Tory was right as well as unusual when she described her son Edward as an ordinary little boy. She did so not only because she believed it to be true, but partly because she was weary of all the mothers of her acquaintance claiming sensitive and highly-strung children, no matter how phlegmatic, even bovine, they might be.
Edward returned from school more or less the same as when he went away; cheerful, rigidly conservative, and lazy with the instinctive, deeply-rooted preserving laziness of a growing boy.
A feeling of wonderful security had enfolded him as he opened his bedroom door. The room seemed much smaller at first; the picture of ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ (over which Tory so grimly smiled) less brilliant in colour, less poignant in anxiety and noble falsehood.
The dormer window was above the cobbled yard Robert had mentioned so disparagingly and to which Tory had given – she hoped – a Continental air, with creeper on a trellis, a bay tree in a tub and two chairs of overwrought iron. Unfortunately, sheets of corrugated roofing, bright with rust, were plainly -visible above the wall, on the other side of which they made a shelter for crates and empty barrels at the pub.
After the vast asphalt of the school yard, the flat vistas of playing-fields, it was a relief to have the eye checked, the pace slowed, by cramped surroundings. Detail entrances a child and warms his imagination and at school there is a dearth of detail, so that the imagination loses its glow and often dies. Edward found newly exquisite the prettiness of his mother’s house, the collection of blue glass, the copper plates with their pinkish lights, the tongue-ferns lolling out between the stones of the garden wall, and, especially, perhaps, the detail of the food he ate – scatterings of parsley, radishes cut like water-lilies, the fleurons, the garnishings, and all the touches which distinguish private food from institutional.
‘And how does your son like school?’ Bertram asked, having looked in after breakfast, curious to see the boy. Edward, however, was up at the fish-market, standing on the slimy stone floor and watching the baskets of cod and whiting being brought in.
‘He says it is not bad,’ Tory answered reservedly.
‘In fact, grounds for any other mother to say he has taken to it as a duck to water.’
Tory would not encourage him with a smile. She wanted only to be rid of him this morning so that she could attempt to untangle her thoughts as she had tried and failed to do during the night. She stood very still by the window, obviously waiting for him to go. Her instructions from Robert, to keep out of Beth’s way, would be simple enough, for Beth so seldom went out of the house; but she did feel all sorts of compulsions, which seemed to her vulgar and petty – the compulsion of telling lies, not in the grand manner, but in an intricacy of excuses, trivial explanations, distortions, all to be devised beforehand, and complicated by the necessity of making the same explanations and distortions as Robert; all this, moreover, to her dearest friend with whom there had been since childhood only clarity and candour and intimacy, and to Prudence, a young girl to whom it would be lowering to explain anything. Useless it would be, too, she must now admit, having considered during the long night, how hopeless her case was with Prudence, who had guessed at once where she might find her father and must have noticed that careless switching-on of lights before Tory opened the front door. Inadvertently, by her behaviour, and deliberately, by hints, she had shown how she felt herself to be confronted by their guilt.
As she stood there hoping that Bertram would go, she was horrified suddenly by the appearance of Beth, who had come out of her own house and now stood looking at the harbour, where the trawlers, closely packed in a small space, grated against one another, masts and funnels like a forest along the sea-wall.
‘Now here’s Beth!’ Tory said crossly, as if this were entirely Bertram’s fault. She felt in a great flurry and tried to will Beth away, moving discreetly from the window as she did so.
‘I must go,’ Bertram said. ‘I have a great job on hand to-day, and I could not mean that more literally. This afternoon young Flitcroft and I are to carry Mrs Bracey upstairs. Perhaps this is the last time you will see me as I am.’
Tory laughed at last. ‘It will be a lesson to you not to romanticise yourself, nor to see poetry in people in whom it does not exist. Even Rembrandt didn’t have to carry those fat old women about. I could not be more delighted.’ She moved to the door as Beth rang the bell. She was determined now, in spite of having had no time to lay the lies out ready in her mind, to seem at her gayest, most self-possessed, and she crossed the hall and opened the door, still smiling.
Beth’s gravity smote her heart.
‘Well, now!’ said Bertram, coming into the hall after her, bowing to Beth. ‘I will go and collect some strength together, prepare myself.’
‘What does he mean?’ Beth asked after he had gone.
