Other People's Worlds Page 3

  ‘Hullo,’ Julia said, and Mrs Anstey realized she’d dropped off. It was darker than it had been, sounds no longer carried from the house.

  ‘How silly of me,’ she said, struggling to her feet.

  ‘Not silly at all, dear.’

  ‘An extraordinary thing, you know. I thought that dog was called Baloney.’

  ‘I think it was.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that rather strange?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Though I suppose it’s just as odd to be called Mrs Spanners.’ ‘You say it suits her.’

  ‘Oh, it does.’

  The journey to the house was slow, for after sleeping in the evening air Mrs Anstey had become stiffer than she usually was. Her two sticks paused from time to time while she rested. She could sense Julia resisting an instinct to help her on her way, for Julia knew she disliked it.

  ‘Cheerio then, Mrs Ferndale,’ Mrs Spanners called from somewhere in the dusk, causing Mrs Anstey to conclude that she’d decided it inadvisable to present herself for closer examination. ‘Cheerio, Mrs Anstey dear.’

  ‘Good night, Mrs Spanners,’ Julia replied, but Mrs Anstey said nothing. It was patronizing to be addressed familiarly just because she’d reached a certain age. It was patronizing to be called a senior citizen or an O.A.P., as if elderliness implied a desire for regimentation, the individual’s spirit dead already.

  In the drawing-room they were waiting for her, the lights not yet lit. Francis poured her a glass of sherry, and a conversation that had been going before her entrance was continued, about a film of the past called Casablanca. ‘A marvellous scene,’ Francis said, ‘Paul Henreid conducting the Marseillaise in the café.’

  Everyone except Father Dawne remembered the film. Mrs Anstey had seen it in Stratford-upon-Avon, taking Julia and a friend called Topsy Blythe out from the convent one weekend; Father Lavin had seen it in the Savoy in Cork. Julia had said that afterwards Topsy Blythe never ceased to sing As Time Goes By, and Mrs Anstey imagined that now: Topsy Blythe, very tall with spectacles, striding between two rows of beds in a dormitory, singing the song from the film. It was at St Mildred’s that Julia had begun to collect her lame ducks. ‘You should be proud of your daughter, Mrs Anstey,’ the Mother Superior had once remarked in a challenging tone of voice.

  She listened while Francis told Father Dawne the plot of the film. The other two talked about local events, among them the abandoning of plans for a new road less than half a mile from the town. There was a silence between Julia and the older priest when that subject was exhausted. Then, drawing her mother into the conversation, Julia said:

  ‘Diane has found herself the worst possible boyfriend. Nevil Clapp.’

  Mrs Anstey nodded. By all accounts, the little hairdresser had indeed made a preposterous choice and if a marriage took place she would discover her mistake within a week. Yet what girl alive would listen to her parents when they warned her that the boy she loved would one day seek to entice her into the realms of corruption? How could her imagination stretch so that she heard his voice persuading her to take an interest in the handbags that came and went in the Crowning Glory Salon?

  ‘Poor Diane,’ Julia said, causing Mrs Anstey to wonder how her daughter would eventually become involved in the disastrous relationship. Inwardly she frowned, although her face revealed no trace of this. Again she had the feeling that she was being touched by a fragment of a dream, that some instinct of her own was failing to communicate with her. Casting her mind back to the gathering beneath the tulip tree, she remembered the dog that appeared to have been oddly named. Was it something as little as that that was upsetting her? From close at hand she heard Francis’s voice still retailing the plot of the film. The head of the lanky young priest stood out in silhouette against the dwindling light of the French windows. Now and again it nodded.

  Quite a lot had happened in this room she didn’t care for. Framed in gilt, the false likeness of the man she’d married was a lie that for more than twenty years had been constantly alive in the room, presiding over everything. Here it was that she had read to Henrietta and Katherine the girls’ school stories they had preferred to Hans Andersen and Grimm. Here she had learnt, one Tuesday evening, of the death of Roger Ferndale in Germany. Nine years later, turning to smile at her from the bow windows, Julia had said she was going to marry Francis Tyte.

