Song at Twilight (9 page)

I do not know whether Leo saw me, but I can only suppose that he must have done. In any case I hardly need say that he did not come to call on me that day.

But he did come later in the term. 

*

Eric’s opera-going lady friend came to stay with him for the weekend. I, of course, was eaten up with curiosity and longed to meet her. I suggested that he bring her over for a drink before lunch on Sunday, but he made some inadequate excuse. Perhaps, like me, he feels the need to keep his life compartmentalised.

He did, however, reveal that his friend had had a very sad life. Her only child, a little girl, had died of leukaemia at the age of nine. A painful expression crossed Eric's face as he told me about it. He stared distractedly into the distance and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.

"She was very cut up at the time," he said. "Very cut up."

So, I thought, the opera-going lady was not like me, a spinster. She must be a widow or a divorcee. But I dared ask no more.

"She'll be wanting a quiet week-end," he said. "She works very hard."

Ah… so she still works, I thought. She must be younger than us.

"What does she do?" I ventured.

"She's a chiropodist," he said.

I nearly laughed.

"Anyway, I must be getting on," he said, heaving himself out of the chair. "All this chat is getting us nowhere."

I saw him to the door and watched him shuffle off down the path, leaving me with a faint feeling of pique… almost loneliness.

On Sunday morning I was walking back from church when Eric drove by. I just caught a glimpse of the woman sitting beside him in the front of the car. She looked neat and pretty and, as far as I could tell from that distance, quite young. Somewhere in her mid-fifties perhaps.

I thought that I had long since learned to live with the appearance which the good Lord gave me, but, to my horror, I felt a faint resurgence of that old, self-pitying melancholy which used to well up in me years ago whenever I saw a particularly pretty and feminine woman.

How absurd I am, I thought. Eric is nothing to me. Just a companion, a companion who, through his own loneliness has sought me out, and with whom I pass some pleasant times. It would be quite absurd to resent his other friends. Indeed, it would be a very peculiar thing if he had none. And yet I wondered where they were going to in that car.

Perhaps he was taking her to Porlock or Lynton… or Isle Abbots… It occurred to me that she could hardly be expected to find the weekend restful if she was to spend it hurtling about the countryside in Eric's shaky old car.

Ah well, that was none of my business.

What I consider to be much more my business is Eric's swiftly developing relationship with my niece, Laurel.

Eric's repeatedly uttered clichés certainly belie his character which has an undoubtedly reckless streak.

Not content with the company of a pretty chiropodist throughout the weekend, Eric entertained Laurel to lunch yesterday. Yesterday was Monday, and I dearly wanted to know why Laurel was not at school.

Because of his lady friend, Eric had asked Laurel not to come at the weekend. She had happily agreed to come on Monday instead.

"Do her parents know she's coming to lunch with you, instead of going to school?" I asked him on the telephone.

"I've no idea," he said.

It is not part of my nature ever to cause trouble if I can avoid it, so I decided that rather than speak to Patricia, or even Victor, about the matter, I would look in on Eric immediately after lunch on the pretext of wanting to borrow something. That way Laurel would know that I knew what she was up to and, what is more, I would be able to ask her why she wasn't at school.

The sun was shining yesterday and the birds were singing so I spent most of the morning weeding my garden. My white lilac is coming into bloom and there are Kaufmaniana tulips and sweet smelling Daphne so that it is all beginning to look really pretty – or it was until this morning when the heavens opened. I woke to the sound of rain at about six and now it is nearly one o'clock and as I look out of the window I can see my poor lilac bending under the great weight of the water, and it is still raining.

Well at about this time yesterday I was just collecting up my secateurs and trowel and so forth and thinking that I had done enough for one morning, when I heard the sound of a scooter and looked up to see Laurel in shorts and a bright red T-shirt whizzing past on her way to visit Eric.

She was easily identifiable as, to my horror, she was riding without her crash helmet, the silly child. And with that bald head, she is quite unmistakeable.

I decided to wait for about fifty-five minutes to give her and Eric time to have lunch before going round to call. But call I certainly would.

I have to admit that when I turned up, almost exactly fifty minutes later, neither Eric nor Laurel appeared best pleased to see me.

The back door was open, so I wandered in unannounced and there they were, sitting side by side at Eric's kitchen table, surrounded, like a pair of students, by dirty plates and mugs of coffee, and poring over a book which lay open on the table between them. Laurel was smoking a cigarette.

