The Collected Short Fiction Part 50

"You look tired. Poor Laming! It's a girl isn't it?"

He could only gaze at the floor. His leg was about to fall right off. His brain had gone rotten, like an egg.

"There's always the one you take, and the one you might have taken."

He continued to stare at the eroded lentil-colored carpet "Lie down and rest. I'll come back for you soon."

Agonizingly he flopped onto the hard chesterfield, with its mustard-and-cress covering, much worn down in places.

In the end, she was with him again. She wore a short-sleeved nightdress in white lawn, plain and pure. Her hair had long been quite short. She looked like a bride.

"It's too hot for a dressing gown," she said, smiling. He smiled wanly back.

"Let me help you to take your things off," she said.

And when they were in bed, her bed, with the windows open and the drawn blinds carelessly flapping, she seemed younger than ever. He knew that she would never change, never disappoint. She did not even need to be thought about.

"Laming," she said. "You know who loves you best of all."

He sank into her being.

His leg could be forgotten. The heat could be forgotten. He had sailed into port. He had come home. He had lost and found himself.

Growing Boys (1977).

What, you deny the existence of the supernatural, when there is scarcely a man or woman alive who has not met with some evidence for it!

LUCIEN.

It is, indeed, singular that western man, while refusing to place credence in anything he cannot see, while rejecting absolutely omens, prophecies, and visions, should at the same time, as he so often does, deny the evidence of his own eyes.

OSBERT SITWELL.

The first time it occurred to poor Millie that something might really be wrong was, on the face of it, perfectly harmless and commonplace.

Uncle Stephen, the boys' great uncle, had found the words, conventional though the words were. 'You're much too big a boy to make messes like that, Rodney. And you too, of course, Angus.'

'Angus wasn't making a mess,' Rodney had retorted. 'There's no need to bite his head off too.'

'Keep quiet, boy, and clean yourself up,' Uncle Stephen had rejoined, exactly as if he had been father to the lads, and a good and proper father also.

In reality, however, Uncle Stephen was a bachelor.

'I'll take you up to the bathroom, Rodney,' Millie had intervened. 'If you'll excuse us for a few moments, Uncle Stephen.'

Uncle Stephen had made no effort to look pleasant and social. Rather, he had grated with irritation. When Millie took Rodney out of the room, Uncle Stephen was glaring at her other son, defying him to move, to speak, to breathe, to exist except upon sufferance.

It was certainly true that the boys lacked discipline. They were a major inconvenience and burden, overshadowing the mildest of Millie's joys. Even when they were away at school, they oppressed her mind. There was nowhere else where they were ever away, and even the headmaster, who had been at London University with Phineas, declined to accept them as boarders, though he had also declined to give any precise reason. When Millie had looked very pale, he had said, as gently as he could, that it was better not to enter into too much explanation: experience had taught him that. Call it an intuition, he had experienced. Certainly it had settled the matter.

She had supposed that, like so many things, the headmaster's decision might have related to the fact that the boys were twins. Twins ran in her family, and the two other cases she knew of, both much older than she was, did not seem to be happy twins. None the less, until the coming of Rodney and Angus, and though she would have admitted it to few people, she had always wished she had a twin herself: a twin sister, of course. Mixed twins were something especially peculiar. She had never herself actually encountered a case, within the family, or without. She found it difficult to imagine.

Now, Millie no longer wished for a twin. She hardly knew any longer what she wished for, large, small or totally fantastic.

All that notwithstanding (and, of course, much, much more), Millie had never supposed there to be anything very exceptional about her situation. Most mothers had troubles of some kind; and there were many frequently encountered varieties from which she had been mercifully spared, at least so far. Think of Jenny Holmforth, whose Mikey drank so much that he was virtually unemployable! Fancy having to bring up Audrey and Olivia and Proserpina when you had always to be looking for a part-time job as well, and with everyone's eyes on you, pitying, contemptuous, no longer even lascivious!

But upstairs in the bathroom, it came to Millie, clearly and consciously for the first time, that the boys were not merely too big to make messes: they were far, far too big in a more absolute sense. Rodney seemed almost to fill the little bathroom. He had spoken of Uncle Stephen biting his head off. That would have been a dreadful transaction; like... But Millie drew back from the simile.

