Читать книгу The Gazebo - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 8

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Miss Madison was always extremely offended if anyone alluded to her establishment as a boarding-house. The word had drab associations. It suggested something inferior to an hotel. Miss Madison took Paying Guests. The term guest house was not unacceptable. It was her aim to provide cheerful surroundings, nourishing and appetizing food, and the amenities of home at a moderate charge. Since she was a very good cook, her rooms were seldom empty. Old Mr Peters had occupied one of them ever since his wife died ten years ago. He might be a disconsolate widower, but the Miss Pimms often remarked on how much younger and better he had looked since he had gone to live at Miss Madison’s.

Each of the rooms was furnished in a distinctive colour and was known by that name. Mr Peter had the Red Room. Old Mrs Bottomley, who had been there nearly as long as he had, occupied the Blue Room. She was in her middle eighties, and she had one of those fair downy complexions which seem to get fairer and downier as time goes on. She was a very nice old lady. She had blue eyes and fluffy white hair, and she really looked charming in her pale blue room. Mr and Mrs Blount were in the Pink Room, which was a pity, because poor Mrs Blount had no complexion at all, and the flowered carpet, the pink walls and curtains, and the twin beds with their rose-coloured bed-spreads, only made her look paler and plainer than ever. The pink was also very unfortunate as a background for her rather sparse sandy hair. Not that she herself was in the way of noticing such things as colour effects, but it afflicted Miss Madison who was. If another double room had been vacant, she would have pressed the Blounts to take it, though really when she came to think it over she didn’t know which of the other colours would have been any better. Yellow or green wouldn’t have been too bad with the hair, but she felt shaken when she considered what they might do to that pale flat face, those dull pale eyes. Miss Madison decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about. People who worried disseminated gloom. She considered cheerfulness to be a duty.

Mrs Blount sat in the easy chair in her pink bedroom with a gaily coloured magazine on her lap. It was one of those publications which announce themselves frankly as appealing to Woman with a capital W. It contained household hints, the kind of love story in which everything always comes right in the end, advice on dress, on health, on the conduct of your love-life, on how to manage your house, your children, your husband, together with answers to correspondents, and most important of all, how to be beautiful. Mrs Blount always read the love stories first. When the current serial left the heroine convinced that the tall fair man who had come into her life was unalterably attached to another, she could solace herself with the thought that if not next week, or the next, or the next after that, at any rate in the end it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding and the wedding-bells would ring. Sometimes the man was dark with flashing eyes. Sometimes instead of being handsome he had strong, rugged features. But it all came to the same in the end. He put his arms round the heroine and they kissed each other. Of course the people who wrote the story put it in much more complicated ways, but that was how Mrs Blount thought about it. She was a simple woman and a most unhappy one. It soothed this unhappiness to read about other people who were unhappy, and who got over it and lived happily ever after. It wasn’t that she thought it would happen to her, she just liked to read about it happening to other people. It was for the same reason that she read every word of the advice on beauty culture—‘If your skin is inclined to be greasy—if you are getting a double chin—if there are any of those fine lines about your eyes—if you are inclined to lose weight, to put on weight—if your face is too long, too wide, too plump, too thin ...’ There were ways in which you could put everything right, and she never got tired of reading about them. She didn’t get as far as imagining herself doing any of the things that were recommended. Never for an instant did she picture herself with wavy hair, a transfigured skin, eyebrows carefully shaped and darkened, eyeshadow, rouge, powder, and lipstick. She just liked to read about these things.

When she heard Mr Blount’s step on the stairs she pushed the magazine behind a cushion. He laughed at the stories and made unkind remarks about the letters from correspondents. They were people who had their troubles, and it wasn’t right to laugh at them. When he came into the room with a frown she knew at once that something had upset him. He shut the door behind him and said in an ugly voice,

‘Fred’s here.’

Mrs Blount’s pale mouth fell open, and he swore at her.

