The Key to My Heart Read online

  I let her run on.

  “It was all or nothing with you, wasn’t it?” she said. “And you get nothing, don’t you?”

  I am not sure what I did. I may have started to laugh it off and I may have made a step toward her. Whatever I did, she went hard and prim, and if ever a woman ended anything, she did then. She went over to the car, got in, and slammed the door.

  “You backed the wrong horse when you backed Jimmy,” she called out to me.

  That was the last of her. No more Mrs. Brackett at the shop. “You won’t hear another word from her,” my mother said.

  “What am I supposed to do—get her husband back?” I said.

  By the end of the week, everyone in the town was laughing and winking at me.

  “You did the trick, boy,” the grocer said.

  “You’re a good-looking fellow, Bob,” the ironmonger said.

  “Quite a way with the girls,” the butcher said. “Bob’s deep.”

  For when Mrs. Brackett went home that night, she sat down and paid every penny she owed to every shopkeeper in the town. Paid everyone, I say. Bar me.

  2

  Noisy Flushes the Birds

  Things were quiet in the town; they’d been quiet for a year.

  “You put on your clothes,” Mother said one evening, after we had closed the shop, “and it isn’t worth it.” That hat she bought in Ainsworth, she said, the blue one—she’d only worn it once.

  But it was September now and, in our part of the country, if anything happens, September is the time for it. The harvest is in, people have nothing to do, except think of how they can annoy one another. I have heard holiday visitors put this down to the strong air, the variable warm Atlantic winds that send us half asleep so that we don’t know whether we are alive or dreaming; Miss Croggan, the headmistress of the girls’ school, says it’s the Celtic blood taking time off to stir up old feuds. But nothing had happened, so far, this year. There was nothing to compare, for example, with the week Teddy Longfellow introduced two lunatics to the town and persuaded Major Dingle—Nigerian police, retired, and a stickler for the “right people”—that they were a pair of baronets looking for a large property in the neighbourhood. The year before that, there was Hoblin, the farmer, who used disguised voices on the telephone, pretending that he was the Chief Constable, an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, the County Medical Officer, and so on, inquiring into a report that Teddy Longfellow had been watering his milk; he kept the story up for days, until Teddy nearly pulled his red beard off with panic.

  And to move from fiction to fact, we had had no scandal to match the break-up of the Brackett marriage. No Bentleys about at night, I mean. No Noisy Brackett roaring through the town, followed a few minutes later by his wife chasing him. Their married life had been, for us, like one of those air displays when suddenly a pair of jets scream the place down, vanish into a whistle and, then, silence; suddenly, five minutes later, they are back again, down your neck, like wasps. Mother and I closed the shop in the evening, as I say, and we sat down doing nothing.

  “Can’t you talk?” she said. “Your father used to.”

  “I’ve been on my legs all day,” I said.

  Like an enormous, simple-minded cheese the September moon came slowly over the houses opposite and we stared at it. The size of it, Mother said, upset her.

  And then—as if the moon had started them off—things began to happen. One thing after another. I caught it first. I went out to a dance on the Saturday night and, driving back, I got engaged to a girl called Claudia Dingle. I knew before I went that it was ten to one I would get engaged to someone or other. Claudia was the daughter of Major Dingle up at the Old Rectory, the man Teddy Longfellow had made a fool of. She was a tall girl with a small cloudy head of golden hair that seemed to be blowing off her head like flame, yet with a voice as cool as a water ice. She was so slight that I thought she would snap in two when she laughed. She had just come back from a finishing school in Switzerland. You should have heard the band play up at the Old Rectory and at our house, too! Mother pretended not to hear first of all when I told her and then said “Every time you go to a dance you get engaged.” When I said “Only twice,” Mother said:

  “They don’t get their bread from us; they deal with Higgs.” Up at Claudia’s house the Major said:

  “That hulking lad who comes round the backdoor with the bread and works in the café! Is the girl out of her mind?”

  “Anyway,” said Claudia on the second day, “it’ll be divine to work in the shop. And you don’t always have to be a baker.”

