The Winds Of Heaven Page 8

  pigs, which they did with pride each night, and went in to see if Anne had done anything about getting tea ready.

  Anne was sitting on the torn leather chair in the kitchen, with her bare feet on the rung, painting her fingernails a crude shade of orange.

  "I thought Fd come and put the kettle on/* Louise said, thinking how nice it would have been to come in and find the table laid and the kettle welcoming her with a thin murmur of steam. She would have liked to sit down, too, and watch someone else move about the kitchen, making a friendly noise with cups and saucers, but Anne made no attempt to help. Her nails were not dry, so she sat and waved them in the air, while Louise rallied her strength to get things ready before Frank carne in hungry for his tea.

  "You're tired, Mother/' Anne said. "Why do you stay out so long? It's silly to try and do so much at your age."

  Louise was not offended. Anne's spade-calling remarks were somehow not insulting.

  "There's so much to do/' Louise said. "And I like to help Frank. He works so hard.'* She tried not to make it sound like a criticism of Anne's idleness, although it grieved her that her daughter took no share in the work, and no interest in the results that Frank achieved.

  "You really ought to go out and see the pigs/' Louise said* "Frank has done wonders with this new feeding. They're monsters/'

  "Brutes/' said Anne, unwinding her legs from the chair, and getting up with a rumpled skirt to tramp into her shoes. "They all look like Charles Laughton, except the one that looks like Marie Dressier/'

  'Til pick a lettuce and some tomatoes for supper, shall I?" Louise suggested, looking in the larder to see what was there. "The lettuces are beauties. Frank certainly has a way with vegetables. They're growing splendidly."

  'Why shouldn't they?" Anne yawned and looked at her nails.

  "Frank puts them in the ground. They take root. Why shouldn't they grow?"

  "You don't know the half of it, Army," Frank said, leaving his boots at the kitchen door and coming in in his socks. "You ought to come out with your mother sometime and help do some of the things that make them grow."

  "Don't keep on at me," Anne said, although he hardly ever tried to persuade her to help him. "I'm tired. My legs are tired."

  Frank looked round from the sink. "Not ill are you, dear?" he asked with concern.

  "If you must know," Anne said sulkily, Tm going to have a baby."

  "Anny!" Frank came towards her with dripping hands, the cold water weaving along the hairs on his sunburned forearms. "Oh, you clever girl!"

  "What's so clever about it?" Anne said. "I think it's awful."

  "It's just lovely." Frank held out his arms to her, and Louise, in confusion, slipped out of the room before she could see whether Anne stood still to be embraced, or turned away.

  Anne's godfather, Bruce Cory, lived ten miles away in an airless Victorian house besieged by overgrown laurels. It had always been a gloomy place, and was even gloomier since his wife died four years ago and left Bruce in the martial care of a housekeeper who kept the blinds half way down for fear of the sun on the carpets.

  Bruce had been Louise's friend before she married. She sometimes hinted that if circumstances had been different, she might have married him, although the question had actually never occurred to either of them. It had only occurred to Louise in later years, when her affection-starved fancy remembered more poignancy into those dances and tea parties than had ever existed.

  Louise was going to tea with Bruce. Frank was driving her there since he had to go into Bedford to see about his livestock

  rations. Louise wished that she had something better to go in than the green knitted suit which was the nicest thing she had brought. She had forgotten about Bruce when she packed to go to Anne's. Not that Bruce would notice what she wore. He accepted her as a contemporary, although she was nearly fifteen years younger, and assumed that she had given up trying to keep pace with the world, as he had. It was still an outing, however, and to Louise an outing meant clothes that were not everyday, and a carefully performed toilet, which left her looking just the same, but feeling different.

  Frank was waiting for her when she came down from her room, where she had been arranging herself since lunch. Anne wanted the car to go to the village, which was only half a mile away, but beyond the limits of Anne's legs; so Frank was taking Louise in his little truck, which said: F. c. NIXON, MKT GDNR, STONE FARM, HADLEiGH, BEDS, in home-painted letters on the door.

