Tea At Gunter's Page 9

  Juliet made no apology for being late; although Quentin, after the order had been given, remarked:

  ‘Madam, we’ve been here twenty minutes, you know.’

  ‘Don’t you two do any work?’ she said. ‘Sitting around in tea-shops on a weekday –’

  Richard said, ‘Quentin’s been at a sale actually. All afternoon.’ He shrugged his shoulders, then added, smiling: ‘And I’m playing truant. Just for once.’

  ‘Which I’m all for,’ said Quentin. ‘That’s the sort of fall from grace which makes you human, Richard. Don’t you agree, Juliet?’

  Juliet merely smiled, but didn’t answer. Quentin, catching my eye, smiled at me: I smiled back – and would have gone on looking except that I was afraid it might make him talk to me. I liked his face. Full, with a slightly dimpled chin it just missed conventional good looks; faintly olive skin, dark hair worn quite long and curling at the ends; a bright waistcoat, which in those days of drab dressing struck an unusual note. My mother, I guessed instinctively, would have distrusted him. He had a foreign look. What exactly this reaction of hers was all about, I was never sure (some chance remark of Robert Tinsdale’s, her mother’s, even Gervase’s which had stuck?) but she’d had this attitude ever since I could remember, making room for it amidst her pre-occupations with the niceties of the English social scene. Foreigners worried her; she was unable to place them. Even their titles were suspect.

  The waitress brought tea, toast, teacakes. The handle on the teapot was too hot for Juliet, and Richard lent her a big handkerchief. While she was pouring, Quentin said,

  ‘Richard and I were at the Kenworthys’ dance last night, Juliet. Did you enjoy your – theatre, was it? at any rate your conflicting engagement?’

  Juliet ignored him. She said to Richard, sweetly:

  ‘How was the party?’

  ‘Fancy even asking him!’ said Quentin, putting on a shocked expression: ‘I quote:

  How did the party go in Portman Square?

  I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there…’

  Juliet blushed, the colour flooding her thin skin; as she passed his cup over, Quentin said, ‘Extraordinary! You have a lovely colour today, dear Juliet.’

  It was Richard who changed the subject. He seemed embarrassed by Quentin’s obvious baiting of Juliet, even though, it seemed, it was on his behalf. He began asking me a few polite questions about the White Rose, and I found myself answering easily: their attention after all, wasn’t really on me. Juliet, I thought (and it was a comforting notion) had probably brought me along as a sort of buffer.

  For a while they chatted on, mostly about people and places I hadn’t heard of. Gradually the atmosphere became less edgy, although Richard, I noticed, was hardly able to take his eyes off Juliet. For him, she seemed to be the only person in the crowded teashop.

  ‘I shall release myself at Christmas,’ she was saying: Quentin, bringing me back into the conversation, had asked her how she was getting on at Miss Metcalfe’s? ‘The place is so impossibly boring Juliet can’t take it seriously.’ She said to Richard: ‘Mama nags me about getting something to do – as you know. But there are limits.’

  Richard said, laughing, but gazing straight at her, ‘Well, darling, you know you’ve only to say the word –’

  ‘But not here, Richard,’ said Quentin. ‘You haven’t a hope.’ He passed his cup over to Juliet. ‘What girl wants to remember that she said “yes” in Fuller’s? Bendicks, Gunter’s, the Ritz (just), Joe Lyons, an A.B.C. – but Fuller’s –’

  ‘Oh God that’s enough,’ said Richard, half-laughing, half-serious.

  While Quentin was talking, I’d been taking a good look at Richard. With his tall, heavy build went generous rather rough features – the skin already a little lined, his forehead creasing when he talked; his colouring was the almost traditional, fair-haired Englishman. In a way I didn’t find him as interesting to watch as Quentin, but I did recognize him, timidly (my mother would have done so joyfully), as belonging very much to the world from which she insisted I had come, and to which, if I loved her, I would try to return.

  I recognized his clothes: the tweed jacket with its leather elbows, telling me of someone who could afford the best but couldn’t afford not to take care of it. And his voice – the sort of sound my mother would have liked tumbling about my ears daily. His manner, a mixture of diffidence and clumsy ease, I recognized too – not so much from first-hand experience as from memories of outings with her when, quite without warning, she would suddenly assume her grande dame manner.

