Uncle Paul Read online

  “Back-from-where?” Meg condensed the words almost into a single syllable hoping that, if she was quick enough, she might be able to snatch some useful information from her nephew before his thoughts had proceeded further on their relentless course. It was like trying to jump on to a moving train.

  “From Aunt Mildred’s,” said Johnnie; and Meg had the sensation of dropping into the corner seat, breathless and triumphant. “She went straight there after dinner,” Johnnie continued obligingly, “because Aunt Mildred was crying, or something. That’s why we couldn’t bathe—”

  With juggler’s speed, Meg retrieved the conversation:

  “Where is Aunt Mildred. Staying in the town, or what?”

  “She seemed to be just crying,” said Johnnie, detachedly; and before this rather unhelpful contribution as to his aunt’s whereabouts could be further elucidated, his face suddenly lit up.

  “There’s Mummy!” he squealed; and, bathing-suit in hand, he streaked across the dry, yellowing grass towards the wire fence and the dusty white path along which Meg herself had approached the encampment.

  Isabel was looking tired and strained. Her print dress was a shade too long, and she carried a limp canvas shopping bag. Isabel always carried a shopping bag, wherever she went. For years Meg had meant to ask her why such a bag was so invariably needed, but it never seemed quite the right moment. Nor was it the right moment now: Isabel had caught sight of her sister, and her face had suddenly brightened and softened unbelievably with an upsurge of the old childhood affection.

  “Oh, Meg, how lovely to see you! Oh, I am glad! Oh, it’ll be so much easier now!”

  But even as she linked arms with her sister, Isabel’s features were falling once more into the familiar anxious lines: “No, Johnnie, I can’t. I’ve told you I can’t. I’ve got to collect Peter from the Hutchinses. I’m late already, I said I’d fetch him before tea, and I don’t know what time they have their tea, I expect it’s earlier than us. And I’ve got to see about the beds, too, and the water takes such a long time to heat on that stove. I’m sure there’s something wrong with the supply—”

  Of course, Johnnie wasn’t listening. He knew that people often used a tremendous number of words to say “No”—or even “Yes,” for that matter—and he didn’t really mind. He only had to wait until the flow of speech ended, and then he could ask again.

  But Meg was listening. And watching, too, unhappily, as the worried expressions flitted back and forth across her sister’s face. Was Isabel really upset? And, if so, was it about Mildred, about some big, important trouble, or was it merely about these tiny domestic difficulties that she always allowed to loom so large? And if it was only these trifles—if she could look like that and feel like that about such things—wasn’t that the biggest, most important trouble of all? To be a person so easily weighed down—so little able to enjoy her life?

  Meg checked herself. It wasn’t fair to criticise Isabel like this, when she didn’t even know yet what was the matter. Johnnie had said that Aunt Mildred was crying—not that that was anything new, but you could never tell. It is easy to forget that people who cry about trifles may also cry about disasters. She turned again to Isabel:

  “Mildred?” she asked. “How is she?”

  Meg spoke in a low voice in deference to Johnnie’s restless presence—in deference, rather, to the accepted conventions about conversations in the presence of children. For she could not but feel that the precaution was, in Johnnie’s case, superfluous. The seagulls themselves could scarcely have been attending less, swooping hither and thither, shrilly, self-centredly whining after their own affairs.

  “I’ve just been seeing her,” answered Isabel, also in a dutiful undertone. “Oh, Meg, it’s such a nuisance!” The words burst forth spontaneously, with piercing sincerity, and Isabel immediately apologised for them: “I don’t mean that —I mean it’s dreadful for Mildred, of course, I’m terribly sorry for her. I’ve been up there all the afternoon.”

  “Has Hubert left her again?”

  “Yes. No. That is, I think he’s still at the flat. She’s left him this time, you might say. But that isn’t it, Meg. She’s not just upset this time. She’s frightened. Really frightened. And Philip says it’s all nonsense, and not to humour her. He’s furious about it. He’s trying to get hold of Hubert. He says he must fetch her back. He says it’s his job, not ours, and of course it is in a way, but you see Philip doesn’t really understand about Mildred. He can’t tell when she’s just being silly, and when—well—when it’s something like this. Oh, Meg!”—Isabel abruptly reversed her whole argument —“Can you persuade her that she’s just being silly? She’ll listen to you more than to any of us. That’s partly why I sent for you. Can you convince her that it’s all nonsense? Because if not”—Isabel’s voice sank lower—“If not, someone’ll have to go to the police.”

