Under the Skin Page 11

  I went through the tiny hall – it always surprised me how small it was; two steps and you were in the sitting-room. No light was on, only the grey dusk outside and the grey, underwater gloom from the television set. My mother glanced at me, accepting my presence but not really taking it in; at once, her gaze returned to the screen.

  Miss Foley said, ‘I’ll turn it off in a minute.’

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t interrupt her.’

  ‘Oh – she doesn’t follow anything. But we have to go carefully. We have to wait until the people aren’t looking, otherwise they might be angry if we switch them off.’ She tiptoed with elaborate caution round the back of the set. My mother was watching the screen closely. Suddenly she said in her surprising, deep voice – rich and full as a preacher’s – ‘It’s all right now, Harriet. They’ve turned their backs. Be quick.’

  Miss Foley turned the switch and winked at me. ‘I do have a game sometimes. Particularly with the news. They never take their eyes off you, do they?’

  ‘No.’ I refused to answer her arch, conspirator’s smile. I hated her when she assumed an alliance between us against my poor Mum; the sane against the mad. And despised myself for hating her too; she was good to my mother in a way only a very kind and very silly woman could be. Like children, the old and senile are best cared for by the good and simple-hearted; intelligent people are too impatient, their own lives more important. All the same, Miss Foley depressed and embarrassed me. I was always glad when she left, as she usually did, soon after I arrived. But before she went there had to be the usual questions, the routine of interest and gratitude.

  ‘How has she been this week?’ There was no need to lower my voice. Mother was still transfixed by the empty screen.

  ‘We’re quite well in ourselves. The doctor says he’d like us to take an opening medicine occasionally. We don’t always do our duty as we should.’ (An awkward little giggle.) ‘But you know how we feel about drugs, so I’ve been persuading her to take a little All Bran in the mornings. I hope I did right.’

  ‘You know what she needs, Miss Foley.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Otherwise the doctor’s very pleased. He says she’s wonderful for her age.’

  In my childhood, she had never been strong; there had been mysterious aches and pains – probably gynaecological, since the discussion of them had broken off whenever I came into the room. Now, in her mad old age, she was splendidly healthy. Varicose veins and constipation were the only things that troubled her. She ate well, her clear, blue eyes had the sparkle of youth, her skin the faint, peachy bloom of a girl’s.

  ‘They always are healthy,’ Miss Foley said – whispered, because my mother had suddenly turned her calm, reflective gaze upon us. She said in a louder voice, ‘We’ve done our hair in a new way. Don’t you think it suits us?’

  Hardly new. Her thick, auburn hair, only lightly streaked with grey, had been arranged in the monstrous ear-phones that had probably been all the rage when Miss Foley was a girl; they suited my mother’s rather heavy, Victorian face. She looked like one of those pictures of someone’s dead, great aunt, stiff and immortal in a silver-mounted oval frame.

  She said to me, in her strong voice, ‘You’re putting on weight. You’ll have to watch your diet. Harriet, are you off already?’

  She rose, a gracious hostess, while Miss Foley pinned on her hat – black, with wool violets – in front of the glass on the chimney breast. ‘I’ll see you out, dear, then I’ll make Tom a cup of tea.’ She wasn’t confusing me with Bertie: this must be a good day. ‘I’ve got some of those Small Rich Tea biscuits he likes.’

  She ushered Miss Foley from the room, looking far and away the younger and stronger. In the hall she forgot what she had meant to do and halted with a lost, puzzled air. Then she smiled, ‘I must just take a look at my snowdrops,’ she cried, and went to the front door.

  ‘I’ll nip out the back,’ Miss Foley said. ‘It’s best – while she’s looking at her garden. She doesn’t really like to see me go.’

  I went into the kitchen with her, thanked her, listened to her usual parting speech. (Don’t mention it, Mr Grant, she’s such a sweet person with such sweet ways, it’s a pleasure to do what I can for her) thanked her again, paid her (so little for so much) and shut her out gratefully.

