The Complete Short Stories (17 page)

He gave a jerky laugh
which nearly knocked over his cup.

‘I saw Mrs Marais today,’
he ventured.

‘Oh, her,’ said Mrs Jan
Cloote. ‘Did you speak?’

‘Certainly not,’ he
said; ‘I just passed her by.’

‘Quite right,’ said Mrs
Jan Cloote.

‘I gave them notice,’
she explained to me. ‘Mr wasn’t so bad, but Mrs was the worst tenant I’ve ever
had.’

‘The things she said!’
Greta added.

‘I showed her every
consideration,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife, ‘and all I got was insults.’

‘Insults,’ Mr Fleming
said.

‘Mr Fleming was here
when it happened,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.

‘We were showing her Isa’s
picture,’ she continued, ‘and do you believe it, she said it wasn’t Isa at all.
To my face she as good as called me a liar, didn’t she, Mr Fleming?’

‘That’s true,’ said Mr
Fleming, examining a tea-leaf on his spoon.

‘Mr Marais, of course,
was in an awkward position,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘You see, he’s right under
his wife’s thumb, and he didn’t dare contradict her. He only said there might
be some mistake. But she sat on him at once.
“That’s
not Isa,” she said.’

‘Poor Mr Marais!’ said
Greta.

‘I’m sorry for Mr
Marais,’ said Maida.

‘He’s soft in the head,
man,’ said Isa.

‘Isa’s a real scream,’
said her mother when she had recovered from her gust of laughter. ‘And she’s
right. Old Marais isn’t all there.’

‘What was it again?’ she
inquired of the young clerk. ‘What was it again, that old Marais told you
afterwards, about Isa’s picture?’

The young clerk looked
at me, and quickly looked away.

‘What did Mr Marais say
about the picture?’ I said insistently.

‘Well,’ said Mr Fleming,
‘I don’t really remember.’

‘Now, you remember all
right,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Come on, give us a laugh.’

‘Oh, he only said,’ Mr
Fleming replied, gazing manfully at the painting, ‘he only said there were
railway lines and a train in the picture.’

‘Only
said!’ Mrs Jan
Cloote put in.

‘Well, poor thing,’ said
Mr Fleming; ‘he can’t help it, I suppose. He’s mad.’

‘And didn’t he say there
was an old-fashioned car in the picture, man?’ said Greta. ‘That’s what you
told us, man.

‘Yes,’ said the clerk,
with a giggle, ‘he said that too.’

‘So you see,’ said Mrs
Jan Cloote. ‘The man’s out of his mind. A railway in Isa’s picture! I laugh
every time I think of it.’

‘As for Mrs Marais,’ she
added; ‘as for
her,
I never trusted the woman from the start. “Mrs
Marais,” said I, “you’ll take a week’s notice.” And they left the next day.’

‘Good riddance to the
old bitch,’ said Isa.

‘She was jealous of Isa’s
picture, eh,’ chuckled Greta.

‘We had a nice time with
the artist, though, when he was painting Isa,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.

‘I’ll say, man,’ said
Maida, ‘and the crew as well.’

‘We often have famous
artists here,’ said the mother, ‘don’t we?’

‘We do, man,’ said
Greta. ‘They come after Isa.’

‘And the crew,’ said
Maida. ‘They was nice. But the pilot did a real man’s trick on Isa.’

‘Yes, the swine,’ said
the mother. ‘But never mind, Isa’s got other boys. Isa could go on the films.’

‘Isa would be great on
the films,’ said Greta.

‘All the famous actors
come here,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘We get all the actors. They want Isa for the
films. But we wouldn’t let her go on the films.’

‘She’d be a star, man,’
said Greta.

‘But we wouldn’t let her
go on the films,’ Maida said.

‘She’ll do what she
likes,’ said the mother, ‘when she leaves school.’

‘Bloody right,’ said
Isa.

‘You know Max Melville?’
said Mrs Jan Cloote to me.

‘I’ve
heard
the
name …’ I said warily.

‘Heard the
name!
Why,
Max Melville’s a top-ranking star! He was here after Isa the other day. Isn’t
that right, Greta?’

‘Sure,’ said Greta.

And Mrs Jan Cloote took
up the story again. ‘I told him there was too much publicity on the films for
Isa. “We’re quiet folk, Max,” I said.
Max,
I called him, just like that.’

