THE window was shut. Outside was an April sky, tufted with small white clouds, and a semi-rustic landscape dotted with red-roofed new bungalows whose television masts controverted the anarchy of some old apple trees, a sufficient number of which had been preserved to justify the title of The Orchard Estate.
Once again, Mrs. Drew consulted her watch. The watch was attached to her bosom by a matching enamel brooch; to turn its face upwards and bend her own over it involved a certain degree of effort, and made her grunt. But though there was a clock on the mantelshelf, she preferred to consult her watch. For one thing, it had sentimental value; her husband had given it to her as a honeymoon present, fifty years earlier. For another, she could trust it. Audrey had more than once forgotten to wind the clock.
Three minutes to eleven. No doubt her Bovril would be late. Dr. Rice Thompson had said repeatedly that with a digestion like hers regularity was everything. But one does not expect too much. One has learned not to. Two minutes to eleven. At eleven precisely, the door burst open. Audrey came in with her stumping tread.
‘Mother! Mother! Did you hear? The cuckoo?’
‘What, dear?’
‘The cuckoo. The first cuckoo.’
‘What, dear? Has something gone wrong?’
There was nothing wrong with the tray, that she could see. The toast was nicely browned, the pepper caster had been remembered. So why did not Audrey put it down?
‘The first cuckoo, Mother. Spring has come.’
‘Who has come? I wish you’d tell me. I can stand up to bad news better than suspense. And do put that tray down. If you aren’t careful, you’ll slop it.’
Audrey put down the tray and slopped it as she did so.
‘The cuckoo, Mother.’
‘Oh. The cuckoo…. I can’t hear it.’
‘No. It’s left off.’
So much confusion and nonsense about a bird that came year after year and more or less at the same date. But the Bovril was delicious. It swept down her, a reviving tide, and renewed her interest in life.
‘Has the paper come?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Tchah! It’s always late now. Why is it always late?’
‘Because it comes with the milk.’
‘But it has always come with the milk.’
‘Yes. But now there are all these new houses, you see, all having milk, so the milkman takes longer to get to us.’
‘I don’t see at all.’
For the last eighteen months this conversation about the newspaper and the milk had taken place daily.
But everything, thought Audrey, is more or less daily. Daily, her brother Donald caught the 8.5 in order to reach his office at 9 with a few minutes in hand to feed the city pigeons. Daily at 10.50 she squared the crust off two slices of bread and put them in the electric toaster to accompany the eleven-o’clock Bovril. Daily at 2.30 she arranged her mother on the sofa for an afternoon sleep and had an hour or so to herself. Daily at 5.55 the bell of St. Botolph’s sounded its twenty strokes and she slipped off to Evensong. Nightly at 10.30, having settled Mother in bed and emptied the sink basket, she noted down the day’s expenses, wrote in her diary and read the Psalms for the day. The milkman, the postman, the baker, the B.B.C. announcers—all rolled round in a diurnal course along with Wordsworth’s Lucy; though Lucy rolled unconsciously, being dead.
Luncheon, too, was daily; and today it involved both mincing and sieving, so she would have to set about it immediately. As she was leaving the room, her mother said, ‘By the way, you’ll have to order extra milk if …’ There she stopped.
‘If what, Mother?’
‘If you make a milk pudding.’
Poor Mother! It was sad to see her trying to assert her former hold on life.
‘Yes, Mother. I’ll remember.’
Hearing the door close, Mrs. Drew chuckled. Good Lord, that had been a near thing! It was no part of her plan to mention Betty Sullivan until she was sure of her. Fortunately, she had kept her head, and turned it off with a pudding.
The milkman came in his diurnal course, and Audrey carried in The Daily Telegraph. Mother turned with avidity to the Deaths. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grass hopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast. On days when it failed to record the death of someone Mother knew, it would almost certainly provide a name familiar to her, and this would be dwelt on with speculation and gathering confidence.
Today the name was Polson.
‘Polson. Gertrude Polson. Pepper, please; you never put in enough pepper nowadays. I met her at Malvern. We were staying in one hotel and she was staying in another, and we met at the lending library. Such a charming woman, and I’m almost sure her name was Gertrude. She looked frail even then, though. Gertrude Polson, in her eighty-seventh year. I don’t suppose you remember her.’
