The Complete Short Stories (18 page)

Anne had often lamented
to me about the château-grabbers of her later life. People who didn’t want to
know her when she was obscure and a bus driver’s wife now wanted to know her
intimately. Monty didn’t care much about this, one way or another. But then the
work of organizing meals and entertaining in style fell more on Anne than on
Monty, who mostly spent his time helping the factor in the grounds,
game-keeping and forest-clearing.

Anne could see that the
English couple she had invited in ‘for a cup of tea’ were clingers, climbers,
general nuisances, and she especially cast a look of desperation at me when
Marion Ringer-Smith said, ‘I’m sure we’ve met.’

‘You think so?’ Anne
said. She had got up and was leading the way to the back door. ‘This is the
Cour
des Adieus,’
she said; ‘it leads quicker to your bus stop.’ Marion stooped
and took a cake as if it was her last chance of ever eating a cake again.

I was at this moment
coming to the end of a novel I was writing. Anne had offered me the peace and
quiet of French château life and the informality of her own life-style which
made it an ideal arrangement. She had also undertaken to type out the novel
from any handwritten manuscripts on to a word-processor. But now at a quarter
to six, I could see the rest of our afternoon’s plans slipping away.

I doubted that Marion
had indeed seen Anne before. It was by some mental process of transference that
she had picked on Anne. The one she had actually met was myself, but she wasn’t
very much aware of it. After a gap of forty years, she remembered very little
of me.

Jake Ringer-Smith asked
if he could use the bathroom. Oh, you bore, I thought. Why don’t you
go?
There
are trees and thick bushes all the way down the drive for you to pee on. But
no, he had to be shown the bathroom. It was nearly ten minutes to their bus
time. Jake kicked his backpack over to his wife and said, ‘Take this, will you?’

‘I would really like to
see round the château,’ Marion said, ‘while we’re here and since we’ve come all
this way.

I had come across this
situation before. There are people who will hold up a party of tired and worn
fellow travellers just because they have to see a pulpit. There are people who
will arrive an hour late for dinner with the excuse that they
had
to see
over some art gallery on the way. Marion was very much one of those. If
challenged she would have thought nothing of pointing out that, after all, she
had paid a plane fare to arrive at where she was. I remember Marion’s shapeless
cheesecloth dress and her worn sandals and Jake’s baggy, ostentatiously
patched, grubby trousers, their avidity to get on intimate terms with the lady
of the house, to be invited to supper and, no doubt, to spend the night. I was
really sorry for Anne who, I was aware, was sorry for herself and most of all
regretting her own impulsive invitation to a cup of tea in her house.

Anne kept a soup kitchen
in a building some way from the house, beyond a vegetable garden. She was
pledged, I knew, to be there and help whenever possible, at six-thirty every
evening. Laboriously, she explained this to the Ringer-Smiths. ‘… otherwise I’d
have been glad to show you the house, not that there’s much to see.

‘Soup kitchen!’ said
Jake. ‘May we join it for a bowl of soup? Then perhaps we can stretch out our
sleeping-bag for the night under one of your charming archways and see the
house tomorrow.

Does this sound like a
nightmare? It was a nightmare. Nothing could throw off these people.

Down at the soup kitchen
that evening, dispensing slabs of bread and cheese with bowls of tomato soup, I
was not surprised to see the Ringer-Smiths appear.

‘We belong to the lower
orders,’ he said to me with an exaggeratedly self-effacing grin that meant ‘We
do not belong to any lower orders and just see how grand we really are —
we
don’t
care what we look like or what company we keep. We are Us.’

In fact they looked
positively shifty among the genuine skin-and-bone tramps and hairy drop-outs
and bulging bag ladies. I dished out their portions to them without a smile.
They had missed the last bus. Somehow, Anne and Monty had to arrange for them
to have a bedroom for the night. ‘We stayed at the Château Leclaire de
Martineau at Dijon’ I could hear them telling their friends.

Before breakfast I
advised Anne and Monty to make themselves scarce. ‘Otherwise,’ I said, ‘you’ll
never get rid of them. Leave them to me.

‘I’m sure,’ said Marion,
‘I’ve met Anne before. But I can’t tell where.’

‘She has been a cook in
many houses,’ I said. ‘And Monty has been a butler.’

