“It’s only the sideboard and the bookcase and that little cabinet,” she said cheerfully, opening the door upon the chaos in the woodshed. A confusion of large, dark objects confronted them with a hopeless air. Snow blew in Mr. Waite’s face and settled upon his best necktie.
“Can you see?” she asked.
“Well enough,” replied Mr. Waite, without any of the inflections that might have been expected, and for the next twenty minutes he pulled and pushed and steered the furniture round awkward corners, while Alda, in silence except for an occasional laugh or brief comment, helped him at critical moments. When at last he stood in the hall, dusting his hands and looking down at her, she was surprised to see that he did not look cross. He buttoned his overcoat, still looking at her; he seemed absent.
“There!” she said, surveying the orderly sitting-room. “Now if Mrs. Prewitt comes back in the small hours, she’ll find everything all right.”
“Are you expecting Mrs. Prewitt?” in a startled tone,
“Of course not, it was only a joke,” soothingly. “Thank you so much for helping me. Oh—your hat.” She held it out to him and he took it. She opened the front door. “I’m so glad that you were able to come. Ugh! Summer seems years away, doesn’t it?”
Together they peered out into the night. Snow drifted glittering into the beam of light shining out from the hall and vanished again into darkness.
“But it isn’t cold,” he answered, still with that absent air; then seemed to recollect himself.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Lucie-Browne, thank you for a pleasant afternoon—oh, I nearly forgot.” He felt in his pocket and brought out some chocolate. “For the kiddies. They oughtn’t to have them to-night; too heavy; keep them till to-morrow.”
“You are kind!” exclaimed Alda, in a voice of genuine and unflattering surprise. “Thank you very much indeed; they will be so pleased.”
“Not at all. Er—you must all come and have tea with me one day soon, only,” laughing ruefully, “I can’t promise to move all the furniture in your honour, you know! Good night.”
“We’d love to. Good night.”
And she shut the door.
Oh, what a relief it was to rush into the kitchen, where washing up was in its last stages, accompanied by gales of laughter and jokes about the Sisters, who were rapidly being transformed by Sylvia and Jean into harmless funny old cats and who would remain so until twenty minutes to nine on the following morning when Jenny and Louise again saw Sister Benedict approaching in the car! Men can be bores, thought Alda, scooping her daughters into an embrace, and honestly believing that she preferred the society of women.
“What did you think of him?” she could not help asking of Jean, in a lowered tone.
“Wasn’t he awful?” said Sylvia, standing by the draining-board with a teacloth draped round her ample hips to protect her dress and glancing delightedly from one face to the other. “He didn’t half tick me off, didn’t he? But I soon bobbed up again; you can’t keep a good woman down. He’s a regular masochist or monagonist or whatever you call a woman-hater, isn’t he?”
“Misogynist—if you must call him something,” said Alda. “Meggy, my love, come along—bed.”
Meg was leaning with her elbows on the seat of a chair and sucking her thumb (a gesture she only used when she was sleepy), while her eyes, which were already heavy under her pale gold fringe, moved interestedly from one grown-up to another and then back to Jenny or Louise. She wanted to go on watching and listening, but something—a warmth, a deliciousness that came nearer and nearer inside her—kept breaking over her, plunging her each time a little deeper and making her open her eyes slightly wider against its drowsy waves. When her mother lifted her up, she said indignantly, “Meg will stay up to supper,” but as no one took any notice, she inclined her head gratefully upon Alda’s shoulder, sighed, and was borne away.
Alda came downstairs and found Sylvia patronisingly helping Jenny and Louise with their homework, her loud voice, giggles and dictatorial manner adding to their already considerable confusion.
“Off you go, Sylvia,” said Alda crisply. “It’s half-past six and these two have to be in bed by half-past seven sharp.”
“Oh, must I, Mrs. Lucie-Browne? We’re having such a lovely time, aren’t we, Jenny and Weez?” and she grinned at the children, who did not respond.
“Mother, I’m in an awful muddle and we really must get it done,” said Jenny, who now looked exhausted and inclined to tears, while Louise was pale and yawning.
“J., can you just start them on whatever they’ve got to do?” said Alda, “and I’ll take Sylvia up to get her things on,” for she perceived that Sylvia was not going to leave the cottage unless she were firmly ushered out.