  “Someone”. It was typical of Isabel to keep the essential, the point of action, as colourless and as indefinite as possible. “I must go”. “You must go”. “Philip must go”—any of these would have brought to her harassed mind too great a sense of personal involvement, too thick a tangle of adjustments and arrangements, obligations and counter-obligations.

  Meg could feel that her sister’s thoughts were on the point of trailing off down some anxious by-path of their own, so she hastily recalled them.

  “But, Isabel, you haven’t told me. What’s it all about? What is she frightened of? Not Hubert, surely?”

  “No. Oh, no. Not Hubert. At least—”

  Meg noticed now that her sister’s glance was darting this way and that along the lanes between the caravans; and her arm, still crooked into Meg’s own, had stiffened slightly.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she muttered. “I have to fetch Peter back now. The Hutchinses will be thinking—I mean, we were late last time when they had him for me. We’d been to the museum, you see, and I didn’t like to make Philip hurry away, he’d think I was making a fuss—Oh, it’s all so difficult! Oh dear, and there’s Mrs Hutchins at the door! She must have been watching out for me….”

  Clearly, it wasn’t possible to continue the conversation any more just now. Nor did it seem to be possible after they had reached the caravan once more. The moment they got inside, Isabel applied herself to cutting up carrots with a blunt knife, meanwhile casting frequent anxious glances at the clock—one of the few pieces of Isabel’s equipment which was (regrettably, Meg felt) in full working order. Quite what the hurry was she could not make out, but she set herself to helping Isabel as best she could. She despatched Johnnie, with a large earthenware jug, to fetch water from the tap; she provided Peter with a piece of string and a bent stick with which to catch sharks in the withered grass under the caravan steps; and then she volunteered to scrape the potatoes.

  But Isabel was a difficult person to help—the people most in need of help often are, Meg reflected. She was herself, Isabel explained, using the only basin for the carrots. And there wasn’t anywhere for Meg to sit. And to get at the potatoes at all, she (Isabel), would have to fold the table back, and that would mean moving the basin off it, and the carrots, and the colander, and the dirty mugs, and the thermos flask….

  “It’s got broken.”

  Johnnie displayed the four earthenware pieces in a detached sort of way, as if they were objects of interest that he had happened to come upon outside. A sharp frown creased Isabel’s brows, and Meg hastened to the child’s defence:

  “It’s my fault, Isabel—I sent him with it; he was only trying to help—” she began; and then realised that her intervention was quite superfluous. Isabel’s frown had not been for Johnnie at all. With extraordinary haste, and without a word of reprimand, she seized the fragments from the child’s hands, and, half stumbling down the steps, she ran and stuffed the broken pieces into the bin at the side of the caravan, pushing them well down among the rest of the rubbish and covering them with a piece of newspaper. Then, with a look of quite disproportionate relief,
she wedged the lid back on to the bin. Turning round, she met Meg’s look of mingled surprise and amusement. Isabel smiled then, sheepishly.

  “I know—it does look silly,” she said. “You see, it’s just that I’m so thankful he should have done it before Philip gets back. You see, Philip doesn’t always remember that he’s only seven; and then, of course, he’s spent most of his life in the army—Philip, I mean—and children do take a lot of getting used to, I suppose, if they’re not your own….”

  It seemed to Meg that Isabel was explaining a little too hard; that there was something uneasy about her manner as she sidled back up the steps, not quite meeting her sister’s eyes. Was Isabel hiding something from her—evading some issue which lay, unknown to Meg, between them? For it did seem odd that, having sent that urgent telegram, she had still not managed to make an opportunity to tell Meg properly about the trouble. All this hurrying, this frantic scraping of carrots—was Isabel deliberately—or, more likely, being Isabel, half-deliberately—playing for time? Time to collect her thoughts? Time to decide how much of the truth to reveal? Or time for something to happen—for someone to make some move—that would take the decision out of her hands?

