The Collected Stories

  Sergeant Wall attempted to quieten the girl, but her fingernails scratched at his face and her fingers gripped and tore at the beard of Mr Beade, who had come to Sergeant Wall’s aid. Dympna did not move from her chair. She was looking at Mrs Digby-Hunter, smoking quietly, as though nothing at all was happening.

  ‘It’ll be in the newspapers,’ shouted Barbara.

  She was taken from the kitchen, and the Digby-Hunters could hear her sobbing in the passage and on the back stairs. ‘She’ll sell the story,’ said Dympna.

  Digby-Hunter looked at her. He attempted to smile at her, to suggest by his smile that he had a fondness for her. ‘What story?’ he said.

  ‘The way the boys are beaten up.’

  ‘Now look here, Dympna, you know nothing whatsoever about it. The boys at Milton Grange are here for a special purpose. They undergo special education –’

  ‘You killed one, Mr Digby-Hunter.’ Still puffing at her cigarette, Dympna left the kitchen, and Mrs Digby-Hunter spoke.

  ‘My God,’ she said.

  ‘They’re upset by death,’ said her husband tetchily. ‘Naturally enough. They’ll both calm down.’

  But Mr Beade, hearing those remarks as he returned to the kitchen, said that it was the end of Milton Grange. The girls would definitely pass on their falsehoods to a newspaper. They were telling Sergeant Wall now, he said. They were reminding him of lies they had apparently told him before, and of which he had taken no notice.

  ‘What in the name of heaven,’ Digby-Hunter angrily asked his wife, ‘did you have to go engaging creatures like that for?’

  They hated her, she thought: two girls who day by day had worked beside her in the kitchen, to whom she had taught useful skills. A boy had come and stood beside her in the sunshine and she had offered him a chocolate. He had complained of a pain, and she had pointed out that he must make his complaint to the headmaster, since that was the rule. She had explained as well that corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange. The boy was dead. The girls who hated her would drag her husband’s boarding-school through the mud.

  She heard the voice of Sergeant Wall saying that the girls, one of them hysterical but calming down, the other insolent, were out to make trouble. He’d tried to reason with them, but they hadn’t even listened.

  The girls had been in Milton Grange for two and a half months. She remembered the day they had arrived together, carrying cardboard suitcases. They’d come before that to be interviewed, and she’d walked them round the house, explaining about the school. She remembered saying in passing that once a year, at the end of every July, a Conservative fete was held, traditionally now, in the gardens. They hadn’t seemed much interested.

  ‘I’ve built this place up,’ she heard her husband say. ‘Month by month, year by year. It was a chicken farm when I bought it, Beade, and now I suppose it’ll be a chicken farm again.’

  She left the kitchen and walked along the kitchen passage and up the uncarpeted back stairs. She knocked on the door of their room. They called out together, saying she should come in. They were both packing their belongings into their cardboard suitcases, smoking fresh cigarettes. Barbara appeared to have recovered.

  She tried to explain to them. No one knew yet, she said, why Wraggett had died. He’d had a heart attack most probably, like Mr Beade said. It was a terrible thing to have happened.

  The girls continued to pack, not listening to her. They folded garments or pressed them, unfolded, into their suitcases.

  ‘My husband’s built the place up. Month by month, year by year, for seventeen years he has built it up.’

  ‘The boys are waiting for their tea,’ said Dympna. ‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, you’d better prick the sausages.’

  ‘Forget our wages,’ said Barbara, and laughed in a way that was not hysterical.

  ‘My husband –’

  ‘Your husband,’ said Dympna, ‘derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children. So does Beade. They are queer men.’

  ‘Your husband,’ said Barbara, ‘will be jailed. He’ll go to prison with a sack over his head so that he won’t have to see the disgust on people’s faces. Isn’t that true, Mrs Digby-Hunter?’

  ‘My husband –’

  ‘Filth,’ said Dympna.

  She sat down on the edge of a bed and watched the two girls packing. She imagined the dead body in the bedroom that was never used, and then she imagined Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade and her husband in the kitchen, waiting for the school doctor to arrive, knowing that it didn’t much matter what cause he offered for the death if these two girls were allowed to have their way.