‘You needn’t make yourself more of a damned idiot than you are! I said, “Fred’s here!” You can understand as much as that, can’t you?’

She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’

He stared at her angrily.

‘We’ve been too long about it, and that’s a fact! Might have made a difference if you’d played up a bit! You’re supposed to be dead set on the house, aren’t you? But I take you to see it, and what do you do—just sit about like a bundle of old clothes and say, “Very nice!”.’

‘What did you want me to say?’ The words came slow and dead.

He swore again.

‘I ought to have left you at home, and that’s the fact! I ought to have known it wasn’t any good expecting you to play up! You are supposed to be so keen on that house that I shan’t get any peace until I’ve bought it! You’re supposed to want it so badly that I’ve got to go on raising the price until they are willing to sell, and when I take you there you sound just about as keen as a cat would be for a ducking! I tell you I could have twisted your neck! And what’s the result—what’s the result, I ask you! Fred, I tell you—Fred turning up here with money in his pocket and bidding me up! Fred who hadn’t two sixpences to rub against each other and came to me to put up the money! And now what? He’s had a lucky win, and here he is, in the market against me and bidding me up! In a wicked temper about it too, that’s what he is! Says I double-crossed him! When he hadn’t got twopence to put up himself—not twopence! And now he says he’ll blow the gaff if I don’t take him in! After bidding me up too! The dirty spite of it!’

Mrs Blount sat on the chair and looked at him. She never knew anything about his business—he never told her anything. Only every now and then when something had put him out he would talk like he was doing now. He never explained anything, and she didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to know about his business. Sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep it would come to her that if she ever did get to know about it anything might happen. Anything dreadful. She just sat there and went on looking at him. When he used that voice to her she was too frightened to do anything else. She would have liked to look away, but she was afraid even to do that. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad. He had a red face, and eyes that were too light for it. People thought him a jolly-looking man. There was a frightening strength in his arms and his big coarse hands. She had married him because nobody else had asked her, and it didn’t take her long to find out that he had married her because of the house her Uncle George had left her and the thousand pounds in the post office savings bank.

He stumped over to the window and came back again.

‘Now look here!’ he said. ‘If you run into Fred, you don’t know anything—see? Not anything at all! If he asks you what I’m doing bidding for the house, you don’t know! You can look as much like an idiot as you want to and you don’t know anything at all! It would be just like Fred to catch you alone and try and get things out of you! You just shake your head and say you don’t know a thing! You can say I never talk to you about business, and that’s gospel truth! Have you got that?’

She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’

‘All right, don’t you forget it!’

He stumped out of the room and shut the door behind him carefully, not banging it, because he was the kind husband who was always so considerate to a trying wife.

Miss Moxon was coming out of the Green Room, followed by her friend, Mrs Doyle. She was tall and thin. Mrs Doyle was as round as a dumpling but full of energy. She undertook shopping for people who were abroad. She also met schoolchildren and saw them across London. In the intervals she wrote innumerable letters to her married sons and daughters, who were scattered round the world in both directions from China to Peru. Miss Moxon only did cross-word puzzles, but she did them very slowly and they sufficed. They stopped and spoke to Mr Blount and asked him if Mrs Blount was feeling any better. When he shook his head regretfully, they commiserated with him, and thought what a good husband he was.

On the other side of the door Mrs Blount heard their voices. She knew what they were saying, because it was just what everybody said. They were sorry for her because they were kind, but they were much more sorry for Sid having such a poor thing of a wife.

When the footsteps and the voices had quite gone away she got her magazine out from under the cushion and began to read about how to renovate a woollen dress which had got the moth in it. You did it by cutting the sleeves short and making patch-pockets out of the pieces you cut away. It didn’t say what would happen if the mothholes were where they couldn’t be covered by pockets. The moths had been terrible two years ago. She had forgotten to put moth-ball with her combinations, and they had come out full of holes.

She passed to a recipe for getting stains out of marble.