The Happy Prisoner (42 page)

She had brought presents for Oliver too, books and sweets and cigarettes and a half-mocking sympathy, which said: “I understand you: you are my type. You and I are grown-up in this rather juvenile world.” Once, when she leaned over him to point at something in his paper, Oliver felt frissons travelling
up and down his spine, and put it down, for his own peace of mind, to her nails. For Honey was attractive, in a serpentine, unwholesome way, to men, but not at all to women.

Bob was crazy about her. He was a noisy, good-tempered, middle-aged man with a large fit body and a round grey head too big for its brain. His voice carried everything before it, not only by its volume but by the sweeping things it said. You could never have an argument with Bob. If he said a thing was so, it was so, and you soon learned to spare yourself the effort of contradicting. He would make the most fantastic statements and stick to them, shouldering aside all disagreement, like a buffalo coming through pampas grass. Mrs. North had always adored her brother, and his presence in the house woke her from her long comas of domestic absorption. She seemed to get less tired, and she could sit down and forget what was in the oven if he were talking to her. She could pass a clock ten times without looking at it and next quarter's telephone bill would show that she had been less extravagant on TIM. She worried less and laughed more. She was as gay as a girl and reverted more and more to her mother tongue, which she refurbished with the latest expressions which she picked up avidly from the Linnegars.

Evelyn, who had not seen her father since she was old enough to realise him as anything more than a vast male presence, was a little afraid of him. She had worshipped him in the mind, encouraged by her aunt, and she worshipped him in the flesh, but from a safe distance, prowling round on the edge of her company, watching him, coming quickly to him if he called her, but slipping away as soon as the conversation side-tracked him from the bear's hug he was giving his daughter. She swallowed all his stories and electrified her school with the information that New York was built on a foundation of rock no thicker than a paving stone and that an American train went so fast that its sound followed it through a station and had to have a signal of its own. She believed everything he told her, and he told her what he thought she wanted to hear.

When she asked him about the ranch, he said: “Oh, sure, sure, we'll have a ranch, with a swimming-pool and whole herds of cattle and wild ponies and cow-punchers and hill-billies. You can have Gary Cooper too, if you want.”

“I think I'd rather have Rodeo Ralph, if you don't mind,” said Evelyn, whose knowledge of film stars was confined to the retrogressive, second-feature cinema to which she sometimes went with Violet and Fred. “He could be head groom, but of course I shall look after my own horse myself. Have you bought
him yet? What's he like? Oh, I do so want a chestnut, with golden lights in mane and tail, but of course”—she looked at him anxiously—“if it's not, I'm sure I should like another colour just as much.”

“You shall have the finest, high-steppingest chestnut in all California,” said Bob expansively. “You shall come with me and choose one. We'll go on the Santa Fé Chief, in a state berth with satin sheets and perfume coming out of sprays in the wall. You start lunch in the Grand Central and get halfway across the continent before you've done.”

“I've seen a melon,” said Evelyn cautiously. “In a shop. Aunt Hattie said she wasn't rich enough to buy it. Are we rich enough, Daddy, to buy a very big ranch?”

“Acres and acres of it.” Bob spread his arms and Oliver saw Honey frown at him and tap her foot. They did not intend to live anywhere but in New York, where an apartment was being fitted out for them by a fashionable interior decorator who looked like being Honey's next experience.

Oliver thought it was about time someone started breaking it gently to Evelyn where she was going to live. It should also be broken to her that Honey was a permanency. She did not seem to realise that she would be going back to the States with her and her father. She thought he would leave her over here now that he had got a daughter for company.

“If she's coming with us, Uncle Ollie, I'm not going,” Evelyn said determinedly, eating her supper in his room in a skimpy woollen dressing-gown with her hair in pigtails.

“But that's the whole idea of their coming over here, to take you back with them,” said Oliver.

