The Complete Short Stories (5 page)

‘She’ll have to go to a
home.’

Pooh-bah went out to
look at the barometer and did not return.

‘I don’t mind, really,’
said Daphne.

‘Look at the work she
causes,’ said Linda. ‘Look at the trouble!’

Next day, when Daphne
was scrubbing the kitchen floor Aunt Sarah came and stood in a puddle before
her. ‘My Friar’s Balsam,’ she said. ‘I left a full bottle in the bathroom, and
it’s gone.

‘I know,’ said Daphne,
scrubbing away, ‘I took it in a weak moment, but now I’ve put it back.’

‘Very well,’ said Aunt
Sarah, trotting off and dragging the puddle with her. ‘But don’t do it again.
Pilfering was always a great weakness in your mother, I recall.’

The winter temperature
lasted well into April. Linda and Daphne had to sit by a one-bar electric fire
in the library if they wanted to smoke; Pooh-bah’s asthma was affected by
cigarette smoke.

Linda was conducting a
weekend liaison with a barrister in London, and with Daphne in the house she
found it easier to disappear for longer weekends, and then, sometimes, a week. ‘Daphne,’
she would say on the phone, ‘you don’t mind holding the fort, honestly? This is
so important to me.

Daphne went for walks
with Uncle Pooh-bah. She had to take short steps, for he was slow. They walked
on the well-lad paths to the river which Daphne always referred to as ‘the
Thames’, which indeed, of course, it was.

‘We went as far as the
Thames,’ Daphne would tell Linda on their return. They ventured no further than
the local lock, a walk bordered with green meadows and wonderful sheep.

Relations of some
friends in the Colony invited her to London. She accepted, then told Linda when
she would be away.

‘But,’ said Linda,
‘I
shall be in London next week. It’s important, you know. Someone’s got to
look after Pooh-bah and Aunt Sarah.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne.

Linda cheered up. ‘Perhaps
you could go the week after?’

‘No, next week,’ said
Daphne patiently, ‘that’s when I’m going.’

‘Someone’s
got to
look after Pooh-bah and Aunt Sarah.’

‘Oh, I see.

Linda started to cry.
Daphne said, ‘I’ll write to my friends, and explain.’ Linda dried her eyes and
said, ‘You can’t imagine how deadly it is living in this awful house year after
year with a couple of selfish old people and that helpless Clara.’

Next weekend, while
Linda was away, several Patterson relations arrived. Molly, Rat, Mole and an
infant called Pod. Mole was an unattached male cousin. Daphne expressed a
desire to see Cambridge. He said it would be arranged. She said she would
probably be in London soon. He said he hoped to see her there. Aunt Sarah stuck
a pin in the baby’s arm, whereupon Molly and Rat took Daphne aside and advised
her to clear out of the house as soon as possible. ‘It’s unhealthy.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne, ‘but
it’s typically English.’

‘Good gracious me!’ said
Rat.

At last she had her week in London with the
relations of her friends in the Colony. Daphne had been told they were wealthy,
and was surprised when the taxi drove her to a narrow house in a mean little
side street which was otherwise lined with garages.

‘Are you sure this is
the right place?’ she asked the driver.

‘Twenty-five Champion
Mews,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said
Daphne. ‘This must be it.’

Before Daphne had left
the country Linda had remarked, ‘A house in Champion Mews. They must be rather
rich. How I would adore a mews house.’ Daphne remembered this.

The interior of the house
was very winning. She readjusted her ideas, and at dinner was able to say to
her hostess, ‘What an adorable mews house.

‘Isn’t it? We were so
lucky — literally
everyone
was after it.’

Mrs Pridham was
middle-aged, and smart. Mr Pridham was a plastic surgeon.

‘I shan’t make the
mistake,’ he said to Daphne, ‘of asking you about all the dangers you
encountered in darkest Africa.’

Daphne laughed.

‘You must have a Season
of course,’ said Mrs Pridham. ‘Have you arranged anything?’

‘I’m here for two years
at least.’ Then she remembered about the London Season, and said, ‘No, I have
nothing arranged. But my uncle has written to various friends.’

‘It’s getting a little
late in the year,’ said Mrs Pridham.

‘Really,’ said Daphne, ‘I
just want to see England. I’d like to see London. I’d like to see the Tower,
and Uncle Chakata’s friends.’

‘I shall take you to the
Tower tomorrow afternoon,’ said Mr Pridham.