  “Actually, my sweet,” I said, putting on a drawling voice like hers, “I do.”

  She said she didn’t mean it that way. She said it wasn’t her fault she was upper class and she’d adore to go out in the van with me.

  Any time I got engaged it always upset me. It upset other people, too, and Mother got moody; and Claudia had no tact either, coming in and out of the shop and wanting to look at the bakehouse and saying how divine it was, when we were busy, and upsetting the girls. But the thing that set Mother against her was saying she was going to have the announcement put in The Times. Mother thought she meant the County Times and so did I, but Claudia meant the London Times.

  “Everyone does,” Claudia said.

  “I never heard of it in this town yet,” I said. “I’d look a damn fool.”

  Mother said it was daft; no one in the town would know. I argued this with Claudia.

  “I meant people, not the town,” said Claudia. She didn’t mean any harm; her finishing school had finished her.

  The announcement went into the London Times.

  * * *

  One evening when I had been out at her house I came back home early and Mother was sitting at the window.

  “What are you sitting there for; you can’t see to read,” I said to her.

  “Troubling about me—that is new,” Mother said. “I’ve had my life.” And then she said, changing her voice to something like Mrs. Dingle’s refined accents, and mocking:

  “We’ve had another of your old lady friends in this afternoon—Mrs. Brackett. It never rains but it pours.”

  My heart gave a jump like a fish.

  “What did she want—credit?” I said.

  “She’s asked you and this girl—what is her name?—Claudia—to dinner,” said my mother. “She asked me. No, I said, not me. I never go out, not since Dad died.” Mother thought eating with anyone but our relations a wickedness and only went to their houses because it was painful; and she looked like the Ten Commandments at anyone else who invited her to go out.

  “She read about it in that London paper,” Mother said, accusing Claudia and me. And then we had the usual line about making your bed and lying on it.

  “You can go and see the nobs if you like,” she said. “And feast yourself on all this getting engaged and getting divorced. Dad was the one and only for me and we were true. You think you want the Fairy Prince, it’s womanlike—but it’s all soft pansy nonsense. I blame her; you don’t know whether she’s married or single; lady she may call herself, but I don’t see she’s even a woman, not a real woman.” And Mother added: “She’s got stout.”

  The women in our town got stout or thin from day to day, according to Mother’s moods. Father used to say he never knew a town where the weight and measurements of women changed so often and where an ordinary dress or coat was ever of the right length.

  I switched on the light and I saw Mother’s face looking square and offended, suspicion puffing it out. I expected her to look sulky, but I was astonished to see it was worse than that. She looked insulted and miserable.

  “She paid her bill,” Mother said bitterly. She might have been looking at her grave in the churchyard. She was also suspicious.

  “We had a long chat,” Mother said. “She came inside.” (Mother referred to the room at the back of the shop which was a mixture of sitting-room, store-room and office. When Mother came out of
it with anyone who had been “asked inside” she always had a peculiar look on her face—pleased and unnatural. You could never get her to say what “they” had said.)

  I was as surprised as Mother that Mrs. Brackett had paid. And I was suspicious, too.

  “After five years, about time, too,” I said. “I wonder what put that idea into her head?” I said.

  “Why ask me?” said Mother. “I’m not getting engaged to all these girls; you were the one chasing after her, driving her husband out of the house.”

  “Chasing after Mrs. Brackett!” I said.

  Mother was on to her old tale. You won’t believe it, but she blamed me for Mrs. Brackett’s divorce! Just because I ran into Noisy Brackett that evening a year before and he asked me to give him a lift to the station. How did I know he was leaving his wife?

  We sat saying nothing.

  “Well,” said Mother, “you’ve come in. Haven’t you any news?”

  * * *

  News! We had it next day in the lunch hour when the shop was closed. I was eating a chop when something went by with a roar. I mean something in the street. There was a screech at the sharp left bend at the Church and then a noise like someone tumbling dustbins over. I put my knife and fork down.

