The Wine-Dark Sea (17 page)

‘It’s quite a small garden,’ she said objectively.

But Uncle Stephen had produced his big, ticking watch from his waistcoat pocket, which sagged with its weight. There was this sagging pocket in all his waistcoats. It helped to confirm Uncle Stephen’s identity.

‘Can’t be done, Millie. I’m due back for a rubber at six and it’s five-eleven already.’

‘Oh, I’m terribly sad, Uncle Stephen. Phineas and I have raised the most enormous pelargoniums. Mainly luck, really. I should so much like you to see them.’ Then Millie said no more.

‘My loss, Millie dear. Let me embrace my sweet girl before I go.’

He crushed her for a minute or two, then stepped back, and addressed Angus.

‘Stand up and give me your hand.’

Angus soared upwards but kept his hands to himself.

‘I mean to shake your hand,’ bawled Uncle Stephen, in his quarter-deck manner; even though he had never mounted a quarter-deck, except perhaps on Navy Day.

Angus extended his proper hand, and Uncle Stephen wrenched it firmly.

When Millie and he were for a moment alone together in the little hall, something that could not happen often, Uncle Stephen asked her a question.

‘Have you a strap? For those two, I mean.’

‘Of course not, Uncle Stephen. We prefer to rely on
persuasion
and, naturally, love.’

Uncle Stephen yelled with laughter. Then he became very serious. ‘Well, get one. And use it frequently. I’ve seen what I’ve seen in this house. I know what I’m talking about. Get two, while you’re about it. The Educational Supply
Association
will probably help you.’

‘Phineas will never use anything like that.’

‘Then you’d better consider leaving him, Millie dear, because there’s trouble coming. You can always make a home with me and bring the boys with you. You know that, Millie. There’s a welcome for you at any time. Now: one more kiss and I must vamoose.’

As soon as the front door shut, Angus, who had been watching and listening to the scene through the hole the twins had made in the upstairs woodwork, almost fell on her in every sense.

Back in the drawing room she saw that Rodney, released from thrall, had resumed his tea, and had already eaten
everything
that had been left. Noting this, Angus began to bawl.

It might be all right later, but at that hour Millie was afraid lest the neighbours intervene: Hubert and Morwena Ellsworthy, who were ostentatiously childless.

‘Don’t cry, Ang,’ said Rodney, putting his arm tightly round Angus’s shoulder. ‘Uncle Stephen always hogs the lot. You know that.’

Angus’s rage of weeping failed to abate.

Rodney gave him a tender and succulent kiss on the cheek.

‘We’ll go to the Lavender Bag,’ he said. ‘I’m still hungry too. I think I’ve got the worms. I expect you have as well. Race you. Ready. Steady … Go.’

As the race began on the spot, the picking up and clearing up for Millie to do were not confined to the tea things.

The Lavender Bag was a café at the other end of the Parade. It was run by the Misses Palmerston, four of them. It was a nice enough place in its way, and useful for the release through long lunchtimes and teatimes of high spirits or low spirits, as the case might be. Millie went there often, and so did her friends, though soon she would have no friends. Some of them distrusted her already because they knew she had a degree.

Now Millie suddenly set down the cake tray she was holding. She took care not to let the large crumbs fall to the carpet.

‘Oh God,’ gulped Millie, sinking to the edge of the settee and almost to her knees. ‘God, please, God. What have I done to be punished? Please tell me, God, and I’ll do something else.’

Only some outside intervention could possibly avail.

*

She had never been very good at having things out with anyone, not even with girl friends, and Phineas had
undoubtedly
weakened her further. All the same, something simply had to be attempted, however recurrent, however foredoomed.

To make a special occasion of it, she put on a dress, even though it had to be a dress that Phineas would recognise: at least, she supposed he must. The boys were still rampaging about at the Lavender Bag, which in the summer remained open for light snacks until 8
P.M
. They liked to run round the tables wolfing everything that others had left on plates and in saucers. The Misses Palmerston merely looked on with small, lined smiles. Simultaneously the boys were normal children and flashing young blades.

