Seven Lean Years Page 6

  This, no doubt, was why he had allowed himself to rely so much on his ex-wife’s sympathy and support when he was faced with the problem of bringing up Ellen after her young mother died. Probably, Ellen reflected now, he no longer thought of Cousin Laura as his ex-wife at all, but simply as the loyal and affectionate playmate of his boyhood. The few years of mistaken marriage must have seemed to him, looking back over the years, as a mere ripple on the surface of this older, and probably deeper relationship established in childhood; a relationship like that of brother and sister, permanent, quiet, and undemanding.

  Had it seemed like this to Cousin Laura, too, after the first grief and fury was over? Ellen, looking back over her own childhood, felt it must be so. Cousin Laura had been there, in the background, ever since she could remember; not a demonstratively affectionate figure, but nevertheless a benevolent one, and of a rock-like stability. Whenever there was a gap in the kindly but impermanent series of aunts and housekeepers who had looked after Ellen after her mother’s death—at such times there was always Cousin Laura to fall back on. And later when Cousin Laura had married an old neighbour in his widowhood, she had not withdrawn from the Fortescue family orbit; rather her new stepson Leonard had been drawn into it. Though he was nearly four years older than she, Ellen and Leonard had become friends at once—drawn together, perhaps, by the semi-orphaned state which they had in common….

  Melissa was making faces to indicate that she wanted to turn the page over, and Ellen, who hadn’t really been reading the letter at all, but simply allowing the look of the paper to stir her memories, hastily nodded assent:

  “You will regret it till your dying day …” “Never forgive you …” “Nothing left in life for me….”

  Poor Cousin Laura! Ellen felt a pang of sorrow for this non-existent story-book woman whose namesake slept so quietly a few feet away, lapped in awful sunless heat from the unseasonable fire. Why had Cousin Laura kept the letter all these years? How, indeed—it suddenly occurred to Ellen—had it come back into her possession at all? It was Father’s letter, after all; it was among his papers that Leonard had found it. What had happened to it next? Had he left it about somewhere, carelessly, and had Cousin Laura picked it up? Or had Father given it back to her for some reason? … Ellen gave it up, and turned her attention to the new page which Melissa had flicked over:

  “… I have never been a revengeful person, but you have made me one tonight. I don’t hope you will be happy with her, I hope you will be miserable, miserable. I hope you will suffer as you deserve…. And if there is no Heaven…. No Justice … to see that you are punished, then I will punish you myself, if it is the last thing I do….”

  “The last thing I do.” Words written in blind, unthinking fury thirty-five years ago had a strange poignancy today. Ellen looked at the motionless figure, sunk into its folds of black silk. Any minute, any hour, Cousin Laura might be doing the last things she would ever do. Combing her hair, perhaps … or reaching out with uncertain fingers for a cup of tea … or trying to sit up to see the time in the grim small hours of the night; the time when the aged become restless, like the birds, when it is not yet dawn, and the time for migration is near.

  Some such trivial act would be the last thing Cousin Laura would ever do. Suddenly, Ellen felt ashamed; ashamed that she had ever read the letter; that she should be reading it again now. Ashamed, too, that the old lady should still possess it; should leave behind her a record of hatred that already meant nothing. For Ellen felt sure that Cousin Laura had not kept the letter on purpose. Like Father, she probably hated to throw things away; like him, too, she probably kept her papers anywhere and everywhere; in drawers, boxes, in the pockets of various garments, and never really knew what she had or where it was. Sometimes, no doubt, she tried to sort them, but wearied of the task before it was completed, and bundled everything back just as it was before. Thus accidentally this letter must have been preserved through the years, like ajar of mouldy jam on the back shelf of a store-cupboard.

  On a sudden impulse, Ellen snatched the letter from the table, and stepping across the room she bent down and pushed one corner of it into the blue humming flame of the gas-fire. It flared up at once, and Ellen pushed it, burning, into the obsolete grate behind. The yellow flame burned for a minute straight and strong, then died away, leaving only the thin metallic murmur of the blackened ashes as they stirred and writhed, still glowing red about the edges.

