The Winds Of Heaven Page 2

  Louise, who had lived her childhood on a Shropshire farm, knew that it was not, and disliked the self-conscious perpetuation of beams and thatch that housed the sophisticated shops and clubs and stiffly tweeded businessmen. When she had once referred to it, however, as a glorified suburb, Miriam and Arthur had jumped down her throat with as much horror as if she had accused them of living in the slums.

  Sometimes Louise looked at her eldest daughter and tried to believe that the tall composed woman had once been curled up inside her, helplessly dependent. It did not seem possible. The girl, as Louise called her—she called all her daughters 'the girls/ and would probably still do so when they were long past forty—the girl was so self-sufficient, so very much a separate entity, who moved upright through life, without needing props or pushes.

  Miriam was red-haired; slim, elegant and rather expressionless of feature. Everything about her—her hands, feet, nose, neck—was long, slender and fastidious. She even looked cool when cooking a meal for six, and her underclothes drawer was a joy to behold.

  Miriam's best feature was her grave, green eyes, which for the last few years she had hidden behind pastel-rimmed spectacles, Louise had been sad for her when she first had to wear glasses, but when you got used to them you saw that they actually suited her unemotional face in some complementary way. Miriam herself did not mind them. They were another

  piece of armor behind which she could hide anything that was soft and vulnerable in her.

  'What have you been doing, Mother?" she asked, when they had exhausted the subject of iniquitous prices and slapdash shop assistants. Louise's daughters all called her Mother. They had not called her Mummy since Miriam was eight years old, when for some reason she had started saying Mother, and the younger ones had copied it.

  "Did you see the pictures?" Miriam asked, her gloved hands light and capable on the wheel at the 'ten minutes to two' angle advised by the Highway Code.

  "Well, no dear. I didn't have time. The afternoon just seemed to fly. And it was so windy. I couldn't stay out in the streets any longer, so I went into Lyons."

  "Oh, Granny." Simon leaned over the back of the seat. "You always go to Lyons. Daddy says it's your spiritual home. Did you have baked beans?"

  "No, because we'd just had lunch, you see." Louise answered even the children's silliest questions with serious consideration. She thought that Miriam and Arthur too often shut them up, or cut them off with a careless answer.

  "So I had a cup of tea, and one of those cakes that look better than they taste. And I met such a nice man," she told Miriam. "He was sitting at my table, and we talked. He was fat and gentle, and looked rather neglected. He sells beds. He was charming, I thought."

  "Really, Mother." Louise had known that Miriam would say this, as if she had seen the words written on the windshield for Miriam to pluck off and use.

  "Somebody has to sell beds, I suppose* But he does something else. He writes books."

  Miriam raised her eyebrows.

  "Not what you would call books, I know, but the kind I like. These shockers." She showed Miriam The Girl in the Bloodstained Bikini, and then turned the book upside down on her lap, so that the children should not see the cover.

  "He gave it to me to read. He wanted my opinion of it. Now don't say: Really, Mother, because he was nice, and so friendly. He was a little common, I think, and I liked him/' Louise put on the slightly defiant tone with which she occasionally tried to remind Miriam who was the mother and who the daughter.

  "Mother being democratic again," Miriam said, to no one in particular.

  Louise wanted to talk about Gordon Disher, and to try to describe the queer, reassuring excitement she had felt in being able suddenly to enter into quite an intimate conversation with a stranger; but Miriam was not interested. She started to talk to the children.

  Louise fell silent and began to read the book, which had two screams and a pistol shot on the first page. She would tell Ellen about Mr. Disher when they got home. Ellen would listen. Ellen wanted to share in everything that happened to her grandmother. The spindly young girl and the middle-aged woman were comfortable allies in a household into which neither of them fitted very well.

