The Echoing Stones (3 page)

Well, summer had come, of course, and now it was nearly gone and Mildred with it.

Arnold sighed. Turning back to the little rose-wood desk which was one of the few bits of furniture here that Mildred had really liked, he picked up the abortive draft of his Lonely Hearts advertisement, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Who on earth was going to seek acquaintance with so half-hearted and lack-lustre a suitor? It was just money down the drain – a lot of money, too, he’d learned that they charged £30.00 for each introduction. And even if some woman
did
turn out to be so undemanding as to think that Arnold might do (
why
was she so undemanding? what was wrong with her that she set her sights so low?) then, once acquainted, yet further inadequacies would have to be revealed. Not only was he 61, slightly below medium height, and with an avowed dislike of all those activities – theatres, travel and the rest – which people seeking partners appear to enjoy most, but he wasn’t much good in bed, either. Not hopeless; just not much good. A low sex-drive – something like that. Secretly, he thought that Mildred wasn’t much good either, but of course he’d never told her so. Why make things worse when you could just as easily – well, a lot
more
easily – leave them as they are? You might have thought that the joint possession of so compatible a failing might have enabled them to get on singularly well together; and so, in any other age, it might have done.
But not nowadays. Who nowadays dares to admit to – let alone accuse a partner of – a low sex-drive? When every magazine you ever pick up, every advice column in every newspaper, takes for granted heroic levels of lust as the human norm and warns readers only against the psychological dangers of repressing these all-consuming and non-stop passions. Where did these articles leave such as Arnold, failed sex-level candidates, whose passions fell so far below pass-mark as never to need any repressing?

And maybe it was even worse for Mildred, because she actually read these magazines instead of just glancing through them. Maybe she believed everything they told her about the heights of passion to which she was entitled, and which she could have attained, if, if, if … If it hadn’t been for Arnold, in fact.

Oh, well. Maybe it hadn’t been all that bad. No worse, perhaps, than for many another couple of closet inadequates who also don’t talk about it. And at least they’d managed to produce Flora, who’d been an amazing, an incredible joy to both of them – a revelation, really, of what joy could be.

Well, for her first six years she’d done just that, with her flaxen curls, her enchanting smile and her cheeky little ways. And even later – up to the age of about ten or eleven, perhaps, the joys had still – more or less – outweighed the anxieties. It was only as she moved into her teens that the anxiety-joy ratio had tipped so disastrously in the wrong direction; so that now, in their twentieth year of parenthood, the joy had finally been blotted out by worry – constant, non-stop, unrelieved worry. Flora’s increasingly erratic and
unsatisfactory
life-style had become an ever-darkening shadow over her parents’ lives, an ever-present threat to their peace of mind, like the wings of a great black bird-of-prey eternally hovering. Any news of their daughter’s doings in that sordid squat off the Fulham Road had become
something to be dreaded. Even more to be dreaded were her occasional visits home.

Not that he and Mildred had ever admitted to this dread, even to each other – particularly not to each other. On the contrary, news of an impending visit from their daughter was still greeted with a desperate facade of pleasure.

“Oh, good, Flora’s coming next weekend,” one of them would say brightly, turning from the telephone, sick with dread; and “Oh, good,” the other would answer, choking back panic. Because the pain of seeing their once gorgeous little girl, skinny with dieting – or was it drugs? – out of a job, needing money – it was too much. And, on top of that, biting the hand that fed her; because, of course, Arnold always did give her the sum demanded – arrears of rent, or whatever – and straightaway she would stuff the cheque into her shoulder-bag with scarcely a “thank you” and almost without a break in her litany of complaints and criticisms of her parents’ home: her mother’s cooking; the net curtains; the fitted carpet in the bathroom; the awful décor; the pretentious ornaments; the ghastly furniture; and, above all, the awful boredom and monotony of her parents’ lives.