‘He has to help Mrs Bracey upstairs this afternoon; or rather carry her up as a dead weight. I can’t imagine how it is to be done. And as soon as she’s there, no doubt she’ll want to be moved down again.’
They had drifted back into the little sitting-room. Beth sat down at an angle to the table, suggesting that her call was of a temporary nature. Tory waited, her heart lurching about drunkenly. She turned away to light a cigarette.
Beth launched upon one of her long explanations and was a good way through it before Tory realised that favours were being asked of her, and favours of a safe and trivial kind.
‘. . . And it would mean staying the night in London,’ Beth was saying. ‘If I were to do any shopping as well . . .’
Tory looked blank at her.
‘If you could keep an eye on Stevie . . .’
‘Of course.’
‘And perhaps have her in to lunch . . .’
Beth floundered wretchedly, awaiting the generous offers she had been so sure of, so sure, that she had not prepared herself for asking each favour separately. Then suddenly Tory warmed and thawed and smiled.
‘My dear Beth, she shall come for as long as you like and be welcome every minute of it. Don’t dream of coming home until you want to. You deserve a change.’
And then again Beth saw the warmth fade even from Tory’s face, which paled. She was like one of those spring days, full of flooding sunshine and curt showers.
‘Whom did you say you have to see?’
‘My publisher,’ Beth said, surprised at having to repeat what she had already explained.
‘Oh, yes. Then you can make a day of it, as they say, go to the theatre afterwards to cheer yourself up . . .’
‘I said “publisher”, not dentist.’
‘Oh, well . . . And buy yourself something beautiful – a new summer hat.’
Beth smiled at Tory’s idea of a good day out.
‘But don’t come back with string bags full of children’s shoes,’ Tory went on, ‘or I shall be quite cross. When did you say it was to be?’
‘To-morrow. I don’t believe you are listening to a word I say.’
‘My thoughts run on at once to all the important things, you see – what you are going to buy and what you are going to wear.’
‘My green suit, I thought.’
‘Oh, no! You look all behind in that. I always knew it was a mistake.’
‘Well, I am all behind. It’s because I sit on it so much. I can’t disguise it.’
‘But of course you can. Everybody else does.’
‘What does it matter? I’m middle-aged,’ Beth said tactlessly. ‘I don’t care any longer.’
‘Nonsense. You’re the same age as me. I will lend you a corset and my new hat.’
‘It sounds,’ said Beth, ‘like one of those indecent slot-machines “The Secrets of an Actress”. There is one at the Fun Fair, Prudence told me – a pack of fading postcards flicking over, showing a woman unlacing some black stays . . .’
‘Oh, I know! And as soon as she gets them unlaced she skips behind a screen and throws them over the top, and then there is a prim click and that’s all. Edward is very fond of it, although he can’t possibly appreciate its daring.’
‘Where is Edward?’ Beth glanced round as if he might possibly have been overlooked.
‘He went out early to watch the fishing-fleet come in.’
‘Oh . . . well, then!’ Beth hesitated and then stood up. ‘If you are quite sure about to-morrow . . . I am sorry to have to ask you when I have a grown-up daughter, but Prue is behaving so strangely . . .’
‘Prue!’ Tory said coldly, alarmed now that she had not escaped after all.
‘She is so rude to Robert, as if she had some grudge against him. She sits and stares at him at mealtimes, and yet won’t meet his glance. Her manner is – uncomfortable. She is like a thorn-tree encased in ice.’ Beth spread the fingers of one hand along the edge of the table and seemed to consider them, while in reality she reconsidered her simile. ‘Yes!’ She raised her eyes and smiled and Tory saw in them a little flicker of pleasure, of triumph, even, soon filmed over by anxiety.
‘I think she ought to go away, you know,’ she heard herself telling Beth. She was shocked at herself, had never imagined that she could sink to such treachery or scheming or lack of compassion. The vulgar voice of rationalisation whispered: ‘It’s true. She ought to go . . .’, but she was still too proud to listen to it, and brushed the words aside with shame and impatience.
‘Robert won’t hear of it,’ Beth said in the proud, complacent way some wives describe their husband’s obstinacies. ‘He says she’s much too delicate to go away at present.’
As she was taking leave she suddenly asked with the direct attack dreamy people can often use with good result: ‘This . . . Bertram, is it? . . . is he fond of you?’
‘He appears to be.’
‘And what do you think of him?’
