The Sleeping Beauty (3 page)

He followed her downstairs. Vinny turned from the window to greet them. He had drunk very little of his sherry, which was not pleasant. He came forward to shake hands, with the grave and slightly suspicious air of a psychiatrist. Laurence felt the authority, the calm fatherliness; firm, yet casual; detached, yet compassionate. The brown eyes looked directly at him, but veiled his impressions. The handshake was cordial. ‘You are welcome to follow me to the ends of the earth’, Vinny seemed to be assuring people when he was introduced.

Laurence tried to pull his shirt-cuffs down before taking the sherry. Going straight from school into the Army had meant that he had very few grown-up clothes. Nothing fitted.

‘Aren’t you having a drink, Isabella?’ Vinny asked.

‘No, darling, thank you. I feel rather thirsty,’ she said vaguely. ‘Well then, if you will excuse me, I will just … oh,
Vinny
you know, Laurence, used to build sand-castles for you. I remember that so clearly.’

She could not have left them feeling more daunted than
after this remark, and both smiled apologetically – Laurence, for his mother; and Vinny, for the sand-castles.

Laurence sipped his sherry desperately, as if it were his bedtime glass of hot milk, and gazed at it intently rather than glance anywhere else.

‘A beautiful spot,’ Vinny began, with a backwards gesture towards the window.

‘Yes, very.’

‘I have never seen it out-of-season before.’

‘Oh, no?’

‘No. It hardly seems the same place.’

‘Awfully quiet,’ Laurence suggested.

‘The sands so deserted, and no children … there were some earlier on, but they seemed only to accentuate the emptiness.’

‘Would you like some more sherry?’

‘I still have some.’ Vinny lifted his glass as proof. ‘That house on the cliff is a guest-house, is it? Or some sort of private hotel? I never know the difference. I don’t remember it in the old days.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t there. It used to be a private house, but I think the woman got hard up. Rose someone-or-other. My mother would know,’ he said restlessly. ‘I’m not here much now.’

‘How do you like the Army?’

‘Oh, very well, thank you,’ Laurence added, after a pause. In truth, he desperately longed for his leave to be over. Army life had its own frightfulness; but not the emotional burdens of being at home.

‘The steps up the cliff, I suppose, are a private way up to the house,’ Vinny asked.

‘Yes.’

Laurence felt again that the man was like a psychiatrist,
asking questions which really were not those questions at all, but deeper ones. The manner was so artfully veiled.

‘I saw those children going up there.’ Vinny half-turned back to the uncurtained window, although it was now dark outside. ‘And then just now a woman and a young girl …’

To this, Laurence felt he really could not be expected to reply. He poured himself some more sherry, after giving a side-long look at Vinny’s glass.

‘Would she be the owner of the house, this woman with the girl?’ Vinny shamelessly persisted. He felt that he did not care what Laurence thought, as long as he could find out without asking Isabella.

‘It’s her sister who has the daughter, I think. I believe she’s not quite all there, that girl … not right in the head, you know …’ He looked for the first time boldly at Vinny, as if to say: ‘Now let me alone. There are bigger fish in the sea than you dreamed of.’ He could not rid himself of the suspicion that Vinny was probing his mind, and testing his reactions. For this reason, he felt a great desire to come up with some enormity, to give him something to digest. But this manner seemed to bounce back to him, hitting Vinny with scarcely any effect. ‘I may be wrong,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know them … she
looks
jolly odd … funny eyes … and I heard rumours. Mother would know,’ he concluded.

Yet, although Isabella came in then, he said no more, sensing that Vinny did not want the conversation to go on. Isabella drew the curtains across the windows with a flourish; then, thrusting a hand down the neck of her jumper, seemed to be dragging shoulder-straps into place. She gave a tug at her girdle through her skirt, pulled her pearl necklace round, so that it was graded right, with the largest pearl in the centre-front, and having settled herself, said: ‘How nice and cosy! If you like to show Vinny his room, Laurence, supper will be ready.’