  In sudden panic at what she had done, Ellen turned to face Melissa.

  But Melissa was smiling.

  “Good idea,” she commented. “Someone should have done that years ago. Oh—Cousin Laura! I’m so sorry—did we wake you?”

  For the old lady had raised her head. Her blue eyes were wide open with a smiling, dancing eagerness: for a second, the folds of her black dress seemed to quiver as if she were about to leap from her chair.

  “Bessie!” she cried joyfully. “Dick! Let’s go and——” And then the brightness died, the folds of the dress hung limp once more. But the smile remained—pleased, welcoming:

  “Why, Ellen! Melissa! How nice to see you both! How are you after all this time? Four years, is it? … Five? …”

  CHAPTER VI

  LAURA LEANED HER WEIGHT against the familiar buoyant prickliness of the hedge, and stared out across the buttercups which surged like a golden sea almost to her feet. She and Bessie had finished their lessons, and Mama (not Laura’s own mother, of course, any more than “Papa” was her own father, but she had always called them “Papa” and “Mama” just as their own children did)—Mama had said that they could play out here for the rest of the afternoon. Soon—any minute now—Dick would come out, too, and the three of them would scramble through the gap in the hedge and plunge, like swimmers, waist deep in the buttercups, right across the meadow to the copse beyond; and there the game would really begin. Since the last time they had played it, Laura had thought of a lovely new hiding-place that the others would never guess; her throat contracted with excitement as she thought of crouching there in triumph, half drowned in the summer scent of cowparsley, while the puzzled voices of the others called to each other across the little wood.

  The still, golden light beat down on her, and Laura suddenly knew, as one sometimes does know, even in quite early childhood, that this was one of the moments of absolute perfection that would stay with her until the end of her life.

  But no—the perfection was not quite absolute after all; for she was wearing long sleeves; she could not feel the sun on her bare arms. Why hadn’t Nurse let her wear her summer dress—the old blue one that she usually wore for romping in the garden? These long sleeves were black, too … a strange uneasiness began to cloud Laura’s mind, for she did not remember that she had a black dress at all, even a winter one….

  “Come along, Cousin Laura; you should be sitting down and resting. You’ll be getting tired, standing there in the hot sun.”

  Ellen took the old lady by the arm and drew her gently away from the hedge. She felt Cousin Laura drag back a little, and turned to see what she could be looking at so intently in the untidy garden next door, with its pre-fab bicycle shed and its drooping string of washing. Ellen, of course, could not see the field of buttercups fading into ragged lawns and fences; did not hear the distant voices of the haymakers change into the clamour of Saturday afternoon traffic along the Harville Road. But she waited, patiently, while Cousin Laura finished looking, and then led her to the group of canvas chairs on the lawn.

  “Thank you, my dear,” said Cousin Laura, a little out of breath. “Yes—perhaps a cushion for my back—yes, that’s just right…. But where’s Dick gone now …?”

  “Dick?—Oh—Father’s over there, picking gooseberries still,” explained Ellen, indicating the corner of the garden where Mr Fortescue, in a panama hat and old tweed suit, was sitting precariously on a camp-stool and groping intently into the heart of the big bush. “I’m afraid he’s going to get terribly hot,” she went on. “Bu
t you know what he is: he won’t stop, and he won’t wear anything cooler. What can you do?”

  “I’ve offered to help him,” broke in Melissa, somewhat testily, from her deckchair. “But he won’t let me. He’s terribly obstinate, you know, Ellen. He’s missing an awful lot too, especially the ones near the ground. Why don’t you make him come and rest, and let me do it? I could do it properly, and in half the time.”

  “No,” said Ellen. “No, don’t, Melissa. He loves doing it himself, he’s been looking forward to it ever since the spring. And as to missing some, he’s only thinning them, you know. The others are to be left to get ripe.”

  “It’s a funny thing that the ones that need to be left to get ripe are just the ones that are difficult to get at,” sniffed Melissa. “Right in the centre of the prickles, or down low on the ground. That’s what annoys me so about old people,” she went on, in a lower voice, and after a perfunctory glance to make sure that Cousin Laura was already dozing: “They’re so determined to cling on to their little bits of work, no matter how badly they do them. It annoys me to see something being done slowly and inefficiently that I could do quickly and efficiently.”