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked, quite calmly.

  Neither replied. They went on packing and while they packed she talked, in desperation. She tried to speak the truth about Milton Grange, as she saw the truth, but they kept interrupting her. The bruises didn’t show on the boys because the bruises were inflicted in an expert way, but sometimes hair was actually pulled out of the boys’ scalps, small bunches of hair, she must have noticed that. She had noticed no such thing. ‘Corporal punishment,’ she began to say, but Barbara held out hairs that had been wrenched from the head of a boy called Bridle. She had found them in a wastepaper basket; Bridle had said they were his and had shown her the place they’d come from. She returned the hairs to a plastic bag that once had contained stockings. The hairs would be photographed, Barbara said; they would appear on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. They’d be side by side with the ex-headmaster, his head hidden beneath a sack, and Mr Beade skulking behind his beard. Milton Grange, turreted baronial, part ivy-clad, would be examined by Sunday readers as a torture chamber. And in the garden, beneath the beech trees, a man would photograph the deck-chair where a woman had slept while violence and death occurred. She and her husband might one day appear in a waxworks, and Mr Beade, too; a man who, like her husband, derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children.

  ‘You are doing this for profit,’ she protested, trying to smile, to win them from the error of their ways.

  ‘Yes,’ they said together, and then confessed, sharing the conversation, that they had often considered telephoning a Sunday newspaper to say they had a story to tell. They had kept the hairs in the plastic bag because they’d had that in mind; in every detail they knew what they were going to say.

  ‘You’re making money out of –’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dympna. ‘You’ve kept us short, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

  She saw their hatred of her in their faces and heard it in both their voices; like a vapour, it hung about the room.

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked again.

  They laughed, not answering, as though an answer wasn’t necessary.

  She remembered, although just now she didn’t wish to, the clergyman who had kissed her with passion after a dance in a church hall, the dampness of his lips, his body pressed into hers. The smell of his clothes came back to her, across thirty years, seeming familiar because it had come before. She might have borne his children in some rectory somewhere. Would they have hated her then?

  Underclothes, dresses, lipsticks, Woolworth’s jewellery, unframed photo graphs of male singing stars were jumbled together in the two cardboard suitcases. The girls moved about the room, picking up their belongings, while Mrs Digby-Hunter, in greater misery than she had ever before experienced, watched them from the edge of the bed. How could human creatures be so cruel? How could they speak to her about being a figure in a waxworks tableau when she had done nothing at all? How could they so callously propose to tell lies to a newspaper about her husband and Mr Beade when the boy who had so tragically died was still warm with the memory of life?

  She watched them, two girls so young that they were not yet fully developed. They had talked about her. In this room, night after night, they had wondered about her, and in the end had hated her. Had they said in their nightly gossiping that since the day of her marriage she had lived like a statue with another stat
ue?

  It was all her fault, she suddenly thought: Milton Grange would be a chicken farm again, her husband would be examined by a psychiatrist in a prison, she would live in a single room. It was all her fault. In twenty-nine years it had taken violence and death to make sense of facts that were as terrible.

  The girls were saying they’d catch a bus on the main road. Without looking at her or addressing her again they left the bedroom they had shared. She heard their footsteps on the back stairs, and Dympna’s voice asking Barbara if she was all right now and Barbara saying she was. A white slug, the girl had called her, a fat white slug.

  She did not leave the room. She remained sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to think. Her husband’s face appeared in her mind, with its well-kept moustache and shrewd-seeming dark eyes, a face in the bedroom of a Welsh hotel on the night of her wedding-day. She saw herself weeping, as she had not wept then. In a confused way she saw herself on that occasion and on others, protesting, shaking her head, not smiling.

