Last Stories Page 6

  Mrs Crasthorpe

  On the short walk from the churchyard to her car Mrs Crasthorpe was aware of a profound humiliation. A lone mourner at her husband’s funeral, she had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he had called his obsequies. A woman cleric unknown to Mrs Crasthorpe had conducted a bleak service, had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs Crasthorpe, and then had scuttled off without so much as a glance in Mrs Crasthorpe’s direction. Two men were waiting, leaning on their shovels in the nearby graveyard, and within minutes had returned the clay to where they had dug it from, making a little mound, the coffin gone for ever and with it Arthur, all of it a mockery. She was wrong, Mrs Crasthorpe knew, to blame Arthur for the arrangements he’d put in hand before he went, but she’d become used to blaming him in his lifetime and couldn’t help doing so still.

  She was a woman of fifty-nine who declared herself to be forty-five because forty-five was what she felt. She had married a considerably older man who had died in his seventy-second year. She had married him for his money, but in spite of the comfort and convenience this had brought, Mrs Crasthorpe believed that in marriage she had failed to blossom. Always a rosebud, was how, privately, she thought of herself; and there was, in Mrs Crasthorpe, a lot of privacy, there always had been. She knew she would tell no one, not ever, that Arthur had been buried without a decent send-off, just as she’d told no one that she was the mother of a son or that there had been, in the late years of her marriage, Tommy Kildare and Donald.

  ‘I shall relish my widowhood,’ she asserted, aloud and firmly, in her car. ‘I shall make something of it.’

  A light rain became heavier as she drove, the windscreen wipers slushing it away, a sound she particularly disliked. In the driving mirror, which she glanced at from time to time, her blonded hair, her grey-blue eyes, the curve of her generously full lips pleased Mrs Crasthorpe. She liked the look of herself, and always had.

  She turned on the radio to suppress the windscreen-wiper noise, wondering as she did so why Arthur had chosen to be buried in such an obscure place, wondering what it was she hadn’t listened to when she’d been told. Faintly, on some foreign station, popular music passed from tune to tune, each one known to Mrs Crasthorpe since they were of her time.

  * * *

  * * *

  Etheridge let himself in quietly, not releasing the catch of the lock until he’d pulled it to and could open the door soundlessly. With luck, Janet would have slept and would be sleeping still. Sleep was everything to her now, the kindest friend, the tenderest lover. She didn’t allow it to be induced, the drugs she was offered invariably declined.

  He looked down at the sleeping face that illness was taking from him, a little more each day. For a moment he saw in the wan, tired features the shadows of Juliet, the wisdom of Portia, Estella’s thoughtless pride. ‘I’ll go,’ the carer whispered from the doorway.

  ‘Dear Janet,’ he whispered himself, wondering how her day had been.

  When he had made tea Etheridge carried the tray back to the bedside and the rattle of the cup and saucer woke his wife, as every day it did. It was what Janet wanted, what she liked: that she should always be awake when he was here.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said.

  He bent to embrace her, and held her for a moment in his arms, then plumped her pillows up and straightened the turndown of her top sheet. She said, when he asked, that she was feeling better. But she didn’t eat any of the cake he had brought, or the biscuits, and didn’t look as well as she had that morning.

  ‘Oh, nothing to write home about,’ he responded to a query of how the day had been for him. She’d finished A Fine Balance, she said. She’d heard a programme about silverware on the radio. ‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Not interesting at all.’

  ‘Some soup later, darling? Cream cracker?’

  ‘Soup would be lovely. No cream cracker.’

  ‘We landed the contract. I thought we wouldn’t.’

  ‘I knew you would.’

  She was an actress. He had been settled for years in the offices of Forrester and Bright, a firm of specialist printers that had made a corner for itself by taking on complicated assignments which other printers couldn’t be bothered with. In their early forties now, they’d been married since they were both twenty-three.

  ‘It’s awful for you,’ Janet said, gloomy as she sometimes was when she’d just woken up.

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’ Without an effort, the familiar reassurance came.

  They smiled at one another. They knew it was awful.

  ‘University Challenge tonight,’ Janet said.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘You’ll behave yourself,’ the warder said.

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘She’s here. You see you do.’

  Derek wished she wouldn’t come. All of it was silly from both their points of view. She knew it was, it wasn’t as if she didn’t, but still she came. She’d tell him the latest about the old boy and he’d try not to hear. She’d tell him because there was nothing else to tell him. She’d sit there in her finery, ashamed of him and ashamed because she was. She had called it naughty once, the way he was. She didn’t call it anything now.

  He heard the click of her heels, a sprightly sound, different from the thump of boots. The warder respected her, knowing her from her visits; a nice man, she said. She liked people being nice.

  ‘Now, you behave, lad.’ The warder again rebuked Derek in advance, a white splotch on the shiny peak of his cap his only untidiness.

  ‘You see that?’ Derek said when she came. ‘A bird done its business on Mr Fane.’

  He teased her with bad grammar and she winced when he did although she pretended she didn’t mind. She was on about something new: the old boy had died and no one had come to the funeral. Derek hadn’t known him, there had never been a reason why they should have known one another, but even so she talked about him.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, great,’ he said.