  “That’s why she’s always annoyed,” came the voice of Melissa’s husband from where he lay face down on the grass, up to this moment apparently asleep. “Poor Melissa finds herself surrounded by inefficiency wherever she goes just as a pop singer finds himself surrounded by admirers; he can neither get away from them nor ignore them, poor fellow; and it’s just the same for Melissa. Why, even a kettle boils better when she puts it on the stove,” he added, with the guarded truculence of a husband bringing up in the safety of a social gathering a grievance that he would never have dared to raise in private; and Melissa laughed, with the edgy lightness adopted by wives on such occasions.

  “Roger, darling, it was the wrong kettle,” she exclaimed, laughing more lightly than ever in the effort to show that she was both in the right and was taking it all as a joke. “I’m always telling you, the enamel kettle….”

  “It was the wrong kettle!” groaned Roger. “Do you hear that, Ellen? The wrong kettle! Who else but my efficient wife would be able to find space for a wrong kettle as well as a right one in our restricted kitchen! Have you got a wrong kettle?”

  He threw the question inconsequentially at Mrs Butler. She and her husband were sitting a little way away from the rest of the party, neat and aloof in their own deckchairs which they always took punctiliously back to their room the moment they went in.

  Mrs Butler smiled a little frostily, and Ellen felt herself growing tense. It wasn’t the rhubarb wine any longer; that had been settled—or rather had reached the familiar point where Ellen ran out of apologies and Mrs Butler could think of no further arguments to strengthen her already unassailable position as injured party—some while ago.

  No, this was the Saturday grievance. It had been going on, every weekend, ever since Melissa and her family had moved in. On every fine weekend, that is to say; Ellen had often found herself praying for rain as the only solution to her troubles. For the Butlers had been the first tenants of all, and of the various rooms available they had chosen the two biggest ground-floor rooms—the dining-room, and the old drawing-room with its french windows opening on to the lawn. And, of course, Ellen had said they could have the use of the garden.

  They still had the use of it; but they maintained—in silent disapproval rather than in words—that that use had greatly deteriorated in value since the arrival of Melissa and her children. A quiet, pleasant garden shared with just one old man and his quiet spinster daughter, was, they managed wordlessly to convey, a very different thing from a garden full of noisy, giggling schoolchildren, to say nothing of Melissa’s line of weekend washing. Once, Ellen had tried to talk to Mrs Butler about it; to explain that she, Ellen, could hardly forbid her own cousin to use the garden; and to suggest that perhaps it would be fair for the Butlers to pay a little less rent now that their share of the garden was in effect a smaller one than before.

  But Mrs Butler wouldn’t hear of it; with averted eyes, as if Ellen had raised a subject of gross indecency, she refused the offer, and then kept saying that she quite understood; and with this understandingness lying like a slab of granite in the path of any kind of communication, Ellen had given up and allowed matters to take their uneasy course.

  But this afternoon it mightn’t be so bad. So far, the children were still indoors—though Ellen recalled, with fleeting dismay, the two school friends who were to visit Adela today. Still, there might be a thunderstorm; or the two friends might have developed mumps since this morning, or been struck by lightning…. Ellen now heard Mrs Butler answering Roger quite cordially after her first surprise.

  “A wrong kettle?” Mrs Butler laughed almost coyly. “Oh no; we’ve only got one kettle—and sometimes we hardly know where to put that, with only our one little shelf.” Here she allowed herself a quick glance at Ellen—a glance that glinted with unspoken comments on the old, useless copper pots and pans which Father insisted on keeping on the one wide, useful shelf low enough and near enough to the stove to be convenient. Ellen hastily changed the subject:

  “I’ll tell you how you could help, Melissa,” she said. “Instead of picking gooseberries, you could help me with the topping and tailing. There’s going to be a lot more than Father and I can do this evening. I’ll go and get some bowls.”