You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that this last complaint would have been silenced by the news of her father’s extraordinary, and surely courageous new venture: chucking up his safe and boring job; plunging, at his age, into the unknown. “Good for you, Dad!” you’d think she might have said, at least with surprise, at least with a spark of grudging admiration.

But not a bit of it.

“You must be crazy! You must be starting Alzheimers!” was her first comment, followed closely by: “And what about
me
!”

Well, what about her? Arnold was quite thrown by the question – as, doubtless, was Mildred, though, as always, she was keeping a low profile. Their daughter had been
living away from home for nearly three years now and had shown every sign of hating every moment of the time she occasionally spent under her parents’ roof. How could it possibly matter to her whether this despised and hated home was uprooted or not?

“
Of
course
it matters to me!” she’d screamed. “It’s my
home
, for God’s sake …!” and had even – astonishingly – burst into tears.
Real
tears, Arnold could swear it hadn’t been put on.

“It’s not
f
air
!” she’d sobbed – sounding, for one second, so like her old six-year-old self, that for a moment Arnold’s heart melted utterly and he yearned to take her in his arms and comfort her. No, not
her,
not this alien, hostile young woman, but the
other
one, the loving, enchanting little child who was gone for ever.

“It’s not fair!” she repeated, her voice rising to a shriek. “You should have consulted
me
!”

Ridiculous! The demand went beyond all reason, but Arnold had tried, all the same, to appeal to reason, to make the girl see sense. Had she, he enquired,
consulted
them
about what she did with
her
life? About dropping out of Art College? About moving into that sordid, unsavoury squat full of unwashed milk-bottles and slinking figures in dirty jeans and dark glasses appearing wordlessly through doors and up and down the carpetless, unlit stairs?

But Flora had only sobbed the louder.

“That’s
different
!” she wailed; and of course it was. For parents to interfere in their grown-up children’s lives is absolutely taboo these days; but there are no rules at all about how much grown-up children are entitled to interfere with their parents’ lives.

“It’s not fair!” Arnold had felt inclined to protest in his turn, but of course he didn’t. This phrase, too, is the prerogative of children, not parents.

*

Oh, well, it was all over now. The old home had been sold up, the move completed, and Flora was settled back in the Fulham squat and in no dire trouble – well, presumably this was the case, he hadn’t heard from her in weeks, which was always a good sign.

And as to Mildred – well, Mildred had upped and left him. Three weeks ago she’d gone, marching out with the barest minimum of her belongings and telling him in a voice hoarse from a whole night of crying and recriminations, that he was impossible.

Well, she could be right. But of one thing Arnold felt certain. It wasn’t he, himself, with all his multifarious failings that had driven her away: It was the
Teas.

And in a way, he couldn’t blame her. He wondered, now, whether he might not have handled the problem more tactfully – more lovingly, perhaps one should say? Because she
had
tried, she really had, and for the first few weeks things had seemed to be going quite surprisingly well. Arnold had from the beginning been acutely aware of the fact that it was he who had dragged her into this venture: had wheedled and badgered and pleaded until at last, probably from sheer weariness, she had given in and reluctantly acquiesced in his plans. Against this background, it was really something of a marvel that, in the beginning, she had settled in as well as she had. Indeed, once the die had been cast, and their own dull little suburban house had found a buyer, Mildred had thrown herself into the practicalities of the move with commendable zest. She had seemed to enjoy the arranging of their own favourite bits of furniture among the sparse but elegant pieces that went with the flat. The flat had been contrived from the newer part of the West Wing, on the ground floor, and had been really quite skilfully modernised. The old walls were still there, and the deep windows looking out onto the park, but central heating had been installed, and modern plumbing, and
even fitted carpets. No wonder that Mildred, who had been visualising something like a medieval dungeon, with dripping stone walls and a single high barred window, had been pleasantly surprised. She had really enjoyed fixing new curtains and a new, matching bedspread for the old-fashioned brass bed. Not that they were going to sleep in it – not both of them, anyway – but Mildred liked its style and the fact that the flower-patterned bedspread now matched the curtains. She had always liked matching fabrics – this was one of the things that Flora had railed at most bitterly in their old home.

