Essential Stories (26 page)

“Where did you learn that one, Saxon?”

He looked with bewilderment at us.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said and walked across the room to the outer hall of the hotel.

Mrs. Selby put herself with kind Jenny Fox and whispered to her for a long time and Mrs. Fox said:

“It’s not your fault. How could you know?”

“I only
said
it,” Mrs. Selby said wretchedly, looking at the swing door that let cold air in from the outer hall when it flashed round and where Saxon had gone.

“What was the matter with Saxon?” Selby accused.

“He’s upset—nothing,” said Mrs. Fox turning to Selby as she patted Mrs. Selby’s hand. And then, arguing for herself, Mrs. Selby told us.

Presently the swing door flashed and Saxon came back and three of us got up to offer him a chair. We gave him the best one, beside a low table which had a brilliant lamp on it. Instantly it threw his shadow on the white wall—a shadow that caricatured his face—the long nose, the chin that receded, the glasses tilted as he looked askance at us, the sprig of schoolboy hair.

“They haven’t turned up yet,” he said.

We looked at our Saxon with awe. It was obvious he was in love with that rich, beautiful woman. He must always have been in love with her. We had pulled her to pieces in front of him. What he must have been feeling as he pretended and as he submitted to our joke. And, after all this, she had not come. Where was she? One or two of us wanted to get up and find her. Where would she be? We could not guess. We had to admit that Tessa merely slummed with us. She would never think of coming to a second-rate hotel like this or to an old Asaphians’ reunion. She’d be at some smart dinner party, something very grand—she certainly had “oldest friends” in very grand circles. One could imagine her long neck creeping up close to the conscience of an Archbishop. Or disturbing the shirt of an Ambassador, or her boding voice creeping up the sleeve of a banker who would be saying: “Young lady, what are all your hippie friends up to nowadays?” at one of old Ma Dustman’s dinner parties.
She
would be stripping the jewellery off the women and telling Sir Somebody Something that one would be a fool to sell one’s Matisses yet. The Dustman would not be there. We tried not to look at the unmarriageable silhouette of Saxon’s head on the wall.

“Where did you pick up that wonderful step, Saxon?” Mrs. Selby said gaily, to make amends.

Saxon gave a forgiving glance. He had recovered.

“At the Cool It,” he said.

“What’s the Cool It?” Thomas said.

“A club,” said Saxon.

“Never heard of it.”

“In the docks,” said Saxon.

“The docks?”

Saxon in the docks! The liaison committees in the docks! Saxon in low life! Saxon a libertine!

“What on earth takes you to the docks? Research? Come clean. Having fun?”

In our repentance, we made a hero of him. The old sly Saxon, pleased and pink, was with us again.

“In principle, yes,” said Saxon. “I sometimes go with the Dustman.”

We could not speak. Saxon and the Dustman in the docks!

“What is it—a cellar?”

“It’s a sewer,” said Saxon complacently. “Tessa goes there with her father.”

“The Dustman takes his daughter to a place like that!”

“He says it will loosen her up,” said Saxon, looking for hope in our eyes. “You see he wants her to get married.”

Saxon settled back, impudently, comfortably, in the chair. The brocade enriched him and he maliciously considered us one by one.

“To a stoker?” said Selby.

“No,” said Saxon. “To me—in principle. That’s why I go down there. You see, she’s worried about him. We go down to see he doesn’t get into trouble. I had to pull him out of a nasty fight last week. We got him out. We got him home. To her place. He hates going to his.”

The notion of Saxon fighting was as startling as his dance.

“She must be very grateful to you,” we said politely.

“Why do you say ‘marry in principle?’ ” said Selby.

“He means,” Mrs. Selby explained sharply to her husband, disliking the mockery, “the Dustman is her oldest friend, older even than Saxon is. Isn’t that so, Saxon?”

“In practice, yes,” said Saxon, entirely forgiving her. “I’ll go and have another look for them. They promised to come. The Dustman said it would be awfully nice to see us all again. I’ll just go and see.”

And he got up and trotted across the yards of hotel carpet that had a pattern of enormous roses. It seemed that their petals were caressing him on his way to the door. The door spun round and Saxon vanished.