“It’s not much fun at that place, I can tell you,” said Sylvia when they were in the bedroom. “Mr. Hoadley’s all right, but she’s very funny, you never know how to take her, and that girl they have in three times a week’s bats, if you ask me. As for the Italians, the little one’s always trying to paw you about, it makes me sick, and the red-haired one——”
“Fabrio? What about him?” asked Alda with some impatience as Sylvia paused to paint her mouth.
“Oh, he’ll murder me one of these days, I should think, he hates the sight of me.”
“Much more likely he’s in love with you and frightened that you’ll guess, young men don’t hate the sight of attractive girls,” said Alda, with the gay authority she used for such announcements, and looking at her with renewed interest. “How do you treat him?”
“It’s not my fault, Mrs. Lucie-Browne, I’m quite willing to be friendly. After all, we were all victims of the Capitalists’ War, weren’t we? Him just as much as you or me or anybody, I haven’t any Fascist hatred for Germans or Italians or Japanese.”
“Yes, I know all about that, but do you like him?”
“I don’t get the chance. He never speaks to me and if I speak to him he slaps me down.”
“Well, you offer to help him learn English. I happen to know that he’s mad keen to learn, and he couldn’t slap you down for a friendly suggestion, could he?”
“Oo, no, he couldn’t,” said Sylvia doubtfully. Then, suddenly realising what Alda had said earlier, she cried out, “In love with me? He’d better not be! I hate all that sort of thing, it just makes me laugh.”
“You’re a very unkind little girl,” said Alda, who at eighteen had done her own share of private jesting at scars because she had never felt a wound, and who indeed was one of those Eternal Fifth Formers, most common in England, who are capable of inspiring the subtlest pangs without understanding what on earth it is all about.
Nevertheless, she was too kind-hearted to enjoy the thought of Fabrio sighing in vain. “He is a prisoner, and far away from his own country and I expect he gets very lonely sometimes,” she went on. “He’s not married, by the way, is he?” for she was not going to promote a friendship that might end in a sordid tangle.
“Emilio is, but not Fabrio, Mr. Hoadley says.”
“Well, you take my advice. I’m sure he’ll be grateful, and teaching him English will be good for you, too.” She did not say why; indeed, she did not know. Behind her towered Mother Nature, blindly, blandly, inexorably pressing forward these suggestions with her pitchfork from which drooped wheat and olive sprays.
“All right, I will. He can only push my face in, can’t he,” said Sylvia amiably. As she went down the stairs she giggled and added:
“Oo, I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I do wonder if there’ll be a letter for me to-morrow? I’ve written to Alan Ladd telling him his last picture was corny.”
“What was that? I haven’t seen him in anything since This Gun for Hire.”
“Oo, wasn’t he smashing in it?” (Alda remembered a boorish young man shooting his way in and out of railway sheds.) “I made the letter ever so critical, and I was just wondering—of course, he won’t—but he might write back, and send me a signed photo.”
/> “Would that be so wonderful?” asked Alda, smiling as they paused at the front door.
“It would be marvellous,” and she sighed ecstatically. “I’m simply crazy about him. You’ll think I’m quite bats, but I was wondering if he’d send for me—you know—to go out to Hollywood and give me a part in his next picture.”
“But I thought you wanted to go on the stage?” said Alda beginning to open the door.
“Oo, so I do—but a part in an Alan Ladd picture—only of course a film star’s life is awful really, isn’t it? and they’re all awful, too—so uncultured.”
Alda only laughed and said “Good night” and gently edged Sylvia, earnestly thanking her for a lovely time, out into the porch.
“You take my advice about giving those English lessons,” she called after her, as she shut the front door. She thought that Sylvia would make a better wife for Fabrio than she would an actress, and if Fabrio was the son of a prosperous peasant farmer, as no doubt he was, she would enjoy considerably more comfort and authority than her own social setting could provide in England; she was also better educated than Fabrio and would improve his mind.
All of which would have delighted the young man who had once been in love with Alda, and who had made her indignant after a long silence had fallen between them at a dance by taking her hands and saying adoringly: “Promise me that you will never try to think.”