‘I don’t think I do.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. We were at Malvern in 1917, when you were three. There was a Mr. Poison, too—he etched or something. But the announcement doesn’t mention him, it just says that she died peacefully in a nursing home at Castle Bromwich. I expect there was a divorce.’
In some ways, Mother’s presumptive deaths were even better than her valid ones. They afforded her more scope. But though Mrs. Polson brightened lunch, tea was clouded by the usual disappointment. ‘Where are the letters? Hasn’t the post come?’
‘Yes, it’s come. But there were no letters for you this afternoon.’
‘No letters? Are you sure? Did you look carefully?’
‘Yes, Mother. Two for Donald, and a circular for me. Nothing else.’
‘Are you sure there wasn’t a letter for me? With a Devon postmark?’
‘Were you expecting a letter from Devonshire?’
Mrs. Drew looked at her daughter as though seeing her steadily and whole, and said, ‘Fool!’
At 5.55 the bell of St. Botolph’s rang for Evensong. Audrey went to church through an exquisite evening, the evening of the day when she had heard the first cuckoo; and prayed to be made perfect in patience. Mrs. Drew continued to extort patience till her bedtime.
‘What’s wrong with Mother?’ Donald inquired when Audrey came downstairs to empty the sink basket. ‘Has anything upset her?’
‘She didn’t get some letter she was expecting—from Devonshire. I do wish she could get more letters, poor old thing!’
‘Perhaps she’ll have one tomorrow.’
The expected letter, addressed in a curly, dashing hand and post-marked Exeter, was in the morning post. Mrs. Drew tore it open, read it with obvious satisfaction, replaced it in the envelope and said she would have a poached egg for her breakfast. It was after she had drunk her eleven-o’clock Bovril that she remarked, ‘There’s not much on a duck, so I think you had better order a couple. Why are you looking at me like that? Didn’t you hear me? I said, order a couple of ducks.’
‘But ducks are still very expensive, Mother. It’s only April, you know. And one duck is more than enough for three.’
‘Four.’
‘Four ducks?’
‘No! Two ducks. Four people. Betty Sullivan’s coming. I suppose you can remember her, at least.’
‘Oh yes. She was your great friend when you were a girl, wasn’t she? And married a lawyer. What day is she coming?’
‘How nice! You will enjoy seeing her again. For lunch?’
‘To stay.’
‘Over the weekend? I’ll get the spare room ready.’
‘For a couple of months.’
‘Months, Mother?’
‘Months, Audrey. Or longer, if she likes. And I wish you’d go and have your ears syringed. I’m not strong enough to have to say everything twice over. And don’t bother about the spare room. She’ll be bringing a lot of luggage with her—she’s giving up the lodgings she moved into after Gerald Sullivan died and that odious daughter-in-law of hers insisted that they’d inherited the house and moved into it with a pack of children. It can’t possibly all get into the spare room, so she will have to have your room and you can have the spare room. Has the paper come?’
‘Not yet. It comes with the milk, you know.’
‘That’s no reason for it to be late.’
‘It isn’t late, Mother. It comes later, that’s all. But, Mother, about Mrs. Sullivan …’
‘Well?’ Mrs. Drew’s neck crimsoned.
‘I didn’t know she was a widow,’ said Audrey hastily. For though Mother’s blood pressure would sooner or later carry her off—whereby everything would be greatly simplified—Audrey did not wish to bring on a stroke in order to avert Mrs. Sullivan. That must be Donald’s part. A son has more authority. And it was only fair that Donald should undertake Mother occasionally, instead of talking about Quietism and leaving everything to her. After a few words about Mrs. Sullivan’s widowhood (which, bursting on Mrs. Drew through the column of Deaths, had called forth a letter of condolence, and a renewal of former intimacy), Audrey said no more and spent the afternoon tidying the spare room.
Nuns, she recalled, are contented with their narrow cells. Considering the spare room in this light she felt that with a transference of pillows and a removal of all the pictures and ornaments she might be quite happy in it. For one thing, it would make a change; for another, it was at the other end of the passage from Mother; for yet another, it was definitely more cellular, and so might be thought of as a sort of ante-cell to the little whitewashed room under a beehive roof that awaited her in South Africa. ‘We will take you at any moment,’ Sister Monica had said. ‘Just send a cable and get a plane.’
