, he wanted to cry to the redheaded nymph fleeing away to her laurels. There was Nigel lumbering away from him, disappearing among the fine shaving brushes, the Chippendale bookcases, the fishing rods, the glossy boots, the Georgian bow windows of St. James’s Street. He vanished, he was swallowed up. After a minute, Stephen Marshall went on to lunch with Baxter.

All the same, it lasted, the lightness of heart, in slightly diminished form right up to the evening. After lunch, it had seemed highly probable that Nigel would ring him up. They must lunch, they would dine, he would come down to Weakling to stay and bring the girl who was not in the least Ruth. The feeling that they would never meet again was nonsense. Tonight at dinner, thought Stephen, he would tell Laura about the meeting. She would remember old Nigel from his letters. There was so much to tell her this evening — Nigel, the preposterous hats in London, the way in which he had suddenly missed her in the middle of the long, hot day. Perhaps he might even be able to tell her that, if they stopped jumping up and down long enough. He found himself glancing from time to time at Barrow Down, the old hill towering over the fields and the little villages. An ice-blue shadow lay on its wooded lower slopes, giving its crown a look of Alpine loneliness and purity. How often he had thought of it while he was away, at all sorts of odd moments. In some peculiar way it had come to mean England for him, and his love of England, which was the reason why he was stuck here waiting for the next big bang, if it ever happened, and why Laura would never pick vivid blue trumpets off the picket fence of a white house in a strange land. However he might feel in moments of gloom, that was the reason. And it was something which Laura would never really understand, bless her heart, for women loved people, things, places, but not an idea, a vague shape somehow embodied in one rabbit-tunneled old hill. He kept on glancing up at Barrow Down over the shag of wild roses and blackberry flowers. He must find time one day soon to get up there, to look at the view from the top. If ever I get a moment from the damned garden and the rest of the chores I’ll walk up there, he thought.

He drove through Wealding. He looked at it affectionately, his village, the church, the little houses, men gardening quietly among the bean rows. He felt extraordinarily happy. When the car turned in at his gate, when he had backed it into the garage, just grazing old Voller’s tricycle, he could hardly wait to get out and find Laura. He grabbed his hat and paper off the back seat and made off like an impetuous boy. The front door stood open. “Laura!” he called. Silence. The house seemed very still. A rug was pushed askew, a music case had been throwu on the hall table and had come open, showering loose sheets of music and what looked like a damp little brown paper parcel of something on the floor. “Laura!” he called again, but already the moment had been slightly flawed, her answer from the distant room or the far corner of the garden would not make up for the quite surprisingly sharp pang of disappointment. Yes, darling, he would hear her calling faintly in a moment, and she would come in, smiling, saying that she had had no idea, the vague creature, that it was quite so late.

Instead, Victoria said over the edge of the stairs, “She’s not back yet.” She came down towards him, step by step. “ I can’t think where she’s gone,” Victoria said. Collapsed, the moment hopelessly ruined and never to be revived, he stood in the middle of the hall staring up at her.

33

BY NINE o’clock Stephen was beginning to feel rather anxious.

His first impulse had been irritability. He gazed at Victoria and was struck by her extremely disheveled appearance. Suddenly the lightness of heart started up by meeting Nigel Fox left him and he felt hot and tired, he knew that his first feeling had been right and that Nigel would not telephone, He dropped his hat on a chair and said to Victoria, “Oughtn’t you to be in your bath?”

“I’m running it,” she said, and he heard, far away upstairs, the splash of water running into the tub.

“She was going over to try and find Stuffy,” said Victoria.

“So she was. Well, she’ll be back soon, I expect.”

Victoria disappeared. He stood for a moment irresolutely looking round him, then he began to wander from room to room, as though hoping Laura had left a footprint or perhaps a message on the pincushion to account for her absence. The rooms gave no clue, but the air was close; he opened the windows, letting out a bee who was crawling anxiously on the drawing-room panes. Everything looked unnaturally neat — ah yes, it was old Prout’s day to come and bang the carpet sweeper against the chair legs. She had plumped up the cushions on the shabby Knole sofa and had just slightly changed the position of all Laura’s Staffordshire figures on the bookshelves, but had she —? He ran a finger along the top of the books and, as usual, brought it away grubby, and the lampshades looked gray. The room had been redecorated at a time when it was fashionable to have everything “off-white,” a coloring which now sounded somewhat sardonic.

