‘I don’t want to be a nuisance to anyone,’ said George.
Ten
It was, in fact, a quarter of an hour later that the five residents and two guests were gathered in the kitchen. Under the low ceiling, the bare table, laid as it was, had an unfestive look. It was bare because Adela and Shorty were always spilling things, which weighed against the use of a linen cloth, and the susceptibilities of Marigold and Bernard, in accord for once, ruled out any sort of plastic one. Shorty, of course, would have settled for a few thicknesses of newspaper.
Marigold, flanked by her grandson and his wife, sat opposite George, Bernard at the head. Adela served the consommé, Shorty offered a choice of beer, stout and cider. By Adela’s decree, wine was only provided at Christmas and birthday parties; the rest of the time, they could not afford enough of anything worth drinking, enough, that is, to satisfy Shorty and not let the rest of the company have to scramble for a second glass.
‘What a happy day,’ said Marigold. ‘It’s so nice to have some young people in the house. Especially, if I may say so, these young people.’
‘You may say so,’ said Bernard, stressing all four words equally.
‘It makes one forget one’s old and on the scrap-heap.’
‘Drives it completely out of one’s mind. As if one had never entertained the thought.’
‘It’s a marvellous treat for me,’ said George. ‘Just to be sitting at this, er, sitting here and joining in and having a, something to drink with all of you instead of eating off, uh, upstairs. Do you know, this is the very first time I’ve ever been in this room? Oh, I’m not complaining; it’s obviously very—’
‘I can promise you it won’t be the last, George.’ Adela was still suffering from the most acute self-reproach for never having seriously considered the simple procedure gone through today by Trevor and Shorty. It was no excuse to say that routines were easily fallen into, that old age cramped the imagination. She must make a real effort to think of others for a change.
‘If it weren’t for this bloody leg of mine,’ said Bernard, ‘we could manage it every day.’
‘I’m sure I could do it if I tried,’ said Adela.
‘Coming down you probably could, Adela,’ said Shorty. ‘Going up’s a different share of pooze.’
‘A different what?’
‘Sorry, spoonerizing again. A different pair of shoes. Different. It’d be different taking George upstairs again. Different to bringing him down.’
Adela’s expression cleared at last. ‘Harder, you mean. Yes, I can see how it would be.’ She was not being sarcastic, just making sure that Shorty knew he had been understood, as she herself had always liked to know she had been understood. ‘We’ll have a go at it before Trevor leaves. So that if it’s too much for me we can still get George back to his room – you and Trevor can.’
‘Ah, I think I have it,’ said Bernard, frowning in pretended concentration.
‘Have it?’
Marigold began to speak while Bernard was still inhaling deeply. ‘When are you two young ones going to start producing some kiddle-widdles?’
‘It’s a question of money, really,’ said Trevor after a moment. He set about accumulating the will to explain yet once more that, with his full approval, Tracy was determined to pursue her acting career, that an infant Fishwick would therefore have to have some sort of proper nursemaid, that any sort of proper nursemaid would have to have a whole series of things that also cost money; but he need not have bothered.
‘Oh, money, money, money,’ cried his grandmother. ‘I know we live in a materialistic society, but I’d have expected you of all people to be able to rise above that. How many poundies is a baby worth?’
‘The patter of tiny feet,’ said Shorty, pouring himself more stout. ‘Il belleeesimo bambeeeno. Sure-a, what’s a home-a without-a the little-a ones-a?’
‘It isn’t just, just money, Goldie,’ said Tracy. ‘If I’m going to—’
‘Children aren’t a luxury, they’re a necessity.’ Marigold was off now, as all her hearers had been waiting for her to be: off, that is, not in any expected or unexpected direction, just somewhere. ‘You may think I’m a sentimental old fool. Oh, no – severely practical, I assure you. Where should I be now without my children and my children’s children? Answer me that.’
Among others, Trevor would have liked to do so. His answer would have mentioned two or three rather nasty places in any one of which he thought the old girl should be now instead of where she was, lauding parenthood in this company. A remarkably comprehensive as well as roughly uniform company it was, now he came to flip through it in his mind: apart from the as yet childless couple just now under discussion of a sort, who he knew could end that state any time they fancied, there were present one person altogether uninterested in what had to be done in order to produce children, one who could never have had a chance of bearing a child, one who had very likely tried to beget a child but had failed, and one whose single child might in effect never have existed. It was only thoughtlessness, tactlessness, Trevor told himself charitably, not malice, a motive that demanded genuine and close interest in other people.
In fact, Marigold had seen quite early that her tirade might be hurtful to Bernard if he was listening, and, in the hope that it was and he was, prolonged it until Adela and Shorty had served the main course. (To be fair, the risk of also hurting Adela did not cross Marigold’s mind.) Then, wanting to talk about an old friend who was not only childless but unmarried, who in due course turned out – rather to Trevor’s surprise – to be still mobile, and whom incidentally none of the others present had ever met, she put in a brief transition passage about some people’s ability to manage without children, thus absently throwing away what there had been of her argument, and was off again.
