Family and Friends Read online

  ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me.’ She hesitated, undecided whether to add a conventionally polite reference to some other evening. Better not, instinct warned her; let things lie. ‘I hope you enjoy the play,’ she added lightly.

  Arnold jerked his attention away from his mental picture of Zena. Some mechanism in his brain sprang into action, playing over at once its faithful recording of Linda’s utterance, allowing him to register the fact that she had refused his invitation. He smiled at her without reproach.

  ‘I quite understand.’ He wasn’t overwhelmingly disappointed, recognizing now with habitual acceptance that he had never really expected anything else.

  Linda held the parcel out to him. In spite of the gentler look that still turned his mouth up in a half smile, he seemed to her a man capable of anything, violent action, a sudden release of pent-up forces–even heroism.

  ‘I hope your sister likes the present.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she will,’ Arnold said abstractedly. He felt the walls of the room begin to advance upon him as they sometimes did in palpitating nightmares even now, more than a quarter of a century after he had turned his head and looked for the last time at those miserable ranks of prison huts.

  ‘If you’d like to come into the shop—’ Linda walked smoothly and swiftly into the passage and through the arch. ‘The dish is three pounds,’ she said with impersonal pleasantness.

  He drew a five-pound note from his wallet and laid it on the polished wood, withdrawing his hand immediately. Another man, Linda thought suddenly, taking the note and ringing up the till, any other man who had just made a pass at her, would have seized the opportunity to touch her fingers. But this man no longer even looked at her.

  A sense of his absolute loneliness struck at her, his acceptance of rejection as normal and customary; she was all at once aware of the effort it must have cost him to ask her out. She stood, briefly irresolute, washed over by a flood of compassion. And then she sighed and gave a tiny shake of her head. There was simply no place for him in the pattern of her life.

  ‘But I’ll take off ten per cent because of the sale,’ she added.

  ‘Thank you.’ His voice was brisker now, he could breathe more easily in the wider spaces of the shop. He took the change and turned to go.

  ‘I’ll lock up after you.’ Linda came round from behind the counter and followed him to the door. ‘Good night. And a happy New Year to you.’ Even as she uttered the words she thought he looked like a stranger to happiness or even the notion of it.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again. He strode off into the icy evening without a backward glance. No hat, no scarf, his coat blowing back. He drew a long cold breath of freedom, savouring the misty solitude of the streets.

  Linda looked after him with a flicker of regret. In the distance the church clock struck the hour, its tones muffled by the heavy air. Six o’clock–and no sign of the charwoman. She drew a long breath of exasperation, closed the door with a firm snap, turned the key and thrust home the bolts.

  ‘That Mrs Bond!’ she said aloud with irritation. ‘I’d like to wring her neck!’

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Emily!’ Zena Yorke flung a shout towards the door that stood open between her large bedroom and the long narrow bathroom constructed seventy years ago from a slice chopped off the end of the adjoining dressing room and her husband’s room beyond it.

  ‘Yes?’ Emily Bond screeched back. She no longer bothered to tack a deferential ‘Madam’ or even ‘Mrs Yorke’ on to her utterances and it was many a long day since she had troubled to interrupt a task in order to trot obediently at Zena’s call and put her head round the door of whatever room the summons had issued from. If Mrs Yorke didn’t like it, Mrs Yorke could blooming well lump it.

  Plenty of women in Milbourne only too eager to find a charlady–and to pay better money than Mrs Yorke. Sweeter-tempered women, too. Emily rubbed vigorously at the mirrored front of the medicine cupboard, lost for a moment in a comforting fantasy of those other idealized housewives smiling gratefully at her, proffering steaming beakers of cream-laden coffee.

  ‘I can see a huge cobweb over the wardrobe,’ Zena yelled from the downy nest of her double bed with its richly-quilted coverlet of rose-pink satin. She ran her eyes over the rest of the room, alerted now for further evidence of slapdash work. She heaved herself up with an effort, scanning the crevices and corners, lighting with a glance of triumph on a curl of grey fluff under the washbasin.

