The Carousel (6 page)

I did not accompany them on this expedition. It was half past four and Lily Tonkins had gone home, so when I had collected our coffee mugs and washed them up, I laid a tea tray, found a fruitcake in a tin, and took the empty kettle off the Aga to fill it at the sink.

The sink in Phoebe's kitchen was beneath the window, which was pleasant, because it meant that while you were washing up, you could enjoy the view. But the view now was lost, drowned in a mistlike rain. The clouds were low, the wet, emptying sands of the estuary reflecting their leaden darkness. Flood tide, ebb tide. They made a pattern of time, like the minute hands of a clock, ticking life away.

I felt philosophic, peaceful. And then, suddenly, very happy. This happiness caught me unawares, as I used to be caught unawares by the random ecstasies of childhood. I looked around me, as though the source of this reasonless euphoria could be seen, pinned down, remembered. I saw everything in that familiar kitchen with a rare and heightened perception, so that each humble and ordinary object appeared both pleasing and beautiful. The grain of the scrubbed table, the bright colours of the crockery on the dresser, a basket of vegetables, the symmetry of cups and saucepans.

I thought about Daniel and Phoebe, rooting around together in Chips's dusty old studio. I was glad that I had not gone with them. I liked him. I liked his beautiful hands and his light, quick voice and dark eyes. But there was also something disturbing about him. I was not sure if I wanted to be disturbed.

He had said, "You are not only exceptionally pretty, but you are talented as well."

I was not used to being told I was pretty. My long straight hair was too pale, my mouth too big, my nose snub. Even Nigel Gordon, who—according to my mother—was in love with me, had never actually got around to saying that I was pretty. Smashing, maybe, or sensational, but never pretty. I wondered if Daniel was married and then laughed at myself, because my thought processes were so painfully obvious, and because it was exactly the question that my mother would have asked. My own self-ridicule broke the spell of that extraordinary moment of perception, and Phoebe's kitchen dissolved into its usual mundane self, left neat by Lily Tonkins before she had donned her head scarf and bicycled home to get her husband's tea.

When tea was over, Daniel pushed back his cuff, looked at his watch, and said that he must go.

"I wish you were staying here," said Phoebe. "Why can't you come back here? Fetch your things and then come back to us."

But he said that he wouldn't. "Lily Tonkins has got quite enough on her plate looking after the pair of you."

"But we'll see you again? You're down for a little?"

He stood up. "A day or two, anyway." It sounded vague. "I'll be back to see you."

"How are you going to get back to Porthkerris?"

"There's probably a bus ..."

I said, "I'll drive you in Phoebe's car. It's a mile to the [51]

bus stop and it's still raining and you'll get soaked." "Don't you mind?" "Of course I don't mind."

So he said good-bye to Phoebe and we went out and got into her battered old car, and I backed it cautiously out of the garage and we drove off, leaving Phoebe silhouetted in the lighted doorway of Holly Cottage, waving her good arm and wishing us a safe journey, as though we were setting off on some marathon rally.

We bowled up the hill through the rain, past the golf club, onto the main road. "You're so clever to drive," he said admiringly.

"But you can surely drive a car. Everybody can drive a car."

"Yes, I can drive, but I simply hate it. I'm a total fool about anything mechanical." "Have you never had a car?"

"I had to have one in America. Everybody has a car in America. But I never really felt at home with it. I bought it secondhand, and it was enormous, long as a bus, with a radiator like a mouth organ and huge, phallic headlights and exhaust pipes. It had automatic gears, too, and electrically operated windows, and some sort of supercharged carburetor. I was terrified of it. When I'd had it three years, I finally sold it, but by that time I'd only just worked out how to operate the heater."

I began to laugh. I suddenly thought of Phoebe saying, when you settle down with a man, it is absolutely vital that he makes you laugh. Nigel, it was true, had never made me laugh much. On the other hand, he was a wizard with cars, and spent a good deal of his spare time either with his head under the hood of his M.G., or else prone beneath it, with only his feet sticking out, and conversation reduced to requests for a larger monkey wrench.

I said, comfortingly, "You can't be good at everything. If you're a successful artist, it would be too much to ask to be a mechanic as well."

