Emma said, ‘And he told you not to tell anyone.’
‘Yes.’
‘You scoundrel.’
‘You won’t tell. It’s like talking to myself or God. Come, let’s make up, let’s sing, let’s sing that German round you taught me. I’ll begin.’
Tom began to sing softly,
‘Alles schweiget. Nachtigallen
Locken mil süssen Melodien
Tränen ins Auge
Sehnsucht ins Herz.’
When he had sung the round through and started again Emma joined in, not using his full voice but with a high clear pure whispering sound. And by the time they turned into Travancore Avenue, although there were not positively tears in their eyes, there was a great deal of mournful yearning in their hearts.
‘My God, it is snowing!’
An awful iron grey silence had possessed the town since early morning. The sky, appearing like a dull solid dome low over the roofs, had been grey, then yellowish, then almost white. Now scarcely visible very small snowflakes were dancing up and down like midges. As Brian and Gabriel watched them (it was lunch time) they (the snowflakes) were to be seen, not as it seemed falling, but jigging about just above the pall of steam which (as the temperature fell in the direction of zero) once again covered the surface of the open-air pool.
‘Snow in April!’
‘It can snow any time in this bloody country.’
Brian and Gabriel returned to the little white cast- Iron table, covered with circular brown stains, at which they had been sitting and drinking tea out of plastic cups. The white snowy light revealed in terrible detail the pale stained flaky green walls of the Promenade and the cold, wet brasswork of the lion disgorging Ennistone water into a kind of sink. Zed, established upon one of the chairs, was with them today. Dogs were allowed, in the Promenade only, upon leads. Gabriel had brought him with her, from her shopping and his run in the Botanic Garden, and had given up her swim so as to sit with him over coffee, waiting for Brian and Adam to arrive. Adam was still out there swimming, somewhere underneath the roly-poly blanket of the steam. Gabriel banished from her mind rapid mental movies of Adam drowned, his limp body lifted from the water, et cetera. She returned to the topic of the seaside visit. Brian detested this topic and refused to help her to think about it. He sat scratching his pockmarked face with blunt, audible fingernails, and glaring unseeingly in the direction of Gavin Oare and Maisie Chalmers who were giggling at a corner table, and of Mrs Bradstreet who was drinking some of the sulphurous water and brooding over her terrible secret.
‘If we want to go to a hotel we ought to book now.’
‘One day’s enough, isn’t it?’
‘I think it would be fun to go to a hotel — ’
‘I don’t. Why go at all?’
‘Well, it’s a family tradition. Alex sets store by it.’
‘I don’t think Alex “sets store by it”, whatever that means. With Maryville gone it’s pointless anyway.’
‘We did it last year without Maryville.’
‘And what a frost it was.’
‘I don’t think so — ’
‘I know why you want it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you want George to come.’
‘Don’t be silly!’ It’s true, thought Gabriel, but not in a bad way. It was so important to let George know that they cared.
‘I’ve never seen such a dog for playing.’
‘Yes, remember when we watched him through the kitchen window playing there all by himself— ’
Zed, fluffed up on top of Gabriel’s shopping bag, had his roosting bird look. He had what Gabriel called his ‘winsome look’, his black lip a little curled to show a flash of teeth, his blue-black shot-silk eyes staring flirtatiously at his admirers. He touched the handle of the bag with one tentative white paw, stared at Gabriel, then patted it twice as if inviting co-operation in a game or ritual.
‘Zed! Where’s bailie?’
‘Don’t excite him, Gabriel.’
‘Zed, you darling, kiss hands!’
‘Soppy little blighter. There are small dogs, but this is ridiculous. A miserable sissie little object that couldn’t defend itself— ’
‘Dogs in Ennistone don’t have to fight for their lives!’ She added, ‘Oh dear.’ Such a tiny defenceless crushable animal. Oh dear.
‘He’s not a dog, he’s a cuddly toy. Adam treats him like a toy.’
‘Adam treats everything like a toy.’
‘How does such a ridiculous little animal know that it’s a dog at all? Put him down, he’s sitting on the cheese.’
Gabriel put Zed on the ground where he immediately began to frisk and dance at her feet, moving his round black and white rump voluptuously, as a preparation for attempting to jump up. She lifted him on to her knee where he settled himself, staring with intense insolent private amusement at Brian.
‘We could stay at that little hotel — ’
‘I’m not paying out money for hotels.’
‘Then if we go for the day — ’
‘What’s the use of a day? We’d spend half the time getting there and getting back.’
‘No we wouldn’t. It’s very quick now by the motorway. And a day by the sea is - so special - if we’re all together. Brian, please don’t say no. It’s our only family thing except Christmas, and you know how much I enjoy Christmas.’
‘And you know how much I hate it! Alex hates it too, remember how she wrecked the last one.’
‘Don’t be cross, I have to organize this because nobody else will, like I have to organize Christmas because nobody else will. You’re all glad enough when I’ve done it!’
‘You deceive yourself.’
‘Tom suggested we should take tents and camp.’
‘Oh did he!’
‘I’ll make the sandwiches, Ruby will help, you know how she enjoys it — ’
‘You’re always imagining that other people enjoy things, but they are not like you!’
‘Well, they’re not like you either, you don’t enjoy anything!’
‘I used to enjoy things, but they’ve all gone, the nice things, like waltzing with you at the thé dansants we used to have in this room before everything got so awful.’
Gabriel was touched by this memory. She too had enjoyed the sentimental old thé dansants with the three-piece orchestra. ‘Darling! And the tangos and the sambas and the rumbas and the slow fox-trot — ’
‘No. Only the waltzes. But they’ve gone. We shall never waltz again. Oh God, must you cry about it?’
I’m not just crying about that, thought Gabriel, though I am crying about that. Why am I always so near to tears? It annoys Brian so. Are other people’s lives like mine - always so near to the edge of something infinitely touching, awfully moving and significant and sort of deep - Can it be God? No, it is too small.
Adam had been upset this morning because Gabriel had destroyed his ‘bear’. This ‘bear’ was a smudge upon the kitchen wall which resembled a bear, which had somehow become Adam’s property. Busily cleaning, Gabriel had accidentally mopped his bear away. He’s like me, she thought, and yet with him it’s different. He loves all sorts of funny little things which are almost non-things. For him the world is full of such things. He owns the world - it’s always his blackbird that’s singing, his spider that has made a web in the corner. The thought about the lost bear reminded her somehow that last night she had dreamed about Rufus, and in the dream he was her son. She often had this dream, which she told to no one.
There was something else too, something which had just happened as she sat at the table in the Promenade waiting for Brian to join her. An Indian man, perhaps a Pakistani, a thin, youngish man with a beard, had sat down opposite to her, as she sat reading the Ennistone Gazette, and asked her one or two trivial questions. Gabriel had answered his questions briefly and gone on reading. She did not easily talk to strange men. After a short while the ‘intruder’ went away. A few minutes later, after he had disappeared, and just before Brian came, Gabriel put down her paper, penetrated by a terrible pang of conscience. The man had been lonely, perhaps he had only lately arrived in England, a new immigrant, living alone, made to feel unwanted, looked askance at, victimized. His trivial questions were an appeal, for conversation, for human contact, for a smile, for a look. Perhaps he had thought she had a kind face. And she had utterly failed, she had been curt, almost rude. And now he was gone, and that precious moment would never come to her again. This too was what made tears come into her eyes when Brian recalled the thé dansants.