Tea At Gunter's Page 8

  ‘It’s to practise initial hooks on straight strokes,’ I told her. ‘Or that’s what it says. We’re having a test.’

  ‘But how boring, darling,’ she said. She reached over for her handbag and took out a gold cigarette case and long tortoiseshell holder, ‘I can see that poor Juliet is going to suffer from the most dreadful ennui.’

  She offered me a cigarette and when I refused she lit one herself; then with her free hand she began fingering Marjorie’s machine.

  ‘I did some typing of a sort, in the W.R.N.S. But that was all over in forty-six. I shall look at the keys of course.’ She pulled at the guard carelessly, ‘I have my own fingering anyway; Juliet’s system.’ Her hands resting on the machine were small, and plumper than I would have thought.

  Back looking at her magazine again – I saw that it was the Queen – she asked me a little about the typing lessons: half-listening to the answers with a small, secret smile, saying finally, ‘but really?’ so that I wasn’t sure whether it was the White Rose or I who was being laughed at. Then reaching for her handbag again, she took out a portable ashtray and unfolded it on the desk.

  ‘I really ought to let you get on with your hooks, darling,’ she murmured, puffing lightly. ‘Naughty Juliet.’

  She was still smoking when the other girls came back (although admittedly Miss Metcalfe was away for the afternoon, her daring in continuing to do so even after Miss Laycock had clapped her hands for order amazed me). She didn’t stay for long afterwards: just went over and discussed one or two points with Miss Laycock, then quietly strolled out.

  Realizing that she’d probably be beside me for many weeks to come, I wished I’d been less shy and had asked a few questions. Fortunately I ran into Jennifer in the cloakroom at going-home time. She was a mine of information:

  ‘That’s Juliet Hirst you’ve got next door! I kept trying to pass a note over to you,’ she twitched at the roller towel.’ You know – Blackett’s. The sauce and jelly people. I’ve often seen bits about her in the paper – she’s the only daughter, and terribly rich.’

  We were the only two left in the cloakroom now, but as it was my day for Miss Lister I was very keen to stay on talking.

  ‘I think from what someone said, she must be doing the Shortened Course. War Heroines, you know. It used to be in the prospectus when my sister was here. All sorts of blah,’ she put on Miss Metcalfe’s voice: ‘vital years of your lives, sacrifices for King and country, etc, etc. There used to be loads of them doing it, A.T.S. and Land Army and so on. But it’s a bit stupid now.’ Pulling heavily on the roller towel, she sent it spinning. ‘Anyway, I don’t expect she’ll stick it for long.’

  Unable to put it off any longer, I began dawdling my way to Miss Lister’s. I was even more reluctant than usual because I hadn’t really been practising my exercises: in our small house, I found it quite impossible to raise my voice to the frantic full-blooded tones she recommended; and this week I hadn’t learnt my homework properly either.

  ‘O Death in Life, the days that are no more,’ I recited, stumbling from line to line, while Miss Lister prompting me, tapped her fingers impatiently on the wooden arms of her chair.

  My breathing was much, much too shallow:

  ‘Direct, drive, push the air out!’ she urged, blowing at me a cachou of a different scent – rose perhaps? Then she placed her hands firmly round my waist and as my diaphragm tensed to her command, she demonstrated how I was able by my breathing to move her fingers apart.

  ‘You have no catarrh, no adenoids,’ she declared. ‘Nothing to come between you, and a beautiful, deep, controlled, breath.’

  ‘Harrogate is a Spa! Aaaaah …’ I repeated after her, ad nauseam. My vowels it appeared had not improved at all.

  ‘We’ve a long way to go,’ she said sadly at the end of the lesson, setting me part of The Lotos-Eaters for my homework.

  ‘All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:’

  she chanted,

  ‘Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone,

  Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown …’

  ‘Have you been up on the moors yet, dear?’ she asked.

  On the Friday of that week, my grandfather died.

  I’d come in from the White Rose, later than usual because my mother had sent me shopping, to find my father standing by the telephone in the hall. Still in his macintosh, he looked white and shaken. He told me shortly: ‘We’ve just heard. Your grandpa’s dead.’ He began at once to move towards the front door.

