The Sleeping Beauty (11 page)

‘I remember the shepherd’s crook. It was in the loft.’

‘I never saw it. How does one get such a thing in the first place? I don’t recollect any shepherds in the family. Or sheep, either.’

‘Are you going to the sale?’ Laurence asked, hoping that she might avoid some remark about black sheep.

‘Or only
black
sheep,’ she said merrily. ‘Yes, I shall go. Vinny promised to take me. He goes to Market Swanford sometimes on business, and says that day will do as well as any. I think he has property there of some sort. The butterfly collection’s in the catalogue … you
did
say … I hope you haven’t changed your mind about it. Or about the rowing-machine? They’ve put the little carriage-table into thick, black print, like the Persian rugs. I didn’t know it had any value. The china I feel worst about. I ought to have it stored, so that I could give some to your wife.’

‘My wife?’

‘Unless she’s given some, no bride can get nice china nowadays. Of course, I’d never let the Rockingham go. I couldn’t – not even to a daughter-in-law. But I ought to have kept the blue-and-white Worcester for her.’

‘I may never marry.’

‘Of course you’ll marry,’ she said crossly. ‘Don’t start that sort of nonsense.’

‘Or my wife might not care about blue-and-white china.’

Isabella took off her spectacles and looked at him most suspiciously. ‘I hope you won’t marry
that
sort of girl,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t like that at all. Have you had any supper?’

‘No, but don’t worry. I’ll get myself some baked beans.’ This preference of his had outlasted the years, seen him through
high-tea at Prep-school, study-teas at Public School, Naafi snacks in the Army. Isabella sighed. ‘But perhaps it’s as well,’ she thought, ‘that he’s what he is, the world being what
it
is. And I don’t suppose he has very nice friends, not being an officer.’ Once, taking him out to dinner on his birthday, his father had offered him oysters. ‘I’d rather have the money,’ Laurence had said. Harry had behaved quite equably about it and at the end of the meal said: ‘Well, fourteen-and-six less two shillings for the soup you had instead is twelve-and-six,’ and handed him a ten-shilling note and half-a-crown, and Laurence had said ‘Thank you, sir’ and put the money in his pocket. ‘It was no way to develop his taste,’ Isabella thought, and the next day the boy had bought three Fats Waller records, and played them to himself, hour after hour.

‘I don’t understand him,’ Isabella thought. To understand misunderstood boys had at one time seemed easy to her: she had sympathised with them in novels and on the stage – boys who were introspective, sensitive, unhappy at school, misfits in the Army; who hated games, who wrote poetry and fell in love with older women. But from such characters to Laurence was a big step indeed. ‘Yes, it is the world we live in,’ she decided, hearing him opening the tin of beans in the kitchen. ‘Nothing has
style
any more.’

Laurence ate his beans sitting at one end of the kitchen table. He ate slowly and with enjoyment, all the crusts first, then the buttery, soggy middle part. When he had finished eating, he sat for a little while and thought about Betty; not going over, as she at that minute was, what had so far happened between them; but planning their next meeting from beginning to end. Erotic visions he had often had, but these, and Len’s and Fred’s and Norman’s stories, seemed now to have nothing to do with the truth; for, in all the visions and the stories, tenderness had been missing, and this, as he now found, was a foreign
ingredient, negativing other ingredients, such as callous triumph, cruelty, lechery, rude laughter; transforming lust to love, sensuality to sensuousness. He was vaguely conscious of change and although he would not resist telling Len of his adventure, he would leave out his feelings about it, which Len, with his simple appetite, could not appreciate. (It did not occur to him that Len ever left out some part of
his
stories.)

He thought he would make himself some cocoa and, upset by the evening’s happenings into sudden unselfishness, made some for his mother, too.

Isabella, who was trying to slim, faced by the hated, strong, sweet drink in the thick beaker, was extremely touched. No champagne could have made her feel more cherished.

Laurence went to his room, feeling inspired, suddenly dizzy with ambition. From the bottom of his Prep-school tuck-box, from under old magazines, he brought out a sheaf of newspaper-cuttings. He spread them over the table and with devotion, as if he were writing a poem, traced back, from one snippet to another, the breeding, history, performance, achievement of April Madrigal, which was to run on Monday.

