Starlight (Vintage Classics) Read online

  ‘My mother said you aren’t to be frightened. Is that mine? Thanks.’ She held out her hand for the cup. For once robbed of words, Gladys stood staring and for a moment did not pass it to her.

  ‘Who’s frightened?’ she demanded at last. Miss Pearson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what she said, though. Tell them they aren’t to be frightened.’

  ‘I’m not frightened. Nothing to be frightened about, far’s I can see.’

  ‘All right. She just said I was to tell you.’ Peggy Pearson bent her head over her cup and took an indifferent sip.

  Gladys carried a cup through to Annie, whose eyes glared up at her with a hundred questions and all of them alarmed.

  She had heard every word. Of course they were frightened, all of them, she and Glad and Mr Fisher – with him you couldn’t be certain, but he must be – but it wasn’t nice to hear it said right out. Oh, if the girl would only go away and leave Glad and her to talk it over! Why did Glad have to go and offer her tea? She was always wasting tea on people. Frightened?

  ‘All right.’ Miss Pearson stood up, looking round for somewhere in the cluttered room to put down her cup. ‘I’m off. I’ll tell mother and she’ll send someone in.’

  ‘When’ll that be, then? We got to have some idea – my sister’s bedridden and I go out to work – I can’t go shifting stuff ready for the men and them not coming, I know what they are …’

  ‘These’ll come. They’re people my father knows. Some time early next week. You can move into those rooms downstairs, if you like, while they’re here, my mother said.’

  Gladys stared. High-handed, but after all the girl’s mother did own the place. And was anything going to be done about those two rooms on the ground floor with their ceilings all down? Empty, they’d been, for years.

  ‘She said he’d bought it,’ she muttered.

  ‘Who said?’ Miss Pearson was pulling on the gloves that matched her suède coat.

  ‘Jean, she had the flat below us, only moved out this morning, she said she told her –’

  ‘Who told who? I can’t bother with all this … my father bought the place and he’s given it to my mother and she’s coming to live here and someone’s coming in to do it up and she told me to tell you all you aren’t to be frightened. That’s absolutely all I know. I’ve got to go now. ’Bye.’ She waved, without looking at her, towards Annie.

  ‘Coming to live ’ere?’ Gladys repeated eagerly, leading the way across the landing where the tap lacking a washer dripped musically. ‘P’raps the men’ll see to that tap then?’

  ‘I dare say. Or someone will. My mother doesn’t like irritating noises, her nerves are bad.’

  Gladys, inwardly raging to get back and discuss every detail of what had been said with her sister, now took a reckless plunge.

  ‘There’s a very old gentleman, educated he is, name of Fisher, well, it isn’t always he changes it every month, I mean, that’s his real name but he makes believe, he can do for himself, lives up in the attic, earns a bit showing off fancy dolls, do you think she’d let him stay on? He’s not really what you’d call mental.’

  They were on the doorstep now and the door stood open to the bright November morning. This time Peggy Pearson laughed, shortly but outright, showing teeth small, white, and pointed as those of a young fox.

  ‘I expect so. She likes what you’d call mental people. ’Bye!’

  She walked away, leaving Gladys staring after her.

  6

  The Reverend Gerald Corliss associated the season of Advent with the scent of violets.

  This was the hour before the dawn of the Church’s year, when the end of the nave was in darkness by four o’clock, and Evensong was said under a night sky. To him, it always seemed darker, more patient, and more a time of waiting than the three days following Good Friday.

  Born and brought up in the country, he knew well that English violets did not appear until the spring, but the flowers that haunted this season for him were not country ones; they belonged to London, and were sold in bunches made up with an alien leaf; sometimes at street corners, but most often in expensive flower-shops, and their faint scent was blent with that of the London smoke.

  He thought of this idea about violets as a weakness in himself, and faced it resignedly. Nevertheless, he always bought a bunch of violets in the first week in December and put them in his room.

  It was all petty; the association, the tiny self-indulgence, and the introspection. He did not need telling that, in ‘a world bursting with misery’, he should have felt ashamed; and he was ashamed. He had read somewhere that among the crosses bestowed by God temperament might be included, and the clerical essayist had added, almost casually, that it could be one of the heaviest.

