Seven Lean Years Page 3

  “You see,” Leonard was saying, “this nursing home in Leeds is folding up. I’ll have to find something else for her. In the same neighbourhood if possible—most of her friends are there since she’s lived there for so long. But it’s a great worry, having to change. It’s been no joke finding fifteen guineas a week out of my income all this time, and it may be even more now. These places go up every year. And she must be somewhere decent. I can’t have her tucked away in some sordid hole on the cheap. I won’t consider it!”

  He said these last words quite belligerently, as though Ellen had been urging him to consider it. Her brief feeling of uncomplicated affection towards him stiffened a little; became laced with caution, and with the all-to-familiar anxiety not to say the wrong thing.

  “I think you’re awfully good to her,” she said at last, carefully. “Finding her such a comfortable home, I mean, and not even letting her know that you’re having to pay for it yourself. I think it was terribly generous of you, when the crash came, not to let her know about it; to let her think she still had an income of her own, when really you’re paying for everything. And she’s not even your own mother, either….”

  This might easily have been a wrong thing to say, and Ellen drew in her breath sharply. But it was all right. Leonard took her hand again, smiling ruefully.

  “That, of course, would never weigh with me,” he said, rather ponderously. “If anything, it’s the other way round—I feel more responsibility for her since she’s only my stepmother. I realise, now, that the—well—the ways in which she made me unhappy as a child weren’t exactly her fault. It was something—well—inherent in the situation. Something outside her own control. I see that now, and I don’t bear her any grudge.”

  Again blade after blade of grass was subjected to painstaking review. Then, suddenly, he straightened up in his chair, with a brisk, business-like air.

  “Well, there you are, Ellen; there’s the problem. What are we going to do?”

  What are we going to do? Ellen braced herself. It was fair enough, of course; if you wanted to bask in the pleasant sense of being needed, then you had sometimes to undertake tasks that were needful.

  “I could have her here.” Ellen took the plunge. “She doesn’t need actual skilled nursing, does she? She could have my room—that’s on the ground floor—and I could move up to——”

  “No!”

  Leonard’s voice snapped back at her like a piece of elastic, and Ellen recoiled in astonishment. Surely her offer had been what the whole conversation had been leading up to? But evidently not; Leonard was looking at her quite angrily.

  “No, I wouldn’t think of it. Not for a moment. For one thing, she does need skilled nursing, and for another I wouldn’t dream of imposing such a burden on you. This is my problem.”

  “But it wouldn’t be a burden …” began Ellen, and then faltered. It would be a burden, of course; a tremendous one; and there was no knowing how Father would take it, either. Leonard seemed to be reading her thoughts, for he went on:

  “And if you aren’t worried on your own account, what about your father? And what about her—Mother—if it comes to that? It’d be pretty embarrassing for the poor old things to find themselves under the same roof, don’t you think?”

  There was a sort of painstaking lightness about the last sentence; and, forced though it was, Ellen hastened to respond to it. She laughed.

  “What, after all these years? But they’ve met each other hundreds of times since the break-up—and stayed under the same roof. What about all the times when Cousin Laura used to come and look after me when I was small? Once the divorce was properly over she and my father became quite good friends again—lots of ex-husbands and wives do. Anyway, it was all so long ago—they must have almost forgotten what they were quarrelling about. Father has, I’m sure.”

  “But Mother hasn’t,” said Leonard gravely. “And I don’t see, Ellen, how you, of all people, can expect her to have forgotten. It was you they were quarrelling about. You! Doesn’t it ever worry you at all, knowing that your birth was the cause of so much bitterness?”

  He seemed to have discovered the exact blade of grass that suited him now, and he was chewing on its succulent stem with absent-minded gusto. Something in the gesture roused all Ellen’s resentment. She felt herself subtly reproved —and most unfairly, too, seeing that all she had done was to offer, quite heroically, to look after his stepmother for him.

