The Fabulous Mrs. V. Read online

  Stooping to fill the kettle from the brook Mr. Thompson was aware of a sudden uneasiness again. Thin white saucers of mist were forming and floating across the meadows beyond the wood and out of them Mr. Thompson could suddenly have sworn he heard another cry, followed by another, from a jay.

  He was walking back up the slope before it came to him that what he had heard was the whining of a dog. He went back a few yards and stared across the meadows, listening. The sound of whining, this time of more than one dog, reached him again. It was quite a long way off yet and it had that eerie sound that hounds make when they’re hungry.

  Uneasy for the first time, he walked back through the wood to the girl. He found she had been busy collecting bracken and laying a pile of it out for herself as part of a fresh bed. She had made up the fire too and it was ready for the kettle.

  He put the kettle on to boil. She was pleased to see him back, she said. She could wash up now and help him when he shaved.

  Mr. Thompson rubbed his beard with the ball of his thumb and didn’t say anything.

  ‘You know what you said you might get down at the brook,’ she said. ‘Remember? Watercress.’

  Yes, Mr. Thompson remembered the watercress. Didn’t see any, though, he said.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll get some tomorrow.’

  It was half in Mr. Thompson’s mind to say that there wouldn’t be any tomorrow, but he said nothing and merely pushed the kettle farther into the fire. He didn’t like the water too hot for shaving and a few moments later he washed out the coffee tin, filled it with warm water and then started to lather his face.

  ‘Give me the mirror and I’ll hold it for you,’ she said. ‘I like doing that.’

  He seemed, she thought, to take an extra long time to lather his face. While she waited for him she took off her shoes and sat gravely watching him. He seemed preoccupied and thoughtful and now and then he lifted his head sharply, listening. While he was slowly lathering himself she washed up the cup, billy-can, knife and plate. The lingering taste of mushrooms still clung to her mouth and now and then she licked her lips slowly with her tongue.

  It was about six o’clock when Mr. Thompson began to shave. She squatted in front of him, brown eyes grave again, and held the mirror so that he could see. It would be dark in less than an hour from now and when it was dark Mr. Thompson would make up the fire. It was the moment of the day she longed most deeply for. She didn’t dread the darkness—not like she did at home. It was all so silent and shut away. That dead smell of the house wasn’t there and the big circle of outer darkness framed the central core of crimson firelight, across which Mr. Thompson would presently gaze at her and say ‘You’d better git your sleep now.’ The birds, except perhaps for the last croak of a roosting pheasant, would all be silent by that time and presently she would lie down on one side of the fire to go to sleep, with Mr. Thompson dozing on the other.

  In the morning the autumn singing of the birds would wake her and she would experience once again the extraordinary sense of not belonging to anyone or anywhere, as Mr. Thompson did, and of being free.

  Suddenly Mr. Thompson gave a sharp impatient exclamation. She saw that he had nicked the upper part of one cheek with his safety-razor, drawing blood. In a sharp turn of his head, as if attracted again by a sudden far-off sound, he had forgotten to take the razor away. The half-shaven face, white here and there with lather, stained for an inch or two with blood, looked grotesquely ill-at-ease. She hadn’t seen it look like that before.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hold the mirror straight, did I?’

  ‘Wasn’t that,’ Mr. Thompson said.

  Mr. Thompson, drawing the razor hastily across his face, was sure beyond doubt that he could hear the cry of dogs again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘Hold the glass straight,’ he said and in his voice she detected the first and only sign of sharpness. ‘I don’t want to cut myself again.’

  The cry of dogs was nearer now; Mr. Thompson judged them to be somewhere out in the meadow. He suddenly jumped to his feet and rapidly wiped the remaining lather from his face with a rag of towelling.

  ‘You got to go,’ he said.

  Too astonished to speak for a moment, she saw him abruptly pour the rest of the kettle of water on the fire. The explosive impact of it tore out of her, painfully, a single amazed word:

  ‘Go?’

  ‘You got to go home,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Now. Quick. You got to do what I say.’