  There was no doubt about the nature of Father Gerald Corliss’s cross, and it weighed several ton.

  A coffee-party was always held in the church hall at Saint James’s after Evensong in the first week in December. The Vicar, whose cross was not in his temperament, felt that the month was a gloomy one; and with the exhausting business of commercialized Christmas only three weeks away, to say nothing of the gloomier aspects of the Advent message looming over his congregation (although few of them took that seriously), he did feel that a little social intercourse sweetened with coffee and biscuits would lighten the atmosphere. On Sunday evening, December the third, therefore, some seventy people had gathered in Saint James’s Parish Hall.

  Coffee was being served by three Youth Club members, and two seasoned elderly ladies, both the latter included in Mr Geddes’s list of ‘stand-bys’. These stayed in the background, in the little room fitted with tap and sink, behind the bar with its correct height and curve and its brilliant striped awning. There, scarcely hampered by lack of room and ancient equipment, they washed up and boiled water with the casual speed of some force of Nature.

  The Youth Club, in which the moving spirit was a darting kind of boy known as Disher, had collected for, and installed, the awning. Nothing strong to drink was served, but the awning did give a note of sophistication: I may be an old shed, I may suffer from draughts, but at least I know what’s with it and what isn’t, the Hall seemed to be saying.

  The Vicar was sitting on a hard chair, cradling his coffee-cup and chatting with two or three of the men in the congregation, while a steady roar of conversation, broken by occasional squeals from the young group led by Disher, filled the gradually warming room.

  Gerald Corliss was stalking in and out of the chatting groups, doing his utmost not to appear aloof and wishing guiltily that he were at home reading Teilhard de Chardin; pausing at decent intervals to ask someone how their leg was or had they managed to get rid of their cold, and quite unaware, amid his uncomfortable efforts, that no-one was thinking him intellectually arrogant or aloof but many were saying, ‘Poor boy, it is a pity he’s so shy.’

  It was the last thing he ever thought himself; the Public School vocabulary omits the word.

  It is not expressing it too strongly to say that horror came upon him when he saw, staring at him out of a small group, two large blue-grey eyes behind glasses, below a green beret set rakishly on greying curls. It was Miss Barnes; he could never forget her name; in fact he sympathized with Mary Tudor; he knew how she must have felt about Calais.

  She was waving to him with a half-eaten biscuit.

  He went up to her, and summoning every drop of mateyness in a most unmatey nature, said: ‘Oh … good-evening, Miss Barnes. Nice to see you here …’

  ‘I expect you’re wondering, well, I said to myself, she can’t come to no harm, got the Coloured Supplement and I’ll be home by nine, be a bit later I expect but they can’t knock you on the head if there’s two of you though they’re up to anything these days and Miss Gallagher, that’s her in the scarf, she goes part of my way and now it’s painted it don’t seem so lonely somehow, I miss the children, though, that Melinda she was a spoilt little piece always after pennies, you got a penny Glad, she’d say
as bold as you like and the men are working all hours not regular men they aren’t, some friends of the rackman’s I expect, I said would he just put the kettle on and have one himself if he felt like it, and there’s going to be a carpet. Grey and pink.’

  Her breath seemed to run out, and she put her head down and gulped at her coffee, keeping her eyes fixed on him as if daring him to run away. Gerald had set himself to listen; now he was trying to interpret. It was the first time he had done so; usually he was trying so hard to be un-aloof that the meaning of his parishioners’ remarks eluded him.

  ‘Oh … you … your sister. Well, you … must have a … change sometimes … you know … The last time I saw you … you were rather … upset … some disreputable type had bought your home over your head, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still there, I’m still there,’ Gladys said earnestly, ‘there’s been a change for the better, she’s got it now, he gave it to her, bought it for her for a present, she said, that girl, I mean, Peggy she calls herself, been several times, very smart, it’s all painted down below and up as far as our landing, said they’d come up farther if I liked, well, I said, I’d welcome you for one but my sister said all that mess, Glad, and the smell of paint you can’t sleep of a night, the carpet’s come, down in the hall in a roll it is, pink and grey, I had a peep.’

