Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (22 page)

‘I’m sorry. I never listen,’ Mrs Post said. ‘I always feel there’s nothing I can do about it, whatever they say.’

‘Very true. And they’re never right. Here comes the Colonel back from his constitutional. Indefatigable. That’s the word for him. Takes the steps well.’

If this game comes out it will mean Brenda will come one afternoon soon and take me for a drive, Mrs Post was thinking, laying out the cards with anticipation – even excitement.

‘What’s his name?’ Mr Osmond asked. ‘Colonel Thingummy? I’m blessed if it hasn’t gone out of my head for the moment.’

Mrs Post could not remember, either. ‘I’m afraid it’s escaped me, too,’ she said. ‘I always have been hopeless at people’s names.’ But this was not true. It was only lately that she had become so absent-minded and she struggled to cover up her forgetfulness. It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

‘Colonel Mildmay,’ Mrs Palfrey said to them from her desk, without turning round.

‘It was a most pleasant change,’ she wrote. ‘Each of the women guests received gilt powder-cases as a
present. A rather charming idea.’ She frowned, and took another sheet of paper, and began the letter again. She would leave out about the powder-case, having suddenly decided to send it to her daughter for Christmas.

The Colonel came in. He was a shy man, who wished to make friends, and offered the evening newspaper about, and said, ‘Well, they have chicken fricassee lined up for us tonight. He had read the menu on his way in, and did not know that the others liked to read it for themselves. Mrs Post nodded, concentrating on her cards. A missing two of spades held up everything else.

‘How’s your game coming along?’ Mr Osmond asked her. She did not know why he was so chatty to her this evening. He usually ignored her and did, in fact, regard her as one of the silliest creatures of her sex.

‘Oh, not very well, I’mafraid. I’m afraid I’ve…’

‘Now don’t be tempted to cheat. You’ll only be cheating yourself,’ he said, shaking a finger at her. He glanced then at Mrs Palfrey’s back, but
she
wrote calmly on.

Mrs Burton walked towards them, carrying her first whisky of the evening. She was rather interested in the Colonel; was always
intrigued,
as she herself said, by military men (of rank), and often confessed to have gone about with an American Colonel in the war – ‘As every woman in England would have wished to do,’ she proudly said. ‘And younger ones than me. Bird colonel, to wit.’

‘Too what?’ Mr Osmond said mischievously.

She smiled and said, they did not know why, ‘Boid Coinel.’

‘Ciggie?’ she asked Colonel Mildmay, holding out her case, and blowing thin streams of smoke down from her nostrils.

It was her brother-in-law’s evening for dinner, and she was wearing a sleeveless dress and a burst of diamante near her collar-bone; sagging arms were goose-pimpled. She flopped on to a sofa and put her head back and now the streams of smoke wavered upwards.

‘It has dawned on me,’ Mr Osmond said, turning from the window, ‘that they deliberately seek out those oafs in order to deaden the effects of the Comprehensive Schools.’

The Colonel looked at him inquiringly.

‘Oh, you weren’t here. The weather forecast, I mean. They choose uneducated people to read them, on purpose. Then if little Willie comes back from his Comprehensive with a Botany Bay accent, parents will say, well, there can’t be very much wrong with that, if they talk like it on the wireless.’

He did not see Mrs Palfrey smile.

‘You may well be right,’ said Colonel Mildmay.

‘It’s a deliberate policy to foist their educational programme on us.’

‘That’s very astute of you,’ the Colonel said.

He seemed to Mr Osmond to be a very agreeable fellow. He – Mr Osmond – thought of drawing him to one side and asking him if he had heard the one about
the man who went into the chemist’s shop; but the realisation of Mrs Palfrey’s being in the room shamed him. He now remembered lingering outside strip clubs looking at the photographs there, of making, indeed, special journeys to Soho to do that. He shied away from the knowledge of Naturist magazines in a drawer upstairs in his room. These reminders, in the very room where Mrs Palfrey was sitting, seemed to make a monster of him – a being from a different, shoddier world. She could not have understood, and he would not have respected her if she had.

Mrs Burton stubbed out a cigarette vigorously, and the underneath of her old arm shook up and down.

Mrs Post gathered up her cards sadly, and slowly shuffled them. The omens were against her cousin coming for many a long week.

‘… has asked me to marry him,’ Mrs Palfrey was writing. She smiled, with pleasure and mischief, paused, thought she would leave it at that, and stir up things in Scotland a little. She wrote ‘loving Mother’, and put her letter into the Claremont envelope.

‘How did the old prancy-prancy go?’ Mrs Burton asked Mr Osmond. ‘You know, the dance, the old orgy?’

‘I enjoyed it,’ he said stiffly. ‘I believe we both enjoyed it.’

‘It was a very pleasant evening,’ Mrs Palfrey said clearly. She stamped her letter, and drew another sheet of paper towards her. ‘Dear Ludo,’ she wrote, on a sudden thought. ‘I should love you to come to dinner one evening. Any time. Yours, Laura Palfrey.’

‘P.S. I hope I made it clear to you that the money was a small gift, and not a loan. I’m not sure that, in the haste of the moment, I explained this properly.’

Her letters written, she would have to turn round to face the company. She felt self-conscious and confused, especially as she had had her back so resolutely to them.

Mrs Post laid out her cards once more. ‘There’s a witch in that clock,’ she said, ‘holding it back.’ She glanced up at the marble chimney-piece. It seemed as if half-past seven would never come.

‘Have you relatives in London?’ Mrs Burton asked Colonel Mildmay.

‘I have a couple of nephews, with their various families.’

‘Well, there, how nice. You’ll be seeing a lot of them, no doubt.’

