Authors: Penelope Lively
When the vicar had at last made an awkward departure Sydney fetched the dustpan and brush and tidied up the carpet. It was gone twelve, and the rain looked set in. He went into the kitchen to put a couple of potatoes on for lunch.
There was another knock at the door. With a sigh, Sydney turned the tap off.
Shirley Bryan was standing there. She had a ravaged look to her, disconcerting, more blowsy even than usual. She said, “I've come to ask you a favor, Mr. Porter.”
He led her through to the lounge, where she would not sit but stood at the french window looking out at the garden. Words tumbled forth. Sydney, in embarrassment and apprehension, sat looking at the floor.
Her husband had left her this note. Another woman. He was clearing out; best thing. Sorry and all that.
She stood at the window, picking at the curtain with her fingernails. “… Just stuck there all anyhow with some bills and stuff so I didn't see it till halfway through the morning … Shock of my life … Rang the office but they said he's off north for three days on an assignment, wouldn't you just know it, they must have had it all worked out…”
Sydney cleared his throat and said something about a cup of tea. She ignored him.
“He says he's in love. In love! Fat chance I get to fall in love,” she went on, savagely now. “Stuck here at home day in day out. Have an affair yourself, that's what they tell you in the magazines, show him you're attractive too. How do I get to have an affair, I'd like to know? When do I ever meet any blokes?” She ripped a loose thread from the curtain and twisted it round her finger. Sydney
cleared his throat again and lined up the edges of the books on the table, to be appearing to do something. He felt as though some errant force were at large in the house—fire or flood or rampant rot. He wished she would go; he wanted no part of this. It was hard on her, yes, but he didn't see what he could do and other people's personal troubles are their own affair. Favor, she'd said. What favor? He shifted nervously in the chair.
“…So I rang my sister at her office and I'm going to go up to London and stay with her for a couple of days, I can't stand it here all on my own in the house and she's got this flat, I can think things out a bit, see what I'm going to do.”
Sydney nodded.
“But there's Martin, see.”
Sydney looked up in alarm.
“…So what I was wondering was could you do me a big favor—just keep an eye on him for a day or two till I get back. I can't take him, there's not room and anyway it'd be a bind, he'd get bored stiff and I want to be on my own. He'll be at school all day. It's just for him to know he can pop in here in the evenings a bit, see? I'd be ever so grateful. You needn't have him to sleep here, it's just so he knows there's someone handy if anything goes wrong.”
When at last she had left, the smell of her cigarette hung in the room. He opened windows, emptied the ashtray, straightened the mangled curtain. There was a sense of invasion; the privacy of the house had been violated as tangibly as by the breaking of the hall window. In agitation, Sydney went into the kitchen to make himself something for dinner; in the process he smashed a plate. But what could he have said? No, Mrs. Bryan, look after your own
child, you've no business going off leaving a boy of that age on his own. He couldn't have said that. He'd had no option but to do what he did.
The boy didn't show up till nearly six. When he came he made Sydney jump, appearing like that suddenly at the french window. He must have climbed over the garden fence. He said, “There was this note in the house.”
For a wild moment Sydney thought he was referring to the husband's note, then he realized the mother must have left another. She'd not even waited for the lad to come home, then.
“She said to come over here if I wanted.”
Sydney offered a meal, but the boy had already eaten. “She left a pie. One of those frozen steak and kidneys you heat up. I had that. I'm not hungry. Can I look at your telly?”
Sydney, who would not normally have switched on at this time, nodded. Martin settled on the sofa, his knees hunched up to his chin; a peaky-looking lad, Sydney thought, too pale, and those large gray sober eyes staring out. Presently, he left him there and went out to spray the tomatoes.
When he came back the program had changed. Martin said, “D'you watch this series, Mr. Porter—it's good.” Sydney sat down; silly stuff, not something he'd have bothered with in the normal way, but after a minute he found himself smiling. The boy was grinning away; later, they laughed out loud, together.
At the end, Martin got up and switched off. “There's nothing now.” He looked at Sydney, expectantly, it seemed. Sydney cleared his throat and looked away; it was
only seven-thirty. What time did a boy that age go to bed?
“She didn't say when my dad's coming back. He's taking me to the Air Show next week. Monday and Tuesday, it is.”
“Ah.”
“Monday we'll go, I should think.”