Chief among the things which Mrs. Drew’s blood pressure would ultimately simplify was the matter of her children’s religious vocations. Audrey’s was the more compact. She was an oblate of an Anglican sisterhood, and at a retreat she had met Sister Monica, on leave from the daughter house in Africa. By the end of the retreat Audrey felt sure of her vocation and Sister Monica had provisionally accepted her. It was only a question, as the nun remarked, of keeping her passport up to date and waiting on the Lord. While Audrey waited on the Lord, Donald was going through more complicated spiritual adjustments. There were times when he even thought of becoming a Buddhist. Just now he felt almost certain that he would become a Roman Catholic and enter a contemplative order. But all this had to be kept from Mother, who prided herself on despising all forms of religion impartially—though if she were to discover Donald’s present way of thinking she would be ready to shed the last drop of his blood for the Protestant faith.
Instead of coming straight back from Evensong Audrey intercepted Donald at the station and told him about Betty Sullivan. He pooh-poohed it, with every sign of alarm. ‘I shan’t say a word about it,’ he declared, ‘unless Mother does.’ And while Audrey was getting dinner he retired to the tool shed and oiled the lawnmower.
The lawnmower had been put away dirty—he would not say by whom—so he had to clean it, too. He could not but think it unfair that he, working all day in the office, should find himself expected to deal with poor Mother’s vagaries the moment he got back. That was a daughter’s part. And it was all very well for Audrey to secrete a vocation to be a nun in Africa, but here and now her vocation was to be a daughter in Middlesex.
At 7.30, Mother sat down at the head of the table, made sure that the pepper caster was within reach, and said, ‘Audrey, have you remembered to order those ducks?’
Audrey glanced meaningly at Donald, who said, ‘Duck? Are we going to have roast duck? How delightful!’
‘No, Mother. We can’t afford them. I asked, and they are twenty-five shillings each. Isn’t it wicked?’
Disregarding the moral issue Mother said, ‘And may I ask who pays for the food in this house? You haven’t got that power of attorney yet, you know.’
Donald raising his voice remarked, ‘Audrey, this is very nice soup.’
Audrey’s silence and Mother’s ominous sotto-voce ‘Not yet, not yet, not yet!’ drove him to speak again.
‘By the way, Mother, returning to the duck, do you particularly want a duck? I might be able to find a cheaper one in London.’
‘I never said I wanted a duck. I want two ducks. I wish you and Audrey would listen to me occasionally, and not wink at each other. You’re as bad as Betty Sullivan.’
‘Who is Betty Sullivan?’ ‘Does Mrs. Sullivan wink?’ Donald and Audrey spoke simultaneously.
‘Of course she winks. She’s always winked. But in her case, it’s nervous. It only comes on when she’s angry. And it’s quite uncontrollable; she can’t be blamed for it. Not like you two, winking at each other all through meals, like semaphores.’
Donald started. Audrey had kicked him sharply on the ankle. ‘We seem to have lost sight of the duck,’ he began. ‘As I said, if you want a duck, I might be able to——’
‘I said nothing of the sort. I said I wanted two ducks. And I mean to have them. I don’t call five shillings a great deal for a duck.’
‘Twenty-five shillings!’ shouted Donald, roused at last.
‘Twenty-five shillings, if you like,’ said his mother airily. ‘Are we going to have anything besides soup, Audrey?’
Donald could be relied upon to put up a pretty good fight when money was concerned so Audrey took her time over dishing up the braised lamb. Their voices grew increasingly louder, increasingly alike. Donald was certainly engaged; she would leave him to it for a little longer. In the event, she left him too long. When she took in the lamb, he was saying, ‘Well, I wash my hands of it.’ The lamb was eaten in silence. During the pudding there was a little conversation about the cuckoo.
Apparently Donald had also washed his hands of the washing up, which he ordinarily helped in. When Audrey returned to the sitting room he had turned on the wireless and was listening to a talk about the thraldom of writers behind the Iron Curtain. Mother’s neck was no longer crimson. Her hooked nose, which in moments of wrath asserted itself as it would when she lay dead, had sunk back into the mass of her face and she looked as composed as a sea anemone digestively sealed on its prey. Excerpts from The Merry Widow followed the thraldom of Soviet writers. Donald continued to listen. When she had settled Mother in bed, he was having a bath. She waited for him to come out, and pounced.