Our wives said: “What a sad story!” and “What a bitch that girl is.” But we thought: “Good old Saxon.” And “He’s suffering for us.” Selby put it crudely saying: “That lets us off the hooks.” And then our feelings changed. There was Saxon sitting like a committee on his own feelings, delegating them incurably to sub-committees, and sitting back doing nothing, relying on an amendment. He must have been doing this for the last eight years. But this led us to another feeling.
We
would never have behaved as Saxon behaved. Each of us saw that beautiful girl in our minds and thought we would have soon pulled her out of this ridiculous obsession with the Dustman and his low life. And how often we had heard of coquettes like Tessa settling down at last in their thirties with faithful bores like Saxon, men they had snubbed over and over again before that alarming age caught them out.

We kept our eyes on the main door of the hotel and were so fixed on it that we did not notice, at once, a figure crossing the dance floor at our side and looking in at us.

“Well!” we heard Tessa’s slow, only too well-known voice, dwelling raffishly on the word so that it meant “What are you up to? You didn’t think you could keep me out of this.” Her large solemn eyes, as forcefully short-sighted as Saxon’s were, put their warning innuendo to each of us in turn and the mouth of a beautiful Persian cat possessed us one by one. The spell was on us. A comfortable mew to each of our wives indicated that she had known us years before they had.

We were nearly screaming for help. It was for Thomas, the rescuer, to save us.

“Saxon has just gone out looking for your father.”

She was up from her chair at once and making for the main door. She had fine legs, a fast passionate step, and Mrs. Selby said of her dress:

“It’s expensive, but pink is hopeless if you’re putting on weight.”

But Selby, over-eager for any hope that could be got out of the situation, said:

“Did you see her when she came in? It was exactly like Saxon. Hunting. You know—in principle yes, but in practice—well. She’s a liaison too. I think the Dustman’s loosened her up and found the man for her.”

But no one paid much attention to Selby for the swing doors flashed and across the hall came the Dustman, Saxon and Tessa together.

“Look, daddy,” she said to the old man. He had not, of course, changed into a dinner-jacket and his tweed jacket was done up on the wrong button. His trudging step, I now thought, was not so much a trudge as a scraping caused by the probability that he was swinging by an invisible rope hooked to the seat of his learned trousers.

“Look,” she said, “all my oldest friends!”

And Saxon stood apart with his hands on his hips, watching, his legs apart, keeping goal, wistful, admiring, triumphant.

“Who’s dancing?” piped the old man. And soon all of us were on the floor, the Dustman shoving Mrs. Selby along as if to her doom, and Tessa following him with her eyes all the time, as Saxon leapt into his passionate, dreadful and unavailing antics all round her. Once in a while she would note where he was, open her mouth to say something pleasant, and then coldly change her mind.

ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF

The sea fog began to lift towards noon. It had been blowing in, thin and loose for two days, smudging the tops of the trees up the ravine where the house stood. “Like the cold breath of old men,” Rowena wrote in an attempt at a poem, but changed the line, out of kindness, to “the breath of ghosts,” because Harry might take it personally. The truth was that his breath was not foggy at all, but smelt of the dozens of cigarettes he smoked all day. He would walk about, taking little steps, with his hand outstretched, tapping the ash off as he talked. This gave an abstracted searching elegance which his heavy face and long sentences needed. In her dressing gown Rowena went to his room. His glasses were off and he had finished shaving and he turned a face savaged to the point of saintliness by age, but with a heavy underlip that made him look helplessly brutal. She laughed at the soap in his ears.

“The ghosts have gone,” she said poetically. “We can go to Withy Hole! I’ll drive by the Guilleth road, there’s a fair there. They’ll tell our fortunes.”

“Dull place,” he said. “It used to be full of witches in the sixteenth century.”

“I’m a witch,” she said. “I want to go to the fair. I saw the poster. It starts today.”

“We’ll go,” he said, suspicious, but giving in.

He was seventyish, and with a young girl of twenty-five one had, of course, to pretend to be suspicious. There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game.

“The sea pinks will be out on the cliffs,” he said.

“You old botanist!” she said.

