The Daffodil Sky (12 page)

‘Funny how you get so many jobs a-Sundays,' she said and her nose rose, pointed as a bird's.

Then because he sat there without moving for a second or two longer she said:

‘Well: you know where the pantry is. You don't expect me to put it in your mouth for you, do you?'

Daylight was fading a little when he came lumbering back into the room with hunks of jam tart and cheese and bread and cold new potatoes and a slice of cold Yorkshire pudding on a plate. He sat with the plate on his knees. He knew that he had to be careful of the crumbs; he knew she would horse-face if he dropped the crumbs. But the taste of the new potatoes and the cold Yorkshire pudding were the taste of all the summer Sunday evenings of his boyhood and he crammed them in with blind-eyed pleasure, bolting them down, licking thick red lips and wishing to God she had a pint in the house to wash them down.

She muttered at last:

‘Anybody'd think you'd never had a mite in your life. Don't she ever get you nothing a-Sundays?'

‘Never care whether I get much a-Sundays,' he said.

‘It don't look like it,' she said.

That was the worst of his mother, he thought. She couldn't hit it off with Edna. He had given up trying to make her now. It was like trying to turn a mule.

‘You can get yourself a spill when you want one,' she said.

Edna was a bit easy-going, he knew, but on the whole he didn't complain. She had let herself go a bit, perhaps, after the last baby. She was a bit sloppy round the middle. Her face was nothing much to write home about but then he wasn't a picture either. The chief thing was she didn't nag him; he really didn't get drunk very much and if he was late at
The Unicorn
on a Sunday she and the children ate the dinner without him and he pacified her with a pint of Guinness afterwards.

By the time he had finished eating it was almost dark and he got up and did the thing he always did, without fail, every Sunday. He lit one of the gas-lamps above the mantelshelf and then, holding his big red face under the light, adjusted the burner until it gave a pure white glow. Then he filled his pipe and lit one of her paper spills from the gas-mantle and put it to his pipe. The flame was sucked down by his red powerful mouth into the pipe bowl until at last he blew out strong blue clouds of smoke that almost smothered him.

As she sat in the window she let the smoke come over to her with her head slightly uplifted, as if it were a cool breeze blowing through the warm airless room in which no window had been open all day. There were three moments she really waited for all evening, and this was the second of them. The first was when she saw him turn, so like a doctor with the fiddle case, at the bottom of the hill. The second was the moment of the gas-lamp, the pure white glow on his face, the great sucked-down flame and the smoke puttering across the room in blue string clouds. It was the smoke above all that she associated with that clumsy massiveness of his and after she smelled it she was aware of the slow dying of cantankerousness inside herself, a softening of all the edges of the day.

When the pipe was really going she knew what he was going to do next. She began unconsciously to finger the keys of the piano and the bookcase that hung on the chain round her neck. That was the third moment: the moment when he reached for the fiddle case and undid it and opened it and took out the bow.

He had begun to play the fiddle when he was seven years old. That had been her ambition for him: a fiddler, a violinist, a great player of the violin in the household. Mr Godbold, who had been a fiddler himself in a great orchestra in Leicester or Birmingham or some other big city up in that part of the world, gave him lessons in his front room, twice a week, after school, at two shillings a time.

‘He has fine hands,' Mr Godbold said. ‘He will make a fine player. He is slow but in the end he will make a fine player.'

The walls of Mr Godbold's front room were hung with many pictures of Mr Godbold playing the violin as a soloist or in orchestras or at social evenings and smoking concerts. She thought Mr Godbold, in pieces like
The Spring Song
and excerpts from
Mariana
and
Il Trovatore
, played like an angel, and she thought it would be wonderful if Luther could rise as far as that. The first winter he persevered through many exercises and the second winter he came to his first piece,
Robin Adair
. Most children who learned the piano or the violin went to a Miss Scholes, in the High Street, where they learned
The Bluebells of Scotland
as their first piece and Miss Scholes gave them sixpence for doing so. Mr Godbold did not believe in bribing his pupils; they worked hard on exercises that were the real foundation of music and then went straight on to pieces like
Robin Adair
.