  ‘I’m never going back there —’

  ‘You got to go now,’ he said. ‘Why’d you take your shoes off? Put ’em on. Quick.’

  He raised his hand. It was as if her father were threatening yet again to mark her and she was quick to duck. But Mr. Thompson’s hand was raised simply to perform an extraordinary act—that of pushing his battered hat firmly down, for the first time, on the front of his head. It was exactly as if he wanted to hide underneath it and the shadow of the brim seemed almost to suffocate his face.

  ‘Got your shoes on?’

  She was struggling with the laces of her shoes. When they were tied she looked up at Mr. Thompson with bruised and frightened eyes.

  ‘What are you sending me away for, Mr. Thompson? I never want to go back there —’

  ‘You got to go,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Git hold of my hand. I’ll take you to the end of the wood and then you git home. Quick.’

  ‘I won’t go there.’

  ‘Listen to that,’ Mr. Thompson said. He was beginning to be half-frightened himself now; he could distinctly hear the dogs hungrily whining somewhere down by the stream. ‘You know what that is? Dogs—they’re looking for you.’

  He started to run with her towards the upper edge of wood. It took them ten minutes to break clear to the boundary and already it was half dark beyond the trees.

  ‘You go down here until you git to the railway bridge—’

  ‘I’m not going. I’ll never find my way—’

  ‘Under the railway bridge,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘and then after about a mile there’s a brick works. After that you turn right and you go straight for the town.’

  She stood absolutely still, looking up at his face. She had nothing at all to say. The grave brown eyes were darkened completely, all light beaten out of them.

  ‘You git back where you belong,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘You be a good girl now. They’ll be waiting for you.’

  Soon she was running. She was running under the shadow of the railway arch, past the chimney spire of the brick works and into the town. She was running past the lights of grinning windows, into the night, back where she belonged, to where the house was dead.

  The Fabulous Mrs. V.

  It is now more than thirty-five years since Tom Blackwood and I, travelling home from London on a fine late June evening, by slow train, met the fabulous Mrs. V. for the first time.

  It was one of those warm pellucid evenings that have a breathless and suspended aura about them and it would have been memorable even if Mrs. V. hadn’t made it so. The train on that particular Midland line passes time after time over a broad slow river and that evening all the meadows had about them the green tranquillity of some old and eternal pastoral. Even the cows in them looked like classical figures and in the quieter reaches of river the many wide stretches of pure white water-lilies looked strangely uplifted, as if about to take to air.

  We were travelling by slow train because, after stopping to see the end of a film, we had missed the express. I continually fret about trains. To me it seems almost immoral to miss one. Tom, however, was the sort of man who, having paid for a thing, found it immoral, in his own way, not to consume it to the last crumb. He was exceedingly obstinate in the politest sort of way.

  You saw this in his face. He was a big muscular young man with strong burning brown eyes, a big square jaw and massive cheek-bones that might have been sculptured out of reddish rock. A shock of stiff dark hair gave him a look of almost quar
relsome aggression completely belied by his mouth, which was very sensitive, and his voice, which was slow and soft except when he laughed. Then it started tripping over itself, rather like a puppy having fun with string. And it was that laugh, I think, that endeared him so much to everybody—particularly, as it turned out, to the fabulous Mrs. V.

  We played a lot of tennis together, Tom and I. His wrists and forearms were the steeliest I have ever seen in a man. He didn’t merely hit the ball. He cleaved at it with fury, as with a meat axe. The result was that I was proud if I took off him more than one set in twenty. I simply wasn’t in his class. And it was part of the beauty of his nature that he didn’t care.

  We were in fact talking about tennis when the train pulled slowly into a place called Sturvey, the last station but two before we were home. As the train stopped I caught sight of a woman, fortyish I supposed, in a smart white dress, a small carmine straw hat and a pink veil walking quickly up the platform, peering into carriages as if looking for someone. She walked twice up and down the train and then, at the very last moment, just as the guard’s whistle blew, she suddenly wrenched open our carriage door and got in with us.

