The 40s: The Story of a Decade (121 page)

“It’s only until Monday,” my father said.

They both of them looked ashamed, as though by having the stairs removed they had done something foolish. My father tried to conceal this by an air of modest importance. They seemed a very modest couple. Both of them looked shorter to me since their marriage; I was rather shocked by this.
She
seemed to have made him shorter. I had always thought of my father as a dark, vain, terse man, very logical and never giving in to anyone. He seemed much less important now his secretary was in the house.

“It is easy,” I said, and I went to the ladder and was up it in a moment.

“Mind!” called my stepmother.

But in a moment I was down again, laughing. While I was coming down, I heard my stepmother say quietly to my father, “What legs. She is growing.”

My legs and my laugh! I did not think that my father’s secretary had the right to say anything about me. She was not my mother.

· · ·

After this, my father took me around the house. I looked behind me once or twice as I walked. On one of my shoes was some of the sand he had warned me about. I don’t know how it got on my shoe. It was rather funny seeing this one sandy footmark making work for Janey wherever I went.

My father took me through the dust curtains into the dining room and then to the far wall, where the staircase was going to be.

“Why have you done it?” I asked. He and I were alone.

“The house has wanted it for years,” he said. “It ought to have been done years ago.”

I did not say anything. When my mother was there, she was always complaining about the house, saying it was poky, barbarous—I can hear her voice now saying “Barbarous,” as if it were the name of some terrifying
and savage queen—and my father had always refused to alter anything. Barbarous—I used to think of that word as my mother’s name.

“Does Janey like it?” I asked.

My father hardened at this question. He seemed to be saying, “What has it got to do with Janey?” But what he said was—and he spoke with amusement, with a look of quiet scorn—“She liked it as it was.”

“I did, too,” I said.

I then saw—but, no, I did not really understand this at the time; it is something I understand now I am older—that my father was not altering the house for Janey’s sake. She hated the whole place, because my mother had been there, but was too tired by her earlier life in his office, fifteen years of it, too unsure of herself, to say anything. It was an act of amends to my mother. He was punishing Janey by getting in builders and making everyone uncomfortable and miserable; he was creating an emotional scene with himself. He was annoying Janey with what my mother had so maddeningly wanted and he would not give her.

· · ·

After my father had shown me the house, I said I would go and see Janey getting lunch ready.

“I shouldn’t do that,” he said. “It will delay her. Lunch is just ready. Or should be.” He looked at his watch.

We went to the sitting room, and while we waited, I sat in the green chair and he asked me questions about school and we went on to talk about the holidays. But when I answered, I could see he was not listening to me but trying to catch sounds of Janey moving in the kitchen. Occasionally there were sounds; something gave an explosive fizz in a hot pan, and a saucepan lid fell. This made a loud noise and the lid spun a long time on the stone floor. The sound stopped our talk.

“Janey is not used to the kitchen,” said my father. I smiled very close to my lips. I did not want my father to see it, but he looked at me and he smiled by accident, too. There was a sudden understanding between us.

“I will go and see,” I said.

He raised his hand to stop me, but I went.

It was natural. For fifteen years, Janey had been my father’s secretary. She had worked in an office. I remember when I went there when I was young she used to come into the room with an earnest and hushed air, leaning her head a little sidewise and turning three-quarter face toward my father, at his desk, leaning forward to guess at what he wanted. I
admired the great knowledge she had of his affairs, the way she carried letters, how quickly she picked up the telephone when it rang, the authority of her voice. Her strength had been that she was impersonal. She had lost that in her marriage. As his wife, she had no behavior. When we were talking, she raised her low bosom, which had become round and ducklike, with a sigh and smiled at my father with a tentative, expectant fondness. After fifteen years, a life had ended; she was resting.

