School for Love (10 page)

‘Of course it’s not Frau Wagner.’ Miss Bohun was still exasperated but her tone softened a little: ‘I’ve got nothing against her. It’s just that I want to make changes. You’ve been here all winter. It’s given you a chance to find your feet, and now, well, people are likely to talk. I owe it to myself not to give rise to gossip – and, besides, I want the attic for a particular reason and I really must have it.’

In her agitation Miss Bohun was cutting her fish, putting down her knife and fork, lifting them and cutting it again. Felix, watching Mr Jewel, who troubled him very much, saw the old man raise his eyes and give her a pitying look.

‘You’ll just have to look for somewhere. Seriously,’ she said.

‘I have looked, but there’s such a lot of refugees here. People can ask any price for a room.’

‘Exactly!’ Miss Bohun significantly agreed.

On Saturday Felix saw Mr Jewel knocking at doors in the Old City and the poverty of the quarter made Mr Jewel’s poverty evident. Perhaps he was not taking advantage of Miss Bohun. Perhaps he was as helpless and alone as he looked. Felix felt he ought to go to Mr Jewel and offer him help of some kind, but he had nothing to offer, so, instead, he hurried out of sight. He began to wish that Mr Jewel would go away and release them all from the embarrassment suffered each evening at the dinner-table, especially that suffered by Mr Jewel himself.

Miss Bohun said nothing more about the matter, but her silence spoke. Then, one evening, the old man did not come down when the bell rang. Miss Bohun ‘tutted’ to
herself and gave the bell another ring, then she said: ‘Mr Jewel again. He might at least spare us his ill-breeding. Well, we can’t let the soup get cold.’

Felix and Miss Bohun had their soup; when Maria entered, Miss Bohun said: ‘Go upstairs, Maria, and ask Mr Jewel if he has heard the bell.’

Maria ascended slowly to the attic and as slowly descended while Miss Bohun sat in restless silence.

‘Well?’

‘Mr Jewel sick.’

‘No!’ Miss Bohun turned sharply in her chair and her long period of exasperation crystallised suddenly into militant anger: ‘This is the last straw. What does he say is the matter with him?’

Maria spread her hands: ‘Don’t know.’

‘Really! It’s too bad.’ Miss Bohun turned to Felix, ‘Felix, you go up.’

Felix went up almost as slowly as Maria had done. He was certain Mr Jewel was dead, but when he whispered: ‘Mr Jewel,’ into the dark, icy attic, the old man murmured hoarsely.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Felix.

‘Light the lamp, there’s a lad,’ said Mr Jewel. ‘Matches in the saucer.’

Felix put back the curtain to get a glimmer from the landing and found and lit the lamp. ‘I’ll light the oil-stove, too.’

‘No kerosene,’ croaked Mr Jewel, ‘used it all last week. No more coming up.’

‘I’ll get you some.’

‘No, no. Don’t ask her. Quite warm in here. Be all right in the morning. Bit of a chill like.’

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘Drink of water.’

There was an Arab water-cooler and glass on the floor by the bed. Felix, feeling efficient and useful, filled the glass and held it for Mr Jewel. The old man’s face shone with sweat. The skin of his neck felt very hot as Felix propped him up.

‘I’ll bring up your soup,’ said Felix.

Mr Jewel shook his head: ‘Don’t ask her. Don’t want it. Be all right to-morrow.’

‘Shall I leave the lamp?’

‘Better not. Don’t need it. She wouldn’t like it.’

When Felix went downstairs he said with some importance: ‘He’s got a temperature.’

‘Oh, dear! Now what are we supposed to do?’ She was silent through the rest of the meal, but at the end she said in sudden, cheerful decision: ‘But he must see a doctor. I know the hospital doctors so well – they’ve always been so kind to me.’

She went over to the writing-desk where the telephone stood. After a long delay, during which she remained unperturbed, she got on to the sister on duty at the English Hospital: ‘Sister Smart? Ah, how good to hear your voice. I am so worried. . . . No, it’s my lodger, Mr Jewel. I don’t know what’s the matter, but I suspect pneumonia, always a serious business in the very old. If someone could come over to Herod’s Gate . . . No. I understand. But I think it would be very dangerous to delay. Another night – the crisis – you know – and I feel so responsible. He has no friends. He came up here as a refugee and I took him in. It seems to me
vital
that he get attention to-night. . . . Well, yes, that would indeed be the best thing. Thank
you. Thank you so much.’ When she put down the receiver she sat some moments smiling gratefully before she said: ‘How good of Sister Smart. How very kind.’

‘Is a doctor coming?’