He did, and afterwards
they went for a spin round Richmond and Kingston. He pulled up at a pleasant
spot. ‘Daphne,’ he said, ‘I love you.’ And he pressed his lips of sixty summers
to hers.

As soon as she could
disengage herself, she casually wiped her mouth with her handkerchief—
casually, for she did not want to hurt his feelings. However, she told him she
was engaged to be married to someone in the Colony.

‘Oh dear, I’ve done the
wrong thing. Have I done the wrong thing?’

‘Daphne is engaged to a
lucky fellow in Africa,’ he said at dinner that night. Mole was present. He
looked at Daphne. She looked back helplessly. Mrs Pridham looked at her
husband, and said to Daphne, ‘Before you do anything, you must have your London
Season. Stay six weeks with us, do. I’ve brought out girls before. It’s too
late of course to do anything much but —’

‘Do stay with us,’ said
Mr Pridham.

Later, when Daphne
explained the tale of her ‘engagement’ to Mole, he said, ‘You can’t stay with
the Pridhams. I know someone else you can stay with, the mother of a friend of
mine.’

Mrs Pridham looked said
when Daphne told her she could not prolong her visit. For the rest of the week
she unmistakably cast Daphne into her husband’s way, frequently left them alone
together, and often arranged to be picked up somewhere in the car, so that
Daphne was obliged to dine with Mr Pridham alone.

Daphne mentioned to
Mole, ‘She hasn’t the least suspicion of what he’s like. In fact, she seems to
throw the man at me.’

‘She wants to hot him
up,’ said Mole. ‘There are plenty of women who behave like that. They get young
girls to the house simply in order to give the old man ideas. Then they get rid
of the girls.’

‘Oh, I see.’

She went to stay as a paying guest with the
mother of Mole’s friend, Michael. It was arranged by letter.

Michael Casse was thin
and gangling with an upturned nose. He had been put to stockbroking with an
uncle, but without success. He giggled a great deal. His mother, with whom he
lived, took a perverse pride in his stupidity. ‘Michael’s hopelessness,’ she
told Daphne, ‘is really…’ During the war, his mother told her, she had been
living in Berkshire.

Michael came home on
leave. She sent him out with the ration book one day after lunch to buy a
packet of tea. He did not return until next morning. He handed his mother the
tea, explaining that he had been held up by the connections.

‘What connections?’ said
his mother.

‘Oh, the trains, London,
you know.’

And it transpired that
he had gone all the way to Fortnum’s for the tea, it never having occurred to
him that tea could be bought in the village, nor indeed anywhere else but
Fortnum’s. Daphne thought that
very
English.

Michael now lived with
his mother in her fiat in Regent’s Park. Greta Casse was as gangling as her
son, but she gangled effectively and always put her slender five foot ten into
agreeable poses, so that even her stooping shoulders and hollow chest, her bony
elbows akimbo, were becoming. She spoke with a nasal drawl. She lived on
alimony and the rewards of keeping PGs.

She took vastly too much
money from Daphne, who suspected as much, but merely surmised that Greta Casse
was, like her son, stupid, living in an unreal world where money hardly
existed, and so one might easily charge one’s PGs too much. Daphne frequently
slipped out to Lyons for a sandwich, so hungry did she go. She assumed at first
that society women were simply not brought up to the food idea, but when she
saw Greta Casse tucking in at anyone else’s expense, she amended her opinion,
and put Greta’s domestic parsimony down to her vagueness about materialistic
things. This was a notion which Greta fostered in various ways, such as always
forgetting to give Daphne the change of a pound, or going off for the day and
leaving nothing in the house for lunch.

That she was, however, a
society woman, in a sense that Daphne’s relations were not, was without doubt.
Molly and Linda had been presented, it was true. And Daphne had seen
photographs of her mother and Aunt Sarah beplumed and robed, in the days when
these things were done properly. But they were decidedly not society women.
Daphne mused often on Greta Casse, niece of a bishop and cousin of an earl, her
distinctive qualities. She went to see Pooh-bah one weekend, and mentioned
Greta Casse to a Miss Barrow, a notable spinster of the district who had come
to tea. Daphne was surprised to learn that this woman, in her old mannish
Burberry, her hands cracked with gardening, her face cracked with the weather,
had been a contemporary of Greta’s. They had been to various schools together,
had been presented the same year.