"That's what's so fantastic about Phoebe. She paints like a dream. She could have made a really great name for herself if she hadn't happily subjugated her talent in creating a home for Chips . . . and for all the stray students like myself who lived with them and worked with them and learned so much from them. Holly Cottage was a sort of refuge for so many young and struggling artists. There were always immense, delicious meals, and order and cleanliness and warmth. You never forget that sort of security and comfort. It instills in you a standard of good living—and I mean 'good' in the true sense of the word—for the rest of your life."

It was marvellously satisfying to hear another person state aloud what I had always felt myself about Phoebe, and yet, somehow, had never been able to express.

I said, "We're the same, you and I. When I was a child, it was just about the only time I ever cried, when I had to say good-bye to Phoebe, and get on the train and go back to London. And yet once I was home again, back with my mother, and with my own room, and all my own things around me, it was all right. And by the next day, I was always quite happy again, and involved, and glued to the telephone, ringing up all my friends."

"The tears would have been the direct result of the insecurity of two different worlds touching. Nothing makes one more miserable."

I thought about this. It made sense. I said, "I suppose so."

"Actually, I can't imagine you being anything but a happy little girl."

"Yes, I was happy. My parents were divorced, but they were both wise and intelligent people. And it all happened when I was very little, so that it didn't leave what you might call a lasting scar."

"You were lucky."

"Yes, I was. I was always loved and I was always wanted. You can't ask more than that out of any childhood."

Now the road sloped and curved towards Porthkerris. Through the murk, the lights of the harbour sparkled far below us. We came to the gates of the Castle Hotel, and turned in, and made our way up the winding drive, the avenue of oak trees. There was an open space, with tennis courts and putting greens, and then a wide gravel sweep in front of the hotel. Lights shone from windows and the glassed revolving door. I drew up between a Porsche and a Jaguar, pulled on the brake and turned off the engine.

"I can't help feeling very slightly out of place. Do you know, I've never been here before. Nobody's ever been rich enough to bring me."

"Come in and I'll buy you a drink."

"I'm not suitably dressed."

"Neither am I." He opened the door. "Come on."

We left the car, looking dusty and forlorn between its aristocratic neighbours, and Daniel led the way through the revolving doors, and inside it was tremendously warm and thickly carpeted and expensive-smelling. It was that slack period between tea and cocktail time, and there were not many people about; only a man in golf clothes, reading the Financial Times, and an elderly couple watching television. 

The hall porter gave us a cold glance, then recognised Daniel and hastily rearranged his expression.

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening," said Daniel and headed straight in the direction of the bar. But it was my first visit to the Castle, and I wanted to linger and inspect. Here was a writing room, and here, visible through open double doors, an overheated, overupholstered apartment arranged as a card room. In this, by a blazing fire, sat four ladies around a bridge table. I paused for a moment, my attention caught; the scene was so reminiscent of some play from the thirties. I felt that somewhere I had seen it all before: the long brocade curtains, the chintz-covered chairs, the set piece of the elaborate flower arrangement.

Even the ladies wore the correct clothes: the cashmere cardigans, the strings of good pearls. One smoked a cigarette with a long ivory holder.

"Two no trumps."

"Prue." Daniel, impatient, had retraced his steps to urge me on. "Come on. "

I was about to follow him when the lady who faced me across the card table looked up. Our eyes met. I had not instantly recognised her, but now I was face to face with Mrs. Tolliver.

"Prue." She looked politely pleased to see me, though I found it hard to believe that this was so. "What a surprise."

"Hello, Mrs. Tolliver."

"What are you doing here?"

I did not want to go and talk to them, but confronted by the situation, I couldn't think of anything else to do. "I ... I was just looking around. I've never been here before." I moved forward into the room, and the other ladies looked up at me from their hands of cards with smiling mouths and eyes that did not miss a detail of my windblown hair, my old pullover, my faded jeans.

Mrs. Tolliver laid down her cards and introduced me to her friends. ". . . Prue Shackleton. You must know Phoebe Shackleton, who lives at Penmarron. Well, Prue is her niece ..."

"Oh, yes. How nice," said the ladies in their various ways, obviously longing to get on with their game.

"Prue was so kind to Charlotte yesterday. She travelled down with her from London on the train."

