Cousin Rosamund (16 page)

‘No,’ said Uncle Len. ‘We’re not going to the Red Lion at Haxton, we’re going to Nancy’s. You two have got the willies too, and I know it, and I don’t blame you, for you haven’t got the strength I have and if I got them you got a right to them too. But I’d rather you had the willies at Nancy’s than at the Red Lion.’

‘If you’re thinking…’ Aunt Milly began vaguely.

‘Get on your bloody hats,’ shouted Uncle Len in sudden rage.

I had never seen him lose his temper before. He had lost it too easily, with these two tired and ageing women.

They went silently up the stairs. Uncle Len called after them, very softly. ‘Milly. Lily.’ They turned and looked down at him, tears on their cheeks. ‘All the same you’re a couple of good old gazooks,’ he said, and blew a kiss at them. Without speaking, they blew kisses down to him, and turned about and went on upwards.

We got into the car and sped off through the dusk, past the fields where floodwaters lay like sheets of white metal on the darkening earth, towards Haxton, a village so swollen by the building of two factories that it had spread out and acquired the polluted quality of a suburb.

‘Young Os will be giving us all that science he knows about the causes of floods,’ said Uncle Len, grimly.

‘Well, that should be very interesting,’ said Aunt Milly, with an air of reproof.

‘Unfortunately science doesn’t know more about the causes of floods than a man living on the banks of a river, and therefore interested in floods, can read in his spare time,’ said Uncle Len.

‘You been reading books about that too? You sly thing,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘The books he gets from the library, Rose, you wouldn’t believe,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘You ought to have had an education, you ought,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘So’s I could be more like young Os?’ chuckled Uncle Len.

We had reached a crossroads, and had to halt, where a light switched off and on a crimson cast-iron lion standing on the porch of an inn larger and more urban than the Dog and Duck. A sudden hush fell on the three in the back of the car.

‘They do do a fish tea,’ said Aunt Lily suddenly. ‘Quite a good one. That’s really why I mentioned it.’

‘I know, I know, Lil,’ said Uncle Len, gently.

There was evidently a long-standing family dispute about the Red Lion at Haxton. I looked at the narrow oblongs of its windows, gold on the ground floor, where the bars were, and on the floors above black and printed with the flickering reflections of the light behind the lion. Those upper windows had the secretive and sinister look of dark spectacles, but I felt not much curiosity about the secret that they hid, for since it concerned these people it was bound to be simple and creditable, and indeed to lack all the ambiguous character that would seem inherent in a secret. I smiled to myself in the dusk at the unearthly innocence of these most earthly people.

As we drew nearer Uncle Len said, ‘I always like going to our Nancy’s home. You couldn’t have anything more decent. In its own half-acre.’

‘The Laurels was bigger,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Poor Harry wanted Queenie to have the best. But this will last. There’ll never be any trouble in this house.’

When we got there they stopped and looked at the house before they opened the garden gate. ‘What I like,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘is that the house and the garden aren’t exactly like the house and the gardens on either side, but they aren’t really different. The people in those houses wouldn’t have the slightest excuse for looking down on this house.’

‘I wonder if they do all they might with that greenhouse,’ said Uncle Len, his steps lagging as we went up the crazy-pavement path between the standard roses. ‘But there, nobody likes getting advice.’

The door was opened by Nancy’s servant, Bronwyn, in black dress and cap and apron. She was a child of seventeen from South Wales, and she looked up into our faces and told us, her eyes growing rounder and, it seemed, her little nose growing snubber with every word she spoke, as she told us that the master and mistress would be happy we had come, for they were all terribly afraid we should all be drowned. Uncle Len said that he personally had been drowned, round about two o’clock, and it was his own ghost, come along to have a last look at a pretty girl, and Bronwyn giggled, and Milly and Lily told her she was a clever mite to have got up her cap and her apron so beautifully, and Bronwyn was explaining that she had understood nothing of the laundry work, but the mistress was teaching her, when Oswald and Nancy called to us from the dining-room.

