Tea At Gunter's Page 3
She chose me twice for Nuts in May; but although I’d been already over three years at the school I didn’t dare to speak to her, until one dark December afternoon when, after putting up my hand during percussion, I walked along the corridor to the lavatories, and saw her looking through the boys’ coat pockets.
She looked startled for a moment. Then, in her breathy voice, she said ‘Want to know what I found in Billy Holroyd’s?’
I nodded. ‘Dried cow muck and a dead frog,’ she said, pulling a face. Down the corridor, the thin chiming of the triangles came through the closed door. She leant back against the coats and took out a length of Spanish; breaking off a piece for me: ‘You got a brother?’ she asked.
I explained; and she said, ‘I’m an only too.’
She chewed with her mouth open, her big teeth black with liquorice. After a moment she said: ‘I’ve noticed you lots – you’re a Roman candle, aren’t you?’
‘What?’ I thought it must be something to do with my hair.
‘R.C., silly. I heard you tell Brent. You ought to go to your own school,’ she said; then looping the Spanish onto a coat hook, she folded her hands piously: ‘Our church, the services are champion. “Dearly beloved brethren, is it not a sin to get behind a fat man and prick him with a pin?”’ She took the liquorice down and knotted it round her figures. ‘That’s a joke,’ she said.
She seemed to be waiting. I tried desperately to think of something, anything funny to do with religion, but all I could remember was a joke about Mass, which I hadn’t really understood: it was Uncle Gervase’s, and he and my mother had laughed over it that last summer.
‘In our church we have a priest, and he says “Dominic, have the biscuits come?” then the little boy what’s helping says “yes, and the spirits too” …’
She didn’t laugh, and I said feebly:
‘It’s a Latin joke.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘Jokes are in English.’ She gave me a push towards the lavatory: ‘Get on in and throw your water.’
She waited outside, drumming on the door and singing in a nasal voice, ‘Whistle while you work, Mussolini is a twerp, Hitler’s barmy, so’s his army …’
But our absence together had been noted, and that afternoon we had to stay in late, copying out with our scratchy pens a list of the kings of England. The friendship had begun; and in its odd way survived that school and then, after we both got scholarships, the grammar school too. This summer was the first time we’d been separated.
Now, walking over with the buns and ices, she sat down at one of the tables not far from the entrance. I could see straightaway that she wanted to talk about her new boyfriend: she’d been shouting hints as we wove our way in and out of the traffic.
‘He’s called Andrew, Lu. And he’s been left school three years. His figure’s smashing. You can see everyone looking jealous like. But he’s to go in the Army next month, that’s the awful part.’ She bit hungrily into the sugary bun. ‘And his kisses, Lu. Heck – I can’t think why we thought anything to those ones at the pictures. He says his are French ones …’ She giggled and stuck her tongue out.
I didn’t understand. But as we always shared our information – Elizabeth providing the greater part (and virtually all of the experience) – I wasn’t worried. Almost all we knew, we’d discovered for ourselves: my mother, telling me nothing, had managed to escape even the formal revelations, the ‘little talks’ which Elizabeth had complained of in the Horsfall home. (‘You should have seen her face, Lu. And she’d not got it right either. I mean, I don’t think like she’d ever really looked at me dad – if you get me …’)
But: ‘You wouldn’t know,’ was all she said today. ‘That Brian –’ Last Christmas her cousin Brian, a redhead like me but more carrotty, had leapt from behind a door in the Horsfall home, giving me a pleasurable fright which I hadn’t done anything about repeating since. ‘That Brian. He was born yesterday.’
Two boys carrying a pile of sandwiches walked past and settled themselves at the next table. She looked them over:
‘Let’s get us milk shakes, Lu,’ she said, jumping up, ‘Give us a bob.’
As she came back, carrying the glasses of frothy yellow liquid, passing purposely a little too near the boys’ table, she asked:’ You any news, Lu?’
