And of course I shan’t be able to go to the funeral because That Woman will be there.
Such thoughts – bitter and repetitive – buzzed in her head like a disturbed wasps’ nest.
It was nine years now since Edward had left her, and she had carved out some sort of life for herself. The dancing school she had started with Zoë had faltered and finally shut down. Zoë’s pregnancy, the fact that she and Rupert had moved so far away and that Villy was then unable to find a new business partner who came up to her standards, had finished it off.
For a while after that, she had had to content herself with the house Edward had bought for her. Roland now went to a public school where he had been disconcertingly happy. At the beginning, she had expected (had she even wanted?) a desperate little boy already deprived of his father (she would not dream of letting him meet That Woman, so he saw his father once a term when Edward took him out to lunch) and then deprived of her, his loving mother. She had envisaged sobbing telephone calls, mournful letters, but the nearest she had got to these was when he had written, ‘Darling Mother, I am board, board, board. There is nothing whatever to do here.’ After that the letters were full of a boy called Simpson Major and the amazing crimes he committed without ever being found out. However, Miss Milliment, the girls’ governess, was still with her; on discovering that she had no living relatives, Villy had offered her a home for life. In return she received a steady affection that touched her blighted heart. Miss Milliment’s attempts in the kitchen were disastrous, as her sight was very poor and she had not cooked anything since her father had died a few years after the First World War, so her help was confined to feeding the birds and sometimes the three tortoises, and going to the local shops if Villy had forgotten anything. She was largely employed in editing a work of philosophy written by one of her former pupils. In the evenings they were taking turns to read War and Peace aloud. So when Villy took an ill-paid and dull clerical job with a charity that a rich cousin of her mother persuaded her into, it was comforting to come back to a home that was not empty.
The family had been good to her, too. Hugh and his nice young wife Jemima had her to dinner sometimes, Rachel always visited when she was in London, and the Duchy usually invited her to Home Place during term time. Teddy turned up about once a month. He was working in the firm, but found conversation about it tricky as he kept nearly mentioning his father, which he had discovered early was a no-go area. The trouble about nearly all of this was that she felt they only made the effort because they were sorry for her. Like most people who are sorry for themselves, she felt she had to have the monopoly of it. She called it pride.
No. The people she loved were Roland (how could she ever have contemplated not having him?) and dear Miss Milliment – who wished to be called Eleanor, but Villy had only managed that once just after they had discussed the matter.
She must write to Rachel, who had been a wonderful daughter to both of her parents – unlike mine, she thought. Louise made duty visits if Villy was ill – prepared supper, if necessary, and made small-talk, but was utterly unforthcoming about herself, varying evasion with spasmodic efforts to shock. And her mother was shocked. When Louise had suddenly announced, ‘But I have a rich lover now, so you really don’t have to worry about me,’ there was a frozen pause before Villy had asked, as calmly as she could manage, ‘Is this wise?’ Louise had retorted that of course it wasn’t but she wasn’t to worry, she was not allowing him to keep her. All of this was in her bedroom, out of earshot of Miss Milliment. ‘Well, please don’t talk about this in front of Miss M,’ she had begged, and Louise had said she wouldn’t dream of it.
Her theatrical career had come to nothing but she was tall and thin, with abundant reddish blonde hair and an undeniably beautiful face – high cheekbones, wide-apart hazel eyes and a mouth that reminded Villy uncomfortably of the sensual depictions so loved of the Pre-Raphaelites. She was long divorced from Michael Hadleigh, who had instantly got married again, to his former mistress. Louise had refused any alimony, and scraped along in a small maisonette over a grocer’s shop with her blue-stocking friend Stella. Villy had been there only once when she had paid a surprise visit. The place smelt of dead birds (the grocers were also poulterers) and damp. The flatmates had two small rooms each, and the third floor had been turned into a kitchen and dining room, with a very cramped bathroom and lavatory built out onto a flimsy extension. On the day that she visited, there was a plate of distinctly high mackerel lying on the dining table. ‘You’re not going to eat those – surely?’
‘Good Lord, no! Somebody we know is painting a still-life, and he wants us to keep them till he has finished.’
‘There, you’ve seen it all now.’ So why don’t you go? It was not said, but she’d felt it.
‘What about your rent?’
‘We share it. It’s quite cheap – only a hundred and fifty pounds a year.’
Villy realised then that she had no idea what her daughter did to earn her living. But she felt miserably that she had clearly been inquisitive enough for one day. Going home on the bus she was struck afresh by her awful loneliness. If only Edward was there to discuss the matter! Perhaps he was paying her rent; it would at least be respectable. She couldn’t talk to Miss Milliment about it – with all the business of lovers and sex, it was out of the question.