They looked very young, far younger than they were, and they were laughing, and could not quite sober themselves even when they greeted us and told us how they had grieved over the inundation of the Dog and Duck. The dining-room looked Victorian, for it was dominated by two enlarged photographs, one of Oswald’s father, his handsome features blazing with impatient yet contented evangelism, and the other of Oswald’s mother, she who had been a drunkard and was dead, a pretty woman with smooth hair and an oval face, and troubled, staring eyes, and a tiny mouth, so tiny that it seemed hardly broader than her nostrils. There was an early-Victorian clock, an early-Victorian wall-bracket bookcase, a mid-Victorian mirror over the chimneypiece, none of them very good, but all showing signs of a restrained taste, a provincial nonconformist purity. The rest of the room had been decided by Oswald’s taste, and was garden-suburb. The tables and chairs and sideboard were rough-hewn of unpolished wood, the curtains were hand-blocked linen, the ingenuously designed pottery and glass and the table silver made reference to some sort of peasant in another country. The room exhibited a clash between the generations. There was a brooch at the breast of the woman in the photograph which showed that she would not have understood why her son should have chosen to own any object in this room. It even exhibited a clash within Oswald’s generation, or rather an unresolved harmony. The early-Victorian bracket bookcase was filled with the works of Shaw and Wells, and it was certain any house where the dining-room was furnished in the peasant tradition would contain their works. Yet there was really nothing in the writings of either which would have led anybody to agree with them to think it logical that oak should not be polished or that pottery and textiles should ignore the achievements of the last four centuries. But there was another disharmony. Nancy and Oswald seemed to have at this moment nothing to do with their own room. Surprised in their enjoyment of their secret joke, they were not as I had ever seen them. They were classical, they were idyllic, they might have been outside time, actors inside art, who had no private lives but perpetually performed. They even recalled what was not human, the winter sunlight on the bronze branches of the woodland, the crimson buds of the willows rising from the waters.

‘We’ve had to alter the table, Oswald’s father is coming too,’ explained Nancy, smoothing the laughter from her face. ‘We see a lot of him, now that Brother Clerkenwell has come to live at Haxton. He rang up just after you did, it’s funny, it really is -’ She and Oswald took the flimsy excuse and surrendered to laughter again. ‘Oswald, you look after Uncle Len, and I’ll take the others to get their things off.’

She ran up the stairs lightly before us, giving Oswald a last smile over her shoulder. As we went into the bedroom Aunt Lily pointed a reproving finger and said, ‘Who’s been a careless girl? Tchk, tchk. You should take care of your good things.’ There was a wide Heal bed, with a headboard of unpolished oak running out at each side into bookcases; and on the floor at its foot Nancy’s fur coat lay in a semicircle. ‘I threw it down anyhow when I came in,’ said Nancy, and again broke into laughter. The rest of us gathered round the triple mirror on the dressing-table, and patted our tired faces with our powder puffs.

Nancy’s smiling face floated in the darkness behind our reflections. ‘I threw it down anywhere,’ she said, ‘because I heard Oswald come in, and I had to run down at once to tell him my news. And now I’ll tell you. I’ve been to the doctor and he says I’m all right.’

I slipped my arms round her and we kissed.

‘But here, what’s this?’ breathed Aunt Lily.

‘We thought you wanted one!’ exclaimed Aunt Milly.

‘Well, I’ve got one,’ said Nancy. ‘I’m telling you, that’s what the doctor said. It’s coming in July. Something went wrong at the beginning, so we weren’t sure till now.’

They squealed for joy and hugged her. ‘Forgive us for being stupid,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but when we were young and a girl went to the doctor and came back saying she was all right it usually meant she hadn’t got a baby. But, oh dear, oh dear, isn’t this lovely?’

‘Won’t Queenie love this?’ cried Aunt Lily.

‘I know, I know,’ said Nancy, ‘she’ll come back to a proper, ordinary family in working order.’

‘Do you want a boy or a girl?’ asked Aunt Milly, while Aunt Lily said, ‘Coo, I’m a grand-aunt. Are you going to have it here or in a nursing home?’ and then both began to sob.

‘You old sillies,’ said Nancy, ‘none of that. I want to cry too, and it’s ridiculous, as there’s nothing to cry about. I am nothing remarkable, but millions and millions and millions of women have had babies since the world began, so presumably I can.’

‘My God, and you so slim,’ marvelled Aunt Lily and broke into sudden panic. ‘And we let you pick up that fur coat yourself.’ She threw it on the floor and picked it up again, and we all laughed at her. But Nancy hushed us with an uplifted finger.