  Miriam's house was on the outskirts of the village of Monk's Ditchling, at the end of the road that ran past the neat green, and the garages, and the antique shops and the cocktail bar that was still called a pub, and the grocer who sold foie gras and peaches in brandy. It was not the best house, because there were so many expensive and beautifully tended houses around, but it was pleasing enough in a trimmed and tasteful way. It was an old house, so well remodelled that you could not tell which were the original beams and which the new ones, or just where the usurping Victorian slates had been ripped off the kitchen roof to bring back the mellowed tiles, which had been obtained at considerable expense when Arthur won his first big case in the Criminal Court.

  The garden was orderly, with the daffodils in rows in the flowerbeds, instead of scattered about in the grass and under the hedges. There was a thatched lych-gate over the drive entrance. This was a mistake, since the house and garage and

  stables were tiled; but there was so much thatch weighing down the other houses and outbuildings in the neighborhood, that you could not really feel you belonged unless you had had the old man in the green bowler hat—'Positively the last thatcher left in the country. We're lucky to get him'—with his blowing straw and his shears and his despotic demands for beer. Quite a character. He would have been surprised to know what a gay conversational subject he was at the local dinner parties, where people had started wearing dinner jackets and long dresses again since the war.

  When they drove in under the unnecessary thatch, Ellen was waiting on the edge of the lawn. She looked cold.

  "Where's your coat?" Miriam asked, as she got out of the car.

  "Oh, pooh!—I haven't had it on all day. It's been lovely sun."

  "The wind was cold, though," Louise said. But although it was still blowing, the wind was not as cold and rough here as in London. It was tamed and caged and clipped at the claws, like the rest of nature in this overbuilt part of the country.

  Miriam was making the other children collect the parcels from the car, but Ellen went skipping away with her grandmother toward the house, her rod-straight hair dancing at angles.

  "Did you have a nice time, Granny? Did you go to the cinema? Mrs. Match and I had a lovely time, although we couldn't find much for lunch. She told me all about when she was in the hospital, while we were cleaning the silver. 'It's better out than in, Mrs. Match/ they said. What did you do?"

  "Nothing much. But I had quite an adventure. I met a man in Lyons, and he was so nice. I felt as if I'd known him quite a long time, as you did with the dog that followed you five miles on your bicycle. We talked, and he told me "

  Before Louise could get into her story, Miriam called from the car: "Come and help with the parcels, you lazy child 1 Why should everyone else do all the work?"

  "It's their clothes," muttered Ellen, and dawdled back, scuffling the gravel of the drive. She was given the biggest par-

  eel. As the family came into the house, Louise, taking off her coat in the hall, heard Ellen say: "I must tell you about Mrs. Match, Mummy. Her operation. It's better out than in, Mrs. Match/ they "

  "I am not interested in Mrs. Match's surgical history," Miriam said. "And neither should you be. Now take that parcel upstairs and get your hands and face washed. We're going to have tea."

  At seven o'clock, with Judy preparing for bed, and Simon hunched over the stripped parts of a model aeroplane, Miriam had a twinge of conscience about Ellen, who never seemed to have anything special to do. The child had no hobbies. She should. All the other children Miriam knew had hobbies. Ellen's idea of entertainment was to hang about and talk to anybody who would sustain a conversation with her. Mrs. Match, the gardener, her grandmother, the man who came to put down poisoned bread for the mice, occasionally her mother, if she could catch M
iriam in an unguarded responsive mood.

  Tm going to fetch Daddy. Do you want to comer 5 " Miriam asked, finding Ellen sitting irritatingly on the bottom step of the staircase. Not doing anything. Just sitting. Not reading, or playing with a piece of string, or waiting for a meal. Just sitting patiently, like a pavement artist expecting the world to come to him.

  Ellen got up indifferently. She was not sure that she did want to meet her father at the station. She never knew whether to kiss him or not. Sometimes he seemed to expect it. Sometimes her proffered embrace was no more to him than a cobweb unthinkingly brushed off. However, she appreciated Miriam's offer, and did not want to turn down the motherly overture.

  Miriam began to regret having suggested it as soon as she had spoken. It might make an atmosphere with Arthur, who was often so tired when he got off the train that he had to be treated delicately until he had had his dinner. They stood

  there, the mother and daughter, trying separately to decide what to do.