‘A cook and a butler?’
said Jake.

‘Yes, the master and
mistress are away from home at present.

‘But she
told me she
was the owner,’
Marion said, indicating the dining-room door with her head.

‘Oh no, you must be
mistaken.’

‘But I’m sure she said—’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘What
a pity you can’t see over the château. Such lovely pictures. But the Comtesse
will be here at any moment. I don’t know how you will explain yourselves. So
far as I know you haven’t been invited.’

‘Oh we have,’ said Jake.
‘The servants begged us to stay. So typical, posing as the lord and lady of the
manor! But it’s getting late, we’ll miss the bus.’

They were off within
four minutes, tramping down the drive with their bulging packs.

Anne and Monty were
delighted when I told them how it was done. Anne was sure, judging from a
previous experience, that the intruders had planned to stay for a week.

‘What else can you do
with people like that?’ said Anne.

‘Put them in a story if
you are me,’ I said. ‘And sell the story.’

‘Can they sue?’

‘Let them sue,’ I said. ‘Let
them go ahead, stand up, and say Yes, that was Us.’

‘An eccentric couple.
They took the soap with them,’ said Anne.

Monty went off about his
business with a smile. So did Anne. And I, too. Or so I thought.

It was eleven-thirty,
two hours later that morning, when, looking out of the window of my room as I often
do when I am working on a novel, I saw them again under one of the trees
bordering a lawn. They were looking up towards the house.

I had no idea where
Monty and Anne were at that moment, nor could I think how to locate the factor,
Raoul, or his wife, Marie-Louise. This was a disturbance in the rhythm of my
morning’s work, but I decided to go down and see what was the matter. As soon
as they saw me Marion said, ‘Oh halo. We decided it was uncivil of us to leave
without seeing the lady of the house and paying our respects.’

‘We’ll wait till the
Comtesse arrives,’ Jake stated.

‘Well, you’re unlucky,’
I said. ‘I believe there’s word come through that she’ll be away for a week.’

‘That’s all right,’ said
Marion. ‘We can spare a week.’

‘Only civil …’ said Jake.

I managed to alert Anne
before she saw them. They were very cool to her when she did at last appear
before them. ‘The Comtesse would, I’m sure, be offended if we left without a
word of thanks,’ said Jake.

‘Not at all,’ said Anne.
‘In fact, you
have to go.

‘Not so,’ said Marion.

Raoul tackled them,
joined by Monty. Marion had already reclaimed their bedroom. ‘As the beds had
to be changed anyway,’ she said, ‘we may as well stay on. We don’t mind eating
down at the shed.’ By this she meant the soup kitchen. ‘We are not above eating
with the proletariat,’ said Jake.

Raoul and I searched the
house, every drawer, for a key to the door of their bedroom. Eventually we
found one that fitted and succeeded in locking them out. Monty took their packs
and dumped them outside the gates of the château. These operations took place
while they were feeding in the soup kitchen. We all five (Marie-Louise had
joined us) confronted them and told them what we had done.

What happened to them
after that none of us quite knows. We do know that they went to retrieve their
bags and found themselves locked out by the factor. Anne received a letter,
correctly addressed to her as the Comtesse, from Jake, indignantly complaining
about the treatment they had received at the hands of the ‘staff’

‘Something,’ wrote Jake,
‘told me not to accept their invitation. I knew instinctively that they were
not one of us. I should have listened to my instincts. People like them are
such frightful snobs.’

A Member of the
Family

‘You must,’ said Richard, suddenly, one day
in November, ‘come and meet my mother.’

Trudy, who had been
waiting for a long time for this invitation, after all was amazed.

‘I should like you,’
said Richard, ‘to meet my mother. She’s looking forward to it.’

‘Oh, does she know about
me?’

‘Rather,’ Richard said.

‘Oh!’

‘No need to be nervous,’
Richard said. ‘She’s awfully sweet.

‘Oh, I’m sure she is.
Yes, of course, I’d love —’

‘Come to tea on Sunday,’
he said.

They had met the previous June in a lake
town in Southern Austria. Trudy had gone with a young woman who had a
bed-sitting-room in Kensington just below Trudy’s room. This young woman could
speak German, whereas Trudy couldn’t.

Bleilach was one of the
cheaper lake towns; in fact, cheaper was a way of putting it: it was cheap.