She found that the children’s homework was not so difficult, as they had led her to suppose. Jenny had a short chapter to read and digest on the religious, economic, and social changes brought about in England by the Norman invasion, and Louise had the future tense of faire and aller to learn by heart, Sister Paul having discovered (without showing any of the surprise and approval which she felt) that “my father” had taught Louise the other tenses of these verbs when he was on leave at Christmas. Whereupon Sister Paul had quelled any tendency towards complacency in Louise by comparing her writing to spiders.
“Is that why you cried?” asked Alda, sitting by Louise’s bed while Jenny was in the bathroom.
“No, Mother. As a matter of fact” (lowering her voice) “I rather liked it. The Sisters were quite kind to me; but they were so beastly” her eyes suddenly filled, and she gulped “to Jenny. I do hate it when people are unkind to people.”
“But what did Jenny do to make them unkind? (don’t cry, darling).”
“Well, nothing, really, it was the way she spoke to them—sort of loudly and looking straight at them while she talked. She wasn’t respectful.”
Alda muttered something; then said: “Children aren’t brought up nowadays to be respectful to grown-ups. It’s an old-fashioned idea, and so long as they aren’t rude it doesn’t matter. Was Jenny rude?”
“Oh no, Mother, truly. But you should be respectful to the Sisters, they’re so good. They give up their whole lives to God.”
“Is that what they told you?”
“No. Damaris Bernais told me. She’s one of the big girls. She’s nearly fifteen. She’s half-French and she stays there all the time. She saw me crying and she was so kind, Mother. And she’s so pretty, she’s got natural curly hair, not permanently waved at all, and a lovely long necklace of little black beads and pearls with a little crucifix on it. She said Jenny was rebellious.”
Alda thought this the greatest nonsense and took a dislike to Mlle Bernais from that moment. Who was this chit, with her rosary and curls, to criticise Alda’s Jenny and win the admiration of Alda’s Louise?
She gave them their chocolate, with a caution not to awaken Meg, and went thoughtfully downstairs.
“Jean,” she said while they were at supper, “you could go out with Jenny while she has those riding lessons, couldn’t you? I’m afraid they’re going to be necessary.”
“Love to,” said Jean cheerfully. “I’ll probably fall off, but who cares. Would you let me stand Weez some lessons, too, darling?”
Alda gratefully but absently said that of course she would.
14
SYLVIA WALKED BACK across the snowy fields, determined to follow Alda’s advice. Alda had taken her measure at the first meeting and adopted towards her precisely that mixture of kindness, amusement and bossiness which Sylvia unconsciously expected from elders and betters, and she respected Alda, though of course the word itself never entered her head. She also thought Alda very pretty (though she could have looked much smarter if she had used make-up) and she had been impressed by the sight of Ronald’s books lying about; Mallock’s The New Republic, Sartre’s novel (in French) and Toynbee’s A Study of History. She imagined herself asking Alda if she might borrow them, especially the French one. If only she could read French! But she would; she would learn to.
Indeed, the world of ideas did attract Sylvia, but only because there might be drama therein. Her father had possessed strong vitality and it had been transmitted to his children in varying forms. His eldest son could play any tune by ear; the girls were expert dancers, well known at the dance-halls of North London, and Sylvia had been from childhood “the mimic”; she could “take anyone off; isn’t she a yell!” All were voracious readers of any book, newspaper or magazine that came to hand, which they would afterwards discuss for hours in their loud young voices, sitting over the untidy tea-table and waving their hands about in the cigarette smoke, while the mother (who was fat but still beautiful, and the only one among them who possessed a sense of direction, and the will to drive herself and others towards a goal) moved about the big kitchen of their house near the Nag’s Head; tidying, managing, sometimes pausing to put an emphatic word into the conversation or to nod sardonically over some piece of wisdom from a sixteen-year-old.
Drama was what these Scorbys desired: clash, the strong tension between black and white in colours, between extreme Left and Right in politics; the exhausted sweetness of extracts from the works of classical composers plugged on the screen and afterwards sold in simplified versions in Woolworths as “The Concerto from the film”; the acerbities and generalisations of the Brains Trust; they wanted nothing that was slow, quiet, patient, subtle, or humble, nothing that required listening to in silence, nothing that was noble.
