Tea At Gunter's Read online

  ‘You can just take the dress back,’ I said sharply. ‘I don’t want anything to do with it.’

  She looked surprised. ‘What a storm in a teacup, darling. Quentin’s to blame of course, and I’m sure he gave you a horrid time, but why don’t you just forget it, darling?’ She smiled – a small, secret smile. ‘Richard has.’

  I didn’t say anything. A little later, looking at her watch – a wrist one today – she said, ‘Juliet really must go.’ She opened the drawer: ‘Some Queens and Tatlers for you there, darling.’

  At the door, she said, ‘We must meet sometime, Juliet would like that. I’ll be in touch, darling.’

  *

  I expected to hear from her about as much as I expected to hear from Bob. In fact, I hoped to hear from neither, and only wanted to wipe from my mind the whole unhappy occasion. Even the moments I’d enjoyed were sicklied over. Luckily, my father hadn’t asked me about it at all, but my mother’s questions were incessant, and the more she asked the less I told her: I must have seemed to her more than usually vague and exasperating.

  ‘I hope you didn’t drink, Lucy,’ she said at one point: harking back to one of her greatest fears. An odd worry, in a way, since Robert Tinsdale had kept a good cellar – she still spoke of it with pride. I could only suppose that it was her mother’s influence (helped on perhaps by half-buried memories of her father) which had prevailed.

  But whether I’d been drinking or not, it was obvious, she said, that I’d wasted my time there. Had I really nothing to tell her, about anybody? What about this boy, this man, who’d brought me home-who exactly was he? And so on; on and on in this vein. Looking hurt rather than angry, she implied that Cinderella had come back with both slippers firmly on: worse – had not even danced with the prince.

  ‘I suspect of course,’ she said, ‘that you didn’t even try. How ever will you manage in London?’

  Christmas came: never a great success in our household. The forced togetherness only increased the tensions; present-giving invariably went wrong; and by nightfall there was sure to have been a scene of some sort.

  Ten days or so before, a wave of nostalgia for Patmore would overwhelm my mother, and she’d devote an entire afternoon to buying Mrs Pickering’s present: coming back with something totally unsuitable and unnecessarily expensive for which Mrs Pickering had never expressed any desire, and which she would receive with polite surprise. (When I suggested once that she might prefer the money, my mother was indignant, hurt, uncomprehending: ‘One of our greatest pleasures in December, Lucy, was the outing to buy Christmas presents for the staff …’)

  This year, while she was over in Harrogate making her annual search, I received a present myself. An enormous scarlet azalea was delivered to the door; with it a note, which read: ‘Love, from a repentant Nell and Quentin.’

  I looked at it with mixed feelings, as I did also a small parcel from Juliet two days later. It was a handbag size of Houbigant’s ‘Quelques Fleurs’. ‘In memory of the White Rose,’ she’d written, ‘and do forgive Juliet.’

  ‘So suitable for a young girl,’ said my mother, sniffing at it. ‘Papa, you know, always bought me Floris. “Gardenia”. Every Christmas from 1911.’

  The meal, not usually a success, was even less of one this year. My grandmother came over: still very upset, she sat withdrawn, hands restless on her lap, while my father salvaged slices of drying turkey (last year it had oozed pale red juice), and spooned out portions of underboiled austerity plum pudding – its centre still cold and clammy.

  After the meal, my mother as usual blamed all her culinary disasters onto the post-war world. Running the two wars together, and moving straight from food to bigger issues she remarked of the world today that it was ‘fit only for spivs and squatters’.

  ‘Nothing makes sense since 1914 – who can blame the squatters? Where are the homes fit for heroes? In 1917, and in 1918 –’

  ‘Keep those years to yourself!’ interrupted my father, suddenly and angrily.

  ‘Winifred’s only giving a political opinion, Peter,’ said my grandmother mildly; but with some of her old spirit – surprisingly taking my mother’s side.

  My father leant over and snapped on the wireless for the King’s speech.

  ‘You and your memories – I’ll give you 1918, Winifred. You weren’t even sewing shirts for soldiers then.’ He gave the fire a kick. ‘Just ironing them for officers.’