  The front door was still open. My mother was bending over her rock garden, a mound, covered with snow. A few yards away, in the road, Jay had got out of the car and was cleaning the windscreen. As I came into the garden he smiled at me and my mother straightened and saw him. Annoyed with myself for having let this happen – if she thought I had brought a stranger with me, it would upset her for days – I stepped to her side quickly and put my hand under her arm, steadying her against a frightened outburst. But it didn’t come. Astonishingly, a broad, calm smile spread over her face. She shook off my hand impatiently and advanced, beaming welcome, towards Jay who had approached the gate rather uncertainly. (I had told him only that my mother was shy of strangers.)

  ‘How lovely to see you after all these years,’ my mother said. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  Then her statuesque calm broke. A look of intense, childish excitement came into her face; she gave a half-skip like a little girl and ran back into the bungalow. We heard her call. ‘What a surprise, dear. You’ll never guess. Harriet – Harriet, it’s Bobo come back. …’

  ‘Miss Foley’s gone, Mum,’ I shouted after her and turned to Jay, feeling foolish. ‘You’d better come in. I don’t know who—’

  She appeared in the doorway, flushed, patting a plump ear-phone nervously with a white, plump hand. She looked coy.

  I said, ‘Mother dear, this is—’

  ‘Bobo,’ she said, her voice loud and full. Then she smiled. ‘Of course I know that’s not your real name. Your real name escapes me for the moment. You must forgive me. It was such a surprise.’ She looked at me, frowning. ‘I didn’t know you knew my son.’

  Jay looked at me, puzzled. I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t tell him anything. We followed her into the sitting-room.

  ‘It’ll come back in a minute,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t tell me – Harriet is always telling me things. I like to remember on my own.’ She looked at his dark, bewildered face. Then she gave a quick, light laugh – a girl’s laugh, full of happiness. ‘Of course. Mr Henderson. What will you think of me? Fancy my forgetting, after all those summers you stayed with us. I am a silly billy. Sit down – that’s the most comfortable chair. Tom, you go and make the tea. We’ve got so much to talk about, Mr Henderson and I.’

  I looked at Jay. He sat down and said slowly, ‘It is very pleasant to see you, Mrs. Grant.’ He caught my eye and gave me a quick, reassuring smile.

  I could hear her talking away while I made tea in the kitchen. The pewter teapot, the cups and saucers, were set out ready on the chipped enamel tray with the peacocks on it; I remembered having meals served on that tray when I was a child, in bed. I found the packet of Small Rich Tea and tipped it out onto the Coleport Batswing plate which was all that was left of the tea-set Great-great Aunt Polly had given my grandmother for a wedding present. I could have made a historical inventory of everything in that kitchen, of everything in the whole house. My mother never bought anything new. Even the double saucepan – mended, I noticed, with a piece of Elastoplast – was the one she had used to make porridge for me on school mornings in winter. Louise had once wanted, if we could not re-furnish the house, at least to replace the cracked and broken china, but chipped cups had memories for my mother: she put our presents away in the bottom drawer of the chest in her bedroom, the chest that had the burn mark where I had put the tea-pot down, one day when she, not I, was ill in bed.

  I heard Jay’s voice. ‘I’ll show Tom this, if I may. He will be interested.’.

  He came into the kitchen. He was holding the family album – heavy, bound in brown leather with a useless, brass lock. He was smiling gently. ‘I think one of these is Mr Henderson,’ he said. />
  Together we looked at the photograph of six nigger minstrels dressed in striped blazers and white flannels; singing, strumming the guitar, the piano. Underneath was written in beautiful copperplate: The Travelling Coons, Summer 1909.

  Jay said, ‘I understand Mr Henderson was an actor.’

  ‘Yes. Of a kind.’ How on earth should he know? ‘They came round the seaside towns in summer, giving shows on the pier. They – they blacked their faces. My grandmother kept a boarding-house. A sort of cheap hotel. I suppose she must have put this lot up.’

  He said, seriously, ‘Won’t your mother be surprised that I have not washed my face to come to tea?’

  ‘No. She isn’t quite logical.’ I hesitated. ‘Thank you for not laughing at her.’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Why should I? I admit I was somewhat astonished at first – but why should I laugh? You cannot help forgetting, when you are old.’ He smiled gaily. ‘I must remember that I am Henderson,’ he said.