We ought to sell it, he thought, looking gloomily round. It’s too big for Laura to manage, it’s getting her down, and we’d never get a better price than we would now. Bellamy might like it. Only this morning in the train he had been saying that Hunter’s Lodge was too small for them. The thought of Bellamy sitting here, crossing his legs and complacently fondling his little mustache, was oddly depressing. No, damn it, he thought, let’s hold on a little longer and see if things improve. And it suddenly struck him as preposterous how dependent he and his class had been on the anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and worked the strings. All his life he had expected to find doors opened if he rang, to wake up to the soft rattle of curtain rings being drawn back, to find the fires bright and the coffee smoking hot every morning as though household spirits had been working while he slept. And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them. All the same, he’d be damned if he would sell the house to Bellamy!

He went down to the kitchen garden to see how that old fool Voller was getting along. The raspberries were netted all right, the jays were making an outraged squawking from the cherry trees, and the old man was hoeing at the far end beyond the asparagus bed. Stephen had meant to go along and shout one or two questions at him, but for some reason he stayed in the archway watching Voller, whose back was turned. The old man went on hoeing, very slowly, moving his spidery thin arms back and forth. He was bent as a thornbush, the back of his neck was earth-colored and seamed with deep lines and furrows, as though all the sorrows and cares of Voller’s life had somehow gone to his neck. The sound of his hoe breaking up the earth was oddly soothing, the sight of him working away quietly in the lovely evening light gave Stephen a peaceful feeling, he could not have explained why. Why worry? he thought. All will be well. And yet he had not the faintest idea why looking at old Voller, scratching away like a patient old mole at a few square feet of England, should make him feel suddenly peaceful. All he knew was, he did not feel like breaking up the moment by bellowing into Voller’s ear. He turned away, lighting a cigarette, and went back to the house.

Someone was moving plates in the kitchen. He went in quickly, saying “Hulloa! You’re back!” But it was Victoria, who must have bathed with extraordinary rapidity, and was now, in dressing gown and pajamas, bustling back and forth from the dining room.

“I’ve laid the table,” she said, “and I’ve put something in the oven. It looks like fish.”

She had the flushed and triumphant air all women wear when meeting the sudden emergency, as though drawing from it a mysterious source of pleasure. He looked at her respectfully.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You won’t have potatoes,” she said, “I’m afraid there wasn’t time.”

“That’s all right,” he said meekly.

“Will you start?” she asked. “I expect you’re awfully hungry, aren’t you? Probably Mummie has popped in to see someone. You know what she is about time,” she added with an amused, social manner — was it a gruesome echo of Mrs. Herriot again? Mesmerized, he followed her flapping slippers into the dining room. She had laid the table profusely, adding the silver candlesticks which they never used, several ash trays, and an empty sugar sifter.

“I do hope it’s done,” she said when they had taken the fish out of the oven and brought it into the dining room.

“It looks perfect,” Stephen said.

She beamed.

“What about you?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to have some with me?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, “I’ll bring in a glass of milk, just to keep you company — I think there’s some milk over. I ate such an awful lot at the Watsons’. Oh, Mrs. Watson sent you some cream cheese — it’s on the sideboard.” And there it was, looking small and damp in the middle of a huge plate.

34

VICTORIA, coming back with her milk, said suddenly, “Perhaps she met a bull.”

“Who?” asked Stephen, startled.

“Mummie. I saw a perfectly immense bull today — it belonged to Mr. Watson.”