  How thin she is, Miriam thought. Perhaps she will be slim, like me, but I don't think I ever had such knobs of bones at her age. 1 do hope she's not going to grow up to be one of these raw-boned, striding women who can never get a man and have to pretend they don't want one.

  There had been two men in Miriam's life. Dark, solemn-faced Arthur, whom she had known in childhood and married quite young, because all her friends were doing it, and it seemed preferable to living at home, with her father putting on his airs, and her mother so sickeningly compliant. Then Colin, Arthur's scapegrace friend, who had brought such reviving glamour to the difficult days when Arthur was slaving and struggling, and with whom Arthur was not friendly any more now that he was successful.

  No, that was not fair. It was not because Arthur was successful that he did not see Colin any more. "Come on if you're coming," Miriam said abruptly, and Ellen rose, and fetched her coat, because she thought that would please, and followed her mother out to the car.

  But Colin had accepted it so peaceably, Miriam thought, driving to the station past the houses that were beginning to light up behind their barricades of evergreens and rhododendrons. That was what had hurt the most. Although Miriam would not have left Arthur if she had been asked to, she had not been asked, and that made her think at times that she would have left Arthur for Colin.

  The whole thing had been so gentlemanly. Arthur had found out. Fie had been wearily sad. He had not offered to fight anybody. Colin had faded tactfully out of the picture, after a heart-wringing and rather stagey scene with Miriam, in which he had talked excessively about 'doing the decent thing.'

  It had all been deftly arranged so that there was hardly a ripple on the surface of the marriage of Miriam and Arthur.

  Her parents never knew. No one knew except Eva, who had guessed, challenged Miriam with it once, and been for ever silenced.

  It was a neatly ended affair. No one had asked Miriam what she wanted. She wanted to stay with Arthur, but at the same time she did not want Colin to be already so tired of her that he welcomed a husband's intervention.

  What were his feelings when he thought of it now? Did he have to fight down the wild memories? Miriam hardly ever had to now. With a successful husband, a comfortable home, thr^e children and plenty of sociability, she had little time to think of the restless, seeking girl, who had stolen out of the house where her husband pored over his dusty briefs, to run in fearful joy to her unscrupulous lover, waiting for her at the corner of the square. Or did Colin ever think of her at all? How could he not remember swimming together, and the night they saw the ghost?

  Ellen played with the window of the car in the annoying way she had of never being able to leave things as they were, either up or down, or open or shut. She always had to fiddle.

  Colin! Miriam said in her heart, trying masochistically to recreate the yearning. But it was dead. She could only imagine how she had felt. She could not remember. It was all so long ago. And then the war had come; man's war, in which a pregnant woman could have no part except to wait about and drink orange juice, while the husband and the lover sailed out of her reach in the purifying nobility of the King's uniform.

  Arthur left the train at the little creaky station, and stood looking round for a moment, stretching his legs and craning his neck stiffly, in the habit acquired by a man who is slightly shorter than his wife, Miriam touched the horn, and he came down the steps, looking exactly what he was: a rising junior counsel, whose lunch had not agreed with him. His striped trousers, black hat, umbrella and brief case hardly looked

  incongruous at the country station, where several other men had left the train in the same kind of clothes.

  Arthur nodded to some of them, and waved his evening paper to Alice Cobb, who was waiting for Sidney in a grey Jaguar. Sidney had gone over to talk to Miriam. The Cobbs and the Chadwicks were friends, which is to say that they went often to each others houses, combined for parties at the club, and knew very few fundamental things about each other. If either couple had died or gone away, the other would scarcely have missed them.

  Ellen climbed into the back seat of the car, and Arthur got into the front. Miriam kissed him, and felt the prickle of beard already roughening his skin. Arthur often had to shave twice a day. He began to get blue about the chin by midafternoon. When he had been in court all day, and was tired, with reddening, shadowed eyes, he looked like a careworn but exceedingly intelligent ape.

