“Let’s hope not,” said their hostess.
They followed her.
A round, brown teapot. Comfortable, man-size willow pattern cups.
Andie sat up to the table, facing Joanna. Over tea as a meal, here in
this parlour, hung an air of habitual ceremonial – if, as a rule, a
ceremonial for one. Spooning jam from the jar, he spread it carefully
over his slice of bread. “Nice . . .” he remarked in a general way.
“The jam?” said Joanna, gratified. “It’s not bad.”
added: “That sounds like sales-talk!”
“You made it?”
“Mm-mm. I do well for fruit, in this garden.” She laughed, and
Tonia sat, knees crossed, on an arm of the big chair, a short
distance off. Having yielded to the compulsion from Joanna, she
was
(somewhat carelessly) holding a cup and saucer. The cup, she had so
far neglected; the saucer she was using as an ashtray – she was
chain-smoking. She rose – at this point – ran an exploratory finger
round Andie’s plate, then went on to lick the jam off the finger. Her
expression showed that she did not care for any jam, but that since
there must, apparently,
be
jam, she recognised this as the best kind.
13
“Made this?” She gazed at her hostess. “How on earth?”
Joanna said: “Oh, you’d soon learn.”
“I didn’t only mean the jam,” said Andie. He drank to the bottom
of his cup, gave a deep sigh. He tipped back his Windsor chair, took
a look at the pear tree, out of the window.
“What I can’t see is, what you’ll do when you’re
not
here!” the girl
exclaimed, to Joanna. Tonia’s directness, this time, was no longer
aggressive or impertinent – she sounded concerned, sorrowful.
All the same, Joanna flinched. For a moment she looked like a
person at bay, lips pressed together – to gain time, she filled a saucer
with milk and put it down for the cat. That done, she steadied
herself. “Oh,” she said, “I shall grow to like London at weekends:
many people do. Concerts, and so on. Art galleries . . . My friends
so often tell me how much I miss. I’ve
got
a one-room flat; I’ve had
it for years. I could make it nice; so far I’ve rather neglected it – I
have so little time, you see, from Mondays to Fridays. There’s no
reason why
it
shouldn’t be a home, if I settle into it properly – as I
mean to.” She paused, as though to renew her store of conviction;
then went on – “In many ways, I expect, it will be a rest for me –
here, there’s been always so much to see to.
You
’ll find that,” she
began to say to Tonia,
14
then corrected herself – “Whoever comes
after me will find that. In the country, it’s endless.” Her voice
softened; it could stay brusque no longer. “Outdoors –
and
indoors,
in a cottage like this. That’s what keeps life so full. That’s what
makes one happy.”
“Happy?” queried the girl. (She dwelled on the word partly
sceptically, partly satirically, partly longingly.)
“Contented,” explained Joanna.
“You think the two are the same?”
“Surely . . . More?” Joanna asked Andie, reaching out her hand for
his empty cup.
Watching her pour out, he said with a smile: “You’ve got
everything under wonderfully good control. That all you want?”
“I’m not young any more,” said she.
He said: “Don’t be too certain.”
“She
is
certain,” said Tonia – “
I
should say, about everything!” She
turned to Joanna: “You know all the answers – but they’re
your
answers.” She turned again to Andie: “Though
you
think they’re
the
answers, don’t you? . . . ‘Contented’! – are you and I just to be
that
?
Never ask for more? You – you
appal
me!” she told the two at the
table.
Neither of the two at the table answered.
Their silence affected Tonia: she thought again – nibbling at the
tip of a painted fingernail. “Or don’t
I
, perhaps, know what content
ment means – what it
could
mean?” she asked the woman behind the
teapot.
“Possibly,” said Joanna – for once, tentative.
“Well then, what
could
it mean? Go on, tell me!”
“I suppose . . . having no longing that isn’t satisfied . . . These
content me, for instance,” said Joanna, somewhat shyly touching the
bowl of primroses.