‘How odd,’ Daphne
remarked to Pooh-bah later, ‘that two such different people as Mrs Casse and
Miss Barrow should have been brought up in the same way.

He gave a verbal assent,
‘I suppose so, yes,’ but clearly he did not understand what she meant about it
being odd.

Back she went to Regent’s
Park. Greta Casse arranged a dinner party for Daphne at a West End restaurant,
followed by an all-night session in a night-club. About twenty young people
were invited, most of them in their early teens, which made Daphne feel old,
and she was not compensated by the presence of a few elders of Greta’s
generation. Michael came, of course. Englishman though he was, Daphne could not
take him very seriously.

The party was followed
by another, and that by another. ‘Can’t we invite Mole?’ Daphne said.

‘Well,’ said Greta, ‘the
whole idea is for you to meet
new
people. But of course, if you like…’

The bill for these
parties used up half of Daphne’s annual allowance. Luncheons, at which she met
numerous women friends of Greta’s, used up the other half. Daphne longed to
explain to Mrs Casse that she had not understood what was involved by becoming
her lodger. She did not want to be entertained, for she had merely counted on
somewhere jolly to stay. Daphne had not the courage to put this to Greta who
was so uncertain, precarious, slippery, indefinite and cold. She wrote to
Chakata for money. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘when I’ve had my fun I’ll take a
job.’

‘I hope you are seeing
something of England,’ he replied when he sent his cheque. ‘My advice to you is
to go on a coach tour. I hear they are excellent, and a great advance on my
time, when there was nothing of that sort.’ She rarely took much notice of
Chakata’s advice, for so much of it was inapplicable. ‘Do introduce yourself to
Merrivale at the bank,’ he had written. ‘He will give you sherry in the
parlour, as he used to do me when I was your age.’ On inquiring for Mr
Merrivale at the bank, Daphne was unsuccessful. ‘Ever heard of a chap called
Merrivale?’ the clerks asked each other. ‘Sure it’s this branch?’ they asked
Daphne.

‘Oh yes. He used to be
the manager.

‘Sorry, madam, no one’s
heard of him here. Must have been a way back.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Daphne got into the
habit of ignoring Chakata’s questions, ‘Have you been to Hampton Court?’

‘Did you call on
Merrivale at the bank? He will give you sherry…’

‘Have you booked for a
tour of England and Wales? I trust you are planning to see something of the
English countryside?’

‘I couldn’t find that
bootmaker in St Paul’s Churchyard,’ she wrote to him, ‘because it is all
bombed. Better stick to the usual place in Johannesburg. Anyway, I might not
order the right boots.

Soon, then, she made no
reply to his specific requests and suggestions, but merely gave him an account
of her parties, pepping them up for his benefit. He seemed not to read her
letters properly, for he never referred to the parties.

Greta came back to the
fiat one afternoon with a toy poodle. ‘He’s yours,’ she said to Daphne.

‘How utterly perfect!’
said Daphne, thinking it was a gift, and wanting to express her appreciation as
near as possible in the vernacular.

‘I
had
to have
him for you,’ said Greta, and went on to demand a hundred and ten guineas.
Daphne ducked her face affectionately in the pet’s curly coat to hide her
dismay.

‘We were so terribly
lucky to get him,’ Greta was saying. ‘You see, he’s not just a miniature — they’re
slightly bigger — he’s a
toy.

Daphne gave her a
cheque, and wrote to Chakata to say how expensive London was. She decided to
take a job in the autumn, and to cut out the fortnight’s motoring tour of the
north with Molly, Rat, and Mole which she had arranged to share with them.

Chakata sent her the
money as an advance on her next quarterly allowance. ‘Sorry can’t do more. Fly
has had a go at the horses, and you will have read about the tobacco crops.’
She had not read about the blight, but a bad year was not an uncommon
occurrence. She was surprised at Chakata’s attitude, for she believed him to be
fairly wealthy. Shortly after this she heard from friends in the Colony that
Chakata’s daughter and her husband who had gone to farm in Kenya, had been
murdered by the Mau Mau. ‘Chakata implored us not to tell you,’ wrote her friend,
‘but we thought you should know. Chakata is educating the two boys.’

It was the middle of
May. Daphne had engaged to be Mrs Casse’s lodger till the end of June. However,
she telephoned to Linda that she was returning to the country. Greta was out.
Daphne packed and sat down courageously with Popcorn (the poodle) on her lap to
await her return, and explain her financial predicament.