“They don't want me. When I go out for walks with them, or in the car, which I don't like because Daddy drives too fast, they talk to each other all the time and it's dreadfully boring. She won't let him talk to me. If he starts and we're just enjoying ourselves, she calls out: “Oh Ba-arb!'” She gave a good imitation of her stepmother's twanging city accent. “I've gotten a stitch in my side, or a thorn in my finger, or a stone in my shoe'—you know how she's always shamming she's got something wrong with her. Then he fusses over her like Heather used to do with Susan when she cried. She wouldn't be any good on a ranch. She'd always be getting colds or hurting herself or getting her toenail trodden on by one of the horses. She kicked up an awful shindy when Dandy trod on her foot, and it couldn't possibly have hurt because he hasn't any shoes on, and he's so light, anyway. He's stood on my toe loads of times and I haven't minded.

“Look.” She kicked off her slipper and showed him the crinkled, blackened big toenail of anyone who has much to do with horses.

“Fred doesn't like her either, because she said his bulls ought to wear knickers. He thought that was rude and so do I.” She tore savagely at a crust of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar and her pale-lashed eyes brooded their dislike of her stepmother.

Oliver cleared his throat. “Perhaps you won't live on the ranch just at
first
,” he said tentatively. “You might live in New York for a bit; you'll love that. You live in a flat like a palace with beds like clouds, higher up than the top of the Wrekin, and the lift takes you up in one go—swish—without stopping.”

“Daddy said we were going to have a ranch,” said Evelyn doggedly.

Oliver sighed. “Probably later on you will. You could leave Honey in New York while you and he went to California.”

“He wouldn't go without her. He won't go anywhere without
her
.” Which was true.

Bob followed his new wife about like an infatuated St. Bernard. If she got up, he would ask where she was going, and when she was sitting down he would ask her it she was comfortable and did she want anything fetched and wasn't she tired and wouldn't she like a small shot of rye, of which he seemed to have brought an inexhaustible supply in his baggage. When they had been at Hinkley for a week, Honey decided that her hair needed resetting and her nails resharpening.

“I'll make an appointment for you with my man in Shrewsbury,” Mrs. North said obligingly, already moving towards the telephone. “It's only a little place, but Mr. Meechayul is a very skilled man. He used to be with Antoine.”

“Thanks a lot, Hattie,” said Honey with a patronising smile, “but I couldn't go to anyone but Julian in Dover Street. He always does me when I'm over here. Barb is going to take me up to town. Have you wired the Dorc
hes
ter yet, dear?”

“Blimey,” said Violet, flabbergasted, “all the way to London to have your hair washed? You must be potty.” Her status as Mrs. Williams with a home of her own and no one to tell her what to do all day had given her more poise with people like this. Instead of being paralytic as she once would have been, the uneasiness which Honey's presence caused her manifested itself in an outspoken bravado of rudeness.

“You ought to hold your head under the pump like I do,” she went on. “We haven't had any water at the cottage since
the drought.” Honey shuddered and leaned well back as Violet reached across her for another piece of cake.

“Say, isn't that terrible?” she said. “I'd just pass
out
if I didn't have my bath every evening.”

“I should think everyone else passes out if you do that in this house. There's never enough hot water for more than one bath at night.”

“Violet!” Her mother quickly changed the subject. “You never told me you hadn't any water. That's terrible. Why don't you and Fred come up here for baths?”

“Should think you'd got enough people having baths without us too,” said Violet, glad to have the point handed to her. “We're O.K. You ought to see us washing in the morning. Fred pumps while I wash, then I pump while he washes.”

“Quite a charming little idyll,” said Honey, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke down her nostrils, and Bob made everybody jump by going “Ha-ha-ha!” like the hooter on a calliope.

When Evelyn heard that they were going to London for the week-end, she went dead white and stared at her father unbelievingly. “But you can't, Daddy, you can't. It's my school sports. I
told
you!”

“So you did. Say, isn't that just too bad? You'll have to tell me all about it, hm?”

“But you promised you'd come. You know I might win the high jump, and I wanted you to see me. All the other girls' parents go.”

“I'll come, of course, dear,” said Mrs. North, “and perhaps Violet and Fred will too.”