As I came in they both started, and turned to look at me. I couldn't help thinking that they made rather a funny couple. He with his still thick, woolly grey hair, and lined, tired face, she with her shiny, bald head and smooth round face. As they looked up, they both wore an expression of marginally irritated surprise.

Eric was the first to collect himself.

"Oh Prudence," he said, and stood up, "come on in. Have some coffee. You know Laurel… " He waved a hand in her direction and shuffled his feet awkwardly.

"Of course you do. How silly of me," he said, and blushed I think, as he moved towards the kettle.

Laurel said "Hello" rather sourly and I felt, I have to admit, a little discomfited, like an intruder.

"What, not at school, Laurel dear," I said and raised one eyebrow. 

"It's not worth it,” said Laurel. "They spend all the time on useless revision classes."

"Revision is never useless," I said. After all I have not been a school-mistress all my life for nothing.

"It is, the way they do it," she said rudely.

There was no point in continuing to argue and neither did I want to embarrass Eric but I did just enquire if Patricia knew where Laurel was.

"She didn't ask," said Laurel and turned her gaze on the open book in front of her as Eric handed me a cup of Nescafé.

Of course I know that as Patricia's children seem to do precisely what they want, it is not really relevant whether or not she knows where they are. But I do think it is a good thing for Laurel to realise that I have my eye on her.

"Eric," she said, impertinently calling him by his Christian name, "asked me here to discuss Hindu art. He knows a lot about it."

That was news to me.

"I don't think Aunt Prudence would like this kind of thing very much, do you," she said, turning to Eric with a sweet smile and pointing to a picture which I could not see from that distance and which, anyway, would have been upside down for me.

I was so incensed by the child's impudence that I got up and left almost instantly, without finishing my coffee or mentioning the crash helmet and having quite forgotten to ask to borrow some slug pellets, an excuse which I had devised for calling.

Now, with all this rain, whole armies of slugs will be on the march and I have no pellets with which to confound them. Perhaps I shall go out and buy some this afternoon.

As for Eric, I must have a word with him about Laurel. He is surely old enough to know better, and has no business encouraging that silly girl to smoke cigarettes and to miss school. 

Chapter 9

May 7th

Eric came to see me this morning, looking, I thought, a little apologetic. I hadn't seen him since the beginning of the week when I interrupted his lunch with Laurel. For some reason which I can't quite explain to myself, the memory of that incident leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable. Perhaps it is because of that that I have failed to ring Eric about Laurel, as I had every intention of doing.

I told Eric, somewhat inhospitably, that I was delighted to see him as the washer on my kitchen tap needed replacing.

He smiled, rather wryly I thought, and set obediently to work.

Which of us, I wondered, would be the first to raise the subject of Laurel. He, perhaps, would attempt to avoid the subject altogether. Men, I have observed even without having been married to one, are past masters of non-confrontation. They even seem to think that if they don't want a subject to be discussed, they can, by sheer determination, prevent other people from so much as thinking about it.

So I said nothing for a while as Eric chatted about this and that, about the quality of washers nowadays and about the bad weather we have been having all week.

"Except for Monday," I said. "It was lovely the day Laurel came to see you…" I paused.

"The seeds will be rotting in the ground, it's so wet," Eric said. "I shan't have many vegetables this year."

"There you are," he said, putting the wrench down on the draining board and turning the tap on and off again, "that should be all right."

I thanked him and then added in what sounded, even to me, like regrettably school-mistressy tones, "I think we should have a word about Laurel."

Then Eric took me completely by surprise.

He looked me straight in the eye and said, "You needn't worry. I have no intention of running away with her. In any case, I don't suppose she'd come, although they say it's better to be an old man's darling… " he chortled somehow privately to himself and annoyed me. "I won't even take her dancing in a petrol station," he added as he sat down at my kitchen table.

I felt myself blushing foolishly.

"Come on," he said, "aren't you going to offer me a cup of coffee?"

I had never known him so assertive.

"Of course I am," I said, and went on lamely, "It's just that I don't think Laurel should be encouraged to miss school, and you know her parents don't allow her to smoke. I wouldn't let her smoke here."

That was quite understandable, but Eric was an outsider, not a parent nor an uncle, He was in no position to tell Laurel whether or not she could smoke. Of course it was a shame that she did. But there you were.

"You don't want to worry about Laurel," he said. "She'll be all right when she gets rid of some of her silly ideas." Then, suddenly confiding, "I would love to have a daughter, you know."