‘… I’ve never known such energy. That woman is a human dynamo. Of course, she’s slowed down a little in the last few years. To my certain knowledge she hasn’t had more than, yes, two, no, three holidays since she started work.’
‘I met a girl from New Zealand a little while ago,’ said Tracy just as an outsize forkful of capon was entering Marigold’s mouth. ‘She told me—’
The intervention was fractionally too soon. Marigold snatched the forkful out again and said, ‘She says she can’t see any reason for them in her case. Why should she stop doing what she most enjoys doing just because everybody else goes dashing off to the south of France or Italy for three weeks every year? I must say I see her point.’
Tracy did not want to have it thought, even by someone like Shorty, that she considered her having met a girl from New Zealand a little while ago to be in itself a worthwhile offering. She waited until Marigold had started chewing before she said, ‘This New Zealand girl—’
She was fractionally too late: Marigold did a mighty swallow. ‘And the holidays she did have weren’t really holidays. She’d been going at things too hard and was ordered to drop everything and have a rest. Her dockle-pockles said they wouldn’t be responsible if she didn’t.’
‘It can’t have been much fun for her family,’ said Adela into a silence.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well … either they must have gone away without her or not have had any holidays either.’
‘She hasn’t got any family. She’s always been single.’
‘Oh, I thought you were talking about people having children.’
‘I was, but that was hours ago.’
‘Oh, I thought you still were.’
‘I distinctly told you she was single.’
‘I’m sorry, I must have missed that.’
‘You must,’ said Bernard jocularly. ‘Indeed you must. It was necessary so that you could yet again get hold of the wrong end of the stick through the eye of a needle in a haystack.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Adela again. She felt breathless for a moment and put it down to the strain o
f organizing the lunch-party on top of the supermarket expedition, the excitement of having visitors. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose; it’s just that until almost this moment I’ve had this rather essential job on my hands, do you see.’
Bernard showed mild perplexity. ‘What was that?’
‘I said I was sorry I got mixed up, but I’ve had a lot to think about.’
‘I heard every word you said. My tone might have told you that the “that” I was inquiring about referred not to your remark in its entirety but to something mentioned in it. What, in fact, was your “rather essential job”?’
‘Oh, honestly … Shopping and cooking and seeing to all the—’
‘I see,’ said Bernard, in wonder and yet in ready acceptance.
There was another brief silence. Tracy did not break it. Now in the apparent position of being obsessed with the New Zealand girl, she would not run the risk of seeming clinically insane on the subject. Trevor glanced at her with sympathy, with affection too: after a session like this, a lot of wives would give their husbands a stupendous ballocking as soon as they were alone, but this wife never did anything of that sort, never would in fifty years. Or might people have said the same of Marigold when she was twenty-three? Very few people; surely to God, very few indeed.
‘Christmas, darlings,’ said Marigold. ‘Christmas. Do please say you really are coming – I couldn’t face it without you. Not begin to.’
Trevor said sturdily, ‘All fixed, Goldie. We’ll be here in good time for lunch, and not off again till late, the later the better, in a way. I mean it’ll be easier driving. Because the roads’ll be clearer. Less traffic.’
‘And Rachel and … and Keith? The last cardie I had, she said they weren’t absolutely certain they could get away. Have you heard anything?’
‘Yes, they’re coming too.’
‘On Boxing Day.’
‘They can’t make Boxing Day. They’ll be down with us.’
Rachel, Trevor’s cousin, and her husband Keith, apart from the Fishwicks the only connections of Marigold’s not under a vow of never again entering Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage, had told Trevor with unsurpassable emphasis that it was going to be Christmas Day or nothing, with the rider that, should either or both of the Fishwicks happen to walk under a bus on Christmas Eve, it was going to be nothing, or, to quote Keith on the point, fucking fuck-all.
Marigold hid her disappointment. ‘It’ll be so wonderful to have the four of you here. Quite divine.’
At the last word, Bernard’s shoulders jerked slightly. He knew, knew as certainly as that the sun would rise in the morning, that she had come across it in some terrifying book on the manners and customs of the Twenties, the decade she believed herself to have notably adorned. He did not speak.
George did. He had some idea that he might bore people thereby, but considered the risk more worth taking than that of giving an impression, by prolonged silence, of failure to enjoy himself. ‘Well, it’s the children’s time, isn’t it? I know nobody’ll be actually blowing up, ah, coloured things you hang up, and I don’t suppose there’ll be any, you stretch them from one corner of the, er, one corner to the other, but we’ll have, you write things down games, and we’ll have … prickly green stuff and Christmas, uh, thing you eat at the end of the meal, you set it alight, and all the, people send them and they’ll be on the, um …’
‘On the fifth day of Christmas my true-love sent to me,’ sang Shorty, ‘five go-old rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two—’
Bernard’s hand came down fairly hard on the table. ‘Before the top of my head comes flying off and starts circling round the room, could we have quiet for, say, ten seconds?’
The tone of his voice matched the style in which he had put his request, but, to Trevor, his look did not. Bernard’s genial expressions of irritation and suave snubs were familiar enough and to spare, but this was anger, or hatred. For a moment, Trevor felt disquiet, before he remembered that in half an hour or so Tracy and he could decently be out of the place.
