WELCOME STRANGER Read online

  ‘She has to do her practice. As far as the double oak, please, and no further.’

  ‘You’re bossy.’

  ‘Someone has to be in charge here, and it so happens it’s me.’ This kind of exchange had been going on for so long between them that she forgot about Guy. ‘Right? His lead is hanging up behind the kitchen door.’

  It was not right, but James knew it was no use arguing. And, since she did not make emotional appeals to his better nature, it did not really matter all that much. It did not diminish him to obey her; he did it as a gesture to her, because she was his mother. She made no enquiry as to his motives. Their relationship was something outside the realms of reason. It was quite beyond Guy’s understanding.

  ‘You are rather hard on him sometimes,’ he said when the children had both gone.

  But her authority had limits. When Guy was shocked by James’s behaviour he had long, severe chats aimed at bringing the boy round to his own way of thinking. James sulked. Under Louise’s regime, it was a matter of rough justice, quickly meted out and as soon forgotten. When they were young and had quarrelled with each other, she had said, ‘I haven’t got time to sort out who did what to whom, you both go upstairs until you can behave properly.’ She made no demands on their minds. It was unimportant to her whether they accepted her opinions or laughed at them. ‘You think I’m a silly old cow,’ she had once said. Later, when James called her a cow, she slapped his face. In half an hour they had both forgotten about it. Claire said you should never raise a hand in anger to a child; Louise thought it was the only time when it was permissible.

  ‘You’re not going to rehearsal?’ Guy asked, noting that Louise was in no hurry to get supper.

  ‘The play has been put off until the end of the year. Our producer has had to go abroad for his firm.’

  ‘Will they do something else?’

  ‘Oh yes. Man and Superman. But I shan’t be in that. I like the part in Asmodée. Did you read the play?’

  ‘A bit intense, I thought.’

  ‘You should talk to Alice about it. She loves all that claustrophobic, simmering passion.’

  ‘Is Alice in? If she could stay with the children, we might go to the pictures.’

  ‘I’ve been to so many rehearsals. I don’t like to go out and leave them when there’s no need.’

  He flinched from crying out his own need, and said pettishly, ‘They have you every day when they come out of school.’

  ‘They used to have me to themselves all the time, Guy. They can’t understand why they are pushed out of the way so often now.’ She saw that he was hurt, and went on, ‘I want us to be on our own, too. But it would help if you took them out more often. You would get to know them better without me there to take over. James is right about that! I am bossy.’

  ‘I took them for a walk on Hampstead Heath. James went rushing off with the dog, and Catherine got a blister.’

  ‘When that happens you let James go, and sit down on a seat with Catherine. It doesn’t matter about being together all the time. You’re not a sheepdog, Guy. The object isn’t to get us all into a pen and close the gate.’ She rumpled his hair gently, but he was not appeased.

  ‘The pleasure is in being together, surely?’

  ‘But we are together. Catherine is playing her scales and James is loitering round the double oak. That’s together enough for me.’

  ‘I accept that. But when I give up a Saturday-afternoon to take them out, I do expect to have their company. I lost James for an hour and I had to carry Catherine.’

  Louise got up. ‘Well, I’m going to get supper.’

  Guy followed her into the kitchen. ‘I don’t seem able to make my point . . .’

  She whirled on him shouting, a fist emphasising each word. ‘If there could be one evening when this doesn’t happen! Just one, that’s all I ask.’

  He backed out of the room. A quarter of an hour later, Louise went into Alice’s room at the top of the house. ‘What are you doing lying on your bed?’ she asked irritably.

  Alice, who was lying flat on her stomach with her head resting on her arms, replied, ‘Lying on my bed, of course.’

  Louise said, ‘Is there anyone in this house who isn’t miserable?’

  Alice raised herself on one elbow and screwed her head round to look at her sister.

  Louise sat in a wicker chair and began to cry. ‘I’m not very happy myself, but I do try!’ She drummed her hands on her knees. ‘I do try! No one seems to believe it, but I do!’

