Don't Tell Alfred Read online

  Of course Uncle Matthew could not remain in a place where he risked setting eyes on this loathed daughter-in-law. He took a flat in London, always known as The Mews, and seemed strangely contented in a town which he had hitherto regarded as a plague spot. Aunt Sadie remained peacefully in her nice new house, able to see a few friends and entertain her grandchildren without any fear of explosions. Uncle Matthew, who had been fond of his own children when they were young, took a very poor view of their progeny, while my aunt really liked them better, felt more at her ease with them, than she ever had with their parents.

  At first domestic troubles raged in The Mews. There was no bedroom for a servant; daily women were found but Uncle Matthew pronounced them to be harlots; daily men smelt of drink and were impertinent. Luck favoured him in the end and he arrived at a perfect solution. One day, driving in a taxi to the House of Lords, he spied a pound note on the floor. On getting out, he handed it and his fare, plus, no doubt, an enormous tip (he was a great over-tipper), to the cabby, who remarked that this was a nuisance because now he would be obliged to take it round to the Yard.

  ‘Don’t you do any such thing!’ said Uncle Matthew, rather oddly, perhaps, for a legislator. ‘Nobody will claim it. Keep it for yourself, my dear fellow.’ The cabby thanked him warmly, both for the tip and the advice, and they parted on a chuckling note, like a pair of conspirators.

  The next day, by chance, Uncle Matthew, having rung up his local shelter (or, as it is probably now called, Drivers’ Rest and Culture Hall) for a cab to take him down to the House, got the same man. He told my uncle that, though he had quite seen the good sense of his advice, he had nevertheless taken the pound to Scotland Yard.

  ‘Damned fool,’ said Uncle Matthew. He asked him his name and what time he started his day. The name was Payne and he was on the streets at about half past eight. Uncle Matthew told him that, in future, he was to put his flag down when he left his garage and drive straight to The Mews.

  ‘I like to get to Victoria Street every morning in time for the Stores to open so that would suit us both.’ The Stores (Army and Navy) had ever been a magnet to my uncle; Aunt Sadie used to say she wished she could have a penny for each pound he had spent there. He knew most of the employees by name and used to take his constitutional in the magic precincts, ending up with a view from the bridge, whence he would note the direction of the wind. No sky was visible from The Mews.

  Presently Payne and my uncle came to a very suitable arrangement. Payne would drop him at the Stores, return to The Mews and put in a couple of hours doing housework there. He would then go back for Uncle Matthew and drive him either to his club or home, in which case he would fetch him some hot luncheon from the Rest and Culture Hall, where according to my uncle, the cabbies do themselves exceedingly well. (I often feel pleased to remember this when waiting in a bitter wind for one of them to finish his nuts and wine.) For the rest of the day Payne was allowed to ply his trade on condition that between every fare he should ring up The Mews to see if anything were wanted. Uncle Matthew paid him, then and there, whatever was on the clock and a tip. He said this saved accounts and made everything easier. The system worked like a charm. Uncle Matthew was the envy of his peers, few of whom were so well looked after as he.

  As I was walking along Kensington Gore a cab drew up beside me, Payne at the wheel. Taking no notice of his fare, who looked surprised and not delighted, he leant over to me and said, confidentially, ‘His Lordship’s out. If you’re going to The Mews now I’d best give you the key. I’m to pick him up at St George’s Hospital after taking this gentleman to Paddington.’ The fare now pulled down the window and said furiously, ‘Look here, driver, I’ve got a train to catch, you know.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Payne. He handed me the key and drove away.

  By the time I arrived it was raining hard and I was glad not to be obliged to sit on the dust-bin. Although we were already in July the day was turning chilly; Uncle Matthew had a little fire in his sitting-room. I went up to it, rubbing my hands. The room was small, dark and ugly, the old business room at Alconleigh in miniature. It had the same smell of wood fire and Virginia cigarettes and was filled, as the business room had always been, with hideous gadgets, most of which my uncle had invented himself years ago and which, it was supposed of each in turn, would make him rich beyond belief. There were the Alconsegar Ash Tray, the Alconstoke Fire Lighters, the Alcondef Record Rack and the Home Beautifier, a fly trap made of fretwork in the form of a Swiss chalet. They vividly evoked my childhood and the long evenings at Alconleigh with Uncle Matthew playing his favourite records. I thought with a sigh what an easy time parents and guardians had had in those days – no Teddy boys, no Beards, no Chelsea set, no heiresses, or at least not such wildly public ones; good little children we seem to have been, in retrospect.