‘No, but she’s sending the ambulance. She, too, suspects pneumonia. Mr Jewel will get the very best of attention at the English Hospital.’

‘Poor Mr Jewel,’ said Felix, ‘I wonder how long he’ll have to stay there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Miss Bohun lifted her chin with a movement of tranquil and gracious decision. ‘But he’s not coming back here.’

Next morning, as Felix was struggling to write an essay on ‘The Animal World’, he heard a ceaseless coming and going on the stairs. When he put his head out, he saw that under Nikky’s direction Maria and the gardener were moving everything out of the attic. As Maria passed down with a bundle of Mr Jewel’s paintings under her arm, Felix asked Nikky anxiously: ‘You’re not going to burn them, are you?’

Nikky answered: ‘Not yet,’ and shouted after Maria: ‘Put them in the wood-shed.’ He turned his back on Felix to prevent further questions and Felix went back to his room to write slowly, in a childish forward-sloping hand:

‘Faro is a little cat, but being a Siamese she is not an ordinary cat. She has some toys of her own and the one she loves best is her rabbit’s paw. She brings it and places it on my lap and waits for me to throw it. When I throw it . . .’ Felix paused, sucking his pencil-end and cogitating how he could describe the flurry and pin-pricking of claws with which Faro went off his knee, leaping, flying –
like a leaping frog, perhaps he could say, but it reminded him also of the pictures he had seen of the fruit-bat; her brown velvet toes stretched, stretched in excitement, looking webbed as they stretched, she would pounce on the rabbit’s paw – then back she would bring it to be thrown again with all the flurry of before. After a long pause he started to write again: ‘She sails through the air like a frog and lands on the paw, then she brings it back for me to throw again.’ Another pause – now he had to describe how, when she got tired of playing with the rabbit’s paw, she would continue to jump down after it, just to show her appreciation, but slowly and more slowly, and then, in the end, she would place it, not on his knee, but out of reach somewhere, perhaps on the window-sill or the bed. Then she would settle herself beside it with paws curved in beneath curved breast – he could see the dark paws neatly placed beneath the white swansdown curve of fur, her head half up, erect but dreaming, and that lioness poise, that unselfconscious dignity of a queen! The picture hung on his mind as on a cinema screen, but how could he put it into words? He sighed and wrote:

‘When she is tired . . .’ and suddenly there was an uproar of sawing and banging from upstairs. His door fell open and Miss Bohun appeared, cheeks pink, voice high: ‘I hope this isn’t disturbing your studies, Felix, but the work
must
be done. The sooner it’s started, the sooner it will be finished.’

‘Yes,’ Felix began packing up his books.

‘Oh, I’m so excited,’ she brought her hands together in a single clap. ‘I’ve wanted to do things in the attic, but with Mr Jewel there I couldn’t get in. I had a little spare
cash and I asked myself: “What shall I do with it? I know,” I said, “I’ll make the attic a
den
, a positive den.”’

‘For Frau Leszno?’ Felix was surprised.

‘Oh no. I’ve been thinking of moving up there myself. It’s so quiet and away from the traffic of the house. I’m having a door put on, too. I can shut myself up there with my thoughts and compose my sermons. Oh, I
do
look forward to it.’

Miss Bohun seemed unusually happy, but Felix was wondering if he very much wanted Frau Leszno in the room just across the passage. He decided he did not and gloomed a little over the idea until at luncheon-time, as he was about to descend the stairs, he heard a new uproar break out, this time from the room below.

‘What then is it for me,’ Frau Leszno somehow wailed and raged at the same time, ‘to spend my life in this so little box, like a prisoner? Am I a bad that I spend my life so? How is my son, a black-beetle, that he must in the kitchen sleep? Is this the roof you put upon my head and the head of my child? And here mine own furnitures – mine six dining-chairs, mine table, mine horsehair sofa? For what? That I may not sit at mine own table, that my child may not sit at mine own table? Then I go. Then I find myself such a big job as is fitting. . . .’

‘That,’ Miss Bohun’s voice broke in quietly, ‘is for you to decide, Frau Leszno. If you insist on going, of course, I cannot . . .’

‘So!’ screamed Frau Leszno, ‘now I am to go! Such is the great promise of the death-bed of Herr Leszno. Always a roof I have – and now to go. Now I, a lady, who had been to boarding-school, must make herself a servant in another’s house.’ Frau Leszno’s voice was pitched on a
note of self-pity and self-righteousness and accusation that roused in a listener neither remorse nor compassion, but rather a murderous irritation of the nerves. Miss Bohun’s voice, breaking in, was in comparison reasonable and dignified:

‘But you always tell me the Germans treat their servants very well. You might get an
au pair
job in a German-Jewish household. . . .’