‘Partly my reason for coming to London,’ said the Colonel, ‘I must confess.’

‘There’s nothing like it,’ Mrs Burton said cordially, but vaguely.

When at last half-past seven came, Mr Osmond was the last to leave. He picked up the crumpled sheet of writing-paper Mrs Palfrey had thrown into the waste-paper-basket and put it in his pocket. In the ground-floor Gents he smoothed it flat and read it, and was simply puzzled. He wondered why she had not wanted her daughter to know about the gilt powder-compact. He pondered this, sitting at his table, awaiting the lentil soup, and the chicken fricassee.

I
T was a rather beautiful late-autumn afternoon, with a pearly sky, a hint of dusty sunshine. Mrs Palfrey stood with a letter in her hand, looking down at the Cromwell Road. She watched a woman going by, carrying a bunch of Michaelmas daisies that looked webbed and misted over.

She thought of Rottingdean, imagined it, with the leaves coming down – or down already – on the lawns, and this softness in the air; but at the very idea of ever going back there, her heart heeled over in pain.

Although she felt too old to do so, she knew that she must soldier on, as Arthur might have put it, with this new life of her own. She would never again have anyone to turn to for help, to take her arm crossing a road, to comfort her; to listen to any news of hers, good or bad. She was helplessly exposed – to the idiosyncrasies of other old people, the winter coming on, her aches and pains and loneliness, even that absurd and embarrassing proposal of marriage. Rottingdean, and Ludo, too, she determined not to think of- those two happinesses. He had not answered her letter. She had lost him.

Mr Osmond was reading snatches from his old school magazine to Colonel Mildmay, who had wished to doze. ‘I see we trounced Haileybury.’ The Colonel, who had been to Haileybury, said nothing.

Mrs Post was stealthily taking chocolates from a half-pound box hidden under a cushion. She would have been pleased to have handed them round, but once when she had done so, Mr Osmond had touched both a peppermint cream and a hazelnut cluster, before he had changed his mind and taken an almond whirl.

A photograph of the First Cricket Eleven was now shoved under the Colonel’s nose, so that he might join with Mr Osmond in deploring the length of the young louts’ hair. ‘Just look at that. My God! This one at the back, heh? Old Bordon would turn in his grave; probably is.’ Then Mr Osmond remembered that Mrs Palfrey’s grandson had longish hair, and feebly added, ‘Not so bad, of course, if they keep it clean and shipshape.’

Antonio came in and removed the coffee cups. When he had gone, Mrs Post, having pulled the cushion completely over the box of chocolates, took up her knitting and said, ‘He flustered me.’

‘Who?’ asked Mr Osmond.

‘Antonio.’

‘Taking the cups away? They’re late with that today.’

‘No, correcting my French like that. I don’t know what’s come over him. After all, he’s no more French than I am.’

Mr Osmond looked puzzled.

‘“Abricot”, I said. For my little tart, you know. At lunch.’

‘Ah!’ (As if light dawned.) But he wondered what she was gabbling about.

‘
“Cérise?”
he said. “Non”, I said, “abricot”, I said. “Oh, abricot”, he said, or something like that. Hardly any difference. Just slightly altered the stress. But he knew perfectly well what I meant. In any case, it was apple.
Pomme,
you know. Just the jam on top of it was apricot. I always make a rule of putting the stress on the first syllable – Apricot and abricot. Is that wrong?’

‘Not wrong enough for anyone to make an issue of it,’ said Mr Osmond with authority. ‘Certainly not an Eye-tie.’

In his new mood of remorse, he even felt guilt about Antonio – remembered telling him jokes in simple English, or describing the graffiti of his own country to him. The turned-down expression with which the stories had been received – was it from contempt, or the natural drooping of age and fatigue; or only non-comprehension?

Colonel Mildmay, unable to snooze, decided to go early for his constitutional, and got up quite nimbly from his chair, and quite soon Mrs Palfrey, at the window, saw him go down the steps, and pass along the Cromwell Road, westwards, at an enviable pace.

She should bestir herself, Mrs Palfrey thought. It was not in her nature to stand and stare, to feel melancholy about the past. At that moment, as she decided to go off and post her letter, and had half turned, Mr Osmond appeared beside her at the window.

‘You seem a little pensive, a little off-colour,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Not your usual self today. Aloof from all our idle chatter.’

What an intrusion! thought Mrs Post, knitting more slowly, drawing wool from its cretonne holder, tilting her head back a little, awaiting Mrs Palfrey’s reply.

‘There is nothing in the least wrong. I was simply watching people go by in this lovely weather. In fact, I’m just about to go out myself- for a little stroll, as far as the Natural History Museum, perhaps.’

Mr Osmond looked at her archly. ‘Is that an invitation?’ he asked.

The cords tightened down Mrs Palfrey’s neck. Her usual consideration for other people’s feelings, her disinclination to rebuff him, warred with her fury at his temerity.

In one of Lady Swayne’s phrases, she said, ‘I’m afraid that it was not.’

They were her last words to him. She hastened, as far as she was able, from the room. She was still hurrying when, in her hat and coat and gloves, she came back across the hall and made a dash for it, as she herself would have described her urgent lope forwards through the swing doors. Going fast, as if pursued, she fell.

‘I am Mrs Palfrey’s grandson.’

‘I rather think not,’ said Mr Osmond. ‘Perhaps you would care to describe her.’

‘No, I really don’t think I would.’

‘Or cannot?’ Mr Osmond raised an eyebrow.

The place was obviously a luxury lunatic asylum, Desmond decided. He had been standing by the
deserted reception desk waiting to make inquiries, when this mad old man had come up to him.