Little of What You Fancy, page 4
As the melancholy wail increased and the ambulance finally tore past them, travelling very fast, Miss Pilchester remarked:
‘Another accident, I expect. Another poor innocent laid low, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘There are few innocents left,’ the Professor said. ‘And no poor.’
Miss Pilchester, able to stand it no longer, gave a positive snort, together with a savage swirl of the umbrella, and stalked away. As she swept into the road the Professor delivered what he himself would undoubtedly have called his Parthian shot and called:
‘French you may speak. But in this country we still drive on the left of the road.’
To her dismay Miss Pilchester abruptly realized that she was wandering, half-blind with anger, somewhere to the right-centre of the road. She wasn’t looking where she was going at all. It was truly awful. It was absolutely ghastly.
It was all the fault of that wretched foreigner, that Communist, that cynic, she told herself over and over again as she tramped her way up to the post-office, half-exhausted by anger, so that now and then she felt compelled to pause and draw in savage breath. The countryside could well do without such people, it really could. Suddenly the delicious, sweet, intoxicating air of summer felt tainted.
What a contrast, she told herself, with her friend Mr Larkin. Mr Larkin was himself like summer: eternally intoxicating, always sweet, always perfickly delicious. The only thing was that, like the precious days of summer themselves, he appeared so rarely. It seemed weeks since she had seen him last. Now and then she had seen him float serenely past her cottage in the splendour of his shining monogrammic Rolls, once with a brief wave of his hand, once with a few symphonic chords, both high and low, on the horn, and once with a gesture of such meaningful airiness that she was unable to sleep that night and kept telling herself that unless she was grievously mistaken the gesture was, in fact, a blown kiss.
The precious nature of such rare displays of distant affection from Mr Larkin couldn’t lightly be dismissed, still less forgotten. She still treasured beyond all expression the original palpitating rapture of the first kiss he had ever given her in the cottage and still more of that other time, after the gymkhana, when Pop had seized her like a sheaf of corn and had passionately urged her with that luscious compulsion of his to give everything she’d got and she had tried so hard to do so, even though knowing it wouldn’t possibly be half enough.
Ever since that time she had longed, over and over again, to give all she’d got. She’d give it any time. Sometimes, in fact, she gave it in the last moments before sleep, metaphorically wrapped in Pop’s arms, murmuring to herself, as in an intoxicated lullaby, that it was perfick, absolutely perfick, and urging Pop, if possible, to do it again.
As she went into the post-office, which was also the village shop, Miss Pilchester found herself as usual in a state of tart wonder at the revolution that had, over the past few years, taken place there.
Where once the counter had held little but a block of margarine, a red wedge of mouse-trap cheese, a few pock-marked apples and a cube of sweet, cheap dates, it was now bright with tempting delicacies, French, Italian, Spanish and even Indian and Chinese, from Bisque d’Homard to cannelloni and chop suey. In another corner of the shop stood a vast deep freeze cabinet stuffed with smoked salmon, escargots de Bourgogne, scampi, smoked trout, petit pois, smoked cod’s roe, smoked eel, salami and sausage of every kind, palm hearts and ice creams great and small, bright-coloured as the flags of the United Nations. On the shelves above stood regiments of tins containing mangoes, paw-paws, lychees, fraises des bois and exotics of every kind.
In front of her a fat young woman further rotund in pregnancy, with four children sucking green-and-pink ice-lollies of such magnitude that they were actually washing in them, as in frothy soap, was filling baskets with mangoes, fresh Italian peaches, Bisque d’Homard, scampi, Emmenthaler, Brie and Stilton cheese, packets of spaghetti Bolognese and smoked salmon, at the same time complaining in rough, loud country accents hadn’t they got no Rocquefort this week then? It was coming to summat now when you couldn’t get no Rocquefort. She didn’t know what her husband would say. There wouldn’t half be a carry-on. Last week he very nearly hit her with the poker because they never had no escargots. She didn’t know what things were coming to.