  Alice pulled back the eiderdown and rolled off the bed. She went to Louise and knelt beside her. Louise said, ‘What do I do wrong, Alice? Tell me what I do wrong.’

  Alice contemplated the linoleum in dismay. It would have been easier to reply had she not had an answer so ready to hand. Louise said, ‘Well, go on!’

  ‘Was it a good thing to be in the play, so soon after he came back?’

  ‘I thought he would come, too.’

  ‘He wants you to himself, I expect, don’t you?’

  Louise sat looking ahead of her. After a moment, she said quietly, ‘He wants to come in in the evening and make love to me. I don’t mind that, but it’s difficult with the children. After all, it’s the only time they see him. Then, when at last we’ve got them to bed – and it’s not easy to get children to bed when they know they are being pushed out of the way – he wants to tell me everything that has happened to him at his office; and then he wants to know what I have been doing all day. Or, he might like to go to the pictures, and hold my hand, whisper to me, so that I don’t lose myself in the film. He doesn’t enjoy music, so we don’t often listen to it. If we do, he fidgets and jokes with the dog. When I go out to prepare supper, he follows me into the kitchen. At the end of the evening, I feel . . . as if he had been trying to eat me alive!’

  Louise had had six years of freedom. The room seemed to vibrate with her anger. Alice wondered if Guy knew what he was doing when he tried to harness the force in Louise for his own purposes. ‘I can see that you have to belong to the dramatic society,’ she said.

  Louise stood up and straightened her skirt. ‘I feel better now. So what’s your little problem? Is it the cold up here? You can always come down with us whenever you want to.’

  ‘Oh, Louise!’ Alice laughed. She had said it so spontaneously and could not even see how funny it was. There would always be room for people to come and go in Louise’s life. No wonder she and Guy were having difficulties.

  ‘My problem is that everything is so dull and grey and I’m afraid it’s going on forever. And I expect that is how Guy feels, too. Do you remember those books about the 1920s, all the war heroes coming back after giving their youth for their country? Seven men came back. They were all so full of misery and self-pity! Well, no more self-pity from me, I promise!’

  Louise put an arm round her shoulders and hugged her. ‘That’s my girl! Now, what about sitting in for us after supper? Guy wants to go to the pictures.’

  Chapter Three

  In the spring Alice was to spend a weekend with her mother and stepfather in Sussex. She had been invited for Christmas, but had made the excuse that she thought one of the family should be with the grandparents in Falmouth. The visit to her mother’s new home could not be delayed any longer; it could, however, be curtailed and she said it would not be possible for her to arrive before the Saturday morning. This was accepted without much argument.

  ‘Austin won’t try to behave like a stepfather,’ Louise assured her.

  This did not alter the fact of his being one.

  Louise and Claire had already stayed at the house. For different reasons, they were muted in their reactions. Claire, who had wanted a substitute father, had found Austin Marriott too detached. Louise had found him too attractive. Had he been a new member of the dramatic society, she would have hailed him as a find; but she could not forgive her mother for marrying a man who overshadowed Guy. That he should be more intellectually able did not trouble Louise;
but she had not been prepared for so powerful a physical presence. This not only disturbed her, it made her conscious of her mother’s sexuality. Austin had not been unaware of her response to him and had treated her with a caution which suggested the experience was not new to him. When their eyes met at the dinner table, or as they sat by the wood fire in the evening, she could see that he was laughing. She was not used to being laughed at.

  ‘You’ll get along with him very well,’ she said to Alice. ‘You’ll be able to talk books.’

  ‘That will be like talking politics to Irene,’ Alice said. ‘He will know everything and everyone.’

  Judith had said, ‘One of us will meet you at Lewes station.’ Alice anticipated the worst: if one did that, one could only be pleasantly surprised. So, as she walked towards the ticket barrier she was rehearsing her conversational gambit – a statement she had read recently to the effect that it would take the publishing industry about seven years to make good wartime losses and restore publishers’ catalogues to prewar standards. After that, he would talk about his firm’s catalogue and this would probably see them through the journey to the village where her mother now lived.

