WELCOME STRANGER Page 9

  They looked out of the window. Thanks to the adjacent wing, the room was always in the shade, but they could see sunlight on the roof of Westminster Abbey.

  The telephone rang. ‘Have you got Miss Trotton with you?’ a woman’s voice asked accusingly.

  ‘Yes, she’s been helping me with the minutes.’

  ‘My dear girl, if you have any difficulties you must ask Mr Hadow about them. I need those figures urgently.’ The receiver was put down.

  ‘What figures does she want?’ Alice asked.

  ‘The number of lettings of secondary school halls in the three years prior to the war – because the wartime figures won’t be representative. It means looking up the minute books for those years, and it will take all the afternoon. You can tell her that if she rings up again.’

  ‘Why does she want to know?’

  ‘The caretakers are on about it. And in order to prove they are being unreasonable we have to go back to 1936.’

  Alice hunched over her desk. ‘My soul will shrivel up if I stay here. I can feel it happening already.’

  ‘It’s not your soul you have to worry about. Do you realise all the kids here think there is something odd about us? We have had the greatest opportunities known to womankind and we still haven’t found a husband.’

  Alice had this thought in her mind as she entered the City Literary Institute that evening. The seating pattern in the room where her course was held had been established in the autumn and was rigorously adhered to. The seats at the front were occupied by those who wished to impress the lecturer with their keenness, and the ones at the back by those who sought to demonstrate their nonconformity. The seats under the window had been taken, not because of the view (the window sills were too high to allow of any view) but because the radiators were situated here. There remained the seats in the middle and by the door. Alice sat in the middle, a position in life to which she was accustomed.

  ‘I don’t like Raphael,’ the American woman in front of Alice confided. ‘But I just know he’s going to win me over. He’s so positive, isn’t he?’

  ‘At least he will tell us what we should look out for.’ Alice agreed with the judgement passed on the lecturer, but was not prepared to commit herself to Raphael, whom she imagined to belong to the parted lips, rolling eyes school of religious art. In a few minutes, she was marvelling at the gentleness in the face of the madonna, the differentiation between the unformed body of the child and the body of the woman. The lecturer had a mop of dusty, lemon-coloured hair and a little pointed face which also had a lemon hue. He had very pale eyes and grey teeth. He looked as though he had never been in a strong light. But he had such enthusiasm one could only imagine he daily drained himself of vitality to give to others. ‘Be grateful!’ he squeaked excitedly, pointing to the picture on the screen. ‘Here is a human hand – a thing of flesh and bone! Four hundred years later you will see paintings by much-admired artists where the hands are like blocks of wood! Here is drapery which is not only different in texture from the flesh, but different in kind from other drapery. It is silk, not wool, or lace . . .’ Even so, he admitted when he had finished for that evening, ‘Raphael is not entirely to my taste.’

  ‘But you did him justice, that is what I admire so much!’ Alice told him later when they had coffee in a dingy café near by.

  ‘One must never encourage people to sneer at a great artist. To sneer is easy. People love to find flaws, it makes them feel clever – and safe. They stand in front of a Rubens and are affronted because the women are huge, and then pass on to complain that Botticelli’s colours are cold. But ask them what is good, and most of them are dumb.’

  They sat talking about art for nearly an hour. He was interested in her way of looking at paintings, while she assumed him to be interested in her.

  The weekend with Heather was quite successful in spite of the fact that it rained most of the time. They stayed in a small inn on the edge of marshland and spent the days wading through mud. Heather was a good companion, able to laugh at misadventure – quite a clown, in fact, singing the Great War songs and making them comic, yet sad. In their more serious moments they talked about their wartime experiences and the difficulty of settling down.

  ‘After all,’ Alice said, ‘it’s not as if we had settled before we went away. We hadn’t made a start. The war postponed it.’

  Heather, who was going back to Austria in a week’s time, said, ‘I can’t imagine starting anything over here. There is so much to be done in Europe.’

