Seven Lean Years Read online

  So first the Butlers had come, and while it was only them, everything had gone fairly smoothly. They were an ideal couple really, quiet and reliable, both out at work all day and so regular in their habits that you could tell the time by their every movement. They had to share the kitchen with Ellen and her father, but the inconvenience of this was reduced to a minimum by their modest and exact requirements. Mrs Butler wanted to use the stove from seven-fifteen to seven-thirty every morning and from six to six forty-five every evening—no other times whatever. There was really no inconvenience of any sort….

  Oh dear! Why didn’t I touch wood while I thought about it? Ellen asked herself, starting up in bed and sniffing the air in growing dismay. There could be no mistake. That hot, rich, spicy smell creeping through the cracks of the door could mean only one thing: Father had begun making the rhubarb and ginger wine! Out of all the hours of all the days when he could have messed about in the kitchen to his heart’s content, he had to choose now, seven-fifteen on a weekday morning. The exact minute when Mrs Butler, neat and brisk in her office dress, would be bustling in to make breakfast for herself and her husband.

  Ellen leapt out of bed, and began to dress in a flurry on all too familiar apprehensions. Perhaps, if she was quick enough … and if by any improbable chance Mrs Butler was a few minutes late this morning … matters could still be put right.

  As soon as she stepped into the kitchen Ellen found herself in a wilderness of scarlet peel, coiled like springs on every available surface. Father must have been up at five to have picked and peeled all that rhubarb! The touching picture of the old man stooping over the great dewy leaves in the summer dawn was swiftly erased from her mind by annoyance; for there at the gas stove he stood, triumphantly supervising the contents of two mighty saucepans, which between them covered the entire surface of the cooker. Mrs Butler was nowhere to be seen.

  “Father!” cried Ellen indignantly. “What on earth do you think you’re doing, so early in the morning? Don’t you know Mrs Butler wants to cook her breakfast now?”

  Mr Fortescue did not turn round. He merely bent over to stir more vigorously the smaller of the two saucepans; his very back, it seemed to Ellen, expressing gleeful obstinacy. He knows, she thought furiously. He hasn’t forgotten about the Butlers’ breakfast at all! He’s doing it on purpose!

  “Father!” she exclaimed again; and, yet more urgently, “Father!”

  This time the old man did turn round, with a smile of such guileless pleasure at the sight of her that Ellen was momentarily disarmed. But only momentarily:

  “Father, we must take that stuff off at once,” she exclaimed, pushing sharply past him. “Don’t you know it’s Butler’s time for using the stove?”

  “What? No, no, Ellie, leave it alone. You can’t take it off now, it’ll be ruined. It has to get up to 18o° Fahrenheit. That darned thermometer’s gone again, someone’s taken it; it’s a lucky thing I can tell temperatures to within half a degree just by—”

  “But Father! I must take it off! It’s the Butlers’ time, don’t you see? We promised them. It’s nearly half-past already—hasn’t Mrs Butler been in?”

  “Who’s Mrs Butler?” enquired Father truculently—always, his trump card against the tenants was to pretend that he didn’t know they existed at all, let alone what their names were.

  “Oh, Father! Mrs Butler! The one who lives in the old drawing-room and dining-room. And shares our kitchen. And pays us the two pounds a week that means you can still have your midday glass of port!” she concluded triumphantly.

  “Pshaw! I was having my midday glass of port before she was born! And I’ll still be having it after she’s dead, too. That type dies young—too much rushing about.” Then, hastily recollecting that he didn’t know who Mrs Butler was—he finished belligerently: “Women are all like that nowadays!”

  Ellen almost shook him.

  “Has Mrs Butler been in the kitchen this morning? Has a woman been in?”

  “Oh. A woman.” Mr Fortescue seemed prepared to consider this. His great wooden spoon dripped stickily on to the edge of the stove while he pondered.

  “Oh, yes,” he conceded at last. “I believe there was some sort of a woman, earlier on. Screeching about something—I couldn’t understand a word she said. At first I thought it was that woman who screeches on the wireless about this time. I’m a bit deaf in the mornings, you know, Ellie,” he concluded with gentle triumph, plunging his spoon into the pan once more.