  ‘I must go and see to things in the kitchen,’ Julia said now, and for a moment Mrs Anstey sensed that the unease she felt had to do with the person Julia was and always had been: Julia concerned about the boyfriend of her hairdresser, Julia looking after Topsy Blythe, Julia who couldn’t help being charitable.

  Father Lavin rose and offered her more sherry, which she accepted since she had drunk nothing on the lawn.

  ‘She’s happy now,’ she conversationally said. ‘Julia.’

  ‘Yes, I believe she is.’

  A priest could not help loving a woman: muzzily the thought occurred and she wondered if it could possibly have to do with her elusive worry. During all the years she’d watched Father Lavin hiding from Julia the affection he felt for her, Mrs Anstey had lived quite securely with the knowledge of it: her sudden agitation was as unlikely to have been caused by it as by Mrs Spanners or the dog on the lawn. ‘Oh, most remarkable,’ the voice of Francis Tyte murmured, and immediately her intuition explained itself. Julia should not be marrying this man.

  In Mrs Anstey’s mind that statement was repeated, resounding as a simple fact. Yet only a few hours ago Francis had held out the hosta leaf to her in the garden, and she had thought yet again how pleasant he was to talk to. Charmingly, he had helped with their guests on the lawn. Most important of all, Julia loved him.

  ‘Yes, she’s happy now,’ Father Lavin repeated, when minutes later they were all sitting down to saddle of lamb in the dining-room, while Francis’s voice quietly continued, still speaking of the cinema of the past. And there was Julia’s voice also, speaking to Father Dawne of something else. An old woman’s unfounded fear was of course ridiculous, Mrs Anstey told herself, yet the silly worry continued, appearing to be even sillier when she found herself thinking that Julia was marrying Francis Tyte in much the same way as Diane of the Crowning Glory was contemplating such a union with Nevil Clapp. She didn’t know why on earth that suddenly seemed so. Angrily she tried to push it all away from her, bringing up once more the subject of the strangely named whippet and names in general, Mrs Spanners’s and Nevil Clapp’s. Father Lavin explained that the choice of so bizarre a title for a dog was in keeping with the vagaries of the animal’s owner, and after that Father Dawne politely asked her how she would manage when Julia and Francis were in Italy on their honeymoon.

  ‘Mrs Spanners has agreed to sleep here,’ she replied, refraining from stating that the presence of the woman in her house for the greater part of every twenty-four hours was something she anticipated with dread. At eighty-one one couldn’t say a thing like that, any more than one could suddenly protest that a marriage should not take place.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be perfectly all right,’ she said instead. ‘We’re lucky she can come.’

  She forced herself to smile around the table and then listened when the talk turned to the Victorian murder case in which Francis was to play a part. He was to be an under-gardener, and while he spoke she endeavoured to fill her mind with the scenes he colourfully described. Someone called Constance Kent it was all about, an adolescent girl who had cut a child’s throat.

  When the priests left, Julia washed up and Francis tidied the dining-room. Scents from the garden filled the bottom of the house. In the kitchen Julia stacked plates and dishes in a rack on the draining-board; Francis swept crumbs from the mahogany surface of the dining-table and wiped the surface clean. He collected the remaining wine-glasses.

  ‘A few weeks isn’t long,’ he said when they both had finished.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know.’

  They clung together in the hall, his arms around her shoulder
s, their lips sharing a warmth. For Julia there had been no such embraces since the death of her husband and often she felt it should have been Henrietta or Katherine who stood in Francis’s arms, Henrietta’s long fingers which stroked his cheek, Katherine’s flesh which went on tingling. The madonna face they’d stolen from her complemented his, their slender bodies matched his boyishness.

  ‘You’ll bring your dragon brooch?’ he said, speaking of their honeymoon. ‘And your little sapphires and your seed pearls?’

  Surprised, Julia replied that jewellery could be a nuisance when you were travelling.

