THERE were CRUMPETS for tea. The children had been quite right. Everyone was back safely, and the dining-room fire was blazing, just as they had known it would be. Routine had emerged triumphant, as it usually does, in the face of almost anything. It takes more than a Teri to make people miss their tea.
He had achieved something, though—something which would no doubt have pleased him, could he have known about it. Before the second lot of crumpets were out of the toaster, he had grown nearly seven feet tall, his voice was like that of Marty the Monster in Timmie’s favourite comic, and his eyes were as big as saucers.
“All evil they was, and his glance was like forked lightning,” Timmie elaborated fluently, “and he glared at us like … like …”—here either Timmie’s memory or his library of clichés faltered, for “Like anything” he finished, a little lamely. Then, as if to make up for the momentary lapse, he resumed yet more shrilly:
“Ever so big he was, almost a giant. And when he came at us … Oooh!”
It was at this point that Uncle Robin left the table with a groan of boredom, carrying his teacup with him; but the response of the rest of the company was splendid. Cynthia, her blue eyes very wide, was giving excited little squeals in all the right places, while Dot, looking both anxious and smug, was nodding her head sagely at every other sentence, as if cheeking-off Timmie’s complexes against some ideal list lodged in the back of her mind. Even Piggy, who had condescended this afternoon to drink a cup of ordinary, non-herbal tea with the rest of the household, was looking vaguely interested for once. The only member of the party to be wholly unimpressed by the recital was Vernon.
“No, he didn’t,” “No, it wasn’t,” “No, it was me who said that,” he kept interposing, but of course no one listened. He hadn’t really expected them to, for it was always like this. He, Vernon, always remembered much more accurately than Timmie did what had actually happened on any occasion, and could have explained it all properly, in precise and consecutive detail, but unfortunately not so that anyone would actually ever listen. If he’d been relating this afternoon’s adventure, he’d have got it all absolutely right, and they’d all have been bored, not just Uncle Robin. His father would have carried on with his crossword puzzle without even looking up; his mother would have said Was it, dear? Well I never, and gone on with her argument about tea-bags being cheaper in the long run; and “Auntie” Cynthia (whose puff-ball blondeness and tinkling jewellery Vernon greatly and secretly admired) would have sighed, and looked at her watch, and asked Dot if it wasn’t the children’s bedtime?
It wasn’t, of course. It hardly ever was when Cynthia asked the question, but she remained hopeful. It wasn’t that she disliked children particularly—in fact, if challenged, she would probably have claimed to be a child-lover. It was just their company that she couldn’t stand. And most of all she couldn’t stand it when their mother was around as well, nudging and grimacing, and interrupting Cynthia’s best anecdotes with mouthings and whisperings about them being “unsuitable”.
Well, of course they were. How boring can you get? Conversation fit for an eight-year-old isn’t fit to listen to, that was Cynthia’s credo, and she found it frustrating in the extreme to have her narrative style thus cramped by Dot’s arbitrary maternal whims. And most frustrating of all was it at this evening hour, when something like two-thirds of the household were gathered cosily round the fire in a setting absolutely perfect for tearing to shreds the characters and reputations of the other third. And those of their friends, too, and their friends-of-friends…. Oh, it was maddening! And all for the sake of a couple of snotty-nosed kids who didn’t even need to listen if they didn’t want to.
For Dot, too, the situation was fraught with problems, and she, too, suffered. For her, the problem was how to be modern and permissive as well as preventing the boys listening; and she spent many anxious hours worrying about it, and reading magazine articles on the question. The articles came up with answers, all right; confident, expert answers, based on all the latest research, but somehow with singularly little bearing on the actual problem with which Dot was currently confronted. The experts all agreed, for example, that children of Timmie’s and Vernon’s ages should be told frankly and truthfully about the facts of life: but did this really include telling them the details of Cynthia’s ex-boyfriend’s prostate trouble? Or not? On this, as on so many similar issues, the massed company of the experts was distressingly silent; and thus Dot was left in the end to her own anxious devices, guided only by her instincts and by her passionately-held permissive principles; the most crucial one of which being that children should always be left entirely free to choose for themselves to do exactly what she, Dot, wanted them to do.