  Tea was already laid out, silver hot-dishes containing scones and girdle cakes and a pot of Tiptree jam. You could count on a good tea, at The Mews. I looked round for something to read, picked up the Daily Post and fell upon Amyas Mockbar’s Paris Page. Provincials like myself are kept in touch with fashionable and intellectual Europe in its last stronghold of civilized leisure by this Mr Mockbar who, four times a week, recounts the inside story of Parisian lives, loves and scandals. It makes perfect reading for the housewife, who is able to enjoy the chronicle without having to rub shoulders with the human horrors depicted therein; she lays down the paper more contented than ever with her lot. Today, however, the page was rather dull, consisting of speculations on the appointment of a new English Ambassador to Paris. Sir Louis Leone, it seemed, was due to retire after a mission of unusual length. Mockbar had always presented him as a diplomatic disaster, too brilliant, too social and much too pro-French. His beautiful wife was supposed to have made too many friends in Paris; reading between the lines, one gathered that Mockbar had not been among them. Now that the Leones were leaving, however, he was seized with an inexplicable tenderness for them. Perhaps he was saving his ammunition for the new Sir Somebody whom he confidently tipped as Sir Louis’s successor.

  I heard the taxi crawling into The Mews. It stopped, the door slammed, the meter rang, my uncle rattled some half-crowns out of bis pocket, Payne thanked him and drove off. I went to meet Uncle Matthew as he came slowly up the stairs.

  ‘How are you, my dear child?’

  It was comfortable to be my dear child again; I was so accustomed to seeing myself as a mother – poor, neglected mother today, left to have her luncheon all alone. I looked at myself in a glass while Uncle Matthew went to the little kitchen to put on a kettle, saying ‘Payne got everything ready, there’s only the tea to make.’ No doubt there was something in my appearance which made ‘my dear child’ not too ridiculous, even at the age of forty-five. I took off my hat and combed my hair which was as springy as ever, turned up all over my head and was neither faded nor grey. My face was not much lined; my eyes looked bright and rather young. I weighed the same as when I was eighteen. There was an unfashionable aspect about me which came from having lived most of my life in Oxford, as much out of the world as if it had been Tibet, but no doubt some such drastic treatment as a love affair (perish the thought) or change of environment could still transform my appearance; the material was there.

  ‘Very civil of you to come, Fanny.’

  I saw Uncle Matthew but seldom these days and never really got accustomed to finding him old, that is to say, no longer in the agreeable, seemingly endless autumn of life but plunged in its midwinter. I had known him so vigorous and violent, so rampageous and full of super-charged energy that it went to my heart to see him now, stiff and slow in his movements; wearing spectacles; decidedly deaf. Until we are middle-aged ourselves, old age is outside our experience. When very young, of course, everybody grown up seems old while the really old people with whom we come into contact, never having been different during the few years – short to them, endlessly long to us – of our acquaintance, seem more like another species than me
mbers of our own race in a different condition. But the day comes when those we have known in the prime of life approach its end; then we understand what old age really is. Uncle Matthew was only in his seventies, but he was not well preserved. He had gone through life with one lung, the other having been shot away in the Boer War. In 1914, on the reserve of officers, he had arrived in France with the first hundred thousand and spent two years in the trenches before being invalided home. After that he had hunted, shot and played lawn tennis as though he had been perfectly fit. I can often remember, as a child, seeing him fight to get his breath – it must have been a strain on the heart. He had known sorrow too, which always ages people. He had suffered the deaths of three of his children and those his three favourites. Having lost a child myself I know that nothing more terrible can befall a human being; mine, having died as a baby, left no gap comparable with the disappearance of Linda and the two boys he was so proud of.

  When he came back with the tea, looking like some old shepherd of the hills who had invited one to his chimney-corner, I said, ‘Whom were you visiting at St George’s?’