When I told her, she stood quite still, holding the drinks: ‘Get away,’ she said. ‘You never –’ She stared hard at me. ‘Heck, Lu – you can’t!’
‘Of course I mightn’t get a place,’ I said. (It was a hopeful thought which had just come to me.)
‘All those posh girls,’ she said. ‘Still – if your mam’s got the money … Remember Brenda Kitchin, Lu? She’d a cousin was at the White Rose – very rich they were – she said the woman who runs it’s ever so awful. Sort of a dragon.’ She paused. ‘Heck, Lu. Next thing – you’ll be talking “laike thet”.’
For a while we chatted about the White Rose; then, losing interest, she began to talk instead about the hotel, in a very loud voice. She’d pushed her chair round so that she could see the boys without turning – now she was carefully watching them watching us.
Soon, she moved back to the subject of Andrew.
‘There’s a dance on next month,’ she said. ‘I’m bringing him. Want to go?’
She told me a lot about his family then, and what she and he did on their outings.
‘What’s your mother think of him?’ I asked, unable to imagine anyone Mrs Horsfall would approve of.
‘Pardon?’ she said, absentmindedly. ‘Oh – not so bad. She reckons he looks clean-living. That’s a compliment and all from her, Lu.’
The boys got up to go, banging noisily against our table. When they’d left we talked for a while. Then Elizabeth grew restless.
‘I’d best go,’ she said. ‘I’ve to meet Andrew.’ I had shopping to do, I told her: in the morning, that was. Realizing as I said it, that the town would be crowded by now.
‘Daft,’ she said. ‘If I’d thought, I’d have got a blind for you.’
Pushing our bikes, we walked up the hill. Suddenly exasperated:
Those boys in the café,’ she complained, panting: ‘You never tried, Lu.’ She shouted against a passing lorry: ‘You have to practise! I’ve told you till I’m sick. I mean, heck – boys go for red hair.’ She was just in front of me now; over her shoulder, she called:
‘Look at Rita Hayworth – how’d you think she got on, eh?’
Chapter Three
Back home, I found my mother asleep; I made some lunch for her and put it on a tray. The rest of Saturday yawned before me: I thought vaguely of going back to the river, but there didn’t seem much point. Upstairs in my bedroom, the air was stifling even with the windows open, and after a while I wandered downstairs.
In the sitting-room the curtains weren’t drawn yet; it smelled fusty and even when I let in the afternoon light, revealing Pugin in one of the armchairs, it felt oppressive still. Cluttered, it had, not the orderly fussiness of a Victorian interior but the random ugliness of a junk room. There were large awkward-shaped chairs covered in faded cretonne, a brown sofa with sagging springs, a corner cupboard whose door didn’t shut; and above the fireplace, a hotch-potch of ornaments – an ashtray made from a Great War cartridge base, a Portobello jug, Old Bill in Staffordshire pottery, a chipped ‘Present from Whitby’; but, belonging to my father, these had at least been put there intentionally, unlike the furniture, which was accidental: pieces meant to be temporary which it was unlikely we’d ever change now. More than any other room in our untidy, uncomfortable house, this one symbolized for me the unhappy state of affairs. My mother never dreamt of improving it: treating it always, as she did her whole life in Bratherton, as an outrage beneath her dignity to try and remedy; while my father spent as little time in it as possible – sometimes when he was alone, strumming on the piano, but mostly treating it like a station waiting-room, shabbiness and grubbiness taken for granted while he waited. (For what?)
The jumble inside was divided into two compartments (hard and soft chocolates?) but without any system, so that once a year at least: ‘We really must make an album of all this, Lucy,’ my mother would say. But so far she hadn’t even begun. It was the element of surprise she liked, I think, and an album would have made too predictable viewing.