Luther stuck at
Robin Adair
. He played it through for a whole winter and then his hands began to grow. By the time he was twelve he was a big awkward gargoyle of a boy in whose hands the violin looked effete and fragile. She thought by that time he could play beautifully: perhaps not quite as beautifully as Mr Godbold. Perhaps it only seemed to her almost as beautiful because he was so very young.

‘You want the key?' she said. She took it off the chain and held it out to him.

The sound of the fifths as he spaced them out on the piano was, she thought, a most wonderful thing. It was different from anything else that was ever heard on the piano: those queer, sharp steps of notes climbing up and starting a trembling on the air. That was the true violin
sound: that wonderful prelude of quivering that drew out finally into the glassy, soaring singing of strings.

She had never been very happy about his being a carpenter and at first she opposed it. It was probably that, she thought, that had made his hands so large and clumsy. She was certain the hands of a carpenter could not also be the hands of a violinist; the one could only ruin the other. But his father had said a man had his living to earn and what was wrong with a man being a carpenter? ‘There was One who was a carpenter and there was no shame in that,' he said.

‘Play th' old un?' Luther said, but she said nothing because she knew he never began with any other.

The time he took to play through
Robin Adair
always seemed to go by, perhaps because she shut her eyes, very quickly. It flew away on the song's own delicacy. He liked to play too with the pipe in his mouth, so that it seemed as if every scrape of the bow gave out its own rank cloud of smoke that finally choked the room with gas-green fog.

After
Robin Adair
he played several other pieces he knew:
The Jolly Miller
and
Oh! Dear What Can the Matter Be?
She thought he played better as he got older; but that, after all, was only natural. That was only as it should be. He was a man of over fifty now. He had been playing the same pieces, on the same violin, for forty years.

‘Gittin' dark,' Luther would say, after the third piece. ‘Better be gittin' steady on home.'

He sat with the fiddle case on his knee and the pipe and the violin in his right hand, waiting to pack up. There would be just time, he thought, to nip into
The
Unicorn
and have a couple of beers, perhaps even three or four beers, before they closed at half-past ten. Old Shady Parker would be there and Bill Flawn and Tom Jaques and Flannel Clarke and they would stand each other a round or two. That would rouse him up nicely and he would go home to Edna happy, belching through the dark summer streets, up and down the hills. Tomorrow he would begin to cut out another coffin. Trade was never what you called good in the summer but someone was always going, unexpected or not, and he mucked along somehow. Damn what the family said. That was good enough for him.

‘Better put the key back afore you forgit,' he would say and she would take the key from him and clip it back on the chain.

The poise of her hands, held for a second or two about her throat, was a signal that she gave him every Sunday.

‘Want me to gie y' another?'

‘Have you got time? Don't you hang about if you haven't got time.'

‘Plenty o' time.' The big voice was crude and massive as the hands. ‘You jes' say and I'll play it. Want another? What's it goin' a-be?'

‘Play me the old one,' she would say.

The old one was
Robin Adair
. As he played it she stared beyond the smoky gaslight into spaces empty of shape. She sat ageless and tranquil as if already embalmed among the greenery of fern-pots, before a shroud of blanketing curtains, under a gas-blue summer sky. The harsh sound of the fiddle strings drew out thinner and thinner across the spaces into which she was staring
until her eyes went cloudily after them and she was sightless as she listened.

‘Ah! y' can't beat th' old uns,' Luther said. ‘They take a bit o' beatin'.'

She did not answer. She felt always that she could hear the sound of the strings long after they were silent. They were like the sound of pigeons' voices echoing each other far away in summer trees, and in the sound of them was all her love.