He was about to say “I know that” and go on to say that girls were like flowers with voices and that he had spent a lot of his life collecting both, but he had said these things to her often before and at his age one had to avoid repeating oneself, if possible. Anyway, it was more effective as a compliment when other people were there and they would turn to look at her. When young girls turned into women they lost his interest: he had always lived for reverie.

“So it’s settled,” she said.

Now he looked tragic as he gazed at her. Waving his razor, he began his nervous trick of taking a few dance-like steps and she gave him one of her light hugs and ran out of the room.

What with his organising fusses and her habit of vanishing to do something to a drawing she was working on, the start was late.

“We’ll have to eat something,” she said, giving an order.

But it was his house, not hers. He’d lived alone long enough not to be able to stand a woman in his kitchen, could not bear to see her cut a loaf or muddle the knives and forks or choke the sink with tea leaves.

“Rowena and I,” he said to people who came to see them, in his military voice, “eat very little. We see no one.”

This was not true, but like a general with a literary turn, he organised his imagination. He was much guided by literature. His wife had gone mad and had killed herself. So in the house he saw himself as a Mr. Rochester, or in the car as Count Mosca with the young duchess in
La Chartreuse de Parme;
if they met people, as Tolstoy’s worldly aunt. This was another game: it educated the girl.

While he fussed between the kitchen and the room they ate in, she came down late and idled, throwing back her long black hair, lassoing him with smiles and side glances thrown out and rushed at him while he had a butter plate in his hand and gave him another of her light engulfing hugs and laughed at the plate he waved in the air.

“Rowena!” he shouted, for she had gone off again. “Get the car out.”

The house was halfway up the long ravine, backed and faced by an army of ash trees and beeches. There was the terrace and the ingenious steep garden and the plants that occupied him most of the day, and down from the terrace he had had to cut the twenty or thirty steps himself, heaving his pickaxe. Rowena had watched his thick stack of coarse grey hair and his really rather brutal face and his pushed-out lips, as he hacked and the pick hit the stones. He worked with such anger and pride, but he looked up at her sometimes with appealing, brilliant eyes. His furious ancient’s face contained pain naturally.

She knew he hated to be told to be careful when he came down the steps. She knew the ceremony of getting him into the car, for he was a tall, angular man and had to fold himself in, his knees nearly touching his chin, to which the long deep despondent lines of his face ran heavily down. It was exciting for her to drive the old man dangerously fast down the long circling lane through the trees, to show how dangerous she could be, while he talked. He would talk nonstop for the next hour, beginning, of course, with the country fair.

“It’s no good. Plastic, like cheap food. Not worth seeing. The twentieth century has packaged everything.”

And he was on to the pre-Roman times, the ancient spirit of carnival, Celtic gods and devils, as they drove out of the ravine into deep lanes, where he could name the ferns in the stone walls, and the twisting hills and corners that shook the teeth and the spine. Historical instances poured out of him. He was, she said, Old Father Time himself, but he did not take that as a joke, though he humoured her with a small laugh. It was part of the game. He was not Father Time, for in one’s seventies, one is a miser of time, putting it by, hiding the minutes, while she spent fast, not knowing she was living in time at all.

Guilleth was a dull, dusty, Methodistical little town with geraniums in the windows of the houses. Sammy’s Fair was in a rough field just outside it, where dogs and children ran about. There was only one shooting gallery; they were still putting up the back canvas of the coconut shy. There were hoopla stalls, a lot of shouting and few customers. But the small roundabout gave out its engine whistle and the children packed the vulgar circle of spotted cows with huge pink udders, the rocking horses, the pigs, the tigers and a pair of giraffes.

The professor regarded it as a cultural pathos. He feared Rowena. She was quite childishly cruel to him. With a beautiful arrogance that mocked him, she got out of the car and headed for ice cream. He had to head her off the goldfish in their bowls. She’d probably want to bring one home.

“Give me some money,” she said, going to the roundabout. There was a small crowd near that. “I’m going on the giraffe. Come on.”

“I’ll watch you,” he complained and cleaned his glasses.

There she was, riding a giraffe already, tall and like a schoolmistress among the town children, with her long hair, which she kept on throwing back as she whirled round, a young miracle, getting younger and younger. There were other girls. There were town youths and there was an idiotic young man riding backwards on a cow, kicking out his legs and every now and then waving to the crowd. Rowena on her giraffe did not smile, but as she came round sedately, waved to the old man as she sailed by.

