The Yellow Houses

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Wilfred said.

  He had expected to feel embarrassment; the last time this man had seen him he had been crying. But he felt only pleasure at the sight of Mr Taverner’s lanky figure draped along the seat, as if he had recognized a friend. He seated himself alongside him.

  ‘Not too bad, now, is it?’ he ventured.

  Pat had disliked the dim, white something that frequently rolled into Torford late on winter afternoons. The sea was only fifteen miles away, and old Torford hands called this something ‘the sea mist’. Wilfred, while liking the mystery it gave to streets and houses, had never until today said anything to anyone that implied an affection for it. The setting sun was now looking redly through it, and already the trees were ghostly.

  ‘I like this kind of afternoon,’ said Mr Taverner, but said no more.

  In the pause, Wilfred brought out the clean envelope from his pocket-book. ‘Here’s . . .’ he began, and for the first time he felt embarrassment. ‘You may not remember . . . but . . . you lent me a handkerchief that afternoon . . . when we first met, I mean.’

  ‘So I did.’ And Mr Taverner, a little to Wilfred’s surprise (surely it would have been more tactful to put the envelope at once and unopened into his pocket?) tore it open, flourished the contents about his long pointed nose, and shied the envelope unerringly into a nearby litter bin.

  ‘I . . . I expect you thought I’d made off with it,’ and Wilfred gave a nervous little laugh. ‘I . . . did mean to bring it back the next day, but . . . that day, you know, I was a bit upset about something . . . it all mounted up . . .’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d pinched it. I knew it would be back. Handkerchiefs and umbrellas – other people lose ’em. I never do.’

  ‘You’re lucky, then,’ said Wilfred. The wet scent of the mist, his companion’s indolent voice, and the very pose of his angular body along the seat, were all soothing. It’s a long time, he thought vaguely, since I felt soothed.

  ‘Yes, I’m lucky,’ Mr Taverner answered, turning his large, light-haunted eyes on Wilfred. ‘And so today you’re feeling better?’

  ‘Yes . . . my daughter wrote to me. Only a postcard, but . . .’ and then and there he began to tell.

  He told it all without thinking. At the back of his mind there was a slight feeling of surprise at thus pouring out to a stranger more freely than he could have done to his own father. But the feeling was not strong enough to restrain him. Though when, at the end of the recital, Mr Taverner only said: ‘Won’t you come home and have a cup of tea with us?’ Wilfred’s common sense took over.

  Was it natural to feel this intimacy? He recalled Pat’s earnest reading of certain Sunday papers. There were odd types about nowadays – loonies, psychopaths, schizophrenics. One didn’t, of course, condemn them. They were sick. But only a b.f. would go home to tea with one.

  Mr Taverner continued to look at him mildly, with the suggestion of a smile.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ Wilfred said. ‘I’d like to.’

  They set off through the thickening mist, walking in easy silence along several roads of elderly houses where grew plane trees whose annual leaf-dropping threatened the shopping ex-peditions of the retired people living there. The roads ended in mist tinted to coral by the setting sun.

  The footsteps of the few people who were about sounded without echo in the muffling dimness. It did not occur to Wilfred, among his barely formulated fears, that Mr Taverner might be a murderer. There are fashions in bogeys, as there used to be in hats, and murderers were not real; they belonged to thrillers and television.

  They turned a corner, and there was Hardy Crescent curving away before them; hushed, deserted, graceful, with its miniature pillars and bay windows veiled in mist. It ended in a rosy blankness, beyond which lay the railway cutting.

  ‘Empty, aren’t they?’ observed Wilfred, glancing up at boarded doors and down at broken stone steps.

  ‘Not all. Two or three are let out in bed-sitters.’

  Wilfred was going on to say something about the council deciding to bulldoze the place any day now, but did not. The houses were beautiful, and their beauty laid a restraining finger upon his lips. Instead, he said:

  ‘There’s a nice . . . I was noticing, earlier this afternoon . . . our house overlooks the railway and I can see the Crescent from our kitchen windows . . . someone’s painted one of them yellow – a really wonderful yellow . . . it is most unusual.’ Mr Taverner turned to him attentively. ‘Kind of a pale gold; got a lot of white in it. If I hadn’t almost decided to sell my house – as I was telling you – I’d do up my daughter’s room that colour – if I could buy it anywhere. I know she’d like it. We always have liked the same colours.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’ Mr Taverner laid a hand on a low gate of scrolled iron. ‘Here we are.’

