Love Song Page 16

Chapter Eight

  With the money repaid to her by Alexander it was now possible for Hope to buy herself a car instead of always having to borrow Verna’s old Renault. She bought herself a second-hand Morris Traveller of great lineage but recently restored so that its wood shone, and its maroon paintwork looked as near to that of an old coach as was possible.

  Aunt Rosabel approved of her choice – very discreet – but for Hope, newly returned from her three days away, which were meant to have been spent quite alone resting in Worcestershire, Aunt Rosabel’s choice of words seemed horribly apt.

  Very discreet could only too easily apply to a love affair, a love affair which, Hope realized, was becoming all too central to her existence.

  Not that she and Jack were able to see each other very much – no parents with children are able to conduct love affairs easily – but just the thought of him kept her swinging through the day.

  And then there were the phone calls. Calls that she still made from roadside telephone boxes, or large, anonymous department stores, or small teashops such as were still found in the country and to which she could be quite sure that no-one she knew would go, places which sold small packets of home-made fudge where the drinking of tea was a great deal noisier than any of the whispered conversational exchanges.

  ‘There’s a Celtic saying We saw the two days – the good and the bad,’ Jack said at one moment. ‘We had the three days – and they were out of this world. I can remember each hour, each minute and each second of all three of those days. I can remember how you felt and how you looked, and what you wore, and how your voice sounded, the very scent of you – everything. And now nothing seems to matter beside those three days, not now, not the rest of my life. Because I have known you, everything’s all right. All my bitterness over Dave’s leaving me and the children, all the confidence that her departure took from me, it’s all healed. Every day I get up and I think, I am all right because I have Hope.’

  Neither of them discussed what they should do next because somehow for the moment it did not seem to matter. Sometimes as Hope drove through the country lanes around Hatcombe she found herself imagining what Hatcombe would be like if she and Jack were living there. She could not stop herself from imagining how it would be, walking through the gardens on a summer evening with Jack, talking and laughing. And because she had never done anything like that with Alexander her daydreams seemed all the more real, just as the wonder of Jack in her life seemed all too unreal.

  Nevertheless, careful as she was only to telephone Jack away from home, she knew that she must be equally careful not to think about him in front of Aunt Rosabel. Having grown so close to her, Hope was frightened that the old lady might somehow be able to sense something different about Hope; afraid that the old, like the young, being somehow removed from that state of involvement from which the in-between ages suffered, were able the more easily to sense feelings and read thoughts that were not their own.

  As something of a distraction to both of them she set about encouraging Aunt Rosabel in her criticisms of the modern age.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ Aunt Rosabel would say, with that curiously theatrical gesture that was so characteristic of her, the hand first raised, and then dropped as if she was starting a race. ‘Do not, I beg you, start me on modernisms.’

  ‘Oh, but please, Aunt Rosabel. You know how much I love to hear what you think.’

  Then Hope would pick up her tapestry and start sewing, something which seemed to soothe Aunt Rosabel and give her the energy and confidence to express herself.

  ‘Oh, very well. Let us talk about voices. Why must they always be raised so, for instance on the wireless? Why so dreadfully harsh? And the sounds they make, they split the ear. And who taught the young to say die-rect instead of di-rect, nee-ther instead of nei-ther? It is so appallingly ugly to the ear. English, if it is to be spoken and written correctly, must start off with a standard. Then – and only then – there can be diversifications, embellishments, modern argot, development, but there must be a decent standard from which to work. It is precisely the same with art. Do away with drawing by all means, but only once you can draw. Develop the singing voice along the classical lines and then ask of it what you will. Draw the lines of a garden so that its outlines are quite clear, the bones are there, and only then, after that, fill it with what you will. Everything will then work.’

  After these small lectures Hope would turn away, longing sometimes to be back in some more classically minded era and at the same time ashamed for the era in which she lived which seemed to have destroyed itself, its eyes fixed only on money.

  Certainly, and the thought was unavoidable, Alexander seemed to have spent his whole life being interested in nothing but money, whilst at the same time hankering after a lifestyle which he had not yet been able to support. To say that they had, of late, grown apart, would be to miss the point – they were apart. He was in London all the time, she was at Hatcombe, they hardly saw each other except at weekends, and then only to find themselves surrounded by other people. And yet, ironically, Hope who had dreaded moving to Hatcombe now loved living there, whilst Alexander seemed only too bored by Sunday evening and only too anxious to leave it.

  At least the building works were at last completed, the dry rot eradicated, the underpinning finished, and she and Aunt Rosabel could set about apportioning rooms to each of the girls, and planning their redecoration on a major scale.

  It was entrancing for Hope to be with Aunt Rosabel in a furnishing shop and to hear her discreet reactions to the wallpaper and curtaining samples in front of which they would be seated by some uninterested and half-trained assistant.

  ‘My dear, too awful – Hope ducky, look at this! I mean to say! The vulgarity of those swirls. Have they no taste!’