  Alice could feel dampness seeping through the seams of her jacket. ‘I hope there’s something hot for supper,’ she said.

  The inn was named The Welcome Stranger. This is what we are, Alice thought, as they trudged towards it in driving, misty rain. Heather singing ‘Laddie in Khaki’. We are strangers to be given a welcome on arrival, who will the next day set out on our journey, strangers still.

  This thought rather appealed to her. Perhaps she could make a book out of it, set in a marshy, undefined landscape – a Hermann Hesse sort of thing. One would have to find endless variations on the theme of misty marshland, of course, if it was not to become monotonous. It would be quite a challenge.

  There was little time for such a challenge in the months which followed. At the beginning of July Claire gave birth to twin girls and her family was called into immediate service. Quite apart from the help needed with the babies, there was the question of finding more suitable living accommodation. Even in the first days of their marriage, the room at the top of a Victorian house in a seedy part of Hammersmith had seemed unacceptable to Claire and Terence. Now it was quite intolerable, and much against their will, they had to accept the hospitality of Claire’s Aunt May, who lived not far from Louise in Notting Hill.

  Alice entered into the house-hunting with zeal, often going off on her own at weekends to report on accommodation in Richmond, Ealing, Twickenham, Kew, and all the other places which Claire and Terence had previously said were quite unthinkably suburban, and which now seemed so eminently desirable. While she made sensible reports on her investigations, she nevertheless found herself more often asking, ‘Could I live here?’ than considering the needs of Claire and Terence. She endowed each small house with a personality of its own, and she wrote a series of short stories, some amusing, some disturbing, all on the theme of the house choosing its partner. The stories flew from her pen, something she felt any seriously-intentioned writer should frown upon. Nevertheless, they read well, and one evening when she felt particularly reckless, she put them in a large envelope and sent them to a publisher. Within a month they had been accepted. Alice was astonished that anything conceived so light-heartedly should be accepted with apparently equal lack of reflection. She sat in the book-lined room of the fiction editor and studied the woman for any sign of mental instability.

  ‘What are you writing now?’ There was no doubting the alert professional interest.

  ‘I’m half-way through a children’s book.’

  This was received without a great deal of enthusiasm. ‘You hadn’t thought of a novel?’

  Alice, thinking with shame of the Hermann Hesse novel still waiting in her drawer, said she hadn’t yet ‘got down’ to it.

  ‘There’s one story here that I thought had the makings of a novel.’ She thumbed through the typescript. ‘The one about the rather silly girl, whom you make so amusing, who is always planning new lives for herself and never gets beyond the first chapter. One can see her life as a series of first chapters.’

  Alice, already a third of the way through her own life, said she would think about it, although she was determined that this was one theme she would not pursue.

  ‘I think you could make it very funny.’

  Irene had suggested she might write about local government because she could make it funny. No one took her seriously except herself.

  Chapter Six

  In September, Joseph Tippet died, sitting in the armchair by the window where for far t
oo long he had been imprisoned by arthritis. He had never complained. ‘I’m used to living in cramped spaces,’ he had said. His eyes had grown so weak that it was doubtful whether he could see beyond the roofs of Falmouth to the blue waters of the Carrick Roads. But his memory was not impaired, and as he stared out of the window he saw as if it was yesterday the grain ships loading in the harbour. ‘I’m going to sail in a clipper when I grow up,’ he had told one of the old seamen. ‘Then you’ll have to look lively, lad,’ the old man had said sadly. And, indeed, Joseph had spent most of his life in steam ships.

  ‘He never really understood life on shore,’ Ellen Tippet said to Ben, who had come to Falmouth to stay with her. ‘I miss him – though goodness knows, he was seldom here in body, let alone soul. I miss having someone to meddle with, I suppose that’s the truth.’