  “Sit down/’ said Mother, getting up herself and going to the window. “That’s Noisy Brackett. He’s back.”

  Mother was holding the curtains. She was lit up with excitement. Even her brown hair shone.

  “I knew he’d come back,” she cried. And she touched her hair here and there and brushed the crumbs off her dress.

  “If it’s Noisy he’s hit something,” I said, getting up again.

  “Sit down,” she said. She turned on me in a temper.

  “People leave cars all over this town, no wonder there are accidents. The police ought to stop it,” she shouted.

  Mother had always thought that all cars should be cleared out of the town so that Noisy Brackett could have a clear run through at ninety miles an hour. Mother smiled again. She was in heaven. If it had been anyone else but Noisy she would have screamed, pushed me to the door, pulled me back—but not for Noisy. He was a god; he could do anything.

  I didn’t believe it was Noisy; I think I know a Bentley when I hear one. But when I went up the street I found out Mother was right. People were still looking at the tyre marks on the street and the pavement. A couple of shopkeepers were looking at the back doors of their vans that had been cannoned down the hill. It was Noisy, they said. He had gone off now, nobody knew where. But the police, of course, had got him somewhere outside the town.

  At first Mother was upset that Noisy had gone clean through the town without stopping for a word with us. But when Mother heard that he had been summoned for dangerous driving she was in Paradise. He would be back! He would be up before the Court. And if any of those stuffed animals on the Bench dared to do anything to her Noisy she would put arsenic in their bread, she would tell their wives all she knew, and so on. But, underneath and more powerful, her feeling was different. You have got to know Mother. Noisy was back. That meant, for her, that “they”—Mrs. Brackett and Noisy—were reconciled. The divorce was off. “He loved Her.” He was back in Heading, that beautiful house, full of those things worth thousands, life was normal; love—“the one and only”—was triumphant after all. And, to crown it, that dear sweet girl Claudia and I were invited there to dinner at the very throne of matrimonial happiness, an object lesson to us all. In the week following my engagement and Noisy’s summons to appear in court on a charge of “wanton driving to the public danger” I have not known Mother so suddenly turn to happiness since Father’s death.

  All the same, Mrs. Brackett did not turn up at the court when Noisy’s case came on. Mother was a bit put out by this when I told her, but she said that it never looks nice when women are mixed up in the law; her own father left it in his will that no woman should go to his funeral. But I’ll tell you who did turn up—I mean aside from half the town, and someone from the Ainsworth Press—Teddy Longfellow. He was Noisy’s witness. He had been in the car at the time. Teddy was a funny man. He had a loud reddish suit on, with yellow squares on it, but it was not that—people said he got himself up to look like Satan. It was the way his hair came to a point in front and stood up in a couple of horns at the sides; and his beard. It was his stammer that made people say he had been a German spy.

  But we had come to look at Noisy, to see how he would get out of it. The police had got him thoroughly tied up. There he was, the same old Noisy. Small, thin— “his poor chest”, Mother used to say—with a head of oily crinkly black hair, his gypsyish skin and always the dandy. He was all nerves and illness in an electric way and the women loved him for that. And there was that sudden twitch to one side of his face. It pulled the skin down from the eye, which seemed to stare out from the middle of calamity like the end of a pistol, before his face went back into dozens of soft smiling wrinkles. We knew he’d get off somehow, but how we could not imagine. He denied, of course, that he was doing fifty, because, as he said, he knew that corner by heart. And Teddy Longfellow denied it also.

  “I was practically at a standstill, sir,” Noisy said to the Bench, with a shocked, polite glance at the police. “But an extraordinary thing happened. I’ve never known it happen before in twenty-five years of driving; Le Mans, Monte Carlo, Brooklands. I sneezed, sir, just on the turn. A blinding sneeze, sir, without warning, quite extraordinary, like an explosion, like a bomb flash. Visibility absolutely nil. I didn’t know where I was. I lost control. Never done it before. It was a mercy I was only doing twenty-two at the time, as Teddy, I mean the witness has just said. Perhaps I ought to say I suffer from hay fever. I got it in India.”

