‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ said Suspiria, with faintly acid sweetness.
He knew she was making fun of him, but didn’t know with what more subtle word to cancel out her contribution, so he said nothing. He looked to Theo for help, amazed to realise that while he had been staring the flow of words had ceased. Theo’s chin was on his chest, his head nodding heavily; even when the awareness of being watched stirred him awake again, and he raised his head, his eyelids were seen to be dropping.
‘At last!’ said Suspiria, and shook him gently by the shoulder. ‘Come on, time you went to bed! You’re dropping off to sleep where you sit.’
‘Nothing of the kind!’ said Theo, quite distinctly; but he rose at her hand’s prompting, and allowed himself to be turned towards the door. ‘What do they put in the beer these days? Or did you dope the whisky?’
‘Of course!’ she said serenely, slipping her shoulder closely under his. Beneath the drowsy bulk she looked smaller than ever. Dennis, whose heart had leaped with joy to think he would be able to slink away, turned back from the very threshold of escape to realise that this was no job for her. Much as he wanted to get out of this alien world and stay out of it for good, it surely wouldn’t hurt him to stay for ten more minutes, and relieve her of the job of getting her husband to bed. He felt impelled to make the offer. She looked up at him for an instant with an astonishment so blazingly sincere that she seemed a different woman, and then without a word surrendered the weight to his arm, and went before them through the doorway.
By the time they had climbed the stairs, and entered a large, low-ceilinged bedroom, she was having some difficulty in hiding completely her amusement at the heavy weather the boy made of it, with all his good intentions. She could have handled it herself without difficulty, but she left it to him, and him to it, with impersonal forbearance, and waited for him below. He was not a fool, he would see through her if she stayed upon the scene; and perhaps it was worth smoothing things over a little, for his sake, since she was hardly likely ever to see him again upon the same terms. Let him enjoy his chivalry if he could, and feel a man of the world, gracious, competent and sophisticated. When he came down the stairs he looked more like a ruffled and perspiring boy just gratefully rid of a job which had taxed him to the limit.
He said in a constrained voice: ‘He’s asleep! He dropped off as soon as he was flat. I shouldn’t think he’ll stir for about twelve hours.’
He could see his own relief and eagerness reflected in her eyes, which smiled full into his with a bright elation which was certainly not meant for him. She was thinking of only one thing, that her old man was safe out of the way for the night, and in five more minutes she would be rid of the other nuisance, too. She was promising herself a speedy return to her precious pots – what was so special about them, anyhow? In the Midlands they turned them out by the thousand, much more elaborate specimens than these, and with no such fuss and bother about it.
‘You’ve been very kind! Won’t you have another drink before you go? You must need it, after that!’
‘No, thanks, really! I ought to get home.’
He needn’t worry any more about escaping, she wasn’t going to put any obstacles in his way, she could hardly wait to push him out of the house. Oh, she did it with an air, all right! She got him to the door in a few seconds, and almost before he knew it they were out on the quarried yard before the house, looking down the track to the road.
‘The moon’s up, you’ll be able to see your way.’
‘I shall be all right, I haven’t got very far to go.’
‘Good-night, Mr. Forbes! Thank you for taking care of Theo!’
‘I was glad to help,’ he said untruthfully, but in the best traditions of his training. ‘Good-night, Mrs. Freeland!’
The door closed with almost insulting alacrity as soon as he had gone a few steps. She would be flying back through the stone passage, back to her workshop, plunging her hands into the clay again, sinking herself deep into her mystery. Probably she would be laughing, he thought, half for joy at being free, half in contemptuous amusement at the recollection of his awkwardness and simplicity.
It didn’t matter now, he reminded himself gladly, lengthening his pace along the cart-track. That was the last of the pair of them, as far as he was concerned. He’d never have to see either of them so close again, and he’d take jolly good care no second situation like tonight’s should ever involve Dennis Forbes. Once was enough! Now forget them!
He hustled them to the back of his mind, and set out as fast as he could on the walk home.
CHAPTER TWO:
Venture into Unknown Territory
1
Mrs. Forbes was a woman with a strong competitive spirit and a natural instinct for domestic perfection, who had all her life had to make do with inadequate material. Before her marriage in 1920 she had been the middle one in a large family in the industrial Midlands, in an overcrowded house without amenities, where there was never enough food to make cooking anything better than a problem in distribution, never any new clothes except for the eldest, never any leisure or any privacy. Even her husband was small and insignificant, and accepted by her in the same spirit of making do with what she could get, since she could not have what she wanted. In the same way she managed to be truly fond of him, for she had learned to perfection the art of shortening her sights to the range of her weapons.
