Love in Our Time (21 page)

There was the sound of something being put down outside and the door opened. The young man who came in was evidently very much at home. His coat was off and the sleeves were rolled back as far as the expanding links would let them go. Across the neat black waistcoat ran an imitation gold and platinum watch chain. As Gerald looked at him he remembered that he was contemplating someone who was a very bright light indeed at the local Co-op.

“Hallo, old man,” he said. “Excuse shirt sleeves.”

“How-do-you-do?” Gerald answered.

“Have a spot of bother with the car?” the young man continued.

Gerald nodded.

“I expect you feel like a drink,” Fred said understandingly.
“I kept this back in case you turned up.”

He brought out a bottle that had been hidden at the back of the dresser and poured out a glass of sherry. Gerald drank it gratefully. He was rather surprised that there should be sherry in the house. In his day he remembered it only on special occasions like Christmas. And then he reflected that in a sense
this
was a special occasion, too; a very special one. All the same, he wondered how Mrs. Sneyd in the grip of widowhood had been able to afford it.

Over the second glass of sherry, Fred went out of his way to be friendly. And then the horrifying significance of it slowly broke upon Gerald. Far worse than treating him as a superior, Fred was treating him as an equal. Through the bright, rimless pebbles of his glasses he was regarding him with the understanding eye of someone who, too, in the affairs of life was on the up and up.

Gerald finally managed to break away and rejoin the party in the front room. It had thinned out considerably since he had last been there. It was as though his arrival had been the climax of the afternoon; and, having seen him, they had all left happy. There was now only a little group standing over by the mantelpiece.

“Well, Brother,” said one of them, “are you satisfied?”

Mr. Biddle shook the hand that was offered to him.

“Couldn't have been better,” he said. “It was a credit to the Order.”

“I told you, you could rely on us,” the fellow Mariner replied.

“One of the most successful funerals I've ever attended,” the small man on the outside of the group remarked. “Easily one of the most successful.”

“Must have been a great comfort to the widow,” the first Mariner went on. “She's got our Brother here to thank for this.”

Mr. Biddle shifted his feet.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “Things like this usually work out somehow.”

After a final round of handshakes and salutes, the last of the party broke up and went into the hall in search of hats and umbrellas. Mr. Biddle went out with them to superintend; he was the natural host in any company.

As soon as he returned, Gerald buttoned up his coat and began looking businesslike.

“Well, I suppose I ought to be saying good-bye, too,” he said briskly. “Have you seen Mrs. Sneyd?”

Mr. Biddle jerked his thumb towards the ceiling. “She's upstairs resting,” he said. “I think it all became just a bit too much for her.”

“I'll go up and find her,” Gerald replied. “Think I shall disturb her?”

Mr. Biddle seemed almost shocked. “You're one of the family, aren't you?” he said.

Gerald went upstairs cautiously. If Mrs. Sneyd were resting he did not want to disturb her. The last thing he looked forward to was having to comfort an hysterical woman. But Mrs. Sneyd was not asleep. She was sitting alone in her untidy bedroom staring blankly in front of her. She started when Gerald approached her.

“Have they gone?” she asked.

“There's only Mr. Biddle there now,” he told her.

She got up from the sagging wicker chair and went over to the dressing-table to powder her face. The
powder she used was a dead, chalk white. It gave her a blanched, dissipated appearance.

“I've got to be going, too,” Gerald said gently.

For no reason at all she began crying again.

“I know,” she said. “It's all over now.”

When he went over to kiss her she clung to him. She rubbed great smears of the white powder into the shoulder of his coat as she nestled her head there.

“Don't you cry,” he said awkwardly. “It'll all come right in the end.”

“It'll come out all right if they let it,” she answered.

“What—what do you mean?” he asked.

“It's the bills,” she said. “They've started to come in. I knew they would as soon as people heard about Stan.”

He paused. This was the moment he had been waiting for; the moment which, ever since that night in St. Martin's Hospital, he had foreseen was coming.

