Authors: Monica Dickens
‘So have you,’ said Joy when she was outside on the other side of the door.
Alexander was cleaning the shoes, a job which he managed to dignify by wearing chamois leather gloves and buying new tins of polish as soon as the old ones got the least bit cracked or messy. ‘A ghost?’ he said, breathing on the pointed toe of Rodney’s City footwear. ‘Certainly I saw a ghost. The memory is with me yet.’
‘What was it?’
‘A dead baby, surrounded by an ice-cold aura, somewhat similar to the one they have at Glamis, the girlhood residence of her Majesty the Queen.’
Joy shuddered. ‘I’d die if I saw it. There was a woman lived
near us in the Porto, who saw a transparent nun looking out of the convent in Ladbroke Grove.’ There was no one else to whom she could mention North Kensington. Rodney always changed the subject, so she often brought it into her talk with Alexander.
‘Nuns,’ said Alexander, with a tomb-like voice and face. ‘I daresay they’ve got some of those at the Hall, too. The old pile is full of ghosts. And there’ll be one more,’ he added, placing Rodney’s shoes in precise alignment with the pattern of the linoleum, ‘soon.’
‘When the old lady dies, you mean. It won’t be all that relief when she does, you know, because I shall have to go and live at the Hall’
‘That,’ Alexander picked up one of her shoes, ‘is what I meant,’ he dabbed a brush in the polish, ‘Miss Joy.’ When he was talking while he worked, he fitted his remarks to the job like a secretarial student typing to a gramophone.
‘What
do
you mean? Have you got a presentiment of my death or something?’ Joy would not have been surprised to hear that Alexander had second sight. She could believe anything of him.
‘No, no.’ He looked down at her over the folds of his lower lids as if he were looking over spectacles. ‘Don’t be so macabre. I mean you don’t belong there, so to speak. You’ll wander restless as a little ghost.’
‘I think you’re the limit,’ Joy said. ‘You don’t want me to marry Archie, do you? You’ve been against it from the start. Oh, I know you haven’t said anything, but don’t think I don’t know when you’re disapproving. Uncle Rodney always thinks he knows what’s going on in your mind, but he doesn’t of course, at all. You’d die sometimes if you could hear the way he talks about you to people. Why shouldn’t I marry Archie? I’m going to anyway, so you might as well be nice about it, even if you are jealous because you aren’t married.’
‘Not me.’ Alexander shook his head, following the strokes of the brush.
‘You ought to marry. I think it’s a good thing; I’m quite looking forward to it. Why don’t you marry this girl at
Hounslow you’re always so secretive about. Or isn’t it a girl you go to see?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Alexander, with a sigh, ‘it’s a girl.’
‘Well then, why don’t you?’
‘Please, Miss Joy – ’ and his cavernous face looked all at once so bitter and wretched that Joy wished she had not spoken, ‘leave my affairs in West London alone.’
‘Well, all right. You leave my affairs in North Oxfordshire alone.’ Joy went to the larder. ‘Anything to eat? That was a pretty skimpy dinner you provided for a girl getting up strength to be the mother of the heir to Astwick Hall. You know what it is,’ she went on from the larder, with half a cold sausage in her mouth, ‘I believe you really think I ought to have stayed Jo Abinger. You’ve never approved all along. Remember you once called Uncle Rodney Pygmalion? Well, I went and read the book and I saw what you meant. You don’t think I’m really Joy Stretton, do you? You don’t think I’m good enough to be a Cope – or a Drake. Isn’t that it?’ She challenged him half jokingly as she came out of the larder, but her smile faded when she saw the distress in his face.
‘Oh no, no, Miss Joy.’ His infallible hand actually fumbled, trying to open a tin of polish. ‘It’s – I think you’re too good.’
Too good for the Copes and Drakes? Joy stared at this fantastic statement and went out to ring up Archie. Alexander had unsettled her; she needed reassuring. You never knew what Alexander was going to say; with Archie you always did. She wanted to hear his level, harmonious voice, and talk to him prosaically about the Dower House cesspool.
On the first week-end in September, there was to be a large house party at Astwick. Joy was nervous about it. Her visits there had not yet made her feel at home with the house or the family. She felt that she knew even the General less well than in the
Dominican,
where he had been convivial and sometimes roguish in a footling, rickety way.