  A surprise indeed awaited her. It was her Cornish relative, Ben Sherman, who was standing just beyond the barrier.

  ‘Austin let me have the car,’ he said, taking her case. The car was an old, treasured Rover, and this had represented an act of faith on Austin’s part. Four years as a Japanese prisoner-of-war had left Ben with a legacy of unpredictable reactions and poor coordination.

  Alice, who did not realise how important this small act of charity was to Ben, thought it odd that he should explain about the car rather than his own unexpected presence.

  ‘Are you staying for the weekend?’

  ‘Yes, I came down by the earlier train.’

  ‘Mummy didn’t tell me. We could have travelled together.’

  ‘Judith doesn’t make that sort of connection.’

  So it’s ‘Judith’ now, Alice thought; I am going to be one on my own this weekend!

  Ben drove the car as though it was a truck, hauling on the wheel, one window wide open so that he could lean out when he turned a corner. It seemed to Alice that he was more concerned with what might be behind him than with the road ahead. As she was thrown against the windscreen, she thought how typical it was of Ben that if he had problems he should manhandle them! She was relieved when they arrived unscathed in the village.

  ‘Stop here a moment,’ she said when they came to the church. She made the daffodils an excuse for getting out.

  ‘There are heaps of daffs in your mother’s garden.’

  ‘But these I can enjoy!’

  There was a bench in the graveyard and they sat side by side, each agitated by exposure to the keen spring sunlight. Wild flowers had thrust up all over the old graves and on a cottage wall near by the white montana was thick as a quilt.

  ‘It was in the spring that Daddy was killed,’ Alice said to Ben, who did not need reminding.

  ‘Later than this,’ she said, recalling the cherry trees at their most abundant. Not one of them had been touched when the bomb exploded. That was five years ago and the sharpness of grief had gone now, leaving only a dull pain which Alice was beginning to realise would never be completely eased. Lately, however, the good times she had shared with her father had come spontaneously to mind, as though his shattered image was gradually being refashioned. There would be joy as well as sorrow to take through life. If only her mother had not remarried!

  ‘I’ve been dreading this weekend,’ she told Ben. ‘I’m so glad you are here.’

  ‘He is really a very decent sort.’ Ben spoke warmly.

  ‘I’ve met him once or twice. I know he’s all right. It’s Mummy. She doesn’t want to talk about Daddy. I suppose that is understandable – Austin might not like it. But it only leaves the present to talk about, and that’s something one does with strangers.’ It was as though her mother had drawn a hard line across her daughters’ lives, cutting them off from their past and denying them a necessary continuity.

  ‘Do you talk about your father a lot with Louise and Claire?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But we know we can if we want to. We don’t have to think, we just say what comes into our minds. That’s the great thing with being a family. That, and the taking for granted.’

  ‘You had to be quite careful how you behaved with your father,’ Ben reminded her. ‘He was a fairly explosive character.’

  But Stanley Fairley had passed beyond criticism now and Alice took no notice of this remark. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t seen you since before Christmas. How was Christmas?’

  He had spent Christmas with a family in Herefordshire. Their son, Geoffrey, had died in the prison camp in Siam where Ben had spent much of his war service. Last autumn, Ben had set out on a disastrous walk along Offa’s Dyke and had had to give up on the second day because he was in such poor condition. It had been apparent that these expeditions to the Welsh Marches were something in the nature of a pilgrimage.

  ‘It was all right,’ he said gruffly. He had not been well since his return from captivity and had had to give up his career at the Bar. He had no one to help him ease his way back into civilian life. He had gone to Herefordshire expecting a miracle. The parents had welcomed him eagerly as Geoffrey’s friend. But he had looked for more than that. He had wanted a firm place in the family and had had some notion of falling in love with one of Geoffrey’s sisters, or with the girl to whom his friend had been engaged. This would set the seal on his friendship with Geoffrey. There was a rightness about the solution, a simple economy which he found as satisfying as an algebraic equation. In the event, he had thought the girls superficial and suspected that they had found him angular and difficult to communicate with. He had learnt that algebra is not subject to the will, that there are certain things which no amount of yearning can ever bring into being. Other people, too, dream their dreams, separate from one’s own.