  ‘I want to show you off.’ He smiled at her. One Saturday afternoon all four of them had slowly strolled with her mother near Anstey’s Mill, on the grassy path that once had been a railway track. Her mother’s feeling for this other place had come to be an affectionate family joke, especially her repeated claim that the past was past and should not be disturbed. While memory and sentiment were indulged, young men with tripods had been measuring something, earnest young geographers from the field centre which the house had become. Like an offering, or a seal of their acceptance, the joke was held out by Henrietta and Katherine, and Francis delicately received it. He laughed when Julia afterwards said so, and laughed again when she hesitantly pointed out that he belonged more to her daughters’ generation than her own. ‘But it’s you I love,’ he had replied. ‘It’s only you I love, Julia.’

  ‘Of course I’ll bring my jewellery,’ she said.

  They went upstairs together and to their different rooms. Julia, in hers, undressed, and washed in the adjoining bathroom, still thinking about him among the della Robbias she had never seen. She gazed at her naked body in the bathroom looking-glass, not fearful of his possessing it. On her other wedding night she had been uncomfortably apprehensive, though trying not to be.

  On the inside of Francis’s bedroom door there was a key, which he turned. He always did so when he stayed in other people’s houses, an involuntary gesture, not because he imagined he’d be disturbed. For a moment he leaned against the door, reflecting that it would be nice when in the evening she wore her dragon brooch and the long loops of her seedpearl necklace, and her sapphires. It would be nice to be seen with her in a piazza, nice if they ran into someone from the past.

  He moved from the door and sat on the edge of his bed. Slowly he cleared his lean face of the traces of make-up which he always inconspicuously wore. He worked with a piece of cotton-wool and a little cold cream, no longer thinking about Julia. He wondered about Constance Kent and the nature of her crime. It fascinated him, all that.

  2

  Francis’s

  When he had met the two women in the lounge of the Queen’s Hotel in Cheltenham, Francis had just completed one of the tobacco advertisements for television that people so ubiquitously noticed. He’d had to stand in the Parade with his pipe while various other men, attired and made up to resemble brigadiers and colonels, passed him by and were impressed by the odour of the smoke he was emitting. When all that was over he hadn’t returned to London with the others: he didn’t like being in their company for longer than he had to be. He’d made some excuse and had set his sights on a later train, inflicting upon himself the chore of killing time in Cheltenham. He’d found it difficult, had wandered into the Queen’s Hotel, and when Mrs Anstey and her daughter arrived in the lounge he’d been aware immediately of wishing to charm them. He knew by the look of them that they’d find it interesting, his being an actor, and at once began a conversation while they had their coffee. They demurred when he suggested a drink in the bar, but when he casually said he would be returning to Cheltenham in a week or so the invitation he’d hoped for followed. ‘Come over to Stone St Martin,’ the old woman suggested, ‘if you’re ever at a loose end.’ Directions were given, which he cut short by saying he did not possess a car. Then he must take a bus, the old woman laid down: the journey would be worth it because the town was pretty and well worth looking at. Something was mentioned about the saint who had apparently given it its name, St Martin of Braga. The younger woman appeared to be a Roman Catholic, and Francis found it easy enough to claim he was one also because, of course, that would be interesting for her too.

  It wasn’t true that he was obliged to return to Cheltenham in a week or so, but nevertheless he did return. He took the bus to Stone St Martin, having telephoned beforehand the number he’d been given. It was winter then: bitterly cold, fields white with frost for most of the day, the garden of Swan House bleak beneath a misty sky. Darkness had fallen by half-past four when they sat down to tea in the drawing-room, the three of them around a wood fire. ‘I’m surprised you don’t have a dog,’ he laughingly remarked, for a dog stretched out on the hearth-rug would have completed the picture of domestic cheerfulness in the cosy gloom. They had laughed politely also, but he hadn’t quite heard the reply of either of them.

  Francis had been well dressed that day. Though considerably on his uppers, waiting for the latest tobacco advertisement cheque, he had bought himself a pair of sponge-bag trousers. In his room in Folkestone he had carefully washed a white shirt, gone over his jacket with Thawpit, and borrowed an iron from Denise in the bed-sitter next door. Conversing with Mrs Anstey and her daughter, he transformed this room into a flat, since that seemed called for. ‘Quite a pleasant view of the sea,’ he reported, although his single window in fact stared straight at the back of another house. Smearing a scone with strawberry jam, he described a flat-all russet brown and white-that had featured in a television drama he’d once taken part in.