  ‘You’ll have to do in here before you go. You were supposed to clean this room out yesterday.’ Her voice cracked on a high note. She reached angrily over to the bedside cabinet and snatched a king-size cigarette from a carved wooden box, flicked impatiently at her lighter and flung herself back against the heaped-up pillows.

  She closed her eyes, temporarily exhausted by the bellowing, tempted for the hundredth time in a month to give old Emily the sack, but recollecting for the hundredth time that it might be impossible to replace her. The domestic agency in Milbourne had adopted a very wary note in recent years when she had rung up to demand assistance.

  There had been a time when they had willingly answered her appeals, supplying her with a stream of helpers, living-in maids, living-out maids, foreign girls, local dailies. None of them had stayed longer than a couple of months. And word had got about among the small band of daily women. Times were growing a good deal less hard and there was no longer any reason for a competent domestic to put up with bouts of bad temper–and wages that were less than handsome.

  Throughout the long procession of female feet in and out of the Yorke household, only Emily Bond had remained a constant. Not, Zena reminded herself sharply, that it was any reason actually to spoil the woman.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ she cried, revived by the cigarette, bored again, in need of the stimulus of a heated exchange. ‘This room’s filthy!’

  Mrs Bond insinuated a duster among the bottles and boxes in the cupboard. If your bedroom’s filthy, she said in her mind, pleased with a certain lofty note in her imagined tone, that’s on account of your spending half your days lying about in it pretending to be poorly when there’s nothing wrong with you that a good dose of salts and a month’s starvation wouldn’t cure.

  ‘It’ll have to wait over,’ she called. ‘I should have been gone to Mrs Fleming’s the best part of an hour ago. I’m off as soon as I’ve done in here.’ She picked up a small brown bottle and studied the label. Sleeping-pills. Mr Yorke’s sleeping-pills. Mrs Yorke bawled at her again but she closed her mind and let the sound bounce off her eardrums.

  ‘I hear you,’ she said calmly, not having the remotest idea what her highness was on about this time but adding from force of professional habit, ‘I’ve only got one pair of hands,’ a remark she had usefully employed thousands of times in the last fifty-five years.

  She put the bottle back on the shelf and gave a final righteous flick of her cloth along the ranks of medicines, scattering the greater part of the dust she had removed a few minutes before. She clicked the cupboard shut.

  ‘That’ll have to do you for today,’ she said firmly, making her way back into Mrs Yorke’s bedroom and standing for a moment in the doorway like a general surveying the scene of a recent battle.

  ‘I’m off now.’ She unfastened her apron to show she meant business. ‘Got to look in at Mrs Fleming’s.’

  Zena’s restless attention, diverted from cobwebs and fluff, alighted on the notion of Linda Fleming. She had never met the woman, having no reason to go poking her nose into every little upstart draper’s shop in Milbourne but it was in her nature to keep tabs on people, to docket and file away scraps of information.

  Her self-indulgent habits had gradually trimmed away the keen edges of her once active existence but her mind still darted about like a ferret, reduced now to nibbling at other more purposeful lives. And she had been connected with the trade since the day she was born; she could hardly escape a stir of curiosity about the newcomer.
r />   ‘Quite young, I think you said?’ She stubbed out her cigarette absent-mindedly; she had smoked barely a quarter of it.

  ‘Who?’ Emily halted, baffled, on her way to the door. ‘Oh, you mean Mrs Fleming. Not much over thirty, I’d say. Pretty too.’

  ‘Does she go out a lot? Has she got many friends? Men friends, that is,’ Zena added in case Emily missed the point. ‘Is the shop doing well?’

  ‘It’s early days yet, she hasn’t been in the town but five minutes.’ Emily considered Mrs Fleming’s possibilities, a good-looking young widow building up a smart little business. ‘Give her time. They’ll be round her like flies round a honeypot.’ She shook her head at the grasping ways of men, always looking out for a comfortable berth.

