Bilgewater Page 17

  He was talking to Mrs. Rose who was in her white overall and giving him the confident straight look of a professional about to do fearful but necessary things. “What a silly mistake,” Pen was saying smiling at her as if she was the prettiest and most enchanting thing he had seen for years.

  “Oh not at all,” she was answering brightly. “We’re all a bit scatty about Jack’s arrangements. He brings home so many friends.”

  “Of coune I imagined Bill Green would have said something—long-standing outing—rather vague chap—ha ha ha.”

  They both laughed indulgently at the thought of father forgetting to tell them that I was leaving them on the Monday A.M. and not in the evening, Uncle Pen knowing perfectly well that father had probably forgotten whether I was coming back at all and would have taken some time to notice had I not.

  “I do hope you don’t mind—now that we are here?”

  “Not at all. Not at all. Jack has Grace Gathering here to keep him happy.” (Pen gripped the end of the hamster.)

  “Um yes.”

  “Actually we haven’t seen much of little Bilgie. She went off to bed early last night. Locked her door. I believe she went to church. There was a little note—I expect she’s about now—” She looked vaguely in the direction of the stairs from behind her dentist’s mask. She had some sort of sharp thing in her hand again and from behind her in the surgery that dreadful gurgling noise of the pink water could be heard. I saw darling Uncle HB’s knuckles whiten on the rail.

  “It’s all right,” I called. “Just coming.”

  “Oh, there you are.”

  “I’m nearly ready.”

  “Oh. Super. Sorry not to have seen you, Marigold. See you again. Welcome anytime if you don’t mind us being so quiet.”

  “Thankyouverymuchforhavingme.”

  “I must get back to my patient.”

  “I’ve had a lovely time.”

  “Good show. ’Bye now.” She vanished into her surgery and shut the door and I said, “Oh—” I had wanted to tell her about the amber beads and that she could have them and where they were. I remembered the trace of softness and niceness in her yesterday when she mentioned my ma, and her saying in a way I hadn’t thought her capable of, “No—not luck.” I remembered that I had spent the hostess’s present money on the bus fare. But a great whistling came out of the opposite door across the hall which meant that Mr. Rose was at the drill again fixing the infected flaps and I saw poor Uncle Pen now rigid with distaste and sweating. “Come on, Marigold.”

  “Just coming.”

  “Get moving.”

  “All right I won’t be long.”

  I dashed for the bathroom and took off the black dress and washed with other people’s soap and flannels and towels. In a wall cupboard I found somebody’s comb. I drew the line at any of the row of toothbrushes though they were in excellent condition and included a range of electrical ones, too. I put the dress back on and went back to my room for the fur coat and put on my tights which had been stuffed down my front all night and were now dry.

  “Come on,” called Uncle Pen.

  I looked at the room and decided against making the bed whatever Paula would have said. (“Take off the blankets, sheets, pillowslips, fold them rectangular. It’s manners in guests.”) On the landing I paused a second outside Grace’s door. I had a great longing suddenly to go and say goodbye. I remembered the way she’d got me to bed after all that gin. The trip to Marks and Spencers. Perhaps she hadn’t known I was invited this weekend after all. And what if she had been rolling about the kitchen on Sunday morning with Jack? Maybe she liked him. It was difficult to know anything about Grace. Jack clearly wasn’t good enough for her but maybe she really did like him. I should have liked to talk to her, and a very slow, sad, miserable feeling welled up in me as I stood there, almost as if I was never going to see Grace or Jack or anybody again.

  “Bilge, come ON.”

  “Thank God we’re out of that,” Uncle HB said on the steps. “Come on quick.” He held a back door of the car open for me and went round like a chauffeur to the driver’s seat, blowing with relief. “My word. Glad to get away from that. Don’t like telling lies. You idiot of a girl. Fearful woman.”

  “Why’m I in the back?”

  “We’re picking up two more.”

  “Are we? Who? Whoever?”