  ‘Those were Ampleforth boys,’ she would say to me later, of some trio we’d seen waiting to go into the cinema: or ‘that undergraduate was wearing a Christ Church scarf, Lucy. Gervase’s college, you know …’

  Quentin was saying to Juliet:

  ‘But I thought they were especially kind on this Shortened Course? After all that you went through for your country, too. Sunning yourself in –’ He raised his eyebrows, ‘Where was it? It’s awfully sad really, that we never saw you as a little Wren.’

  Juliet, refusing some cherry cake, said with a small pout, ‘Juliet was quite fond of the uniform. The stockings suited her legs.’

  Richard nodding enthusiastically, smiled at her. Quentin looked over at me; he said suddenly:

  ‘You see – Juliet has travelled, Lucy. Even before the War, she graced a school in Switzerland – although I believe they did try and contain her at Queen Ethelburga’s here, for a term. But since then she really has been places – can’t you sniff the Gauloises and garlic? They compete very successfully, you know, with the smell of brown sauce – thick or thin. And fruity jelly, bubbling in cauldrons –’

  ‘Easy does it, Q,’ said Richard, angrily almost. ‘Easy does it.’

  Juliet said nothing, although she had coloured again. It was Richard who changed the subject once more, asking me, with the same polite eagerness, what I thought about Bratherton and the sort of place it became in the summer? He never seemed to go there now – Was it as bad as it looked? Often it was, I said – thinking of Elizabeth and me and our summer afternoons down by the river. I was finding it quite easy to talk now. Although my voice came out quieter than I intended, it was my own – Miss Lister had not, after all, got through the doors of Fuller’s.

  Soon after that, Juliet murmured that she’d have to go. We all broke up, and I accepted a lift from her as far as the bus station.

  Quentin said: ‘I hope we’ll see you again, Lucy Locket.’ Juliet, putting on her gloves, started up the engine – Richard still in sight by the car door. A half-hearted rain was coming down in the darkness outside.

  As we drove off, she said:

  ‘I hope you weren’t too bored, darling? It was really very sweet of you to come along and support poor Juliet.’

  When I said politely that I’d enjoyed it, she said in a rather purring voice, ‘Quentin wasn’t very nice today, was he?’ adding, ‘he’s madly disapproving of me, you know. He imagines I may do Richard some fearful harm.’

  We had stopped behind some traffic. Talking more than I’d ever heard her, she told me that both Quentin and Richard had been prisoners of war, in the same Stalag; and that after the War when Quentin had been visiting the Inglesons, he’d decided on Harrogate as an obvious choice for his shop. ‘He fell rather heavily too for Richard’s sister, Nell. She’s up at Cambridge now. Juliet doesn’t like her terribly, though. She can be very offhand and bitchy – all the good nature at the Inglesons seems to have gone into Richard.’ She paused, gloved hands on the wheel. ‘I can’t think what the spring will be like. The four of us are going to Rome together – Quentin’s half-Italian through his mother, and his aunt has this lovely flat there. Nell and Richard were over last year; and this time Juliet’s invited along too.’ She gave me a half-smile. ‘It’s really rather tempting, don’t you think? I shall certainly go – that is, if I can stand Richard’s proposals. One a month, darling, at least, and none of them indecent.’ She suppressed a yawn
. ‘Just endlessly, “will you marry me, Juliet?” It’s all those lost years, darling – they’ve given him a terrible nesting fever.’

  We had come up to the bus station. Pushing open the car door for me, she said, ‘I feel so restless sometimes. And bored too.’ She yawned again, gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Juliet does so hate to be bored.’

  ‘Whoever were these people?’ asked my mother irritably.

  She was sitting, as if stranded, in the big armchair; ignoring my father’s presence, saying insistently, accusingly, ‘but who is this Juliet?’

  When I told her, ‘Oh trade, Lucy!’, she said scornfully, with a little flash of her eyes; then: ‘But the boys – you still haven’t told me anything about the boys.’

  Richard Ingleson and Quentin Myers; one fair, the other dark:

  ‘Anyway, they weren’t boys,’ I said – feeling a need to be provocative. ‘They were men.’

  My mother spat out her frantic interest. But who were they, and what did they do? And why had I gone out looking such a mess (‘really, Lucy!’)? And had I actually, while I was there, talked at all?

  My father came out suddenly from behind the Yorkshire Evening Post: ‘Give over interrogating!’ Gathering his paper in one hand, he slapped it hard against the coal scuttle, ripping the pages. ‘You’re worse than the ruddy police. Give over, Winifred!’

