Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (17 page)

‘Are you historical?’ Mrs Post asked eagerly. She had by now quite put aside her regrets about the evening out in Richmond Park.

Ludo, whose eyes, Mrs Palfrey noticed, seemed not to be seeing anything, said in a tired voice, ‘I’m not sure that I know much about history.’

Mrs Post, for the first time that evening – and for a long time – exulted. She knew perfectly well that in her kindness, Mrs Palfrey had condescended to her, and thought now that she would do a little condescending herself.

‘I should have thought,’ she began, ‘though I’m not scholarly, of course … you must forgive me; but the British Museum must be the place above all to get to grips with it.’

Ludo, fidgeting so nervously that Mrs Palfrey got up and pressed the bell for Antonio, said, ‘I suppose I’m only interested in Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie. And they’ve been done.’ Then, looking up quite dazedly at Antonio said, to Mrs Palfrey’s consternation, ‘Oh, anything. Bring me anything you like.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Post, ‘and what a shame for you. They have been done indeed.’

‘A glass of brandy,’ Mrs Palfrey said, looking steadily at Antonio.

‘And
now,’
cried Mrs de Salis, coming forward, ‘we can at last see your gorgeous grandson.’ To Ludo, who had got up tiredly, she said, ‘The last time you slipped through our fingers and went out walking.’

Ludo wondered what she was talking about. He smiled vaguely, hoping to stave her off, but she settled herself in a near-by chair.

‘I rather wanted to be speaking to you privately,’ he said presently in a low voice to Mrs Palfrey. ‘And so you did last time,’ Mrs de Salis said, for, after all, she had the best hearing at the Claremont.
‘And
you got your poor grandmother soaking wet into the bargain. She might have caught pneumonia but for my advice to have hot whisky sent up to her in bed.’

Mrs Palfrey was in a horrid panic and Ludo looked dazed.

Mr Osmond, wondering if he, too, might go over and have a word with them, had decided not to. As far as Mrs Palfrey was concerned, he would rest on his laurels.

‘She’s so right, your grandmother,’ said Mrs de Salis. ‘To dote on you, I mean.’ To Ludo’s consternation, she suddenly put out a hand and stroked the back of his head teasingly.

Mr Osmond looked at her with loathing, irritation and jealousy; and Mrs Palfrey did the same.

Ludo took his brandy from Antonio’s tray and began to sip it, glad of something to do.

‘And now I’ve embarrassed him,’ Mrs de Salis said, adding to her impropriety, as embarrassing people do. ‘It’s an old woman’s privilege, you know.’ She laughed as if the thought of herself as an old woman amused her, and must amuse everybody else.

‘To embarrass people, you mean?’ Mr Osmond asked loudly, from his distance.

Mrs de Salis let her eyes rest on him for a moment or two, and there was a shade of menace in her look.

‘If I had gone on my picnic, I should have missed you,’ Mrs Post said happily to Ludo. ‘As we did before, of course. And we see so few young people.’

‘This
one has been kept purposely from us,’ Mrs de Salis said.

‘I think … when you have finished your brandy, my dear, we might go for a little stroll,’ Mrs Palfrey suggested, and at once Ludo drained his glass and stood up. He helped Mrs Palfrey to her feet.

‘Oh, what indefatigable walkers you both are,’ said Mrs de Salis, sounding cross. ‘I feel you are being hustled away from us,’ she told Ludo. ‘You are always being hustled away from us.’

Mrs Palfrey was walking towards the door. She could not get out of the room quickly enough.

‘It was Desmond,’ Mrs Palfrey explained, as they walked towards the gardens. ‘He simply arrived one evening, and I had to smuggle him out quickly before anyone could see him. It upset me.’

‘How dangerously you live. And he might come again,’ Ludo said.

‘No, I told him not to.’

‘How on earth did you do that?’

‘I said that it was inconvenient. That there is nowhere to receive visitors. After all, there isn’t. What a beautiful evening!’

Ludo did not seem to notice the softness of the light, the gilded windows, the roses drying out in the gardens of the square. He was nervy, as a bee is in bad weather. And Mrs Palfrey began to feel edgy herself.

‘There has been a calamity,’ he said. ‘I came to tell you about it.’

Before she could think of the calamity itself, she felt a little pride in his wish to confide. It lasted no time.

‘Is it to do with – with – Rosie?’ she asked, with distaste but resolution in her voice. She had almost said ‘that Rosie’. Getting into trouble was the sort of trouble one associated with the young these days.

Ludo, seemingly mystified, said, ‘Rosie? No, not Rosie. Why Rosie?’

‘I simply wondered,’ Mrs Palfrey said primly.

Ludo considered this for a moment – shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid the Major has skedaddled.’

‘What Major?’

‘From the love-nest. My mother’s, you know. I surely told you.’

Ah, so his mother was the calamity. Hers was the trouble. Mrs Palfrey felt enormous relief. But she was tired. Side-stepping from a dog’s mess, she stumbled a little. He took her arm.

‘Oh, if only one had a key and could get into the gardens and sit on one of those seats. I feel like Alice in Wonderland about it.’

‘That’s Blighty for you.’

‘I think I must go home … back … now,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘It has been what I believe young people call quite a day.’ No doubt her daughter up in Scotland imagined her rotting away hour by hour, doing nothing, nothing happening. ‘I am sorry about your mother. Is she much put out?’

‘“Put out”, to be taken literally.’

They turned at the corner of the Square to make the return journey.

‘Why did this Major leave her? Although it is certainly no business of mine.’