She began telling him about the Watsons’ farm. Her bath or the heat of her exertions had given her a damp, rosy look. She’s going to be pretty, he thought, when she gets that damned coil of wire out of her mouth. He listened, nodding, thinking with amusement what it would be like to have a pretty daughter on his hands. Before they knew where they were, she would be a long-legged thing like that redheaded minx he had seen in Ashton, hurrying away, away, disappearing among the uncut laurels. She still looked very small, though, sitting drinking her milk at one side of the long table which they had bought in the old days when there were always people to dinner, people staying, never a minute to themselves. A long, positively patriarchal table. We should have had more children, thought Stephen, swallowing fish pie and looking round the empty places. Eight children, four boys, four girls. That is what we should have done, before the blighting weather set in which makes one worry to death over the future of even this solitary little object sitting licking milk off its downy upper lip. He would have liked a boy. It was locked up in his soul, he had never let Laura, even, suspect how much he would have liked a boy. But one worried desperately, desperately. All will be well, old Voller had mysteriously stated to the earth, bound in some ancient alliance in the greenish light between the asparagus bed and the tall hazels. But I don’t know, I don’t know, thought Stephen.

“Couldn’t we,” Victoria was asking, “have a cow, don’t you think? Just one? She could live perfectly well in the orchard, if you made her a little house.”

She was looking at him in suspense, hanging on his answer. It was obviously of enormous importance. He pushed back his plate.

“Well,”he said, “let’s think. There’s the milking of it, in the first place —”

He had not said no. He was discussing the question with her, in a gratifying, reasonable adult way. She seemed about to blow up, she turned so pink, and then she gave him a deep, soft look of love, so breath-taking, so utterly delicious that he felt he would promise her a dozen cows if she would often look at him like that.

“We could make our own butter,”she said. “You could always have cream cheese like this.” She scrambled up and set it before him with a flourish.

Afterwards, when she had gone up to bed, he began to feel just a little anxious. What on earth had happened to Laura? She had gone, of course, on that wretched old bicycle of hers. It had no brakes, it was obviously due to buckle up at any moment, he had told her only the other day that Jukes had got some perfectly decent new bikes down in the village. But she preferred to hang on to the old rattletrap, and now look what had happened, it had let her down. It had punctured or lost its chain somewhere in the maze of lanes at the foot of Barrow Down. That was the best that could have happened. At the worst, she was now lying senseless somewhere, in a ditch, crumpled up in a heap on the road. He would go out in the car and look for her, he thought. He went upstairs to fetch a new packet of cigarettes out of his dressing room, and was stopped by Victoria’s voice calling him.

He went into her room.

“I’ve been sick,” she said.

She was sitting up in bed, looking deadly pale.

“Hold on,” he said, “I’ll get a basin.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” she gasped politely.

“Well, a — a sponge.” He bolted from the room.

For the next few minutes he was very busy. Victoria leaned against him, her forehead was damp and glistening. He kissed it, and she sighed.

“I knew I’d eaten too much at the Watsons’,” she said.

“I expect the heat had something to do with it, darling,” he said.

She lay quietly, twiddling one of the buttons on his coat. She sighed again.

“I feel better now,” she said.

“We’d better do something about your bed,” he said.

What a day, he thought, rummaging about in the linen cupboard. He found clean sheets and a pillowcase, he brought them back and put them on Victoria’s bed, he hunted fresh pajamas out of the drawer and peeled her out of the old ones.

“Poor old baby,” he said when he had got her tucked up again and she lay there, placidly watching him, the pink color already draining back healthily into her face. By this time he was the one who was feeling slightly queasy. He bent to kiss her.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“I must,” he said, “I’m going to have a look outside the gate and sec if I can see Mummie coming.”

“You don’t think anything’s happened, do you?” she asked.

“Good Lord no,” he said, mockingly reassuring.

35

SHE put out her arms and gave him a huge strangling kiss. She was only a baby after all, she believed things with beautiful ease. Then she fell back on the pillow, and he had a feeling that she would be asleep almost as soon as he was out of the room. He went along to the bathroom and washed his hands and fetched the packet of cigarettes. It was really not any good to go and see if he could meet Laura, on second thoughts, for there were two ways that she might come and they could easily miss each other. He went downstairs again and cleared away the supper things. The cat sat watching him, with that insufferable feline air of knowing everything, of being able to speak if it liked. He dumped the china and silver in the sink. He really could not tackle washing up tonight. And suddenly for the first time he thought of the gypsy fellow. Was he all right? No one knew very much about him except that he lived in the old railway-coach shack up on Barrow Down. If she’s not back in half an hour, thought Stephen, I’ll take the car straight up there and have a look around.