“How—how much are they?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said miserably. “They've gone on and on Ever since Stan had to leave the Bon Marché.”

He tried to harden himself and behave brutally.

“What'll happen if you leave them?” he asked.

But Mrs. Sneyd saw through him.

“They'll go for the furniture,” she said. “That's what they'll do.”

The remains of the wad of notes which Mr. Plymme had given him made a hard, crisp ridge in his pocket; he could feel them pressing into him as he stood there.

“How much do you want?” he asked sadly.

“Could you spare five pounds?” Mrs. Sneyd asked timidly.

Spare it! The damn silliness of the question annoyed
him. But it was his own fault. He had asked her and she had told him. Those five pounds represented the cost of making the front room into a nursery and the next instalment on the Majestophone—and it was all to go into the cash tills of a lot of miserable little Tadford tradesmen. Besides, Fred was on the spot. He could leave him to keep up the high name of the Co-op the next time the local shopkeepers became really insistent. But he unbuttoned his coat and removed the wad of notes. Carefully and deliberately he peeled off five clean one-pound notes

Mrs. Sneyd's hand closed over them.

“There's one thing more,” she admitted in a low voice. “Just one more thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's all the stuff for to-day.”

“What stuff?”

“The drinks and things.”

“Well, what about it?”

“It's—it's got to be paid for.”

“Well, then I should pay for it while you've got the money.”

“I can't”

“But what about that five pounds?”

“That's for the other bills. I told you they won't wait any longer.”

Gerald buttoned his coat up. “I can't afford another penny,” he said. “Not another penny.”

“But they only let me have it because I said we'd pay for it to-night.” Mrs. Sneyd was weeping loudly again by now. “I told them about you. I said you were coming.”

“I've done all I can,” he said.

It was at that moment that Gerald heard a cry behind him. He turned round and there was young Violet standing there. Her face was scarlet and her mouth was wide open ready to cry. She had witnessed everything. She had crept upstairs to catch one last glimpse of her Prince Charming before he went away again and she had seen—this. Rows were nothing new to her; as money had gradually grown tighter and tighter in the family she had been present at many scenes when Mrs. Sneyd's impatience with her sick, useless husband had culminated in words. But this was different. This was the collapse of a whole civilisation. She felt utterly abandoned in the world. Pushing back her hair from her eyes she ran forward and flung herself into her mother's arms.

The resemblance between them had often been commented on. As they hugged each other in a frenzy of devotion the spectacle was that of Mrs. Sneyd bending forward and embracing her own childhood.

Something inside Gerald weakened.

“How much is it?” he asked.

There was silence for a moment. Then the answer came.

“It's thirty-two and six,” Mrs. Sneyd told him in a strangled, gulping voice. “You can see the bill if you want to.”

He pulled out the envelope containing the notes—there were fewer of them by now: they scarcely bulged the pocket at all—and extracted a pound note and one for ten shillings. He searched in his pocket and finally produced a half a crown as well.

“There you are,” he said, and put the money down on the end of the bed.

His eye caught young Violet's as he spoke. Her expression troubled him. She was gazing at him with overwhelming adoration. He knew that if he waited even a second longer she would come running forward and kiss him. Without another word, he turned on his heel and left them.

At the foot of the stairs Mr. Biddle was standing.

“Bit of trouble upstairs?” he asked.

Gerald shrugged his shoulders.

“Are you coming?” he asked.

“Better make sure I'm not wanted here,” he said.

“O.K.,” said Gerald.

They were still standing there when Mrs. Sneyd's voice, weak and tremulous, was heard from the front bedroom.

“Don't leave me yet, Mr. Biddle,” she said. “I can't bear it here alone.”

