Complete Short Stories (VMC) (6 page)

‘It is only a countrified sort of dance,’ Robert told Rex. His words were chiefly for Muriel, who should have known. ‘Nothing very exciting. Good of you to turn out.’

He hoped that Hester would now feel that she would miss nothing by staying at home, that he could not have gone himself, except as a duty; or asked anyone else to go, except as a favour. His stone, which should have killed two birds, missed both.

Hester, wearing a day-frock and trying to look unconcerned, managed only a stubborn sullenness – a Cinderella performance Muriel thought wrongly, underlined by Rex’s greeting to her – ‘But you are coming with us, surely?’ – when her clothes made it quite obvious that she was not.

Robert’s shame, Muriel’s guilt, Hester’s embarrassment, seemed not to reach Rex, although for the other three the air shivered, the wine-glasses trembled, at his tactlessness.

‘Too bad,’ he said easily. ‘Well, there is no doubt that you are coming.’ He turned to Muriel, his eyes resting once more upon all her shimmering glitter. (‘Ice’, he called it, and – later, to Hugh Baseden – ‘rocks the size of conkers. Crown jewels. The family coffers scraped to the bottom.’)

The glances, which he had meant to appear gallant and flattering, looked so predatory that Muriel put her hand to her necklace in a gesture of protection, and a bracelet fell into the soup. She laughed as Rex leant forward and fished it out with a spoon and fork and dropped it into the napkin she held out. Her laughter was that simulated kind which is difficult to end naturally and her eyes added to all the tremulous glint and shimmer of her. Hester, coldly regarding her, thought that she would cry. A Muriel in tears was a novel, horrifying idea.

The bracelet lay on the stained napkin. ‘The catch must be loose. I shan’t wear it,’ Muriel said, and pushed it aside.

‘That will be one less,’ Robert thought.

After dinner he had a moment alone with Hester.

‘All rather awkward about this dance. I hope you don’t mind, my dear. Don’t like leaving you – like Cinderella.’

Hester could see Muriel, re-powdered, cocooned in tulle, coming downstairs and laughed at this illusion, remembering who did go to the ball in the fairy-tale. ‘We must go to a real dance another time,’ Robert said. ‘Not a country hop, but a proper dance, with buckets of champagne.’ But Muriel, rustling across the hall, finished this vision for them. ‘I should sit with Matron,’ he added.

‘Oh, it is quite all right,’ Hester said, with a brightness covering her extreme woundedness. ‘I could not have gone with you tonight, or sit with Matron either; because I have another engagement, and now I must hurry.’ With a glance at their halted expressions she ran upstairs, leaving behind an uneasiness and raised eyebrows.

The cistern in the downstairs cloakroom made a clanking sound and there was a dreadful rush of water. This always embarrassed Muriel, and she turned aside as Rex appeared.

Hester, at the bend of the stairs, called out in a ringing, careless voice: ‘Oh, do have a lovely time.’

In this exhortation she managed to speak to them both in different ways – a difficult thing to do. Muriel felt herself condescended to and dismissed, unenvied, like a child going to a treat. But Robert’s guilt was not one scrap appeased, and Hester did not mean it to be. He perceived both her pathos and her gallantry, as she desired. Her apparent lack of interest in their outing and her sudden look of excitement worried him. Even Rex was puzzled by her performance. ‘Now what’s she up to?’ he wondered, as they went out to the car.

Yet, when she was in her own room Hester could not imagine where she might go. Recklessness would have led her almost anywhere, but in the end she could only think of the churchyard. As Miss Despenser had said, ‘to water the graves makes an outing’, and perhaps she could borrow a grave – Miss Linda’s, for instance – and cherish it in such dull times as these.

When she arrived in the churchyard, she found that Miss Despenser had finished planting and was vigorously scrubbing the headstones. Dirty water ran down over an inscription. ‘That’s better,’ were her first words to Hester as she came near.

‘I watered the plants.’

‘Yes, I noticed that.’

‘Can I help you?’

Miss Despenser threw the filthy water out in a great arc over some other graves – not her own family ones, Hester was sure – and handed her the bucket. ‘Clean water from the tap by the wall.’

‘Is that where the adders were?’

‘Adders?’

‘There were some once. I thought they might have come again.’

‘This is a fine thing – a stranger telling me about my own churchyard. I know nothing of adders. Are you a naturalist?’