*

During the supper and afterwards sitting by the fire while Isabella cracked cob-nuts into her lap and scattered the rug with shells, Laurence listened to the story of the past and hoped that the conversation would stay there rather than turn to the future, the thought of which filled him with dismay and a sense of inferiority. He could not think what he should do when his military-service was over. His father had only vaguely spoken of ‘pulling a few strings’ and ‘having a chat with so-and-so some time’. ‘Now he’s left me high and dry,’ Laurence thought bitterly; but it was not a nice metaphor to have chosen and he swung his thoughts clear of it at once.

Vinny and his mother, he learnt, had first met one another at the very beginning of the war, at what Isabella called ‘the blood-donating’, to which she had gone ‘for a lark’, ‘to see what it was like’, and Vinny, Laurence guessed, because of the general trend of putting people under an obligation to him, even people he would never know, even to the tune of a bottleful of his blood.

They had sat next to one another in a queue, holding the same coloured cards. ‘We have only the most ordinary kind of blood,’ Isabella had whispered to Vinny – for she would always talk to strangers. ‘The most
useful
kind,’ Vinny had said reproachfully. ‘The more of us there are, the more there must be who need it.’ When it was their turn, they lay down on beds next to one another in what was as a rule a school class-room. Lying there waiting, they were conscious of the oddest intimacy. The situation had seemed ludicrous, they now decided. A young doctor was pacing up and down, like an animal in a cage, distracted with boredom. He barely said ‘good-evening’ as he stabbed them in the arm, fixed the tubes, and paced away. All down the room, figures lay on beds, whispering to the nurses or staring up at the ceiling as the blood drained away from them; orderly; quiet; very English. The English cup of tea
was being prepared in a corner. Vinny had finished first and was led away to recuperate on another bed. Immediately Isabella’s feeling of a ‘lark’ faded. Without him, she grew anxious. She confessed to him now that he had taken steadiness from her when he moved away. She had wondered if perhaps she had no more blood in her and would die. Her arm had grown numbed.

‘Oh, stop!’ Laurence said suddenly. ‘You make me feel faint.’

‘He can’t abide the sight of blood,’ Isabella said proudly, smiling as she cracked away at the nuts.

Vinny held his hand out for one.

‘Ah, they were the good old days,’ Isabella went on. ‘When I did get over to lie beside you, you leant over and tucked the blanket in for me. So kind.’

‘It all sounds ambiguous and absurd,’ Laurence complained.

But the ambiguity was the great fun of it. She was laughing quite merrily now; although Vinny, like some gloomy Nannie, forecast to himself more tears before bedtime.

‘It was so lulling,’ Isabella said. ‘The peaceful whisperings; the chink of crockery, so muted; the tiptoeing about.’

‘I always think of you when I go now,’ Vinny said.

‘I never went again. I thought the novelty would have worn off.’

‘Mother!’ said Laurence in his scandalised voice.

‘You drove me home, Vinny. Do you remember that flat we had in Westminster – it was boarded up last time I saw it. A bomb next door. You and Harry found you were at school together.’

‘Didn’t – father – give his blood, too?’ Laurence asked offhandedly.

‘Oh, no, darling. He was much too busy for that sort of thing,’ Isabella said reprovingly.

Harry, in fact, had been a Member of Parliament. Isabella
had often sat on platforms holding bouquets and smilingly looking down at her little feet: not making speeches ever, because, like most chatterboxes, she became tongue-tied if requested to say a few words.

Because of Harry’s public position, his death had been reported on the front pages of newspapers, with his photograph, commendations of Laurence’s attempt to save his father’s life, and, lastly, a note about the by-election resulting from the tragedy, with the figure of Harry’s previous majority.

Isabella, reminded of all this, suddenly said: ‘I am afraid he will lose to Labour,’ then put her hand over her mouth in an appalled way.

Laurence, his face pale with embarrassment, stood up and walked across to a fruit bowl and began frantically to eat an apple.

‘Oh, dear,’ Isabella said weakly, ‘what am I saying? I cannot seem to realise what has happened. For a while everything seems ordinary, then – not.’

Vinny moved over and sat on the arm of the chair. Her tears fell into her lapful of nutshells. She leant easily against his shoulder. It was as if she had done herself up in a parcel, addressed to him, left on his doorstep; from now on, his responsibility.

