Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (13 page)

‘My nicest evening, I think, since Arthur died,” she said, as he helped her into her coat.

He opened the door into the area. A fine drizzle was falling without sound upon the dustbin lids and railings, and he fetched a rather broken umbrella, another relic from a former occupier.

‘It’s nothing much,’ he said, meaning the rain.

He took her arm, and guided her along the wet pave
ment, holding the umbrella over her and, under it, giving her little sidelong glances, as young people do the old, as if they wonder if they will collapse or crumble away at any moment.

A fresh cold smell came from the gardens – the rain on the sour grass, damping the grit and seeds blown down the paths, and the sharpness of all the new small leaves.

He saw her right up the steps and into the Claremont. She made quite a little stir, saying ‘good night’ and ‘thank you’ to him, and showing off rather like a child. The manager, happening to be there, greeted her cordially: Mrs Post stood waiting for the lift, after her dull evening, rolled-up knitting under her arm; and Mr Osmond was showing a captive American one-night guest the clipping of his letter to the
Evening News.

It was a splendid entrance Mrs Palfrey was able to make. Ludo, guessing this, blew her a kiss as he went back through the revolving doors.

In bliss she went to bed.

Ludo hurried back home to write up his notes.

F
ULL summer; and Mrs Arbuthnot left the Claremont. It was going downhill, she said. Trippery people coming at random. It was not the place she had once known. ‘We used to have bridge,’ she said wistfully. ‘A dowager countess stayed here.’ In truth, Mrs Arbuthnot had become incontinent, and in the nicest possible way, which in the circumstances could not be very nice, had been asked to make some other arrangement.

She was vague about her destination, mentioning a quiet hotel on the outskirts of London, which was in reality a nursing-home for elderly people, where she was to share a small bedroom, and so finish up her days. Her indefatigable sisters had found it for her, and much humiliation she had borne while they were doing so.

‘Shall have some peace at least,’ she said, surveying the Cromwell Road traffic from one of the chairs at: the top of the steps, waiting for her sisters to fetch her. Her cases stood in the vestibule. She had tears in her eyes.

‘May I visit you there?’ Mrs Palfrey asked on an impulse. She had come out to say good-bye, and help if she could.

Mrs Arbuthnot turned stiffly, but looked at Mrs Palfrey’s feet and not her face. ‘I can’t think that either of us would gain from that,’ she said.

She was filled with agony, and she spat it out where
she could. What she had been through, no one should ever know – those middle-of-the-night dreams of relieving herself, of finding after long searching a Ladies’ room in some mazy hotel – oh, the release of it! Only to wake up and find the bed saturated, and herself stiff and helpless. It could not go on, she knew. It had happened three times. A kind Irish chambermaid had tried to cover up for her; but the housekeeper found out in the end. Now someone must be paid to dry up after her; soon, not only that, but put on her shoes, get her up from her chair.

Mrs Post paused on her way out. She was wearing, in spite of the warm afternoon, her mock (and as far as Mrs Arbuthnot was concerned, her mocked
at)
fur coat of grey shaded stripes. If I were going to copy any kind of fur, Mrs Arbuthnot thought, consoling herself, it would not be squirrel.

‘Do let me have your address,’ said Mrs Post. ‘I can write you a newsy little letter now and again about all the goings-on here.’ She made the Claremont seem the very hub of life.

‘I will send it to you,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘If I find the hotel to my liking – enough to stay there, that is.’ She would never see or hear anything from any of them again. Her mind was made up to that.

Mrs Palfrey, still looking stern from the rudeness she had suffered, said good-bye in a formal voice and went back inside to write a letter to her daughter. There was an indefinable melancholy about Mrs Arbuthnot’s departure. Mrs Palfrey began to wonder if they had
been given the true reasons – if the move were not an enforced one for the sake of economy.

She sat down at the writing-table. There was only one sheet of Claremont paper in the drawer. The printed sheets were always rather pounced upon, and Mr Osmond was the worst culprit.

‘Dear Elizabeth,’ wrote Mrs Palfrey. She took her daughter’s latest letter from her handbag and re-read it, with pursed lips. It was about the bottling of gooseberries and the weights of salmon, about neighbours her mother had never met, and Scottish orgies she could not imagine. Up there, they were for ever coming home in the wee sma’ hours. Of course, they were known for their hardiness, Mrs Palfrey knew, and the farther south one comes the more that disappears; but Elizabeth and Ian were not young, and Elizabeth had been born in Tunbridge Wells, which could avail her nothing. She was not bred to Hogmanay, or dancing reels, or going out with the guns, but she had surrendered herself to it as if it were all she could ever have desired. Mrs Palfrey found this a strange reaction to a foreign country. For her part, only when she had been abroad, had she consciously thought, ‘I am English’. She had kept
that
barrier up, she proudly remembered now, pondering instead of writing. It had been her solace for homesickness, her defiance from fear, her affirmation of her origins. When she was young, it had seemed that nearly all the world was pink on her school atlas – ‘ours’, in fact. Nearly all ours! she had thought. Pink was the colour, and the word, of well-being, and of optimism.

To be born into it was the greatest luck. ‘I am in the pink. So glad to know you’ve settled in,’ had concluded her letter. As if I had just started at boarding-school, thought Mrs Palfrey. And it would have been her second term by now.

‘Thank you for your letter,’ she wrote. She paused. ‘I was interested to hear …’

There was a little commotion on the front steps and she went to one of the windows which looked down on them. She parted the net curtains slightly, as if watching a funeral go by. Mrs Arbuthnot was being helped down the steps and into an ancient Daimler.