‘Oh, no! I am really rather afraid of nature.’

Miss Despenser threw out her arms and laughed theatrically. ‘You’re a damn witty girl, I know that. When I first met you I thought you were a bit
of a nincompoop. You improve on acquaintance.’ She turned to examine the lettering on the grave, and Hester went to fetch the water.

‘Afraid of nature!’ Miss Despenser said, when she returned. ‘I appreciate that.’

The water, swinging in the pail, had slopped over into Hester’s sandals and her feet moved greasily in them.

‘So you’re afraid of nature!’ Miss Despenser said, and she grasped the bucket and threw the water over the headstones. Some went over her and more into Hester’s sandals. ‘She is drunk,’ Hester thought, remembering Muriel’s words and feeling annoyance that there should be any truth in them.

‘The bucket goes back into the shed and the scrubbing-brush into the basket.’ Miss Despenser shook drops of water off her skirt. ‘And we will go down to call on Mrs Brimmer.’

‘Mrs Brimmer?’

‘A friend of mine. You are quite welcome. I will look in at the house first and leave the scrubbing-brush. Mrs Brimmer would think me rather eccentric if I went to see her with a scrubbing-brush in my basket.’

‘Any adders?’ she asked, when Hester came back from the tool-shed. The piquancy of her own humour delighted her and she returned to the allusion again and again, puzzling Hester – who expected drunkenness to affect the limbs, but not the wits, and was exasperated as the young so often are at failing to read an extra meaning into the remarks of their elders.

Through a kissing-gate they came into a wood of fir trees. Miss Despenser slid and scuffled down the sloping track which was slippery with pine-needles. Jagged white flints had surfaced the path like the fins of sharks, so that Miss Despenser tripped and stumbled until Hester took her arm. She thought that they must look a strange pair and – such was the creaking darkness and mysterious resinous smell of the wood – half-feared that as the path curved they might see themselves coming towards them through the trees, like a picture of Rossetti’s she remembered called
How They Met Themselves
. ‘I shouldn’t care to meet myself,’ she said aloud, ‘in this dark place.’

‘You wouldn’t recognise yourself. You are much too young. When at long last you really learn what to look for, you will be too old to be alarmed.’

‘I didn’t mean that I should, or could; just that I’d hate it.’

‘I meet myself every so often. “You hideous old baggage,” I say, and I nod. For years I thought it was someone else.’

‘This wood goes on and on,’ Hester said nervously.

‘Ah, you are frightened of adders.’ When she had finished laughing, Miss Despenser said: ‘When I go into the town to get the cat’s meat, the chances
are that as I go round by the boot shop I see myself walking towards me – in a long panel of mirror at the side of the shop. “Horrid old character,” I used to think. “I must change my shopping morning.” So I changed to Fridays, but there she was on Fridays just the same. “I can’t seem to avoid her,” I told myself. And no one can. Go on your holidays. You take yourself along too. Go to the ends of the earth. No escape. And one gets so bored, bored. I’ve had nearly seventy years of it now. And I wonder if I’d been beautiful or clever I might have been less irritated. Perhaps I am difficult to please. My mother didn’t care for
herself
, either. When she died, the Vicar said: “It is only another life she has gone to, an
everlasting
life.” An extraordinarily trite little man. He hadn’t got much up here.’ She tapped her forehead and stumbled badly. ‘I said to him: “Oh dear, oh dear, for pity’s sake, hasn’t she had enough of herself?” I asked. He couldn’t answer that one. He just stared at the glass of sherry I was drinking, as if he were taking comfort in the idea of my being drunk. “I believe in personality,” I said. “You believe in souls.” That’s the difference between us. Souls are flattened out and one might very well spend an eternity with one’s own – though goodness knows what it would be like – as interesting as a great bowl of nourishing soup. I always think of souls as saucers, full of some tepid, transparent liquid. Couldn’t haunt anyone. Personalities do the haunting – Papa’s for instance. Tiresome, dreadful things. Can’t shake them off. Unless under the influence, of course.’

‘Of drink, I suppose,’ Hester thought.

‘Of drink,’ the old lady added.

‘It
is
a gruesome place. I like trees which shed their leaves.’

