Tea At Gunter's Page 7

  The room she was to teach me in was large and dark with a lot of heavy drapes of the same plum-coloured velvet as her skirt. While she asked me some questions about myself, I sat on the edge of a knobbly sofa and gazed for reassurance at a stuffed canary in an ornate wicker cage; she herself sat very upright in a high, carved chair, shuddering as I spoke.

  ‘So flat!’ she said. ‘Such slovenly sounds.’

  My vowels, she explained to me sadly were the ugly vowels of Yorkshire townsfolk – never, never of course to be confused with the lovely, country dialect. ‘I often sit, quite quietly,’ she said, ‘on my beautiful visits to the Dales, listening to the shepherd, the ploughman, the herdsman, the –’ She searched for another example, but not finding it she waved her arm airily. ‘Their dialect is sacred,’ she declared. ‘I would never tamper with it.’

  But my vowels, it appeared, weren’t ready for improvement yet: I would have to begin with breathing. Breathing was of the greatest importance; and for what seemed an age, I had to sit before a large diagram showing me in red and black the whole complex of larynx, pharynx, lungs, windpipe, while Miss Lister, blowing violet over me, pointed them all out. Then we did some simple exercises which I was to continue faithfully at home, fifteen minutes every evening. In the meantime we would approach the vowels by stealth as it were, forcing them through beautiful poetry. To this end, I read aloud from the Golden Treasury; Miss Lister wincing at regular intervals.

  In the middle of The Lotos-Eaters, she interrupted me.

  ‘Do you ever go up on the moors, Lucy?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, starting. ‘Sometimes. In the summer.’

  She stood up suddenly.

  ‘Emily Brontë!’ she cried. She threw back her arms, straining the buttons of her blouse. Then in her most dramatic voice, she announced, ‘Lucy, next time you are up on the moors – I want you to run. Run, run, flinging your arms wide like this,’ she made another wild gesture, ‘run away, away! Call out your vowels, Lucy. Ah, ah, ah!’ She sounded in pain. ‘Hear the wind catch them – a wonderful, rising, falling, dying-away sound – ah, ah, ah!’

  I said that certainly I would see about it, and she sat down again, refreshed. Then with my eye on the grandfather clock, I read her two more poems, watching relievedly as the hand approached the half hour.

  The second poem, ‘Innisfree’, I was to learn by heart for next week. ‘Lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,’ declaimed Miss Lister with relish, lingering on the word ‘low’. ‘I have a great deal of the Celt in me,’ she confided as she showed me out. ‘I find it a wonderful help in my work.’

  When I got home my mother thought that I sounded better already: and she was thrilled by the homework.

  ‘“Innisfree”, Lucy – Gervase used to read me that!’ She told me yet again, ‘Gervase read so beautifully then – his voice was so gentle, so controlled. We would have gone to Ireland on our honeymoon, you know, Lucy. The West Coast, Sligo, Galway. A Stonyhurst friend had offered us a house.’

  Later on, she said:

  ‘I tried once to read some other Yeats poems, more modern ones, Lucy. But they weren’t at all like “Innisfree”. They were about old age, and sex, and some were frankly disgusting. All the romance lost. Not what I call poetry at all, Lucy.’

  Two evenings later, it was my date with Alan. I met him straight from his work and as it was still quite early, we went into a milk bar before the cinema.

  Most of the day I’d been agitated: that morning my mother had hinted that homework and early bed and Miss Lister’s exercises were of greater importance, and without actually forbidding me to go had made me feel that I was being ungrateful to her and to Uncle Gervase. Also, since the tea last week I’d been prepared to feel awkward in Alan’s company; and now, although ashamed of myself, I saw, as if through her eyes, that his suit was all wrong; so was the way he was cutting up his pork pie into minute pieces.

  But perched on a high stool beside me, he chatted animatedly about his work, and after a while I began to relax.

  He didn’t mention Saturday again, except to say, ‘My mother won’t have a cat in the house. When she was a kiddie her baby sister was suffocated. It got in and laid on her. Now she can’t see one but she thinks of it.’