‘Well, Donald. So you’ve decided to give in.’
‘No. Not exactly. But I think we should give way. Not to the ducks, of course. That’s palpably absurd, and you must get round it. But give way about this Sullivan person. After all, she is our mother.’
‘You mean, Mother is.’
Donald for a moment looked exactly as Mother had done before ejaculating ‘Fool!’
‘As you say, Audrey, she is our mother. Her life is monotonous, she lives in the past, she has never realized that her money is only worth half what it was twenty years ago. She has set her heart on seeing Mrs. Sullivan. Anyhow, it won’t be for long. They are bound to quarrel. Mother quarrels with everyone after a week. Are we to grudge her this little pleasure?’
Stalking down the passage in his bare feet and his plaid dressing gown, he looked positively apostolic. Even in the nursery she had made it her business to shelter her little brother. The little brother was now going bald. The sheltering process had gone on too long.
Two days later, and with a great quantity of small pieces of luggage, Betty Sullivan arrived.
‘Betty!’
‘After all these years!’
‘But I’d know you anywhere!’
They continued to exclaim. Audrey continued to carry the small pieces of luggage upstairs. One of them was so unexpectedly heavy that she exclaimed, too. Mrs. Sullivan turned round. ‘And is this your Audrey?’
‘How do you do.’
‘Why, you might be your great-aunt! Poppy, isn’t she exactly like your Aunt Ada? Don’t bother with that parcel, dear. It can stay. Poppy! You’ll never guess what I’ve brought. All my old snapshot albums.’
Though Mrs. Sullivan’s face was more ravaged than Mother’s she had kept some modicum of her waist and seemed the younger of the two. In fact, as Audrey realized when called on to look at a snapshot of two pigtailed girls in skirts down to their ankles, Poppy and Betty were exact contemporaries. Now they sat on the sofa with the albums, elatedly identifying people with names like Bertie and Nina.
Ducks require basting, so Audrey had to forgo Evensong. The oven door was open and the basting in process when Donald looked in.
‘What’s she like? She seems to talk a—— You don’t mean to say you bought those ducks?’
‘I gave way, Donald. After all, she is our mother.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s too late now. But I wish you hadn’t.’
Having left the kitchen, Donald speedily returned. ‘Audrey! What’s this frightful smell all over the house?’
‘I expect it’s Mrs. Sullivan’s scent.’
‘Good God! But it’s everythere.’
‘She’s been everywhere. Mother’s been showing her round. She put some on Mother, too. I t’scalled Méfie-toi.’
While Poppy and Betty continued to evoke the past—to recall hockey matches, blue voile, fox terriers, confirmation classes, the Bishop’s boots; while Mother, animated by these feasts of memory, grew increasingly demanding and autocratic and Audrey increasingly jaded and fatalistic, Donald was being driven frantic by Méfie-toi. He bought aerosols, he sprayed the bathroom with disinfectant, he soaked his handkerchief in citronella and pressed it convulsively to his nose whenever Mrs. Sullivan came near him. He pressed it so convulsively that after a few days his nose became inflamed. Mrs. Sullivan, calling him her poor boy, insisted on applying a cooling lotion—one of the Méfie-toi series. Trying to remove the stink from his nostrils with carbolic soap and a nailbrush, Donald rubbed himself raw. This wasn’t so obsessive in the train, for there he could hold up his newspaper. But one cannot walk through the streets of London with a newspaper before one’s face, and it seemed to him that people were either looking at his nose or avoiding looking at it. Then Holiday, with whom he lunched on Tuesdays, said to him, ‘You ought to take care of that nose, Drew.’ The same evening, when he turned to Audrey for sympathy, she blinked at him as though he were a very long way off and remarked that she had a pain in her stomach. Donald replied that he was sorry to hear it—Audrey had expressed no sorrow about his nose—and added that it was probably colic, arising from the richness of the food since Mrs. Sullivan had been with them. As Audrey did the cooking, the remedy was in her own hands.