  Ellen gave it up. She hurried along what had once been the servants’ passage and came out into the wide high hall, where the parquet floor was now scratched and dented beyond repair, and the plaster bulged with damp beneath the chipped and blackened cornice.

  Outside the old dining-room—now the Butlers’ sitting-room—she stopped. What could she say? Since Father was still refusing to remove his saucepans, any apology must be a hollow one, offering no hope of breakfast for the Butlers yet, even if they still had time for it. Probably they hadn’t, since they always left the house at exactly five minutes past eight.

  This morning they must have left even earlier, for there was no answer to Ellen’s knock. Perhaps they had gone out to a café for breakfast? Ellen knocked again—futilely, for has it every been known for a door to open to a second knock when it didn’t to the first?—and then turned away, with no feeling of relief at this respite. For now it would hang over her all day, and there was no reason at all to suppose that Mrs Butler’s annoyance would have cooled at all by the evening; that was not her way. Mrs Butler was not a quick-tempered woman—Father’s reference to “screeching” must be deemed poetic licence. At the most, a certain shrillness might have crept into her voice as she found that icy politeness availed nothing against Father’s gleeful and unresponsive back. Mrs Butler’s anger was of the calm, rational variety—and correspondingly long-lived. Anything that warranted complaint at half-past seven in the morning would still warrant it at quarter-past six in the evening—of that Ellen felt sure.

  That was the trouble with these reasonable people: you couldn’t hope for any lightening of mood. Yet were unreasonable people any better, Ellen wondered aggrievedly. People like Father, who had caused all the trouble this morning; if it wasn’t for Father, letting rooms would have been quite a simple business….

  Or would it? Perhaps Leonard had been right when he’d said that she was temperamentally unfitted to be a landlady. But then, it was Leonard also who had himself urged her to become one, pointing out how wrong it was that the big house should be occupied by only two people. If people with varying moods were what she liked, Ellen reflected ruefully, then she had picked a winner in Leonard!

  No, I’m not being fair to him, Ellen reproached herself as she moved slowly back across the hall; I expect I have awful moods too. An engagement that has gone on for seven years is a strain on both of us.

  At least, I suppose it’s a strain? For a sickening second, Ellen’s mind hovered on the sudden thought that perhaps the delay, far from being a strain, was an unmitigated relief. She still didn’t have to marry Leonard. And he didn’t have to marry her. Did he, too, experience these horrid moments of relief at the thought? Did this feeling form a secret, never-to-be-mentioned link between them?

  “Oh—Ellen——Hullo! I was just coming to look for you——”

  Melissa, dressed ready for work, appeared at the head of the stairs. Neat—hurried—assured—both she and Mrs. Butler put Ellen to shame by the amount they fitted into their busy lives. At this bustling morning hour Ellen always felt particularly useless and drone-like as she pictured the quiet day ahead of her—quiet, and yet somehow devoid of leisure; ceaselessly occupied, and yet with nothing to show for it—unless you counted Father’s continued survival in the teeth of flat disobedience to everything his doctor had ever ordered….

  “Ellen,” Melissa was saying, “I suppose you’re going to be in all day?” (Was Ellen imagining a touch of pitying scorn in the assumption?) “If you are, I won
der if you’d mind giving the man my laundry when he comes? It’s up on our landing, I’d have brought it down, only I know your Butlers don’t like seeing it in the hall.” (Why my Butlers? To make me feel that I am responsible for their pernicketiness?) “Oh, and Ellen, do you think you could ask the milkman not to leave my milk on the sunny side of the step? He could just as easily put it right under the laurels on the other side, where it’s really cool, could you speak to him about it?”

  “Yes, all right,” said Ellen, musing resignedly on the cheery way the milkman would say “O.K., Miss,” and continue to leave the milk exactly where it suited him.

  “And what about Jeremy,” she added, as a sort of compensation for milkman’s prospective failings: “Do you want me to run up and look at him now and then? Or is he all right for school today?”