I looked askance at Eric. Was he, I wondered, being completely honest with himself? It doesn't seem to me that his attitude to Laurel is entirely paternal although the idea that it could be anything else amazes me.

"She wants to go to Glastonbury and Cadbury," he said. "She's interested in Arthurian legends."

I can't help noticing that Laurel has suddenly developed a great many surprising interests about which I have never heard before, what with Hindu art and now Arthurian legends. 

"I would have thought that she must at least have been to Glastonbury before now,' I said.

"No, she's never been there," said Eric. "I thought we might take her one day. You and I together. We could go on to South Cadbury, although I'm told that's a little disappointing and not at all what one would imagine for Camelot."

I am not sure that the idea of Laurel intruding on my outings with Eric is entirely pleasing to me. I have begun to enjoy those outings most particularly for Eric is a good and likeable companion who takes tremendous pleasure in whatever it is that he's doing, and this enjoyment enthuses me.

How I hated dancing with him in that dreadful petrol station, but the more I think about that incident, the more I feel some strange sort of respect for Eric. I am, and always have been, inhibited – prudent I have called it – but he, who is so perfectly mannered and who always speaks in clichés which for months made me think of him as a really dull man, is able to break out suddenly and take the world – or his small world at least – by surprise. I suppose that I have never in my entire life taken anyone by surprise.

If I am to be perfectly honest with myself, I have to admit that I look forward to my outings with Eric as much as I look forward to anything these days. It may be a strange thing to say at my time of life, but I think – in fact I know – that I have never before experienced such an easy and companionable relationship with a person of the opposite sex. I could pity myself for what I have missed in that field, but I try to look at life positively and so I tell myself how lucky I am to have so pleasant a friendship develop in later life.

So now Laurel is to intrude on that friendship. I could hardly refuse to take my own niece to Camelot, besides which it seems far more suitable to me that I should be present if Eric is to take the child on long outings. So I agreed to go on the trip to Glastonbury which is to take place next Saturday, but I have to say that I do hope that we are not about to become a permanent, awkward threesome. 

*

May 16th

I didn't see Eric again until Saturday afternoon when he passed by in his car to pick me up. I had been watching for him from my window and as I walked down my garden path, I did not at first recognise the girl sitting beside him in the passenger seat. She had long, peculiarly fuzzy, reddish hair and, as I approached, she jumped out of the car.

"Aunt Prudence," she said, "you get in front, I'll go behind."

I did what can only be described, I believe, as a 'double take'.

How extraordinary!

"Where did you get all that hair from, so suddenly?" I asked.

"It's a wig," said Laurel and pulled the frizzy, synthetic mess away from her head to reveal three days growth on her otherwise bald pate.

"Put it back on!" I explained shrilly. And I am happy to say that she did.

"I had to have hair to go to Camelot," she said. "Don't you think so?"

I told her that as far as I was concerned she was better off with hair wherever she went. Camelot was neither here nor there.

All the way to Glastonbury Laurel chattered away in the back of the car. I sat in the front with Pansy on my knee, barely able to hear a word that she was saying and intensely irritated by her hot breath in my ear and by the occasional brush of nylon fluff across my cheek as she leaned her head between the two front seats so as to be heard more clearly.

Eric, on the other hand, drove along with what I regarded as an irritating smirk on his face. I could not understand why he was so delighted. Laurel's conversation seemed to me to be perfectly idiotic. For one thing she appeared to have no understanding whatsoever of the nature of a legend so that she persisted in talking about Lancelot and Gawain and Guinevere not even as though they were real, historical characters, but as if they were her school friends whom she saw every day.

At Glastonbury I felt a little embarrassed by Laurel and, at the msame time, ashamed to be embarrassed by her. After all there are plenty of odd-looking young people around these days and, anyway, I should have reached an age when I am beyond such childish discomfort. But, all the same, I did feel rather ill at ease, accompanied, as I was, by an elderly man and a fat teenager in a hideous wig. In fact it was not until we got out of the car at Glastonbury that I quite took in how Laurel was dressed. Besides her horrid wig, she was wearing a long white nightdress with some kind of fluorescent turquoise binder-twine wrapped around her body so that she looked like an ill-conceived parcel although, she assured me later, the object of the exercise was to look medieval.

She walked along beside Eric, chatting in a lively fashion, always about Gawain and Guinevere and he kept on smirking and smirking and smiling inanely. I walked with Pansy several steps behind.