  ‘We’d better get on,’ he said. ‘Sitting here admiring the daffodils isn’t going to solve anything.’

  As they returned to the car, he said, ‘Austin has been looking at Geoffrey’s drawings, to see whether they can be reproduced in a book.’ He was still talking about the drawings when they arrived at the house. He had difficulty in opening the gate because he was hampered by Alice’s suitcase. It would have taken a matter of seconds to have put down the case and then unlatched the gate.

  ‘Let me . . .’ Alice said.

  ‘I did the captions – it was supposed to be a joint venture. And I kept a diary after Geoffrey died. But the drawings are the important thing . . .’ Alice could see he would soon pull the gate off its hinges, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the latch. Really, what a way to behave, just when she needed to be calm! She leant across him and undid the latch.

  ‘Why ever didn’t you put the case down?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said impatiently. ‘I can’t be bothered with all that.’

  ‘You’re in much more of a bother now.’

  But to have put down the case would have involved a movement which interfered with his train of thought. He isn’t going to change, Alice thought; he is Ben, of whom I am very fond – only just at this moment I could strike him!

  They arrived flushed and disconcerted at the front door to be greeted by Judith, flushed from a calamity in the kitchen.

  ‘Come and have tea,’ Judith said after she had embraced her daughter. She led Alice towards the back of the house. Austin appeared in the doorway to the sitting-room and raised one hand in salute, then he picked up Alice’s case and disappeared up the stairs with Ben. His restraint, though well-meant, was accounted discourtesy by Alice who was not used to restrained men. A clumsily over-enthusiastic greeting would have won her heart. This brief appearance only served to emphasise that Austin Marriott was master of this house. He was a man who filled any spaces there might be around
him, not, as her father had done, by expenditure of a ferocious energy, but simply by virtue of being big. He had the benign manner of one who can look down on others from a comfortable height. As he was not concerned with winning hearts, only with keeping the peace, he did not join Judith and Alice in the kitchen, but said to Ben, ‘We’ll leave the women to themselves. Come into my study.’

  ‘Pour yourself a cup of tea,’ Judith said to Alice. ‘I’ll clear this up. Austin says I wouldn’t hold down a housekeeper’s job for a week.’ She bent to collect the pieces of broken crockery heaped on the tiled floor. ‘They’ll do nicely in flower pots.’ She was never one to cry over breakages.

  Alice, looking down at her mother, could see that there was a powdering of grey over the thick brown hair. This apart, Judith looked young for her fifty years. Her skin was dark and her face wedge-shaped. ‘You’re never going to be a beauty,’ her mother had told her. ‘So you’d best make yourself useful.’ But a pair of bold dark eyes and a general air of forcefulness can do wonders for a face, and many would account her a handsome woman.

  ‘I wonder any of us can use our hands at all!’ Alice said. ‘Daddy was always breaking things, too.’

  ‘Your father had two left hands,’ Judith said. ‘I only break things when I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘But you always are in a hurry.’

  ‘Not nearly so much now that I have a country garden again.’ Alice was glad that Austin was not credited with this slackening of pace. She preferred an unquiet mother to one tempered by her stepfather.

  When Alice had finished her tea, Judith took her on a tour of the house, excluding the study. It was a rambling fifteenth-century house, smelling of old, dry plaster and creaking with age. The rooms, although low-ceilinged and giving the impression of being small, were, in fact, quite long and the furniture was arranged to give a sense of space. People did not need to live huddled on top of one another here. The furniture, Alice noted, was mostly Austin’s; it was worn and fitted its surroundings comfortably. The house, however, had the appearance of having recently been polished, scrubbed and generally freshened throughout. There were books and flowers everywhere. Alice said, ‘It’s very nice,’ feeling a stranger in her mother’s home. Doors and windows were open and in the sitting-room a grey cat paused in its ablutions long enough to salute Alice with a languid paw.