Today it was the prospectus of St Mary’s Convent, glossy and impressive, which lay on top: on its cover, above the direction to apply to Sr Xavier, a sunlit photograph of Patmore, while inside, livening up the details of School Certificate, piano, hockey and home-grown vegetables, was a stirring account of the house’s history, and more photographs – the panelled dining-room, the wide oak staircase, the gallery and (marked with an x) the priest’s hiding hole. I’d often looked longingly at this prospectus, especially in my first term at grammar school; my imaginings of boarding-school life, a sort of stew of L. T. Meade and Angela Brazil, were confused and romantic in the extreme, but for a while the idea of going there had possessed me completely – reaching its height during a phase, very short, when I managed to convince myself that Gervase was my real father.
‘The money just isn’t available’ explained my mother, blinking rapidly as she did when upset; adding bitterly, ‘Even were they to grant a special rate, it would be impossible.’ And the craze of course had passed, so that today I only gave the brochure a quick glance, before going on to the photograph underneath.
‘Winifred – Patmore, 1910.’ My mother, in ankle-length white broderie anglaise standing on the lawn, eyes screwed up against the sun; the house behind her looking less formal than in the prospectus: a door open, a curtain flapping, a hat lying on the stone seat.
My second favourite of them all, this picture showed off her hair: abundant, and so intensely fair as to be almost white. She’d kept a cutting of it from that time which showed the texture and some, but only a little, of the brilliance. Now, although still very thick and not grey at all, it was a dull, dusty colour, but then it must have been her main asset: for all the photographs show a jolly – even a generous face – but not a pretty one. It was, I think, the old story of a gift so great in one direction as to make any Other lack irrelevant. Only last week, with a shock almost of recognition, I saw sitting in a restaurant, a girl with hair of just this same radiance surrounding just such a pouchy heavy-featured face and indifferent skin; but laughing and talking, she was saved, just as my mother must have been, by animation and excitement.
She told me that she had her father’s looks, together with her mother’s build; but there were no pictures of him in the Box, and only one of my grandmother: a heavily-corseted, matriarchal figure, sewing in a garden chair, staring at the camera through pince-nez, disapprovingly. ‘She looks so unkind,’ I’d remarked once; but my mother had replied: ‘Nonsense! She could be very gay indeed – there were lots and lots of happy times, Lucy. It’s just that you have to remember what she had been through.’
Then she would tell me about it, all over again.
It appeared that at thirty, and more or less as a last resort, my grandmother had married a frustrated would-be journalist with a minor post in the Home Office. Although she didn’t realize it he was then already halfway to becoming an alcoholic, and only two years after their marriage he lost his job. Several years of discomfort and terror followed, in cheap rooms and boarding-houses, with my uncles, twin boys, and my mother. Between bouts, my grandfather was charming, but inevitably the bouts grew more frequent and the charm more scarce, and when my mother was about three or four, he died of cirrhosis.
Two years later – to everyone’s surprise, and her own too, I think – my grandmother met, and married, Robert Tinsdale: a comfortably off, middle-aged widower, Roman Catholic, head of an old recusant family, owner of Patmore, and father of an eleven-year-old boy, Gervase. Her worries seemed over, and with an eagerness bordering on fanaticism, she embraced the whole way of life – not only changing her religion, but also instilling into her children a belief that the only worthwhile life was that lived by the minor landed Catholic gentry.
‘Of course, strictly speaking,’ my mother admitted once, ‘we haven’t any Tinsdale blood. But I was so young when I went there, the twins too, Tom and Bertie, we all took the name. From the very beginning it was our home, Lucy.’