  Ben’s maternal Grandfather had been Joseph’s cousin. It was not a near relationship, but Ben had few close relatives. His American father had gone down on the Lusitania, and Ben knew little of the American side of the family. His mother, an only child, had been orphaned in her teens. Ben had cherished the Tippets.

  ‘You’ve got all your children and grandchildren,’ he said. To him this seemed riches enough. Three of the grandchildren could be heard quarrelling outside the window where they had been put to work weeding the flower border.

  ‘I’m a burden to my children.’ Sitting by the window in Joseph’s armchair, she might have been engraved in the glass, there was so little of her and that so brittle. ‘They’d like to put me in a home. Except for Judith. She and that new husband of hers came to the funeral. She thought I could manage – but then I’m no problem to her; she’s so far away it won’t be her has to come in each day to make sure I haven’t had a fall.’

  Ben said furiously, ‘Don’t you let them put you away! Shutting you up in a home, saying it’s for your own good, when all they want is to get on with their lives without having you on their conscience! You’ve lived a long time and you’ve earned the right to die in your own way. If you burn yourself alive, or fall down the stairs and break your neck, so what? If you’re happier living on here and taking the risk, that’s your decision.’

  The blue eyes considered him as if he was a very distant object, rather than a distant relation. ‘That sounds more like you. I was beginning to be afraid you had lost all your fire.’ Ben groaned and put his face in his hands, a gesture only half-mocking. He had come to stay with Ellen Tippet in her time of trouble because he had had some idea of repaying her for her goodness to him after his mother’s death. It had been a mistake to think of giving comfort: what he should have remembered was Ellen’s ability to discomfort. She had the gift of seeing the future. Only the other day Ben had pointed with approval to work being carried out by a young couple on a cottage near by. Ellen had shaken her head and said, ‘There will be too many tears in that house.’ He had spent the first few days of his stay avoiding personal discussions as much as possible. Now, it seemed, he had given her the opening she needed.

  ‘War gave you a bit of a jolt, didn’t it?’ She dismissed the years in prison camp as if they had been an isolated incident. ‘You thought you had the world in the palm of your hand before you went to be a soldier.’

  ‘Be that as it may, I know that I can’t go back to the Bar.’

  ‘I could have told you you wouldn’t make your living at the Bar.’

  ‘As I recall you did tell me, more than once.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been brought to the truth of it now.’ She made it sound as if the whole Malayan campaign had been fought for no other purpose.

  ‘A hard way to learn,’ he said wryly.

  ‘But you’re one will only learn the hard way.’

  ‘And you would like to smooth my path by telling me where it is leading?’

  She settled back in her chair, face calm, eyes remote as they always were when she was exercising her gift. ‘No one will ever smooth your path for you. But I’ll tell you what I see, though you won’t accept it now. They told you at school you had the makings of an advocate, didn’t they? So you thought you were going to be the Attorney General. But that won’t be the way of it. It won’t be court appearances and rich rewards for you. I see you working for other people.’

  ‘I’m doing that now.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean being employed by other people. I mean working for people who need you, not people who can pay you. I see them. But not very clearly.’ She closed her eyes, not in order to see the more clearly, but because she was tired.

  ‘In another age, you’d have been burnt as a witch,’ he told her fondly.

  ‘I’d have had a fine time first, though. People paid more attention in those days.’

  ‘You would have enjoyed stirring up trouble?’

  ‘Not trouble, so much. But people need stirring up. Look at what happens to most of them. Men particularly. Dead wood by the time they’re forty.’

  ‘Joseph wasn’t. He had a good life while he was at sea. He said to me once, the sea was unpredictable, it never let you feel you had mastered it, so you must always be on the alert.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Joseph had been too much a part of her life’s history for her to be able to see him as clearly as she saw others; and, in any case, he had had two lives, about one of which she knew nothing. Perhaps as a protest against this limitation of her powers, she made one of those lightning raids into other people’s territory which had earned her more respect than liking. ‘But I do know it’s not like you to give up something you’ve set your heart on just because you’ve had a few tumbles. You’re the sort to pick yourself up and fight harder than ever. So there’s some good reason why you aren’t going back to the Bar.’

