The Winds Of Heaven Read online

  As it was, sitting under the roof with him, half afraid that whoever had agitated the lace curtain might come up and say: No ladies allowed, Louise felt that she was making a friend.

  The oddest but the most comforting friend she had ever made.

  "Were you ever married?" she aslced him, when she had finished telling him those few things about Dudley which her misplaced loyalty would allow.

  "Alas, no." He sighed. "I'm what they call a confirmed bachelor, though I've often wished it otherwise/'

  "Why?" Louise asked, with the bluntness that often got her into trouble in other places.

  "I lived with my mother, you see, until I was really past the age of thinking about such things. She didn't want me to marry."

  That sounded like Dudley, and his futile objections to Anne's marriage. "How could she stop you?" Louise asked with interest.

  "She had reason on her side. I wasn't in the shape for it, aren't now, and never shall be, even if I got the chance."

  "But that's absurd " Louise had been going to say something diplomatic about plenty of women liking fat men, but was glad she did not, for that was not what he meant.

  "A diabetic shouldn't marry," he said, quite cheerfully. "At least, my mother didn't think so. She took wonderful care of me—far better, she always said, than any wife could have. I miss her very much now that she's passed on."

  "Of course you do." Louise thought Mrs. Disher sounded something of a monster, but she admired his devotion, and she was only giving half a mind to the conversation now. The other half was skating away along the thin ice of her scant medical knowledge. A diabetic! What a good thing they had not had tea at the flat. It would have been embarrassing about the iced cake and the sandwiches. Or perhaps he would have eaten them out of politeness, and fallen to the floor in a coma, immovable as a beached whale.

  "I hope you don't mind my telling you this." He recalled her attention from her hypothetical worry about how she would have got hold of an ambulance* "Some people think it's not nice to talk about sickness/'

  "That's silly/' Louise said. "I think it's interesting/' Perhaps interesting was the wrong word. "I think it's bad luck/' she amended. "I'm sorry."

  "Please don't be/' he said. "I wasn't complaining. It's merely an inconvenience, having to regulate one's diet, and that. I'm quite happy, you know. I have my job, and my writing, and a place to live. What more could anyone want?"

  "Company?" Louise suggested.

  "I'd rather live on my own than with someone who didn't share my ways. There was a girl once . . . before they found out what was wrong with me. She faded out of the picture when I had the long spell in hospital, which was lucky. She was the social, ambitious type. She ended up as a councillor's wife/'

  He is happier than me, Louise thought. He is alone and sick, and he has no family to care, and he must be bored with selling beds, but he knows where he stands, and he is free.

  When she left him, adamantly refusing a taxi, because she was afraid he would try to pay the driver for her, they did not make any arrangement about meeting again. Like old friends, they knew that they would see each other by and by. It could be months, for Louise was going to Bedfordshire soon, and then to Miriam's; but they would pick up where they left off. Her daughters would probably be surprised at the friendship, but even they, with their variously biased standards, must see how kind he was—kinder than Louise had thought a man could ever be.

  "He's so very kind/* she told Eva, who was not really listening. "I went to his rooms in Fulham. Miriam would think that disgraceful, no doubt, but he's so—I mean, not brilliant, like Arthur, or—well anything much at all—^but he's so kind."

  "Why do you keep harping on 'kind/ Mother?" Eva asked, a little irritably. "Aren't we kind to you? We try—mean to be."

  "Oh, my darling " Louise fell over herself not to be misunderstood.

  "But I forgot about your tea party, didn't I? I'm a beast. You were going to have him to tea here—we ate your sandwiches, by the way—and I had to come blundering in and spoil it all. Ask him next week, why don't you? You can have the flat to yourself any day you like/'

  "That's not necessary. I don't like to interfere with your plans."

  "Shan't have any, except work. The boys are going into a sort of tentative rehearsal, though they still haven't got a theatre, or enough money, and David will be away for a few days. His play closed yesterday."

  "What a pity. Such a lovely play, I thought, though I didn't care for the girl in it. You could have played the part much better. Is David going on tour?"