  I’d begun to tremble as soon as he’d said it. I asked urgently to his retreating figure, ‘But what happened? He was all right on Sunday –’

  Through the open sitting-room door I saw my mother, her legs up on the sofa, a handkerchief pressed to her face.

  My father took out a battered cigarette packet and lit up quickly. Then without looking at me: ‘Mother’d been round the corner for an evening paper,’ he said. ‘She’d left him having his tea and when she got in – she thought he’d fallen asleep. A neighbour phoned, just a few minutes back.’ He pulled at the cigarette. ‘I’m just off over there,’ he said, his hand on the front door. ‘She’d best not be alone.’

  When he’d left, I went straight through to my mother. She hadn’t moved from the sofa and seeing me come in, she blew her nose loudly.

  ‘How awful –’ I began. My voice was very wobbly.

  She got up suddenly. ‘Nonsense!’ she said, with a false briskness, ‘we all have to die, Lucy – it’s quite unnecessary to dwell on the subject.’ She blew her nose again, more vigorously this time. ‘I’ve a cold beginning,’ she explained. ‘It isn’t emotion.’

  I wanted to cry but it was as if she had forbidden me. She made me give her a full account of the day’s classes, with a blow by blow account of the Friday etiquette lecture.

  ‘At least you’ll know how to behave,’ she commented.

  But later, in the kitchen making some toast, while I opened a tin of sardines, Pugin mewing round my ankles, she was unusually silent. She let the toast burn: the acrid grey smoke billowed round the cooker; then, as she threw the charred pieces in the bin, she turned on me suddenly:

  ‘Anyway,’ she burst out, ‘what good was he doing, Lucy? As old as that – and sitting by the fire all day?’

  I turned my head away quickly. Under cover of getting some more bread I went into the larder. Bent over, rattling the bin, I felt the tears begin to flow, scalding, uncontrollable.

  ‘Don’t say we’re out of bread!’ called my mother.

  ‘Housekeeping really is a wearying business,’ I heard her go on. ‘I wasn’t brought up to it at all. With all the worthwhile things I could be doing – to be fussing over bread, and rations, meat, butter and so on. And the endless dust. Dust everywhere, Lucy. I think often, you know, that that’s what’s at the back of my asthma. Dust!’

  At the weekend my father and I went to visit my grandmother. Still very shaken, she nervously arranged and rearranged jars, pans, plates on and off the dresser. There was a dismal tidiness everywhere.

  I wanted very much to say something consoling. Looking at her agitatedly patting the leaves of a trailing plant, I felt confused sentences jostle for order in my mind: there seemed not too few, but too many words. Sadly I said nothing.

  She talked a lot of the time, going over and over again her account of how he died. In all she must have told us four or five times at least. Of how she’d just poured him out a cup of tea, with a drop, ‘just a teaspoon’, of whisky in it.

  ‘Then when I were in again with the paper, there he was fallen asleep. And I was vexed with him, Peter, because he’d let drop the cup.’ It had been quite a few moments before she’d realized the truth and even now, grief was still tinged with a little outrage.

  ‘To be smelling of spirits like that at the end. His trousers sodden with it, Peter. It didn’t satisfy him the bit I put in, you know. He was putting more and more in his cup every day. On the quiet like
.’

  During the journey back my father seemed distant and preoccupied, and I was tense, as always when alone with him in the car. In a way it was simpler when my mother was there too. The sullen build-up of taunts and fury, subtly charging the air, much as I disliked it, made me feel safer, more protected, earthed as it were.

  He spoke to me only once. As we approached Bratherton – the beech trees, damp and drooping, stretching over towards the Dropping Well, the castle gaunt in the afternoon gloom – he said in a firm rather cold voice, ‘This is bloody well an order. We’re burying him Tuesday, and you’ve got to get leave from that finishing school. Understand?’

  My mother’s cold grew worse, and she wasn’t able to come to the funeral. It was early November now, and the weather raw. As we stood in the graveyard of the little moorland church where my grandfather was to be buried, a cutting east wind blew in our faces; around us, their inscriptions worn not so much by time as by the high winds over the moors, stood tombstones with the family name. For a couple of hundred years or more Taylors had farmed this district: now the shopkeeper was going back to his roots.