  Louise climbed into the truck and sat down with a surprised jolt on the flat unyielding seat, Anne had wandered into the garden to see them off, walking well back on her heels and sticking out her front in a way she had assumed since her pregnancy, although it would be a long time before her naturally thick figure altered enough to make this necessary.

  "Give old Bruce my love/' she said, without enthusiasm.

  Louise leaned out of the glassless window. "Can I tell him about—you know?"

  "If you like. I'm past caring. He won't be interested though/'

  "His goddaughter? Of course he will." Louise was glad to have some news to cheer Bruce's twilight hibernation.

  He was not interested, however. He had no children, and anyone of a younger generation was to him mere protoplasm, incapable of leading an existence of any significance. He sat in his darkened library, with a scarf round his neck, because the thermometer, although high, was lower than yesterday, and grunted appreciatively while the housekeeper creaked in with

  Rockingham china and the anchovy toast and sponge cake that he loved.

  Bruce looked at the clock. "Right on time/' he nodded. "When one gets to our age, Louise, one likes meals to be punctual."

  He made Louise feel very old. He had surrendered to the years, and she felt that if she did not appear to have done the same, he would think her skittish.

  When he asked her: "How is life with you, my dear? Are you happy?" she was going to say: "Perfectly/' before she caught the disbelieving look in his faded eye.

  "You know how it is," she said, glad in a way to be able to grumble to someone who expected nothing else. "It's not easy, being dependent on one's children."

  Bruce cut the cake and smiled, his beliefs confirmed.

  "Don't think they're not good to me," Louise hastened to say. "They're wonderful. But however hard they try, it's not like having your own home."

  Bruce munched, and had a little trouble with his teeth. "You're not happy, are you, my dear?" He did not ask it. He said it.

  Louise toyed with the fine old lace tablecloth, which might, she fancied, have been hers, but would surely be ruined by now if it had been. What should she say? Did it matter what she told Bruce? He probably did not care enough about anyone but himself to remember what she said to him over tea. And so she asked, without dissembling: "What have I done, Bruce? What have I done wrong? There ought to be some reward in life for having lived through the longest part of it."

  Bruce raised the grey feelers of his eyebrows. "Why should there be? You're a criminal, didn't you know?'*

  "What do you mean?" Louise frowned. "I "

  "You, my dear, have committed the crime of growing older. The greatest crime in our society. People shouldn't do it. It doesn't pay." He wagged his head, and rang the jerky porcelain bell for the housekeeper to bring more hot water.

  Louise was depressed when she left Bruce. Was that what it was like to be seventy-five? Would she be like that—a passionless hermit, waiting merely for the tedious ritual of days to end?

  "Its dreadful to grow old/' she told Frank, driving off with him in the truck, which he had parked in the tunnel of drive ^between the laurels.

  "Is he very old then?" Frank asked. "Getting to be a hundred, or something?"

  "Heavens, no. He's only seventy-five, but he's given up trying. He's finished, and he makes me think I ought to think about being finished, too."

  "You!" Frank's laugh vied with the gear-box to be heard. "God bless you, why you ve only just started. You'll be marryi
ng again one of these days and surprise us all, I shouldn't doubt/'

  "Don't be silly, Frank/' Louise began to feel better.

  "No boy friend?" Frank had fought a successful batde with the Feeding Stuffs Officer, and was feeling jaunty.

  "How could I? I never meet anybody/'

  'What about old Harry? Now there's a nice, spry young widower for you/' This was the sort of feeble joke that Louise and Frank enjoyed together.

  "Poor old Bruce," she said, shaking off the enervating mists of the stagnated house she had left. "He's really given up the struggle. To think I might once have married him! But perhaps he wouldn't have got like that if I had, unless, of course, I'd died, as his wife did."

  'Why didn't you marry him?" Frank asked.

  "Oh, I don't know." Louise leaned back on the hard seat and clasped her knee. "You know how it is when you're young. He was a good deal older than me, but he was very attractive, though you wouldn't think it now. We used to go skating together. It seems as if there were more frosts in those days. And we went to the same dances. But it was just one of those things. . . . Too good to last, perhaps."