  Christmas over, I sank into the usual holiday torpor. With my mother I felt ill at ease, although her mood was equable enough and she’d stopped nagging. The discovery of the letters, which I thought I’d put out of mind, disturbed me still. Beneath my present feelings of emptiness, it lay festering: joined now by memories of the Inglesons’ dance, and all to do with it. I didn’t water the azalea – I’d just plonked it down in the sitting-room – but it flourished obstinately: cared for, I suspect, by my father.

  Then, just after the New Year, Elizabeth had a few days off. Not wanting to stay at home – Mrs Horsfall was evidently worse than ever – she spent most of them with me. She was very cheerful: Andrew, who was still mad about her, had been on leave. But her real life, I sensed, was in the hotel now. She talked a lot about a regular, George Turnbull, who was in several times a week and who often talked to her in reception.

  ‘He’s quite old, Lu – in his forties, and he’s got a moustache; I’ve never been kissed by a moustache, Lu; and I can’t help thinking – he’s that fresh you know, sometimes. He’s good-looking, too, Lu. Not as good-looking as your Dad, but not bad at all, and smart like. And ever so well off, Lu.’

  Her ways of passing the time, however, hadn’t changed at all: there seemed to me a greater air of unreality than ever now about her attempts to get notice taken of us – in the cinema, in buses, in cafés and even, one snowy dark afternoon, in Harrogate reference library. ‘You see some smashing-looking boys going in there, Lu. Undergrads, and that sort.’ But although she chose both the seats and the reading matter most carefully, we had no success. It appeared that the few boys in there had actually come in to work.

  Two days before term began I caught ’flu.

  My mother, provided she wasn’t feeling ill herself, rather enjoyed playing nurse. Bringing me up some home-made lemonade, (‘at Patmore, we always had a jug of this by our bedside – for the slightest indisposition’) she sat on the end of my bed, and reminisced about the Spanish ’flu epidemic.

  ‘Ethel went so quickly! It was a terrible shock to us all. Just a few days in bed, Lucy, and seeming to recover – then all hope gone. An awful colour, struggling for breath (I should know about struggling for breath, Lucy). It was unbelievable. And she looked so healthy too – all that work on the land. One would never have thought. But of course the food wasn’t good then – we had no resistance. And it’s the same story now, Lucy, thanks to Cripps and all this austerity …’

  Her third day as a nurse however, she became a little restless and after lunch announced that she was going to the cinema. ‘The Guinea Pig – about white-coated scientists I should imagine. I feel rather in the mood for something like that.’

  Thinking that I felt a bit better, and tired of lying in bed, as soon as she’d gone I got up and began to wander shakily around the house. Passing her bedroom, I had a sudden, very strong temptation to go and look if the workbox was unlocked – and to see if any more letters had been added. Although I knew passionately that I didn’t want to read them I stood, my hand on the doorknob, for several minutes. Then turning away suddenly, on impulse, I wobbled instead up the narrow stairs that led to the top of the house: to the attic and boxroom.

  I didn’t go up there often; couldn’t remember in fact when I’d last been – nor was there any real reason for going now. The box-room was crammed with rubbish most of which could well have gone for salvage, while the attic was just a dumping place for any overflow – although it did have in it as well a bed, a small electric fire and a gramophone, dating from the first days of the War
when it had been cleared out and converted for an evacuee. Now my father used the room as a refuge, sleeping in it when he came in late or when he’d had open warfare with my mother. He was probably there more often than I realized because it didn’t smell musty or damp and there was a lingering scent of eau de cologne.

  I turned on the electric fire and sat on the end of the bed waiting for the room to warm up. Outside, it was already growing dark and through the small high window the sky was leaden, full of icy rain. The room with its sloping ceiling felt oppressive: junk everywhere, piles of newspapers in one corner; in another the wind-up gramophone and a cardboard box of old records. I never bothered with these. Once, years ago, Elizabeth and I had played through them all, but we hadn’t thought much of them; collected by my father as a boy – and some of them must have been secondhand even then – they were mostly scratched hissing ballads, muffled Caruso, worn Gerald Kirby or G. H. Elliot. We much preferred the old ‘twenties ones at Elizabeth’s home: with titles like ‘Something in my disposish’, ‘Diga diga doo’ and ‘My canary has circles under its eyes’, they’d all belonged, unbelievably, to a young Mrs Horsfall. There was a radiogram there too, so that when later Elizabeth and I bought records jointly – Joe Loss, Glenn Miller, Geraldo, Ambrose – it was always at her house we kept them.