  She sat down on the far side of the carriage, crossed her elegant legs with cool deliberation and let her skirt ride above the exposed knee-cap. Tom and I stopped talking and I felt myself holding my breath. Behind the pink veil her eyes were so blue and brilliant, almost vitriolic, that I couldn’t look at her for more than a second or two. Instead I looked back at Tom and I could see that he too was holding his breath.

  ‘Oh! isn’t this first class?’ she suddenly said. ‘This carriage?’

  Tom said he was afraid it wasn’t, and in a high, vexatious voice she said ‘How awfully stupid,’ rather as if implying either that the carriages themselves were stupid not to have got themselves elevated to her requirements or that Tom and I were somehow responsible.

  ‘You can always change at the next station,’ I said. ‘It won’t be five minutes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  As she said this she didn’t look at me. She deliberately looked at Tom. And I thought the look on her face was that of a woman who had suddenly seen something in a shop-window that she desperately wanted.

  For a minute or so there was an almost indecent hush on the carriage and then Tom actually let out a difficult sort of sigh and said:

  ‘Well, we’ll do that then, shall we? You book the court for three o’clock Saturday afternoon and I’ll ring up Daphne and Lois to see if they’ll make up the four.’

  ‘What if Lois can’t come? She sounded awfully doubtful when I saw her. Should we ask Kay?’

  ‘Oh! Kay’s so flabby. She doesn’t even try. She’s always such a passenger.’

  All the time our other passenger sat listening; you could almost hear her breathing into your mind; and then suddenly, while Tom and I were still discussing who might substitute for Lois if Lois couldn’t come, she said:

  ‘Do forgive me, but I hear you boys talking about tennis. Do you play a lot?’

  We said we did; we were mad on tennis.

  ‘And I’m sure you’re awfully good at it too.’

  I said Tom was terrific; I just did the best I could.

  ‘I can see he would be.’

  Again she looked at Tom in that brilliant covetous fashion of hers but the odd thing was that he didn’t seem to notice it. Nor did the significance of those half dozen simple words of hers seem to strike him either.

  Then with the most disarming sweetness she smiled and said:

  ‘You’ll probably think I’m poking my nose in, but I just wondered if you’d care to make up a party with us some time? I live at Vane Court. We play practically every evening and always on Sundays.’

  Sundays? We found ourselves listening hard. It was still something of an adventure, in our stuffy, chapel-ridden little town, to play tennis on Sundays. It was still something to be done in secrecy.

  ‘There’s absolutely no formality,’ she said. ‘We dispense with all that. Just roll up. Don’t even bother to telephone.’

  We both started to thank her very much when she said:

  ‘My daughter will be absolutely thrilled when I tell her you’re coming. We can never get enough young people. And she loathes playing with a lot of old fuddy-duddies.’

  Tom laughed, in that typical puppy-string fashion of his, and I could see that it got her. It was impossible for her brilliant blue eyes to light up any further, they were so intensely and vividly transparent already, but I saw the corners of her mouth suddenly twitch.

  ‘We usually start about three o’clock on Sundays,’ she said. ‘That gives the old fuddy-duddies a chance to nap and the young folk to get in a decent set or two before tea.’

  I don’t know why, but I got the impression that she didn’t include herself with the fuddy-duddies. She was very much with the young.

  ‘If it’s good weather we go on playing until about eight,’ she said, ‘and then we all have supper in the garden. It makes a nice ending for the day.’

  Tom, with that enormous frame of his, was constantly ravaged by raving hunger, and he laughed again, I supposed from sheer joy at the thought of food, and again I saw her stir.

  ‘Now you will come, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean it. It’s an invitation. You won’t let me down?’

  Oh! we were certainly coming, we said; we meant it too; we wouldn’t let her down.

  ‘Promise?’

  With an almost paralysing directness she looked straight at Tom. In a confused fashion he repeated the word promise and then laughed again.

  ‘Splendid,’ she said. ‘Joy will be so excited.’