  * * *

  * * *

  And that was all; Mrs Crasthorpe accepted without protest that their brief exchanges were over. ‘You’re good, the way you come,’ the warder said when she began to go. She left a pot of damson jam, which was a favourite.

  She hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to Pasmore’s. She had phoned, as she always did, to make sure there’d be a table for her, and there it was, in the corner she had come to regard as hers. They didn’t gush in Pasmore’s; you could feel the dignity of their being above it. They spoke almost in whispers, but you could hear every word because they wanted you to. She always had tea in Pasmore’s after visiting Derek.

  Ordering from the waitress who had come at once to her, her thoughts picked up from where she’d left them, no different from the thoughts she always had in Pasmore’s. He couldn’t help himself, he didn’t try. He wasn’t the kind to try, he had explained: he liked being a persistent offender. Yet even so it couldn’t be less than horrid for him. That it must be awful had many times haunted Mrs Crasthorpe at this same table, and she pressed it away from her now, glancing about for a face she recognized among the teatime people. But, as always, there wasn’t one.

  ‘How nice!’ She smiled away her dejection when her sultana scones came and her tea was poured for her, which they always did for one at Pasmore’s.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Janet died, painlessly in her sleep, Etheridge moved from the flat in Barnes to a smaller one in Weymouth Street, no practicality or economic necessity inspiring the change. It was just that Barnes, shadowed now by death, was not as once it had been. Its spaciousness, its quiet streets, stared back at Etheridge morosely, the jazz pub that had been theirs seeming ordinary, the river unappealing. The same flowers blooming again in the window boxes should have been a mem
ory and a solace, but were not. Moving in at Weymouth Street, Etheridge thought of leaving Forrester and Bright, of leaving London too, but when a few weeks had gone by Weymouth Street seemed far enough. It had no past, it tugged at nothing. He settled there.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mrs Crasthorpe set about making something special of her widowhood with a will. She spent a week in Eastbourne clarifying her thoughts, for the town’s modest opulence, its unhurried peace and sense of other times had had a calming effect before. Nothing had changed: the Parades, the Grand Hotel, the well-dressed people on the streets, the unfearful sea drew once more from Mrs Crasthorpe an admiration that went back to her girlhood. It was in Eastbourne she first had felt the better for being alive. She could think more productively in the briny air, she got things right. Funeral weeds had had their day, solemn rites were dead and gone: in the dining room of the Grand Hotel she sensed she was forgiven for her unshed tears, the grief she could not manage. Shambling through his days, Arthur hadn’t wanted to know about Tommy Kildare or Donald. ‘We’re chalk and cheese,’ he said vaguely. He left her everything.

  She walked about in Eastbourne, going nowhere, wondering if she would meet a chum and when she didn’t it seemed better that she shouldn’t, that privately and on her own she should dwell on how life should be now. In this she did not banish fantasy: her chums would give her a party, for they were party people. In twos and threes they would stand about and see in her another woman, and Derek would come with presents, as he never had before; and Tommy Kildare would be as once he’d been. So young she seemed, he’d say, she could be seventeen. And Donald would kiss her fingers and call himself a Regency buck.

  * * *

  * * *

  At first Etheridge didn’t hang up the print of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon when he moved to Weymouth Street, but then he did because it was a shame not to. Framed and wrapped, it had been waiting for him one 12 September, probably his fortieth, he thought. The sum of the accumulated IOUs, each one dated 4 April, hadn’t become enough for Janet’s earrings; they would have if there’d been another year. Sometimes, even in Weymouth Street, such lesser shadows flitted about, but Etheridge dismissed this interference as a trick of the light or of his own imagination.

  Work was a help, and when he had been in Weymouth Street for less than six months he ceased to lie sleepless in the lonely early hours. Recollections were less distinct; bits of remembered conversations were somehow lost, the last of the clothes were given away. At a cookery class he learnt to make risotto and eggs Benedict. He played the piano more skilfully than before, had a drink every evening in the Cock and Lion, read Mauriac in French and was promoted at Forrester and Bright.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mrs Crasthorpe had earlier noticed somewhere the man who was coming towards her in Beaumont Street. His tie bore the colours of a regiment or public school. His hands were delicate: gentle hands, Mrs Crasthorpe surmised, the fingernails well kept. He had looks, and she imagined charm; she liked the way he dressed. She liked his serious expression as he walked, how he seemed to dwell on serious matters, unravelling confusion, clever. He wasn’t in a hurry. She liked that too.

  ‘Enford Crescent,’ she said to herself, wondering how long it was since Enford Crescent had been plucked out of nowhere by Tups or Primmie, she couldn’t remember which. You asked the way to Enford Crescent when a boy you liked the look of came along. He wouldn’t know, he couldn’t know: there was no Enford Crescent. For an hour once Primmie and a nameless boy had trailed about, searching for what they would never find, falling in love, so Primmie had said. And Tups another time, searching also, was taken to the Palm Grove, and bought a Peach Surprise.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘I think it’s probably quite near,’ Etheridge said when he was asked for directions to somewhere he thought he’d once noticed on a street sign. ‘Excuse me,’ he called out to a couple with a dog on a lead. ‘This lady’s looking for Enford Crescent.’

