Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 3

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The way in which Miss Pomfret and Miss Primrose met was typical. It was typical of their previous and independent histories and of their subsequent and joint history; but it is their joint history which really concerns us. This is how they met.

Miss Pomfret got into the train at Cirencester, having just buried her younger sister Ursula. It had always been a whim on the part of Ursula that she should not be buried in the little churchyard at Bramlingham, a mile from the cottage which she and her sister occupied in a blue Cotswold valley. No, she shouldn’t like to be so near her sister, she lying so cold and doing nothing and Miss Pomfret with all the dusting and the cooking and the washing-up to do, and quite alone. It would make her uncomfortable. She must be taken to Cirencester, where they were born and where their mother had died. There she would not feel contrite, said Ursula, for taking no hand in the cooking of stews and the setting straight of pictures. So when Ursula died (she had always been expected to die first, having been delicate from childhood) her sister duly carried her away to Cirencester.

Miss Pomfret got into the train for the return journey dry eyed and a little stern. (Miss Pomfret, I say. It was only as “Miss Pomfret” that Miss Pomfret was ever thought of or known. Even by Ursula, it would seem. Ursula must have known her Christian name, but she died just before this story begins and the knowledge lies with her in Cirencester.) Somehow, Miss Pomfret was on her mettle. Ursula dead; no relative nearer than Nigeria, and he, as Ursula used to say, a Prince Leopold of Holland the way he ill-treated the natives; herself and the Vicar of Bramlingham sworn enemies; and those two armchairs in the south room facing each other, where Ursula and she used to talk and knit and nod. How Ursula’s chair would creak on windy spring evenings! She twisted a loose tress of grey hair from her eyes, stared defiantly into the railway carriage, saw only a little woman in the opposite corner with her face turned away, and entered. Miss Pomfret, as I have said, was on her mettle.

The train moved away and both ladies sat silent and motionless for many minutes. A sense of strain began to tighten the air. Why wouldn’t she, that other one, turn her head? Why? Was she being superior? Did she resent anybody else getting into the carriage? Gracious me, did the woman think she’d bought the carriage? No, it couldn’t be exactly that! It didn’t belong, somehow, to that old-fashioned bodice and the subdued clothing that wrapped the mysterious little figure. It made Miss Pomfret feel awkward; it was as if one were travelling with a spirit.

Then Miss Pomfret became aware that ever so slightly the shoulders of the stranger were shaking, slightly but quite surely. Then Miss Pomfret felt a cold hand of desolate certainty at her heart. Oh, poor, poor dear, she was sobbing, that tiny, hurt woman, sobbing like a child in the dark.

In one moment Miss Pomfret was by her side, just as she used to find herself suddenly, without quite knowing it, by Ursula’s chair or bed, when she gave one of her short sombre coughs.

“Tell me ... oh, I’m so sorry ... can I help?”

The stranger shook her head, but did not turn it towards Miss Pomfret. Her hand still covered her eyes, as it were from the sun, though at that moment actually the sun lay behind a heavy stretch of cloud. And then, unaccountably, Miss Pomfret herself broke down. She had not shed a single tear all these last mournful days, and now a stranger’s sorrow, in a common train, darted through her like a stiletto, unbearably. Fortunately—Miss Pomfret subsequently remembered—it was at least not a corridor train....

And then a voice said to her—a faded voice and thin, like a forgotten spinet touched in an attic, and a voice, none the less, curiously sweet:

“Oh, what is going to happen to us? Here’s you as well! What shall we do?”

And Miss Pomfret replied, “I can’t tell you how much she was ... how little everything is without her! You too! What have you lost? Is it your sister too?”

A silence followed. The women looked away from each other. Miss Pomfret—sworn foe as she was to fidgets—tapped the thumb of each hand with each successive finger, tapped the floor five times with each foot, adjusted her hat.

And then Miss Primrose—this was the stranger’s name—said, “He’s gone away. He lied.”

The humiliation of that bowed head, the catch of that husky voice, were more poignant than tears. And, as Miss Pomfret knew, there was nothing more to say or to learn.

“Where are you going?” said Miss Pomfret briefly.

“I don’t know. I just got a ticket for the first train that left the station. It doesn’t matter—nothing matters.”

Then said Miss Pomfret, that unromantic lady who had never suffered from illusions because the world had never offered them her, to this crushed child of a woman she had not set eyes on half an hour ago:

“I need you and you me, and there’s room for you in our cottage. Ursula is dead. I’ve just buried her at Cirencester. You and Tim—Tim’s the dog—will be great friends, and he’d fret with Ursula ... away. You are coming?”

Miss Primrose looked up into Miss Pomfret’s eyes for twenty or thirty seconds.

“Yes!” she said.

When Miss Pomfret and Miss Primrose arrived at the cottage that evening, what with the oil stove which had to be filled, and the bread which both of them liked ever so thinly cut, and a dozen little domestic concerns and a dozen more, you would have thought that Miss Primrose had occupied that cottage as long as Miss Pomfret. And there was the routine to be explained; oh, there was much to do!

Six years passed quietly at the Cotswold cottage. You can imagine what sort of busy drowsy years they were. Tim, faithless fellow, accepted Miss Primrose in Ursula’s place without the least demur. He did not utter a single whine of inquiry concerning Ursula, though she had petted him even when Miss Pomfret had lifted her voice and said, “Bad dog, go to bed!” But, then, why should he? Never again was Ursula mentioned by Miss Pomfret, as never again was any reference made to that man who had lied to Miss Primrose and left the world black for her; their obsequies had been spoken in that train speeding from Cirencester. They had passed from the world.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Miss Primrose got up first and made the breakfast. These were egg days, in any permutation of egg. The other three week-days were Miss Pomfret’s, and these were fish days, for Miss Pomfret had a hundred ideas on the correct treatment of plaice or haddock or sole. Sunday was arranged as the spirit directed. After breakfast there was the kitchen garden, not to mention the flower-beds and the minute rockery. There was painting for Miss Primrose in the afternoons, crochet and knitting for Miss Pomfret; in the evenings, for both, there was the circulating library. A gentle world it was, though the Vicar of Bramlingham remained difficult and accused Miss Pomfret of Socialism, as the milkman reported. What if the hair grew a little greyer, the fingers a trifle more reluctant? What mattered these?

And then one Wednesday morning—a Miss Primrose morning—Miss Pomfret came down at the usual hour for poached eggs, or eggs, perhaps, scrambled. But there was no smell of toast. The water had boiled away from the aluminium kettle. The door was open and the cold wind blew in from the garden.

Miss Primrose left no note behind. She had taken with her only her coat, hat, and purse. Miss Pomfret, stealing towards the garden gate that evening, like a ghost, found a briar pipe under the hawthorn that grew just inside the gate. She took it in with her and stuffed it at the bottom of a trunk under a heap of discarded curtains and cloths, so that it was not likely she would come across it again. There was no resentment in Miss Pomfret’s heart. She knew it was not a matter as to who had a greater right to Miss Primrose—he, the unnamed man who had lied, or herself. It was not a moral issue, an affair of the mind or the conscience at all. She felt merely a bitter taste in the mouth, and heard a dull singing behind her forehead all day and deep into the night.

“She has taken the latchkey with her,” said Miss Pomfret. “I shall have to get another one made.”