Who Calls the Tune Read online

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nina Bawden

  Who Calls the Tune

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Chapter One

  I saw Brigid when I was half-way up the platform; she had been in front of me all the time and I had not recognised her. She was just a stranger in a shabby blue coat that wrinkled at the waist, hatless, and with too sturdy legs in the wrong sort of shoes. The station was almost dark, the lamps were misty through the raw, coughing air, and somewhere a wireless was blaring out the weather report, the megaphone muffling and distorting the prim, righteous voice.

  I wasn’t listening to the report, but at one point the announcer said that there would be snow on high ground and I heard that bit. The phrase sounded oddly dramatic; there was a veiled hint of the skeleton at the feast.

  Then the wireless cut out, and the station announcer was directing passengers to their trains. The station swirled with ghostly activity; the people moved silently, the sounds of their moving drowned by the booming voice, clutching at suitcases and the hands of children. It was then that the woman in front of me dodged a motor-propelled trolley and as she turned her head, I saw her blunt, familiar profile and the way her hair grew low on her forehead. I called to her and she turned, screwing up her eyes in a short-sighted way. Then she saw me and smiled, uncertainly.

  “Hallo, Paul,” she said. “I’ve been walking up and down for ages.”

  “Looking for me?” I said.

  She looked, suddenly, confused.

  “Yes. I’ve got the car. There was enough petrol, though at first I thought there wouldn’t be because Venetia was using the car this morning and she forgot to fill up the tank and the pump in the village is broken or something. I … Paul … I’m staying with Venetia. It’s rather a Thing.”

  She blushed; her blunt-featured, smooth-skinned face that missed being pretty by so slight a margin that I was always surprised to find her not pretty at all but plain, was scarlet with suppressed urgency. Brigid’s features were almost Jewish; she was as tall as Venetia, but her limbs and body were thick set so that she seemed stocky. Her brown, velvet eyes, her maddeningly gentle mouth, exaggerated every trifling emotion. Just now her lips were quivering with so obvious a desire to pour forth the stream of circumstances that had led to her meeting the train, and not living snugly in North Harrow, that I got her by the elbow and said quickly:

  “Tell me about it in the car. I’m cold.”

  She looked at me with the hurt little-girl expression that Venetia and I had always found so intolerable, and I realised that she had expected me to kiss her. I said:

  “It was nice of you to turn out, Brigid. The bus would have been damned unpleasant.”

  That made her happy; she laughed her loud, boisterous laugh and said:

  “Oh, it would, Paul. One of the drivers is sick, or something, and one bus isn’t working. The other one went by the end of the lane this morning and it had at least eighty people inside. The conductor was hanging on the steps to keep them in. That never happens in London; I think country buses are such fun, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said, but I don’t think she heard me because the megaphones had started to transmit martial music. She went on talking while we left the station and looked for the car. Outside it was very cold, the wind stung our faces, and when we found the car it was parked in an impossible position. Brigid couldn’t find the keys, and we stood there in the wind while she went through her pockets and turned out her bag, apologising non-stop for keeping me waiting. At last she found them in the finger of her glove; when she was a child she had always kept things there for safety, and she had never lost the habit.

  “Would you like to drive, Paul?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, because I hate driving, and then, remembering that Brigid’s driving was hopelessly incompetent, I said “Yes” hastily and got into the driving seat.

  She sat beside me in silence while I drove through the tortuous Shrewsbury streets, but she watched me all the time and I knew she was waiting for permission to tell me her Thing. I knew I should have to listen because it was a long drive, but I put it off as long as I could and pretended to be absorbed in the Highway Code.

  We drove clear of the town and rode high above it, the hedges slipping past like moving, black ghosts. I said:

  “Come on, Brigid. Let’s get it over.”

  She gabbled furiously, clipping off the ends of her words as she always did, as though she wasn’t sure whether anyone would listen to her or not.

  She said, “Paul, I’ve left Tony. I’ve been meaning to for so long, only it was so difficult, I didn’t know what to say to him or even where to go, because of Sebastian, you see. And then I wrote to Venetia, and she was terribly sweet to me, which is quite different, isn’t it? I mean from what she’s always been. And suddenly it was all quite easy; she said I was to come to her and bring Sebastian with me and stay as long as I wanted to. I shan’t stay too long, of course. I thought we’d get a little house, just Sebastian and me. It wouldn’t cost too much, and I could get a job and Sebastian could go to school. He’s not going now because he’s so delicate … he …”

  There was a lot more of it but I stopped listening because I knew there
was no need to listen. Brigid had never learnt the art of dramatic speech; she put all her meat in the beginning and her plans and ideas at the end, and Brigid’s ideas were never worth listening to.