Laurence, neither comforted nor comforting, tore enormous pieces out of his apple and stood as far away from them as he could, chewing furiously and frowning.

In Vinny’s experience of women, their tears were of a great sameness, and fits of weeping went in twos. First, came the exhausting catharsis; followed by weakness – a sense of irresponsibility, as if all were washed away, even decorum; a little shaky gaiety. Reacting from this, and in remorse, steady tears would flow for a while – the clearing-up shower. The early tears were of despair, rebellion, outrage; the later ones signified a grieved settling again to the world; after them, convalescence could be hoped for. This Vinny now hoped for for Isabella, and his plan was to keep her busy all day long with little things.

The next morning was bright and gusty and the Tillotson children were on the sands early, flying their kite. Vinny watched the scarlet wedge of it tottering and dropping, the wind tugging and relinquishing it, then suddenly taking it up, lifting, bearing it away … He felt elevated too.

‘Oh, you look extraordinarily happy!’ Isabella said, coming into the room with some of his ties which she had been pressing.

‘I felt I
was
that little girl,’ he said, nodding towards the
beach. ‘When the wind really takes it – that’s exciting – the kick of it, like feeling a salmon at the end of the line.’

‘How strange! I thought salmon were caught with spears. See, Vinny, what having a wife would mean to you – your ties would always look like this …’

He turned to her, glanced at the ties, his head on one side. His excited look faded.

‘I shall never marry,’ he said. ‘And, oh!’ she thought, ‘the gravity of it, the headmasterliness!’ Then she remembered her own new situation and thought that in future she must not try to chide bachelors into marriage, as she had once liked to do when protected by her own husband. From now on, a man might think she was trying to marry him herself.

‘Well, there are the ties,’ she said awkwardly, and hung them over the back of a chair as if averting further intimacy.

‘Now let us go out for coffee,’ Vinny said, ‘and change your library book, buy a cake for Sunday tea and have a drink at The Victoria. Then I shall be sure I am at the seaside for the weekend.’

‘I don’t know about Laurence.’

‘Dearest,
leave
Laurence. Don’t interfere with his studies.
Leave
him.’

‘Yes … well, then, yes, I will.’

‘Put on a wonderful lot of make-up and hurry.’

The morning did her good. Vinny, over coffee, and while she shopped, watched her recuperating. In the café, the residents, who never went there in the season, exchanged glances. The gilt basket-chairs creaked as women turned discreetly to look at Vinny, taking him in as they seemed to be checking their watches with the clock, or signalling to the waitress.

In the little town, the wind sprang at them at the corners of streets, it came up from the sea and was bandied about between the shop-fronts in no particular direction, swirling dust before
it on the pavements. Isabella turned up her collar and bent her head. The veins on her cheeks were a violet confusion; her eyes watered. But Vinny insisted on looking in all the shop-windows, standing gravely bowed over displays of coral necklaces; handkerchiefs embroidered ‘A Present From Seething’, boring thick pottery. He bought two coloured postcards showing the esplanade with bathing-huts, flower-beds let into the asphalt, and wind-gnawed shrubs. He chose them with care, turning the revolving stand with great absorption. For Sunday’s tea he bought a walnut-cake, for Saturday’s tea a bag of prawns. He made Isabella enter into the shopping with much serious discussion. Once, an acquaintance stopped to speak to her, and he sauntered on and stood a little way up the street with his hands behind his back. Isabella, hurrying towards him, wore once more her defeated look. He had to begin all over again, and damned her friends.

But in spite of such little setbacks her morale steadily mounted and he took immense pride in it. Their drinks at The Victoria helped. He made his way towards the bar through the Saturday morning crush and hubbub. Glancing back as he waited, he saw Isabella stretch out to take a discarded newspaper from the next table. She smiled at him and began to study the headlines. When she looked again, he seemed to be examining a potted fern on the bar, and she took a hasty glimpse at the back page. He returned, carrying their drinks steadily; and lazily, languidly, she cast the newspaper aside, disengaged her attention from it, leant forward to pick up her drink and, when she smiled, seemed like a young girl being taken out for the first time. ‘I am all yours,’ her smile seemed to proclaim, ‘in return for the drink, all my thoughts shall be bent on you. Simply
bent
.’ He knew the smile was something heedless and automatic, conjured-up from long ago, to conceal guilt. After a second or two, she found her bearings again and composed her
features. Before he went for another drink, she mentioned the Ladies, and, edging herself through the crowd impatiently, even desperately, ran all the way to the foyer to telephone her book-maker.