But Janey had not lost her office behavior; that she now kept for the kitchen. The moment I went to the kitchen, I saw her walking to the stove, where the saucepans were throbbing too hard. She was walking exactly as she had walked toward my father at his desk. The stove had taken my father’s place. She went up to it with impersonal inquiry, as if to anticipate what it wanted; she appeared to be offering a pile of plates to be warmed as if they were a pile of letters. She seemed baffled because it could not speak. When one of the saucepans boiled over, she ran to it and lifted it off, suddenly and too high, in her telephone movement; the water spilled at once. On the table beside the stove were basins and pans she was using, and she had them all spread out in an orderly way, like typing; she went from one to the other with the careful look of inquiry she used to give to the things she was filing. It was not a method suitable to a kitchen.

When I came in, she put down the pan she was holding and stopped everything—as she would have done in the office—to talk to me about what she was doing. She was very nice about my hair, which I had had cut; it made me look older and I liked it better. But blue smoke rose behind her as we talked. She did not notice it.

No, it was not the way to cook a meal.

I went back to my father.

“I didn’t want to be in the way,” I said.

“Extraordinary,” he said, looking at his watch. “I must just go and hurry Janey up.”

He was astonished that a woman so brisk in an office should be languid and dependent in a house.

“She is just bringing it in,” I said. “The potatoes are ready. They are on the table. I saw them.”

“On the table?” he said. “Getting cold?”

“On the kitchen table,” I said.

“That doesn’t prevent them getting cold,” he said. My father was a sarcastic man.

I walked about the room humming. My father’s exasperation did not last. It gave way to a new thing in his voice—resignation.

“We will wait, if you do not mind,” he said to me. “Janey is slow. And by the way,” he said, lowering his voice a little, “I shouldn’t mention we passed the Leonards in the road when I brought you up from the station.”

I was surprised. “Not the Leonards?” I said.

“They were friends of your mother’s,” he said. “You are old enough to understand. One has to be sometimes a little tactful. Janey sometimes feels …”

I looked at my father. He had altered in many ways. Giving me this secret, his small, brown eyes gave a brilliant flash, and I opened my blue eyes very wide and gravely to receive it. He had changed. His rough, black hair was clipped closer at the ears, and he had that too-young look that middle-aged men sometimes have, for by certain lines it can be seen that they are not as young as their faces. Marks like minutes on the face of a clock showed at the corners of his eyes, his nose, his mouth; he was much thinner; his face had hardened. He had often been angry and sarcastic, sulking and abrupt, when my mother was with us, but I had never seen him before, as he was now, blank-faced, ironical, and set in impatient boredom. After he spoke, he had actually been hissing a tune privately through his teeth at the corner of his mouth.

At this moment, Janey came in smiling too much and said lunch was ready.

“Oh,” I laughed when we got into the dining room, “it is like—it is like France.” Miss Richards—how she would sit in the house in her best clothes, like a visitor, expectant, forgetful, stunned by leisure, watchful, wronged and jealous to the point of tears.

· · ·

Perhaps if the builders had come, as they had promised, on the Monday, my stepmother’s story would have been different.

“I am so sorry we are in such a mess,” she said to me that morning at breakfast. She had said it many times, as if she thought I regarded the ladder as her failure.

“It’s fun,” I said. “It’s like being on a ship.”

“You keep on saying that,” my stepmother said, looking at me in a very worried way, as if trying to work out the hidden meaning of my remark. “You’ve never been on a ship.”

“To France,” I said. “When I was a child.”

“Oh, yes,” said my stepmother.

“I hate mess,” said my stepmother to both of us, getting up. In a prosaic person emotion looks grotesque, like clothes suddenly become too large.

“Do leave us alone,” my father said.

There was a small scene after this. My father did not mean by “us” himself and me, as she chose to think; he was simply speaking of himself and he had spoken very mildly. My stepmother marched out of the room. Presently, we heard her upstairs. She must have been very upset to have faced going up the ladder.

“Come on,” said my father. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll get the car out. We will go to the builders’.”

He called up to her that we were going and asked if she’d like to go with us.