  “No, it doesn’t worry me,” she answered sharply—perhaps more sharply than she intended. “Why should it? I couldn’t help my father leaving Cousin Laura in order to marry my mother, now could I? I wasn’t even born at the time! It’s absurd to say that I should worry about it!”

  Leonard did not seem angry at her outburst. He was stroking her hair gently, almost pityingly.

  “You’re a difficult person to talk to, Ellen,” he said sadly. “You’re so touchy—whatever I say, you take it as some sort of insult. All I’m trying to do is to share my problem with you. However, there is really no need. I can have Mother at my flat for a few days while I look round for somewhere suitable. My landlady’ll look after her—she was a nurse before she married.”

  “And I could drop in every day and see her,” added Ellen impulsively. “I’d like to—I’ve quite missed her all these years she’s been living up North.”

  No. She had said the wrong thing again. Leonard was looking at her with a curious expression on his face. Pity? Anxiety? Even a sort of fear?

  “Ellen,” he said gravely, “can’t you understand at all how my stepmother must feel about you and your father? She is an embittered woman, and you are the very core of her bitterness. Yes, yes—I know she seemed to get over it all—married my father and so on. And I know she seemed fond of you—helped to look after you after your mother died, as you say. And wonderfully noble and self-sacrificing it was of her in the circumstances. But, Ellen, don’t you ever stop to wonder what lies behind that sort of ‘nobleness’? Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that hatred can cover itself with strange disguises? And that the disguises sooner or later may slip—particularly as a person grows older, and less in control of themselves? No, Ellen: you’re a very sweet-natured person, but you’re very naïve. You see the world as a child sees it—peopled with kind characters who always behave kindly, and cruel characters who always behave cruelly. I suppose it’s because you’ve led such a sheltered life compared with most women nowadays. But when you show so little knowledge of the darker side of human nature that you cheerfully suggest that my stepmother should be invited to your father’s house—well, I’m frightened for you, Ellen. Really frightened.”

  CHAPTER III

  AFTER LEONARD HAD GONE, Ellen walked slowly round to the front of the house, reflecting, with old complacency, that he was quite right: she was touchy. It was a surprisingly comforting thought, for, if true, it meant that much of his apparent moodiness might well lie in her imagination, not in him at all. It gave some assurance that he was quite a reasonable sort of chap really; the sort of chap that any girl might wait for for seven years. Ellen knew that every passing year was making it more and more necessary that the wait should have been worth while; this necessity sometimes felt like a great and growing weight that she had to drag about with her everywhere, growing heavier year by year; like a great shopping basket with more and more heavy parcels being added to it. There were times when any relief from this burden seemed welcome, even one afforded by her own shortcomings.

  Thus Ellen savoured the thought of her own unreasonableness this morning; the way she had provoked him, contradicted him, and had finally allowed herself to be reduced to sulky monosyllables merely by his harmless suggestion that her life had been a sheltered one.

  And it had, of course; that was why it annoyed her so much to be told so. While her contemporaries had been rushing about earning their livings at exacting jobs, marrying difficult or impecunious husbands, producing families in the teeth of every kind of obstacle and p
reoccupation, she had spent her youth alternately looking after Father and working at the most undemanding kinds of office job—the sort she could leave at a moment’s notice if Father suddenly needed her.

  Now, of course, he needed her all the time. Also, his shares were no longer producing enough for him to live on, and his only other asset, the old, decaying family home, had had to be turned into a paying proposition. This Ellen had done—and done fairly effectively, she felt—felt particularly at moments like this when the sun was shining, the tenants all out, and Leonard not threatening to “go over the financial situation” with her. Leonard, of course, being an accountant by profession, was able (and unfailingly willing) to point out to her all sorts of snags which she, her financial vision comfortably bounded by the six pounds fifteen handed to her by the tenants every week, would never have thought of.