‘Why
should
you feel at the end of your tether?’ enquired Phineas. ‘After all, every day’s your own. Certainly far more than my days are mine.’

If only one could give him a proper drink before one attempted to talk seriously with him; that is, to talk about oneself!

‘It’s the boys, Phineas. You don’t know what it’s like being at home with them all day.’

‘The holidays won’t last for ever.’

‘After only a week, I’m almost insane.’ She tried to rivet his attention. ‘I mean it, Phineas.’

Millie knew extremely well that she herself would be far more eloquent and convincing if Phineas’s abstinence had not years ago deprived her too, though with never the hint of an express prohibition, but rather the contrary. When she was reading, she had learned of the Saxons never taking action unless the matter had been considered by the council, first when sober and then when drunk. It was the approach that was needed now.

‘What’s the matter with the boys this time?’ asked Phineas.

Millie twitched. ‘They’re far too tall and big. How long is it since you looked at them, Phineas?’

‘Being tall’s hardly their fault. I’m tall myself and I’m their father.’

‘You’re tall in a different way. You’re willowy. They’re like two great red bulls in the house.’

‘I’m afraid we have to look to
your
family for that aspect of it. Consider your Uncle Nero, if I may venture to mention him.’

‘I don’t like him being called that.’

‘But you can’t deny he’s bulky. There’s no one of his build anywhere up my family tree, as far as I am aware. For better or for worse, of course. There are more troublesome things than sturdiness, especially in growing boys.’

Millie did not have to be told. She had often reflected that Phineas, seeping tiredly over the settee at the end of the day’s absence, was like an immensely long anchovy, always with the same expression at the end of it; and in the next bed it was, of course, far worse.

‘Then you’re not prepared to help in any way? Suppose I have a breakdown?’

‘There’s be no danger of that, Millie, if only you could persuade yourself to eat more sensibly.’

‘Perhaps you could persuade your sons of that?’

‘I shall try to do when they are older. At present, they are simply omnivorous, like all young animals. It is a stage we go through and then try to pass beyond.’

‘Then you do admit that they
are
like animals?’

‘I suppose it depends partly upon which animals.’

Millie knew perfectly well, however, that for her they were not like animals, or not exactly; and despite what she had said to Phineas. They were like something far more frightening.

‘Uncle Stephen was very upset by them before you came home.’

Phineas merely smiled at her. He had all but finished the lactose drink which he consumed every evening before their meal.

‘Uncle Stephen said we ought to see what discipline could do.’

‘Discipline would hardly prevent the boys growing up,’ observed Phineas.

And it was still a matter of hours before it was even sunset.

The boys could be heard approaching in what had become their usual way. They stumbled in through the open French window.

‘Got any good grub in your pockets, Dad?’ shouted Rodney.

With a smile, Phineas produced a dun-coloured bag of huge, gluey toffees; something he would never have put into his own mouth.

The boys fell into chairs and began to pass the bag from hand to hand.

‘Mum going to cook supper soon?’

‘I expect so, Angus.’

‘What’s it going to be, Dad?’

‘Better ask her, Rodney.’

It was not, as he knew, that he aimed to instil manners. It was merely that he could not care less.

One thing Millie had particularly resented was that every single evening she had to produce two very different meals, and then be silently sneered at if she herself chose the more exciting one, or consumed any scrap of it.

Now Millie was past resentment. Panic had taken its place.

‘We need food, Dad. You don’t want us to outgrow our strength.’

‘Besides, we’re twins,’ said Angus.

It was hard to see where that came in, but Millie knew quite well that somewhere it very much did.

Everything was fundamentally her own fault. She was perfectly well aware of that. Everything always is one’s own fault.

‘Our reports come yet, Dad?’

‘I don’t think so, Rodney.’

‘You can’t put them on the fire this time, because it’s summer, but you
will
put them down the
topos
?’

‘Unopened, Dad?’ put in Angus. He was half on his feet again, and redder than ever.

‘
Unopened
, Dad,’ insisted Rodney, though perhaps more calmly.

‘Torn up, if you like,’ said Angus.