Tory’s instinct was at once to laugh, but that new acuity she despised in herself enforced a sort of coy hesitation, and she shrugged her shoulders in an expressive way, yet without knowing what it signified, only conscious of a desire to fog poor Beth and foist on her imagination notions of romance, of relationships which were welcome and permissible.
Beth, to whom human nature was an open book, which, moreover, she would finish writing herself, could see through her friend’s hesitation and drew in her cheeks with a sly smile. This Tory noticed with a confusion of feelings, despising Beth for her lack of perception and herself for misleading her; and, above all, annoyed that a romantic attachment for an old man should be so easily attributed to her.
‘So you would consider that a good match?’ she asked frostily.
‘You couldn’t make a good match. You would always be throwing yourself away, my dear, as you threw yourself away upon Teddy.’
‘Oh, Beth, you are the sort of person who insists on making gallant speeches at weddings and on the other side of every compliment is an insult for somebody or other. Come in this evening and let me dress you up for to-morrow! We will have some good fun trying clothes on.’
‘You shall not dress me up as a girl of seventeen,’ Beth insisted.
‘It is beyond me how tactless you are!’ Tory laughed.
When Beth had gone, Tory leant for a moment against the inside of the front door. ‘If I throw away Beth,’ she told herself, ‘I throw away my best chance of happiness.’ And she felt that that must answer the hedonists, since we do not appear to seek what will give us pleasure, nor to feel ourselves satisfied by mere happiness.
Eddie had come walking jauntily in, swinging a fry of fish on a piece of string, wearing his good navy suit over his thick jersey. Maisie was in the shop, wrapping up a pair of broken shoes for a customer, and by her glance he knew that something was wrong. He stood by whistling, until she was alone.
‘Mother wants to speak to you,’ she then said.
‘What about?’
‘You’d better go and see.’ Maisie hesitated. ‘She wants your room. You’ve got to clear out.’
‘She can’t do that.’
Maisie could not be bothered to answer such a stupid statement. She turned away.
Eddie opened the door into the back room and went in. Even Mrs Bracey faltered when she saw his expression.
‘What’s all this?’ he thundered.
‘Ah, Eddie!’ she said. She laid down her book and tried to look pleased to see him. ‘I’ve a favour to ask of you. I know you won’t mind giving up that room, but Dr Cazabon says I need the change.’
‘Dr Cazabon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What about me?’
‘Well, I made it plain to your auntie at the time that it only held good for so long as I might see my way clear . . .’ She had embarked upon one of those formal, meaningless sentences which are heavy with grandeur but difficult to round off.
‘I mean, where do I go?’
‘Your auntie’ll have to put you up on the front-room sofa.’
He saw himself reclining on one elbow upon slippery -horse-hair-stuffed leather, the window darkened with curtains which parted only an inch or two to show the plant on what was called the palm-stand, and the room chill and gloomy as a sea-cavern.
‘If I go now, I’ll never enter this house again,’ he said.
Nothing clouded Edward’s happiness. Life entranced him. When the sun shone it touched his very bones. Time was undivided now by bells clanging; so he could drift, beguiled, unchevied, wandering in that maze of alley-ways where the roofs went tipping down so steeply towards the harbour that he could spit down the chimneys from where he stood, he thought. With the sun shining on them, these roofs were the colours of pigeons – the slates of rose and grey and lavender and blue. It was all familiar yet wonderful to him.
He stopped to read the picture postcards at the tobacconist’s – a fat woman bending down to make a sand-castle, red bloomers, ‘What would you do, chums?’ printed underneath. He laughed aloud at this joke, standing there, squinting with the sun, jingling coins in his pocket.
Then on down the cobbled streets until the sea showed in a little cup at the bottom. Far out, a white-sailed yacht ventured across the smooth stretch of glinting purple. Nearer in, the water was turquoise. In the harbour itself there was the fleet and a great congregation of gulls.
He passed the Waxworks and walked out along the quay. ‘For every Pipe Puncheon or Piece of Wine or Spirits,’ he read aloud off the wall of the old Customs house, ‘and so in proportion in smaller quantities the charge of one florin.’
By the lighthouse an old man with a beard was sketching the harbour. Edward went and stood by him, whistling, clinking his pocketful of coins. Along the waterfront Stevie rode on her tricycle, wearing Beth’s torn bridal-veil and a wreath of broken orange-blossom over one ear. The veil streamed out behind her, so furiously she went, and her little legs pedalled at a great rate. Edward laughed to himself.