If she had ever had any hopes that her opportunities might be enlarged by the marriage, the Depression effectively killed them. Her husband spent three demoralising years on short time, and eighteen months without employment of any kind, and dwindled away from shame and discouragement to half his former size, and a grey shrivelled silence from which he never really recovered. He suffered the conviction that he was a failure in everything he had ever touched, and that there was no good reason for his existence at all; a common occupational disease among the unemployed, but one for which neither medicine nor psychiatry had stirred themselves to find a palliative, much less a cure.
It was a fundamental need of Mrs. Forbes’ nature that she should have something to be proud of; and if she could not have the accumulation of possessions which would have given her status in her own and other eyes, it was all the more necessary that she should be proud of what she had. Cleanliness, order and neatness can be had without spending, and she made do with them through all the bad years. She turned out her husband, on his trips to the Labour Exchange, well-brushed and regularly shaven, never without a collar and tie, a witness to her dogged assertion of respectability. The standard was never allowed to sag, because only by this fanatical adherence to every rite could she buttress her self-respect upright against the crushing weight of the world.
In 1931 Mr. Forbes went south on a wildgoose chase after rumours of jobs going in light industry, and though nothing materialised in that line, he managed to get a temporary job in a furniture warehouse. A death made the temporary job permanent, and the following year he found a small insanitary cottage in a back lane on the country side of Great Leddington, and his family came down to join him. The old defiant assertion of respectability began again in new surroundings, but with fresh optimism, since a job is a job.
But it was the war that really changed things for the Forbes family. It was not only that there was suddenly more than enough work for everyone, but rather that the pressure of necessity produced, for the wrong reasons but irrevocably, the social revolution which acknowledged them as human beings, with rights and needs. The younger children began to bloom and grow, because for the first time they were ensured a reasonably fair share of the foods they needed, and even the older ones benefited to a lesser extent from this belated measure of justice. Suddenly their health was a matter of public concern, and their rations protected. Albert, when he was called up in 1940, was bringing home weekly wages of which his father had never dreamed in all his life. Marjorie left school and went straight into a factory, and was soon earning what seemed to her mother a fabul
ous sum for a girl of fifteen. Harold, who was bright and plausible, got himself an office-boy’s job soon after leaving school in 1939, and was a junior clerk, and well thought of, before he, too, had to go into the army. So they were almost rich, even if they could not spend their money on precisely the things they had always wanted.
Now Albert was married, and so was Marjorie, and the council house into which the family had moved in 1947, on the edge of the newest estate in the town, was wonderfully spacious for the parents and their three remaining children. Albert was felt to have married rather above him, into a greengrocery business with three shops in the town and its environs. The shades of social significance involved were infinite in number and infinitesimal in degree. His wife’s family had got hold of him pretty tightly, and his calls at Lancelot Road were becoming few and far between. Marjorie, on the other hand, had married somewhat beneath her, a milk-roundsman who came from a large and turbulent family out at Copping Common; and she was for ever back at home pouring out her complaints against Stan, and his mother, and all the lot of them, though she always stood up for him if anyone else joined in the condemnation. Harold was too clever to have got caught so far, and as for the other two, they were too young to be thinking about marriage as yet.
It was the five years between Harold and Dennis which had induced Mrs. Forbes to think of her youngest son as still hardly more than a schoolboy. After all, the other two had actually been in the war, while even Dennis’s military service had been spent safely in England, and involved nothing more dangerous than barrack-room larking and extreme boredom. More like a sort of game, she thought indulgently. The first three had been brought up in the hard years, Dennis and Winnie in the stimulation of prosperity. They seemed to her still children, though even Winnie was eighteen, and working behind the lingerie counter at Haddow’s for the last three years.
The older children had always considered that Dennis and Winnie were being spoiled, and had done their best to reverse the trend; an attempt which had had little effect upon the young people concerned, but had served to accentuate the five-year interval which cut them off from their critics, and had made them seem younger than ever to Mrs. Forbes. So she was not disposed to take very seriously any of Winnie’s many and ephemeral boy-friends, nor to lose any sleep over the insinuating appearance of Iris Moffatt in Dennis’s life. Almost before she realised what was in the wind, they were walking out steady.
It had been Iris who made the going. Dennis had never taken much interest in girls, or rather his interest had been so diffuse that none of them had managed to establish a claim on him. He danced in the winter evenings, if he couldn’t find anything better to do, and occasionally he had been known to go off somewhere on his motor-bike with a girl on the pillion instead of a boy; but it was so seldom the same girl twice running that no one had ever expected anything to come of these jaunts. There had never been many ways that a girl could hope to get hold of him, until his interest in her awakened naturally; but Iris had found one of them.