I shall never see her again, Mrs Palfrey thought. There was nothing more to fear from that sharp tongue. Into the afternoon traffic Mrs Arbuthnot was driven away. She did not turn her head to see Mrs Post, standing at the top of the steps waving a handkerchief.

Summers, the hall porter, pocketing a florin, came back up the steps; and presently Mrs Post descended them, feeling suddenly at a loss, with no more errands to run for Mrs Arbuthnot.

‘… that Desmond has been visiting you,’ Mrs Palfrey, sitting down again, added to her letter. ‘It was nice that he could spare the time from his work.’ Rather catty, she thought; but let it go.

After all these years there was no communication with her only child. These letters between them were either a farce or a formality.

Mr Osmond came in and looked annoyed at the sight
of Mrs Palfrey sitting at the only writing-desk. He took up a magazine and fidgeted about.

‘Our company is sadly depleted,’ he observed.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mrs Palfrey agreed, looking up.

‘The so-called hotel is, in fact, a nursing-home, you know.’

‘Which so-called hotel?’

‘The one to which Mrs Arbuthnot has repaired. A nursing-home not of the first order, moreover. They will let her die there: as she deteriorates, they will not be bothered to get her out of bed.’

‘If this is true, we can be sure that Mrs Arbuthnot did not want us to know it,’ Mrs Palfrey said, in what Mr Osmond considered a priggish tone.

‘It
is
true,’ he said.

‘Did Mrs Arbuthnot herself tell you?’

‘No. Summers mentioned a forwarding address. It so happens that an old cousin of mine died there – at the Braemar. I visited her once or twice. I was not impressed by it. My wife …’ He had been going to speak of the superior nursing-home where
she
had died, but he could not go on. His face collapsed. He put his fingers to his moustache, then cast a glance inside his magazine.

‘Poor Mrs Arbuthnot! She must have been in far worse shape than one imagined,’ Mrs Palfrey said, feeling upset. So readily she forgave that earlier rudeness, everything.

Mr Osmond now looked pointedly at the letter she was writing, feeling it was time she put an end to it. ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted you,’ he said.

Mrs Palfrey bent her head, but she could not concentrate on her task with Mr Osmond hovering about. She wrote a little more – praised the weather, sent her kind regards to Ian – and finished – ‘Loving Mother’.

As she addressed the envelope, Mr Osmond watched her anxiously, hoping she would not begin another letter. But no, she stamped it and then rose. She would post it after tea, she said, amused by his impatience. As soon as the door closed after her, he hurried to the desk and opened the drawer. It was empty except for an old piece of blotting-paper. He slammed the drawer shut in great vexation, and strode off to the reception-desk, with ‘Dear Sir’ boiling in his mind, the beginnings of his letter half composed already – a furious complaint to the Postmaster-General, about delay sin mail deliveries, with instances and dates. The receptionist, under directions from the manager, handed him one sheet of paper, one envelope, taking them slowly from the stationery cupboard on which she then firmly turned the key.

Mrs Palfrey, having posted her letter, walked for a little longer in the dusty summer streets, and away from the rush-hour traffic. Her life at the Claremont was so much more endurable in this warmer weather, her time more easily filled. She had almost a sense of freedom. But this evening, Mrs Arbuthnot’s departure had cast a shadow. Mrs Palfrey could not help referring the situation to herself, imagining herself immobile in the
inferior nursing-home. Must keep going, she thought, as she so often thought. Every day for years she had memorised a few lines of poetry to train her mind against threatening forgetfulness. She now determined to train her limbs against similar uselessness. Although tired, she went on past her usual turning-place, thought she would stroll down Ludo’s street, and so make the round journey.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Her lips moved gently as she tried to remember her lines for the day. By tomorrow she would have forgotten them. Only the poetry she had learned by heart as a girl remained.

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

She was stuck after the third line. That was the way it went with her these days.

Ludo was home already. Down in that dark basement she saw him pass across, wearing the sweater she had knitted for him. She would not dream of calling, but she stood by the railings for a moment and waved.

Instead of Ludo, a girl wearing his sweater, came to the window and stood looking up, holding back the curtains on either side of her.

Mrs Palfrey nodded curtly and walked on. She felt in a commotion and could not sort out what she was feeling, only knowing that she had made a fool of herself. To her, there was something intimate about
wearing other people’s clothes. She brushed that thought aside, feeling breathless with jealousy. She wished that she had taken another direction. Now she would feel put out all the evening. She veered across the pavement in her agitation. Cucumber sandwiches she had had for tea repeated.

‘Some old girl standing there waving,’ Rosie said.

‘Mrs Palfrey,’ Ludo said, when she had been described. ‘You know, I’ve told you. Wanting a chat perhaps.’

He had been out to Putney to see his mother, who was lying in bed with what she called ‘summer’ flu’. The room had been stuffy and Ludo had kept looking at the clock. She was tousled and blotchy. The bed was strewn with screwed-up tissues and discarded hot water bottles. On the bedside table were sticky bottles and smeared glasses and a plate with some egg on it. The Major had given her a gin-and-french and a bite to eat, and gone back to work. Ludo had sat on the bed reading
Woman’s Own
for half an hour, had filled a hot water bottle, fetched another gin-and-french, and felt that he had done his duty. While waiting for the kettle to boil, he had explored the food cupboard and spread some peanut butter on a crust of new bread and eaten it quickly. Cheese on ablate had a green fuzz half an inch high.