  “Telegram, lady.”

  Isabel whirled round with such violence that Meg, crouching down to retrieve Peter’s string for him from underneath the steps, was almost thrown off her balance. Even before she had righted herself, and got to her feet, her sister had ripped open the envelope, and a look of relief had already replaced the expression that had flashed into her face—an expression that had come and gone so swiftly that Meg could not give a name to it.

  “It’s from Philip,” she said now, her voice warm and natural, Meg thought, for the first time this afternoon. “He can’t get back tonight after all, he’s going to stay in town. So you can be in the caravan, Meg, for tonight, anyway. Come on; let’s leave the silly old stew, and I’ll tell you all about everything.”

  “Silly old stew”. After all the frenzied vegetable-chopping and clock-watching that had been rendered up on its behalf, it was heart-warming to hear the thing thus described. Quite absurdly cheered by the phrase, Meg followed her sister into the untidy recesses of the caravan. The hinge of the bunk had come away from the wall, but a carefully adjusted biscuit tin had nevertheless rendered the contraption fairly secure. With a grey army blanket folded across it, it made a comfortable enough seat for the two sisters, out of range of the shrill demands of the little boys and the inquisitive eyes of the over-near neighbours.

  CHAPTER III

  “IT ALL BEGAN,” said Isabel, “with Mildred and Hubert having another row. She rang me up about it, actually, at the time, but I’m afraid I didn’t pay very much attention. I was busy, you see, getting ready to come away, and so as soon as I found that she wasn’t hoping to come and stay with us—well, I’m afraid I didn’t bother any more about it. I suppose I should have, but honestly, Meg, this sort of thing is always happening to Mildred, you can’t keep on worrying about it, can you? Well, I did ask her what she was going to do—carefully, you know, so she wouldn’t think I was inviting her to our place—people do think that sort of thing so easily, don’t they, if you sound at all sympathetic. And I couldn’t have her, could I, now? I mean, with Philip not liking her, and us just going away on holiday—you do see, don’t you, Meg?”

  Foreseeing that the whole story might be side-tracked indefinitely by this mounting barrier of Isabel’s self-reproach, Meg hastened to reassure her sister.

  “So what did she say she was going to do?” she prompted.

  “Well—that was just the bit that I wasn’t bothering about,” Isabel explained remorsefully. “I could kick myself now, looking back, because if only I’d listened…. Well, anyway, roughly what she said was that she wanted to go somewhere where she could be alone: quite alone, because nobody understood her—you know, all the usual thing. She said—and this is the part I wish I’d listened to more carefully—she said she was renting a tiny cottage on the coast, miles from anywhere, and absolutely primitive. She wanted to be alone with Nature, she said—”

  At this point Meg burst out laughing. The thought of Mildred, with her high heels, her lacquered hair-do, and her armoury of creams and lotions, existing for so much as an hour in the conditions described seemed too absurd. But Isabel silenced her sister with a reproachful glance.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought,” she retorted to Meg’s unspoken comment. “When she told me about this cottage miles from anywhere I thought, as you do, that she wouldn’t stick it for a moment. But she has. She’s been there three days. And the anywhere it’s miles from”—Isabel lowered her voice portentously—“is here! Two and three-quarter miles, actually,” she finished, with anxious bathos.

  “Oh.” Meg felt that she could now finish the story herself, and was relieved that it was no worse. “Oh, I see. And now she’s finding it’s full of earwigs, and no hot water, and she can’t go back to Hubert yet because a woman has her pride. And all the hotels are full up, and so she wants you to do something about it. Is that it?”

  “No.” Isabel’s face was sombre. “I haven’t told you everything yet, Meg. I haven’t told you about the cottage. Meg, it’s the cottage!”

  For a moment Meg was quite at a loss. Isabel’s words meant nothing to her.

  “The cottage?” she repeated stupidly.

  “Oh, Meg, surely you remember? You must remember. I know you were very little at the time, but—Meg—you surely remember about—about Uncle Paul?”