  ‘Where did she come from?’ Zena asked. ‘And what happened to her husband?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what happened to him,’ Emily said crossly. ‘He’s dead, that’s all I know. I’m off,’ she added abruptly and banged her way out of the room. At the head of the stairs she paused for breath. I’m getting old, she told herself in ritual lamentation. All this rush and bustle is a bit too much for me these days. I’m going to have to slacken off a bit, start taking it easy.

  She went heavy-footed down into the hall and along to the kitchen quarters to find her coat. Then she cocked a questioning ear towards the stairs. All serene. From the bread-bin she took, as she always did, the stale rolls and ends of loaves. ‘Just a few crumbs for me birds,’ she said aloud, righteously. A body had to love something and birds were a good deal more satisfactory than most human beings.

  She eased open the door of the fridge and smiled with pleasure at the contents. One or two little odds and ends of food and drink left over from the festive season that would slip nicely into her hold-all and never a soul the wiser.

  Outside the back door she heard a plaintive mew. ‘All right, me beauty, Emily’s coming,’ she said soothingly. She poured a saucer of milk and took it out, setting it down by the step; the cat pushed its head against her fingers. ‘Go on,’ she said urgently, ‘get that inside you, and quick about it.’ The cat rubbed against her legs, so pleased at a friendly contact that in spite of its hunger it couldn’t at once give attention to the milk. ‘You’ll lose me me job,’ Emily said with affectionate fierceness. ‘Get a move on.’

  At last the cat crouched over the saucer, purring loudly. A lean black stray, an abandoned pet most likely; some people had no heart. Mrs Yorke had caught her feeding it only the other day, couldn’t abide cats, Mrs Yorke, always a bad sign, Emily had observed that more than once in her long life. ‘Don’t encourage that filthy beast!’ Mrs Yorke had cried, ever so nasty. ‘If you want a cat, why don’t you keep one yourself?’ As if she hadn’t explained a thousand times why she couldn’t keep a cat. On account of her birds, it stood to reason. You could keep a cat or you could feed wild birds, you couldn’t do both, any fool would know that.

  ‘Finished, have you, me lovely?’ She stooped and retrieved the saucer. ‘Go on, scarper.’ With her foot she gently pushed the stray back from the door, went inside and washed the saucer, put it away. ‘Now then,’ she said briskly. ‘Better get going if I’m going to get me bus.’

  As soon as Emily was safely out of the room Zena heaved herself half-way out of her nest and fumbled about under the bed like a sea-lion baffled by a new trick. Her fingers encountered the squared edges of a box. She smiled in triumph and hauled herself up again, clutching at her booty.

  She tore away the Cellophane wrapping, snatched off the lid and sat upright with her hands clasped, gazing down with anticipation at the elegant rows of petit-fours. But there was no time to sit and gloat; at any moment her husband’s car might sweep into the drive. She began to stuff the sweetmeats into her mouth, giving herself barely time to taste them, but experiencing all the same the intense pleasure of satisfying an overpowering greed.

  In four minutes’ flat she had put paid to most of the top layer. She raised her head and glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf. Not quite half past six. No sign of Owen yet. Surely now she had time for just one quick sip?

  Yes! Of course she had! She stuffed the box back under the bed and tried to contort herself into a position in which she could wrench open the door of the bedside cabinet. She groaned and tugged but it was impossible; she was compelled at last actually to flop out from between the sheets on to the carpet and in a cross-legged posture she sank a tot of neat brandy. By the time she had drained her glass for the second time she had ceased to bother about Owen’s car.

  A terrible sense of sorrow and the harsh injustice of life welled up inside her. Some sentinel fragment of her brain insisted that it was never meant to be like this–how had Daddy’s little golden-haired princess come to be slouched on the floor of Daddy and Mummy’s bedroom, fat and ailing and unlovely, a little drunk and more than a little nauseated?

  She silenced the disturbing voice in the only way she knew–she filled her glass again and lifted it to her lips. But she couldn’t finish the drink. After a few sips she began to feel so unwell that fright restored her temporarily to sobriety. She levered herself up and went over to the basin, where she emptied the glass into the sink and ran a tap to wash away the traces.