  The mist had crept up on them while they chatted, so thickly that now it was not possible to see more than a few yards ahead, but Wilfred glanced up at the house behind the gate and exclaimed –

  ‘Why, this is the yellow house!’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I’m glad you like it.’

  Mr Taverner stood aside to let Wilfred pass along a little walk, paved with black and blue tiles, running between beds of yellow chrysanthemums drooping heavily in the motionless air and giving out that aromatic scent of which some people never tire.

  The front steps of number 7 were so white that they appeared to send out a glow into the dusk, and with a feeling of pleasure Wilfred recognized the humble yet stout presence of hearthstone, which he remembered his mother using on the doorstep of their cottage sixty years ago. He could see her tumbling knot of fair hair and the curve of her young back and the sweeping movement of her strong red arm.

  ‘You don’t often see steps hearthstoned, nowadays,’ he observed, as they stood in the portico.

  ‘Whizzo, Promesseing (with an e), and Sensuelle,’ said Mr Taverner, producing a latchkey. ‘But Miss Dollette and I like hearthstone.’

  ‘You’re lucky to get a woman to do it,’ said Wilfred, remembering various failures to secure such services (Pat never could ‘get on’ with daily women). Mr Taverner was making fun, of course, of the telly adverts with their fancy names.

  ‘Mind you, those electric things save a lot of work,’ Wilfred added, feeling a vague disloyalty to Pat, devout user of the time-saving household devices.

  ‘I-do-it-myself,’ Mr Taverner sang, as he fitted the key into the lock. ‘Work. Work. It keeps me off the streets and out of the pubs.’

  Wilfred was feeling a little uneasiness. This certainly was a queer kind of chap; seemed to make fun of everything, Odd way of talking, too.

  ‘And not early in the morning when everybody is asleep. About twelve, when they’re just about waking up. That’s when I do it.’ Mr Taverner swung open the front door.

  That’s nice, I like that, was Wilfred’s first thought at the sight of the octagonal hall, and the staircase curving sweetly upwards, and the ceiling with its medallions lustrous in that same glowing colour. But then astonishment banished every other feeling.

  ‘Why, it’s Kichijoten!’ he cried.

  He spoke the exotic syllables of the name without shyness, having sometimes repeated them over to himself in his times of what Pat had called mooning.

  Taller than a real woman, the figure smiled down at him in her pink draperies. In one long hand she held some rosy fruit.

  ‘How on earth did you get hold of her?’

  ‘Oh, I . . . spent a lot of time and took some trouble.’

  Mr Taverner lowered himself onto some six of the stairs and reposed there comfortably, watching his guest with a gentle half-smile while Wilfred continued to stare up into the placid smiling face of the goddess.

  She wore large pins of tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl in the black coils of her hair. The pose of her body was benevolent, inclining slightly towards the beholder. The only angularities about her were her hands, thin and delicate, cherishing
the apples that were only a little smaller than one of her white-stockinged feet.

  ‘Is it really the same one that used to be in the Japanese Room in Lorrimer House?’

  ‘I’m – not quite sure.’ Mr Taverner sounded drowsy. The hall was in deep twilight now, yet its walls seemed to give off enough light to see Kichijoten.

  In a moment, however, Wilfred began to feel that he was behaving like a half-wit, and turned towards his host; at which Mr Taverner came up off the stairs and stooped over a table. There came the scritch of a match being struck, and a wide blue flame slowly expanded in the middle of a brass lamp.

  ‘Haven’t you electricity?’ asked Wilfred. ‘No – I remember now, it was never put on again after the bombing, was it?’

  ‘We like oil here.’ Mr Taverner was settling the pearly shade onto the lamp.

  If you can see, of course . . . But Pat’s impatient voice in Wilfred’s head was silenced by the quality of the light beginning to waver up. Up, up soared the lamplight with an effect of gaiety and triumph. Someone ought to be dancing, he thought confusedly.