When we had visited the ruins of the Abbey, we walked up to the Tor, and still Laurel talked, and still Eric smirked, and still I walked behind, and then, somewhat exhausted, we climbed back into the car and set out for South Cadbury, about half an hour’s drive away.

By the time we reached South Cadbury, Laurel was in a fever of excitement. I have no idea what it was that she really expected to see. Turrets and battlements, and knights in armour and ladies in wimples and Sir Lancelot singing Tirra-lirra by the river, no doubt.

Whatever, she must have been disappointed.

We trudged up a stony path through messy unkempt woodland to a dull green field where a few mangy cattle grazed. We wandered to the edge of the field, hoping to look down on some magical, poetic landscape, but there was little to delight the eye.

Eric had thrown out his arms theatrically, but overcome by the uninspiring nature of the place, he let them drop to his side as he turned back towards Laurel.

"Let's face it," he said, "it's not quite the Camelot we imagined."

A group of school children accompanied by two teachers had materialised from nowhere to stare balefully at us. 

Then quite unexpectedly, Eric flung out his arms again.

" 'Enid’,'' he cried, " 'the pilot star of my lone life,

Enid, my early and my only love,

Enid, the loss of whom hath turned me wild…’”

Turned him wild indeed.

Laurel for some reason decided then to execute a little dance and before I knew what was happening, she too began to declaim.

"'And Enid answer'd, Yea, my lord, I know

Your wish, and would obey; but riding first,

I hear the violent threats you do not hear,

I see the danger which you cannot see…’”

I stood awkwardly by. The school children gawped and giggled. The school teachers stared in blank amazement. There was no stopping them now. Eric was off again, his woolly hair standing on end, his eyes flashing.

"‘With that he turn'd and look'd as keenly at her

As careful robins eye the delver's toil…’”

And Laurel took up the strain:

"'And that within her, which a wanton fool

'Or hasty judger would have called her guilt,

Made her cheek turn and either eyelid fall.

And Geraint looked and was not satisfied…’”

I thought they would go on for ever, but eventually they grew tired of what they were doing, thank God, or perhaps they just ran out of lines which they knew by heart.

Eric's arms dropped to his sides again and he shuffled over towards me. His cheeks were flushed and his hair was still sticking up all over his head.

"Smooth your hair down," I said.

He smoothed his hair ineffectually with one hand, whilst placing the other on my shoulder.

"Poor Prudence," he said, "I'm always embarrassing you." He turned to look at Laurel. "Sometimes I take your aunt by surprise,' he said. "Ah well it's a funny old world."

Funny indeed. Laurel looked quite crazy standing there all tied up in binder twine with her orange wig askew. But she, too, had taken me by surprise. In fact, I have been seeing quite a new and unexpected side to Laurel lately. I suppose that I have never until now ever seen her without her parents. And heaven only knows what they would have said had they heard her declaiming at Camelot.

"I can't imagine what those other people must have thought about you two," I said rather primly.

As soon as the performance had ended, the school party had wandered off and disappeared almost as suddenly as it had appeared.

"Who cares what they thought?" said Laurel. "Anyway, we probably livened up their outing for them."

I had reluctantly to concede that she was probably right.

By the time we had all three climbed back into the car, I was quite exhausted, but Laurel, who was still full of life, talked and talked all the way home, pushing her face between the two front seats as she had done on the way out, so I was really glad when Eric at last drew up in front of my cottage and too tired even to ask him and Laurel in for a cup of tea. I sincerely hope that Laurel will not be included on our next trip. She is a tiring child who demands a great deal of attention. Thank the Lord there are no Hindu temples in the vicinity. Camelot was bad enough.

As soon as Pansy and I were indoors, I sank down onto my sofa without even bothering to take off my coat. I felt a strange emptiness, almost a sense of desolation. I wondered how many more years I had to live and I wished that Eric would look in for supper. But I supposed he wouldn't. Perhaps he had invited Laurel to have supper with him and perhaps they were, at that very moment, poring over pictures of indecent Hindu carvings. I could see Laurel's fuzzy red wig brushing Eric's cheek as she talked and pointed and gesticulated. And I could imagine Eric grinning idiotically beside her. Silly man. Or perhaps Laurel had taken her wig off again. Perhaps she didn't need it for Hindu art. 

*

Lately I have been so concerned with Eric and Laurel and the garden and Pansy who has had to go to the vet about an eye infection, that I have quite put Timothy out of my mind.