  There was a short silence; but it was no longer the silence of incomprehension. Sitting there in the hot, dusty clutter of the caravan, both sisters had felt the sudden, ruthless pull of childhood memory. Each of them simultaneously seemed to be sliding back down the years; sliding, slithering, skidding back along the paths of their separate lives, until they landed, together, on the kitchen stairs of the old home. Wide-eyed with fright and a queer excitement, they were leaning over the banisters, listening: two little girls straining their ears, their very souls, in the effort to hear through that closed door some word, some sound, that would explain why Uncle Paul (as they called him) with his dark, insolent eyes, with his gay, enchanting smile, should be going out of their lives, suddenly and for ever.

  Isabel stirred, moved uneasily on the hard wooden edge of the bunk.

  “The cottage,” she repeated once more; and this time she knew that Meg would understand. “The cottage where Mildred and Paul were staying for that fortnight just before … before….”

  “I know.” Meg hastened to rescue her sister from the morass of evasive reminiscence into which she was about to flounder. “But, Isabel, why? I mean, why should Mildred go there of all places? Surely she doesn’t want to remind herself all over again—remind everybody—that she was the girl in the case? Out of all the cottages in England, why should she choose that one?”

  Isabel shook her head helplessly.

  “I don’t think she did choose it, Meg. I’m sure she didn’t. I think it’s just one of these horrible, extraordinary coincidences. I think Hubert’s secretary must have booked it for her—you know how Mildred hates anything like business, she always gets Miss Wynne to do anything like that for her if she can. She must have just told Miss Wynne to find her a tiny cottage in some deserted spot by the sea, and by some awful, one-in-a-million chance, the girl landed on this one.”

  “A one in two million chance I make it,” interposed Meg sceptically. “I mean, it’s another frantic coincidence that it should be just near where you were going for your holiday.”

  “Oh, no. I can understand that,” said Isabel immediately. “After all, everyone knew we were coming here, we arranged it ages ago; and I daresay Miss Wynne thought it would be a good idea to plant Mildred somewhere near us so that we’d have to look after her—pushing the responsibility on to us, sort of thing. And the reason why we’ve come here is because I vaguely remember it from when we were children. You wouldn’t remember, Meg, but this is whe
re we always used to come before Mother died. I daresay that’s how Mildred and Paul came to hear of the cottage in the first place. So perhaps none of it is a coincidence, really,” she concluded, with the tentative optimism of the non-mathematical pupil who nevertheless knows when a sum looks right.

  “Yes, I see.” Meg thought it over. Put like this, the coincidence did seem less glaring.

  “But what are we supposed to do?” she asked. “I mean, what does Mildred say she wants? I can understand her being upset at finding it’s the very same cottage, but why can’t she just come away? Find another cottage, if she’s so set on the simple life. Though why Mildred, of all people—”

  “That’s just it,” interrupted Isabel. “She won’t leave. You know how obstinate she can get sometimes, for no reason at all. At least, she kept saying she wouldn’t leave when Philip talked to her before. But I think she might, now, if we could only think of anywhere else for her to go. You see, since then, she’s had a fright.”

  “What sort of a fright?” Meg was not sure whether to feel anxious or amused. There were so many things about a lonely cottage that might frighten a lifelong town-dweller like Mildred. The wind howling down the old wide fireplace. The tiny feet of birds tap-tapping in the eaves. A cow snorting outside the window.

  “It must have been the night before last,” Isabel was saying. “It was about midnight, she told me, and she was lying there, trying to go to sleep, and listening to the owls and the bats outside—that’s what she says, but I don’t believe anybody can hear bats really, not from indoors, anyway. Isn’t their voice too high-pitched, or something? Well, anyway, there she was, lying awake—she’d just taken a couple of sleeping tablets, she told me, but they hadn’t done any good —and as she lay there, she heard footsteps. Outside. They came along the track to the cottage, but they didn’t go past. They stopped. And then, she says, after a minute, she heard them again. Sort of scuffling about round the back door. And then, after a bit, they went away again, crunching back along the cinder track.”