Читать книгу Family and Friends - Emma Page - Страница 8

CHAPTER 4

Supper was over in the Pierson household. Sarah sat upright in a straight-backed chair at one side of the sitting room fire, knitting assiduously a square of bright red wool. All over Africa sick natives huddled themselves under the comfort of patchwork blankets stitched together by Sarah over more than forty years. Or so she liked to think.

At the other end of the little room, as far away as possible from the fireplace, her stepbrother lowered his newspaper an inch or two and stole a glance at her. He had told her at supper about the closing of the shop. She had said nothing, merely raising her eyes to give him a single veiled look and then continuing to serve the food while he did his best to soften the blow. He explained the wisdom of the decision, enlarged on the certainty of an earlier pension, pointed out the new leisure to be enjoyed.

To all this she had made no reply. When his voice had finally ceased she flicked him a glance that seemed to hold sardonic amusement. Or a trace of quiet pleasure at the prospect before her? It was gone before he could read it. She had begun to talk about his father lying upstairs.

‘He doesn’t seem to be picking up. I’ll get the doctor to look in on him again.’ Of course, worried as she was–as they both were–about old Walter, she might not think retiring a year or two earlier a matter of any particular consequence. But he would just like to be sure. He shifted in his chair, nerving himself to raise the subject again.

‘You could take a holiday,’ he ventured. ‘A good long holiday.’ He couldn’t remember when she had last been away from the house for a single night. Arrangements could surely be made for himself and his father. ‘You’d enjoy that.’ He tried to picture her on her own in a seaside resort; all he could see was an image of her sitting straight-backed in a hotel lounge, fashioning rainbow coverlets for ailing Africans. Hardly a scene of compelling gaiety.

She raised her head and held it in a listening attitude. A sound came from the room above. Arnold got to his feet.

‘I’ll go up and sit with Father.’ He abandoned all attempt to talk to Sarah and went slowly upstairs into the front bedroom.

Walter was struggling to lift himself against the pillows. His face was flushed, his look restless and bewildered. He frowned as Arnold bent over to assist him; trying to place him, to come out of his clutching dream.

‘Oh–it’s you.’ He passed a trembling hand over his face. ‘I thought I was back in France.’ Relief now in his voice. ‘A bit of a nightmare.’ He sank back for a moment into that grim memory. ‘We were going out after Cottrell. Yorke and myself. There was a bright moon.’ He let out a long shuddering breath. ‘We could hear him screaming.’

‘It’s all right, Father,’ Arnold said soothingly. He straightened the bedclothes. ‘It was only a dream.’ But he knew himself the clammy horror of such dreams when the present dropped away and there were only the helpless cries of men long dead.

He crossed to the washbasin, moistened a flannel with cool water, came back to the bed and passed the cloth gently over his father’s face and hands.

‘You’ll feel better in a moment.’ He picked up a towel. ‘Would you like something to drink? I won’t leave you, I can give Sarah a shout, she’ll get something hot.’

Walter shook his head. ‘Don’t bother Sarah. I’ll just have some of that.’ He gestured at the tray holding a glass and a tall jug of orange squash covered with a beaded muslin drape. He watched Arnold pour the drink.

‘Do you ever see anything of Cottrell’s son these days? David. He grew up a good lad. His father would have been proud of him.’

‘I see him now and again.’ Arnold held the glass while his father drank from it. ‘In the street sometimes. Just to nod to.’ He’d been at school with David Cottrell, they’d been called up together in the middle of the war, served in the same county regiment; they’d been taken prisoner together, had endured the scarring years in the same Japanese camp. And now they merely nodded to each other in the streets, at once linked and held apart by the long chain of shared experience.

‘You should ask him round some evening when he’s off duty,’ Walter said. ‘I’d like a chat with him.’ Cottrell had gone into the police after the war, a detective sergeant now, well thought of in the town.

Arnold replaced the glass on the tray. ‘I’ll see if I can catch him one of these days.’ He hadn’t the slightest intention of asking Cottrell to the house. And by tomorrow Walter would have forgotten the request.

Downstairs in the hall the phone rang sharply. ‘Sarah will take it.’ Walter put out a detaining hand as Arnold turned to go. ‘You stay and talk to me.’

