The Travellers and Other Stories (19 page)

What do they see, her fellow passengers?

They see a small, plain, obscure woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining—a small, plain, obscure-looking woman who has been to London several times before and has no plan when she gets to her lodgings to do anything differently from the last time or the time before that or the time before that.

It's only the next morning when she is walking along Gracechurch Street that she decides to do it—and even then it doesn't feel like a decision, it feels like she is being carried along on a wave of something she cannot help.

For a long time she stands there before going in. She knows that in a great many ways she has led a sheltered life and that there are plenty of things she doesn't know, such as the right places to go for certain things. Even now, when she comes to London, she feels most of the time like a clumsy traveller in a foreign land.

She can see herself in the glass: her black travelling outfit, her big dark bonnet with its grey lining; her reflection very clear in the sparkling window.

How clean the window is!

She herself has been doing a lot of cleaning lately. When she can't write, and these days she cannot seem to write a single line, cleaning feels like a good productive thing to do.

Still not quite knowing what she'll do when she gets inside, she pushes open the door.

He wants to talk to her, he said in his letter, about her next book. The appointment is at four o'clock which means she has two hours.

As soon as she's inside, the bell on the door ringing out its last chimes behind her, she knows why she's come.

The choice is bewildering.

‘That one,' she says, pointing, after much deliberation over the possibilities, and takes the money from her purse. A huge amount, it seems, for such a thing. And then she takes off her bonnet, and puts it on the counter and watches it being taken away through the curtain, and sits, and waits till it's ready. She feels naked, without her bonnet; almost asks if there is one she can borrow while she's waiting.

At a quarter to four she leaves the shop, her bonnet back on her head, and makes her way along Gracechurch Street and from there to Cornhill to attend the meeting that is due to take place at four with her young publisher.

He has written her a letter, her tall, dark-haired, handsome young publisher, but she has not received it.

Not the letter asking if they can meet to talk about her next book.

Another letter, a second letter.

It was early when she left home yesterday and climbed into her compartment, first at Keighley, then at Leeds, and she has not received this second letter, as he had expected she would have, before her visit.

A second letter in which he's told her the news that he has fallen in love with a Miss Elizabeth Blakeway and is engaged to be married.

He is standing behind his desk when she is shown into his office, a collection of papers in his hand.

His pale complexion is flushed from his morning ride in the park, and in the half-second it takes for him to look up from his reading, she takes him in afresh: his rangy, athletic height, his youthful, generous, intelligent, shrewd and sensitive face.

Never, in her whole life, has she been as conscious of her own appearance as she is at this moment—and she is always
always
acutely and painfully conscious of her own appearance when she is with him here in London, here in his office or having dinner with his mother and his sisters, or out in public, at the opera, or at an exhibition or at some terrifying literary party; but she has never, ever, been as conscious as she is now of her own tiny body and large, ill-proportioned head; her crooked mouth and her thin hair, bulked up with its little pad of stuffed brown silk—of her big nose, of her spectacles, of her age, or of how until this moment, she has never appeared before him in anything other than black or grey.

It is pink, the new lining of her bonnet—a lustrous, pearly pink like the interior of a shell, and it is the worst imaginable thing, when he looks up, for him to see it; for him to see this small plain woman, his friend, with this unexpected bonnet on her head.

For a moment he is speechless—all he can do is stand there looking at her and wishing that he could tell her something, the future perhaps—that before she dies in eighteen months' time, at the age of thirty-eight, she will marry and be so happy, eventually, in this brief, late marriage with her quiet clergyman husband, that she will not care if she never writes another word; but he knows nothing of her future—nothing that could come now to her rescue or to his, and all he can do is to move towards her and shake her hand with what he hopes is all his usual warmth and invite her to sit, and for an hour they talk about her books, and the books of other people—they have always got along so well together, their discussions have always been so lively and full of interest—and he says nothing about the bonnet and neither does she but it is the worst imaginable thing for her to sit and feel the bright new silk around her face, like a shout, and see how embarrassed he is, how he can't look at it.

It's late when she boards the night train—dark when she leaves her lodgings and arrives at Euston Square and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers. By six the next morning she is a world away, in Leeds, and by eight in Keighley again where, unable to face the prospect of being collected in the Haworth gig, she begins at once the long walk home, keeping her eyes down to avoid her reflection in shop fronts and the windows of houses. It has been raining though, here in the north. There are puddles everywhere, and she is in all of them: a small, plain, obscure-looking woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining.

FIRST JOURNEYMAN

(Responsible for fruits, plants and legumes)

WHAT CAN
I tell you?

That he was seventeen years old; that in the morning he top-dressed the Melon Pit with a compost of turf, lime rubble, charcoal, wood ash, clay and bone dust. That he rolled the drive and cleaned out the pond, and put a small stake to the Chrysanthemums to prevent the wind from breaking them; that after that he watered the Trees in the Peach Case and dusted the berries with sulphur to keep the mildew down.

That Jenny came out then, asking for something sweet and tasty for Master B who had a summer cold and was keeping to his room with books and a hot water bottle and was after something to tempt his appetite.

That he went off and came back with a leaf of mint and a pound of First Peas, Sutton's Bountiful, in a white dish, and sent them in for Master B, and that all through our dinner he was very quiet and hardly touched his food; that in the afternoon he mowed the tennis court and made up the vases for Thursday's party and tied up the kidney beans and cleaned the glass in the Rose House and shifted a few Gloire de Lorraine out of 3" into 5½" pots. And in the evening, on our way home when we called in at the back door for a cup of water, he asked Jenny if Master B had enjoyed the Peas and Jenny, pushing back her hair and wiping her old hands on her apron, said, What Peas? and he, kicking the toe of his boot against the doorstep and looking down at it, said, The Sutton's Bountiful, from this morning, and Jenny frowned as if she couldn't think what he was on about and then she smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead and said, Oh
them
Peas! Oh no—hadn't we heard? Master B's cold was better now and his American friend Mr. Slade had come and fetched him back off to London again before the Peas was eaten.