  My mother’s face quivered, I saw her try to arrange her mouth. A moment later, more mildly, he remarked,

  ‘Myers I wouldn’t know, but Ingleson – that’ll be the solicitor. I’ve met the father. The family’s R.C. and I’d have thought by now they’d be on your secret list, Winifred. The son’s quite presentable. And Ma Ingleson is on every committee that’s going, Catholic Mothers, Legion of Bloody Mary – the lot. If you ever got up off your backside and went around you’d have met her by now, and then who knows?’

  He bent over, picked up the torn newspaper. My mother said with angry dignity: ‘I’ve never made any pretence, Peter, of trying to enter Yorkshire Society, so called. From this background – I should be wasting my time.’

  She flounced out leaving the door wide open.

  I trailed after her – although I didn’t want to. I couldn’t face staying: didn’t know what to say, feared what might be said to me.

  ‘He’s so vulgar!’ she exclaimed, banging the enamel colander full of potatoes into the sink. ‘These gibes at Catholicism. He’s never realized what my religion means to me, Lucy!’

  The inquisition, I thought, was over. But standing in the doorway of the larder, her head to one side, she pleaded suddenly:

  ‘Lucy, these boys – or if you like, these men – couldn’t you tell Mummy a little more about them?’

  I saw with dread her mind clanking into action, about to make out of this small self-contained dead-end experience, some embarrassing project or plan. Hopeful of ending it all, I said:

  ‘Quentin’s pretty well engaged to Richard’s sister. And Richard and Juliet – they’re going to be married I think.’ As a finishing touch I added, ‘Quentin isn’t really English, he’s half-Italian, they said.’

  Her eyebrows lifted. ‘A dago, you mean? Now that I think of it, there must be Jewish blood too, with that name. Still, it was all practice and will help for London.’ She handed me a tin of Spam. ‘You open this, Lucy, you’re better with your hands. When I think of the food at Patmore! More at breakfast than we eat in a week here. It never seems worth bothering, really…’

  By the end of the week it became obvious that my mother wasn’t getting over her cold: often when I came home at five, she would already be in bed for the night. Then at the weekend, she told me that Doctor Varley had suggested a complete rest. She was arranging a fortnight with the maiden aunts in Wiltshire. Although these aunts had never been to Patmore (hadn’t in fact kept up with my grandmother at all after her second marriage) they liked, I think, to listen to my mother’s reminiscences, and it was probably this as much as the rest and change of air and good food, which made her trips there such a success.

  During the last visit about three years ago, my father and I, left together, had formed an uneasy truce: with me disappearing to stay with the Horsfalls while he went over to Harrogate – appearing only on the last evening to take Elizabeth and me out to dinner. The dinner had been a great success. We went with one of his work colleagues – I’d seldom if ever met any of his friends, and never his drinking pals. Alec, a big jolly man, expressed surprise at my existence. ‘Where does Peter hide you, eh?’

  But Elizabeth, who talked almost non-stop, was the real star of the evening: my father reminded her of the first time they’d met – nearly ten years ago now – when Elizabeth, sitting on top of the piano, legs swinging, had sung to his playing:

  ‘She was a good girl, and I can never understand …

  Why did she fall for the leader of the band?’

  He’d seemed proud of me too, that evening. It was the first time I’d drunk wine and he thought I held it well. ‘Winifred doesn’t drink,’ he explained to Alec. ‘She’d a father who couldn’t stop.’

  This time however, we both stayed at home, theoretically anyway; there were no signs of any outings to come, nor as far as I could see any particular interest at all in what I did or where I went. Our few conversations were purely practical; most evenings he went straight to my grandmother’s from work, often staying the night there, and in the mornings he was often up and gone before I came down. We both wrote notes for Mrs Pickering.

  After a week of this I felt tired and restless. The White Rose term was in its second half; a dull grind which looked like never ending, while Miss Lister – against whom I’d borne a grudge since the funeral – seemed to me more than ever a giant waste of time. Also, and I wasn’t sure why, the tea with Juliet had unsettled me. I’d find myself reliving it in bed at night or on the bus going home, sometimes even amending the dialogue so that I came out of it better. Juliet hadn’t mentioned it again; Richard I saw once on my way to the bus, going into Ogden’s the jeweller’s, but he didn’t see me. I was afraid to call out and didn’t think he would recognize me anyway.

  Most evenings I just sat up in my bedroom; I’d always more than enough homework to keep me quiet. The night before my mother’s return, there was for some reason less than usual; I’d already done it, and a perfunctory run through of Miss Lister’s exercises, by nine o’clock. Sitting on the bed I flipped now through a pile of old magazines from Elizabeth’s hotel.

