Complete Short Stories (VMC) (8 page)

‘I will pop a hot-bottle in your bed,’ she promised. ‘You are not to think it will be a trouble.’

‘I must go home. There is no reason why I should not.’

Miss Despenser bent her head. ‘I dare say you think me very frumpish,’ she said. ‘Can’t be helped. We all come to it. Most kind,’ she said again to Hugh, but gave Mrs Brimmer a sharp glance as a Guinness only was placed before her. Mrs Brimmer was once more glancing nonchalantly inside her blouse.

‘Is she cooking something down there?’ Hugh muttered, as he sat down beside Hester, and then in an even lower voice asked: ‘May I walk home with you?’

‘But how can I get rid of her?’ Hester asked, and felt soiled by her disloyalty.

‘Time, gentlemen, if you please.’ Mrs Brimmer went to the door and opened it, letting in cool air and moths.

‘I will see you home,’ Miss Despenser told Hester. ‘But let
him
get on his way first.’ She slowly drained her Guinness, keeping her eyes shut. When she opened them, Hugh Baseden was still there. ‘Good-night!’ she bade him. Froth was drying on her moustached upper lip, and Hugh looked away from her as he spoke.

‘I am taking Hester back to the school. May we see you home first?’

‘Good-
night
!’ said Mrs Brimmer, not caring who went with whom, as long as all went without delay.

They set off together, and Miss Despenser was sullen and her course vague and veering. Once she stumbled against the high bank and, hoping to steady herself, put her hand down into a patch of nettles. She righted herself and wandered on, rubbing her inflamed wrist, drawing herself obstinately away from Hugh when he tried to support her. But when they reached her house she allowed him to take her key and open the door. He switched on the light, and she sat down abruptly on a chair in the hall. When Hester said good-night, she just nodded without lifting her head to see her go and stared at the cat who seemed to have waited for her to come home before he squatted in a corner and began to wet the carpet. She did not rebuke him but sat still for a long time, and at last tears began to slant out of her eyes and down the sides of her face. ‘Not since Linda died!’ she thought. For Hester, that stranger to her, had come up out of a mist or a dream to confront her with loneliness. Unsteadily, she stood up and crossed the hall. The looking-glass was filmed with damp and dust, but she could see herself dimly in it. Clutching the back of a chair she rocked to and fro, staring. ‘It is what I am,’ she told herself. ‘It is what I live with.’ Her vision seemed to slide and slip like colours in a kaleidoscope. ‘Pussy,’ she called. ‘Naughty pussy! Now where are you?’ He came swaying out of the kitchen, paw before paw, coat rippling, pupils only a dark slit, tail curved. ‘I am master here,’ he seemed to say.

‘Who was that tipsy, titupping little person?’ Hugh Baseden asked.

‘I met her once when I was wandering around. She is mad, I think.’

‘The stench in that house! Is she a witch?’

‘I expect so.’

‘I didn’t know what to think when you walked in with her.’

‘I have to go somewhere.’

‘Do …
they
… know?’

‘Neither know nor care.’

They climbed the bank and began to cross the field towards the wood.

‘You must be very lonely,’ he said. ‘I have often thought that. I suppose they’re very nice, though so terribly set in their complacent ways. And when they do do something enjoyable … this dance, I mean … they leave you at home.’

‘I didn’t want to go – like Miss Despenser’s mother’s maid.’

‘And Robert’s a kind chap, but such a very dry old stick. Very fussy to work for.’

‘Very fussy,’ Hester panted, breathless from the steep field-path.

‘Of course, he’s your uncle. I shouldn’t have said that …’

‘My cousin … my cousin.’

‘He has some rather old-maidish ways, you know … peering over his glasses, taking pills …’

‘And the barometer!’ Hester was astonished to hear herself saying. ‘Tapping it at least three times a day. Why not just take the weather as it comes?’

They entered the warm wood and this time she was not afraid.

‘
She
is the dominant one, of course,’ Hugh said.

Hester thought: ‘Perhaps I was only scared not to be in love with someone; anybody.’ She was confused by her sudden sensations of irritability towards Robert. ‘My head!’ she said, and stumbled along over the tree roots, pressing both hands to her temples.

‘I will find you some of Rex’s famous hangover pills when we get back. It was funny about Rex going tonight.’