“Yes, I know—thanks awfully—but I mean—well, you always come, and they know you. Nobody's got a father who's an American, and I did so want him to come. Daddy, do. They have lovely teas,” she said hopefully. “Miss Mann makes the most super baps, with strawberry jam and cream—”

“What in heaven's name is a baps?” asked Bob.

“A bap,” said his sister. “It's a sort of round, doughy thing you make on a griddle.”

“You mean a hot biscuit,” said Honey.

“Not a
biscuit,
” said Evelyn scornfully. “Biscuits are things like this.” She waved a
petit beurre
furiously under her stepmother's nose.

“A cracker,” murmured Honey.

“Oh, don't let's have that old argument again,” said Oliver wearily. “You'll have to get used to talking about crackers,
Evie, when you go to the States, or no one will know what you mean.”

“I'll say biscuit if I want to,” said Evelyn stubbornly, “and they'll jolly well have to understand.”

“You'll go hungry,” said her stepmother in a catty little singsong.

Evelyn was understood to mumble that she'd rather starve than talk that potty language, as she slouched out, aiming a kick at a table leg on the way. They heard her go upstairs, bang, bang, bang, against the back of each step.

“Oh dear, her shoes—” said Mrs. North. “That's her only good pair. I shall have to talk to you about her clothes, Honey, before you take her back. She'll need a completely new outfit; she hasn't a decent thing to wear. I've been letting her run wild, I'm afraid, and she's nearly always in pants, so it hasn't really been worth buying her anything good. And there's nothing in the shops—” She was horrified to find herself apologising to her sister-in-law.

“Oh, sure,” said Honey. “Archer can take her to Maceys and get her fitted out. She's been a children's maid; she'll know all about it.”

“Don't let her get fussy things,” said Mrs. North, who hated the thought of her poor Evelyn in New York. “Those dresses that you brought were very lovely, but I'm afraid she'll never wear them.” She gave a half-hearted laugh. “She's quite a madam, I'm afraid, in her likes and dislikes.”

“She'll have to dress like an American child and not like a stable boy when she's over there,” said Honey, looking hard. “She's too darned independent altogether for my way of thinking.”

“Now, Honey,” said Bob uneasily. “Now, Honey.”

“Look, Bob,” said Mrs. North, knowing that it was no use suggesting that Honey should postpone her hair appointment, “why don't you take Eve up to town with you? She wouldn't mind missing the sports for a treat like that, especially if you won't be there. Do take her and show her a good time. She hasn't been to London since she was old enough to enjoy it.”

“Why—” Bob glanced at his wife, who was looking more than ever as if she had just come up through a trapdoor in a green magnesium flash. “Why, I don't know—”

“It's impossible, Bob. We've planned to go all sorts of places she couldn't go. It wouldn't be any fun for her. What would she do?”

“What she really wants to do,” put in Oliver, “is to take the
longest journey there is on the Underground and then come back by as many different buses as possible.”

“If you think,” said Honey, “that I'm going to spend my week-end exploring London's transport system—”

“I'll take her another time,” said Bob largely, “take her up and give her ice-cream and take her to movies and theatres and anything she wants.”

“You'll hardly have time, dear,” said his sister, “if you really mean to sail at the end of the month.”

“I can make time for anything. How d'you think I made a success of my business? It's a mathematical fact that you can make a day have more than one thousand four hundred and forty minutes if you know the right trick. You go with Evie and see her win the races, Hattie, hm? She loves you.”

Yes, she loved her aunt in a safe, familiar way, but she loved her father with a deluded worship that was heading her straight for a broken heart.

Elizabeth, who had been on holiday since before the Linnegars arrived, came back just before they left. She looked very smart in a new suit and a new pair of shoes and a little straw hat like a boater on the back of her head. Oliver goggled at her and made rude whistling sounds. She twirled round for him. She seemed self-satisfied. “Like it?”

“Not half. And a new bag too—let's look. Pigskin. Must have cost the earth; you never bought that on the salary we pay you. No, don't tell me; I know. Well, he has good taste in bags, I'll say that for him. Been in London all the time?”