The Collected Stories

  ‘We came to say goodbye, Mrs Ashburton.’

  She told us to wait. She had a saucer of chocolate for us, she said, and we heard her rooting about on the table beside her. We heard the glass being removed from a lamp and then she struck a match. She lit the wick and put the glass back. In the glow of lamplight she looked exhausted. Her eyes seemed to have receded, the thinness of her face was almost sinister.

  We ate our chocolate in the kitchen that smelt of oil, and Mrs Ashburton didn’t speak. We said goodbye again, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even nod or shake her head. She didn’t kiss me like she usually did, so I went and kissed her instead. The skin of her face felt like crinkled paper.

  ‘I’ve had a very happy day,’ she said when Belle Frye and I had reached the kitchen door. ‘I’ve had a lovely day,’ she said, not seeming to be talking to us but to herself. She was crying, and she smiled in the lamplight, looking straight ahead of her. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘Yet again.’

  We didn’t know what she was talking about and presumed she meant the tennis party. ‘Yet again,’ Belle Frye repeated as we crossed the stable-yard. She spoke in a soppy voice because she was given to soppiness. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ she said, beginning to cry herself, or pretending to. ‘Imagine being eighty-one,’ she said. ‘Imagine sitting in a kitchen and remembering all the other tennis parties, knowing you’d have to die soon. Race you,’ Belle Frye said, forgetting to be soppy any more.

  Going home, Joe and Arthur sat in the back of the truck with Dick and Betty. Colin Gregg had ridden off on his bicycle, and Mr Bowe had driven away with Mrs Tissard beside him and Mr Tissard and Miss Sweet in the dickey of his Morris Cowley. My mother, my father and myself were all squashed into the front of the truck, and there was so little room that my father couldn’t change gear and had to drive all the way to the farm in first. In the back of the truck Joe and Arthur and Dick were singing, but Betty wasn’t, and I could imagine Betty just sitting there, staring, thinking about Colin Gregg. In Betty’s bedroom there were photographs of Clark Gable and Ronald Colman, and Claudette Colbert and the little Princesses. Betty was going to marry Colin, I kept saying to myself in the truck. There’d be other tennis parties and Betty would be older and would know her own mind, and Colin Gregg would ask her and she’d say yes. It was very beautiful, I thought, as the truck shuddered over the uneven back avenue of Challacombe Manor. It was as beautiful as the tennis party itself, the white dresses and Betty’s long hair, and everyone sitting and watching in the sunshine, and evening slowly descending. ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ my father said, and he didn’t seem to be talking about the tennis party because his voice was too serious for that. He repeated a conversation he’d had with Mr Bowe and one he’d had with Mr Race, but I didn’t listen because his voice was so lugubrious, not at all like it had been at the tennis party. I was huddled on my mother’s knees, falling asleep. I imagined my father was talking about Lloyd’s Bank again, and I could hear my mother agreeing with him.

  I woke up when my mother was taking off my dress in my bedroom.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Is it because the tennis party’s over? Why’s everyone so sad?’

  My mother shook her head, but I kept asking her because she was looking sorrowful herself and I wasn’t sleepy any more. In the end she sat on the edge of my bed and said that people thought there was going to be another war against the Germans.

  ‘Germans?’ I said, thinking of the grey, steely people that Mrs Ashburton had so, often told me about, the people who ate black bread.

  It would be all right, my mother said, trying to smile. She told me that we’d have to make special curtains for the windows so that the German aeroplanes wouldn’t see the lights at night. She told me there’d probably be sugar rationing.

  I lay there listening to her, knowing now why Mrs Ashburton had said that yet again it was all over, and knowing what would happen next. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help thinking about it: my father would go away, and Dick would go also, and Joe and Arthur and Betty’s Colin Gregg. I would continue to attend Miss Pritchard’s School and then I’d go on to the Grammar, and my father would be killed. A soldier would rush at my father with a bayonet and twist the bayonet in my father’s stomach, and Dick would do the same to another soldier, and Joe and Arthur would be missing in the trenches, and Colin Gregg would be shot.