‘Good day,’ Bertram said, sketching busily. It was an import-ant moment for both of them, he felt – this first meeting with his future stepson.
‘Good day,’ Edward said at once, edging a little nearer to the sketch, which was very good, he considered, very like, obviously a harbour.
‘I think you must be Edward Foyle,’ Bertram said, and he looked down at the boy’s slate-blue eyes and the great sweeping lashes on the downy cheeks.
‘Yes, I am,’ Edward admitted, glancing at the beard with curiosity. He turned his back to the wall and looked out to sea. Bertram turned, too.
‘My father had a yacht,’ the boy murmured, and he gazed and gazed at that tall, tipping wing of sail, and all his happiness was gone.
‘Eddie having gone off in a huff like that, you’ll have to fetch someone else in to help me upstairs,’ Mrs Bracey informed her daughters. ‘I can’t be jarred about by a lot of incompetents. Is that bed aired, Maisie?’
‘Yes.’
‘And pulled up close to the window?’
‘Yes.’
‘Slip up to the vicarage, there’s a good girl, and tell Mr Lidiard I want him urgent.’
‘That I will not.’
‘He’d come. Though what strength there is in him for a man’s job I don’t know. Tell him I want him here ready to make my last confession to him in case.’ She laughed recklessly.
‘That’d be worth hearing,’ Iris said.
‘Now Mr Hemingway, he’s what we used to call a fine man in my young days, before there was all this crooning and moaning and men trying to look girlish. He reminds me of your father.’
Neither of the girls would fetch Mr Lidiard and in the end Bertram brought Ned Pallister in from his afternoon nap.
The short staircase led up from behind a door and was so dark that Maisie went before with a candle. The light wavered over the flushed, set faces of the two men, who a minute earlier had been teasing Mrs Bracey about her weight, and upon Mrs Bracey’s own glistening forehead. Maisie went up backwards, the candle held at shoulder-height and great hunched shadows bending, climbing up over the walls and across the narrow ceiling.
They brought her up into the little room and put her on the bed by the window. All colour had now fled from her face and she lay there with her nostrils wide, her lips curved down.
‘Thank you,’ she breathed at last. ‘Many thanks.’
‘Perhaps she is going to die,’ Maisie thought; for her appearance, her sudden courtesy did suggest this possibility.
She tidied the bedclothes, wiped her mother’s face and Iris jerked the curtains wider apart, saying: ‘There, now, you can have a nice look out at last.’
But Mrs Bracey would not glance outside until she was alone. Already her throat felt half closed with emotion, her eyes could not accustom themselves to their new limits, these rose-covered walls, or the lightness of the atmosphere.
‘Maisie!’ she said sharply. ‘Run down and fetch that bottle of whisky I won in the Cruelty to Children Raffle. You put it to the back of the dresser cupboard.’
When Maisie had gone she said to Bertram: ‘I’d really intended it to be for the bearers when I kick the bucket, but we’ll have a nip out of it now and sod the undertakers.’
But as Maisie came back she could not help adding grudgingly: ‘Once a bottle’s broached it’s as good as gone; no hope of keeping any for a special occasion; a sip here and there, a little nip of a cold night or if a neighbour gets a bad turn and you’ve come to the end before you can feel the benefit of it.’
Bertram sat on the edge of a frail bedroom chair in his shirtsleeves and sipped from his tumbler. Ned Pallister leant against the wardrobe.
‘Here’s the best, Mrs Bracey,’ he said, holding up his glass. ‘Many more years of enjoying the view, I’m sure.’
She bowed in acknowledgment of this toast.
Iris was draped about the bed-post, picking her nail-varnish. Maisie went downstairs and they heard water droning into a kettle. Bertram and Mr Pallister finished their whisky and said good-bye.
‘Many thanks,’ Mrs Bracey said carelessly.
‘A pleasure to do anything for a neighbour,’ Ned Pallister replied. ‘Any time, you’ve only to ask.’
‘Next time I go down those stairs, I go with the lid screwed on,’ she said. ‘Show them out, Iris!’
Iris undraped herself. ‘As if they don’t know the way,’ she thought, but did not say so aloud in front of her employer.
Then, when she was quite alone at last, Mrs Bracey heaved forward a little on one elbow and, drawing the curtain on one side, looked out.