  Talking had brought the sweat out in beads on his forehead and his face was flushed, but close to he smelt inviting. We sat on companionably. There was a loudspeaker in the milk bar playing tunes from Annie Get Your Gun; he sang some of the words: ‘The girl that I marry’, ‘Doin’ what comes naturally’.

  ‘I’m really enjoying this,’ he said.

  There was quite a queue for Brief Encounter but we were early and got good seats. Throughout the renunciation scene we clasped hands stickily. When we came out, wiping his palms on his handkerchief he apologized profusely for the clamminess. ‘I always perspire like this. You should see me on a new call – my hands slipping all over the samples case.’ I said I didn’t mind, because I didn’t; that he should have wanted to spend an evening with me at all filled me with wonder. On the way home, walking from Bratherton bus station, we discussed earnestly the moral issues raised by the film. Celia Johnson had done right to renounce Trevor Howard, Alan said: there were the children to consider, and Bob was a good husband.

  ‘I’m maybe old fashioned. But there were lies told. Once you’ve got lies –’

  ‘You could see she’d never get over it! The ending was in for the censor,’ I said. ‘You aren’t allowed that sort of happy ending.’ I was worried, distressed suddenly; but about what I didn’t know.

  ‘It could be a very dangerous film. If you think about it,’ went on Alan, telling me how many people shouldn’t make marriage vows if they didn’t mean them. ‘A promise is a promise, like.’

  I saw then in a sudden flash a picture of my mother visited by a resurrected Gervase; frail gilded youth of 1913. ‘Choose,’ someone was saying; and I saw her crash about clumsily happy, rushing out of our lives: the past made right at last. She came before my eyes as I’d always wanted her to look – joyous. ‘Tell Peter where I’ve gone, would you?’ she cried; the beige felt hat pulled down hard; not minding or needing me any more, scarcely bothering to say goodbye. ‘We’ll see you next summer, darling – tea at Gunter’s as usual!’

  ‘Penny for them,’ said Alan. We were turning the corner of the avenue coming up to the house; our feet squelched in a pile of sodden beech leaves.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, giving my hand a squeeze, ‘it seemed the right ending to me! Not that I’d know much about it really. At home – they’re a couple of love birds still.’ He opened the gate for us, then as we came up to the porch he leant over suddenly and pulled me to him, kissing me awkwardly at first, then as I didn’t resist, tightening his hold; I felt his lips press harder and harder. His skin, not smooth as it looked, had a pleasing roughness, and surprised into enjoyment, I leaned back.

  As he released me, he said, ‘I wanted to do that all evening!’ Then as if suddenly overcome, he clasped my hand quickly and skipping almost, hurried down the path, turning for a moment at the gate to call, ‘Cheerybye!’

  Inside, there was a light on downstairs but no one about. I supposed my mother had taken a sleeping tablet: when she did this no sound seemed to disturb her. I turned off the light and went upstairs.

  In the bathroom, my lips which had been tingling began suddenly to burn and looking in the glass I saw that they were swelling rapidly. At first I was agitated, wondering if they’d be right by morning; then I became all at once very proud of them. Reverently smearing them with vaseline I thought of how, in Elizabeth’s eyes at least, I could be said to have begun to arrive; and for that – and for making a pale thing of red-headed Brian’s kiss last Christmas – I felt towards Alan a great rush of gratitude.

  It was only later, hearing the door bang downstairs, the creaking of the top steps on the staircase, that I realized how much I’d hoped in fact that my father would be at home when I came in. I’
d been proud of course that someone had asked me out; but that wasn’t what it was all about. I had wanted, I knew now, his anxiety – even his anger. I had wanted him to fling open the sitting-room door, to march out, anxious-faced, full of orthodox righteous indignation: ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Worried, caring, on his twentieth cigarette of the evening. ‘Did that lad bring you straight home – tell me that now. Did he? Did he bring you straight home?’

  Chapter Six

  We all began, gradually, to get used to the White Rose. I got on well enough with the other girls – to some extent a dislike of Miss Metcalfe united us all. But as I’d suspected, most of them had fairly vivid outside lives, which they discussed in loud confident tones in the cloakroom, and although I chatted occasionally with a lively blonde called Jennifer in the row behind, Marjorie was still my only friend.