But Arnold eluded his grasp. As he reached the door he heard the receiver lifted and Sarah’s brisk voice.

‘Good evening, Mrs Yorke. I hope you’re feeling better?’ He drew his brows together, listening.

‘Who is it?’ Walter asked impatiently. ‘Sarah can deal with it.’

‘It’s Mrs Yorke.’ Arnold came slowly back towards the bed.

‘Then it’ll only be some business about the shop. Pull up a chair and sit down.’

Arnold looked about for a chair, trying without success to catch at fragments of the conversation below.

‘I must confess I was a little surprised at the news about the shop,’ Sarah said into the phone. After her long years of service she might surely have expected to be told the decision with due ceremony by either Mr or Mrs Yorke instead of in this secondhand fashion through her stepbrother.

‘What news?’ Zena asked sharply.

‘That the shop is to close down, of course.’ Sarah maintained the deferential courtesy of her tone in spite of a thrust of impatience. She wished Mrs Yorke wouldn’t play her devious games.

‘It’s news to me,’ Zena said. ‘I’m certainly not thinking of closing the shop. Where did you get hold of such an idea?’

‘I don’t think there can be any doubt about it. Arnold told me this evening. Mr Yorke spoke to him this afternoon.’ She heard the intake of Zena’s breath.

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line and then Zena spoke again in a lighter, more casual tone. ‘I’ll have a word with Owen about it later. Actually, I rang up to speak to your brother. Is he in?’

‘Yes, I’ll get him, he won’t be a moment.’ Sarah laid down the receiver.

So I wasn’t mistaken, Zena thought, biting her lip. There is something going on. My shop–Owen has the nerve to talk about closing down my shop–and without a word to me. I have to learn about it from an underling! He stood there as calm as you like this evening, never uttered a syllable about it. She drummed her fingers on the table. Where was Arnold? He was certainly taking his time.

‘Mrs Yorke wants to speak to you.’ Sarah came into the bedroom, ready to take Arnold’s place while he was gone. Her tone was drily neutral, her eyes expressed nothing.

For years she had been aware that Zena had some kind of hold over Arnold. She had speculated about it, resented it, failed to understand it. He had been sweet on Zena when he was a lad, of course, and there had been some kind of fusion between them for a short time after the war; she’d have had to be blind not to have seen it. But it certainly wasn’t affection that linked them now, she was sure of that. She had caught his look when her name was mentioned, the uneager way he moved whenever Zena’s imperious command summoned him to the phone.

Arnold went reluctantly downstairs. In the hall he stared at the receiver with distaste before picking it up. Whatever Zena wanted of him, it wasn’t likely to add to his peace of mind.

‘Yes?’ He threw a great deal of meaning into that single word.

‘I want you to come over here.’ No question whether it might be agreeable or convenient. ‘Owen’s out. I’m by myself.’

‘I’m busy this evening.’ He always gave this initial jerk of resistance.

‘How is your father?’ she asked. ‘I thought I might look in on him one of these days. Have a little chat.’

He closed his eyes, accepting the inevitable. ‘All right. I’ll come over later on.’ Zena had it in her power to darken old Walter’s last days. And Arnold knew with absolute certainty that she wouldn’t scruple to speak if it suited her.

‘No, not later on. Now, right away.’

‘Very well.’ He replaced the receiver without another word. At his sides his hands clenched and unclenched themselves. There was the laughing, dazzlingly pretty Zena of his youth, and there was this sour, dangerous woman with touched-up hair and a puffy face. At what point of time had one image overlaid the other? Even now they seemed to him totally distinct, as if she had been two separate women, the one who had gone away and the one who had bafflingly taken her place.

‘I’m going out,’ he called up the stairs. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very long.’ He snatched his coat from the stand and shrugged it on, flung open the door and let himself out into the misty lamplight of the empty street.

A surge of melancholy rose inside him. He was forty-seven years old, no wife, no child, no house of his own, not even a spectacular success at his job. His mediocre qualifications had been laboriously acquired by sweating his way through an accountancy course at evening classes; it was highly unlikely that he could ever hope for a really good post.