  My grandmother with bent head was standing a little way from me; my father was on one side of her, and Uncle Arnold, his mouth set in the firm line I’d so often seen on my grandmother, was on the other; a handful of friends stood near. With our collars turned up, we formed a bleak little circle round the pit. It seemed to me frighteningly deep. In my ignorance I’d always imagined people buried only just below the earth’s surface, and gazing down now, I thought with horror of my brother: faded photographs and hearsay only, but once flesh and blood, never seen or heard or touched by me, and now lying as deep as this.

  The words of the burial service rolled on around us; in the background I heard a sheep bleating down in the valley, the sudden cry of a peewit.

  And then as if from nowhere, a picture of Miss Lister floated before me. She was standing up on the moor, arms flung wide, head thrown back; her vowels echoing, her bosom rising and falling, she called out to the wind across the faded heather. The image, ludicrous and unwanted, wouldn’t go away and a moment later, without warning, I felt a giggle begin: pushing at my ribs, shaking me, forcing tears to my eyes. Slowly, but relentlessly, a sacrilegious grin of mirth spread over my face.

  My father saw it almost at once. Stepping forward, he grasped me by the wrist, then half-pushing, half-pulling, led me over to the car. Jerking the door open, he pushed me roughly inside. ‘Laugh in there, will you.’

  My wrist was sore where he’d pressed it. I huddled in the corner, a handkerchief over my face, till it was time to drive away. On the journey home, we took three of the neighbours while Uncle Arnold drove my grandmother. I sat choked and silent, looking out of the window.

  Our route back went through Bratherton, and as we passed our house my father stopped the car:

  ‘You get out now,’ he said, coming round and opening the door. He spoke to the people inside: ‘Lucy’d do best not to come to the tea,’ I heard him say. Then, as I was about to walk shakily away, he appeared behind me.

  ‘The others all think you were overcome with grief,’ he said. ‘Hysterics. And I’ve left it at that.’ I tried to say something, but no words came. He went on, in a low voice:

  ‘I’ve had enough. I reckon you wouldn’t find a Patmore funeral such a bloody laugh, would you? Would you?’

  I turned my head away, pretended to be looking for my gloves.

  ‘Get on in and tell Winifred all about it,’ he said. ‘Split your sides – the two of you.’

  Chapter Seven

  My father forgave me I suppose, that is he didn’t refer to the matter again; but his general mood over the next week was gloomy, and my mother by this time was wheezing with the asthma which inevitably had followed her cold. She sat about a lot – her Roger’s inhaler at the ready – so low-spirited that she didn’t even bother to quiz me about the White Rose. As yet, I hadn’t mentioned Juliet Hirst to her and as I always found it difficult to tell her old news nonchalantly, the respite was welcome.

  Juliet had been at the school nearly two weeks now and was still a source of wonder to many of us. As far as we could see she obeyed none of the rules. She had her own car and, expensively and immaculately turned out always, she came and went when she liked. We found it hard to believe that the Shortened Course was in reality so liberal, but Jennifer, who was fascinated, and jealous in a hearty way (‘this month’s Vogue – walking and talking,’ she would hiss behind her hand to me), had by the end of the second week come up with a really consoling fantasy.

  ‘I’ve worked it all out,’ she said, from her favourite perch, hanging on to the roller towel – most of our giggling was necessarily done in the cloakroom: ‘It’s blackmail. You see, the Metcalfe’s got this sister, and she’s not awfully clever and she’s worked in Blackett’s ever since she was twelve, or whenever it was they used to leave school, and now she taps away all day with one finger just hoping and longing for her pension – and Juliet’s got this terrific hold over the Metcalfe because of this. I mean, it could be all up with the sister tomorrow. Juliet just has to appear at Blackett’s and wink at her father, and say “Off with her head!”’

  I didn’t want to spoil it for her by pointing out that Miss Metcalfe was probably making more than enough to support both of them through a luxurious old age: fantasies like Jennifer’s were cheering, and over the next few days we embroidered it considerably. But I had already guessed the real secret of Juliet’s relaxed attitude. It was very prosaic: a state of mind that couldn’t be faked even by the most cocky amongst us. She truly didn’t give a damn.