  I worried for her continually. Her typewriter was a clawed monster, which she approached fearfully each morning, as if the keys were about to strike her, not she the keys. Most of us had got the eccentricities of our old uprights more or less under control – except for Marjorie; her machine had a life of its own. It was Marjorie who’d been the first to tangle a typing ribbon, pulling and twisting unending coils of it with her sore hands – which now that the cold weather had come were stiff and swollen with chilblains. Twice a day she coated her fingers hopefully with winter-green, and Miss Metcalfe, passing by, would sniff ominously. In every respect Marjorie’s misery seemed to aggravate her in a way that no cheerful incompetence could have done. In shorthand class she would stride suddenly across the room, snatching up Marjorie’s nervously chewed notebook, waving it in front of us all and making some withering exclamation, such as, ‘Ladies! How not to practise grammalogues …’

  It all came to a head one Friday morning. We were practising typing exercises before lunch, a barely suppressed feeling of weekend liberation in the air. Miss Metcalfe had been prowling about the room for some time. She came over our way now, and stopping suddenly by Marjorie’s desk, looked at it for a moment. Then leaning forward, she tore the paper angrily from the machine.

  ‘Over three weeks of practice,’ she shouted, in the ringing tone we’d all come to dread. ‘And the paper still in crooked!’

  From my seat in the front row I didn’t dare look at Marjorie. Miss Metcalfe went up on to the dais, and after a little while, when she began looking at some papers, I was able to glance across quickly.

  Marjorie was sitting motionless, her sore red fingers hanging by her sides, tears coursing silently down her cheeks. I thought of trying to write a comforting note which I might slip across, but before I could do anything, she stood up suddenly. Saying in a loud voice ‘bloody hell,’ she banged against her desk and ran, jerkily, out of the room.

  It was a dramatic gesture – and a final one. In the afternoon Marjorie was nowhere to be seen.

  When we returned on Monday we were told, in the course of a short homily, that she had left us.

  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Miss Metcalfe’s words, because that morning I’d had a letter from Alan which had upset me very much. Since our outing, I’d been half-expecting him to telephone and was surprised that after nearly three weeks I’d still heard nothing. Now this letter had come.

  ‘I have phoned three times now,’ he wrote, in a scratchy, sloping hand, ‘but on each occasion your lady mother told me you were not At Home. I have been wondering therefore if my “Goodnight” after the pictures was out of turn, I must say that you seemed to enjoy it. But perhaps however you do not want to see me again and if that is so I shall quite understand, but Faint Heart never won Fair Lady, so please forgive me writing this…’

  The morning after I’d been out with him, there had been a scene with my mother. I looked exhausted, she said; did I think really I was being fair to Uncle Gervase, who had invested so much in this White Rose course?

  There’s plenty of time, darling. I’ve told you. When you go to London –’ She broke off and looking at me closely, ‘Lucy, do try and understand. It’s not that I’m snobbish in any way – but just because someone is worthy, doesn’t mean they’re suitable, you know.’

  ‘But I only went out with him. I’m not going to marry him –’

  ‘Oh darling!’ she exclaimed sadly, shaking her head. ‘Darling.’ Then suddenly intense, she had hugged me to her closely.

  ‘Lucy, all Mummy wants for you, in the end, is to make the sort of marriage you would have made if you’d been brought up at Patmore! And this isn’t the way to go about it.’ I was terrified as she released me to see that her eyes were full of tears. ‘You do want me to be happy, don’t you, darling? You do see, Lucy?’

  This morning, after opening Alan’s letter, I’d mentioned the telephone calls to her, timidly; but she was recovering from a weekend migraine, and rubbing her hand to and fro across her forehead she only said, wearily, that there might have been one or two calls. ‘However, with the way I feel today, how can I possibly be expected to remember that sort of thing?’

  Her behaviour over this had induced in me one of my rare fits of rebellious anger – none the less real for being so rare. I said nothing at the time, but when I came out of the White Rose at four o’clock I didn’t feel that I could face going straight home; and turning off at the bottom of the crescent, instead of walking up to the bus I went off towards the Valley Gardens.

