No More Meadows (7 page)

Christine took another cup of coffee up to the spare room. Geoffrey was lying in twilight with the curtains drawn. He had been sitting up, but when he heard the door handle turn he slid down under the bedclothes and lay flat with his eyes closed.

‘How do you feel, Geoff?' Christine asked, coming up to the bed.

‘Got a headache.'

‘Poor dear. I'll just take your tray. Oh, good, you've eaten your lunch. That's fine.'

‘Well, I just had a taste of soup,' Geoffrey grumbled without opening his eyes. ‘What was it made of? Bones the dogs wouldn't eat?' But the bowl and the plate of toast were empty, and Christine had seen the amount of soup Aunt Josephine had taken up.

She knocked against the bed as she picked up the tray, and he gave an irritable exclamation and opened his eyes, which were pale and unfamiliar without his glasses. With the bandage low on his forehead, he looked like Suzanne Lenglen in her bandeau. His hair stuck up in points above the bandage.

‘I thought I heard my car a while ago,' he said. ‘You haven't been driving it, have you?'

Aunt Josephine had said that he was not to be excited. ‘How could you possibly hear it from this side of the house?' Christine hedged.' Quite a lot of cars go along our road.'

‘I'd know the sound of mine anywhere.' He closed the eye under the wound and looked at her with the other one. ‘Have you been driving it? I wouldn't put it past you.'

‘Of course not.' Christine put down the tray and went to the window to move the curtains.

‘Well, in any case,' he said sulkily. ‘I want you to take it to a garage today. It can't stand out all the time.'

The nearest garage was far away. If she took the car there she would have to walk back right across the Common. ‘But, Geoff,' she said, coming back to the bed, ‘it wouldn't hurt. It's quite warm and it isn't going to rain. Why, Americans leave their cars out all the time, even in winter. Hardly any of them have garages.'

‘I don't care what the Americans do!' he said loudly, raising himself bolt upright like Lazarus in his coffin. ‘Horrible people. It's my car, and it's all your fault that I'm lying here, and the least you could do –'

‘Whatever is going on?' asked Geoffrey's mother, surging into the room all furs and bags and umbrellas. ‘Geoffrey, my
darling boy!' She hurried to the bed and dropped magazines and flowers on his feet. ‘You're dangerously ill and you're supposed to be kept quiet, and my goodness, how uncomfortable you look! Christine, whatever are you thinking about, and you a nurse!'

Echoes of the remark made so often to Christine by so many irate ward sisters. ‘How did you get in, Aunt Lottie?' she asked sulkily. ‘I didn't hear the bell.'

‘The front door was open, in your usual charming country style,' said Aunt Lottie coldly. She swarmed over the bed. She was a large woman, and she gave forth a lot of voice and perfume and a kind of invisible ectoplasm of high-pressure living that took up a lot of space in the air around her. ‘Oh, my poor Geoffrey,' she said. ‘This is surely a terrible thing. I don't for the life of me see how it could have happened. Tell me
all
about it.'

‘It was all the fault of that damned dog,' he began, putting on the whining tone of a small boy with a doting mother.

‘I knew it! All those animals. I knew they'd be the ruin of this family some day. The house is like a menagerie. Why, when I came in a great brown-and-white monster came at me with slavering jaws, and if I hadn't run for my life up the stairs –'

‘That was my dog,' said Christine. ‘Timmy wouldn't hurt a fly. If he was slavering, it was because he can smell his dinner cooking.'

Aunt Lottie ignored her. She hovered with voluptuous exclamations over Geoffrey, who lay back, looking quite flat, like a typhoid patient sinking into the mattress.

Christine brought a chair up to the bed. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea, Aunt Lottie.'

‘I don't care for any, thank you. I've just had my lunch, but I dare say Robbins would be grateful for a cup, if you would invite him into the kitchen. Don't you bother about me. I just want to talk to my son. Now tell me, Geoffrey. I want to hear all about this dreadful accident.'

Dismissed, Christine went downstairs and brought Aunt Lottie's chauffeur into the kitchen and gave him tea and cake and talked to him about murder trials, while she mixed scones
to surprise Aunt Josephine when she came home from the Incurables.