Sydney got up jerkily and went over to the sideboard. He took out the biscuit tin and offered it. The boy chose a cream wafer. After a moment he said politely, “I like chocolate ones best, actually.” Then, “I watch you sometimes when you're digging your garden.”
“Ah,” said Sydney, again.
“You don't always know I'm there, I hide in the bushes.”
Sydney offered the biscuit tin.
“No, thanks,” said Martin. “It's not spying,” he added, after a moment. “It's just there's a place I use to hide in. If you don't like it. I won't do it.”
Sydney looked at the boy. In ten years of neighborhood, he realized, he had barely exchanged a dozen words with him before. He said, “I don't mind. That's all right.”
“I like your garden. I like the way you've got everything in rows.”
“You've got to keep things under control, if you're doing veg.”
“My dad can't be bothered with gardening. Nor my mum.”
“No,” said Sydney.
They sat in silence for a while. Sydney got up and went
to the corner cupboard. He got out a pack of cards. “Like to learn how to play rummy?”
“O.K.,” said Martin with alacrity.
The boy picked up the game with ease. They had a couple of hands and then Sydney remembered the card tricks he'd known years ago. Martin crouched over the table in absorption. “Cor … That's good … Can I have a go…”
Suddenly it was nine o'clock. Martin said, “Shall we have the news?” Sydney got up. “You switch on. I'll make us a cup of cocoa.”
In the kitchen, he stood looking out at the houses round the Green: each an island unto itself, each with the cozy inhabited glow of windows. He went back into the lounge and said, “There's a bed upstairs in the back room. You could stop there tonight if you like.”
The boy's face lit up. “Could I?” he said.
Later, Sydney lay awake. He had not shared his roof with someone else for thirty-five years. For thirty-five years he had gone to bed, and risen again the next day, alone in a house. There was total silence: the boy might not have been there, he must have slept at once. Nevertheless his presence was absolute; it lent another dimension to the place. Sydney, disturbed, lay considering in the darkness, hearing the church clock strike midnight, and then the quarter.
* * *
George Radwell, making an entry in his desk diary, saw the year reach ahead in a progression of weddings and christenings, thick over the next few weeks, tailing off gradually into a barer autumn and winter. Funerals, of
course, were disobliging, giving less notice. Backward, the pattern repeated itself, clustered around weekends, weekdays yawning empty, a spate at Christmas and Easter and bank holidays. An endless vista of smiling—or sober—faces; of people wearing clothes in which they did not feel quite themselves; of occasions detached from the normal for others but which, for him, were routine. “Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife … In the midst of life we are in death …” It had occurred to him once, staring down at the absorbed faces of yet another bridal couple, that his was an eerie presence at crucial moments in other lives: essential, yet irrelevant. There he stood, holding prayer book or cup of tea or glass of champagne, proclaiming or looking on or politely responding, while other people had emotions. The thought made him uneasy, lingering after the end of that particular ceremony; he had seen himself for a moment, walking back alone to the vicarage while chattering parties piled into cars.
Two weddings in succession on Saturday; a christening on Sunday. He turned to the post: electricity bill, brochures, church correspondence, a letter from his mother, passing a tetchy old age in Scarborough. She wrote on alternate Sundays. This letter, like most, dwelt on weather, rising prices, some domestic worry to do with plumbing or wiring, and included a mild swipe at George's deficiencies. A neighbor had dropped in flaunting a visiting grandchild: “A lovely little fellow, what a pleasure he must be to them, well I suppose I must be grateful for what I've got. I'm doing you a gray pullover for your birthday, the same as last year's, as the elbows will be out by now the way you wear them.”
It looked as though this line was to supplant her running
commentary on his unmarried state which, over the years, had shifted from coy remarks about wedding bells to petulant criticism of his failure to “settle down with a nice girl.” He had been a disappointment to her, he realized; mediocrity in childhood had been excusable, quite a good thing indeed—“a good, quiet boy,” “no trouble, we've a lot to be thankful for,” “steady, not one of those temperamental ones.” But lack of performance in adult life was another thing; fortnightly, from Scarborough, she carped on.
He put the letter aside. The back door slammed with the force of a bomb blast, indicating the arrival of Mrs. Tanner. George, hastily closing the desk top, prepared to flee to the church. Cornered in the hall, he had to listen to a protracted account of the death of a relative; through the window he saw the white mini, with Mrs. Paling in the driving seat, which prompted the usual unsettling feelings. “You dropped your hankie, Vicar,” said Mrs. Tanner heavily. “Put it for the wash, shall I? It's very soiled.”