  My mother disliked the Gardens, and seldom went in them now; but when I was a child she had had to take me there occasionally. The outings then had been peppered with comments, all the way through from the entrance gate, up till Harlow Moor. ‘Pathetic! After one has been brought up with acres to roam in…’ ‘I find these gardens so artificial. So public …’ Hands in the pockets of her old tweed coat, she would amble along grudgingly, while I ran to and fro just ahead of her, clatter, clatter, up and down the corridors of the sun colonnade.

  This afternoon it was already growing dark. It had been a damp day and the few children going off home were all in Wellingtons; an old man, head bent in his mackin osh collar, looked up startled, when I heard myself say, out loud: ‘I want a home like Alan’s.’ Walking along to the sun pavilion, my steps echoing, I realized that Alan’s face was already hazy in my memory, but that the picture of his home life, which he’d given when he came to tea and embroidered on during our outing, was completely clear to me in every detail – and filled me with inexplicable longing.

  I saw the warm, firelit room where they sang in the evenings: Wesleyan hymns, I thought probably; or just-out-of-date dance tunes. ‘At weekends we often go hiking,’ he had said. ‘We do youth hostelling too.’ His sisters thought he was wonderful, and he returned the compliment: ‘Jean’s a swimmer. You should see her – good as Esther Williams she is.’ While his mother fussed endlessly over his too-hardworking father, who was always thinking up small, inexpensive surprises for her: ‘“You’ve got to guess first,” Dad says always, “then you can have it!” They’re a couple of love birds still…’

  In my fury I walked the length of the Gardens, through on to Harlow Moor; it was almost dark now, the air damp and resinous. After a while I came out by the reservoirs; the filter beds, clean and shallow, lay just visible in the disappearing light and behind them, the reservoirs themselves, black and deep and sinister. My mood of rebellion nearly spent, I shuddered. Years and years ago, walking that way with my father, he’d told me, ‘Two boys got drowned there. They’d been fooling around, for a dare. Then there was this accident. Night time it was.’ Since then I’d tried never to go by the reservoirs, because for me the boys lay there still. Against all commonsense I fancied their bodies had never been removed; and tonight, unable to look at all, cold and shivery, I began running and running, not stopping till they were right out of sight.

  Then, on the bus back to Bratherton, ashamed of my fears I felt foolish, and flat. Everything, really, seemed pointless: the White Rose, torments like Miss Lister, deciding whether or not to make an issue over Alan, goin
g to London; above all – this trying to live for ever as a Patmore might-have-been. Why, why, why?

  But when I got in my mother didn’t remark that I was late, and I said nothing more to her about Alan’s letter. I didn’t answer it either, and never heard from him again.

  Marjorie’s machine didn’t remain vacant for long. The next day, coming back early from lunch to finish some homework, I saw a strange girl sitting in her place. My first reaction was surprise; not so much at the speed with which Miss Metcalfe had filled the vacancy, but because the replacement was obviously so much older than the rest of us – well into her twenties, I thought. She seemed altogether a far more sophisticated, finished product than was usual for the White Rose. Under cover of my Pitman’s manual I took a good look at her.

  She was reading a magazine, a cloud of expensive scent wafting round her, and hadn’t seemed to notice when I came in. Everything about her was very neat and slightly fragile, not brittle like china but with the small-boned delicacy of a kitten. Fashionable ankle-strapped shoes showed beneath her long skirt and lilac cashmere sweater, and on her bent head the light brown hair was cut very short to fit like a cap; her skin, dry and rather delicate, had the remains of a strong tan.

  Sensing my gaze perhaps, she looked up and smiled: a slightly crooked smile which gave the impression of being for herself alone.

  ‘What sort of a penance have you got there, darling?’ Her voice was very quiet, and when she spoke she seemed to round the words in her mouth, drawling them almost. ‘Let Juliet see.’

  I handed her the opened book; she looked at it for a moment idly. ‘What is the least price at which Briggs and Baker will deliver their brass paste in glass bottles?’ she read out. She made a little shape with her mouth, then shrugging her shoulders, handed the book back. ‘Are they tongue twisters, darling, or what?’