  At the end of one of these sessions they might come away with perhaps a small scrap of material or a paint card, and in the end too, little by little, Hope came to appreciate Aunt Rosabel’s discerning eye for colour, her understanding of how to put subtle tones together and yet not make them shout or over-state, for decoration in Aunt Rosabel’s era had been a much less fleeting matter, a serious matter that when undertaken it was assumed would set the tone for the next generation.

  ‘The painters would arrive in their striped trousers and their black coats, looking much as perhaps only bank managers do today. And they would set up their paint pots in the pantry or the scullery and mix for you there, my dear. No question of bringing home some little pot to try out. You spent the morning with them, and in general, providing there was a modicum of taste about, the result was quite good.’

  Certainly the results in the girls’ rooms were spectacular, and in a matter of a few weeks under Aunt Rosabel’s guidance Hope was able to see that essentially taste was a matter of discretion and discipline, and decoration should be in keeping with the building in which it was set, and she looked back on her and Alexander’s naive efforts in West Dean Drive with embarrassment.

  Light too came into choices, and it was at one such moment, when she was holding up a swatch of cloth at a window so that Aunt Rosabel could judge its folds, that Hope saw a man down below, staring up at the house, obviously waiting for someone to come to the door.

  For no cause that she could imagine Hope felt her heart sink. It was unreasonable, particularly since he looked respectable, suited and hatted, and wearing the kind of topcoat that usually inspires confidence. And yet there it was, her sense of someone down there who might so easily be something to do with Alexander and his ugly ducklings that had still not yet turned to swans.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Rosabel, I must go to the door. There’s someone down there. The bell can’t be working.’

  She hurried down the stairs and opened the first of the two main doors. The man, grey-haired and with a round good-natured face, smiled at her affably and, although Hope immediately recognized him from his previous visits to Hatcombe, meticulous as always produced a card which read Orphan Welfare Trust with, at t
he bottom, a photograph of the gentleman who was now standing in front of Hope.

  ‘Mrs Merriott?’ he asked her, beaming. ‘How nice to see you again.’

  ‘Mr Bell – how are you? Goodness, is it really a month since you were last here?’

  Hope smiled and shook his free hand, the other being weighed down by his old-fashioned leather briefcase.

  ‘No, indeed, Mrs Merriott, I was in fact here just a fortnight ago – or was it only ten days? At any rate Mrs Fairfield wrote and asked me to call again today to discuss the Trust and other matters of concern to her.’

  Hope showed Mr Bell into Aunt Rosabel’s drawing room. He was a nice man. Every inch the country gentleman. It was typical of Aunt Rosabel to forget, she thought, as having called her she left them together and hurried off to fetch what she thought might be suitable refreshment for such a charming old-fashioned pair – namely, sherry and biscuits.

  As she pushed open the drawing room door in an equally traditional manner – using elbow, backside and foot in neat transition – Hope heard Mr Bell saying, ‘… but such generosity deserved a personal visit, Mrs Fairfield. My only regret is that you cannot personally see all the good your tremendous generosity has brought about, all the immense good. There are still, alas, in our society, too many Oliver Twists, too many children at risk from the fiendish Fagins of this latter part of our century. By helping them we cut down on so much evil, so much wickedness.’

  Hope served them both sherry and small sweet Italian biscuits and then left them together, smiling as she went, because what with Mr Bell’s immaculate moustache and Aunt Rosabel’s silk dress and white hair the two of them seated together would make a beautiful photograph. She could already hear herself telling Jack about it, and found herself wishing that he had been there to take it in the light falling from the window, the pale, faded blue silk of the drawing room covers, the old rose of the antique ornaments on the military chest, the sunlight making dusty patterns in the air.

  Yet the covers and the ornaments were not the only faded elements in the beautiful room. Their voices too, low and intermittent, the sentences dovetailing each with the other, never hasty, they too were faded. Shutting the door on them Hope had the feeling that she was shutting the door on the entire century and that never again would she hear or see such niceties of behaviour.

  But it was not only in her taste that Aunt Rosabel gave Hope a sense of something about to be lost. When Alexander’s great-aunt talked about her son, which she sometimes did on their drives in search of furnishings, Hope understood that the nature of people had changed. Gone was the unswerving ideal of dedication to duty and love of country, to be replaced by something more amorphous, and yet perhaps more urgent. Where now Hope’s children seemed to talk of saving the planet, Aunt Rosabel had thought only of saving her country.

  ‘We all knew there would be another war. Hardly had we put up the monuments to the dead from the First World War before we realized that there would be another. And those summers, you know, before the second war – they really were sunnier, and the voices on the air as we played croquet and swam and boated really were happier, because we still, despite everything, we still believed in the old ways, God, Church, that sort of thing, despite that terrible first war. Ridiculous when you think of it, but there. Perhaps we had to – perhaps there was no alternative? And of course we all wanted to give birth to sons, because if we did not every scrap of our world would be annihilated. As it is, now, there is still something left, don’t you think? I look at your young and I think, Yes, there is still something left. Not that we were perfect, by any means, but I do think we might have been happier, or just simpler perhaps; perhaps less choice made us happier.’

  * * *

  Hope was at pains to try not to look different or happier to Alexander, but sometimes, on his brief weekend visits to Hatcombe, and together once more in the same house and the same bedroom, she thought she felt him looking at her in a new way, and she hated it.