  She had once reminisced in this vein to Anne, and Anne had

  said: "You mean he never asked you/' But Frank said eagerly: "Romantic, isn't it—the past? I bet you could tell some tales/'

  "Not many, I'm afraid. I was quite gay though, and pretty in a way, I think, though I always had trouble making my hair stay up. Those curling tongs! One could never move without them. But I married so young, you see/'

  "I dare say/' Frank avoided the subject of Louise's husband. He never said what he thought about Dudley s insulting hostility. He took refuge in a meaningless: "Ah, well, life goes on, they say."

  "Slowly," Louise said. "I thought, when I was with Anne's godfather, that mine was chugging to its end. But it isn't really. Do you know, Frank, I picked up a man not long ago. In London."

  "Good for you," Frank said. "London's the place for that, I hear."

  "In Lyons," Louise continued, "and we've become friends/'

  "So you have got a boy friend?"

  "No, but—well, in a way. Miriam thinks he's dreadful, although she's never seen him. But you know what Miriam is."

  Frank nodded.

  "But he's different, you know. You'd think he was quite ordinary, and rather pathetic, if you went to buy a bed from

  him, but when you get to know him " Louise was eager to

  talk about Gordon Disher to someone who would bother to listen, but Frank jammed on the brakes with a jolt that gritted her teeth, and stopped the truck for a girl who was standing by the side of the road with her hand raised, and her skirt blowing against her legs.

  The girl went to the window on Frank's side. "Give a person a ride?" she asked, staring up at him. She was pretty, with chestnut hair hanging over one eye, and an acquired resemblance to some film star whose name Louise could not remember.

  Frank got out and the girl climbed nimbly in and sat balanced between the two seats, closer to Frank than to Louise.

  "This is Freda Rivett, Mother/' Frank said, in some embarrassment. "My mother-in-law, Freda."

  "Oh, I've seen you in the village/* the girl said, tossing tack the lock of hair, which immediately fell down again, as she meant it to. "Staying at the Stone Farm with your daughter, aren't you? Well, that's a nice enough place, I dare say. I live in that cottage on the corner, by the memorial/'

  "I've seen it," Louise said, anxious to be friendly. "It's so pretty, with those roses, and the little porch. Quite the nicest house in the village."

  "Which isn't saying much/' The girl's eyelashes were endless, and curled at the tips. "What a hole. I'm getting out of it as soon as I can. I've had an offer of a position in town." She looked at Frank, staring at his profile, while he kept his gaze on the road.

  "Have you?" he mumbled. "I didn't know."

  "Oh, well, you can't know everything that goes on in the village. We don't see you about so much since you got married. Quite a stranger to your old friends. Very nice of you, I'm sure, to give me a lift." She pitched her voice affectedly and tapped her long red fingernails on her knee, which showed in a nylon curve below her hitched-up skirt.

  Then she put her head on one side, smoothed her skirt, and spoke less haughtily. "I recognized your truck coming half a mile off," she said showing her white, uneven teeth in a smile. " 'That's Frank/ I said, so I stopped walking."

  Louise's mind was churning. Why did she talk like this to Frank? How did she know the truck so well? Why, when the space on which she sat was so narrow, was there a gap between her and Louise? She must be pressing closely against Frank.

  But I trust him, Louise told herself, as she stepped clumsily down from the truck outside the grey house. The girl had said: "Why don't you drop Mrs. What-is-it first, to save taking her out of her way, and then run me home, Frank, if you've time?" and Frank, looking hunted, had mumbled agreement.

  Louise went into the house and began to tell Anne about Bruce.

  "Where's Frank?" Anne asked. "Harry says one of the goats has broken Its tether, and he can't catch it."

  "He went up to the village for something/' Louise said. "He'll be back directly/' She would wait to see whether Frank told Anne about picking up the girl with the eyelashes, before she began to get worried.

  Before Frank turned the corner into the village, Freda put her hand on his arm and said: "Drop me here. Thisll do. I'll get a bit of air before I go in."