‘Never,’ screamed Frau Leszno. ‘Never do I leave my home—’

Miss Bohun again interrupted, speaking with decision: ‘I really think, now you have suggested it, that you had better go, Frau Leszno. These scenes are exhausting me. They break into my contemplative life and I owe it to my nephew to give him a tranquil home in which to pursue his studies. You are not happy here. You could do better elsewhere.’ She picked up the bell, rang it loudly, but called ‘Felix’ as though she knew him to be within hearing. He began to descend the stairs. Frau Leszno gave him a look of distracted disgust, then went out, crashing the door behind her.

The meal was served. Felix ate his, but Miss Bohun sat for some time with her right hand shading her eyes. After a long pause, she said: ‘Frau Leszno is leaving. I have broken my promise. Do you think I have done wrong?’

‘No,’ said Felix, who could not feel sentimental about a promise that had proved so troublesome to all concerned.

There was another long pause, then Miss Bohun said: ‘I like you, Felix, I think you’re a very nice, well brought-up boy; but you are, after all, very young and a member of the opposite sex, so I hope you won’t feel hurt if I feel – have indeed felt for some time – that I owe it to myself
to have someone here who will be my friend. You
do
understand?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Felix, not knowing whether he was hurt or not.

Miss Bohun continued: ‘I have met a young widow, a Mrs Ellis, who would like to come to me. Mr Posthorn put me in touch, as a matter of fact; he met her at the Hendersons’. She’s quiet little thing – simple perhaps, but there’s something so nice about her, so trusting. I’m sure you’ll like her.’

‘Yes,’ said Felix again, rather coldly, already dissociating himself from this female partnership. In his mind he said: ‘I’ve always got Faro,’ and at the same time he began to think he must go and enquire about Mr Jewel. He felt now that Mr Jewel was out of the house there could be no disloyalty to Miss Bohun in visiting him.

Miss Bohun suddenly gave a sigh and said: ‘Of course, in a way, I don’t like to see the household breaking up. The Lesznos have been with me for nearly five years.’

‘Is Nikky going too?’ asked Felix.

‘I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. I am quite willing to let him stay; he reminds me so of his father – such a handsome, charming old man. A very beautiful sort of friendship existed between Herr Leszno and me. I’m fond of Nikky, too, in a way. I could never feel quite the same about Frau Leszno.’

‘When she goes, will she take all this furniture?’

‘What furniture?’

‘Oh, I thought I heard her say that the table and chairs and the sofa were hers. . . .’

‘In a way they are;
in a way
. Our first arrangement was that we held everything in common. She supplied
some pieces of furniture, it is true, and I supplied others. But if she chooses to be petty and lay claim to the things she provided – well, she must just take them with her. I don’t doubt something can be found to take their place,’ Miss Bohun’s voice became cheerful as she talked. ‘I find that my troubles always sort themselves out. You can’t do better than trust in the Lord. I don’t know of any occasion when God has failed to look after me. Faith is a wonderful thing. Since I’ve found it, I’ve never had a day’s illness, and as for money – well, money seems to grow on trees. And I used to be such a nervous ailing sort of girl! I used to dread the future with nothing but my own little private income – a mere two hundred pound a year – but how wonderfully things have worked out for me.’ There was in Miss Bohun’s tone something exultant that held Felix amazed. She raised her face with her eyelids shut and smiled a rather knowing smile: ‘But I’m afraid Frau Leszno was not over-pleased when I read her Mr Shipton’s letter about you. Dear me, no. She thought that time she’d worn me down at last. When I pointed out to her that it was my duty to offer my orphaned nephew a home, she said – well, I won’t tell you what she said, but I’m afraid she thought God had let
her
down.’

‘I suppose He had rather.’

‘My dear boy,’ said Miss Bohun briskly, ‘the ways of the Lord are beyond our understanding. Now, if you don’t mind, I have Madame Babayannis in a few minutes.’

That afternoon Felix went to inquire after Mr Jewel. The English Hospital, surrounded by a walled garden, stood in a square known as the Russian Compound. It was a bare, gravelled space, like a barracks square, and enclosed also the Arab Hospital and the Law Courts. In
the afternoon warmth Felix made his way through crowds of Arabs who mingled gossiping and squabbling as they waited to get into either building. The stone-built English Hospital was as cool as a cellar. A nurse, an Armenian girl, stood in the doorway, her face dark against her white tunic and the whitewashed walls: when Felix asked after Mr Jewel, she said indifferently: ‘You can run up if you like.’