Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (3 page)

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Long after Tom had dried himself off with his shirt and then pulled on his clothes, they stayed there, oblivious of the rain, watching Daisy and her twins; fascinated by the miracle, and yet delighted with themselves and their combined achievement. Vicky and Toby sat side by side on the ground beneath the old Scotch pine, and there was a smile on Vicky's face that Toby hadn't seen in ages.

She turned to look at Tom. “How did you
know
there was another lamb there?”

“She was still pretty bulky and she didn't seem very comfortable. She was restless.”

Toby said, “That's a two-hundred-percent lambing Mrs. Sawcombe's got.”

Tom smiled. “That's it, Toby.”

“But why didn't the lamb come of its own accord?”

“Just look at him! He's a big fellow, with a big head. He'll be all right now, though.” He looked down at Vicky. “But you won't be all right if you sit there in the rain much longer. And you'll catch a cold with your hair so wet.” He stooped and picked up the bucket, then held out his other hand to Vicky. “Come along now.”

She put her hand into his and he pulled her to her feet. They stood smiling into each other's faces.

He said, “It's good we're talking.”

“Yes,” said Vicky. “I'm sorry.”

“Just as much my fault.”

Vicky looked shy. She smiled again, ruefully, the smile turning down the corners of her mouth. “Don't let's quarrel again, Tom.”

“My grandfather used to say life's too short for quarrels.”

“I haven't said how sorry I am … about him … we're all at a loss. I don't know how to say it properly.”

“I know,” said Tom. “Some things don't have to be said. Come along now.”

They seemed to have forgotten about Toby. They walked away from him, up the field, with Tom's arm around Vicky, and Vicky's wet head on his shoulder.

He watched them, and felt satisfied. Mr. Sawcombe would have been pleased. He would have been pleased about Daisy's twins, as well. The second lamb was indeed a handsome fellow, not simply a whopper as Tom had described him, but with beautiful even markings and a pair of horns, like buds, already visible, bedded in soft, curly wool. He wondered what Mrs. Sawcombe would call this lamb. Perhaps she would call him Bill. He stayed until it grew too wet and cold to stand any longer, so he turned his back on the sheep and started to walk home.

His mother returned from her visit to Mrs. Sawcombe and gave him a splendid tea of fish fingers and chips and beans and plum cake and chocolate biscuits and cocoa. While he ploughed his way through this, he told her of the great adventure with Daisy. “… and Tom and Vicky are friends again,” he told her.

“I know.” His mother smiled. “He's taken her off in the Land-Rover. Vicky's having her supper at the Sawcombes'.”

After tea Toby's father came home from the office, and they watched football together on television, and then Toby went upstairs to have a bath. He lay in the hot, steaming water that smelt of pine essence on account of he had stolen some out of Vicky's bottle, and decided that, after all, it hadn't been too bad a day. And then he decided to go and pay a call on his Granny, whom he had not seen all day.

He got out of the bath, put on his pyjamas and dressing gown, and went down the passage that led to her flat. He knocked at the door and she called “Come in,” and it was like going into another world, because her furniture and curtains and things were so different to those in the rest of the house. No other person had so many photographs and ornaments, and there was always a little coal fire burning in the grate, and by this, in her wide-lapped chair, he found his Granny, knitting. As well, she had a book on her knee. She had television but she didn't enjoy it too much. She preferred to read, and Toby always thought of her deep in some book or other. But whenever he interrupted her, she would place a leather bookmark between the pages, close the book, and lay it aside so as to give him her undivided attention.

“Hello, Toby.”

She was terribly old. (Other boys' grandmothers were often quite young, but Toby's was very old because, like Toby, his father, too, had been an after-thought.) She was thin, as well. So thin that she looked as if she might snap in two, and her hands were almost transparent, with big knuckles over which she could not get her rings, which meant that she wore them all the time, and very sparkly and dashing they looked.

“What have you been doing today?”

He pulled up a stool and sat down to tell her. He told her about Mr. Sawcombe, but she already knew. He told her about Willie making a coffin for Mr. Sawcombe. He told her about not playing with David, and he told her about Daisy's lamb. And then he told her about Vicky and Tom.

