The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (15 page)

They went on for more than an hour trying out these songs and one or two others, and the time passed quickly. Now and then George Abrahams would stop them, making a criticism. At the end of each piece they had a brief general discussion and Miss Appleby, who was a good constructive musician, would say that this or that could be improved, that
allegro
rather than
allegro moderato
might be better here or there. He noticed that Dora Williams did not say much. Her eyes, which normally could not be other than frank even when most meditative and were sometimes full of immense vivacity, seemed obscured and depressed, in direct contrast with the strange brightness of her voice.

‘Well,' he said at last, ‘let's try “Standchën” over once more, and then give it a rest and have some sandwiches.'

‘What about the broadcast audition?' Miss Appleby said.

‘Heard nothing yet,' he said hurriedly. ‘Ready?'

They sang ‘Standchën' through once more. He forced himself not to listen to Dora Williams's voice, but concentrated instead on the warm tranquil brownness of Miss Appleby's contralto and to Tom Willis, who had warmed up now and was singing better than ever. He felt pleased when it was all over, and he got up from the piano rubbing his hands.

‘Well, it went splendidly,' he said. ‘Tom, you're in grand voice.'

‘They say tenor singing is a disease,' Miss Appleby said. ‘That probably means he's got a singing temperature.'

They all laughed, and George Abrahams began to hand round the sandwiches. When he got to Dora Williams he saw that she alone was no longer laughing. ‘Sandwich?' he said. ‘Cheese this side. Ham that.'

He noticed that she did not look at the plate when she took her sandwich, and that she was not listening when he asked if she would like a glass of wine, so that he had to ask her again.

‘Oh! no,' she said. ‘No. No thanks, George. No, I don't think so.'

He went back to the table, put down the plate of sandwiches, and uncorked the wine. As he poured the
wine he had a delightful feeling of pleasure in the moment: the deep purple wine veined by upward glances of fire, the great scent of the bowls of winter hyacinths from the window ledge, the strange exaltation in his throat after singing. He stood too on the verge of a more exciting moment. ‘Hold your glasses a moment,' he said. ‘I've got something to say.'

He gave a glass of wine each to Miss Appleby and Tom Willis, and then waited for a moment.

‘It's about the audition,' he said at last. He waited again for a fraction of a second. ‘It's fixed for a week on Tuesday. I didn't want to tell you until we'd had the practice.'

‘I'll never trust a bass again,' Miss Appleby said dryly.

‘Well,' he said, ‘here's the letter.'

Quite excited now, Miss Appleby took the letter and read it and then gave it to Tom Willis. They both made some enthusiastic remark and then after a few moments George Abrahams took it back and handed it to Dora Williams.

She took the letter, but George Abrahams saw that she made no attempt to read it. Already she had turned slightly pale, and he saw a sudden tremendous nervousness take hold of her. Her fear of showing this nervousness was concentrated into her eyes, which were now as dead as slate. He saw her try to say
something, but without success, and then try again and at last form her words. ‘I've got something to say myself.'

For a moment she looked really ill. He looked at her patiently and quietly, puzzled, and asked her what it was, but for another moment she could not say anything. Then she said quickly, ‘I shan't be coming again.'

‘Not coming?' Miss Appleby said. ‘But the audition, Dora.'

George Abrahams could not speak.

‘No, I shan't be coming again,' Dora Williams said. ‘I'm giving up the quartette.'

‘But why on earth?' Miss Appleby said.

She did not speak, and again George Abrahams asked her gently what was the matter. At last she got it out, hurriedly, almost coughing it up, like something distasteful she had swallowed.

‘Jimmy's jealous,' she said.

Jimmy was her husband. As soon as she spoke George Abrahams felt an enormous relief. He looked at her strained sad face and burst out laughing.

‘Jealous of what?' he said. ‘Not me, I hope?'

She shook her head a little, not speaking.

‘He's just jealous, is that it? Just jealous because his wife sings in a quartette two nights a week?'

‘Yes.'

‘Nothing else?' he said. ‘Just that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, my God!' he said. ‘My God.'