  My mother kissed me and told me to say my prayers before I went to sleep. She told me to pray for the peace to continue, as she intended to do herself. There was just a chance, she said, that it might.

  She went away and I lay awake, beginning to hate the Germans and not feeling ashamed of it, like Mrs Ashburton was. No German would ever have played tennis that day, I thought; no German would have stood around having tea and sandwiches and meringues, smacking away the midges when night came. No German would ever have tried to recapture the past, or would have helped an old woman to do so, like my mother and my father had done, and Mr Race and Mr Bowe and Mr Throataway and Mrs Garland, and Betty and Dick and Colin Gregg. The Germans weren’t like that. The Germans wouldn’t see the joke when my father said that for all he knew Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton.

  I didn’t pray for the peace to continue, but prayed instead that my father and Dick might come back when the war was over. I didn’t pray that Joe and Arthur and Colin Gregg should come back since that would be asking too much, because some men had to be killed, according to Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages. I hadn’t understood her when Mrs Ashburton had said that cruelty was natural in wartime, but I understood now. I understood her law of averages and her sitting alone in her dark kitchen, crying over the past. I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.

  2. The Summer-house

  My father came back twice to the farm, unexpectedly, without warning. He walked into the kitchen, the first time one Thursday morning when there was nobody there, the second time on a Thursday afternoon.

  My mother told us how on the first occasion she’d been crossing the yard with four eggs, all that the hens had laid, and how she’d sensed that something was different. The sheepdogs weren’t in the yard, where they usually were at this time. Vaguely she’d thought that that was unusual. Hours later, when Betty and Dick and I came in from school, our parents were sitting at the kitchen table, talking. He was still in his army uniform. The big brown teapot was on the table, and two cups with the dregs of tea in them, and bread on the bread-board, and butter and blackberry jam. There was a plate he’d eaten a fry from, with the marks of egg-yolk on it. Even now it seems like yesterday. He smiled a slow, teasing smile at us, as though mocking the emotion we felt at seeing him there, making a joke even of that. Then Betty ran over to him and hugged him. I hugged him too. Dick stood awkwardly.

  The second time he returned he walked into the kitchen at half past four, just after I’d come in from school. I was alone, having my tea.

  ‘Hullo, Matilda,’ he said.

  I was nearly eleven then. Betty was sixteen and Dick was seventeen. Dick wasn’t there that second time: he’d gone into the army himself. Betty had left the Grammar School and was helping my mother to keep the farm going. I was still at Miss Pritchard’s.

  I was going to be pretty, people used to say, although I couldn’t see it myself. My hair had a reddish tinge, like my mother’s, but it was straight and uninteresting. I had freckles, which I hated, and my eyes were a shade of blue I didn’t much care for either. I detested being called Matilda. Betty and Dick, I considered, were much nicer names, and Betty was beautiful now. My friend Belle Frye was getting to be beautiful also. She claimed to have Spanish blood in her, though it was never clear where it came from. Her hair was jet-black and her skin, even in the middle of winter, was almost as deeply brown as her eyes. I’d have loved to look like her and to be called Belle Frye, which I thought was a marvellous name.

  I made my father tea that Thursday aft
ernoon and I felt a bit shy because I hadn’t seen him for so long. He didn’t comment on my making the tea, although he might have said that I hadn’t been able to before. Instead he said he hadn’t had a decent cup of tea since he’d been home the last time. ‘It’s great to be home, Matilda,’ he said.

  A few weeks later my mother told me he was dead. She told me at that same time of day and on a Thursday also: a warm June afternoon that had been tiring to trudge home from school through.

  ‘Belle Frye has to stay in for two hours,’ I was saying as I came into the kitchen. My mother told me to sit down.

  The repetition was extraordinary, the three Thursday afternoons. That night in bed I was aware of it, lying awake thinking about him, wondering if he’d actually been killed on a Thursday also.