  "No. He's going to Windsor to see his wife about some legal thing."

  "His wife?" Louise's visions of David as a son-in-law crumbled into horrified dust. "Eva, I didn't know "

  "They're separated," Eva said shortly. "There'll be a divorce soon."

  "Are there any children?"

  "One."

  "Oh— Eva!"

  "Now Mother, don't 'Oh, Eva' me. I haven't broken up his home, if that's what you think. His wife is poisonous. We hardly ever talk about her; but I know that she is."

  "But, darling " Louise fumbled for the right thing to say.

  She would be a poor mother indeed if she let this pass. "Going out with a married man . . . one doesn't do that sort of thing." Then she remembered that Eva was in love with David. She put out her hand, and cried in awkward pity: "Oh, my poor Eva!"

  Her daughter turned away. "I told you. He's going to get a divorce. Please leave me alone about it, Mother, I'm twenty-seven. I have to go my own way."

  4.

  "So EVA'S going to Italy, I hear," Anne said. "Witt that matinee idol she brought to Miriam's, no doubt/'

  "David's going, yes; but only as one of a party." Louise hoped that what Eva had told her was true.

  Anne made a disbelieving sound, and humped up her thick shoulder. "And what about this new play she's been so excited about?" she asked, on a grumbling note. "Or did someone else get the part?"

  "Of course not," Louise said. "They just had to postpone it for a while. I'm glad. Eva needs a holiday."

  "Who doesn't?" Anne heaved herself up to get a cigarette from the cracked china jug on the mantelpiece. "But they don't get one, it seems, unless they've got a boy friend to take them."

  "Now, Anny," Frank said mildly. "You know I'd like nothing better than to take you to the sea, but who would look after things here? I can't trust old Harry. You know you can go away any time you like if you need a break. Auntie Edna would love to have you at Hunstanton. She said so."

  "Oh, Frank!" Anne often spoke without looking at him, tossing remarks like carelessly thrown cricket balls. "Can you see me?"

  "I don't know why not," His patience with her was everlasting. "Auntie Edna has a very nice place."

  "Not as nice as Portofino with a man."

  "Don't always jeer at what Eva does," Louise said, looking up from the pillowcase she was darning lumpily. She always

  found an overflowing mending basket waiting for her when she came to stay with Anne. She struggled through it during her visit, knowing that whatever she left would stay in the basket until she came again. "You always want to pick holes in everything your sisters do. I can't think why, because when you were little, you used to follow them about like a dog, copying everything they did/'

  "When I was little was a long time ago," Anne said. "You mustn't harp on the past, Mother, or people will think you're getting senile/'

  "Army!" Frank embarked on the remark which he made so often during Louise's visits. "You mustn't talk to your mother like that."

  "That's all right," Louise said. "That's the way young people are nowadays."

  "I can't even annoy you, can I, Mother? Why don't you care what I say, the way you do with Miriam and Eva?" Anne asked shrewdly.

  "Because you're my baby," Louise said. "And you're a silly girl. I'm not afraid of you." She laughed, but there was truth behind her joke. Although Anne made little attempt to make her comfortable, Louise felt mor
e at home in the damp, ugly stone house than she did in Miriam's beautifully run home, or Eva's brighdy painted flat. Anne said what she thought, while the other two had more civilized ideas about what can be said to a mother, and Louise minded more about what she thought they were thinking than about what Anne actually said.

  Anne's home was uncomfortable, and the life she led in it ungracious and slovenly, but she left her mother alone to do what she liked. Louise did not mind staying there, although she was always glad to get away to a bath with hot water, and a meal without dogs clamoring round the table.