  “Boakeses.”

  “Boakeses? Does Boakes live round here? There’s only one of him.”

  “No. There’s his father. Friend of mine. He and I were going off on this outing anyway. I said he’d better bring Boakes as well since I had to collect you. He seemed to think that I ought to collect you as soon as possible. Very urgent about it he was. Crack of dawn this morning. Though he didn’t seem to know where you were, except that it was nearby. Funny business. Lucky I knew the address!”

  “Boakes’s father! However could Boakes’s father know I wanted to be collected? I never knew Boakes had a father. Oh! Good heavens!”

  We had stopped outside a grim, plum-coloured dwelling with a lot of net curtaining, none too clean. On the step stood the Vicar and next to him Boakes reading a book.

  “You mean that’s Boakes’s father? That Vicar? I don’t believe it!”

  “Hullo Boakes. Hullo Boakes,” said Pen to each in turn. “Well, I’ve got her. It’s hellish early and I don’t know what it’s all about. Are we too soon?”

  “Not a bit,” said the Vicar getting in beside him, “Hullo Miss er—How nice to meet you again. Are you feeling better this morning?”

  “Been ill?” asked Boakes (son) getting in beside me and keeping a finger in the page like father does. “Hi.”

  “Not really. Just hang-over,” I said, thinking that two days ago I could never have said anything like that to anyone even if it had been true—“Roses. Awful gin. They give you pints. I say is that your father?”

  “Oh them,” said Boakes. “Whatever did you go and stay with them for? Yes of course it’s my father, why not?” He gave an amiable nod and went back to Fletcher’s History of Architecture: the Comparative Method. He was on the chapter on Cathedrals of the Monastic Foundation. The book was nearly the size of a monastery itself.

  The car rolled off through the rainy streets of the town towards Thornaby and Stockton-on-Tees. I settled back on the splendid old leather cushions and nobody spoke.

  Then, after a while, it struck me that the silence was very companionable. The Vicar and Pen stared ahead of them through the rain, the windscreen wipers purred and a page of Fletcher was occasionally turned.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked Boakes.

  “Durham,” said he.

  “Why?”

  “For a visit.”

  “Were you anyway?”

  “They were. I wasn’t—Oxbridge entrance. Last papers coming up. Work and that. But since you were coming—”

  We passed through Darlington—its dreadful black church, its lovely covered market, and out to the wide fields beyond.

  “An unconventional route to Durham,” said Mr. Boakes.

  “Oh—I don’t know,” said Pen and began to sing:

  “And so I went to Darlington,

  That pretty little town,

  And there I bought a petticoat,

  A coat and a gown.”

  “You’d look well in a petticoat, Edmund,” said the Vicar and we all laughed, even Boakes who looked up at me from the monastic foundations and said, “I rather like your petticoat, Bilgie. Where’d it come from?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’ll bet it didn’t come from Jack Rose’s. It’s a bit ancient isn’t it? I didn’t know you had a fur coat.”

  “Oh it’s just an old thing.”

  “Looks as though it belonged to Queen Lear.” He winked at me and began reading again. The sun came out.

&
nbsp; And quite astonishingly after the pain of the last days I realised that I was enormously enjoying myself. When we got through Barnard Castle Uncle Pen put his foot down and we went rushing towards Durham at speed. Uncle Pen clenched his curly pipe, up-tilted his nose as we sped in and out of villages with mine shafts beside them and pubs called The Pit Laddie. Snow showers and sun succeeded each other over the fells as we reached high ground, and the trees on the field sides against the stone walls sparkled with frost. Down the winding hill into Durham at length the cathedral stood up all at once before us like a potentate. It rose out of brown woods on the high rock over the Wear. Then it was gone.

  “Did you see it!”

  “Have you never seen it before?” said Boakes.

  “Never.”

  We drove over the arched bridge and there it was again. I could hardly bear it when we parked the car and all sailed into the County Hotel for coffee. I said, “Don’t let’s be long.”