Of course, for years no one could have failed to notice that the boys were enormous; and few had omitted to refer to it, jocularly or otherwise. The new element was the hypothesis that the irregularity went beyond merely social considerations. It existed in a limbo where she and her husband, Phineas, might well find themselves virtually alone with it, and very soon.

Millie had read English Language and Literature and knew of the theory that Lady Wilde and her unfortunate son had suffered from acromegaly. That appeared to have been something that ran in Lady Wilde's family, the Elgees; because Sir William had been quite stunted. But of course there were limits even to acromegaly. About Rodney and Angus, Millie could but speculate.

When all the clothes had been drawn off Rodney, she was appalled to think what might happen if ever in the future she had to struggle with him physically, as so often in the past.

Re-entering the drawing room, Rodney pushed in ahead of her, as he always did.

Angus seized the opportunity to charge out, almost knocking her down. He could be heard tearing upstairs: she dreaded to think for what. It mattered more when her respected Uncle Stephen was in the house.

She looked apologetically at Uncle Stephen and managed to smile. When her heart was in it, Millie still smiled beautifully.

'Rodney,' roared Uncle Stephen, 'sit down properly, uncross your legs, and wait until someone speaks to you first.'

'He'd better finish his tea,' said Millie timidly.

'He no longer deserves anything. He's had his chance and he threw it away.'

'He's a very big boy, Uncle Stephen. You said so yourself.'

'Too big,' responded Uncle Stephen. 'Much too big.'

The words had been spoken again, and Millie knew they were true.

Uncle Stephen and Millie talked for some time about earlier days and of how happiness was but a dream and of the disappearance of everything that made life worth living. They pa.s.sed on to Phineas's lack of prospects and to the trouble inside Millie that no doctor had yet succeeded in diagnosing, even to his own satisfaction. Millie offered to show Uncle Stephen round the garden, now that it had almost stopped raining.

'It's quite a small garden,' she said objectively.

But Uncle Stephen had produced his big, ticking watch from his waistcoat pocket, which sagged with its weight. There was this sagging pocket in all his waistcoats. It helped to confirm Uncle Stephen's ident.i.ty.

'Can't be done, Millie. I'm due back for a rubber at six and it's five-eleven already.'

'Oh, I'm terribly sad, Uncle Stephen. Phineas and I have raised the most enormous pelargoniums. Mainly luck, really. I should so much like you to see them.' Then Millie said no more.

'My loss, Millie dear. Let me embrace my sweet girl before I go.'

He crushed her for a minute or two, then stepped back, and addressed Angus.

'Stand up and give me your hand.'

Angus soared upwards but kept his hands to himself.

'I mean to shake your hand,' bawled Uncle Stephen, in his quarter-deck manner; even though he had never mounted a quarter-deck, except perhaps on Navy Day.

Angus extended his proper hand, and Uncle Stephen wrenched it firmly.

When Millie and he were for a moment alone together in the little hall, something that could not happen often, Uncle Stephen asked her a question.

'Have you a strap? For those two, I mean.'

'Of course not, Uncle Stephen. We prefer to rely on persuasion and, naturally, love.'

Uncle Stephen yelled with laughter. Then he became very serious. 'Well, get one. And use it frequently. I've seen what I've seen in this house. I know what I'm talking about. Get two, while you're about it. The Educational Supply a.s.sociation will probably help you.'

'Phineas will never use anything like that.'

'Then you'd better consider leaving him, Millie dear, because there's trouble coming. You can always make a home with me and bring the boys with you. You know that, Millie. There's a welcome for you at any time. Now: one more kiss and I must vamoose.'

As soon as the front door shut, Angus, who had been watching and listening to the scene through the hole the twins had made in the upstairs woodwork, almost fell on her in every sense.

Back in the drawing room she saw that Rodney, released from thrall, had resumed his tea, and had already eaten everything that had been left. Noting this, Angus began to bawl.

It might be all right later, but at that hour Millie was afraid lest the neighbours intervene: Hubert and Morwena Ellsworthy, who were ostentatiously childless.