He pondered again the possibility of clearing out, making a fresh start in some other town. It seemed for a hopeful moment that it might be the answer. At one stroke he could turn his back on the past, stepping down from the train in that far-off place a completely different man. Outgoing, at ease, in command of his life.

But there was never really a fresh start. Among the inescapable luggage one carried the burden of personality. And in that other town he would start without any kind of contact, he would be even more alone. He saw the bleak lodgings, himself confined every evening to a single room or wandering about streets that didn’t even call up, as the streets of Milbourne sometimes did, memories of a cherished childhood.

He shook his head, relinquishing the notion of escape. As he turned into the narrow road leading to The Sycamores he fell back into an old habit of mind he employed whenever depression threatened to overwhelm him. It was a trick he had begun to practise in the prison camp; it had kept him sane then and it had served him during all the years that followed. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but even when it failed, the effort involved at least took his attention for a brief spell from his blackest imaginings.

What he did was to switch his brain into another gear, trying to alter the whole climate of his mind, looking back into his boyhood, attempting to think himself into the same attitude of carefree gaiety to life.

He would look at the sky, the trees, the buildings, striving to see them as they had appeared to him then; he would watch a child skipping by and grasp at the notion that the time and place and weather that seemed so carelessly joyful to the child existed also at that very moment for himself.

And click! sometimes the brief miracle happened and he could glance about him with hope and pleasure, feeling the bright air as inviting, the roads as beckoning, as forty years ago. As if he were constantly practising the memory of happiness so that if he were ever fortunate enough to encounter it again in reality he would remember and recognize it, clutch it to him before it slipped away for ever.

By the time he turned the knob on the front door of The Sycamores he felt composed, almost cheerful.

‘Hello there!’ He sent an enquiring call soaring from the hallway. A moment later he heard Zena’s answering voice, and he went briskly, confidently up the stairs.

In the comfortable sitting room of his small detached house in a quiet area of Milbourne, Neil Underwood sat at his bureau, shuffling a little pile of bills into a tidy square. He sighed; his face wore a baffled look. The exuberance of Christmas had faded now, leaving behind a wash of regret for the rash generosity that had sent him out so blithely to the silver-glittered shops.

Rates, electricity, gas, coal; the record-player for his daughter. Once again he flicked through the accounts as if they might magically have diminished in the last three minutes. His glance came inescapably to rest on the biggest body-blow of the lot, the one he had so far managed to thrust into some merciful recess in his mind–the appalling, horrifying bill for Ruth’s fur coat.

Four hundred and fifty pounds! For an instant he felt almost proud of the figures, magnificent, princely. A noble gesture of a man towards his new wife on her first Christmas in the bosom of his family.

A week ago, with pine needles scattering the carpet and sprigs of holly peering out from the tops of pictures and mirrors, it had seemed worth every penny. Ruth had slipped the coat on with delight, sinking her fingers into the silky pelt. He had felt himself a maharajah, an emperor. And there had been the lunatic notion that Santa Claus might suddenly remember his duties, there might be a windfall, a legacy–a gold necklace from the Iron Age might spring up in his back garden.

He jabbed a pen down on the papers, considering the possibility of an overdraft, shaking his head even as he pondered the word. Some little time now since his bank manager had smiled at him; his eyes these days took on a wary, calculating look as soon as he saw Neil. Bank managers weren’t notoriously helpful to men who ran through their patrimony, actually spending capital instead of doing what every natural law commanded, sending it out to increase and multiply.

And not only to live up to the hilt of his less than princely salary from the local council but to take a new wife in addition! None of your homely stew-and-semolina-pudding wives either but an elegant, sophisticated young woman whom any bank manager would at once associate with a regrettable taste for fillet steaks and smoked salmon.

Ah well! Jabbing at the bills didn’t seem to have helped much, so he swept them all away into a pigeon-hole, slammed the desk shut and stood up. He’d done his bit for the time being; he’d taken the damned things out and looked at them, about all any civilized creature could be expected to do on New Year’s Day. It would be a few weeks yet before the final notices shrieked out their red-ink warnings. All kinds of things might happen in that time. He crossed over to the television set and switched it on.