Mr. Biddle finally got away after lunch the next day. Mrs. Sneyd was reluctant to let him go even then. She did everything in her power to make him comfortable and got young Violet to wait on him as well. During those eighteen hours Mr. Biddle lived like a rajah. He was pampered. He had only to raise a finger to have the paper or the matches brought to him; cups of tea, with extra lumps of sugar in the saucer, appeared at his elbow as if by magic. And the atmosphere became particularly cosy and enfolding after young Violet had been sent to bed. Elsie had left on Fred's arm, and Mrs. Sneyd and Mr. Biddle were left alone to entertain each other. Lily, after hanging about self-consciously by the window had grabbed her beret and gone out with someone.

“I expect you know what it's like to feel lonely, too,” Mrs. Sneyd remarked, fiddling with some sewing she had brought down with her.

Mr. Biddle nodded.

“I know the feeling,” he said. “I had it all right, after Mrs. B. passed on.”

“You keep on remembering it when you're not thinking about anything,” Mrs. Sneyd continued.

“It gets better,” said Mr. Biddle slowly. “That's the one comfort.”

Mrs. Sneyd sniffed and began dabbing at her face with her handkerchief.

“But I'm being selfish,” she said. “It isn't fair, expecting you to be around here while I'm like this.”

“It's not your fault,” Mr. Biddle assured her. “We all get like it.”

There was a pause.

“Do you play draughts?” Mrs. Sneyd asked at length.

Mr. Biddle uncrossed his legs. “Thanks,” he said. “I'd like a game of draughts.”

“Stan used to like a game, too,” she said.

She found the pieces and they moved a small table up between them. Mrs. Sneyd played badly and disjointedly, interspersing the game with little snatches of conversation.

“It's Violet I mind about,” she said. “I think a girl needs a man in the house just as much as a boy does.”

“Huffed you,” said Mr. Biddle. “That gives me another King.”

Mrs. Sneyd looked surprised. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I'm not thinking.”

There was a pause; then she spoke again.

“It's just the two of us now, you see. Lily can stay with Elsie.”

Mr. Biddle lit his pipe and removed two more of her pieces. It wasn't like a game of draughts at all; it was slaughter. But it was obvious that only one player was giving his mind to the game. The other was gazing out of the window with a distant, distracted look in her eyes.

“I suppose it was really my fault in a way for marrying someone so much older than myself,” she said almost as though speaking to herself. “You see I was in my twenties at the time and Stan was forty-three. I'd been through it once before, remember.”

Her hands were in her lap and she was apparently oblivious of Mr. Biddle. When she spoke she seemed to be thinking aloud.

“I shall have to get a post as housekeeper or something,” she said. “There are plenty of widowers who advertise.”

Through his own cloud of smoke Mr. Biddle sat back and looked at her. He could see now that she must have been good looking in her time. The black dress she was wearing set off the bundle of her fair hair—it was of the indefinite, ungreyable kind—that she wore coiled in the nape of her neck.

She had added a touch of colour to her cheeks and she no longer even looked miserable. There was a new expression of helpless complacency on her countenance as though the events of the preceding week had passed completely over her and left her untouched. The corners of her mouth, in particular, no longer drooped; they were set in hopeful, optimistic fashion. It was almost as if she were planning something.

Mr. Biddle was looking at her so hard that he almost jumped when she spoke to him.

“I don't know how you're placed yourself,” she began, “but I was just wondering … ”

Mr. Biddle jumped up and knocked his newly-filled pipe out on the fire grate.

“I reckon it must be about bedtime,” he said. “We've had a tiring couple of days.”

The house seemed unnaturally quiet with Gerald away, quiet and vaguely unfriendly. Alice began to imagine things, so that she had to get up and go into the kitchen to make sure that there wasn't someone standing there on the little square of concrete outside. It was nerves of course; the result of being alone all day. And she wasn't the only one who had got like that. There was a young, married woman with two children up the road in Collet Close—the case had been in the papers—who had put her head into a gas oven for no reason at all, except that she said she was tired of never seeing anyone except the tradesmen. Suburban Neurosis, the Coroner had called it; Alice had understood what that woman must have
felt
. She knew that it was possible to live within a hundred yards of a bus stop and still feel like the last woman on a lost continent.