Isabella’s guess that Vinny owned property in Buckinghamshire was incorrect. He merely paid the rent of his wife’s flat in Market Swanford. The floor above it, which was one long room once used by the Spiritualist Society for seances, was now rented by his wife for her dancing-studio. Large pockmarked mirrors covered one side of the room, opposite the
barre
. Above the piano hung a pair of old ballet-shoes. The pupils were told that these had belonged to Pavlova; but they had belonged to no one of the kind.

To say that Vinny’s wife was not above telling a lie – and she would not have been his wife at all if that had been so – would be to underestimate her inventiveness. She had, in fact, a great distaste for the truth and was for ever tidying it up or turning her back on it. ‘How can I present
this
to people?’ she would at once ask herself when faced by anything shameful or alarming. Vinny’s desertion she had disposed of by moving to a new place and saying he was dead. She even changed Vinny himself into a Fighter Pilot and gave him a D.F.C. with bar.

As the Rita Shinfield School of Dancing sounded so well, she retained her maiden-name and would have been surprised
to be called Mrs Tumulty – for that had become, in her mind, merely her mother-in-law’s name. When Vinny came to see her, she told anyone who would listen that he was the family solicitor. This amused him, for he saw that her description of their relationship was one of the instances when, in trying to tell a lie, she stumbled accidentally towards the truth. Sitting at her table, going through her books, her income-tax forms, he sometimes thought how odd sex was to lead him to such a situation, to such a woman. The most fleeting loosening of his control, that faintest experience of pleasure, had as its result all these years of going over her accounts, the secret journeys, the letters he drafted to the landlord, the advertisements he worded for the local newspaper, the cups of tea and the macaroon-biscuits with which they sedately rounded off the occasion.

He had not found time to see her since the early Spring and his first visit of condolence to Isabella at Seething: he felt, too, a new disinclination to be with her, and put off the journey from week to week, planning to see her if he could slip away from Isabella for a few hours when he took her down to her old home in Buckinghamshire for the Auction Sale.

Isabella was staying in London, and the evening before the sale Vinny took her to dine in Soho. The outing was only fairly successful. He made mistakes due to heedlessness, said: ‘Darling, what a gay little frock!’ and touched the black silk fringe which swung against her plump arms when she moved.

‘Gay?’ she said dubiously. ‘I bought it for Harry’s memorial-service. It was not meant to be gay.’

He ordered a sweet, sallow wine she liked and which made him pause in the middle of sentences while he smothered little belches. She ate
mille feuilles
, then regretted them. Waiters constantly interrupted to ask if the meal was all they desired.

Afterwards, they walked some way through littered streets, hoping to repair the effects of the wine and pastry. It began to
drizzle and Isabella’s heel caught in a grating. Women at street-corners stared past her at Vinny and this embarrassed her.

In the morning, when they met at Marylebone station it was raining hard. They dodged the fishy-smelling puddles on the platforms. A deluge of rain drummed on the glass roof of the station, and when the train moved, it seemed to beat its way through the sodden landscape, smoke flapping back at the misted windows. The brilliant green woods of early Summer took the full weight of the rain.

‘This doesn’t help your day,’ Vinny said.

She wiped the window with her newspaper and peered out at the familiar scenes – the backs of houses, strips of garden, sheds, allotments. Then striped fields unrolled; a barge went slowly up a steamy canal; the rain was white against dark fir-trees. This journey had played its part in her married life. On Wednesday mornings she had taken what Harry called ‘the matrons’ train’ for her day’s shopping in London – an entirely feminine day with visits to hairdressers and dressmakers; luncheon at one of the stores; delightful trackings-down of gloves to match a blouse, a belt to match a bag; tea at Fortnum’s, enviously watching a mannequin weaving her way between the tables with a quick step that seemed to cover no distance. (‘A mink stole is slimming,’ Isabella would think, breaking open a chestnut meringue with her fork and wishing that she was not about to eat it and hoping that she would not have another when it was gone.) In the holidays, Laurence would often be with her, going sulkily to the dentist, or to Gorringe’s for school clothes. ‘How nice to be home!’ she would greet her friends as they got out of the train in the evening; but she would not have missed her Wednesdays for the world. This morning, taking the journey the wrong way round, she felt an alien, and knew that she was on her way to see a home disintegrate which was already lost.

