Friends and Lovers Page 12

  And yet he was glad to be home. He never knew how much he had missed London until he was back in it again. He changed his bag to his left hand, and searched in his pocket for his exact fare. The sickly smell of the Underground, always stronger in summer, reached him while he was still some paces away from its red, circling sign. He hurried down the flight of stairs, walking quickly between white-tiled walls, towards the steadily moving escalator which would bear him deep into the heart of his own city.

  12

  DAVID COMES HOME

  David left the bright lights of Chiswick’s high street and crossed over the small dark common, where the trees and dim lamplight gave at least the appearance of coolness. He entered the long street, with its rows of neat houses stretching so silently before him. Most of the windows which he passed were already dark. Here and there a bedroom lamp was lit, dimly glowing behind its pink silk shade. The road was empty except for an occasional man with his pipe and his dog, or a straggling couple walking home slowly with arms linked. He noticed the cracks between the paving-stones, and remembered how he used, as a child, to make this long stretch of road seem shorter by counting his paces, measuring them carefully so that he would never step on the black, dust-filled lines.

  Twice he stopped to rest his bag and change his carrying hand. Soon home now, he thought as he paused for the second time. Those he had passed in the street had found their houses, and the silence was complete and waiting for his footsteps. A cat, out on its mysterious business, looked at him suspiciously. He could see its eyes, reflecting the lamplight behind him, turn to flat luminous disks. And then they too vanished, and he was left alone in possession of the street. Here was the house with lace curtains, here was the house with the green gate, here was the house with the disastrous yellow door. And here at last, by the red pillar-box under the lamp-post, was the entrance to Cory’s Walk.

  It began as a side-street, so insignificant that a stranger— perhaps even the residents in the more prosperous little villas surrounding it—would pass it without remembering it. For it wasn’t even a useful short cut to some place more important. Only the people who lived there appreciated its seclusion, its lack of traffic, along with the modest rents which suited their budgets. But even they could not call it charming. The eleven boxlike houses which stood in a tight row along one side of Cory’s Walk were of red brick, now dirty and soot-lined at the seams; jaundice-coloured plaster framed the narrow doors and small windows; the wood-work, once a possible green, had turned a greyish black; the railings, shielding the small patches of earth in front of each house, had forgotten the touch of a paintbrush. There they were, the eleven small houses clustered together as if to encourage each other; and the red brick wall which ended the little road; and another red brick wall, longer, higher, opposite the row of houses, separating them coldly from the garden of the mansion which had given the Walk its name. Only the tops of the lime-trees, which overhung the long wall in their friendly way, were evidence that a garden did exist. Cory House itself, buried silently behind trees and high walls, preferred not to notice what had happened around it.

  It had changed considerably from the Regency days when Nathaniel Cory had built it as a country house, north of the Thames and north-east of fashionable Kew Gardens. It must have been a pleasant place, surrounded by fields and woods, for many a gay week-end party. Now it was owned by a lay sisterhood as intent on their future salvation as Mr. Cory had been on his worldly relaxation. And in a few years’ time, it was rumoured, the ninety-nine-year lease would be ended and the house in the garden and the houses in the Walk would be equally levelled, and there would be a new street with noble buildings, an arcade of pleasant shops, and a children’s green playground. Margaret Bosworth had laughed when she heard that. She had remarked, “Yes, we talk that way...until we start building.”

  David halted by the pillar-box at the corner, and felt in his pocket for the letter. He looked thoughtfully at the address, comparing it with the row of silent houses beside him. This forest of brick through which he had walked in the last fifteen minutes looked mean and makeshift. The architect and builder should have been imprisoned for inflicting such eyesores on their fellow-citizens. For that was the trouble about houses: they stood there for years, looking at you. Hurting you, too; pulling you down to their level. It seemed monstrous that people who could afford only cheap houses should find themselves automatically surrounded by ugliness. And it did not take many years before they had little sensitivity left in them. It had been smothered to death by the amount of bad taste forced on them by their poverty.