‘Persevere!’ said Tory.
She sat on the fuchsia-coloured sofa in her bedroom window and watched the sea.
‘I can’t,’ Beth gasped, trying to tuck great bunches of flesh into the corset.
‘If I can, you can,’ Tory said calmly.
Beth stood quite rigid in front of the mirror, not breathing. ‘But I’m in agony. Surely it isn’t like this for you all the time.’
‘You get used to it. Put your skirt on. No, my black skirt.’ She turned her head at last. ‘You see! Don’t breathe in little gasps like that. Put your shoulders back. You’ve slumped over your writing-table too long.’
‘I shall never get out of it again.’
Tory suddenly became enthusiastic and fetched her best white blouse, the barathea jacket. Beth combed her short hair away from her temples and considered the effect rather shyly.
‘It’s a pity about the spectacles,’ Tory said. ‘Can’t you possibly not wear them?’
‘I should only get run over, and cut all my dearest friends.’
‘There you are! You look like a real writer now,’ she said. ‘Neat, distinguished.’
‘I think I look like a Lesbian,’ Beth said doubtfully.
‘You won’t when your hat’s on,’ Tory encouraged her. ‘A silly hat is what’s needed. My red-currant hat which shames Edward so.’
‘Oh, no!’ Beth pleaded.
‘I thought you wouldn’t. What about this?’ Tory twisted round and displayed a wheel of grey and yellow ostrich feathers. ‘Or the new white hat. You’ll have to go without spectacles. It won’t matter for one day, surely?’
Beth put the hat rather nervously on her head at what she considered a daring angle to please Tory; she thought that if she could forget that the image in the mirror was herself, she might approve of it.
‘Not forward!’ Tory corrected her. ‘Straight on the top of the head, or slightly back.’ She walked round and round Beth. At last, satisfied, she sat on the bed, looking triumphant. ‘You do see, don’t you? And you won’t add any finishing touches, please promise!’
‘Suppose it rains?’
‘Oh, well, if it rains you must wear your Burberry and just look dull and well-bred and hope for the best. Edward!’ she called, going to the door, ‘if you are out of the bath, run and fetch the sherry and a couple of glasses, there’s a dear boy. I love sherry in the bedroom,’ she said, turning back to Beth.
‘It makes one feel like – like Becky Sharp,’ Beth said, still turning slowly before the mirror as if bemused.
‘Watch Edward’s face when he comes,’ Tory said.
But when he did come, carrying the tray carefully, his dressing gown cord trailing on the floor, his face was expressionless like a good waiter’s, although smeared with tooth-paste.
‘Do you see nothing different about Beth?’ Tory asked him as she poured out the sherry.
‘She has your clothes on,’ Edward said.
‘And does she look nice, do you think?’
Tory handed Beth a glass and they smiled at one another.
‘She always looks nice, I think,’ Edward said politely.
‘Edward, you restore my pride,’ Beth laughed. ‘I was beginning to feel I was nothing in myself.’
‘Good night, darling.’ Tory bent and kissed him. ‘Don’t read too long.’
When he had gone she laughed. ‘He is non-committal like his father,’ she said, refilling their glasses. ‘Sit down, for heaven’s sake, Beth.’
‘Sit down! I can’t go sitting down here, there and everywhere just when the mood takes me. I cannot bend.’
‘Then you had better practise. You can scarcely stand up to eat your lunch to-morrow.’
Beth slid uneasily on to a chair, her legs straight before her. They sat laughing and rocking, the sherry a little gone to their heads, the white hat tipping forward again over Beth’s forehead.
‘I wish I could be there to-morrow to see you,’ Tory said weakly. ‘That hat will astonish him, especially if it falls forward like that each time you take a bite.’
‘Him!’ Beth said. ‘Astonish whom?’
‘Your publisher, darling. Oh, hell, I can’t speak properly now. Hush! the child will think we are intoxicated. I always imagine publishers looking like King Edward the Seventh, but I suppose they don’t – no more than anybody else.’
Years fell away from them. They became two silly girls giggling at nothing.
‘But my publisher is a woman,’ Beth said, looking mystified.
‘A woman!’
Tory sobered up at the shock. ‘How could a publisher be a woman?’
‘She could be and she is.’
‘Well, I’m damned!’ Tory exploded. ‘You might have told me. You really are impossible, Beth. What the hell have we been wasting all this time for?’