  That she should change so much, and in so short a time, shocked her. Time was when she would have given anything to have Alexander look at her with some new sense of appraisal, as if he had not really noticed her before, but now she dreaded seeing that appreciative look in his eye, and was grateful for the least distraction – Letty having a cold, herself having ’flu and a temperature, Aunt Rosabel having one of her little turns. Each weekend she would find herself praying that some small domestic drama would take her out of Alexander’s range, away from the gleam in his eye which, rightly or wrongly, she was sure that she could see.

  Jack did not have the same problem, since he lived with no-one but the idea of Hope, but he seemed to burn up with just the idea of Alexander coming home.

  ‘It eats me up, Hope. The idea of his coming near you—’

  ‘I know, Jack, but he is my husband.’

  ‘What is to happen?’

  ‘Something.’ Hope turned to look at him. ‘Believe me, something always does.’

  * * *

  However, happily for Hope, Alexander was far too involved in extracting himself from Imogen while at the same time plunging deeper into his affair with a newer, richer and far more interesting mistress to notice anything more than that Hope was looking younger and more attractive than he could remember her ever looking before. Naturally he put it down to her having settled into Hatcombe and enjoying country life at last, and flattered himself into thinking that with this knowledge of his wife’s new contentment he could enjoy his life in London even more. Her obvious happiness seemed to justify his own pleasures and make his life more carefree, encourage him to take risks in his business associations, be braver than he had previously been.

  Indeed as he went about London Alexander really did like to think of Hope being at Hatcombe. He found he could take a pride in his own unselfishness, because, after all, it had been his idea to go to Hatcombe, and Hope who had been insistent, to the point of boredom, that they should not take the gamble, a gamble which he had been at such pains, against everything she had thrown at him, to point out was non-existent.

  But, in the event, how right he had been, and how grateful she should be to him for his foresight, which meant that she and the girls now lived in a beautiful house that at last gave them some status, meant that they were people of note, not crouching in some insignificant suburban semi.

  All the more astonishing therefore to find that Hope, on his weekends home, always seemed to him to be carping on about money. Try as he might to reassure her, she seemed quite unable to accept that for once everything was all right, that Aunt Rosabel was paying for everything.

  ‘Not everything, Alexander. I have had to pay for all the furnishings so far.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, out of my account and what you give me. You know how it is. She’s really quite forbidding when it comes to discussing money, most of her generation are – and somehow or another I haven’t dared ask her to pay me back. But now I must, simply because there’s nothing left in the kitty. It’s not her fault, it’s my fault. I should have asked her sooner, and now it’s getting to be just a little awkward.’

  ‘Well, if you’re stupid enough not to ask for your money back you can’t expect her to be a clairvoyant, can you?’

  Hope looked up from her sewing and stared at Alexander. She knew him well enough to be certain that he only became really vehement when he was deeply and truly worried. Most of life for Alexander was a question of coasting through and only coming to a shuddering halt when he met up with a concrete wall, or a mountain.

  ‘I just said that, Alexander,’ she said quietly. ‘It is my fault. But I mean, has she paid you for what you have paid for the building work? Has she paid you for what you handed over to Mr Frances?’

  Alexander stood up and put another log on the fire, and then turned and smiled wearily at his wife. Really, Hope was so boring. No wonder he had to have a mistress.

  ‘Of course she hasn’t, why should she? I could well afford
to pay for everything out of our house money, so I did and I know, absolutely, that she will pay me back.’

  ‘Good.’

  Hope looked down at her sewing and tried to think about Jack and what he would say or do, because she had a feeling that when it came down to it, much as he was always boasting about ‘charming’ Aunt Rosabel, Alexander was actually really rather frightened of her.

  ‘As a matter of fact, before I go back to London tonight – after she wakes up from her kip – I will ask her for my cheque myself. And while I’m at it, I will also ask her for yours, since you don’t have the courage to do it for yourself.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I don’t have the courage.’ Hope nodded her agreement. ‘I don’t have the cheek either.’

  ‘What’s cheek, as you call it, to do with anything?’

  ‘It’s to do with—’ Hope stopped before starting again quietly, ‘It’s to do with thinking that we seem to be taking so much off her already – the use of her house, this lovely place. I feel terrible asking her for money for furnishings for our daughters’ rooms, for heaven’s sake! And, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I should, but if I am to go on paying Verna and buying the girls’ clothes, and all those things, I have to. That little bit of money is all I have that is my own.’

  ‘Ah!’ Alexander smiled suddenly, his white teeth flashing really rather effectively, he noted as he looked at himself appreciatively in the mirror above the chimneypiece. ‘In that case, why not leave it to your gorgeous husband? Leave it all to me, and I will charm our money out of her and be back to take tea with you in no time at all. Just watch.’

  He was gone, and an hour later, having taken tea in to Aunt Rosabel in the room now used solely as her personal drawing room, he came back brandishing a cheque.

  ‘There you are, you silly little thing, that’s what a little charm, a little time, and a nice cup of Earl Grey tea can do. Let that be a lesson to you, Mrs Merriott.’