‘Funny?’

‘I thought Madam’s view of him was very dark indeed.’ He took Hester’s elbow and guided her out of the way of some low branches. ‘Nearly there,’ he said.

The air was thinner and cooler outside the wood. They came to the churchyard and the neat Despenser graves.

Muriel had creamed her face and was weeping. Robert was silent with frightening displeasure.

‘I don’t want to see him again,’ she cried.

He took the cuff-links out of his shirt and put them back into their velvet-padded box. He said: ‘That is what you cannot help doing. It is a little awkwardness you have created for us all.’

‘He might resign.’

‘But he won’t, and there is no reason why he should. You will find he is quite unperturbed. It will have meant nothing to him,’ Robert added cruelly. ‘When he remembers, and if it amuses him, he may take advantage of the situation to discomfit us. It is dreadfully late to be crying so,’ he said fretfully. ‘I am very tired, and he will see your red eyes in the morning and purr more than ever.’

‘Robert, you are rather working this up. By the way you are speaking I might have committed adultery.’

‘I think you might, if you hadn’t suddenly heard “God Save the Queen”. Your patriotism made you stand up – even if it
was
in one another’s arms.’

‘Oh, the brittle wit! How dare you? We had suddenly realised that the dance was over.’

‘Time had stood still.’

She began angrily to splash cold water on her eyes. When she was in bed, she said shakily: ‘After all,
you
don’t make love to me.’

He got neatly into bed and lay down as far from her as he could, his back turned.

‘Do you?’ she wept.

‘You know I do not, and you know why I do not.’

‘If I didn’t like it, perhaps that was your fault. Did you ever think of that?’

‘Very often. I surveyed every explanation in turn. Then I became rather bored and thought “so be it”.’

‘I know I was wrong tonight … though really sillier than wrong.’

‘You made us both look absurd and started a ridiculous scandal by your behaviour. Everyone missed you. I suppose it was an arranged thing between you … I remember your insistence on having him there. How long, if you wouldn’t mind telling me, has this romance been flourishing?’ He spoke stiffly, lying with his back to her. He was anxious to be reassured, to shake off the insecurity which results from a serious deviation in one we have trusted.

‘You shall not say such a thing,’ she cried.

He had gone too far in his suspicions, and her amazed rejection of them was so genuine that he now went too far in his relief; although he only gravely said: ‘I apologise.’ ‘This dreadful conversation!’ he thought. ‘The cold phrases of hatred – “I apologise.” “How dare you!” “You
know
why.”’ ‘If it was just a sudden ill-judged thing,’ he said, ‘I can understand better. Anything else – plotting, lying – would not have been like you.’

She lay on her back and stared up through the darkness; said ‘Thank you’ in a far-away voice.

‘Oh, don’t cry again.’ He turned over and touched her hair.

‘We were so happy,’ she cried.

‘I don’t think we were very happy.’

‘I was.’

He meant his silence to punish her. To explain – she thought – everything; to simplify everything and press the punishment back upon him, she said: ‘If Hester had never come here! If we could be as we were!’

‘She had no part in this. She was utterly innocent.’

‘Her innocence has been like a poison to us. It has corrupted us both.’ In her mind she seemed to step back from the thought of their married life, as if she recoiled physically from an unexpected horror. She said: ‘It is like the time when I found the adders lying under the ferns.’

‘What is like that?’ he asked. His head lay on his crooked arm, and he stared into the darkness where there was less to see than behind his closed lids.

‘To realise my ignorance about you; to discover our estrangement – this tangle of secrets; and to know that I can behave as I did tonight …’

‘Don’t cry, Muriel.’

‘Why do you call me “Muriel”? You have never done so until now, until lately.’ ‘Until Hester came,’ both thought.

‘She … Hester, I mean … has made no difference to us. I’m not in love with her, if that is any comfort … if you want to hear such embarrassing things really said aloud.’ He spoke coldly and angrily and with a sense of treachery to himself, as if she had forced from him some alien oath. ‘She has changed nothing … only shown us what existed, exists.’

‘We should be very grateful for that.’

Her burst of anger was a relief from tears.