  But when she came back, with two pudding basins and two knives, Ellen discovered that this provision was quite inadequate. The whole party, including Adela and Jeremy who had just emerged from the house, were sitting upright and expectant; even the Butlers had found themselves drawn into the circle. “I’ll do some, Ellen …” “Give me a few, I’d like to …” “Just give me a knife and a basin …” “Let me help Auntie….”

  The obliging chorus was almost an embarrassment; and Father’s heaped-up basket began to look very small surrounded by such an assembly of helpers, all waiting, like a nestful of hungry birds, for basins and knives. Ellen laughed, helplessly.

  “Honestly,” she protested, “there won’t be enough gooseberries to go round! It’s terribly nice of you all, but really there’s no need. Melissa and I can easily——”

  But the protests were too unanimous and too heartfelt to be ignored; clearly, everyone loved the prospect of so peaceful and undemanding an occupation.

  ‘Oh, well—if you really want to …” Again Ellen went indoors, and returned laden with knives and assorted receptacles, and the whole party fell upon the gooseberries in a sort of eager, tranquil rivalry.

  “It would be quicker with scissors,” observed Melissa, after a minute of contented silence broken only by the tapping of plump, hard berries on earthenware. “And it wouldn’t make your thumbs sore.”

  “A knife’s good enough for me,” replied Roger lazily from where he was still lying, in the most awkward position possible for the job in hand. “It’s more restful.”

  Melissa opened her mouth to argue the point; then shut it again. You could see that it had occurred to her, just in time, that the outcome of winning the argument could only be that she would have to go all the way indoors and up the stairs to fetch the scissors. Or else she would have to tell one of her children to go, and then everyone would hear how they argued and grizzled at being sent on such an errand, just like the children of weak, inefficient mothers; no difference at all. Ellen smiled to herself as Melissa moved on to safer ground:

  “You ought to have a machine for it, Ellen,” she said. “I believe they make them now, I read about it somewhere—Oh! Aren’t there any more to do?”

  The unguarded disappointment in her voice made both Ellen and Roger laugh.

  “The machine’s done them,” explained Ellen. “No, it’s all right, Melissa! Here you are. Adela’s trying to make a corner in them.” She took the basket from her niece’s lap and set it in the centre of the group again. Melissa flushed a little at the laughter.

  “A machine would
be a good idea,” she insisted. “After all, you don’t always have all of us here to help, and there must be pounds and pounds to do by the look of those bushes. How many do you usually get?”

  “Father thinks there’ll be over a bushel this year,” said Ellen, with a touch of pride—her own or the old man’s, she did not know which. And whichever it was, Melissa promptly crushed it.

  “How much is a bushel for goodness’ sake?” she asked; and Ellen felt at once that this was a terribly old-fashioned thing to know; just the sort of queer, out-dated piece of knowledge that a spinster daughter living at home might be expected to have acquired.

  “About forty pounds,” she answered meekly; and before she had decided whether she dare plunge yet further into blue-stocking spinsterishness and explain that the exact weight depended on the kind of fruit in question, a gentle stir of disappointment ruffled the little company. The gooseberries really were all done now.

  “What: no more?”

  “Here, pass me a few of those.”

  “No, no—those are mine!”

  “Hi! Je veux topper et tailer plus de goosegogs!” This last from Adela, in the fearsome hybrid jargon that was all the rage in her class just now. As usual, it called forth a reprimand from Melissa.

  “Don’t talk that silly way, Adela,” she said impatiently. “It’s dreadfully irritating. Just say you want to top and tail more gooseberries, for goodness’ sake!”

  “Oui, Maman, je do,” replied Adela amiably, and quite without impertinence: and then, at Melissa’s warning frown: “Oh, I’m sorry, Mummy. I didn’t notice I was doing it. Truly I didn’t.” Without warning she jumped up, overturning Jeremy’s basin; and, ignoring his acidulated though languid protests, she continued cheerfully: “Je will helper mon oncle to picker plus,” and charged headlong across the lawn with the empty basket, catching her foot heavily in the bars of Mrs Butler’s deckchair (it would be Mrs Butler’s) as she went.