Miss Pilchester, silently and tartly wondering why on earth it wasn’t caviare that had caused the incident of the poker – after all the Russians, the Communists, practically regarded it as a staple diet – then had to wait nearly five minutes at the post-office counter while the woman drew a vast sum in children’s allowances and complained again, as she counted up a fat wad of notes, about the absence of a particular brand of cigars her husband was more than partial to.
‘He don’t ‘alf raise ‘ell if he don’t ‘ave ‘is cigars, I tell you. Raises bloody ‘ell, ‘e does an’ all. Ain’t you got no chianti again this week then? That’ll make ‘is blood boil I tell you.’
Finally Miss Pilchester was able to buy six fourpenny stamps, a quarter of tea, a small tin of baked beans, a quarter of mouse-trap cheese and a packet of potato crisps: the limit she could afford. At the mention of potato crisps one of the children started shouting that he wanted potato crisps too, at which the mother promptly belted him across the ear, demanding to know if he thought she was bleedin’ made of money?
Trying hard to look the other way, Miss Pilchester then asked the girl behind the counter how much that would be and got the astonishing reply:
‘One pound sixteen and fourpence, Miss Pilchester, please.’
Miss Pilchester stood aghast. She knew that prices had risen pretty steeply these last few years; she was fully aware of the social revolution in which, among the working classes, so-called, smoked salmon and Rocquefort had replaced margarine and mouse-trap, but this was, she thought, altogether a bit too much.
‘Haven’t you,’ she said, ‘made some slight mistake?’
‘Oh! my goodness, Oh! dear, Oh! Miss Pilchester, I’m terribly sorry’
She should think so, Miss Pilchester told herself. It was yet another example of the futilities of modern education. Nowadays people couldn’t even add up.
‘I make it, unless I’m much mistaken, nine-and-three.’
‘So it is, Miss Pilchester. I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I’m all of a tizzy this morning. I’m all of a heap.’
Some of these words were drowned by the howling of the small boy who, having been belted about the ear once, was now being belted twice, this time with a packet of crisps. Either as an act of appeasement or example his brother and sisters were being belted too and were responding by tearing open the packets of crisps like ravenous wolves who had had nothing to eat for several days.
‘Now bleedin’ be quiet or else I’ll give you summat to remember next time. If you don’t shut your gob you won’t have no scampi.’
In the confusion of din caused by belting, howling and the crackling of crisps Miss Pilchester started to ask the girl behind the counter why she could possibly be all of a heap when the girl promptly burst into tears.
What on earth was the matter? Miss Pilchester wanted to know. All of a sudden the place was Bedlam.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ the girl said. With painful difficulty she sucked back her sobs. ‘I mean – it’s so awful.’
‘So awful about what?’
‘Mr Larkin.’
‘Mr Larkin? What about Mr Larkin?’
The girl now broke into louder weeping, causing the children who had been belted to bawl even louder still.
‘They say Mr Larkin’s dead. Mr Larkin’s dead.’
In the confusion of weeping, gossip and crackling of crisps over the next few indeterminable minutes Miss Pilchester stood like a pillar of salt. Vaguely she heard the young woman far gone in pregnancy say Oh! yes, it was right: knocked down by a bus, to which an elderly man drawing his weekly pension promptly corrected her by saying No, a stroke. It was gospel. A stroke. About eight or nine o’clock that morning, he understood. Very sudden. Out like a light.
In a slight pause among all the confusion the voice of the eldest child, having finished bawling, suddenly piped up with the irrefutable truth that ‘Ah! well, we all have to go some time,’ a remark which caused Miss Pilchester to recover her own voice. A moment later the pillar of salt melted and her voice with it. In that moment too Miss Pilchester remembered the ambulance going past her door.
‘Oh! no, it can’t be. Oh! no – God wouldn’t do it. God would never do a thing like that –’
In the act of frantically clutching her head with both hands she dropped tea, beans, crisps and mouse-trap on the floor and then blindly rushed from the shop.
*
Totally unaware for the next few minutes of where she was or where she was going, her only really conscious impression was being alone. The village street was utterly deserted. The whole place was like something stricken, itself dead, with not a soul in sight.