But, as it happened, it was Miss Milliment who elicited the facts.
‘And what are you doing these days, dear Louise?’ she had enquired when, later that month, Louise had dropped in for tea.
‘I’m modelling, Miss Milliment.’
‘How very interesting! Are you using clay? Or are you perhaps cutting stone? I always imagined the latter would be very hard work for a woman.’
‘No, Miss Milliment. I’m doing photographic modelling – for magazines. You know – like Vogue.’ And Miss Milliment, who thought that magazines (excepting the Royal Geographic Society’s) were generally for people who found reading difficult, murmured that it must be most interesting.
‘Do they pay you?’ Villy had asked then, and Louise had answered – had almost retorted – ‘Of course. Three guineas a day. But when you’re freelance you never know how much work you’re going to get. I must go, I’m afraid. Dad has asked me to go to France with them. Two weeks, and he’s paying for everything. He’s taken a villa not far from Ventimiglia and there’s a beach.’
It was a careless parting shot. She can have no idea of how that makes me feel, Villy thought, as she lay sleepless, far into the night, struggling with bitterness and rage. Their honeymoon had been in Cassis, west along the coast, in those far-off post-war pre-war days.
Except for the difficulty of so much sex that she had neither wanted nor understood, it had been a golden time. Then there had been those skiing and sailing holidays with a mixture of family and friends. She had excelled at skiing, and was a good sailor. By then, she had learned to pretend about sex – always said it was lovely – and, incurious, he had seemed easily to believe her. Her pregnancies had also provided welcome relief, then the drab, anxious, interminable years of war when she had been incarcerated in Sussex, and he had been seeing to the defence of Hendon Aerodrome until the urgent need for timber had put him back in the firm. It was he who had made clear that their London house, which she had loved so much, had to be sold. It was he who, after the war, when she had thought that a good ordinary life together would at last return, had urged her to find a smaller house, and she had chosen this odd little place with only one upper floor that faced north and south so that only three of the rooms got sun … and then abandoned her in it. And for months, years, he had been carrying on with That Woman. Divorce had followed, which her mother would have considered unthinkable. And Louise had known about it and had never told her. Darling Roly, when she had told him, had promised, with tears streaming down his face, that he would never leave her. Teddy and Lydia had been shocked too; they had not been part of the conspiracy. But she saw little of Teddy and virtually nothing of Lydia, who had gone through an acting school and now had a job with a repertory company in the Midlands. It was a weekly rep, which meant, as Lydia explained in one of her rare, sprawling letters, that you performed one play while rehearsing play number two in the mornings, and learning your lines for play number three in bed at night. She said that it was very hard work, but she loved it and, no, she hadn’t the faintest idea when, if ever, she would get a holiday. Villy sent this daughter ten pounds each birthday and Christmas; she was grateful that she could feel natural, untainted love for her.
After Zoë’s telephone call about the Duchy, she went to tell Miss Milliment, who was in the sunny sitting room seated in her usual chair by the open French windows that looked out onto the garden. Here she read The Times every morning, and did the crossword, which she completed in less than half an hour. Usually she also spoiled The Times for Villy by telling her the stories that had struck her most. This morning, though, she had reverted to the unfortunate Ruth Ellis, arraigned last year for the murder of her lover. ‘I really do think, Viola, that whatever a person has done they should not be executed for it. It is one of our most uncivilised laws, don’t you agree?’
And Villy, not replying to this (people who murdered other people should surely not be allowed to get away with it), instead told her about the Duchy, ending with a bitter tirade about not being able to go to the funeral because of That Woman.
‘But you do not know that she will be there. Might it be possible to find out before you distress yourself so much?’
‘Well, Edward will certainly go.’
‘Yes, but she may not. Perhaps you could ask Louise or Teddy.’
‘I could ask Teddy, I suppose. Rupert has gone down to Home Place, and I don’t suppose anyone will know when the funeral is to be until after the weekend.’
‘Viola! My dear, I’m afraid I have a confession to make. I knocked over the cup of tea you so kindly brought me. I was asleep, and I have no idea why, but I thought it was the afternoon, and I was feeling for the switch of my bedside lamp and, of course, if it had been the afternoon, the tea would not have been there. I’m afraid I have not made a very good job of clearing it up, but in any case, it will dry during the day and I shall not mind it at all. But I felt I should tell you.’
A light rattling of the newspaper in her hands showed Villy that poor Miss Milliment was nervous. Her compassion for her companion, for the years of nasty landladies that she must have endured, filled her heart now with real feeling, and she put her arm round the bulky shoulders. ‘You mustn’t worry. Anybody can spill a cup of tea.’
In the bus later, on her way to the dreary office in Queen Anne Street, she realised that this was already the third episode of tea-spilling in a month.