  One great advantage of the Shortened Course it seemed, was that work was done either alone or at worst with Miss Laycock, so that it was very rarely that she came under Miss Metcalfe (not that the odd sarcastic remark upset her anyway: beyond looking slightly surprised, she would go on exactly as before), but it did mean that I saw very little of her, and apart from that first afternoon we’d scarcely spoken.

  Then one Wednesday – it must have been about her third week there – I was alone in the typing room just after four, half-heartedly cleaning my machine after an angry tirade against smudgy work, when she came in, very quietly, and began looking vaguely about her.

  ‘I thought I left a Tatler in here. Have you seen it, darling?’

  ‘It’s wedged under your machine,’ I said. I’d noticed her push it there at lunchtime.

  She took it up and yawned. ‘That job looks impossibly filthy,’ she said: I was picking with a pin at small ‘h’ – an action which reminded me of Elizabeth and my frantic nail-cleaning before school inspection. ‘I think I shall get a man at the works to clean mine.’

  Her machine was a shiny new portable: Marjorie’s upright had ground to a standstill a few days ago and Juliet had brought one of her own along.

  She yawned again, then flicking open the ring-watch on her right hand she said wearily:

  ‘Juliet should be meeting some friends for tea at half-past. But she’s not at all in the mood.’

  I picked up the old toothbrush and began to work on the typewriter keys. She watched me for a while, then yawning yet again, she said:

  ‘Why don’t you come along too, darling?’

  The suggestion, taking me completely unawares sent me into a panic. I saw it as a Royal Command.

  Yes, of course I’d come, I told her.

  Together, we went to the cloakroom to get ready.

  When I looked in the mirror my appearance depressed me, increasing my panic. How could I go out like this? The gloom at home had spread to my dressing and the sensible outfit of Gor-Ray skirt and ex-gym blouse looked even more dreary now than on the first day. At least I wasn’t wearing lisle stockings, but my rayon ones, worn shiny side in, had a long cobbled ladder up the calf.

  There’s no hurry, darling,’ said Juliet, dawdling in what seemed to me an incredible manner.

  The whole cloakroom smelt of Jean Patou ‘Col
ony’ – some days it was the only indication that Juliet had been in the building at all. A big bottle of it as eau de toilette stood above the basin now and she was splashing her wrists and neck with it. Then after doing over her face completely she took out a silk scarf and rubbed at her hair till it shone. Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was already twenty to five.

  Just as we left she lifted up the skirt of her beige Jaeger dress, showing a small red arrow on her nylons, just above each knee. ‘Seam correctors, darling,’ she explained. Then picking up her handbag, she went over to the mirror for a last, loving look.

  Although we were to meet her friends at Fuller’s, not many minutes’ walk away, we went by car. On the way she told me a little about them. ‘Quentin runs an antique or junk shop – whichever you like to call it. Richard’s a solicitor. He’s quite sweet but much too fond. Juliet finds it a little bit boring.’

  Climbing the stairs to Fuller’s behind her, I felt already the trembling legs, the prickly sweat, which heralded an attack of shyness. I tried hastily to decide what expression to wear – since I didn’t think any expression was going to come naturally: then Juliet walked straight over to where two men were sitting at a table in the window and, in a moment, the worst was over.

  The fair one was Richard Ingleson; the dark one Quentin Myers. This was as much as I’d taken in – and Richard was already leaning towards Juliet asking her whether she wanted toast or teacakes – when a fresh worry hit me.

  It was to do with my accent. As a result of Miss Lister’s campaign, which was beginning at last to have some effect, I’d become rather like a boy with a breaking voice – never sure how it would come out; far from lengthening my ‘a’s’ permanently she’d merely made them unpredictable, and after saying ‘how do you do’ and opting hesitantly for teacakes I decided to stay completely quiet. It didn’t look impossible: Quentin had said, ‘ah, Lucy Locket’ and Richard had said ‘oh dear’ sympathetically when he heard I was from the White Rose, but after that they began at once to talk amongst themselves.