The Yellow Houses Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1: The handkerchief

  Chapter 2: The canary

  Chapter 3: Old Mr Davis

  Chapter 4: Mary

  Chapter 5: Egg-putters

  Chapter 6: Sylvie

  Chapter 7: The bargain

  Chapter 8: The break-out

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 9: Two invitations

  Chapter 10: The desolate place

  Chapter 11: Thinking

  Chapter 12: Christmas Day

  Chapter 13: Enter the hero

  Chapter 14: The explanation

  Chapter 15: Mrs Wheeby’s cousin Fred

  Chapter 16: The golden offer

  Chapter 17: A death

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter 18: ‘I’m done for’

  Chapter 19: Coffee

  Chapter 20: At the Anstruthers’

  Chapter 21: Old Mishima

  Chapter 22: Shock!

  Chapter 23: Ride in a hired car

  Chapter 24: The photograph

  Chapter 25: Deadlock

  Chapter 26: Invited visitor

  Chapter 27: Samurai combat

  Chapter 28: Epic

  Chapter 29: Sylvie again

  Chapter 30: The party

  Chapter 31: Katherine

  Chapter 32: Three journeys: three destinations

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Wilfred Davis, quiet, retired, respectable widower, is sitting and sobbing on a park bench. He has lost his daughter and any sense of purpose. A mysterious stranger passes him a handkerchief, and strikes up a conversation that leads to friendship and an unconventional new home for Wilfred.

  Mary Davis wants only four things out of life: a husband and three children, so at seventeen she runs away from school, her father and her home and moves to London to find them. Only a few months later Mary is engaged, but love and marriage promise to be very different from her childhood daydreams.

  For Mary and Wilfred, it seems Fate has taken a hand, or is there another kind of guiding spirit at play?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-seven novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  My American

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  The Bachelor

  Westwood

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  Here Be Dragons

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  Starlight

  Pure Juliet

  For dear Laura

  ‘Guardian Spirits are ex-human souls, reconditioned for reissue by the Lower Hierarchy.’

  ‘Uncovenanted Mercies’ from

  Limits and Renewals, Rudyard Kipling

  ‘Resolute imagination is the beginning

  of all magical operations.’

  Paracelsus

  BOOK ONE

  1

  The handkerchief

  It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and still, with clouds more cream-coloured than white lingering in the hazy blue of the September sky. In Lorrimer Park a robin whistled in the shrubs; the children’s pool rippled in the sun, and the children splashed in the water and sailed pieces of wood and the first fallen leaves. The orange berries on a rowan tree glowed in the scene of gently-moving, ordinary life.

  The town, Torford, was smallish, lying some seventy miles from London on the side that goes east towards marshes, and the villages where the sailing people gather.

  In the final months of the war its ancient heart, where the old houses and a few mossed pitted crosses and troughs of stone were cherished, had been badly hurt by the rockets. But this ancient heart was alive some thirty years later, with shops looking as near as they could get to the shops in London: boutiques and steak-houses and Chinese restaurants. Estates of bungalows, white and clean as daisies, curved over low surrounding hills; and there was talk of a new motorway.

  The man sitting on the seat below the rowan tree seemed to express in himself some of the town’s prosperity. His overcoat was newish and of good quality; his collar as white as the distant bungalows. Respectable was the word that had come into the minds of the one or two strollers who had glanced at him: a fair-skinned, ordinary type of man, who had probably looked sturdy up to three or so years ago, but had now turned into his middle sixties and was, oh yes, decidedly elderly – and a little too thin to carry off that coat. And what could be interesting about the purplish composition of the path where his well-polished shoes rested? Or was he dozing – with his head forward on his chest like that?

  It was about half past four; the shadows were lengthening. The children and elderly strollers turned homewards.

  Three little girls lingered, puttering with leaves and rowanberries in a game of nursing; and it was while the man on the seat was allowing his eyes to move desolately over them that he began to cry.

  He sobbed aloud. The children neither looked towards him nor stopped their play. His tears blurred his sight, and the children disappeared into a rainbow caused by the late sunlight glittering on the pond. He was shamefully aware of sitting there crying in public, and shamefully aware that he could not stop.

  But he did hear slow, lounging steps approaching; heard them distinctly because, from the moment his crying began, he had dreaded that someone should come past and see.

  The footsteps stopped. He did not look up, but waited, with a sudden anger. Staring. Someone was staring. You would think anyone would have the decency to pretend they hadn’t noticed. He kept his head down while the tears ran on.

  The figure which had stopped was a long whitish blur to him: someone wearing a light raincoat, perhaps, with the sun on it.

  He kept still, with his head lowered.

  The scene slowly cleared, and he heard the robin’s song, making him want to cry again. All the time he was struggling to drive off the lingering intruder; flinging anger towards it – man or woman. Go away, go on, go, go, shouted the weeping spirit inside his motionless body and averted head.

  A little time passed. Nothing moved. How soft fell the robin’s notes. Like the robin in the garden at home. The evening sun was warm. But suddenly he felt cold, and shivered. Had the figure moved away?