  And when he said “sneeze” Noisy’s face gave one of his twitches and sudden stares with his left eye, as if he were going to produce a sample sneeze in court, a final burst, to make sure. The Chairman even started to raise his hand to ward it off. Well, the Bench hummed and ha’ed, but, of course, Noisy got off. Afterwards, at the Red Lion, he did one or two of these sneezes to show us; one of his Squadron Leaders during the war, he said, could do it with a monocle in his eye, without dropping it.

  “I must pop in and have a word with your mama, Bob,” Noisy said to me. And when he came to the shop he gave Mother a kiss and said:

  “What’s happened? You look ten years younger, Mrs. Fraser. I wonder if you would add to all your kindnesses and cash me a teeny weeny little cheque. Yes? You’re quite sure? Now, isn’t that like old times?”

  “Come inside,” Mother said, blushing with happiness, leading him to the room at the back. “I’m ashamed of you.” They stayed inside talking quite a while and when they came out Mother’s face was blissful.

  “Now remember your promise! Go and see,” said my mother, and she walked with him to the doorstep of the shop.

  “I will. You bet I will, Mrs. Fraser. Bang on.” Noisy smiled and waved to her. I walked a few yards with him. His face changed, he gave a serious twitch and said, in a dead, quizzing voice:

  “How is she? How’s the Fairy Queen? Have you seen her?”

  “Not to speak to,” I said.

  He looked as though he didn’t quite believe me.

  “I hear she paid her bill,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Lovely money,” he said. “I’ve got a spot of trouble there. Keep it under your hat—she’s got her tiny little hands on my birds. She won’t give them up. You don’t know my birds! Yes, you do. That big case of birds that stands inside the door at Heading. Tropical birds. They’re mine.”

  I didn’t remember them. Heading was so full of things.

  “She can have what she likes, but she’s not going to have my birds,” said Noisy. “I’m going to get them. I’ve got to. I’ve sold them. I need the cash.” Noisy’s race was now hard and serious; he lit a cigarette and wagged it up and down on his lips, studying my van. “Wonderful woman, the Fairy Queen, really one of the best.
But there’s going to be a burglary.”

  We got to his car and Teddy Longfellow was there.

  “Take a look at this. T’that’s what we w’want,” Teddy said. He was nodding to our van, which was parked behind his car. “Take out the shelves and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Hear that?” said Noisy to me. “He’s a natural car thief, that’s how he made all his money. See you one of these days.” They got into Noisy’s car, Noisy turned to give a tremendous sneeze for my benefit, there was the lovely throb of his engine and he was off.

  You pass Teddy Longfellow’s house on the Ainsworth road. It stands on a hill, one of those modern houses of glass and steel with a spiral staircase enclosed in a glass tower in front and something like the top of a lighthouse on the roof. It was built just as the war broke out and people said Longfellow had built it so that he could signal to the Germans from it. Claudia and I drove past once or twice and I was telling her that Teddy had made a fortune out of cotton and was a damn good farmer, the only up-to-date farmer in the district. I started telling her about the two fake baronets he had introduced to the town. The place, I said, is full of snobs. Of course, there I put my foot in it. I’d clean forgotten that Claudia’s father, the Major, had been Teddy’s victim. Class is a funny thing. Claudia was a pretty girl, no brain as Mother said, I give you that; but sweet and she stood up to the old Major and her mother with a will of her own; but when it came to class and family—well, she was her mother all over again. I’ve seen it since. I got the lot. Teddy was not a gentleman; he was just a shot-up businessman—at the word “business” her face went sick—pretending to be a county gentleman and trying to buy his way in. He was loud. He was vulgar. He was rude. Of course, he wasn’t a German, but loads of Germans came to visit him after the war. They came, Claudia said, to look at his pictures.

  “They’re worth a lot, aren’t they?” I said.

  “You’re always talking about money,” Claudia said.

  “It’s what I live on,” I said.