He turned abruptly away from her. As he turned he had on his lips all sorts of things about the monstrosity of it that he wanted to say – the littleness of it, the thoughtlessness, the casual breaking up of the dreams and happiness of four people – but he was less angry than exasperated, and all he could say was ‘Jealous? Jealous of what? Jealous of who? What made him jealous?'

As he turned, he saw the face of Tom Willis. His eyes heavily disturbed, were looking straight at Dora Williams. He had assumed a kind of pained frailty, his arms loose at his sides, and he was looking at her with a sort of tender alarm.

George Abrahams could not say anything. He felt that what he had to say was no longer important. Already the quartette had ceased to exist. He could not argue. In silence he stood looking down at the untouched glass of wine in his hands.

The situation was saved by Miss Appleby, who said, ‘Well, rather than cry about it, let's sing again.'

He hesitated, but before he could make up his mind Dora Williams said yes, it was a good idea. She would like to sing again. It would get it off her chest.

‘Let's sing “Standchën” again,' Miss Appleby said.
The thought of the song momentarily upset her and she said: ‘You mean you're never coming again? But why? There's no reason for it. No excuse. It's not right!'

No one spoke, and George Abrahams put down his glass on the table. His hands were shaking and suddenly he asked Miss Appleby if she would mind taking the accompaniment this time. She said yes and she sat down and began to play the first notes of the Schubert very softly.

George Abrahams stood between Tom Willis and Dora Williams, who did not look at each other. As soon as he opened his mouth he knew that he was going to sing very badly, and a second later, for the first time in his experience, he was hearing Miss Appleby forcing her notes, the warm ripe texture of her voice dry and broken. But he could hear on either side of him the voices of two people singing out of a deep preoccupation, with painful beauty. He thought he could feel the passionate quality of their singing transcending the small hot room and the small bewildered minds of Miss Appleby and himself.

When the singing was over he did not speak. He saw the hands of Miss Appleby as motionless on the piano keys as the wax flowers of the hyacinth in the window. He saw the light of the fire caught up again by the wine, and was aware of the strange upheaval of silence that comes after singing.

Mr. Penfold, a travelling draper and haberdasher, easy terms arranged, a painfully shy, retreating man with almost invisible eyelashes, who looked as if he would have been much happier walking backwards, struggled out into the countryside every other Thursday on a massive basket-work tricycle, and called on Mrs. Armitage, a war-widow, and her daughter Katie. Mr. Penfold, who was in his early forties, was a single man.

Mr. Penfold had been calling on Mrs. Armitage and her daughter ever since the war: so long that he had become like one of the family. To the Armitages, who lived at the bottom of a hill, in a red-brick house surrounded by large clumps of lilac under which there was a great trembling spread of snowdrops in early spring, Mr. Penfold had become an institution. ‘Well, it's Mr. Penfold's day,' they said, every other Thursday; then, as the clock drew on to five in the afternoon, ‘it's nearly Mr. Penfold's time'; and then, at last, as they heard the huge wicker-work carrier of the tricycle squeak and clump over the grass verge outside the house, ‘that'll be Mr. Penfold.' Then they waited for Mr. Penfold's knock: a gentle retreating kind of
knock, as if Mr. Penfold had made it and run away. Finally, when with great timidity and decency Mr. Penfold stepped over the threshold they would say, ‘Well, it's Mr. Penfold!' as if he were a stranger turned up from a far country.

On this same afternoon once a fortnight there was always a cup of tea for Mr. Penfold in the Armitages's comfortable living room, and with it whatever the Armitages had: a boiled egg, tinned salmon, cake, fresh lettuce in summer. In return, after tea was over and the table cleared, Mr. Penfold would carefully and almost religiously lay out his lines, stockings, knickers, handkerchiefs, ribbons, elastic, buttons, woollen combinations. And there would suddenly hang in the air a smell which, after so many years, had become to symbolize Mr. Penfold: the dry, discreet odour of new drapery, a smell that had become to stand for the grave and timid discretion of a man who appeared to be forever on the verge of folding himself up and putting himself away. It seemed sometimes as if this discretion might flower into something else. It seemed to Mrs. Armitage, who was lonely and who had nothing to look forward to except the careful saving of her meagre pension and the growing up and perhaps finally the loss of Katie, that it might flower into something beyond friendship. For many years it seemed as if this might happen, but every Thursday she watched
Mr. Penfold go through the same painful, too-discreet process of folding himself up and putting himself away for another fortnight. She watched him manœuvre the tricycle away from the house, and felt a strange conflict of anger and despair, and became resigned at last to the fact that Mr. Penfold would never change, was perhaps incapable of change, except under the impetus of a revolution.

