When she heard Mr Blount’s step on the stairs she pushed the magazine behind a cushion. He laughed at the stories and made unkind remarks about the letters from correspondents. They were people who had their troubles, and it wasn’t right to laugh at them. When he came into the room with a frown she knew at once that something had upset him. He shut the door behind him and said in an ugly voice,
‘Fred’s here.’
Mrs Blount’s pale mouth fell open, and he swore at her.
‘You needn’t make yourself more of a damned idiot than you are! I said, “Fred’s here!” You can understand as much as that, can’t you?’
She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’
He stared at her angrily.
‘We’ve been too long about it, and that’s a fact! Might have made a difference if you’d played up a bit! You’re supposed to be dead set on the house, aren’t you? But I take you to see it, and what do you do – just sit about like a bundle of old clothes and say, “Very nice!”.’
‘What did you want me to say?’ The words came slow and dead.
He swore again.
‘I ought to have left you at home, and that’s the fact! I ought to have known it wasn’t any good expecting you to play up! You are supposed to be so keen on that house that I shan’t get any peace until I’ve bought it! You’re supposed to want it so badly that I’ve got to go on raising the price until they are willing to sell, and when I take you there you sound just about as keen as a cat would be for a ducking! I tell you I could have twisted your neck! And what’s the result – what’s the result, I ask you! Fred, I tell you – Fred turning up here with money in his pocket and bidding me up! Fred who hadn’t two sixpences to rub against each other and came to me to put up the money! And now what? He’s had a lucky win, and here he is, in the market against me and bidding me up! In a wicked temper about it too, that’s what he is! Says I double-crossed him! When he hadn’t got twopence to put up himself – not twopence! And now he says he’ll blow the gaff if I don’t take him in! After bidding me up too! The dirty spite of it!’ Mrs Blount sat on the chair and looked at him. She never knew anything about his business – he never told her anything. Only every now and then when something had put him out he would talk like he was doing now. He never explained anything, and she didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to know about his business. Sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep it would come to her that if she ever did get to know about it anything might happen. Anything dreadful. She just sat there and went on looking at him. When he used that voice to her she was too frightened to do anything else. She would have liked to look away, but she was afraid even to do that. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad. He had a red face, and eyes that were too light for it. People thought him a jolly-looking man. There was a frightening strength in his arms and his big coarse hands. She had married him because nobody else had asked her, and it didn’t take her long to find out that he had married her because of the house her Uncle George had left her and the thousand pounds in the post office savings bank.
He stumped over to the window and came back again.
‘Now look here!’ he said. ‘If you run into Fred, you don’t know anything – see? Not anything at all! If he asks you what I’m doing bidding for the house, you don’t know! You can look as much like an idiot as you want to and you don’t know anything at all! It would be just like Fred to catch you alone and try and get things out of you! You just shake your head and say you don’t know a thing! You can say I never talk to you about business, and that’s gospel truth! Have you got that?’
She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’
‘All right, don’t you forget it!’
He stumped out of the room and shut the door behind him carefully, not banging it, because he was the kind husband who was always so considerate to a trying wife.
Miss Moxon was coming out of the Green Room, followed by her friend, Mrs Doyle. She was tall and thin. Mrs Doyle was as round as a dumpling but full of energy. She undertook shopping for people who were abroad. She also met school-children and saw them across London. In the intervals she wrote innumerable letters to her married sons and daughters, who were scattered round the world in both directions from China to Peru. Miss Moxon only did cross-word puzzles, but she did them very slowly and they sufficed. They stopped and spoke to Mr Blount and asked him if Mrs Blount was feeling any better. When he shook his head regretfully, they commiserated with him, and thought what a good husband he was.
On the other side of the door Mrs Blount heard their voices. She knew what they were saying, because it was just what everybody said. They were sorry for her because they were kind, but they were much more sorry for Sid having such a poor thing of a wife.
When the footsteps and the voices had quite gone away she got her magazine out from under the cushion and began to read about how to renovate a woollen dress which had got the moth in it. You did it by cutting the sleeves short and making patch-pockets out of the pieces you cut away. It didn’t say what would happen if the mothholes were where they couldn’t be covered by pockets. The moths had been terrible two years ago. She had forgotten to put moth-ball with her combinations, and they had come out full of holes.
She passed to a recipe for getting stains out of marble.
SEVEN
MRS GRAHAM’S STATE of mind was becoming very much confused. On the one hand it was desirable that Althea should be paying more attention to her appearance, having regard to the fact that no one is going to believe you are under forty yourself if you have a daughter who might be thirty-five. But on the other hand it was impossible to help connecting the change with Nicholas Carey’s undesired return. When anyone had been away for five years you really don’t expect them to turn up again. Not that he was likely to take the slightest interest in Thea after all this time. She had always thought that French proverb about coming back to your first loves very silly – just a jingle for the sake of the rhyme.
‘On revient toujours
A ses premiers amours!’
In her experience once a man went away he stayed away. All the same she hoped they wouldn’t meet. Thea might be upset, and when she was upset it made a very depressing atmosphere in the house. Really the best thing would be to sell the house to this Mr Blount who seemed to want it so badly. They could store the furniture and be off on their cruise before the cold weather set in. She wondered whether he would rise beyond seven thousand. If he did, it would be madness to refuse, and Thea would be kept much too busy to have any time to spare for Nicholas Carey.
She continued in this frame of mind until the afternoon of Mrs Justice’s cocktail party. By an irony of fate it was Ella Harrison who disturbed it. Making her way to the comfortable chair which Mrs Graham had managed to secure, she sat down on the arm of it and embarked upon a kind of running commentary.