  David smiled wryly. Here he was, standing with his letter in his hand, feeling hot and tired, arguing with himself about the obvious in order to postpone a decision. I must be more tired than I feel, he decided, or I would not be standing here like this. Oh, hell, make up your mind.

  A policeman, marking his solitary rounds with heavy footsteps, halted across the street and walked over to the lamp-post. He looked at the bag, and then at the young man standing by the pillar-box.

  “Good evening, officer.” No, I am not loitering with intent.

  “Evening, sir.” The policeman was more assured as he had a closer look at the young man.

  David grinned, and said, “I must look a fool standing here, but the truth is, officer, I can’t make up my mind whether to post this letter or write another one.”

  The policeman relaxed. He stood with his feet apart, his hands clasped behind his back. “Important letter, sir?”

  “Very.”

  “Then if you’ve any doubts you’d better look at it again. That’s my advice. I’m not much of a letter-writer myself, but sometimes things are read different from what they are written.”

  “Yes,” David agreed. It was a rotten letter, now that he thought over it. He shoved it back in his pocket. “Good night. Thanks for the advice.”

  “That’s all right, sir. Breaks the monotony for me. Quiet round here, although we may have a spot of trouble.” His voice sounded hopeful. “People away on holidays, you know: houses all shut up. Good night, sir.” He gave a forefinger salute and started his lonely march, his thick-soled boots giving their word of comfort to all those who lay awake and heard the steady echo.

  One o’clock and all’s well, David thought, as he picked up the bag and entered Cory’s Walk. Yes, it was a rotten letter, full of gush and sentiment.

  Cory’s Walk had played its little part in bringing him back to earth. He passed the first six houses with sadness rather than distaste. They tried so hard, he thought. The Crescent in Edinburgh had been a row of houses all very much alike, too. But similarly when it has money behind it, it becomes a solid wall of convention, of permanence, even of defiance. Similarity conceived and born in poverty becomes an inferiority complex. One had only to look at this row of brick rabbit-hutches to feel that a giant wind might blow them all into crumbling dust. The people who lived in them must be haunted by their own impermanence—jobs that could be lost, money that wouldn’t cover necessities unless pleasures were cut to nothing. Their life meant only a round of small worries and distasteful duties, the constant battle for respectability of the lower middle class.

  He noticed that Number 2 had planted three small rose-trees in its plot of garden, and Number 4 had painted its railing. But Number 3, into which new tenants had moved last spring, looked worse than ever. Another year or two, and they would succeed in converting their house into a genuine slum.

  As he opened the gate to Number 7, took six paces to the three stone steps, and then searched for his key, David was thinking that it wasn’t enough to be given something: you also had to make an effort to keep it. If you had money you paid other people to make the effort for you. But nothing could continue to be as it had been without an effort. And yet, how could Number 3 be really condemned? They were living, by spending money on clothes and pleasure—only on a very reduced scale—as Lady Fenton-Stevens and her friends lived. No doubt Lady Fenton-Stevens hated housewor
k and dish-washing just as much as the woman at Number 3. But then, La Fenton-Stevens had married a rich man. That had turned out pleasantly for her, but it certainly wasn’t any mark of moral virtue. She and her friends were just as lazy and incompetent in actual scrubbing and scouring as the woman at Number 3. They were all equals in their search for enjoyment, sisters of definitely the same breed And as long as people praised Lady Fenton-Stevens’s photographs in fashionable magazines they had no moral justification for sneering at Number 3’s dirty doorstep.

  I’m certainly home, David thought, as he realised his own bitterness. He opened the door quickly, closed it quietly, and stood for a moment to get his bearings in the dark hall. It was small and narrow, with a steep staircase leading abruptly upstairs from the hall stand. In his caution he knocked against the collection of umbrellas and walking-sticks which stood on either side of its table. He grabbed at them as they moved, scraping heavily on their metal-lined stand, but in the darkness some of them slipped free of the wooden rail which supported them and clattered on to the linoleum floor.

  “Damn,” he said softly, and had to switch on the light after all. Then he started to mount the stairs cautiously, but the second one creaked as it always did.