She had her hands in the dough when the spare-room bell rang.

‘Just as if I was a servant,' Christine said.

‘I know, miss,' said the chauffeur with feeling. ‘Wouldn't it drive you off your natural.'

‘Something always happens when you start to make scones.' Christine scraped the dough off her fingers into the bowl, washed her hands and went up to the spare room. Aunt Lottie was winding herself into her blue foxes.

‘I'm ready to go now,' she said. ‘Geoffrey wants to sleep, and the poor boy must have all the rest he can. I only wish we could have got him home.'

‘So do I,' said Christine. ‘I mean - you'd be happier to have him with you.'

‘Please have Robbins go to the front door for me,' said Aunt Lottie, as if she were ordering her carriage and pair round to the door.

She was coming down the stairs as Christine came back from the kitchen. ‘Geoffrey has told me the whole story,' she said. ‘I wouldn't embarrass you, Christine, by saying so in front of him, but I consider it was foolhardy of you, very foolhardy indeed. Rash of Geoffrey, of course, but he was only trying to be gentlemanly.'

‘He would have left me to get in by myself,' Christine protested, ‘if I hadn't absolutely made him help.'

Aunt Lottie's attention was diverted by the large cardboard box of clothes and toys which Aunt Josephine had put out for the nuns to collect. She poked at it with her umbrella.

‘You never know what you'll find standing about in the hall of this house,' she said, and went out, raising her suède-gloved hand to Robbins as if she were hailing a cab.

When Roger arrived on Sunday morning, the first thing he saw was his sister walking through the hall with a tray of dirty bandages and bloodstained cotton wool.

‘Ha!' he said. ‘The estimable Miss Cope. What's happened? One of the tykes been fighting?' He always called the dogs the
Tykes, just as he called his father The Aged Parent, or The Aged P., and his wife The Little Woman. He seldom called anything by its right name, because he liked to make a joke about everything in the world, even the war, which he referred to as ‘that small scrap we had with the Nastys'. He called Aunt Josephine Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy, or simply Dogface, and his two children, who bore the lyrical names of Clement and Jeanette, were always known as Champ and Boots.

The children followed their mother into the hall, round-eyed, looking for trouble. They opened the door of the grandfather clock and played with the weights, while Christine unfolded the story of Geoffrey.

Roger roared with laughter, but his wife Sylvia frowned and said: ‘I don't think it's funny at all. Poor Geoffrey might have been killed.'

‘The little woman wasn't born with our sense of humour,' Roger said. ‘Now, kids, don't let your grandfather catch you messing about with that clock.'

‘Oh, he won't mind,' said Jeanette. She meant: He will mind, but we don't mind if he minds. The elder Cope so seldom spoke to them without censure that it bothered them no more than a fly on the window-pane.

‘Well, anyhow, run along and muck about somewhere till lunch-time,' their father said. ‘Champ, your flies are undone again. That boy! He'll be arrested yet. Where's Dogface? In the galley, I suppose.' He went down the passage past the stairs to the kitchen.

He was a large man with too much energy and no acquaintance with relaxation. The house was noisy and restless on Sundays when he was there. His wife was quiet and unobtrusive, perhaps because she had long ago given up hope of competing for attention. Christine supposed that she loved Roger because he was her brother, but they had never been close. Ever since she could remember, he had always laughed at her, and she had never been able to share her emotions with him or take him her problems.

‘There's a new puppy,' she told the children, who were now exploring Aunt Josephine's box for the nuns. ‘She's out on the
lawn. You can take her out of the run if you don't let her get on to the road.'

The boy and girl looked at her with delight, then looked at each other with secret faces, making the idea that a grown-up had given them entirely their own.

‘Jeanette is growing out of all her dresses,' Sylvia said, as they ran out of the door, with Christine's dog scrambling after them. ‘I wish I had another daughter to put into them.'

‘Why didn't you?' asked Christine.

‘You know I couldn't, after Clemmie.'

‘Oh yes, of course, I forgot. Why didn't you adopt one then, if you wanted another child?'