The bark of the trees was blood-red in the dying light and there were no sounds of birds or of anything but branches creaking and tapping together. Then the pink light thinned, the trees opened out and blueness broke through, and in this new light was a view of a tilted hillside with houses, and a train buffeting along between cornfields.

‘And there is my home,’ Miss Despenser said. She scrambled down the bank into a lane and, as she brushed dust and twigs from her skirt, she crossed the lane and opened a gate.

Laurels almost barred the way to the little house, which was of such dark grey and patchy stucco that it looked sopping wet. The untidy curtains seemed to have rooms of blank darkness behind them. Shepherd’s-purse grew round the mossy doorstep where a milk-bottle dribbling curdled milk had been knocked over.

‘Welcome!’ said Miss Despenser, throwing open the door upon such a smell of dampness and decay, such a chaotic litter, that Hester stepped aside to take a last full breath before going in.

‘You were right. He
is
behaving abominably,’ Muriel said to Robert as they danced.

Rex had reconnoitred, got his bearings, soon left Lady Bewick’s niece and now was slipping out through the flap of the marquee with a girl in a green frock. Muriel saw his hand pass down the back of his gleaming hair in an anticipatory gesture as he went.

‘He’s lost no time in finding the most common-looking little minx in the room,’ she told Robert. She was unsteady and almost breathless with frustration, not getting her own way. So far she had danced once with the doctor and the rest of the time with Robert.

‘It’s his duty, if nothing else,’ she thought. But Rex and his duty made a casual relationship. ‘Am I so faded, that he would rather be rude?’ But Rex was firstly doing what he wanted to do. If rudeness was involved, it was only as a side-issue. ‘It is because he knows I am inaccessible,’ she told herself.

They continued to catch brief glimpses of Rex during the evening; at the bar, at the buffet. Someone else took Lady Bewick’s niece to supper. As it grew later, the sky deepened its blue behind the black shapes of the garden trees – the monkey-puzzles darkly barbed; the cedars; and the yews clipped into pagodas and peacocks. Voices floated across the lawns; long skirts brushed the grass.

In twos, the dancers strolled in the enclosed warmth of the walled garden, sat on the terrace among the chipped statues, or gazed down at the silvered lily-leaves in the pool.

‘A good thing we
didn’t
bring Hester,’ Muriel said. ‘Rex would have left her stranded.’

‘Sorry!’ said Robert, as they fell out of step. They had never danced well together, yet they went on dancing. There was nothing to walk in the garden
for
, among all that pulsating romance. At their age.

In the end, Muriel’s dance with Rex was accidental, during a Paul Jones. Hearing the first romping bars of this, she was all for going to the bar, but Lady Bewick hustled her into the dance – ‘Now,
everyone
! You must’ – and took her by the hand and led her to the circle. They revolved, with absurd smiles, feeling looked-over by the encircling men. Robert’s expression was one of sudden gaiety, as if he were let off the leash for a moment. ‘How many years has he had that suit?’ Muriel wondered. ‘Since he was at school, I should think. The sleeves are too short. He looks buttoned-up, spry, like a cock-sparrow. What can a young girl see in him, unless a father?’ Yet could not that be a danger, especially if Robert were at the same time looking for a daughter? Rex bowed mockingly as he passed her; but his eyes were instantly elsewhere.

‘An absurd game, like a child’s,’ Muriel thought, feeling outraged and
also secretly dismayed at the thought of the music stopping as she faced blankness; then to trail disconsolately to a chair, watched by Robert, and by Rex. She had not learnt how to mind less than as a little girl at parties – the panic of not being chosen, the first seeds of self-mistrust.

But when the music stopped she was at once in the doctor’s arms again. He came straight forward with his hands outstretched; easy to dance with, he waltzed away with her, bouncy, soft-treading, his rounded paunch doing the guiding. By fate or by manoeuvre, Rex had the green girl. Muriel could not see Robert and was inattentive to the dance as she tried to search him out. Then she saw him at the edge of the room. He had been left without a partner and now was going forward to claim a very plain woman in a pink frock and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. Muriel was at peace, until the next round. It was then that she found herself between Rex and another man when the music stopped. Both hesitated; then Rex seemed to master his unwillingness, smiled and stepped forward. Authoritatively he took her over; automatically pressed her to him. She made some remark, and, while his eyes still roved round the room, he smiled again and laid his cheek to her hair. ‘What did you say?’