Granny looked delighted. “That's the best. They've patched up that silly quarrel.”

“Do you think they'll fall in love and get married?”

“They might. They mightn't.”

“Were you in love when you married Grandpa?”

“I think I was. It's so long ago that sometimes I forget.”

“Did you…” He hesitated, but he had to know, and Granny was a person who never minded awkward questions. “When he died … did you miss him very much?”

“Why do you ask that? Are you missing Mr. Sawcombe?”

“Yes. All day. All day I've been missing him.”

“It'll get better. The missing bit will get better and then you'll only remember the good times.”

“Is that how it was with you and Grandpa?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Is it very frightening to die?”

“I don't know.” She smiled, her familiar smile, amused and gamine, that was so surprising in that old and wrinkled face. “I've never done it.”

“But…” He looked intently into her eyes. Nobody could live forever. “But aren't you
frightened?
”

Granny leaned forward to take Toby's hand into her own. “You know,” she said, “I've always thought that each person's life is like a mountain. And each person has to climb that mountain alone. To begin with, you start in the valley, and it's warm and sunny, and there are lots of meadows and little streams, and buttercups and things. That's when you're a child. And then you start to climb. Slowly, the mountain becomes a little steeper and the going isn't so easy, but if you stop every now and then and look about you, then the wonderful views are worth every bit of effort. And the very top of the mountain, the peak, where the snow and the ice glitter in the sunshine and it is all beautiful beyond belief, why, that is the summit, the great achievement, the end of the long journey.”

She made it sound magnificent. He said, full of love for her, “I don't want you to die.”

Granny laughed. “Oh, my darling, don't worry about that. I'm going to be around, being a nuisance to you all, for a long time yet. And now, why don't we each have a peppermint cream, and then a game of clock patience? How nice that you came to see me. I was beginning to be a little tired of my own company…”

*   *   *

Later, he said goodnight and left her; went to clean his teeth, and then to his bedroom. He drew back the curtains. It had stopped raining and there was the beginnings of a moon climbing the sky in the east. In the half light, he could see the paddock and the dim shapes of the sheep and their lambs, gathered beneath the sheltering branches of the old pine. He took off his dressing gown and got into bed. His mother had put a hot-water bottle into it, which was a treat, and he pulled this up onto his stomach and lay wide-eyed in the soft darkness, feeling warm and thoughtful.

He decided that today, he had learned a lot. A lot about life. He had helped at a birth, and had seen, in Vicky and Tom, the start of a new relationship. Perhaps they would get married. Perhaps not. If they did get married, then they would have babies. (He already knew how babies started because once, in the course of a manly chat about cattle breeding, Mr. Sawcombe had told him.) Which would make him, Toby, an uncle.

And as for death …
Death is a part of life,
his mother had told him. And Willie had said that death was a secret between God and himself. But Granny believed that death was the glittering, shining peak of each person's private mountain, and that perhaps was the best, the most comforting of all.

Mr. Sawcombe had climbed his mountain and reached his peak. Toby imagined him, standing there triumphant. Wearing sun-goggles because of the brightness of the sky, and his best Sunday suit, and perhaps holding a flag.

He was suddenly very tired. He closed his eyes. A two-hundred-percent lambing. How satisfied Mr. Sawcombe would have been, and what a pity that he had not lived long enough to know about Daisy's twins.

But as sleep crept up on him, he smiled to himself, because, for no particular reason, he was suddenly pretty certain that wherever he was now, his old friend already knew.

Home for the Day

After a European business trip that had taken in five capital cities, seven directors' lunches, and countless hours spent in airport lounges, James Harner flew into Heathrow from Brussels on a Wednesday afternoon in early April. It was, inevitably, raining. He had not got to bed until 2 a.m. the previous night, his bulging briefcase weighed heavy as lead, and he seemed as well to have caught a cold.