  The couple had been engaged in an argumentative conversation which had abruptly ceased. They were middle-aged and tired-looking, a note of impatience in both their voices. The dog was a black-and-white smooth-haired fox terrier, snappish because it disliked its lead.

  ‘Enford?’ the man who restrained it repeated. ‘Not round here, I shouldn’t think.’

  His companion nodded her agreement. The woman who’d asked for directions was smiling rather helplessly now, Etheridge thought. ‘Never mind,’ she said.

  The couple and the dog went on. ‘You’ve been most kind,’ the woman in search of Enford Crescent said.

  ‘Well, hardly that.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Indeed.’

  ‘I’m sorry I misled you.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Someone will know when you ask again.’

  ‘Of course.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Mrs Crasthorpe watched the man she had spoken to walking away from her, and when he passed out of sight she missed him as if she knew him. He had a cultivated voice and was polite without being like an icicle. She’d always been attracted by fair-haired men.

  Still gazing into the empty distance, she felt the weight of her middle age. She’d been impulsive once upon a time, hasty and not caring that she was. Tups had called her a spur-of-the-moment girl. Primmie had too. They’d liked impulsiveness in her; she’d liked it herself. He would have done, the fair-haired man, she’d known he would. She would have told him. He would have listened and understood. She knew that too and yet she’d let him go.

  * * *

  * * *

  For no particular reason, when Janet was ill, Etheridge had begun to fill the remaining pages of a half-used-up ledger book with autobiographical jottings. He did not intend this to be a diary, simply a record of early childhood, his own and Janet’s, some later memories collected too. It established time and place, what had been shared and what had not, the marriage, and people known and houses lived in. While he was homesick at a Gloucestershire boarding school, Janet was being taught at home by a Miss Francis, school for a delicate child being considered a risk. Her first theatrical appearance, unnamed, unnoticed, was in the pantomime chorus of Jack and the Beanstalk. Short-skirted, glamorous, she was seventeen, while Etheridge, not then known to her, was waiting for a vocation to offer itself. They met when Janet came to London.

  Alone thirty years later, Etheridge could not forgive her death and imagined he never would. He sensed that his feelings were unreasonable and he struggled to dismiss them, disliking himself for what seemed to be a selfishness. But still resentment hung about. Why should she not have what mostly people did have, why was she now mere dust?

  The autumn that came was an Indian summer and every weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday, Etheridge walked in Regent’s Park. He learnt from a book the names of flowers he didn’t know, he fed the birds. But mainly, while time passed more slowly than on weekdays, he watched from a pavement table of a café the people who came and went. He envied them, and he envied himself as he had been.

  * * *

  * * *

  When years ago, and halfway through her marriage, Mrs Crasthorpe discovered this same part of London she liked it at once. She had visited it to inspect, and take her pick of, an elderly woman’s jewellery, the woman once well-to-do but no longer. Mrs Crasthorpe had bought three rings and a bracelet and when, a month or so later, the same advertisement appeared again she made a second journey and persuaded her husband on her return to sell their house and buy one she had seen in Coppice Mews. She liked the mews, she liked the streets and so did he; he hadn’t at first but with time she persuaded him that he did. He died in Coppice Mews, apologizing for having to leave her on her own and for wanting to be buried in a small country churchyard she considered unsuitable for the urban man he’d been. She honoured his wishes none the less, and was alr
eady on familiar terms with the people of the shops, had the mews house painted in the colours she had previously wanted. All of which, for Mrs Crasthorpe, increased the pleasure of widowhood.

  * * *

  * * *

  A faintly familiar face was what Etheridge was aware of, without knowing where or when he’d seen it before. Then he remembered and nodded at the woman who was turning the pages of a newspaper at the next table. She stared at him when he did so, as if her thoughts had been similar to his. ‘Good Lord!’ a moment later she exclaimed. Her scent was as pungent as it had been when she had asked for directions. Her clothes were different. She held out a hand that was just within Etheridge’s reach. ‘I rather think we’ve met before,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes, we have.’

  ‘What weather!’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘A day for the races!’

  She used to go racing often, she said. The Oaks, the Derby, Cheltenham. Wimbledon for the tennis, Henley. ‘Oh, such a lot,’ she said, but things were quieter now. Inevitable, of course, as the years pile up.

  She was handsome in her fleshy way, Etheridge supposed. Careful, experienced. You couldn’t call her gross, and there was something in her lavish, well-used smile that was almost delicate. Her teeth were very white. Her breasts were firm, her knees were trim. She fiddled with a brooch she wore, a loop of tiny stones, chips of sapphire and washed-out ruby they might have been, the only decoration on a pale cream dress. Sometimes a languid look came into her features and for a moment then they were tranquil.

  ‘What a troublesome country Cambodia is!’ she chattily remarked, folding away her newspaper as she spoke. ‘You’d think they’d have more sense.’