This family of nine people living in North London in a working-class setting and neighbourhood used the names of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Beethoven, Wagner and other men of genius every day in conversation, and were familiar (in a highly distorted form, thanks to the film and the wireless) with the chief events of their lives. History itself had to be floodlit and telescoped in order to hold their attention and if they read biographies they were in the form of vivid easy novels.
They knew no dates, referring to all historical events or costumes as “Elizabethan” or “Jane Austen style” or “Naughty Nineties touch.” Beyond the reign of Elizabeth their knowledge, such as it was, stopped abruptly, and there was a blank until they reached the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Romans: behind these, the background was “Prehistoric” and, of course, funny. They spoke with hatred of the rich; they despised as fools such educated people as they encountered who had no glamour and did not get into debt in order to buy smart clothes, a car and a steady flow of alcohol; yet, had they known intimately an educated family which did, they would have disapproved even more bitterly, because (buried deeply in their minds and by them unsuspected) there lingered on the ancient noblesse oblige.
A fascinated scorn of the film stars drew the Scorbys three times a week or so to the pictures. As Communists, they despised these luxurious lives, yet the personal beauty and dazzling success of the latest favourite aroused their bitterest envy and almost silenced the voice of their hard working-class common sense, which told them that such triumph could only be purchased very dearly.
Sylvia was entranced by the world of the cinema: she would suddenly fling aside the part she was learning, rush upstairs to the bedroom she shared with her sister Shirley, and reappear with cheeks painted like peaches and—if it were summer—a rhododendron blossom in her hair stolen from a nei
ghbour’s garden. Off she would go to the local (which can mean a cinema as well as a public house) and sit there, dazed and adoring some “curled Assyrian bull” of a young man or one with a face like an amiable sponge, if he happened to be the star of the moment, for two or three hours, creeping home at last sullen and yawning, with all the world about her seeming slow, colourless and lacking in ro-mance.
She preferred American films, because their pace was faster, their violence more blasting, their morals and contrasts easier and sharper, than those in British ones. Such films as The Rake’s Progress, This Happy Breed, I Know Where I’m Going, took a story from everyday life and touched it with poetry, and the Scorbys did not notice everyday life; they were too bemused with words and drama and half-baked theories. In these films the soul of England shone tenderly; and the Scorbys did not know about tenderness; they were too busy, poor little things, trying to be tough. Here hovered the spirit of small gardens, of the Caledonian Market with its white tower above and its Indian or Regency junk on the stones beneath, the kitchen dozing in the afternoon hush, the lawns and orangeries of lordly mansions that have become resting places for ordinary people. But the Scorbys dismissed British films as corny.
And all these young people, except Hugo the eldest, were disturbingly inept with their hands. The girls sewed clumsily when they impatiently tried to mend a tear or make the simplest garment, the boys could not put up a shelf and they never noticed the garden unless they rushed out into it to snatch in some dabbed-out washing or chase away a cat. Mrs. Scorby occasionally arranged a pot of flowering plants upon a window-sill which she herself had painted blue, and Hugo’s fingers were quick and intuitive upon the keys of a piano, but even he was not capable of the concentration necessary to learn to read the simplest music. He had been apprenticed before the Second World War at one of the numerous piano factories in Camden Town, and had returned to his work after being demobilised. He was warmly welcomed, for piano-making is a craft which does not attract young workers to-day and serious observers are wondering what will happen when the sixty-, seventy- and even eighty-year-old craftsmen are dead, and he liked his work. His sisters and brothers drifted in and out of jobs, a way of living which increased their restlessness and lack of concentration. While they had the tall, ugly old brown house to come home to, with copious meals cooked by their mother and no regular ways to interrupt their smoking and talking, the Scorbys enjoyed life and they did no harm. Only in the company of quieter, older or more solid people did their shallowness become apparent, and to such people they were the most dreadful bores. There was an old man who lived with his old wife in two top rooms of a house overlooking the Scorbys’ garden, and how he did long to get his hands upon that thirty feet of neglected, trampled earth! To him the dramatic Scorbys, ever gesticulating behind the windows in the smoke-filled rooms or screaming to each other above the noise of the wireless, were objects of strong disapproval, distaste and weariness. He described their activities to himself as Always At It.