  There are many unattractive houses in Bedfordshire, but Frank had picked the most unprepossessing of all to start his market garden. When he took the place he had been interested only in the land and outbuildings that went with it. He had

  scarcely looked at the house, and he did not look at It too closely now, for the state in which Anne maintained it offended his innate sense of cleanliness and order. He knew that it was no use asking her to clean or tidy up. She would only say: "Not now. I'm reading/' or "I'm going to the movies," or "I ran the vacuum last week. Do you want me chained to that damned thing? The place wouldn't get so dirty if you didn't bring all that filthy mud in from outside." Which was unfair, because Frank was meticulous about wiping his boots and brushing off his trousers.

  It was a square, grey house with a slate roof, and a flat, blank look about its front, as if it were an uninteresting billboard set up beside the rutted road that ran by it. One side had no windows at all, only two different-colored spaces which had been blocked in during the days of the window tax. The back of the house was a jumble of irregular windows that did not all open, with rickety coal-sheds leaning against it among the battered dustbins, as if too exhausted to stand up under their own weight.

  Frank had no time to spend on the house. He lavished all his care on his chicken houses and pigsties and goat sheds. The outbuildings were whitewashed and in impeccable repair. His vegetables grew in neat rows in the two little fields on which his property was set. He was not interested in flowers, and Anne would not lift a spade, and so the narrow garden at the front and side of the house remained a jungle of waving grass and tangled shrubs, over which Anne's clothesline flapped its unheroic banners of grey and faded laundry in the searching wind.

  The wind always seemed to blow in this part of the country, even in summer. The land all round was flat for miles, with few trees, and a vista of sour brassels sprouts and turnips, that did not hide the main railway line, along which the great trains roared disdainfully through Bedfordshire toward the glamour of the North,

  Anne hated the house, so did not bother to do anything to

  improve it. Frank had hung some limp curtains when he lived there as a bachelor, and Anne had left them, as she had left the inadequate masculine furniture and the worn stair-carpet and the patched linoleum in the old-fashioned bathroom, whose hot water heater gave forth more noise than steam.

  She seldom bothered to empty ashtrays or straighten the rugs when guests came. She did not notice them looking round, if they were in clean clothes, to see if there was any chair that they could sit on without collecting dogs' hairs. She did not have many guests. During the years she had been there, she had made few friends, apart from one or two rather raffish couples from the local Air Force camp, who came and drank beer, and called Frank: "I say old chap," in accents that were unconvincing copies of the Battle of Britain pilots who had put R.A.F. talk on the map of the English language.

  Frank's friends dropped in from time to time, with heavy feet, to talk about the price of balancer meal or cabbages, but Anne was no more at home with them than Frank was with her Air Force friends, with their crepe-soled shoes and shrill, sharp-featured wives.

  It was a peculiar marriage; unsatisfactory, and yet restfully undemanding; held together by Franks invulnerable regard for his wife, and Anne's lazy acceptance of any kind of life that came her way.

  Having no home of her own, Louise kept her clothes and the few possessions she had not sold in Miriam's storeroom, picking out what she needed for wherever she was going to stay. When she left Eva, she had gone to Pleasant-ways for the night to put away her town clothes and get out all her oldest things to take to Anne's.

  "Mother," Miriam had said, coming in while she was packing, "you can't possibly wear that linen dress another summer, I remember you buying it ages ago—before I was married, I believe."

  "So I did/ Louise held up the shabby dress. "My goodness—

  before the war! Clothes were made differently then. They were made to last"

  "That wasn't," Miriam said. "It died quietly some time ago, but no one buried it. Let me buy you another one. We could go into Wincham in the morning before your train goes and get you something—let's see—pink, I think. A lavender pink, or a whitey pink, like a rose. You always look best in those sort of garden colors." When Louise was only staying for a short visit, Miriam managed to be very affectionate and attentive.

  "Thank you, dear," Louise said, folding the linen dress into her suitcase, "but I wouldn't dream of it. A new dress to go to Anne s! Whatever for?"

  "I see your point," Miriam said.
  Louise pottered comfortably about Anne's house in bedroom slippers and overalls, cleaning up anything that had not already gone too far for her limited domestic talents to rectify, often cooking the meals, for Anne was glad to stay out of the kitchen, and did not mind when her mother broke things or burned a saucepan. When the wind was not driving the rain across the flat fields, Louise would go out with a scarf over her head and Anne's large Wellington boots on her feet to see what Frank was about, and to help him with the things she could do, like feeding the chickens or sorting eggs.