  We had a very happy evening. It seems absurd, but we did. My mother asked Jay a few questions, but there was no awkwardness because she had no interest in the answers. She talked quite happily about Mr Henderson and Harriet and Uncle Bertie and other people we knew nothing about and between bursts of talk she sat, equally happy, in a dreamy silence. After supper, I opened the piano in the comer – it had a lattice work front, backed by dusty pink silk – and persuaded her to sing to us. She had liked singing as a girl, and as a young woman had sung in the Methodist choir. She played her own accompaniment and sang old songs in her good, deep, slightly hoarse voice, while Jay and I sat, stretched out to the fire, listening and talking and dozing. It was very pleasant in that sitting-room which was ugly and commonplace and comfortable with a sagging, blue sofa and a worn, Indian carpet and the red velveteen curtains I remembered my mother buying at a sale in Canterbury. On one side of the fireplace was the piano, and on the other a bureau bookcase with a glass front. My mother never read and the contents of the glass-fronted case had not been changed, or touched probably, since my childhood: the blue and gold volumes of the Children’s Encyclopedia bought and paid for by instalments; the grim, brown Home Doctor, much thumbed and falling open automatically at the pages that had to do with dire prophecies of disease and death; miscellaneous books, bequeathed by aunts, won as school prizes or picked up at the jumble sale. The Wandering Jew. Dombey and Son. Little Miss Vanity. I looked round the room and thought how strange home-comings must be for children whose parents refurnish once they are grown; throwing out their childhood along with the worn chairs, the old books.…

  There was no question of Jay going to an hotel. I suggested it half-way through the evening, when she had just finished one song and was searching through the pile of tattered sheets for another.

  ‘Harriet would never forgive me,’ she said, shocked. ‘What an idea! Mr Henderson can have your bed, Tom, and you can make do with the sofa. You’ve got young bones.’

  Suddenly she looked at Jay and frowned, as if something puzzled her. I thought: how old would Henderson be now, for heaven’s sake? But then her face cleared and she turned back to the piano to sing ‘Smilin’Through’.

  Her good mood lasted through the night. Usually she drifted through the mornings in a kind of coma, not stirring until Miss Foley had done the fires and come to help her dress and do her hair. But today, for some reason, she was up before we were and made tea and eggs which we ate in the kitchen. She wore a red dressing-gown. Her long hair flowed down her back in a thick plait. She looked like a gay, elderly child.

  She said good-bye to us, standing at the door of ‘Dunrovinvin’, in the blue, early morning light. She kissed me, and called me Bertie. She had forgotten me, but Jay was still Mr Henderson.

  ‘Good-bye, Mr Henderson,’ she said. ‘Come again. Don’t leave it so long, this time.’

  ‘I would very much like to come,’ Jay said.

  ‘That’s good.’ Her face glowed. ‘That’s good. I shall look forward to it so much. You’ll always have a welcome here.’

  Chapter Eight

  It was a marvellous morning. Even though my bones ached from a cramped night on the sofa, I felt cheerful and refreshed. The sun glittered on the fallen snow and the air was dry, tingling in the nose like the air at a ski resort. Since the coastal road was tolerably empty at this time of the year and of the morning I let Jay drive; though he was sublimely confident of his skill in traffic, I was not. He drove with extraordinary verve and dash, rather as if he were driving a Dodgem car. His hands were clamped fiercely on the steering wheel, his lips emitted a low, humming sound. He hurled the car at the road with dare-devil courage; clearly, the landscape on all sides bristled with terrible dangers. The only other man I had ever known drive a car with such theatrical aggression was Reggie.

  We negotiated a slippery bend in top gear with screaming tyres while I sat silent and dry-mouthed, refusing to think of the mechanical damage he was almost certainly causing. He swept into the straight at seventy miles an hour and said, on a deep, happy sigh, ‘I think I should like to buy a car while I am in England.’

  Like Reggie, he loved cars with passion: it should have been a bond between them.

  ‘A car’s not much use in London.’

  ‘But I could go on trips to see the beautiful English countryside. And take Philip out from his school.’ To my horror, he turned towards me. His voice rose in the plaintive tone of self-justification. ‘It is not a school for the sons of poor men. He will be humiliated if his father does not have a car.’