“Yes,” said the girl, impatiently, “but – enormous longings? The
kind one can’t explain, that tear one to bits?”
“There can be enormous contentment – I understand.”
“Oh . . . ?” said the girl. Thoughtful, she looked at Andie.
“Though to me,” said Joanna – slowly; she was unused to voicing
ideas – “contentment is never a small thing. Small things can cause
it, but it’s a large feeling. I – I’ve come to know that from living here.
Of course, I’ve been lucky.”
“How content shall you feel,
always
there in that pokey flat?”
Joanna said: “Well, there’s usually something. – And the flat’s not
pokey; and there’s a tree in the courtyard. – I’m lucky having had
this for so many years, lucky to have learned how to make a life –
once one has made one, one can make another.”
“I wouldn’t call that luck,” said Andie. “I’d call it courage.”
Joanna lowered her eyes. Embarrassed by having spoken of
herself, she reached round the table, collecting china, taking the
spoon from the jampot, beginning to stack the tray. She said: “I’ll
just take these into the kitchen, then we’ll . . .”
Andie got up, to help her. Constrained to say one thing more, she
straightened her back and looked from him to Tonia. “Of course, I
can quite see, for me it’s simple. Alone, one has only one’s own
problems.”
Tonia said: “You never thought of marrying?”
Joanna (looking the girl straight in the eye, calmly) replied:
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Then, why . . . ?”
“Two people don’t always think of the same thing.” A conclusive
pause was followed by a change of tone: “Do you,” Joanna wanted
to know, “know anything about a kitchen range?”
The girl murmured something about an electric grill.
“Then perhaps,” said Joanna, “you’d like to look at one? Mine,
here, I put in three years ago. It’s far from heavy on fuel, and heats
the bathwater – also warms up the kitchen, wonderfully quickly. A
woman comes in and gets it going for me, on Friday mornings. By
the way, she’s an excellent caretaker; she looks after Bobbin – I must
give you her name.” She had started propelling Tonia, by moral
force, in the direction of the kitchen – to Andie she turned, and
said: “You, perhaps, should take a look at it too? My range. Like
most things, it does better if it’s understood.”
“Like most people, also, I should imagine,” said Tonia – with a
sidelong, kindly-take-note-of
that
glance at Andie.
Andie said to Joanna: “Show us its ways.”
The three went through to the kitchen, leaving the parlour
empty. A faint breeze, having sprung up, stirred the muslin curtains
over the open window. Tonia’s last cigarette, put hastily down,
fumed in an ornamental crinkly china dish on the chimneypiece.
15
Through the door to the kitchen, ajar, there could have been
overheard – that is, were there anyone in the parlour
to
overhear –
the tones of Joanna giving an authoritative talk about the range, of
Andie asking relevant questions, of Tonia’s dutiful “yes’s” and “
I
see’s.”
An oven door was opened and shut, a demonstration in clinkerraking was given . . .
Andie came back into the parlour. He went to the chimneypiece
and ground out Tonia’s derelict cigarette, to stop it fuming. Offstage, Joanna could be heard asking if Tonia’d like to take some
daffodils back to London? Very well, then: good – would she pick as
many as she liked? Here was a basket . . . Shortly after, Tonia passed
outside the parlour window, swinging a massive basket. Joanna,
meantime, had followed Andie back into the parlour – again, now,
she brought out her “answer” list, with the evident intention of
going on with it.
“Well, thanks very much – that was interesting,” he said – with a
retrospective nod in the direction of the kitchen.
“It was important,” Joanna pointed out, firmly.
He smiled: “Yes, we might, I expect – without that – have blown
ourselves up!”
She looked disproportionately startled – indeed, agonised. Her
fingers, holding the list, gave such a jerk at it that the paper tore.
She blurted out (it seemed, irrepressibly): “What makes you say
that?”
He
was, naturally, startled by her reaction. “Stupid,” he said. “A
thing one
does
say. – Why?”
“Only, I know somebody who was blinded.”
“By a blow-up?”