‘Listen, that’s the doorbell. It’ll be Oswald’s father.’ She began to giggle. ‘We’ll be able to tell exactly when he’s heard. Ordinarily you can’t hear in this room what’s said in the room underneath - unless it’s Oswald’s father speaking. It comes up like what you sometimes hear on a cliff by the seaside, when the waves rush into a crack. You know, a sort of booming. Just you wait a minute. It’ll come. Boom, boom-boom, boom-boom-boom boom-boom-boom. That’ll be “Well, I just thought I’d look in and see how the Lord is dealing with this little household”, and then we won’t hear anything, and that’ll be Oswald saying we’re all quite well, but deliberately not bringing the Lord into it, and then there’ll be little booms which will be Mr Bates saying that yes, he will take a glass of tomato-juice, and a bit about may he have his favourite chair that’s big enough for his long legs.’ She paused. ‘That,’ she said coolly, ‘is to make Oswald realise that he’s not as tall as he is, and that is the real reason why Oswald won’t say anything about the Lord.’ Then she went on, ‘After that there’ll be a silence, and that’ll be Oswald telling him about the baby, and then, you listen, there’ll be such a boom.’

She pointed to the floor and we all bent down towards it. Aunt Milly was a little deaf and she cupped her ear with her hand, but said, ‘Well, I don’t need any help to hear this,’ as the rich belling came up through the boards. The little booms went on in the order predicted, and she said, ‘Funny how you can nearly always tell what they’re going to do.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Nancy, and they exchanged a cynical nod.

‘Funny, I always think they’re so deep,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘Yes, they’re
deep,’
said Aunt Milly, ‘but at the same time…’ But the great boom rolled and echoed under our feet, and we clung together in silent laughter as it went on and on, rose and fell, fell and rose.

‘Any idea what he’s saying?’ asked Aunt Milly, drying her eyes. ‘Len will be as pleased over the little fellow as if it was his own grandson but he won’t go on about it like that, thank God.’

‘Oh, it’ll be a great thing for Father Bates,’ said Nancy. ‘It’s a great thing, you know, when a child is born to one of the Heavenly Hostages.’ I listened to her with irritation, for she spoke these words in an affected tone, quite uncharacteristic of her, which I had heard her assume once or twice before. It was borrowed, I think, from her Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara and their friends, for it carried a trace of the Midland accent. But it was nothing so innocent as regionalism. It was a lethargic defence of mediocrity, it indolently ridiculed all acknowledgment of the prodigious, and all attempt at interpretation of the ordinary. She told us that the sect held that membership conferred access to special means of grace. Each Heavenly Hostage could be perfect if he could but keep his mind on it; but nobody ever did. If anyone could he would die; but even in imperfection their members were better than other people and were recognised by God as His best beloved children. ‘So each member is a hostage held by sinful humanity, and it’s a good thing for the world, since God will be more reluctant to destroy the world for its wickedness if he knows that some of those he specially loves are captive on it.’ She seemed to be speaking with the cheapest irony, and I was about to protest that at least the sect saw that the world was a battlefield of forces not confined to this world, when she smiled timidly and gloriously, and I remembered that she borrowed this horrid way of speaking only when she was very shy. ‘Surely it can’t be like that,’ she said, in her own voice, ‘it seems too far-fetched. But there’s something. There must be something,’ she told us, her eyes wide. ‘It’s all so strange. You can’t think how strange it is having a baby.’

‘I’ve always thought it must be a funny feeling,’ said Aunt Milly.

‘You see, the thing isn’t a bit reasonable,’ Nancy went on. ‘Oswald keeps on telling me how it happens, ovulation and all that, but it doesn’t explain anything. It’s not logical that two little things without any sense can get together and make a third thing, that suddenly gets sense and thinks and feels for itself and gets born and has a will of its own, and is a person. How can there be a person, suddenly, when there wasn’t one before?’

‘It’s a mystery,’ agreed Aunt Milly.

‘Yes, put it like that, it’s against nature,’ said Aunt Lily.

‘And think of it happening all the time,’ Nancy went on. ‘And all these people that come into the world in this extraordinary way clinging on to the earth, which is just a star like any other, and nobody knows how the stars come to exist. It’s all so odd that anything should be here.’

‘I never thought of it before, but it would be more natural if there wasn’t anything at all,’ said Aunt Milly.