The Town in Bloom

It was near the top of
The Times
Personal column:

I read it on Saturday morning, Lilian having sent me a cutting from Friday’s
Times
. (She’d repeat the
advertisement
up to the morning of the lunch party.) I felt sure that Molly, too, would have received one. I rang her up and found she had.

I said, ‘What did you think of it?’

‘Darling Lilian being a wee bit hot-making, perhaps?’

Lilian would never have permitted herself such a dated expression. Molly would barely know it was dated – and certainly would not mind.

‘More than a wee bit, surely.’

‘Still, I couldn’t care less. Hardly anyone but ourselves will remember the old names now. And they just might fetch Zelle. None of Lilian’s dignified reminders ever have.’

‘Probably Zelle never saw them, though she did
sometimes
read
The Times
; also
Dracula
and the Bible.’

‘That’s more than I have. Of course you’re coming on Thursday?’

‘I suppose so, or Lilian will never forgive me. But it’s a bit of an effort.’

‘Quite time you made one,’ said Molly. ‘We haven’t met for ages. If you drive, be sure to park the car outside the West End. We always do now.’

‘Me, too – not that I’ve been up this year. Molly, how long is it since you saw Lilian? Is she all right?’

‘Of course she is. I had tea with her the week before last, when I went up to the dentist, and she looked blooming. Why wouldn’t she be all right?’

‘I just thought – well, it worried me that she put in “This may be the last reunion.”’

‘Oh, that’s just an extra effort to attract Zelle,’ said Molly. ‘Lilian couldn’t be better – anyway, physically; mentally she’s a bit peculiar and one can’t altogether blame her, the life she leads now. And all this nostalgia for the past …’

I said I sometimes suffered from that myself.

‘But you, dear child, have so many pasts and anyway you seldom talk about them. Lilian focuses on that one little period when we knew Zelle, and this last year she’s never
stopped
talking about it, sort of putting it through a fine sieve.’

‘Have you ever discovered why?’

‘Well, she did once try to explain but I can’t go into that now. This call’s costing you money.’

‘I don’t mind. What did she say?’

Molly, addressing shouting children and barking dogs, all of whom I could hear, said: ‘Quiet, fiends!’ in a tone which neither expected nor got results. Then she told me she couldn’t remember what Lilian had said – ‘Probably because it didn’t make sense. Anyway, don’t worry. She’ll be all right once the reunion lunch is over.’

‘Thank God she only holds them every five years.’

‘Oh, I quite enjoy them. Now will you excuse me? There’s a dogfight starting
and
childfight. They’ll probably end in a foursome. I must
dash
.’

Never had I seen Molly so much as hurry, let alone dash.

I considered telephoning Lilian to let her know she could count on me, then decided a postcard would do. Telephone calls to Lilian were apt to prove ruinous. And I’d some more telephoning to do. If I had to go to London I must make good use of the trip.

On Thursday I woke to find a perfect September morning, summer with the first gentle hint of autumn, exactly the wrong day to be away from the country. I would have gone for an enormous walk – except that, while in the bath, I saw exactly how to finish the book I was writing, after being stuck for weeks; though as things turned out, I doubt if I should have walked or written, because during breakfast I suddenly
knew
how to paint the view framed by my open window. I had been threatening to paint for months, sometimes seeing myself as a primitive, sometimes as an abstractionist. Today the primitive mood was in the ascendant. I saw the white fence, with flat flowers against it, and the grey lane on top of the fence, with a flat child cycling along it, and the green
field on top of the grey lane, with flat cows against it, and a blue sky on top of the green field, with flat white clouds. I knew not only the whole of the composition but the actual brush strokes I would use. So eager and confident was I that, on my way to London, I stopped at the first little town and laid in a stock of paints – oils; I had once tried water colours and they ran about too much.