He looked at his watch. How much longer?

“I’m going on again,” she called, and did not get off.

He found himself absurdly among the other patient watchers, older than all, better dressed too, on his dignity, all curiosity gone. He moved away to separate himself from his bunch of them, but he had the impression they all moved with him. There was a young woman in a bright-red coat who always seemed to be in the next bunch he joined. Round came the giraffe: round came the young man on the cow. The young woman in red waved. Seeing that to wave was the correct thing, the old man too waved at the giraffe. The woman waved again a moment later and stared at him as if annoyed. He moved a yard from her, then five yards, then to the other side of the roundabout. Here he could wave without being conspicuous, yet the woman was standing close to him once more. She was small with reddish hair, her chin up, looking at him.

“You don’t remember me,” she accused him in a high voice. Her small eyes were impudent. He stepped back, gaping.

“Daisy Pyke,” she said.

Pyke? Pyke? He gaped at her briefly, his mind was sailing round with Rowena.

“George’s wife,” she said, challenging his stupidity.

“George . . .” But he stopped. George Pyke’s wife must be fifty by now. This woman could not be more than thirty. Her daughter—had they had a daughter?

“Have I changed as much as that?” she said. Her manner was urchin-like and she grinned with pleasure at his confusion and then her mouth drooped at the corners plaintively, begging. Nowadays he thought only of Rowena’s wide mouth, which made all other women vague to him. And then the hard little begging, pushing mouth and its high voice broke into his memory. He stepped back with embarrassment and a short stare of horror which he covered quickly, his feet dancing a few steps, and saying with foolish smiles, “Daisy! I thought . . . I was watching that thing. What are you doing here?”

Now that he remembered, he could not conceal a note of indignation and he stood still, his eyes peered coldly. He could see this had its effect on her.

“The same as you,” she said in that curt off-hand voice. “Waiting. Waiting for them to come off.” And she turned away from him, offended, waved wildly at the roundabout and shouted, “Stephen, you fool!” The young man riding backwards on the cow waved back and shouted to her.

What an appalling thing! But there it is—one must expect it when one is old: the map in one’s head, indeed the literal map of the country empties and loses its contours, towns and villages, and people sink out of sight. The protective faces of friends vanish and one is suddenly alone, naked and exposed. The population ranked between oneself and old enemies suddenly dissolves and the enemy stands before one. Daisy Pyke!

The old man could not get away. He said as politely as he could manage, “I thought you went abroad. How is George?”

“We did. George,” she said, “died in Spain.” And added briskly, “On a golf course.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

She looked back at the roundabout and turned again to say to him, “I know all about you. You’ve got a new house at Colfe. I’ve still got the old house, though actually it’s let.”

Forty miles lay between Colfe and Daisy Pyke—but no people in between! Now the roundabout stopped. There was a scramble of children getting on and getting off, and the local watchers moved forward too.

“I must get Rowena,” he said ruthlessly and he hurried off, calling out in his peremptory voice, “Rowena!”

He knew that Daisy Pyke was watching him as he held out a hand to help Rowena off, but Rowena ignored it and jumped off herself.

“Rowena. We must go.”

“Why? It was lovely. Did you see that ridiculous young man?”

“No, Rowena,” he said. “Where?”

“Over there,” she said, “with the girl in red, the one you were chatting up, you old rip. I saw you!” She laughed and took his arm. “You’re blushing.”

“She’s not a girl,” he said. “She’s a woman I used to know in London twenty years ago. It was rather awful! I didn’t recognise her. I used to know her husband. She used to be a friend of Violet’s.”

“Violet’s!” said Rowena. “But you
must
introduce me.” She was always eager to know, as if to possess, everyone he had ever known, to have all of him, even the dead. Above all Violet, his wife. Rowena longed to be as old as that dead woman.

“Really, Harry, you are frightful with people.”

“Oh, well . . . But she’s appalling. We had a terrible row.”

“One of your old loves,” she teased.

“I had to throw her out of the house,” he said. “She’s a liar.”

“Then I
must
see her,” said Rowena. “How thrilling.”

