Complete Short Stories (VMC) (2 page)

Some reviewers criticised my mother for writing about only those places and people she knew. It was, I think, a misplaced judgement, as several stories were set well outside her comfort zone and she was not wedded to the familiar. Writing to her agent Patience Ross, she alluded to a current project as being ‘rather horrible’, adding, ‘and I dare say no one will like it’. This was ‘The Fly-paper’, and indeed the
New Yorker
didn’t like it; William Maxwell asked her to consider altering the ending. However, I wonder whether readers of the tale will agree with me that without that ending there is no story. It later became a very chilling television film.

One of the many things that I recall about my mother was her deep love for art and the great pleasure she took in visiting galleries and exhibitions. This pleasure is captured in another of her letters, written in 1965: ‘I nipped up to London yesterday, and bought the most beautiful picture at the Leicester Galleries. It is by Elinor Bellingham-Smith – a dead still, frozen world. I long for the exhibition to be over so that I can have it home to stare at. I was frightened at spending so much money, but didn’t take a taxi afterwards. Then this morning the cheque came for
“Tall Boy”, and I thought, “This is marvellous, I am turning stories into pictures.”’

As I write this, I pause and look up at the painting, which now hangs on my study wall, and I think to myself, her stories
are
pictures.

Joanna Kingham

2012

Muriel’s first sensation was one of derisive relief. The name – Hester Lilly – had suggested to her a goitrous, pre-Raphaelite frailty. That, allied with youth, can in its touchingness mean danger to any wife, demanding protectiveness and chivalry, those least combatable adversaries, against which admiration simply is nothing. ‘For if she is to fling herself on his compassion,’ she had thought, ‘at that age, and orphaned, then any remonstrance from me will seem doubly callous.’

As soon as she saw the girl an injudicious confidence stilled her doubts. Her husband’s letters from and to this young cousin seemed now fairly guiltless and untormenting; avuncular, but not in a threatening way.

Hester, in clothes which astonished by their improvisation – the wedding of out-grown school uniform with the adult, gloomy wardrobe of her dead mother – looked jaunty, defiant and absurd. Every garment was grown out of or not grown into.

I will take her under my wing, Muriel promised herself. The idea of an unformed personality to be moulded and high-lighted invigorated her, and the desire to tamper with – as in those fashion magazines in which ugly duckling is so disastrously changed to swan before our wistful eyes – made her impulsive and welcoming. She came quickly across the hall and laid her cheek against the girl’s, murmuring affectionately. Deception enveloped them.

Robert was not deceived. He understood his wife’s relief, and, understanding that, could realise the wary distress she must for some time have suffered. Now she was in command again and her misgivings were gone. He also sensed that if, at this point, she was ceasing to suspect him, perhaps his own guilt was only just beginning. He hated the transparency of Muriel’s sudden relaxation and forbearance. Until now she had contested his decision to bring Hester into their home, incredulous that she could not have her own way. She had laid about him with every weapon she could find – cool scorn, sweet reasonableness, little girl tears.

‘You are making a bugbear of her,’ he had said.

‘You have made
her
that, to
me
. For months, all these letters going to and fro, sometimes three a week from her. And I always excluded.’

She had tried not to watch him reading them, had poured out more coffee, re-examined her own letters. He opened Hester’s last of all and as if he would rather have read them privately. Then he would fold them and slip them back inside the envelope, to protect them from her eyes. All round his plate, on the floor, were other screwed up envelopes which had contained his less secret letters. Once – to break a silence – he had lied, said, ‘Hester sends love to you.’ In fact, Hester had never written or spoken Muriel’s name. They had not been family letters, to be passed from one to the other, not cousinly letters, with banal enquiries and remembrances. The envelopes had been stuffed with adolescent despair, cries of true loneliness, the letters were repellent with egotism and affected bitterness, appealing with naivety. Hester had been making, in this year since her father’s death, a great hollow nest in preparation for love, and Robert had watched her going round and round it, brooding over it, covering it. Now it was ready and was empty.

Unknowingly, but with so many phrases in her letters, she had acquainted him with this preparation, which must be hidden from her mother and from Muriel. She had not imagined the letters being read by anyone but Robert, and he would not betray her.