  Another pause, and this time a bite out of another biscuit which she had, as if absently snatched from a tray borne past at a run by Disher.

  ‘Oh hullo, Miss Barnes, I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to leave your sister, I’m glad you managed it.’

  Mr Geddes had come up, smiling, cordial. That was the way it should be done. Gerald knew, none better, that it was the way. But his Vicar must have had nearly forty years of such situations.

  Gladys, switching the eyes, began again about the Coloured Supplement, and the rackmen’s men but was effortlessly stopped in full spate.

  ‘Now, how’re things going? They haven’t turned you out yet, I’m sure, you look very cheerful. Doesn’t she?’ to Gerald, who gave a bleak smile. How to explain to the Vicar or to anyone else that the cheerfulness was part of Miss Barnes’s general incomprehensibility?

  ‘Won’t be no question of turning out so far as what I can see, neither, it ’asn’t been mentioned nor putting up our rents, that Peggy she hasn’t got much to say for herself but what I hear of her mother she don’t seem so bad, an imbalid, and goes about after dark all the time, seems a bit funny but I s’p’se it’s nerves, she hasn’t been near the place not to see it ’cept that evening you was there if that was her in his car, and not a sign of him, the rackman, thank God, leaving it all to her, yes, I ’spose we must. Well I’ll be saying good-bye and thank you for a pleasant evening, oh, coming to live in our ’ouse, I forgot to tell you, keep an eye on things, might be worse, at least she won’t let the roof leak, oh, and knocked a hole right through into next door for a kitchen, four rooms weren’t enough for her, so it’s one house really now, yes, Vi must be off, I’m coming.’

  The last remark was addressed to Miss Gallagher, a shyly smiling figure in old brown coat and headscarf who had drawn near, and was hovering expectantly during the monologue. Mr Geddes shook hands with them both, expressed his relief and pleasure at ‘things going so well’, and they made their way through the crowd to the door, which opened on to a dark little cobbled lane where damp trees dripped.

  Gladys was not, in fact, as cheerful as she appeared.

  As she and Miss Gallagher set off through the almost deserted orange-lit streets, where the only movement was that of big cars speeding impatiently on short journeys to the pub or the houses of family or friends, she began immediately to confide in her friend, who was well accustomed to her part as listener, and only put in a word occasionally to show that she was paying attention.

  ‘Didn’t tell him about what she said about don’t be frightened, sauce! Who’s frightened? I said to Annie all I’m frightened of is not having no new rent book nor contrac’ or nothing, I never had none with Mrs A. but we’d known her since dad was alive, she used to come out over the Fields with me and Georgie when we was little, six years older than me …’

  ‘Oh, have you heard from your nephew, then?’

  ‘Not – for – these – eighteen – months!’ cried Gladys, hurrying along faster than ever and speaking with immense drama and emphasis, ‘vanished. Well as good as, said he was going to take this job at Orpington in a garage, got this bit of money put by, you must come down and see me, auntie, he says, and never another word, I wonder if it isn’t a mystery –’

  ‘It does seem a long time. Eighteen months.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll hear from him any day now I expect, he’s like that, always was from a baby, what was I saying, it all seems a bit queer to me, Mrs P., I mean, never coming to the house, still it’s better than the rackman, well, here’s the parting of the ways as they say, nighty-night and thanks for your company.’

  ‘Bye-bye and thanks for yours. See you next Sunday.’

  ‘See you!’ shouted Gladys, and charged away down the darker streets, past the little shops where occasionally some proprietor was displaying his goods in a quiet, lit window. A cat darted across the road, and a distant diesel train blared impersonally. The dun clouds of the London night pressed down low on the roofs; kept at bay by the orange glare in the better-lit streets, they now took possession once more.

  She came round the corner into Rose Walk – and there was the car again! drawn up just outside the house, this time; she could see the girl, Peggy, and another woman. A man was sitting at the wheel, staring at nothing in particular.

