Seven Lean Years Read online

  They would get married when Cousin Laura died. The thought was a familiar one by now; but today, with the imminent prospect of seeing Cousin Laura again for the first time in nearly five years, the idea seemed brand-new again, and full of wickedness, just as it had at the very beginning. Ellen stood still half-way up the dusty, uncarpeted attic stair, her hand reaching out for support to the old peeling wall. Her fingers met one of those horrible limp bulges in the plaster that one dared not touch, and she withdrew them quickly, and continued her ascent.

  It wasn’t wicked—it couldn’t be—just to recognise a simple fact. Particularly, added a small, unwelcome corner of her mind, since you don’t even want to marry Leonard; that makes it hardly wicked at all….

  Whether this dubious twist of ethics was valid or not Ellen did not pause to consider; her whole soul was bent on scrambling for safety on to the safer ground of worrying about Cousin Laura. Poor Cousin Laura! Why, she herself must sometimes have faced this thought, perhaps in so many words: “When I die, Leonard and Ellen will get married.”

  Was it, to her, a sad thought? Or a frightening one? Or was it a simple, matter-of-fact one—as if she might say to herself: “When I’ve had my lunch, Leonard and Ellen will go for a walk.” When you were very old, and life was telescoping towards its end, did death begin to seem something quite trivial and ordinary—one more chore to be got through? Between lunch and tea, perhaps; or during the hour before bedtime. A chore, too, for which you would never become too feeble or too confused, as you were sometimes too feeble and too confused to get on with your knitting, or set the table for tea….

  I’m doing it again, thought Ellen; I’m thinking old people’s thoughts again. And dawdling over it, too—why, it’ll soon be time to start Father’s lunch, and I haven’t done a thing yet! Quarrelled with my boy-friend, that’s all; not much to show for a whole morning! No wonder Melissa looks superior….

  Ellen hurried across the little dusty attic landing, and into the long dim room under the rafters where most of the old books were stored, higgledy-piggledy, among all the rest of the rubbish. Rubbish, that is, until the question of getting rid of any of it arose. At the faintest hint of any such idea, Father would instantly shed his deafness, his forgetfulness—even, if necessary, his treasured unawareness of the existence of the tenants—and would fight for the miscellaneous collection with a force and logic that one would never have imagined were still at his command: The objects had a value; they had been in the family for generations; they would come in useful if Ellen thought of letting any more rooms….

  They hadn’t, of course; and they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, Father had won; and so now here was Ellen, clambering once again over the old marble washstand and down on to the wobbly old trunk with its powerful iron bindings coming loose. Yes, and there was the jagged edge of one of those bindings catching on her ankle in exactly the place it always did. On, past the box of some ancient uncle’s moth-eaten naval uniforms; past the pile of old letters and the stuffed weasel with one glass eye; past all those disintegrating bead things which that same seafaring uncle had all but stolen from unfortunate natives somewhere … and here, at last, were the books.

  No children’s books, though. Now, too late to save herself the perilous clamber across Father’s sharp-cornered treasures, Ellen remembered that the children’s books had never been put among this lot. They must be among the ones in the Rose Room. Back she crawled under the rafters, this time grazing her other ankle on the projecting corner of the trunk.

  The Rose Room was simply another attic—rather a small one, too, dark and sunless even at noonday. It had been given its name in some past epoch when the rose-patterned paper on the walls was new; before the gay pink of the roses had grown brown with age and before the dark stains of damp had spread in great sickly curves, yellow-edged, across the walls. That the dank, dingy little room should still retain such a name seemed almost macabre; and Ellen looked round in distaste. This must have been a servant’s bedroom once. You could still see the grey, uneven stains, the smears of ancient soap, where a washstand had once stood against the wall. Two young housemaids must have slept in that hideous iron bedstead on which dusty books and papers were now piled; and over that great chest, perhaps, they had hung their cracked square of mirror.

