Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (14 page)

Mrs. Molesworth nearly lost her head, recovered herself in time, apologised by innuendo, and crept back disconsolately to Christopher and bed.

The night passed most wretchedly.

In the morning poor young Petterboy cornered his hostess and repeated his requests of the night before. But the sage was departing by the 11.12 and Mrs. Molesworth was driving with him to the station. In that moment of her triumph the diamonds seemed relatively unimportant to Elvira Molesworth, who had inherited the Cribbage fortune a year before. Indeed, she kissed poor young Petterboy and said it really didn’t matter, and hadn’t they had a wonderful, wonderful week-end? And that he must come down again some time soon.

The Feisons said good-bye to the sage, and as Mrs. Molesworth was going with him, made their adieux to her as well. As the formalities had been accomplished there seemed no point in staying, and Christopher saw them off in their car, with poor young Petterboy leading the way in his.

As he was standing on the lawn waving somewhat perfunctorily to the departing cars, the post arrived. One letter for his wife bore the crest of the Doctor’s hotel, and Christopher, with one of those intuitions which made him such a successful husband, tore it open.

It was quite short, but in the circumstances, wonderfully enlightening:

Dear Madam,

In going through Dr. Koo Fin’s memoranda, I find to my horror that he promised to visit you this week-end. I know you will forgive Dr. Koo Fin when you hear that he never takes part in social occasions. As you know, his arduous work occupies his entire time. I know it is inexcusable of me not to have let you know before now, but it is only a moment since I discovered that the Doctor had made the engagement.

I do hope his absence has not put you to any inconvenience, and that you will pardon this atrocious slip.

I have the honour to remain, Madam,

Yours most apologetically,

Lo Pei Fu,

Secretary.

P.S. The Doctor should have written himself, but, as you know, his English is not good. He begs to be reminded to you and hopes for your forgiveness.

As Christopher raised his eyes from the note his wife returned. She stopped the car in the drive and came running across the lawn towards him.

“Darling, wasn’t it wonderful?” she said, throwing herself into his arms with an abandonment she did not often display to him. “What’s in the post?” she went on, disengaging herself. Christopher slipped the letter he had been reading into his pocket with unobtrusive skill.

“Nothing, my dear,” he said gallantly. “Nothing at all,” He was amazingly fond of his wife. Mrs. Molesworth wrinkled her white forehead. “Darling,” she said, “now about my jewellery. Wasn’t it too odious for such a thing to happen when that dear, sweet old man was here: what shall we do?”

Christopher drew her arm through his own. “I think, my dear,” he said firmly, “you’d better leave all that to me. We mustn’t have a scandal.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Molesworth, her eyes growing round with alarm. “Oh, no; that would spoil everything.”

In a first class compartment on the London train, the elderly Chinese turned over the miscellaneous collection of jewellery which lay in a large silk handkerchief on his knee. His smile was child-like, bland and faintly wondering. After a while he folded the handkerchief over its treasure and placed the package in his breast pocket.

Then he leaned back against the upholstery and looked out of the window. The green undulating landscape was pleasant. The fields were neat and well tilled. The sky was blue, the sunlight beautiful. It was a lovely land.

He sighed and marvelled in his heart that it could be the home of a race of cultivated barbarians to whom, providing that height, weight and age were relatively the same, all Chinese actually did look alike.

Before Miss Amber died, she lived for eight or nine years in a small darkish room with a very high ceiling at the back of the dilapidated house where we students had lodgings.

She was a compact and tidy little body, so exquisitely happy that you were instantly aware of it if you so much as passed her on the stairs or brushed by her in the dank, unpainted hall.

She was sixty-one or two when I knew her, and she earned a small weekly wage in a coal office in a side street. It was one of those London backwaters which seem to have been left over from the stuffy intimacy of the last century.