  At this point in her musings Ellen reached the front door, and was straight away confronted by Melissa’s three pints of milk basking peacefully in the sunniest corner of the step. The milkman must have come while she was still engrossed in her conversation—quarrel—whatever you liked to call it—with Leonard; and this must be one of his mornings for not shouting “Oy-oick!” as he put the bottles down. Some mornings he did shout “Oy-oick” and some mornings he didn’t; and Ellen would have loved to know on what it depended. Did the milkman have moods, like Leonard, and did “Oy-oick” express one of them? Oy-oick—Oy-oick: as inhuman a sound, almost, as the clatter and clank of the bottles themselves. But perhaps some moods were like that—inhuman….

  The milkman’s moods, indeed! It’s no wonder I never seem to get anything done in the mornings, Ellen admonished herself. Hastily she stooped and gathered up the bottles, hot and slippery to the touch, and transferred them to the damp shadowy depths of the laurels to the left of the porch. And as she reached into the cool, pungent quietness, and settled the bottles securely on the carpet of dead leaves, she caught that scent of eternal autumn which lies at the heart of evergreens, and was aware of a familiar sadness—familiar, although she knew it was not quite her own. For it was not she who could remember the days when this solitary little clump of laurels had been the beginning of a splendid laurel drive, curving away between wide, well-cared-for lawns, down to the lane which was now the main London road. It was Father who could remember that—Father and Cousin Laura. It was they who had watched the lawns laid waste, the old mulberry tree felled, and the buttercup fields submerged for ever under the bricks and mortar of the Harville Road Estate. It was their sadness, not her own, that was catching at her throat now as she twisted her shoulders free of the quiet polished leaves and stood up in the sunshine. This was a thing that must be guarded against when you were the spinster daughter at home —this tendency to think the thoughts, to feel the feelings, of the old. You mustn’t let yourself do it—not yet, anyway, not at thirty-four. You should be thinking young thoughts still. Or busy, practical thoughts, like Melissa….

  Melissa! Melissa would be dashing home in her lunch hour to see how Jeremy was, and Ellen remembered with compunction that she had meant to run up during the morning and amuse him for a little. Melissa had said it was unnecessary, but all the same he was only nine, and it seemed a kindly thing to do—a sort of compensation, too, for having forgotten to speak to the milkman about putting the milk in the shade.

  As she went indoors, Ellen was aware of wishing that it was twelve-year-old Adela who was at home needing to be amused today—poor giggling, scatter-brained Adela, inquisitive as a puppy, and ready to be interested in absolutely anything other than information.

  However, it wasn’t Adela at home, it was Jeremy; and Ellen set off up the stairs with some misgivings. She knew that she did not like Jeremy as much as his sister—in fact, every now and then she admitted to herself that she did not like him at all. But the admission always brought with it a dreadful sense of guilt: because you ought to like children. Especially if you were unmarried and had none of your own you ought to; there was really quite a compulsion to like them then, every single one of them, just to prove to yourself and the world that you weren’t really spinsterish at all. Ellen sometimes longed quite ardently to be married for no other reason than that she would then be able to cease submitting her thoughts and behaviour to this tiresome inner tribunal: “Is this spinsterish?”

  She had reached the big upstairs landing now, with the main bedrooms opening off it. They weren’t all bedrooms now, of course; one had been converted into a kitchen, one into a bathroom, and the rest of the rooms were divided in a rather haphazard way between Melissa and Mrs Hammond. It had begun with Mrs Hammond’s having the old nursery and the little room adjoining it, and Melissa the remaining four rooms; but as Mrs Hammond never seemed to use her second room Melissa had one day ventured to ask if she might keep her ironing board there. This request had been agreed to with such lackadaisical good-nature on Mrs Hammond’s part that it was soon followed by others: a fairy cycle, a tattered armchair, and Adela’s old doll’s-house quickly joined the ironing board in the little room; and in the midst of these innovations Adela suddenly decided, after nearly three years of being too old for it, that she wanted to play with her doll’s-house again. So Adela, too, was admitted—closely followed, of course, in the unanswerable interests of Fairness, by Jeremy.