  ‘Why, Davey! I though you couldn’t have known he was there or you would have come.’ Davey Warbeck was my uncle, widower of Aunt Emily who had snatched me from my own, unmatemal mother and brought me up.

  ‘Indeed I would have. Whatever is he in for now?’ There was no terror in my voice as I asked; Davey’s health was his hobby and he spent much of his life in nursing homes and hospitals.

  ‘Nothing serious. It seems they have got a few human spare parts, frozen, don’t you know, from America. Davey came up from the country to give them the once over. He says it was hard to know what to choose, they were all so tempting. A few yards of colon, some nice bits of membrane, an eye (but where could he put it? Even Davey would look rather odd with three) – finally he picked on a kidney. He’s been after a suitable one for ages – he’s having it grafted. It’s to give the others a chance. Now who else would have thought of that? Wonderful fella – and all for nothing, don’t you know? We pay – health service.’

  ‘It sounds rather terrific – how did he seem?’

  ‘Strong as a bull and having the time of his life. Doctors and nurses so proud of him – exhibit A. I asked if they couldn’t give me a new lung but they wouldn’t touch it. Kill me stone dead they said, with my heart in the state it is. You want to be in the pink, like Davey, to have these graftings.’

  ‘Delicious girdle cake.’

  ‘Comes from the Shelter – they’ve got a Scotch cook there now. Davey’s been telling me about your mother’s new husband. You know how he likes to be in on things – he went to the wedding.’

  ‘No – how could he! Weren’t the papers awful?’

  ‘I thought so too, but he says not nearly as bad as they might have been. It seems to have been a thick week, luckily for us, with all these heiresses running to leper colonies and the Dockers docking at Monte Carlo. What they did put in they got wrong, of course. Have you seen him, Fanny?’

  ‘Who? Oh, my mother’s husband? Well no, she has rather stopped asking Alfred and me to meet her fiancés. They’ve gone abroad now, haven’t they?’

  ‘To Paris, I believe. He’s only twenty-two, did you know?’

  ‘Oh dear, I can easily believe it.’

  ‘She’s as pleased as Punch, Davey says. He says you must hand it to her, she didn’t look a day over forty. It seems your boy Basil was at the wedding – he introduced them in the first place.’

  ‘Goodness! Did he really?’

  ‘They both belong to the same gang,’ said Uncle Matthew, adding rather wistfully, ‘we didn’t have these gangs when I was young. Never mind, though, we had wars. I liked the Boer War very much, when I was Basil’s age. If you won’t have wars you must expect gangs, no doubt.’

  ‘Does my stepfather, aged twenty-two (oh, really, Uncle Matthew, it is past a joke. Why, he is the boys’ step-grandfather, you realize?), does he do any work or is he just a criminal?’

  ‘Davey said something about him being a travel agent. That’s why they’ve gone abroad, most likely.’

  The words of that Teddy boy came back to me. ‘Old Baz is a travel agent… he’s joined up with his Grandad.’ I became very thoughtful. What was I going to tell Alfred when I got home?

  I said: ‘At least that sounds fairly respectable?’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. A chap in the House was telling me about these travel agents. Bandits, he said. Take people’s money and give them ten days of hell. Of course, going abroad in itself would be hell to me. Now how many would you say that makes, Fanny?’

  ‘What, Uncle Matthew?’

  ‘How many husbands has the Bolter had now?’

  ‘The papers said six –’

  ‘Yes, but that’s absurd. They left out the African ones – it’s eight or nine at least. Davey and I were trying to count up. Your father and his best man and the best man’s best friend, three. That takes us to Kenya and all the hot stuff there – the horsewhipping and the aeroplane and the Frenchman who won her in a lottery. Davey’s not sure she ever married him, but give her the benefit of the doubt: four. Rawl and Plugge five and six, Gewan seven, the young man who writes books on Greece – relatively young – old enough to be the father of this one – eight and the new boy nine. I can’t think of another, can you?’