But even with an unswerving belief like this to guide her, it could still be difficult. Sex, it would appear, was liable to be just as time-consuming and unsatisfactory in Bermuda as it was in Twickenham: and Dot often found herself in a quandary about it all, not to mention increasingly resentful. Having dutifully brought up her children to believe that sex is wonderful (albeit with singularly little domestic evidence to back up the proposition), Dot was understandably reluctant to see all her painstaking work undone in a single evening by Auntie Cynthia’s ill-judged anecdotes.
On this particular evening, though, things were going a bit better than usual from Dot’s point of view. Timmie’s burgeoning narrative, however silly, could hardly be unsuitable for his own ears; nor (she hoped) could any of the improbable recital possibly remind Cynthia of any of those event-packed days in Bermuda which always seemed to give such an unfortunate turn to any conversation. Why, they didn’t even have fog in Bermuda, did they? Let alone fog so thick that … “we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, could we, Granny?” “Yes we could” (this with dogged disgruntlement from Vernon), “we could see at least four feet…. Actually, the visibility was …”
Or not. Or maybe. No one would ever know, for by now Timmie had filled all their heads with a fog thick as cotton-wool, impervious, fact-resistant, and apparently outside time. Timmie was being Creative, Vernon recognised sourly, that’s why the grownups were all sitting like paralysed guinea-pigs, no one daring to be bored first. Creativity always had this effect on people, Vernon had observed; you couldn’t fight it, you just had to sit it out.
One day, he thought darkly, one of Timmie’s stories will go on for ever; and then what will they do?
They’ll all starve, that’s what. They’ll sit round and starve!
It didn’t quite come to that.
*
“No, Cynthia dear, it’s not their bedtime, it’s barely six o’clock,” Dot was saying repressively; and “Quarter-past, dear, actually”, Cynthia was correcting her with exaggerated sweetness; while underneath, the real battle raged wordlessly between them, veering this way and that, the issue as yet undecided. Would Dot, or would she not, succeed in preventing Cynthia giving voice to the speculations already bubbling so insistently in her brain—highly “unsuitable” ones by any standard—about Teri, and about his real motive for accosting two little boys in a fog….
“I mean, I don’t want to upset anyone—” Cynthia was gleefully beginning—and then suddenly quailed. She did want to upset them, of course, that was the whole point of this kind of discussion; but as a mature and sensible woman she realised that you can’t always have what you want. You have to cut your coat according to your cloth. For the time being, she would have to restrict herself to the relatively innocuous aspects of the episode—murder, blackmail, and false accusation.
“You should sue him, Imogen,” she urged, with all the righteous fervour of the one who isn’t going to have to lift a finger. “You shouldn’t let him get away with it. Get the police after him. It’s libel. Or is it slander?—I’m not sure, but I do know you get much more money for one than the other, I forget which. I once knew a woman in Hamilton who got 18,000 dollars just for someone saying her hair was dyed. And it was, too….”
*
Her voice jerked into silence. The dining-room door slammed open, crashing against the rim of the antique sideboard in a way that would have appalled Ivor if he hadn’t been dead, and would have set him re-telling all through dinner the story of how he’d picked up that sideboard in Penzance, buying it for a song from a chap who thought he was Napoleon and wanted to make amends for all the evil he’d done in the world. How Ivor’s acquiring of an eighteenth-century oak sideboard for a tenth of its market price could be said to have compensated the world in any degree for the depredations of the Napoleonic wars, was never made clear; but then it didn’t need to be. Because, of course, the story wasn’t about Napoleon at all, nor about the poor madman, nor even about the sideboard itself. It was about Ivor, and how he attracted to himself bizarre and exciting adventures wherever he went. That was the point of the story; it didn’t need a moral as well.
The dully painful crack of wood on antique wood died away, and there stood Robin, in the doorway. Smiling, as he always smiled when something was going badly wrong. Was Imogen the only member of the little party who recognised the signs? She sat very still, clutching the edge of her chair.
Yes, here it came: the witty, off-hand, joking remark. Robin deadly serious at last: Robin angry as he had only been once or twice before in his life.
“Piggy, darling,” he said lightly, “Shall I tell you what’s new? Somebody wants you. Wants you! Only on the telephone, as it happens, but we all have to start somewhere.”
And as Piggy, mouth open, reacting at last to her environment (as flatworms, protozoa and sea-snails have always been accustomed to do), got noisily to her feet, Robin stood quietly watching her.