Regret at leaving the country lasted as long as the country lasted. Then, as usual with me, the pull of London began, growing stronger whenever I drove through places where there were fairly large shops. It would be pleasant to do some shopping in the afternoon if Lilian would permit it. Not that I hankered to buy anything in the shops I was passing. I just wanted to paint them, particularly the gaudiest clothes shops; I got the chance to study one while I was held up by traffic lights. But could paint simulate the astonishingly vivid dyes now popular? Perhaps I could achieve a kaleidoscopic effect with dots, dashes, triangles of colour; a little Klee-like? I had stopped being a primitive. Then, in the outer suburbs, I gave up my mental painting, needing to concentrate completely on my driving; it was nearly a year since I had coped with so much traffic.

As always I had allowed myself two hours to reach St John’s Wood, where I usually left my little car. Today the drive had taken longer. And it was some time before I could find anywhere to park. Then I took a taxi to the hotel.

Molly and Lilian were there ahead of me, talking to the head porter. I saw them before they saw me and, as so often before, felt a pang because they looked older than my mind’s-eye picture of them. Then they became the
no-age
,
or all-ages, of friends one has known from their youth. Now, as then, Molly looked large, beautiful and placid. Now, as then, Lilian looked slight, beautiful and anything but placid. When alone with Lilian I thought of her as tall; next to Molly she seemed barely of medium height.

‘Dear child, you get smaller and smaller,’ said Molly, turning to envelop me in an embrace.

‘You’re late,’ said Lilian, before offering her cheek to be kissed. I was one of the few people she kissed in return.

‘No luck with Zelle, I suppose?’

‘Oh, there’s time yet.’ Lilian’s tone sounded defensive. ‘Actually, I’ve one of my “feelings” that she’ll come today.’

‘And we all know dear Lilian’s “feelings”,’ said Molly. ‘Count on them and they let you down. Jeer at them and they come true. Could we eat? I’m ravenous.’

Lilian had a last word with the head porter. ‘You’ll be on the look-out for our friend? She’s very fair.’

‘How do you know she’s still fair?’ I asked as we walked towards the restaurant.

‘Oh, that colour of hair looks fair even when it’s turning grey. She’d only need a fair rinse.’

If there is any grey amidst the night-black of Lilian’s hair only she and her hairdresser know about it. There really is no grey amidst my unspectacular mouse-brown. I often remind myself that does not
prove
I am young for my age.

Lilian, her mind like mine still on hair, went on, ‘Isn’t that the perfect hat for Molly? Exactly the right shade.’

It was a close-fitting cap of russet velvet leaves.

‘Well, I like to pretend I’m still a red-head,’ said Molly. ‘But the tide of white flows in.’

‘You’re a fool to let it,’ said Lilian.

The restaurant always looked to me just as on our first visit; beautiful, formal, dignified yet light-hearted, gleaming with silver, damask and glass, and flooded with light from its tall windows. Beyond them stretched the park, where the grass was still dried by summer, the trees still in full leaf, though the autumn seemed just a little nearer here than it had seemed in the country.

We were shown to our usual window table. Our reception conveyed that we were honoured guests of many years’ standing and that this was an important occasion. The table was laid for four and our waiter made no attempt to remove the setting we did not need. Five years before he had been prevented from doing so by the head waiter, who had told him another lady was expected. As I sat down I mentally counted up how many times Zelle’s place had remained unoccupied.

It was no use hoping for a menu. Lilian would have ordered the lunch in advance and it would be an exact replica of our first lunch. Smoked salmon would be followed by chicken and chicken by a pudding of extreme richness which Lilian – though often slimming sternly and unnecessarily – would finish to the last mouthful. It was as well she did not know what vintage of champagne we had originally drunk as she could hardly have gone on
repeating
it throughout the years. She settled for the same name.

I began a normal conversation with Molly but was cut short by Lilian.

‘You’re not to talk about the present. You’re to think yourselves into the past – so that the past becomes the present. I’m twenty-three, Molly’s twenty-one. And you, Mouse, are eighteen.’

‘Must you call me Mouse?’

‘I must for today. And I always think of you as Mouse. What have you against it?’

‘I never felt it particularly suited me. And as one grows older, comic nicknames seem a bit ridiculous. Anyway, they’re dead out of fashion now.’