Oh, it was a terrible holiday. When I grew up and was myself married, my father said, “It was a very difficult summer. You didn’t realize. You were only a schoolgirl. It was a mistake.” And then he corrected himself. I mean that. My father was always making himself more correct; it was his chief vanity that he understood his own behavior.

“I happened,” he said—this was the correction—“to make a very foolish mistake.” Whenever he used the phrase “I happened,” my father’s face seemed to dry up and become distant; he was congratulating himself. Not on the mistake, of course, but on being the first to put his finger on it. “I happen to know,” “I happen to have seen”—it was this incidental rightness, the footnote of inside knowledge on innumerable minor issues, and his fatal wrongness, in a large, obstinate, principled way, about anything important, that, I think, made my beautiful and dishonest mother leave him. She was a tall woman, taller than he, with the eyes of a cat, shrugging her shoulders, curving her long, graceful back to be stroked, and with a wide, champagne laugh.

My father had a clipped-back, monkeyish appearance and that faint grin of the bounder one sees in the harder-looking monkeys that are without melancholy or sensibility; this had attracted my mother, but very soon his youthful bounce gave place to a kind of meddling honesty and she found him dull. And, of course, ruthless. The promptness of his second marriage, perhaps, was to teach her a lesson. I imagine him putting his divorce papers away one evening at his office and realizing, when Miss Richards came in to ask if “there is anything more tonight,” that
here was a woman who was reliable, trained, and, like himself, “happened” to have a lot of inside knowledge.

To get out of the house with my father, to be alone with him! My heart came alive. It seemed to me that this house was not my home any more. If only we could go away, he and I; the country outside seemed to me far more like home than this grotesque divorced house. I stood longing for her not to answer, dreading that she would come down.

My father was not a man to beg her to change her mind. He went out to the garage. My fear of her coming made me stay for a moment. And then (I do not know how the thought came into my head) I went to the ladder and I lifted it away. It was easy to move a short distance, but it began to swing when I tried to lay it down, and I was afraid it would crash. I could not put it on the floor, so I turned it over and over against the other wall, out of reach. Breathlessly, I left the house.

“You’ve got white on your tunic,” said my father as we drove off. “What have you been doing?”

“I rubbed against something,” I said.

“Oh, how I love motoring.” I laughed beside my father.

“Oh, look at those lovely little rabbits,” I said.

“Their little white tails.” I laughed.

We passed some hurdles in a field.

“Jumps.” I laughed. “I wish I had a pony.”

“What would you do?” asked my father.

“Jump,” I said to my father.

And then my terrible dreams came back to me. I was frightened. I tried to think of something else, but I could not. I could only see my stepmother on the edge of the landing. I could only hear her giving a scream and going over headfirst. We got into the town and I felt sick. We arrived at the builders’ and my father stopped there. Only a girl was in the office, and I heard my father say in his coldest voice, “I happen to have an appointment.”

My father came out and we drove off. He was cross.

“Where are we going?” I said when I saw we were not going home.

“To Longwood,” he said. “They’re working over there.”

I thought I would faint. “I—I—” I began.

“What?” my father said.

I could not speak. I began to get red and hot. And then I remembered. I could pray.

It is seven miles to Longwood. My father was a man who enjoyed talking to builders; he planned and replanned with them, built imaginary houses, talked about people. Builders have a large acquaintance with the way people live; my father liked inside knowledge, as I have said. Well, I thought, she is over. She is dead by now. I saw visits to the hospital. I saw my trial.

“She is like you,” said the builder, nodding to me. All my life I shall remember his mustache.

“She is like my wife,” said my father. “My first wife. I happen to have married twice.” He liked puzzling and embarrassing people. “Do you happen to know a tea place near here?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t feel hungry.”

But we had tea at Gilling. The river is across the road from the teashop and we stood afterward on the bridge. I surprised my father by climbing the parapet.

“If you jumped,” I said to my father, “would you hurt?”

“You’d break your legs,” said my father.

Her “nicest thing”!