‘I’m afraid he’s in some sort of bother about money with his business-partner. As soon as there’s that sort of bother, everything else emerges. I doubt if my mother will ever see him again, though I don’t tell
her
that.’

‘The Major sounds a bit of a bounder,’ Mrs Palfrey said, coming up with one of her husband’s words.

‘Keeping two homes going,’ Ludo said vaguely. ‘Not having paid the Putney rent for some time, it appears. He might go to prison for this business.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Mrs Palfrey sighed, but really for herself and not the Major. The sun had gone now, and it was the end of a long day.

‘It was nice of you to come to confide in me,’ she said, plodding on.

At this, Ludo looked more downcast than ever.

‘Well, she certainly can’t come to me,’ he said briskly, but as if he were arguing with himself. ‘She will have to go to my aunt’s in Wimbledon. She can stay there for a week or two, until they have one of their quarrels.’

To Mrs Palfrey she sounded a tiresome and feckless woman.

‘There are all her things in Putney,’ Ludo said. ‘How to get all that junk away while she still owes the rent? She can hardly steal away in the middle of the night with it, and the landlord sleeping in the flat below.’

‘I should think not,’ said Mrs Palfrey, and then wondered if this tone of righteousness became her. She had herself practised to deceive.

‘Parents should lead their own lives,’ Ludo grumbled.

Mrs Palfrey, who was doing so, was silent.

‘She has nothing put by?’ she presently suggested. It was all beginning to appear more of her business than she could have believed.

‘Well, she never
had
much. The Major was mean, except with drink. Plenty of that. She had this silly
little part-time job. Well, that won’t do any more, of course.’

‘My means are rather limited,’ Mrs Palfrey began, and Ludo looked at her with a sort of glum hope, ‘but for your sake alone … although it is hardly my concern, as I have said …’

And then – to her, a miracle; to him it seemed disaster – a taxi came slowly down the road towards them, and Mrs Palfrey put her last strength into a large beckoning wave of her arm.

‘I’m sorry, but my day has proved too much for me,’ she apologised. ‘The Claremont Hotel,’ she said to the driver, who looked surprised, for it was hardly two hundred yards away. In fact, he had just dropped two Americans there.

Ludo helped Mrs Palfrey into the cab; but, before he could shut the door, she leaned forward and said, ‘Fifty pounds.’

He felt a sudden fury with his mother, and he blushed.

‘In the post tomorrow,’ Mrs Palfrey said, and slammed the door. She had meant to say ‘as a loan’. Now it was too late.

Ludo’s mother had humiliated them both, had threatened their relationship. He, striding away along the street, frowning, thought, When my book is published, I’ll pay it back, and with interest. Then he remembered that his book would displease Mrs Palfrey more than any debts. He had banked on her being dead – or out of his life – before it saw the light of day.

Mrs Palfrey leaned back for a moment and closed her eyes. From capital, she thought. She was beginning to do the thing she knew that she must never do: for some unknown woman of loose morals and, worse than that, untidy thinking.

Once, Arthur had talked about arranging annuities, but had died too soon to do so. It was men’s business. Money was to do with
them.
Woman had not the chance to practise until it was too late. She wondered, as the cab drew up, so quickly, before the Claremont, if Mr Osmond knew about such things. London bank managers she imagined as far too alarming to consult. They would explain; but she would not grasp.

In the Claremont vestibule two Americans stood looking lost, bewildered, beside a heap of their admirably matching luggage.

Mrs Burton and Mrs de Salis still sat in the lounge.

Mrs Palfrey took her key, and made her way to the lift.

‘Will we have a drink before we go up?’ the American husband asked his wife, looking round doubtfully, as if uncertain if he could arrange it.

Fawn-coloured, the woman’s face; exhausted from travelling. ‘Why now, Pete,’ she said dully, ‘I don’t believe I will.’

w
ELL, that’s the last we shall ever see of
her,’
Mr Osmond said, having curtly waved goodbye to Mrs de Salis from the steps of the Claremont. Mrs Post had gone on waving wistfully until the taxi could no longer be distinguished from others in the traffic-jam.

‘Oh, I shall miss her,’ she cried, at last. ‘She made us all feel young.’

Tor myself, I shall not grieve,’ Mr Osmond said in a low voice to Mrs Palfrey in the hall. She had been the first to go inside, rather like the Queen turning away from the Palace balcony after the fly-past.

But it was
not
the last they were to see of Mrs de Salis. Like quite a few show-off people, she sometimes kept her word, and surprised everybody by doing so. The effect was that of a well-proved liar’s saying something later found to be true – sending all the premises topsy-turvy. Mrs de Salis had always been disturbing.

‘What is plonk?’ Mrs Post asked nervously one morning.

After breakfast, they all had invitation cards in their hands, on which champagne glasses were dizzily scattered, with haphazard bubbles rising from them,
drink salutations in various European languages were printed slant-wise between, and the whole suggestion of sophistication was puzzling to all save Mrs Burton.

However, it was Mr Osmond who answered Mrs Post. ‘plonk,’ he said, ‘is something dire. Never to be drunk.’

‘It says “Plonk for all who come”, ’ Mrs Post read, her nervousness increased.

‘She must be joking,’ Mrs Burton hoped aloud.

During the next few days, Mrs de Salis’s party was scarcely mentioned. Acceptances were sent off on the sly.

‘Are you
going?’
Mrs Post at last dared to ask Mr Osmond, who had said at the start that he would not.
(Where
was taken for granted.)

‘I suppose one must be civil. I dare say I shall look in.’

‘I was wondering if it might not be possible for us all to share a taxi. Inverness Crescent is quite a little ride from here. I was asking Summers about it.’