‘If I can never love her again,’ he thought, ‘why is it Hester’s fault? It is she, Muriel, who destroyed it, let it slip from her and then, in trying to have it back again, broke it for ever.’ Lying so close to her, he let this monstrous treason against her form in the darkness. Then he felt her lift herself up on one elbow. She was wiping her eyes. Crying was over, then? But, more dread to him even than her weeping, she put out her hand and touched his arm and he wondered if she had sensed the fissure widening, separating her from him, in his heart – the hard knowledge of non-love. She began to throw words into this abyss as if to close it before too late. ‘Robert, forgive me! I will try. I will do everything. I am sorry. I cannot bear it.’

The words worked no magic, and continued into unseemliness, he thought. This reserve had changed to cold-heartedness, and he wondered how he could ever change it back again. He turned over and put his arms round her.

‘Let us try again!’ she begged, and she pressed her burning eyes against his shoulder. He moved his head back a little, for her hair had fallen against his mouth.

‘We will both try!’ he whispered. ‘I will try very hard.’ ‘But will it be-any use?’ he wondered.

Robert, in the days that followed, wondered if it were the mildness of his nature which enabled him to find the suppression of love more easy than the suppression of non-love. No concentration could cure him of his lack of feeling towards Muriel, and, to ward off his indifference to her, he began, without knowing it, to catalogue her virtues. In this way, he always had a ready antidote for the irritations she caused him, and quickly smothered thoughts of her coldness with remembrances of her kindness to animals and that servants loved her. Against her sarcasm he recalled her loyalty, and tried to acknowledge her steadfastness when beset by her lack of humour.

At first, as if a true understanding were between them, Muriel went through her days in chastened peace of mind, submissive and forgiving. Emotion had tired her and she seemed weakly convalescent, her mind on such little things, as if she only waited for the time to pass. At night, the resentment she fought during the day poisoned her dreams, so that, lying beside Robert with her heart full of love for him, she dreaded to fall asleep and so out of love again – would wake trembling or tearful at his dream-betrayals, carrying imaginary wrongs beyond the dawn, to discolour all the morning.

Bravely, she set out to enchant him all over again, as she had done so many years ago, but disheartened now, frightened, and lacking the equipment of romanticism, energy, curiosity. ‘For I did not have him once for all,’ she thought sadly, arranging her pink dress against the red carpet and her white hands on the tapestry; glancing timidly at him, who did not look in her direction. Her voice lost its edge when she spoke to him, but only Hester noticed the new warmth, and was embarrassed.

‘It will soon be Speech Day,’ Muriel said. ‘Will last year’s hat do, Robert? Or would that look as if the school were going downhill?’

‘I should buy a new one – for your sake, not the school’s. I can’t imagine parents remembering a hat from one year to the next.’

‘Hester and I can’t agree with that.’

Hester did not raise her eyes.

For the first time, Muriel was self-conscious at Speech Day, watched the great marquee going up, arranged flowers, and finally pinned on her new cartwheel hat, feeling unusual sensations of flurried dread. ‘Exquisite!’ Rex whispered, passing her as she crossed the hall. Until that moment, the evening of the dance, for him, might never have been. He was as heedless as a bird snatching at berries along a hedgerow.

Muriel stood beside Robert and shook hands with the parents and felt that beneath their admiration these people did not like her; fathers were over-awed and mothers were doubtful – unsure as to whether she really loved their sons as they deserved. Hester watched her; Rex watched her; Robert looked away from her; tiredness overtook her.

In the evening, she telephoned Beatrice – her only friend, she now felt; though more than a friend: perhaps an extension of her own personality and her own experiences (sometimes sullying) greedily grafted on to the weaker parts of Beatrice’s nature. ‘Oh God, let her not be out!’ she prayed, imagining the telephone ringing and ringing in the empty house. But Beatrice, breathless from hurrying, soon answered and lost her mystery in doing so, became accessible, too easily summoned.

‘I was in the garden. How did it go, darling? I thought of you. Was the hat right? Did Robert love it?’

‘He didn’t say he didn’t.’

‘And tea and everything? And Robert’s speech?’

‘Yes. Beatrice, if I call in, will you come for a drive before dinner? My head aches. The last ones have only just gone away.’

‘Oh, parents!’ she said later. They drove along the lanes, down the hill past the Hand and Flowers, where Mrs Brimmer stood at the doorway in the sun. ‘Perhaps I just hate them because they have children,’ Muriel said.