‘We shall have to see,’ said Phineas. ‘Shan’t we? When the time comes, that is.’

He rose from the settee and walked quietly from the room.

‘Oh Mum,’ said Rodney, jumping up and down. ‘Do get on with it.’

The patience of the young is soon exhausted.

‘We’re hungry,’ Angus confirmed. ‘Remember, we only had salad for lunch. Muck, we called it.’

It had been a cut-up which Phineas had not eaten the previous evening. One could not simply throw it away; and Phineas would never accept such things unless they were completely fresh. It was the trouble with food of that kind that no one ever wanted it all, and it then became useless. Nor was the household made of money. Phineas not only lacked prospects: he lacked a suitable income also. Unhappily, Phineas was an intellectual without either creativity or
judgement
. Millie had realised it even during those early days in the Camargue, when Rodney and Angus were being conceived.

In the kitchen, she was shaking so much she gashed the index finger of her left hand. It would, of course, have
mattered
more if she had been lefthanded, as were Phineas and the boys; but it was a nasty enough cut, which bled far too much, so that fair-sized gouts fell on the newly prepared vegetable matter, which thereupon had to be slowly picked over a further time. Blood oozed through Millie’s handkerchief and spotted the dress she had specially put on.

At the same time, the big fry-up for the boys was
beginning
to run out of fat.

In the end, they came charging in. Millie was weeping, of course, and in more and more of a muddle. Once, she had never muddled things, but quite the contrary: perhaps that was why she wept now.

‘For God’s sake, Mum! We’re hungry. We told you.’

‘Hungry as hunters.’

What had that originally meant? A kind of horse? A kind of tiger? A kind of man?

‘What is it, Mum? What are we getting?’

‘Chops and liver and bacon and things,’ replied Millie in a very low voice, possibly inaudible above the sizzle. ‘I’ve hurt my finger.’

‘We could eat the entire animal,’ said Angus.

Phineas always lay on his bed while a major meal was in preparation, and Millie had to ascend and summon him, because the boys simply did not do it, however often she asked them.

*

Four days later, Millie’s finger was as bad as ever, and her left hand almost unusable. She knew that incurable illness often first manifested itself through minor injuries which failed to clear up.

‘Oh Mum, do get better!’ admonished Angus at breakfast when she let slip the teapot.

‘It’s entirely a matter of eating the right things,’ observed Phineas mildly, ‘though, naturally, it’ll take some months before you can expect to enjoy the benefits.’

Phineas himself was eating a small quantity of muesli in skim milk. He always used a tiny teaspoon for such purposes.

The flap of the front-door letter-box was heard: presage everywhere of Charon’s final shoulder-tap, bone against bone.

The boys made a dash, as they did each day; but this time Millie had reached the door of the room before them. She stood there facing them.

‘We’re going for the post, Mum.’

‘I’m going for it this morning. You both sit down, please.’

‘It may be our reports, Mum.’

‘I’m going this morning, Angus.’

They were only a foot or two away, but before they could lay hands on her, she had not merely whipped open the door but also snatched the key out of the lock, flashed from the room, and managed to lock the door on the other side: all this with the real use of one hand only.

For the moment she had proved as effective as she used to be, but there had been something strange about the incident; which had all begun with a vivid dream she had had the previous night, so vivid that she remembered it (or imagined it) still, and in detail: a small dream really, but prophetic.

For the moment Phineas had been left to manage the two roaring boys. The French window was in the drawing room, but soon the boys would be out through the dining-room casements and making mischief of some kind. Happily, the big drawing-room window was never opened until after breakfast. The boys had never as yet intentionally smashed their way in or out, but Millie dreaded to see their huge faces gazing at her, diminishing her, from the world outside.

None the less, Millie paused for a moment, and quite consciously.

Much was at stake if her dream could be taken at all seriously.

It could. Millie had advanced into the hall and the
delivery
had proved to consist of two accounts rendered and a packet with the school crest upon the envelope.

Millie went back into the drawing room, and, sitting down, even straightened the crease in her jeans. Then, while in the locked room the abominable hubbub raged on, she calmly opened the boys’ reports.