Iris had a brother who belonged to the same darts club, and she took to meeting him on club nights, always with some reasonable excuse. Brothers, however dumbfounded by such sudden attentions from their sisters, are not notably quick on the uptake; and even if they do see through the manoeuvre, family loyalty may bar them from giving the game away. At any rate, no one had warned Dennis what was in the wind. Even so, Iris had to work hard to take the affair past the accidental stage. It was six weeks before she managed to get herself invited out on the pillion, and several months more before she got him trained to a proper routine, which included appointments with her at least twice a week. Then she felt fairly safe, for he was a good-natured boy, and not likely to make any violent struggles for his liberty. He liked her, and enjoyed her company, and they got on together very well, on the whole, and he hadn’t yet realised that there was more to be had than that.
Mrs. Forbes wanted the best for her youngest son, and had not thought of having to let him go for some years yet. But there it was, and Iris was a nice, steady girl enough, and would make him a good wife, if it should come to that. After all, she had to be prepared for it to happen sooner or later, and it could easily have been worse. So she sat back quietly among her new possessions, and watched Iris gradually tightening her hold about Dennis’s innocent neck. If she had hunted him down, it was because she wanted him. Who wouldn’t? Such an attractive boy, a good worker, steady in his ways but plenty of fun – the girl might well think it worth going to some trouble to make sure of him. Nor did it seem to Mrs. Forbes such a bad foundation for a marriage, if one partner knew exactly what she wanted, and the other merely had no objection. That was how her own marriage had started out, so she knew it could turn out well.
And then, just because of one night when Dennis should have met Iris and didn’t turn up – just because of one disappointment after months of steady, reliable companionship – it all began to go wrong.
2
Dennis loitered to straighten his tie at the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, and his eye was caught, not for the first time recently, by his mother’s two big pottery vases, biscuit-coloured things made in a square shape, with the edges sheered off and painted red, a big bunch of flowers stencilled on the side, and a jazz sort of handle. Lately he’d caught himself looking at these things with a seriously studious eye, because they were so different from anything that Freeland woman had in her house.
All those simple shapes, all that roundness on her shelves, roundness that made you cup your hands instinctively when you looked at it, as if to feel how much tactile satisfaction such a shape could give you. He touched one of these vases, suddenly. It felt dry and brittle, and the angles stuck into his tentative hand in an uncomfortable way. Still he could not help being impressed by the floral decoration, full of so many colours. Surely it must be affectation to prefer those plain things, those patterns, where there were any, made of three brush-strokes, perhaps one thin little branch in leaf coiled round a jug, or three reeds and a bird hinted at, as if materials were rationed – surely it was a kind of pose, to choose that in place of such lavish colour and shape as this? It might be clever to put over the idea that those skimpy designs were more artistic, because they were easier to produce. Perhaps she couldn’t do anything as elaborate as this! He wanted to be pleased with the idea, if he had to think of the beastly woman at all, after the lapse of almost a month since he had seen her. But the minute he had put the thought into perceptible form, he knew it was not true. He could think of a lot of things to say against them both, but they had no affectations, they were almost terrifyingly without them. So that couldn’t be the answer; whatever they were, they weren’t phoneys.
He was aware of his mother on her knees somewhere behind him, industriously polishing the linoleum round his feet. He asked impulsively: ‘Mum, do you like these vases?’
She looked up momentarily to be sure on which ornaments she was being asked to pronounce, and said warmly: ‘Yes, of course I like them. What a question! What do you think I keep them there for, if I don’t think they’re pretty?’
‘Well, but do you think they’d be reckoned good? I mean, in an artistic way?’
‘Oh, my goodness, I don’t even know what you mean by that! I should think they would. Your Aunt Win gave twelve-and-six each for them in one of the biggest shops in London. And that was before things went up the prices they are now, too!’
He hesitated, his lips apart, not knowing what he wanted to ask, nor who was to answer it. She reached up and gave him a smart pat behind to move him out of her way. ‘Move over a bit, there’s a good boy! I want to do where you’re standing.’
Dennis stepped aside obediently, and watched her continue instantly her polishing of the already bright. ‘What’s the idea? You’ve done there once this morning, by the look of it.’
‘What a story! I haven’t touched it since Thursday. Winnie’s bringing that Ferriday girl in with her for a cup of tea before they go to t
he pictures tonight. I want it to be nice – you know what that family are! I’m not having that mother of hers carrying any second-hand tales round about our house.’
For some reason he was deeply offended by the thought of his mother scrabbling about on her knees, frantic to remove the last grain of dust which might be used as ammunition against her. As if even her house-pride had to be in reality a kind of house-shame, and her impregnable fortress of cleanliness really existed only to provide a shell for her fear. ‘I wouldn’t make any fuss for them,’ he said, sharply frowning. ‘Surely we’re good enough as we are.’
Indignantly, as she scrambled to her feet and faced him, she retorted: ‘We want the place to be presentable when visitors come, don’t we?’
‘It always is presentable. I wouldn’t put myself out to fuss like that just because you’re expecting someone – trying to make it look as if no real people lived here at all! I wouldn’t do it for royalty!’ he said, almost violently.