The smooth and shaven face of Roberts, the advertising agency's driver who had come to meet him off the plane, was the first cheerful thing that had happened to him all day. Roberts wore his peaked cap, and he moved forward to relieve James of his suitcase, and to say that he hoped he had had a pleasant trip.

They drove straight to the office, and James, after casting a cursory eye over his desk and presenting his secretary with the small bottle of duty-free scent that was no more than her due, took himself down the passage to call on his chairman.

“James! How splendid. Come along in, old boy. How did it go?”

Sir Osborne Baske was not only James's chairman, but, as well, an old and valued friend. There was, therefore, no need for formal pleasantries or polite small talk, and within half an hour James had him more or less briefed on what had been happening: which firm had shown interest, which had remained cagey. He kept the best till last—namely, the two valuable accounts that were already in the bag: a Swedish firm that made prefabricated knock-down furniture, quality goods, but in the slightly lower price bracket, and an old-established Danish silversmiths which was expanding cautiously throughout all the market countries of the EEC.

Sir Osborne was gratifyingly delighted and could not wait to pass on the good news to the rest of the directors. “There's a board meeting on Tuesday. Can you get a complete report out by then? Friday if possible. Monday morning at the latest.”

“If I get a clear day tomorrow, I should be able to get it typed on Friday morning, and circulated on Friday afternoon.”

“Splendid. Then they can peruse it during the weekend when they're not playing golf. And…” But he paused tactfully while James, suddenly overcome by an agonizing sneeze, fumbled for his handkerchief, exploded enormously into it, and blew his nose. “… got a cold, old boy?”

He sounded nervous, as though James might already have infected him. He did not approve of colds, any more than he approved of large waistlines, heavy business lunches, or heart attacks.

“I seem to have caught one,” James admitted.

“Hmm.” The chairman considered. “Tell you what, why don't you have a day at home tomorrow? You look fairly washed out, and you'll have more chance of getting that report done in peace without endless interruptions. Let you see something of Louisa, too, after all this time away. What do you say?”

James said he thought it was a splendid idea, which he did.

“That's arranged then.” Sir Osborne stood up, ending the interview abruptly before any more germs could be released into the sterile air of his palatial office. “If you start off now, you should be home before the worst of the rush-hour traffic. We'll see you on Friday morning. And if I were you, I'd take care of that cold. Whiskey and lemon, hot, last thing at night. Nothing better.”

Fourteen years earlier, when James and Louisa had first been married, they had lived in London, in a basement flat in South Kensington, but when Louisa became pregnant with the first of their two children, they had made the decision to move out into the country. With some financial juggling, they had achieved this, and not for a single moment had James regretted it. The twice-daily hour-long journey to and from work seemed to him a small price to pay for the sanctuary of the old red brick house and the ample garden, and the simple joy, each evening, of coming home. Commuting, even on roads swollen with traffic, did not dismay him. On the contrary, the hour in the car by himself became his switching-off time, when he put behind him the problems of the day.

In midwinter, in darkness, he would turn into his own gateway and see, through the trees, the light burning over his own front door. In spring, the garden was awash with daffodils; in summer, there was the long drowsy evening to look forward to. A shower, and changing into an open-necked shirt and espadrilles, drinks on the terrace beneath the smoky-blue blossom of the wistaria, and the sound of wood pigeons coming from the beech wood at the bottom of the garden.

The children rode their bicycles around the lawn and swung on the rope ladder that hung from their treehouse, and at weekends the place was usually invaded by friends, either neighbours or refugees from London, bringing their families and their dogs, and everybody lazed in chairs with the Sunday newspapers, or indulged in friendly putting matches on the lawn.

And at the heart of all this was Louisa. Louisa, who never failed to amaze James, because when he had married her, he had done so without the remotest suspicion of the sort of person she had turned out to be. Gentle and undemanding, she had proved, over the years, to have an almost uncanny instinct for home-making. Asked to lay an exact finger on this, James would have been defeated. He only knew that the house, although frequently strewn with children's toys, shoes, drawings, had about it an ambience of peace and welcome. There always seemed to be flowers about the place, and laughter, and enough food for the extra guests who decided to stay for supper.