  “It’ll be there when we come out,” said Pen. “It has been for the last thousand or so years. Keep your hair on. Bilge, my dear, aren’t those rather curious clothes?”

  “Let’s go up right away,” I said.

  “Not till I’ve got through this,” said the Reverend Boakes and drew up a great plate of pork pie and tea-cakes. “No breakfast,” he said. “Early Communion.” (He nodded over at me.) “We have the whole day before us—my dears, the whole day! Not a meeting, not a service, not a Boy Scout jumble sale, not a marriage, confession or Holy Unction—yes please, chocolate biscuits—not a blessed thing except sheer enjoyment,” and he licked his fingers like a baby. “Makes up for everything—day like this.”

  “And we’ll have wine for luncheon,” said Pen.

  There are days that you remember as perfect and which in fact were nothing of the kind. They grow better for the telling and more beloved with the years. For example, to hear Paula go on about her childhood you’d think Dorset had never had a rainy day, all the harvest dripping gold and garlands round each cottage door. I love to hear her carrying on about it, because it does mean something; but I know, and she knows, too, if she would only examine herself, that it is all in fact not so. She has manufactured something—a mood, an atmosphere, a haze which is not there, like the sepia in the photos of her little sisters in their straw hats on her sitting-room mantelpiece. It is quite possible to manufacture a memory completely—as I have pointed out to her on Thursday evenings for so many years. This is known between us and to father, too, though I’m not sure that he really understands it being himself incapable of colouring the truth with the very faintest of tints—as saucer stories.

  A saucer story is descended from something years ago when we were all three very happy—the reason has gone, and that’s interesting, too. Probably father’s exam results were even better than usual or perhaps it was the day they realised that if I put my mind to it I really could read, or perhaps it was when I was at long last better from the beastly measles, or when we’d had the letter from the psychologist to say that although I looked and behaved so dotty my IQ went right off the chart—whatever it was, we were all fooling about washing up and laughing in Paula’s private kitchen and Paula began to sing. Then Paula began to do daring things with the china, like flinging it into the air for me to catch. Every time she’d washed a plate—whee! she went, and it spun into the air.

  I caught each one because I just had to, and father stopped singing and stood there looking grave. Paula, seeing his face, suddenly picked up the last saucer which was a good one—Spode or something—and whirled round the kitchen with it and then hurled it into space. And I caught it. How, goodness knows. I nearly dropped it. I caught it, dropped it and caught it again and we both dissolved in helpless laughter.

  Well, it isn’t all that funny if you weren’t there, but somehow or other it had a very tremendous and delightful effect upon us and was ever called thereafter “The Night You Dropped the Saucer.”

  Yet I didn’t drop the saucer. It was a fabrication—a manufactured event. “D’you remember the saucer?” we say—and dissolve with laughter. And yet absolutely nothing had happened.

  Now the visit to Durham with Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson and the two Boakeses was just the opposite, in that many things happened—coffee in The County, the wandering walk together up the cobbled hill and over the cathedral close; the time inside the Cathedral where we stood in the nave and the wind blew through the giant pillars from the south door to the north like wind in a forest. Then there was lunch: turkey, stuffing, two kinds of potatoes, sprouts not too long cooked, gravy, red-currant jelly followed by a good plum pudding, and a bottle of claret that cost pounds. Then there was evensong in the cathedral—all dark but for the pools of light round the choir stalls, and voices of angels, white ruffs, gold windows. Then we all went out to tea.

  These events were all usual. Other people all around us were doing the same things. Yet the memory of them doesn’t come up with a name for what went on. It was just a series of things that were important and beautiful and namelessly good, an experience proof against nostalgia, proof against the distortions of time. An experience one is the better for having had even when the brain grows soft and slow and can’t remember whether it has just locked the door or was just about to do so. Or if not why not, or if so why. Like Old Price and the zeppelins.

