It was getting late. We bandied words for a bit, but there was little zest behind her thrusts and parries. ‘If you knew how I felt about you, you wouldn’t look so pleased with yourself’ was the best she could do.
‘It makes you feel old, doesn’t it?’ she said suddenly.
‘What does?’
‘Oh, I dunno, the whole thing—seeing your sister get married before you do. You think he’ll marry her?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Jolly good. I never wanted to marry—I’ve seen too many people part—and I don’t expect you do.’
‘Well, not at the moment,’ I said ungraciously.
She sighed musically.
‘Too comfortable, I suppose. Well, I don’t blame you. I should like to write to Gladdy, though. We call her Gladdy, or Glad—though she never was glad so as you’d notice. Perhaps she’ll be gladder now. I needn’t tell her what I’m doing here—she doesn’t know, none of them do. But I should like her to know I wish her well. Or do you think I’d better wait until she’s hooked him?’
‘I think I should.’
‘They might not tell me—but he’ll tell you, won’t he?’
I saw the implication of this, and said rather unwillingly:
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So if I don’t hear, you’ll find a way to pass it on. All right? I wonder if they’ll invite me to their wedding.’
‘I’ve no doubt they will.’
‘The more fools they—I shouldn’t, in their place. I suppose it will be ever such a smart wedding—bang on and whizzo. The real McCoy. Heigh ho!’ She gave her musical sigh, and looked up at the clock. ‘Good lord, I must be off. But I must powder my nose first.’
‘Look here,’ I said, when she came back, refurbished, ‘I’ve wasted a lot of your time, and it hasn’t turned out as I thought it would. If you are disappointed, so am I. Now what about a little remembrance?’
I didn’t have to fumble, I had the notes ready in my pocket.
‘I’ve told you before,’ she said, rising, ‘and I don’t mind telling you again, you’ve got no respect for a girl’s feelings. You can keep your blasted money! I shall tell Uncle Harry I was ill, and so I am—you’ve made me ill, and I wouldn’t go back with you, not even if you asked me!’
She glared at me through unshed tears and for a moment the impression of the Face was so intense that I could hardly see hers for it.
‘That’s O.K. by me,’ I said. ‘I don’t like these transports so soon after dinner. They give me indigestion.’
At that she laughed, and by the time we reached the pavement—now her haunt—we were friends again. Only a few steps to the kerbstone, but how the tap-tapping of her heels betrayed her! And then a passing taxi bore her off.
THE CORNER CUPBOARD
It was the first September of the Second War, and Philip Holroyd had decided to leave his flat in London and settle in the country out of the way of the bombs. The place he hit upon was in the West of England, about four miles from a middle-sized market town which he did not think would interest the enemy. Being a bachelor, and as helpless as bachelors generally are, and also a writer, as helpless as writers generally are, he knew he could not fend for himself: he must have a cook and a daily woman. The house, like many other houses, was called the ‘Old Rectory’, and was, of course, much too large for Philip; perhaps he would not have taken it but for the urgency of his desire to get away from London. In September 1939 travelling by train was difficult: he paid the house a brief visit, and when he heard that several other people were after it he took it on the nail, being easily influenced by threats. The pride of the well-worn Victorian furniture was a magnificent doll’s house, but there were some good pieces of an older date, which, occurring haphazard with the rest, and not given any special prominence, gave the place a kind of dignity and unself-consciousness. These included, in the room Philip had marked out for his bedroom, since among other advantages it had the inestimable one of being nearest to the bathroom, an old mahogany bow-fronted corner cupboard, which, unlike some of the cupboards and chests of drawers, was empty of the owner’s possessions. It will do for my medicines, thought Philip, who was something of a hypochondriac.
To find a cook was his most urgent problem. The woman who had looked after him in London, being cockney-born, refused to leave it. He dreaded the thought of having to get used to a new person; he was too timid to give orders with conviction, but at the same time liked things done his way. Having lived for many years alone, he was not at all adaptable and was prone to make mountains out of molehills. Although in London he had plenty of friends his experience with each had become taped: they neither gave nor took from him anything new. The unpredictable was his bugbear. Unconsciously he had withdrawn into himself and grown a shell, albeit a soft one.
Days passed with no news from the Registry Office in Shuttleworth; and when at last they wrote that they had found someone who they thought would suit him it was too late for him to go to interview her; the man in the Foreign Office who had taken his London flat was on the point of moving in. So he engaged Mrs. Weaver without seeing her, but not (as might have happened nowadays) without a reference. ‘She is a woman’, wrote her late employer, with whom she had stayed a year, ‘who needs a good deal of special attention and sympathy which, in our rather large and busy family, she has not always been able to find. She is honest and clean and within her limitations a good cook. Where there is only one in family she would, I think, feel more at home. She responds quickly to encouragement and appreciation. The loss of her husband in the First World War seems to have unsettled her in some ways.’
In her own letter Mrs. Weaver gave her age as forty-six—which happened to be Philip’s own age—and said that she hoped to be able to oblige him in every possible way. All this predisposed him in her favour; the need for sympathy and attention was one that, in spite of being an egotist, he was quite ready to meet; indeed, he rather fancied himself as a consoler. When he arrived at the Old Rectory she was already installed.
For the first day or two, in spite of his resolution to ladle out sympathy and appreciation, he didn’t see much of Mrs. Weaver. He was busy trying to assimilate the strangeness of his new surroundings. All those outhouses and stables, which the old rectors had no doubt been able to find a suitable use for; couldn’t, indeed, have done without! That weedy courtyard with its central drain, through which the water (it had been raining plentifully) took so long to run away! And the garden with its towering trees, traversed by a sullen but romantic rivulet, how much too large it was for the gardener who was said to come three times a week! And the emptiness and silence, after London! A car coming by (the house faced the village street) was quite an event; one listened to its entire progress, from the first throb of the engine to the last. And soon, if petrol-rationing really became a fact, these irruptions into the silence would be fewer, almost non-existent! Already he could hear his own footsteps, the footsteps of a single man, walking alone. Isolation made Philip Holroyd busy with his thoughts as never before; they had the intensity of sensations. Then suddenly he remembered Mrs. Weaver and her need for sympathy.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, going into the kitchen. Flanked by a larder and a pantry and a second kitchen, and having a back-stairs defended by a door opening out of it, it was a room where meals for twenty people might have been prepared. ‘Excuse me,’ he repeated, for he was a man who liked to err on the side of politeness, ‘but I wanted to tell you how very much I enjoyed the supper you gave me last night. The cheese soufflé was a dream, and it is such a test of cooking.’
Mrs. Weaver looked up at him from the deal table where she was making pastry. Her hands were floury. Her face was round and pink, framed by soft brown hair that was going grey. She parted it in the middle; it was thin and straggled a little, but not untidily. Her figure was short and compact. She had a pleasant, almost sweet expression, which didn’t change much when she spoke.