Joy began to see why he had needed to go round the world. He had had his fling and now, back to heel, he was seldom convivial and never roguish. When Joy first went to Astwick, he
was so distant that she wondered if he recognized her. Piqued with him, she alluded in front of Mrs Drake to Mrs Beaucourt, whereupon the General staggered to his feet and roared up the volume control of the wireless, which was one of the few modernizations allowed at Astwick Hall, because Mrs Drake liked to hear the News, and decry it.
In the ship, the General had liked jazz music and even gone boop-a-doop with crazily wagging head, but at Astwick he never sang or whistled, except for an occasional melancholy hymn when he remembered it was Sunday. He never wore his corespondent shoes nor his dazzling M.C.C. tie. The colour of his veins faded and his nose seemed to subside. He prowled about on spindling legs in plus-fours, with one eye – and you still could not be sure which was which – on his wife, or locked himself for hours at a time in the office by the stables. What did he do in there? Archie and the agent did all the work of the estate. Archie said it was crosswords, but Joy imagined experiments with chemicals or booby traps, or some senile Heath Robinson scheme against his wife, for surely he could not suffer her if he had not at least some dream of release.
Joy would meet him sometimes in the groves and walks round the Hall, pushing the chair that was much too heavy for him, peering from side to side round its bulky occupant like a small man trying to steer a big girl round a dance floor. Or she would meet him toiling up the avenue alongside the pony carriage, with the pony turning its head to nip him from time to time and Mrs Drake making no attempt to check it by the reins.
Sometimes, Joy had to walk by the carriage. If she saw a tree that should have been cut down or a hedge that needed trimming, Mrs Drake would make her favourite ‘Ach!’ sound, and note it in a book, but otherwise she drove in silence, with her eyes fixed on the pony’s laid back ears. Joy would try to make conversation, nervously pointing out this flower, or that tree changing colour already, or naming a bird that Archie had taught her, but nothing would quicken Mrs Drake to interest. It was not so much apathy as the iron control with which she silently ruled herself as she liked silently to rule others. Even when a wheel came off the carriage, she just sat and waited like
a lopsided rock while Joy went back for help. When an adder slid across the path and the pony reared and Joy cried out in fear, Mrs Drake’s face was impassive and her hand steady on the reins until the pony sullenly consented to unstiffen its legs and go on.
‘Wasn’t it awful?’ Joy said on the way home, ‘when we saw that adder? I thought the carriage was going over. Weren’t you scared?’
The only answer she got from her future mother-in-law was a demand to know why Joy carried a walking stick if she did not use it to kill adders. Joy could well believe the story they told of how, after the crushing fall that had crippled her, she had been found with her top hat bashed in and her cheek laid open, trying to climb back into her side saddle with a broken thigh and a dislocated hip.
Archie only laughed at her when she told him she was nervous of the week-end at Astwick, so she did not say any more. He loved his home, so, if she was to marry him, she supposed she must try and love it too, but she did not want to go and her recent talk with Alexander had not reassured her.
She tried to make Rodney go with her, but he had carefully made other plans. ‘The place gets on my nerves,’ he said. ‘I’ve never recovered from that time they gave me a room in a tower with six windows and no fire and made me go to a meet in a pony cart and I saw a dead fox.’
‘You won’t see one this time, silly,’ said Joy. ‘Cubbing’s only just started and I don’t see you getting up at four for that.’
‘I could, though not for that. I can’t sleep in that house. Last time I ran out of aspirin on a Sunday and toured all the bathrooms in vain, and when at last I ran one to earth in the bedroom of a dowager Duchess, her maid thought I was after the jewels.’
‘You didn’t talk like this about Astwick when you were trying to get me off with Archie. You thrust the place down my throat.’
‘It’s different for you. You can adapt yourself to live anywhere. You’ve proved that by your life so far. I’m like Lady here.’ He picked up the Pekinese and let it slobber on his face.
‘You and I will go to Edna’s at Camberley,’ he told it in baby talk, ‘and ‘oo shall take ‘oo’s own cushion and Roddie will take his own pillow, and dear Edna will give us brekky in bed and have amusing people in to bridge and not make us go for walkies, and we shall hardly know we’re not in town.’
‘Do come to Astwick, Uncle Roddie. I might get a migraine. I hardly know anyone who’s coming. They might give someone else my room and give me the haunted bedroom.’
‘You’ll be all right. You’ll have Archie.’
‘Not in my bedroom, Uncle Rodney, what are you suggesting? Drakes don’t take such liberties with their fiancees. Couldn’t I take Alexander – not in my bedroom, I mean – just for support and to bring me morning tea. I don’t like that housemaid with the moles.’