They had had nearly a month to get settled in their new home before the place was opened to the public. After that, the Visitors began to arrive and the organising of the Teas began to loom large in Mildred’s daily programme.

It hadn’t been too bad, to begin with. It happened that April was cold and blustery that year and not many people ventured on outings such as this. Mildred quite enjoyed baking enough scones each morning for the dozen or so customers who were likely to turn up. With jam and real butter, they were delicious, and earned much praise, which Mildred greatly enjoyed. It was a new experience to her, being fulsomely complimented on her cooking, Arnold having been (as he realised now) sadly sparing of compliments during their long years together. She enjoyed, too, the adding up of the small profits which accrued from the exercise, and to a percentage of which they were entitled. By the middle of May, Mildred was already talking grandly of branching out into Cream Teas. But it was then, alas, that the blow fell.

Not, of course, that most people would have described it as a blow, consisting as it did of a sudden burst of glorious weather. New leaves, almost overnight, on every tree; apple blossom white against the hot blue sky; tulips, gold and scarlet, ablaze in the great circular bed that dominated the gardens; and the lawns, shimmering with new grass,
freshly mown, lay smooth and inviting under the resurgent sun. Everything was coming out together, including, of course, the tourists. Instead of the usual twelve or fifteen people in the Tea-Room during the afternoon, suddenly there were ninety – a hundred – a hundred and thirty. Instead of praise for her delicious scones, Mildred’s ears rang with complaints as she rushed, hot and frantic, from table to table. “We’ve been here 25 minutes already!” they cried; and, “You call this
service
?” And to make matters worse, on the hottest and busiest Saturday of all, one of the two girls from the village who were supposed to help out in the afternoons had once again failed to turn up.

“She’s not feeling too good,” the surviving member of the pair explained, with a certain air of smugness, as if not feeling too good was something a bit special; and added, for good measure: “
I
shan’t be able to come up Wednesday, I have to go up the hospital about my injections.”

Injections for what? Distracted as she was, Mildred didn’t get around to asking, and anyway why should she? What was the matter with these girls, always off sick? If it wasn’t hayfever it was migraine, or an inflamed tendon playing up. Surely it is the
old
who are entitled to be ill all the time, not young things like these, barely in their twenties?

And so it went on: the glorious summer weather, and the growing hordes of tourists, ever more numerous, and ever thirstier as the thermometer climbed. Baking scones for a dozen or so customers is one thing: baking them for a hundred is quite another and, though Arnold tried to help out, driving down to the village to buy up cakes and scones in packets (ridiculously uneconomic though this was), and even serving in the restaurant himself at times – he couldn’t, single-handed, stem the tide of disaster. Apart from anything else, he had his own duties to attend to, as part-time guide and as general overseer of
crowd behaviour inside the house. It was surprising what they got up to, it really was: climbing over rope barriers, pushing past “NO ADMITTANCE” notices; even trying to clamber, giggling, onto the four-post bed in which Queen Elizabeth was supposed to have slept.

Mildred was in despair. She couldn’t cope and, not surprisingly, she turned on Arnold as the cause of it all. It was he who had dragged her to this God-forsaken hole, working her to death, treating her worse than a slave: turning her into a tea-making machine,
using
her …

And Arnold had hung his head and couldn’t answer. For it was all true.

*

Arnold roused himself, looked at his watch. Soon, it would be two o’clock, opening time. Leaning down, he retrieved from the waste-paper basket his discarded advertisement, spread it out, read it through again.

It wasn’t just that he was a wimp – though no doubt he was; nor was it just that no rational woman would possibly want a man like that – though no doubt she couldn’t. No, the point was that he didn’t want
her,
whoever she might be. Mildred had been quite right: he didn’t want a live woman at all, he wanted a tea-making machine, a robot waitress.

Once again, and this time decisively, he crushed the ill-omened paper in his fist and consigned it to the waste-paper basket, this time for good.