  But probably the great chest hadn’t been there in those days. It was solidly made, of oak—too good for a servant’s bedroom. It must have been moved up from one of the downstairs rooms for some reason—to get it out of the way, perhaps. Had someone else once hated that old chest as Ellen had always hated it, even as a child? With sudden vividness, Ellen recalled those shadowy winter afternoons, playing up in these attics with Leonard; he seizing, with schoolboy gusto, on her fear of the old chest, and teasing her about it mercilessly. “Oh, the Mistletoe Bough!” he had carolled tunelessly. “Oh, the Mistletoe Bough!”—making up for his ignorance of any further words of the tragic ditty by piling on the agony of the theme. No wonder she had been scared stiff of the chest!

  No wonder she had been scared of it then; but wasn’t it a little odd that she should still be scared of it now? She, a grown woman, and knowing full well that it contained nothing but blankets,—how absurd still to feel that tremor of unease at the sight of the heavy lid and the great iron lock. Almost as if it reminded her of something. Something very long ago … and never quite explained….

  The heat in this little dusty, low-ceilinged room was intolerable—suffocating! And the nature of the errand which had brought her here seemed, somehow, to make it worse. The thought of Jeremy, fidgeting about under his pile of unnecessary blankets in his hot little room seemed to join with the airless heat beating down through the slates so close above her head, and Ellen felt stifled. Hastily moving over to the bed, Ellen glanced through the dusty piles of books. What sort of things did children read nowadays? Ellen felt herself driven by a curious sense of urgency—a need to hurry over her choice. Almost at random, and quite regardless of Jeremy’s tastes (if any) she picked out two or three of her own favourites—Coral Island—Little Lord Fauntleroy—A World of Girls—and hurried downstairs.

  CHAPTER IV

  SATURDAY MORNING shopping with Melissa was one of minor pleasures of Ellen’s existence—or so she had always reckoned it in her occasional uneasy surveys of her present way of life. The ingredients of the pleasure were easy to enumerate: Melissa’s invigorating company after a week of comparative solitude; the pleasant feel of the tenants’ six pounds fifteen, still untouched, in her purse; the busy, sunlit High Street, where, on Saturdays, every second person seemed to be an acquaintance; the delicious temptation to buy a geranium or a great yellow pansy from the massed displays outside nearly every shop—in summer, potted plants were no longer the prerogative of the flower shop at the corner, but became a species of greengrocery, or ironmongery, or even, occasionally, fish. And, finally, there would be the cup of coffee with a blob of cream in it at Lyons—an impossible piece of self-indulgence had Ellen been by herself, but seeming quite all right when Melissa was sharing it with her.

  These were the ingredients; and it was easy to see that they added up to pleasure. What was not so easy to understand was why Ellen always started out on this expedition with a slightly guarded feeling—the sort of battered wariness one feels when left working late in an office where they are already sweeping and stacking up furniture for the night.

  “Butcher first,” said Melissa firmly, glancing at her neat and comprehensive list. “I want to get there while he still has some decent-sized legs of lamb. And some lean stewing steak, too. I’m going to make a meat pudding for tonight because it goes a long way, and Adela’s having some friends in. Children never seem to mind what the weather is when it comes to food. I’ll get your meat, too, Ellen, if you’ll tell me what you want, then you can be going to Alsopp’s about the roof. And do give them a good shaking up, won’t you; the rain came right through the attic floor into our living-room during that last thunderstorm. Now—here we
are. Tell me what you want.”

  “Let me see …” Ellen had a list too, much shorter than Melissa’s, but by now it was lying at the bottom of her basket under six pounds of potatoes and a pair of shears to be sharpened, so it was easier just to try and remember.

  “I just want two lamb chops, I think,” she said.

  “Two lamb chops!” Melissa didn’t actually say: What a ridiculous little amount compared with my family shopping, for my husband and for my healthy, growing children with their big appetites; but she gave a short, wondering laugh:

  “Two lamb chops?”

  “Yes; two lamb chops.” Hang it all, Melissa knew that Ellen was catering only for herself and her father; why did she have to rub it in every time?