‘He wouldn’t go, after seeing the ghost. Anyway,’ said Rodney, ‘he’ll want to be with that woman of his. I daresay he has her here when I’m away, but I don’t enquire. I’d rather not know.’
‘Aren’t you interested?’ Joy asked. ‘Don’t you wonder about her, and what she’s like?’
‘Not particularly, so long as she doesn’t take Alexander from me.’
‘What if
I
take him,’ Joy said, ‘when I’m married? I bet you he’d come. Alexander’ – as he came in with the next course – ‘wouldn’t you like to come with me when I’m Mrs Drake, and fold the napkins into boats like no one else can do?’
‘No thank you, Miss Joy,’ he said chillily. He knew they had been talking about him.
‘There,’ said Rodney triumphantly. ‘I knew he wouldn’t leave me, would you, Alexander?’
‘It isn’t so much that, Sir Rodney,’ Alexander said, still chill, ‘but I shouldn’t care to work anywhere but in a flat since I had that distress with my legs last winter.’
‘Alexander!’ cried Joy. ‘I never knew that. Why didn’t you tell me? Did you know, Uncle Rodney? What was wrong with Alexander’s legs?’
‘My dear …’ Rodney laid his palm on the table and waggled the middle finger as a sign that one did not discuss the varicose
veins of the man who was handing you asparagus. She still had these occasional lapses that had to be corrected.
‘Well, what happened when the lift was out of order?’ pursued Joy, whose interest in Alexander’s legs was a legacy from the Portobello Road, where the mention of bad legs made women suck their teeth and click their tongues and crowd together in the shop. ‘You must have been very brave, walking upstairs without a murmur.’
‘I was,’ said Alexander candidly.
A little draught came under the door and reminded Joy of Astwick. ‘Oh Alexander,’ she begged, ‘I wish you’d come with me this week-end. Archie – that is, Mr Drake – ’ with a glance at Rodney, ‘will be glad, because some of the staff are away on holiday. You could help with the wines, or play with that knife machine; you’d like that. There must be a bedroom on the ground floor you could have. There’s an absolute forest of rooms down there, not that I’ve been allowed to go beyond that screen much. Do come. You might quite enjoy it – a breath of country air.’
‘I am promised for Friday evening, Miss Joy.’
‘Come on Saturday then; it wouldn’t matter. They’ve got a dinner-party that night. I shall be terrified. I might have to sit next to a bishop like last time, and if I can see you pottering about with those monstrous entrée dishes it will feel more homey. Think, I shall be married soon, and you won’t see much more of me. Do, Alexander. The week-end will be much more fun if we can discuss it together afterwards.’
Although he disapproved of these undignified entreaties, Rodney could not help smiling. He knew his Alexander, You could never make him do anything against his will, except by a definite order, and then he got his own back by doing it subtly wrong. He sat back contentedly, licking buttery fingers, a comfortable man of possessions, among which he counted Alexander.
Joy sat forward, dangling a forgotten asparagus, her eyes catching the light like sapphires, soft lips parted, the line of her tilted neck graceful as a flower though firm with youth.
Alexander studied her gravely. ‘I could consider it, Miss Joy,’ he said at last,
‘if,
as future mistress of Astwick Hall, you could
see your way to arranging for the improvement in the quality of the gravy in the servants’ hall.’
Archie drove her up to Astwick on Friday evening, arriving at tea-time, as you were supposed to do when going for the weekend, whether you were family or not. On the way, they had lunch in Oxford with a friend of Archie’s called Jock Spooner, who should have left two years ago, but had not been encouraged to pass his Finals since the University needed his leg breaks.
They had cutlets and peas and trifle in Jock’s rooms, and Jock had thoughtfully provided a noted conversationalist for Joy, so that he and Archie could talk about cricket. The noted conversationalist, having told Joy about the stream of consciousness in some book of which she had heard, got caught up with the other two in college talk and did not earn his lunch. Joy did not mind; she was not feeling very well. She was feeling the fatigue that most engagements bring in the limbo between stepping out of one life and into another. You don’t belong to yourself any more, but you don’t yet belong to the other person.
She took her coffee over to the window seat and watched young men strolling across the grass and thought of her sons coming to Oxford. Jock’s friends dropped in, admired Joy in a callow way, but finding her lackadaisical, soon drifted away to the group round the table. Archie came and fetched her when he was ready, and took her away to Astwick as if she were a parcel.