  “David.” It was his father’s voice.

  David retraced his steps, placed his bag beside the hall stand, and opened the door which lay opposite.

  “Sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to waken you. I was trying not to.”

  The shadowy face against the white pillows smiled. “That’s all right, David. I wasn’t asleep, anyway. Did you have a good holiday?”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.” David crossed over to the heavy wooden bedstead, carefully avoiding the invalid chair which stood at its side. He lifted the thin hand which stretched over the counterpane to meet his, and said, as he pressed it gently, “Let me draw down those blinds. That lamplight is keeping you awake.”

  “No. I can’t breathe when the windows are covered. That keeps the air out.”

  “It’s pretty warm tonight,” David agreed. He heard the light clatter of heelless slippers on the wooden stairs. “That’s Margaret,” he said, with a smile, “coming to give me a row about wakening you up.”

  David’s father smiled too, as Margaret appeared in her cotton kimono at the doorway and said, “David, you can see Father in the morning. This is a dreadful hour to come home.”

  For a moment the two men enjoyed the shared feeling of innocent conspiracy against female authority. Then David said, “Good night, Father.” And, remembering the thin face staring so hopelessly up at the ceiling as he had entered the room, he suddenly bent over the bed and kissed his father’s gaunt cheek.

  Margaret closed the door impatiently. “Really, David!” she said. “We’ve only one article of furniture in this hall, and you had to fall over it.”

  “I had forgotten how narrow the hall was,” David said. He pulled one of the long dark plaits of hair which hung over her shoulder. “How are you?” he asked affectionately. “You look about fifteen in that rig-out.”

  Margaret’s thin face softened for a moment. She tossed the plait out of his reach. “I’m all right, but Scotland seems to have ruined your eyesight. Now that you have got me thoroughly wakened, what about a cup of tea or something?”

  “You’ll probably curse me, but I should like some tea. And a sandwich. I haven’t had anything to eat since midday.”

  “Well,” Margaret said shrewdly, “they say beer is nourishing.”

  He laughed softly, and followed her towards the kitchen. Same old Meg, same old house, David thought.

  “Why didn’t you have dinner on the train?” Margaret asked him, as her slippers clopped over the linoleum floor from sink to gas-stove. She looked round in her half-worried, half-shortsighted way. David took a box of matches out of his pocket, rattled it to make sure there were still some there, and threw it over towards her.

  “I didn’t feel very hungry,” he said. Actually he hadn’t felt like paying three shillings and sixpence for lukewarm boiled cod smothered in melting lanoline, with a dab of green garbage on top. And he hadn’t been able to get any beer, either.

  Margaret looked at him quickly. “The cheque?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Lady Fenton-Stevens will no doubt tell her secretary in a day or two,” he said bitterly.

  “Oh...” Margaret sat down on the other kitchen chair. Disappointment chased away that young look: suddenly she seemed much older than her twenty-five years. Now you noticed that she was too thin (she was very proud of her lack of breasts and hips), and that the sloping shoulders were round. The bright kitchen light robbed her of any pretension to prettiness. Her skin was sallow; her eyebrows were too heavily marked; her lips were too pale, too tight. (In the daytime she wore her heavy black hair drawn sleekly into a knot at the nape of her long, slender neck. With lipstick to broaden the narrow edge of her mouth, and powder to camouflage sallowness, she could look extremely attractive.) David now watched her, half affectionately, half worriedly, but with a touch of horror. He wondered how many women looked like this once the make-up was removed.

  Margaret said, “No Cornwall. No holiday. She will never send it in time.”

  “I’ve thought it all out,” he said quickly, moved by her pathetic face. “If the cheque doesn’t come through before you go to Cornwall I’ll give you the money which I set aside for the first weeks back in Oxford. The cheque will surely arrive in time to keep me solvent. Don’t worry, Meg. This is what is known as high finance. You filch out of one reserve to pay for immediate needs, and then use the money for that to fill up the old reservoir again. Don’t worry.”