  Something touched the hand clenched on his knee, the one furthest from his obstinately turned head. Startled, he glanced down. A handkerchief, large and white, rested against his glove.

  ‘Mop up,’ said a voice, low-pitched and cheerful. Someone was sitting beside him.

  But this was the last straw. This was treating him like a tearful child. He snatched away his hand an
d thrust it into his pocket, while muttering something – he hardly knew what – some sort of rejection, some sort of assertion of his ‘all-rightness’.

  But he had come out of the house without a handkerchief.

  Six months ago, in the other life whose last solidities had been whirled away from him that morning, such a thing wouldn’t have been possible.

  Pat had always said that his position at the Town Hall deserved, and needed, such small marks of respectable achievement as a daily, spotless linen handkerchief, and a dozen of these, initialled and prettily wrapped, had always been her Christmas present to him. None of your slovenly paper things for Pat. ‘Dad’s wipers!’ This had been one of Mary’s jokes.

  But there was nothing in either pocket of his coat; he was feeling in the right one now and here was Mary’s letter. Christ! he swore to himself. But nothing else.

  He had been shrinking from the figure in the white coat, leaning as far as possible towards the end of the seat. But at the contact of his hand with the letter he forgot everything but searing pain. The tears gushed again.

  The man’s handkerchief moved slightly towards his hand. He could just discern its white blur.

  Blinded by tears, he accepted it and put it to his eyes. It kept the faintest of scents that reminded him of something. Ferns?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said hoarsely in a moment. ‘Be all right now – had some bad – a bit of a shock. Sorry.’ He held out the handkerchief as if to return it, at the same time slowly lifting his head.

  A nice face, kind. Long, pale brown, clean-shaven. Wearing a hat, but not old. In his forties, Wilfred Davis judged. And – he searched confusedly for a word – middle-class. A doctor? Perhaps. Or a clergyman?

  ‘Hang on to it, won’t you? I’m often here in the late afternoons. We’ll see each other again, I expect. My name’s Lafcadio Taverner. Goodbye for now.’

  He got up – how quickly he moved! – and was walking away, turning to give a last smile before he was lost to sight behind some rhododendrons.

  Lafcadio. That was an unusual name. Yet Wilfred was certain of what he had heard.

  The three little girls straggled past, looking chilled and pale, the smallest with a spray from the rowan tree drooping in her hand. Their long hair hung limp in the cooling air. Mary! Wilfred’s heart went out to them. He wanted to call to them, gently take the youngest’s small cold fingers in his own. But he did not move. Perhaps they would shout at him and refuse his gesture. Girls were not gentle nowadays.

  He looked down at the handkerchief, then pushed it into his pocket. His crying was over; now he must think – about so much – and the washing and ironing and the returning of the handkerchief presented its own small addition to the vast, the over-toppling total sum of his difficulties.

  The grass, the paths, Lorrimer House seated small and white and serene on its gentle slope amid dark shrubberies, the cold pond – all had an air of desertion. It must be near closing time.

  Lafcadio Taverner. The only kind look, untouched by curiosity or duty, that had been given to Wilfred that day. He sat on for a moment, looking absently, wretchedly, about him while making ready to go home.

  The little girls’ chatter was fading in the distance; his eyes followed them while he was deciding cautiously that he did feel a little better; sort of numb; that was it, numb, as if an injection had been given to a throbbing tooth.

  If the numbness could only last . . .

  ‘Well, Mr Davis. And what brings you out so late in the afternoon?’

  Round the rhododendrons, accompanied by the sound of panting, came Mrs Wheeby, who lodged in Wilfred’s house, and suffered with her chest. She was bundled in layers of elderly wool, and wore a hat of felt; hard in outline and fawn in colour, cocked above an unmemorable face.

  ‘Very cold, isn’t it,’ Mrs Wheeby began. ‘Well, seeing you’re here I may as well sit down. I should have never done if I was alone. I heard an elderly lady was struck down just about here only last week. I’m just on my way home.’ She lowered herself carefully onto the seat, and now put a laden shopping bag down at her feet.

  ‘I always have said you save five minutes coming this way, though Mrs Davis never would have it . . . said it was quicker by way of Cartwright Road. I’ve been to the supermarket, the one that used to be Reynolds’s. It’s no use, I shall never like it. Nasty noisy place and so inconvenient, through you do get things a bit cheaper, I suppose. That decimalizing, Mr Davis, I shall never get used to it, never. It stands to reason – people of our age can’t. Why they wanted to change everything round I can’t imagine. Nobody likes it. Nobody can make head nor tail of it. I passed three little girls a few minutes ago. The eldest can’t have been more than eight. What their mothers can be thinking of, I do not know. Not a soul about. Anything might happen to them . . .’

  She paused to pant.

  ‘The times are terribly dangerous, Mrs Wheeby,’ Wilfred said faintly. ‘Even for boys . . . in the paper . . .’ The thought of Mary to whom anything might happen struck his heart.