  Something should be done about it, Ellen supposed, rather helplessly, as she passed the door in question. Mrs Hammond should be paying less rent—or Melissa more—or something. But the little room seemed infinitely capacious, Mrs Hammond infinitely indifferent; no one was complaining. When there were so many things people were complaining about it seemed a pity not to leave alone so innocuous an arrangement.

  Jeremy’s room was very hot in spite of the open window, and Jeremy himself was reclining among a mountainous tangle of blankets that looked to Ellen quite intolerable on this June morning. He was picking aimlessly at some loose threads in the curtain above his head, and when Ellen came in he glanced at her without surprise.

  “Hullo, Jeremy,” she said brightly—there was something about Jeremy which always made her force a little extra brightness into her voice, as if to make up for some quality lacking in him. “How are you? Feeling very bored?”

  “No, thank you.” He had secured quite a long thread at a single tweak, and was examining it with satisfaction. Ellen waited a moment for him to say something more; then she tried again:

  “Wouldn’t you like me to make your bed for you?” she suggested. “Or we could play something?”

  Jeremy shook his head.

  “No, thank you,” he said politely, to both offers. He seemed to be waiting for her to go so that he could go on picking at his curtain in peace, and Ellen suddenly wanted to shake him. The flabbiness of his responses infuriated her. He ought to be bored, lying there like that. He ought to want to play something—to be amused in some way. He wasn’t as ill as all that—just a sore throat. Talking to him was as irritatingly unsatisfying as threading a garment with poor quality elastic—it was fiddly and tiresome, and you knew all the time that it wasn’t going to work properly. Was he like this with everyone, Ellen wondered, or only with her? Because, of course, it wasn’t fair to dislike a child because of behaviour that you yourself were unconsciously provoking. Still less was it fair to dislike him because he had a small mouth, and because his eyebrows and lashes were so fair as to be almost invisible on his pale, freckled skin.

  Remorseful, Ellen spoke more brightly than ever.

  “I’ll fetch you some books, shall I?” she suggested. “There must be a lot up in the attic that you’ve never read. Books that I had as a child—some even that my father had. Would you like to look at some very ancient books?”

  “Yes, please,” said Jeremy—whether from politeness, a desire to get rid of her, or a real wish to see the books Ellen had no way of guessing. Nor did she greatly care which it was; it was enough that the limp interchange had provided her with something definite—and quite quick—to do for the child.
Now when Melissa came dashing in at lunch-time, radiating superiority over people who have nothing much to do all day, she wouldn’t feel so guilty.

  Ellen did not often go up to the attics. They oppressed her with the knowledge that it would cost eight hundred pounds to get them in a fit state for anyone to live in. The whole roof needed renewing, Leonard said, and every month she neglected it was adding to the cost. The botched-up emergency repairs for which Messrs Alsopp the builders were called in every few months were, Leonard claimed, worse than useless. Going over the house with Leonard was just like going over the finances—it made her feel that she was surrounded by hidden, malevolent forces. Dry rot—wet rot—income tax—death duties—the Borough Surveyor—Leonard managed to merge them all together into one fearful, faceless army, for ever converging on the old house, for ever gathering fresh reinforcements from some unspecified inadequacy in Ellen. An army of mysterious, diabolical strength, to be combated, it seemed, solely by unremitting pessimism. For though Leonard had no suggestions to make about where the eight hundred pounds was to come from, he seemed to regard it as the blackest treachery on Ellen’s part to propose to carry on without it. One gathered that it was all right to be threatened with inescapable ruin so long as you never, for one moment, allowed yourself to feel cheerful about it.

  But then, no doubt, accountants were like that; it was part of their job. Ellen reflected that it was probably a measure of Leonard’s success at his profession that he was able to throw himself with such whole-hearted gloom into the inspection of the Fortescues’ sagging ceilings and warped floorboards. Besides, it was natural that he should worry about the house, since it was an understood thing that, when they married, they would be living here. Really, the house was his just as much as hers. It was a compliment, in a way, that she should fuss about it like this—an assurance that “when they got married” was still a reality to him, a solid, calculable proposition, and not the ever-receding dream that it sometimes seemed to Ellen.