  Used to wrap themselves up like that when they had the face-ache, was Gladys’s reflection upon the white scarf that was folded about the other woman’s head, as she drew near to the car. But the next moment most of her sturdy good sense was scattered, as the head turned quickly, and she saw such a face as to strike even her thoughts dumb, and fill her with awe.

  It had been very pretty; pretty in the way of a rose on a summer morning; a dewy way; a girl’s way, and above all an English way. It could not have been the face of any but an Englishwoman, and it was a sick face, transparently white, with eyes so large in their hollow sockets as to be haunting, unnatural, like the cavities in a skull. The mouth drooped mournfully, the marvellous, shaped, curling gold hair visible beneath the gauze scarf hung to the shoulders of a rich fur coat.

  But there was something more than sickness and whiteness and the abnormal size of the very bright eyes. Gladys felt it from her first stare at Mrs Pearson, but had no word for it; she felt only the overruling sensation of a most unfamiliar gravity and awe. The word death breathed chillingly from some cave in a mind so stuffed with cosy things that there was barely room for it. As she said afterwards to her sister, ‘That was what she put me in mind of – death. Poor soul, I thought.’ Yet – it was not only death.

  ‘Hullo – here’s Gladys,’ said the girl Peggy, who was standing beside the car and seemed to have been arguing with her mother about something through the half-opened window. ‘My mother was wondering if she would go in and look at the house. How’ve they been getting on?’

  ‘Well, I said to Annie, I’m sure they’re foreigners, the way they work isn’t natural, always at it, don’t even stop for a cup of tea, I never saw anything like it, they’ve finished except for just below our landing. Pleased to meet you,’ she ended in a mutter, in the general direction of that face. Her sensation of awe had dissipated itself in an indignant conclusion that such a one ought to be looking up from the pillows in a hospital bed.

  ‘Later on, perhaps you’ll let me do up your rooms for you,’ Mrs Pearson said, in a voice so soft that it was difficult to hear, in spite of the absolute stillness in the dim street. ‘They do need it, Peggy tells me … I like everything to be pretty all round me. Light colours. Pink’s my favourite.’ The words came whisperingly out of the dimness.

  ‘Well that’s ever so kind of you Mrs Pearson but it
’s my sister, she’s such a one for the smell of paint, it always has upset her, she’s the one who’s really set her face against it, I’d be only too glad, I don’t mind telling you she was always promising to have them done up, promises are like piecrust I used to tell her and now it’s too late –’

  ‘Oh don’t say that!’ It was almost a cry, and Gladys gaped at her. ‘It’s never too late. I’ll talk to your sister and I’ll have it all made pretty for you. And isn’t there – Peggy’ – she glanced timidly at the silent, graceful figure standing beside the window – ‘Peggy said there’s someone living up in the attic – an old man. What about him? Wouldn’t he like his room done up? and the electric light up there? The men told Mr Pearson it doesn’t go up that far.’

  In spite of the kindness of the speech, Gladys felt her usual impulse to defend Mr Fisher from intrusion, however wellmeant, and exclaimed sharply:

  ‘I couldn’t answer for him, no I couldn’t, he don’t never let anyone up there, he likes it kep’ private, I been up there sometimes to inquire like but he keeps the door half shut, he’s got his home up there, see, all his bits of things it’s only natural, been there years now, it’s only natural, his home.’

  ‘But surely – electric light …’ The voice died away. The huge eyes stared.

  ‘Someone’s coming now,’ Peggy interrupted. ‘Is this him?’

  Gladys peered down the street in the direction of the light advancing footsteps. It undeniably was Mr Fisher, and the knowledge that it was now December, and he would therefore be appearing under a new name, occurred to her, together with the irritated conviction that another jawing-set-out would now keep her out here in the cold for goodness knew how long, and Annie thinking she was hit on the head.

  The problem of these names was embarrassing. She did not want Mrs Pearson to think Mr Fisher was mental. Yet it certainly did sound mental – giving yourself a new name every month. She plunged into explanations even as the footsteps drew level with them.