The Paying Guests(43)
Frances wondered if Mr Crowther knew quite what he was in for. He was a nice-enough looking man of twenty-nine or thirty, dark-haired, with a trim moustache. ‘You’ve known Mrs Playfair a good while?’ he asked her as they sipped their sherry, and she explained the connection between the families.
‘I was a regular here in my schooldays,’ she said, ‘when Kate and Delia were still at home. They’re married now, and both living far away; Delia out in Ceylon.’
He gave a nod. ‘I’ve thought of Ceylon for myself. Or perhaps South Africa. I’ve a cousin out there.’
‘Yes? What sort of work would you look for?’
‘Oh, an administrative post, if I could get it. Or engineering. I don’t know.’
‘You sound as though you have many talents.’
He smiled, but in a way that seemed to throw the subject off.
The dinner-gong sounded, and they went through to the dining-room. The evening sun was just as bright in there, and again Mrs Playfair put Frances in the full of it, at Mr Crowther’s side; she had to squint against the light for the whole of the meal. Still, it was a treat to eat four courses that had been prepared by someone else. Mrs Playfair, her investments undented, had managed to hang on to her servants right through the War. She had a cook, and a parlourmaid, Patty, as well as a daily woman for the roughs. Frances, cutting her buttery breast of chicken in the sunlight, was very aware of the state of her hands. She saw Mr Crowther look once at them, then politely look away.
He kept up the politeness even when the conversation turned, as it was bound to do, to Eric, talking in a stilted but obliging manner about their time in Mesopotamia, describing the heat, the grit, the marches, the rush and confusion of the skirmish in which he and Eric had been injured; Mrs Playfair nodded at his words like a collector with some new trophy, as if already seeing the spot in the display case in which it would be placed. And when the meal was finished and they returned to the drawing-room to admire the wireless set, he made himself handy with the twiddling of the switches. Frances was dubious about the wireless. She felt faintly ridiculous as she fitted on the ear-phones, and there was an anti-climactic few minutes when all that could be made out was a sort of prolonged death-rattle in the wire. But finally the crackles and the hisses resolved themselves into a voice – and then, yes, it was thrilling and uncanny to recognise a bit of Shakespeare and know that the words were coming across miles of empty space, directly into one’s ear, like a whisper from God. Somehow, though, it was even more uncanny to take the ear-phones off and realise that the whisper was still going on – to think that it would go on, as passionate as ever, whether one listened in to it or not.
Patty brought the coffee, and they moved outside. It was the day after midsummer, and still fantastically balmy and light. Frances’s mother and Mrs Playfair settled themselves in cane chairs on the terrace, but Frances and Mr Crowther wandered down into the garden. Mrs Playfair’s Siamese cats, Ko-Ko and Yum-Yum, wandered with them, and when they sat, on a carved stone bench, the she-cat, Yum-Yum, jumped on to Mr Crowther’s knee, and he stroked and fussed the little creature until she purred like an engine.
They were in full view of the terrace, but just far enough away from it so that they could talk without being overheard. Frances, watching Mr Crowther work his fingers over the cat’s ecstatic face, said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve had rather to sing for your supper tonight, Mr Crowther. Not just with the wireless, I mean. It can’t be much fun.’
He answered without lifting his gaze. ‘Oh, I’m not complaining. Generally when ladies learn that one was anywhere out east of Suez they rather lose interest. They want the romance of the trenches and all that.’
‘You don’t mind going over it?’
‘No, I don’t mind. It was every kind of hell, at the time. It was real, stinking hell. But the queer thing is, I sometimes find myself missing those days. There were things to do, you see, and one did them. That counts for a lot, I’ve discovered. Back here, now it’s all over – well, there isn’t a great deal for one. Lots of one’s friends dead, and so on. And there are no paid posts for men like me. I ran into my second lieutenant the other day. He’s shining shoes at Victoria Station! Other fellows I know are drifting about, getting into this, getting into that. None of us has any sticking power. I feel half in a daze, myself. Ceylon, South Africa – I’ll never get there. Or, if I do, I’ll wear my days away just as I wear them away here. I envy the ordinary working man, to be honest with you. He hasn’t a job, either – but at least he has Bolshevism.’
He continued to fuss with the cat as he spoke, and Frances was struck by the absolute lack of rancour in his manner; by the absence of any sort of passion in him. She said quietly, after a pause, ‘I miss the War too. You’ve no idea, Mr Crowther, what it costs me to admit that. But we can’t succumb to the feeling, can we? We’ll fade away like ghosts if we do. We have to change our expectations. The big things don’t count any more. I mean the capital-letter notions that got so many of our generation killed. But that makes the small things count more than ever, doesn’t it?’
‘The small things?’ He smiled. ‘Like this little beast, you mean?’
‘I mean ordinary things, to be done well. Bits of ground to till and care for. Houses to sweep.’
‘Houses to sweep,’ he repeated, still with that smile on his face, and she couldn’t tell from his tone whether he liked the idea or was making fun of it. She didn’t know, after all, whether she liked the idea herself or suddenly thought it a nonsense. The sight of him petting the cat like that had begun to get on her nerves. There seemed no life in him at all save in the tips of his restless fingers. She suspected that he had come to Mrs Playfair’s tonight for the same reason she had – simply as a way of killing an evening, striking another one off the calendar. Perhaps the prospect of a free dinner had appealed to him, too.