  ‘I’m leaving the army for a step-ladder firm,’ he said to her, and she struck his face with her hands, tormented by the absurdity of what he said. She cried out in anger that she had married an army officer, not a step-ladder salesman who was after her father’s money. She wept again when ridiculously he told her that he intended to spend his days filling machines full of powdered coffee. He had failed her, she shrilled at him, that night in the Welsh hotel and he had failed her ever since. In front of boys, she accused him of ill-treating those who had been placed in his care. If ever it happened again, she threatened, the police would be sent for. She turned to the boys and ordered them to run about the gardens for a while. It was ludicrous that they should be cooped up while the sun shone, it was ludicrous that they should strive so painfully simply to pass an examination into some school or other. She banged a desk with her hand after the boys had gone, she spat out words at him: they’d all be in the Sunday papers, she said, if he wasn’t careful, and she added that she herself would leave Milton Grange for ever unless he pursued a gentler course with the boys who were sent to him, unless he at once dismissed the ill-mannered Mr Beade, who was clearly a sinister man.

  In the room that had been the maids’ room Mrs Digby-Hunter wept as her mind went back through the years of her marriage and then, still weeping, she left the room and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. To her husband she said that it was all her fault; she said she was Sorry. She had knitted and put down bulbs, she said, and in the end a boy had died. Two girls had hated her because in her easy-going way she had held her peace, not wanting to know. Loyalty and devotion, said Mrs Digby-Hunter, and now a boy was dead, and her husband with a sack over his head would be taken from Milton Grange and later would have sessions with a prison psychiatrist. It was all her fault. She would say so to the reporters when they came. She would explain and take the blame, she would come up to scratch as a wife.

  Her husband and Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade looked at Mrs Digby-Hunter. She stood in the centre of the kitchen, one hand on the table, a stout woman in a blue-and-pink dress, weeping. The tragedy had temporarily unhinged her, Sergeant Wall thought, and Mr Beade in irritation thought that if she could see herself she’d go somewhere else, and her husband thought that it was typical of her to be tiresomely stupid at a time like this.

  She went on talking: you couldn’t blame them for hating her, she said, for she might have prevented death and hadn’t bothered herself. In a bedroom in Wales she should have wept, she said, or packed a suitcase and gone away. Her voice continued in the kitchen, the words pouring from it, repetitiously and in a hurry. The three men sighed and looked away, all of them thinking the same thing now, that she made no sense at all, with her talk about putting down bulbs and coming up to scratch.

  Raymond Bamber and Mrs Fitch

  For fifteen years, ever since he was twenty-seven, Raymond Bamber had attended the Tamberleys’ autumn cocktail party. It was a function to which the Tamberleys inclined to invite their acquaintances rather than their friends, so that every year the faces changed a bit: no one except Raymond had been going along to the house in Eaton Square for as long as fifteen years. Raymond, the Tamberleys felt, was a special case, for they had known him since he was a boy, having been close friends of his father’s.

  Raymond was a tall man, six foot two inches, with spectacles and a small moustache. He was neat in all he did, and he lived what he himself referred to as a tidy life.

  ‘I come here every year,’ said Raymond at the Tamberleys’, to a woman he had not met before, a woman who was tall too, with a white lean face and lips that were noticeably scarlet. ‘It is an occasion for me. almost, like Christmas or Easter. To some extent, I guide my life by the Tamberleys’ autumn party, remembering on each occasion what has happened in the year gone by.’

  ‘My name is Mrs Fitch,’ said the woman, poking a hand out for a drink. ‘Is that vermouth and gin?’ she inquired of the Tamberleys’ Maltese maid, and the maid agreed that it was. ‘Good,’ said Mrs Fitch.

  ‘Raymond, Raymond,’ cried the voice of Mrs Tamberley as Mrs Tamberley materialized suddenly beside them. ‘How’s Nanny Wilkinson?’

  ‘She died,’ murmured Raymond.

  ‘Of course she did,’ exclaimed Mrs Tamberley. ‘How silly of me!’

  ‘Oh no –’

  ‘You put that sweet notice in The Times. His old nurse,’ explained Mrs Tamberley to Mrs Fitch. ‘Poor Nanny Wilkinson,’ she said, and smiled and bustled off.

  ‘What was all that?’ asked Mrs Fitch.

  ‘It’s one of the things that happened to me during the year. The other was –’

  ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ the woman interrupted. ‘I don’t think I ever caught it.’