‘You are old enough to be her father,’ Muriel had once said; but those scornful, recriminating, wife’s words never sear and wither as they are meant to. They presented him instead with his first surprised elation. After that he looked forward to the letters and was disappointed on mornings when there was none.

If there were any guilty love, he was the only guilty one. Hester proceeded in innocence; wrote the letters blindly as if to herself or as in a diary and loved only men in books, or older women. She felt melancholy yearnings in cinemas and, at the time of leaving home, had become obsessed by a young pianist who played tea-time music in a café.

Now, at last, at the end of her journey, she felt terror, and as the first ingratiating smile faded from her face she looked sulky and wary. Following Muriel upstairs and followed by Robert carrying some of her luggage, she was overcome by the reality of the house, which she had imagined wrong. It was her first visit, and she had from Robert’s letters constructed a completely different setting. Stairs led up from the side of the hall instead of from the end facing the door. ‘I must finish this letter and go up to bed,’ Robert had sometimes written. So he had gone up
these
stairs, she thought in bewilderment as she climbed them now.

The building might not have been a school. The mullioned windows had views of shaved lawns – deserted – and cedar trees.

‘I thought there would be goal-posts everywhere,’ she said, stopping at a landing window.

‘In summer-time?’ Muriel asked in a voice of sweet amusement.

They turned into a corridor and Robert showed Hester from another window the scene she had imagined. Below a terrace, a cinder-track encircled a cricket field where boys were playing. A white-painted pavilion and sight-screens completed the setting. The drowsy afternoon quiet was broken abruptly by a bell ringing, and at once voices were raised all over the building and doors were slammed.

When Muriel had left her – with many kind reminders and assurances – Hester was glad to be still for a moment and let the school sounds become familiar. She was pleased to hear them; for it was because of the school that she had come. She was not to share Muriel’s life, whatever that may be, but Robert’s. The social-family existence the three of them must lead would have appalled her, if she had not known that after most meal-times, however tricky, she and Robert would leave Muriel. They would go to his study, where she would prove –
must
prove – her efficiency, had indeed knelt down for nights to pray that her shorthand would keep up with his dictation.

From the secretarial school where, aged eighteen, she had vaguely gone, she had often played truant. She had sat in the public gardens, rather than face those fifteen-year-olds with their sharp ways, their suspicion of her, that she might, from reasons of age or education, think herself their superior. Her aloofness had been humble and painful, which they were not to know.

When Robert’s offer had arrived, she had regretted her time wasted. At her mother’s death she was seen clearly to be the kind of girl whom relatives must help, take under their roof as governess or companion, or to do, as in Hester’s case, some kind of secretarial work.

In spite of resentment, Muriel had given her a pleasant room – nicely anonymous, ready to receive the imprint of a long stay – no books, one picture and a goblet of moss-roses.

Outside, a gardener was mowing the lawn. There, at the back of the house, the lawns sloped up to the foot of a tree-covered hillside, scarred by ravines. Foliage was dense and lush, banking up so that no sky was seen. Leaves were large enough to seem sinister, and all of this landscape with its tortured-looking ash trees, its too-prolific vegetation, had a brooding, an evil aspect; might have been a Victorian engraving – the end-piece to an idyllic chapter, hitting inadvertently, because of medium, quite the wrong note.

At the foot of the hillside, with lawns up to its porch, was a little church, which Hester knew from Robert’s letters to be Saxon. Since the eighteenth century it had been used as a private chapel by the successive owners of the house – the last of these now impoverished and departed. The family graves
lay under the wall. Once, Robert had written that he had discovered an adder’s nest there. His letters often – too often for Hester – consisted of nature notes, meticulously detailed.

Hester found this view from her window much more pre-envisaged than the rest. It had a strength and interest which her cousin’s letters had managed to impart.

From the church – now used as school chapel – a wheezy, elephantine voluntary began and a procession of choir-boys, their royal-blue skirts trailing the grass or hitched up unevenly above their boots, came out of the house and paced, with a pace so slow they rocked and swayed, towards the church door. The chaplain followed, head bent, sleeves flung back on his folded arms. He was, as Hester already knew, a thorn in Robert’s flesh.