Every evening at a quarter to six she came hurrying down the street, her long black coat, which she wore both in winter and summer, flapping in the wind. She usually carried three carrier bags, one brown and two white ones, on these occasions; and she would pant upstairs with them, fit her key in the scratched yellow door and disappear into her small high-ceilinged cell until ten minutes past eight in the morning, when she would trot out again to the coal office, plump and smiling and utterly content.

On Sunday mornings she turned out her room, leaving the door wide open, so that as we came by we could see that grim, clean prison which was twilit even in the summer because the blank wall of the house next door was considerably too near her window.

On Sunday afternoons she shut the door and was not seen again until ten minutes past eight on Monday morning, when she hurried out to work once more.

We were art students then. There were about a dozen of us scattered over the house, all very noisy, young and traditionally poor. We accepted Miss Amber as part of the landscape.

I was the first of our gang to become aware of her as a person. A series of late afternoon lectures decreed that I should arrive at the tube station an hour later than usual on two days of the week and my walk home led me past the multiple store at the precise moment that Miss Amber came out with the largest and last of her two white bags.

Naturally we walked along together and she chatted affably the whole way in her soft high voice, which always gave me the uncomfortable feeling that it was very seldom used.

She was neither brusquely rude nor embarrassingly frank, which I have since discovered are the two more usual peculiarities of the very lonely people of the world. She talked very quietly and without affectation of the ordinary things of life, revealing a store of unexpected information on all sorts of subjects.

I found her a most delightful and comforting companion. She was wise, sophisticated without being worldly, intelligent, balanced and informed. I began to look out for her neat figure with anticipation.

Now and again I was tempted to confide in her some of my own more pressing problems and I found her not only sympathetic but also helpful and sane in her advice, which was unusual in my experience.

Our bi-weekly walks had gone on for a couple of months before it occurred to me to wonder at this remarkable contentment of hers, this strange unfed fulfilment.

It was only when she chanced to say one day that she had no friends or relations that I realised she had no acquaintances or business associates either, and, moreover, never seemed to have had any, and the woman confronted me as a phenomenon.

Once I was aware of this she worried me as the unexpected has always worried me, inspiring a passionate curiosity I have never been able to control.

Miss Amber talked, thought, and felt like a woman who was in the midst of an interesting family life with friends, hobbies and objects of affection to absorb and interest her. Yet I knew she had none of these things and, as far as I could see, had never had any of them. I began to pump her shamelessly.

She was not exactly reticent, but she was shy. The first glimmer came to me when she had referred in the course of conversation to a piece of society gossip some three months old. It had been a fairly common rumour, but not much had appeared in print, and as a young woman very conscious of living in the knowledgeable set I was rather surprised to find that she knew more than I did.

“That’s interesting,” I said. ‘Where did you hear that?”

She hesitated and frowned.

“I’m not quite sure,” she said. “Could it have been on the radio?”

“Hardly,” I said and laughed, but the word had given me a clue. “You listen in a lot, do you? I never hear a radio in your room.”

Her face lit up.

“I listen all the time,” she said. “I’ve got earphones. They are very comfortable. As soon as I’ve had my supper I get into bed and pop them on and I listen until I go to sleep. I don’t know what I’d do without my radio. It’s such a wonderful thing. I’m never lonely now.”

“You’ve been lonely, then?” I demanded with all the brutal avidity of the collector.

“Oh yes,” she said and sighed. “Oh yes. Three years ago, before I got my radio. I was very lonely then. I had no one to talk to at all. I never got a new point of view. It was terrible, like being shut outside a house, you know.”

“You hear talks and music and things, don’t you?” I inquired then.

She was dubious.

“Not much music,” she admitted finally. “I don’t understand music very well. I hear the old songs, of course. I like the talks and I like the announcer best, when he tells you things.”

I tried to press her further because I thought she must have confused the announcer with some chatty commentator on current affairs. We had reached the gate by that time and she was in a hurry to get back to her bed and her earphones.

The next time I saw her, however, I continued my rather vulgar investigations. On this occasion I found her in more communicative mood.