‘Max was a rare guy,’
said Maida.

‘He gave Isa a wonderful
present,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Not that it’s worth much, but it belonged to
his family and it’s got the sentimental value, and he wouldn’t have parted with
it to anyone else but Isa. Run upstairs and fetch it, Maida.’

Maida hesitated. ‘Was it
that brooch …?’ she began.

‘No,’ said her mother
sorrowfully and slowly. ‘Isa got the brooch from the artist. I’m surprised at
you forgetting what Max Melville gave to Isa.’

‘I’ll get it,’ said
Greta, jumping up.

She returned presently,
with a small compass in her hand.

‘It isn’t worth much,’
Mrs Jan Cloote was saying as she handed it round. ‘But Max’s great-grandfather
was an explorer, and he had this very compass on him when he crossed the
Himalayas. He never came back, but the compass was found on his body. So it was
very very precious to Marie, but he parted with it to Isa.’

I had been given the
compass when I was fourteen; it was new then; I recognized it immediately, and
while Mrs Jan Cloote was talking, I recognized it more and more. The scratches
and dents which I made on my own possessions are always familiar to me, like my
own signature …

‘A very old antique
compass,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife, passing her hand over its face
appraisingly. ‘It was nice of Max Melville to give it away. But of course he
wanted Isa for the films, and that may have been the reason.’

‘What do you think of
it?’ she asked me.

‘Very interesting,’ I
said.

What voyager had fetched
it over the seas? How many hands had it passed through in its passage from the
pawnshop where I had pledged it, to the pawnshop of Mrs Jan Cloote? I wondered
these things, and also, why it was that I didn’t really mind seeing my compass
caressed by the hands of this pawnbroker’s wife — seeing it made to serve her
pleasure. I didn’t care. Her nose pointed towards it, as to a North …

‘We shall never part
with this,’ Mrs Jan Cloote was saying; ‘because of the sentimental reason, you
know. It wouldn’t fetch a price, of course.’

I had, for a few years,
kept the compass lying about amongst my things, until the day came to pawn it.
That was how it had got scratched and knocked about. It was knocked about in
the drawer, thrown aside always, because I was looking for something else. I
had never used the compass, never taken my bearings by it. Perhaps, it had
never been very much used at all. The marks of wear upon it were mainly those I
had made. Whoever had pledged it at Mrs Jan Cloote’s pawnshop did not think
enough of it to redeem it. The pawnbroker’s wife was welcome to the compass,
for it was truly hers.

‘It wouldn’t fetch a
price,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Not that we think of the price; it’s the thought
that matters.

‘It’s Isa’s lucky
mascot,’ said Maida. ‘You’ll have to take it with you when you go to Hollywood,
Isa, man.

‘Hollywood!’ said Mrs
Jan Cloote. ‘Oh, no, no. If Isa goes on the pictures she’ll go to an English
studio. There’s too much publicity in Hollywood. Do you see our Isa in
Hollywood, Mr Fleming?’

‘Not exactly,’ said the
young man.

‘I’d be great in
Hollywood, man,’ said young Isa.

‘Well, maybe …’ said
the mother.

‘Yes, maybe,’ said Mr
Fleming.

‘But there’s too much
show in Hollywood,’ said Isa.

‘You see,’ said Mrs Jan
Cloote, turning to me, ‘we’re quiet people. We keep ourselves to ourselves, and
as Mr Fleming was saying the other day, we live in quite a world of our own,
don’t we, Mr Fleming?’

They opened the door and
let me sidle through, into the dark hall.

The Snobs

‘Snob: A person who sets too much value on
social standing, wishing to be associated with the upper class and their mores,
and treating those viewed as inferior with condescension and contempt’ —
Chambers
Dictionary.

I feel bound to quote
the above definition, it so well fits the Ringer-Smith couple whom I knew in
the nineteen-fifties and of whom I have since met variations and versions
enough to fill me with wonder. Snobs are really amazing. They mainly err in
failing to fool the very set of people they are hoping to be accepted by, and
above all, to seem to belong to, to be taken for. They may live in a democratic
society — it does nothing to help, Nothing.