  But now, for want of anything better to do I looked through the ones in the cardboard box; then played a few of them. I wasn’t enchanted. Age and wear had given them a false rhythm and tone – John McCormack, in the garden where the praties grow, had become arch, almost hysterical. Then, after ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ I forgot to rewind, and ‘A Perfect Day’ died down with a baritone moan. The room was warming up, and turning the gramophone handle vigorously I began to feel lightheaded. Heavy rain was beating now against the window and the skylight.

  Back at the box, I came across – sandwiched between Gertie Millar and ‘The Rosary’ – a thick one-sided record of Handel’s ‘Where e’er you walk’; its label was blurred so that I couldn’t make out the singer’s name; the quality of the record was poor also, and at first I listened only half-heartedly, irritated even as he sang of cool glades and shades. Then, arrested by some quality in the voice – the sound, now faint now scratched now oddly pitched – I tensed.

  It was nearing the end. ‘Trees where you sit –’ the singer’s voice rose – ‘shall crowd into a shade’: lovingly, he played on the words. ‘Shall crowd into a shade,’ he sang. Final, rounded, triumphant.

  Surprised that I’d liked it, I played it over again; sitting back on my heels beside the gramophone, trying to ignore my throbbing head. Outside, the rain turned to hail drummed against the skylight. The room seemed very warm; confused images, most of them meaningless, jostled for a place in my mind. Then I shut my eyes and, suddenly and clearly, saw Richard.

  He was exactly as I’d seen him at the party; exactly as when, dancing with him (‘may I ask you something?’ he’d said) I’d given my happy reply: ‘A cast-off of Juliet’s … never fitted … doesn’t want it…’ In my confusion I’d barely noticed his hurt; later I’d been too upset and too angry. Now – long after the event – I saw it quite clearly. The flushed forehead, the struggle behind the eyes, the lines about the nostrils, the mouth working. He might have been in the room.

  The gramophone needle, record finished, grated to and fro; I did nothing about it; pierced by pity – useless now – I sat quite still, hands clenched, nails dug into palms, fighting his image.

  And then, just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone again and I was aware only of the throbbing in my head. For a while I didn’t move; then getting up dazedly I cleared away the records, turned off the fire, tidied up the bed and crept back, shivering, to my room.

  I must have fallen asleep almost at once. When I woke up, my mother was in the room.

  ‘Such weather!’ she exclaimed, drawing the curtains to hide it, ‘I should never have gone out.’ She sat on the end of the bed, after placing a cup of watery Bovril beside me. ‘And it was so disappoïnting! Such a silly film, Lucy. All about a public school which has to give a place to a working-class boy – the result of some Government report or other. Anyway, of course he doesn’t fit in. The Guinea Pig, it’s from a play, I believe. I had hoped it would be something like Madame Curie –’

  She looked tired, pinched. Later, she brought her supper up and ate it with me. ‘Peter never even said he wouldn’t be in,’ she grumbled. I felt uneasy with her, as if I had some secret.

  That evening my temperature went up to a hundred and three, and all that night I lay: half awake, half asleep, my mind full of ghoulish, terrifying images. Outside in the darkness, the lorries that had killed my brother crashed their gears and came rushing towards me – the room shaking; shadows on the wall, downstairs a door banging; hot and cold by turns, I was haunted too by anxiety: a question hung, half-formed – as if something once known had been forgotten; all the next day, tossing and turning, I searched and searched.

  On the second morning, I woke late, weak but cool, my head clear. I’d had a dream, I knew that, but I could remember nothing of it. Through the half-open curtains the sky was a sharp blue, a light winter breeze rattling the window frame; as I lay there, a sudden intense joy swept over me; a memory of such sweetness, that it lent radiance to everything around me – chipped shiny chest of drawers, faded curtains, heavy dark wardrobe, threadbare carpet. And then I remembered. Greeting what I’d been searching for in my delirium: I love him, I thought; I love him. I love Richard.