“Last night he was tremendously interesting; they all were,” she said. “It was like going home, it really was. The children, too. They don’t often have children, but these were charming. They sang and said their pieces and afterwards I heard them playing games.”

I thought I understood and permitted myself to get a little sentimental over the spectacle of this lonely little woman listening in to some programme for children. Unconsciously she added to my mental picture by remarking placidly:

“It was my caramel night, too. I did enjoy it.”

I suppose I looked startled, for she blushed and laughed.

“I have a little treat every night when I’m listening in,” she said. “Sometimes a cup of milk cocoa, sometimes caramels, and sometimes a cigarette. Oh, I do myself very well. I have a lovely time. They tell you to.”

I stared at her stupidly.

“Who do?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“The people who broadcast. Not all of them of course, but sometimes somebody slips something homely like that in. I get little recipes, too. Different ways to cook my eggs and that sort of thing.”

My impression of Miss Amber underwent a change. I began to think I saw the straggling flaw in her sane, equable temperament. I thought she must take the programmes personally, considering each comedian’s aside or commentator’s little archness as a direct kindness to herself. In my youth and ignorance I thought it very sad.

Once she had got into the habit of talking to me about her one real interest in life, she seldom spoke of anything else.

The mysterious gossipy commentator, whom she insisted on referring to as “the announcer”, was easily her favourite. She was charming about him in a naive fashion that was half apologetic because she was neither a foolish nor unduly sentimental old woman.

“I would like to have had a son like that,” she said one day. “That
would
have given me pleasure.”

She told me the story of her life one day in a word or two, and the cold empty tragedy of it touched me and then rather excited me, because I was young enough to dramatise it.

“I was engaged for fourteen years,” she said. “We never had enough to marry on. He was such a dear good man. He had relations to support and he wouldn’t marry me until we could have a home and I could have a baby. We both wanted to have a baby, a son, you know.

“When I was thirty-five his mother died and we thought we might manage it, but there was a “flu epidemic and he caught it and went too. So I had to go on with my job. For years after that I was so lonely. I was right down once. I had silly ideas about leaving the gas on and that sort of thing. And then I got my radio set. I paid all I had for it, three pounds, but it’s never gone wrong and I’ve been really very happy ever since.”

She smiled at me and her round face was bright and contented, so that I saw she was telling the literal truth.

“It was extraordinarily cheap,” I said hastily. “Where did you get it?”

“I bought it off a man who came into the shop,” she said. “Quite a rough-looking person. I thought at first he’d cheated me, because it didn’t seem to work, but that was because I hadn’t turned the knobs properly. Suddenly I got it right and it’s been right ever since.”

I told the others about Miss Amber and because we were all very raw her tragedy had a fine fascination for us. We were a very ordinary set of young jugginses just going through that particular period of devdopment when conscious virtue is at its most priggish worst.

We decided, over modest mugs of cheap Chianti, that something must be done about the old woman. At this distance I do not see why, exactly. Miss Amber was certainly a good deal happier than we were, or at least much more consistently so.

Mercifully Miss Amber was unaware of our interest. She did not need our pity and she did not notice it. She had her own amusement.

At the height of our excitement the idea of the new set was born. Someone pointed out that any radio set of three or four years of age must be pretty bad by modern standards, so we whipped round to buy Miss Amber a new one.

Finally we got it. It was a handy-sized set which could be plugged into the wall socket by her bed. We all got back early one evening, bribed the landlady to open the door of Miss Amber’s room, and had it all fixed up and blaring like a fairground organ by the time she came back from work.

I remember to this day that half proud, half apprehensive thrill which I for one experienced as we leant over the banisters and saw her coming down the lower hall.

I remember, too, her terrified expression as she realised the ghastly noise was coming from her own little sanctuary. But, as I have said, she was a wise, sane little body and when the turned and saw our solemn young faces and round, embarrassed but excited eyes, she played her part magnificently.