  It was July now, and the muddy stretches that connected the various items of Frank's smallholding were caked and cracked, and smelled like rotten river beds. He yearned to pave his yard with concrete, but had not yet had the time or the money to do it.

  Louise went out in the old linen dress, with a light chiffon scarf over her intractable hair, because the wind was a hot, sluggish one today, and found Frank bent double, thinning out lettuces. He wore stained and shapeless grey flannel trousers, a broad leather belt round his narrow waist, and an open-

  necked blue shirt that echoed his bright eyes. When he straightened up, Louise saw the golden brown hair curling on his chest, and the muscular arms and firm hands, and thought again what an attractive man he was. Although Dudley had raved and protested, and called his daughter an idiot, Louise had always understood why Anne had married Frank.

  "Hullo, Mother/' It had been quite a time before he would stop calling her Mrs. Bickford. "Come to do some work for me?"

  "I wouldn't mind doing whatever it is you're doing/' Louise said. "It looks good for the figure." She would like to be slimmer, although since Anne's birth she had been this same stumpy shape, without ever managing to recapture her waistline. It would be nice to be able to get into dresses that were the right length for her, without the salesgirl having to leave the zipper open and call the fitter. She would like to be slimmer for the new dress that Miriam was going to buy her. She would save up and buy a new hat to go with it and go up to London to see Gordon Disher.

  She worked in the field all morning with Frank and in the afternoon she helped him with the animals. She liked to be with Frank. He did not talk very much, and when he did, it was about something practical. Louise had a child's liking for being given information. She preferred it to being given ideas.

  She knew that she was sometimes more of a nuisance than a help to Frank, because she so often had to ask what to do and how to do it; but he never got impatient or said: "Here, it'll be quicker if I do it myself." He instructed her kindly, and Louise began to remember things that she had done on the farm when she was young.

  "You're getting to be a real help to me," Frank said, finding her st
ruggling out with buckets to feed the chickens at the right time without asking. "You've got quite a way with those chickens, too. Not everybody has it. People think fowls have no sense, but they like to be treated right. Old Harry puts them in a fluster every time he goes near the houses."

  "That's because he's the executioner," Louise said. Harry's

  speciality was killing chickens. He did it with a grab, a twist and a grunt, so quickly that the bird was dead before you or the chicken knew it. He seemed to enjoy the slaughter. Chicken-killing time was one of the few occasions when he smiled.

  He was a spare, stooped old man, with a toothless skull and a cloth cap that seemed to have grown on to his head. No one knew whether he had any hair. He helped Frank erratically, coming punctually for weeks and then suddenly staying away for several days, usually when there was the most work to do. When he returned, shuffling sideways into the yard like a bundle of old clothes with nothing inside them, he would raise a gloomy, unshaven face to Frank, and say: Tve been a bad boy. Don't tell me. I know it."

  When Frank asked him: "Why don't you be a good old man and stay off the beer?" Harry would say, with a tremulous head: "Fm going to, boy. It won't happen again. If you don't want to keep me on no more, that's all right. But if you could see your way to letting me stay, I give you my word, it won't happen again."

  "Till the next time." Frank would laugh and pat him on the shoulder.

  "Why don't you throw out that old drunk?" Anne often complained. "He's never there when you want him. He just takes advantage of you being so soft."

  "I like the old devil, and I couldn't get another man as cheap. He works all right when he is here, and if I didn't employ him, no one else would. People round here are sick of him."

  "There you go." Anne shrugged her shoulders. "That's typical"

  Louise liked old Harry. When they were working close together, he talked to her about his dreary childhood, although she could not understand everything he said and he could seldom hear her answers.

  She and Frank and Harry finished the day's jobs in the golden diffusion of the evening sun. Louise was tired. She left the bent old man and the agile young one contemplating the