  Joy, I assumed, was the daughter and suddenly, as on an illuminated slide, my mind’s eye saw her: blue, brilliant, disarming, vivacious, elegant, a younger edition of the mother. It was all going to be pretty terrific fun, I kept telling myself, a thought that Tom could hardly wait to echo, half a minute after we had reached our destination and she had waved us the friendliest, most vivid of goodbyes.

  ‘By God, she’s fabulous,’ Tom kept saying. ‘Absolutely fabulous.’

  ‘Damn fools,’ I suddenly said. ‘We forgot to ask her name.’

  ‘I got an idea it’s Vane. Didn’t she say Vane Court? She did. I’m sure that’s it. I’ll ask my father. He’ll know.’

  ‘We’ll call her Mrs. V.’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, laughing again. ‘Mrs. V. The fabulous Mrs. V.’

  ‘There’s a daughter too, remember.’

  ‘By God, the fabulous Miss V. too. So there is. I’d almost forgotten her. Gosh, if the daughter’s anything like the mother you’re going to have a pretty terrific time.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘Oh! I’ll make you a present of the daughter,’ Tom said and once again laughed, the puppy-string notes seeming to mock his huge frame and tie him in knots of delight. ‘I’ll settle for the mother. The fabulous Mrs. V.’

  We both laughed heartily at this; after all, we were young and gay.

  The following Sunday afternoon, about half past three, we turned up at Vane Court in Tom’s old open Ford, looking and feeling like a pair of half-impudent, vainglorious cockatoos.

  Tom had actually bought himself a new blazer for the occasion, a coat of many colours, a fetching affair of daffodil-yellow, crimson, chocolate and purple stripes, with a silk neckerchief of brightest purple to match. I was wearing a blazer too, a thing of white and scarlet stripes, with a silk muffler of red and cream. We were both very brown from much tennis in the sun and Tom, I thought, looked as handsome as a steel-gold god.

  The day was hot and Vane Court, which was one of those big ugly Victorian houses with ecclesiastical bay windows built of brick and terra-cotta, had a scorched appearance in the sun. Large lawns, with clumps of rhododendron and here and there a big acacia or two and one gigantic elm, surrounded it. Farther away was a big ornamental pond, almost a lake, and about equidistant between it and the house lay the te
nnis lawn.

  A rather half-hearted mixed doubles was in progress as Tom and I arrived. The air rippled with shouts of laughter and encouraging cries such as ‘Played, partner!’ The two men—I recognised one as a bank-clerk named Aitcheson, a stumpy little man with a head bald as a melon—were playing the game with a combination of deadly decorum and masculine craftiness. Low cut spinners crept over the net. The differences of sex were being heavily respected. It was what Tom called a giggle.

  About seven or eight men and women were sitting in deck chairs in the shade of the big elm and as we walked across the lawns the figure of the fabulous Mrs. V., in a very low-necked cream shantung tennis frock, sprang up to meet us.

  ‘I’d given you up. I’d really given you up. I said “those naughty boys—”’

  This rapturous greeting actually made Tom blush. He started apologetically to explain that he’d had trouble with his car’s petrol pump but she cut him off with gay laughter.

  ‘As long as you’re here, that’s the thing. As long as you’re here. And stupid me. I quite forgot to ask your names the other evening. Ours is Varley. Now tell me yours and I’ll introduce you.’

  Tom dealt with the formal business of the names and we followed her over to the elm. In her low-necked frock, which exposed a shell-like inch or two of breast, she looked if anything more elegant, more captivating and more brilliant than ever: except for one thing. I noticed that, without her veil, the eyes that had formerly seemed so vivid now looked rather weak. It was exactly the sort of impression you get when an habitual spectacle-wearer takes off his glasses. Suddenly a new person becomes revealed.

  Under the tree sat the fuddy-duddies and a pretty dull-looking crowd they were. I recognised a man named Dickson who sang in the local operatic society in a mousy sort of tenor; and another named Smythe, a craggy grey schoolmaster who wore starched butterfly collars even when playing tennis; and two owl-eyed sisters, also school-teachers, a pair of podgy dumplings with the odd name of Spong—rather as if they had originally been Sponge and out of shame had dropped the final letter.