Too stunned to cry, she desperately longed for someone, even a stranger, to talk to. The emptiness of the street seemed to mock her. She then observed, coming out of the shade of a big chestnut tree overhanging a wheelwright’s yard just beyond the church, a horse.
It was a big, handsome chestnut, coat gleaming in the midday sun, and something about it seemed suddenly of great comfort. One could talk to a horse. One could even confide in a horse. One could even, failing all else, weep with a horse. She knew. Long ago, when times had been better, she had had a horse, a mere hack it was true, but in both body and spirit she and the horse had been one. But those days were far off – now she had no horse. The dividends on her gilt-edged – mocking term – pitiful enough as they were, kept constantly falling, and horses were no longer a possible part of her world.
She then saw that the horse was being ridden by a woman. Horse and woman were, she then saw, well married, the big shining flanks of the animal being handsomely repeated in the round thighs, round buttocks and even rounder bosom of Freda O’Connor, who was dressed in jodhpurs, bright yellow sweater and a crimson scarf on her head.
Freda O’Connor, breasts protruding over the neck of the horse, as Pop Larkin had once observed, like headlamps, was notorious as a woman of shifting affections. During the week she lived with a retired naval commander; at weekends she had matters of great interest to discuss with a horse-dealer two villages away. Out hunting, she had a propensity to disappear into coppices after invisible foxes, closely followed by a former guards officer who was using his gratuity to grow mushrooms that nobody apparently wanted to buy. When new foxes appeared in the village, preferably in the shape of sporting or other military men, she was out hunting for them. The lines of the marriage service, ‘to have and to hold’, had not, as Pop’s friend the Brigadier once caustically observed, been precisely written for her. A lot of men had had her. Few had held her for long.
‘Morning. Damn nice morning.’
Freda O’Connor’s voice, as if she had long modelled it on her regiments of men, was loud and brassy.
A bitter thought in the mind of Miss Pilchester, who liked neither Freda O’Connor nor the men with whom she consorted, reminded her that nice though the morning might be it was also damned.
‘Corn looks well. Early harvest I shouldn’t wonder. See the show-jumping on TV last night?’
No, Miss Pilchester had seen no show-jumping on TV, purely because, as she put it, she had no machine. Nor could there be any harvest, she thought, now that Pop was dead.
‘You’ve heard the awful news, I expect?’
No, Freda O’Connor hadn’t heard the awful news. What awful news?
‘Pop – Mr Larkin – is dead.’
‘God. Holy catfish. You don’t say.’
Miss Pilchester was silent, merely staring at the bright eyes of the horse, soft and oily as it seemed to her with comfort, at the same time ignoring the big yellow figure of Freda O’Connor swelling like a brassy statue above it.
‘What happened? Accident?’
There appeared to be, Miss Pilchester said, conflicting reports. Some said a car. Some said a stroke.
‘And some say elbow-lifting, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Miss Pilchester icily begged her pardon?
‘Bit excessive with the old bottle, I mean. Get me?’
Miss Pilchester said No, she didn’t get her and added, in a voice frozen now to flat, level bitterness, that there were, after all, excesses and excesses. Or didn’t Freda O’Connor know?
The oblique, insensitive reference to Pop’s drinking habits enraged her so much that she was a hundred yards away from Freda O’Connor, striding past the old wheelwright’s yard and then the church, before she was fully conscious again. When her mind finally began working once more she could think of only one thing. Like Pop himself, she needed a drink. She needed a long, stiff, powerful whisky.
Somewhere between the church and The Hare & Hounds a sudden pang of conscience arrested her. Perhaps, after all, she ought to go into the church instead: there to pray, if only words could be found, for Pop’s departed soul. Thus stricken, she stood for fully a minute in the middle of the road, struggling with her conscience and its problem until she decided after all that whisky, rather than prayer, was perhaps the more appropriate medium with which to send the soul of Pop on its last, long journey.
Inside The Hare & Hounds she found herself still so possessed by the struggle with conscience and mournful thoughts of Pop that in the abysmal agony of trying to grapple with them she actually found herself talking in his language.