The rain slackened, and had stopped when they got out of the train. Drips fell from the spiked shelter, and out in the road all the suburban trees sighed and shook down showers of raindrops and wet petals. Behind the drenched laburnum, the pink may, the ornamental cherries, stood large brick houses with curving drives. They had deceivingly rural names, like Red Barns and Little Orchard and Old Thatches, and all were familiar to Isabella – for she had dined here and played Bridge there – and she leant forward and noted the smallest change – each lick of paint or mended fence.

‘How absurd to have come!’ she thought. She had little imagination and had not, until this moment of approaching the house, visualised the ordeal of witnessing her home stripped down before her neighbours’ eyes.

Cars stood in the lane already. The white farm-gate was open between the glassy laurels. ‘For Sale’ boards were thrust into the hedge.

They drove in, over loose wet gravel, and Vinny touched her clasped hands steadyingly.

‘It was vulgar to come,’ she whispered. ‘And embarrassing. I shall bid myself for the little lacquer bureau. Not that I want it; but I suddenly recall that Mrs Mitchell always did. I could not bear for it to be in her home, with her papers in it.’

The garden looked untidy and trodden about. The whitewashed house, so looped with purple clematis and wistaria, looked a transitory residence, a place taken over and furnished for summer months; bought and re-sold over and over as speculation, a house without reality or experience, from which mothers went to nursing-homes to give birth to their children, out of which no coffins had been carried. ‘Nothing has happened here,’ the leaded diamonded windows assured, ‘nothing left its mark.’ The garden had been laid out once for all at the beginning; a polite cycle of social exchange had
been maintained – he who was host one week was guest the next – envy was a commoner emotion than jealousy; tiny unkindnesses were done; the lacquer bureau aroused deep feelings. ‘Nothing wild,’ Vinny thought, ‘nothing beautiful, tragic, terrifying took place. No one threw open those smug windows to feel the cool air on his burning eyes.’

The car stopped. The porch was full of gravel; footmarks were all over the parquet-flooring of the hall, Isabella saw with dismay.

‘But I do not like terror, violence, beauty,’ Vinny told himself. He helped Isabella out of the car. She kept her gloved hand on his arm as she entered the porch, supported by him, upheld, in her neighbours’ eyes; prepared to meet their sympathetic glances and their tact. ‘What I love is charm, grace, discretion, order.’

This villa, which did, or had done, well enough for Isabella, would not have done for Emily. He imagined some desolate moorland, a house rock-hewn, mist-wreathed, haunted.

Isabella stepped over a rolled-up carpet to greet an acquaintance. Vinny looked at his catalogue. He had planned to leave Isabella and return for her later, when he had been to see his wife at Market Swanford, fifteen miles away. He hoped that the lacquer bureau would come up within an hour or two: for, to buy it himself, to snatch it from under Mrs Mitchell’s nose – whoever Mrs Mitchell might be – was, he decided, the best comfort he could contrive for Isabella that day.

Buckinghamshire contains all of England – suburbia, industrial squalor, great estates, even valleys remote and rural where most of the families have the same name. Some of the market-towns change little – coaching-inns and old-fashioned drapers surround the squares where the buses end their journeys. On market-days Market Swanford is crowded, with stalls and
village-people. Waitresses run to and fro in the dining-room at The Bull; bus-queues line the pavements.

Early-closing day makes another world of it. Vinny came into this blank world, in the dead part of the afternoon. Navy-blue blinds covered the shop-windows, reflecting the empty streets. He saw no sign of life, but pigeons walking about under a statue of some great Buckinghamshire figure – Disraeli or Hampden, perhaps … he had never been close enough to be sure – in the middle of the square.

Rita’s flat was in a street off the square, and over a cheap tailor’s. The shop-window was full of overcoats and suits on dummies which had large price-tickets in place of heads. From the top floor – so quiet was the street – came the sound of a piano and the staggered thumps of children practising a
pas de chat
. He felt that the pianist should have been in time, having, probably, more control over her instrument than the children had over their limbs.

‘Stand!’ said Rita’s dancing-mistress voice, and the music trailed off and a humming and shuffling arose.