'Don't cry, Ang,' said Rodney, putting his arm tightly round Angus's shoulder. 'Uncle Stephen always hogs the lot. You know that.'

Angus's rage of weeping failed to abate.

Rodney gave him a tender and succulent kiss on the cheek.

'We'll go to the Lavender Bag,' he said. 'I'm still hungry too. I think I've got the worms. I expect you have as well. Race you. Ready. Steady... Go.'

As the race began on the spot, the picking up and clearing up for Millie to do were not confined to the tea things.

The Lavender Bag was a cafe at the other end of the Parade. It was run by the Misses Palmerston, four of them. It was a nice enough place in its way, and useful for the release through long lunchtimes and teatimes of high spirits or low spirits, as the case might be. Millie went there often, and so did her friends, though soon she would have no friends. Some of them distrusted her already because they knew she had a degree.

Now Millie suddenly set down the cake tray she was holding. She took care not to let the large crumbs fall to the carpet.

'Oh G.o.d,' gulped Millie, sinking to the edge of the settee and almost to her knees. 'G.o.d, please, G.o.d. What have I done to be punished? Please tell me, G.o.d, and I'll do something else.'

Only some outside intervention could possibly avail.

She had never been very good at having things out with anyone, not even with girl friends, and Phineas had undoubtedly weakened her further. All the same, something simply had to be attempted, however recurrent, however foredoomed.

To make a special occasion of it, she put on a dress, even though it had to be a dress that Phineas would recognise: at least, she supposed he must. The boys were still rampaging about at the Lavender Bag, which in the summer remained open for light snacks until 8P.M. They liked to run round the tables wolfing everything that others had left on plates and in saucers. The Misses Palmerston merely looked on with small, lined smiles. Simultaneously the boys were normal children and flas.h.i.+ng young blades.

'Why should you feel at the end of your tether?' enquired Phineas. 'After all, every day's your own. Certainly far more than my days are mine.'

If only one could give him a proper drink before one attempted to talk seriously with him; that is, to talk about oneself!

'It's the boys, Phineas. You don't know what it's like being at home with them all day.'

'The holidays won't last for ever.'

'After only a week, I'm almost insane.' She tried to rivet his attention. 'I mean it, Phineas.'

Millie knew extremely well that she herself would be far more eloquent and convincing if Phineas's abstinence had not years ago deprived her too, though with never the hint of an express prohibition, but rather the contrary. When she was reading, she had learned of the Saxons never taking action unless the matter had been considered by the council, first when sober and then when drunk. It was the approach that was needed now.

'What's the matter with the boys this time?' asked Phineas.

Millie twitched. 'They're far too tall and big. How long is it since you looked at them, Phineas?'

'Being tall's hardly their fault. I'm tall myself and I'm their father.'

'You're tall in a different way. You're willowy. They're like two great red bulls in the house.'

'I'm afraid we have to look to your family for that aspect of it. Consider your Uncle Nero, if I may venture to mention him.'

'I don't like him being called that.'

'But you can't deny he's bulky. There's no one of his build anywhere up my family tree, as far as I am aware. For better or for worse, of course. There are more troublesome things than st.u.r.diness, especially in growing boys.'

Millie did not have to be told. She had often reflected that Phineas, seeping tiredly over the settee at the end of the day's absence, was like an immensely long anchovy, always with the same expression at the end of it; and in the next bed it was, of course, far worse.

'Then you're not prepared to help in any way? Suppose I have a breakdown?'

'There's be no danger of that, Millie, if only you could persuade yourself to eat more sensibly.'

'Perhaps you could persuade your sons of that?'

'I shall try to do when they are older. At present, they are simply omnivorous, like all young animals. It is a stage we go through and then try to pa.s.s beyond.'

'Then you do admit that they are like animals?'

'I suppose it depends partly upon which animals.'

Millie knew perfectly well, however, that for her they were not like animals, or not exactly; and despite what she had said to Phineas. They were like something far more frightening.

'Uncle Stephen was very upset by them before you came home.'

Phineas merely smiled at her. He had all but finished the lactose drink which he consumed every evening before their meal.