Perhaps later on he ought to ring up the Wealding police station. No, really, he thought, this is too farcical. Dodge, their policeman, was such a pompous old fool, cycling round the village very slowly as though the law were a steel ramrod stuffed down the back of his tunic. Stephen could imagine him coming to the telephone in the square red box of a police station, embowered in Dorothy Perkins roses and earwigs, and taking it all down slowly and laboriously in a black notebook. Larst seen at breakfast, eight-fifteen — ay — em— Ah, what nonsense, thought Stephen. For it was only a puncture, nothing but a puncture.

He went out again. He could not settle down to anything. The evening was consolingly lovely, and he remembered that dusk, when there would be time to think of Dodge, was still some way ahead. In this last magnificent burst of light, people at the sea would still be bathing, the few remaining children would be trailing home along the sand dunes, lovers would sit hand in hand on the cliffs watching the fishing boat creep along the glittering pathway of the sinking sun. It was dropping fast, the sun, but it still showered the earth superbly with light, denying the watch on Stephen’s wrist. Only a little owl spoke thinly, huskily among the trees, as though impatient for night.

He leaned against the fence. What could have happened to Laura? He felt suddenly irritable, he did not believe about the puncture, she had simply forgotten about the time, that was all. She was hopeless, absolutely hopeless! He remembered past occasions when she had forgotten the time and kept him waiting at railway stations, drinking lonely beers to while away the minutes in pub bars, kicking about one freezing winter day in Salisbury Cathedral, where he felt his toes turning cold as Saxon stone. Then she would drift in, smiling, unrepentant, explaining that she had just picked up a book, or started a conversation with someone, or followed a fascinating little street which had somehow led her a few miles out of her way. He absolutely shuddered to think how she and Victoria had got along while he was away. Meals on trays, all the clocks wrong, and the worst of it would be nobody would mind in the least. And suddenly he remembered the telephone bill which had been such a nasty shock at breakfast. Neither she nor her mother had the slightest telephone conscience. They would ramble away by the hour, without a thought of the appalling sum which in time he and the poor old Colonel would have to face. Laura had no idea of money. What an upbringing, he thought, for the kind of life in which we are all floundering now, and likely to flounder. She was really impossible!

But at the same time he knew that this was just a bluff put up to hide his growing panic. Without her, everything was dust and ashes. He knew that perfectly well, watching the ducks roll and pause and suddenly rear on end to explore with their beaks under a wing feather. When she came back — for she must come, there was some perfectly ordinary reason for her absence — he would be so relieved that his temper might flare up, he might ask her angrily where she had been, giving them all such a scare, even to the point of thinking of telephoning Dodge. Or he might simply say, for once, that he loved her, that without her everything was dust and ashes. He did not know. The little owl called again. Soon it will be night, soon, soo-o-oon. He straightened up and swung round from the fence so abruptly that the ducks, who had been exploring close to him, ran some little way before they felt emboldened to turn and watch him out of sight.

Stuffy’s growl woke Laura. She sat up, feeling cramped, pushing back her hair. I must have dropped off, she thought guiltily. But for how long? She had no idea. Oceans of wonderful sleep seemed to have rolled over her, she had rocked and floated deliciously in endless caverns. The land had sung, she remembered that. She had heard it singing under her ear, pressed against the milky little flowers. Now she could tell from the deepening shadow, the wider glacier of cold blue which had slid down the slope into the valley, that it was really getting late. The great bowl below her was slightly misted over, and a fluff of beautiful pink clouds, a feather bed of flamingo down, hung in the sky. Good heavens! she thought in alarm. Victoria will have got home long ago, Stephen will have got home, they will be wondering what on earth has become of me.

She sprang to her feet, or tried to spring to her feet, but she was awfully stiff. She staggered and stood for a moment, her head spinning stupidly. I am glad I got to the top, she thought, looking dizzily down into the great misty bowl. But now she wanted to be down in it, to be part of it, to be home. She wanted to run in, calling their names, to find Stephen and say to him —what? Something that had come into her mind just before she fell asleep, though it did not really matter. She was feeling so extremely happy.

Stuffy was barking excitably, relieved that the long rest was over. “Come on then,” said Laura, stooping to pick up her scattered belongings.

And she began to run down the hill.

(The End)