‘Well, we did and we didn't.' Sylvia took off her coat and hung it on the hall stand, which was piled with old coats and hats that nobody wore any more. ‘And an adopted child-I don't know that it's too satisfactory. They nearly always suffer from emotional insecurity.' She was quoting something that she had read.

‘Not if you treat them properly,' said Christine, holding the tray of dressings on her hip. ‘I've always thought that if I don't marry I shall adopt a child.'

‘You couldn't,' said Sylvia, smoothing down her dry reddish hair in the mirror that was partly obscured by all the clothes that hung on the stand. ‘Single women aren't allowed by law to adopt children.'

‘I'm sure I could if I really set about it,' Christine said, irritated by Sylvia's submissive acceptance of everything she was told. ‘There were two women won a case about it some years ago. Don't you remember? I'd manage it somehow, and if I had a child –'

‘Well, don't let's stand about in this cold hall all day,' said Sylvia, going towards the drawing-room. ‘Don't you want to go and get rid of that tray?'

Christine had wanted to continue the conversation where she was, with the unappetising tray of dressings balanced on her hip. The most interesting things never cropped up when you were sitting comfortably in chairs. It was always in transient places like halls or staircases or bathroom doorways that the really important things started to be said and you had to discuss
them then and there, because the mood was lost if you moved away to a more suitable place.

Some of the major events of her life had come to her when she was passing through this wide chilly hall, with its grandfather clock that told the months and days of the week, its loaded hatstand, and its huge gilt-framed print of Queen Victoria's coronation. It was here that her father had come from the telephone and told her that her mother had died in the nursing-home. It was here that Maurice had plucked up courage on his way out of the front door and looked back over his shoulder to ask her to marry him, and here that she had stood in her nightdress and read the letter from Jerry, which said that he was on leave in England.

But Sylvia did not like halls, and she was not interested in the problems of a woman who loved children, but had no husband to give them to her. She went into the drawing-room and poked the fire, and Christine took her tray out to the kitchen and then came back to pour sherry for all the family.

The Sunday was like so many other Sundays. It started off with everyone friendly and glad to see each other, and ended with a dyspeptic bickering, after they had eaten too much lunch and tea.

At one o'clock Mr Cope came in from his study, rubbing his eyes to show he had been writing.

‘Hullo there, aged P.!' called Roger from the fireplace, where he was straddling to warm his behind. ‘How's the
magnum opus?'

‘Pretty fair. I make slow progress though, and the publishers want it in a month's time. They never will realize that translating is a highly meticulous art and can't be rushed.'

‘Philistines, all of them.' Roger shouted his laugh, which went: ‘Ha-ha-ha!' on the air, like a bubble coming out of the mouth of a character in a comic strip. ‘What are you on to next? Why don't they give you something Parisian and sexy for a change? It would warm the cockles of your old age. Get the old glands gushing again.'

His father ignored this. He did not think Roger should talk like this in front of Sylvia. She was a favourite with him. He considered her one of the few really nice girls he knew.

She played up to him. She called him Copey, and made a great point of fussing over him and paying him respect, as if she did not think he got enough of it from his family. She brought him his sherry now, and settled him in an armchair, telling Roger to move over so that his father could get some of the fire.

Aunt Josephine came in from the kitchen with her face and hands red and some of the hairpins slipping out of her heavy hair. Christine went out to fetch the children, who had already got themselves dirty. She helped them to wash in the little lobby under the stairs. If she left them alone they would just hold their hands under the cold tap and wipe some of the dirt off on a towel, so she washed their hands in her own, liking the feel of the strong clutching little paws in hers.

She washed their faces with the corner of a wet towel, and they shut their eyes and pursed their soft mouths. She looked in the mirror over the basin and imagined that she was their mother. When she was drying Jeanette's face she bent and kissed her.

‘Why do you do that?' asked Clement with interest, swinging on the towel rail. ‘You always kiss us.'

‘Don't you like it?'

‘Oh, we don't mind.' His face shone and his black hair was combed wet and flat to his round head.

‘It's because I love you,' Christine said, untying Jeanette's bow, which was slipping off the end of her forelock. ‘Doesn't Mummy kiss you?'