Of the Ringer-Smith
couple, he, Jake, was the more snobbish. She, at least, had a certain natural
serenity of behaviour which she herself never questioned. She was in fact
rather smug. Her background was of small land-owning farmers and minor civil
servants. She, Marion, was stingy, stingy as hell. Jake also had a civil
service background and, on the mother’s side, a family of fruit export-import
affairs which had not left her very well off, the inheritance having been
absorbed by the male members of the family. Jake and Marion were a fairly
suitable match. He was slightly the shorter of the two. Both were skinny. They
had no children. Skeletons in the family cupboard do nothing to daunt the true
snob, in fact they provoke a certain arrogance, and this was the case with
Jake. A family scandal on a national scale had grown to an international one. A
spectacular bank robbery with murder on the part of a brother had resulted in
the family name being reduced to a byword in every household. The delinquent
Ringer-Smith and his associates had escaped to a safe exile in South America
leaving Jake and his ageing mother to face the music of the press and TV
reporters. Nobody would have taken it out on them in the normal way if it had
not been for the contempt with which they treated police, journalists,
interrogators, functionaries of the law and the public in general. They put on
airs suggesting that they were untouchably ‘good family’, and they generally
carried on as if they were earls and marquises instead of ordinary middle-class
people. No earl, no marquis at present alive would in fact be so haughty unless
he were completely out of his mind or perhaps an unfortunate drug addict or
losing gambler.

I was staying with some
friends at a château near Dijon when the Ringer-Smiths turned up. This was in
the nineties. I hardly recognized them. The Ringer-Smiths had not just turned
up at the château, they were found by Anne, bewildered, outside the village
shop, puzzling over a map, uncertain of their way to anywhere. Warming towards
their plight as she always would towards those in trouble, Anne invited these
lost English people for a cup of tea at the château where they could work out
their route.

Anne and Monty, English
themselves, had lived in the château for the last eight years. It was a totally
unexpected inheritance from the last member of a distant branch of Monty’s
family. The house and small fortune that went with it came to him in his early
fifties as an enormous surprise. He had been a shoe salesman and a bus driver,
among other things. Anne had been a stockbroker’s secretary. Their two
children, both girls, were married and away. The ‘fairy tale’ story of their
inheritance was in the newspapers for a day, but it wasn’t everybody who read
the passing news.

Monty was out when Anne brought home the
Ringer-Smiths. I was watching the television — some programme which now escapes
me for ever due to the shock of seeing those people. Anne, tall, merry,
blonded-up and carrying her sixties well, took herself off to the kitchen to
put on the kettle. She had made the sitting room as much like England as
possible.

‘Who does this place
belong to?’ Jake inquired of me as soon as Anne was out of the room. Obviously,
he had not recognized me in the present context, although I felt Marion’s eyes
upon me in a penetrating stare of puzzlement, of quasi-remembrance.

‘It belongs,’ I said, ‘to
the lady who invited you to tea.’

‘Oh!’ he said.

‘Haven’t we met?’ Marion
was speaking to me.

‘Yes, you have.’ I made
myself known.

‘What brings you here?’
said Jake outright.

‘The same as brings you
here. I was invited.’

Anne returned with the
tea, served with a silver tea service and pretty china cups. She carried the
tray while a young girl who was helping in the house followed with hot water
and a plate of biscuits.

‘You speak English very
well,’ Jake said.

‘Oh, we are English,’
said Anne. ‘But we live in France now. My husband inherited the château from
his family on his mother’s side, the Martineaus.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said
Jake.

The factor came in from
the farm and took a cup of tea standing up. He addressed Anne as ‘Madame’.

Anne was already
regretting her impulse in asking the couple to tea. They said very little but
just sat on. She was afraid they would miss the last bus to the station.
Looking at me, she said, ‘The last bus goes at six, doesn’t it?’

I said to Marion, ‘You
don’t want to miss the last bus.’

‘Could we see round the
château?’ said Marion. ‘The guidebook says it’s fourteenth century.

‘Well, not all of it is,’
said Anne. ‘But today is a bit difficult. We don’t, you know, open the house to
the public. We live in it.’

‘I’m sure we’ve met,’
said Marion to Anne, as if this took care of their catching the last bus — a
point which was not lost on Anne. Kindly though she was I knew she hated to
have to ferry people by car to the station and take on other chores she was not
prepared for. I could see, already in Anne’s mind, the thought: ‘I have to get
rid of these people or they’ll stay for dinner and then all night. They are
château-grabbers.’