In the drawing-room, Muriel was pouring out tea. Robert always stood up to drink his. It was a woman’s hour, he felt, and his dropping in on it was fleeting and accidental. Hugh Baseden stood up as well – though wondering why – until Muriel said: ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Baseden?’

At once, he searched for reproof in her tone, and thought that perhaps he had been imitating a piece of headmasterliness – not for him. Holding his cup unsteadily in one hand, he jerked up the knees of his trousers with the other and lowered himself on to the too-deep sofa, perched there on the edge staring at the tea in his saucer.

Muriel had little patience with gaucherie, though inspiring it. She pushed aside Hester’s clean cup and clasped her hands in her lap.

‘What can she be doing?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps afraid to come down,’ Robert said.

Hugh looked with embarrassment at the half-open door where Hester hesitated, peering in, clearly wondering if this were the right room and the right people in it. To give warning to the others, he stood up quickly and slopped some more tea into his saucer. Robert and Muriel turned their heads.

‘We were thinking you must be lost,’ Muriel said, unsure of how much Hester might have heard.

Robert went forward and led her into the room. ‘This is Hugh Baseden. My cousin, Hester Lilly, Hugh. You are newcomers together, Hester, for this is Hugh’s first term with us.’

Hester sank down on the sofa, her knees an inelegant angle. When asked if she would have sugar she said ‘yes’ in error, and knew at once that however long her stay might be she was condemned to sweet tea throughout it, for she would never find the courage to explain.

‘Mr Baseden is one of those ghoulish schoolmasters who cuts up dead
frogs and puts pieces of bad meat under glass to watch what happens,’ Muriel said. ‘I am sure it teaches the boys something enormously important, although it sounds so unenticing.’

‘Do girls not learn biology then?’ Hugh asked, looking from one to the other.

Muriel said ‘no’ and Hester said ‘yes’: and they spoke together.

‘Then that is how much it has all changed,’ Muriel added lightly. ‘That marks the great difference in our ages’ – she smiled at Hester – ‘as so much else does, alas! But I am glad I was spared the experience. The smell!’ She put her hand delicately to her face and closed her eyes. Hester felt that the lessons she had learnt had made her repulsive herself. ‘Oh, do you remember, Robert,’ Muriel went on, ‘last Parents’ Day? The rabbit? I walked into the Science Room with Mrs Carmichael and there it was, opened out, pinned to a board and all its inside labelled. How we scurried off. All the mammas looking at their sons with awe and anxiety and fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs, wondering if their darlings would not pick up some plague. We must not have that this year, Mr Baseden. You must promise me not. A thundery day … oh, by four o’clock! Could we have things in jars instead, sealed up? Or skeletons? I like it best when the little ones just collect fossils or flint arrow-heads.’

‘Flint arrow-heads are not in Hugh’s department,’ Robert said, although Muriel knew that as well as he, was merely going through her scatter-brain performance – the all-feminine, inaccurate, negligent act by which she dissociated herself from the school.

‘They are out of chapel,’ Hugh said. The noise outside was his signal to go. ‘No rabbits, then,’ he promised Muriel and turning to Hester, said: ‘Don’t be too bewildered. I haven’t had much start on you, but I begin to feel at home.’ Then, sensing some rudeness to Muriel in what he had said, he added: ‘So many boys must be a great strain to you at first. You will get used to them in time.’

‘I never have,’ Muriel murmured, when he had gone. ‘Such dull young men we get here always. I am sorry, Hester, there is no brighter company for you. Of course, there is Rex Wigmore, ex-RAF, with moustache, slang, silk mufflers, undimmed gaiety; but I should be wary of him, if I were you. You think I am being indiscreet, Robert; but I am sure Hester will know without being told how important it is in a school for us to be able to speak frankly – even scandalously – when we are
en famille
. It would be impossible to laugh if, outside, our lips were not sealed tight …’

‘If everything is to be said for me,’ Hester thought, ‘and understood for me, how am I ever to take part in a conversation again?’