  She splashed her face with cold water and dabbed it partly dry. Ah! That was better! She got back across the room and pushed the brandy bottle into a corner of the cabinet.

  Twenty minutes to seven and Owen still not home. Brandy-inspired anger began to mount in her brain. I could die here all alone, she thought with savage resentment, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Resentment suddenly gave way to near-panic as this habitual expression of self-pity all at once translated itself into a terrifying possibility. I could actually die! The words leapt before her eyes in characters of fire. I am ill! Desperately ill! It isn’t just a game I’ve been playing.

  Up to this moment she’d always cherished the illusion that she could stop whenever she chose, pull herself together, like a child saying, ‘I’m going to be good now, for ever and ever,’ as if the debilitating years could be dissolved in a single flash of resolution and she could wake up next morning slender and beautiful, radiantly healthy and gloriously young again.

  For one piercing moment she saw the skeleton face of reality rise up from the pit. She shut her eyes tight, forcing the image away, down, out of perception and consciousness. She slid back, lying full-length on the satin spread, and dropped at once into a doze that lasted barely a minute.

  When she opened her eyes again she had the impression that she had been asleep for a long time. The brandy had resumed its interrupted work; she felt relaxed and dulled. The terror had vanished, leaving behind only a hazy notion that she ought to ring her doctor. She raised herself up and went with a kind of floating motion into the dressing room that linked–or, more accurately, separated–her room from that of her husband’s.

  The phone stood on a small table at the other side of the room. She wove her way towards it, sat down and dialled the number. The engaged signal sounded in her ear. Not at all put out, she replaced the receiver and leaned back in her chair, ready to try again in a couple of minutes. It never occurred to her to wonder whether fifteen minutes before the start of evening surgery might not be an ideal time to phone a busy doctor.

  Owen Yorke turned his large black saloon car into the narrow road–little more than a lane, really–that led to the secluded house where he lived with Zena. He had never been able to think of The Sycamores as home although he had inhabited it for half of his fifty years.

  His speed dropped until he was barely keeping the car in motion. He hadn’t consciously slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator, it was just that he was finding it more and more difficult every evening to propel himself towards the house at all.

  A couple of weeks back his eye had fallen on a paragraph in the paper, some man who’d been missing from home for more than a month, a prosperous professional man with a family life that seemed ordinary en
ough; he’d turned up, unkempt, half-starving, in a bleak little mining town in the north, hundreds of miles away from his comfortable base. Discovered by a policeman late at night, sitting all alone on a stone bench outside the post office in the middle of a snowstorm. He hadn’t been able to offer any explanation.

  The item had stuck in Owen’s mind. It was the kind of trivial news story which didn’t merit a follow-up. One never knew how it ended or indeed, why it had begun. The thought of that man would spring into Owen’s brain quite often now as he opened the door of his car in the evenings and a prickle of fear was beginning to accompany the thought.

  All his life he had relied on the exercise of his will to channel his energies and discipline his emotions and desires so that the whole of his conscious effort kept him unswervingly directed towards the goal he saw so clearly.

  Status, wealth, respectability; he could put not a pinpoint between them in order of importance. He had never for a single moment questioned the validity of his ambitions and he still wasn’t questioning them.

  What troubled him now, what caused the tingle of apprehension to run across his mind in the middle of everyday routine activities was a horrid suspicion that his will was no longer absolute master of his personality. He felt as if he had for fifty years been damming behind a massive barrier deep and powerful forces of whose existence he had been totally unaware.

  And now the barrier was beginning to crack; he sensed the underground currents seeping through. As he drove out of the car park at the end of each busy and purposeful day he would be seized for an instant by a nightmare panic that the whole structure of his identity might suddenly and uncontrollably topple, that he might vanish from the familiar environs of Milbourne, materializing inexplicably weeks later on a bench in an alien blizzard.