‘Since when have you cared what was in fashion or out?’

Come to think of it, what name did I most recognise as mine? Certainly not my real, much too long Christian name; though for years now I had nagged Molly and Lilian to use it, or corruptions of it. And I could remember at least half a dozen nicknames, acquired at different periods of my life. But was there any name more ‘me’ than any other? I found myself accepting ‘Mouse’ – for today, anyway. Lilian’s mood was catching.

She was determinedly recreating the past. Unable to remember much that had been said at the first lunch, she was inventing what might have been said. This presented difficulties, seeing that she and I had then been keeping our innermost thoughts to ourselves. So had Zelle. Only Molly had been hiding nothing, and she’d been too happy to feel the need to talk of her happiness.

I have a better memory than Lilian has (though hers is no slouch, nostalgia and memory being blood brothers) so I helped her out. I was beginning to feel very sorry for her; there could be little doubt that Zelle was not going to turn up. Again and again poor Lilian looked at her watch and then, entreatingly, at the door. Already we were finishing the smoked salmon.

Molly, eating her last slice of brown bread and butter,
said, ‘Whatever happened to Veda bread? Do either of you remember it?’

What joy for Lilian, a new-minted bit of nostalgia! The three of us at once pooled our memories of Veda bread. I said, ‘You two fed it to me the first night I spent at the Club. Wonderful! But even better when we could toast it.’

‘How did we toast it?’ said Lilian. ‘There were no gas fires in our cubicles.’

‘It was later, after Zelle came. There was a gas fire in her room. Oh, Molly, I have such a vivid mental picture of you kneeling in front of it.’

‘So have I, now,’ said Lilian.

‘I wonder why they stopped making Veda,’ said Molly, ‘and when they stopped. Funny, I can’t remember when it vanished from my life.’

Lilian’s dark eyes, so often restless, had a visionary stillness. I guessed she was seeing Zelle’s attic at the Club. After a moment she said, ‘That was our last meeting with Zelle, at one of those Veda toast sessions. Oh, dear!’ She looked at her watch again, then shook her head sadly. After that she obviously accepted the fact that Zelle was not coming and the conversation was allowed to drift from the past into the present.

For a while we chatted casually. This was pleasant enough but not particularly interesting as none of us had any important news to tell. Half my mind was occupied in wondering why, among the many women I had met, they had remained my closest friends. It was not merely a matter of affection; I had felt affection for many friends, both men and women, and yet let them drift out of my life. Was it Lilian’s tenacity that held us together? It seemed to
me that the tenacity was the result, not the cause, of the mysterious fixative in our friendship. And there was no doubt that the little period of summer months which so obsessed her had been of the utmost importance to our lives; to Zelle’s too, surely, yet for her the fixative had not worked.

I was thinking of this, gazing across the park and giving little attention to Molly and Lilian, who were now exploring one of my least favourite subjects: their recent minor ailments. They then drifted into a discussion of the blatant sexual laxity of present-day youth. I was about to join in by reminding them there had been as much laxity in our own youth, if rather less blatancy – and blatancy
could
be equated with honesty – when I noticed an
odd-looking
woman seated on one of the park chairs some thirty yards away. Her crouched figure suggested old age; and her clothes, of extreme shabbiness, were at least two decades out of date. One could see little of her face as a battered hat came down to her ears, a mangy-looking bit of fur rose up to them, and in between fur and hat was a large pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. She was knitting something only recognizable as grey. I found myself reminded of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

She looked up – straight at me, it seemed – then quickly looked back at her knitting. I felt ashamed to be finishing an enormous lunch when there were still women as poor as that around. Should one go out and present her with a few bob? But perhaps she was merely eccentric; would a real down-and-out be knitting? I had another look at her, rather a longer one. It would have
been even longer if Lilian had not asked what I was staring at.

I said – absurdly keeping my voice low, ‘Now listen carefully and, whatever I say, don’t look out of the window. There’s a woman in the park who just might be Zelle. Lilian! I told you
not
to look!’