  “Two lamb chops,” Ellen repeated; and then, in a spurt of annoyance:

  “The butcher bawled it through the shops

  This customer here wants two lamb chops!”

  “All right, all right; I only wanted to make sure,” said Melissa huffily. “Anyway, ‘shops’ is feeble—he’s only got one shop. Don’t you want something for Sunday as well?”

  “I’m going to get a chicken for Sunday,” said Ellen. “One of those little roasters at Sainsbury’s—they’re only six shillings.”

  “Gosh! It would cost me a fortune to feed my family on those little things!” said Melissa smugly, and Ellen hurried away before a sharp retort escaped her. To hear Melissa talk, you’d think she had twelve children, not two. Couldn’t she just enjoy her good fortune, without forever flaunting it before her cousin?

  Was Melissa flaunting it—or was Ellen reading into her words slights which simply weren’t there? As she threaded her way along the pavement, Ellen felt again that little perverse throb of satisfaction at this further proof that Leonard was right about her touchiness. Leonard was right … Leonard was right … the rhythm of the words throbbed comfortably in tune with the throbbing of the sunlit traffic-filled street … and brought Ellen, all too soon, to the window, filled with tins of glue and bicycle enamel, of Messrs Alsopp, Builders and Decorators. At the sight, Ellen felt her courage waning, to be replaced by a familiar sense of inefficiency; inefficiency which seemed to cling about her, like an inadequate bathing dress, for all to see. Were Messrs Alsopp already peering gleefully out from some secret spy-hole, whispering to each other: “Ha ha! Just look! Here comes the sort who can be kept waiting for six weeks before we even say we will be along on Monday; let alone before we actually do send a deaf-and-dumb man with a limp who will prise a square foot of plaster off on to the stair carpet, make a gutteral noise in his throat, and disappear for another two months. Ha ha! Here she comes! She’s opening the door now—PING! That bell going off right in her ear will demoralise her all right! Ha ha! And it won’t stop ringing until she’s come right inside and has shut the door … has put herself right in our power …!”?

  But it was only the typist there, after all, clicking away like a death-watch beetle in the dark recesses of the shop. She came forward with a certain caution, which, as she recognised Ellen, crystallised into what must, surely, be artificial astonishment.

  “Why, Miss Fortescue!” she exclaimed. “Good morning! And what may we do for you?”

  The white hand with its beautifully varnished nails was holding a pencil, poised like a precision instrument ready to take down in exact and eager detail whatever Ellen might be about to say. You’d never have guessed that its owner couldn’t spell, and muddled every single message.

  The expectancy was unnerving. The girl couldn’t not know what Ellen had come about, after all those phone calls.

  “It’s about the roof,” she said, and watched the young woman’s expression change, as she had known it would, from one of sparkling, generalised willingness to one of specific, withering distaste. She lowered her pencil, as one who could not demean herself to put such a message in writing, and repeated unbelievingly:

  “The roof? The roof of the house?”

  “Yes,” said Ellen, with an attempt at firmness. “The roof. The rain comes in. I rang up about it last week. And the week before. You said you’d be sending someone round at once.”

  With the air of a commander-in-chief summoning reinforcements in a desperate engagement, the girl began looking through her ledger. Succour was evidently forthcoming, for she looked up in triumph.

  “We did your roof,” she announced. “Last December. We’ve got the record of it.”

  With a smug, crimson-tipped forefinger she indicated a line of writing both illegible and upside down from where Ellen was standing, and awaited, with apparent confidence, Ellen’s utter submission.

  But Ellen stood her ground.

  “I know you did,” she said. “But it’s since then. The water started coming in again almost at once. I told Mr Alsopp about it several times.”

  But the young lady kept her finger on the entry in the ledger; it was her trump card.

  “It’s coming through again?” she said disapprovingly. “But it’s only six months since we did it….” She referred again to her barely legible ally. “December 12th!” she read out triumphantly. “We did it on December 12th! You see?” She looked accusingly at Ellen, and even, in a rush of inspiration, turned the ledger round so that Ellen could read it the right way up.