She had not come back when Vinny brought the drinks to the table. While he waited, he took out his picture-postcards and scribbled messages on them, to his mother, and to his wife.

After tea, Vinny went down for a walk on the shore, alone. The tide was out and the wet sand sucked at his shoes and rose to fill each footprint. When the lights along the esplanade came on, it seemed all at once much darker. He went towards the cliff, where seaweed heaped the rocks, its coarse bladdery succulence hiding encrustations of limpets, smelling evil, dripping into pools.

His footprints now held in the sand and he looked back to see the neat shape of his shoes following him. At that moment, as he glanced back, a woman going swiftly along the sands, her head bent under the hood of her coat, her hands thrust up her wide sleeves, was brought up sharply by his pausing there;
felt
before
saw
him, jerked up her head and, as he turned, stumbled into his arms. He felt her own arms folded across her breast, for she could not disentangle them to thrust him away. Stepping back, to steady her he touched her shoulder for an instant. His apology was hesitant. He forced his lips to move as he looked down at her face, which was white in the shadow of her hood and of a perfect, even beauty; mask-like and, in the gathering dusk, terrifying.

Her bare hand drew the hood closer to her cheeks and her sleeve fell back to show her thin wrist and forearm. He felt her shoulder move impatiently as if to shake off his hand, then she hurried forward, across the sands to the cliff-steps – the steps he had watched her climb the evening before. Her straightness,
the hands in her sleeves, he recognised at once. What he had not been able to imagine had been the strange quality of her beauty, its faultlessness and blank terror.

He walked back under the cliff. The sea was so far out in the bay and the air so silent that he felt wary; he had an impression of her standing quite still on the steps watching him. Although he tried hard not to look, after a while he turned his head. She was going slowly up the steps and had almost reached the top. Her hood hung from her shoulders now and he could see her dark hair. He turned right round and stood still, hoping that the cliff’s shadow obscured him, that he would become – to her, if she glanced down – one with the rocks. At the very top of the steps she paused and he drew back until he touched cold seaweed. The wind lifted her hair away from her face and he could see her pale hand against her coat. He could not visualise again the earlier moment when he had touched her and spoken to her; but he remembered that she had not answered him or added an apology to his.

Pacing the sands more and more slowly, because unwilling to return to Isabella, he tried to go back over that experience; but failed. He could only feel the shock of, the inexplicable recoil from, her beauty – as if a moth had brushed his cheek and terror had driven him to beat it off; a terror ridiculous, instinctive and humiliating.

Nearing fifty, Vinny felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men; adoring all scarcely-revealed things; insinuations, whispers; eyes veiled, landscapes veiled; the imperfectly remembered and the half-anticipated. Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself:
‘Later on, I shall remember.’ To link his favourite tenses in such a phrase was to him the exhalation of romance, and the fact that such phrases had preceded all his disappointments, heralded all the counterfeit and treachery he had worked or suffered, could not detract from its magic. He disdained to learn from so drab a teacher as Experience.

When he reached Isabella’s little house by the pier, he saw Laurence come to the parlour window to draw the curtains. Although, with the light of the room behind him, he could not have seen Vinny out in the dark, his gesture seemed insolent, and the drawn curtains an affront.

Laurence continued to be exclusive for the rest of the evening, so that his act of drawing the curtains became symbolic to Vinny, who seldom in his life had been up against just such an unrelaxed dislike in a person. Other people, thinking: ‘We cannot all take to one another,’ would turn from or return the antagonism; but Vinny did not: he grieved. It was his business to be loved – a mission created afresh with everyone he met – and he was always conscious of another’s coldness. Uneasily, he would be aware. He could not work his magic.