  ‘I’ve had more than a few tumbles. They only bruise the body.’

  She shook her head. ‘I know your nerves are all to pieces, and you’re very sorry for yourself. But you’re the kind who pulls through. Provided you want to pull through. So why don’t you want to?’

  ‘Success was what I wanted.’ He resigned himself to her. Why else had he come, knowing her as he did? It must have been some need of her strange wisdom which had brought him back here. ‘I owed it to my mother. She worked all the hours God gave to give me a chance.’

  She nodded. ‘She had your life planned for you, and no mistake.’

  He reacted angrily to the implied criticism. ‘She wanted me to have a better life than she had. That’s what most parents want for their children.’

  ‘Oh, she had nothing to be ashamed of,’ Ellen said peaceably. She hadn’t liked Lizzie much, but no one could doubt either her good intentions or her indomitable courage. ‘So why aren’t you fighting, since you owe her so much?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem worth the effort. I said I wanted success, but it wasn’t that. The really important thing was beating everyone else. I wouldn’t have been a success in my own eyes if I had not been acknowledged as the greatest advocate of my time. And when that happened, I’d have felt cheated because the great advocates of the past were safely dead and couldn’t compete with me. The dead have an unfair advantage. Does that sound a good way of life to you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘When I left the camp in Siam, I was one of the lucky ones. And as the train took us away and we watched the jungle receding, believe me, I knew just how lucky I was. And I knew that life was a gift. It doesn’t any longer seem a good idea to spend the rest of it running, looking over my shoulder from time to time to make sure no one is catching up with me.’

  He got up and went to the window. The house was perched high with steep steps leading from the front door to the street. The grandchildren were jumping from them instead of weeding the garden as they had been instructed. One of them, a red-headed boy with long legs, was jumping from the third step. Ben said, ‘Years ago when I came here, Guy challenged me at swimming – and he won. I spent the rest of that holiday working out why he won so that I would be able to beat him. But I think the
thing which angered me most was that he did it so effortlessly. He was a natural swimmer, you see, he just gave himself to the water. Everything I did demanded effort.

  ‘I suppose you could say that at the moment, I am giving myself to the water. Not because I want to, but because I haven’t any choice. I have no energy, no ambition, I don’t know where I am going or what is to become of me, and it doesn’t seem to matter.’

  Ellen nodded her head in satisfaction, as though in some obscure way he had vindicated everything she had said. ‘You’ll find your path when you stop thinking so much of yourself.’

  The boy leapt now from the fourth step, seeming for a moment to give himself to the air before landing as surely as a cat on the pavement.

  ‘You need to get married.’ The visionary had departed and it was an old woman who spoke. ‘Once you had a family to provide for, you’d soon sort yourself out.’

  ‘Oh, I shall marry!’ He spoke of it as an accomplished fact. ‘But the sorting out comes first.’

  ‘That’s the way of it, is it?’ She was alert again. ‘So long as you haven’t a particular girl in mind, me ’ansome! Men have this idea – always have had – that the girl will be there waiting while they do whatever business seems more important to them than marrying her, whether it’s going soldiering, or sailing the China seas, or just sorting themselves out. Then, when they’ve proved whatever they needed to prove, they say she’s fickle because she’s found someone else in the meantime. Someone who put her first!’

  ‘But the girl is always first!’ he exclaimed. ‘She is a part of whatever a man does. You were always a part of Joseph’s life however far away he was.’

  ‘And do you imagine that Joseph was always a part of my life when I was trying to see the children through school and worrying about the slates coming off the roof! Do you think Joseph was with me when I lay in bed alone night after night and year after year? If you do, then I’m sorry for any girl who marries you!’