  It was the most joyful knowledge. Masked by fever, revealed to me now on a crisp January morning, it needed no action, no thought. It was just a wonderful discovery, a secret source of strength which all that day grew and grew – precious, because delicate, yet tough: a beginning of such simplicity and satisfaction that I couldn’t imagine it otherwise.

  And it made me well again; so that when later that afternoon my mother, clutching her forehead, said that she’d caught my complaint (‘so dizzy, Lucy!’) I was able to nurse her, strong enough to run up and downstairs time without number, finding nothing too much trouble.

  My father was away: ‘Thank God Peter isn’t around – Not of course that he would catch it. He’s never ill.’

  ‘You must rest,’ she said feebly, the second day. ‘You should be resting, Lucy.’

  But rest, like thought, I didn’t need. Sitting up in the attic, I played the Handel record: three four five times, over and over. Mostly I didn’t need even that – knowing that any time, at any moment of the day, I’d only to halt in my tracks for the wonderful, inexplicable sweetness to suffuse me again.

  It was still with me when, three days later – my mother well enough to be left – I climbed the stairs of the White Rose once more. Blissful, confident, banging away at my upright, my fingers weak, my head like cottonwool in the fuggy heat, I was unassailable.

  And it was the same in the afternoon, sitting in the shorthand room, while smoke from the paraffin stove rose and made our eyes smart. Miss Laycock, looking exhausted already, dictated:

  ‘Queen Victoria had a necklace of pink pearls which was worth $80,000, but the ladies of the Rothschild family possess pearls of far greater value – Baroness Rothschild has a pearl necklace valued at £50,000

  Miss Metcalfe, coming up behind me suddenly, looked over my shoulder and snorted.

  ‘Where is our mind today, Miss Taylor?’ she asked loudly. ‘Where is our mind?’

  Chapter Ten

  Depression struck towards the end of my second day back. It was alarming in its sudden onslaught as if, deceitfully, it had only been lying in wait: one moment, calmly rolling a new sheet of paper in my machine, I was happy; the next – all was gone; I was without hope or purpose, where the sweetness had been, a dull ache.

  Unable to face going straight home after the White Rose, I walked instead, like an automaton, in the direction of the Valley Gardens. It had been one of those January days, never fully light – now it was darkening fa
st and an icy wind starting up. The Gardens were nearly deserted: in the sun colonnade there was only a woman in a pixie hood hurrying a small child home. Hunched and shivery, I sat on a bench a little above the stream and rockery. The seat felt icily damp, even through my coat; as I gazed out at the tall grey houses tiered behind, I wondered, common sense flooding in, what ever could I have been about these last few days? In what Never Never Land had I been living? What could I have been thinking?

  It was then that I remembered Juliet. Mysteriously, miraculously, I’d forgotten her existence until today. Yet, adored by Richard, she might well by the year’s end have married him; and in the meantime, unless my mother changed her mind suddenly, I’d be leaving Yorkshire anyway. When should I ever – why should I ever, see him again? Even if finally Juliet didn’t want him for herself, what was the most I could hope for? The odd glimpse, the stray report, and if I was persistent and haunted the right places, perhaps the casual encounter. All very small coin – even if through longing and desire I turned them into treasure trove.

  In the wake of my quiet happiness – my rich feelings of only a few hours ago-had come something sharp, demanding: above all, hungry. But it couldn’t live on nothing. That I wanted it to stay, I was certain: an emotional vacuum which I’d barely noticed, nature had abhorred – to return to that state now was a far, far worse prospect. Sitting there, self-indulgently hopeless, miserable: I’ll settle for the hunger, I thought.

  My mother was up again; weak and querulous, breathing with difficulty, she didn’t suppose that she would feel better now until at least the spring. Princess Elizabeth had measles, she said, as if this royal irrelevance somehow dignified her own ill health.

  My own quietness and general low state weren’t much noticed, fortunately; they were anyway easily explained by post-’flu depression and overwork at the White Rose. She did comment however, on my lack of appetite, remarking also that I was very pale.