  “Oh—well—no, I’m not sending him today, his throat’s still sore. Funny at his time of year. But you needn’t worry about him, he’ll be all right, and I’ll manage somehow to pop in at lunch-time.”

  She would, too. Melissa was wonderful, the way she managed never to let her children down, or her employer either.

  “Well, thanks, Ellen,” Melissa was saying, half-way through the front door. “I’m sorry I’ve got to dash off without saying hello to Uncle, but my mornings are rather a rush now that we can’t get up till seven. Cheerio!”

  Her smile and wave softened this parting shot, and Ellen closed the door, wondering yet again whether it had been such a good idea to have relations for tenants. She and Melissa were cousins, had been at school together, and had often spent Christmas holidays together, too; had, in fact, always been the best of friends. But could you expect a friendship to survive unchanged if you suddenly superimposed a landlady-tenant relationship on top of it? And yet it had seemed, at the time, such a natural and obvious arrangement; Melissa had written last winter in great distress to say that her home was being requisitioned; and Ellen had at once written back to offer her a flat in this big house. Well, some rooms, anyway—you could hardly call it a flat, with all the muddle about shared kitchens and bathrooms, and with Mrs Hammond’s big room wedged awkwardly in between Melissa’s two bedrooms. However, Melissa had come, filled with gratitude, and insisting on paying a fair rent such as Ellen could reasonably have asked from a stranger.

  Was it, perhaps, the fair rent that was the trouble? Or would it have been even worse if there had been an uneasy sense of obligation on Melissa’s side? Leonard said it would have been worse—he had argued, most emphatically, that a sense of obligation is the most destructive of all human emotions; that if Ellen charged Melissa anything less than the full rent, she would be doing it not out of kindness to Melissa, but simply to give herself a feeling of moral superiority.

  Leonard was good at this sort of thing; Ellen easily convinced by it; and if, later on, in a different mood, he had accused her, jokingly, of becoming a tight-fisted landlady, squeezing the last halfpenny even out of her own cousin—well, it was jokingly, and it would have been absurd to take offence—especially as he had called her “darling”, and kept stroking her hair all the time he was speaking. As he said, she must learn to take a joke against herself. Not to be able to do so, she felt sure, was one of the first signs of becoming an old maid; at thirty-four, you couldn’t afford such a symptom.

  CHAPTER II

  THE MORNING SUN streamed in across the rhubarb peel that still littered the old stone floor of the kitchen, and Ellen stood assessing the scene. It wasn’t really much use trying to clear up yet unless Father had finished, at least for today. What stage had the stuff reached, she wondered.

  The pans of rhubarb were still hot, but they were no longer on the stove. Instead they now stood, steaming lazily, among the debris on the table, countless coils of peel flattened stickily beneath them. Really, Father was naughty! He must have carried those pans from the stove himself, in spite of all the doctor had said about not lifting weights. Not bad, though, for eighty-seven! As always, Ellen’s impatience with the old man was tinged with pride, and she smiled as she equipped herself with damp rags and a broom, and set about clearing up.

  Father’s rhubarb and ginger wine! Ever since Ellen could remember, this had marked the beginning of summer; the beginning of the long, golden fruit season. Even now, when only a miserable quarter of an acre remained of the old rambling estate, the successive ripening of the soft fruit seemed still to dominate the year. The gooseberries would be next; then the raspberries, and the red currants; then the black currants, and the blue plums; then the Victorias…. Amazing how the old fruit bushes and trees went on bearing, year after year, seeming to thrive on utter neglect, producing their juicy, succulent crops more from old habit, one must imagine, than from any nourishment they could have extracted from the starved, weedy soil. The garden, shrunken though it now was, was too much for Father, far too much; and of course he wouldn’t let anyone help with it….

  “My dear Ellen! What squalor is this?”

  Ellen turned with a start to see Leonard smiling at her from the doorway, his fair hair looking almost golden in the steamy sunlight, his blue eyes narrowed in its brightness.