  He was very dark, with thick eyebrows and black hair on the backs of his hands. He was forty. 'One of the cleverest young chaps at the Bar/ said the older members of the profession, which houses so many dotards that a man is young until he loses his teeth and begins to have difficulty struggling into his gown.

  It was as much his dogged capacity for work as his quick brain which was helping Arthur to make a name for himself and a comfortable position for his wife and family. His boy was at his old preparatory school, and was going to public school and Oxford. His wife was well dressed, and went to London to get her hair done, and had help in the house, which, if it was only Mrs. Match, with her depleted inside, was still a maid by postwar standards. His younger daughter was pretty and bright, with nasturtium-colored hair and engaging ways. His elder daughter was bonily plain at the moment, with teeth that were costing a lot in dentists' bills, but at least she was giving no trouble, and was said to be doing quite well at school.

  Arthur was content to pay the dentists' bills and to let her pursue her gawky, aimless life about his house, as long as she did not trouble him. But when all the children together gave trouble, it was usually Ellen who emerged as the scapegoat.

  Arthur sighed and yawned and said he needed a drink, and grumbled a little because Miriam had let the gas run low. This was clearly an evening when he did not expect a kiss, so Ellen sat back in the car and watched the batde for supremacy between the headlights and the dusk.

  "How was London?" Arthur asked.

  "You should know/' Miriam said. "You were there."

  "In court! That's not being anywhere, except in a padded cell. Old Fowler dithered and drooled and made his senile jokes. They should never have made him a judge in the first place, even when he had all his faculties."

  Miriam told him something of her day. "I took Mother with me/' she said. "It does her good to get about a bit. But she's like a rabbit. All she did the moment my back was turned was to dive down into Lyons and have tea with a car salesman, or something."

  "He sells beds/' Ellen put in gently, but they did not hear her.

  "Did you ring Eva?"

  "Yes. She's maddeningly vague/'

  "She give a date?" They talked cabalistically, remembering Ellen. Even when they were alone together, they did not often talk outright about Louise. When it first became apparent that they would have to house her for some months of the year, they had had a torturing argument, with Arthur pacing the bedroom floor in silk pyjamas, and Miriam at the dressing table, desperately creaming her face over and over again.

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nbsp; After a night's sleep, Arthur had begun to see reason, and had accepted the situation with only an occasional protest. It was just one of those problems that was there, and they lived with it, referring to it only obliquely. Arthur was proud of his unselfishness, and Miriam added to her family duties the job

  of trying to prevent her mother impinging more than necessary on her husband's ordered life.

  Louise liked Arthur. She did not feel entirely comfortable with him, but she admired him for being shrewd and reliable and clever all through instead of on the surface, and all the things that Dudley had not been.

  "He has a fine mind/' she told Miriam. Miriam, who did not care to discuss Arthur, or any of the things that mattered most in her life, would say: 1 suppose so/ and change the subject before Louise could go on to: I hope you appreciate what a good husband you have, which might lead to talk about her father.

  There had been too much talk about him when he died, although Louise always tried to be loyal. Miriam had been fond of her father in an undemonstrative, critical way. She had been the least shocked of anyone at the mess he had left behind at his death, because she had always suspected what he was really like. She had been his favorite child, if he could be said to have liked any of his daughters well enough to have a favorite. Like all bullies and boasters, he had despised those who believed his pretences, and he had favored Miriam, because she saw through him.

  She remembered childhood times when they had shared a secret against the rest of the family, and odd occasions when he had taken her off on some exploit in which the others were not asked to join.

  When she married Arthur, her fathei had given her a fabulous wedding present, which had set her mother struggling between anxiety that they could not afford it and pleasure that Dudley should suddenly be so generous.

  Miriam did not know that the bill for her wedding present was one of the things her father had bequeathed to Louise.

  Arthur tried quite hard with Dudley's widow, but he could not always be as nice to her as he meant to be. Like other small animals, she had a talent for getting underfoot; for being there when you had hoped she would not be.