  “It has been the most heavenly day,” said the Reverend. We walked in a line across the Galilee Chapel, away from the dust of the Venerable Bede, the tomb which the angel with a talent for carving in marble had once visited by night with just the right adjective. “A heavenly day.” We walked out across the huge peaceful cloister towards a low wide tunnel with shallow cross-vaulting and trees creaking their branches in the woods at the other end. We all walked through the woods to a tea-place. It stood out on stilts over the river. There was a coal fire.

  The table cloths were clean and red checked, we got a table in the window and the tea and cakes and hot tea-cakes and home-made strawberry jam were brought quickly. Below us rushed the wide brown river, fading in the winter afternoon. Boakes kept on with Fletcher’s Architecture occasionally looking over his gold specs to hand up his cup. Mr. Boakes and Uncle Edmund peacefully munched and in my sables I poured out.

  “Time to go.” Uncle HB left a colossal tip and we got into the Rolls waiting at the foot of the cathedral hill and went bowling away.

  “Uncle Pen,” I said when we’d dropped the others. “I love you so.”

  He looked pleased, rather surprised. “For why because?”

  “For rescuing me. For taking me with you. For not asking questions. For not fussing father or Paula.”

  He sang the song about Darlington again, and petticoats and then said in his funny, old-fashioned Oxford voice, “Matter of fact old thing, why didn’t you send for Paula?”

  “Oh—the fuss. I don’t know,”

  “I can see you wouldn’t send for your father of course—”

  “Well of course not. He’d have been—well, anyway he can’t drive.”

  “Ah.

  “Bilgie,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  We were through Teesside now and off along the coast beyond Skinningrove and Brotton—nearly home. “Bilge—er. Hum.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Well, I just forgot to tell you something. Should have mentioned it before. Paula won’t be there when you get back.”

  “Won’t be there? Whyever not?”

  “She’s gone away.”

  “Look,” I said, “For heaven’s sake! Is this one of those Victorian children’s books and you’re breaking the news about death or something?”

  Then—we had reached the front door of father’s House—I went ice cold all over beneath my black clothes. “Oh my God!” I said. “Oh my God!”

  CHAPTER 23

  He pursed his lips and began to smooth his han
ds over the steering wheel, regarding them with deep thought, and I leapt from the car and up the steps and flung through the door of father’s study without knocking—coaching or no coaching, he must be disturbed.

  “Where’s Paula?”

  Miss Bex was there. She was sitting alongside father on the saggy old sofa leaning a little towards him. The chess board had been moved onto the top of the heaps of papers on the desk and instead on the chess stool there stood a tray of tea with the best china.

  She leapt up like a thing on wires and the look in her eye was the look of the classroom. She didn’t say “Go out this minute and come in again properly,” but it was as if she had. She stopped herself but noticed that I had noticed.

  “Where’s Paula?”

  “My dear—” Father got up and wafted his arms about. “Miss Bex—”

  “Where is Paula?”

  “Please speak to Miss Bex.”

  “Hullo Miss Bex. Where is Paula—”

  “Paula has had to go home,” said father.

  “Home? What home?”

  “Home to Dorset. For a while. A—a family matter.”

  “But she didn’t say! She didn’t tell me a word! When I left on Saturday.”

  “It all—blew up—on Saturday. She left on Saturday evening.”

  “Oh heavens!” I collapsed somewhere. “Oh Lord—I thought she was—”

  Pen lumbered in grumbling, then said, “Evening Miss Bex. Now what William?”

  “Oh we’ll manage, we’ll manage. Housekeeper back today. And cook. And Miss Bex has very kindly—”

  “Just standing in,” said Miss Bex with a gleam of teeth, “and I think we all need a nice cup of tea, don’t you? This will be cold. Marigold dear—a nice fresh pot for your father.”

  Father said, “Well—the boarders are beginning to arrive. I’m afraid I must be about outside. Without Paula—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, “I’ll check them in. Miss Bex can find herself some more tea.” It sounded rude and I meant it to be.