That anyone so in need of comfort as Laurence was should reject him was especially putting-out. He seemed like a traveller dying in the snow from cold and exhaustion, yet turning pettishly from the St Bernard dog, saying: ‘I do not care for brandy.’ Vinny tried to dislike him and he found much – Laurence’s resolute adolescence, his indifference to his mother, his laziness, his greediness over sherry and the butter ration – upon which to hang his distaste; but in the end only pity hung there, and his own rejected sympathy.

It was the last evening of Laurence’s leave. After tea on Sunday he must return to Aldershot. Vinny, who had often driven
through the place, thought it intolerable. The whole idea depressed him and he could visualise the dismal landscape of playing-fields, with cloddish, Breughelish figures at football; the avenues of leafless chestnut-trees; hutted sites and barracks separated by roads named after forgotten generals. He felt that it was no wonder that Laurence, with, after all, so many causes, should be downcast.

While Isabella was telephoning in the hall, sitting neatly up to the small table as if she would be there a long while, Vinny tried to discuss the future with Laurence. He could tell that Isabella was talking to a woman, for she said ‘my dear’ a great deal: to a man she would have said ‘darling’. He guessed that it was one of the long daily conversations women have, the idea of which was charming to him and not in the least bit irritating.

Laurence was cleaning a clock. Parts of it were spread over a newspaper and he was brushing them with a gull’s feather dipped in oil. His grubby hands had the clumsy-looking delicacy of a schoolboy’s, ill-adapted to the task, yet sure. His nails were bitten; cropped down; uneven; consistent, Vinny thought, with his secretive and nervy air.

‘I was talking to Isabella,’ Vinny said. To say ‘Isabella’ was supposed to suggest equality and was more informal than ‘your Mother’; he felt that this ‘Isabella’ promoted the lad and drew him into the grown-up world. ‘I want to help her about the other house – your home really. I expect she has discussed it with you.’

‘No,’ Laurence said.

‘She thinks it best to sell it.’

Laurence held up a little jagged wheel and looked at it against the light with one eye screwed up.

‘I told her I would go down to Buckinghamshire with her to arrange about the furniture, to pick out what she wants to keep, before the auction sale.’

He got so little response from Laurence that he began to walk about the room, and even filled a pipe, a thing he only did when driven to it by interviews of this kind.

‘I expect you would like to think over what you want brought here. All your private things, naturally; but in the way of furniture for your room, I meant.’

‘There isn’t anywhere to put any more furniture in my room.’

‘Well, there may be something. The ideal plan would be for you to go down there to see.’

‘I wouldn’t get any more leave.’

‘No, well … Are you unhappy at leaving the other house?’

Laurence for a moment looked quite surprised. ‘I couldn’t
be
there,’ he said. ‘I can’t be here, either. It makes no difference now I’m in the Army.’

‘You won’t always be in the Army.’

‘No, but even when I’m not, I shan’t be living at home with mother.’ Utter consternation was on his face. He really is awfully stupid, Vinny thought.

‘What
will
you do?’

‘Father used to say something about going into business.’ He resumed his work, which he had paused in for a moment.

Looking at his bent head, Vinny said: ‘That sounds rather vague.’

‘I know.’

‘What are your own ideas?’

‘I wouldn’t mind working on a farm,’ Laurence mumbled.

For the first time, Vinny thought that he was getting somewhere, that he had drawn close enough to this timid ambition to throw a noose over it.

Warily, he said: ‘Have you always wanted to be a farmer?’

Laurence looked up. ‘Oh, I don’t want to be a
farmer
. There’s too much worry in that, and filling in forms, you know. Your job’s never finished … really no life. I meant a … labourer.’

The boy’s seriousness warned Vinny. He said gently: ‘What would you live on, firstly?’

‘They get six pounds a week. That would be enough for me. My needs are not great,’ Laurence said with dignity. ‘I have learnt that they aren’t – at school, in the Army.’ He glanced at the decanter on the sideboard and added: ‘I don’t really drink sherry, except in people’s houses. I mean, I wouldn’t dream of buying it. I drink mild-and-bitter and sometimes just mild. Very little of that, too. And I never smoke – or very rarely. Sometimes when I’m offered one, I take it.’