  “Why—Leonard! What a start you gave me! Fancy seeing you here so early! Have you got the morning off?”

  “Bit of outside work today,” said Leonard briefly. “Thought I’d drop in for a minute. I wanted to see you. I’m having a very worrying time just now, you know, Ellen.”

  “Your mother?” asked Ellen quickly; and then: “Wait a second while I wash the rhubarb off my hands, and then we’ll go and sit down somewhere a bit tidier!” She gestured ruefully towards the littered floor.

  “Good idea,” commented Leonard; and then, following her glance: “Don’t you find it depressing, living in a mess like this?”

  While he spoke, he was still balancing fastidiously in the doorway, as if on the edge of a dangerous swamp.

  “I don’t live in it!” retorted Ellen. “In fact, I was just beginning to clear up when you came. It’s Father’s rhubarb wine. You know. It’ll go on for two weeks. It has to soak, and steep, and stand, and all sorts of things.”

  Leonard was smiling a little now, and he ventured a couple of steps into the room.

  “He’s doing it all wrong, you know, Ellen,” he observed, peering into the cooling pans. “In the first place, he shouldn’t have heated it at all. How does he expect it to ferment properly if he starts off by heating it?”

  “I don’t know,” confessed Ellen. “I think he adds yeast, or something. He doesn’t tell me, and I don’t interfere. He does so love doing it all by himself, and it always turns out more or less drinkable. And you can’t say much more than that of any home-made wine, made by any method,” she finished, practically.

  “I don’t know.” Ellen guessed from Leonard’s tone that he was not referring to anything so innocuous as recipes for home-made wine; and she was right.

  “I don’t know; I sometimes think you ought to interfere more than you do, Ellen. For his own sake, I mean. Non-interference—tolerance—they sound very fine, but they can be just other names for laziness!”

  Ellen felt irritation stiffening in her diaphragm. Was he being pompous and hectoring—or was she being touchy? Certainly, if she took him up on his words, he would say she was being touchy … that he had meant nothing … was only joking…. Oh, well, better to let it go, then … change the subject.

  Not allowing herself fully to recognise the terrible familiarity of this sequence of thought, Ellen finished drying her hands, and smiled up at Leonard brightly.

  “Come on; let’s go into the garden. It’s not such a mess out there—at least, it’s a different kind of mess. I’ll go and get the deckchairs.”

  But Leonard insisted on fetching the deckchairs himself. He was being very sweet to her now, after all that criticism—and this, too, was part of the pattern. He set the chairs close together in a sunny corner of the lawn, arranged a cushion for her back, and when they had sat down he took her
hand.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Ellen,” he said softly—and Ellen knew, all over again, why it was that she had put up with his moodiness for seven years and was still putting up with it, now and indefinitely. “I leave home this morning feeling quite raw with worry, and after five minutes with you I am at peace! Even though all my causes for worry still remain”—and he gave her a wry, sideways smile, and dropped her hand. He reached down, and began tugging nervously at long tufts of the ill-cut grass; examining and discarding blade after blade on some principle of selection known only to some uneasy corner of his mind.

  “It’s Cousin Laura,” said Ellen with certainty. Not that Leonard’s stepmother was really her cousin; but this was the rather old-world title by which Ellen had been taught as a child to address her; the title which must have seemed to the family to best cover the rather complicated relationship that really existed between them. “It’s Cousin Laura, isn’t it?” she repeated. “Is she worse?”

  Leonard shook his head.

  “No. Well, that is—of course she can’t ever be better, we know that. She can’t ever be younger either; and it’s not as if she carries her age as your father does. You’re lucky, Ellen. You don’t know what the burden of a dependent parent really is.”

  Don’t I though? reflected Ellen. If not of my own parent, then of yours. Isn’t it a burden to me, too, that you can’t marry me while you have her to support? At this moment the thought of the years passing and of Leonard’s still not being able to marry her was inexpressibly sad. That flash of furtive relief earlier this morning was gone, buried—perhaps for ever, perhaps only for a few hours—under this precious sense of being needed.