Two evenings later Audrey fell off her chair during dinner and lay writhing on the floor. When they tried to pull her up she screamed. Dr. Rice Thompson was sent for, and she was taken to hospital in an ambulance and operated on for acute appendicitis.
When Audrey came round from the anaesthetic and saw only strange faces bending over her she gave a sigh of relief and burrowed back into unconsciousness. Some time later—how much later she did not know or care—she opened her eyes and there was Donald. A voice from somewhere said, ‘Not more than five minutes, Mr. Drew.’ Donald sat down and gazed at a kidney basin.
‘How are you all getting on?’ she asked.
‘Splendidly!’
‘Oh.’ She felt a vague relief and also a vague surprise. ‘I’m so glad.’
‘You needn’t worry about us. Betty got Hannah.’
Hanna. Hanna in the wilderness. Probably some kind of patent food. Well, if it satisfied them…. Then her conscience woke up and told her that poor Donald was putting a brave face on it. ‘What is——’
At the same moment Donald continued, ‘Hannah is her old servant. Betty telegraphed and Hannah came by the next train, and does everything. I must say, Betty has been very helpful. I’ve never eaten better pastry. And Betty’s arranged with her to stay on for a week after you’re back to ease you in.’
‘Oh. Where does she sleep, this Hannah?’
‘She’s sleeping out. She fixed it up with the greengrocer. He’s a Wesleyan, too. They’re thick as thieves, and he lets her have asparagus for next to nothing. I could never be a Wesleyan myself—but there’s something rather beautiful in such a simple outlook.’
No one is wholly pleased at learning that he has been replaced by someone who does as well or better. Only by exerting her lower nature, by reflecting on such domestic offices as cleaning round the bathroom taps and washing the milk bottles, was Audrey able to repose on the thought that Betty Sullivan’s Hannah, lodging at Powell’s and coming in to get Donald’s breakfast, would be there when she got home.
Betty Sullivan arrived in a hired car to fetch Audrey away and throughout the drive was everything that was kind and everything that was hospitable. ‘I want you to feel as free as if you were staying in a hotel,’ she insisted. ‘A nice restful little hotel, where you’ve only got to ring a bell. I’ve put one of your mother’s bells in your room. It’s absurd for her to have five hand bells, even if they do have associations. So you’ve got the one that Madge Massingham-Maple gave her as a wedding present. She never really cared for poor old Madge.’
‘How is Mother?’
‘In wonderful form. Top-hole. Fit as a flea.’
Audrey had scarcely greeted her mother before she was being put to bed. Tea, with homemade cake, was brought in by Hannah. It was a Saturday, and presently she heard Donald mowing the lawn. The millennium could not last. The bills would be appalling. Mother looked dangerously red. Betty had somehow got at the best tea service and Hannah would undoubtedly break it. Sooner or later, there would be the devil to pay, and Méfie-toi would hang about the house for months. Meanwhile she would make the most of this unexpected sojourn in a nice restful little home where she had only to ring Madge Massingham-Maple’s bell.
But nothing whatever went wrong. Hannah was an excellent manager as well as an admirable cook and seemed prepared to stay on indefinitely. So, of course, did Betty Sullivan, but this was not altogether a matter for regret. Not only was Betty an adjunct to Hannah; not only was she contributing, and pretty handsomely, to the household expenses; but since her arrival Mother had become a changed being, a being with an interest in life. They talked untiringly about their girlhood—about the winters when they went skating, the summers when they went boating, the period when they were so very pious, the period when they were pious no longer and sent a valentine to the curate: the curate blushed, a crack ran out like a pistol shot and Hector Gillespie went through the ice, the fox terriers fought under old Mrs. Bulliver’s chair, the laundry ruined the blue voile, the dentist cut his throat in Centry Wood, Claude Hopkins came back from Cambridge with a motorcar and drove it at thirty miles an hour with flames shooting out behind, Addie Carew was married with a wasp under her veil. From time to time, they pursued themselves into their later years—into marriage, maternity, butter coupons, the influenza epidemic, the disappearance of washstands, poor Lucy Latrobe who took to drink, Mr. Drew going out for an evening paper and being brought back dead, Addie’s pretty granddaughter rushing from one divorce to the next. But over these years the conversation did not flow so serenely. There were awkward passages where Betty boasted, where Poppy criticized. So presently they travelled back to the days of their youth, and told the same stories over again and laughed with inexhaustible delight at the same misfortunes. The windows stood open, summer curtains frisked in the breeze and Mother felt so well that she and Betty made several excursions to London, to choose new chair covers, to lunch at little places in Soho.