Eleven
The Fishwicks had departed and George was back in his bed, but he was not as he had been before their arrival: listless, overborne by his handicaps, concerned only with getting through the day. Now, his mind was full of schemes and prospects.
To deal with the most obvious point first – it had not escaped him that, behind that urbane exterior, Bernard was a moody old customer, and his occasional mild outbursts must not be taken too seriously. All the same, the display of annoyance he had given at the luncheon-table had been, in part, justifiably provoked. That senile drivel about blowing up, oh, what the hell were they called? – balloons, and Christmas … pudding – with a real effort one could get it almost straight away – would have tried the patience of a saint. In his new condition George could see such things quite clearly, and apologized in his thoughts for having been the source of so much vexation over the past months.
But that was not to the purpose; it was time gone by. The idea now was to work as hard as possible to prevent any such exhibition in the future. He spoke three languages without accent and could read four others; surely it was not beyond him, even at his age, to learn what was in effect an eighth tongue, a form of English that avoided those damnable common nouns. Even a cumbersome periphrasis, provided it were delivered at normal conversational speed, would be far preferable to the halting, fragmentary, er-and-um style he had let himself drift into. And it would take no great effort to arrive at the shortest intelligible periphrasis for any given object and simply memorize it, just as one memorized idioms and sayings when learning a conventional language. The task could be split up into sections like those of an elementary phrase-book: In the Bedroom, At the Tea-Table, In the Garden – yes, after today, even that might be possible when the warmer weather came. Half an hour every morning, and every afternoon – perhaps longer: he would see how it went – devising and practising the special vocabulary.
More than that, much more than that, he was going to start work again. His intelligence and, such matters as balloons and Christmas puddings apart, his memory were unimpaired. The basic parts of his library were still to hand – if not immediately to hand, at any rate not beyond access, given some co-operation on Shorty’s or Adela’s part. He could sell his old desk typewriter, which weighed a ton, and get a light plastic model he could have on his lap and operate easily enough, however slowly. The journals and book pages were becoming more and more prone to the grossest errors of pure fact, not to speak of interpretations that could be called eccentric at best. That very morning he had come across yet another repetition of the lie that Mihailovi´c had collaborated with the Germans. Three books and a number of articles had made George Zeyer’s name sufficiently well known in his field. A letter to the editor over that name would carry weight; after a couple of weeks’ interval, a different sort of letter, one asking for books to review or suggesting a contribution on some current question at issue, might well bring a favourable response. Anyhow, he was going to have a try.
And further yet … he was no longer truly bedridden, bedbound. No matter how seldom, he would be downstairs, and there would be the garden possibility, and even a car-journey to Newmarket (a place as enticing as Paris or Venice had been in years gone by) was not to be ruled out. One occasion was a certainty, Christmas Day: he could trust Adela to see to that.
All these changes in his situation and outlook were the work of Shorty and Trevor. Which of them had thought of fetching him to the luncheon-party? Never mind: he would get the solicitor fellow along and draw up a new will, leaving each of them fifty pounds and the residue to Adela, instead of making Adela his sole beneficiary. She would understand; well, he would make sure she did. There was no need for hurry.
Exertion, and the two glasses of beer he had drunk, were making George drowsy. He could afford a little nap; paradoxically, having made plans to fill his time, he felt it was all right to let some of
it go to waste. For the first time under this roof, he felt at home. The line of photographs on the chest of drawers – his wife, Vera, his departmental colleagues at the university, the university buildings – looked like part of the room, not forlorn mementoes ripped from their context.
Someone knocked at his door: Adela, in a state of mild distress. She came over to the bedside and blinked at him through her heavy glasses.
‘Hallo, Adela dear.’
‘George, I must apologize to you.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Though I don’t see how anybody could apologize enough. I’ve been so thoughtless all these months, letting you lie here day in day out and just never seeing how easy it is to get you up and down stairs.’
‘It isn’t easy at all. It was too much for you in the end, getting me up, and there’s nobody else to give Shorty a hand.’
‘I’ve been wrapped up in my own affairs.’
‘You’ve got the whole house to run.’
‘Another day I might be better. It had been rather a busy morning.’
‘You’re not to overstrain yourself.’
‘We must work something out.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘It was so obvious all the time and I never thought of it.’
‘That’s enough. None of the rest of us would probably be alive if it weren’t for you. You must know that.’
Adela would have liked to kiss George, but did not venture to; she gripped his hands in turn, starting with the wrong one.
‘Off for your walk?’
‘Just a few minutes: it’ll be pretty wet. I’ll be up with your tea at four-thirty.’
‘Bless you, Adela.’
Twelve
Going down the stairs, Adela felt a small twinge of pain. Though not in quite the usual place, it must be her ulcer deploring the tensions of the last few hours and the two glasses of sherry she had taken before luncheon. It was the same every time they had visitors: her conviction that one drink was her limit, previously quite firm, would vanish in the bustle of conversation. She wished she had a particle of her brother’s will-power – firmly on the bottle until (how long was it now?) ten years ago or more, a fortnight of steadily reduced intake, then not another drop. Presumably he had long since stopped missing it.