  “You and Montagu Norman,” Margaret said, but the pathetic look had gone. She was suddenly indignant. “She’ll probably forget all about it.”

  “No, no. After all, she came asking me to take on the job. I didn’t go begging her for it.”

  “What were they like? The boys you tutored, I mean.”

  “Decent enough. But between you and me, Meg, there were moments when I thought they were solid teak above here.” He placed his forefingers across his eyebrows.

  “So it wasn’t all holiday,” his sister conceded. She rose to deal with the bubbling kettle. She was in good humour again: she was reassured about Cornwall.

  “Not entirely,” her brother said, with quiet irony, which was lost in the ritual of heating the brown teapot. It would have been a wonderful place for a real holiday, he thought.

  “You’ll find some cold meat in the pantry,” Margaret was saying. David took the hint, and went foraging for his sandwich. The pantry window was wide open, protected from flies and marauding cats by a gauze-wire screen. The milk-bottle stood on a marble slab in front of the window for coolness, but even so the milk had turned sour. A damned waste, he thought angrily.

  “What is Scotland like?” Margaret was saying. “Whom did you meet?”

  David brought some cold mutton into the kitchen, and the small brown crock which held butter floating in salted water. He planked them down on the table. “Better wash first and get rid of the grime,” he said.

  “What’s Scotland like?” Margaret repeated. “Not that one, David; that’s the dish-towel. Over there...that’s right.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow,” he said. “You go up to bed, Margaret. I’ll have a sandwich and then turn in too.”

  “I’m going to have a cup of tea. It’s too warm to sleep anyway, so we may as well talk.”

  David thought of the letter he wanted to write and post so that it could reach Edinburgh by tomorrow night. He began to tell her about Loch Innish. He talked, too, of Inchnamurren and Dr. MacIntyre. Briefly, because he had the feeling, once he did start to talk, that Margaret’s attention was not always focused on what he was saying; it was strange how people could ask you to explain something, and then after the first few sentences they would hardly bother to listen. If you stopped explaining, of course, they would
be hurt. He didn’t say anything, however, about the Lorrimer family beyond a short reference to their visit to Inchnamurren. He knew instinctively that Margaret would be antagonised by the idea of Penny. She had sulked for weeks when she had learned about Eleanor Fenton-Stevens, for instance: a cool, calculated sulking to show her disapproval. She had never given any reason for it, even after Eleanor and the sulking period were both over.

  “It must have been wonderful,” Margaret said. “How I envy you, David. You get all the luck, don’t you?”

  “Well—” he said, and then smiled and said no more about that. “Perhaps we’d better turn in now. You will have a lot of packing to do tomorrow.”

  “I’ve packed everything already. I don’t need so very much for two or three weeks. Just as well, isn’t it, considering the state of my wardrobe? And Cornwall is so very quiet.”

  “Well, why not choose a gayer place if you want it? You will have money enough for a decent holiday,” David said, trying to keep his voice even.

  “Oh, it is all settled. Florence is expecting me. She has been having a miserably lonely summer, and she would never forgive me if I didn’t go. She is counting the weeks until she can be back in London. She will probably be qualified by next spring.”

  “Qualified as what?” David couldn’t resist asking. “A piano-mover?” Florence Rawson, the large, raw-boned daughter of a country doctor in Cornwall, had met Margaret at the College of Music in their first year as students there. Florence was going to be the composer, Margaret the concert pianist. Time had altered Margaret’s plans: when her mother died she had had to come home here to look after her father, and she could only manage to attend an occasional class once or twice a week. But her friendship with Florence Rawson had increased, and they never seemed bored with each other or their ideas however much these were repeated. They were egocentrics whose thoughts were like a pleasing reflection in a mirror. Narcissus-like, Margaret and Florence would gaze at them for months without any distaste, any self-criticism. Probably for years, David considered. But then, he didn’t particularly like Florence Rawson. Her tweeds and booming laugh and hearty step, her perpetual assumption that men were either fools or in league to keep women from the major careers in life, filled him with horror.