Audrey and Donald wallowed in unprincipled peacefulness—to Audrey, at any rate, it seemed unprincipled, for she was ill-acquainted with pleasures not snatched from the jaws of duty.
‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking?’ said Donald. They were in the garden, collecting slugs by twilight. From the kitchen came the sound of Hannah washing up, from the sitting room the story of Hector Gillespie going through the ice.
‘No, what?’ she said apprehensively.
‘That now’s your time.’
‘Now’s my time?’
‘Now’s your time. To get away. If you went to Africa now, Mother would scarcely notice it. Listen to her! She’s completely happy, living in the past. And if you go, Betty will certainly stay on. It would be just the excuse she needs for staying here, in reach of London.’
‘But if now’s my time, isn’t it your time, too?’
‘It’s not so urgent for me. And not such plain sailing.’
‘You’re thinking Mother couldn’t live without you—without your salary?’
‘I’m thinking nothing of the sort,’ he said with acerbity. ‘Betty’s very well off. You’ve only to look at her—you’ve only to smell her to know that. Besides, I happen to know.’
‘But how? Did she tell you?’
He scooped up another slug with his teaspoon and dropped it into the jar of salt water.
‘As a matter of fact, I sent Lorna—my secretary—to the Probate Office to have a look at Gerald’s will.’
A voice from indoors exclaimed, ‘Betty, you’ve got that wrong again! You always get it wrong. Bertie Gillespie was dancing with me—not with Mabel.’
‘Very well, very well. Have it your own way, dear.’
Their tones made it apparent that Betty Sullivan was winking, that Mother’s neck was crimsoning. From time to time, they had these girlish tiffs.
‘But, Donald—I shall have to tell her.’
‘You can tell her that Sister Monica has invited you to go there for a month, to convalesce.’
Such resourcefulness, such solicitude for her vocation, such readiness to stand aside and let her get away…. Poor Donald! How she had misjudged him! For years she had thought him selfish. Yet now he stood beside her, a strong brotherly presence, prepared to suffer in her stead—not only Mother, either; for he suffered as much as ever from Méfie-toi, which was why he was sharing the slug hunting, and why he often did not come home till the last train, making a supper of sandwiches on the Embankment or in some quiet city churchyard in order to avoid it. For years, Audrey had been misjudging Donald; and within half an hour she was misjudging him again. The more she thought of it, the more penetrating became her impression that Donald had something up his sleeve and was trying to get rid of her.
Feeling in some vague way menaced, she took refuge in a precautionary inertia. The way of escape stood open—at least, Donald assured her it did. Mother needed her no longer, infinitely preferring Betty’s company and Hannah’s cooking. Nothing tied her to a home where, since she slept in its spare room, she was already in part a stranger. She had not even to buy an outfit, for when she arrived at the convent she would put on her novice’s habit. Inoculations, topee, sunglasses—everything would be provided. She had only to make up her mind. But instead of letting itself be made up, her mind drifted away to suppositions and excuses. Was she well enough? Had Sister Monica really meant it? Oughtn’t she to wait till Mother died? Was she sure of her vocation? What was Donald really up to? And when Donald inquired if she had written to the convent, if she had found out about flights, she put him off with adhesions, old letters that must be sorted and disposed of, a bank manager that must be visited.
‘I warn you, Audrey. Time is getting short.’
‘What do you mean? Why is it any shorter than it was last week?’
‘It is a week shorter. Didn’t you hear Mother yesterday evening?’
‘Yesterday evening? Yes, they did have rather a tiff, but they often have tiffs. And then they make it up again.’
‘Before very long, they’ll have a tiff and not make it up again. Mark my words, Audrey. Time is getting short. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
These words provoked the inevitable reaction. Audrey laughed in an elder-sisterly way and said that if Donald had seen as much of Mother as she had done, he wouldn’t think much of yesterday evening. Donald, his nose standing out like Mother’s at its most embattled, said he would say no more, and added that he would be away for the weekend.