‘Gwen, I didn’t realize
it ever rained here,’ Trudy said on their third day. ‘It’s all rather like
Wales,’ she said, standing by the closed double windows of their room regarding
the downpour and imagining the mountains which indeed were there, but invisible.

‘You said that
yesterday,’ Gwen said, ‘and it was quite fine yesterday. Yesterday you said it
was like Wales.’

‘Well, it rained a bit
yesterday.’

‘But the sun was shining
when you said it was like Wales.’

‘Well, so it is.’

‘On a much larger scale,
I should say,’ Gwen said.

‘I didn’t realize it
would be so wet.’ Then Trudy could almost hear Gwen counting twenty.

‘You have to take your
chance,’ Gwen said. ‘This is an unfortunate summer.

The pelting of the rain
increased as if in confirmation.

Trudy thought, I’d
better shut up. But suicidally: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we moved to a
slightly more expensive place?’ she said.

‘The rain falls on the
expensive places too. It falls on the just and the unjust alike.’

Gwen was thirty-five, a
schoolteacher. She wore her hair and her clothes and her bit of lipstick in
such a way that, standing by the window looking out at the rain, it occurred to
Trudy like a revelation that Gwen had given up all thoughts of marriage. ‘On
the just and the unjust alike,’ said Gwen, turning her maddening imperturbable
eyes upon Trudy, as if to say, you are the unjust and I’m the just.

Next day was fine. They
swam in the lake. They sat drinking apple juice under the red-and-yellow
awnings on the terrace of their guesthouse and gazed at the innocent smiling
mountain. They paraded — Gwen in her navy blue shorts and Trudy in her puffy
sunsuit — along the lake-side where marched also the lean brown camping youths
from all over the globe, the fat print-frocked mothers and double-chinned fathers
from Germany followed by their blonde sedate young, and the English women with
their perms.

‘There aren’t any men
about,’ Trudy said.

‘There are hundreds of
men,’ Gwen said, in a voice which meant, whatever do you mean?

‘I really must try out
my phrasebook,’ Trudy said, for she had the feeling that if she were
independent of Gwen as interpreter she might, as she expressed it to herself,
have more of a chance.

‘You might have more of
a chance of meeting someone interesting that way,’ Gwen said, for their close
confinement by the rain had seemed to make her psychic, and she was continually
putting Trudy’s thoughts into words.

‘Oh, I’m not here for
that. I only wanted a rest, as I told you. I’m not —’

‘Goodness, Richard!’

Gwen was actually
speaking English to a man who was not apparently accompanied by a wife or aunt
or sister.

He kissed Gwen on the
cheek. She laughed and so did he. ‘Well, well,’ he said. He was not much taller
than Gwen. He had dark crinkly hair and a small moustache of a light brown. He
wore bathing trunks and his large chest was impressively bronze. ‘What brings
you here?’ he said to Gwen, looking meanwhile at Trudy.

He was staying at an
hotel on the other side of the lake. Each day for the rest of the fortnight he
rowed over to meet them at ten in the morning, sometimes spending the whole day
with them. Trudy was charmed, she could hardly believe in Gwen’s friendly
indifference to him, notwithstanding he was a teacher at the same grammar
school as Gwen, who therefore saw him every day.

Every time he met them
he kissed Gwen on the cheek.

‘You seem to be on very
good terms with him,’ Trudy said.

‘Oh. Richard’s an old
friend. I’ve known him for years.’

The second week, Gwen
went off on various expeditions of her own and left them together.

‘This is quite a
connoisseur’s place,’ Richard informed Trudy, and he pointed out why, and in
what choice way, it was so, and Trudy, charmed, saw in the peeling pastel
stucco of the little town, the unnecessary floral balconies, the bulbous
Slovene spires, something special after all. She felt she saw, through his
eyes, a precious rightness in the women with their grey skirts and well-filled
blouses who trod beside their husbands and their clean children.

‘Are they all Austrians?’
Trudy asked.

‘No, some of them are
German and French. But this place attracts the same type.’

Richard’s eyes rested
with appreciation on the young noisy campers whose tents were pitched in the
lake-side field. The campers were long-limbed and animal, brightly and briefly
dressed. They romped like galvanized goats, yet looked surprisingly virtuous.