  At this point the telephone bell rang and my uncle picked up the receiver. ‘That you, Payne? Where are you now – East India Docks? I’d like the Evening Standard, please. Thank you, Payne.’ He rang off. ‘He can take you to the station, Fanny. I suppose you’re catching the 6.5? If you wouldn’t mind being a bit on the early side so that he can be back here in good time for the cocktail party.’

  ‘Cocktail party?’ I said. I was stunned. Uncle Matthew loathed parties, execrated strangers and never drank anything, not even a glass of wine with his meals.

  ‘It’s a new idea – don’t you have them at Oxford? You will soon, mark my words. I rather like them. You’re not obliged to talk to anybody and when you get home, it’s bedtime.’

  Timidly, without much conviction, but feeling it my duty to do so, I now broached the subject which was the reason for my visit. I asked him if he would like to see Fabrice, Linda’s child whom Alfred and I had adopted. He was at school with our Charlie; they had been born on the same day and in the same nursing home; Linda had died; I had survived and left the home with two babies instead of one. Aunt Sadie went to Eton sometimes and took the boys out but Uncle Matthew had not set eyes on his grandson since he was a baby, during the war.

  ‘Oh, no, my dear Fanny, thank you very much,’ he mutterred, embarrassed, when he understood what I was trying to say. ‘I don’t set great store by other people’s children, you know. Give him this and tell him to keep away, will you?’ A pocket book lay beside him – he took out a fiver. This unlucky idea of mine was a cold spoon in the soufflé; the conversation lapsed and I was thankful when Payne arrived with the Evening Standard.

  ‘Eighteen and six on the clock, m’lord.’

  My uncle gave him a pound and two half-crowns. ‘Thank you, Payne.’

  ‘Thank you – much obliged, m’lord.’

  ‘Now, Payne, you’ll take Miss Fanny to Paddington – no scorching, I beg, we don’t want her in the ditch, we are all very fond of Miss Fanny. While you are there, would you go to Wyman’s, present my compliments to Mr Barker of the book-stall and see if he could oblige me with a ball of string? Come straight back, will you? – we are going to Lord Fortinbras in Groom Place. I am invited for six-thirty – it wouldn’t do to miss the beginning.’

  When I arrived at Oxford I was startled to see Alfred waiting for me on the platform. He never came to meet me as a rule – I had not even said what train I would take. ‘Nothing wrong?’!said. ‘Theboys – ?’

  ‘The boys? Oh dearest, I’m sorry if I frightened you.’ He then told me that he had been appointed Ambassador to Paris.

  Chapter Two

  IT
may be imagined that I got little sleep that night. My thoughts whizzed about, to begin with quite rational; more and more fantastic as the hours went on; finally between sleeping and waking, of a nightmare quality. In the first place, of course, I was happy to think that my dear Alfred’s merits should have been publicly recognized at last, that he should receive a dazzling prize (as it seemed to me) to reward him for being so good and clever. Surely he was wasted in a chair of Pastoral Theology, even though his lectures on the pastoral theme made a lasting impression on those who heard them. During the war he had filled a post of national importance; after that I had quite expected to see him take his place in the arena. But (whether from lack of ambition or lack of opportunity I never really knew) he had returned quietly to Oxford when his war-work came to an end and seemed fated to remain there for the rest of his days. For my part, I have already told* how, as an eager young bride, I had found University life disappointing; I never reversed that opinion. I was used to being a don’s wife, I knew exactly what it involved and felt myself adequate; that was all. The years rolled by with nothing to distinguish them; generations of boys came and went; like the years I found that they resembled each other. As I got older I lost my taste for the company of adolescents. My own children were all away now: the two youngest at Eton; Basil – oh where was he and when should I confide my fears about him to Alfred? Bearded David, the eldest, was a don at a redbrick university, living with the times, or so he informed me. In moments of introspection I often thought that a woman’s need for children is almost entirely physical. When they are babies one cuddles and kisses and slaps them and has a highly satisfying animal relationship with them. But when they grow up and leave the nest they hardly seem to belong any more. Was I much use to the boys now? As for Alfred, detached from all human emotions, I thought it more than likely that if I were to disappear he would go and live in college, as happy as he had ever been with me. What was I doing on earth at all and how was I going to fill in the thirty-odd years which might lie ahead before the grave?