The sight of Donald going away with a little bag, to mind his own business instead of hers, restored Audrey’s confidence in her purpose. She checked her passport and sent a cable to Sister Monica; on Monday she would go up to London and book her flight. All this took no time at all, and she spent the afternoon tearing up old diaries and parcelling clothes to be sent to the Church Army. Walking to Evensong through a downpour of thundery rain, she seemed to be moving under an invisible umbrella that sheltered her from alternatives and second thoughts far more efficiently than the visible umbrella, which had holes in it, sheltered her from the downpour. In the same heavenly frame of mind she walked home and entered the house.
The sound of violent altercation came from the sitting room.
‘I tell you, you’ve got it wrong. You’ve been singing it wrong ever since I first knew you.’
‘Well, that’s a lie, anyhow. You first knew me when we were at the kindergarten—and they hadn’t been published then. We’re not so young as you try to make out, Betty.’
‘I didn’t know you at the kindergarten—not to call it knowing. I merely disliked you, because you sat on your hair and never left off saying so.’
‘I can sit on it to this day.’
‘Well, suppose you can? Is that the be-all and end-all of existence? But we’re not talking about your hair, Poppy. We’re talking about the Indian Love Lyrics. And I tell you again, you get it wrong. It goes like this: “Less, pom-pom-pom, than the dust, pom-pom-pom, be-Neath, pom-pom, thy chariot Whee-heel.” The way you sing it, it sounds like a hymn.’
‘The way you sing it, it sounds like a railway accident.’
Terrified of what she might overhear next, Audrey crept away. Her umbrella was still in her hand. She opened the kitchen door. ‘Hannah. May I leave my umbrella to drip in the sink?’
Hannah sat at the table, shelling peas. ‘Leave it where you like, Miss Drew. I don’t know what Mr. Powell thinks he’s doing, calling these fresh garden peas. Maggots in every pod! I’ve got more than a mind to throw the whole lot back in his face.’
Audrey crept away from the kitchen. She went up to the spare room, fell on her knees among the tidy confident parcels for the Church Army, and prayed with her hands over her ears. During dinner she tried so slavishly to speak peace to Mother and Betty that they unitedly bit her head off. Well, if it united them….
For the time being, it did. Sunday might almost have been called a day of rest, if it had not been for Hannah, who slammed in and out looking harried and injured, and when offered praises of a gooseberry tart replied ominously that no one could say that she hadn’t always tried to give satisfaction. The next day, as is usual after Sunday, was Monday. Audrey had dedicated Monday to seeing her bank manager and booking her passage. But she did neither, for in the course of discussing whether their next outing should be to Windsor or Box Hill Mother became so curt and Betty so bridling that she was afraid to leave them alone together. All day she longed, as she had never thought it possible to long, for Donald’s return; and when she saw him at the gate, she rushed out and drew him into the tool shed.
‘Donald! It’s too awful! You were quite right, I feel it will break up at any moment, and Betty and Hannah will go off in a huff—for Hannah’s furious, too, and has turned against Powell. And now we shall never get away.’
‘You’re leaving on Wednesday—the day after tomorrow.’
‘The day after tomorrow?’
‘I knew you’d put off doing anything, so I fixed it all up this morning. I couldn’t get a direct flight, so you’ll have to change at Amsterdam, and spend a night in Athens, and go on from there by a plane that carries freight and one or two passengers. But you’ll find it all perfectly easy and straightforward.’
‘The day after tomorrow!’
‘You can make some excuse—the dentist or something—and travel up with me on the 8.5. And I’ll see you off. So all you’ve got to do now is to pay me for your tickets and behave as if nothing were up.’
‘And tell Mother.’
‘I will tell Mother.’
‘You will tell Mother? Donald, do you mean it?’
‘Certainly. I shall tell her that evening, when I get back. I’ve been thinking it out. It will be far better to tell her then, when it’s all past praying for. The shock will draw them together.’
She stared at him. In the dusk of the tool shed his face was smug and moon-like—as the face of some all-sufficing, all-managing, miraculously intervening angel would naturally be.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in and hurry up Hannah. And we’ll have a bottle of Graves. I feel like celebrating.’