Oh, he said.

And I could see them then, the Peas, behind her. A gleam of green on the table, still in the white dish he'd put them in with the sprig of mint on top, like some sort of offering, and all I can tell you is that it must have seemed a big thing to him, what had happened.

All I can say is that it must have seemed to him, somehow, like the end of the world.

PRECIOUS

FROM THE MOMENT
I arrived, they loved me.

They loved my funny accent, the way I had ketchup with everything. They loved my black socks and my brown sandals; they loved my flesh-coloured money-belt, my grey wheeled suitcase with its retractable handle. Most of all though, they loved the way I sweated in the heat, the way the hot sun made the pale dome of my head glow like a light-bulb. They loved the sight of it, and when they touched it, it brought a smile to all their faces.

Within a week the mayor had installed me in an apartment on the top floor of his mansion and employed an extra cook and a housekeeper to look after me; queues formed every morning at first light outside the mansion's tall iron gates, and throughout the day the townspeople came to touch my head. It was extraordinary, the pleasure it gave them, the way it made them smile. Little by little they began expressing their appreciation with gifts—home-made bread and custard flans, bottles of wine, sausage, cash; it wasn't long before they began requesting my presence at important events: birthdays and retirement parties and the unveiling of a new fountain in the market square, at baby showers and at weddings. They even wanted me at their funerals to stand by the open coffin of the deceased when they came to say their good-byes. It cheered them up, they said, to be able to touch my head after kissing the body for the very last time. By the end of the summer there was hardly a single public occasion that took place without me and I—well, I had begun to feel slightly uncomfortable with the situation.

It bothered me that they thought so much of me, and while I tried to remind myself that I had never once claimed to be anyone special, I couldn't help feeling, as the months passed and they took me ever more passionately to their hearts, that I was moving, slowly but surely, towards some kind of frightful unmasking or exposé; that each day was bringing me closer and closer to my own humiliating demise.

I decided I'd better leave, before things got out of hand.

I decided I would slip out of my apartment one night while the cook and the housekeeper and the mayor were all asleep. I would walk out of the town on the road I'd come in on and I would go to a different place—a quiet beach or a little chalet up in the mountains—somewhere I wouldn't attract quite so much attention.

And I would have gone, I really would have. I even got as far as putting a few things in my wheeled suitcase, ready for my departure. But then the people sent me Precious and once they'd sent me Precious, I just couldn't tear myself away.

Precious was the daughter of the cook and she arrived very early one September morning before the queues had begun to form outside. I knew at once that she had come for some important reason because she was shown up to my apartment, not in the clunky old service elevator at the back which her mother the cook and the housekeeper and all the other townspeople were made to use, but in the beautiful hand-operated Schindler elevator at the front with its fitted carpet and gilded paintwork and its twinkling chandelier.

When I opened my apartment door that morning there she was—a small, serious-looking girl with dark hair and a pale face wearing a floral cotton dress and holding a large black leather bag with a metal clasp, like an old-fashioned doctor's. As soon as she saw me she blushed and bobbed a sort of curtsey and told me that she had come to polish my head.

Everyone, she explained, wanted it to be as bright and soft as possible and they would all be very pleased if I would allow it to be polished first thing every morning. She was very good at polishing, she said, blushing again, and had been specially chosen by the people for the job. She would come every morning and do it before the crowds came, if I was agreeable.

I looked at her.

I looked at her shy serious face, her dark eyes with their grave almost sad expression, at her small neat fingers on the stitched handle of her bag, and as I looked, I forgot the anxiety I'd begun to feel about my strange position in the town; I forgot the certainty I'd felt, just the night before, that it was time for me to get out of there; I forgot the half-packed suitcase lying open on the velvet armchair in the sitting room behind me, waiting for me to pick it up and wheel it out of the door.

‘Yes,' I said, smiling. Of course I was agreeable.

Precious's visits became the highlight of my days.

As soon as I opened my eyes in the mornings, I began listening out for the slow whirring progress of the Schindler elevator bringing her up. Hearing her knock at my door—seeing her there when I opened it—watching her set down her big doctor's bag on the carved chest beneath the window and take out her pots of wax and her various creams and cloths—hearing her asking me, in her quiet way, to please take a seat so she could begin—these were the things I lived for. I looked forward to them more than anything else in the world. The rest of my days—the birthday parties, the baby showers, the weddings, the funerals—all of it passed in a dull blur, and I can honestly say that I was never happier in my whole life than when Precious was there, close to me, moving around my chair, turning away from time to time to pick up a different pot or a fresh cloth, asking me to tip my head a little to the left or a little to the right, forward or back.

My only difficulty was that I had no idea what she thought of me. She was always so shy and deferential in my presence—so silent and business-like in the way she went about her work—that it was impossible to tell what was going on inside her head, let alone her heart.

If I ever tried to make eye contact with her while she polished, she blushed and looked away and focused instead on whichever part of my scalp she was busy with at the time. When she was finished she packed her things away in her big bag and bobbed another of her funny little curtseys and left.

At the end of six weeks we had hardly exchanged a single word; I still had no idea what she thought of me, if she had grown even the slightest bit fond of me during our time together. For all I knew, I meant no more to her than any other object she'd been asked to polish; for all I knew I was no more important to her than a brass candlestick or a canteen of silver cutlery.