  Mr Taverner was opening a door. ‘Felicity? A friend: Mr Davis,’ he said, and stood aside to let Wilfred enter.

  Here it was: a kitchen. Wilfred thought at once: the kitchen.

  The old wooden floor was painted a pale, shining yellow, and a large old table was scrubbed to a warm white suggesting the bleaching work of the sea. It was half spread with a white cloth, on which stood brilliantly red and peacock-blue china, and a breadboard incised with a decoration of wheat sheaves, on which sat a flat, golden-brown loaf. The walls were painted a deeper yellow, and another pearly-shaded lamp filled the room with amber light. There was a built-in dresser having cupboards underneath, laden with more bright china of all colours and kinds and disposed with homely lack of arrangement.

  A woman was standing by the large range where the fire was in precisely the right state for making toast; that is, on the very point of declining from a long fierceness, as if its tide of heat were on the turn. She held the bread at the end of a long wire fork, and it was browning gently.

  For years, Wilfred’s picture of a woman had been bright-coloured and a little stout, with immaculately arranged hair. This was the outer picture. Behind it, overshadowed and softer, was another. The other had tendrils of hair that blew across her eyes, and her clothes were softly tinted and rather shapeless. She had no voice to set against the loud, kind, sensible voice of the other picture. Only God, and the subconscious memories of a silent, rather observant little boy, knew where and when this second picture had been born. She was not his mother.

  Miss Dollette wore a soft greenish dress and her hair was pale wheat colour, streaked with a silvery grey. The tendrils strayed about her small face and large eyes. She was a small woman, shorter than his five foot six.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, smiling up from the range. ‘Do you like dripping toast?’

  ‘I won’t say no,’ Wilfred said, smiling too.

  He would have liked to sit down. The change from the bitingly cold air in the streets and the momentary forgetfulness of his anxiety and grief were making him feel drowsy. The light of these lamps: that had something to do with his state. It was so steady and splendid – but it was tiring, too.

  ‘No, I won’t say no. Thank you,’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s right – say “no” as little as possible,’ exclaimed Mr Taverner, pulling chairs up to the table. ‘Try saying “yes” a hundred times before breakfast – “yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.” Makes you feel like a snake.’

  Hissing was the kind of joke that Wilfred enjoyed with Mary (if anything so silly could be called a joke) and which Pat had always heard with an impatient smile.

  ‘Then I’ll say “yes”, Yes and thank you . . . Just the right afternoon for dripping toast, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s always the right afternoon for dripping toast,’ said Mr Taverner. ‘Mind you, I admit that on August the Eighth – (sounds stifling, doesn’t it?) – one might falter before a plateful. But on every other afternoon – yes.’

  This was the point at which Pat would have begun to look irritated. Miss Dollette neither spoke nor looked anything. She added a sixth slice of toast soaked in dripping to the pile on the plate standing at the cool end of the range.

  ‘Assam tea, we’re having. Oh-what-an-ass-I-am tea,’ Mr Taverner ran on. ‘Sit down, sit down, Mr Davis,’ and he waved at three stout old wooden chairs. Wilfred settled himself thankfully between the hard, comforting old arms, and felt the support of the curved back, and observed: ‘Now this is what I call a chair, this is . . . feel you really are sitting down in this.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it. I made it.’

  Wilfred was about to exclaim in admiration, when Miss Dollette turned her head just a little in Mr Taverner’s direction.

  ‘Well . . . that is . . . I took some trouble and spent some time,’ Mr Taverner said quickly.

  ‘I see. Like you did over the statue of Kichijoten.’

  ‘Oh, that was more dif–– Do help yourself. The salt’s in front of you.’

  Wilfred took a slice, soggy with rich gravy-impregnated fat, and put it on his plate. He took the linen napkin from under the plate and wiped his fingers.

  ‘Eat it up,’ Mr Taverner urged. ‘Devour and consume and absorb it while its savoury vapours exhale and fume upwards.’ The toast drooped and dripped from his long fingers. ‘Because when it’s even the least bit cold, it’s hellish – I mean in the sense of Shakespeare’s “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice”.’ He bit into the toast and mopped unashamedly at the dripping running down his chin. ‘I say,’ he went on, with his mouth full, ‘we’re like the Three Little Ghostesses –’

  ‘“Sitting on posstesses,”’ Miss Dollette went on for him, looking dreamily out of the window into the mist.