Though she did not notice it, this revolution was going on under her eyes, and once every fortnight under the eyes of Mr. Penfold, though for many years he did not notice it either. There was a revolution going on in the young girl, Katie. When Mr. Penfold first began to call on Mrs. Armitage there was a baby in the house, and sometimes he would take the child on his knee. He had a small gold watch which struck the hours like a little bell, and the child would listen to it for a long time, with dark eyes that had alternate moods of sulkiness and vivacity. As she sat on Mr. Penfold's knee he would stroke his hand backwards and forwards with grave pleasure across her hair, which was the colour of sun-bleached straw and which, Mrs. Armitage said, would grow darker as she grew older. But for some reason, and to Mr. Penfold's secret happiness, the hair never grew darker, but remained the one constant and beautiful element in the changing and growing girl.

For some years there were no changes in the girl that could startle Mr. Penfold. He would see sometimes that the child had grown from one fortnight to another; there periodically came a time when she needed the next size in underclothes. When he expressed any feeling about the way the girl was growing and changing it was always one of surprise: surprise that time could go so quickly. ‘She'll be telling us what to do before we know where we are,' he would say.

Then one summer, during the whole month of August, Katie went away to stay with an aunt, and it was six weeks before Mr. Penfold saw her again. During this time there were changes, but to Mr. Penfold unnoticed changes, in the behaviour of Mrs. Armitage. One afternoon she said that the plums were ripe in the garden. Would he like to see them? He said yes, and in his simple way, that had no connection with and did not understand subtleties, he went into the garden with her. The plums were dark and thick on the high tree, the skins warm in the rich August sunshine. He took off his coat and climbed the long high ladder and found himself in a deep sun-trembling world of fruit and leaves, his basket hooked on a branch, his two hands free for the great bunches of plums that hung everywhere like blue grapes on the brittle branches. After a time he heard Mrs. Armitage's
voice and looked down and saw her coming up the ladder. It was very warm and she had loosened the neck of her dress. She was a neat, firm little woman with dark brown crinkled hair and a still young figure, and he had only to glance down in order to see the hollow of her breasts opening darkly in her loosened dress. She came up the ladder smiling, with slightly parted lips, but he did not seem to see either her breasts or her smile, and it did not occur to him that he had only to reach down and she would fall into his life more easily than the plums were falling into his hands.

He remained in the plum tree with her for more than two hours that afternoon, and at no time did he come near to understanding what had brought and kept him there. When he breathed the sweet, almost autumnal fragrance of ripe plums and saw the sunlight breaking through and quivering between the leaf-shadows on his hands and he said how lovely it was in the country, he did not grasp the meaning of her answer, that it was lovely but that you only understood how lovely it was until you lived there always. And when finally they left the tree and he carried the plums indoors for her and she gave him two glasses of her cool home-made wine to drink and begged him to stay and have a little supper, he was still as remote from the meaning of it all as ever. It was still as if he
could never reverse the fixed process of habit and nature, and for once unfold and give himself, instead of folding himself up and putting himself away.

She was more angry than despairing when he went away that evening, but he did not know that either. He could not begin to know it, incapable as he was of understanding an inner meaning, kept as he had been by great shyness from any entry into a single great experience. He understood simple, visible things like a yard of velvet, a tree of plums, snowdrops in bloom, a pair of combinations. He understood that Mrs. Armitage had been buying things from him every fortnight more or less for fifteen years and that she paid him by a system of rather parsimonious instalments which in his shyness he called ‘this week's', but he did not understand that she was lonely and unsatisfied.