  It wasn’t surprising that she had left Tony. What was surprising, I decided, although I had never thought about it before, was that she had ever married him. It was so obviously unsuitable. He was a slick fellow, a commercial traveller. He liked fast cars and television and bed. He was not the kind of man that women stayed married to; a sensual woman might have done, but Brigid wasn’t that sort. Marriage to her meant cosy firesides and babies, the coos and gurgles of the Young Mothers’Guild. Sebastian had been born a year after her marriage; to Brigid he must have been its only consolation. He was an ugly child, I remembered, but Brigid adored him. Tony did not; a hard, eager, active child he might have loved, but not Sebastian. He had bullied Sebastian until a year ago when the child had started to have fits. It was that, I supposed, which had finally made Brigid leave Tony. She had been married to him for ten years and she had been nineteen when she had married. I think that Tony then had been a refuge. Brigid had not been happy at home. Not since Caroline had died.

  It was not remarkable that Brigid had left her husband. What I wondered at was that Venetia had apparently encouraged her to do so and had offered her a home. For Venetia had always found Brigid more irritating than I did. I asked:

  “How is Venetia?” and Brigid stopped in full spate.

  “I am sorry, Paul. I should have known you’d want to hear about her. It was beastly of me.”

  I could not see her face, but I could feel the sudden, apologetic cringing of her attitude.

  “How is she?” I said again.

  “She’s fine. Terribly well. Not terribly, of course, that’s quite the wrong word, I know.” She laughed nervously and rasped her gloved hands together. “She’s been awfully busy, of course, she goes out a lot and everyone thinks she’s marvellous the way she does it …”

  “The way she does what? “

  “Goes out. Oh, Paul, you know what I mean.”

  “But why shouldn’t she go out? And why should it be ‘marvellous’ if she does?” I was only half angry; I had been used to hearing this sort of thing said by people much less stupid than Brigid.

  She faltered. “Oh, Paul, you know what I mean. The … the way she is.”

  I felt real anger now, though God knows I should have been used to this sort of stupidity.

  “You mean,” I said coldly, because it never paid to shout, “that she is marvellous because she leads a normal life although she has only one leg of her own, and because she doesn’t mind people staring at her because anyway she’s the most beautiful thing they’ve seen in their silly little lives and they’d stare if she hadn’t any legs at all!”

  “But she doesn’t,” said Brigid, “go out with one leg. She wears that mechanical thing. It hardly notices, you know, and she’s got a new one now.”

  This was something interesting at last. Brigid wouldn’t know what was new about the leg; Venetia would never have talked to her about it. At first, of course, she had had a wooden one because she was growing so fast, but when she was older she had had a series of mechanical gadgets which did everything but wash up. When I had seen her last, her limp had been so slight that it was barely noticeable. I wondered how the new one fastened on. The early ones had all fastened with a strap and been very simple, because she would never allow anyone to help her. Once she had locked the door and screamed when her mother had tried to come into the room when she was bathing. Brigid had never been able to understand that; if it had happened to her she would have leant on her mother, been dependent, allowed pity.

  “You’ve missed the turning, Paul,” said Brigid, and I turned the car on the narrow, icy road, and swore. The snow had started to fall as we turned into the drive of blowsy rhododendron bushes and yew trees. The farm buildings lay on our right, crouched and unpretentious; the house itself was at the end of the gravel drive. It was an ugly house, built during a bad period, with a great many bow windows and false towers.

  “Paul,” said Brigid, and suddenly she sounded nervous. “Venetia is different, somehow. I don’t quite know how to describe her …”

  “What do you mean?” I asked quickly.

  “Oh, nothing wrong, Paul,” she said eagerly. “Not that. She’s just happy, I think. She seems all lit up inside, like … like a church,” she ended fervently.

  I grinned to myself. Brigid was having a passion for Venetia, I thought. She was always having a passion for someone. And then I stopped grinning, and wondered what Venetia was up to.

  The door opened as we got out of the car, and Henry came down the steps.

  He shouted, “Hallo, old chap. Have a good journey?”