  ‘“Eating buttered toastesses,”’ Wilfred capped eagerly. ‘Only it ought to be “dripping toastesses”. My father used to say that to me – goodness only knows where he got it from, for he – isn’t a reading man.’ (Wilfred recalled copies of two papers called respectively Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday and The Police Gazette lying about the cottage sixty years ago. The cover of the latter often showed a murdered girl – lying across a kitchen table with hair streaming down to the floor. Usually showed her knickers, too. Well I s’pose Z Cars is better than that, he mused. Of course, in those days, knickers . . .

  ‘“See how the gracetises

  Roll down their facetises –

  Dirty little basteses!”’ Mr Taverner capped. ‘Irish ghosts, wouldn’t you think? I’ve always imagined those postesses in the middle of an Irish bog.’

  ‘I never went into it,’ Wilfred answered, suddenly prim and self-conscious.

  ‘And a good thing too – very prudent!’ Mr Taverner’s laughter was a musical shout, and Miss Dollette’s chiming with it, a bubbling gush, seemed to escape of its own will. Wilfred laughed too, enjoying the silliness as he used with Mary.

  Miss Dollette handed him a cup of red tea, and he sipped.

  ‘“Swoon to the timeless taste of Tiddlers Twoshy Tips”,’ said Mr Taverner. ‘Actually, it’s quite good.’

  ‘I always did think there’s a lot of rubbish talked on those TV adverts.’ Wilfred said this aloud for the first time in his life. Pat had studied the commercials as a Shakesperian critic might scrutinize a manuscript for clues.

  ‘And now, about selling your house,’ said Mr Taverner, setting down his cup.

  Wilfred was instantly alarmed. He too put down his cup, fixing his gaze on Mr Taverner’s face, and did not immediately answer.

  ‘You see, it’s Mary,’ he said at last. ‘I must have a home for her to come home to, when she does come. She’s only seventeen – well, seventeen next month. And besides, there’s Mrs Wheeby, the old lady I was telling you about. What would I do with her? She – she relies on me. She said so. Or as good as.’ He broke off. Mr Taverner continued to munch and keep his
eyes on Wilfred’s face. ‘It would be a big upheaval, you see,’ Wilfred continued. ‘We’ve been there nearly twenty years – bought it just after the war. It went for a song – being on the east coast, you see. People hadn’t started to come back. But I got out of the Army early (first in, first out), and if you were on the spot you were lucky . . . But there’s all the trouble of selling it . . . moving . . . finding somewhere else . . . The fact is, I don’t feel I can face it. And I must keep a home for Mary.’

  In the silence following his speech, a cat came wandering in and rubbed itself against his legs, and he put down a hand and absently caressed it. Miss Dollette murmured: ‘Antony, aren’t you a nuisance?’ and the cat went across to her and rolled over on the floor at her feet, looking lovingly up at her. It was shining black, with brilliant eyes.

  Wilfred was hearing voices: sensible voices, warning him that Mary might take up with some young layabout, down in the City of Dreadful Night; that something terrible might happen to her there; that she might never come home again.

  ‘I’ll have to think about it, you see,’ he said at last. ‘It isn’t a thing you can make up your mind about in five minutes, selling a house.’

  A door slammed somewhere, and Miss Dollette sat upright, while her face seemed to come alight with a gentle glow of pleasure. ‘There’s Katherine,’ she said.

  ‘It isn’t a crime, of course, never to shut a door quietly,’ Mr Taverner said, as if to himself, and Miss Dollette laughed.

  The kitchen door opened, and in swirled a scarlet cloak. Inside it was a tall woman. Her lipstick and headscarf matched its glow, and her mouth was large and smiling.

  ‘Hullo, dears,’ she said in a loud, rich voice. ‘Hullo,’ with a friendly nod to Wilfred.

  ‘Mr Davis – Mrs Cornforth,’ said Mr Taverner, and Wilfred felt as if the temperature of the room had gone up.

  ‘We’ve eaten all the dripping toast,’ announced Mr Taverner, ‘and if you want any, Katherine, you must make it yourself.’