  Summer numbers, they were mostly full of how to renovate a dingy winter complexion, what to do, say, wear on the beach, how to cope with the hot weather. Then seeing a diagram for making a fitted headscarf out of an old blouse, I remembered that I had a paisley one I’d always disliked: forgetting that I’d probably dislike it even more as a headscarf, I got it out and measured it up with my White Rose ruler. Then I hacked away at it for a while with my nail scissors: but they weren’t very effective.

  My mother, I knew, had a good pair in her sewing chest in the bedroom. This chest, antique, rosewood, a Patmore relic which she’d rescued through Gervase sometime during the War, was usually – though not always – kept locked. Today I was lucky. I slid the top tray out carefully, then as the scissors weren’t there, gently pulled out the blue satin basket underneath. This was in great confusion – she mended as seldom as possible, buying new reels of cotton and cards of wool each time, and never putting away needles. I’d pricked myself twice, and was about to give up, when I came against something very hard right at the bottom. It was a bundle of papers, tightly wadded; I lifted them clear of the tangled wools and cottons, but as I did so they slipped from my hand. Sheets of paper covered in my mother’s handwriting lay scattered about the floor, so that I was frightened – even at first glance I could see they were private. I started at once to gather them up. Then, instead of replacing them, on impulse I rushed with them across the landing and back into my bedroom.

  There I began to examine them; trying frantically, wit
h a guilty greed, to read them all at once. Isolated phrases leapt out at me: ‘Gervase love’, ‘worship you’, ‘my beloved heart’, ‘my darling darling’; and I relaxed. These were simply her Great War letters to Gervase (returned by him when she married my father?). And as if to prove it, a stiff photograph fell from one of the folds. Sepia, creased at the corners, it was one I hadn’t seen before – a studio portrait taken in uniform. As he gazed serenely at the camera – his beauty almost shocking – the lips, the angle of the head, the arrested perfection of feature, all breathed a calmness which in the several years of sitting opposite him at Gunter’s I’d never so much as glimpsed.

  ‘To my beloved, who must have faith,’ he’d written above the date: December 1914. ‘I have done wrong, I have done wrong, I have done wrong,’ my mother had added, in an undated pencilled scrawl.

  I picked up the letter it had dropped from.

  ‘All day, every day,’ I read, ‘I’ve been flooded with gratitude darling – when you said so very quietly, I’ll pay Winifred – and Gervase I’ve already sent off the forms and they’ll interview Lucy soon, when you said that I wished Gunter’s was empty except for us – because I died to reach out and touch you but I couldn’t just touch you Gervase I’d have to clutch and cling. I’d be desperate, the flesh that could have been mine – Gervase we only throw away, lose deliberately what we really care about and my punishment is many things but it’s most of all that I can’t touch you – That if I touched you it wouldn’t be that same you, they say Gervase only seven years to make a new body –’

  I stopped, my heart thumping, my mouth dry. There was no date on the letter. I could find no dates on any of them at all. The fresh blackness of the ink should have told me these weren’t old love letters anyway. I wanted to stop then – not see another word.

  ‘Foul! Foul! Foul!’ she wrote, ‘when I think he’s going to touch me. Peter mustn’t touch me – it’s the not being touched by you Gervase makes it all worse so much worse – Once he asked me to – No I can’t write it, I wish I didn’t know anything at all and you could teach me darling darling – Mother said nothing to me about it ever except once she said Gervase will teach you all you need to know. O thank God it’s not often now and I sometimes wonder if he gets it somewhere else – I would die rather than ask I care not at all – he’s very cruel Gervase he said once – alright, alright, but if ever you want it Winifred you can whistle for it – he’s so vulgar Gervase you wouldn’t know you are so pure my darling you don’t know what its like to live closely to bump into accidentally someone you – I was bewitched Gervase he must have known some tricks that trapped my flesh, how else could I have been taken from you my own parfit gentil knight – do you remember that I used to call you that and you made me write it out and spell it right, you laughed anyway – I didn’t listen when you used to talk about poetry I was too young. There aren’t second chances. I feel so tired and flabby – such rare fits of energy now darling – I think its disgusting to call it the change, nothing will change, I know that. Perhaps 1948 will be better – but how can it be? if I only held the key to your heart Gervase and you held the key to mine – Love holds the key to set me free, and Love will find a Way from the Maid of the Mountains – oh you always held the key to my heart darling, Why didn’t you use it? …’