“I think they’ve gone,” he said.

“No,” said Rowena. “There they are. Take me over.”

And she pulled him towards the hoopla stall where Daisy Pyke and the young man were standing. There lay the delightfulness of Rowena: she freed him from the boredom into which his memories had set and hardened. He had known many young girls who in this situation would be eagerly storing opportunities for jealousy of his past life. Rowena was not like that.

At the stall, with its cunningly arranged bowls, jugs, and toys, the young man with the yellow curling hair was pitching rings onto the table, telling Daisy to try and altering the angle of the ring in her hand.

“Choose what you want, hold the ring level and lightly, don’t skim fast. Don’t bowl it like that! Like this.”

Daisy’s boldness had gone. She was fond and serious, glancing at the young man before she threw.

“Daisy,” said the old man, putting on a shady and formal manner as if he were at a party, “I have brought Rowena to meet you.”

And Rowena stepped forward gushingly. “How d’you do! I was telling Harry about the young man on the cow.”

“Here he is,” said Daisy stiffly. “Stephen!”

The young man turned and said “Hello” and went on throwing rings. “Like that,” he said.

Rowena watched him mockingly.

“We are just off,” said Harry.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Daisy to Rowena.

“We’re going to walk along the cliffs,” said Harry.

“To Withy Hole,” said Rowena.

“It was extraordinary meeting you here,” said Harry.

“Perhaps,” said Daisy, “we’ll meet again.”

“Oh, well—you know we hardly see anyone now,” said Harry.

Daisy studied Rowena impudently and she laughed at the boy, who had failed again.

“I won a goldfish once,” said Rowena, laughing. “It died on the way home.”

“Extraordinary,” the old man said as he and Rowena walked away. “That must be George’s son, but taller. George was short.”

When she got him back into the car she saw by his leaden look that the subject was closed. She had met one more of his friends—that was the main thing.

The hills seemed to pile up and the sea to get farther and farther away and then, suddenly, as they got over the last long hill, they passed the caravan sites that were empty at this time of the year and looked like those flat white Andalusian towns he remembered, from a distance. The old man was saying, “But we have this new rootless civilisation, anarchic but standardised”—suddenly the sea appeared between the dunes below, not grey and choppy, but deep blue, all candour, like a young mouth, between the dunes and beyond it, wide and still and sleepily serene. The old man was suddenly in command, fussing about the exact place where they could leave the car, struggling over the sand dunes dotted with last year’s litter, on to the huge cliffs. At the top there they could look back and see on the wide bay the shallow sea breaking idly, in changing lines of surf, like lips speaking lines that broke unfinished and could not be heard. A long way off a dozen surfers were wading out, deeper and deeper, towards the bigger waves as if they were leaving the land for good and might be trying to reach the horizon. Rowena stopped to gaze at them, waiting for one of them to come in on a long glissade, but the old man urged her on to the close turf of the cliffs. That is what he had come for: boundlessness, distance. For thirty miles on a clear day in May like this, one could walk without meeting a soul, from headland to headland, gazing through the hum of the wind and under the cries of the dashing gulls, at what seemed to be an unending procession of fading promontories, each dropping to its sandy cove, yet still riding out into the water. The wind did not move the old man’s tough thatch of hair but made his big ears stick out. Rowena bound her loose hair with a scarf. From low cliff to high cliff, over the cropped turf, which was like a carpet, where the millions of sea pinks and daisies were scattered, mile after mile in their colonies, the old man led the way, digging his knees into the air, gesticulating, talking, pointing to a kestrel above or a cormorant black as soot on a rock, while she followed lazily yards behind him. He stopped impatiently to show her some small cushioned plant or stood on the cliff ’s edge, like a prophet, pointing down to the falls of rock, the canyons, caverns, and tunnels into which the green water poured in black and was sucked out into green again and spilled in waterfalls down the outer rocks. The old man was a strong walker, bending to it, but when he stopped he straightened, and Rowena smiled at his air of detachment as he gazed at distant things as if he knew them. To her he looked like a frightening mixture of pagan saint and toiling animal. They would rest at the crest of a black cliff for a few minutes, feel the sun burn their skin, and then on they went.