“Boy-friend trouble, from the sound of it, darling,” he observed silkily, holding the door open for her with exaggerated courtesy, “Congratulations”—and turning on his heel he followed her swiftly out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Funny, thought Imogen. I didn’t hear the telephone ring. Were we all talking too loud—too preoccupied to notice it? Out of curiosity, and a mounting sense of unease, she made an excuse to go out to the kitchen … more hot water … fresh tea…. Teapot in hand, she slipped out of the room and made her way, as slowly as she dared, across the hall.
“No,” she heard Piggy saying in a low voice on the telephone. “No, well, I haven’t had a chance, have I?” And then—in a little spurt of indignation: “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, you’re the one who … No. No, of course I didn’t, how could I? I keep telling you … Oh, don’t be so stupid! It’s all very well for you, you don’t know what it’s like here….”
The response at the other end of the line sounded like a terrier yapping, frustrated and frantic at the mouth of a rabbit-hole. Imogen could not in decency loiter any longer, so she passed on into the kitchen, boiled up the kettle, re-filled the teapot; and by the time she came to make her return journey, the telephoning was all over. It was only much later in the evening that Piggy was found to be crying, bitterly and uncontrollably.
On the stairs, of course, so that no one could go up to bed without being either heartlessly indifferent or tactlessly interfering.
“No, I’m all right,” “No, thank you, it’s nothing,” were the sort of replies received by would-be comforters, and by midnight even Cynthia had given up. In general, Cynthia rather fancied herself in the rôle of confidante to those in trouble—and indeed, in a way she was rather well-qualified for it. For one thing, she really enjoyed trouble, provided it was only somebody else’s; and for another, her range of experience was, in its way, formidable. You name it, somebody she knew had had it. In matters of masculine villainy she was by way of being a world expert, and could hold her own, Rat for Rat, in discourse with any woman in the land.
But on this occasion, the result of all her efforts was rather disappointing. Either she was applying the wrong methods, or else Piggy didn’t have the right troubles.
“Leave me alone!” the girl kept saying; and then, in a sudden spurt of anger: “Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you all stop spying on me? Creeping about the house on tiptoe … peeping in at me through windows…. I’m sick and tired of it! What the hell do you think you’re going to discover, anyway …?”
Afterwards, calming down a little, she conceded, grudgingly, that she hadn’t meant Cynthia herself. “It’s certain other people in this house,” she explained darkly, and had refused to be further drawn.
“Oh, please go away,” she’d repeated: and at last, with some chagrin, and an aching back from squatting matily on the third step of the stairs for so long, Cynthia had done so, going off to impart her meagre findings to whoever might still be up. Dot and Imogen, as it happened, were the only two available, Herbert having slunk guiltily off to bed before anything could become his fault, and Robin having locked himself in his room with a KEEP OUT notice on the door and his record-player blaring away inside.
And so it happened that Dot and Imogen were the only two to hear of the encounter, and even they didn’t hear very much. Being low on facts, as well as weary, Cynthia made it short. That Piggy’s boy-friend had found another girl, gone to prison, become impotent, forgotten Piggy’s birthday, expected her to pay for her own dinner, was Cynthia’s theory: and with the whole mystery thus satisfactorily solved, everyone could at last relax and go to bed.
Or almost. There was still one small obstacle to be surmounted.
“I’ll never be able to get Herbert up by seven,” complained Dot, yawning hugely, and pausing on the bend of the stairs to hear the murmur of sympathy that should, by rights, come her way.
It didn’t. Not because either Cynthia or Imogen were being wilfully unsympathetic; it was just that it was all so complicated. Dot and Herbert’s morning routine (so far as Imogen could make it out) seemed to go something like this: the alarm went at six-forty-five, and thereupon Dot proceeded to wake Herbert in time for him to wake her in time for her to nag him into bringing the cup of tea which was essential for enabling her to wake up sufficiently to wake him in time to eat his breakfast and catch his train.
It was all too much, especially at this time of night; and so “good night” was all that any of them said, and Dot plodded off to bed with a familiar sense of being vaguely disappointed, vaguely let-down. The sense of grievance was so vague, and so familiar, that she scarcely noticed it. Almost, it gave her a sense of security, like an old and well-worn dressing-gown wrapped about her.