When he got outside the mini was on the other side of the Green, stopped now, the window wound down, Mrs. Paling talking to Sydney Porter. George, crossing the road, heading for the lych-gate, prepared and executed a wave of greeting (nonchalant, a little preoccupied, the gesture of a man with concerns of his own …} which neither of them saw.
* * *
“Poor little blighter,” said Clare.
Sydney, awkward and slightly agitated, continued. “It's not that I'd choose to go round talking about it, I'm not a one for gossip.”
“I never thought you were.”
“It's the question of this Air Show.”
“I see the problem. It would be difficult for you because you haven't got a car…”
Sydney nodded.
“…Whereas I have and as you've rightly guessed I'm taking my own offspring anyway—worse luck, I can't think of anything I need less than a day with a lot of roaring aeroplanes—and yes, of course I'll take him. A pleasure.”
“It'll be appreciated,” said Sydney stiffly.
“Well, it won't be much of a substitute, but it'll be better than nothing, I daresay.” There was a pause. Clare scowled at the car windscreen.
“What charming people. It makes the blood boil, doesn't it?”
Sydney cleared his throat and looked away.
“Sorry. I just meant … Anyway, it's good of you to keep an eye on him.”
“He's not a bother.”
“Let me know if there's anything I…”
“That's all right,” said Sydney quickly. “We'll manage.”
Clare looked at him reflectively. “She—the mother—she said she'd be back on Tuesday?”
“Thereabouts.”
“Hmn. Well, I'm glad you mentioned it. Tell Martin we're planning to have a picnic lunch on the way and make a day of it, being as it's their half term holiday.”
* * *
They had moved from rummy to whist, and thence to a game of Martin's unfamiliar to Sydney called “Attack!”
Cardboard armies, French and English (an archaism that struck neither of them as curious} confronted one another, hierarchies of generals and colonels and lieutenants and sappers and the all-powerful mine that could put an end to anyone, even the commander-in-chief. “Attack!” “Private.” “I'm a major. Your go.” “Attack!” “Mine!” “Bother, that was my last general.” They watched the telly. Sydney made a treacle tart, resuscitating a long-forgotten skill. Under a watchful eye, Martin learned to wield a hoe, to distinguish a carrot from a weed. From time to time, he drifted back to his own house, returning on one occasion to say, “My mum telephoned.” “Ah.” “She said she'd been trying on and off for ages, she said she was getting ever so worried.” “Did she, now?” said Sydney coolly. “Anyway, she said thank you ever so much for letting me come over here and it's O.K. if I go on sleeping in your house. She said she may stop up in London with Auntie Judy till next week, since I'm getting on fine on my own.” After a moment Martin added, “She didn't know about Dad taking me to the Air Show, he's gone off somewhere for the firm, she doesn't know when he'll be back.” “Ah.” “He forgot, I suppose.” “I been thinking,” said Sydney. “There's that old shed far side of the potting-shed that I don't use, we could clear that out and you could have it for somewhere of your own, keep your junk in it, like.”
* * *
“I'm happy!” cried Anna. “I'm so happy I could
scream!
”
“Let's scream, then.”
“Goon, Thomas!”
“You first.”
Anna gave a ladylike shriek. “Now you.”
“Maybe not,” said Clare. “I might upset the cows.”
The picnic site, unlike most picnic sites, had indeed turned out a perfect selection. It was by the river, near the spot at which Clare had seen the Red Devils. They sat on luxuriant grass intricately woven with wild flowers; the water, a few yards away, was dappled with light that filtered down through alders and willows. There was birdsong and faint mysterious ploppings along the river-bank, and a smell of hay.
“Can we start the ice cream now?”
The flowers sparkled: yellow and blue and mauve and crisp white. Examined closely, at eye level in the forest of the grass, their arrangement was of wonderful complexity, a labyrinth of growth, stems twisting and spiraling, swarming under and above, an anarchic but ordered world in which everything struggled for light and air and achieved a mindless perfection in the process: the glint of buttercups against a misty undergrowth of speedwell, a bright tangle of stitchwort pierced by mauve pinnacles of bugloss. Elaborate, disorderly, and beautiful.