  Francis had experienced relationships like this before. There were two elderly sisters called Massmith whom he had met by chance almost sixteen years ago on a train in Cheshire. He had been out of work at the time and had taken a temporary job as a milk clerk in the neighbourhood; on the train he’d dropped into conversation with the Massmiths and had later stayed with them in their bungalow. Quite some time later there were a doctor and his wife whom he came to know in Lincolnshire after he’d had to attend the doctor’s surgery with a sore finger. ‘Well now, that’s interesting,’ the doctor said when he learnt that Francis-then employed in the offices of a paint factory-was really an actor. The doctor revealed that he and his wife were leading lights in a local amateur group called the Whetton Players. Invited first of all for morning coffee, Francis afterwards returned and stayed for some weeks. After that there were the exceedingly rich Kilvert-Dunnes, with whom he stayed on the Isle of Wight for three months, helping in their glasshouses. A fourth couple took him so warmly under their wing that he remained with them for almost a year, and there were other couples as well.

  Francis told Mrs Anstey and her daughter all about himself, as he had told the Massmith sisters and the doctor and his wife, the Kilvert-Dunnes and all the others. After the tragedy of his parents’ death when he was eleven he’d spent the remainder of his childhood in Suffolk, with a faded old aunt who had died herself a few years ago. None of that was true. As a child he had developed the fantasy of the train crash; his parents were still alive, the aunt and her cottage figments of his imagination. But in the drawingroom of Swan House he recalled the railway tragedy with suitable regret, and was rewarded with sympathy and another cup of tea. He offered to draw the curtains, on his feet to do so as he spoke. Lights gleamed then on the delicately framed paintings of roses and on various faded, inlaid surfaces. Francis himself put a log on the fire.

  ‘No, I never married,’ he revealed, accepting a second buttered scone instead of cake. The women had not asked him if he had, but the statement sounded natural enough in the course of a casual conversation. It wasn’t actually true. In 1965, out of work and feeling weary, about to be twenty, Francis had met a widow one afternoon on the sea-front at Folkestone, a town he had taken a train to in an idle moment. She was thirty years older than he was, a Jewish dressmaker who appeared to be well-to-do in a modest way. Over vanilla ice-creams in a café he’d listened to her recital of the emptiness in her l
ife since her husband, a bookmaker, had dropped dead at Brighton races three years ago, leaving her childless. Until she told him she was a dressmaker Francis put her down as a boarding-house keeper or a woman who sold tickets in the kiosk of a cinema. She was overweight and pale, with black dyed hair and dry podgy lips. But she owned a house in a terrace and while speaking of her late husband she revealed that she, too, suffered from a heart condition and might even be living on borrowed time. A month later Francis proposed marriage. He was accepted with alacrity, and looked forward to a brief and peaceful sojourn with a dressmaker who would not expect much of him, whom he would discover one morning dead in her bed. He did all the shopping, going out every day with a basket while she continued to make clothes. He did the washing-up and the cleaning and some of the cooking, but to his consternation the woman he had married showed no sign of handing back her borrowed time and in fact was still alive. No petition for divorce had ever been filed, and Francis often saw his wife on the streets of Folkestone and always endeavoured to have a chat. She’d become even fatter than she’d been when he’d married her, her dyed black hair as black as ever and her lips still podgy in her unhealthy face. Across the width of her workroom she once had thrown a sewing-machine cover at him. It had not hit him, and all he wanted to say when he met her in shops or on the streets of Folkestone was that he forgave her for this violent action. He’d have quite liked to sit with her again over an ice or a cup of tea, listening to her gossip about the women who came to be fitted for the clothes she made them. He had always enjoyed that.

  But the marriage itself now belonged in the past, and Francis saw no reason to burden the women of Swan House with it. To have done so would have sounded as out-of-place in their drawing-room as regaling them with the fact that a girl in a department store had once borne a child of his, or with various other facts about himself. He smiled instead on that first visit to Swan House, and accepted a glass of sherry. He held his head a little to one side in a way that drew the best out of his features.