“Yes. Right in his face.” She drew a hand across her own face, as
though the thing had happened to
her
. Then, she collected herself.
– “Oh, not a stove like the one in
there
!” (She gestured towards the
kitchen.) “Not a modern range: they’re as safe as houses. The worst
mine could do, if you mishandled it, would be, burn less well, choke
up, perhaps go out. No, what exploded was an old oil pressure-stove
– a bad, tricky kind, long ago off the market. Don’t know where he
got it from; I suppose he’d borrowed it. If so, whoever lent it him
should have warned him. He was always rather an idiot about those
kinds of things – I’d have thought
anyone
knowing him would have
known that.”
Absently trying to piece together the torn list, she added: “He
was out camping.”
During what she had said, a note in her voice had caused Andie
to fix his eyes on her searchingly. There began to dawn in his face
a look of perception. He
said
, however, only: “I’m sorry.”
She bowed her head, saying nothing.
He ventured: “This happened lately?”
“Three weeks ago. You remember that freak heat-wave we had in
March? Early to go camping, all the same. But he liked that; he liked
catching the early morning light, in the early spring. He is – he
was
– a painter.”
“Of all things, to happen to a painter!” he said, awed.
“Yes . . .” she said.
“Apart from everything else,” he said, “what will he
do
now? –
How will he make a living? That
was
his living?”
“Yes. When I first knew him, it wasn’t much of one; but lately he’d
been beginning to make a name. In fact, more than that: since last
year he
had
a name. If he was not yet famous, he was about to be.
He had an exhibition – a show, they call it. It was an unexpectedly
great success. People not only came, but they bought the pictures.
Even I had had no idea he would do so well.”
“Well, at least,” said Andie, “that’s
something
– isn’t it?”
She no more than looked at him, unseeingly.
“I mean, he’s now got a bit of money behind him.”
“No,” she said.
“
What
. . .?” he asked, puzzled.
“He should have. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t. The money’s
gone.”
“
Without
his knowing? – how could that happen?”
“A man in the art world, a man he trusted, had the idea of starting
a gallery – or, at least,
said
that was the idea he had. Apparently, it
did sound a good proposition. He said he had found the premises,
but needed to raise money to buy the lease. To my friend, it sounded
a reasonable investment – it
could
have been, if the man had been
. . .
bona fide
. He was not. What he did with the money, no one will
ever know. Overnight, he ran out – totally disappeared.” (Her voice
shook with anger.) “The news broke – the news of his get-away –
Two days after the accident happened to . . . this friend of mine.”
“So
he
hasn’t heard – yet?”
“Who tells news like that to a man lying in the dark?”
“Naturally, no. But sooner or later – ”
“No,” said Joanna calmly.
“But he’s bound to hear, when he’s better. Or, bound to ask.”
“When he does ask – by the time he’s well enough to do that –
the money will be there. It will be with his sister. He will be told
that, before he bolted (bolted for
other
reasons) the man did the
decent thing: sent the money back. That won’t sound to
him
as
incredible as you might fancy. As I told you, he thought well of this
man, and anybody he likes seems to him good – or at least
some
good: that is his kind of temperament. Anybody he’s trusted, he goes
on trusting. After he married, he never had a suspicion of his wife –
till the day she left him.”
“Oh, he did marry, did he?” asked Andie quickly.
“What do you mean?” said Joanna, sharply.
He frowned down thoughtfully at the carpet. “So his
sister
’ll be
able – somehow – to raise the money? It’s quite an amount – I
imagine, from what you tell me?”
Joanna half-turned away from him. She repeated: “It will be
there.” Her manner, though still firm, was for the first time also
evasive. “However,” she said, “none of this concerns you: why let it
worry you? I’m sorry; I’d simply intended to talk business –
then
, I felt
I ought to explain why I couldn’t take that harmless joke you made,
about an explosion. Why should I have told you all this, though –
all the same?”
He looked straight at her. “Look, don’t be angry, but – ”
“Well?” she said, on the defensive.