  ‘Dangerous! I should think they are. Oh boys. I don’t care about them. They can look after themselves. – By the way, I didn’t hear Mary go off shopping this morning. She got a cold?’

  An eye, like a chip of grey granite under the fawn felt, fixed him.

  He had read of the blood draining from a heart. Now it drained from his heart. That was exactly what it seemed to do. But instantly – and surprisingly – a picture of Lafcadio Taverner’s face came before his inward eye.

  ‘She’s gone to stay with her auntie in London,’ he answered, at once and steadily.

  ‘Oh that’s funny. I never heard her go. Yesterday, was it? And I hear most of what goes on. When did she go, then?’

  ‘Early this morning. Before you were up, I expect, Mrs Wheeby,’ and he even smiled. Mr Taverner’s face was still clear in his mind.

  ‘What part of London? I used to live there, you know. I lived there for a year when we were first married, but we never liked it. How long has she gone for? Just for the weekend, I expect . . .’

  ‘I don’t know for how long, really. Her auntie’s found her a job in London.’

  ‘A job! And Mrs Davis working all those years to pay for her schooling. I thought it was all arranged she should go to university. She isn’t seventeen yet, is she . . .’

  Not seventeen. Oh God. Oh God.

  ‘It was hoped for, Mrs Wheeby,’ Wilfred answered slowly and as if repeating something he had learnt by heart. ‘But her – Aunt Beatty, my sister, you know –’

  ‘Never knew you had a sister, Mr Davis,’ panted Mrs Wheeby, not removing the eye.

  It passed through Wilfred’s mind that there was no reason why Mrs Wheeby, who had been their lodger for only eighteen months, should know it. But that was not the sort of thing one said to people – at least, he didn’t.

  ‘Oh yes. My sister is three years younger than I am,’ he said, while his imagination stayed with Mr Taverner’s face. ‘She . . . runs a little dress shop in . . . Watford . . .’

  ‘Watford isn’t in London. Twenty miles outside London, Watford is. That I do know.’

  Dusk was growing rapidly. The lights in the houses shining through the park’s bare trees looked homely and cheerful. A few yellow leaves rattled dryly along the path.

  ‘Wanstead, I should have said Wanstead. She wanted . . . my sister . . . a girl to help her in the shop, so she wrote . . .’

  ‘Not much of a job working in a shop, I’d say.’

  ‘Well, you know Mary likes clothes . . .’

  His voice was almost a whisper. The kind face in his mind’s eye had vanished. He looked wildly into the dim face of Mrs Wheeby, dim and pallid in the dusk. What had happened, where had it all gone, his life, that he should be sitting in Lorrimer Park with his lodger, tear stains on his cheeks, telling fibs about Mary? Where was the order, the pattern of everyday, that had gone on for nearly seventeen years?

  ‘Yes, we all know that, Mr Davis.’
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br />   She meant the row about that . . . what was it . . . micro-mini skirt? Pat had shouted at Mary. The house had . . . resounded. He could not bear to remember it . . . and Pat had been defied . . . and two months later she was dead.

  There was silence. Then Mrs Wheeby turned to look at Lorrimer House on its hillock, palely reflecting the last of the light. How clear the air – and not a cloud in the darkening sky.

  ‘Do you remember the Japanese Room?’ she asked in a different tone.

  ‘Japanese – oh, in the house. In Lorrimer House, yes. Mrs Wheeby, oughtn’t we to be getting along? It must be nearly closing time.’

  ‘I was taken to see that when I was six. Six, I was. I recall it perfectly; sixty-four years ago, that was. They had a lot of pretty things, all Japanese: little cabinets, and a red rope to keep the public off – though no one would have dreamt of touching anything in those days – and a statue, life-size it was, over life-size––’

  ‘Kichijoten,’ said Wilfred suddenly, sounding surprised.

  ‘Yes, yes, that was the name. Fancy you remembering. She was meant to be the Goddess of Fortune. All in palest pink, holding an apple. And there were little boxes, I remember. Carved ivory. Every week I used to be taken to see the Japanese Room, if I’d been a good girl; and when I came to my schooldays I would often go by myself. I loved that room, Mr Davis, and all through the war, the first one I mean, the 1914 one, it was there, and they were our allies then, of course, and no danger from bombs. And then I went to live in London. But I always meant to come back to Torford – and the Japanese Room was one of the first things I went to see when I did. But in the second war of course there were the air raids, and the things had to be stored away. For safety.’

  ‘Mrs Wheeby, they will be shutting the gates . . .’

  ‘I’m telling you, Mr Davis. I did so look forward to seeing those things again after the war. And when it was opened again, at last, I went. And there they all were, as pretty as ever, and it was such a pleasure.’ Mrs Wheeby laid a wool-gloved hand on his arm. ‘The ladies on the screen, and the white silk storks. Every week I used to go and study them. But then, as time went on, you know, lads didn’t take any notice of the rope, and they got to touching the things, and later on they damaged them; there was no one to look after them; the council could only afford to pay an elderly man . . .’