The ladies smiled again, approving of this. I realised with some dismay that I had not thought of Charlotte all day. For some reason this made me feel guilty, and the guilt was not assuaged by the sight of Mrs. Tolliver sitting here in her element and playing bridge.

I said, "Where is Charlotte?"

"At home. With Mrs. Curnow."

"Is she all right?"

Mrs. Tolliver fixed me with a cold eye. "Is there any reason she shouldn't be?"

I was taken aback. "No reason ..." I met her eye. "It's just that, on the train, she seemed very quiet."

"She's always quiet. She never has much to say. And how did you find Phoebe? Not bothered by her broken arm? I'm so glad. Is she with you now?"

"No. I just drove someone back . . . he's staying here . . ."

I remembered Daniel then, standing behind me, and in some confusion turned to include him in this little encounter and introduce him to Mrs. Tolliver.

"Daniel, this is Mrs. . . "

But he wasn't behind me. I saw only the open doors and the empty foyer beyond.

"Your friend took one look at us and left," one of the other ladies remarked, and I turned back and saw them laughing as though it were a joke. I smiled too.

"How silly of me. I thought he was still there."

Mrs. Tolliver picked up her cards once more and arranged them in a neat fan. "So nice to have seen you," she said. I found myself, for no reason, blushing. I made my excuses, said good-bye to them, and left.

Back in the foyer, I searched for Daniel. There was no trace of him, but I saw the lighted sign of the Cocktail Bar and headed for it, and found him, a solitary figure, sitting on a high stool with his back to me.

I was indignant. "What did you go off like that for?"

"Bridge-playing ladies aren't really my scene."

"They aren't my scene either, but sometimes you have to talk to people. I felt such a fool. I was going to introduce you and you'd evaporated into thin air. It was Mrs. Tolliver, from Penmarron." "I know. Have a drink."

"If you knew it was Mrs. Tolliver, that was even ruder."

"You sound like an etiquette writer. Why should I be bothered with Mrs. Tolliver? No, don't tell me, because I don't want to know. Now I'm having a Scotch. What do you want to drink?"

"I don't know if I want a drink." I was still feeling put out.

"I thought that having a drink was what we'd come to do."

"Oh, all right." I climbed up onto the stool beside him. "I'll have a lager."

He ordered it for me. We then proceeded to sit in silence. At the back of the bar the shelves of bottles were backed by mirrored glass, and our two reflections gazed back at us from behind them. Daniel took out a cigar and lit it, and the barman brought me my lager and made a few remarks about the weather. He gave us a dish of peanuts. When he had gone back to the other end of the long bar, Daniel said, "All right, I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"For insulting Mrs. Tolliver, and for being bloody to you. I am in fact quite often bloody. It's as well to know before we embark on some deathless friendship." He looked at me and smiled.

"You didn't insult her." I added ruefully, "To be perfectly truthful, I don't much like her either."

"How do you come to be on such intimate terms with her?"

"Talking to someone at a bridge table isn't exactly being intimate."

"But you do know her quite well?"

"No, I don't. But my mother used to play bridge with her when we came down to stay with Phoebe. And then yesterday I travelled down on the train from London with her little granddaughter, Charlotte Collis. Her mother is Annabelle Tolliver. She was sitting next to me and she looked rather miserable, so we went and had lunch together. There was ..." I decided not to go into the details of Charlotte's predicament, ". . . some complication, and she can't be at her boarding school, so she's spending a week with Mrs. Tolliver. Phoebe says she's a lonely child; she's always at Holly Cottage, just to have someone to talk to."

Daniel, quietly smoking his cigar, said nothing. I wondered if I was boring him stiff and looked to see if he was politely stifling yawns. But he wasn't. He was simply sitting, his elbow propped on the bar, his profile showing no expression, his eyes downcast. The smoke of his cigar made a fragrant, curling plume.

I took a mouthful of delicious icy lager. "Mrs. Tolliver didn't really want her to stay, according to Phoebe. She didn't even come to the junction to meet Charlotte off the train, and Charlotte and I had to share Mr. Thomas's taxi. And now, today, Mrs. Tolliver's playing bridge, and she's left the child with her housekeeper. It can't be much fun for Charlotte. She's only about ten. She should be with other children."