  “There you are! December 12th!” She waited again for Ellen to crumple.

  And this time Ellen did—or very nearly.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “do you think you could send someone to see to it? And soon? Mr Fortescue’s not a young man, you know, it’s very bad for him to be living in a damp house.”

  The girl looked at Ellen scornfully. It was as if she could actually see the poor fragile old gentleman gleefully lugging saucepans of rhubarb wine about, and planting them in places where they would cause the maximum inconvenience. Hastily Ellen changed her ground, and plunged into an involved and implausible account of how the attic rooms were needed for bedrooms … and knew at once that this was a mistake, too. Two reasons are always twice as weak as one…. Messrs Alsopp’s victory was complete. So complete, indeed, that their beautifully manicured representative even found it in her heart to take a little pity on her victim.

  “Well, I’ll put it down,” she condescended, taking up her pencil with a fine air of magnanimity. “And Mr Alsopp will see what he can do. But he’s very busy, you know, at this time of year.”

  The implication that there was some other, more correct, time of year, at which any well-brought-up woman would have arranged to have her roof leak, Ellen had to let pass. She escaped from the shop with a mixed feeling of defeat and triumph—defeat, of course, at the hands of Messrs Alsopp, but triumph at the thought that at least she had done it—she had spoken to them. Melissa could no longer complain that she was letting the whole thing slide. It would be at least another fortnight—more if it didn’t rain—before she felt obliged to go through the whole performance again.

  As she hurried to rejoin Melissa in the queue at Sainsbury’s, Ellen tried to prepare a report on the encounter as optimistic and as creditable to her own firmness as was possible without actually lying: but she was happily spared from delivering it, for hardly had she embarked on the first implausible sentence when a young woman with a pram swooped alongside Melissa like a duck skidding to rest on the water, and the two began, instantly and both together, to talk about their respective nine-year-olds’ chances in the eleven-plus next year.

  Ellen felt left out; and the feeling of resentment against Melissa began to stir again. Melissa was, within a few months, the same age as herself; and yet, while Melissa was greeted as a contemporary by bright young women with prams and sleeveless cotton dresses, she, Ellen, was button-holed by women of fifty, even sixty … the women who, like herself, had aged parents as the centre of their lives. While Melissa was discussing eleven-plus exams and the poor wearing qualities of the regulation school knickers, she would be finding herself, at any moment now, talking about illnesses. Discussing with Miss Ba
ssett the pros and cons of old Mrs Bassett’s playing patience before she went to bed. It took the old lady’s mind off her back, but on the other hand she never seemed to sleep so well afterwards….

  But this time Miss Bassett, looking quite bright and summery in her yellow silk blouse and pleated skirt, and less tired than usual, seemed more eager to hear about Ellen’s affairs than to recount her own:

  “Miss Fortescue—I’m so glad I’ve met you,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been so wanting to know how your—how Mrs Rivers is feeling, back in the old place again after all this time. She is back, isn’t she?”

  “Oh yes. Leonard—my fiancé, you know” (surely this put her a little outside Miss Bassett’s elderly circle?)—“Leonard brought her back on Thursday. But I haven’t seen her yet. She hasn’t been too well, you know, and Leonard thinks she shouldn’t be excited after such a tiring journey. And then this very hot weather is trying for her …”

  With disgust. Ellen heard her own voice expressing these unexceptionable sentiments in just the right tone of optimism mingled with concern. Cousin Laura surely meant more to her than this—and less, too—and yet this was the only way you could talk about her, with a dreadful, impersonal brightness and solicitude, exactly like Miss Bassett herself….

  “… And the elastic was perished after the very first washing,” sounded the shrill voice of Melissa’s companion above the muted clamour of the shop. “And not only that, but it was sewn in, not threaded! I had to unpick every stitch….”

  A woman is not as old as she looks, thought Ellen sadly; nor even as old as she feels. She is as old as the people she looks after. If she’s looking after children then she’s young, like Melissa; if she’s looking after old people then she’s old, like me and Miss Bassett….