  Raymond told her his name. He saw that she was wearing a black dress with touches of white on it. Her shoulders were bare and bony; she had, Raymond said to himself, an aquiline face.

  ‘The other thing was that an uncle died and left me a business in his will. That happened, actually, before the death of Nanny Wilkinson and to tell you the truth, Mrs Fitch, I just didn’t know what to do. “What could I do with a business?” I said to myself. So I made my way to Streatham where the old lady lived. “Run a business, Raymond? You couldn’t run a bath,” she said.’ Raymond laughed, and Mrs Fitch smiled frostily, looking about her for another drink. ‘It rankled, that, as you may imagine. Why couldn’t I run a business? I thought. And then, less than a week later, I heard that she had died in Streatham. I went to her funeral, and discovered that she’d left me a prayer-book in her will. All that happened in the last year. You see, Mrs Fitch?’

  Mrs Fitch, her eyes on her husband, who was talking to a woman in yellow in a distant corner of the room, said vaguely:

  ‘What about the business?’

  ‘I sold the business. I live alone, Mrs Fitch, in a flat in Bayswater; I’m forty-two. I’m telling you that simply because I felt that I could never manage anything like taking on a business so suddenly. That’s what I thought when I had considered the matter carefully. No good being emotional, I said to myself.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch. She watched the woman move quite close to her husband and engage him in speech that had all the air of confidential talk. The woman wasn’t young, Mrs Fitch noticed, but had succeeded in giving the impression of youth. She was probably forty-four, she reckoned; she looked thirty.

  So Mrs Tamberley had seen the notice in The Times, Raymond thought. He had worded it simply and had stated in a straightforward manner the service that Nanny Wilkinson had given over the years to his family. He had felt it her due, a notice in The Times, and there was of course only he who might do it. He remembered her sitting regally in his nursery teaching him his tidiness. Orderliness was the most important thing in life, she said, after a belief in the Almighty.

  ‘Get me a drink, dear,’ said Mrs Fitch suddenly, holding out an empty glass and causing Raymond to note that this woman was consuming the Tamberleys’ liqu
or at a faster rate than he.

  ‘Gin and vermouth,’ ordered Mrs Fitch. ‘Dry,’ she added. ‘Not that red stuff.’

  Raymond smiled and took her glass, while Mrs Fitch observed that her husband was listening with rapt care to what the woman in yellow was saying to him. In the taxi-cab on the way to the Tamberleys’, he had remarked as usual that he was fatigued after his day’s work. ‘An early night,’ he had suggested. And now he was listening carefully to a female: he wouldn’t leave this party for another two hours at least.

  ‘It was quite a blow to me,’ said Raymond, handing Mrs Fitch a glass of gin and vermouth, ‘hearing that she was dead. Having known her, you see, all my life –’

  ‘Who’s dead now?’ asked Mrs Fitch, still watching her husband.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Raymond. ‘How silly of me! No, I meant, you see, this old lady whom I had known as Nanny Wilkinson. I was saying it was a blow to me when she died, although of course I didn’t see much of her these last few years. But the memories are there, if you see what I mean; and you cannot of course erase them.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch.

  ‘I was a particularly tall child, with my spectacles of course, and a longish upper lip. “When you’re a big man,” I remember her saying to me, “you’ll have to grow a little moustache to cover up all that lip.” And declare, Mrs Fitch, I did.’

  ‘I never had a nanny,’ said Mrs Fitch.

  ‘ “He’ll be a tennis-player,” people used to say – because of my height, you see. But in fact I turned out to be not much good on a tennis court.’

  Mrs Fitch nodded. Raymond began to say something else, but Mrs Fitch, her eyes still fixed upon her husband, interrupted him. She said:

  ‘Interesting about your uncle’s business.’

  ‘I think I was right. I’ve thought of it often since, of sitting down in an office and ordering people to do this and that, instead of remaining quietly in my flat in Bayswater. I do all my own cooking, actually, and cleaning and washing up. Well, you can’t get people, you know. I couldn’t even get a simple char, Mrs Fitch, not for love nor money. Of course it’s easy having no coal fires to cope with: the flat is all-electric, which is what, really, I prefer.’