‘Give me a snifter. God, a big one too. God. Whisky.’
It was of course awful to speak of the Almighty in such terms in the same breath as whisky, but the occasion, she felt, was hellish enough to demand it. It was hellish enough for anything. It wasn’t merely absolutely ghastly. It was sheer absolute, nightmare hell.
Mr Foreman, the landlord, was himself serving at the bar, his only other customers being a farm labourer apparently half-talking to himself over a pint of beer, his jacket covered with sprigs of boughs and leaves from a hedge he had been clipping, and a retired butcher who, himself red and beefy of face, with small jolly blue eyes, looked not at all unlike a prize piece of beef cattle fattened and ready for market.
‘Don’t often see you in here of a morning, Miss Pilchester,’ the landlord said. ‘What’ll it be? Black and White? Johnny Walker?’
‘Hell. Anything. The stronger the better. And double please.’
Knocking back a good half of the whisky with a speed not unworthy of Pop himself getting outside one of his special Red Bull cocktails, Miss Pilchester gave a great sorrowful gasp and muttered in a voice slightly incoherent something about she might well be seen there all day and every day from now on – God, how she’d needed that – the snifter, she meant, the stiffener.
This slightly wild demeanour of Miss Pilchester’s drew from the landlord, who was used enough to seeing people go out of the pub drunk but not to come into it in the same condition, the question as to whether she was all right? Was something the matter?
Draining the whisky, growing slightly incoherent but not enough to prevent herself ordering another, Miss Pilchester gave the astounding reply that the roof had fallen in and God shouldn’t have let it. It was hell. It was absolutely ghastly.
The reference to roof, God, hell and the ghastliness all in one breath left the landlord with a growing suspicion that Miss Pilchester had already been at the bottle somewhere. That was largely the trouble with women in the country. Frustrated and lonely, they got at it in secret and then didn’t know when to stop. If he knew the form, which from long experience he did, Miss Pilchester would at any moment start weeping.
Which, at the arrival of her second whisky, Miss Pilchester promptly did.
‘Now, now, what’s it all about?’ the landlord said and thought it a not inappropriate moment to shift the burden of responsibility to his missus and then remembered that she had gone into town, shopping. ‘It can’t be as bad as all that, surely.’
Bad? Not bad? Not hell, when a great, good man like Pop Larkin had gone? Wrested from them, struck down.
‘Larkin? Pop? You don’t mean? –’
Yes, she meant, Miss Pilchester said. She was sobbing openly now. Some said it was a stroke, some a car. She had seen an ambulance. The details didn’t matter. All that mattered was the going, the fact of it –
‘Might be just a rumour.’ The landlord made consolatory gestures as he mopped up spots of moisture, that might well have been Miss Pilchester’s tears, from the bar. ‘You know villages. Rumour fair gallops round.’
No, no. Rumour she was sure it wasn’t. Rumour it couldn’t be. She felt it in her bones. Her heart. ‘The Lord giveth,’ she suddenly said, starting in further incoherence to make consolatory gestures herself, ‘and the Lord taketh away’ – but there were plenty of others he could have taken, she declared with vehement sorrow, other than Pop. She could name them too, she thought, thinking of Freda O’Connor and her horsey, whoring crowd.
‘I could name them. I know them. They should have been cast out of the Temple long ago.’
This further mystifying excursion into vehemence, accompanied by strange accusations about the Temple, utterly convinced the landlord that Miss Pilchester had undoubtedly been at the bottle all right somewhere, but not in time enough to prevent the butcher from coming up to the bar and ordering her another whisky, at the same time offering the consolatory but sensible suggestion that wouldn’t it be a good idea to telephone somebody and find out if it was true? The butcher knew old Pop Larkin wasn’t one to give in lightly.
‘Give in? You don’t give in when somebody knocks you flat with a car. You’re in Kingdom Come. The Lord hath taketh.’
‘Best to telephone.’ The butcher offered her the third consolatory whisky. Miss Pilchester grabbed at it eagerly but vaguely, hardly seeing it through her tears. ‘It’ll set your mind at rest.’