She reminisced often, the present invariably and inevitably coming off badly beside the past. ‘When I look at this pokey house! We had so much space, Lucy – the long landing at Patmore: you could put ten of ours here into that. And those big oak chests that used to stand there – the linen, Lucy, the linen was always herb-smelling. How I miss the flowers! All the flowers. So much purple, I love purple… The vine on the west wall was very, very old, Lucy. I only hope the nuns are looking after it properly. And the ornamental hedges – they need upkeep too. Gervase says that during this last War the nuns grew vegetables almost every-where …’
But sometimes her memory would let her down; and then frantically, with an upset out of all proportion, she would search for the missing detail. Once it was a plaster frieze with hunting scenes on it. ‘I nearly see it, Lucy. But the flowers, the way the leaves went – that’s gone. I’ve not been bringing it back enough. I think it’s lost.’ Why not ask Uncle Gervase? I suggested. Or we could go back and look? But her voice thick with emotion, she said that no, she could never do that: ‘I could never go back. Perhaps, possibly – if you had been to school there, possibly.’
It had all been perfect: every day a holiday (in spite of a governess); every relationship unmarred by conflict. Robert Tinsdale (‘Papa’), bluff and easygoing, was thrilled with his new family; Gervase, apparently, was equally delighted. And the sun had shone, every day, all day.
They’d played games. Her favourite one had featured the priest’s hiding hole: from her description, even if safe the hole didn’t sound at all comfortable, but evidently playing in it, with permission, had been one of the highlights of her childhood.
‘The hole really had been used, Lucy. A Jesuit, Gervase said. I wish I could show you some of the family papers – Gervase used to explain all the history part to us, the background – the terrible tortures, Lucy. He said some of the priests were so frightened then, they used to have nightmares that they were being disembowelled, and wake up screaming. And he said that sometimes guests at houses like Patmore were really informers – they’d pretend to want to go to confession, then they’d betray the priest It was a terrible time, Lucy – for families like ours.’
Gervase had played the favourite game, ‘even when he was quite big, and already at Stonyhurst. Tom and Bertie would be two Jesuits on the run, and he would be the priest hunter. I was the lady of the house. But he’d tell me what to say, because of my being the youngest. I had to raise the alarm and get the boys hidden. Then Gervase would come along – knocking on the panelling and making noises like splintering wood, calling out for them to surrender. Sometimes he’d let them escape, but sometimes not. We never knew beforehand how the game was going to turn out…’
I reached out for the next picture. My arm jerked and the Memory Box, turning over suddenly, scattered letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings about the carpet. I bent to pick them up, and it seemed to me then all at once that every picture was of Gervase. I had never realized there were so many. Gervase playing croquet, Gervase at Oxford, Gervase in a Stonyhurst group, Gervase playing tennis, Gervase in Elizabethan costume, Gervase on horseback, Gervase in Italy, Gervase, Gervase, Gervase…
‘He was so beautiful, Lucy. If you could only have seen him then!’ But I was never able to reconcile this Gervase of the photographs wit
h the twitching uncle of tea at Gunter’s; the sea change had been too great. ‘His looks, Lucy, were the sort that made one feel protective – as if he might break. And yet he was the strong one; I always thought of him as the strong one. He was a brother first of course. But later – well, it was quite a different story, Lucy …’
He’d first begun to take notice of her, other than as his little stepsister, when she was about fourteen and he was twenty. (‘I’ve been the only woman in his life, Lucy. His mother, you know, died in childbirth; and with my mother, he was always a little stiff – Although they got on perfectly, of course.’) Evidently Gervase had never taken any real interest in girls before: this particular venture was highly approved of, and that he should have chosen my mother delighted Robert Tinsdale and made my grandmother overjoyed; marriage, taken for granted, became just a matter of time. Gervase was happy to wait. A year or so later he came down from Oxford, having had a book of poems published privately, and began preparing to take over, gradually, the running of Patmore. His intention was to lead a life of beneficent leisure. The date: 1913.
But it’s to the following summer my favourite photograph belongs. In it, my mother leans back against a tree (‘Gervase took this one, Lucy, We’d all been chasing round the orchard like children …’), her ribboned tucked dress looking improbable for a game of tig, her hand over her mouth as if surprised.
July 1914. Gervase has written on the back:
To Winifred –
‘A man who would woo a fair maid