  Frank stopped the truck under an oak tree that bowed over the road and waited for Freda to get out. If it had been Louise or Anne he would have jumped out himself and helped them down.

  "Well, go on," he said. "Aren't you going to get out?"

  "Not until you hand me down." The girl laughed at him. "I thought you were such a litde gentleman these days."

  "All right." Frank got out, walked round the truck and opened the door. Freda stepped down daintily, keeping her hand in his after she was standing in the road.

  Her nails scratched his palm. Frank pulled his hand away. "Look, Freda," he said roughly. "For God's sake, leave a chap alone, can't you? I'm married. Get that into your head."

  The girl leaned against the truck and laughed at him again. "Oh, pooh,'' she said. "What land of married is that with that lazy slut you've got? You were daft to take up with her, and you know it. She's no good to you."

  "Shut up, Freda." Frank clenched his hands to keep them off her body. "Anne's a good girl. She's the right wife for me. I love her, do you hear? You don't understand that."

  Freda lowered her lashes. "I understand what it was like with you and me before you met her." She came closer and put her hand on his shirt. "And you haven't forgotten either, have you, Frank? What it was like r"

  Frank sweated, kissed her roughly, jumped into the truck and drove off, leaving the girl standing smiling in the road.

  "You've got lipstick on your face/' Anne said placidly, when Frank came in.

  "Damn it—excuse me y Mother." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Look here, Anny, I "

  Louise sat in terror on the edge of her chair, and waited for the storm to hreak; but Anne kissed Frank lightly on the cheek and said: "Don't worry, Frankie boy. I shouldn't let you out on your own when that red-headed bitch is around, should I?"

  Frank relaxed, and Louise released her grip on the sides of the chair.

  "I don't want you to think anything wrong." Frank wrinkled his forehead.

  "I don't. I know you. And I don't care what you did before you met me. God knows I had my moments, too, didn't I, Mother?"

  Louise was silent. She did not want to be dragged into this.

  "Remember that Italian?" Anne chuckled. "I wish you'd seen him, Frank. He was hot."

  "I'll bet," Frank said, without resentment. "It's the Latin blood, they say."

  "Don't sit down," Anne said. "You've got to go out. One of

  the goats is loose again. Here " She stopped him on his

 
way to the door. "You've missed a bit of Rita Hayworth's lipstick." Anne fished a grubby handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped his mouth. Frank pursed his lips like a child being cleaned up after a meal.

  "Thanks, dear. Well, I'd better go and see about that goat. Come out and help me catch it, Anny?"

  "If I must." They went out arm in arm.

  Louise got slowly up from her chair and went automatically to the sink to peel the potatoes for supper. She was relieved and amazed. How extraordinary they were, dealing with the situa-

  tion like that, but how devastatingly sensible! They talked as if they were quite sure of each other. For the first time Louise began to see that there could be something fundamental and lasting about this marriage.

  Anne was sulky again by the time she returned with Frank. He had given her the goat to hold while he fixed its bedding, and it had dragged the rope through her hand, chafing the skin, Anne always made a fuss about the smallest physical pain. She put an unnecessary amount of salve on her hand, and grumbled protractedly at Frank. "Enough/' he said with a grin, "to make a man want to go out and kiss a girl again/'

  "Go, then." Anne pushed him away when he bent to look at her hand. "I don't care. Maybe she likes the smell of goats."

  Such a short time ago, it seemed to Louise, that she had watched and understood every new facet of Anne's developing character. But there came a time with all children when they grew sly and did not tell you things, and after that it grew harder to understand them and the way they behaved. Louise was puzzled by Anne and Frank, but not worried. They had worked out their rough-and-ready solution to the problem of living together, and did not seem to notice its inadequacies.

  Anne was at her worst with Frank when his people came. They lived in the next county, but they did not come very often, for they liked Anne no better than she liked them.

  When Frank looked up from a letter and said: "Mum and Dad want to come Sunday," Anne said, "Oh, God!" and banged a plate down on the table so that the toast bounced off it.