  All the days of the week had a special thing about them: they had different characters and even different colours. Monday was light brown, Tuesday black, Wednesday grey, Thursday orange, Friday yellow, Saturday purplish, Sunday white. Tuesday was a day I liked because we had double History, Friday was cosy, Saturday I liked best of all. Thursday would be special now: I thought that, marking the day with my grief, unable to cry any more. And then I remembered that it had been a Thursday afternoon when old Mrs Ashburton had invited everyone for miles round to her tennis party, when I had realized for the first time that there was going to be a war against the Germans: Thursday, 31 August 1939.

  I would have liked there to be a funeral, and I kept thinking about one. I never mentioned it to my mother or to Betty, or asked them if my father had had a funeral in France. I knew he hadn’t. I’d heard him saying they just had to leave you there. My mother would cry if I said anything about it.

  Then Dick came back, the first time home since he’d joined the army. He’d been informed too, and time had passed, several months, so that we were all used to it by now. It was even quite like the two occasions when my father had returned, Dick telling stories about the army. We sat in the kitchen listening to him, huddled round the range, with the sheepdogs under the table, and when the time came for him to go away I felt as I’d felt when my father had gone back. I knew that Betty and my mother were thinking about Dick in that way, too: I could feel it, standing in the yard holding my mother’s hand.

  Colin Gregg, who’d kissed Betty at Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party, came to the farm when he was home on leave. Joe and Arthur, who’d worked for my father on the farm, came also. At one time or another they all said they were sorry about my father’s death, trying not to say it when I was listening, lowering their voices, speaking to my mother.

  Two years went by like that. Dick still came back, and Colin Gregg and Joe and Arthur. I left Miss Pritchard’s school and went to the Grammar School. I heard Betty confiding to my mother that she was in love with Colin Gregg, and you could see it was Colin Gregg being in the war that she thought about now, not Dick. Belle Frye’s father had had his left arm amputated because of a wound, and had to stay at home after that. A boy who’d been at the Grammar School, Roger Laze, had an accident with a gun when he was shooting rabbits, losing half his left foot. People said it was a lie about the rabbit-shooting. They said his mother had shot his foot off so that he wouldn’t have to go into the army.

  At church on Sundays the Reverend Throataway used to pray for victory and peace, and at school there was talk about the Russians, and jokes about Hitler and Göring and most of all about Goebbels. I remembered how old Mrs Ashburton used to talk about the previous war, from which her husband had come back with some kind of shell-shock. She’d made me think of Germans as being grey and steely, and I hated them now, just as she had. Whenever I thought about them I could see their helmets, different from the helmets of English soldiers, protecting their necks as well as their heads. Whenever I thought of the time before the war I thought of Mrs Ashburton, who had died soon after she’d given her tennis party. On the way home from school I’d sometimes go into the garden of Challacombe Manor and stand there looking at the tall grass on the tennis court, remembering all the people who’d come that afternoon, and how they’d said it was just like my father to say the tennis party was a lot of nonsense and then to bring on beer and cider at the end of the day. The tennis party had been all mixed up with our family. It felt like the last thing that had happened before the war had begun. It was the end of our being as we had been in our farmhouse, just as in the past, after the previous war, there must have been another end: when the farm had ceased to be the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, when the estate had been divided up after Mrs Ashburton’s husband hadn’t been able to run it any more.

  When I wandered about the overgrown garden of Challacombe Manor I wondered what Mr Ashburton had been like before the war had affected him, but I couldn’t quite see him in my mind’s eye: all I could see was the person Mrs Ashburton had told me about, the silent man who’d come back, who hadn’t noticed that everything was falling into rack and ruin around him. And then that image would disappear and I’d see my father instead, as he’d been in the farmhouse. I remembered without an effort the brown skin of his arms and his brown, wide forehead and the way crinkles formed at the sides of his eyes. I remembered his hands on the kitchen table at mealtimes, or holding a newspaper. I remembered his voice saying there’d been frost. ‘Jack Frost’s been,’ he used to say.