The door at the side of the tailor’s shop was open, and Vinny went up the stairs. These were narrow, and had rubber treads. At the turn of the stairs there was a little board on the wall, with a pointing hand and the words ‘Rita Shinfield School of Dancing. 2nd Floor.’ On a bench beneath this, Vinny sat down to wait.

The music began again – one of those ageless, dancing-class pieces which he could hum but give no name to. ‘Hold!’ Rita called. ‘Oh, dear, dear! Arms, Cynthia!’ But soon she said ‘Stand’ again and then clapped her hands. ‘Thank-you!’ Her high, actressy voice came floating down. ‘Thank
you
!’ thought Vinny. In a minute or two, his ordeal began. Little girls came clattering down the stairs, swinging ballet-shoes by the ribbons, flicking back their plaits, glancing at Vinny – all
tremulous, secret, personal. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Shinfield,’ they had chanted. ‘Perhaps they adore her,’ he suddenly thought.

The pianist followed them down; slowly, for she was rather lame. She had a sad, reproachful look which Vinny well understood, and he could think of no more irritating way of earning a living than hers, no mode of living more dim or fruitless.

‘She’ll be down directly,’ she said as she passed, and, as he watched her descending the stairs, clutching her music-case, leaning her weight on the banisters, he could imagine the house she would return to and the whole of the life that she had led and must lead; submerged and unnoticed; crying in vain, he thought, for a kind word.

Rita came running downstairs, her feet, in old ballet-shoes, turned outwards; her hand holding some ropes of pink and grey pearls to her breast. She was still humming the
pas de chat
tune and did not stop when she saw Vinny. She patted his cheek and in an excess of gaiety put her face to be kissed, going up on tiptoe to reach him. She then did a little glissé, took her key from her handbag and opened the door of the flat. ‘Entrez!’ she called after her.

‘There is only one thing she can settle down to without lighting a cigarette,’ he thought, watching her going round from one empty box to another, even lifting the clock and looking behind it. He handed her his case. Although she smoked so much, she did it in a fussy way as if it were the first cigarette of her life. She blew out smoke and waved it away with her hand, narrowed her eyes, shook ash off her pearls, made a fish’s mouth and forced out smoke-rings. ‘Well, darling!’ she said.

He moved a fluffy cat off a chair, revolted by the creature’s lumps of uncombed fur. He brushed hairs off the velvet cushion and sat down. Rita took the cat on her lap and stroked it. He remembered with disgust that she took it to bed with her.

‘That poor woman – your pianist,’ he began – for he could not escape from his old ways of pity.

‘Poor?’

‘I mean the poverty of her life. It is in her face and her voice.’

‘She’s perfectly happy.’

‘None of us is that.’

‘I am,’ Rita said in surprise. ‘Darling puss!’ she murmured, holding the cat up to her face. ‘We are
very
happy, aren’t we? Being busy’s the secret,’ she said in a brisker voice. ‘So as there’s no time to think about yourself.’

‘It is a poor happiness that can only exist that way.’

‘What’s the good of unsettling everyone and making them think they’re badly off? Poor Miss Walker, as you call her … supposing you manage to convince her she’s missing something by not living in Mayfair and drinking champagne every day … that’s you all over … you like to make people feel dissatisfied … I wouldn’t put it past you to take her out and give her a taste for fine things, so that she’d fret for them ever after … long after you’d forgotten her, or gone away feeling good, thinking you’d given her a glimpse of high-life and something to look back on … You really are a silly old fool,’ she concluded, in her most friendly voice. ‘People have to live those lives.’

Against his judgment, he asked: ‘What does she
do
?’

Although this flat and Rita’s own life made him feel claustrophobic, his last intention was to unsettle her. His wish was quite the reverse; but curiosity always endangered him.

‘How do I know what she does? Goes home and cooks her father’s supper, I suppose. If there was anything so very terrible in that, half the world would starve, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

‘So you see!’ she said gaily. ‘And
there
you are, Puss angel, and down you go, sweetest, while mother puts the kettle on.’

Vinny went to the window and looked into the wet street.
He had meant to rehearse some dialogue beforehand, but had found the difficulty of being unsure how her half of it would go. ‘If I say this and this,
she
may answer me thus,’ he had thought. Now – not only had he not made his own set speeches: he had set her off along quite opposite lines – trying to make what she would call ‘the worst of it’ for her; allowing her cause for self-pity, none for gratitude.