From the calm of her place under the acacia tree, on the swinging canopy seat, Mrs Fairfax listened with growing impatience to the loud chock of croquet balls cracking the silence of afternoon, each stroke like the chime of a wooden clock setting off peals of senseless and exhausting laughter. She did not know how anyone, even the young, could be so energetic or so furiously amused in the three o'clock heat of July.

‘Children—please! Couldn't you please? Melanie!—Fay!—couldn't you please
shout
a little less? It sounds like a madhouse—
please!'

She supposed that if they could hear her they were taking no notice. Or if they were taking no notice it was because of that old habit of hers of calling them children when they were nineteen and twenty.

‘Fay—don't
shriek
like that! I won't have that shrieking. Melanie—stop her!'

She thought there was nothing so irritating in girls as shrieking. It was worse too because the shrieking sounded like something disembodied, quite pointless. She was
cut off from the main lawn of the house by a semicircular bank of azaleas and guelder-rose, so that she could not see the figures of her daughters and the three young men. She did not think she had ever been allowed to shriek like that as a girl. It irritated her exactly as if someone had started to fire off rockets in mid-afternoon.

‘I shall have to stop it. I shall go and speak to them. I won't have that sort of thing.'

Then she remembered that going to speak to them would be awkward because she herself had suggested croquet. She had remembered, after lunch, the old croquet box in the stable loft. It struck her as being just the sort of quiet and companionable game that did not require energy on hot afternoons and she thought it would keep them out of mischief.

For the same reason she had invited three young men to lunch instead of two. That was also companionable. She wanted her daughters to have companions. She was not after all so very old herself, not so very far removed from the time when such things filled your head. But children grew up so quickly. They flashed through childhood. They whisked through adolescence into young womanhood and you did not know where you were. You felt you did not know at times what was best for them.

Before lunch Melanie for instance had made a great fuss about wearing a dress from last summer. Mrs Fairfax thought it an enchanting dress; she thought it made her daughter look like a young fresh flower. There was something bud-like and tender about it but the child had suddenly thrown an exhausting tantrum up
in her bedroom and said she wouldn't be seen dead in it for her or anybody.

‘You will wear it and like it,' Mrs Fairfax said. ‘Don't be so tiresome. It fits just as well as ever. You haven't grown a scrap.'

‘Fay has a new one on. You bought it for her. If Fay can, why can't I?'

‘Fay's that much older than you. She's grown out of hers. That's why.'

It ended in a strange thing happening and she supposed it was that which had begun her irritation. Melanie had not come down to lunch in the fresh, flower-like dress that Mrs Fairfax liked so much and thought was so right for her. She had put on the last thing for a scorching summer day. It was a shining bottle green dress of Fay's that was too severe at the neck and far too drawn-in at the waist, and until she saw it Mrs Fairfax had not realised how alarmingly and fully her child had grown. The girl had done her hair differently too, in a high severe style that made her look, Mrs Fairfax thought, old and false and sophisticated.

Then Fay appeared in a dress that, at first, Mrs Fairfax did not recognise. She became aware only slowly of its uneasy familiarity. It was not until she was actually sitting at the lunch table that she grasped that this was the new dress: the white summer organdie that had been so fresh and youthful with its wide crinkled collar and cuffs to match. Now it had a broad black velvet waistband and the collar had been taken away, leaving all the soft wide shoulders bare.

In perplexed annoyance Mrs Fairfax remembered she had chosen the dress herself. It was young and sweet
for Fay, who was after all only a month over twenty. Now it looked—it was rather difficult to say—indelicate somehow—perhaps not exactly indelicate; there was rather something aggressive and obvious about it, something uneasily wilful about the nakedness that should not have been there.

She was so upset that she looked severely at Fay and said:

‘Don't go out into the sun without putting something on your shoulders, child. You'll suffer for it if you don't. You burn so easily.'

‘I never burn. I've never burned in my life,' Fay said.

‘There's always a first time. You don't want to be sick, child, do you? It's terribly hot today.'