  When I was twelve I began to pray a lot. I prayed that my father should be safe in heaven and not worried about us. I prayed that Dick should be safe in the war, and that the war would soon end. In Scripture lessons the Reverend Throataway used to explain to us that God was in the weeds and the insects, not just in butterflies and flowers. God was involved in the worst things we did as well as our virtues, he said, and we drove another thorn into His beloved son’s head when we were wicked. I found that difficult to understand. I looked at weeds and insects, endeavouring to imagine God’s presence in them but not succeeding. I asked Belle Frye if she could, but she giggled and said God was a carpenter called Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ. Belle Frye was silly and the Reverend Throataway so vague and complicated that his arguments about the nature of God seemed to me like foolish chatter. God was neither a carpenter nor a presence in weeds and insects. God was a figure in robes, with a beard and shreds of cloud around Him. The paradise that was mentioned in the Bible was a garden with tropical plants in it, through which people walked, Noah and Moses and Jesus Christ and old Mrs Ashburton. I could never help thinking that soon the Reverend Throataway would be there too: he was so old and frail, with chalk on the black material of his clothes, sometimes not properly shaved, as if he hadn’t the energy for it. I found it was a consolation to imagine the paradise he told us about, with my own God in it, and to imagine Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, with flames all around them, in hell. The more I thought about it all and prayed, the closer I felt to my father. I didn’t cry when I thought about him any more, and my mother’s face wasn’t all pulled down any more. His death was just a fact now, but I didn’t ever want not to feel close to him. It was as if being close to him was being close to God also, and I wanted that so that God could answer my prayer about keeping Dick safe in the war. I remembered how Mrs Ashburton had worked it out that by the law of averages some men have to come back from a war, and I suggested to the robed figure in charge of the tropical paradise that in all fairness our family did not deserve another tragedy. With my eyes tightly closed, in bed at night or suddenly stopping on the journey to school, I repetitiously prayed that Dick would be alive to come back when the war was over. That was all I asked for in the end because I could feel that my father was safe in the eternal life that the Reverend Throataway spoke of, and I didn’t ask any more that the war should be over soon in case I was asking too much. I never told anyone about my prayers and I was never caught standing still with my eyes closed on the way to school. My father used to smile at me when I did that and I could faintly hear his voice teasing Dick about his smoking or teasing my mother about the Aga cooker she wanted, or Betty ab
out almost anything. I felt it was all right when he smiled like that and his voice came back. I felt he was explaining to me that God had agreed to look after us now, provided I prayed properly and often and did not for a single instant doubt that God existed and was in charge. Mrs Ashburton had been doubtful about that last point and had told me so a few times, quite frightening me. But Mrs Ashburton would be in possession of the truth now, and would be forgiven.

  My thoughts and my prayers seemed like a kind of world to me, a world full of God, with my father and Mrs Ashburton in their eternal lives, and the happiness that was waiting for the Reverend Throataway in his. It was a world that gradually became as important as the reality around me. It affected everything. It made me different. Belle Frye was still my friend, but I didn’t like her the way I once had.

  One wet afternoon she and I clambered into Challacombe Manor through a window that someone had smashed. We hadn’t been there since the night of the tennis party, when we’d found Mrs Ashburton crying and she’d given us pieces of chocolate. We’d run out into the night, whispering excitedly about an old woman crying just because a party was over. I wouldn’t have believed it then if someone had said I’d ever think Belle Frye silly.

  ‘Whoever’s going to live here?’ she whispered in the dank hall after we’d climbed through the window. ‘D’you think it’ll just fall down?’

  ‘There’s a mortgage on it. Lloyd’s Bank have it.’

  ‘What’s that mean then?’

  ‘When the war’s finished they’ll sell the house off to someone else.’

  All the furniture in the drawing-room had been taken away, stored in the cellars until someone, some day, had time to attend to it. People had pulled off pieces of the striped red wallpaper, boys from the Grammar School probably. There were names and initials and dates scrawled on the plaster. Hearts with arrows through them had been drawn.