On Wednesday, after a day during which her efforts to exercise a calming influence brought down on her a lecture from Betty about showing more consideration for Poppy’s blood pressure and a considered critique from Mother wherein her stupidity, her virginity, her grovellings at St. Botolph’s, her lifelong failure to exhibit a spark of initiative and her parsimony over buying new toothbrushes were severally laid forth and enlarged on; after a night of being alternately devoured by conscience and by a conviction that one or other of those planes would crash, Audrey caught the 8.5 with Donald. He accompanied her to the airport, assuring her from time to time that once she was on the plane everything would be easy and from time to time glancing covertly at his watch. At the airport they had twenty minutes to wait. Donald ordered coffee. His conversation was repetitive, and he seemed to have something on his mind. Remembering what lay before him, Audrey thought this was only reasonable. They sat at a little table and round them other people sat at other little tables, and it was as though this were some unnaturally hospitable out-patients’ department. Another group of doomed travellers, these doomed to perish on a flight to Brussels, was summoned and rose up. The doors opened on a roar of propellers, and closed behind them. Swallowing with terror, Audrey said, ‘Donald, I shall pray for you this evening. When will you do it? Before dinner or after?’
‘Do it? Oh, tell Mother, you mean. As soon as I get back. After all, I shall have to explain why you’re not with me.’
‘About quarter to seven.’
‘Or thereabouts. They should be back from their outing by then.’
‘I’m afraid she will be very angry.’
‘Yes. That’s what I’m counting on.’
The surmise that Donald had something up his sleeve darted back and transfixed her. ‘Counting on?’
‘Yes. You see, I shall be killing two birds with one stone. First I shall tell her about you going off to Africa. Then about my marriage.’
‘Donald! Are you going to marry?’
‘I am married. I married Lorna—my secretary—ten days ago. And I’ve been waiting to get you safe off to Africa so that I can begin with that, and draw the worst of her fire. As a matter of fact, I mean to say that you promised to break the news to her at the weekend while I was away—and that you forgot to. It can’t hurt you, you’ll be safe out of it. And it may make a great difference to me.’
‘Then if there’s a crash and I’m killed, it will serve me right!’ The words burst from her. It was as if her fear, raw and bleeding, had been torn out and lay on the table between the coffee cups. ‘Donald, I must go back! I can’t think why I gave in to you. How could I do such a thing? Leave Mother without a word? Why, it might kill her. Oh, poor Mother! And you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do for her. You’ve never even seen her in one of her attacks.’
‘Hannah will be there.’
‘I must have been mad to think of it. And just to make things easier for you—for that’s all it amounts to. Really, Donald, for cold-blooded selfishness … Why are you looking at me like that?’ He continued to look at her. ‘No, I must go back. I must be there when you tell her about your being married. Besides, if I’m there, you won’t have to tell her. You’ll be able to leave everything to me. As usual!’
Donald appeared to be considering this. Then he shook his head. ‘No, Audrey. I know what I’m about, and it will be far better if you are out of the way. For years, you’ve been getting on Mother’s nerves——’
‘Oh!’
‘—and she’s been getting on yours. Look at the state you’re in now, working yourself up, as if planes crashed every time someone who’s left a mother is on board. Besides, everyone with a vocation goes through something of this sort. Think of St. Chantal, walking over her son’s body. Concentrate on your vocation, Audrey. They’re expecting you. The tickets are bought. You can post a letter to Mother from Amsterdam, if you want to—in fact, I think you should. It’s all perfectly straightforward, and by this evening …’
‘Attention, please,’ said the impartially summoning voice.
‘Oh, poor Mother, poor Mother!’
‘Audrey! Pull yourself together. People are beginning to look at us.’
That did the trick. Appearing only moderately distraught, Audrey let herself be put on the plane, sank into an embracing seat, fastened her belt and began to read the advertisements. As the plane taxied interminably along the runway, everything became a certainty. A few minutes of remorse; then an explosion in which her cry for forgiveness would be lost. The plane rose. She looked down on reeling buildings, roofs fleeing like frightened sheep, a surprising quantity of trees. A moment later, she forgot everything in the realization that she was going to be sick.
In Athens a cable was handed to her: ‘MOTHER DIED CLIMBING BOX HILL.’