  ‘Look out.’ We made a flamboyant, sweeping curve round an elderly cyclist.

  ‘It’s all right. I saw him,’ Jay said in a hurt voice.

  ‘How? Out of the back of your head?’ I returned to his earlier remark. ‘Philip’s got too much sense to mind about that sort of thing.’ I felt slightly uneasy. With Jay, I had discovered the wish for something was all too likely to lead to its rapid acquisition. In the short time he had been with us he had bought two suits, innumerable shirts and Italian ties; whisky for me, expensive flowers for Louise and Julia. I did not grudge him his pleasure in spending but in an odd way it depressed me: I did not like to see him seduced by toys. There was a shabbier reason, too. I was nervous of the effect his lavishness might have on others – Julia, for example. (They are so irresponsible about money!) Though Julia liked Jay, she also liked to be proved right. I could just see the cold, satisfied gleam in her eye if he should turn up with a car, however tinny and second-hand.

  ‘You can’t afford it, anyway,’ I said shortly.

  ‘I could buy it on the hire purchase. Of course, it would be necessary for someone to guarantee the payments.’

  ‘Not me,’ I said cheerfully.

  He glanced at me sidelong, his face quite without expression. It was as if a stranger sat beside me.

  He said, with cold dignity, ‘I would never suggest that. I am told my Government will do this, in certain circumstances.’

  If not an untruth, this was a misunderstanding of something someone had said to him. But it seemed best to say nothing. We sat in silence and I felt miserable; I had not meant to offend his pride.

  We came onto a straight stretch of road. To the right, the land fell gently away; in the distance, a pencil line against the great sweep of winter sky, was the white curve of the sea-wall.

  I said, ingratiatingly, ‘Over there – that’s the Land of the King’s Cows.’

  Curiosity restored his good humour. He craned his neck to look and nearly took us off the road. I restrained myself with some difficulty from putting out a hand to the wheel. A herd of bullocks in a field near the road turned to stare at us as he righted the car.

  ‘When you told me about it in Kenya,’ he said, ‘I had pictured it quite differently. A great, green valley – very rich and green.’ He chuckled suddenly; I heard the sound with relief. ‘But English cows are very fat,’ he said. ‘It has amazed me.’

  We arrived late in London. It didn’t matt
er; Jay had only one seminar, late in the morning, and my day was fairly free. Or should have been, since I had no lectures; but when I got to the college I found Hilton, my boss, was away sick. He had been due to appear on a discussion programme on the B.B.C. European Service; he had left a message with his secretary to say he had told them I would take his place.

  It was like Hilton to leave me no option. He was a mild, stooping, reticent man with a shock of white hair that made him look more like a back-room scientist than any back-room scientist could possibly look. In fact, ‘back-room’is misleading. He had worked most of his life abroad: at the research station in Malacca; with Fischbein in Java; and after the war, first with the F.A.O. in India and then in Israel, where he had produced his work on the morphology of carps of different genotypes. His appointment as head of the biology department was regarded by most people as a form of honourable retirement, but not by him. He lived with his mother and grandmother in Peckham – even his mother was immensely old – but only his body travelled backwards and forwards there. His spirit resided permanently in the laboratory and in his cramped, untidy room at the university, surrounded by screwed up sweet papers, back numbers of Hydrobiologica, and notes for the two books he was writing; one on the therapy of bacterial fish diseases and the other a layman’s book on nutrition and fish culture among primitive peoples. He lived for his work and assumed everyone else did so too, but in such a gentle, inoffensive way, that it was impossible to object. He was, I think, continually surprised to find himself regarded as eminent, or in any way an authority. He had been astonished when his recommendation had got me the F. A.O. job in Kenya and insisted that it was really the effect of an article I had had in Science on external parasites of fish. He was always honoured when anyone asked him to give an outside lecture or take part in a radio discussion; so honoured that he usually waived the fee. I wondered if he had done so this time but shrank from asking his secretary since Hilton’s modesty about money – as acute as a Victorian lady’s about her underclothing – infected everyone about him.