  It always seemed to me that Henry shouted. He was a stocky man with heavy shoulders and shortish legs. His face was round and red, and he cultivated a bristly, sandy moustache. He looked bluff and rather stupid until you noticed his mouth, which was sensitively curved, and the shy, blue eyes. He talked hurriedly and was over-busy with rugs and suitcases … I guessed because he did not like me and always tried to conceal it not only from me, but from himself. He needn’t have bothered; I had never liked him either.

  He was even redder now with shouting and stooping and sending away the dogs that jumped up at me. I have always disliked dogs, and Henry’s dogs especially. They were big, noisy brutes, and their paws were always muddy.

  There were three other people in the hall; a big woman who looked like a housekeeper, a small boy, and a girl. I saw the girl first; she was standing half-way up the stairs, and when I looked up at her and smiled, she inclined her head gravely and I noticed her eyes. They were long, and a curious golden colour. She was small, thin as a child, and as she came down the stairs towards us I saw that she moved well, like a dancer. Henry saw her.

  “Oh, Rella,” he said. “We’ll run you home in the car.”

  He introduced us rapidly. “This is Rella, Paul. She’s been to see Venetia. She lives in the village.”

  The girl smiled then, but not with her eyes; her smile was merely politeness. Her voice was soft and foreign and unsure.

  “How are you?” she said to me. “Venetia has talked to me about you.”

  She smiled again, even more perfunctorily, and then went to the door. Henry and Brigid were arguing as to who was to take her home.

  Henry said, “Look, old dear, you’ve been out in this filthy weather quite long enough. You stay in and get warm.”

  “But, Henry, I don’t mind. It isn’t any trouble, really,” said Brigid, but she was blushing happily at his solicitude, and finally yielded in a gentle, feminine way that surprised me. She was usually clumsy and ungracious when men tried to do things for her.

  Henry apologised to me, and left with Rella. Then Brigid said:

  “Now, Sebastian, you must meet Paul. Paul, this is Sebastian. He was only a baby the last time you saw him.”

  Sebastian was a pale, ugly, nervous child, with buck teeth that had a band round them, and round, light eyes behind strong lenses.

  He muttered at me and shuffled his feet.

  “Come along, don’t be shy,” said Brigid. “Wouldn’t you like to help me show Paul his room?”

  The boy gulped, gave his mother a look of pure terror, and shook his head. He twisted away from her plump, encircling arm, and said, “I’m goin’with Dorry.”

  The woman who looked like a housekeeper clicked her teeth disapprovingly, but she did not rebuke the boy when he seized her red hand and clung to it. Holding her hand, he didn’t look so frightened.

  Brigid said crossly, “All right. But don’t stuff yourself up with patties and things in the kitchen, or you won’t eat your supper. Come along, Paul.”

  I followed her up the staircase, reflecting with some surprise that Brigid seemed, suddenly, to have more confidence than I remembered. She talked to me as we went upstairs and into my room without a trace of t
he humiliating self-consciousness that she had always shown and that I had always hated. In the soft bedroom light she looked almost pretty; her eyes, like patches of brown velvet, shone and sparkled. I could see that she had made-up, and done it well.

  She said, “I’m sorry Sebastian is so rude. He’s shy, you know, and he doesn’t get on well with strangers. I don’t think he likes it here.”

  She waited expectantly, as though she wanted me to ask why he didn’t like it, but I said I must unpack, and would she tell Venetia that I was here?

  “All right,” she said. “But Venetia knows. She said to tell you to come to the drawing-room as soon as you are ready.”

  She went out and closed the door. If I had not known that Brigid would never do such a thing, I should have said that she had banged it.

  I took a long time over my unpacking. My hands were shaking a little, and my mouth was dry. I always felt like that when I hadn’t seen Venetia for a long time. It was as if there was a cord between us, sometimes loose and barely felt, and then, quite suddenly, taut and quivering. I always felt it when I was going to see Venetia or when I was with another woman. When I was married and in love with Betty, my wife, I had never been able to forget Venetia for a moment.

  When I couldn’t find anything else to unpack, I went down to the drawing-room. Venetia looked up as I came in, and I went to her and kissed her. Her mouth was firm and cool; she looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. I have never found it possible to explain her beauty; feature by feature, I could never remember her face. She was fair, her eyes were blue, I think. She was radiant and light as a tongue of flame; she gave the impression of dancing, though she could never dance.

  “Paul, dear,” she said, and laid her hand against my face.

  She got up to get me a drink; she wore a loose, flowing house-coat, and she walked beautifully across the room. She looked over her shoulder and smiled at me.

  “Marvellous, isn’t it?” she said, and laughed.